Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition: The Muses in America 9781000079319, 1000079317

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Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition

This volume explores the reception of the classical past in the works of twentieth-​century American dramatist Robert E.  Sherwood and his use of the ancient world to critique key events and trends in American history. It explores his comedies and the influence of both Greek Old and New Comedy, as well as his mediation of his experiences in World War I through Livy’s account of the war with Carthage. During the 1930s, Sherwood used the Peloponnesian War as a template for bringing to the attention of an unaware public the danger of an impending war between the forces of ­democracy and the totalitarianism represented by Nazi Germany, and post-​war he raised awareness of the dangers of nuclear war through the lens of the Greek gods. As well as looking at his use of the classical past in his work, since Sherwood wrote drama deeply concerned with the major social and political events of his day, his plays open windows onto the major social and political challenges facing the United States and the world from the outbreak of World War I until the beginning of the nuclear age. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on the Classical Tradition and Classical Reception, as well as to students of twentieth-​century American literature, drama, history, and politics. Robert J.  Rabel is Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. He has also taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He is the author of Plot and Point of View in the Iliad (1997) and editor of Approaches to Homer, Ancient and Modern (2005). He has also written articles on Homer, Greek tragedy, Greek and Roman philosophy, Greek history, Roman epic, Classics and film, and Classical influences on American drama. He is currently working on a book dealing with the survival of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century fiction.

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

Titles include: Drama, Oratory and Thucydides in Fifth-​Century Athens Teaching Imperial Lessons Sophie Mills The Poetics in Its Aristotelian Context Edited by Pierre Destrée, Malcolm Heath, and Dana L. Munteanu Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire Dana Fields Un-​Roman  Sex Gender, Sexuality, and Lovemaking in the Roman Provinces and Frontiers, 1st Edition Edited by Tatiana Ivleva and Rob Collins Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition The Muses in America Robert J. Rabel Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama Essays in Honor of Margalit Finkelberg Edited by Jonathan Price and Rachel Zelnick-​Abramovitz Animals in Ancient Greek Religion Edited by Julia Kindt Classicising Crisis The Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-​Roman Repertoire Edited by Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson For more information on this series, visit: www.routledge.com/​classicalstudies/​ series/​RMCS

Robert E. Sherwood and the Classical Tradition The Muses in America Robert J. Rabel

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Robert J. Rabel The right of Robert J. Rabel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Rabel, Robert J., 1948– author. Title: Robert E. Sherwood and the classical tradition: the muses in America / Robert J. Rabel. Identifiers: LCCN 2020006840 (print) | LCCN 2020006841 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367361112 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429343872 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sherwood, Robert E. (Robert Emmet), 1896–1955–Criticism and interpretation. | Civilization, Classical, in literature. | Classical literature–Influence. Classification: LCC PS3537.H825 Z85 2020 (print) | LCC PS3537.H825 (ebook) | DDC 812/.52–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006840 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006841 ISBN: 978-0-367-36111-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34387-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

To Jackie, without whom this book would not be.

Contents

List of figures  Preface  Introduction: A group of brilliant people named Robert E. Sherwood 

viii ix

1

1 The curious case of Barnum Was Right 

12

2 Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome: The ghosts of battle 

43

3 Acropolis 

77

4 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse 

127

Conclusion 

149

Bibliography  Index 

152 163

Figures

0 .1 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 2 .4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

Robert E. Sherwood. NBC Television Publicity Photo, 1953 Poster for Barnum Was Right The Algonquin Round Table The Road to Rome. Dramatis Personae. Playhouse Theatre Jane Cowl and Philip Merivale in The Road to Rome. Playhouse Theatre Movie poster for Jupiter’s Darling Acropolis. Playbill cover Acropolis. Playbill insert Acropolis. Author’s note Acropolis. Dramatis personae Idiot’s Delight. Shubert Theatre. Playbill cover Idiot’s Delight. Shubert Theatre. Lunt and Fontanne Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Plymouth Theatre. Playbill cover Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Raymond Massey as Abe Lincoln Young Mr. Lincoln. Henry Fonda as Abe Lincoln There Shall Be No Night. Alvin Theatre. Playbill cover There Shall Be No Night. Alvin Theatre. Dramatis personae

2 35 48 53 55 69 79 80 81 82 132 133 135 139 140 141 142

Preface

Julian Barnes quotes Igor Stravinsky, who wrote:  “I wonder if memory is true, and I  know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nonetheless and not by truth.”1 In memory, I  seem to recall a caustic review that dismissed a publication by saying that it filled “a much-​needed gap.” I wonder whether this memory is true. This book fills a gap. Robert E. Sherwood has not received the critical attention his work as a dramatist deserves. I hope the reader will decide against thinking this gap should remain “much-​needed.” Robert E.  Sherwood and the Classical Tradition:  The Muses in America discusses and analyzes Sherwood’s dramas that reflect a deep and abiding interest in the literature and history of Greece and Rome. His best plays all show the influence of Greco-​Roman antiquity to a great degree—​even the Pulitzer Prize–​winning plays of the late 1930s, which are set at or close to the playwright’s own time and seem, on the surface, to have little to do with the literature of Greece and Rome. A word about the title:  scholars these days prefer to speak of Classical Reception rather than the Classical Tradition, but the latter remains a useful and convenient phrase to describe the engagement with classical antiquity that takes place in later historical periods. The relationship between tradition and reception, if such a relation exists, is a topic I have chosen to avoid. I hope readers will not be put off by a title that might seem overly conservative and elitist.2 In memory, I seem to recall a reviewer who quipped that most authors’ lives are “rot in print.” Such was not the case with Sherwood, whose career was extraordinary for its range of accomplishments. Good biographies of Sherwood exist. He was quite famous during his lifetime, but until recently he has mostly been remembered by historians of World War II, who make frequent reference to his Pulitzer Prize–​winning biography of Harry Hopkins, a close adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.3 Sherwood himself was also an adviser to Roosevelt and one of his two speechwriters during World  War  II. Though he seems to have been largely elided from historical memory, there are signs that Sherwood is once more beginning to be regarded as an important historical figure in his own right. Lynne Olson makes frequent reference to his vehement opposition to Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist stance preceding

x Preface World War II.4 Thomas Doherty discusses at length the international incident that arose over fascist Italy’s opposition to the movie version of Sherwood’s play Idiot’s Delight, which depicted the beginning of World War II at a time when most thought war could still be avoided.5 Readers wishing to learn more about Sherwood’s life than I provide here should consult the masterful biography of Sherwood by Harriet Hyman Alonso.6 Few critics have concerned themselves at all with Sherwood the dramatist. He receives cursory treatment by scholars who study the subject of realism on the American stage. American realist drama of the 1920s and 1930s is too little studied because it closely reflects the lives and times of the playwrights and thus might seem irrelevant to later decades. Among scholars in the burgeoning field of the Classical Tradition, Sherwood is virtually unknown. This study attempts to bridge the gap between two vital areas of study: realist drama and the Classical Tradition. Sherwood demonstrated unexampled skill in composing realist drama through the medium of classical myth and story. His plays are worthy of high regard—​but only if they are studied in relation to what Mark Thompson calls “the felt context of the moment,” lacking which, even the speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt may sound “feeble, the language overwrought.”7 To the best of my ability, I have tried to supply these contexts. Telling friends and students I’m writing a book on Robert E. Sherwood often elicits a blank stare. The more literary among them sometimes answer, “The guy who wrote Winesburg, Ohio and a lot of short stories, right?” “No,” I answer. “That’s Sherwood Anderson. I’m writing about Robert Sherwood.” It’s ironic that Robert Sherwood is now sometimes confused with the more famous Sherwood Anderson, since during their lifetimes fame dictated otherwise:  Sherwood Anderson was often taken for the more famous Robert Sherwood. In a letter to Robert Sherwood, Sherwood Anderson once wrote how much he enjoyed the confusion of names, which was compounded by the fact that he was also sometimes confused with the equally famous, but now also largely forgotten, playwright Maxwell Anderson. Sherwood Anderson often received mail intended for Robert Sherwood or for Maxwell Anderson. This misunderstanding, he said, helped him meet good-​looking blondes, to whom he would sometimes promise a part in his next play.8 In another letter, Sherwood Anderson playfully signed himself “Abraham Maxwell Sherwood Anderson.”9 I share the conviction underlying Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh’s magisterial study of Greek tragedy in its relationship to the British theater: a fertile field of classical scholarship is the study of how Greek and Roman literature was enjoyed, studied, and employed beyond the confines of the academy.10 This book offers a new chapter in that larger story. I have a number of people to thank. The librarians at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where the bulk of the Sherwood papers are stored, were especially helpful, as were the archivists at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center. The New York Public Library has been a wonderful resource over the past several years. I want to thank Kathy Kienholz of the American Academy

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Preface  xi of Arts and Letters for help in tracking down references to Sherwood’s writings among the Academy’s papers—​and also for a tour of the Academy’s wonderful facilities in New York. I want to thank former students Katherine Donohue, Stephanie Straub, and Claire Bishop for their careful reading and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this book’s chapters. I especially want to thank my wife Jackie DeCroo, to whom the book is dedicated. She has been a dedicated, encouraging, and critical reader and editor throughout the many years of writing. Her remarks on the need to provide historical context to Sherwood’s plays have done much to determine the final direction this book has taken.

Notes 1 Barnes (2008: 223). 2 Budelmann and Haubold (2008:  13–​14) point out that elitist connotations are sometimes attached to the idea of the Classical Tradition, but they acknowledge the usefulness of the phrase and also the difficulty of distinguishing tradition from reception. 3 Sherwood (1948). 4 Olson (2013). 5 Doherty (2013: 211–​17). 6 See Alonso (2007). 7 M. Thompson (2016: 25). 8 Sherwood Anderson to RES:  b MS Am 1947, November 21, 1940, 28:  HHU. References to Sherwood’s papers use the call numbers of Harvard’s Houghton Library, followed by date, if known. HHU  =  Houghton Library, Harvard University. 9 Sherwood Anderson to RES: b MS Am 1947, n.d., 28: HHU. 10 See Hall and Macintosh (2005).

Introduction A group of brilliant people named Robert E. Sherwood

In 1949, the New York Times described Robert E. Sherwood as “an inspired dramatist who both in deeds and words has measured himself against history.”1 The paper captured in a sentence the importance of his contributions to the worlds of drama and politics. In November 1955, Sherwood died. His funeral was attended by more than five hundred people. In a eulogy written by dramatist Maxwell Anderson, distinguished actor Alfred Lunt described Sherwood in lines taken from George Bernard Shaw: “Death reveals the eminent.”2 Shaw, Anderson, and Lunt all played significant roles in Sherwood’s life and art. Newspapers around the world spread the news of Sherwood’s death. The Montreal Gazette wrote: “Robert Sherwood, a great writer and a great friend to Canada, is dead.” Cyril John Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe, wrote in the Times of London: It would take a long time to make a list of all his enchanting aspects. One or two stick firmly in my memory. He was a gay man, a man with a rich appreciation of life and its oddities, and, above all, a man who never admitted the necessity, as he grew older, of hardening or shutting up his heart. Radcliffe added:  “he liked, understood, and admired the English so much more than we could ever like, understand, or admire ourselves.”3 Sherwood was a life-​long Anglophile. His high regard for the English was on display throughout his career. Self-​critical and self-​effacing to a fault, Sherwood often undervalued or disparaged his own plays, though he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times and in a quick succession unmatched by any other American dramatist including Eugene O’Neill. Sherwood won for Idiot’s Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois:  A Play in Twelve Scenes (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1940). Pride of authorship was seldom displayed unless privately or in answer to questions posed by others. S. N. Behrman describes a scene at the Playwrights’ Company, where a manuscript replete with abstruse symbolism

2 Introduction

Figure 0.1 Robert E.  Sherwood. NBC Television Publicity Photo, 1953 (New  York Public Library).

was under discussion. Behrman reproduces on the printed page Sherwood’s practice of measuring out every syllable of every word before he spoke: “I pre fer the plays of Rob ert Em met Sher wood. He hasn’t got much to say but at least he does not try to say any thing else.”4 Nor did Sherwood give much public expression to the importance of his service to his country in wartime.

Introduction  3

I Life Robert E. Sherwood was born on April 4, 1896, in New Rochelle, New York, the privileged scion of two conservative families with long and distinguished histories, the Emmets and the Sherwoods.5 His relatives never quite forgave him for becoming a Roosevelt Democrat. His early academic record showed little promise of later achievement. Because of poor grades, he failed to graduate from Milton Academy, a prestigious college prep school offering opportunities to underachieving students. Still, Sherwood was able to enroll at Harvard in 1914. Academic success eluded him at Harvard as well. He earned Ds in Greek and Latin. Nonetheless, two versions of Barnum Was Right, written for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, demonstrate a remarkable understanding of the devices through which Aristophanes, a poet of Old Comedy, and Menander, a poet of New Comedy, achieved their effects. Especially strange was Sherwood’s ability to compose comedy in the manner of Menander, whose work in Sherwood’s time existed only in short fragments. John Mason Brown described his academic and extracurricular performance at Harvard: Bob loved the Pudding. He would have loved Harvard too, if he had not had to attend classes and face the rhythmic menace of exams. The Lampoon, of which he was President and the Pudding, for which he wrote the book of Barnum Was Right, were where he found, and gave, pleasure in Cambridge …. His interests were many but studies were not among them. Once a freshman, twice a sophomore, he always teetered undaunted on the tightrope of probation.6 Charles Poore spoke the truth when he wrote of “A Group of Brilliant People Called Robert E. Sherwood.”7 Always willing to respond with flexibility to the crises of his times, Sherwood led a life of shifting commitments, occupations, and literary pursuits. An ardent supporter of war against Germany, he served as a frontline soldier in World War I. Experience of combat made him a pacifist. After the war, Sherwood served as editor at Vanity Fair and Life and was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, sometimes known as the Vicious Circle. In 1928, Sherwood convinced humorist Will Rogers to run for President of the United States as a representative of the Anti-​Bunk Party. Rogers received a large write-​in vote all over the country.8 In the 1930s, Sherwood’s lighthearted treatment of politics took a serious turn. In 1933, he became the first major American figure to realize that war with the Nazis was on the horizon—​this in the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.9 As part of newspaperman William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, Sherwood wrote a column in 1940 that appeared in more than one hundred newspapers with the headline “Stop Hitler Now!”10 He was also a member of the militant Century Group of prominent intellectuals, publishers, and financiers, who supported America’s

4 Introduction entry into the war in Europe long before Pearl Harbor.11 Sherwood’s “bête noir,” according to Lynne Olson, was famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, chief spokesman for America’s isolationist policies in the 1930s.12 In his diary, Sherwood wrote: “Will Lindbergh one day be our Fuehrer?”13 Sherwood fit the mold of the Liberal New York Intellectual of the 1930s and 1940s: he was well read in European culture and history; he was a generalist; he was also an atheist.14 Sherwood was drawn into President Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s orbit as early as September 1938 through initial acquaintance with Harry Hopkins. “Roosevelt,” Sherwood wrote, “educated Hopkins in the arts and sciences of politics and of war and then gave him immense powers of decision for no reason other than he liked him, trusted him, and needed him.”15 Hopkins would school Sherwood in much the same way. Hopkins had considerable knowledge of the theater, and, based on his appreciation for Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Hopkins struck up a friendship with Sherwood and introduced him to Roosevelt.16 Sherwood shared much in common with the president. Both came from privileged backgrounds, both were Democrats, and both were possessed of a strong egalitarian streak that led to their being considered traitors to their class. In October 1940, Sherwood became one of two major speechwriters for Roosevelt. His experience in the theater was well suited to the style and requirements of the most theatrical of American presidents.17 Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle suggest that Roosevelt’s frequent references in his speeches to Abraham Lincoln can be attributed to Sherwood, Roosevelt seeing himself as much like the hero of Sherwood’s play, “inclined by nature not to fight, but ready to do battle once sufficiently angered.”18 Outside of personal correspondence, Sherwood revealed very little about his years in the White House. He worked on all of Roosevelt’s important speeches from October 20, 1940, until the president’s death. “Every syllable was of vital importance,” Sherwood wrote in a letter to Ernest S.  Brandenburg.19 Sherwood’s characteristic modesty makes impossible any accurate assessment of his role in the writing of Roosevelt’s speeches. What survive are largely anecdotal accounts provided by him or others. For example, several years after the war, he wrote to Sam Rosenman, his former colleague and fellow speechwriter, about Roosevelt’s stirring tribute to the defenders of Malta in 1943: I worked with you on the Malta Tribute and was always particularly proud of the line that it “stood alone but unafraid in the center of the sea,” the latter part of that being from Homer.20 While serving as speechwriter, Sherwood also lived the life of chief propagandist for the Roosevelt Administration’s wartime efforts. (The term “propaganda” had yet to acquire the negative connotations it would carry after its debased use in Nazi Germany.) Sherwood had responsibility for the first

Introduction  5 civilian psychological warfare teams that were sent from the United States prior to the TORCH Operation (the joint British-​ American invasion of French North Africa in 1942).21 Sherwood headed the Foreign Information Service, part of the COI (Office of the Coordinator of Information), the precursor of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).22 The COI marked the Roosevelt Administration’s initial foray into the areas of espionage, sabotage, and propaganda. As head of the office’s propaganda wing, Sherwood maintained a tense and uneasy relationship with legendary American spymaster “Wild Bill” Donovan. Richard Harris Smith explains differences between the two men in terms of politics and personality. Sherwood, an avid supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal, was unhappy about the presence of anti-​New Dealers within the organization. He found himself frequently in conflict with bankers and Wall Street financiers in other branches of the organization, people who respected and admired Donovan. In an unflattering portrait of Sherwood, New York banker of the time James Warburg described their differences: Donovan, accustomed to command, was quick, extremely energetic, and ambitious. Sherwood, a playwright completely inexperienced in working with, under, or over other people, was slow, unpunctual, and moody. In addition, Sherwood resented any authority other than that of the President and was morbidly jealous of any intrusion upon his White House relationship.23 According to a recent history of the CIA, deeper philosophical differences set Sherwood and Donovan at loggerheads. “Sherwood,” Douglas Waller says, “believed that propaganda should be based on truth and that his service should educate the world on ‘the American way of life’.” Donovan, on the other hand, “saw information as a weapon and had no qualms about spreading lies to subvert the enemy.” Eventually, the two fell out completely and rarely spoke.24 Sherwood’s wish to disseminate information based on truth received concrete expression in the Voice of America, which he founded during the war and which continues to operate to this day.25 He came to feel, however, that the name “Voice of America,” which he coined, was appropriate only in wartime, the Voice of America being in times of peace “eternally, many voices.”26 In addition to speechwriting and disseminating propaganda, Sherwood performed other wartime duties as well. By his own account, he traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, around the Mediterranean, and in the far Pacific on behalf of the Roosevelt Administration. He was present in Paris, Manila, and Rome, when they were first liberated.27 He also conveyed letters of instruction from President Roosevelt to Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific theater of war.28 After the war, Sherwood maintained his commitment to the Democratic Party and wrote speeches for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He achieved postwar literary success as a biographer

6 Introduction and screenwriter, but as a dramatist he was unable to match the commercial triumphs of the plays he wrote during the 1920s and 1930s. He died in New York City in 1955.

II Dramatist and screenwriter Sherwood is of interest as a distinguished man of letters and student of the Classical Tradition. In addition to his three Pulitzers for Drama, he won a fourth for Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History.29 He is one of only four people to have won four Pulitzers and the only one to win in two categories.30 Sherwood was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1941. He was elected to the Academy in 1949.31 He won the Academy Award for screenwriting for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Scholar and critic Stanley Fish regards The Best Years of Our Lives as the greatest American film ever made. Fish sees within it “a measure of optimism” but “more than a residue of disappointment and bitterness.”32 These are attitudes we shall see reflected again and again in Sherwood’s work for stage and screen. The film was roundly (and wrongly) criticized in the Commie-​hunting days of the 1950s for seeming to contain much in the way of Communist propaganda.33 Liberals like Sherwood were men and women “standing precariously between fanatic extremes.” Communism was on the far left and powerful conservative forces were on the far right.34 Unlike contemporary playwright and friend Maxwell Anderson, who developed a stylized, poetic language for his characters, the like of which has never been spoken off the stage, Sherwood’s characters always employ a twentieth-​century, colloquial manner of speech—​even in the case of gods and mortals from classical antiquity. As John Erskine noted in presenting Sherwood with the Gold Medal for Drama, he treated “ancient men and women exactly as though they were with us today.”35

III Living ruins Sherwood made no pretense of being a classicist. As a creative artist, however, he made frequent use of the classical past, though he never approached the ancient world in an attempt to understand it on its own terms. He was heavily indebted to the past but saw himself as sovereign over it. In this regard at least, he resembles modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.36 The opening scene of The Twilight (1947), one of his last major attempts to secure a Broadway hit, presents the audience with a cast of ancient gods and mortals, inhabiting a landscape that seems to sum up how all his life Sherwood imagined the connection between the ancient and modern worlds. The time of The Twilight is very much the present of the postwar years: the beginning of the Cold War, when the world was threatened by the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The place is a remote island in the Ionian Sea, where

Introduction  7 personages from classical antiquity live on in exile, the circumstances of their lives radically altered since they were forced to abandon Olympus. Ganymede, Ares, Aphrodite, and her half-​mortal daughter Lyrith inhabit the island,37 which has a single building: the ruins of a graceful temple erected originally in honor of Aphrodite. Only part of the temple is visible; the rest is overgrown with vegetation: cypress, olive trees, and innumerable vines and shrubs. Such scenes of picturesque decay have often prompted ruminations on the significance of ruins. Within the vast literature on the subject of ruins, at least three of Sherwood’s core beliefs about the ancient world can be detected. A glimpse is also provided of the sense of bleak pessimism regarding the future of mankind that overtook him at the beginning of the nuclear age. First, Charles Martindale, speaking of how Vergil fuses past, present, and future in the Aeneid, calls attention to the relationship between ruins and the natural environment in which they are often situated. He explains what he calls the ideology of ruins:  “Ruins suggest … that the present social order is rooted deep in time and the soil; culture and nature are mysteriously at one.”38 Sherwood’s temple is rooted in the soil, from which grow the ornaments of nature that have become inextricably entwined with it. Culture and nature form a favored pair in Sherwood’s thinking. They stand in opposition to modern science and technology, which in The Twilight threaten the existence of the human race. Second, like Virginia Woolf, Sherwood believed that the world of classical antiquity must endure eternally, though classical achievements in art and literature remain at a great distance from us, consisting, as they do, according to Woolf, of “incongruous odds and ends.”39 Sherwood’s temple consists of such odds and ends and is offered to the audience’s view only in part. Its presence in ruined form signals what the play will confirm:  the ancients and their achievements survive in the modern age only partially. Sherwood’s belief in our limited understanding of antiquity led him to find it perfectly reasonable, for example, to turn Hannibal into a pacifist in the course of The Road to Rome. Ruins further serve to arouse feelings of melancholia. “When we contemplate ruins,” Christopher Woodward points out, “we contemplate our own future.”40 Ruins were charged with strong emotive force in the works of Heinrich Heine and the British aesthetes of the nineteenth century like Walter Pater, who followed in his wake. In a striking epigrammatic utterance, Heine declares:  “We do not comprehend ruins until we ourselves are in ruins.”41 Once such kinship with ruins is achieved, we are liberated and enabled to experience the feelings of nostalgia for the past that are so often reflected in Heine’s poetry and especially in his essay “Die Götter im Exil,” where ruins preserve the Greek gods in precarious safety from the hostile forces of Christianity.42 In The Twilight, the enemies of the classical past that have relegated the gods to a marginal existence are the purveyors of modern science and technology.

8 Introduction

IV Robert E. Sherwood in the Classical Tradition Sherwood’s plays most worthy of attention all reflect the influence of Greco-​ Roman antiquity. When he dispensed with classical models and sources, his work usually suffered. Chapter 1 (“The Curious Case of Barnum Was Right”) offers an analysis of Sherwood’s first plays, two versions of Barnum Was Right, which together demonstrate a depth of interest in classical antiquity that he would maintain throughout his life. The first was written in 1917 during World War I but never produced; the second was staged in 1920 after the war. In the prewar version of Barnum, Sherwood harnessed the resources of Greek Old Comedy, recreating the kind of comic fantasy associated with Aristophanes. Here, he brought to life Ganymede and Jupiter, making the king of the gods a foolish, naive divinity, who goes on to become a matinee idol in film. After the war, the play was rewritten as a palimpsest of the first, and all traces of Aristophanes were erased. Barnum now took the form of later Greek New Comedy, a more lifelike comic mode popularized by Menander and others. As far as I know, Sherwood is the only dramatist in history to have written successfully in the modes of Greek Old and New Comedy. Both versions of Barnum reflect the spirit of the times they were composed, and, taken together, they open a window onto significant social and political changes taking place in America as a result of World War I. Chapter  2 (“Robert E.  Sherwood on The Road to Rome:  The ghosts of battle”) deals with Sherwood’s first Broadway hit (1927). The play imaginatively reconstructs the moment in the Second Punic War when Hannibal of Carthage decided not to attack Rome in the aftermath of his brilliant victory at Cannae. Since antiquity, an argument has raged over the reason for his failure to move against the enemy capital. Sherwood offers a reason of his own:  cherchez la femme. Amytis, wife of Fabius Maximus, uses sex and suasion to deflect Hannibal from the course recommended by his generals. The naive and foolish Amytis instructs Hannibal on the evils of war. In a decade when veterans of the war like Robert Graves and T. E. Lawrence could only come to terms with the war through personal reminiscences, The Road to Rome transcends the personal experiences of the individual soldier and takes an historical view of the problem of war. Having imitated Aristophanes and Menander in his first two comic plays, Sherwood turned to the works of George Bernard Shaw as a model. The Road to Rome follows the conventions of realist drama that had been taking root in America since the end of the nineteenth century. Sherwood would continue to compose plays in the realist mode throughout the decade of the 1930s. The success of The Road to Rome was followed by a string of critical and financial failures unworthy of serious attention. Sherwood briefly turned his back on the muses of the classical age. He later described his work in the years following The Road to Rome as several attempts to repeat the formula represented in The Road to Rome.43 This description is far off the mark; the plays to which he refers are at most only tangentially related to The Road to Rome, and they follow no set formula.44

Introduction  9 Chapter 3 (“Acropolis”) takes up the most important work of Sherwood’s career (1933). He at last found a personal and compelling voice in the realm of realist drama. The play is set in fifth-​century Athens and deals, ostensibly, with the building of the Parthenon and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War between a democratic Athens and a totalitarian Sparta. Future Athenian general Alcibiades, sculptor Pheidias, and Pericles’ mistress Aspasia are featured. Acropolis employs allegory to alert America and the world to the menace to democracy posed by the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. Sherwood was likely the first American to recognize the extent of the danger simmering beneath the surface of world politics. The play became the pivot around which his most successful plays would later turn. Chapter 4 (“Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse”) discusses Sherwood’s plays that immediately preceded or followed World War II. The three Pulitzer Prize–​ winning plays, Idiot’s Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois: A Play in Twelve Scenes (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1940), all draw from Acropolis as they sound an alarm with increasing volume and directness regarding the dangers posed by fascism. Idiot’s Delight is a marvelous cocktail of American realist drama blended with the kind of Greek New Comedy Sherwood had written in his youth in Barnum Was Right. He based the character of Harry Van, the eponymous idiot of the play, upon that of the sculptor Pheidias in Acropolis. Abe Lincoln in Illinois also draws heavily upon Acropolis, featuring a strong-​minded woman (Mary Todd) who transforms her hapless and helpless mate (Abraham Lincoln) into a figure of mythical dimensions. Sherwood based the portrayal of the couple upon the relationship of Aspasia and Pericles in Acropolis. There Shall Be No Night is mapped out as a modern Acropolis, where a militant aggressor to the South (the Soviet Union = Sparta) attacks its freedom-​loving neighbor to the North (Finland  =  Athens). Chapter  4 concludes with a brief description of The Twilight (1947), where Sherwood returns in memory to days prior to World War I and once more breathes life into the gods of Greek antiquity. Though The Twilight never came to life on the stage, the play is noteworthy: the first dramatic work that attempted to come to terms with life in the nuclear age.

Notes 1 See the newspaper clipping enclosed in RES to R. L. Simon, February 3, 1949, b MS Am 1947, 1610: HHU. 2 New York Times, Thursday, November 17, 1955. 3 Newspaper clippings from around the world regarding Sherwood’s death, most unattributed, are collected as RES, b MS Am 1947, 2411: HHU. 4 Behrman (1965:  138). The Playwrights’ Company was a consortium of five of America’s most distinguished playwrights:  Robert E.  Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, and Sidney Howard. They banded together in 1938 in order to produce their own plays and deserving works of others. 5 For details regarding Sherwood’s upbringing, see Alonso (2007: 7–​35).

10 Introduction

6 J. M. Brown: see RES, b MS Am 1947, Miscellaneous Box 2, 275: HHU. 7 For Poore’s comment, see RES, b MS Am 1947, Miscellaneous Box 2, 275: HHU. 8 See RES to Homer Croy, March 17, 1952, b MS Am 1947, 1073: HHU. 9 Sherwood predicted the outbreak of the war in 1933, but he publicly called for armed intervention against Germany only in 1938 with the production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, when he had finally abandoned his pacifist beliefs. Archibald MacLeish seems to have been the first American literary figure to call the country to arms against Nazi Germany—​this in 1935. MacLeish was followed by Sherwood in 1938 and by John Steinbeck in 1940: see Buitenhuis (1996). 10 See Alonso (2007: 214). 11 Olson (2013: 139–​50) discusses the activities of the Century Group. 12 Olson (2013: 81). 13 See Olson (2013:  86). In the form of a best-​selling novel, Roth (2004) later imagined the scenario Sherwood feared:  Charles Lindbergh as president of the United States. 14 See Alterman and Mattson (2012: 96). As we shall see, Sherwood’s atheism was qualified by his belief in the essential divinity of the human race. 15 Sherwood (1948: 3). 16 Sherwood (1948: 5). According to Alterman and Mattson (2012: 13–​14): “FDR opened the gates for intellectuals to enter politics,” including among their number “influential Jewish intellectuals, black intellectuals, playwrights, novelists, and other radicals who had previously viewed themselves to be living and working at the margins of mainstream society in critical opposition to its central values.” 17 Wills (1987: 64), comments on Roosevelt’s “great sense of theater” and sees it in operation during the suspenseful beginning of his first term as president. 18 Holzer and Garfinkle (2015: 211). 19 RES to Ernest S. Brandenburg, November 7, 1947, b MS Am 1947, 1003: HHU. 20 RES to Samuel Rosenman, April 22, 1949, b MS Am 1947, 1478: HHU. 21 See RES to Thomas G. Dobyns, March 7, 1951, b MS Am 1947, 1100: HHU. 22 As Sherwood explained in a letter to Donald F. Hall, The origin [of the Psychological Warfare Branch] may be said to have been in September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, when I went to the UK on a confidential mission to study the whole British propaganda and political warfare set-​up. (RES to Donald F. Hall, May 15, 1945, b MS Am 1947, 1197: HHU)

23 Warburg is quoted in R. H. Smith (2005: 2). 24 Waller (2011: 104). 25 Alonso (2007: 244–​51) discusses the early years of the Voice of America. 26 Sherwood cited in Alonso (2007: 259–​60). 27 See RES to Thomas Dinesen, November 4, 1946, b MS Am 947, 1098: HHU. 28 See FDR to Douglas MacArthur, RES, January 20, 1945, b MS Am 1947, 1305: HHU. 29 Sherwood (1948). 30 The other four-​time winners are Eugene O’Neill (Drama), Robert Frost (Poetry), and Carol Guzy (Photography). 31 See R.  E. Sherwood, Correspondence File (1937–​1948), American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Introduction  11 32 Fish (2015: 52). On the other hand, Sarris (1998: 351) judges the film too redolent of Sherwood’s liberal bent. Dwight D.  Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces during World War II, wrote to Samuel Goldwyn on November 22, 1946, commending the role he and Sherwood played in bringing the story of returning veterans to the screen: see RES, Miscellaneous Box 2, 275: HHU. 33 See Alterman and Mattson (2012:  107–​9). They note that Fredric March, who won the best actor Oscar that year for The Best Years of Our Lives, and Myrna Loy, who played his wife, both saw their careers suffer as a result of participation in the kind of socially conscious film that was rare during this period. 34 Alterman and Mattson (2012: 109). 35 Erskine awarded Sherwood the Prize on January 18, 1941: see R. E. Sherwood, Correspondence File (1937–​1948), American Academy of Arts and Letters. 36 For the modernists’ sovereignty over the past, see Gay (2008: 201–​8). 37 Unlike Gilbert and Sullivan’s Strephon from Iolanthe, who was a fairy down to the waist while his legs were mortal, Lyrith’s mortal half seems to reflect itself only in a certain dissatisfaction and restlessness she inherited from her mortal father, who lived at the time of the Persian Wars. 38 Martindale (1993: 51). 39 Woolf (2008:  3). Sherwood may not have been familiar with Woolf’s essay, but he would have been cheered by her observation that as far as knowing Greek is concerned “we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys.” He occupied just that place in Greek class at Harvard. 40 Woodward (2002: 2). 41 Snodgrass (1888: 298). 42 Heine ([1856] 1962). Odds are that Sherwood was influenced by Heine’s essay. 43 See Sherwood (1940: xx). 44 These are Love Nest (1927), The Queen’s Husband (1928), Waterloo Bridge (1930), and This Is New York: A Play in Three Acts (1931).

1  The curious case of Barnum Was Right

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. William Shakespeare

Within a span of four years, Robert E. Sherwood wrote and then rewrote a comedy that in two versions recapitulates in the twentieth century the history of comedy as it played out over more than a century in ancient Athens. As incarnations of the two basic forms of Greek comedy, Barnum Was Right has a fascinating history unlike any comedy known to me. When else has a work done in the manner of Greek Old Comedy been rewritten so as to morph into New Comedy? I  shall argue that many of the sociopolitical and aesthetic factors that were operative in the gradual transformation of Athenian comedy after the Peloponnesian War were at work in America. History repeated itself, with World War I playing the transformative role that may be assigned to the Peloponnesian War in antiquity. I  shall then offer close readings of both versions of Barnum Was Right. Taken together, they offer a kind of time-​lapse shot of Old Comedy becoming New—​but now in America. Barnum Was Right (book by Robert E. Sherwood and music by S. P. Sears) started rehearsals in the spring of 1917 for production by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The musical comedy, a broad satire of public fascination with the movie industry, was almost immediately withdrawn, however, when its author and other members of the cast and crew went into one branch or other of military service. Many of them died during the war.1 Barnum began life as a surrealistic Greek Old Comedy expressly in the manner of the Athenian comic poet Aristophanes (c. 446–​386 B C ).2 Aristophanic comedy is characterized by a generous element of fantasy, comic reflections on current events, and pointed satire directed at prominent politicians and generals of the day.3 It exhibits a remarkable level of freedom of speech and explicit sex, which, to borrow from P. G. Wodehouse, “would bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty” among many today.4 Old Comedy was a vehicle for effecting social change. On the level of style, Aristophanes crafted topsy-​turvy, fractured plots that develop with cheerful

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  13 disregard for real life and the canons of probability or necessity, said later by Aristotle to be necessary for the proper development of a plot. When Sherwood returned home after the war, his taste in the comic underwent a sea change. He reworked the play, took out sections of dialogue and music from the original text, changed some among the cast of characters, and relocated the action from its original settings on Mount Olympus and in Hollywood and New  York. The play now took place in Cairo, Egypt. In this new version (1920), the elements of satire and fantasy are virtually eliminated.5 Barnum Was Right now bore the stamp of the later coherent and lifelike works of New Comedy written in Athens by Menander (c. 342–​290 B C ) and others and reproduced later in Rome by Plautus and Terence. In this second major period of comedy’s history, the action is “broadly logical, and the psychology and the whole spirit broadly realist.”6 In New Comedy, proper decorum is maintained throughout. Strict limits are observed regarding what may be said and done. New Comedy bears witness to a lowering of sights as to what comedy can accomplish; it ceases to be a vehicle for bringing about change in society and provides instead a generous dosage of moralizing on the human condition, stock characters, and harmless entertainment. With New Comedy, humor lost its bite. Laughter was no longer designed to hurt or upset. According to Marcus Aurelius’ brief but illuminating account, both political and aesthetic causes underlay the development from Old to New Comedy in democratic Athens. As far as politics is concerned, Marcus maintains that Old Comedy flourished in a political climate characterized by freedom of speech (parrhēsian). In a single word, he captures much of the essence of Old Comedy as it was written in Athens prior to the end of the Peloponnesian War (431–​404 BC ). Following the failure of two oligarchic coups, the Athenian democracy was restored in 402 BC , but freedom of speech lost its luster as a hallmark of Athenian democracy. Marcus notes that aesthetic considerations played an important part in the transformation as well. He observes that little by little Old passed into New Comedy because of a love of technique based on the imitation (mimesis) of life (Meditations, XI.6). The details of the evolution from Old to New Comedy, encapsulated in Marcus’ phrase “little by little,” are impossible for us to comprehend fully, given that only isolated fragments of comedies written between Aristophanes and Menander survive. The development was likely not as smooth as our fragmentary sources might lead us to expect. Indeed, a later Aristophanes, one from Byzantium, posited a transitional phase of Middle Comedy. This Aristophanes strongly favored New Comedy, which imitated real life. Regarding Menander, he famously rhapsodized: “Oh! Menander and man’s life, which of you imitated the other?”7 New Comedy has had a long and enduring history and continues to be written and performed today in the so-​called “comedy of manners.” Reports on the curious history of Barnum Was Right, published over several decades in The Harvard Crimson, offer clues to an understanding of the

14  The curious case of Barnum Was Right reasons for Barnum’s peculiar metamorphosis. In these reports, we can chart the beginnings of a change in taste occurring in Sherwood and in America at large in the aftermath of World War I. On February 17, 1917, The Harvard Crimson announced the Hasty Pudding Club’s forthcoming production of Barnum Was Right and provided dates and locations for performances in Cambridge, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and New York.8 Two weeks before the premiere, however, the cast and crew voted to cancel the production and enlist in the armed forces.9 Following the war, plans finally to stage the play were cancelled, when it was found to be “somewhat out of date.”10 In 1920, however, Barnum was once again in play, so to speak. The title remained the same and the film industry was still the subject, but Sherwood had rewritten the play, deleting its various Aristophanic elements, especially the play’s satirical bent. No longer did Barnum poke fun at a gullible public. Sherwood turned the play into a lifelike comedy of manners, like the New Comedy of Menander. Plans were announced to stage the new version in Cambridge, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.11 An additional performance was to be staged a year later in London.12 Barnum was a hit in its new form, which was no longer deemed out of date. In 1956, looking back on the history of Pudding shows, The Harvard Crimson explained why the second version of Barnum was a success while the first was deemed out of date: Perhaps the best show ever put on by the Pudding was “Barnum Was Right,” produced in 1920 …. It was a success largely because of its straight musical comedy format instead of the usual burlesque offering. The play was actually “good theatre” and played to enthusiastic audiences.13 After World War I, a play done in the manner of Aristophanes no longer won favor. Something more tightly structured, less disjointed, less like “the usual burlesque” was deemed preferable. Now the word “burlesque” to describe the original Barnum mischaracterizes the play. Rather than burlesque, the play took the form of the Broadway revue, a genre of musical comedy popular at the time Sherwood was writing before the war. A brief excursus on the history of musical comedy in America will make clear how the first, Aristophanic version of the play reflects the times in which it was written, the heyday of the Broadway revue.

I From Burlesque to the Broadway Revue No smooth evolution from burlesque to the Broadway revue took place. Rather, there was a series of overlapping developments akin to the gradual movement from the topsy-​turvy world of Old Comedy to the more ordered realm in which New Comedy flourished. Describing the origin of Old Comedy in Athens, Erich Segal remarks:

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  15 The genesis of comedy resembles the Creation as told by Hesiod (and parodied by Aristophanes): in the beginning there was Chaos. The earliest comic writers were criticized for formlessness and chaotic construction.14 Chaos is also an apt term to describe burlesque.15 Burlesque first arrived at the shores of America in 1868 in the person of Lydia Thompson, the star of a touring group of actresses called “The British Blondes.”16 Burlesque was a variety show of comic skits interspersed with choruses of dancing females in various states of undress. No attempt was made to mold the skits into any form of artistic unity. From the beginning, burlesque sold sex—​though not always striptease.17 In both incarnations, Barnum Was Right is unlike burlesque; the plays have plots, and issues raised in the beginning of each are resolved at the conclusion. Nor is Barnum much like vaudeville, another subgenre of musical comedy, though performers cycled back and forth between burlesque and vaudeville. Vaudeville, which enjoyed its period of greatest popularity between 1881 and 1932,18 also involved a heterogeneous mixture of self-​contained and easily replaceable component parts, functioning independently of one another. Variety was the essence of vaudeville. Its aesthetic, like that of burlesque, was markedly fractured with one act succeeding another and no connection linking the various parts of the show. Unlike burlesque, however, vaudeville was intended to appeal to women and children. Modern viewers can get a taste of vaudeville antics by watching Eddie Cantor cavort in Show Business.19 Rowdy audience members throw fruit at Cantor and demand to see the girls. These “Tough Eggs”—​again to borrow a phrase from P. G. Wodehouse—​show woeful ignorance of genre. Wanting burlesque, they have come to the wrong theater. Aristotle would not have approved of burlesque or vaudeville. Neither version of Barnum Was Right resembles vaudeville. Indeed, commentators who sometimes find a modern analogy to Aristophanic comedy in vaudeville are looking in the wrong place. Finally, the Broadway revue, the last to evolve, was a more respected form of art than burlesque and vaudeville, and it paid better too. Performers circulated among these three subgenres of musical comedy. In the course of Show Business, Cantor leaves vaudeville and graduates to the revue. Like vaudeville, the revue featured a diversity of material, but the attempt was made to shape these elements into a unified whole, and an overarching plot, though tenuous at times, could be discerned throughout. The true measure of “making it” in New  York was graduation from vaudeville to the revue, though the revue had elements in common with vaudeville. In addition to employing vaudeville performers, the revue “shared vaudeville’s quick pace and heterogeneous material, its immediate appeal and its emphasis on spectacle over narrative.”20 The Broadway revue, however, was designed to appeal to grown-​up tastes. The revue broke from vaudeville in several other respects as well. The revue featured more sophisticated humor of a topical kind, found also in the prewar version of Barnum Was Right. From the beginning, the

16  The curious case of Barnum Was Right revue “combined the showmanship and spectacle of vaudeville with the unity and coordination of the legitimate theater,”21 integrating diverse elements into its program through the introduction of an overriding theme or unifying plot. The revue sought a delicate balance between centripetal forces working for unity and centrifugal forces threatening the kind of fragmentation found in burlesque and vaudeville. The Broadway revue is closely analogous to Aristophanic comedy. The first version of Barnum Was Right is a revue, a medium of entertainment popularized in the twentieth century by Florenz (“Flo”) Ziegfeld, who is mentioned in Barnum Was Right and whose influence is visible throughout. Incidentally, Ziegfeld had much in common with P.  T. Barnum; both were “independent wizards, savvy inventors of theatrical enterprises.”22 In 1907, a decade before the first version of Barnum Was Right, Ziegfeld began production of a long string of Follies, eventually called Ziegfeld’s Follies, which marked a break with the traditions of vaudeville. The Follies of 1907, his first follies, incorporated the centripetal and centrifugal forces that would come to characterize the Broadway revue. Commemorating the three-​hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, The Follies of 1907 sent Captain John Smith and Pocahontas on a tour of modern New York. Their presence as observers of contemporary life provided the element of unity. What they saw in their peregrinations was a string of otherwise unrelated incidents that provided an optimum level of variety: for example, a controversy at the Metropolitan Opera over the production of Richard Strauss’ Salome.23 A modern audience can get a taste of the Broadway revue through The Great Ziegfeld, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 1936.24 The film uses the life and career of Flo Ziegfeld (William Powell) as the unifying factor. When he comes to conceptualize The Follies, Ziegfeld demands a musical with a plot. Interspersed within the film is the kind of lavish, over-​the-​ top production number characteristic of The Follies. These feature a number of performers who actually worked with Ziegfeld like Will Rogers and Eddie Cantor. The film transforms Ziegfeld’s life into one of his Follies. The first Barnum Was Right is a somewhat tightly organized musical comedy revue of the Ziegfeld type. Indeed, Sherwood had personal experience with Ziegfeld. While a student at Harvard, he traveled to New  York to sell songs he had written with Sears to Ziegfeld himself.25 Burlesque, vaudeville, and the Broadway revue are no longer central elements of popular culture, but they have not died out completely. To borrow a phrase from Trav S. D., their ghosts have “continued to haunt us thereafter.”26 These “ghosts” remain among us as revenants of an earlier time. Yet Trav points out their relevance to the modern world: In this post-​ MTV, postmodern, attention-​ deficit-​ ridden age of electronics-​induced schizophrenia, I make bold to suggest that few of us will have a problem with this “fractured” aesthetic.27

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  17

II War and politics: the Peloponnesian War and World War I Marcus Aurelius’ thumbnail sketch of political considerations at work in the evolution from Old to New Comedy in Athens can be glossed in such a way as to prove relevant to Sherwood’s abandonment of Old in favor of New Comedy. War and the politics of the time help explain a change in taste shown by Sherwood, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and, indeed, by America in general. The curious case of Barnum Was Right allows a glimpse of political changes occurring after World War I that resemble what took place in Athens. The guns of August had just fallen silent in 1920, the year Barnum was finally produced, when British classical scholar and statesman Gilbert Murray first drew attention to resemblances between the Peloponnesian War and what was then called “the Great War.” Murray argued that the Great War curbed freedom of speech in Britain in much the same way as the Peloponnesian War affected Athens. Both were world wars, he said, both the greatest conflicts of their eras, and both witnessed the decline of a great empire.28 Murray focused his attention on the issue of freedom of speech (Marcus’ parrhēsia), though his analysis may cause some confusion inasmuch as he conflates freedom of speech with freedom in general. (Later, we shall see that freedom of speech is but a single element in a larger constellation of freedoms.) Murray celebrated freedom of speech in the plays of Aristophanes, where, for example, the leading statesman of the day could be referred to as “a whale that keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire.”29 According to Murray, the end of the Peloponnesian War saw the passing of “the city of law and freedom, of simplicity and beauty.” Thucydides, he cleverly notes, couches his praise of Athens within a funeral oration, the Funeral Speech of Pericles in Book 2. In the voice of Pericles, the historian nostalgically contemplates the passing of the Athenian Empire and the ideals represented by his native city.30 Socrates soon became the first martyr for free speech when he was condemned to death by his fellow citizens several years after the end of the war (399 B C ).31 Murray expresses an uneasy hope that the values represented in prewar Athens, which he saw embodied in the British Empire during the Victorian Era, might survive the depredations of the Great War in Britain, that history might not repeat itself in his own time. The jury was still out, so to speak, when almost a decade later (1929) a less-​than-​sanguine Murray took the temperature of the 1920s. Murray developed a theory of history based on alternating cycles of cosmos and chaos. The Greek city-​state or polis, he believed, was a cosmos in which “the good citizen knew exactly how to behave.” This cosmos was overthrown by the “chaos of military conquest in which no one felt clear what to think or what to do.”32 This pattern, he thought, was unfolding in his own time, as the cosmos represented by the Victorian Age yielded to the chaos brought about by the Great War. The security of life in the Victorian Age, he held, was responsible for “an almost reckless freedom of thought

18  The curious case of Barnum Was Right and speech.”33 There was, Murray says of Victorian society, “a general agreement to praise freedom: some wanted much more of it and some only a little, but all were in favor of it.”34 Satire cut deep in those prewar days. Murray calls attention to “an incessant bombardment” of criticism directed at “the State, the Church, the Nonconformist Conscience, the middle class, and the institution of the family.”35 Murray speaks of Dickens, Carlyle, and Tennyson as authors of the Victorian Age who exercised freedom of speech and aimed their verbal missiles at society at large. He might equally well have recognized the Victorian Age as the Golden Age of political caricature, represented in the drawings of Robert Seymour and others.36 In such an environment, it makes sense that the comedies of Aristophanes would have enjoyed great popularity—​both as texts and performances.37 Both the Peloponnesian War and the Great War produced situations in which a sense of security was undermined, in which “no one felt clear what to think or what to do.”38 It remained an open question in 1929 whether chaos would once more make way to cosmos. “If we wish to be free,” Murray mused in a chapter on the uncertain future of the British Empire, “if we wish to be merciful, we must first see that civilization is safe.”39 Lost freedom could only be restored, if at all, through the recovery of a sense of security, the attainment of which remained uncertain as he wrote. Murray also claims that, while the Victorians were “seriously interested in the main work on which the nation was engaged,” much like polis-​era Greeks, the present-​day public of 1929 focused attention on “crimes and betting news and interviews with passing celebrities.”40 To my knowledge, scholarship has yet to take the path blazed by Murray, for America’s experience following World War I also reflects that of Athens after the Peloponnesian War—​particularly on the issue of freedom of speech. Christopher M. Finan has argued that World War I served as the watershed moment in the history of free speech in America. Prior to the war, he says, the right to free speech (Marcus’ parrhēsia) was largely taken for granted by the country’s citizens. During the war, however, the expanding federal government took steps to crush criticism of the war in fear of foreign radicals. The Espionage Act of 1917 began a process of censorship that continued for years.41 “From war-​time censorship,” says Frederick Lewis Allen, who lived through the period, “it was a short step to peacetime censorship of newspapers, and books, and public speech.”42 Allen speaks of a “reign of terror” in 1919–​20, which was directed at blacks, Catholics, and Jews—​especially at unions and communists.43 David J. Goldberg writes at length on “the postwar suspicion of all things foreign” and “the growing intolerance of the 1920s.”44 Finan refers to the arrests of suspected communists and socialists by Attorney General A.  Mitchell Palmer. The first so-​called “Palmer raid,” he says, netted more than a thousand people in eleven cities, the second more than three thousand. He calls the Palmer Raids “Ground Zero” of the assault on free speech.45 Bill Bryson’s figures are higher: he speaks of six thousand to ten thousand people beaten and/​or arrested in at least seventy-​eight cities in twenty-​three states.46

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  19 The nation’s courts, Finan maintains, were staunchly hostile to freedom of speech throughout the decade of the 1920s.47 Sherwood revamped Barnum Was Right as New Comedy in 1920, at Ground Zero in the history of free speech in America, a period extending from the end of the war to 1921, after which restrictions were gradually relaxed. In a time of censorship of movies and books, the offensive, satirical, sex-​saturated Old Comic sensibility of Aristophanes—​and of an extremely clever imitator of Aristophanes—​could find little purchase.48 For the moment, the moral order of the country demanded a safer, more sanitized form of comedy. New Comedy fit the bill, just as it had in Athens following the Peloponnesian War.

III America and Athens: war and civic freedom That war would imperil free speech—​even in times and places where its exercise was especially valued—​is perhaps not too surprising. Of greater consequence, I think, are setbacks to civic freedom brought about in the aftermaths of the Peloponnesian War and World War I. Treating freedom of speech as synonymous with freedom itself, Murray failed to take note of other freedoms curtailed by the Great War.49 Orlando Patterson has shown that freedom is a tripartite value. Patterson uses the musical metaphor of “a chordal triad” in order to distinguish among three notes comprising the chord of freedom.50 He provides the conceptual tools necessary to understand that much more than threats to freedom of speech are at issue when assessing the aftereffects of the Peloponnesian War on Athens and World War I on America. Personal freedom consists in the ability to do what one wishes within the limits imposed by others who wish to do the same. Civic freedom is “the capacity of adult members of a community to participate in its life and governance.” Civic freedom “implies a political community of some sort with clearly defined rights and obligations for every citizen.” Sovereignal freedom is the freedom to do what one wishes, “regardless of the wishes of others,” as opposed to personal freedom, which implies limitations.51 (Patterson is unclear how freedom of speech fits his schema.) The three notes of freedom may sound independently of one another or in various combinations. Leaving aside the note of sovereignal freedom, which seems irrelevant to a study of America in the 1920s, America no longer having slaves nor yet much interested in building an overseas empire,52 Athens and America had sounded the note of civic freedom with enhanced volume before their respective world wars. Pericles’ Funeral Oration singles out his city for being open and free in granting all citizens the right to participate in political life, in other words, to enjoy fully the fruits of civic freedom (Thucydides, 2.37). The Athenian democracy managed to survive in the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, “But the ordered world of the fifth century, precarious even then, had now crumbled away.” In Athens and in other Greek cities, politics became a game too dangerous to play.53 In 359 BC , when Menander was a boy, Philip of Macedon ascended the throne in the kingdom of Macedon to the north

20  The curious case of Barnum Was Right of Greece and began a process of conquest that, according to Peter Green, marked “the end of real freedom in Greece.” (To be more precise, Philip and his son Alexander brought an end to civic freedom: Greeks lost the power to participate in and to determine their own governance.) “The polis, the city-​ state,” he says, “had run its course: a new era was dawning.”54 This was the era of chaos referred to above in Murray’s theory of history. The lack of meaningful politics entailed the absence of civic freedom. From this state of affairs, Old gave way to New Comedy in Athens. The brutality of the times, Murray says in a fine phrase, contrasted with “a delicacy of feeling” represented on the stage of New Comedy.55 The demise of the city-​state did not bring down the curtain on freedom, however, for Athenians gained a greater measure of personal freedom at the expense of lost civic freedom. According to M.  I. Finley, “[T]‌he search for wisdom and moral excellence concentrated on the individual soul so completely that society could be rejected as a secondary and accidental factor.”56 Peter Green points out that many turned to materialistic, financial, or spiritual pursuits: The loss of external political freedom inevitably drove men inward on themselves. Not all were looking for the same thing but a remarkable number of those who did not opt for financial, material success (and indeed, some who did) were on a quest for freedom of the soul.57 In the fourth and third centuries, Stoic and Epicurean philosophers offered to Greeks and so-​called barbarians inner personal freedom. Indeed, Zeno and Chrysippus, the founders of Stoicism, were not themselves native Greeks. So adverse had philosophy become to politics that Epicurus warned his followers to abstain from all forms of political engagement and to lead a quiet, unobtrusive life. As Isaiah Berlin argued, the Stoics also regarded social life and politics as hindrances to the attainment of the kind of self-​sufficiency that constitutes happiness.58 Though philosophers eschewed the drive for worldly success, the more materially inclined lavished their riches on great houses and the purchasing of gangs of slaves. Green points out how the nouveaux riches, for example, often escaped criticism for failing to feed the poor; rather they were blamed for neglecting the health of their own souls.59 Mutatis mutandis, America also experienced a shift away from civic to personal freedom after World War I—​but with a difference. Civic freedom was not wrested from Americans in the 1920s by foreign invaders after military defeat; it suffered decline following victory in war and was willingly abandoned. Furthermore, material gain put any search for inner, spiritual freedom in the shade:  no philosophies were formulated to fill the gap left by the loss of civic freedom. The pace of change being quick in twentieth-​century America, civic freedom yielded place to personal freedom in a matter of several years. The first Aristophanic Barnum Was Right was written before America entered the war during the heady, optimistic days of civic freedom and

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  21 security, comparable to the age of the polis, when Aristophanes composed his comedies, and to the Victorian Age Murray lauded. America evidenced what Philipp Blom has called “a thrusting optimism,” “built on a robust, quasi-​religious trust in words and the truth behind them.”60 What Murray says about the Victorians applies equally to prewar Americans:  “The age was so confident and had so clear a conscience that it rather liked hearing denunciations and paradoxes.”61 This was the age of the “muckraker,” as Theodore Roosevelt characterized the investigative reporter. (British political caricaturist Robert Seymour was a muckraker of the Victorian Age.) William Randolph Hearst published “The Treason of the Senate,” which initially sparked Roosevelt’s ire.62 Lincoln Steffens and Joe Folk’s “Enemies of the Republic” uncovered and denounced bribery schemes reaching into the highest levels of government. The New  York Times called on the public to condemn the shady business practices this work uncovered, and newspapers around the country joined the chorus of condemnation.63 The first version of Barnum offered a cornucopia of satirical comedy and invective appropriate to the age, but it was unfortunately never given voice on stage. Barnum was first written in the time of democratic president Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom,” an era of distrust in big business, the influence of which was to be checked by big government bringing equality of opportunity and thus civic freedom to all citizens. Wilson was firm in the belief that “freedom today is something more than being left alone,”64 that is, something more than personal freedom. He believed that “men are no longer to be catalogued, … no longer to be put in classes.”65 Former President Theodore Roosevelt went a step further in his proposal for a progressive agenda. A month before America formally entered the war in April 1917, Roosevelt had proposed “a system of old age, sickness, and unemployment insurance, public housing, and other reforms designed to promote equality of opportunity for all;” “the people’s government had to be stronger than business if popular rule were to be effective.”66 Roosevelt, Doris Kearns Goodwin explains, wished to apply “an ethical framework” “to the untrammeled growth of modern America.”67 Indeed, the very phrase “the bully pulpit,” coined by Roosevelt, points to the near-​religious dimensions of his thought about the purpose of government and thus recalls—​in modern dress—​Aristotle’s understanding of a Greek city-​state as an ethical community concerned with “living well” (Politics, 1280b). Liberal progressive Herbert Croly, co-​founding editor of The New Republic and an important part of Roosevelt’s brain trust, gave voice to the New Freedom—​or “New Federalism,” as Roosevelt called it—​in 1911.68 According to Croly, individual freedom—​what Patterson calls personal freedom—​must be subordinated to the civic freedom of the country as a whole, which is otherwise endangered by “chaotic individualism.”69 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. credits the thirty-​year-​old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a mere state senator from New  York, with providing the most trenchant statement of the doctrine of public—​in other words civic—​supremacy. Roosevelt argued that personal freedom had spawned a set of problems

22  The curious case of Barnum Was Right unknown in earlier times; these could only be addressed at the community or civic level. He held that in the case of conflict “the liberty of the community must take precedence” over “the right of any one individual to work or not as he sees fit, to live … where and how he sees fit.”70 That is, personal freedom must sometimes give way to civic freedom. Roosevelt felt that in America the balance had tipped too far in the direction of personal freedom, and greater weight had to be accorded to civic freedom in order to restore the balance. He would carry this philosophy into his presidency in 1932. The war brought an abrupt halt to the agenda of the “New Freedom” and to a widely shared belief in the importance of unity and equality of opportunity for all. America entered a period of distrust of big government and turned back the clock to the era of laissez-​faire capitalism, which had gone into steep decline when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901.71 As in Athens—​but at a much quicker pace—​disenchantment with politics and a drive for personal freedom gripped the United States. Disparity among classes grew throughout the 1920s. In 1920, America elected to the presidency conservative Republican Warren Harding, a poster child for the idea of benign governmental neglect. As has often been said, Harding had no qualifications for being president except that he looked like one.72 The ethical dimensions of the Progressive Era were gone. During the Harding and Coolidge Administrations, big business was in the driver’s seat, and measures to insure equality and equal opportunity for all came to a halt. According to remaining progressives, the hallmarks of what was quickly christened “The New Era” in American politics were laissez-​faire capitalism, competition, and rugged individualism, not unity and freedom.73 The compulsion for unity being gone, division took its place. Idealism and a concern for society as a whole waned; materialism and individualism took their place.74 As if in compensation for the decline in value accorded to the idea of civic freedom, many Americans, like many fourth-​century Athenians, turned away from politics after the war in order to pursue their own affairs—​to make fuller use of their personal freedom. As in Athens after the Peloponnesian War and in Britain after World War I (at least according to Murray), the public seemed to forget that there were such things as public issues. Allen describes the temper of the times after the turbulence of the immediate postwar period had worn off. “A sense of disillusionment remained; like the suddenly liberated vacationist, the country felt that it ought to be enjoying itself more than it was.”75 The world of these postwar years is mirrored in the Brave New World created by Aldous Huxley, where a devastating Nine Years War with “fourteen thousand planes dropping anthrax bombs” gave birth to a society devoted solely to pleasure.76 Different weapons of war, same social effects. The 1920s marked the period Allen dubs “the ballyhoo years:” One of the striking characteristics of the era … was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  23 attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of trifles—​ a heavyweight boxing match, a new trial, a new automobile model, a transatlantic flight.77 Allen is especially critical of the ballyhoo surrounding the transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh, who, incidentally, was not the first to cross the Atlantic by air. Such a flight had been successfully accomplished in 1919. Allen’s succinct and persuasive explanation for the public’s fascination with Lindbergh:  “A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had allowed itself to entertain.”78 While many fifth-​and fourth-​century Athenians turned to philosophy in the exercise of a burgeoning sense of personal freedom, Americans—​and the British spoken of by Gilbert Murray—​turned to trivial pursuits in their disillusion with the public business of the nation. Murray well described the psychological impact of the Peloponnesian War on the hearts and minds of Athenians. In the works of Menander, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, Murray writes, one witnesses “a response of the human soul to an almost blinding catastrophe of defeat and disenchantment. All that a fifth-​century Athenian had believed in had failed and been found wanting.”79 Murray saw the Peloponnesian War as a violent interval separating markedly different ways of thinking and living. Sherwood came to see the Great War of his time in exactly these terms, though he (wrongly) believed its effects were unexampled in previous history. He says that “Man” in his own time has the ill luck to occupy a limbo-​like interlude between one age and another. Looking about him, he sees a shell-​torn No Man’s Land, filled with barbed wire entanglements and stench and uncertainty. If it is not actual chaos, it is a convincing counterfeit thereof. Before him is black doubt, punctured by brief flashes of ominous light, whose revelations are not comforting.80 More pessimistic than Murray, for whom cosmos might still emerge from chaos, Sherwood could discern in the future only “black doubt” and a feeling of desperation, which he saw as “essentially comic.”81 As in ancient Athens, the brutality of the times was balanced in his revised play by the delicate sensibility of New Comedy. Former pro-​war liberals (like Sherwood) found their confidence in democracy undermined. A war that had promised democracy to the world had failed to deliver.82 In 1940, Sherwood confessed “with deep shame” that he had voted for Harding in 1920 and thus participated in what he called the “great betrayal” of the American soldiers who had died for nothing in the war.83 Sherwood, who had proudly gone to war on behalf of the English-​ speaking world in order to make the world safe for democracy and to defeat “the Hun,” forswore allegiance in the 1920s to all forms of patriotism and nationalism.84

24  The curious case of Barnum Was Right Prior to their own Great War, Athenians could find satisfying comedy in the fulfillment of the “grandiose wishes of the whole state.”85 Everything was possible in the plays of Aristophanes, in whose Birds, for example, a couple of recalcitrant old Athenians forced the gods to surrender on unfavorable terms. After the Peloponnesian War, however, “comedy lowered its sights,” finding subject matter in modest scenes actually possible in everyday life.86 New Comedy replaced the Old. The second version of Barnum is infused with just such a lowering of sights and a diminished, less fantastic conception of what is funny. Barnum Was Right became a palimpsest:  the features of the play drawn from Old Comedy were deleted and replaced by a more realistic form of comedy, New Comedy. Sherwood would never again write in the Aristophanic mode.

IV America and Athens: changing aesthetics Were Sherwood’s disenchantment and lowering of sights sufficient to prompt a change in his taste for comedy—​and perhaps in the public’s taste as well? Perhaps not entirely. No more can the evolution from Old to New Comedy in fifth-​and fourth-​century Athens be attributed solely to the effects of the Peloponnesian War on the public consciousness. “The Athenians had lost their freedom,” says Segal, “but not their marbles.”87 Segal proposes that New Comedy represented what the average Athenian wanted to see and hear. “The comic theater,” he says, “had progressed and would ultimately present universal truths that would apply to all nations and all times.”88 In its concern for the universal, New Comedy worked fully in accord with the philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism, which likewise were concerned with ways of living appropriate to all. Nor had Sherwood and the American public lost their marbles. Rather, the growing popularity of the movies had begun gradually to eclipse burlesque, vaudeville, and the Broadway revue as the most popular form of public entertainment. Film brought in its wake a different aesthetic, being more a mimetic (to use Marcus Aurelius’ term) medium of entertainment than its predecessors. Taking a cue from Aristophanes of Byzantium, the cinema might be apostrophized thus:  “Oh! Movies and human life, which of you imitated the other?” Sherwood was one of the first to appreciate how film’s unique ability to imitate life distinguished it from all other forms of popular entertainment. I believe that he rewrote Barnum Was Right at least partly in order to make the play conform to the mimetic quality apparent in film from its earliest years.

V Robert E. Sherwood on film In the case of Barnum Was Right, we are fortunate to possess an external control affording an opportunity to make sense of postwar Sherwood’s abrupt change in taste after the war. On January 27, 1921, a short piece called “The Tenth Muse”

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  25 appeared in Life, then under Sherwood’s editorship. It tells a story set on Mount Olympus. Ganymede meets the god Apollo and brings him a horse’s neck of nectar. He also brings news of a visitor to Olympus, a woman. She is “indeed comely, with a little of the Mona Lisa in her whimsically enigmatic smile, and a little of the Bella Donna in her baby-​blue eyes. Flaxen curls tumbled in semi-​ transparent waves about her immature shoulders.” She’s a dish. The maiden has come to Olympus to apply for admission to the Society of the Muses. Apollo is puzzled, membership in the club being limited to nine, one for each of the arts. “Surely there is not a tenth art … or is there?” the god asks. Yes, she explains: I refer … to the cinema—​the motion pictures, the silent drama, the movies—​or what you will. Under any other name, the box-​office receipts would be just as large. The cinema is the tenth art, allied to the other arts in various degrees, and greater in its appeal than all of them. It embraces the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak—​ everyone, in fact, who possesses the price of admission, plus war tax. In the face of the god’s continuing skepticism, the visitor extends an invitation: “Then”—​she was gradually fading out before Apollo’s startled eyes—​ “then I advise you to read the pages of Life every week (advt.), and find out the facts for yourself.”89 The author of this vignette was Sherwood; his conceit that the movies deserve their own Muse—​put forth at the very beginning of film’s history—​has been echoed to this day.90 Sherwood’s column “The Silent Drama” ran in weekly issues of Life from January 27, 1921 until December 28, 1928 with few interruptions. In this series of reviews, he turned out the most extensive and significant body of film criticism produced during the silent era. He was clearly up to something new and original. S.  N. Behrman relates an anecdote about a dinner party where dramatist George S. Kaufman asked: “Do you realize that there sits at this table the founder of a new form of journalism?”91 Kaufman was referring to Sherwood, who began work as a film critic at the age of twenty-​four and by the time he was twenty-​seven was regarded as the dean of motion picture critics. Richard Watts went a step further, according to Sherwood the title of “father of motion picture criticism in America.”92 Sherwood’s film criticism is often amusing. On big-​scale epic movies set in the ancient world, he says: “I have always wondered why movie directors seem to believe that there were many more people around in the old days than there are now.”93 His criticism is often trenchant. On Lessons in Love, he says: “Its story has just about the same breadth as a geometric line, and it takes considerably longer to reach a given point.”94 I confine myself here to his thoughts on how good films were true to life or mimetic. Ironically, film likely proved to be the partial undoing of the first version of Barnum, which was written in order to satirize and draw attention to film’s weaknesses, its “hokum.” Sherwood’s film criticism reads like a palinode, recanting allegiance to the comic mode of extravagance found in Aristophanes. He demonstrates a

26  The curious case of Barnum Was Right distinct preference for what came to be known as the “classical narrative style” of filmmaking, which privileges “thematic significance, character consistency, narrative unity, causal logic, and psychological realism.”95 Sherwood’s favorite terms of denigration were to find “bunk” or “hokum” in a film. Though he never defined the terms clearly, Alonso describes “hokum” as “theatrical tricks … such as ham acting, tear-​jerking scenes, blatantly melodramatic plots, and sight gags,” theatrical effects employed abundantly in the first version of Barnum.96 Anything not true to life, anything not mimetic, anything unlike the comedy of Menander is hokum. Film, Sherwood believed, provided a kind of vivid drama and realism impossible to obtain in any other form of art.97 Film should not avoid the expression of sentiment or the provision of thrills, he believed, but both should be “of the sort one may experience in reality, not the sort that are administered through a dramatist’s hypodermic syringe in the theater.”98 Characters in film should be allowed to “live their own lives as human beings” and not experience “impossible emotions in improbable situations.”99 Acting, he believed, “may be (and usually is) finer on the screen than on the stage.”100 The superiority of acting in film, as opposed to the stage, allowed film to plumb the depths of the human soul. Peter the Great, for example, dissects the soul of a mighty figure of history. It shows his dominant power and his Achillean weakness, his wisdom and his short-​sightedness, his terrible emotion and his stolidity, his gross coarseness and his delicacy.101 Sherwood welcomed the advent of color film for its tendency further to enhance realism.102 Let us look closely at both versions of Barnum Was Right, which reflect in microcosm the Athenian experience of the transition from Old to New Comedy.

VI Barnum Was Right as Old Comedy “Surreal” is an apt term to apply to the first version of Sherwood’s play, which was written the year (1917) Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “surreal,” and a year after the beginning of the Dadaist movement, founded in Zurich.103 This Barnum anticipates Sherwood’s life-​long interest in the myth and literature of Greece and Rome.104 Jupiter is the first of what we shall come to see as Sherwood’s typical foolish outsider, who speaks the truth bluntly and as the playwright saw it. A world-​weary Sherwood would not restore the Olympians to life again until The Twilight (1947). The artistry Sherwood demonstrated in presenting Old Comedy to a twentieth-​century audience is impressive—​at a time he was earning Ds in Greek. Yet the comic spirit thrives best “wherever there is inward freedom,” for example, “among the young at university.”105 Barnum in its original incarnation is as political as the Clouds of Aristophanes, which satirizes Socrates

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  27 and contemporary philosophy. Both are concerned with identifying the wellsprings of mass power, in Sherwood’s case the power of film.106 Barnum is an important part of the “spin-​off industry” of original plays in the style of Aristophanes, which were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,107 but it is closer in structure and spirit to the comedies of Aristophanes than most works characterized as Aristophanic.108 Sherwood borrowed little from specific plays. Rather, he seems to have possessed an intuitive grasp of Aristophanes’ comedic methods and the narrative pattern underlying most of his plays. Following a brief summary of the plot, I shall analyze several stylistic features Barnum draws from the plays of Aristophanes: discontinuity in plot development, satire, gestures toward high poetry, slapstick, jokes, one-​liners, and puns, and, finally, song and dance.109 I  then shall show that Sherwood’s play reproduces the narrative pattern found more or less in all the comedies of Aristophanes: A (Dissatisfaction), B (Quest), C (Conflict), D (Victory), and, finally, E (Celebration).110 The plays of Aristophanes usually find their starting points in the world of everyday reality that soon gives way to surrealist fantasy.111 For example, Trygaeus in the Peace (421 BC ) leaves Athens and flies to Olympus on a “hippobeetle,” only to find that the gods have moved on to a new home. Sherwood reverses this movement: fantasy in the heavens is quickly succeeded by reality on earth. The Prologue takes place on Mount Olympus, thus establishing that anything will be possible in what follows. The play opens with a chorus of Muses performing “a Greek dance, breaking into a syncopated one-​step” (Prologue 1).112 Jupiter appears here and throughout the play as “the conventional musical comedy Englishman, drooping mustache and monocle” (Prologue 1). He has just completed a round of celestial golf, and his frame of mind is excellent, given that the course on Olympus lacks sand traps and bunkers. He asks Ganymede to bring him a horse’s neck of nectar, then picks up a copy of Snappy Stories and begins reading (Prologue 2). However, he sinks into despondency as he contemplates the lack of interest among humans in the old gods. He and the other Olympians have been “thrown into the discard” (Prologue 4). He complains: Ganymede, my good and faithful servant, do you realize what depths we have sunk to? Do you realize that there was a time when we were the idols of song and story, the head-​liners of every production when Aristophanes was writing librettos? And now, alas, we are relegated to the prologue of a musical comedy—​and indeed how out of place and ill-​ sorted we must seem. (Prologue 2) Jupiter resembles the old men who appear in many of Aristophanes’ plays, to whom a certain comic pathos attaches, concerned as they are with their “past youths, their losses, their complaints.”113 Aristophanes’ Dicaeopolis, for

28  The curious case of Barnum Was Right example, pines for the good old days when plays by Aeschylus were written. He opens Acharnians (425 BC ) with a long string of complaints about the present age (Ach. 1–​39). Here, however, Jupiter’s lament to Ganymede is ironically undercut by the fact that he is starring in just the sort of libretto Aristophanes used to turn out. The appearance of an intruder on Olympus enlivens the divine mood. The Spirit of the Movies, “an applicant, your lordship, from the world of mortal men,” arrives unexpectedly (Prologue 3). The Spirit begins the play’s comic reflections on current events: people all over the world have gone completely movie-​mad. He requests the stamp of divine approval for the new art form and asks that he be received among the immortals on Olympus. We might liken the Spirit to the typical Aristophanic little woman or little man with a very big idea. For example, Lysistrata in the eponymously named Lysistrata (411 B C ) plans to bring an end to the Peloponnesian War through a sex strike. Jupiter expresses initial skepticism about the Spirit’s request, but eventually he gives in. Together they form a plan. The god will visit earth along with the Spirit, so that he may observe the workings of the movie industry firsthand (Prologue 6). The Spirit explains that the movies follow in the tradition of the greatest philosopher of all time—​not Socrates, as Jupiter in his ignorance supposes, but rather P. T. Barnum. The public at large is lampooned; there’s a sucker born every minute: The greatest philosopher in history was P.T. Barnum. And why? He propounded the immortal theory that half the world are squirrels and the other half are nuts. He based his operations on the idea that there is one born every minute, and made a fortune from that vast assemblage of suckers known as the human race. The movies have taken up that great work where Barnum left off. So come with me to earth, and I will demonstrate to you most conclusively that I deserve a place on Mt. Olympus and that Barnum was right.114 (Prologue  6–​7) Act 1 takes place in the studios of the Bunkem Film Corporation. Idiotic director Abel Kidder begins by telling his cameraman Lasky to stop shooting, lest they use up “all the celluloid in existence” (1.1). Kidder laments his fate; he is forced to turn out the same tripe day in and day out, though he sees himself as another Alexander the Great, “the guy that licked everybody in sight and then sighed for new worlds to conquer” (1.3). Mention of Alexander leads Harold, the hero of Kidder’s films, to suggest that Kidder pray to the gods of Olympus to bring him a scenario for something fresh and new. (Film at the time was a silent art requiring scenarios, not screenplays.) The prayer ushers in the Spirit of the Movies amidst thunder, lightning, and wind. The Spirit offers Kidder the scenario for a movie entitled Barnum Was Right. Barnum Was Right is a play that contains within it the making of a film of the same name. Kidder may use the scenario for free, provided he employs the Spirit’s

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  29 friend Jupe as the leading man (1.14). Jupe will play opposite Vera, the seductive siren or “vampire,” as she is called. Harold will play opposite ingénue Mary in the love scenes. Desmond will be the villain (1.23–​24). In the Prologue, Jupiter characterized himself as being “out of place and ill-​sorted” for work in musical comedy. This turns out to be true of his talent as an actor in film. His ignorance in regard to the conventions of silent acting and film production is the source of much of the play’s humor. During the movie’s opening scene, Vera seduces her leading man. She begs Jupe to leave behind the movie business and run away with her “to New York, and from there to some South Sea isle where we can live the primitive life” (1.28). Jupiter fails to realize that she is a working actress meeting the specifications of a film scenario. “Oh-​oh! If Venus could only see me now!” (1.27), he exclaims. He swears “by the gods above—​(aside)—​ the second string lineup” (1.28) that he will do whatever is required to be alone with Vera. He tells the Spirit that he is quitting the film business and returning to Olympus on the one o’clock express (1.30). In reality, however, he runs off to New York with Vera, mistakenly supposing that he has left the whole “bally institution” of the movies behind (1.29). Using various forms of subterfuge, Kidder and Lasky improvise the filming of the rest of the scenario. They rent the dining room at the Ritz Hotel in New York from the maître d’hotel Oscar, and they film Jupiter and Vera without the god’s knowledge. Jupiter has yet to realize that a film is being made with himself as star. As the Spirit finally tells the gullible and victimized god, “you have been stung” (2.35). But all ends happily. Ganymede unexpectedly rushes in as a kind of deus ex machina and begs Jupiter to return to Olympus, where “Juno has run wild” in his absence. Upon seeing the familiar face, Jupiter first exclaims:  “Save me, Ganymede, save me from the movies” (2.35). Almost immediately, however, he decides otherwise. The Spirit of the Movies will take his place as ruler of the gods (2.36). He himself will stay on earth in the movies. In a manner analogous to the end of the Birds, where Zeus surrenders his scepter to the birds, Jupiter turns the hierarchy of the universe on its head.115 The Spirit and Kidder conclude the play: SPIRIT:  Thanks,

Jupe, I’ll give them the best administration they ever had on Mt. Olympus. KIDDER:  Barnum seems to have had the correct dope, after all. (2.36) Kidder may speak the play’s final line, but, as will become clear when we examine the god’s role more fully, Jupiter has the final word on the nature of film. Barnum was only half right. Throughout the play, Sherwood employs the distinctive features of Aristophanes’ style enumerated above. Discontinuity in plot development takes two forms: overt statement violating the dramatic illusion and interruption.116 The play cheerfully ignores Aristotelian canons of probability and necessity.

30  The curious case of Barnum Was Right Violation of the illusion occurs when “you have a norm of stage discourse within a self-​sufficient fictive world, and someone on stage, suddenly, violates it by stepping out from his world into ours, or out from his perception of his world into ours.”117 Prominent examples of this form of discontinuity in the plays of Aristophanes can be found, for example, in the first words of the Frogs. Xanthias asks: “Shall I make one of the usual cracks, master, that the audience always laughs at?” (Fr. 1).118 Sherwood works this kind of discontinuity into his plot, when, for example, Jupiter refers to his pitiable state as a character “relegated to the prologue of a musical comedy” (Prologue 2). Later in the play, Brick and Egg, two reckless and intrusive comic characters, shatter the dramatic illusion when they argue with the orchestra leader, who demands they get off stage in preparation for the play’s next song number (1.20–​21). The second form of Aristophanic discontinuity involves the type of interruption that breaks the causal chain of probability or necessity. In this vein, Silk speaks of “causality-​free zones” in the plays of Aristophanes.119 Such a free zone of humor occurs in the Birds, for example, when a poet unexpectedly arrives at Cloud-​cuckoo-​land with verses already composed to celebrate a city that was founded just moments ago (Br. 904–​51)! He is dismissed but followed in short order by an oracle collector, an astronomer, an Athenian traveling inspector, and a decree seller (Br. 952–​1057). All of them are presented to good comic effect, but their appearances are unmotivated. Such free zones of humor occur in Sherwood’s play as well, most prominently in the words and actions of Brick and Egg, who make several unmotivated appearances on stage and launch mad barrages of surreal comic exchanges, non sequiturs, insults, and sight gags that leave behind no residual effect on the rest of the play (1.16–​21, 2.16–​20, 2.27–​28, 2.33). Satire in Barnum Was Right is directed toward ridicule of the movie industry, the people like Abel Kidder who work in the fledgling art, and the suckers who spend money going to the movies. For his part, Kidder wants “to do something big … something that’s never been done before.” He wants to surpass Griffin and Ince in the art of filmmaking (1.3). Kidder is simultaneously the deceived and the deceiver. He is deceived regarding Jupiter’s identity until the filming of the scenario is complete. His lack of comprehension should come as no surprise. Kidder thinks that Alexander the Great used to pitch for the Cubs (1.3), and he briefly considers filming a play by Shakespeare, whom he regards as “a real comer if he keeps on moving the way he is now” (1.4). When told by Harold that Shakespeare is dead, Kidder remarks: “I didn’t know he was sick” (1.4). Yet at the same time Kidder is a squirrel preying on the nuts who make up the general public, turning out films he knows to be rotten. Kidder tells his cameraman: “Just because I don’t like it you shouldn’t worry. If the dear old general public keeps passing in by the ticket-​taker to see it we’ll give them all they can stand” (1.2). Prompted by the Spirit, Kidder decides to bill his new leading man as “the million-​dollar star” or “the million-​dollar mystery” but worries that the public might not be taken in by the deceit. The Spirit tells him not to worry:

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  31 Anyone who has been in the picture business ought not to ask such a question. Try it on anyone. Ask if they’ve seen the million-​dollar star and they’ll be crazy to see him the first chance they get. (2.27) As Silk has argued, Aristophanes’ genius as a creative lyric poet lay in his ability to blend low lyrics with a more elevated or high style of poetry.120 Barnum Was Right contains an elaborate gesture toward high poetry, in this case a hybrid poem combining the low (the movies) and the high (Shakespearean verse). In the voice of the Spirit of the Movies, Sherwood updates and applies to the movies Jacques’ famous meditation on the theme that “all the world’s a stage” (As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7). The Spirit tells Jupiter:  “Had Will Shakespeare, the well-​known bard of Avon, lived 300  years later, he would have characterized the movies thus”: All the world’s a screen, And all the men and women movie players; They have their cut-​backs and their fade-​outs—​ And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven reels: At first the infant, Sure to produce sympathetic tears From the female portion of the audience. Then the dashing cow-​boy, with his repeater And fractious bucking-​bronco, riding like mad Across the western plain. And then the hero, With sport-​shirt neat and shaven neck, Conquers the world to guard his mistress’ welfare. Then the villain, suave and deliberate, Hissed by the populace for his relentless deviltry Foreclosing the cruel mortgage That seals his rival’s doom. And then the comedian With nimble gait and ready brick, Seeking a bubble reputation even at the camera’s mouth; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered father Who will later claim the child as his own And save a situation. Such are the Movies, A strange and absorbing spectacle; Sans speech, sans colour, sans everything But the power to attract crowds in myriads And provide a medium by which The brain of man may rule the world. (Prologue  5–​6)

32  The curious case of Barnum Was Right Slapstick, jokes, one-​liners, and puns are provided by Brick, Egg, and others. Brick, dressed as a waiter carrying a tray, lurches about the stage, balancing plates in various precarious positions (2.16). Finally, both Brick and Egg enter dressed as Keystone Cops working in the service of Desmond, the villain (2.33). A profusion of jokes, one-​liners, and puns runs throughout. For example, Mary resists Harold’s initial advances because, “I know you by touch, by taste, by hearing. So you see I  have too much sense” (1.6). After Jupiter swears to Vera, “By Jove, you are a merry wench,”121 this sparkling bit of humor occurs: JUPITER:  Life on Olympus was never like this. VERA:  Olympus? Where’s that? JUPITER: (Disturbed at his break) What, never

heard of Olympus? It’s a health resort—​headquarters for thunder. VERA:  No, I didn’t. JUPITER:  (Laughing) And a jolly old fellow is boss of the place. You’ve never heard of Jupiter? And Juno? VERA:  No, I don’t know. But I’ve heard of Jupiter. His family name is Pluvius. He’s some sort of king. He reigns on rainy days. JUPITER:  (Enjoying the joke) Haw-​haw-​haw. I see you do know a little something about it. VERA:  Yes. They say he who laughs last is usually an Englishman. (1.25–​26) When a restaurant owner serves him a lobster missing a claw after a fight with another lobster, Jupiter orders: “Then take it back and bring me the winner” (2.12). As regards song and dance, the introduction to Barnum Was Right describes the play as containing seventeen songs with titles like “When They Sang Little Buttercup” and “Find Me a Melody,” songs that seem to have little or no relevance to the plot of the play. Among Sherwood’s papers, I have found the music and lyrics to only one of these music numbers, so it is difficult to test for an analogy between Sherwood’s and Aristophanes’ lyrics. Nonetheless, Silk aptly describes Aristophanes’ lyrics as containing “something of the grown-​ up wit and demotic attack of the Tin Pan Alley/​Broadway popular song in its classic modern phase.”122 Sherwood and Sears, we know, wrote songs they boasted would eventually put Tin Pan Alley out of business.123 In addition to employing various stylistic devices characteristic of Aristophanes’ surviving Old Comedies, Barnum Was Right reproduces the narrative pattern Silk finds more or less characteristic of them all: Dissatisfaction, Quest, Conflict, Victory, and Celebration.124 In the Birds, for example, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides are dissatisfied with the litigious nature of their fellow Athenians (Br. 39–​41). Disguised as birds, they embark on a quest in order to find a city where they may live in peace (Br. 42–​48). Conflict ensues, first with the birds, who feel betrayed by the presence of humans, their

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  33 natural enemies (Br. 322–​86). Later, open warfare breaks out between the gods and the birds (Br. 1189ff.). The gods are soon forced to surrender, and the birds achieve complete victory (Br. 1706–​17). The play concludes in the celebration of a wedding between Pisthetaerus and a heavenly princess (Br. 1731–​65). This narrative pattern underlies Barnum Was Right. First, dissatisfaction:  the Olympians have been relegated to the discard pile. Jupiter is discontented and longs for the good old days when Aristophanes wrote plays. From this follows the quest: Jupiter visits the mortal realm after the passage of two millennia in order to learn about the movies, the new art form taking the world by storm. Conflict arises when Jupiter cuts the Spirit “to the quick” by deciding to leave behind the “whole bally institution” of the film world (1.29). Celebration finds Jupiter now recognized as a movie star. In the end, he wins no heavenly princess but rather Vera the vamp (2.36). The tired old stay-​at-​home god of the Prologue is at the end of the play amazingly rejuvenated. He resembles the stay-​at-​home Philocleon of Aristophanes’ Wasps, who is rejuvenated and transformed into a dancing and whoring youth. He is a “transformative” or “recreative” character in the Aristophanic mold.125 He does not develop over the course of the play; he is created anew. The god’s low estimation of the genre and wish to be rescued by Ganymede gives way immediately to the happy resolve to continue as a star of the silver screen. Jupiter literally has two minds regarding film. In the portrayal of Jupiter, we first observe what will become Sherwood’s standard practice of employing a character with whom he identifies in order to carry a message. Jupiter is a natural as self-​reflexive counterpart. The gullible, naïve, imbecilic Jupiter is a fool, but one who speaks the truth as Sherwood saw it. Sherwood viewed himself as a fool, working in a medium peopled by fools. “To be able to write a play, for performance in a theatre,” he wrote a decade after Barnum, “a man [sic] must be sensitive, imaginative, naïve, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool ….”126 Sherwood was also of two minds regarding film. As a critic and editor of Life, he viewed himself as film’s best pal, but also its severest critic. Like the plays of New Comedy, the second Barnum bears witness to a loss of confidence in what comedy has to offer. What took place in Athens was experienced once again in America. The “chill wind of disillusion” brought on by a cataclysmic war can be felt.127

VII Barnum Was Right as New Comedy Barnum writ anew shows no evidence of the devastating war that preceded it.128 The delicacy of feeling that characterizes New Comedy is fully on display. The surreal fantasy that characterized the first Barnum is missing, as is the element of satire directed at society at large. The play is logical, coherent, and realistic. Nothing on stage contravenes the norms of everyday life. With the

34  The curious case of Barnum Was Right exception of a brief foray up the Nile to the tomb of Rameses the Twelfth, all the action takes place at the Ritz Hotel in Cairo, Egypt—​not the hotel of the same name in New York, where the climax of the earlier version was reached. Barnum Was Right now adheres to New Comedy’s “unity of place.”129 Coincidence abounds in New Comedy. In Plautus’ Menaechmi, for example, a twin named Menaechmus leaves Syracuse in search of his long-​lost brother, also named Menaechmus, who lives in Epidamnus. When the traveler finally arrives at Epidamnus, comedy ensues, as the two brothers are mistaken for one another. By chance, they happen to be wearing the same clothes on the same day. Eventually, they are reunited. So pervasive are such coincidences that a goddess is imagined as presiding over and arranging affairs. Chance (Tychē) is the presiding deity of New Comedy, and she brings people together in a harmonious union that will most often result in marriage.130 In Menander’s Aspis (Shield), Chance (Tychē) is anthropomorphized, and she explains to the audience the set-​up that will result in the following comedy (As. 97ff.).131 Though not anthropomorphized in Sherwood’s play, Chance runs the show here also and in the end unites man and woman in marriage. The plot is the standard plot of New Comedy: “boy sees girl, boy loves girl, boy must suffer setbacks before ultimately marrying her.”132 Prominent features of New Comedy are used to impressive effect: coincidence/​chance, disguise and recognition, resurrection, and eventual marriage. Abel Kidder of the Bunkem Film Corporation is still in the business of making a film. This is an altogether more serious, lifelike Kidder, a man of diminished expectations like the play’s author and much of America following the Great War. He still wishes to do “something big” (1.2), but he no longer seeks to build a celluloid empire in imitation of the heroic exploits of Alexander the Great. He wants only to make his film in progress more realistic, infused with “some real Egyptian atmosphere” (1.3). In Cairo, Kidder works together with cameraman Bennie, who substitutes for Lasky. Vera the vamp once again has a starring role. The play opens at the Ritz in the middle of a “shoot.” Kidder is heard complaining to Bennie that he wants to get “artistic” (1.2). By chance (coincidence 1), a certain Captain Smiley enters and shows him the way to achieve this end. Smiley is “a British officer—​young, handsome, with a considerable air of assurance and an unmistakable swagger,” (stage direction, 1.3). Smiley embodies the conventional character of the soldier found throughout New Comedy—​not the boastful, self-​important miles gloriosus of Plautus. Smiley more resembles several soldiers found in Menander. For instance, in Perikeiromenē (The Girl with Her Hear Cut Short), Polemon is willing to give up a life of soldiering and settle down with his girlfriend. Segal calls him “a tenderhearted and (barely) braggart soldier.”133 In Misoumenos (The Hated Man), one of Menander’s most popular plays in antiquity, the sensitive soldier Thrasonides pines away after his beloved, who mistakenly thinks he has killed her brother.134

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  35

Figure 1.1 Poster for Barnum Was Right (HUD 3447 Box 57, olvwork625463, Harvard University Archives).

36  The curious case of Barnum Was Right The helpful Smiley provides Kidder with a history lesson and the means to acquire the realism he wants. According to Egyptian legend, Pharaoh Rameses the Twelfth—​he used to be the Second, but everything has gone up (1.4)—​is said to be about to rise from the grave on that very day (coincidence 2), when the effects of the embalming fluid used to preserve him wear off. The Egyptian people are traveling a few miles up the Nile to welcome him back to life. This celebration will provide Kidder the opportunity to get the Egyptian atmosphere he seeks. In return, the sensitive, love-​struck Smiley asks Kidder’s permission to pursue his love for Olive, the young ingénue in his employ. Kidder gives his blessing and exits. True love runs deep—​and is easily won—​for the captain. Not so for the title character Barnum O’Brien. This Barnum is a con artist of a sort like his namesake P. T. Barnum, but he is redeemed by his quick wit and love for Vera the vamp. He is a sponger (parasitus) much like the parasite of New Comedy. Barnum is a first-​class impersonator. He lives for free at the Egyptian Ritz, claiming to be the ambassador from Brazil. While the protagonists of New Comedy often fall in love at first sight, Barnum does them one better: he has yet even to see the girl of his dreams in the flesh before falling madly in love with her. He had earlier found a picture of Vera in Shanghai and has been wandering the world searching for her. Vera, it happens, is also staying at the Ritz (coincidence 3). Kidder, however, stands in Barnum’s way; he also loves Vera. Kidder is the “blocking character” of New Comedy.135 When Barnum and Smiley meet after a long separation (coincidence 4),136 Barnum confesses his love for Vera and invites Smiley to take a trip up the Nile to witness a scheme that will win Vera and thwart Kidder (1.7). There, Barnum carries out a daring act of imposture that has clear precedents in New Comedy’s use of the theme of resurrection, a close counterpart to the theme of rebirth or rejuvenation, which occurs often in Aristophanes and in Sherwood’s first Barnum.137 The play moves to the tomb of Rameses, where the long-​dead pharaoh—​ Barnum O’Brien in disguise—​seems to rise from the dead. Barnum’s impersonation of a pharaoh/​god in order to win Vera echoes Plautus’ Amphitryon, where the god Jupiter disguises himself as the mortal Amphitryon in order to gain sex with Amphitryon’s wife Alcmena. In the end, he reveals himself to be Jupiter and is recognized as the god. The situation is reversed here: a mortal impersonates a pharaoh/​god. Moreover, Barnum’s intentions are more honorable than Jupiter’s—​more honorable also than Jupiter’s in the first Barnum! Barnum O’Brien will marry Vera. As the camera rolls, the expectant people of Egypt stand by with bated breath. The high priest addresses a prayer to the long-​dead pharaoh, and Vera as Chloe, Rameses’ love from ages past, adds a personal touch to the priest’s invocation: V ER A : I, too, lift my voice, oh Rammy. For three thousand years have I waited

for your love—​for three thousand years have I  been true to you. No maiden was ever more faithful than I have been. But three thousand years is a long, long time, oh Rammy! And a girl like me is liable to become

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  37 impatient …. Please, Rammy, please come back to me; you can’t expect a normal healthy girl to wait forever, (1.21) Barnum emerges from the sarcophagus and embraces his love Chloe/​Vera, whom he immediately asks to adopt a more modish gown, “with less to it” (1.22). The people of Egypt are told to party, and Kidder is escorted off to “the royal cooler” (1.22). Act 1 concludes in a ragtime march. Act 2 returns to the Ritz where Barnum/​Rameses dines with Vera, who is unaware, like Alcmena in Plautus’ Amphitryon, of the clever act of imposture being carried out. Humor in the second act arises from various attempts by Kidder and Pierre, the maître d’hotel, to unmask the deceiver. When Barnum finally admits his true identity and is recognized by all, the High Priest is about to have him arrested. Captain Smiley, however, steps in and as a representative of the British Crown orders his release (2.45). According to Segal, the lynchpin of New Comedy—​and of the Western comedy of manners to which it gave birth—​is the concluding gamos (marriage) of the principals.138 (Even Zeus, the successful seducer in Plautus’ Amphitryon, orders Amphitryon and Alcmena to resume their married life together at the end of the drama [Am. 1131ff.]). Often, however, it is “the preliminary steps toward realizing the wish to be married” that concludes New Comedy.139 Such is the case here. Smiley wins Olive and Barnum Vera. Says Barnum to Vera/​ Chloe: “Chloe, I was thinking I’d like to put down a diamond ring as a deposit for you.” Vera/​Chloe answers with a clever pun: “Well, Barnum got his start with only one ring” (2.45). Segal has marked off three major stages in the history of comedy: (1) Old Comedy; (2) New Comedy, including the post-​Classical Comedy to which it gave birth in Shakespeare and others; and (3) the Death of Comedy, the beginning of which he assigns to the works of George Bernard Shaw.140 Segal reserves the name comedy for works in the tradition of Greek Old and New Comedy. After writing plays in the manner of Old and New Comedy, Sherwood was to hit the trifecta in 1927, when he enjoyed his first Broadway success with The Road to Rome, a comedy, tellingly, after the manner of Shaw. One can find a macroscopic history of comedy—​at least as told by Segal—​in Sherwood’s three comic works. The Road to Rome was a hit and launched Sherwood’s career as an important dramatist for the Broadway stage. However, he had yet to find his voice. He was still writing plays in the manner of another, this time of Shaw.

Notes 1 The first version of Barnum Was Right is catalogued as RES b MS Am 1947, 1728: HHU. Copies are available on request. For the devastation wrought by the war on the Pudding, see Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1920: 662–​63). 2 For us, Aristophanes constitutes virtually the whole of Old Comedy: the works of other writers of the period survive only in fragments.

38  The curious case of Barnum Was Right 3 For Aristophanes’ frequent lampoons directed at Pericles and Alcibiades, who will figure prominently in this book, see Vickers (1997). 4 Wodehouse ([1923] 2012: 128) provides one example of this conceit. 5 The second version of Barnum is catalogued as b MS Am 1947, 1729:  HHU. Copies are available on request. 6 Silk (2000: 26). 7 Aristophanes of Byzantium quoted in Segal (2001: 108, 153). 8 The Harvard Crimson, February 17, 1917. 9 The Harvard Crimson, March 23, 1937. 10 The Harvard Crimson, January 30, 1919. 11 The Harvard Crimson, April 6, 1920. 12 See The Harvard Crimson, April 9, 1920. I  have found no evidence that the promised London production ever took place. 13 The Harvard Crimson, March 13, 1956. 14 Segal (2001: 93). 15 The origins of American musical theater and musical comedy as it existed before burlesque are traced in Hurwitz (2014). 16 Thompson’s story is told in Gänzl (2014). 17 For the nature of burlesque, see Trav (2005). 18 See Trav (2005: 14). 19 Show Business (1944). 20 Jenkins (1992: 89). 21 For the sophisticated and topical humor of the revue, see Mordden (2008: 96ff). 22 Postlewait in Wilmeth and Bigsby (1999: 159). 23 Mordden (2008: 92–​96) describes the plot of the Follies of 1907 in detail. 24 The Great Ziegfeld (1936). 25 See Alonso (2007: 44–​45). 26 Trav (2005: 3). 27 Trav (2005: 5). 28 Murray (1920: 2). 29 Murray (1920: 6). 30 Murray (1920: 16). 31 Saxonhouse (2006: 100–​26), it should be noted, contests the view that the trial and death of Socrates can be viewed in such a light. 32 Murray (1929: 53). 33 Murray (1929: 236). 34 Murray (1929: 198). 35 Murray (1929: 239). 36 Jarvis (2015) brings the world of Victorian political caricature vividly to life. 37 See Hall and Wrigley (2007: 66). 38 Murray (1929: 53). 39 Murray (1929: 232). 40 Murray (1929: 203). 41 Finan (2007: 8–​12). 42 Allen (1931: 196). 43 Allen (1931: 40). 44 Goldberg (1999: 148, 175). 45 Finan (2007: 1–​37). 46 Bryson (2013: 281).

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  39 47 Finan (2007: 43). 48 No surprise: according to Finan (2007: 78), “It was sex and violence that made the censors mad.” Rabban (1997) resists the idea that the period of the war marked any sort of watershed moment in the history of American free speech. He depicts free speech as a burning issue long before the war. 49 Like Murray, Segal (2001: 110) describes the loss of freedom of speech (parrhēsia) in Athens as the loss of freedom itself. 50 Patterson (1991: 3). 51 Patterson (1991: 3–​4, 95–​105). 52 R. Kahn (1999: 151) quotes isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson, who gave voice to what many in the country were thinking: “We have no use for foreign … ideas in this great and free nation of ours.” 53 Murray (1933: 237). 54 Green (1991: 34). 55 Murray (1933: 233). 56 Finley (1964: 113–​14). 57 Green (1990:  53). Patterson (1991:  165–​80) also speaks of this turn to inner freedom. 58 See Hardy (1969: 306–​10). Berlin’s thesis has, however, been called into question by Sorabji (2012: 179–​95). 59 Green (1990: 387). 60 Blom (2008: 61, 89). 61 Murray (1929: 238–​39). 62 Goodwin (2013: 480–​81). 63 Goodwin (2013: 375). 64 Goodwin (2013: 730). 65 Wilson quoted in Cooper (2009: 186). 66 Schlesinger (1957: 3). 67 Goodwin (2013: xii). 68 Journalist William Allen White joked:  “between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that had existed between tweedle-​ dum and tweedle-​dee”: see White quoted in Cooper (2009: 175). 69 Croly (1911: 17). 70 Roosevelt quoted in Schlesinger (1957: 336–​38). 71 As Goodwin (2013:  12) has remarked, Laissez-​faire capitalism “precluded collective action to ameliorate social conditions.” 72 For example, see Leuchtenburg (1958: 89). 73 Schlesinger (1957: 185). 74 Allen (1931: 22). 75 Allen (1931: 67). 76 Huxley ([1932] 2005: 52–​53). 77 Allen (1931: 161). 78 Allen (1931: 161–​94). 79 Murray (1933: 225–​27). 80 Sherwood (1940: xv). 81 Ibid. 82 See Schlesinger (1957: 44). 83 Sherwood (1940: xii). 84 Sherwood (1940: xi).

40  The curious case of Barnum Was Right 8 5 See Hunter (1985: 12). 86 Ibid. Hunter makes the point about comedy’s lowering of its sights without attributing it specifically to disillusion after the Peloponnesian War. 87 Segal (2001: 110). 88 Segal (2001: 111). 89 Sherwood, “The Silent Drama,” Life, January 27, 1921: 77, 1995. All references to Life below take the form of date, volume number, and issue number. In Sherwood’s years there as editor, Life was a satirical magazine, published weekly. 90 Laura Marcus uses Sherwood’s conceit of a tenth Muse as the title for her book about the literature of cinema in the Modernist period: see Marcus (2007). 91 Behrman (1965: 157). 92 Richard Watts, Jr., New  York Herald-​Tribune, n.d.  =  RES MS Storage Box 2.275: HHU. 93 Sherwood, Life, November 22, 1923: 82, 2142. 94 Sherwood, Life, June 30, 1921: 77, 2017. 95 Jenkins (1992: 4). 96 Alonso (2007: 73). 97 See Sherwood, Life, March 1, 1923: 81, 2104 and June 26, 1928: 92, 2386. 98 Sherwood, Life, July 26, 1928: 92, 2386. 99 Sherwood, Life, November 30, 1928: 92, 2404. 100 Sherwood, Life, June 17, 1926: 87, 2276. 101 Sherwood, Life, July 19, 1923: 82, 2124. 102 See Sherwood, Life, July 31, 1924: 84, 2178. 103 Apollinaire used the word to describe his surrealist drama Les mamelles de Tiresias: Drame surrealiste (The Breasts of Teiresias: A Surrealist Drama), which tells of a man (Teiresias) able to produce children. In myth, Teiresias lived his life in the form of both man and woman. The play may be read in the English translation by Slater (1997). Stoppard (1975) takes us back to the early days of the Dadaist Movement in Zurich. His play—​and the Dadaists in general—​recalls the works of Aristophanes. 104 The first version of Barnum Was Right is listed among Sherwood’s papers as b MS Am 1947, 1728: HHU. Copies are available on request. 105 Silk (2000: 92) quotes Jean-​Paul. 106 On the Clouds, see Cartledge (1990: 27). 107 Hall and Wrigley (2007:  18). Their bibliography mentions the anonymous Rhopoperperethrades: A Comedy of Aristophanes (1895) and the anonymous The Bees:  With Humblest Apologies to the Shade of Aristophanes (1904), a student performance at Girton College, Cambridge. 108 According to Murray (1933:  219), however fresh the jokes may remain, Aristophanes’ art “is utterly strange to us, and one we should never dream of reviving.” Yet such revivals proliferate throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-​first century. 109 This list is drawn mostly from Silk (2000: 69). Silk also considers Aristophanes as possessing a “sense of duty.” This is not an explicit feature of Sherwood’s play, except insofar as satire implies such a sense. Silk also points to Aristophanes’ use of obscenity. Nothing quite as blatant as Aristophanes’ obscenity is to be found on the early twentieth-​century American stage.

The curious case of Barnum Was Right  41 1 10 The pattern is discussed in Silk (2000: 263–​67). 111 See Cartledge (1991: 19). 112 References to the Barnum plays will take the form of act and page number, e.g., 1.1. 113 Silk (2000: 393). 114 Sherwood’s portrayal of Barnum fits his comic concerns but lacks nuance. P. T. Barnum (1810–​1891), a product of the radically democratic Jacksonian Age in America, actually seems often to have relied on his audiences’ awareness of being playfully fooled. He presented them with illusions and counted on their being skeptical evaluators, finding enjoyment in distinguishing truth from falsity. 115 See Sommerstein (1987: 3). 116 Silk (2000: 136–​58, 256–​300) offers a detailed analysis of Aristophanic discontinuity in terms of style, character, and plot. 117 Silk (2000: 138). Violation of the dramatic illusion is studied in greater detail in Stow (1936). 118 All translations of the plays of Aristophanes are taken from Henderson (1998–​2007). 119 Silk (2000: 264). 120 See Silk (2000: 160–​206). 121 The self-​referential humor here reminds me of a scene from Mel Brooks’ To Be or Not to Be (1983). When the Hitler impersonator receives the greeting, “Heil, Hitler,” he responds “Heil, me.” 122 Silk (2000: 183). 123 See J. M. Brown (1965: 89). 124 Silk (2000: 263–​67). 125 Silk (2000: 227–​29). 126 Sherwood (1928: xvii). 127 I borrow the phrase from an essay of H. L. Mencken, written soon after the end of World War I: see Mencken (1919, 1920, 1922: 63). 128 The second version of Barnum Was Right is listed among Sherwood’s papers as b MS Am 1947, 1729: HHU. Copies are available on request. 129 See Hunter (1985: 11). 130 For Chance (Tychē) as the presiding deity of New Comedy, see Segal (2001: 157–​58). 131 See Zagagi (1995: 143). 132 Segal (2001:  172). Segal sees the classic form of the comedy of manners first undermined in the works of Shaw (404), which we shall discuss in the next chapter. 133 Segal (2001: 163). 134 Zagagi (1995:  29) refers to both soldiers as “humane, likeable and sensitive,” deeply committed to the women they love. 135 For the role of the blocking character, see Segal (2001: 151). 136 SMILEY: To think of meeting you here. BOTH (almost in unison): It’s a small world after all. 137 Segal (2001:  161). In New Comedy, however, the resurrection is usually metaphorical or subliminal, for example, when Knemon emerges from the well into which he has fallen in Menander’s Dyskolos. Here the theme is actualized; it involves emergence from a tomb.

42  The curious case of Barnum Was Right 138 See Segal (2001:  216 et passim). The comedy of manners is found represented in the work of Shakespeare and others. According to Segal (2001:  403), both New Comedy and the comedy of manners reached their state of perfection in Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro:  “After reaching its apogee with Figaro, comedy had nowhere to go but down.” 139 Zagagi (1995: 60). 140 Segal (2001: 404–​6).

2  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome The ghosts of battle

The years 218–​202 BC were critical years in the history of the Roman Republic. Rome faced its greatest enemy in Hannibal of Carthage, who invaded Italy (218 B C ) by crossing the Alps and winning a series of brilliant victories that culminated in the battle of Cannae (216 BC ). Hannibal’s march into Italy marked the beginning of the Second Punic War (218–​202 B C ).1 In The Ghosts of Cannae, military historian Robert L. O’Connell describes the battle as “a mass knife fight.”2 At the end of the day, over forty-​eight thousand Romans lay dead. Rome suffered more deaths in battle on that day than the United States during the war in Vietnam—​more deaths than on any single day of combat in Western military history.3 Following a brilliantly conceived plan, Hannibal allowed the Romans to force the middle of the Carthaginian lines into slow retreat, opening up a large gap between the Carthaginian flanks. Into this the Romans surged. Hannibal counted on his physical presence to keep the middle from collapsing until the left and right wings could envelop the Romans on both sides. Meanwhile, Hasdrubal, leading the cavalry units on the right, outflanked the Roman and Carthaginian lines and set upon the Romans from behind. They were thus surrounded on all sides. Then the slaughter began in earnest.4 In the immediate aftermath of Cannae, Carthaginian cavalry officer Maharbal is reported to have urged Hannibal to march on Rome immediately. According to Livy, Maharbal predicted that within five days his general would be able to dine on the Capitoline Hill. Hannibal demurred. Maharbal is said to have added: “So the gods haven’t given everything to one man; you know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but you don’t know how to use one” (22.51). Instead of marching on Rome, Hannibal proceeded south to Campania in an ultimately futile search for new allies.5 After Hannibal withdrew, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator took the field against him, Fabius’ last three names “ ‘greatest, warty, delayer’, being a characteristic Roman combination of boastfulness and realism.”6 Fabius continued the delaying tactics he had employed prior to Cannae. He refused to confront the Carthaginian general in pitched battle but harassed his enemy throughout Campania, sending out small raiding parties, giving the Romans time to recover from the loss

44  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome at Cannae. In tribute to Fabius, Ennius wrote that one man alone saved the Roman Republic through his delaying tactics. “But there have always been those,” Beard writes, “who have thought Fabius a slowcoach and a ditherer rather than a clever strategist.”7 (Sherwood was one of these.) So the Romans soldiered on despite their devastating loses. Eventually, Hannibal suffered defeat at the hands of Publius Cornelius Scipio, afterwards named Africanus, who took the war to Africa and defeated his Carthaginian foe at the battle of Zama in 202 BC Zama, however, did not mark the end of hostilities between Rome and Carthage. In 146 BC , Rome utterly destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War. O’Connell makes imaginative use of the image of a “ghost” to describe the conditions under which the survivors of the traumatic Battle of Cannae continued to live on. The ghosts of Cannae are the “living ghosts of this terrible battle,” the legiones Cannenses, Roman soldiers who managed to survive the killing fields, only to be banished in disgrace from their homeland to the island of Sicily.8 They were compelled to remain there until rehabilitated by Scipio, himself a survivor of Cannae, to whom they professed their loyalty. Afterwards, these “ghosts” fought valiantly at Zama.9 After Zama, it was Hannibal’s turn “to play the ghost.”10 Like the legiones Cannenses, he lived on for almost two decades after his defeat, and afterwards his specter cast a long shadow over the history of the West. Alfred von Schlieffen may be thought to have resurrected Hannibal’s ghost in 1909 when he recommended study of the Carthaginian battle plan to modern armies, describing it as possessing “timeless and absolute validity.”11 The so-​ called “Schlieffen Plan,” inspired by Hannibal’s victory at Cannae, may have been the basis for Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France in 1914.12 It was during the 1920s and 1930s, however, that Schlieffen’s thinking regarding Cannae came to be accepted without question—​at least by the German military establishment. During World War II, German tank commander Heinz Guderian acted in accordance with Schlieffen’s belief in Cannae as furnishing a sound strategy for the annihilation of the foe (Vernichtungsgedanke). He put this plan into action, using highly mobile tank forces as the modern equivalent of Hasdrubal’s fast-​ moving and destructive cavalry at Cannae.13 An equally long shadow was cast by Hannibal’s Roman counterpart: Fabius. It was he who gave his name to the Fabian Society, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was content to avoid direct political confrontation and await the coming of democratic socialism to Britain. In Fabius, we may also see a prefigurement of later military men, content to practice the delaying tactic of guerrilla warfare. In the aftermath of World War I, Robert E. Sherwood, a survivor of the battlefield, raised Hannibal’s ghost once again.14 Sherwood did what had never been done before. Picking up the story in the aftermath of the battle, he imagined the butcher of Cannae as a dynamic figure who withdraws from Rome because he comes to realize the futility of war. His change of heart

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  45 mirrors the evolution of Sherwood’s own thinking about the nature of war.15 Is such a depiction of Hannibal justified by the historical record? Perhaps not, but, as O’Connell, points out, there is a certain kind of world historical figure like Hannibal, whose genius cannot adequately be captured in words and must therefore always remain “ineffable.”16 Hannibal’s motives after Cannae will probably always remain an enigma. This chapter falls into five parts. In the first, I  discuss the background to the writing of The Road to Rome and the problems Sherwood faced in depicting the Carthaginian general’s change of heart. Second, I show that the play, though in every way a product of its time (1927), still possesses a large measure of literary and historical interest, best seen when viewed as a realist playwright’s reflection of the unique social and political climate bubbling up in New  York City in the 1920s, which was also in many ways Broadway’s Golden Age. Here, the fool representing Sherwood’s views turns out to be not a god like Jupiter but a Greek woman at odds with life in militaristic Rome. Third, I identify The Road to Rome as a comedy done in the manner of George Bernard Shaw. Next, I turn briefly to the subject of the influence the play exerted on later literature and film, most especially Jupiter’s Darling, a frivolous musical comedy adapted from The Road to Rome. Finally, I discuss the importance of The Road to Rome as a curious anomaly in the history of how the First World War came to be perceived by its veterans, who tended to deal in reminiscences and personal narratives. Sherwood, however, sought to understand the war through an imaginative reconstruction of events of the historical past, at a time when, to many, historical writing seemed unable to make sense of the conflict.

I Background to The Road to Rome When America entered the war in 1917, Robert Sherwood put aside Barnum Was Right and exchanged the life of a student for that of a soldier. He was an enthusiastic proponent of America’s entry into the war. First, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was found unfit for military service because of a disproportion between his height (6 feet, 6 ½ inches) and weight (167 pounds). Rejected by both the U.S. Army and Navy, Sherwood left for Canada, where he enlisted in the Canadian army. He served as a soldier in the 42nd Royal Highlanders, the Canadian Black Watch. Sherwood arrived in France in February 1918 and spent a little over six months in combat. He was part of a company chosen to guard Vimy Ridge and Avion on the Western front. The Canadians had previously taken it at a cost of almost four thousand killed and an additional seven thousand wounded.17 Thomas Dinesen, brother of the more famous Isak, also fought as part of the Black Watch. Dinesen described Vimy Ridge as “Suicide Valley.”18 Volunteering for a raiding party sent out to capture prisoners, Sherwood jumped into a trench occupied by a German officer, who pointed a gun at him. Sherwood acted first and shot him in the head. He was gravely disturbed by the incident and rarely spoke of it.19

46  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome In July, he experienced the effects of a gas attack and was taken to an emergency station.20 In August, he suffered injuries to his legs when he fell into a German booby trap and was (perhaps) gassed a second time and wounded by shrapnel.21 In any event, he began to suffer the effects of an enlarged heart from which his doctor thought he might die.22 The severity of his condition is indicated by the fact that over the course of the next six months he spent time in hospitals in France, England, and Canada.23 Life in the trenches of World War I  was often as bad as or even worse than the living hell of combat. Both the living and the corpses of the dead attracted a plague of rats. Lice, frogs, horned beetles, and slugs were a constant presence.24 Added together, these menaces had a psychological effect that came to be known as “trench fever.” Symptoms of trench fever haunted Sherwood even after his return home. The war turned Sherwood into an ardent pacifist, a position to which he would adhere until the late 1930s. Writing in 1940, he described how the war shaped his character in at least one positive way. While recuperating in various hospitals, he came to know men of other nationalities and religions. He spoke to a horribly burned Australian and a South African Jew, who was paralyzed with a bullet lodged in the base of his spine. The experience moved him: It was a great surprise to me to discover that these two men, and all other men whom I got to know well, thought and talked and acted and reacted just about as I did. What was so surprising about it was the revelation of the narrowness and shallowness of my own mind. I had been brought up to believe that because I was a 100 per cent American—​and a Harvard man, at that—​I was superior.25 Sherwood wrote against the grain of “Americanism” that swept the country during the 1920s, as a result of the anticommunist Red Scare and the League of Nations debate.26 As California Senator Hiram Johnson expressed this aspect of the postwar mood, “We have no use for foreign … ideas in this great and free nation of ours.”27 The Immigration Restriction League attracted a number of Harvard professors, Boston Brahmins, and Harvard alumni, the very people with whom Sherwood had close associations as a student before the war.28 Following military service, Sherwood undertook the life of a magazine editor. As he later told the story, When I  emerged from that service in 1919, I  started looking for a job and I was given a tentative one ($25 a week) on the magazine Vanity Fair, whose editor, Frank Crowninshield, was a notoriously softhearted man. He gave me a desk in an office which contained the two other members of the editorial staff—​Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. Ever since then, my considered advice to young literary aspirants has been, “Merely make sure that you start out in fast company.”29

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  47 Fast company indeed. The association of Parker, Benchley, and Sherwood formed the original core of the Algonquin Round Table, a loosely knit group made up of editors, writers, and newspaper columnists, who lunched together daily at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the 1920s.30 The Algonquinites usurped the place of honor formerly reserved for the great moneyed families of New  York like the Astors and the Bradley-​ Martins, who had served as the epitome of New York sophistication at the beginning of the twentieth century. For their part, the Algonquinites valued individual achievement over ancestry, humor over seriousness, and eccentricity over conventional behavior. The emotively-​charged word “elite,” with its connotations of exclusivity and special privilege, which had been applied to the wealthy class of New York society, came now to be used to designate writers and various others: “actors, publishers, musicians, and sidekicks of various kinds.”31 Some of the leading lights of the Algonquin Round Table were newspaper columnists and critics Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, and Franklin Pierce Adams; magazine writers and drama critics Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley; novelist Edna Ferber; and fledgling, soon-​to-​be-​famous dramatists like Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman. Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, and comic actor Harpo Marx became regulars at the Round Table. (Groucho was not a welcome guest; the Algonquinites considered him “Harpo’s ‘Bad Brother’.”)32 Irving Berlin and Ring Lardner also sometimes attended these lunches, as did Damon Runyon, chronicler of life in the New York of the 1920s. The Round Table also welcomed millionaire banker and bon vivant Otto Kahn, who as a young man had associated with Oscar Wilde—​a timely reminder that the Algonquinites were not far removed in time and temperament from British aesthetes like Wilde.33 Round Table denizen Dorothy Parker, in many respects an American version of Wilde, manifested just his sort of “fin de siècle boredom with convention.”34 For both Wilde and Parker, frivolity was a means to banish boredom. Parker’s characteristic mood may perhaps be the inspiration for the boredom displayed by Amytis in The Road to Rome and later by Alcibiades in Acropolis.35 The Round Table was a circus devoted to wit and the artful put-​down. When pompous newspaper columnist Alexander Woollcott fingered one of his books and asked rhetorically, “Ah, what is so rare as a Woollcott first edition,” Adams replied: “A Woollcott second edition.” Adams again: when the subject of German dramatist Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist came up, Adams identified him as “The Chinese Messiah.” Dramatist Marc Connelly was sometimes the butt of jokes for his premature baldness. However, being told, “Your head feels just like my wife’s behind,” Connelly shot back: “So it does.” Are these witticisms or just plain wisecracks? It’s unclear, though the incisive Dorothy Parker, preeminent wit and queen of the Round Table, found an essential difference: “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

48  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome

Figure 2.1  The Algonquin Round Table. Clockwise from bottom left:  Robert E.  Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Franklin Pierce Adams, Edna Ferber, and George S. Kaufman. In the background left to right: Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt, Frank Crowninshield, and Frank Case (© The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org).

The Round Table was only one part of the complex mosaic making up the picture of life in New York in the 1920s. This was the Jazz Age, the (perhaps mythical) decade made famous by Damon Runyon, when gangsters and gold diggers, figures like Dave the Dude, populated the streets of New York.36 (The life and death of gangster Arnold Rothstein, familiar to many these days through the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, were subjects for Runyon’s pen.)37 The 1920s also ushered in the so-​called “Lost Generation,” writers like Ernest Hemingway, e.e. cummings, and John Dos Passos, whose belief in political action had been destroyed by the war. The “Lost Generation sought to break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely, and be wholly creative.”38 The thrill of changing places was important to many of them. The Algonquinites were also escapists, except that their flight was to lunch at a New York hotel. Like many of the Lost Generation, they devoted themselves to relaxing and enjoying the new escapist era of personal freedom and frivolity alive in New York during the 1920s.39 History has dealt variously with the Algonquinites. They have been called “a Bronx Zoo of contemporary neurotics, a group so dazzling in its

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  49 assortment of idiosyncratic personalities that the wonder is simply that they spoke to each other at all, even in epigrams.”40 Journalist and author Jimmy Breslin refers to the Round Table as “the most successful group of literary people the city ever had” but qualifies the compliment to lethal effect: In lore and books, the Algonquin had Ring Lardner and George S.  Kaufman and after that a collection of overrated misfits and half-​ talents, such as Robert Benchley, and I never did quite understand what it was he actually did, and Wolcott Gibbs, who wrote nothing more than reviews, and a half-​poetess, Dorothy Parker. Their fame would extend all the way to Connecticut.41 Interest in the Round Table continues to this day, as evidenced by a spate of publications on their bons mots, essays, and short stories.42 Two series of mystery novels have begun appearing, where Parker, Benchley, and (sometimes) Sherwood leave the safe environs of the Round Table to track down killers terrorizing Broadway and its denizens.43 Sherwood’s continuing relationship to the Round Table was motivated largely by personal friendship with Parker and Benchley. The three became fast friends while working together at Vanity Fair, and they were all fired for insubordination at about the same time: Sherwood first, Parker second, and Benchley third.44 Unlike his friends, however, Sherwood straddled the line separating moralist from hedonist. He was profoundly affected by the war in ways the others were not. Following military service and the success of the second version of Barnum Was Right, Sherwood remained a committed moralist for the rest of his life, though the causes he supported would change over time, as he moved from pacifist to one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of the war against Hitler in America.45 Sherwood was the slowest talker at the Table and is underrepresented in collections of Algonquinite witty sententiae. Nonetheless, he participated in Round Table lunches and frequently sat in on their poker sessions, dubbed the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. He also starred in the Round Table’s one-​night vaudeville production No Sirree! on April 30, 1922. Gaines prints a hilarious two-​page picture of a towering Sherwood in straw hat surrounded by a bevy of chorus girls, including, among others, Helen Hayes.46 This vaudeville show was later rewritten and presented in the form of a Broadway revue as The 49ers, but it closed after only a few performances. After leaving Vanity Fair, Sherwood was hired as assistant editor of Life, at that time a satirical magazine. He promptly hired Benchley as drama critic and Parker as a freelance writer. On January 27, 1921, “The Tenth Muse” appeared in Life and inaugurated “The Silent Drama.”47 During this period, the busy Sherwood directed and edited a number of cartoons for the silent screen, one of which, “Barnum Was Right,” takes place in a circus. With the exception of the title, it bears no relation to the earlier play.48 Other Sherwood

50  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome cartoons are “Balloon Tired” and “Red Hot Rails.”49 Working primarily as a film critic and editor, Sherwood also occasionally took on a creative role in the new medium. He rewrote the subtitles for Lon Chaney’s classic version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1924—​a job he carried out just for the extra cash. In 1926, Sherwood left the Round Table, fed up with the group’s moral vacuity. At the time, he regarded the 1920s as “a dreadful decade for anyone idealistically or romantically or even hopefully inclined. Disillusionment was fashionable.” In the 1940s, however, he looked back and decided that he had been “just plain silly.” New talent and new ideas—​as well as old—​ were flourishing in the theater during the 1920s and 1930s. Sherwood lists over twenty new playwrights making a splash on Broadway at the time including George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, and Elmer Rice. In the next decade, Moss Hart, Preston Sturges, Lillian Hellman, and others would join their number.50 While Broadway’s new generation of playwrights was breaking fresh ground, others, most notably Eugene O’Neill, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert E.  Sherwood, were returning to the Greek and Roman classics for inspiration and story. They made use of the resources of antiquity in different ways. O’Neill was the first of the three to move back to the past. His early plays embody the spirit of Nietzsche and Greek tragedy. He sometimes dramatized Nietzsche’s view that the protagonists of Greek tragedy are masks for Dionysus, the original hero. In The Great God Brown (1926), the drunkard Dion Anthony is a sensual young Pan, killed off in the middle of the play (Act 2, Scene 3). Billy Brown, an untalented architect, adopts Dion’s persona and switches back and forth between a masked Dion-​self and a masked Billy-​self. Beneath both masks lurks O’Neill, a struggling alcoholic questioning his literary talent. Lazarus Laughed (1926) also featured the use of masks, a chorus, and a protagonist whose face recalled that of a statue of a Greek god. In Desire Under the Elms (1924) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), O’Neill directly transplanted Greek tragedy to New England. Desire enacts a sexual conflict between a father (Ephraim Cabot) and son (Eben) over a stepmother (Abbie Putnam). Euripides’ Hippolytus is the source. Desire also borrows elements from the Medea and Oedipus Rex. In Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill turned out a tragic trilogy based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The plays take place against the backdrop of the Mannon residence, which is a modern counterpart to Aeschylus’ House of Atreus and resembles a Greek temple. Though the playwright eschews the use of masks, most of the characters are said to bear facial expressions resembling lifelike masks. Even the House wears a metaphorical mask; it resembles a pagan temple front stuck like a mask on Puritan gray ugliness. O’Neill combined Greek tragic form with Freudian psychology. In his “Greek phase,” O’Neill employed frequent repetition of words, phrases, and motifs in order to convey a meaning beyond the understanding of his characters and to achieve what Brenda Murphy calls

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  51 “ultimate transcendence.”51 Such transcendence is characteristic of Greek tragedy. Beginning with Ah, Wilderness! (1932) and continuing through A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), O’Neill’s plays are noticeably freer from overt classical models. Maxwell Anderson is important in the history of American drama as both playwright and critic. Unlike O’Neill, Anderson believed throughout his life that modern theater has followed the Greek pattern with no change in essence from Aristophanes and Euripides to his own day. Anderson’s masterpiece is Winterset (1935), a drama in verse that scholars have yet to recognize as a modern Oresteia, transplanting Aeschylus’ complex web of themes to the American stage.52 Winterset won the New York Drama Critics Award for best play. Anderson’s The Wingless Victory (1936), a play in verse based on Euripides’ Medea, followed almost immediately. The Wingless Victory is a tepid affair that shrinks from portraying the full horror staged by Euripides. More than any of his contemporaries, Anderson sought to import Greek transcendence to American drama—​and to do so, in further imitation of the Greeks, using verse drama. In the process, he developed an artificial literary and poetic language, which, like the language of Greek tragedy, was never spoken anywhere but on the stage. In The Bad Seed (1954), Anderson resorted to prose and scripted a modern Oedipus story, but one that satirizes the uses to which modern dramatists were sometimes putting Freudian psychology. Despite the divorce from his friends at the Round Table, Sherwood retained custody of his sense of humor and began to harness it directly in the service of various moral and social causes. He began his Broadway career in 1927 with The Road to Rome, a sunny comedy played out against a backdrop of the slaying of thousands, a story of war carrying an antiwar message.53 Unlike (early) O’Neill and Anderson plays, Sherwood embraced the aesthetic of realism, which came to fruition after World War I. Murphy’s analysis of the specifically American style of realism describes a movement that disrupted the traditional distinction between tragedy, which seeks ultimate transcendence, and comedy, which enacts the emergence of “a new order based on integration and harmony.”54 American realism sought to provide an artistic reflection of the dramatist’s own time and place, the imitation of life portrayed in a natural way, avoiding the inflated rhetoric conveying the inflated experience of melodrama. Soliloquy is a device absent from realist drama, for in soliloquy characters break the fourth wall, so to speak, and directly address the audience, thus disrupting the dramatic illusion important in realist drama. The audience is presented with the illusion of overhearing actual conversations taking place. The use of recurring words and motifs to impart transcendent meaning that we find in O’Neill is usually shunned. American realist drama fitted out the stage with the furniture of real life.55 Whereas in earlier periods setting had little to do with plot, realist drama makes setting an important conveyer of meaning. The uses to which Sherwood puts a realistic, Greek setting

52  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome in Acropolis (1933) to convey a story about the dangers posed by National Socialism in the 1930s is especially noteworthy. In Idiot’s Delight (1936), the Hotel Monte Gabriele, where the story occurs, suggests “an amusing kind of horror.”56 The Road to Rome reached the Broadway stage in 1927, one of the most notable years of the twentieth century; it was the year of the transatlantic Lindbergh flight, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the great Dempsey/​ Tunney fight, the gangster Al Capone’s last year of eminence, the filming of The Jazz Singer, the creation of television, the beginning of work on Mount Rushmore, the great Mississippi flood—​more devastating than Hurricane Katrina in 2005—​and Babe Ruth’s season hitting sixty home runs.57 On Broadway that year, 264 productions opened, the most ever.58 The Road to Rome was one of the most successful. Road opened at the Playhouse Theatre in January and ran for 392 performances. It subsequently played in Ottawa, London, and Vienna, where it was titled Hannibal ante Portas. Alonso details the abortive attempt to stage the play in Fascist Italy, where objections were raised to the depiction of “our divine Rome.” The Road to Rome has never received the close analysis it deserves. In the preface to the play, Sherwood admits to “an unashamedly juvenile hero-​worship of Hannibal” from early youth (p. xli). His major literary source for the play was Livy, whom he cites several times in the introduction (pp. xviii, xxii, xxvii). Among the moderns, he read H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History (p. xiv). A  reading of Mommsen’s classic Römische Geschichte (pp. xviii, xxii) in English translation provided additional historical weight.59 According to Brown, Sherwood was looking over books in the library of playwright and screenwriter Sidney Howard when he happened upon Mommsen’s history. He turned immediately to the chapters on Hannibal, and, as he flicked the pages, “the magic of that name caused a fire long cold within him to blaze again.”60 Despite the intensity of that moment, Sherwood’s earlier experiences as a soldier in World War I and its aftermath provided the major catalyst for the writing of the play. His service in wartime—​and those of countless other soldiers in the war—​bears a marked similarity to the trials undergone by characters in Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, especially those in her Booker Prize-​winning novel The Ghost Road (1995): “Ghosts everywhere. Even those living were only ghosts in the making.”61 While others saw the influence of George Bernard Shaw operating in The Road to Rome, Sherwood wrote that Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stalling’s What Price Glory? furnished him with the appropriate dramatic precedent (p. xliii). In making this claim, he was surely being disingenuous, as we shall see below. As a playwright, Sherwood faced a problem often encountered by writers in a medium that, unlike the novel, deals almost exclusively in the spoken word: how to portray on stage the processes of inner conflict. He remarked upon the problem confronting him in the play’s introduction:

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  53

Figure 2.2 The Road to Rome. Dramatis Personae. Playhouse Theatre (David K. Chappel).

54  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome It seemed possible to me that Hannibal, after the Battle of Cannae, was suddenly afflicted with an attack of acute introspection—​that he paused to ask of himself the devastating question, ‘What of it?’, and he was unable to find an answer. In resolving this idea into a three-​act play, I  realized that I  couldn’t express it all in the form of a soliloquy by Hannibal; there would have to be a character to put these disturbing thoughts into Hannibal’s mind. As there was no record that such a character existed at the time, I took it upon myself to invent one in Amytis, the purely fictitious wife of Fabius Maximus. (p. xxxviii) Hannibal and the fictitious Amytis conduct a brief, offstage love affair during the course of the drama, and the birth of a child from their union is foreshadowed. The heart of the play is taken up with extended conversation between the two enemies, which results in Hannibal’s decision to withdraw from the gates of Rome. The triad of father (Hannibal), mother (Amytis), and child is central to the consummation of the plot of The Road to Rome. With a more sophisticated sense of the complexity of human identity and a surer dramatic touch, Shakespeare achieved the results at which the fledgling dramatist was aiming through the use of the dramatic convention unsuited to realist drama: soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s case, the triad of father, mother, and child appears in Richard II but is internalized. In effect, Richard asks himself—​ and by implication, the audience—​Hannibal’s question, “What of it?,” as he reflects upon the loss of his kingship and impending death. He launches into a magnificent soliloquy expressing his internal conflict. I  quote only a small part: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world, And for because the world is populous And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-​breeding thoughts, And these same thoughts people this little world, In humours like the people of this world, For no thought is contented.62 Hannibal (“My soul the father”) acquires a measure of dignity by listening to the persuasive arguments against war of Amytis (“My brain … the female to my soul”),63 with whom he will eventually bring forth not only “a generation of still-​breeding thoughts” but also a child.

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  55

Figure 2.3 Jane Cowl and Philip Merivale in The Road to Rome. Playhouse Theatre (Museum of the City of New York and New York Public Library).

Sherwood consigns the sexual union between Amytis and Hannibal to the wings. When the two appear together on stage, emotion gives way to reason. Under the tutelage of its mother, this child is expected to carry into the future the father’s newly acquired resolve. Hannibal and his author surely (but vainly)

56  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome hope that the union with Amytis will mark the advent of a way of thinking about the futility of war that will eventually come to people the world.

II The Road to Rome and New York City Sherwood describes the play as peopled with modern comic stereotypes used in the portrayal of the three major characters: There is, in the play, a neglected wife [Amytis], who spends too much money on clothes and wants to go out to the movies; there is an unimaginative, unappreciative tired-​business-​man of a husband who doesn’t understand [Fabius]; there is even a bossy, envious mother-​in-​law who coddles her darling son and abominates his restless wife [Fabia]. (p. xliii) Bertrand Russell saw ancient Romans as “stern, stiff, stupid,”64 a characterization that fits Sherwood’s Romans to a tee. In order to be appreciated fully by a modern audience, the comedic interactions among them require some knowledge of the historical moment at which the play was written. The dysfunctional triad of Amytis, Fabius, and Fabia is drawn with broad strokes in order to embody prominent social and ethical conflicts being played out in New York during the 1920s, the decade when the play was a hit on Broadway. A  story set in ancient Rome is put to use to provide a vivid picture of the playwright’s world in the 1920s. In mood, morality, and dress, Fabius’ wife Amytis represents a general ethos and revolutionary way of thinking prominent in New  York in the decade following the end of the Great War. She is the New Woman, stuck in an old Rome.65 “I had the misfortune,” she says, “to be born in Athens, where gaiety is not listed among the unpardonable sins” (p. 26). The Broadway audience of the 1920s would recognize in this Athens a reflection of their own city, where, according to Ford Maddox Ford, to be “rich and gay” was the be-​all and end-​all of life, an attitude of which Ford strongly approved.66 The Gaiety Theatre, first owned by George M. Cohan, was a Broadway landmark from 1909 until it closed in 1976. Jazz Age New  Yorkers showed little interest in the politics of the day.67 Amytis has given so little attention to politics and war that she must ask her husband and mother-​in-​law who Hannibal is (p. 25). “The trouble with me,” she says, “is—​I’m bored. And I don’t like it. Being bored is so—​so snobbish” (p. 27).68 Amytis’ struggle with boredom reflects a modern problem regarding a distinctly modern condition. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the verb to bore arose as a description of a psychological state only after 1750. (Ancient Greek has the word akeideia but the Greek word signifies “indifference” or “apathy,” not quite the same as boredom.)69 Boredom is a distinctly modern disease of soul.70 Such an attitude is reflected in the way The

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  57 New Yorker in 1935 viewed the differences between life in its city and in the rest of America: people in Kansas live longer lives, but they are too often bored.71 Amytis’ trouble stems from the fact that Roman Senators (even more so their wives) are “dull” (p. 27). She finds a number of outlets to combat dullness and boredom. First of all, according to mother-​in-​law Fabia, she spends too much time with the slaves, violating customary Roman rules of discipline by dealing with them in too familiar a manner (pp.  19–​20). “We’re her only friends,” Meta tells her fellow slave Varius: “She clings to us” (p. 12). Amytis’ refusal to respect distinctions between slaves and free Romans finds an analogue in the New York of the 1920s, where collaborative energy between blacks and whites “reached a peak of intensity … never seen in American history before or since.”72 Furthermore, Amytis loves the theater. She tries to persuade her husband to go to a play: a company of players from (gay) Athens is putting on Oedipus Rex the very evening Act I of The Road to Rome opens (p. 28). Statistics bear witness to the fact that Amytis’ love of theater was fully shared by the New York crowd of the 1920s.73 Finally, Amytis spends a lot of time in the marketplace, where, on the day the play opens, she has purchased “a Phoenician nightgown, from the Court of Antiochus the Great” and “a peacock-​green dress from Damascus—​made of silk” (p. 21). Just so, America in the 1920s experienced “the advent of mass markets and the consequent necessity of consumerism as a behavior and ideology.”74 New  York in that period was characterized by an extreme level of commerciality.75 Like the Rome of the play, where costly consumer items were imported from abroad, “New York was the center of the consumer’s, not the producer’s, life.”76 At one point, Fabius chides his wife for irregular attendance at the temple (pp. 33–​34), a neglect reflecting the growing lack of trust in traditional religious belief occurring in America, most especially in New York, at the time The Road to Rome was produced.77 Like Amytis, many New  Yorkers were losing respect for long-​held religious values and becoming more concerned with their own material prosperity.78 Maxwell Anderson referred to the decade, which he spent in New York, as “the godless nineteen-​twenties.”79 Amytis fails in the attempt to arouse her husband sexually with these purchases, so she turns her attention to Hannibal when Fabius reports that the armies of the enemy have been despoiling women throughout Italy, giving rise to a “veritable epidemic of pregnancies” (p.  35). To Amytis, Hannibal sounds like “a thoroughly commendable person.” “Is it wrong for me,” she asks, “to admire good, old-​fashioned virility in men? I certainly haven’t seen any too much of it in my own life.”80 Her unsatisfying marital situation, she says, leaves her “wondering what it would be like to be despoiled” (p. 42).81 Such remarks are offensive to the modern era. It should be remembered, however, that the play is a product of the 1920s and public attitudes have changed much over time. At the end of Act I, Fabia is puzzled that Amytis has slipped quietly out of the house wearing her new dress (pp. 65–​66). It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Amytis simply as an instantiation of revolutionary social and political forces at work in the New  York of the period. Unlike husband Fabius

58  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome and mother-​in-​law Fabia, she possesses a distinct personality. I suggest that Sherwood has at least partly modeled her after Dorothy Parker, his friend and fellow member of the Algonquin Round Table. In Amytis, art imitates the New York life of Dorothy Parker. Parker took to an extreme the less inhibited attitudes toward sex of the New Woman of the 1920s. Throughout her life, she attempted to seek solutions for her problems in sex. Her sense of the importance of fashion recalls Amytis’ pride in her Phoenician nightgown and peacock-​green dress from Damascus. To a protest on behalf of convicted killers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Parker wore an embroidered dress with matching scarf, high-​heels, and the kind of cloche hat considered fashionable in the 1920s. In addition, “her gloves were spotless and she moved in a cloud of perfume.”82 The fictional Amytis and the historical Parker may also be described as mongrels. As the product of a union between an Athenian mother and a Roman father, Amytis has a kind of liminal status betwixt and between two cultures and ways of life. According to Ann Douglas, Parker had intended to title her never-​written autobiography Mongrel, reflecting her mixed Jewish and Wasp background.83 The malaise of boredom figures prominently in Parker’s life, as it does in Amytis’. Finally, Parker shared Amytis’ strong egalitarian streak. Parker composed a wicked satire about a woman whose racial bias is unmasked by her repeated, emphatic denials of such prejudice.84 Amytis and Parker both make similar use of irony and acerbic wit to expose pretense and deflate pomposity. It was Parker who named her pet canary Onan because “he spilleth his seed upon the ground.”85 In a never-​published reminiscence, Sherwood recalled words once used by Alexander Wollcott, who described Parker as “an odd blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth … a potent distillation of nectar and deadly nightshade.”86 Reporting on a prom at Yale, Parker quipped: “If all those sweet young things present were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”87 Reviewing a book, she wrote: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”88 Parker excelled at a game the Round Tablers played called “I-​Can-​Give-​You-​ A-​Sentence.” Each player had to take a multi-​syllabic word and in ten seconds turn it into a punning sentence. For the word “horticulture,” Parker came up with: “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” For “penis,” she responded; “The penis, mightier than the sword.”89 When a play opened on Broadway featuring a character based on her life, a friend asked Parker why she had yet to see it. She answered: “I’ve been too fucking busy, and vice versa.”90 Regarding Amytis from the perspective of the 1970s, Walter J.  Meserve finds her thoroughly unconvincing. He grants her quick wit but thinks her too petulant, too flippant, and too interested in sex to be the “rational” character necessary to bring Hannibal to a change of heart on matters relating to war.91 Such a judgment—​also offensive to the modern ear—​fails to take account of her status as another Sherwood fool who speaks the truth without illusion. Amytis is an outsider who doubts what seems self-​evident to others

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  59 and proclaims the opposite. For example, when Fabius accuses Amytis of not setting a good example in living in accordance with the Roman virtues of “respectability, modesty, economy, devotion to duty, reverence, chastity, and—​and,” Amytis completes the sentence with the word “Mediocrity.” She promises her husband that in the future she will do her best “to be a model of all that is most virtuous and most thoroughly uninteresting” (p. 33). As Dictator, Fabius proudly boasts, “I control everything.” Amytis replies:  “Everything except Hannibal” (p. 37). Upon hearing the report that the Roman army has been defeated by Hannibal at Cannae, Fabius and Amytis have the following exchange: FA BIU S : 

More of his damnable deception. would never have resorted to such foul tactics—​ would we, Fabius? FA BIU S : Never! AM Y TIS :  No—​we wouldn’t have thought of them. (p. 53) AM Y TIS : We

Fabius judges irrelevant a question Amytis addresses to Scipio as to whether Hannibal is good-​looking, and she makes the flippant response: “But this isn’t irrelevant. It is very important for Hannibal to be handsome. Think of the statues” (p. 54). When Fabius laments the loss of seventy thousand Roman soldiers at Cannae despite Rome’s traditional scrupulousness in regard to proper sacrifice to the gods, Amytis responds: “Perhaps Hannibal was nice to the gods, too” (p. 55). Fabius and his mother Fabia represent the forces of an earlier Victorian-​ American culture, which were centered in New England during the nineteenth century and remained prevalent in Boston, while New York was living through the gay 1920s. Ann Douglas has described a shift in cultural power from New England to New York taking place in the decade when The Road to Rome was produced. Boston supplied “integrity itself ” in the person of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.92 New  York, however, worked from a revolutionary cultural script written by Sigmund Freud.93 Like Eugene O’Neill, in many of his plays Sherwood imparts a psychoanalytical spin to his drama, though with a lighter touch than the heavy-​handed use of Freud O’Neill employed in Mourning Becomes Electra. While he emphasized sexual repression as the source of lofty ethical and moral standards, Freud instructed the New York intelligentsia not only how to undermine traditional Victorian-​ American morality but also how “to make its enemies betray themselves.”94 In just this way, Sherwood does something subtler than exposing Fabius and Fabia to ridicule; he uses their words and actions to unmask sexual repression as the source of their devotion to the high-​minded virtues they espouse. Upon first appearance, Fabia catches the slaves Varius and Meta in the act of kissing. Her complaint: “Why, I never heard of such loose, shocking behavior—​never

60  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome in all my life. How dare you kiss each other—​right here in the atrium, of all places?” (pp. 12–​13). Fabius, for his part, is just as critical of such behavior as his mother (p. 19); he disapproves of Amytis’ purchase of the Phoenician nightgown, though she bought it “in the hope that it might be just the least bit stimulating” to him (p. 32). Fabius can have little thought for sex until the time arrives when “Rome rules the world” (p. 36). Sherwood characterizes Fabia in the play’s introduction as “the bossy, envious mother-​in-​law who coddles her darling son and abominates his restless wife” (xliii). As such, she is a type familiar from late Victorian-​American culture of the decades preceding World War I. Ann Douglas has described this period in terms of a process of feminization, by which she refers to the “compensatory power” being accorded women of the period, who were welcomed as teachers and praised as mothers but at the same time were denied status as voting members of society and holders of political power.95 Fabia fits this mold; she compensates for formal exclusion from the realm of politics by rejoicing in the social eminence accorded her as the mother of the Dictator of Rome. “When I walk out into the streets of the city,” she boasts, “everyone—​ even the best families—​will bow before me, and say, ‘She is the mother of Fabius Maximus, the Dictator of all Rome’!’ ” (pp. 16–​17). According to the stage direction, Fabius pats her hand patronizingly and calls her “My dear, loyal mother” (p. 17). Amytis has no desire for the ersatz power so valued by her mother-​in-​ law. Indeed, she is indifferent to the allure of any sort of power. Claiming to leave the city in search of her mother at Ostia, she instead sets out to implement the strategy she recommended to her husband: “I mean—​why don’t you go out, under a flag of truce, meet Hannibal and talk the thing over in a civilized manner?” (p.  63). Disregarding the matter of a flag of truce, Amytis turns up in Hannibal’s camp. The play takes a serious turn when she is captured and taken as a prisoner to Hannibal, whom she eventually deflects from his purpose of sacking Rome. Given the sexual interest she earlier displayed toward the Carthaginian general, the audience should expect something more intimate than a meeting of minds. Such expectation will be met as Hannibal and Amytis become offstage lovers between the second and third acts. Hannibal is an evolving character, unlike Amytis, Fabius, and Fabia. His look and changing attitude toward war closely reflect the experience and character of Sherwood himself.96 Amytis, who puts disturbing thoughts into Hannibal’s mind, is the feminine embodiment of wisdom. Hannibal represents the author’s soul into which new ideas were implanted by the experience of war. Sherwood’s imaginative link across the centuries with the hero of his youth can first be observed in the description of the Battle of Cannae in Act I. When questioned by Amytis and Fabius about the disastrous outcome, Scipio, a witness to the carnage, describes Hannibal as he appeared from the Roman lines of battle:

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  61 SCIPIO:  He was standing on a little hill … FABIUS:  Laughing, I suppose? SCIPIO:  No—​He was not laughing. He was

watching the battle as though it were a play that he had written, being performed by actors in a theatre. (p. 54)97

Hannibal’s experience as both viewer and author of the Battle of Cannae reflects Sherwood’s position outside the drama as viewer and author of the play. The metaphor here is well chosen: Hannibal, like the playwright, exercises his talents and skills in arranging and manipulating characters according to his will. The metaphor acquires more pointed and personal significance when Hannibal is described in a stage direction introducing his first appearance before the audience in Act II: (HANNIBAL is tall, thin, dark—​quiet and surprisingly unemphatic in his speech—​rather diffident in his manner …. He is the sort of man who is apparently none too powerful physically, but manages to exist on an inexhaustible supply of reserve strength. He provides not only the brains which direct his army, but the vitality which animates it. He is regarded with absolutely unqualified respect by his officers and men alike; his mildest whisper is instantly obeyed.) (p. 85) In addition to being very tall, Sherwood was so thin that he was rejected for service in the American Army and Navy. He was also dark in complexion, frail in health, and rather taciturn by nature, a man of few words. Sherwood, like Hannibal, provides the intellect and vitality that direct and animate the characters of his play. It goes without saying that they instantly obey his every command. Some in the audience—​even without benefit of written stage directions—​may have appreciated the irony at work here and recognized a self-​portrait of Sherwood inhabiting his protagonist. Compared to the playwright in the first act, Hannibal is assimilated still more closely to the author when he appears in the second. By the end of the play, the arc of the Carthaginian general’s thoughts about war will have traced a pattern identical to that of the modern New  York dramatist who raised his ghost. Both here and throughout his career, Sherwood recycled personal experiences into art. His characters often bear the stamp of his outlook and personality. It is difficult to imagine a closer connection between author and protagonist than what we find here, and as Hannibal is gradually revealed as a self-​reflexive counterpart of the author of the drama, so lessons to be gleaned from the Carthaginian War prefigure what the author thought ought to be learned from the experience of World War I.98 Hannibal’s credentials as an enemy of Amytis and of Rome are quickly established when he first appears in person in the second act. “We attack the city in the morning,” (p. 86), he tells his men. When Amytis is taken prisoner,

62  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome Mago informs her that as an enemy of Carthage she will have to die (p. 95). Hannibal orders that the execution be carried out immediately (p. 101). He only relents temporarily when she requests “one final favor” (p. 102), an opportunity to speak with him regarding the reasons underlying his enmity toward Rome. Hannibal cautions her to come to the point without delay:  “there happens to be a war on just at present, the contending parties being Rome, on the one hand, and Carthage on the other,” and Amytis, he says, is a “representative of Rome” (p. 104). He relates to her a variant of the famous story found in Polybius and Livy: as a child his father laid him on the altar of Baal and consecrated him to the destruction of Rome (p. 120). From that time, he has been driven forward by the voice of Baal, urging him on to the obliteration of Rome (p. 121). Hannibal’s status as an enemy of Rome extends also to his relationships with individual Romans like Amytis. She, however, refuses to argue from the premise that she is Roman. “I’m not really a Roman at all,” she answers him (p. 106). Nor is she Athenian, since her father was Roman. In a neat rhetorical gambit, she uses her status betwixt and between peoples and cultures in order to dismiss Hannibal’s description of the relationship between them as a false dichotomy. She requests, therefore, that he speak with her “not as a Carthaginian conqueror speaking to a Roman victim but as one civilized human to another” (p. 111). Agreeing to carry on the discussion in purely human terms, Hannibal sets himself up for quick defeat because his experiences in the aftermath of various battles he has fought undermine the distinction he wishes to maintain between friend and enemy, Roman and Carthaginian. In all his battles with Gauls and Romans, he confesses, he has “seen nothing but death—​death…. For ten years, I’ve followed the road that leads to Rome—​and it’s a hard road to travel, Amytis. It’s littered with the bones of dead men” (p. 116). The road to Rome is full of bones that cannot be distinguished as those of Gauls, Romans, or Carthaginians; they are simply the bones of men.99 Amytis calls Hannibal’s attention to “the human equation.” “It’s so much more beautiful than war” (p.  132). Acceptance of this so-​called “human equation” brings Hannibal to recognition, in this case a change from enmity to philia regarding Amytis.100 She had earlier told Hannibal that she came to his camp when she saw the smoke and “decided that I should like to see the fire” (p. 118). As the curtain falls at the end of the second act, she gets her wish, and their night of lovemaking cements the bond of philia uniting the two (p. 134). As the third act begins next morning, Fabius, Scipio, and several other Romans appear in the Carthaginian camp under a flag of truce. The belligerent young Scipio wants to continue fighting. Fabius claims the existence of twenty legions ready to resist an assault on the city. Hasdrubal calls his bluff:  these are “hollow words” (p.  155). Advantage belongs entirely to the Carthaginians. On the basis of the human equation, no other argument being necessary, Hannibal moves quickly to a further recognition, this time a

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  63 change from enmity to philia with Rome itself. Hannibal grants the Romans a truce and gives orders that his own army proceed immediately to Capua (p. 169). Maharbal protests this decision in a version of the words taken from Livy: “The trouble with you, sir, is that you know how to gain victories but not how to use them …” (p. 170). But Hannibal wins over the army, explaining to the troops with a furtive glance toward Amytis that he has been ordered away from Rome by the goddess Tanit, who has told him of “the human equation” (p. 171). Bidding farewell to Amytis and Fabius, Hannibal indulges in a piece of delicious irony at the expense of Amytis’ husband, with whom she chooses to remain rather than go to Carthage, as Hannibal wishes: H A N N IBA L :  Fabius,

I wish happiness and prosperity to you, your wife, and your sons. FA BIU S :  Thank you—​but I have no sons. H A N N IBA L :  You may have … and if you do, I hope that your first-​born will inherit the qualities of greatness that were so evident in his father—​that he will duplicate his father’s signal triumphs and that he, too, will ultimately discover the human equation …. (He turns to Amytis.) It is so much more beautiful than war. (p. 176) It may seem naïve to a modern reader or audience that the recognition of such a vague and ill-​defined concept as “the human equation” could be so decisive a determinant in the outcome of a play—​as if human relationships could be fostered and wars forestalled by a mere adjustment in perspective, resulting in the reclassification of enemies as other human beings simpliciter. Yet such an idea was much in the air in the New York of the 1920s. For example, in the year The Road to Rome was first staged (1927), Ford Maddox Ford praised New York because he found there just the attitude toward war and humanity that closely corresponded to his own perspective. Americans, he claimed, frightened him, but New Yorkers, he thought, were not really Americans:101 This author has spent his life … pointing out the sameness of humanity in all nations and down all the ages. Here he is at it again. That is the only Internationalism. If one-​tenth of the sums spent on diplomacy or international leagues were spent on saying: “Here we are; we are just all merely poor humanity making our voyage upon a spinning planet that is whirling to its doom somewhere in space,” there would be no more international misunderstandings; for sure there would be no more war.102 Ford is speaking of what Sherwood through Amytis has called “the human equation.” In the same year as The Road to Rome, Salmon Oliver Levinson published Outlawry of War, a rather simple twelve-​step program for the elimination of war. Levinson’s proposal was endorsed by, among others, American

64  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome educational reformer John Dewey, who called war “that abomination of abominations.”103 It should also be remembered that in 1928 the United States joined other nations in signing the Kellogg-​Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy, as if war could be abolished by a shared, international change in perspective and a mere stroke of the pen.104 The phrase “the human equation” may have arisen from Sherwood’s reflections on the life and career of Jimmy Walker, famous in the 1920s as the Nightclub Mayor of New York, whom Ann Douglas describes as “the human element, New York style, incarnate.”105 Or the phrase may have been derived from Sherwood’s familiarity with an early play by Eugene O’Neill entitled The Personal Equation (1915), the theme of which is similar to that of The Road to Rome, mainly that “personal readjustments can bring human beings into right relationships despite their antagonistic individual beliefs and biases.”106 Alternatively, Sherwood may have coined the expression as a convenient catch phrase to convey the message of his play. At the end of the play, Sherwood’s Hannibal makes a prophecy to the Romans regarding their future: “I’m leaving Rome to an enemy that is crueler even than I am …. I shall allow Rome to destroy itself ” (p. 175). This is what in fact took place in the long aftermath of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. In the wake of Cannae, the primitive financial system of Rome was subjected to a strain too great for it to bear.107 At the same time, the example of Scipio portended the rise of a new class of rulers who would be increasingly inclined to seek their support from the people.108 The Republic would eventually fall to the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. Sherwood’s version of why Hannibal turned away from Rome, however unlikely, is justified as an experiment in drama, given the fact that the Carthaginian general’s move has never been adequately explained. Mommsen saw no problem in understanding Hannibal’s actions after Cannae. He claimed the move was fully justified in the circumstances and dictated by sound military thinking: From the field of battle Hannibal had turned his steps to Campania. He knew Rome better than the simpletons, who in ancient and modern times have fancied that he might have terminated the struggle by a march on the enemy’s capital. Modern warfare, it is true, decides a war on the field of battle; but in ancient times, when the system of attacking fortresses was far less developed than the system of defense, the most complete success in the field was on numberless occasions neutralized by the resistance of the walls of the capitals.109 Lancel sees a political strategy in operation: Hannibal wanted to establish a Carthaginian protectorate over southern Italy, winning hearts and minds by appearing to be the restorer of liberty to the old Greek states of Lucania, Bruttium, and Campania. At the same time, by containing Rome to the northern part of Campania, he would deprive them of important southern

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  65 relay-​points for their fleets.110 Richard Miles approximates Sherwood’s view of why Hannibal turned away from Rome after his victory at Cannae. Without turning Hannibal into a pacifist, Miles believes that Hannibal sought peace with Rome on terms favorable to Carthage—​much as Rome earlier dictated terms to end the First Punic War with Carthage.111 O’Connell urges us to set aside the opinions of scholars and listen to a soldier, in this case British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, who agreed with Maharbal.112 O’Connell sides with Maharbal. Hannibal’s appearance outside the walls of Rome, he says, might well have broken the Romans’ will to resist. This is what happens in Sherwood’s play. Alternatively, O’Connell suggests, the Romans might have felt compelled to send out an ill-​prepared force to meet the Carthaginian army.113 This would have happened in Sherwood’s play had Fabius listened to the advice of the impetuous Scipio. I  prefer the explanation given by Livy. Hannibal may have discerned an unintended threat implicit in Maharbal’s words. Livy tells us that Hannibal regarded Maharbal’s plan “as a thing too great for his mind to grasp” (Hannibali nimis laeta res est visa maiorque quam ut eam statim capere animo posset, 22.51). The Carthaginian general may have feared hubris. Livy tells us that before Zama Hannibal warned Scipio of the dangers of unbroken success (perpetuam felicitatem, 30.30). Modern simpletons may continue to remain puzzled.

III The Road to Rome and George Bernard Shaw When The Road to Rome opened on Broadway, the reviews, as Alonso says, were “generally kind.” Brooks Atkinson called attention to the play as a political satire in the manner of Shaw.114 Others were not so generous. In refusing to produce it, Gilbert Miller of the Theatre Guild had earlier remarked: “I don’t like even first-​rate Shaw.”115 According to Brown, “Shaw in short-​pants” was written or said in a variety of ways.116 Sherwood himself protested that too many critics of the drama were crying “Shaw-​Shaw-​Shaw!” and he denied much genuine Shavian influence.117 However, he was being disingenuous. The Road to Rome exudes Shaw from every page. Sherwood was a great admirer of Shaw. Their lives overlapped, and the two were personally acquainted. Sherwood was a guest at the Shaws in May 1932.118 In a review for Scribner’s six months before the visit, Sherwood heaped praise upon Shaw and disparaged those “who parrotwise protest that the author of Candida, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Saint Joan is a monster of exaggerated intellect and no heart.”119 Sherwood was perhaps attempting to disguise the influence of Shaw by arguing that such use as he and Shaw made of modern colloquialisms is a practice at least as old as Shakespeare (p. xl) This effort at misdirection draws attention away from the areas where Shaw’s influence is imprinted. To mix a metaphor and add a pun, Sherwood apes Shaw parrotwise.

66  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome Desmond McCarthy’s description of Shaw’s method of dealing with the past in plays like Saint Joan can be seen in The Road to Rome: The first thing he invariably does when his setting is in the past is to rub off his period the patina of time. He will scrub and scrub till contemporary life begins to gleam through surface strangeness and oddities.120 Further characteristic of Shaw’s plays is their overt didacticism. Thus, in the preface to Pygmalion, Shaw protests against “the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic.” Art, he claimed, should never be anything else.121 Pygmalion is a call for the revival of “noble English” through the scientific study and practice of phonetics.122 The  lengthy “Preface on Doctors” preceding The Doctor’s Dilemma marks the play as a protest against doctors who “perform unnecessary operations and manufacture and prolong lucrative illnesses.”123 For Shaw, as G.  K. Chesterton remarked, “truth is close and clear.”124 The Road to Rome is equally didactic and equally clear:  war can be eradicated by a change in perspective. In Shaw’s plays, emotion typically clouds judgment and must therefore give way to reason. Men and women in Shaw often engage in sparkling conversation and then go their separate ways. Henry Higgins and Liza Doolittle part at the end of Pygmalion. (The makers of My Fair Lady opt for sentiment over reason and unite the couple at film’s end.) Caesar leaves Cleopatra at the end of Julius Caesar, first promising that he will send Marc Antony her way. (Shaw’s Caesar loves Cleopatra for her mind!)125 Dr.  Ridgeon and Mrs.  Dubedat also part company in The Doctor’s Dilemma.126 (Shaw proudly wrote what he called Plays for Puritans.) Segal attributes Shaw’s preference for such an ending to “an almost pathological fear of women.”127 (Readers familiar with Segal’s work will recall that here and elsewhere he indulges frequently in psychoanalysis from a distance.) Chesterton is gentler in his treatment of the man he knew personally:  he says that for Shaw emotion brings to the fore sensual symbols “coming in between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship.”128 Though neither Sherwood in his life nor Hannibal in his art exhibit even traces of gynophobia, the one-​night stand between Hannibal and Amytis is consigned to the wings, and their subsequent conversation occurs without a residual trace of erotic sentiment. Action, sexual or otherwise, dissolves into talk in the manner found so frequently in realist drama and in Shaw,129 who often ends the drama in the middle, as Sherwood does here, and devotes the second half of the play to discussion.130 In regard to the delineation of character, Amytis, I have argued, is modeled after Dorothy Parker but, despite her wish to be “despoiled” by Hannibal, she is drawn much in the manner of the typical Shavian “Woman-​the-​Huntress,” she who stands in opposition to the “Victorian Woman-​on-​a-​pedestal.”131 Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion represents the Shavian “New Woman,” destined finally to “topple the womanly woman from their stage

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  67 pedestals,” then march them down “from the boards to the stalls and out into the world.”132 The Road to Rome, you will recall, uses the “Victorian Woman-​ on-​a pedestal” (Fabia) as foil for “Woman-​the-​Huntress” (Amytis). Sherwood also follows Shaw’s practice of using women as spokespersons for the expression of his own ideas.133 Shaw’s comedies typically end without the traditional marriage (gamos) found in Greek and Roman New Comedy and familiar in comedy right up to Shaw’s own time.134 Shaw’s plays mark what Segal regards as the third and (hitherto) final stage in the evolution of comedy; Segal dubs Shaw the first instigator of the death of comedy, the first among “the assassins of comedy.”135 By this characterization, Segal means to call attention to the fact that much modern comedy has sprung loose from its moorings in Classical Antiquity. If we accept Segal’s characterization of Shaw as the assassin of comedy, Sherwood in this play buries the corpse. In sum, we can discern in Sherwood’s first three plays a microcosmic history of Western comedy, at least as seen by Segal. In the first Barnum Was Right, Sherwood imitated Greek Old Comedy, the first stage in the history of Western comedy. Ending in the kind of party atmosphere typical of Aristophanes, the first version of Barnum witnessed the man—​in this case the god (Jupiter)—​end happily with the girl of his dreams (Vera the Vamp). Boy gets girl. The second Barnum led right up to the staging of the traditional gamos. Boy marries girl (a more straight-​laced Vera, less of a slattern) in the manner of New Comedy. The Road to Rome resembles nothing in the comic tradition prior to Shaw—​except for its setting in classical antiquity. As such, the play bears a certain resemblance to Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, where, incidentally, Caesar stands in as spokesman for Shaw. Sherwood had yet to find his own voice. In the words of Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry, for whom all influence is immoral, Sherwood—​even with his first Broadway hit—​remained “an echo of someone else’s music.”136 In Acropolis, the subject of the next chapter, the voice that emerges is Sherwood’s own and it spoke with great power to the America of the 1930s.

IV Afterlife of The Road to Rome After seeing performances of Sherwood’s play a dozen times, Earl H. Emmons composed a short comic and rather pedestrian epyllion entitled Victoria, which accentuates the comic element in Sherwood’s play and brings Hannibal to a new point of view after Cannae:  he comes to prefer love over war.137 The film The Private Life of Helen of Troy may have been partially based on Sherwood’s play, but little of the film survives today.138 In Hannibal (1959), the filmmakers’ debt to Sherwood is evident but unacknowledged. Hannibal (Victor Mature) falls in love with Sylvia (Rita Gam), in this case a niece rather than wife of Fabius Maximus. After attempting to arrange a peace treaty between Hannibal and the Romans, Sylvia is treated as a traitor to Rome by her uncle and buried alive. With his own peace initiatives a failure, Hannibal

68  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome after Cannae comes to a final realization, according to the voice-​over ending the film, that he is “driven by events he cannot undo. Bound forever to a terrible and barren oath, he will continue in ceaseless combat to the end.”139 In Ross Leckie’s novel Hannibal, the Carthaginian general engages in desperate internal dialogue with himself after Cannae and comes to believe that, like Oedipus, Ajax, and Orestes, he is guilty of hamartia. Unfortunately, the end of the novel leaves the reader uncertain regarding the nature of this hamartia.140 Jupiter’s Darling (1955), a lighthearted musical adaptation of play to screen, manifests the operation of influence of an unusual sort. In the context of film theory, Linda Costanzo Cahir divides what she calls “translations” of literature into film into three categories:  the literal, the traditional, and the radical.141 Jupiter’s Darling fits into the third category, though the film does not so much translate as traduce both Sherwood’s play and Roman history. The film opens with a disclaimer: “In 216 B.C. Hannibal the barbarian marched on Rome. The history of this great march has always been confused. This picture will do nothing to clear it up.” The film positions itself at an ironic distance from Sherwood’s play and produces its only memorable moments of humor through the act of asserting difference from its parent text. On the screen, Amytis (Esther Williams) is Fabius’ fiancée rather than wife, and he expends much fruitless effort trying to convince her to marry. Hannibal (Howard Keel) attacks and breaches the walls of Rome, only refraining at the last minute from sacking the city when Amytis agrees to return with him to Carthage. Like the case of My Fair Lady, the filmmakers chose the emotional over the rational ending. In the play, Amytis smiles sadly and waves her hand to the departing Carthaginians (p. 178). In the film, Hannibal and Amytis ride off together to Carthage on painted elephants, a gratuitously silly scene made funny only if the viewer recalls Mago’s exuberant suggestion in the play that the Carthaginian elephants be “painted every color of the rainbow” for an impending attack on Rome never actually carried out (p. 87). Sherwood’s play points to the later birth of a child; the film makes no mention of such an expected outcome. Meta and Varius, the unhappy slaves of the play, thoroughly enjoy their bondage to Roman masters in the film, the latter, singing “If this is slavery, then give me slavery.” The role of the historian is much larger in the film, and he is portrayed as a figure of fun, constantly attending to the unfolding action of the plot but taking incorrect notes—​sometimes in iambic pentameter—​on what the audience has just seen actually to occur. This Egyptian is a very poor historian. Though not always manifested in his plays, Sherwood had greater respect for the discipline.

V Sherwood and history In his Blashfield Address of 1955, Sherwood lamented the lack of interest in history he saw as characteristic of his fellow Americans, and he singled out Henry Ford’s famous dictum “History is bunk” as an expression of the temper of the times. Sherwood remarked:

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  69

Figure 2.4 Movie poster for Jupiter’s Darling (Alamy).

70  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome We have not yet reached a state of total intellectual bankruptcy and we never shall unless the theory that history is bunk becomes state dogma and causes us to wipe out the record of the past.142 Yet World War I seemed to give the lie to any benefit accruing from the study of history. According to Modris Eksteins, “The historical imagination, like so much of the intellectual effort of the nineteenth century, had been sorely challenged by events of the war ….” Eksteins characterizes this pervasive “self doubt” of historians by quoting H. A. L. Fisher’s confession of 1934: Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave.143 Hence literature—​ especially among the veterans who did the fighting—​ almost invariably took the form of personal reminiscences of the Great War, the most prominent being those of Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), Robert Graves (Good-​Bye to All That), and Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer).144 Sassoon expressed doubt about the efficacy of personal recollections in adequately capturing the experience of war: “I am beginning to feel that a man can write too much about his own feelings, even when ‘what he felt like’ is the nucleus of his narrative.”145 Nonetheless, the pronoun “I” proliferates through his narrative in equal measure to the “we” by which he speaks of his fellow soldiers. Even T.  E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who complained that veterans of the war “can’t keep off their blooming selves,” wrote about the war from his own individual perspective.146 His “blooming self ” blossoms from every page of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.147 Compelling historical narratives about World War I  began to appear only with the outbreak of World War II.148 Eksteins is correct in questioning whether the spate of literary efforts that emerged from the war can be considered “great” art.149 Nor can such a claim be made for The Road to Rome. Nonetheless, Sherwood’s play stands out from the literature occasioned by the war for several reasons. First, the play carries an overt antiwar message, not shared by the works mentioned above nor by other notable efforts to come to terms with the war in the following decade.150 Second, Sherwood eschewed personal reminiscence and turned to history in order to place his experience in a larger context—​no matter how imaginative and even imaginary it was.

Notes 1 The First Punic War, waged unsuccessfully by Hannibal’s father Hamilcar Barca, had lasted for twenty-​three years (264–​241 BC ). 2 O’Connell (2010: 3).

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  71 3 See O’Connell (2010: 4). 4 Hanson (2001: 108–​9) provides a succinct account of Hannibal’s basic strategy. 5 Hannibal and his forces first rested at Cannae and arranged for an exchange of prisoners with the Romans: see Goldsworthy (2000: 214–​19). They then proceeded to Capua in Campania. 6 Beard (2015: 181). Holland (2015: 85) remarks on the close connection conservative Romans saw between ugliness and virtus. 7 Beard (2015: 182). 8 O’Connell (2010: 13, 148). 9 O’Connell (2010: 247). 10 O’Connell (2010: 252). 11 Holmes (2003: 745). 12 See Daly (2002: x). O’Connell (2010: 264) questions the existence of such a plan governing strategy during World War I. 13 See Holmes (2003: 769–​71). 14 In a broad sense, imaginative writing is by its nature intimately concerned with resurrecting the ghosts of the past. Atwood (2002: 156) has pointed out that all narrative art “is motivated, deep down, by a fear and a fascination with mortality—​ by a desire to make the risky leap to the Underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” 15 Sherwood (1927). 16 O’Connell (2010: 84). MacDonald (2015: 238) calls Hannibal “a chameleon who can be molded to fit the guise of an enemy, a great fighter, a strategist, or an anti-​ hero.” Or, we might add, on the basis of Sherwood’s play, even a pacifist. 17 For the casualty figures at Vimy Ridge, see Fussell (2009: 301). 18 Dinesen ([1930] 2005: 122). 19 See the description of the killing in J. M. Brown (1965: 115–​16). 20 See J. M. Brown (1965: 116) and Alonso (2007: 54–​55). 21 J. M.  Brown (1965:  118) emphasizes the extent of his injuries on the second occasion. He claims Sherwood was gassed, suffered injuries to his feet and legs, was struck by shrapnel, and was carried unconscious from the trap by stretcher-​ bearers, regaining consciousness only later in a hospital in Amiens. 22 See J. M. Brown (1965: 126). 23 See J. M. Brown (1965: 119). 24 See Alonso (2007: 51–​52). 25 Sherwood (1940: x). 26 See Goldberg (1999: 118). 27 Johnson quoted in R. Kahn (1999: 151). 28 See Goldberg (1999: 142). 29 Sherwood in Foreword to N. Benchley (1995: xiv). 30 On a trip to New York several years ago, I stopped in to the Algonquin and asked to see the original Round Table. The clerk brusquely informed me that they had disposed of it years ago and anyway, he said, “The Table wasn’t round.” 31 Mordden (2010: 16). 32 Charyn (2003: 218). 33 For the flamboyant Kahn and his association with the Round Table, see Charyn (2003: 213–​15). 34 Pettit (2000: 157).

72  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome 35 Meade (2004: 56, 145) discusses Parker’s unreliability about meeting deadlines and attributes it to boredom, timidity, or anger. 36 Charyn (2003: passim). 37 Runyon’s writings played a great part in creating the myth of New  York in the 1920s: see Runyon (2008). 38 Malcolm Cowley, Sherwood’s contemporary at Harvard and fellow serviceman in World War I, describes the feeling of disillusion that plagued the “Lost Generation”: see Cowley (1956: 58). 39 See Gaines (2007: 20). 40 Gaines (2007: 29). 41 Breslin quoted in Mordden (2010: 29). 42 In addition to works cited above, see Drennan (1985); Benchley and Fitzpatrick (2009); Penzler (2009); Bonds and Conners (2010). 43 In J.  J. Murphy (2011a), Parker, Benchley, and Sherwood meet a young Billy Faulkner on a visit to New  York. In Murphy (2011b), Parker, Benchley, and Sherwood work together to solve the murder of a New  York artist. Murphy’s novels preserve some of the rich humor of the Algonquinites. Also see Stanford (2010) and (2011). 44 Details regarding the trios’ turbulent time at Vanity Fair can be found in Meade (1989: 65–​70). 45 The story of Sherwood’s reaction to the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany will be discussed in Chapter 3. 46 See Gaines (2007: 64–​65). 47 The best analysis of Sherwood’s work as movie critic known to me is Hagermann (1972: 81–​104). 48 Robert E. Sherwood, “Barnum Was Right” (1926). The only copy of this cartoon known to me is lodged in the Library of Congress (ATM 49, Box 7). 49 These cartoons may still be viewed in The Animators: Silent Cartoons (2010). 50 For Sherwood’s discrepant reflections on the 1920s, see Sherwood’s “Footnote to a Preface,” enclosed in RES to Norman Cousins, July 7, 1949, b MS Am 1947, 1065: HHU. 51 See B. Murphy (1987: xi). 52 I plan a full-​length study on Winterset and its relationship to Aeschylus’ Oresteia at a later date. 53 Sherwood had been advised by Edna Ferber that if he wanted to do serious work he needed to get away from the Round Table:  see Gaines (2007:  152, 163–​64). He took her advice and wrote The Road to Rome almost immediately. Meserve (1970: 44) has, I presume, seen the play. He remarks that, “Before an audience it is an extremely humorous play; the reader gets the antiwar message more clearly.” 54 B. Murphy (1987: xi–​xii). 55 See B. Murphy (1987: 24–​49) for a succinct account of realist dramatic theory. 56 Sherwood (1936: 49). 57 These and other major events of 1927 are chronicled in Bryson (2013). 58 See Bryson (2013: 86). 59 See Mommsen ([1855] 1913). 60 J. M. Brown (1965: 211). 61 Barker (1995: 46). 62 Shakespeare (2011: 5.5.1–​11). 63 Shuman (1964: 42) notes that Amytis is “a complete rationalist.”

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  73 64 B. Russell (1945: 236). 65 For the concept of the New Woman in politics, work, and private life, see Dumenil (1995: 98–​144). 66 Ford (1927: 50). Ford also commends New York for “its gayety, its tolerance, its carelessness” (49). 67 See Douglas (1995:  18). I  am indebted to Douglas’ brilliant book for my understanding of life in New York immediately following World War I. 68 Regarding the denizens of the Algonquin Round Table, J. M. Brown (1965: 149) has written that they hated bores and being bored, and were foes of the affected, the long-​winded, and the self-​important. 69 Satire 1.9 of Horace is often titled “The Bore,” but that title seems to have been imposed on the work in modern times: see Spacks (1995: 7–​8). 70 Spacks (1995: x) traces the roots of the concept of boredom to a constellation of historical conditions arising during the eighteenth century: Boredom’s status as a cultural construct becomes increasingly apparent as its verbal records multiply. It was born in the same era as the ideas of “leisure” and the pursuit of happiness, and its social and literary functions have charted the development of civilization’s discontents. 71 Regarding New York attitudes to the rest of America, see Douglas (1995: 22). 72 See Douglas (1995:  5). On the other hand, Charyn (2003:  123) points to what he calls “the perverse racism” of the period, even in New York, blacks not being welcome on Broadway unless they were comedians in black face or chorus girls in an all-​black production. Bryson (2013: 359) refers to the 1920s as the “Age of Loathing:” “There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.” 73 See Douglas (1995: 60): “As early as 1900, New York boasted forty-​one theaters to Paris’ twenty-​four and London’s thirty-​nine, and the 1920s witnessed an explosion of theatrical activity.” 74 Koritz (2009: 1). When Victorian values still prevailed before the rise of the New Woman in New York of the 1920s, the dress of “the well-​bred girl” was expected to consist of “good material and an abundance of it.” She should dress “from the shops” and not have recourse to the “penetralia of great importers” from London or Paris: see Harrison (1898: 20–​21). 75 See Douglas (1995: 13). 76 Douglas (1995: 15). 77 As we shall see below, Sherwood and New York in general in the 1920s were especially receptive to the works of Freud, who “advertised his unbelief every time he could find, or make, an opportunity”: see Gay (1987: 3). 78 See Leuchtenburg (1958: 157–​77). 79 Anderson (1942: 7). 80 Erenberg (1981: 66) argues that New York women in the 1920s were seeking more from marriage than the opportunity of simply acquiring duties to perform: “They called for greater spontaneity, passion, and intimacy with their husbands; leisure became the realm for exploring these new styles.” Douglas (1995: 496–​99) provides extensive bibliography on the changing sexual mores in the decade after World War I. The New Woman of the 1920s was giving public expression to female sexuality: see Dumenil (1995: 131–​44).

74  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome 81 Alonso (2007: 98) rightly finds Amytis’ remark to be “inappropriately humorous,” yet such flippancy was characteristic of Dorothy Parker. 82 Meade (1989: 181). When late in life she outwardly adopted a more “proletarian look,” Parker wore hundred-​dollar underwear and nightgowns made at an expensive Beverley Hills shop: see Meade (1989: 255). 83 See Douglas (1995: 5). 84 See Meade (2006:  19–​23). In her will, Parker donated her entire state to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 85 Grothe (2005: 278). 86 RES, b MS Am 1947, 2126: HHU. 87 Drennan (1985: 113). 88 Drennan (1985: 116). 89 Parker’s success in this game is reported in Alonso (2007: 71). 90 The anecdote is related in Grothe (2005: 277–​78). The play referred to here seems to be Moss Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along: see J. Brown (2006: 100). 91 See Meserve (1970: 45). 92 See Douglas (1995: 13–​14). 93 See Douglas (1995: 27–​28). 94 Douglas (1995: 44). 95 Douglas (1977: xiii). 96 Of Shakespeare, Greenblatt (2004: 119–​20) has written: “But the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.” Sherwood’s play springs in equal measure from personal experience and books. 97 In order to strengthen ties between himself as playwright and Hannibal as general, Sherwood distorts Hannibal’s position at the Battle of Cannae. Daly (2002: 147) remarks: “Practical leadership … virtually demands that commanders be seen to involve themselves in the fighting in some way, leading their men in a literal sense”: Hannibal and his brother Mago were stationed with the Celts and Spaniards in the Carthaginian Center. 98 See J. M. Brown (1965: 220): “To most theatre-​goers, the comedy was a spoof on Rome; to Sherwood it was an oblique attack on America.” 99 Sherwood is perhaps playing on a theme alluded to with impressive effect by the narrator of the Iliad. When the Greeks and Trojans collect the bodies of the dead in Book 7, the narrator observes that “it was hard for them to recognize the individual dead” (Il. 7.424). Death erases all the distinctions between friends and enemies that so fiercely animate the living. See Rabel (1997: 106). 100 I use the Greek word philia here because it can cover the concepts of friendship, sex and love, and a truce between enemies, all three of which come into play in The Road to Rome. 101 See Ford (1927: 46–​47). Muckraker Lincoln Steffens (1904: 200) tells the story of an efficient New York City mayor who lost election to the corrupt Tammany Hall machine because he lacked “the appealing human element.” 102 Ford (1927: x–​xi). 103 See Dewey in Levinson (1927: 7). 104 For the terms of the Kellogg-​Briand Pact and other documents relating to its approval by the United States and other countries, see the Avalon Project of Yale University Law School: http://​avalon.law.yale.edu/​20th_​century/​kbpact.asp.

Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome  75 America’s acceptance of the Kellogg-​Briand Pact may have originated from cynicism and not naiveté. Reynolds (2014: 231) sees American acceptance merely as a sop to the peace movement. American policy was publicly committed to the peace movement “but not to any mechanism for its enforcement.” 105 Douglas (1995: 12). Jimmy Walker was a fixture of Broadway nightlife in the 1920s. A habitual “first-​nighter,” he was routinely provided with two of the best and most visible orchestra seats at the opening of a new play: see Mitgang (2000: 86). 106 Bogard (1988: 4). 107 See O’Connell (2010: 225). 108 See Lancel (1998: 162). 109 Mommsen ([1855] 1913: 302). 110 See Lancel (1998: 110). 111 See Miles (2010: 280–​81). 112 Goldsworthy (2000: 215) opts for the scholars’ view and dismisses Montgomery’s thinking. 113 See O’Connell (2010: 164). 114 See Alonso (2007: 100–​1). 115 See J. M. Brown (1965: 216). 116 J. M. Brown (1965: 219). 117 See Sherwood (1927: xxxix–​xli). 118 J. M. Brown (1965: 288–​91) devotes several pages to the meeting. 119 Review quoted in J. M. Brown (1965: 289). 120 McCarthy quoted in Holroyd (1997: 522). 121 “Preface to Pygmalion” in Shaw (2004: 365). 122 Ibid. 123 “Preface on Doctors” in Shaw (2004: 165). 124 Chesterton (1909: 24). 125 Shaw (2000) contains Caesar and Cleopatra. 126 The Doctor’s Dilemma is published in Shaw (2004). 127 Segal (2001: 404). 128 Chesterton (1909: 23). 129 For the kind of “dissolving of action into talk” that constitutes the Shavian “discussion drama,” see Holroyd (1997: 163). 130 See Holroyd (1997: 408) on Shaw. 131 The terms are those of Holroyd (1997: 65). 132 Holroyd (1997: 279). 133 See Holroyd (1997: 65). 134 Segal (2001: 406) dwells on this aspect of Shaw’s plays, which set them in opposition to Classical forms of comedy. 135 Segal (2001: 404). 136 Wilde (2003: 28). 137 Emmons (1938: 17) offers the following on Hannibal’s changed motivation: And long before the night was through He got a different point of view, The shackles from his pent desires were sundered; He found there’s greater joy in life Than gained in military strife; How long had this been going on, he wondered.

76  Robert E. Sherwood on The Road to Rome 138 Alonso (2007: 103) reports that a fragment of the film is to be found at the British Film Institute. 139 The film perhaps makes overt reference to Sherwood’s play when a merchant-​spy in Hannibal’s employ visits Sylvia in Rome and tells her that “the road to Rome is now open” to Hannibal’s army. His very presence in the film may be attributed to the play: the merchant who sold Amytis the peacock-​green dress from Damascus in The Road to Rome (pp. 21–​22) also turns out to be a spy for Hannibal (p. 106). 140 See Leckie (1996: 197, 241). 141 See Cahir (2006). The literal translation reproduces the plot of the literary work as closely as possible. The traditional translation revamps particulars of a literary plot in ways the filmmakers deem necessary. The radical translation reshapes the literary work in extreme and revolutionary ways. 142 Sherwood (1957a: 15). 143 Fisher cited in Eksteins (1989: 291). 144 See Remarque ([1928] 1982); Graves ([1929] 1958); Sassoon (1930). 145 Sassoon (1930: 316). 146 This quotation is taken from Eksteins (1989: 292). 147 See Lawrence ([1922] 2011). 148 See Reynolds (2014: 330). 149 See Eksteins (1989: 291). 150 As Reynolds (2014: 201) remarks, “Today most of these books and films from ten years on are often interpreted as univocally antiwar, but that is not how their authors perceived them at the time.” Ayrton (2014) offers a generous sample of writings about the war.

3  Acropolis

On a trip to Athens in 1937, Robert E.  Sherwood climbed the Acropolis for the first time. He was deeply moved by the sight of the Parthenon. The experience had special meaning for him because for the past five years he had been laboring over a play called Acropolis, which, he felt, was “a persistent challenge to my desires & the exposure of my inadequacies.”1 In a letter written to his mother, he explained what the Parthenon meant to him; that the values the ancients expressed in the building represent the ideals of democracy he most cherished: When I think of all I’ve read about the Acropolis—​attempted descriptions of it by the greatest writers—​I realize how completely inadequate are all the written accounts of it. But—​standing up there and looking toward all points of the compass—​the main feeling I had was one of a queer sort of patriotism; for I felt that in my country, more than in any other that has existed since the age of Pericles, has been realized the ideal which the Parthenon symbolizes—​and that is democracy, which the Age of Pericles invented. I felt that I knew at last what it is that has made me so absorbed in the play, Acropolis, what it is that has made me go back to that play again and again and slave on it although it had once been branded as a failure. It is a feeling that this is what I was born of, for and by—​which is what leads me directly from a play about the Acropolis into one about Abraham Lincoln. But please, mother—​consider this as strictly between you and me; and therefore keep this letter to yourself.2 Brown reflects on the changes that took place in Sherwood: “The joking attitude of The Road to Rome was gone …. The confectioner of comedies, his wit persisting, had more on his mind than laughter or contrivance.”3 Sherwood’s gradually accelerating move from detachment to social and political engagement throughout the 1930s would be repeated in the lives of many of the characters he was to create. He stopped writing his best plays in imitation of great dramatists such as Aristophanes, Menander, and Shaw. He began to write in defense of democracy against the forces of totalitarianism he

78  Acropolis perceived likely to gain a foothold at home and threaten the country from abroad. Yet the play in which he found his authentic voice as a dramatist was a flop. Sherwood’s friends and colleagues at the Theatre Guild in New  York had refused to stage Acropolis without major revisions. In England, Paul Bonner decided to produce the play before it might once again be offered to New York. Under the direction of fellow playwright Marc Connelly, Acropolis opened at London’s Lyric Theatre on November 23, 1933, and closed after twelve performances. Reviews were mixed. The critic for The Stage described Acropolis as “nobly written, beautifully staged.” Recognizing the conflict only as a general one between the forces of war and peace, he heaped special praise on Raymond Massey’s portrayal of Cleon as “a wonder of malignant force and mob oratory.” “It will not be a credit to the English theatre,” he wrote, “if it [Acropolis] does not enjoy a run.” The Illustrated London News thought the play only “spasmodically moving.” The final scenes were described as falling off “feebly.” The Sheffield Independent viewed the play as brilliant satire “on the eternal struggle of culture versus the forces of war.” The Daily Herald dammed with faint praise: “A gently pungent play about ‘a world that is so insufferably slow in coming to its senses’, as Pheidias laments. But, I fear, a little too clever in spite of its real beauty.” Most praised Raymond Massey’s Cleon, Ian Hunter’s Pheidias, and a number of people who performed minor roles. Gladys Cooper was found to be too subdued in the role of Aspasia.4 Some found the massive sets involved in the production “stolid.”5 Criticism of the sets, we shall see, is an index of failure to understand the importance they play in carrying the message of the drama. The outbreak of World War II at the end of the decade would prove the words of The Daily Herald to be unwittingly prophetic: the world was indeed insufferably slow in coming to its senses. How best to explain the reasons for the failure of Acropolis? Among the factors that doomed the play, two seem of special significance. For the first, audiences and critics may (forgivably) be at fault. Those who saw the play in 1933 failed to realize it was a reflection of the ominous shape of things to come in the future, conveyed through a story set in the distant past. Sherwood was amazingly clairvoyant regarding the crises about to threaten America and the rest of the world and spark a second war with Germany. In Acropolis, figures drawn from the democratic world of ancient Athens seemed to live the life of Americans in the perilous 1930s—​and vice versa. The time of Acropolis is the future, the place ancient Athens.6 The primary responsibility for the play’s failure rests with Sherwood. The ultrademocratic principles governing his life so fully manifested themselves in his art that a leveling effect on the delineation of character resulted, no one being accorded prominence as central protagonist (or protagonists) surrounded by minor figures of secondary importance. Nor, as we shall see, can the play be looked at simply as an ensemble piece with a number of characters serving together as joint protagonists. Sherwood’s radical imparting

Acropolis  79

Figure 3.1 Acropolis. Playbill cover (David K. Chappel).

of equality, giving voice and space to all and sundry, serves to elide the distinction between major and minor characters that makes for the best kind of performed drama. In Sherwood’s play, multiple characters seem engaged with one another in a contest for primacy that puts paid to any sense of unity and coherence in the plot. Indeed, the idea of contest (agōn), so important a factor in Greek life and literature from Homer through the classical period, is central to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Acropolis, a play lacking what we normally understand, following Aristotle, as unity and coherence. Sherwood would later achieve unparalleled success and a string

80  Acropolis

Figure 3.2 Acropolis. Playbill insert (David K. Chappel).

newgenrtpdf

Acropolis  81

Figure 3.3 Acropolis. Author’s note (David K. Chappel).

82  Acropolis

Figure 3.4 Acropolis. Dramatis personae (David K. Chappel).

Acropolis  83 of Pulitzer Prizes in quick succession when he tempered his enthusiasm for democratic principles of plot construction and centered his plays on a major protagonist. Like many of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, which are best enjoyed as literature rather than drama, Acropolis is better on the page than on the stage. O’Neill, perhaps not coincidentally, judged Acropolis “a damn sound piece of work.”7 Let us first consider how Acropolis demonstrates Sherwood’s remarkable, unparalleled level of insight into the dangers facing his country and the world with the rise of Hitler in Germany.

I Acropolis: writing history in the future tense8 In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered office as president of the United States, and Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. While composing Acropolis, Sherwood first read and was deeply disturbed by Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which had recently been published in translation in England and America.9 Sherwood experienced a Damascene moment; he realized the menace to the world posed by the new ruler of Germany. (British Ambassador to Germany Sir Horace Rumbold had a similar reaction at the same time, also based on a close reading of Mein Kampf,10 which was little read in England during the 1930s.11 Winston Churchill had warned of the dangers of a rearmed Germany even before Hitler came to power.)12 Others would later come to perceive the danger only gradually over time—​if at all. Acropolis was Sherwood’s response. Writing history in the future tense, he foresaw a looming threat to his country and the ideals of democracy for which it stood. History was about to repeat itself: a do-​over of the Peloponnesian War, when Athens, the cradle of democracy, faced off against oligarchic Sparta. The enemies of democracy would soon be at the gates once again, however far off the bugles of war sounded at the time Sherwood was writing. The threat to America of a future war against external enemies, Sherwood foresaw, would likely be compounded by the presence of barbarians undermining American society from within. As far as I have been able to determine, with the possible exception of syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson, who witnessed events firsthand in Germany, Sherwood alone among Americans at the time of writing Acropolis in 1932–​ 33 was alive to the Janus-​faced nature of the peril: enemies without, enemies within.13 He foresaw the full measure of the regimented insanity that escaped the notice of others. In the same year Acropolis was produced, massive protest rallies against Hitler and the Nazis were convened in America. On March 27, 1933, an anti-​ Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden, attended by 23,000 people; another 35,000 were unable to gain admission. Hitler was not yet considered the menace to the world he would later become,14 so American fears centered on the issue of anti-​Semitism and the treatment of Jews in Germany. However, a minor note, which would increase in intensity over the coming years, was also being sounded. Several days before the March rally, Rabbi Stephen Wise warned: “What is happening in Germany today may happen tomorrow in any

84  Acropolis other land on earth unless it is challenged and rebuked.”15 Other Americans besides Sherwood were alive to the possibility of the toxic poison of Nazism infecting their country. Might Hitler become a role model for future leaders, an inspiration to internal enemies? Enemies without seemed of little concern—​ except to Sherwood. Vast oceans isolated the country and seemed to offer sufficient protection against foreign incursion. Isolationist sentiment remained strong in America right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.16 Fear of totalitarian enemies within taking power in America antedated the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy (1922) and Adolf Hitler in Germany (1933). In 1908, Jack London published the dystopian novel The Iron Heel, where a group called The Oligarchy manages to snuff out the last vestiges of freedom in America.17 The novel projected that The Oligarchy would seize full power in 1932, the time Sherwood was composing his play. In September 1934, The Modern Monthly sponsored a symposium titled “Will Fascism Come to America?” In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, which envisions the election of a fascist-​inspired president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt having been defeated in the election of 1936. The novel sold 320,000 copies and, like The Iron Heel, is in print today.18 Americans in Germany during the years following World War I had ringside seats to events that in hindsight seem to have led inevitably to World War II. But a position close-​up afforded little in the way of understanding. Americans at home were more alive to the dangers represented by National Socialism than their counterparts living and working in Germany. William L.  Shirer, author of the monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, offers the best explanation: It is quite remarkable how little those of us who were stationed in Germany during the Nazi time, journalists and diplomats, really knew of what was going on behind the façade of the Third Reich. A totalitarian dictatorship, by its very nature, works in great secrecy and knows how to preserve that secrecy from the prying eyes of outsiders.19 Many American newspaper correspondents were stationed in Germany between World War I  and World War II. Their number reached a peak of fifty or so in Berlin alone in the mid-​1930s.20 For the most part, they lacked an understanding of what was brewing beneath the façade of which Shirer speaks.21 Some thought Hitler unlikely to gain or remain long in power. He seemed unfit for high office. In 1932, Dorothy Thompson, the wife of novelist Sinclair Lewis, published a short book called I Saw Hitler! “Hitler’s tragedy,” she wrote, “is that he has risen too high.”22 She denigrated Hitler as “the very prototype of the Little Man” in Hans Fallada’s popular novel Little Man, What Now?23 Nonetheless, her opinion gradually changed when Hitler came to power, and she began to speak out against Nazi crimes. She was exiled from Germany in 1934 on the orders of Hitler himself. Thompson thereupon furnished insight and ammunition for her husband’s popular novel It Can’t

Acropolis  85 Happen Here. Most among Thompson’s colleagues in Germany seemed not so prescient. Edgar Mowrer stood forth as one of few Americans in Germany who publicly spoke out against the barbarous treatment of the Jews.24 But he saw the German national character peculiarly suited to Nazism and unlikely to inspire the growth of enemies within America. “This people,” he wrote of the Germans, “is formless and therefore craves a form so strong that it cannot be broken.”25 “Now the German is a marvelous thinker,” Mowrer added, “but he believes what he is told by his ‘betters’.”26 (Pulling no punches, Sherwood wrote in his diary at the same time that “The German people are surely the … dumbest on earth.”)27 Mowrer as late as 1939 saw Hitler representing little or no direct danger to America—​unless France and England were first conquered.28 John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News furnished portraits of the most influential Nazi leaders, but “he largely evaded the question of what the Third Reich meant for the United States.”29 On first meeting Hitler in 1932, radio broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn found himself unimpressed. In the summer of 1933, he revisited Germany with his son, who was beaten up for not saluting Nazi banners. Kaltenborn, believing that American correspondents were often exaggerating claims of Nazi brutality, refused to comment on the incident. Nagorski remarks: “Some Americans, it seemed, didn’t want to see what was really happening, even when it was happening to them.”30 Beatings and arrests of individual Americans were occurring in Germany in 1933,31 but for the most part, reciprocal good feeling characterized relations between Germans and the Americans living in their midst for most of the 1930s.32 Among their former enemies in the Great War, the Germans looked most favorably upon the Americans, who tended to respond with good feelings of their own. The mood of Americans in Germany was predominantly one of curiosity or fascination with the country’s new ruler.33 In the early years of the 1930s, Americans were made to feel very much at home in Berlin. “Americanization” of the country proceeded apace. German industry was being reformed in accordance with American time-​and-​motion studies, and the efficiency of The Ford Motor Company was adopted as an industrial model. Hitler himself found kinship across the ocean with (anti-​Semite) Henry Ford, whom he described as “my inspiration.”34 Hitler named his personal train “Amerika.”35 Public fascination with Hitler was to be found among Americans visiting Germany. A young John F. Kennedy, arriving in the summer of 1937, found the Germans to be “really too good.”36 In 1938, his father Joseph Kennedy was appointed ambassador to Great Britain where, according to Nagorski, “he quickly gained a reputation as an envoy with pro-​German leanings.”37 Frequent visits to Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1938 led Charles Lindbergh to the belief that Hitler and the Nazis posed no threat to the United States and in many respects were worthy of emulation. Lindbergh liked and admired the Germans, especially for their technological expertise; German airpower exceeded anything to be found in England, France, or the United States.38 Lindbergh and Truman Smith, who in 1920 had been the

86  Acropolis first American official to meet Hitler, remained isolationists right up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. What looked large from a distance (in America) close-​up (in Germany) seemed not so big. In 1936, a confluence of events—​Hitler’s decision to support Franco in Spain and the famous Nuremberg party rally—​led Shirer to the conclusion that war was inevitable in Europe.39 Three decisive events taking place in 1938 caused most other American reporters in Germany to be “stripped of their illusions:” the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria into Germany), the Munich agreement allowing Germany to gobble up parts of Czechoslovakia, and Kristallnacht, the wave of anti-​Semitic pogroms throughout Germany.40 Sherwood suffered no such illusions as plagued American reporters and visitors to Germany. In Acropolis, he was boldly predicting that war would come to America, as it was to do eight years later. As Brown has shown, critics—​and likely the few London audiences who saw the play—​failed to see what seems evident today. They looked for the most part to the past and occasionally to the present to determine the play’s relevance to external events rather than to the future. They were puzzled about what they saw and heard. As Brown explains, In the aesthetes of ancient Athens they saw precursors of those Victorians known as “The Souls.” When discussing Cleon’s objections to having work continued on the Parthenon during wartime, they recalled a project for a National Theatre in London which had been dropped after August, 1914. Edging into the contemporary, they likened the intellectual advisers of Pericles to the Brain Trusters who during Roosevelt’s “First Hundred Days” had converged on Washington. But they stopped with strange abruptness and a blindness stranger still, considering what we with hindsight can plainly see.41 Acropolis can best be understood as an allegory about the dangers to America and the world posed by the Nazis and the spread of their totalitarian ideology. Democratic Athens stands in for America. Hitler and the Nazis are external enemies, represented by the warlike Spartans. More prominent in the play than the antidemocratic Spartans, however, are their Athenian admirers, who devote themselves to undermining the Athenian democracy from within. They represent the greater danger. To complete the network of analogies on which Acropolis is based, influential American fascists or fascist sympathizers serve as equivalents of the traitorous Athenians. Were there such turncoats in America in the years 1932–​33? Despite the fears of novelists and conveners of symposia, homegrown domestic fascists were few on the ground and possessed little influence at the time Sherwood was writing Acropolis. Fascism in America was first made intellectually respectable because of the failure of capitalism and the democratic system to ameliorate sufficiently the economic crisis wrought by the Great Depression, which had begun in 1929. An important turning point in the history of fascism in America was reached in 1936. (I use the word “fascism” to designate allegiance to the ways

Acropolis  87 of thinking and acting promoted by Mussolini and/​or Hitler.) Prior to 1936, American fascists were “figures in a sideshow without significance in American politics.”42 Things began to change that year with the publication of Lawrence Dennis’ The Coming American Fascism: The Crisis of Capitalism. In a series of closely reasoned arguments, Dennis maintained that capitalism was incapable of solving the lingering economic crisis of the Great Depression, for capitalism, Dennis believed, requires infinite economic expansion, but such a state of affairs, he argued, flies in the face of the laws of growth and decay formulated in mathematics and the natural sciences.43 Capitalism is only workable, Dennis claimed, in historical periods where “the settling, grabbing and conquest of new resources and markets are possible,” conditions operative in America only in the prewar period.44 The only alternatives likely to replace outmoded capitalism, Dennis thought, were fascism or Communism, fascism emerging as by far the more desirable alternative.45 Striving mightily to overcome the unfavorable emotive connotations already attached to the term “fascism,” Dennis avoided much discussion of Hitler, Mussolini, and Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey Long, who, though assassinated in 1935, remained associated with fascism in the public consciousness. Dennis believed in the possibility of instituting a particularly American form of strong-​ governmental fascism. Liberal ideologies and regimes only create plausible fictions, he thought, when they argue for a limited use of force or coercion in affairs of state.46 Dennis caught up with Sherwood’s earlier prediction of inevitable war, which he believed would occur within five years.47 Charles Lindbergh began his series of visits to Nazi Germany in 1936. He would finally provide fascism with an attractive, fashionable face. Like Dennis, Lindbergh found democracy and capitalism bankrupt, and he hailed fascism as “the inevitable alternative to decline”48 and “the wave of the future.”49 Sherwood would launch vitriolic attacks against the famous aviator, considering him “simply a Nazi with a Nazi’s Olympian contempt for all democratic processes.”50 Only after the war was Sherwood able to write dispassionately about Lindbergh, whom he then described as President Roosevelt’s “most formidable competitor on the radio.”51 A third influential figure, spiritual kin to Dennis and Lindbergh, was anti-​ Semitic radio priest Fr. Charles Coughlin. Coughlin was an early supporter of Roosevelt after the election of 1932, but the failure of the New Deal to make sufficient headway against the Depression led Coughlin eventually to glorify Hitler before a radio audience estimated to have included some 40  million listeners. Coughlin received more mail than the president of the United States.52 In 1936, Coughlin described Roosevelt as “a scab president,” leading “a scab army.”53 The German-​American Bund, a group whose purpose was to create a favorable image of Nazi Germany, was formed in 1936. Sherwood, the dramatist who foresaw war looming in America’s future as early as 1933, likely anticipated the bitter harvest of fascism that would soon be reaped at home as a result of the Great Depression and admiration for the goals of Hitler and Mussolini.

88  Acropolis Sherwood fluctuated between optimism and pessimism in domestic and foreign affairs as he was working on Acropolis. Nineteen thirty-​three marked the final year of the period Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has referred to as “the crisis of the old order” (1919–​33). Schlesinger paints a vivid portrait of the condition of the country on March 4, 1933, when Roosevelt was inaugurated: The image of a nation as it approached zero hour: the well-​groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-​breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol plaza.54 “As dawn broke over America,” Schlesinger continues, “the banks of the nation seemed in rigor mortis.” Inauguration Day “was dull and dreary, skies dark and overcast, breaking on a people afraid, yet expectant.”55 Schlesinger ends the first volume of his magisterial study of the Roosevelt administration with several lines taken from a long poem called “Inaugural Parade,” written by a sardonic but nonetheless cautiously hopeful Robert E.  Sherwood and published in The Saturday Review of Literature on the day of Roosevelt’s inauguration—​lines that register mixed feelings about the incoming president: Are we sure that you have fixed your eyes on A goal beyond the politician’s ken? Have you the will to reach the far horizon Where rest the hopes of men?56 The “you” of the poem is, of course, Roosevelt. Appended to the poem was a clarion call to action on the part of the country. “What everyone, even the destitute and broken, even the intellectuals, can contribute to this inauguration,” Sherwood wrote, “is hope.” He added: “the realist knows that man has skidded around dangerous curves before and come down on four wheels at last.” And Sherwood added:  “Defeatism is always dangerous.”57 After World War II, Sherwood looked back and reflected on the scene as Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address: No cosmic dramatist could possibly devise a better entrance for a President—​or a new Dictator, or a new Messiah—​than that accorded to Franklin Delano Roosevelt …. Roosevelt rode in on a wheel chair instead of a white horse, but the roll of drums and the thunderclaps which attended him were positively Wagnerian as emotional stimuli and also

Acropolis  89 as ugly warnings of what might happen to American democracy if the new President should turn out to possess any of the qualities of a Hitler or even of a Huey Long. The people did not have to wait long for him to reveal himself, clearly and irrevocably.58 Like Dennis, Sherwood bracketed Huey Long with Hitler but saw reason for hope in a different direction:  Roosevelt’s firm trust in the democratic system:  “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed.”59 Sherwood, the cynical, disillusioned army veteran of World War I, who had voted for Republican Warren Harding, found reason for a commitment to democracy under a Democratic president. He gave voice in Acropolis to the faith he saw incised into the marble of the Parthenon in fifth-​century Athens.

II Literary agōn and Acropolis60 Acropolis offers an abundance of plots and characters, resulting in a profusion of dramatic interests traceable to the democratic impulses taking concrete form in the play. A democratic form of contest (in Greek, agōn) occurs. The concept of the agōn, so central to an understanding of ancient Greece, is played out in the twentieth century in Sherwood’s paean to the democratic spirit, haply set in ancient Greece. In the nineteenth century, historian Jacob Burckhardt and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the centrality of the contest (agōn) to Greek life. Competition among the elites in Greek society, Burckhardt argued, permeated all aspects of culture during this period. The agōn allowed for “the expression of the will to self-​distinction among equals before judges.”61 Gymnastics, religious festivals, art, music, and poetry—​all developed under the influence of agonal competition.62 While also tracing its origins to the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche universalized the agōn, taking it as the “spirit of competition” to be found in all times and places. “Nietzsche,” as Harold Bloom said, “taught that every spirit must unfold itself in fighting.”63 Talent grows in contest, as one talent meets another in opposition, eventually bringing excellence to the fore.64 Nietzsche also internalized a version of the agōn: contesting elements of the individual psyche, he thought, compete with one another and achieve victory or suffer defeat in the quest for individual freedom and autonomy.65 Heavily indebted to Nietzsche, Bloom himself gave the agōn a specifically literary twist. He contended that relationships among poets are not “gifts graciously bestowed and gratefully received.”66 Rather, he used the word agōn to describe what he saw as a contest carried out among them—​for example, Matthew Arnold and George Meredith contesting to their detriment with Wordsworth in their quests to attain originality in the face of the achievements of their great predecessor.67 Expanding the conception still further, I suggest that agōn is the appropriate term to describe a frequently overlooked form of contest taking place within certain texts—​competition

90  Acropolis for character-​ space and importance—​ that occurs most especially in the nineteenth-​century novel and later in Acropolis. The title of Alex Woloch’s study of the nineteenth-​century realist novel encapsulates his book’s contents:  The One vs. the Many.68 Though he does not characterize the phenomenon of which he writes as an agōn, the term is certainly applicable to the kind of opposition he studies, which sets the One, that is, the protagonist of a novel, against the Many (minor characters), who make bids for prominence that “are generated by a democratic [my emphasis] impulse that forms a horizon of nineteenth-​century politics.”69 We may speak then of a democratic form of agōn, which, present in Middlemarch, according to Woloch, allows the novel to be read as involving a singular protagonist (Dorothea), a pair of co-​protagonists (including Lydgate), a series of principal characters … or a manifold group of characters, extending from principals to nearly anonymous figures, who all compete for attention within the narrative web.70 The pull of such an egalitarian aesthetic, Woloch shows, takes a different form in the workings of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, where we find “two competing co-​protagonists.”71 Woloch makes frequent use of the verb jostle in his descriptions of how minor characters in the realist novel seem to jockey for position against one another and against the One, competing for the reader’s attention, often seeming to become major protagonists for long stretches of narrative.72 At the same time, however, a measure of equilibrium in the whole work results and a modicum of structural unity is achieved due to how this democratic bent is balanced by the “acute economic and social stratification” of the nineteenth century.73 That is, long-​entrenched aristocratic privilege acts so as to hold in check the drift toward democratic equality. As a result, “while any character can be a protagonist, only one character is.”74 (Woloch may be involved in a minor contradiction here, since he recognizes the possibility of multiple protagonists.) The interior life of a protagonist, he says, is portrayed in depth, while “a wide narrative gaze” simultaneously sweeps across “a vast social universe.”75 Attention to the larger social context brings in its train the possibility of destabilization by “too many people [author’s emphasis].”76 The democratic spirit animating the realist drama Acropolis, however, so levels the field of competition that no one emerges as victor in the agōn; no one rises to the level of major protagonist. Nor can the play be understood simply as an ensemble piece with a number of characters sharing the role of protagonist. Woloch’s recommendation of caution in locating a central figure or figures provides a salutary warning in the interpretation of Sherwood’s play:  “Highlighting a stable thematic center too swiftly leaves no room for examining the competition between alternative character centers.”77 Three character centers emerge in the course of Acropolis, which lacks a stable character center. A competition among equals takes place. First to come to

Acropolis  91 prominence is the young Alcibiades, whose appearance in the first scene of Act 1 creates expectations of a kind of dramatic Bildungsroman to follow in the rest of the play. Alcibiades is in the early years of becoming what historians and novelists often refer to as the flesh-​and-​blood “idol of Athens.” His emergence as the likely One, the protagonist, is signaled through close association with the marble “idol of Athens,” the Parthenon on the Acropolis. In the second scene of Act 1, however, Alcibiades’ role shrinks, and the courtesan Aspasia comes to prominence and remains the character center throughout Act 2. She shows herself to be the driving force behind the building of the Parthenon. In the third act, Aspasia is sidelined and hardly appears at all. The artist Pheidias, thus far only one of the Many in the two earlier plots, makes his bid for the role of the One. Indeed, his defense of art and democracy carries the message of the play. The agōn pitting Alcibiades, Aspasia, and Pheidias against one another works itself out as a zero-​sum game: the competition of each to rise to the level of major protagonist insures the failure of the other two to reach that status. The agōn lacks a victor, and compositional unity suffers—​if, like Aristotle, we think that a narrative ought to tell a single story. Acropolis tells three stories, though all involve the Parthenon in one way or another. Perhaps the critic for the Sunday Graphic, who reviewed the play during its abortive run in London, was alive to this point when he saw in the play “enough profundity, wit and beauty … to make the fortune of a half-​ dozen plays conceived on less ambitious lines.”78 Acropolis, we might say, is destabilized by too many plots. Competition for the role of protagonist in Sherwood’s Athens most certainly undermines the unity of the drama and confronts the audience with three quite distinct plots, featuring three protagonists, none of whom, in the governing spirit of democracy, can ultimately claim preeminence and  the status of protagonist. The first plot comprises the Bildungsroman of the young Alcibiades. Here we are introduced to Athenian enemies within and without—​and, by implication, their counterparts in twentieth-​century America.

III The Bildungsroman of Alcibiades Alcibiades is the protagonist of the initial plot. He gives (false) promise of becoming the thematic center of the play. In fashioning Alcibiades, Sherwood drew upon a natural connection between the man who, according to Burckhardt, “most fully personified Athens” and the Parthenon, which still serves as the embodiment of the ideals of democracy—​ancient and modern.79 Sherwood was on firm historical ground in relating the two so closely: between the ages of three and eighteen, the historical Alcibiades would have witnessed at firsthand the building of the Parthenon.80 Alcibiades is probably about eighteen years old in Acropolis, although his age is not specified. Though he will early fall out of contention to be victor in the play’s agōn, the aesthetic ideals of Athenian democracy continue to be hammered into his soul, as these

92  Acropolis take physical shape in the marble of the Parthenon. Sherwood demonstrates ingenious, unexampled originality in so closely associating man and temple.81 The historical Alcibiades was the most charismatic figure in fifth-​century Greek history. At times during his life he served the military interests of Athens and Sparta. Eventually, he died at the hands of assassins. Sherwood’s Alcibiades will undergo a brief but unsuccessful military career before eventually renouncing war and devoting himself to the completion of work on the Parthenon. Having earlier depicted Hannibal as a convert to pacifism, Sherwood did not blush at transforming Alcibiades into a devotee of Athenian architecture.82 Yet in most respects the Alcibiades of Acropolis is recognizably the young Alcibiades of the ancient world, in his youth closely associated with Socrates. He displays in Acropolis the physical beauty unanimously attributed to him by the ancient sources.83 Plato’s Socrates, for example, begins Alcibiades I by acknowledging the youth’s extraordinary physical attractiveness. Socrates reflects a typical Greek attitude when he links beauty of person to quality of soul (104a). The Alcibiades of Acropolis manifests just such inner quality, vouchsafed through outer beauty. He is acknowledged in the play as an exception to the normal run of humanity, a rara avis, a youth equipped with such natural excellence as to attract the attention of many in his native Athens. Sherwood’s Alcibiades further recalls the youth of Alcibiades I in his expression of a sense of personal self-​sufficiency. Plato’s Socrates remarks upon this in the beginning of Alcibiades I: “You profess that you are not in need of anyone for anything” (104a). Both Plato’s and Sherwood’s characters are faced with the same problem: in their heightened sense of autonomy, they have yet to come to an understanding of what goals should shape their lives.84 Finally, and most importantly, Sherwood’s Socrates gets to the very core of Alcibiades’ being as it can be reconstructed from a number of ancient literary representations. Sherwood’s Socrates characterizes Alcibiades in terms of his heightened sense of “individualism” (1.1.8).85 The Alcibiades who emerges from the surviving ancient sources is much like the Achilles of the Iliad or the Ajax of Sophocles’ play. He is not the differentiated individual who possesses unique characteristics shared by no others. (Plato’s Socrates and Sherwood’s Pheidias may be such unexampled individuals.) Alcibiades and many heroes of Greek legend do not seek to challenge social norms when they find themselves in conflict with society; they live within the recognized norms and only try to enhance the level of honor and status that should be accorded them.86 Just so, Sherwood’s Alcibiades seeks to distinguish himself within the social and political structure of Athens. He has the potential to become an exemplary lover, politician, artist, writer, philosopher, or soldier. The first scene of Act 1 recalls the opening of Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades and of Plato’s Alcibiades I. In Plutarch, unnamed corrupters appeal to Alcibiades’ love of distinction and fame, and try to convince the gifted youth that he could quickly surpass the ordinary generals and public leaders in his

Acropolis  93 city’s estimation—​that he might even outshine his guardian Pericles, were he to choose to enter public life. Socrates there provides the counterargument, albeit only a temporarily effective one, instructing Alcibiades on the limits of his excellence (6.1–​4).87 In Alcibiades I, Socrates makes extensive use of his typical question-​and-​answer technique to convince Alcibiades of the necessity of following a life of politics grounded in wisdom and virtue. In furtherance of this goal, Plato’s Socrates initiates what has been fittingly called “a drama of philosophical seduction.”88 Readers familiar with the political career of the turncoat Alcibiades will recognize Platonic irony at the conclusion of the dialogue, when Alcibiades promises to live such a life and in the future become a student of Socrates (135d). Act 1 of Acropolis is the most complex and fascinating scene Sherwood ever created. It rewards close analysis. The play opens at the construction site of the Parthenon. A procession of seducers approaches Alcibiades, seeking to influence his choice of a career. First up is the young courtesan Phais. She is madly in love with Alcibiades and worships him like a god, but she receives nothing in return. He is indifferent to her. “Your unhappiness doesn’t bother me in the least,” he says (1.1.3). He requests: “Why don’t you try kissing me for a while? I  may respond” (1.1.4). Alcibiades is in the midst of a torrid love affair—​with himself, as the comic poet Aristophanes will later point out (1.2.23). Phais departs, having elicited the promise that Alcibiades might visit her later (1.1.5). Insatiably curious, Socrates, plying his trade as a stonemason, has overheard the conversation between ardent courtesan and narcissistic youth. He asks Alcibiades what advice his guardian Pericles has given him about his future. Alcibiades replies: “He thinks I ought to follow his distinguished footsteps into politics,” but I can think of nothing more tiresome than having to attend the assembly, and vote with the fish-​mongers and offal-​mongers and all the rest of the scum that covers the surface of our democracy. Pericles thrives on that, but it would stifle me. (1.1.8) Socrates suggests other possibilities. Alcibiades might become an artist like Pheidias, a contemplative philosopher like Anaxagoras, or a satirist like Aristophanes (1.1.8). Cleon, third in the sequence of seducers, enters and begins to harangue Alcibiades. The historical Cleon, though an Athenian democrat, was a bitter enemy of Pericles and, according to Thucydides as quoted by Sherwood, “the most violent of the citizens” (stage direction, 1.1.10). Sherwood’s Cleon speaks admiringly of Sparta at the same time as he denigrates the present state of Athenian democracy. In the person of Cleon, the audience is invited to recognize America’s enemies within, sympathizers with the Nazi movement in Germany. The Nazis themselves are represented by the militaristic Spartans.

94  Acropolis The Peloponnesian War, about to begin between Athens and Sparta, prefigures America’s entry into World War II against Nazi Germany. As we saw earlier, audiences failed to recognize how Sherwood was uncannily writing history—​ in the future tense. Cleon argues that Alcibiades will find the meaning his life lacks if he becomes a soldier. Athens, Cleon claims, is mired in a social crisis. Formerly, he says, “we were one people, one race, united and determined.” Now, however, aliens have begun “to crawl like vermin through the structure of our state, enfeebling our powers of resistance,” aliens like the philosopher Anaxagoras from Clazomenae, close friend and confidant of Pericles, and, behind him, the still more dangerous Aspasia, “an alien whore” from Miletus. Formerly, Pericles “was devoted entirely to expansion, establishing and strengthening the outposts of empire.” But now, under the poisonous influence of Aspasia, “he’s squandering the tax-​payers money on all this confection of marble, and ivory, and gold.” “I tell you,” Cleon continues, “there are strange forces at work on this sacred hill, forces that are not of our race, or of the immortal gods that we worship” (1.1.12–​13). Aspasia’s motives, Cleon says, should be perfectly clear: By furthering these extravagant schemes, she provides employment and satisfaction for Pheidias and other patrons of her house of ill fame—​ and, at the same time, she prevents Pericles from devoting the funds of our treasury to weapons for our defence. Can you see what I mean when I speak of subtle poison? (1.1.12–​13) Proper role models for Alcibiades can be found among the xenophobic Spartans, with whom Cleon aligns himself. (Raymond Massey showed great reach as an actor when he first played Cleon in 1933’s Acropolis and later starred as Abraham Lincoln in both the stage and screen versions of Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois.) Cleon says of the Spartans: They’re not tolerating foreigners in their midst …. They’re expressing their racial vitality in the more practical form of armies and navies, the sole purpose of which is to shatter forever the grandeur of Athens …. The Spartans acknowledge the endless truth that all life is war—​and that for us mortals there is peace only in death. (1.1.13) Sherwood was among the few—​ perhaps the first—​ to link the Athenian demagogue Cleon and the ancient Spartans with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler’s first historian Konrad Heiden, discussing Hitler’s unparalleled success as a mob-​leader, wrote at about the same time as Sherwood that he eclipsed Cleon, Wat Tyler, and Rienzi.89 Cleon’s concern with racial

Acropolis  95 purity and imperial expansion points forward to Hitler’s same goals for his country.90 Cleon’s determined efforts to locate the true enemies of Athens among a foreign element “not of our race,” “poisoning the state from within,” are echoed in the anti-​Semitism of National Socialism, which sparked the massive protests in America discussed earlier. Moreover, Cleon appeals to Athenian religious beliefs and practices to justify his persecution of the party of peace and beauty. Just so, the Nazis based their ideology on a foundation of Christian belief, however skewed.91 The Spartans acknowledge the endless truth that life is war. Hitler acted upon this axiom from the moment he came to power. In the year Acropolis was produced (1933), he put Germany on a permanent war footing.92 Spartan racial vitality, which Cleon lauds, expressed itself in a highly organized, state-​ sponsored eugenics program. “In historical Sparta,” as Joseph Roisman says, “the community controlled the right of babies to live.” Elsewhere in Greece that decision rested with the parents.93 The Spartan program of eugenics was to find a close analogue in Nazi Germany. At the time Sherwood was working on Acropolis, however, the Nazi program to enhance “racial vitality” existed only in word. As Hitler explained his position in 1928, even before coming to power, Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State [an organically grown, united community of healthy citizens]. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a generation of degenerates burdened with illnesses.94 At the Nuremberg rally in 1929, Hitler called Sparta “the clearest racial state in human history.”95 Hitler did not begin to put his eugenics program into operation until after the beginning of World War II. According to Anthony Beevor, “More than 100,000 mentally and physically disabled Germans would be killed by August 1941.” Nazi liquidation of all “degenerates,” “useless mouths,” and “lives unworthy of life”—​sub-​humans of various races and countries—​would soon follow.96 Even the historical Spartans might have been appalled. Sherwood seems especially prescient in foreseeing all of this as early as 1933. Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi fantasist and ideologue on all matters concerning race, spoke of how Hitler admired the Spartans as Herrenvolk, who exerted mastery over a subservient population of slave-​like Helots. Hitler’s interest in the Spartans sparked “a veritable boom in the field of Spartan studies” among German classicists and ancient historians in the 1930s and 1940s.97 Stephan Rebenich writes of “Spartan-​maniacs” among the population at large within the Third Reich.98 Elizabeth Rawson says that German “laconism” reached

96  Acropolis its apotheosis with Hitler, who, incidentally, believed that the peasant soup in Schleswig-​Holstein followed the recipe for Spartan broth!99 During the Nazi siege of Stalingrad in 1942, Herman Göring used the example of the Spartans as a stick with which to beat beleaguered German troops: they should remember the example of Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylae—​perhaps not the best paradigm for emulation because the Spartans lost the battle there and perished almost to a man. Hitler later evoked the memory of Leonidas and the Spartans at the end of World War II during the Götterdämmerung that brought an end to his Third Reich.100 Cleon’s presence at the site of the Parthenon project is not lacking in a certain (situational) irony, for he also sees himself as an “artist” of sorts. He resembles the twentieth-​century fascist later depicted so vividly by Aldous Huxley in 1948’s Ape and Essence. A decade and a half earlier Sherwood had already recognized this type of modern demagogue, who works with some of the tools of the true artist; with these he simplifies, abstracts, imposes a style on his material and eliminates everything he considers nonessential, consigning whatever falls short of perfection to the waste paper basket.101 Later at the climax of the play, Cleon will identify himself with the Spartans as an “artist” in this inverted sense of the term, when he declares that “the destiny of man cannot be told in words, or painted in colors, or carved in marble: it can only be written in blood” (3.1.2). Cleon departs from the views of Hitler and the Nazis in a single important respect:  he despises Pericles and Aspasia’s Parthenon, a “confection of marble, and ivory, and gold,” and, favors the Spartan view that wealth should be used in the provision of weapons of war (1.1.12–​13). Hitler much admired the Parthenon, though it exerted no influence on his building program for a modern Germany. He was also happy to be likened to Pericles.102 Hitler looked with favor upon the Greeks in general as the Nordic ancestors of the modern Germans,103 but he found true kinship with the Spartans. The sole difficulty in unraveling and interpreting the web of connections Sherwood weaves between Greek antiquity and 1930s America involves the absence of identifiable American equivalents to “laconizer” Cleon in the play. In 1933, as we saw, above, Nazi sympathizers in America were merely “figures in a sideshow,” in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Domestic American fascists would not begin to emerge as influential figures until 1936. Yet a dramatist whose vision of the future saw another world war looming on the far horizon likely possessed the foresight—​and the knowledge of his countrymen—​to predict the eventual emergence of Nazi fellow-​travelers like Charles Lindbergh. Cleon’s hostility to Pericles may foreshadow the bitter animosity that arose later in the decade of the 1930s between Lindbergh and President Roosevelt, a subject treated at length by Lynne Olson.104 Both Pericles and Roosevelt came to be considered traitors to their class; both used public funds to finance public works projects.105 Pericles never appears on stage in Acropolis, but Sherwood’s characterization of the leader of the Athenian

Acropolis  97 democracy may reflect his ambivalent feelings about Roosevelt during the first year of his first term as president. As work on the Parthenon ceases for the day, Pheidias joins the conversation. Pheidias is initially cast as one of the Many in the coming-​of-​age story of Alcibiades. A  stage direction describes him as evidencing a “fine contempt for everything that is not directly concerned with his own immediate interests” (stage direction, 1.1.14). Pheidias reveals himself to be an amorous, self-​indulgent artist with little interest in the politics swirling around him. He bears a certain resemblance to Shakespeare’s Falstaff, from Henry IV, Part I. Like Falstaff, Pheidias will increase in worth and dignity as he becomes protagonist in the third plot of Acropolis. But Pheidias first plays the fool: he slaps his belly; food, drink, and sex are uppermost in his mind: “You’re right, Cleon,” he says, “That’s what we need:  youth, and fire. I’d like to have a renewal of both, all the way through the intestinal tract” (I.1.14). Alcibiades asks his opinion: Is Athens really in danger of destruction? Pheidias replies in obvious mockery of Cleon: I hadn’t thought about it. But I suppose it’s true. Yes—​it must be true. Here we are, at the pinnacle of achievement. We can’t go any farther in that direction. (He points upward) Can we? And I don’t think we have the ability to stand still. It takes genius to do that. So from now on, our progress will have to be steadily down hill. I’m going that way myself. I’m going to Aspasia’s house, and have a hot bath, and then be rubbed with oil of saffron, for aphrodisiac purposes. And then I’ll consume six flagons of wine, and then go to bed with twelve beautiful women. That’s the way to accept the dictates of fate, Alcibiades. That’s the true stoicism. (1.1.14) Like Falstaff, Pheidias is content to sponge off others. Later in Aspasia’s garden he complains to her:  “This house would be ruined if you started bringing in patrons who pay for their pleasure” (1.2.34). The self-​absorbed Pheidias has no recommendation to make to Alcibiades on the subject of a career, though he sounds a new note by objecting to Cleon’s idea that soldering constitutes a meaningful career. To Cleon’s claim that the man who dies in battle becomes a god, Pheidias replies: “No, you’re not, Cleon—​you’re nothing but another corpse, an object of importance only as long as the stink lasts” (1.1.15). For the nonce, both Cleon and Pheidias manage to strike chords within Alcibiades’ soul. As a consequence, he makes no decision regarding a career. He departs in high dudgeon, leaving the subject of his future in abeyance (1.1.15). Alcibiades’ initial status as the One arises partly through his close relationship with the Parthenon. The link between the flesh-​and-​blood idol of Athens and his marble counterpart will continue through the play—​though Alcibiades’ role will diminish as others don the mantle of protagonist. Consisting in the beginning of only three steps, the stumps of three Doric

98  Acropolis columns, and a temple platform (1.1.1), the marble beauty of the Parthenon still manages to cast its spell over the artist Moschio. He stands on the second step and looks down upon Alcibiades, reclining on the first step (stage direction, 1.1.2: he is “physically flawless and richly attired”). Then he glances off to the left where work on the temple is proceeding. First acknowledging Alcibiades “as a glorious creature,” Moschio addresses the youth on the architectural work in progress: “I wish you could see this view now; the columns against that lovely violet sky. I like to imagine in my mind’s eye what it will be like when it’s all finished” (1.1.5). Moschio’s words invite the audience to wonder the same about Alcibiades. For both, the Parthenon and Alcibiades are in the early stages of development; they are dazzling but unfinished works of art, pregnant with possibilities, beauty that evokes immediate admiration. Both, however, will require much sustained effort if the task of bringing them to consummation is to be accomplished. The Parthenon serves as objective correlative to Alcibiades’ inner world of thought and feeling. T. S. Eliot imported the idea of the objective correlative into literary criticism: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative;” in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.106 Eliot used the concept in criticism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which he judged to be deficient as drama because Hamlet’s state of mind lacks an external equivalent to the emotions he experiences. That is, his emotions are not artfully objectified; they appear to be in excess of the apparent facts. Objective correlative is an apt term to apply to the relationship between Alcibiades and the Parthenon. Alcibiades’ words adequately express his inner mood and emotions, but these only become artful because the dramatist has provided objective, visual expression of them through the chain of events taking place as workers and slaves labor at the construction site. Alcibiades is “bored to death” (1.1.6). In Athens, he tells Socrates, one quickly grows “old and dull and self-​satisfied” (1.1.7). He is “discontented—​ restless” (1.1.7). He rejects Pericles’ advice to enter Athenian politics (1.1.8). He thinks he was born in the wrong time: “I ought to have lived in the brave days of Salamis and Marathon, when the whole world was young and full of excitement. I  could have been a hero!” (1.1.7). His mood is adequately conveyed through his words, but it is expressed artfully because it conforms to the external facts as they appear on stage in the background. Work taking place on the Parthenon is also characterized by boredom. Boredom on the job normally results when work is experienced purely as necessity. To counteract boredom, either work must be continued beyond the extent of one’s necessities or workers must be able to engage in some form

Acropolis  99 of play.107 The workers and slaves at the site of the Parthenon are denied the opportunity for either form of relief. They experience work purely as a necessity. The boredom of which Alcibiades speaks is artfully expressed through their mind-​numbing, backbreaking activity.108 Indeed, their inattention to the stern commands of their foreman is itself a sign of boredom. “It is one of the essentials of boredom,” Bertrand Russell writes, “that one’s faculties must not be fully occupied.”109 They also visibly externalize the diminished sense of alternative possibilities Alcibiades experiences as he thinks about his life. Alcibiades misses the excitement that would have been his “in the brave days of Salamis and Marathon” (1.1.7). For their part, the workers and slaves are thwarted even in their modest desire to overhear Cleon’s harangues. During Cleon’s speeches, a crowd gradually gathers, but the workers hastily resume their activities when Pheidias enters (1.1.14). The contrast between their present circumstances and other, more agreeable circumstances is brought to their attention and ours in visible and painful fashion. The opening stage direction dictates that throughout the scene “a steady procession of workers should continue up and down the runway … carrying burdens of various kinds” (stage direction, 1.1.1). Exposed to their view is an idle Alcibiades being courted by the adoring and beautiful young courtesan Phias. A good director might wish to emphasize the connection between the two cases of boredom by having the workers glance enviously at the elegant young couple at rest. The end of the workday holds little promise of relief from their boredom. While Pheidias, Alcibiades, and others repair to Aspasia’s house to satisfy their desires in elegant surroundings, the workers are ordered by Pheidias: “Drop your loads and go home to your disgruntled wives” (1.1.16). Sherwood imaginatively develops similarities between slaves and workers, the lowest stratum of Athenian society, and Alcibiades, the most promising of aristocratic youths. Boredom in both their cases is “a thwarted desire for events.”110 Left alone after the others depart, Socrates is finally permitted uninterrupted speech: My fellow citizens—​you have been listening to the voice of stern wisdom; now pay heed to the voice of perishable folly. Cleon says you can’t eat beauty, you can’t win battles with beauty, you can’t build an Athenian empire on a foundation of beauty. But I say that food is something which ends in a sewer, and a battle is something which ends in the lime pit, and an empire is no more than the invariable prologue to chaos. But beauty is that which has no end—​men or no men—​gods or no gods …. That is what I say, fellow citizens, but I don’t ask you to listen. (1.1.17) The stage being otherwise empty, Socrates seems to speak directly to the audience in the manner of a Shakespearean soliloquy—​unusual in realist drama—​ frequently employed by the poet as running commentary on plot and also as a way to mark the transition between scenes.111 Socrates’ remarks neatly

100  Acropolis accomplish the transition from Scene 1 to Scene 2. At the same time, he makes reference to one of the central antinomies of the play. Socrates speaks of the irreconcilable nature of the opposition between the life-​affirming power of beauty, represented by Pheidias, and the death-​devoted commitment to war, espoused by Cleon. At the end of the play’s first scene, the young Alcibiades finds himself in equipoise between the attractions of ways of life embodied by two potential role models. The story pattern through which his internal conflict is represented and eventually resolved later in the play has deep roots in allegory regarding the choice between living a life of virtue or of vice. According to Xenophon’s fourth-​ century B C Memorabilia, the sophist Prodicus used the choice of Heracles as a vehicle to describe the process of growth and development that characterizes the maturation of the young—​ psychology dispensed through allegory. There, the young Heracles thinks hard about whether to pursue a life of virtue or vice. Two women accost him. The first, representing Vice, shows him the easy path leading to self-​ gratification through pleasure; the other, representing Virtue, points out the arduous road that must be taken if Heracles wishes to perform noble deeds. Both are outward projections of a mind in conflict (2.1.21–​34). In Prudentius’ later Psychomachia (fourth century AD ), the Christian soul becomes the site of an internal battle externalized, made visible, and allegorized in the depiction of open warfare conducted between a plethora of virtues and vices, with Faith (Fides), for example, taking the field against Worship-​of-​the-​Old Gods (Veterum Cultura Deorum, 21–​39), Chastity (Pudicitia) encountering Lust (Libido, 40–​108), and so on. Much closer to Sherwood, the pattern of a war between Virtue and Vice left its stamp on several of Shakespeare’s plays, most especially Henry IV, Part I. There, Falstaff and Hotspur are “real” characters active in the life of the play, but at the same time they represent projections of opposing elements fighting for supremacy within the soul of young Prince Hal. Falstaff provides an Elizabethan equivalent to the allegorical figure of Vice; he is Lord of Misrule. The valiant and warlike Hotspur, on the other hand, represents Virtue. In the end, Hal chooses Virtue over Vice, Hotspur over Falstaff, legitimate rule over misrule.112 Hal proves so successful in taking on Hotspur’s martial spirit that he is able to kill and thus replace the play’s exemplary figure of Virtue. (Hal to Hotspur before the duel: “Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,” Henry IV.I.5.4.) According to Marjorie Garber, the play can be understood both as a ‘real’ set of external individuals and environments (the King, Falstaff, Hotspur and the rebels, the tavern and so on) and as a projection of these elements within Prince Hal upon the stage.113 Acropolis here works somewhat like Shakespeare’s play. Dramatic personages in the “real” environment of the stage (Cleon and Pheidias) also serve as external projections of a struggle going on within Alcibiades. As in

Acropolis  101 Shakespeare, Virtue will eventually win out over Vice, but Sherwood turns the moral order of Henry IV.1 on its head. Morality in the world of Acropolis is a struggle in which unleashed martial spirit has become Vice, instantiated in Cleon, while virtue is embodied in Pheidias. Cleon’s identification with the allegorical figure of Vice is obvious from the start. He lacks redeeming qualities and, like despots of every age, wishes to narrow the range of Alcibiades’ possible choices to one, which would constitute no choice at all: service as a soldier in what he calls “honourable war” (I.1.12). Since throughout his career Sherwood often modeled characters in such a way as to reflect his own personality and experience, he may have seen in Cleon a reflection of himself in his early years before he was scarred by service in World War I.  Sherwood’s Pheidias, the play’s emblem of Virtue, is both ancient and modern in an especially complex manner. Pheidias, who will eventually become the One in the play’s third plot, is fashioned after the manner of Plato’s Socrates and Shakespeare’s Falstaff. (Falstaff, it should be noted, was himself modeled partly on Socrates, so that his roots also extend deep into the past.)114 Pheidias looks, talks, and shares some of the values of Shakespeare’s grandest creation, who is himself, like Pheidias, a fat man given to the ridicule of those in power (“God save thy grace—​Majesty I should say, for grace thou wilt have none” [Henry IV I. 1.2.17–​18]). Pheidias repairs to Aspasia’s elegant house of pleasure much as Falstaff makes use of Mistress Quickly’s tavern:  both are familiar places for the two to eat, drink, whore, and make merry without cost to themselves, blithely detached from the political crises brewing around them. Pheidias and Falstaff utterly reject the idea of military honor.115 Both are “opportunistic outsiders.”116 Bell describes Falstaff as “profoundly sublime and spectacularly ridiculous.”117 At the end of Acropolis, the initially ridiculous Pheidias will become spectacularly sublime, sober, philosophical, and worthy of great respect. In the first scene of Acropolis, Alcibiades shows great promise of becoming the play’s major protagonist. His claim, however, is immediately undermined in Scene 2, where Aspasia comes to prominence and completely overshadows him. In Act 1, Scene 2, the democratic impulse governing the play (temporarily) shines the spotlight on Aspasia. She receives the lion’s share of character-​ space and assumes the status of the One, which she will concede to Pheidias in Act 3. Fittingly, the action takes place in her garden, into which a host of the Many enter and exit. These include Pheidias, Hyperbolus (a businessman/​ financier who funds Cleon’s war party),118 Hipparche, Laena, and Phais (all courtesans in the employ of Aspasia), Aristophanes (the satirist/​comedian), Socrates, Anaxagoras—​and, mirabile dictu, Alcibiades himself, now relegated to the status of one of the Many! Though Alcibiades assumes a subordinate role throughout the rest of the play, it still remains possible to track the course of his psychomachia, which first seems to resolve itself in favor of Vice: Cleon and the war party. Bursting into Aspasia’s garden with an apparent resoluteness he earlier lacked, Alcibiades tells the attendant crowd that he has enlisted in the expedition

102  Acropolis Cleon is about to lead against Sparta. “I’ve thought it all out for myself ” (1.2.26), he says, but his words belie this notion. He apes Cleon parrotwise. Cleon earlier urged Alcibiades “to play the part of a man” and become a soldier (1.1.11). So Alcibiades now wants to be a “fighting man” (1.2.25). Cleon encouraged him to avoid the companionship of “talkers, theorists, self-​styled philosophers, effeminate artists” (1.1.11). Alcibiades no longer desires to be identified with “talkers, theorists, play-​actors” (1.2.26). (He parrots not only the words of Cleon but also his style of speaking in tricola, groups of threes.) “The days of soft, effeminate peace are over” (1.2.25), speaks the fledgling soldier. Cleon warned him of the dangers posed by “aliens,” crawling “like vermin through the structure of our state, enfeebling our powers of resistance” (1.1.12). Alcibiades now predicts bad times ahead for Aristophanes and his “alien friends” (1.2.26). Cleon further counseled that Athens was suffering under “the dominion of old men” (1.1.13). Alcibiades now agrees and says of Pericles: “I know what’s wrong with him—​he spends too much time with old men. He needs rejuvenation” (1.2.38). (Rejuvenation of the German national character through greater attention to marches and music—​especially that of Richard Wagner—​was one of Hitler’s main projects.)119 Alcibiades earlier expressed a vague wish to have lived back “in the brave days of Salamis and Marathon when the whole world was young and full of excitement” (1.1.7). Cleon now offers an opportunity for the excitement he craves: “Glory is to be won, and I’ll be the first to win it,” Alcibiades proclaims, boasting of his fitness to embark on “the path to glory” by wiping out the whole race of Spartans (1.2.25). Reacting to Alcibiades’ resolve to become a soldier as Cleon wished, Aristophanes belittles and satirizes his new allegiance to the war party: ARISTOPHANES: 

Athens for the Athenians! Drive out the licentious foreigners! Sparta—​ menace—​ moral pollution—​ enveloping doom! Don’t tell me that anyone above the intellectual level of a sheep pays attention to that. ALCIBIADES:  I pay attention to it, and when the time comes… ARISTOPHANES:  I said, above the intellectual level of a sheep. (1.2.26) Not coincidentally, Alcibiades’ newfound desire to take part in war represents an obvious threat to the building program on the Acropolis. According to Cleon, Aspasia has cast a spell over Pericles, so that he’s now “squandering the tax-​payers’ money on all this confection of marble, and ivory, and gold” (1.1.12). To Alcibiades, building the Parthenon now seems a waste of money that could be better spent financing the coming war: Our walls are crumbling, our arms are rusting, while the tax-​payer’s money is being squandered on the Acropolis. Do you think that the Spartans will be driven back by your art, your philosophy, or your feeble satire? (1.2.26)

Acropolis  103 As if speaking to a recalcitrant child, Aspasia orders Alcibiades to “sit quietly, or go elsewhere.” Bursting with new life, Alcibiades sets off to make love to Phais. But Aristophanes gets off a parting shot: “He makes me suspect that our civilization is over-​rated” (1.2.27). Only after the firsthand experience of war will Alcibiades begin to resolve his psychomachia in favor of Virtue. An indeterminate period of time has passed when Act II begins. Aspasia has married Pericles, Alcibiades has gone off to war against the Spartans, and Aristophanes has produced his first comedy, written under the name Callistratus.120 Alcibiades’ entrance (2.1.14) to the garden interrupts a lengthy conversation on the virtues of Aristophanes’ new play (2.1.6–​13). Alcibiades appears, wearing “armour,” “his right arm suspended in a blood-​stained sling” (stage direction, 2.1.14.). Like the petulant child of the prior scene, Alcibiades deflects all the questions immediately posed to him, but the truth soon emerges. Cleon’s expedition ended in shambles, and most of the Athenians were killed. Cleon, Alcibiades, and several others fought their way back to Athens (2.1.14-​18). As for how Alcibiades feels about the experience of war, he has nothing to say: “Don’t all talk to me at once! Don’t try to tell me what’s going on inside me. You don’t know” (2.1.15). What must remain unclear to the audience within the play, however, is soon revealed to the audience of the play. For when the scene shifts immediately to the building site of the Parthenon (2.2.21), the audience is offered a decidedly different artistic objective correlative to the inner life of Alcibiades, linked, in this case, to a markedly different state of mind within the wounded soldier. Sherwood opens with an illuminating stage direction. Rather than the “lovely violet sky” of the first scene (1.1.5), the weather is ominous and threatening. On top of the Acropolis. The columns have now advanced to about twice their previous height, but are still incomplete. The work is going on more strenuously. SOCRATES is pounding away as before. There is a Doric capital at the right, which MOSCHIO is slowly, carefully decorating with the standard Greek design. The sky is grey, and the lighting should progressively convey the suggestion of gathering clouds. (Stage direction, 2.2.21) Foreman Menon and artist Moschio reappear for the first time since play’s opening. As marble sections of the temple lie strewn at random around the building site, they are at loggerheads: MENON: 

They’ve just brought up another of those sections for the frieze, and we don’t know where to put it. MOSCHIO:  What does it seem to represent?

104  Acropolis MENON:  More

gods. Apollo and Artemis, I  think. As if they cared where they’re put, in this jumble. MOSCHIO:  Apollo and Artemis. They’d probably be on the east. But you’d better ask Pheidias. MENON:  I have asked him, but he’s too busy. MOSCHIO:  (Petulantly) Then ask Ictinos, or Callicrates, or anybody. But don’t keep annoying me. MENON:  (Sneering) You’re also too busy? MOSCHIO:  As you may see. (2.2.21–​22) Socrates stands by and offers commentary in the manner of a Greek chorus: “There would seem to be a deplorable lack of harmony among us” (2.2.22). Alcibiades inwardly is experiencing just such a deplorable lack of harmony. The mise-​en-​scène and the temper of those working at the construction site provide an objective correlative to Alcibiades’ present frame of mind following the experience of battle. A snapshot of concrete, observable phenomena once again artfully expresses private consciousness, not a mood of boredom, as in the play’s opening scene, but of overexcitement and confusion. The quarrel taking place between Menon and Moschio betokens a mind in a state of great agitation, a condition that results when one inclination (in this case toward Vice) runs counter to another (toward Virtue).121 The fact that the columns of the Parthenon are now twice their previous height, however, suggests that Virtue may be in the ascendancy. This is borne out in the drama that follows. Trouble begins when Alcibiades climbs to the top of the Acropolis to warn Pheidias that Cleon is on his way. A stage direction draws attention to a further objective correlative signaling his changing mood and allegiance:  “his right arm is bandaged, but the sling is gone” (stage direction, 2.2.23). The gradual healing of the body points to the healing getting underway in the soul. Cleon arrives with Hyperbolus and an escort of soldiers at the site of the Parthenon. They are looking for Pheidias. Conveniently for their purposes, Aspasia and Anaxagoras are there as well. Cleon announces his plan to indict the three under a variety of charges:  “Misappropriation of public funds, treason, irreverence, conspiring to distort the orderly processes of government ….” Pheidias interrupts adding, contemptuously:  “Arson, body-​snatching, self-​abuse—​have you included everything?” (2.2.26). Pheidias demands that Cleon take these charges to Pericles, but the war party fears a direct assault against the popular leader. According to Hyperbolus, the punishment for such religious heresy and corrupt practices “may be a small fine, or it may be exile, or it may be death” (2.2.27). Having added nothing of consequence to the discussion up to this point, Alcibiades now takes a firm stand with the party of peace and beauty against the party of war. Pheidias attacks Cleon and takes him by the throat.

Acropolis  105 Alcibiades draws his sword to protect the sculptor from attack by the war party’s supporting cast of soldiers: (ALCIBIADES has drawn his sword and advanced to the centre of the gathering fray) ALCIBIADES:  (To the SOLDIERS) Put your swords up! PHEIDIAS:  (PHEIDIAS looks at the soldiers, and then at ALCIBIADES) Are

you defending me? (Tensely) Somebody has to.

ALCIBIADES: 

(2.2.29) Though Alcibiades’ action comes as a surprise to Pheidias, it should be understandable to an audience that has “read” the outward signs of growth and maturity conveyed through the corresponding objective correlative. Much later in the third act, when Pheidias is emancipated from his status as one of the Many and makes his own claim to potential victory in the play’s agōn, he will hand over to Alcibiades the job of securing the eventual completion of the Parthenon. Virtue has won out over Vice: You’re a great man, Alcibiades, and you can do great things. You can make it your life’s work to see that no one ever tampers with my plans. Doesn’t that reassure you?… You can force even Cleon himself to keep his hands off the Acropolis. (3.2.18) Pheidias’ speech here breaks off, but before we move on to a discussion of his ascent to the role of protagonist, Aspasia’s participation in the play’s democratically inspired agōn as the One needs to be discussed.

IV Aspasia as scapegoat Aspasia, the famous or notorious courtesan from Miletus and émigré to Athens, is known to history only through her close connection to Pericles. She may or may not have been his wife, but Sherwood treats her as such. Aspasia figures prominently until the third act of Acropolis, where she suffers near-​ total eclipse in the democratic agōn by Pheidias. As Madeline H.  Henry has demonstrated, “Next to Sappho’s and Cleopatra’s, Aspasia’s is the longest and richest female biographical tradition to come down to us from the Greco-​Roman past.”122 Aspasia has been variously portrayed in the Classical Tradition as philosopher, teacher, concubine, proto-​feminist, dominatrix, and clever matchmaker. “Mystery and slander surround Aspasia,” Anthony Everitt says, “and the more we look the less we see.”123 In an especially acute and original portrayal of a woman about whom so little is known but much has been written, Sherwood has fashioned

106  Acropolis a heroine with single-​minded strength and firmness of purpose, which are reflected in her subordination of all concerns to aesthetic principles. A failure to understand the wellsprings of her character and motives seems to have been one of the major stumbling blocks to audience appreciation of Acropolis back in 1933. In a letter to Sherwood two weeks after the premature closing of the play, producer Paul Bonner sent advice to the author about how Acropolis could be improved. Bonner claimed that audiences were puzzled by the portrayal of Aspasia. People expected her to be acting out of love, and they were unsure which of the male characters in the play she really wanted. Was it Pericles, Pheidias, or was it the Parthenon itself ? Bonner wrote: Being a woman they expect, and rightly, that whatever ambitions she will have will be motivated, not by any male abstraction of beauty or posterity, but by an honest and natural, physical and biological love for some man. In the first scene Cleon suggests that this man might be Pericles. In the second scene, though the truth is clear to you, the audience are still undecided whether it be Pericles, Pheidias, or the Parthenon …. The majority of the audience (I have checked this) believed at the end of the first act that she was really in love with Pericles.124 Cherchez l’homme is the task the producer sets before the playwright. Being a woman, Bonner thought, Aspasia could not be expected to be thinking rationally about an abstract concept like beauty; her ambition must spring from a more concrete motive: love of a man. Was Sherwood so ahead of his time that a woman of singular, independent ambition was unintelligible to an audience in 1933? The plot of Acropolis runs counter to the notion that Aspasia is moved by her love for a man—​any man. The suggestion that she is motivated by “physical and biological love” for the Parthenon (hierophilia?) is interesting and closer to the truth, but why must such a love be “physical and biological?” From her early life, Sherwood’s Aspasia has been governed by aesthetic considerations. We might say that aesthetic principles provide ethical standards for her. In conversation with Socrates, Aspasia explains how she and Pheidias once were lovers, but her ambition drove them apart: ASPASIA: 

I was very young and confident of my attractions. But I wasn’t what he wanted. I made too many demands. I had too much ambition of my own. I wanted to model life as though it were clay, on a potter’s wheel. I wanted to see it take perfect form, under my hands, and then become dry, and hard, and useful—​so that I  could drink from it, or smash it, whichever I might choose. SOCRATES:  (with an air of excitement) And have you let that purpose wither within you? Because there’s still clay to be molded—​important clay. (1.2.37)

Acropolis  107 Socrates fails to complete his thought—​a problem that plagues him throughout the play. Aristophanes enters the garden and interrupts him (1.2.37). The unfinished Parthenon provides the “clay” awaiting consummation as a work of art. Pheidian philosophy will fill the lacuna in this conversation in the play’s third act. Aspasia understands that her unique position in Athenian society makes her an ideal candidate for scapegoating. As she explains to Aristophanes, Have you noticed that they always include us all in one decadent group: artists, philosophers, poets and prostitutes? All equally objects of scorn. But I want them to know that we prostitutes are not to be classed with the rest of you minor menaces. We’re not frivolous or inconsequential. We’re a serious force in the community, possessed of great malignant power. We’re women—​the only women who can’t be relegated to the positions of wives, and ignored. I want them to be afraid of us, and concentrate all their attacks on us—​so that they’ll leave you helpless people alone. We’re competent to deal with them. (1.2.31) The firmness of Aspasia’s resolve to serve as scapegoat becomes apparent with the arrival of the philosopher Anaxagoras. Here it is made clear that Pericles himself is also one of the “helpless people” she must protect in order to insure the completion of the Parthenon. Anaxagoras, who has served for years as Pericles’ teacher and adviser, brings her unwelcome news: the Oracle of Delphi has lent its voice to the public attacks on her. The Oracle lacked the “effrontery” to criticize Pericles directly (1.2.41), so it has located a safer target through which to undermine public confidence in the government’s building program: The oracle has spoken as follows:  Beware, O Athens—​beware of the forces of decay that are in your midst. Beware of the deadly venom that is in Aspasia, the foreign woman of ill-​fame. (1.2.40) Anaxagoras reports the rest of the oracle in indirect discourse: It seems that your house is the birthplace of death, that you were sent here by the daemons of the jealous East to plant and cultivate the seeds of degradation and despair. The oracle even went so far as to mention the youth and the conquering vigour of Sparta as the model of our salvation. (1.2.40) Anaxagoras sees no good coming from allowing himself to continue as scapegoat. He decides he can best aid Pericles by ceasing to serve as his adviser. He

108  Acropolis must give up this role because he also is an undesirable alien in Athens. More importantly, Pheidias’ “expensive schemes” may involve his feckless friend Pericles in ruin: [T]‌he time has come when he at least must make a choice between the ultimate ideal and the immediate reality; and I believe it’s useless to try to influence that choice. It’s like climbing up on the roof and moving the weathervane—​in the hope of changing the direction of the wind. (1.2.42) Anaxagoras’ understanding of Aspasia’s character and motives far exceeds that of other denizens of her garden. Seeing the Parthenon through to completion, he says, is her sole concern: I’m aware that nothing else matters to you. As long as every scrap of marble is fitted into its proper place on the Acropolis, you don’t care what happens to Pericles or Athens itself. (1.2.42) Aspasia will continue to serve as scapegoat, absorbing all public attacks on Pericles in order to insure the completion of the Parthenon. She will do so by associating herself as closely as possible with Pericles, whom she will marry in Act 2.  While Anaxagoras acts admirably and remains true to his friend, Aspasia’s actions are courageous but perhaps merit censure: she uses Pericles as a means to reach her goal of seeing work on the Parthenon through to completion. René Girard’s theory about the contagion of social unrest and its amelioration through the act of scapegoating provides a perfect framework for understanding the Athenian social crisis and its (temporary) resolution in Sherwood’s play. Girard begins by drawing attention to modern society’s aspiration for equality among its citizens. This, he argues, represents a certain “antidifferential” prejudice, which wrongly locates the origin of strife and conflict in various horizontal and vertical systems of differentiation, as if the abolition of difference might furnish a prescription for social order and peace. On the contrary, Girard maintains that “[o]‌rder, peace and fecundity depend upon cultural distinctions; it is not these distinctions,” he says, “but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries ….”125 Girard quotes Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as an exemplary text illustrating the connection between sameness and violence on the one hand and differentiation and stability on the other. According to Ulysses in the play, … O when degree is shaked Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Acropolis  109 Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogatives of age, crowns, scepters, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy.126 (I.3.101ff.) According to Girard—​and Ulysses—​lack of difference brings in its wake strife and conflict. Where difference is effaced and sameness rules, strife and the competition of one against the other, brother against brother, father against son, are likely to engender acts of violence threatening the very fabric of society.127 As a result, the need for a scapegoat arises. For her part, Aspasia points to just such an erasure of differences taking place in Athens where the war party—​in its quest to restore unity—​has bundled together into one “decadent” group all the artists (Pheidias), philosophers (Anaxagoras), poets (Aristophanes), and prostitutes (Aspasia) in Athens (1.2.31). Cleon earlier provided an example of such elision in the first scene, when he spoke of the talkers, theorists, philosophers, and effeminate artists who have been advising Alcibiades (1.1.11). He sees Aspasia and Anaxagoras as part of a single degenerate group, comprised of those “not of our race” (1.1.12–​13). In moments of social crisis, attending such elision of difference, Girard says, “all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community” require resolution.128 In such circumstances, a (sometimes) arbitrarily chosen “other” may become the object of anger. The “other” functions as a scapegoat, diverting collective anger to himself or herself and away from what constitutes the real problem or problems. Members of ethnic minorities, such as Aspasia and Anaxagoras in Sherwood’s play, are ready candidates for scapegoating. They are examples of what Girard calls “the marginal insider.”129 The fool, Girard maintains, is also a ready candidate for scapegoating.130 As another in Sherwood’s line of (wise) fools, Pheidias, who situates himself on the periphery of the city and observes its politics from a distance, will later take on the role of the play’s most important scapegoat. Aspasia and Anaxagoras survive, but Pheidias is the lightning rod that in the end will attract all the animosity of the war party in Athens. His sacrifice will temporarily resolve the internal social crisis plaguing the city of Athens, which will nonetheless suffer invasion from without by an army from Sparta. Girard maintains that those responsible for turning others into scapegoats often make reference to the use of poison, for the accusation of poison “makes it possible to lay the responsibility for real disasters on people whose activities have not been really proven to be criminal.”131 Just so Cleon speaks of his target class of miscreants and old men as people engaged in “a subtle process of poisoning from within” (1.1.12–​13). The oracle related by Anaxagoras, for which Hyperbolus paid much, tells of the “venom” within Aspasia.

110  Acropolis Cleon and Hyperbolus are perhaps not acting purely out of malice but may truly believe the charges they have made and will make against Aspasia, Anaxagoras, and Pheidias. For persecutors are often fully convinced of the enormity of the guilt they assign to their single victim or victims; they can bring themselves to believe that even a single person with little recognized power and authority is responsible for the great harm they see being done to society as a whole—​so much may the perspective of the persecutor differ from the point of view of those who witness the process of scapegoating from without, like the audience in a theater, for example.132 Girard’s theory of scapegoating provides insight into the curious hostility Cleon and the war party manifest to the Spartans, whom they so greatly admire but with whom they go to war: Sherwood’s version of the Peloponnesian War. To put the matter simply, their sameness, not difference from the Spartans, may be the source of enmity. Pheidias’ role as one of the Many in relation to Aspasia as the One is complex and psychologically compelling. Aspasia tells Hipparche that Pheidias never really loved her: though in his dreams he might call out her name, her fellow courtesan should understand that Pheidias really loves his work (the statue of Athena he is carving for the Parthenon). His love takes a strange and unusual form: Don’t be misled by that, Hipparche. That call doesn’t come from him. It comes from a bewilderment of symbols that happen to bear my name. He’s calling to an inhuman image, not of flesh and blood, but of ivory and of gold and divine inspiration. (1.2.48) Love of statues (agalmataphilia) plays a role in the depiction of Pheidias in the Classical Tradition, as we shall see below. Sherwood’s Pheidias, however, is a more nuanced and complex figure than the tradition otherwise has to offer. He discovers himself to be in love with Aspasia when she makes it known to him that she has been Pericles’ mistress. Out of jealousy, he resorts briefly to violence: PHEIDIAS: 

Why did you do it? What did you hope to gain by it?       (He has taken brutal hold of her arm)       You must have had some discreditable purpose? What was it? ASPASIA:  You’re hurting my arm. PHEIDIAS:  I intend to hurt it. In another minute, I’ll be twisting your neck. (1.2.45–​46) Aspasia’s further declaration that she will marry Pericles incites in Pheidias the jealous rejoinder—​and, incidentally, the non sequitur—​that horrible ambition has “made it impossible for you to devote yourself to any one love for more than a day and a night” (1.2.46).

Acropolis  111 Alcibiades was revealed as suffering great agitation upon his return from battle with the Spartans (2.1.14–​18), Virtue competing with Vice for primacy in his soul. Immediately prior to his arrival, a drunken Pheidias enters the garden in a similar state of high agitation; his conflicting inclinations pit his love for Aspasia against that for the Athena Parthenos statue. He explains his absence from the production of Aristophanes’ new play because he has been up on the Acropolis. Drunk on Chian wine, he climbed onto the left shoulder of Athena’s great statue and sang “to the birds in Eleusis, and the bees on Hymettus, and the frogs in the Ilissian swamps” (2.1.11). From that exalted perspective, he began to hallucinate and seemed to catch a glimpse of the Titan Prometheus, the sight of whom brought Aspasia immediately to mind, for She had the same idea as Prometheus: if the vultures choose to live on a diet of vitals, let them go ahead and make pigs of themselves. That’s a characteristic of every vulture—​his eyes are always bigger than his stomach, and he suffers for it in the end. What am I talking about? (2.1.12) The relationship Pheidias sees between Prometheus and Aspasia should be clear to the audience, though apparently not to Pheidias. He took refuge from his feelings for Aspasia by retreating to the cold comfort of Athena’s statue, symbolic of his commitment to the life of an artist—​and to his love of the statue! Prometheus here is the Titan celebrated by Byron and Shelley, the suffering scapegoat whose liver is devoured daily by a vulture. He served as scapegoat, the single target of a wrath directed at mankind for the theft of fire from the gods. The vision of Prometheus is inextricably confused in Pheidias’ mind with his thoughts and feelings about Aspasia, a scapegoat persecuted by the vultures of the war party. Aspasia remains the One throughout the entire middle sections of the play, while Alcibiades and Pheidias appear only as two of the Many in the plot unfolding around her. In Act 3, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Pheidias are put on trial for the charges made in the prior scene (2.2.26). Under the protection of Pericles, however, Aspasia is exempted from the trial, and she appears in the courtroom only after the trial of Pheidias is completed, where she remains a silent figure (3.1.8). In the zero-​sum game that constitutes the democratically inspired agōn of Acropolis, Pheidias’ competition for the status of the One is purchased at Aspasia’s expense, as her role as protagonist was gained through the loss suffered by Alcibiades.

V Pheidias: art, democracy, and the divine Pheidias was antiquity’s most famous sculptor. His large chryselephantine statue of Athena dictated the dimensions the Parthenon would assume under the direction of the architect Ictinus, who is spoken of but does not appear in

112  Acropolis the play. The Classical Tradition as it relates to Pheidias has never been fully explored. What Plato says about Pheidias in the Hippias Major is beyond dispute:  Pheidias was an artist of extraordinary talent, especially skilled at depicting the gods (290 a–​b). Pliny the Elder says no one ever produced a statue to rival Pheidias’ Olympian Zeus (Natural History, 34.54). Quintilian agrees with Plato that Pheidias excelled at depictions of the divine. He adds that Pheidias contributed to the awe (religioni) with which people regarded the gods. The majesty of his work was fully equal to his divine subject (maiestas operis deum aequavit, Institutes of Oratory, 12.10.7ff.). To Plotinus, Pheidias made his image of Zeus not from any model perceived by the senses but from an understanding of what Zeus would look like if he appeared to mortals (Enneads, 5.8.1). In his Olympian Discourse, Dio Chrysostom remarks that Pheidias took his pattern of Zeus from the Iliad, where the god shook all of Olympus by a slight inclination of his brows (25).133 Dio also lists Pheidias as first among artists and craftsmen skilled in depicting the nature of the divine (44). Seneca the Elder nicely sums up this view: Pheidias “was the kind of man who could make gods” (qui facere posset deos, Controversiae 8.2). In the absence of his masterpieces, Pheidias the man came to overshadow the art he made. He became a subject of great interest to writers and poets, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sherwood’s depiction of Pheidias recalls attributes attributed to the sculptor in earlier works by E. M. Thompson, Frank W. Gunsaulus, and John Galen Howard. In “The Death of Phidias” (1879), Thompson provides the sculptor with brief reminiscences of growing up, working as apprentice under Ageladas, falling in love, and abandoning his love in pursuit of his art.134 Pheidias pictures himself as a Prometheus-​figure, who “raised my daring hand to snatch a brand from heaven.”135 Thompson’s Pheidias was concerned to bring out the divine elements in human nature: he “stooped/​To deify the human.”136 As a result he contracted a severe case of agalmataphilia. Sherwood’s Pheidias suffers the same ailment, as Aspasia earlier told Hipparche (1.2.48). The Pheidias of Acropolis makes statues that reveal the divine element residing in the human form. In Frank W.  Gunsaulus’ Phidias (1891), the sculptor languishes in prison and is visited by Aspasia and his son, to whom he tells his story.137 This Phidias also “makes mortality divine.”138 Howard’s long blank verse poem Pheidias (1929) is by far the most imaginative, pleasant, and readable account of the sculptor that survives in the Classical Tradition—​prior to Sherwood’s play. In keeping with an age that worshiped the work of Freud, Howard finds the roots of the sculptor’s genius in the experiences of his youth. Pheidias’ inspiration for his art arises from strong feelings for his father, whom he worshiped as a god.139 In successive chapters, Howard traces the sculptor’s career from Athens to Argos, Corinth, Salamis, Delphi, Olympia, and then back to Athens, where he gets into legal trouble for including images of himself and Pericles on Athena’s Parthenon statue.140 Pheidias finds precedent for his art

Acropolis  113 in the work of Daedalus and likens himself to Prometheus.141 His mission, however, is to make the divine more human: The gods are ever near us, very near; They see and hear us; but because mankind Not sees not hears them, they seem far away, Shapeless, forbidding, and mysterious. I have essayed to make them real to men, By sense of humanness in the divine. My work bears witness they and we are kin.142 Like Thomson and Gunsaulus, but unlike Howard, Sherwood’s Pheidias is devoted to the portrayal of the divine in the human. Act 3 belongs almost entirely to Pheidias. Sherwood uses his apologia pro vita mea as a personal proclamation about the importance of art, which makes possible a flourishing human life and can only exist in true form in a democratic society. His trial and heroic death serve as a defense of art and democracy. The first scene takes place at the court of law in Athens, where Aspasia, Anaxagoras, and Pheidias are under indictment for the charges Cleon has already laid out: misappropriation of public money, treason, irreverence, and conspiracy to distort the orderly processes of government (2.2.26). Hyperbolus acts as judge. Prosecutor Cleon begins with a vehement charge to the jury directed at the three defendants. Infected with a disease Cleon calls “individualism,” they have placed themselves above “the interests of the commonwealth,” violated “the doctrines of our faith,” and “striven for the disintegration of our national unity.” Drawing attention once again to what he calls “the confection of architectural fripperies on the summit of the Acropolis,” Cleon makes a contrast between two types of art with corresponding types of artist: “the destiny of man cannot be told in words, or painted in colours, or carved in marble: it can only be written in blood!” This he describes as a “god-​given law” (3.1.1–​2). The true artist, according to Cleon, is also a physician, and he cures the body politic of disease. Is Sherwood correct in denying to Sparta—​and, by implication, to Nazi Germany—​a concern for art and architecture of the Athenian sort? True, the only art a Spartan was allowed to practice was the art of war,143 and Thucydides comments on the humble nature of Spartan architecture in comparison with that of Athens (1.10.2). The Spartans abjured all sorts of architectural fripperies. The situation in Nazi Germany, however, was quite different. Hitler always admired the art and architecture of the Greco-​Roman past and believed that Germany could only come to deserve and preserve its place in history through monuments like those Cleon dismisses as architectural fripperies. Hitler sought to assure Germany’s place in history through the word written in stone (Wort aus Stein), not just the word written in blood

114  Acropolis (Word aus Blut).144 Sherwood, however, is concerned to draw the contrast between totalitarian and democratic societies in the strongest terms possible. He believed that democracies offer the only possibility to express what Cleon calls “the destiny of man.” Cleon lays claim to the title artist, for in the truest sense of the term he says, an artist writes in blood. His views in some respects reflect the beliefs of Adolf Hitler. Eric Michaud devotes two lengthy chapters on Nazi art to a consideration of Hitler as artist/​dictator/​savior.145 Hitler considered himself “pope-​ Führer” and “artist inspired by the Volksgeist.”146 Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, was speaking of his Führer when he described politics as a form of art. Goebbels used the language of Cleon when he described the true politician as artist and physician, his task being “not simply to produce unity” but “to create, to impart form, to eliminate that which is sick, and open up the way for that which is healthy.”147 Cleon acted in the manner of the Nazi artist/​politician in the play’s first scene, when he strove to fashion Alcibiades into his own work of art. In characterizing themselves as various combinations of artist/​ physician/​savior/​pope, Cleon, Hitler, and Goebbels alike employ a too-​seldom-​ recognized, but very common, technique of argumentation first described by philosopher Charles L. Stevenson: persuasive definition. Stevenson noted that many words carry both a denotative and a connotative sense and that the denotative meaning of a term may be shifted or altered as a means of persuasion, while leaving the connotative meaning intact.148 Cleon, Hitler, and Goebbels employ such a technique when they take words with normally favorable connotations like “artist,” “physician,” “savior,” change the denotative meaning, and preserve the favorable connotations adhering to the terms. In this way, Cleon’s act of judicial murder, for example, can be seen as the healing work of a doctor and an artist. Anaxagoras is first called to make his defense and admits to the charge of atheism (3.1.4). He is found guilty and sentenced to exile in Sicily (3.2.9). In accordance with the zero-​sum game involved in the play’s democratic agōn, Aspasia must cede the role of the One to Pheidias so that he in turn may take on the role of protagonist. In Act 3, Pheidias claims the lion’s share of character-​space and importance, relegating Aspasia to the subordinate status of one of the Many. Formerly she sacrificed herself in a heroic manner to protect Pericles and others of those she numbered among the “helpless.” Now however, she escapes trial because a seemingly rejuvenated Pericles refuses to submit her to that indignity. Alcibiades, speaking for Pericles, expresses contempt for the charges against her and hurls insults at the Athenian jurors: If you have any resentment against Pericles … then express it, you rooting swine. Gobble the falsehood that you’ve been fed, swill it about in your bloated intestines, then belch forth your protest. (3.1.7)

Acropolis  115 A sad and artless run-​up to the great speech of Pheidias—​and a further measure of Alcibiades’ and Aspasia’s sad fall from grace as protagonists. Cleon brings against Pheidias the charge he used to convict Anaxagoras: atheism. The philosopher, having no defense, confessed. Pheidias, however, admits to the view that the gods do not exist, but he manages to escape the charge of atheism. CLEON:  There has to be one question. PHEIDIAS:  Put it in the fewest possible words. CLEON:  Your costly monuments were dedicated

presumably to the glory of the gods? PHEIDIAS:  Yes—​presumably. CLEON:  But you in your heart know that presumption to be false. PHEIDIAS: Of course it’s false. Those monuments were dedicated to the symbols of mortal heroism, not to the symbols of mortal inferiority. (3.1.5) Pheidias’ grand apology contains Sherwood’s most eloquent defense on the nature and purpose of art—​in democratic Athens and in twentieth-​ century America. By art, I  take it, he means to include all that Cleon has disparaged:  what conveys the destiny of man through the written word, through painting, or through marble carvings. Pheidias works to bring out the divine element in the human. He uses the story of Oedipus as illustrative of the human condition. He produces work worthy of its divine subject. But the divine subject is man. His speech is worth quoting at length because it conveys the heart of the play’s message about the importance of art and democracy. The totalitarian government of Sparta, favored by Cleon, can have no concern with true art and beauty. I saw Man as a legendary king, who could confront all the forces of terror and chaos and subdue them. I  saw him as Oedipus, married to his own mother, Nature, forcing new life into her withered womb—​and finding, thereby, the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. He thus incurred the jealous anger of the gods, for he was daring to avail himself of their prerogatives. The gods knew that the consequences to them would be disastrous if Man ever emerged from his humble place among the beasts of the field and the jungle. So they heaped reprobation and punishment on Oedipus. They deprived him of sight. But in blinding him, they opened his eyes, and for the first time, he could see the gods clearly, and he could say, in defiance: “These beings, that I have worshipped, before whom I have abased myself, at whose command I have shackled my hopes, upon whose altars I have sacrificed my birth-​right—​these beings, these gods—​they are no more than the mirrored projections of me!” This was the assurance that Man cherished. It impelled him to build the citadel of civilization, as a defense against the encroaching forces of despair. Such was the object

116  Acropolis of the architectural fripperies on the summit of the Acropolis—​to say, in enduring words, that within Man are the divine powers of creation which defeat death. That is what I believed, in my moments of sodden exaltation. And I  ask you now to look into yourselves, my fellow citizens—​observe all the mean little fears, and hates, that crawl around inside you—​and you’ll realise that it must have been strong wine that gave me an idiot’s conception of the splendour and grandeur and dignity of mankind. Do as Cleon has told you: vote me guilty. Give me something to drink that will produce oblivion, instead of illusion. I’ll be glad to be used as a means of proving that the vision of Oedipus was the vision of a blind man, who was spared mercifully from the anguish that’s involved in contemplation of reality. (3.1.6)149 Especially worthy of note is Pheidias’ clever use of persuasive definition: he takes the emotively charged noun “god” and the phrase “divine powers of creation,” brings them down from a non-​existent Olympus, preserves their favorable, emotively-​charged connotations, and lodges them within Man. He uses the myth of Oedipus to convey this truth. Pheidias’ version of the story of Oedipus is a highly original “take” on the Greek myth. Among Greek myth’s various interests and concerns, it “offered the chance to explore humanity’s relationship with the gods, in all its varieties.”150 The subject of humans battling the gods is a common feature of Greek myth. Unlike Pheidias’ version of the story of Oedipus, however, mortals usually lose in the end, as they do in Sophocles’ Oedipus, though, at least for a time, Oedipus imagines a world without gods—​until they destroy him.151 In the philosophy espoused by Pheidias however, Oedipus achieves a victory over the gods and reaches a great insight.152 In a perverse way typical of him, Seneca’s Oedipus also claims victory over the gods by blinding himself and thus depriving them of the opportunity to punish him (victor deos/​ conclamat omnis).153 Pheidias’ grand defense of art, buried in the conclusion of a play that saw only a brief run in London, will be revised and put to grand use in Sherwood’s later There Shall Be No Night, where it furnished much of that play’s strong emotional impact. The play’s final two scenes deal with the imprisonment and execution of Pheidias. As Socrates has been shunted aside through most of the play, he is now deprived of the honor of being the courageous martyr for his beliefs we find in Plato and elsewhere. Socrates’ backseat role in Acropolis has the effect of emphasizing that art, not philosophy, offers humanity its best hope for salvation. Pheidias prepares to die among his friends in a scene reminiscent of several Platonic dialogues. Alcibiades arrives with plans to rescue the sculptor from his prison cell, but Pheidias refuses to leave (3.2.13–​15). Pheidias awaits death when a path to escape lies open to him. He thus bears witness to social corruption by willingly becoming its victim and scapegoat. Just so Socrates in

Acropolis  117 the Crito chooses to remain in prison and face death rather than be rescued by his friends (46bff.). Pheidias sees in his impending death a means of revenge against his enemies, who will be left wondering where he has gone, whether he is wandering in the enchanting groves of the Underworld with Homer, Orpheus, and the heroes of Troy (3.2.14). Socrates asks if such an afterlife is possible. Pheidias replies: “The state upon which I’m about to enter is nothing more than deep, oblivious sleep” (3.2.15). In Plato’s Apology, Socrates, like Pheidias, prophesies that his death will bring punishment upon his accusers and the people of Athens, who will be subject to harsh criticism for putting him to death (39c), whereas for Socrates himself, death will bring either annihilation or pleasant communion with the shades of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, Homer, and the heroes of Troy (40c–​41c). Sherwood has contrived a clever conceit here. With tongue firmly in cheek, he leaves discerning members of the audience with the impression that Socrates was schooled in the nature of death by Pheidias. Conversation with his friends ends for Pheidias when the jailor enters with the hemlock bowl and brings him sweet oblivion. The final brief scene takes place at night on the top of the Acropolis. The columns at least are now complete (3.3.22) and so is the play. Bugle calls are heard in the distance, and the Spartans have lighted hundreds of campfires. They are poised for a major attack on the city of Athens (3.3.22), harbinger of the crisis soon to roil the world as democracy once again will face off against totalitarianism at the end of the decade of the 1930s. Alcibiades wonders why Pericles has not accompanied Aspasia to the building site. She reports only that he is tired and ill. Socrates wonders whether he has contracted the plague. “No,” Aspasia responds cryptically, “it isn’t the plague” (3.3.23–​24). She adds only that the Athenian people came to Pericles and asked him to speak over the bodies of those who fell first in the war. There follows Sherwood’s version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, made famous in the pages of Thucydides’ history (2.34–​46). Aspasia reports in indirect discourse a summary of what he said on that occasion: He tried to persuade them that he’s done with speaking, but they wouldn’t go away. So he told them that the dead could not be restored to the living by any of the old words that say how fair and noble it is to show courage in battle. He told them to draw strength from the spectacle of our commonwealth, as we have it before us day by day, falling in love with it as we see it, and remembering that it is the creation of men. Men of daring, understanding of duty, and self-​discipline in its performance. He told them that because of such men the story of our commonwealth will never die, but will live on, far away, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives, in a world that is filled not with terror but with glory. (3.3.24–​25) If Cleon stands in for American Nazi sympathizers the dramatist thought likely to emerge later in the decade of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt is most

118  Acropolis certainly represented by Pericles. As we discussed above, Sherwood was initially of two minds about Roosevelt at the time of his inauguration as president earlier in March 1933. Pericles’ evolution from vacillating politician to statesman may reflect Sherwood’s hope for the newly inaugurated president. We are left in doubt at the play’s conclusion as to whether Pericles’ illness may prevent him from “reaching the far horizon/​where rests the hopes of men.”154 Pericles’ unexplained illness has a possible analogue in Roosevelt’s story. Years before the Democratic National Convention of 1932, which nominated Roosevelt for president, rumors of his ill health had been circulating throughout the country to the effect that Roosevelt, who suffered from polio, was physically unfit to serve as president. Some even suggested that he had contracted syphilis.155 Oedipus was much on Sherwood’s mind in 1933. In the screenplay for Roman Scandals (1933), written by Sherwood and George S.  Kaufman, protagonist Eddie (Eddie Cantor) speaks truth to power about political corruption in Depression-​era America. He feels sure that things were better in ancient Rome. Suffering a head injury, Eddie is soon transported back to Rome and dubbed “Oedipus” by Romans unfamiliar with his name. Cantor’s rolling, bulging eyes add an element of visual humor to the story of a modern Oedipus-​figure. In Rome, this new Oedipus overcomes the obstacles standing in the way of true love but eventually learns that—​despite the glamor of ancient Rome—​the problems plaguing America in the Depression were also rife in ancient Rome. The movie generated wildly discrepant responses among the film’s viewers. Audiences were in a quandary as to whether or not the film was politically subversive.156 How much of the film’s screenplay can actually be attributed to Sherwood remains something of a mystery. Eddie Cantor objected to so much that Sherwood and Kaufman had written that the two resigned from the project after a stormy meeting with the star.157

VI Acropolis: 1937 Sherwood explained to his mother in the letter that began this chapter how he returned to Acropolis again and again and slaved over the play, though it had been branded a failure. In 1937, he completed a revised version of the text, attempting to add to it a new level of interest.158 He shortened the play from three acts to two, whittled down the cast of characters, and, most noticeably, centered the drama on a single character:  Aspasia, whom he transformed into a kind of demon love goddess from the sensual and effete East. In the process, a play too rich in character and ideas became what, in his early days as a movie critic, Sherwood would likely have dismissed as “bunk.” In keeping with a new concentration on the erotic, the play now opens in the garden of Aspasia, not on the Acropolis. The beginning dialogue represents one of the play’s few clever moments. The courtesan Hipparche

Acropolis  119 sings a song to Hyperbolus, who expresses dissatisfaction with the effort. He requests a different song, and Hipparche complies. This exchange takes place: HIPPARCHE: 

Muse—​grant me a throne loftier than the Kings Where I may be immune. Make of my mind a treasury Filled with the gold of vast imaginings. Give me the eyes of Time, that I may see The truth, which is the essence of the arts: The whole of life is greater than its parts. HYPERBOLUS: That’s enough of that. I prefer to hear some song of love. HIPPARCHE:  Here’s one, Hyperbolus. I think you’ll like this better. Come, goddess of love—​come from the star-​strewn night. Pour in my cup the liquor of delight. HYPERBOLUS:  Much better. HIPPARCHE:  Give me Nepenthe’s nectar, that will dim The sight of you who are the child of him Who, with his shafts of thundering vengeance, rules This suppurating world of knaves and fools. HYPERBOLUS: Suppurating? HIPPARCHE:  This cancered earth, pitted with ancient graves Filled with forgotten bones of fools and knaves. Give me to drink, goddess of love, but spare me this: The soft, pervasive deception of your kiss. Let me remain unseeing of the lies That lurk between your lips, your breasts, your thighs. Fill—​fill my cup, and I shall drink it deep And then, goddess—​be off—​and let me sleep. (She rolls up the poem.) HYPERBOLUS:  That’s a dolorous bit of verse. Who is the poet? HIPPARCHE: Aristophanes. HYPERBOLUS:  I should have recognized his rancid style. Do you admire such stuff, Hipparche? HIPPARCHE:  No. But you asked for something about love. And this is the best that Aristophanes can do on the subject. (1.1.1–​2) Sherwood here performs a virtuoso act of literary self-​reflexivity aimed at critics, audiences, and, perhaps, at himself. In a few clever lines of doggerel, he manages to look back upon the initial reception accorded the play, censure the dismissive judgments it sparked, and in a palinode promise a drama more in accord with contemporary interests and tastes. All this is accomplished with such brevity and subtlety as to escape notice easily. Hipparche’s first poem, I  think, describes what Acropolis used to be:  a play expressing the truth about the essence of art. But Hyperbolus has had “enough of that.” He wants a different song, a song of love. His negative

120  Acropolis reaction conveys the disappointment of critics and audiences alike in the earlier version of the play. So Hipparche offers a song about love that does additional duty as author Sherwood’s palinode, taking back what was previously performed under the title Acropolis and promising something new in its place, a play about love. Hyperbolus judges the palinode to be “rancid.” Does author Sherwood intend a mild jab at the dismal state of what passes at the time for theater, including even his own revised play?159 The adjective “rancid” certainly describes the Acropolis of 1937. Following its sparkling opening, the play descends quickly into cheap, pseudo-​ romantic melodrama—​ but perhaps the best that Sherwood, like Aristophanes, was capable of on the subject of love. Alcibiades no longer develops as a character. Indeed, he spends much of the play obsessed with learning the truth about Aspasia’s love life. For her part, Aspasia exhorts Aristophanes to write about love: ASPASIA:  I’m

afraid, Aristophanes, you’re not yet ready for the thundering tragedies. Your talent for talk has raced too far ahead of your capacity for thinking. ARISTOPHANES:  And what are you talking about? ASPASIA:  About the exalting influence of love. ARISTOPHANES:  The commodity in which you trade. ASPASIA:  And in which poets live. It has another name—​faith. Faith, which enables men to escape from the dark prison of themselves and go on a pilgrimage to give worship and make sacrifice at the shrine of the beloved. And when you make the pilgrimage, you’ll find that the shrine is everywhere—​in the ashes of your ancestors and the hopes of your children unborn—​in the stars of the Milky Way and their reflection in a rippled pool—​in the memory of a truth once uttered long ago, and in the listening for a word that has yet to be spoken. (1.2.30) It gets worse. Hyperbolus accuses Socrates of acting as go-​ between for Aspasia and Pericles, calling him “the most important pimp in Athens” (1.2.30). Hyperbolus is mistaken, however. Aspasia, it turns out, is in love with Socrates.160 Roles in the first play are now reversed: Socrates must act as scapegoat for her indiscretions: ASPASIA: 

If only I had been blessed with some of your humility. I might have known enough to live within my spiritual means. But I’ve been extravagant, and now those I love are called upon to pay my debts. Including you, Socrates. SOCRATES:  You love me?     (She goes to him and strokes his unkempt hair) ASPASIA:  Yes. I realize that you’re filthy dirty—​and most of your habits are revolting—​and I sympathize deeply with your poor wife. But I love you

Acropolis  121 and I know that whatever sins I have committed, you will find a way to justify them. (2.4.21) Justification fails to arrive, and the Athenians send Socrates off to exile in Sicily. Sherwood perhaps took too much to heart Paul Bonner’s criticism of the original staged play. Bonner, if you recall, found fault with the treatment of Aspasia, who, he thought, could only be made consistent and believable if she were motivated “by an honest and natural, physical and biological love for some man.” She gets that in spades here! Nonetheless, Sherwood’s bogus, rewritten version of Acropolis at least has the virtue of a simpler plot centered on the action of a single protagonist. Writing in this fashion, along with other stylistic modifications, would bring him stunning success through a string of three Pulitzer Prize–​winning dramas that would more directly, and with stentorian voice, address the crisis in Europe soon to culminate in World War II.

Notes



1 Sherwood’s journal as quoted by J. M. Brown (1965: 307). 2 Ibid. 3 J. M. Brown (1965: 303). 4 Full reviews of the play can be found online at https://​charlesmortimer.weebly. com/​acropolis-​1933.html. 5 Further details about the staging of the play and the responses of critics can be found in J. M. Brown (1965: 294–​307). 6 I play fast and loose with Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove’s updating of the Frogs of Aristophanes (2005), which begins: “The time is the present, the place ancient Greece.” 7 O’Neill quoted in J. M. Brown (1965: 307). 8 With apologies to W. H. Auden, “Secondary Epic”: No, Virgil, no: Not even the first of the Romans can learn His Roman history in the future tense.

9 See Alonso (2007: 128). 10 See Bouverie (2019:  15–​17). Rumbold’s opinion came to be shared by several others in the British military or government. 11 See Bouverie (2019: 56). 12 See Bouverie (2019: 23–​24). 13 For the importance of Thompson and Sherwood as important vocal opponents of fascism, see Olson (2013: 77–​86). 14 For information regarding this and other anti-​Nazi rallies in America during the 1930s, see Waite (October 20, 2013). 15 See Wise (March 21, 1933). 16 See Olson (2013: 254–​55).

122  Acropolis 17 London ([1908] 2013). 18 For the importance of It Can’t Happen Here, see Michel Meyer’s introduction to Lewis (1935] 2005). Sprague (2013) discusses London’s and Lewis’ dystopian novels, which look forward to an imagined future in conjunction with Roth’s novel (2004). Roth’s book imagines a past where Charles Lindbergh has become president and Nazis have gained control of America. 19 Shirer (1959: xxvi–​xxvii). 20 See Nagorski (2012: 6). 21 See Nagorski (2012: 3). 22 D. Thompson (1932: 35). 23 See D.  Thompson, quoted in Nagorski (2012:  85). Thompson was referring to Fallada ([1932] 2009). It should be noted, however, that Thompson soon became an outspoken critic of Hitler and the Third Reich: see Olson (2013: 77–​80). 24 See Wick (2011: 82). 25 Mowrer (1939: 27). 26 Mowrer (1939: 106). 27 See RES, diary, April 1, 1939, B 89M-​66, Box 1: HHU. 28 For the danger posed to America if Hitler should conquer England and France, see Mowrer (1939: 395). 29 Moore (2010: 47). 30 For Kaltenborn’s first meeting with Hitler and the incident involving his son, see Nagorski (2012: 86–​88, 109–​10). 31 See Larson (2011: 3–​5). 32 Nagorski (2012: 16). 33 See Nagorski (2012: 80, 84, 324). 34 For the Americanization of German industry under the Nazis and Hitler’s admiration for Henry Ford, see Nagorski (2012: 55–​56), and Evans (2003: 113–​14). 35 See Fischer (2011: 8, 10). Hitler’s thoughts and feelings about the United States are more nuanced than I present here. Hitler had a “split image” of America. He admired American technological superiority but found it “a half judaized and negrified society.” 36 See Nagorski (2012: 223). Nagorski sees in Kennedy “the sense of innocence—​and ignorance—​of many young Americans who visited Nazi Germany in this period.” 37 See Nagorski (2012: 223). In Philip K. Dick’s alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), Hitler has won the war in Europe and President Kennedy achieves détente with the Nazi ruler—​but President Kennedy is Joseph Kennedy, the father of the future president and a known Nazi sympathizer. 38 See Olson (2013: 17–​23). 39 See Wick (2011: 97). 40 See Nagorski (2012: 225). 41 J. M. Brown (1965: 305). Of course, Sherwood was writing for an American audience, but those who actually saw the play were British. The British were unlikely to be receptive to the play’s message for a host of reasons. Bouverie (2019: 15, 24, 90, 93) points out that the British were animated by a spirit of pacifism during the early 1930s. Also, he says (2019: 51), Nazi Germany was considered a bulwark against communism, which was regarded as “the Antichrist.” British sentiment at the time (2019: 89) was largely anti-​French and pro-​German. 42 Schlesinger (1960: 73). 43 See Dennis ([1936] 1993).

Acropolis  123 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Dennis ([1936] 1993: 15). See Dennis ([1936] 1993: 163–​81). See Dennis ([1936] 1993: 139). See Dennis ([1936] 1993: 46). Lindbergh quotes in Olson (2013: 19). See Sherwood (1948: 102) characterized Lindbergh’s view of fascism. See Sherwood quoted in Olson (2013: 312–​16). Sherwood (1948: 122). See Berlet and Lyons (2000: 137). Coughlin quoted in Sherwood (1948: 66). Schlesinger (1957: 5). Schlesinger (1957: 481). Sherwood quoted in Schlesinger (1957: 481–​82). Sherwood quoted in Schlesinger (1957: 464). Sherwood (1948: 32). Sherwood (1948: 33). Acropolis is catalogued as RES b MS Am 1947, 1723: HHU. Copies are available on request. 61 See Burckhardt (1998: 163). 62 Burckhardt (1998: 160ff). 63 Bloom quoted in Ratner-​Rosenhagen (2012: 275). 64 Tuncel (2013: 7, 15). 65 See Acampora (2013: 115) on Nietzsche. 66 Bloom (2011: 7). 67 See Bloom (2015: 315). 68 Woloch (2003). 69 Woloch (2003: 31). 70 Ibid. 71 Woloch (2003: 36). 72 For example, see Woloch (2003) 2:  “jostle for attention;” 177; “jostling among numerous characters;” 245: “competitive jostling for position within the narrative:” 73 Woloch (2003: 31). 74 Ibid. 75 Woloch (2003: 19). 76 Ibid. 77 Woloch (2003: 244). 78 Quoted in J. M. Brown (1965: 305). 79 Burckhardt (1998: 245). 80 See Ellis (1989: 9). 81 Green (1967: 6ff) begins his novel by imagining Alcibiades in conversation with Pheidias at the building site of the Parthenon, but nothing further is made of the connection between Alcibiades and the Parthenon in the later parts of the novel. 82 Alonso (2007: 129), relying solely on evidence taken from the play, may be forgiven for believing that Alcibiades was a “young artist” rather than the consummate general we know from history. 83 Thucydides is the exception in this regard. He nowhere comments on this aspect of Alcibiades. 84 Denyer (2001: 85) makes this point regarding the Alcibiades of Alcibiades I.

124  Acropolis 85 Sherwood’s manuscript reads:  “You have within you the insects of individualism.” I  feel certain that there is a typographical error rather than a bizarre metaphor. References to Acropolis are given by act, scene, and manuscript page number. 86 I here borrow the incisive character sketch of Alcibiades from Gribble (1999: 9–​10,  18). 87 In Plutarch, nothing like a battle for the soul of Alcibiades takes place. Socrates rather quickly drops out of the picture when Alcibiades grows to manhood. In the end, Alcibiades is said to have been ruined by his own exalted reputation (35.2). 88 For the theme of “philosophical seduction,” see Denyer (2001: 5–​9). 89 See Heiden ([1932] 1935: 80). 90 See Weinberg (2010: 8): The struggle for existence in which the races of the world engaged, the basic element of life on earth, was fundamentally a struggle for space …. Racial vitality and spatial expansion were directly related. A  people always faced the question of bringing about a proper relationship between the space on which it lived and its population. In his view [sc. Hitler’s], a people could choose between adjusting a population to a given space or adjusting space to population. Hitler and Cleon favor the second alternative. 91 For a detailed discussion of the relationship between Nazi ideology and Christianity, see Steigmann-​Gall (2004). 92 See Evans (2003: 311). 93 Roisman (2011: 99). 94 Hitler quoted in Lynch (2013: 171). 95 Hitler quoted in Ullrich (2016: 545). 96 Beevor (2012: 47). 97 Rosenberg is quoted in Scobie (1990: 14), who further discusses German interest in Spartan studies. 98 Rebenich quoted in Cartledge (2006: 191). 99 See Rawson (1969: 342–​43). 100 On Hitler, Göring, and the Spartans, see Cartledge (2006: 192). 101 I paraphrase the language of Huxley (1948: 7). 102 See Scobie (1990: 15). 103 See Scobie (1990: 13). 104 See Olson (2013). 105 See Martin (2016: 170). 106 Eliot (1948: 100–​1). 107 Svendsen (2005:  59) distinguishes these two ways by which boredom may be alleviated on the job. 108 Svendsen (2005: 34): And there is no escaping the fact that many forms of work are deadly boring. Work is often onerous, often without potential to promote any meaning in life. The answer to the question as to why people get bored does not lie in work or leisure on their own.… Boredom is not a question of idleness but of meaning.

Acropolis  125 1 09 B. Russell (1930: 48). 110 B. Russell (1930: 49). 111 For these uses of the Shakespearean soliloquy, see Clemen (2005: 4). 112 Wilson (1943: 21) notes Falstaff’s association with the Devil of the miracle play. 113 Garber (2004: 328, 325–​28). 114 See Goodman (1985: 97–​112). 115 On Falstaff’s cynical view of military honors, see Moulton in Dutton and Howard (2003: 240). 116 The phrase is applied to Falstaff by C. Kahn (1981: 148). 117 Bell (2011: 35). 118 The historical Hyperbolus was a democratic demagogue and a minor figure during the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes jokes in Peace that he was a lamp-​ seller by trade and thus able to shed light on affairs of state (P. 681–​90). 119 See Bendersky (2014: 122). 120 Sherwood’s knowledge of the history of ancient comedy is impressive on this detail. Aristophanes’ first play, the Banqueters (427 B C ), was produced by Callistratus. Sherwood imagines that Aristophanes and Callistratus were one and the same. 121 On the nature of agitation, see Ryle (1949: 93). 122 Henry (1995: 6). 123 Everitt (2016: 256). 124 Paul H. Bonner to RES, December 4, 1933, b MS Am, 1947, 98: HHU. 125 See Girard ([1972] 1977: 49). 126 Girard ([1972] 1977: 50). 127 See Girard ([1972] 1977: 47, 63–​64). 128 See Girard ([1972] 1977: 7). 129 Girard ([1982] 1986: 18). 130 Girard ([1982] 1986: 12). 131 Girard ([1982] 1986: 16). 132 See Girard ([1982] 1986: 15, 29, and especially 40–​41), where he maintains, Imprisonment in this system [scapegoating] allows us to speak of an unconscious persecutor, and the proof of his existence lies in the fact that those in our day who are the most proficient in discovering other people’s scapegoats, and God knows we are past masters at this, are never able to recognize their own. 133 The emotions evoked in critics and philosophers at the sight of this famous statue differ somewhat: on this matter, see D. Russell (1992: 15). 134 E. Thompson (1879: 1–​31). 135 E. Thompson (1879: 14). 136 E. Thompson (1879: 22). 137 See Gunsaulus (1891: 9–​48). 138 Gunsaulus (1891: 31). 139 See Howard (1929: 14). 140 See Howard (1929: 269–​87). 141 See Howard (1929: 280–​81). 142 Howard (1929: 282). 143 See Cartledge (2001: 182).

126  Acropolis 144 These reflections on Nazi art and architecture are taken from Michaud ([1996] 2004: 208). 145 Michaud (2004: 1–​73). 146 Michaud (2004: 16). 147 Goebbels quoted in Michaud (2004: 23). 148 As Stevenson (1944: 210) explains the matter, In any ‘persuasive definition’ the term defined is a familiar one, whose meaning is both descriptive and strongly emotive. The purport of the definition is to alter the descriptive meaning of the term … but the definition does not make any substantial change in the term’s emotive meaning. 149 Sherwood’s Pheidias, who sees “Man” as the proper subject of his work, may be taken to recall Goethe’s dictum that Pheidias created works of art for a people who “exist for themselves alone”: see Goethe cited in Lloyd-​Jones (1982: 48). 150 Whitmarsh (2015: 42). 151 Whitmarsh (2015: 102–​6). 152 “Oedipus, blind,” says Bloom (2011: 10), “was on the path to oracular godhood.” 153 Seneca, Oedipus, 974–​75. Boyle (2011: 334) notes that Oedipus’ victory is a motif running through the end of the play. 154 In a letter to Sherwood, Edward Sheldon suggested in passing a possible analogy between Pericles and FDR but gave no grounds for thinking so: Edward Sheldon to RES, April no day, 1934, b MS Am 1947, 739: HHU. 155 For a detailed description of rumors about the candidate’s health, see Houck and Kiewe (2003: 65–​76). 156 Novelist and essayist Gore Vidal relates that he was forbidden to see Roman Scandals. The movie takes place in Oklahoma, the state represented in the Senate by his grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore: see Vidal (1992: 18–​19). 157 See Goldman (1997: 155–​56). 158 The 1937 version of Acropolis is listed among Sherwood’s papers as b MS Am 1947, 1724: HHU. Copies are available upon request. 159 See Sherwood (1941: 120): When I contemplate the present state of the theatre I am deeply moved to ask myself, “Why am I in it?” … When I look at the prospect of Broadway, and at the Broadway barons and the Broadway critics, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I am in a lousy business and I feel unclean. 160 That Socrates was in love with Aspasia has an analogue in modern scholarship: see D’Angour (2019: 211–​13).

4  Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse

Acropolis marked a watershed in Sherwood’s career. From this neglected and overlooked play sprang the works that made him famous:  Idiot’s Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois:  A Play in Twelve Scenes (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1940). All three won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for, unlike Acropolis, they succeed magnificently as dramas. Sherwood abandoned the hyper-​democratic approach to character that caused confusion among audiences and critics, who sought, unsuccessfully, to identify a central protagonist in Acropolis. Each of his three succeeding plays, like the 1937 version of Acropolis, is centered on a single protagonist surrounded by a constellation of minor figures, whose words and actions acquire significance only insofar as they relate directly to the protagonist, who in each case is modeled after a character in Acropolis. Sherwood set the plays in the present or, in the case of Abe Lincoln, a near-​present moment likely to be more familiar to modern audiences than events of the fifth century BC. I  will show that Sherwood abandoned allegory and spoke out directly about the impending international crisis.

I Idiot’s Delight “Oh dear, now we are in for another war,” Lynn Fontanne wrote to a friend in England in 1935.1 Fontanne represented the distaff side of the West End/​ Broadway power couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: “the Celestials and Gloriously Beloved Supremes” according to Laurence Olivier. In England, they were “the Duke and Duchess of the West End;” and in America “the Aristocrats of the American Stage.”2 Sherwood had known the Lunts since his days at the Algonquin Round Table. In 1936, the couple starred as song-​ and-​dance man Harry Van and the adventuress Irene in Idiot’s Delight. The cast also included Sydney Greenstreet of Casablanca fame and Richard Whorf. After tryouts in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh, Idiot’s Delight opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theater on March 24, 1936. After a phenomenally successful run in New York—​the play did the biggest business on Broadway in the 1936–​37 season—​Idiot’s Delight toured the country for twenty-​two  weeks.

128 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse At the time, other American playwrights remained aloof from the impending international crisis, were oblivious to the likelihood that another great war was in the offing, or simply wrote plays concerned with other matters. Albert Wertheim has studied how playwrights staged World War II. He begins with a sketch of how the most notable among them reacted to the international situation during the decade before the war.3 Elmer Rice’s Judgment Day (1934) and S.  N. Behrman’s Rain From Heaven (1934) saw fascism offering little direct threat to the United States.4 Clifford Odets’ Till the Day I  Die (1935) presents a Communist Party critique of the brutality rampant in Nazi Germany. Wertheim calls the play “uninteresting and not the stuff of memorable theatre.”5 The play was also irrelevant to the foreign-​policy issues facing America. Wertheim dubs Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead (1936) “possibly to this day the single most celebrated antiwar play.”6 The plot belies the title: soldiers killed in war refuse to be buried. The play graphically illustrates the horrors of war but does not address the crisis in Europe. In 1939, Shaw’s The Gentle People singles out fascism as America’s enemy of the future. Critics disagree, however, as to whether the play constitutes a call for direct American intervention in Europe.7 Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here was staged with a script written by Lewis himself and John C. Moffitt. The play opened in eighteen cities in October 1936. Lewis, we saw earlier, was concerned only with the threat of fascist enemies within.8 As the calendar moved closer to the outbreak of the war, most American playwrights still ignored the gravity of the danger. Oliver H. P. Garrett’s Waltz in Goose-​Step (1938) was a lackluster play dealing with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Much the same may be said of Jacques Deval’s Lorelei (1938).9 These two dramas do little more than bolster general concerns felt by many Americans from the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.10 Sidney Howard’s The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (1938) “waffles” on the question whether the possibility of war in Europe should be considered an issue of significant importance to America. Characters express differing points of view that run the gamut from calls for continuing isolation to passionate cries for outright intervention.11 Wertheim includes Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) in his catalog of plays reacting to the Nazi threat, but this seems to me a stretch.12 George S.  Kaufman and Moss Hart’s The American Way (1939) demonstrates an awareness of the dangers Hitler and Nazism pose to America but balks at recommending American intervention.13 William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life opened on Broadway a month after the beginning of World War II in Europe (October, 1939). The setting is Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, where a policeman named Blick disrupts the surface harmony prevailing among the patrons of the salon. Wertheim argues that “Blick’s manner is unmistakably that of the Gestapo,”14 but to view him in that light strains credulity. Nick’s bar is a hangout for prostitutes, and Blick is a vice-​officer doing his job. The single reference to Hitler sets him at the remote distance of seven thousand miles from a speaker who refers to the German leader only by complaining that newspapers pay too little attention to events at home.15 Despite Wertheim’s

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  129 protestations to the contrary, even in retrospect it’s difficult to see in the play a call for America to abandon its isolationist stance.16 In Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight of 1936, however, the bombs fall in Europe killing Americans. World War II begins. America can no longer turn a blind eye to the crisis. Song and dance man Harry Van (Alfred Lunt) and a troupe of female performers called Les Blondes find themselves stranded at the Hotel Monte Gabriele in northern Italy. Italy has closed the border into Switzerland and Austria. The world is on the brink of war. Mutual hostilities mar the relationship between Italy and France. The hotel is located just above an Italian military airbase, and so guests find themselves perilously close to a likely theater of war. Among the people trapped in the hotel is Irene (Lynn Fontanne), who impersonates a member of the former Russian aristocracy with a fictitious romantic past. As it happens, Harry and Irene carried on a brief affair long ago in Omaha, Nebraska, where both were eking out meager livings in different show-​business ventures. Mirabile dictu, the two are now reunited on the eve of World War II. Murphy and others set the play in the tradition of American realist drama, which is concerned with the portrayal of human decision-​making and action in purely human terms, lacking any sense of transcendence.17 Seen as characters in a realist drama, Harry and Irene are sovereign, autonomous figures, responsible for the fates that befall them. Harry recognizes nothing more than a strange coincidence involved in his meeting Irene once again (1.55).18 Like the best realist dramas, Idiot’s Delight incorporates elements of both tragedy and comedy. Robert F.  Gross is especially alive to the comic elements in realist plays. Humor in Idiot’s Delight, however, is not the sort he characterizes as “American High Comedy.”19 The humor is Greek, specifically ancient Greek New Comedy as practiced by Sherwood in the second version of Barnum Was Right. Audiences who enjoyed the humor in Idiot’s Delight—​and critics as well—​were perhaps not aware that they were watching one of the oldest, tried-​and-​true forms of comedy ever to hit the stage. For us today, Sherwood’s masterful employment of the techniques of New Comedy serves to make Idiot’s Delight the most complex, interesting, and ambiguous of his published, Pulitzer Prize–​winning plays. Yet, in Sherwood’s view, the comedy at the time seemed to overwhelm the play’s serious message, which went unappreciated by many in the play’s various audiences. “I see a burst of indignation accepted as a gag-​fest. At least, too much of a gag-​fest,” he confided to his diary.20 The play takes place entirely in the Hotel Monte Gabriele. Idiot’s Delight conforms even closer to New Comedy’s unity of place than the second version of Barnum. The focus of the comedy lies in Van’s attempts to penetrate Irene’s disguise. Harry wants her to admit her true identity, but she coyly deflects his efforts. Irene soon turns the tables on Harry. Unbeknownst to him—​and to the audience—​she has been testing him all along to confess his love for her. Only then does Irene admit who she is, and she speaks of her happiness: “All these years—​you’ve been surrounded by blondes—​and you’ve loved only me”

130 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse (3.179). The reunited lovers contemplate a happy future together. Their reverie is terminated by the sound of French bombers, coming to avenge an earlier Italian raid on Paris (3.183). Harry and Irene are killed in the attack. The play reaches its conclusion in appropriately Wagnerian fashion. Harry plays “The Ride of the Walkyrie” on the piano, as the two undergo a twentieth-​century Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”). They close the play singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” (3.185–​87). Novelist Peter DeVries wrote of “that final courage which consists in knowing courage to be useless.”21 Irene and Harry demonstrate that kind of courage. While American realist drama rejects the notion of transcendence, Greek New Comedy, we saw in Chapter 1, has a transcendent, presiding deity: Chance (Tychē). As Segal says of Chance (Tychē): The goddess was always ready to operate without motivation to unite people and pieces, no matter how complicated the situation, in an “automatic” happy ending. Menander frequently invokes “the usual machinery” (to automaton) to explain away the inexplicable and free both himself and his characters from any responsibility.22 The sensitive Irene interprets her meeting with Harry in a different light from the way he viewed it as mere coincidence. In the ambience of the hotel, she senses the presence of an uncanny, eerie, and nameless power: “There’s something about this design,” she says, “—​it suggests a—​an amusing kind of horror” (1.49). In the stage direction opening the play, Sherwood emphasizes the importance of creating a mise-​en-​scène with an atmosphere appropriate to Irene’s vague intuition, though he slightly misquotes her: Note a line in the dialogue along toward the end of Act One; there is something about this place that suggests “a vague kind of horror.” This is nothing definite, or identifiable, or even immediately, apparent. Just an intimation. (1.4) Aeschylus’ House of Atreus and Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel are places haunted by malign supernatural forces that eventually reveal themselves in full horror to those who come under their influence. The Hotel Monte Gabriele is wreathed in horror—​albeit of a sinister and amused kind. It used to be a sanatorium and is called “a lunatic asylum” (1.35). The hotel is close kin to the sanatorium that sits upon the mountain of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, where Hans Castorp comes to visit his invalid cousin.23 A nameless spirit haunts the sanatorium, “sprouting up here and there to hint at its presence.”24 Mann’s realist fiction thus acquires supernatural overtones. Dr.  Waldersee, another guest at the hotel, has been reading The Magic Mountain, and he quotes passages to Harry that evoke an eerie similarity between the subject of Mann’s novel and what the doctor sees occurring in Europe in the decade of the 1930s:

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  131 “Backsliding”—​he [Mann] said—​“spiritual backsliding to that dark and tortured age—​that, believe me, is disease! A degradation of mankind—​a degradation painful and offensive to conceive.” True words, eh? (1.57)25 Mann’s sanatorium works as a metaphor for the spiritual malaise afflicting Europe prior to World War I. In Idiot’s Delight, Sherwood accomplishes—​ in less exhausting detail—​the task of exploring a similar malady afflicting Europe prior to World War II. Sherwood’s realist drama, like Mann’s realist novel, has supernatural overtones. In New Comedy, however, Chance (Tychē) is a benign deity, whose presence underpins and explains the extraordinary level of coincidence that powers the plot and keeps it moving forward to a happy conclusion. She may on occasion openly disclose herself to the audience, as she does in Menander’s Shield (97–​ 148), but she normally manifests herself indirectly. This goddess, or perhaps a close relation, is at work in Idiot’s Delight, where she displays an uncommonly vicious sense of humor by allowing Irene a glimpse of the amusement and horror soon to come. She still acts without apparent motivation, however, first uniting lovers, then separating them, years later reuniting them. But she cuts short their lives as they prepare for the marriage (gamos) that marks the completion of the unfolding comedic pattern. For want of a better name, this vaguely discerned power may perhaps be named Bad Luck (Dystychē). New Comedy’s recurring themes of chance (tychē), disguise and recognition, and preparations for a wedding (gamos), appear, though the latter is made prominent only through its unexpected absence. By chance (coincidence 1), Harry Van and Irene met for a brief time when they worked in separate variety acts touring America. The two lovers are reunited in an Italian hotel right before the beginning of World War II (coincidence 2). Irene is in disguise. She is an expert in the art of imposture, pretending to be a member of the Russian aristocracy, full of romantic stories about her past. Following a series of comedic interactions, the typical scene of recognition occurs: Irene admits to being Harry’s former lover. At the very moment the two begin the expected preparations for marriage, French planes appear in the sky, drop their bombs, and the two are killed. With Bad Luck (Dystychē) at work as a motivating force, Harry and Irene seem the helpless pawns of only vaguely recognizable and recognized supernatural forces. In my reading of the play, Sherwood subtly subverts the conventions governing American realist drama. It’s as if the play has been scripted by a malign deity who wreathes the hotel in an aura of comic horror. Viewed in this way, Harry and Irene are invested with an aura of tragic solemnity. Tragedy, as novelist Robert Coover has written, “implies … the dignity of fate.”26 Idiot’s Delight ushers onto the stage another fool like Jupiter in Barnum Was Right, Amytis in The Road to Rome, and more importantly, Pheidias in Acropolis. God, matron, and artist are reincarnated, as it were, in the form of twentieth-​century song-​and-​dance man Harry Van. Van is modeled mostly

132 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse

Figure 4.1 Idiot’s Delight. Shubert Theatre. Playbill cover (Houghton Library, Harvard University).

after Pheidias. The two are artists in their respective fields. Irene describes Van as “a real artist,” whom she has seen in some café chantant somewhere (2.1.99). While Pheidias has long been recognized as a genius, Harry whimsically calls himself “a potential genius—​reduced to piloting six blondes through the Balkans” (1.66). Pheidias dubbed himself an “idiot.” Van is the eponymous idiot of Idiot’s Delight. Linking a song-​ and-​ dance man with antiquity’s greatest sculptor may seem a stretch, except that Sherwood believed that artists are by nature charlatans and fools. Pheidias and Van bespeak the folly of war. Pheidias lamented the coming of the Peloponnesian War because “some bloody fools have murdered an anonymous old man” (2.1.16); Harry regrets that friends become enemies and enemies friends once war begins (1.63). Neither Pheidias nor Van concerns himself with politics. Both have achieved insight into the human condition at least partly through artificial stimulants. Pheidias told of how “strong wine”

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Figure 4.2 Idiot’s Delight. Shubert Theatre. Lunt and Fontanne. Darkness on stage signifies the presence of the sinister force Bad Luck (Houghton Library, Harvard University).

gave him “an idiot’s conception of the splendour and grandeur and dignity of mankind” (3.1.6). Harry acquired his own “delusions of grandeur” regarding mankind at least partly from cocaine (1.27). Before drinking the hemlock, Pheidias tried to console himself with the assurance that “even though the sun will set tonight, it will rise again in the morning, attended by the maiden whom our poet has described as the rosy-​fingered Dawn” (3.2.10). Van is a bit more optimistic—​but less poetic—​about the coming of the new day: “Let doubt prevail throughout this night—​with dawn will come again, the light of truth” (1.30). Pheidias and Van embrace death. Both artists “choose to die without rising to defend their beliefs.”27 Both choose a pacifist’s vehicle for bearing witness to corruption. Van remarks at one point that he has learned much “from reading about the great courtesans, and getting to understand their technique …” (1.30). This gratuitous comment is intended to describe how Van goes about dealing with his troupe of female performers. But Les Blondes are clearly not courtesans. Sherwood can only be making a clever aside to his audience, evoking recollection of Pheidias and his relationship to the courtesans in Aspasia’s house. Idiot’s Delight was a hit, and MGM bought the rights as a vehicle for Clark Gable. Pressure from Italy delayed the release of the film until 1939 because the Italian government threatened to ban it from all theaters in Italy.

134 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse Sherwood’s name had been anathema to the Italians since he had pilloried ancient Rome in The Road to Rome. MGM attempted to assuage Italian fears partly by removing all traces of Italian accents from the film, but by 1939 Mussolini had nationalized all film distribution in his country and Hollywood was forced to withdraw from the Italian market. Regardless, as Thomas Doherty notes, the Italians had decided to ban Idiot’s Delight even before its release.28 Clark Gable played Harry Van. Gable as a song-​and-​dance man is a sight not to be missed. Gable demonstrates what he also exhibits in Gone with the Wind, released the same year (1939): he could “swing a dashed efficient shoe.”29

II Abe Lincoln in Illinois: a play in twelve scenes Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which debuted in 1938, was Sherwood’s most successful and enduring play.30 Though completed in May of that year, production was delayed for five months because Raymond Massey, who had played Cleon in Acropolis, had still to complete the London run of Idiot’s Delight before taking the lead in another Sherwood play. Abe Lincoln was previewed in Washington on October 3 and opened on October 15 at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway. Following a run of 472 performances, the play toured the country and later played in Europe. Abe Lincoln received the most effusive reviews in Sherwood’s career as a playwright. Brooks Atkinson, often a trenchant critic of his work, wrote: “An inspired play—​inspired by the sorrowful grandeur of the man it portrays …. A reviewer’s anxiety is that he may not herald it vigorously enough.” Heywood Broun wrote:  “Abe Lincoln is the great American drama …. It is the very battle cry of Freedom.”31 As Alonso writes, Abe Lincoln “was written about three men—​Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Robert E. Sherwood ….”32 As representative of Sangamon County to the Illinois State Legislature, Lincoln begins his political career from a position of timorous neutrality regarding the institution of slavery. He refuses to get involved in the issue roiling the country and declines an invitation to run for Congress, lest he be called upon to cast a vote “on the terrible issue of war or peace” (2.4.76–​7).33 Later, he starts to come around to an anti-​slavery position, worrying, first, that it might be extended to territories in the West, which might result in the eventual dismemberment of the country (2.7.120).34 Finally, at the behest of law partner Billy Herndon, Lincoln states his readiness to resort to war in defense of the democratic principles of “liberty and equality” for all (3.12.183). In the final scene, he boards the train in Springfield that will carry him to Washington as president. As the play draws to its conclusion, Lincoln speaks of how “threats of war increase in fierceness from day to day” (3.12.182). The relevance of a Civil War play to the current international crisis could not be made more obvious. Broun’s phrase “battle cry of Freedom” catches the dramatist’s intent for the play and audiences’ and critics’ reaction to what they saw and heard.

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Figure 4.3 Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Plymouth Theatre. Playbill cover (Houghton Library, Harvard University).

Sherwood, I believe, based the marriage of Abraham and Mary Lincoln upon that of Pericles and Aspasia in Acropolis. In both plays, strong women transform hapless mates into figures of mythical dimensions and world historical importance. Before his marriage to Aspasia, Sherwood’s Pericles is

136 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse regarded by friend and foe alike as a weak and vacillating figure—​at best, a politician lacking the courage of his convictions. Pericles is said by Cleon to be in thrall to the philosopher Anaxagoras and, behind him, “always in the shadow, but always exerting a sly, deceptive influence,” lurks Aspasia (1.1.12). Much later, Cleon claims that Pericles is no longer a man but a “mouthpiece” for Aspasia (2.2.27). Aspasia admits that she and Anaxagoras have been providing Pericles with whatever fixity of purpose he has—​which was precious little (1.2.42). Pheidias describes him as a “vacillating” politician (1.2.43). Following his marriage to Aspasia in the interval between Acts 1 and 2, Sherwood’s Pericles becomes the statesman of heroic quality known to history in the pages of Thucydides, Plutarch, and others. At the end of the play, Aspasia explains that he is even willing to sacrifice his life to ensure that work on the Parthenon will be completed (3.1.7). Sherwood’s Lincoln is first revealed as a man of similar feckless nature and feeble resolve. He brands himself a failure while working as a storekeeper in New Salem, Illinois. He takes a dim view of himself: “Give me a steady job, and I’ll fail at it,” he tells Mentor Graham, his aptly named teacher (1.1.8). Old Ben Mattling, veteran of the Revolutionary War, tells Abe:  “You’re a good-​for-​nothin’, debt-​ridden loafer.” Abe accepts the insult without protest (1.2.40). He generates a modicum of ambition, however, when Ann Rutledge, whom he has long loved from afar, begins to reciprocate his feelings. In an anticipatory doublet of his later relationship to Mary Todd, Abe resolves to run for the state legislature and is elected. He wishes to prove himself worthy of her love (1.2.50). When Ann dies unexpectedly, Abe sinks back into a deep depression and returns to his previous state of listless inertia. Joshua Speed complains about him: “He has just been sitting there—​drawing his three dollars a day—​and taking no apparent interest in the proceedings” (1.3.54). According to Nancy Green, a sympathetic admirer, “he’s a poor man, and he’s failed in trade, and he’s been in the legislature for a year without accomplishing a blessed thing” (1.3.50). She adds: “the one thing he needs is a woman with the will to face life for him” (1.3.57). Enter Mary Todd, who, just like Aspasia in Acropolis, steps in to fill that role and, again like Aspasia, employs marriage as the vehicle to impart fixity of purpose to her mate. Lincoln is introduced to Mary at the home of Ninian Edwards. She initially charms him for the importance of her Kentucky family and her relationship to Lincoln’s idol Henry Clay: “Very high-​grade people,” Lincoln says. “They spell their name with two D’s—​which is pretty impressive when you consider that one was enough for God” (2.4.70). Mary Todd’s family objects to her decision to take Lincoln as husband: he’s “lazy and shiftless and prefers to stop constantly along the way to tell jokes.” Mary takes the word stop and imparts to it a sense that suits her own purposes:  “He will not stop, if I  am strong enough to make him go on! And I am strong!” (2.2.87–​88). A brief peripety ensues when Lincoln decides to renege on his proposal of marriage (2.2.104). Finally, Lincoln achieves what Pheidias in Acropolis called “the culmination of destiny and desire” (2.1.12). He begs Mary to take him back: “The way

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  137 I must go is the way you have always wanted me to go” (2.8.127). Elected president, Lincoln concludes the play with a speech to an audience in Springfield as he prepares to leave for his inauguration (3.11.182–​85). He embarks on a career of singular importance and becomes a fitting American equivalent to the Athenian general Pericles, each brought to greatness through the heroic efforts of a strong-​willed spouse. Sherwood assimilated Mary Lincoln to his Aspasia in a further respect. Both women are portrayed as scapegoats for their respective husbands. Aspasia took on the part willingly. Indeed, her service as a heroic, self-​ sacrificing scapegoat exalted her to the position of one of three protagonists in the expansive, democratic agōn inspiring the earlier play. Perforce, Mary’s similar role can sound only a minor note in a play so completely devoted to her husband.35 Unlike Aspasia, however, the job of scapegoat is imposed upon her. The prophetic voice of Billy Herndon captures the sacrifices Mary must make. While the Christian God is invoked in oaths and prayers throughout the play, Herndon takes the audience back to an older, polytheistic tradition of gods receiving the sacrifice of a scapegoat to take on guilt on behalf of others. An angry Billy lashes out at Abe, reluctant to marry, reluctant to fully embrace the abolitionist cause: You’re only using her [Mary] as a living sacrifice, offering her up, in the hope that you will thus gain forgiveness of the gods [my emphasis] for your failure to do your own great duty! (2.6.105) Billy’s fears are fully realized on the night of Lincoln’s election to the presidency. With the vote too close to call, the soon-​to-​be president-​elect turns on his wife in anger when she fusses and complains too openly in the presence of others and refuses to leave him to await the final verdict of the polls alone: Damn you! Damn you for taking every opportunity you can to make a fool of me—​and yourself. It’s bad enough, God knows, when you act like that in the privacy of our own home. But here—​in front of people. (Mary is aghast at this outburst that her hysterical temper vanishes, giving way to blank terror.) Mary (in a faint strained voice) Abe! You cursed at me. Do you realize what you did? You cursed at me. (Abe has the impulse to curse at her again, but with considerable effort, he controls it.) (3.11.167)36 As Mary fills the role of Aspasia, the preternaturally perceptive Billy Herndon is in some respects a throwback to Pheidias in that play and also to Harry

138 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse Van in Idiot’s Delight. Pheidias drew inspiration from wine, and Harry took cocaine. Billy Herndon is looked down upon and pitied for his drinking, of which much is made in the play. “Does the boy drink?,” Bowling Green asks Abe, who responds: “Yes. He’s got great fires in him, but he’s putting’ em out fast” (2.4.73). A  later stage direction describes him as acting “more than a little drunk and sullen, but abnormally articulate” (2.6.99). Before the wedding of Abe and Mary, Billy drinks before and after his toast to the bride and groom, nearly emptying a large bottle (2.6.101–​2). Lincoln mocks Billy as “a firebrand, a real radical abolitionist—​and he can’t stand anybody who keeps his mouth shut and abides by the Constitution.” Billy begs Bowling Green to drag Lincoln “out of this stagnant pool in which he’s drowning himself ” (2.4.71–​72). Though himself sober—​he never drank alcohol—​Lincoln soon follows the path Billy has laid out for him, insofar as he evolves into the kind of radical, firebrand defender of the Constitution Billy sought him to become.37 Truth from a bottle. No historical source known to me treats either Pericles or Lincoln during their pre-​ marital lives as such spineless, hopeless failures. Alonso offers one possible explanation for Sherwood’s denigrating depiction of Lincoln. Discussing his bleak and pessimistic mood prior to the outbreak of World War II, she points out how insistently Sherwood came to regret his pacifist view in the run-​up to the war. He felt he “was culpable for the rise of fascism, tyranny, unchecked imperialism, and crimes against humanity.”38 Quite a load for any one individual to take on—​let alone a writer of plays. Lincoln’s quietism and avoidance of responsibility through so much of his life may have been a form of authorial self-​flagellation. In contrast to Sherwood’s Lincoln, Goodwin offers a portrait of a young, highly ambitious, up-​and-​coming politician, whose “self-​assurance was enhanced by his physical size and strength, qualities that were valued highly on the frontier.”39 Abe Lincoln in Illinois was filmed with a screenplay by Sherwood (1940). Raymond Massey and Ruth Gordon reprise their stage roles as Abe and Mary Lincoln. Massey was nominated for an Oscar on the basis of his performance. At least a part of the film’s power arises from Massey’s uncanny resemblance to Lincoln. The screenplay follows the stage version very closely, sometimes word for word, making it all the more striking that the theme of Mary as scapegoat is missing. Lincoln gently scolds his wife for losing her temper on the night of his election to the presidency and requests that she return home. The movie’s Lincoln lacks the stain upon his escutcheon that appears so shocking in the staged version of the president. Billy Herndon is reduced to the status of a drunken bystander. John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, made a year before Abe Lincoln in Illinois, begins in New Salem in 1932 and covers much the same temporal period as Abe Lincoln in Illinois. For reasons that baffle me, Ford’s version of Lincoln’s early years is usually regarded more highly.40 True, the acting is less mannered, but the stovepipe hat sits uncomfortably on the head of a young Henry Fonda and, at least to me, looks slightly ridiculous. Lincoln’s relationships with

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Figure 4.4 Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Raymond Massey as Abe Lincoln (Alamy).

Ann Rutledge and Mary Todd are given cursory treatment. They are granted no active role in his legend. This Abe Lincoln is fully fashioned from youth and undergoes no evolution or modification in his character. He has already become what he is to be as president. The picture centers on a fictitious trial, where Abe as a young lawyer defends two men accused of murder. In a Perry Mason-​like moment, the true killer breaks down and admits his guilt under ruthless questioning by Lincoln. Leaving the courtroom, Lincoln strides up a steep hill to the sound of falling rain and thunder, while “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays. Metaphor anyone? Sherwood read the screenplay for Young Mr. Lincoln and confided to his diary that he considered it “a lot of nothing.”41

III There Shall Be No Night Sherwood called There Shall Be No Night “a sequel” to Idiot’s Delight.42 The play was written as a vain call for the United States to stand up to the Nazis, in this case, to provide aid to Finland, which the Germans had invaded in November 1939. Sherwood was writing at fever pitch as events of the so-​ called “Winter War” between Nazi Germany and Finland unfolded. That war had ended before There Shall Be No Night opened on March 29, 1940 in Providence, Rhode Island. The play premiered on Broadway on April 29 of

140 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse

Figure 4.5 Young Mr. Lincoln. Henry Fonda as Abe Lincoln (Alamy).

that year at the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) and met with enthusiastic responses from audiences and from most critics.43 Noël Coward is said to have wept throughout the play. Charlie Chaplin described himself as too moved to meet with the cast after the performance he witnessed. Eleanor Roosevelt called the play “a performance I  shall never forget.”44 The play is perhaps most noteworthy for marking the Broadway debut of a young Montgomery Clift, who played the son of protagonist Kaarlo Valkonen (Alfred Lunt). Lynn Fontanne played Kaarlo’s wife Miranda. Richard Whorf and Sydney Greenstreet returned to the stage in still another Sherwood play. It’s difficult to read There Shall Be No Night today and conjure up much of the visceral response it excited in the year before America entered the war. Nonetheless, the conclusion of the play packed a considerable punch that can be attributed to the rewritten version of Pheidias’ climactic speech in Acropolis and to another palimpsest of Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Sherwood uses Valkonen as the mouthpiece for a revised version of the philosophy expressed by Pheidias, who gave a novel, provocative twist to the myth of Oedipus. Here, Sherwood accomplishes a similar rhetorical sleight of hand, as it were, imparting new meaning to a much-​quoted passage from the Biblical Book of Revelation. He turns Pheidias’ philosophical thoughts on the divinity inherent in humankind into theological discourse made compatible with the Judeo-​Christian beliefs of much of his audience, providing emotional solace

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  141

Figure 4.6 There Shall Be No Night. Alvin Theatre. Playbill cover (David K. Chappel).

in those troubled times. Pheidias’ rebarbative rhetoric is now made pleasing and consoling. In a small schoolroom in Eastern Finland, at a moment of respite from the fighting, Kaarlo is queried about the conclusion of the famous book that won him the Nobel Prize, a scientific treatise that ends surprisingly with a religious message taken from the Book of Revelation. Frank Olmstead (young, sensitive, serious-​minded) (4.109), wearing the uniform of the American Ambulance Corps, reads the puzzling passage and asks its meaning: “How long, O Lord, before we shall hear the sound of the seventh Angel of the Apocalypse? Have you forgotten the promise of St. John? ‘And they shall see his face, and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall

142 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse

Figure 4.7 There Shall Be No Night. Alvin Theatre. Dramatis personae (David K. Chappel).

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  143 be no night there and they need no candle, neither light of the sun: for the Lord giveth them light; and they shall reign forever and ever.’ How long, O Lord, before we shall be given the true revelation?” …. Why did you conclude a scientific work with Biblical words [Frank asks]—​and what did you mean by the true revelation? (4.1.49–​50)45 Kaarlo schools Frank on the nature of this true revelation. He sees it coming to fruition in his own time. Like the speech of Pheidias that concludes Acropolis, Kaarlo’s words are worth quoting at length: It’s the revealing to us of our selves—​of what we are—​and what we may be. (Smiles). Of course—​we can all use the Book of Revelation to substantiate our own theories. It’s an eternally effective device …. But there is something profound in those words I  quoted. That unknown Jewish mystic who wrote that—​somehow, unconsciously, he knew that man will find the true nature of God in his own forehead, in the mysteries of his own mind. “And there shall be no night there.” That is the basis of all the work I have done. (6.150) Further work in the field as an active—​not an armchair—​physician has served to enlighten Kaarlo further. Reasonless war is a disease that can only be cured from “behind the forehead” (6.151). In his work as a battlefield physician, Kaarlo has seen the truth coming alive “in all kinds of men, of all races, and all varieties of faith. They are coming to consciousness:” And [he adds] for the first time in history, consciousness is not just the privilege of a few secluded philosophers [read Pheidias?]. It is free for all. For the first time, individual men are fighting to know themselves …. What you hear now … is the long-​deferred death rattle of the primordial beast. We have within ourselves the power to conquer bestiality, not with our muscles and our swords, but with the power of the light that is in our minds [my emphasis]. (6.152) A truculent Pheidias spoke in much the same vein in his defense against the charges leveled at him by Cleon near the conclusion of Acropolis. He pictured an equally defiant Oedipus, coming to terms with the realization that “the gods are no more than the mirrored projections of me!” (3.1.6). Pheidias wanted his death to serve as revenge against his fellow Athenians, for whom he would soon become an unpleasant memory (3.2.14). While Pheidias saw little chance that his fellow citizens would come to consciousness, Kaarlo Valkonen, identifying with the Jewish mystic, sees it happening all around him. Sherwood has tempered the rhetoric of Pheidias, and soft-​pedaled the defiant atheism

144 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse of his speech. Without openly denying the existence of a transcendent deity, Kaarlo finds a secure abode for God in the forehead, in the mind. There Shall Be No Night closes with the summary of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, borrowed from Acropolis. There, Aspasia told of how Pericles asked the Athenians to draw strength from the spectacle of their state’s greatness. There Shall Be No Night concludes in the same way. Kaarlo offers written consolation to his wife Miranda on the death in battle of their son Erik. Kaarlo asks his wife to find comfort in the words of Pericles. He writes: I have often read the words which Pericles spoke over the bodies of the dead, in the dark hours when the light of Athenian democracy was being extinguished by the Spartans. He told the mourning people that he could not give them any of the old words which tell how fair and noble it is to die in battle. Those empty words were old, even then, twenty-​four centuries ago. But he urged them to find revival in the memory of the commonwealth which they together had achieved; and he promised them that the story of their commonwealth would never die, but would live on, far away, woven into the fabric of other men’s lives. I believe that these words can be said now of our own dead, and our own commonwealth. (6.175–​76) Consoling a mother for the death of her son by quoting Pericles’ Funeral Oration must strike the contemporary ear as strange—​if not bizarre. Perhaps this final turn back to Acropolis is nothing more than evidence of hasty writing. Perhaps, however, at a time when a whole country like Poland could be swallowed up by force of arms in a few days, the national sovereignty of Finland, and by extension, of other countries was equally imperiled and thus an object of concern. With World War II under way, Sherwood found reason to spread a message of hope for a better future. His faith would be shattered at war’s end with the invention of the atomic bomb.

IV Post apocalypse Coming to terms with the bomb Following the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the end of World War II, Sherwood devoted most of his energy to the establishment of a memorial for Roosevelt and to the writing of Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, for which he was awarded a fourth Pulitzer Prize, this time for Biography. Sherwood was approached by a London theatrical producer of his acquaintance, who wanted him to write a play on the last days of Hitler. Sherwood declined the offer, thinking that, if successful, such a play might endow Hitler with the tragic dignity of a Macbeth.46 He won an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Best Years of Our Lives and returned to playwriting but

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  145 without critical success. Sherwood composed The Twilight while working on Roosevelt and Hopkins. He sent the play to Lunt and Fontanne in the hope that they would want to star in it. They refused, finding it lackluster. Maxwell Anderson wrote to Sherwood that reading the play “was a great pleasure and like a breath of fresh air,” but he thought it needed major revision.47 The difference in reactions is easily explained:  The Twilight fails to maintain much interest as drama, and the mood of the play is less comic, as Sherwood wished it to be, than elegiac, as it certainly is. Like Acropolis, The Twilight is better on the page than it would have been on the stage. Charles A.  Carpenter has told the story of how American and British dramatists confronted the nuclear age in the years following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II. Impressive dramas on the subject, he argues, began to appear first in 1984 and thereafter.48 Though he finds no masterpieces among the plays described, British playwrights, he says, outshine the Americans. J.  B. Priestley (1958), Doris Lessing (1958), Robert Bolt (1960), Bernard Kops (1960), and David Mercer (1962) all tried their hands at coming to terms with the bomb.49 The only American playwright to finish a drama of the early nuclear age, he claims, was Lorraine Hansberry (1962).50 On the contrary, Robert E. Sherwood anticipated them all a mere two years after the end of World War II. With The Twilight (1947), Sherwood imagined the gods of Greece and Rome living on in exile far from Olympus, abandoned by a humanity that no longer has need of them, people having turned their backs on the rich cultural heritage of the past and put complete trust in a future determined by science alone.51 Though virtually unknown today, The Twilight ranks as a significant achievement in the Classical Tradition. It rounds off Sherwood’s imaginative treatment of Classical Antiquity by returning to his roots in Barnum Was Right and once again reanimating the gods of Olympus in a modern setting. The Twilight concludes this chapter and book, which ends, as did Sherwood’s career as a major dramatist, by returning in a circle near to its beginning.52 The scene of the play is an unnamed island in the Ionian Sea. There live Ares, god of war, Aphrodite his wife, the goddess of love, and, Lyrith, Aphrodite’s half-​mortal daughter by an Athenian shepherd, who died long ago during the Persian Wars. The three are served by Ganymede, servant to the gods, reprising the role he played in Greek mythology and in the Aristophanic version of Barnum Was Right. Sherwood’s gods dwell in the depths of nature, surrounded by “cypress and olive trees and innumerable flowers and vines and shrubs.” They inhabit “the ruin of a graceful temple erected originally in honor of the goddess Aphrodite” (1.1.1).53 These gods are peaceful creatures, who represent no danger to mortals. They seem to have escaped human notice, and Ganymede describes them as “discredited and forgotten” (1.1.3). So a curious Ares returns to the world of humankind to look around. Like Jupiter in Barnum Was Right, he finds life among mortals much changed from what he recalls of the olden times—​much changed, but not in a happy

146 Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse way. Nuclear war has taken place. As Ares tells Aphrodite upon his return to their island, I went to places where continents had once been, and there is no trace of them. I saw instruments of war whereby one frail man could destroy an entire army or a great fleet with one touch of his finger. I was amazed!… They are literally hurling themselves to destruction …. There is degeneration and decay. There is disease—​a plague of terror, producing paralysis. Wherever I  looked I  found the same consciousness of doom …. They discarded us because they no longer needed us! And in my case, at least, they proved themselves right …. They have been the instruments of their own demoralization. (2.5.29–​31) The twilight closes in on the hapless gods at the play’s conclusion. It did so for Sherwood as well. The Twilight marked the end of his career as an important dramatist. Perhaps he came to believe that the dawn of the nuclear age meant that the time had come when the past—​represented by the gods of Greece—​ no longer had relevance for understanding what Aldous Huxley, following Shakespeare, called “the brave new world.” Sherwood produced no further work of any consequence. He died in 1955.

Notes

1 Fontanne quoted in Peters (2003: 147). 2 Ibid. 3 See Wertheim (2004: 1–​53). 4 See Wertheim (2004: 3–​4). 5 Wertheim (2004: 8). 6 Wertheim (2004: 42). 7 See Wertheim (2004: 42–​43). 8 For the dramatic version of Lewis’ novel, see Wertheim (2004: 5–​7). 9 In 1936, Sherwood tossed off in three days an adaptation of Deval’s hokum-​filled, frothy comedy Tovarich, which proved to be a hit in America and all across Europe. J. M. Brown (1965: 324) calls it “a Sherwood comedy that Sherwood did not write.” 10 See Wertheim (2004: 11). 11 Wertheim (2004: 14). 12 Wertheim (2004: 19) writes: “Wilder seems to have war and America’s seemingly inevitable involvement in mind ….” This may be true, but Wilder’s thoughts failed to make their way on to the pages of the play. With the exception of scattered references to the American Civil War and the mention that Joe Crowell died on the battlefields of France in World War I, Our Town ignores the trouble about to erupt in Europe: see Wilder ([1939] 1998). 13 See Wertheim (2004: 19). 14 Ibid. 15 See Saroyan ([1939] 1983: 45). 16 See Atkinson’s quotation in Wertheim’s (2004: 21–​22) analysis of the play.

Post Acropolis, post Apocalypse  147 17 See B. Murphy (1987: 173). 18 See Sherwood (1936). Idiot’s Delight is cited by act, page number, and, where necessary, scene. 19 See Gross in Demastes (1996: 71–​90). 20 RES, diary, March 9, 1936, B 89M-​66, Box 1: HHU. 21 De Vries ([1964] 2014: 248). 22 Segal (2001: 157). Consult Chapter 1 for the plays of Menander, where Chance is invoked. 23 Mann ([1924] 1995). 24 Mann ([1924] 1995: 672–​73). 25 The doctor quotes from a speech delivered by the tendentious Senior Ludovico Settembrini to Hans Castorp:  see Mann ([1924] 1995:  97). The translation Sherwood used is slightly different. 26 Coover (1977: 322). 27 J. M. Brown (1965: 330). 28 For the full story of intrigue surrounding the making of Idiot’s Delight, see Doherty (2013: 211–​17). Urwand (2013) smells conspiracy and believes that Hollywood in the 1930s was in close collaboration with Nazi Germany. He fails to mention how MGM tried to stand up to the Nazis in the case of Idiot’s Delight. 29 As P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster frequently boasts of himself. 30 Upon publication of Abe Lincoln, Sherwood appended a series of notes, discussing his sources and objectives. The last major staging of the play known to me was in 1993 at Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, New York. 31 For these and other reviews of the play, see J. M. Brown (1965: 382) and Alonso (2007: 200). 32 Alonso (2007: 192). 33 See Sherwood (1939). Abe Lincoln is quoted throughout by act, scene number (if appropriate), and page number. 34 Such rock-​ribbed thinking, standing in opposition both to the abolitionists and the pro-​slavery faction in the south, resulted in the birth of the Republican Party in 1854. See Goodwin (2005: 25). 35 In his supplementary notes to the play, Sherwood (1939: 197) regrets lacking the opportunity to devote more attention to her character. 36 Several recent critics and historians share Sherwood’s view of Mary Todd as scapegoat for the president. For example, G. Smith (2010: 135) sees the depiction of Lincoln as a tragic hero arising partly from a contrast with his wife, who “is made a scapegoat for his defects as man and president.” 37 Lincoln, however, did not embrace the abolitionist cause before he became president, nor does Sherwood imply that he does. At the time, Lincoln recognized and publicly acknowledged that the Constitution protected the existence of slavery; he merely opposed its spread from the Southern states to the territories in the West: see Goodwin (2005: 164, 233). As president, however, “ultimately he became the nation’s leading abolitionist. But not quickly, and not without much criticism from their leaders:” see Holzer and Garfinkle (2015: 127). 38 Alonso (2007: 218). 39 See Goodwin (2005: 50, 61, 87, 102). Burlingame (1994: 254) steers a middle course between Sherwood and Goodwin: “Although strong, Lincoln’s ambition was not all-​consuming and probably would have not led him to aspire to the presidency had his wife not goaded him on.”

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53

Lincoln’s qualities as a leader were largely appreciated by others only after his election to the presidency in 1860. Mary may have foreseen his potential for greatness as early as 1841, when others dismissed him as “a storytelling jester, a crazy loon, or an awkward country bumpkin.” She saw her husband as a character of Shakespearean proportions and likened him to Richard II: see Baker (1987: 91). Sarris (1998: 187), for example, praises the intensity of emotional expression Ford achieves in the film. See RES, diary, April 7, 1939, B 89M-​66, Box 1: HHU. Sherwood (1940: ix). For critical response to the play, see Alonso (2007: 211–​12). For these and other reactions to the play, see Peters (2003: 188–​89). Sherwood (1940). There Shall Be No Night is quoted by scene and page number. See RES to Richard A. Newhall, October 27, 1948, b MS Am 1947, 1397: HHU. See Avery (1977: 217–​18). See Carpenter (1999: 2). See Carpenter (1999: 60–​112). See Carpenter (1999: 2). The Twilight is catalogued as RES b MS Am 1947, 1824: HHU. Copies are available upon request. Sherwood may be said to have returned to his roots also in Small War on Murray Hill, a thinly disguised version of The Road to Rome, set in New York during the American Revolutionary War. The play was a failure. It opened in New York on January 3, 1957—​after Sherwood’s death—​and closed on the 12th of January: see Sherwood (1957b). The Twilight is cited by manuscript act, scene, and page number.

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Conclusion

In The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby laments the dichotomy in America that so often divorces thought from action. She offers as a desirable alternative model the living of a life in accordance with the Enlightenment values of the eighteenth century, exemplified in the careers of America’s Founding Fathers. They saw a natural harmony linking the life of the mind to a strong commitment to action in the public sphere. As an example of the gap she sees separating modern intellectuals from those whom she calls “ordinary Americans” (a term perhaps illustrating her own bias), she relates a simple anecdote. Moving to New York City in the early 1970s, she was astonished to meet intellectuals who, in the 1950s, had believed that Adlai Stevenson would defeat Dwight Eisenhower for the presidency of the United States. She refers to this view as “a wishful misconception that was surely a measure of their psychological and social distance from ordinary Americans in the nation’s heartland.”1 Robert E.  Sherwood shared this “wishful misconception.” He believed Stevenson would beat Eisenhower and wrote speeches on Stevenson’s behalf. He seems at first sight to fail Jacoby’s litmus test for recognizing a properly engaged public intellectual of the Enlightenment model. Yet Sherwood maintained a strong commitment to public service and thus resembled the very Founding Fathers whose way of life Jacoby extols. Sherwood also trumpeted his respect for “our ‘Founding Fathers’:  Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, James Monroe—​yes, and Tom Paine….”2 Sherwood volunteered to be a frontline soldier in World War I. Recognizing the extent of the dangers posed by Hitler far earlier than other Americans, he participated in the movement to “Stop Hitler Now!” The success of his plays gave him entrance into the Roosevelt White House, where he performed a number of jobs on behalf of the president:  speechwriter, propagandist, founder of the Voice of America, spymaster, and liaison to foreign leaders and American generals abroad. He lived a life of active engagement with the world. Sherwood’s life exhibits a happy marriage between the forces of action and contemplation. His commitment to action was balanced in equal measure by the need to comprehend the world, a need that expressed itself through a

150 Conclusion true Hellenism, but of a sort carried out largely independent of the Greek language—​and of the kind of schooling he was offered at Harvard early in the twentieth century. There, he received Ds in Greek. In this respect, he differs from the Founding Fathers he (and Jacoby) so much admired. Immersion in Greek and Latin started for them early in grammar school, and continued through college.3 Sherwood might have excelled as a student in a classroom run according to the educational reforms championed in England by Matthew Arnold during the nineteenth century. Arnold wished to see the teaching of Greek minimized in the educational curriculum,4 as it is today—​ even at Harvard. But Arnold’s Greece was a place of “sweetness and light,” a phrase he seems to have invented.5 Sherwood, on the other hand, saw Greece (and Rome) as distant from twentieth-​century America in time but close in attitudes and values. The struggles of the Greeks and Romans seemed to him to mirror and offer insight into our own. The colloquial language spoken by them created an instant sense of familiarity borne out by their actions. Yeats spoke of great public men, who “exist after death as historical monuments, for they are without meaning apart from time and circumstance.”6 He placed George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in this class. Yeats erred, I think, in his evaluation of Shaw and perhaps also of Wells. Shaw’s plays continue to be performed today, and they delight audiences regardless of time and circumstance. Sherwood, however, fits Yeats’ description to a tee. Wayne Booth invites us to think of the authors we read as friends offering gifts to their readers. Some view their readers as equals; Booth names Dickens, Trollope, and Ogden Nash as literary artists who belong in this “comradely” group. Others like Joyce, and Tolstoy “meet us as teachers, gurus, learned geniuses, implying that they are so far ahead of us … that we may never become their equals in energy, invention, learning or wisdom.”7 This rough-​ and-​ready distinction may be usefully applied to artists in other genres as well. In epic, the poet of the Iliad, who claims privileged access to the divine song of the Muses, fits comfortably into the second category. The poet of the Odyssey, who emphasizes that poetry is a human creation, belongs, I think, in the “comradely” group with Dickens and others. I  entered into literary friendship with Robert E. Sherwood a number of years ago and have enjoyed receiving his gifts. I would place him in the second category, however much he falls short of the exalted company Booth names. Sherwood offers no close or intimate friendship. He maintains a kind of reserved superiority slightly at odds with his democratic—​even on occasion hyper-​democratic—​approach to politics and society. Jacoby rightly laments the intellectual vapidity of modern American political rhetoric—​and of modern American politics. Things are kept simple, and speaker and audience inhabit the same level of discourse as just plain folks. She refers the reader back to an earlier age, when the soaring rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt called upon his audiences to expand their understanding and knowledge of the world. She calls attention specifically to Roosevelt’s great “Arsenal of Democracy” speech of 1940 before America entered the

Conclusion  151 war.8 The phrase “Arsenal of Democracy” was perhaps coined by Sherwood.9 It has been sealed into the façade of the great World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the world’s most visited museums. In his plays—​as in his political rhetoric—​Sherwood also sought to expand the knowledge and understanding of his audiences by taking them back to places and times that were made to look uncannily familiar. Jacoby’s book on American unreason is a decade old as I  write, and American political discourse has markedly degenerated in the intervening period, leading her to a further updated and revised edition of her text now titled The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies.10 Robert E. Sherwood would be appalled by the degeneration of contemporary American political discourse and the deceit practiced on generations largely unschooled in even the basics of American, let alone ancient, history. As I write, two plays currently running on Broadway are based on classical literature: Hadestown and Moulin Rouge both retell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice for modern audiences. As a reader of my manuscript for Routledge remarked: “Sherwood might be smiling from Olympus.”

Notes 1 Jacoby (2009: xiii). 2 Sherwood (1957a: 21). 3 See Richard (2008: 17). As Richard points out, the term grammar in the phrase grammar school refers to Greek and Latin grammar. English grammar was not taught in American grammar schools until after the Revolutionary War. 4 Goldhill (2002: 228–​29). 5 See Goldhill (2002: 217). 6 See Yeats as quoted in Holroyd (1997: 597). 7 See Booth (1988: 185). 8 See Jacoby (2009: 5). 9 See Wallace (2011: 175). Putting the finishing touches on this manuscript, I had occasion to visit the World War II Museum but could find no references to Sherwood among the exhibits. 10 See Jacoby (2018).

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156 Bibliography Harrison, C. (1898), The Well-​ Bred Girl in Society (1898), New  York and Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing and Doubleday & McClure. Harvard Alumni Association (1920), “The Hasty Pudding Show,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 22. Hastings, M. (2011), Inferno:  The World at War, 1939–​ 1945, New  York:  Alfred A. Knopf. Heiden, K. (1932] 1935), A History of National Socialism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Heine, H. (1856] 1962), “Die Götter im Exil,” Werke und Briefe, Vol. 7, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. Henderson, J. (1998–​2007), Aristophanes, Vols. 1–​5, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Henry, M. H. (1995), Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition, New York: Oxford University Press. Holland, T. (2015), Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar, New York: Doubleday. Holroyd, M. (1997), Bernard Shaw: The One-​Volume Definitive Edition, New York and London: W. W. Norton. Holmes, J. M. (2003), “Classical Blitzkrieg: The Untimely Modernity of Schlieffen’s Cannae Program,” The Journal of Military History (67): 7–​45. Holzer, H. and N. Garfinkle (2015), A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity, New York: Basic Books. Houck, D. W. and A. Kiewe (2003), FDR’s Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability, College Station: TAMU Press. Howard, J. G. (1929), Pheidias, New York: Macmillan. Hunter, R. L. (1985), The New Comedy of Greece and Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurwitz, N. (2014), A History of the American Musical Theatre: No Business Like It, New York: Routledge. Huxley, A. (1948), Ape and Essence: A Novel, New York: Harper. Huxley A. ([1932] 2005), Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, New York and London: HarperCollins. Jacoby, S. (2009), The Age of American Unreason, revised and updated edition, New York: Vintage Books. Jacoby, S. (2018), The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies, New  York: Random House. Jarvis, S. (2015), Death and Mr. Pickwick, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jenkins, H. (1992), What Makes Pistachio Nuts?:  Early Screen Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, New York: Columbia University Press. Kahn, C. (1981), Man’s Estate:  Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Kahn, R. (1999), A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ‘20s, New York: Harcourt. Koritz, A. (2009), Culture Makers:  Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s, Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lancel, S. (1998), Hannibal, Oxford: Blackwell. Larson, E. (2011), In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, New York: Crown. Lawrence, T. E. ([1922] 2011), Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. The Complete 1922 Text, Radford, VA: Wilder Publications.

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Bibliography 157 Leckie, R. (1996), Hannibal: The Novel, Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Levinson, S. O. (1927), The Outlawry of War: A Constructive Policy for World Peace, Chicago: Willett, Clark, and Colby. Leuchtenburg, W. E. (1958), The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–​ 1932, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, S. ([1935] 2005), It Can’t Happen Here, New York: Penguin Group. Lloyd-​Jones, H. (1982), Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. London, J. ([1908] 2013), The Iron Heel, New York: Wilshire Book Company. Lynch, M. (2013), Hitler, London and New York: Routledge. MacDonald, E. (2015), Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mann, T. ([1924] 1996), The Magic Mountain, trans. J. E. Woods, New York: Vintage. Marcus, L. (2007), The Tenth Muse:  Writing About Cinema in the Modern Period, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, T. R. (2016), Pericles:  A Biography in Context, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Martindale, C. (1993), Redeeming the Text:  Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meade, M. (1989), Dorothy Parker:  What Fresh Hell Is This?, New  York: Penguin Books. Meade, M. (2004), Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties, New York: Harcourt Books. Meade, M. (ed.) (2006), The Portable Dorothy Parker, Penguin Deluxe Edition, New York and London: Penguin Books. Mencken, H. L. (1919, 1920, 1922), Prejudices:  First, Second, and Third Series, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Meserve, W. J. (1970), Robert E. Sherwood: Reluctant Moralist, New York: Pegasus. Michaud, E. (2004), The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany trans. J. Lloyd, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Miles, R. (2010), Carthage Must Be Destroyed, New York: Viking. Mitgang, H. (2000), Once Upon a Time in New York: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age, New York: Free Press. Mommsen, T. ([1855] 1908), The History of Rome, Volume 2, trans. W. P. Dickson, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Moore, M. H. (2010), Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism 1933–​1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mordden, E. (2008), Ziegfeld:  The Man Who Invented Show Business, New  York: St. Martin’s Press. Mordden, E. (2010), The Guest List:  How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication—​ From the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote’s Ball, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Moulton, I. F. (2003), “Fat Knight, or What You Will:  Unimitable Falstaff,” in R. Dutton and J. E. Howard, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume III: The Comedies, Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Mowrer, E. A. (1939), Germany Puts the Clock Back, revised edition, New York: William Morrow. Murphy, B. (1987), American Realism and American Drama, 1880–​1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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158 Bibliography Murphy, J. J. (2011a), Murder Your Darlings:  An Algonquin Round Table Mystery, New York: Obsidian. Murphy, J. J. (2011b), You Might as Well Die:  An Algonquin Round Table Mystery, New York: Obsidian. Murray, G. (1920), Our Great War and the Great War of the Ancient Greeks, New York: T. Seltzer. Murray, G. (1929), The Ordeal of This Generation, New York and London: Harper & Brothers. Murray, G. (1933), Aristophanes: A Study, New York: Russell & Russell. Nagorski, A. (2012), Hitlerland:  American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, New York and London: Simon & Schuster. O’Connell, R. L. (2010), The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic, New York: Random House. Olson, L. (2013), Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II, New York: Random House. Patterson, O. (1991), Freedom. Volume I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, New York: Basic Books. Penzler, O. (ed.) (2009), The Vicious Circle: Mystery and Crime Stories by Members of the Algonquin Round Table, New York: Pegasus. Peters, M. (2003), Design for Living:  Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. A  Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Pettit, R. S. (2000), A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Postlewait, T. (1999), “The Hieroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post-​ Civil War to 1945,” in Wilmeth, D. B. and C. Bigsby, The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II: 1870–​1944, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabban, D. M. (1997), Free Speech in its Forgotten Years, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Rabel. R. (1997), Plot and Point of View in the Iliad, Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press. Ratner-​Rosenhagen, J. (2012), American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rawson, E. (1969), The Spartan Tradition in European Thought, Oxford: Clarendon  Press. Remarque, E. M. ([1928] 1982), All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. H. Wheen, New York: Ballantine Books. Reynolds, D. (2014), The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, New York and London: W. W. Norton. Richard, C. J. (2008), Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, Lanham and Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield. Roisman, J. (2011), Ancient Greece: From Homer to Alexander: The Evidence, trans. J. C. Yardley, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-​Blackwell. Roth, P. (2004), The Plot Against America, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Runyon, D. (2008), Guys and Dolls and Other Writings, New York: Penguin Books. Russell, B. (1930), The Conquest of Happiness, London: Liveright. Russell, B. (1945), A History of Western Philosophy, New York: Simon & Schuster. Russell, D. A. (1992), Dio Chrysostom Orations VII, XII, XXXVI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Bibliography 159 Saroyan, W. ([1939] 1983), The Time of Your Life, London and New  York: Bloomsbury. Sarris, A. (1998), “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet.” The American Talking Film. History and Memory, 1927–​1949, New York: Oxford University Press. Sassoon, S. (1930), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, New York: Coward, McCann. Saxonhouse, A. W. (2006), Free Speech and Democracy in Democratic Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlesinger, A. M., Jr. (1957), The Crisis of the Old Order:  The Age of Roosevelt, Volume 1, 1919-​1933, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Schlesinger, A. M., Jr. (1960), The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt, Volume 111, 1935-​1936, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Scobie, A. (1990), Hitler’s State Architecture:  The Impact of Classical Antiquity, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press. Segal, E. (2001), The Death of Comedy, Cambridge, MA and London:  Harvard University Press. Shakespeare, W. (2008 a), As You Like It, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, W. (2008 b), Henry IV, Part I, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, W. (2011), Richard II, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, J. (2014), Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now, New York: The Library of America. Shaw, B. (2000), Three Plays for Puritans, New York and London: Penguin Books. Shaw, B. (2004), Pygmalion and Three Other Plays, New  York:  Barnes and Noble Classics. Sherwood, R. (1927), The Road to Rome, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sherwood, R. (1928), The Queen’s Husband: A Comedy in Three Acts, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sherwood, R. (1936), Idiot’s Delight, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sherwood, R. (1939), Abe Lincoln in Illinois: A Play in Twelve Scenes, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sherwood, R. (1940), There Shall Be No Night, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sherwood, R. (1948), Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, New York: Harper Brothers. Sherwood, R. (1957a), “Blashfield Address by Robert E.  Sherwood,” American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Institute of Arts and Letters (7): 20–​25. Sherwood, R. (1957b), Small War on Murray Hill, New York: Dramatists Play Service. Shirer, W. L. (1959), The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, New York and London: Simon & Schuster. Shuman, R. B. (1964), Robert E. Sherwood, New York: Twayne Publishers. Silk, M. S. (2000), Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Slater, M. (1957), Three Pre-​ Surrealist Plays, Oxford and New  York:  Oxford University Press. Smith, R. H. (2005), OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Guilford: Lyons Press. Smith, G. (2010), Lady Macbeth in America:  From the Stage to the White House, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Snodgrass, J. (1888), Wit, Wisdom and Pathos:  Selections from the Prose of Heine, With a Few Pieces from the Book of Songs (1888), London: Alexander Gardner.

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160 Bibliography Sommerstein, A. H. (1987), Aristophanes: Birds, Oxford: Aris and Phillips. Sorabji, R. (2012), Gandhi and the Stoics:  Modern Experiments on Ancient Values, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spacks, P. M. (1995), Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Sprague, C. (2013), It Can Happen Here:  Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, Provincetown, MA: Chippewa Books. Stanford, A. (2010), The Broadway Murders:  Dorothy Parker Mysteries, New  York: Jenevacris Press. Stanford, A. (2011), Mystic Mah Jong:  Dorothy Parker Mysteries, New  York: Jenevacris Press. Steigmann-​Gall, R. (2004), The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–​ 1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steffens, L. (1904), The Shame of the Cities, New York: McClure and Phillips. Stevenson, C. L. (1944), Ethics and Language, New Haven and London:  Yale University Press. Stow, H. L. (1936), The Violation of the Dramatic Illusion in the Comedies of Aristophanes, private edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries. Svendsen, L. (2005), A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. J. Irons, London: Reaktion Books. Thompson, D. (1932), I Saw Hitler!, New York: Farrar and Reinhart. Thompson, E. M. (1879), Phidias and Other Poems, London: Remington. Thompson, M. (2016), Enough Said:  What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Trav S. D. (Stewart, D. T.) (2005), No Applause—​Just Throw Money, or The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Tuncel, Y. (2013), Agon in Nietzsche, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Ullrich, V. (2016), Hitler:  Ascent, 1899–​1939, trans. J. Chase, New  York:  Alfred A. Knopf. Urwand, B. (2013), The Collaboration:  Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vickers, M. (1997), Pericles on Stage: Political Comedy in Aristophanes’ Early Plays, Austin: University of Texas Press. Vidal, G. (1992), Screening History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallace, D. (2011), Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press. Waller, D. (2011), Wild Bill Donovan:  The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, New York and London: Free Press. Weinberg, G. L. (2010), Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–​1939: The Road to World War II, New York: Enigma Books. Wertheim, A. (2004), Staging the War: American Drama and World War II, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Whitmarsh, T. (2015), Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wick, S. (2011), The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilde, O. (2003), The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 5th edition, London: HarperCollins.

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Bibliography 161 Wilder, T. ([1939] 1998), Our Town: A Play in Three Acts, New York: Harper Perennial Classics. Wills, G. (1987), Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Wilson, J. D. (1943), The Fortunes of Falstaff, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Wodehouse, P. G. (1960), The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, New York and London: Simon & Schuster. Wodehouse, P. G. ([1923] 2012), Leave It to Psmith, New York: W. W. Norton. Woloch, A. (2003), The One vs. the Many:  Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Woodward, C. (2002), In Ruins:  A Journey through History, Art, and Literature, New York: Vintage. Woolf, V. ([1925] 2008), On Not Knowing Greek, London: Hesperus Press. Zagagi, N. (1995), The Comedy of Menander, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Unpublished Sherwood plays available on order from Houghton Library, Harvard University Sherwood, R. (1917), Barnum Was Right, RES b MS Am 1947, 1728: HHU. Sherwood, R. (1921), Barnum Was Right, RES b MS Am 1947, 1729: HHU. Sherwood, R. (1933), Acropolis, RES b MS Am 1947, 1723: HHU. Sherwood, R. (1947), The Twilight, RES b MS Am 1947, 1824: HHU.

Newspapers and magazine articles Harvard Alumni Bulletin (1920), “The Hasty Pudding Show,” 22: 662–​63. Harvard Crimson is available online at thecrimson.com. Sherwood, R. (1921–​28), “The Silent Drama,” Life. Sherwood, R. (1933), “Inaugural Parade,” Sunday Review of Literature (9): 461–​2. Sherwood, R. (1941), “The Dwelling Place of Wonder,” Theatre Arts (25): 120–​22. Waite, R. G. (2013), “Raise My Voice Against Intolerance,” New York History Review, October 20. Wise, S. (1933), “Jews Here Demand Washington Action,” New York Times. March 21.

Videos and CDs Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), [Film] Dir. J. Cromwell, USA: RKO Radio Pictures. The Animators. Silent Cartoons. Vol. 1. (2010), [Film], Manchester, NH: Looser Than Loose Publishing, Barnum Was Right (1926), [Film] Dir. R. Sherwood, USA: Mason Wadsworth. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), [Film] Dir. W.  Wyler, USA:  Samuel Goldwyn Company. The Frogs (Broadway Cast Recording) (2005), [CD] S.  Sondheim and B.  Shevelove, P.S. Classics. The Great Ziegfeld (1936), [Film] Dir. R. Leonard, USA: MGM. Hannibal (1959), [Film] Dirs. C. L. Braggalia and E. G. Ulmer, USA: Warner Brothers.

162

162 Bibliography Idiot’s Delight (1939), [Film] Dir. C. Brown, USA: Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer. Iolanthe (1989), [CD] W. S. Gilbert and A. Sullivan, Polygram Records. Jupiter’s Darling (1955), [Film] Dir. G. Sidney, USA: Metro-​Goldwyn-​Mayer. Roman Scandals (1933), [Film] Dir. F. Tuttle, USA: Samuel Goldwin Company. Show Business (1944), [Film] Dir. E. L. Martin, USA: RKO Pictures. To Be or Not To Be (1983), [Film] Dir. A. Johnson, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), [Film] Dir. J. Ford, USA: Twentieth Century Fox.

Index

Note: illustrations are denoted by italicised page numbers; notes by ‘n’ Abe Lincoln in Illinois: A Play in Twelve Scenes (1938) 1, 4, 9, 94, 127, 134–​9, 135, 139 Abe Lincoln in Illinois (film) 138 Academy Awards 6, 16, 144–​5 Acropolis (1933) 9, 47, 51–​2, 67, 77–​126, 79, 80, 81, 127, 131, 135, 137–​8, 140, 144 Adams, Franklin Pierce 47, 48 Aeschylus 27–​8, 130; Oresteia 50, 51 aesthetic factors 12, 13, 24, 105–​6 agōn (contest) 79, 89–​91, 105, 111, 137 Alcibiades 9, 47, 90–​105, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120 Alexander the Great 20, 28, 30 Algonquin Round Table (Vicious Circle) 3, 47–​50, 48, 127 Allen, Frederick Lewis 18, 22–​3 Alonso, Harriet Hyman 25, 52, 65, 134, 138 Alvin (Neil Simon) Theater 139–​40, 141, 142 The American Way (Kaufman and Hart) 128 Amytis (wife of Fabius Maximus) 8, 47, 54–​6, 57–​9, 60, 61–​2, 63, 66, 67, 68, 131 Anaxagoras 93, 94, 101, 104, 107–​8, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 136 Anderson, Maxwell 1, 6, 50, 51, 52, 57, 145; The Bad seed (1954) 51; The Wingless Victory (1936) 51; Winterset (1935) 51 anti-​Semitism 18, 83–​4, 85, 86, 87, 95, 128 Aphrodite 7, 145, 146 Apollinaire, G. 26

Apollo 25, 104 Ares 7, 145–​6 Aristophanes 3, 8, 12–​13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20–​1, 27, 36, 67; Acharnians 27; in Acropolis 93, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 111, 120; Birds 24, 29, 30, 32–​3; Clouds 26–​7; Frogs 30; Peace 27; Wasps 33 Aristophanes of Byzantium 13, 24 Aristotle 12–​13, 21, 79, 91 Aspasia 9, 78, 91, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102–​3, 104, 105–​11, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120–​1; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois 135–​6, 137; and There Shall Be No Night 9, 144 atheism 10n14, 114, 115, 143–​4 Athena 110, 111–​12 Athens 9, 12, 13, 56, 77, 83, 86; freedom of speech (parrhēsia) 13, 17; see also Acropolis (1933); Parthenon; Peloponnesian War Atkinson, Brooks 65, 135 Bad Luck (Dystychē) 131, 133 Barnum, P. T. 16, 28, 36 Barnum Was Right (1917) 3, 8, 12–​13, 14, 15, 16, 20–​1, 25, 36, 45, 67, 145; as Old Comedy 8, 12, 24, 26–​33, 67 Barnum Was Right (1920) 3, 8, 9, 14, 17, 19, 24, 35, 67; as New Comedy 8, 13, 14, 19, 23, 24, 33–​7, 67 “Barnum Was Right” (cartoon) 49 Beard, M. 44 Beevor, Anthony 95 Behrman, S. N. 1–​2, 25, 128 Belgium 44 Bell, R. H. 101

164 Index Benchley, Robert 46, 47, 48, 49 Berlin, Irving 47 Berlin, Isaiah 20 The Best Years of Our Lives (film) 6, 144–​5 Blashfield Address (1955) 68–​70 Blom, Philipp 21 Bloom, Harold 89 Bolt, Robert 145 Bonner, Paul 78, 106, 121 boredom 47, 56–​7, 58, 98–​9 Boston 14, 46, 59 Brandenburg, Ernest S. 4 Breslin, Jimmy 49 Britain 7, 17–​18, 21, 22, 23, 44, 46, 78, 85, 127, 145 Broadway 45, 49, 50, 56, 58, 73n72, 75n105, 126n159, 128, 151; and Sherwood 6, 8, 37, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 65, 127, 134, 139–​40 Broadway revue 14–​16, 24, 49 Broun, Heywood 47, 48, 134 Brown, John Mason 3, 52, 65, 77, 86 Bryson, Bill 18 Burckhardt, Jacob 89, 91 burlesque 14–​16, 24 Bury the Dead (Shaw) 128 Caesar, Julius 64, 66, 67 Campania 43, 64–​5 Canada 1, 45, 46, 52 Cannae, battle of (216 bc) 8, 43–​4, 54, 59, 60–​1, 64, 65 Cantor, Eddie 15, 16, 118 capitalism 22, 86, 87 caricatures, political 18, 21 Carpenter, Charles A. 145 Carthage 8, 43, 44; see also The Road to Rome (1927) cartoons 49–​50 Case, Frank 48 censorship 18, 19 chance (Tychē)/​coincidence 34, 36, 130, 131 chaos 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, 99, 115 Chaplin, Charlie 140 Chesterton, G. K. 66 Churchill, Winston 83 Cleon 78, 86, 93–​5, 96, 97, 99, 100–​2, 103, 104–​5, 106, 109–​10, 113–​14, 115, 116, 117–​18, 136, 143 Clift, Montgomery 140, 142 Cold War 6

The Coming American Fascism: The Crisis of Capitalism (Lawrence) 87 communism 6, 18, 46, 87 Connelly, Marc 47, 48, 78, 80, 82 Cooper, Gladys 78, 82 Coover, Robert 131 Coughlin, Fr. Charles 87 Coward, Noël 140 Croly, Herbert 21 Crowninshield, Frank 46, 48 cummings, e. e. 48 dance 27, 32, 127, 132 democracy 23, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 113, 114, 115, 117; Athenian 9, 13, 19, 77, 78, 83, 86, 91–​2, 93, 111, 113, 114, 144; Hitler as danger to 9, 83; and Sherwood 77–​8, 79–​83, 88–​9 Democratic Party 3, 4, 5 Dennis, Lawrence 87, 89 Deval, Jacques 128 DeVries, Peter 130 Dewey, John 63–​4 “Die Götter im Exil” (Heine) 7 Dinesen, Thomas 45 Dio Chrysostom 112 Dionysus 50 discontinuity in plot development 27, 29–​30 disguise and recognition 32, 34, 36, 129, 131 Doherty, Thomas 134 Donovan, “Wild Bill” 5 Dos Passos, John 48 Douglas, Ann 58, 59, 60, 64 Eksteins, Modris 70 Eliot, T. S. 98 Emmons, Earl H. 67 Ennius 44 Epicureanism 20, 23, 24 equality 21, 22, 78–​9, 90, 108, 134 Erksine, John 6 Espionage Act (1917) 18 Euripides: Hippolytus 50; Medea 50, 51 Everitt, Anthony 105 Fabia (mother of Fabius) 56, 57–​8, 59–​60, 67 Fabian Society 44 Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator, Quintus 43–​4; in Jupiter’s Darling

Index  165 (film) 68; in The Road to Rome 8, 56, 57, 59, 60–​1, 62–​3, 65 Falstaff (Henry IV) 97, 100, 101 fascism 9, 84, 86–​7, 96, 128, 138 Ferber, Edna 47, 48, 50 film 24, 28; Barnum Was Right (1917) as 26–​7, 28–​9; Barnum Was Right (1920) as 34–​7; Sherwood on 24–​6, 27, 33, 50 Finan, Christopher M. 18, 19 Finland 9, 139, 141, 144 Finley, M. I. 20 First Punic War 65 Fish, Stanley 6 Fisher, H. A. L. 70 Folk, Joe 21 Fonda, Henry 138, 141 Fontanne, Lynn 48, 127, 129, 133, 140, 142, 145 Ford, Ford Madox 56, 63 Ford, Henry 68–​70, 85 Ford, John 138 France 44, 45, 46, 85, 129, 130 freedom 17–​24, 84, 89, 134; civic freedom 19–​24; freedom of speech (parrhēsia) 13, 17–​19; personal freedom 19, 20, 21–​2 Freudian psychology 50, 51, 59, 112 Gable, Clark 133, 134 Gaiety Theatre, Broadway 56 Gaines, J. R. 49 Ganymede 7, 8, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 145 Garber, Marjorie 100 Garfinkle, Norton 4 Garrett, Oliver H. P. 128 The Gentle People (Shaw) 128 Germany 3, 4, 83–​5, 87, 113–​14, 128; see also Hitler, Adolf; World War II The Ghost of Yankee Doodle (Howard) 128 Girard, René 108, 109, 110 gods, Greek 6, 7, 9, 24, 27, 28, 29, 33, 112, 115, 116, 145; see also individual gods Goebbels, Joseph 114 Goldberg, David J. 18 Goodwin, Doris Kearns 21, 138 Gordon, Ruth 138 Göring, Herman 96 Graves, Robert 8, 70 Great Depression 86, 87, 118 The Great Ziegfeld (film) 16 Green, Peter 19–​20

Greenstreet, Sydney 127, 140, 142 Gross, Robert F. 129 Guderian, Heinz 44 guerrilla warfare 44 Gunsaulus, Frank W. 112, 113 Gunther, John 85 Hadestown 151 Hal, Prince (in Henry IV) 100 Hannibal 7, 8, 43–​5, 52, 54–​6, 57, 59, 60–​3, 64–​5, 66, 67–​8 Hannibal (book) 67 Hannibal (film) 67 Hansberry, Lorraine 145 Harding, Warren 22, 23, 89 Hart, Moss 50, 128 Harvard 3, 12, 14, 16, 35, 46 The Harvard Crimson 13–​14 Hasdrubal 43, 44, 62 Hasty Pudding Theatricals (Harvard) 3, 12, 14, 35 Hearst, William Randolph 21 Heiden, Konrad 94 Heine, Heinrich 7 Hellman, Lillian 50 Hemingway, Ernest 48 Henry, Madeline H. 105 Heracles 100 Herndon, Billy (character in Abe Lincoln in Illinois) 134, 137–​8 high poetry 27, 31 Hipparche (courtesan in Acropolis) 101, 110, 112, 118–​19, 120 Hitler, Adolf 3, 9, 83, 84, 85–​6, 87, 88–​9, 94–​6, 113–​14, 128, 144 Holzer, Harold 4 Homer 4, 79, 112, 117, 133 Hopkins, Harry 4 Hotspur (in Henry IV) 100 Howard, John Galen 112 Howard, Sidney 52, 128 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (film) 50 Hunter, Ian 78, 82 Huxley, Aldous 22, 96, 146 Hyperbolus (businessman in Acropolis) 101, 104, 109–​10, 113, 118–​20 Idiot’s Delight (1936) 1, 9, 52, 127–​34, 132, 133, 137–​8 individualism 21, 22, 92, 113 Irene (character in Idiot’s Delight) 127, 129–​30, 131, 132

166 Index It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis) 84, 128 Italy 52, 84, 129, 130, 133–​4 Johnson, Hiram 46 jokes 27, 31, 125n118, 136 Judgment Day (Rice) 128 Juno 29, 32 Jupiter 8, 26, 27, 28–​9, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 67; see also  Zeus Jupiter’s Darling (film) 45, 68, 69 Kahn, Otto 47 Kaltenborn, H. V. 85 Kaufman, George S. 25, 47, 48, 49, 50, 118, 128 Kellogg-​Briand Pact  64 Kennedy, John F. 85 Kennedy, Joseph 85 Kops, Bernard 145 Lancel, S. 64 Lardner, Ring 47, 49 Lawrence, T. E. 8, 70 Leckie, Ross 67 Lessing, Doris 145 Levinson, Salmon Oliver 63–​4 Lewis, Sinclair 84–​5, 128 Life (magazine) 3, 24–​5, 33, 49 Lincoln, Abraham 4, 9, 77, 94, 138; Young Mr. Lincoln (film) 138–​9, 140; see also Abe Lincoln in Illinois: A Play in Twelve Scenes (1938) Lindbergh, Charles 4, 23, 52, 85–​6, 87, 96 Livy 43, 52, 62, 63, 65 London, Jack 84 Long, Huey 87, 88–​9 Lorelei (Deval) 128 Lunt, Alfred 1, 48, 127, 129, 133, 140, 142, 145 Lyric Theatre, London 79, 80, 81, 82 Lyrith (half-​mortal daughter of Aphrodite) 7, 145 MacArthur, Douglas 5 Macedonia 19–​20 Maharbal 43, 62, 63, 65 Malta 4 Mann, Thomas 130–​1 Marcus Aurelius 13, 17, 24 marriage 34, 36–​7, 67, 131, 135–​6 Martindale, Charles 7 Marx, Harpo and Groucho 47

masks 50 Massey, Raymond 78, 82, 94, 134, 135, 138, 139 McCarthy, Desmond 65 Menander 3, 8, 13, 19–​20, 23, 130; Aspis 34; Misoumenos 34; Perikeiromenē 34; Shield 131 Mercer, David 145 Meserve, Walter J. 58 Michaud, Erich 114 Middle Comedy 13 Miles, Richard 65 Miller, Gilbert 65 mimesis 13, 24 Moffitt, John C. 128 Mommsen, T. 52, 64 Montgomery, Field Marshall Bernard 65 Moschio (artist in Acropolis) 98, 103–​4 Moulin Rouge 151 Mowrer, Edgar A. 85 Murphy, Brenda 50–​1, 129 Murray, Gilbert 17–​18, 19, 20–​1, 22, 23 Mussolini, Benito 84, 87, 134 Nagorski, A. 85 National Socialism 9, 52, 84, 95 New Comedy 3, 12, 13, 19, 20, 24, 37, 67, 129, 130, 131; Barnum Was Right (1920) 8, 13, 14, 19, 23, 24, 33–​7, 67; evolution from Old Comedy 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 24, 26; see also Menander New Deal 87 “New Freedom” 21, 22 New York Times 1, 21 The New Yorker 47, 56–​7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 50, 89 nuclear age 6, 7, 9, 144, 145, 146 O’Connell, Robert L. 43, 44, 45, 65 Odet, Clifford 128 Oedipus 51, 68, 115, 118, 140, 143 Oedipus Rex 50, 57, 116 Old Comedy 3, 12–​13, 14–​15, 37; Barnum Was Right (1917) 8, 12, 24, 26–​33, 67; evolution to New Comedy 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 24, 26; see also Aristophanes Olivier, Laurence 127 Olson, Lynne 4, 96 Olympus, Mount 6–​7, 13, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 112, 116; see also gods, Greek one-​liners  27, 32 The One vs. the Many (Woloch) 90

Index  167 O’Neill, Eugene 50–​1, 59, 83; Ah, Wilderness! (1932) 51; Desire Under the Elms (1924) 50; The Great God Brown (1926) 50; Lazarus Laughed (1926) 50; A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) 51; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) 50–​1, 59; The Personal Equation (1915) 64 Orpheus 117, 151 “other,” the 109 Our Town (1938) 128 pacifism 3, 7, 10n9, 46, 49, 65, 70, 133, 138 Palmer, A. Mitchell 18 Parker, Dorothy 46, 47, 48, 49, 58, 66 Parthenon 77, 89, 91, 96, 106; building of 9, 86, 91–​2, 93, 96, 97–​8, 99, 102, 103–​4, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111–​12, 117, 136 Pater, Walter 7 Patterson, Orlando 19 Peloponnesian War 9, 12, 13, 23, 28, 83, 110, 132; and World War I 12, 17–​19, 22, 23–​4, 33; and World War II 94 Pericles 77, 86, 137, 138; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois 135–​6; in Acropolis 9, 92–​3, 94, 96–​7, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107–​8, 114, 117–​18, 120, 135–​6; Funeral Oration of 17, 19, 117–​18, 140, 144; and There Shall Be No Night 140, 144 persuasive definition 114, 116 Phais (Athenian courtesan in love with Alcibiades) 93 Pheidias 9, 78, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100–​1, 104–​5, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111–​18, 131–​3, 136, 143; and Abe Lincoln in Illinois 9, 137–​8; and Idiot’s Delight 131–​3; and There Shall Be No Night 140–​1, 143–​4 Philip of Macedon 19–​20 philosophy, ancient 20, 23, 24, 26–​7, 102, 107, 109, 116; see also individual philosophers/​philosophies Plato 101, 116; Alcibiades I 92, 93; Apology 117; Crito 116–​17; Hippias Major 112 Plautus 13, 34; Amphitryon 36, 37; Menaechmi 34 Playwrights’ Company 1–​2 Pliny the Elder 112 Plotinus 112

Plutarch 136; Life of Alcibiades 92–​3 Plymouth Theatre, Broadway 134, 135 poetry 27, 31, 51, 89, 150 Poland 144 polis (Greek city-​state) 17, 20–​1 Polybius 62 Poore, Charles 3 Priestley, J. B. 145 The Private Life of Helen of Troy (film) 67 propaganda 4–​5, 6, 114 Prudentius, Psychomachia 100 Pulitzer Prizes 1, 6, 9, 79–​83, 127, 144 puns 27, 32 Quintilian 112 racism 18, 58, 73n72, 94–​5; see also anti-​Semitism Radcliffe, Cyril John, 1st Viscount Radcliffe 1 Rain From Heaven (Behrman) 128 Rameses the Twelfth 33–​4, 36–​7 Rawson, Elizabeth 95–​6 realist drama 8, 9, 13, 24, 26, 33, 45, 51–​2, 54, 66, 129, 130, 131 Rebenich, Stephan 95 rebirth/​rejuvenation 33, 36, 102 resurrection 34, 36 Rice, Elmer 50, 128 The Road to Rome (1927) 7, 8, 37, 43–​76, 53, 55, 131, 134; and George Bernard Shaw 65–​7; influence of 45, 67–​8; and New York City 56–​65 Rogers, Will 3 Roisman, Joseph 95 Roman Scandals (film) 118 Rome 5; ancient 13, 26, 118; see also The Road to Rome (1927) Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (Sherwood) 6, 144, 145 Roosevelt, Eleanor 140 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 4–​5, 21–​2, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88–​9, 96–​7, 117–​18, 134, 144 Roosevelt, Theodore 21, 22 Rosenberg, Alfred 95 Rosenman, Sam 4 Ross, Harold 47 Round Table, Algonquin (Vicious Circle) 3, 47–​50, 48, 127 Runyon, Damon 47, 48 Russell, Bertrand 56, 99

168 Index Saroyan, William 128 Sassoon, Siegfried 70 satire 18, 49, 51, 58, 65; in Acropolis 78, 102; in Aristophanes 12, 19, 26–​7; in Barnum Was Right (1917) 12, 21, 25, 30, 33; in Barnum Was Right (1920) 13, 14, 19, 33 scapegoating 107–​11, 116, 120, 137, 138 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. 21, 88, 96 Schlieffen, Alfred von 44 Scipio, Publius Cornelius (Africanus) 44, 59, 60–​1, 62–​3, 64, 65 Sears, S. P. 12, 16, 32, 35 Second Punic War 8, 43 Segal, Erich 14, 24, 37, 66, 67, 130 Seneca the Elder 112 Seneca the Younger 116 Seymour, Robert 18, 21 Shakespeare, William 12, 30, 37, 54, 65, 99, 100, 146; Hamlet 98; Henry IV, Part I 97, 100–​1; Richard II 54; Troilus and Cressida 108–​9; As You Like It 31 Shaw, George Bernard 1, 8, 37, 45, 52, 65–​7; Caesar and Cleopatra 67; Captain Brassbound’s Conversion 66–​7; The Doctor’s Dilemma 65, 66; Pygmalion 66; Saint Joan 65, 66 Shaw, Irwin 128 Sherwood, Robert E. 2, 48; character of 1–​2, 61; life of 1, 3–​6, 45–​51; pacifism of 3, 10n9, 46, 49, 70, 138; prescience regarding World War II 3–​4, 49, 78, 83, 86, 87, 88, 93–​4, 95, 96, 138, 139; role in World War I 3, 23, 45–​6, 52, 101; role in World War II 4–​5; see also individual plays Shirer, William L. 84, 86 Show Business (film) 15 Shubert Theatre, Broadway 127, 132, 133 Sicily 44, 114, 121 Silk, M. S. 30, 31, 32 slapstick 27, 31 slavery: in America 134; in the ancient world 20, 57, 59–​60, 68 Smith, Richard Harris 5 Smith, Truman 85 Socrates 17, 26–​7, 28, 92, 93, 101, 116–​ 17; in Acropolis 92, 93, 99–​100, 101, 103, 104, 106–​7, 116, 117, 120–​1 soliloquy 51, 54, 99 song 16, 27, 32, 118–​20, 127, 132 Soviet Union 9 Spain 86

Sparta 9, 83, 92, 93, 94, 101–​2, 107, 109, 110, 115, 117; as Nazi Germany 86, 93–​4, 95–​6, 113; see also Peloponnesian War Stalling, Laurence 52 Steffens, Lincoln 21 Stevenson, Adlai 5 Stevenson, Charles L. 114 Stoicism 20, 23, 24 Sturges, Preston 50 surrealism 12, 26, 27, 30, 33 television 52 Terence 13 Theatre Guild 65, 78 There Shall Be No Night (1940) 1, 9, 116, 127, 139–​46, 141, 142 Third Punic War 44 Thompson, Dorothy 83, 84–​5 Thompson, E. M. 112, 113 Thompson, Lydia 15 Thucydides 17, 19, 93, 113, 136 Till the Day I Die (Odet) 128 The Time of Your Life (Saroyan) 128–​9 Todd, Mary (after, Lincoln, wife of Abraham) 9, 136–​9 tragedy 50, 51, 129, 131 transcendence 50–​1, 130 Trav S. D. 16 The Twilight (1947) 6, 7, 9, 26, 145–​6 Tychē (chance/​coincidence) 34, 36, 129, 130 Valkonen, Kaarlo (character in There Shall Be No Night) 140, 141–​4 Van, Harry (character in Idiot’s Delight) 9, 127, 129–​33, 134, 137–​8 Vanity Fair (magazine) 3, 46, 49 vaudeville 15–​16, 24, 49 Venus 29 Vergil, Aeneid 7 Wagner, Richard 88–​9, 102, 130 Walker, Jimmy 64 Waller, Douglas 5 Waltz in Goose-​Step (Garrett) 128 Warburg, James 5 Watts, Richard 25 Wells, H. G. 52 Wertheim, Albert 128–​9 What Price Glory? (Anderson and Stalling) 52 White, William Allen 3

Index  169 Whorf, Richard 127, 140, 142 Wilde, Oscar 47, 67 Wilder, Thornton 128 Wilson, Woodrow 21 Woloch, Alex 90 Woodward, Christopher 7 Woolf, Virginia 7 Woollcott, Alexander 47, 48, 58 World War I 8, 14, 22, 23, 48, 49, 61, 70, 131; and the Peloponnesian War 12, 17–​19, 22, 23–​4, 33; Sherwood’s role in 3, 23, 45–​6, 52, 101; veterans’ perceptions of 8, 45, 70

World War II 44, 70, 78, 83–​4, 128, 130, 131, 144; enemy within 83, 91, 93; Sherwood’s prescience regarding 3–​4, 49, 78, 83, 86, 87, 88, 93–​4, 95, 96, 138, 139; Sherwood’s role in 4–​5 Xenophon, Memorabilia 100 Young Mr. Lincoln (film) 138–​9, 140 Zama, battle of (202 bc) 44, 65 Zeus 29, 37, 112; see also Jupiter Ziegfeld, Florenz (“Flo”) 16