The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  This catches very well the awe the cult of Elizabeth engendered. Part of the purpose of her “progresses” around the realm from noble pile to pile was to be seen by the people, toward whom she could be remarkably generous in contrast with her usual tight-fisted attitude toward money. She so much became the Virgin Queen the nation forgot the dangers of succession because of a lack of a direct heir and was instead jealous of her final dalliance with the Duc d’Anjou, horrified at her belonging to anyone but themselves. She embodied the nation like Churchill at his peak, but unlike him, for decades.

  They were troubled decades for all the reasons mentioned. Elizabeth tried with the Thirty-nine Articles in 1563 to make a “big tent” out of the Anglican Church, including all but Catholics and fringe Protestants. The romantic troubles of Mary of Scotland placed her in Elizabeth’s hands for nineteen years; as a prisoner she too could be contained. The Dutch revolt against Spain made it impossible for the latter, a great power, to turn its attention fully to England, a revolt she abetted directly and through her sanction of the famous raids of Drake and his peers to bleed the Spanish treasury. For years she succeeded in this balancing act of containment and interference. Nonetheless, “it was a country in the throes of profound transformation” and only her resourcefulness kept that transformation from turning into a slaughterhouse like the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1574.18

  Not even excommunication in 1570 overthrew her; just as the theatre gained steam, the 1570s turned into golden Elizabethan years. Anyone knowledgeable knew how fragile was the nature of this success. When Philip finally sent the Armada in 1588, a year after Elizabeth had Mary executed, she appeared before the army like an Amazon queen, ready to fight with the body of a woman but “heart and stomach of a man.” She wowed everyone—enemies, people, even the councilors who saw her up close and were periodically driven mad by her temporizing and stinginess.

  She remained admirable into old age, defying public expectation that as a virgin she must wither. The Venetian ambassador wrote of her as having an unexpected appeal even then. Nonetheless, the sight of the gaudy old Elizabeth, bejeweled and bare-breasted, must have been trying. The war with Spain dragged on, the harvests failed, and inflation took off. London transformed itself from a city of barely 50,000 to over 200,000 by the end of her reign, as enclosure in the countryside broke up the medieval patterns of farming so great lords could assemble vast acreages to increase their herds and incomes. Added to all the other transformations going on, then, were an agricultural upheaval and an urban explosion. There was a proliferation of poor laws and of vagabonds, which brings us to Shakespeare.

  So much has been imagined and written about Shakespeare that any summary must tread where angels fear to go. Here I largely follow the work of Anthony Holden, who points out Shakespeare’s father was the equivalent of a mayor of Stratford before his fortunes declined later in life.19 Shakespeare probably received a classical education as a youth in logic, rhetoric, and literature, something that provided a strand of connection to the university influence on drama, with its Renaissance attempt to revive classic tragedy by emulating Seneca. Shakespeare’s was apparently a Catholic family at a time of increasing suspicion and proscription of Catholics and Catholicism. Shakespeare’s twenties are lost: he may have been a tutor to a Catholic lord’s family. During this time he took an immense social leap and joined an acting troupe, when individuals in such troupes were thought no better than vagabonds. After a few years, he surfaced in London as an actor. By the late 1590s, Shakespeare was a part owner of his theatre, respected as a dramatist and poet and well enough off to buy a coat of arms for his father and be regarded as a gentleman. He bought one of Stratford’s biggest houses and returned home in triumph.

  Shakespeare carried out many functions as part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men which included the famous actors Kempe and Burbage, at first holding the horses of aristocrats, acting, and beginning to write, later rising to part owner. He averaged two plays a year, the first eight without credit. After that he was famous enough his authorship was given as a selling point. He was seen to outshine his competitors, yet he retired to Stratford in 1611 after a career in London of barely more than seventeen years.

  As the greatest of the Elizabethans, what do the greatest of his plays have to stay about the spiritual burden of Elizabethan drama?

  Consider this from Hamlet, as Hamlet picks up Yorick’s skull:

  HAMLET

  Let me see. (Takes the skull) Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fine fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.20

  The resemblance of the sentiments to the soliloquy starting “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” is clear, as well as to the sentiments quoted from Sophocles. Othello says before he kills himself,

  OTHELLO

  … nothing extenuate,

  Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak

  Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

  Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

  Perplex’d in the extreme

  … And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

  Where a malignant and turban’d Turk

  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

  I took by the throat the circumscribed dog

  And smote him, thus. (Stabs himself)21

  These plays have a clear perception of mortality and a grappling with its meaning, but are very odd in what they leave out. There is no reference to God or heaven in any but the vaguest sense. Hamlet, as he considers suicide, stops from the fear that in death’s sleep he may dream, and who knows what nightmares that may bring? Who, after all, knows anything about “the undiscover’d country,” death?22 Just about every Elizabethan, as a matter of fact; when you died, heaven or hell, God’s grace or damnation, awaited your soul, with which you were intimately acquainted too. But in these plays we see no reference to a divine Christian order at all, for it was precisely the nature of that order that was under question. A mind like Shakespeare’s, then, could consider an order without a received structure. Lear may refer to “gods” but takes a sharp view of man’s nature without mythic or doctrinal swaddling:

  LEAR

  Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with the uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.23

  Macbeth may make an occasional generic call of God but invokes no traditional religious solace after learning of his wife’s death and, just before Birnam Wood appears to be on the march, soliloquizes:

  MACBETH

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more: it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.24

  That is Hamlet’s perception of the futility of action, which even such vigorous interpreters as Richard Burton or Mel Gibson were constrained to honor.

  Shakespeare and the Elizabethan playwrights borrowed freely from one another and their sourc
es. They turned all their characters into Elizabethans, put Elizabethan rhyme, slang, and blank verse in their mouths. They cannibalized the ages without our concern for historical accuracy. They used whatever they liked without our concern for such niceties as acknowledged borrowings. They didn’t use what was of no interest to them. The omission of a received Christian viewpoint like that found in the morality plays only a little earlier is, then, deliberate and revealing. Man and his nature are up for grabs, and, in Shakespeare’s vision, stoicism before inevitable suffering is the only recourse. It is as though he wrote from the center of Freud’s world, where religion is dismissed and the bare facts of life must be registered and endured. Prospero does not thank God for his deliverance on his departure: he surrenders his magical powers and asks our indulgence to set him free. The truth seen through the prism of comedy in Much Ado about Nothing is that “man is a giddy thing” and can hardly be held responsible for his actions.25 We are far from a Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, or Catholic vision of the redemptive power of grace, good works, or faith.

  Shakespeare and Elizabethan tragedy stepped into a unique moment in history. Because no specific belief was generally held, all particular beliefs were subject to question. That need to wrestle with the burden of our behavior and our place in the cosmos inspired a generation to greatness in plays catering to general audiences consisting of many zealously held faiths. A play could not have taken any one of their versions of faith without causing a riot or losing some part of its audience, as well as entering an area subject to official repression. Yet plays did not reflect the official line either. Instead, and accepted by their audiences, they let their characters freely state their confusion and anguish and left it to ourselves as audience to draw our own conclusions. In so doing they implicitly stated: “These conclusions concerning the great issues are ours to draw,” something each sect accepted as true of itself if not of others. This tremendous legacy of Elizabethan and Shakespearean drama looms large and explains its continuing hold on ourselves. Imagine a current screenwriter with as many films to her or his credit as Shakespeare has through the constant stream of Shakespearean film adaptations: that would be success!

  In this sense Bloom is right about the connection of modern consciousness with Shakespeare. Our modern consciousness grows from the spiritual freedom within the Elizabethan plays where the chief characters could be whatever they were capable of making themselves, for better or worse; where, looking within themselves, men and women could find what answers were possible from their own resources, however bleak they might prove, to the great questions of life, death, truth, reality, fate, morality, and self. The possibilities inspired the greatest outpouring of genius in dramatic writing since the Athenian apogee. When the Elizabethan noon was over and the ensuing civil wars concluded and the theatres reopened under a restored monarchy in the 1660s, the religious, social, and political issues that so troubled the Elizabethans settled into a broad, “Augustan” consensus, and drama fell deeply asleep.

  The Argument We Are Having with Ourselves

  Thus I can now culminate my remarks on drama’s ultimate role in the argument we are having with ourselves. What the two preceding sections make clear is that dramatic apogees coincide with moments of intense social stress and transformations of belief. The spiritual element in drama at such moments is not there as a reflection of the time’s social or religious concerns but as an integral part of what makes drama intensely relevant and calls to its service individuals of genius with moral and spiritual concerns. Drama carries and embodies the spiritual concerns of its time. One apogee hardly shares the outlooks of another; we live, as Winnicott emphasized, in a shared space-time continuum; we speak to our own times. But while our cultures may vary, we do so far less and speak to ourselves across the barriers of time insofar as we and our works endure in that shared “cultural area” that is Winnicott’s third area, the transitional space where our mutual experience and culture transpire. What is present in that space is still alive and part of our ongoing dialogue. The argument over the relevance of “great white dead authors” is pertinent here: relevance is always under question. That the men disparaged as dead are being debated reveals that they are quite alive in the cultural area of our experience and part of our argument with ourselves.

  What, however, can we say about modern dramatic writing?

  Certainly it begins with a bang in the theatre of the late nineteenth century with naturalism and Zola, then is greatly influenced by Ibsen and those who follow. Those dramatists’ stance vis-à-vis our culture has often been critical, taking one aspect or another of our social and economic behavior to task as we live through the enormous transformations of our industrial and technological revolutions, our wars of great isms, the materialism of our economic and social system’s outlook, and our often apocalyptic, fractured religious sects.

  Not surprisingly from the preceding analysis, we would expect to find we are living in an age of great dramatic writing—and we are with, at first, stage authors like Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, O’Neill, Beckett, Miller, and others, and now with a cinema that since World War II has overshadowed the stage in entertainment value and in dramatic writing that probes our experience and carries our spiritual quest. It is the era of Bergman, of Antonioni, of Fellini, of Truffaut, of screenwriters like Towne, or Schrader, or … We are in the midst of our own cinematic dramatic apogee, which makes it perilous to say for sure what we are striving for or where we are going; nothing so humbles one as reviewing his or her predictions or analyses after a few years have passed.

  Campbell envisages the modern quest as our finding a new sense of “thou” in a new sense of community. Certainly in reaction to our Cartesian heritage, we have struggled ever more sharply against the division of experience into a simple “me vs. not me” framework; philosophers have struggled to escape that straitjacket, while Winnicott struggled in the language of modern psychoanalysis to indicate a place that is central to our experiencing where “thou” can be said to be embodied—that cultural, creative area where you and I mingle in our daily activities. It’s so new a concept that we struggle to understand its meaning: how can the lonely “I” of the self also be in some part a “you/me,” an “us”? How is it possible that through creativity/playing, understood as cultural activity, we find the true self, not as a fixed quantity, but always in process and with some “other,” for that is the nature of playing and experience? But we can understand why such a fleeting experience of wholeness requires repeated immersions in the mature playing of our creative response to reality, and how in such playing we continue to incorporate some part of an “other” into our self to continue.

  A great paradox is that since we lost our unconscious relationship to nature, the “I” that is so private has always existed in relation to an “other”: the “other” world of nature we separated from, and the actual “other(s)” we once unthinkingly moved among. The very fact we can objectify ourselves (“I” am speaking) reflects the presence of both this simultaneous separation and perception of the “other” in the heart of our self-conceiving. We recapitulate just this experience as infants in the process so clearly laid out in Winnicott as the mother, by separating herself from our omniscient illusion in the weaning process, brings us up against the perception of the “not me” and the “other” of the mother, whose separation from her infant simultaneously casts us into the first, lonely perception of ourselves as an “other” too.

  I have said drama is caught up in this argument and takes sides. It has always taken sides. Curiously, drama is not found in simple societies, though storytelling and the rites that precede drama flourish. Drama excels in great civilizations in their moment of apogee and maximum stress; civilization, as Freud underscores, inherently causes profound conflict in the individual—how much more so when it is riding to a crest undergoing profound transformation. Even more curious is the primitiveness of the immediate dramatic impact, for screenplays quintessentially, as well as
dramatic work more widely, appeal powerfully to our emotions from the beginning of an action, whether Schindler wowing the military brass in Schindler’s List or the endangered Princess Leia being captured by Darth Vader at the start of Star Wars. Rachel is met in Witness at her husband’s funeral; Will Kane in High Noon begins with a marriage, while in the crisis he drains the cup of abandonment. It is a truism of drama that emotion makes real within the milieu established at the start of a given work, developed in a cause-and-effect and more or less necessary and probable way. The paradox is as great as that involved in the appeal of music: for all the craft that goes into either art, their immediate impact goes straight past conscious reflection to the deeper layers of the self.

  This paradox reveals some of its secret when we reflect it is precisely the conscious mind in times of great stress that does not know what decision is right. Greek Sophists may have taught there are two sides to every question, and Elizabethans wondered about the true nature of reality and religious solace. We wonder about all three and suspect a given question may have far more than two correct answers. Certain popularizations of science take this attitude further, like deriving relativism from relativity, where all is relative and so anything has a just claim, as in multiculturalism where any culture is held to be as valid as another, to the raising of quantum indeterminacy into the idea nothing can be known for sure. Earlier our mythopoetic instinct reared deism in the eighteenth century from Newtonian physics, with God as a distant clockmaker, and social Darwinism from the evolutionary theories of Darwin in the nineteenth century. We constantly and necessarily elaborate insights into explanatory systems to give a rational container to our social experience, even if paradoxically living in a system that denies ultimate knowledge and leaves us grasping hopelessly for a certain version of “the truth.” In their succession these systems betray the extent and duration of the transformation we are undergoing, whose final outcome is so uncertain.