What Hugo says in his Preface to Cromwell is that, like Shakespeare, he wanted to run the whole poetic gamut from the high to the low, from the most elevated ideas to the most vulgar, from the most comic to the most serious, without ever leaving the confines of the spoken scene. This is the sort of poetry a man would write if a spirit had endowed him with the soul of Corneille and the head of Molière. ‘Il nous semble que ce vers – là serait bien aussi beau que de la prose’ (Hugo’s emphasis). ‘I have flung classical verse to the black dogs of prose!’ he writes in a wonderfully combatant manifesto poem which can be set beside the Preface to Cromwell as a central French Romantic text. Both Preface and poem bristle with Hugo’s phenomenal energy:
Je fis souffler un vent révolutionnaire,
Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire.
Plus de mot sénateur! plus de mot roturier!
Je fis un tempête au fond de l’encrier,
Et je mêlai, parmi les ombres débordées,
Au peuple noir des mots l’essaim blanc des idées …
Je massacrai l’albâtre, et la neige, et l’ivoire;
Je retirai le jais de la prunelle noire,
Et j’osai dire au bras: Sois blanc, tout simplement.
Je violai du vers le cadavre fumant;
J’y fis entrer le chiffre; O terreur! Mithridate
Du siège de Cyzique eut pu citer la date …
J’ai dite aux mots: Soyez république! Soyez
La fourmilière immense, et travaillez! croyez,
Aimez, vivez! – J’ai mis tout en branle, et, morose
J’ai jeté le vers noble aux chiens noirs de la prose.
I caused a revolutionary wind to blow,
I put a red bonnet on the old lexicon.
No more senator words! No more plebeian words!
I revelled in the tempest of ink I had stirred
And blended, among all the shadows spilling out,
Swarms of white ideas with the black words of the crowd …
I massacred ivory, alabaster, and snow;
I said to arms: ‘You’re white, plain white, as children know.’
I removed all the jade from the pupils of the eyes.
I exhumed all the reeking carcasses from lines.
I used numbers. Terror! Mithridates referred
To the date on which the siege of Cyzicus occurred …
I said to all the words: ‘Be democratic, give
And work with others like an anthill. Trust and live
And love!’ – I started things, then mixed others with those:
I threw the noble line to the black dogs of prose.
The old dictionary flaunts the red liberty cap of the revolutionary. (I have one of Jocelyn Herbert’s Fury masks from the Oresteia on my OED!) Arms are simply white, not ‘alabaster’ or ‘ivory’. He will use prosaic calendar dates, as he did when he flung down the gauntlet in the very first line of Cromwell:
Demain, vingt-cinq juin mil six cent cinquante-sept …
Tomorrow, 25 June 1657 …
Words will be republican and work. The distinctions between high and low are abolished. This is not a theatrical sensibility that would shy away from le mouchoir as translation for Desdemona’s handkerchief of Vigny’s Othello, even if the grand actress Mlle Mars would find it utterly objectionable and ask for the genteel circumlocutions of neoclassical verse at its worst – Mlle Mars (1779–1847), past whose somewhat stern and disapproving bust I walk when I go to see anything at the Comédie-Française, or even when I just pass by. Her stare looks through the glass doors of the Comédie-Française whenever I walk from my favourite little hotel, next to the statue of Molière, to any of my favourite brasseries. She was not hospitable to assaults like Hugo’s on ‘le vers noble’, being renowned for rejecting Vigny’s mouchoir from his Le More de Venise (1829). She would have accepted the periphrastic euphemism of ‘fatal tissu’ or ‘lin leger’. Snot rag was still a century away. The handkerchief became the kitchen sink of French Romantic drama. Oscar Wilde, in The Truth of Masks, talks about the French Shakespearean translator Jean François Ducis (1733–1816), who had to adapt the plays so that they conformed to the ‘unities’ of French neoclassical taste. He had great difficulty also with the handkerchief and tried ‘to soften its grossness by having the Moor reiterate “Le bandeau! Le bandeau!”’. And a sack with a king’s body in it? Unthinkable!
In 1829, a production of Hugo’s earlier verse drama Marion de Lorme was planned, with Mlle Mars as Marion. But the Ministry of the Interior refused to authorise its performance, on the grounds of its suspected allusions to Charles X. So Hugo turned from the Comédie-Française to the boulevard theatre. The actress Marie Dorval (1798–1849), unlike Mlle Mars, came from boulevard theatre and was unused to the grand verse style and found the alexandrine uncongenial. She played at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, which was not subsidised by the state and less hassled by censorship. Its staple was melodrama, its audience more mixed than that of the Comédie-Française. One reason for this was that its prices were a good deal cheaper, and the writer who wrote most plays for it was Pixérécourt (1773–1844), ‘the Corneille of Melodrama’, who always claimed that he ‘wrote for those who cannot read’.
A year before Le Roi s’amuse, Hugo had given his Marion de Lorme to this theatre, and Marie Dorval had played the title role. Romantic drama shocked this public less than the elite at the Comédie-Française. What is interesting about this experience for Hugo, who wanted to bring her to the Comédie-Française for Le Roi s’amuse, is that a study of the emendations he made during the rehearsals for Marion de Lorme reveal the influence of the boulevard actress pushing Hugo further along the road of his manifesto aims in the Preface to Cromwell. The manuscript as studied by the scholar M. Descotes shows that the actress was frequently inducing Hugo towards making his verse more broken up, more jagged, in short more prosaic. This is the kind of change that I am also used to making in rehearsals. Hugo clearly valued the experience, as the manuscript contract with the Théâtre Français for Le Roi s’amuse makes clear in the controversial point that it was Hugo himself and not Alfred de Vigny, her lover, who insisted on the engagement of Marie Dorval, ‘sur l’expresse demande de M. Hugo’. Hugo even threatened to take the play elsewhere if she could not be hired. She was unavailable on this occasion. Mlle Mars refused. Marie Dorval wasn’t to appear at the Comédie-Française until 1834, in the role of Kitty Bell in Chatterton, by Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), her lover, with whom she turned up for the première of Le Roi s’amuse. Mlle Mars turned up too, who had refused a role in the play and whose jealousy eventually was to drive Marie Dorval from the Comédie-Française back to the boulevards.
IV
This impulse to bring the energy of natural prose into verse is a constantly renewing strategy, as natural colloquial speech which changes rapidly can leave successive poetic styles marooned, and when poetry reconnects with prose it reanimates itself. Sometimes it means that the inherited form struggles to accommodate itself to the freedom of conversation, and sometimes, as in the case of Ibsen, it means an abandonment of poetic drama entirely. To consider the case of Ibsen is crucial for anyone who wants to write poetry for the theatre. Ibsen, who was a great dramatic poet, did not re-energise his verse by tempering it in douches of prose, but deserted the medium entirely for prose because, as he wrote to Lucie Wolf in 1883:
The stage is for dramatic art alone, and declamation is not dramatic art … Verse has done immense injury to the art of the theatre … It is most unlikely that the verse form will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future; for the dramatic aims of the future will pretty certainly be incompatible with it. It is therefore doomed to extinction. For art forms die out, just as the preposterous animal forms of prehistoric times died out when their day was over … I myself, for the last seven or eight years, have hardly written a single verse, but have cultivated exclusively the incomparably more difficult art of poetic creation in the pl
ain unvarnished speech of reality.
This is a daunting text for the dramatic poet of our day, though I comfort myself by noting he refers to the immediate future. It is also some comfort to know that Ibsen told C. H. Herford, who translated Brand into English, that he would probably write his last play in verse, ‘if only one knew which play would be the last’. When We Dead Awaken was his last, but I can imagine Ibsen not wanting to fulfil his promise to Herford because he would never want to face the fact that anything he was writing could be his last. But his English translator and biographer Michael Meyer wrote that he thought that When We Dead Awaken ‘would have been a much greater play if he had written it in poetry – as he nearly did’.
V
Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse had its first and last performance on 22 November 1832. It was ‘suspended’ by the Ministry of the Interior. Contemporary accounts speak of the tumult in the house following Triboulet’s
vos mères aux laquais se sont prostituées.
Your mothers have been prostitutes to lackeys.
A review which history has dragged out of its timid anonymity, and shown to be by Lucca, described Le Roi s’amuse as one of the ‘most grotesque abortions of French dramatic literature’. A supercilious critic said that the much-vaunted revolution in drama had met its Waterloo:
La révolution dramatique a été battue avant-hier à la Comédie-Française, elle est en pleine déroute: c’est le Waterloo du Romantisme.
It wasn’t played again until 1882, and a witness noted that the respectful silence was a hundred times more cruel than the hostile cries of 1832. The actor Got, who played Triboulet fifty years after Ligier, noted in his journal that there was above all ‘froideur’ and ‘ennui’ in the audience. Edmond Bire: ‘Le grand poète offre au peuple, au mauvais peuple, un tableau jacobin.’ He condemns not only Le Roi s’amuse, but also Lucrèce Borgia as belonging to the ‘prolonged revolution’.
Lucrèce Borgia (1833) was Hugo’s next play after the disappointment of the banned Le Roi s’amuse. He speaks in the Preface of the two plays as a ‘bilogy’ conceived at the same time, but with the important difference that he wrote Lucrèce Borgia in prose for the boulevard theatre, the Porte-Saint-Martin. Graham Robb, in his wonderfully full, engrossing and often funny biography of Hugo, records how the old claque of Romantics, who came as vociferous supporters to both Hernani and Le Roi s’amuse, were horrified to know that the characters of the new play would speak prose and demanded an explanation of Hugo. He convinced them that ‘it was the duty of Romanticism to renovate prose just as it had smashed the old alexandrine mould’. And that in itself, if he had done nothing else, was a great achievement, even for this nineteenth-century giant.
VI
How could I bring the ‘Waterloo of Romanticism’ to Waterloo? As with the Paris of de Gaulle in The Misanthrope, with street unrest and disturbance round the corner in 1968, or with the Indian Mutiny hovering over Phaedra Britannica, I was looking for a way of setting Le Roi s’amuse in a more familiar period that would re-energise the social tensions and clarify the corruption and anti-royal tirades of Triboulet. I wanted to bring it a little nearer home, and came up finally with the mid-1880s, the London of Jack the Ripper, with its answering guignol, and constant rumours of royal scandal round Eddie, the Duke of Clarence. It was the world of that earlier Bloody Sunday of 13 November 1887, when an estimated 20,000 unemployed demonstrated in Trafalgar Square. Sir Charles Warren opposed them with 4,000 constables, plus Life Guards and Grenadier Guards. And it was a time of royal affiliations with actresses, chorus girls and comedians like Dan Leno, known universally as ‘the King’s Jester’. The King’s Jester in my version eventually became a Glaswegian music-hall comic. I didn’t begin to finalise the comic’s speeches, even though they were the ones I was first naturally drawn to, until I knew who we would find to play him. I would always seek to use the natural first accent of the actor, so had not decided whether the comic was a Cockney or a northerner, a Lancashire Ian McKellen or a Geordie, like Alun Armstrong, or, as it finally turned out, a Scot, when Richard Eyre cast Ken Stott. I made him a working-class Glasgow comic who found success in London and was patronised by His Royal Highness. Ken Stott, who proved utterly brilliant in the role, bridging the comedy and tragedy with an ease that would have gladdened the soul of Hugo, became Scotty Scott, with a tartan hump made to look like the bag of a bagpipe bristling with chanters. He became like a bitter version of Harry Lauder, with no chance whatever of being dubbed a knight. The way he has to ingratiate himself on stage and off to the set that hangs around HRH eats like a canker in his soul. On the other hand, the Poet Laureate, whom I made the equivalent of Hugo’s Clement Marot, poet to the court of Francis I, although like Scotty Scott also of humble origin, had totally transformed himself, modelling his accent and behaviour on the gang of witless aristocrats hanging round HRH. He becomes a genteel version of the Jester, writing the romantic chat-up lines for a prince who can’t think them up himself. Verdi and Piave don’t bring the Poet into Rigoletto. But, unbelievably, we still have a Poet Laureate, and a monarchy! It should be pointed out that I created this character out of the Marot of Hugo, and it was some five years before I wrote my poem ‘Laureate’s Block’!
The period we chose to set the play in was also a time when, as now, the Prince of Wales was a great asset to republican propagandists. Ramsay MacDonald, looking back on the period, writes in the journal Democracy for 23 February 1901, ‘the throne seemed to be tottering … the Queen and the Prince of Wales had no hold on the popular mind; there was a spirit of democratic independence abroad; the common man believed in the common man’, but is forced to add: ‘That has gone.’ Even Queen Victoria wrote to the Lord Chancellor when the behaviour of the Prince of Wales was increasing that democratic independence ‘of these days when the higher classes, in their frivolous, selfish and pleasure-seeking lives, do more to increase the spirit of democracy than anything else’. ‘Democracy’ is, of course, a dirty word. It’s no surprise that when the Queen saw Tom Taylor’s adaptation of Hugo’s play The Fool’s Revenge, she was not amused: ‘a dreadful play’, she notes in her journal, ‘adapted from Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse, and the same subject as Rigoletto, only altered. It is a most immoral, improper piece …’
My aim was to bring that immorality and impropriety the unamused monarch saw underneath the play out into the open. In Cromwell Hugo gives Harrison, the fanatic pillager, the following lines:
Il ne reste plus rien des biens de la couronne.
Hampton-Court est vendue au profit du trésor;
On a détruit Woodstock, et démeublé Windsor.
Nothing remains of all the Crown Estates. Hampton Court is sold to profit Cromwell’s treasury; Woodstock is destroyed and Windsor dismantled.
(Victor Hugo, Cromwell, Act I, scene ix)
Egil and Eagle-Bark
* * *
2001
Aischulos’ bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood
Has somehow spoiled my taste for twitterings!
Robert Browning, Aristophanes’ Apology (1875)
I
The date on page one of the first of what became over a dozen thick notebooks devoted to my workings and reworkings of the Oresteia is 8 March 1973, about two weeks after the opening of my Misanthrope at the Old Vic, which was the home of the National Theatre before the new building on the Thames was completed. The trilogy of Aeschylus finally opened in the Olivier Theatre on 28 November 1981, after a false start aborted owing to industrial disputes at the NT in 1979. So the style of it had a long gestation, owing partly to a protracted grappling with the Greek and partly to the Gargantuan birth pang of a newly opened ‘theatre industry’ complex on the South Bank. I have written pieces for all three auditoria of this complex, but most have appeared in my favourite of the three, the Olivier – inspired, said the architect Denys Lasdun, by the ancient Greek theatre of Epidaurus, where to my great gratification the National Theatre’s Oresteia became, in 1982, the fir
st foreign production ever to be presented in its two-thousand-year-old space. One of the things that attracted me to the Olivier space was that it was inhospitable to the clichés of naturalistic drama that have become the norm on TV and in most theatrically anaemic modern drama. It seemed a space ready for poetry, a verse drama that was public and presentational and owed nothing to that of T. S. Eliot, who, perhaps apart from Murder in the Cathedral, forced verse theatre into anorexia in order to squeeze it into the proscenium drawing room, and made it so discreet and well bred in its metrical gentility you wondered why it bothered to go public at all. The kind of theatre I was most exposed to as a child, the last days of music hall and pantomime, introduced me to verse in the theatre in both the comic monologue and the panto, in rhymed couplets which, though often crude, clumsy and gauche, had a vernacular energy to crackle across the footlights and engage an audience. The language and the style of playing, the butch male ‘dame’, the glamorous leggy girl ‘principal boy’, have always been in my mind as something which could, given a serious context, suggest clues for a kind of theatricality I was looking for as a poet, and which made me use the languages I’d learned and the earlier poet/dramatists to clear a space for a new verse drama.
Once I had agreed to work with Peter Hall on the Oresteia, I had a vivid dream – unusual because I dream very rarely. I’ve always supposed it’s because I spend most of the waking hours of my days dreaming. But on this occasion I dreamed that there was in my hallway in Newcastle a large, rather ornately bound visitors’ book, but its engraved cover read ‘Oresteia’, or, to be precise, ‘ΟΡΕΣΤΕΙΑ’, as it was embossed in Greek script. I think it was meant as a kind of audition roster for the chorus of Aeschylus’ trilogy. In my garden at dawn, or even before dawn, there was assembled a long queue of men, all old men. They all wrote their names in the book and left without a word. Each of them seemed to have no trouble with the Greek script on the cover, and they each ran a finger over the gilded Greek and then opened the book, ran the same finger down the list of previous signatories and then signed themselves, then closed it again for the man behind to read and trail his finger on the ancient Greek. Strangely, though it was a repeated action, each signatory brought to the occasion his own definite individual style. When the last one had left, I picked up the book and read the names. They were all the names of the comedians I had seen in panto as the dame or as a solo act, at the Leeds Empire or Grand Theatre: Norman Evans, Frank Randall, Nat Jackley, Robb Wilton, Arthur Lucan (‘Old Mother Riley’, but for some reason without Kitty), Jewell and Warriss, etc…. the list went on for pages. The kind of theatricality that they had, though still defiantly alive in the last days of vaudeville, had more or less disappeared from so-called ‘serious’ theatre, and I carried their presences with me as a sometimes grinning and gurning, but always supportive, chorus, paradoxically, into the quest for an Aeschylean gravitas. One of the essential secrets of that theatricality, still preserved in the popular forms, is that the audience is there to be addressed, entertained, moved, accosted, not to be eavesdroppers on some private happening. This simple fact is behind almost all the pieces I created for the Olivier, but perhaps most obviously in The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990) and Square Rounds (1992), both of which I also directed, in order to allow the old men who signed my Oresteia visitors’ book to be there at every stage of the productions. In the unashamed coupling of ‘high’ and ‘low’ the theatrical poet finds his most persuasive voice.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 26