'Will' and 'Shall' Best Fitteth Tamburlaine

Click for a better jpeg.

TAMBURLAINE, PART ONE, by Christopher Marlowe (ca 1588): a difficult play to assess, but I do have thoughts about it.

Tamburlaine knows, thoroughly, utterly knows, that he will conquer the world, so he begins. When the ends of his power are served by persuasive oratory and generosity to those who follow him, he shows mercy and clemency. When the ends are served by the slaughter of innocents and the brutal humiliation of his opponents, he mows down entire populations without a second thought, and treats human beings as furniture, as caged amusements. The man seems more a drive to conquest than a human being, and this makes the play disturbing.

For this reason, the play is less about plot than about iron pageantry: a tapestry of murders, victories, humiliations dished out by a symbol of power with few human characteristics. Yet the play does does offer moments of unexpected sympathy for those caught up in Tamburlaine's path: in the fate of Bajazeth and Zabina, emperor and empress of the Turks, brutally mistreated like caged animals until they show surprising depths of love for each other; in the final words of Arabia's king, whose intended bride, Zenocrate, was captured for marriage by Tamburlaine, and who, at the moment of his death, reveals himself to have been a good man sincerely devoted to the woman who should have been his; and in the second thoughts, the hesitations, of Zenocrate herself, the one person close to Tamburlaine who argues for mercy and against mass murder. These brief glimpses of humanity stand out all the more as a contrast to the single-minded will of Tamburlaine.

The result is a troubling, repetitive play that lacks the layered characters of Shakespeare, Webster, Ford. What it offers, instead, from beginning to end, is brilliant language: the first great poetry of Elizabethan drama. Quote one passage, and you might be tempted to quote them all.

THERIDAMAS:
Before the moon renew her borrowed light,
Doubt not, my lord and gracious sovereign,
But Tamburlaine and that Tartarian rout
Shall either perish by our warlike hands
Or plead for mercy at your highness’ feet.

======

TAMBURLAINE: Whom seek’st thou Persian? I am Tamburlaine.

THERIDAMAS:
[Aside] Tamburlaine?
A Scythian shepherd, so embellished
With nature’s pride and richest furniture?
His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods,
His fiery eyes are fixed upon the earth
As if he now devised some stratagem,
Or meant to pierce Avernus’ darksome vaults
And pull the triple-headed dog from hell.

======

TAMBURLAINE:
Theridamas my friend, take here my hand,
Which is as much as if I swore by heaven
And called the gods to witness of my vow --
Thus shall my heart be still combined with thine
Until our bodies turn to elements
And both our souls aspire celestial thrones.

======

MENAPHON:
Your majesty shall shortly have your wish
And ride in triumph through Persepolis.

TAMBURLAINE:
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

======

TAMBURLAINE:
The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair
And place himself in the empyreal heaven,
Moved me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand’ring planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

For all of its great poetry and stark moments of humane feeling, TAMBURLAINE, PART ONE is hardly a great play, but its place in the history of world theatre and its nagging persistence in the mind after its pages have been closed make it worth celebration.

Why We Need That Foreign Country, The Past

When we turn to the past, do we seek a mirror to reflect our own faces back at us, to reinforce our current attitudes and behaviours? Or do we look for a window that could show us other faces, other ways of thinking and living?

By the same token, when we deal with plays and poems, art and stories of the past, should we "reinterpret," "reimagine" them for "today's audience," to align them with current ideologies, or should we allow them confront us, to challenge us, on their own terms?

In 163 BC, the Roman playwright Terence translated a Greek play by Menander; this became HEAUTON TIMORUMENOS ("The Self-Tormentor"), remembered today for one brief riposte. "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."

"I am human: nothing human is alien to me."

When we look into the past, we find attitudes and activities that we share now, and yet, often in subtle, disconcerting ways, we also find differences. These differences have become all the more striking in our current crises.

The West is collapsing. Human values and human relations have been supplanted by values and relations of the market. This is neoliberalism, the defining ideology of our times. In September 1987, while interviewed in WOMAN'S OWN, one of the pushers of neoliberalism, Margaret Thatcher, said, "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families."

Yet if we go back to the 5th century BC, we find that Aeschylus took a different view. At the conclusion of his dramatic trilogy, THE ORESTEIA, he shows how the legal system of a democratic state can end the seemingly unstoppable cycle of murders for the sake of revenge. For too long, the House of Atreus has been trapped in this brutal cycle, but now, the citizens of Athens hold a trial and reach a verdict that finally puts the killings to a stop. Left on their own, individual men and women and families can tear themselves apart, but a democratic society can bring justice and civic peace.

In today's dying West, democracy crumbles into rule of the rich and powerful. Human rights retreat into smaller and tighter coffins of identity, and thus become self-limited, unthreatening, no challenge to the power of corporations and oligarchs. We need reminders of another time, when democracy held the promise of liberation, when societies and human beings mattered. For this, Aeschylus represents a good starting point, but only a starting point.

"Nothing human is alien to me." This is true, yet it also remains true that the people of yesterday did not quite resemble us. We do not read Montaigne or Thomas Browne to find ourselves; we read them to encounter minds better than ours. We read the Greek dramatists, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, for their poetry, for their piercing insights into human character and human failings. We read Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS, or the OEDIPUS REX of Sophocles, because the nobility of these heroes perplexes and challenges us in ways that the idiotic Trumps and Macrons, Bidens and Zelenskis, Modis and Netanyahus never could.

As L. P. Hartley wrote in THE GO-BETWEEN (1953), "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This is why we need the past. This is why we should allow the past to speak to us on its own terms, with all of its difference, because we have lost many ways of being human, and we must rediscover all that we can, to survive.

John Ford, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE (1633)

By critical consensus, the plays of John Ford represent either a last echo of popular Jacobean theatre, or early examples of a Caroline theatre designed not for the crowds, but for private viewings in palaces or in houses of the wealthy. Whatever the label, most critics agree that by this time, the vitality, the broad appeal of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy was dead, that Ford was one of the few interesting writers of this period who retained something of Jacobean vigour, and that his most interesting, most lively play, 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE, remains one of the best from its period.

I would call it a hand grenade, to be handled carefully at the risk of losing several fingers or an eye.

One reason for caution: the play's topic.

GIOVANNI:
Must I not praise
That beauty which, if framed anew, the gods
Would make a god of if they had it there,
And kneel to it, as I do kneel to them?

FRIAR:
Why, foolish madman!

GIOVANNI:
Shall a peevish sound,
A customary form, from man to man,
Of brother and of sister, be a bar
'Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?
Say that we had one father, say one womb
(Curse to my joys!) gave both us life and birth:
Are we not therefore each to other bound
So much the more by nature, by the links
Of blood, of reason (nay, if you will have't,
Even of religion), to be ever one,
One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

[Act I, Scene i]

Like many teenagers before and since, Giovanni knows that he knows everything, and that his will, his desires, transcend social norms and accepted customs.

GIOVANNI:
What I have done I'll prove both fit and good.
It is a principle, which you have taught
When I was yet your scholar, that the frame
And composition of the mind doth follow
The frame and composition of the body;
So where the body's furniture is beauty,
The mind's must needs be virtue; which allowed,
Virtue itself is Reason but refined,
And Love the quintessence of that. This proves
My sister's beauty, being rarely fair,
Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,
And chiefly in that love, her love to me.
If hers to me, then so is mine to her,
Since in like causes are effects alike.

[Act II, Scene v]

What Giovanni ignores is the weight of the world's countering opinion.

FRIAR:
O ignorance in knowledge! Long ago
How often have I warned thee this before!
Indeed, if we were sure there were no deity,
Nor heaven nor hell, then to be led alone
By nature's light -- as were philosophers
Of elder times -- might instance some defence;
But 'tis not so. Then, madman, thou wilt find
That nature is in heaven's positions blind.

[Act II, Scene v]

Luckily (or unluckily) for Giovanni, his beloved sister is more than willing to love him back. For Annabella, the long line of suitors eager to win her hand might as well not exist; her one true love is her brother.

ANNABELLA :
This noble creature was in every part
So angel-like, so glorious, that a woman
Who had not been but human as was I,
Would have kneeled to him, and have begged for love.
You -- why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or indeed,
Unless you kneeled, to hear another name him.

[Act IV, Scene iii]

The first unsettling aspect of this play is the implication that these lovers are indeed sincere. Despite the hardships that eat away at their secret union, they remain devoted and loyal to each other.

The second unsettling detail is the brutal ferocity of the other characters towards Annabella. Like the enemies of the Duchess in John Webster's THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, these men seem to resent her mainly because she openly, honestly, and courteously follows her own path. Circumstances are complicated (perhaps over-complicated) by plotters in disguise, by daily betrayals, by feuds between the suitors, but in all of this, Annabella, despite her incest, comes across as the better human being.

Yet as we know, history is written by the victors. The final judgement of the victors in this play is that Annabella was a despicable whore, which ignores her actions and her personality. Whether this harsh assessment of her character was also John Ford's remains impossible to tell, but much of the lingering bitterness of this play comes from the unfairness, the cruelty of the men.

If Annabella seems more innocent, more pure than the men around her, Giovanni carries the weight of a more complex mind. At the play's end, he becomes a full revenger against those who persecute his sister, yet his own "solution" to the challenge of his love is just as brutal as theirs. The play foreshadows this end in many lines, but it remains horrific. For some readers, this might seem over the top, but in the traditions of Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedy, the spectacle of gore fits right in.

While John Ford shares with Webster and Shakespeare this passion for bloodshed, he lacks their genius for metaphors and imagery. Instead, he offers a smoothly elegant dramatic language that brings pleasures of its own.

ANNABELLA:
Methinks you weep.

GIOVANNI:
I do indeed: these are the funeral tears
Shed on your grave; these furrowed up my cheeks
When first I loved and knew not how to woo.
Fair Annabella, should I here repeat
The story of my life, we might lose time.
Be record all the spirits of the air,
And all things else that are, that day and night,
Early and late, the tribute which my heart
Hath paid to Annabella’s sacred love
Hath been these tears, which are her mourners now.
Never till now did Nature do her best
To show a matchless beauty to the world,
Which in an instant, ere it scarce was seen,
The jealous Destinies required again.
Pray, Annabella, pray. Since we must part,
Go thou white in thy soul to fill a throne
Of innocence and sanctity in heaven.
Pray, pray, my sister.

ANNABELLA:
Then I see your drift.
Ye blessed angels, guard me!

GIOVANNI:
So say I.
Kiss me. [They kiss] If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred.
Give me your hand. How sweetly life doth run
In these well-coloured veins! How constantly
These palms do promise health! But I could chide
With Nature for this cunning flattery.
Kiss me again. Forgive me.

ANNABELLA:
With my heart. [They kiss]

[Act V, Scene v]

What we have, then, is a play of elegant poetry, undeniable power, and an overwhelming bitterness. Readers will respond as they will; for my part, I admire the play even as I wince at the sting of its venom.

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

Click for a better jpeg.

In the 1977 theatrical version of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a moment of human honesty caught me off guard: as protagonist Roy Neary sculpts a mound of mashed potatoes into the blob-image that haunts him, his elder son watches with silence and tears. It offers a glimpse of the pain that Neary has brought to his family, but writer-director Steven Spielberg will soon reassure us that a family's pain counts for nothing. The one thing that matters is Dad's rapture into heaven as a Chosen One.

When I saw this film in 1977, I hated it. Watching it now, I respect its technical merits. It looks great (with five expert cinematographers, it should), and the visual effects by everyone from model-maker Greg Jein to the legendary Douglas Trumbull ensure that visually, at least, the film will grab its audience. At the same time, Spielberg shows genuine skill with direction. He knows how to set up elaborate crowd sequences without losing focus on the placement and movements of the central characters, how to block action with clarity, and where to place the camera for maximal impact. These once-common skills can be hard to find in the Age of Marvel, and I appreciate them here.

What troubles me now is what troubled me in 1977: the failure (the refusal?) of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS to explore the implications of its evangelical message, along with the failure of any character in the film to suggest that religious adoration of alien beings might be short-sighted.

Any first contact would leave impact craters on human science, politics, philosophy, art, on all aspects of human existence. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS turns away from this, and instead, looks at one man's religious conversion. Not a bad concept, and much could be done with it, but Spielberg has no concern for the implications of ideas; he wants a rock concert light-show, and thanks to his team of technical geniuses, he can provide it. But story-telling films live or die by drama, and what this film lacks is a doubter to pose the obvious questions: Should we assume that superior technology means a superior culture? Why, against all biological odds, do these alien beings look so human, so childlike? If they can fly starships, why should they not be able to master human languages? Can we really trust these alien kidnappers?

Writers are not obliged to answer all questions (indeed, unanswered questions can make a story haunting), but I do expect writers to understand that questions will arise. I would have been less uneasy with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS if someone in the film had put up a hand, and said, "Excuse me. Excuse me! Have we really thought about the implications of our choices? Aren't we assuming more than we actually know?"

These questions would have turned CLOSE ENCOUNTERS into science fiction, but like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS playing on TV in the Neary house, Spielberg's film remains, at heart, religious. Other viewers have embraced its blank-eyed innocence, but I see a failure of imagination, a lack of dramatic development, a refusal to confront the implications of running away from your wife and children to join a cosmic cult. The result is akin to Neary's mound of mashed potatoes: it might have meant something in Spielberg's head, but here, on the plate, it looks more like an unfinished blob.

Click for a better jpeg.

"You are a fucking idiot."

With terse precision, a Mr D on Facebook assessed my comments on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. He continued:

"It's a movie. An action=adventure piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment. About ufo's and aliens. It's nothing more than that."

This is where he and I disagree. Films that tell any kind of story are necessarily statements of meaning. This meaning can sometimes be hard to specify; it can be plural and contradictory; it can be dramatized, so that we know how certain characters think and feel, without necessarily finding ways to transpose their personal meaning into an overall meaning for the film. But in certain cases, the meaning is presented with simple clarity, and this is often true of "crowd-pleasing entertainment" films.

Mr D implies that we should never look for meaning in popular entertainment, but as I see it, films that reach a wide audience often tell us about the unspoken assumptions, hopes, or dreads of that audience. For this reason, I think a close look at certain films can bring widely-held public attitudes to light, and sometimes, these attitudes can be disturbing. They can suggest unaddressed issues, hidden resentments, or troubling limitations of thought and feeling.

Mr D concluded, in summary:

"Get a life."

Perhaps he rejects the examined life as not worth living, but I would say that looking under public stones and peering through dusty public windows can be worthwhile, if only to see what cobwebs writhe in the shadowed spaces of our times.

Click for a better jpeg.

Mr D encouraged me to share his comment:

"Please do. It would be a pleasant surprise for everyone if you posted something intelligent."

I suspect I might have disappointed him again.

John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL Revisited

As a Jacobean-mad teenager forty-five years ago, I read John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL for the first time. I applauded its brilliance, but I also wanted to take a hot, soapy shower to wash away the grease of all that evil.

FRANCISCO:
Brachiano, I am now fit for thy encounter.
Like the wild Irish I'll ne'er think thee dead
Till I can play at football with thy head.

= = = = = = = =

[A man with a set of pistols threatens two women, and he means it]

FLAMINEO:
Look, these are better far at a dead lift
Than all your jewel house.

VITTORIA:
And yet methinks
These stones have no fair lustre, they are ill set.

FLAMINEO:
I'll turn the right side towards you: you shall see
How they will sparkle.

Above all, in the world of THE WHITE DEVIL, power counts for everything, people count for nothing.

FLAMINEO:
He was a kind of statesman, that would sooner have reckon'd how many cannon-bullets he had discharged against a town, to count his expense that way, than how many of his valiant and deserving subjects he lost before it.

= = = = = = = =

[A child, a mere child of murdered parents, has claimed the throne]

GIOVANNI:
Away with them to prison and to torture.

A world of power is a world of horrors.

BRACHIANO:
Look you; six gray rats that have lost their tails,
Crawl up the pillow....

= = = = = = = =

BRACHIANO:
O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber: no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure: the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement: the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

VITTORIA:
I am lost for ever.

BRACHIANO:
How miserable a thing it is to die
'Mongst women howling!

Yet reading this play again -- for what, the fourth time? The fifth? -- I caught a hint of grey light in its darkness. There is goodness in this world, even if much of it endures in resigned sadness.

FLAMINEO:
I would I were from hence.

CORNELIA:
Do you hear, sir?
I'll give you a saying which my grandmother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute--

FLAMINEO:
Do, and you will, do.

CORNELIA:
'Call for the robin red breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flow'rs do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'

They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel
But I have an answer for them.
'Let holy church receive him duly
Since he paid the church tithes truly.'
His wealth is summed, and this is all his store:
This poor men get; and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you all good people.

FLAMINEO:
I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray leave me.

This night I'll know the utmost of my fate:
I'll be resolved what my rich sister means
T'assign me for my service. I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court;
And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honour'd robes those tortures try:
'We think cag'd birds sing, when indeed they cry'.

Yet along with resignation comes defiance, in particular, the courageous defiance of women. This hits a peak during Act 3, Scene 2, with an arraignment of the heroine, Vittoria, whose only crime is that men want her. She will not be cowed by accusations: instead, she argues back, brilliantly, and gains approval from the court's witnesses.

VITTORIA:
Find me but guilty, sever head from body:
We'll part good friends: I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, sir.

ENGLISH AMBASSADOR:
She hath a brave spirit.

Her defiance, and the defiance of certain women around her, never fades, not even at the end.

VITTORIA:
'Twas a manly blow.
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant
And then thou wilt be famous.

In THE WHITE DEVIL, defiance often snarls with bared fangs, but it remains courage, and as a light against the darkness, admirable.

Darkness obscured the critical consensus on Webster for decades. Even after Shakespeare had been revisited and rehabilitated from his long neglect by British and German Romantics, Webster was hobbled with the reputation of Horror Sensationalist until the end of the 19th Century, when critics like Swinburne and John Addington Symonds came forward to defend him. His rehabilitation continued in the 20th Century, thanks to critics like Rupert Brooke and F. L. Lucas. They pointed out what should have been obvious right from the start: John Webster was not only a great poet, but a great dramatist.

A great poet, a great dramatist. Marlowe was a great poet, but not exactly a good dramatist. Chapman could write beautifully, but dramatically, his plays, especially BUSSY D'AMBOIS, were unconvincing, inconsistent messes. Ford was often fine as a dramatist, and as a poet, often very fine. Above all, however, as dramatist and poet, stood William Shakespeare, and along with him, John Webster.

Webster's poetry differed from Shakespeare's in its precision. Shakespeare seems to have thought in metaphors, and he rarely used one or two when he could use twelve or fifteen; Webster showed more constraint, which enhanced the power of those metaphors he carefully chose. Webster's drama differed from Shakespeare's in its range of people and emotions. While Shakespeare understood all kinds of people, and covered a vast emotional range, Webster focused on angry, bitter people, ignored, passed by, denied promotion and money despite their qualities. It would not be exaggeration to call Webster a Poet Of Resentment.

Yet as THE WHITE DEVIL makes clear, he was also a Poet Of Defiance.

LODOVICO:
Dost laugh?

FLAMINEO:
Wouldst have me die, as I was born, in whining?

GASPARO:
Recommend yourself to heaven.

FLAMINEO:
No, I will carry mine own commendations thither.

For John Webster, defiance represents courage: a daylight strength against a world of brutal midnight power.