Helen of Troy

by Bettany Hughes

  Faustus had come into the consciousness of the Elizabethans via a volume published in Frankfurt and then translated into English, sometime around 1587, entitled, The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death, of Doctor John Faustus. This was a ‘true’ story of dreadful temptation. Johann Faust did exist; he was a German scholar and conjuror who billed himself as a mid-16th-century disciple and double of Helen’s old friend Simon Magus. As with Simon Magus, much of our evidence for Faust’s life comes from hostile sources and so has to be read carefully. Lutheran reformers used Faust’s story as a case-study of how not to engage with the spiritual world.

  The details of Dr Faust’s life are sketchy. But the Historie left its readers in no doubt that at some point the sorcerer’s soul had indeed been sold to the devil in return for earthly pleasures, including the carnal knowledge of Helen:

  Now, in order that the miserable Faust could indulge in the desires of his flesh at midnight when he awoke, in the twenty-third year that had past, Helen of Greece entered into him …Now when Doctor Faust saw her, she so captured his heart that he began to make love to her and kept her as his mistress: he became so fond of her that he could hardly be a moment without her. In the last year he made her pregnant and she bore him a son …16

  Helen as a captive mistress: it was a mortal delight that would lead Faust to eternal death. Temptation incarnate. We are told that students of the religious reformer Luther discovered evidence, at Faust’s home, of a gruesome end: ‘his brains cleaving to the wall: for the devil had beaten him from one wall against the other, on one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth’, and then moving outside they found ‘lying on the horse dung, most monstrously torn and fearful to behold … his head and all his joints were dashed in pieces’.

  Inspired by this ghastly story, Marlowe set to penning his work for the London stage.

  In Marlowe’s play Faustus is a man who cannot not sin – he is predestined for damnation. And one of the most significant staging posts on his journey into hell is his sexual relationship with the lascivious, luciferous spirit of Helen. Marlowe’s Helen is not just an agent of destruction, she is an agent of the devil himself. Popular woodcuts of the time – the Ars Moriendi – show devils dragging a man’s soul out from his mouth as he dies.17 Just so, Helen’s ‘lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies –’ here Faustus is a necromancer and Helen a succubus, a spirit of the dead.

  Helen has always been ambiguous, but there is something different going on here. Whereas classical authors imagined in her a brilliant source of light that permeated into the heavens itself, the light in her that balanced the dark, here Helen’s glow is hemmed in with an oppressive gloom. Helen gleams in the pages of Faustus and on the stage of the Rose Theatre, but it is an aureole of light surrounded by impenetrable, stifling shadow.

  The play met the tastes of the Tudor audience perfectly. Here on stage were the necromancers and occult illusions and witches that they knew to be real. In Europe, trafficking in spirits had recently been made a capital offence and the Lutherans were whipping up witch-hunt fever. In 1586 in Trier after a particularly late spring, ‘a hundred and eighteen women and two men’ had been burnt following their confession that ‘the prolongation of the winter was the work of their incantations’.18 In Britain on the other hand, an increasingly puritanical outlook went so far as to deny that such forces existed – but men and women wanted to believe in the supernatural. There were reports of great confusion and consternation among both the actors and the audience during one performance of Marlowe’s Faustus, when some panicked, believing that there was one too many devils on stage.19

  Just forty years before, all official public performances in England had taken the form of miracle plays and morality plays. These were unofficially sanctioned productions that peddled only ideas which met the approval of the Church. Much of Marlowe was blasphemous, and the impact for a live audience must have been thrilling. Here, for instance, was a man who was being made immortal thanks to the kiss of a whore-queen – not an idea to be found in the tenets of orthodox Christianity. But here too was a play of morals that seemed to reach beyond lessons of good and evil, asking questions about what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to be a man; about what it meant to be human. Two thousand years earlier, on the sun-baked slopes of the Athenian acropolis, the same questions had been asked, and now as then it was the spirit of Helen that was at the heart of the enquiry.20

  Helen posed a problem – she was the perfect classical beauty that the Elizabethan Renaissance, with its love of antiquity, craved,21 and yet her actions represented sin in its purest form as promulgated by the new, increasingly puritanical Church. The culture of the Renaissance keened for Beauty, but the prevailing Protestant mores upheld predestination and the unpardonable nature of sin.

  And because playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dekker and Heywood had (although each to varying degrees) a broad knowledge of classical literature, their fertile minds were being exposed to the visceral, raw horrors of a classical world dominated by fickle and unforgiving gods. The result was a harrowing explosion of creativity. Elizabethan London was reeling under the impact of both a classical Renaissance and a Protestant clamp-down. This was an edgy world, when religious uncertainty kept the waters churning like a neap tide. And in the swell Helen slipped even further from the rank of heroic queen. Now losing yourself in Helen meant spinning into a vortex, where Aphrodite had no roses, only thorns.

  Marlowe lived in stirring times. There are many parallels between 5th-century BC Athens and 16th-century AD London. The Elizabethan capital had the schizophrenic exuberance of an age in political, social and cultural transition. Londoners were beginning to experience foods, stimulants and stories from countries their grandfathers had never even dreamed existed. Live crocodiles were presented at court in 1605 and a camel was touted around the streets. Suddenly Londoners were tasting the unknown and the exotic and it was making the fin-de-siècle capital restless. In the fifty years since 1550, the London population had risen by nearly 70 per cent. The city was booming, it was humming with a cultural energy and Helen’s name was quickly carried along the lines of current.

  But also – as in 5th-century BC Athens – one of the spurs to this vivacity was the spectre of mass and premature death courtesy of the plague.

  Beauty is but a flower,

  Which wrinkles will devour,

  Brightness falls from the air;

  Queens have died young and fair;

  Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

  I am sick, I must die

  Lord have mercy on us!22

  The poet and playwright Nashe describes the dreadful inevitability of death in an infected London. The Elizabethan Helen is indeed besmirched with dust: this is a time when even the immortal queen may succumb to death.23 And although Marlowe’s lyrical line ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ has gathered to itself a wonderfully bright timbre, his inspiration may in fact have been the very dark work of the Greek satirist Lucian.24 Lucian conjured up a vision of Helen’s skull in Hades in one of his Dialogues of the Dead, written around AD 170. A new arrival to Hades, Menippus, is being given a guided tour by Hermes, and stands in front of a pile of bones and skulls:

  HERMES: This skull is Helen.

  MENIPPUS: And for this a thousand ships carried warriors from every part of Greece; Greeks and barbarians were slain, and cities made desolate.

  HERMES: Ah, Menippus, you never saw the living Helen; or you would have said with Homer

  Well might they suffer grievous years of toil

  Who strove for such a prize.

  We look at withered flowers, whose dye is gone from them, and what can we call them but unlovely things? Yet in the hour of their bloom these unlovely things were things of beauty. Menippus: Strange, that the Greeks could not realise what it was for which they laboured; how short-lived, how soon to fade. Hermes: I have no time for moralising. Choose your spot, where you will, and lie down. I must go and
fetch new dead.25

  So, on the stage of the Rose, the face that launched a thousand ships was enjoying a true re-naissance, albeit in a shadow cast by classical antiquity. And whereas even the most hostile ancient sources allow Helen to escape death and ignominy as a star, a spirit in the oceans, or in Elysian fields making love to Achilles, for many Elizabethans Helen has become a symbol of endless death.26

  Tottel asks of Helen in his Songs and Sonettes composed in 1557:

  Did not the worms consume

  Her carrion to the dust?

  Did dreadful death forbear its fume

  For beauty, pride or lust?

  Thomas Proctor rewrites history by killing Helen off in Troy, in his poem ‘Helen’s Complaint’ from the volume The triumph of truth. 27 And yet, still one feels Marlowe’s Helen is attractive not repulsive; the playwright’s saturated lines drip with a personal yearning. Marlowe had risen from a family of poor shoe-makers thanks to an education that introduced him to the characters who created and inhabited the classical texts he avidly read. Men like Homer and women like Helen, these were his heroes and his heroines, his path to enlightenment.

  Marlowe’s Helen was a Zeitgeist. She was dark, distinctive and transitory enough to become legendary once again. And the face that launched a thousand ships was particularly vivid for the very reason that she could get away without an actual appearance – Faust’s Helen is a wraith, an appearance in spirit only. Rather than some callow boy dressed up as a woman trying to play the most beautiful woman in the world, the Elizabethan image of Sweet Helena could blossom in the minds of London’s theatre-goers.

  The stage directions of Dr Faustus distil, perfectly, one of the enduring and fundamental problems with Helen. Marlowe’s Helen ‘passeth over the stage’ but never speaks. Is she real or is she a ghost? Is she an eidolon or an icon, a creation of the act of sex or of the sexual imagination? Is she Simon Magus’ Ennoia, the sacred feminine, trapped in different bodies down the centuries, or one hapless woman with feet of clay, a real, tired matron who inspired many millennia of fantasies? How do you transmit the idea of Helen, how do you become her?

  Theatre directors have dealt with the problem in a variety of ways. In 1950, Orson Welles put Eartha Kitt on stage as Helen, accompanied by the music of Duke Ellington. In 1966, as their offstage relationship crumbled, a plump Elizabeth Taylor was Helen to Burton’s Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse. The RSC production of 1968 had Helen naked, whereas in Manchester in 1981, Helen descended from the ceiling in a shower of gold-dust. In John Barton’s 1974–5 staging (with Ian McKellen as Faustus), Sweet Helena was simply a marionette with a blonde wig, a mask and a chiffon nightie.28 In the Young Vic’s sell-out show of 2003 directed by David Lan, Helen was not there at all, it was only the movie-star beauty of Jude Law as Faustus that was allowed on stage.

  Remember Zeuxis and his frustrating quest to find the perfect way to represent the ultimate beauty. Any physical Helen can only disappoint; but a poetic Helen has always the chance to embody absolute perfection. Marlowe’s versification lifts Helen beyond the confines of a Faustian pact, out of the slavering, syphilitic fug of a theatre on Bankside. She is made immortal once again at the very moment she ‘immortalises’ Faustus with a kiss. For many she abides as ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, a beautiful, formless poetic image, which first swirled around the heads of Elizabethan Londoners and which still hangs in the air.

  44

  HELEN’S NEMESIS

  Fame has indeed made great heralding of you, and there is no land that knows not of your beauty; no other among fair women has a name like yours – nowhere in Phrygia, nor from the rising of the sun.

  Paris comparing Helen’s beauty to that of Venus in OVID, Heroides1 (1ST CENTURY AD)

  WHEN ZEUS ADDRESSES APHRODITE in the Iliad he counsels: ‘Fighting is not for you, my child, the works of war. See to the works of marriage, the slow fires of longing.’2 And the goddess of love obliges. On an amphoriskos (a vessel used to contain cosmetics or perfumes) in the Berlin Museum, painted in around 430 BC, Helen sits in Aphrodite’s lap.3 Our heroine looks a slip of a thing, an ingénue, an innocent being drilled in the facts of life. Aphrodite is giving the child-queen her instructions in the ways of love. And just in case this young recruit buckles under the strain, the goddess has brought along reinforcements. Eros is there, hovering, naked at the corner, and tugging at the Trojan prince’s arm, staring intently up at him, is another, urgent young male figure, another son of Aphrodite – Himeros, Desire.

  PARIS: That is just the thing that seems downright incredible to me, that she should be willing to abandon her husband and sail away with a foreigner and a stranger.

  APHRODITE: Be easy on that score; I have two beautiful pages, Desire and Love; these I shall give you to be your guides on the journey. Love will enter wholly into her heart and compel the woman to love you, while Desire will encompass you and make you what he is himself, desirable and charming. I myself shall be there too, and I shall ask the Graces to go with me; and in this way, by united effort, we shall prevail upon her.4

  Helen was put on earth to catalyse desire. And for three millennia she has been hated for it: because in entertaining desire, we recognise our needs and our disappointments. Helen embodies mankind’s drive to covet, yearn, raven for what it does not have.5 Helen is both fantastical and terrible because however often she is enjoyed, she still promises more; no one stops wanting her. Theseus rapes her when she is a child but the heroes of Greece still queue up to win her hand. Paris takes her once again yet none the less thousands are prepared to die just to see her face. She has moved on to her second Trojan prince by the time Menelaus storms Troy, but still the Spartan king wants her back.

  Helen’s guises may change, but not her role. Like a drop of mercury that will always reunite however often it is split, she remains one thing: the incarnation of sexual promise. She is a woman blessed or cursed by that strange alchemical ability to fuse passion of the head and the heart and thus cause the world, despite its best intentions, to fall hopelessly, disastrously in love with her. She is a factotum for our fantasies. This is the secret of Helen’s abiding celebrity, why she has won out over the many sensational women in Greek stories and histories: the other virgins who have been raped, the powerful queens, the seductive sorceresses. Here is a narrative not just of beauty, sex and death, but of eternal longing, a story born out of the first civilisation on the Greek mainland. Civilisation is rest-less, greedy – it always wants more, what it does not have. Longing propels us into uncharted territories, we go willingly and yet come to resent the journeys we have embarked on. Eros, eris; love and strife. Because we know we have to seek her, but because we know the consequences of the quest, Helen makes the world around her ‘bristle with fear’. There is a frisson as she passes.

  Down the ages, different cultures have interpreted Helen in a way that reflects their own preoccupations. We want to categorise her, but we cannot. She is an icon of beauty who flees from view.6 Sometimes she is a victim of fate, sometimes a self-seeking force of evil. For some her beauty alone excuses her anything, for others it is proof that humankind is at its most frail when erotic passion impacts on human affairs. But without exception, all make it clear that once the person and image of Helen are distilled what is left is one irreducible element: a sex-appeal so powerful and so unknowable, that men will simply do anything – however cataclysmic – to possess it and therefore her.

  And on that vase in Berlin we can read the punishment for being so desired. Helen is joined by another female figure who stands close by pointing an accusing finger at the thoughtful queen. She is Nemesis, the spirit of fate and revenge. She stares unwaveringly at Helen, inescapable. Some mythographers tell us that Nemesis – a sea-nymph – was Helen’s mother; they make the connection between beauty and fate umbilical.7 Mention Nemesis today and Greek men will swear and spit, to ward off her evil power. But Helen, the sometime child of Nemesis, has no heed of curses, and after tw
o and a half thousand years of vilification, she is used to them.

  Helen whirls through history, often turning full circle as she does so. She is worshipped by the ancient Greeks as a sex-goddess, and becomes that again in the Gnostic tradition. Works of scholarship claim Helen’s responsibility for a huge range of things from the Aryan ideal, fair-haired, blue-eyed superiority,8 to Easter eggs (fertility symbols), from the Hollywood stereo-type of blonde bombshell to fairies strung up on top of our Christmas trees – a much corrupted version of a tree-spirit.9 Men seize her from the Spartan palace and entrap her in whichever sanctuary or castle or brothel or heaven or hell best befits their age. They are attempting, always unsuccessfully, to frame her beauty, both mentally and physically: creating ever more Helens as they do so.

  For since I crossed this threshold last, as duty bade,

  All unsuspecting, visiting Cythera’s shrine,

  And there was ravished by an adventurer from Troy,

  Much has befallen: far and wide men tell the tale

  And take their pleasure in it. But no tale can please

  One round whose name legend spins its false report.10

  An aside. Just a week after September 11, 2001 I was taken to Heathrow Airport by my local mini-cab company. My destination was North America and, inevitably, we talked about the cause of the recent attacks. My mini-cab driver laid the responsibility for the entire tragedy at Monica Lewinsky’s door. If it had not been for her, he said, the Bush administration would never have got in. In his opinion Bush was only in power (and therefore al Qu’eda was only so active) because a degenerate woman had made Bill Clinton ‘weak around the trousers’. It is an opinion I am sure a number of classical male Greeks would have subscribed to.