Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  The glory of that countenance is her rosy lips Sighing for a lover’s kiss, delicate lips That break into laughter as delicate as they …

  … Her smooth neck and shoulders whiter than Snow give way to firm but dainty breasts …

  Her chest and waist are narrow and compact, giving Way at last to the swell of her rounded abdomen. Next is the area celebrated as the storehouse Of modesty, the mistress of Nature, the delightful Dwelling of Venus. Of that sweetness which lies Hidden there, he that partakes can be the judge.16

  The Art of Versification prefigures the equally passionate language employed by another monk, Joseph of Exeter, to describe Paris’ seduction, with Helen when she ‘pressed him with her mouth and robbed him of his semen’.17

  Unlike Benoît, Joseph of Exeter does not allow Helen any attributes other than the carnal. In a particularly intrusive and demeaning depiction of her, he shows he cares not a jot for who she is, but simply how she looks and how sexually arousing she can be:

  Her ears are well-formed and not too large, her eyes ever watchful, and her nose alive to every passing scent, each feature in turn demanding admiration as they vie for praise. Her chin, protruding slightly, gleams white, and her full lips swell a little into a rosy pout, so that kisses may more gently be pressed deep upon her mouth. Her neck seems to flow into her shoulders, her modest chest all but conceals her breasts, both her arms and her sides are short and dainty. When she walks, she glides with playful step, her small feet kissing the earth as they fall, while the graceful movement of her legs supports her limbs with easy poise. A single blemish between her fine eyebrows dares to separate their delicate bows with a mole.18

  Benoît’s Helen is sexually powerful, but she is not the sex-object or the pin-up conjured by the pens of the poet’s contemporaries.

  Illustrated versions of Benoît’s Roman show Helen marrying Paris with a charming exchange of rings; she trips gracefully into Troy on the back of a white palfrey. Paris and then Priam hold the reins, a mark of great respect and an indication that these aristocrats, female and male, Greek and Trojan, have equal standing.19 Mirroring the Spartan Queen, Eleanor was famously beautiful. ‘By reason of her excessive beauty, she destroyed or injured nations’, wrote Matthew Paris.20 Another chronicler described the young heiress as ‘perpulchra’, ‘utterly’ or ‘more than beautiful’.21 The lines of the Carmina Burana, written in around 1204 with Eleanor in mind, could just as easily have been dedicated to Helen:22 ‘Were the world all mine, From the sea to the Rhine, I’d give it all, If so be the Queen of England, Lay in my arms.’23 Eleanor must have realised that those who listened to stories of Helen, in the resonating Ducal Hall, would have easily made the connection between a breath-taking but dangerous Spartan Queen, and the queen who sat, glinting with jewels and wrapped in furs, in front of them.

  Eleanor’s grandfather, Duke William IX, was famously the first ‘troubadour king’ (although he was, in fact, only ever a duke). Troubadours sang of desire and longing, and among their influences they could count the clever, sensual poems of Ovid. Helen appears in a number of Ovid’s works: the Heroides, Metamorphoses, Amores, Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Here she is often a minxy, duplicitous creature – a heart-breaker – but delightful enough to be well worth the trouble. The ladies in the troubadours’ songs were always impossibly beautiful and always just out of reach. This ‘civilisation de courteoisie’ was a highly eroticised environment; although cited in literary and musical terms, women’s sexual power was being acknowledged and enshrined. These were the lessons of Eleanor’s childhood.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine’s fabled courts of love were just that – a fabula. But even if there were no theatricalised legal judgments in the 12th-century palaces that dealt with the broken hearts and the ideals of lovers, there were still troubadours and there were still love poems. Although we have no piece of parchment that proves Eleanor commissioned the Roman from Benoît (nor do we for most comparable works of medieval literature) it is a distinct possibility that Eleanor, duchess and queen, knew exactly what she was doing when she encouraged the creation of this new Trojan epic, this new story of Paris and Helen. For Eleanor, Helen was an unusual but ideal icon. When Paris addresses Helen, his words are both tender and terrible:

  Now I have placed my heart so in you, And your love has so burned me, That I am completely enclined toward you. Loyal beloved, loyal spouse

  You will henceforth be all my life: Of this fact you may be certain and confident. All will obey you And all will serve you.24

  Eleanor herself was exceptional, as the chronicler Richard of Devizes described her, a ‘femina incomparabilis’. She was unusually ambitious and unusually proactive in international and domestic affairs. To maintain her atypical standing and influence she needed actively to promote her own image as a powerful, desirable, threatening creature. She needed an irregular role-model. So when she heard those lines, drifting through the echoing acoustics of the Ducal Hall, speaking of Helen’s ability to affect the world around her, I can imagine Eleanor thinking, this is really good, listen and tremble.

  There is also another, more subtle, comparison to be made between the two women. Eleanor was deeply spiritual. In commemoration of their marriage, she and Henry had had their image built into the very fabric of the grand cathedral at Poitiers, Eleanor’s home town. Eleanor still stares down from the glorious east window: dressed in blue and with a fine gold crown on her head, she is myriad fractured colours. The king and queen cradle a model of the cathedral between them like a newborn baby. This was not just vainglory. From her few letters, her many charters and her bequests to religious institutions it is clear that Eleanor was a true and pious believer. On her tomb at Fontevraud she lies peacefully reading a prayer book.

  In his Roman, one of the details Benoît chooses to emphasise is that Helen was taken by Paris while she was offering up prayers in the Temple of Venus (Aphrodite) on the island of Kythera. This follows the ‘real’ version of events as laid out by Dares. In art galleries and private collections across Europe, paintings and manuscript illustrations (including those for the Roman de Troie) from the 12th to the 17th centuries frequently show Helen being plucked from her devotions to the Goddess of Love. Benoît’s epic was the inspiration for many of these creations. In a number of the pictures the Spartan Queen is flanked by idols, and lit by candles: a Helen framed within religious architecture and iconography. Benoît’s Helen (in tune with the feistier Helens that scatter the classical corpus) is not just an object but a subject.

  By equating herself with a chivalric Helen, I think that Eleanor was sending out a coded message to Christendom. She was positioning herself as neither angel nor whore, but a potent combination of both. Like Helen, Eleanor was not content with watching from the sidelines. Through force of character and charisma, by using her intellect resourcefully, she sought to occupy a central position. She was a woman both lusty and sovereign. Like Helen, happy to exploit her God-given gifts.

  Benoît’s Roman did much for Helen’s rehabilitation. Thanks, largely, to Eleanor’s influence, Helen the hieratic potentate rather than the fantasy whore had a brief but significant reprieve. And so Helen is sung once again, and continues to be sung across the courts and mansions of medieval Europe. A Provençal poem called ‘Flamenca’ from 1234 listed the fables that minstrels were expected to perform – Helen’s story is one of them.25 Helen is now a fixture in the world of the literate and the aristocratic. But her memory did not just hover in this rarefied atmosphere. Soon she was going to come hurtling back onto the street; this time as an agent of the devil himself.

  43

  DANCING WITH THE DEVIL

  Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

  Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

  Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies –

  Come, Helen, come give me my soul again.

  Here will I dwell, for Heaven be in these lip
s,

  And all is dross that is not Helena.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,

  The Tragical History of Dr Faustus c. 1549

  WITHIN DAYS OF ITS PREMIERE IN LONDON, in the last decade of the 16th century, Kit Marlowe’s perfect pentameter line, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ from Act V of his Tragical History of Dr Faustus was buzzing around the capital.1 In the cut-throat commercial world of Elizabethan theatre, the play was an immediate success. The audience loved it, the money-men were happy. Its producer, Philip Henslowe,2 kept meticulous production accounts in a journal. Henslowe’s Diary is a valuable historical source, which records numerous performances of Dr Faustus at the Rose and at the other new playhouses in the capital. The show was still being performed regularly well into the 17th century. Faustus was a hit.

  The Tragical History of Dr Faustus was one of eight-hundred-odd plays produced in London over a period of forty years from 1574 to 1616 (the year of Shakespeare’s death).3 The productivity of the playwrights in the Elizabethan capital was unprecedented. As well as the editions that have survived, there were scores of other plays lost to time, the manuscripts destroyed by dissatisfied authors or burnt in the less discriminating Great Fire of London of 1666. And yet in that maelstrom of theatrical creativity, one desperate, appalling, erotic line immediately gained currency in the popular imagination. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? The question is an expression both of utter bliss and of utter desolation.

  At their inception, the words had simply been just part of another speech penned by Marlowe and then muttered over and over by a lone actor, as he paced up and down the South Bank, desperately trying to remember his lines. The dramas were in repertory, and there was a punishing turnover of scripts. Actors worked six days a week, forty-nine weeks of the year.4 That is a lot of dramatic verse (some brilliant, some dreadful doggerel) to commit to memory.

  Much of what was written was instantly forgettable. But ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ was soon carried across the River Thames to the City of London on the tongues of thousands. It has been estimated that from three to four thousand men and women every afternoon would travel from the north bank of the river to the south bank and back again. They were pleasure-seekers using the services of the wherry-men who plied to and fro across the river carrying passengers to take in the entertainments on ‘Bankside’ – London’s wild side, the suburbs of sin. Wherries wound their way across the Thames and along the London waterways that are now for ever clogged underground – lost rivers such as the River Fleet and the Oldbourne; Elizabeth I herself was rumoured to use these river taxis, in disguise, at night. In one of the largest cities in the West, a city that handled between two thirds and three quarters of the nation’s trade,5 in a newly burgeoning international axis, Helen’s name was back on the great water-ways and back on the streets.

  One has to imagine the context in which Marlowe’s line took hold of the capital. When Faustus was first staged, Elizabethan London was at its most fervent and fetid. Pox and plague stalked the streets. There were human heads on London Bridge and bears being ripped to shreds by mastiffs within sight of the theatres. Prostitutes picked up custom in the playhouses them-selves, others sat a stone’s-throw away in infamous brothels such as the Holland Leaguer.

  Much of the South Bank has been sanitised now, but around one of the few remaining derelict areas, where plastic bags and tin-cans are heaped up on the ghosts of the past, prostitutes still street-walk. In Marlowe’s day it was illegal to tout for custom. Calling out or throwing stones at passers-by was outlawed; so scores of ‘trulls and flurts’ stood waiting, some branded, some with their nipples painted, all desperate to earn a crust through the sale of their bodies. A punter could pick up a strumpette (a woman), an apple-squire (a rent-boy) or a young child whose maidenhead was restored every night. The impresarios of the theatre often had financial interests in the whore-houses.

  Sexually transmitted diseases were endemic. A broadsheet of 1584, A Mirror for Magistrates, tells us ‘forty shillings or better’ would buy ‘a pottle or two of wine, the embracement of a painted strumpet and the French Welcome’. Thefts of personal possessions are much talked about during a session at the ‘stews’ (the local brothels) with ‘Winchester geese’ or ‘Flanders Mares’.6 For the Elizabethan audiences, sex meant danger.

  In one edition of the play, when Helen makes her entrance she is flanked by two cupids – an immediate signal to the audience that the incarnation of the sex goddess Venus/Aphrodite has arrived.7 Marlowe also makes a clever, direct connection between his Helen of the 16th century and another sexually active Helen of the 1st century AD, Simon Magus’ companion, Helene. Just before Helen and Faustus leave to have sex, Helen is exalted in fine poetic terms, reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, one of the texts referred to by Simonians and the Gnostics.

  O, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter, When he appeared to hapless Semele, More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms, And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

  Exeunt

  (V.i.102–8)

  His paramour. Marlowe’s Helen is daimonic, a diabolic spirit. The symbolism of the play goes so far as to suggest she is even the devil in female form, a succubus. If Faustus was leaving the stage to make love to this she-devil Helen, then many would have known that from this point on they were irrevocably condemned. Enjoying Helen was the ultimate delight that brought with it the ultimate, awful punishment: eternal damnation.8

  To catch the natural light at the Rose, or the other theatres on the South Bank, theatrical performances such as Marlowe’s Faustus would normally be held around 2.00 p.m. There was no fixed roof over the new amphitheatres, which were an architectural hybrid of bear-pits and makeshift performance spaces in inn courtyards. Bankside was low-lying and marshy. Given that the Rose accommodated just over 1,600 people and that Dr Faustus was a commercial hit, in high summer, sitting or standing through the tragedy must have been a steamy and pungent experience. Added to the smell of immediate neighbours (for the unlucky, one of London’s ‘Stinkards’ who reeked of garlic and urine) and those outside ‘plucking the rose’ (having a pee) was the distinctive stink of the South Bank: dyers, tanners and starchers all using the river as a free resource.9

  The audience who met Helen in this rank environment at the Rose Theatre would have been mixed. The basic entry rate to London’s new play-houses was one penny and although a few extra coins could buy a cushion or a better seat, theatre of this period was a democratic experience. Archaeological investigation has shown the area close to the stage to be hard-worn and beaten – witness to crowds of Tudor playgoers ‘moshing’ – jostling around, flicking and grabbing the actors.10 The highest percentage of the audience probably consisted of citizens and successful artisans, but along with these and well-to-do traders, there were also journeymen and students, dukes and duchesses, sitting across the way from pimps and prostitutes. It was for this catholic crowd that Helen danced with the devil.

  To appreciate the physical setting in which the Elizabethan Helen made her mark, I visited the site of the Rose Theatre on London’s South Bank during its excavation, and found a suitably Stygian setting.11 The ghost of the stage is now 10 feet or so (3 m) beneath the current street level, submerged (for preservation) in 2 feet (0.6 m) of distilled water. Encased in a 1980s office building, the profile of the stage has been picked out by a scattering of grit and a snaking red light tube. The air is dank and musky – there are replicas of the earthenware pots at the entrance once used by the theatre’s entrepreneurs to re-coup their investment, collecting pennies from lords and ladies, bishops, traders and spies. But the pots rattle no more – this is a site that has been silenced by concrete and by time.

  So it was here on the South Bank, a stirring, sensuous, sordid location, that the most enduring Elizabethan Helen was born. The capital’s trade-mark ‘ja
ngling’ (gossip and chit-chat) gave the oxygen of publicity to its new resident. Tourists noticed that in the roughest inns and the finest dining houses, Londoners were always talking, talking, talking.12 Courtiers were essential to the patronage of the players and play companies, and many of these sponsors and pundits met daily in locations such as the central aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral (known as Paul’s Walk or Duke Humfrey’s Walk) to chat and exchange news. Two of the things they discussed were Marlowe’s new play, and one of its most striking images, ‘Sweet Helena’. Shakespeare and Jonson were among those who eagerly drew on and parodied Marlowe’s line.13 Word of mouth, like spoken poetry and oral history, covers its tracks. But what is certain is that, blasted by the bitter smell of gunpowder and the searing beauty of Marlowe’s lines, the Elizabethan Londoners made Helen an icon in the popular imagination once again.

  Marlowe’s Helen arrived in the Elizabethan capital with a bang. Theatrical producers fed off the punters’ taste for spook and spectacle. We know that in 1595 Philip Henslowe paid seven pounds two shillings for the tricks and trappings that made theatre so exciting to an Elizabethan audience. An early production of Faustus boasted a ‘throne in the hevenes’ and ‘enterludes and music’. Later a dragon-machine was added. And in 1598, Henslowe appropriated from the Admiral’s Men’s properties store, a ‘Hell’s Mouth’ into which Faustus could collapse.14 In 1620, one audience member reported that ‘shagge-hayr’d Devills runne roaring over the Stage with Squibs in their mouthes, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tyring-house and the twelve-penny Hirelings make artificiall Lightening in their Heavens’.15 The special effects employed by the producers of the Tragical History of Dr Faustus were bumptious, brassy and wondrous to the Elizabethan audience. Their infernal nature was particularly appropriate for this play; because Faustus was a diabolic piece of work.