The Ethos of Drama: Rhetorical Theory and Dramatic Worth [1 ed.] 0813217415, 9780813217413

Citation preview

V The Ethos of Drama

V

The Ethos of Drama R het or ic a l T heory a n d Dr a m a t i c W o r t h

Robert L. King

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data King, Robert L. (Robert Leo) The ethos of drama : rhetorical theory and dramatic worth / Robert L. King. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8132-1741-3 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. English drama— History and criticism—Theory, etc.  2. Rhetoric—Moral and ethical aspects.  3. Theater—Philosophy.  4. Theater audiences.  5. Persuasion (Rhetoric)  6. Literature and morals.  7. Ethics in literature.  8. Values in literature.  I. Title. PR625.K57 2010 822.009—dc22 2009040262

For Connie and our children

C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments  ix



1. Rhetorical Ethos and Dramatic Theory  1



2. Syntax, Style, and Ethos  30



3. The Worth of Words  76



4. Memory and Ethos  131



5. Shaw, Ethos, and Rhetorical Wit  154



6. Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric  174



7. Rhetoric and Silence in Holocaust Drama  191



8. Conclusion  215

Bibliography  223 Index  231

Ack now ledgments

Five summer awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me opportunities for research and collegial discussions of my work. Matching one of its challenge grants, the Elms College joined with the NEH to create a fund for development of humanities faculty at the college. The Elms also provided academic leaves for me to complete this book. I am happy to acknowledge my debt to both institutions and to the enlightened people behind them. I am grateful to the editors of the Massachusetts Review and the North American Review for commissioning my series of theatre articles. At the Massachusetts Review, Paul Jenkins of Hampshire College was sponsor, critic, and supportive friend. At the North American Review, Robley Wilson, followed by Vince Gotera and Grant Tracey, gave me more lenient treatment than I probably deserved. The editors of the Catholic University of America Press have managed to be professional and personable at the same time; I appreciate their prompt attention to my comments and questions, and in particular, Susan Bond’s meticulous copyediting. The readers for the press, Steve McKenna of the Catholic University of America and Jim Bulman of Allegheny College, gave my manuscript diligent, sensitive review and surely improved it.

ix

I regret that Albert Wertheim, late of Indiana University, will not see this book; I am a better student of drama for having known him. I am further indebted to Jim Bulman for his advocacy and friendship over many years. So, too, my brother Tom, now beyond this place but always a presence. My deepest debts are in the dedication. Portions of this book were previously published as follows and are reprinted here with permission. Much of chapter 1 appeared as “Dramatic Worth: Rhetorical Ethos and Dramatic Theory,” Journal of Theatre and Drama, vol. 5/6 (1999–2000), 197–214. Part of chapter 2 appeared as “Syntax and Ethos in English Style,” Language and Style, vol. 24 (1991), 503–16. Parts of chapter 3 appeared as “Res et Verba: The Reform of Language in Dryden’s All for Love,” ELH, vol. 54 (1987), 45–46; and “Language and Values in David Hare,” in David Hare: A Casebook, edited by Hersch Zeifman (New York: Garland Press, 1984), 69–87. Part of chapter 4 appeared as “The Play of Uncertain Ideas,” Massachusetts Review, vol. XLII, no. 2 (2001), 165–75. Part of chapter 6 appeared as “The Rhetoric of Dramatic Technique in Blood Knot,” South African Theatre Journal, vol. 7 (1993), 40–49. Part of chapter 7 appeared as “Psychic Numbing and Grumberg’s L’Atelier,” Massachusetts Review, vol. XXVI (1985), 580–94.

x   Acknowledgments

V The Ethos of Drama

Chapter 1

Rhetorical Ethos and Dramatic Theory V This book investigates how a play in performance leads an audience to accept its dramatic vision. That is to say, it raises a basic question that rhetoric has asked of political speech for centuries: How and how effectively does the work earn its credibility and project its worth? Since rhetoric is broadly social in its goals, it concerns itself with people acting communally—as drama ordinarily does both within the boundaries of the stage and in relating to an assembled audience beyond it. In rhetorical theory, moral authority is indispensable to winning the assent of such audiences, so Aristotle understandably gives ethos priority among the three “modes of persuasion”: [There is persuasion] through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly [than we do others].1

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the connection between choice and moral character more succinctly than he does 1. Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse, ed. and trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), bk. 1, 1356a, 38.



1

in the Rhetoric: “Virtue or excellence is a characteristic involving choice” and by the “good man—I mean that his acts are due to choice.”2 The means of rhetorical proof that follow ethos are said to reside in the audience (pathos) or to derive from an argument (logos) while the ethical proof comes out of “the personal character of the speaker.” As I point out below, these categorical distinctions are not absolutes either in rhetorical theory or dramatic practice; nonetheless like the general theory of ethos, they supply broad premises for empirical criticism. In the Poetics, Aristotle’s discussion of the pity and fear produced by tragedy emphasizes pathos. Yet I believe that the equally crucial mode of rhetorical proof, ethos, rewards comparable emphasis in dramatic theory and that paraphrasing Aristotle can supply a guiding principle for a valuable critical approach: The ethos of drama is the mode of rhetorical proof grounded in the moral character of the play. This assertion assumes that the play itself, unlike Aristotle’s good man, cannot be personified so that it is seen to make moral choices; rather, it is the product of choices that its author makes. Its character, however, is revealed when it presents choices being made and sets them before us or when it displays characters living with the consequences of choices they have made. As a critical premise, the assertion assigns proper theoretical importance to all components of a play in performance, for any aspect of staging can be effective in bodying forth the character of the text; for example, lighting and blocking are, at the very least, circumstances in which dramatic speech occurs. Because rhetoric studies context or the circumstances in which speech is delivered and because it assumes the presence of an audience, its procedures are particularly well suited to the study of political and social drama.3 Before asking more pointedly how a drama establishes its 2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1962), bk. 2, 1106b, 43. 3. In The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Herbert Blau assumes an audience of at least one—as rhetoric does.

2   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

worth, however, the terms of this rhetorical approach need to be clarified. In what follows, “worthy” and “worth” do not refer to moral standing on some objective or absolute scale of values; rather, they allude to what is deserving of an audience’s attention, respect, consideration or reflection. In this meaning, a simplistic presentation of something generally held to be morally sound would be less worthy than a daring treatment of a challenging, morally questionable view. The complex reality behind the defense of Nazis in Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, however repugnant, is more credible to a mature audience than the readily accepted matters of fact, the logos, of the information about a growing AIDS crisis in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. That is, the moral core of the term “worth” takes its force from the earned thoughtfulness of the drama’s total voice, not from any paraphraseable meaning or summary message masquerading as a definitive truth. The drama, like other genres, fashions its own truths; rhetorically, however, it is significantly distinct from novels or poems because it characteristically addresses an audience gathered to hear speech delivered in settings intended to enhance that delivery. Dramatic presence—both the immediacy of the dramatic presentation and the presence of an audience—affords the same kind of opportunities traditionally available to a public speaker; in its immediacy, a play can manipulate, enlighten, shock, elevate, lead, harangue, divert, insult, uplift, flatter, inform, and so on. Ignoring sound bites and TV images, we still judge a speaker favorably for dressing appropriately, displaying humor or charm, and appealing to common values. If that speaker is earnest and apparently sincere, our acceptance becomes trust, and that trust, in turn, gives any logically developed argument a moral force rooted in a humane exchange. In George Kennedy’s apt condensation: “Ethos means ‘character’ and may be defined as the credibility that the author or speaker is able to establish in his work.”4 I want to test 4. George A. Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   3

this ethical proof as it applies to the play as a whole, to principled dialogue, and to the moral voice of single characters—not to the author’s character as known from outside the boundaries of the play. At the outset I distinguish the ethos of drama from the ethics of criticism. The moral judgments of exemplary critics—Samuel Johnson and A. C. Bradley, Wayne Booth and Tobin Seibers— are often valid and sometimes magisterial, but they are not directly relevant to a study of the ethical proof as a necessary preliminary to conclusions about values. In The Ethos of Restoration Comedy, Ben Ross Schneider Jr. equates ethos with “moral content,” and Robert L. Fiore has a similar focus in Drama and Ethos: Natural-Law Ethics in Spanish Golden Age Theater.5 Despite the promising title, none of the papers gathered in Drama as Rhetoric/Rhetoric as Drama devotes even a paragraph to ethos. The essays collected in The Ethos of Rhetoric respond to a call to investigate the role of ethos in the “dwelling place” of community and, in doing so, to go beyond the concept of ethos as credibility; many of its insights have been useful although our basic premises are distinct.6 Christy Desmet’s Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity overlooks two rhetorical places on which I rely, disputation and stasis theory; we differ, then, in some applications of ethos as key to character.7 In Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, William Worthen illuminates “the role the audience performs” but does not consider how a play earns authority or credibility for that audience.8 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 15. I substitute “drama” for Kennedy’s “author or speaker.” 5. Ben Ross Schneider Jr., Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 19; Robert L. Fiore, Drama & Ethos: Natural-Law Ethics in the Spanish Golden Age Theater (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975). 6. Stanley Vincent Longman, ed., Drama as Rhetoric/Rhetoric as Drama: An Exploration of Dramatic and Rhetorical Criticism, in Theatre Symposium, vol.5 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). Michael J. Hyde, ed., Ethos of Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). 7. Christy Desmet, Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).

4   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

Alone among the critics I have read, George K. Hunter suggests how pervasive and subtle a character’s ethos can be. To him, it is never “an isolated phenomenon” because the speakers and their circumstances demand our thoughtful respect: The polyphony of truths and standards that a drama sets before us is certainly a proper part of the persuasive means the dramatist uses; but the truth of these standards is always held inside the emotional processes by which they are stimulated.9

And, I would add, simulated, for the quality and means of representation also contribute to a play’s ethical proof. After surveying current dramatic theory, I will indicate how a theory of ethos can contribute to that body of criticism. As the final part of this chapter, I will put my theory to a practical test by applying it briefly to Shakespeare, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and David Mamet. At a few places in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Keir Elam edges toward considerations of overall worth, but he stops short of a critique of rhetorical ethos: “The question . . . is whether . . . it is not possible to devise what might be called a dramatological approach which respects, and indeed is grounded in, the dialectical play of utterances within the dramatic hereand-now.”10 In his useful and provocative book, Bert O. States proceeds from a broad premise, that the “idea of theatre [is] an act of speech,” and he recognizes a “mutual agreement by actor and audience on the value and appropriateness of the subject to the community of men.”11 Martin Esslin makes a similar claim for the necessary bond between the audience and the play; he does not, however, analyze that bond as ethical or rhetorical: 8. William Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 5. 9. George K. Hunter, “Rhetoric and Renaissance Drama,” in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (London: St. Martin, 1994), 113. 10. Keir Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1987), 144–45. 11. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 160, 180.

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   5

A dramatic performance must . . . at the most elementary level, be regarded as an event designed to capture and hold the attention of those for whom it is intended. All other conceptual and emotional effects of such a performance depend on the fulfillment of that basic premise.12

In “Literary History as Challenge,” H. R. Jauss’s argument frequently rests, perhaps unconsciously, on standards that rhetorical theory has relied on for centuries. For example, Jauss recalls rhetoric’s sensitivity to the demands of occasion when he connects “analysis of the literary experience” to “the objectifiable system of expectations that arises for each work in the historical moment of its appearance.”13 In his third thesis, his emphasis on reception and context should not obscure the suggestions for rhetorical criticism of “presupposed,” for the term implies that an author deliberately shapes his work in recognition of an audience’s character: Thesis 3. Reconstructed in this way, the horizon of expectations of a work allows one to determine its artistic character by the kind and the degree of its influence on a presupposed audience.14

In his concluding thesis, Jauss attributes to the “social function of literature” the extraordinary power of rhetoric to lead to discovery when he claims it can “preform” a reader’s “understanding of the world” and “have an effect on his social behavior.”15 The phenomenologist Bruce Wilshire makes a similar claim in Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor when he calls theater “a mode of discovery.” He maintains that the things on the stage are at least as meaningful as the play’s text; indeed, “narrative or argumentative verbal language limps lamely after these perceptual encounters with existence artisti12. Martin Esslin, The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen (London: Methuen, 1987), 136, 137. 13. H. R. Jauss, “Literary History as Challenge,” in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 22. 14. Jauss, 25. 15. Jauss, 39.

6   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

cally structured.”16 His point compares with Antonin Artuad’s in The Theater and Its Double: What is essential now . . . is to determine what this physical language consists of, this solidified, materialized language by means of which theater is able to differentiate itself from speech. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words.17

Writing as a semiologist and without declaring any debt to rhetorical theory, Patrice Pavis also urges criticism to move beyond the distinction between language and stage details, and he raises several related questions for the study of drama: because “everything” on stage is “called into question by instances of discourse which do not necessarily match the character’s words,” he sees a “need” for “a study of the discursive formation of the text”: • because the audience finds itself deprived of a relationship with the real “author [who] has disappeared within the fiction itself,” he notes “how difficult it is to situate the spectator vis-àvis the fictional theatrical universe which confronts him”;18 • he wonders, much as Elam does, how we can ask of a play a central question that is both “sufficiently general (and thus pertinent from the theoretical viewpoint) and sufficiently specific (to take into account problems raised by the specific play).” Pavis traces most of these problems to a failure of criticism: “The question of its reception by the spectator seems to have been 16. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), xiv, 57. 17. Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), 37–38. 18. Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1982); in no. 1 the first quotation is from Pavis; the second, from a passage by T. R. Warning that Pavis endorses (72).

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   7

totally neglected, except for the famous instance of carthasis or its Brechtian counterpoint, alienation.”19 Catharsis, dealing with the purgation of pity and fear, appeals to an audience’s pathos; alienation, correcting such an emotional involvement, distances an audience to make it confront, inquire, or study—in short, it values logos. The place of ethos in an audience’s reception and participation awaits and merits similar critical scrutiny. Aristotle’s linking of character to choice, and choice to action; Cicero’s requirement that emotions be “visibly stamped” on the advocate; Chaim Perelman’s comments on the power of “presence,” and dozens of other places give dramatic criticism the authority of rhetorical standards, but I know of no extension of theory along the lines I propose.20 In sum, I would test a critical stance that views aspects of the whole play—all the characters, techniques of staging, and the text—as components of one speaker. The “instances of discourse which do not . . . match the character’s words” and the disappearance of author are then subsumed by the larger premise that the entire play works to create its ethos and that, as a corollary, any of its elements can contribute to bodying forth its moral vision. This theoretical approach has, I maintain, several advantages over most current ones: • It takes rhetorical criticism of drama beyond the analysis of set speeches and of stylistic devices by insisting that such analysis be evaluated as parts of the discourse of the entire play 19. Pavis, Languages of the Stage, 75. 20. For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics: “It seems that it is possible for a man to be of such a character that he performs each particular act in such a way as to make him a good man—I mean that his acts are due to choice and are performed for the sake of the acts themselves” (169). For Cicero, see De oratore, where Antonius calls it “impossible” to arouse emotion in the listener “Unless . . . those emotions . . . are visibly stamped or rather branded on the advocate himself” (trans. E. W. Sutton [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979], 189). Among Perelman’s several comments in The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argument: “The thing that is present to the consciousness assumes thus an importance that the theory and practice of argumentation must take into consideration” (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971, 117).

8   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

and hence remain subordinate rhetorically as well as aesthetically. • It attributes general worth to incidents, stage properties, action (including blocking), lighting and other aspects of the production that might otherwise be seen as having more limited importance. • It begins to satisfy one of Pavis’s needs by allowing “everything on stage” to be pertinent in examining ethos, the creation of which is basic to “the discursive formations of a text.” • It asks a proper, general question and a sufficiently specific one: How does a drama establish a credible moral character for itself so that its anticipated audiences will accept its vision or its point of view? That is, does its ethos tend to manipulate or to persuade, or does it lead to discovery, self-knowledge or social awareness? • Accordingly, it situates the audience before “the fictional theatrical universe” much as a sensitive playwright must when asking how the work in progress can project a complex, provocative dramatic image. For, insofar as the play’s ethos is conscientiously achieved, it respects the audience as morally responsive. • It leaps the question of whether the playwright, narrator, or commentator is the “real speaker” and examines the ethos of the play as the most basic source of its relationship with an engaged audience. As a further result, it renders questions of the playwright’s probity or motivation irrelevant to the total moral vision of the theatrical experience. • Finally, it does not postulate a rigid critical paradigm or methodology, but remains openly theoretical before the practice of any drama. While it is relatively easy to see how a speech tries to give evidence of the speaker’s good character, a play’s rhetorical strategy is rarely so clear, and when a character directly connects the audience with the play, its fictional nature complicates the tone of the message. The critical issue is not whether Brecht’s Arturo Ui, to take a clear example, himself believes that “where Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   9

faith is lacking, all is lost,”21 but whether the play establishes an occasion sufficient to display to an audience the maxim’s present worth, its immediate dramatic relevance. The occasion for Ui’s speech includes both the audience on the stage and in the theater, and the larger dramatic context that displays, among other things, Ui being instructed in Nazi rhetoric by a failed actor. Brecht’s obvious parallels between Ui and Hitler appeal to the most rudimentary knowledge of history, and while the play does spring a rhetorical trap at the end (when the Ui actor removes his moustache and challenges the audience to apply the play’s lesson to contemporary events), a spectator cannot confuse Ui’s direct addresses with the moral point of view of the play. Analyzing Ui’s rhetoric, his set speeches, without considering the rhetorical situations of the drama would be a school exercise certain to miss Brecht’s point about audience responsibility in political settings. Speech in Hamlet occurs in richer contexts that pose greater challenges to a theory of dramatic ethos. The opening scenes of Hamlet introduce serious, complex subjects of pressing concern to the characters and to their political state; they invite investigation of the worth of those subjects, and of the means of conducting that investigation. The weighty themes of death, succession, time, rebellion, and moral responsibility deserve balanced elaboration, but Hamlet does not earn its ethos simply by articulating them; on a deeper level, the play approves rhetorical procedures that move from fact to value, and it questions the practical uses of the resulting knowledge in the world of affairs that we all inhabit. Hamlet arrives at no truth to live by, but gains its moral character through an uncompromising examination of its own lifeblood: language and rhetoric. The theoretical range of its rhetorical inquiries contributes to the play’s moral stature. Hamlet asks the questions raised by stasis theory, the method of rhetorical investigation originally recommended for the 21. Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Parable Play, in Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, vol. 6 (New York: Random House, 1976), sc. 10, 266.

10   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

judiciary but extended to rhetorical inquiry at large.22 Quintilian’s lengthy discussion of stasis includes a clear statement about the theory’s wide application and a summary of its central concerns: We must therefore accept the view of the authorities followed by Cicero, to the effect that there are things on which enquiry is made in every case: we ask whether a thing is, what it is, and of what kind it is.

The last of the three questions (Qualis sit?) unmistakably directs attention to moral worth: “Under this heading [that is, “the special aspects of quality”] come all questions about what is honourable, just or expedient.”23 The illustrative examples for the theory in Quintilian and other ancients center, as Hamlet does, on the question of homicide: whether an act took place at all; what kind of act it is (self-defense, murder) and what worth it has (beneficial to the state, simply evil). Stasis theory, however, can be applied to other events in the play and can involve the audience in a moral quest. Its fundamental purposes are to discover truth, resolve controversy, and, as an ideal result, create a sound social order. Its goals are Hamlet’s; his questioning and the play’s earn moral authority for the drama as a whole. Hamlet’s first line, “Who’s there?” delivered at night, prompts another question from an open-minded spectator (admittedly a hypothetical person now): “What is going on here?” or “What is it?” Mysteries and melodramas never rise above this level of inquiry—hence the shorthand name, whodunit—but Hamlet, like a rhetorical exploration, moves from fact to worth and in the process begins to create its ethos. The progression sets the play apart 22. Joel Altman discusses stasis theory at several places in The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). His discussion relates to disputation and inquiry in the action of the play, while I focus on communication between the play and the audience. 23. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, vol. 1, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 3.5.80, 3.6.41. Reference numbers for Quintilian refer to book, chapter, and section.

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   11

from forensic and legal investigation, for after failing to determine facts, characters judge and act without grasping them. Horatio’s question to the Ghost in the first scene (“What art thou?”), Bernardo’s to Horatio (“Is it not something more than fantasy?”), and Marcellus’s (“Is it not like the king?”) all are designed to discover facts, the necessary ground for judging the worth of a deed.24 Horatio realizes that he lacks this basic knowledge, yet he attempts a conclusion nonetheless: In what particular thought to work I know not, But, in the gross and scope of my opinion, This bodes some strange eruption to our state.

(1.1.71–73 [my emphasis])

Elsewhere in the play, moral burdens are accepted, shifted and put off in ignorance of fundamental matters of fact. For Shakespeare’s contemporaries and for a modern audience, Hamlet can be said to achieve credibility by dramatizing honest attempts to act ethically in a world that will not disclose its facts, the truths on which responsible action must be based. Hamlet’s examination of Horatio and the sentinels sounds like a lawyer’s cross-examination, a dogged search for facts; in only twenty-one lines, Hamlet asks a dozen pointed questions from “Saw? Who?” to “His beard was grizzled, no?” (1.2.190, 245). When he first sees the Ghost, Hamlet cannot know exactly what he sees “in such a questionable shape” (1.4.43) but nonetheless goes on to the questions of worth: “What may this mean / . . . why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?” (1.4.51, 58). The theater audience, cued by Hamlet, follows the standards of stasis theory as it watches the play; that is to say, dramatic presentation itself provides objective evidence that can reveal deeper worth, or as Hamlet tells us, moving from the level of fact to value, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience 24. , 58, 62. All citations to Shakespeare are from The Complete Works, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Text references are to act, scene, and line of this edition.

12   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

of the king” (2.2.605–6). For audiences who saw Hamlet without our preconceptions, the play-within-the-play posed the second of the stasis questions for them as well as for Claudius: What is it we see? Or, what is this “thing”? The theater as a place of seeing—the spectator’s place etymologically—is underlined as a concept by Hamlet’s question to Horatio: “Didst perceive?” (3.2.285); the perception causes Hamlet’s interpretation of the play’s worth and the king’s guilt. Soon, after Hamlet kills Polonius, Gertrude asks the matter-of-fact question, “What hast thou done?,” and Hamlet’s reply echoes Horatio’s moral uncertainty in the first act: “Nay, I know not” (3.4.26, 27). The ethos of Hamlet derives in large measure from Shakespeare’s dramatizing a method of rhetorical inquiry, time-tested and worthy in itself, but imperfectly implemented. Despite its usefulness and authority, that method can be no moral guide in a deceptive world whose very “facts” are ambiguous; this profound point gives Hamlet an even greater claim to a credible ethos, for its painful truth is earned on a metaphysical level. Like Hamlet, King Lear holds rhetorical riches in great abundance; again, stasis theory provides systematic access to many of them. From the very first scene, the play deserves an audience’s moral attention because it examines our ways of knowing the world and of expressing our limited knowledge. At his entrance, Lear is all logos, not only dividing his kingdom into measures of love, but trusting insincere display as truly persuasive. Prompting Cordelia, he unconsciously reveals the absurdity of relying on logos alone through the self-contradiction of “a third more opulent” (1.1.86). Moments earlier in an aside, Cordelia alerts us to her rhetorical problem and to her sisters’ falsity: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent” (1.1.62) and “I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue” (1.1.77–78). Her moral worth cannot be expressed in this situation, for no words can effect change; hence, her response to Lear is perfectly apt rhetorically: “Nothing, my Lord” (1.1.87). It is the correct reply to Lear’s contradictory “a third more opulent” and to her sisRhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   13

ters’ inflated, baseless claims. Kent soon makes the point for the play when he chides Goneril and Regan, for he insists that values be grounded in action, the dramatic equivalent of fact. His internal rhyme yokes speech and deed—as they should be in a society that honors a true, moral rhetoric: “And your large speeches may your deeds approve / That good effects may spring from words of love” (1.1.186–87). As in Hamlet, Shakespeare questions our reliance on speech to effect social and political ends, but he is not content in either play to examine rhetoric as mere persuasion or manipulation. One of Lear’s central topics is the value of speech in a stage world indifferent to the truth of factual assertions, yet logos—both the Is it? of stasis theory and King Lear’s standard of proof in act 1—must be credibly established before any emotional or moral insights can be attained. King Lear’s progress to a vision of a true rhetoric moves on too long and tortuous a road to trace here; we may, the play suggests, be irremediably flawed and be finally incapable of valid knowing, yet we get glimpses at least of the most fulfilled of good characters when Cordelia’s pathos lovingly rejects here father’s more worldly logic: l e a r: I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have (as I do remember) done me wrong. You have some cause, they have not. cor del i a: No cause, no cause. (4.7.74–77)

And, again, when Edgar the avenger articulates the rhetorical ideal for the polis, he combines action, emotion, and speech in service to the highest social virtue, justice: If my speech offend a noble heart, Thy arm may do thee justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  This sword, this arm, and my best spirits are bent To prove upon thy heart whereto I speak.

(5.3.130–31, 142–43)

14   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

As in Edgar’s lines, rhetorical inquiry through Shakespeare’s plays assumes an ideal that embraces all three modes of rhetorical proof: logos, pathos, and ethos. Audiences are constantly exposed to partial appeals that omit or slight one of these modes with the result that, unlike the characters on stage, we decide to suspend judgment. Othello’s reductive demand for “ocular proof” (3.2.360) limits the range of his knowing and delivers him into Iago’s control where a literal handkerchief, logos on the lowest level of accessibility, can carry probative force independent of human values. Macbeth’s willingness to leave the moral question open is a clue to his self-deception: “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good” (1.3.131–32). Shylock’s reliance on literal measurement, the exact pound of flesh, is his undoing. In the opening speech of Antony and Cleopatra, Philo leads the audience to question the worth of what it sees on stage; through him, Shakespeare implies a governing distinction for the play between simple sight (“behold”) and insight: Look where they come Take but good note, and you shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transform’d Into a strumpet’s fool: behold and see.

(1.1.10–13)

Other plays engage our critical attention to the language of persuasion. Richard III’s opening soliloquy and Richard II’s comment on Bolingbroke’s style (“How high a pitch his resolution soars!” [1.1.109]) are among many examples of early signals in the Shakespearean texts that the methods of persuasion require our critical attention lest we misread character. Typically, the audience progresses from questioning the worth of what it sees and hears to appreciating the worth of the inquiry itself. Should that inquiry result in uncertainty, the journey has sufficient value in itself to body forth the ethos of the play. (In the penultimate chapter, I argue that Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen takes a modern audience on such a journey.)

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   15

Because most of us know Chekhov’s plays only in translation, we cannot study nuances or figures in his language with great confidence, but we can take a broad view of more general rhetorical and dramatic strategies. The first act of The Three Sisters, for example, presents speeches in social contexts that complicate the expression and communication of personal and social values. The play’s ethos derives in part from a witty and serious questioning of rhetorical credibility itself. Like The Seagull—and Hamlet for that matter—the play encourages a critical attitude toward the physical context for dramatic speech, both the stage space itself and the spaces created within its boundaries. At the opening of The Three Sisters the audience sees “A drawing room with columns, behind which is seen a ballroom”; soon the ballroom’s function as an inner stage is made clear to the spectator when “In the ballroom, behind the columns (1.103), BARON TUZENBAKH, CHEBUTYKIN, and SOLYONY appear near the table” (1.104).25 Their first lines, “The hell you say!” and “Of course, it’s all nonsense,” may be taken as comments on Olga’s nostalgic, unrealistic declamation about going “home” to Moscow because Chekhov’s dramatic juxtapositioning insists that we judge otherwise disconnected speech. We are not asked to accept or endorse a specific point of view but to decide whether a connection exists between the speech and the comments, and then whether the comments are appropriate for the situation and for the speaker. Various other speeches in act 1 are also situated dramatically to undermine their own credibility. Irina, radiant in her white dress, declaims on the nature and meaning of work that she has never undertaken; the ethos she posits is unearned, and Olga, speaking “on behalf of the play”sharply distinguishes her appearance from her character: “Father taught us to get up at seven o’clock. So now Irina wakes up at seven, but she lies in bed at least until nine, thinking about something or other. And see how serious she looks! 25. All text references to Chekhov are from Anton Chekhov’s Plays, trans. Eugene K. Bristow (New York: Norton, 1977).

16   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

[Laughs.]” (1.106).26 Much as Irina prefaces her declamation with the rhetorically obtuse, “I know now the way people must live. . . . I know everything,” Tuzenbakh introduces his visionary endorsement of work with “I’ve never worked, not once in my life” (1.106). One speaker claims all authority; the other, none. Both are ignorant implementations of the ethical proof. So, the moral weight of serious topics—dynamic time present before us, work, the future—is carried only by delivery, not by the speaker’s good character or the speeches’ substance. As if to insist on the split between content and character, Chekhov puts credible lines in the mouth of the least likeable person, Solyony. His cynical tag after Vershinin and Tuzenbakh expostulate rings more true than their speculations about a future they can never know: “Don’t feed the Baron any mush, just give him a chance to talk philosophy” (1.111). In general, Solyony’s negative comments carry greater validity than do the several affirmations in act 1, but his offensive tone weakens his ethos—a strong demonstration of the pragmatic need to join good character to content. Solyony, Kulygin, and Chebutykin with his newspaper snippets, rely on facts of no social use or rhetorical purpose beyond self-display; Masha moves herself to tears reciting lines virtually without a clarifying context or connection in a social exchange. This world would get only a small moral investment from an audience had not Chekhov made the character of the speaker—often the unearned projection of ethos—a standard for belief in the content of the speeches. Without a credible ethos, the speakers display unconscious irony and often become ludicrous. When we recognize their common rhetorical failing, we see that act 1 of The Three Sisters gains its ethos and, at the same time, our moral assent by its ironic display of the characters’ ethos in their social discourse. Chekhov’s other major plays earn their ethos distinctively in developing common concerns, in The Seagull, Treplyof’s 26. I slightly alter Kenneth Burke’s provocative title “Antony in Behalf of the Play,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage, 1957), 279.

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   17

“platform stage” redirects audience expectations about theater, and the opening line questions the purpose of costume: “Why is it you always wear black?” (1.5). Questions about the value of theater come from several points of view and in as many styles throughout the first act. We are cued to evaluate speech as such by the staging of bombast in Treplyof’s play-within-the-play; characters who ignore or ridicule his set speeches later deliver themselves of more natural, but no more efficacious ones. Astrov lectures an audience of one in Uncle Vanya, but he builds to an empty peroration and loses his listener: “Now almost everything has been destroyed, but nothing at all has been created in its place. [Coldly] I can see by your face that this doesn’t interest you” (1.80). All the while, the theater audience is required to be interested. Astrov’s rhetorical failure is typical of the play’s study of discourse; the final stage image of Vanya counting as Sonya delivers her ironically visionary speech gains poignant depth from the varieties of flawed ethical proofs that precede it. Vanya numbs his soul with numbering, logos as an ultimate value, while Sonya imagines a confirmation of worth that they can never know. Throughout The Cherry Orchard, characters eagerly recite speeches that cannot effect change in society at large or in the people at hand. The play’s action turns on a matter of fact that only the crude Lopakhin articulates forcefully (the family’s debts cannot preserve the orchard), yet characters who willfully evade the painful truth claim to speak on a higher moral plane. In all these plays, the moral nature and efficacy of speech are givens for most of the speakers but are disturbing problems for the play; sensitive direction can block individual scenes and parallel ones to induce the theater audience to face these problems and to arrive at answers—often tentative, probable ones— when the play does. Chekhov speaks to us across distances of language and politics because he dramatizes a discourse of social failure open to our common understanding. David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross allow for a surer application of the theory of ethos because they 18   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

claim to speak directly to contemporary society about its values. Mamet himself says that American Buffalo “is about the American ethic of business . . . About how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.”27 Writing in The New York Times, Samuel Freedman calls these plays Mamet’s “caustic critiques of big business.”28 Mamet has apparently reached large audiences on topics of general social relevance, so that on one level his plays are rhetorically effective. Further, their unstated social and cultural assumptions are accessible to us as Mamet’s contemporaries; we are quite literally members of his intended audience. The plays are set in the America of our time; the characters speak American idiom so well that critics routinely praise Mamet’s ear for its accurate rendering of speech rhythms. In sum, we should be able to recognize the stylistic and physical boundaries of these plays well enough to assess their worth as guidelines to the plays’ ethos. The maxims and all the other speech in American Buffalo are delivered in a junkshop, a cluttered, dirty place of such realistic detail in the production with Al Pacino that most theatergoers would disdain it. They judge it from a distance, alienated in a Brechtian sense of the term; since they cannot enter imaginatively, they are positioned to judge the worth of its axioms. Of the three characters, Don, the proprietor, and Teach deliver themselves of the general “truths” that govern their “fictional universe”; their stage audience sometimes includes Bobby, a drug addict. Maxim Gorky located his characters in a similar stage world in The Lower Depths, “a cavelike basement” with dirty curtains, falling plaster and plank beds for many of its denizens. Yet, the aspirations of some characters would lift them beyond their bleak setting, and Luka can set transcendent beliefs against literal, sordid truths. Through him the audience can at the very 27. Quoted by Jack V. Barbera in “Ethical Perversity in America: Some Observations on David Mamet’s American Buffalo,” Modern Drama 24 (1981), 273. 28. Samuel Freedman, “The Gritty Eloquence of David Mamet,” The New York Times, December 21, 1985, 15.

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   19

least glimpse the light of a potentially larger vision of “a true and just land,” and the more negative Satin concludes a set speech with “Truth is the god of the free man.”29 In sharp contrast, setting and individual choices expressed by Teach, Don, and Bobby encourage the audience to feel superior to what it sees. Satire, of course, can nourish such an attitude and, through it, lead an audience to new self-awareness, and in one important way, Mamet directs the derisive laughter of satire at Don and Teach by having them deliver trite maxims. Don’s include: Action talks and bullshit walks. There’s business and there’s friendship. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

Among Teach’s: Everything’s all right to someone. Each one his own opinion. Any business . . . You want it run right, be there. What’s done is done. Man is a creature of habits.

Besides Teach’s absolute tone, his diction can make him humorous in its mixture of general advice and street talk: “All the preparation in the world does not mean shit.” Mamet more seriously lowers Teach’s stature at the end of the play by having Don challenge his credibility: te ach: Don . . . I talk straight to you ’cause I respect you. It’s kickass or kissass, Don, and I’d be lying if I told you any different. don: And what makes you such an authority on life all of a sudden?30

29. Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths, in The Lower Depths and Other Plays, trans. Alexander Bakshy (London: Yale University Press, 1972), 3.49, 64. Text references are to act and page numbers. 30. David Mamet, American Buffalo (New York: Grove, 1977), 2.74. References in my text are to this edition and for Glengarry Glen Ross to the 1984 Grove edition.

20   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

Finally, the last time we see Teach, he exits wearing a ridiculous hat made of newspaper. Teach, the dominant character of the play, is no source of its values for the audience, but neither is he an object of true satire, although Mamet makes his intention clear enough when he has him say “I am a businessman, I am here to do business, I am here to face facts”(83). Even if we accept the dubious claim that a realistic junkshop symbolizes the world of corporate America, and if we also assume that a petty theft—never carried out— represents an amoral profit motive at work, the play is no more than a staged allegory requiring interpretation—a What Is It?— not ethical involvement. Furthermore, we are left with Teach’s blatant sexism and racism (“I am not your nigger. I am not your wife” [100]) and with this extraordinarily heavy-handed passage on free enterprise: te ach: You know what is free enterprise? don: No. What? te ach: The freedom . . . don: . . . yeah? te ach: Of the Individual . . . don: . . . yeah? te ach: To Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit. don: Uh-huh . . . te ach: In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit. Am I so out of line on this? don: No. te ach: Does this make me a Commie? don: No. te ach: The country’s founded on this, Don. You know this. . . . Without this we’re just savage shitheads in the wilderness. . . . And take those fuckers in the concentration camps. You think they went there by choice? (2.72–73) This reference and consequent numbers in my text are to page numbers. Ellipsis points in my text appear in Mamet’s to signify a pause in delivery.

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   21

Facile adherence to a doctrine of free enterprise deserves mockery, but any laughter is directed at Teach; it does not cleanse the guilty so much as it creates feelings of superiority, for Teach’s swaggering and his gratuitous, debasing reference to the Holocaust prohibit a thoughtful response. In the “fictional universe” of American Buffalo, he is neither complex enough to be Mamet’s satiric spokesman nor consistent enough to be a satiric target. We are led to laugh down at him from a vantage so secure as to provide escape from the expense-account world and its bottomline morality. Mamet does not examine or challenge values; he panders to them. A related, less harsh charge can be leveled against the moral world of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.31 Its maxims come from several speakers and can therefore be heard as the voice of the play. In general they derive their values from a competitive, materialist society and aim to confront it on its own shallow terms: Never fight fair with a stranger.

(Ben to Biff, 1.34)

You don’t raise a guy to a responsible job who whistles in the elevator!

(Happy to Biff, 1.44)

Personality always wins the day.

(Willy to Biff, 1.40)

It’s contacts, Ben, contacts.

(Willy, 2.65)

Willy, the title character who bullies his wife into silence and who encourages his son to cheat on a test, has so absorbed the values of his business world that when he tries to impose general worth on his life, his unconscious pun on “add” subtly confirms his acceptance of a bottom-line morality: “A man has got 31. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin, 1998). References in the text are to act and page numbers.

22   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

to add up to something” (to Ben, 2.99). The maxim that gained currency as the play’s most memorable one is morally bankrupt. Linda’s impassioned “Attention must be paid” recalls a teacher’s frustrated command to an indifferent student; more than that, its passive voice, rising consistently out of Linda’s passive character, excludes a clear subject and denies her the moral authority of an agent. The maxim has no social force; undirected, it absolves its audience of individual responsibility. In a world of such limited and limiting values, if Willy’s suicide has an inevitability, it is melodramatic, not tragic. To anticipate an objection: Teach’s confusion can be said to embody the amoral confusion in the business world, a world indifferent to human needs or suffering, and Willy is intended to be pitied as a tragic common man. But both characters accept the values of their worlds; they do not question their worth or try to rise above them. Had Willy so tried and failed, he might have achieved something of the stature that distinguishes a tragic figure. The theatrical dimensions of American Buffalo do not justify such an allegorical reading because the play values a realism of language, setting, and behavior that reduces its moral significance to the level of its characters. When Don says to Bobby, “Everything that I or Fletcher know we picked up on the street” (1.6), we have no reason to doubt him or lift his credibility above the level of that street, nor is that level used as a platform from which to debunk the pretensions of higher-ups. Audiences are titillated by the speech of Mamet’s characters; it is relentlessly faithful to the language of the locker room and of some workplaces so that its rhythmic obscenities are as trite as Don’s “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” If American Buffalo as a whole is assumed to be a speaker and the set to be part of its occasion, its audience is confronted by a thoroughly constricted “fictional universe.” More important, nothing in the play submits cultural assumptions about American materialism to scrutiny because the confused ethos of the play prompts reactions of superiority and escapism. The play is Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   23

deficient rhetorically because its system of values is enclosed and self-ratifying like its dramatic world. In fact, an aggressive entrepreneur watching the failed characters in this play and in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross could smugly conclude that he is on the right course. Act 1 of Glengarry Glen Ross is set in a Chinese restaurant; act 2, in a real estate office. In the first set, sales and sales problems are discussed; in the second, a burglary is solved. The salesmen of this world are glib and profane; they work from leads supplied by their office to persuade small investors to buy land proposed for development. The most glib, most profane, and most successful of these men is Richard Roma, who delivers a virtual monologue in scene 3 of act 1 to the man in the next booth, James Lingk. Roma mixes level of diction—most strikingly, in “You fuck little girls, so be it” (1.47)—but unlike Teach, he pontificates. When, near the end of the scene, Roma introduces himself to Lingk, his name comes as the punch line to a well-told joke because Mamet has led the theater audience to believe that the two men are old friends who need no introduction. When, a few moments later, it becomes clear that Lingk is a patsy for Roma, the audience laughs and applauds the first-act curtain line: “Listen to what I’m going to tell you now” (1.51). Roma also has the last words of the play, and far from being a businessman subject to a “caustic critique,” he is the hero of the play’s world. Beyond that, he is our guide, the one who structures scene 3 as a slick joke and who amuses us as he manipulates the mousy Lingk in act 2. The other scenes of act 1 also build like jokes, as in scene 2 when Moss broaches the idea of burglarizing the sales office. He leads on a fellow salesman, Aranow, and the scene approaches some provocative distinctions between talking and saying as the two men converse, but when Aranow is apparently gulled into participating and asks why, Moss’s last line makes a salesman’s joke at Aranow’s expense: “Because you listened” (1.46) Punch lines like this one neither encourage nor demand reflection; they seal off discussion to cap a point. 24   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

In both scenes, the audience laughs with the salesman who controls both the form of the joke and its butt, the other character in the scene. Far from being an object of satiric or moral scrutiny, the speaker creates the point of view. Indeed, a theme of domination runs through Glengarry Glen Ross, and much of our laughter is at the expense of the weak. The play explicitly and insistently puts us on the side of the forceful salesmen; unlike their prospects, they are the stage presences, the doers. Moss gets the laughs when he controls Aranow in act 1, and Levene, recounting a sales triumph in act 2, regales the audience with a story that makes sympathizing with his victims difficult at best. More consistently in this play than in American Buffalo, the automatic racism and contemptuous attitude toward women come from the sources of the humor in the text and are brought into sharp focus by the staging. Roma’s bravado defies the authority figure in the office and that of the police; the neat resolution of the action—one of the salesmen has burglarized the office for leads—is satisfying comfort for the very audience that Mamet presumably satirizes. Both Mamet plays fail to persuade rhetorically because their systems of values are enclosed and self-ratifying in their narrow dramatic worlds. The theory of ethos puts Mamet’s speeches in a proper perspective because it distinguishes between kinds of rhetorical success; plays and speeches can be unquestionably successful in moving audiences—as the distressing history of propaganda demonstrates— without being rhetorically responsible. In Mamet’s stage world, the unasked question is, “What is it worth?” Examining dramatic ethos, we can more firmly ground our aesthetic distinctions between plays which simply announce or posit values (and perhaps exploit them) and those which develop a morally mature perspective. The finest dramatic achievements are often the richest ones rhetorically because their most basic premises remain unspoken and, accordingly evolve from “the joint effort of speaker [in my projection, drama] and audience” that Lloyd Bitzer concludes to in “Aristotle’s Enthymeme Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   25

Revisited.”32 There is an instructive difference between Mamet’s bludgeoning us with rhythmic obscenities and Edward Bond’s trust in the audience he “presupposes.” Both playwright Bond and rhetorician Richard Weaver assume that language has moral content that can cause positive effects in practice. In 1970 Weaver writes, “Every speech, oral and written, exhibits an attitude, and an attitude implies an act . . . Language is a system of imputation by which values and percepts are first framed in the mind and then imputed to things.” In the preface to his 1978 play, Bond makes a similar point: The Bundle . . . is . . . best understood . . . as a demonstration of how the words “good” and “bad,” and moral concepts in general work in society and how they ought to work if men are to live rationally with their technology, with nature and with one another.33

Bond goes on to claim that he dramatizes analysis at several places in the play; in one of them, he wants the audience to realize that a character shouting “Buy me” as a way of saving his life is making a moral language choice to expose dramatically the values of a society that would respond to such a call over a distressful cry for help. V

Any playwright who addresses us as social beings should reward study along the lines this theory proposes, for a theory based on ethos applies most relevantly to plays with cultural implications. If a speaker must—as Quintilian postulates—appear to be a good person to be believed, then such plays should also earn their moral stature, their worth, as conveyors of social or political meanings. They can do so in various ways: by displaying sensitivity to a range of choices (a common bond in the four plays in Robert Skloot’s anthology, Theatre of the Holocaust), 32. Lloyd Bitzer, “Aristotle’s Enthymeme Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1950): 399–408. 33. Edward Bond, The Bundle (London: Methuen, 1978), xvii. For Richard Weaver, see “Language is Sermonic,” in The Rhetoric of Western Thought, ed. James L. Golden, et al. (Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 1983), 211.

26   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

to human aspirations (as Genet’s The Balcony does without subscribing to them), to provocative ambiguities in language (as in Beckett’s slightest forms and scenes), to the potentials in social structures (as in much of David Hare’s work). Mamet’s audiences cannot weigh competing social or ethical positions, with the result that lines that might resonate with suggestions of moral complicity like “Because you listened,” issue only as punch lines to a skit. His audience is flattered into a position of superiority; it sits at a comfortable distance from the society Mamet portrays—not distanced in the Brechtian sense of alienation, but in a self-satisfied, unthinking way. The audience relates to the play’s characters as the play does to American society—superficially. Traditionally, speakers conscious of the ethical proof meet its demand for general worth both to establish personal credibility and to make a sympathetic connection with the appropriate emotions in their audience. To do so, rhetoricians must have sympathetic knowledge of our needs, drives, and aspirations, and they must also respect the specific demands of the occasion, for rhetoric—like drama—often presents the particular and universal at once. A dramatic theory which proceeds from the ethos of the play necessarily must consider the specifics of its historical context as the new historicism insists, the details of staging as the semiologists do, the nature of the appeal to the audience as prior to its reception, and the more general ethical appeal that transcends occasion in the speech of a really or apparently moral person. Emphases on these elements will vary from play to play, but the theory has the striking potential to account for more of the structures and strategies of a play than do other theories currently being advanced. The application of ethos in the succeeding chapters argues by implication to the relevance of rhetorical standards from Shakespeare’s time to our own. Each chapter focuses on one rhetorical topic, sometimes anticipating later critiques and generally building on preceding ones. The book as a whole, then, Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   27

expands the field of its focus as its argument develops; its discussion moves from syntax as the ground of a character’s ethos, to the moral implications of a play’s diction, to devices of style as markers of character, to rhetorical argument in drama, and to the rhetoric of dramatic action. This critical sequence moves on a rough parallel to the sequential approach of dramaturges and directors as they move a play from page to stage. Ideally, rhetorical theory and dramatic practice go hand in hand. Chapter 2 briefly surveys theories of style from ancient times to our own as they are pertinent to criticism of syntax. It emphasizes syntax as the basic ground of a speaker’s character in Richard II and other plays of Shakespeare, in Eugene O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, and in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie; it concludes with an analysis of style, argument, and personal ethos in Measure for Measure. Examining works of John Dryden, Thomas Otway, David Hare, and Tom Stoppard, chapter 3, “The Worth of Words,” analyzes dramatized responses to the res et verba debate in the seventeenth century and to contemporary controversies over determinate meaning in abstract terms. Chapter 4, “Dramatizing Personal Ethos,” pursues the topic of memory and character, expands upon rhetorical argument in drama, and discusses memory and staging in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play that raises the question of the morality of the atomic bomb. Chapter 5 is a critique of the rhetoric of the enthymeme in Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House and other plays of his; it examines his persuasive strategy before audiences he perceived as hostile to his social message. Chapter 6 concentrates on the rhetoric of dramatic action as controlled by a playwright facing one of the dominant moral topics of the twentieth century; in Blood Knot Athol Fugard addresses racism, and in The Island, he and his South African collaborators, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, dramatize human worth under the oppression of apartheid. Chapter 7 argues that dramatic and rhetorical art can overcome the difficulty of presenting truths about the Holocaust without sensationalizing or diminishing the historical reality. While the 28   Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory

focus in each chapter is distinct, memory, devices of style, and other rhetorical topics are often drawn upon because their treatment complements a chapter’s central concern. General concepts fundamental to a full rhetorical inquiry frequently govern the discussion of specific topics; among them, nature, essence, contingency, and circumstances.

Rhetorical Ethos & Dramatic Theory   29

Chapter 2

Syntax, Style, and Ethos V The sentences that a dramatic artist shapes provide an actor, dramaturg, and director the fundamental units for appreciating and realizing a character. When sentence structure is an artistic choice, its syntax is part of a rhetorical strategy. Indeed, rhetorical critics from ancient times to the Renaissance often assume a direct relationship between style and personal values, but no critic examines the creative or simply persuasive implications of “I” in the grammar basic to any style that asserts the character of its speaker. Criticism has, accordingly, bypassed a fundamental stage in determining the ethical proof, fundamental because anyone fashioning a personal ethos must, as a necessary preliminary to studied speech, choose whether and how forcefully to assert the self. In many instances, a dominant “I” as grammatical subject informs a syntactic pattern that frequently makes the speaker an agent responsible for the consequences of an active verb. In passive constructions that turn action back upon the speaker, a self-exculpatory ethos often is insinuated, for the “I” controls the grammar even as the speaker would suggest that circumstances condone questionable behavior. In both grammatical voices, we can discover a strategy 30

designed to project a positive character apparently in control of circumstances much as the pronoun governs the verb and other words of a sentence. Shakespeare’s Richard II and other speakers caught in an ambivalent position find that they must speak forcefully but that they have no real political power; the result is that Richard’s style has the form of unconscious self-betrayal, for its attractive figures and other rhetorical flights are grounded in a syntax that reveals a fundamentally weak or dependent character. In general, studies of Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespearean style concentrate on the figures and tropes of a style or on the dominant patterns of sentence structure; some identify figures and see them as characteristic of a Romeo or Hamlet, while others argue from frequency of a pattern or usage to an inference about an Antony or Richard.1 At a more basic level of style, syntax locates the maker of eloquence in the stylistic field where ornament can be created; there can be no such ornament without a ground, and the subject-verb combination is the essential component of that ground, however attractive or highly wrought other stylistic features may be. While English insists that the pronoun be articulated, the classical languages can relegate it to a verb ending; nonetheless, critics have occasionally seen a connection between sentence structure and personal ethos. For example, Hermogenes claims “the figure that is most characteristic of Purity is the use of a straightforward construction with the noun in the nominative case,” and he directly connects this quality with ethos later: “I think that there is more need for Purity in those [private] speeches [of Demosthenes] because most of them involve an argument from Character.”2 Annabel Patterson briefly treats a related point when in paraphrasing Hermogenes, she suggests 1. Studies of Shakespeare’s style are numerous; for a full treatment based on frequency of usage, see Dolores M. Burton’s Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Richard II and Antony and Cleopatra (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). 2. Hermogenes’ On Types of Style, trans. Cecil W. Wooten (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 49.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   31

that suppressing the “I” creates an acceptable persona: “The modest speaker is frequently heard to say, ‘It seems to me.’”3 Similarly, Aldo Scaglione’s comments on a tenth-century Latin treatise interpret the style’s “drastic inversions and disjunctions” as “expressive of the author’s moral ordeal and dialectic emotional tension,” but his summary of centuries of thought reveals that critical theories of grammar never focused sharply on ethos: “The scholastic reasons given for the principle whereby noun and pronoun should precede the verb are in keeping with the Aristotelian metaphysics . . . because the substance is naturally prior to the act.”4 R. H. Robins notes similar assumptions in medieval grammars: “It is . . . apparent on this theory of language how complete is the interdependence of language structure with both the structure of things and the operations of the human mind.”5 Such metaphysical premises, however, finally could not account for the diversity of usage. As Scaglione observes in a summary that encloses Shakespeare’s productive years, theories of syntax claimed to occupy only a limited field: For Ramus, too, syntax was no more than what it was for most of his European contemporaries, and continued to be until the middle of the eighteenth century: a study of concord between single words, rather than a study of word patterns within the clause and clause patterns within the sentence.6

Sixteenth-century grammars published in England do little more than hint at a more expansive, moral view of syntax; they do not ground personal ethos in syntactic rule or grammatical patterns. In 1553, Thomas Wilson sets up “meete termes and apt order” as an ideal, but the goal of that order is “that the Eare 3. Annabel Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 62. 4. Aldo Scaglione, The Classical Theory of Composition from Its Origins to the Present: A Historical Survey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 121, 109. 5. R. H. Robins, Ancient and Medieval Grammatical Theory in Europe with Particular Reference to Modern Linguistic Doctrine (London: Bell, 1951), 83. 6. Scaglione, The Classical Theory of Composition, 154.

32   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

maie delite in hearing the harmonic.” Earlier, Wilson more provocatively makes style the indispensable means of conveying proof; however, he omits any mention of the ethical proof: But yet what helpeth it though wee can finde good reasons, and knowe how to place them, if wee haue not apt words and picked [i.e., adorned, ornamented] Sentences, to commende the whole matter. Therefore, this point must needes followe to beautifie the cause, the which being called Elocution, is an applying of apt wordes and sentences to the matter, found out to confirme the cause.7

William Lyly, in the preface to his Latin grammar (1567), compares grammar and speech on one hand to a foundation and on the other to a “buyldynge,” but he leaves the figure on the literal, structural level.8 Likewise, Roger Ascham (1570) makes grammar fundamental, but apparently to organization alone. Elizabeth Sweeting introduces the relevant passage by placing Ascham in a larger historical context than his immediate one: “Rhetoric is the means of cultivating sure taste and sharpening mental abilities, for the conviction was growing that ‘le style, c’est l’homme.’” She then goes on to say that “Ascham describes the resulting habit of mind as the ability to” worke a true choice and placing of wordes, a right ordering of sentences, an easie understanding of the tonge, a readiness to speake, a facultie to write, a true judgement, both of his owne, and other mens doinges, what tonge so ever he doth use.9

Richard Mulcaster, in a 1582 book dedicated to the moral shaping of youth, aspires to “reduce our English tung to som certain rule, for writing and reading, for words and speaking, for sentence and ornament, than men maie know, when theie wright 7. Thomas Wilson, Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Thomas J. Derrick (New York: Garland Press, 1982), 32. 8. William Lyly, A Shorte Introduction to Grammar, ed. Vincent J. Flynn (New York: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945), sig., Aii. 9. Elizabeth Sweeting, Early Tudor Criticism: Linguistic and Literary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940), 117.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   33

or speak right.”10 Mulcaster’s exclusive concentration on grammatical correctness throughout his work, however, rules out any pun on the moral sense of his concluding word, “right.” Finally, beneath Lyly’s treatment of the pronoun, one can detect an assertive “I” in a definition that Bullokar repeats verbatim in the first English grammar (1586): “A Pronoune hath three persons. The First person speaketh of him selfe.”11 This shift from the noun as agent to a self-conscious speaker remains too slight to be significant, however; it opens to no new perspectives on grammatical theory and personal ethos.12 In the absence of a developed theory, Nancy Streuver’s general observations about Shakespeare’s rhetoric apply with pertinent force to an examination of his style: Shakespeare’s practice is certainly rhetorical: theatrical competence is a quintessentially rhetorical competence. But his interests do not have to be defined as those of rhetoric as discipline, and his mastery does not have to be stipulated as mastery of pedagogical formulations. . . . It is unnecessary to claim Shakespeare as academic rhetorician.

In Richard II, Shakespeare keeps “his focus,” in Streuver’s words, “on the web of usage, on compossibility of meaning” in the speeches that Richard shapes in response to pressing occasions.13 To appreciate the multiple revelations of those speeches, I now argue, the most fundamental elements of Richard’s style must be examined first because the subject-verb relationship is psychologically and rhetorically prior to the creation of 10. Richard Mulcaster, Mulcaster’s Elementaire, ed. E. T. Campanac (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 55. 11. W. Bullokar, Bref Grammar for English (London, 1586), reprinted in Palaestra LII: Untersuchen und Texte aus der Deutschen und Englishen Philologie (Berlin: Mayer and Müller, 1906), 352; compare Lyly in A Shorte Introduction, sig., Bii. 12. W. Keith Percival discusses the subject as agent; see “Deep and Surface Structure Concepts in Renaissance and Mediaeval Syntactic Theory,” in History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. Herman Parret (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976), 249. 13. Nancy Streuver, “Shakespeare and Rhetoric,” Rhetorica VI, no. 2 (1988): 144.

34   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

figurative language and to the organizing of an argument. At those moments when Richard is most conscious of the need to project a commanding self capable of winning a following, his style unconsciously announces his weakness: his syntax betrays a deficient ethos just as he tries to establish a strong one. As a Shakespearean character, he stands at a rhetorical extreme because unlike other forceful stylists, he comes to depend exclusively on verbal power, on style without political clout or physical bravery to back it up. In the first scene of the play, Richard presides at the hearing of a challenge of treason from one duke, Bolingbroke of Herford, against another, Mowbray of Norfolk, In this formal setting, Shakespeare presents a Richard with a limited view of rhetoric. As king, he admires style but divorces it from the exercise of kingship. When Bolingbroke delivers his response to Mowbray’s accusation, Richard comments on the heightened style and invites Mowbray to reply in kind: “How high a pitch his resolution soars! / Thomas of Norfolk, what say’st thou to this?” (1.1.109–10).14 Yet, after the charges and countercharges are made and after both Richard and Gaunt fail to make peace between the adversaries, Richard, with three of his direct commands ignored, breaks off any further talk with the regal pronoun as authority: “We were not born to sue, but to command” (1.1.196). In this assertion, Richard claims more than political power, for “command,” especially as he distinguishes it from “sue,” stresses an absolute control over public discourse, a control that can ignore the civilities of persuasion and still get results. Unlike the suppliant who must earn fresh personal approval with each new request, a king has no pragmatic reason to establish an ethos because the good will of his audience is irrelevant to the exercise of sheer power. At the moment of banishment, Bolingbroke recognizes how complete Richard’s control is, for he echoes the Lord’s Prayer in submitting to the royal 14. All textual references by act, scene, and line are to Richard II, New Arden edition, ed. Peter Ure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956).

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   35

verdict: “Your will be done” (1.3.144). Assuming a divine right, Richard can be indifferent to public perceptions of his character and can, accordingly, indulge in a rhetoric that satisfies the self to the point that he projects an ego but not an ethos. When, for example, York recommends against his taking “Herford’s rights” because he “would lose a thousand well-disposed hearts” (2.1.201, 206), Richard dismisses such public support contemptuously: “Think what you will.” His rhetorical gradatio celebrates material power: “We seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money and his lands” (2.1.209–10). Coming so soon after Gaunt’s deathbed lament, York’s speech underscores Shakespeare’s point about Richard’s ethos; with no good character of public standing to draw upon, with an impolitic refusal to see any need for one, and with a royal “command” that requires an appropriately high level of expression, Richard restricts the range of his rhetoric to self-indulgent display. As a result, when he loses political standing, he projects a forceful character chiefly through syntax, and the resulting style ideally complements the man himself; as the king is formally on the throne but without power, his grammatically dominant “I” controls passive verbs that act upon subject-Richard, or it governs active verbs with negative import. Consciously, Richard creates sentences that insist on a central ego, but through anastrophe and other devices, he unconsciously locates his “I” in a grammar that undermines its superficial dominance and at times questions his own metaphysical worth, as in “I must nothing be” in the deposition scene (4.1.201). The multiple, mutually informing associations of being and the Word, and of being and God, complicate centuries of theology before Shakespeare and survive to buttress both the positive argument of Paradise Lost and the satiric one of The Dunciad. All being, the traditional reading of Genesis argues, is good because it is of God; the absence of that good is evil and source of all things negative—nothing, death. Richard II draws in general on the dark side of this tradition: Mowbray’s foreign exile is a “speechless death” (1.3.172), and Northumberland 36   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

tells Richard that Gaunt has lost “words, life and all” (2.1.150). Richard himself compresses several crucial parts of the wordcreation formula in “Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke’s, / And nothing can we call our own but death” (3.2.151– 52); the climactic position of “all” in the first triad makes it the transcendent being term, and the next line reverses divine naming, for the “call”—unlike God’s or His king’s—leads to nonbeing, “nothing” and “death.” Richard delivers these last lines upon his return from Wales in the first of four scenes that display his deficient ethos most clearly. Aumerle greets him with a courtly question, “How books your grace the air, / After your late tossing on the breaking sea?” (3.2.2–3). Until this point in the play, Richard’s characteristic personal pronoun has been “we,” the sign of conventional royal power; in his reply to Aumerle, he not only shifts to “I,” but he indicates its relative weakness by an anastrophe that stresses the constraints of the auxiliary verb: “Needs must I like it well” (3.2.4).15 Richard, who acts like an independent agent (or subject), is by his own tacit admission defined from the outside. He has 142 of the scene’s 218 lines; he adopts several tones and constantly calls attention to himself, but his dominance is only an appearance. For the first time in the play, he is on the defensive, and in two senses of the word, he tries to compose himself. In the scene’s longest speech (3.2.144–77), he begins with a negative and ends with a question. His tone is imperative and hortatory; his verbs, active; their traditional values, rich: “speak . . . talk . . . write . . . choose.” These verbs outline the spiritual fulfillment of a Christian humanist, yet in alluding to the guiding ideals, Richard saps the terms of sustenance, for his “talk” ends in the words of death, “epitaphs.” He involves his audience directly but only to share a creativity that mocks the nourishment of the natural order: “Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes / Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.” The choice he 15. See Burton, Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style, 171–74.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   37

advocates avoids action; indeed, it anticipates the day when another agent is decisive for the dead: No matter where. Of comfort no man speak. Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death.

(3.2.144–48, 151–52)

His final exhortation in this speech is to inaction, further intensified by the irony that Shakespeare’s control of context gives to the initial colloquialism: “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” An additional irony follows; the kings he would memorialize are, compared to Richard, active leaders, but they are made the subjects of passive verbs. When at line 162, Richard returns to the active voice, “Death” is the subject-agent: Some have been depos’d, some slain war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d, All murthered—for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court.

(3.2.157–62)

The final sentence of the speech is governed syntactically by apparently strong self-assertions, “I live” and “I am,” but Richard defines a life of dependency, going as it does from “live” to “feel” to “taste” to “need,” and finally—in a reversal of the political situation as it then stands—making him, the clause’s subject, “subjected.” The often powerful “I am” structure, as noted earlier, is part of a question: “I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am

38   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

a king?” (3.2.175–77). If one looks on the thirty-four lines as a self-enclosed speech, designed for an audience and delivered by a political leader, two fundamental ironies come to the foreground. The potential ambiguity of the first two words, “No matter,” may comment on the substance of Richard’s speech, and his concluding with a question about his identity both misplaces the ethical proof in an oratorical structure and invites his listeners to question its validity. Discounting Aumerle’s vain attempt to interrupt him, Richard has a final speech of sixteen lines to conclude this scene. He introduces two future tenses, but both end in futility (“I’ll hate” and “I’ll pine away”); like his typical uses of the active voice, these verbs are without substance enough to affect society or the body politic. He repeats the potentially decisive “I have” but follows the first one with “discharge” and the second with “none.” His final commands, all in the form of exhortations, issue in no things: “Let them go . . . Let no man speak again / . . . let them hence away.” Given the sun imagery of earlier lines in the scene (3.2. 47–53) and the opposition of “Richard’s night to Bolingbroke’s fair day” at the end, the three commands can be read as empty echoes of the creative formula of Genesis. In the next scene, before Flint Castle, Richard’s repetitions become increasingly elaborate the more his power wanes, and the closer he comes to abdicating, the more he heightens his style. As frequently happens in the play, the audience is cued to evaluate speech; Richard asks the trusted Aumerle, “We do debase ourselves, cousin, do we not, / To look so poorly, and to speak so fair?” (3.3.127–28).16 Richard speaks of himself as “the king” and as “I” in the same speech (3.3.143–75) with the significant difference between the two being that the “king” is acted upon in his grammatical constructions (four musts and two pas16. Besides the examples I cite in my text, Richard has many others: (to Gaunt) “Can sick men play so nicely with their names?” (2.1.84) and “that tongue that runs so roundly in thy head” (2.1.122); (to Scroope) “Too well, too well thou tell’st a tale so ill” (3.2.121); (after returning from Ireland) “Mock not my senseless conjurations, lords” (3.2.23).

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   39

sives) and that the “I” strikes the pose of decisive actor-agent. His self-pitying list in balanced cadences compiles things that Richard will lose, however commanding the governing subject and verb appear to be (“I’ll give”); he self-consciously glosses his own style, “I see / I talk but idly, and you laugh at me” (3.3.171–72)—an admission of concern for his ethos, delivered just before descending to Bolingbroke’s level on the stage. As if to make this literal descent seem like a free choice, Richard articulates a stage direction: “Down, down I come.” Again, the basic elements of the sentence strike a positive note, but working against the normal suggestions of a strong subject and verb are not only the repetition of “down,” but also the anastrophe that forces an actor to elide into the “I” and, hence, obscure it more than it would be in normal word order. The long o sounds when yoked with m and n also contribute to blurring the focus on the self that Richard is trying to maintain in these desperate, hollow histrionics. He capitulates to Bolingbroke without much resistance, and he expresses his submission in the ultimate terms for which the play has carefully prepared: bol.: My gracious lord, I come but for mine own. r ich.: Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  r ich.: Set on towards London, cousin, is it so? bol.: Yea, my good lord. r ich.: Then I must not say no.

(3.3.196–97, 208–9)

This last line reminds us of the creative power of speech because its basic grammatical elements, subject and verb, project the essential, rhetorical Richard (in “I . . . say”) and because, coming as it does at the very end of the scene, it receives strong theatrical emphasis. Its grammar captures the futility of Richard’s attempts to speak himself into a commanding position because the self (“I”) is directed by “Then” and constrained by “must,” and because “say” is similarly enclosed by strong qualifiers, both of them, in Pope’s later usage, “uncreating.” 40   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

In the deposition scene (4.1), Richard has more than half of the lines spoken while he is on stage, and even as he literally shatters his image when he dashes a mirror to the floor, he controls the stage action. In the mirror speech, Richard briefly uses the third person, but not to achieve objectivity or introspection. More frequently than in other scenes, Richard, alone before Bolingbroke and his court, relies on “I” to insist on personal worth, but more insistently than elsewhere Shakespeare gives Richard a style that qualifies any force that the repetition of “I” may lend it. Richard’s earlier tendency to elaborate speech as a comfort against realities that he will not confront reaches its fulfillment in this scene. His “I” is more strikingly qualified; his commands and active voices, more clearly pointless. Shakespeare has created for Richard the stylistic equivalent of decisive action as moral pretense; his I-centered delivery, superficially forceful but morally empty, neatly complements Bolingbroke’s ascent “in God’s name” to the throne, a politically decisive but amoral act. They are fit companions to grasp the crown together.17 In the first speech of the scene, Richard’s word order raises the topics of self and being with three repetitions of “am I” in questions (4.1.162, 173, 176); in his next two speeches, anastrophe introduces an undercurrent of questioning into two of his assertions: “That bucket down and full of tears am I” (4.1.188) and “You may my glories and my state depose, / But not my griefs; still am I king of those” (4.1.192–93). This pattern of unconscious self-doubt, along with “I be not he” (4.1.174), serves as apt prelude to the opening line of his longest, most declamatory speech: “Ay, no; no ay; for / must nothing be” (4.1.201). The “elaborate quibble”18 on Ay and I and the three negatives di17. In his introduction to Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) and in his first chapter, James Calderwood maintains that both Richard and Bolingbroke participate in “the surrender of a sacramental language to a utilitarian one” (6). 18. Peter Ure’s note in the New Arden edition, 137. “Unking’d” also occurs at 5.5.37.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   41

vert attention to sound even though the final, emphatic “be” reminds us that an ultimate reality should be the end of discourse at this weighty time. As he continues, Richard nearly identifies himself with his sound patterns: “Therefore no ‘no,’ for I resign to thee. / Now mark me how I will undo myself” (4.1.202–3). These puns and repetitions exist to puzzle or distract; the words turn in upon each other because the puns are crowded so close together and because no other words come between the repeated nos. Further, the flash of Richard’s word play blurs the distinction between assent to Bolingbroke (“Ay”) and the independent self (“I”) at the same time that he tries to impose quasi-logical control over meaning: “for . . . Therefore . . . for . . . Now.” With his personal standing at its lowest, Richard is moments away from losing the last audience he will have simply by virtue of being king. The separation of the man from his royal power awaits only ritual ratification; for Richard, the distance between an ethos based on the worth of character and its appropriate stylistic embodiment will never be greater. Much as he has tried to impose a personal logic on mere sounds, Richard now tries to cover his weakness with his most heightened style, a level of expression signalled by anaphora and balance as well as by the repeated long i sound. An “I” stands at the head of a long structural block and governs eight active verbs in eleven lines (4.1.204–13). The verbs all convey losses, however, and the sonorous repetition of “mine own” calls attention to parts of the speaker (“tears . . . hands . . . tongue . . . breath”) so that a sense of fragmentation and denial corrects Richard’s pose of a harmonious self. The poetic quality of lines 206 and 207 locates a caesura before the “I” and makes it prominent in the blank verse much as Richard yearns for a meaningful centrality in the ritual emptying that he now performs; indeed, the lines recall “Down I come” in their rendering stage directions explicit in the text. Dominant action and loss, accordingly, are strikingly combined: “With mine own tears I wash away my balm, / With mine own hands I give away my crown.” The next four lines make the conflict absolute: 42   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

God pardon all oaths that are broke to me,

God keep all vows unbroke are made to thee!’ Make me, that nothing have, with nothing griev’d, And thou with all pleas’d, that has all achiev’d. (4.1. 214–17)

Besides emphasizing the all-or-nothing tendency of royal power in this play, these lines remind Richard’s audience of the spiritual, creative force of language by juxtaposing “oath” and “vows” with “all.” Beyond that, and perhaps most important, is the half-articulated prayer from Richard that “God . . . Make me . . . nothing.” In the tradition that Richard cannot help alluding to, language is both spiritual force and instrument of social power; its contrary impulses can be reconciled only in the ancient ideal of the rhetorician who is also the good man. When no ethos controls expression, style adorns a moral death. With no power and no ethos, Richard is a no thing, as he very nearly admits to Northumberland in yet another reversal of creative naming: “I have no name, no title; / No, not that name was given me at the font” (4.1.255–56). He is, in the only Shakespeare play to use the word, “Unking’d” (5.5.37). In his prison soliloquy, Richard rehearses many of these themes, but with no stage audience to impress, he need not obscure their conflicts. He cannot find a basis for comparing his prison to the world, but in his determination to force one, he makes himself the sole creator, usurping God’s position: Yet I’ll hammer it out.

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts.

(5.5.5–8)

Still dissatisfied, he questions the authority of the Bible which can be seen to “set the word itself / Against the word” (5.5.13– 14), and having criticized Scripture for what he himself has done throughout his public discourse, Richard concludes that Syntax, Style, & Ethos   43

his character has no ethical center and, hence, results in nonbeing: Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. Sometimes am I king, Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a King; Then am I king’d again, and by and by Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing.

(5.5.31–41)

In a profound irony, Shakespeare enriches Richard’s account of his descent to “nothing” by giving him his most functional schemes; two climactic nothings convey Richard’s emptiness, but the subtle poetry suggests that Richard has earned an empty truth, for the internal rhymes of “one” and “none” (5.5.31, 32) and “unking’d” and “nothing” (5.5.37, 38) imply relations and absolutes that Richard would not earlier admit and will not fully articulate now. The chiastic pattern of “am I” and “I am” (5.5.32, 34) encloses his roles of “king” and “beggar” within a frame of being that recalls self-assertion, but the relative “Sometimes” modifies all the behavior of this once absolute king. The concluding lines insist on a long e scheme, but those six open sounds are boxed in by two nothings, and one of them is the last word before the shift in tone announced by music from off stage. The last service of Richard’s training in the high style is, as James Calderwood has argued, to proclaim its practical irrelevance.19 Similar patterns of self-revelation in Richard II carry through the Henriad to create a positive impression of the character of 19. Besides his first chapter in Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad, see also Calderwood’s appendix, “Elizabethan Naming.”

44   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

Bolingbroke’s son and heir, Prince Hal. He begins his tavern soliloquy with the dominant “I know” and concludes it with “I will.”20 His control of the ambiguity in the final “will” allows Hal to embrace both decisive future and conscious choice. In the second act, his response to Falstaff’s “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” continues the pattern and is confirmed by the sheriff’s knocking at the door: “I do. I will.” (2.1.474–76). The line retains its absolute conviction no matter how delivered; a rueful note or a tone of regret as in some performances only underscores the conviction conveyed by Hal’s syntax. Banishing his friend may prove burdensome, but it will be done. His assertion to Hotspur (“I am the Prince of Wales” [5.4.63]) identifies the new public self with his conviction carried by monosyllabic certainty. With dozens of like constructions along the way, Hal becomes Henry V and when he enters historic time, he reverses the slide that Richard took from the public “we” to “I.” As Henry V, he rejects Falstaff using the same formula that introduced his soliloquy in 1 Henry IV: “I know thee not, old man” (5.5.47).21 Rejecting his irresponsible times with Falstaff as something he “dreamt,” he emphasizes his conviction with the expletive “do” and a strong alliteration: “But being awaked I do despise my dream” (5.5.51). With his true self achieved, his “I” stands outside his former, impersonal role: “Presume not that I am the thing I was” (5.5.55). As he concludes, his style becomes more public. The royal “we” is followed by a formal, qualifying parenthesis; it is the first time in the speech that his verb is delayed by sentence structure. If Falstaff reforms, “We will, according to your strengths and qualities / Give you advancement” (5.5.69–70). In the speech before Agincourt (4.3.18–67), dotted with words of spiritual value (“pray,” “faith,” “God’s peace,” 20. The First Part of King Henry IV, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (HarperCollins: New York, 1992), 1.2.189–211. Textual references by act, scene, and line are to this edition. 21. The Second Part of King Henry IV, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, 5.5.47. Textual references by act, scene, and line are to this edition.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   45

“hope”), Henry’s negatives about himself clear the moral ground for a positive, transcendent claim. He begins by invoking “God’s will” and interjects, “I pray thee” before “I am not covetous,” “Nor care I” and “It yearns me not.” His pure ethos is then suggested by the syntax—this warrior-king is spiritually composed and motivated: “But if it be a sin to covet honor / I am the most offending soul alive.”22 After juxtaposing “hope” and “I have,” he moves, as Richard under threat of defeat could not, from “I” to the imperial “we” before his peroration rises above the present time to time immemorial. The syntax of Brutus’s speech to the mob in Julius Caesar23 carries unintended suggestions that undermine the ethos that Brutus strives to create through a style of balanced control.24 He peremptorily commands assent to his credibility (“Believe me for mine honour”) and makes himself the object of “Censure” before launching a series of highly structured clauses. A crucial one of them, however, reaches its climax with an “I” governing the negative act (“I slew him”). In a culminating triad of rhetorical questions, Brutus, like Richard II, creates a syntactic pattern powerful on the surface but damning in its basic elements. He answers the questions himself, and his repetition is a clear sign of an intention to determine the mob’s reaction. Through anastrophe, however, Brutus unconsciously reminds his listeners of his guilt, for the repeated “I offended” is given the strong concluding position: Who is here so base, that would be a bondman? If any, speak: for him have I offended. Who is here so rude, that would not be a Ro22. The Life of King Henry the Fifth, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, 4.3.27– 28. Textual references by act, scene, and line are to this edition. 23. Julius Caesar, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, 3.2.13–34. Textual references by act, scene, and line are to this edition. 24. Brutus’ style also fails to convey pathos “credibly” as Brian Vickers concludes: “But always, Quintilian writes, the orator must convince his audience of the genuineness of his feeling by suiting style to subject and to the appropriate emotions, for anger cannot be credibly expressed in neat antitheses” (9.3.102). The passage provides an illuminating gloss on the failure of Brutus’ rhetoric in Julius Caesar (In Defence of Rhetoric [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], 319).

46   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

man? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile, that will not love his country? If any, speak, for him have I offended. . . . Then none have I offended.

Whether this unwitting admission predisposes the mob to be more receptive to Antony’s speech is questionable, but Shakespeare would hardly vary normal word order capriciously. He surely suggests that Brutus, regardless of his stated meaning in carefully structured prose, cannot subdue the promptings of a troubled conscience. In Coriolanus, before he earns the name of the play’s title, Caius Marcius is contemptuous of the citizenry and will not try to win their “favors” through an ethical proof based on his military prowess.25 As a result, no “I” appears in his first speech to his public (1.1.166–87). Later, when the Senate promotes his name for consul, he need only, as his friend Menenius advises, “speak to the people” to gain election, but he balks: I do beseech you, Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage.

(2.2.136–39)

A Roman tribune, Sicinius, counters that people’s expectations must be met, and Menenius urges him to “fit you to the custom” (2.2.143). In this political world, ethos is overlaid on the self like a garment or put on like a role, and Coriolanus recognizes as much: “It is a part, / That I shall blush in acting” (2.2.145–46). When he goes before the citizens, the stage direction calls for a “gown of humility” (2.3.40), his “I” is as restricted by the syntax as he is by the occasion; he asks Menenius, “What must I say?” (2.2.50). He cannot tell the truth—that some of their “brethren” ran from battle and, accepting Menenius’ s advice, he is somewhat conciliatory, offering to show his wounds in private. He 25. Coriolanus, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, 1.1.179. Textual references by act, scene, and line are to this edition.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   47

ironically promises to flatter the people with performances that they expect and that betray his true character: Since the wisdom of [the people’s] choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practice the insinuating nod and bow off to them most counterfeitly. That is, sir, I will counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular man and give it bountiful to the desirers.

(2.3.98–103)

His “Therefore” cynically judges the citizenry: “Therefore, beseech you I may be consul.” Later, goaded by Brutus, another tribune, and Sicinius, Coriolanus overrides Menenius’s objection and declares that he will again speak against the citizens’ interests; his true character is expressed through forceful resolve: “As I live, I will” (3.1.67). When he gives his “reasons, / More worthier than their voices” (3.1.122–23), the “I” disappears for nearly twenty lines so great is his reliance on a logos fueled by emotion that he will not subdue. His mother’s advice follows a belligerent challenge that affirms Coriolanus’s self-reliance and confidence in his integrity. The poetic structure of the second line implies his harsh judgment on playing a role; “False” is stressed by the meter, and the enjambment isolates and questions the idea of acting while the sentence ends in the next poetic line with an assertion of individual, manly being. To Coriolanus, public act and inner worth, his ethos, are one: Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me False to my nature? Rather say I play The man I am.

(3.2.15–17)

Volumnia urges circumstances to qualify this claim of individual integrity; she would, she argues, “dissemble with [her] nature” in “honor” for the benefit of her “fortunes” and “friends.” Menenius seconds her pleading, and Cominius enters to say that Coriolanus can defend himself if he can speak with per48   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

suasive moderation. Menenius offers “only fair speech” as the means to sooth the people, and Cominius adds that it will succeed if Coriolanus “can thereto frame his spirit” (3.2.99). The frame, to be sure, is a rhetorical form that assigns priority to the ethical proof, in this instance a lie to the self (“The man I am”) by Coriolanus’s standards. When, then, he finally speaks at length, having been spoken to for sixty lines, his “I” appears in a line bounded by “must”s; he accepts a strategy that imposes on him a “part” that, in turn, as his imagery suggests breaks his integral “I am” into lesser parts: Must I go show them my unbarbed sconce? Must I With my base tongue give to my noble heart A lie that it must bear?

(3.2.101–3)

In his next speech, he briefly resolves, “I will not do’t” after he imagines the loss of personal integrity as a consequences of a false posturing. His several parts would all be further reduced: My throat of war be turned, Which choired with my drum into a pipe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys’ tears take up The glasses of my sight. A beggar’s tongue Make motion through my lips, and my armed knees, Who bowed but in the stirrup, bend like his That hath received an alms! I will not do’t Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness.

(3.2.114–15, 117–25)

His moral integrity would be so violated that he would be reduced to bodily parts, and the false ethos would so corrupt his mind that its very essence or “nature” would become base. Volumnia’s reply moves him to act the “mountebank,” and from that moment on, relatively few Coriolanus’s “I”s appear in the play. Syntax, Style, & Ethos   49

Having compromised his true character, Coriolanus is vulnerable to the scheme of Brutus and Sicinius to put him in a “choler”; his anger leads to his downfall in Rome, to his more positive emotional reaction to his mother’s later appeal, and to his losing his Roman name to “traitor” (5.6.86), ironically where he gained it in Corioles. Having surrendered his ethical integrity, Coriolanus stands virtually defenseless against the rhetorical proof of pathos. Volumnia could well be following the advice of classical rhetoricians when she brings in his children; Quintilian’s recommendation is directly pertinent: “The practice . . . of appealing to the judges by all that is near and dear to them will be of great service to the accused, especially if he, too, has children.”26 In The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose, Brian Vickers’s brief comment on Lear’s verse outlines a general pattern that an analysis of syntax confirms: A discussion of the verse would . . . perhaps begin with the imperiousness in his style which was established with his first words in the play and which persists now through all the transformations of his madness only to collapse into the pathetic and infinitely moving simplicity of his reawakening to sanity and love in the recognition of Cordelia.27

Only after Cordelia’s “Nothing” in act 1 does Lear shift from the imperial “we” to “I” and then to assert control, but in act 4 he is much more conscious of his self-characterization: “I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / Methinks I should know you and know this man” (4.7.63–64).28 The enjambments in the succeeding lines invest his speech with ambiguities that stress negatives: Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant What place this is, and all the skill I have 26. Quintilian, Institutio Oratorio, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 6. 34.405. 27. Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London: Methuen, 1968), 368. 28. King Lear, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, 4.7.63–64. Textual reverences by act, scene, and line are to this edition.

50   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night.

(4.7.65–68)

The conjunction in line 66 allows for another buried meaning; Lear is mainly ignorant of all the skill he has. With the negatives behind him, he speaks with a simplicity that conveys a great humanist principle, a governing one for an ethical person, that to be truly human is to be rational: “As I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia.” (4.7.69–70). His basic humanity leads him to locate his daughter in the proper category, the natural “child” not the social “lady.” Her assent, “And so I am, I am” (4.7.70), seals the bond between them in several ways. It is separated from his words and her name only by a caesura; her love for her father is affirmed by her style. “And so” concludes like a logical pointer to the understated pathos of “I am, I am,” all the more effective because she makes his style hers. His exit line in the scene carries as much complexity as the most inventive metaphor: “Pray you now, forget and forgive: I am old and foolish” (4.7.84). Beneath the simple syntax of “I am” the full context of the play has created ambiguities of being, identity, and ego, now overwhelmed in tragic self-awareness. Eugene O’Neill so carefully prepares the theater and stage audiences for Hickey’s delayed entrance in The Iceman Cometh that his character seems fully defined before he appears. The skid row denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon and rooming house expect “a grand guy,” with “a joke to cheer people up” and with money enough to buy them drinks to oblivion during his annual visit.29 The theater audience, so cued, is likely to expect a bravura performance of a stereotype: the fast-talking salesman, the slick drummer who can, as Hickey later boasts, “convince some dame [to buy] another wash boiler” (3.112). The flush salesman, heavy drinker, and glad hander will provided drunken escape for the “gang” in the saloon; these people have a long-standing, 29. Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh (Vintage: New York, 1999), 19, 11. Textual references to act and page number are to this edition.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   51

tacit agreement not to face the truth about themselves—each to accept as true the delusional “pipe dreams” of the others as a way of validating their own. Shortly before Hickey’s arrival, Cora, a “tart” who objects to being called a “whore,” reports having seen Hickey outside where he told her, “Tell de gang I’ll be along in a minute. I’m just figurin’ out de best way to save dem and bring dem peace”(1.58). At this point, Cora’s secondhand report could well be prelude to one of Hickey’s jokes, and Harry Hope, proprietor and easy touch for the penniless drinkers, takes it that way. The old, familiar Hickey will soon return, and all expectations will be met. The regulars “greet him with affectionate acclaim”; “He immediately puts on an entrance act” and responds “ jovially” before assuming a comic role and singing an invitation to drink (1.59). So far, his character has no depth; he is little more than a charming cliché, a joker to the stage audience. O’Neill, however, has planted the notion that Hickey’s life has been an act, an accomplished one of its kind but a third-person act nonetheless. The change to a man who tries to create an uncharacteristic moral authority—a personal, persuasive ethos—is projected by his syntactical “I” and grounded in a claim that he is truly introspective. No fewer than forty times O’Neill puts “I know” at the head of a Hickey assertion; never simply a filler, it governs attempts to earn credibility from reluctant listeners. He speaks with unqualified certainty and newfound sobriety: I know from my experience I know from my own experience (thrice) I know all about that game I know all about tomorrow [as a false goal] I know all about that kind of pity I know the truth is tough at first I know it’s still hard for you I do know a lot about him I know how it is (twice, once quoted) I know [because] I’ve been through the mill I know how he feels. I wrote the book.

52   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

I know how tough it is on him right now. I know it’s hard to believe (passim)

The basis of Hickey’s knowing rests on two claims: that he can see through people and that he has wide experience (unlike his listeners whose world now ends at the door of the saloon). Throughout he identifies with his audience and, in the first act curtain line, rouses himself from sleep to say that their best interests motivate him: “All I want is to see you happy” (1, 71). Knowing them so well, he cannot plunge into his real topic—that all of them should abandon their pipe dreams. So, like a trained rhetorician, he skirts around it at first; in an oratorical formula (which of course he doesn’t follow), his ploy would be part of an insinuating exordium: “Don’t let me be a wet blanket, making fool speeches about myself; Hell, why d’you suppose I’m here except to have a party, same as I’ve always done?” and “Of course, I was only kidding Cora [before his entrance] with all that stuff about saving you”(1.62, 63). Like the apologists for satire, Hickey claims moral authority to speak a hard truth by saying that he is constrained to do so—of his prodding them to face reality: “It simply had to be done” (3.112); of revealing he murdered his wife, “I’ve got to tell you” (4.173). Like a visionary in a soaring peroration, he offers a better future with his repeated “I promise” (3.151). In sum, under O’Neill’s artistic control, Hickey strives to achieve a credible ethos. His appeals for trusting acceptance insist on his knowledge of the world, on sympathetic concern for his audience, and on good will toward them—all traditional places in the rhetorical tradition. For all their technical skill, however, Hickey’s attempts to move the pipe dreamers to action fail as he knew they would; in performance their lethargic and hostile reactions to his long speeches dramatize the futility of his appeal. Only Larry Slade and Don Parritt arrive at moments of self-realization, but their epiphanies narrow to dead ends—Parritt as a suicide over “guilt” and Slade in his own words as a “real convert to death [with] a coward’s heart” (4.195). Finally, Hickey himself is seen Syntax, Style, & Ethos   53

lacking in true introspection. As “I know” is repeatedly sounded, O’Neill gives it the depth of painful irony, for Hickey’s glib salesman’s career has isolated him from meaningful human contact. He cannot create a valid ethos because he has never been a responsible social being. Simple awareness of facts can be morally courageous, but without the will to change, to reform the self from within, that awareness remains only first step toward achieving moral stature. It is confession without repentance. Hickey lives in a trap sprung by his very success as a con artist; his sales pitches have been aimed at victims, and he must leave the scene of his triumphs before the “dame” realizes that she has been conned. Because he leaves before his words have their consequences, he has taken no responsibility for what he caused. He rationalizes this moral failing when he says that killing his wife, Evelyn, was the “only one possible” thing he could have done to give her peace, relief from her pipe dream that he is faithful to her. This is one point he sells successfully, for Harry Hope rationalizes as well: “We mustn’t hold him responsible for anything he’s done” (4.190). His act before the dreamers was for his own benefit; he knew from the start that they would not leave the saloon and begin to change: [To Rocky] “Of course [Hope’s] coming back. So are all the others. By tonight they’ll all be here again. You dumbbell, that’s the whole point” (3, 147). The deeper point, which Hickey misses, is that he wants their failures to ratify his own. Significantly, his failure of character is projected by a fragmented style. Blurting out his real feelings for his wife (“damned bitch”), he loses stylistic agency and “stammers”, “No! I never—!” This spontaneous exclamation, strikingly at odds with his prepared speeches, reveals a truth about himself long suppressed— his “I” has “never” been fully realized and cannot be the responsible agent of an active verb. Soon after, as he tries to recover control (“You know I’d never—”), O’Neill subtly transfers knowing to Hickey’s audience. Moments later, the policeman who arrests him picks up the pattern: “You know who we are” (4.183). 54   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

Then, when Hickey retreats to an insanity plea, his style breaks down twice more, and Detective Moran, the play’s point of view from beyond the saloon doors, says, “I’ve [not “We”] had enough of your act” (4.184). As Hickey is led off, he once more cannot finish a thought (“I was a raving rotten lunatic or I couldn’t have said—”) and his “voice . . . protesting” (4.186) reverberates hollow from the wings to the world outside. Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy defends “ordinary” or “mere suffering” (Yeats’s phrase) as a valid subject for tragedy and amplifies his point with a distinction that applies to The Iceman Cometh: “The real key, to the modern separation of tragedy from ‘mere suffering,’ is the separation of ethical control and, more critically, human agency, from our understanding of social and political life.”30 Hickey learned his values in the school of American materialism; to succeed, he had to persuade his “victims” that he, not whatever product he was pitching, was credible. That is, he needed persuasive control but he had no genuine ethical base. O’Neill, in a consistently revealing irony, endowed Hickey with a distinctive style that in the ground of its syntax dramatizes the bankruptcy of his ethos and of the values of the society that nursed and nurtured him. Without a valid ethos, Hickey has neither Williams’s “ethical control” nor truly “human agency”; he does not “know,” his repeated term, much less have “understanding of social and political life.” His career, however, does deepen our understanding of that life; The Iceman Cometh is a more profound and broad indictment of the American financial dream than anything in Miller or Mamet. From the ground of syntax, the “I” may elaborate style to establish credibility and to assert or gain control in a rhetorical situation. The critical tradition speaks clearly on the figures as vehicles for pathos; beyond that, the connection between some devices and ethos can be inferred from observations made by a wide range of theorists. Brian Vickers summarizes much of the 30. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 48–49.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   55

critical tradition on the emotional effects of style: “From Aristotle to the end of the eighteenth century the figures and tropes were regarded mimetically, as capturing specific and clearly defined emotionally states.”31 In his Elizabethan Rhetoric, Peter Mack notes that in “rhetorical theory . . . speakers may employ amplification and heightened style to demonstrate skill and maintain decorum rather than to move an audience to a course of action.”32 That is to say, skill and decorum are joined, and to be decorous a speaker must be, in the classical formulation, a good man speaking well. In about 1599, John Hoskyns implies that skill in speaking is the servant of reason and truth, the key components of personal ethos: The shame of speaking unskilfully were small if the tongue were only disgraced by it. . . . Careless speech doth not only discredit the personal judgment, it discrediteth the truth, force and uniformity of the matter and substance.

Careful, skillful speech, then, embodies abiding values as it does in Ben Jonson’s distinction: “Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks, and out of observation, knowledge, and use of things.”33 In this construction, eloquence and knowledge are indispensable foundations for wisdom—the knowledge acquired in observation and put to high, practical use. In modern times, Kenneth Burke attributes a potentially insidious effect to a balanced style. He claims that the form of antithesis (“opposition”) can dispose an audience to “assent” to the content of a “proposition”:

31. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, 304–5. 32. Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 216. 33. John Hoskyns, Sidney’s Arcadia and the Rhetoric of English Prose, and Ben Jonson, Timber: Or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 399 and 573, respectively.

56   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

Imagine a passage built about a set of oppositions . . . Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites a participation regardless of the subject matter. Formally, you will find yourself swinging along with the succession of antitheses, even though you may not agree with the proposition that is being presented in this form . . . But in cases where a decision is still to be reached, a yielding to the form prepares for assent to the matter identified with it.

Burke argues that balance and gradatio work in the same way: By the time you arrive at the second of its three stages, you feel how it is destined to develop—and on the level of purely formal assent you would collaborate to round out its symmetry by spontaneously willing its completion and perfection as an utterance.34

Burke focuses on the psychology of the audience; Richard Weaver concentrates more sharply on style itself and as a result implies more about the speaker’s control and character: Through balanced clauses, the sentence achieves a degree of formal completeness missing in sentences where the interest is in mere assertion. Generally speaking the balanced compound sentence, by the very contrivedness of its structure, suggests something formed above the welter of experience, and this form . . . transfers something of itself to the meaning.35

In Weaver’s judgment, a speaker must exercise discrimination to select material from the “welter of experience” before giving it a form. Two steps, then, both involving choice create a style; selectivity and balance not only rise above the confusion of a “welter” but by imposing form upon it, subtly endow the speaker with a measure of moral authority. With sentence structure as its foundation, skillfulness may add sound patterns in addition to the devices of balance, repetition, and climax. In the speech34. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Meridian, 1962), 582, 583. 35. Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1985), 126.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   57

es of many plays, the most heightened styles occur at moments of emotional intensity; Edward Bond’s “Notes on Acting The Woman” (1979) illuminates this point: “Emotion by itself is not truth. But when the emotion shapes and demands ideas and actions that express it, then it begins to tell the truth.”36 In some other plays, heightened styles occur when the speaker appeals to justice and its companion, equity; these, the highest social virtues, cannot be invoked persuasively without a correspondingly high ethos. Unfortunately, as the careers of Shylock, Bond’s Ismene, and Shakespeare’s Isabella demonstrate, a fine style while it clearly displays a character’s ethos is no guarantee of worldly success. It may rise above the welter of circumstances, but its speaker remains vulnerable to those in power and, in Isabella’s case, open to moral compromise. The topic of Shylock’s most balanced speeches is his race; his emotions have resulted from abuse that his audience, the Christian Venetians, acknowledge. (Antonio admits that he is likely to call him dog again and to spit upon him [1.2.125–26].)37 Having been spurned before, he responds to Bassanio’s dinner invitation with a studied, emotional series of balanced assertions in the simple diction of penetrating clarity: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following: but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (1.3.30–33). Later, taunted by Solanio and Salerio, he delivers his oft-cited, frequently analyzed “I am a Jew” speech (2.1.47–66) which, in its rhetorical richness, puts him on ethical ground high above his adversaries. His repetition of “same” insists on the standard of equity without directly articulating it; five rhetorical questions beginning with “If” establish a pattern his larger audience is “willing to complete.” If we “yield to the form,” “revenge” becomes— at least for the time—understandable and inevitable: 36. Edward Bond, “Notes on Acting The Woman,” in The Woman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 128. 37. The Merchant of Venice, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington. Textual references by act, scene, and line are to this edition.

58   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us do we not revenge?

(3.1.55–63).

Portia’s courtroom success is anticipated by her first lines in the play; she contrasts her “little body” and the “great world,” and, apparently helpless to follow her own emotions in marriage choices, nonetheless fashions a long speech filled with devices of stylistic control: If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do [epanalepsis, an enclosing repetition] chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces,—it is a good divine that follow his own instructions, [maxim]—I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done [extends “good to do”], than be one of the twenty to follow [recalls earlier “follow”] mine own teaching [modest ethos]: the brain may devise laws for the blood [axiomatic], but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree [axiomatic] . . . O me the word “choose”! I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse [rhyme stresses her quandary], so is the will of a living daughter curb’d by the will [punning control of meaning] of a dead father [antithesis]: is it not hard Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?

(1.2.12–25 [my comments in brackets]).

The rhetorical question with a directed reply and the absolutes of “one” and “none” tellingly conclude a speech in which Portia has faced the “welter” of her untenable position. All her attempts at control lead to momentary frustration but at the same time signal the personal worth that will be crucial in the court and the courting of the final acts. Centuries later, Ismene in Edward Bond’s The Woman calls for peace, another of the transcendent abstract terms and one Syntax, Style, & Ethos   59

often seen as fitting in the mouth of a woman. Under guard for urging that her fellow Greeks go home from Troy, she asserts her identity and the ethos beneath it, “I am a Greek—Officers applaud ironically—and speak the truth.”38 When Nestor tries to set a logical trap for her, she sees through it and reduces it with a hissing scheme: “Your subtlety sounds silly.” Challenged to speak her truth, she elevates her style in one of the very few such speeches in Bond’s two-part play. She begins with personal testimony, an approach that calls for the ethical proof in almost any rhetorical situation, all the more needed here before a hostile audience: “In Troy I saw the people suffer.” Her description of what she saw, then, in its sound patterns indicates her control while the hard consonants and s sounds control the truth above the welter: “Young men crippled or killed, their parents in despair and dying of disease.” The lack of a verb, ellipsis, obliges her hearers to supply one, and her next sentence further draws them in with an enthymeme: “I told them as they were dying—they couldn’t hear but I told them because I’m Greek—I shall do all I can to stop this. No more suffering caused by men!” The unstated premise behind “because I’m Greek” can be expressed in various ways, but any of them must include a moral standard— among the possibilities: All Greeks should be compassionate; Greek values transcend death; No Greek can be passive in the face of suffering. At the end of her speech, she pictures her audience entering Troy and “looking for something left to steal or kill,” and concludes with “Is that Greek?” to thrust the moral responsibility back upon her guardians. We know beforehand that she cannot carry the day, but her speech in Bond’s drama is far from ineffective because Ismene’s values outlive her historical time. When it is clear that Troy will be sacked and her cause is lost, Ismene’s style again becomes heightened. With no hope for peace and life, she promises a “prophesy” but utters an emotional imprecation. Her style surely conveys pathos; at the same 38. Bond, The Woman, part 1, sc. 13. The cited passages here and below are on 51–53.

60   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

time, her vision carries conviction and credibility because her figures control the scene she reconstructs. She repeats the damning word, “curse,” and picks up its sibilant in an image of impending, wanton destruction: “I curse every Greek who goes into Troy! I curse him and his house! Young soldiers were sharpening knives and swords on the square. They were pumping the pedals like laughing schoolboys.” After saying that the soldiers “started to drink,” Ismene concludes; she repeats “pedals” and enforces a bitter personification with the s scheme: “They jumped on the pedals in excitement and the stones screamed like children.” In shaping her emotion, Bond elevates her emotion to truth, her pathos to ethos. In Shylock’s exposure of inequity and Ismene’s pleas for peace, the abstract values that ideally guarantee civil society are honored by a decorously high style. In act 5 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Isabella summons “justice” to her cause, yet social pressures and circumstances, the world’s realities, lead her—despite her high character—to make compromises as she strives to establish a credible ethos and to achieve a worthy goal. In the first scene, the Duke of Vienna, having indulged the weakness of his subjects, appoints the cold, rational Angelo as his deputy, a move that the duke says will cleanse the city of its immorality in his absence. He never leaves, however, and in disguise as a friar manipulates much of the plot. In his presumed absence, Isabella appeals to Angelo who, departing from precedent, has condemned her brother, Claudio, to death for impregnating his betrothed. Before Isabella’s call for justice, then, the play raises questions about the values of language, argument, and ethos. Angelo’s punning aside in act 2 of Measure for Measure comes during Isabella’s plea asking him to spare her brother’s life. Confiding a personal failing to the theater audience and therefore credible, he discloses that Isabella awakens his desire first through her voice and the quality of her thought: “She speaks and ’tis such sense / That my sense breeds with it” (2.2.147, Syntax, Style, & Ethos   61

148).39 More than admission of his own confusion, Angelo’s pun compresses the fundamental, vexed preliminary of much persuasion: logic and rhetoric may make sense by the book, but they operate perforce in a world of circumstance where their audiences may have impulses, desires, and needs that cannot always be anticipated and that sometimes lead a speaker to make moral compromises. As a competent disputant, Isabella wins the exchange with Angelo, but her pure character and logical sense arouse only his long suppressed sexuality. After the first encounter, he openly reveals his inner turmoil in a soliloquy that mixes diction of moral and immoral connotations. He labels himself a “saint” and generalizes his responsibility in “our sense”; these attempts at self-justification result in paradoxes that border on self-contradiction. One question makes “I love” and “I desire” parallel, and he betrays his confusion as he tries to sound ethical: Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman’s lightness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  What, do I love her, That I desire to hear her speak again And feast upon her eyes? What is ’t I dream on? O cunning enemy that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous Is that temptation that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue.

(2.2.175–77, 184–90)

Angelo’s inability to beat down his knowledge of guilt does more than offer the audience insight about his character; it comments on the ethos he has fashioned as a public man. The final sentence of his soliloquy embodies the basic conflict for him and for the play’s depiction of rhetoric: “Ever till now / When men 39. Measure for Measure, in The Complete Works, ed. Bevington. Textual references to act, scene, and line are to this edition.

62   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

were fond, I smiled, and wonder’d how” (2.2.193–94). “Ever” as absolute and “now” as circumstantial are set together in an uneasy pairing much as “nature” and “sense” are in Measure for Measure, much as rhetorical standards and contingency are in practice. The precise Angelo ever had a superior, categorical approach to “men” whose fondness made him smile indulgently. Now, he sees himself recognizing something about human nature, and its relevance to himself causes him to wonder. Angelo was swayed by Isabella’s virtuous appearance, not by the substance of her argument. What her brother Claudio supposed constituted her ethos as a woman, her “speechless dialect” and “prosperous art” (1.2.180, 181), worked against her. Her appearance on the stage—her person as a dramatic presence—bodies forth half of the classical ideal of the ethical proof. To establish a credible character, one must appear to be good, as indeed she does, costumed as a novice in some productions. This appearance of good character is crucial in Measure for Measure, for through the Duke as agent, the play legitimates deception as a means to a good end. Angelo’s public character— what he appears to be—has so much authority that Isabella cannot expose him as a seducer. In her public character as a good person, she herself calls for justice and belief in act 5 but as the theater audience knows, she constructs a false narrative (“I did yield to him” [5.1.106]) to support her appeal for credibility. From the outset, the play questions the general usefulness of rhetorical forms and challenges the audience to be wary of ethical appeals, including perhaps the pat resolution of Measure for Measure itself. Traditional rhetorical theory posits a stable human nature sufficiently knowable for a speaker to proceed from it in order to be persuasive emotionally and ethically. Beginning with the Duke’s first speech, Shakespeare puts “nature” in the mouths of various speakers with the result that its value as a standard, however slippery or elusive, is common to the world of the play. In the Duke’s usage, it clearly means quiddity or the essence of Syntax, Style, & Ethos   63

a thing, and as a categorical term, it stands behind many a rhetorical presentation, like a definition based on a thing’s “properties.” Centuries later Richard Weaver drew on the tradition as a living thing in an analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “The argument from definition . . . includes all arguments from the nature of the thing.”40 The Duke, and Shakespeare for that matter, assumes as much in his presentation to his confidante Lord Escalus and others: Of government the properties to unfold Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  The nature of our people, Our city’s institutions, and the terms For common justice, y’are as pregnant in As art and practice hath enriched any That we remember.

(1.1.3–4, 10–14)

The Duke recognizes that his immediate audience knows rhetoric by the book; using its techniques before them would be an affectation. Before an Escalus, someone fully knowledgeable about its “art and practice,” he must be cautious lest obviously artificial speech undermine credibility. Moments later, as he makes Angelo his deputy, the Duke continues to speak for the play about persuasion and appearance. There is, he tells Angelo, “a kind of character in thy life”; his virtues are apparent to an “observer” (1.1.28, 29) as they are in the OED citation from Shakespeare to support its definition of “character”: “The face or features as betokening moral qualities” (1601). Twelve lines later, the Duke’s surface meaning again calls attention to his self-conscious use of rhetoric in a seemingly open disclosure: “But I do bend by speech / to one that can my part in him advertise” (1.1.41–42). The Duke, however, knows otherwise about Angelo’s character—behind his “face” and “features” is the true 40. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric, 86.

64   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

character of a man who before the play’s action begins broke his word on a marriage promise when Mariana’s dowry was lost. The Duke, then, reserves one meaning of “part” and another of “character” to himself; his public ethos, credible to both Escalus and Angelo, is itself a deceptive, constructed appearance, acted out as a “character” in a “part” to control the events he sets in motion. In the Duke’s career as a character in the drama, theatricality and ethos become inseparable as they are in political rhetoric elsewhere in Shakespeare and in current practice; costume can be donned and movement learned as means to making a false appearance convincingly “true”: du k e [to the Friar]:   Therefore, I prithee, Supply me with the habit, and instruct me How I may formally in person bear Like a true friar.

(1.3.45–48)

In disguise, he remains in memory the “good Duke” as he plays the “good father” to Isabella (3.1.193, 240); likewise, as “good friar” (4.1.53), he has unquestioned credibility for Mariana. Like the Duke, Isabella enters the play as and with a character of high moral standing. Her public ethos, however, is untested and although Claudio says that she has “prosperous art / When she will play with reason and discourse” (1.2.181–82), more important to him and to contemporary views of women is her “prone and speechless dialect” (1.2.180). Her practical knowledge of “reason and discourse” may have been merely “play,” like the school exercises of boys and men in Shakespeare’s time. The libertine Lucio, a person credible if only for being consistent in his desires, urges her to “weep and kneel” before Angelo to move him, and when her voice falters before him, Lucio is ironically her coach. When she speaks most effectively by the audience’s standards, her arguments and pleas are ineffective in the world of Measure for Measure. She must act out a falsehood to be effective; hers is an ironically complex ethos, and Shakespeare gives her the final comment on that rhetorical proof. Moreover, Syntax, Style, & Ethos   65

by the time she shows her skill as a disputant in act 2, the play has displayed the deficiency of other rhetorical forms. Like the Duke’s self-conscious comments in the first scene, his speech of consolation to Claudio relates more to schoolbook rhetoric than to a creative response to the present circumstances. Although garbed like a friar, the Duke offers not Christian commonplaces but more skeptical ones on the burdens of life. In its abstract, the argument rings hollow: Accept death because life is troublesome. His apostrophe to life is later countered by Claudio when he would persuade his sister to sin to save his life. Claudio’s speech holds nine adjective-noun constructions in eight lines: “cold obstruction,” “fiery floods,” “thickribbed ice” and others (3.1.119–33). Its patterned syntax seems to come rehearsed from a text not from a troubled soul. The two declamatory speeches side by side sound like a mere exercise in disputation; as such, they earn no credibility from the audience. They, however, do serve a useful function in the play’s critique of ethos, for their speakers subordinate their individual selves to forms and, as a result, have little personal authority. In marked contrast, in her disputation with Angelo, Isabella applies the general rules of disputation to specific circumstances, and she speaks as a person of character of genuine moral worth. In the play’s historical context, Isabella entered the contest at a great disadvantage; as a woman of the Renaissance, she did not receive an education in rhetoric. In her introduction to Distaves and Dames: Renaissance Treatises for and about Women, Diana Bornstein points out that a “thorough knowledge of rhetoric [was] considered appropriate for a grown man” but was excluded from the “backward looking . . . treatises for women.”41 More pertinent to Measure for Measure is Deborah Greenhut’s comment on how the long tradition behind the role Claudio anticipates for his sister and her use of “apprehensions” applies to Angelo’s confusion: 41. Diane Bornstein, ed. Distaves and Dames: Renaissance Treatises for and about Women (New York: Delmar, 1978), 16.

66   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

The more subtle historians and politicians try a more subtly repressive approach, characterizing the ideal woman as one who exhibits silent eloquence. . . . This conduct book ideal of the silent woman . . . derives from medieval apprehensions about woman and sexuality.42

An Isabella in Shakespeare’s time would have received no formal training in disputation or other forms of rhetorical discourse, and if she had, she would have been impertinent or unchaste to display it in practice. But, Isabella not only follows the strict procedures of disputation, she gives the ethical proof the priority in her presentation that it had in a formal oration. In her first exchange with Angelo, Isabella apparently recognizes him as a hostile audience because when he asks “Well, what’s your suit?” she replies with an insinuating exordium that stresses her high moral standards. The repetition of “must” suggests moral compunction while the balanced style conveys thoughtful control: There is a vice that most I do abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice; For which I would not plead, but that I must; For which I must not plead, but that I am At war ’twixt will and will not.

(2.2.32–36)

Angelo responds with much the same question: “Well, the matter?” And her reply distinguishes the issue much as a university disputant was advised to do: I have a brother is condemn’d to die; I do beseech you, let it be his fault, And not my brother.43

(2.2.37–39)

42. Deborah Greenhut, Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 10. 43. For a summary of procedures in disputation, see William T. Costello, S.J.,

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   67

The Provost’s aside, “Heaven give thee moving graces!” indicates that he believes that Isabella is about to develop her proposition formally, that her distinguishing the issue is preliminary to presenting her own case. Angelo, however, will not distinguish the “fault” from the “actor,” and Isabella concedes the legal point: “O just but severe law! / I had a brother, then” (2.2.45–46). At Lucio’s urging, she considers appealing to pathos, but unprepared to do so, she plays for thinking time by asking several questions, a strategy still favored by debaters. Next, after introducing “mercy” as an ideal, she subtly—in a conditional clause in a rhetorical question—appeals to Angelo’s “heart” (2.2.58). Her speeches to him could be used to illustrate a wide range of rhetorical places and strategies. She would redefine power (“potency”) if their roles were reversed (2.2.72–75); she argues a fortiori: “Shall we serve heaven / With less respect than we do minister / To our gross selves?” (2.2.90–92). Her moral axioms compress deductions, as in this balanced one: “O, it is excellent / to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant” (2.2.112–14). Later, the comparison enforcing another moral judgment transforms Angelo’s absolute standards into the contingent and relative: “That in the captain’s but a choleric word, / Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy” (2.2.135–36). Significantly, Angelo recognizes the general moral worth of her maxims and their possible application to him: “Why do you put these sayings upon me?” (2.2.138). Her reply goes directly to the questions Measure for Measure raises about ethos as the appearance of worth; she challenges Angelo to see beneath his public reputation to his fallen human nature: Because authority, though it err like others, Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself That skins the vice o’th’top. Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 14–31.

68   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

A natural guiltiness, such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother’s life.

(2.2.139–46)

His unconsciously revealing pun on “sense” is his reaction in an aside. As he starts to leave, Isabella, with new confidence, calls him back. She “plays” with a pun of her own, asking him to listen how she will “bribe” him. To his outraged, proud response (“Bribe me?”), she offers the bribe of prayers, an elevated topic for a peroration in small—lines of high-level diction with spiritual connotations (2.2.155–61). The stage audience for the dialogue between Angelo and Isabella embodies ethical extremes. The Provost is an officer of the law; in his function he does not question Angelo’s authority. His asides are directed to heaven. Lucio is a libertine and unduly florid in his style when he first approaches Isabella; he prepares her for Angelo’s cold character and urges her to make an emotional appeal to “weep and kneel” as befits her place in the category of “maidens [who] sue” (1.4.80, 81). For all that, his worldliness proves helpful in prodding Isabella to be more forceful (“You are too cold”); at the same time, his encouragement borders on the bawdy and his diction lowers the prospective nun to the level of a “wench” (2.2.61, 129). The staging, then, locates Isabella in the proper ethical space between the letter of impersonal law rigidly enforced and the reality of a human nature with feelings and desires. When Isabella returns two scenes later to meet with him, Angelo treats her like a worthy adversary in disputation. In that elaborately stylized exercise, she proves Claudio right; “prosperous” in its sense of “flourishing” is akin to rhetorical copia in this context, and “play” alludes to the rules of a formal dispute: “She has prosperous art / When she will play with reason and discourse.” Angelo opens with a new, ambiguous proposition: “Your brother cannot live” (2.4.33), and she replies in kind, ironically granting the obvious fact of mortality: “Even Syntax, Style, & Ethos   69

so” (2.4.34). In trying to draw her out, Angelo uses the license of “play” to mask his desire, and she, equally adept, discloses no more than a respondent must. He says that he will “pose” her a question as a hypothetical in a debate (2.4.51), that he can test an idea without assuming its moral burden (“I can speak / Against the thing I say” [2.4.59–60]) and that he can change roles to enforce credibility (“I—now the voice of the recorded law” [2.4.61]). The conventions of this serious game allow Angelo to hide his lust behind another hypothetical: Admit no other way to save his life— As I subscribe not that, nor any other, But in the loss of question—that you, his sister, Finding yourself desir’d of such a person [one with “credit” or authority] You must lay down the treasures of your body

(2.4.88–91, 96).

In contrast to Angelo whose use of “person” is duplicitous and whose hypotheticals are dishonest, Isabella’s distinctions narrow meaning in sharp antitheses of moral weight: ’Tis set down so in heaven, but not in earth.

(2.4.50)

I had rather give my body than my soul.

(2.4.56)

It is no sin at all, but charity.

(2.4.66)

In one distinction, she creates a fresh maxim of transcendent worth: “Lawful mercy / Is nothing kin to foul redemption” (2.4.112–13). Because she puts her standards in practice so well, Shakespeare’s audience and most likely subsequent ones would at this point see Isabella as the moral authority in the exchange with Angelo. Growing more defensive, Angelo tries to catch her on the horns of a dilemma: “Be that you are, / That is, a woman; if you be more you’re none” (2.4.133–34). You are, he argues, either

70   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

a woman and frail enough to be silent, or you are “well express’d” (2.4.135) and therefore nothing (“none”). Isabella avoids the trap by invoking her integrity or ethos: “I have no tongue but one” (2.4.138), and the conclusion of the scene emphasizes the gulf between credibility earned by Isabella’s personal virtue and Angelo’s public reputation conferred by political power and social standing. In a soliloquy, Isabella’s questions to the audience return her exchange with Angelo and Measure for Measure itself to the crucial topic of credibility, or ethos: “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this / Who would believe me?” (2.4.172–73). With no one else to trust, she turns to Claudio. Isabella speaks with “one tongue” to her brother in the next scene; having assumed his good character, she is incensed when he asks her to sin to save his life: “O, you beast! / O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!” (3.1.138–39). Yet, in her ensuing conference with the Duke as “good father,” Isabella willingly enters the world of deceptive appearance and circumstance. She steps far back from the threshold of timeless, cloistered silence where Lucio found her in act 1 and agrees to assume a “plausible obedience” to Angelo so that he will accept the “time” and “place” of her supposed surrender to him. That is, she agrees to enter the world of circumstance. From this point on, midway through Measure for Measure, she never again speaks with one tongue as herself although she continues to display the rhetorical knowledge reserved to the men of Shakespeare’s time. T. W. Baldwin found a detailed model in Apthonius for Isabella’s “reprehension” of Angelo in act 5, and—despite intrusive interruption—she makes her case for justice along the lines of a loosely constructed judicial oration.44 Before the hostile Angelo and the pretended hostility of the Duke, she cries for “Justice” at a time when women rarely did; their hopes rested on a judgment for mercy. In Shakespeare’s time, as Linda Woodbridge has pointed out, women rarely called out for justice; the great 44. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, vol. 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 325–27.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   71

abstraction did not apply to them.45 Yet in Measure for Measure, Isabella, prompted by Friar Peter to “speak loud,” begins her appeal to the Duke with “Justice” and repeats it four times in the last line of the speech. She is, of course, playing a role and is indeed, contrary to her implication, “a maid,” but the plea itself is heartfelt. When, then, Angelo tries to prejudice the Duke against her, like the talented disputant of act 2, she turns his word (“strange”) against him, and in an antithesis she reserves “truly” to herself. She shifts the burden to her audience with rhetorical questions, uses asyndeton to suggest no end to Angelo’s faults, and expands the meaning of “strange” in the last line by a repetition: a ngel o: And she will speak most bitterly and strange. is a bel l a: Most strange: but yet most truly will I speak. That Angelo’s forsworn, is it not strange? That Angelo’s a murderer, is’t not strange? That Angelo’s is an adulterous thief, An hypocrite, a virgin-violator, Is it not strange, and strange?

(5.1.39–45)

Whatever we make of his intentions, the Duke’s reaction is a gloss on the rhetorical success of Isabella’s amplification: “Nay, it is ten times strange!” (5.1.46). Although the Duke does not abandon his manipulative plan, Shakespeare’s text clearly assigns moral superiority to Isabella and her plea for justice. When, as he had threatened, Angelo attacks her credibility, she establishes a valid ethos with a balanced, rational style, appreciated by the Duke for its “dependency of thing on thing” (5.1.65). To support her claims that Angelo is an “archvillain” (5.1.60), she begins a narration, false in itself but correctly positioned in her rhetorical presentation. Lucio butts in three times, prompting her to object that “This gentleman told 45. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 309–10.

72   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

somewhat of my tale”; the Duke, taking her point, then chastises Lucio for breaking the form of her speech: “You are in the wrong / To speak before your time” (5.1.89, 91–92). She completes her false story, the one the Duke as friar created for her earlier, and when he dismisses it with an ironic, “Someone has set you on” (5.1.117), she returns the play to its topic of the ethical proof as an exclusive value that the world may not honor: “I, thus wrong’d, hence unbelieved go” (5.1.124). After the Duke has condemned Angelo by the standard of absolute equity, the measure-for-measure form of justice, Isabella speaks on behalf of his espoused. Once more drawing a disputant’s distinction, she would save Angelo for Mariana; thinking her brother dead, she has no selfish motive: My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died: For Angelo, His act did not o’ertake his bad intent, And must be buried but as in intent That perish’d by the way. Thoughts are no subjects; Intents, but merely thoughts.

(5.1.457–63)

These, her last words in the play, conclude with a maxim that is simply indefensible by the moral values that she and others have professed. The generality smacks of moral certainty and ethical authority, but the meaning—that intentions are innocent in themselves and that mere thoughts have no moral import—is a concession to the occasion in an attempt to persuade. The Duke disguised himself the better to know whether Angelo was one of the “seemers” (1.3.54) whose appearance belied his thoughts. In his soliloquy before his second meeting with Isabella, Angelo admits to “the strong and swelling evil of my conception” in his heart; “evil” labels his thoughts as anything but mere. His puns, perhaps unconscious, on “swelling” and “conception” link his thoughts with the deed he has condemned in Claudio (2.4.6–7). Isabella accepts the premise behind AngeSyntax, Style, & Ethos   73

lo’s initial refusal to listen to her pleas for her brother: “Every fault’s condemned ere it be done” (2.2.41). She virtually contradicts herself in her last speech when she moves from “bad intent” to “merely thoughts.” In her plea “for Angelo” Isabella is also speaking as an advocate for Mariana in a role, then, that licenses a persona who makes the best case for a client. As one who conspired in the deception, Isabella knew that Angelo’s “act” did in a very real way “o’ertake his bad intent” because he thought he was having sex with her, not with Mariana. She may resort to a mental reservation, adding, “to the absolute law (of measure for measure)” after “Thoughts are no subjects.” Her concession in fashioning an ethos to and for the moment recognizes merciful distinctions that the Duke’s absolute verdict does not: “The very mercy of the law cries out / . . . An Angelo for Claudio, death for death” (5.1.415, 417). She may have learned enlightened role-playing from the Duke who in disguise was devious to effect one good end—to teach the absolute Angelo the errant ways of his common human nature. When the Duke reveals to her that her brother lives, she sees that he himself did not believe in eyefor-an-eye justice untempered by mercy and presumably that her plea for Angelo was unnecessary. She too may have been instructed by the Duke; she may have learned that the simply innocent and the purely good cannot succeed morally without making some concessions to a fallen world. Small wonder, then, that some criticism labels Measure for Measure a “problem play” for the questions its dark subject matter raises. Many directors have a problem with the abrupt move toward a comic resolution when the Duke, now back in power, says to Isabella, “Give me your hand and say you will be mine” (5.1.503). But Shakespeare gives her nothing to say. In the 1994 Royal Shakespeare production, Stella Gonet slapped him, grabbed his face, quickly kissed him, and then turned away to stand apart from him at the end. As in many other stagings, the audience was left to decide what she would decide. However Isabella chooses now, ear74   Syntax, Style, & Ethos

lier she has more significantly exemplified a stronger point, for by the lights of rhetorical theory, she is the good person speaking well, yet acting perforce in a world of duplicity and compromise. Justice, like other abstractions, must have a meaning we aspire to implement; the next chapter discusses the realization in various dramas of similar words of moral worth.

Syntax, Style, & Ethos   75

Chapter 3

The Worth of Words V In the seventeenth century, John Dryden wrote when language reformers attacked abstract words as meaningless, and in our time, David Hare and others have written when words themselves were reduced by some to marks on a page. In Dryden’s time, “insignificant” was the pejorative attached to words like “conscience”; in Hare’s time, “indeterminacy” to words like to “truth” and “faith.” The practice of these dramatists and others, however, has rebuked the theoretical position that abstract value terms carry no verifiable or practical meaning. John Dryden’s name appears frequently in scholarly accounts of language reform in the seventeenth century in England for several good reasons: he belonged to the Royal Society committee on language: his essays frequently deal with language as such: and he has long been regarded as an early master of a mature prose style.1 In 1930, R. F. Jones implied that a caus1. Many critics notice Dryden’s membership in the Royal Society; Robert D. Hume summarizes several accounts and adds, “[George] Watson argues convincingly that the influence is much less than has been supposed” (Dryden’s Criticism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970], 44; Watson’s “Dryden and the Scientific Image” appears in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18 [1963]: 25–35). Hume “think[s] it safe to say that in almost every essay Dryden discusses style or

76  

al chain connects Dryden’s prose to the influence of the Royal Society and to John Wilkin’s attempt to forge a language of signs with universal, common significance: thirty-eight years later, Philip Harth saw Wilkins’s influence reaching Dryden through Cambridge.2 Two recent critical comments indicate that scholarship has generally accepted Dryden’s association with the Royal Society as evidence of abiding convictions that disposed him toward a plain, unornamented style. In the University of California Works (1984), Maximillian Novak glosses Dryden’s assertion that “progress has been made in making words “usefull”: “Dryden may be thinking of the committee of the Royal Society established for this purpose, and of men like John Wallis who had helped found the Royal Society.”3 Relating Dryden’s poetry to the standards of the reformers, Barbara Shapiro says that Dryden defended English poetry and drama in terms almost identical to those of Thomas Sprat. And Dryden, a member of the Royal Society, also advocated a literary standard that emphasized clarity of expression.4 Like Shapiro, Harth sees the Royal Society influencing more than Dryden’s poetry: Dryden did not abandon the idea of the Royal Society when he relinquished his membership . . . Rather, he carried these ideals stylistic problems—they are his most abiding concern” (63). Samuel Johnson’s praise helped establish Dryden’s reputation as a master of prose: “The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled; every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place” (Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birbeck Hill [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905], 1, 418). 2. R. F. Jones, “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century,” reprinted from PMLA 45 (1930) in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 103–4. Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 17–18. 3. John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Maximillian E. Novak, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 13:223, 528. All references to Dryden are to this edition unless otherwise noted. Hereafter, volume and page numbers for citations of Dryden’s prose, along with act, scene, and line numbers for quotations from the plays, are included parenthetically in the text. 4. Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 260–61.

The Worth of Words   77

with him into another sphere . . . The advancement of learning which Bacon predicted from his method need not he confined to natural philosophy: it can be extended to all the arts and sciences, including poetry.5

Harth does not directly allege that Dryden embraced the reformers’ standards of language, but even his carefully qualified argument associates Dryden, as most scholars do, with Sprat, who advocated “so many things, almost in an equal number of words,” and also with John Wilkins, who hoped that “the expression of our Conceptions by Marks . . . [would] signifie things and not words.”6 In the conclusion of his well-known essay, A. C. Howell labels res et verba (things and words) “a rallying cry for the new plain style adopted by the Royal Society” and, after glancing at Swift’s satiric reductio of verbal thingness in book 3 of Gulliver’s Travels, quotes Karl Shapiro to imply that some twentieth-century poetry is affected for the better by avoiding “the dangers of ‘high order abstractions.’”7 Dryden’s contemporaries likewise applied their standards for a plain style beyond the categories of science and natural philosophy. Sprat wanted “eloquence . . . banish’d out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and good Manners,” and Samuel Parker hoped for “an Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and lushious Metaphors.”8 Positions such as these have been staked out with such clarity that they have become commonplaces for the critical study of language reform, while the dramatic practice of John Dryden in his 5. Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought, 30–31. 6. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1958), 113; John Wilkins, An Essay toward A Real Character, and a Philosophical Language [with] the Alphabetical Dictionary (London, 1668), 21. Murray Cohen argues against a “separation of Dryden’s view of literary language from contemporary theories” like Wilkins’s in Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 150. 7. A. C. Howell, “Res et Verba: Words and Things,” ELH 13 (1946): 142. 8. Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 111; for the full context of Parker’s oftquoted remark, see his Discourse of the Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1670), 75–76.

78   The Worth of Words

finest heroic play has been virtually ignored. I want to approach All for Love as a dramatization of “high order abstractions,” as a play that, from its choice of diction to its final dramatic image, projects its highest heroic values through highly wrought sound patterns, and bodies forth a qualified endorsement of terms not rooted in things. In five works published between 1665 and 1671, Parker articulates his position with undiminishing force. His first book, an attempt at a “physical-theology of God,” was praised in the Transactions of the Royal Society for being more meaningful than “the Notionals of the Gentils.” Parker endorsed “the Mechanical and Experimental Philosophic before the Aristotelean” because its method was more likely to lead men to “greater certainty” rather than end “by amusing them with empty and insignificant Notions.” Of “True Philosophic,” he wrote: “Her Game is things not words.”9 Even though his own topics—the nature of the state and “True Philosophic”—are abstract, Parker boasts: “I have no where played with Phrases, nor argued from Metaphors and Similitudes; and if any of my Words may happen to be fine, there are none of them empty; and the most pompous and lofty Expressions contain under them Notion, and Thing enough to fill out their Sense, and warrant their Truth.”10 In sharp contrast, Dryden believed that “Love and Valour ought to be the Subject” of “an Heroick Play” (11:10) and that a tragedy ought to evoke more than “Pity and Terror”: “for all the Passions in their turns are to be set in a Ferment; as Joy, Anger, Love, Fear, are to be used as the Poets common Places” (17:186). 9. See Jones, who lists Parker with those who rejected “any compromise whatsoever with rhetoric,” and associates his work with the attempts to “establish a linguistic ideal which reduced language to its simplest terms, a single word being exactly the equivalent to a single thing” (The Seventeenth Century, 110, 157); and Harth, who compares Parker’s Tentamina Physico-Theologica De Deo (London, 1665) to other works which drew all of their proofs from the experience and evidence of our senses (Philip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of “A Tale of a Tub” [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], 145). 10. Samuel Parker, A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1671), 97–98.

The Worth of Words   79

He endorses Rapin’s words as “remarkable” because they attribute “the Beauty of a Tragedy” to “the Discourses, when they are Natural and Passionate” (17:193). He envies Virgil his “stock . . . almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words,” and he admires the “sweatness” (i.e., sweetness) of two highly schematic lines from Cooper Hill: “Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; / Strong without rage; without o’er-flowing, full.”11 Through ceremonious dramatic imagery and finely wrought verbal patterns, Dryden’s All for Love affirms the value of abstractions, of the ideals that humans can aspire to; it is a more complex literary response to the res et verba question than Swift’s satiric one. The pertinence of Dryden’s play to the study of language reform is suggested by the title itself; in the Alphabetical Dictionary published with Wilkins’s Real Character, “Love” is an “Action Spiritual” which becomes more diffuse in its meaning as one pursues the definition. The reader looking for a general meaning turns first to “Affection” and then is directed to subsection 5.3, where this elaboration appears: LOVE, Affection, inamour, dote on, smitten, amiable, besotted, amo-

rous, dear, endear. Darling, Minion, Paramour, well-beloved, Likings, Fancy, Philtre.12

Pursuing “Honour,” the value that Antony and the play oppose to passion, yields no greater certainty; no mark or character could signify the multiple suggestions one finds after going from “Honour” to “Dignity” to “Worthiness,” a “Transcend. [ental] General” subsuming “Merit, Desert, Value, demerit, cheap, clear, price, precious, depreciate.” Remove the word from the thing in this projection, and all meaning breaks loose. Dryden’s attempt to communicate some of these meanings depends for 11. Cited by John M. Aden in The Critical Opinions of John Dryden: A Dictionary (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963), 85, 199. Aden’s entries under “Prosody” show a general concern for sound on Dryden’s part. 12. The Alphabetical Dictionary is unpaged. Murray Cohen attributes it to William Lloyd (Sensible Words, 31).

80   The Worth of Words

its success partly upon the visual nature of drama, the persuasive power of presentation. After all, the “thing” prized by the reformers must be an object of sight; the truly significant word must be a sensory image. Literature, and especially drama in performance, can provide a richer kind of thing; All for Love does not pretend to define “Love and Valour,” but it gives us pageantry and tableaux to realize the meanings of those terms. Dryden creates a complex, specific dramatic scene to body forth a stage image, one that paradoxically gives greater honor to the immediacy of meaning than did Parker and Wilkins, and at the same time recognizes its elusiveness. To achieve the play’s final tableau, Dryden builds on oppositions that seem to be generated by the latent one in res et verba.13 The play is filled with reminders of relationships between seeing and saying; this pair of concepts is diminished and extended by tears, a blurring of vision, and sighs, sometimes a passionate reduction of language and sometimes its natural or understandable extension. Heroic speech filled with sound patterns and scenes of pageantry elaborately staged by the participants transcend their simple beginnings in res et verba to finally give the play its resolution. In the preface to All for Love, Dryden explains that he has not “Copy’d” Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra “servilely,” and says that “Words and Phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding Ages” (Works, 13:18). To stress this point the first two lines of the play call our attention to proper naming and the changeable nature of language; the priest in the temple of Isis, Serapion, says that “Portents, and Prodigies, are grown so frequent, / That they have lost their Name” (1.1.1–2). The Antony we meet soon after tells his trusted general Ventidius that he has “dis-grac’d / The name of Soldier” (1.1.293–94), and the play 13. Much of the criticism of All for Love written in the last forty years sees a central opposition of some kind in the play; to my knowledge, however, no analysis focuses on res et verba. See, for example, Moody Prior’s critique of a “basic design involving two opposing sides” in The Language of Tragedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 194; and J. Douglas Carfield, “The Jewel of Great Price: Mutabilily and Constancy in Dryden’s All for Love,” ELH 42 (1975): 38–61.

The Worth of Words   81

carefully distinguishes between names that summon up values and those that remain more referential. Cleopatra, mocking Antony’s Octavia, equates her title of “Wife” with mere thingness, an equation Dryden reinforces through the structure of the poetic line: Respect is for a Wife: Am I that thing, That dull insipid lump, without desires, And without pow’r to give ’em?

(2.1.82–84)

Some names, like “Caesar’s Sister” (3.1.255), which Antony applies to Octavia, carry no suggestions of affection or worth, while the titles that Cleopatra and Antony employ in their elaborately staged meeting at the beginning of act 3 try to evoke values that the lovers, celebrating a reunion, can aspire to: a n t.: My Brighter Venus! cl eo.: O my greater Mars! a n t.: Thou joinst us well, my Love!

(3.1.11–13)

As the climactic member of this triad, “Love” transcends the power of the Gods’ names, perhaps because the two more referential ones are “joined”; to Antony and to Dryden, the meaning of “Love” can neither be fixed nor dismissed as empty because insignificant. Before speaking, the first stage direction tells us, the lovers have staged a ceremony with music and pageantry as means of demonstrating their love for the eyes of their public: the world, of course, has long known them to be lovers, but their love—like honor—constantly needs expression to make its worth known. The pageantry, accordingly, becomes as much a comment on language as on the drives and motives of Antony and Cleopatra; they earn their titles partly through a staged image in which they perform, as Cleopatra crowns Antony with a laurel wreath after their respective trains have entered accompanied by music. The names depend on something momentarily fixed, po82   The Worth of Words

tentially renewable, but finally transitory: “Love” cannot simply apply to Cleopatra as object or thing. The concept arises from a scene on stage, a scene with more things, stage properties, than words to give love public worth or credibility. The abstraction has greater meaning, at least for Antony, than the sum of all the concrete, visible presences. In his heroic role as well, Antony must constantly seek public ratification of his reputation. His moments of self-dramatization, the first one bordering on the maudlin, can be attributed to his need to fulfill his name. With no stage audience, however, his first apostrophe is too self-conscious to provide him insight or comfort: “Ant. having thrown himself down. Lye there, thou shadow of an Emperor” (1.1.216). Because his shadow self cannot inform the name of emperor, Antony lapses into a sterile poetic convention as his attempts at introspection fail. He continues to locate himself in a scene, but his imagery is general, and he uses seven adjective-noun constructions in as many lines: Live in a shady Forrest’s Sylvan Scene, Stretch’d at my length beneath some blasted Oke; I lean my head upon the Mossy Bark, And look just of a piece, as I grew from it: My uncomb’d Locks, matted like Mistletoe, Hang o’re my Hoary Face; a murmring Brook Runs at my foot.

(1.1.234–40)

Before the scene is over, the play will correct this style, as it will finally suggest the proper relation of knowledge to image, one opposed to Antony’s “More of this Image, more; it lulls my thoughts” (1.1.244). The vague imagery of pastoral convention gives the senses no basis for seeing clearly or for knowing; hence, its “image . . . lulls.” But a constant renewing of the stuff that validates the ideal prompts a more suitable heroic style with elaborate sound patterns and, later, original dramatic images of pain and loss. Before he urges Antony to act in the name The Worth of Words   83

of a great abstraction, “Up, up, for Honour’s sake” (1.1.337), Ventidius has already shown himself capable of a heroic style that relates seeing and knowing (“Can Roman see, and know him now, / Thus alter’d from the Lord of half mankind?” [1.1.175– 76]) Under prodding from Ventidius, Antony’s heroic resolve stiffens, and he ends the scene with a new style, one that announces its higher level of meaning with sound patterns rather than with conventional imagery of distinctive things; we may note especially the resonance created by the frequent joining of long vowels with m, n, and r sounds, and the three a sounds in consecutive monosyllables: Come on, My Soldier! Our hearts and armes are still the same: I long Once more to meet our foes; that Thou and I Like Time and Death, marching before our Troops, May taste fate to ’em; Mowe em out a passage, And entring where the foremost Squadrons yield, Begin the noble Harvest of the Field.

(1.1.447–53)

At a time when ornamentation and schematic patterns were under attack by reformers of language, the former fellow of the Royal Society reserved a highly wrought speech for the end of an act and put it in the mouth of his hero as one way of signaling a change in character toward a more noble course. Ventidius supplies the play’s attitude toward this level of expression: “You speak a Heroe” (1.1.437), with the ellipsis of “like” more surely equating words and nobility to make heroism an outcome of style. In this scene, the manner of expression affirms the worth of abstractions, of words not rooted in things. Not only do we find high-order abstractions throughout the play, but, as when Ventidius personifies honor, they are given active power in human affairs. One passage in act 4 is crowded with such personifications; Cleopatra and Dollabella are defending themselves to Antony:

84   The Worth of Words

a n t.: Hence, Love and Friendship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  My Justice and Revenge Will cry so loud within me, that my pity Will not be heard for either.

(4.1.528, 535–37)

dol l a. [Dollabella, Antony’s friend]: Sweet Mercy seems Its darling Attribute, which limits Justice.

(4.1.539–40)

a n t.: Treason is there in its most horrid shape, Where trust is greatest.

(4.1.545–46)

cl eop.:    Oh hear me; hear me, With strictest Justice.

(4.1.557–58)

a n t.: Honour stops my ear.

(4.1.563)

“Most horrid shape,” of course, suggests degrees of abstract value and, consequently, the difficulty of rooting its meaning in a thing, while at the same time, the personifications attribute real power to the ideals. Indeed, at one point Antony makes things and abstractions apposite: “Faith, Honour, Virtue, all good things forbid, / That I should go from her” (2.1.441–42). Antony’s resolution to leave Cleopatra had been firm until he saw her again; in act 2, seeing often relates to the emotional coloring that the viewer contributes to the seductive power of an attractive sight. Alexas, Cleopatra’s eunuch, arguing that his reason is “undisturb’d,” corrects her: You see through Love, and that deludes your sight; As, what is strait, seems crooked through the Water.

(2.1.85–86)

Cleopatra knows that if Antony could see her, he would “sigh” (2.1.24), and Charmion, her maid, knows that “He could deny The Worth of Words   85

you nothing, if he saw you” (2.1.73). Ventidius scoffs at Cleopatra’s emotive response to Antony’s argument when he ironically advises her: Now lay a Sigh i’th’way, to stop his passage: Prepare a Tear, and bid it for his Legions.

(2.1.324–25)

When Antony begins to be swayed by Cleopatra’s appeal, Ventidius tries to counter it with a comprehensive scene: “Words, words; but Actium, Sir, remember Actium” (2.1.373). Many of the elements for a full rhetorical appeal (logos, ethos, pathos) are touched upon in this scene, as they are in act 3 when Antony is briefly reunited with his wife and children. Yet these appeals to reason, values, and emotion never come together in a proper, balanced relationship; their disjointed presentation suits a character in conflict with himself and with a rapidly changing world. Octavia sets a scene for Antony, right down to stage directions. To move him, her appeal parallels Volumnia’s in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: Go to him, Children, go; Kneel to him, take him by the hand, speak to him; For you may speak, and he may own you too, Without a blush; and so he cannot all His Children; go, I say, and pull him to me, And pull him to your selves, from that bad Woman, You, Agrippina, hang upon his arms; And you, Antonia, clasp about his waste.

(3.1.350–57)

Octavia’s carefully arranged family portrait does not, however, completely win Antony over, even though it elicits a series of appropriate titles: v en.:   Was ever sight so moving! dol l a.:   Friend! octav.:   Husband! both chil dr.:   Father!

86   The Worth of Words

a n t.:   I am vanquish’d: take me Octavia; take me, Children; share me all.

(3.1.361–63)

Husband and father, of course, can be referential terms; Antony cannot be content with them for long, but the several false appearances that follow in acts 4 and 5 suggest that this world can not supply a satisfying meaning for love either. The limitations of sensory evidence are dramatized when Dollabella’s mission to Cleopatra on Antony’s behalf is misinterpreted and when Antony believes the false report of Cleopatra’s death. These two reports come to the stage and theater audiences only through words, while the tableau of death creates a present image on stage and through it a fullness of meaning for the world of the play. Even that finality, however, has a strongly qualified meaning. With Antony dead before her, Cleopatra manages the details of their final tableau: “Short Ceremony, Friends; / But yet it must be decent” (5.1.451–52). When Charmion asks why Cleopatra elaborates her costume, the reply paradoxically stresses the future even though Cleopatra heads toward death: “Dull, that thou art! why, ’tis to meet my Love” (5.1.458). She hopes that the “dear Relicks / Of my Immortal Love” (5.1.466–67) will “rest for ever here” (5.1.469); and in her final stage direction, “O turn me to him, / And lay me on his breast” (5.1.499–500), she believes that she completes the tableau as a gesture against the forces of political power and time, for she invites Caesar to do his “worst” and defies him: “Now part us, if thou canst” (5.1.500–1). Caesar, of course, never appears in the play, and Dryden artfully reserves the final directions for himself. As he hinted when he had Cleopatra call for “Haste” (5.1.462) in ordering her ceremony, he disrupts the final image with the direction that “Iras sinks down and dies,” and by having Charmion, who had been standing behind Cleopatra “as dressing her head” (5.1.501), also fall just before Serapion delivers the play’s last words: The Worth of Words   87

See, see how the Lovers sit in State together, As they were giving Laws to half Mankind. Th’ impression of a smile left in her face, Shows she dy’d pleas’d with him for whom she liv’d, And went to charm him in another World. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Sleep, blest Pair, Secure from humane chance, long Ages out, While all the Storms of Fate fly o’er your Tomb; And Fame, to late Posterity, shall tell, No Lovers liv’d so great, or dy’d so well.

(5.1.508–12, 515–19)

This speech, stylistically refined with its s and l patterns and its antitheses, invites us to “see . . . the Lovers sit” when the present tense is ironically at odds with their deaths, and when literally seeing them is virtually unavoidable. We are, rather, being invited to look beyond the literal thing on the stage to the significance of a complex stage image arranged in hasty time and marred by the collapse of two attendants, an image that will continue to speak (“Fame . . . shall tell”) because it is informed by love. The flawed life-in-death tableau can be read as Dryden’s delicately qualified response to the debate over values in language; the “Love and Valour” that Dryden and the lovers tried to realize attains permanence only for a moment as an image and only in a stage and staged presentation that will surely fade. Despite its fleeting nature, though, this attempt by the lovers and Dryden to body forth the elusive meaning of love can speak as a thing to “late Posterity”; it is renewable and meaningful. The great high-order abstractions cannot equal a single thing or be finally defined in a universally significant scheme, but their worth can be apprehended and communicated, to the conquering Romans by Serapion and to a theater audience by Dryden.14 14. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume assert that “All for Love was a great and lasting success (holding the stage to the end of the eighteenth century), and some

88   The Worth of Words

To appreciate the dramatic art of All for Love both its language and action must be evaluated. The formula of the seventeenthcentury reformers—no more things than words—gives intellectual priority to the concrete object over its expression, to fact over worthy potential; in general, their theories either exclude or devalue abstractions. Dryden’s poetic imagination projects the simultaneous presence of abstract word and symbolic thing, a fusion Dryden achieves theatrically and ritually. Because all language is symbolic in a fundamental way, word and thing can never truly be equated; in All for Love, heroic speech is inevitably deficient until confirmed by deed. Dryden’s theatrical case for meaningful abstractions affirms a balance between res and verba by emphasizing the et. In act 5 of Venice Preserv’d or A Plot Discover’d (9 February 1682), Thomas Otway’s stage direction reads: “Scene opening discovers a Scaffold and a Wheel prepar’d for the executing of Peirre, then enter Officers, Peirre and Guards, a Friar, executioner and a great Rabble” (5, post line 369).15 Similar to the tableau in All for Love, this staging, like a coup de théâtre, dramatizes the worth of one of the most politically fraught and disputed abstract terms of seventeenth-century England, cause. Associated for decades with the Good Old Cause, Otway’s cause had contemporary currency as did the less abstract term in his subtitle, “plot.” After a brief survey of “Good Old Cause,” I mean to supply the political and cultural context of Venice Preserv’d before suggesting the meaning of cause for the first audiences of the play. Without explicitly associating Otway with any side in the res et verba debate, I argue that his thinking is conditioned by that controversy and that his drama demonstrates the real consequences of value terms. In doing so, Venice Preserv’d projects values of its own intwentieth-century productions have reportedly gripped their audiences” (Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays 1675–1707 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 107. 15. In vol. 2 of The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). References in the text by act and page number are to this edition, and by page number only for prologue and epilogue.

The Worth of Words   89

dependent of its allegorical meaning and of its genre as heroic or tragic play. Christopher Hill defines the Good Old Cause from a 1655 source; it had “a dual sense of ‘the advancement of Christ’s kingdom’ and the privileges of Parliament.”16 Hill cites numerous other places to demonstrate the widespread use of the word and of its association with God’s plan; most notably, the regicides on the scaffold made that connection as they affirmed the righteousness of their cause.17 Like Hill, Elizabeth Skerpan mines seventeenthcentury pamphlets to illustrate that the phrase served several political positions; it was so flexible that “any reader may supply his own specifics” but all were opposed to established order.18 Before the Civil War (1640–49), the Good Old Cause imagined an England ruled by the saints; shortly before Charles II’s restoration (1660), the movement was “split into fragments” although in 1659, “for a few months a revival of God’s Cause seemed possible.”19 In Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660, Austin Woolrych calls “the Good Old Cause” a “catch-phrase,” “the cause for which the Civil Wars had been fought and won, but whose purity had since been lost through selfish ambitions of sectional interests.”20 As an abstract term to rally round, cause invokes visionary idealism, while in usage and application, its apparent purity becomes mixed with debasing alloys: partisanship, selfish drives, political expediency, and the need to compromise. Yet, cause as a code word carried positive connotations for anti-royalists and religious radicals. It retained potency enough in 1672 for the Puritan Andrew Marvell to endorse it ironically in a work that Charles enjoyed; referring to the Civil War, Marvell wrote: 16. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Viking, 1984), 59. 17. Hill, The Experience of Defeat, 71–74. 18. Elizabeth Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution: 1642– 1660 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 18. 19. Hill, The Experience of Defeat, 59, 161. 20. Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 709, 715.

90   The Worth of Words

Whether it were a War of Religion, or of Liberty, is not worth the labour to enquire. Which-soever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the Cause was too good to have been fought for.21

Testimony to the word’s continuing potency comes from John Dryden in 1681 in Absolom and Achitophel, a poem that Otway’s play alludes to in the next year. The Tory Dryden sees the Popish Plot as descending from the old revolutionary zeal and having the same ill purpose: But when to sin our bias’d nature leans, The careful Dev’l is still at hand with means; And providently pimps for ill desires: The Good Old Cause reviv’d a plot requires. Plots, true or false, are necessary things To raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.22

Later, Dryden strikes an antithetical balance similar to Marvell’s “top/bottom” figure; the plot was “Rais’d in extremes, and extremes decried.” The antithesis of the next line looks back to the executions of regicides and perhaps to later ones, and forward to the oaths sworn in Venice Preserv’d: “With oaths affirm’d, with dying vows deni’d” (461, lines 110–11). In 1680, the Popish Plot had sufficient interest for the publication of A Complete Catalogue of all the stitch’d books and single sheets printed since [its] first discovery, and in the next year, Aphra Behn, friend of Otway, saw her play The Roundheads or The Good Old Cause staged at Dorset Garden. In Antonia Fraser’s view, other plots were common: “There had been various plots against Charles’s own life, from the Fifth Monarchists of 1661 onwards.”23 The opening lines of Otway’s prologue 21. The Rehearsal Transpros’d 1672, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, vol. 1, ed. Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 192. 22. Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel, in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 2, ed. Elias F. Mengel Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 460, lines 79–84. 23. Antonia Fraser, Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration (New York: Knopf, 1979), 354.

The Worth of Words   91

to Venice Preserv’d not only call his audience’s attention to the dangers and prevalence of plots but acknowledge with a measure of self-consciousness the possibility that he is using the word Plot as a name that would sell his play: In these distracted times, when each man dreads The bloudy stratagems of busie heads; When we have fear’d three years we know not what, Till Witnesses begin to die o’ th’ rot, What made our Poet meddle with a Plot? Was’t that he fansy’d, for the very sake And name of Plot, his trifling Play might take?

([203], lines 1–7)

Answering his rhetorical question, Otway aligns himself with “Truth” against those who falsely testify or make vows, the “Swearers” (lines 11, 12). Having introduced the pervasive concerns of his play, Otway turns to a more specific target, Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper); echoing Dryden’s satire of the Whig leader in Absalom and Achitophel, he cues his audience’s response to the eponymous character Antonio. Dryden’s line, “Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit” (line 53), is from a relatively balanced portrait; Otway is more absolute: “Here is a Traitour too, that’s very old, / Turbulent, subtle, mischievous and bold” ([203], lines 23–24). When in “The Medal,” Dryden attributed “lewdness” and “Whoring”24 to Shaftesbury, he apparently returned the allusive compliment, for the month before the poem was published, Otway’s prologue introduces the Shaftesbury figure as “a Senatour that keeps a Whore” and is given to “lewdness” (lines 29, 31). The controversy over the meaning of words stood behind this war of words; cultural and literary allusions, heavyhanded as some are, were designed to draw readers and hearers into participation on the author’s side. In Venice Preserv’d vows have life-and-death consequenc24. Dryden, The Medal, in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satiric Verse, 1660– 1714, vol. 3, ed. Howard H. Schless (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 48, lines 37, 40.

92   The Worth of Words

es for the characters; for Otway’s audience, words in action— speech acts—present object lessons on the character of those characters. Judith Milhous and Robert Hume say that the plot of the play “is simplicity itself”; I bracket my amplification of their act-by-act summary: I. Jaffeir, broke, is refused help by Priuli [father of his wife, Belvidera. Pierre introduces him to the concept of a conspiracy against the state of Venice]. II. Jaffeir joins the conspiracy [and delivers Belvidera to the distrustful conspirators as a pledge of his commitment to their cause]. III. Jaffeir becomes disillusioned with the conspirators [because one of them tried to rape Belvidera]. IV. Jaffeir betrays the conspiracy [and his friend Pierre along with the others]. V. Catastrophe ensues.25

Jaffeir’s conflict is dramatized as between love and honor, the characteristic theme of the heroic play. He compromises his love for his wife in act 2 and loses honor in his acts of betrayal in act 5. In his first words to Jaffeir, Pierre greets him as “the honest Partner of my Heart” (1.121), but when Jaffeir questions “how that damn’d starving Quality / Call’d Honesty, got footing in the World” (1.123–24), Pierre undermines any positive meaning the great social abstraction may be thought to have: Honest men Are the soft easy Cushions on which Knaves Repose and fatten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  Honesty was a Cheat invented first To bind the Hands of bold deserving Rogues, That Fools and Cowards might sit safe in Power, And lord it uncontroul’d above their Betters.

(1.126–28, 132–36)

25. Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretation, 181.

The Worth of Words   93

In his reply, Jaffeir may be offering his friend a chance to soften his view, or he may be simply puzzled after being greeted as honest; in either case, he associates Pierre with the reformers of language: “Then [i.e., by your logic] Honest is but a Notion” (1.136). Pierre’s response finishes the poetic line with three stressed syllables that emphatically allude to the res et verba debate: “Nothing else” (1.136). The no-thing, he quickly elaborates, is “Like wit, much talkt of, not to be defin’d” (1.137). A dozen lines later, Pierre begins ironic play on the meaning of “villain,” professing to be one because he sees “the suffering of my fellow Creatures” (1.152) but who has yet to act against the senate that makes them all “slaves and tell us ’tis our Charter” (1.164). In this dialogue, before Venice Preserv’d portrays Pierre as a conspirator and before any oaths are sworn, Otway puts before the audience prefatory doubts about language as a means of communicating clear meaning and values. His concerns, not expressed outside the text as clearly as Dryden’s, are nonetheless strikingly similar to those dramatized in All for Love, with the crucial difference that his Venice alludes more surely to the England of his time. Allegorical readings of Venice Preserv’d, invited by undisguised references to Shaftesbury and the Popish Plot, most often cannot resolve the play’s inherent tensions. Indeed, probably the most coherent interpretation, Zera Fink’s, makes such demands on an audience’s ingenuity that it is doubtful Charles II himself, never mind the politically less astute, would get the point in performance.26 At its most successful, decoding an allegory can reduce a complex work to the level of factual narrative; the events click into place, the meaning is settled. To be sure, Otway’s epilogue explicitly offers that kind of unambiguous lesson, but far less than the events of the time evoked:

26. Zera Fink, “Venice, Its Senate, and Its Plot in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d,” Modern Philogy 80 (1983): 256–63.

94   The Worth of Words

The Text is done and now for Application, And when that’s ended pass your Approbation.

([289], lines 1–2)

However, succeeding lines—quoted below—recall and at first seem to resolve conflicting meanings generated by the one of the play’s and the century’s most explosive terms, cause, a no thing for which Pierre, Jaffeir, commonwealth men and regicides died. Throughout Venice Preserv’d, cause is used in its practical sense: the action or thing that produces an effect. But only in the first three acts and only in scenes with Pierre, Jaffeir and the conspirators does its ideal, political, no-thing meaning appear. The first instance echoes specific revolutionary usage; Pierre’s modifier connects him to rebels and regicides who saw their cause as blessed by heaven: “Now could this glorious Cause but find out friends / To do it right” (1.216–70). In act 2, Bedamar uses the same key phrase in a similar verbal context; he invites any coconspirators to identify “friends” they would “save” from the general slaughter of their “glorious cause.” Pierre, having recruited him earlier, introduces Jaffeir as one who “knows the very Business of this Hour; / But he rejoices in the Cause, and loves it” (2.304–5). His persuasion of Jaffeir in the previous scene occurs in a context that associates Pierre with pure evil; like Milton’s Satan, Jaffeir carries hell with him to the meeting: “I look as if all Hell were in my Heart, / And I in Hell” (2.67–8). Later, in what may be an aside, he characterizes Pierre: “I but half wisht / To see the Devil, and he’s here already” (2.99–100). With evil established early in both characters, any nobility attached to their cause later is at best severely qualified. When, then, Pierre assures Jaffeir that “it’s a Cause thou wilt be fond of,” his rationale is further tainted at its very foundation: “For it is founded on the noblest Basis, / Our Liberties, our natural Inheritance” (2.153–55). The allusion to Shaftesbury’s politics is clear, for he argued from “natural” lineage to promote the illegitimate Monmouth as heir to the throne, and “liberty,” freThe Worth of Words   95

quently paired with “property” at the time, was a Whig or country party rallying cry. Besides being represented by Antonio, Shaftesbury is also represented in Venice Preserv’d by the conspirator’s leader, Renault, a man whose speech and behavior compromise the cause. His admiration for Catiline is stressed by the emphatic monosyllables that conclude his tribute. Pierre asks, “Was not Brutus / . . . A Gallant Man?” and Renault replies: Yes and Cateline too; Tho story wrong his Fame; for he conspir’d To prop the reeling Glory of his Country: His Cause was Good.

(2.250–53)

Pierre’s endorsement of Jaffeir does not suffice, for Jaffeir “read[s] distrust in all [the conspirators’] faces” (2.332) and offers his love, Belvidera, as a pledge of his commitment. To calm her fears, Jaffeir invokes richly connotative value terms: “I’ve contriv’d thy honour; / Trust to my Faith.” He imagines lifting her to such a “height” that “the gazing World [will] wonder what strange Virtue plac’d thee there” (2.404–9). But Renault violates honor as an ideal when he tries to violate Belvidera’s body. Significantly, Otway subordinates the off-stage rape attempt, brutally symptomatic as it is of the popular love and honor conflict, to the political point: ja ff.: May not a Man then trifle out an hour With a kind Woman and not wrong his calling? pierr.: Not in a cause like ours. ja ff.   Then Friend our Cause Is in a damn’d condition: for I’ll tell thee That Canker-worm call’d Letchery has toucht it.

(3.229–33)

It is ironically appropriate, then, that the faithless Renault deliver one of the play’s last uses of cause as a flawed ideal. Although he appeals to virtue and honor, Renault believes that 96   The Worth of Words

“there’s nothing pure upon the Earth, / That the most valu’d things have most allays” (3.2.384–85). Jaffeir “droop[s]” when Renault adds the alloy of personal pursuit to the rhetorical mix and distinguishes revolutionary action (“our Swords”) from its presumed goal: But let’s all remember We wear no common Cause upon our Swords, Let each Man think that on his single Virtue Depends the Good and Fame of all the rest; Eternal Honour or perpetual Infamy.

(3.2.343–48 [my emphasis])

Cause in its ambiguous political sense does not appear again until the play is over. Through the speaker of the epilogue, Otway takes command of the word and applies it to himself as object of “causeless hatreds” (289, line 12) but who “serves a cause too good to let him fear” the thuggish types who attacked Dryden in Rose Alley (289, line 16). Without changing a word, this last claim could have heartened a regicide on the scaffold; Otway surely intends an allusion to the Good Old Cause, for speaking of the Duke of York, who attended the play in March of ’82, he sees in him the image of his father, Charles I: “A face, in which [The Rebel-Tribe] such lineaments they reade / Of that great Martyr’s, whose rich bloud they shed.” (286, lines 26, 31–32). Exploiting the wide-ranging application of what is “not to be defin’d”— the play’s undermining of cause in the age’s usage—he deftly makes Whigs the present heirs of the regicides and a continuing threat: “their rebellious hate they still retain, / And in his Son would murther Him again” (286, 33–34). The connection between the martyred Charles and the Good Old Cause had been made for Otway decades earlier, and accounts of the executions of the regicides at the Restoration supply part of the context for act 5 of Venice Preserv’d. For Christopher Feake writing in 1659, “The Good Old Cause . . . was transformed by the King’s execution into ‘the most lovely, lively, growing, prosperous Cause in The Worth of Words   97

all the earth.’”27 Charles’s behavior at his death in 1629 came out of a well-defined tradition and was widely publicized. Decades later, the regicides spoke and acted in much the same way, almost like his soul mates at times. Pierre, however, does not belong in this tradition, and to the extent that Otway’s audience would recognize key discrepancies, his nobility would be diminished. That nobility is enforced by his clear conscience (5.381–83), but he rejects any spiritual comfort. Like Charles I, martyrs before him, and regicides who said that they were on a joyful journey at their deaths, Pierre tells Jaffeir that he is “preparing for the land of peace” and would have his friend and all good men like him “bless [his] journey” (5.408, 410). He pays tribute to the conspirators who were executed before him (“all dy’d like men . . . / Worthy their Character” [5.423–24]), but he himself weeps, and although Jaffeir’s nobility may cause it, other victims studied to suppress that “weakness” (5.349). Charles wore an extra shirt against the cold lest any trembling be mistaken for fear. In 1660, when General Harrison trembled at the knees, he attributed it to old wounds; seeing the gallows, he was “transported with joy.”28 A negative account of Hugh Peters’s death says that he wept, but in another, he is smiling just before his death after being forced to watch John Cooke’s quartering and after being taunted by the bloody hangman. “Mr. Scot’s Speech upon the Ladder” was interrupted early and often by the sheriff who prohibited any talk of politics, but Scot still managed to insinuate the “Cause” into his prayer.29 On the third night of Venice Preserv’d, one member of the audience, Charles II, had ordered executions of regicides; he had “watched some” of them and in his own words, had become “weary of hanging.” In December of 1680, the hangman held up the head of Lord Stafford, an innocent Popish Plot victim, 27. Quoted by Hill in The Experience of Defeat, 54. 28. The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harison [sic] . . . Octob. 13. Mr. John Carew, Octob.15. Mr. Justice Cooke, Mr. Hugh Peters, Octob. 16. [etc.] (London, 1660), 7. 29. Speeches and Prayers. For Peters, 63–64; for Scot, 61 [mispaged].

98   The Worth of Words

but “there were no cheers from the crowd”; Charles had reluctantly signed the death warrant only sparing Stafford “the traditional and disgusting mutilation.”30 In 1678, William Staley was “executed during the Popish Plot terror”; his “quarters . . . were affixed to the city gates, and his head set up to rot on London bridge.” In August of 1681, Stephen College was “hanged and quartered” as a plotter.31 For Charles and for many others in Otway’s audience, then, cause and execution were inextricably linked—the first, “not to be defin’d,” the second, a thing often too graphic. For them, too, those executed for their politics, including Charles I as well as the regicides, performed predictable roles in a proscribed pattern and had their deaths memorialized in theatrical language. In this historical context, when the scaffold and wheel were “discovered” in act 5 of Venice Preserv’d, the first audiences surely could have supplied an informing context for what would follow. They could reasonably have expected to hear “cause” again, and while a hideous quartering could not have been enacted realistically, the prospect of such a horror and the memories of others could have uneased them. Not willing to leave the details to the culturally conditioned imaginations of his audience, Otway has Belvidera foretell the details of Pierre’s execution in act 4. She pictures drawing and quartering, and the taunting of the hangman; Pierre’s will be “a tormenting and a shamefull death, / His bleeding bowels, and broken limbs / Insulted o’r by a vile butchering villain” (4.454–56). Distraught by her words, Jaffeir, furthering Otway’s dramatic strategy, repeats the same details a few lines later in rhetorical questions. Pierre’s behavior breaks the traditional pattern of a person dedicated to a cause. Besides weeping, he contrasts with Harrison and others in not being “transported with joy” at the sight of the scaffold and the instruments of torture and death. Understandably, he thinks it not “fit [that] a Souldier, who has 30. Fraser, Royal Charles, 185, 400. 31. Engel, “Headnotes,” Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 2, 42, 448.

The Worth of Words   99

liv’d with Honour . . . be expos’d a common Carcass on a Wheel” (5.445, 447) as regicides were ignominiously exposed. To some extent, then, the scaffold scene in Venice Preserv’d presents a human, sympathetic Pierre whose death is noble because he asks Jaffeir to kill him so that he can avoid being exposed to ignominious torture. With both men on the scaffold and Pierre bound by the executioners, Jaffeir stabs him and then himself. At the same time, Pierre articulates selfish motives, appeals to no higher cause and exhibits nothing like the stoic, steadfast courage of Charles I or the regicides, and, rejecting the Friar, he equates him with Satan (“Hence, tempter.” [5.462]). Otway also removes a traditional religious element from the execution scene. In one of the most frequently repeated lines in narratives of Charles’s execution, he says that he is going “from a Corruptible, to an Incorruptible Crown”; the immensely popular Eikon Basilike pictured that heavenly crown inscribed with “Gloriam.”32 Regicides appropriated the icon for themselves; Cooke said, “My Enemies . . . hasten me . . . to my Crown and Glory”;33 Harrison saw his heavenly “Crown” just before forgiving the hangman, and Carew felt “joy” at the thought of the “Glorious Crown” that Christ held ready for him. Self-destructive, neither Pierre nor Jaffeir utter visionary final speeches; Pierre would avoid “disgrace,” a social stigma (5.451), and Jaffeir curses the “Rulers” (5.469). The Officer hopes that he will “dye so well” (5.480) as the two; however, the final moments of the play give them an afterlife of horror. When the “scene shuts upon them,” Belvidera enters “distracted” (5.480) with her father and servants. Jaffeir’s ghost “rises” and “sinks” before her; she thinks him alive until his ghost and Pierre’s “rise together both bloody” (5.499). No more transfigured than the bodies of regicides exhumed for disgrace at the Restoration, they “drag [Belvidera] to the bottom” and cause her death. In the epilogue to the play, Otway sees anoth32. Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), xii. 33. Speeches and Prayers, 27.

100   The Worth of Words

er “Conspiracy . . . hatching” from “causeless hatreds” (289, lines 3, 4). Unlike his enemies, he “serves a cause too good to let him fear” the likes of those who attacked Dryden in Rose Alley; such men act from a “private cause where malice reigns” (289, lines 16, 21). Otway’s phrase, “cause too good,” recalls Marvell’s “The cause was too good” and repossesses the catch-phrase to conclude that the Good Old Cause and Shaftesbury’s present one, be it parliamentary power or the succession of a Protestant, are by extension, valueless. Cause in the right context, here a Tory one, can be meaningful in itself and belong with Truth (23), Love, Goodness, Honour, Peace, and Vertue (288, lines 23, 37–41). Venice Preserv’d does not affirm abiding values in the lofty terms of its epilogue; rather, it dramatizes the bloody consequences of the unthinking acceptance of catch phrases and what Richard Weaver would centuries later call a God term. In their plays, neither David Hare nor Tom Stoppard participates formally in the debate over meaning that began with the language reformers of the seventeenth century, but both often use the very terms that have framed that debate and, as a result, they challenge audiences to examine their own values as the worth of words is presented dramatically. For many of Hare’s characters, the issues are momentous: whether words are signs of things; whether abstract terms carry values or whether the audience supplies them; whether meaning is so indeterminate that political or social discourse is futile. Characteristically, Hare creates dramatic situations in which the social and moral force of language is tested and evaluated. These situations are, as a result, rhetorical ones because the potential of language to effect change in the ways we think and argue is paramount. A prolific playwright, Hare knows very well how to shape a drama, but in the following pages, plot summaries are not necessary as preliminaries to an appreciation of the language choices his characters make and face. Assertions about meaning range from the absolute, out-of-fashion conviction of Irwin in The Secret Rapture (“There’s such a thing as evil. You’re dealing with The Worth of Words   101

evil”)34 to contemporary reader-response theory as expressed by the novelist Mehta in A Map of the World: The reader brings to the book his own preconceptions, prejudices perhaps. He misreads sentences. Insignificant words that seem to you bland carry for him or her some huge significance. A tiny incident in the narrative is for one person the key to the book’s interpretation; to another it is where he accidentally turns two pages and misses it altogether.35

To be sure, Hare does not speak in his own voice in his plays and films, but it is still clear that he concedes no moral ground to advocates of indeterminacy. In his “version” Of Maxim Gorky’s Enemies, he puts a Derridean premise in the mouth of a clownish general, a practical joker who represents a fading authority. The owner of a factory defends his sympathy for striking workers as his “trying to do good”; the general rejects his thinking outright: “‘Good’? What’s ‘good’? It isn’t even a word. It’s just a group of letters.”36 Compare M. H. Abrams: “Like Derrida, [J. Hillis] Miller sets up as his given the written text, ‘innocent black marks on a page’ which are endowed with traces, or vestiges of meaning.”37 While a sense of loss pervades Hare’s various treatments of meaning, he does not despair of language’s efficacy. Indeed, he insists that we take a moral point of view in the face of a morally ambiguous world. The instrument for defining and negotiating that position is language, and Hare’s most complex attitudes toward its usefulness are manifested through dramatic speech, delivery, and lighting. In his essay “Four Actors,” Hare endorses Vanessa Redgrave’s commitment to values and equates her inner state with something “real”: 34. David Hare, The Secret Rapture (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 2.57. Textual references are to act, scene when specified in the text, or act and page number. 35. Hare, A Map of the World (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), act 2.76. 36. Hare, Enemies (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), act 2.52–53. 37. M. H. Abrams, “The Deconstructive Angel,” in Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 205.

102   The Worth of Words

[Redgrave’s] values are curiously nineteenth century. More than anyone I have met she believes in the great abstract nouns, with capital letters, like Youth and Enthusiasm and Wickedness and Art. These nouns are real to her, and inform all her acting.38

The director Jonathan Kent, having worked with Hare, sees the same values in the man himself: “He’s a utopian, and words like ‘faith,’ ‘decency,’ and ‘honour’ have real meaning for him.”39 Hare, a realist as well as a utopian, knows that words like those can be abused by the powerful; in The Judas Kiss, his Oscar Wilde character makes the point: “If the cost of being understood [to get ‘society’s approval’] is that I must issue manifestos, issue statements, hack our dull fatuous slices of prose, full of abstract nouns, nouns as heavy as lead weights, then, no! The price is too high.”40 In contrast, the Thatcherite Marion in The Secret Rapture makes a more modern, pragmatic observation: “I don’t believe this. This is most peculiar. What is this? A vow? It’s outrageous. People making vows. What are vows? Nobody’s made vows since the nineteenth century” (act 2.63). As a speech act, a vow represents the highest kind of responsible usage because it makes a spiritual pledge against the vagaries of time to come; it pledges that the values of the self will remain constant regardless of circumstances. As Hare sees it, Redgrave’s belief works in a similar way. This creative, meaningful connection between the inner self and speech (“acting” in Redgrave’s case) can be the source of values in a world, like Marion’s, that has lost touch with them. The pun on “characters” in the following exchange from Knuckle stresses this inevitable human participation in creating meaning; the reminder of a literary character indicates the opportunities and limitations facing the playwright who often speaks through unreliable speakers like these: 38. In Hare, Writing Left-Handed (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 168. 39. Quoted in Richard Boon, About Hare: The Playwright and His Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 214. 40. Hare, The Judas Kiss (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), act 2.110.

The Worth of Words   103

mrs du n ning: I wonder why all the words my generation believed in—words like honour and loyalty—are now just a joke. cu r ly: I guess it’s because of some of the characters they’ve knocked around with.41

In Hare’s film Wetherby, Morgan contrasts meaningful abstractions and those terms applied by our century to the inner self: Well, I don’t know. I only know goodness and anger and revenge and evil and desire . . . These seem to me far better words than neurosis and psychology and paranoia. These old words . . . these good old words have a sort of conviction which all this modern apparatus of language now lacks.

Morgan, we know in this flashback, is already a suicide; the “good old words” were evidently churning within him in irreconcilable conflict. If the “modern apparatus of language” lacks an objective framework, and hence “conviction,” personal passion is no more sure a guide: roger: Define your terms. (morga n looks at him.) morga n: They don’t need defining. If you can’t feel them you might as well be dead.42

In Amy’s View, the veteran actor, Esme, challenges the values of Dominic’s commercially successful films. She is “appalled by the violence”; the young man defends himself by imposing his meaning in an irrelevant distinction that ignores her point: “We don’t call it violence. We call it action.” As she becomes “disturbingly out of control,” she moves from invoking realism as a general artistic standard to what has happened in her life, in Dominic’s and in Amy’s, her dead daughter. As in Wetherby, Hare repeats the conjunction for the cumulative effect of polysyndeton, and recalling the res et verba debate calls the abstractions “things”: “Is 41. In The History Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pt. 1.36. 42. In Heading Home, Wetherby and Dreams of Leaving (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 123.

104   The Worth of Words

it that you just don’t dare to deal with real experience . . . with the things that really go on in real life? Like grief . . . and betrayal . . . and love and unhappiness . . . and loss . . . the loss of people we love.”43 In Amy’s View, Wetherby, and elsewhere, Hare fudges the terms of any formula that would equate feeling with morality, yet he constantly challenges us to examine how feeling prompts us to act on our values. Morgan is at best an ambiguous spokesman, and his list of abstractions is morally indiscriminate. Yet, his words carry “conviction” because of their moral weight independent of a political or social context. When Hare gives a character such absolute moral diction, the lines are delivered with force or fervor, but the speaker, ironically, does not always have the moral dedication necessary to justify the tone. In Pravda (co-written with Howard Brenton), Lambert Le Roux’s first-act curtain speech uses biblical diction (“cast out”) and articulates a traditional religious belief about life as a struggle. However, Le Roux, modeled after Rupert Murdoch, has just sacked many employees arbitrarily; his amorality gives a frightening undercurrent to the surface meaning of his words: “We have cast out the bad. There was bad on this paper. Life is a fight between the good and the bad.”44 In Wrecked Eggs, when Grace becomes “suddenly vehement” over the morality of gentrification in New York, she states the issue in an unexceptionable way, but she herself writes copy to defend the practice she condemns. So the audience should not necessarily trust Grace’s delivery as an index of her values or of the play’s: The question is never “Is this right or wrong?” (She shakes her head, suddenly vehement.) It’s not “Shall we do this?” “Should this be done?” No, it’s “Do we like the guy who’s doing this? Is he a nice guy?”45 43. Hare, Amy’s View (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), act 4.120. The ellipses appear in the text to signify a pause in the actor’s delivery. Later textual references are to act and page number. 44. Hare and Brenton, Pravda (London: Methuen, 1985), act 1.62. 45. Hare, Wrecked Eggs, in The Bay at Nice and Wrecked Eggs (London: Faber and

The Worth of Words   105

Even when a speaker seems truly committed to a moral course, delivery can still betray him—as Judd tells Chesnau, the advocate of a humane evacuation from Vietnam in Hare’s television film Saigon: “Lately you’ve become very loud. Whether you’re right or wrong, it’s not very effective. You’re not going to make anyone change their mind.” Forceful, apparently sincere delivery is divorced from the speaker’s ethos; indeed, Chesnau’s passion effectively diverts attention from the moral question: “Raising your voice . . . [is] self-indulgent,” Judd continues, “And it doesn’t have the effect you require.”46 In these passages, Hare confronts us with deliberately obscured uses of right and wrong as topics of argument; his common thread is the character of the speaker, but that source of rhetorical ethos can be as empty as the language people use. Similarly, the line between right and wrong is blurred by the dramatic form of A Map of the World. In that play relations between ethical character and commitment to change are complicated by the dramatic technique of overlapping scenes, from the set where filming a novel is being rehearsed to discussions of the “real” beliefs of the novelist, the actors and others attending a UNESCO conference on world poverty in India. Martinson is running the conference called to result in social action on a global scale, so expressing clear, principled positions is necessary as prelude to any action. Yet to Peggy, an American actress, personal prejudice determines behavior: “Principle, indeed! People do what they want to, then afterwards, if it suits them, they call it principle.” Stephen, an English journalist, objects in language that flatly identifies morality and reality: “Certain things are important. Certain things are good.” Peggy’s response stresses the personal pronoun, emphatically returning values to their source in the individual: “When he [M’Bengue, an Anglophile Indian novelist] says ‘principle,’  we listen. It’s at some cost. It’s at some personal expense. But your principles have been bought Faber, 1986), one act, 77. Similarly, The Bay at Nice is without act or scene divisions. 46. Hare, Saigon: Year of the Cat (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 50–51.

106   The Worth of Words

in the store on the corner and cost you nothing.”47 Peggy’s diction, however, undermines her apparent moral superiority, for she defines principle in monetary terms (“cost,” “expense”) that apply to M’Bengue as well as to Stephen. Few would dispute Peggy’s claim that the character of the speaker leads us to “listen”; we have the authority of Aristotle that “character is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor in persuasion.”48 In addition, dramatic fictions necessarily present us with appearances, but Hare’s characters—like the politicians produced by modern image-makers—also use diction that appears ethical, and their onstage critics, like Peggy, often speak in the same terms. Through this challenging presentation, Hare apparently wants his audience to approach speech much as he expects it to judge the twelve scenes of Plenty, a play in which chronology is juggled and place shifts from London to the Continent. The Suez crisis and undercover action in World War II provide the stuff of some scenes; Hare writes in a postscript: Each of these actions is intended to be ambiguous . . . This ambiguity is central to the idea of the play. The audience is asked to make its own mind up about each of the actions. In the act of judging the audience learns something about its own values.49

We are to decide whether words like the “good old” ones carry values; whether their use by various speakers is responsible— that is, whether the speakers mean what they say and accept the consequences of their words; and, frequently in a Hare play, whether speech can effect any true social or political change. Hare sets forth the premises for our judging without connecting them to any clear conclusion. When, for example, Robbie questions Grace’s speech in Wrecked Eggs (cited earlier) as “kind of pointless,” Loelia invokes the standard that Hare seems to endorse: “She feels it, Robbie.” She adds that, as a re47. Hare, A Map of the World (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), act 1.45. 48. Aristotle on Rhetoric, bk. 1, 1356a, 38. 49. Hare, “A Note on Performance,” in Plenty (London, 1978), 87.

The Worth of Words   107

sult of that personal feeling, Grace’s belief deserves “respect.” Robbie’s “I do respect it” moves the exchange toward resolution until he adds, “However, I also happen to think she’s wrong.” Robbie doesn’t tell us if Grace is wrong in her feelings, her beliefs, or in her ambivalent yoking of the two. The audience hears an unambiguous, absolute moral term (“wrong”) in a dramatic context that prohibits sure interpretation. In The Bay at Nice, Valentina’s delivery and style are convincingly forceful; in the following exchange, her sudden reaction indicates genuine emotion, and her short sentences and simple diction suggest conviction: sophi a: I still have the right. (va l en tina suddenly gets angry.) va l en tina: Don’t use that word. You have the right? What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. Be a person. Do what you have to. Don’t prattle about rights. (1.24)

Again, we are left in a muddle. After all, Valentina is an ultimate judge of meaning for the play’s central dramatic metaphor, the onstage painting of uncertain provenance, and she posits the same belief that Hare subscribes to elsewhere: “Be a person.” Yet, she is no advocate for personal freedom in her domineering tone (“Don’t use that word”) and in her quasi-satiric juxtaposing of “prattle” and “rights.” A more obviously reductive treatment of the bond between values and the self appears in Pravda: l e rou x: . . . Moral feelings? They pass. A second. What are they? Little chemical drops in the brain. A vague feeling of unease, like indigestion. A physical mood. Too much dinner. “Oh, I have a feeling,” then in the morning it’s gone. You’re there. You’re the owner. You’re a fact. (1.4.45)

“Owner” is reminiscent of Peggy’s “cost” and “expense”; it is on the same level of measurement as “fact,” relatively low in rela108   The Worth of Words

tion to worth. Hare laments the passing of the great abstractions, but he will not substitute a positivist view in their place. His practice rejects that position, for literal, material, and factual meanings are favored not only by Le Roux, where we might expect them, but also by one clergyman in Hare’s generally sympathetic treatment of the Church of England, Racing Demon. The absolutist point of the curate, Tony Ferris, allows no shades of meaning when he judges others. He can call a questionable connection—that Reverend Lionel Espy’s manner of spiritual counseling caused a man to abuse his wife—a “fact,”50 and he compares his spiritual power to a machine: “I can throw on three extra generators” (2.75). Concerned about “statistics” and “numbers” (1.17) of churchgoers, he is rhetorically inept, antagonizing the people he would change. He is even capable of turning a prayer into a self-assertive lecture to God: “Christ didn’t come to sit on a committee. He didn’t come to do social work. He came to preach repentance . . . God, please help Lionel to see this” (1.22). Through the style of Tony Ferris Hare’s concerns with the ways in which language means are all projected: the worth of moral absolutes, the self as source of meaning, the limitations of literal diction, the efficacy of speech. Early in Racing Demon, Tony and his lover, Frances Parnell, break off their relationship in natural dialogue that subtly insists on the superiority of language of moral worth. Tony, the clergyman, may not realize that he hides behind empty fashionable terms; Frances, the nonbeliever, surely knows that ethical linguistic categories (“sinning” and “lying”) can accurately label personal behavior. Tony draws unreflective ease from the broad, shallow pool of contemporary usage: he speaks of “a caring and loving relationship” and of “a long-term commitment,” he would “share what I think” and “communicate my thoughts” (1.7–8), but his verbs are cant terms that promise open disclosure as they withhold it. “Share” in current usage often qualifies as a euphemism for “tell” in the patronizing sense of the 50. Hare, Racing Demon (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), act 2.53.

The Worth of Words   109

word; it suits Tony well. Against these gutted terms, Hare ironically plays off the sad filler “I mean.” Four times in one speech Tony falls back on that expression; it introduces either incomplete thoughts or qualifications that prevent clear meaning (“sort of” and “you understand”): I mean, I know this sounds terrible, but the fact is, our relationship . . . well, we understand. It’s a caring and loving relationship, with some eventual purpose. It’s in the context of . . . well, of our future. Of one day marrying. I mean we’ve sort of joked about it. But I think that’s what we’ve both thought. Haven’t we? (He pauses. She doesn’t answer.) I mean, you know I would never . . . the physical experience, I mean you understand it’s always in the context of a long-term commitment.

(1.7)

Tony’s most revealing verbal strategy may be his mystifying use of “context.” Traditionally, locating words in context led to greater precision by setting limits on their application; lately, appealing to “context” has become a way of dodging responsibility by politicians and other people on the defensive. Tony’s abuse of the term in the modern manner comes through sharply, for he appeals to a context that doesn’t even exist: “It’s in the context of . . . well, of our future.” As Tony falters on, Hare artfully displays his confusion through multiple verbal clues: (1)  the juxtaposition of his filler “I mean” to “you know” and “you understand”—an unconscious admission that the burden of meaning is transferred to Frances; (2) his failure to articulate a complete thought despite the absolute and emphatic “never”; (3) the contrast of “never” with “always,” which in turn contrasts with “long-term” and the relative connotations of “context”; and 4) Tony’s qualifying “context,” his signal of clarity, with “if you like” and with fragments of sentences and thought. In this same scene, Racing Demon finally rejects Tony’s expression and subscribes to the standards that Frances’s style evokes; her moral diction provides the boundaries for the most

110   The Worth of Words

serious dialogue, and she reduces Tony to silence at the scene’s end. After his rationalizing speeches, she—who has had far less to say—renders Tony wordless by raising the linguistic subtext to the play’s surface: fr a nces: Why is there one word you’re frightened to use? ton y: Which one? (Frowns.) What word? fr a nces: I’m not a Christian, so it doesn’t frighten me. ton y: I have no idea what you mean. fr a nces: (Smiles) The word is sin. Why don’t you use it? You’ve been sinning. (He looks at her, silenced.) Well, isn’t that what you think? (1.10)

As a Christian, Tony should know that “sin” has an objective meaning outside all his self-serving talk. Others, like Frances, need not accept such moral categories, but one who does can no longer center meaning in the self. The correspondence between self-centered meaning and general values is mocked by Valentina in The Bay at Nice. To her daughter’s axiom, “In their private life, a person must be free to live as they choose,” she reacts first with an incredulous raising of her eyebrows and then with a belligerent question: “My goodness me, your principles are convenient. You call that an ideal?” (20). Her casual “goodness” anticipates similar Hare examples in social discourse of words drained of their spiritual values; Streaky in Racing Demon, a young priest eager to please, reacts to talk of damnation with a “gracious” (2.58). Valentina will not accept the hypocrisy that drapes fine-sounding names over selfish behavior: How convenient. Goodness. An ideal. Which also coincides with what you want. How perfect . . . For me, it had a different name. I never called it principle. I called it selfishness.

(20)

The Worth of Words   111

Again, absolute diction (“ideal,” “principle”) establishes the gulf between naming and reality when the speaker alone is free to determine meaning. Frances Parnell is more honest than Sophia when she tells Tony: “I didn’t make love in any ‘context.’ Whatever that may mean. I made love because I wanted you” (1.9). By way of contrast, Stephen in A Map of the World turns heavy irony on Peggy for rationalizing her desires under the name of “freedom”: “Gosh, well, thank goodness” (1.46). Unlike Frances in Racing Demon and contrary to Samuel Johnson’s maxim, Peggy may be a hypocrite in her pleasures. Her offer to be the prize in the debate between Mehta and Stephen debases both personal desire and the ideal behind the form of open verbal exchange. Peggy would attach the highsounding terms “freedom” and “principle” to her offer, but Stephen insists that it be given a more proper name: “That’s not freedom. My God, that’s bartering” (1.47). This negative judgment, expressed in a metaphor of trade, constitutes one of the poles in Hare’s scheme of linguistic things. The simply measurable or transactional lacks the inherent worth of the good old abstractions, no matter how strongly they resist defining. Hence, Tony’s unwitting pun in Racing Demon damns him to us and to Frances when he concludes an appeal based on his emotional confusion with “I’m not sure I can afford that any more” (1.10 [my emphasis]). Hare is too thoughtful an artist to suggest that we operate from either one extreme, the tangible, or the other, the abstract; instead, they are mixed together dramatically, as at the very end of A Map of the World. The Stephen actor defines his car technically, exclusively on the What is it? level: “It’s a steel-grey, 2.4 litre 1954 Alvis.”51 This unconscious moral reduction is prelude to “It’s my whole life.” The figure who has spoken for higher values earlier in the play becomes the enthusiast for a thing that he identifies with his whole being. Mehta’s 51. Hare, A Map of the World, act 2.83. In A Map, characters appear both as media figures or participants in a world conference on poverty and as actors who play those characters in a film purporting to depict what happened at the conference.

112   The Worth of Words

response, “Yes. I am sure,” ironically confirms the confusion of object and worth. As the winner’s trophy, Peggy is a stage presence during the men’s debate, a constant, ironic reminder that her body as a sexual commodity occasions the speeches over principle. The debate itself deals directly with the political efficacy of language. To address that topic, one in which Hare has a deep professional concern, the adversaries raise the collateral, preliminary ones about meaning. On that level, the clear winner is Stephen. At the outset, Mehta tries to “bait” Stephen with a condescending tone, but Hare calls attention to Mehta’s limited vision by having Peggy interrupt him just as he uses a term of calculation: mehta: But I had not reckoned . . . peg gy: Victor!

(2.65)

This implicit comment on Mehta’s values is then amplified by Stephen’s charge that Mehta poses as “a finished human being” who is “objective” and without “emotions.” In a characteristic Hare development, Mehta’s own words then expose him, for he calls his emotive label of Graham Greene (“charlatan”) “an objective fact” (2.65), a willful wrenching of fact’s meaning to defend a personal position. Mehta takes the strategic ground of many contemporary politicians with the appeal to objectivity; like them, he goes on to base his ethos on a personal narrative of doubtful relevance: “My mother died when I was born.” Having misnamed linguistic value as objective fact, Mehta should not be persuasive when his endorsement of “the value of [the West’s] material prosperity” (2.66) makes the same basic error again. Mehta, then, confuses matters on the most fundamental level where any distinctions between referential and moral meanings are made. Nonetheless, he delivers the most impassioned attack on bureaucratic abuse of language, and he speaks unequivocally in support of an author’s “individual integrity” (2.68):

The Worth of Words   113

mehta: this now-futile United Nations. stephen: Futile? Why futile? mehta: Futile because it no longer does any good. (He gets up again, shouting.) Words! Meaningless words! Documents! . . . A bureaucracy drowning in its own words and suffocating in its own documents . . . In this universe of idiocy, the only thing we may rely on is the lone voice—the lone voice of the writer— who speaks only when he has something to say. (2.67–68)

Lest we hear the unfiltered voice of David Hare sounding through Mehta, we should recall that a stage direction like “shouting” often signals something akin to bluster, loud delivery overriding objections. Stephen returns us to the beginning level of solid evaluation when he censures Mehta for delighting in the “dismal statistic” and for opposing “information” to “hope” (2.69). Aside from other points that Stephen scores against Mehta, the most telling one stands unrefuted—that despite “the points of order” and “verbiage,” political discourse achieves worthwhile goals: “Crises are averted, aid is directed.” The factual ring to Stephen’s claims is strengthened by his calm delivery, contrasting sharply with Mehta’s shouting; he remains seated, only “leaning forward” for emphasis (2.71), while Mehta stands in an attempt to dominate physically where he cannot argue winningly. In the play’s final scene, the “real” Mehta further qualifies the appearance of power that the Mehta actor conveys in the debate; he is far more sensitive to the inability of an artist to convey subtleties of meaning. That Mehta—as an outgrowth of the earlier one—seems more like a spokesman for the dramatist himself; he remains, though, only one of many voices competing for the trust of the audience. In A Map of the World, as in Pravda, Hare sets differing styles against each other as part of his challenge to us to work through meaning for ourselves. In act 1, M’Bengue glosses “boring” almost as a rhetoric instruc-

114   The Worth of Words

tor would (1.40). In act 2, the search for a crossword puzzle answer satirizes tendencies to surrender control of meaning to the speaker’s intention; “Zionism” can be “the plague of the earth” if “it’s got seven letters” and if that’s “what the compiler thinks” (2.51–52). Narrowing the word to its letters reduces the literalminded approach to its absurd, amoral conclusion. By the time we reach the penultimate scene, we should be like M’Bengue in seeing through the socially sanitized words and phrases that Martinson applies to the UNESCO conference he has supervised: m a rtinson: The occasion was perfectly handled. And in a way, although tragic—the tragedy eats into my soul—but also, we must say, the way things fell out has also been elegant. m’bengu e: Elegant? m a rtinson: Convenient. (2.81)

Throughout his works, Hare invites us to be critics of language as social action. The rewrite of fairly accurate news copy in Pravda (2.65) could be lifted from the play and used as a teaching technique in a study of slanting. Scene 7 of Plenty illustrates with devastating cultural force how ready-to-hand negative political terms are (Susan’s catalogue includes “Suez Canal,” “Nasser” and “fiasco” [7.50]). Patrick in Knuckle translates a once current phrase, “peace with honour,” into its true meaning of “surrender”: “Peace with honour—peace with shame” (78). In general, Hare is content to illustrate such negative examples briefly, but his television film Licking Hitler locates black rhetoric near its dramatic core. Pravda shows us misuse of language on the grand scale of media influence; its more fundamental theme is the loss of ideals that make responsible discourse possible. In Skylight, Kyra, an idealistic teacher in a deprived area, lectures the entrepreneur Tom, her former lover, on the gap between gauzy categories and the gritty reality: You only have to say the words “social worker” . . . “probation officer” . . . “counselor” . . . for everyone in this country to sneer. Do

The Worth of Words   115

you know what social workers do? Every day? They try and clear out society’s drains. They clear out our rubbish. They do what no one else is willing to do.52

During the interval of Fanshen (as a Chinese term, the very title calls attention to meaning) two characters rehearse the speeches that they will deliver in act 2; political rhetoric in that play has the power to redirect society. Deliberately deceptive political usage can have catastrophic consequences; in Stuff Happens, Donald Rumsfeld approves of George Bush’s word choice: ru msfel d: I like what you said earlier, sir. A war On terror. That’s good. That’s vague. [Vice President] chene y: It’s good. ru msfel d: That way we can do anything.53

The resolution of Wrecked Eggs turns on Loelia’s opening herself to new meanings and to a self-informed awareness of her inner qualities: gr ace: I’m just saying you have certain qualities I envy. Qualities which aren’t just . . . momentary. l oel i a: Like what? gr ace: Loyalty. Courage. Perseverance. (There is a pause.) If you don’t use them, you’re going to feel lousy. (93)

These are the very qualities that would lead a person to stay on, as Loelia finally does. The Secret Rapture, from its title through to its romance-like ending, celebrates Isobel’s self-possessed virtue. And the question of meaning also supplies a continuing dramatic image in The Bay at Nice; the authenticity of the canvas we see from behind parallels verbal authenticity. The inner self creates a validity that cannot be literally expressed: 52. Hare, Skylight (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), act 2.80 (ellipses in the text). 53. Hare, Stuff Happens (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), act 1.24.

116   The Worth of Words

va l en tina: I didn’t know Matisse well. But I understood him. I understood what’s called his handwriting. I love this phrase. Do you know what it is? peter: No. va l en tina: It’s a painting term. Which is indefinable. It’s not quite even signature. It’s more than that. It’s spirit.

(33)

The spirit of the word in the Christian tradition is the Logos, Christ as the word of God; in Racing Demon, Hare draws on survivals of that rich tradition to create a complex treatment of the meaning of spirit and the spirit within meaning. In its original production at the Cottesloe, the smallest of the three auditoria that make up London’s National Theatre, seating was arranged so as to make a cross, with the audience defining its outer edges and allowing for playing space within. When the space becomes a church, it is a natural setting for prayer, a form of speech in Racing Demon that leads to entirely credible soliloquies in modern idiom. The theater audience supplies its own idea of the God addressed by believer and nonbeliever alike as they search for words to express their inner states. A prayer from the Reverend Lionel Espy opens the play and introduces the question of meaning in the absolute sense that eternity sanctions: God. Where are you? I wish you would talk to me. God . . . You never say anything. All right, people expect that, it’s understood. But people also think, I didn’t realize when he said nothing, he really did mean absolutely nothing at all.

(1.1)

Lionel’s somewhat disjointed style and perplexed tone before what he calls the “perpetual absence” (1.1) of his God project an essential deficiency in his private prayer, the formal means given to him for solace and strength. Uncertain of the unseen God, Lionel ironically has put faith in the custodian of God’s Word, the Bishop of Kingston, who assured him that if he gave up his freehold, or life tenure, in his parish (to ease the transition to

The Worth of Words   117

team ministry), his position would still be guaranteed. As a result, some important events of the play revolve around the moral and legal meanings of the Bishop’s word. Lionel’s confidence is so supreme that he can mimic the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit when he dismisses the suggestion that he could be removed from his post: “Gilbert gave me his word. (Blows on his hand, as if to signal the problem being blown away.)” He also characterizes the promise as “freely given” and “in good faith” (1.36). The first of these phrases traditionally attaches to divine benefits, a proper allusion for a promise given by a bishop, but the theological connotations of “in good faith” have been coated over by years of social and legal usage. Like “goodness” and “gracious” in other passages, Lionel’s normal diction carries both the ancient spiritual suggestions and the current secular ones. One set of connotations does not cancel the other out; rather, their unquestioned, slightly uneasy co-existence gives speaker and audience alike a power of selection over meaning. At the moment of crisis, the Bishop of Southwark overrules Kingston’s promise as he vests himself in the episcopal robes symbolic of power, and Lionel responds, “A friend of mine has been [to see a lawyer] . . . I have a watertight case” (2.7.87). The conflict between the two men, as Hare dramatizes it through the ways in which meaning works, can never be resolved, for it resides in the refusal of moral language to yield a single meaning in self-centered contexts. When Southwark comments, “No two people will ever agree on theology. . . . But you can insist that, whatever our beliefs, we assemble together and perform the same rituals,” Lionel expresses the problem honestly: “I agree. As long as those rituals aren’t an organized hypocrisy.” The Bishop replies like a literalist who resists the inevitable shifts in meaning that time imposes: But what else can we do? Truly? . . . We must rely on formulae which have served men well for two thousand years. No, more than rely on them. I have begun lately to realize we must fight for them as well . . . Oh yes, the church’s reformers are

118   The Worth of Words

always great advocates of passion and—what do you call it?— “commitment.” But always in their own cause.

(2.7.84–85)

Admittedly, individual commitment does not determine meaning by itself; still, Southwark’s accusation of “egotism” (2.7.83) against Lionel is unfair because it oversimplifies the process of meaningful struggle. Earlier, the conflict was set forth in the abstract terms that Racing Demon immerses in dramatic contexts of human exchange; Kingston, the bishop who gave his word, confronts Harry, a member of Lionel’s ministerial team: k ing ston: Is [Lionel] a man of faith? (h a rry looks down.) h a rry: He’s a man of conscience.

(1.11.47)

In the play’s brief final scene, “faith” is as absent for Lionel as God is. Tony, Lionel, and Frances share the stage, but “All three are oblivious of each other”—together, yet distinct and apart. In alternating speeches, each speaks twice; Tony alone does not mention God, although he instructs the Almighty from his literal perspective. He talks down to the Above: “It’s numbers, you see. That’s what it is, finally. You have to get them in.” In Tony’s last words, “faith” has been replaced by “confidence,” a word with an inherent tension lost on him; its root meaning recalls the virtue of true belief, but advertisers—like Tony himself, huckster for a full church—have appropriated it for their own: “It’s a question of confidence. If you don’t allow doubt, the wonderful thing is, you spread confidence around you” (2.11.97). As he did in scene one, Lionel asks for more than “silence”; he concludes with questions. Frances has the final words; she begins with a pun (“bit”) more from show business than serious theater, and concludes the play with an image of technical transcendence: I love that bit when the plane begins to climb, the ground smoothes away behind you, the buildings, the hills. Then the

The Worth of Words   119

white patches. The vision gets bleary. The cloud becomes a hard shelf. The land is still there. But all you see is white and the horizon. And then you turn and head towards the sun. (The stage darkens.)

(2.11.98)

In production, before the stage went dark, there was nearblinding light from a multitude of bulbs on the back wall. As at the end of Plenty, stage lighting serves as metaphor for ambiguity of meaning: what allows for clarity of physical vision cannot be applied reliably even to the specific scene it literally illuminates. We know that when Susan opens her arms to a brilliantly lit new world at Plenty’s close, her post-war optimism is painfully wrong: “There will be days and days and days like this” (12.86). As an abstraction, plenty has been infused with meanings at odds with its positive ones; more specifically, Susan herself has spoken of her “glittering lies” in France (6.44). In a television play, Licking Hitler, the verbal metaphor of bright light also falls short of a positive ideal: a nna: In retrospect what you sensed then has become blindingly clear to the rest of us: that whereas we knew exactly what we were fighting against, none of us had the whisper of an idea as to what we were fighting for.54

In Knuckle, Curly argues that harsh light exposes the evil of our time because people no longer can rationalize that “they were ignorant or simple or believed in God”: “[A]t last greed and selfishness and cruelty stand exposed in white neon: men are bad because they want to be” (2.71). The theater audience, often literally in the dark, also gets a false promise from strong light in A Map of the World: “brilliant light” announces the “real” Mehta in scene nine (9.74). Although it “is in the matter of meaning” (9.75) that Mehta appears, his theorizing over reader response 54. Hare, Licking Hitler, in The History Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 128 (my emphasis).

120   The Worth of Words

(cited previously) and his comments on the values of his fictional characters complicate interpretation rather than ease it. In Strapless, the medium of film allowed Hare to give something of a double perspective on blinding light; as Lillian Hempel faces the walkway in the fund-raising fashion show at the film’s end, we see the back of her head against the field of brightness she is about to enter. Hare freezes this final shot, a moment of personal commitment and inner feeling held against the swings of meaning that acting inevitably brings about. The pun on “acting” as doing and performing returns us to Hare’s praise of Vanessa Redgrave for her lived belief in abstract terms. Theater is the place and production the means for Hare to test meaning for himself and for his audience. As a politically sensitive author, he will not surrender meaning to that audience, nor does he abdicate personal control to a deconstructionist theory. Since his work is best realized in performance, two modern theorists are especially pertinent in summarizing how words work in Hare’s drama. Both Michael Polanyi and Kenneth Burke are concerned with how language achieves meanings through its audience. Polanyi argues that, although “all our knowledge is inescapably indeterminate,” “personal participation and imagination” examine “subsidiaries” (e.g., words) as “bearing upon . . . their focal meaning.”55 That is, experiencing language in usage and within contexts leads us to see multiple meanings in metaphor, symbol, and universal terms. Burke could be thinking of Hare’s “great abstract nouns” when he insists that “things do have intrinsic natures, whatever may be the quandaries that crowd upon us as soon as we attempt to decide definitively what these intrinsic natures are.”56 Polanyi similarly assumes that we will fall short of certitude in trying to reconcile “incompatibles” in our lives. He could be analyzing Lionel Espy, Isobel Glass, the young Susan Traherne and, 55. Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). I compress the argument of 60–65. 56. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 54.

The Worth of Words   121

maybe, David Hare. His summary observation certainly applies without qualification to the career of Alexander Herzen, the dominant character in Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, The Coast of Utopia: Incompatibilities . . . make up the whole stance of our lives: the hope that we may be able to do or achieve what we know we must do but which we also know we have not the power to do.

As a result, Polanyi argues, we live—again the applicability to Hare’s dramatic worlds is striking—“in a sort of permanent tension.”57 It is the very condition that Herzen (1812–70) acting on his principles creates for himself as a Russian socialist ultimately exiled by the czarist regime. One source of respite from the tension can be found, extending another Burke insight, in the language that ironically is its source: All thought tends to name things not because they are precisely as named, but because they are not quite as named, and the name is designated as a somewhat hortatory device, to take up the slack.58

Hare would exhort us without giving us a program or sentimental hope. In the “seeing place,” theater, the audience is challenged to see moral language at work in an incompatible world and to think about taking up the slack. The first word of the first play in Stoppard’s trilogy introduces the governing action and underlying theme of the whole of The Coast of Utopia, a work that covers decades as it presents Russian idealists and radicals striving for a better political order. That word, “Speaking,” is delivered by a landed patriarch as a dinner party winds down.59 His only son is Michael Ba57. Polanyi, Meaning, 156. 58. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 54 (my emphasis). 59. The three plays were published as The Coast of Utopia in separate volumes (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). To identify the sources of quotations readily, I refer to them by their titles and act and page numbers in my text: Voyage (vol. 1), Shipwreck (vol. 2), and Salvage (vol. 3). The present quotation is from Voyage 1.3.

122   The Worth of Words

kunin, an outspoken proponent of German idealism who after delivering himself of a guiding principle (“The outer world of material existence is mere illusion” [Voyage 1.9]), stuffs his mouth and exits chewing. This incident opens the audience to a world in which social conventions and philosophical abstractions are tested against the human limitations that Stoppard’s dramas put in the foreground. The gap between “speaking” and its social and political validity constantly challenges Herzen, Bakunin, and the other would-be reformer, Vassarion Belinsky. Stoppard’s Bakunin can embrace a philosophy that suits him only when it acquires currency. Belinsky, in fact an influential literary critic, has no sense of rhetorical decorum; in his enthusiasm he speaks out of turn and his style becomes disjointed. Herzen believes that speaking out in print can set Russia on the path toward change, but he is the also the most sensitive to the seductive attraction of “high order” abstractions that can at best be imperfectly realized. To Alexander Herzen, rhetorical pathos can form the basis for a logical case: “Passions,” he says, “are facts” (Shipwreck 2.65). It follows, then, that the human condition in, for example, the life of serfs must initiate any argument for change. Bakunin argues that Hegel, his intellectual hero, speaks a language so rarified that it only hinders progress. Likewise, Bakunin’s popular success results from an attractive, but ultimately ineffective style: “You’ve made yourself a reputation by a kind of revolutionary word-music from which it is impossible to extract an ounce of meaning, let alone a political idea, let alone a course of action” (Shipwreck 1.36). In contrast to his friend, Herzen more coolly appraises the faults of Russian society, and uses his inherited wealth to finance The Bell, an opposition magazine published abroad during his years of exile and smuggled into his native land. Simultaneously removed and committed, he has deep reservations about the power of language to realize his vision, yet he continues to write, doing what he must do and knowing that he does not have the power to do. To him, abstract terms are The Worth of Words   123

not indeterminate; rather, they are dangerous because they are meaningful: a “Transcendental Spirit” or “anarchism” generates a priori arguments that fail to touch social problems. More enlightened abstractions, “republicanism” and “socialism,” have a negative force because to his oppressors too, they are things: “Words are become deeds. Thoughts are deeds. They’re punished more severely than ordinary crimes. We are revolutionaries with secret arsenals of social theory” (Voyage 2.1.58). He sees a causal connection between res and verba but he also sees the failure of “liberty, fraternity and equality” (2.1.55) to be “the embodiment of morality and justice as a rational enterprise” (2.1.51). In Herzen’s Russia, as in later language theory, the speaker no matter how clear, how innocent or how circumspect cannot limit meaning to the boundaries of the most carefully controlled context. Stoppard’s Herzen, far more than any other character in the trilogy, criticizes the chasm between the supposed value of high-sounding words and the political reality. Never fully disillusioned, he arrives at a position that The Coast of Utopia finally affirms when its ethos fuses with his, both of them evolving over nine hours of playing time and fifty-five years of history in the 2002 premiere at London’s National Theatre. While reformist ideas have continuing life and while the highest ideals have real worth, meaningful change comes in small steps and the surest satisfaction comes in present comfort. To reach this point, the trilogy criticizes the intellectual depth of the general assertions various speakers make and questions the integrity of the language they use. Herzen is the most outspoken in rebutting the facile premise: • When Nicholas Ketsher, a member of his circle, speaks of “the Spirit of History, the ceaseless March of Progress,” Herzen angrily replies, “Oh, a curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood—at least spare them your conceit that they’re acting out the biography of an abstract noun” (Shipwreck 1.18).

• to Nicholas Ogarev, another friend: “I’ve taken a vow of si124   The Worth of Words

lence about socialism. We have to move forward looking at our feet, not at the horizon” (Salvage 1.49). • to Bakunin, after quoting him ironically, “‘Destruction is a creative passion!’ You’re such a . . . child! We have to go to the people, bring them with us, step by step” (Shipwreck 2.103). As the dominant character in the plays, Herzen comes closest to speaking for the values of the trilogy; his critique of political language ideally leads the audience to question it—to judge its worth. Although Stoppard sets Ivan Turgenev against Herzen at one point, the novelist’s character provides an insight to the play’s character, for he speaks on behalf of objectivity and choice. Turgenev’s Fathers and Children is published near the end of Salvage, the final play of the trilogy. His fictional portrait of the nihilist Bazarov is so objective that it appealed to “both the left and the right” and concealed his own attitude. He is asked, “So you don’t take sides between fathers and children?” and Turgenev’s reply strikes an ideal aesthetic stance, much like Joyce’s God paring his nails: “On the contrary, I take every possible side” (Salvage 2.96). Similarly, The Coast of Utopia displays a wide range of reformist beliefs; its variety presents the audience with alternates to evaluate before it reaches a final, qualified conclusion in the person of Herzen. Through Turgenev, Stoppard also complicates any analysis of the meaning of words, for the novelist wordsmith makes penetrating comments but remains too aloof to change things. To him, “the word ‘liberal’ has now entered the scatological vocabulary, like ‘halfwit’ or ‘hypocrite’ . . . It means anyone who supports peaceful reform over violent revolution” (Salvage 2.64). Asked for a response to the troubled Paris of 1848, he says, “I’m a tourist like you” (2.1.47); at the same time, Herzen admires the city as a center of free expression and laments the shortcomings of the republic. At the end of the trilogy, in Herzen’s dream vision, Turgenev’s pose as an aesthete renders him irrelevant, and he exits, perhaps to the Sandwich Islands. The Worth of Words   125

Stoppard’s plays were often criticized for a similar kind of irrelevance, of being “all linguistic pyrotechnics” without much substance.60 In Travesties and Jumpers, Stoppard introduces topics about knowing and language, but the comic settings render the treatment ridiculous. His television play, Professional Foul, includes a judgment on “verbal felicity” but goes well beyond stylistic flash to challenge a theory of language. In it, an academician in a Communist country departs from the approved text of his paper: In our own time linguistic philosophy proposes that the notion of, say, justice has no existence outside the ways in which we choose to employ the word, and indeed consists only of the way in which we employ it. In other words, that ethics are not the inspiration of our behavior but merely the creation of our utterances.61

The Coast of Utopia responds to such claims and finds them wanting. Words like “justice” in a living context have sufficiently stable meanings to have repercussions “outside the ways in which we choose to employ them,” and personal ethos can inspire behavior. In a striking coincidence, some thirty years before The Coast of Utopia, Michael Polanyi takes the country of Stoppard’s birth to exemplify the political “reality of intangible things”: [The Hungarian] revolution, as well as that more recent, illfated one in Czechoslovakia, was fought to gain recognition for the reality of intangible things: truth and justice and moral and artistic integrity.62

In passages that could easily belong to the ancient debate over meaningful abstractions, Herzen at times sounds like a 60. In several variations, the term “linguistic pyrotechnics” has been applied to Stoppard’s plays often; for one use in an influential place, see Mel Gussow, in The New York Times, May 18, 1987. 61. Stoppard, Professional Foul, sc. 14, in Modern and Contemporary Drama, ed. Miriam Gilbert, et al. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 575. 62. Polanyi, Meaning, 24.

126   The Worth of Words

seventeenth-century reformer of language, one who argues that words that refer to no thing have no significant meaning and, as a result, no bearing on reality. Among the examples of this attitude: • He characterizes Bakunin’s unfounded hope for a revolution: “This is not a sensible conversation” (Shipwreck 1.32). • To Herzen, Bakunin’s “freedom” and “equality” do not “mean anything” (Shipwreck 1.36). • To Ogarev: “There’s no such thing as everyone, everywhere” (Salvage 2.77 [my emphases]).

Yet, while rejecting his friends’ abstract usage, Herzen remains committed to implementing—imperfectly to be sure—the values behind the abstractions. With his eye fixed on reality, he sees that whatever meaning the abstraction exalts must be tested from the ground up, from observation back to the ideal. His inferred attitudes toward language are strikingly similar to his position on social reform. As change must come from the serfs up to the theorists, so meaning is known, but not necessarily fixed, empirically: b a k u nin: Freedom is a state of mind. herzen: No, it’s a state of not being locked up . . . of having a passport (Shipwreck 1.36).

In his final dream confrontation with Marx, Herzen rejects History as a governing concept or transcendent value in a political theory. His speech uses more highly charged value terms than any other in the three plays; in its lofty tone, it sounds like a peroration to The Coast of Utopia. As the Marx of his imagining revels in the bloodshed that will precede the triumph of his revolution, Herzen interrupts him with a declamation that rewards rhetorical analysis: But history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. We shout

The Worth of Words   127

into the mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every gate there are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings, and we rob ourselves if we pardon us by the absolution of historical necessity. What kind of beast is it, this Ginger Cat with its insatiable appetite for human sacrifice? This Moloch who promises that everything will be beautiful after we’re dead? A distant end is not an end but a trap. The end we work for must be closer, the labourer’s wage, the pleasure in the work done, the summer lightning of personal happiness. (Salvage 2.118).

Herzen’s style is too polished for the unbidden associations of most dreams; its devices are more appropriate to the practiced persuasion of a visionary, most likely to the style that Herzen perfected in print. In fact, what follows the rhetorical questions above is taken verbatim from the English translation of Herzen’s From the Other Shore; of that book, a minor character in the trilogy tells him that he admired its “stylishness,” and elsewhere a young activist says dismissively, “You’re a poet, a storyteller, an orator” (Salvage 2.109). While Herzen’s central stage presence confers a greater authority upon him than these incidental characters have, their judgments further complicate analysis of the “orator’s” speech. The traditional guidelines for a rhetorical critique are too restrictive for a dream in a drama; in this instance, the speaker is not his conscious self, dreams are not generally persuasive, and the audience—Marx and Turgenev strolling on and off—is a fantasy. However, in Stoppard’s full dramatic context, established over nine hours in three plays, the speech succeeds rhetorically because the speaker is not simply Herzen alone but, behind him, the controlling intelligence that created his world and spoke in accord with its principles, and because the idea of audience expands to include the one in the theater, now schooled by the trilogy’s competing voices and social arrangements to accept and perhaps approve its final, understated affirmation. The syntactic patterns and

128   The Worth of Words

figures in the speech, elements of a heightened style, force attention to the present moment in Herzen’s political and stage life. History, Marx’s grinding abstraction, is brought to earth by personification; it “knocks,” “chance” opens, and we cannot occupy any time but the present. The absolute antithesis, “There is always / There is no,” excludes all but the moment, enough of a challenge in itself with its burdensome choices. Herzen rebukes Marxist thinking in what may be the most finely wrought sentence in The Coast of Utopia; its asymmetrical chiasmus sounds the high tone of a peroration. Its neat, self-enclosing form usually suggests a kind of finality, but Stoppard’s play on the verbal form opens to intensify the present: We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is make [ing us]

Speech, so crucial to Herzen as an instrument for articulate persuasion, is represented as an incoherent “shout” aimed at an audience, indefinable in the “mist.” “We” governs parallel verbs in a climactic order, “shout . . . need . . . rob . . . pardon”; this pattern is then suspended for two rhetorical questions and a fresh maxim. The basic syntax of “The distant end is not an end but a trap” affirms its truth tautologically before Stoppard, extending the anaphora, broadens the meaning of “end,” recalls the “We” pattern, and intensifies the elevated tone with a moral imperative: “The end we work for must be closer.” The play on the voices of “make” casts the exiles as both agents and objects. They must act and, having chosen how to proceed, they are the “while” being shaped—ethically it seems—by unforeseeable contingencies. “Wit” which has frequently been used to characterize and slight Stoppard’s style, here means far more than clever word play; reformers need a skewed, enlightened attitude toward an oppressive society and an alert intelligence to fuel courage. In the rational struggle, Herzen sees “our dignity as human beings,” and the long tradition behind this axiThe Worth of Words   129

omatic belief stands firmly behind one of the few Latin derivatives in the passage, “dignus” which ultimately means worth. And the belief in the ideal of human worth may well be the ultimate source of rhetorical ethos because of what “our [mutual] dignity” assumes about both the creator and receiver of meaning. As audience we often do more than receive meaning, we see language choices dramatized, and we participate in evaluating their worth. We become partners in a rhetoric of discovery.

130   The Worth of Words

Chapter 4

Memory and Ethos V In his valuable, comprehensive survey of memory in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, William N. West notes “the vagueness of its role in rhetoric,” yet other summary comments of his broaden an understanding of memory beyond its use as a mnemonic to a rhetorical place with clear theoretical applications to narrators in plays by Tennessee Williams, Brian Friel, to the autobiographical Hally in Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the boys, and to the collective, reconstructed memories of the three historical characters in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Beginning in classical times, West writes, “memory serves as the locus of personal history and individual identity”; in its “nature,” it has “unmatched rhetorical force as authentic knowledge [and] continue[s] to be in the forefront of contemporary cultural concerns.” In our time, “authentic knowledge” still provides the ethical ground for persuasive “individual identity” which in turn makes a “personal history” credible. West’s summary of the Rhetorica ad Herennium on a speaker’s use of memory applies in almost all its particulars to autobiographical plays in performance and could stand as epigraph to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie:

131

Creating one’s own memory images further anchored personal identity in the faculty of memory; it required that one combine private fantasies, perceptual stimuli, and intense feeling in a mental experience that was simultaneously physical, sensual and emotional.1

The title refers to the figurines collected by Laura, the sister of Tom Wingfield. With a slight, but decided limp, she is withdrawn, an object of concern to her mother, Amanda, a faded belle who hopes that the play’s fourth character, The Gentleman Caller, will prove a suitable beau for Laura. Amanda’s affectations, Tom’s dead end job, and Laura’s insecurity—all of them aspects of Williams’s own life—frustrate the apprentice writer who finally chooses career aspirations over family. As the playwright’s narrator and surrogate, Tom instructs the audience in his opening monologue that “The play is memory,” and he asserts that its pathos (“intense feeling”) follows as a direct effect from that cause: “Being a memory play . . . it is sentimental.”2 To identify with Tom emotionally the audience must trust him, and Williams carefully works to establish his character’s ethos and the play’s from the outset. In the first moments of the play, Tom “addresses the audience” with a flat statement designed to establish his good character from the noblest of motives; unlike the “stage magician,” he says, “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” (1.144). In the same speech, he tries to add a deeper dimension of credibility to his character; as a poet, he presumably will offer subtle insights from a penetrating, complex point of view. Because his disclosure is mildly self-deprecating (“I have a poet’s weakness for symbols”), the audience is expected to identify with his modest “weakness,” a coyly disingenuous claim, and to trust him as 1. William West, “Memory,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed.Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 483, 484, 486. 2. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1990), sc. 1.145. Textual references are to scene and page numbers of this edition.

132   Memory and Ethos

a guide to the meaning of illusion and symbol. But Williams’s stage illusions broadcast single meanings; stock symbols declare their significance, and the poetic elements in Tom’s style are as heavy-handed and patronizing as his declaration that he gives us the truth. In explaining the Gentleman Caller’s role, Tom’s voice merges with the playwright’s: “I am using this character as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for” (1.145). These lines belong more properly in a dramaturge’s notebook; they interpret the significance of the character before he appears, and the contrast between The Glass Menagerie and plays that progress toward a similar, unstated meaning—notably Waiting for Godot and The Three Sisters—could hardly be sharper. If, in Pound’s formulation for an image, a symbol is an emotional-intellectual complex, then forecasting the intellectual component, the meaning, breaks down its integrity and undermines its potential for emotional impact. Further, in identifying the character as a symbol, Williams—contrary to his clear intention—ironically transforms Tom into a false “stage magician,” one who lets the audience in on his technique and explains away the mystery of his illusion. Williams also cues emotional response with offstage music; at one point, it “becomes ominous” (6.194) at another, “a wind blows . . . with a faint, sorrowful sighing” (6.193). The textual equivalent of these pointers is the simile, the explicit figure of comparison that, in Williams’s drive for control over meaning, goes past insight and clarity to single-minded, unquestioned authority. The audience, in the etymological sense of the word, is dictated to by Tom as in his second address to the house introducing scene 3. He explains that for his mother “the idea of getting a gentleman caller for Laura . . . became an obsession.” Then, a simile, grounded only in Jungian abstractions, precedes the scene with an interpretation lest the audience or the production fail to grasp it: “Like some archetype of the universal unconscious, the image of the gentleman caller haunted our apartment.” In the same passage, WilMemory and Ethos   133

liams’s surrogate imposes meaning yet again: the Gentleman Caller’s “presence hung like a sentence passed upon the Wingfields!” (3.159). Two scenes later, Tom expands upon “the social background of the play” in his next speech to the house. Brief references to Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain, and Guernica set up a contrast to the world outside the Wingfield home: “But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bar, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows” (5.179). This overwrought style with its cluttered simile further undermines Tom’s credibility and with it, the play’s, for he sees reality through a distorting lens. Furthermore, his style is the playwright’s as it appears elsewhere; in stage directions clearly in his own voice, Williams writes of a piano “being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers”3 and of a set that “is shadowy and poetic as some inner dimension of the play.”4 To Williams and his admiring reviewers, “poetic” seems to mean something at once ethereal and vaguely accessible, not something allusive, suggestive, indirect, and challenging, as memories in Copenhagen are. If a poet is one whose unflinching examination of the self or the world speaks through a complex persona in a suitably complex or cryptic style, Tom’s easy self-characterization as a dreamer with a poet’s weakness excludes him from the company. Williams attributes an ethos to Tom independent of his literary character. The most effective and affecting of Tom’s addresses to the audience should be his final one because its significance depends on all that has gone before under his control as narrator. With all his choices made, his moral character—the basis for our accepting his final words—has been as fully established as the drama allows. But in this farewell speech, Tom is the passive vessel for memories of Laura; in general, his verbs are either 3. A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1, 243. 4. “Prologue” to Orpheus Descending, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 3, 227.

134   Memory and Ethos

correspondingly passive or negative: he “didn’t go . . . was fired . . . left . . . descended . . . would have stopped . . . was pursued by something.” In another simile, he sentimentalizes himself as torn from the place he willingly left: “The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from their branches.” He is “faithful” to Laura only through mundane images that trigger memories of her, “faithful” no more earned as a value than the labels of his “poetic” similes: Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger—anything that can blow your candles out.

(7.236–37)

The only subtle disclosure in this final soliloquy is apparently unintended; twenty “I”s in nineteen sentences reveal Tom’s self-centered concern. Since he, the play’s sole point of view, has no credible, positive ethos, The Glass Menagerie as a whole lacks moral stature. Like The Glass Menagerie, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa begins and ends with addresses to the audience from its narrator, Michael, a surrogate for the playwright who surely knew Williams’s earlier work well and may have learned from it. Friel dedicates his memory play “In memory of those five brave Glenties women,” doubtlessly as real as his own mother who came from that town in Donegal, the county where he locates Ballybeg, the fictional setting for many of his plays. Grounded in a reality that Friel’s audience would recognize, the play’s persuasive connection to that audience depends, then, on the credibility of Michael’s and the play’s ethos. The boy Michael appears in the play, the mature Michael stands outside its action, both spectator and narrator. Act 1 begins and ends with his monologues; he is an onstage observer for a few minutes at the start of act 2, enters briefly later to introduce some uncertain exposition and concludes the play with another monologue. Michael’s opening speech sharply distinguishes his character from Tom’s. His style Memory and Ethos   135

is conversational, less authoritative; Tom controls memory, Michael is more open to receive its impulses: When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me. We got our first wireless set that summer—well, a sort of a set; and it obsessed us. And because it arrived as August was about to begin, my Aunt Maggie— she was the joker of the family—she suggested we give it a name.5

The metaphor in “cast” has virtually the same suggestions as the traditional one for the function of memory as a rhetorical place. Drawing on the tradition and echoing Hobbes, John Dryden writes: The faculty of imagination . . . like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after; or without metaphor, which searches over all the memory for the species or ideas of those things which it designs to represent.6

Michael poses as one similarly selective (“different kinds of memories”) but singularly receptive; his syntax makes memory active and him an object (“to me”). He poses as open to its offerings prior to “design[ing] to represent” them. The parenthetical second thoughts about the wireless and Maggie along with the casual stylistic redundancies (“Maggie . . . she . . . she”) create a conversational tone, making Michael’s vision accessible and seemingly spontaneous. Memories in Friel’s fiction come unbidden to his narrator; they are more clearly contrived in The Glass Menagerie. As he develops Michael’s opening address, Friel stresses memory as selective and unreliable. “When I cast my mind back” is repeated and then varied: “So when I recall . . . at the same time, I remember . . . And when I remember,” yet as a boy, Michael had “a sense of unease, some awareness of a widening breach between what seemed to be and what was.” This 5. Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), act 1.1. Textual references are to act and page number. 6. John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, vol. 1, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962), 4.

136   Memory and Ethos

awareness leads to alternative interpretations of memories: what “may have been . . . Or maybe . . . Or maybe” (1.2) as determining his response and his character, now not fully revealed but credible in his refusal to close the book on the past and to leave interpretations open for the audience. Choices, the basis for moral decisions, are presented through Michael who ends the play documenting without sentimentality the limitations of his own character. His recollections lead him to present and accept various points of view: Aunt Maggie’s wit; the toleration and practical wisdom of Uncle Jack, the unbalanced exmissionary; Aunt Kate’s rigid propriety. Friel merges dramatic present and the women’s past because Michael’s memories have continuity for him as they do for many people; he recalls “the shame Mother brought on the household by having me—as it was called then—out of wedlock” (1.9) and corrects that usage from Father Jack’s African experience: “So Michael is a love-child?” (1.40). When Michael hears of his father’s other life and family, he admits to indecisiveness: My mother never knew of that letter. I decided to tell her—decided not to—vacillated for years as my father would have done; and eventually, rightly or wrongly, kept the information to myself.

(2.61)

My italics stress the phrase that leaves the moral evaluation to the audience while it further dramatizes Michael’s modest ethos. His refusal to assign values to others is signaled throughout Dancing at Lughnasa by “maybe,” “I suppose,” and “perhaps”; at the end, he is morally explicit about himself: “When my time came to go away, in the selfish way of young men I was happy to escape.” No longer a young man, he repeats the opening words of the play to summon up the most frequently recurring memory, “When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936.” That memory “owes nothing to fact”; in it, “atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory.” He remembers “wordless ceremony,” “ritual” dancing, as “everybody”—all the characters—“sways slightly” behind him; Memory and Ethos   137

they are not dancing as the women did earlier in near frenzied movement (2.71). Friel would draw the audience into the present mood and have them believe that, to Michael, Friel himself and their play, memory is a constant that values symbolic significance over factual recall. Selective facts can justify past behavior; ritual return honors the past by including its contrary elements. Michael’s modest ethos blends with the play’s; both accept people as they were without judging them. They are all included in drama’s time-honored ceremonial conclusion, here muted, the celebratory dance. Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the boys is set in a Port Elizabeth tea room much like the one the playwright’s mother ran. The “boys” are grown men, black South Africans; Harold, seventeen, arrives on the scene at the end of his school day. Those of us who saw the world premiere of the play at the Yale Repertory Theatre, like the later New York audience, did not know how exactly Athol Fugard drew on his own experiences for the character and behavior of young Hally, the Harold of the title and the nickname of the playwright as a boy. As the exact similarities became known, Fugard’s courageous encounter with his past self deepened the already intense emotional appeal of his work. Without that autobiographical knowledge, the first audiences could nonetheless infer that Hally was created from a source of some authentic experience and that he was symptomatic of a much larger problem. The parallels between Hally and the young Fugard and between the fictional Sam and the actual one, Fugard’s mentor, are certainly powerful and absorbing, but they can shift attention from the play’s more general thrust. It does not diminish Fugard’s achievement to say that the facts behind the play are on the level of logos while its higher values, located in its ethos, can be obscured when an audience judges dramatic fulfillment for fidelity to those facts. Fugard’s unflinching examination of a self-lacerating truth is, of course, a major component of his play’s moral integrity. At the same time, I believe, Fugard leads us to see deeper, to the con138   Memory and Ethos

trasting values of Hally and Sam as their conflict leads to Hally’s taking the first step toward self-knowledge—an admission of ignorance. From his entrance, Hally confidently thinks he examines other lives correctly and thinks that his recollections, recalled with the “boys” as dramatic scenes, completely enclose the truth about the past. But Sam’s knowing and memories correct Hally’s; Sam’s values emerge late in Master Harold and constitute his and the play’s ethos. Hally is, to be sure, a product of his time and of white culture; ingrained attitudes toward race have been softened somewhat in his friendship with Sam and Willie, but they burst through in all their harshness when Sam’s humane standards confront Hally’s inherited ones. And, the place where the conflict takes place is rhetorical memory. Hally’s memories are unconsciously selective. As a younger boy wrapped up in the moment, he did not see the “Whites Only” sign on the bench that Sam could not use, and he buried in his memory the image of Sam literally taking up the burden of Hally’s drunken, crippled, befouled father, now a moral burden that the older schoolboy will not accept. Hally’s present view of memory is likewise limited; to enforce this point early in the play, Fugard carefully distinguishes memory as rote from memory as a living thing. When Sam recites the “first lesson” (about Africa) that Hally taught him from school books, something the boy doesn’t remember, he responds, “You’ve got a phenomenal memory.” A few lines later, Hally recalls his family’s boarding house days: “Those years are not remembered as the happiest ones of an unhappy childhood.” The “not remembered” signals his selective, prejudicial sense of recall, soon corrected by Willie’s imaginative intervention: He “knock[s]on the table” and tries to “imitate” Hally’s mother: “Hally, are you in there?”7 We learn what Hally has suppressed (“The memories are coming back now” [36])—that 7. Athol Fugard, “Master Harold” . . . and the boys (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 35. Textual references by page number are to this edition; it has no act or scene divisions.

Memory and Ethos   139

the “boys” gave him a refuge in their “servants quarters” and his first lesson about sex. These pleasant recollections trigger Hally’s “best memory.” “Best” turns out to be ironic in its ambiguity: it is Hally’s fondest and most valuable memory, but he has unwittingly left out its best lesson. Sam made a crude kite which to Hally’s amazement soared. He will “never forget that first moment” when he saw it in flight, but when he asks Sam why he made it, the older man replies, “[Evenly] I can’t remember” (40). Sam chooses “can’t” over “don’t” because “don’t” would be a lie and because at this moment he will not tell Hally the whole, painful story. After Hally mocks his sick, absent father, tells a crude racist joke, and spits in Sam’s face, the incident that he has recounted only in part gets a full rendering from Sam. He begins gently, “I’ve also got a memory.” As he traces the story of his carrying Hally’s father from the bar, he asks, “And do you remember how we did it?” Sam’s point of view includes white prejudice as a given: “A crowded Main Street with all the people watching a little white boy following his drunk father on a nigger’s back!” His memory amplified, Hally replies in “great pain,” “I love him, Sam.” Sam’s humanity comes through in all its fullness in his long reply introduced by a confident, understated response: “I know you do.” What Sam knows is that Hally’s reaction to his father came out of the shameful reaction of an immature boy to his turbulent emotions: “You love him and you’re ashamed of him.” Hally needed moral guidance and emotional support then, and Sam tried to provide them: “If you really want to know, that’s why I made you that kite” (60–61). In his smug, baseless certainty, Hally said earlier, “Tell me something I don’t know, Sam” (42) and “(Furious) Jesus, I wish you would stop trying to tell me what I do and don’t know” (57). He has told Sam not to “get clever” (33) and to “mind [his] own business” (54). Bedsides ordering him to call him “Master Harold” rather than Hally, he commanded: “Just get on with your bloody work and shut up.” Most telling is Hally’s rejection of Sam’s attempt to make him see his “terrible sin” in “mock[ing] 140   Memory and Ethos

his father” (56): “You’ve been trying to meddle in something you know nothing about” (57). Finally, Sam’s memories have a moral meaning and his voice a moral authority that cannot be “shut up.” He can speak of “sin” and “forgiveness” and assume that words impose responsibility on their user as in his response to Hally’s vulgar attack on his father: “Do you know what you’ve been saying?” (56). To Sam, words have consequences and speaking must be informed by a moral awareness. He clears the ground for Hally’s growth to that kind of knowledge, but Fugard is no sentimentalist. The playwright leaves his youthful self befuddled; his last line would be trite in a melodramatic context. In the full context of the play, it puts Hally where he can begin to mature emotionally and ethically: “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore” (62). In Master Harold, the past and its memories are present before us. The moral burden of the past is enacted dramatically, and Hally’s authenticity emerges from Fugard’s control of his literary character as he reacts to Sam and Willy. The honesty of Fugard’s approach to apartheid, apart from the autobiographical ground of the play, presents Sam and Hally as human; Sam is not always the decent victim, and Hally remains a long way from the enlightened liberal who in a melodrama would finally learn an important lesson. The play earns its ethos because it tells a complex truth. What William West says of memory early in this chapter can stand as one of the premises and themes of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, for in that play memory truly “serves as the locus of personal history and individual identity.” Its three characters like Friel’s narrator “recall” and recreate distant acts and behavior; their drama makes the past present, as memory tries and sometimes labors to do, often with imperfect, uncertain results. More prominent is the point early reviewers made when they appreciated the staging of Copenhagen as a dramatic rendering of the theoretical physics that grounds its character conflicts. The play’s lighting and blocking display human interactions as parallels of the waves and particles of matter, siMemory and Ethos   141

multaneously interdependent and isolated. However, the technical achievement of the production has, I believe, diverted attention from a greater one, for Copenhagen takes the play of ideas well beyond the theoretical limits set by Shaw and Brecht, the two modern playwrights clearly committed to the principle that drama provoke its audience to rational thought as prelude to a new social awareness or action. Unlike the thesis play which directs an enlightened conclusion or pits conflicting positions against one another, Copenhagen presents, as only a drama can, the intellectual excitement and emotional burden of uncertain or incomplete knowledge, and it does so without taking moral refuge in an indeterminacy with no practical consequences. It confronts what may be the ultimate ethical question of its time, for atomic research had and still has world shaping, life-anddeath consequences: “Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy?”8 “Moral right,” combining personal ethos and public responsibility, overrides the rationalization of the physicist who claims to engage in scientific research for its own pure sake. In Copenhagen, the Is it? and What is it? of the laboratory lead inexorably to the question of worth without, however, the play proposing a definitive answer to the question despite acknowledging the effects of the Holocaust and of anti-Semiticism in the Europe of the time. Frayn’s opposition of the essential and the circumstantial parallels that of nature and contingency in traditional rhetoric. He persuades through identification when he allows the theater audience to see some dramatic techniques openly displayed, and he locates his three characters in the land of the dead where they presumably have no reason to lie and are, then, like the play itself invested with a credible ethos. Shaw admired Ibsen and Strindberg for their “attack[s] all along the front of refined society,” and he endorsed the “problem” play for its “remorseless logic and iron framework of fact.” 8. Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (London: Methuen, 1998), 1.36 and 2.90. Textual references by act and page number are to this edition.

142   Memory and Ethos

To Brecht, the theorist of alienation, Shaw practiced what he praised: “The reason why Shaw’s own dramatic works dwarf those of his contemporaries is that they so unhesitatingly appealed to reason.”9 Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism elevates his didactic commitment to the level of a formal theory in which the “unraveling in the third [act]” of a “well-made play” is replaced by a “discussion and its development.” Shaw discovered this “technical novelty” empirically; even today, the climactic discussion of A Doll’s House remains the prime example of his new dramatic form.10 The dialogue of Ibsen’s last act, however, also exemplifies techniques of debate in which Nora controls the discussion and directs its resolution. Like a disputant akin to Shakespeare’s Isabella, Nora distinguishes her opponent’s meanings: when Torvald says “loved,” she replies, “You never loved me. You’ve thought it fun to be in love with me”; when he calls her “incompetent,” she turns his word back upon him, “I must learn to be competent.” When Torvald asserts as a fact that “no one gives up honor for love,” Nora responds with a strategy taught to Renaissance men, the direct denial: “Millions of women have done just that.”11 Her slamming the door puts a triumphant exclamation point to her victory as debater. The discussion has a clear winner, a resolution similar to the intellectual satisfaction an audience gets when plot complications are resolved. Likewise, although Brecht claims that his dramatic form frees the audience to “think for itself,” his political lessons come through with unmistakable clarity. At the end of Copenhagen, however, the character who most strongly wants the others to understand him is resigned, as the audience must be, to accept an inconclusive ending, one which leaves ideas in play, 9. Bertold Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 11. 10. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 3rd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 16, 171, 184; “Preface,” in Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. 3 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962), 18. 11. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: Signet, 1965), act 3.109–110, 112.

Memory and Ethos   143

jostling against one another, mutually uninforming. It challenges moral certainties but is not an ethical muddle. Frayn’s imagined conversations take place after the deaths of Copenhagen’s three characters. The premise frees him to create arguments that the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, might have used to justify his Nazi-sponsored research to his early mentor, Niels Bohr, in meetings that took place in 1941 and 1947. Heisenberg did in fact go to Copenhagen early in the war and returned after it, both times to talk to Bohr. Beyond that, the record of what they actually said is blank; historians rely, reasonably enough, on circumstantial evidence to argue incompatibilities: that Heisenberg willingly tried to develop the atomic bomb for Hitler, that he deliberately obstructed efforts to make one, that he was indifferent to the destruction of Jews or that he went to Copenhagen to save Bohr and thousands of others. Frayn seems to be offering a resolution of such opposing positions when he attributes a debater’s proposition to Heisenberg as he drives to recover a certain account of his conversation with Bohr: “I chose my words very carefully. I simply asked you if as a physicist one had the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy.” But Bohr’s reply prevents a Shavian discussion or a Brechtian lesson: “I don’t recall” (1.36). In Frayn’s view, answering that question Yes or No would only comfort us with smug certainty imposed from an impersonal historical distance. A better proposition, one that would be a witty paradox in other hands, comes in the play’s opening minutes when Heisenberg alludes to his theoretical achievement as a physicist: “Everyone understands uncertainty.” He quickly qualifies that absolute (“Or thinks he does”) and in a sharp antithesis locates abstract knowledge in its confused human context, for he himself is part of “No one”: “No one understands my trip to Copenhagen” (1.4). In the play’s structure, theoretical physics is subordinated to character; what we think we know is only one part of what makes us human. Frayn delays his most complete explanation 144   Memory and Ethos

of the uncertainty principle until well into the second of Copenhagen’s two acts when Heisenberg, in one of many artful lines that ambiguously combine the idiomatic and the esoteric, says, “That’s when I did uncertainty.” He talks about taking a walk at night and realizing that if he could be seen through a distant telescope, he would appear passing under streetlights as a series of “glimpses” to the spectator, not as someone on a continuous path. This insight told him that fellow scientists view “what we see in a cloud chamber” (2.68–69) not as a fixed reality observable for and in itself but as something conditioned by their point of view and by their laboratory techniques. Whenever we observe—the unstated analogy to the theater audience is a constant—we introduce “some new element into the situation” that allows us to measure its effects but also makes that measurement less than absolutely accurate. We cannot, it seems, always find a certain answer to the Is it? question. Bohr confirms this point in his summary of Einstein’s thinking: “Measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It’s a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from one particular viewpoint of a possible observer” (2.73). This comment also comes late in the play, long after Bohr has advocated logical calculation as a step toward deciding whether to welcome Heisenberg to his home; early in act 1, he meets his wife’s objection to the visit with, “Let’s add up the arguments on either side in a reasonably scientific way.” His first reason, though, is based on ethos not logos, “Heisenberg is a friend,” (1.8) and it implicitly argues for the superiority of human values over scientific ones. Throughout Copenhagen, scientific problems and procedures are silently subordinated to questions of character and motivation even as the dialogue recounts the physicists’ thinking in precise detail. An audience need not follow discussion of isotopes and neutrons, of U-238 and U-235, to appreciate Frayn’s point about the worth of certain ideas in an uncertain world. Theoretical abstractions and laboratory experiments, once proved to Memory and Ethos   145

work, can no more be isolated from their effects than physics can be removed from politics, for as Heisenberg says of the latter pair, “The two are sometimes painfully difficult to keep apart” (1.18). As dramatic and thematic preliminary to such observations, Frayn has the men recall their first meeting when Heisenberg, a “cheeky young pup” (1.22) as Bohr remembers him, publicly questions the mathematics in the older man’s lecture. Although Heisenberg was not only cheeky but correct, the men became friends, the human relation more important than the mathematics. Later, when Bohr wonders if he could have “miscalculated” absorption rates of neutrons in their first conversation, each of the three characters in close sequence asks what “exactly” was said (1.34–35). To come to terms with the past they want an exact historical record, a way of knowing as comforting in its way as mathematical certainty but more of a false fire because it relies on memory that, even in the sincere pursuit of truth, has a capacity to deceive. Frayn himself creates a drama based on the recollections of his three characters, but he cautions his audience on memory’s reliability when Margrethe corrects her husband’s recollection, and he defends himself by calling memory “a curious sort of diary” (1.6). In contrast, Heisenberg’s faith in mathematical certainty can be absolute. He recalls being excited by a vision of “a world of pure mathematical structures,” and disputing with Bohr, he declares, “What something means is what it means in mathematics” (2.64, 67). But the human element complicates any equation. Bohr says that his working partnership with his wife succeeds because neither is “one but half of two,” and in reply, Heisenberg must qualify his pure belief: “Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums,” and his voice then trails off (1.29). Logic offers no firmer ground for clear resolutions; the steps to its conclusions are taken by imperfect human beings. Both Bohr and Heisenberg warn and are warned against “jump[ing] to conclusions” about each other (1.17). Although 146   Memory and Ethos

Heisenberg’s theory “lays waste to the idea of causality” (2.70) as a physical force, prejudice as a moral and social cause had profound practical effects for the Nazi atomic project. Heisenberg says that the men who “should have been making their calculations for us” were in England, and Margrethe gives the reason, “Because they were Jews.” Hitler saw the Jewish scientists as less than human, their science too relativistic, so he lost the men who did the calculations necessary to solve the diffusion equation. Heisenberg’s reaction to Margrethe, completely in character, compresses uncertainty and certainty with unconscious irony: “There’s something almost mathematically elegant about that” (2.85). In many lines like these, Copenhagen argues, outside of logic, that human concerns—the very stuff of much drama—inform all our actions and that the formal structures of our thinking are inevitably qualified in practice by uncertain “somethings” and “almosts.” So limited, we are nevertheless obliged to make choices and in doing so create our moral selves. Countering Heisenberg’s drive for certainty, Bohr can delight in paradox, the trope that turns in on itself and, so, leaves ideas in suspension, unresolved, perhaps mysterious. In a subtle undercurrent, Frayn introduces paradox and its natural partner, ambiguity, in simple language; they are his stylistic renderings of a certain uncertainty. They entice the audience to anticipate a resolution in an attempt to work through meanings. Besides the early “Everyone understands uncertainty,” we get a critique of the dialogue to come: “The more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become” (1.4). Later a pun on “chilly” questions the bond between the men: “A little chilly tonight, perhaps for strolling” (1.21). Recalling the Bohrs’ lost children, Heisenberg sees them both as “simultaneously alive and dead in our memories” (1.28) an observation that applies to the characters themselves in the dramatic exchanges Frayn creates and to the general nature of memory itself. Like them, a responsive theater audience lives in paradoxical time with present and past alive and dead simulMemory and Ethos   147

taneously, and what Heisenberg says later applies to them as well, “All we possess is the present, and the present endlessly dissolves into the past” (2.88). These insights belie Heisenberg’s judgment on the pleasure Bohr takes in scientific mysteries: heisenberg: You actually loved the paradoxes, that’s your problem. You reveled in the contradictions. bohr: Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of water.

(2.67–68)

From the first word of Copenhagen, Frayn locates the audience in the ambiguous space between Heisenberg certainty and Bohr suggestiveness; we are teased into thought without following Brechtian signposts or Shavian deductions. “But” is the conjunction that doesn’t quite connect, that qualifies what comes before. Not only does silence precede it, Margrethe also wants to know a reason: “But why?” (1.3). The last words of the play are similarly unsettling—sentence fragments delivered by Heisenberg, the character who most strongly wants to be understood but who can conclude only to “that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things” (2.96). This apparent irresolution is a satisfying ending to a nonlinear play which relies almost exclusively on the dramatic present; an immediate present that subsumes stage presence, the historical present and the past all at once. The three characters remain in view throughout; when Bohr and Heisenberg go for a walk, they circle the edges of the playing space, bare except for a few straight chairs and Margrethe. Imagined as dead by the playwright, the three can examine their motives before and after the speeches they recreate, and Margrethe can speak directly to us from an apparently dispassionate point of view. Her first words echo Bohr’s second line in the play, “Now we’re all dead and gone” (1.3). The men have yet to meet at the point, but 148   Memory and Ethos

Frayn’s staging has put Heisenberg before us as a way of insisting on the theatrical present through his repeated “Now”: “The more I’ve explained the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt. Now we’ re all dead and gone. Now no one can be hurt, now no one can be betrayed” (1.4). Characters and their ethos, Heisenberg suggests, can be abstracted from the circumstances of historical time, and a truth may emerge. Frayn’s staging seems to collaborate with Heisenberg: a minimal use of props, pools of light from above, and bland period costumes. The paucity of stage effects, those circumstances that can direct an audience to judge, narrows and sharpens Copenhagen’s focus. Beyond the words of its resurrected characters, the play offers no theatrical signs to convey sure meaning—no symbolic seagulls, no vulgar Paycock furniture. As a result, the immediate present acquires a dominance even as the characters reconsider their versions of the past. Much as Frayn summons the past into that present, he finds the significant in the transient and the essential in the accidental. What Heisenberg says of social contacts opposes the permanent (“essential”) and the fleeting (“circumstances”) and ironically modifies them with antithetical qualifiers: “Essential perhaps, in certain circumstances” (1.20). He could be speaking of the rhetorical investigation that studies the nature of a thing as contingencies affect it in practice. What we try to fix as permanent truth is similarly qualified by our angle of vision as spectators, for Frayn has situated the theatergoer in a position analogous to the physicist’s. Not only must we choose how to listen, to lines and speeches either as convincing in themselves or as parts of dialogue (as waves or particles), but we must also evaluate the characters’ speeches as choices made under a major constraint. As Margrethe puts it early in the play, historical and dramatic pressures prevent full disclosures: “What can any of us say in the present circumstances?” (1.14). Conventionally, stage entrances make characters “present” and give promise of something to come, an action to unfold plot or dialogue to deMemory and Ethos   149

velop relationships. In a departure from the norm, Heisenberg does not enter a scene without first appearing on stage, and his entrances, such as they are, circle back to the constant “Now” of his opening speech. This formal pattern of recurrence undermines any expectations of chronological or logical progression that the audience might have and directs its critical attention to the significance of speech. The “Here” in “Here I am” refers to the actor’s place on stage and to several distinct places that, absent scenery, must be imagined both by actor and audience. Heisenberg speaks the line to himself as he walks toward the Bohr house (1.6), and much later in dialogue with him, Bohr, positioning himself to recreate a conversation, echoes the line: “But now here I am” (1.39). Minutes later, he resigns himself to follow Heisenberg’s prompting, “Very well. Here I am walking very slowly” (1.40). At three important times, Heisenberg prefaces his entrance to the house with “I crunch over the familiar gravel,” near the beginning and end of act 1 and near the end of the play (1.12, 54; 2.88). The lines signaling these returns sound like creative variations on Brecht’s rehearsal prompts and allow the audience to identify with Frayn in his control of dramatic techniques and to participate in the play’s informing strategy: Three aids . . . may help to alienate the actions and remarks of the characters being portrayed: 1) Transposition into the third person. 2) Transposition into the past. 3) Speaking the stage directions out loud.12

Speaking in the first person, as actual performance dictates, and in the present tense, Frayn’s characters retain their immediacy and gain emotional distance at the same time. Like the repeated “crunch,” the men’s greeting, a version of hundreds of conventional entrances, is reenacted at the close of the first act: heisenberg: My dear Bohr! bohr: Come in, come in . . . (1.55) 12. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 138.

150   Memory and Ethos

These textual and thematic returns are realized theatrically in the characters’ movements and gestures, and the pattern argues subtly about our ability to know. For, although the three characters have applied singular talents and intelligence to understand themselves and each other, their discussions, explanations, reconstructions, and reminiscences do not make connected sense of the past. Often lit separately as they speak and standing apart, they are together and apart simultaneously; the lighting and blocking judge the value of communication and the social worth of what is said. At best, they “glimpse” discrete points in a loop, but to their credit they labor hard to make their circular journey and finally they learn to cherish the moment that they glimpse. Journeying with them, the audience is led to evaluate modes of thinking from the privileged position of intellectual voyeurs and at the same time to fill out the empty space imaginatively. Copenhagen, like many other plays, stands squarely in the tradition dominated by Waiting for Godot. Its minimal setting and its nonlinear form connect Frayn to Beckett while the questions that Heisenberg and Bohr raise have profound political and social implications. They are heirs of Didi and Gogo, but they do not play roles to pass the empty time; rather, along with Margrethe, they play them as reenactments of actual events, as present recreations of life-and-death discussions and of their historical contexts. At times, the Brecht and Beckett traditions merge, as in one passage when the characters resemble actors in rehearsal trying to get inside their roles. Since the roles are the selves they would study, however, the playacting teaches a form of objectivity: m a rgr ethe: I watch the two smiles in the room bohr: I glance at Margrethe heisenberg: I look at the two of them looking at me bohr: I look at him looking at me

(2.89)

Their limited self-awareness authorizes interpretations of the others’ acting; Bohr, addressing the audience, uses language Memory and Ethos   151

that calls attention to Heisenberg’s practiced delivery and, so, to his sincerity: “With careful casualness he begins to ask the questions he’s prepared.” And Heisenberg, in turn, cues a response to Bohr: “He gazes at me, horrified.” A few lines later, Bohr tries to engage the historical past with a form of theatrical improvisation: “Let’s suppose for a moment that instead I remember the paternal role I’m supposed to play. Let’s see what happens if I stop, and control my anger, and turn to him. And ask him why” (2.90–91). Watch them watching themselves closely, Frayn seems to advise, and see how proper sight can lead to insight for the audience as well as the characters. So, we learn with Margrethe that the past, laden with emotional weight, resists rounded, causally finished accounts: “What I see isn’t a story! It’s confusion and rage and jealousy and tears” (2.75). We can sympathize with Heisenberg sharing some of Bohr’s burden over the loss of children and his own role in developing the Bomb: “Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust” (2.96). At the very end, we are aligned with Heisenberg who wanted mathematical certainty but must, too, be content—richly content at that—with fragments. He has learned that what is truly worthwhile outlives the moment it cherishes even though we cannot articulate it: But in the meanwhile, in this most precious meanwhile, there it is. . . . Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things. (2.96)

Copenhagen also entertains the weighty questions of man’s place in the universe, of ultimate responsibility for unintended consequences and of evil. Frayn roots these and other moral abstractions in flawed human beings; the imperfect truths they earn survive their social and theatrical roles. Like many of the

152   Memory and Ethos

playwrights in this book, Michael Frayn in Copenhagen imagines a world which calls for principled action from conscientious people whose best thinking and moral standards offer no guarantee of personal fulfillment or social success. Searching the field of memory, we should try to recall truths, not simply facts, and acting, both doing and performing, as best as one can makes us morally responsible even if we cannot rest secure in moral certainty.

Memory and Ethos   153

Chapter 5

Shaw, Ethos, and Rhetorical Wit V Unlike the authors of the escapist drama he castigated, G. B. Shaw needed to create a credible ethos to persuade audiences to accept his social positions. He articulated those positions with didactic clarity in his ample prefaces and his theater criticism, and his commitment to them as a public man was well known. His values were current before the curtain rose on his plays with the result that his personal ethos as a controversialist and admirer of Ibsen determined the shape of his dramatic forms, the bases of his plays’ credibility. As a corollary, many of his plays take on the character of a debate in which the force and ingenuity of presentation decide the victor. Ideas in conflict, of course, can be dramatic, as the dialogue in Shaw’s discussion plays frequently is. Yet rhetorical problems remain when the play favors one side over another and is overtly didactic in general. Combined with Shaw’s low opinion of his audiences, these problems raised formidable obstacles between the playwright and those audiences, obstacles that Shaw himself had consciously faced. I argue that Shaw’s witty rhetoric in Heartbreak House is a significant rhetorical and dramatic achievement, a more indirect use of the rhetorical strategies he used in Candida, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Major Barbara, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession. 154  

In his common practice Shaw would convince or challenge an audience with compressed deductive arguments. In that connection, his maxims often stand as first premises in an undeveloped syllogism; similarly, his dilemmas are disjunctive arguments, and his most persuasive, most subtle argument is the enthymeme, the abridged syllogism. Shaw’s enthymeme bases its deductive persuasion on silent generalizations; by insinuating its major premise, in his hands it can lead, surprise or dupe an audience into assent. Lloyd Bitzer’s summary of the theory of enthymeme applies easily to Shaw’s strategy, notably in Heartbreak House: To say that the enthymeme is an “incomplete syllogism”—that is, a syllogism having one or more suppressed premises—means that the speaker does not lay down his premises but lets his audience supply them out of its stock of opinion and knowledge. . . . What is of great rhetorical importance . . . is that the premises of the enthymeme be supplied by the audience.1

Responding to Shaw’s wit, the audience’s laughter leaps over analysis to an unquestioning, often unwitting acceptance of the basic “truth” behind the compressed reasoning. To take a clear example from Getting Married, Collins makes a mildly satiric point with “She’s a born wife and mother, maam. That’s why my children all ran away from home.”2 The assumption—Wives and mothers by their very natures ruin home life and drive children away—hits at a form of benevolent domination. No one in the stalls need feel threatened. In contrast, many of the frequent enthymemes in Heartbreak House obscurely but surely attack the audience even as it laughs its complicity. This use of the enthymeme seems both calculated and inevitable in light of Shaw’s low opinion of the British public, his own high regard 1. Bitzer, “Aristotle’s Enthymeme,” 407. 2. All references in the text to Shaw’s plays and prefaces are to Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces, 6 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962). Quoted passages often honor the unconventional spelling that Shaw employed. Getting Married has no act or scene divisions; the cited passage is from 4: 398. Other references in the text supply volume number first, then act and page numbers as in 3.1.204.

Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   155

for ideas and for social reform, his belief in theater as a moral force, and his commitment to wit as a means of penetrating an audience’s resistance. Indeed, Thomas B. Farrell’s reading of Aristotle could have been written with Shaw in mind: “The enthymeme was designed not to be a distorted or flawed syllogism but rather a mode of participatory reflection on cultural norms.”3 To establish the cultural context of Shaw’s plays as he sees it, I will review his expressed opinions on the function of drama and on the nature of his audience; then, I will examine controversial exchanges in several plays before claiming that Heartbreak House is distinctive. In his theater reviews and his prefaces, Shaw consistently characterizes his potential audience as complacent and unintelligent. It is “sanctimonious” (Preface 3:22) and “stupid,”4 unfit to appreciate a good play: “The success of such plays depends upon the exercise by the audience of powers of memory, imagination, insight, reasoning, and sympathy, which only a small minority of the playgoing public at present possesses” (Drama 1:188). In a review of Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy,” Shaw says that the English public . . . are everywhere united and made strong by the bond of their common nonsense, their invincible determination to tell and be told lies about everything, and their power of dealing acquisitively and successfully with facts whilst keeping them, like disaffected slaves, rigidly in their proper place: that is, outside the moral consciousness. (Drama 2:809)

If the morally obtuse are unfit collaborators in a “joint effort”5 to construct rhetorical enthymemes, Shaw’s “Englishman” has a more serious deficiency: “He is shocked . . . at the danger to the foundations of society when seriousness is publicly laughed at” 3. Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 150. 4. George Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed, ed. Bernard f. Dukore (University Park: State University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 4 vols. References in the text are to Drama. 5. Bitzer, “Aristotle’s Enthymeme,” 408.

156   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

(Drama 1:241). Even when provoking such laughter, Shaw usually subordinates shock value to didactic clarity: “Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world.” (Preface 3:7) “No great writer uses his skill to conceal his meaning.” (Drama 1:176)

Widower’s House has a “didactic object.” (Drama 1:205) “For me the play is not the thing, but its thought, its purpose, its feeling and its execution.” (Drama 1:205)

Shaw endorses the “problem” play for its “remorseless logic and iron framework of fact,” and he distinguishes it from the “fashionable drama . . . flaccid in its sentimentality” (Preface 3:18). In calling the traditional plot a “dramatic cancer” (Drama 1:42), he rejects the means of getting an audience hooked on a play’s forward movement. The obstacles to persuasion that result from Shaw’s principles are formidable: on one hand, an unintelligent, but indispensable audience hostile to ideas; on the other, a playwright who admires “remorseless” and “didactic” presentation of ideas and who will not convey them in a tightly plotted drama. To exert control in discussions, Shaw’s speakers often employ maxims for their dominating moral generalities and dilemmas for their coercive form. In Candida, Shaw raises a question fundamental to any specific strategy; to question the efficacy of speech he applies the classical standard of a good man speaking well through the character of the Reverend James Morell. The first line of the play, “Another lecture?” introduces the topic of speech, and the ensuing dialogue between Morell and his secretary touches on its potential to reach people. As the play develops the question of efficacy, the title character, Morell’s wife, makes the most telling and insightful comments on language. She is more Shaw’s spokesperson that her Christian socialist husband although his books, Fabian Essays, Marx’s Capital, and others, could have come straight from the Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   157

playwright’s shelves. Shaw further distributes the play’s attitude toward language through the character of the young, idealist Marchbanks whose poetic yearnings and attraction to Candida prompt flights of stylistic airiness. Late in the final act, Morell, stung by Candida’s apparent openness to Marchbank’s declaration of love, reacts defensively and challenges her with a personal dilemma: “We have agreed—he and I—that you shall choose between us now. I await your decision.” Candida, “recoiling, her heart hardened by his rhetoric,” restates his demand much like the respondent in a debate: “Oh! I am to choose, am I? I suppose it is quite settled that I must belong to one or the other.” Marchbanks sees what Candida means and what Morell, the confident preacher of social justice, missed—a third possibility: “Morell, you don’t understand. She means that she belongs to herself” (1.3.264). That line settles the “Woman Question” to the extent that the play has raised it (3.1.206), for from then on to the final curtain, Candida controls the stage; she resolves the dilemma and directs the dialogue. She, more than any other character, projects the play’s ethos. Before she has “One last word” with Marchbanks, she settles the question that is raised throughout the play: Whether public character, personal ethos, and its stylistic embodiment are effective. Or, is it enough for a morally good man to have an elevated style? More than any other character, Candida evaluates her husband’s expression. He has high ethical standing according to his curate: “a good man . . . a thorough loving soul” (3.1.205) and he speaks well enough to have more invitations to lecture than he can manage. He is “a bit of a fool” to his father-in-law, perhaps because he sounds like a public man when he delivers himself of the “spiritual truths” (3.1.206) that his curate admires. Speaking to him familiarly, Morell’s structured sentences and moral diction carry the scent of the lecture hall and the tone of the socialist; they violate the decorum of the personal occasion:

158   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

An honest man feels that he must pay Heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

(3.1.204)

Although his affection for Candida prejudices his judgment of her husband, Marchbanks hits home when he labels Morell’s speech “cant” (3.1.221), remains “unimpressed” by his “oratory” and accuses him of starving Candida emotionally by feeding her “metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric” (3.1.223). Shaw reserves the strongest criticism for Candida to express; she says of Morell’s lectures and sermons, “What you say is all very true; but it does no good” (3.2.239). His fine style gains effects he does not intend: women are “enthusiastic” about him because “They’re all in love with you. And you are in love with preaching because you do it so beautifully” (3.2.240). To Morell’s distress (“His words!”) she echoes Marchbanks’ critique: “Your sermons [are] phrases that you cheat yourself and others with every day” (3.2.242). She also repeats one of Morell’s heightened speeches, delivered as an offer of his love for her, but she exposes it as a “stale peroration”; she cannot love him only because he does “it so beautifully.” At the end of her second and last long speech, she restates Morell’s offer in the auction for her love; she deflates his peroration not only by repossessing his words but also by disrupting his balanced phrases and by reducing them to mere sound: “To tempt me to stay he offered me his strength for my defence! his industry for my livelihood! his dignity for my position! His—[relenting] ah, I am mixing up your beautiful cadences and spoiling them, am I not, darling?” (3.3.267). Candida is not, however, entirely trustworthy as a critic of style; after all, she didn’t want to hear Morell “spoil” Marchbanks’ dreamy, trite vision of their being transported away in a “chariot to carry us up into the sky, where the lamps are stars” (3.2.236). And, before criticizing Morell’s “cadences,” she elevates her own style with balance and repShaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   159

etition. Nonetheless, she gets the last, definitive word of the play on the efficacy of fine speech; through her, Candida rejects high-sounding diction and rhetorical figures if they only decorate a style without meaningful substance. The good man, presumably Shaw himself, must do more than speak in “beautiful cadences” to instruct an audience. In The Doctor’s Dilemma, the artist Louis Dubedat sounds very much like Shaw himself when he faces down the doctors he has angered with his brazen, socially obtuse behavior; his diction assumes unexceptionable absolutes: It’s always the way with the inartistic professions: when they’re beaten in argument they fall back on intimidation. I never knew a lawyer yet who didn’t threaten to put me in prison sooner or later. I never knew a parson who didn’t threaten me with damnation. And now you [doctors] threaten me with death.

(1.3.148 [my emphases])

Minutes later, Dubedat flatly identifies himself with Shaw, but behind the clear surface meaning Shaw is fashioning an ironic twist on the modest ethos gambit: “I don’t believe in morality. I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw” (1.3.149). (The corollary: Shaw is amoral.) Sir Patrick Cullen, whose attitudes are also much like the playwright’s, soon adds, “Bernard Shaw? I never heard of him. He’s a Methodist preacher, I suppose” (1.3.150). (The corollary: Shaw is irrelevant.) Don’t, the message to the theatre audience seems to imply, take this fellow seriously; he isn’t worth listening to. He is, as another doctor says, opposed to vaccination and, so, cannot be credible on “science, morals and religion” (1.3.149), three of Shaw’s favorite topics and targets. His anti-vaccination stand “place[s] a man socially,” that is, outside of conventional society, a place where Shaw chooses to be even as he writes for a socially constructed audience. His selfdeprecating pose opens the real Shaw to complicit laughter from that audience, overstates his ethical character, and implies that he is open to criticism. Such a man is, when the laughter subsides, worth attending to—all the more so because he challenges 160   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

the audience to think about a dilemma that catches death on one of its horns. Behind the dramatic dialogue stands a long ethical and rhetorical tradition that honors people as moral when they weigh alternatives and make responsible choices. Before spelling out the dilemma of the play’s title in act 2, Shaw establishes the context in which Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the doctor of the play’s title, must make the fatal choice. In act 1, he receives notice of the knighthood to be conferred upon him for his groundbreaking treatment of tuberculosis. As other doctors enter to congratulate him, Shaw displays the fixed, conflicting medical opinions that they support with circular reasoning and adhere to with minds closed to counter evidence. One doctor, Sir Patrick Cullen, labeled as “old cynic” (1.1.91) by Ridgeon, delivers Shavian maxims that contribute to the play’s moral tone: “All professions are conspiracies against the laity” (1.1.110) and “The criminal law . . . is only fit for fools and savages” (1.3.147). Moments later, Sir Patrick speaks to Ridgeon and for the play; he insists that the circumstances of the real world cannot be ignored and that they affect the justness (“scales,” “fairly”) of our decisions: “The world isn’t going to be made simple for you, my lad: you must take it as it is. You’ve to hold the scales between Blenkinsop and Dubedat. Hold them fairly” (1.2.133). Colenso’s choice between the two men, his dilemma, has been set forth squarely by Sir Patrick: “Well, Mr. Savior of Lives: which is it to be? That honest decent man Blenkinsop, or that rotten blackguard of an artist?” Since Ridgeon’s calendar is so full, he cannot treat both men; no third possibility—no way of escaping the horns—exists. Further complicating the choice, Ridgeon questions whether Blenkinsop is of “any use” while Dubedat is “a genuine source of pretty and pleasant and good things” (1.2.132). But, what truly “troubles [his] judgment” is the attractive Mrs. Dubedat, for as he admits to Sir Patrick, “If I let Dubedat die, I’ll marry his widow” (1.2.134), a woman some twenty years his junior. He lets him die, and within minutes of his death in act 4, his widow amazes a clutch of doctors by her Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   161

appearance: “wonderfully and beautifully dressed, and radiant” (1.4.177). Although she refuses to shake hands with Ridgeon, he shows up at a gallery where her late husband’s art is displayed; she has written a sanitized biography of the man and, as Ridgeon learns only after declaring his love for her, has remarried. She has seen the healthy Blenkinsop, living proof of Ridgeon’s choice, and he concedes that by turning Dubedat over to another doctor, he killed him. He had tried to find a middle way out of the dilemma when there was none. Stunned to “gabbling and stuttering” at news of her marriage, he exclaims, “Then I have committed a purely disinterested murder!” Except for “Good morning” (1.4.188), it’s his last line and very nearly the play’s; in its morally mixed diction and confused sense of realization, it is Shaw’s summary comment on the values of the man and the play. Ridgeon cannot be disinterested after the fact of his choice, never purely so. “I have committed murder” would be a clear, honest admission of guilt and responsibility. To qualify that statement before the law, one might argue mitigating circumstances, but Ridgeon retreats to the pure air of intellectual abstraction to defend himself. That kind of thinking is absurd, the play concludes, because social realities, including the life of a “blackguard” and the beauty of his wife, condition logical appraisals. As there is no such thing as a “purely disinterested murder,” there is no such thing as a pure logical tool for managing the world. We must, in Sir Patrick’s words, take it as it is. As Colenso does in the final stage image; his fanciful hope for marriage lost, “He goes towards the door; hesitates; turns to say something more; gives it up as a bad job; and goes” (1.4.188). He is speechless and, so, without value. Through him, Shaw rejects asocial logic in The Doctor’s Dilemma as he rejected an oratorical style in Candida. In John Bull’s Other Island Shaw’s dilemmas set Irish and English stereotypes in opposition and then undermine them throughout the play; its central characters finally take the world as it is. As a result, when Doyle and Broadbent exit at the cur162   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

tain, they are a discordant One, not an either/or. What Declan Kiberd sees as a vice may be the play’s culminating virtue: There is a real sense in which [John Bull’s Other Island] . . . is an artistic casualty of the vice of compartmentalization which [Shaw] satirizes. The plot issues in an emphatic victory for the efficient and romantic Englishman, while all the subversive witticisms have been uttered by the cynical but inactive Irishman.6

Keegan, “the cynical but inactive Irishman,” “goes away across the hill,” after articulating his vision of an Ireland where all conflicts are resolved, of a state where the secular and spiritual are one. In his final words, the vision is “the dream of a madman” (2.4.611). In a world of either/or logic, one alternative must be rejected altogether, but Shaw’s compartments overlap because the opposition embodied in the stereotypes cannot be resolved. To underscore his points, Shaw takes pains to foreground the John Bull/Other disjunction that governs his play; he makes the point clearly in “Preface for Politicians”: “Roughly I should say that the Englishman is wholly at the mercy of his imagination, having no sense of reality to check it. The Irishman, with a far subtler and more fastidious imagination, has one eye always on things as they are” (Preface 2:448). To accentuate the categories, he distributes dilemmas among the major spokesmen and underscores their importance in a balanced style: doy l e: Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality.

(2.1.525)

broa dben t: The fact is, there are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient.

(2.4.604)

6. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 61.

Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   163

k eega n: Well, perhaps I had better vote for the efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no business.

(2.4.606)

These are, to be sure, debater’s dilemmas, for they come as responses and allow a third option to an alert member of the audience, but at the same time they give dramatic life to the fixed attitudes behind the ethnic stereotypes, and the characters will not see beyond the two choices. Finally, the “other” of the play’s title abides, and John Bull’s man, efficiently enough, will work with him. The dilemma that cannot be resolved comes to life as a concluding stage image and, significantly, as the basis for a real world choice: broa dben t [to Doyle]: I feel now as I never did before that I am right in devoting my life to Ireland. Come along and help me choose the site for the hotel.

(2.4.611)

Nicholas Grene rightly comments that “the ending of John Bull, like so much of the play, is remarkable for its poised balance.”7 Insofar as that balance is tentative as well as poised, it is achieved in part by the unresolved dilemmas, and the final one is realized in the staging. The competing claims have been dramatized in the attitudes of people who decide to get along, to ride the wave of a materialist future. The worth of the very real third options is left to the audience to ponder. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, various speakers deliver axiomatic lines and, so, give the play a consistently critical point of view toward a favorite Shaw target, social conventions. Not so insistently as Heartbreak House and without its witty indirection, Mrs. Warren’s Profession uses the enthymeme as vehicle for its criticism of manners. Defending herself to her daughter Vivie near the end of the play, Mrs. Warren’s unstated premise is eas7. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33.

164   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

ily extracted: “Haven’t I brought you up to be respectable? And how can you keep it up without my money and my influence and [Aunt] Lizzie’s friends?” (3.4.101). She assumes that respectability requires money, influence and connections; coming from a well-presented woman of her profession as madam of a brothel, the assumption subscribes to the values of the audience and comments on them satirically. Sir George Croft makes a related point when he assumes that decent society is fundamentally amoral; he is addressing Vivie: “If you’re going to pick and chose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society” (3.3.84). In the play’s final minutes, Vivie not only assumes that the conventional women in the audience are all hypocrites but, in a corollary, that they and her mother are soulmates: “I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart” (3.4.104). When the dramatist assigns similar attitudes and rhetorical strategies to several characters, they tend to speak as the voice of the play. In Mrs. Warren’s Profession, they create a strong satiric point of view that attacks the values of a complacent audience head on. In Major Barbara, Andrew Undershaft’s maxims and belligerent deductions do more than amuse the audience. Indeed, Stuart Baker virtually equates the play itself and Undershaft’s reasoning; to Baker, the play “is a model of logical consistency” and much of its structure, as the title of his article suggests, is as formal as a scholastic deduction: “Logic and Religion in Major Barbara: The Syllogism of St. Andrew Undershaft.”8 Shaw’s stage directions insist that Undershaft’s set speeches be delivered with a force appropriate to their declamatory style and to his character. In one passage alone, he is to speak “triumphantly . . . in towering excitement . . . with redoubled force . . . with surging energy,” and physically controlling Cusins at the same time by “seizing him by the shoulder . . . [and] pressing him” (1.2.388). In 8. Stuart Baker, “Logic and Religion in Major Barbara: The Syllogism of Andrew Undershaft,” Modern Drama 21 (1978): 251.

Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   165

general, Undershaft’s major premises are unmistakably clear; he intends them to have a force comparable to the munitions he manufactures and sells to the most willing customers whatever their values. If we grant that “All religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich” (1.2.389), the conclusion follows inevitably both in logic and practical reality—the Salvation Army does take his check. His other principles include: “The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it” (3.1.361); “Whatever can blow men up can blow society up” (1.3.436); and “Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated” (1.3.440). He endorses the seven principles of the armorer’s “true faith” as his predecessors set them down; all are worldly wise if not downright cynical, they prompt Cusins to call Undershaft “My good Machiavelli” (1.3.430, 431), a defensibly accurate label. Like Dubedat, Undershaft seems to speak for the playwright who, with a touch of the self-conscious, has Undershaft’s wife, Lady Britomart, deflate him: “Stop making speeches, Andrew. This is no place for them.” He replies, like the Shaw of his prefaces and criticism, “My dear: I have no other means of conveying my ideas” (1.3.435). Through Undershaft, Shaw approximates the ancient apology for satire; we are to accept the non-dramatic speeches in this “place” because his character compels him to convey his ideas, they take priority over dramatic form. In the clash of a priori reasoning that engages Undershaft, Barbara and Cusins, Lady Britomart’s perceptive analysis of her husband’s domineering logic goes unregarded: “That’s Andrew all over. He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it” (1.3.408). Ironically, the society matron with her precious views is given the line designed to “stimulate thought.” Later, Shaw directs the Britomart actor to dramatize her analysis in a movement at odds with her insight: “She sits down on the rug with a bounce that expresses her downright contempt for their casuistry” (1.3.428). Casuistry it remains to the end, for in Shaw’s dramatic world, social, and political realities confuse matters so deeply that honest reason166   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

ing—like his own—will always be ineffective. Shaw’s strategy is deliberate: “My reasoned-out syllogisms amuse my readers by seeming the first things that would come into a fool’s head and only my fun, provoking hasty contradictions and reactions instead of stimulating thought and conviction” (Drama 4:1524). The rhetorical problems persist, however. The outrageous assertion may jolt the listener to fresh attention but it doesn’t gain assent. Further, if the playwright’s ethos is well known, his unconventional ideas as given voice in this play can be readily dismissed. Sensitive to his audience’s preconceptions, Shaw kept Heartbreak House from the stage for the duration of the war and relied on rhetorical indirection to convey its central idea. With a rhetorical subtlety distinctive among these plays, Shaw’s wit in Heartbreak House provokes laughter through an audience’s unconscious, instantaneous acceptance of the unstated premises of enthymemes. Those premises are the very ones that legitimate the audience’s social arrangements governing wealth, family, class, and morals. By itself, the laughter tends to create a sympathetic bond between the audience and the play, but that bond works like a snare, for Shaw so undermines social beliefs that they collapse when tested against the insinuated values of Heartbreak House. Ultimately, he questions the very compact that makes the staging of his own plays possible, and in a final lesson to the audience, he both frustrates their hopes for a satisfying resolution and invites them to return for more of the same dismissive treatment. As Shaw clearly recognized, the broad social context in which Heartbreak House was written and produced further complicated his daunting rhetorical situation. With England at war he questioned how he could write a play about social disruption for an audience looking to theater for “some sort of distraction” (Preface 1:478). At first, Shaw writes, “I had to withhold Heartbreak House from the footlights during the war,” and he wrote two anti-war pamphlets instead (Preface 1:486–87). When, after years of delay, Heartbreak House was produced, the audience was Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   167

treated to and unwittingly subjected to another, subtle “sort of distraction,” a rhetorical one. Shaw leads the audience to share the play’s point of view on one level, but the engaging dramatic and humorous techniques distract attention from his more serious point until the audience has absorbed and tacitly, momentarily, accepted it. On that deeper level, the obscured, withheld premises of Shaw’s enthymemes and their corollaries mimic the values of the audience; as a result, to a reflective person the laughter of escape comes back as a judgment. When Shaw presented any play, a set of essentially social conventions operated: proper dress, appropriate behavior, ticket prices. Combined with the audience’s predisposition for melodrama and entertainment, these conventions were bound to act as constraints on Shaw the satirist and moralist who knew that the “nice people” (Preface 1:450) occupied the stalls. In Heartbreak House Shaw may be said to lure them in with “the ghosts of several nineteenth-century character stereotypes . . . and . . . clear reminiscences of nineteenth-century farce.”9 More clearly alluring is Captain Shotover who has rejected social conventions for most of his eighty-eight years. His abrupt entrances and exits are dramatic metaphors, the staged equivalents of Shaw’s abridged arguments, as Ellie’s penetrating analysis of Shotover’s behavior indicates: “You pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away before they can answer you” (1.2.566). The comment applies equally to Shaw’s rhetorical wit at work in the play, except that most of his imagined audience lacks Ellie’s power of perception and laughs without considering an answer. Even Shotover’s most playful enthymemes are fundamentally serious as, for example, when he refuses to acknowledge normal family relationships. What seems aberrant and idiosyncratic is stated as an axiomatic truth: “The natural term of affection for the human animal is six years.” Since he has not 9. A. M. Gibbs, Heartbreak House: Preludes of Apocalypse (New York: Twayne, 1994), 5.

168   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

seen his daughter Addy Utterword in over six years, Shotover can reject her and her conventional behavior as well. He attacks a social belief much as Shaw did in his own voice: “People [in general] have a fixed convention that the proper name of the relation between mother and son is love . . . and by the instinctive logic of timidity they infer that a man to whom convention is not sacred is a dangerous man” (Drama 3:1208). Shaw’s stage direction for the daughter mocks conventional, melodramatic acting; her lines are the clichés of recognition scenes: “l a dy u t terword [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]: Papa! Don’t you know me? I’m you daughter.” Since she is a stereotype, it follows that her father not “know” her; since he should, his abrupt departure is funny: “Nonsense! My daughter’s upstairs asleep. [He vanishes through the half door]” (1.1.496). A few minutes later, that upstairs daughter, Hesione, enters and makes such a fuss over her guest, Ellie Dunn, that Addy comes forward to claim her dramatic space. Again, the stage direction reveals Shaw’s point of view; it stresses the gulf between socially approved behavior and “natural affection”: l a dy u t terwor d: Hesione: is it possible that you don’t know me? mrs hush a by e [conventionally]: Of course I remember your face quite well. Where have we met?

(1.1.499)

Early in the first act of Heartbreak House, then, the audience is encouraged to laugh at stage and family conventions: No one should love their children for more than six years; and, All social bonding, even that between sisters, is based on appearance. Shaw begins by stimulating the “instinctive logic” of the audience; as the play develops, his unstated premises carry greater moral weight. Later in the first act, in as strong a judgment as the play holds, Lady Utterword implicitly equates acceptable social conduct and moral license. Her first clause is meant to establish her authority (“I am a woman of the world, Hector”), and restShaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   169

ing on this flimsy ethos, she goes on to argue: “And I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like” (1.1.522). The neatly balanced style and Utterword’s superior tone deflect attention from the underlying amorality of the buried major premise: Major: Observing social conventions legitimates any behavior. Minor: Always doing and saying the perfectly correct thing is the governing social convention. Conclusion: Doing and saying the perfectly correct thing allows you to do whatever you like.

To be sure, Utterword may be unwittingly satirizing herself in this and other passages; the satire, though, is Shaw’s, and it hits at the class-conscious “sanctimonious” in his audience as well. It imagines a world of self-centered, class-based moral relativism—hardly the ideal audience for a didactic playwright. One of Hesione’s lines also assumes a cynical absolute and invariably gets a big laugh: el l ie: But how can you love a liar? mrs hush a by e: I don’t know. But you can fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world.

(1.2.511)

The comment is more sweeping than it first appears to be. If we spell out Hushabye’s thinking, the fraudulent foundations of her world are exposed: All conventional social arrangements are based on lies. Love is a conventional social arrangement. Therefore, love is based on lies.

Similarly, Hushabye provokes superior laughter when she says that Mazzini is “so poor” because “he has been fighting for freedom” all of his life (1.1.500). The major premise—that people who fight for freedom are necessarily poor—is mild compared to one of its corollaries: People of means are indifferent to the 170   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

plight of others. Rendering such a verdict explicitly would likely antagonize Shaw’s “nice” people, the financially secure patrons of his art; his wit draws them into taking at least the first step toward accepting the premise as a valid truth, in logic if not in their lives. These few of many examples illustrate how Shaw’s enthymemes strike at the most basic principles of his fashionable public and find them empty. Not content with satiric thrusts like these, the Shaw of Heartbreak House insinuates the worth of positive standards as the play progresses. Using Shotover as vehicle, Shaw suggests higher principles of behavior than the ones he satirizes. Shotover dismisses out of hand both Ellie’s uncertainty about being expected and Utterword’s italicized implication that she outranks the younger woman: el l ie: Lady Utterword: do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me? l a dy u t terwor d: Oh, don’t ask me. You can see for yourself that I’ve just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years absence! and it seems that I am not expected. the c a p ta in: What does it matter whether the young lady is expected or not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food. I’ll find a room for her myself. (1.1.498)

Whether Shotover is invoking an ancient tradition of hospitality, he is supposing that humane values override artificial conventions, like the ones that determine a welcome based on a guest’s being “expected.” In another sense of the word, it does not matter to Shaw the dramatist whether a character’s entrance on stage is “expected” so long as the play’s ideas come through forcefully. He was so absorbed by the discussion in A Doll’s House that he didn’t notice the play’s “Scribish artificiality” at first (Drama 3:1130). He knew all too well that whatever his convictions and didactic goals, once a play was finished and went on stage, the objectivity of its form, the quality of acting, sensitivity of directShaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   171

ing, and mood of the audience usurped much of his control. When the lights go down, the theater house can still break a playwright’s heart; by Shaw’s standards, the best plays challenge the audience to a new awareness, but that same audience insists on being entertained. The premise of one enthymeme recognizes this ambivalent truth. The speaker, Hector Hushabye, is in a “handsome Arab costume” that mitigates his authority: “Lady Utterword: you are not to be trusted. You have made a scene” (1.2.562). The premise comes through clearly—People who make scenes are not to be trusted—but the clarity is muddied in the dramatic context. Hector’s outlandish costume belies his unqualified certainty, and Utterword’s world sustains itself in scenes. Remove them and little else remains. But the ironies fall away to expose a core truth if the axiomatic premise is applied to Shaw himself, the scene-maker who cannot trust an audience to trust him. A representative of that audience at one extreme is Boss Mangan. In his preface to the play, Shaw sees society at large endorsing their Mangans at the very time that he could not stage his drama: “From the beginning [of World War I] the useless people set up a shriek for ‘practical business men.’ . . . Men who had become rich by placing their personal interests before those of the country” (Preface 1:470). What Mangan says of Heartbreak House is true of the theater Shaw hoped to purify: “It aint my house, thank God” (1.2.554). When he tells Shotover that he wants to get “to hell out of this house,” the Captain replies as Shaw might address the theater house: “You were welcome to come: you are free to go” (1.2.552). Since the theater he depended on to express his message was “only [a] commercial affair” (Preface 1:449), the blend of welcoming and indifference is understandable. Later, through Mangan, Shaw conveys an ironic meaning reserved perhaps for his own satisfaction: “Everybody is listening. It isn’t right.” Mrs. Hushabye’s reply assumes that Shaw’s message in the dim theater has no impact: “But in the dark, what does it matter?” (1.3.580). In a kind of 172   Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit

peroration to the house references, every attribute that Ellie assigns to Heartbreak House can modify Shaw’s mixed feelings towards his theater, and one of them puns on the ancient Greek term for tragic struggle: “This silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it Heartbreak House” (1.3.589). Theater audiences can be counted on to laugh self-consciously when, in the languidly paced talk of the final act, Hector says to no one in particular, “How is this going to end?” (1.3.592). The audience has been taken on a long and apparently inconclusive journey. Shaw himself could be sure only of their laughter not whether they learned from his witty indirections. With all his reservations about their motivation and intelligence, he could be voicing muted hopes about the audience through Hesione and Ellie in the play’s final words: “I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night” and “I hope so” (1.3.598). If they come, Shaw hopes, they will come to join him in satiric laughter aimed at the working premises of a shallow society. If they laugh in recognition of those premises, they may be teased into learning something about themselves and, the playwright may hope, into questioning their values.

Shaw, Ethos, & Rhetorical Wit   173

Chapter 6

Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric V In his introduction to the Samuel French edition of The Blood Knot, Athol Fugard writes: “I am a South African, white skinned. There are three million of us. There are also twelve million darkskinned South Africans.”1 Since the premiere of that play in 1961, such matters of fact about Fugard himself and South Africa in general have become more familiar to theater audiences in the United States, but the early explanation remains significant for the clues it offers about Fugard’s dramatic priorities. As in Master Harold, he will posit, not dwell on, the facts informing social or political issues. Indisputable facts with great persuasive potential, they are preliminaries to his work, not the stuff at their core. He surely knows what it is, racism; his concern, both overriding and fundamental, goes beyond facts to the stasis question of worth. From the opening moments of Blood Knot through to its final ones, Fugard constantly and openly approaches his audience on the basic levels of theatrical apprehension, awareness of set, costume, and acting chief among them. He then trusts the audi1. Athol Fugard, The Blood Knot: A Play in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, n.d.), 3. Fugard’s introduction was no doubt written after the American production of 1964.

174  

ence to convert that awareness into a new knowledge about self, society, and racism, all topics of ethical moment in the play. Like the best of artists, he combines the particular and the universal as he dramatizes the human condition in general. The fundamental premise of Blood Knot gives concrete meaning to the term mixed race, for the two characters are uterine brothers; Morris is white-skinned, Zachariah is black. They live in a hovel and on a dream of one day owning their own farm. Their play, Blood Knot, opens to a dimly lit, sparse set, and its first action is a form of reduction to dramatic first principles; Morris is lying in bed waiting for his alarm to ring, and responding to it with practiced, or rehearsed, behavior: “He knows exactly what he is going to do.”2 The audience, however, like Morris, has its expectations roused only for “Nothing.” When Zachariah does appear, the promise of dialogue in the entrance of a second player is initially thwarted: “Their meeting is without words.” Instead Zachariah’s behavior further illustrates the artificiality of our typical behavior, for “when he sees Morris smile,” he directs our attention to acting as a technique of social control: “He frowns, pretends to think, and makes a great business of testing the water with his foot” (1.3). Ordinary human behavior, Fugard reminds us before a word of dialogue is spoken, is rehearsed; we are led to laugh at Zachariah’s “great business” at the same time that his role playing takes over the scene from Morris, the one who has elaborately prepared it. Before long, Morris will reassert control, first by putting categorical labels on Zachariah’s own experience at work (“insult . . . Injury . . . Inhumanity!”) and then by supplying quotations at Zachariah’s request: morr is [quoting]: “The rude odors of manhood.” z ach a r i a h: “The rude odors of manhood.” What’s the other one? The long one?

2. Athol Fugard, Blood Knot and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991), 1.3. References in the text are by number to the scene divisions of this edition.

Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   175

morr is: “No smell”? [Zachariah nods.] “No smell doth stink as sweet as labor. Tis joyous times when man and man Do work and sweat in common toil, When all the world’s my neighbor.” z ach a r i a h: “When all the world’s my neighbor.”

(1.7)

Through these two signals of language as meaningful, Fugard lays careful ground for a letter in which, like an acting coach, Morris feeds lines to Zachariah. Morris proposes that his brother satisfy his longing for a woman by finding a pen pal; they review the classified ads in a paper that Zachariah brings to their hovel, and Morris coaches him: “This time you say: ‘Dear Ethel.’ . . . Now comes the introduction. [Writes] ‘With reply to your advert for a pen-pal, I hereby write.’ . . . I am . . . and so on” (2.20– 21). The white man, often Fugard himself in performance, quite literally gives voice to the black, but that voice, again like the dramatist’s, is bound by convention and, as a result, has little value either for Morris or the author who creates him. What Morris defends as conventional, “something you must add in letters” characterizes expression that Zachariah answers with “Shit!” and a yawn. After a pause, Morris responds, “Well, it’s your letter” (2.21). It is, of course, no more Zachariah’s letter than the formulaic language is that of the creative Fugard. This emphasis on convention may lead the audience to question easy acceptance of proven dramatic procedures like characters serving as our surrogates or the author’s. In these opening scenes, Fugard similarly raises and rejects melodramatic uses of time so that we focus sharply on the theatrical present. Besides the intrusive sound of the alarm clock that reminds us of dynamic, demanding time, Fugard more subtly restricts meaningful action to the dramatic moment. Zachariah “loses the thread of his story” (1.8) about the good old days with Minnie, and the alarm leads him to forget what he was 176   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

going to say. Morris’s plans for a secure, idyllic future would let them escape their setting: “They’ve left no room for a man to breathe in this world. But when we go, Zach, together, and we got a place to go, our farm in the future . . . that will be different” (1.10). Through other lines, Fugard nearly flaunts his commitment to a theater restricted to dialogue in a sparsely furnished, unchanging space: “ZACHARIAH . . . then you said: ‘Zach, let us spend tonight talking.’” A minute or two later, Morris echoes Zachariah’s judgment: “You’re not the only one who’s sick of this room. It also gets me down” (1.11, 12). Scene 1 concludes with a striking reexamination of the meaning of costume. Again, Fugard carefully anticipates the moment so that the audience is led to more than a standard interpretation of simple signs, like rags as poverty or white as good. Earlier, Zachariah puts on his jacket as a gesture against Morris’s plans for the farm; he rejects the formula that the clothes make the man: “What do you think I am, hey? Two legs and trousers. I’m a man” (1.11). Later, Morris reenacts the incident; he puts on the same coat before the sleeping Zachariah, and the theater audience, cued to its importance, sees an image of absurdity because the coat “is several sizes too large” (1.17). Morris’s self-indulgent belief that he can know Zachariah by wearing his coat in private makes him ridiculous and simultaneously ridicules the notion that a white can readily understand the black experience. He dresses himself like an actor preparing to go on stage, but the white cannot get under his brother’s skin so easily as he can don his jacket. We apprehend the poignant absurdity of the dramatic image, the first in a series that builds to a climactic image in the final scene. The opening of scene 3 recalls the opening of the play: “Next he resets the clock and prepares the footbath as in the first scene” (3.24). Along with continuing treatment of language as a topic, this parallel action gives Blood Knot a kind of self-validation; its standards are internal and dramatic before they have any external and political applications. Dramatic components that are Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   177

naturally associated—costume, setting, dialogue—are brought into the play with their technical uses displayed for evaluation. In scene 3, Fugard adds to the play’s self-affirming value system when he presents the actors acting as they mime driving a car. Less obviously, he insists strongly on the inseparability of drama and reality through a series of puns. In general, the thoughtful pun reminds us that meaning is open to question and choice, and that language is the contact point between the characters and between the audience and the play. Beyond that, Fugard uses it to make a serious point about the nature of acting—that far from being an escapist game, it is a risky business that engages life directly and dangerously. Morris has cautioned Zachariah about the letter to Ethel, a white woman he has never seen, and Zachariah replies in part, “It’s not so bad.” He is unaware of his innocent ambiguity; of course, it is “bad” for him to write to a white woman. “Playing” in Morris’s reply includes Zachariah’s make-believe and the acting going on before us: “But you’re playing with fire, Zach” (3.33). The word game appears several times in this scene; once it is used to change the tone after Zachariah has recited a jingle that, like Blood Knot itself, contains words that “hurt”3 and that make Morris react in “horror” (3.34) to its racist implications. The men recreate a “game [they] played” as youths; they mime riding a car and, as escapist a move now as it was before, arrive at a time of “goodness” and “gladness” (3.37). But the mood is soon broken. Zachariah’s attempt to categorize the letter writing as “another game” is gently refuted by Morris’s “Yes . . . but not ours this time” (3.37). The exchange of letters is like other forms of address in the play; words in their ambiguity and shifting contexts may take on meanings beyond the speaker’s control. All of the modes of the brothers’ behavior are determined by conventions that their “play” and the play itself cannot redefine. When we recall that Fugard himself acted Morris, the implications for the playwright are profound. Are the conventions of drama and 3. In Blood Knot, Samuel French edition, 44.

178   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

dramatic presentation so fixed and autonomous for both creative artist and receptive audience that trying to speak through them frustrates clear meaning? Do the parallel social conventions, forms of speech and public scene, have even greater power to define a self, at least for a viewer? Scene 4 dramatizes answers to these questions. Morris has willingly surrendered the money tin to Zachariah to buy proper clothes for a meeting with Ethel; it held their savings toward the purchase of an independent life on a farm of their own. But Morris, the play’s humor has hinted, will not be able to sustain the role of gentleman, for he has mistakenly assumed a position of social superiority and has confidently misadvised Zachariah on costume: “If she wants to blow her nose, offer your hanky, which you keep in a breast pocket” (4.47). On his part, Zachariah has proved an untrustworthy coach in feeding lines to Morris: “Good day, Miss Ethel. Can I shake your white hands with my white hands?” (4.49). When Zachariah returns with the “outfit for a gentleman” (4.50), he has been playing games with the kind of social stereotypes that “gentleman” suggests: “His manner is exaggerated, a caricature of the shopkeeper who sold him the clothing” (4.51). He can wear the clothes, but he cannot inhabit the role because white society has shown him only the surfaces that belie the attitudes within. So limited, he instructs Morris on the niceties of dress: z ach a r i a h: And next we have a real ostrich wallet. morr is: What for? z ach a r i a h: Your inside pocket Ja! You forgot about the inside pocket. A gentleman always got a wallet for the inside pocket.

(4.52)

In a sequence that follows the process of mounting a theater piece, the brothers improvise a scene in which appearance recreates reality for Morris and in which art leads to a painful moral truth. It begins with Zachariah inviting Morris to become a typical character: “Go ahead, Morrie. The clothing. Let’s

Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   179

see the gentle sort of man.” Morris, however, needs the Method actor’s commitment to the inner life of the character before he will perform; he has to get “inside” the stereotypical white. morr is: Give me time. z ach a r i a h: What for? You got the clothes, man. morr is: For God’s sake, Zach! This is deep water. I’m not just going to jump right in. You must paddle around first. z ach a r i a h: Paddle around? morr is: Try it out! z ach a r i a h [offering him the hat]: No, try it on. morr is: The idea, man. I got to try it out There’s more to wearing a white skin than just putting on a hat . . . It’s that white something inside you, that special meaning and manner of whiteness. (5.53)

The secondary meaning of “try” recalls one strategy of improvisation, and that meaning in turn gives moral, symbolic weight to costume, as “wearing a white skin” indicates. Further, to be convincing in the quality of “whiteness,” one has to “learn” voice and movement: z ach a r i a h: Ah—so you must learn to walk properly then. morr is: Yes. z ach a r i a h: And to look right at things. morr is: Ja. z ach a r i a h: And to sound right. morr is: Yes! There’s that, as well. The sound of it. (5.54)

Morris tries the hat and rehearses a greeting to Miss Ethel. In the latest edition of the play, Fugard has dropped a line with an unambiguous acting term (“Look, Zach, I’m going to do that little bit again”), but the remaining stage directions clearly signal the process he follows to adapt to his role as a white.4 He is ready, then, to work through the scene that Zachariah sets for 4. In Blood Knot, Samuel French edition, 63.

180   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

him; ironically, as we learn later, Morris has already played it on his job as a park attendant. We attend theater for such scenes, and Zachariah’s placard style increases our sense of Brechtian distance: “You’re walking with Ethel. I’m selling monkey-nuts” (5.55). Morris realizes that this scene holds danger; he hesitates and is “frightened” (5. 55), but Zachariah is a demanding director: “You got to learn your lesson, Morrie. You want to pass, don’t you? Peanuts! Peanuts!” (5.56). Zachariah corrects Morris’s form of address twice because it is unrealistic from a white, and he ignores “Boy,” prompting Morris to drop all selfprotection and to take the risky leap to truth that convincing acting demands: morr is: You’re asking for it, Zach! z ach a r i a h: I am. morr is: I’m warning you. I will. z ach a r i a h: Go on. morr is [with brutality and coarseness]: Hey, swartgat! (“black arse”). (5.56)

Morris’s weak apology (“Just a joke!”) can be true only if theater is escapist. The pun on “try” is repeated to return us to the unavoidable intersection of appearance and reality, of art and life, of trial and truth. “See” underscores the visual nature of theater that Fugard values so highly, and “sort of man” begins to make articulate in the text the painful lesson that dramatic processes have already begun to illustrate—the socially constructed category and the self cannot be disassociated:5 morr is: But don’t you see, Zach? It was me. That different sort of man you saw was me . . . I’ll tell you the whole truth now because I did try it! (5.56) 5. For a rewarding treatment of this topic, see Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity.

Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   181

Once again, the particular, living image of theater makes a universal point. At the end of this scene, Morris has begun to confront the self that play allowed him to suppress but that was the core of his moral self. Zachariah questions whether “brother” fits Morris, who in the last line can say only that he is “no Judas” (5.57). In the final scene, the brothers once again improvise, but Ethel’s letter announcing her engagement to a police officer removes any practical reason for their acting; it is no longer a rehearsal but the thing itself. The boundaries of pure drama are restored, abstracted from pedestrian concerns or pressing demands. The letter can be a hoary dramatic device to resolve a complication or move plot along; after Morris reads Ethel’s, however, the dialogue reveals Fugard’s deeper purpose. To “begin again” at this point involves something other than repeating the rituals of preparing the foot bath or ending the day with prayer, for to know what to do, the brothers must confront truly radical questions that go to the very nature of ethical theater as an investigation of character: morr is: So I think we can begin again, Zach. z ach a r i a h: What? morr is: That’s a good question. [Pause.] Well, let’s work it out. Where are we? Here. What is this? Our house. (7.62)

This “here,” the space before them and us, makes strong demands but can also liberate its players from real time and physical demands, the circumstances that can so limit one’s attention that moral significance is lost: morr is: What time shall we make it? . . . z ach a r i a h: We’ll say we’ve eaten.

(7.63)

Morris, who quoted favorite passages for Zachariah, wrote his letter for him and fed him lines, now finds speaking impromptu difficult because it has revealed so much that he would con182   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

ceal from his brother: “Not so easy now . . . after yesterday. Say something to help me” (7.63). After Zachariah reassures him that they are “only playing,” Morris repeats “Swartgat,” the epithet he rehearsed the day before: “No harm done now, heh, Zach?” (7.64 [my emphasis]). To Morris, the repetition apparently freezes the term and all the negative forces that it might set loose, but through him, Fugard virtually equates roleplaying and identity, and once into the role, Morris must pursue its full implications. Because he has learned to make theater, Zachariah pushes Morris further into the scene; he locates an imaginary property, the entrance to the park Morris guards: “I’ll show you. Here it is. [Vague gesture.] This here is the gate” (7.64). When he elaborates on the setting with “flowers and butterflies,” Morris approves in rehearsal diction: “That’s a good touch, Zach” (7.65). Fully in the spirit of improvisation, Zachariah says, “I have a thought,” one which allows him to stop Morris short by calling him “Bastard.” Not only does this term requite “Swartgat,” it hits at Morris’s very identity as a South African and serves as prelude to his resurrecting their mother imaginatively, giving her dramatic existence to kill her off as a social and moral force. Zachariah’s complicity in the attack on their mother—he calls her “hoer” (whore) and “Swartgat” before knocking her down—enlarges the play’s vision of racial injustice because inculcated social behavior, like dramatic interaction, has taught him to play along; his job at the gate is to “chase the black kids away” (7.65). Earlier in Blood Knot, Morris established the precedent for saying “Swartgat”; so, when Zachariah applies it to their mother, he deserves a measure of the contempt Morris’s self-loathing transfers to him. Morris beats Zachariah with an umbrella, a prop with no practical use indoors except for self-assertion. Fugard calls attention to its theatrical purposes when Morris first “flourishes” it (7.65) and later when, attacking Zachariah, he asks, “What do you think umbrellas are for when it doesn’t rain” (7.69). Beating Zachariah leaves Morris “released of all tensions” (7.70) because he has actAthol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   183

ed out the desires and drives that lie below articulation. Dramatic action has momentarily purged him of tensions created by the conflicting impulses of guilt that led him back home and by the feelings of hopelessness that returning created. Both he and Zachariah, however, are returned to their dramatic origins with no clear promise of personal or artistic redemption. Some evidence of meaningful change appears: Zachariah goes from calling Morris, Baas to Baasie to Morris to Morrie; and Morris says, “We’ll sleep well tonight, you’ll see” (7.72). But finally Zachariah’s questions discover hard truths. The first question could be our own, that of an audience seeking a conclusion to applaud: “What happened?” (7.72). What happened was theater, and although Morris calls it “only a game,” they need its eternal present to occupy them: “I’m sure it’s a good thing we got the game.” The second question goes to the very essence of their lives and of the theater: “What is it, Morrie? You know, the two of us . . . in here?” Morris answers simply, “Home” (7.72, 73), an answer that applies equally to Athol Fugard as actor and playwright and to Zakes Mokae, his acting partner, as it does to Morris and Zachariah. Fugard’s theater licenses an acting through or a working out of a question; it does not supply or validate answers. It can accommodate the past and speak of a future, but only in a demanding present. It is the specific home of Morris and Zachariah and, at the same time, the place where universal laws about our conflicting social roles can be represented in accessible detail. Zachariah’s third and final question asks, “Is there no other way?” The answer seems patronizing out of the full context of the play: morr is: No, Zach. You see, we’re tied together. It’s what they call the blood knot . . . the bond between brothers. (7.73)

The knot that cannot be seen cannot be untied; no way other than living drama can honor the paradoxes and ambiguities that lie beneath the tangible, clearly available surfaces of our social lives. None of these comments are meant to deny that “there was

184   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

a hell of a lot of teaching going on” in Blood Knot, as Sam says in Master Harold; rather, the language of theater has suggested insights about racism that are beyond the reach of straightforward exposition, historical accounts, photographs or news reports. One needs no glossary of Afrikaans to interpret the absurd fit of the out-of-fashion suit or to sense the menace behind “hoer” and “swartgat.” If a role can be rehearsed and learned, it can be supplanted by a better one in a better game, one that acknowledges the unseen knot of blood of our common humanity. Twelve years later, Fugard’s collaboration with John Kani and Winston Ntshona created The Island, another play about the ethical implications of theater and the knotted bond between its two characters. The play’s title refers to South Africa’s notorious Robben Island, site of the prison where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen years often in repetitive, mind-numbing labor and once as Creon in an amateur staging of Antigone. The basic facts of Mandela’s imprisonment and of the conditions on the island as the play had its run surely provided part of the context of The Island for its first audiences. The play begins with a mimed representation of hard fact and ends with a clear, transcendent affirmation of human dignity. Its two characters grunt and sweat as they act out their daily routine, shoveling imaginary sand into a wheelbarrow and moving it to a pile only to, Sisyphus-like, move it back again in a pointless circularity. The theatricality of their mime at first distances the audience from the reality it represents and as the action is repeated, engages it to supply that reality imaginatively. In performance, the prolonged mime of The Island tests the audience’s patience and makes some of them restless, for the labor went on for “ten painful minutes”6 in the original production and for five in the 2002 London revival. With no dialogue, the repeated movement, like the prisoners’ labor, becomes an end in itself and, 6. Albert Wertheim, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 89.

Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   185

as the minutes pass, an increasingly intense dramatic image of life without redeeming worth. From theater at this fundamental level of mime, The Island next moves to improvisation in the prisoners’ cell and finally to their adaptation of the classic Antigone. In the evenings, the men have routinely alternated roles to create escapist fictions. A Glenn Ford Western was Winston’s improvisation the night before the present action; taking his turn; John picks up the prop at hand, a mug, and places a call to a familiar telephone number. At first Winston is pleased to hear “news” (1.56)7 of distant friends, but the simple mention of his wife sinks his spirits and gives the lie to escapist drama. With this form and mime behind the men, The Island becomes a play about the continuing ethical power and personal relevance of a classic play. John and Winston have promised to put on their version of Antigone for fellow prisoners, prison administrators, and guards. Six days before the performance, however, Winston in the title role gets the basic facts of the story wrong; he says that Antigone is the mother of Polynices, that she buried Eteocles and that she pleaded guilty (2.51–52). He hasn’t learned his lines and he objects to wearing Antigone’s necklace of rusty nails on a string. A few days closer to the performance, scene 2 gives the audience a dress rehearsal of John and Winston’s Antigone. Once again, we see theater created from scratch; Winston is putting on false breasts and his wig, a stringy mop of hair. He is a walking incongruity, so far removed from any Antigone the world stage has ever seen as to border on parody. John not only laughs at him but “launches into an extravagant send-up of Winston’s Antigone” (2.59). Enraged, Winston tears off his costume: “It’s finished! I’m not doing it. Take your Antigone and shove it up your arse!” (2.59). John’s first attempt to placate his friend is transparent (“I wasn’t laughing at you”); his second begins 7. Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Sizwe Bamzi Is Dead & The Island (New York: Viking, 1973), 73. Designations in the text are to scene and page number of this edition.

186   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

with a rationalization (“I was preparing you for [Beat] stage fright!”) and ends with a prophetic truth: “But just remember this brother, nobody laughs forever! They’ll come a time when they’ll stop laughing, and that will be the time when our Antigone hits them with her words” (2.61[my emphasis]). The men will make the classic words their own; no matter how ludicrous their trappings, the truth of the play will rise above them. Not immediately convinced, Winston contrasts his life sentence at hard labor, his history, to the Greek legend: “Your Antigone is child’s play” (2.62), as it understandably is to a man in his circumstances. But the laughter of ridicule that John encourages is a masterful artistic stroke, for his laughter licenses the audience’s, and once released, laughter will not greet Winston’s final appearance as the principled Antigone. The audience does indeed “stop laughing” when he hits them with his highly personal and universally powerful delivery of “her words.” Later in the scene, John is called to the prison office; in his absence Winston tries on the wig again, laughs at his reflection in the common water bucket and stiffens his angry resolve not to do the part. John’s return alters the tone; his appeal has succeeded, and he will be released in three months. Winston rejoices with him, and Antigone is forgotten for the rest of the scene. Soon, however, John’s good news, more stunning for being unexpected, strains their relationship; here and throughout, The Island is emotionally honest: “Your freedom stinks, John, and it’s driving me mad” (3.71). The bond between them may snap. It was literally forged when they were shackled together to be transported to prison; now, they cannot escape each other in their cell. Their stronger bond of kinship is reaffirmed when their Antigone unites them on their improvised stage and on a moral level that their captors would deny them and cannot reach themselves. In the final scene, John comes down stage and speaks directly to his double audience, the imagined one of the drama and the actual one before him. Speaking as his double self, Kani Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   187

and prisoner, he introduces a subversive meaning to the decorous form of the standard opening. He addresses the imagined audience in order of rank: “Captain Prinsloo, Hodoshe (carrion fly, derogatory name for the guard), Warders, (Pause) and Gentlemen!” (4.73) His pause disrupts the expected rhythm of delivery and directs sharp attention to the prisoners’ new names, elevating them to the social level of free men. He then summarizes his play’s background in full detail and in his subtle conclusion asserts its timeless connection to all principled lawbreakers, people like Winston imprisoned for burning his pass book: Polynices . . . was to lie on the open fields to rot, or at most be food for the jackals. It was a law. But Antigone, their sister, defied the law and buried the body of her brother Polynices. She was caught and arrested. That is why tonight the Hodoshe Span, Cell Forty-two, presents for your entertainment: “The Trial and Punishment of Antigone.” (4.73)

The connection, the “why,” cannot be causal; it is purely moral and qualifies “entertainment” ironically. John then goes behind “a makeshift backdrop” of blankets and reenters as Creon, robed in a blanket and wearing a equally makeshift crown. In the last London production, John Kani as Creon stared some members of the audience into eye contact; he risked antagonizing many as he applied the direct address authorized by the text to them. He insisted that the people in the front rows look behind them. To his “What do you see?” he supplied the answers: “fat” people and “liberals.” (In the text Creon sees “fatness and happiness” [4.73].) Any comfortable distance or identification between paying customer and John Kani himself was swept away. Kani’s delivery masked a reserve of hostility behind his broad, nearly servile smile, the practiced performance of a prisoner answering to his guard. No longer could the audience sit complacent as surrogates for the prison audience, nor could it accept the performance as “entertainment.” In his ethical proof Creon 188   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

posed as humble: “My good people, I am your servant”; the playwrights, however, undermine this false ethos, for the blanketed king identifies with his audience, equating his “symbols of office” with “the uniform of the humblest menial in your house” (4.73). Furthermore, he justifies punishment for “rats” like Antigone as impersonal and selfless; the “law” ensures the happiness of his people. In an unconscious irony he points The Island’s moral: “Let what follows be a living lesson for those among you misguided enough still to harbour sympathy for rats” (4.74). Winston as Antigone is brought in. He knows his lines and holds his own in the exchange with Creon; he remains defiant on the rightness of his act. In response, Creon can invoke his law only on the basic level of stasis, appropriate in a trial as preliminary to judging the worth of an act, an end in itself here. Addressing the audience, he says, “You have heard all the relevant facts.” In his view, then, he has no choice: “My hands are tied” recalls the prisoners’ handcuffs, but the “lesson” will not rest dormant in a classic: “Take her from where she stands, straight to the Island.” They all are, of course, already on Robben Island, as certainly a death trap for Winston as Antigone’s cave has been for her in the legend’s long life. The sentence passed, Winston as Antigone speaks “to the audience”; “The Land” holds poignant resonance for a people dispossessed: Brothers and Sisters of the Land! I go now on my last journey. I must leave the light of day forever, for the Island, strange and cold, to be lost between life and death. So, to my grave, my everlasting prison, condemned alive to solitary death.

Then, “tearing off his wig” once more, not in disgust now but in bold self-assertion, he “confronts” the audience; his apostrophe carries beyond the space before him to the place where transcendent values live: “Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home!” His last words affirm a social value far above the ones in Creon’s “law”; the abstraction “honour” encloses Winston’s act in an enlightened circularity: “Time waits no longer. I go now to my Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric   189

living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs” (4.77). The prisoners strike their “set” and, in a dramatic return to the opening, they mime being shackled together and exit with their dignity intact as a siren sounds. Their worth and the worth of theater have been affirmed.

190   Athol Fugard’s Dramatic Rhetoric

Chapter 7

Rhetoric and Silence in Holocaust Drama V Only a relentless bigot would deny the factual reality of the Holocaust. The “Is it?” of stasis theory is indisputable. The “What is it?” inevitably pushes the language of any answer beyond the connotations of words like horror and, as its application has extended to other events, genocide. Humanistic literature, facing its greatest challenge to the values proclaimed by civilized societies, tries to answer or at least pose the moral question: What is it worth? Without raising this question, drama and especially film can represent the factual details graphically and provoke intense emotional reactions. But they do so at a cost, for the artistic and moral danger of graphic imagery is that its painful details have an overwhelming power capable of absorbing all of one’s attention and of arousing such revulsion that a physical reaction forecloses moral reflection. In the criticism of Holocaust literature, language itself is raised as an insurmountable obstacle to faithful and ethical representation. An oft-cited critic, Lawrence Langer, endorses the fictional procedure of Pierre Gascar: his “dramatic incarnation of the principle that the concreteness of the Holocaust repudiates the abstractness 191

of the words used to describe it.”1 Later, Langer claims—and he is far from alone in the claim—that the facts (“events”) of the Holocaust prohibit a fitting moral approach: “The literature of atrocity, by design and of its very nature, frustrates any attempt to discover a moral reality behind the events its narrates.”2 Holocaust literature, then, obeys contrary impulses that go beyond paradox to approach flat contradiction; as Elie Wiesel has put it, “What we really wish to say, what we feel we must say cannot be said.”3 The drive to keep the horror before the world’s historical memory and its conscience must confront the impossibility of depicting its reality, and hence of comprehending its moral enormity. As a true survivor, Wiesel commands authority by simply articulating the problem, but other apparently wellintentioned writers so subordinate the awful events to personal artistic goals that they can be faulted for “exploiting atrocity,” as Alvin Rosenfeld so compelling argues in a devastating critique of “Daddy,” other Plath poems, Sophie’s Choice, Seven Beauties, and The Investigation.4 In the last work, Peter Weiss relies almost exclusively on verbatim “condensations” from German trials held in the years 1964 and 1965, yet even that kind of fidelity to matters of fact—a fairly common strategy in much Holocaust writing—puts obstacles between the rhetorical success of the work and its audience, for not only can graphic imagery be an emotional and intellectual cul-de-sac, but studying it can be cathartic, resulting in a kind of moral self-assurance, a smugness that announces its private honesty: “Yes, I’ve read about the medical experiments,” or “I’ve seen the films.” Indeed, the imperative of the survivor (“The world must not be allowed to forget”) would abstract a lesson from history by first 1. Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 64. 2. Langer, The Holocaust, 120. 3. Elie Wiesel, “Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art?” The New York Times, April 17, 1983. 4. Alvin Rosenfeld, “Exploiting Atrocity,” A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), ch. 8.

192   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

overwhelming us with painful matters of fact on a scale that cannot be imagined and with a moral significance that cannot be articulated. In Holocaust Representation, Berel Lang approves of the approach taken by Simon Attie who does not consider himself to be a “Holocaust artist” presumably because of “the absence from his work of scenes depicting the manifold horrors of that event.” Lang argues that “this absence, far from removing him from the association of Holocaust artists, places him in good standing among them.”5 To the sensitive artist, then, “Never again” compels expression while at the same time the horror imposes a form of silence as a theme and a stumbling block. The four plays collected by Robert Skloot in The Theatre of the Holocaust employ, variously, Brechtian alienation techniques, historical accuracy, and imaginative extensions of history to work their powerful effects.6 In Dr. Korczak and the Children, Erwin Sylvanus likewise combines historical accuracy (“The author has not invented the events depicted in this play; he has merely recorded”) with Brecht-like distancing designed to provoke thought: actr ess (angry and astonished [at the Narrator’s getting involved in the emotional force of the story]): Exciting? Maybe you even got a bit of gooseflesh out of it, eh? Well, that’s not what we’re doing this play for. It might be a good idea to stop now in order to sit quietly for a while and just think about this.7

Sylvanus clearly sees the danger of using graphic images of such force and accuracy that they refuse to lift fact to metaphor; his 5. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 122. 6. Robert Skloot, The Theatre of the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). The plays are Edith and Harold Lieberman’s Throne of Straw, Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word?, George Tabori’s The Cannibals, and Shimon Wincelberg’s Resort 76. 7. Erwin Sylvanus, Postwar German Theatre, trans. and ed. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (New York: Dutton, 1967), 115–57.

Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   193

attempt to achieve distance is a tacit admission that his material has too much inherent emotional force to be put unfiltered before an audience, even in a play that adds nothing to the record. The writers surveyed by Rosenfeld, whatever their genre, also begin with the raw material of history, and they challenge the reader or viewer to learn something, to acquire an insight, to earn a new sympathy, to feel more deeply about events that they themselves often despair of managing artistically. From the title of her play, Who Will Carry the Word?, to its brief epilogue, Charlotte Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz, sets forth the problem without pretending to solve it: Epilogue To audience denise: We have come back fr a nçoise: We have come back to tell you and now we are standing here ill at ease not knowing what to say, how to say it . . . We wanted to be heard we wanted to be understood denise: Don’t think we resent it we know you wouldn’t understand that you wouldn’t believe because it has even become unbelievable to us fr a nçoise: Why should you believe those stories of ghosts ghosts who came back and who are not able to explain how?8

Attacking the artistic problem from another direction, David Edgar in Albert Speer attempts to assign moral responsibility to its title character, Hitler’s architect, and near the end of the play to lead the audience to an insight about the reality behind Speer’s complicity. Edgar’s stage direction was followed in performance; as Speer moved closer to the audience, he “walk[ed] 8. Skloot, Theatre of the Holocaust, 324–25.

194   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

through the images” of emaciated corpses being bulldozed from a pile into a mass grave.9 In grainy black and white, the bodies seemed to move closer and closer to the audience as the film’s field narrowed and its images grew larger. Speer, speaking in the late 1970s, has told a rabbi that what guilt he felt had over the years become “routine” (2.6.1.134); now he admits that “they told me what I’d turned away from. . . . I should have known, I could have known, I didn’t know. I turned away” (2.6.2.135). His next speech to the audience comes in the play’s final moments. He has rationalized complicity throughout; now, at the edge of a death, which he welcomes as an ultimate forgetting, he admits that he knew: “If I turned away, I knew. I knew. I helped to build a boneyard. Yes, I knew” (2.8.2.146–47). No one in the theater could be blamed for turning away from the film of the mass grave in that boneyard. Edgar forces the audience to look and to make our turning away from the film images an instructive prelude to Speer’s admission of moral evasion. As stunning and disturbing as that climactic moment is, however, it returns the play to the level of fact. The laudable moral that Edgar presumably intended through the staging is overwhelmed ironically by the staging itself. If, as he insists, the images are “vast, unmanageable, inescapable,” they take over the stage and our consciousness. They prompt the audience to turn away, not in moral complicity with Speer but in revulsion at the dominating, “inescapable” graphic rendering of facts. Like Edgar, Arthur Miller uses facts of Holocaust history; unlike him, he confines them to his text. His title, Broken Glass (1994), refers to a crucial event in that history, Kristallnacht, the 1938 night of Nazi terror. Set in Brooklyn, the play centers on the reaction of Sylvia Gellberg to accounts of abuse of Jews in Europe. She is in a loveless marriage to Phillip, a man twenty years her senior, and although her doctor can find nothing wrong with her physically, she is paralyzed. Newspaper pic9. David Edgar, Albert Speer (London: Nick Hern, 2000), 2.6.2.135; Edgar subdivides the scenes of his two acts, as in 6.2.

Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   195

tures from Germany of old Jews cleaning a sidewalk with toothbrushes as a crowd smirks disturb her beyond her sister’s and husband’s understanding. Anti-Semitism more than her husband’s impotence is the likely cause of her conversion hysteria, and program notes to the play confirm the reality of hysterical paralysis as a response to persecution of the Jews in the thirties. Miller never lifts this aberrant phenomenon to the symbolic level however, and through her doctor, his own aesthetic anxieties surface. Sylvia is deeply disturbed by a newspaper story and by Hyman’s more muted reaction: s y lv i a: But how can those nice people go out and pick Jews off the street in the middle of a big city like that and nobody stops them . . . ? h y m a n: I don’t understand what that has to do with your condition. What is the connection?10

and later h y m a n: It’s also what’s going on in Europe. gel l bu rg [Sylvia’s husband]: What do I have to do with that? h y m a n: I really don’t understand it. I think there’s some connection in her mind.

The audience has no trouble making the connection, largely because Miller’s admirable commitment to his serious theme prizes clarity over suggestiveness: h a rr iet [Sylvia’s sister]: Why would they make them scrub with toothbrushes? s y lv i a: (angered) To humiliate them, to make fools of them! h a rr iet: Oh! (2.146)

The deepest suggestion of Broken Glass goes to the obstacles of writing about the Holocaust at all. Sylvia, who does by the way rise to her feet at the curtain, may represent Miller himself, the 10. Arthur Miller, Broken Glass (New York: Penguin, 1994), 2.121–22. The ellipsis is Miller’s; further references in the text are to this edition.

196   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

morally sensitive Jew burdened in conscience but paralyzed artistically by distant, unimaginable events impossible to ignore. Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes begins and ends in silence. In a sparsely furnished set, its two characters engage in the cryptic dialogue for which Pinter is famous, an ideal vehicle for the denial of one of its characters. The first words of the play, Rebecca’s, break the silence; they continue a conversation begun before the curtain. Devlin, the other character, has been questioning her in an attempt to draw out a story about her treatment at the hands of a threatening, domineering man. Before we suspect that Rebecca’s story is part of a larger history, Devlin presents himself as one driven to discover the truth, a limited and personal one in her case: You understand why I’m asking you these questions. Don’t you? Put yourself in my place. I’m compelled to ask you questions. There are so many things I don’t know. I know nothing . . . about any of this. Nothing.11

Devlin has in mind a referent for the demonstrative “this,” no more clear to the audience than the characters’ thoughts during Pinter’s frequent pauses but seductive intellectually all the same. As Devlin continues, he asks for Rebecca to “define [‘the man’ as she calls him] more clearly”; Devlin asks first for physical details and moves in broken steps to “his character . . . or his spiritual . . . standing” (34). The pause before “standing” is likely to entice the audience to choose another word; for many, “standing” will come across as inadequate after “character” and “spiritual.” Applying the right word, as Devlin would do, involves choice, and considering alternatives can be an ethical act. Which, as French puts it, is le mot juste? In telling her story of the man fitfully, Rebecca mixes euphemism and highly moral diction. She calls him an employee of a “travel agency” and says that workers under him had “total faith in him. They respected 11. Harold Pinter, Mountain Language & Ashes to Ashes (London, Faber and Faber, 2001), 33. The ellipses are Pinter’s. The play has a single scene with no interval.

Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   197

his . . . purity, his . . . conviction.” Her flat recital first alludes to concentration camp conditions and culminates in the only long sentence after declarative ones in primer style: And there was one other thing. I wanted to go to the bathroom. But I simply couldn’t find it. I looked everywhere. I’m sure they had one. But I never found out where it was. (Pause) He did work for a travel agency. He was a guide. He used to go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their screaming mothers.

(41)

The euphemism of “travel agent” has proved a self-delusion, and the understated narration that depends on it fails the facts. Later, undermining Rebecca’s personal ethos, Ashes to Ashes presents the strongest qualification of credibility as it relates to Holocaust narratives. Devlin has challenged her: “What authority do you think you yourself possess which would give you the right to discuss such an atrocity?” She replies: I have no such authority. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to any of my friends. I have never suffered. Nor have my friends.

(48)

She could be speaking for Pinter who, like her, finds the traditional rhetorical places—ethos, definition, narration—too slight to carry the gravity of the subject. Something indeed has happened to Rebecca, and in her denial she continues to suffer, mostly from moral amnesia, the death of the spirit. Denial cannot totally suppress the memory, and the language of denial is as inadequate for her as language itself is in general for Holocaust history. “Nothing” as the absence of being is the right word for the universe concentrationnaire. At the end of the play, Pinter dramatizes Rebecca’s moral conflict through her need to speak and her inability to articulate the whole truth; she embodies the conflict that Wiesel articulated—she “must” but “cannot” speak. Devlin has reenacted the role of the taunt198   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

ing “man” as a way of driving her to confront the past. She begins her story, “They took us to the trains,” and an irrepressible echo answers “the trains.” The echo elevates her experience to the higher level of general significance; her flat delivery cannot deny the past she would hide from herself. In her dialogue of one, Echo speaks the truth that lurks beneath her consciousness. Part way into her recital, she reintroduces the man. Her baby wrapped in a shawl “cried out”; the man asked what she had, “And I gave him the bundle.” r ebecc a: And that’s the last time I held the bundle echo: the bundle Silence r ebecc a: And we got on the train echo: the train r ebecc a: And we arrived at this place echo: this place r ebecc a: And I met a woman I knew echo: I knew r ebecc a: And she said what happened to your baby echo: your baby r ebecc a: Where is your baby echo: your baby r ebecc a: And I said what baby echo: what baby r ebecc a: I don’t have a baby echo: a baby r ebecc a: I don’t know of any baby echo: of any baby Pause r ebecc a: I don’t know of any baby. Long silence. Blackout

(65–69)

Echo isolates “I knew” from Rebecca’s relatively innocent context; her subconscious admits the truth she will not face. At the end, as Echo dies, Rebecca chooses the lie that silence sustains. The ambiguity of “I don’t have a baby” exceeds mere poignancy. Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   199

It is at once her lie to the woman, her denial to herself, and, at that moment, the literal truth. Part of herself will always speak to her; she may be morally numb but not morally bankrupt. Seeking details of the unspeakable can characterize a morbid personality; in contrast, Pinter’s ethical proof for Devlin puts him at least for the moment on the high moral ground occupied by pursuers of truth. In retrospect, and Ashes to Ashes demands reflection, Devlin’s compulsion to know responds to the moral imperative that the Holocaust imposes on conscientious people. Castigating Osbert Sitwell for questioning whether Jews were being slaughtered, Arthur Koestler writes what could stand as epigraph to the play: “It is your duty to know and to be haunted by your knowledge.”12 A person deeply haunted, Jean-Claude Grumberg, could not ignore the unfinished history of his family. He wrote The Workroom out of hard experience; his father was a déporté, the euphemism for a person last seen at a stopping point on the way to inevitable death in a concentration camp, and his mother, like Madame Simone in his play, worked for years as a seamstress without knowing how her husband died, and perhaps nurturing the hope that he was alive. The playwright himself must have known the behavior he imagines for Simone’s sons who, four years after their father’s “deportation,” have “made up a game: whenever someone is heard on the stair, they play Listening for Papa.”13 These are the children George Steiner writes about in “A Kind of Survivor”: “To have been a European Jew in the first half of the twentieth century was to pass sentence on one’s own 12. Quoted by Robert L. King, in “Arthur Koestler’s Moral Logic and the Duty to Know,” Massachusetts Review XLI (2000): 47. 13. Jean-Claude Grumberg, The Workroom (L’Atelier). I rely on the typescript of the Tom Kempinski translation of L’Atelier as used in the Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven) production, but sometimes I silently supply my own translation from the text as it appears in Éditions Stock (Paris, 1979). The ellipses do not signify omissions but pauses or voices trailing off; they appear in the text. The Catherine Temerson translation is available in The Free Zone and The Workroom (New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1993). L’Atelier was honored in Paris as best play of 1979, won the Prix Molière in 1999, and has played throughout the world.

200   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

children, to force upon them a condition almost beyond rational understanding.”14 From this point of view, the “condition” can hardly be apprehended as fact, “rational” logos, and it renders questions of worth, ethos, well beyond the reach of “understanding.” Yet, as one of those children, Grumberg nonetheless wrote The Workroom for his mother and other Jews because as he says in a brief preface he “wanted to honor simultaneously their courage and cowardliness, their blindness and perspicacity.”15 The Workroom dramatizes the condition of several survivors; it shows them at work, and, more important, it shows them losing themselves in work rather than facing the horrible truth that overwhelms “rational understanding.” This universal human tendency to deny a painful reality by occupying oneself in doing a task well has been studied by Robert Jay Lifton in survivors of Hiroshima and of concentration camps, and even in the Nazi doctors who “had to focus upon [their] professional skills to prevent themselves from feeling.” Lifton categorizes this behavior as “psychic numbing” and judges it “one of the great problems of our age.”16 That is, the doctors, like the survivors, immersed themselves in the work before them, a deliberately narrow focus on fact or logos in order to shut off pathos so that they never allowed themselves to ask the ultimate question of worth. While only the camp survivors could identify with the facts of a death camp, and few choose to, audiences in the comfort of a theater can appreciate from personal experience the dynamics of the workplace. Most know how new workers aim for acceptance as Simone does and how the senior ones assert their standing as Madame Laurence does. Through Grumberg’s artistry, an audience is caught up in the rhythms of the work place, of its speech and of its silences until we see their totality as a code of social conduct, a set of unwritten rules for coping. More surely and in14. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 141. 15. In Grumberg, The Free Zone and The Workroom, 125, xxi. 16. Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 508–9.

Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   201

sistently than the devices of style, rhythmic repetition on stage involves the audience in a persuasive form; what Kenneth Burke claims for willing participation in a balanced stylistic pattern applies equally well to the dramatic imagery of The Workroom. Grumberg trusts his audience to apprehend this unstated point about human nature; he succeeds rhetorically because the audience discovers this truth in cooperation with the play itself. Like Edward Bond in his preface to Lear, Grumberg makes the same broad assumptions about humankind that classical rhetoric does: “As animals we react to threat in a natural, biological way; but we must also react in more complicated ways as human beings—mentally, emotionally and morally.”17 Change the final triad to logos, pathos, and ethos, and we could more clearly hear the voice of Aristotle behind the standards of the contemporary Briton. It is the same voice that speaks through the total dramatic vision of The Workroom. To involve the audience in the process of psychic numbing and to understand its worth, Grumberg confines his play and our attention to a single set, but beyond that, he informs that fixed image of the workplace with continuous, quietly insistent images of work being performed; active images are played out within the more static one of setting, and a recurring stage direction is Silence. The audience, like the characters in the play or like the seamstresses in a workroom, becomes so accustomed to the work being performed that it operates in the foreground of the staging but also beyond the foreground of our conscious attention. In addition to the work, other actions are performed, but the most deeply meaningful stage action comes out of words, including unspoken ones, and silences. The silences lead an audience to anticipate what will be said next and when; a character’s concentration on work can cover a reluctance or refusal to participate in conversation. An audience waiting for dialogue to resume engages in reflective participation, the goal of 17. Edward Bond, “Author’s Preface,” Lear (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), xi.

202   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

the best kind of persuasion. When the lights come up on each of the play’s ten scenes, the audience sees people in place and silently at work; the number of workers varies occasionally, as do their arrivals and departures, but work and silence—both accessible, common images and both central to the experience of the Holocaust and the strategies of its literature—contribute to the shaping of each scene. Actors put on smocks, find their places, reach for needles and thread, and gesture while working, all with the unthinking ease of habit. Some characters have distinctive speech—Mlle. Mimi’s bawdy, reductive wit and Mme. Laurence’s prudish superiority—but they are quickly perceived as typical or habitual. Although the play covers seven years, little changes in the workroom itself; throughout the play, the rhythms of work remain a ritual constant, a dramatic metaphor complemented by constancies in setting and lighting. To live by the values of this metaphor imposes an amoral absolute upon the workers because so totally engaging is their world of work that it excludes any enriching moral truth. No serious personal insight can intrude; the person who risks one violates an unstated code and is, as a consequence, excluded from the world of the play. The mid-point of the play, “Night,” may well be its moral center as well, for telling the truth exiles one person and puts an unmanageable burden on the central character, Simone. As the following synopsis is designed to show, when she tries to escape into activity, she is finally diminished by it.

Scene 1: “Trial Period” (Morning, very early, 1945) The lights come up on two women sewing. One is Simone in her first day at the workroom and the one whose fortitude is tried throughout the play. The other one is Helen, the owner’s wife. Helen rarely works with the other women; she is the only character in the play who speaks openly about the Holocaust. In her first exchange with Simone, she is more circumspect than she later proves to be as she tests the bond, if any, between them: Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   203

hel en: They took my sister away also. In ’43 . . . simone: Has she come back? hel en: No . . . She was thirty-one . . . simone: Not everyone’s back yet . . . Some take time. hel en: We’re not expecting her back anymore . . . (Silence) So you used to work for yourself?

Simone fills the silences with labor; her absorption in her work is a broadly human, completely natural tactic for a newcomer in a workplace. We come to learn that it is her psychological refuge, a self-contained activity that gives her sanctuary from emotional pain and from the rigors of a logic that would force her to acknowledge her husband’s death. This mundane image of repetitious labor appears in each of the ten scenes: work is being done as the play opens and as it ends; it presumably goes on beyond the boundaries of the workroom and of The Workroom. Grumberg’s directions for the entrances of each of the other four women reveal how deliberately his enclosed world of work subsumes the individual; each character behaves distinctively but is otherwise defined by the properties of the place: • Mme. Giselle, who like Simone has children, “takes off her jacket, hangs it up, slips on her working-smock, and sits down at her place.” • Mme. Laurence, the oldest and most reserved of the workers, “takes her time, even swapping her street shoes for a pair of slippers” before taking her place on a high stool which “enables her to oversee events.” • Marie, who goes through a marriage and pregnancy during the course of the play, changes into her “work clothes [and] starts on her first garment before she’s even done up all her buttons.” • Mimi, whose vulgar humor makes her counterpart and tormentor of Mme. Laurence, “sounds as though she has been running” and “hurries into her work clothes.” When Helen introduces Simone to her co-workers, the civilities of speech are kept to the perfunctory minimum allowed by the 204   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

conventions of a closed, self-sufficient society. To an exchange of names is added Simone’s identity in the craft (“she’s a finisher”), and that is done “without stopping work.” Laughter and song, basic assertions of human distinction in the face of drudgery, are also introduced in the first scene, specifically through Giselle, who hums unconsciously (“chantonne machinalement”) as they work and who easily relates escapist laughter to the breakdown of the larger social order: “A good laugh does you good, helps you forget there’s no meat.” Throughout the scene, Simone tries to be accepted by joining in the convulsive laughter, by offering throat lozenges to the others and by working expertly, but when she leaves the workroom to discuss her wages with the owner, Leon, Mimi identifies her as a Jew: “I can always tell one.” The scene ends as it began, with two women at work; because of a shortage of material, the other workers have had to leave Simone and Giselle to “finish their work in silence.”

Scene 2: “Songs” (A little before noon, 1946) All the women and the male presser are at work. Mimi tries to coax Giselle into singing (“It’ll take your mind off [your troubles]”), but her song breaks off into group silence twice, the first time in a failure of harmony, the second “in the middle of a note.” Song, at its best, here provides no outlet or support; indeed, it soon provokes a fight between Giselle and Marie. Near the scene’s close, we hear a man singing outside; the workers throw him “some small change and some buttons.” He interrupts his song to shout his thanks, and, as a result, his melody, like the other two in the scene, breaks off. In this scene a brief silence follows when, asked about her husband, Simone replies that he is “déporté.” Song cannot provide solace, and for Simone work may not either, because at the very end of the scene she is “quietly crying” as she “starts on a new garment.”

Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   205

Scene 3: “Natural Selection” (Late afternoon, 1946) All the women are on the scene at the opening; after more than a year on the job, Simone is asked about her husband’s deportation. Her account of his departure is as cryptic as politeness will allow, and it ends in silence, followed by an apparent change of subject on Marie’s part; she questions Simone about a man who had followed her the day before. After a sharp exchange between Simone and Mme. Laurence, the women bring their day to its ritual close. Grumberg’s stage direction indicates the rhetorical point of his artistry, for “silence,” “night” and finally the darkness at the scene’s end are all reminders of the Holocaust’s unspeakable: Silence. The women are now working with great energy, hurrying to finish their garments so they can leave. Night has fallen. One by one they finish, set down their garments, tidy their places; some of them count their tickets; then they change and leave.

Helen, left alone in the darkened room, finishes work; Leon, her husband, enters, and she tells him that she “cannot look at” their presser because he is a survivor of the death camps. Leon’s praise of the presser as a good worker who is a product of “genuine Natural Selection” drives her to leave “wiping her eyes.” Leon, betrayed by his bluster and by his escape into his workplace, has endorsed the standard of the oppressor; he closes the scene by turning off the lights.

Scene 4: “The Party” (End of an afternoon, 1947) Everyone is at work, but they soon stop, earlier than usual, for a party for Marie, who is about to marry. After two years in the workroom, Simone is asked directly by Giselle, “So, you are a Jew then?” and she answers, “Sure.” The scene ends with Simone and the presser trying to dance, and nearly falling down; Simone, the last stage direction reads, “roars with laughter.” Dance, frequently a symbolic celebration of order at the end

206   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

of a traditional drama, symbolizes disruption here because in reaching for a moment of happiness with a counterpart of her husband, Simone breaks the mood of the workplace and undermines the routine that she has used to numb her feelings—and her conscience.

Scene 5: “Night” (Half-darkness, 1947) Simone and the presser are alone; he waits for her to finish a garment so that he can press it. She tests her rationalizing on him, who, as a true survivor, is the toughest audience for her hope that her husband is still alive. He, though, leads her through a series of questions that arrive at the overwhelming, inevitable truth that her husband was gassed. At one point, Leon briefly intrudes with the poignantly ambiguous line, “Still battling in the dark?” Simone’s last words to the presser before she leaves end in a silence that conveys the inadequacy of speech: “I know they did what you say to the old ones, to people who couldn’t work any more, to women, to children, I know that, of course, but . . . .” Her silence is soon paralleled by the presser’s, who tells Leon, “I’d like to cut out my tongue.” Leon’s reaction is a long, personal tale that reaches its climax with an account of his finding work; his bluster gets only the presser’s silence for a response. The latter, having imposed truth on the workplace, announces that he will work there no more; he cannot reconcile respect for the horrors of history with losing the self, as Leon and Simone would do, in work. Scene 6: “The Competition” (Before noon, 1948) All the women are at work at the opening. Leon, in a tirade over the quality of a garment, alludes to the Star of David that Nazis forced the Jews to wear, and at the same time he unwittingly interprets the play’s metaphoric truth about psychic numbing: Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   207

If we are working for the dead, then I say that this garment is a very good garment for a dead person. Except, if the truth be told, a corpse doesn’t really need clothes, does it? . . . Let us now look at this garment, which Monsieur Max has just returned to me with a teeny weeny bit of paper pinned to the lapel, and I will read out to you what is written on it: “This is work for the dead.”

The first person he criticizes by name for such work is, significantly, Mme. Simone. When she leaves a minute later to fight the bureaucracy over her pension as widow of a déporté, he erupts: I want no tears and no songs! From this moment, no one will take off a single hour, you hear me, not one hour, not if your children are dying, not if your parents are dead and decomposing, not even if husbands are going berserk. I no longer wish to know about such things, clear?

With this last line enforcing silence, he chooses emotional refuge through bluster and in ignorance—ignorance, though, that he would have to create in defiance of what he already knows and what he cannot totally suppress. Unlike Simone, who can “reasonably” lie to herself about her husband, Leon has to deny history and can do so only with posturing. When he finishes dominating the workplace, “the women work without looking at him as he exits.” And Mimi “speaks without lifting her eyes from her work”; she shifts the topic to the quality of Leon’s cutting. Mimi has tried to defend the absent Simone, but when speech becomes pointless, she, like the others, immerses herself in work and talking about work.

Scene 7: “The Death Certificate” (Afternoon, 1949) Several women are at work when Simone enters and changes from street clothes to work blouse. Helen questions persistently, almost belligerently, the accuracy of the language in the death certificate; “Simone doesn’t reply, concentrating even more ferociously on her work.” Helen represents those who insist that the world not be allowed to forget the victims of the Holocaust; as 208   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

she more heatedly demands a full, accurate record of the déportés, Leon counters: Don’t shout. This is a workroom, we’re here to work, to work, not to hold philosophy classes . . . (To Simone) And you pull yourself together . . . What are you doing coming here waving papers around? We don’t give out pensions here; we work here and that’s all!

To subdue pain, work is all to him and less successfully to Simone. Leon pointedly rejects speech, “You think you can straighten everything out with talking, huh?” and he waits for communal labor to substitute, as it always has, for meaningful human contact: (Helen exits. Leon sighs, then wanders restlessly about the workroom; everyone works in silence. Leon stands for a few moments in the center of the room, arms dangling, no one speaks, no one looks at anyone else.) l eon: (To Simone) All right, now? (Ça va?) simone: (Shrugging her shoulders as if everything that’s happened had nothing to do with her.) Yes, fine . . . (Ça va . . .) l eon: Good . . . Good . . . (He exits.)

Simone, the scene’s conclusion reminds us, has sought out and adjusted to the ambivalence of the world of the workroom: a place, perhaps “community,” where she belongs as a seamstress but not as a Jew; where social convention encourages song and banter to fill in the spaces that would lower the humanity of the workers to the level of automatons, but where thoughtful speech on a fundamental social issue is tacitly but willfully forbidden; where personal support on the superficial level is volunteered, but where no one except the exiled presser would lead her to a saving truth.

Scene 8: “The Meeting” (1950) After he challenges Jean, the new presser, about leaving work to attend a Party meeting, Leon assumes that Simone has Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   209

no demands on her, much less a sense of purpose, outside of work: “Simone, you stay after and sew buttons with me; at least you don’t have any meeting.” When three of the women and Jean question her accepting this order, the normal pattern of psychic numbing is shattered because her kind of withdrawal cannot resist questioning: je a n: You got rights, you know. You don’t even know what they are. How are you going to get anyone to respect you? (Silence. Everyone working. Suddenly Simone drops onto the table, head in her hands, and bursts into tears. Everyone stops what they’re doing.)

Simone’s frustration in this scene—she bangs the table (her workplace) and says that she doesn’t know why she’s crying— dramatizes the ultimate hollowness of her understandable selfdeception. She has shut off thought for so long that she cannot understand her emotions. Despite Mimi’s partially successful attempts to laugh her out of her tears, Simone cries for much of the rest of the scene until, finally, Mimi’s bawdy makes all of them but Mme. Laurence “collapse into laughter.” Laurence’s sarcasm unconsciously underscores how false are the therapeutic effects of communal work and laughter. When she asks everyone in general, “Are you feeling better now?,” her question implies that the laughter is hollow and inturning. In the last line of the scene, Simone’s broken sentence projects the forlorn hope that she may change her life, “If I stay here with you, maybe . . .” But in the workroom there can be no change without changing the very nature of the relationships that the place defines, without, in short, creating a better community based on trust and understanding. The controlling power of place, constantly affirmed by the unchanging set, is reasserted in the final stage direction of this scene when Grumberg returns to one of his key metaphors: “The women work in silence. The crisis is passed.” It passes because their routine ignores its true dimensions.

210   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

Scene 9: “Making a New Life” (1951) In conversation with Leon and Helen, Simone claims to be content with her life; she laughs at Leon’s prodding her to find a new husband, and she delivers her final line in the play: “I’m O.K. the way I am, I feel I’m free; I couldn’t . . . good . . . good night.” For the remainder of the scene, Helen and Leon argue over his reluctance to invite some of his cousins to leave Poland and live with them. He delivers the last line of the scene alone; that is, to the theater audience. It approximates a central image of l’univers concentrationnaire while it absolves him of any responsibility: “Is it my fault it’s shit everywhere?” Scene 10: “Max” (1952) Simone has left the play. Grumberg risks farce by having Leon hide in a pile of unironed clothes under the press from Max, his major customer. This reductive image implies a comment on Simone’s strategy for coping because Leon, like her, would hide in his work. The literalness of his escape, however, is absurd in comparison to the more humanly realized pathos of her unsought problems. When Max discovers him, Leon tries to hide behind verbal formulae: I don’t want anything more to do with dead people, the dead are dead, I say, and our dead are a thousand times more dead than the other dead, because no one even gave our dead a . . . right? You have to think of the living, I say, the living.

This pat recital cannot work for him because it defies his racial memory. With the abrupt leaps of style, however, that characterize an unsettled mind, he suggests that the synthetic fabric Max supplies contains human hair, and he attacks the garments themselves, throwing some at Max’s feet and pulling others from the rack. For the moment, his attempt to escape into work has, like Simone’s, failed; technical skill cannot overcome material weaknesses in the fabric. Labor, no matter how well per-

Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   211

formed, can occupy the mind but cannot satisfy the spirit because it has no moral fiber. At this point, with “the workroom in total disarray,” one of Simone’s children, a boy between ten and twelve, enters to say that his mother cannot come to work. Helen asks the child, “What’s wrong with her?,” but in keeping with Grumberg’s insight into Simone’s all-too-human nature, neither the child, nor the doctor, nor Simone herself can say. Her problem, as Lifton says, is “one of the great problems of our age,” and to name it is to be well. Simone’s child, the inheritor of his mother’s pain, under questioning from Leon and all the workers, is the play’s witness from outside the boundaries of its setting. He comes to excuse her absence from work, but like the doctor who keeps her for “observation,” the boy cannot identify his mother’s symptoms; she has no pain, she simply “can’t stand up.” The boy is dressed in a girl’s coat sent by the Americans; through this final clothing image, Grumberg alludes to the Holocaust that may be: chil d: I don’t like it; it’s a girl’s coat . . . gisel l e: It’s still very nice of the Americans to send coats to French children . . . chil d: I don’t like the Americans. gisel l e: Why not, pumpkin? chil d: I’m not a pumpkin; I like the Russians; the Americans want war.

The workers characteristically respond with laughter to his naiveté, but the innocent outsider, like the eiron of satire, has forced a moment of revelation on the artificial community of the play. For, when he leaves, Giselle tries to reestablish the familiar mood by singing, but Mimi, who has usually been the first to fill the time with usefully irrelevant speech, interrupts her with the play’s last words: “Shut up!” (“Ta gueule!”). The last image is of the women working in silence. The Workroom does not try to speak for the survivors, nor do its characters speak directly to the theater audience. Yet it succeeds in connecting with that audience by dramatizing a par212   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

ticularly painful, accessible truth about the Holocaust and human nature—that its legacy impoverishes us all by leading us to numb our memories and consciences. Grumberg dramatizes our major political and social failing, the studied, practiced refusal to think about things that our ethical and emotional drives need to acknowledge if we would call ourselves human. Like Grumberg’s workers, we are incapable of seeing some truths whole, and many of us are unwilling to try. Without the rigor of honest thought to inform them, our judgments are morally deficient. Yet, we will pronounce judgments. As his characters do, we can indulge in cant, attack the system, say that present work demands our full attention, and rationalize with Mimi, “Everyone’s got troubles.” If we are not to forget the Holocaust and if we are to avoid the final one, we must, as Grumberg suggests, first penetrate the self-deceptions that allow us, drama being the ideal metaphor for his truth, to act out our lives as self-fulfilling human beings, all the while losing our redemptive potential in the clutter of dailiness. Only a realistic setting can serve Grumberg’s unstated point, for it bodies forth our tendency to take definition from our scene; to numb our psyches, we willingly escape into things. With its workbenches, pins, thimbles, and especially in the rhythmic activity of being at work, The Workroom uses some of the devices of realism to transcend its limitations, for usage has created a revealing ambiguity: we do indeed occupy ourselves in the details of the space we choose to occupy. Ideally, the theater audience becomes similarly engaged in the flow of the ten scenes, the alternating raising and lowering of the lights, the routine uses of song and banter. We do not see our realistic counterparts on stage, nothing so facile or rhetorically rudimentary as that. Rather, we apprehend the condition of people choosing to be enclosed in a state of activity, activity that denies thought and excludes the thoughtful, and we see that their methods, their processes, are often our own. If art led only to historical truth, we would need no art. The Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama   213

Workroom helps us to discover ourselves; work, song, and laughter are some of the very few activities that all people can share metaphorically as humanly fulfilling. The play passes Peter Brook’s “acid test in the theatre” because it creates “a central image that remains [and] this shape will be the essence of what it has to say.”18 Besides creating a transcendent image, Grumberg has made the deeply personal, universal. Like Leon, we are frequently tempted to hide and bluster; it is a measure of Grumberg’s integrity that he himself played that role, with all it suggests about recreating his own mother thirty years later and “employing” her in his Workroom. In that 1979 production, Grumberg acted out, and perhaps through, the attitudes he wants us to question; he used theater as his play invited us to use it—to engage the self in the discovery of a submerged truth. Like Grumberg, Pinter assumes the facts of the Holocaust without dwelling on their graphic details. Both playwrights dramatize denial and silence in ways accessible to a comfortable theatergoer and, as a result, make morally credible a horror that cannot be represented accurately. 18. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 136.

214   Rhetoric & Silence in Holocaust Drama

Conclusion V This study has argued that, from the basic elements of expression, syntax, and the word, to the staging of a play, the ethical proof of rhetoric has continuing critical relevance from Shakespeare’s plays to Tom Stoppard’s. “Ethical proof” encompasses the values that a play embodies, and “rhetoric,” the means of communicating those values to a theater audience, which, by the nature of theater and rhetoric, participates in the discovery and judging of those values. Including ethos in dramatic criticism exposes by implication the danger or inadequacy of a play’s dominant or unaccompanied appeal to pathos or logos, the first leading to sentimentality and the second to discursive discussion abstracted from a developed character. The theory of ethos locates the sensational or graphic in its proper place; it dismisses “shock value” as a contradiction in terms. Further, it assumes a capacity for moral engagement with an audience; cooperating with logos and pathos, it creates a fully humane point of view in its appeal to that audience. It affirms as Brian Vickers says in another context, “the notion of a community to whom interpretations are referred.”1 Its centrality to rhetorical study can be inferred from Thomas Farrell’s point about practi1. Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

215

cal reasoning; changing a few words would make his judgment readily applicable to dramatic ethos: What is needed is a manner of thinking rhetorically, so that the essential qualities of persons—[their character]—may . . . emerge through their own participation in the formation of discursive judgments.

Later in the same discussion, Farrell could be summarizing the insistence of dramatic ethos on choice and the tendency of some plays to suggest universal values through specific actions: “Ethical choice and character enactment always involve the mediation of generalizable principle with unique particular.”2 The theory of ethos offers no assurance of proper values triumphing. It prizes choice made by a character acting in the face of social and moral constraints and seeking a real, imagined, or selfish good. Like Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts, a character may be created as the product of choices made earlier—not necessarily the right ones—and be seen living with the consequences of those choices in the dramatic present. At the end of both literal and social trials, characters who decide to choose one course of action over another act as moral agents. Those with mixed motives, like Stockmann in The Enemy of the People, command a measure of respect because they are, like us, flawed human beings driven to act in a world unwilling to understand their principles or motives. In Trevor Nunn’s production (1997), the crowd shouted for Ian McKellan as Stockmann to be silenced by the Chair of the town meeting. The theater audience could not approve of such an illiberal act and should sympathize to some extent with Stockmann despite his superior attitude. Yet, moments later in Christopher Hampton’s “version,” he did “talk like a real enemy of the people” and used imagery associated with Hitler: “Everyone who lives by a lie should be exterminated like vermin!”3 McKellan’s Stockmann, righteous and right, 2. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture, 207, 226. 3. Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, a new version by Christopher Hampton (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 99.

216   Conclusion

obliged the theater audience to think not about a water supply in a distant fictional town, but about the ways that selfish considerations drive social decisions and, most important, about the inseparable bond between personal character and moral principle that ideally grounds the ethos of valid political rhetoric. Besides Winston at the Sizwe Bansi curtain, Shaw’s Saint Joan is righteously belligerent in her final refusal to compromise belief to save her life, and Ibsen’s Nora makes a controversial but informed choice a the end of Doll’s House. When circumstances overwhelm characters who are sensitive to the pressures of their world and strive unsuccessfully against them, their resigned acceptance of their lot comes as a result of self-conscious effort and evokes our response on a moral and emotional level. The lights that slowly dim to close productions of The Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya do not, in my experience, signal a time to applaud. They induce a moment of reflection on the quietly courageous decisions of the characters to go on. As they construct characters, serious playwrights choose the language that can best represent a character’s ethos, and their choices influence an actor’s delivery. The noted voice coach, Patsy Rodenburg, links Shakespeare’s diction to a triad that roughly parallels logos, pathos, and ethos: “The word is the character’s way out—body, heart and mind meet in the word.”4 When it attends to recurrent words throughout a text (“justice,” “cause,” “man”), the theory of ethos not only identifies them in a social world but, as they acquire layers of meaning, it can be said to appreciate their aesthetic complexity. In Julius Caesar at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in 1998, Mark Lewis Jones as Mark Antony departed from the standard, ironic emphasis of “honorable” in the repeated “Brutus is an honorable man,” to stress “man.” His delivery put the noble Brutus in a category, and as the line was repeated, the refrain subtly chipped away at his individuality and at the moral stature that 4. Patsy Rodenburg, Speaking Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 6.

Conclusion   217

his prior speech had worked so hard to achieve. If a play establishes an ethical ground for such diction, we can see how the values of some words may be lost and how others may retain their positive force. In the pauses that a character makes while searching for a word as in much of Pinter’s plays, the audience enters the moment and wonders whether the choice is appropriate. If it is, we confirm a value’s relevance; if not, our silent participation leads us to question it and perhaps to supply a better one. Either way, we become partners in a rhetoric of discovery. When we are familiar with a text, a pause can lead to a fresh insight. Under Peter Hall’s direction of Waiting for Godot in 1997, Alan Howard’s Vladimir questioned his own ideas with a puzzled look before he tried to articulate them, and Ben Kingsley’s Estragon, in contrast, frequently seemed puzzled by his own words after he spoke them. Their dialogue, as a result, anticipated Beckett’s final stage direction: “They do not move.” They may have exemplified the deconstructive enterprise, but the audience was teased into thought—not about multiple meanings—but about the right word for the situation. Where and if an actor breaks “To be or not to be” offers a reading of Hamlet’s thinking; which word is emphasized in “The King comes here tonight” cues us to how the rest of the scene in Macbeth might be played. Likewise, in a world premiere before an audience with no expectations, craftsmanship can achieve similar effects as in the final dialogue of Conor McPherson’s Shining City (2004). An ex-priest, Ian, addresses another character; he uses “God” six times in five lines. From him it seems a conversational filler, but it is the playwright’s artful signal of Ian’s spiritual loss. The ex-priest cannot rid himself of God and guilt. He says that he once wanted to see a ghost: “Just something that gave everything (Pause) some meaning, you know? I’m talking about God, really, you know?” Of course, neither man knows. The ambiguity of “really” next to “God” along with that “you know” is McPherson’s; he invests Ian’s simple diction with deeper meanings left to the audience to appreciate, drawn in as they are by 218   Conclusion

that Pause.5 To be sure, pregnant pauses can deliver the stillborn, and slowly lowered lights can ask for mere nostalgia; like all matters of delivery, ethos insists that they be justified as projections of the play’s values. Throughout Action Is Eloquence, David Bevington offers insights on the staging of Shakespeare’s plays and on the meaning of gesture. The question of worth is rarely far from the surface of his interpretations of gestures like kneeling, and in several places, he is the ideal critic of rhetorical ethos: The elaborate chivalric symbolism and providential assumptions in Richard II are at odds with the morally complex issues posed by the murder of Thomas of Woodstock. The extensive symmetries of the Henry VI plays cannot determine right or wrong; instead they testify to an increasing savagery made all the more terrible by the ritual form in which the massacres are staged.6

In the National Theatre production of The Seagull under John Caird’s direction (1993), the staging provided constant visual commentary on the values of Chekhov’s characters. Trigorin’s stage-within-the-stage itself provides a double point of view toward theater, but well beyond that, Caird added a large foursided frame that descended to enclose the playing space. At the start of each subsequent act, a somewhat smaller one was lowered inside the preceding one. At the end, not only the enclosing frames suggested the artificial quality of the lives so contained, the main props from each scene remained on stage as well. The stage was increasingly cluttered by the oversized props; as they shrank the playing space, their cumulative effect subtly insinuated that the characters, despite their claims of individuality, were defined by and dependent on material circumstances. At the end, the frames lifted for a tableau; all but the rejected 5. Conor McPherson, Shining City (London: Nick Hern, 2004), 63. Ellipses signify a pause in the text. 6. David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 123.

Conclusion   219

Konstatin were brought back, together but disconnected, frozen and inactive because their material support had been taken from them. Whether one accepts Caird’s insight, his staging bodied forth an increasingly provocative moral point view and culminated in a theatrical truth. A play’s point of view is complicated when its apparent spokesman has low or questionable morals. Iago and Richard III disclose motive and strategy in soliloquy and, so, ally the audience with them in the machinations of their plots. They oblige the audience to expand its critical attention to include the character of the characters that Iago and Richard work their persuasion upon, and to resist being seduced by conspiring with them as a source of insider knowledge. The historical background of Michael Frayn’s Democracy (2003) served as the basis for a dramatic investigation of credibility. Günter Guillaume was in fact a double agent who stood literally beside Willy Brandt as his confidante all the while reporting to Arno Kretschmann, his contact in Stasi, the East Germany equivalent of the CIA. As Conleth Hill, the Guillaume actor, crossed between stage left and right, between East and West Germany, he often spoke to London’s National Theatre audience in stride; he acted the busy man with things to do and roles to play. He cued us to his deceptive performance: “In the end I have to lose my temper” to appear credible to a suspicious superior, and he used irony to lure us into complicity when, for example, we know he is duplicating Brandt’s speech in order to pass it on to Kretschmann: “Virtuoso of the Xerox machine. Confidentiality assured.”7 Guillaume’s divided presence enlarged the context of many lines and deepened their meanings. The insider was our way into the world of the play; however, we had to see through his double act to judge his credibility and the play’s worth as comment on acting and trust. This book has developed its thesis by examining instances of moral choice in a character’s language and a play’s staging; I have argued that an audience, then, inevitably participates in 7. Michael Frayn, Democracy (London: Methuen, 2003), 6, 11.

220   Conclusion

an ethical investigation. Playwrights with a social or political vision and with a humane approach to their craft will necessarily meet their audience on a common moral ground. I endorse Brian Vickers’ view of the deliberate author: “The New Historicists, in the wake of Barthes and Foucault, generally dismiss the notion of the author having shaped his materials with a coherent moral and aesthetic design.”8 Even in a century of war, one can read a summary comment from Czeslaw Milosz as an appeal for an ethical approach to life as well as literature: Dostoyevsky was one of the first writers . . . to identify a crisis of modern civilization: that every one of us is visited by contradictory voices, contradictory physical urges. I have written about the difficulty of remaining the same person when such guests enter and go and take us for their instrument. But we must hope to be inspired by good spirits, not evil ones.9

The theory of dramatic ethos can aid in discovering the relative worth of contradictory or competing voices, and it can lead to a better appreciation of the good spirits who create richly humane work. 8. Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare, 258–59. 9. Czeslaw Milosz, “Interview: The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review 133 (1994): 257.

Conclusion   221

Bibl iogr a ph y

Abrams, M. H. “The Deconstructive Angel.” In Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Aden, John M. The Critical Opinions of John Dryden: A Dictionary. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1963. Altman, Joel. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostward. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962. ———. Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse. Edited and translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Richards. New York: Grove, 1958. Baker, Stuart. “Logic and Religion in Major Barbara: The Syllogism of Andrew Undershaft.” Modern Drama 21 (1978): 241–52. Baldwin, T. W. William Shakpere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, vol. 2. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944. Barbara, Jack V. “Ethical Perversity in America: Some Observations on David Mamet’s American Buffalo.” Modern Drama 24 (1981): 270–75. Behn, Aphra. The Roundheads, or The Good Old Cause. In The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1. Edited by Montague Summers. New York: B. Blom, 1967. Reissue of the 1915 edition. Bevington, David. Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bitzer, Lloyd. “Aristotle’s Enthymeme Revisited.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45 (1950): 399–408. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

  223

Bond, Edward. “Author’s Preface.” In Lear. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. ———. The Bundle. London: Methuen, 1978. ———. The Woman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Boon, Richard. About Hare: The Playwright and His Work. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Bornstein, Diane. Distaves and Dames: Renaissance Treatises For and About Women. New York: Delmar, 1978. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated and edited by John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. ———. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: A Parable Play. In Bertolt Brecht Collected Plays, vol. 6. New York: Random House, 1976. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Bullokar, W. Bref Grammar for English. London, 1586. Reprinted in Palaestra LII: Untersuchen und Texte aus der Deutschen und Englishen Philologie. Berlin: Mayer and Müller, 1906. Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. New York: Vintage, 1957. ———. A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Meridian, 1962. Burton, Dolores M. Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Richard II and Antony and Cleopatra. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Calderwood, James. Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Carfield, J. Douglas. “The Jewel of Great Price: Mutability and Constancy in Dryden’s All for Love.” ELH 42 (1975): 38–61. Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Plays. Translated by Eugene K. Bristow. New York: Norton, 1977. Cicero. De oratore. Translated by E. W. Sutton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Cohen, Murray. Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Costello, William T., S.J. The Scholastic Curriculum at Early SeventeenthCentury Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. Crane, William. Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1964. Reissue of New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Desmet, Christy. Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Drew-Bear, Annette. Rhetoric in Ben Jonson’s Middle Plays: A Study of Ethos, Character Portrayal and Persuasion. Salzburg: Salzburg University, 1973. Dryden, John. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Essays, vol. 1. Edited by George Watson. London: Dent, 1962. ———. The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13. Edited by Maximillian E. Novak, et al. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

224   Bibliography

Edgar, David. Albert Speer. London: Nick Hern, 2000. Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1987. Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen. London: Methuen, 1987. Farrell, Thomas B. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Fink, Zera. “Venice, Its Senate, and Its Plot in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d.” Modern Philology 80 (1983): 256–63. Fiore, Robert L. Drama & Ethos: Natural-Law Ethics in the Spanish Golden Age Theater. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975. Fraser, Antonia. Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration. New York: Knopf, 1979. Frayn, Michael. Copenhagen. London: Methuen, 1998. ———. Democracy. London: Methuen, 2003. Freedman, Samuel. “The Gritty Eloquence of David Mamet.” The New York Times, April 21, 1985. Friel, Brian. Dancing At Lughnasa. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Fugard, Athol. The Blood Knot: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French, n.d. ———. Blood Knot and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications, 1991. ———. “Master Harold” . . . and the boys. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Fugard, Athol, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona. Sizwe Banzi Is Dead & The Island. New York: Viking, 1973. Gibbs, A. M. Heartbreak House: Preludes of Apocalypse. New York: Twayne, 1994. Gilbert, Miriam, et al. Modern and Contemporary Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Gorky, Maxim. The Lower Depths. In The Lower Depths and Other Plays. Translated by Alexander Bakshy. London: Yale University Press, 1972. ———. Enemies. Adapted by David Hare. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Greenhut, Deborah. Feminine Rhetorical Culture: Tudor Adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Grumberg, Jean-Claude. The Workroom (L’Atelier). Translated by Tom Kempinski. Typescript of Long Wharf Theatre production. New Haven: unpaged, n.d. ———. L’Atelier. Paris: Éditions Stock, 1979. ———. The Free Zone and The Workroom. Translated by Catherine Temerson. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1993. Gussow, Mel. “State: Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz.’” The New York Times, May 18, 1987. Hare, David. Plenty. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.

Bibliography   225

———. A Map of the World. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. ———. Saigon: Year of the Cat. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. ———. Knuckle. In The History Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. ———. The Bay at Nice and Wrecked Eggs. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. ———. The Secret Rapture. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. ———. Racing Demon. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. ———. Heading Home, Wetherby and Dreams of Leaving. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. ———. Writing Left-Handed. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. ———. Skylight. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. ———. Amy’s View. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. ———. The Judas Kiss. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. ———. Stuff Happens. New York: Faber and Faber, 2004. ———. Enemies. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Hare, David, and Howard Brenton. Pravda. London: Methuen, 1985. Harth, Phillip. Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of “A Tale of a Tub.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. ———. Contexts of Dryden’s Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Hermogenes. Hermogenes’ On Types of Style. Translated by Cecil W. Wooten. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. New York: Viking, 1984. Hoskyns, John. Sidney’s Arcadia and the Rhetoric of English Prose. London, c. 1599. In English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Howell, A. C. “Res et Verba: Words and Things.” ELH 13 (1946): 132–42. Hume, Robert D. Dryden’s Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. Hunter, George K. “Rhetoric and Renaissance Drama.” In Renaissance Rhetoric. Edited by Peter Mack. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Hyde, Michael J., ed. The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Ibsen, Henrik. Four Major Plays. Translated by Rolf Fjelde. New York: Signet, 1965. ———. An Enemy of the People. A new version by Christopher Hampton. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Jauss, H. R. “Literary History as Challenge.” In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. Edited by George Birbeck Hill. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905. Jones, R. F. “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century.” In The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History

226   Bibliography

of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951. Jonson, Ben. Timber: Or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter. London: 1640–1641. In English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Kennedy, George A. New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. King, Robert L. “Arthur Koestler’s Moral Logic and the Duty to Know.” The Massachusetts Review XLI (2000): 45–52. Knachel, Philip A., ed. Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966. Lang, Berel. Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Lifton, Robert J. Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House, 1967. Longman, Stanley Vincent, ed. Drama as Rhetoric/Rhetoric as Drama: An Exploration of Dramatic and Rhetorical Criticism. In Theatre Symposium, vol. 5. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997. Lyly, William. A Shorte Introduction to Grammar. Edited by Vincent J. Flynn. New York: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945. Mack, Peter. Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Mamet, David. American Buffalo. New York: Grove, 1977. ———. Glengarry Glen Ross. New York: Grove, 1984. Marvell, Andrew. The Rehearsal Transpros’d 1672. In The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, vol. 1. Edited by Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. McPherson, Conor. Shining City. London: Nick Hern, 2004. Mengel, Elias F., Jr., ed. Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satiric Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume. Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675–1707. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Miller, Arthur. Broken Glass. New York: Penguin, 1994. ———. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1998. Miller, J. Hillis. “Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait.” Daedalus 105, no. 1, 97–113. Milosz, Czeslaw. “Interview: The Art of Poetry.” Paris Review 133 (1994): 257. Mulcaster, Richard. Mulcaster’s Elementaire. Edited by E. T. Campanac. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. O’Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Bibliography   227

Otway, Thomas. “Prologue” to the City Heiress. In The Works of Thomas Otway, vol. 2. Edited by J. C. Ghosh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. First published in 1932 by Clarendon Press. ———. Venice Preserv’d. In The Works of Thomas Otway, vol. 2. Edited by J. C. Ghosh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. First published in 1932 by Clarendon Press. Parker, Samuel. A Discourse of the Ecclesiastical Politie. London, 1670. ———. A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie. London, 1671. Patterson, Annabel. Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre. New York: Methuen, 1982. Percival, W. Keith. “Deep and Surface Structure Concepts in Renaissance and Mediaeval Syntactic Theory.” In History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. Herman Parret. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976. Perelman, Chaim. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argument. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Pinter, Harold. Mountain Language and Ashes to Ashes. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Prior, Moody. The Language of Tragedy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, vol. 1. Translated by H. E. Butler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959. Robins, R. H. Ancient and Medieval Grammatical Theory in Europe with Particular Reference to Modern Linguistic Doctrine. London: Bell, 1951. Rodenburg, Patsy. Speaking Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Rosenfeld, Alvin. A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Scaglione, Aldo. The Classical Theory of Composition from Its Origins to the Present: A Historical Survey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Schless, Howard H., ed. Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satiric Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 3. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr. The Ethos of Restoration Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Shakespeare, William. Richard II. New Arden. Edited by Peter Ure. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. ———. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. Edited by David Bevington. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Shapiro, Barbara. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

228   Bibliography

Shaw, George Bernard. Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces. 6 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962. ———. The Quintessence of Ibsenism. 3rd ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. ———. The Drama Observed. 4 vols. Edited by Bernard F. Dukore. University Park: State University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Skerpan, Elizabeth. The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution: 1642– 1660. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Skloot, Robert. The Theatre of the Holocaust. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harison [sic] . . . Mr. Justice Cooke, Mr. Hugh Peters, Octob. 16. [etc.]. London, 1660. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society. Edited by Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones. Saint Louis: Washington University Studies, 1958. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985. Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia. 3 vols. Voyage, vol. 1. Shipwreck, vol. 2. Salvage, vol. 3. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Streuver, Nancy. “Shakespeare and Rhetoric.” In Rhetorica VI, no. 2 (1988): 144. Sweeting, Elizabeth. Early Tudor Criticism: Linguistic & Literary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1940. Sylvanus, Erwin. Dr. Korczak and the Children. In Postwar German Theatre. Translated and edited by Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth. New York: Dutton, 1967. Vickers, Brian. The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose. London: Methuen, 1968. ———. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. ———. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Watson, George. “Dryden and the Scientific Image.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18 (1963): 25–35. Weaver, Richard. “Language Is Sermonic.” In The Rhetoric of Western Thought. Edited by James L. Golden, et al. Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 1983. ———. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1985. Wertheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. West, William. “Memory.” In Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Edited by Thomas O. Sloane. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wiesel, Elie. “Does the Holocaust Lie Beyond the Reach of Art?” The New York Times, April 17, 1983. Wilkins, John. An Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophy of Language [with the] Alphabetical Dictionary. London, 1668.

Bibliography   229

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Williams, Tennessee. “Prologue.” Orpheus Descending. In The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 3. New York: New Directions, 1971. ———. The Glass Menagerie. In The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1. New York: New Directions, 1990. Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982. Wilson, Thomas. Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique. Edited by Thomas J. Derrick. New York: Garland, 1982. Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Worthen, William. Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

230   Bibliography

In de x

Abrams, M. H., 102 A fortiori, 68 Altman, Joel, 11 Ambiguity, 39, 45, 107, 120, 140, 147, 178, 199, 213, 218 Anaphora, 42, 129 Anastrophe, 36, 37, 40, 41, 46 A priori, 124, 166 Apthonius, 71 Aristotle, 1, 2, 8, 25, 56, 107, 156, 202; Nichomachian Ethics, 1, 2; Poetics, 2 Artaud, Antonin, 7 Ascham, Roger, 33 Asyndeton, 72 Attie, Simon, 193 Baker, Stuart, 165 Baldwin, T. W., 71 Barbara, Jack V., 19n27 Barthes, Roland, 221 Beckett, Samuel, 27,151; Waiting for Godot, 133, 151, 218 Behn, Aphra, 91 Bevington, David, 219 Bitzer, Lloyd, 25–26, 155–56 Blau, Herbert, 2

Bond, Edward: The Bundle, 26; The Woman, 56–60 Boon, Richard, 103n39 Booth, Wayne, 4 Bornstein, Diane, 66 Bradley, A. C., 4 Brecht, Bertolt, 9, 10, 142, 143, 150; Brechtian, 8, 27, 144, 148, 151, 181, 193; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 10–11 Brenton, Howard: Pravda, 105 Brook, Peter, 214 Bullokar, W., 34 Burke, Kenneth, 17, 26, 56, 57, 121, 122, 202 Burton, Dolores, 31, 37 Caird, John, 219, 220 Calderwood, James, 41, 44 Carfield, J. Douglas, 81n13 Casuistry, 166 Character: ethical, 160; and ethos, 149, 217; of a play, 125 Chekhov, Anton, 5, 219; The Three Sisters, 16–17, 133, 217; Uncle Vanya, 18, 217 Chiasmus, 129 Cicero, 8, 11; De Oratore, 8

231

Circumstances: as topic of argument, 29, 48, 162 Cohen, Murray, 78n6, 80n12 Cooke, John, 98, 100 Copia, 69 Corollary, 8, 154, 160, 165 Costello, William T., 67n43 Decorum, 56, 123, 158 Deduction, 68, 148, 165 Definition, 34, 64, 80, 198 Delbo, Charlotte: Who Will Carry the Word, 194 Derrida, Jacques, 102 Desmet, Christy, 4 Dilemma, 70, 155, 157, 158, 161–64 Disputation, 4, 11, 66, 67, 69 Dryden, John, 28, 76–82, 88, 89; All for Love, 79–89, 94 Edgar, David, 194, 195; Albert Speer, 194 Eiron, 212 Elam, Keir, 5, 7 Ellipsis, 60, 84 Enjambment, 48, 50 Enthymeme, 25, 28, 60, 155–56, 164, 167–68, 171–72 Epanalepsis, 59 Essence, 29, 49, 63, 184 Esslin, Martin, 5–6 Ethos: of a character, 5, 16, 17, 28, 35, 36, 40, 42–43, 47–49, 54, 62–63, 65, 71, 74, 106, 113, 132, 134, 137, 149, 158, 170, 189, 198, 217; of credible character, 3, 4, 32, 34, 53, 56, 58, 61, 126, 142; of drama, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, 23, 65–66, 68, 124, 135, 138, 139, 141, 158; as dramatic theory, 2, 5, 10, 18, 19, 25–27, 215–17, 219, 221; as rhetorical proof, 1, 15, 32, 59, 61, 86, 106, 130, 145, 154, 160, 167, 198, 201–2, 215,

232   Index

217; and syntax, 30, 31–35, 37, 46, 52, 55, 60, 72, 135 Exordium, 57, 67 Farrell, Thomas, 156, 215–16 Fink, Zera, 94 Fiore, Robert L., 4 Foucault, Michel, 221 Fraser, Antonia, 91 Frayn, Michael: Copenhagen, 15, 28, 141–53; Democracy, 220 Freedman, Samuel, 29 Friel, Brian, 131, 138; Dancing at Lughnasa, 135–37 Fugard, Athol, 28, 131, 174; Blood Knot, 175–85; The Island, 185–90; “Master Harold” . . . and the boys, 138–41 Gascar, Pierre, 191 Genet, Jean: The Balcony, 27 Gorky, Maxim: Enemies, 102; The Lower Depths, 19, 109 Gradatio, 36, 57 Greenhut, Deborah, 66 Grene, Nicholas, 164 Grumberg, Jean-Claude, 200–201, 214; The Workroom, 201–14 Gussow, Mel, 126 Hare, David, 27, 28, 76; Amy’s View, 104–5; The Bay at Nice, 108, 111, 116; Enemies, 102; Fanshen, 116; The Judas Kiss, 103; Knuckle, 103–4, 115, 120; Licking Hitler, 115, 120; A Map of the World, 102, 106, 112–15, 120; Plenty, 107, 15, 120; Pravda, 105, 108; Racing Demon, 109–11, 117; Saigon, 106; The Secret Rapture, 101, 103, 116; Skylight, 115; Strapless, 121; Stuff Happens, 116; Wetherby, 104–5; Wrecked Eggs, 105 107, 116 Harrison, General, 98–100

Harth, Philip, 77, 78 Hermogenes, 31 Hill, Christopher, 90 Hobbes, Thomas, 136 Hoskyns, John, 56 Howell, A. C., 78 Hume, Robert D., 88n14, 93 Hunter, George K., 5 Ibsen, Henrik, 142, 154; A Doll’s House, 143, 217, 171; An Enemy of the People, 216; Ghosts, 216 Jauss, H. R., 6 Johnson, Samuel, 4, 77, 112 Jones, R. F., 76, 79 Jonson, Ben, 56 Kani, John, 28, 185, 187–88 Kennedy, George A., 3, 4 Kiberd, Declan, 16 Koestler, Arthur, 200 Kramer, Larry: The Normal Heart, 3 Lang, Berel, 193 Langer, Lawrence, 191, 192 Lifton, Robert Jay, 210, 212 Logos, 2, 3, 8, 13–15, 48, 86, 117, 138, 145, 201–2, 215, 217 Lyly, William, 33, 34 Mack, Peter, 56, Mamet, David, 5, 18, 26–27; American Buffalo, 18–25; Glengarry Glen Ross, 18, 24–25 Marvell, Andrew, 90, 91, 101 McPherson, Conor: Shining City, 218 Memory, 29, 65, 136–40, 146–47, 153, 156, 192, 198, 211; and character, 28, 132, 139, 141; and rhetoric, 131, 136, 139; and theater, 28, 132, 135

Metaphor, 6, 51, 78, 79, 112, 20, 121, 136, 159, 193, 203, 214; dramatic metaphor, 108, 120, 168, 203, 207, 210, 213 Milhous, Judith, 88n14, 93 Miller, Arthur, 5, 55, 195; Broken Glass, 195–97; Death of a Salesman, 22–23 Miller, J. Hillis, 102 Milosz, Czeslaw, 221 Mokae, Zakes, 184 Mulcaster, Richard, 33, 34 Narration, 72, 198 Nature: of an audience, 156; of drama, 9, 27, 81, 178, 181, 182, 215; of a person, 48, 49, 63, 64, 68, 69, 74, 91, 155, 202, 212, 213; of a thing, 16, 18, 29, 63, 64, 79, 81, 88, 121, 131, 142, 147, 149, 192, 210 Novak, Maximillian, 77 Ntshona, Winston, 28, 185 Nunn, Trevor, 216 O’Neill, Eugene, 28; The Iceman Cometh, 28, 51–55 Otway, Thomas, 28, 89; Venice Preserv’d, 89, 91–101 Paradox, 62, 81, 87, 144, 147, 148, 184, 191 Parker, Samuel, 78–80 Pathos, 2, 8, 14, 15, 46, 50, 51, 55, 60, 61, 68, 86, 123, 132, 201, 202, 211, 215, 217 Pavis, Patrice, 7, 8, 9 Percival, W. Keith, 34n12 Perelman, Chaim, 8 Peroration, 18, 46, 53, 69, 127, 129, 159, 173 Personification, 61, 84, 85, 129 Persona, 134 Peters, Hugh, 98

Index   233

Pinter, Harold, 197–98, 200, 214; Ashes to Ashes, 197–200 Plath, Sylvia, 192 Polanyi, Michael, 121, 122, 126 Polysyndeton, 104 Pound, Ezra, 133 Prior, Moody, 81 Quiddity, 63 Quintilian, 11, 26, 46n24, 50; Institutio Oratoria, 11 Ramus, Peter, 32 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 131 Rodenburg, Patsy, 217 Rosenfeld, Alvin, 192, 194 Satire, 20, 21, 53, 92, 166, 170, 212 Scaglione, Aldo, 32 Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr., 4 Seibers, Tobin, 4 Seven Beauties, 42 Shakespeare, William, 65, 67, 70–72, 74, 81, 86, 143, 215, 217; Coriolanus, 47–50; Hamlet, 10– 13, 14, 16, 31, 218; Henriad, 44; Henry V as character, 45; Julius Caesar, 46–47, 217; King Lear, 13, 14; Macbeth, 15, 218; Measure for Measure; 28, 61–75; Othello, 15; Richard II, 15, 28, 31, 34–44; Richard III, 15, 20 Shaw, George Bernard, 28, 142, 143, 217; Candida, 154, 157– 62; The Doctor’s Dilemma, 154, 160–62; Getting Married, 155; Heartbreak House, 28, 154–56, 164, 167–73; John Bull’s Other Island, 162–63; Major Barbara, 154, 165; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 154, 164–65; Saint Joan as character, 217 Shawn, Wallace: Aunt Dan and Lemon, 3

234   Index

Shapiro, Barbara,77 Shapiro, Karl, 78 Skerpan, Elizabeth, 90 Sitwell, Osbert, 200 Skloot, Robert, 26, 193 Sophie’s Choice, 192 Sprat, Thomas, 77, 78 Stafford, Lord, 98,99 Stasis theory, 4, 10–14, 174, 189, 191 States, Bert O., 5 Steiner, George, 200 Stoppard, Tom, 28, 101, 215; The Coast of Utopia, 122, 124–27, 129; Salvage, 125, 127–29; Shipwreck, 123–25, 127; Voyage, 122–24 Streuver, Nancy, 34 Strindberg, August, 142 Sweeting, Elizabeth. 33 Swift, Jonathan, 78, 80 Syllogism, 15, 156, 165, 167 Sylvanus, Erwin: Doctor Korczak and the Children, 193 Symmetry, 57 Syntax, 50, 51, 55, 66, 129,136, 215 Vickers, Brian, 46, 50, 55–56, 215, 221 Watson, George, 76 Weaver, Richard, 26, 57, 64, 101 Weiss, Peter: The Investigation, 192 West, William, 131–32, 141 Wiesel, Elie, 192, 198 Wilde, Oscar, 103 Wilkins, John, 77, 78, 80, 81 Williams, Raymond, 55 Williams, Tennessee, 28; The Glass Menagerie, 28, 131–35, 136 Wilshire, Bruce, 6, 181 Wilson, Thomas, 32, 33 Woodbridge, Linda, 71 Woolrych, Austin, 90 Worthen, William, 4

Ethos of Drama: Rhetorical Theory and Dramatic Worth was V The designed and typeset in Filosofia by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Natures Book Natural and bound by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Michigan.