Victory’s signalled by firing rounds to Heaven
and for the god to whom their victory’s owed.
We see some victors cycling down the road
on bikes that they’re too big for. They feel so tall
as victors, all conveyances seem small,
but one, whose knees keep bumping on his chin,
rides a kid’s cycle, with a mandolin,
also childish size, strapped to the saddle,
jogging against him as he tries to pedal.
His machine gun and the mandolin impede
his furious pedalling, and slow down the speed
appropriate to victors, huge-limbed and big-booted,
and he’s defeated by the small bike that he’s looted.
The luckiest looters come down dragging cattle,
two and three apiece they’ve won in battle.
A goat whose udder seems about to burst
squirts her milk to quench a victor’s thirst
which others quench with a shared beer, as a cow,
who’s no idea she’s a Muslim’s now,
sprays a triumphal arch of piss across
the path of her new happy Bosnian boss.
Another struggles with stuffed rucksack, gun, and bike,
small and red, he knows his kid will like,
and he hands me his Kalashnikov to hold
to free his hands. Rain makes it wet and cold.
When he’s balanced his booty, he makes off,
for a moment forgetting his Kalashnikov,
which he slings with all his looted load
on to his shoulder, and trudges down the road
where a solitary reaper passes by,
scythe on his shoulder, wanting fields to dry,
hoping, listening to the thunder, that the day
will brighten up enough to cut his hay.
And tonight some small boy will be glad
he’s got the present of a bike from soldier dad,
who braved the Serb artillery and fire
to bring back a scuffed red bike with one flat tyre.
And among the thousands fleeing north, another
with all his gladness gutted, with his mother,
knowing the nightmare they are cycling in,
will miss the music of his mandolin.
The Fanatic Pillager
* * *
2001
Harrison, fanatique pillard.
Victor Hugo, Preface to Cromwell (1827)
I
Rigoletto was the first grand opera I ever saw, when I’d hitch-hiked to Paris in my teens and queued for the gods at the Paris Opéra, the Palais Garnier, topped by a gilt Apollo brandishing his lyre like a winning team captain in the FA Cup. Somewhere on that day the seeds of both The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and The Prince’s Play were sown without my knowing it. I’ve never forgotten the experience, though I have seen countless productions since. The impression that the final scene made was profound. The storm, the stabbing of Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda, the jester exulting over the sack he thinks contains the Duke of Mantua:
Quest’ e un buffone, ed un potente e questo!
Ei sta sotto i miei piedi! E desso! oh gioia!
Here is a buffoon, and a powerful buffoon!
And standing under my foot! It is him! Oh joy!
The lightning flash, the thunder machine that Verdi specifies in the score, affected me more than any theatre I’d seen since the comedians, magicians, verse pantomimes and 1940s and ’50s variety in Leeds which first made me love and want to create theatre. The success of Verdi’s opera (1851) eclipsed Hugo’s play (which was banned after only one performance in 1832), and is often used to belittle the original drama by critics like George Steiner, for example, who wrote that ‘Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse is an insufferable piece of guignol; as Rigoletto, it is enthralling’. It seems to me enthralling before it was ever set to music. Verdi had better dramatic instincts and thought Le Roi s’amuse ‘perhaps the greatest drama of modern times’, and Triboulet ‘a creation worthy of Shakespeare’ and, in another letter, ‘a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history’ (23 April 1850). He writes to his librettist Piave of his flash of inspiration:
Oh, Le Roi s’amuse is the greatest subject and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times. Triboulet is a creation worthy of Shakespeare … I was going over several subjects again when Le Roi s’amuse came into my mind like a flash of lightning, an inspiration … Yes, by God, that would be a winner.
(8 May 1850)
When, years later, I read Hugo’s play from a copy I’d come across on the stalls of a bouquiniste on the Seine, it had the same effect on me, but instead of being created by the music, it was induced by the unadorned verse of Hugo, who, for the same scene, where Verdi draws on the resources of a huge orchestra, and a distillation of Triboulet’s speech, has a much longer magnificent tirade in his own brand of the alexandrine. It was the Hugo version of the alexandrine I’d always wanted to explore since my earlier immersion in those of the comic Molière and the tragic Racine for the Old Vic, using the same metre for different ends, and in need of radical renewal by the Romantics. The cumulative venom of the verse is redistributed in the opera to horns and strings, with the baritone Rigoletto left with only a simplified Italian couplet or two from Triboulet’s French tirade. The unaccompanied verse works by the venomous accretions of crowing vengeance. The Jester drags the sack in which he believes he has the dead King down to the Seine:
TRIBOULET
Il est là! – Mort! Pourtant je voudrais bien le voir.
Here, according to Hugo’s stage directions, Triboulet touches the sack:
C’est égal, c’est bien lui – Je le sens sous ce voile
Voici ses éperons qui traversent la toile. –
Now Triboulet puts a triumphant foot on the sack.
Maintenant, monde, regarde-moi.
Ceci, c’est un bouffon, et ceci, c’est un roi! –
Et quel roi! Le premier de tous! Le roi suprême!
Le voilà sous mes pieds, je le tiens. C’est lui-même.
La Seine pour sépulcre, et ce sac pour linceul.
Qui donc a fait cela?
(Croisant les bras.)
Hé bien! oui, c’est moi seul. –
Hugo makes the alexandrine perfectly conversational, stopping and starting to accommodate action, and then comes up with a beautifully balanced line like:
La Seine pour sépulcre, et ce sac pour linceul
and at once completes the couplet with prosaic address.
His plays represent a total reworking of the neoclassical alexandrine. It was this speech that I went to when I wanted to persuade Richard Eyre that it should be done at the National Theatre. I offered him the choice of two plays by Victor Hugo: Le Roi s’amuse or Torquemada, another powerful play on the dangers of ideology, with the Inquisitor swearing he’ll burn everyone to save them from Hell, lighting bonfires from here to the stars. Both plays are well worth the resources of the National Theatre. Richard Eyre went for Le Roi s’amuse probably because I already had an idea for a London setting for the play.
II
The Comédie-Française actor Ligier, who was to play Triboulet, wept through the whole of Act V, which contains the speech I quoted from above, when Hugo read Le Roi s’amuse to the company. Hugo records what Ligier said to him afterwards: ‘Ligier me disait hier à la répétition que je reconstruisais le théâtre français.’ What sort of reconstruction of French theatre was it exactly? How did Hugo and the Romantics throw off the restraints of neoclassical verse drama? Central to the endeavour was the example of Shakespeare, who combined high and low, sublime and grotesque, poetic and prosaic. Shakespeare’s example stultified subsequent English drama but helped to reanimate both the German and French stages. In some ways the ghost of Shakespeare prevented English Romantic poets being quite as radical as Hugo, who was inspired b
y his dramaturgy but was not obliged to imitate his language. The English failure to do this is mocked by Coleridge:
As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate ‘I wish you a good morning, sir! Thank you, sir, and I wish you the same,’ into blank verse heroics:
‘To you a morning good, good sir! I wish.
You, sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.’
As Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges in 1885: ‘The example of Shakespeare … has done ever so much harm by his very genius, for poets reproduce the diction which in him was modern and in them is obsolete.’
It was a great loss to English theatre when the great, all-accommodating flexible blank verse of Shakespeare lost its theatrical energy and poetry adopted neoclassical ‘rules’. What Thomas Nashe could call the ‘drumming decasillabon’ in 1589 would become in the hands of Shakespeare and the Jacobeans one of the most flexible and varied metres in any language and richer than almost any other dramatic medium. That it encompassed a greater scale of language than anything else also depends on the heterogeneous audience, and audiences became more restricted after the age of the Globe. The blank verse eventually became the style parodied above by Coleridge, and we can see the process in its earlier stages in the work of Sir John Denham as early as 1642, with his play The Sophy, which shows, according to the Rev. Gilfillan, ‘here and there an appreciation of Shakespeare – shown in generous though hopeless rivalry of his manner’. The year 1642 saw not only the closing of the theatres, but also the publication of Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, with the beginning of the monotonously regular couplet, losing the blank verse of the drama, where dramatic situations create the variety of invention in the verse, scansion being as much a question of dramatic character as metronome. Half a century later, John Dennis is regretting what has been lost and what he calls ‘the Harmony of Blank Verse’, whose
Diversity distinguishes it from Heroick Harmony, and bringing it nearer to common Use, makes it more proper to gain Attention, and more fit for Action and Dialogue. Such Verses we make when we are writing prose; we make such Verse in common Conversation.
It was dramatic sensitivity that gave immense variety to what could be monotonous dramatic blank verse.
Verse always needs to return itself to ‘prose and common conversation’. Returning verse to the realities of prose is also to acknowledge the truth of dramatic situations. When they drift apart, we tend to have our culture falling into the mutually exclusive categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’. Verse and prose. Sublime and grotesque. As the constantly perceptive Granville Barker says, the lines of Shakespeare and the Jacobeans ‘are to be scanned – and can only be scanned – dramatically and characteristically’. Perhaps it is even better expressed by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria: ‘Every passion has its proper pulse, so it will likewise have its characteristic modes of expression.’
I remember having a conversation about this with Richard Eyre, who was to direct The Prince’s Play, during a rehearsal of The Changeling, which he was directing at the National Theatre. He had invited me to talk to the actors about verse, as it is a sad truth that even experienced actors often have little familiarity with verse – even Shakespeare – as their careers (and mortgages) are dependent on the intimate techniques of TV and film. To illustrate the truth of Granville Barker’s observation, we could look at examples from the play they were rehearsing:
ALSEMERO
Even now I observ’d
The temple’s vane turn full in my face,
I know ’tis against me.
JASPERINO
Against you?
The servant completes the five-stress line with an utter disbelief prosodically expressed in the three equally stressed syllables: ‘Against you?’ His surprise and mocking disbelief are part of the metre. His bunched stresses question his master’s sanity. There is something similarly simple at the end of the play, when De Flores is confronted:
TOMAZO
Ha! my brother’s murderer?
DE FLORES
Yes, and her honour’s prize
Was my reward; I thank life for nothing
But that pleasure; it was so sweet to me
That I have drunk up all, left none behind
For any man to pledge me.
The defiant sexual relish of De Flores before Alsemero, the husband of Beatrice Joanna, and Vermandero is metrically flourished in ‘was so sweet …’. It’s a similar dramatic stress to what we find in Wyatt’s line from his sonnet ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’, so misunderstood by his editor, Tottel:
It was no dream; I lay broad waking.
Tottel, who edited the poem, didn’t understand the dramatic stress of ‘I lay broad waking’ and printed the line as:
It was no dream, for I lay broad awaking.
Almost all critics and academics who review poetry or the theatre are afflicted with a bad case of Tottel’s ear. In one of the very few good scholarly books on theatre poetry, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama, Coburn Freer condemns most of his colleagues when he says:
As far as the bulk of published criticism on English Renaissance drama is concerned, including criticism of Shakespeare, the plays might as well have been written in prose … when the verse is noted at all, it is made to sound like a background Muzak.
What the rare perceptive critic could see in Jacobean verse could also be applied to Molière:
The opinion, still often encountered, that Molière wrote ‘carelessly’ or ‘awkwardly’ usually overlooks the fact that he was a dramatic poet, and that alexandrines that are criticised for their ungainly style may, in their dramatic context, be the apt expression of a character’s evasiveness, embarrassment, anger or pedantic self-importance, as the case may be.
We can see in The Misanthrope the headlong angry impetus of Alceste and that of the mollifying Philinte trying to apply the brake, and the insinuation of Arsinoe. The variations on the basically similar metrical base both distinguish the characters by a bespoke tempo and also bind them in a united fate emblemised by the shared metrical code. No one understood this fact better than Victor Hugo himself, and as he himself puts it in the great gauntlet-throwing preface to Cromwell (1827): ‘Molière est dramatique.’
III
So while the influence of Shakespeare stifled English theatre, because it came removed from its English, it vivified German and French theatre in different ways. In Germany, the example of Shakespeare, whom they also adapted for Weimar, helped Goethe and Schiller to create a new German drama. Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) ‘used … for the first time since Shakespeare … a dramatic language which ranged from the coarse expressions of the soldiers’ camp to the heights of poetic rhetoric’. A contemporary review termed the work ‘the most beautiful, the most captivating monstrosity’. It was monstrous, of course, because it shattered every rule of French classical dramaturgy. It was in fact ‘Shakespearean’, and to those who cleaved to the ideals of neoclassical French, that was repellent. Frederick the Great of Prussia was one such, and even in 1780 called it ‘une imitation détestable de ces mauvaises pièces anglaises’.
Significantly, this early stage work of Goethe was written in prose which could pass from high to low with greater facility than the neoclassical verse derived from Corneille, Racine and Voltaire. The increasingly classicising world of Weimar found itself less able to accommodate the Shakespeare who encompassed both low and high. Goethe’s later practice was to convert a first prose version into blank verse, creating blank verse derived from Shakespeare by the rules of French neoclassical drama. As Michael Hamburger observes, ‘At their most Shakespearean, Goethe and Schiller wrote their plays in prose.’ As Goethe and Schiller became more self-consciously ‘classical’, they tried to omit from Shakespeare those aspects – the low characters and language – which were the very things that inspired the French Romantics to throw off the restraints of Racine. Both Goethe and Schiller adapted Shakespeare more to the taste of
Weimar. The porter in Macbeth was an obvious casualty in Schiller’s version. So was Mercutio in Goethe’s Romeo and Juliet. By 1815, Goethe had come to the opinion that Shakespeare was better read than performed.
The French had their own neoclassical verse drama, with its Aristotelian unities of time and place and rarefied language and in the regular alexandrine, which a renewed acquaintance with Shakespeare helped to overthrow. Shakespeare was rediscovered by the French Romantics during the visit to Paris of Charles Kemble’s company in 1827, with Harriet Smithson (1800–54), who played Ophelia and Juliet and later married Hector Berlioz in 1833, a member of the appreciative audience, which also included Gautier, Dumas père, Delacroix and Victor Hugo, for whom Shakespeare became the inspiration to overthrow the restrictions of neoclassical drama in France, with its unities and its diction that excluded everything prosaic. For Hugo Shakespeare was ‘the deity of the theatre, in whom the three characteristic geniuses of our own stage, Corneille, Molière, and Beaumarchais, seem united, three persons in one’ (Preface to Cromwell).
Hugo was not, like Goethe and Schiller, anxious to delete or devulgarise the porter in Macbeth or exclude the Fool from Lear. Far from it! In his groundbreaking but rarely performed Cromwell, Hugo gives the Protector no less than four fools: Trick, Giraff, Gramadoch and Elespuru! It is in the great Preface to this huge play that Hugo sets out his credo for the theatre of his time. Again we find verse being renewed by plunging it into the constant flow of conversational prose, the language of real situations.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 25