The Transformations of Tragedy (Studies in Religion and the Arts, 16) 9004416536, 9789004416536

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The Transformations of Tragedy

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Studies in Religion and the Arts Editorial Board James Najarian (Boston College) Eric Ziolkowski (Lafayette College)

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sart $)((-&
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The Transformations of Tragedy Christian Influences from Early Modern to Modern Edited by

Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning Erik Tonning Jolyon Mitchell

leiden | boston $)((-&
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Cover illustration: Golgotha by Bob Hanf. Print (h. 347mm × w. 425mm). F. G. Waller Bequest, Amsterdam, 1937. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, catalogue no. RP-P-1937-1828. Public domain. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tonning, Fionnuala O’Neill, editor. | Tonning, Erik, editor. | Mitchell, Jolyon P., editor. Title: The transformations of tragedy : Christian influences from early modern to modern / edited by Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning, Erik Tonning, Joylon Mitchell. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Studies in religion and the arts, 1877–3192 ; volume 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019033808 (print) | ISBN 978004416536 (hardback) | ISBN 978004416543 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: European drama (Tragedy)--History and criticism. | Christianity and literature. Classification: LCC PN1898.E85 T73 2019 (print) | LCC PN1898.E85 (ebook) | DDC 809.2/512--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033808 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033809

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1877-3192 ISBN 978-90-04-41653-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41654-3 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Acknowledgements  VII List of Illustrations  VIII Notes on Contributors  x Introduction  1 Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning, Erik Tonning and Jolyon Mitchell

Part 1 Early Modernity, Tragedy, and Christianity 1

Early Modern Tragedy and the Mystery Plays: New Material Evidence  23 Beatrice Groves

2

Christianity, Staging and Ambivalence: Tragedy as Via Negativa in Shakespeare and After  44 Stuart Sillars

3

Tragedy and Iconoclasm  67 Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning

4

Pity and Neo-Stoicism in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi  95 Adrian Streete

5

Reformation Theology and the Christianization of Tragedy: Neoclassicism, Epistemology and Tragic Spectacle in the Christus Patiens Drama  116 Giles Waller

Part 2 Modernity, Tragedy, and Christianity 6

The Grave of Greek Tragedy: Hegel Reading Oedipus at Colonus  143 Peter Svare Valeur

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vi

Contents

7

Nietzsche’s Crossings: Nihilism, Tragedy, Christianity  159 Ronan McDonald

8

‘What Festivals of Atonement, What Sacred Games We have to Invent’ (Friedrich Nietzsche): Modernist Tragedy after the Death of God  176 Olga Taxidou

9

Modernism, Tragedy, and Christianity: Beckett and the Theatre of Racine  199 Erik Tonning

Part 3 Tragedy and Christianity in Transformation: Towards the Present 10

‘Is this the Promised End?’ Shakespearean Tragedy and a Christian Tragic Theology for Today  219 Paul S. Fiddes

11

Transforming the Massacre of the Innocents through Literature, Art, Theatre and Film  243 Jolyon Mitchell and Linzy Brady

12

Tragedy, Recognition and the War on Terror  295 Jennifer Wallace Afterword: Thoughts on Fidelity  315 Rowan Williams Index  327

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Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank each of the contributors for their hard work and fine essays. They also are thankful to the entire team at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in the University of Edinburgh for helping to host and co-fund the 2015 symposium that became the basis for this volume. This was one of the late Professor Susan Manning seminars, partly supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Thanks to Professor Jo Shaw, Dr Peta Freestone, Anthea Taylor and Donald Ferguson, as well as more recently Professor Steve Yearley and Dr Ben Fletcher Watson, and other colleagues at the University of Edinburgh including Professor Penny Fielding, Professor Greg Walker, Dr Andrew Taylor, Dr Alison Jack, Dr Linzy Brady, and Dr Linden Bickett for all their support and encouragements. Thanks also to the ‘Modernism and Christianity’ project, the Bergen Research Foundation at the University of Bergen, and the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) at the University of Edinburgh, especially the Binks Trust (particularly Jo and Alison Elliot) and the Petra Trusts, for contributing additional support for the initial discussions and the subsequent publication. We are particularly grateful to Wassim Rustom for his careful and fine copyediting for this volume as part of his Doctoral duty work in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen. We are grateful to the entire team at Brill, including our editor Tessa Schild, the editorial board of the Studies in Religion and the Arts Series, the anonymous reviewers, and the production team. Finally, thanks to our respective families for their patience and kindnesses as we landed this book.

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Illustrations The authors acknowledge the following institutions for their kind permission to reproduce images. In all other cases, images are in the public domain and available for fair use. 2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 11.1

11.2

11.3

11.4

11.5

Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund (‘The Wilton Diptych’), c. 1395–1399). © The National Gallery, London  47 Memorial to Lady Joan Bardolph, St Mary’s Dennington, Suffolk. Image courtesy of Simon Knott  50 Deposition of Christ, from Imytaciō of crist, Wynkyn de Worde, 1515? Author’s collection  54 Macready as King Lear, 1850. Author’s collection  56 Detail from ‘Statue of the Dead Christ’, c. 1500–1520. Photograph courtesy of the Mercers’ Company ©Mark Heathcote  78 Giotto (Giotto di Bondone, c. 1266–1336), Scenes from the Life of Christ: Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1303–6). Padua, Scrovegni Chapel. Giotto’s frescoes in the Capella Scrovegni (or Arena Chapel) in Padua include a comparatively restrained rendition of the Massacre. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence  250 Giovanni Pisano, (c. 1248–1314), Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1301–1310) Pulpit – detail, Pisa, Cathedral. Pisano also depicted this scene in the pulpit at San Andrea in Pistoia (1301). © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence  253 Matteo di Giovanni (c. 1430–1495), Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1482). Siena, Palazzo Pubblico. Matteo di Giovanni’s Massacre of the Innocents was made for the church of Sant’ Agostino in Siena in c. 1482. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence  255 Raphael, (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483–1520), The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1511–12). Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest (Szépművészeti Múzeum). Drawing, pen, ink on paper, 262 × 400 mm. Inv.: 2195. Florence Raphael’s drawing of the Massacre was preserved by his printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi (1480–c. 1534). © 2019. The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest / Scala  257 Brueghel the Elder, Pieter (c.1525–1569), Massacre of the Innocents (c.1565–67). This ‘censored’ version, is currently housed in the King’s Dressing Room, Windsor Castle. © 2018 Royal Collection Trust/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II  259

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Illustrations

ix

11.6

School of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Massacre of the Innocents, formerly attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and dated at 1636–1638. Oil on wood panel. © 2019. Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource NY/Scala, Florence  261 11.7 Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665), The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1625–32, probably 1628–29). Musee Conce, Chantilly. © 2019. Photo Fine Art Images/ Heritage Images/Scala, Florence  263 11.8 Otto Dix (1891–1961), Massacre of the Innocents, from Matthäus Evangelium (1960)  265 11.9 York Minister Mystery Plays Image, ‘Soldiers, mothers, Mephistophles, babies’, 2010, York. Performed by teenagers from St Peter’s School, York. © The National Centre for Early Music, York  276 11.10 William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Triumph of the Innocents (1883–4). Oil paint on canvas, frame: 2208 × 3175 × 125 mm, © 2019. Tate N03334  289

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Notes on Contributors Linzy Brady is an Honorary Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (Department of English) at the University of Sydney. She has published in the field of teacher development and professional learning, the history of Shakespeare in education from 1850 in England and Australia, and the Bible in performance. Her latest publications also include editions of Shakespeare’s plays for the Cambridge School Shakespeare series. Paul S. Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on the relation between literature and theology, including The Promised End. Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Blackwell 2000) and Seeing the World and Knowing God (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is coeditor of David Jones: A Christian Modernist? (Brill, 2018), and is completing a book on the intertextuality of Shakespeare with theology. Beatrice Groves is Fellow and Research Lecturer in Renaissance English at Trinity College, Oxford. She has published monographs and many articles on early modern literature, including The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1592–1604 (Oxford University Press, 2007). Ronan McDonald is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, where he holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies. He has published monographs, articles and edited collections on Irish literature, the history of criticism and the value of the humanities. Jolyon Mitchell is a Professor who specialises in Religion, Violence and Peacebuilding, and Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) at the University of Edinburgh. President of the UK’s National Association for Theology and Religious Studies (TRS UK) from 2012–2018, he directs a number of interdisciplinary research projects (several on peacebuilding and the arts). His publications

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Notes on Contributors

xi

include: Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (Routledge, 2012) and Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Peacebuilding and the Arts (Palgrave, 2020). Stuart Sillars is Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively on the relations between literature and visual art, especially in relation to Shakespeare. His most recent book is Shakespeare Seen (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Adrian Streete Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Religion at the University of Glasgow. He has published extensively on early modern literature, and his most recent book is Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies and the University of Edinburgh and has been a Visiting Professor at New York University since 2015 (Spring Semester). She has written monographs and edited books on Modernism and Performance and on the modernist reception of Greek tragedy. Recently she co-edited (with V. Kolocotroni) The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and is completing a book on Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance. Erik Tonning is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of Modernism and Christianity (Palgrave, 2014) and Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama (Peter Lang, 2007), and the co-editor of Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse (Brill, 2015) and David Jones: A Christian Modernist? (Brill, 2018). Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Renaissance Literature at the University of Agder, Norway. She has published on revenge tragedy, on geopolitics and genre in Shakespeare, and on the critical reception of the ShakespeareJonson relationship. She is currently completing a monograph on early modern tragedy and Reformation iconoclasm.

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xii

Notes on Contributors

Peter Svare Valeur is a Postdoctoral researcher in Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen. He has published many articles on European Romanticism as well as on Modernist poetry. Jennifer Wallace is Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. Her publications include Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Palgrave, 1997), The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Tragedy since 9/11: Reading a World Out of Joint (Bloomsbury, 2019) and her edited volume A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2019). Giles Waller is a Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor (with Kevin Taylor) of Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature, and Tragic Theory (Ashgate, 2011), and the author of several articles and book chapters on tragedy and theology, and on the theology of Martin Luther. He is completing a monograph on Tragic Theology. Rowan Williams (Baron Williams of Oystermouth PC FBA FRSL FLSW) is a Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian and poet. Williams was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan of the Province of Canterbury and Primate of All England, offices he held from December 2002 to December 2012, and was previously Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales. Williams spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. Williams stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury on 31 December 2012 to take up the position of Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in January 2013. Later in 2013 he was also appointed Chancellor of the University of South Wales. He is the author of over 30 books; one of his most recent is The Tragic Imagination (OUP, 2016).

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Introduction Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning, Erik Tonning and Jolyon Mitchell 1

Historicizing ‘Tragedy and Christianity’

Tragedy as a dramatic art form is a subject of enduring popular and scholarly interest. Within the Western tradition it has experienced three great historical flowerings: classical, early modern, and modern. Classical tragedy, of course, considerably predates Christianity. Early modern tragedy and modern tragedy, however, both emerged alongside, and engage with, periods of remarkable upheaval within the cultural, theological, and political history of Christianity: first following the European Reformation, and secondly with the emergence of modernism following the slow and piecemeal ‘death of God’ during the long nineteenth century.1 Focusing on these latter two periods, this book offers a systematic and detailed study arguing for Christianity’s creative influence upon the development of experimental new forms of tragic drama in the West. These two periods both reveal a Christian culture in crisis, radically transforming itself in response to the stresses and revolutions of modernity. It is thus a key contention of this volume that the dialogue between tragedy and modernity (which has received considerable recent attention) is inseparable from a dialogue with Christianity and the Christian past.2 This claim is rooted in the parallel ‘turns to religion’ over the last twenty years within both Early Modern and Modernist scholarship, where scholars have begun to treat late medieval Catholicism, as well as mid-nineteenth to twentieth century Christianity, as on-going, dynamic, inescapable influences on cultural creativity, rather than as something simply left behind or overcome. The field of 1 See, for example, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 2010), and J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five NineteenthCentury Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Some scholars divide modernity into three periods: early modern (c. 1500–1789); classical modernity (c. 1789–1914), and late or high modernity (1914–1989 or Present). See Peter Osborne, ‘Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category: Notes on the Dialectics of Differential Historical Time’, in Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1992). 2 Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard, eds., Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); see also the four essays in the section on ‘Tragedy and Modernity’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 197–284.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_002  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_00 6543_0022

2

O’neill Tonning, Tonning and Mitchell

interdisciplinary and theoretical tragedy studies has yet to fully recognise the implications of this changed emphasis. One difficulty in bringing about such recognition is the contested relationship between tragedy and Christianity within this field. Scholars of tragedy too often assume that Christianity, with its message of hope and redemption, has little to say to tragedy. Modern tragedy and tragic theory are sometimes felt to begin at the place where Christianity, confronted with the obscene fact of inexplicable human suffering and agony, discovers its own limits and falls silent. In the past, influential tragic theorists including Friedrich Nietzsche and George Steiner have argued at length that Christianity is not only inherently alien to tragic drama but actively hostile; and indeed that it has been instrumental in the supposed ‘demise’ of tragedy as a pillar of Western civilization.3 In fact, putting the origin of this debate back into its historical context offers one apt illustration of how the ‘turn to religion’ within a field like Modernism Studies can challenge received ideas. Nietzsche specifically sought to revive tragedy as an antidote to a decadent, bourgeois, soporific, and finally nihilistic modernity that he held Christianity responsible for instigating. His idea of tragedy, which he explicitly conceived of as an ‘anti-Christian counter-doctrine’, thus became a tonic concocted to cure and revitalise this diseased modernity.4 For Nietzsche, the project of returning to Greek origins was not just an antiquarian exercise, it reached back before the advent of Christianity’s influence to provide new possibilities for the modern era to become rooted in an alternative cultural history. The contemporary revival of tragedy (effected, for the young Nietzsche, via Wagner) thus pointed forward, towards a regenerated, post-Christian culture of the future. As Jeffrey Perl has shown, an ongoing agon with Christian thought and culture was fundamental to the influential drive towards a ‘Second Renaissance’ within literary modernism: The central question faced by the modernists was, historically speaking, What is the meaning of the middle period? or, put in its more usual form, What is Christianity? What purpose did it or does it serve, and has it a 3 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated and edited by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2000) and George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 4 For Nietzsche’s account of his ‘anti-Christian’ project, see his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ in The Birth of Tragedy, pp. 9–10. See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 45–61 and pp. 104–107 for a view of Nietzsche as prototypical of modernist ‘revitalisation movements’. For a sympathetic critique of Griffin that discusses Christianity (and Nietzsche) in relation to modernism more directly, see Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (London: Palgrave, 2014), Chapter 1.

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Introduction

3

future? […] In general, the modernists attempt to deconstruct Christianity and its cosmology at the same time that they attempt to construct a post-Christian cosmology based on pre-Christian ones.5 In other words, theorisations of tragedy as ‘inherently’ anti-Christian are often rooted in distinctively modernist ideas, which can be historically situated as rhetorical gestures within a continuing cultural and religious battle of the midto-late nineteenth century and beyond. So far from being irrelevant to tragedy, then, Christianity turns out to be a formative influence upon the very terms of modern discussions of the topic. Similarly, the ‘turn to religion’ in Early Modern Studies has led to widespread reassessment of the continuing influence of late medieval religious culture throughout the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth. This has had profound implications for scholarship on early modern theatre, including tragedy. Many scholars are now keenly aware that the rediscovery of and experimentation with classical modes of tragedy were necessarily filtered through established traditions of late medieval theatre. Take, for instance, the centrality of the wounded body to English Renaissance tragedy, and the discovery of its violent power when displayed as tragic visual spectacle. This forms the sharpest possible contrast with classical tragedy, where the wounded body is vividly described, often by a messenger, rather than visually displayed. The emphasis on visual spectacle in English Renaissance tragedy is inherited straight from late medieval Corpus Christi plays, which do not shrink from displaying the graphic torture and murder of Christ or the Massacre of the Infants, and it represents an entirely new departure in the history of tragic theatre. Furthermore, these lingering late medieval traditions were also being re-shaped under the immense pressure of the Reformation in its many guises: its theological debates, its new crises of doubt and scepticism, and the sweeping and sometimes culturally traumatic changes to visual and material culture, such as the iconoclastic assaults upon devotional images in English churches, that followed in its wake.6 An emergent new body of scholarship showing how these religious concerns migrated into the ostensibly secular plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is transforming the way we understand 5 Jeffrey Perl, The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 13. 6 Of course, in parts of continental Europe, the Counter-Reformation would also contribute to new ways of interpreting, presenting, and portraying different forms of tragedy. These developments are beyond the scope of this volume; but see for instance Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?: Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Chapter 5 (Counter-Reformation Tragedy).

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4

O’neill Tonning, Tonning and Mitchell

both early modern tragic drama and the historical periodization of literature itself. Together they reveal the Reformation as a watershed moment for tragedy; a crucible of late medieval religious and theatrical tradition, cultural loss, and radical new theological and philosophical ideas, from which dramatists drew inspiration to generate new and experimental modes of tragic art. The essays in this book are thus rooted in two very different historical epochs: early modern and modern(ist). Read together as part of the broader framework of this book, however, they enter into dialogue with larger theoretical and interdisciplinary questions about the history of Christianity as a productive and shaping force upon the development of Western tragedy. The proper theorisation of tragedy has always called for a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach: the willingness to examine works within their specific historical and performance contexts, alongside an approach which plots these historical studies as part of the broader history and recurring problematics of tragedy as a genre. Accordingly, the realisation that Christianity, far from stifling creativity in tragic modes of writing, has been a demonstrably potent force in the historical development of tragedy makes it possible for literary scholars and theorists of tragedy to engage in fresh ways with more theologically-oriented work on the intersection of tragedy and Christianity. Despite a recent attempt by a reviewer to confine the work of Rowan Williams and other theological critics of tragedy strictly to ‘the corpus of Christian writing on Western literature [which] will feature on theological bibliographies alongside works by a sub-set of other philosophically minded Christians’, there is in fact a rich field here of formative tensions and creative overlaps to explore.7 The 2011 collection Christian Theology and Tragedy notes a number of common concerns including ‘the experience of suffering, death and loss, questions over fate, freedom and agency, sacrifice, guilt, innocence, the limits of human understanding, redemption and catharsis’, arguing along with Donald MacKinnon that ‘tragedy is vital to a properly disciplined Christian theology, and that, by the same token, Christian theology can be a way of vouchsafing the true significance of tragedy’.8 Thus the theologians can help by sharpening the

7 Edith Hall, ‘Rowan Williams’s Tragic Mistake’. Review of Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 17 November 2016. Published in December 2016 issue of Prospect: The Leading Magazine of Ideas. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ magazine/rowan-williamss-tragic-mistake. See also Rowan Williams’s response: ‘Tragedy and Redemption: A Response to Edith Hall’, 19 December 2016. https://www.prospect magazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/tragedy-and-redemption-a-response-to-edith-hall -rowan-williams. 8 Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller, eds., Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 1. $)((-&
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Introduction

5

critic’s sense of common, and contested, ground.9 It is true that Christian theological discourse can sometimes run the risk of appropriating tragedy, thereby losing historical specificity and sometimes blunting the impact of individual works and performances. Equally, though, literary critics of tragedy have at times failed fully to acknowledge the fact that two of the most transformative and experimental periods in the development of tragedy are saturated with Christian influences and creative tensions. Properly interdisciplinary conversations about tragedy and Christianity therefore need to acknowledge more extensively not only these shared conceptual concerns but also the important role of Christian religious history and discourse in shaping the conditions in which tragedy has flourished. Ultimately, to reject Christianity’s contribution to tragedy is to risk ending up critically confused, reaching in the end the logical extreme espoused by George Steiner of rejecting almost all post-classical tragedy, including much of Shakespeare’s, as somehow ‘not tragic enough’.10 This volume contends instead that the history and problematics of tragedy as a genre cannot be coherently theorised without fully registering the impact of different aspects of and traditions within Christianity in transition towards modernity. Understanding the intertwining relations between Christianity and tragedy is also inevitably complexified by historical events, such as the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of the ‘Great War’ in the twentieth century. In Life After Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War writers, many based at Worcester cathedral in England, explore ‘the tragedy of the conflict from a theological perspective’. Drawing on the life and work of the British army chaplain Geoffrey 9

10

See Katherine T. Brueck, The Redemption of Tragedy: The Literary Vision of Simone Weil (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. Volume iv. The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), pp. 101–154, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), Part iib (‘Elements of the Dramatic’), and ‘Tragedy and Christian Faith’, in Explorations in Theology. Volume 3: Creator Spirit, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993); Donald MacKinnon, ‘Atonement and Tragedy’, reprinted in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (London: Lutterworth, 1968), and The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), especially pp. 114–145; John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 18–24; David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 373–394; and Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See George Steiner, ‘“Tragedy”, Reconsidered’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 41: ‘So far as I can make out, we have only one Shakespearean text, almost certainly written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton, which is uncompromisingly tragic: it is that erratic, volcanic bloc, Timon of Athens’. Christianity is blamed for the demise of ‘absolute tragedy’ further down the same page. $)((-&
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Studdert Kennedy, the authors explore ‘how God … might be spoken of in the midst and wake of tragedy’.11 Life After Tragedy is an apposite title, representing an attempt to reflect on living through and in the aftermath of a war that claimed around 19 million lives, with over 20 million wounded. Many writers and theologians were significantly influenced by their own experiences in the First World War trenches or observations of this or other cataclysmic wars.12 These ‘Dangerous Memories’ of experiencing actual wastelands informed how tragedy was considered or represented, turning expectations on their heads as theologian Johan Baptist Metz writes: ‘The memory of human suffering forces us to look at the public theatrum mundi not merely from the standpoint of the successful and the established, but from the conquered and the victims’.13 Tracing the transformations of tragedy thus includes looking at painful pasts and harrowing representations in new ways, while also bearing in mind that they emerge from diverse religious perspectives, traditions, and histories. While it is important to recognise the differences between and within Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions in relation to tragedy, a comparative analysis is not one of the aims of this book, nor is exploring the significant role of other religious traditions influencing understandings of tragedy (although one or two of the chapters do touch on the role of non-Christian traditions, see for example Olga Taxidou’s discussion of Hellenism and Primitivism in the work of the Cambridge Ritualists). It is also beyond the scope of this volume to delve into the world of Ancient Greek Tragedy, religion, and ‘the practices of the worship of Dionysus’.14 Neither is there space to explore, for instance, how George Steiner’s and Gillian Rose’s Jewish backgrounds informed their work, nor to analyse how ‘The Tragedy of Karbala’ is still regularly re-enacted by Shi’a Muslims in Iran and beyond.15 In aiming for a more limited scope, the editors hope that the parallels between the Early Modern and modern(ist) cases 11 12 13

14 15

See Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, eds., Life After Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War Evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2018), p. xvii. See, for example, Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War 1 Changed Religion for Ever (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2014). Consider also how J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and theologian Paul Tillich’s experience of trench warfare informed their later writing. See Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (London: Burns and Oates, 1980 [1977]), p. 105. Metz goes on to observe: ‘This recalls the function of the court fool in the past: he represented an alternative (rejected, vanquished or oppressed) to his master’s policy’. See Rebecca Bushnell, ed., A Companion to Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), especially p. 3 and pp. 5–38. See Jolyon Mitchell, Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (London: Routledge, 2012), especially Chapter 2, ‘Celebrating Martyrdom’.

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7

Introduction

emerge more clearly as a historically specific basis for exploring the ongoing creative tensions at work between that shape-shifting pair, ‘tragedy and Christianity’, across the whole modern period and towards the present. 2

‘Tragedy and Christianity’ in the Early Modern Period

The first section of this volume centres on Early Modern studies, where a sharper realisation of the continuities between late medieval and early modern culture, and of the ongoing trauma of religious change, has been spearheaded by revisionist histories of the Reformation such as Eamon Duffy’s landmark The Stripping of the Altars (1992). Extending Duffy’s insights into the cultural field, major studies by, among others, Helen Cooper, Beatrice Groves, Sarah Beckwith, Curtis Perry, and John Watkins have rejected rigid notions of periodization to demonstrate the pervasive continuities between late medieval theatre, culture, and religious practice, and the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.16 Furthermore, scholars including Stephen Greenblatt, Huston Diehl, Michael O’Connell, Alison Shell, Brian Cummings, and Gillian Woods have demonstrated how early modern drama was pervasively engaged by Reformation doctrinal and cultural changes, from the abolition of purgatory and changing beliefs in the sacraments, to the transformation in visual culture and the legacy of religious iconoclasm.17 The relevance of these scholarly shifts to our understanding of tragedy in the period can be suggested under three broad headings. Firstly, a realisation of the impact of medieval religious culture and drama upon the fundamental assumptions or grammar of what a ‘play’ is, and upon the material culture, 16

17

Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012); Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds., Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), and Sarah Beckwith and James Simpson, eds., Premodern Shakespeare, Special Issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010). Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010); Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Gillian Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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visual language, and rhetoric that sustained play-making, play-going, and performance. Secondly, a heightened realisation of the ongoing tensions between cultural memories of medieval Catholicism and the new Reformation language and imagery, leading to a specifically theatrical thematization of religious crisis that also encompasses intense doubt and scepticism as a subject for tragedy. Thirdly, a reconsideration of the influence of Greek and Roman sources on early modern tragedy, in that these were profoundly reconfigured and appropriated by the religious assumptions, dramatic traditions and ongoing theological controversies of a specific Christian culture in transition. The essays in this volume extend the debate in all these fields. Under the first heading, Helen Cooper’s study Shakespeare and the Medieval World has shown how the generic mixtures and lack of classical decorum of the early modern stage – with its premise that ‘multitudes, space and time’18 can be staged and enacted with the aid of an audience’s ‘imaginative complicity’19 – would be unimaginable outside a theatrical culture shaped by the great medieval cycle plays and moralities. In this volume, Beatrice Groves adds further weight to Cooper’s argument through her exploration of the material culture of early modern theatre (Ch. 1). For Groves, the physical continuities between medieval and early modern staging practices through richly symbolic objects reveal how early modern tragedy is an ‘inheritor of the dramaturgy of the mystery plays’. This is a key source of the unique dramatic power of early modern tragedy, which ‘responds to the raw emotional power of the drama of the Passion. And it is often at the moments of supreme suffering that the connection with medieval dramaturgy is at its most palpable’. Stuart Sillars’s contribution (Ch. 2) focuses on visual allusions to Christian rite, belief, and iconography in Shakespearean tragedy: a grammar of signs and gestures (such as rites of kneeling in Richard ii and Hamlet, or funerary monuments and the pietà in Othello and King Lear) that are both recognisable and unsettling in their richly ‘dynamic imprecision’ or ‘generative ambivalence’. His essay also points forward to a comparable modern ambiguity about Christian echoes in Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, and J. M Synge’s Riders to the Sea. Groves and Sillars discover both medieval and Reformation contextual echoes, thereby reminding us that emphasising the medieval in early modern drama is simultaneously to sharpen our sense of the ongoing religious crisis brought about by the Reformation. Indeed, this crisis itself becomes potentially innovative and productive subject matter for tragedy, through the impact of political-theological revolution, anxiety over disjunction and rupture with 18 19

Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, p. 43. Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, p. 97. $)((-&
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Introduction

9

the past, and new forms of potentially corrosive sceptical doubt.20 One topic that naturally generated a theatrical response was Reformation iconoclasm. As Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning’s essay recalls (Ch. 3), the commercial theatre, even if divorced from its medieval grounding in religious ritual that implicated the spectator specifically as a Christian believer, was yet accused by the English Puritan anti-theatricalists of falsely claiming to deliver an experience of ‘real presence’ on the stage through mere pretence. This continuing anxiety about the power of images to mediate any form of contact with the divine thus impinged directly on playwriting and performance. Tonning’s reading of Timon of Athens as a tragedy that mourns the lost power of art through a broken image of Eucharistic communion, where flesh turns into stone, suggests the complexity of the imaginative clash of liturgical and commercial spectacle on the early modern stage. This also indicates a broader lesson about the relationship between tragedy, Christianity, and the emergence of early modernity in this period. As Tonning argues, tragedy’s response to the Reformation is crucially to cast it as ‘a problem of representation’. The third way in which a reconsideration of early modern religious culture affects our understanding of tragedy in this period is through the realisation that appropriations of Classical sources were no mere ‘revivals’, but were necessarily filtered through Christian thought and imagery, and yoked to pressing theological, cultural, and political concerns. In this volume, two essays by Adrian Streete (Ch. 4) and Giles Waller (Ch. 5) explore distinctive mixtures of the Christian and the Classical in tragic form. For Streete, John Webster’s savage Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi is a searching examination of the value of pity versus control of the passions, explored via the ‘interface between Christian and neo-Stoic discussions of the emotion’. Pity, on this reading, is ‘mimetically dangerous’, and the Duchess’s final enactment of constancy offers the audience an ‘exemplary neo-Stoical self’ that does not embrace persecution as a form of tragic ennoblement but instead affirms such immovability as a form of political resistance to tyranny. Waller’s essay examines Hugo Grotius’ widely circulated Latin version of the Passion play Christus Patiens (1608, 20

It is important to emphasize that resulting dramatic thematizations often do not fall neatly along confessional divides. Whether we read them as ‘uniquely Protestant’ (Diehl), as imaginatively ‘unreformed’ (Woods), as expressions of the ‘pervasive anxiety’ of religious and cultural change (O’Connell) or as sceptical dramas ambivalently mourning the felt inadequacy of older forms of belief (Greenblatt), critics have become increasingly sensitive to what Greenblatt calls the ‘tragic potential’ and Diehl the ‘rupture’ and ‘disintegrative and disturbing aspects of religion’ as a ‘source of stress in English history at this moment’. See Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, p. 5; Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions, pp. 1–4; O´Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, p. 12; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 240. $)((-&
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O’neill Tonning, Tonning and Mitchell

translated into English by George Sandys in 1640). Maintaining a strict observance of Aristotle’s ‘unity of time’, the play remains circumscribed within twenty-four hours and ends on Good Friday, so that the risen Christ remains hauntingly absent from the stage. In contrast with those scholars (such as Cooper and Groves, above) who focus on the power of the wounded body in early modern tragedy, and its medieval inheritance, Waller argues that ‘the Christianization of classical and neoclassical dramaturgy can be seen to be differently, but no less affectingly powerful, precisely in the haunting absence of these wounded bodies’. Streete’s and Waller’s contributions together provide an acute re-examination of pity, horror, and spectacle as elements of the Christian-Classical compound in early modern drama, demonstrating conclusively some of the theatrically generative possibilities arising from the encounter between neo-classical tragedy and Reformation theology. 3

‘Tragedy and Christianity’: Modernism beyond the ‘Death of God’

While early modern commercial theatre could provide a liberating space for practical experiments in tragic form that baffled contemporary theorists of tragedy, from the late nineteenth century onwards theorisation itself has often acted as a driving force for generic experimentation and innovative performance practices. The list of theorist-practitioners is extensive: and whether arguing for a more hieratic, mystical tragedy (W.B. Yeats), a democratic tragedy (Arthur Miller), a neo-Christian tragedy (T.S. Eliot), or for a rejection of tragedy itself as a bourgeois, deceptive form (Bertolt Brecht), or alternatively as grotesquely comic in its overassertive heroism (Samuel Beckett), it is clear that a creative contestation of tragic form has itself been a fundamental source of renewal in modern theatre. And of course, the practitioners are themselves aware of the existence of a formidable and sophisticated body of analysis, with thinkers like G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud at the helm. The point made before in relation to Nietzsche therefore bears repeating, and can in fact be generalised: arguably, all modernist discussions of tragedy are indelibly shaped around various kinds of ongoing, creative tension with Christianity. Whenever tragedy is theorised in this period, the question of how to assess the Christian past, and whether Christianity has any viable future, is never far away. Of course, such epochal thinking stems from a religious crisis that was no less severe than that of the Reformation. Whether characterised in terms of J. Hillis Miller’s ‘disappearance of God’ (a widening gap or withdrawal),21 21

Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God. $)((-&
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Introduction

11

or through Peter Berger’s stress on the breakdown of the ‘sacred canopy’ of religious and social order (fuelling anomie),22 or via Charles Taylor’s more nuanced account of the multiplication of competing religious and ethical alternatives (as opposed to simplistic ‘loss-of-faith’ stories) within late modernity,23 the recurring note here is doubt, tension, conflict, and the search for some form of future renewal. Yet as scholars of modernism such as Stephen Schloesser, Pericles Lewis, Michael Bell, Leon Surette, Suzanne Hobson, Roger Griffin, and Erik Tonning have demonstrated over the past few decades, it is no longer possible to construe this crisis as a straightforward ‘secularisation narrative’, from faith to doubt to secular scepticism.24 On the contrary, modernism was fuelled by various religious impulses and replacement religions. Furthermore, Christianity itself remained an inescapable presence, both for those modernists seeking to somehow overcome it, and for those who appropriated or converted to it in order to advance some version of cultural and spiritual revitalisation. The residually Christian culture of the post-nineteenth century West, then, has created fertile ground for experimentation in tragic form through motivating both theorisation and practice. Yet this volume is the first to explicitly address this creative interaction between the reconfigurations and reinventions of modern tragedy, on the one hand, and the ongoing impact of Christianity, on the other. Modern theorisations of tragedy begin from G.W.F. Hegel, but it is seldom fully recognised how concerned this thinker was with prefigurations of Christianity (linked to modernity) within the Greek corpus. Peter Valeur’s essay (Ch. 6) for the first time brings together Hegel’s scattered references to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, under the headings of undoing/forgetting the past, mourning, and the grave. Hegel was the first to invoke the ‘death of God’, and Valeur traces the resonances of the ancient Greek cult of graves, Christ’s empty tomb, and burial in the syncretic, museum-like Pantheon in Rome, while interpreting Hegel’s philosophy of tragic art as itself an ambivalent form of mourning for that death. Nihilism is the stage beyond such mourning, and Ronan McDonald’s essay (Ch. 7) offers an original reading of the intersections of tragedy, Christianity, and nihilism in Nietzsche’s work. McDonald traces the ‘self-negations’ of both 22 23 24

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (London: Palgrave, 2011); Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism; and Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity. $)((-&
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tragic and nihilistic views: how the tragic doubles into the aesthetic/valuable, and the nihilistic into the ascetic/renunciatory, while linking this with Christian traditions (the via negativa and apophatic theology) emphasising the unknowability of God. For McDonald, Nietzsche’s philosophy is ultimately haunted by the Cross, as the perpetual opposite or mirror-image into which both his readings of tragedy and nihilism always threaten to collapse. Olga Taxidou’s essay (Ch. 8) explores a complementary aspect of Nietzsche as inspirer of the Cambridge Ritualists and, in the modernist dramas of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and the Greek translations by Ezra Pound and H.D., the catalyst for a ‘heady fusion of Christianity and Greek tragedy’. The ‘death of God’ was followed in modernism by a fascination with the potential revitalisation offered by the ‘savage God’, and Taxidou analyses a range of those sometimes unholy and blasphemous alliances that bring together Classicism and Christianity in ways that help create a specifically modernist theatricality. Similarly, as Erik Tonning’s essay (Ch. 9) shows, Samuel Beckett’s ambivalent engagement with tragedy and tragic theory was shadowed by Christian concepts of sin and redemption. His earliest definition, drawing on Schopenhauer, calls tragedy the statement of an ‘expiation’ of the ‘original sin of having been born’. Beckett’s exemplary tragic dramatist was thus the Jansenist Jean Racine, whose work, for Beckett, staged a divine condemnation of human desire as such. Yet Racine’s characters achieve expiation: their final clarity about their own state may point towards redemption. For Beckett, such clarity and hope were unacceptable, and his rejection of an achieved expiation is the basis for his conscious attempt to go ‘beyond’ tragedy, first in Waiting for Godot and later (with many Racinian echoes) in Play. While that ‘beyond’ verges on indifference and nihilism, Beckett’s continuing ethical revulsion with Christian theodicy is nonetheless what ensures that suffering remains acute and significant in these plays. 4

Tragedy and Christianity in Transformation: Towards the Present

The third section of this volume offers a series of soundings of the ongoing dialogue between tragedy and Christianity towards the present. The capacity – or otherwise – of both tragedy and Christianity to adequately recognise suffering becomes an ever more acute question in light of the genocides and catastrophes of the twentieth century, and the resurgence of sectarian terror and apocalyptic fundamentalisms in the present century. Beckett’s stark vision offers a starting-point for reflection here, as his tortured, confined and endlessly interrogated figures in Play – almost-already $)((-&
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Introduction

13

mere ash in their urns – evoke a distinctly post-Holocaust version of Dante’s Inferno. In his radio talk ‘Capital of the Ruins’, a report from his work with the Irish Red Cross in the devastated city of St. Lô in late 1945, he argued that only the ‘time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’ could give ‘an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again’.25 Central to Beckett’s critique of both tragedy and Christianity is that neither goes far enough in recognising and contemplating humanity in ruins. Nazism had precisely tried to sanitize and expel the ‘degenerate’: a cancer or poison was to be eradicated from the Volkskörper, whether by burning paintings or Jewish bodies. Already in 1937, eagerly in search of ‘degenerate’ paintings in museum cellars during his German trip, Beckett noted in his diary his visceral distaste for the ‘NS gospel’: ‘the expressions “historical necessity” and “Germanic destiny” start the vomit moving upwards’.26 For Beckett, German nationalism with its imagery of a ‘new dawn’ for the Volk had exposed the potential grotesqueness and sacrificial underbelly of all narratives of redemption. By contrast, an authentic ‘fidelity to failure’27 requires steadfastness in rejecting all false redemptions or renewals of order, whether cosmic, socio-political or personal. Measured against this radical criterion, both tragedy and Christianity ultimately fall short in Beckett’s reading. However, if we step back to consider the genealogy of Beckett’s uncompromising identification with the position of the victim, his work can itself be seen as emphatically post-Christian. As René Girard has argued, the very idea of sympathy for the sacrificial victim is biblical and, in its developed form, distinctively Christian, from the ‘suffering servant’ of Isaiah to the crucified man-God of the New Testament.28 Anthropologically, this represents a radical departure from the archaic sacred, where a scapegoat victim is unregretfully (often festively) sacrificed for the sake of community cohesion. For Girard, this is done to suppress or contain a crisis of imitative-competitive (‘mimetic’) desire that might otherwise perpetuate a disintegrative cycle of violence and revenge. Nevertheless, the figure of Christ unmasks and critiques this victimizing 25 26 27 28

Samuel Beckett, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, in The Complete Short Prose, edited by S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 278. Samuel Beckett, ‘German diary’ entries, 3 March 1937 and 15 January, 1937, quoted in Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 86–87. Samuel Beckett, ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1999), p. 145. See especially René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972), translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Continuum, 2003).

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mechanism at the basis of human society, in that the peace Christ’s cross offers his followers is one that claims to transcend the false sacred of collective sacrificial violence. But as Scott Cowdell’s recent study René Girard and Secular Modernity points out, this unmasking itself plants the seed of a desacralized modernity in which ‘sacred protection is dwindling away and violence is less reliably held in check’.29 The ‘secular’ here names a condition in which mimetic desire finds no outlet that is socially cohesive in the old way, since a plurality of competing worldviews proliferates endlessly, and all the gods are doubted. Secular modernity thus releases ever new cycles of violence through its failing attempts to invent substitutes for the gods: an insight that applies to the totalitarian and genocidal political religions30 of the twentieth century such as Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism, no less than to our contemporary clash of a ruthless global consumer capitalism versus resurgent religious and political fundamentalisms that both imitate and seek to destroy the system of substitute desires that postmodern capitalism generates.31 For Girard, both tragedy and Christianity share an emphasis on unflinching recognition of the victim. Where tragedy exposes and analyses collective violence and its scapegoating mechanism, Christianity actually reconfigures the divine itself in the image of victimhood. From this point of view, Beckett’s ‘fidelity to failure’ seems ultimately in alignment with this imperative of recognition, while also offering a useful challenge and corrective to superficial reassertions of heroic virtue or redemptive order. Moreover, this insight can provide tools with which to confront the bewildering variety of postmodern violent mimetic desire. When – and how – do Christianity and tragedy help us in recognising the victim, in confronting and really processing and assimilating failure? This question resonates through the three essays of this section, as well as in the Afterword by Rowan Williams. In drawing on tragedy as a source of insight for contemporary Christian theology, Paul Fiddes is determined to confront scepticism about tidy theodicies head-on, even to the point of arguing that ‘there is eternally a cross in the heart of God’. His essay (Ch. 10) thus poses a forceful challenge to the Steinerian assumption that a story of forgiveness and transformation is inherently un-tragic. Fiddes proposes his own revision of Donald MacKinnon’s idea of a Christian ‘tragic theology’, based on the positive model of Shakespearean rather than 29 30 31

Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), p. 57. See Emilio Gentile, ‘Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics – A Critical Survey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6:1 (2005): pp. 19–32. See Chapters 4 (‘Modern Institutions and Violence’) and 5 (‘War, Terror, Apocalypse’) in Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity for a suggestive analysis of the relevance of Girardian insights to the contemporary world. $)((-&
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Introduction

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Greek drama. Readers of this volume will recognise Fiddes’s emphasis on consolation in Shakespearean tragedy not as ‘a metaphysical explanation for evil and suffering, but the simple affirmation of human values that death cannot destroy’, such as forgiveness in the face of moral frailty. Yet a confrontation with the cross, no less than with the end of a tragedy like King Lear, still reaffirms ‘all the ambiguity of tragedy: we are left with an open question, “Is this the promised end?”’ Fiddes’s argument may here suggest a key insight about the sub-genre of those tragedies that are creatively transformed by their encounter with Christianity: they thrive on such ambiguities and endure that open question. If contemporary Christian theology can find in tragedy a source of insight and challenge, so too can political tragedy find itself reinterpreted through different kinds of artistic expression. This is the insight that informs Jolyon Mitchell and Linzy Brady’s essay (Ch. 11), which explores how a wide range of portrayals of the Massacre of the Innocents adapted for painting and literature, theatre and film, can become ‘like a mirror to the context out of which they are produced’. Spanning several centuries of art and theatre, from the medieval Corpus Christi plays to contemporary revivals in theatre and film, the essay shows how this poignant and powerful narrative has routinely been used to bear witness to wartime killings and child massacres from the slaughter of women and children during the siege of Otranto in 1481 right through to World War Two, with the most recent example being the death of the three-year-old refugee Aylan Kurdi in 2015. Mitchell and Brady show how representations of the narrative vary: some appear to be reticent, leaving the violence offstage or outside the frame, reflecting ‘an understandable desire to turn away from the horror and tragedy’, others, like Mark Dornford-May’s politically-engaged Son of Man (2006) show Jesus refusing ‘to escape the world of bloodshed and injustice’: ‘He says, “This is my world,” and fully enters in to its suffering and violence’. The interplay between contemporary political tragedy, Christianity and war is also central to the final essay of the collection. The insight from Modernism Studies that a continuing creative confrontation with Christianity remains indispensable to understanding the modernist revolution in both arts and politics has gained new purchase in light of the more recent ‘post-secular’ return of religion in public life.32 Following on from this, the contemporary relevance of Christianity to tragedy is suggested not least by the so-called War on

32

See for example Peter Berger, ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’ in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). $)((-&
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Terror and the related rise of Islamist fundamentalism, a violent ideology which casts itself in an ongoing heroic struggle with blasphemy in a heretical Christian or post-Christian West. In her essay (Ch. 12), Jennifer Wallace argues that whereas ‘At the end of the twentieth century, it was a much-repeated commonplace to consider both tragedy and religion as anachronistic concepts … since 2001, religion has become the ostensible premise behind the clash of cultures which constitute the War on Terror and an appetite for tragedy, both the revival of classical tragedy on the stage and the generation of new forms of tragic representation, has been re-awakened’. Wallace is concerned with the function of ‘recognition’, a key Aristotelian concept which has become a cornerstone not only of tragic theory but of a great deal of post-Holocaust theological, philosophical, and political thought concerning the way we relate to the Other and his or her suffering. If tragic drama has traditionally revealed to us ‘the degree to which we both do not want to recognize or acknowledge aspects of ourselves and we do not want to put ourselves in a vulnerable position of shared vulnerability and reciprocity’ then it faces new challenges in the age of modern military technologies which allow war to take place remotely, on the other side of a screen, disrupting and distorting forms of recognition between friend and foe. Analysing two recent dramas about the War on Terror, the film American Sniper and the prize-winning play Grounded, Wallace argues that ‘the War on Terror, both because of its technological developments and because of the nature of its ideology and discourse … is producing new forms of tragedy, new ways of thinking about recognition, responsibility, pity and fear, and therefore new forms of religious thinking’. This volume concludes with an Afterword by Rowan Williams which takes Beckett’s ‘fidelity to failure’ as its starting-point and probes the subtle ways in which such fidelity can be betrayed or distorted, while also insisting that tragedy and Christianity share a concern with witnessing and recognition that still calls for language, for images, for narrative. As Gillian Rose’s well-known essay on the Holocaust suggests, there are any number of ways to sentimentalise or appropriate atrocity. In light of this, Williams asks how we can avoid either ‘appropriating suffering to the self-interest of the observing ego or dissolving the particularity of suffering into a general edifying pattern’. For Williams, both tragedy and Christianity test the limits of recognition and in doing so pose a challenge to the ego’s complacency, namely ‘what will upset and finally dissolve that security in such a way that a truly disturbed and selfscrutinising response to the suffering of others is made more possible’. As such, they remain not just historically and thematically interconnected, but also still able to unsettle and transform our capacity for attention to wounded humanity. $)((-&
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Introduction

17

Wounded and grieving human forms fill the picture on the front cover of this book: Golgotha (1937), by the Jewish artist Bob Hanf. In it, the mix of spiky curved lines and human figures draw the eye towards the central figure fixed on a symmetrical wooden cross. This familiar crucified shape, with a long history of representation, is surrounded by light and then by lines cutting through space. The angles of the other two crucified forms are part of an encircling movement which is continued on the left by a female spectator’s outstretched arm. She reaches towards the suffering, as another female figure raises her hand to cover part of her face. The male watcher on the right, with a beard and an angular face, holds his arm back in a contorted gesture. The suffering of the three figures on the crosses appears to provoke different kinds of grieving, questioning or shock from the three spectators. This print, found in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, neither sentimentalises nor appropriates atrocity. Instead it captures different, ambiguous responses to suffering. This is reflected in the life and death of the artist, Bob Hanf (1894–1944), who printed Golgotha seven years before his death in Auschwitz on 30 September 1944.33 Born in Amsterdam and brought up in Germany, Hanf was a talented and versatile painter, writer, musician, and award-winning composer.34 Later described as one of the first ‘anti-fascist artists’ in the Netherlands, his haunting music was silenced and his expressionist art banned during the Nazi occupation.35 It would not be until the 1960s that some of his drawings were displayed and the 1990s that his compositions were performed again.36 Golgotha stands out among his artistic work for its very explicit treatment of suffering and grief. Hanf’s Golgotha is a very different kind of crucifixion from the better known White Crucifixion (1938) by Marc Chagall (1887–1985), which explicitly depicts Jewish persecutions and Christ as a Jewish martyr. Hanf’s

33 34 35

36

See R. Fuks-Mansfeld (ed.), Joden in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw. Een biografisch woordenboek (Jews in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century. A biographical dictionary) (Utrecht: Spectrum, 2007), pp. 124–125. See Elinor Pameijer, ‘Bob Hanf: Painter, Writer, Musician’, from Forbidden Music Regained, https://www.forbiddenmusicregained.org/search/composer/id/100026. See Wim van der Beek, et al, Bob Hanf 1894–1944, veelzijdig kunstenaar (Bob Hanf 1894– 1944, versatile artist) (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007). This three part book include discussions by an art historian (Wim van der Beek) about Hanf’s visual work, a literature scholar (Niels Bokhove) about his poems, novels, and scripts, and a musicologist (Huib Ramaer) about his compositions. More recently, exhibitions have begun to bring together Hanf’s music and art. For example, in 2007, a number of his drawings were displayed and a series of concerts featuring his music were played at a synagogue in Groningen.

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18

O’neill Tonning, Tonning and Mitchell

own Jewish background, and his involvement in the resistance, meant that he himself had to go into hiding during the Second World War, where he wrote a vivid poem under a pseudonym entitled Mijmeringen over de Nachtzijde des levens, ‘Musings about the Dark Side of Life’. In it he captures the atmosphere of Amsterdam during the German occupation. For example, he describes the reflections in the canals as ‘wavering light imprisoned’, ‘like dead people turned to stone’. The people in his Golgotha print are far from turned into stone. The movement of the observers is inscribed in the picture, which draws the eye towards the muted agony in the background. The centre of the image is in darkness, even if there is light above. Golgotha challenges tidy theodicies. But tragedy itself resists watertight definitions and neat resolutions. The same is true of the dramas, pictures and other texts considered through this book. As we underlined earlier, the chapters that follow trace a range of theologically creative influences upon attempts to represent tragedy in the West. Like the picture on the front of this book these were often experimental, coming from unexpected sources, presented in unexpected ways. As we shall see these evolving theatrical, literary, and visual experiments frequently both enrich and interrogate the genre of tragedy itself. Bibliography Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord. Volume iv: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989). Beckett, Samuel. ‘The Capital of the Ruins’. In The Complete Short Prose, edited by S.E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995). Beckett, Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1999). Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Beckwith, Sarah and James Simpson, eds. Premodern Shakespeare. Special Issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40, no. 1 (2010). Beek, Wim van der, Bokhove, Niels and Ramaer, Huib, Bob Hanf 1894–1944, veelzijdig kunstenaar (Bob Hanf 1894–1944, versatile artist) (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007). Berger, Peter. ‘The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview’. In The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter Berger (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967). Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 2010). $)((-&
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Introduction

19

Billings, Joshua and Miriam Leonard, eds. Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Brierley, Michael W. and Georgina A. Byrne, eds. Life After Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War Evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2018). Brueck, Katherine T. The Redemption of Tragedy: The Literary Vision of Simone Weil (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). Bushnell, Rebecca, ed. A Companion to Tragedy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Cooper, Helen. Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2012). Cummings, Brian. Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Diehl, Huston. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Felski, Rita, ed. Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Fuks-Mansfeld, Rena, ed. Joden in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw. Een biografisch woordenboek (Jews in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century. A biographical dictionary), (Utrecht: Spectrum, 2007). Gentile, Emilio. ‘Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics – A Critical Survey’. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6:1 (2005): pp. 19–32. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred (1972), translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Continuum, 2003). Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007). Groves, Beatrice. Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Hall, Edith. ‘Rowan Williams’s Tragic Mistake’. Review of Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Prospect Magazine, 17 November 2017, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/rowan-williamss-tragic -mistake. Hobson, Suzanne. Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960 (London: Palgrave, 2011). Jenkins, Philip. The Great and Holy War: How World War 1 Changed Religion for Ever (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2014). Leonard, Miriam. Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). $)((-&
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20

O’neill Tonning, Tonning and Mitchell

Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. by David Smith (London: Burns and Oates, 1980 [1977]). Miller, J. Hillis. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Mitchell, Jolyon. Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (London: Routledge, 2012). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, translated and edited by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2000). Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries (London: Continuum, 2011). O’Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Osborne, Peter. ‘Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category: Notes on the Dialectics of Differential Historical Time’. In Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1992). Pameijer, Elinor, ‘Bob Hanf: Painter, Writer, Musician’, from Forbidden Music Regained, https://www.forbiddenmusicregained.org/search/composer/id/100026. Perl, Jeffrey. The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Perry, Curtis and John Watkins, eds. Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Schloesser, Stephen. Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Shell, Alison. Shakespeare and Religion (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). Taylor, Kevin and Giles Waller, eds. Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity (London: Palgrave, 2014). Williams, Rowan. ‘Tragedy and Redemption: A Response to Edith Hall’, Prospect Magazine, 19 December 2016, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/ tragedy-and-redemption-a-response-to-edith-hall-rowan-williams. Williams, Rowan. The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Woods, Gillian. Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Part 1 Early Modernity, Tragedy, and Christianity

∵

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Chapter 1

Early Modern Tragedy and the Mystery Plays: New Material Evidence Beatrice Groves In Act Three of Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1638) there is a detailed description of the properties of a well-stocked seventeenth-century ‘tyringhouse’: Our Helmets, Shields, and Vizors, Haires, and Beards, Our Pastbord March-paines, and our Wooden Pies … The divells vizors … and their flame painted Skin coates.1 The importance of props is gradually being acknowledged in theatrical criticism and in early modern studies. This has led critics to attend to the importance of the visual apparatus of drama, no less than verbal texture, in thinking about early modern theatre’s relationship with earlier English drama.2 Brome’s list points to the basic homogeneity of medieval and early modern costuming and props for his ‘Vizors, Haires, and Beards’ recall the lists of properties for earlier, different kinds of theatre. The ‘players Apparrell’ for the devotional plays performed in Tewkesbury in 1584–5, for example, records a similar list of vizors, false hair, and beards that will be needed for performance: ‘viij heads of heare for the apostles and .x. beardes; Item a face or visor for the devyll’.3 1 Richard Brome, The Antipodes: A Comedie (London: J. Okes for Francis Constable, 1640), sig. Gv. 2 See, for example, Kurt A. Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), and Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For an overview of criticism that attends to properties, see Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 3 Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield, eds., Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 339. For a further discussion of beards, as ubiquitous in accounts for medieval playing as they are in early modern theatrical inventories, see Will Fisher, ‘Staging the beard: masculinity in early modern English culture’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 230–257.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_003  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_003 6543_003

24

Groves

Brome’s theatre, likewise, used ‘vizors’ to portray devils and the ‘flame painted / Skin coates’ of Brome’s devils point not only to a perennially popular stage character, but also to a piece of theatrical technology inherited straight from the medieval stage. The dramatic simulation of nakedness by means of a skin coat was used in a number of mystery plays. In mid fifteenth-century Coventry, six skins of ‘whitleder’ – a pale, pliant leather, usually untanned sheep skin – were used to make ‘godds garment’.4 This costuming, used to reproduce Christ’s nakedness at the Crucifixion, remained standard through the sixteenth century, and in 1578 the players in Tewkesbury are still paying for ‘vj sheepe skyns for Christes garments’.5 This large, six-skinned garment would have had space for the secretion of little leather bags of blood, so that Jesus’ five wounds could bleed convincingly, and there is a strikingly late attestation to the dramatic power of this staging. A preacher in 1644 tried to catechise an old man about his knowledge of Jesus Christ who ‘shed his blood for us on the crosse’ and the old man replied: ‘Oh, Sir (said he) I think I heard of that man you speake of, once in a play at Kendall, called Corpus-Christi play, where there was a man on a tree, & blood ran downe’.6 These material technologies – garments made of sheep skin to simulate nakedness and leather pouches of sheep’s blood to simulate bleeding – mark a physical continuity between the mystery plays and the early modern stage. In early modern tragedies there were also ‘bladder[s] fill’d with bloud’, so that characters could bleed realistically.7 When these later tragedies used the properties, costumes, or aural technologies of the mysteries it seems possible that they carried with them some of their traditional significance. Elizabeth William has called these ‘affective technologies’ pointing to the way in which a

4 R.W. Ingram, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Coventry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), p. 25. 5 Douglas and Greenfield, eds., Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, p. 337. See also the detailed account in 1499 Coventry: ‘item payd for mendyng a cheverel for god and for sowing of gods kote of leddur and for making of the hands to the same kote, xij d’. Ingram, ed., Coventry, p. 93. 6 Douglas and Greenfield, eds., Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, p. 219. See also Helen Cooper, ‘Blood Running Down’, London Review of Books 23, no. 15 (2001): pp. 13–14. 7 For a discussion of the staging of blood on the early modern stage, including this stage direction from The Rebellion of Naples (1649) and the book-holder’s instruction for The Battle of Alcazar (in which three characters are killed and disembowelled on stage) for ‘3 violls of blood & a sheeps gather’, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 182–184.

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Early Modern Tragedy and the Mystery Plays

25

physical staging can carry an emotional resonance.8 One of the most famous examples of this is the suggestion (first made by Glynne Wickham) that the knocking on the gate in Macbeth would have sounded like Christ’s knocking at the gates of hell in the Harrowing play.9 The text self-consciously relates this moment to the Harrowing when the Porter says ‘I’ll devil-porter it no further’ (Macbeth, ll. 2.3.16–17),10 and the nuances of this aural memory have been convincingly explored by Kurt A. Schreyer.11 Earlier in the play, when Macbeth slaughters his enemies with ‘doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe’, it is as if he means ‘to memorise another Golgotha’ (ll. 1.2.39–40). In this phrase, likewise, it is the blood of the mystery staging (not the biblical account, which is not noticeably bloody) which appears to be recalled.12 The technology of those blood-filled leather pouches has passed from the devotional empathy of mystery plays to the gore of early modern tragedy: ‘embodied on stage, this became one of the least analysed but most practised of the Elizabethan expectations of tragedy, the spectacle of blood’.13 As Michael O’Connell has convincingly argued, it is a legacy of the mysteries that ‘On Shakespeare’s stage the specific occasion of the spectacular effusion of blood seems always connected with innocence’.14 This paper will argue that this is because early modern tragedy was deeply indebted to the staging of innocent suffering on the medieval stage. The mystery plays put the Passion at the heart of their drama and their concept of dramaturgy. While in classical tragedy, likewise, physical suffering is suffused with authority, in early modern drama, as in the mysteries, this authority is communicated through the way it is staged rather than the way it is described: the indecorous spectacle of the broken body of the victim. In Elizabethan tragedy the violent power of medieval theatre, rather than the decorum of classical

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Elizabeth William, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 27. Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 214–231. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 1968. All subsequent Shakespeare references are to this edition. Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft, pp. 135–161. Michael O’Connell, ‘Blood Begetting Blood: Shakespeare and the Mysteries’, in Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 187. Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), p. 150. O’Connell, ‘Blood Begetting Blood: Shakespeare and the Mysteries’, p. 189.

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theatre, is revived in drama that forces the sight of suffering on its audience.15 In Shakespeare, as in the mystery plays, in direct contrast to the verbosity of Senecan drama, ‘The terribleness of what is happening is conveyed by the inadequacy of the language’.16 There is growing critical interest in uncovering the medieval structures that underlie Elizabethan theatre. It is an indebtedness that is discernible both physically (through shared properties) and conceptually, in the kind of drama this physical legacy inspired. Schreyer has recently argued for the importance of ‘stuff’ to any exploration of early modern drama’s relationship with earlier English theatre, stating that medieval artefacts were ‘often indispensable to Renaissance authorship’.17 Janette Dillon argues that ‘Perhaps the single greatest legacy of medieval theatre was its flexibility, a flexibility deriving primarily from the understanding of stage space as a dialogue between place and scaffold’.18 The clearest theatrical example of the material legacy of medieval theatre on the Elizabethan stage is the 1584 Coventry Destruction of Jerusalem play. This is a newly written Elizabethan tragedy, based on a Greek history and written by a young university playwright, but performed by the Coventry guilds as civic drama, using the properties and staging practices of the Corpus Christi plays which preceded it. This essay will illustrate new material connections between this Destruction of Jerusalem play – which survives only as guild records – and the mystery cycle plays which preceded it. The shared material technologies and properties between these two dramatic productions – the evidence of their shared use of rushes, beards, Temples, green cloaks, trumpets, storms, and conflagrations – is one uniquely direct path by which early modern tragedy is an inheritor of the dramaturgy of the mystery plays. Andrew Sofer states that ‘props are possessed by the voices of the past’ and that, ‘As they move from play to play and from period to period, objects accrue intertextual resonance as they absorb and 15

16 17 18

See, for example, the way in which the game lexis which surrounds the torture of Jesus in the mysteries is reused by Shakespeare for the blinding of Gloucester, in Beatrice Groves, ‘“Now wole i a newe game begynne”: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): pp. 136–150. Helen Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, edited by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), p. 39. Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft, p. 11. Janette Dillon, ‘From Scaffold to Discovery-Space: Change and Continuity’, in Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 203.

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Early Modern Tragedy and the Mystery Plays

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embody the theatrical past’.19 This is perhaps never truer than in the relationship between early modern and medieval props. In the case of the Destruction of Jerusalem, it is a material continuity that carries a freight of interpretative possibility. The Jerusalem play, like the Coventry mysteries, is a play which Shakespeare could have seen, and it stands as one of the most direct examples of theatrical contact between the suffering body of the Passion plays and the authority given to the body-in-pain in Renaissance tragedy. The mystery plays had long worked hard to involve spectators with the suffering that they witnessed on stage, to make their audience realise, instinctively, the theological idea that what Jesus suffered was not something separate from themselves but something in which they were themselves implicated. The Destruction of Jerusalem is one concrete example of a way in which the profound emotional power of early modern tragedy finds its roots in the devotional drama that preceded it. 1

The Destruction of Jerusalem: An Elizabethan ‘Tragidye’

In 1584 the Coventry guilds paid John Smith – a young scholar at Oxford – a generous sum ‘for his paynes for writing of the tragidye’.20 The Coventry mysteries had been ‘laid down’ four years earlier (due to increasing distrust of biblical theatre among the church hierarchy) but the appetite for civic theatre in Coventry had not abated. Smith’s newly written tragedy was presented in the place of the mysteries. Although this new, non-scriptural tragedy, performed without any obvious devotional intent, marked a profound change in Coventry’s theatre, it nonetheless retained many and various continuities with the explicitly religious drama that preceded it. The Coventry Destruction of Jerusalem remained civic theatre: it was performed on the pageant wagons and it reused many of the actors, costumes, props, and dramatic techniques of the mystery plays. The most striking connection between the medieval mysteries and the Coventry Destruction play is that the latter was likewise performed on the guild pageant wagons. In 1584 many of the guilds spent lavishly to ensure that their wagons would be ready for the new play’s demands.21 In 1591 Coventry’s council 19 20 21

Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, pp. 27, 2. Ingram, Coventry, p. 303. Ingram, Coventry, pp. 303–309. See also Stephen K. Wright, ‘“The Historie of King Edward the Fourth”: A Chronicle Play on the Coventry Pageant Wagons’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): pp. 69–81, p. 77.

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agreed that ‘the distrucion of Ierusalem’, if that play were chosen for performance again that year, ‘shalbe plaid on the pagens’.22 Other large properties may also have been recycled from the medieval mysteries. For example there is a ‘hell mowth’ from the Harrowing of Hell play which was kept by the Cappers’ Guild until at least 1591 (alongside a substantial number of other mystery play props: ‘ij bisshoppes myters, Itm pylates dublit … the spirate of godes cote, godes cotes and the hose, pylates heade, fyve maries heades … mary maudlyns goune, iij beardes, gods head, the spirites heade … pylates clubbe, hell mowth … adams spade … iij marye boxes’).23 This hell mouth, still being carefully stored by the Cappers seven years later, therefore, could have been reused in the 1584 Jerusalem play; just as the ‘hell mouth with a nether Chap’ was in the new Elizabethan Tobias play, performed in 1560’s Lincoln as a replacement for their traditional Marian and Corpus Christi guild plays.24 The hell mouth was probably the largest medieval prop to retain its theatrical capital, and its stunning appearance in Henslowe’s 1598 inventory for the Admiral’s Men (‘hell mought’) is the clearest material evidence for the connection between the old religious theatre and new London drama.25 The most important large prop shared between the 1584 Coventry ‘tragidye’ and earlier plays is the Temple. This was a crucial location for the Coventry performance of Jesus’ life, as it was for the events of the Destruction of Jerusalem play which dramatised the Roman siege of Jerusalem during the first Jewish-Roman war (66–73ad); a siege that culminated in the final destruction of the Temple. If, as Lawrence Clopper conjectures, the Coventry cycle centred on the events of Jesus’ ministry and passion, Jerusalem and its Temple would have been a particularly important location in this cycle.26 The Temple is certainly crucial to the Coventry Weavers’ pageant (a rare textual survival from the Coventry mysteries) which concerns Jesus’ Presentation in the Temple as a baby and his disputation with the doctors there as a child. The Coventry version performs this latter episode in unusual detail and its stage directions indicate how the Temple frames the action of the play: ‘Gaberell cumyth to the tempull 22 23 24

25 26

Ingram, Coventry, p. 332. Ingram, Coventry, p. 334. James Stokes, ed., Records of Early Modern English Drama: Lincolnshire. Volume 1 (Toronto: British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 187, 191. The traditional Lincoln plays centred on an Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, performed on St Anne’s day, but the records also name a ‘corpus Christi play’, p. 180. Carol Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 136. Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 173.

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dore’; ‘here Semeon goth to the awtere’; ‘here gothe Semeon and his clarkis owt of the tempull’; ‘here Mare and Josoff goth downe in to the tempull warde’.27 The Temple, which may have been staged either as a painted backdrop or a freestanding property, appears likewise in the accounts of the Destruction of Jerusalem play when Thomas Massey is paid three shillings ‘for the Temple’.28 In Lincoln, where medieval guild plays were likewise replaced by a newly written play in the Elizabethan period, there is also evidence of the continued importance of Jerusalem as a setting, for ‘the Citie of Iersualem with towers & pynacles’ was stored by the guilds.29 The evidence from Lincoln suggests that guilds were willing to pay for the storage of bulky props: in the 1540s the St Anne’s Guild had paid for the storage of its ‘stuffe’ which included a premium for the storage of the particularly bulky property of Noah’s ark: ‘euery pagent to pay yerly iiij d. & noyschyppe xij d’.30 Large guild props continued to be stored across the city after the suppression of the traditional guild plays, with some ‘lying at Mr nortons house in the tenure of William Smart’, others ‘remanyng in Saynt Swythunes Churche’ or ‘in the custodye of Thomas ffulbeck alderman’.31 William Huddylston who had been storing the dramatic ‘Stuff & gere’ for various guilds received a payment in 1567–8 when these props were used in the new Tobias play.32 This evidence from Lincoln, in which payments are made to citizens for storing the ‘stuffe’ of the pageants, suggests the possibility that some of the payments in the Coventry records – such as the 3 shillings ‘paid to Thomas Massye for the Temple’ – might, likewise, be payments for storing old guild props (rather than for making them new). Thomas Massey was an enthusiastic promoter of guild drama, and it seems perfectly plausible that he stored the Temple from the previous guild pageants for the mere five years that elapsed between the suppression of the mysteries and the performance of the new tragedy.33 In the 1584 Destruction of Jerusalem play, a drama that is likely to have centred on the final cataclysmic conflagration of the Temple, the structure would once again have taken a starring role.

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

The Weavers’ Pageant, in The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, edited by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), ll. 364, 691, 718, 849. All subsequent references are to this edition. Ingram, Coventry, p. 309. Stokes, Lincolnshire. Volume 1, p. 187. Stokes, Lincolnshire. Volume 1, p. 167. Stokes, Lincolnshire. Volume 1, p. 187. Stokes, Lincolnshire. Volume 1, p. 194. For more on Thomas Massey, see King and Davidson, eds., The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, p. 57.

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The longest surviving prop from the Coventry mysteries was ‘Pylates clubbe’ which was found in 1790 in ‘an antique chest within the Cappers’ Chapel’ by Thomas Sharp while he was researching his dissertation on the Coventry mysteries.34 ‘Pylates mawlle & his clobe’ – Pilate’s mace and club – presumably represented, at one level, the bundle of rods (the fasces) which symbolised Roman magisterial power.35 It seems therefore likely that – as the familiar symbol of Roman authority – they could have been carried by the future emperors Titus and Vespasian, who led the Roman forces in their assault on Jerusalem. In the Coventry mystery plays Pilate wore a cloak of green silk which – like his club – sustained frequent injury due to the vigour of his performance.36 In 1576 the Cappers paid ‘ffor a skeane off grene silke and mending pylates gowne vj d’ and two years later both it and the clubbes needed mending again: ‘paide for mending pylates gowne and his clvbbes vj d’.37 This green silk gown cloak may likewise have reappeared in the Destruction of Jerusalem play for the Mercers’ accounts record a payment ‘ffor making ij Greene clokes x s ij d’.38 No material is given for these green cloaks but their expense (strikingly, they cost thirty times the price of the ‘red cotes’ of the soldiers39) suggests that they must have been made of a luxurious material such as silk. As Pilate had been dressed in a green silk cloak for the Coventry mysteries, it seems plausible that these two costly green cloaks were likewise used to clothe the new embodiments of Roman authority in Judea: Titus and Vespasian. If Titus and Vespasian were dressed in green silk cloaks, and carried a club or fasces, then their costuming would have been strikingly reminiscent of Pilate. ‘Pylates mawlle & his clobe’ and these green cloaks, therefore, are particularly suggestive of both this new Elizabethan play’s theatrical continuity with medieval drama, but also of its difference from the medieval interpretation of its subject. Such costuming would have carried the explicit signification of ‘Roman ruler’ but the implication of Pilate’s villainy, as well as his Roman-ness, may have rubbed off on those who were dressed like him. Early modern tragedies 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ingram, Coventry, p. 334. Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently performed at Coventry … (Coventry: Merridew and Son, 1825), p. 51. Ingram, Coventry, p. 240. A maul is ‘A heavy hammer or mace, usually with a lead or iron head, used as a weapon. Also: a wooden club’. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘maul’. In 1572 the Cappers ‘paid for ij skaynes of sylke which mended the pall, and pylates cloke iiij d’. Ingram, Coventry, p. 261. See also pp. 288, 291. Ingram, Coventry, pp. 278, 288. Ingram, Coventry, p. 305. These two cloaks cost five times the amount of the 12 outfits of the soldiers: ‘payde xij souldyars to were Red cotes ij s’. Ingram, Coventry, p. 304.

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on the fall of Jerusalem marked a dramatic shift into empathy for the stricken city from medieval versions, which celebrated Rome’s triumph.40 If the Roman rulers of the Coventry play had recalled Pilate, the villainous Roman ruler of the mysteries, this would be striking, visual confirmation of this shift. In medieval romances the story of the fall of Jerusalem was often combined with the De Pylato tradition so that Pilate remained the ruler of Jerusalem under the Roman siege of ad 70. In these texts the horrific death of Pilate was the punitive climax to the destruction of the city and its people meted out by the newly converted Roman emperors in vengeance for the Crucifixion. It would therefore have been a striking inversion of these medieval romances – and their ahistorical and anti-Semitic presentation of an alliance between Pilate and the Jews – if in the Coventry Jerusalem play the traditional mace and club and green silk cloak of Pilate had been borne instead by the besieging Roman rulers. 2

The Mysteries and Elizabethan Theatre: Shared Stage Technologies

In addition to these shared physical properties many of the aural and mechanical effects of the Jerusalem play would also have been reminiscent of the mysteries.41 The Smiths’ pageant in the Destruction of Jerusalem staged an episode from Josephus’ Jewish War in which factional fighting broke out within Jerusalem. The Temple became the headquarters of a faction led by John of Gischala, and he invited the Edomites to join Jerusalem in its fight against the Romans. But the high-priest Ananias would not allow the Edomites to enter the city, so, under the cover of a storm, John’s forces broke out of the Temple and opened the city gates to let in the Edomites. The Smiths record that six pence was ‘paid for starche to make the storme in the pagente’ and they likewise ‘payde to Hewette for fetchynge of the hoggesheaddes, vj d’.42 James Hewet provided music and sound effects for the Jerusalem play (as he had for the Corpus Christi 40 41

42

For more on the shift between medieval and early modern responses to the fall of Jerusalem, see Beatrice Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Such as, for example, shared musical effects. There are payments to trumpeters in both the mystery and the Jerusalem play records: Ingram, Coventry, pp. 242, 306, 307. Trumpets remain important for the early modern London stage and Henslowe’s 1598 inventory includes ‘iij trumpettes and a drum’. Rutter, Documents of the Rose Playhouse, p. 136. For more on shared staging practices, see Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 150–151. Ingram, Coventry, p. 308.

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pageants43) and the payment for starch, as well as the fetching of large casks (‘hoggesheaddes’), suggests that hard granules of starch were shaken inside a barrel to create the sound of this storm. It may well have been precisely the same technology as had been used to signal an even more violent natural event – an earthquake – in the Coventry Drapers’ Doomsday pageant, which records a payment for ‘the baryll for the yerthe quake’.44 Another part of Josephus’ history that is likely to have been staged in the Coventry Jerusalem play is the burning of the Temple. The Temple was set on fire and destroyed at the climax of the siege and this event forms the climactic dramatic spectacle in the three early modern plays of Jerusalem’s fall for which a text is extant. The stage directions of John Crowne’s Restoration tragedy about the siege call for a striking and apparently dangerous spectacle of ‘the Scene the Temple burning, fill’d with Jews lamenting’.45 In Coventry, as with the staging of the storm this dramatic effect probably drew on the staging expertise of the mysteries, in particular that of the Drapers, whose Doomsday play involved ‘settynge the worldes on fyre’.46 It even seems possible that the author of the Destruction of Jerusalem, John Smith – who was a native of Coventry – was drawn to dramatise the fall of Jerusalem and its Temple because he knew from his childhood memory how successfully the guilds could stage a conflagration. Early modern commentators noted how this destruction of the Temple ‘is phrased in Scripture as the desolating of the whole world’47 and on the Coventry pageant wagons the burning of the Temple by the guilds who had previously ‘sette the worlds on fyer’48 would have brought this theological connection vividly to life. Some of the sense of the cataclysm of the Drapers’ burning of the world may have been experienced as the Temple burned in the Jerusalem play and – at a further remove – in the burning Temple and towns in London tragedies. In William Heminge’s Jewes Tragedy (c. 1626) the firing of the Temple is accompanied by thunder as Titus exclaims:

43 44 45 46 47 48

James Hewet played the regals in the Weavers’ play from 1554 to 1573, and for the Drapers 1563–8: Ingram, Coventry, p. 573. In 1561 he is paid for ‘hys Rygoles & synggyn’, p. 216. Ingram, Coventry, p. 474. John Crowne, The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian. In Two Parts. Volume 2 (London: James Magnes and Richard Bentley, 1677), p. 56. Ingram, Coventry, p. 230. See also pp. 224, 242, 246, 250, 257. John Lightfoot, The Harmony, Chronicle and Order of the New Testament … (London: Simon Miller, 1655), sig. Aav. ‘Payde for A lynke to Sette the worlds on fyer vjd’. Ingram, Coventry, p. 224.

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By all the gods it burns, it burns; The raving fire has seiz’d the battlements. Horrors and vengeance, plagues and punishments Seiz on your stubborn souls; it burns, it burns afresh.49 In 2 Tamburlaine a town is likewise burned on-stage, when Tamburlaine (to the accompanying stage direction ‘the town burning’) exults over his destruction of the place where Zenocrate had died: So burn the turrets of this cursed town, Flame to the highest region of the air, And kindle heaps of exhalations, That, being fiery meteors, may presage Death and destruction to the inhabitants.50 In both these passages the actor draws attention to the dramatic effect (suggesting stage business of which the company was proud) and interprets it as portentous. As with these staged storms and conflagrations, many of the mysteries’ stage technologies would have been carried through to the early modern London stage. The guilds who staged Judas’ death, for example, had a method for the tricky business of hanging an actor without implausibility, unintended comedy, or danger. In 1574 the Coventry Smiths ‘paid to Fawston for hangyng Jwdas and coc-croyng, viij d’,51 and the same method may well have been used thirty years later for hanging Judas in William Haughton, William Birde, and Samuel Rowley’s lost play Judas (c. 1600–2), or for Absolom’s death in the 1602 revival of George Peele’s popular The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599) when Henslowe records a payment ‘for poleyes & worckmanshipp for to hange absolome … xiiijd’.52 49 50 51

52

William Hemings, The Jewes Tragedy, or, Their Fatal and Final Overthrow by Vespatian and Titus his Son, Agreeable To the Authentick and Famous History of Josephus (London: Matthew Inman and Richard Gammon, 1662), p. 72. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1986), 2 Tamburlaine, ll. 3.2.1–5. Ingram, Coventry, p. 269 (see also p. 265). In 1578 they pay ‘to Thomas Massy for a trwse for Judas, ij s viij d; paid for a new hoke to hange Judas, vj d’, p. 289. This is, presumably, the same Thomas Massey who supplied the Temple backdrop and beards to the Smiths for the Jerusalem play. See p. 309. Rutter, Documents of the Rose Playhouse, p. 206.

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‘Rushes, Packthryd and Tenterhooks’: From Corpus Christi to the Elizabethan Stage

One final connection between the Jerusalem play and the mysteries, suggestive of the wider parallels between medieval and early modern stages, is the use of rushes to strew the stage. The 1584 Coventry records show that ‘rushes, packthryd and tenterhooks’ are purchased for the new Jerusalem play, just as ‘russhes packthryd & nayles’ had regularly been purchased for the mystery plays.53 Payments for rushes appear most regularly in the Weavers’ accounts,54 and it is possible that the grouping of rushes, packthread and nails (or ‘tenterhooks’) meant that these items were used together to form some kind of matting. Later theatrical evidence suggests that matting was a higher status floor covering than loose rushes: when Henry Wotton went to see Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True in 1613 he wrote that it was ‘set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the stage’.55 The guilds often used their pageants to exhibit their skills and wares. The Norwich Grocers, for example, decked the Tree of Knowledge with the luxuries of their trade: ‘aples and fyggs, 4d.; oryngys, 10d.; 3 lb. datys, 1s.; 1 st. almonds, 3d’.56 Such decoration simultaneously served the theological purpose of rendering the tree enticing and the practical purpose of advertising the Grocers’ wares. As Jonathan Gil Harris has argued: Any prop in the Corpus Christi cycle plays potentially had the status of a visual pun, functioning as a multivalent metonymy for a cluster of distinct but interrelated corporate structures. The bread of the Bakers’ Last Supper pageants, for example, was at once and the same time the contemporary product of skilled labor by English artisans, the historical food shared by Christ with his disciples, and the eternal sacrament of the Eucharist.57 53 54 55 56

57

Ingram, Coventry, pp. 308, 252. This is a payment by the Smiths. The Weavers, Cappers and Mercers all also purchase rushes for the Jerusalem play. See pp. 306, 304. See Ingram, Coventry, pp. 156, 169, 172, 185, 189, 199, 204, 206, 208–210, 213, 216, 219, 222, 228, 235, 244, 248, 252, 255, 258, 262, 268, 279, 284, 288, 292. Shakespeare, Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1968. Norman Davis, ed., Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, s.s. 1. (London: The Early English Text Society, 1970), p. xxxii. For another example, see the extensive gilding and metalwork on display in the Coventry play performed by the city’s goldsmiths and blacksmiths, in Ingram, Coventry, p. 231. Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 43.

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The Coventry Weavers’ pageant, like the Bakers’ Last Supper pageant, used props to display the guild’s craft but, like them, this self-promotional display of artisanal identity also partook in the ‘socio-religious corporate values that the Corpus Christi festival ostensibly celebrated’.58 The gorgeous costuming of the Weavers’ pageant exhibited their skill59 and its luxuriant rush matting may, likewise, have simultaneously served the purpose of displaying weaving skills while also carrying a devotional meaning. In Act two of George Chapman’s The Gentleman Usher a masque is performed in Earl Lasso’s house and the Usher takes great care in how the ground is strewed with rushes in preparation for this performance and for the arrival of the guests. Bassiolo enters ‘with Rushes’ and orders the servants to ‘strew this roome afresh’. He gives careful instructions about how to arrange the rushes – ‘lay me vm thus: / In fine smoothe threaues’ so that ‘all this roome / Is passing wel preparde’ to welcome the ‘faire Dutchesse to this Throne’.60 Green rushes were a high-status floor covering and, partly due to their sweet smell and partly because of the effort involved in procuring new rushes, they were used to welcome honoured guests. Indeed, the link binding green rushes and guests was so strong that ‘green rushes’ could be used to express surprise on seeing a visitor: ‘Greene rushes M. Francisco, it is a wonder to see you heere in this Country’.61 Early in the Coventry Weavers’ pageant an angel appears to Simeon at the Temple door telling him to prepare the Temple for the Lord’s arrival. Simeon hastens to make the ‘tempull soo presseoosely pyght / In gorgis araye thatt hyt be dyght / This Prynce for to ownowre’ (ll. 313–20). The rushes purchased for this pageant may have been used at this moment to ready the Temple for its Lord’s entrance in order to stress the implicit narrative of the Weavers’ pageant: the welcoming of God as a guest into his own house. Rushes were used to decorate churches on special occasions, and during the annual Corpus Christi procession in Coventry the Corpus Christi Guild paid for ‘russhes to strewe the Church’.62 There is an embedded parallel between the entrance of the infant Christ into his Temple in the Weavers’ Corpus Christi play and the entrance of the sacrament into Coventry’s St Mary’s Cathedral at 58 59 60 61 62

Harris, ‘Properties of skill’, p. 46. Clifford Davidson, Technologies, Guilds and Early English Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), pp. 63–65. George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1606), sigs. Cv–C3r. A ‘threave’ is ‘A bundle or handful tied up like a small sheaf’. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘threave’. Nicholas Breton, Wonders Worthe the Hearing (London: John Tappe, 1602), sig. A3r. Ingram, Coventry, p. 162. See also pp. 157, 170. For a description of the procession, see p. xxiii.

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Corpus Christi. Simeon, expressing his unworthiness to hold the baby in his hands, sounds like a priest expressing his unworthiness as he holds the Host in his hand: ‘now art thow cum, Lorde, to my honde, / Thogh that I onworthe were’ (ll. 693–4). This implicit Eucharistic language is made explicit when the Angel refers to the baby Jesus as ‘hys blessid bode’ (l. 295) – using the Eucharistic language of Corpus Christi for the historical baby. The preparation of the Temple in the Weavers’ pageant recalls the way in which Coventry Cathedral was likewise made ready to welcome the ‘blessed body’ of Christ during Corpus Christi. The rushes were part of a sweet smell which symbolised holiness for the early modern as for the medieval world.63 ‘Holy’ means ‘set apart’ and nothing was more ‘set apart’ from the reality of the mundane pre-modern world than a sweetly smelling space. Coventry Cathedral at Corpus Christi would have been sweetened with incense, and the records for the Weavers’ pageant note payments for Frankincense suggesting that Simeon prepared the Temple with scented smoke as well as rushes and flowers ‘thatt of oddur sweetly smellis’.64 Burning incense, slightly surprisingly, was to remain a popular stage effect on the London stage.65 In 1544 the records for the Corpus Christi procession note the payment for ‘russhes & floures’ so the sweet scent of the rushes would have been augmented with that of flowers.66 In the same year, those who lived along the route of the York Corpus Christi Procession were instructed ‘that every howseholdr that dwellith in the hye way ther as the sayd procession procedith, shall hang before ther doores & forefrontes beddes & coverynges of beddes of the best that they can gytt and strewe before ther doores resshes and other suche fflowers’.67 The text of the Weavers’ Coventry pageant likewise stipulates that the ‘blessid bode’ of Jesus will be welcomed with rich clothes and sweet smelling flowers: Then hast we this alter to araye, And clothis off onowre theron to laye, 63 64 65

66 67

See Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Ingram, Coventry, pp. 161, 156, 208, 210. ‘Spyce’ is also mentioned, p. 189. Fifty plays in the period 1573–1642 include specific reference to the burning of incense. See Holly Crawford Pickett, ‘The Idolatrous Nose: Incense of the Early Modern Stage’, in Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, edited by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 20. Ingram, Coventry, p. 170. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., Records of Early English Drama: York. Volume 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 283.

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Ande the grownde straw we with flowris gay Thatt of oddur sweetly smellis. (ll. 357–60) Sweetened with the scent of incense, flowers, and rushes, and decorated with rushes and flowers, as well as gorgeous ‘clothis off onowre’, the Temple of the Weavers’ pageant, ready to welcome Christ, would have precisely recalled the Coventry Cathedral at Corpus Christi.68 The sweetness of the rushes, flowers and incense would have functioned as an olfactory memory of ecclesiastical spaces (in particular, for this play’s Coventry audience, their own Cathedral at Corpus Christi). And, as is well known, smells instinctively feel as if they have a peculiarly powerful relation to memory – that ‘magical’ sensation of immediacy ‘when a sniff triggers a twinge of remembrance’.69 Both the visual appearance of the rushes, flowers, and fine clothes used to prepare the Temple for Christ’s visitation and the olfactory memory created by the Coventry Weavers’ play are likely to have functioned as signifiers of holiness. As they bring Coventry’s Corpus Christi celebrations to mind they mark the theatrical space of the Temple in the Weavers’ pageant as ‘holy’. The Coventry Weavers’ pageant revolves around the Temple. As discussed above, it is possible that the three shillings ‘paid to Thomas Massye for the Temple’ may indicate that the earlier prop was itself reused in the Destruction of Jerusalem, but, even if it were not, the Weavers’ presentation of the Temple may have been replicated in this early modern tragedy. The records note that ‘rushes, packthryd and tenterhooks’ are once more required, just as they were for the Weavers’ pageant. By reconnecting the Temple with its old significance, 68

69

Elizabeth Williamson notes how the Records of Early English Drama illustrate a more general continuity between religious and theatrical properties, arguing that these records ‘document the purchase, storage, repair, and sale of church ornaments such as altars, candlesticks, and crosses. They provide information about the business of making properties for a dramatic enterprise that was nearly contemporaneous with the public theater, while simultaneously revealing the proximity of church goods to players’ goods, objects that were linked through material technologies that did not entirely disappear with the advent of the Protestant Reformation’. The Materiality of Religion, p. 4. ‘Why does it feel so magical when a sniff triggers a twinge of remembrance? A lot of it has to do with surprise. You weren’t trying to remember the paints, oils, and solvents in Grandpa’s worshop – the memory popped up, unasked for, when you walked through a random odor plume. […] [B]ecause odor memories accumulate automatically, outside of awareness, they cover their own tracks. We don’t remember remembering them. […] [T]he mind presents us with a memory it picked from our pocket when we weren’t looking’. Avery Gilbert, What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (New York: Crown publishers, 2008), pp. 200–201.

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the scented rushes would have helped to retain the perception of the Temple as sacred and heightened the tragedy of its fall. This material (and olfactory) connection of using rushes as a floor covering also forms a link – in a much more vestigial manner – to the early modern stage as a whole, for rushes appear to have been the normal flooring of the early modern stage.70 Rush-strewn stages mark one material way in which early modern drama connected with the medieval stage, and one that may have carried with it a sense of the stage as a space set apart. 4

Medieval and Early Modern Tragedy

The Destruction of Jerusalem was a popular topic for early modern tragedy. In addition to the Coventry play, there was Thomas Legge’s Solymitana Clades (‘The Destruction of Jerusalem’, c.1579–88), a highly popular, anonymous Titus and Vespasian in 1592 (performed by Strange’s Men), William Heminge’s The Jewes Tragedy (c. 1626), and John Crowne’s Restoration tragedy The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian (1677). It was an inherently dramatic topic, but it was also one that fitted perfectly with the concept of tragedy the Elizabethan dramatists inherited from medieval tragic theory.71 The de casibus tradition of tragedy concerns the histories of those who fall, as Chaucer wrote, from ‘greet prosperitee, / … / Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly’.72 While de casibus tragedy is often described as the fall of great men, Chaucer’s translation of Boethius specifically links the idea of tragedy with the fortune of ‘realms’: ‘what other thynge bywaylen the cryinges of tragedyes but oonly the dedes of Fortune, that with an unwar strook overturneth the realmes of greet nobleye?’.73 The emphasis on tragedy as concerning the overturning of noble realms makes the destruction of Jerusalem a perfect subject. Chaucer famously defined tragedy as: ‘to seyn a dite of prosperite for a tyme, that endeth in wrecchidnesse’.74 Such a reversal is precisely the fate of Jerusalem itself and Jesus’ prophecy of its fall was understood as meaning that prosperity has made Jerusalem complacent: ‘and when he was come neere, he behelde the Citie, and wept for it, Saying, O if thou haddest euen knowen at the least in this thy day those things 70 71 72 73 74

E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 529. For more on this see Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, pp. 139–169. Monk’s Tale, Tales vii, ll. 1973–7, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry Dean Benson and F.N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Boece ii pr. 2.67–70, in Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer. Boece ii pr. 2.71–72, in Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer.

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which belong vnto thy peace! but nowe are they hid from thine eyes’ (Luke 19.41–2). The idea of a realm which falls from prosperity to wretchedness echoes the Lucan understanding of the destruction of Jerusalem: a city in the height of its fortune which falls into desolation. Medieval English texts about Jerusalem’s destruction, however, (although they were legion) were not tragedies. As mentioned above, they were prose and verse romances which celebrated the victory of Rome over Jerusalem as prefiguring the ascendance of the Christian church over its Jewish predecessor. In contradistinction to this, early modern plays on the topic were all tragedies – Legge’s Solymitana Clades was even considered a ‘famous tragedy’ by Francis Meres, who thought it a work that placed Legge alongside Shakespeare as one of England’s foremost tragedians.75 While medieval romances could evince a voyeuristic satisfaction in Jewish suffering – the most famous critical description of the late fourteenth-century Siege of Jerusalem calls it a ‘chocolatecovered tarantula … [of] cheerfully sanctioned violence’76 – early modern plays encourage empathy for the appalling suffering they stage. The change in genre from romance to tragedy encodes a fundamental change of perspective. The destruction of Jerusalem is no longer read as a narrative celebrating the military and ideological triumph of Christianity but as a warning about the consequences of sin. The empathy of these plays, as well as their theatrical ambition in staging the calamitous fall of a city of two million souls and the burning of its holy place to the ground, responds not so much to medieval romances on this topic, but to a different part of early modern England’s medieval inheritance: the mystery plays. The staging of suffering is central to both the mysteries and early modern drama. Over forty years ago Emrys Jones noted the likelihood that since Shakespeare had seen the mysteries ‘before he became aware of more neo-classical ways of writing tragedy, those Passion plays may well have taken a position of absolute priority in his mind, seeming to him more moving, more natural, more fundamental forms of tragic drama’.77 The mystery plays did not flinch from staging pain and death. Instead of the decorum of classical theatre, Shakespeare inherited the violent power of the mysteries, whose devotional focus made the emotional potency of the visual fundamental to their dramaturgy. In King Lear Edgar describes the sight of Lear in his madness as a 75 76 77

Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), edited by Don Cameron Allen (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1938), p. 283. Ralph Hanna, ‘Contextualizing the Siege of Jerusalem’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): pp. 109–121, pp. 109–110. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 51.

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‘side-piercing sight’ (l. 4.6.85): an image that insists on the power of what is seen to transmit an understanding of pain to the spectator, and hints at the devotional origins of such an empathetic gaze. Early modern tragedy – which forces the sight of Lear’s death, Gloucester’s blinding, Desdemona’s suffocation, and Antony’s mangled suicide, as well as the bloody murder of Ananias in Heminge’s Jewes Tragedy (ll. 4.10.1–35), upon its audience – responds to the raw emotional power of the drama of the Passion. And it is often at the moments of supreme suffering that the connection with medieval dramaturgy is at its most palpable. Helen Cooper has written of how, in King Lear, history opens its reach towards ‘total theatre’, that extension beyond limitation or particularity that characterizes the cycle plays. […] [I]ts shift from history towards a more mythopoeic mode frees it to expand its conception of character beyond normal individual limitations. Its stagecraft deploys the same readiness to perform embodied violence and imagined space … [and it carries the] quality of myth, of deeper significance than mere event.78 Jerusalem plays – like Passion plays - are tragedies of suffering on an epic scale. The material connections between the Coventry Destruction of Jerusalem – a newly written Renaissance tragedy – and the Coventry mysteries mean that this play is both an important witness to, and probably the clearest recoverable example of, the agency of medieval theatre in early modern tragedy. Bibliography Breton, Nicholas. Wonders Worthe the Hearing (London: John Tappe, 1602). Brome, Richard. The Antipodes: A Comedie (London: J. Okes for Francis Constable, 1640). Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). Chapman, George. The Gentleman Usher (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1606). Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry Dean Benson and F.N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, p. 165.

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Clopper, Lawrence M. Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Cooper, Helen. ‘Blood Running Down’, London Review of Books 23, no. 15 (2001): 13–14. Cooper, Helen. ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, edited by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), pp. 18–41. Cooper, Helen. Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). Crowne, John. The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian. In Two Parts. Volume 2 (London: James Magnes and Richard Bentley, 1677). Davidson, Clifford. Technologies, Guilds and Early English Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). Davis, Norman, ed. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, s.s. 1. (London: The Early English Text Society, 1970). Dillon, Janette. ‘From Scaffold to Discovery-Space: Change and Continuity’. In Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 190–203. Douglas, Audrey and Peter Greenfield, eds. Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). Fisher, Will. ‘Staging the Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern English Culture’. In Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 230–257. Gilbert, Avery. What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (New York: Crown publishers, 2008). Groves, Beatrice. The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Groves, Beatrice. ‘“Now wole i a newe game begynne”: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): pp. 136–150. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hanna, Ralph. ‘Contextualizing the Siege of Jerusalem’. The Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): pp. 109–121. Harris, Jonathan Gil. ‘Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama’. In Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 35–66. Harris, Jonathan Gil and Natasha Korda, eds. Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Hemings, William. The Jewes Tragedy, or, Their Fatal and Final Overthrow by Vespatian and Titus his Son, Agreeable To the Authentick and Famous History of Josephus (London: Matthew Inman and Richard Gammon, 1662). Ingram, R.W., ed. Records of Early English Drama: Coventry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). Johnston, Alexandra F. and Margaret Rogerson, eds. Records of Early English Drama: York. Volume 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979). Jones, Emrys. The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). King, Pamela M. and Clifford Davidson, eds. The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). Lightfoot, John. The Harmony, Chronicle and Order of the New Testament … (London: Simon Miller, 1655). Nelson, Alan H. The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays, edited by J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1986). Meres, Franics. Palladis Tamia (1598), edited by Don Cameron Allen (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1938). O’Connell, Michael. ‘Blood Begetting Blood: Shakespeare and the Mysteries’. In Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 177–189. Pickett, Holly Crawford. ‘The Idolatrous Nose: Incense of the Early Modern Stage’. In Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, edited by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 19–38. Rutter, Carol, ed. Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Schreyer, Kurt A. Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Sharp, Thomas. A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently performed at Coventry … (Coventry: Merridew and Son, 1825). Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Stokes, James, ed. Records of Early English Drama: Lincolnshire. Volume 1 (Toronto: British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2009). The Weavers’ Pageant. In The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, edited by Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000).

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Wickham, Glynne. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Williamson, Elizabeth. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Wright, Stephen K. ‘“The Historie of King Edward the Fourth”: A Chronicle Play on the Coventry Pageant Wagons’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): pp. 69–82.

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Chapter 2

Christianity, Staging, and Ambivalence: Tragedy as Via Negativa in Shakespeare and After Stuart Sillars Finding any common identity within Shakespeare’s tragedies, whether related to genre, moral foundation, or relation to contemporary ideas and practices, is tortuous enough; defining any consistent approach to Christianity or indeed any other belief system further complicates things with the dangers of spurious specificity. The continuing debate about Shakespeare’s possible Catholicism has made the path of analytic identification labyrinthine. In part, all of this difficulty arises from a larger circumstance. Like so much within the canon, the tragedies depend on a subversion of established convention: forms already well known to Shakespeare’s audience by their use in earlier plays are now presented with an irony or ambivalence that their original audiences would surely have grasped. In structure especially, but also at more local performative, linguistic, and referential levels, the plays present perhaps the fullest example of inventive allusiveness that defines in practice the notion of Renaissance copia. In discussing these issues, I want to argue that Christianity is engaged with only in some of the tragedies, and in a manner that, wholly performative in nature, develops elements from earlier theatre to absorb aspects of Christian rite and belief, with a quality of dynamic imprecision that rather heightens than diminishes their impact. That, in so doing, this process of structural assimilation implicitly reveals the theatric nature of religious ritual, made forceful by the relative novelty of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer yet retaining, like that volume itself, elements of the Roman rite, is further index of the subtle allusiveness and metatheatric self-reflection that is a major thread throughout the plays’ textual fabric. Such an approach, resting as it does on the creative tension between literary theatre and religious belief and ritual, has implications that move outwards from the plays of Shakespeare to larger issues of this relationship in work from other periods. In consequence, the latter part of this chapter looks at some more recent dramas, to explore their workings and in particular to consider their approaches to historical events that are described as tragic in the broader sense of the word. From this process, I hope to establish a way in which the paths of resemblance between tragedy as a theatric entity and Christianity $)((-&
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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_004  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_004 6543_004

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as a belief may be seen to run parallel, and how they diverge. But first to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s earlier tragedies do not at first sight offer much suggestion of Christian foundation. Titus Andronicus, often too easily dismissed as mere Senecan spectacle, has recently been seen as a virtuosic exploitation of the possibilities of the Rose Theatre that, to misquote Shaw, is a choreographic poem in which the libretto is the music. The Friar in Romeo and Juliet is important in driving the plot, but the play’s outcome rests far more on its classical origin in the Pyramus and Thisbe tale than on any specifically Christian moral debate. Yet in both plays there are elements fundamental to the mature tragedies’ engagement with Christianity, largely through taking and reconfiguring what they need of earlier forms and concerns, demonstrating the inventive allusiveness of Shakespeare’s copia seen in so many other features of structure and subject throughout the canon. In this way, Romeo and Juliet absorbs the sinister world of Italian intrigue from Kyd, changing the main religious impulse from one of revenge to one of misguided and failing guidance and consolation. Titus takes much further the blood-fest that Romeo and Juliet has borrowed from earlier revenge plays while, especially in the much-misunderstood soliloquy about the tortured Lavinia, developing a scene powerfully visual in language that reveals a great deal about the psychology of grief, simultaneously offering forceful metatheatric refractions – structural innovation combined with moral reflection. Neither is explicitly Christian in the issues it directly presents; yet their address to moral issues within a larger concern for the workings of theatre, and the assimilation and interrogation of earlier forms, becomes important in the theatric manoeuvres in later plays, throwing out questions of Christian belief for supple intellectual and emotional examination which, in my reading, owe much of their effect to their inconclusiveness. But before exploring these scenes and the Christian impulses they reveal, I want to look at another earlier play which approaches Christianity rather differently, in the process demonstrating again the range of Shakespeare’s tragedic structures and their closeness, often involving no little risk, to contemporary politics: Richard ii. Although now reductively branded a history, the play first appeared under the title The Tragedie of King Richard the Second. The realignment of genre is revealing about the play’s form, in shifting the emphasis from the discussion of past events to the examination of the title figure – and, as is well known, by metaphoric extension to Queen Elizabeth i. The key Christian element here is the notion of the divinity of kingship, making inseparable issues of monarchy and belief, unmasking as far too convenient the concept of the king’s, and the queen’s, two bodies. The duality, first raised as a critical force by Ernst $)((-&
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Kantorowicz,1 has recently been clarified in studies that explore more fully the legal writings, and their manifestation in actual cases, on which the concept rests. The work of Lorna Hutson and Paul Raffield makes clear that the higher of the two bodies is not in itself a deity, but the body politic that guides the state.2 The clarification is important, because it reveals the extent to which Shakespeare has adapted it within the role of King Richard, stressing that he has taken on himself the identity of a deity, something far beyond the legal stature of the body politic. In this change, the stage figure resembles far more closely the identity constructed by Elizabeth as corpus sanctorum, through her progresses and the images related to them; and in this lay the great danger of the play, manifested in the removal of the abdication scene from the first quarto and the unsanctioned performance on the eve of the Essex rebellion. In consequence, it becomes clear that, while Christianity is recurrent in the play, it is always inseparable from politics, due to the corrosive persistence of Richard’s view of himself as unimpeachably divine. As Raffield stresses, Shakespeare’s King is himself acting the role of a divinity.3 This is shown in the uniquely ornate language where rhetoric shears away from reference, reaching its climax in the logical absurdity of his abdication, where Richard becomes both the divinity conferring the ritual attributes of coronation and the figure on which they are bestowed: With mine own tears I wash away the balm; With mine own hands I give away the crown; With mine own tongue deny my sacred state; With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. (4.1.206–9)4 This linguistic fracture, and the abrogation it betrays of Christian ethics to personal power, are matched in the play’s stage blocking through the repeated

1 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 2 Lorna Hutson, ‘Not the King’s Two Bodies: Reading the “Body Politic” in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, Parts 1 and 2’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, edited by Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 166–198, and Paul Raffield, Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart, 2010). 3 Raffield, Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution, pp. 112–116. 4 Quotations from the plays are from the most recent editions of the New Cambridge Shakespeare volumes, as listed in the Bibliography.

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Due to rights restrictions, this illustration is not available in the digital edition of the book. You can view the illustration online at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/ english-or-french-the-wilton-diptych

Figure 2.1

Richard ii presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund (‘The Wilton Diptych’), c. 1395–1399 © the national gallery, london

use of a compositional form borrowed from the fourteenth-century painting known as The Wilton Diptych (Figure 2.1). The image shows Richard kneeling before the Virgin Mary, the infant Christ, and a host of angels wearing his badge, the white hart; the play repeatedly shows other characters kneeling before Richard. That the Diptych was probably intended as a portable icon, before which the king would kneel, effectively praying to himself, is translated in the play to Richard’s subjects kneeling before him as if before the Deity, a further absurdly literal reading of divine kingship. The sheer richness of the image, using lapis lazuli over a ground of gold leaf, is matched in the extravagance of Richard’s language.5 That the play ends with Richard’s death does more than reveal the beginnings of the Tudor dynasty, in the manner presented within the frame of historical providentialism, courtesy of Polydore Virgil: it suggests the failure of one particular order of 5 I have discussed this in detail in Stuart Sillars, Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 133–162.

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Christianity in which monarchy is automatically assumed as divine, something that, in the shared iconography of the portrayal of Richard and Elizabeth herself, made it such a dangerous political statement at its first performance. Christianity thus has a major significance in this tragedy; but, as has been shown with the two early tragedies already touched on, and as will become clearer with the later plays, it is achieved as much through elements of theatric performance – the rite of kneeling – as through language demonstrating a misalliance between governance and celebratory Christian ceremonial. It is always dangerous to see in the canon any kind of continuous development, but here I think it worthwhile to consider the elements of Christianity so far asserted, and most apparent in Richard ii, as in some ways developed in later tragedies. These are the appropriation and reconfiguration of elements of earlier theatre; the use of language that reflects and engages directly with ideas of divinity and power; and above all the use of theatric blocking to convey a fundamental concept. All come together to present an approach to Christianity that, like so many aspects of the canon, functions as much through incompleteness of utterance as direct statement. It is this quality, something that might best be termed ‘generative ambivalence’, that makes the plays so forceful in their approach to Christian belief and Christian rite, also following an objective frequent in the plays of avoiding direct allegiance to either Catholic or Protestant faiths while allowing the feasibility of both. Such openness protected the author and performers from accusations of Popery or criticism from different kinds of Protestant viewers, as well as facilitating allusions to Catholic ritual familiar to audience members and enriching both action and language in the plays. Unlike the structure of Richard ii, however, in later plays this is achieved not through a growing trajectory of allusion in language and event, but in moments of action that are pivotal to the plays’ movement, in ways that remain shocking when seen on stage and which have come to dominate critical discussion. These moments, markedly different in detail but fundamentally similar in operation, are central, I would argue, to King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. That they do not figure in Macbeth neither denies the effect of that play nor undermines the force of the device in the others: it is simply that, in the Scottish play, Shakespeare’s concerns are rather different, with a set of personal and political imperatives central to the new reign. In all of the three plays the scenes – the entry of Othello into Desdemona’s bedchamber, Hamlet’s entry upon Claudius at prayer, and Lear’s entry with the body of Cordelia in his arms – have a visual, performative impact of great power. To this should be added an allusive force far stronger for the first audience, now largely eroded by the loss of awareness of both the Christian rite and the meanings of its visual forms. This force should not be underestimated; its $)((-&
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operation in the theatre comes before the texts as print documents that, in all three cases, have attracted a great deal of interpretive attention. To these elements should be added the longer resonances of the passages within the dynamic processes of the plays themselves; importantly, these work through the issues they raise but to which they offer no single conclusion, in the problematic uncertainties with which they place the Christian elements within the plays. This is radically to simplify the way in which the scenes work in the theatre and in any sensitive reading: it is reductive to see the three elements as separate phases, when they are part of the larger forms of each play, but for processes of analysis it makes sense to approach them in this way. The final act of Othello is perhaps the earliest use of this schema. The entry of the Moor into Desdemona’s chamber is in visual terms a sombre prevision of an entry into a tomb, made stronger for the original audience by a recognition of the staging of the last scenes of Romeo and Juliet – we should never forget this special kind of persistence of vision within an audience familiar with earlier plays and earlier players. In her contribution to the present volume Beatrice Groves makes clear the strength of ‘material connections’ between mystery plays and the Renaissance theatre; earlier plays in the Shakespeare canon have a similar resonance for an audience skilled in assimilating complexities of plot and allusion. This element – what might be termed a kinetic energy of association – would certainly arouse expectations of mood. Another dimension of association is with the resemblance to a longer, extratheatric tradition: the likeness of the sleeping Desdemona to a funerary monument. Of immediate visual impact, most likely as the curtain to the inner stage is withdrawn, the likeness is given verbal confirmation by Othello’s reference to her flesh as ‘smooth as monumental alabaster’ (5.2.5); but the initial impact is purely visual. In essence, when the scene begins Desdemona is presented as already dead, buried within a Christian holy place. The reference would have carried strong resonances for an audience accustomed to seeing funerary sculptures in parish churches. A particularly striking example is the memorial to Lord and Lady Bardolph in St Mary, Dennington, Suffolk, dating from the mid-fifteenth century (Figure 2.2). The quality of the stone parallels closely that mentioned in Othello’s language; strikingly, the sculpture also echoes Horatio’s farewell to Hamlet: ‘Good night sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (5.2.338–9). On each side of Lady Bardolph’s head is a sculpted angel reaching out hands to carry the lady above. With such images in mind, the general allusion made by Othello takes on an immediate force to the play’s first viewers, for many of whom such memorials would have been familiar from their own parish churches. The lines also suggest Desdemona’s stature: only the great have $)((-&
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Figure 2.2

Sillars

Memorial to Lady Joan Bardolph, St Mary’s Dennington, Suffolk image courtesy of simon knott

marble tombs, and the specific nature of this high rank is suggested by Othello’s own argument. In addition, the setting of the speech, with Othello before the sleeping Desdemona, echoes the elision of sleep and death frequent in contemporary thought: John Donne’s assertion ‘From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee / Much pleasure’6 and the poet’s habit of sleeping in a coffin wrapped in a winding sheet are perhaps the readiest examples. Othello’s distorted vision of himself as instrument of justice is poised against the audience’s view of Desdemona as martyr: the act of murder recalls the whole history of martyrdom suffered and inflicted by both Catholic and Protestant during the English reformation.

6 John Donne, Holy Sonnet x, ‘Death be not proud’, in John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, edited by John Hayward (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1967), p. 283.

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Set against that are other iconographic elements, made explicit in the stage direction in Q2: ‘Enter Othello with a light and Desdemona in her bed’, and Othello’s subsequent discussion of the ease with which the flame may be extinguished. The candle may be likened to a single element of the rite of excommunication, suggesting in Othello the role of Church legislator that he parodies in his justification of murder. This he sees rather as prevention than revenge: ‘Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men’ (5.2.6), and justifies the act with the same assumption of judicial impartiality as that of Leontes in the show trial of Hermione. The consequence of all these resonances, first visual, then verbal, is deeply ambivalent. Does the tomb-like setting suggest a degree of redemptive martyrdom, enhanced by the earlier purity of Desdemona and her refusal to find fault in her husband? The idea of Desdemona as a sinless sufferer is certainly appealing, but we should guard against such a simple, single reading. Or does the parodic legal process argued by Othello satirise the manoeuvres of the Church? Overall, the scene presents a vision of proleptic mourning that, in its complex address to the idea of death, makes darkly uncertain the nature of Christianity within a larger personal and political frame, a sombre theatric meditation on processes both eschatological and ecclesiastic. Just as the earlier plays were fresh in the minds of Shakespeare’s audiences, so too were the powers of the Elizabethan state in connection with religious belief and practice. When mentions of the word ‘God’ in plays were outlawed, the tensions within which Shakespeare operated and the dangers that they aroused are revealed as severe. Shakespeare’s theatres were physically beyond the City, and thus had more freedom; but this was not absolute, as the removal of the abdication scene from Richard ii confirms. Similar in kind is the pivotal scene in Hamlet (starting at 3.3.73) when the prince discovers Claudius at prayer. To anyone in Shakespeare’s original audiences this would have been immediately suggestive of the Anglican rite of Holy Communion as designed first by Thomas Cranmer and slightly revised in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. The key element for the play is that, in his posture, Claudius is adopting that of one about to receive the sacraments and has thus confessed, asked forgiveness, and sworn to amend his ways. The passage from Cranmer enfolds these within what is essentially a set of stage directions: You that doe truly and earnestly repent you of your synnes, and be in love and charitie with your neighbours, and entende to leade a newe lyfe, folowyng the commaundments of God, and walking from henceforth in

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his holy waies: Drawe nere, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort: make your humble confession to almightie God before this congregacion here gathered together in his holy name, mekely knelyng upon your knees.7 Here, with the initial absence of language, the state of Claudius’ soul is made quite explicit. From this, Hamlet’s speech develops with a clear logic: if he kills Claudius, then he will go straight to heaven, having been pardoned. The scene rests on the coming together of two ways of thinking, Hamlet’s clear logical progression and something quite different, the immanence of belief in the communion rite. Here the critical commonplace that Hamlet the character is the first embodiment of Cartesian man, always shaky, is revealed not so much as irrelevant but deeply qualified by another, earlier, and more innate outlook – the power of belief, not reason. The consequence of this is felt throughout the remainder of the play, in the absence of Hamlet’s action and his surrender to the ‘special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (5.2.215–6), itself an allusion to Matthew 10:29. That the result is the apparent arbitrariness of the final duel both reveals this surrender and questions the nature of providence, leaving the audience with an uncertainty regarding the power of Christian faith within the pattern of the tragedy. At the same time, it continues through serious parody the development of earlier theatric forms, here the multiple murders that conclude first-generation revenge tragedies, with a deep ambivalence about the plot’s direction and the larger, metatheatric reflection on the nature of drama itself. Once again, Christianity is revealed as one element of many within a refined but perplexing skein. It is in King Lear that the full complexity of such a theatric moment is most fully apparent, and most completely developed in terms of its larger implications. In the final act, Lear enters carrying the body of the dead Cordelia, both Quarto and Folio having the stage direction ‘Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms’ (5.3.230, SD2). As many have noted,8 the iconography derives from the long tradition of paintings of the deposition of Christ from the cross, or the pietà in which the grieving Mary holds the body of Christ in her lap – the latter 7 The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward vi, edited by Douglas Harrison (London: Dent, 1968), p. 386. 8 See, for example, Margreta da Grazia, ‘King Lear in BC Albion’, in Medieval Shakespeare, Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 138–156, and my own Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination, pp. 231–233.

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itself a dreadful reversal of the Madonna and Child tradition. In this sense, Lear’s entry is a reference to Catholic painting, but such a reading is too simple: the brutal force of the moment, shocking because at first perceived simply as a moment of action, without words, would surely have been related by most early viewers less to Italian canvas or fresco than to woodcuts included in Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ9 (Figure 2.3). There the central figure is surrounded by instruments of torture that have a key part in the Tenebrae rite of the passion. The text has been called one of the first bestsellers in the history of publishing, and was certainly produced in what for the time were great numbers. Little is known of print runs for books of this period, but the existence of the illustration in two wood-cuts suggests a large figure, perhaps between 1000 and 1500 in total – and the number of readers would have been several times that figure. This in itself is not the major point, though; what matters more is the resonance on Shakespeare’s stage of the descent from the cross and the surrounding Tenebrae liturgy, the latter recalling practices presumably still strong in the memory of many audience members. The significance of this visual echo is instantly to place the entry in a larger tradition of religious meditation on the crucifixion, guiding the audience response towards the process of the passion. The effect is to make the initial moment even more shocking: whereas the Tenebrae meditation is part of the Easter story leading to the Resurrection, there is no such implication in the play. Believers may place the event within the frame of eternal life, but there is nothing in the event itself to suggest this, made hopeless as it is because in showing the father carrying the daughter it reverses the natural order of birth and death. That the descent from the cross is an essentially Marian event gives the stage entry even further force in seemingly rejecting the redemptive force of the crucifixion. The bleakness continues in Lear’s language, the dreadful, meaningless fourfold ‘Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl’ (5.3.231), a religious chant rendered inarticulate. That Lear continues to ask ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?’ erases any suggestion of Christian hope within the visual allusion. Whereas in both Hamlet and Othello the Christian elements are held in balance with patterns of logic, here there is no such order: the sharpness of death is overcome by neither Christian allusion nor humanist argument.

9 William Atkinson, A full deuoute & gostely treatyse of ye Imytaciō … of … cryst … / trāslate into Englissh … by wyllyā atkynson … (London: Wynkyn de Worde, n.d. [1510–1519?]).

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Figure 2.3

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Deposition of Christ, from Imytaciō of crist, Wynkyn de Worde, 1515? author’s collection $)((-&
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Lear’s final words, ‘Look there, Look there’ (5.3.285) may at first glance be seen as a vision of divine redemption, but a long tradition of critical readings argues against this. Critics from as long ago as A.C. Bradley have recognised that, while the death of Lear is powerfully moving, its qualities depend on his false belief that Cordelia lives rather than on any vision of the Christian afterlife. The point is confirmed by the grammar of the passage, Lear’s ‘there’ referring directly to the antecedent ‘her lips’. Lear dies in ‘an agony not of pain but of ecstasy’, and his certainty that Cordelia lives serves largely to reveal further his lack of understanding.10 Alongside this reading, elements of the play’s performance history demand consideration. The first recorded version of Shakespeare’s ending, by William Charles Macready in 1838, offers a contrary approach to the play’s conclusion, suggesting that Lear accepts Cordelia’s death and dies full of anger. An engraving of the scene, reproduced in the so-called ‘Tallis Shakespere’ of 185011 (Figure 2.4), shows Lear raising his arm in anger against the pagan gods that have let Cordelia die, denying even the bleak irony of his false belief that she lives. Although the engraving is based on a Daguerreotype photograph, taken in a studio not a theatre, it retains veracity as a theatric record; images of this kind were designed to reflect climactic moments, known as ‘points’, in an actor’s performance. The engraving was reproduced in other Shakespeare editions of the mid-century, suggesting its reading as reflecting a widely accepted view of the play’s darker, non-Christian, ending. To this image may be added the evidence of twentieth-century performances, which are dominated at the close by Lear’s despair. Further, the absence of any Christian allusion is repeatedly emphasised by the rejection of the Pietà allusion, with Lear carrying Cordelia on his shoulders, on his back, or even dragging her along the ground. The conclusion towards which all these arguments drive, surely, is that for Christian or post-Christian audiences the bleakness of a pre-Christian world is repeatedly apparent. Yet it is arguably tempered by occasional glimpses of Christian thought elsewhere in the play. John Russell Brown stresses the anticipation of Christian values in Lear’s ‘poor naked wretches’ speech (3.4.28–36), finding the lines ‘O I have ta’en / Too little care of this’ (3.4.32–3) as foreshadowing the centrality of compassion and nurture in the New Testament.12 Other echoes are similarly powerful in revealing the difference of belief systems 10 11 12

A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 291. The Complete Works of Shakspere. Volume i, edited by J.O. Halliwell (London: John Tallis, 1850), facing page 181. John Russel Brown, Shakespeare: The Tragedies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 246.

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Figure 2.4

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Macready as King Lear, 1850. author’s collection

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between Lear’s world and that of Shakespeare’s audience. The word ‘grace’ appears over twenty times in the play, generally as a term of address to a superior that would be commonplace in Shakespeare’s time. But one appearance, Gloucester’s ‘Grace go with you, sir’ (5.2.4) surely plays on the theological meaning of the word: it is perhaps another pre-vision of Christianity, yet, seen in its longer context, it hints at the absence of a state of Grace at the play’s ending. But neither passage can be resolved into a single reading, and this uncertainty is the major force of the individual moments and their effect within King Lear and the other plays I have discussed. They pose one of the great questions surrounding Christian belief, through the quality of generative ambivalence and the copious appropriation of earlier conventions, questioning the power of theatre as much as engaging with insistent human concerns in a manner recurrent throughout the canon but here given most inescapable, most insoluble utterance. That these scenes offer no specific answer to the nature of Christian tragedy in Shakespeare is in no way a deficiency. In their refusal to convey a complete stance, they embody processes typical of the operation of the plays in offering incompleteness, the starting point rather than the conclusion of argument, here addressing issues of life and death as insistent now as when first posed. Their engagement with Christian rites and beliefs demonstrates the careful balance between Catholicism and Protestantism typical within the canon, revealing the constant risk-taking in the plays’ pursuit of insistent questions. Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of these scenes is their wordless embodiment in performative actions of issues that go beneath words, both because of the risk of heresy sometimes entailed, and through their evoking an experiential immediacy of belief that is never fully definable. In addressing both the processes of religious rite and the faith that they embody, and the questions of denomination that lie beneath them, the plays rest on contingencies essential to the theatre, and especially the qualities of generative ambivalence present throughout the canon. The result is that these scenes, and the literary and dramatic structures within which they appear, do not constantly debate the issues they raise, nor do they unequivocally use Christian language – in fact, the force of these moments depends in part on their sheer unexpectedness. The exception here is Richard ii, as hinted at above; but there the emphasis is on the relation between Christianity and monarchy, something that differs from the idea and ideal of Christian redemption. Arguably, the scenes’ belonging within the plays’ larger movement rests more on their being part of the questioning, redefinition, and outright rejection of forms and devices of earlier plays, a major consequence of which is to add an element of metatheatric reflection to the $)((-&
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plays as aesthetic structures while still, as stated earlier, allowing audience involvement, if not quite identification, with role and situation. In this sense, the tragedies are always problem plays in offering complex issues for moral debate. The problems they present are not questions to be easily resolved: just as the ending of Measure for Measure leaves audiences with a series of complex moral problems concerning guilt, responsibility, and redemption, so the endings of the plays discussed here offer no clear answers about the varieties of belief and their application to insistent issues of governance. Seen thus, the episodes become parts of a series of rejections of convention around which the plays are built – the most shocking, perhaps, but similar in kind to many other departures or reversals. Hamlet’s rejection of the most immediate offer of revenge completely overturns the pattern of earlier revenge tragedies, both in the fact of its being offered directly against the victim rather than through a range of proxy murders and in the theological objections that he offers in soliloquy – and it must be said that, while his argument depends on an awareness of Christian rite, its conclusion is more concerned with rejecting the possibility of redemption for Claudius than with any adherence to the sixth commandment. Ironically, in assuming that Claudius has attained a state of grace and should therefore not be killed and sent to heaven, Hamlet demonstrates that he himself has not done so. Othello’s adoption of a quasi-legal justification for murder, taken to the extreme of seeing the victim as a martyr, is a similar kind of logical absurdity, perhaps a further, penultimate stage in the demonstration of his position beyond the play’s central society in another version of the Shakespearean outsider. Logically, this is supported by his final words: ‘I took by th’throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus’ (5.2.351–2). As a Moor, or Mohammedan, Othello would not be circumcised, so that in parodying the words of those describing his death the words also reveal an awareness of Venetian society’s larger rejection inscribed into the state’s identity, its anti-Semitism.13 Seeing the murder within these frames reveals the allusions to Christian rite as intellectually bleak, resting on the logic of the outsider penalised both by a social structure and through an individual’s manipulation. This way of seeing is important in showing the process as one of social and political criticism as much as of psychological defect, introducing a factor fundamental to the discussion of tragedy and Christianity: the status of stage roles as intellectual and emotionally self-sustaining entities with an existence within the interstices of the play’s action. The contorted nature of that sentence 13

I am indebted to Professor Edward J. Esche for the final clarification of this point after long and thorough discussion.

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reveals the difficulty caused by the fact that, especially since Stanislavsky but in essence from much earlier, we are accustomed to talking about roles as characters – as real people. The approach is especially complex, especially misleading, within the frame of Christian belief, because it inevitably leads to a consideration of the religious belief and condition of individual figures. This immediacy of response is often matched by a similar, larger concern, where the historical and social settings of a play, instead of those in which it was written and performed, are addressed as a major determinant of its veracity and hence validity. The two come together with particular intensity in the discussion of King Lear, with significant relevance to its Christian or pagan foundations. From the above it seems to me quite clear that, while the plays of Shakespeare include scenes that rest strongly on a close awareness of Christian rite and belief, since this does not permeate whole thematic structures of the plays, they cannot be described as Christian tragedies. My reading differs from those offered elsewhere in this volume in that I am concerned with the plays’ workings as staged and read documents, not as philosophical statements made by individual figures – the stage roles around which they revolve. In places this rests on a larger acceptance of character as actual which I have argued against. Certainly, it is possible to see Cordelia as an extreme embodiment of Christian suffering; but, as Kenneth Muir points out,14 Cordelia is almost marginal to the play’s action, appearing only in a small number of scenes, despite, of course, embodying the moral complexities on which it rests. At the end, Lear’s death is an ironic return to one of the principles of tragedy, in a sense confirming Lear’s stature, with a moment of anagnorisis and heroic action – ‘I kill’d the slave who was a-hanging thee’ (5.3.274) – feeble and ultimately inconsequential though it be. Kent’s final words, ‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go / My master calls me; I must not say no’ (5.3.321–2), are moving in their gentleness, offering another kind of via negativa to match Hamlet’s acceptance of providence; but that does not make the play as a whole a Christian tragedy, the final words from Edgar, ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (5.3.298), stressing the need for truth, not belief. Perhaps the best way to see them is as engagements with Christianity as one component of the traditions of idea and theatre which they both uphold and reject, each of them moving away from earlier tropes and conventions yet, at the last, returning to the deaths of central figures and ending, in that dimension, with a notion of hope for the future, if such there be, only in change of regime or behaviour, not the hope of life eternal. 14

Kenneth Muir, ‘The Texts of King Lear: An Interim Assessment’, Aligarh Journal of English Studies 8 (1983), pp. 99–113.

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This is not, however, my final position regarding the presence of Christian belief in the plays. If, because of their supple play between sophistication of structure and careful avoidance of doctrinal controversy, Shakespeare’s plays may not ultimately be termed Christian, what others may be seen fundamentally and genuinely to rest on, and to present, Christian belief? In the discussions from which this collection emerged, several features were suggested as the basis of Christian tragedy. They may be brought together as a complex involving recognition – of a state of fallen humanity in self and other – portrayed through the interaction of stage figures, in itself leading to a state of forgiveness, of self as much as of other. Implicit within this is the notion of some kind of process, a spiritual journey towards understanding and redemption to parallel, at whatever distance, a state of grace. Allied to it is some notion of the special nature of literary tragedy when considered in relation to the term as used of actual events, national or personal – the quality of their action and the degree to which any kind of curative or redemptive state to which tragic events in private or public life may lead. Taking these as a basis for discussion, and their presence within Shakespeare’s plays for the moment held in abeyance, I turn now to some more recent dramatic embodiments of tragedy in an effort to find something that may truly be described as Christian in tone, movement, and result. Two of the plays are direct responses to the First World War, and differ sharply in construction and attitude. Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie was first produced by Raymond Massey in the Apollo Theatre, London, in 1928. In narrative it follows a sporting hero from enlistment through the trenches to his return, half-paralysed; in presentation it is heavily symbolic, making extensive use of sets designed to parody elements of Christian iconography. It is also, especially in the opening scenes, comic in the vigorous, knockabout sense of O’Casey’s one act plays and passages from the earlier Abbey Theatre works. The anti-Christian tone is set from the start, when Simon and Sylvester robustly reject the proselytising of Susie Monican: ‘Violence won’t gather people to God. It only ingenders hostility to what you’re trying to do’; ‘Heaven is all the better, Susie, for being a long way off’.15 Harry Heegan, the central figure, is first shown carrying a silver trophy ‘joyously, rather than reverentially elevated, as a priest would elevate a chalice’ as the stage direction specifies (p. 38). The representation of Christian iconography and rite continues throughout the play, often with savage irony. Act ii takes place in a set with stained glass and a 15

Sean O’Casey, The Silver Tassie, in Three More Plays by Sean O’Casey (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 29. Subsequent references to the play are to this edition, and page numbers will be cited parenthetically.

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damaged crucifix bearing the legend ‘Princeps pacis’ (p. 47, SD); much of it is performed in parody plainsong, sung by marching soldiers; this is balanced against the third act, which concludes with nuns singing the ‘Salve Regina’. In Act iv, the soldiers’ lanterns are arranged in the form of a cross, and Harry’s monologue on red wine parodies the sacrament. Most explicit is the ‘Song to the Gun’, performed in a set designed by Augustus John showing a massive howitzer: Corporal (singing): Hail, cool-hardened tower of steel emboss’d With the fever’d, figment thoughts of man; Guardian of our love and hate and fear, Speak for us to the inner ear of God! Soldiers: We believe in God and we believe in thee. (p. 64) In its complete rejection of the troop-blessing ideology of the time, the play in these passages thrusts home the rejection of Christianity not simply as applied to war but as a ritual force in itself. The final act begins with the return of the crippled Harry Heegan to the football club’s dance hall; later, he sings the spiritual ‘swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home’ to his own ukulele accompaniment (p. 100). There is a brutal literalism here, as he sings this from his wheelchair, having been carried home; but the softness of the singing acts against this to suggest something of the song’s original power. Immediately after this, Harry discovers his former friend Barney flirting with Jess, his wife, and the two start to fight, Barney calling Harry a ‘half-baked Lazarus’ (p. 103). Harry’s outburst that follows is bitter in the extreme, but then it calms into a kind of liturgy: Dear God, this crippled form is still your child. [To Mrs. Heegan] Dear mother, this helpless thing is still your son. Harry Heegan, me, who, on the football field, could crash a twelve-stone flyer off his feet. For this dear Club three times I won the Cup, and grieve in reason I was just too weak this year to play again. And now, before I go, I give you all the Cup, the Silver Tassie, to have and to hold for ever, evermore. (pp. 104–105) After flinging the battered cup to the floor he asks the crowd to ‘treat it kindly’, and dedicates it to Jess and Barney (p. 105). His friend Teddy Foran, blinded in the trenches, leads him away, saying ‘what’s in front we’ll face like men’, and $)((-&
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Harry repeats this line; then, as he leaves, he continues ‘The Lord hath given and man hath taken away!’, to which Teddy answers: ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord!’ (p. 105). As in The Plough and the Stars, it is the women who make the most direct statement of survival: Susie: Teddy Foran and Harry Heegan have gone to live their own way in another world. Neither I nor you can lift them out of it. No longer can they do the things we do. We can’t give sight to the blind or make the lame walk. We would if we could. […] But we, who have come through the fire unharmed, must go on living. (pp. 105–106) For all its bleakness of set and word, there is something in the play that presents itself as Christian tragedy, not simply because of the constant reference to Catholic rite, insistent as itself as much as in dark parody, nor alone through the pathos of individual lines and scenes such as those quoted above. The final lines present a sense of survival, for those who are left in the play’s world, but also for the audience; there is a journey towards some kind of understanding, of the potential of redemption achieved through a kind of purifying fire, and it is this that, despite its many differences in tone and form, is significant in the operation of stage tragedy. A little later than O’Casey’s play, Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff was premiered by the Incorporated Stage Society, again at the Apollo, for two nights; it then transferred to the Savoy, and finally to the Prince of Wales, where it ran continuously for two years. These practical elements are important because they give the most accessible evidence of the quality just mentioned: the experience of the audience, most especially at the play’s ending. Whereas The Silver Tassie is heavily symbolic, Sherriff’s play is overwhelmingly naturalistic, set in a dugout in the British lines at St Quentin in March 1918. The action revolves around the young Second Lieutenant Raleigh who has come to the company controlled by Captain Stanhope, whom he hero-worshipped at the public school he has so recently left. Within the play’s action, Raleigh comes first to be disillusioned by his hero, then to realise the strength and compassion he shows within his heavy-drinking, insensitive exterior. At the play’s end, the older Captain Hardy is killed during a raiding party, and Raleigh mortally wounded. Stanhope brings water to the dying soldier, and is then called back to the battle, as the sounds of artillery continue. It is easy to dismiss the final scene as sentimental, or discern elements of sexuality within its tenderness; at the time of its first production, however, it was clearly representative of something very familiar, and in no small measure satisfying, to the large audiences it attracted. There is sacrifice by many, $)((-&
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a realisation of the actuality beneath Stanhope’s drinking and harsh discipline and, in a short scene before the close, a carefully controlled humanity when the captured German soldier, described repeatedly in the stage directions as ‘the Boy’, is interrogated by the Sergeant-Major, who calls him ‘Lad’ and ‘Sonny’.16 One detail stands out in the present context. After the raid, the Sergeant-Major tells Stanhope that Raleigh has been wounded: ‘Fraid it’s broke “is spine, sir; can’t move ‘is legs’” (p. 86). And then: “the Sergeant-major comes carefully down the steps carrying Raleigh like a child in his huge arms”’ (p. 86, SD). The visual parallel with the deposition resembles that in King Lear, modified by its presentation within a wholly naturalistic setting. It is equally shocking, equally powerful, whether seen as sentiment or irony. Journey’s End displays many elements that might be described as Christian. There is the recognition of Stanhope’s moral strength within his apparent disdain and lack of feeling, and of the fellow suffering between the German ‘Boy’ and the nurturing Sergeant-Major; and there is the compassion beneath these elements and the repeated exchanges between the officers and men in the cramped dug-out. What it demonstrates most particularly, though, is the identity of tragic theatre as a moral progression, made clear not least in the play’s title. It is not only the stage roles that go through a progress through suffering towards some kind of understanding and forgiveness, evident in all the plays discussed here and perhaps true of all kinds of theatric tragedy: it is the audience who, in sharing the progression, arrive at some kind of catharsis. In Journey’s End it is enhanced by the memories of experience, personal or vicarious, of the war just ended; but in the other plays the individual passages related to Christian ritual are encased in longer processes that might be seen to be the closest relation to Christian belief. In his undergraduate lectures, Moelwyn Merchant was fond of saying that the mass is constructed of five acts, as is Renaissance drama.17 The allusion is more to the sung mass, with its progression of Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, than to a said rite, but it is suggestive. It recalls, too, the historic movement from the chancel to beyond the church, from the Quem quaeritis trope to enactments on the rood loft to pageant wagon to Globe; the dynamic of mass and tragic drama is fundamentally similar in its corporate act of catharsis and, at different levels, its redemptive power. 16 17

R.C. Sherriff, The Acting Edition of Journey’s End (London: Samuel French, 1929), pp. 68, 69. Subsequent references to the play are to this edition, and page numbers will be cited parenthetically. I have been unable to find this anywhere in print, and rely instead on personal recollection.

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There is another order of recognition. Manifested in Kent’s last words quoted above, it shows the importance of the final part of the journey, of which the acceptance is all. The quality is shared by a play from some years before Journey’s End, J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904).18 Its brief text tells of the loss through drowning of the four sons of Maurya, the play’s central figure, while fishing off the Aran Islands. When the play begins, the third is about to be buried; the white planks for the coffin stand on stage, a constant statement of the immanence of death. Finally, the news comes of the death of the fourth and last son. After making clear that she has constantly prayed for the safety of her sons at sea, Maurya speaks of the calm brought by this final release: It’s a great rest that I’ll have now, and it’s time, surely (p. 78) And at the end: What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied. She kneels down again and the curtain falls slowly. (p. 80) ‘We that are left’; ‘we must be satisfied’; ‘we who have come through the fire unharmed must go on living’. In these more recent plays, which hover between the theatric and more widely understood uses of the word tragic, there is a move towards accepting the importance of living on after the events presented, with all their suffering and loss. The plays of Shakespeare differ from that of O’Casey, the former in their complex qualifications of faith and form, the latter in its origin in a demonstrably Catholic culture; but there is more that unites them. Through their theatrical movement they draw the audience into a process of struggle and loss, at the end of which some kind of resolution is achieved: peace at the last. Is it, I wonder, too reductive to see the whole movement of tragedy as a kind of theatric via negativa, an acceptance of the unalterability of loss, which offers an order of release different, but in practical terms perhaps just as immediate in its offer of reassurance? Ralph Vaughan Williams, who set Synge’s play to music in the 1920s and produced many outstanding settings of text from the Bible or Christian liturgy, including the Mass in G minor of 1922, has been aptly described as a ‘Christian agnostic’. Perhaps this is an appropriate way of seeing the movements of the plays discussed here. This is not to suggest the kind of 18

J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea, in The Tinker’s Wedding, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen (Dublin: Maunsell, 1904).

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resolution in, say, Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ – although the similarities might repay further thought. Perhaps it is a kind of inverted anagnorisis, attaining selfknowledge through self-loss that brings a special order of recognition and release, shared between text and audience, to offer a glimpse of Christian redemption. That this is achieved through the aesthetic structure, the trajectory of the play, as much as the emotional narrative of events that it provides and the words of the roles it develops, is what I see as the essence of the relationship, and the difference, between tragedy and Christianity. Bibliography Atkinson, William. A full deuoute & gostely treatyse of ye Imytaciō … of … cryst … / trāslate into Englissh … by wyllyā atkynson … (London: Wynkyn de Worde, n.d. [1510–1519?]). Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904). Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare: The Tragedies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Da Grazia, Margreta. ‘King Lear in BC Albion’. In Medieval Shakespeare, Pasts and Presents, edited by Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 138–156. Donne, John. Holy Sonnet x, ‘Death be not proud’. In John Donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, edited by John Hayward (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1967), p. 283. The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward vi, edited by Douglas Harrison (London: Dent, 1968). Hutson, Lorna. ‘Not the King’s Two Bodies: Reading the “Body Politic” in Shakespeare’s Henry iv, Parts 1 and 2’. In Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, edited by Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 166–198. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Muir, Kenneth. ‘The Texts of King Lear: An Interim Assessment’, Aligarh Journal of English Studies 8 (1983): pp. 99–113. O’Casey, Sean. The Silver Tassie. In Three More Plays by Sean O’Casey (London: Macmillan, 1969). Raffield, Paul. Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late-Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart, 2010). Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakspere, edited by J.O. Halliwell (London: John Tallis, 1850).

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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, edited by Philip Edwards. 2nd ed. The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear, edited by Jay L. Halio. 2nd ed. The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William. King Richard ii, edited by Andrew Gurr. 2nd ed. The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shakespeare, William. Othello, edited by Norman Sanders and Christina Luckyj. The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Sherriff, R.C. The Acting Edition of Journey’s End (London: Samuel French, 1929). Sillars, Stuart. Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Synge, J.M. Riders to the Sea. In The Tinker’s Wedding, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen (Dublin: Maunsell, 1904).

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Chapter 3

Tragedy and Iconoclasm Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow, Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images.1 What part does the history of broken images play in the emergence of modern tragedy? For Walter Benjamin, early modern tragic drama (especially Shakespeare’s) became a testing-ground for exploring the origins of modernity, whose conditions he sees as fundamentally tragic. In his reading, tragedy demonstrates what is at stake when there is a collective failure of faith in the power of images to mediate an encounter with the divine. This essay focuses on the place of iconoclasm within tragedy and tragic theory, building on the ‘turn to religion’ in early modern studies, and especially the current interest in postReformation religious visual culture and the legacy of the late medieval era. It brings Benjamin’s approach to tragedy and modernity into dialogue with current historical scholarship exploring the influence of Reformation iconoclasm upon the stage, and the surrounding debates on the nature and function of art itself. In doing so it aims to show firstly how religious iconoclasm exerted a formative influence upon the development of early modern tragedy, and secondly to explore Reformation iconoclasm as a forge which helped to shape the conditions of modernity and to inscribe these conditions as tragic. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part examines Benjamin’s modernist thesis The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which reads the Reformation as a crisis of representation and the flourishing of early modern Trauerspiel (‘mourning-plays’) as an articulation of severe cultural and religious loss. The second part places Benjamin’s largely theoretical account of the influence of the Reformation upon art into its historical context by exploring the actual conditions of English iconoclasm and its impact upon the tragic stage. The third part of the essay builds on these two earlier sections by offering 1 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 49–74, ll. 19–22.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_005  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_005 6543_005

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a new reading of Shakespeare’s collaborative tragedy Timon of Athens, arguing that the play stages a response to contemporary religious iconoclasm and the surrounding debates over images and idolatry, and that iconoclasm itself is here ultimately identified as a cause and site of tragedy. 1

Tragedy and Trauerspiel: Walter Benjamin and The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Benjamin was keenly interested in the function of literature as a response to cultural ruin. In The Arcades Project he writes with fascination about Baudelaire’s image of the poet as ‘ragpicker’ of civilization, picking through piles of urban refuse to catalogue and collect what has been discarded and crushed underfoot by the forces of history.2 This idea of modern civilization as ruin or rubbish-heap was not unique to Benjamin: it pervades modernist writing, forming part of modernism’s preoccupation with widespread cultural crisis. The same trope suffuses T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which presents modern civilization in an advanced state of cultural decay, posing the urgent (and ultimately inconclusive) question of whether any creative or fertile potential remains in its arid landscape of ‘stony rubbish’ (l. 20). Sowing its own poetic landscape with the corpses of literary forebears through constant citation from their work, Eliot’s poem incorporates these lost voices into the body of a new work. Like the body of the (supposedly) dead father-king in The Tempest, the traces of these cultural forefathers suffer a ‘sea-change / Into something rich and strange’.3 The Waste Land is itself a mighty ruin of a poem whose very form acts as a work of literary mourning. By incorporating and bodying forth the fragments of what it mourns, the poem’s creative achievement is everywhere scarred by the marks of loss, rupture, and absence. The Waste Land is thus a modernist poem which perfectly illustrates two of the central ideas of Benjamin’s modernist thesis The Origin of German Tragic Drama: firstly, that literature can function under certain historical circumstances as a creative work of mourning in response to cultural crisis, 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume prepared by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999). For the recurring figure of the ragpicker see esp. pp. 349–350. 3 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, edited by Frank Kermode (Arden-Methuen: Croatia, 1954), ll. 1.2.403–4. Referring to this scene in the play, The Waste Land includes the lines ‘I remember / Those are pearls that were his eyes’ (ll. 124–5), a quotation from Ariel’s funeral song.

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and secondly, that it is primarily literary form rather than content which enables this function. For Benjamin (as for Eliot), modernity is itself fundamentally mournful. In his account, this phenomenon has its roots in the European baroque era following the Reformation. Considering the seismic shifts in Reformation theology, including sola fide and the erosion of belief in the efficacy of works, Benjamin identifies them as a failure of belief in the power of ritual and representative ‘forms’ to mediate effectively between God and man. Of all the profoundly disturbed and divided periods of European history, the baroque is the only one which occurred at a time when the authority of Christianity was unshaken. Heresy, the mediaeval road of revolt, was barred. […] Since … neither rebellion nor submission was practicable in religious terms, all the energy of the age was concentrated on a complete revolution of the content of life, while orthodox ecclesiastic forms were preserved. The only consequence could be that men were denied all real means of direct expression. […] [T]he dominant spiritual disposition … did not so much transfigure the world in them as cast a cloudy sky over its surface. Whereas the painters of the Renaissance knew how to keep their skies high, in the paintings of the baroque the cloud moves, darkly or radiantly, down towards the earth.4 This passage illustrates two of Benjamin’s most significant insights. Firstly, he reads the Reformation as a crisis of faith in the power of those hitherto orthodox ‘ecclesiastic forms’ to facilitate ‘direct expression’, meaning their capacity to mediate an effective encounter between the human and divine spheres. The second is his claim that this crisis of faith in the validity of representative forms produces an acute cultural mournfulness at the resultant widening of the chasm between the divine and human (or ‘creaturely’) spheres, a mournfulness which finds formal expression in visual and theatrical art. His description of the lowering skies of baroque art illustrates what he sees as the rupture between the late medieval world, in which God remained palpable and immanent within a postlapsarian world, and the modern or post-Reformation world from which the divine has withdrawn as if behind a veil.5 4 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne with an introduction by George Steiner (London: Verso, 1998), p. 79. 5 Contemporary historians continue to debate the exact extent to which the divine was experienced to have ‘withdrawn’ from a post-Reformation world, and in what ways these changes took place. It is clear that such a withdrawal was broadly experienced, although historians from John Bossy to Alexandra Walsham have done valuable work detailing some of the ways

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The resulting experience of catastrophic loss, Benjamin argues, produced a response of pervasive cultural mourning articulated in a new kind of drama: baroque tragedy or Trauerspiel. The word Trauerspiel does not indicate ‘plays about mourning’, but plays which themselves embody and perform mournfulness. Benjamin distinguishes sharply between Trauerspiel and classical Tragödie, seeing the former as an entirely new genre of post-Reformation tragedy. In tracing early modern tragedy’s debt to late medieval sacred drama, Benjamin anticipates some of the recent efforts of late-medieval scholarship, working to overturn Reformation-influenced narratives of periodization between the literature and thought of the ‘Middle Ages’ and that of the ‘early modern’. The Origin of German Tragic Drama sees Trauerspiel as the heir of the earlier sacred dramas. But where the latter assert their capacity as artistic forms to mediate a legitimate encounter with the divine sphere, Trauerspiel inherits only the empty shell, the form without the content. The relationship of the Trauerspiel to the mystery-play is called into question by the insuperable despair which seems necessarily to be the last word of the secularized Christian drama. […] The tension derives from a question concerning the redemption of mankind, which was allowed to expand to immeasurable proportions by the secularization of the mystery-play, which did not only occur among the Protestants of the Silesian and Nuremberg schools, but equally so among the Jesuits and with Calderón. […] But from the outset these efforts remained confined to a context of strict immanence, without any access to the beyond of the mystery plays and so, for all their technical ingenuity, limited to the representation of ghostly apparitions and the apotheoses of rulers.6

in which divine mystery ‘migrated’ into other spheres including the secular and political rather than simply vanishing from the world. For a detailed overview of competing historiographies of religious change and continuity over the last century see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44, no. 2 (2014): pp. 241–280. While Walsham herself continues to urge caution about the difficulties inherent in ‘progressive’ narratives of modernisation, she admits that anxiety about balancing ‘recognition of the decisive transformations wrought by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations with awareness of the complexities and contradictions that characterized their evolution and entrenchment in practice’ has been the ‘Achilles heel’ of her own scholarship together with that of many of her generation of historians when it comes to giving an adequate account of religious change as well as continuity (‘Migrations of the Holy’, p. 241). 6 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 78–80.

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Benjamin points to the changing subject matter of the dramas: while many of the formal features of late medieval drama survive on the early modern stage, post-Reformation drama is increasingly secular in its content. While Reformed writers did continue to produce new religious dramas rooted in Scriptural material, there are marked differences when compared with the late medieval cycle plays. Where the medieval plays are principally liturgical and devotional, portraying the Passion of Christ or salvation history from the origins of the world to the eschaton, the new Reformed dramas tend to focus increasingly on self-contained historical narratives of the Old Testament. In addition, they are didactic rather than devotional in content, designed to inform and educate rather than to encourage an affective response from the audience. Benjamin notes in passing that the Jesuit drama of the Counter-Reformation is as affected by this as Protestant theatre. The crucial difference is that where late medieval sacred drama assumes an access to the divine ‘beyond’, Trauerspiel does not. It inherits the forms of late medieval drama, but they have been emptied of their essential content: the power to mediate an encounter with the divine. Even where the drama remains overtly religious, it is no longer liturgical in its appeal. For the late medieval religious theatre there was often no contradiction between the concept of highly ritualised performance, which presented the re-enactment of specific events understood to have occurred at a particular point in history, and the mediation of an authentic encounter with the divine. To illustrate how this worked in practice we might recall the conclusion to the York Play of the Crucifixion, when the actor playing Christ looks down from the cross and addresses the audience directly. It is a liturgical moment, taken from the Quem quaeritis or Reproaches of the Good Friday service where the Man of Sorrows cries out in the words of Isaiah: ‘All ye who pass by this way, look and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow?’ JESUS. Al men that walkis by waye or strete, Takes tente ye schalle no travayle tyne, By-holdes myn heede, myn handis, and my feete, And fully feele nowe, or ye fyne, Yf any mournyng may be meete Or myscheve mesured unto myne.7

7 The Crucifixion, in English Mystery Plays, edited by Peter Happé (London: Penguin, 1975), pp. 525–536, ll. 253–8.

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In this moment the distinctions between theatre and un-theatre start to collapse. Addressed directly by the actor playing Christ, the medieval English audience enacts the part of the historical audience of Christ’s crucifixion in first-century Palestine. However, these medieval audience members are also themselves Christ’s intended audience: guilty of the sins for which he dies, legitimate recipients of the divine warning and offer of salvation. This theatrical logic is liturgical in nature. It draws directly on the internal logic of the medieval mass, which presents itself simultaneously as memorial performance of the historical events of the Last Supper and as supreme encounter with the living Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Eucharist. It is through theatre that the priest can simultaneously give a highly ritualised performance of Christ, and yet be permitted to act efficaciously as Christ (‘in persona Christi’). Christ himself in his turn, through this conflation of the historical events of the Last Supper and Crucifixion, simultaneously fulfilled both the mystical roles of sacrificing High Priest and sacrificial Victim. Theatre is the natural medium which, by collapsing these different historical moments into one another, allows the divine economy of salvation, which is outside time, to be expressed and conceived of within the human and timebound sphere. As such, it is not sufficient to refer to the mass as something merely analogous to theatre. It is essentially theatrical, the work it accomplishes crucially enabled by theatre.8 The various waves of Reformation iconoclasm – which attacked sacred theatre, religious visual art, church furnishings, and of course the liturgy itself – have increasingly come to be understood by religious historians as the practical expression of a new theology. Reformation iconoclasm was a watershed moment for the emergence of an epoch that we have been taught to think of as distinctively ‘early modern’: the birth of the modern world. But this narrative, which can be traced back to many of the early Reformers and iconoclasts themselves, is premised upon the rejection of the medieval (and Catholic) past. It documents a fundamental shift in our cultural understanding of what art is, and what it does. At stake in Reformed assaults upon visual and theatrical art as well as upon ritual and liturgical practices was belief in the capacity of visual, embodied, and performative forms to mediate between the sphere of the human and the divine/transcendent. Writing from an acute and distinctively modernist sense of cultural crisis and fragmentation, one of Benjamin’s 8 For an extended examination of the operations of ‘sacramental theatre’ see Sarah Beckwith’s exploration of the York cycle plays in Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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key insights was thus to identify the roots of modernity within the early modern. Unlike Nietzsche and – to a lesser extent – Walter Burckhardt, however, he does not read this as a moment of triumphal rebirth predicated upon the necessary repudiation of an exhausted, stiflingly superstitious, and ultimately bankrupt medieval past.9 Rather, he identifies it as a moment marked by tragedy and loss. And in this, too, his ideas are strikingly prescient. ‘Revisionist’ histories of the Reformation have shifted the ground on which literary and cultural scholars read early modern texts, paying fresh attention to the relationship between literature and religion. Correspondingly, scholars of late medieval and early modern literature have increasingly mounted challenges to narratives of periodization, recognising that the narrative of cultural and religious renewal against an exhausted medieval past itself originates partly in the sixteenth-century Reformed agenda, in its wish to occlude the medieval past.10 The tenacity of this idea of the medieval ‘dark age’ – superstitious, violent, and culturally stifled – is apparent in the way that it persists not only within popular culture but within mainstream scholarly discourse.11 But here again, iconoclasm needs to be understood as a work which seeks by its very nature to periodize, to repudiate the past. James Simpson writes: [I]conoclasm is not ‘somewhere else’. Instead, it lies buried deep within Western modernity, and especially deep within the Anglo-American tradition. This tradition insistently and violently repudiates idols and

9

10 11

For more on this see the ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 9–10 et passim. See also Walter Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore with an Introduction by Peter Burke and Notes by Peter Murray (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 98 et passim. See discussion in the Introduction to this volume. Examples here range from popular faux-medieval TV shows like Game of Thrones to the controversial but bestselling The Swerve, which helped to win Stephen Greenblatt the Holberg Prize, in which the author consistently asserts medieval Christianity’s hostility to classical culture, educational and scientific inquiry, and physical pleasure. ‘Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body’. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Modern World Began (London: The Bodley Head, 2011), pp. 9–10 et passim. For a review which praises Greenblatt’s ‘engaging literary detective story’ while heavily criticising its historical inaccuracies and caricatures of late medieval religious culture see Jim Hinch, ‘Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong – and Why it Matters’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 December 2012.

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images as dangerous carriers of the old regime. […] [I]conoclasm is itself a historiographical act that seeks to close off historical process. Precisely because iconoclasts wish to separate one historical period from another absolutely, the history of iconoclasm is of necessity a diachronic history. Iconoclasm’s historian must resist the closures that its own subject would wish to impose.12 In terms of a theory of tragedy and Christianity, then, Benjamin’s ideas are useful in three ways. Firstly, he opposes Nietzsche’s enduringly influential theory that Christianity is inimical to tragedy by reading the Reformation as a fundamentally generative influence upon the emergence of a radically new genre of tragedy.13 Secondly, he reads the theological and cultural crisis of the Reformation in primarily aesthetic terms, as a collective failure of faith in the power of ritual and of representative forms to mediate an authentic encounter with, or knowledge of, the divine. And thirdly, he argues that Trauerspiel articulates a correspondingly acute sense of cultural loss and mourning, staging a sphere of human affairs which is increasingly isolated, its access to the divine sphere no longer adequately mediated by rituals and visual or performative art forms. Insofar as this rupture with the medieval past marks the emergence of early modernity, Benjamin’s modernity is itself tragic. Impelled by the Reformation discourse of idolatry, sixteenth-century religious iconoclasm became a prolonged historical and cultural episode in which ideas about what art is, and what it does, were smashed and re-formed. Benjamin’s thesis provides a valuable conceptual framework which identifies the Reformation as a crucible for the emergence of tragedy out of an imagebreaking modernity. The next section of this chapter places Benjamin’s philosphical thesis in its historical context by exploring recent developments in our understanding of how Reformed dialogue about visual culture and idolatry affected the world of the early modern stage. 2

Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Early Modern Anti-Theatricalism

In 1606, the Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players made it illegal in ‘any Stageplay, Enterlude, Show, May-game or Pageant, jestingly or prophanely [to] speak

12 13

James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), pp. 11–12. See the Introduction to this volume.

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or use the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost, or of the Trinity’.14 This censorship followed half a century of assaults upon the representation of religious matters on stage. As early as 1559, unlicensed interludes had been forbidden by royal proclamation.15 This Act stated that nothing could be played ‘Wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweale shall be handled or treated, being no meet matters to be written or treated upon, but by men of authority, learning and wisdom, nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreet persons’. Aside from the obvious concerns about the potential for political unrest in an epoch so dominated by religious division and rupture, these attempts at censoring religious content on the stage emerged out of profound cultural anxiety about religious representation itself. It forms a central preoccupation of the Elizabethan Homily Against Peril of Idolatry (1563), which was read regularly to huge audiences from the pulpits. By these and many other places of Scripture it is evident, that no image either ought or can be made unto God. For how can God, a most pure spirit, whom man never saw, be expressed by a gross, bodily, and visible similitude? How can the infinite majesty and greatness of God, incomprehensible to man’s mind, much more not able to be compassed with the sense, be expressed in a small and little image? […] A man might justly cry with the prophet Habakkuk, Shall such images instruct or teach anything right of God? […] Wherefore men that have made an image of God, whereby to honour him, have thereby dishonoured him most highly, diminished his majesty, blemished his glory, and falsified his truth. And therefore St. Paul saith, that such as have framed any similitude or image of God, like a mortal man, or any other likeness, in timber, stone, or other matter, have changed his truth into a lie.16 The author of the Homily expresses deep scepticism concerning the capacity of visual art to provide an adequate representation of sacred things, or to facilitate any direct encounter between worshipper and divine. The danger of idolatry arises from the fear that the audience could confuse the image with the 14 15 16

T.E. Tomlins and John Raithby, eds. The Statutes at Large, of England and of Great Britan: from Magna Carta to the Union of the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 4 (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1811), p. 679. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1964–1969), p. 115. The Two Books of Homilies, Appointed to be Read in Churches, edited by John Griffiths (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1859), p. 215.

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thing itself, leading to anthropomorphism and blasphemous idolatry. This seems to signal a radical shift, asserting not just the grave imperfection but the ultimate inadequacy of human forms of visual representation to mediate the divine. In 1985 Patrick Collinson gave an influential lecture called ‘From iconoclasm to iconophobia: the cultural impact of the second English Reformation’, in which he argued that around 1580 English iconoclasm hardened into actual iconophobia, witnessing a shift away from visual towards verbal culture.17 Thanks to more recent scholarship on popular print culture and domestic art, it is now clear that Collinson’s thesis was exaggerated. Research into domestic art, including in the houses of the Puritan ‘godly’, demonstrates that many forms of religious art continued to exist and be commissioned during the second half of the sixteenth century and beyond. However, their function did shift quite significantly. Documenting a large number of religious artworks in Puritan households as evidence, Tara Hamling demonstrates that the function of art in the domestic context was aesthetic, moral, or pedagogical: that is, for use in religious instruction, education, or for artistic appreciation, but not for direct use in the worship of God.18 It was not art in itself that was under attack, nor even religious art, but rather religious art within specifically liturgical or devotional contexts. The shift in function is also illustrated by the changing subject matter of many of these religious artworks: depictions of Christ’s passion or the sufferings of the saints declined sharply, while historical and didactic episodes from the Old Testament became increasingly popular. This trend in domestic art is echoed on the early modern stage, where late medieval Passion plays, saint plays, and eschatological cycles increasingly gave way after the 1580s to historical and didactic dramas drawn from the Old Testament. These trends illustrate not a collective iconophobia but a fundamental shift in understanding of the purpose of art. Iconoclasm attacked the belief that embodied forms (both the visual arts and the human body itself) could act as the locus for divine revelation and communion. Entertainment and moral instruction had always been an important part of religious art and theatre, but they increasingly became art’s primary functions, along with the memorialization or representation of historical episodes. This latter shift of course echoed the changing 17

18

Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading: University of Reading, 1986). Some of his conclusions were re-stated in Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010), Introduction et passim.

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theology of the Eucharist itself: away from the sacrificial moment of transcendent encounter with the divine, and towards historical re-presentation and memorial. Although Reformation image-breaking in England eventually spread to include attacks upon a wide variety of different visual art forms including paintings, church plate and furniture, vestments, and even church organs, early attacks on idolatry were primarily concerned with images of the human body. The word ‘image’, in late medieval England, referred primarily to embodied or three-dimensional artworks, usually statues. A useful example of this iconoclastic focus on the body appears in the Mercers’ Hall ‘Statue of the Dead Christ’ (Figure 3.1), which featured in the Tate Britain’s 2013–14 ‘Art Under Attack’ exhibition. The work dates from c. 1500–1520, the eve of the Reformation, and has been the subject of an iconoclastic attack. Presumably buried to protect it from further assault, it was discovered only in 1954, concealed underneath the chapel of the Mercers’ Company in London. The statue has been severely mutilated. However, the assaults have been confined to quite specific areas: the arms, the feet and lower legs, and the upper head which would once have worn a Crown of Thorns; the iconoclasts seem to have targeted the locations of the Five Wounds of Christ, which formed the subject of a popular devotional cult.19 The ‘Dead Christ’ is a typical example of the often specific, sophisticated, and highly theatrical attacks upon religious images. It provides further evidence that iconoclasm usually represented not an indiscriminate assault upon religious art, but a careful and sophisticated targeting of those artworks which were the focus of particular devotions and affective pieties. The focus on the three-dimensional embodied image, and in particular upon the wounded body, is also significant. The wounded or vulnerable body held a central place in late medieval culture as a place of direct encounter with God. The Eucharist, as the unbloody repetition of the sacrifice of Calvary, was the climactic expression of this truth, but it was joined by a host of other devotional practices and meditational aids: the exertions of pilgrimage; the discipline of fasting; practices of affective piety like meditation upon the Five Wounds and the sufferings of the Passion, which brought forth an embodied and theatrical response within the believer; and the various cults of the saints with their suffering, Christ-like bodies.20 19 20

See the discussion in Tabitha Barber and Stacy Boldrick, eds., Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), pp. 68–69. For a useful and engaging discussion of the wounded body in late medieval hagiographic literature, and the significance of its later migration into secular literature, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996), especially ch. 2.

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Figure 3.1 Detail from ‘Statue of the Dead Christ’, c. 1500–1520 photograph courtesy of the mercers’ company ©mark heathcote

The iconoclast who attacked the ‘Dead Christ’ has directly targeted the belief that the human body could act as the location for revealed truth. This focus by religious iconoclasts upon visual art and the human body itself as inadequate and/or fraudulent mediums for authentic encounter with the divine sets the scene for later anti-theatrical rhetoric. Despite the largely secular nature of plays put on in the commercial London playhouses in the 1590s, anti-theatrical writers repeatedly attacked the stage on religious grounds, accusing the theatre of being not just dangerously immoral but actively blasphemous. In particular, an insistent concern with the issue of idolatry emerges.21 The language of the Homily Against Peril of Idolatry is echoed by the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson, as he argues that the plays of religious authorities from the fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nazianzen to George Buchanan were designed to be read, not staged.

21

For further discussion of the relationship between anti-theatrical writing and fears about idolatry, see Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), and Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).

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For Nazianzen, detesting the corruption of the Corpus Christi plays that were set out by the papists, and inveighing against them, thought it better to write the passion of Christ in numbers himself, that all such as delight in numerosity of speech might read it, not behold it upon the stage, where some base fellow that played Christ should bring the person of Christ into contempt.22 Gosson’s contempt for the visual and representational gap between the body of the actor and its divine referent reflects considerable anxiety about the late medieval theatrical legacy of sacred drama, still so influential upon what was ostensibly a newly secular, commercial stage. Late medieval sacred drama’s capacity to accommodate the ‘base’ and the numinous within one another, enfolding contemporary topical reference to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century civic and rural life within the presentation of Biblical events, or juxtaposing moments of slapstick comedy alongside moments of sacral transcendence, is here the subject of blistering scepticism. In addition to this suspicion of visual art, the iconoclasts’ accompanying preoccupation with the idolatrous potential of the human body also stimulated anti-theatrical fears. Hundreds of years of tradition had asserted that theatrical representation – in the form of the mass – was a mode of direct communion with God. This close association is reflected by a number of anti-theatrical writers who touch uneasily upon theatre’s capacity for magical transformation. A repeated distrust of the stage’s ‘juggling’ appears in the writings of Stephen Gosson; the term echoes anti-Catholic sentiment which aims to dismiss the mass as mere hocus-pocus or fraudulent conjuring, and displays considerable nervousness about the basic nature of theatrical representation itself.23 Theatre makes things present, embodies things, in a way no other art form does; it is imbued with what Michael O’Connell has dubbed an ‘incarnational’ aesthetic, gesturing towards the lingering associations between theatrical representation and Eucharistic transubstantiation.24 Its particular mode of operation in the symbolic register makes physically present what is being explored. A third strand in anti-theatrical rhetoric is illustrated in the anxiety in Gosson’s writing about the potentially blurred lines between performance and reality. In his condemnation of the idolatrous nature of theatre, Gosson takes as an example an actor in a classical play, worshipping pagan gods. 22 23 24

Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, in Shakespeare: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 102. See Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, in Shakespeare: A Sourcebook, pp. 95, 97, 99, 102. Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, p. 47.

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Setting out the stage plays of the Gentiles, so we worship that we stoop to the names of heathen idols; so we trust that we give ourselves to the patronage of Mars, of Venus, of Jupiter, or Juno, and such like; so we pray that we call for their succor upon the stage; so we give thanks for the benefits we receive, that we make them the fountains of all our blessings, wherein if we think as we speak, we commit idolatry, because we bestow that upon the idols of Gentiles which is proper to God. If we make a divorce between the tongue and the heart, honouring the gods of the heathens in lips, and in gesture, not in thought, yet it is idolatry, because we do that which is quite contrary to the outward profession of our faith.25 Gosson’s anxiety centers upon what we would now call ‘performative language’: the possibility that language might signify something or have real efficacy irrespective of the intentions of the speaker.26 Thus, for him, the divorce between tongue and heart does not matter: it is the gesture itself that signifies idolatry, and not the private intention of the actor. Alongside its status as visual art and embodied art form, theatre is also a mode of ritual performance. It recalls the mass not only in its ‘incarnational aesthetic’, but in its repetition of certain words of power. Iconoclasts often vocally deny the significance of the idol – condemning it as a mere doll or lifeless figure – while simultaneously affirming its power by treating it as a false god, a dangerously seductive devilin-disguise. Gosson’s attack on the implicit, even unconscious blasphemy of playing follows this logic. At the heart of the anti-theatrical challenge, then, is a loss of faith in theatre’s claims to mediate something authentic. The discourse and practice of Reformation iconoclasm reduces this claim to fraud and cheap conjuring tricks at worst, and the didactic re-presentation of Biblical events at best. Even at this ‘best’, we find a residual uneasiness about the way that theatre and reality have a tendency to merge and blend across dividing lines. Thus attacks on the stage are informed by tensions over the question of the function of art and theatre, and their capacity: the question of whether art can facilitate true knowledge and a transcendent encounter with the truly other, or whether it is limited to the purely didactic and memorial.

25 26

Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, in Shakespeare: A Sourcebook, pp. 98–99. For a related discussion on performative speech acts which blurred the boundaries between theatre and the supernatural, see Andrew Sofer, ‘How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus’, Theatre Journal 61, no. 1 (March 2009): pp. 1–21.

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The third and final part of this essay presents a case study, via a reading of the Shakespeare-Middleton collaboration Timon of Athens, which illustrates how the whole discourse of anti-theatricalism and these changing ideas about theatre are themselves being staged and examined. 3

Timon of Athens: Stone or Flesh?

Timon of Athens has a long history of critical and theatrical neglect. Critics and audiences alike have commonly found the play difficult, unsatisfactory, unsympathetic, or alienating. Some have believed the play to be unfinished; others have regarded it as an unsuccessful generic experiment, or the result of a failed collaboration with Middleton. Now, though, it seems to be emerging in both criticism and performance as something of a ‘play for our time’, for example in the topical production by Nicholas Hytner for the National Theatre in 2012, which set the play in the world of the 2008 global economic crash.27 Even earlier in the twentieth century, though, when Timon was much less popular critically and theatrically than it is now, a few lone voices have always claimed it as one of the great examples of Western tragedy. For G. Wilson Knight, writing in 1930, Timon is a Nietzschean tragic superman, disdaining the limits of the human. He finds in the play a tragic movement more precipitous and unimpeded than any other in Shakespeare; one which is conceived on a scale even more tremendous than that of Macbeth and King Lear; and whose universal tragic significance is of all most clearly apparent. […] There is no tragic movement so swift, so clean-cut, so daring and so terrible in all Shakespeare as this of Timon. We pity Lear, we dread for Macbeth: but the awfulness of Timon, dwarfing pity and out-topping sympathy, is as the grandeur and menace of the naked rock of a sky-lifted mountain, whither we look and tremble.28 George Steiner, revisiting his controversial thesis that tragedy ‘dies’ with the rise of modern Christian and Marxist worldviews, calls Timon the only Shakespearean text which is ‘uncompromisingly tragic’.29 Steiner, like Knight, is 27 28 29

Timon of Athens, directed by Nicholas Hytner. National Theatre. Starring Simon Russell Beale. 9 September 2012. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 207, 221. George Steiner, ‘Tragedy, “Reconsidered”’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 41.

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influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas about tragedy and Christianity, and especially that the Christian world-view proved inimical to true tragedy. He too reads Timon as a kind of Nietzschean superman defying the gods, following up these remarks by reiterating his position that ‘Christianity made total tragedy implausible’.30 More recently Hugh Grady – although he takes these earlier critics to task for post-Romantic anachronism, arguing that they lose sight of the play’s social criticism of its own historical and economic moment – nonetheless argues alongside them that the play represents a radical movement away from pre-modern culture towards modernity. Well before it was institutionally established, skeptical Renaissance intellectuals were able to find a model through which to imagine secularity in the works of ancient Rome (and secondarily Greece) which proved to be the cultural harbingers of modernity throughout Western Europe. Shakespeare’s classical plays, very much including Timon of Athens, can be considered as a series of thought experiments investigating an imagined secular culture well before its actual historical construction.31 For Grady, the play’s achievement is its supposed rejection of the late medieval, its location of inspiration in classical humanist sources as it clears the stage of older religious worldviews. Axiomatic to these three critical responses is the idea that the play’s brilliance as a tragedy is linked to the way it supposedly explodes and supersedes its Christian cultural framework, striding towards secular modernity. The reading of the play advanced in what follows challenges that view. It argues, firstly, that Timon stages a response to the legacy of sixteenth-century religious iconoclasm and its related discourse of anti-theatricalism in the late sixteenth century discussed above, and that as such it is a distinctly Reformation tragedy. Secondly, Timon does not simply explode the late medieval religious framework of belief as Knight, Steiner, and Grady suggest. Rather, the play identifies iconoclasm itself as a cause and locus of tragedy. From its very opening lines Timon of Athens is preoccupied with the status of art: visual art, verbal art, and by extension theatre itself (‘Poet’, of course, being the familiar sixteenth century term for ‘Playwright’). The opening scene of the play stages an ongoing debate between the rivalrous Painter and Poet. It draws on the Renaissance paragone tradition in which one art form is 30 31

Steiner, ‘Tragedy, “Reconsidered”’, p. 41. Hugh Grady, ‘Timon of Athens: The Dialectic of Usury, Nihilism, and Art’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume I: The Tragedies, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), pp. 432–433. $)((-&
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rhetorically pitted against another, but it also echoes fifty years of intense and ongoing religious argument over the relative merits of Image versus Word – a debate which saw many churches paint over their medieval murals with vast Biblical texts, and theatre itself attacked, as we have seen, for its visual and sensual appeal. In Timon of Athens, however, poetry and painting seem equally degenerate. The opening lines stage a conversation between a set of four parasitical tradesmen, all hoping to gain money and patronage from the wealthy Timon.32 The juxtaposition of the Poet and Painter with the Jeweller, Merchant, and other greedy tradesmen instantly places the visual and verbal arts in a secular, commercial context. Art has become a commodity. The tensions thus created were beautifully highlighted by Hytner’s National Theatre production, which staged this scene as the opening of a new wing of an art gallery (the ‘Timon Room’). As the well-dressed crowd on-stage hung about Timon, sipping champagne and fawning over him, a vast reproduction of an El Greco painting, ‘Christ Driving the Moneylenders from the Temple’, hung above the stage. In the Gospels, Christ’s rage is provoked by the money-changers who have transformed the holy temple into a place of commerce, transforming it from house of prayer to den of thieves. They are there to assist in the selling of animals and birds for slaughter, intended as a representative sacrifice mediating between man and God but now transformed into pure commerce. The presence of El Greco’s painting on-stage thus silently illuminated the contrast between art’s potential for the sacred and transcendent, versus its descent into commodity. Over fifty years ago Anne Righter [Barton] remarked on the weary disgust Timon displays towards the whole concept of representation. Timon of Athens is marked by a curious strain of contempt for shadows, shows, imitations of all kinds, even for the clothes men wear. The masque of Amazons introduced in the first act evokes images of vanity and hypocrisy, the unnatural and depraved (1.2). To the Poet and the Painter, come to visit him in his solitude, Timon addressed words of scorn which somehow reach beyond the two sycophants before him to attack the idea of mimesis itself. […] The play upon the word ‘counterfeit’, a virtual synonym for the actor as well as for falsehood, is familiar from Shakespeare’s early work, but not this accompanying sense of the corruption, the dishonesty of art.33 32 33

William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2008), ll. 1.1.1–96. All further references to the play refer to this edition. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967), pp. 166–167. $)((-&
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Righter perspicaciously observed that it is not merely theatre (or visual art, or poetry) which is under attack here, but every form of mimesis itself, down to the very costumes men wear. Every mode of representation, every sphere from fine art to the vulnerable human body in which late medieval culture found possibilities for encounter with the divine comes to seem inherently corrupt. The Poet expresses this succinctly: When we for recompense have praised the vile, It stains the glory in that happy verse Which aptly sings the good. (1.1.16–18) Here the Poet highlights the ‘problem of praise’: when his art prostitutes itself, deceitfully flattering what is not worthy to be praised in return for money, it pollutes poetry’s capacity to give praise to the truly transcendent. The inherently fallen nature of language and poetic art is confirmed some thirty lines later, in a brisk skirmish between the cynic Apemantus and the Poet. Apemantus. How now, poet? Poet. How now, philosopher? Apemantus. Thou liest. Poet. Art not one? Apemantus. Yes. Poet. Then I lie not. Apemantus. Art not a poet? Poet. Yes. Apemantus. Then thou liest. (1.1.218–27) The philosophical sentiment is Platonic, but the bitter disillusionment echoes half a century of repeated attacks upon the capacity of art and representation for truth-content. Several characteristics of art as it is depicted in Timon of Athens reflect the changing status of visual art and theatre in sixteenth-century England. Recent research into domestic art has demonstrated the migration of religious art out of the churches and into the privatised sphere of the house. The rapid rise of the new commercial London playhouses and the erosion of late medieval civic religious drama likewise speaks to the changing role of theatre (and the attacks of the anti-theatricalists to its enduringly idolatrous potential). The strikingly commercial nature of art in Timon reflects its changing place and purpose. $)((-&
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Similarly, art’s capacity is noticeably limited. ‘Singing the good’ is now problematic, as we have seen: so, too, is art’s capacity for novelty. The Painter cannot tell the Poet anything that is not already ‘well known’ (l. 1.1.3), and although his art is said to have ‘conjured’ up a magical bounty of new ‘spirits’ on to the stage (l. 1.1.6), these too are immediately identified as familiar merchants. The art of the painter, it appears, has no privileged access to knowledge, no new truth to impart. These lines riff on the power of art to ‘conjure’ or perform magic, perhaps even to create something from nothing, but this is revealed as mere illusion. Even where art retains its (contested) claim to truth-content, its claims are purely didactic rather than devotional or transcendent. In the opening scene (1.1) the Poet describes to the Painter his new poem, an allegorical work featuring Timon climbing Fortune’s hill. The rivalrous Painter argues that such works are better presented visually: another dig at the fraught question of visual and verbal forms of representation, and indeed the description is so startlingly visual that it is easy to forget that the work in question is a poem and not a painting. The Poet’s description makes clear that this is a moral or didactic work. Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill Feign’d Fortune to be throned: the base o’ the mount Is rank’d with all deserts, all kind of natures, That labour on the bosom of this sphere To propagate their states: amongst them all, Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fix’d, One do I personate of Lord Timon’s frame, Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her; Whose present grace to present slaves and servants Translates his rivals. […] When Fortune in her shift and change of mood Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants Which labour’d after him to the mountain’s top Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down, Not one accompanying his declining foot. (1.1.65–74; 86–90) Like the religious artworks in the houses of the Puritan godly, this work is allegorical, didactic, even aesthetically pleasing, but it offers nothing transcendent and nothing new (the rivalrous Painter points out that this type of work has been ‘common’ in painting, l. 1.1.91); there is no hint of privileged access to knowledge. The scene does not merely echo the Reformation divisions between $)((-&
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visual and verbal art; it identifies and stages some of the ensuing shifts in the status and function of art and theatre themselves. The play’s explicit engagement with the legacy of religious reform and iconoclasm takes centre-stage in the climactic ‘banquet scenes’ (1.2 and 3.7) in which Timon feasts his friends. The second scene (3.7) is densely Eucharistic, building upon a series of allusions which draw out the latent Timon-as-Christ analogy, for example in Apemantus’ earlier exclamation: ‘O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon and he sees ’em not! It grieves me to see many dip their meat in one man’s blood, and all the madness is, he cheers them up too’ (ll. 1.2.39–41). The lines foreshadow Timon’s own cry, as his friends abandon him and the creditors surround him, waving their unpaid bills: Timon. Knock me down with ’em, cleave me to the girdle. Lucius. Alas, my lord – Timon. Cut my heart in sums – Titus. Mine, fifty talents – Timon. Tell out my blood. Lucius. Five thousand crowns, my lord. Timon. Five thousand drops pays that. What yours, and yours? 1 Varro Servant. My lord – 2 Varro Servant. My lord – Timon. Tear me, take me, and the gods fall upon you. Exit. (3.4.88–97) The wounded and bleeding body, and especially the bleeding heart, is elsewhere figured as a place of authentic and self-sacrificial encounter with the other, as when Timon’s one faithful friend, the steward Flavius, remarks helplessly, ‘I bleed inwardly for my lord’ (l. 1.2.208). Timon’s figurative openheartedness towards his friends becomes re-imagined as an attempted imitation of Christ’s sacrifice. But in the second banquet scene it is to undergo a radical transformation. The scene stages a reversal or parody of the Last Supper: when the covers are removed from the dishes not wine but lukewarm water is revealed, which Timon hurls at his guests. In Shakespeare and Middleton’s source-play, the anonymous satire Timon, the feast features stones painted to look like artichokes.34 Echoing this, in Timon of Athens one of the retreating guests remarks suggestively: ‘One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones’ (l. 3.7.115). In addition to the obvious reversal of the Eucharistic transubstantiation, with wine translated into water and 34

Timon, edited by James C. Bulman and J.M. Nosworthy, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 4.5. $)((-&
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bread or flesh-meat into stone, the scene also invokes a host of other Biblical passages which prefigure the sacrifice of Christ. These include the marriagefeast at Cana, where water is transformed into wine, as well as the Temptation of Christ in the desert, where Satan suggests that Christ should change stones into loaves. There is a third, prophetic Old Testament passage which famously prefigures the transformation of stone into flesh. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.35 The verses were used by a number of Reformed preachers to emphasise the radical nature of divine grace, and man’s absolute dependence on it. Calvin uses it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion to oppose the Catholic doctrine of works, as does the Elizabethan fin-de-siècle preacher Francis Bunny.36 The verses are, I want to suggest, imaginatively invoked by this scene, following on from the striking image of stony or bleeding hearts appearing in the lines from 3.4, quoted above. The scene directly parodies the actions described in Ezekiel: earlier in it, when the dishes are uncovered, Timon hurls the water in the faces of his erstwhile friends in a parody of baptism which also directly mimics Ezekiel’s ‘sprinkling of clean water’. If the verses do indeed operate as an additional source-text for the scene then they do not only prefigure baptismal cleansing and Eucharistic transformation but also invoke the smashing of idols. The play is preoccupied with the troubled status of art, both the painter’s visual image and the poet’s (or playwright’s) verbal productions; it has been preoccupied with them since the opening scene of the play. The banquet scene with its densely Eucharistic language draws heavily upon the visual iconography of the Last Supper, that much is clear. In smashing it violently apart onstage Timon plays the role of reforming iconoclast, exposing the whole scene 35 36

Ezekiel 36:25–26. The Holy Bible. Containing the Old and New Testaments. Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press). John Calvin, The institution of Christian religion, wrytten in Latine by maister Jhon Calvin, and translated into Englysh according to the authors last edition. Seen and allowed according to the order appointed in the Quenes maiesties iniunctions (London: Reinold Wolfe and Richarde Harison, 1561), ii, iii, pp. 20–21. Francis Bunny, A comparison betweene the auncient fayth of the Romans, and the new Romish religion. Set foorth by Frauncis Bunny, sometime fellowe of Magdalen College in Oxforde (London: Robert Robinson for Raph Jackeson, 1595), ch.10, pp. 43–44. $)((-&
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as nothing but fraudulent charade. But is Timon’s unyielding scepticism, his ‘exposure’ of human beings as nothing but painted and rotten images with feet of clay, and of ritual forms of encounter such as the Eucharistic banquet as hollow stage-plays, one which the play itself ultimately sustains? Or does it identify the true source of tragedy elsewhere? 4

The Imagination of Stone

In attempting to suggest a more complex reading, I want to look in conclusion at the significance of stone in this scene, and in the play at large, to ask why the smashing of the idols tips the play over into tragedy, and why it should be accompanied by a literal and metaphorical ‘turning to stone’. Eamon Duffy has referred to Reformation iconoclasm as a kind of ‘sacrament of forgetfulness’, and the actions behind the radical transformation of the English landscape do often appear like a sacramental theology-in-performance, as ritual and performative in their way as the sacrifice of the Mass itself.37 ‘Image’, in late medieval English, referred primarily to embodied images, especially stone statues. The actions of smashing and breaking emerged from a failure of belief: these beautiful embodied images were made to feel the full force of iconoclastic rage for being ‘just’ dead stone, not living flesh, their claims to mediate a genuine encounter with the divine sphere exposed as fraud. Iconoclasm often reveals a curious contradiction or doubleness in the affective logic: even as the graven images are condemned as lifeless clay they are treated most as if they could see, or hear, or feel. The Dead Christ, discussed above, has drawn such a response, looking startlingly as if Christ himself has suffered a re-enactment of his wounds, but there are many such instances of iconoclastic acts which seem to test the image, punishing it for its lifelessness by treating it as if it were living flesh. Notable examples include the Wycliffites who enacted a mock martyrdom of a St. Katherine statue by chopping her up and putting her to the fire to make cabbage soup; the public exposure and demolition of the supposedly miraculous Boxley Rood of Grace, its limbs smashed and carried away in pieces by the crowd to the sound of an iconoclastic sermon; and finally Bishop Latimer’s famous ‘Marian burnings’ in 1538, in which statues of the Virgin from shrines all over the country were brought up to London and paraded in all their finery before being burned at Chelsea in exactly the same way as the martyrs before them. These episodes unfold as if the statues might at any moment reveal

37

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themselves as living flesh, ready to speak their defence and feel the agony of their martyrdom.38 Historians of Reformation iconoclasm, as well as literary critics of iconoclasm and anti-theatricalism, have long observed a gendered strain to aspects of iconoclasm. Huston Diehl, in her far-reaching study of Reformation culture and the stage, identified what she described as a ‘gynophobic’ side to Reformed fears about idolatry, arguing that the Reformers’ association of the devotional gaze with the erotic gaze contributes to the imagination of sacred images as sexualised women, and beautiful women as potential idols, leading men away from God.39 Images of the Blessed Virgin, revered and loved in late medieval piety as mirrors of idealised femininity, became targets of a quite literal ‘Madonna-whore’ dichotomy, accused of harlotry and witchcraft, of seducing men away from the truly good and beautiful under fraudulent painted exteriors. Graven images, then, become the focus of a profound theological ambivalence: the rage and violence they attract is a direct result of their magnetic attraction. The ritual attacks are a direct outcome of their ambiguous status: living flesh, or cold stone? Elsewhere in the Shakespearean tragic corpus there are two instances in which female bodies are imaginatively transformed into stone images and subjected to iconoclastic violence by men in the grip of paranoid doubt: Desdemona, lying like ‘monumental alabaster’ upon her deathbed, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, transformed to living statue for sixteen long years.40 Timon is unusual within the Shakespearean corpus for the almost total absence of women from the stage. A masque of dancing Amazons at the first banquet, and the later appearance in the second half of the prostitutes Phrynia and Timandra, bidden by Timon to go and infect the world with venereal disease, are the only female characters who appear. Feminist criticism, however, has drawn attention to the startling misogyny of Timon’s language in the second half, and the felt threat of female sexuality in the play. In a now-famous essay on the maternal presence in the play, Coppèlia Kahn contrasted the dominant image of Timon and Lady Fortune, encapsulated in the Poet’s description of his new

38

39 40

Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards, and the Breaking of Idols’, in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, edited by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 131–150. Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 114 and pp. 117–118. Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage. See especially ch. 6: ‘Iconophobia and Gynophobia: The Stuart Love Tragedies’. William Shakespeare, Othello, edited by E.A.J. Honigmann (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997), l. 5.2.5. $)((-&
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poem, with the horrified paranoia of Timon’s description, in the second half of the play, of ‘counterfeit matrons’ and those ‘virgins, whose milk-paps through the bars bore at men’s eyes’.41 Like the statues of the Virgin which drew such ire at reforming hands, women in Timon of Athens are treacherous mothers, painted idols waiting to lure men in through the power of the visual (and potentially idolatrous) gaze before betraying them to their ruin. ‘Gynophobia’ is alive and well in this play, a logical extension of Timon’s iconoclastic rage and iconoclasm’s own gendered legacy in which the female body is itself always an object of paranoid suspicion as a potential idol. The text of Ezekiel promises that the smashing of the stone idols will induce a concomitant ‘un-stoning’, a turning of the stony heart to living flesh and blood. Christ echoes it in his radical words forbidding divorce, as he explains that divorce law was permitted under Moses only ‘because of the hardness of your hearts’.42 The turning of a stone heart to flesh thus signifies the opening up of the human heart to God – or, in Christ’s account, of one human heart to another – and in Ezekiel this is conditional upon the destruction of the idols. In Timon, this climactic scene of iconoclasm likewise initiates a complex imagery of stone, both literal and metaphorical. As we have seen, the mock ‘transubstantiation’ of the banquet parodies the Eucharistic celebration, transforming flesh to stone. It also inaugurates the play’s tremendous reversal – the transformation of Timon from all-giving Christ-figure to implacable misanthrope living in self-imposed exile outside the city walls – marking the moment at which Timon’s bleeding heart and open body turn to stone. The same imagery is invoked again when after repeatedly rebuffing emissaries from the city Timon flings stones at them, once more literalising the trope of a granite heart impenetrable to pity. The depth of its impenetrability is tested by the arrival of the faithful steward Flavius, the same servant whose own body has been earlier figured as inwardly bleeding in its pity for his master. It is a moment of possibility, a moment in which Timon has the choice, to borrow Stanley Cavell’s resonant term, to ‘acknowledge’ Flavius and in so doing to acknowledge the possibility of distinguishing between false image and true friend.43 But he does not take it, and Flavius is sent grieving away. In the imaginative landscape of this play, iconoclasm becomes a site and cause of tragedy because 41 42 43

Coppèlia Kahn, ‘“Magic of bounty”: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power’. Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1987): pp. 34–57. See esp. pp. 34–41 and pp. 52–53. Matthew 19: 1–9; see also Mark 10: 1–12. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 48, 138, et passim.

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it inaugurates an all-encompassing failure of faith in embodied forms, from theatre and visual art to the human body itself, to mediate truth content. This in turn brings about a concomitant ‘stoning’ of the human heart, unrelentingly proof against the claims of the other. Shakespearean tragedy often leaves us with a visual emblem: the coffin of Richard ii; the reverse pietà of King Lear. In Timon of Athens this final emblem is itself a great memorial stone, carved with his epitaph. Here lie I, Timon, who alive, all living men did hate, Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait. (5.5.70–72) He is stone to the last. 5

Conclusion

Timon of Athens responds to Reformation iconoclasm as a failure of faith in the power of the image, exploring what is at stake in that failure. Considering the relationship of tragedy to Christianity, then, one valuable insight that we might take from much of the current, richly varied work on the different ways in which early modern theatre responds to the Reformation and in particular to Reformation iconoclasm is (pace Benjamin) to read tragedy’s response to the Reformation as a problem of representation. Innovative and experimental new dramatic forms like early modern tragedy, which flourished during the aftermath of the Reformation amid the erosion of older forms of religious theatre and culture, take up the fragments of older cultural forms, incorporating them into creative new works which are also ‘mourning-plays’, works that recall (as The Waste Land does) what has been lost. But the legacy of iconoclasm goes beyond the loss of specific customs and artworks. Under attack was the devotional capacity of art, theatre, and embodied forms, the capacity of these forms to mediate an encounter with God and the realm beyond the self. It is this ‘crisis of representation’ to which Reformation tragedies like Timon of Athens respond. Bibliography Aston, Margaret. Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016).

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Barber, Tabitha, and Stacy Boldrick, eds. Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (London: Tate Publishing, 2013). Beckwith, Sarah. Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume prepared by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999). Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne with an introduction by George Steiner (London: Verso, 1998). Bunny, Francis. A comparison betweene the auncient fayth of the Romans, and the new Romish religion. Set foorth by Frauncis Bunny, sometime fellowe of Magdalen College in Oxforde (London: Robert Robinson for Raph Jackeson, 1595). Burckhardt, Walter. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore with an introduction by Peter Burke and notes by Peter Murray (London: Penguin, 1990). Calvin, John. The institution of Christian religion, wrytten in Latine by maister Jhon Calvin, and translated into Englysh according to the authors last edition. Seen and allowed according to the order appointed in the Quenes maiesties iniunctions (London: Reinold Wolfe and Richarde Harison, 1561). Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988). Collinson, Patrick. From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading: University of Reading 1986). The Crucifixion. In English Mystery Plays, edited by Peter Happé (London: Penguin, 1975), pp. 525–536. Diehl, Huston. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997). Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992). Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. In Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 49–74. Gosson, Stephen. Plays Confuted in Five Actions. In Shakespeare: A Sourcebook, edited by Tanya Pollard (Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 84–114. Grady, Hugh. ‘Timon of Athens: The Dialectic of Usury, Nihilism, and Art’. In A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume I: The Tragedies, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), pp. 430–451. Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the Modern World Began (London: The Bodley Head, 2011).

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Hamling, Tara. Decorating the Godly Household (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010). Hinch, Jim. ‘Why Stephen Greenblatt Is Wrong – and Why it Matters’. Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 December 2012. The Holy Bible. Containing the Old and New Testaments. Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford UP). Hughes, Paul L., and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1964–1969). Kahn, Coppèlia. ‘“Magic of bounty”: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power’. Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1987): pp. 34–57. Knight, G. Wilson. The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen, 1960). Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Standford: Stanford UP, 1996). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. with an introduction and notes by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). O’Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Righter, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967). Shakespeare, William. Othello, edited by E.A.J. Honigmann (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997). Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, edited by Frank Kermode (Croatia: ArdenMethuen, 1954). Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2008). Simpson, James. Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010). Sofer, Andrew. ‘How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus’. Theatre Journal 61, no. 1 (March 2009): pp. 1–21. Stanbury, Sarah. ‘The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards, and the Breaking of Idols’. In Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, edited by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 131–150. Steiner, George. ‘Tragedy, Reconsidered’. In Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 29–44. Timon. Edited by James C. Bulman and J.M. Nosworthy, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Timon of Athens. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. National Theatre, 9 September 2012. Theatrical performance. Tomlins, T.E. and John Raithby, eds. The Statutes at Large, of England and of Great Britan: from Magna Carta to the Union of the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 4 (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1811).

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The Two Books of Homilies, Appointed to be Read in Churches, edited by John Griffiths (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1859). Walsham, Alexandra. ‘Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44, no. 2 (2014): pp. 241–280.

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Chapter 4

Pity and Neo-Stoicism in Webster’s The Duchess Of Malfi Adrian Streete 1 Is it good to feel pity for others?1 In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580–1), Philip Sidney offers an equivocal answer to this question. Tragedy, he notes, openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours; that, with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded; that maketh us know, Qui sceptra duro saevus imperio regit timet timentes; metus in auctorem redit. But how much it can move, Plutarch yieldeth a notable testimony of the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus, from whose eyes a tragedy, well made and represented, drew abundance of tears, who without all pity had murdered infinite numbers, and some of his own blood; so as he that was not ashamed to make matters for tragedies, yet could not resist the sweet violence of a tragedy. And if it wrought no further good in him, it was that he, in despite of himself, withdrew himself from hearkening to that which might mollify his hardened heart.2

1 For two useful discussions of pity and tragedy, see Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 153–177, and Martha Nussbaum, ‘The “Morality” of Pity: Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 148–169. 2 Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 363. The Latin quotation is from Seneca’s Oedipus 3.705–6: ‘Who harshly wields the sceptre with tyrannic sway, fears those who fear; terror recoils upon its author’s head’.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_006  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_006 6543_006

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Sidney allows that tragedy provokes fear.3 By ‘stirring the affects’ of tyrants, it enables them to contemplate the transitory nature of authority. This is a familiar admixture of Aristotelian mimesis and the de Casibus tradition. In the Poetics, Aristotle denies that the wicked man is a fit subject for tragedy. We may feel sympathy with such a figure but not fear or pity at his fate.4 By contrast, Sidney says that the tyrant is a proper subject of tragedy. His allusion to Seneca’s Oedipus is instructive. The ruler who creates fear in his subjects must consequently live in fear. Might the tyrant be overthrown, then? Sidney does not consider this politically contentious conclusion here.5 Rather, the example of Alexander Pheraeus shows the limitations of theatrical affect. He is moved to tears by sweetly violent representations. He is a cruel murderer in real life. Yet he keeps these two modes of affect apart. He leaves plays that move him ‘in despite of himself’. And he is able to do so because he has no ‘pity’. This essay considers the place of pity in John Webster’s mid-Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (c.1612–3) by considering the interface between Christian and neo-Stoic discussions of the emotion. I argue that Webster’s approach to pity is influenced both by Old Testament models of female resistance to male power, and by neo-Stoic ideas about the exemplary suffering subject. The play presents the Duchess as a prophetic figure, one whose political threat emerges as piteous identification gives way to eschatological promise. Sidney only uses the word ‘pity’ twice in the Defence. Not long before the passages on comedy and tragedy, he discusses some other poetic genres in order ‘to see what faults may be found in the right use of them’.6 He speaks of ‘the lamenting Elegiac’ who may have ‘a kind heart’ but who ‘would move rather pity than blame’. Such a poet ‘surely is to be praised, either for compassionate accompanying just causes of lamentations, or for rightly painting out how weak be the passions of woefulness?’7 Sidney knows that this is how the elegist is commonly seen. Yet the passage is ironical. The elegist is, like any other literary writer, a rhetorician. He deals in appeals to pathos, and specifically to

3 Apart from these remarks, I do not consider fear in any depth in this chapter, nor how it is discussed in The Duchess of Malfi. But it is worth noting that fear is expressed as a negative emotion in the play and is most commonly associated with Antonio, who often fears in an unnecessary or unmanly way. 4 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), p. 57. 5 But Sidney does in his discussion of Hecuba. Sidney, Defence, p. 382. 6 Sidney, Defence, p. 361. The passages on the ‘faults’ of pastoral and elegy precede the wellknown passage on the ‘abuse’ of comedy. 7 Sidney, Defence, p. 361.

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commiseratio, the attempt to evoke pity or compassion in an audience.8 In Sidney’s account of the elegist, such appeals reduce the poet to a poor imitator of ‘weak’ passions, a poetic backing-singer for someone else’s sad song. There is little that is ‘just’ or ‘right’ about that. So why does Sidney hesitate over pity? Why does he have an equivocal attitude to the term and to the emotion in poetic writing? The answer can be found in his interest in neo-Stoicism. Sidney and his circle introduced neo-Stoic ideas into English intellectual culture during the late 1570s and 80s.9 He knew and admired the great Dutch neo-Stoic Justus Lipsius.10 In England Lipsius’ most well-known book, the neo-Stoic dialogue De Constantia, was published in Latin in 1586 and in translation in 1594.11 Lipsius’ interlocutor Langius argues that in times of conflict we must honour family, friends, and the common good. We can only do so dispassionately through an inner constancy, ‘a right and immoueable strength of the minde, neither lifted vp, nor pressed downe with externall or casuall accidents’.12 We must not be swayed by opinion but rather guided by patience and right reason.13 Only then can the passions be brought under control, achieving a state that is ‘the nearest that man can haue to God, To be immooueable’.14 In times of conflict, pity is especially dangerous. Langius says that ‘Those words, My countries calamitie afflicts me, carrie with them more vainglory than veritie’.15 In order to drive home this 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

Connected to the rhetorical concept of energia. see Brian Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 715–745, pp. 719–720. See Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 66–69, and Freya Sierhuis, ‘Autonomy and Inner Freedom: Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism’, in Freedom and the Construction of Europe. Volume ii: Free Persons and Free States, edited by Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 46–64. Sidney and Lipsius first met in Louvain in 1577 and in 1586 he and Leicester met Lipsius in Leiden. After this last meeting, Lipsius dedicated a book on Latin pronunciation to Sidney. See Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 296–298. The book was written in 1584. Ivsti Lipsi, De Constantia Libri Dvo (Londini: Geor. Bishop, 1586), and Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie … , trans. Iohn Stradling (London: Richard Iohnes, 1594). Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes Of Constancie … , edited by Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1939), p. 79. See also Sierhuis, ‘Autonomy and Inner Freedom’, p. 48. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 48. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 83. This may be a transliteration of Stoic apatheia. The Latin phrase that Lipsius uses is ‘Non moueri’. Lipsi, De Constantia, p. 9. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 88.

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point, he uses the example of ‘Polus a notable stage player’ who, when he needed to expresse some great sorrow, he brought with him priuely the bones of his dead son, & so the remembrance therof caused him to fil the theatre with true teares indeed. Euen so may I say by the most part of you. You play a Comedy, vnder the person of your country, you bewail with tears your priuate miseries. One saith The whol world is a stage-play. Trulie in this case it is so. Some crie out, These ciuil warres torment vs, the blood of innocents spilt, the losse of lawes and libertie. Is it so? I see your sorrow indeed, but the cause I must search out more narrowly. Is it for the common-wealths sake? O player, put off thy vizard: thy selfe are the cause thereof.16 Theatre trades in emotional dissimulation. Just as the ‘pity’ we see expressed there is mimetic, so the pity we feel for our country is, in fact, false. Pity is a kind of emotional fakery that should be avoided. Lipsius dislikes this suggestion. He asks ‘What Stoyical subtilties are these?’ and argues that pity for another is surely ‘a vertue among good men, and such as haue anie religion in them’.17 This passage alludes to one of the major Christian discussions of the question, Book 9, Chapter 5 of Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei. Here, Augustine attacks the Stoic conception of the passions, especially their reprehension of pity: ‘What is mercy but a compassion in our own heart of another’s misfortunes, urging us as far as our power stretches to relieve him? This feeling serves reason, when our pity offends not justice, either in relieving the poor or forgiving the penitent’.18 Compassion moves one towards the plight of the other. Augustine’s advice permeates early modern discussions of the passions and of pity. Fellow feeling is a natural law making pity compatible with reason and action. Augustine also brings together the terms pity, mercy, and compassion, a trio that henceforth defines orthodox Christian discussions of this subject.19 Lipsius was, as Christopher Brooke observes, ‘trying to produce a distinctively Christian Stoicism, one that could be 16 17 18 19

Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 89. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 99. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God. Volume 1, trans. John Healey (1610) (London: J.M. Dent, 1947), p. 258. For example, Thomas Wilson’s 1612 definition of ‘Compassion’ refers to and cross-references ‘pity’ and ‘mercy’. See A Christian Dictionarie … (London: W. Iaggard, 1612), p. 60. Or see Thomas Bilson, The Svrvey Of Christs Svfferings … (London: Melchisedech Bradwood for Iohn Bill, 1603), p. 27.

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defended against Augustinian objections’.20 The main objection is pride: Stoic constancy denies original sin, placing the individual above his fellow Christians. Nevertheless, as De Constantia shows, neo-Stoicism also emerges as a reaction to the religious wars of the sixteenth century that scarred Europe. In such a context, the call for personal immovability and emotional self-control can be understood. As Katherine Ibbett has recently noted, while the first half of the Augustinian equation – fellow feeling – is commonly observed in the period, the second impulse – compassionate action – is less common: ‘Far from reaching out to the others for whom it feels, compassion often kept the other at arm’s length’.21 For Ibbett, the act of being moved can be action enough. We might tend to view this now as an emotionally insufficient response. Yet this is a period where religious tolerance is not an ‘absolute virtue’; as commonly understood, toleration is ‘to suffer and endure, to put up with something but also to allow’.22 We put up with the other; we may even be moved by her plight. But toleration, and thus pity, has its limits: ‘Both toleration and compassion looked not to overcome gaps between selves but rather to observe a necessary distance, to mind the gap’.23 Neo-Stoicism offered an intellectual defence of that gap between self and other. In his Sermons on Job, John Calvin follows Augustine. He notes that ‘wee must not goe to schoole to say, Let vs haue compassion vpon such as are in distresse: that is ingrauen in all men’. As Romans 12:15 reminds us, the man who has ‘no pitie vpon the poore wretched creatures which are in aduersitie, haue giuen ouer the feare of God’.24 Pity and fear are linked for Calvin. Perhaps recalling his youthful commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, Calvin is wary of the Stoic suggestion that fear hinders ‘this vpright poise and euennesse’ of the mind.25 In De Constantia, Langius answers this kind of objection by affirming the providential control of God.26 Yet he still attacks pity as ‘a verie daungerous contagion’. Once more, he reaches for a mimetic metaphor. Pity is the ‘fault of

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Brooke, Philosophic Pride, p. xv. Katherine Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 3. Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge, p. 6. Ibbett, Compassion’s Edge, p. 7. John Calvin, Sermons of Maister Iohn Caluin, vpon the Booke of Iob, trans. Arthur Golding (London: George Bishop, 1574), p. 113. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 85. See John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, trans. Ford Lewis Battles and Andre Malan Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969), pp. 355–371. See for example Lipsius, Two Bookes, pp. 163–164, where he draws on the metaphor of tragedy to make the point.

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an abiect and base mind, cast downe at the shew of anothers mishap’.27 Certainly we may be ‘moued at anothers miserie’. This inclination Langius calls ‘mercy’ and ‘compassion’.28 But to pity someone is a ‘softenesse and abiection of the minde’. Pity is not subject to reason. To pity another is to become infected ‘with other mens contagion’.29 Not only does pity get the passions out of balance, it diminishes the ethical ability of the self to help another, and to act in the face of oppression. Significantly, Sidney and Lipsius associate pity and tyranny. In De Constantia, Langius defends providence, specifically the charge that God seems indifferent to human suffering, through the example of tragic tyranny: Tell me, in beholding a tragedy, will it stomacke thee to see Atreus or Thiestes in the firste or second acte walking in state and maiestye vppon the scene? To see them raigne, threate and commaund? I thinke not, knowing the prosperitie to be of small continuance; And when thou shalt see them shamefullie come to confusion in the last Acte. Nowe then in this Tragedy of the World, why art not thou so favourable towards God, as to a poore Poet. This wicked man prospereth. That tyrant liueth. Let be awhiles. Remember it is but the first Act, and consider aforehand in thy mind, that sobs and sorrowes will ensue vppon their solace. This Scene will anon swimme in bloud.30 The key phrase here is ‘consider aforehand in thy mind’. Stoic apatheia creates a distance between the self and the representation. It allows the spectator to view the tyrant dispassionately, apprehending his imminent downfall and affirming providence by analogy. Political retribution will come. As Sidney notes, the mimetic pity we feel in the theatre does not necessarily translate into ethically virtuous behaviour outside that building. This is also why he criticises the elegist for avoiding blame, the political critique of the subject’s life. Freya Sierhuis has recently argued that Lipsius creates ‘a space in which the individual subject is fully free and beyond the reach of fortune or tyrannical power’. This concept of liberty is ‘figured on the opposition between freedom and servitude, self-mastery and slavish ambition, between the acquisition and the loss of power and autonomy’.31 Tragic theatre is such an important test case for Lipsius because, viewed rightly, it is an ethical space where pity and tyranny 27 28 29 30 31

Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 99. The Latin term used is ‘speciem’. Lipsi, De Constantia, p. 19. He also says that tragedy provokes fear but not pity. Lipsius, Two Bookes, pp. 99–100. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 100. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 163. Sierhuis, ‘Autonomy and Inner Freedom’, p. 47. $)((-&
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are rejected, and where the ethical freedom of the exemplary self may serve as a model for political action. In early modern England, those who defend the stage generally steer clear of discussing pity directly. Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612) is a case in point.32 He starts with the disclaimer that mimetic action is a mere ‘shadow’ that cannot ‘mooue the spirits of the beholder to admiration’. Yet he quickly moves to affirm that extraordinary theatrical representations are ‘sights to make an Alexander’.33 Fellow feeling leads to individual action. Writing of ‘domesticke hystories’, Heywood praises them for their mimetic fidelity and ability to shape affect: ‘as if the Personater were the man Personated, so bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the hearts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt’.34 Later in the text he explains that ‘If we present a Tragedy, we include all the fatall and abortiue ends of such as commit notorious murders … to terrifie men from the like abhorred practices’. So when we show ‘Nero against tyranny’ on the stage, it is done for the following reasons: ‘either animating men to noble attempts, or attaching the consciences of the spectators, finding themselves toucht in presenting the vices of others’.35 Although Heywood’s phrasing is notably careful here, the implication is that pity for those suffering under the yoke of the tyrant may induce ‘noble attempts’ against that tyrant – resistance led by the nobility or magistracy – or even by the spectators themselves, a politically bold suggestion. Theatre is an arena where the vices of individuals – and of society at large – may be amended.36 By contrast, critics of the stage often invoke pity as a negative emotion. John Rainoldes’s Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (1599) says that his opponent William Gager darkens ‘the trueth with mistes of pitie and humane affections’ and criticises Peter for pitying Christ in Matthew 16:22.37 Like many anti-theatricalists, Rainoldes does not necessarily want to do away with theatre altogether. He does want to reform what he sees as its abuses. His well-known attack on crossdressing tends to obscure the neo-Stoic temper of his mimetic theory: Lipsius is quoted approvingly by Rainoldes in a number of places.38 As he asks: ‘if Ulysses 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

See Heywood’s comments on the theatre as an antidote to pride. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors … (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), sig. G1r. Heywood, An Apology, sigs. B3v–B4r. Heywood, An Apology, sig. B4r. Heywood, An Apology, sig. F3v. See the examples of spectators moved by plays to confess to murder, and of plays preventing invasion by hostile forces. Heywood, An Apology, sigs. G1r–G1v. John Rainoldes, Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes … (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1599), pp. 45, 85. Rainoldes, Th’overthrow, pp. 109, 160, 178. $)((-&
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begging in his own house, did move all the spectators to have compassion of him, and thereby grew no hurt to them: yet into the actor might their grow some hurt by acquainting him self with hypocriticval faining of lyes, hunger, beggerie, and shedding of blood’.39 Throughout, Rainoldes criticises the ‘inordinate passion’ stirred up by theatre especially when wrongly directed.40 Just after the Ulysses passage, Rainoldes recounts this story: ‘As Aesopus playing the part of Atreus in a tragedy (one of your examples of passions moved, without hurt, at the least, to any man) grew to such a rage by thinking and advising how he might wreake his anger, and be revenged on Thyestes; that with his Mace royal hee strooke one of the servants running by, and slew him’.41 In Seneca’s Thyestes the tyrannical Atreus wreaks a terrible vengeance on his brother Thyestes. Here, tyranny seemingly knows no bounds. As Rainoldes carefully suggests, inordinate passion inhibits rightful political restitution. Stephen Gosson says that when players reprehend vice from the stage, it does not come from ‘sorrow, or compassion towards him that hath offended’ but from the malice or corruption of mere poets.42 In a later passage, Gosson discusses the play Baptistes written by the Scottish Protestant George Buchanan.43 Significantly Gosson does not criticise the author or the play for their anti-tyrannical stance. Instead, he makes the rather narrower argument that the play was designed to be read and not performed. If the play were to be staged it would give the spectator (presumably the monarch) ‘time to whet his minde vnto tyranny’, to ‘learne to counterfeit, and so to sinne’.44 William Prynne writes that those who frequent stage plays will perish ‘without all pittie’,45 and rails against the false passions that theatre produces in its audiences.46 Plays only serve to encourage tyrants by enflaming their passions, a further reason that the institution should be banned.47 Yet Prynne also lists the instances of Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, the Roman emperors who all performed dishonourably on the stage. In the case of the first – killed as he left the theatre – it was an ‘end most suitable to his vitious tyrannical play-adoring life’.48 Although pro and anti-theatrical writers differ in their approach to the 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Rainoldes, Th’overthrow, p. 112. Rainoldes is similarly concerned with the effect of theatre on the spectators. See pp. 108–109. Rainoldes, Th’overthrow, p. 119. Rainoldes, Th’overthrow, p. 119. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in fiue Actions … (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582), sig. D3v. Gosson, Playes Confuted. See sigs. E6r–E6v. Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig. E6r. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix … (London: E.A. and W.I. for Michael Sparke, 1633), p. 56. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, p. 443, fol. 520. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, pp. 72–73. Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, p. 849. $)((-&
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affective use and power of pity on stage, all grant that the theatre is a place of political action. In sum, then, the neo-Stoic critique of pity tends to separate this term from its usual companions in Christian writing, mercy and compassion. Pity is mimetically dangerous. For Sidney, there is no guarantee that theatrical pity translates into ethical behaviour outside the theatre. For Lipsius, the emotion should be avoided: it imbalances the self because it is not subject to reason. For the anti-theatricalists, pity opens us up to ‘infection’ by others. In each of these cases, albeit for different ends, the liberty of the self is at stake. To reject pity is an ethical choice with political implications. The immovable, exemplary self who forgoes pity has the potential to provoke political action, even resistance. This is why tragedy and in particular tyranny is so important in these texts. Although each writer acknowledges doubts about the theatre, they are all intrigued by the idea that the representation of tyranny helps us to shape a self that stands apart from, and in opposition to, political oppression. In what follows, then, I want to read these claims in relation to John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. The ‘stoicism’ of the Duchess in her suffering is a truism in criticism.49 Much less has been said about her explicit refusal of pity in her suffering, and its political implications.50 By examining Webster’s use of Old Testament biblical models for Ferdinand and the Duchess, I argue for a neoStoic account of pity that reads her constancy and exemplarity as an act of resistance to tyranny. 2 The first major figure in the play to feel pity is Antonio.51 He speaks to his friend Delio about the malcontent Bosola who has been unable to find employment 49

50

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See for example Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London: Methuen, 1936), pp. 21–25, 186–187, Joan M. Lord, ‘The Duchess of Malfi: “The Spirit of Greatness” and “Of Women”’, sel 16, no. 2 (1976): pp. 305–317, and Lee Bliss, The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 152–157. For a good critical overview, see David Gunby, ‘The Critical Backstory’, in The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide, edited by Christina Luckyj (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 14–41. See the brief discussion in M.C. Bradbrook, ‘Two Notes Upon Webster’, The Modern Language Review 42, no. 3 (1947): p. 290. See also Philip D. Collington, ‘Pent-up Emotions: Pity and the Imprisonment of Women in Renaissance Drama’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 16 (2003): pp. 162–191. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, edited by Leah S. Marcus (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). All references are to this edition. See Castruccio’s comment about his wife at i. ii.27–8. $)((-&
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since leaving the army: ‘Tis great pity / He should be thus neglected. I have heard / He’s very valiant. This foul melancholy / Will poison all his goodness’ (i.i.74–6). Antonio prefers to moralise about Bosola’s situation rather than do anything about his ‘want of action’ (i.i.80). As Lipsius notes, ‘he that is truly merciful in deed, wil not bemone or pittie the condition of distressed persons, but yet wil do more to helpe and succour them, than the other. He wil beholde mens miseries with the eye of compassion, yet ruled and guided by reason’.52 Antonio prefers pity to reasonable and active mercy, opening the way for Bosola’s employment by the villainous Ferdinand. It is not that Antonio disregards the virtues of moral constancy. When he is being wooed by the Duchess in the next scene, he promises that he ‘will remain the constant sanctuary / Of your good name’ (i.ii.370–1), an aptly neo-Stoic statement.53 But when he expresses concern about the Duchess’s brothers, she replies: Do not think of them. All discord without this circumference Is only to be pitied and not feared. Yet, should they know it, time will easily Scatter the tempest. (i.ii.377–81) The Duchess is right to reject fear.54 Her proleptic imagining of a time where her brothers’ anger at her relationship with Antonio is dissipated is both consolatory and a fantasy. Yet like her contracted husband, she feels pity for ‘discord’ in the external world. Indeed, as he says, ‘These words should be mine, / And all the parts you have spoke, if some part of it / Would not have savoured flattery’ (i.ii.381–3). Either the Duchess is mimicking Antonio’s neo-Stoic language of pity in order to woo him, or else she has a flawed understanding of how that language addresses the passions. The suggestion that both characters enact pity in a flawed way is underlined by the words of the servant Cariola that conclude the Act: ‘Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman / Reign most in her, I know not; but it shows / A fearful madness. I owe her much of pity’ (i.ii.410–2). The Duchess is deliberately framed in an ambivalent way: she

52 53 54

Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 100. This assertion follows Seneca’s De Clementia closely. See Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary, p. 371. The Cardinal and Julia, his mistress, use the language of constancy, an ironic counterpoint to the main lovers. See ii.iv. Lipsius, Two Bookes, pp. 85–86.

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is susceptible to pity; but are her actions in betrothing herself to Antonio ethically defensible in a patriarchal, misogynistic culture? The most pitiless character in the play is the tyrannical Ferdinand. At the end of Act Two, he and the Cardinal express their fury after they find out about the Duchess’s children. Ferdinand has dug up a ‘mandrake’ (ii.v.1) in order to read the ‘prodigy’ (ii.v.2) of his sister’s transgression, an image that combines prophecy with intimations of popular magic, even malfeasance. His anger also extends to the fact that ‘Rogues do not whisper’t now, but seek to publish’t, / As servants do the bounty of their lords, / Aloud’ (ii.v.5–7). The brother’s lack of control over the Duchess’s private domain has caused a public scandal. Many critics have commented on the sexually suggestive language and imagery of this scene.55 It is certainly extreme, revealing a sexual pathology which, in its morbid violence, shows an obsessive and misogynistic concern with sexual pollution. I want to focus instead on the connections between Ferdinand’s pitiless, tyrannical behaviour and the book of Ezekiel. Chapter 23 describes two sisters who are prostitutes, Aholah and Aholibah (allegorical synonyms for the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah), and their various dealings with the Assyrians. The verses describing Aholibah are especially relevant to the play. Ferdinand suggests that the libels concerning his sister are published by rogues and servants who watch ‘with a covetous, searching eye, / To mark who note them’ (ii.v.7–8). The implication is that the Duchess has sanctioned this behaviour and is using libels publicly posted by her own servants to illicitly procure men for sex. As he says, she has ‘the most cunning bawds to serve her turn’ and ‘more secure conveyences for lust, / Than towns of garrison for service’ (ii.v.9–11). In Ezekiel 23: 14–17, we are told about how Aholibah procures men: For when she saw men painted vpon the wall, the images of the Caldeans painted with vermillion, And girded with girdles vpon their loynes, and with died attire vpon their heads (looking all like princes after the maner of the Babylonians to Caldea, the land of the natiuitie) Assoone, I say, as she saw them, shee doted vpon them, and sent messengers vnto them, into Caldea. Now when the Babylonians came to her into the bed of loue, 55

See Theodora Jankowski, ‘Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, in The Duchess of Malfi: Contemporary Critical Essays, edited by Dympna Callaghan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 80–103, p. 95. Compare also Antonio’s comment, ‘The common rabble do directly say / She is a strumpet’ (iii.i.25–6), and the Duchess’s, ‘a scandalous report is spread / Touching mine honour’ (iii.i.47–8).

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they defiled her with their fornication, and she was polluted with them, and her lust departed from them.56 The image of a promiscuous woman using her servants as panders, manipulating or being manipulated by sexually suggestive art, and fatally polluted by her desire, informs Ferdinand’s condemnation of his sister. It also underlies his strange fantasy when he imagines her ‘in the shameful act of sin’ (ii.v.41) with some strong-thigh’d bargeman Or one o’th’ wood-yard that can quoit the sledge Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire That carries coals up to her privy lodgings. (ii.v.43–46) Ezekiel tells us that Aholibah ‘doted vpon the Assyrians her neighbours, both captaines and princes cloathed with diuers suites, horsemen riding vpon horses: they were all pleasant yong men’. He also notes that she ‘doted vpon their seruants whose members are as the members of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses’ (Ezekiel 23:12, 20). Ferdinand condemns his sister’s sexually scandalous behaviour. As a homoerotic fantasy, replete with the kind of priapic imagery that is also found in Ezekiel, it may also imply a sexual rivalry for the ‘pleasant yong men’ and their servants with whom the Duchess supposedly consorts.57 Ferdinand’s tyrannical desire for violent revenge is all-consuming: Would I could be one, That I might toss her palace ’bout her ears, Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads, And lay her general territory as waste, As she hath done her honours! […] Apply desperate physic. We must not now use balsamum, but fire – The smarting cupping-glass, for that’s the mean To purge infected blood, such blood as hers. (ii.v.17–26) 56 57

All biblical references are to the Geneva Bible. The Bible, That Is, The Holy Scriptures … (London: Christopher Barker, 1599). For a persuasive reading of this scene that draws on early modern anatomical thought and psychoanalytic theory, see Maurizio Calbi, ‘“That body of hers”: The Secret, the Specular, the Spectacular in The Duchess of Malfi and Anatomical Discourses’, in Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–31, p. 17ff.

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The punishment described in Ezekiel for Aholah and Aholibah when ‘the shame of thy fornications shall be discouered’ (Ezekiel 23:29) is similarly violent and militaristic: And the righteous men they shall iudge them after the manner of harlots, and after the manner of murtherers: for they are harlots, and blood is in their hands. Wherefore thus said the Lord God, I will bring a multitude vpon them, and will giue them vnto the tumult and to the spoyle, And the multitude shall stone them with stones, and cut them with their swords: they shall slay their sonnes, and their daughters, and burne vp their houses with fire. Thus will I cause wickednesse to cease out of the land, that all women may be taught not to doe after your wickednesse. ezekiel 23:45–8

Ferdinand desires the power of the ‘righteous’ described here to make an example of his sister. He says that he will give his handkerchief to ‘her bastard’ (ii.v.29) so that it can ‘make soft lint for his mother’s wounds, / When I have hewed her to pieces’ (ii.v.30–1). Images of fire as purgation also abound. Ferdinand says he will ‘have their bodies / Burnt in a coal-pit’ or else burned with ‘pitch or sulphur’ (ii.v.68–70) as Ezekiel promises that Aholibah and all her family ‘shal be deuoured by the fire’ (Ezekiel 23:25). The purgative qualities of fire are central to the book of Revelation and to anti-Catholic language in the period. As Thomas Adams notes, ‘the second deluge of fire is to come’, and when ‘all the putrified feces, drossie and combustible matter shall bee refired in the fire, all things shall be reduced to a christaline clearenesse’.58 Unlike Adams, Ferdinand does not see any hope for redemption in his purging fire. His imagined apocalypse is resolutely pitiless and rooted in lex talionis Old Testament precepts like the following from Deuteronomy 19:21: ‘Therefore thine eye shall haue no compassion, but life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foote for foote’.59 His vow to ‘boil their bastard to a cullis, / And give’t his lecherous father to renew / The sin of his back’ (ii.v.72–4) can be seen in this light. It is noted that Aholibah and her family are idolaters who ‘haue also caused their sonnes, whom they bare vnto mee, to passe by the fire to be their meat’ (Ezekiel 23:37). Ferdinand promises to redouble this act of cannibalistic 58 59

Thomas Adams, The Sinners Passing Bell … (London: Thomas Snodham for Iohn Bridge, 1614), p. 223. For a text that makes a link between Aholah, Aholibah, Antichrist, and the book of Revelation, see Henry Ainsworth, An Animadversion to Mr Richard Clyftons Advertisement … (Amsterdam: Giles Thorpe, 1613), pp. 82–83.

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idolatry back onto the father for his sexual crimes.60 His plans are also informed by Ezekiel 23’s violent misogyny. The ‘general eclipse’ (ii.v.80) that he outlines in the manner of the vengeful Old Testament God is coloured by his obsession with his sister’s sexual transgression and pollution. He uses the word again when he asks the Duchess, ‘What hideous thing / Is it that doth eclipse thee’ (iii.ii.72–3), and constructs her as being demonically possessed: ‘Whate’er thou art that hast enjoy’d my sister / (For I am sure thou hear’st me), for thine own sake / Let me not know thee’ (iii.ii.89–91). By distancing the Duchess as a woman from the demon that supposedly has possessed her, Ferdinand can enact his pitiless, tyrannical vengeance. Up to this point, the play has contrasted those who feel pity and act ambivalently against those who are pitiless and act against ethical propriety. As the Duchess’s torments begin in Act Three, there is a notable shift in tone and meaning. When told that she will never see her husband again, she says ‘Oh, misery!’ (iii.v.103). This is a mark of acceptance rather than a bemoaning. Bosola says that ‘Your brothers mean you safety and pity’, and the Duchess replies ‘Pity? / With such a pity men preserve alive / Pheasants and quails, when they are not fat enough / To be eaten’ (iii.v.108–10). Pity is now seen as a false ethical posture; tyrants like Ferdinand and the Cardinal cannot feel true pity at all. Pity does not prevent punishment, merely palliates it. The Duchess now moves decisively away from pity. In Act Four, she sees her fate in familiar mimetic terms: ‘I account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in’t ‘gainst my will’ (iv.i.81–2). Lipsius makes a similar point: ‘The tragedy commonly is tedious’. However, this only serves to prove that for the tyrant ‘the day of execution is prolonged, not wholly taken away’.61 This political sentiment informs the ambivalent presentation of pity in the rest of the play. Philip Collington rightly notes that as the Duchess’s ‘plight becomes increasingly pathetic, she becomes more adamant that any witnesses not pity her’.62 Bosola says ‘Now, by my life I pity you’ (iv.i.85), to which the Duchess replies ‘Thou art a fool then, / To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched / As cannot pity it. I am full of daggers. / Puff! Let me blow these vipers from me’ (iv.i.85–8). The grammar in the first sentence is somewhat opaque: the Duchess seems to mean that Bosola is foolish for pitying a thing that cannot feel pity for itself. In her neo-Stoic disdain, 60

61 62

The threat of cannibalism as a punishment for idolatry is found elsewhere in Ezekiel. See also Ezekiel 5:9–10: ‘And I will do in thee that I neuer did before, neither will doe any more the like, because of all thine abominations. For in the mids of thee, the fathers shall eate their sonnes, and the sonnes shall eate their fathers, and I will execute iudgement in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the windes’. Lipsius, Two Bookes, pp. 163–164. Collington, ‘Pent-up Emotions’, p. 170.

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the Duchess tries to re-affirm control of a self that might withstand the daggers of others. She is ‘acquainted with sad misery’ and says that ‘Necessity makes me suffer constantly, / And custom makes it easy’ (iv.ii.28–9). As Lipsius notes, necessity is ‘next vnto Prouidence, because it is neere kinne to it, or rather borne of it. For of God and his decrees Necessitie springeth’.63 This is not simply a pious affirmation of providence. In neo-Stoic terms, necessity holds out the promise that tyranny will eventually be overcome. So when Cariola says that the Duchess is ‘like some reverend monument / Whose ruins are even pitied’ (iv.ii.32–3), her reply, ‘Very proper; / And Fortune seems only to have her eyesight / To behold my tragedy’ (iv.ii.33–5), is double-edged. She is a de Casibus figure at the mercy of Fortuna. But she is also a tragic exemplar for others. Her death presages the fall of her tyrant brothers. The Duchess understands the cost of immovability and exemplarity. In Act Four, scene one, she is tormented by the artificial figures of Antonio and her children as if dead. Yet she remains constant in the face of this ‘sad spectacle’ (iv.i.56), calling it ‘an excellent property / For a tyrant’ (iv.i.65). Pity can be produced mimetically but only if the spectator acquiesces to the passion. Instead, the Duchess positions herself as a figure of neo-Stoic equipoise in the face of tyranny. She wishes that she might be bound ‘to that lifeless trunk, / And let me freeze to death’ (iv.i.66–7)64 and evokes a well-known figure of Stoic exemplarity: ‘Portia, I’ll new kindle thy coals again / And revive the rare and almost dead example / Of a loving wife’ (iv.i.70–2). Bosola’s response captures the threat posed by these words: ‘Oh, fie! Despair? Remember / You are a Christian’ (iv.i.72–3). He can only imagine suicide in conventional Christian terms. The Duchess goes even further than Lipsius in imagining suicide as a noble example for wives to follow.65 Yet perhaps her most direct threat comes at the end of this scene. She curses her brothers saying ‘Plagues that make lanes through largest families / Consume them!’ (iv.i.100–1). The Duchess’s aristocratic status gives these words an added charge, attacking the shared basis of her family’s political power. She also says ‘Let them, like tyrants, / Never be remembered but for the ill they have done’ and that ‘I long to bleed’ (iv.i.101–7). The Duchess does not embrace her persecution as a form of tragic ennoblement. Rather, her immovability in the face of death affirms the exemplary neo-Stoical self in opposition to tyranny. 63 64 65

Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 106. As Marcus notes in her edition of the play, this is the punishment devised by the tyrant Mezentius in Virgil’s Aeneid, 8.485–8. See p. 263. Langius says that Brutus moves him to ‘compassion’ but that his suicide was in vain because the Roman Empire was to fall. Lipsius, Two Bookes, p. 168. Lipsius rejects Stoic arguments about the virtue of suicide.

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The various torments suffered by the Duchess in prison are unusually macabre, even ‘sadistic’ as Susan Zimmerman suggests.66 In these scenes, Webster represents the Duchess neither as a conventional Whore of Babylon nor as a figure of Christian redemption.67 Frances Dolan remarks that ‘If anything, the Duchess becomes more enigmatic as she suffers, shoring up her boundaries rather than breaking open’.68 I agree with this assessment to a degree, but to stress the opacity of the Duchess’s character is to overlook key moments of political revelation in her final speeches. Her construction in these scenes offers a counter to the pitiless Old Testament tyranny adopted by Ferdinand. She is resolutely associated with the Old Testament prophetic voice, whose function is to cry in the wilderness, to suffer, to warn and exhort, and to intervene in the political realm. A key example is found here: Th’ heaven o’er my head seems made of molten brass; The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad. I am acquainted with sad misery, As the tann’d galley slave is with his oar: (iv.ii.24–7) These words allude to Deuteronomy 28.69 In this chapter, God shows the Israelites the contrast between a nation that obeys him and one that does not. It is the latter’s punishment that the Duchess invokes: ‘And thine heauen that is ouer thine head, shall be brasse, and the earth that is vnder thee, iron’ (Deuteronomy 28:23). Moreover, like Ezekiel, this chapter of Deuteronomy stresses that a disobedient people will be subjugated to a nation ‘which neither thou nor thy fathers haue knowen’ (Deuteronomy 28:36). This makes sense of the Duchess comparing herself to a galley slave forced into military service.70 It also calls to mind other punishments outlined in the biblical text that resonate with the Duchess’s suffering and with the punishments inflicted upon her brothers. For instance, we are told that ‘the Lord shall smite thee with madnesse 66 67 68 69 70

Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 149. On the Duchess as a Christ-figure, see Celia Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 87. Frances E. Dolan, ‘“Can this be certain?”: The Duchess of Malfi’s Secrets’, in The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide, edited by Christina Luckyj (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 119–135, p. 130. See Bradbrook, ‘Two Notes’, p. 281. It also brings to mind Bosola’s similar captivity described in i.i.35–6.

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and with blindnesse’, ‘Thy sones and thy daughters shallbe giuen vnto another people, and thine eyes shall still looke for them. […] So that thou shalt be madde for the sight which thine eyes shall see’, and ‘thou shalt be a wonder, a prouerbe and a common talke among all people’ (Deuteronomy 28:28–37). Think of the Duchess forced to view the waxworks of the supposedly dead Antonio and their children, Ferdinand’s inability to look at his dead sister’s body, and his eventual madness. In his lycanthropy, Ferdinand likens the Cardinal, the doctor, and the courtiers to ‘beasts for sacrifice’ (v.ii.77–8), a reminder of the idolaters of the Old Testament who refuse to observe the new covenant.71 By associating the Malfi siblings with these Old Testament prophetic narratives, Webster downplays the possibility of typological transcendence or redemption. Nevertheless, if transcendence is missing from the Duchess’s torture and death, there is at least room for some apocalyptic intimation: this play does not, as Walter Benjamin says of the Trauerspiel more generally, entail ‘the total disappearance of eschatology’.72 Famously the Duchess does not die at her execution but remains alive long enough to hear from Bosola that Antonio and her children are not in fact dead. When Bosola realises that she is alive he dares not call for help because, as he says, ‘So pity would destroy pity’ (iv.ii.336). The Arden editor says this means that if Bosola cries out, it will bring back the recently departed Ferdinand who would then kill his sister.73 The difficulty with this interpretation is that Ferdinand has consistently shown himself to be a tyrant without pity.74 Rather, to bring the Duchess back to life would provoke an unhelpful degree of pity in the audience and in Bosola. It is not the act of ‘mercy’ (iv.ii.338, 342) that will allow Bosola to revenge the Duchess on the ‘cruel tyrant’ (iv.ii.361). Webster’s

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See in particular Moses’ difficulties with Jews in Exodus, chapters 30 to 40. See also Leviticus 11. On the cultural significance of lycanthropy, see Brett D. Hirsch, ‘An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi’, Early Modern Literary Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): pp. 1–43. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p. 81. Marcus, The Duchess of Malfi, p. 293. See also iv.ii.248ff where Bosola tries to move Ferdinand to pity by showing him the dead children. His reply – ‘The death of young wolves is never to be pitied’ – might remind us of Sidney’s tyrant in the Apology. Ferdinand says that he will fix his eyes on the dead bodies of the Duchess and her children ‘constantly’ (iv.ii.249) but this false ethical posture soon becomes apparent: he quickly asks for his sister’s face to be covered, stating: ‘Mine eyes dazzle’ (iv.ii.254). See also Ferdinand’s parody of neo-Stoic philosophy in his madness, v.v.54–60.

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neo-Stoic tragic art demands the rejection of pity on political grounds.75 Bosola realises as much when he tries in vain to protect Antonio: ‘Though nothing be so needful / To thy estate as pity, yet I find / Nothing so dangerous’ (v.ii.314– 316).76 Bosola kills Ferdinand and the Cardinal, but he also inadvertently kills Antonio and is fatally wounded himself. He dies ‘In a mist’, ‘ruined’, a ‘vaulted grave’ that ‘yields no echo’ (v.v.92–6). He also proclaims the worth of dying ‘for what is just’ (v.v.102). The Duchess’s constancy and exemplarity give motility to his act of political resistance. 3 I have argued that Webster explores a neo-Stoic mode of selfhood defined by liberty from tyranny. We can debate the extent to which these things are achieved by the Duchess. Feminist criticisms of the play have been especially important in this regard. Nevertheless, I want to end with her extraordinarily resonant, much interpreted line: ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (iv.ii.137). Whether it is understood as a disavowal of patriarchy, a political rejection of tyranny, the words of a martyr, a doomed attempt to attain tragic autonomy, or as the motto of a proto-feminist heroine, these words exemplify a number of possible positions. They also have a force and recognition that go beyond the relatively narrow confines of academic criticism. As I have argued, Webster’s neo-Stoic understanding of political autonomy informs the Duchess’s prophetic exemplarity. Yet the sufferings of the prophets are not without issue. The play concludes not with piteous elegy but with exemplary eschatology.77 As Delio’s final couplet puts it: ‘Integrity of life is fame’s best friend, / Which nobly beyond death shall crown the end.’ (v.v.119–20). These lines suggest that while personal honour is crucial, ‘fame’ is less important than the spiritual ‘crown’ received ‘beyond death’. In these concluding words, the play moves beyond the Old Testament prophetic mode, offering a typological

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See Bradbrook, ‘Two Notes’, pp. 287–290. For Webster’s possible uses of Lipsius and other Stoic/neo-Stoic writers, see Robert William Dent, John Webster’s Borrowing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), e.g. pp. 107, 139, 186, 253. For more on neo-Stoicism and literary culture, see Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). See too his comment to Antonio’s servant when the former is dying: ‘Smother thy pity; thou art dead else’ (v.iv.51). On the play and eschatology, see my article ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics: Literary Responses to the Death of Prince Henry Stuart, 1612–1614’, Renaissance Studies 31, no. 1 (2017): pp. 87–106. $)((-&
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glimpse of the eschatological promise contained in the New Testament. In the words of Revelation 2:10: ‘Feare none of those things, which thou shalt suffer: behold, it shall come to passe, that the deuill shall cast some of you in prison, that yee may be tried, and ye shall haue tribulation ten days: be thou faithfull vnto the death, and I will giue thee the crowne of life’. As an affirmation of the interrelations between world and divine history, Delio’s words are an understandable conclusion. It is also a refutation of temporal power, even tyranny, something that the exemplary Duchess would certainly understand. The generative collision between Christian and neo-Stoic ideas is, of course, one that informs a wide range of early modern drama. In this essay I have isolated one particular emotion – pity – and explored its dramatic treatment by Webster. The same consideration could fruitfully be applied to other theatrical emotions. We might think here of ‘mercy’ in The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), a term that is usually analysed in exclusively Christian terms but which was also central to neo-Stoic debates. The comedies and tragedies of George Chapman and John Marston – two writers very much concerned with the intersection between neo-Stoic and Christian ideas – strike me as ripe for analysis along these lines, as do the politically controversial Roman plays of Ben Jonson. The connection between fellow feeling and compassionate action informs theatrical discussions of affect and resistance in many ways. Further work in this area would allow for a more rounded understanding of how affect informs political theatre – and the threat it posed – in early modern England. Bibliography Primary

Adams, Thomas. The Sinners Passing Bell … (London: Thomas Snodham for Iohn Bridge, 1614). Ainsworth, Henry. An Animadversion to Mr Richard Clyftons Advertisement … (Amsterdam: Giles Thorpe, 1613). Augustine of Hippo, The City of God. Volume 1, trans. John Healey (1610) (London: J.M. Dent, 1947). Aristotle. Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982). The Bible, That Is, The Holy Scriptures … (London: Christopher Barker, 1599). Bilson, Thomas. The Svrvey Of Christs Svfferings …(London: Melchisedech Bradwood for Iohn Bill, 1603). Calvin, John. Sermons of Maister Iohn Caluin, vpon the Booke of Iob, trans. Arthur Golding (London: George Bishop, 1574). Calvin, John. Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, trans. Ford Lewis Battles and Andre Malan Hugo (Leiden: Brill, 1969). $)((-&
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Gosson, Stephen. Playes Confuted in fiue Actions … (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582). Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors … (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612). Lipsi, Ivsti. De Constantia Libri Dvo (Londini: Geor. Bishop, 1586). Lipsius, Justus. Two Bookes of Constancie … , trans. Iohn Stradling (London: Richard Iohnes, 1594). Lipsius, Justus. Two Bookes Of Constancie … , edited by Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1939). Prynne, William. Histrio-Mastix … (London: E.A. and W.I. for Michael Sparke, 1633). Rainoldes, John. Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes … (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1599). Sidney, Philip. A Defence of Poetry. In English Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi, edited by Leah S. Marcus (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Wilson, Thomas. A Christian Dictionarie … (London: W. Iaggard, 1612).

Secondary

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). Bliss, Lee. The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983). Brooke, Christopher. Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Calbi, Maurizio. Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Collington, Philip D. ‘Pent-up Emotions: Pity and the Imprisonment of Women in Renaissance Drama’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 16 (2003): pp. 162–191. Daileader, Celia. Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Dolan, Frances E. ‘“Can this be certain?”: The Duchess of Malfi’s Secrets’. In The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide, edited by Christina Luckyj (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 119–135. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Ellis-Fermor, Una. The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London: Methuen, 1936). Gunby, David. ‘The Critical Backstory’. In The Duchess of Malfi: A Critical Guide, edited by Christina Luckyj (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 14–41. Hirsch, Brett D. ‘An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi’. Early Modern Literary Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): pp. 1–43. Ibbett, Katherine. Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (Philadelphia: University on Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

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Jankowski, Theodora. ‘Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’. In The Duchess of Malfi: Contemporary Critical Essays, edited by Dympna Callaghan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 80–103. Lord, Joan M. ‘The Duchess of Malfi: “The Spirit of Greatness” and “Of Women”’. SEL 16, no. 2 (1976): pp. 305–317. Nussbaum, Martha. ‘The “Morality” of Pity: Sophocles’ Philoctetes’. In Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 148–169. Sierhuis, Freya. ‘Autonomy and Inner Freedom: Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism’. In Freedom and the Construction of Europe. Volume ii: Free Persons and Free States, edited by Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 46–64. Stewart, Alan. Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Pimlico, 2000). Streete, Adrian. ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics: Literary Responses to the Death of Prince Henry Stuart, 1612–1614’. Renaissance Studies 31, no. 1 (2017): pp. 87–106. Vickers, Brian. ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’. In The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, and Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 715–745. Zimmerman, Susan. The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

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Chapter 5

Reformation Theology and the Christianization of Tragedy: Neoclassicism, Epistemology and Tragic Spectacle in the Christus Patiens Drama Giles Waller Originating as a weapon of forensic oratory, ekphrasis in early-modern literature becomes a subtle, insinuating instrument of narratorial patterning, authorial control, and psychological insight. At its most supple, it prompts strenuous interpretive work: characters within the fiction and readers without are asked to view and analyse the pictures on show; occasionally, differential responses from the two potential audiences become part of the meaning of the figure. Ekphrasis is not only an instantiation of Sidney’s claims for poetic makerliness, but embodies a difficult, Protestant aesthetic, where understanding is won by effort. claire preston, ‘Ekphrasis: Painting in Words’1

The ekphrastic conjuring of absent, offstage tragic spectacle forms a crucial part of early modern drama, both Shakespearean and more self-consciously neoclassical. Passion plays such as Hugo Grotius’ 1608 Christus Patiens (translated into English by George Sandys in 1640 as Christs passion, a tragedie) make rich and complex use of these dramatic techniques, and of the Aristotelian tragic affects of fear (and its intense relation ‘horror’) and pity. In what follows, I trace the dramaturgical and theological implications of the tragic staging of 1 In Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 115–130. Preston notes that ekphrasis emerged as a defined rhetorical trope during the Second Sophistic of the first four centuries ad, with its sense in the Renaissance widening beyond the verbal evocation of a visual work of art or artifact to encompass a broader practice of ‘verbal pictorialism’ (p. 117). For an illuminating theoretical treatment of the poetics of ekphrasis, see W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 151–182. For a thorough historical and theoretical discussion of ekphrasis in Greek tragedy, see Froma Zeitlin, ‘The Artful Eye: Vision, Ekphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre’, in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 138–196.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_007  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_007 6543_007

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the Passion and death of Christ when it cannot be directly represented on stage, but only imagined for and mediated to its characters and its audience through witnesses and disciples, traitors and tormentors.2 These plays make both dramatic and theological use of a heightened ambivalence about watching the suffering of others, a suffering that is always at one remove from the onstage audience, through whom the offstage audience – the play’s readers and spectators – are engaged in the evocation of tragic spectacle. The roots of the Christus Patiens drama lie in what survives of classical tragedy, and in the ways in which these classical survivals have stimulated Christian writers to probe the central narrative of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ in tragic terms. The Greek text of the Christos Paschōn is a cento of Euripidean verses with scriptural interleaving texts. It dramatically narrates the Passion with wonderfully jarring details, such as the Virgin Mary mourning her dead son with the words of Medea lamenting the children she has murdered. The text was transmitted under the name of the patristic theologian Gregory of Nazianzus, and although now thought to be a later Byzantine text of indeterminate date and provenance,3 as such it was long ‘respectable’ in ecclesiastical circles even in periods when Greek tragedy would have been beyond the pale. It was first edited in 1542 in Rome by Antonius Bladus, and went through various subsequent editions across Europe. In 1608, Hugo Grotius wrote a Latin play of the same title, and although he refers to ‘Nazianzus’ in his preface, it is a substantially new text. Grotius’ version was widely circulated both in England and on the Continent, and was translated into English by George Sandys in 1640.4 Grotius’ and Sandys’ texts thus represent an intriguing early modern attempt to render the Passion in classical tragic terms. Given the lively current interest in the relation between Christianity and tragedy from a number of angles, it is surprising that the various versions of the 2 Sections of this essay have appeared in my article, ‘Complicity, Recognition, and Conversion in the Christus Patiens Drama’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49, no. 1 (January 2019): pp. 33–55. I am grateful to the editors for permitting the re-printing of this material. 3 See André Tuilier, ed., Grégoire de Nazianze. La Passion du Christ: Tragédie, Sources Chrétiennes 149 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969), pp. 75–116. Commentary on the Greek Christos Paschōn drama has largely focused on questions of provenance and date. For a recent and extremely illuminating exception that pays attention to the poetic, dramatic, and theological implications of the text, see Rachel Bryant Davies, ‘The Figure of Mary Mother of God in Christus Patiens: Fragmenting Tragic Myth and Passion Narrative in a Byzantine Appropriation of Euripidean Tragedy’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 137 (2017): pp. 188–212. 4 Hugo Grotius, Tragoedia Christus Patiens (Leiden: 1608), and George Sandys, Christs passion a tragedie, with annotations (London: John Legatt, 1640). Further citations, to Grotius and Sandys, are indicated using the page numbers of these editions.

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Greek text and its Latin and English successors have not received more scholarly (or indeed dramatic) attention. A notable exception is Beatrice Groves, who treats Grotius’ play comparatively with the Quarto text of King Lear, published in the same year as Grotius’ play (1608).5 Christus Patiens is here a neoclassical foil with which to demonstrate Shakespeare’s inheritance of the tradition of the mystery plays, showing up through its observation of the classical dramatic unities of time, space, and action, and especially its decorous avoidance of the presentation of violent spectacle on the stage, the vitality of Shakespearean dramaturgy, drawn from medieval theatrical practice. Groves’ focus is on the affecting power of violent spectacle in Shakespearean and medieval drama to elicit sympathy through ‘the physical presence of the wounded body’.6 In this essay, however, I am concerned to trace the ways in which the Christianization of classical and neoclassical dramaturgy can be seen to be differently, but no less affectingly powerful, precisely in the haunting absence of these wounded bodies, and in the complex forms of anguish that attend the ekphrastic evocation of (imagined) spectacular suffering.7 In tracing the dynamics of the techniques that arise from these neoclassical formal constraints, I will argue that these formal considerations, such as unity of time and place, and an absence of the physical enactment of violence on the stage, need not be seen as merely constraining, as unfortunate restrictions on the dramatist’s imagination. These formal constraints are rather to be seen (like Wordsworth’s ‘voluntary prison’ of the sonnet form) as potent stimuli to an enlarged creativity, productive of a drama rich in affective power and theological nuance.8 Moreover, a critical focus on the dramatic power of the visual 5 See Beatrice Groves, ‘“Now wole I a newe game begynne”: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays, and Grotius’s Christus Patiens’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): pp. 136–150. Russ Leo offers an illuminating treatment of earlier Latin plays on Christ’s Passion, particularly focusing on Stoa’s Theoandrathanatos of 1508, a century earlier than Grotius’ play, and thus composed before the influential Greek text of Christos Paschōn was widely known after its publication by Bladus in Rome in 1542. See Russ Leo, ‘Christ’s Passion, Christian Tragedy, and Ioannes Franciscus Quintianus Stoa’s Untimely Theoandrothanatos’, Renaissance Studies 30, no. 4 (2016): pp. 505–525. See also James A. Parente, Jr., ‘The Development of Religious Tragedy: The Humanist Reception of the Christos Paschon in the Renaissance’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 3 (1985): pp. 351–368. 6 Groves, ‘“Now wole I a newe game begynne”’, p. 146. 7 In his preface to the play, Grotius points out his observation of the neoclassical dramatic unities (Christus Patiens, sig. *7r), and the avoidance of directly staging the questioning before Pilate and the Crucifixion themselves (Christus Patiens, sigs. 6v-7r). 8 Lorna Hutson’s work is particularly important here in challenging the scholarly polarization of early modern, and particularly Shakespearean dramaturgy into medieval ‘enactment’ on the one hand, and neo-Classical ‘reported action’ on the other. Hutson draws attention to the

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verbalizations of Grotius’ and Sandys’ ekphrastic techniques seeks to move beyond a rigid interpretative dichotomy between Catholic ‘incarnational’ or ‘embodied’ aesthetics on the one hand, and ‘aniconic’ or narrowly ‘logocentric’ Reformed aesthetics on the other.9 If visual representation or embodiment was a problem for Reformed theatrical practice, my claim in reading Grotius’ and Sandys’ texts is that this problem generates a forceful ekphrastic evocation of visual presence with its own dramatic power and theological bite. Beyond, but arising from, questions of literary technique and affective power, I will draw out the contributions that a reading of this drama might make to wider understandings of the relation between Christian theology and tragedy. 1

‘Shuddering Horror’ and the Christianization of Classical Tragic Theory

I begin by examining the use of a key term from Aristotelian and neoclassical tragic theory: the affective response of ‘horror’ which tragedy has long been understood to provoke in its audiences and its readers – a response that has a crucial place in Grotius’ and Sandys’ texts. The Protestant humanist Philip Melanchthon’s Cohortatio ad legendas tragoedias et comoedias of 1545, and his 1546 lectures on, and collaborative (with Vito Winshemius) translation of the seven remaining plays of Sophocles, form some of the earliest explicit early ways in which recent retrievals of ‘medieval’ elements in Shakespearean dramaturgy operate by neglecting the importance of, and often altogether denigrating, neoclassical formal elements and devices, such as messenger speeches. See Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1–50. In what follows, I am indebted to a paper by Lorna Hutson, ‘Unseen, save to the eye of the mind’, delivered at a Cambridge conference on ‘The Places of Early Modern Criticism’ in March 2015. Hutson examined the ways in which neoclassical dramatic theory, far from simply being ignored by English dramatists, whose work, it has been argued, was all the richer for their reliance on medieval theatrical traditions and their ignoring the constraints of neoclassical drama, did in fact make extensive use of techniques such as ekphrasis, enargeia, and evidentia, especially in their conjuring of extradiegetic imagined scenes. This is especially the case, Hutson argues, for tragic messenger speeches (which are a key feature of Christus Patiens), in which ekphrastic description, and especially the quality of enargeiea, or vividness of description, ‘forcefully bring a thing before one’s eyes’: ‘Reports of the Nuntius are less like impoverished substitutes for spectacle, necessitated by the regulatory restrictions of classicism and neoclassicism, and more like a technique for enhancing the imaginative reach of the stage, both extensively, enabling it to travel in space and time, and inwardly, allowing it to depict passion and motive’. 9 See, for example, Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in EarlyModern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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modern Christian tragic theory: Melanchthon’s Cohortatio appeared in eleven editions in the sixteenth century, and went on to have a major influence on seventeenth-century dramatic theory.10 Melanchthon reaffirms the serious purpose of tragedy – it is not for titillation, but rather serves the lofty moral purpose of an admonishment to virtue, an instruction as to the ‘governance of life’. He is particularly taken with the tremendous affective power of tragedy; these texts, and performances, are not dry primers, but, he writes, ‘filled with horrors’. His choice of word to describe this affective response to tragedy, ‘cohorresco’, conveys the sense of an involuntary shudder of terror. In Latin translations of Aristotle’s Poetics, horresco stands for the Greek φρίσσω, a physical, affective reaction, a shiver of the bristling of the hairs on the back of the neck.11 Melanchthon writes: [T]his was of particular practical wisdom, namely to choose arguments not of common misfortune, but notable and horrendous misfortunes, with the telling of which all theatres bristled with horror [cohorrescerent]. For the people are not moved by thinking about trifling and middleof-the-road miseries, but a terrible sight has to be thrown right before their eyes [sed terribilis species obiicienda est oculis], enters into their minds and sticks for a long time, and the sight moves by its very appeal to compassion, so that the people think about the causes of human disasters, and one by one they compare themselves to those representations. And nor was it a negligible capacity and skill on the part of the Greeks, to express in whatever way the magnitude of things with magnificence of speech and variety of gestures. I myself often bristle with horror (cohorresco) throughout my whole body reading such a thing, not even watching as in the theatre they act tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides.12 10 11 12

See Michael Lurie, Die Suche nach der Schuld: Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristoteles’ Poetik und das Tragödienverständnis der Neuzeit (München/Leipzig: K.G. Saur/De Gruyter, 2004). See, for example, Alessandro Pazzi’s influential translation, Aristotelis Poetica (Venice: 1536). ‘Qua in re & hoc singularis prudentiae fuit eligere argumenta non uulgarium casuum, sed insignium & atrocium, quorum commemoratione cohorrescerent tota theatra. Non enim mouetur populus leuium aut mediocrium miseriarum cogitatione, sed terribilis species obiicienda est oculis, quae penetret in animos & diu haereat & moueat illa ipsa commiseratione, ut de caussis humanarum calamitatum cogitent, & singuli se ad illas imagines conferant.

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Here, for Melanchthon as for Aristotle, the affect of φρίκη can result from witnessing the enacted spectacle of tragedy, but also simply from reading the text. Indeed for Aristotle, even reading appears to be unnecessary: the mark of a good tragic poet is to construct a plot that does not need to be seen enacted on stage to have this effect, which should result from plot construction alone: Fear and pity [τὸ φοβερὸν καὶ ἐλεεινὸν] sometimes result from the spectacle [ἐκ τῆς ὄψεως γίγνεσθαι] and are sometimes aroused by the actual arrangement of the incidents, which is preferable and the mark of a better poet. The plot should be so constructed that even without seeing the play anyone hearing of the incidents happening shudders with fear and pity [φρίττειν καὶ ἐλεεῖν] as a result of what occurs. So would anyone feel who heard the story of Oedipus.13 We can see a likely direct influence on Grotius’ text here. Grotius’ friend and collaborator, Daniel Heinsius, follows Aristotle in an influential 1611 treatise on tragic poetics, De constitutione tragoedia, arguing that the passions proper to tragedy are ‘pity and horror’ [Misericordia & Horror],14 and moreover that

13 14

Nec fuit exigua facultas & ars, grandiloquentia sermonis & gestuum uarietate magnitudinem rerum utcunque exprimere. ‘Ego ipse saepe toto corpore cohoresco legens tantum, non etiam intuens ut in theatro agentes, Sophoclis aut Euripidis Tragoedias’. Philip Melanchthon, Cohortatio Philippi Melanchthonis ad legendas tragoedias et comoedias (January 1, 1545), in P. Terentii Comoediae sex, cum prioribus ferme castigationibus et plerisque explicationibus … editae studio et cura Ioachimi Camerarii Pabergensis, in Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 5 (Halis Saxonum, 1838), no. 3108, pp. 567–572. Translations from Melanchthon are my own. Poetics 1453b. ‘Since this Muse is primarily engaged in arousing the passions, Aristotle therefore thinks its end is to temper these very passions, and to put them back into order. The passions proper to it are two: pity and horror. As it arouses these in the soul, so, as they gradually rise, it reduces them to the right measure and forces them into order’. Daniel Heinsius, On Plot in Tragedy, trans. Paul R. Sellin and John J. McManmon, (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1971), p. 11. See Dan. Heinsii De Tragoediae Constitutione Liber : In Quo Inter Caetera tota de hac Aristotelis sententia dilucide explicatur (Lvgd. Batav. [Amsterdam]: [ex officina] Elseviriana, 1643), p. 10: ‘In concitandis igitur affectibus cum maxime versetur haec Musa, finem ejus esse, hos ipsos vt temperet, iterumq; componat, Aristoteles existimat. Affectus proprii illius sunt duo: Misericordia, & Horror. Quous vt excitat in animo, ita sensim efferentes sese, deprimit, quemadmodum oportet, & in ordinem sic cogit’.

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simply reading the text (without seeing it enacted theatrically) should result in the arousal of these passions.15 Emulating the brilliant intricacy of the plot construction of Oedipus Tyrannus is a tall order for any poet. However, the prescription of Aristotle (and following him, Melanchthon and Heinsius) that plot construction alone is sufficient to elicit this response to the tragic figure of Oedipus is rather complicated by a famous scene in Sophocles’ play: the reaction of the Chorus to the physical presence – the bloody spectacle – of the miasmic, blinded Oedipus. While, like many Greek tragedies, many of the most intense and violent moments occur in an imagined offstage space (usually within the house) and are relayed by messenger speeches, the moment of most intense tragic affect for the Chorus is not its response to the Messenger’s speech, but to the onstage presence of the bloodied, eyeless hero: Chorus: This is a terrible sight for men to see! I never found a worse! Poor wretch, what madness came upon you! What evil spirit leaped upon your life to your ill-luck – a leap beyond man’s strength! Indeed I pity you, but I cannot look at you, though there’s much I want to ask and much to learn and much to see. I shudder at the sight of you.16 The Chorus is filled with profound pity, yet it cannot bear to look. Torn between its desire to gaze, to find comprehension in the incomprehensible, the 15

16

‘[A]nyone would be sorely moved with pity and horror just upon hearing or reading it, which he [Aristotle] shows to have been the case with Oedipus. […] Indeed, who, for example is not horrified, who is not moved with pity when in but one instant Oedipus is hurled from prosperity to finding himself a parricide, husband of his mother, grandfather to his children. And that through the very arrangement of the argument, even when one reads it at home without seeing any of it in the theater’. Heinsius, On Plot in Tragedy, pp. 46–47. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, ll. 1299–1306. Interestingly, Melanchthon and Winshemius, in their Latin translation of Oedipus Tyrranus, do not render φρίκη into its more immediate Latin cognate, but render the line: ‘Ita mea perturbat tua calamitas’, the physical affect of ‘horror’ that might stand in for φρίκη is softened to a rather more intellectual perturbation. Melanchthon, and Winshemius, Interpretatio tragoediarum Sophoclis ad utilitatem iuventutis, quae studiosa est graecae linguae, edita a Vito Winshemio (Frankfurt, 1546), p. 204.

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Chorus is yet repulsed, ‘shuddering at the sight of you’ – τοίαν φρίκην παρέχεις µοι, literally ‘you have poured such a bristling horror in upon me’. As with Plato’s tale of Leontius’ conflicted desire to rush towards the ‘disgusting’ sight of the corpses of the executed by which he is repulsed in Republic 4.439.3,17 the impulse to see, and the desire to know, are here the object of a contradictory simultaneity of desire and abhorrence. I will return to this simultaneity shortly when examining the tragic affect of the Christus Patiens. 2

Spectacle and the ‘Unscene’ Offstage

Before turning to the Christus Patiens, I want briefly to consider the nature of the offstage scenes that it conjures, through the consideration of some more familiar Shakespearean examples, in what Marjorie Garber, in a study of offstage action and its onstage report in Shakespeare, has termed the ‘unscene’ – the unseen imagined scene, usually evoked by an unnamed ‘Gentleman’, as in King Lear 4.3.18–34.18 Garber argues that these ‘unscenes’ are a dramatic ‘translation of the “inexpressibility topos”’, the rhetorical trope in which an object or scene is declared to be beyond the power of words, while this very declaration of inexpressibility itself cunningly achieves a sense of that which is declared to be inexpressible. The alternative in the face of this inexpressibility is silence or absence. The inexpressibility topos carefully circumscribes this inexpressibility, giving, as it were, ‘a local habitation and a name’. The subjects of these ‘unscenes’, Garber argues, are often moments of highly conflicting (indeed utterly contradictory) emotions, ‘joy and fear, love and grief or anger. Their content, like their mode of expression, is ineffable’.19 King Lear provides some notable examples. While, as Beatrice Groves has shown, a great part of the dramatic power of Lear lies in its staging of violent spectacle (and in particular the ludic violence of the blinding of Gloucester, so reminiscent of medieval theatre), it derives further impact from the evocation of intense ‘unscenes’. Garber terms as ‘literally ineffable’20 the emotion evoked in the Gentleman’s report to Kent of Cordelia’s response to Lear’s degradation in 4.3, a conflict between ‘smiles and tears’, ‘patience and sorrow’: ‘Were she present on the stage we would have a grieving daughter, not, as we do here, a vision of patience on a monument, 17 18 19 20

I am grateful to Simon Goldhill for suggesting this comparison. Marjorie Garber, ‘“The Rest Is Silence”: Ineffability and the “Unscene” in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: ams Press, 1984), pp. 35–50. Garber, ‘“The Rest Is Silence”’, p. 43. Garber, ‘“The Rest Is Silence”’, p. 45.

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smiling at grief’.21 While Gloucester is spectacularly maimed on stage, his death is an ‘unscene’, reported by Edgar to Albany. Garber notes that, as with Cordelia in 4.3, the inexpressibility lies in the profundity of the conflict of emotions, here stretched beyond their bearable limit: But his flawed heart – Alack, too weak the conflict to support – ‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (5.3.198–201) In their rich use of ekphrastic description, these ‘unscenes’ can be understood to do more than give expression to inexpressibly contradictory emotions, or ‘stand in’ for elaborate spectacles which could not readily or plausibly be staged. In his study of ekphrastic messenger speeches in the theatrical evocation of ‘offstage space’, William Gruber has drawn attention to neurophysiological accounts of the role of the visual cortex, which processes images seen with the eyes, but is active in the same ways in the imagination of unseen objects.22 In the process of visual imagination, the mind’s eye and the eyes of the body cannot easily be disentangled, and thus we cannot posit a simple dichotomy between the ‘presence’ of direct bodily enactment, and the ‘absence’ of indirect ekphrastic report. Messenger speeches, Gruber argues, operate not through a ‘simple point for point exchange of visual data for their equivalents in language, but a kind of psychogenesis whereby only a few key stimuli are used by the mind to construct what then seem like real memories and fully 21

22

Garber, ‘“The Rest Is Silence”’, p. 45. Garber notes that ‘the image of “sunshine and rain at once” ironically suggests a rainbow, God’s promise to Noah that a flood would never again destroy the earth. But we should note that the pearls and diamonds, sunshine and rain, and implicit rainbow are all visual images evoked by Cordelia’s absence’: Gentleman: ‘Patience and sorrow strove Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears Were like a better way: those happy smilets That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence As pearls from diamonds dropped. In brief, Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved, If all could so become it’. William Gruber, Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 28ff. Gruber cites the psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling in Happiness (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), pp. 129–130.

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complete visual perceptions’.23 The workings of such ‘unscenes’ on an audience may be subtler, less immediately shocking, than the presentation of physically enacted spectacle, but they are not necessarily less affecting. Gruber, following George Steiner, notes that in tragic messenger reports ‘the world behind the stage’ is given a ‘paradoxically intense nearness and pressure’ by the removal of spectacle and violent physicality.24 The nearness of this offstage violent world is the result of the intimate and individual process of imaginative internalization required of each member of the audience, deriving a particular pressure from the process by which the evoked images of this violence insinuate themselves into the audience’s own visual memories. 3

Christus Patiens: Absence and Horror

I have claimed that, where Groves finds the tragic and sympathy inducing power of King Lear and the medieval dramas of Christ’s passion in the ‘physical presence of the wounded body’, Grotius’ and Sandys’ texts derive their power from the colourful and often verbally tortuous ekphrastic evocation of their ‘unscenes’ – ‘unscenes’ which, like those Garber identifies in Shakespeare, frequently turn on the inexpressibility of radically conflicting emotions. These dramas are haunted by the absence of their wounded bodies, an absence that teases both the Chorus’ and audience’s desire for tragic spectacle, and that thereby puts this desire itself, and its motivations, on stage. For all of its lively ekphrastic evocation of physical suffering, Christus Patiens is equally concerned with the mental and spiritual (through the multivalent Latin mens) anguish of its characters. As in the Aeschylean Chorus’ famous pathei mathos,25 knowledge and suffering are intimately, if inchoately, related. Christus Patiens revolves around the ways in which certain kinds of knowledge, and the desire for terrible kinds of knowledge, can be a form of suffering, perhaps anticipating what Dennis Schmidt, in his study of the German philosophical reception of classical tragedy, has called ‘a knowledge that is suffered but not cognizable’.26 As the interpenetration of the ‘eyes of the body’ and the ‘eyes of the mind’ is integral to the evocation of spectacle in neoclassical dramaturgy, the relation 23 24 25 26

Gruber, Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination, p. 31. William Gruber, Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination, p. 33, citing George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 227–228. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. and trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), l. 177. Dennis Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 10.

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between physical and mental suffering in Christus Patiens cannot be readily disentangled. The relation between physical and mental suffering is addressed in the play’s opening speech, in which Jesus, seemingly in Gethsemane, reflects on the torments of his ‘hour’, a reflection which is itself a proleptic mental anticipation of the bodily crucifixion: See what this Nights confederate Shadows hide: My Minde before my Body crucifi’d. Horrour shakes all my Powers: my entrails beat, And all my Body flowes with purple sweat. Et quicquid atra nox tegit vidi tamen. Mens ante corpus pendet. Horresco nefas, Pressumque venis sanguinem exsudat timor.27 The bodily suffering of the crucifixion is preceded by, and perhaps thereby even secondary to, the ‘crucifixion of the mind’, begun in Gethsemane, and continued through the whole sequence of the Passion. Yet this startling image of mental crucifixion cannot itself be contained within a dualistic separation of the mental and the physical, for its effects inhere within its bodily tragic affect: all ‘Powers’ (presumably mental) are ‘shaken’ – an intense verb of physical motion – by ‘Horrour’, that quintessentially tragic affect noted in Sophocles, Aristotle, Melanchthon, and Heinsius. The bodily bristling of ‘Horrour’ (horresco in Grotius’ Latin), underscored by the seizure of ‘shaking’, is visceral, ‘beating’ on the ‘entrails’, such that this embodied mental anticipation of physical crucifixion causes the entire ‘Body’ to ‘flow with purple sweat’, an anticipation that itself is declared ‘more cruell’ than death.28 Jesus’ last words on stage come at the end of the third act, addressing the lamenting Chorus of Jewish Women. Here, paraphrasing Luke 23:28, Jesus admonishes the women to weep not for him, but ‘for your selves and your children’.29 He points forward prophetically to the apocalyptically figured destruction of Jerusalem (‘That horrid day will shortly come, / When you shall blesse the barren Wombe’30), hinting that the Chorus’ present great suffering is soon to be overtaken with a ‘greater’ suffering. The scene ends with the Chorus responding to this admonishment (and prophecy) from Jesus of its own greater 27 28 29 30

Sandys, p. 5; Grotius, pp. 4–5. ‘O Death, how farre more cruell in thy kinde! / Th’anxiety and torment of the Minde!’ [Heu morte dura durius mortis genus / Animique tristis languor…], Sandys, p. 5; Grotius, p. 5. Sandys, p. 39. Sandys, p. 39. $)((-&
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suffering with a hopeless lament, crying ‘no more our eyes / Shall see thy Face! Ah, never more Shalt thou return from Deaths dark shore’.31 While the Chorus recalls the raising of Lazarus, it yet despairs that ‘None ever rais’d himself from death’ (Pauci raro munere coeli / Potuere aliis reddere vitam,/se nemo sibi).32 The resurrection, which, as we shall see, is not represented in this drama, is here declared to be impossible. The fourth act begins abruptly, its place in the sequence of the Passion narrative unclear. A messenger (Nuntius Prior) appears to rush onto the stage, lamenting to the bewildered Chorus: I From the horrid’st Act that ever fed the fire of barbarous Rage, at length am fled: Yet O too neare! The Object still pursues; Flotes in mine eyes, that sad Scene renewes. Tandem execranda barbara, infanda, impia Facinora fugi, nec satis fugi tamen: Quodcunque vidi sequitur, & totum scelus Oculis oberrat.33 The effect, in relation to the absent spectacle of Jesus on the cross, sets off an intense sequence of wrenchingly ambivalent responses to that suffering, and especially to its absence, to its constitution as an ‘unscene’. The First Messenger has fled the spectacle of the crucifixion – Sandys’ rendition is even more explicitly theatrical than Grotius’ in its conjuring an imagined ‘scene’. The extended sequence of adjectives in Grotius’ Latin that delay the verb (fugi) is rendered in Sandys’ English by the addition of ‘at length’ to a syntactically contorted sentence that stretches the space between the first person pronoun ‘I’ and the action ‘am fled’. The vertiginous effect suggests the witness to the scene lingering there uncomfortably, before – finally – fleeing. This rather queasy sense of lingering to look while yet longing to tear oneself away (here, seemingly the obverse of Leontius’ desire to rush towards the spectacle of the corpses in Plato’s Republic) is contradicted (or perhaps, given its very ambivalence, reinforced) by the Messenger’s sudden cry ‘Yet O too neare!’ The change of pace in Sandys’ rendition is perhaps more dramatic than that in Grotius’ text, although both preserve the vividness of a dramatically conjectured scene which is not merely conjured for Chorus and audience, but which 31 32 33

Sandys, p. 40 Sandys, p. 40; Grotius, p. 34. Sandys, p. 41; Grotius, p. 35. $)((-&
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‘pursues’ the fleeing witness. Grotius’ text here refracts the image of the crucifixion through a classical tragic lens, explicitly recalling Seneca’s Hercules Furens in its ‘totum scelus / oculis oberrat’,34 the image a monstrous vision that ‘hovers’, or ‘flits’ ‘before the eyes’ (chiming too with Melanchthon’s sed terribilis species obiicienda est oculis). Like the tragic Hercules, it is as if the Messenger is not so much haunted as hunted by what he has seen. The Chorus, however, implores the messenger to share his knowledge of Christ’s suffering in terms that suggest a deep but intriguing ambivalence towards that knowledge, echoing the Messenger’s own ambivalence: Forth-with unmask this wretched face of Wo: All that he suffer’d, and the manner show; What words brake from his sorrow; give thy tongue A liberall scope: Our minds not seldom long To know what they abhorre: nor spare our eares; What can be heard, is fancied by our feares. Pande iam totam simul Faciem malorum. fare quis poenae modus, Quas vis dolorum rupit in voces. cupit Animus quod horret scire. ne parce auribus Timor ipse finxit quicquid audiri potest.35 The poetic and epistemic consequences of the offstage violence he narrates can be understood both to heighten and complicate the affect at this point in the drama. Knowledge of suffering becomes the object of a paradoxical simultaneity of desire and abhorrence. The verbs in Grotius’ Latin imply stretching and extension (pande) and breaking (rupit); indeed, he extends the sense over a line break (cupit / animus). Sandys replicates this enjambement in his ‘our minds not seldom long / To know’, and inserts a double negative, ‘not seldom’, further stretching and delaying the sense of the line, before the arrival of the paradoxical punch of ‘abhorre’. Early modern English retains the physical, affective nature of ‘abhorre’. While it can bear its somewhat etiolated modern sense of ‘to shrink from’, here it recalls Hamlet’s fascinated disgust at holding the skull of Yorrick: ‘And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge 34 35

See Seneca, Hercules Furens, in Tragoediae, edited by Rudolf Peiper and Gustav Richter (Leipzig: Teubner, 1921), ll. 1279–81: ‘iamdudum mihi / monstrum impium saevumque et immite ac ferum / oberrat’. Sandys, p. 42; Grotius, p. 36.

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rises at it’, his repulsion underscored by the miasma of decay (‘And smelt so? Pah!).36 We might pause here to note that, in Garber’s treatment of the ‘unscene’, death, ‘The undiscover’d Country, from whose bourn / no Traveller returns’ (3.1.79–80), is, as it were, the ultimate ‘unscene’, that which bears the greatest condition of ineffability.37 The Messenger has ‘fled’ the scene from which the Chorus both recoils but also yearns to run towards. The Chorus, which we might understand in some sense as representative of (or intermediary for) the reader, has been spared, or perhaps denied, like us, the spectacle of theatrical violence. However, it still yearns, like the audience, for it to be granted. The effect, in the imagined spatial terms of the stage, is one of simultaneous advance towards the spectacle, while yet recoiling from it; perhaps not a bad emblem for the work of tragic drama itself. While the paradoxical desire for knowledge of that from which one recoils recalls the Chorus’ response to Oedipus that we noted above, in Sophocles’ play, it is a response to the physical presence, the actual spectacle, of the blinded Oedipus. Here, however, this same paradoxical tragic desire for horrific knowledge is a response to the very absence of spectacle. The anxiety of Grotius’ and Sandys’ Chorus, of not having witnessed the violence, is a moment of intense tragic affect, and precisely an affect centred, dialectically, around a desire both to know and to not-know, that which cannot be seen. The Chorus is afflicted by its imaginings of what it does not know, and it is pained by not knowing, of not being there to witness, of having to rely on the testimony of others, to take their testimony on faith. This is to say that the absence of the suffering Christ on the stage, far from draining the play of its affective impact, encapsulates something important about it. What follows this exchange is a lengthy and vivid ekphrastic realization by the Messenger of the spectacle of the Crucifixion, replete with symbolic topographical detail. The scene of the suffering is figured as ‘This Stage of Death’ [Hanc morte sedem]38 – an explicit evocation of the ‘unscene’ – the theatrical scene which cannot be staged. ‘Stage’ here also refers to the execution scaffold, and the Messenger lists the horrific crimes committed by criminals who have been executed there. This imagined ‘stage’ is now the site of Jesus’ executed, mutilated body, the whole of which, the Messenger relates, has become one totalizing wound (Unum toto corpore vulnus).39 36 37 38 39

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J.M.M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), ll. 5.1.193–4, 207. Garber, ‘“The Rest is Silence”’, p. 49. Sandys, p. 43; Grotius, p. 37. Grotius, p. 33.

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Spectacle and Pity: Acknowledging the Spectators

Christus Patiens shows a particularly heightened interest in the depiction of the response of its characters to imagined spectacle, whether onstage (as with the Chorus), or in the ‘unscene’, as is the case with the Virgin Mary, who here plays the role of imagined Mediatrix of exemplary grief, and the ‘Beloved Disciple’, St John. The spectacle of suffering witnessed by the Virgin is particularly intense. While the Chorus both yearns to look at and yet simultaneously recoils from the spectacle of the Passion, Mary is unable to tear her gaze away from it. The entire imagined field of her vision is filled, as Sandys puts it, with the ‘killing sight’ of the bloody scene, such that her grief is indistinguishable from the very suffering that she cannot but witness: Where should she fix her looks! if on the ground; She sees that with her bloud, he bleeding, drown’d: Or if she raise her eyes; the killing sight Of her wombs tort’red Issue quench their light. Fearing to look on either, both disclose Their terrours; who now licences her woes. Quo vertat oculos nescit: an figat solo? Qua misera mente sanguinem aspiciat suum Terra fluentem? levet in altum lumina? Dira videbit peste convelli ac trahi Quos peperit artus; cernere alterutrum timens Utrumque cernit, seque permittit malis.40 While the central tragic dynamic of the Christus Patiens revolves around the tragic affect of fear or ‘horror’ – as I have suggested, a key figure for the Christian reception of Aristotelian theory and dramaturgical technique – the play is perhaps even more creative in its evocation of the first of Aristotle’s tragic emotions: pity (eleos), a response reiterated by Melanchthon, for whom the sight moves by its very appeal to compassion (commiseratione). While the play abounds in the vocabulary of fear, tragic pity is buried deeper beneath the surface of the text. The ekphrastic conjuring of absent tragic spectacle has, I have suggested, an especially intense dynamic for its onstage audience who stand at a remove from the reported action, for whom the scenes are evoked, and through whom the (offstage) audience of the play’s readers (and spectators) are engaged in the evocation of the spectacle. Yet a key element in the 40

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ekphrastic technique of the Messenger speeches is the way in which they conjure relations between imagined offstage spectators, other witnesses to whom the speeches themselves bear witness. These offstage figures inhabit a number of roles, from soldiers, tormentors and torturers, where there is some continuity with the ‘Jewish Crowd’ (turbus) which clamours for the Crucifixion in the earlier scenes, and the ‘Chorus of Romane Soldiers’, which later appears onstage after the crucifixion, highlighting the classical tragic resonances of the spectacle it has witnessed. The Chorus of Jewish Women does not merely press the Messenger for grisly details of Jesus’ wounds; it is equally concerned to form its own response through hearing about the reactions of these spectators at the scene of the Crucifixion itself. When asked by the Chorus to characterize these spectators’ responses, the Messenger cannot but note their fragmented diversity, a recursive spiral of pity and cruelty in response and counter-response, in which the tears of one are derided by another, this derision provoking yet more tears: Not all alike: discording murmurs rise. Some, with transfixed hearts, and wounded eyes, Astonisht stand: some joy in his slow fate, And to the last extend their Barbarous hate. Motion it self variety begets, And by a strange vicissitude regrets What it affected, nor one posture beares: Teares scornfull laughter raise, and laughter teares. Non una facies: dissonae voces strepunt. Pars moesta vultu ac corde defixo stupet: Pars morte lenta fruitur, & quantum potest Extendit iras. motuum discordia Alit ipsa motus: nanque miranda vice Tristes acerbos lachrimae risus movent, Risusque lachrimas.41 It is perhaps in its attention to its very spectators, to those who are forced, or who long to force themselves, to look on the spectacle of suffering, that Christus Patiens is most concerned with pity, and concomitantly, with compassion. Where the figure of the doubling of the crucifixion in the opening scene was first mental, then physical (and thereby an intertwined, indissoluble instance of both physical and mental suffering), here, in its imagined spectators, the 41

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spectacle of the crucifixion is redoubled through the pity, cruelty, and empathy it evokes in its spectators. For the centre of the spectacle of suffering – Christ – is himself imagined as a spectator to the scene, witnessing others suffering through their pity, horror, and grief at his own suffering. Seeing the suffering of the Beloved Disciple and his mother is, for Jesus, more torment than his own suffering; it becomes for him ‘an other Crosse’. The spectacle of suffering is thereby recursively multiplied by its spectators, who become, to the sufferer, an ‘other Crosse’: That Youth, one of the Twelve, so dignifi’d By his deare Masters love, stood by her side. Beholding this sad Paire, those Souls that were To him then life, while life remain’d, more deare; He found an other Crosse: his spirits melt More for the sorrow seen, then torments felt. claudit huic sanctum latus Bis sex sodales inter adamatus pio Iuvenis magistro. Triste ut aspexit iugem, Animasque dulces non minus vita sibi Dum vita mansit, sentit ille aliam crucem Grauiusque torque ille spectatus dolor.42 Jesus’ suffering is re-duplicated and intensified by the suffering of the spectators looking on the spectacle; but here, the effect of the tragic pathos is motivated not by the horror or fear of the spectacle, but by the divine pity, a generative sympathy that forms the community of the church at the foot of the cross: At length, in strength transcending either, brake The barres of his long silence, and thus spake: A legacie to each of you I leave: Mother, this sonne in stead of me receave By thy adoption: and thou gentle boy, The seed of Zebedeus, late my joy, Thy friend now for thy mother take. Sed utroque tandem fortiori longi moras Rumpit silentii. Sume depositum meum 42

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Uterque: natum mater hunc pro me tibi Posthac adopta: tuque Zebeai puer Qua fuit amici nunc tuam matrem puta, Hac fatus iterum flexit in poenam caput.43 5

Grief Lessons

The affect that results from this spectacle of suffering is further complicated by the shifting senses of responsibility – of guilt – for this suffering, as in turn, the Jewish Crowd, Pilate, Peter, the Romane Soldiers, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the Chorus of Jewish Women all implicate themselves, or are implicated by others, in the burden of guilt for Jesus’ suffering and death. Through these multiple implications, the audience, who themselves take tragic pleasure in the suffering, are at each point in the drama themselves – ourselves – implicated in this guilt. This is made especially clear in the dispute between Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus after the crucifixion. Echoing Jesus’ parting words in his ‘Daughters of Jerusalem’ speech, Joseph of Arimathea exonerates the Romans from the crime, and calls down a series of colourful, and to a modern reader profoundly uncomfortable, curses on the Jews, prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem (including the Josephan trope of the starving mother forced to eat her own baby), and with it the end of any semblance of a Jewish state, such that ‘Despis’d, and wretched’, they might ‘wander through all Lands’. This speech draws a sharp rebuke from Nicodemus, as he accuses Joseph of the selfexculpatory accusation of others. Nicodemus goes on to suggest that even those who have seen themselves as innocent in the drama cannot escape their responsibility, his speech implicating not only Joseph and the Chorus, but potentially the drama’s readers and spectators too: This Error with a secret poyson feeds The minds Disease. Who censures his own deeds? Who not anothers? These accusing Times Rather the men condemne, then taxe their Crimes. Such is the Tyranny of Judgement; prone To sentence all Offences, but our owne. Because of late we cry’d not Crucifie, Nor falsely doom’d the Innocent to die, Our selves we please: as it a Vertue were; 43

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And Great one, if from great Offences cleare. Confesse; what Orator would plead his Cause? To vindicate his truth who urg’d the Laws? Or once accus’d their bloudy suffrages, By Envy sign’d? Who durst those Lords displease? So Piety suffer’d, while by speaking they, And we by silence, did the Just betray. When women openly their zeale durst show, We, in acknowledging our Master, slow, Under the shady coverture of Night Secur’d our feares, which would not brook the Light. Joseph, at length our faith it selfe exprest; But to the Dead. Hic inter alios foedus humanum genus Insedit error. facta quis culpat sua? Aliena quis non? magna pars non crimina Damnat, sed homines, dispari sententia, Aliis severi iudices, faciles sibi. Nos, quia profana voce non addiximus Morti immerentem, iura nec contra & fidem. Scripsit cruentum nostra decretum manus, Nobis placemus, magna ceu virtus foret At si fatemur vera, quis forti virum Defendit ore, quisve corrupta arguit Livore saevo iudicum suffragia? Non esse magni conscium sceleris sibi. Quis commodavit legibus vocem suam? Sic victa pietas fasque, dum sanctum caput Illi loquendo, nos tacendo prodimus. Cum nil timentes feminae illius palam In nomen irent, nos magistrum agnoscere Segnes pavori noctis umbram obtendimus. Iosephe, tandem nostra sese aperit fides, Sed in peremtum.44 How far does Nicodemus’ inclusive first person plural ‘we’ extend? Are the play’s audience, who, as we saw, are implicated in the Chorus’ desire to see the 44

Sandys, pp. 62–63; Grotius, p. 53.

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violence of the Passion, not also thereby implicated in Nicodemus’ extension of guilt for that suffering? As Christus Patiens repeatedly makes clear, the only proper innocence belongs to Christ. Notably, the mode of Nicodemus’ speech here is interrogative, and the extent of the boundaries of his question, given that the audience, like Joseph, has been moved by the drama to judge the boisterous crowd, and to regard the Romans as less complicit. Dramatically, the text unsettles the judgments that it has hitherto encouraged the audience to make. Christus Patiens here questions our response to it, in a way, perhaps, that is beyond anything that we might find in classical tragedy; tragic pleasure is seen through the theological lens of the exposure of sin, and the eliciting of its confession. It is striking that in a play so concerned with oration, and so rich in dramatic rhetoric, the power of the ‘Orator’ to plead the cause of the unacknowledged (indeed self-deluding) sinner is helpless. The only solution, confession of offences, is itself what introduces the denial of the possibility of the help of the Orator: ‘Confesse; what Orator would plead his Cause?’ 6

Endings

Unlike their Greek predecessor, Grotius’ and Sandys’ texts do not end with the Resurrection, the strict observance of the unity of time requiring that the drama be circumscribed within the twenty-four hours from the evening of Maundy Thursday until after sundown on Good Friday. Theologically, we are left to linger in the long Holy Saturday. Christ has died, but not yet risen. For its dramatic resolution, the play turns to prophecy. When Mary appears on stage, at the very end of the drama, she begins by recalling the prophecies that she received, declaring herself ‘born to grief’: O John, for thee in such extreames to mourn Perhaps is new: but I to grief was born. With this have we convers’t twice sixteen yeares: No form of sorrow hath beguil’d our feares. To me how ominously the Prophets sung, Even from the time that heavenly Infant sprung In my chaste Wombe! Old Simeon this reveal’d; And in my Soul the deadly wound beheld. Lugere nobis forte Iohannes nouus est: Ego nata in hoc sum: ter decem annis amplius Non aliud egi. Nulla me species mali $)((-&
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Fefelit: ex quo casta coelesti satu Detumuit alvus, dira mihi dira omnia Cecinere vates: vidit hac Simeon senex, Imaque anima vulnus aspexit meum.45 After several speeches reflecting on the bitterness of their mutual grief, John ends a long passage by reflecting on the glorious theophany of the Nativity, and its attendant angels. The dolorous mood abruptly shifts. As if seized by a vision, Mary begins the final speech of the drama with sudden, and utterly unexpected apocalyptic joy: Sorrow is fled: Joy, a long banish’d Guest, With heavenly rapture fill’s my inlarged brest Fugiunt dolores. laetior praecordia Subit ille motus...46 While there is an allusion to Jesus’ resurrection, this is far from the main figure in Mary’s prophetic vision. Rather, the substance of the vision is expansively cosmological – of the whole world overturned by the Last Judgment, all nations praising the Christus Victor (‘Subjected Death thy Triumph now attends [Iam tuos mors pallida / Sequitur triumphos]’47). After a sequence of lines forming something of a doxology, there is a return of the Johannine images of light and dark, of night and day, that run through the play, often in rather paradoxical ways (in particular the portentous darkening of the sun). In a play of such complex temporality, which is constantly making imaginative leaps between the ‘present’ of the action, reported action in the recent past, Old Testament narratives, and ambiguously mythological classical narratives (in illo tempore), the drama ends with a prophecy of the end of ‘Time’ itself: The Time draws on, in which it selfe must end, When thou shalt in a Throne of Clouds descend To judge the Earth. In that reformed World, Those by their sins infected, shall be hurl’d Downe under one perpetuall Night; while they Whom thou hast cleans’d, injoy perpetuall Day. 45 46 47

Sandys, p. 65; Grotius, p. 55. Sandys, p. 72; Grotius, p. 60. Sandys, p. 72; Grotius, p. 61.

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Quin tempus illud meta saclorum prope est, Cum nube in alta tot sedebis gentium Quesitor, orbe cum reformato manet Nox una fontes, una purgatos dies.48 As prophetic utterance, this is not ‘the promis’d end’, but it is, ekphrastically, ‘the image of that horror’. It is not only the manifestation as prophecy that is theologically significant (in which it is thereby proleptic, but also collapsed into the eschatological horizon), but also its very unprepared abruptness. The memorial acclamation here is something like ‘Christ has died, he is not yet risen, he will come again’. There is a perennial tension in scholarly discussions of Christianity and tragedy between Crucifixion and Resurrection.49 The achievement of the Christus Patiens is to insert its audience into the time of the Crucifixion – the transition from Friday to Saturday – without a retrospective intrusion of Easter that overdetermines the suffering by relativizing it or subordinating it to a compensatory victory. Nor however, does the drama, in its curiously exultant final lines, deny the triumph of the resurrection. Rather, the final lines of Grotius’ drama emphasize the radical nature of that resurrection from the dead which overturns the entire order of the world, which comes from outside of the world and time. Resurrection does not, in this play, follow sequentially from the order of events of the Crucifixion, but arrives (albeit proleptically, and collapsed into the horizon of the eschaton) ecstatically, from without; it is nothing other than grace. Moreover, it proves the despairing lines of the Chorus to have been correct, but only ironically, and in a manner that could not possibly have been imagined: ‘None ever rais’d himself from death’. In its re-imagination of the Passion narrative as a neoclassical tragedy, Christus Patiens offers a particularly concentrated attempt to stage what we have come to think of as the ‘problem’ (some would argue the impossibility) of Christian tragedy. Indeed, through its self-conscious mediation of absences through ekphrastic report, we have seen how the play incorporates aspects of this ‘problem’ into its dramatic structure. The Aristotelian constitutive tragic affects of fear and pity are put to theological work: fear and horror prompt the audience, through their very desire to witness tragic spectacle, to reflect on their own sinful complicity in the suffering that is evoked and presented, a sin 48 49

Sandys, p. 73; Grotius, p. 61. See, for example, I.A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), p. 246; Richard Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 50; Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. H.A.T. Reiche, H.T. Moore, and K.W. Deutsch (London: Victor Gollancz, 1953), p. 38; and George Steiner, ‘A Note on Absolute Tragedy’, Journal of Literature and Theology 4, no. 2 (1990), pp. 147–156.

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that the drama also obliquely presents as redeemed through the atoning death of its protagonist.50 Yet through the operation of this fear and horror, Christus Patiens also commends to its audience a pattern of divinely bestowed pity that – as with Mary and John commended by the suffering Christ to one another at the foot of the cross – forms the ongoing community of heirs to those first faithful witnesses to this Passion, the Church. Bibliography Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. and trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). Bryant Davies, Rachel. ‘The Figure of Mary Mother of God in Christus Patiens: Fragmenting Tragic Myth and Passion Narrative in a Byzantine Appropriation of Euripidean Tragedy’. Journal of Hellenic Studies 137 (2017): pp. 188–212. Garber, Marjorie. ‘“The Rest Is Silence”: Ineffability and the “Unscene” in Shakespeare’s Plays’. In Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984), pp. 35–50. Grotius, Hugo. Tragoedia Christus Patiens (Leiden, 1608) and Sandys, George. Christs passion a tragedie, with annotations (London: John Legatt, 1640). Groves, Beatrice. ‘“Now wole I a newe game begynne”: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays, and Grotius’s Christus Patiens’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007): pp. 136–150. Gruber, William. Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Heinsius, Daniel. Dan. Heinsii De Tragoediae Constitutione Liber : In Quo Inter Caetera tota de hac Aristotelis sententia dilucide explicatur (Lvgd. Batav. [Amsterdam]: [ex officina] Elseviriana, 1643). Heinsius, Daniel. On Plot in Tragedy, trans. Paul R. Sellin and John J. McManmon (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1971). Hutson, Lorna. Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Jaspers, Karl. Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. H. Riche, H.T. Moore, and K.W. Deutsch (London: Victor Gollancz, 1953). Leo, Russ. ‘Christ’s Passion, Christian Tragedy, and Ioannes Franciscus Quintianus Stoa’s Untimely Theoandrothanatos’. Renaissance Studies 30, no. 4 (2016): pp. 505–525.

50

For a fuller treatment of this aspect of the play, see Waller, ‘Complicity, Recognition, and Conversion in the Christus Patiens Drama’.

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Lurie, Michael. Die Suche nach der Schuld: Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex, Aristoteles’ Poetik und das Tragödienverständnis der Neuzeit (München/Leipzig: K.G. Saur/De Gruyter, 2004). Melanchthon, Philip. Cohortatio Philippi Melanchthonis ad legendas tragoedias et comoedias (January 1, 1545), in P. Terentii Comoediae sex, cum prioribus ferme castigationibus et plerisque explicationibus … editae studio et cura Ioachimi Camerarii Pabergensis, in Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 5 (Halis Saxonum, 1838), no. 3108, pp. 567–572. Melanchthon, Philip and Winshemius, Vito. Interpretatio tragoediarum Sophoclis ad utilitatem iuventutis, quae studiosa est graecae linguae, edita a Vito Winshemio (Frankfurt, 1546). Mitchell, W.J.T. ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’. In Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 151–182. O’Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in Early-Modern England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Parente, Jr., James A. ‘The Development of Religious Tragedy: The Humanist Reception of the Christos Paschon in the Renaissance’. Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 3 (1985): pp. 351–368. Pazzi, Alessandro, trans. Aristotelis Poetica (Venice, 1536). Preston, Claire. ‘Ekphrasis: Painting in Words’. In Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gareth Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 115–130. Richards, I.A. The Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, 1924). Sewall, Richard. The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). Steiner, George. Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). Steiner, George. ‘A Note on Absolute Tragedy’. Journal of Literature and Theology 4, no. 2 (1990), pp. 147–156. Tuilier, André, ed. Grégoire de Nazianze. La Passion du Christ: Tragédie, Sources Chrétiennes, 149 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969). Waller, Giles. ‘Complicity, Recognition, and Conversion in the Christus Patiens Drama’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49, no. 1 (January 2019): pp. 33–55. Zeitlin, Froma. ‘The Artful Eye: Vision, Ekphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre’. In Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 138–196.

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Part 2 Modernity, Tragedy, and Christianity

∵

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Chapter 6

The Grave of Greek Tragedy: Hegel Reading Oedipus at Colonus Peter Svare Valeur This essay focuses on Hegel’s interpretation of Sophocles’s late drama Oedipus at Colonus. As Joshua Billings has noted, the importance of this play to German Idealism is surprisingly essential, for it offers thinkers like Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel the opportunity to think through the idea of ‘reconciliation that is the ultimate aim of tragedy and philosophy’.1 Previous work on Sophoclean tragedy and Hegelian dialectics notwithstanding2, Hegel’s claim that this play, in its representation of reconciliation, points beyond the world of Greek tragedy towards Christianity and modernity remains under-explored. Of particular interest here will be the thought-figure that permeates Hegel’s reflections on both the tragic as such, and on the historical process more generally, namely the grave. This figure becomes a conduit for Hegel to think through the idea of different kinds of reconciliation across different historical contexts. I will look

1 According to Billings, ‘German Idealism discovers in the Oedipus at Colonus a mirror of its own philosophical ends.’ Joshua Billings, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism’, Arion 21, no. 1 (Spring 2013): pp. 113–131, p. 114. Apart from the article by Billings, which however only contains a few pages on Hegel’s reading of it, and some comments in Simon Goldhill, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus’, in Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, edited by J. Billings and M. Leonard (Oxford: oup, 2015), pp. 231–250, and Wolfgang Bernard, Das Ende des Ödipus bei Sophokles: Untersuchung zur Interpretation des ‘Ödipus auf Kolonos’ (München: Beck, 2001), pp. 12–17, little has been written on Hegel’s reading of this play. This lack of scholarly interest contrasts markedly with the vast corpus devoted to Hegel’s readings of Antigone. 2 Among the most important: Pierre Bertrand, ‘Le sens du tragique et du destin dans la dialectique hégélienne’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 47, no. 2 (Paris 1940): pp. 165–186; Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974); Miguel Beistegui, ‘Hegel: or The Tragedy of Thinking’, in Philosophy and Tragedy, edited by M. Beistegui and S. Sparks (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 11–38; Jean Hippolyte, ‘Le tragique et le rationel dans la philosophie de Hegel’, in Figures de la pensée philosophique (Paris: puf, 1971); Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Werner Hamacher, ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’, in Sprachen der Ironie – Sprachen des Ernstes, edited by K.H. Bohrer (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 121–158; Otto Pöggeler, ‘Hegel und die griechische Tragödie’, in Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg: Alber, 1971), pp. 97–110.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_008  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_008 6543_008

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at three versions of it in Hegel’s work: The so-called ‘secret grave’ of Oedipus at Colonus, the ‘empty grave’ in Christianity, and the Roman Pantheon. The grave, I argue, must be seen in relation to the two modes of the tragic that lie at the centre of Hegel’s reflections on Oedipus at Colonus: tragic vagrancy and tragic certainty. 1

The Secret Grave

Hegel discusses Oedipus at Colonus in two places, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and the Lectures on Aesthetics. In the former work, Hegel does not say much about the play, but what he does say merits quotation: ‘Ödipus Kolonos spielt an die Versöhnung und näher an die christliche Vorstellung der Versöhnung an: Ödipus wird von den Göttern zu Gnaden angenommen, die Götter berufen ihn zu sich.’3 For Hegel, Oedipus at Colonus is thus a tragedy with Christian traits, or better, a historically transitional drama where the old world of Greek tragedy begins to transmute into what will become a Christianised future. This remark is somewhat nuanced in his Lectures on Aesthetics, held in the same decade (1820–9). The ‘eternally marvellous’ play shows a new ‘subjectivity’ and individualism due to the hero’s ‘inner reconciliation’, and this is, according to Hegel, what makes Sophocles’s last play more modern than all his other texts – it borders on, or more precisely strays towards the modern era (‘gegen das Moderne hinstreift’4). Hegel then briefly paraphrases the story of the hero who, after having killed his father and slept with his mother, was expelled from Thebes and who is, at the start of Oedipus at Colonus, reduced to a blind beggar and exiled wretch – like Adam after the Fall, as Hegel puts it. In the end he finds reconciliation: ‘Then a god calls him; his blind eyes are transfigured and clear; his bones become a salvation and safeguard of the state that received him as friend and guest.’5 This is what Hegel sees as Oedipus’s triumph, his ‘transfiguration in death’ (‘Verklärung im Tode’). He concludes with the following somewhat gnomic statement: 3 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion ii (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 135. Translation: ‘Oedipus at Colonus hints at reconciliation, and more precisely at the Christian representation of reconciliation: Oedipus comes to honor among the gods, the gods call him to them.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Volume ii, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2011), p. 667. 4 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik iii (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 551. 5 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 2, p. 1219.

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Man hat einen christlichen Ton darin finden wollen, die Anschauung eines Sünders, den Gott zu Gnaden annimmt, und das Schicksal, das an seiner Endlichkeit sich auslieβ, im Tode durch Seligkeit vergütet. Die christliche religiöse Versöhnung aber ist eine Verklärung der Seele, die, im Quell des ewigen Heils gebadet, sich über ihre Wirklichkeit und Taten erhebt, indem sie das Herz selbst – denn dies vermag der Geist – zum Grabe des Herzens macht, die Anklagen der irdischen Schuld mit ihrer eigenen irdischen Individualität bezahlt und sich nun in der Gewiβheit des ewigen, rein geistigen Seligseins in sich selbst gegen jene Anklagen festhält. Die Verklärung des Ödipus dagegen bleibt immer noch die antike Herstellung des Bewuβtseins aus dem Streite sittlicher Mächte und Verletzungen zur Einheit und Harmonie dieses sittlichen Gehaltes selber.6 In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel had claimed that the tragedy pointed in the direction of Christian reconciliation, but now he limits himself to the more objective statement that ‘Attempts have been made to find a Christian tone here’. As he puts it, the reconciliation of the play must be seen in a purely Greek context. Thus we see that Hegel points to the Christian connotations of the play only to finally dismiss their importance. The question, then, is why Hegel claimed that the text pointed towards Christian reconciliation in the first place. So what was it that made Hegel see the play as historically transitional? Here a short digression is necessary. Some of Hegel’s contemporaries, including his friends Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger and Friedrich Hölderlin, had already written about the play. Hölderin had claimed this play to be ‘hesperic’, i.e. modern7, while Solger had argued that Oedipus’s death showed ‘the abyss of holiness, where the eternal and the temporal meet once more and are 6 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik iii, p. 551. Translation: ‘Attempts have been made to find a Christian tone here: the vision of a sinner whom God pardons and a fate endured in life but compensated with bliss in death. But the Christian reconciliation is a transfiguration of the soul which, bathed in the spring of eternal salvation, is lifted above its deeds and existence in the real world because it makes the heart itself into the grave of the heart (yes, the spirit can do this), pays the imputations of earthly guilt with its own earthly individuality and now holds itself secure against those imputations in the certainty of its own eternal and purely spiritual bliss. On the other hand, the transfiguration of Oedipus always still remains the Greek transfer of consciousness from the strife of ethical powers, and the violations involved, into the unity and harmony of the entire ethical order itself.’ Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, pp. 1219–1220. 7 Hölderlin believed that the Greeks were immediately ‘hit’ by their ‘Schicksal’, whereas the modern or hesperic world is ‘schicksallos’, without fate. See Billings, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism’, pp. 115–121.

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reconciled’.8 The one who made the most of the Christian connotations, not of this play especially, but of Greek tragedy in general, was however F.W.J. Schelling in his 1802 lectures on art – lectures it is likely that Hegel would have known.9 Particularly interesting is Schelling’s discussion of the so-called ‘mystical elements’ in Greek culture, namely the desire for the infinite. For Schelling, the originary mythology of the Greeks such as it surfaced in the Homeric epos was ‘natural’: by this he means that the finite and the infinite were ‘symbolically’ interwoven with each other.10 The desire for the infinite, and its ‘allegorical’ representation (i.e. consisting in signs which, to use Schelling’s terminology, point at the infinite without being anchored in the finite or natural), only won influence in Greek literature at a later age – Schelling specifically mentions the tragedies and the Orphic lyric. These genres, he claims, developed independently from the Homeric epos. What makes this view interesting is not only Schelling’s contention that the ‘mystical elements’ were directly imported and engrafted onto the Greek tragic and Orphic cultures from Oriental philosophies, but, more importantly, that the so-called mysticism of Greek tragedy and Orphism formed a source which would help generate Christianity. On basis of the wealth of angels and miracles in Christianity, Schelling contends: ‘The essence of Christianity is mysticism.’11 Christianity, at first an Oriental sect, thus found, as it were, the soil of the West prepared and ready for it.12 Schelling’s point about the mysticism of Greek tragedy certainly makes sense in relation to Oedipus at Colonus, arguably the most mysterious of all Greek tragedies.13 As for instance Bernard Knox notes, unlike the harsher world of Sophocles’s previous plays, Oedipus at Colonus has an ending which ‘is full of divine signs and wonders’, and the play centres on ‘a unique theme: the 8 9 10 11 12

13

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Des Sophokles Tragödien (Berlin: Reimer, 1824), p. xxvii. For Schelling’s influence on Hegel, see Billings, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism’, and Goldhill, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus’. When claiming that the originary Greek Homeric world was a world devoted to nature, Schelling might have been inspired by Schiller’s ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’. F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophy of Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 72. As Szondi has shown, Schelling’s arguments recall both those of Friedrich Schlegel, who like Schelling insisted on the Oriental dimension in Christianity, and, not least, of Hölderlin, who, unlike Schelling, would hold that the mystical or Asian influences were basic to Greek civilisation, and, in syncretic fashion, that Jesus was himself one of the Gods from the East. On these influences and many more, see Peter Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie i (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 215–230. See for instance Wolfgang Schadewaldt in Sophokles, Ödipus auf Kolonos, trans. W. Schadewaldt (F.a.M.: Insel, 1986), pp. 99–100.

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transformation of Oedipus the mortal man into the hêrôs he is to be in his grave’.14 The point about the grave is crucial; already Hegel’s contemporary August Wilhelm Schlegel singled out the place of Oedipus’s death as the most mysterious element in the play.15 The point is evident: For Oedipus leaves behind no visible grave whatsoever. After having been summoned by the gods, Oedipus disappears in thin air, and there is no trace of either his corpse or of a grave. Knox thus speaks of Oedipus’s ‘secret grave’, a grave invisible to the human eye. Of course, this adds complexity to Knox’s further argument that the play illustrates the ‘cult of heroes’, which, going back to at least the fifth century, consisted in sacrificial ceremonies where ‘dead heroes, protectors of Greek earth, were worshipped and placated by sacrifice on their graves’.16 In Sophocles’s play there is no grave where posterity can worship. 2

The Empty Grave

The topic of the secret grave underscores Schelling’s point about the allegorical and mystical, indeed proto-Christian, tendencies of Greek tragedy: a desire for the infinite that shows itself in the absence of what is, after all, an eminently powerful image of finiteness, the grave. With the grave invisible and inaccessible, the dead Oedipus turns into someone whom it would not be amiss to see pointing in the direction of Christian transcendence and the victory of the spirit over the body. As we saw, some of Hegel’s remarks about the play tended in this direction. Even if he insisted that the play satisfies the Greek worldview and its ethical conceptions, and as such remains bounded by finitude, he is not free from suggesting Oedipus as a Christian character avant la lettre. As he put it, the play’s end hints at a Christian idea of reconciliation. According to Hegel, however, the key difference was that while Oedipus experienced a ‘transfiguration in death’, Christian reconciliation offers a ‘transfiguration of the soul’. Symptomatically, he turns, in the passage already quoted, to the topic of the grave to illustrate the latter. The Christian reconciliation, he said, was:

14 15 16

Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. R. Fagles (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 277. Schlegel, in his lectures from 1802–3, speaks of the ‘tiefe und mystische Sinn’ surronding Oedipus’s death. A.W. Schlegel, Geschichte der klassischen Literatur (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964), p. 290f. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, pp. 257, 261.

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eine Verklärung der Seele, die, im Quell des ewigen Heils gebadet, sich über ihre Wirklichkeit und Taten erhebt, indem sie das Herz selbst – denn dies vermag der Geist – zum Grabe des Herzens macht, die Anklagen der irdischen Schuld mit ihrer eigenen irdischen Individualität bezahlt und sich nun in der Gewiβheit des ewigen, rein geistigen Seligseins in sich selbst gegen jene Anklagen festhält.17 In themselves, these rather enigmatic utterances exemplify what Schelling called ‘allegorical’ representation: they tend to suppress or ignore the finite, in order to point in the direction of the infinite and the purely spiritual. This, of course, leads to their vagueness.18 However, it can be taken as certain that, to Hegel, the Christian idea of reconciliation consists in the spirit’s transcendence and the overcoming of the finitude of death, and that this is shown in the way the heart becomes the ‘grave of the heart’, as if the heart is both mourning itself and at the same time transcending itself. The Christian ‘soul’ survives its death and by its death annuls all guilt. Christian reconciliation is thus a kind of purification ending in ‘eternal and purely spiritual bliss’. According to Hegel, Oedipus’s death secured the future glory of the city of Colonus: his secret grave becomes ‘a salvation and safeguard of the state that received him as friend and guest’.19 It is worthwhile to compare this cult of a dead hero to a Christian conception of the grave. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel speaks of the Crusades in a way that illustrates that, to him, Christianity historically developed into a religion in which the cult and the mystery of the grave inherited from earlier religions gradually lost its attraction. The medieval crusaders, Hegel explains, wanted to take possession of the sensual ‘this’ (‘Dieses’) of the grave of Christ, they yearned for the sacred sepulchre of the East. Yet the grave where they had hoped to find holy remains turned out to be empty (‘das leere Grab’). Thus they came face to face with the ‘vanity of the sensuous’:

17 18

19

G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik iii, p. 551. It is probable, given the somewhat hymnic quality of Hegel’s statement, that he had one or more Biblical sources on his mind. Perhaps he might have been thinking of this passage in Ezekiel: ‘For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh’ (Ezekiel 36:24–26). G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, p. 1219.

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Die Christenheit hat das leere Grab, nicht aber die Verknüpfung des Weltlichen und Ewigen gefunden und das Heilige Land deshalb verloren. Sie ist praktisch enttäuscht geworden, und das Resultat, das sie mitbrachte, war von negativer Art: es war, daβ nämlich für das Dieses, welches gesucht wurde, nur das subjektive Bewuβtsein und kein äuβerliches Ding das natürliche Dasein ist, daβ das Dieses, als das Verknüpfende des Weltlichen und Ewigen, das geistige Fürsichsein der Person ist. So gewinnt die Welt das Bewuβtsein, daβ der Mensch das Dieses, welches göttliches Art is, in sich selbst suchen müsse.20 The encounter with ‘das leere Grab’ was an experience that, as Hegel claims, became interiorised and from thence would dominate Christian Europe. In the place of the grave, which had hitherto been celebrated as the sacred ‘Dieses’, arose the awareness of the divine nature of man (‘der Mensch’), ‘the spiritual self-cognizant independence of the individual’. This resulted, as Hegel insists, in a new worldliness that would emerge as the Renaissance: ‘Man hat das Grab, das Tode des Geistes, und das Jenseits aufgegeben.’21 Hegel’s remarks make clear that he is not viewing post-medieval Christianity as a religion centred on a cult of the grave, but rather centred on the spirit. At least from the time of the Crusades, the grave was revealed as a nothingness. By witnessing ‘das leere Grab’, the Christians learnt, as it were, ‘die Lehre des Grabes’, namely that what mattered was not the sensual element outside man, but the spiritual element inside him. In this sense, we can also understand his ambivalence when it comes to Oedipus at Colonus. Even if the play has certain elements, for instance Oedipus’s ‘inner reconciliation’, which might point 20

21

G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 471–472. Translation: ‘Christendom found the empty sepulchre, but not the union of the secular and the eternal; and so it lost the Holy Land. It was practically disappointed; and the result which it brought back with it was of a negative kind: viz., that the definite embodiment which it was seeking, was to be looked for in subjective consciousness alone, and in no external object; that the definite form in question, presenting the union of the secular with the eternal, is the spiritual self-cognizant independence of the individual. Thus the world attains the conviction that man must look within himself for that definite embodiment of being which is of a divine nature.’ G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), p. 412. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 488. Translation: ‘One gave up the grave, the dead state of the spirit, and the Beyond’ (my translation). According to Sigrid Weigel in her reading of Hegel, the discovery of the empty grave unleashed an eternal desire for images formative to the Renaissance, where art attempted to fill the vacuum left by the deserted body of Christ. Sigrid Weigel, Grammatologie der Bilder (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2015), p. 312.

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beyond the realm of Greek religion, it nonetheless does not transgress the very boundaries of Greek religion as such. For Hegel, the play is thus certainly transitional (it ‘strays toward the modern era’), yet it does not overbridge the distance – it remains, as it were, half way between the ancient world of Greece and the modern world of Jerusalem. 3

Tragic Vagrancy

Hegel thus establishes a clear divide between tragic and Christian reconciliation. However, we have also seen that he contradicts himself – for in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion he had claimed that the ending of Sophocles’s piece ‘spielt an die christliche Vorstellung der Versöhnung an’, but in the Lectures on Aesthetics he had dismissed those who had heard, in the ending of the play, a ‘christlicher Ton’. It seems that Hegel is uncertain about the precise historical status of the play. Such an uncertainty must be viewed in light of Hegel’s eagerness to appropriate the play to fit his philosophy of reconciliation. As Billings notes, by being bound to the reconciliatory model, Hegel ‘largely passes over the more troubling elements of Oedipus’ end: the rejection of Polyneices, and the laments of Antigone and Ismene at the end of the piece’.22 Hegel thus ignores or underemphasizes the negative, non-reconciliatory elements of the piece. However, Billings himself under-emphasizes the inner contradiction in Hegel’s remarks. On the one hand, Hegel wishes to claim that Greek tragedy historically ended with Oedipus at Colonus. This play is about a grave – and Hegel’s aesthetics itself in a sense seeks to bury Greek tragedy, to make it something of the past. But on the other hand he also envisages an after-life of tragedy, wherein Oedipus at Colonus tends also to overcome or surpass its historical finality. Even if the idea of closure through reconciliation is the most prominent aspect of Hegel’s reading, it is also true that it suggests a certain prophetic quality and historical dynamics that point beyond the Greek world. Hegel’s most important characterization of the piece is that it strays towards the modern era: ‘gegen das Moderne hinstreift’ (the verb ‘streifen’ is etymologically related to ‘streichen’, to roam or stray). This could be read as a symptom of Hegel’s uncertainty about the play’s historical status: the play strays away from a definite meaning. However, it is precisely this hermeneutic uncertainty, the lability of its meaning, that makes the play ‘modern’, since it is neither exclusively at home in a Greek tragic world nor a Christian world. Thus the play 22

Billings, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism’, p. 126.

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acquires the status of an exception – neither purely Greek nor purely Christian, it becomes a prototype for a kind of historical vagrancy, unsettledness, and disorientation that characterizes art in the modern era. Hegel, as we saw, argued that the play ‘strayed’ towards the modern because it evidenced, as he put it, a new degree of individual ‘subjectivity’ in its presentation of the ‘inner reconciliation’ experienced by the hero. But in Hegel’s aesthetics the term ‘subjectivity’ is laden with difficulties and dialectical intricacies. Significantly, Oedipus at Colonus is the last play that Hegel discusses in the section devoted to Greek tragedy in his Lectures on Aesthetics, and his reference to the play’s ‘subjectivity’ is used as a cue for his subsequent discussion of Attic comedy, an institution where, as he says, ‘subjective caprice, vulgar folly, and absurdity’ reign supreme.23 According to Hegel’s dialectical view of history, not only is comedy (which he sees as a historically posterior phenomenon) a more intellectually or spiritually refined form than tragedy, but Attic comedy even, he argues, made the very idea of Greek tragedy become outdated: in his philosophical parlance, Aristophanean comedy ‘sublates’ tragedy. This sublation is grounded on comedy’s enthronement of the principle of individual subjectivity which had already been promoted by Oedipus at Colonus, a principle that would replace and surpass the more ‘objective’ spirit manifested in Aeschylus and the earlier tragedies of Sophocles. One can say, then, following the semantic suggestions in the passage quoted above, that with Oedipus at Colonus, presumed to be Sophocles’s last play, Greek tragedy gradually started to change: to stray, as it were, away from itself, and to become non-identical. Furthermore, when Hegel suggests the text’s straying, he also tacitly points to a broader and more general movement, namely the straying and homelessness of modern art generally. As is well known, Hegel claimed that in the modern era art had begun to lose its former importance, being no longer able to represent and channel the deepest human interests. Art is becoming increasingly marginal and obsolete, he contended. This is usually called Hegel’s ‘end of art’ thesis24, his notorious claim that ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life’.25 What does this mean? Hegel frequently refers approvingly to the Greek so-called ‘Kunstreligion’, the conception of art as culturally primary, and as the most significant and adequate representation 23 24 25

Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, p. 1221. See for instance Eva Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel (F.a.M.: Surhkamp, 2002). G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik i (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 24–25. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, p. 11.

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of the human spirit. At its most historically important stage, namely in Classical Greece, art was the central medium of religious life, Hegel maintains. However, this belief in art as a religious institution was already relinquished by the Romans, and since then we are in a position where art is no longer religiously honoured: ‘We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them.’26 According to Hegel, this severance of art from religious life reveals something of art’s diminished status in the modern era, the decrease of art’s vitality and truth. Importantly, though, this modern and post-classical movement was already a consequence of energies at work in Greek art itself. Hegel points out that the subjective principle exposed by Attic comedy was already in itself carrying the seeds of the increasing obsolescence of art – brought to its logical conclusion, comedy will even lead to the dissolution of art altogether.27 It is thus clear that Hegel’s argument about Oedipus at Colonus straying towards the modern era because of its manifestation of subjectivity, can be read as illustrating the very historical movement that has dominated art in the post-classical era: a straying away from the previous status of art as the centre of religious and spiritual life. We thus begin to see the end motif of Oedipus at Colonus in a new light. To be sure, Hegel’s eagerness to exploit the topic of reconciliation as a model for his own dialectics and to indicate the historical closure of Greek tragedy has been noted by both Billings and Goldhill, who both view Hegel’s emphasis on reconciliation as a ‘model end of tragedy’.28 However, one can also choose to emphasise that with Oedipus at Colonus, tragic art itself becomes unstable and starts the fatal historical process of its vagrancy. But this would also mean that this vagrancy is related to the tragic as such, to the point where the straying is itself an element of the tragic. This key point is illustrated at the end of the play, when after Oedipus’s death his daughters Antigone and Ismene are left despairing and not able to locate their father’s grave. Antigone laments: ‘A deadly night has fallen on our eyes. / Where, I ask you, where do we wander now? – / what alien land, what heaving salt seas – / where will we find the bitter bread of life?’29 And somewhat later: ‘O Zeus, where do we turn? / What last hope? Where will the great power, / destiny, drive us now?’30 Thus we see that far from ending with Oedipus’s transfiguration in death, the play rather ends with an image of straying and exile, as Antigone is left 26 27 28 29 30

Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, p. 10. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik iii, pp. 572–573. Billings, ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism’, p. 122. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, p. 382, ll. 1684–9. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, p. 387, ll. 1748–50.

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alone and bereft of a guiding light. Given that Oedipus has died ‘without a tomb’ (‘atafos’)31, she has lost her spirit or ‘daimon’. Hegel, we remember, argued that the crusader’s discovery of the ‘empty grave’ had made Western man aware of the infinite power and freedom of his own spirit. Antigone, however, is far from having gained the same certainty and individualism. At the end of the play she appears just as lost and helpless as her father had been at its beginning. She is an image of tragic vagrancy, not tragic certainty. 4

Tragic Certainty

In Hegel’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus, much is made out of the hero’s ‘transfiguration’, namely Oedipus gaining certainty at the hour of his death. Even if Oedipus had started as an errant wretch – as ‘helpless’ as Adam after the fall, as Hegel points out – at the end ‘his blind eyes are transfigured and clear’, and a new insight is won. This is, then, the moment of individualism, as Hegel saw effected in this play, the very ‘inner reconciliation’ that brings redemption to the old vagrant. It is tempting to see this inversion of tragic vagrancy into tragic certainty in light of a term that frequently appears in Hegel’s works, namely ‘tragic fate’. In a complex and famous statement from Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel starts by pointing out the modern pastness of art, but ends with referring to the ‘spirit of tragic fate’ which comes into being when the consciousness (or ‘spirit’) is conscious and certain of itself: Die Bildsäulen sind nun Leichname, denen die belebende Seele ... entflohen ist. […] Den Werken der Muse fehlt die Kraft des Geistes, dem aus der Zermalmung der Götter und Menschen die Gewiβheit seiner selbst hervorging. Sie sind nun das, was sie für uns sind, – vom Baume gebrochene schöne Früchte: ein freundliches Schicksal reichte sie uns dar, wie ein Mädchen jene Früchte präsentiert; es gibt nicht das wirkliche Leben ihres Daseins […] So gibt das Schicksal uns mit den Werken jener Kunst nicht ihre Welt, nicht den Frühling und Sommer des sittlichen Lebens, worin sie blühten und reiften, sondern allein die eingehüllte Erinnerung dieser Wirklichkeit. – Unser Tun in ihrem Genusse ist daher nicht das gottesdienstliche, wodurch unserem Bewuβtsein seine vollkommene, es ausfüllende Wahrheit würde, sondern es ist das äuβerliche Tun, das von diesen Früchten etwa Regentropfen oder Stäubchen abwischt […] Aber 31

Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, p. 385, l. 1733.

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wie das Mädchen, das die gepflückten Früchte darreicht, mehr ist also die in ihre Bedingungen und Elemente, den Baum, Luft, Licht usf. ausgebreitete Natur derselben, welche sie unmittelbar darbot, indem es auf eine höhere Weise dies alles in den Strahl des selbstbewuβten Auges und der darreichenden Gebärde zusammenfaβt, so ist der Geist des Schicksals, der uns jene Kunstwerke darbietet, mehr als das sittliche Leben und Wirklichkeit jenes Volkes, denn er ist die Er-innerung des in ihnen noch veräuβerten Geistes, – er ist der Geist des tragischen Schicksals, das alle jene individuellen Götter und Attribute der Substanz in das eine Pantheon versammelt, in den seiner als Geist selbst bewuβten Geist.32 The passage ends with a very Hegelian mode of reasoning: the ‘spirit of tragic fate’ gathers all gods and attributes of substance into ‘the one pantheon’, and this pantheon is the spirit that is conscious and certain of itself. This is effected by means of what Hegel calls re-collection (‘Erinnerung’), an inwardizing where what was previously exterior is transfigured into self-reflective thought. This method of ‘re-collection’ is also the method behind Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: by reflecting on historical periods, Hegel ‘re-collects’ them and gathers them into the temple of his own historical-philosophical system, where their true spiritual content is revealed. But why does he speak of tragic fate? This is indeed the very crux of the passage. It begins with an elegiac musing about artworks taken out of their historical context and having lost their 32

G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 547–548. Translation: ‘The statues are now only stones from which the living souls have flown. […] The works of the muse now lack the power of the spirit, for spirit has gained certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and humans. They become what they are for us now – beautiful fruit already plucked from the tree, which a friendly fate has offered us as a maiden might set the fruit before us. The actual life in which they existed is no longer there. […] So fate does not restore their world to us along those works of art, nor the spring and summer of ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actuality. Our active enjoyment of them is not therefore an act of worship whereby our consciousness might attain to its perfect truth and fulfillment; rather it is an external activity, the wiping off of some drops of rain or specks of dust from these fruits. […] But just as the maiden who offers us the plucked fruit is more than the nature that directly provides them in all their conditions and elements (tree, air, light, etc.), since in a higher way she gathers all this together into the light of her self-conscious eye and her gesture in offering the gifts, so too the spirit of the fate that presents us with these works of art is more than the ethical life and actuality of that people. For it is the inwardizing in us or recollecting of the spirit that was in them still externalized – it is the spirit of the tragic fate that gathers all those individual gods and attributes of substance into the one pantheon, into the spirit that is itself conscious of itself as spirit.’ Peter C. Hodgson, ed., G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), p. 118.

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former power, and it points to these artworks as reflective of a former religious life that has, in the historical process, become obsolete. This obsoleteness is however not simply an effect of arbitrary historical circumstances, but the very consequence of the power of the spirit (‘Geist’) itself, and the premise of its certainty: ‘The works of the muse now lack the power of the spirit, for spirit has gained certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and humans’, Hegel writes. What Hegel calls ‘tragic fate’ thus appears in a clearer light: It emerges as a consequence of the historical process of the spirit itself, which had to destroy the gods and the artworks related to them, and thus initially to go through a period of vagrancy and uncertainty, before finally becoming certain of itself.33 What is tragic, is that Greek tragedy, one of the ‘works of the muse’, had to be destroyed and left behind by the spirit in order for the spirit to gain certainty. The necessary overcoming of Greek art and its religiosity is thus itself a tragic fate, as Hegel suggests. The passage presents a new vision of the grave. This we see in its elegiac musings about the artworks taken out of their original context. To the crusaders the grave was empty. Yet what we find here is not emptiness, but rather something more like a museum – Hegel calls it a ‘Pantheon’. This means of course a temple for all gods, but is also the building in Rome that, since the Renaissance, had been a burial ground for celebrities. This museum, a grave for artworks and their gods, allows for thinking about the necessity of historical changes, it enables the Hegelian ‘spirit’ to gain consciousness of itself, as an historical being, and to see the past as inferior and sublated versions of itself reflected in the museal artworks. In a brilliant prosopopeia Hegel moreover imagines a maiden who presents these now dead and sterile artworks to posterity – like fruit. She is the figure of tragic certainty, transmitting these relicts of the past with her ‘self-conscious eye’ and gesture. She demonstrates tragic certainty and not tragic vagrancy, because unlike the despairing Antigone, whose father at the end of Oedipus at Colonus had left her without any grave to attend to, the maiden offers to posterity – as a ‘friendly fate’ – precisely those artworks that the spirit itself had had to destroy in order to gain self-certainty.34 33

34

Tragic certainty always must be seen on the background of initial uncertainty or vagrancy. In his discussion of the school of scepticism and their ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel points out, in drastic wording, that these sceptics experienced a ‘tragic fate’ deriving from the uncertainty that had been created by the downfall of universal standards: ‘It is the anguish that finds expression in the hard words, God is dead.’ Hodgson, ed., G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit, p. 117. The role of this maiden in Hegel’s argument is discussed in Jean-Luc Nancy, Les Muses (Paris: Galilée, 2001).

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Thus the grave, or ‘Pantheon’, in Hegel’s dialectics is not simply or exclusively pointing to sadness and mourning, but is something ‘friendly’ that allows one to consider the infinite power of spirit itself and the ‘tragic fate’ that it unleashes. Even if these dimensions are not manifestly present in Hegel’s readings of Oedipus at Colonus, the seeds are there. This play points forward, as Hegel insists. As we have seen, it demonstrates tragic vagrancy, but also certainty. Both relate to the topic of the secret grave, for while its absence is what disorients Antigone, its secrecy is key to Oedipus’s own sense of triumph and ‘transfiguration in death’: the secrecy surrounding his death enables him his tragic certainty, when ‘his blind eyes are transfigured and clear’, at the end.35 Oedipus’s death, with its dual energies of uncertainty and certainty, exposes a dialectical dynamics that points forward in time and can be found again, albeit in wholly different contexts, in later stages of history – both in the experience of the empty grave in Jerusalem, and in the ‘tragic fate’ exposed in the modern pantheon. In his 1802 lectures on art, Schelling had claimed: Die ganze alte Geschichte kann als die tragische Periode der Geschichte betrachtet werden. Auch das Schicksal ist Vorsehung, aber im Realen angeschaut, so wie die Vorsehung das Schicksal ist, aber im Idealen angeschaut. Die ewige Notwendigkeit offenbart sich in der Zeit der Identität mit ihr als Natur. So in den Griechen. Mit dem Abfall von ihr offenbart sie sich als Schicksal in herben und gewaltigen Schlägen. Um sich dem Schicksal zu entziehen, ist nur Ein Mittel, sich in die Arme der Vorsehung zu werfen. Dies war das Gefühl der Welt in jener Periode der tiefsten Umwandlung, als das Schicksal an allem Schönen und Herrlichen des Altertums seine letzte Tücke übte. Da verloren die alten Götter ihre Kraft, die Orakel schwiegen, die Feste verstummten, und ein bodenloser Abgrund voll wilder Vermischung aller Elemente der gewesenen Welt schien sich vor dem menschlichen Geschlechts zu öffnen. Über diesem finstern Abgrund erschien als das einzige Zeichen des Friedens und des Gleichgewichts der Kräfte das Kreuz, gleichsam der Regenbogen einer zweiten Sündflut, wie es ein spanischer Dichter nennt36 – zu einer Zeit, wo keine Wahl übrig blieb, an diese Zeichen zu glauben.37 35 36 37

For instance, one of the last things Oedipus says, is that the mystery of his death will be vital to the future glory of Colonus. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, p. 375. Schelling thinks of Calderon, La Devoción de la Cruz. F.W.J. Schelling, Texte zur Philosophie der Kunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), pp. 216–217. Translation: ‘All of ancient history can be viewed as the tragic period of history. Fate, too, is a form of providence, except that it is intuited within the real, just as providence is fate

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Schelling speaks of the violent transition from ‘the tragic period of history’ to a new era, namely that of Christianity, the era of history. Christianity, he argues, embraced for the first time ‘the universal intuition of the universe as history, as a world of providence’, where man searches his truths in the universal Church and in the infinite ‘ideal world’, rather than, as the Greeks, to find it represented in empirical nature. Providence is the mystical and infinite ‘sign’ that replaces the finite signs of antiquity. However, this new era is also one of homelessness: ‘The modern world begins when man wrests himself loose from nature. Since he does not have a new home, however, he feels abandoned.’38 Schelling’s historical panorama, and the distinction he makes between tragedy and history, fate and providence, offers a valuable conclusion to this article. This article has pointed out the two tragic moments in Hegel’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus: tragic vagrancy and tragic certainty, in their relation to the topic of the grave. Now, in Schelling, we find a slight re-accentuation of these moments. To him, tragic fate is fate intuited within the real, while providence is fate intuited within the ideal. The former offers certainty, while the latter is premised on the vagrancy that is the result of man’s abandonment from the world of nature. Hegel’s reading of Oedipus at Colonus, and his ambivalent suggestion that this play points towards Christian reconciliation, might indicate that, to him, these two versions of fate are both present in the play. As Hegel sees it, Oedipus at Colonus is a play that tells of both tragic vagrancy and tragic certainty, both fate intuited within the real and fate intuited within the ideal. Bibliography Beistegui, Miguel. ‘Hegel: or The Tragedy of Thinking’. In Philosophy and Tragedy, edited by M. Beistegui and S. Sparks (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 11–38.

38

intuited in the ideal. Eternal necessity reveals itself during the time of identity with it as nature. This was the case with the Greeks. After the fall from nature it reveals itself in bitter and violent blows as fate. One can escape fate only in one way: by throwing oneself onto the arms of providence. This was the general world feeling in that particular period of the deepest transformation when fate played its final tricks on all that was beautiful and splendid in antiquity. The old gods lost their power, the oracles and celebrations fell silent, and a bottomless abyss full of wild admixture of all the elements of the past world appeared to open itself up before mankind. Above this dark abyss the only sign of peace and of a balance of forces seemed to be the cross, a kind of rainbow of a second flood, as a Spanish poet calls it – and this at a time when there was no other choice but to believe in this sign.’ Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 61. Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 59.

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Bernard, Wolfgang. Das Ende des Ödipus bei Sophokles: Untersuchung zur Interpretation des ‘Ödipus auf Kolonos’ (München: Beck, 2001). Bertrand, Pierre. ‘Le sens du tragique et du destin dans la dialectique hégélienne’. Revue deMétaphysique et de Morale 47, no. 2 (Paris 1940): pp. 165–186. Billings, Joshua. ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Oedipus at Colonus and German Idealism’. Arion 21, no. 1 (Spring 2013): pp. 113–131. Derrida, Jacques. Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974). Geulen, Eva. Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerüchts nach Hegel (F.a.M.: Surhkamp, 2002). Goldhill, Simon. ‘The Ends of Tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus’. In Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity, edited by J. Billings and M. Leonard (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 231–250. Hamacher, Werner. ‘(Das Ende der Kunst mit der Maske)’. In Sprachen der Ironie – Sprachen des Ernstes, edited by K.H. Bohrer (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 121–158. Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols, trans. by T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Volume ii, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011). Hegel, G.W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001). Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion ii (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik i–iii (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). Hegel, G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). Hippolyte, Jean. ‘Le tragique et le rationnel dans la philosophie de Hegel’. In Figures de la pensée philosophique (Paris: PUF, 1971). Hodgson, Peter C., ed. G.W.F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997). Nancy, Jean-Luc. Les Muses (Paris: Galilée, 2001). Pöggeler, Otto. ‘Hegel und die griechische Tragödie’. In Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg: Alber, 1971), pp. 97–110. Schelling, F.W.J. Philosophy of Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Schelling, F.W.J. Texte zur Philosophie der Kunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991). Schlegel, August Wilhelm. Geschichte der klassischen Literatur (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964). Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. Des Sophokles Tragödien (Berlin: Reimer, 1824). Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays, trans. R. Fagles (London: Penguin, 1984). Sophokles. Ödipus auf Kolonos, trans. W. Schadewaldt (F.a.M.: Insel, 1986). Szondi, Peter. Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie i (F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974). Weigel, Sigrid. Grammatologie der Bilder(F.a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2015). White, Hayden. Metahistory. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). $)((-&
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Chapter 7

Nietzsche’s Crossings: Nihilism, Tragedy, Christianity Ronan McDonald Nihilism is standing at the gate: from where does this uncanniest of guests come to us?1 Tragedy and nihilism. Nietzsche starts off his career exploring the first, and ends it preoccupied with the second. His first full-length work The Birth of Tragedy (1872) remains a foundation for twentieth-century conceptions of tragedy and the tragic, in particular the idea that they are at odds with melioristic, rational, or redemptive worldviews (though Nietzsche has remarkably little to say about Christianity in this early work). He does not deploy the word ‘nihilism’ until mid-career and extensively theorizes it in his posthumously published late notebooks. But nihilism as a concept (if not the word itself) underlies his entire corpus, including his engagement with tragedy. The wisdom of Silenus, companion of Dionysus, touches the very pith of nihilism: ‘The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon’.2 In both cases, we are dealing with a problem of value and meaning. Both tragedy and nihilism suggest a view of life as ‘but a walking shadow’, as Macbeth puts it in Act v, a tale ‘Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing’. However, in the sense that tragedy, as an aesthetic form, gives pleasing shape and spectacle to this view of life, they are opposed. The Birth of Tragedy shows how the Greeks faced pessimistic nihilism and overcame it, how art brings suffering into the aesthetic light of affirmation and exhilaration, how

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 83. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Guess and Ronald Spiers, trans. Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 23. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_009  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_009 6543_009

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the Apolline and the Dionysiac merge in tragic drama to create exhilarating art. So for Nietzsche tragedy affirms life despite, or even because of, its suffering. It is the dearth of passion that he finds most deplorable in passive nihilism, which is why he will later repudiate the ascetic or religious response to the tragic condition of life for the affirmative, dynamic ‘transvaluation of values’ that he elaborates in The Anti-Christ (1895). In Nietzsche’s scheme, Christianity is life-denying and thus a mode of passive nihilism: it turns its face away from earthly existence for an otherworldly hereafter. Ironically, the Christian drive towards truth gives rise to the realization that reality is appalling in the first place, which underpins the scientific revolution that opens up the path to meaninglessness. But Christianity recoils from the implications of its discovery. It lives in arrest, in static decadence.3 The tropes of nihilism in Nietzsche’s schema tend towards transition, a state that occurs in-between, in a world haunted by the absence of God, which still hankers for stable meanings and extrinsic values, which has not yet embraced ‘becoming’ and the transvaluation of value. It therefore constitutes a sort of incomplete narrative, something that hovers on the threshold or in the middle of the bridge. This essay examines some of these figurations to illuminate the collision and the collusion between modern tragedy and Christianity in Nietzsche’s work and elsewhere. It takes mainly a conceptual and philosophical perspective, finding in the shifting ground of value, and the self-negations of both tragedy and nihilism, a revelation of the limits of human knowledge that dismantles the possibility of a stable worldview. This dismantling, this breakdown of narrative coherence, chimes with a Christianity in which the tragedy of the crucifixion is not erased by the redemptive promise of resurrection, and whereby the Christian insistence on human value imbues general human suffering with tragic significance. I seek to read Nietzsche’s idea of ‘active nihilism’ as resonant with both his aesthetics of tragedy and his interpretation of the figure of Christ. As Nietzsche distinguishes passive from active, being from becoming, so in his reading of the ‘crucified one’, the noun ‘cross’ becomes animate in the verb ‘crossing’.

3 Monographs on Nietzsche and Christianity include Abed Azzem, Nietzsche versus Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), Stephen N. Williams, The Shadow of the Anti-Christ: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity (Milton Keynes: Baker Academic, 2006), and Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Tragedy and Nihilism: Value and Meta-value

In the sense that tragedy, as an aesthetic form, gives pleasing shape and spectacle to serious loss, it opposes nihilism. It is the prized mode of expression for grave loss. Importantly the loss must be of something valuable to be tragic: the loss of a child, not, generally, a handkerchief or a football match. That applies both to the literary sense of the term and to its real-world application. A tragic loss means a significant one. Nihilism, by contrast, questions value and meaning altogether: it responds to loss with a shrug. If nothing matters, then nothing merits mourning. But for loss to have any significance there need to be stable criteria of value. If tragic knowledge leads a protagonist to conclude that life is but a walking shadow signifying nothing, then the tragedy of death becomes hard to sustain. If nothing is valuable, then loss ceases to be tragic. This is expressed in the work of Samuel Beckett whose works render not the value of tragic loss so much as the loss of tragic value.4 To call a loss tragic is to say it matters. Such an assertion is no longer available in Beckett’s world. In a play like his Endgame (1957), it is not just sugar plums, pain killers, and anything resembling nature that has been lost, but also the very value system that renders loss significant or worth mourning. As well as describing a particular relationship to value, both nihilism and tragedy are themselves value-laden terms. Rather than a neutral philosophical or aesthetical viewpoint, nihilism often stands as a red flag, signaling danger to be avoided or a disease to be cured. Commentators routinely speak of getting ‘beyond’ nihilism or ‘overcoming’ nihilism in philosophical discourse: it is, implicitly, a dead end, even a trap.5 Nihilism, then, is a concept that seeks to describe a sense of meaninglessness or of the groundlessness of value but because it is so heavily invested in descriptions of value it becomes itself a negatively evaluative term. In an inverse but symmetrical way, tragedy is also tied up reflexively with value. Clearly tragedy and the tragic evoke value in so far as they deal with grave loss. But they also have a ‘meta-value’, the valued dramatization, expression, or conceptualization of sadness or catastrophe or chaos. Tragedy evokes a view of the world both profound and pessimistic, or profound to the extent 4 Ronan McDonald, ‘Beyond Tragedy: Samuel Beckett and the Art of Confusion’, in Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 127–171. 5 Ray Brassier in his book countering this repulsion effect of the concept dubs nihilism ‘a vocable tainted by dreary over-familiarity and nebulous indeterminacy’. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. x.

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that it is pessimistic. ‘Tragedy’, Milton intones in his preface to Samson Agonistes (1671), ‘hath ever been held the gravest, moralest and most profitable of all other Poems’.6 Addison called it ‘the Noblest Production of Human Nature’.7 Commentary on tragedy and tragic theory has often proceeded on the idea that, in Clifford Leech’s phrase, ‘a civilization without tragedy is dangerously lacking something’.8 The gravity and the esteem signal not just tragedy’s centrality to the literary canon. It also illustrates that the value of tragedy goes beyond artistic pleasure towards fundamental truth, that there is an epistemological payoff in getting close to the darkest reality. It is in this context that the stakes of declaring the ‘death of tragedy’ need to be located: its disappearance from a culture signals a deprivation or vitiation, both aesthetic and perhaps epistemological.9 As Simon Goldhill argues, ‘When suffering becomes so charged a term, there is inevitably a great deal at stake in how pain or misery is narrativized (and valued) and thus policing the tragic becomes in turn far more than a philological nicety’.10 It is in this context that attempts to think through ententes between tragedy and Christianity must be understood. Those Christian thinkers who want to connect the Christian story to tragedy are motivated in part by this deep cultural resonance and esteem, as well as by the promise of tragic insight and its implicit confrontation of the problem of evil.11 Part of the reason for the esteem of tragedy as a literary genre is the Hellenism of German Romanticism that Nietzsche inherited. However, in The Birth of Tragedy, despite his intense admiration for the Greek recognition that life is suffering, he is not as hostile to Christianity as the prefatory ‘Attempt at Self Criticism’, added to the 1886 edition, would suggest. Rather it is on Socrates that he lays the blame for the foundation of ‘theoretical man’. He even praises Luther and the German reformation as ‘the enticing call of the Dionysiac’ (p. 109). However, the later Nietzsche locates his ‘anti-moral’ stance in terms explicitly opposed to Christianity, specifically applauding the Greek god 6 7 8 9

10 11

John Milton, The Complete Poetical Works, edited by H.C. Beeching (London: Humphry Milford, 1913), p. 505. Joseph Addison, Critical Essays from the Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 210. Clifford Leech, Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 32. In a sense, The Birth of Tragedy is really about the death of tragedy, killed allegedly by Socratic rationalism. But the classic account for the putative inability of modern culture to produce tragic art is George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). Simon Goldhill, ‘Generalizing about Tragedy’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 45–81, p. 46. For example D.M. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 124. $)((-&
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Dionysus (whom he associates with tragic energy) as the anti-Christ. The tragic principle, the confrontation of the groundlessness of value, remains key throughout his philosophy. In his later use of the term, according to Walter Kaufmann’s generally accepted view, the Dionysian and Apollonian opposition is merged under the unifying term ‘Dionysian’, a ‘creative striving which gives form to itself’.12 In The Anti-Christ he adulates the figure of Jesus, ‘a free spirit’ (albeit a qualified one), at odds with the dead-handed religious and moral framework that developed from Christianity. With the last binary line of his autobiographical work Ecce Homo Nietzsche brings the figure who incarnates the libidinal destruction of tragedy – Dionysus – into explicit opposition to Jesus: ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysus versus the Crucified’.13 Elsewhere in Ecce Homo, he states that Christianity is neither Apolline nor Dionysiac, but rather ‘negates all aesthetic values’ and is hence ‘nihilistic in the deepest sense’ (108). But nihilism – ‘the uncanniest of guests’ – is multivalent, sly, and shifting. Nietzsche’s own use is far from consistent. For him it represents a crisis and a possibility. In Nietzsche’s hands, as he elaborates his theories in his late notebooks, nihilism is sometimes a diagnosis of a cultural sickness, the lingering attachment to the delusions of being, but a more dynamic nihilism involves an emboldened recognition of the flimsiness of inherited values, an assertion of transvaluation. This affords his distinction between passive and active nihilism. Nietzsche’s sense of nihilism bridges our common use of the term now as the assertion of a meaningless and valueless world and an indictment of late nineteenth-century ennui, apathy, and listlessness. Marking a split between the world and human values, nihilism, for Nietzsche, comes both from a decrease in the power of the spirit and an increase, it is both a symptom of modern degeneracy and a sign of strength when the spirit outgrows inherited goals and frozen values. It therefore attracts an alternating valence in his account of modernity, between the poles of passivity and violence. The knowledge it imparts can lead in two directions: towards joyous becoming, the transvaluation of values, or towards ascetic withdrawal, which he discerns in Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Christianity. Importantly, nihilism the ‘uncanniest of guests – unheimlichste gast – is standing at the gate’ and therefore on a journey (Late Notebooks, p. 83). Nietzsche continually figures nihilism in terms of movement, transition, crossover. 12

13

Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 245. Robert Luyster, ‘Nietzsche/Dionysus: Ecstasy, Heroism and the Monstrous’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 21 (Spring 2001), pp. 1–26, seeks to complicate the Kaufmann view by giving different senses of Dionysian – Ecstatic, Heroic, and Monstrous. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 151. Hereafter cited parenthetically. $)((-&
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‘Nihilism’ is variously the route of the journey and, as here, itself a traveller, and its locale and signification shift.14 Nietzsche’s use of the word is not consistent and, for all his confident and overweening tone, his forays into this subject often end in vertigo. Even when, at first glance, he seems confident, even clairvoyant, there is an anomaly between the metaphoricity and the ostensible meaning: What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.15 What is remarkable about this passage is its slide from omniscience to opacity, which accompanies a shift of focalization from the authoritative ‘I’ to the nonreflecting river. The passage moves from deterministic positivism, through a semiotics of omens and portents, an anticipatory music, a ‘tortured tension’, to a final rushing, roiling torrent. That shift in focalization deflates the authoritative claims at the beginning of the passage. In that respect there is an ambivalence between the confident diagnostic and the textual figuration here, one that prefigures the self-cancellation or tension between moral and epistemological nihilism: the liability that the statement ‘there is no external truth’ may fall under its own stricture. A similar dialectical model is reproduced in Nietzsche’s historical account of nihilism, in which nihilism is inaugurated by that which would, ostensibly, most strongly oppose it, such as Christianity or Enlightenment. The immediate cause of nihilism is precisely the search for truth and external reality, which ends up routing meaning and value. While morality and religion seem to afford a temporary protection from this decentring of humanity, offering a stable meaning and value, they nonetheless contain the seeds of their undoing, precisely in avowing the value of ‘truth’. Truth is a form of morality, and the 14 15

For a taxonomy of Nietzsche’s different sorts of nihilism, see Alan White, Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 15–16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 3.

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search for it exposes its own lack of grounding. Faced with a world of becoming, flux, and suffering, the Christian view urges hope in the hereafter, and for Nietzsche it is thereby complicit with the negation of life. So while Christianity has provided a protection from the common sense of nihilism as meaninglessness, it has also been the cause of the arrival of this uncanny guest. Its insistence on knowledge finally unveils the desolate truth of things, the groundlessness of values. In that respect Christianity is complicit with the nihilism it would oppose: both advocate a negation of the will to life. On occasion Nietzsche goes further and casts Christianity not just as the harbinger of nihilism, but its embodiment. In Ecce Homo (1888), he states that Christianity is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian, but rather ‘negates all aesthetic values – the only values the Birth of Tragedy acknowledges: it is nihilistic in the deepest sense’ (p. 108). It subverts in the process the basis of all values in an extrinsic reality, including the basis for valuing reality over appearance and knowledge over life. Nihilism, then, straddles in Nietzsche’s usage the detritus of Christianity in a disenchanted world, and the putatively life-denying aspects of ascetic Christianity itself. This situation is complicated further by the self-cancelling implications of different denotations of the word. The common sense of nihilism as metaphysical – the world has no meaning or value – yields to a different sense of nihilism as epistemological – we cannot know anything, our truths and values are contingent, provisional emanations. Importantly, the latter insight negates the former. Epistemological nihilism cannot renounce the world because the grounds for making a renunciation are not available. Nietzsche’s claims that judgments against life, such as those advanced by Socrates or Plato, or for life, such as those he advances, can only ever be contingent. He writes in Twilight of the Idols: Judgments, value judgments on life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they can be taken seriously only as symptoms, – in themselves judgments like these are stupidities. You really have to stretch out your fingers and make a concerted attempt to grasp this amazing piece of subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. (p. 162) It is precisely because life remains the precondition for all evaluation that life itself cannot be evaluated. There is no basis to pass judgment on it good or bad. Life may be a tale told by an idiot, but who is telling the story of this idiot but another idiot? So the assertion of the meaninglessness of the world corrodes itself. Instead, for Nietzsche, we come upon a vertiginous and groundless $)((-&
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‘becoming’ that philosophy can gesture towards but not define or grasp. It takes art, in the form of Dionysiac tragedy, to affirm this condition. The language of rationality and philosophy cannot achieve it because it is only in the aesthetic that value gets created. ‘Can an ass be tragic?’, he ponders in Twilight of the Idols, ‘Can someone be destroyed by a weight he cannot carry or throw off? … The case of the philosopher’ (p. 157). So the emergence of nihilism typically follows a dialectical shape: idealism gives birth to nihilism, values are annihilated at the moment when they are most strenuously hypostasized. ‘The whole idealism of humanity until now is on the point of tipping into nihilism – into the belief in absolute valuelessness, that is meaninglessness … The annihilation of ideas, the new wasteland, the new arts of enduring it, we amphibians’ (Late Notebooks, p. 138). The metaphor of the amphibian again reinforces the idea of the in-between, of nihilism as an incomplete journey, as humanity in an interstitial space where we gasp for meaning and value. In the Notebook from Autumn 1887, he declares: Nihilism represents a pathological intermediate state (what is pathological is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all): whether because the productive forces are not yet strong enough or because decadence is still hesitating and has not yet invented the resources it needs. (p. 146) Nihilism stems, Nietzsche makes clear elsewhere, from a detachment from goals and here he seems to suggest that the pathology is a form of inertia or suspension, a failure to cross into a state of flux without extrinsic value, without an inherited moral framework or the reassuring old narratives. The failure to cross, the pathology, stems from the tremendous generalization, the generalization whereby the failure of objective truth, the loss of foundations for belief, the inadequacy of inherited value, means that all value, purpose, and joy wither with it. The successful crossing means that human beings realize that the search for meaning has been conducted in the wrong place. It requires, by implication, not just the sort of overweening grasp and will that constructs transvaluation, but the ability to release the dead hand of generalization and totalizing thought, to allow truth to flower into interpretations. It is also, as we shall see, a failure to heed the glad tidings that he discusses in The Anti-Christ – the news that the ‘kingdom of God’ is here, immanent and within us, not a state to be deferred to an afterlife. ‘Sitting still is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only peripatetic thoughts have any value’, pronounces Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols (p. 160). Thinking is dynamic and productive, always transitional. ‘Mankind is a rope fastened $)((-&
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between animal and overman – a rope over an abyss’, in an image from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still’.16 This prospect of transition, of crossing, is why Nietzsche welcomes the possibility afforded by the bridge, why despite the talk elsewhere of nihilism as sickness, he still sees its possibilities in active form. But like the uncanny guest, like becoming itself, the crossing will not be complete, the peripatetic aesthetics never resting into the sedentary posture. Has Nietzsche himself crossed the bridge? Occasionally, his rhetoric suggests that he has passed through nihilism and can survey the other side. But his doctrine of becoming, of transition and contingency, dismantles totality and with it certainty. This means, counter-intuitively, that the new philosophy will never be epistemologically assured, always contingent and in process. The portentous language of Thus Spoke Zarathustra may conceal this contrapuntal diminution of conceptual domination, as being is replaced by becoming. Certainly the modesty that must of necessity come from rootlessness conflicts with Nietzsche’s rhetoric and his public image. In other hands, this dimension of nihilism, what we might call its epistemological humility, or weak thought, has politically emancipatory implications. For the Italian Catholic philosopher Gianno Vattimo, nihilism is the moment when human knowledge, in confronting its own limits, moves from veritas to caritas. In weakening the grip of metaphysics and totalizing knowledge systems nihilism affords a better mode of plural belonging, based on fluid interpretation rather than dominant truth.17 2

Tragedy, Nihilism, and Christianity

How might these self-reflexive connections between value and its negation help us think together the relationship between tragedy, nihilism, and Christianity? The question reaches to the very core of the problem of suffering with which Christian theology has long grappled. On the one hand, there is a tradition within Christian theology that insists that the salvation and redemption at the core of Christian faith is inimical to tragedy.18 Famously, Dante 16 17 18

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 7. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, Law, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). See Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937).

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elects to call his epic The Divine Comedy, despite its many miseries, because it holds out the promise of divine redemption and salvation. But yet a number of modern theologians argue that Christianity rejects tragedy and modern tragic theory at the risk of evading, or seeming to evade, the problem of suffering, and of alienating itself from strenuous cultural and aesthetic efforts to engage that problem. Hans Urs von Balthasar and Donald MacKinnon have sought to articulate Christian thinking that might own its tragic aspects: MacKinnon quotes the Duke of Wellington who claims that ‘a victory is the most tragic thing in the world only excepting a defeat’, a truth that ‘abundantly applies to Christ’s victory’.19 Human beings die and are maimed in battle regardless of the outcome. The total blackness and bleakness of the crucifixion needs to be tragic in order that the resurrection can occur. If we regard tragedy and comedy in terms of their integral narrative shape, then perhaps the crucifixion seems untragic: a dark path to be sure but one leading to ultimate redemption. But just as the victory of battle does not erase the tragic death of the battlefield, so Calvary must not be cancelled by the resurrection. To do so risks turning it into a sort of economics, a sacrifice for a return, the logic of which appals Nietzsche, but also those theologians who seek to grapple with the problem of evil and suffering. If we adopt a fragmented narrative perspective, or what we might call in literary or artistic terms a ‘modernist’ one, then the crucifixion can ramify and resonate in all its ineffable trauma and desolation. Stories, like wars, can be tragic even if they end in victory. Kathleen Sands argues that ‘Tragedies are to history as trauma is to time. Traumas interrupt time; they are black holes not just pot holes, in the journey. This is their finality, the feeling of the “end” that circumscribes and sanctifies every profound loss’.20 If the crucifixion is not tragic, then it is merely a conjuring trick, a pot hole rather than a black hole to borrow Sands’s metaphor. Donald MacKinnon also wishes to avoid the trap of narrative holism, whereby the trauma is erased by a vision of all-embracing order: Christianity, properly understood, might provide men with a faith through which they are enabled to hold steadfastly to the significance of the tragic, and thereby protect themselves against that sort of synthesis

19 20

MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 131. Kathleen M. Sands, ‘Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time After Time’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 82–103, p. 83.

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which seeks to obliterate by the vision of an all-embracing order the sharper discontinuity of human existence.21 The ‘sharper discontinuity of human existence’ that the tragic highlights suggests that the meeting of Christianity and tragedy does not provide an alternative vision of the world but rather shatters a holistic vision altogether, asserting the problem of evil without pat resolution. In that respect, it anticipates Sands’s assertion that tragedy ‘shatters worldviews but it is not a worldview’.22 So tragic insight moves from anagnorisis to a sense of sheer up-endedness and bewilderment, just as nihilistic thought moves from the metaphysical to the epistemological spheres. In this light, when considering the coalescence between Christianity, tragedy, and nihilism, we might look at these self-cancelling, reflexive aspects which splinter worldviews or stable theodicy. If we sought a Christian correspondence to the idea of groundlessness from which nihilism (both positive and negative) grows, we would find it in the flux, becoming, and negation that have been articulated in certain traditions of Christian mysticism. It is this aspect of tragedy, above all, that chimes with a key aspect of modernity, the idea of an epistemological collapse rather than a value judgment, a splintering brought about by the overweening hubris of modern knowledge acquisition. Tragedy does not underscore the meaninglessness of the world so much as reveal that our knowledge of it is circumscribed and that our ability to control and act upon it, as we are now learning about the ecologies we inhabit, can have unforeseen, devastating consequences. In that respect, tragedies respond to nihilism and trauma by recording, as Sands puts it, the contradiction between reality and ideality: life is not as it should be; we are not as we should be. This contradiction is the birth trauma of moral consciousness, and each new blossom opens around the knowledge that the contradiction will outlive it.23 This split between the is and the ought, the real and the ideal, also describes the condition of modernity, where science and knowledge have produced a Weberian disenchantment of the world. How then might a Nietzschean sense of nihilism and Christianity accord with these insights? The Anti-Christ (1895) is Nietzsche’s most extended excoriation of the development of Christianity. 21 22 23

MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 135. Sands, ‘Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time After Time’, p. 84. Sands, ‘Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time After Time’, p. 84.

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This book sharply distinguishes between the figure of Jesus and the development of institutional Christianity, which for Nietzsche distorted and inverted his message: Jesus could be called a ‘free spirit’, using the phrase somewhat loosely – he does not care for solid things: the word kills, everything solid kills. The concept, the experience of ‘life’ as only he knew it, repelled every type of word, formula, law, faith, or dogma. He spoke only about what was inside him most deeply: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ are his words for the innermost. (p. 29) Elsewhere ‘free spirit’ is one of Nietzsche’s highest terms of praise. At the very highest level, the purest freedom comes from accepting the world of becoming and eternal return. The greatest free spirits embrace or affirm a sort of acceptance of fate, if not ‘faith’.24 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche praises Goethe as a free spirit who believes that ‘only the individual is reprehensible, that everything is redeemed and affirmed in the whole – he does not negate anymore … But a belief like this is the highest of all possible beliefs: I have christened it with the name Dionysus’ (p. 223). Baptism, faith, redemption: all these tropes when placed alongside ‘Dionysus’ create, as so often with Nietzsche, a movement whereby ostensible binary opposition is revealed as a hidden double. Goethe embraces the whole, accepts flux in its totality, but this acceptance is also an emancipation. He is freed from analysis, from the separation of things into frozen parts, from the split between perceiver and perceived. This embrace of the whole is for Nietzsche the ultimate liberation. Just as the highest form of freedom involves an acceptance of fate, so tragedy and Christianity, Dionysus and Jesus, here chime. Jesus’s status as a free spirit is qualified, and elsewhere in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche classifies him as a decadent, more akin to the modern conception of freedom as mere escape from compulsion rather than attunement to the instinct of the highest form of life. Nonetheless, for Nietzsche, Jesus’s own sense of value was deeply immanent, inside him, not transcendent and otherworldly; therefore he is here associated with the emancipation of values in the flux and freshness of phenomenal experience, deeply felt. Nietzsche’s Jesus is consequently a profoundly unsystematic figure: ‘he never had any reason to negate “the world”, the ecclesiastical concept of ‘world’ never occurred to him … Negation is out of the question for him’ (The Anti-Christ, p. 30). So Jesus 24

Amy Mullin, ‘Nietzsche’s Free Spirit’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 38, no. 3 (July 2000), pp. 383–405, doi:10.1353/hph.2005.0059.

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is a supreme individualist who lives the truth of his own experience, who generates values rather than doctrines. In this rendering, the opposition with Dionysian energy seems less stable. The ‘kingdom of heaven’ which Jesus promised is ‘a state of the heart’, not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death’. […] The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something that you wait for; it does not have a yesterday or a day after tomorrow, it will not arrive in a ‘thousand years’ – it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere and it is nowhere. (p. 32) Nietzsche’s Jesus abolishes sin and guilt, does away with the burdensome concept of the Judaic Law. In that respect, like Dionysus, he points the way ‘beyond good and evil’, creating value through immanent experience rather than deadhanded ecclesiastical teaching. Yet these revolutionary ideas were thwarted by the early Christians, above all Paul, the epitome of a ‘type that is the antithesis of the “bringer of glad tidings”’ (p. 38). For Nietzsche, Christ’s life example, like Buddhism, is a practice rather than a faith in transcendent order, a being present in the Kingdom of God, here and now, not caught up in life-denying anticipation of a messiah or future salvation as a return for ascetic self-sacrifice. However, for Nietzsche, there ‘was really only one Christian, and he died on the cross’ (p. 35). His death was used by Paul to establish exactly what Christ repudiated, an idea of sin and sacrifice, a patrician idea of judgment and redemption, which separates humanity from God, and feeds on the idea of resentment and imaginary revenge: The small congregation had evidently failed to understand the main point, the exemplary character of dying in this way, the freedom, the superiority over every feeling of ressentiment. […] his disciples were far from being able to forgive this death, – which would have been evangelical in the highest sense. (p. 37) In a sense, the early Christians misread the death of Jesus by making of it an economic narrative, whereby sacrifice renders greater return, and death absolves sin. The economic model is also a comic one: the crisis resolves happily, balance is restored. They therefore refuse to allow the crucifixion to be fully tragic, in its Dionysian sense, which is to be free of these temporal and moral strictures. Paul inverts the glad tidings of Jesus by shifting the focus from this life to the next, thereby devaluing the world of lived experience and allowing him to steal a march on other temporal forces: $)((-&
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This was his Damascene moment: he understood that he needed the belief in immortality to devalue ‘the world’, that the idea of ‘hell’ could still gain control over Rome, – that the ‘beyond’ could be used to kill life … Nihilist and Christian: this rhymes. [it does rhyme in German]. (p. 62) Yet despite the laudatory words Nietzsche has for Jesus the individual in The Anti-Christ he is still not the revered Dionysus, to whom, as we have seen, he is famously opposed at the end of Ecce Homo. His key weakness is his drive to equality, his removal of caste, rank, and discrimination in his treatment of people. For Nietzsche, this is a sort of heresy. As well as going beyond good and evil, the highest types must seek to forge new modes of aristocracy, a new elite that will drive forward a dynamic transvaluation. Jesus preached that all are of God, that all are equally valuable. He is therefore at odds with the Nietzschean valorization of the hero, the rare spirit who drives forward across the nihilist chasm. According to Nietzsche, the ironic manoeuvre of the early Christians was that, motivated by ressentiment, they thwarted Jesus’s message and made a hero out of this preacher of anti-heroism, just as they refused the tragic implications of the crucifixion and turned his glad tidings of the present into a deferred focus on the hereafter. However, even if Nietzsche’s Christ falls short of the exalted figures of Dionysus and Zarathustra, he nonetheless affirms life, including life as suffering. Ecce Homo has much to say about all three figures, and culminates in the tantalizing dialectic between Dionysus and Jesus. Just as Aeschylean tragedy died at the hands of Euripides, so the life-affirming doctrines of Jesus are inverted and perverted by Paul. All are calcified by certainty and system. Yet at the core of Jesus’s life is a Dionysian energy. It is possible to link this energy along with other aspects of Nietzsche’s Jesus (including his egalitarianism) with a modern idea of tragedy. One could argue, contra Nietzsche, that it is precisely through its cultivation of equality that Christianity intensifies, rather than relieves, our modern sense of the tragic. Nietzsche indicts Christian pity as that which multiplies suffering. However, it also multiplies value, precisely that value which tragedy relies upon. Christian ethics make suffering considerable – worthy of consideration and compassion. Modern tragedy and Christianity are committed to valuation: both reveal the significance and value of human loss. The motive of Raymond Williams’s 1966 book Modern Tragedy, an indirect riposte to Steiner’s exclusive and hieratic theory of tragedy in The Death of Tragedy, was precisely to counter this severance of tragic meaning from everyday experience:

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The events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture: war, famine, work, traffic, politics. To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say that we cannot connect them with general meanings, is to admit a strange and particular bankruptcy, which no rhetoric can finally hide.25 My point here is that the Christian spreading of pity and elevation of human beings, its radical egalitarianism (for all the objections of Nietzsche), spreads tragic significance. Williams, a Marxist critic eager to assert the significance and dignity of everyday misery, wants to elevate ordinary suffering with the label ‘tragedy’. Both widen the scope of tragic loss by attributing significance to a wider range of people. The mode of Christianity which emphasizes compassion and fellow feeling, crucially partakes of this expansion: in so far as it extends the remit of human sympathy beyond socially vertical strictures, insisting on the significance of all human suffering, from princes to paupers, it magnifies pity, which for Nietzsche is a weakness but for a wider sense of the tragic is essential. The recognition of the value of that which has been lost is necessary for tragic significance – Christianity is a custodian of that value. Finally, the idea that tragedy is not a worldview but rather marks the moment when the worldview shatters resonates with some strains of Christian tradition which emphasize the ineffability of God, such as the via negativa. This spiritual path recognizes that ultimate reality, the Godhead, is beyond the scope of human comprehension, that the nature of the divine far surpasses our power of expression. In this way, it chimes not with a world-view of confident epistemology, but with the shattered or broken one that Sands identifies in her account of tragedy. So the three categories – tragedy, nihilism, Christianity – are dialectically related in Nietzsche’s work, and what seems a strenuous binary can often be exposed as covert double. Equally, all three play between pessimism and affirmation, stasis and dynamism. Nietzsche is a notoriously inconsistent thinker at times and his meanings for a word like nihilism shift radically. Indeed, his own performative style and affective investments weave a beguiling labyrinth that enchants but resists the extraction of a clear philosophical system. His demolition of Christian morality, yet valorization of the figure of Jesus, reveals religious engagement, however heterodox his conclusions. Modern tragedy is intimate with value and no philosopher has been as foundational in thinking through the collapse of value foundationalism as Nietzsche, which is why he 25

Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 49.

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wrote about tragedy so influentially. He also wrote about nihilism, and about Christianity as a form of nihilism. We can use his insights to illuminate connections between the discourses of Christianity and modern tragedy, so often seen as oppositional. Nietzsche’s work reveals oppositions collapsing into and emerging from one another, beauty emerging from tragedy, nihilism from the Christian search for truth. Writ large in his conception of nihilism is a sense of incompletion, a crossing in process, just as humans are the amphibians or inter-species between animals and the overman. The decentring of humanity by modern science, the disenchantments of modernity, are themselves an incomplete passage. A note in a late notebook of Nietzsche registers the crossing: ‘Since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the centre into the x’ (p. 84). Bibliography Addison, Joseph. Critical Essays from the Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). Azzem, Abed. Nietzsche versus Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Goldhill, Simon. ‘Generalizing about Tragedy’. In Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 45–81. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Meridian Books, 1956). Leech, Clifford. Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1969). Luyster, Robert. ‘Nietzsche/Dionysus: Ecstasy, Heroism and the Monstrous’. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 21 (Spring 2001), pp. 1–26. MacKinnon, D.M. The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). McDonald, Ronan. ‘Beyond Tragedy: Samuel Beckett and the Art of Confusion’. In Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett (Baskingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 127–171. Milton, John. The Complete Poetical Works, edited by H.C. Beeching (London: Humphry Milford, 1913). Mullin, Amy. ‘Nietzsche’s Free Spirit’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 38, no. 3 (July 2000). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968).

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Guess and Ronald Spiers, trans. Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Nietzsche Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Niebuhr, Reinhold. Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937). Sands, Kathleen M. ‘Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in the Time After Time’. In Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2008). Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). Vattimo, Gianni. Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, Law, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). White, Alan. Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990). Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy (London: Hogarth Press, 1992). Williams, Stephen N. The Shadow of the Anti-Christ: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity (Milton Keynes: Baker Academic, 2006). Young, Julian. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Chapter 8

‘What Festivals of Atonement, What Sacred Games We have to Invent’ (Friedrich Nietzsche): Modernist Tragedy after the Death of God Olga Taxidou 1

The Death of God as the Death of Tragedy He is gone! He himself has fled, My last, sole companion, My great enemy, My unknown, My Hangman-god! No! Comeback, With all your torments!1

This beautiful, aphoristic poem from Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–91) describes a world devoid of God, where the cruellest form of torment that God can impose lies in his very absence. As Georges Bataille eloquently put it, ‘Nietzsche revealed this primordial fact: once God had been killed by the bourgeoisie, the immediate result would be catastrophic confusion, emptiness and even sinister impoverishment’.2 Can this world, however, be described as a tragic world? Is there an idea of the tragic at work even while God is being killed, and is this a particularly modern view of the tragic? All the elements are there: the void, the alienation, existential strangeness and formalist estrangement. Importantly, in both Zarathustra and The Gay Science (1882) this death of God is itself staged like a tragedy. Zarathustra is not fooled by this actordramatist and unmasks the falseness of his proclamation above: ‘Stop, you actor. You fabricator! You liar from the heart!’3 Equally importantly, in The Gay 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 267. 2 Georges Bataille, ‘The “Old Mole” and the prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 38. 3 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 267.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_010  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_0 6543_01100

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Science where the notorious phrase ‘God is dead’ appears, God is not simply dead but killed in a collective ritual that mirrors the sparagmos of Dionysus himself. And this death/murder leaves the actors/performers with a deep sense of the void, but also with the need to invent new rituals, possibly celebrating that very death: ‘What festivals of atonement, what sacred games we have to invent’.4 This mirroring effect reverberates throughout all the philosophical discourses of modernity that link the death of God with the death of tragedy. The absence of the divine has been singled out as one of the reasons for the impossibility of tragedy within modernity, both as a motor for philosophical thinking (the void enacted above) and as a mode of performance. For this absence of God is seen as depriving tragedy of both its metaphysical dimension and its ritualistic discourses of performance (‘What festivals? What sacred games?’). Is it significant, then, that the death of God itself is staged like a tragedy? Somewhat incongruously, the philosopher who directed this death is also the architect of The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the single most influential text on modernist performance and specifically on the modernist revival or re-birth of tragedy. This chapter will look at the ways the difficult relationship between tragedy and Christianity is enacted through the modernist encounters with tragedy that in many ways attempt to reconcile the binary codified by Nietzsche and expressed in Ecce Homo as ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’.5 This binary itself has been problematized by René Girard6 amongst others, highlighting the parallels and similarities between the two figures. There are several ways we can challenge this binary reading that conflates the death of God with the death of tragedy and posits tragedy as incompatible with both Christianity and modernity. From Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton within the more materialist tradition of cultural critique, and in the more recent works of philosophically inclined classicists like Miriam Leonard7 and James I. Porter,8 critics have challenged the so-called ‘death of tragedy’ thesis and maintained that tragedy is far from incompatible with modernity. Indeed, tragedy re-surfaces as constitutive of the project of modernity itself. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Vintage, 1974), p. 181. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, ed. and trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 104. 6 René Girard, ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’, mln 99, no. 4 (Sep. 1984): pp. 816–835, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/2905504. 7 Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 8 James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), and Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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Drawing on these existing traditions, this chapter will focus on the ways a performance imperative has inflected these debates; in particular, a performance aesthetic that has been deeply influenced by Christian ritual with a strong attachment to the metaphysical and the divine. It will propose a reading of the intriguing interface between Christianity and Greek Tragedy in modernist performance, and the ways that this encounter was informed by Primitivism and Orientalism, particularly as this appears in the discourses of modernist anthropology. It will sketch out several test cases where this hypothesis is enacted, including the Christian tragedies of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, and the performances of the Miracle and Everyman directed by Max Reinhardt. Equally fascinating is the delineation of an anti-Christian tragedy in the work (and life) of Antonin Artaud, whom contemporary philosophers from Jacques Derrida to Gilles Deleuze view in a Nietzschean tradition, and whose drama is fuelled not so much by an absent God, as by the presence of a gnostic, evil demiurge. The ‘Cruelty’ of Artaud’s theatre might be at least partly due to its strong attachment, even in its negation, to a Christian theology and a tragic aesthetic of sacrifice. Either through his absence or through its ‘cruel’ presence, the figure of God plays a considerable role in the modernist attempts at reviving tragedy. Before we proceed with the close readings of specific performance events, it would be helpful to sketch out a broad framework for the genealogy that the work of Nietzsche on tragedy inhabits. In many ways, he is both the result and the aberration of the so-called ‘German cast’ of Greek Tragedy. This is the philosophical tradition that initiates a split between tragedy as a literary form – a poetics, in the legacy of Aristotle – and tragedy as a philosophical category, as something that pertains to life in general: an ‘idea of the tragic’. This tradition is rooted in German Idealism and Romanticism, with its list of impressive protagonists (Schelling, Hegel, Winckelmann, Lessing, Schlegel, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine amongst others). It approaches the tragic as part of a metaphysical, ethical, and universal quest where the ideal of aesthetic judgement occupies a privileged position. In the words of Peter Szondi: ‘Since Aristotle we have a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic’.9 However, as Miriam Leonard claims, ‘The philosophy of the tragic did not represent a departure from aesthetics and a refuge in metaphysics;’ 9 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1. Quoted and analyzed in Simon Goldhill, ‘Generalizing About Tragedy’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 45–65, p. 52. For an early twentieth-century study of the centrality of ‘the tragic’ for German Idealism, see E.M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

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rather it proposed ‘the elevation of aesthetics to a new position within philosophy’.10 Tragedy, in this reading, is seen as adding an aestheticizing impulse to philosophy, one that is further highlighted within modernism by the introduction of a performance imperative. The philological and the philosophical versions of tragedy also confront the notion of tragedy as embodied performance and the potential of theatricality itself. Interestingly, contemporary classical scholars like Stephen Halliwell have questioned the logic of the split itself that claims that, although the Greeks had a literary/aesthetic theory of tragedy, they lacked a reflective philosophical apparatus that could conceptualize tragedy in ethical and political terms. For Halliwell, as indeed is the case in much recent classical scholarship on the Greek sense of the tragic, the ‘idea of the tragic’ is inextricably linked to its theatricality. In this reading it is Plato rather than Aristotle who features as the first philosopher of tragedy, interested in its impact on the audience, on the actors, on the ethics of the polis and in its general truth claims. Somewhat counter-intuitively, despite Aristotle’s advocacy of tragedy’s cathartic/redemptive function, it is the philosopher who he is defending tragedy against, Plato, who seems to be more concerned both with the ‘idea’ of the tragic and with the spectacular and theatricalized manifestations of that ‘idea’. Halliwell writes: One commonly drawn corollary of the German cast of interest in the tragic is the claim that while ancient Greece created the first and most concentrated tradition of dramatic tragedy, it lacked anything that can be classified as an explicit notion of the tragic. But I contend … that there are important grounds for ascribing to Plato the first conscious delineation of something we can coherently identify as ‘the tragic’.11 It is fascinating that the philosopher of anti-theatricality formulates this ‘idea of the tragic’. In many ways, this makes sense, as it is Plato who is interested in the ethical impact of tragedy for the actors, for the audience and for the polis. Although Aristotle provides us with a formal and, as some scholars claim, formalist definition of tragedy,12 it is Plato who is more concerned with 10 11 12

Leonard, Tragic Modernities, p. 43. See Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 99. See also Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). See Edith Hall, ‘Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?’, in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and Beyond, edited by M.S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 295–309. For Plato’s repudiation of the tragic see Laws, trans. A.E. Taylor, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, and Symposium, trans. A.E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith

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the political, ethical, and, to use his own term, ‘muddy’ aspects of tragedy.13 In his repudiation of tragedy, in Laws, in The Republic, but also in The Symposium, Plato provides us with one of the first and most insightful accounts of the impact of theatricality both on the body of the actor and on the body politic. Through a kind of negative critique, it is Plato and not Aristotle who is concerned with the fundamental issues of theatricality: its supplementarity, its falseness, its distortion of the divine, its power to distort the truth and our perception of it. In terms that eerily pre-echo twentieth-century critiques of the spectacle and spectacularization,14 Plato is not interested in the redemptive, socially constructive powers of tragedy, but is instead graphically and ‘dramatically’ concerned with the power of tragedy to mislead the audience and demagogically influence the polis itself. His notorious term theatrocracy, where the discourses of theatricality and spectacularization spill over into the public sphere, making the political assembly appear as a mere parody of the theatrical audience, poses a crucial challenge in the modernist encounter with Greek tragedy, especially in its attempts to redefine the relationships between theatre and the polis. In the notorious section of the Laws Plato describes the negative impact of theatre on its audience: Afterward, in the course of time, an unmusical license set in with the appearance of poets who were men of genius but ignorant of what is right and legitimate in the realm of the Muses. Possessed by a frantic and uncontrolled lust for pleasure, they contaminated laments with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, actually imitated the strain of the flute on the harp, and created a universal confusion of forms. […] By compositions of

13

14

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 1225– 1513, 575–844 and 526–574. For an analysis of Aristotle’s term catharsis and its relation to what Nussbaum calls the ‘katharsis … word-family’, where it is described as ‘clearing up’ and ‘clarification’, as ‘the removal of some obstacle (dirt or blot, or obscurity, or admixture)’, and as ‘the clearing up of the vision of the soul by the removal of [bodily] obstacles’, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 389–393. In its most radical and aphoristic mode this critique appears in Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). Written in 1967, it came to act as the manifesto of Situationism, expressing the repudiation of the spectacle, as the quintessential political tool of capitalism. For a recent insightful contemplation of the relationships between philosophy and media culture – from Aristotle to modernity – see Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).

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such a kind and discourse to the same effect, they naturally inspired the multitude with a contempt of musical law, and a conceit of their competence as judges. Thus our once silent audiences have found a voice, in the persuasion that they understood what is good and bad in art; the sovereignty of the best, aristocracy, has given way to an evil sovereignty of the audience, a theatrocracy.15 In many ways the above passage contains all the contours of the anti-theatrical tradition: the inability of the poets to separate right from wrong and true from false resulting in an indulgent and lustful relativism; a disregard of formal attributes and constraints, mixing artistic forms and media; the distorting qualities of imitation itself; and, possibly worst of all, the delusional belief that these acts can form an aspect of critical thinking, inspiring the faith in the audience that they can be ‘judges’. Interestingly, this kind of Platonism can be traced in the works of Nietzsche but it is also echoed in the anti-theatrical tradition of Christianity itself. Thus the modernist attempts at reconciling tragedy with Christianity could also be read as addressing the longue durée of the anti-theatrical legacy in both its Platonic and Christian ramifications. We might be able to sketch out these parallel anti-theatrical traditions through a broad, etymological genealogy of the term ‘theatre’. The complex and sometimes fraught relationships between theatron and theoria, spectacle and speculative thinking have a long and distinguished history in performance theory, in the philosophies of tragedy, and also in Christian theology. They form a potentially enabling critical nexus of terms that will allow us to approach these modernist renditions of Greek/Christian tragedy as gestures within the practice of theatron and theoria, in a sense reestablishing the broken link between the two. The etymological connections between theatron as the ‘seeing place’ of drama and theoria as an activity undertaken by a theoros (a viewer or witness), which also entails contemplative, speculative thinking, have been well documented.16 Françoise Dastur eloquently outlines how the transformation of the speculative and philosophical dimension of theatron turned into its evil sister, the outright and distorting spectacularization:

15 16

Plato, Laws, 700d–701, trans. A.E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues, pp. 1225–1513. See Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 25–26.

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The word speculatio comes, of course, from specto, to look at, to scrutinise, and was used by Boethius to translate the Greek theoria into Latin. But in Christian theology this meaning was forgotten, especially by Thomas Aquinas, who derives speculatio from speculum, mirror, and relates the word to what Paul says in the first Epistle to the Corinthians (13, 12) concerning the vision of God whom we see now confusedly as ‘in a mirror’ but whom later, that is to say, after death, we will see ‘face to face’. Speculatio means, therefore, partial and confused knowledge.17 This echoes Plato’s critique of the distorting and confusing aspects of theatre spectatorship. According to this reading in Christian theology the Greek sense of theoria, and the original meaning of specto (all connected semantically with looking, scrutinizing, reflecting, but also with the embodied and spatialized dimension of those original etymologies), now become connected with speculum, the mirror. The stage itself, as a result, is seen as such a distorting mirror, rather than a site of reflective speculation. This identification of things spectacular with distortion and corruption of the truth may partly account for the difficult relationship between Christianity and theatre. At the same time, however, it points to the relationship with the divine, often neglected, that we can also find in the original sense of theoria. And this concept of the divine sometimes appears in a heady fusion of Christianity and Greek tragedy, as in the work of T.S. Eliot, or through equally interesting fusions of Orientalism, Primitivism, and Hellenism. The intriguing interface between Hellenism and Primitivism that we find in the theatrical works of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Antonin Artaud, and also in Bertolt Brecht results from the fascination with the theatres of South East Asia, Japan, and China, but also, in the case of Anglophone modernism, from the more direct influence of the ‘group’ of charismatic Cambridge scholars known as the Cambridge Ritualists. Although this grouping itself has been recently contested,18 and although the validity of their theories is constantly re-assessed 17

18

Françoise Dastur, ‘Tragedy and Speculation’, in Philosophy and Tragedy, edited by Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 76–77. She writes, ‘Thus speculation is connected with the visio Dei, the vision of the supersensible, or with what Kant calls “intellectual intuition”, an intuition which is refused to finite things, which are only able to have “sensible intuition”, that is, an intuition of what is already given to them through their senses’, p. 77. See Mary Beard, ‘Hellas at Cambridge’, in The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 109–129. She writes, ‘In the case of Ritualism, to talk so consistently, as modern scholars do, of “membership” and “group” glibly concretizes and personalizes the fleeting, complicated, overlapping intellectual processes and relationships

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within classical studies, their impact on actual languages of performance is inescapable and has recently received more critical attention.19 Gilbert Murray’s translations and his involvement with actual theatrical productions,20 the works of Francis Cornford, Arthur Bernard Cook (with Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as theoretical context), and the work of Jane Harrison offered the modernist playwrights and theatre makers ways of reviving notions of ritual and the sacred. These revivals are at once part of an evolutionary trajectory of theatre and quintessentially modern in their modes of production and languages of performance. Within this group the centrality of Jane Harrison needs to be stressed both as a scholar and as a symbolic figure (and I would claim as a performer/lecturer as well). Harrison’s impact on Sapphic and feminist modernism has been well documented.21 Her work on Greek religion and art, drawing on the diverse influences of Durkheim, Darwin, nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology and theories of matriarchy, archaeological discoveries, and also modernist theories of time such as Bergson’s, helps to reconstruct a version of theatre – closely linked with ritual – that does not see it as simply one amongst the arts, but as the foundational art-form itself. As such, it can provide lost links with the past, but also help her contemporaries to understand their modernity. Julie Stone Peters has recently claimed that ‘her work offered a model for modern theatre historiography’ and stresses ‘the consequences and meaning of her work not only for twentieth-century theatre but also for the development of theatre history and (eventually) performance

19

20 21

that (if anything) constitute the “movement”, at Cambridge or elsewhere’, p. 115. She too concedes, ‘Just because they didn’t write under the banner of Ritualism, doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t use the word. Intellectual and artistic movements have regularly (and often usefully – think of mannerism) been identified retrospectively’, p. 114. The primary group study is Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (London: Routledge, 2002). Robert Segal, the series Editor, notes in his Preface, ‘In literary lingo, they were the first “myth critics”. Contemporary literary critics like Northrop Frye are their successors. Also we can say that they were the first “performance critics” if not theorists in a line of thought/practice from Nietzsche onwards’, p. ix. See also William M. Calder, ed., The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991). See Fiona Macintosh, ‘From the Court to the National: The Theatrical Legacy of Gilbert Murray’s Bacchae’, in Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, edited by Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 145–165. See Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison; also Martha Carpentier, ‘Themis in To the Lighthouse’, in Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 171–188, Heather Ingman, ‘Virginia Woolf: Retrieving the Mother’, in Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 125–145, and Theodore Koulouris, Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (Furnham: Ashgate, 2011).

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studies as academic disciplines’.22 In giving theatre centre-stage, the Cambridge Ritualists and particularly Harrison seem to be re-working the theatrum mundi metaphor. Modernist theatre practitioners found in their work ways to enact this metaphor and materialize it on the stage. The Cambridge Ritualists offer ways of addressing the Platonic fear of theatrocracy and turning it into something positive, critical, and enabling, something that has always been part of the evolutionary trajectory of being human. This humanity, however, despite its modernity (or perhaps because of it) also entails a primitivist dimension. And in the ways that the Cambridge Ritualists reconfigure the classics, this primitivism is not read in opposition to Hellenism or Classicism, but is seen to inhabit the same evolutionary trajectory. These are the Greeks as Primitives as Moderns. So, when Yeats utters his aphoristic proclamation: ‘After us, the Savage God’ after viewing the dress rehearsal of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, directed by Lugné-Poë in 1896, his Savage God is both primitive and modern. Significantly, this appears in an essay written years later in 1914 entitled ‘The Tragic Generation’.23 Of course, the use of the term ‘Tragic’ is not coincidental here as the Greek model of theatre is the form that receives a foundational refurbishment through these modernist experiments in performance. Through the impact of the Cambridge Ritualists and, of course, Nietzsche, that Savage God is allowed to wear the mask of Dionysus. And this mask, as Yeats himself was later to discover, does not even necessarily need to be Greek; it can also be found in the theatres of the so-called Orient or in what were termed ‘primitive cultures’. This fascination with Hellenist Primitivism does not only appear as a performance trope in the more metaphysical strands of modernist performance such as the work of Yeats or Eliot, but also manifests itself in the materialist traditions, as in Brecht’s staging of Antigone. This interface between Hellenism and Primitivism creates enabling languages for performance, where the two terms are not opposed but more often than not seen as interchangeable. For T.S. Eliot in particular the eniautos daimon of Harrison’s writing on Greek religion could easily morph into a Nietzschean Dionysus, but also into the figure of Christ. In this way the Cambridge Ritualists facilitated the 22 23

Julie Stone Peters, ‘Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archaeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre’, Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008): pp. 1–41. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1914), in Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 279–349, pp. 348–349. For an analysis of this event and its impact on modernist theatre aesthetics, see Olga Taxidou, ‘Introduction: Savages, Gods, Robots and Revolutionaries: Modernist Performance’, in Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–9.

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experiments in performance that bridged the binary between Dionysus and the Crucified. Interestingly, René Girard refers to the ‘anthropologists’ of the modernist period as being significant in understanding the similarities between the two ‘collective deaths’ of Dionysus and the Crucified.24 I believe that this specific group of modernist classicists had a direct impact on bridging that divide as well, especially when it came to creating modernist Christian tragedies, either reverent ones (T.S. Eliot)25 or blasphemous ones (Antonin Artaud). 2

Experiments in Modernist Christian Tragedies26 ‘He [Orestes] follows the Furies as immediately and as unintelligibly as the Disciples dropping their nets’.27 t.s. eliot

This statement by T.S. Eliot in a letter to his producer E. Martin Browne, providing notes on the production of his play The Family Reunion, clearly underlines how inextricable the discourses of classical tragedy and Christianity became in his search for a modernist poetic drama. It is an extraordinary phrase that conflates Christ and Dionysus, and reads the passion of Christ itself as a tragedy. The Family Reunion, Eliot’s adaptation of The Oresteia, appeared in 1939. Four years earlier, in 1935, he wrote Murder in the Cathedral, a fascinating attempt at a modernist Greek tragedy. This play at once engages the idea of tragedy, 24 25

26

27

Girard, ‘Dionysus and the Crucified’, p. 820. In The Sacred Wood, Eliot acknowledges this influence and the impact it had on an understanding of ‘what used to be called the Scriptures’. He writes of the modernity of Murray: ‘As a Hellenist, he is very much of the present day, and a very important figure in the day. This day began, in a sense, with [E.B.] Tylor and a few German anthropologists; since then we have acquired sociology and social psychology, we have watched the clinics of Ribot and Janet, we have read books from Vienna and heard a discourse of Bergson; a philosophy arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled abroad; our historical knowledge has of course increased; and we have a curious Freudian-social-mystical-rationalistichigher-critical interpretation of the Classics and what used to be called the Scriptures’. T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 75–76. Some of the ideas in this section, especially the close readings of the plays by T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, appear in my chapter, ‘Communities of Production and Consumption: Modernism and the Re-birth of Tragedy’, in A Cultural History of Tragedy. Volume 6: The Modern Age: 1920–Present, edited by Jennifer Wallace (London: Bloomsbury, Forthcoming 2019). T.S. Eliot, qtd in E. Martin Browne, The Making of T.S. Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 108.

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re-working it through Christian theology as well as the formal demands of training actors and chorus, while also thematizing audience reception. It presents what some scholars would consider an impossibility: a Christian tragedy. Eliot’s conflation of a Christian martyr (Thomas Becket) with the tragic protagonist, and the tragic chorus with the chorus of the women of Canterbury, can be read as a direct result of the influence of the Cambridge Ritualists and their ritualistic, evolutionary model of drama. He writes in The Criterion in 1923, in an article entitled ‘Dramatis Personae’, in terms that echo the writings of the Cambridge Ritualists: Instead of pretending that the stage gesture is a copy of reality, let us adopt a literal untruth, a thorough-going convention, a ritual. For the stage – not only in its remote origins, but always – is a ritual, and the failure of the contemporary stage to satisfy the craving for ritual is one of the reasons why it is not a living art.28 Eliot was also familiar with the work of Edward Gordon Craig and his writing on acting. He had read Craig’s The Art of the Theatre (1905) while an undergraduate and was well versed in the debates about puppets and actors (he had defended Craig in an article in The Dial in 1921). The invitation from the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral to write a play29 allowed Eliot to bring together his experiments in poetic drama with his interest in reviving Greek tragedy through the prisms of both Christianity and modernism. This attempt offered Eliot the opportunity to address the ‘problem of the chorus’. Although it is viewed by most philosophical critics as the quintessential anti-modern aspect of Greek tragedy, modernist experiments in performance find in the Greek chorus a space (both conceptual and physical) to rehearse new theories of acting and audience reception. Here is Eliot, talking about the uses of the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral: In making use of [the chorus] we do not aim to copy Greek drama. There is a good deal about the Greek theatre that we do not know, and never shall know. But we know that some of its conventions cannot be ours. The characters talk too long; the Chorus has too much to say and holds up the 28 29

T.S. Eliot, ‘Dramatis Personae’, in Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot. Volume 2: 1919–1926, edited by Anthony Cuba and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 430–434, p. 434. Browne, The Making of T.S. Eliot’s Plays, pp. 34–79.

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action; usually not enough happens; and the Greek notion of climax is not ours. But the chorus has always fundamentally the same uses. It mediates between the action and the audience; it intensifies the action by projecting its emotional consequences, so that we as the audience see it doubly, by seeing its effect on other people.30 This is a sophisticated reading of the chorus both in terms of what it can offer theatrically and for the ways that Eliot considers it strange (‘never shall know’). It posits the chorus as a mode of mediation that enables a kind of ‘double vision’ in the audience. This meta-theatrical and quotational use of the chorus, as commenting both on the action and on the audience, is a trope that many modernist theatre makers will employ (including Brecht and Artaud). These choruses help create a modernist version of tragedy that is also a Christian liturgical drama. Eliot was well aware that he could not repeat the success of Murder in the Cathedral, partly because he could not repeat these stylized, ritualistic choruses, and partly because in his later ventures he could not have access to that ‘organic audience’ in Canterbury Cathedral that participated in the play as a religious experience. He claims that ‘for a beginner … the path was made easy’ and attributes this to three main factors: the subject matter was ‘generally admitted to be suitable for verse’, the play was produced ‘for a rather special kind of audience’, and ‘finally it was a religious play’.31 These three factors – heightened language, an ‘organic’ audience and the play as a religious experience – characterize Greek tragedy as well, and it is these aspects that present the most demanding challenges for modernist theatre makers. These challenges were also addressed in what was probably the most successful conflation of Greek tragedy and Christian ritual of the period, in the work of the seminal German director Max Reinhardt. It might be interesting to speculate whether Eliot possibly got some of his ideas for staging Murder in the Cathedral from the German director, who had a huge impact on the London stage. Apart from the very successful tours of Oedipus the King, Reinhardt was the first European director to stage a Christian drama with a heavily Greek inflection. For he was not only responsible for reviving Greek tragedy within a modernist aesthetic;32 he was also responsible for creating the first production 30 31 32

T. S Eliot, qtd in David E. Jones, The Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 52. T.S. Eliot, ‘Poetry and Drama’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), pp. 132–147, p. 139. J.L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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of Everyman (in 1911, and then inaugurating the Salzburg Festival in 1920). Reinhardt’s work caused a stir in London with the tour of his production of Oedipus Rex (1910–12). This was a so-called ‘arena’ production originally presented at the Circus Schumann in Berlin. However, in 1911 Reinhardt dazzled the London audiences with another ‘arena’ production, The Miracle. This was a huge undertaking within the vast space of Olympia in London. J.L. Styan writes that, for the purposes of this production, Olympia was to become a twelfth-century Gothic cathedral […] To assure the effect, there were to be six-foot-high gold lamps, a towering gold canopy over the Madonna, and stained-glass windows, including a circular one of 50 feet in diameter, larger than the original in Cologne and three times the size of the rose window in Notre Dame.33 Surely those numbers and those comparisons were flirting with blasphemy. Not only were Reinhardt’s productions ignoring the historically fraught relationship between theatre/tragedy and Christianity; they were very deliberately drawing parallels between the aesthetics of tragedy and Christian ritual. The theatricality and the spectacle created by The Miracle were questioned in the reviews of the period. The Telegraph accused Reinhardt of ‘playing to the gallery with the Crucifix’, and The Times reviewer stated that the production had ‘a pervasive sense of something strained and false and theatrical’.34 Still, what became startlingly clear with the production of The Miracle was that Reinhardt had created a sense of a community ritual heavily infused by the heritage of Catholic Christianity, one that as J.L. Styan writes ‘he could not wholly reject, even had he wished to’.35 This sense of ritual would also inflect the ways he staged Greek tragedies. T.S. Eliot admired Reinhardt and it is very likely that he would have attended the production of The Miracle. However, he makes no direct mention of it. He does state in a letter to Herbert Read (1929) that Craig or Reinhardt would be the ideal directors of a proposed stage version of ‘The Hollow Men’, but he is concerned that the ‘author’s responsibility would be nil’.36 Apart from the Catholic excesses, which Eliot might have also found distasteful in Reinhardt, his main concern was one of stage authorship. In the case of Murder in the 33 34 35 36

Styan, Max Reinhardt, p. 96. Styan, Max Reinhardt, p. 102. Styan, Max Reinhardt, p. 9. T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 4, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 734.

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Cathedral Eliot had full control of staging. It is important to underline that staging a Christian tragedy was as important as writing a Christian tragedy for Eliot, and that he claimed authorship for both. Dionysus and the Crucified are also fused into one character in W.B. Yeats’s play Resurrection (1927), which presents in the form of questions and answers (antiphones perhaps) a discussion about the nature of Christ among three emblematic figures: a Greek, a Hebrew, and a Syrian (or Egyptian in the Adelphi version). This debate is threatened by an off-stage ecstatic chorus of Dionysus performing horrific rituals. This brief play which combines prose and verse exhibits many of the traits that were to characterize Yeatsian drama: it features a chorus of musicians, it uses the mask, the folding and unfolding of the curtain, and it was specifically written for a small studio audience such as that of The Peacock Theatre (the smaller theatre of The Abbey). Here is the opening song that, as Yeats states in his directions, is for ‘the folding and the unfolding of the curtain’: I saw a staring virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died, And tear the heart out of his side, And lay the heart upon her hand And bear that beating heart away; And then did all the Muses sing Of Magnus Anus at the spring, As though God’s death were but a play.37 All these formal aspects are borrowed from the Noh, and have parallels in Yeats’s earlier Four Plays for Dancers (At the Hawk’s Well, 1917; The Only Jealousy of Emmer, 1919; The Dreaming of the Bones, 1919; Calvary, 1920). Yeats had spent considerable time with Ezra Pound in Sussex in 1913 familiarizing himself with the Fenollosa Noh manuscripts, and witnessing performances by the Japanese dancer Michio Ito. Resurrection is dedicated to a Japanese admirer called Junzo Sato. However, Yeats’s theatre of this period is not solely influenced by the Noh tradition. While he is writing Resurrection he also returns to a project that he would pursue for many years: the translations of Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus (He had initially attempted and abandoned a verse translation of Oedipus the King in 1904).

37

W.B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume ii: The Plays, edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 481–482.

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The language that Yeats chose in his translations was a combination of prose and verse (prose for the protagonist and verse for the chorus). The quest for a language that could speak to the big national themes and attract large audiences fits in quite neatly with Yeats’s fascination with the oral and popular tradition. Like Eliot, Yeats views the difficulty of reviving the poetry of the Greek plays as a general symptom of a modernist ‘malaise’, a world where language has been debased and lost its ‘organic’ links with a living community. Yeats finds the alternative, ideal audience on the Aran islands and, in line with many of the linguistic experiments of the Celtic Twilight (also undertaken by J.M. Synge and later Louise MacNeice who translates Agamemnon in 1937), uses rhythms and patterns that he considers to be part of an organic community that somehow has not been marred by modernity. In addition to the linguistic inspiration that Yeats garners from the Aran islands, might he also have been inspired by the predominantly Catholic Christian rituals of the islands? Although Yeats was a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, during this period in his life, and fueled by nationalist sentiment, he exhibits a strong attraction towards Catholicism in general, which inspired both the Celtic Twilight and the independence movement. Like Reinhardt, he might have found this ritualist aspect of Christianity impossible to resist. 3

Experiments in Modernist Anti-christian Tragedy No one will believe me and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders but the so-called Christ is none other than he who in the presence of the crab louse god consented to live without a body, while an army of men descended from the cross, to which god thought he had long since nailed them, has revolted, and, armed with steel, with blood, with fire, and with bones, advances, reviling the Invisible to have done with the judgment of god.38

38

Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes. Volume xiii (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), pp. 86–87. Also quoted in Jane Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), $)((-&
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The Aran islands offer an unlikely connection between Yeats and the damned prophet of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’: Antonin Artaud. A decade before Artaud wrote To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1948), he too visited the Aran islands as part of his quest for sites (geographical, philosophical, and theatrical) that he considered to be raw, exotic, and ritualistic. He was promptly deported, probably having suffered a mental breakdown. One could envisage a notional play, where Yeats and Artaud meet on the Aran islands. At first glance it may appear somewhat incongruous to include Artaud in a study of modernist Christian tragedies. However, as the above quotation clearly reveals, throughout his life (as an actor, playwright, and theorist), Artaud was obsessed with the figure of the Crucified. Indeed, we can claim that Artaud’s idea of the ‘holy actor’ could itself be seen as a transformation, or yet another masking of the Christ/Dionysus figure. As a young actor he played the role of the monk in Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), having learned the craft of the actor under the tutelage of the charismatic Charles Dullin. His work draws heavily on Christian ritual and on Christian notions of sacrifice. However, as several scholars have noted, it is the specific tradition of Gnosticism that seems to permeate his work. Despite his damning of Greek tragedy in the figure of Oedipus in ‘An End to Masterpieces’ and his life-long dislike of Christianity, this analysis claims that both traditions of Classical tragedy and Christianity play a significant role in shaping the Artaudian aesthetic of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’.39 And this principle of ‘Cruelty’ that Artaud both codified and enacted throughout his life has proved particularly formative for understanding the aesthetics and the philosophy of tragedy in a Godless world. Indeed, in terms of performance practice, we can claim that Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ has probably been one of the more inspirational motors for reviving tragedy after modernism. In her illuminating reading of Artaud, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, Jane Goodall makes a convincing case for reading Artaud as both a continuation of Nietzsche and as a revival of the Gnostic legacy. She ends her reading by stating that, ‘If Nietzsche’s philosophy has led the way in the modern assault on the onto-theological foundations of Western humanism, Artaud’s dramaturgy reechoes the terms and images of an older and absolute assault’.40 This reading

39 40

p. 204. This was written for French radio. See Allen Weiss, ‘From Schizophrenia to Schizophonica: Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, in Phantasmic Radio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 9–35. See Antonin Artaud, ‘An End to Masterpieces’ and ‘The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto’, in Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 252–259 and 242–252. Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, p. 220. $)((-&
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places the work of Artaud within a genealogy of assaults against Western humanism that have as their starting point and as their inspiration the early Christian blasphemous tradition of Gnosticism. We owe our understanding of the ‘Gnostic’ Artaud initially to Susan Sontag, who re-introduced and re-framed him for the thinkers of post-structuralism and difference. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to present a detailed theological account of the heretical movement of the second century Christian Church. In very general and somewhat schematic terms, this early Christian sect believed that the world was created not by a benevolent God but by a lesser, evil demiurge, the central tenet of Gnosticism being that humans are never at home in the world, ‘strangers to themselves’ as Nietzsche would later proclaim. Everything in the world is seen to be the double of its better, ideal version, and we are doomed to an existence of distortion and corruption of reality. An important characteristic of this Hellenistic heresy was also that is was syncretic and eclectic, combining elements of Greek philosophy (especially neo-Platonism) and many religions and philosophies from the Middle East and the Far East. The gnostic world is barren of meaning and redemption, and humans are self-alienated creatures. The origin of Gnosis is located in the ability of human beings to become aware of their alienated condition. At the same time, there is an acute sense of suffering and anxiety that comes with this awareness. The awareness itself is not necessarily seen as cathartic. Susan Sontag states in her writing on Artaud: The leading energies of Gnosticism come from metaphysical anxiety and acute psychological distress – the sense of being abandoned, of being alien, of being possessed by demonic powers which prey on the human spirit in a cosmos vacated by the divine.41 This is clearly not the world of Greek tragedy, where knowledge and catharsis redeem suffering, no matter how horrific the deeds. So, this is not really the world of the ecstatic Dionysus, but neither is it the world of the Crucified Christ of Christianity. Artaud’s theatre shares quite a few traits with the Gnostic tradition. These can be summarized as follows: the absolute awareness of humanity’s alienated condition; the revelation of the ‘doubleness’ of existence and the ‘doubleness’ of human beings themselves (‘An estranged or alien self resides in each human being as a spark of the dispersed pneuma waiting to be released from the corporeal form that prevents it from being reunited with the “great first Life”, 41

Susan Sontag, ‘Approaching Artaud’, introduction to Artaud, Selected Writings, p. xlv.

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the hidden God’, writes Goodall42); the conviction that the world of forms is false. It is very difficult to separate the work from the life of this visionary prophet of the theatre as his own life may be read as enacting the suffering of a Gnostic martyr/actor. And here the lack of the singularity or separability of the aesthetic might be useful in trying to understand that heady fusion that is the life and works of Artaud. A month after the broadcasting of To Have Done with the Judgment of God Artaud passed way, having spent his final years in various mental institutions. Perhaps the impact of Artaud can be felt on the following generation of theatre makers and philosophers, whose lives and works were not so completely intertwined. The thinkers of difference from Sontag to Deleuze and Guattari to Derrida and Kristeva, revive Artaud as a philosopher, and many post-war and contemporary theatre directors re-work Artaud’s concept of cruelty, particularly in their various approaches to staging Greek tragedy (as we can see in the work of Richard Schechner, Jan Fabre, and Theodoros Terzopoulos). It is tempting to read Artaud’s blazing manifesto for the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ in The Theatre and its Double as an attempt at a ritualistic sacrifice of both Greek tragedy (‘An End to Masterpieces’) and Christianity (To be Done…). As with any ritualistic sacrifice, these brutal, violent, and ultimately cruel attacks contain within them the possibility of re-birth and regeneration/ resurrection. Another paradoxical protagonist for the appropriation of Christian ritual for the modernist stage is Bertolt Brecht. In many ways the binary opposite of Artaud (where Artaud represents the archetypal and mythopoetic on the stage, Brecht represents the historical and materialist), Brecht’s edifice of Epic theatre can be read in at least some of its manifestations as re-working some fundamental traits of what we may understand as a Christian aesthetic. If we consider the impact on his work of his messianic Marxist friend, Walter Benjamin, then those traits could be read as Judeo-Christian. In Benjamin’s essay ‘What is Epic Theatre’, he very deliberately reads Epic theatre as part of a genealogy of theatricality that includes the mystery plays. He writes: This important but poorly marked road, which may here serve as the image of a tradition, went via Roswitha and the mystery plays in the Middle Ages, via Gryphius and Calderon in the Baroque age; […] It is a European road, but a German one as well – provided that we may speak of a road and not of a secret smugglers’ path by which the legacy of the medieval 42

Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, p. 15.

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and Baroque drama has reached us. It is this mule track, neglected and overgrown, which comes to light today in the dramas of Brecht.43 This evocative quotation from Benjamin, written in his characteristic literary style itself draws upon Judeo-Christian imagery and tropes (the path, the mule, ‘neglected and overgrown’). Importantly, it creates a lineage for Brecht’s Epic theatre that does not read it in opposition to Christian ritual. Epic theatre’s use of allegory and parable, its exposition of the ‘doubleness’ of theatre through highlighting theatricality, its fear of complete identification and manipulation of the audience all bear a Platonic signature, but also have precedents in the Christian mystery cycles. What in the mysteries would have been blasphemous (for example, the identification of the actor with the role – who can pretend to be God, who the devil?), for Epic theatre, similarly, is an emblem of false consciousness and ideological manipulation. This analogy is not as tenuous as it may appear, especially if we also underline the pedagogical dimension of both traditions. All these aspects come together in many a Brecht play. However, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is especially notable in this context since, apart from the formal aspects of Christian theatre, it also thematically reworks the biblical story about the wisdom of Solomon (which is also a Chinese parable). This quotation is also significant in the ways it interpolates religious tropes and discourses in its description of what Benjamin considers a quintessentially modernist theatre. And in doing so it enacts another significant principle at work in the writings of Walter Benjamin, where modernism and modernity more generally are not viewed as an abrupt break from religion. Benjamin’s reading of Epic theatre (and his reading of tragedy in The Origin of Tragic German Drama) does not view it in opposition to the Christian dramas of the Middle ages but as a continuation of similar formal and thematic concerns about representing the truth, about audience reception, and about the relationships between pleasure and pedagogy. This resists one of the grand narratives of modernity that views it as an all-encompassing linear and triumphant march towards secularization. In this sense, religion is not viewed as pure ideology, and modernity is not viewed as expressing the ‘disenchantment’ of the world. In establishing a link between Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Christian early modern drama, Benjamin is underlining the force of religion within modernity, and in a sense he is also being a good Marxist in presenting these relationships as more dialectical/dialogical and not simply oppositional. I have written extensively about Brecht’s debt to Greek tragedy 43

Walter Benjamin, ‘What is Epic Theatre’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), pp. 144–151, p. 146.

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(despite his proclamations),44 which is clearly evidenced in his version of Antigone, and here we can also see Epic Theatre as inhabiting a lineage of Christian drama. There is much more that can be said about Epic theatre and Christian drama and ritual. I have, however, chosen this iconic Benjamin quotation as it acts as a kind of constellation of ideas that helps to illuminate the rich and complex interconnections between Epic theatre, Christian drama and classical tragedy. It is also an eerily prophetic quotation as it pre-echoes Benjamin’s own plight across another smugglers’ path on the border between Spain and France, the Route Lister named after the famous Republican general of the Spanish Civil War who led his troops along the same path. This is the path that would lead to his death, and, in another twist of fate, this messianic Jewish Marxist thinker was buried in a Catholic cemetery. The protagonist of Nietzsche’s anguished cry that ‘God is dead’ is also anxious about the absence of festivals and rituals that might result from this death. This chapter has traced some of the ways in which this ‘death’ is dramatized through the encounters with tragedy, the death of which is also supposedly hailed by modernity. As René Girard states, ‘The death of God is also his birth’,45 as this death will always be re-enacted through sacrificial rituals and rites. Within modernist performance these rites may be sacred, but they may also be profane. Whether he might be present, absent or hidden, whether as theme or as form, the Christian God and his rituals occupy a central position in modernist theatre experimentation. And this Christian God is usually shadowed, or doubled by his Greek equivalent, joined by a paratactic and: re-writing Nietzsche’s binary as Dionysus and the Crucified. Bibliography Ackerman, Robert. The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (London: Routledge, 2002). Artaud, Antonin. Œuvres Complètes. Volume viii (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976).

44 45

Olga Taxidou, ‘Machines and Models for Modern Tragedy: Brecht/Berlau, Antigone-Model 1948’, in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 241–262. Girard, ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’, p. 831.

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Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992). Browne, E. Martin. The Making of T.S. Eliot’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Butler, E.M. The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). Calder, William M., ed. The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991). Carpentier, Martha. Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf (London: Routledge, 1998). Dastur, Françoise, ‘Tragedy and Speculation’. In Philosophy and Tragedy, edited by M. de Beistegui and Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 2000). Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1967). Eliot, T.S. ‘Poetry and Drama’. In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975). Eliot, T.S. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volume 4, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Eliot, T.S. ‘Dramatis Personae’. In Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot. Volume 2: 1919–1926, edited by Anthony Cuba and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Felski, Rita. Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). Girard, René. ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified’. MLN 99, no. 4 (Sep. 1984): pp. 816–835. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504. Goodall, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Hall, Edith. ‘Is there a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics?’ In Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and Beyond, edited by M.S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Halliwell, Steven. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Ingman, Heather. Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). Jones, David E. The Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). Koulouris, Theodore. Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

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Leonard, Miriam. Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Macintosh, Fiona. ‘From the Court to the National: The Theatrical Legacy of Gilbert Murray’s Bacchae’. In Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, edited by Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra, ed. and trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Vintage, 1974). Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, ed. and trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1986). Peters, Julie Stone. ‘Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archaeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology, and the Modern Theatre’. In Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008): pp. 1–41. Plato. The Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Porter, James I. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on the Birth of Tragedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Porter, James I. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Rokem, Freddie. Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Styan, J.L. Max Reinhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Szondi, Peter. An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Taxidou, Olga. ‘Communities of Production and Consumption: Modernism and the Re-birth of Tragedy’. In A Cultural History of Tragedy. Volume 6: The Modern Age: 1920–Present, edited by Jennifer Wallace (London: Bloomsbury, Forthcoming 2019). Taxidou, Olga. Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Taxidou, Olga. Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).

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Weiss, Allen. ‘From Schizophrenia to Schizophonica: Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God’. In Phantasmic Radio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 9–35. Yeats, W.B. ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1914). In Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 279–349. Yeats, W.B. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume ii: The Plays, edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, (New York: Scribner, 2001).

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Chapter 9

Modernism, Tragedy, and Christianity: Beckett and the Theatre of Racine Erik Tonning In his 1931 monograph Proust, the young Samuel Beckett launched this pithy and uncompromising definition of tragedy: Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organised by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his ‘socii malorum’, the sin of having been born. ‘Pues el delito mayor Des hombre el haber nacido’.1 This essay will begin by recalling the dense intellectual background to Beckett’s view of tragedy as the ‘statement of an expiation’ for the ‘original sin … of having been born’. Besides the relationship between the narrator and Albertine in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (the ‘Albertine tragedy’2) that is the immediate occasion for Beckett’s comments, this background includes Arthur Schopenhauer’s treatment of tragedy in The World as Will and Representation, as well as Beckett’s reading of Jean Racine’s Phèdre and Andromaque, alongside Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. Beckett’s trenchant notion of ‘expiation’ here critiques an orthodox Christian understanding of original sin. Yet even so, the conception of tragedy derived from these three writers also comes to seem unsatisfactory to him precisely because it may still be construed as continuing to gesture towards some attenuated version of Christian transcendence. But Beckett did not simply theorise tragedy, he confronted what he saw as the problems and inadequacies of the genre as a dramatist. His comparison of the painterly approaches of Jean Antoine Watteau and Jack B. Yeats in key correspondence from 1937 documents Beckett’s conscious effort to push ‘beyond’ 1 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1999), p. 67. 2 Beckett, Proust, p. 45.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_011  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_0 6543_011 11

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tragedy by emulating Yeats’ ‘indifference’ and ‘detachment’ towards the pathos of pity and fear. We see one creative outcome of this critique in Waiting for Godot, famously subtitled ‘a tragicomedy’: the ‘spirit of the play’, as Beckett put it in another letter from 1953, is that ‘nothing is more grotesque than the tragic’.3 But while Godot parodies tragic pathos and gravitas, the main focus of my analysis here will be Beckett’s first attempt to take tragedy-as-expiation quite seriously even while attempting to go ‘beyond’ it, in his 1963 Play. Here, ‘expiation’ is made literal as three characters trapped in urns are forced to recount their tale of adultery endlessly in a purgatorial setting, at the prompting of an eye-of-God-like spotlight. As we shall see, it is specifically Racine’s Christian tragedy that is being invoked and critiqued in Play. For Beckett, an achieved tragic knowledge and clarity is implicit in Racinian ‘expiation’, whereas in Play, such expiation fails and is never completed. Beckett’s specific quarrel with Racine is ultimately grounded in an ethics of ‘fidelity to failure’ that governs his lifelong agon with Christianity. 1

Beckett Theorising Tragedy

Schopenhauer must be our first port of call in elucidating Beckett on tragedy. Indeed, as Beckett scholars have long been aware, the quoted passage from Proust would not pass a basic plagiarism check. For Schopenhauer, in §51 of The World as Will and Representation, tragedy, in displaying the terrible side of life – mankind’s inescapable pain and wretchedness, the triumph of wickedness, the mastery of chance, the fall of the just and innocent – reveals the Will at war with itself within the world of phenomena. Individual existences all manifest ‘one and the same will, living and appearing in them all, whose phenomena fight with one another and tear one another to pieces’.4 Tragic anagnorisis for Schopenhauer consists in a seeing-through of the illusory world of phenomena to the reality of the one Will behind it: this releases the tragic character from the realm of human motives and desires and produces a quieting of the individual’s will, a ‘resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole “will-to-live” itself’.5 Tragic characters thus die ‘purified by suffering, in other words after the will-to-live has already expired in them’.6 It is thus, 3 Letter to Roger Blin, 9 January 1953, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume ii: 1941–1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 350. 4 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 253. 5 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, p. 253. 6 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, p. 253.

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Schopenhauer claims, nonsensical to look (with Samuel Johnson, for instance) for ‘poetic justice’ – the reaffirmation of moral order – in tragedy: The true sense of the tragedy is the deeper insight that what the hero atones for is not his own particular sins, but original sin, in other words, the guilt of existence itself: Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido (“For man’s greatest offence Is that he has been born,”) as Calderón [La Vida es Sueño] frankly expresses it.7 At this point one might ask, why speak of Beckett on tragedy at all, since his words in Proust are apparently mere cribbed Schopenhauer – down to the unacknowledged Calderón quotation and even the phrase ‘socii malorum’, or community of sufferers (meaning all mankind), which derives from another Schopenhauer essay (‘Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World,’ 1851).8 However, Schopenhauer acted as a conduit for Beckett’s thinking and reading in a uniquely productive way; so that the key issue is less the fact that he borrows from Schopenhauer, and more what Schopenhauer as focal point serves to bring together for Beckett.9 One important use of Schopenhauer for Beckett was as a stick with which to beat Christianity. Beckett’s lifelong agon with Christianity arises from his ethical revulsion against any and all forms of theodicy: the idea that a justification of the ways of God to men (revealing a moral purpose behind suffering, and an ultimately harmonious eschatology) could ever be possible.10 The cosmic optimism of the Christian doctrine of original sin, with its implication that a 7 8 9

10

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, p. 254. The ‘socii malorum’ reference was identified by J.D. O’Hara in Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 29. See Erik Tonning, ‘“I am not reading philosophy”: Beckett and Schopenhauer’, in Beckett/ Philosophy, edited by Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2015), pp. 75–101. I have discussed Schopenhauer, Beckett and Christianity at greater length in this essay and other publications, including Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), ch. 1, and Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), ch. 4. See Tonning, Modernism and Christianity, ch. 4.

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primordial goodness has been damaged but may be restored through acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice, is intolerable for Beckett: as he would indicate in the bitter poem ‘Ooftish’ (1938), it amounts to a dishonest ‘boiling down’ of suffering, dissolving its scandal into mere ‘blood of lamb’.11 Instead, for Schopenhauer and Beckett, to exist at all is figured as ‘original sin’; any goodness within this world is merely apparent and temporary, and depends on a more fundamental evil, desire itself. Ultimately, as in the last paragraph of The World as Will and Representation, it would be better if there were nothing at all.12 All this underlies Beckett’s emphasis on the difference between the authentic ‘expiation’ of tragedy and the ‘miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organised by the knaves for the fools’: a moral code on this reading is a mere ‘local arrangement’, and corresponds to no absolute or divine law.13 Justice, poetic or otherwise, remains unavailable. Yet even the kind of expiation that Schopenhauer claims for tragedy is ultimately suspect for Beckett, in so far as it contains a religious posture of its own. Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the possibility of achieving tragic knowledge – resignation, purification, abandonment of self-will and immersion into the non-individuated Will behind all phenomena – draws on the Eastern idea of Nirvana, and was also by his own admission not far removed from a kind of Christian mysticism that denies the world as utterly fallen, practises asceticism, and seeks transcendence through the annihilation of self. For Beckett, as he put it to Charles Juliet, this amounted to yet another way seeking for a ‘way out’ of the prison of being.14 As I have argued elsewhere,15 Beckett rejects this precisely because any such ‘solution’16 would be at least partly akin to Christian transcendence itself. Thus, even Schopenhauer’s stance ultimately did not satisfy the artistic imperative of ‘fidelity to failure’17 that would be central to Beckett’s own aesthetics and literary work. Later in this essay, we shall see 11 12 13 14

15 16 17

Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove Press, 1977), p. 31. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, pp. 411–12. Beckett, Proust, p. 67. See Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde, trans. Tracy Cooke, Axel Nesme, Janey Tucket, Morgaine Reinl and Aude Jeanson (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), p. 16. From a conversation with Beckett dated 24 October 1968. See Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama, pp. 31–39, and Modernism and Christianity, ch. 4. Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde, p. 39. From a conversation dated 11 November 1977. Beckett, Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, p. 125. For a discussion of ‘fidelity to failure’ as a driving force of Beckett’s aesthetics, see Tonning, Modernism and Christianty, ch. 4.

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Beckett attempting to go beyond tragedy in Play precisely by staging an ‘expiation’ that fails; but in doing so, he was also drawing on a rich model of tragedyas-expiation in the Schopenhauerian sense, in order to establish a creative distance from it. In other words, tragic knowledge is both evoked and systematically denied. To appreciate this rich model, we need to elaborate on Beckett’s wider reading of tragedy before we encounter Play itself. In the Proust monograph, Schopenhauer’s view of tragedy becomes a conduit for Beckett’s engagement with Proust’s novel, with Racine, and more implicitly with Pascal.18 A closer look is thus clearly in order. Let us start with the ‘tragedy of the Marcel-Albertine liaison’, which, on Beckett’s reading, displays nothing less than ‘the type-tragedy of the human relationship whose failure is preordained’.19 Marcel’s obsessive vacillation between desire for and jealousy of Albertine produces a multiplicity of Albertines in his mind, and these mutually contradictory images are what ‘transforms a human banality into a many-headed goddess’.20 Love is inherently a state of dissatisfaction, of non-possession: and since these images of Albertine are scattered in time and space and fragmented in memory, complete possession remains impossible yet endlessly tantalising: [Marcel] knows that this woman has no reality, that ‘our most exclusive love for a person is always our love for something else’, that intrinsically she is less than nothing, but that in her nothingness there is active, mysterious and invisible, a current that forces him to bow down and worship an obscure and implacable Goddess, and to make sacrifices of himself before her. And the Goddess who requires this sacrifice and this humiliation, whose sole condition of patronage is corruptibility, and into whose faith and worship all mankind is born, is the Goddess Time.21 Beckett’s reading follows a Schopenhauerian script in its analysis of desire as intrinsic non-satisfaction, and also in highlighting how tragedy, in Schopenhauer’s account, brings into ‘fearful prominence’ a suffering brought about by ‘chance or error’ that transforms into ‘the rulers of the world, personified as fate through their insidiousness which appears almost like purpose and 18 19 20 21

Concerning the interrelationship of Beckett’s reading of these three writers, my discussion here draws on Melanie Foehn’s doctoral thesis ‘Samuel Beckett and the Writers of Port-Royal’ (University of Kent, Unpublished PhD thesis, 2012), especially pp. 71–108. Beckett, Proust, p. 18. Beckett, Proust, p. 49. Beckett, Proust, p. 57.

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intention’.22 Albertine becomes a tragic vehicle, through which Marcel confronts the Goddess Time. This excruciating experience, then, states his ‘expiation’: and it leads towards a withdrawal into the ascetic vocation of the artist. Specifically, Marcel becomes an artist who seeks out moments of transcendence of time through the mystical experience of involuntary memory. However, this is precisely where Beckett accuses Proust of a residual romanticism: ‘He is a Romantic in his anxiety to accomplish his mission, to be a good and faithful servant’.23 The allusion to Matthew 25:23 here in fact links romanticism and Christianity:24 in showing an accomplished expiation, Proust lapses from a thoroughgoing fidelity to failure and into a potentially Christian paradigm that reaches for transcendence. At one point in Beckett’s treatment of the vagaries of the Marcel-Albertine relationship – Marcel having decided that his love for her is dead, only to suffer a violent relapse when he finds she has unexpectedly left him first – Racine suddenly enters the analysis: And like Phèdre, [Marcel] recognises the ever-wakeful Gods. ‘…ces dieux qui dans mon flanc Ont allumé le feu fatal à tout mon sang; Ces dieux qui se sont fait une gloire cruelle De séduire le coeur d’une faible mortelle’.25 To grasp the connection Beckett is making here we must examine his presentation of Racine in his lectures at Trinity College, Dublin in 1931.26 Beckett on Racine emphasises the non-reciprocity of desire, the incessant convertibility of love and hate in the characters’ minds, and the ultimate impossibility of any form of community.27 In the lectures, this appears as the ‘solitary nature of every human being’: 22 23 24 25

26 27

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume i, p. 253. Beckett, Proust, p. 81. For a discussion of Beckett’s scepticism towards romantic ‘Sehnsucht’, see Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama, pp. 179–185. Beckett, Proust, p. 59. Beckett quotes these lines from Racine’s Phèdre, Act ii, Scene v. Translation: ‘…The gods will bear me witness, / Who have within my veins kindled this fire, / The gods, who take a barbarous delight / In leading a poor mortal’s heart astray’. (All translations of Phédre quoted in this essay are by Robert Bruce Boswell: https://www .bartleby.com/26/3/). These lectures are documented through three sets of extant student notes by Rachel Burrows, Leslie Daiken, and Grace McKinley. I am indebted to Shane Weller’s article ‘The Anethics of Desire: Beckett, Racine, Sade’, in Beckett and Ethics, edited by Russell Smith (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 102–117, for my understanding of desire in Beckett and Racine. $)((-&
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Final statement of Racinian thesis: that there is no impact; they [the characters] are all hermétiques, not aware of each other, but of one thing: each trying to get into the other’s state of mind.28 This a pivotal insight for Beckett, invoked also in Proust as ‘that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned’.29 But there is not merely solitude: there is also an overwhelming, inextinguishable desire for otherness, for communion, for knowing and being known. This is the intimate ‘gloire cruelle’ of the gods: that simply being alive means being the site of desires that cannot and will not be fulfilled. This general condition takes on a particular edge in sexual desire, which is of course what Phèdre has just confessed towards her stepson Hippolytus in this scene. Immediately before the words recorded by Beckett, her intense sense of guilt at her illicit desire for Hippolytus turns from a specific horror at having (mentally) broken a moral law against incest, towards what might well be dubbed a general horror of the more original sin of having been born: J’aime. Ne pense pas qu’au moment que je t’aime, Innocente à mes yeux, je m’approuve moi-même, Ni que du fol amour qui trouble ma raison, Ma lâche complaisance ait nourri le poison. Objet infortuné des vengeances célestes, Je m’abhorre encore plus que tu ne me détestes.30 Another character in a Racine play admired by Beckett, Oreste in Andromaque, confronts the same dilemma – involuntary sexual obsession with an unattainable object – and faces a similar tryst with the gods, albeit with a more defiant attitude that actively provokes their wrath. Beckett not only commented on these lines in his 1931 lectures, but copied them out to George Reavey years later after a 1948 performance of Andromaque in Paris:31 28

29 30

31

Notes taken by Rachel Burrows née Dobbin on the lectures of Samuel Beckett on Gide and Racine. Michaelmas 1931. Library of Trinity College, Dublin, mic 60. Quoted in Brigitte LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, trans. Ros Schwartz (London: Souvenir Press, 2009), p. 64. Beckett, Proust, p. 63. Jean Racine, Phèdre, in Théatre Complet , edited by J. Morel and A. Viala (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1980), Act ii, Scene v, p. 602. Translation: ‘I love. But think not / That at the moment when I love you most / I do not feel my guilt; no weak compliance / Has fed the poison that infests my brain. / The ill-starr’d object of celestial vengeance, / I am not so detestable to you / As to myself’. Letter to George Reavey, 8 July 1948, in Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume ii: 1941–1956, pp. 80–81. $)((-&
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Je ne sais de tout temps quelle injuste puissance Laisse le crime en paix et poursuit l’innocence. De quelque part sur moi que je tourne les yeux, Je ne vois que malheurs qui condamnent les dieux. Méritons leur courroux, justifions leur haine, Et que le fruit du crime en précède la peine.32 And here are Beckett’s comments on sexual desire in Andromaque: For the first time in the Fr[ench] theatre we have no heroic love. Sexuality is rep[resented] at last, and treated realistically. None of the fine Cornelian phrases. The word hate is more frequent than the word love. We have the cruelty of sexuality stated. There is the pagan tiger of Lawrence with a dreadful Christian awareness. It chases its own tail. This is the tragic position.33 These comments are further clarified by Rachel Burrows, who records Beckett’s description of sexual desire in Andromaque more vividly: ‘A loves B, and B loves C, and C loves D. The great pagan tiger of sexuality chasing its tail in outer darkness’.34 The ‘dreadful Christian awareness’ that Racine adds to this scenario is for Beckett closely linked to the ‘tragic position’ that he discerns in these plays. Based on the tryst with ‘the gods’ we have observed Beckett returning to in both Phèdre and Andromaque, we may sum up this ‘dreadful awareness’ thus: human beings are utterly subject to desires they cannot control, yet these very desires, implanted by divine decree in the first place, are also condemned by the God or gods who made them, and so predestined to victimize their human bearer.35 32

33

34 35

Racine, Andromaque, in Théatre Complet, Act iii, Scene i, p. 159. Translation: ‘I know not why some dark divinity / Forgets the guilty, hunts the innocent. / However I may look upon myself, / I see woes only that condemn the gods. / Let me deserve their anger, earn their hate, / And let crime’s fruit precede its punishment’. All translations of this play in this essay are from Jean Racine, Andromache: A Tragedy in Five Acts, 1667, translated into English verse by Richard Wilbur (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). Notes taken by Grace West (née McKinley) on the lectures of Samuel Beckett on Gide and Racine. Michaelmas 1931. Beckett International Foundation Archive, University of Reading. Quoted in James Knowlson and Elizabeth Knowlson, Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 307. Burrows notes, quoted in LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, p. 56. The Burrows notes record Beckett arguing in his lecture that in Andromaque (with reference to Pyrrhus’ lack of self-control) the ‘whole victimised organism is out of control’; quoted in LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, p. 67. $)((-&
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But what of ‘expiation’ in Racinian tragedy? In his lectures, Beckett describes an inexorable, tightly controlled, merciless progression in Racine’s plays towards a fully realised consciousness of the tragic dilemma: ‘At what point in the self-consciousness does the play come to an end? When the mind faces facts, when the mind has an integral awareness of the facts … when there’s a unification of awareness. Their function is to express the division in the mind of the antagonists’, and, therefore, ‘when the mind is unified, the play ends. No physical action’.36 The ending achieves clarity: ‘The inner integrity that precedes a collapse is the tragedy of the clairvoyants’.37 Expiation, then, is effected in Beckett’s Racine when the characters are granted this moment of integral, clairvoyant tragic knowledge – as they realise and fully face up to the ‘dreadful awareness’ of their own case of literally self-destructive desire. In a 1961 interview, following his rediscovery and rereading of Racine in 1958,38 Beckett’s essential perception of this Racinian progression had not changed: ‘The destiny of Racine’s Phèdre is sealed from the beginning: she will proceed into the dark. As she goes, she herself will be illuminated. At the beginning of the play she has partial illumination, but there is no question but that she moves toward the dark. Within this notion clarity is possible, but for us who are neither Greek nor Jansenist there is not such clarity’.39 Of course, the historical background of Racine’s ‘dreadful Christian awareness’ was the theology of seventeenth-century Jansenism, as Beckett acknowledges here and in his lectures. And a key thinker associated with this movement – who is also a thinker of the tragic – is Pascal. Melanie Foehn’s recent PhD thesis has pointed out the degree to which Pascal influenced not just Racine, but also Schopenhauer and Proust: and she has demonstrated several references to the Pensées and other Pascal texts in Beckett’s Proust-monograph. A few thematic links will be enough to suggest the areas of common ground here. Firstly, predestination, which obliterates individual free will, and makes it impossible to know the plan of a hidden God: Pascal’s individuals are no more free than Schopenhauer’s phenomena in relation to the Will. Secondly, the utter fallenness of human nature, and the state of permanent longing and misery that ensues, characterised (in terms that Schopenhauer would adapt) by oscillation 36 37 38

39

Burrows notes, quoted in LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, pp. 58–9. Burrows notes, quoted in LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, p. 60. For details on Beckett’s rereading of Racine around August 1958, see James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 426: ‘It pointed him in the direction that made a tightly focussed, monologic play like Happy Days or Play possible’. Knowlson’s discussion does not, however, focus on tragedy. Samuel Beckett interviewed by Tom Driver, ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’, Columbia University Forum iv (Summer 1961); reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Laurence Graver and Raymond Federman (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 220. $)((-&
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between ennui and divertissement. Thirdly, the imagination is for Pascal a contributor to our suffering (and a false palliative), because it produces dissatisfaction with the present, and the expectation of something better. Fourthly, Pascal, like Schopenhauer, emphasises the inconstancy and frailty of all things human. Foehn aptly observes that ‘Beckett retained, from his readings of Augustine and Pascal, the emphasis in their works upon the monstrous state of fallen man, as opposed to a former, ideal state of innocence and splendour. Human mortality is a constant reminder of a recurrent feature in the Pensées: the haunting evocation of the Fall – mankind driven towards the gulf – and … the dream, in the midst of turmoil, of finding some kind of stability (“repos”)’.40 My own point here is simple: the fact that Beckett was aware that Pascal’s influence underlies the work of Proust, Schopenhauer, and Racine shows that Beckett’s understanding of tragedy as ‘expiation’ inevitably engages Christian sources. Beckett’s reading of Racine, Schopenhauer and Proust in terms of the ‘original sin of having been born’ is clearly directed against the idea that there could have been any pre-Fall state of innocence and splendour – let alone any worldly or eschatological ‘repos’. Yet at the same time, Beckett also considered Pascal’s recourse to the Christian God as the only escape from the prison of being as another attempt at a ‘solution’: and he saw this tendency towards escape as being implicit in the tragic knowledge offered by all these three writers. Hence, the vision of Proust, Schopenhauer and Racine still remains too-close-for-comfort to that of Pascal. The very possibility of an achieved ‘expiation’ remained too uncomfortably, lingeringly Christian. This acute ambiguity sets the stage for Beckett’s attempts to go ‘beyond’ tragedy in his own plays. 2

Beckett ‘Beyond’ Tragedy

Beckett’s interest in an artistic move ‘beyond’ the tragic is explicitly attested in his correspondence from August 1937, comparing the painting of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jack B. Yeats. The first painter is admired for his tragic vision, whereas Yeats is admired even more for going beyond tragedy: Watteau put in busts and urns, I suppose to suggest the inorganism of the organic – all his people are mineral in the end, without possibility of being added to or taken from, pure inorganic juxtapositions – but Jack Yeats does not even need to do that. The way he puts down a man’s head & a 40

Foehn, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Writers of Port-Royal’ (University of Kent, Unpublished PhD thesis, 2012), p. 79.

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woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between. I suppose that is what gives the stillness to his pictures, as though the convention were suddenly suspended, the convention & performance of love & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken. A kind of petrified insight into one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness. All handled with the dispassionate acceptance that is beyond tragedy. I always feel Watteau to be a tragic genius, i.e. there is pity in him for the world as he sees it. But I find no pity, i.e. no tragedy in Yeats. Not even sympathy. Simply perception & dispassion. Even personally he is rather inhuman, or haven’t you felt it?41 The idea of ‘inorganism’ here requires a bit of context, which brings in another theorist of the tragic and major influence on Beckett, Sigmund Freud. Beckett was fascinated with Freud’s idea of the ‘death drive’ in his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), which argues that all organisms seek to return to the inorganic state from whence they once emerged. This may be called Freud’s scientized, materialist version of his predecessor Schopenhauer’s philosophical myth of the self-individuation of Will: for Freud, it is matter that becomes conscious, is racked by conflicting drives, and yearns to return to nothing.42 Watteau, on Beckett’s reading, conveys an implicit version of this insight: his is an art of ‘pure inorganic juxtapositions’, where each human organism is ‘mineral in the end’, utterly isolated in its solitary drive towards returning to dust. But Watteau conveys this with a distinctly tragic flair, which involves ‘pity’ and ‘sympathy’. For Beckett, Jack Yeats’s attitude is different, although the same fundamental concerns are at play: indeed, the idea of ‘irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between’ echoes the analysis of irremediable solitude in Proust and Racine examined before. Similarly, the shifting, reversible passions of ‘love & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken’ were also integral to Beckett’s interpretations of both Proust and Racine. By contrast, it is Yeats’ ‘dispassionate acceptance’ that goes ‘beyond tragedy’: on Beckett’s reading, there is no pity here, but a detachment from the whole ‘convention and performance’ of human desire, which issues in a kind of inhumanity on the part of the artist. This is intended as praise from Beckett, 41

42

Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i: 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 535–6. See also his letter to Thomas McGreevy (also dated 14 August), p. 540, where Beckett makes several of the same points. For a fuller discussion, see Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama, pp. 133-–9.

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and we can now hazard a summary of what it might mean for him to both confront and go beyond tragedy in his own dramatic work: a ‘dispassionate’, pitiless statement of a failing, impossible ‘expiation’ for the original sin of having been born. Beckett’s key objection to tragedy is that it exaggerates the significance of human suffering to the point of grotesque. Such excitability is, I take it, the opposite pole from Yeats’s ‘dispassionate acceptance’: as Beckett wrote in a 1953 letter to the first director of Waiting for Godot, Roger Blin (insisting that Estragon’s trousers must fall right down to his ankles at the end), ‘the spirit of the play’ is that ‘nothing is more grotesque than the tragic’.43 Critics have rightly related this statement to Schopenhauer’s sense that the ‘life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general … is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. […] Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy’.44 Waiting for Godot was of course subtitled ‘a tragicomedy’, and Beckett’s chosen strategy for going beyond tragedy in the first half of his playwriting career from Godot to Happy Days is through parodic deflation of tragic gravitas and aggrandisement. The fall of Estragon’s trousers because his belt was being tested and found insufficient for a hanging is an instance of what Beckett had previously dubbed the ‘fundamental unheroic’.45 Beckett’s comedy mocks pretension and illusions, such as the very idea that we might come to know what we are waiting for, that suffering has any purpose, or that there is some hope of salvation. The circular structure of Waiting for Godot – the repetition of the act of ‘waiting’ across two acts, with constant variations on the theme in every scene – prevents any final anagnorisis for these characters. There is no Racinian clarity here, no achieved ‘expiation’, just a cruel, residual hope that keeps the game going: ‘We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes. / And if he comes? / We’ll be saved’.46 Yet arguably this parodic, tragicomic mode cannot fully engage the high seriousness of Racinian tragedy at its most compelling. In Play, Beckett’s most 43 44 45 46

Letter to Roger Blin, 9 January 1953; in Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume ii, p. 350. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, p. 320. For a discussion of this concept in Beckett (which derives from a note on the novel Murphy in his ‘German Diaries’, dated 18 January 1937), see C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 215. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), p. 88.

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explicitly Racinian effort, the comedy is all but gone, and the emphasis has shifted towards a much more explicitly ‘dispassionate’, ‘pitiless’, ‘inhuman’47 and even mechanised theatrical form.48 Beckett here literalises the idea of a ‘mineral’ humanity that he attributed to Watteau by placing his three characters in funeral urns, with only their faces visible, and the faces themselves – in the 1964 London production directed by Beckett – made up to look like stone. The story they tell is a variation on the ‘eternal triangle’, involving an adulterous male (‘M’ in the script), and two competing women (the wife, ‘W1’ and the mistress, ‘W2’): plenty of scope, then, for dramatic analysis of the ‘convention and performance of love and hate’.49 But the characters do not speak to each other at all; they are only aware of the spotlight that is prompting their brief lines, before it cuts them off and moves on to the next face at breakneck speed. Beckett has found a way of ‘putting down a man’s head & and woman’s head side by side’ that makes dramatically palpable their ‘irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between’.50 This remarkable stage image also recalls Beckett’s comment (quoted earlier) in his lecture on Andromaque: ‘A loves B, and B loves C, and C loves D. The great pagan tiger of sexuality chasing its tail in outer darkness’.51 Indeed, a Racinian convertability of love and hate, or sexual obsession and visceral disgust, runs through Beckett’s compressed piece: M: […] So I took her in my arms and said I could not go on living without her. I don’t believe I could have. [Spot from M to W2.] W2: The only solution was to go away together. He swore we should as soon as he had put his affairs in order. In the meantime we were to carry on as before. By that he meant as best we could. [Spot from W2 to W1.] W1: So he was mine again. All mine. I was happy again. I went about singing. The world— [Spot from W1 to M.] 47 48 49 50 51

Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937, in Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i, pp. 535–536. I am not the first critic to note the Racinian background of Play: Vivian Mercier did so in Beckett/Beckett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), though less systematically and without detailed reference to Beckett’s lectures. Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937, in Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i, p. 536. Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i, p. 536. Rachel Burrows notes, quoted in LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, p. 56.

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M: At home all heart to heart, new leaf and bygones bygones. I ran into your ex-doxy, she said one night, on the pillow, you’re well out of that. Rather uncalled for, I thought. I am indeed, sweetheart, I said, I am indeed. God what vermin women. Thanks to you, angel, I said. [Spot from M to W1.] W1: Then I began to smell her off him again. Yes.52 This might indeed be glossed with Beckett’s own comment on the ‘Racinian thesis’: ‘they are all hermétiques, not aware of each other, but of one thing: each trying to get into the other’s state of mind’.53 Furthermore, the static, selfenclosed, constricted stage space of Racinian tragedy is made quite literal in Beckett’s play. Yet Beckett’s approach differs from Racine’s in systematically and perpetually denying any access to tragic knowledge, or even the completion of any one cycle of ‘expiation’. Where Phèdre on Beckett’s reading is progressively illuminated even as she moves towards her dark fate, and achieves a kind of clarity in her open-eyed confrontation with the ‘gloire cruelle’ of the gods, the characters in Play remain in the dark (ignorant and confused) even when confronted with a glaring, torturing, eye-of-God-like light: W 1 : Dying for dark—and the darker the worse. Strange. [Spot from W1 to M.] M : Such fantasies. Then. And now— [Spot from M to W2.] W 2 : I doubt it. [Pause. Peal of wild low laughter from W2 cut short as spot from her to W1.] W 1 : Yes, and the whole thing there, all there, staring you in the face. You’ll see it. Get off me. Or weary. [Spot from W1to M.] M : And now, that you are...mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and off. [Spot from M to W1.] W 1 : Weary of playing with me. Get off me. Yes. [Spot from W1 to M.] M : Looking for something. In my face. Some truth. In my eyes. Not even.

52 53

Samuel Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 311. Rachel Burrows notes, quoted in LeJuez, Beckett Before Beckett, p. 64.

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[Spot from M to W2. Laugh as before from W2 cut short as spot from her to M.] M : Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. Am I as much— [Spot off M. Blackout. Three seconds. Spot on M.] As I much as...being seen?54 At this point, there is a brief ‘choral’ section where all three voices overlap. This is followed by the uncompromising stage direction Repeat play: and after a choral return to the opening lines of the play (indicating an unending cycle of future repetitions), the final blackout cuts off their speech. It remains unclear to the characters what the light wants, whether the interrogation will ever end, and whether their interrogator is cruelly playing with them, in search of some elusive truth or confession, or even conscious at all. Of course, Racine is well known for the remorseless light that floods his stage: as Jennifer Wallace points out, the sun’s brightness and clarity in Racine is symbolically ‘the source of powerful fate, the guarantor of terrifying inevitability’.55 The ploy of placing an inanimate spotlight in the place of the divine gaze thus ironically reworks Schopenhauer’s notion that objects or people through ‘chance or error’56 might come to seem terrifyingly symbolic of Fate or divine judgement. In Play, the characters crave judgement, but receive none, and they begin to fear that they are themselves not ‘as much as being seen’. Here again Beckett’s reversal seems entirely calculated: in Play, we see the characters projecting their increasingly desperate readings of purpose (even malign purpose would be a relief) onto a merely mechanical, indifferent spotlight. Again, they pointedly fail to achieve clarity, even when confronted with relentless light. ‘Indifference’ belongs to a register that Beckett invoked in his analysis of ‘the dispassionate acceptance that is beyond tragedy’ in Jack B. Yeats: other examples from the Sinclair letter would be ‘petrified insight’, ‘hardness’, ‘no pity’ (not even ‘sympathy’), and ‘inhumanity’.57 In Play, Beckett has found systematic formal expression for this whole stance: in the indifferent mechanical

54 55 56 57

Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 317. Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 36. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, p. 253. Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i, pp. 535–536.

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spotlight; in the automaton-like speed and monotonous delivery he demanded from his actors; in their depersonalising, ‘mineral’ make-up (‘Faces so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns’58); in the stylised shifts between individual and choral utterance as the light ‘plays’ with the voices; and in the device of a cycle of potentially endless repetitions. Everything we hear and see in fact evokes a series of past repetitions – further deflating emotional urgency, pity or sympathy. Furthermore, the deft manipulation of cliché – dead language spoken by dead voices – in Beckett’s play is another innovative formal feature. For instance, M’s phrase-making (‘all heart to heart, new leaf and bygones bygones’59) glibly advertises reconciliation and renewal, while in fact illustrating an eternal recurrence of drearily predictable sameness. This amounts to a detached observation and static ‘suspension’ of ‘the convention & performance of love & hate, joy & pain, giving & being given, taking & being taken’.60 The portrayal of the whole ‘convention’ of human desire as shadow-play or puppet-show also underlies the following refrain, again spoken by ‘M’: ‘All this, when will all this have been...just play?’.61 The grave dignity of Racinian ‘expiation’ is in the end, Beckett suggests, ‘just play’ – not praeparatio evangelica. Nevertheless, even if Play was Beckett’s attempt to push ‘beyond’ Racinian tragedy, he can hardly be said to have gone ‘beyond’ Christianity in any definitive way. On the contrary, his work remains haunted by the repeating gesture of overcoming-Christianity-by-negation, to the point of inventing a hell worse than any theological damnation for his characters, in order to insist on nonsalvation and non-expiation. What this essay has tried to demonstrate, then, is that Beckett’s creative dialogue with tragedy, both in theory and dramatic practice, simply cannot be separated from his lifelong agon with Christianity. Bibliography Ackerley, C.J., and S.E. Gontarski. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

58 59 60 61

Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 307. Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 311. Letter to Cissie Sinclair, 14 August 1937, in Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i, p. 536. Beckett, Play, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 313.

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Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove Press, 1977). Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986). Beckett, Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1999). Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume i: 1929–1940, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume ii: 1941–1956, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Driver, Tom. ‘Beckett by the Madeleine’. Columbia University Forum iv, Summer 1961. Reprinted in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Laurence Graver and Raymond Federman (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 217–223. Foehn, Melanie. ‘Samuel Beckett and the Writers of Port-Royal’ (University of Kent, Unpublished PhD thesis, 2012). Juliet, Charles. Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram Van Velde, trans. Tracy Cooke, Axel Nesme, Janey Tucket, Morgaine Reinl and Aude Jeanson (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009). Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth Knowlson. Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). LeJuez, Brigitte. Beckett Before Beckett, trans. Ros Schwartz (London: Souvenir Press, 2009). Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). O’Hara, J.D. Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997). Racine, Jean. Théatre Complet, edited by J. Morel and A. Viala (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1980). Racine, Jean. Andromache: A Tragedy in Five Acts, 1667, translated into English verse by Richard Wilbur (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Volume i, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966). Tonning, Erik. Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). Tonning, Erik. ‘“I am not reading philosophy”: Beckett and Schopenhauer’. In Beckett/ Philosophy, edited by Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani (Stuttgart: ibidemVerlag, 2015), pp. 75–101.

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Tonning, Erik. Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Wallace, Jennifer. The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Weller, Shane. ‘The Anethics of Desire: Beckett, Racine, Sade’. In Beckett and Ethics, edited by Russell Smith (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 102–117.

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Part 3 Tragedy and Christianity in Transformation: Towards the Present

∵

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Chapter 10

‘Is this the Promised End?’ Shakespearean Tragedy and a Christian Tragic Theology for Today Paul S. Fiddes 1

Can There Be a Tragic Theology?1

At the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, we are presented with the figure of Lear sitting with the dead body of his faithful daughter Cordelia cradled in his arms. In his dying words he asks the onlookers, including the audience: Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there!2 This plea does not, as some commentators have suggested, express a mistaken belief that Cordelia is still alive and breathing. The clue is in the posture of the king and his daughter, representing (as at least one critic has suggested)3 a kind of secular Pietà, an echo of the many religious works of art in which Mary holds the body of Christ in her arms after the deposition from the cross. As Mary draws attention to the dead Christ, so Lear asks us to look on Cordelia, inviting us to see humanity at zero-level, the human person reduced to the barest condition, stripped down to nothingness in the face of mortality and death. ‘Thou’lt come no more’, he cries with a terrible emphasis, filling up a whole line of verse with just one word: ‘Never, never, never, never, never’.4 Shortly before this, one bystander had asked ‘Is this the promis’d end?’ and another had added ‘Or image of that horror?’ On the surface the question is whether this might be such an awful event that it anticipates the day of judgement, as apocalypse 1 This paper is a thoroughly re-written version of the author’s ‘Tragedy as Rhetoric of Evil’, in Rhetorik des Bösen / The Rhetoric of Evil, edited by Paul S. Fiddes and Jochen Schmidt (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2013), pp. 165–192. Used in this form by kind permission of the original publisher. 2 Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Kenneth Muir. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966), ll. 5.3.310–1. 3 Helen Gardner, King Lear: The John Coffin Memorial Lecture, 1966 (London: Athlone Press, 1967). 4 Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 5.3.307–8.

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now. But there is the undertone: ‘Is this all that can be hoped for and expected of life?’ ‘Is this the promised end?’ Christian tragic theology, we may say, responds to the plea of King Lear to ‘look’ on mortality, suffering, and death: ‘Do you see this? Look there!’ insists Lear, and tragic theology looks and pays attention to two realities. First, it recognizes what Donald MacKinnon has called the ‘intractability’ of evil and suffering in the contingencies of everyday life.5 It insists that there can be no easy metaphysical consolations for these mysteries, no grand theories that can be foisted onto human misery, no guaranteed happy ending. In the second place, tragic theology calls on us to look at the cross of Jesus, insisting that we take the forsakenness and death of Christ with utter seriousness, forbidding us from any superficial alleviation of Christ’s suffering. What is meant by affirming that ‘God is revealed in Christ’ can only be grasped in the total desolation of Gethsemane and Calvary. In these two ways, in these two dimensions, tragic theology learns to look with Lear. This kind of theology has, however, met with a good deal of criticism. First of all, it may be objected that the word ‘tragic’ is a kind of sleight of hand. There is a gap between theatre and life. We are, it seems, jumping from a literary genre, tragedy-as-art, to the tragedies of daily experience. In fact, it is questionable whether the horrors and evils of everyday life should be called ‘tragedy’ at all. Much of human misery stems from moral turpitude, from horrific harm perpetrated by persons on others such as sexual abuse or the violence arising from religious or racial prejudice. It is not in our normal speech to call these events ‘tragedies’. The critic Helen Gardner, indeed, maintains that strictly speaking there are no ‘tragedies’ in real life, since tragedy is a work of art and intended to give pleasure, or at least satisfaction. She does allow that there are some events in life in which we feel that there is material for tragedy, and that some are ‘more than half way towards assuming tragic form’ since they have an element of irony characteristic of tragedy within them.6 She gives no examples, but we might think of a father who runs over and kills his own young son reversing out of his garage, due to some momentary loss of attention. Everyday events that we are more likely to call ‘tragedies’, such as deaths and injury resulting from earthquakes, volcanos, and tsunamis do not usually make the content of tragedies-as-art. 5 Donald MacKinnon, Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (London: Lutterworth, 1968), p. 102, and Explorations in Theology (London: scm Press, 1979), pp. 185, 187. 6 Helen Gardner, ‘Religion and Tragedy’, in Religion and Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), pp. 13–118, p. 18. See also Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p. 93: ‘real life is not tragic’.

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There are, nevertheless, good reasons for using the word ‘tragedy’ for the intractable evils of everyday life, and so for calling theological reflection upon them a ‘tragic theology’. I suggest that tragedy-as-art approximates to everyday miseries, or, as Terry Eagleton puts it, tragedy is ‘figurative’ of life; he suggests that ‘tragedy begins as art, which life then imitates’, although the artistic resonances may then drop out of the term altogether.7 We may say, then, that tragedy-as-art or dramatic tragedy enables us to notice and cope with everyday horrors. So Donald MacKinnon claims that the literary form of tragedy, such as Oedipus Rex or King Lear, is a form of discourse that expresses ‘as does no available alternative’8 the intractability of evil and suffering in everyday life. Dramatic tragedy, he maintains, best represents these irreducible aspects of human life and history, and is able to speak on behalf of the unspeakable. Like misery and evil in daily life, tragedy as a literary form deals with contingencies and resists any resolution in a broader system of explanation or justification.9 Tragedies, then, are as full of moral ambiguities as history is. Further, we may observe that horrors and evils come to us as Christians already wrapped up in the form of a story, first oral, then written, and then performed in the liturgy. I mean that both dimensions of human misery with which I began – the everyday suffering and the particular suffering of Christ – are portrayed in the text of Holy Scripture, and this has shaped the Christian community. The disturbed human situation is explored by the prophets and is focussed in such tragedies as Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Samson, and David and Saul.10 The Four Gospels tell in detail the story of the passion of Christ. For Christians there is then a constant overlap between experience and the story that shapes it, into which the hearers are drawn. Yet another reason for thinking there is a legitimate connection between artistic and everyday tragedy is the issue of where we experience ‘transcendence’. It is MacKinnon again who insists that that which is ‘transcendent’, that which exceeds empirical existence, can only be known within the manifold diversity of human life and the minutiae of the world, not as some foundation of reality which exists beyond them. Transcendence is about the ‘unnoticed 7 8 9 10

Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 14. Donald MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 136. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 145. Cf. Paul D. Janz, God, the Mind’s Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 171–172. See Ben Quash, ‘Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy’, in Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, edited by Giles Waller and Kevin T. Taylor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 15–34.

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richness and diversity of the everyday’.11 The strange is known within the familiar. Now, everyday evil is thoroughly contingent; it is intractable, inexplicable, mysterious, and not subject to explanation or manipulation in the interests of ideology. Experiencing it can thus orientate us towards the transcendent, while refusing any metaphysical solace. Tragedy-as-art, MacKinnon suggests, likewise signals transcendence. He writes: In tragedy we reach a form of representation that by the very ruthlessness of its interrogation enables us to project as does no available alternative, our ultimate questioning.12 The story of Christ’s passion above all, he argues, drops hints of transcendence like this, though in the form of irony and double-entendre. There is Pilate, for instance, ironically witnessing to the kingship of Jesus (‘what I have written I have written’) through angry resentment against those whom he supposes to have blackmailed him into connivance with their own purposes.13 Thus in both tragedy and daily misery we meet the strange in the familiar, and this links art and life. So far I have been dealing with the criticism that it is merely a careless use of language to speak about a tragic theology. But a second criticism is perhaps more substantial. I began by urging that we should look with Lear on two horrifying realities – the passion of Christ and everyday human miseries. Neither, so the criticism runs, can be seen as tragic in the perspective of the overall Christian story. The first, it may be argued, is undermined by the resurrection of Jesus. The light of Easter must surely cancel out the darkness of the cross. This means also that the second terrible reality is alleviated by the hope of eternal life based on the triumph of Christ. George Steiner, for example, robustly asserts that: ‘Christianity is an anti-tragic vision of the world. […] Christianity offers to man an assurance of final certitude and repose in God. He leads the soul towards justice and resurrection’.14 Again he writes, ‘Real tragedy can occur only where the tormented soul believes there is no time for God’s forgiveness’.15 11 12 13 14 15

Here MacKinnon is referring to the art of Cézanne. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 109. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics, p. 136. MacKinnon, Borderlands, p. 91. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 331. See Graham Ward, ‘Tragedy as Subclause: Steiner and MacKinnon’, Heythrop Journal, no. 34 (1993): pp. 274–287. Steiner, Death of Tragedy, p. 332.

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Echoing this last sentiment, Brian Hebblethwaite believes that if tragedy means ‘ultimate, eternal failure and an absolutely unredeemable corruption of the good’, then this must be countered by the hope of universal salvation or apokatastasis.16 Thus he opposes MacKinnon’s contention that tragedy cannot be erased from Christianity. He admits that it is certainly hard to apply the ultimate Christian hope to situations of unspeakable tragedy without the appearance of trivializing suffering; but he believes that the fact that tragedies in life have not so far been resolved ‘has no bearing whatsoever on the characteristically Christian faith that, in the end, they will be resolved, in the sense that their victims will participate in resurrection, transformation and consummation of all things’.17 To the question ‘Is this the promised end?’ – or, ‘is this tragic event all there is to be expected?’ – the Christian answer must be no. Asking what might be meant by calling Jesus himself a tragic figure, Hebblethwaite considers a number of tragic elements of the story to which MacKinnon draws attention: there is Judas, there are those at the time who hardened their hearts against Jesus and became mere instruments in the drama, and there is the ensuing horror of anti-semitism through the ages which has taken the crucifixion as its excuse. The question, he thinks, is whether these failures, tragedies, and horrors are ‘ultimate, irredeemable facts’ and whether the people involved in them are ‘for ever unforgivable, unchangeable and unresurrectable’.18 Only if they are, he asserts, can tragedy be said to be inseparable from Christian faith. But Hebblethwaite is offering us a particular definition of tragedy. With Steiner he assumes that a story of forgiveness and transformation can have no tragic elements in it, and this I am going to contest before we reach the end of the paper. 2

What Kind of Tragedy?

But if there can be Christian tragedy, and if tragic dramas approximate to the miseries of life, what model of tragedy are we actually talking about? For MacKinnon, and for Hans Urs von Balthasar, the paradigm lies in Greek tragedy,

16 17 18

Brian Hebblethwaite, ‘MacKinnon and the Problem of Evil’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon, edited by Kenneth Surin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 131–145, p. 140. Hebblethwaite, ‘MacKinnon and the Problem of Evil’, p. 141. Hebblethwaite, ‘MacKinnon and the Problem of Evil’, p. 142. Reinhold Niebuhr took a similar view much earlier in his Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (London: Nisbet, 1938), pp. 153–169.

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to which we owe the very word, tragoidia (or the ‘goat song’19). But there are two main problems, I suggest, for rooting a Christian tragic theology in Attic drama. In the first place, Greek tragedy offers the kind of large metaphysical explanations that it seems a tragic theology must avoid. It does certainly show an ambiguity of moral meaning, but this points to a transcendent horizon of cosmic forces to which human beings are subject – the malice of the gods, the necessity of fate, and the contamination of evil which is a kind of natural energy flowing from generation to generation. Bewailing the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the beginning of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the chorus portrays Agamemnon as ‘putting on the yoke of necessity’, and so changing in character from being a loving father to being ‘sacriligious’ and ‘cruel’.20 Evil arises not in the human will but in the gap between individual guilt and the arbitrary malignance of the gods. As Sophocles concludes The Women of Trachis, ‘mark how the distant insensitive gods/have permitted these things to occur’.21 There must be some doubt about whether this kind of tragedy reflects the contingency and accidents of life that MacKinnon celebrates. Second, Greek tragedy assumes an economy in which excessive violence is endemic to society, and sacrifice is needed to relieve stress, puncture a crisis, and allow society to recover. This mechanism has been well analysed by René Girard in his study of competitive violence and the scapegoating of victims, while later in his work he also proposed that the Gospel story shows Christ as deconstructing this myth of redemptive violence. In his death Christ shows that the victim of society’s violence is innocent, and so he exposes the whole sacrificial system.22 David Bentley Hart and (to a lesser extent) John Milbank are among theologians who draw from this analysis to deny that Christ can be seen as a tragic hero in the mode of Greek tragedy, although they also (in my view wrongly) conclude that Christ cannot be any kind of tragic figure at all, failing to consider the potential for Christology of other tragic forms.23

19 20 21 22 23

The term probably indicates the origin of tragic drama in the cult-rites of Dionysus. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in Greek Tragedies. Volume 1, ed. and trans. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), p. 12, ll. 218–219. Sophocles, The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes, trans. Robert M. Torrance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), ll. 1266–70. My italics. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Athlone Press, 1995), pp. 77–103, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London: Athone Press, 1987), pp. 326–351. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 373–394; John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 31–36, 149–150.

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A defence can nevertheless be offered of Greek tragedy as a paradigm for tragic theology. It might be said that while the words of the text insist on a tragic necessity, when the drama is performed it feels very different; space is opened out in performance for alternatives, contingencies, and ambiguities to appear as we watch people actually caught between various forces.24 It may also be said that the tragedies themselves regard some sacrifices as failed sacrifices or ‘sacrilegious’, as in the example from the Agamemnon I have already quoted.25 Von Balthasar puts up the stoutest defence, fitting tragedy into his vision of the participation of human life in the drama that happens between the persons of the Trinity. He maintains that what really matters is the presence of the gods with human beings in the drama, the binding together of the gods with human suffering. It is because Greek tragedy depicts ‘humans in terrible situations while in a God-soaked environment’ that Christ is the ‘heir of tragedy’.26 A loss of this sense of divine presence in the midst of suffering leads, in Balthasar’s view, to the loss of tragedy itself and its replacement by the modern theatre of the absurd. Here he follows Steiner’s view of the death of tragedy, and (unlike Steiner) he shows no interest at all in contemporary drama or novels that might be called tragic in tone. Yet modern tragedy marks a sensibility we cannot ignore. God’s presence has to be re-thought if it is not to become absence. The particular kind of divine engagement with the world presented in Greek tragedy – human beings facing implacable cosmic forces – is no longer consistent with life as it appears to be. I have suggested that tragedy can be an approximation to life, but tragedy portraying the kind of divine presence characteristic of Greek tragedy loses figurative power and no longer enables us to face horrors and evils in all their terrible contingency. There is in fact another kind of tragedy which has had a powerful influence on modern writing, a form ignored by Hart and generally conformed to the Greek model by Balthasar. I mean Shakespearean tragedy, to which I now come. Shakespearean tragedy portrays evil in a way that belongs to our modern consciousness, shaped as it has been by Christian culture. 24 25 26

See David Cunningham, ‘Tragedy Without Evasion: Attending [to] Performances’, in Christian Theology and Tragedy, edited by Waller and Taylor, pp. 213–232, pp. 219–231. See Douglas Hedley, ‘Sacrifice and the Tragic Imagination’, in Christian Theology and Tragedy, edited by Waller and Taylor, pp. 199–212, pp. 200, 208–211. He stresses that the point of sacrifice is to make something holy. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. Volume 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, edited by John Riches, trans. Brian McNeil, Andrew Louth, John Saward, Rowan Williams, and Oliver Davies(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 101–113, 151–154, and TheoDrama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume 5: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), pp. 192–194, 244–246.

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The sovereign force of Fate – to which even the gods are subject in Greek drama – has to bow to the Christian idea of the providence of a personal God, and to the recognition that this will be mysterious, baffling, and hidden to human eyes. Envisaging the nature of evil as privatio boni, a deliberate turning away from the good, means that evil is not an eternal force but a disruption in the created order, and so one finds what is under-represented in Greek tragedy – a sense of the mystery of human iniquity, an irrational malignity that fills a Goneril or an Iago. 3

The Tension in Shakespearean Tragedy

While there can be no rigid theory of Shakespearean tragedy, we can detect a continual tension between Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and the society around them; there is a conflict between individuals who perceive some truth or value that challenges custom, and the society that guards habitus and convention. These protagonists have a vision of how things are that contradicts appearance and traditional structures, and they create friction with their surroundings for a while; but they are unable to hold to the vision they glimpse, or to build anything substantial upon it. Shakespeare has inherited several strands of tragedy that preceded him – for instance the medieval concept of Fortune that overthrows the great and prosperous, so developing the classical idea of Fate, the Greek notion of a tragic flaw (especially hubris), and the Roman Seneca’s exploration of the inner destructive workings of the mind, driven by such passions as lust, ambition, and jealousy. But these strands are woven into and subsumed by the main theme of a conflict of values between the individual and society. Here Shakespeare seems to have anticipated Hegel’s theory of tragedy as a clash of ideals, each noble and worthy, but apparently incompatible in the course of history; there is, maintains Hegel, a conflict in the ethical ‘substance’ of the universe.27 However, for Hegel these contrary values are ultimately to be reconciled in the return of Absolute Spirit to itself; all dialectic is resolved in synthesis by a necessity of the onward movement of Spirit. For Shakespeare, as we shall see, this is not where consolation lies. The dialectic is always unresolved; the tension remains and has a destructive edge. It is the love-tragedies that provide the most obvious example of a conflict of values between individual and society. They exhibit a particularly intense 27

F.W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 2, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1193–1197.

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form of this pattern: in a kind of swinging movement, the hero begins with a new vision of love which is at odds with society, relapses back into the old perspective, and then attempts unsuccessfully to recover the former height of vision. For example, in Antony and Cleopatra, Antony begins with an intuitive vision of his love with Cleopatra in Egypt: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space, Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life Is to do thus.28 But he betrays his vision when he swings back to Rome to recover the old values of political power, reflecting: ‘These strong Egyptian fetters I must break/ Or lose myself in dotage’.29 The political bargain he makes by marrying Caesar’s sister will mean tragedy when he swings back again to Egypt and Cleopatra, as he must. As Wilson Knight perceives about both Antony and Cleopatra, there is ‘a strange see-saw motion of the spirit, an oscillating tendency, back and forth’.30 Again, when Othello woos and marries Desdemona, his love challenges the outward forms and conventions of his society. His tragedy lies in failing to hold to his intuitive perception of Desdemona, and in relapsing into the prevailing view of his world; prompted by Iago, he accepts the verdict that the match is such an unlikely one that she is bound to betray him in the end, and he lets the outward evidence of his senses (the handkerchief) convince him against the inner knowledge of his faith. Judging that Desdemona’s love for him is ‘nature, erring from itself’, he capitulates to the surface view of things expressed by Iago: Not to affect many proposed matches, Of her own clime, complexion and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends; Fie, we may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion; thoughts unnatural.31 28 29 30 31

Wiliam Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M.R. Ridley. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1967), ll. 1.1.33–7. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ll. 1.2.114–5. G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 265. Shakespeare, Othello, edited by M.R. Ridley. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966), ll. 3.3.231–7.

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Similarly, Romeo, from the perspective of his love for Juliet, begins by challenging all the conventions of his feuding society by tolerating the insults of Tybalt. But he loses his grasp on the new vision when Mercutio is killed, exclaiming ‘O sweet Juliet,/Thy beauty hath made me effeminate’.32 He reverts to the old vendetta between the houses of Montague and Capulet, kills Tybalt, and so catapults himself into tragedy. From that relapse flows all the haste which brings them finally to the ‘dateless bargain to engrossing Death’.33 Other tragedies of Shakespeare do not show the disastrous element of ‘relapse’ we find in the love-tragedies, but they still exhibit a protagonist in a clash of values with his environment and unable to sustain some personal vision. Hamlet finds himself torn between his own sense of himself as a questing intellectual and humanist Prince, probing at truth, and the public role of avenger which has been thrust upon him. We are presented with a Hamlet who plays at being mad, ‘putting an antic disposition on’ while at other times he is perfectly sane and self-composed; he is not mad, but assumes the masks of the melancholic and the court-jester in order the better to pursue his role as avenger of his murdered father which the conventions of his time – and the seeming ghost of his father – demand. Notoriously, Hamlet delays in killing Claudius, and it is this delay that – in terms of the plot – leads to the tragic disaster in which seven people die when they need not have done so, including Ophelia and Hamlet himself. But his is not a psychological case-study of an indecisive mind; he is caught impossibly between two styles of life, the intellectual, critical, and fair-minded Prince and the revenge hero. He is caught between two ways of living that are basically incompatible. The world being what it is, trying to live on two levels at once will destroy him. The conflict between the roles Hamlet tries to play is highlighted by the incompatibility between the ethics of revenge and Christian ethics. It is simply accepted by Hamlet and the other characters that just revenge is right and proper; there is no overt moral struggle between this revenge ethic and the ethic of Christian charity and forgiveness, but the appearance of Christian beliefs in the play makes us and the audience feel that there should be such a conflict, and throws us as spectators into a moral impasse about where our sympathies lie. Moreover, where these beliefs surface, this is itself in a morally ambiguous context. Notably, there is the scene where Hamlet has the opportunity to kill Claudius and postpones the act because Claudius is on his knees praying, and Hamlet does not want to dispatch him in a state of grace and 32 33

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, edited by Brian Gibbons. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), ll. 3.1.112–3. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, l. 5.3.115.

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reward him with heaven; he would rather wait and kill him when he is unprepared, so sending him to hell. There is a vast moral complexity in this scene. It is only because Hamlet has a Christian faith at all that the consideration arises; a pagan would have killed Claudius on the spot. But he is wrong theologically, as Claudius could have told him himself. As he rises from his knees he admits that no prayer is going to help him while his sin is unrepented and no penance has been made: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below./Words without thoughts never to heaven go’.34 The viewer is led into thinking that Hamlet has missed an opportunity through making this error, but at the same time from the Christian perspective we can hardly blame Hamlet for not killing Claudius: he seems to be doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Without open debate, moral issues are being raised that throw the spectator into uncertainty and irresolution, into a similar hesitation as Hamlet, arising from a conflict of roles. Lear, in his tragedy, begins by sharing the assumptions of his society, based on an economy of exchange. He tries to measure love arithmetically, proposing to dispose of his kingdom according to the quantity of expressions of love his daughters can summon up. He should not be surprised when his evil daughters progressively reduce the number of his knights by their own arithmetic to zero: ‘what need of one?’ they ask, and he finally sees that quantity is not everything – ‘O! reason not the need’.35 Having made love into a matter of calculation and percentage, declaring harshly to Cordelia that ‘nothing will come of nothing’,36 he propels himself precisely into nothingness. Reduced to the zero level of bare humanity he ends stripped of everything – clothes, sanity, and his only loving daughter, Cordelia. In between, the passing of time is marked by three mock trials in which he plays at judging his two ungrateful daughters, and in which he learns a new set of values which challenge his culture, setting him against it. In the first of these scenes, which takes place in the raging storm of the open heath, Lear realizes for the first time the state of the naked poor. He calls upon the gods to show justice to the poor and to have vengeance upon their so-called judges who have exploited them; significantly, at this point he includes himself as chief among the oppressed: ‘I am a man/More sinn’d against than sinning’.37 Lear has had a glimpse of humanity in its basic state, and he expects the 34 35 36 37

Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), ll. 3.3.97–8. Shakespeare, King Lear, l. 2.4.266. Shakespeare, King Lear, l. 1.1.90. Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 3.2.58–9.

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thunder of heaven to intervene on the side of the poor and himself. He is still confident about the justice of society, and wants it applied. In the second of these mock trial scenes, however, sheltering in a farm-house near the castle, the journey to nothing has gone a further stage. Now as Tom, the Fool, and Lear play out a court scene where Regan and Goneril are accused, the poor and the justices have their roles reversed; the beggar and the fool change places with the judges.38 We have gone further than demanding that the law should be applied justly for the poor; the whole order of judges has been supplanted by the poor and the mad. In the final trial scene his conflict with the economy of exchange has come to a point of furious intensity. He realizes that in their basic state all people are equally guilty, all sinners. He calls for the beadle who lashes the back of the whore tohalt his hand, for ‘Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind/For which thou whipp’st her’.39 This vision of universal sin does not, however, lead Lear directly to quote Paul’s text in Romans 3:21, ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’. In his mad wisdom he creates an apparently anti-Pauline text: ‘None does offend, none I say, none’.40 I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight.41 Since all are guilty, none are guilty; no discrimination can be made between them. All are equally guilty; all are equally innocent. We have arrived at nothing. At the end of the play, with Cordelia dead on his lap, he cries out: And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!42 The three-fold ‘no’ and the five-fold ‘never’ underline the story of a man reduced to nothing, the passion story of a man stripped bare. The action proceeds 38 39 40 41 42

Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 3.6.37–8. Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 4.6.164–5. Shakespeare, King Lear, l. 4.6.170. Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 4.6.112–6. Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 5.3.305–8.

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remorselessly until Lear has nothing left that people usually build upon in their lives. He has come to the final ‘no’ and ‘never’. He has entered apocalypse now. We are to look upon the picture and learn the Protestant, Reformation lesson that human beings are in themselves ‘nothing’, created ex nihilo.43 Unless we face this apocalypse, this revelation, we cannot begin to build any structures of value. However, the zero-state is even more radical than the Protestant Reformers might have conceived it. With his anti-Pauline text (‘none does offend’), arising out of his conflict with a culture of exchange, we are left in a state of moral indeterminacy, even moral vacuum. All these tragic characters – with the possible exception of Macbeth – oscillate from one claim upon them to another, ‘lackeying the varying tide/ To rot [themselves] with motion’ (as the censorious Caesar comments about the common people).44 They lose their balance, alternately asserting their freedom and capitulating to the limits of their environment. We cannot altogether blame them, for the pressures of their world make their fall practically inevitable. 4

The End in Shakespearean Tragedy

But this is not all there is to be said. Death, when it comes, gives Shakespeare’s tragic figures an opportunity to affirm the vision they have lost. Death is a waste of the gifts and potential of their life, and yet there is a moment of triumph in it. As Othello stabs himself, he recalls his valour by telling the little story of his smiting of the Turk, and re-asserts his love for Desdemona: I kiss’d thee ere I killed thee, no way but this Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.45 Thus, in the act of dying he affirms the values of courage, honour, and love that he had perceived beneath the surface and yet failed to live by: as Helen Gardner judges, ‘beginning and end chime against each other. In both the value of

43

44 45

E.g. ‘God destroys all things and makes us out of nothing and then justifies us’. Martin Luther, Die zweiteDisputationengegen die Antinomer, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritischeGesamtausgabe. Volume 39/1: Disputationen 1535–38(Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1926), p. 470. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, l. 1.4.47 Shakespeare, Othello, ll. 5.2.359–60.

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life and love is affirmed’.46 Similarly Antony and Cleopatra, while betraying their love for each other in life, attain fidelity in death; now, claims Cleopatra, I am marble-constant: now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine. […] The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch Which hurts, and is desir’d.47 As Lear dies, asking those around to ‘look on her lips’, he evokes her love and the faithful – though halting – speech that he failed sufficiently to recognize when she lived. He is not redeemed, but he does learn what love is, and the love which he has for Cordelia remains in the face of death. In performance of both King Lear and Timon of Athens the spectators are provoked into thinking what might be built on the nothingness to which each protagonist is reduced at the end of the play. In both we are called to look on humanity as ‘the thing itself […] poor, bare, forked animal’ (Lear),48 and exhorted to ‘let it go naked – men may see’t better’ (Timon),49 and in both Shakespeare also makes the audience feel that ‘nothing’ cannot be the last word, the promised end. However, in Lear we are given a hint as to how we might build on nothingness, with a picture of faithful love; in Timon we have to do all the work as we are left only with a misanthropic curse – unless there is a hint of the possibility of renewal in the image of the ever-changing sea, as Timon vows to make an ‘everlasting mansion’ on ‘the beached verge of the salt flood’.50 Hamlet ends with the Prince being carried away in state as a soldier who has faithfully kept the watch (‘Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage’, commands his successor). This is the image with which the play begins – that of a night watch with a sentinel who is ‘sick at heart’ upon the battlements of Elsinore. There comes to mind the Renaissance image of the soul as a soldier on watch in this world, declining to take the easy way out through suicide (‘when he might his quietus make/With a bare bodkin’).51 In death, Hamlet has discharged 46 47 48 49 50 51

See Helen Gardner, ‘The Noble Moor’, in The Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume xli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 203. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ll. 5.2.239–40, 294–5. Shakespeare, King Lear, ll. 3.4.109–110. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, l. 5.1.65. The reference is to ingratitude, but is easily extended to ‘ingrateful man’ (KingLear, l. 3.2.9). This is suggested by Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘“Thee thither in a whirlwind”: Tragedy and Theology in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens’, in Christian Theology and Tragedy, edited by Waller and Taylor, pp. 75–100, p. 85. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ll. 3.1.75–6.

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his duty despite his failures on the way. In a different setting, Richard ii has squandered his kingdom by leasing out its lands to raise money, and is told bluntly ‘Landlord of England art thou now, not king’;52 yet in the face of death, confessing that he does not know what his name is any longer, he can assume again the name of king and the kingly vocation he once felt deeply, claiming that his killers have with ‘the King’s blood stained the King’s own land’.53 Of course, we must get matters into perspective, as the Clown does at Cleopatra’s theatrical death, remembering that he once knew a woman ‘something given to lie’.54 A bystander at Othello’s dying speech observes, ‘All that’s spoke is marr’d’.55 Fortinbras, surveying the scene of dead bodies around Hamlet’s own body, observes that this might be expected on a field of battle, but ‘here shows much amiss’.56 Truly, if it were not for death’s coming the hero might betray the vision again: Cleopatra might again ‘pack cards’ with Caesar, Lear might again begin to calculate love, and Richard might again justify his irresponsible behaviour by appeal to the divine right of kings. But this is just the point: since death has come, it can be used to fix the vision into a monument of art which will survive death itself. Death can be used to defeat itself, and the mutability of time is overcome in the moment of its apparent victory. Death makes the story immortal. Shakespearean tragedy thus suggests that to die well, in a way that summons up those values by which one wanted, but failed, to live is to make death serve one. It is to make a pattern and a story that will overcome the ravages of time more effectively than brass or stone (see Sonnet 65). At the end of Romeo and Juliet the Montagues and Capulets who have now been reconciled by the deaths of their children raise a golden statue to their memory; but the enduring monument is the story which can never be forgotten. Hamlet stops Horatio from drinking the poison so that he will live to tell Hamlet’s story properly, and at the end the bodies are placed ‘high on a stage’ while Horatio asks, ‘Let me speak to th’yet unknowing world’.57 Fortinbras calls all the noblest to be ‘the audience’, and the story is to be ‘presently performed’.58 The art of story has conquered death, and Hamlet is immortal through it.

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Shakespeare, Richard ii, edited by Peter Ure. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966), l. 2.1.113. Shakespeare, Richard ii, l. 5.5.110. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ll. 5.2.250–1. Shakespeare, Othello, l. 5.2.358. Shakespeare, Hamlet, l. 5.2.407. Shakespeare, Hamlet, l. 5.2.384. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ll. 5.2.392, 398.

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The word lives in the grasp of death. Shakespeare does not directly associate the immortality of art with a literal immortality, a life beyond death. Although Cleopatra, in constructing the artistic tableau of her suicide, muses that she is ‘again for Cydnus/To meet Mark Antony’, and Antony earlier has the hope that they will meet again in an Elysium where ‘souls do couch on flowers’,59 the point of the scene is not hope in an afterlife. Yet this image of eternity does reach out beyond the initial moments of history. Its effect is unlimited. It is an image of eternity that gives hope for the finding of what has been lost, for the recovery of a lost vision, lost possibilities, and lost values. Death which seems to have triumphed has over-reached itself and lost its prey in giving the opportunity for this vision, this beauty, to be disclosed and affirmed. There is then a proper consolation in Shakespearean tragedy – not a metaphysical explanation or justification for evil and suffering, but the simple affirmation of human values which death cannot destroy.60 In the Shakespearean model of the tragic protagonist these are not just any values a person might want to hold. They are consistent with what we may call Shakespeare’s ‘general spirituality’, developed in a situation of blurred religious identities during the English Reformation,61 which is a propitious moment for allowing Shakespeare to affirm certain values without having to attach them to any particular dogmatic system. Chief among these values are the need for forgiveness in the face of human moral frailty, the persistence of love in the face of passing time and death pressing in, and a suspicion towards rigid schemes of order in the state and family. This kind of consolation is a key instance of ‘form’ in tragedy. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch echoes MacKinnon in declaring that tragedy reflects the contingency, accidents and diversity of everyday life. However, she is clear that tragedy-as-art holds all this in tension with form, writing that: What makes tragic art so disturbing is that the self-contained form is combined with something, the individual being and destiny of persons, which defies form. A great tragedy leaves us in eternal doubt. […] In the 59 60

61

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ll. 5.2.227–8, l. 4.14.51. Gardner, ‘Religion and Tragedy’, p. 88. Helen Gardner stresses that the values of love, affection, mercy, and forgiveness belong peculiarly to Shakespeare’s tragedies, and in these (rather than explicit Christian doctrine) she finds the evidence of a Christian world-view; they are not to be found in Greek tragedy with its exalting of apatheia. See David Daniell, ‘Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind’, in Shakespeare Survey 54, edited by Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–12. Barbara Everett offers the image of a ‘draughty church’ in her ‘Saint Shakespeare’, London Review of Books 32, no. 16 (19 August, 2010): pp. 32–34.

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practical world there may be only mourning and the final acceptance of the incomplete. Form is the great consolation of love, but it is also its great temptation.62 Art, and above all tragedy, offers consolation in its form, against the formlessness of life. Tragedy offers a kind of consolation, or we would not find it pleasurable and satisfying. Something rings true in the theory of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that the end of a tragedy enables us to face the inevitability of our own death, to ‘embrace darkness as a bride’, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra puts it in her dying words.63 For Schopenhauer, this end fosters resignation, producing in the spectator a moment of ‘quietness’, a joyful surrender of the struggle of the will to live.64 Nietzsche proposes that since tragedy integrates the Dionysian and the Apollonian types of art, it combines a recognition of the dissolution death brings with an affirmation of the values of life as a sublime spectacle; this, he thinks against Schopenhauer, stiffens the will to overcome.65 Shakespeare offers neither resignation nor triumphalism, but the quiet persuasion of tragi-comedy that evil does not hold the final victory, and that death can become our servant instead of an enemy. This is not after all ‘the promised end’. As Murdoch points out, we certainly do not read this lesson easily from the miseries of the everyday world. Chief among these must be the immense evil of the European Holocaust, opaque to reading, inviting only silence.66 But then, as I have suggested above, tragedies as art-works can only correspond approximately to historic evils, and they sometimes offer quite poor analogies. Within the form of art, Shakespeare seems most at home in the genre of tragi-comedy.67 While his tragedies end on a subdued note of affirmation, 62 63 64 65 66

67

Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’ (1959), in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by Peter Conradi (London: Chatto &Windus, 1997), pp. 205–220, pp. 219–220. Cf. Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, pp. 93–96. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ll. 5.2.294–5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 1, para. 51, and vol. 2, para. 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 10. Further on the end of classical theodicy in the wake of the Holocaust in Jewish and Christian thought, see: Paul S. Fiddes ‘Suffering in Theology and Modern European Thought’, in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, edited by Nicholas Adams, George Pattison and Graham Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 181–8. This is his own kind of tragi-comedy, not the kind of tragi-comedy commended by his contemporary Giambattista Guarini, author of Il Pastor Fido, who advocated some miraculous intervention in the denouement.

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his comedies end with dark shadows among the festivities. While there is reconciliation, often a dance and perhaps a marriage or two, some character is usually left out of the charmed circle (either excluded, like Shylock and Don John, or self-excluded like Malvolio and Jacques), and we are never allowed to forget that time has passed whose loss can never be compensated for, and that death presses in. I am shortly going to suggest that the Christian story itself is not so much Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ as the divine tragi-comedy. 5

Is the Passion a Tragedy?

So we return to the challenge I outlined at the beginning of this paper. Lear invites us to look at everyday, universal suffering and tragic theology adds the invitation to look at the particular passion of Christ, but are these two realities tragic at all from a Christian perspective? The story of Christ is of one who maintains a vision of the kingdom of God, of justice, peace, acceptance of the outcasts, and forgiveness, against the conventions of the society around him, both Jewish and Roman. His career is a failure in the sense that the society does not accept his vision and rejects him, and he ends in utter forsakenness and alienation. Thus far Jesus fits the shape of a Shakesperean tragic hero. He does not, however, conform to the typical pattern in any failure to hold to his vision of transformative values under the pressures of life. He remains obedient to his Father’s purpose to the very end, but still suffers the complete loss that characterizes the tragic figure. Indeed, what is unique about Jesus is that he suffers infinite loss precisely in faithfully holding to the vision of the kingdom. This is the particular nature of his own self-sacrifice, and it points us to an alienation undertaken in willing identification with human life at zero-point. The complete participation of Christ in the suffering that evil brings is shown by another key difference from the Shakespearean hero: in the death of Christ there is no comforting affirmation of human values. In a Shakespearean tragedy, at the very moment when conflicting values run together into death, the vision can be affirmed. Death which seems to triumph has over-reached itself and lost its prey. But as Christ does not fail in holding to the vision given him by his Father, so his death does not embody and preserve any values that have been lost. The uniqueness of this tragic Figure is that loss is total, the desolation ultimate. MacKinnon’s concept of tragedy that has no consolation within it applies in fact only to the tragedy of Christ. It may even be, I venture to suggest, that MacKinnon has unconsciously developed his general definition of tragedy from the particular event of the cross. Only in this story of death is there no consolation. This means that all those who suffer, in their own $)((-&
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particular way, can identify with Christ and find they are not forsaken because he was forsaken. Thus the tragic pattern is still recognizable in the story of the cross, but it has been transformed. Christ is a tragic hero in so far as he has upheld a vision and values which are in conflict with his society, and this has brought him to utter disaster in the end. On the other hand, he is not a tragic hero since he has neither failed in holding to the vision, nor experiences any consolation in the face of death. One might say that he simultaneously fulfills and surpasses the genre of tragedy. In other words, to speak of his story as tragedy is a short-hand way of saying that it has an analogy to tragedy, which at the same time must imply some dis-analogies. For Christians, the story of Jesus is unique in the extent and focus with which it discloses the nature and purpose of God, but it need not be different in principle from the whole world-archive of stories. 6

Tragedy in the Face of Resurrection?

The proper consolations of a literary tragedy are thus absent from the cross. Consolation is only to be found in what follows the cross in the Christian story, the glory of the resurrection. For some the very place of the resurrection in Christian faith means that the cross cannot be a tragedy. In answer, we may say that resurrection is not the reversal of the tragedy of the cross: it is an event of a completely different order. Death is not overcome by some inner meaning of the event, making it less final, but by new creation. It is just because death is final within this old order of creation, and Christ meets its finality head on, that God has to do something new in the face of death. In itself, the cross has no meaning: but it can acquire meaning. David Bentley Hart affirms that in the resurrection God ‘disrupts the analogy between cosmic and civil violence’, untelling the tale by which power sustains itself.68 It is for this reason, and not because (as Steiner argues) resurrection dispels the darkness of the cross, that Hart denies that the death of Christ is a tragedy. Because of the resurrection it is, he urges, impossible to be reconciled to either coercive or natural violence, to ascribe its origins to fate or cosmic order. Since, in his view, this is what tragedy does, the resurrection prevents us from thinking of the death of Christ as a tragedy. However, if we understand tragedy in a Shakespearean rather than a Greek mode, we can affirm this ‘disorientating rhetoric of the empty tomb’ and still understand the passion of Christ as a kind of tragedy. 68

Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 385.

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For Hart, tragedy is simply about excessive violence. But Shakespearean tragedy is at heart about the relation between a conflict of values and appropriate consolation. It is this shape of tragedy that allows us to see the death of Christ as a kind of tragedy in the light of resurrection, despite dis-analogies. The death of Christ is unique because we can find no consolation there; he cannot, it seems, use the moment of death to recall the values of his life as do Shakespeare’s heroes. According to the earliest Gospel tradition he can only cry ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ followed by a wordless cry of desolation (Mark 15:37). But his story follows the pattern of tragedy because his whole life has been a tension between his vision of ultimate value and the conventions of society around. Thus he fulfills and surpasses the sequence of tragedy, allowing us to understand the vicarious nature of his death. The resurrection, his glorification, does not only deconstruct and invalidate the human violence shown in the crucifixion. It is God’s validation of the vision to which Christ has faithfully held. The cross cannot validate itself. It has no meaning in itself. It has all the ambiguity of tragedy: we are left with the open question, ‘Is this the promised end?’ From the other side of Easter, the meaningless cross can acquire meaning. Though the experience was one of utter estrangement, we can say now that God was in it and using it as a final reconciling act. From the standpoint of Christian poetics we may also say that it is the resurrection that allows all other human tragedies to show marks of consolation in their endings. Their very consolations derive from this one validation of a vision. 7

Can Consummation Be Tragic? Is This the Promised End?

But there remains then a final challenge to the designation of the passion of Jesus as a tragedy: can it be tragic in the light of eschatological hope for all, based in the resurrection? With regard to the participants in all other human passions, it is surely possible to conceive of final consummation and final tragedy together, in the reaping of a harvest of what A.N. Whitehead called a ‘tragic beauty’.69 Apokotastasis need not exclude elements of tragedy, as Hebblethwaite assumes, in so far as future transformation and new creation is an open concept. The new creation of created persons does not imply the making of a standard product, but the raising to a new level of reality of a personality that has been shaped by all the decisions and actions of this life. One might then 69

A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (London: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 356, 380–381.

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envisage that there are values and experiences that were within the potential of a person, but have tragically not been actualized, some goods which were within the grasp of a person that have been neglected. There has been, in short, evil as ‘lack of good’ (privatio boni) and this makes human persons what they are. While we can only speak of new creation in images and metaphors rather than literally, there is reason to think that persons who experience future redemption will be totally satisfied with their vision of God, and will be unaware that they lack some unfulfilled potential. Objectively their beauty will include an aspect of tragedy, but it is likely that this lack of fulfilment will be known only to God, who will know that persons are not entirely what they could have been. The God who feels and values the worth of every life will also (as Charles Hartshorne puts it), be open ‘to the tragedy of unfulfilled desire’.70 In this sense, eschatologically God will be the only eternal experient of tragedy, and we might conceive this to be an aspect of the divine humility. We can, of course, only think in this way if we deny the view of Aquinas that in God all potentials are always perfectly actualized, since God will know some potentials that have either not been actualized at all, or which have been modified by the choices and creative freedom of God’s creatures. But then, we might agree with process thinkers such as Hartshorne, that the omniscience of God is perfectly satisfied by God’s knowing all potentials and all actualities there are, without knowing what is potential as actual.71 Such omniscience is congruent with the concept of a passible God, who in self-limitation allows created reality to make an impact upon the very being of God, enhancing divine satisfaction and causing divine suffering. A vision of God as Trinity allows us to think of broken human relations being taken into eternal relations of love and (as Balthasar puts it) deepening the difference and separation between the divine persons into a tragic gulf of estrangement.72 Such a God, one might think, is revealed in the passion of Christ, participating with infinite empathy in every human passion. Christ himself one cannot conceive as being ‘less than he could be’, but the nature of his tragedy is surely that he does not achieve all he wants to accomplish in human life, that there are potentials in the lives of those whom he touches in his ministry that remain 70 71 72

Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Hamden: Archon Books, 1964), p. 294. See Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 105–106. Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology For Our Time (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1967), pp. 20–21. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume 4: The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), pp. 324–328.

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unactualized, and will remain so for eternity. In the Christian eschatological vision persons who are involved in the tragedy of Christ at any point of history are never ‘unforgivable, unchangeable and unresurrectable’;73 but there may be ‘failures, tragedies and horrors’ that are ‘ultimate’ (though not ‘unredeemable’) in the sense of making an eternal impact on the life of God. Such a God is not the eternal victim of the universe, disabled and broken by suffering, since passionate love can absorb suffering and transform it. Indeed, we may judge that only suffering love has the power to persuade reluctant human wills towards the Good, and so overcome evil. Does such a vision of tragic beauty make evil eternal in God? Not, certainly, in the sense of a continuing turning away from the good (deprivatio boni), but where human choices have resulted in a loss of the good in this life, the marks and the loss will remain in the being of God. Poetically we may dare to say that there is eternally a cross in the heart of God. That, indeed, is the promised end. Bibliography Aeschylus. Agamemnon. In Greek Tragedies. Volume 1, ed. and trans. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord. Volume 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, edited by John Riches, trans. Brian McNeil, Andrew Louth, John Saward, Rowan Williams, and Oliver Davies (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume 4: The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994). Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. Volume 5: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998). Cunningham, David. ‘Tragedy Without Evasion: Attending [to] Performances’. In Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, edited by Giles Waller and Kevin T. Taylor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 213–232. Daniell, David. ‘Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind’. In Shakespeare Survey 54, edited by Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–12. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Everett, Barbara. ‘Saint Shakespeare’. London Review of Books 32, no. 16 (19 August, 2010): pp. 32–34. Fiddes, Paul S. The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Fiddes, Paul S. ‘Suffering in Theology and Modern European Thought’. In The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, edited by Nicholas Adams, 73

Hebblethwaite, ‘MacKinnon and the Problem of Evil’, p. 142.

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George Pattison and Graham Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 169–92. Gardner, Helen. King Lear: The John Coffin Memorial Lecture, 1966 (London: Athlone Press, 1967). Gardner, Helen. ‘The Noble Moor’, in The Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume xli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 189–205. Gardner, Helen. ‘Religion and Tragedy’. In Religion and Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), pp. 13–118. Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London: Athone Press, 1987). Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred (London: Athlone Press, 1995). Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). Hartshorne, Charles. Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Hamden: Archon Books, 1964). Hartshorne, Charles. A Natural Theology For Our Time (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967). Hebblethwaite, Brian. ‘MacKinnon and the Problem of Evil’. In Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon, edited by Kenneth Surin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 131–145. Hedley, Douglas. ‘Sacrifice and the Tragic Imagination’. In Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, edited by Giles Waller and Kevin T. Taylor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 119–212. Hegel, F.W. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 2, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Janz, Paul D. God, the Mind’s Desire: Reference, Reason and Christian Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Kirkpatrick, Robin. ‘“Thee thither in a whirlwind”: Tragedy and Theology in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens’. In Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, edited by Giles Waller and Kevin T. Taylor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 75–100. Knight, G. Wilson. The Imperial Theme, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1951). Luther, Martin. Die zweiteDisputationengegen die Antinomer. In D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritischeGesamtausgabe. Volume 39/1: Disputationen 1535–38 (Weimar: H. BöhlausNachfolger, 1926). MacKinnon, Donald. Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (London: Lutterworth, 1968). MacKinnon, Donald. Explorations in Theology (London: SCM Press, 1979). MacKinnon, Donald. The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Milbank, John. Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003).

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Murdoch, Iris. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto&Windus, 1992). Murdoch, Iris.‘The Sublime and the Good’ (1959). In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, editedby Peter Conradi (London: Chatto&Windus, 1997), pp. 205–220. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (London: Nisbet, 1938). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Quash, Ben. ‘Four Biblical Characters: In Search of a Tragedy’. In Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, edited by Giles Waller and Kevin T. Taylor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 15–34. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969). Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra, edited by M.R. Ridley. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1967). Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982). Shakespeare, William. Othello, edited by M.R. Ridley. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966). Shakespeare, William. Richard ii, edited by Peter Ure. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966). Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet, edited by Brian Gibbons. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980). Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens, edited by Anthony Dawson and Gretchen Minton. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Sophocles. The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes, trans. Robert M. Torrance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). Ward, Graham. ‘Tragedy as Subclause: Steiner and MacKinnon’. Heythrop Journal, no. 34 (1993): pp. 274–287. Whitehead, A.N. Adventures of Ideas (London: Cambridge University Press, 1939).

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Chapter 11

Transforming the Massacre of the Innocents through Literature, Art, Theatre and Film Jolyon Mitchell and Linzy Brady 1

Introduction

Some tragic tales last for many generations, growing from the briefest of beginnings. One such tragic tale is found in a poignant vignette from the New Testament, told in two compressed verses in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16–18). which tells the simple story of a Roman client king from Judaea, Herod, who is threatened and enraged by news of the birth of a new king. In response he aims to ‘search for the child to kill him’ (2:13). Being thwarted by visiting dignitaries, he orders the murder of all the baby boys in the vicinity of a small village near to Jerusalem. The implied intention is to eradicate the potential challenge to his own throne. The result of this killing is interpreted in Matthew as fulfilling an even more ancient prophecy, which foretold the outpouring of unquenchable grief. On a superficial reading, the story contains several aspects of Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy: a simple yet serious plot, a problematic character, powerful diction, memorable rhythmic language, and an unforgettable spectacle.1 Obviously, this brief biblical story is not in five acts and is not a play. Herod is represented not as a heroic character who makes an error (hamartia) and suffers cosmic retribution out of proportion to his shortcoming, but rather as a violent tyrant determined to hold onto power. The tragedy is rooted in the outworking of Herod’s murderous rage and it is debatable whether the story in the biblical account will indeed lead to pity and fear, and ultimately catharsis of these emotions. Through his orders Herod crushes numerous innocents, but he has no moment of anagnorisis (recognition), reminiscent of Lear at last recognising the loving loyalty of Cordelia or Othello awakening to the innocence of Desdemona. As will be demonstrated, some artistic elaborations of Herod’s story show not only how he meets the end he deserves, but also how artistic translations, reinterpretations, or ‘re-mediations’ heighten the tragic

1 See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcom Heath (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), especially Chapter 6. $)((-&
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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_013  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_0 6543_01133

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nature of the story.2 This is often achieved by focussing upon the suffering of the victims. While not necessarily meeting all the usual components of a classical or Shakespearian tragedy,3 this sparse Matthean description of infanticide, followed by lamentation and inconsolable sorrow, nevertheless resonates with many of the other tragedies discussed in this volume. This tragic tale bears re-visiting, and reading as if for the first time: Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, flew into a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more’. matthew 2:16–18

It can take less than 30 seconds to read aloud, and yet it now has a twomillennia-long history of interpretation and re-interpretation, presentation and re-presentation, adaptation and imaginative elaboration. Numerous biblical scholars have raised questions regarding its historicity:4 one suggests that it has been ‘drenched with doubt by historians’5 and others claim that the author of Matthew was trying to draw parallels with Pharaoh’s murder of the firstborn and his attempt to kill Moses (Exodus 2),6 thereby demonstrating that Jesus 2 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Boston: The mit Press, 1998). 3 See, for example, Ruth Scodel, An Introduction to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1–32 and Claire McEachern, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–22. 4 See E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 85 and Geza Vermes, The Nativity: History and Legend (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 22, who both see this text as ‘creative hagiography’. See also Paul L. Maier, ‘Herod and the Infants of Bethlehem’ in Chronos, Kairos, Christos. Volume 2, edited by Jerry Vardaman (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), pp. 169–191. 5 Maier, ‘Herod and the Infants of Bethlehem’, p. 170. Maier observes how, with a few exceptions, the story has been ‘drenched with doubt by historians, biblical commentators, and biographers of Herod the Great’. 6 Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Updated Edition (New York: Yale University Press, 1999). See pp. 29–43 and pp. 204–206. $)((-&
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was the new Moses. Several scholars claim that the story finds its origins in accounts of Herod murdering some of his own sons himself, and is therefore not out of keeping with what we know of Herod’s ‘barbarous temper’, character, and violent actions.7 Some concur with New Testament scholar Raymond Brown who argues that Bethlehem was a village of around 1000 people, and therefore probably only had about 20 boys under two.8 Doubts and debates about the Massacre’s historical authenticity do not seem to have affected the recurring influence of this story, which has been appropriated, circulated, and transformed into many new historical contexts and cultural settings. Although the biblical account of the Massacre of the Innocents does not precisely match Aristotle’s narrow definition of tragedy, it is a narrative redolent of other tragic tales and fits within the broader ‘tragic tale’ genre. In this essay we consider how this story of slaughter has been appropriated, represented, and adapted, as well as experienced and elaborated upon, by journalists, artists, playwrights, novelists, actors, directors, and audiences. Our investigation critically considers journalistic reports, literary imaginings, artistic representations, theatrical enactments, and cinematic portrayals.9 Using a range of tools, such as visual and cinematic analysis, we also turn to detailed engagement with original semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, held all over the UK, though particularly in Chester, York, and other locations where the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents has recently been re-enacted.10 The multi-faceted re-interpretations and transformations of this compressed tragic story about the Massacre of the Innocents is a topic that up to this point has received little, if any, detailed scholarly attention.11 Nevertheless, 7

8 9

10 11

See the Roman Jewish historian Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (c. 93–94 ce). Josephus describes how Herod had his second wife, mother-in-law and three sons killed (Book xv), and ordered that leading citizens would be killed on his death to ensure an outpouring of grief (Book xvii). See also Robert Eisenman, James The Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking, 1997), p. 49 and Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, pp. 87–88. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah. Brown recognizes the original text widens to include ‘in that region’. See pp. 204–206. It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider early Christian (e.g. Infancy Gospel of James or Protoevangelium of James, c. 145 ce), liturgical (e.g. Byzantine, Syrian, or Coptic liturgies which suggest 14,000, 64,000, and 144,000 were killed) or later sermonic interpretations of the story. Jolyon Mitchell is very grateful to have had the chance to test out ideas and findings for this essay in a range of public or academic settings including in York, Chester, Cardiff and Edinburgh, as well as Cambridge, Oxford, and Duke Universities. One rare exception is Nigel Spivey’s chapter on artistic representations in Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 136–153 (see footnote 21 of this chapter). See also David Brown, Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 72–105. $)((-&
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as will become clear, the story has developed an extensive artistic afterlife. This was accentuated not only by the fact that the murdered infants were described in the late fourth century as ‘the first martyrs of Christ’,12 but also in several traditions their story also became embedded in the liturgical calendar, becoming a Feast Day from the fifth century, known as The Feast of the Holy Innocents (as well as Childermass). The many Patristic and Medieval commentaries and homilies on the Gospel of Matthew which commented on and interpreted this story are largely beyond the scope of this essay,13 as are the many later biblical commentaries that followed in their footsteps.14 While partly drawing on the tools of reception history, our aim in this essay is also to raise questions as to how tragedies are transformed as they are re-presented and then circulated, taking on new forms and distinct meanings in new settings. 2

Journalistic and Literary Appropriations

Nearly two thousand years on, journalists and commentators regularly reference the story as they describe contemporary cruel killings and tragic deaths. For example, on Boxing Day, 2015, in the Independent, journalist Paul Vallely reflected in some detail about: ‘Our modern-day Massacre of the Innocents’, as ‘children all over the world are suffering as a result of the cruelty and inhumanity 12

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Chromatius, bishop of Aquileia in North Eastern Italy (died c406/7), claimed in Tractate on Matthew (6.2) that ‘These innocents who died on Christ’s behalf became the first martyrs of Christ’. Cited in Manlio Simonetti, editor, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 1–13 (Downers Grove, IL: ivp, 2001), pp. 34–35. Some Patristic writers and preachers, anticipating more recent authors, questioned why Christ abandoned those he knew would die on his behalf. See, for example, the Bishop of Ravenna Peter Chysologus (c380–c450) who asked in his Sermons (152.7):‘Why did he desert those whom he knew were being sought because of himself and whom he knew he would be killed for his own sake?’ His answer was simple: ‘He enabled them [the innocents] to participate in victory without struggle’. Cited in Manlio Simonetti, editor, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 1–13 (Downers Grove, IL: ivp, 2001), p. 34. In his Commentary on St Matthew, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) went even further claiming that: ‘the Holy Innocents suffered as martyrs and confessed Christ non loquendo sed moriendo, not by speaking but by dying’(2.16). There are also numerous recent biblical commentaries on Matthew, providing useful scholarly discussions related to the story. Thanks to Paul Foster for his advice on this. See, for example, W.D. Davies and D.C. Allison, Matthew 1–7: Volume 1 International Critical Commentary Series (London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), pp. 257–284. See also Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Commentary, Hermeneia: A Critical & Historical Commentary on the Bible, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, Revised edition, 2007); and R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Commentary on the New Testament, (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 82–87. $)((-&
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of adults’.15 To support his case Vallely reminds readers of the drowning of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, in ‘blue shorts and red shoes’, as well as children who pay for the intransigence and vindictiveness of their leaders in South Sudan, an adult’s civil war in Yemen, and repeated bombardments in Gaza. Vallely, an experienced Catholic journalist, becomes almost sermonic in his closing lines: ‘The Christmas story is about a family seeking shelter. Mary and Joseph got their refugee child to safety in a neighbouring country. But the Massacre of the Innocents reminds us that, for many families, there is no happy ending. And asks what will we do about that’.16 The story is also linked with recent events described by some journalists as ‘tragedies’ or as linked to ‘tragic realities’. For example, consider a 2012 Al Jazeera opinion piece headlined: ‘The Syrian “Massacre of the Innocents”’. In this extended essay Hamid Dabashi links the killing of at least 108 people, many of them children, by close range gun fire and knives in the Houla region of Syria on the 25th May, 2012, with the distant story of Herod’s orders to kill. For him ‘regardless of blame, humanity must not be distracted from the tragic reality of those who lost their lives’.17 These two examples are the tip of a contemporary iceberg of references to the Massacre of the Innocents when reporting on recent atrocities.18 Nearly 100 years before Vallely and Dabashi wrote these impassioned words, the First Battle of Ypres (1914) was sometimes described by the Germans as Kindermord bei Ypern and by the British as ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ both during and soon after the First World War.19 It was commonly represented 15 16 17 18

19

Paul Vallely, ‘Our Modern Day Massacre of the Innocents’, Independent, 26 December 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/our-modern-day-massacre-of-the-innocents -a6787011.html. Vallely, ‘Our Modern Day Massacre of the Innocents’. Hamid Dabashi, ‘The Syrian “Massacre of the Innocents”’, Aljazeera, 5 June 2012, https:// www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/06/20126410503297278.html. One opinion writer for the Boston Globe website used the story to highlight the perceived misuse of power by some American Catholic bishops (portrayed as modern day Herods) because of their apparent refusal to accept that same-sex parents could provide a ‘safenuturing haven’ for foster children. Using a detail from one of Matteo Di Giovanni’s paintings of the Massacre (see below Figure 11.3), James Lopata claimed that: ‘Antiquity’s massacre of innocents is today’s loss of innocents. The screams of Herod’s tiny victims echo through the ages’. See James A. Lopata, ‘Roman Catholic Bishops and the Loss of Innocents’, 4 January 2012. http://archive.boston.com/lifestyle/blogs/bostonspirit/2012/01/ catholic_bishops_and_the_loss.html. This is an recurring journalistic trope used in many different settings. See, for example, the front page headline of the Italian Corriere Della Sera on 3 April 1985 ‘Autobomba, massacre di innocent in Sicilia’, following a car bombing in Sicily. See Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War i Changed Religion For Ever (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), p. 116. See also Gavin Roynon, Massacre of the Innocents: The Crofton Diaries: 1914–15 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2004). $)((-&
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as a battle that claimed countless young ‘innocent’ students’ lives, making clear that the War would not be over by Christmas. Just over fifty years later the French philosopher, author, and journalist, Albert Camus used the story in a very different way. In his 1956 novel La Chute (The Fall) the protagonist Clamence questions the roots of Christianity, suggesting that Jesus died not an innocent victim but as someone who knew and could never forget that his parents took him to a safe place while the children of Judea were slaughtered. This led Jesus to a state of ‘incurable melancholy’ that would drive him to embrace the cross, to erase the guilt he felt at having escaped the slaughter.20 It is not only journalists, authors and commentators who appropriate this tale. The Matthean story also continues to exert a powerful imaginative hold over readers, viewers, and religious leaders today. Read such poignant biblical passages with survivors from war-torn South Sudan, drc, or Syria, in the early twenty-first century, and it is clear this ancient story of grief resonates with all too recent experience. For people who have no personal experience of atrocities, this violent and grief-filled narrative can provide resources for reflecting upon the violent news that has impinged on their own lives.21 For others who are far distanced from these experiences or fatigued by such news stories, connecting with this biblical tale may add weight to their personal or public reflections as well as depth to their lamentation.22 In his Letter to the Bishops on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (2016) Pope Francis observes how Matthew connects the joy of the nativity with events ‘fraught with tragedy and grief’ and Rachel ‘weeping for her children’: Today too, we hear this heart-rending cry of pain, which we neither desire nor are able to ignore or to silence. In our world – I write this with a heavy heart – we continue to hear the lamentation of so many mothers, of so many families, for the death of their children, their innocent children.23 20

21 22 23

Albert Camus, The Fall (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 35. See also José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (London: Harper Collins, 1993), especially p. 89. In this novel, it is Joseph who is wracked by guilt and ultimately driven to embrace crucifixion because of his inability to save the infants. See Jolyon Mitchell, Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 109. See Emmanuel Katongole, Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), especially p. 83 and p. 287. Pope Francis, ‘Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to Bishops on the Feast of the Holy Innocents’, accessed 1 August 2018, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letvters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20161228_santi-innocenti.html.

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Pope Francis goes on to highlight the actions of the new Herods of our time, ‘who devour the innocence of our children’, through ‘illegal slave labour, prostitution and exploitation’. He even goes on to connect the story with ‘the sufferings, the experiences and the pain of minors who were abused sexually by priests’, begging forgiveness and affirming a ‘commitment to ensuring that these atrocities will no longer take place in our midst’.24 While Francis’s use of the story contrasts with that of Camus, it resonates more closely with the journalists Vallely and Dabashi’s appropriation and contemporization of this ancient tale of slaughter and lamentation. 3

Artistic Representations: Terrible Beauty

Even though the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, asserted that this scene ‘ought never have been made the subject of painting at all’,25 the Massacre of the Innocents has been a recurring theme in a wide range of media including frescos, floor mosaics, ivories, marble sculptures, stained glass windows, bronze doors, copper plaques, silver altarpieces, tapestries, ornamental plates, woodcuts, prayer books, illuminated gospels, chalk drawings, and paintings.26 For example, Italian artists of the thirteenth and fourteenth century all represented the massacre. Giotto (1303–6 and 1315–20), Duccio (1308–11), Pietro Lorenzetti (c. 1330), Giusto de’ Menabuoi (c. 1378), Nicola Pisano (1265–68) and his son Giovanni Pisano (1250–1315) all reflect different kinds of artistic interpretations of this tragic tale and often represent extreme violence with beautiful artistry. Two different frescoes of the slaughter by Giotto illustrate this terrible beauty. Giotto’s frescoes in the Capella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel) in Padua include a comparatively restrained rendition of the Massacre (c. 1303–6).27 A group of six soldiers look determined in their task, unmoved by the anguished faces of the mothers and the pile of naked infant corpses at their feet. (See Figure 11.1) While for Ruskin this pile of bodies is where Giotto’s ‘imperfect drawing is seen 24 25 26 27

Pope Francis, ‘Letter’. John Ruskin, ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, in Giotto and His Works in Padua (Arundel Society, 1854), pp. 53–54. See, for instance the Scala digital archive, which includes over 150 separate examples of the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, covering each of these different artistic forms. http:// www.scalarchives.com/web/ricerca_risultati.asp. See Gianfranco Malafarina, ed., The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2005), p. 46.

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Figure 11.1

Giotto (Giotto di Bondone, c. 1266–1336), Scenes from the Life of Christ: Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1303–6). Padua, Scrovegni Chapel. Giotto’s frescoes in the Capella Scrovegni (or Arena Chapel) in Padua include a comparatively restrained rendition of the Massacre. © 2019. PHOTO SCALA, FLORENCE.

at its worst’,28 the symbolism is painfully clear. Not all the bodies are on the floor. At the centre of the fresco one mother desperately clings to the foot of a child. She gazes at a hooded soldier who meets her gaze with a grim face while trying to wrench the baby away. A bearded soldier clutches another child’s 28

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ankle in his left hand, while poised to thrust a sharp poker-like sword with his right. The mother clutches her over-sized infant, but the outcome is inevitable. As the art historian Jules Lubbock observes, Giotto often depicts the moment just before the climax of an event such as at the Last Supper or Betrayal, while here it is almost finished, with the pile of babies’ bodies resembling ‘the dead on a battlefield’.29 For Lubbock, this ‘is the time of irreconcilable loss, the silence after the killing, when one is almost too numb to vent one’s grief’.30 With what silence Giotto imagined and portrayed this event is open to interpretation. Three babies remain alive and like their mothers do not look as if they will go quietly. More persuasive is Lubbock’s claim that viewers come in to the ‘tailend of a sequence of events and are compelled to work out what has been happening’. As a result observers may experience a ‘transition from numbed incomprehension at the sight of that pile of dead bodies to entering into the feelings of the mother whose baby is slipping out of her grasp and the helplessness of the women in the face of the almost mechanical power of Herod’s militia with its imperviousness to human sympathy’.31 Standing in the chapel itself to contemplate these frescos is obviously a very different experience from seeing them online. Even though Ruskin, in predigital age, claims that in the entire series ‘this composition is the one which exhibits most of Giotto’s weaknesses’, he does hypothesise that the pile of infant bodies, the ‘choir of sorrow’ of mothers, and the motionless types of soldiers and women is intentional in its reticence, as this picture was intended only to be a ‘symbol or shadow’ of the horrors of the massacre.32 Nevertheless, Ruskin’s criticisms do not take into account the narrative nature of the cycle, or the fact that where you stand in the chapel changes the perspective, allowing your eye to take in other neighbouring images, such as the sentencing of Jesus or the more gentle nativity scenes, which offer a sharp contrast to the massacres. Giotto painted this scene again, later, in the much visited Lower Church of the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi (c. 1315–20). In this space, the scene is juxtaposed with, among others, a nativity scene of maternal love between mother and child and a scene of St. Francis bringing a dead child back to life. The horror of the massacre is captured more expressively this time in the distorted facial expressions where the open mouthed anguish of the mothers contrast with the stony-faced soldiers.33 As in the Scrovegni version, Herod watches the massacre from a balcony, set apart at a safe distance, his finger pointing at 29 30 31 32 33

Jules Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 70–73. Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello, pp. 70–73. Lubbock, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello, p. 73. Ruskin, ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, p. 54. See Elvio Lunghi, The Basilica of St Francis in Assisi (Florence: Scala, 1996). $)((-&
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the mayhem he has unleashed. Women with dishevelled hair and hands raised in grief gather round a pile of dead infant bodies while two more children are about to be thrust through with a sword. This depiction goes further in terms of portraying the grief of the mothers.34 Unlike the two-dimensional and emotionally restrained portrayals of women found in Ravenna or Venice35 with their Byzantine influence, Giotto’s portrayals, particularly the series in Assisi, bring the emotions hidden in the text to life. The similarities and dissimilarities become clearer when these two frescoes by Giotto are placed side by side. Both illustrate Giotto’s ground-breaking representation of perspective and his evolving exploration of depicting actual feelings through fresco painting. Giotto’s contemporary Giovanni Pisano also included scenes of the nativity and the massacre in the pulpit carving at San Andrea in Pistoia (1301) with particularly violent depictions of babies ripped from their mothers’ breasts. The peace and tenderness of the nativity scene again contrasts forcefully with the savage violence of the massacre, foregrounding the wretched, imploring, mourning mothers who represent the biblical Rachel ‘weeping for her children because they are no more’. The horror of the scene is depicted with elements of naturalism and classicism and other depictions of the Massacre of the Innocents focus on these terrified, vulnerable, weeping women. The male figures of Herod pointing, his watching dignitaries and his violent soldiers are given more prominence in Pisano’s sculpted pulpit in Pisa’s cathedral. (c. 1301–10) Nevertheless, the women cover their faces and appear to cry in anguish. (See Figure 11.2) In Fra Angelico’s The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1451–52), found in a wooden panel in the Silver Treasury of Santissima Annunziata and now housed in the Basilica di San Marco in Florence, soldiers dressed in dark armour and wielding sharp daggers stream into a courtyard from one side of the panel. They easily outnumber the women who are fleeing from them out the other side. In the centre of the panel are several women who have fallen to their knees as their children are murdered and another, her face distorted in fear, tries to hold her child away from the daggers. In her discussion of motherhood and massacre in Renaissance art, Laura Jacobus notes a focus on the ‘human body in violent activity’ as portrayed in ancient battle reliefs in which ‘women are subject to as much violence as their babies, and occasionally fight back’.36 She also describes a change in the 34 35 36

Lunghi, The Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, p. 124 and p. 127. See, for example, San Vitale in Ravenna and St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Laura Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre: The Massacre of the Innocents in LateMedieval Art and Drama’, in The Massacre in History, edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 39–54.

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Figure 11.2

Giovanni Pisano, (c. 1248–1314), Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1301–1310) Pulpit – detail, Pisa, Cathedral. Pisano also depicted this scene in the pulpit at San Andrea in Pistoia (1301). © 2019. PHOTO SCALA, FLORENCE.

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representation of outpourings of maternal grief in fifteenth-century portrayals of the massacre in Italy with restrained lamentations replacing extravagant displays of grief. Where once women enacted grief through ‘an inversion of normal social behaviour’ – howling, flailing their arms, tearing their hair, and lacerating their cheeks – such ‘extravagant displays of grief came to be considered unfeminine’ with the rise of Renaissance humanism.37 Displays of grief were modified as notions of propriety and emotional restraint became increasingly more prized as a reflection of appropriate femininity. It could be argued that this had the effect of enhancing depictions of the tragedy of the massacre: the greater passivity and vulnerability of the suffering women, the greater the horror and the pity. Representing reticence in the face of pain and tragedy can sometimes speak louder than portrayals of uncontrolled anguish and hysterical grief. Alongside this restraint so prized in women, there are also elements of contemporary experiences of war in fifteenth-century representations of the Massacre. Matteo di Giovanni’s Massacre of the Innocents was made for the church of San Agostino in Siena in 1482 and is one of four versions of the story by this artist.38 (See Figure 11.3) It features a tawny-skinned and cruelfeatured Herod, presiding over a distressing scene of beautifully dressed and restrained women who crouch over their children and plead but do not fight as dark-skinned and turbaned soldiers spear the babies in their arms. The light accentuates a pale-skinned woman at Herod’s feet: her child is speared in her arms and under her feet are bleeding corpses. Commentators have seen in the dark-skinned soldiers a reference to contemporary fears of the Turkish soldiers who besieged and destroyed Otranto in 1481, allegedly also slaughtering up to 12,000 Christian men, women, and children.39 It is possible also to see a caricature of Sultan Mehmed ii in Herod, whose features are contorted in cruelty and whose left hand grips the arm of his throne in a frenzy of violence.40

37 38 39 40

Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’, p. 48. Giovanni is probably best known for these four portrayals of the ‘Massacre’, three of which were for Sienese churches and one was inlaid in the stone floor of the Duomo in Sienna. David Kunzle, ‘Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents: Brueghel’s Massacres of the Innocents in their Sixteenth Century Political Contexts’, Art History 24, no.1 (2001): pp. 51–82, p. 57. Herod was commonly represented as a Turk or an Arab – the orientalised other whose cruelty was an attribute agreed upon by all throughout Christendom. See David Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 41–42. See also Giuseppe Acrimboldo’s grotesque of Herod (c. 1563) as a monstrosity. His head and neck, swathed in rich, oriental materials, are, upon closer inspection, made of tortured infant bodies, some writhing and others dismembered. $)((-&
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Figure 11.3

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Matteo di Giovanni (c. 1430–1495), Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1482). Siena, Palazzo Pubblico. Matteo di Giovanni’s Massacre of the Innocents was made for the church of Sant’ Agostino in Siena in c. 1482. © 2019. PHOTO SCALA, FLORENCE.

Similar allusions to contemporary experiences of war continue in the sixteenth century. David Kunzle argues that the experience of war in Italy in the early sixteenth century ensured that the Massacre of the Innocents was a popular subject for artists who paradoxically saw it as an opportunity to represent it with an elegance taken from Classical paintings: ‘the uglier the action, the more elegant the manner of presentation’.41 Raphael’s rendering of the 41

Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, p. 52. $)((-&
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Massacre of the Innocents in a drawing made in the first decade of the sixteenth century and preserved by his printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi is set amid classical architecture and depicts nude, athletic soldiers and fiercely resisting women.42 (See Figure 11.4) It arguably reverberates with contemporary experiences of the atrocities of war in the city-states of Italy: between 1499 and 1527 Brescia and Ravenna were destroyed, Prato and Pavia suffered vast loss of life, and Fabriano, Como, and even the City of Rome itself were sacked. Kunzle sees Raphael’s work as the moment representations of the story began to bifurcate: The legacy of Raphael mandated a clear choice: either you follow him and set the event in a city, with classical architecture and the killing performed by more or less nude athletes; or you ignore his example, and use a local landscape or village, with contemporary buildings, and dress the killers as contemporary soldiers.43 While the Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto largely followed the former classical option in his 1582/7 painting, with its ‘cruel scene’ of ‘tragic, violently dramatic … [and] unrestrained tangle of forms’,44 the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder followed the latter course. His depictions of The Massacre of the Innocents from the 1560s illustrate the ease with which the story translates into new historical situations and contemporary settings.45 In the two similar versions now held in Vienna and at Hampton Court, Brueghel reframed the biblical story by setting the infanticide in snow-covered Brabant villages where numerous individual stories create a total picture of inescapable horror. In the far centre of the painting is a tight formation of soldiers, lances held upright and gathered around a leader bearded and dressed in black as the Duke of Alva was known to do. There is a lone soldier on horseback in the distance guarding the bridge to the village to ensure no one escapes and that no help may come 42

43 44 45

It is sometimes claimed that Renaissance artists ‘took inspiration for their “Massacres” from Roman reliefs of the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs’, especially from the way in which they depicted heroic-looking figures nude. See ‘Art in Tuscany’, accessed 18 August 2018, http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/art/massacreoftheinnocents.html. Kunzle ‘Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents’, p. 57. See Francesco Valcanover, Jacopo Tintoretto and the Scuola Grande of San Rocco (Venezia: Storti Edizioni, 1983 and 2004), pp. 116–119. There are at least four versions of the Massacre of the Innocents by Brueghel. The two we discuss here are the most well-known: the Vienna version and the version from the Royal Collections at Hampton Court. For a discussion of these paintings and a wide range of artistic representations of the massacre see Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 136–153.

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Figure 11.4

Raphael, (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483–1520), The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1511–12). Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest (Szépművészeti Múzeum). Drawing, pen, ink on paper, 262 × 400 mm. Inv.: 2195. Florence Raphael’s drawing of the Massacre was preserved by his printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi (1480–c. 1534). © 2019. THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS BUDAPEST / SCALA

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to stop the massacre. Scenes from across the village show soldiers kicking down doors and dragging the limp bodies of infants out. A mounted soldier and his dog chase down a woman who is fleeing with her child, a father tries to hide his baby from the soldiers, and a group of soldiers stab at a pile of babies to ensure none survives. Art historian Nigel Spivey sees in this distressing scene the full impact of ‘horror’s final nullity’: ‘In the centre’ of Brueghel’s tableau, there is a red-dressed woman sitting down in the snow. Her feet are splayed out. She holds clasped hands up to her face. A miniature body lies upon her apron-lap […]. Brueghel peered into the deepest darkness of all: horror’s final nullity – numb, dull, petrifying. It lies beyond anger, it lies beyond belief. And worst of all: it is lodged in its own unique and utter void of solace.46 Interpreters believe that this haunting picture was inspired by the bloody campaigns that Philip ii commanded to repress Calvinism and Anabaptism in the Netherlands. The Dutch Revolt and Protestant uprisings against Catholic, Habsburg rule from Spain was suppressed so violently by Charles v, Phillip ii, and the Duke of Alba, his deputy in the Low Countries, that Spanish atrocities were renowned. Not based on any one event, Brueghel’s depictions of the Massacre reflected ‘a generation or more of repression under Charles v and Margaret of Parma … illuminating directly (or prophesying) the worst period of repression under Alva (1567–75)’.47 Brueghel’s scene of such atrocities in a peaceful winter setting was so troubling for some viewers that a later, unknown artist softened the depiction: bundles of food, goods, and even geese were painted over the massacred infants in the Hampton Court (now Windsor Castle) version and the painting became known as the ‘Sacking of a Village’.48 (See Figure 11.5) This censoring of Brueghel’s original work probably occurred sometime between 1621 when it was described as ‘plunder of village’ and 1660 when it was purchased by Charles ii

46 47 48

Spivey, Enduring Creation, p. 153. Kunzle, ‘Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents’, p. 52. See Tim Montgomerie, ‘Slaughter of the Innocents: All is not what it seems’, bbc Radio 4, accessed 19 August 2018, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/59WLFfkTt9fNR1qV 84DZ9wy/all-is-not-what-it-seems. See also Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/ collection/405787/massacre-of-the-innocents adapted from Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Jennifer Scott, Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting (London: The Royal Collection, 2007), which observes how it was described as a ‘Massacre’ in 1604.

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Figure 11.5

Brueghel the Elder, Pieter (c.1525–1569), Massacre of the Innocents (c.1565–67). This ‘censored’ version, is currently housed in the King’s Dressing Room, Windsor Castle. © 2018 ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST/HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II

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and described as ‘village with soldiery landscape’.49 Using x-ray and infrared photography, it is clear to see the layered representations of multiple narratives and the comparison of contemporary religious persecution with biblical massacres, all overlaid with less troubling images of a village in the midst of winter being sacked and pillaged. Similar atrocities echo in Peter Paul Rubens’s two paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents: one painted around 1611 or 1612 and the other towards the end of his life between 1636 and 1638. The first is influenced by the religious conflict that enveloped Antwerp as Calvinists and Catholics again clashed and Spanish soldiers again committed atrocities against Dutch people and Protestant armies. The women in the first painting, fiercely resisting the murdering soldiers, contrast with the women who seem to embrace their suffering in the second painting with its Catholic symbolism and angels who observe the scene from heaven.50 This religious symbolism drew on church tradition which described the massacred children as the first Christian martyrs,51 and also offered a religious framework for understanding atrocities in biblical contexts in a way that offered comfort and solace. A third less well known depiction from the Flemish school of Rubens, originally attributed to the artist himself, looks like the cross between a sprawling battle scene and hunt where bearded men capture their prey. (See Figure 11.6) The angels are no longer visible. While bloodied babies’ corpses lie upon the floor, the violence appears to be directed more against the defenceless, partially disrobed women, raising questions about who are the innocents and the violence of the artistic male gaze. Compared to Rubens’ portryals, in this painting, the women have been entirely disempowered. Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt see in the popularity of the Massacre of the Innocents in the early modern Netherlands a taste for representing extreme violence and cruelty, as well as a need for contemplative viewing that offered a 49

50

51

Spivey locates the doctored Brueghel in seventeenth-century England where Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays were similarly curbing the violent and bloody elements of tragedy. See Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) for a discussion of Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which he considered ‘a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht’. He re-wrote the ending of Shakespeare’s play so that Lear lives and Cordelia marries Edgar. See Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt, ‘The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide and Solace in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries’, in The Hurt( ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600–1800, edited by Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven, and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). In the fourth century, the Roman Christian poet, Prudentius (348–c.413) described the massacred infants as ‘flowers of the Martyrs’ and by the fifth century the veneration of the ‘Holy Innocents’ was included in the liturgical calendar. See also Spivey, Enduring Creation. pp. 136–153. $)((-&
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Figure 11.6

School of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Massacre of the Innocents, formerly attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and dated at 1636–1638. Oil on wood panel. © 2019. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM/ART RESOURCE NY/SCALA, FLORENCE

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religious framework for dealing with violence and despair.52 Perhaps there is also evidence here of a further hidden desire for male dominance over maternal affection and severing the love with their offspring. Other representations of the Massacre of the Innocents allude to religious works depicting the Madonna and Child and the pietà and may also offer a religious framework for viewers confronted with the massacre. Nicolas Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1625–32) contains what Francis Bacon (1909–1992) considered the ‘best’ scream ever painted (See Figure 11.7). Bypassing all distracting detail, it concentrates mercilessly on the imminent death of an infant pinned beneath a soldier’s foot and his distraught mother reaching out to him. The brutality of the soldier, the vulnerability of the child and the desperate grief of the mother are portrayed with dreadful and intimate realism. It is a moment of intense horror frozen in time and viewers are drawn into a scene of raw emotion and violence as they observe the powerless sprawling babe and helpless anguished mother. Representations of the Massacre of the Innocents by Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (c. 1763) and Francois-Joseph Navez (c. 1824) are also intimate portrayals of intense grief that focus on a trio of women: a mother, her dead child, and a servant. These paintings are also reminiscent of portraits of the Madonna and Child and also of the pietà, with similar settings and costumes, but they include other telling details. In Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre’s painting women are still struggling with a mounted soldier in the background, and in Francois-Joseph Navez’s painting a second woman holds her hand over the mouth of her own still-living child to stop its cries intruding on the grief of the mourning mother. The theme of the Massacre of the Innocents has been used in a diverse array of visual images in more recent indictments of military cruelty, government repression, and religious intolerance. Primitivist paintings from Nicaragua alluded to the Massacre during the cruel dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in the 1970s. Among the distinctive paintings by the peasants who lived through his dictatorship is one depicting a scene of mass killings with soldiers wearing the uniform of the National Guard and carrying automatic rifles instead of swords.53 The violence sprawled across the painting evokes the wholesale slaughter of the innocents familiar in depictions by Giotto, Pisano, Giovanni, Raphael, and Brueghel. 52 53

Bussels and Van Oostveldt, ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’. See Philip Scharper and Sally Scharper, eds., Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984) for discussions between a Catholic priest and Nicaraguan peasants, accompanied by peasants’ paintings which identify characters and scenes from contemporary Nicaragua with themes and events in the New Testament.

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Figure 11.7

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Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665), The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1625–32, probably 1628–29). Musee Conce, Chantilly. © 2019. PHOTO FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES/SCALA, FLORENCE

Another massacre is commemorated in a mural on the wall of a church which was re-built on the site where between 978 and 1,000 people were slaughtered in 1981 in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War.54 In the small town of El Mozote, the Salvadoran army massacred unarmed civilians, the majority of whom were children, and the atrocity is remembered in a garden named ‘Jardin de reflexion los inocentes’ or ‘The Garden of Reflection of the Innocents’. Although most bodies were burnt to destroy evidence of the massacre, the bones of 150 children were found buried at the site of the Garden of Reflection. On the church wall facing the garden is a large mural showing children playing in a field. The outer edges of the mural are dark to represent the night of 54

See Simone Gigliotti, The Memorialization of Genocide (London: Routledge, 2016).

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sorrows and the fact that the massacre started at night. The eye is led to the middle by a rainbow which meets a blazing sun at the centre.55 There are figures of children rising towards heaven in what may be a reference to the veneration of the original ‘innocents’, Herod’s victims, as the first martyrs in the Catholic Church. The names of all victims are listed, carved into brown panels arranged neatly beneath the mural. The reference to the Matthean story may be indirect but many locals would reference this story in their reflections on this and similar massacres.56 Artistic responses to other atrocities during the twentieth century also allude to the Massacre of the Innocents, at times indirectly and often influenced by the layers of visual representation that have been built around the theme. For example, the Modernist artist Max Ernst took the Massacre of the Innocents as his theme for a collage composed on a black-and-white aerial photograph taken of the French city of Soissons during the First World War. In his ‘Massacres of the Innocents’ (1920), facades of the buildings from the heavily bombed city fill the centre of the collage looking like train tracks along which three cut-out forms flee from the city. A curious object, which seems to be part bird and part plane, hovers ominously in the top left-hand corner. Having lived through the destructive events of World War i, Ernst draws directly on the biblical account of the slaughter of infants in his title but depicts no women or children. The ‘innocents’ are the people of Soissons and countless other cities that were destroyed during the conflict. By contrast, another well-known twentieth century German expressionist artist, Otto Dix (1891–1961), explicitly engages with the biblical story in one of his 33 lithographs that retell the entire Matthean gospel story in his Matthäus Evangelium. In this sparse picture, there are only two soldiers and two mothers who are clutching one dead child and another child soon to be killed. A baby’s body lies on the floor with a dark stain emanating from its head and one of the soldiers is about to bring down his sword upon the only living child. (See Figure 11.8) Notes related to a recent exhibition on German Expressionism that included Dix’s Matthäus Evangelium prints highlighted his understanding of the Bible in relation to his homeland and his depiction of the Slaughter of the Innocents: ‘These are not Roman soldiers, but executioners dressed in German

55

56

This imagery is mirrored by the gate to the garden with its colourful, iron-wrought detail of sunrays, a rainbow and the linked figures of a man, woman and two children. While the gate is brightly painted, the white letters of the name of the garden and white figures of the small family is a sober reference to the martyrs. See also ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, in The Gospel in Solentiname, edited by Ernesto Cardenal (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007), pp. 36–44. $)((-&
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Figure 11.8

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Otto Dix (1891–1961), Massacre of the Innocents, from Matthäus Evangelium (1960)

military uniforms. From Dix’s perspective the Bible makes sense only if it sheds light upon the present’.57 The Second World War, especially the Shoah, also prompted artists to look back to the biblical narrative to describe the horrors of murder and genocide. One of the earliest artistic responses to the slaughter of Jewish men, women and children during the Holocaust draws on verses in Psalm 22, also apparently quoted by Jesus on the cross (Matt. 27.46 and Mark 15.34), and is titled Lama 57

See Sandra and Robert Bowden’s notes on their exhibition ‘Was God Dead? Biblical Imagination in German Expressionist Prints’. Bowden, ‘Otto Dix: Matthäus Evangelium’, accessed 27 March 2019, http://bowdencollections.com/OttoDix/dix-essay.html. $)((-&
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Sabachthani [Why Have You Forsaken Me?] (1943).58 The artist, Morris Kestelman, was from a Jewish immigrant family living in the East End of London during the Second World War. His physical distance from the actual events did not hamper his ability to engage creatively with the horrendous news of what had happened in concentration camps. Psychological engagement and identification with tragedy does not necessarily require physical proximity. Kestelman’s painting features men as well as women and children, but the grieving women, with their hands raised in despair and grief or clutching their babies, take centre stage as they do in countless other representations of the Massacre of the Innocents. The background of this darkened picture is made up of smoke and burning cities and ‘the mourning men wear prayer shawls and pillbox hats and carry Torah scrolls; the women wear headscarves or shawls over their hair’.59 So while the portrayal may resonate with other Slaughter depictions, it is more explicitly linked with the Psalm, which speaks of crying day by day without answer. This painting points not to the story about Herod, but more to questions about God’s place amidst what is sometimes described as the time of God’s absence and the unspeakably tragic events of the Shoah.60 Turning the unspeakable into something visually arresting challenges artists to stare over the abyss and return with something unforgettable, capturing at least an aspect of the painful truth that may ultimately be inexpressible. This may explain why some artists return to the theme again and again,61 as well as intentionally or unintentionally reference earlier depictions of other horrendous evils such as the Massacre of the Innocents. Roman Halter’s Mother with Babies (1974) is another response to the Holocaust which draws on the long history of representing the slaughter of infants and the suffering of women to capture the horror of war, murder and genocide. It is a large oil on canvas with clearly defined lines reminiscent of a stained-glass window, or the bars and barbed wire of the death camps. The naked women are huddled together, holding their babies close, with their heads bowed in grief and fatigue. It is a 58

59 60 61

See Caroline Sharples and Olaf Jensen, Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also Steven L. Jacobs, ed., Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). ‘Lama Sabachthani [Why Have You Forsaken Me?]’, Imperial War Museum, accessed 27 March 2019, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/15255. See, for example, David Halvini, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). See, for example, Edward Knippers, evolving series of distinctive, large scale, vivid, visual interpretations of the Massacre of the Innocents, 1986, 1993, 2003, 2006, 2012 and 2014. http://edwardknippers.com/?id=815.

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strikingly still scene, recalling scenes of horror on the ramp at AuschwitzBirkenau, where women and babies were the first to be sent through to their deaths in the gas chambers. Halter was also inspired by scenes he witnessed in the Lodz ghetto in Poland in October 1943 when the SS announced that all children were to be rounded up and put on a train. Instead of handing over their children, the mothers chose to go on the trains with their children.62 The scale of the Shoah makes it hard to imagine, and the specificity of these postShoah portrayals may enable both individual insight and universal reflection about the massacre of innocent populations. Several anti-war paintings attempt to do something similar. For example, in response to the escalating conflict in the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953, Picasso painted his Massacre in Korea (1951). One of his most political paintings after Guernica (1937), it shows naked, pregnant women and children huddled together on the edge of a mass grave a few paces away from a group of soldiers in full armour who are about to shoot them at close range. It is a scene reminiscent of Shoah photographs of bodies thrown into mass graves; it is also a scene inspired by Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (painted in 1814) and one of his etchings from Disasters of War (1810–12) titled No se puede mirar (One Cannot Look Upon This).63 Instead of painting the execution of Spanish civilians by Napoleon’s soldiers, Picasso’s Massacre in Korea focusses on women trying to shield their children in a strangely still and silent scene that offers a very different representation to the dynamic action of Renaissance paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents. A more direct reference to the biblical account of the Massacre of the Innocents is found in Bessie Harvey’s Slaughter of the Innocents (1985) which responds to more contemporary violence and the victimization of an entire race of people. Composed of clay, plastic beads and paint, it depicts a stack of distorted, African bodies impaled on a blood-drenched central obelisk. Drawing on the biblical account of the slaughter of innocent children, Harvey represents the voiceless suffering of African Americans and the long history of slavery, abuse and violence against black people in the Americas. In 2001, Anker Eli Petersen also drew directly on the Massacre of the Innocents when he reflected on the price innocent people pay in the struggle between ‘ethnic groups, nationalistic controversies and religious intolerance’. He included an image

62 63

‘Mother with Babies’, Imperial War Museum, accessed 27 March 2019, https://www.iwm .org.uk/collections/item/object/11980. See Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley, The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), pp. 68–71.

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titled The Scream from Ramah in his series of Christmas stamps for the Faroe Islands and wrote: The scream of Ramah is the most terrifying sound of all. It is the sound of a mother, who just lost her child – the tearing horror for the innocent life, which is lost for completely meaningless reasons. And ‘The Scream from Ramah’ still rings in our ears. The innocent victims in Bethlehem were not the first in the history of mankind, and unfortunately neither the last. Our beautiful, blue planet is still plagued by war, hunger and common misery, and unfortunately, there is not much hope that it will be better in the near future. When the men of power go to war or poverty and misery turn the hearts into stone, it is always the innocents that have to pay the price. Struggle between ethnic groups, nationalistic controversies and religious intolerance is still tormenting great parts of the World, and outcries like the one in Ramah merge into a horrifying song of sorrow, so persistent that we can’t bear to hear it any longer.64 Another representation of cultural genocide focusses on the screams of women whose children are ripped from their arms and alludes to countless Renaissance representations of the Massacre of the Innocents. In Kent Monkman’s The Scream (2016), women struggle violently with men who rip their children out of their arms, but here the children are not killed, they are removed. The scene is set in Canada, the men are dressed as Roman Catholic priests and Canadian Mounties, and they are removing indigenous children from their families on the reservations and placing them in a residential school system. The policy of segregation was to weaken indigenous culture and families and the aggressive assimilation practices filled countless boarding schools for indigenous children, the last of which was closed in 1996. The vivid colours, active force and semi-realistic portrayal shows how realism can be visually subverted. Like many of the other pictures discussed above this depiction contains both some beauty and much horror.65 Simply because a painting portrays darkness and evil, does not mean that it cannot still be described as beautiful or at least containing elements of beauty. The mixture of beauty and horror is inescapable in Mat Collishaw’s ‘All Things Fall’ (2014), an animated sculpture that reflects on the Massacre of the 64 65

Anker Eli Petersen, ‘The Scream from Ramah’, Posta Faroe Islands, accessed 19 August 2018, http://en.stamps.fo/ShopItem/2001/0/PPA990901/SETT. See Richard Harries, The Beauty and the Horror: Searching for God in a Suffering World (London: spck, 2018).

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Innocents, particularly on Ippolito Scarsella’s painting on the same theme (c. 1610). It is an elaborate zoetrope in the shape of a domed temple with 300 figures which appear to move as flashes of light from led lamps synchronized with the rotations of the artwork. Within the columns of the temple on the ground floor women struggle with their assailants, a seated woman holds her hand up to protect both herself and the child on her knee, and there are dead children strewn across the floor. Above them a baby is thrown through a window and a woman dangles her child over a balcony away from a club wielded viciously by a soldier. Collishaw intended to capture the way many paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents ‘thrive on the repetition of characters spread across the canvas’: ‘they are designed to excite our emotions and to keep our eyes moving around the surface in an agitated manner without intimacy and with no focal point. The zoetrope capitalises on this, literally repeating characters to create an overwhelming orgy of violence that is simultaneously appalling and compelling’.66 Jonathan Jones, writing in The Guardian, calls Callishaw a ‘true modern moralist’ who ‘makes you glimpse the evil in yourself’: Utter cruelty is happening before your eyes: the animation is solid, it is substantial. As the zoetrope slows down their movement becomes stranger, more jagged, until finally the cold frieze of slaughter is static once again. Collishaw’s convulsive rendering of The Massacre of the Innocents is the most shocking and disturbing British work of art since the Chapman brothers’ Hell. But this is no cheap shock for the sake of it. This is a formidable meditation on art’s sinister relationship with violence.67 It also indirectly highlights what we have seen repeatedly, visual portrayals of the Massacre can become like a mirror to the context in which they are produced. 4

Theatrical Enactments: Staging Violence and Anguish

The earliest dramatic portrayals of the Massacre of the Innocents were originally liturgical dramas performed by clerics and sung in Latin plainchant 66 67

‘All Things Fall: Mat Collishaw, 2014’, Factum Arte, accessed 19 August 2018, http://www .factum-arte.com/pag/636/La%20instalación%20del%20Zoótropo%20en%20la%20Galleria%20Borghese,%20Roma. Jonathan Jones, ‘Mat Collishaw’s shock tactics: “Cruelty happening before your eyes”’, The Guardian, 24 September 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/24/ mat-collishaw-review-new-art-gallery-walsall.

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during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Ordo Rachelis (Play or Ceremony of Rachel) which is also sometimes known as Ludus Innocentium (Play of the Innocents) or Interfectio Puerorum (Murder of the Children), refers to several plays from the eleventh and twelfth century which may have originated in earlier liturgical dramatisations.68 The Interfectio puerorum (Slaughter of Innocents), a liturgical drama from a Benedictine monastery in Fleury, Northern France, draws on texts from the liturgy for All Saint’s Day, Innocents Day, the Purification and Good Friday to present the Innocents ‘as members of the Christian community, united with all those who have been and will be victims of persecution, and united too with the monastics who pray for and with the saints’.69 Liturgical dramas were staged without naturalistic violence and instead the focus was on theology and allusions to scripture as the choristers representing the Innocent Martyrs sang ‘Why do you not defend our blood?’ and the angel, echoing sentiments from the Book of Revelation, told them to wait for a while and promised they would join their brothers in heaven.70 Such theological considerations may have also coloured the representation of the women who embrace their suffering and accept the martyrdom of their infants.71 These liturgical dramas combined didacticism with devotion and the theological implications made the Massacre of ‘serious, symbolic importance’, even if the figure of Herod was presented with an element of farce.72 Theological ideas and religious education were arguably more important than representing historical massacres or alluding to contemporary atrocities in medieval church dramas and pageants, just as they were in early mosaics and frescos. The most developed theatrical representations of the Massacre of the Innocents were of course found in the devotional and didactic plays of medieval England known as the mystery plays or Corpus Christi plays. Performed as part of the Catholic festival dedicated to the veneration of the bread which was thought to be Christ’s body as taught in the doctrine of transubstantiation, these plays were banned as Protestantism spread in England. Before they were 68 69 70 71

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See Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), especially pp. 182–211. Theresa Tinkle, ‘The Fleury “Slaughter of Innocents” and the Myth of Ritual Murder’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102, no. 2 (2003): pp. 211–243, p. 218. Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’, p. 40. For an alternative reading, see Robert S. Sturges, The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Sturges sees the sorrow of mothers of the massacred innocents and Mary lamenting after the crucifixion in the planctus Mariae tradition as a refusal to be comforted and this refusal ‘a form of resistance to power both political and spiritual’, p. 52. Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’, p. 40. $)((-&
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suppressed, they enjoyed great popularity in the city centres of York, Chester, Coventry, Wakefield, and Lincoln. These plays forged a unique dramatic tradition that treated grandiose biblical themes with great spectacle and combined comedy and tragedy with reverence and boisterous humour. From the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century, the Massacre of the Innocents would have been performed both by itself and alongside other plays before the mystery plays were banned for their residual Catholic elements. Mystery plays offered a sharp contrast to classical tragedy: instead of verbal descriptions of wounded bodies and elaborate deaths that took place offstage, the plays offered graphic portrayals of torture and murder, especially when representing Christ’s crucifixion and the Massacre of the Innocents. In the Chester plays bundles representing babies were whipped out of their mothers’ arms and spitted on swords brandished by swaggering soldiers. The comic element of such swaggering was compounded by the buffoonery of Herod.73 The farcical figure of a ranting, raving tyrant was played for laughs and, as Jacobus points out, the struggle between mothers and soldiers was also played with elements of buffoonery for comic effect: ‘The mothers are foul-mouthed harridans who respond in kind, attacking the soldiers with boots and pot-ladles and engaging in sexual banter with them’.74 In contrast to Herod’s rage and violent demands, the mothers’ lamentations could also be lyrical and emotive in the mystery plays, especially in the Shearmen and Tailors’ pageant in the Coventry Plays.75 This pageant dramatized the infancy of Christ from the Annunciation to the Massacre. The drama is both solemn and burlesque, not least when we see the mothers angrily attacking the murdering soldiers, and the

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See also Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’. Jacobus notes a similar portrayal of Herod in fourteenth and fifteenth century pageants in Italy: ‘In other Italian cities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notably Milan and Florence, spectacular outdoor pageants celebrating the Feast of the Magi seem to have been the norm at Epiphany. In these, the ridiculous figure of Herod featured prominently, ranting at the Magi and his courtiers, sometimes killing himself in a burlesque fit of pique. In 1390 in Florence, a chronicler recorded a “feast of the Magi” performed on the streets of Florence. The magnificent displays of the Magi’s mounted retinues … together with the costumes of Herod and his courtiers, were the primary object of the chronicler’s attentions. His account ends with the casual observation that the “celebration” ended at five o’clock in the afternoon, when Herod “caused to be killed many children represented in the arms of their mothers and nurses”’, p. 50. Jacobus, ‘Motherhood and Massacre’, p. 50. See Richard Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Western Michigan University: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). $)((-&
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poetry is both simple and moving. The poignant carol sung by the mothers of the massacred children is still hauntingly beautiful: Herod the king, in his raging, Charged he hath this day, His men of might, in his own sight, All young children to slay. Then woe is me, poor child, for thee And ever mourn I may; For thy parting, neither say nor sing, By-by, lulla, lullay.76 Shakespeare, like other early modern dramatists, drew on these late medieval religious and theatrical traditions and some of the violent and comic elements of the mystery plays echo in his representations of murdered children and lamenting mothers. In Henry v, Shakespeare includes a direct reference to the ‘blood-hunting slaughtermen’ from the mystery plays as the English king warns the besieged citizens of Harfleur of the horrors to come: Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen. henry v, ll. 3.3.118–2177

Powerful, brutal, and remorseless murderers are also present as the two young princes meet their deaths in the tower in Richard iii, and when Macduff’s son is stabbed onstage and his children massacred in Macbeth. Some interpret this scene in Macbeth as a clear parallel with the biblical Massacre of Innocents.78 One of the most painful moments in the play is when one of the murderers stabs Macduff’s son in front of his mother.79 In some nineteenth-century

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See The Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant, ‘The Coventry Carol’, line 8; translated and edited by John Gassner, Medieval and Tudor Drama (New York: Bantam, 1963) p. 143. William Shakespeare, Henry v, edited by Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See Maurice Charney, All of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). As a child, one of the authors of this essay played Macduff’s son, in a late twentiethcentury production. He remembers vividly how he was brutally stabbed every night and then had to cry nightly: ‘He has killed me, mother’. $)((-&
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productions the killing was relegated to take place off stage or was even left out, since it was seen as distasteful and unnecessary.80 Lamenting women figure prominently in the rhetorical outpourings of grief from the three women in Richard iii, but in Macbeth the role of the lamenting mother is left to Macduff after the murder of his wife along with her children. Like Rachel in the Ordo Rachelis or Ludus Innocentium, he refuses to be comforted: ross Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes Savagely slaughter’d: to relate the manner, Were, on the quarry of these murder’d deer, To add the death of you. malcolm Merciful heaven! What, man! ne’er pull your hat upon your brows; Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. macduff My children too? ross Wife, children, servants, all That could be found. macduff And I must be from thence! My wife kill’d too? ross I have said. malcolm Be comforted: Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge, To cure this deadly grief. macduff He has no children. All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What, all my pretty chickens and their dam 80

For more on the Victorian theatrical context see Linzy Brady and Jolyon Mitchell, ‘Theatre’, in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 436–446. $)((-&
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At one fell swoop? malcolm Dispute it like a man. macduff I shall do so; But I must also feel it as a man… macbeth, ll. 4.3.206–22481

There is another revision of the lamenting women in Macbeth as Lady Macbeth not only sets her husband on his murderous course, but also embodies the ruthless, murdering intent behind the Massacre of the Innocents. In a blood-curdling description of her insatiable ambition, she describes in detail what artists of the Massacre had depicted countless times: I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. macbeth, ll. 1.7.54–982

During the twentieth century mystery plays in Chester, York, Lincoln, and Coventry have enjoyed a resurgence of interest and draw thousands to see the plays performed once more in their historic settings.83 Recent revivals and adaptations of the Massacre of the Innocents have inevitably been depicted in different ways, with some directors drawing on elements of street theatre. As Margaret Rogerson points out, the 2000 Coventry Mysteries ‘foregrounded a number of elements of popular and street culture … [including] stilt-walkers, a fire-eater, a shadow-puppet show’.84 One of the most memorable moments was ‘a market scene for the Slaughter of the Innocents, in which the babies

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William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by A.R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Shakespeare, Macbeth. For a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon see Jolyon Mitchell, Passion Play: The Mysterious Revivals of Religious Drama (forthcoming, 2020). Margaret Rogerson, ‘“Everybody Got their Brown Dress”; Mystery Plays for the Millennium’, New Theatre Quarterly 66 (2001): pp. 123–140, p. 129.

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were represented by melons and the slaughter by the splattering of soft pink flesh, flecked with the dark seeds, as the fruit was dashed to the pavement’.85 Some productions have been elusive or reticent with what was actually shown of the infanticide. In 2010, the York Mystery Plays’ wagon production of The Massacre of the Innocents depicted a blond-haired Herod dressed in a dark suit with a bright red tie alongside young soldiers in contemporary military fatigues, and mothers in light grey smocks and black bowler hats (See Figure 11.9).86 These hats, reminiscent of those worn by the violent Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971), became the focal point of violence in this modern rendition of the Massacre of the Innocents. Initially they were cradled like babies, only to be wrested from the mothers and thrown to the ground, stamped upon and crushed, as the mothers wailed and screamed. A small, white-faced and dark-haired puppet was used to re-enact their death, as a redhatted violinist and an accordionist played haunting music. Other revivals of the mystery plays have given realistic or semi-realistic portrayals of the Massacre. In Mark Dornford-May’s Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries (2001),87 the Massacre was a sombre episode in an exuberant and confronting production that was later made into a film.88 Emerging out of what some still described as ‘the rainbow nation’, this adaptation brought together seven languages including Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans with English and a smattering of Latin. The actress, Pauline Malefane, had played Mary in 2001 and 2002, before taking the role of God in 2009 and memorably stepped down from the heavenly throne halfway through the performance to put on the garments of mortality and become Jesus.89 The Massacre of the Innocents began with brightly dressed mothers delighting in their tiny babies, but the laughter quickly turned 85 86

87 88

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Rogerson, ‘“Everybody Got their Brown Dress”; Mystery Plays for the Millennium’, p. 129. It is illuminating to compare the 2010 and 2014 wagon productions of The Massacre of the Innocents, both also now available on dvd. See ‘Wagon Plays’ at York Mystery Plays – Illumination: From Shadow into Light, accessed 28 January 2016, http://yorkmysteryplays. org/default.asp?idno=6 and York Mystery Plays, accessed 19 August 2018, https://www .yorkmysteryplays.co.uk/buy-dvd/. Yiimimangaliso means miracle, wonder, or something wondrous in Zulu. As a theatre production, Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries was staged by a multi-racial South African cast in 2001 at the Wilton Music Hall in London. It was taken on a world tour for a couple of years, before being revived in 2009 at the Garrick theatre in London. See the discussion of Mark Dornford-May’s film Son of Man (2006) below. Michael Billington, writing in The Guardian, noted that ‘the political aspects of the story had been “toned down” in the 2009 production’: ‘there is no longer a white Cain killing a black Abel, and the sjambok-wielding riot police seem less brutal than they were’. Michael Billington, ‘The Mysteries – Yiimimangaliso’, The Guardian, 16 September 2009, https:// www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/sep/16/the-mysteries-review.

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Figure 11.9

York Minister Mystery Plays Image, ‘Soldiers, mothers, Mephistophles, babies’, 2010, York. Performed by teenagers from St Peter’s School, York. © THE NATIONAL CENTRE FOR EARLY MUSIC, YORK.

to tears as darkly uniformed soldiers materialised and one by one the children were killed. One of the most pathos-filled moments was Mary’s attempt to comfort one of the weeping mothers, desolate after the death of her child, while holding her own living child. It was not clear whether the comfort was accepted as the pain on the mother’s face remained and as in the Matthean text, which is equally ambiguous, it was unclear whether grief was healed and the ‘bitter weeping’ quenched.90 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre performed an abbreviated production of Tony Harrison’s The Globe Mysteries in 2011. The play was first performed on the terrace of the National Theatre in 1977 before it was reworked in 2011 as part of the celebrations marking 400 years of the King James Bible. Vera Cantoni describes 90

One interpretation of the text is that as Rachel’s weeping image is followed in Jeremiah (31:16ff) by a more hopeful call, ‘Cease your weeping, shed no more tears’, then the author of Matthew is using this citation to demonstrate how Mary’s child will bring joy and an end to weeping. This appears to be a tenuous interpretative move as Matthew stops short of quoting the more hopeful phrase of Jeremiah. The result of this editing is that the force of the sentence is focused on Rachel weeping as her children are no more. $)((-&
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the evolution of the Massacre of the Innocents in a note in New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe: […] while in the published 1985 version only a short lamentation follows the silent murder of the babies, the prompt book of The Globe Mysteries presents a perceptively longer piece: it begins with the ‘Song of the Mothers’, a wailing rendering of the ‘Coventry Carol’ that in the Globe was sung by an increasingly agitated group of women dispersed among the groundlings; gory actions and excruciatingly painful dialogues follow, with the mothers trying to protect their sons either physically or by lying; finally, Herod danced to the same melody, but with a lively rhythm, on a pile of bloody little corpses. The gruesomeness of the stage business is due to production choices, but undoubtedly Tony Harrison decided to expand this episode, from less than one printed page to a collection of dialogues between mothers and soldiers that make the massacre even more harrowing.91 The 2011 Globe version also included an unforgettable moment when a shedlike structure was removed to reveal a pile of babies’ bodies. Online reviewers described Herod ‘standing in the midst of a grotesque pile of butchered babies’,92 applauded the deranged Herod ‘who marvellously declares: “I am bright in bling, kowtow to Herod, the kid-killing king”’,93 and even regarded it as ‘a scene so exaggeratedly gruesome that it’s in fact charmingly droll’.94 Another enactment of the Massacre of the Innocents took place on what was one of the largest stages in Britain, as part of the ambitious revival of the York Mystery Plays in 2012. The stage combined ‘a slate floor reminiscent of the Giant’s Causeway with five huge trapdoors, 15 smaller ones and five hidden stairways’.95 During the Massacre of the Innocents, the trapdoors were used to good effect, with soldiers stamping their boots on the concealed entrances as

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Vera Cantoni, New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), p. 206. Peter Brown, ‘The Globe Mysteries’, London Theatre, accessed 14 August 2018, https:// www.londontheatre.co.uk/reviews/the-globe-mysteries. ‘The Globe Mysteries’, Time Out, accessed 14 August 2018, https://www.timeout.com/ london/theatre/the-globe-mysteries. ‘The Globe Mysteries, Shakespeare’s Globe’, Evening Standard, accessed 14 August 2018, https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/theatre/the-globe-mysteries-shakespeares -globe-review-7426165.html. Charles Hutchinson, ‘Review: York Mystery Plays, Museum Gardens, York’, The Press, 10 August 2012. $)((-&
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if banging on doors to the mothers’ homes.96 One of the cast members described performing the massacre where the mothers were ‘trapped under the stage’ while soldiers ‘banged on the trap’.97 As they emerged children were ‘snatched from us’ and ‘some of them were murdered above the stage’, but many women simply came ‘up the step ladder, nursing a bundle of rags’ that symbolised their dead babies. The experience for the performers was unforgettable and most them ‘were in tears every night’ because ‘it wasn’t going to work unless you really lived the part; because it was big, the stage was huge. You had to be acting with the whole of your body’. Nearly the entire cast of the York Mystery Plays was clothed in 1940s and 1950s costumes designed by Anna Gooch to bring post-war Yorkshire to life.98 The plain dresses and trousers, the functional scarfs and hats, the muted shirts and jumpers, Mary’s head scarf and Joseph’s flat cap, all intentionally connected the story with the aftermath of the Second World War, the original York Mystery Play revival of 1951 and the art of Stanley Spencer (1891–1959). These resonances ensured that the plays subtly connected with recent painful and dangerous memories as well as the medieval narratives, largely based upon biblical stories.99 In a discussion of the 2012 production, Margaret Rogerson described a scene in which soldiers divide a line of refugees by gender, and for her the ‘frightening separation of the women and girls from the men and boys’ 96 97 98 99

The trapdoors were used at other crucial moments: both fallen angels in the opening scenes and the damned in the closing moments of the production disappeared off stage through the trap doors. Interview with Barbara (name-changed recording and transcript with author), York, 5 February 2014. Margaret Rogerson, ‘Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance?’, Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013): pp. 343–366. Such focus arguably resonates with the scholarly theory of the existence of and style employed by the ‘York Realist’. See J.W. Robinson, ‘The Art of the York Realist’, Modern Philology lx, no. 4 (May 1963): pp. 241–251. See also Clifford Davidson, ‘The realism of the York realist and the York Passion’, Speculum 50, no. 02 (1975): pp. 270–283. Davidson highlights the use by the ‘York Realist’ of ‘vivid details’ to bring the story to life. Nevertheless, few, if any, scholars link the ‘York Realist’ with the play about the Massacre of the Innocents. More pertinent is Roland Reed’s short essay on: ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, in Early Theatre 3 (2000), pp. 219–28. Reflecting on staging a version of the Slaughter of the Innocents at the University of Toronto festival and then Georgetown University in the late 1990s, Reed describes what ‘appealed’ to him ‘about The Slaughter of the Innocents was its portrayal of state sponsored terrorism’ which made him ‘think most immediately of civilian victims among Iraq’s Kurds and Sarajevo’s Muslims’. Citing a number of other recent slaughters in Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, Afghanistan, South Africa, Morocco and Chechnya’ he asserts that: ‘No medieval play could be more immediately and horrifyingly relevant to our time’. p. 219.

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recalled ‘some of the atrocities of the Second World War as well as more recent and ongoing acts of inhumanity’.100 For many viewers, such scenes also evoked the scene of arrivals at concentration camps after long rail journeys during the Second World War Shoah (Holocaust), or images from the Srebenicia massacre (July 1995), where some 8000 Muslim men and boys were separated from their families and taken to isolated fields where they were shot and buried in mass graves. The 2016 production of the York Mystery Plays also highlighted modern atrocities. Director Phillip Breen, prior to the production in the York Minister, asked: ‘How could you approach the slaughter of the innocents in which children’s lives are being wiped out to achieve ruthless political ends and not think about the recent images of refugees from war torn parts of the Middle East and dead children being washed up on foreign shores?’101 This story, like many others within the York cycle, clearly continues to resonate with contemporary audiences and dramatists. Four years later a reviewer in the Yorker, Kate Brennan, reflected on the scene of the Massacre of the Innocents that made her feel most uncomfortable in the 2016 production in the York Minster: ‘Despite the lack of fake blood spewing across the stage, the scene was still horrifying in its own gruesome way’. She described how the soldiers wrenched the babies from their mothers ignoring their ‘deafening screams’. The babies were then ‘held up high for all the audience to see and decapitated to reveal red ribbons of blood’. Dolls were hurled ‘across the stage, stamped on by soldiers and red ribbons emerged everywhere, all under the disturbing and uncomfortable sound of screaming women and crying babies’. Brennan confessed to feeling ‘slightly 100 101

See Margaret Rogerson, ‘Medieval Religious Plays in England: Afterlives and New Lives through Performance’, in Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, edited by Gail Ashton (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 32–47, p. 39. ‘Meet the creators: Director’s vision. Director Phillip Breen shares his initial thoughts for the 2016 production’, York Minster, accessed 26 January 2015, http://www.yorkminster.org/ mysteryplays2016/behind-the-scenes/director-039-s-vision.html. Earlier adaptations of mystery plays had also focussed on other experiences of war and displacement. A 1970 performance of a mystery play in contemporary costume by the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco was a political adaptation expressing condemnation of the Vietnam War. See also ‘Enrique Buenaventura’, in Encyclopaedia of Latin American and Caribbean Culture. Volume 1: A–D, edited by Daniel Balderston, Mike Gonzalez, and Ana M. Lopez (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 233–235. Colombian director Enrique Buenaventura’s (1925–2003) theatre group Teatro Experimental de Cali (tec) clearly tied the Massacre of the Innocents in their ‘nationalized’ Nativity play with ‘La Violencia’, the civil war that lasted from 1948–58. Herod was represented as a tropical dictator and the play was intended as political critique of the conflict in which up to 300,000 people died and almost 1 million were displaced.

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sickened at the scene’, though also observing that ‘it was nevertheless effective in its dramatisation’.102 Like the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays were revived for the Festival of Britain celebrations in 1951 and are now performed every five years. In the Chester Mystery Play performed in 2013, the Massacre of the Innocents ended the first half of the performance with ten women holding bundles and standing in dim, dappled light. They stared down at the babies in their arms to the sound of beating drums as a hunched and cloaked figure hobbled grotesquely and ominously towards them. He threw back his cloak to reveal himself as Lucifer. He gently cooed over one of the infants before walking off stage as he threw a single word to soldiers who had assembled onstage: ‘Kill!’ Four youngsters in army fatigues marched forward and light flooded the stage to the sound of guns being loaded. As the young soldiers touched the shoulder of each women, the mothers unfurled their bundles to reveal flags of countries where child-soldiers are both victims and perpetrators of horrific crimes: Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Palestine, Mali, Kosovo, and Iraq. A choir sang the opening words of the haunting sixteenth century Coventry Carol, ‘Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child. Bye bye, lully, lullay’, as the flags were unfurled and laid on the floor. This bloodless massacre left much to the imagination and was considered by one reviewer as the ‘highlight of the night’ which ‘felt like a punch in the stomach’.103 These scenes had a powerful impact not only on audience members and reviewers, but also on participants such as June, who when she first saw in rehearsal ‘the scene at the end of Act One when the mothers unroll the flags [during the Massacre of the Innocents]’ was ‘completely overwhelmed’. She described how even ‘thinking about it now makes me want to cry!’ She ‘sobbed’ then and every time they ‘sang that scene’, admitting that: ‘I had to look away because I couldn’t sing and watch it. It was just too hideously true and moving and terrible’.104 The 2018 Chester Mystery plays adapted this moment by using white flags with red poppies to resonate with recent World War One memorials. A contemporary, family-friendly take on the Mystery plays is given in performances of The Nativity and The Life of Christ at the Wintershall Estate in the Surrey countryside. Like the creators of medieval liturgical dramas and mystery 102 103 104

Kate Brennan, ‘York Mystery Plays – Review’, The Yorker, accessed 7 June 2016, http://www .theyorker.co.uk/arts-and-culture/york-mystery-plays-review-07062016/. Michael Green, ‘Review: Chester Mystery Plays, Chester Cathedral’, The Chester Chronicle, 28 June 2013, http://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/review --chester-mystery-plays-6085135. Interview with June (name-changed recording and transcript with author), York, 5 February 2014.

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plays, producer Peter Hutley promotes understanding of the Bible through drama, and considerable creative effort is invested in the craft of producing these plays to make Christianity understandable to a broad inter-generational audience. The Nativity, attracting audiences of around 6,000 people over ten performances every Christmas, includes sheep, a couple of cows in a pen, and a donkey for Mary, as well as Wise Men who ‘come in on horseback and ride right through the barn down the centre aisle’.105 There are plenty of what Hutley describes as ‘wow moments’ during the performance: ‘the arrival of King Herod on (real) horseback is wonderfully dramatic, and a scene in which his men go seeking babies to murder, following Herod’s orders to kill all boys under two, is more than a little scary’.106 There are also melodramatic moments in the Nativity, which hint at a ‘pantomime approach to the Christmas story’: when Herod is confronted by the Archangel Michael, for example, he is forced to make a dramatic exit through the barn doors into Hades accompanied by flares, lights, and pyrotechnics. According to cast member Tom, ‘it is phenomenal! And of course the children love it’.107 And to keep the children happy, Herod makes a last appearance ‘rehabilitated in the final scene and [ending] the show holding hands with a couple of the children he was earlier intent on slaying’.108 As Hutley put it, ‘We can’t make it too bleak’.109 In this way tragedy is turned on its head and, as with Brueghel’s softened painting and the Victorian bowdlerization of Macbeth, there is an understandable desire to turn away from the horror and tragedy of the massacre. This, however, is not the case in Wintershall’s performance of the Life of Christ on an outdoor stage in the Surrey Hills. Performed each year in the summer, not at Christmas, the spectacle of the Massacre of the Innocents is unexpectedly realistic, with armed soldiers on horses charging down alarmingly upon mothers and their children. It is an experience more aligned to a film set than the more symbolic massacres in recent Mystery Plays. 105

106

107 108 109

Paraphrase and quotations from ‘Is the Wintershall Nativity in Bramley the best nativity in Britain?’, Surrey Life, 20 December 2012, updated 16 December 2014, http://www .surreylife.co.uk/out-about/places/is-the-wintershall-nativity-in-bramley-the -best-nativity-in-britain-1-1780277. Joanna Moorhead, ‘Away in a Manger: How one Surrey man turned a Nativity in his barn into an annual pilgrimage’, Independent, 19 December 2010, https://www.independent .co.uk/life-style/christmas10/entertainment/away-in-a-manger-how-one-surrey-man -turned-a-nativity-in-his-barn-into-an-annual-pilgrimage-2161339.html. Interview with Tom (name-changed recording and transcript with author), University of Edinburgh, 10 July 2013. Moorhead, ‘Away in a Manger’. Moorhead, ‘Away in a Manger’.

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Cinematic Portrayals: Screening Slaughter and Heartbreak

As well as a long dramatic history, the Massacre of the Innocents has a rich, if shorter, history of cinematic representation. It sits in a tradition of Gospel films that include, according to Graham Holderness, ‘the Anglo-Saxon hero of the Hollywood Jesus-film, the Jewish messiah of the historical Jesus quest, the laid-back hippy guru of Godspell or the hapless clown of Life of Brian’.110 As is to be expected, some cinematic versions offer a temporary glimpse of the Massacre of the Innocents or allude to it obliquely,111 while others give violent and graphic depictions with stirring music and disturbing close-ups. In Alice Guy Blache’s La vie du Christ, a French black and white silent film also known as The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906), the Massacre of the Innocents is omitted. Instead, in the footage titled ‘Le Sommeil de Jesus [The Sleep of Jesus]’ a host of musical angels gather protectively round the crib in which the child sleeps and form a tableau of angelic harmony, which contrasts with the scene of horror that biblically-literate viewers know is taking place at the same time. The film then jumps to the story of the good Samaritan showing Jesus as an adult and the massacre is conspicuous in its obvious absence.112 In Ferdinand Zecca’s Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1907), a 50-minute French silent film, soldiers tear babies from their mothers’ arms in another early cinematic representation of the Massacre of the Innocents. David J. Shepherd compares this massacre with the massacre of Hebrew infants in The Life of Moses, a silent film directed by J. Stuart Blackton which was serialised in five successive parts in the US in 1909: […] Zecca’s portrayal of the scene in his 1907 Vie et Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ included live babies being torn from women’s arms and swung about in the most remarkable and seemingly hazardous fashion. While neither the scene from Mathew nor Exodus offers any details, the melodrama of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms was

110 111 112

Graham Holderness, Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 136. The opening sequence of The Nativity Story (dir. Catherine Hardwicke 2006) is a brief and suggestive depiction of the massacre with no graphic details, focussing instead on Herod and his son and the plight of Israelites under their corrupt rule. This ‘non-depiction’ of the massacre is discussed briefly in David J. Shepherd, ed., The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927) (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 62–63.

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evidently as irresistible to Blackton in The Life of Moses, as it was to Zecca in his Life of Christ.113 Further embellishments are found in the massacre scene in King of Kings (1961), directed by Nicholas Ray who had directed Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 and with narrative and commentary written by Ray Bradbury and delivered by Orson Welles. In this version Lucius, the fictional Roman centurion who oversees the Massacre of the Innocents under Herod, initially refuses to be involved because he believes Romans should not kill children. The massacre, violent and disturbing, is seen by some as more violent that the non-violent crucifixion, presenting Herod as the embodiment of ‘irrational cruelty, degeneracy, perversity, and orientalised otherness’.114 This point is also made by Lisa Maurice: Herod Antipas, Herodias and Salome are portrayed as ‘lurid, sadomasochistic’ Arabs, and represent the contemporary view of the Arab threat to Israel. The Arab Herod is depicted as a worse figure than any Roman in this movie; thus the Roman officer, Lucius declares, ‘I am a Roman soldier. I do not murder children’. Although Lucius is a ‘good Roman’, the distinction is still made between the Romans, who have some kind of moral boundaries, and the Arabs, who do not.115 Lucius, the ‘good’ Roman soldier, later meets the 12-year-old Jesus while on duty in Nazareth. He is astounded to learn he was in Bethlehem at the time of the massacre and will later meet him again when he is sent to spy on him in Judea under Pontius Pilate. Not surprisingly, he is the Centurion who, when Jesus eventually dies on the cross, declares ‘He is truly the Christ’ (cf. Mark 15:39). Political concerns also resonate in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo [Gospel According to St. Matthew] (1964), even though the controversial 113 114

115

David J. Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film: Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 79. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 51. See also Jeffrey Lloyd Staley and Richard G. Walsh, Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on dvd (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). Lisa Maurice, ‘Swords, Sandals and Prayer Shawls: Depicting Jews and Romans on the Silver Screen’, in When the First Western Empire Met the Near East, Graeca Tergestina, Storia e Civilta, edited by David Schaps, Daniela Dueck, and Uri Yifrach (Edizioni: Universita di Triest, 2016), pp. 307–336, p. 313.

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director famously said he followed St. Matthew’s Gospel ‘point by point’ and ‘without omitting or adding anything’.116 His portrayal of the Massacre of the Innocents shows a group of helmeted soldiers assembling on a hilltop in menacing silence. At a whistled signal by a burly soldier they stream down the hill towards panicking villagers. Singling out the mothers carrying babies, the soldiers attack women whose billowing robes hamper their escape and contribute to the pandemonium. Some soldiers drag women to the ground and strike the infants in their arms while others fling the children into the air before using the sword on them. Long shots of the struggle extending down the hillside show babies flung into the air and are interspersed with closeups of an older child covered with blood, dying, while a man’s voice quotes from St Matthew: ‘In Ramah there was lamentation and weeping, Rachel weeps for her children, because they are not’.117 This portrayal of the massacre, with soldiers wrenching, stamping, chopping, and cutting, is reminiscent of the rare film of actual killing by machete in the genocide, some thirty years later, in Rwanda in 1994.118 Like Renaissance painters before him, Pasolini located his story of the massacre and the life of Christ in contemporary Italy. The film is set in Apulia and the Basilicata in the South of Italy with amateur actors and draws on iconography in works such as Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto (1460–65) which depicts the heavily pregnant Mary beneath an archway. According to Barth David Schwartz, it was ‘in Italy’s pictorial tradition that he found the posture for the sleeping soldiers at the Resurrection, and the decapitated children in the massacre of the innocents’.119 He also found in contemporary Italy and contemporary Europe the inspiration for making the film. Pasolini himself said ‘I absolutely needed a moment of current events, that perhaps in the film doesn’t ever emerge because not everyone is aware of it, but I needed this in shooting it’.120 As Naomi Greene points out, Pasolini’s ‘quasi-documentary approach’ reflected both his ‘desire to capture reality’ and to include a ‘political 116 117

118 119 120

Marcia Ann Kupfer, The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), p. 180. In Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), the same words are quoted when Simeon makes an extra-biblical appearance at the Temple after the Massacre of the Innocents saying, ‘In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not…’. See Jolyon Mitchell, Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 109–147. Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem, 2nd edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), p. 415. Pasolini is quoted in Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 126–127.

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dimension’, and she quotes Pasolini when he said ‘for Herod’s soldiers before the slaughter of the innocents, I had to think of Fascist hoods’.121 Millicent Marcus make a similar observation: […] the iconography of the holy family’s flight into Egypt is modelled on photographs of Spanish refugees fleeing the Civil War across the Pyrenees, the Massacre of the Innocents recalls both the Holocaust and the murder of Slavic babies by Fascist soldiers who threw them into the air to their deaths, while the costumes of the Roman military and Herod’s soldiers evoke those of the Italian police and of Mussolini’s squadristi, respectively.122 Just as Pasolini drew on the pictorial heritage of Italian artists to locate his film in the Italy of his generation, other directors have represented the Massacre of the Innocents in familiar locations and contemporary setting. British director Mark Dornford-May locates the Gospel in South Africa and enacts the Gospel story in the townships of contemporary Africa. Son of Man (2006) is a film deeply rooted in both the medieval tradition of mystery plays and the contemporary world of theatre, politics, and culture in South Africa, where Dornford-May is now based.123 The Massacre of the Innocents takes place in the shantytowns of South Africa, filmed with a cast of black actors in Kayelitsha near Cape Town. It takes place after an earlier school massacre in which Christ’s mother 121

122 123

Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Greene also writes: ‘By giving Biblical events and people a modern, earthy cast, Pasolini underscores, and often creates, important analogies between the contemporary world and that of Christ – analogies, as he once remarked, that are at the very heart of the film’, p. 76. Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book, p. 126. Reinhold Zwick, ‘Between Chester and Cape Town: Transformations of the Gospel in Son of Man by Mark Dornford-May’, Journal of Religion & Film 15, no. 1, Article 17 (2011): pp. 1–18. According to Zwick, Dornford-May himself participated in the Chester Mystery plays from an early age, appearing onstage as an angel and eventually as Jesus. See also Official London Theatre ‘Exclusive: Mark Dornford-May on why the Chester Mystery Plays are so important to him’, 7 September 2009, https://officiallondontheatre.com/news/ exclusive-mark-dornford-may-on-why-the-chester-mystery-plays-are-so-important-tohim-107332/: ‘The plays of the Chester Mystery Cycle form some of my earliest memories. As an eight-year-old angel in front of the north side of Chester Cathedral I remember being really and truly in awe of God because his face was painted gold and he spoke in a language (Latin) that was at once thrilling and mysterious. My father directed at least seven productions of The Chester Mystery Cycle plays, all of which I appeared in, although much as he loved me, even he never cast me as an angel again!’

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Mary was trapped and survived by lying among the dead children and pretending to be dead. It is an atrocity clearly linked to Satan who appeared as one of the warlords responsible for the massacre and who moved among the bodies to ensure none survived. In the aftermath of this school massacre Gabriel appears to Mary and announces the coming birth of the Messiah. The actual massacre of the innocents occurs when Jesus is old enough to be a troubled eye-witness. His parents quietly escape from a group of soldiers leading villagers along a path to their deaths and from a distance Jesus sees what Reinhold Zwick describes as a ‘primal scene of violence’.124 Dornford-May further elaborates on the biblical story as Gabriel again appears to offer Jesus an escape from this world of violence and a way to return to heaven. As he would do as an adult in the biblical accounts of the temptation and crucifixion, the child Jesus refuses to escape the world of bloodshed and injustice. He says, ‘This is my world’, and proceeds to fully enter into its suffering and violence.125 Witnessing this violence and injustice has a formative impact on the young Jesus and accounts for the social conscience he displays through the film, heightened by its setting in a country still struggling with its history of apartheid and imperialism. Dornford-May’s Jesus is similar to Steve Biko, the antiapartheid activist and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa whose death in police custody in 1977 made him a hero among international black resistance groups. As Zwick points out, the influence of the Mystery plays is a ‘backbone’ for the film, but Dornford-May draws equally on the South African struggle against Apartheid: ‘With the exception of the Temptation, Son of Man omits all mythological episodes central to the Mystery Play tradition … [and] the Jesus of the movie is much more “grounded”, much more “earthly”, much more incarnated’.126 The struggle against racist politics involves men, women, and children in resistance and activism and by the end of the film the comparisons between Jesus and Biko are unmistakable: his words echo in Jesus’ mouth and Jesus dies after being beaten to death like Biko. These diverse cinematic portrayals, spanning over a century, illustrate not only the

124

125 126

See Zwick, ‘Between Chester and Cape Town’. Zwick compares Son of Man (2016) with Pasolini’s Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo: ‘Dornford-May as well as Pasolini use the murdering of innocent children in Bethlehem as a primal scene of violence and of the deadly dynamics inherent in the struggle to maintain power. Thus both expand this event in their screening far beyond the small biblical basis’ (pp. 13–14). According to Holderness, this episode is included in the Massacre in a way that is ‘entirely consistent with a theological exegesis of the incarnation’. See his note in Re-Writing Jesus, p. 246. Zwick, ‘Between Chester and Cape Town’, pp. 6–7.

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magnetic draw of this tragic tale, but also its ability to once again shed light on contemporary concerns, traumas, and tragedies. 6

Conclusion

The long tradition of depicting the Massacre of the Innocents is rich and multi-layered, developing, evolving, and changing through different contexts and different forms of representation. Artists, dramatists, directors, journalists, and writers have returned to the theme of infants slaughtered by a cruel tyrant, adapting it, embellishing it, censoring it, and politicizing it. Sometimes Herod and his henchmen have been turned into the hated enemy or feared ‘other’ of the day and some of the portrayals we have considered act like faded mirrors reflecting contemporaneous anxieties and tragedies. The story originally told in the Gospel of Matthew has also become part of church and other traditions. As observed earlier the Holy Innocents have been commemorated as martyrs since the fifth century and the medieval Coventry Carol is sung during Advent or Christmas services to this day. The story also exists beyond this tradition and, shaped by Christian thought, imagery and liturgy, is used to speak to and against cultural, social, and political injustices. It is now also commonly found beyond the confines of the Christian tradition. As we have seen through this chapter, different emphases and different interpretations have been placed on the murdering tyrant, the lamenting mothers, and the slaughtered infants of the biblical account, and the result in each painting, play, film, and written account is obviously a unique mixture of pity, horror, and spectacle. Looking beneath the surface of these representations, re-interpretations, and adaptations, we have shown how these moments resonate with recurring themes of this book on Transforming Tragedy. As we have seen in this essay through considering several ambiguous moments, tragedy is not necessarily easily swept under the carpet, such as when the grieving women in Yiimimangaliso: The Mysteries hesitate when offered comfort by Mary. Similarly, Jesus’ ‘entering into’ the world of suffering and bloodshed in Son of Man speaks directly to another central concern of this volume: the relationship (oft-denied) between tragedy and Christianity. While this essay offers an extensive range of examples, it is not intended to be a comprehensive reception history of all representations or interpretations of the Massacre or Slaughter of the Innocents.127 More work could be done, 127

See, for example, Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo (1974 and 1977), which includes a theatrical version of the ‘Slaughter of the Innocents’. See also Tony Mitchell, Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 18–19. $)((-&
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for example, on stained glass representations,128 commentaries, sermons, audience receptions, and recent theatrical revivals.129 Nevertheless, a number of recurring and related themes have emerged through this essay, in particular the complexities of turning a grotesque act and tragic event into beautiful and even hopeful art. Reflecting on items in the Special Collections at St John’s College, Cambridge, such as Giovanni Batista Marino’s 1632 poem on the Massacre of the Innocents and the same theme in sermons and art in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Adam Crothers foregrounds the tension between the horror of the massacre and the beauty of its representation in art and literature: To horrify or to (horrifically) comfort: that both impulses are understandable makes them no less misguided. Imagining the unimaginable, consoling the inconsolable: these are legitimate goals for the pen and the pulpit, but there are other, independent, goals, among them the exploration of inconsolability, of unimaginability, and of the subtleties of human responses.130 The Massacre of the Innocents captures what could be the most personal tragedy in anyone’s life – the senseless murder of a child or dearly loved family member – and the many representations of the massacre confront viewers, audiences, and readers with a tragedy that is at once intensely personal and communal. Mourning memories can transform and heighten communal memories. Represented in mosaics, paintings, dramas, film, and literature, the Massacre of the Innocents becomes a way of understanding the horror of senseless murder, of coming to terms with the devastation of unmitigated loss and of protesting against social and political injustice. It also shows how tragedy, taking on many different forms, can be put to many different uses. The desire to soften or censor the story highlights the difficulty of facing the dreadful reality of innocent children being brutally murdered. Holman Hunt’s Triumph of the Innocents (1883–4) exemplifies this softening approach, with Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus fleeing to Egypt accompanied 128

129 130

See, for example, the stained-glass windows portraying the Massacre of the Innocents at Our Lady of Strasbourg (14th Century), St Peter Mancroft (15th Century), Norwich, Norfolk, and at Church of St Mary the Virgin (1865), Norfolk, UK. See also windows at Amiens and Rouen Cathedrals in France or Ulm Cathedral in Germany. These a few examples of dozens in Europe. See Jolyon Mitchell, Passion Play: The Mysterious Revivals of Religious Drama (Forthcoming). Adam Crothers, ‘Beauty and Horror’, St John’s College, University of Cambridge, 10 January 2018, https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/beauty-and-horror. $)((-&
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Figure 11.10

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Triumph of the Innocents (1883–4). Oil paint on canvas, frame: 2208 x 3175 x 125 mm © 2019. tate N03334

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by playful ‘spirits of the children slain by Herod’ depicted as garlanded cherublike infants.131 (See Figure 11.10.) Beautification of this story, through paint, words, or dramatic action, may be another way of softening or even taming the horror. Arguably, some of the most powerful representations are those that balance reticence with exposure, showing enough to provoke the imagination of audiences to consider the realities and the implications of such violence, but not disabling them with revulsion. Such representations provide space to imagine a world where such grotesque tragedy can be brought to justice and maybe even to an end. Bibliography Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcom Heath (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). Balderston, Daniel, Mike Gonzalez, and Ana M. Lopez, eds. Encyclopaedia of Latin American and Caribbean Culture. Volume 1: A–D (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 233–235. Beadle, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Billington, Michael. ‘The Mysteries – Yiimimangaliso’. The Guardian. 16 September 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/sep/16/the-mysteries-review. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media (Boston: The MIT Press, 1998). Bowden, Sandra and Robert Bowden. ‘Otto Dix: Matthäus Evangelium’. The Bowden Collections, accessed 27 March 2019, http://bowdencollections.com/OttoDix/ dix-essay.html. Brady, Linzy and Jolyon Mitchell. ‘Theatre’. In The Oxford Handbook of NineteenthCentury Christian Thought, edited by Joel Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 436–446. Brennan, Kate. ‘York Mystery Plays – Review’. The Yorker. 7 June 2016. http://www .theyorker.co.uk/arts-and-culture/york-mystery-plays-review-07062016/. Brown, Peter. ‘The Globe Mysteries’. London Theatre. Accessed 14 August 2018. https:// www.londontheatre.co.uk/reviews/the-globe-mysteries. Brown, Raymond. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Updated Edition (New York: Yale University Press, 1999). Bussels, Stijn, and Bram Van Oostveldt. ‘The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide and Solace in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries’. In The Hurt( ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600–1800, edited by Tomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der 131

See William Holman Hunt on the Tate art gallery website, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/ artworks/hunt-the-triumph-of-the-innocents-n03334. $)((-&
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Haven, and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 49–73. Camus, Albert. The Fall (New York: Random House, 1956). Cantoni, Vera. New Playwriting at Shakespeare’s Globe (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Cardenal, Ernesto, ed. The Gospel in Solentiname (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2007). Charney, Maurice. All of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Crothers, Adam. ‘Beauty and Horror’. St John’s College, University of Cambridge. 10 January 2018. https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/beauty-and-horror. Dabashi, Hamid. ‘The Syrian “Massacre of the Innocents”’. Aljazeera. 5 June 2012. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/06/20126410503297278.html. Davidson, Clifford. ‘The realism of the York realist and the York Passion’. Speculum 50, no. 02 (1975): pp. 270–283. Davies W.D. and D.C. Allison. Matthew 1–7: Volume 1. International Critical Commentary Series (London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2004). Dillenberger, Jane Daggett and John Handley. The Religious Art of Pablo Picasso (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014). Eisenman, Robert. James The Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking, 1997). France, R.T. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2007). Gigliotti, Simone. The Memorialization of Genocide (London: Routledge, 2016). Green, Michael. ‘Review: Chester Mystery Plays, Chester Cathedral’. The Chester Chronicle. 28 June 2013. http://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/ review--chester-mystery-plays-6085135. Greene, Naomi. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Halvini, David. Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). Harries, Richard. The Beauty and the Horror: Searching for God in a Suffering World (London: SPCK, 2018). Holderness, Graham. Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Hutchinson, Charles. ‘Review: York Mystery Plays, Museum Gardens, York’. The Press. 10 August 2012. Jacobs, Steven L., ed. Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). Jacobus, Laura. ‘Motherhood and Massacre: The Massacre of the Innocents in LateMedieval Art and Drama’. In The Massacre in History, edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 39–54.

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Jenkins, Philip. The Great and Holy War: How World War i Changed Religion For Ever (New York: Harper Collins, 2014). Jones, Jonathan. ‘Mat Collishaw’s shock tactics: “Cruelty happening before your eyes”’. The Guardian. 24 September 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ 2015/sep/24/mat-collishaw-review-new-art-gallery-walsall. Katongole, Emmanuel. Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017). King, Pamela M. and Clifford Davidson, eds. The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Western Michigan University: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). Kunzle, David. ‘Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents: Bruegel’s Massacres of the Innocents in their Sixteenth Century Political Contexts’. Art History 24, no.1 (2001): pp. 51–82. Kunzle, David. From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550–1672 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002). Kupfer, Marcia Ann. The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). Lubbock, Jules. Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Lunghi, Elvio. The Basilica of St Francis in Assisi (Florence: Scala, 1996). Luz, Ulrich. Matthew 1–7: A Commentary. Hermeneia: A Critical & Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, Revised edition, 2007). Maier, Paul L. ‘Herod and the Infants of Bethlehem’. In Chronos, Kairos, Christos. Volume 2, edited by Jerry Vardaman (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998). Malafarina, Gianfranco, ed. The Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2005). Marcus, Millicent. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). Maurice, Lisa. ‘Swords, Sandals and Prayer Shawls: Depicting Jews and Romans on the Silver Screen’. In When the First Western Empire Met the Near East, Graeca Tergestina, Storia e Civilta, edited by David Schaps, Daniela Dueck, and Uri Yifrach (Edizioni: Universita di Triest, 2016), pp. 307–336. Mitchell, Jolyon. Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Mitchell, Jolyon. Promoting Peace, Inciting Violence: The Role of Religion and Media (London: Routledge, 2012). Mitchell, Tony. Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester (London: Methuen, 1984). Montgomerie, Tim. ‘Slaughter of the Innocents: All is not what it seems’. BBC Radio 4. Accessed 19 August 2018. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/59WLFfkTt9 fNR1qV84DZ9wy/all-is-not-what-it-seems. Moorhead, Joanna. ‘Away in a Manger: How one Surrey man turned a Nativity in his barn into an annual pilgrimage’. Independent. 19 December 2010. https://www .independent.co.uk/life-style/christmas10/entertainment/away-in-a-manger-how $)((-&
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-one-surrey-man-turned-a-nativity-in-his-barn-into-an-annual-pilgrimage-2161339 .html. Petersen, Anker Eli. ‘The Scream from Ramah’. Posta Faroe Islands. Accessed 19 August 2018. http://en.stamps.fo/ShopItem/2001/0/PPA990901/SETT. Pope Francis, ‘Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to Bishops on the Feast of the Holy Innocents’. Accessed 1 August 2018. https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20161228_santi-innocenti.html. Reed, Roland, ‘The Slaughter of the Innocents’, Early Theatre 3 (2000), pp. 219–28. Ritchie, Fiona and Peter Sabor, eds. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Robinson, J.W. ‘The Art of the York Realist’. Modern Philology LX, no. 4 (May 1963): pp. 241–251. Rogerson, Margaret. ‘“Everybody Got their Brown Dress”; Mystery Plays for the Millennium’. New Theatre Quarterly 66 (2001): pp. 123–140. Rogerson, Margaret. ‘Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance?’ Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013): pp. 343–366. Rogerson, Margaret. ‘Medieval Religious Plays in England: Afterlives and New Lives through Performance’. In Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, edited by Gail Ashton (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 32–47. Roynon, Gavin. Massacre of the Innocents: The Crofton Diaries: 1914–15 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2004). Ruskin, John. Giotto and His Works in Padua (Arundel Society, 1854). Sanders, E.P. The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1993). Saramago, José. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (London: Harper Collins, 1993). Scharper, Philip and Sally Scharper, eds. Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984). Schwartz, Barth David. Pasolini Requiem, 2nd edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016). Shakespeare, William. Henry v, edited by Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Shakespeare, William. Macbeth, edited by A.R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Sharples, Caroline and Olaf Jensen. Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Shawe-Taylor, Desmond and Jennifer Scott. Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting (London: The Royal Collection, 2007). Shepherd, David J. The Bible on Silent Film: Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013). Shepherd, David J., ed. The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927) (New York: Routledge, 2016). $)((-&
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Simonetti, Manlio, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Matthew 1–13 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2001). Spivey, Nigel. Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Staley, Jeffrey Lloyd and Richard G. Walsh. Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on DVD (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). Stam, Robert and Alessandra Raengo, eds. A Companion to Literature and Film (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Sturges, Robert S. The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). ‘The Globe Mysteries’. Time Out. Accessed 14 August 2018. https://www.timeout.com/ london/theatre/the-globe-mysteries. The Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant, ‘The Coventry Carol’. In Medieval and Tudor Drama, translated and edited by John Gassner (New York: Bantam, 1963). Tinkle, Theresa. ‘The Fleury “Slaughter of Innocents” and the Myth of Ritual Murder’. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102, no. 2 (2003): pp. 211–243. Valcanover, Francesco. Jacopo Tintoretto and the Scuola Grande of San Rocco (Venezia: Storti Edizioni, 1983). Vallely, Paul. ‘Our Modern Day Massacre of the Innocents’. Independent. 26 December 2015. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/our-modern-day-massacre-of-the -innocents-a6787011.html. Woolf, Rosemary. The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Zwick, Reinhold. ‘Between Chester and Cape Town: Transformations of the Gospel in Son of Man by Mark Dornford-May’. Journal of Religion & Film 15, no. 1 (2011): pp. 1–18.

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Chapter 12

Tragedy, Recognition and the War on Terror Jennifer Wallace The act of recognition has become foundational for current political and theological thinking, and it is similarly at the core of both tragic theory and the business of performing tragic drama. Indeed, we might say that it is the act of recognition that brings together our experiences both in the theatre and in the world. We attempt to explain catastrophic events, terrible decisions taken, or suffering inflicted upon ourselves or others in narratives which impose a pattern or order upon the intractable facts of our experience, based upon our acknowledgement of the perspectives of others. On the one hand, the act of recognition leads to the establishment of what has been termed ‘sovereignty’ or the respect for the equal rights and independence of the Other. On the other hand, the act of recognition can be considered a process of discernment and acknowledgement of our interdependence and limitations. This act of attempted recognition might ultimately lead us to the Socratic (and tragic) conclusion that ‘we know that we know nothing’. But even that attempt at the examined life could be desirable and valuable for the flourishing of a healthy civic life and carry implications for issues of sovereignty. In the twentieth century, theological approaches to the question of tragedy were inevitably shaped by the devastating experience of the Holocaust. The Nazi policy of extermination threw into question the very parameters of thought and representation as well as the ethical issue of who or what is considered grievable? Theodor Adorno, who famously declared that ‘it is not possible to write poetry after Auschwitz’, believed that subjectivity itself, which is central both to tragic theory and to the understanding of religious faith, had been negated by the Shoah.1 Primo Levi followed the more conventional path of negative theodicy, finding the experience of the camps sweeping away the remnants of any religious belief he might have still held: ‘There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God’.2 In contrast, the Holocaust was foundational for 1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’, in Notes to Literature. Volume 2, edited Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 251– 252. See David Kornhaber, ‘Philosophy and Social Theory’, in A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age, edited by Jennifer Wallace (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 85. 2 Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. by John Shepley (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1989), p. 68. See also Christopher Hamilton, A Philosophy of Tragedy (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), pp. 57–70. $)((-&
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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_014  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_0 6543_01144

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other theologians, profoundly shaping their thinking about evil and about the value of suffering, precarity and history. So from a Jewish perspective, Emmanuel Levinas finds a paradoxical purpose and what he terms ‘renewal’ in persecution, since that situation offers the victim the opportunity, through his appeal to us, to illuminate the way towards justice: The traumatic experience of my slavery in Egypt constitutes my very humanity, a fact that immediately allies me to the workers, the wretched, and the persecuted peoples of the world. My uniqueness lies in the responsibility I display for the Other.3 Levinas’s ideas about recognition of the Other and the ethics of intersubjective responsibility, which I discuss later, emerge from this insight. Meanwhile, from a Christian perspective, the evil of Auschwitz was foreshadowed by the evil of the crucifixion, both ‘deeds done in history’ which disrupt and interrogate the neat arc of teleological narrative. Donald Mackinnon, who (according to George Steiner) at ‘the dark heart of [his] search’ put the resurrection into question with Auschwitz,4 repeatedly exhorted his readers to ‘plumb the depths’ of despair with Jesus on the cross, denying a ‘solution of the problem of evil’ in the Gospels and finding only in tragedy an adequate wisdom born of its ‘presence to the reality of moral evil’.5 Rowan Williams, originally MacKinnon’s student, also derives value from the acknowledgement of the limits to understanding, rather than in old doctrinal and teleological certainties which the Holocaust might be thought to have overturned. His recent book on tragedy points to the importance of the act of narrating, finding in Edgar’s lines in King Lear – ‘The worst is not / So long as we can say, “This is the worst”’ – a testimony both to the bottomless abyss of evil of which mankind is capable and at the same time to the collective endeavour to ‘relocate’ that past experience.6 Both these traditions – Jewish and Christian – have developed a theology in the latter half of the twentieth century based upon the ethics of acknowledgement, tragic fragillity, interdependence and what Williams characterises as the ‘liturgical’ act of recognition experienced in tragic performance. But following Donald Mackinnon’s – and indeed Hannah Arendt’s – exemplary practice of ‘grounding theology and metaphysics in concrete 3 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Judaism’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), p. 26. 4 George Steiner, ‘Tribute to Donald Mackinnon’, Theology 98 (1995): p. 6. 5 Donald Mackinnon, ‘Order and Evil in the Gospel’ and ‘Atonement and Tragedy’, in The Borderlands of Theology, and Other Essays (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), pp. 92, 101. 6 Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 113–115.

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material history’, I am driven to consider whether the twenty-first century War on Terror is producing new forms of tragic recognition, discernible both in popular culture and tragic representations and also in our wider theological or cultural imagination.7 We are living in an unprecedented time of surveillance, in which the anomalous movements of one individual in the remote desert of Pakistan can be detected instantaneously, via satellite and computer, in a military bunker in the United States 12,000 miles away. Our military conduct the conflict with the aid of telescopic sights, predator drones and computer algorithms. This is a war of maximum visibility, a scopic conflict. And yet there is a question of how much is really seen and understood as well as simply viewed. Does the accumulation of visual data really lead to greater vision? What are the implications of this new type of warfare, conducted by means of computer algorithms and screen monitors, for traditional notions of tragedy and its key affective means of recognition: pity and fear. A religious fundamentalist viewpoint differentiates between ‘true’ and ‘false’ faith, drawing lines of distinction between the self (‘the true believer’) and others and resisting the Levinasian claims of interdependence. Correspondingly, there is a risk that certain attempts at contemporary ‘tragedies’, in which characters fail to recognise others or which widen the gulf between self and others, would only cement those fundamentalist distinctions. Drawing on a discussion of two recent representations of the War on Terror – the film American Sniper and the play Grounded – I argue that, while theological theories of tragic recognition and responsibility are useful for trying to understand our current situation and the demands that a fully developed contemporary tragic art should make on its audience, ultimately it is our conscious or unconscious resistance to ethical demands to acknowledge the other, revealed in these fictional representations, which prove to be sadly the most paradoxically formative for our sense of community in the twenty-first century. 1

Recognition

Recognition is a central component of tragic drama. Indeed, according to Aristotle, recognition, along with reversal, is the ‘most important device that tragedy uses’. It is a process which the protagonists on stage undergo, in coming to realise the nature and consequences of their actions.8 It is implicitly a process also experienced by the audience watching a drama, who bring their attention 7 Steiner, ‘Tribute to Donald Mackinnon’, p. 2. 8 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (London: Duckworth, 1987), Chapter XI, p. 43.

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to bear upon a situation or character and are transformed as a result: ‘through the arousal of pity and fear [tragedy] effect[s] the katharsis of such emotions’.9 In other words, Aristotle locates the tragic sense both in the formal qualities of the tragic drama – its plot, its action, its content if you like – and in its performative effects – the response of the audience, the act of witnessing and judging the business of others. This tragic sense, for Aristotle, is associated with making intelligible, both visually and cognitively, the possibilities and limitations of action, the range and boundaries of pity and identification, and the degree to which an individual might be considered invulnerable or vulnerable. So Oedipus – Aristotle’s exemplary play – presents its main protagonist coming to recognise simultaneously his story and his identity. Jocasta has earlier expressed the vain hope that he may never discover who he is (γνοίης: l. 1068), but Oedipus needs to hear the truth just as the chorus need to see him blinded. The chorus stratify their recognition of Oedipus into pity and fear, along the lines of Aristotle’s analysis: ‘I pity you but I can’t bear to look’.10 Bringing things to light, a repeated trope in the play, is a process which affects many different participants in the tragic experience, from minor characters such as the messenger, who only seems to realise the full import of what he is saying at the moment of articulating it (‘I’m right at the edge, the horrible truth – I’ve got to say it!’), to Jocasta and Oedipus, to the chorus and ultimately the audience.11 In the Bacchae, Pentheus believes he can watch the Maenads safely from a hidden position only to find that he is identified vocally by the god Dionysus and torn down from his safe position to be a central participant – or victim – in the sparagmos. According to the logic of this play, recognition in its transformative sense seems to come about from a position of vulnerability. Characters come to recognize both themselves and others as a result of the voluntary or involuntary sharing of space and predicament. In a similar act of tearing away defences, Cadmus brings his daughter round from her delusion of Bacchic frenzy, forcing her to acknowledge that the head that she holds in her hand is not that of a lion but her own son: Cadmus: Well then, whose face are you holding in your arms? Agave: A lion’s – or so the huntwomen assured me. Cadmus: Look properly then. It is only a moment’s effort. Agave: What is this I see? What is this that I am carrying in my arms? 9 10 11

Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter VI, p. 37. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1982), l. 1439. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, l. 1284.

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Cadmus: Look at it closely and you will reach a clearer understanding. Agave: I see a sight that brings me infinite pain and misery.12 Recognition, in this scene, is crucially brought about through sight. Agave looks at the sun to sober herself up before she can turn back to look at her son. As I have argued elsewhere, recognition does not necessarily involve sight but it does seem as if visual forms of identification and understanding are one of the structuring norms of tragedy.13 And indeed, as I will discuss later in relation to the current War on Terror, the use of optics for the functioning or nonfunctioning of pity and fear is crucial. Political theorists and theological thinkers have also been particularly concerned with the notion of recognition in recent years. In part, as Patchen Markell has noted, this concern has grown out of the interest in identity politics, in which a search for justice has been driven by political movements organised around ethnicity, race, and gender.14 The civil rights of the individual are based upon the recognition and respect they are accorded by others. And the equality and diversity which result from this recognition and tolerance are important for the flourishing of social democracy. According to this theory, misrecognition by others can lead to ‘real damage, real distortion’, while receiving real recognition is a ‘vital human need’ which allows for the proper constitution of the subject and empowering self-determination.15 Society is thus ideally served through a ‘regime of reciprocal recognition among equals’.16 But this politics of multicultural identity, based upon recognition, has also been accompanied by a renewed ‘ethical turn’ in theory which emphasises not our mutual empowerment and self-determination but rather our mutual vulnerability and burden of compassion. Philosophers and theologians note how we are shaped by the encounter with others; we are constructed and chastened by the sight of other beings, other lives. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, makes the act of recognition central to his concept of the ethical process of relational 12 13 14 15 16

Euripides, Bacchae, trans. James Morwood (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), ll. 1277–1282. The word translated as ‘understanding’ here is µάθε, the same word as in The Oresteia: ‘pathe mathos’ often translated as ‘wisdom through suffering’. Jennifer Wallace, ‘Tragedy, Photography and Osama bin Laden: Looking at the Enemy’, Critical Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2015): pp. 17–35, pp. 18–19. Patchen Markell, Bound By Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 2. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 24, 26. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, p. 50.

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living: ‘The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other […] the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity’.17 For Levinas, the act of recognition results in respect; the process is all about non-violence and peace, conjuring up responsibility and freedom through the encounter with others: The face in which the other – the absolute other – presents himself does not negate the same, does not do violence to it […] It remains commensurate with him who welcomes; it remains terrestrial. This presentation is preeminently nonviolence, for instead of offending my freedom it calls it to responsibility and founds it.18 Levinas presents what the theologian David Ford has called an ‘irreducible pluralism’ which produces good ethics: one of love, compassion, and mutual tolerance.19 ‘The face of the other represents an appeal, even a command, which lays a primary responsibility on me’, as David Ford explains. George Eliot was suggesting a similar notion when she described the moral awakening produced by the compelled recognition of other ‘centre[s] of self’ in Middlemarch. Dorothea finds herself finally able ‘to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that [Casaubon] had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference’.20 Levinas’s and Ford’s ethics of recognition work if both parties are open to the appeal of the Other. If each can recognise what is compelling in the other, can feel his or her responsibility in that act of appeal, and can respond with forms of identification and a shared humanity, then the interrogation and ‘genuinely open question’ which Ford privileges can take place. It is, in other words, to adapt the terms of Judith Butler, only if both sides are able to recognise the precarious situation of the other and of the self that tolerance, compassion, and reciprocal understanding can occur, or indeed that ‘an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community’.21 17 18 19 20 21

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 213. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 203. Indeed, Gillian Rose has called Levinas’s idiosyncratic version of Jewish theology ‘Buddhist Judaism’. See Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 37. David Ford, ‘Tragedy and Atonement’, in Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, edited by Kenneth Surin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 128. George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by W.J. Harvey (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 243. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. xii–xiii.

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However, the current climate of the War on Terror has given rise to a clash of cultures that highlights the extent to which we are prone to non-recognition, to forms of polarisation that categorise, stratify, and condemn. Far from Butler’s ‘shared precarity’, we are living through an era of distance and disparity, when ‘you are either with us or against us’. It becomes more pressing to confront this fact when we think about the return of religious thinking in the early 21st century. At the end of the twentieth century, it was a much-repeated commonplace to consider both tragedy and religion as anachronistic concepts, outmoded in our postmodern, secular age.22 On the eve of the Millennium, the Economist published – notoriously – an obituary for God, the death knell in a thousand years of the growing questioning of belief.23 Meanwhile, the same year, Hans-Thies Lehmann published his influential book, Postdramatic Theatre, a notion of theatre beyond plot, genre, and conventional traditional dialogue, in which tragedy no longer seemed to be a current dramatic form.24 But now, since 2001, religion has become the ostensible premise behind the clash of cultures which constitutes the War on Terror, and an appetite for tragedy, both the revival of classical tragedy on the stage and the generation of new forms of tragic representation, has been re-awakened. At its most basic, the War means a conflict between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity; at a more complex level it entails a conflict between religious intolerance and religious tolerance, whatever that might mean. Questions are raised: how can one be tolerant of another’s intolerance? To what extent can recognition ever be reciprocal and equal, rather than a type of performance in which there is a necessary distortion and misrecognition of the self? And, as Patchen Markell has claimed, does recognition not often make ‘the social world intelligible … by stratifying it, subordinating some people and elevating others to positions of privilege or dominance’?25 Aristotle’s notion of recognition, after all, suggests that the effect of witnessing another’s reversal and fall is to sharpen indifference into friendship and enmity: ‘Recognition … is a change from ignorance to knowledge, bringing characters into either a close bond, or enmity, with one another’. Rather than the mutual opening up of one to the other, as imagined by Levinas or by Judith Butler, Aristotle’s account of the 22 23 24 25

Even more recently, Hamilton’s A Philosophy of Tragedy argued that contemporary ideas of tragedy are dependent upon Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ and therefore predicated upon a loss of faith. ‘God’, The Economist, 23 December 1999. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). The original German edition, Postdramatisches Theater, was published in 1999. Markell, Bound by Recognition, pp. 1–2.

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classic tragic response being ‘pity or fear’ suggests a potential closing down of one’s own precarity, through a distanced act of spectating upon the object of pity or terror.26 The mimesis of tragedy, then, might be thought to have a similar framing, aestheticizing, and distancing effect as ‘phantasia’ described in Aristotle’s De Anima: ‘Whenever we have a belief that something is terrible or frightening we immediately feel the accompanying pathos, and similarly for something encouraging; but in the case of phantasia we are like people looking at a picture of something terrible or alarming’.27 One can call up a terrifying memory, experience, or scene without necessarily feeling those emotions. Aristotle points to the disconnection between the pleasure of representation and the pain of empathetic experience. Tragic drama, it seems to me, offers us moments of these types of disconnection and non-recognition, bringing to our attention the rifts in the Levinasian model, and in particular the degree to which we both do not want to recognize or acknowledge aspects of ourselves and do not want to put ourselves in a vulnerable position of authentic reciprocity. Of course, as Stanley Cavell has exemplified, there are numerous moments when characters fail to acknowledge themselves or their responsibility to others in Shakespeare, allowing rather the ‘eye [to] wink at the hand’.28 But even in Greek tragedy, when ostensibly characters pride themselves on being able to look on horror clearsightedly, the act of bearing witness is frequently ambiguous and compromised by fear and the limits to our understanding of others. In the first couple of years after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Martha Nussbaum argued that the event could have a positive effect on the nation’s concern for others. ‘Terror has this good thing about it: it makes us sit up and take notice’, she wrote. But she also noted, in the same essay, compassion’s ‘obvious propensity for self-serving narrowness’ as well as its capacity for shaping the civic imagination, pointing to the subtle transformation of Hecuba into a heroine with Greek rather than Trojan sensibilities in Euripides’ Trojan Women.29 26

27 28 29

Levinas is himself guilty of restricting the category of who is deemed worthy of recognition, notoriously excluding the Palestinians from the sphere of the recognisable. They simply ‘form a part’ of the ‘great Arab people’ who happen to ‘call themselves Palestinians’. See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Zionisms’, in The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 267–288, p. 278. Aristotle, On the Soul [De Anima], trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 3.3 427b21–24. See James Warren, The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic Hedonists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 166. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Compassion and Terror’, Daedalus 132, no. 1 (2003): pp. 10–26, p. 12. This essay was repeated as ‘Compassion and Terror’, in The Politics of Compassion, edited by Michael Ure and Mervyn Frost (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 189–207. $)((-&
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This, she said, was an illustration of the blind spots in the work of ancient tragic compassion, which allowed the Athenian audience to be able to extend pity towards Hecuba and therefore to ‘reaffirm the essential Greekness of everything that’s human’. More recently Nussbaum’s optimism about the possibilities in the post 9/11 era of the ‘good work of compassion’ has begun to wane and she has acknowledged the dangerous role that fear is playing across the world, from acts of religious intolerance to terrorist attacks to revenge killings. Fear narrows the understanding and ‘unlike grief and sympathy, it has not yet conceded the full reality of other people’.30 The present climate, eighteen years into the War on Terror, necessitates that we be as interested in Aristotle’s phobos as his eleos and the forms of reduction, distance, and blindness it produces. And theological thinking about tragedy must pay heed to the function and effect of terror as well as to that of pity and compassion. 2

The War on Terror

Writing in the catastrophic aftermath of the Second World War, Hiroshima and the holocaust, the philosopher Hannah Arendt declared that technology and violence shape and determine our capacity for thought, the meaning of our politics, and the ‘fundamental experiences of our age’.31 She noted that ‘the modern age … was born with the first atomic explosions’ and that the potential for nuclear Armageddon, together with the genocides committed by totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, altered the very parameters of thinking about power, agency, freedom, and politics.32 If one reflects upon the implications of this thesis for our contemporary predicament, it seems clear that the technology of conflict is fundamentally different now from the Cold War nuclear age, that therefore the ‘meaning of our politics’ and our moral thinking must be altered now, and that thirdly, pace Arendt, a new ‘modern age was born’ with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2011. I am interested, therefore, not only in charting the role of recognition and fear over the last eighteen years but also more specifically in considering the impact of

30 31 32

Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 56. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), p. 109. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 6. See Jonathan Schell, ‘Hannah Arendt and the Atomic Bomb’, in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, edited by Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 247–258. $)((-&
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the prosecution of the War – the technology, the weapons, the strategy – upon our sense of fear and response to tragedy. The so-called War on Terror relies upon a new range of technology to carry out its killing. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (uavs) or drones have been used for surveillance since the Vietnam War but armed drones (uacvs) were first used to fire missiles in 2002.33 Targeted missiles, viewed on a computer screen but also capable of being transmitted on television news feeds, were first witnessed during the Gulf War of 1990 but became much more familiar to us during the second bombardment of Iraq in 2003.34 Meanwhile sniper rifle technology has rapidly developed so that guns can now be fired at greater and greater distances, with fewer risks to the sniper since the enemy does not have weapons with such long range. The telescopic sight allows for increasing degrees of accuracy and, according to the latest reports, will soon be able to guide the missile automatically through the vagaries of wind direction and other environmental conditions at greater and greater range.35 This is conflict conducted through the medium of a screen, with minimal or no risk to the person who fires the missile. And as such, following Arendt’s lead, it necessitates a re-thinking – or even a ‘complete reversal’ – of our relationship to war, to allies and enemies, and to the structuring polarities of pity and fear. Given the scopic nature of the War on Terror, it seems to me that we might well need to understand and even fashion new forms of recognition and therefore, by extension, start considering whether new notions of tragedy are necessary. Drone warfare, which is fast outnumbering flights made by manned aircraft in the prosecution of the war, is already provoking some essential philosophical and theoretical reflection. While warfare since Vietnam might properly be described as asymmetrical, owing to the marked imbalance between the technology and force on one side and that on the other, drone warfare, in which pilots operate unmanned aerial vehicles from a base in Nevada and shoot targets 12,000 miles away in Afghanistan or Pakistan, should be considered unilateral.36 This paradoxical distance and intimacy, between the pilot and his victim, has been analysed by Joseph Pugliese in terms of the ‘parenthetical’ and the ‘prosthetic’. Since the pilot is sitting in a bunker in Nevada and views 33 34

35 36

The first drone attack was with a Predator drone in Yemen in 2002. It was the transmission of the war in Iraq in 1990 on television, replaying the military screen footage of air strikes, which prompted the notorious series of essays by Jean Baudrillard. See his The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Martin Pegler, Sniper Rifles: From the 19th to the 21st Century (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010). Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 13.

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the activity on the ground on a computer screen, he or she can be disconnected from the consequences of the kill, since the technology ‘suspends, circumscribes and holds parenthetically in abeyance the relation between executioner and victim’.37 But meanwhile the drone operates as a prosthetic extension of the pilot, functioning as if the pilot were really dropping into inaccessible locations in the desert or indeed as if he and his body were ‘indissociably tied to technology’, intimately instrumentalised as a killing machine.38 Grégoire Chamayou prefers to see this unilateral risk-free killing as a form of atavistic animal hunting, rather than a futuristic battle of cyborgs and prosthetics. The pilot is given a designated ‘kill list’ and must choose his or her targets for the day.39 Moreover the ability of pilots and their drones to seek their targets globally, wherever they happen to be, means that the conventional notions of zones of conflict and battlefields are overturned. There are, Chamayou points out, no boundaries to drone warfare, either geographically or temporally, a situation which is well matched to the nebulous definition of Terror.40 It is, as the geographer Derek Gregory has pointed out, an ‘Everywhere war’, in which the enemy’s body is the battlefield wherever he happens to be.41 Finally, the unilateral, dissociated nature of drone warfare is altering the understanding of guilt and responsibility. While the pilot is the untouchable victor day after day, choosing which target he or she will erase, Chamayou argues that he or she deals with the burden of omnipotent power by inculcating an environment of victimhood, by taking on the burden of trauma and psychological damage. Tragic responsibility takes on the form, not of concern for the enemy casualties of the drone bombings or the innocent civilians on the ground caught in the collateral damage, but rather of care for the self: Whereas the attention drawn to the soldiers’ psychic wounds was in the past aimed at contesting their conscription by state violence, nowadays it serves to bestow upon this unilateral form of violence an ethico-heroic aura that could not otherwise be procured.42

37 38 39 40 41 42

Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 186. Pugliese, State Violence, pp. 203, 204. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 46. See also Derek Gregory on the ‘special kind of intimacy that consistently privileges the view of the hunter-killer’: ‘From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’, Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): pp. 188–215, p. 193. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 72. Derek Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, Geographical Journal 177 no. 3, 2011, pp. 238–250. Chamayou, Drone Theory, p. 105.

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Modern warfare, in which there is global surveillance, paradoxically results in areas of national blindness. Viewing the enemy on a screen, or identifying ‘heat signatures’ or ‘patterns of life’ as an anomaly on an algorithm, is not the same as recognizing them on the battlefield.43 That failure to recognize others is extended, in modern warfare, to a failure of self-recognition. The degree to which the self is responsible for others is distorted. And it is in these failures and distortions that we can locate the tragedy. There have been numerous attempts by western writers to respond to the current war in the last ten years, from poetry and novels to Hollywood blockbuster movies. These have ranged from the sense that war throws knowledge into uncertainty, and can only properly be experienced rather than represented, to the notion that war hardens certainties and belief systems, and indeed ‘aims to maintain the division of life upon which power rests’.44 Some writers suggest that the facts of war cannot be adequately conveyed to those who were not there and that therefore they can only be reported as accurately as possible, without moral interpretation or justification, as an encounter with the truth that transcends communicability, a sort of ‘negative theology’. Other writers, in contrast, would see the act of representation as itself redemptive and the recognition of guilt, trauma, and horror as an indication of sensibility and value. Very few extend their concern beyond the impact that the experience of war has upon their own soldiers and their own citizenry. Our globalised culture becomes increasingly uninterested in what might be entailed in authentically thought-through globalised compassion. But I wish to look at two portrayals of the US military at war which depend specifically upon the technology and the scopic nature of modern conflict in the ways I have been discussing in order to think about new forms of tragic recognition and non-recognition. My first example is an Oscar-nominated movie directed by Clint Eastwood and my second a prize-winning stage play in New York starring Anne Hathaway. American Sniper and Grounded are both concerned with the repercussions of new technological developments in warfare: the drone strike, aerial surveillance, conflict conducted at the end of a camera or a gun scope. They consequently devote themselves to the disconnected and asymmetrical nature of war today and both are much more

43 44

Pugliese, State Violence, p. 193. Mayam el-Shall, ‘Guantanamo Diary: Interrogating the War on Terror’, Political Theology Today, 24 March 2013. I am indebted for this analysis to Roy Scranton’s excellent overview of recent war literature in ‘The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to “Redeployment” and “American Sniper”’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 January 2015.

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interested in the effect that this warfare has upon the psychology of American soldiers than upon the combatants on the other side. American Sniper follows the career of Navy Seal Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in American military history, as he serves four tours in Iraq. Based upon the best-selling memoir by Kyle, the film structures itself around the escalating violent effects of each tour upon Kyle’s mental state and around his increasingly personal battle with the best sniper on the Iraqi side, whom the Americans nickname Mustafa and who was allegedly once a contestant, for rifle, in the Syrian team in the Olympics. Like a military equivalent of Jaws or Jurassic Park, each tour and each incarnation of the enemy gets worse than the previous one. As Kyle is told at the beginning of Tour 4, ‘Fallujah was bad; Ramadi was worse; this shit is fucking biblical’. But Kyle’s war is no David versus Goliath or Jacob wrestling hand to hand with an angel. It is conducted down the end of a rifle scope from some rooftop or derelict and abandoned buildings. The first scene shows him targeting, from some considerable distance away, a mother and son confronting an oncoming marine convoy with what later turns out to be a small handheld grenade. ‘You got eyes on this?’, he asks the absent commander over the intercom. ‘Negative. Your call’, comes the reply. In the memoir upon which the film is based, Kyle’s killing of the mother with a single shot is followed immediately with a quick judgement: [S]he didn’t care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by the grenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in the houses, maybe her child … She was too blinded by evil to consider them. […] Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq.45 But the film cuts away, before the shot is fired, to a childhood scene in church as the preacher tells of a different kind of seeing and judgement. ‘We don’t see with God’s eyes, so we don’t see the glory of his plan. Our lives unfold before us like puzzling reflections in a mirror. But on the day we rise, we will see with clarity and understand the mystery of his ways’.46 When, finally, the movie returns to the rooftop and Kyle pulls the trigger, it is not hard to interpret this as ‘seeing with God’s eyes’, or at least enjoying the same ‘clarity’ of vision. Kyle, in the words of his commander, is ‘putting the fear of God into these savages’; his solitary judgment on the rooftop has become the objective justice.

45 46

Chris Kyle, with Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwan, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), pp. 3–4. American Sniper [dvd], directed by Clint Eastwood (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros, 2014).

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Seeing the enemy down the end of a rifle scope means that the burden of responsibility and compassion is shown to be felt unilaterally by the sniper. As Yuval Harari has noted, this is not the ‘honorary interpretation of war’, which finds a value in heroism and courage, but rather the ‘revelatory interpretation of war’, which considers combat to be the ‘ultimate experience’ for the individual, offering insight, increased sensibility, and even trauma.47 After Kyle has made a kill, he bows his head in reflection. When, in Tour 4, he sees a young boy pick up a rocket grenade from an insurgent he has just shot and look as if he is about to try and fire it, he wills the boy to drop it so that he will not have to take him out. ‘Drop it, you little cocksucker’, he keeps muttering down his cocked rifle to the oblivious and distant boy, the lack of real communication between them an indication of the disconnect between expressed sentiment and reciprocal recognition. Instead the reciprocity which is examined in the film is the one between Kyle and his family. As the film develops and Kyle experiences more and more service in Iraq, his wife notices that he is being changed by the war, suffering some of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘I need you to be human again’, she says during one of her vain attempts to persuade him not to return for another tour. There are a couple of moments when the film opens up the possibility of an alternative narrative, one in which Judith Butler’s ‘shared precarity’ might have been contemplated. One of Kyle’s main ‘brothers’, a fellow Navy Seal named Marc, is killed in Tour 3 in Ramadi. At his funeral back in the US, parts of his last letters are read out in which he appears to question the purpose of the war and the brutalization, of both sides, to which it has led. Glory is something that some men chase and others find themselves stumbling upon, not expecting to find them. Either way it is a noble gesture that one finds bestowed upon them [sic]. My question is when does glory fade away and become a wrongful crusade or an unjustified means by which consumes [sic] one completely? For a few minutes it seems as if the discourses of ‘savages’ and ‘evil’, of ‘them’ and ‘us’, might be interrogated. But then Chris Kyle shuts the possibility down, criticising his friend for giving up: ‘That letter killed Marc. He just let go and he paid the price for it’.48 The other moment which potentially opens up the film 47 48

Yuval N. Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 299–306. This scene, and the letter, are not included in the memoir. The film’s inclusion of excerpts of the letter has been criticized by Marc Lee’s widow, because she believes it suggests that

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to a productive uncertainty also occurs in Tour 3 in Ramadi. The sniper on the Iraqi side, ‘Mustafa’, who is acquiring the same aura for Chris Kyle as Aufidius holds for Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is shown preparing to go out into the field. For a brief moment the camera tracks over to his wife who is nursing her crying child. The correspondences with Kyle’s own family situation – his wife has just recently given birth to a daughter – are telling. Could these two be developing the same ambiguous forms of intimacy as those which Shakespeare shows in Coriolanus? But when, in Tour 4, Kyle succeeds in shooting ‘Mustafa’, placed on another rooftop in Sadr City, at an impossible 2,100 yard range, the attention of the film lies solely upon the fate of Kyle and his fellow Seals on the rooftop. No thoughts, no feelings of pity or fear, are directed towards ‘Mustafa’. Instead the pity and fear are focused upon Kyle alone as he has to confront the guilt, the horrific memories, and the trauma of the war. He is shown bringing the war back home, hearing the sound of helicopters and murderous drills in the mundane sounds of middle America. And it is arguably the result of bringing that war home that leads to his tragic death, anticipated in the last scene and reported during the credits. He was shot and killed in Texas by a fellow marine veteran whom he was trying to help by taking him on recreational target practice. The complications of bringing the war home animate George Brant’s play Grounded. This play dramatizes, as a poetic monologue, the experience of a female pilot who conducts drone warfare in Afghanistan from a bunker in the Nevada desert during the day and returns to her husband and child in Las Vegas each night. The focus is upon the unreality of the situation, the fact that she can touch a button and kill somebody who is simultaneously 12 hours ahead and 1.2 seconds away. Unlike conventional warfare, or even the rooftop sniper fire to which Chris Kyle is occasionally exposed, the female pilot cannot be touched by her enemy. She is removed in all senses, sealed off, safe, in no way precarious: And them Look at them Poor saps You don’t learn do you You can’t hide from the eye in the sky my children We look down from above we see all and he was not a ‘true patriot’. Instead, she maintains that he ‘believed in the war and he loved his family’. See ‘“American Sniper” Portrayal Hides the Real Marc Lee’, Fox News, 20 February 2015.

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we have pronounced you guilty boom Another grey inferno.49 Like the Olympian gods to whom they are explicitly compared, the drone pilots in their bunker (‘the Chair Force’) look down at the small mortals below and pass judgement upon them, deciding who to ‘erase’ and who to spare. A recent cinematic treatment of drone warfare, Eye in the Sky, directed by Gavin Hood and starring Helen Mirren, focused at great length on the collective act of judgement about whether and when to release the missile, by showing all the different links in the ‘kill chain’ of just one strike in Kenya, from a colonel co-ordinating the attack from her headquarters in North London, to drone pilots in Nevada and image-ID specialists in Hawaii, to local surveillance agents using micro flying robots on the ground in Nairobi, and right up to the General watching the attack on a screen with the Foreign Minister and the attorney general in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room.50 The only risk in the operation is to the legality and the moral consequences of the action, but consequently the decision to strike is endlessly deferred, the politicians continually arguing that they need to ‘refer up’ before they can authorize the attack. While the drone pilots exhibit distress at the prospect of targeting the life of a young girl as collateral damage, in a faux and sentimental attempt to show moral compassion, the emphasis of the film is much more upon the clinical, mechanical nature of the warfare and the contrast between the cold, rational, and lengthy decision-making in the offices and the gritty, dusty reality on the streets in Nairobi. Traditional tragic choice, on an individual basis, has been replaced by collective decision-making, diffused and abrogated by committee. In contrast, Grounded is a one-woman play in which the character of the pilot becomes more and more isolated within her own limited agency, guilt, and confusion. Despite the fact that there is absolutely no risk to her life, she is much more fragile than the sniper Chris Kyle, and much more isolated and vulnerable than the pilots in Eye in the Sky. Indeed although the warfare might be said to be ‘unilateral’, and, according to Elaine Scarry, successful military strategy ‘is one in which the injuring occurs in only one direction’, Grounded portrays a form of trauma for the impervious god.51 The pilot’s difficulty is that, 49 50 51

George Brant, Grounded (London: Oberon Books, 2013), p. 44. Eye in the Sky [dvd], directed by Gavin Hood (Toronto and Glasgow: Entertainment One/ Raindog Films, 2015). Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 78.

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whereas Kyle comes home after a 9-month stint away in Iraq, she gets to go home each night. In no previous war could a combatant serve 12-hour shifts, obliterating the enemy in the desert, and still go home at night to watch TV with the husband and take the child to day care the next day. It is as if, she says, ‘Odysseus came home every day’. One desert (in Afghanistan) becomes confused with the other (in Nevada); one screen (the footage relayed back by the drone) interpolated by another (the entertainment TV screen at home). In a climactic penultimate scene, the pilot confuses the child she is about to target in the enemy desert with her own child whom she dropped off at school earlier that day and she pulls the drone away. The shrink asks me a question Like I’m the guilty I want to tell her You don’t know guilty I know the guilty I see the guilty every day Don’t speak to me of guilt Don’t speak to a god of guilt.52 ‘Guilt’, a word intended to differentiate one group of people from the other, the ‘innocent’, has become confused by the end of the play and applied mutually: ‘I see the guilty every day’. The pilot appears to be seeing the world in shades of grey, rather than black and white, precisely the uncertainty that Chris Kyle dismisses in his memoir. But George Brant implies that this confusion on the pilot’s part is an aspect of her mental breakdown, rather than a form of tragic wisdom. The surreal hallucinations under which she struggles at the play’s end are more reminiscent of Long Day’s Journey Into Night or A Streetcar Named Desire than any cathartic recognition in the classical sense. Tragedy in the modern age has become trauma, stuck fast without the clarity of recognition. In conclusion, the War on Terror, both because of its technological developments and because of the nature of its ideology and discourse (how can you wage war on terror itself?), is producing new forms of tragedy, new ways of thinking about recognition, responsibility, pity, and fear, and therefore new forms of religious thinking in the Levinasian sense. On the one hand, we can

52

Brant, Grounded, p. 56.

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witness a collective retreat into easy and familiar types of amity and enmity which Aristotle might have identified, assisted by a religious, fundamentalist notion of guilt, innocence, and stratified justice. On the other hand, the tragic sense is located precisely in the fact that the opportunities for those forms of recognition and understanding, upon which political theorists and theologians base their thinking, are closed off by an inability for both self-acknowledgement and the acknowledgement of others. In its place, these responses to the War on Terror exhibit an excessive, melodramatic, and unfocused sense of trauma which blinds us to the larger, stark tragedy of millions killed and the opportunity squandered for a more inclusive and tolerant ethical world. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature. Volume 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Aeschylus. The Oresteia, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Aeschylus. The Oresteia, trans. Christopher Collard (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). American Sniper [DVD], directed by Clint Eastwood (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros, 2014). Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Arendt, Hannah. The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005). Aristotle. On the Soul [De Anima], trans. W.S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). Aristotle. Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell (London, Duckworth, 1987). Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Brant, George. Grounded (London: Oberon Books, 2013). Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). Camon, Ferdinando. Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1989). Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Chamayou, Grégoire. Drone Theory, trans. Janet Lloyd (London, Penguin, 2015). Eliot, George. Middlemarch, edited by W.J. Harvey (London, Penguin, 1965). Euripides. Bacchae, trans. James Morwood (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). Eye in the Sky [DVD], directed by Gavin Hood (Toronto and Glasgow: Entertainment One/Raindog Films, 2015). $)((-&
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Ford, David. ‘Tragedy and Atonement’. In Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, edited by Kenneth Surin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 117–130. ‘God’, The Economist, 23 December 1999. Gregory, Derek. ‘The Everywhere War’. Geographical Journal 177, no. 3 (2011): pp. 238–250. Gregory, Derek. ‘From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War’. Theory, Culture & Society 28, nos. 7–8 (2011): pp. 188–215. Hamilton, Christopher. A Philosophy of Tragedy (London: Reaktion Books, 2016). Harari, Yuval N. The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Kornhaber, David. ‘Philosophy and Social Theory’. In A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age, edited by Jennifer Wallace (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 75–91. Kyle, Chris, with Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwan. American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (New York: Harper Collins, 2012). Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (London: The Athlone Press, 1990). Markell, Patchen. Bound By Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Nussbaum, Martha C. ‘Compassion and Terror’. In The Politics of Compassion, edited by Michael Ure and Mervyn Frost (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 189–207. Nussbaum, Martha C. The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Pegler, Martin. Sniper Rifles: From the 19th to the 21st Century (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010). Pugliese, Joseph. State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Schell, Jonathan. ‘Hannah Arendt and the Atomic Bomb’. In Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, edited by Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 247–258. Scranton, Roy. ‘The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to “Redeployment” and “American Sniper”’. Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 January 2015. $)((-&
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El-Shall, Mayam, ‘Guantanamo Diary: Interrogating the War on Terror’. Political Theology Today, 24 March 2013. Sophocles. Oedipus Tyrannus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Sophocles. Oedipus the King, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1982). Taylor, Charles. ‘The Politics of Recognition’. In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–74. Wallace, Jennifer. ‘Tragedy, Photography and Osama bin Laden: Looking at the Enemy’. Critical Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 17–35. Warren, James. The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic Hedonists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Williams, Rowan. The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Afterword: Thoughts on Fidelity Rowan Williams Beckett’s phrase about ‘fidelity to failure’ is quoted more than once in these pages as a way into thinking about tragedy; but it is a phrase that needs some unpacking. On the surface, the point is that tragic narration or representation is a way of speaking about the human world that does not betray the realities of shipwreck – suffering, weakness, cruelty, indeed, ‘infidelity’ of various sorts. Fidelity to failure is most obviously fidelity to a world where fidelity is not to be taken for granted: people walk away from suffering, avoid the contemplation of it and especially the contemplation of their part in it, or else distort its narrative into some purposive and more bearable shape. This insistence on what is so often called an ‘unconsoled’ tragic voice is the most obvious reading of Beckett’s formulation. ‘Fidelity’, however, is a word which could take us in a slightly different direction. Tragic writing is in fact more than simply a ‘faithful’ reproduction of states of affairs in the world: if we hear in the word ‘fidelity’ a resonance of its relational meaning – staying with a partner or a set of circumstances through good times and bad, ‘pledging’ or committing yourself (like the advice of an early Christian monastic teacher to ‘give yourself faithfully’ to the walls of your cell) – then what is involved in it is also a particular way of taking time, allowing the clear awareness of failure to become a habitual lens through which to look at the human world. It is a matter of not leaving failure behind as something instrumental or incidental to a self’s story. In this sense, fidelity is not only faithful representation but sustained attention; not only an unsparing chronicle of pain or atrocity but a discipline of steadily holding in mind that this is a world where such things happen, whatever joyous or satisfying outcomes may at times be in evidence. This does not have to be some metaphysical commitment to a ‘tragic world view’, whatever exactly that is; i.e. it does not imply that pain and atrocity are more prevalent, more significant, more cosmologically final than other experiences; only that they are not reducible to other experiences, intelligible or justifiable in terms of other experiences. Fidelity, like marital fidelity, is, to paraphrase the Book of Common Prayer, ‘keeping oneself only’ to this irreducibility, and not looking for a perspective from outside that will alter the basic requirement of attentive truthfulness.

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004416543_015  | doi:110.  | doi: 0.11 1163/97890044 63/97890044116543_0 6543_01155

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Gillian Rose wrote, in a famously controversial essay on Auschwitz1, that the moral point of visiting a place of unimaginable inhumanity was neither a sort of forced march into intense empathy nor an agonising self-examination (‘would I have been capable of this?’). The truly moral (and political) point is to ask about what the processes are in social and political reality that make us ‘strangers to ourselves’ and so permit the alienation of our moral nature and the abdication of our social agency. It is an insight that is emphatically grounded in the appalling specificity of thinking (and failing to think) about the Shoah, but has some pertinence to a wider reflection on thinking about and speaking about the morally dreadful, the extremities of behaviour. Rose is asking for a ‘fidelity’ that refuses two kinds of sentimentality about our inner life – the kind that invites us to experience fascinating intensities of imagined pain (there are programmes and publications with the disturbing title Adventures in Empathy) and the kind that invites us to compose dramas of extreme decisionmaking with ourselves as the protagonists. In contrast, what she argues for is a form of representation and engagement that obliges us to look not only at the irreducible suffering of others (not trying to turn it into the raw material of our own dramas) but at the way such suffering is located in the world we share with the sufferer: what makes it possible, what are the ways in which it is already narrated, thematised or theorised or domesticated, what are the ways in which it is interrogated, framed, utilised? Tragic representation undertaken in this spirit and attended to in this spirit will reveal to us the degree to which we are strangers to ourselves, reveal something of our capacity to ignore – not only to ignore the raw fact of pain or atrocity but to ignore the various evasions and complicities always already at work in human society. Tragedy, after all, narrates: it does not present a contextless, causeless suffering, but a story of how humanity can unravel its moral bonds. Look again at Lear in this light, not least at the way in which Shakespeare connects the dissolution of moral solidity and solidarity among his main characters with a broader social breaking of bonds. ‘I have ta’en / Too little care of this’, says Lear himself, recognising the link between his reduction to subhuman loneliness and destitution and his previous condition of being isolated from the daily, ‘routine’ suffering of those who live constantly with the destitution he has only just come to experience. Rose’s point about Auschwitz is that the least honest reaction would be to focus on the moment of extreme suffering and extreme evil as spectacle. And to speak of tragic art as an exercise in fidelity is precisely to see it as refusing to construct a static spectacle. 1 ‘The Future of Auschwitz’, in Judaism and Modernity. Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 33–36.

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There are of course corruptions, or rather parodies, of faithfulness – obsessive attention that pulls the narrative back yet again into the struggles and dramas of my own ego, the prurient and self-serving gaze that is dictated by distorted forms of desire, and so on. Building on Rose, we could say that one way of setting out the challenge of tragic representation is to see it as tackling the question of how suffering is to be shown in a way that does not make us complicitly identified with the perpetrator or self-indulgently identified with the victim. Identification with perpetrators of violence happens when suffering is represented in a way that reinforces perceptions of a victim as passively exposed to the agency of another, so that the gaze of the audience becomes another intensification of the abusive power of the perpetrator. Identification with the victim happens when suffering is portrayed in a way that invites the audience to recognise nothing but its own story in the pain of another. If it is not too much of a paradox (in the light of Beckett’s words) to talk about ‘successful’ tragic representation, it sounds as though any claim to such a status would have to satisfy two tests. The first is the criterion of not simply echoing or mirroring the power relations that make human atrocity possible: tragedy has to leave the victim some innate freedom and dignity, otherwise it is a further act of hostility to the victim.2 The second is whether or not a representation leaves the victim the particularity of their story, whether or not it seeks to appropriate their suffering for a purpose independent of their own agency, making it serve the observer’s agenda. That is why tragedy is different from martyrology: in martyrology, a death is already to some degree instrumentalised as an act of witness to some cause. Even if the martyr is wholly committed to the cause, the fact is that the cause itself exists over and above this particular catastrophe. The cause may be reinforced by the martyr’s narrative, but the framing of suffering in this way allows the observer to subordinate the specificity of disaster to the context which gives it intelligibility, and so to appropriate the sufferer’s reality as the sufferer himself or herself owns it. In seeking to avoid these two sorts of distortion, tragic art has to step away from teleology, in the sense that it has to try and leave the suffering represented at a distance from edification, gratification, even individual feeling. If tragedy generates some sort of pleasurable emotion (a matter of continuing debate), it should not be an emotion tied to any of these reductions. And this in turn means that tragic art is something other than a faithful reproduction of pain. 2 There has been some challenging work done on how some representations of women in campaigns about gender-based violence have inadvertently reinforced stereotypes of female victimhood or even come close to pornographic imaging in their versions of the suffering female body.

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The way suffering and disaster are narrated or enacted has somehow to present them as more than a spectacle; the audience for tragic art is not being invited to register a set of shocking or heartbreaking facts. It is only if representation moves beyond this that the audience will find itself put in question by what is shown – that is, invited or even compelled to examine the complexity and complicity of its responses to suffering. This is why – from Attic theatre onwards – it has not been a necessary aspect of tragedy that intolerable physical suffering is directly/realistically shown. When it is shown (Gloucester’s blinding in Lear is the most often cited example), it has to be read as a deliberate challenge to the audience’s capacity to view it appropriately, a challenge that needs to have been tacitly prepared for in the rest of a drama. We shall see later on how the greater willingness in Elizabethan tragedy to show suffering directly as it ‘happens’ may reflect the cultural shift associated with Christian art. The baroque exaggerations of violence in some more modern dramas (the work of Sarah Kane is the obvious example) are another way of refusing a mere reproduction of suffering by refusing us any illusion of being shown a photographic catalogue of ‘actual’ atrocity: extreme, repetitive suffering, suffering that is in fact (as in Kane’s drama) not representable in any literal way, alerts us to the fact that we are being taken into a place where we are interrogated about how we think, speak or imagine pain. Tragedy, it could be said, shows not primarily the actuality of physical suffering but the imprint of suffering on language; sometimes, as again in Attic tragedy, an imprint voiced in inarticulate cries (the phatic explosions of apapapai and the like in classical texts). Tragedy deals with suffering that is already in the process of being narrated or shown. The actual tragic text or action picks up a story already told – sometimes, as in Attic tragedy, a story deeply familiar and regularly retold in diverse ways. Its purpose is not therefore primary narration but the more complex business of witness, inviting an audience to consider precisely how both drama and audience see and speak of suffering. The ‘fidelity’, to recur to Beckett’s word, is a matter of faithfully allowing what is narrated to remain outside the purpose-driven or self-interested processes which habitually silence the question tragedy is there to pose, a question which might be phrased as how drama makes suffering visible without making it a spectacle. Hence the very involved issues touched on in these essays about the place of the wounded body – when, where and how it is actually present in tragic representation. Which is where the connection may be made to questions about religious art, specifically the art of suffering that characterises Christian culture. Given that the wounded body is central to this tradition, we should not be surprised if its representation is a contested site. Christ crucified may be represented in a mode that effectively elides the reality of the cross as an act of atrocious $)((-&
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human cruelty (the vested and crowned figure of much early mediaeval art) or else one that insists on its physicality in ways that render it a spectacle, indeed a spectacle of deliberately designed extremity (the renaissance and baroque intensification of the details of wounds and blood). The representation of the cross in a way that is not spiritually or morally compromising is a continuing challenge in Christian imagination. Some of the studies in this book reflect on what in the Christian narrative of the passion of Jesus is and is not capable of being handled in a ‘tragic’ mode: and what is interesting here is the way in which the Christian dilemma overlaps with that of tragic drama itself – making suffering visible without corruption or collusion. For the Christian, the suffering of Jesus is unequivocally the suffering of a human individual and thus comparable to the suffering I as observer might in principle undergo; yet it is at the same time irreducibly the suffering of a stranger, since I cannot imagine the subjectivity of the divine Word made incarnate. Also it is suffering for which I as observer am called to account: addresses from the cross to the audience in the mediaeval plays of the passion, and the dramatised poems of reproach from the cross, so familiar in the later Middle Ages (poems like the famous ‘Wofully araide’), are, among other things, prohibitions against assimilating this agony to any other, absorbing this victim’s reality into my own identity. This is the passion and death of a divine agent, accepted as a consequence of human sin; as such, it cannot be a ‘martyrdom’ in the sense of an exemplary act of heroic faithfulness to a human cause. At the same time, it makes a similar claim on our attention and compassion as do other presentations of human extremity. From the earliest days of Christian faith, there has been an insistence that there is nothing illusory about the mortal suffering of Jesus. And while it may be ‘read’ in the light of the resurrection, it has never been thought of as cancelled or relativised. Stat crux, as the motto of the Carthusian order declares, dum volvitur orbis: ‘the cross stands as long as the world turns’. Hence the continuing contested nature of the representation of this event; hence some of the surprising strategies in Christian art or drama, including the invisibility of the crucified body or the conspicuous silence of the crucified in the midst of his torment. The various ways in which these issues are handled in mediaeval drama and in that enigmatic text, the Christus patiens illustrate how the koan, as we might call it, of showing the human suffering of the divine saviour remains resistant to conceptual resolutions, as a good koan must. As such, it casts some light on the tensions and fluctuations of tragic convention, even if it is itself not susceptible of tragic dramatisation in the strict sense. To be ‘faithful to failure’ is the essence of Christian devotion to the cross and the crucified, in that it mandates staying with a reality that cannot without loss of fidelity be softened in the severity of its challenge, whether by reduction to $)((-&
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edifying heroism or by translation into a projection of the woes of the observing ego. Just as (if we follow Stanley Cavell’s arguments) the audience is ‘immobilised’ in tragedy, unable to resolve the pain they must witness, so in Christian devotion there is nothing to do in the presence of the dying body – or rather there is only the recognition of what is being and has been done: I cannot turn aside from what I do; You cannot turn aside from what I am. Geoffrey Hill’s sonnet, Lachrimae Verae,3 imagines the confrontation with the crucified as the viewing of a body that ‘moves but moves to no avail’: the crucified cannot escape the fixity of this moment of suffering and as such realises our own nightmare of stasis, being held in our own failure/complicity/ impotence. It is a radical statement of what I have called the koan of the tragic. The representing of the crucified, so far from simply depicting an atrocity, embodies a twofold fidelity, the saviour’s fidelity to the work undertaken for our healing and the observer’s and/or believer’s faithfulness to confronting the truth that human beings have always already refused the truth. This latter faithfulness is itself enabled by the former in a sustained Christian practice, though this cannot be taken for granted as an effect: faithfulness is never other than an act of will. And so the fidelity to failure of tragic art becomes a sort of analogical reflection of the struggle of Christian devotion to ‘see’ the suffering of Christ faithfully. Not that this establishes tragedy as a distinctively Christian art form or anything of that kind; simply that there is a mutual illumination to be found in putting together the problems of Christian art and of tragic art in this particular respect of ‘fidelity’. Just as it is crucial to the spiritual integrity of a Christian representation of the suffering body of Christ that it should somehow mark the separation between the suffering presented and the needs of the ego viewing it, so in tragic art the risks of ambiguous emotional investment have to be addressed and dealt with. Just as it is crucial to the spiritual integrity of Christian representation that the human reality of the suffering should not be swallowed in some prematurely theologised triumph, Luther’s theologia gloriae, so tragic art has to negotiate its way beyond the merely edifying and point-making. Tragedy, as is made plain in these essays, could plausibly be treated in the Middle Ages as a genre dealing primarily with painful reversals of fortune, ‘sad stories of the death of kings’. But it is clear that as tragic drama developed in 3 Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies; Poems 1952–2012, edited by Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 121.

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the sixteenth century, the straightforward element of moral warning in such stories is increasingly woven in with a deeper set of concerns. Precisely as the ambient religious culture of Britain abandons the liturgical drama in which response to Christ’s suffering is handled – both in liturgy in the strict sense, and in liturgically related drama such as the Corpus Christi plays – secular theatre presses questions about the representation of suffering, testing the limits of what is tolerable and inviting audiences to recognise the complexity of their witnessing. Given, as is regularly pointed out by scholars, that this is an age in which there is a new uneasiness about how one thing can ever properly represent another, and how appearances can betray as well as reveal, it is natural enough that theatre becomes something of a lightning-rod for theological anxiety, evoking as it did an age in which a sacramental cosmology allowed representation to be more than some sort of copy of an original, let alone some sort of ersatz and misleading substitute for an original. In the wake of the crisis of public and social symbolism developing in tandem with the various European Reformations (including the Catholic Counter-Reformation), theatre became a site where various issues were worked on indirectly: among them, the legitimacy of a staged set of events purporting to address an audience in a manner that engaged their emotions in what were now potentially unmanageable ways. Liturgical ‘theatre’ had always intended its effects to be transformative or converting: could secular theatre be trusted with anything resembling that role, especially given that liturgical theatre itself had been judged by many Protestants to be a matter of deceit and delusion rather than a participatory or mediated but true and real presence? The culture of that era effectively considered certain forms of representation as intrinsically characterised by ‘infidelity’. It is not fanciful to think that a new tragic theatre was in part a response to that moral and epistemological scepticism, a venture in faithful enactment comparable to the converting theatre of liturgy, which argued implicitly for the converting force of imagined and represented action in other settings.4 And if that is how we can or should read elements of Elizabethan drama, Shakespearean tragedy above all, it is possible to see how it could be very natural to borrow tropes from liturgical imagery in the course of such representation, whether the ritual echoes that are scattered through Richard ii or the complex irony of Claudius’s staged act of prayer in Hamlet (saving his life but not his soul) or the bread-and-stone cluster of imagery in Timon, as argued in one of the essays here – or any one of 4 On the general climate of the period and its concern with doubt and certainty and the ambiguities of sense experience, see Subha Mukherji and Tim Stuart-Buttle, eds., Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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many further examples. This is not a matter of identifying specific theological themes as such in Shakespeare’s drama, though there is nothing disreputable about that; more of observing how questions about ‘transformative’ and ‘participatory’ representation are raised and reflected on here, so that the moral interrogation of the representation of suffering surfaces again in purportedly secular drama. As already hinted, it is not that this interrogation is a novelty in Shakespearean tragedy; Attic drama already raises the issues, simply by its refusal of direct showings of atrocity and injury. What we see and hear in Greek tragedy is a body that has been wounded; the event is always past, always already narrated, and in that sense ‘non-negotiable’ for the audience, who are never invited to be witness to acts of physical wounding. Because of this, the moral question they have to deal with is not primarily about their standing by while injury is done, not about their capacity to look at the imitation of an act of cruelty, with all the ethical tangle that involves. It is the question of how an audience focuses on their relation not to an act of atrocity in itself but to the means by which atrocity is thought and spoken in the culture of the city – and, as Rose’s essay intimates, how the culture of the city itself allows the possibility of atrocity and has to be challenged on this ground. One of the things that changes in Europe between Attic and Elizabethan tragedy is simply that ‘the culture of the city’ has become dominated by a very distinctive narrative of atrocity, the story of Christ’s passion, whose special features – as has been argued here – cast an intensified light on the ethics of representation and witness, marking out with a new clarity where the pitfalls are in either appropriating suffering to the selfinterest of the observing ego or dissolving the particularity of suffering into a general edifying pattern. This cultural story not only permits but encourages the representation of moments of wounding, and makes a large and controversial claim – that human release from the prisons of mutual cruelty depends on the readiness to look at this particular narrative of atrocity: the representation of at least this suffering, Christ’s cross, is lifegiving, partly because it cannot be readily reduced to a story with which I can simply identify and which I can therefore absorb or assimilate (and in this connection, it is perhaps worth saying that some kinds of theology of the tragic which stress unequivocally the passibility of God create fresh problems in softening the contours of the ineradicable otherness of divine suffering). So enacting atrocity and its effects remains morally dangerous but spiritually necessary; and if it is not to be morally disastrous – in de-realising suffering by over-identification or general moralising – the art of enactment has to embody the warnings and correctives that will keep the atrocity strange as well as recognisable to us. And if we ask about how we represent the atrocities of our own day, the complex balance of $)((-&
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concerns that have been articulated in connection with the narrative of the cross (the warnings about the two major distortions of sentimental identification and ideological/teleological generalisation) can be put to work in thinking about other narratives of terror and pain. If we do not attend to that crosscentred warning, whether or not we express it in strictly theological terms, there will always be the risk of co-opting stories of suffering (and there are some pertinent reflections in this book about the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ in this light). And there are enough Christian examples of this sort of co-option to illustrate all too clearly how deep the temptation runs in us as observers of suffering. Tragic drama is faithful to the human world when it keeps that distance, whether by the extreme reticence of the Attic convention or the extreme explicitness of some modern drama. But what I am suggesting, in the light of the essays here collected, is that the development of a culture in which representing atrocity (the death of Jesus) was both unavoidable and risk-laden provided an unprecedented impetus for exploring how to show the facts of human pain and cruelty without a corruption of the audience’s vision. We can, in this light, think of tragedy as testing the limits of recognition, or indeed as embodying the basic paradox of recognition: when I recognise someone else’s experience as in some way continuous with mine, to the extent that we can share a language about it, I acknowledge in the same moment that the difference is real enough to need language to articulate and analyse it. And when – in theological terms – God incarnate shares a language with human beings, including the language of human limitation and suffering, there is supremely a recognition that issues in a confession of utter difference. The trope of the suffering God asserts that God is perceptible and audible in the familiar reality of human suffering; but equally that the nature of this specific suffering will be irreducibly opaque to the observer. In that tension theological language finds its root and impetus, and it is a tension that guarantees a degree of restlessness within the various devotional idioms of faith and in thinking about their visual embodiments. So postmediaeval tragedy works with the legacy of not necessarily avoiding the direct representation of suffering but searching for a way of carrying out that representation so as to put in question how the audience acknowledges and views its complicity. In other words, it seeks at once to involve and to distance, in fidelity to a world that is fundamentally resistant to the reasoned control of any ego. To involve and to distance: for tragic representation to achieve this is precisely for it to take up the challenge of addressing and transforming ‘passion’. The Christian theological tradition includes a sophisticated diagnosis of the conflicted but not finally destructive relations between passion and the life of $)((-&
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reflection, the action of the nous. The goal of the ascetical life is among other things a sufficiently clear understanding of how perception is repeatedly skewed by our capitulation to unexamined instinct, specifically to the kind of instinct that warns us to defend our psychic territory.5 Identifying and combating this tendency to capitulation entails the ability to recognise responses to others and to the world in general that are fundamentally self-serving and defensive. In the context of what we have been discussing here, it involves the various corruptions in the ways we ‘know’ the suffering of others – sentimental identification, sadistic gratification, edifying abstraction, plain denial. All of these leave intact the power and security of the ego’s gaze; and the question is what will upset and finally dissolve that security in such a way that a truly disturbed and self-scrutinising response to the suffering of others is made more possible. Both the tragic drama and the liturgical and devotional act of the religious community seek to keep alive this possibility of disturbance. They evoke and flirt with the risky strategies of representation that most easily draw us; and so they will be vulnerable to the charge of sentimentalising, moralising or colluding. Simply because stories of suffering and atrocity are already in the process of being told, all these elements will be already present. But the distinctive narration undertaken by tragedy, as by liturgy, is designed to push back at this, to make us uneasy with our own ‘pleasure’ in the narration, wherever this comes from. The difficulty of making sense of the pleasure of tragedy is, as already noted, a serious one, but it is not that tragic representation condemns or forbids it: the viewer – again, like the liturgical participant – will recognise the diversity of emotion generated, from the pleasure of a simply well-shaped enactment to the awkward and compromising pleasure of self-congratulatory sensitivity (‘See how much I can look on with pity and horror!’), but will not be allowed to settle in or to any of these satisfactions, if the tragic enactment is doing its work. As we have seen, the necessary making-strange of represented suffering was once a rigorous banishment of the direct depiction of atrocity, but in other contexts may be the exaggeration of such depiction. It may be the absence of the wounded body, but may also be its presence as an unmanageable or otherwise problematic reality. Liturgically, it is of course present in the very strange form of food to be consumed: a body whose function is to be crushed and swallowed by the liturgical assembly/audience so that they in turn become such a body, offered for the nourishment of others. To draw together the scattered 5 The work of Evagrius of Pontus (who died in around 399) is the classic source for this element of the tradition. See, for example, Augustine Casiday, Evagrius Ponticus (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 89–116, for a characteristic Evagrian text.

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reflections of this response to the essays collected here, the point is the obvious one that the interconnection of tragedy and Christian theology and practice is not first and foremost a matter of themes or theories – hence the importance of not being trapped in arguments about the degree to which Christianity can be called a tragic or an anti-tragic system. It is to do with a set of particular concerns about how to represent human suffering in a way that is not morally disastrous, about how to enact a history of atrocity with ‘fidelity’. This will not resolve the question of whether Christian mythology and liturgy have been generative of tragic imagination in a way not found in other cultures – another pretty futile question when stated in those terms, as all we know is the literary history that has in fact unfolded; anything beyond that moves into the realm of essentialist fantasies. It tells us only that a specific religious cluster of worries about showing the wounded body opens significant new avenues for tragic performance and specific new criteria for gauging the seriousness of various sorts of infidelity to what is being shown. But it does also open a new trajectory in thinking about what (in traditional Christian spiritual terms) the ‘dispassionate’ seeing of a suffering world might be, a seeing that was truthful and appropriately responsive, free from distortion and self-indulgence – a seeing that offered some purchase on the strictly unimaginable ‘fidelity’ of a divine seeing of the world. If the history of tragic representation sharpens and illuminates that question for the theologian and the religious believer, it will have served an unexpected but profoundly generative purpose.

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Index Addison, Joseph 162 Adorno, Theodor W. 295 Aeschylus 125, 151, 172, 224 Arendt, Hannah 296, 303–4 Aristophanes 151 Aristotle 10, 16, 96, 116, 119, 120–2, 126, 130, 137, 178–80, 243, 245, 297–8, 301–3, 312 Artaud, Antonin 178, 182, 185, 187, 190–3 Augustine of Hippo 98–9 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 168, 223–4, 225, 239 Bataille, Georges 176 Beckett, Samuel 10, 12–5, 16–7, 161, 199–216, 315, 317–8 Benjamin, Walter 67–74, 91, 111, 193–5 Berger, Peter L. 11, 16 Bergson, Henri 183 Boethius 38, 182 Bradley, A.C. 55 Brant, George 309–12 Brecht, Bertolt 10, 182, 184, 187, 193–5 Brome, Richard 23–4 Brueghel, Pieter 256, 258–60, 262, 281 Bunny, Francis 87 Burckhardt, Walter 73 Butler, Judith 300–1, 308 Calderón, Pedro 70, 156, 193, 201 Calvin, John 87, 99, 104, 258, 260 Camus, Albert 248–9 Cavell, Stanley 90, 302, 320 Chapman, George 35, 113 Chaucer, Geoffrey 38–9 Collishaw, Mat 268–9 Craig, Edward Gordon 186, 188 Cranmer, Thomas 51–2 Crowne, John 32, 38 Dante 13, 167–8, 236 Darwin, Charles 183 Deleuze, Gilles 178, 193 Derrida, Jacques 143, 178, 193 Di Giovanni, Matteo 247, 254–5 Dix, Otto 264–5 Dornford-May, Mark 15–6, 275, 285–6

Donne, John 50 Durkheim, Émile 183 Eagleton, Terry 95, 177, 221 Eastwood, Clint 306–9 El Greco 83 Eliot, George 300 Eliot, T.S. 10, 12, 67, 68–9, 91, 178, 182–9, 190 Ernst, Max 264 Euripides 117, 120, 172, 298–9, 302 Fletcher, John 34 Fra Angelico 252 Francis (Pope) 248–9 Frazer, J.G. 183 Freud, Sigmund 10, 209 Giotto 249–52, 262 Girard, René 13–4, 177, 185, 195, 224 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 170, 178 Gosson, Stephen 78–80, 102 Goya, Francisco 267 Gregory of Nazianzus 78–9, 117 Grotius, Hugo 10, 116–9, 121, 125–38 Guy-Blache, Alice 282 Halter, Roman 266–7 Harrison, Jane 183–4 Harrison, Tony 276–7 Hart, David Bentley 224–5, 237–8 Harvey, Bessie 267 Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 11–2, 143–58, 178, 226 Heinsius, Daniel 121–2, 126 Heminge, William 33, 38, 40 Heywood, Thomas 101 Hill, Geoffrey 320 Homer 146 Hutson, Lorna 46, 118–9 Hölderlin, Friedrich 143, 145, 146 Jarry, Alfred 184 Jonson, Ben 113 Kane, Sarah 318 Kempis, Thomas à 53

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328

Index

Kestelman, Morris 266 Knight, G. Wilson 81–2, 227 Kristeva, Julia 193 Kyd, Thomas 45 Legge, Thomas 38–9 Levi, Primo 295 Levinas, Emmanuel 296, 297, 299–302, 311 Lipsius, Justus 97–9, 100–1, 103, 104, 108–9, 112 Luther, Martin 162, 231, 320 MacKinnon, Donald 162, 168–9, 220–3, 224, 234, 236–7, 296–7 Marlowe, Christopher 33 Marston, John 113 Massey, Thomas 29, 33, 37 Melanchthon, Philip 119–22, 126, 128, 130 Middleton, Thomas 5, 9, 68, 81–91 Miller, Arthur 10 Miller, J. Hillis 11 Milton, John 162 Monkman, Kent 268 Murdoch, Iris 234–5 Navez, François-Joseph 262 Niebuhr, Reinhold 167, 223 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 10–1, 12, 73–4, 81–2, 159–85, 191–2, 195, 235, 301 Nussbaum, Martha C. 95, 180, 302–3 O’Casey, Sean 8, 60–2, 64 Pascal, Blaise 199, 203, 207–8 Paul, Apostle 75, 171–2, 182, 230–1 Peele, George 33 Peterson, Anker Ali 267–8 Picasso, Pablo 267 Pierre, Jean-Baptiste Marie 262 Pisano, Giovanni 249, 252–3, 262 Pisano, Nicola 249 Plato 84, 123, 127, 165, 179–82, 184, 194 Poussin, Nicolas 262–3 Proust, Marcel 199, 200–9 Racine, Jean 12, 199–216 Rainoldes, John 101–2

Raphael 255–7, 262 Reinhardt, Max 178, 187–8, 190 Rose, Gillian 6, 17, 300, 316–7, 322 Rubens, Peter Paul 260–1 Ruskin, John 249–50, 251 Sandys, George 10, 116–9, 125–37 Scarsella, Ippolito 269 Schelling, F.W.J. 143, 146, 147–8, 156–7, 178 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 147 Schlegel, Friedrich 146 Schopenhauer, Arthur 10, 12, 163, 199, 200–4, 207–10, 213, 235 Seneca 26, 95, 96, 99, 102, 104, 128, 226 Shakespeare, William 4–5, 7–9, 15, 25–7, 34, 39–40, 44–60, 63–4, 67–8, 81–91, 113, 116, 118, 123–5, 128–9, 219–22, 225–38, 243–4, 260, 272–4, 281, 296, 302, 309, 316, 318, 321–2 Sherrif, R.C. 8, 62–3 Sidney, Philip 95–7, 100, 103, 111, 116 Socrates 162, 165, 295 Solger, K.W.F. 145–6 Sontag, Susan 192–3 Sophocles 12, 119, 120–3, 126, 129, 143–58, 187–8, 189, 191, 221, 224, 298 Spencer, Stanley 278 Steiner, George 2, 5, 6, 15, 81–2, 125, 137, 162, 172, 222–3, 225, 237, 296 Synge, J.M. 8, 64, 190 Szondi, Peter 146, 178 Taylor, Charles 11, 299 Tintoretto, Jacopo 256 Vattimo, Gianni 167 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 64 Wagner, Richard 2 Watteau, Jean Antoine 199–200, 208–9, 211 Weber, Max 169 Webster, John 9–10, 95–6, 103–13 Williams, Raymond 172–3, 177 Yeats, Jack B. 199–200, 208–10, 213 Yeats, W.B. 10, 12, 178, 182, 184, 189–90, 191

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