Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
This page intentionally left blank
FOOLS AND JESTERS IN LITERATURE, ART, AND HISTORY A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook
Edited by Vicki K. Janik
Emmanuel S. Nelson, Advisory Editor
GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fools and jesters in literature, art, and history / a biobibliographical sourcebook / edited by Vicki K. Janik. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-29785-1 (alk. paper) 1. Comedians—Biography. 2. Comedians—Bibliography. 3. Drama— Bio-bibliography. 4. Comedy—Bio-bibliography. 5. Fools and jesters—Bibliography. 6. Fools and jesters in literature. I. Janik, Vicki K. PN1583.F66 1998 792.7'028'0922—dc21 [B] 97-33144 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1998 by Vicki K. Janik All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-33144 ISBN: 0-313-29785-1 First published in 1998 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Del
This page intentionally left blank
Contents Preface
xiii
Acknowledgments Introduction
xvii 1
FOOLS AND JESTERS IN LITERATURE, ART, AND HISTORY Woody Allen: The Clown as Tragic Hero Douglas Erode The Anthropology of Fools C. Todd White Robert Armin 41 Dana E. Aspinall Archy Armstrong Edmund Miller
50
The Badin 55 Yvonne LeBlanc Lucille Ball 62 Bruce Henderson Jean-Louis Barrault Barry John Capella
71
33
25
viii
Contents Beckett's Postmodern Clowns: Vladimir (Didi), Estragon (Gogo), Pozzo, and Lucky 79 Donald Ferret Jack Benny Janice Keller
85
Birbal 91 Karen Treanor The Bishop of Fools Simonette Cochis
97
George Burns and Gracie Allen: The Jewish Vaudeville Tradition 106 Marcia B. Littenberg The Camp 113 C Todd White Canio-Pagliacco and Petrouchka: Two Contrasting Images of Pierrot 120 William D. West Charlie Chaplin Daniel Green
127
The American Circus Clown Del Ivan Janik Commedia dell'Arte Angelica Forti-Lewis
136
146
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles Ellen Rosenberg The Drag Queen 169 Carl Bryan Holmberg Sir John Falstaff Alan Lutkus
176
Feste 185 Neil Novelli W. C. Fields 194 Carl Bryan Holmberg Folly in the Enduring Tradition Charles M. Kovich
198
755
ix
Contents The Fop: "Apes and Echoes of Men": Gentlemanly Ideals and the Restoration 207 Moira E. Casey Gimpel 275 Alice R. Kaminsky Joseph Grimaldi 220 Nancy J. D. Hazelton Forrest Gump: Innocent Fool James M. O'Brien
226
Hamlet 231 Malcolm A. Nelson Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus: Jesters to the Gods Margery L. Brown The Heyoka of the Sioux Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson
246
Clowns of the Hopi 250 Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson Elizabeth Quay Sullivan Buster Keaton Alan Lutkus
254
265
William Kemp 273 James P. Bednarz Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Yin and Yang Douglas Brode Lear's Fool Alan Hager
289
Loki, the Norse Fool Carl Bryan Holmberg The Marx Brothers Vicki K Janik Merry Report Vicki K Janik Paul the Apostle Mary A. Maleski
295 298
308 316
Penasar of Bali: Sacred Clowns Ron Jenkins
329
281
237
Contents
X
Pierrot: Dramatic and Literary Mask John D. Anderson Plautus's Clowns Aaron W. Godfrey
336
343
Puck/Robin Goodfellow Jonathan Gil Harris
351
Punch and Judy 363 F. Scott Regan and Bradford Clark Francois Rabelais William J. Kennedy
370
Martha Raye 376 Bruce Henderson Rigoletto 382 Peter N Chetta Schlemiels and Schlimazels Joel Shatzky The Sleary Circus Anthony Giffone
388
395
Socrates as Fool in Aristophanes and Plato David Luljak
400
Will Sommers 406 Andrew Vogel Ettin The Sottie, the Sots, and the Fols Donald Perret
477
South African Political Clowning: Laughter and Resistance to Apartheid 419 Ron Jenkins Country Squires and Bumpkins Janet S. Wolf The Three Stooges Henry Sikorski
428
438
Taishu Engeki: Subverting the Patterns of Japanese Culture Ron Jenkins The Tarot Fool David Conford
453
445
xi
Contents The Tarot Fool in English and American Novels David Conford Touchstone Alan Lutkus
466
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays David N DeVries The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature David N DeVries Mae West 494 Marlene San Miguel Groner The Yankee Jack Hrkach
500
Zanni 508 James Phillips Selected General Bibliography Index
459
513
527
About the Editor and Contributors
545
485
471
This page intentionally left blank
Preface Fools and jesters have existed as important figures in nearly all the cultures. Sometimes referred to as clowns, they are typological characters who have conventional roles in the arts, especially to engage in nonsense. But fools are also a part of social and religious history; they may be individuals, often deformed, who live particular sorts of prescribed and marginalized lives in most societies; or they may play key roles in the serious or mock rituals that support social and religious beliefs. Because of their pervasive influence on society, religion, and the arts, jesters and fools have inspired a growing body of scholarship. Over the past seventy years, important studies of literary and dramatic fools have been completed by scholars including Olive Busby, Enid Welsford, Leslie Hotson, William Willeford, David Wiles, and Sandra Billington. These works often focus on the fools of an historical period or a particular society. The purpose of this reference book is to present a group of bio-bibliographical, critical essays on a multicultural group of individual fools and fool archetypes of the past 2,500 years from society, from ritual, and from the arts, particularly literature. The importance of the continued study of fools and jesters is undeniable, first, because of their prevalence. Conventional fools appear and have appeared everywhere. We are thus forced to seek reasons for their presence, reasons why humanity apparently requires these bizarre figures, so discemibly different from the norm. We must conclude that these complex, seemingly paradoxical characters fulfill essential roles in society. Second and even more striking than the universal presence of fools is their similarity throughout the world. Fools are a strangely homogeneous fraternity,
xiv
Preface
remarkably consistent over a broad expanse of time and space. Consequently, the study of fools offers unusual opportunities to examine the common features and unexpected variations in a shared convention. Today, literary studies focus on a culturally diverse canon. Studies of the fool help to explore this canon, highlighting persistent themes and perspectives and calling attention to the jester's often underappreciated sophistication. By convention, fools stand simultaneously both within and without the normal patterns of art, ritual, and life. They participate in events, yet they remain isolated observers, evaluating the world as if they care for nothing. With their pranks and parodies, fools question prevailing order, and their objectivity makes them at once comic individuals who are too removed to suffer and ironists who see existence as absurdity. Fools mock social structures, individual righteousness, passionate personal relationships, and the mutating and fragile underpinning of human thought—language itself. Fools, then, operate as antirulers, offering society skeptical, unencumbered viewpoints that scorn pride and challenge such concepts as logic, cause, reward, and solution. It is significant that nearly all cultures instinctively seek such disordering perspectives. Finally, a study of fools informs late-twentieth-century critical study. First, fools are particularly significant to semiotic, poststructuralist criticism because of their focus upon language and communication. Continually functioning as evaluators of language, they point out its inevitable imprecision and the consequent fallibility of human reason. This is a premise of poststructuralist or postSaussurean theory and virtually all other recent theories of language. Second, the fool is important in gender studies. The most significant fool in the Western culture, Erasmus's Stultitia (Folly) in The Praise of Folly, is female; but in most cases the fool is male, with a masculine pronoun referent. (This grammatical convention is followed in most entries in this volume.) However, the dress and behavior of both male and female fools often suggest sexual ambiguity if not androgyny, while fools' individual sexuality is commonly manifested in equivocal, scatological language rather than action. Third, New Historicism gains from studies of the fool. Because the characteristics of fools in the actual world, in ritual, and in art are interrelated, a broad study of fools provides an excellent opportunity to examine the historical and social contexts that inspire artistic creation. This reference book begins with an introduction that offers an overview of the fool figure. Following this are over sixty entries of varying lengths on individual and typological fool figures. The book concludes with a selected general bibliography, an index cross-referencing terms within the essays, and brief biographies of the contributors. In an overview such as this, the subjects of the essays cannot comprise an inclusive list, nor can all cultures be fully represented, because of limited space. Similarly, gender equity cannot be provided since relatively few clowns of the world were or are portrayed by females. The entries are intended to be critical as well as informative. Each begins with a biographical, artistic, religious, or historical background section, followed
Preface
xv
by a description and analysis of the subject. This may include but is not limited to the fool's or clown's appearance, semiotic purpose, gender role, plot or social function, ethical and moral position, physical activity, and relationship to such themes as nature, time, and mortality. The entries conclude with an analysis of critical reception and a selected bibliography.
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments I wish to thank the scholars who have contributed the wide range of entries in this volume. It is the depth of their analyses and the breadth of their combined study that make possible a reference work such as this. Additionally, I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a study grant that allowed me to begin work on this project. I extend my gratitude to the many staff members at the State University of New York at Farmingdale who generously provided the advice, time, and materials necessary for me to complete this project. My thanks also go to Professor Emmanuel Nelson at SUNY Cortland for encouraging this undertaking and submitting it to Greenwood, and to Dr. George Butler, who answered all my questions, often before I asked them. Most of all, I thank my children and stepchildren, Victor, Tyra, Mary, Carolyn, Kathleen, and David, for their support and truly remarkable patience and my husband Del for his help, encouragement, and love.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction Fools, jesters, and clowns entertain and elicit laughter, a pleasant and even restorative function. They respond to and act in the world with surprise, unconventionality, and even absurdity, with their apparent misperceptions, metaperceptions, or nonperceptions that we would dismiss from our own lives. Although they are apparently human, they are identifiably different from other people in appearance and action, oddly out of focus and sometimes startlingly grotesque. Yet fools, jesters, and clowns are nearly universal, appearing in cultures throughout the world and throughout history. Because of their pervasiveness, fools are not mere cultural novelties, infrequent ludic variations on the earnest human theme. They intrude into conventional order, making us laugh at them, at others, at ourselves, and even at the order itself, artfully distracting us for the moment from the questions raised by their presence in the system. They are traditionally identified as either natural fools, ingenuously unable to function normally because of physical, mental, or emotional conditions; or artificial fools, who mimic the limitations of natural fools and consequently have license to mock others in society.1 These two groups of fools exist in society, ritual, and art. In classical, modern European, and Asiatic societies until the last two centuries or so, fools were generally marginal citizens supported by the wealthy, noble, and royal in exchange for their humor, tricks, music, or mere physical and mental grotesqueness. Across the world, fools perform in serious or mock ritual, often as members of religious groups or fool societies (organizations). They temporarily arrest, contrast, or solidify the ongoing earnest reverence for divine order. Finally, artificial fools exist in art. In such genres as
2
Introduction
drama, theater, narrative, poetry, painting, opera, and circus, fools are cast as either secondary or major characters who explode, invert, blur, or establish anew order, balance, and harmony. In order to better understand fools, jesters, and clowns, we will examine categories into which they may be divided and the characteristics and functions they share in the cultures of the world.
CATEGORIZATION OF FOOLS The term "fool" has a broad range of synonyms: clown and harlequin, jester and joker, buffoon, trickster, vice, even devil and demon. But these words do not offer consistent qualitative or quantitative differences that might separate fool types from one another. Etymologies of these terms are similarly overlapping and general.2 The implicit meanings most common in the late twentieth century identify jesters as verbally witty, buffoons as stupid, clowns as common circus figures providing visual foolery, and fools as dupes or fops. Finally, motivation for their actions distinguishes self-serving tricksters as mischievous, vices as malicious, and devils/demons as evil. Yet because the differentiations associated with these terms are hazy and even subjective, we will not use them to delineate types and will use the term "fool" to represent the entire group. Defining foolishness is notoriously difficult, almost an illustration of itself. In Desiderius Erasmus's The Praise of Folly (1509), the narrator Stultitia, or Folly, one of the most famous fools in Western culture, warns against the absurdity of definition. Her entire text is a classically organized oration that she begins with a directive that she will not accept definition or division of herself. Still, various classifications of fools are common. In most studies, fools are divided into two or three groups, based on a variety of criteria. For example, fools are categorized as either tramp or jester, according to the lumpishness or motley patterned chaos of their dress;3 as natural being or artificial performer, according to their physical peculiarities or natural talent for entertaining;4 as evildoer, victim, or accuser in drama, according to their motivation and behavior (Happe 427); as Hebrew tarn or ksl, according to the innocence or willful evil of their folly (Billington 16); and as incipiens or stultus, according to their God-denying pride (in the former) or innocent benignity (in the latter) (Billington 16; Stevens and Paxson 67). With so many criteria for the classification of fools, is Stultitia indeed at least pragmatic in her cynicism over such a division process? Nevertheless, because "fool" includes so broad a range of figures, including dwarves in court, vice figures in drama, circus tramp clowns, ritualized mock priests, and both Jack Benny and Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, a set of categories is essential in order to understand the whole more clearly. Therefore, in the face of Stultitia's warning and perhaps fulfilling the commonplace that the number of fools is infinite, I suggest a classification of fools into four groups. It divides each of the two categories, incipiens and stultus, into two subgroups and is based on the presence or absence of two criteria:
Introduction
3
1. The fool's perception and acknowledgment of his own weaknesses or desires 2. The fool's perception and acknowledgment of the weaknesses or desires of those around him This leads to the following four categories of fools: 1. The wise fool A. perceives and acknowledges his own weaknesses and desires. B. perceives and acknowledges the weaknesses and desires of others. 2. The dupe or victim A. perceives and acknowledges his own desires. B. does not perceive the weaknesses and desires of others. 3. The trickster or evildoer A. does not perceive his own weaknesses. B. perceives and acknowledges weaknesses and desires in others. 4. The innocent or holy fool A. does not perceive his own weaknesses and desires. B. does not perceive the weaknesses and desires of others. An illustration of the four types may be seen in a Marx Brothers film: Groucho is the wise fool who knows his own acquisitiveness as well as the fanciful desires of others; Chico is the trickster breaking rules in order to gain a prize, perhaps a pretty girl, money, or huge piles of food; Harpo is the innocent who does not know how to manipulate the world, but when he acts, the world offers him success anyway. Margaret Dumont is the fourth fool, the naive victim who understands only her own romantic feelings and not the world of avarice and trickery surrounding her. Other fools are similar: Hans Christian Andersen's Emperor vainly desires a handsome suit of new clothes (victim), is tricked by would-be tailors (tricksters), and is exposed as a fool by a child (innocent) along the parade path. The Hopi rain and fertility ritual presents three tricksters: two clowns with false phalluses made of gourds' necks who pretend to copulate in grotesque exaggeration with a female trickster flaunting a false vulva (Babcock 110-111). On the surface their mimickry of this regenerative act might seem self-serving and victimizing, but it is symbiotic; both male and female seek a partner and neither is a dupe as together they perform for the gods. The supreme value of the order of nature is ritualized. Sambo, the African-American fool figure continuously evolving from the seventeenth century through the 1960s, is regularly a victim, no matter how fun-loving a trickster he may seem. 5 In Shakespearean drama, Lear's wise fool accuses the victim Lear of folly. He suggests to the king, who has just given away his kingdom and is now crownless, "You were best take my coxcomb [headpiece of the fool]" (1.4.90).
4
Introduction
In the more brightly lit world of Illyria, Feste the trickster of Twelfth Night ridicules the self-absorption of the fop-victim Malvolio, imprisoned in the dark depths of Olivia's house. Mockingly implying that Malvolio is a sort of lesser devil and noting his own similarity to the medieval dramatic vice character, Feste calls his foolish victim "goodman devil" (4.2.125), singing, I'll be with you again, In a trice, Like to the old Vice, Your need to sustain. (4.2.116-119) We might continue to fit fool figures into the four categories; some might fit like Cinderella's foot into the glass slipper, but others unfortunately would conform like the feet of her stepsisters, too broad to be enclosed in one contained category. Thus we shall offer five caveats to such a boundary-driven paradigm as this. The first four may be stated briefly: Some fools elude any category; some fit into more than one category; categories of fools cannot be rigid; and categories are most beneficial if they are used only as guides to increase insight. Fifth and finally, we must remember that fool figures exist in varied social, ritualized, or artistic constructs that either accept or condemn as evil the disorder brought by fools. For example, in the Books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, fools are described as corrupt beings who possess vanity and vainglory and believe that there is no God. Such fools surround Eve in the late medieval German verse satire Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) by Sebastian Brant; and while Eve herself is condemned as Temptation, the mother of Fools, all are portrayed as vice-ridden variations of Folly. On the other hand, some societies accept similar trickster fools, perhaps because they serve as contrasts to order, they deflate pride, they celebrate the flesh and regeneration, or they are simply inevitable. For over two hundred years there existed in France perhaps grudging acceptance of the performances of fools in mock rituals and carnival that inspired the foolery described in the five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1567) by Francois Rabelais. Analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin in the classic study Rabelais and His World (1965), such fool-dominated events and texts grant and celebrate the presence of the physical, the procreative, and the mysterious in the natural order. Thus while all fools, in their many manifestations, share characteristic differences from other individuals, entertaining or at least fascinating them with their humor or their peculiarities, not all fools share similar social approval or scorn. CHARACTERISTICS Appearance distinguishes fools from the rest of the world. In The Praise of Folly Stultitia admits that like other fools she is easily recognized: "I appear before you in this strange dress" (8). Later she rhetorically asks her audience,
Introduction
5
"Or what need was there to have said so much, as if my very looks were not sufficient to inform you who I am?" (10). Interestingly, fools worldwide have a consistency in their faces, figures, and movement. Faces are painted, masked, or decorated; hair is highly stylized or artificial; headpieces derive from animals; clothes are tattered and coarse or brightly colored and absurd; and items carried in the hand are often metonymous of nature or magic. Fool costumes fall into two categories. First is the lumpish look, perhaps associated with the etymology of the English word "clown" (related to "clod," "clot," and "lump") and manifested in a tramplike, baggy, often ragged, and dirty coat or petticoat (long coat), abused hat, and overly large shoes. These emphasize disproportion, what William Willeford labels "chaos registered by consciousness as a mere, crude fact" (16). Additionally, they make the clown himself seem small by contrast. These costumes are conventionally associated with certain fools in Renaissance Europe. Such a figure is referred to as early as 1470 in the Wakefield cycle play The Creation, in which a devil complains to Lucifer, "Now are we waxen blak as any coyll, / and ugly, tatyrd as a foyll." The fool is ugly and tattered (Stevens and Paxson 48). Busby cites a 1697 German description of the "English clown" with breeches that "could hold two or more" and "shoes that don't much pinch his toes" (84). William Henslowe records the purchase of "a payer of gyents hose," which were trousers or "slops," for Will Kemp (Busby 84), who remains the archetype for such characters as Falstaff, Dogberry, and Bottom. The book A Nest of Ninnies (1607) by Robert Armin presents sketches of several popular fool types. Armin, fool actor in Shakespeare's acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, describes the clothes of (the probably generic) Jack Oates, an "artificiall foole in his old cloaths" (11). This ' 'lumpish look'' is similar to the dress of the earlier figure Merry Report, the first so-called Vice, who appears in the Tudor interlude The Play of the Wether (1533) by John Hey wood. Merry Report alludes to the frieze or coarsely woven coat he wears, typical of vice figures in early sixteenth-century morality plays. The long "Jewish gabardine" Shylock says that he wears may be included in this style. This costume was also worn by some American Sambo figures. These included Caucasian Jim Crow minstrel characters who performed in blackface (often black and red) with broadly painted white lips and "kinky wig, a multicolored set of pants and shirt, a cutaway and top hat" (Boskin 7). Such blackface minstrelsy survived into the 1970s in such local entertainments as the Traverse City, Michigan, Annual Rotary Minstrel Show (Boskin 93). Baggy costumes also are worn by clowns in the twentieth century, including Harpo Marx in his oversized, multipocketed suit and shoes, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, whose baggy pants and oversized shoes are complemented by an undersized coat, and the Emmett Kelly-type tramp clown of the circus (based on the European prototype). Such dress also is worn by Lucy Ricardo, since the "I Love Lucy" plots regularly require that she wear various baggy, dirty, illfitting outfits.
6
Introduction
The second archetypal fool costume is the harlequin-like, brightly colored, tight-fitting suit or body paint and striking combinations of highly decorated, nature-inspired accessories, ' 'the guise that chaos assumes when attention is paid to it" (Willeford 16). The Jemez creation myth tells of a starving people who are rescued by the Sun deity when he selects one of their number, paints him with zebra stripes, decorates his head with eagle feathers and corn husks, and designates him a "funny man" who keeps his fellows alive through laughter (Babcock 112). The Koshare or first clowns of the Acoma Indians perform during a religious ritual wearing only tattered breechclouts, with their bodies painted white and their mouths and eyes encircled in black, bejeweled with corn husks in their hair, fossil wood at their loins, and tortoise shells at their knees (Babcock 109). European fools' costumes bear some resemblance to this. In 1807 Francis Douce described a somewhat loose-fitting variation of this second type of fool costume worn during the Renaissance: [The motley or parti-coloured coat was] attached to the body by a girdle. . . . A hood resembling a monk's cowl, which, at a very early period it was certainly designed to imitate, covered the head entirely,. . . sometimes decorated with asses' ears, or else terminated in the neck and head of a cock. . . . [The fool] also carried in his hand an official scepter or bauble, which was a short stick ornamented at the end with thefigureof a fool's head, or sometimes that of a doll of a puppet. . . . To this instrument there was frequently annexed an inflated skin or bladder. (508-509, quoted in Willeford 22) This costume is like that in Hans Holbein's illustrations for Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. Holbein's fool wears a hood with ass's ears and bells and carries a bauble with the fool's head on its end. References abound to the motley of the fool in descriptions of such figures as the Italian Harlequin, the French Pierrot, and the English Jack Pudding.6 In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII's, Mary's, and Edward VI's famous fool Will Sommers wore a vice's coat, probably more like the later Elizabethan fool coat designed with brightly colored patches than the lumpish, monochromatic tramp's coat. Lear's fool refers to the motley he is wearing, and in 1607 Robert Armin wrote, "I goe in motly" (4). In the twentieth century, the joker in the deck of playing cards wears motley along with a tight-fitting hood and pointed-toe shoes, while the fool in tarot decks wears minimally designed motley and feathers, may carry a baublelike stick, and may be accompanied by one or more animals. A variation seen in film is the motley worn by Chico Marx—a brightly colored, tight-fitting suit and small pointed hat. In fact, the greasepainted whiteface and black mustache and eyebrows of Groucho also draw from this convention. Some twentiethcentury female clown figures fit less obviously into this category. Mae West's untouchable sexual attire and exaggerated makeup demonstrate the unreality of
Introduction
7
motley. West's "motley" gives shape to a superficial eroticism; it is a stencil placed upon nature that is not entirely dependable. Like dress, the body shape of fools is identifiable and different from the norm. Often fools are physically smaller; dwarves served as prized natural fools in many royal courts, where they were required to intermarry and create dwarfed offspring. In fact, the first recorded court fool was a pygmy named Danga who "could dance the God" in the Egyptian court of Pharoah Dadkeri-Assi of the Fifth Dynasty (Welsford 56). Artificial fools were often similarly short. Robert Armin was known for his shortness and was probably the first actor to play the fool in King Lear, a character whom Lear regularly calls "Boy." As Feste, Armin refers to his shortness in one of his lines, ' T am not tall enough to become the function well" (4.2.6). In A Nest of Ninnies, he writes of another fool, the Scot Jemy Camber, who "lookt like a Norfolke dumpling . . . A yard high and a nayle, no more" (16-17). Twentieth-century Sambo figures are short both in the servant characters they portray in film and in commercial illustrations (Boskin 6-7). Buster Keaton, the three comic Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Lou Costello, and Stan Laurel are other twentieth-century Western clowns whose smallness, sometimes emphasized by their tight-fitting or oversized clothes, adds to their foolery. Smallness and other unusual physical characteristics—the big stomach of Falstaff, "Sir John Paunch" (2.2.61), or the lankiness of Jack Oates, described in detail by Armin (7ff.)—exacerbate the fool's overall strange movement and clumsy action. In royal courts the natural fool's physical exoticism was a source of court laughter; consequently, the artificial fool imitated him or developed other repetitive, characteristic movements in order to gain a like response. Armin describes the comical gait of Camber, who, fooled into believing that he could run swiftly, ran "as swifte as a pudding would creepe" (23). He also characterizes the posture of the famous Will Sommers: "Leane he was, hollow eyde, as all report, and stoop he did, too" (41). A similar stooped posture was characteristic of Groucho Marx, who claimed that he adopted the forward-slanting walk when he was playing an old man in vaudeville. Because the audience loved it, he never changed it. Although recent scholarship infers from historic and textual evidence the staging of fool theatrics, the best examples of fool movement remain in modern film and live performance worldwide. For example, in addition to Groucho's walk, the twentieth century is familiar with Mae West's swagger, Charlie Chaplin's loping gait, Lucy Ricardo's bug-eyed stares, Jack Benny's slow circling gaze with fingers drawn to cheek, Ed Norton's (Art Carney's) swimming arms preparing to write or play the piano, and Stan Laurel's head scratching in tearful response to Ollie's scolding. Such funny onedimensional repetitive and exaggerated actions emphasize the unreality of the fool and assure us both of his distance and of the impossibility of his experiencing consequential emotion or pain. Often, however, the apparent clumsiness of the fool masks agility. Buster Keaton performs dangerous stunts, wavering atop a building or clinging to the
8
Introduction
top of a flagpole, but always with the guise of shortsighted awkwardness. Similarly, Hopi Indian clowns intrude upon the sacred ritual of the fertility dance of the kachinas from a rooftop, appearing as if they are frightened and may fall. They slide down a ramp to the ground and continue skillfully interfering with the ritual dance (Towsen 3-4). Similarly, rodeo clowns who distract the bull from the fallen rider often show apparent awkwardness as they entertain and perform their essential, life-saving function. The unpredictable movement of fools, like their strange figures, strengthens their mystery. Appearance and action reflect the overall undefinable and mixed roles of fools. They seem consciously to defy placement within the perceived order of society, ritual, and art. We remember that in the partition of her oration, Erasmus's Folly warned against attempts to define or analyze her further: "But let none of you expect from me that after the mannere of rhetoricians I should go about to define what I am, much less use any division; for I hold it equally unlucky to circumscribe her whose deity is universal, or make the least division in that worship about which everything is so generally agreed" (10). John Heywood's Merry Report makes a similar pronouncement about himself: Some say I am I per se I But what maner I so euer be I I assure your good lordshyp I am I. (104-106) Definition requires the identification of components—division—and fools, like Folly and Merry Report, allow none of that. First, fools refuse identification of their place in time or space. A fool's age is confusing. Often clowns are thought of as children. Like Lear's Fool, Merry Report is referred to as "Boy" by Jupiter. Harpo Marx is likewise associated with the innocent naivete of a child. In Animal Crackers he smiles sheepishly when one of the women tells him, "I like little boys like you. How old are you?" He replies by holding up five fingers. Some fools enhance their childlike roles with falsetto voices. Lucy Ricardo, Gracie Allen, Stan Laurel, Lou Costello, Ed Norton, and Jerry Lewis raise the pitch of their voices, particularly when they must explain their foolish behavior. Other clowns are of indeterminate age. Chaplin's, Keaton's, and Groucho's heavily made-up white faces do not change over the decades. Mae West's mock sexuality is likewise constant and irrelevant to age. Falstaff dies offstage in act 2 of Henry the Fifth as old as he claims to have been in Henry the Fourth, Part I, "some fifty, or by'r Lady, inclining to threescore" (2.4.399^00). Natural fools in past societies perhaps set the precedent for such agelessness, which is directly related to an absence of family and genealogy. Such fools, marginal individuals who had little or no family or heritage and few if any skills in ordinary society, used foolery for survival. In ancient Greece the foolparasites charmed the wealthy into offering them dinner invitations with the promise of entertainment and joking. One step from being beggars, they ex-
Introduction
9
ploited their own pretended or real infirmities for food and money. Welsford describes the existence of such figures in Greek and Roman society. Nearly two thousand years later in the courts of Europe, natural and artificial fools still were supported and often entirely maintained by the wealthy. Many courts, including that of Peter the Great, the early-eighteenth-century czar of Russia, kept great numbers of natural and artificial fools. In order to maintain the size of this group, his court went so far as to arrange marriages and funerals for naturals such as dwarves who were wed in grotesque mock ceremonies (Welsford 184ff.). Thus, like the jokes they told, natural fools seemed spontaneously to generate and to be forever maintained agelessly; where they had been and when they had left were either unanswerable questions or irrelevant ones. Even very famous fools in society lack clear ties to the real world and seem to be at odds with "normal" existence. Will Sommers was born, according to Robert Armin's verse, "in Shropshire, as some say / Was brought to Greenwich on a holy day, / Presented to the king" (166). His heritage is questionable: meager references to family, like that to an "onckle," may be only fictional, having been recorded by Armin from traditional jokes. Armin also writes that while Sommers dined with the king and Cardinal Wolsey or jested with the king alone, he later "laide him downe among the spaniels to sleepe" (46). Such contradictory, atypical experience is representative of the fool. Modern, real-life fools sometimes live similarly unfocused lives. Douglas Brode contends that Woody Allen's persona has penetrated into his private life and is at odds with the private life he tries to live.7 Although Allen's experiences have been more acutely painful, they reflect the confusion surrounding the private lives of Groucho and Chico Marx. The necessary peripheral objectivity and isolation of the fool perhaps make the intimately shared life of marriage and family difficult. Second, fictional fools are on the margin of their worlds. Like naturals, their genealogical and geographical identities waver on the boundary between fantasy and reality. In the Road films Bob Hope acknowledges his dual role as actor and character as he makes asides to the audience through the camera lens. Gracie Allen, master of the misleading, exists as a human being of that name, as Gracie in the plot section of the television show, and also as Gracie who shares a closing monologue with her husband in which she is coaxed into telling stories about her relatives (like those of Will Sommers) whom George does not recognize, who do not appear in the world of the show, and who do not exist in real life. Who is Gracie and where does she exist? She is like Merry Report, who as a member of the audience volunteers to enter the play and then becomes the chief administrative aide to the mythic character Jupiter. Touchstone, too, does not clearly fit into his fictional world, which is itself not easily defined. Henk Gras describes As You Like It as a play of unclear gender attractions (often the lovers seem androgynous) and unclear genre, superimposing satire and romance into a mix that, Gras claims, has a broad and profitable appeal to both literary and general audiences (33-34). As the clown, Touchstone serves as a metaphor for the resulting questionable gender attractions
10
Introduction
and the eclectic genre blend. His impending marriage to Audrey lacks cause and effect. His attraction to her is something less than passionate. He says of his betrothed, "A poor humour of mine, sir, to take that no man else will. Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house, as your pearl in your foul oyster" (5.4.56-59). Serving as a motley contrast to the romance of the heroes' loves, Touchstone disdains other conventions of the romance. When he arrives in the purifying forest, he complains, "When I was at home, I was in a better place" (1.4.12), and, like Jaques, disturbs an unquestioning acceptance of the timeless harmony of Arden. Named "Touchstone," that which serves as a test for genuineness, he reveals the unresolvable paradoxes in the world of Arden and thereby keeps us from believing in its romantic sanctity. Third, fools are difficult to define because they not only point out paradox, but they themselves hold contradicting, vacillating opinions. Folly's mind seems possessed of paradoxes and oppositions. Her praise for herself, Folly, often sounds reasonable and sincere. For example, she points out folly's indispensability to love relationships, asking, "What is it when one kisses his mistress' freckle neck, another the wart on her nose? When a father shall swear his squinteyed child is more lovely than Venus? What is this, I say, but mere folly?" (Erasmus 30). Sometimes, however, her praise of the folly of others is highly ironic. In her assessment of grammarians and their "insipid verses," she disdainfully observes, "They believe presently that Virgil's soul is transmigrated into them!" (85). But inconsistency should be the expectation with Folly; the subtitle of her text is An Oration, offeigned matter, spoken by Folly in her own person. She concludes with her own proverb: "I hate a man that remembers what he hears" (150). This closing statement reminds us that her text is supposed to be speech and not writing; and that is, of course, false, since we realize that we are, at the moment, reading and not listening to her words. Thus the fool continues to arrange contradictions for us to discover but that we cannot reformulate into harmonious truth. These contradictions must remain aporetical, unresolvable paradoxes. Who and where is Folly? Asking the questions only creates greater questions. Fourth, although fools often refuse to discover, let alone join, the order of their surroundings, oftentimes they have unusual powers in these worlds. Willeford extensively describes the fool as primitive and magical (73-98) and as one who is farther from what we arbitrarily call logical reason than is the general population. Today's magicians feign this quality but perhaps would be more correctly called tricksters. They merely give the appearance of exercising an unknown control over nature that does not follow the rules of cause and effect observed by human reason. Fools often possess such powers. This is why two fools, one in a motorcycle and the other in an attached sidecar, never drive away simultaneously. This is why victim fools are repeatedly beaten, shot, or dropped from high places and are never demonstrably injured. This is why a trickster can drive a car after the steering wheel has fallen off. Fools exist on the bound-
Introduction
11
ary of the fantastic and the actual; thus they share some life events with average humans. But their magical powers—unexplainable skills or imperviousness to pain—are more than quantifiably different from what ordinary individuals term "luck." Their magic, phenomena that defy rational explanation, at once places fools closer to nature, demonstrates our own meager grasp of the world, and reminds us of a potential power over the world that we ordinary humans clearly do not possess. Just as fools seem surrounded by magic and primitivism, they seem the center of sexual and alimentary activity. This is yet a fifth area in which they stubbornly refuse to be defined. As much as their talk and mime are bawdy in subject and language, they themselves usually do not seriously engage in romance, love, or marriage. Willeford writes that the fool is on "the periphery of the encounter of man and woman that leads to marriage" (175) and can play the role of bawd, lecher, partner of a fool double, or yearning lover (175). He can revel in sexual imprudence and remain ignorant of decency in behavior and speech. Ceremonial fools engaged in ritualized bawdy activity may intend to please the gods, often serving as allegorical or mimetic images of the essential regenerative, procreative forces of the gods being lobbied by the tribe. In her article on fool rituals, Barbara Babcock includes a description of the Cochiti in which two clowns perform mock coitus against a fully dressed woman's head and back while a third masturbates with a black rug and his hand in a public ritual at which "everybody laughed" (108). She also cites a Hopi tradition explained by a member of the tribe: "This old katchina is impersonating the Corn maiden; therefore we must have intercourse with her so that our corn will increase and our people will live in plenty. If this were evil we would not be doing it" (111). Apparently, mortal imitation of divine intervention is the highest form of flattery, but such imitation can only be performed by the ritual fool, who is intimate with nature and able to reach beyond reason to influence the controlling pattern of existence. Fools focus on bodily functions other than sex. Some clowns have obsessive concern over food and drink. Gogo is regularly hungry throughout Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot but must be satisfied with a carrot. Falstaff's dinner brings a bill for one capon, sauce, anchovies, and over two gallons of sack (2.4.505-510). Touchstone scorns the shepherd's life because "there is not more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach" (3.2.20). Chico and Harpo Marx are motivated in much of their foolery by a desire for food. In A Night at the Opera, at least three key scenes center around their eating: ordering dinner in Groucho's cabin, piling plates high with food at the ship's party, and eating breakfast in a soon-to-be-denuded hotel room. The Sambo figure strays from many of his more high-minded pursuits in favor of watermelon and drink. In book 3 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Panurge runs through his wealth in two weeks "in a thousand gay banquets and convivial entertainments" (304). In the American circus one of Emmett Kelly's most famous and frequently performed acts was walking slowly toward a member of the audience and staring intently,
12
Introduction
but never ceasing to eat from a loaf of bread (in England) or a cabbage (in the United States). Excretion is another concern of fools. Babcock cites several Native American rituals in which the eating of excrement and drinking of urine are central. Rabelais's fool Panurge frequently refers to bodily waste; scatology pervades the text. In book 5 Friar John angrily shouts billingsgate at Panurge, ' 'Is he going to friggle off, or stay here unloading his ripe, poetic dung on us?" Later Panurge threatens him in rhyme, "I shall drench—hey-diddle-diddle!—/Your foul soul with my fair piddle" (835, 838). Much more has been produced, quantitatively, by Gargantua in book 1. When he sightsees in Paris, he speaks to the surging crowd and gives the bishop an "offertory." Rabelais reports, "Then, smiling, he unfastened his noble codpiece and lugging out his great pleasure-rod, he so fiercely bepissed them that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen, exclusive of women and children" (51-52). Bakhtin notes that Rabelais is part of a strong tradition. For example, excrement played an important role in the Feast of Fools. It was used in place of incense during the serious service, and later the clergy rode in dung-filled carts "tossing it at the crowd" (147). Of course, American film could not refer to such topics for many years, but the more recent Forrest Gump, adapted from the novel by Winston Groom, shows its innocent hero drinking far too many soft drinks as a reception given by President Kennedy at the White House. When he tells the president that he must "go pee," the president shows him the way to the bathroom, where Gump finds a framed and signed photograph of Marilyn Monroe—Bakhtin's identification of the excretory with the sexual made manifest. Indeed, the fool emphasizes the necessary digestive, sexual, or scatological acts of all human beings, what Bakhtin lists as "the acts of defecation, copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth" (21), which elicit inevitable feelings of both joy and shame. Bakhtin further identifies the laughter resulting from such bawdy subject matter as "the people's laughter." He explains, "Laughter degrades and materializes. . . . Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time" (21). He describes the fool's subject matter as "grotesque realism . . . always conceiving." Such is a purpose of the so-called scatological and sexual bawdy in the art of Rabelais and in the ritual of the Hopi and Cochiti. The bawdy of fools in society and art creates the necessary tone for flourishing regeneration, whether it involves pleasing the gods sufficiently for them to send optimal weather, or dissolving enough superegos to allow romance, lust, and love to give birth to the next generation. Fools serve as catalysts, almost as linguistic or mimetic petri dishes. Erasmus's Stultitia argues that it is she who is responsible for the survival of humanity, "the getting of children. . . . In fine, that wise man whoever he be, if he intends to have children, must have recourse to me"(13-14). She lists the "foolish discourse and odd gambols [that] pass between a man and his woman . . . the first and chiefest delight[s] of man's life" (28). An explicit example is Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream when he
Introduction
13
drops love powder in the eyes of the many sets of would-be lovers while, like Cupid, he himself remains a nonparticipant. It might be argued that some fools do indeed become romantically involved. But at second glance, what appears to be romance is actually verbalized lust, devotion, or nonsense. For example, Touchstone is betrothed to Audrey by the end of As You Like It. However, while he speaks of lovemaking and marriage, he is not Audrey's lover. He chides her, "Bear your body more seemly, Audrey" (5.4.65-66), and has already begun plotting "a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife" (3.3.77). Similarly, the innocent fool Forrest Gump indeed is devoted to Jenny, but he never desires or seeks lovemaking, and her terminal condition and young son are the obvious reasons for their marriage. Married fool characters like Lucy Ricardo and Gracie Allen use their married state far more often as a springboard for foolery than for passion. The involvement of Jack Benny's persona with sexuality is similarly verbal and thus paradoxical. He has a perpetual "girl," his real-life wife Mary Livingstone, and even shops with her for an engagement ring. Yet he shows no passionate romance, only one-dimensional familiarity. In addition, he is dazed like a child in the presence of beautiful women, much like all the Marx Brothers, who themselves habitually remain transfixed, immobile, yet always uninvolved with the ingenue. As if to prove their disinterest in romantic and sexual liaisons, many fools tend toward androgyny because they do not seem drawn to one gender or the other. Agreeing with Ted Hughes in his 1992 book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Anthony Paul writes that especially in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is not uncommonly seen as a "figure both mythical and deeply androgynous" (167). In Harpo Marx's first scene in A Night at the Opera, he is dressed in the costume of the lead male opera singer, but when he is forced to remove the outfit, he reveals the costume of the female lead beneath. Finally, when these clothes are shed, he is wearing his traditional oversized suit. He shares an implicit androgyny with female impersonators and drag queens, all of whom imply a variation of Merry Report's refrain: First and foremost, "I am I," not a gendered, and thus categorized, being. Androgyny is one more victory in Folly's quest to remain undefined. Therefore, with the fool's nonparticipatory sexuality, insistent bawdiness, and implicit androgyny, he again blurs identification. However, the continuous presence of the lower body in the fool's talk and mime remind us of regeneration and the death-and-life importance of his words. Sixth and finally, the strikingly unusual speech of the fool is, at the very least, quantifiably different from that of the rest of society. It is valuable to examine the speech of fools because it illuminates their confusing roles. In comparison to others, fools use more wordplay, more rhetorical figures, and more Ciceronian topics of invention and forms of argument, reasoning, and disputation. They mock rhetorical conventions and regularly employ puns and bawdy slang. Because of the quantity of wordplay of fools, society continues to assess their
14
Introduction
words, judging them anywhere from joyously enriching to morally destructive. Fools, in turn, evaluate the language and acts of society, and finally and most valuable, the viewer or reader is seduced into doing likewise. The wordplay of clowns simultaneously generates humor and isolation in Waiting for Godot. Didi and Gogo first encounter Lucky as he sags semiconscious from the abuse of Pozzo. Their stichomythic dialogue includes halfrhyme, anaphora (clauses beginning with the same word), alliteration, and other types of repetition (stage directions and speakers' names eliminated): It's the rope. It's the rubbing. It's inevitable. It's the knot. It's the chafing. He's not bad looking. Would you say so? A trifle effeminate. Look at the slobber. It's inevitable. Look at the slaver. Perhaps he's a halfwit. A cretin. Looks like a goiter. It's not certain. He's panting. It's inevitable. (17) With such imperfect devices of repetition describing the injured and suffering Lucky, Didi and Gogo both acknowledge Lucky's pain yet show fool-like noninvolvement because of the artifice of their language. Their figured words distance them from the victim. Clowns not only use but implicitly mock devices of language. In As You Like It Touchstone applies a chain of abridged syllogisms (sorites) to Corin's confession of never having been at court, thus arriving at a conclusion that conflicts outrageously with the convention of the innocence and virtue of shepherds: "Why, if thou never wast at court, thou never saw'st good manners; if thou never saw'st good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation. Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd" (3.2.38^-1). With the abridged syllogism and the literary convention in opposition, does Touchstone suggest that falsehood lurks in one, perhaps both?
Introduction
15
At what appears to be the other end of the spectrum, some fools, particularly innocent fools and victims, are mimes and do not speak at all. Very often there is great power in such figures as they function without the albatross of language. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a silent film in the era of talking motion pictures, represents human speech only through impressionistic sounds from musical instruments or machine recordings. The film suggests that language is as dark an enemy to human happiness as the uncontrollable technology and bureaucracy of modern times. Mythic or ritual fools performing silently are highly effective also. In the Jemez myth it was a silent fool who saved the lives of the first Jemez. As one of the few survivors of the original tribe, he was painted and decorated by the Sun to serve as the "funny man" who kept the others alive, not with funny language but rather by "dancing, cutting capers, and making grimaces" (Babcock 112). The success of such nonverbal communication additionally implies the handicaps of speech—its fuzzy, equivocating pronunciations, its tainting effects, and its partial paralysis, hindering it from ever pointing directly at anything. Such paralysis is classically recorded in Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?" routine, while the Marx Brothers illustrate the overall superiority of action over speech in Horsefeathers. Trickster Chico is the gatekeeper of a speakeasy and will not allow anyone to enter who cannot pronounce the password, "swordfish." Groucho cannot guess it, and after many hints, Chico finally must tell him the word. When the innocent fool Harpo comes to the door, we know that there is no chance that he can speak the magic password. He cannot even talk. But as he approaches the entrance, Harpo pulls from his coat a sword, skewers a fish on the point, and marches through the door. Language loses in competition with the actual (albeit magical) presence of something. That is the most effective communication of all. Harpo's fish is actually a visual pun, and it is therefore a variation of one of the two most typical language devices of the fool. (The second is the often overlapping device of bawdiness.) Punning has been considered a form of rhetorical adornment from classical times; Aristotle praised it, and scholars of the Renaissance considered it to be among "the highly esteemed figures" (Joseph 340, viii). But Jonathan Culler reminds us that to a traditional, ordered society, the pun is "a sin against reason itself. . . in which an 'accidental' or external relationship between signifiers is treated as a conceptual relationship" (91-92) because it links meaning through sound rather than through the ideas behind the sound. Fools use language in this manner. They emphasize the physical—the sound of language—and consequently explode the logic or symbolic representations of reality. Puns and bawdy slang are not, however, easily recognized figures since the euphemisms of other cultures and generations are not necessarily familiar. For example, the exchange between Feste and Maria in Twelfth Night includes both familiar and unfamiliar puns, one of which is bawdy:
16
Introduction Clown: He that is well hang'd in this world needs to fear no colours. Maria: Make that good. Clown: He shall see none to fear. Maria: A good lenten answer. I can tell thee where that saying was born, of "I fear no colours." Clown: Where, good Mistress Mary? Maria: In the wars; and that may you be bold to say in your foolery. Clown: Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents. (1.5.4-14)
In these lines are puns on "colours" (collars for hanging), "talents" (talons), and the still recognizably bawdy "well-hang'd," plus a reference to a "lenten" or weak answer. The pun equivocates. It exists in the physical sound of speech, which moves the primary meaning "down" to a second, more bawdy, earthy, or physical level. This is illustrated in the downward direction in meaning from "colour" to "collar," "talents" to "talons," 8 "hanging" to "well-hang'd," and Lent to "lenten" or weak. But the fool's pervasively earthy language exists in all his language, not merely in his puns. In his study of Rabelais and carnival, Bakhtin identifies bawdy speech, sprinkled with sexual and scatological references, as the language of folk humor. It celebrates what Bakhtin calls "grotesque realism" and focuses on the physically lower parts of the body that allow both excretion and regeneration and are representative of, if not responsible for, both death and rebirth. This sexual-scatological talk is a crucial characteristic of folk culture. The humor of such language, created by the fool, elicits a universal laughter that acknowledges joy in the physical body. Characteristic in carnival festivities, comic verbal compositions, and billingsgate (curses, oaths, and popular blazons), this language is identified by Bakhtin as the familiar speech of the marketplace, which possesses "all-human character, festivity, Utopian meaning, and philosophical depth" (16). Used in carnival, it "became, as it were, so many sparks of the carnival bonfire which renews the world" (17). But seductive as this probawdy argument may be, biblical references to the fool's language are not so accepting. A fool may be any human being who is a great sinner, incipiens, the destructive fool. Particularly in the words of Solomon in the Old Testament and the Apostle Paul in the New, the fool is associated with the worst about language; his talk can be deceptive, disordering, and arrogant. Interestingly, Paul associates himself with the fool, but only ironically; he claims to possess the pride of the fool when he asks for the fool's license to proclaim unquestioningly the truth of Jesus: "I say again, let no man think me a fool; if otherwise, yet as a fool receive me, that I may boast myself a little" (2 Cor. 11:16); and later, "I am become a fool in glorying; ye have compelled me" (2 Cor. 12:11). But much earlier, Solomon had warned of the fool's ignorance: "Go from the presence of a foolish man, when thou perceivest not in
Introduction
17
him the lips of knowledge" (Prov. 14:7). He later posits a reason for this ignorance and a clue to its identification: "A fool's voice is known by a multitude of words" (Eccles. 5:3). He agrees that the words of the fool can only lead to pain: "It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools. / For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity" (Eccles. 7:5-6). The fool is, in fact, antithetical to truth seeking: "A prudent man concealeth knowledge: but the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness" (Prov. 12:23). The fool's overriding sin, however, is pride or vanity: "In the mouth of the foolish is a rod of pride: but the lips of the wise shall preserve them" (Prov. 14:3). Most heinous, David sings that the fool is blasphemous: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Ps. 14:1). This raises the question: are moral judgments to be made on the verbal and mimetic license of fools? In Twelfth Night Olivia says no; she admonishes Malvolio, "There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he can nothing but rail" (1.5.85-86). Bakhtin finds joy and victory in the language of the fool, while others recognize only blasphemous temptations of Satan. Yet we must inquire whether moral condemnation is appropriate concerning the fool's misdirection and dissolution of meaning in language. Does he intentionally trick and hurt people? In order to answer this, we must agree to two assumptions: First, we must accept Aristotle's statement in the Poetics that fools are identifiably ridiculous. They are "an imitation of men worse than the average . . . the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain" (102). Second, we must agree that in order for evil to be effective, it must have, as Hamlet notes, a pleasing shape, not a ridiculous one. When Mephistopheles first appeared, Faustus ordered him to leave: "Change thy shape, Thou art too ugly to attend on me" (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus 1.3.25-26). Based on these two assumptions, then, we may conclude that the fool cannot possess the power to do harm. He is identifiably ridiculous; therefore, he cannot be effectively evil. But although Aristotle suggests that fools belong in the seemingly easier realm of comedy and that they serve as mere masks or emblems of distortion that can incite laughter but not pain, he does not describe the consequences of such laughter. When we laugh at the fool's antics, we are stepping back, thereby giving ourselves more objectivity, which leads to a more skeptical and less acquiescent response to the world. This may lead us to question or even oppose the order of society. Not all societies sanction fool-inspired opposition. In As You Like It Celia disparagingly notes that in the usurper Frederick's totalitarian court, "since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show" (1.3.80-82). Indeed, the society in which fools exist evaluates the morality of their language according to the inclusivity and rigidity of that society's hierarchical system. Ironically, fools evaluate a society's language more harshly. We have noted
18
Introduction
that fools characteristically celebrate the physical existence of humans and their regenerative potential although they themselves are not participants. Instead, they are heavy users of language. As they manipulate logical, reasoned, linguistic structures and speech, they simultaneously imply that their own speech (the language system of their society) is wholly inadequate. Following Solomon, who says that "all the works that are done under the sun;... all is vanity and the vexation of the spirit" (Eccles. 1:14), fools suggest that the language of humankind, one of those vanity-driven works, is only at best an inferior, mercurial metaphor of experience. Yet they must continue to use it. This is something like the conundrum over writing that Jonathan Culler has suggested plagued traditional deconstructionist philosophy. ' 'Philosophical discourse defines itself in opposition to writing and thus in opposition to itself' (89). Philosophy "devalues writing because, at best, it serves as a metaphor for the conditions of truth, knowledge, and language" (90). Writing is "external. . . . The threat posed by writing is that the operations of what should be merely a means of expression might affect or infect the meaning it is supposed to represent" (91). Like philosophers, fools use language, recognizing that all language—writing and speech—gives meaning, affecting and infecting what "it is supposed to represent" (91). Fools discover when words are being used by others to affect or falsify reality, to transform perception. For example, wise fools recognize that a name change does not make a real change. Solomon's statement that "there is no new thing under the sun" (Eccles. 1:9) is similar to an observation made in The Play of the Wether by the vice-fool Merry Report. After Jupiter presents a long speech to his petitioners saying that he has graciously given all members of society the particular types of weather they had wished for, only Merry Report observes, "Now shall ye have the weather even as it was" (1240). "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be" (Eccles. 1:9). On the other hand, wise fools also point out actual change, heretofore unseen by others, often ironically revealing it with wordplay. Lear's Fool identifies the real change wrought by his king in act 1, scene 1. The intended largesse of Lear's command to Cornwall and Albany, "This coronet part betwixt you" (1.1.138), is perceived by his Fool as yielding nothing. He compares it to the two crowns created if he were to crack an eggshell into two parts (1.4.150). In breaking the shell, the center is lost; in breaking the crown, the kingdom is lost. The Fool is not concerned with the divine hierarchy against which Lear has blasphemed; he notes the obvious: there is no longer a single kingdom for any king to rule. In breaking the crown, Lear has no crown, neither one composed of gold nor, apparently, of gray matter. The ridiculous fool most clearly recognizes Aristotle's mask of the Ridiculous worn by others.
Introduction
19
CONCLUSION Folly is not limited to a single set of (undoubtedly lower) individuals. A commonplace of Western culture states that folly is everywhere. But another commonplace is the traditional logocentric system that is based on hierarchical opposition. This means that elements of existence are dichotomized, divided into separate portions—soul and body, light and dark, wisdom and foolishness, masculine and feminine, order and disorder, the king and the fool—and one side naturally rises above the other. But the pervasiveness of folly argues against the oppositional dichotomies of logocentrism, somewhat like the theory made famous by Jacques Derrida that all things contain traces of everything else within them, thus inseparably linking all of existence. The soul and body are therefore entwined, as are light and dark and all the rest. We can look at this concept of linkage among all things in another way. In "The King and the Fool: King Lear as Self-deconstructing Text," R. A. Zimbardo writes of the inseparability of Lear and his Fool, who, she suggests, are linked as one and zero: ' 'He [the fool] is the nothing that adumbrates something, the absence that makes presence visible" (6). In other words, the absence of something implies its presence, and its presence always holds its absence. We can imagine no exceptions to this because by definition no exception could exist within human perception. Thus the potential disorder, chaos, and distortion emblematized by the fool are the necessary ground upon which we can see a design of order and harmony; order implicitly establishes chaos. But such emblematic dichotomies are in flux, and it is the fool who points out this shifting movement, this unending ambivalence. When Lear asks, "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" Lear's Fool answers, "Lear's shadow" (1.4.218-219)—an inevitably ambivalent fool answer. He may be answering the interrogative main clause (Who is it that can tell me?)—"I, your fool shadow, can tell you who you are." Or he may be responding to the noun clause ("who I am?")—"You, the now shrunken former King Lear," or "You, who are now only the outline of Lear." But of course the reason for the ambivalent reply of the king's Fool is the fool-king's even more ambivalent (and foolish) question. The image of the king's weakness is revealed against the ground of the Fool, and society's hierarchy is exploded. The destruction of this logical hierarchical arrangement is much like the disturbance in the masculine-feminine hierarchy that Shoshana Felman identifies in her reading of Balzac's Lafille aux yeux d'or. Culler quotes her observation: "Femininity as real otherness, in Balzac's text, is uncanny in that it is not the opposite of masculinity but that which subverts the very opposition of masculinity and femininity" (174). The voice of the fool subverts oppositions also. Like the feminine voice or the voice of the marketplace described by Bakhtin, it arises from the lower level of a hierarchical opposition, and it is not a voice of opposition but rather a voice subverting the entire hierarchical order. This
20
Introduction
means that unchanging demarcations between wisdom and foolishness, between order and disorder, and between king and fool are lost. The strangely dressed fool is indeed identifiable, but whether he is fop, innocent, trickster, or wise fool, he either recognizes or unconsciously focuses upon the foolishness around him in individuals, groups, rules, and social and ideological arrangements. The illustration in The Praise of Folly by Hans Holbein the Younger of the fool gazing in a handheld mirror at his reflection that mocks him with outstretched tongue has become a commonplace. It has been interpreted in a variety of ways: as an image of self-absorption and vanity, duality, or the unending jest of human existence. It may also be an icon of the fool and humankind staring at one another. Which one is the fool? Some clues: The fool is the one focused on the physical, both his own physical pleasure and the natural world. He is the one who uses language to alter perceptions, and he seems both involved in and alienated from the prevailing social structure, participating but always commenting and evaluating. While he himself rejects clear analysis, he cannot cease to raise questions that end only in aporetic paradox. Does this help to distinguish the fool from the rest of humankind? For the millennia of their existence, fools have served very much as deconstructionist philosophy did in the 1970s and 1980s. Like deconstruction, fools embody a resistance to clear meaning. For example, Derrida develops intentionally such terms as "difference" and "supplementarity" in order to "disturb" our complacent acceptance of meaning in human language. Thus in describing the confusion wrought by language, Derrida offers confusion in language itself. He sculpts language so that it both represents itself and is itself, like the rhetorical figure synecdoche. An analogous figure is the strange and inscrutable fool whose very presence reminds us to question formulaic answers. Such answers arise continuously, inevitably, fulfilling what Plato considered humankind's unique need: the desire to know. The fool, then, a synecdochal figure, both is and represents. He is the primeval condition that churns and rumbles within us all as we seek to know, and he represents the ground that assures us that we do not. NOTES 1. On the types of Fools, see the works by Olive Busby, Enid Welsford, William Willeford, David Wiles, and Sandra Billington. 2. These etymologies are thoroughly examined by Enid Welsford and William Willeford. 3. This dress is excellently presented by Willeford 15ff. 4. Physical peculiarities are analyzed throughout Welsford's text. 5. See Joseph Boskin's Sambo for a complete discussion of this indigenousfigurein American culture. Unlike other fool figures, the Sambo character had very prescribed conventions onstage and within a household limited by his skin color. 6. See the works by Sandra Billington, William Willeford, Leslie Hotson, and Enid Welsford for thorough descriptions of fools' costumes.
Introduction
21
7. See the entry * 'Woody Allen'' in this reference book. 8. Another reference may be to the parable of the talents, in which talents are money to be used.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Poetics. In Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. New York: Random House, 1964. Armin, Robert. Nest of Ninnies. 1608. In Fools and Jesters, ed. John Payne Collier. London: Shakespeare Society, 1842. Babcock, Barbara. "Arrange Me into Disorder: Fragments and Reflections on Ritual Clowning." In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. Busby, Olive. Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama. London: Oxford University Press, 1923. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. 1509. Trans. John Wilson. 1668. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960. Gras, Henk. ' 'Enchanting Metadrama: Shakespeare and the Use of the Boy Actor in As You Like It." In Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. A. J. Hoenselaars. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994. 33-56. Happe, Peter. "Fansy and Foly: The Drama of Fools in Magnyfycence." Comparative Drama 21.4 (Winter 1993-1994): 426-452. Heywood, John. The Play of the Wether. In A Critical Edition of ' 'The Play of the Wether" by John Heywood, ed. Vicki Knudsen Robinson [Janik]. New York: Garland, 1987. Holy Bible. King James Version. New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d. Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare's Motley. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Joseph, Sister Miriam. Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language. New York: Hafner, 1966. Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. New York: Penguin, 1969. Paul, Anthony. "The Poet Laureate's National Poet." In Reclamations of Shakespeare, ed. A. J. Hoenselaars. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994. 159-172. Rabelais, Francois. The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Jacques Le Clercq. New York: Random House, 1944.
22
Introduction
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge. Waltham, MA: Ginn, 1971. . King Lear. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge. Waltham, MA: Ginn, 1971. . Twelfth Night. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge. Waltham, MA: Ginn, 1971. Stevens, Martin, and James Paxson. "The Fool in the Wakefield Plays." Studies in Iconography 13 (1989-1990): 48-79. Towsen, John H. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn, 1976. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969. Zimbardo, R. A. "The King and the Fool: King Lear as Self-deconstructing Text." Criticism 32 (Winter 1990): 1-29.
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
This page intentionally left blank
Woody Allen
The Clown as Tragic Hero (United States: 1935- )
Douglas Brode The child-molestation scandal that all but destroyed Woody Allen's career in the early 1990s appears, at first glance, to have come from nowhere. Before the accusations, there was Allen the writer, director, and star of contemporary comedy, the clown prince as existential philosopher and acute social observer who over three decades had transformed himself from a popular stand-up performer to the artist behind some extraordinarily funny films, even being named the American Ingmar Bergman, as if Lear's Fool had somehow transmogrified into the King himself.
BACKGROUND The modern myth of Woody Allen began on December 1, 1935, when a son, Allen Stewart, was born to Martin and Nettie Cherry Konigsberg of Flatbush, a lower-middle-class section of Brooklyn. As a little boy, Allen barely tolerated his family, preferring to steal off to his room, where he would eat alone, then practice magic tricks and teach himself the clarinet by listening to classic jazz records and jamming along with them. Allen's father worked at many jobs, and his mother was a bookkeeper in a Brooklyn floral shop. They were religious, so young Allen attended Hebrew school for eight years. To his chagrin, Allen's only sibling, a sister, became a teacher. He disdained formal education and claimed of his days at Midwood High, ' T loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and then be left alone." In the meantime, he avoided extracurricular activities that bright students are
26
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
supposed to enjoy, preferring to listen to "Fibber McGee and Molly" on the radio or play stickball on the street. With his thick glasses and slight build, Allen seemed like someone who spent his childhood reading serious books. In fact, he read little but comics; Batman and Donald Duck were his favorites. Allen would not start on the serious stuff until he realized, as a budding adolescent, that he wanted to date intelligent, educated girls; he did not have a chance unless he could converse on their level. But he did demonstrate a talent for writing; in English class his compositions were invariably chosen as models for the other students and read aloud by the teacher. Before graduating with an overall C-minus average, Allen had discovered the Flatbush Theatre, where he saw everything from movies to vaudeville acts. Soon he was bringing a pen to the theater, jotting down the best jokes of stand-up comics on the insides of candy boxes. Following the show, he tried to create comparable gags of his own. One day, on impulse, he mailed such a creation to Earl Wilson, the syndicated newspaper columnist; it ended up in print. Shortly, Allen, having created his nom de plume from his given name and his favorite musical instrument, was a regular contributor to Wilson, and then to Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan. Agent David Alber hired the fifteen-year-old to write gags for such clients as Arthur Murray and Sammy Kaye. By age seventeen, Allen was working at NBC, writing comedy material for Sid Caesar, Carol Channing, and Jack Paar. Regular employment as a gag writer for "The Tonight Show" led to his guest appearances and eventual guesting for Johnny Carson. All the while, Woody was busily flunking himself out of New York University and City College while getting married to, being miserable with, and divorcing schoolteacher Harlene Rosen. Then, like the characters in everything from his first film, What's New, Pussycat? (1965), to the masterpieces Manhattan (1979) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), he abruptly quit his by-now-lucrative job writing for television—a medium he had decided he despised—to take the risk of competing with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, who were decimating the long-held notion of the stand-up comic as some tuxedoed lush who opened in Vegas for Sinatra by relating facile jokes for the semiinebriated audience; the age of the stand-up comic as autobiographical artist was just beginning. Allen was there at, or at least near, the inception. "If you want to tell people the truth," George Bernard Shaw once claimed, "you'd better make them laugh, or they'll kill you." Better to slay them with perceptive humor. Woody had a funny take on all those unfunny things that happened to him, especially with the girls he dated. His 1962 debut at Greenwich Village's minuscule Duplex Club was not a success, owing to Allen's obvious nervousness. Unable to completely overcome his case of the jitters, he turned the problem into a plus; over the next two years, Allen self-consciously made his onstage awkwardness a key part of his performance. "Allen's act," Maurice Yacowar claimed in Loser Take All, "seemed less a public performance than a private confession"(12). The key word here is "seemed," since Allen's talent
Woody Allen
27
was evident in performing a carefully calculated show that gave an illusion of spontaneous, improvised, intimate confession. Calculated also was his appearance. The famous fatigues he wore for years were not simply available clothes he just happened to crawl into without consideration, though that is precisely how they appeared to his audience. Rather, this was a carefully chosen costume, one that identified him as precisely as the tramp outfit had Chaplin. While the two "little guys" are often compared, their approaches to clown comedy were essentially antithetical: Chaplin's running character was a bum who dressed up on the social scale; Allen's was a member of the Gotham high life who dressed down. Swiftly, he moved from New York's Bitter End to Las Vegas's Caesar's Palace, began turning out humorous pieces for Playboy and the New Yorker, and wrote Broadway plays, including Play It Again, Sam and Don't Drink the Water, until at last he could make contributions to the medium he had loved since childhood, the movies. His first film, What's New, Pussycat?, was in its time the most commercially successful comedy ever released in America, thanks to an all-star cast and Charles K. Feldman's superproduction approach. Audiences loved it; reviewers loathed it; Allen agreed with the latter. He retreated from films for several years, other than dubbing his own New York Jewish comic dialogue onto an imported Japanese James Bond imitation, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966). Allen returned to Hollywood only when his new agents, Charles H. Joffe and Jack Rollins, arranged a deal for him to direct, write, and star in Take the Money and Run (1969), a spoof of 1930s crime films. Clearly becoming a film director satisfied his need for control as much as that for aesthetic success. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The movies that followed were initially uneven, though increasingly ambitious. Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), Sleeper (1973), and Love and Death (1975) all belong to the movie-spoof genre, a popular conception in the early 1970s that poked affectionate fun at pre-Easy Rider movies. If the old adage that a joke is an epitaph on an emotion rings true, then these films were epitaphs on collective emotions for the Old Hollywood's gloriously garish daydreams. When this genre began to falter, Allen moved on. Though his films would always deal with old movies, the Woody Allen film evolved into a happy conciliation of opposites, the cinema of ideas combined with the clown tradition, visually, unmistakable Allen. Thus he developed the paradoxical clown character as his persona. That clown, under a succession of names, including Isaac Davis and Danny Rose, was always some variation on a single parodoxical theme: the gull/wise-fool, Jewish neurotic who feels at one with that vast city he adores, always scoffing at the apparent happiness of everyone around him as a cover for his secret
28
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
longing to be as conformist as they. He alternately contemplates suicide and fears death; he struggles for success and scoffs at those who achieve it, including, eventually, himself. He is chauvinistic about his city and his ethnic identity while abhorring the generalized notion of chauvinism. He tries to remain conventionally moral in an amoral universe. He despises, perhaps more than anything else, what Christopher Lasch called "the Culture of Narcissism" while appearing to some critics as a symbol of that very phenomenon: the modern Everyman so intensely concerned with attempting to understand his own self that he loses touch with the greater problems of the world around him. Allen himself emerged as the only equivalent of an Algonquin Round Table member from the fabled 1930s: the modern Manhattan sophisticate who in successive motion pictures—dramatic or comic—vividly captured the sights and sounds of upscale New York's elegant (if now dirty) demimonde that whirls about his clown persona. A major appeal of his later films was an uncanny ability to vividly portray the last remaining strands of a Cole Porter world, shards of a more agreeable era that have somehow survived, if just barely, in an age of hard rock and gangsta rap. But these harsh street sounds always surround and threaten to overwhelm any lovely lyrics. Such music and the Allen films containing them are not unlike delicate antiques in some special little shop nestled not far from a huge commercial mall. That unique vision of the Big Apple, worms and all, was always cinematically shaded, sometimes through black-and-white cinematography or a soundtrack of music by Porter or George Gershwin. Allen's films recalled a more beautiful time and place, an East Coast Camelot, that had slipped through our collective fingers, and made us feel melancholy for the loss. Allen himself had witnessed the passing of that period and now yearned for it or, more correctly, for its idealized, romanticized image. Then came the explosion. No, Allen insisted, he had never molested his son; yes, Allen admitted, he had fallen in love with his estranged wife's adopted Asian daughter, just barely of legal age. Suddenly Allen, the most selfconsciously private and aloof among twentieth-century celebrities, found his name smeared across tabloid headlines. While this would be vexing for any highly acclaimed star, it was particularly devastating for Allen, who once threatened to sue a publishing company if it dared to distribute a highly flattering biography. His reasoning? He was terrified that any unauthorized biography, however accurate and even gushing, violated his control of the public's perception of him. The publisher of that book removed the volume from bookstores, accepting the financial loss rather than a court battle. Similarly, in the late 1970s, Allen sued a well-respected Canadian interviewer for selling a taped interview to a U.S. cable network, rather than airing it solely in Canada. In that context, Allen's sudden loss of control over both his life and his career is even more painful. Not since the garish Fatty Arbuckle incident from the 1920s had a popular clown been so roundly, broadly, universally trashed, but in no way did Arbuckle will his own terrible fate. In contrast, at some level
Woody Allen
29
Woody Allen appears to have yearned for it all along. The man who disparaged his own status as the great intellectual-clown and wanted to be and became a literary tragedian went a step further, falling in real life as he had in reel life. In the past, Allen had squelched even flattering publicity with the furor of someone employing an atomic bomb to swat a housefly, but this time he could do absolutely nothing for damage control. The horror! The horror! And, in a strange way, the relief. After all, nothing relieves the obsessively controlling person so much as the total, absolute loss of control. In a paradoxical way, the scandal provided Allen with the freedom he unknowingly had hankered for during all these years. At last, Allen could relax, never again needing to worry about his carefully cultivated image as a bohemian wit who feigned disinterest in such superficial things as image while secretly caring far more deeply about it than most of us. Now, there was no image—at least, no positive image—left to worry about. He went on to make a string of his most memorable movies: Husbands and Wives (1993), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1994), and Bullets over Broadway (1995), excellent films practically no one would see, not even his now all-butevaporated coterie of diehard supporters. Their emotional response to the artist cannot be denied. They did not care whether he could be legally prosecuted for child molestation, because by choosing to live with a little girl, even if she was barely above the legal age, Allen could never again represent those lucky people, the last of the Cole Porter sophisticates surviving in an Ice Cube world, who actually inhabit Manhattan's upper eighties, nor those millions of others scattered across America who live there in their dreams. The critical rather than commercial success of the latest Allen films was paradoxical because, in the years preceding the scandal, Allen had turned out dreadful movies like September (1988), Another Woman (1988), and Shadows and Fog (1992). The fans dutifully attended during the final prescandal days, perhaps from a responsibility to serious comedy. Allen attempted to yoke elements of Groucho Marx and Federico Fellini into a single sensibility that always seemed strangely, seductively at odds with itself: the caustic Jewish wit who cruelly commented on social foibles to the delight of everyone and the world-renowned filmmaker whose individual works were all but inaccessible to the general public, just as he wanted them. So Allen juggled, juxtaposing the vulgar with the esoteric: sudden bursts of broad comic clowning alternated with obscure wordplay. Then, in the wake of the scandal, this important contemporary clown selfdestructed. The immediate sensation was shock. Yet in tracing his career, it becomes glaringly obvious that in his life as in his work, Woody Allen had always been moving steadily, purposefully, although perhaps unknowingly, toward such a disastrous situation. "I've been waiting all my life to f up this terribly," admits Michael Moriarty's character in Who'll Stop the Rain?', it would not be difficult to believe that Allen said, or at least thought, much the same thing. Highly controlling, he set into motion the mechanism of self-
30
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
destruction, thereby ensuring that the prophecy would be fulfilled. References to Greek legend permeate Woody's work; his contribution to New York Stories (1989) was entitled "Oedipus Wrecks." "I've always considered tragedy a higher form than comedy," Allen told me in an interview for a magazine story shortly before the release of Annie Hall (1977). This was the film that would win him Oscars for best screenwriter (an award he never bothered to acknowledge) as well as best picture, and one for best actress for his costar Diane Keaton. Many considered it to be Allen's key transitional piece from physical and verbal humor to emotional and psychological horror. In fact, Allen had been steadily moving in such a direction for some time, adding further elements of existential ennui with each successive script. Friends and fans tried to tell him that this was nothing more than "grass is always greener" thinking, coupled with self-loathing: the disparagement of what one does best and has been widely acclaimed for in favor of what remains to be conquered. Nonetheless, Allen continued; his next film was the humorless Interiors (1978), which critics hated, audiences ignored, and Allen considered his most successful work to date. Apparently Allen derived some sort of negative energy from such a strong public reaction, setting to work on an even more infuriating project: Stardust Memories (1980), his ersatz 8V2, which gleefully poked nasty, misanthropic fun at those very people in the press and the public who had always supported him and were trying to understand why a natural genius at clowning could not derive some small satisfaction from what he clearly did so well. But the anhedonic Allen, for whom even the greatest successes offered no momentary, much less lasting, pleasure, expressed anger when his experimental, ambitious films were criticized, just as he had scoffed when his more easily accessible ones were praised. People were fools for not appreciating his desire to stretch; they were fools for being suckered in by anything that was obviously agreeable. Allen eventually relented somewhat, balancing the comedy the public yearned for with the tragedy he wanted to create, resulting in a midcareer quartet of modern masterpieces: Manhattan, Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Consistently, though, he continued to create works that, however many gags they contained, were essentially tragic. For centuries, critics have remarked that the greatest comedy always borders on tragedy; the term "noble fool" can denote with equal validity a tragic hero or a court jester. Woody Allen, however, pushed the envelope, literally transforming himself as no film clown, with the possible exception of Harry Langdon, had ever done before into a tragic hero before an audience's eyes. Often Allen's darkest films dealt with the relationship of life to art, a theme that has haunted his work since What's New, Pussycat? "I know I have a novel in me," the commercially successful photographer hero (Peter O'Toole) says as he quits his lucrative position to pursue a higher form of self-expression. "You're always trying to get things right in art," Allen's alter ego Alvy Singer admits in Annie Hall, after watching his first play performed, "because you can't in life." In
Woody Allen
31
precipitating the scandal, however, Allen paradoxically proved himself wrong. If the public recoiled from his more severe attempts to turn his comic films into tragedy, they were mesmerized when he did precisely that in real life. After all, within the single day that Aristotle targeted as a key unity of Greek tragedy, Allen had transformed his idyllic existence as uncrowned ' 'king'' of New York into that of a feeble fool in search of a contemporary Colonus to which he could crawl.
CRITICAL RECEPTION Like his idol, Ingmar Bergman, Allen attempted to shade each film a little darker than the last. Crimes and Misdemeanors, perhaps his greatest single work owing to the seamless combination of cinematic clowning and tragic implications, perfectly projects the sense of nihilism that worked its way to the surface through the humor of desperation. A highly moral rabbi (Sam Waterston) goes blind as an amoral murderer (Martin Landau) gets away with his crime. Allen, a hero as alienated as Albert Camus's in The Stranger, is the audience surrogate and intelligent observer who attempts to make sense of the situation only to finally accept that he lives in a world without reason, devoid of meaning, without poetic justice. It is a terrible vision, every bit as upsetting as the equally tragic situation that Allen, through great and concentrated effort, created for himself in real life. From the first, Woody Allen's films dealt with the idea that life mirrors art; as he progressed from clown to tragic person onscreen and off, he provided sad, irrefutable proof of his ongoing thesis.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, Bill, and Jeffrey Feinman. Woody Allen: Clown Prince of American Humor. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1975. Allen, Woody. Interviews with author, 1971-1979. . Woody Allen on Woody Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1995. Benayoun, Robert. The Films of Woody Allen, trans. Alexander Walker. New York: Harmony Books, 1987. Brode, Douglas. Woody Allen: His Films and Career. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1985. Byron, Stuart, and Elisabeth Weis, eds. The National Society of Film Critics on Movie Comedy. New York: Grossman/Viking, 1977. Dempsey, Michael. "The Autobiography of Woody Allen." Film Comment, May-June 1979: 9-16. Groteke, Kristi, and Marjorie Rosen. Mia and Woody: Love and Betrayal. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994. Guthrie, Lee. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Drake, 1978. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1978. Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1991.
32
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Maltin, Leonard. The Great Movie Comedians, from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. New York: Bell, 1982. Mamber, Stephen. "Woody Allen." Cinema, Winter 1972-1973: 10-12. Wilde, Larry. The Great Comedians. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1973. Yacowar, Maurice. Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979.
The Anthropology of Fools C. Todd White Now I shall laugh and I shall cause all to be laughed at, and by my power as a God, I will spare none. Iktomi1 Psychologists describe laughter as an instinctive and intuitive reaction, a reflexive response resulting from a physical, emotional, or intellectual stimulus or tickle. Sociologists show that every society has sanctions and taboos that act to either stifle or incite laughter. Anthropologists have found ritualized clowning to be ubiquitous to culture. All of the humanities have noted that patterns of social comedy provide unique windows through which we may better understand how and why the innate psychological trait of laughter manifests itself in various cultural groups; yet words such as jester, clown, and comic are rare in the indexes of the works that these fields produce.
BACKGROUND Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that laughter, a uniquely human phenomenon, developed in the neocortex and was coeval with the emergence of speech. J. J. M. Askenasy, of the Tel Aviv School of Medicine, concurs: "Laughter is a primitive communication medium understood by all human societies in spite of their very different languages. No case of a human being who did not laugh once in his lifetime has been published in the literature" (318). By laughter we have thus defined our humanity.
34
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
As laughter defines our humanity, so comedy delineates culture. Ritualized patterns of burlesque are readily found in all societies, no matter how economically or culturally disparate (Askenasy 317-319). Although differences are readily apparent, cross-cultural analysis reveals fundamental similarities. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS In the late 1920s, the anthropologist Julian Steward identified four "comic themes of universal occurrence" from his studies of ritualized comedy in the indigenous tribes of North America. Steward wrote that these themes are ' 'rude and smack strongly of the soil and are not comparable to the fine-spun themes of the highly intellectualized European comedies, [but] they are nevertheless basic in all cultures" ("Ceremonial Buffoon" 189).
The Ridicule or Burlesque of the Sacred To truly understand the first of Steward's themes, we must remember that what is held "sacred" to any society or culture is not restricted to the realm of religion. Traditions, political affiliations, social status, and celebrities may all be held in divine esteem, and all are subject to public scrutiny and mockery. Persons of high social standing and prestige are perhaps most subject to ridicule, and it is common to find professional fool entertainers within the courts and circles of the highest of social classes. As sociologists show, the fool in this position "becomes the person who through various means reminds the leader of the transience of power. He becomes the guardian of reality and, in a paradoxical way, prevents the pursuit of foolish action" (Kets de Vries 757). Apart from providing a balance to the royal hubris, the primary function of the court jester is to provide comic relief from the everyday stresses inherent to the throne. Max Gluckman reminds us that the jester for Queen Elizabeth "did her more good than the medicines of all her physicians, and the sermons of her chaplains" (Politics 103).2 The influence of these figures on monarchs, and thereby on history, is often underestimated, as biographers of Grigory Rasputin, Will Sommers, and Richard Tarlton have shown. As in European cultures, jesters in many tribes delight and criticize the clan's folk, their chiefs, and many other figures as they see fit. Margaret Mead witnessed a jester's dance in Samoa in which the fool's caper paradoxically honored the nobility "by mocking them" (115). Such clowning may even extend crossculturally, as when Gluckman tells of the Xhosa poet who "used the praisesong form to praise Great Britain when the prince of Wales in 1925 visited South Africa, by being sarcastic about all it had promised the Bantu, and then left them without" (Custom and Conflict 104). In many cultures, rituals and ceremonies may seem on the surface to ' 'protest against the established order'' while actually they preserve and even strengthen that order (Gluckman, Custom 109). This is Gluckman's famous conception of
The Anthropology of Fools
35
"rituals of rebellion." Such rituals may also include "rites of reversal" like those in which men dress in women's clothing or women take on traditionally male roles, as when Zulu women perform the herding of cattle (109). Anthropologists have shown that joking relationships can also foster social cohesion. Gluckman showed how different clans among the Tonga tribe in Northern Rhodesia established formal, cross-clanal joking relationships. "Joking-clan partners" perform many reciprocal social duties. One may act as a "wild-card" stand-in for any missing kinsperson in ceremonies. Since it could be counter to the harmony of small-group cohesion for one clan member to harshly criticize another, it is the duty of the joking-clan partner to play the role of admonisher should one step out of line. These relationships that combine "friendship and antagonism, the pretense of hostility with real friendliness," help to create and maintain the social matrices of esteem and alliance (Politics 97-102).
The Ridicule or Burlesque of Foreigners or Strangers With every conflict of state there comes a barrage of mockery and propaganda designed to disparage the adversary and boost nationalistic morale. Comedians emerge at the forefront of this attempt to control social action. Modern examples include Bob Hope's political monologues and Joel Gray's performance in Cabaret. Laughter is often described as an emotional vent, a safe, vicarious discharge of hostile energy and competitive frustrations (Askenasy 318). It is not surprising, then, to find caricature of the "white man" to be particularly prevalent among Native Americans. Franz Boas described a late-nineteenth-century interlude within a Kwakiutl potlatch where "four men dressed as police officers. They set up an American court, one acting as judge. A woman is arrested for being absent from the preceeding part of the ceremony, tried and fined $70 worth of blankets, which is afterward distributed in her name as Potlatch gifts" (Steward, "Ceremonial Buffoon" 197; Clown 107). Laughter may either divert or incite violence, and the results can range from peace to slaughter. In thirteen of the twenty-nine instances of the word ' 'laughter" in the Bible, it is associated with violence (Ziv, quoted in Askenasy 318). As joking may act to establish and reinforce a friendship, so may it isolate a stranger, justify a murder, or even ignite a war.
Themes of Sex and Obscenity The social restrictions on jibes about sex range from Apollonian censorship to Dionysian spree. Some rituals include the sanctioned phallic play and the public handling and consuming of all manner of excrement and filth. Phallicism is common in many cultures, such as the Pueblo tribes of the American Southwest. Some Zuni clowns wear false penises that they strike and fondle, and the
36
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Hehe kachina of the Hopi wears a mask decorated with phallic iconography (Steward, Clown 85-87). This pattern of sexual jest is an ancient tradition in Western culture as well. It is believed that the earliest Greek comedies were derived from phallic play in ancient bacchanalian songs, skits, and antics (Steward, Clown, 92). The Matachines dance of the Taos Pueblos is an elaborate example of the ritualized burlesque of sex. The festival occurs around Christmas/solstice time and lasts up to three days. In this dance, a leading clown/trickster, his wife (a transvestite), a virgin (usually a seven-year-old girl), and a eunuch bull burlesque the institutions of marriage and religion before hundreds of spectators (Rodriguez). This grand, elaborate, and hilarious dance provides a sacred link to mystical forces that will result in abundant crops, better health, and increased prosperity. In this light, joking both burlesques and celebrates fertility, and the role of the fool becomes that of a spiritual mediator not unlike a shaman or priest.
Burlesque of Physical or Psychological Harm, Tragedy, Illness, or Need The concept of ritualized humor may seem alien to the contemporary American. There are no jesters in American courts (though there is usually an abundance of clowns). The public burlesque of sex, outside of Mardi Gras, Central Park, or nightclubs, is usually forbidden, and the burlesque of strangers runs counter to American democratic ideals. With regard to the parody of physical or psychological harm, illness, or need, however, ritualized clowning is as common as the eight-o'clock sitcom. At the heart of such burlesque is irony. It is ironic, for instance, that the cartoon maiden chained to railroad tracks will elicit mirth. Which of us has never laughed aloud over the Three Stooges' slapstick or Wile E. Coyote's disastrous attempts to catch Road Runner? The continued success of such Hollywood personas as Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, and Robin Williams stands as testament to America's affinity for this brand of humor. The tragic buffoon has become as institutionalized as television: for every Archie Bunker that leaves the prime-time lineup, there is an Al Bundy to replace him. The mockery of death should also be included as yet another category (Willeford 84). Emory Sekaquaptewa has related how, upon the demise of one respected Hopi clown, the clown's relatives transported his body to the roof of a building near a central village plaza. With shouts of "Yaahahay!," they repeatedly swung the torso out over the gathering crowd and, on the fourth swing, released the corpse, which fell with a thud to the ground. The onlookers were, of course, shocked until they comprehended this act as a final, defiant jest with mortality (Boyd 107). Steward's categories are very useful tools by which we may discern the common and the peculiar patterns of jest. There remains, however, one major over-
The Anthropology of Fools
37
sight: Steward makes no mention of the burlesque of self. In all cultures, there are rituals that serve to remind us that we all play the role of the fool at some time or other. In certain myths, humans were created for folly—for the entertainment of the gods. In Native American myths, tricksters such as Coyote and Iktomi are common among the primordials that surely make fools of us all. In recent years, it has become customary among ethnographers to write chapters or articles explaining how each has assumed the role of fool. Indeed, many claim that it is a rite of passage in field research. In a recent collection of such chapters, Douglas Raybeck tells of his introduction to the field and his arrival in the village of Kelantan, Malaysia. Eager to explore his new home and subjects, Raybeck accepted the first invitational tour of the community, offered by the hospitable neighbor Che Din. The two of them set off for a (Malinowskistyled) stroll early the first morning after his arrival. Raybeck reports feeling somewhat uneasy with his companion, thinking Che Din a bit odd. However, as he noted the "broad grins and quizzical looks" of the other members of the community, it soon became clear that something was amiss. When one villager called Che Din a name that translates as "Three-quarters," Raybeck realized that he ' 'had just been squired about the community by the village half-wit'': I genuinely thought Che Din was simply a poor Kelantanese. I had studied the language for two years, read all of the anthropology written on the area, worked in a profession that sensitizes one to interpersonal behaviors, and I still couldn't perceive the difference between a typical Kelantanese and one who was mentally disabled. Lacking a sound basis for comparison, I assumed that Che Din was simply poor and perhaps a bit odd, but maybe many Kelantanese appeared a bit odd to outsiders. (9) It should not be said that anthropologists such as Raybeck are ill prepared. There is wisdom in the current field guides, as Victor Barnouw illustrates: "People who are willing to spend a lot of time telling an anthropologist their autobiographies are often maladjusted persons" (126). As the outsiders they are, anthropologists are susceptible to all manner of pranks, ploys, and misinterpretations. Napoleon Chagnon has written of how he set himself up for a "hoax of the grandest proportions" in the way by which he began to trace a genealogy of the Yanomamo. Underestimating the strength of a social taboo that prevented the mention of a person's "true name" in public, Chagnon proceeded to ask individuals openly to declare their name and then the names of their friends and relatives. As the stating of this name would be a gross violation of common etiquette and respect, the tribe turned his project into a game: Each ''informant" would try to outdo his peers by inventing a name even more preposterous or ridiculous than what I had been given by someone earlier. .. . They even fabricated devilishly improbable genealogical relationships, such as
38
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History someone being married to his grandmother. . . . Everyone who was observing my work would then insist that I repeat the name aloud, roaring in hysterical laughter as I clumsily pronounced the name, sometimes laughing until tears streamed down their faces. (20)
For five months, the Yanomamo explained away apparent contradictions in the bogus genealogy, which Chagnon obligingly expanded into thousands of "those desirable little triangles and circles." Then one day a headman "informant" laughed aloud when Chagnon casually mentioned by name the wife of another headman. It turned out that the name that Chagnon used was sexually explicit, as were many of the "true names" that he had collected, such as "Long Dong," "Eagle Shit," "Asshole," and "Fart Breath." No wonder the natives had wept with hilarity. All of his genealogical data were bogus. The project had to be scrapped, obviously, and a different approach devised (19-21). As stories such as Chagnon's and Raybeck's became common, it became increasingly clear that the objective part of the ethnographic paradigm was problematic. Ethnographers of late have had to reevaluate their position, and instead of objective observation, the role of subjective interpretation has been emphasized. Now, consequently, when ethnographers write about fools, it is frequently themselves that they are discussing. CRITICAL RECEPTION In his recent anthology of ethnographic "bloopers," Philip DeVita has stated a complex warning: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself— and you are the easiest person to fool. . . . After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that" (xvii). The problem with that is, how can you know when you have been fooled? According to Clifford Geertz, "[T]he culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong" (452). To Geertz, the ethnographer's world is an endless conundrum, a perplexing polyphony by which "twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted" (7). The warning is clear: any claim by an ethnographer to have a complete understanding would be quixotic. To further complicate the process, what the ethnologist has perceived must be conveyed. James Clifford contrasts the ethnographer with a Cree hunter who, when called to testify in the American courts, stated: "I'm not sure I can tell the truth. . . . I can only tell what I know" (8). Vincent Crapanzano similarly compares the ethnographer to Hermes: "When Hermes took the post of messenger of the gods, he promised Zeus not to lie. He did not promise to tell the whole truth. Zeus understood. The ethnographer has not" (53). While Crapanzano's critique is well taken, it is not, perhaps, fair. As Steward was well aware, his categories are not mutually exclusive phyla by which we
The Anthropology of Fools
39
can neatly divide the social universe. That is not what they were intended to do. As clowns are constantly reminding us, all typologies are fallible. As William Willeford has noted, "The fool breaks down the boundary between chaos and order, but he also violates our assumption that that boundary was where we thought it was and that it had the character we thought it h a d " (108). Steward knew that there were problems with his categories, and he admitted to considerable overlap, but this did not give him cause to discard them as insignificant. Indeed, Steward would probably agree with Paul Friedrich: "[A]ll representation is misrepresentation, but there is truth in some misrepresentation'' (quoted in Combs-Schilling xiv). Steward's categories do hold up well to their intended purpose: they "provide a least common denominator to the humor of the world and thus clear the ground for sounder psychological theorizing" ("Ceremonial Buffoon" 187). Through exploring these universal themes, we will gain a better understanding of how culture and society influence "what is laughable" (187), and, through the process, we may use our perceptions of the fool on the outside to better discern, laugh at, and learn from the fool that is within.
NOTES 1. Walker 56. 2. Gluckman may have confused Will Sommers with Richard Tarlton when he named Will Tarleton as court jester for Elizabeth I (Politics 103).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Askenasy, J. J. M. "The Functions and Dysfunctions of Laughter." Journal of General Psychology 114 A (October 1987): 317-334. Barnouw, Victor. Culture and Personality. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1985. Boyd, Tom W. "Clowns, Innocent Outsiders in the Sanctuary: A Phenomenology of Sacred Folly." Journal of Popular Culture 22.3 (1988): 101-109. Chagnon, Napoleon A. Yanomamo. 1968. 4th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Combs-Schilling, M. E. Sacred Performances. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Crapanzano, Vincent. "Hermes' Dilemma." In Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. DeVita, Philip R., ed. The Naked Anthropologist: Tales from around the World. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gluckman, Max. Custom and Conflict in Africa. Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, 1956. . Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society. Chicago: Aldine, 1965. Kets de Vries, Manfred F. R. "The Organizational Fool: Balancing a Leader's Hubris." Human Relations 43.8 (1990): 751-770.
40
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. 1928. New York: William Morrow, 1961. Raybeck, Douglas. "Getting below the Surface." In The Naked Anthropologist, ed. Philip R. DeVita. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992. Rodriguez, Sylvia. "The Taos Pueblo Matachines: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations." American Ethnologist 18.2 (1991): 234-256. Steward, Julian Haynes. "The Ceremonial Buffoon of the American Indian." Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 14 (1931): 187-207. . The Clown in Native North America. 1929. New York: Garland, 1991. Walker, James R. Lakota Myth. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Robert Armin (England: c. 1568-1615)
Dana E. Aspinall When in the 1580s a clever young apprentice named Robert Armin entered Richard Tarlton's tavern seeking to collect his master's money from a delinquent debtor tenant, he unwittingly bequeathed an important clue for understanding the profound comic change attributed to his 1599 London stage emergence. Learning that the debtor Charles could not pay, Armin scribbled with chalk across a wall, O world, why wilt thou lye? Is this Charles the great! that I deny. Indeed Charles the great before, But now Charles the lesse, being poore. (Halliwell, Tarlton 's Jests 22) Although the easy musical rhyme, uncanny improvisational quality, and churlish flavor of the insult all could have sprung just as easily from Tarlton or the equally talented Will Kemp, Armin's jest demonstrates an intelligence and tone that would later be his distinguishing characteristic.
BACKGROUND Stage critics and historians emphasize that Armin's influence rests in elevating the Tarltonesque clowns' rustic knockabout roles to more sophisticated representations wherein these clowns become courtly fools, infusing wisdom into the dramatic circumstances in which they operate.1 Leslie Hotson perhaps summarizes this evolution best: Shakespeare "made the low-comedy clowning and
42
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
compere turns of Kempe and Cowley . . . give way to the originality and highcomedy wit of the new and distinctive line of sagacious fools he introduced with Robert Armin" (84). Less recognized, however, in Armin's implementation of "high-comedy wit" is the dialectical character such implementation reveals— including Armin's more tangible knowledge of cultural place, a tone that insinuates licensed position, and an idiom that vaguely signals anxious conflict between cultural milieus. Armin refined these qualities while pursuing many professions in the 1580s—goldsmithing, pamphleteering, and provincial acting— and then brought them to the Globe, where he replaced Will Kemp. Armin's comedic attributes, achieved mostly through his growing obsequious intimacy with the empowered class, substantiate his dramatic roles and in turn validate the tastes and ideological directives of those who helped establish Armin's reputation. Armin's performances became, in short, interplays between representations of authority and those authorized to perform. His relationships with Giles and William Brydges, Lord Chandos, as well as Lady Mary Chandos, Lord Viscount Haddinton, and even James I, who on May 19, 1603, issued a royal patent giving "licence and aucthori[ty to] theise our servauntes" (Chambers 2.208-209), the actors, all constitute an emerging bond between theater and court as the theater became a more politicized site of courtly representation. This bond gradually delimited the space on which other, less privileged spectators could rehearse their own autonomy. While Armin died a fairly successful man on November 30, 1615, having fathered at least three children (Denkinger 95) and sustaining a long acting career, his beginnings were humble. He was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, the son of a tailor and grandson of a fletcher (Felver 10). His earliest years culminate in apprenticeship to John Lowyson (or Lonyson) as a goldsmith in London. The terms of Armin's bond to Lowyson stipulate an eleven-year service, beginning on October 13, 1581 (Denkinger 96). Here, during Armin's tenure as apprentice (he apparently found the profession rewarding, describing himself in his will as a "Cittizen and Goldsmithe of London"), he supposedly met Richard Tarlton (d. 1588), playwright, ballad maker, fencer, tumbler, and dramatic clown. Impressed with Armin's comic flair, Tarlton prophesied that Armin would one day "enjoy my clownes sute after me" (Halliwell, Tarlton's Jests 22); Tarlton's prophecy, dubiously documented in a 1600 jestbook, confirms Armin's partial estrangement from goldsmithing after his Lombard Street master's death in 1582. In 1590 he first appeared as an author, writing a pious preface to A Briefe Resolution of a Right Religion. Charles S. Felver believes that the publisher's enlistment of Armin's services stemmed from his popularity as one of London's common pamphleteers, which he argues is supported by Thomas Nashe's references to Armin in his Strange Newes (1592) and Pierce's Superogation (1593), as well as Gabriel Harvey's several allusions in his angry responses to Nashe; however, none of Armin's pamphlets survive (12).
Robert Armin
43
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Armin initiated his acting career in the 1580s. He first joined Lord Chandos's company, a successful yet unaccomplished troupe that toured the provinces, including Chandos's own Warwickshire, and possibly later played at the Curtain until William Brydges's death in 1602 (Gray 676). His next published work, Quips upon questions, or a clownes conceite on occasion offered (1600), betrays hints of Armin's new theatrical links. More importantly, Quips upon questions exemplifies Armin's gradual dramatic departure from the rustic, russet-clad clowns made famous by Tarlton and Kemp. Having likely already acted clown parts in productions by Chandos's company, including Tutch in Armin's own The History of the two Maids of More-clacke, With the life and simple maner of Iohn in the Hospitall (c. 1597; first published in 1609), Armin begins to emphasize closer affiliations between "fools" (as opposed to "clowns") and characters of rank. Most obvious in this new emphasis is Armin's donning the fool's motley. Quips upon questions' dedication seizes on this intimacy immediately. In this work, written for "Sir Timothie Trunchion: Alias BASTINADO," Armin comically acknowledges the closer links between his position and his superiors: "Either my simplicitie of love, or thy crueltie in cudgeling, will guard me from envious tongues, whose teeth are all blacke with rancor of their spight." Armin is also careful in Quips upon questions to distance himself from Tarlton, whose comic turns, phrases, and dances appealed more readily to the less empowered theater audience members. When writing in "Wher's Tarlton?" Armin muddies his mythic association with the clown and instead cursorily discards Tarlton's memory: Go too, hee's gone, and in his bodyes stead, His name will live long after he is dead.
Armin also expends tremendous energy throughout Quips upon questions defining the fool's societal role. Perhaps using Tarlton as a springboard from which he can refashion the fool's constitution, Armin distends foolery's parameters to include an advisory capacity, one radically elevated from Tarlton's slapstick buffoonery. This fixation on a clown's heightened capacities found more room for rehearsal in The History of the two Maids. Although the play relies for much of its comedy on the natural idiot Blue John, it also foregrounds an intimate— almost familial—relationship between the court fool Tutch and his master. Tutch, who conspicuously enters the play "writing," immediately establishes his worth to Sir William Vergir by keeping a record of perishables entering Vergir's home. An act like this or similar ones found in scenes where Filbon enlists Tutch's flamboyant aid in courting Tabitha would have been impossible with Quips upon questions' fools; they also would have poorly suited the clown-
44
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ish roles Shakespeare was contemporaneously developing for Kemp, including Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing (1598). When Tutch confides to his master's daughter Mary the duality implicit in a clown's persona, 0 mistress now am I tri'd on my owne tutch, 1 am true mettall one way, but counterfeit another, he also lays the groundwork for As You Like It's (1599) Touchstone, the first fool Shakespeare specifically designed for Armin's representation. Here begins the long and productive professional association of Shakespeare and Armin that would continue for the better part of the remainder of their careers. Although it is necessary to keep in mind that, as J. A. B. Somerset argues, dangers arise in focusing one's attention too heavily on "the actor rather than upon the mature experimenting" Shakespeare (69) when explaining the clown figure's evolution, Armin's advent certainly influenced changes occurring between Dogberry's hackneyed doggerel and Touchstone's courtly wit, Feste's refined musicality, and Lear's Fool's nepotistic liberality. Perhaps Shakespeare's broadening of the fool's importance in terms of plot movement and in associations with socially superior characters owes more than a trifle to Armin's own budding intimacies with privileged individuals. While working for Chandos, Armin became acquainted with the entire Brydges family, his company's patrons and powerful but reclusive aristocratic members. This family's embrace is confirmed in his dedication to Gilbert Dugdale's A True Discourse of the practices of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604). Here Armin displays enough confidence in his association with the Brydgeses to refer to the recently deceased Lord as "Pinck," his sobriquet. Armin's aristocratic connection receives further substantiation in his dedicatory epistle to The Italian Taylor, and his Boy (1609), Armin's translation of an old Italian romance. Armin dedicates the piece to the more politically active Lord Viscount Haddinton and his wife, the Lady Elizabeth Fitzwater, "for your wisedome to laugh at. . . being (as you are) the blessed hand for Brittaine, ordained in your cradle, (under God) to preserue the life of our royall King JAMES." Armin previously noted his popularity among this class in discussing the circumstances surrounding The History of the two Maids' publication, especially the parts highlighting Blue John: "[B]eing requested both of Court and Citty, to shew him in private, I have therefore printed him in publicke, wishing thus much to every one." However, as this last passage alludes, Armin's affiliations with those of rank never completely severed his professional relationship with other audience members. Instead, Armin's concern for all classes—probably at its roots a shrewd financial strategy—reveals a faint undercurrent of strife operating within the site of these dramatic performances, which in turn manifests itself in the works and also causes an intermittent confusion of allegiance for actors like Armin. The History of the two Maids accordingly engages as a comic trope of possible cultural disruption, through both disjointed male-female relations and equally
Robert Armin
45
askew father-child negotiations. James, Humil's father and catalyst to much of the chaos and the later reconciliation, summarizes the play's various cruces when he exclaims, How ignorance pleades nonage, in his [Humil's] eie He knows me not, tis not the Lyons kinde, Whose nature challenges right property, Of perfect being, if it were. James's dismay and Tutch's embellished household status become the sites where Armin negotiates certain increasing anxieties emerging in late Elizabethan society.2 These anxieties include representative control of the stage. London theater groups encountered myriad troubles with royal and civic authorities over representations of kings, the aristocracy, and prominent societal members. Many cultural factions as well, most notably those under the nomenclature "Puritan," wanted dramatic enterprises abolished because of religious, economic, and other moral dictates. Yet, starting with Elizabeth's own histrionic displays of monarchy, various acting groups sought and found aristocratic protection. Providing a space wherein the ruling class's prerogatives could be represented, interpreted, and even mythified for the rabble became one raison d'etre among many for these troupes.3 Clowns, however, remained the domain of commoners. Originating from a centuries-old folk tradition, their primary purpose was, as Mikhail Bakhtin states, "precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere" (20).4 Mimicking more serious rituals of court and state and hence sometimes politically charged representational stage actions, dramatic clowns provided bombastic comic relief, self-inflicted buffoonery, and nearpornographic mockery and innuendo. Their appearances "in russet jerkin and breeches, country boots, and buttoned cap" denoted English country life, including a boorish vitality that derived its humor from ' 'the unfailing well of the countryman's coarseness, his self-satisfaction, his vivid mother-wit, his craft in 'lying at catch' under a feigned stupidity, and his pagan mistaking of the languages of the cultivated" (Hotson 85). As such, they possessed little claim to shared space with kings and aristocracy. In fact, clowns innately stood opposed to nobility—even noble figures represented in fictional situations—in their humiliating and parodic postures. The chaotic quality informing such unlicensed displays of revelry, spontaneity, and "suspension of all hierarchical rank" (Bakhtin 10) threatened intimations of order, control, and seriousness—qualities essential to the maintenance of power. In plays before Armin's first appearance on the London stage, clowns usually remained separate from the main plot, only peripherally undermining serious, ritualized aristocratic manifestations. Armin, continually observant of prevailing tastes and authorized discretions, slowly transformed the clown's role to one more fitting the boundaries that court
46
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
and state soberly insisted upon. As his association with noble patrons grew and affiliations with the less transient Lord Chamberlain's Men commenced, he even expanded the clown figure's importance by abandoning the folk-humor-immersed clown for a more subservient, more properly situated fool figure. Armin combined two historic personages, the idiot or "natural" and the court jester, both figures accustomed to and comfortable with aristocratic attendance. In Hotson's words, Armin never "forgot that 'God's fools' stand under a special protection, and at times [are] granted an insight denied to the merely sane" (100). Simultaneously, Armin incorporated jester qualities into his natural's persona, a figure equally protected by kingship. His next printed piece, Foole upon Foole, or Six sortes of Sottes (1600), emphasizes Armin's displacement of the rustic with these two personages. Introducing himself as "Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe," an appellation that may show Armin secure with the Lord Chamberlain's Men (who played at the Curtain until the Globe's 1599 completion), Armin illustrates potential benefits in advocating the socially privileged's tastes and in impersonating a fool: "[T]is no wonder for me to set downe fooles naturall, when wise men before theyle be unprofitable, will seeme fooles artificiall: Is it then a profit to bee foolish? yea so some say, for under shew of simplicity some gaine love, while the wise with all they can doe, can scarce obtaine love." The same "love" Armin earlier provoked from Tarlton can be manipulated to greater advantage when properly presented to the empowered. Armin's validation of the ruling class's virtue, wisdom, and kindness reverberates throughout Foole upon Foole, mostly at the expense of the fools he travesties. In "Jack Oates the Flat Foole," where Jack erroneously boxes a nobleman's ear and then faces his master's severe whipping, the dazed but benevolent nobleman steps in and, "knowing simplicity the ground of [Jack's] error, would not suffer" any further punishment. Even the least likable fool, Leonard the "Lean Foole," provokes sincere affection from his master. After Leonard steals his master's hawk, the master forgives Leonard because "he loved the foole above" the exotic bird. Armin, instead of informing these fools' buffoonery with tones denoting the vast schism between country clowns and their superiors, instead tinctures his characterizations with an equivocal affiliation between the ruling class and Jack Oates and Leonard. In another anecdote concerning Jack Oates, Armin states that fools possess upwardly mobile aspirations, "for indeede the foole was a little proude minded," perhaps signaling a fool's archetypal connection to courtly circles. In fact, three fools described in Foole upon Foole hail from aristocratic environments: Jack, Jemy Camber (James V of Scotland's fool), and Will Sommers (Henry VIII's fool). Later, Armin sheds light on a fool's true persona, further marking off the fool's characterization from what came before and also showing Armin's conscious blend of natural and artificial fool:
Robert Armin
47
Naturall fooles are prone to selfe conceit, Fooles artificiall, with their wits lay waite To make themselves fooles, likeing the disguises. His characterizations, even the most zany, all possess elements of both types of fool. Throughout Foole upon Foole Armin also shows a meticulous care in depicting these fools—many of whom display traits of insanity, mental retardation, or physical deformity—in a benevolent light. Possibly Armin realized that the clownish enactments each fool engages in pleasantly reminded some readers of the clowns Tarlton and Kemp once mimicked, an audience Armin was reluctant to neglect completely. Armin also may have protected these men's dignity because of personal acquaintances with them. John o' the Hospital, " A Very Foole," Armin knew during his apprentice days. Foole upon Foole underwent slight revisions and was republished in 1605; in 1608 Armin expanded and published it again as A Nest of Ninnies, Simply of themselves without Compound. Armin dedicated his revised work to ' 'the generous gentlemen of Oxenford, Cambridge, and the Innes of Court" (2), emphasizing their connections to the theater: You only, and you ever I shall pray, And praising ever that your sunnie shine May beautifie our GLOBE in every line. (2) This connection between Armin's theater and the universities and inns of court underlines the closer links between theaters and power since James's authorizations in 1603. Armin's revisions, including the several "verbal parallels" (Somerset 77) to Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601), also illustrate a swing toward heightened representations of fools. As Hamlet tells his players before the dumb show, And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.5 (3.2.42-49) Judging from his own writings, the man playing Polonius would have eagerly agreed. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although theater historians remember Robert Armin for acting such roles as the previously mentioned Tutch, Touchstone, Feste, Polonius, and Lear's Fool,
48
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
as well as Dogberry, the cobbler in Julius Caesar (1602), Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well (c. 1602), Pompey in Measure for Measure (1604), the Gravedigger in Hamlet, the drunken porter in Macbeth (1606), and Sir Epicure Mammon in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610), literary historians would do well to explore more fully his own oeuvre. For it is here, buried in the pages of his mostly forgotten texts, that the sources of his influence lie.
NOTES 1. Included among these critics and historians are Emma Marshall Denkinger and Austin K. Gray. J. A. B. Somerset (68-82) offers a contradictory view. 2. Much recent work has been done on anxiety and its various manifestations in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, including its concomitant representations on the London stage. These include Paul Brown's " 'This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), 48-72; and Stephen Greenblatt's "Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne," in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 129-165. 3. For further discussion of the politics and/or patronage of English Renaissance theater, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford UP, 1973); Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985); Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988); Cedric C. Brown, ed., Patronage, Politics, and Literary Traditions in England, 1558-1658 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993); and David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Introduction" to Rabelais and His World (1968), trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984). All references to this text are cited parenthetically. 5. The quotation from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is taken from G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources "R. Armin in praise and commendation of this briefe Resolution of a right religion." 1590. In The Works of Robert Armin, Actor (1605-1609), ed. Alexander B. Grosart. Manchester, 1880. x-xi. Foole upon Foole, or Six sortes of Sottes. 1600; 2nd ed., 1605. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970.
Robert Armin
49
The History of the two Maids of More-clacke, with the life and simple maner of Iohn in the Hospitall. 1609. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan (University Microfilms), 1970. The Italian Taylor, and his Boy. 1609. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan (University Microfilms), 1970. A Nest of Ninnies, Simply of themselves without Compound. 1608. In Fools and Jesters: With a Reprint of Robert Armin's 'A Nest of Ninnies." London: Shakespeare Society Reprints, 1842. Quips upon questions, or a clownes conceite on occasion offered. 1600. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970. * 'To the right honourable, and his singular good Lady, the Lady Mary Chandois, R. A. wisheth Health and everlasting happinesse." In A True Discourse of the practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, by Gilbert Dugdale. 1604. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970.
Secondary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1968. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Bentley, G. E. "Shakespeare, the King's Company, and King Lear." In On "King Lear." ed. Lawrence Danson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. 47-60. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. Davies, John "Honest, gamesome Robin Armine." In The Scourge of Folly. 1610. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970. Denkinger, Emma Marshall. "Actors' Names in the Registers of St. Bodolph Aldgate." PMLA 41 (1926): 91-123. Gray, Austin K. "Robert Armin, the Fool." PMLA 42.3 (1927): 673-685. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. Halliwell, J. O. ed. Tarlton's Jests, and News out of Purgatory: With Notes, and Some Account of the Life of Tarlton. London: Shakespeare Society Reprints, 1844. Harvey, Gabriel. The Works of Gabriel Harvey. Ed. A. B. Grosart. 3 vols. London, 18841885. Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare's Motley. New York: Oxford UP, 1952. Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe. Ed. Ronald B. McKerrow. 5 vols. London: A. H. Bullen, 1904. Smith, George. The Concise Dictionary of National Biography, 1953-1961. London: Oxford UP, 1965. Somerset, J. A. B. "Shakespeare's Great Stage of Fools, 1599-1607." In Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984. 68-82.
Archy Armstrong
(England and Scotland: c. 1585-1672)
Edmund Miller BACKGROUND Archy (properly, Archibald) Armstrong was the court fool of James I (15661625) of England and of his son Charles I (1600-1649). In the course of his career, Armstrong unwittingly illustrated the political power of satire and also its limits, for it was his practice to test these limits on every occasion. After his fall from favor, he moved his career in a new direction by capitalizing on his notoriety in a way that has a particular resonance in the late twentieth century. Armstrong was born of Scottish parents toward the end of the sixteenth century. Although J. Doran reports that he was a native of Arthuret, Cumberland (196), he may have been born in Scotland. At any rate, he was raised in Scotland. A youthful reputation as a sheep rustler brought him to the attention of King James VI of Scotland, who made him one of his company of court entertainers. At first he seems to have specialized in physical comedy and horseplay, but when James inherited the English throne in 1603 and became James I of England, Armstrong became bolder in addressing satirical barbs at members of the court, and the scope of his influence became more pronounced, perhaps because of a peculiarly Scottish perspective he provided on English affectations. At any rate, the king gave him the official position of court jester with a permanent place in his personal entourage. Armstrong's skill in puncturing the pomposity of courtiers was the result more of his own sense of self-importance than of any special insight. At least, he seems to have been quite as arrogant as any of the courtiers he attacked and oblivious of the degree to which his license depended on the grace and favor
Archy Armstrong
51
of the king. Once, for example, he told King James that Prince Henry (15941612), then the heir to the throne, was more popular with the people, unaware of the fact that the quarrel thus started between the king and the prince might lose him his position, if not in that reign, then in the next (Doran 197-198). It did in fact result in Archie's being tossed in a blanket ''like a dog" (as he himself reported) by the prince and his friends after they had experienced the king's "ill-humour" over Archie's observation (Doran 197-198). Additionally, Archie took advantage of his position to accept bribes from those wanting access to the king. He was sent on the mission to Spain with the young Prince Charles when a Spanish marriage was being sought for the royal heir. His own record of this visit, in the handwriting of George Villiers (1592-1628), the duke of Buckingham, is dated April 28, 1623, and was sent from the court of Spain in Madrid (Doran 199-200). It is in the form of a letter to King James in which he records his arrogance at the Spanish court in a way that indicates that he was simply acting according to his nature, completely unaware that he might be doing anything inappropriate or that his activities might have political consequences. In a sense he was right. His motley excused any possible offense. Most of all, he seems to have wished for a translator in his meetings with the Spanish king. He asked King James, "I desire your Majesty's help in all need, for I cannot understand him; but I think myself as wise as he or any in his Court" (Doran 200). As he told Buckingham at the time of the mission to Spain, "[DJukes had often been hanged for insolence but never fools for talking" (Doran 200). After the death of James I in 1625, Charles I continued Armstrong in office. Perhaps the most memorable incident in Armstrong's career occurred when he insulted the diminutive Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud (1573-1645) by saying grace before meals in his presence with the words "Great praise be given to God, and little laud to the devil." The remark is insulting, perhaps even sacrilegious, but it has no satirical weight since the joke concerns the name and physical appearance of the archbishop. It makes no allusion to the reason that Laud was such a controversial figure at the moment because of his policy of enforced uniformity. He was at that time attempting to impose the English liturgy on Scottish religious services. Perhaps because the remark was not more satirically to the point, Armstrong was able to escape punishment by pleading the license of his office (Doran 204). However, shortly afterwards, when he greeted the archbishop, who was then entering the Council of State, by asking, "Does not your grace hear the news from Sniveling?" he was immediately condemned by the king in council since a rebellion had just broken out at Striveling in opposition to the new Scottish liturgy, and the remark was therefore politically significant. As punishment he had "his coat pulled over his head" and was replaced as jester and banished from court on March 11, 1637 (Doran 205). Until he died and was buried on All Fools' Day, April 1, 1646, he lived, apparently quite contentedly, on the fortune he had acquired in office, attempting
52
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
to enlarge it by calling in old debts and marrying one of his lady friends, Sibella Bell, in 1646 (Doran 209). When Archbishop Laud was arrested by the House of Commons in 1641 as the English Revolution began, Armstrong had a vindication of sorts. Before retiring to Cumberland to live the life of a landed gentleman, he published a small book called Archy's Dream (1641). In this he condemns the archbishop for his ' 'tyrannical cruelty'' and consigns him to hell. He describes himself on the title page as "exiled the court by Canterburies malice." DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Although he held the official position of court jester, Archy Armstrong really comes from a tradition of physical comedy or slapstick in which any degree of cruelty can be amusing if it is surprising. As his popularity at the English court of King James grew, he came to speak his mind fearlessly but had little natural wit and less tact and yet an inordinate sense of his own worth. While his physical humor had been more generally popular at court, his verbal humor offended various people from time to time in a more lasting way. He owed his longevity in office to the protection afforded by the enemies of those he offended rather than to the significance of his rude quips. He was quite mistaken in thinking that Laud's animosity drove him from office. The political situation at the time simply made it necessary for the king in council to take official action against him for seeming to countenance insurrection. His autobiographical chapbook Archy's Dream is perhaps a first work in the modern tradition of revisionist autobiography, but it is not consciously contrived as such, and he misses an opportunity to make himself the central character in his own life by adopting the medieval tradition of a dream framework. There is no good reason to doubt that the work is his own composition. Stylistically it is similar to a letter he sent James I from Spain. Even the shifts from first person to third reflect the work's origin as the oral composition of an illiterate with no sense of how others regarded him. He notes that his story is being told to "a noble friend," and this is consistent with the duke of Buckingham's having been his amanuensis—not ghost writer—for the letter from Spain. Armstrong also misses the opportunity to tell his side of the story of ' 'having [his] jesting coat plucked off' as part of his official punishment because ' 'few men are ignorant of" this. He tries to blacken Laud's reputation by recounting a vision of seeing Laud quaking in hell as he is condemned by Rhadamanthus. There is neither analysis of the rights and wrongs of Laud's policies nor any hint that Laud may have thought himself wrong in this world, points that would have identified Laud as hypocritical rather than simply as misled. Armstrong describes awaking from his dream to discover that Laud has been conveyed prisoner to the Tower of London in one of the opening salvos of the English Civil War. ' 'For which Archy said he was sorry but could not cry'' because a man's "vices Obnubilate his virtues," and he is even "far more contemned and
Archy Armstrong
53
abhored than if he had never had such gifts bestowed upon him." He follows this platitudinizing with some lame couplets in which he suggests that "Changes of Times surely cannot be small, / When Jesters rise and Archbishops fall." He has failed to notice that the archbishop's fall was not, in fact, accompanied by any rehabilitation of his own reputation. A Banquet oflests (1630) is another work ascribed to Armstrong. While there is some question whether he had any hand in the publication, the material is of the sort ascribed to him—old jokes and riddles traceable in the jestbook tradition. None of it has any connection to particular occasions at court. When in court Armstrong was dressed as a traditional motley jester, as indicated by the terms of his dismissal from office. But he began his court career as a physical comedian, and while he spoke his mind with great freedom, he was often antagonistic without being witty. Neither in his feud with Archbishop Laud nor in his published memoir of the feud does Armstrong seem to have acted in a calculated way. He was not sly nor even intelligent. He engaged Laud as a merely reflexive adherent of established Protestantism and with an arrogant sense of his own self-importance. It was only the accident of the moment that gave the encounter its deep political significance. Armstrong was no more arrogant with Laud than he had been with the kings of England and of Spain. Even the wit of his famous barb against Laud was fortuitous. In fact, the witty remark was not the one that got him into trouble; what did get him into trouble was a merely spiteful observation that happened to have political implications. Similarly, in his retirement, while in a sense he introduced the modern practice of revisionist autobiography as recourse for someone shamed in a scandal, he presented his version of the story in the form of a dream, failing to take advantage of the opportunity to redefine reality. CRITICAL RECEPTION His motley protected Armstrong on more than one occasion but did not save him in the end. Even then, however, he escaped the more serious consequences—perhaps through the intervention of the queen—of prosecution for treason before the Star Chamber. The logic was that he could not have known what he was doing since he was a personage of a sort not to be taken seriously. He was not cast in the heroic mold in which he saw himself. While his name lived on in local memory, it was for his usurious practices, not his wit or his part (if any) in the fall of Laud. There is not so much as a marker to his memory in the churchyard where he lies buried.
54
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Armstrong, Archibald. Archy's Dream, Sometimes lester to his Majestie; but exiled the Court by Canterburies malice. With a relation for whom an odde chaire stood void in Hell. London, 1641. . A Banquet of lests; or Change of Cheare, Being a collection of moderne lests, Witty leeres, Pleasant Taunts, Merry Tales. London, 1630.
Secondary Sources Calendar of State Papers. 1611-1639. Doran, John. The History of Court Fools. London, 1858. (Includes the first publication of Armstrong's letter to King James I from Spain, 199-200.) Ho well, James. Epistolce Ho-eliance. London, 1655.
The Badin
(France: Comic Theatrical Role: c. 1400-c. 1600)
Yvonne LeBlanc BACKGROUND During the waning of the Middle Ages and the advent of the modern European era, Western society was deeply fascinated with the concept of folly in all its diverse permutations. Folly was perceived as evidence of the paradoxical nature of man, an inescapable condition that all, despite their station in life, must experience. This interest in folly was manifested not only in literary and artistic works but also in the real world. Kings and princes kept their own private retinues of fools for amusement; and seasonal celebrations, such as Carnival and the Feast of Fools, were set aside to exalt impulsive behavior and to revel in the overturn, if only temporary, of the established order (Arden 18-20). In literature, the descriptions of folly were diverse and ran the gamut from the pernicious to the beneficent. In his most famous and influential work, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools, 1494), Sebastian Brant painted an image of a society gone amok, in which irrational behavior leads men to sin and perdition. Several years later, in 1509, Desiderius Erasmus took a more benign view of human frailties and the irony of the human condition in the Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly). His main character, Stultitia (Folly), was revealed not only in wicked or irrational deeds but in childlike innocence, possessing a closeness to nature that separates the individual from social order. In French comic theater of the day, the stage was inhabited by a bevy of buffoon figures who exhibited all these diverse traits. They went under a variety of names: fou, sot, galant, and the Badin. The figure of the Badin is linked to the world of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-
56
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
century comic theater with its short plays, farces, and sotties and its semiprofessional bands of performers, the societes joyeuses (Swain 75-90). Prior to the development of late medieval comedy, the origins of the Badin are unclear, though naive fool figures have long peopled popular theater and the human imagination. Jean-Claude Aubailly has suggested that the Badin's roots lie in the stories of popular folklore. He sees the Badin as an avatar of the mythical trickster studied by Paul Radin, Karl Kerenyi, and Carl Jung ("A propos" 13). Both are asocial characters ruled by their instincts who serve as the focus of the action in the story. The word badin comes from the Vulgar Latin badare, which means to stare with a half-opened mouth, an expression indicative of the idiot (Petit de Julleville 282). Certainly this was one of the typical expressions employed by the actor performing the role of the Badin. In modern French, the verb badiner has come to mean to banter or jest in a lighthearted manner, a term that reflects the spirited personality of this comic figure.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS In the world of French fifteenth- and sixteenth-century theater, the Badin was not a specific character but rather a type of role that reappeared with various modifications in a host of short comic pieces, primarily farces, but also sotties and, to a lesser extent, morality plays. In some plays, characters are referred to solely as the Badin, as in the sottie La Farce moralle des Sobres Sots (The Moral Farce of the Sober Fools); in others, they also have first names, such as Robinet, Colinet, or Mahuet, diminutive name forms that evoke the smallness or limited intelligence of the character, for example, Fouquet in La Farce du Badin, de la Femme, et de la Chambriere (The Farce of the Badin, the Wife, and the Maid). Sometimes the Badin is not designated as such, but described as being dressed like a Badin. In La farce d'un mary jaloux (The farce of the jealous husband), the overly zealous servant Colinet is never called a Badin, but he is described as being dressed like one. At other times, there is no direct reference to the Badin, but the conduct of the character fits the pattern of other Badin figures, for example, the addlebrained Jenin in La Farce de Jenin, fdz de Hen (The Farce of Johnny, Son of Nothing). Whether he went under the name of the Badin or not, this fool character was always depicted as a social inferior. He was inevitably either a slow-witted valet, a doltish student, a cuckolded husband, or a country bumpkin (Mazouer, "Un personnage" 146). Despite his lowly rank, the Badin incites the other characters into action. It is he who sets the play into motion and provokes the laughter (Aubailly, "A propos" 6). In Le Tiers Livre, Rabelais states that the role of the Badin was given to the most talented and experienced of the actors in a company (37.550). To play the Badin meant that the performer had reached the upper echelon of his profession. This sentiment is echoed in La Farce du Bateleur (The Farce of the Montebank), in which the title character and his valet sing
The Badin
57
the praises of famous Badins past and present who are remembered not merely as street entertainers but as literary men. Even in sotties that feature other fool figures, it is the Badin who acts as the motor of the play, dominating these kindred spirits of merriment. In the Sobres Sots, the Badin is the center of attention, encircled by five sots (identified in this satirical work as henpecked husbands) who question him, in particular, about what distinguishes fous, sots, and the Badins from each other. The Badin holds forth like a mock teacher, categorizing both fous and sots into a halfdozen or so additional subgroups. For example, fous can be dangerous, joyful, subtle, great, impish, or scatterbrained. Though some of these distinctions may seem imprecise to us, they illustrate a characteristic late medieval attempt to understand and describe folly in all its many facets (Knight 80-81). Aubailly suggests that this play highlights the difference between the folly of the innocent simpleton, the Badin, and the clever fool, the sot (Le monologue 354). The Badin is depicted here as an outsider even among other fools. Though the sots listen to him, they also try to mock him, for he is the odd man out. La Farce des Troys Galons (The Farce of the Three Carefree Fellows) presents a similar situation, but here three galants interrogate a Badin named Naudet, a student who pretentiously mixes Latin expressions into his French. Naudet has had a dream in which the natural order has been reversed. In this dream, he first becomes pope and then God. To pass the time, the galants question him about his vision of paradise. It is described as the ideal heaven of a Badin, a place where the inhabitants are all consumed with eating and drinking and where articles of clothing—jackets, shoes, and most notably hats—grow on trees and bushes. Women are sometimes admitted, but all are rendered mute so as not to become an annoyance. This view of heaven highlights the traditional preoccupations of the Badin with wine and food as well as his perpetual desire for a hat other than his own bonnet. In this play, as in the Sobres Sots, though the galants tease the Badin, he directs the movement of the play. He is an outsider, a loner, but incapable of loneliness. His natural obliviousness to others, indeed to anything outside of his own immediate needs, liberates him from all sentimental attachments. It is clear from these plays that the Badin was recognized by the late medieval audience as a distinct type of fool. In the theater, all the fool characters dressed in strange outfits and were able to perform physical as well as verbal comedy, yet the Badin was unique. What distinguished him from the flock of other fool figures, such as the sot or the foul As suggested earlier, the Badin is portrayed as a naive, socially ignorant character. His is a genuine simplicity, like that of the title character in La Farce de Mahuet Badin, who is easily duped by Parisian merchants and does not even know how to extricate his hand from ajar. Neither can this Badin recognize or even suspect the individual who exposes and exaggerates his mistress's infidelity. This is similar to the deficiencies in the servant in La Farce du Badin qui se loue (The Farce of the Badin Who Sells His
58
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Services), a familiar plot device of the Badin repertory, especially when he appears as a servant. The Badin is an infantile fool, an adult whose social and intellectual development has been retarded. This is why, like a small child, he is always joyful and animated. He often sings, as the Badin servant does in La Farce de la Reformeresse (The Farce of the Reformer). The Badin is incapable of complex emotions and ideas. In the Troys Galans, the Badin's vision of paradise has little to do with a serious satire of the church or papal teaching; instead, it is a comic parody filled with charnel delights and farcical humor. The Badin is closer to nature than to society, and to the flesh than to the spirit. In many plays, he is accompanied by a cat, a domestic but independent animal whose disposition resembles that of his master. Like an animal, the Badin has no sense of social proprieties. In the very funny Jenin, filz de rien, a credulous son, who is willing to believe that he is the son of a jacket, asks his mother to hold a basin while he urinates in public. Supposedly his urine will enable the local soothsayer to determine the identity of his father. Jenin's desire to obtain this information as soon as possible outweighs any consideration of modesty. Though it is always a male role, the Badin is in many respects an asexual as well as an asocial figure. Despite his adult body, he has never matured, and like a small child, he thinks only of the immediate gratification of his desires (Mazouer, "Un personnage" 147). Others exist for him only as a way to satisfy his needs. For example, in La Farce de la Veuve (The Farce of the Widow), a widow decides to marry her servant Robinet Badin. She later has second thoughts about marrying beneath her station, but Robinet urges her to hurry lest the wedding roast get cold. He also beats his uncle, who tries to prevent the ceremony. Robinet cannot tolerate any delay in satisfying his wishes. He does not marry for love or romance; these words have no meaning for this child in a man's body. The Badin's puerility and natural spontaneity separate him from the other types of fools who walked on the late medieval stage. He was also the agent provocateur of the play, the character who propelled the action. Considering the importance of his function to the play, it was imperative that the public be able to recognize him from the onset. How were the spectators able to visually distinguish the Badin from the other fools? Though all wore distinctive clothing, the Badin's outfit was unique. In his epitaph for Jehan Serre, a famous comic actor of the early sixteenth century, the Renaissance poet Clement Marot provides a contemporary account of this costume: "a dirty shirt, the Forehead, Cheek, and Nose; covered completely with Flour, and topped by a baby's Cap, and a tall triumphant hat, / garnished with Capon feathers" (28-33, 107-108). These costume elements served as symbols as well as identifying markers; the baby's cap or beguin denoted the simplicity and immature mind of the Badin. As mentioned earlier, the Badin often tried to appropriate for himself a more impressive hat, often the bonnet of his mistress's lover, as in the farces of Badin qui se hue and the Retrait. His floured face functioned like a mask that
The Badin
59
hid the character's individuality and marginalized him from the community. In this isolation, the Badin possessed a freedom not enjoyed by the others, like that achieved by wearing a mask during the Carnival season. In addition to the fashion elements itemized in Marot's poem, the Badin also wore a hump or codpiece on the front of his body below the waist and sometimes an additional one on his back. The hump worn on the front evoked his male sexuality, an aspect that reinforced his link to the natural rather than to the spiritual world (Rousse 302-303). He also carried a writing case, an ecritoire, the emblematic accessory of the student. Like the codpiece, this ornament ironically suggested the impossible—here, the perversion of trying to educate an imbecile. In La farce de maistre Mymin qui va a la guerre (The farce of master Mimin who goes to war), Mimin is described as being attired like a Badin with a long jacket, a baby's bonnet, and a large writing case. Mimin is the failed student par excellence. All his education has led only to a foolish and pretentious display of faulty Latin. His studies have, if anything, made him less intelligent, distancing him from his original and natural state. In the morality play La Farce de Science et Asnerye (The Farce of Knowledge and Ignorance), the Badin is the clerk of the allegorical figure Anerie. Together these two gain the upper hand over Science and her clerk, their virtuous counterparts. The Badin decides to purchase a position as priest and fantasizes about wearing a new hat, a velvet one with a horned crown that touches the ground. This is one of the few morality plays that feature the Badin. Yet despite the serious intent of this play, the Badin remains an egotistical, carefree, ignorant figure throughout. The Badin was a creation of the theatrical culture of the late Middle Ages and as such could not be transposed intact to the classical age of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Certain elements of the Badin can be found in the comical creations of Moliere, Marivaux, and Beaumarchais, but not the child-fool in all his glory. This is due in part to the conscious rejection of medieval theater in the second half of the sixteenth century, a period of classical aspirations and strident religious partisanship (Rousse 303-304). In his article "Un ancestre de Figaro: Le Badin Naudet dans la farce du Gentilhomme," JeanCharles Pay en compares a medieval Badin servant with Naudet, the rebellious Badin created by Beaumarchais in the classical age. Though Naudet appears moronic in the beginning, he gets the better of his lord, who is having an illicit affair with the peasant's wife. Like other Badin valets, he manages to ruin the couple's fun by his constant, unwanted interruptions. Furthermore, when the opportunity arises, Naudet makes love to his master's wife, proving himself to be a more ardent lover than his social superior. All this activity does not, however, deter him from consuming a considerable amount of food and wine at his master's expense. In this farce, Naudet manifests all the well-known appetites of the Badin, both culinary and sexual. It is only by chance that he can take advantage of his lord. Unlike Figaro, the Badin does not rebel against social injustice and the privileges of birth; instead, he merely seeks a return to "natural" order. It is his master
60
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
who must decide whether he wants to be Naudet or the lord of the manor, because he cannot be both. Naudet is fated by his essence to remain socially unaware. He remains a child of his time. CRITICAL RECEPTION In the theater of the late Middle Ages, the Badin generally acted as the protagonist, stirring others into action by his inability to appreciate the social codes of those around him. Thus audiences recognized him as a significant, albeit thickheaded, figure. He represented natural man, an amoral creature preoccupied with his own desires to the total exclusion of everything and everyone else. Though he remained an outsider, he drew his meaning from reacting with the community, which is why, as a fool figure, he appeared most frequently in domestic farces. A buoyant childlike being, the Badin did not expose the wrongs of society; instead, he represented the uncivilized being in all those who watched him on stage. Prizing the pleasures of the mouth over those of the mind, the Badin represented a totally unrepressed psyche, a purely instinctual life force. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Collections of Plays Due, Viollet le, and Anatole de Montaiglon, Ancien Theatre frangois. eds. 10 vols. Paris: Jannet, 1854-1857. [ATF] Beck, Jonathan, ed. Theatre et propagande aux debuts de la Reforme, six pieces polemiques du Recueil La Valliere. Geneva: Slatkine, 1986. [Beck] Cohen, Gustave, ed. Recueil de farces francaises inedites du xve sieck. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1949. Fournier, Edouard, ed. Le Theatre frangais avant la Renaissance. Paris: Laplace, & Sanchez and Cie, 1872. [Fournier] Philipot, Emmanuel, ed. Six farces, normandes du Recueila La Valliere. Rennes: Plihon, 1939. [Philipot] Picot, Emile. Recueil general des sotties. 3 vols. Paris: Sirmin-Didot, 1902-1912. Tissier, Andre, ed. Recueil de farces (1450-1550). 10 vols. Geneva: Droz, 1988. [Tissier]
Plays Cited in the Text La La La La La La La
Farce Farce Farce Farce Farce Farce Farce
du Badin, de la Femme, et de la Chambriere. ATF 1:271-288. du Badin qui se loue. Tissier 4:237-269. du Bateleur. Fournier 323^52. du Gentilhomme. 1:250-269. de Jenin, filz de rien. ATF 1:351-371. de Maistre Mymin qui va a la guerre. Cohen 27-33. de Mahuet Badin. ATF 2:80-89.
The Badin La La La La La La La
Farce Farce Farce Farce Farce Farce Farce
61
d' un mary jaloux. ATF 1:128-144. du Retrait. Tissier 1:179-242. de la Reformeresse. Picot 3:149-168. de Science et Asnerye. Beck 147-177. moralle des Sobres Sots. Picot 3:45-77. des Troys Galans. Picot 3:325-344. de la Veuve. Philipot. 153-186.
Secondary Sources Arden, Heather. Fools' Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Aubailly, Jean-Claude. "A propos du badin, theatre et mythologie populaire." Treteaux 4 (May 1982): 5-14. . Le monologue, le dialogue, et la sottie: Essai sur quelques genres dramatiques de la fin du moyen age et du debut du seizieme siecle. Paris: Champion, 1976. Knight, Alan E. Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983. Lewicka, Halina. La langue et le style du theatre comique frangais des XVe et XVIe siecles: La derivation. Paris: Klincksieck, 1974. Marot, Clement. Oeuvres poetiques completes. Ed. Gerard Defaux. Classiques Gamier. Vol. 1. Paris: Bordas, 1990. Mazouer, Charles. "Un personnage de la farce medievale: Le naif." Revue d'Histoire du Theatre 24 (1972): 144-161. . Le Personnage du naif dans le theatre comique du moyen age a Marivaux. Paris: Klincksieck, 1979. Payen, Jean-Charles. "Un ancestre de Figaro: Le Badin Naudet dans la farce du Gentilhomme." In Melanges offerts a Georges Couton. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1981. 15-22. Petit de Julleville, Louis. La Comedie et les Moeurs en France au moyen age. Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1886. Rabelais, Francois. Le Tiers Livre. In Oeuvres completes, ed. Pierre Jourda. Classiques Gamier. Vol. 1. Paris: Gamier Freres, 1962. Rousse, Michel. "Discussions" following "La Farce jusqu'a Moliere." Cahiers de VAssociation Internationale des Etudes Frangaises 26 (1974): 302-304. Swain, Barbara. Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. New York: Columbia UP, 1932.
Lucille Ball
(United States: 1911-1989)
Bruce Henderson BACKGROUND Lucille Ball was born on August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York. Her first few years were spent in Montana and Michigan (unless otherwise noted, all biographical information is drawn from Kathleen Brady's biography); after her father's death in 1915, her mother, Desiree, brought her back to Jamestown, where she was raised by her grandparents and her mother, who briefly remarried. Ball was an active community performer as a child and teenager in local productions, and in 1926, she left high school and went to New York City, where she entered the famed Minton-Anderson School. In later years, she claimed that she was imitated by the school's brightest student of the time, Bette Davis. She did not last long at the school and returned to Jamestown briefly. After a few months back at Jamestown High School, she went back to New York City, where she worked as a model and a showgirl, being cast in a road company of Florenz Ziegfeld's production of Rio Rita. After one of the other chorus girls dropped out, Ball was engaged to become a "Goldwyn Girl" in the 1933 film of Eddie Cantor's Roman Scandals in Hollywood and made brief appearances in two other films that year as well. This led to a number of other roles (for a discussion of such roles, see "Description and Analysis"). In 1940, while filming the Rodgers and Hart musical Too Many Girls, she met the Cuban musician and actor Desi Arnaz; they married later that year. The marriage was, by all accounts, both passionate and stormy; as early as 1944, Ball filed for divorce, though ultimately she withdrew the petition. Nineteen fifty-one was a significant year in Ball's life. In July, she gave birth
Lucille Ball
63
to the first of her two children, Lucie; on October 15, "I Love Lucy" premiered. Her second child, Desi IV (also known as Desi, Jr.), was born the following year; Ball's pregnancy was paralleled in a well-publicized onscreen pregnancy for her alter ago, Lucy Ricardo. "I Love Lucy" (including its incarnation as "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour") ran until 1961, the same year she and Arnaz finally divorced. She remarried, this time to entertainer Gary Morton, in November 1961; this marriage lasted until her death, some twenty-eight years later. With the divorce from Arnaz came the reconfiguring of her series, and ' 'The Lucy Show" was retitled "Here's Lucy" when her children joined her and the plot and characters were changed to accommodate their presence. This series ran for another thirteen years. A final show, "Life with Lucy," reuniting her with Gale Gordon, her costar from radio days as well as from "The Lucy Show," lasted half a season. She won the Emmy Award twice, once for "I Love Lucy" in 1953, once for "The Lucy Show" in 1967. Throughout her television career, she occasionally made films. In the 1950s, these were principally with her husband, but also included appearances with Bob Hope. She made fewer films in the last few decades of her life, but had a notable popular success in Yours, Mine, and Ours, a forerunner of the series "The Brady Bunch." Her last theatrical release, Mame, was a critical failure, as was her final made-for-television film, "Stone Pillow." She died of heart failure in 1989.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS While Lucille Ball is perhaps best known to contemporary audiences through the persona of "Lucy"—whether Lucy Ricardo of "I Love Lucy" or Lucy Carmichael of "The Lucy Show"—the conniving yet always childlike and lovable redhead, her life and career suggest a more complex set of roles and relationships. A tough businesswoman offscreen, she and her first husband, Desi Arnaz, made their production company, Desilu, into a major entertainment corporation. Similarly, while the onscreen roles with which she is most frequently associated depict her as subordinate to the men in her life, in her private life, both in her marriage to Arnaz and in her second marriage to entertainer Gary Morton, she displayed an iron fist as well as a genuine vulnerability. Her politics were similarly complex: during the McCarthy witchhunts of the 1950s, she was accused and quickly exonerated of Communist Party membership in the 1930s; at the same time, interviews with her in the 1960s and to the end of her life described her sense of public and private morality in terms that were staunchly conservative, bordering on the prudish. But, her offscreen life aside, it is for the multiple, intersecting, in Bakhtinian terms dialogic set of roles for which Lucille Ball remains in the world's imagination as a premiere female clown. She was also an actress of variable but at times potent forcefulness: while the subtle shadings of realistic characterization
64
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
were rarely her forte, she had a presence equally commanding on the large screen and the small. The stages of her career, which overlap and intersect, can be divided into three parts: the first, the cynical showgirl; the second, the "daffy" woman-child; the third, the dowager actress. While she is most clearly a clown in the middle period, which was the lengthiest, it is important to understand this period within the context of the continuities and discontinuities of all three. In a sense, each stage also reflects the historical moments and the cultural concerns and anxieties of midcentury America.
The Cynical Showgirl The first period may be seen as beginning with Ball's own experiences as a showgirl in New York City, initiated by her dismissal from John Murray Anderson's drama school in 1926 and her determination to remain in the city, working both as a chorine and as a model. As to many such young women, Hollywood beckoned with the birth of talking pictures and the transient popularity of backstage musicals and working-girl comedies. She had her breakthrough role in 1937's Stage Door, an adaptation of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's stage success. Stage Door is a backstage comedy-drama, set in a boardinghouse for young women in the arts (the Footlights Club, modeled on such institutions as the Seven Arts), where unchaperoned young women from the provinces could pursue their artistic careers with their parents' concerns over their safety at least nominally quelled, though, as the play and the film suggest, many young women spent many nights away from the protective confines of the house. The film starred Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers in its major roles, but Ball was memorable in the role of Judy Canfield, an aspiring actress who spends most of her screen time cynically observing the desperate attempts of most of the girls to get cast in any role and in her own preparations for dates with unsuitable hicks, typically from her hometown of Seattle, who will at least provide her with a good steak dinner, which she can then share with the other girls when she gets home. The wages of such a life are inevitable: the film ends with the girls showering Judy with rice as she tearfully leaves the Footlights Club to go home to marry one of her "dates." Here and in other similar roles in the 1930s and 1940s, Ball plays the role of the comic, ironic figure who comments on the action, remaining somewhat outside of it. She is not unlike Shakespeare's fools in this role, in that her humor is used to draw our attention to the incongruities and inequities of the world, rather than primarily to entertain, as will be the case in her more clearly clownish period in the 1950s and 1960s. Roles in such films as Dance, Girl, Dance, directed by Dorothy Azner, one of the few women directing at a major studio in this period, solidified this image of Ball as the darkly comic woman, punished
Lucille Ball
65
in one way or another for her icy distance from the domain of emotion and "womanly" feeling. This phase reaches its apogee in her role in The Big Street (1942) an adaptation of a Damon Runyon story, "Little Pinks," in which she plays Gloria, an opportunistic, materialistic inheritor of the 1930s "golddigger" tradition, a showgirl who at first spurns the attentions of a lowly busboy and then learns the meaning of authentic love when he cares for her after she has been crippled after being pushed down a flight of stairs by a jilted lover. Nonetheless, the moral algebra of the period required that she die at the end, her spiritual salvation apparently not enough to outweigh her earlier commodification of her sexuality. According to both Ball and her critics, this was her strongest dramatic performance and gave her hopes that she would then move into the kind of career developed by such former chorus girls as Ginger Rogers, whose success was guaranteed by her Academy Award in 1940 for the soapily dramatic Kitty Foyle. But this was not to happen for Ball (Brady 128). Studio economics and politics left her abandoned, priced out of her former roles, yet not high enough in the hierarchy of the female star system to get a chance at better roles.
The "Daffy" Woman-Child: "Lucy" As Ball was advancing into middle age, her image needed a change: she could no longer be the tough chorine nor a woman in the work force, since after World War II suspicions grew that such women were taking away jobs from returning male GIs who, in the rhetoric of the times, "needed" the employment more than former housewives or single "girls." Consequently, the most hospitable place for a performer like Ball, who never entirely moved into serious drama, was the domestic comedy. Initially in the medium of radio, but most prominently in television, Ball created the "Lucy" character with whom she will forever be identified. On radio, in "My Favorite Husband," she costarred with Richard Denning; it was only when the show was translated into the relatively new genre of television situation comedy that Lucy and Ricky became a staple of Monday nights on CBS. It is important to note that the shift of "husband" from Denning to Arnaz not only created an interesting "onscreen/offscreen" doubling (audiences could ponder whether the dynamics of the couple onscreen mimicked their offscreen ones), but it also created an intercultural dynamic, with Lucy representing an American proletarianism—the clown as housewife, the clown as "worker"— and Desi/Ricky representing the immigrant, "hot-blooded" Latin, with his strictly patriarchal view of the marriage contract (Brady 194). Lucy's character, which has often been reduced to the scatterbrained woman-child, spent as much time conniving to get the chance to perform, typically in Ricky's nightclub shows, as she did bungling her housework. In a sense, she and her compatriot Ethel Mertz, who was also her landlady, played by yet another female clown,
66
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Vivian Vance, may be seen as always attempting to subvert the economic system that imprisoned them, whether it be by trying some get-rich-quick scheme or by working in a Chaplinesque chocolate factory. Lucy is a trickster and, like most tricksters, is the source of her own comic undoing; at the same time, one could also argue that Ricky's paternalism, which is symptomatic of midcentury American culture itself, colludes with Lucy's personality to produce the comic punishment she always receives by fade-out. While elements of the cynical showgirl remain in the Lucy persona of "I Love Lucy" (particularly in some of Lucy Ricardo's more biting comments on her husband and his paternalistically tyrannical ways), what is most memorable in the development of the figure is the textualization of the female body as physical and sensual clown. The most canonical episodes of "I Love Lucy" are those involving Lucy's getting herself into physically embarrassing, even at times dangerous, situations, worthy of such silent male comics as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Whereas many earlier screen female comics depended for their clowning primarily on verbal wit (though, obviously, some, like Fanny Brice and Marie Dressier, combined verbal and physical humor), the "Lucy" figure was the first to engage her body fully as a subject, rather than an object, of comedy: she was the one who acted in ways that led to her stomping grapes in a huge wine vat, she was the one who attempted to steal John Wayne's footprints from Grauman's Chinese Theatre, she was the one who almost got her putty nose burned off in a scene with William Holden. Her body verges on the grotesque in these episodes, and Ball discovered or rediscovered a talent for mimicry and cartoonish facial expressions that would become iconic (such as her famous baby's "bawl," which ended many an episode), but her sensuality that drew the attention of directors and producers in her showgirl years provided a counterbalance to this exaggeration of the female body. The tenor of the series always suggested that Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had an active and happy sex life, and romance was key to their relationship. This was perhaps concretized nowhere more vividly than in her onscreen pregnancy, in which, for the first time, a pregnant woman came into the living rooms of millions of Americans and was treated as a vital, hardy figure: her fecundity, despite the censor's requirements that circumlocutionary language (such as "enceinte" or "expecting") be used, was naturalized and celebrated. When the Ball-Arnaz marriage ended in 1961, so did the onscreen partnership. Because of public morality of the time, the Lucy figure needed once again to be translated into an "appropriate" middle-aged, solitary figure: that is, not a divorcee, but a widow, although ironically, Vivian Vance's character, because she was only a supporting one, could be a divorcee. "The Lucy Show" ran for several successful seasons, with the male-female tension and comedy provided in the workplace by the relationship between Lucy Carmichael, a secretary, and her boss, Mr. Mooney, played by the original choice for Fred Mertz, Gale Gordon. Mr. Mooney proved just as tyrannical as Ricky Ricardo, this time in an even more curious layering of social roles, as "boss" and as "trustee" of Mrs.
Lucille Ball
67
Carmichael's small "allowance," presumably set up by her late husband, who knew that women could not handle money unassisted. While Lucy usually was hoist with her own petard by the end of the show, there was a subtle revenge in the physical slapstick—drenched suit or pie in the face—that inevitably befell Mr. Mooney along the way. While from time to time Lucy Carmichael had a date, the sexuality that was always near the surface of Lucy Ricardo seemed diminished, also in consonance with American views of middle-aged female sexual appetite. In a sense, the Lucy figure invented in "I Love Lucy" continued in various manifestations throughout "The Lucy Show" and even had one last gasp in "Life with Lucy," her last attempt at a sitcom, also costarring Gale Gordon, in which both principals seemed so physically disabled that the slapstick became a cruel comment on the deterioration of the clown's body, a betrayal of the source of its humor. That Lucille Ball maintained and transformed the clown figure of "Lucy" through a number of different manifestations until the last short-lived series, each reflecting a different stage in the clown's life and in the concerns of American culture, is a testament to its power.
Dowager Actress It is a theatrical cliche that every (male) clown longs to play Hamlet or Lear; it is probably equally true that female clowns long to show a more conventionally feminine and dramatic side to their art. In the case of Lucille Ball, this desire exhibited itself primarily through occasional films she made after ' T Love Lucy" completed its run. A number of these films, such as The Facts of Life and Critic's Choice, were made with Bob Hope and usually featured Ball as a more sophisticated version of the career-aspiring housewife. In a sense, one can see these films as attempts to combine the cynical showgirl and the daffy woman-child. Ball's last two major forays into feature-length film and television movie show her trying to recapture the glamour of her youth and the comic grittiness of her middle age. The first, Mame, an adaptation of Jerry Herman's stage musicalization of Auntie Mame, was critically lambasted. Not only was Ball not up to the role musically, but she was unable to dance at an appropriate tempo; the film has the pace of a dinosaur on the way to the La Brea tar pits. Her brand of humor was also incongruous with the sharper and edgier wit of Patrick Dennis's eponymous heroine. It did not help that her leading man was Robert Preston, who ably demonstrated what musical comedy acting and singing meant. Worse, in the supporting role of Vera Charles, who functions something like an Ethel Mertz of Mame, was the original cast member, Beatrice Arthur, whose blend of bitchiness and campiness made Ball's style seem even more out of place. Her final dramatic performance, the made-for-television film "Stone Pillow," had the potential of a breakthrough. In it, Ball played Florabelle (named after her grandmother), a homeless woman facing the urban streets with conviction,
68
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
eccentricity, and fierceness. To her credit, Ball gave it her all, but audiences too accustomed to laughing at the grotesqueries of Ball's distorted body as "Lucy" were unable to make the transition to seeing how blurry the line between the comic and tragic grotesque could be, a challenge they met with more success when Robin Williams played a similar kind of role in The Fisher King several years later. Ball was simply unable to achieve any of the subtlety or subtext that might have made her homeless woman the combination of Lear and his Fool the script seemed to aim for. CRITICAL RECEPTION It is difficult to assess the critical reception of a figure like Lucille Ball or her "Lucy" character, partly because she (they?) are so recent and also because, given the popular media through which she has been received, what constitutes a critical community is contestable. If such things as television ratings and awards such as the Emmys are one measure of critical reception, then Ball's work as a clown has been highly successful indeed. Similarly, if influence is a measure of critical impact, if not of reception per se, then there is no question that Ball's place in the history of clowning is secure. While, as suggested, there were earlier female clowns, such as Fanny Brice and others from the music-hall and vaudeville tradition, it is not overstating the case to say that just as Hemingway saw all American literature coming from Huckleberry Finn, what it meant and means to be a "funny woman" in American culture comes from "I Love Lucy" and her "sisters" and "cousins." The fact that so many later situation comedies such as "The Nanny" or "Murphy Brown" either refer overtly to Lucy in such often quoted lines as "Lucy, you got some 'splainin to do!" or to specific episodes such as Lucy's pregnancy announcement, or that they covertly mimic conventions from the show as in the "buddy" comedies of "Laverne and Shirley" and "Kate and Allie," suggests that "Lucy" has become canonical. While most of these series use "Lucy" in a nostalgic, even parodic way, often highlighting the chasm between the sexual politics of the 1950s and the present day, it is clear that "Lucy" is the starting point for whatever form contemporary female clowning takes. More formal academic criticism of "Lucy" has been, up to this point, slimmer. Writing on Lucille Ball and "Lucy" has typically been either biographical, in some cases bordering on hagiographic, or part of larger surveys, either of situation comedies or of women in television, television comedy in particular. Of the various biographies, Kathleen Brady's Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball is the most recent and most complete and offers the most critically complex evaluation of Ball's career. Ball's recently discovered memoirs have been auctioned for publication and should offer future biographers and scholars more material upon which to base popular and scholarly discussion of Ball and her career. In scholarly surveys of television situation comedy in general and of women
Lucille Ball
69
in situation comedy in particular, Ball and her "Lucy" creation have usually been situated in predictable ways, as products of postwar attitudes toward women in the work force and women in the home and the conflict between these. In addition, critics such as David Marc situate "I Love Lucy" in the tradition of the tension between the domestic comedy and the work-force comedy, seeing the Ricardos' relationship to show business as the progenitor of more sophisticated comedies, such as "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Virtually every history of television points to some of the technical advances made by Desilu and "I Love Lucy" as ground-breaking. Of particular note is the use of three cameras. Whatever reservations such critics may have about the ideology "Lucy" (re)presents, there is never any question that Ball broke new ground in opening possibilities for the female clown as subject of physical comedy rather than as foil or recipient of action or wit. In this regard, Lucille Ball was a revolutionary artist and "Lucy" a radical characterization. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Selected Films of Lucille Ball Roman Scandals. United Artists, 1933. Stage Door. RKO, 1937. The Affairs of Annabel. RKO, 1938. Room Service. RKO, 1938. Dance, Girl, Dance. RKO, 1940. Too Many Girls. RKO, 1940. The Big Street. RKO, 1942. Best Foot Forward. RKO, 1943. DuBarry Was a Lady. RKO, 1943. Miss Grant Takes Richmond. Columbia, 1949. Fancy Pants. Paramount, 1950. The Fuller Brush Girl. Columbia, 1950. The Long, Long Trailer. MGM, 1954. Forever Darling. MGM, 1956. The Facts of Life. United Artists, 1960. Critic's Choice. Warner Brothers, 1963. Yours, Mine, and Ours. United Artists, 1968. Mame. Warner Brothers, 1974.
Selected Television Series and Other Appearances of Lucille Ball "I Love Lucy" (also known as "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour"). CBS, 1951-1961. "The Lucy Show" (also known as "Here's Lucy"). CBS, 1961-1974. "Stone Pillow." CBS, 1985. "Life with Lucy." ABC, 1986.
70
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Secondary Sources Andrews, Bart. Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel: The Story of "I Love Lucy." New York: Dutton, 1976. Andrews, Bart, and Thomas Watson. Loving Lucy: An Illustrated Tribute to Lucille Ball. London: Robson, 1980. Brady, Kathleen. Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: Hyperion, 1994. Gregory, James. The Lucille Ball Story. New York: New American Library, 1974. Higham, Charles. Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Forever Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1986. Parish, James Robert, and William T. Leonard. "Lucille Ball." In The Funsters. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1979. 75-85. Sanders, Coyne Steven, and Tom Gilbert. Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. New York: Morrow, 1993. Unterbrink, Mary. Funny Women: American Comediennes, 1860-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987.
Jean-Louis Barrault (France: 1910-1994)
Barry John Capella Jean-Louis Barrault, relatively unknown in America, ranks as a true twentiethcentury French Renaissance figure. As mime, speaking actor, director, and theater manager, he led a long and distinguished career in his native France for more than fifty years. Despite such a lengthy tenure, he never lost his enthusiasm for the theater and he expressed his love for it eloquently in Reflections on the Theatre. In that work, he speaks of his yearning to maintain "those waves of feelings that engulf us, those virgin emotions that make us almost want to faint'' (1). Throughout his career, he never lost that yearning.
BACKGROUND Initially, however, nothing in his family background would have prepared him or the world for such a calling. He was born in the French suburb of Le Vesinet on September 8, 1910, to his chemist father, Jules Barrault, and his mother, Marcelle Helene. His father fought in World War I and died of typhus when Barrault was eight; his mother remarried two years later. Barrault's memoirs, Memories for Tomorrow, recounts an episode during the courtship of his mother by Louis Martin that suggests the embryonic actor struggling to emerge from a bourgeois existence. While Martin talked with Marcelle Helene Barrault, the young son listened beneath a table. Having recently seen Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik, he imagined himself under a tent in the Sahara where he conversed with a Bedouin chieftain. Barrault's acting debut may be dated from the tender age of ten (22). His education at College Chaptal proved to be a happy one, "the best of
72
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
games" that he would not miss (26). In the summer, the family held reunions at Beauregard, where the young Barrault most enjoyed the winegrowers' life. In his memoirs, he speaks of the vitners' love for the country. In that love, one becomes another person, an analogy that Barrault applies to the life of the artist. After graduating with a bachelor's degree from Ecole du Louvre, Paris, he studied at the Theatre de I'Atelier under Charles Dullin, an actor whom Barrault revered as "my master." During his apprenticeship with Dullin, Barrault gradually discovered the love for theater that became his life. When he debuted in a small part in Volpone in 1931, he also discovered stage fright, which remained his lifelong companion. His formal association with Dullin lasted four years; throughout his life he always thought of Dullin as his second father. At the Atelier, Etienne Decroux, a fellow actor, encouraged Barrault to explore the world of pantomime. Barrault pursued his interest in mime and discovered Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. With regard to this latter experience, Barrault underwent an epiphany and ecstatically recounted that the novel "was a revelation: a tearing of the veil, a kind of vision, a window opening in the mountain mists to reveal the whole horizon" (Memories 66). Director-actor Barrault achieved considerable success with Autour d'une mere, his adaptation of Faulkner's novel. More important, he earned the enthusiastic endorsement of Antonin Artaud, Jacques Pre vert, and others involved in Parisian theater life. Shortly after, Marc Allegret, Andre Gide's nephew, engaged Barrault for the film Les beaux jours (1935). Thus began the long relationship between theater and film in Barrault's professional life. In 1936, he founded Le Greniers des Augustins in a building on rue des Grands-Augustins where Picasso later painted Guernica. Productions of Numantia (Cervantes) and Hunger (Hamsun) were presented in 1937 and 1939, respectively. During this time, he had formed a growing attachment with Madeleine Renaud, renowned in both French film and theater. A recipient of the Grand Prix du Cinema (Maria Chapdelaine), she also reigned, to use Barrault's expression, as "one of the queens of the Comedie Francaise" (Memories 90). In August 1939, France instituted a general mobilization in anticipation of war with Germany. Barrault served briefly until the surrender of France. At that point in his life, he faced the prospect of an uncertain future and subsequent separation from Madeleine Renaud. He had married her on June 14, 1940, the first anniversary of his mother's death. Without a secure income and with no foreseeable acting career, Barrault thought that he might be forced to leave her and seek his fortune away from Paris. Deliverance arrived on August 16, 1940, in the form of a contract with the Comedie Francaise under Jacques Copeau. His six-year association as both actor and director proved to be both challenging and rewarding artistically, particularly when one remembers that the Nazis occupied France at this time. This period also witnessed a successful professional collaboration between Barrault and his wife, one that continued after their departure from the company. His association with the Comedie Francaise proved to be a turning point in
Jean-Louis Barrault
73
his life. Barrault's career flourished, and his classical repertoire encompassed Le Cid, Hamlet, and Phedre. Of the last work, Barrault proclaimed enthusiastically, ' The study of Phedre was to mark me for ever: here is the alchemical elixir of the secrets of our art" (Memories 120). Jacques Copeau had also engaged Barrault "to bring in new blood" (115), and in 1942/1943 the Comedie Francaise staged an adaptation of Claudel's Le soulier de satin. Somehow during this period of the Occupation, despite 10:30 P.M. curfews, censors, and hostile proGerman newspapers, the play was staged and seemed, according to Barrault's memoirs, to rekindle France's national pride and spirit. With such an active career on the stage, it would be easy to overlook the breadth of Barrault's film career. Beginning in 1935, Barrault appeared in more than forty films over a span of fifty-three years. Apart from his debut in the aforementioned Les beaux jours, his performances included Drole de drame (1937), La symphonie fantastique (1942), Les enfants du paradis (1945), La ronde (1950), The Longest Day (1962), and La nuit de Varennes (1981). Despite such a long career, however, Barrault the actor is forever identified with one of the finest films ever produced, Marcel Carne's Les enfants du paradis (1945), in which he played the famous nineteenth-century European mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who had immortalized the role of Pierrot. Interestingly, Barrault chose to portray the Pierrot figure again in the play Le marchand d'habits, a work in which Pierrot murders an elderly man, is haunted by his victim's ghost, and descends into hell with him. It was a role that Deburau detested and eventually retired after only seven performances. After World War II, Barrault and Madeleine Renaud embarked on yet another adventure. After twenty years, she left the Comedie Francaise and with her husband founded La Compagnie Renaud-Barrault at the Theatre Marigny, where they remained for ten years. Their productions included Barrault's collaboration with Andre Gide on an adaptation of Hamlet (which overcame traditional French hostility to all works Shakespearean) and on Kafka's Le proces (The Trial), Aeschylus's Oresteia, Claudel's Partage de midi and Christophe Colomb with music by Darius Milhaud, Cocteau's Bacchus, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, among others. The company's willingness to present such a wide range of works eventually earned it an international reputation for quality and innovation. Of the fifty-four works given during this period, Barrault offered only three pantomimes, Baptiste, La fontaine de jouvence, and Suites d'une course, a dearth that he attributed to the lack of good subjects and its "ill-defined" nature as a genre. His failure to secure new subject matter for pantomime, especially works that featured Baptiste, deeply disappointed Barrault professionally and personally. However, for his production of Baptiste he engaged a young Marcel Marceau, whose slimness and flexibility seemed more suited for the part. The mid-1950s saw an exodus from the Theatre Marigny and associations with three theaters, Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, the Palais-Royal, and eventually L'Odeon-Theatre de France, where he was named director. One of Barrault's greatest triumphs was Palais-Royal's staging of Offenbach's La vie parisienne.
74
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
In addition to offering such traditional works, Barrault continued to invigorate theater and actively sought out promising new works and playwrights. At L'Odeon-Theatre de France, for instance, Barrault oversaw productions of Beaumarchais's Le barbier de Seville and Racine's Andromaque. He also introduced to the theater world important new productions of Behan (The Hostage), Genet (Les paravents), Ionesco (Rhinoceros), and Beckett (Oh! Les beaux jours). Barrault was especially proud of Beckett's work: "For all of us Les Beaux Jours was a red letter day. The true personality of the Theatre de France was asserting itself" (Memories 290). With these critical successes, Barrault agreed to manage Theatre des Nations and merged it with L'Odeon-Theatre de France. He attracted avant-garde and international companies, including Noh and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as companies from Germany, the USSR, Poland, and England. Although not all of his productions were well received, Barrault took pride in his productions of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine, and SaintExupery. His theatrical interests also fostered a friendship with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. In 1957-1958, he directed Leigh in Duel of Angels, Christopher Fry's adaptation of Giraudoux's Pour Lucrece; ten years later, he offered London Partage de midi, Billetdoux's II faut passer par les nuages, and Le barbier de Seville. He returned to his native France and soon found himself in the midst of political upheaval that eventually led to his ouster from L'Odeon-Theatre de France. The student occupation of and subsequent vandalism of the theater, as well as the wanton destruction of costumes, undermined the confidence that Andre Malraux, minister of state in charge of cultural affairs, had in Barrault. On August 28, 1968, Barrault was dismissed from his position. One month later, he had secured a position at the Elysee-Montmartre and was busily working on a production of Rabelais. Three months later, Barrault enjoyed a huge critical and popular success; indeed, on opening night he saw a theater with eleven hundred filled seats, as well as five to six hundred standing-room audience members. The play continued to sell out and eventually went on national and international tours to great acclaim. Barrault's later years were characteristically active. He returned to the directorship of L'Odeon-Theatre de France. Later, he began a fruitful association with the Theatre d'Orsay from 1974 to 1981. His last base was a mobile theater, the Theatre du Rond Point, where he presented both revivals and new plays. Some of his productions during this period included Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra (1974), Les nuits de Paris (1976), and L'amour de Famour (1981). The last production featured works by Apulee, La Fontaine, and Moliere. Later the Theatre du Rond Point was renamed Theatre Renaud-Barrault. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Barrault continued his love affair with the theater and established himself (with his wife) as an actor-director of extraordinary talent and vision. He retired from the world on January 23, 1994.
Jean-Louis Barrault
75
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Despite Barrault's long career, he never forgot that Death would always be the last player that he would meet on this world's stage. Because he was acutely aware of his own mortality, every gesture and action in his mime roles became a defense against his death. To delay the inevitable, Barrault utilized every part of being—visceral, sexual, nervous, and intellectual—in this lifelong titanic battle. Through the power of imagination, he created a reality that spoke eloquently of and to the inherent nobility and grandeur that define the human experience. In his performances, Barrault was especially admired for the fluidity of his body, a source of ever-flowing music on stage. He was equally comfortable with dress and undress. In 1935, he and his fellow actors shocked audiences by appearing nearly naked in Autour d'une mere. Ten years later, he created his immortal portrayal of Deburau and wore the traditional white loose-flowing costume with black skullcap that Deburau had chosen for his art. Barrault was also a noted dancer, which contributed to the lyricism and grace of his performances. Last, he understood the powerful statement that rigidity can make, especially in a work that dealt with Death, such as Maladie—agonie—mort. Rather than surrender to the forces that assail the psyche relentlessly, Barrault's art reaffirmed the endless potentialities of will and being that can, albeit temporarily, keep Death at bay. "My life is an execution. My conduct will therefore be a struggle against death, against the clock, against time. A single watchword must be issued in this inner world of the body: to delay the hour of surrender, to delay the 'moment of truth' " (Dorcy 92). Despite Barrault's achievements on stage, the public still associates him primarily with film, and specifically with the single portrayal of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, also known as Baptiste and Jean Baptiste, in Les enfants du paradis (1945), "frequently cited as a singular illustration of pantomimic art on film" (Thomas 68). Ironically, Jacques Tati was Marcel Carne's first choice for the role. Barrault gradually overcame the director's resistance, and he created the pale, yearning Deburau of romantic imagination. One of the truly great performances in film history, Barrault's portrayal of Deburau in Les enfants du paradis is definitive. We must note, however, that Deburau's characterizations of Pierrot in the nineteenth century varied considerably from those portrayed in Carne's film masterpiece a century later. Barrault's wan, moonstruck, tragic Pierrot probably reflects Barrault's romanticized concept of the mime and his many roles. Jean-Gaspard Deburau was born on July 31, 1796, in Bohemia, the son of Phillippe Germain Deburau, a weaver, tightrope artist, and Austrian army recruit, and his wife Katherine. The family led a nomadic actors' existence, and young Jean-Gaspard, seemingly the least talented of his theatrical family, endured the ridicule of the audience and the wrath of his father. This wrath figures prominently in Carne's film. Travel brought the family to Paris's Theatre des Funambules, which engaged all of them.
76
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Eventually, substituting for a fired actor, the clumsy Baptiste played the clown Pierrot, a role he never relinquished. Critics agreed that his facial appearance and his gestures distinguished his portrayal from all predecessors. Deburau's Pierrot underwent numerous refinements and alterations, but still the character remained what he had been in commedia dell'arte and comic theater in general: servant, schemer, hedonist, and occasional criminal. To facilitate his movements, Deburau adopted a loose-fitting costume; to accent his face, he hid his hair under a tight-fitting black cap. A representative of the common people, les enfants du paradis, Deburau's Pierrot spoke directly to them of their foibles, dreams, and aspirations. In 1836, an episode occurred that threatened his career and freedom: he killed a nineteen-year-old apprentice who accosted him and his wife. At his trial, crowds packed the courtroom to hear the sound of his voice and to cheer his acquittal. This is the episode that inspired Barrault to suggest to Carne a film based on the life of Deburau. As previously mentioned, Barrault's own interest in mime can be traced directly to the influence of Etienne Decroux when both were at the Theatre de I'Atelier. In Reflections on the Theatre, Barrault speaks of the transformation that he underwent because of mime: "What treasures we unearthed! Mime rapidly became one of my passions. It will always be one of my passions" (29). He had also hurried to the theater to hear Chaplin's voice in the movies, and gradually Barrault "began to associate Chariot with the Deburau anecdote and its implications" (Turk 220). About the time that Barrault conceived of a show that "would contrast silent acting with talking acting" (220), a chance meeting in the late summer of 1942 with Marcel Carne and Jacques Pre vert in Nice allowed him to realize that dream. Carne and Prevert had just suffered the rejection of their script for another film. Seeing Barrault, they asked him if he had any ideas for another script. When he suggested that they "put the story of a mime into a talking film . . ., for example Deburau and Frederick Lemaitre'' (a nineteenth-century romantic actor), film history was made (Memories 151). Carne and Prevert assembled an unparalleled cast that included Arletty (Garance), Pierre Brasseur (Frederick Lemaitre), Marcel Herrand (Jean-Francois Lacenaire), Pierre Renoir ("Chand d'habits"), and, touchingly, Etienne Decroux (Anselme Deburau, Baptiste's father). Les enfants du paradis (1945) offers a panoramic view of nineteenth-century theater life, onstage and off. One critic has enthusiastically stated, ' Tt is a spectacle that few of us can resist" (Storey, Pierrots 3). Considered by many as the finest film in the history of French cinema, Les enfants du paradis regularly appears on the list of the ten greatest films ever made. The film offered Barrault the opportunity to "popularise son genie du mime" (Corvin 88). He capitalized on that opportunity, creating in Baptiste an enchanting, tragic screen figure. Of his role as Deburau (Baptiste), Barrault has noted that "in so far as one's astral complexion harmonizes more or less completely with certain characters that one interprets, I think the closest to me was Baptiste" (Memories 151).
Jean-Louis Barrault
77
However, not everyone categorized the film as a spectacle of theater life and love. Some saw Les enfants du paradis as essentially a political film—a testimony to the indomitable spirit of the French people against the Nazi occupation. "Barrault, like Carne, believed that above all, France had to safeguard its spirit" (Turk 219). In the character of Deburau, "whom Jean-Louis Barrault elegantly incarnates in Carne's film, is a symbol, however emasculated, of the mythical spirit of le peuple" (Storey, Pierrots 4). Regardless of how one interprets the film, Barrault's portrayal remains unforgettable. CRITICAL RECEPTION While Barrault is most remembered for his role of Deburau in Les enfants du paradis, he must be remembered also as a total stage actor. In particular, we must not overlook his accomplishments as a mime. For Barrault, ' 'life is . . . the language of the body, which he discovered via mime and which he sought to magnify throughout his entire career" (Corvin 89). This search for totality led Barrault to employ traditional means such as masks and dance and more modern ones including sound, light, and film. Barrault never ceased perfecting his art, achieving in his silence a sublime eloquence. "In everything this extraordinary mime imagines, one finds not only style and perfection of detail, but also a fierce grandeur" (Dorcy 56-57). Actor, director, theater manager, and mime: his career is astonishing in its longevity and in its breadth. The following evaluation of his art seems an especially fitting epitaph: ' 'Barrault was born a dancer, made himself into a great mime, and finally delighted in being a dramatic actor'' (Doney 57). SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Memories for Tomorrow: The Memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault. Trans. Jonathan Griffin. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974. Reflections on the Theatre. Trans. Barbara Wall. London: Rockliff, 1951. The Theatre of Jean-Louis Barrault. Trans. Joseph Chiari. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1961.
Secondary Sources Braun, Edward. The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979. Carne, Marcel. La vie a belles dents: Souvenirs. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1989. Corvin, Michel, ed. Dictionnaire encyclopedique du Theatre. Paris: Bordas, 1991. Dorcy, Jean. The Mime. New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1961. Fletcher, Ian, ed. Romantic Mythologies. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967.
78
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Green, Martin, and John Swan. The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dellArte and the Modern Imagination. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Janin, Jules. Deburau. Trans. Winifred Katzin. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1928. Packard, William, David Pickering, and Charlotte Savidge, eds. The Facts on File Dictionary of the Theatre. New York: Facts on File, 1988. Perez, Michel. Les films de Carne. Paris: Ramsay, 1994. Storey, Robert. Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. . Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Svehla, Jaroslav. "Jean Gaspard Deburau: The Immortal Pierrot." Trans. Paul Wilson. Mime Journal 5 (1977): 5-43. Thomas, Nicholas, ed. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Vol. 3. Actors and Actresses. 2nd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1992. Turk, Edward Baron. Child of Paradise: Marcel Carne and the Golden Age of French Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
Beckett's Postmodern Clowns
Vladimir (Didi), Estragon (Gogo), Pozzo, and Lucky
(France: In Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett: 1952/1954)
Donald Ferret A timeless, clownesque country somewhere out of this world. Four characters in symmetry with two-syllable names. Acts and actions that repeat, more or less. Performers performing for the sake of performance, spectators watching spectators, and all of it in order to pass the time while waiting for a last routine and an ultimate clown. But neither will ever come, and everyone is forever condemned to another repetition. So goes Godot.
BACKGROUND Paris, after World War II, was a fertile proving ground for literature as experiment. In the theater this was aptly described by a terminological fusion of science and art known as the "laboratory." Inventive playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, and Eugene lonesco, each writing for himself, testing out alternatives in solitude, were nevertheless manifestly together in writing against the conventional French drama, naturalist, historical, or boulevard. Their plays, which we call with hindsight "avant-garde," "absurd," or even "antitheater," made of the stage "a place of the new real," in Antonin Artaud's term. In the wake of the visions of revolution and renewal set forth in Artaud's The Theater and Its Double (1938/1958), the death knell of realistic presentation rang loudly. Finished was the psychology that reduced the unknown to the known, finished were identifiable situations, and, finally, finished were familiar characterizations. From this point on, as Robbe-Grillet would later say about Godot, the dramatic character's only purpose was being there, "pure presence."
80
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Yet if, in the 1950s, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was a radical departure in both plot and characterization, today, it is a work that speaks directly to our postmodernity. In addition, the play's setting ("A country road. A tree.") is among the first manifestations of theatrical minimalism: the four clown-tramps appear in a stark, stylized decor, reminiscent of the Noh, where spatial groupings are geometrical rather than familiar or familial, reflecting the author's passion for Euclid. Speaking of postmodernism is not unlike speaking of Godot itself; that is to say, no clear consensus exists about its meaning. As if to add to this indeterminacy, most definitions announce that for a work of art to be called postmodern, it must exhibit a series of playful, paratactical, deconstructionist traits, not all of which need be present. As Ihab Hassan reminds us, the very term ' 'postmodernism" contains its enemy within, modernism. It is all too often against this equally fuzzy concept that postmodernism is described. Principally, the postmodern literary text is an open work, one that both invites and resists interpretation. Beckett himself said, "The key word in my plays is perhaps." His hermeneutic equation is not either/or but either and or. Such Derridean "undecidability" is further compounded by the fact that the postmodern text is also a blurred genre. Yes, Godot vacillates between tragedy and comedy. But its mixture does not end there; from a performance perspective, the play is a potpourri of music-hall and vaudeville routines, numbers from the French cafe-concert and circus acts, all seasoned with gags from Chaplin and Keaton. That postmodern drama accords little importance to intrigue and causality is also born out by Godot, essentially "a two-act play where nothing happens, twice" (Vivian Mercier, quoted in Schlueter and Brater, Approaches 92). Much like the alazon scenes in Aristophanes, or the modern review format, there is no teleological orientation to the comedy; anyone can show up, anything can happen, anything can be said, and at any time. Waiting for Godot provides a unique type of theatrical experience, one where dialogues unfold amid silences and mimes and contain no psychological, historical, nor sociological issues. If there is a subject to the play, Una Chauduri identified it best, saying that it is "about aboutness" (Schlueter and Brater, Approaches 135); that is, its topic, in keeping with postmodern tendencies and with Beckett's work in general, is referentiality, even self-referentiality. The question that the play asks is not so straightforward as "who is Godot?" but is more along the lines of a metacritical inquiry: "What does it mean to ask who is Godot?" In a now all-too-famous remark, the playwright Jean Anouilh said of Godot that it was like watching "Pascal's Pensees arranged into skits and acted by the Fratellini Brothers" (Dina Sherzer, quoted in Schlueter and Brater, Approaches 96). By way of information, Pascal was a seventeenth-century French moralist who expressed, in terse fragments, the absurdity, smallness, and loneliness of the individual unable to live in the world without diversions or distractions,
Beckett's Postmodern Clowns
81
without entertainment, in fact. The Fratellinis, on the other hand, were renowned Italian circus performers from the 1920s. Herein lies another of Beckett's new twists, combining sophisticated intertexts with popular, comic registers. Throughout the play, metaphysical statements not unlike those found in the Pensees are announced by tramps who pass their time, however unsuccessfully, trying to entertain each other. Further, let us not lose sight of the fact that Didi, Gogo, Pozzo, and Lucky are close equivalents of the medieval fool: incongruous, liminal characters who, in their ridiculousness, speak or show the truth. Much like the French sot of the fifteenth century, they are masters of verbal fantasy: their choices of sound and syntax are made essentially to elicit similar sounds and syntax. Never is it content that communicates first; echoes, variations, reformulations, misunderstandings, and disagreements carry the dialogue forward, not toward its conclusion, for there is none, but toward its inevitable repetition.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS A list of the conventions that inform the clowning in Godot begins with those specific to Beckett's own early work, narrative or dramatic. In Molloy (1951/ 1955), for example, as in Godot, or Endgame (1956/1957) for that matter, the couple of old, infirm characters is central. Pozzo asks Didi, "What age are you . . . ? Sixty? Seventy?'' One clown is inflicted with a kidney ailment and takes a garlic cure; another receives nightly beatings and has foot problems; Pozzo goes blind and Lucky deaf between acts 1 and 2. All four eventually find themselves in a heap, crawling about like Molloy/Moran on his belly, only to hear Didi exclaim, "We are men." Also like Molloy/Moran, the dramatic characters have a penchant for telling stories and relating their dreams; in Godot their purpose in doing so is to fill the temporal void ("How time flies when one has fun," says Didi), but they also use narrative to assure themselves of their own being ("We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist"). Structurally, throughout Beckett's early work, beginnings and endings are the same, and yet, by his slight, intentional shifts, they are not the same at the same time. Ambiguity extends to the onomastics. Molloy settles on a name haphazardly; Godot might be anyone from a diminutive of God to an actual French cyclist of the time; Vladimir and Estragon in the written drama are Didi and Gogo in the spoken drama; Magg, Nagg, Nell, and the like resonate from one work to another. In line with the author's creation of a (postmodern) literature that continuously refers to itself as well as to other literatures, the clown-tramps in Godot experience formal self-consciousness; that is, they are repeatedly aware of the fact that they are taking part in a series of performances. "Charming evening we're having. / Unforgettable. / And it's not over. / Apparently not. / It's only begin-
82
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ning. / It's awful. / Worse than the pantomime. / The circus. / The music hall. / The circus." Absent authorities (Godot, the chief in Molloy), messengers (the boy, Gaber), and prophecies, all echoes of Greek tragedy, are treated in a Chaplinesque mode: tramp dress, pantomime, slapstick, and nonsense continuously undermine the author's oblique evocations of the classics. Like the narrative trilogy, Beckett has constructed Godot in such a way that form reflects content: doubling, repetition, and recurrence—Didi and Gogo, two thieves, Pozzo and Lucky, shepherd and goatherd, act 1 and act 2—throw the play back upon itself, creating more questions than answers and muddying facile interpretation even more. Further appreciation in reading and/or viewing Godot depends on audience awareness of the popular comic traditions that informed Beckett's early theater. These include—but are not limited to—the music hall and vaudeville, the cafe concert, the circus, and the silent film, with elements from all these forms converging. Structured along numbers or turns, the English music hall, like the circus, left place for improvised routines, sanctioned unscripted surprise, and, as happens during Pozzo's speech in act 1, allowed performers to laugh at the poor quality of an act and even to comment on the show as it was being performed. Turns varied in length from quick topical references to full-blown pantomime routines like the business with hats in act 2. Also frequently exploited in Godot is cross talk, a linguistic device from the music hall that simultaneously emphasizes repetition and difference ("Like wings. / Like leaves. / Like sand. / Like leaves") Joking about the audience, social critique (Pozzo as landowner/master), imitations ("Let's play at being Pozzo and Lucky.") and comic scenes of adieu ("Then adieu. / Adieu. / Adieu. / Adieu." And "No one moves") were triedand-true schtick of the vaudeville as well. Pants dropping, penis humor, references to farting, garlic breath, stinking feet, and urination were part and parcel of Victorian working-class entertainment and a sure source of laughter for a public that took delight in the travesty of middleclass respectability. The French cafe concert of the same period also conventionalized the inclusion of the audience as part of the performance, pratfalls, and sentimental or vulgar ditties as dependable routines. Songs, a musical constant in all types of variety shows, are present throughout Beckett's work, but the notorious "A dog came in" that opens act 2 of Godot is more than just benign amusement. In true Beckettian (repetitive, selfreferential) fashion, this song—about the death of a dog and the tombstone of the dog where is written the story of the death of a dog and the tombstone of the dog, and so on—works like a mirror reflecting a mirror, or an infinitely deep Chinese box, and playfully offers a microscopic comment on the play as being only itself on all levels. Equally important to grasping the performance complexities of Godot are, first, the author's implicit fascination with the traditions of the European circus—so well documented in Federico Fellini's film The Clowns (1970)—which
Beckett's Postmodern Clowns
83
are the source for the majority of conventions already listed, and, second, his fondness for the silent films of Chaplin and Keaton, an influence that manifests itself in ways other than just bowler hats and baggy pants. Historically, as the circus at the turn of the century drew smaller and smaller audiences, its performers migrated, routines in hand, to other more lucrative mediums, notably the music hall and vaudeville. A successive stage in the overlapping of conventions between music hall/vaudeville and early cinema is traceable and may be explained by shared, popular tastes and by the fact that many of the early movie comedians received their original training in the variety theaters. It must be stressed here that this kind of begging, borrowing, and stealing of acts from one show to another has always been and always will be in the nature of performance. The circus contribution to Godot remains discernible in many of the previously mentioned turns and is most explicit in the deliberate but entertaining cruelty in gags (Lucky kicks Gogo) and in the often inhuman, detached relations among the characters ("Think pig!" orders Pozzo). As in the clown world, in the inane, illogical universe of Godot, sexuality is of no importance, nor is there any emotional contact between participants except when it may achieve a comic effect ("Embrace me!" .. . "You stink of garlic"). Finally, the different traits from the different traditions mix, match, mismatch, and converge in Beckett's protagonists in much the same way that they did in Chaplin and Keaton. Part tragic, part comic, the clown-tramps in Godot are hapless victims of their own silences, obliged to draw upon the pantomime convention of visual acts and the dumb-show routines of circus tramps frustrated by aborted attempts to succeed in their various games or skits. The drama ends with a failed hanging, a bowler hat, pants dropping, and a question followed by an answer followed by a mute contradiction of the answer: Vladimir. Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let's go. They do not move.
CRITICAL RECEPTION Waiting for Godot remains one of the most highly acclaimed plays of the twentieth century. Although many producers dismissed it before its first performance as being "undramatic" (Esslin 9), it became an immediate popular success when it was first produced at the small Theatre de Babylone on January 5, 1953, in Paris. Translated into more than twenty languages, Waiting for Godot has been a theatrical triumph all over the world, admired by diverse audiences, from artists such as Jean Anouilh and Thornton Wilder to inmates at San Quentin (Esslin 10). It is important to remember, however, that in this stunning play, which has so universal a voice, it is those most strange and liminal beings,
84
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
clowns, who are opening the postmodern stage to all the world, ironically through the highly traditional conventions of stage foolery. With only the artifice of these conventions, then, Beckett's clowns pass their time in an empty world. It is this that makes the audience laugh and, finally, see themselves. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Beckett, Samuel. En attendant Godot. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952. . Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1986. . Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954. . Warten auf Godot. En attendant Godot. Waiting for Godot. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Clurman, Harold, ed. Nine Plays of the Modern Theater. New York: Grove, 1981.
Secondary Sources A complete bibliography of secondary works on Waiting for Godot would be overwhelmingly large. The reader will find here a list of books that have informed my discussion of Beckett's clowns. A full catalogue of research done on Godot can be found in the work of Schlueter and Brater. A recent bibliography of Beckett studies is included in Pilling. Brater, Enoch, and Ruby Cohn, eds. Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990. Clausius, Claudia. The Gentleman Is a Tramp: Chaplin's Comedy. Beme: Lang, 1989. Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1962. , ed. Samuel Beckett: "Waiting for Godot": A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1987. Docherty, Thomas, ed. Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Rev. ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Graver, Lawrence, and Raymond Federman, eds. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1979. Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987. Kenner, Hugh. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Pearce, Richard. Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. Pilling, John, ed. Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel. New York: Grove, 1965. Schlueter, June, and Enoch Brater, eds. Approaches to Teaching Beckett's "Waiting for Godotr New York: MLA, 1991. Titterton, W. R. From Theatre to Music Hall. London: Swift, 1912. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969. Wilmut, Roger. Kindly Leave the Stage! The Story of Variety, 1919-1960. London: Methuen, 1985.
Jack Benny
(United States: 1894-1974)
Janice Keller For my last few months at Northwestern University in the spring of 1949 when I was allowed to have a car on campus, my mother helped me drive out to Illinois from New York. As we were entering Chicago's South Side, she leaned forward to switch on the car radio. It was time for "The Jack Benny Show." I have recalled that click for almost fifty years, as my mother had never turned on a radio before to my knowledge, but listening to Jack Benny every Sunday night was one of our most honored family traditions. At home my father undoubtedly was at that moment making sandwiches on a card table in the living room for my three younger brothers. The nine hundred miles that separated our family melted away as that familiar voice filled the car, saying in its inimitable tone, with a catch in it, "This is Jack Benny." We were not alone in our family loyalty to Jack Benny. Years later President John F. Kennedy told Jack Benny that his father, Joseph Kennedy, insisted that his family listen as a group to Jack Benny every Sunday night. In 1944 a national poll on the best-known voice in America found that Jack Benny's was number one, and President Franklin Roosevelt's was number two. From his first radio program in 1932 until his last public appearance in 1974 just before his death at the age of eighty, Jack Benny arguably was the most widely popular and best-loved comedian who ever lived.
BACKGROUND Jack Benny, then Benjamin Kubelsky, was born in Chicago on Valentine's Day in 1894, but his family lived in nearby Waukegan, Illinois, where his father
86
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ran a haberdashery. When it turned out that young Benny had an ear for music— he thumped out melodies on a piano at the age of four—his mother saw him as a future violin virtuoso. However, Benny as a youngster was averse both to practicing his violin and going to school. At thirteen he quit school, but not the violin. Despite his dislike of practicing, he was good enough to get a job with an orchestra in a local vaudeville theater. At eighteen, with a motherly woman pianist who was actually older than his mother, Benny started touring in vaudeville as the team of Salisbury and Kubelsky, from Grand Opera to Ragtime. Then the lawyer of a concert violinist named Jan Kubelik threatened to sue because of the similarity in name, and Benny Kubelsky became Ben Benny. Some years later another lawyer, this time working for a comic-cum-violinist named Ben Bernie, also offered to sue. Benny needed another name again. He chose Jack as a first name because some sailors in an era when sailors called each other ' 'Jack'' recognized him as having been in a naval revue and naturally called him Jack. Besides his stage name, Jack Benny's choice of career came about inadvertently. When he played his violin in a navy revue in World War I, he was hissed by the sailors. Pat O'Brien, who was later a movie star, and who was also in the show, walked out of the wings and suggested sotto voce that Benny speak rather than play. Benny then scolded the sailors for griping about their food, insisting that the enlisted men ate the same food as the officers did, only the officers' food was cooked. The ensuing howls of laughter led Benny to a change of profession. Not that Benny abandoned the violin. For years it was his prop, his security blanket on stage. He would saw away at his signature song, "Love in Bloom," pretending to be a great violinist. In later years he started taking lessons again. This time he practiced, up to four hours a day, and was thrilled to associate with, and sometimes play with, leading musicians. In the 1920s and early 1930s Benny was a leading vaudevillian and appeared in three movies and several Broadway revues. Though many of the revues' acts were salacious, Benny insisted that his lines be clean, which was a hallmark of his humor. Even if radio and early television's ever-vigilant censors had not existed, Jack Benny required that his show always be geared to family entertainment. He envisioned his audience as individual families. By developing well-marked characters for the six members of his cast, he and his writers made the cast as familiar and as beloved to the listeners as their own families. Jack Benny made his first radio appearance in 1931 as a guest on Ed Sullivan's show. Benny's first words were "This is Jack Benny talking. There will be a slight pause while you say, 'Who cares?' " (Benny and Benny 40). The modest Benny was an instant hit and shortly got his own radio show, which lasted from 1932 until 1955. His radio show overlapped with his television series, which began in 1950 and ended in 1965.
Jack Benny
87
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The story of how Jack Benny got his name would not be worth repeating if it did not illustrate one half of his public, as well as his private, persona, that of being a schnook, a Yiddish term for someone to whom accidents happen, the victim of improbable and hilarious circumstance, the inept stooge, the fall guy. He actually was a frequent victim of Murphy's law: if anything can go wrong, it will. Typically, one day when he cut across the lawn of movie star Jimmy Stewart, a Beverly Hills neighbor, all the lawn sprinklers went on and soaked him. Another time he inadvertently drove off from a club in someone else's Cadillac: not only was it identical to his, but, improbably, his key fit the stolen car's ignition (Josefsberg 325-326). On his show Benny was the butt of everyone's jokes. He would hesitantly address a supercilious character—railroad ticket seller, department-store floorwalker, waiter, doorman—and be insulted, something that has happened to everyone. Both on and off the air he could not cope with modern technology. Once at a conference in his overheated bedroom when he was sick, his writers discovered that he did not know how to turn down the room's thermostat (Josefsberg 283). The other half of Benny's public persona, however, was strictly fictional: He was not pompous, vain, overbearing, or the stingiest miser of all time. His family and friends and the charities for which he raised millions attest that he was generous, gracious, and modest. As a broadcast comedian, Benny was different from the start. Instead of zinging rapid-fire one-liners like Bob Hope or skewering victims with biting satire like Fred Allen, Benny was the victim, the butt of most of the jokes on his show. Instead of using speedy wisecracks, he was the acknowledged master of timing, the meaningful pause. He was a comedian in the classical vein, exaggerating men's (and women's) foibles in a kindly way. He knew that the mainspring of humor is character. In his posthumously published autobiography, he wrote, "The comedy situation arises from the incongruity between a certain character and the situation in which he finds himself" (Benny and Benny 241). The character in the situation was usually Benny himself, and the incongruity often stemmed from his being a wealthy skinflint who pinched pennies until they squealed. The appeal of the miser, whom everyone else on the show derided, stemmed from the prevalence of stinginess. As Milt Josefsberg noted in his affectionate biography of Benny, everyone either is or has a relative or friend who is tight with money (60). Benny's owning an ancient car, his secreting his money in a vault hundreds of feet underground, and his taking in laundry and doing other menial jobs to make money were exaggerations of typical American traits, especially during the depression. The audience could identify with him and at the same time see how ridiculous his behavior was. Other failings often associated with Americans that were spoofed on "The Jack Benny Show" were Americans' youth fetish—Jack never grew any older than thirty-nine—and a
88
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
national boastfulness and boorishness. Benny on the show was convinced that he was a consummate musician and an always-welcome guest of his movie-star neighbors. The judges in the show's 1945 gag contest "I Can't Stand Jack Benny Because . . . " from among almost 300,000 entries chose a doggerel verse as the winner. The poem listed all Jack's major failings and then concluded, "In all the things that he portrays / He shows up my own obnoxious ways." Its conclusion bolsters the view of a social historian on the source of his appeal: ' 'To laugh at [Jack Benny] was to laugh at things the listener most feared in himself. . . . [OJne can identify with Jack's plight, then immediately identify with other characters' deflation of his worst traits" (McFadden 118). Mary Livingstone, who was actually Benny's wife, punctured most of Benny's pomposities on the air. Once when Don Wilson, the show's announcer and its anointed intellectual (in contrast to tenor Dennis Day, bandleader Phil Harris, and trickster Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) was learnedly discussing opera with guest Dorothy Kirsten, a Metropolitan Opera soprano, Benny tried to horn in on the conversation. Livingstone stopped him with "Oh, shut up!" (Josefsberg 139). The audience howled because it knew that Benny was going to pretend to a knowledge of opera that was completely spurious. It was not only on his own program that the failings of Benny's public persona were mocked. Ordinary people, recognizing Benny, would snap witticisms at him, believing that he actually was a miser. Once when he made a person-toperson telephone call, the operator could not believe that he was not calling collect. Another time, when Benny was in a hospital and could not comply adequately with a nurse's request for a urine sample, she scoffed, "Gee, you never give anything away, do you?" (Josefsberg 320). While Benny used writers for his comedy appearances, he helped write and edit his shows and would insist on subtlety. When Benny asked a Yiddishaccented actor which college his son went to, the actor replied, "Southern Methodist," instead of Texas Christian, which Benny thought would be too obvious. Saying "Southern Methodist" required extra thought from the audience. Another national trait besides stinginess that was used to great effect on ' 'The Jack Benny Show" was exaggeration, whose lineage dates at least as far back as clowning itself. On "The Jack Benny Show" it was not enough to have miser Benny keep ten-dollar bills in his underground vault. To get to a tendollar bill he had to give his password to his guard, Ed, and then go through an excruciatingly funny series of locks being turned, chains being rattled, and heavy doors creaking open. The character of Ed was also a masterpiece of exaggeration. On one show after the end of World War II Benny told Ed that the war was over. "How nice," replied Ed in his slow, toneless voice. "Who won, the North or the South?" (Josefsberg 116). A main contribution to Benny's effectiveness as a comedian was his use of silence. Probably the most famous comedy turn in the history of broadcasting was the "Your money or your life" skit. Benny's footsteps are heard walking
Jack Benny
89
at night, and then a second set of footsteps is added. Then a threatening voice: "Your money or your life." Then a long pause. The holdup man says, "Come on, hurry up." Benny, highly irritated, shrieks, "I'm thinking it over!" (Benny and Benny 88). Almost all commentators on Jack Benny's broadcast career agree that he was funnier on radio than on television. Benny himself thought that radio had a greater effect on its listeners. He wrote that in radio he appealed to audiences "gently—quietly, through their ears.... I was like a friendly uncle, a slightly eccentric mad uncle" (Benny and Benny 280). The reason seemed to be that the listeners had to use their imaginations to figure out from the aural clues what a scene looked like and thus participated in the show themselves. As anyone who has ever had a part in a play or sung in a chorus knows, it is more fun to be in a show than just to observe it. CRITICAL RECEPTION Up until just before his death of pancreatic cancer in his California home on December 26, 1974, Jack Benny was still entertaining an adoring public and planned to star in his twenty-second movie. In a New York Times obituary Richard Shepard called him "perhaps the most constantly funny of America's funny men" (26). Writing more than a decade later, another commentator, Ronald Smith, identified Jack Benny as ' 'probably the best-loved comedian in show business, viewed almost as a member of the family" (Smith 19). Certainly millions of his listeners thought so back in 1949, and some of us still consider Jack Benny, though long gone, as a much-loved member of our families. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Autobiography Benny, Jack, and Joan Benny. Sunday Nights at Seven. New York: Warner, 1990. Audio and Video Tapes Available in the Museum of Television and Radio, 25 W. 52nd St., New York, NY 10020, are a number of audio tapes of "The Jack Benny Show" and the following videos: "Jack Benny Program," 1958, 1959 (Video Yesteryear). "The Jack Benny Show," 1952 (with "You Bet Your Life") (Video Yesteryear).
Secondary Sources Jack Benny: The Radio and Television Work. New York: Museum of Television and Radio, 1991.
90
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Josefsberg, Milt. The Jack Benny Show. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977. McFadden, Margaret T. "America's Boy Friend Who Can't Get a Date: Gender, Race, and the Cultural Work of the Jack Benny Program, 1932-1946." Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 113-34. Shepard, Richard. Obituary. New York Times, December 28, 1974. Smith, Ronald. The Stars of Stand-up Comedy: A Biographical Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1986.
Birbal
(India: 1528-1586)
Karen Treanor BACKGROUND While Western readers are familiar with the convention of the king-fool pair, famous in literature (King Lear), history (King Henry VIII and Will Sommers), and even decks of playing cards, they are less acquainted with this pair in other cultures of the world. Yet it existed, and perhaps with even greater fame. In India, the historic king-fool pair of the Emperor Akbar and his fool Birbal of the sixteenth century remains so well known that even today it is still important in popular culture. Yet Birbal was different from his Western counterparts. He was indeed witty and entertaining in court, but he was also powerful. He was named to responsible positions in the military, took part in religious decisions, and was an intimate friend to Akbar, one of the most powerful rulers in the world. Apparently, in India, the absence of wealth, power, or birth was not requisite to being "licens'd" to speak freely as a fool to the king. Birbal was born Mahesh Das in 1528, the third son of his parents, Ganga Das and Anabha Davito, members of a Brahmin family of bards and minstrels. Well educated in Hindi, Sanskrit, and Persian, he was a precocious student with an unusual aptitude for versification and music and soon earned a reputation as a ready wit, talented poet, and gifted singer. He gained employment as a jester to Raja Ram Chandra of Bhatta, who was considered the third most powerful ruler in northern India, as well as a great patron of the arts. Here, at the Rewa court, Birbal used the name Brahma Kavi and became a highly regarded wit and poet. During this period, he married the daughter of a wealthy and respectable family who provided Birbal with some financial security
92
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
(P. P. Sinha 29). When he later entered the imperial court, he was neither a rich man nor a "begging Bhat," as a Muslim contemporary scornfully described him (P. P. Sinha 29). It is not known how or when Birbal first met the Emperor Akbar, but he was first employed at the imperial court sometime between 1556 and 1562. Within a decade Akbar had bestowed upon Birbal the title "Kavi Rai" (Hindi poet laureate). In 1572, Birbal received his first military assignment when he was part of a large military force sent to the Punjab to help Husain Quli Khan resist the invasion of Hakim Mirza (Agrawal 102). Birbal also accompanied Akbar on his successful Gujarat campaigns, a significant period in Indian history. Birbal also advised the emperor in religious matters. By 1582, the empire was "undoubtedly the most powerful in the world," and Akbar, "the richest monarch on the face of the Earth," finally felt secure on the throne, having invented the Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith), a religion in which he was the popeking, an eclectic theosophy-like system of limited membership with two basic tenets: that the sun is the source of all that exists, and that the emperor is the vice regent of God (Smith, Akbar 216). The many rituals of the Din-i-Ilahi included fire worship, sleeping and praying toward the East, vegetarianism, the shaving of beards, and pantheism. Most modern Hindu scholars propose that Birbal "often helped Akbar make bold controversial decisions" (Lai 182) and that Birbal ' 'has a good deal to account for'' in the religious policy and thought that reflect Akbar as "an ideal man" (P.P. Sinha 6). Blochmann, the first scholar to translate Ain-i Akbari into English, asserts that the pious Muslims at court despised Birbal in the belief that he had "influenced Akbar to abjure Islam" (Allami 444). However, Birbal's most notorious enemy at court, Badaoni, relates only one incident in which Birbal uttered a "sneering remark" about Islam and a second in which he directly influenced Din-i-Ilahi: "[Birbal] impressed upon the emperor that the sun was the primary origin of everything" (Allami 192). In other documented events, however, Birbal merely listens as Akbar and others disparage Islam. There is virtually no evidence that Birbal did more than support and articulate Akbar's independent beliefs. It must be remembered that Akbar did not convert to Birbal's religion; rather, Birbal converted to Akbar's. Birbal embarked on a final, fatal military expedition in 1586. An Afghani in northern India, Bayzid, had proclaimed himself a prophet, set aside the Koran, and preached that every particle of matter was God in one of his infinite forms. His followers called themselves the Roshaniyya (Illuminati) and attempted to seize the land and property of infidels. Akbar asked Birbal and another courtier, Allami, to choose lots to determine which should join two other commanders on the difficult mission to suppress the Roshaniyya rebellion. "Much against Akbar's wishes," the task fell to Birbal (Allami 443). The mission failed, and 5,000 to 8,000 of Akbar's soldiers, including Birbal, were slain (Lai 257). His body was never recovered.
Birbal
93
While the bravery Birbal showed in this battle is disputed by scholars, the grief experienced by Akbar for his beloved fool is undeniable. The emperor went without food for days and withdrew into his private chambers. The emperor was particularly anguished by the fact that Birbal's remains could not be found and appears to have wanted to provide his friend with a Hindu cremation. Eventually, Akbar consoled himself with the notion that "the rays of the sun are sufficient for him, there was no necessity to be cleansed by fire" (Allami 214). He wrote that Birbal was "a personal friend of rare loyalty and devotion. Men like him are born once in a million years" (Lai 258). Akbar is said to have remarked that the death of his fool and intimate friend Birbal was the greatest tragedy he had known since coming to the throne (P. P. Sinha 118). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The unusual name Birbal seems to have had its origins in Bir Bar or Vira Vara, which means "courageous and great" (Dowson 356). While the emperor did appoint Birbal as the commander of several military missions, he is seldom regarded as a soldier, which makes his name, thus defined, ill fitting. It has also been suggested that Birbal refers to a character with a similar name in The Vetal Panchvinshati or Baital Pachisi (Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire). In the third story of the collection, a courtier, Vira Var (the origin of the name Birbal), demonstrates complete loyalty to his king. Since Akbar had bestowed upon other courtiers titles based on Hindu traditions, he may have been inspired by this story in naming Birbal (P. P. Sinha 30). Finally, the name Birbal eclipsed Mahesh Das's other names because it suggests the similarities between the legendary jester and the bulbul, a bird that is beloved for its bold, noisy, and quarrelsome nature. The bulbul is a fighter, and in Akbar's time, men placed wagers on bulbul fights. Moreover, the bulbul makes a fine pet that sits easily on the shoulder of its master, and of the two varieties of bulbul in India, the Indian and the Persian, it is said that only the Persian bird sings (R.P.N. Sinha 30). Birbal had been a devout member of the Vaishnaivite sect of Hinduism, which gained special popularity in the sixteenth century. Members of this sect, who worship the god Vishnu, believe that devotion, rather than education or selfdiscipline, is the path to spiritual liberation. To them, bhakti, total submission to a single person or object, results in the complete humility necessary for enlightenment. The bhakti form of worship also tends to be attached to Vishnu's avatars, especially to Krishna, who is often depicted as a practical joker and mischievous child. Birbal's devotion to Krishna was so strong that he built a temple to his consort Radha and him near his hometown (P. P. Sinha 27), and of his surviving poems, at least two concern Krishna. But probably the true recipient of Birbal's bhakti was Akbar himself; thus the king-fool relationship, so conventional in Europe, is repeated in this pair of
94
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
historical figures. But this relationship has important differences from that between a king such as Henry VIII and his fool, Will Sommers. Birbal was not the antithesis of the king; he was indeed a witty fool-like character, but he was also a military figure, a religious advisor, and an intimate friend of the emperor. For thirty years, Birbal remained one of the emperor's closest companions. Although Birbal was fourteen years older than Akbar, the bond between them was strong. Birbal's enemy at court, the "sun-dried Mullah" Badaoni, referred sarcastically to the profundity of their friendship: "it became a case of 'Thy flesh is my flesh and thy blood my blood' " (Smith, Akbar 164). Birbal's loyalty to Akbar was such that he eventually became the only Hindu convert to the Dini-Ilahi (Divine Faith), the religion created by the emperor himself, in which Akbar was acknowledged as God's representative on earth (Ahmad 30). The emperor reciprocated Birbal's devotion by according him great respect. Akbar was a man of refined taste who surrounded himself with many intelligent and charismatic individuals. "Navratna" or "Nao Ratna" (the nine jewels) is the term used to signify nine of Akbar's most accomplished courtiers. Of these, Birbal is often called "the brightest jewel." Indeed, the painting Akbari Nao Ratna in the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta, depicts Birbal in a prominent position, sitting right beside the emperor (P. P. Sinha 14). Akbar gave evidence of his abiding affection for Birbal by saving his life on two occasions. In 1583, Birbal was a participant in a game similar to polo. He fell from his horse, became unconscious, and stopped breathing. Akbar applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive him (Smith, Akbar 300). Two years later, an enraged elephant charged at Birbal and began pounding him with its trunk. Akbar rode a horse between Birbal and the elephant, placing his own life in danger in order to rescue his dear friend (Allami 654). As P. P. Sinha notes, ' 'There have been examples of men dying for their masters, but the example of a king throwing himself forward to save his courtier is an unparalleled one" (110). V. A. Smith's oft-repeated comment that "Akbar loved to have Birbal by his side, that he might enjoy his witty conversation" (Smith, Akbar 170) is borne out by the proximity of their lodgings. Birbal was the only courtier to reside within the palace complex in the capital Akbar had built in Fatehpur Sikri. In fact, one of the nine gates of the city was named after Birbal and is still known as Birbal's Gate. The two-story house was designed by the emperor himself (Lai 182). "Its exquisite, ornate decoration testifies to the intensity of Akbar's affection for Birbal" (Smith, Akbar 238). Akbar often visited Birbal's residence, sometimes at odd hours. Once, it was well after midnight when a servant announced the emperor's arrival, so Birbal sprang out of bed to greet Akbar. The emperor noted with amusement Birbal's scanty attire. "It is enough for me, Your Majesty. I have very little to hide" (Lai 182). In his joke, Birbal alludes to his own candor and, by contrast, to the deviousness of his peers. The most comprehensive contemporary record of the court, Ain-i Akbari (In-
Birbal
95
stitutes of Akbar), relates the only incident in which Akbar seems to have been prepared to punish Birbal. Interestingly, the incident involves sexual license. Apparently some of the "principal prostitutes" had been "deprived of their virginity." Among those responsible was Raja Bir Bar (Birbal), a member of the Divine Faith. But when Bir Bar offered to turn Jogi (ascetic), the emperor "assured him he need not be afraid" (Allami 202). The incident creates an image of the historical Birbal that is wildly at odds with the legendary character. Modern Indian screenwriters and scholars invariably depict Birbal as a "good Hindu" and an intensely religious man. Nevertheless, in this incident, the quintessence of the relationship between Akbar and Birbal is apparent: Birbal respects Akbar's power, but he makes jokes, claiming that he is preparing to become a Jogi, feigning fear and remorse, and pretending that he wishes to renounce worldly and sensual matters. Thus he is associated with the conventional sexual activity of the fool and, somewhat like the helpless fool, relies on the emperor's personal affection for him. The nature of Birbal's professional role is a matter of debate, primarily because Hindu scholars often try to accord him a respect and dignity they find lacking in the title "jester." His Muslim contemporary Badaoni calls him "badfrosh," which means minstrel or jester. V. A. Smith refers to Birbal as "the Hindu jester" (Akbar 235); according to Smith, Birbal "is sometimes described in English books as a 'minister' or even as 'prime minister', but erroneously" (Akbar 237). Muni Lai, however, finds the term "jester" demeaning. Lai argues that by calling Birbal a jester, Smith "betrays a singular lack of understanding of the stuff Birbal was made of.... It would be a poor reflection on Akbar's judgement of men and their capacities had he appointed a mere buffoon to the command of an important military campaign" (258). In any event, Birbal did at least begin his career as an entertainer; the emperor kept him at court because he found Birbal witty and amusing; and in later years, Birbal was sent on important missions. We may note that clowns of the English court did enjoy similar privileges during the same period in history; for example, Will Sommers often enjoyed dinner with King Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, and Archibald Armstrong, clown to King James I, traveled to Spain in the company of nobility seeking a wife for Prince Charles. CRITICAL RECEPTION His keen, acerbic wit enabled Birbal to rise from a humble social station to a prominent place at the court of the celebrated Moghul ruler Akbar. The mutual love and esteem that developed between the emperor and the jester have become proverbial in India. Birbal, who was born a Hindu, encouraged the panreligionist tendencies of Akbar, who was born a Muslim. They both recognized that the many social changes of their era had created a need for a unified Indian culture, one in which neither Hindu nor Muslim would dominate. Although the legendary Birbal is a Hindu hero, the historical Birbal was, rather, a supporter of
96
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
cultural synthesis who believed in his patron's attempt to achieve an amalgam of the best that was in Hinduism and Islam (P. P. Sinha 115). Today in India, even illiterate children in remote villages recite anecdotes about Birbal, the jester of the sixteenth-century Moghul emperor Akbar. Indians in more prosperous circumstances are generally familiar with the paperback editions of Birbal's jokes and the films in which he is a leading character. The folktales, comic books, and movies of popular Indian culture depict Birbal as an amiable Hindu surrounded by scheming Persian Muslim courtiers; he rises above poverty and obscurity by virtue of his skillful repartee and convinces the emperor to favor Hinduism over Islam. In these tales, Birbal is a vulnerable man of conscience whose only tools for survival are his clever mind and sharp tongue. He acquires religious, political, and personal influence over Akbar without resorting to violence or intrigue. But even though many of the legends have a historical basis, there is little evidence that Birbal affected Akbar's policies as greatly as they suggest. Modern Indian scholarship also tends to overstate Birbal's role in the formulation and implementation of Akbar's policies. Akbar's affection for Birbal is evidence of the Moghul's religious tolerance and social liberalism, but was not necessarily the cause of them. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Agrawal, C. M. Akbar and His Hindu Officers. Jalandhar, India: ABS, 1986. Ahmad, Aziz. An Intellectual History of Islam in India. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP, 1969. Allami, Abu'L-Fazl. Ain-i Akbari. Trans. H. Blochmann. Lahore, Pakistan: Qausain Publishers, 1975. Cragg, Kenneth. House of Islam. Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975. Craven, Roy. Indian Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976. Dowson, John, ed. The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians. 1873. New York: AMS, 1966. Lai, Muni. Akbar. New Delhi: Vikas, 1980. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1989. Sinha, P. P. Raja Birbal: Life and Times. Chauhatta, Patna, India: R. B. Singh for Janaki Publications, 1980. Sinha, Rajeshvar Prasad Narain. Our Birds. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1959. Smith, Vincent A. Akbar: Mogul, 1542-1605. Oxford: Clarendon, 1917. . The Oxford History of India. 1919. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958.
The Bishop of Fools (France and England: 1180s-1600s)
Simonette Cochis The Bishop of Fools is the principal character in a most extraordinary religious celebration known as the Feast of Fools, held throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance in churches and cathedrals on or about New Year's Day. The Bishop of Fools headed the role reversal and irreverent parody that was the Feast of Fools: a multifaceted mockery of the liturgy of the Mass where sacred song was replaced by obscenities or gibberish; regal priestly garb was derided by masks; clothes were worn inside out; women's garments were worn by men; nudity replaced robes; the holiness of the altar was desecrated by the presence of an ass, by scurrilous gestures, and by unholy games; and the rituals of censing and of the Eucharist gave way to censing with old shoes and consuming pudding instead of the Host. Yet in its origins and in this very irreverence and sacrilege, ' 'never, upon close observation, did the Feast of Fools depart from the domain of the sacred" (Lever 20).l The script for the feast was molded on the liturgy of the Mass, its costumes were a takeoff of priestly garb, its lyrics mimicked sacred song, and its actions followed the rites of the holy offices.
BACKGROUND The Bishop of Fools was popular particularly in France from the late twelfth century well into the Renaissance, though England also had a Boy Bishop who enjoyed great popularity until the Reformation. Though the most common title for this figure is the Bishop of Fools, there were also archbishops, popes, abbots, abbesses, and even patriarchs of fools. The Feast of Fools turned the church hierarchy upside down: the lower clerics elected their own "bishop" to officiate
98
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
in farcical holy offices and lead jests, cavalcades, and boisterous merrymaking that became the hallmark of the feast. So unruly were the pranks and festivities that the higher clergy periodically issued fulminous bans of this very popular celebration that continued to resurface for more than four centuries. The figure of the Bishop of Fools is inextricably linked with the rituals of the church, as the Feast of Fools was a festivity incorporated within the church's liturgical celebrations of the end of the year. It was the day when the subdeacons, and later all the lower clerics, held a special day of revelry. One of the earliest mentions of the Feast of Fools is in the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (1182— 1190) by the rector of theology at Paris, Joannes Belethus. He describes the subdeacons' feast as held either on New Year's Day, on the Feast of the Circumcision, on Epiphany, or on the octave of Epiphany. It was one of the feasts of the liturgical year known as the tripudia. There were others: St. Stephen's was the deacons' feast, St. John the Evangelist's was the priests', and the Day of Innocents was the feast of the choirboys, who also elected their "bishop" (Chambers 1:275). Following the outline of the church's liturgy, the Feast of Fools duplicated in parody the rituals, the symbols, the text, and the songs of the holy offices. The irreverent revelries eventually spread from the churches to engage the participation of the town. Though each church or cathedral followed its own customs, the celebration of the Feast of Fools throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance provides us with enough similarities to establish a general pattern for the feast. Its motto can be summed up in this verse from the strains of liturgical song: "Deposuit potentes de sede: et exaltavit humiles" (depose the powerful from their seat and exalt the humble) (Chambers 1:278). The twelfth-century subdeacons of Notre Dame in Paris repeated this verse of the Magnificat so many times and with such enthusiasm that a decree of 1199 by Eudes de Sully (bishop of Paris from 1196 to 1208) states that the "Deposuit" is to be sung five times at most and only where it occurs (Chambers 1:278). The reversal of roles authorized by this verse encapsulates the essence of the Feast of Fools and provides the grounds for the election of the Bishop of Fools. The verse marked the passing of the baculus, the staff used by the precentor, the leader of the choir, to a newly elected Bishop of Fools who was to officiate throughout the festivities. The donning of masks, the singing of ludicrous songs, and a "farced" mass (Chambers 1:277) followed the consecration of the Bishop of Fools. A "missal of fools," the Offtcium Circumcisionis in usum urbis Senonensis, which was used at the cathedral of Sens from the early thirteenth century, provides us with a script for the performance of the Feast of Fools, which was known there as the asinaria festa. It also brings to light another important character in the Feast of Fools: the ass. This choirbook of text and music points to the already-well-established rituals of the Feast of Fools. In it, we find that the newly elected Bishop of Fools was led in pomp throughout the church to the
The Bishop of Fools
99
tune of a conductus (Chambers 1:283-284) or to the reciting of a Prose of the Ass such as this one used at Sens, Beauvais, and Bourges: Orientis partibus
Departed from the Orient
Adventavit Asinus,
The Ass comes to us
Pulcher et fortissimus,
Beautiful and so strong
Sarcinis aptissimus.
To carry his heavy load.
Hez, Sire Asnes, car chantez,
Hey, Sir Ass, do sing,
Belle bouche rechignez,
Your fair mouth a grimace,
Vous aurez du foin assez
You will have enough hay
Et de l'avoine a plantez.
And oats aplenty. (Chambers 1:280)
The litany continues in the same vein, with the verses in French as refrain. In this farcical text, the mockery of liturgical song is effected by investing the ass With noble virtues while still evoking its humble animal nature. Alternating Latin with the vernacular brings this duality to light: the role of the ass in sacred history is sung in Latin, while the references to its braying and its link to the earth that gives it sustenance are in French. In Beauvais, an ass was brought to the altar of the church carrying a pretty girl with a child in her arms, representing the Flight to Egypt, and a solemn sung mass ended with braying by the celebrants ahd the people (Chambers 1:287). In the Feast of Fools, the ass symbolizes a role inversion similar to the one embodied by the Bishop of Fools. They both incarnate an essential duality: spirit and matter, divine essence and animal nature. Therefore, it is not surprising to see these two figures together at Chalons-sur-Marne in 1570, when the Bishop of Fools was mounted on a gaily trapped ass and rode in procession toward the cathedral to the sound of bells and music (Chambers 1:305). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The Bishop of Fools of 1570 at Chalons-sur-Marne, like many others before him, mimicked the actions of the real bishop, gave benedictions, sang the office, and had crosses borne before him as if he were on visitation. He also wore the traditional episcopal garb of cope, miter, pectoral cross, gloves, and crozier. Yet it was not the role reversal itself that habitually incited the indignation of ecclesiastical authorities, but the traditionally outrageous behavior of the lower clergy during the feast. Newly elected Bishops of Fools were regularly "dunked" by the horde of unruly clerics, as told by a prohibition issued at Sens in 1444 stating that "not more than three buckets of water at most must be poured over the precentor stultorum at Vespers" (Chambers 1:298). At St. Omer in 1264, a Bishop arid a Dean of Fools, censed in burlesque fashion, took part in a holy office recited entirely "at the pitch of voice and even with howls" (Chambers 1:289). A Ceremonial dated 1365 from Viviers details the incidents
100
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of a drinking bout led by the Bishop of Fools where "even the bishop, if present, must do him honor" (Chambers 1:315) and where the inferior clergy were pitted against the church dignitaries in a drunken singing match, each group attempting to sing its rival down; it ended in jeers, howls, lewd gestures, and mockeries against the vanquished team. Lowly clerics and higher clergy partook in the merriment with equal fervor. In a rare example of a Feast of Fools held by a religious house at Antibes as late as 1645, it was recorded that the choir and office were left to the lay brothers, the queteurs, the cooks, and the gardeners. These put on the vestments inside out, held the books upside down, and wore spectacles with rounds of orange peel instead of glasses. They blew ashes from the censers upon each other's faces and heads and instead of the proper liturgy chanted confused and inarticulate gibberish (Chambers 1:317). In the fifteenth century at Aries, women also took part in the foolery. An "archbishop of Innocents" would pay a visit to the "abbess of fools" of the convent of Saint-Cesaire, who was bound to provide chicken, bread, and wine for his regaling (Chambers 1:317). Another typical scene is given in a passage from a 1445 letter of the Faculty of Theology of Paris to all bishops and chapters of France prohibiting the Feast of Fools: Priests and clerks may be seen wearing masks and monstrous visages at the hours of office. They dance in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black puddings at the horn of the altar while the celebrant is saying mass. They play at dice there. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap through the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and in theatres in shabby traps and carts; and rouse the laughter of their fellows and bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and verses scurrilous and unchaste. (Chambers 1:294). Nevertheless, it is true that in addition to mockery and lewd comportment during the Mass inside the church, the Feast of Fools also prompted festivities outside the church. The spirit of irreverence and the giddiness of inverting the hierarchy and appropriating for one day the seat of authority was inevitably contagious to the townspeople. It was not unusual to have the Feast of Fools be the occasion for mock religious processions led by the Bishop of Fools and his entourage of boisterous subdeacons, vicars, and chaplains, vulgar games, unbridled cavalcades, and irreverent or scatological drama in makeshift theaters and carts on the streets. In 1444, the public town square at Troyes was the site of the consecration of an Archbishop of Fools in a play that mimicked the consecration of a pontiff. Though the feast itself took place in the cathedral, the Archbishop of Fools gave benediction to the people and rode in procession throughout the town. Then the vicars who had defied their bishop, Jean Leguise, by holding the Feast of Fools in spite of his express prohibition impersonated him in a play where he and his two canons were portrayed as Hypocrisie (hy-
The Bishop of Fools
101
pocrisy), Faintise (trickery), and Faux-semblant (falsehood). Rebuked by their insolence, Leguise invoked the Faculty of Theology at Paris and even filed a complaint with the king, who forbade the impious festivities (Chambers 1:296). A most singular development of the Bishop of Fools outside the confines of the church was his role as organizer and judge of the dramatic performances that took place during the Grande Procession in Lille during the month of June. "Through much of the fifteenth century the dramatic activities associated with the procession were organized by the Bishop of Fools, who had been elected by the clerics of the collegiate church of St. Pierre the previous Twelfthnight'' (Knight, "Image" 154). The Church of St. Peter's even provided funds for the Bishop of Fools to award prizes to the best dramatic performances staged by the different neighborhood associations as part of the procession. The dramatic repertory consisted of hystoires or scenes from the Passion, tableaux vivants staged on wagons that moved in the procession, and later, plays proper: "The plays were written by members of the clergy at St. Peter's and presented to the neighborhood associations to be staged. In this way the content of the plays was controlled, and the fear of offending God by speaking heresy or blasphemy was alleviated" (Knight, "Sponsorship" 282). We see, therefore, that the Bishop of Fools of Lille, though a lower cleric, was the instrument whereby the church held in check public dramatic manifestations while providing an orderly vehicle for neighborhood associations to enact religious drama. The shift that occurred at Lille, where the Bishop of Fools was made the organizer of performances staged by townspeople, shows what became of this historic fool character. This clerical figure was eventually secularized. Already in 1499 the bourgeois of Tournai were so keen on holding the Feast of Fools that they violently intervened to enforce the election of a Bishop of Fools by the vicars of Notre-Dame (Chambers 1:307). In the towns where the Feast of Fools did not die off, it was appropriated by the lay society, and the role reversal enacted by the Bishop of Fools moved on to the sociopolitical sphere. Bourgeois civic fraternities, trade guilds, or clerkly groups (the societes joyeuses, the confreries, the literary puys, or the lawyers' Basoches) secularized the core essence of this renowned personage and took over his license to parody the ruling class. ' 'And so we find a second tradition of Feasts of Fools, in which the fous are no longer vicars but bourgeois, and the dominus festi is a popular 'king' or 'prince' rather than a clerical 'bishop' " (Chambers 1:373). The reversal of roles enacted by "the Bishop of Fools—where the lowly appropriate for themselves the seat of the powerful for one day, wear their garb, and mimic their authority with irreverence—is a multifaceted phenomenon of human ritual and performance. Its emergence, continuance, and transformation in society have been analyzed using different approaches. Sociopolitical, sociocultural, phenomenological, philosophical/literary, and theological viewpoints have been expounded and are useful in interpreting this historical fool. The first approach that comes to mind when analyzing the character of the Bishop of Fools is the Bakhtinian sociopolitical theory of the carnivalesque
102
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
impulse of the simple folk in obdurate opposition to the authority in place. According to Bakhtin, "All these forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter and consecrated by tradition . . . were sharply distinct from the serious official, ecclesiastical, feudal and political cult forms and ceremonials" (Bakhtin 5). He severs medieval life into two separate modes of existence, pitting the serious feudal/ecclesiastical authority against the laughing folk. This bipolar vision does not apply to the Bishop of Fools. The laughter and mockery generated by the Feast of Fools, its carnivalesque role reversal, not only occurred in the church, but also, as we have seen, fit within its very own liturgy. The Bishop of Fools impersonates an ecclesiastic and mimics the rituals of holy office. He is not a fool figure emerging from a popular movement. Though elected from among the lowest in the church's hierarchy, he still functions within the sphere of religion. Nevertheless, the question of social class and political empowerment is an important one. The Bishop of Fools can be seen as an indicator of the social and political preoccupations of the times. This figure parodied both the symbols of power and the elements of ritual that characterized the church's ruling class. By personifying a higher prelate, the Bishop of Fools sketched, in a condensed form, what were the common abuses of power (Heers 26). By giving shape to the injustices experienced throughout the year, the role reversal embodied by the Bishop of Fools allowed the lowest in the hierarchy to vent repressed anger and resentment, to blow off steam, and thus to actually perpetuate the social order by acting out their frustrations within the all-embracing liturgy of the church. An interesting phenomenological theory proposes that the function of the role reversal and of the deformations of the Mass "was not so much to release tension as it was to create arousal in the participants" (Gilhus 46). In this view, the excitement produced by the role reversal of the Feast of Fools served as the fuel that kept the feast in existence. It continued through time because the intensity of the emotions it generated gave it life. Though rather reductionist, this view that the "minor priests held their feast primarily for the fun of doing it" (Gilhus 46) adds an important dimension in understanding the continued popularity of the feast. A sociocultural view expounded by Victor Turner highlights the concepts of liminality and root paradigms. Turner states that in human ritual there is "a moment when those being moved in accordance with a cultural script were liberated from normative demands, when they were, indeed, betwixt and between successive lodgments in jural political systems. In this gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen" (Turner 13). In this moment of liminality there exists the possibility of stepping aside "not only from one's own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative arrangements" (Turner 14). If we take the hierarchical feudal and ecclesiastical social structures as the "models, patterns and paradigms for behavior and thinking" (Turner 15), in other words, as the root
The Bishop of Fools
103
paradigm, the Feast of Fools offers an alternative paradigm, a moment of time in this system when the permanent and formal order is inverted, altered in favor of another temporary, carnivalesque structure based on folly and derision. In Turner's view, liminality is a transformative force in society, since the alternate paradigms eventually lose their marginal status to become themselves the root paradigm. It is questionable whether the Bishop of Fools occasioned such a transformative action. On the one hand, he can be seen as perpetuating the established order by allowing for accumulated frustrations to be vented within the controlled structures of the church; on the other, we see appropriation of the the Bishop of Fools by the domain of the secular as a movement to the mainstream of social activity. A philosophical/literary case can be made for the "Janus" effect occasioned by the Bishop of Fools and the mise-en-abime this figure creates in the domain of the sacred. The Bishop of Fools and the feast he led present us with a paradox. Irreverent and scatological, they nevertheless functioned within the universe of the sacred. Through the enactment of a distorted version of the liturgy of the Mass, the two mutually exclusive realms of the Mass and of the Feast of Fools form the two faces of the same entity (Boucquey 5). By providing an upsidedown, motley rendering of the church's liturgy, the Feast of Fools provides a medium for the underside to surface. This upside-down world ruled by foolery creates an altered picture-in-a-picture, a mise-en-abime that complements and completes the domain of the sacred. A theological view links the elements of festivity and fantasy inherent in the Bishop of Fools with man's sense of belonging in history and in the cosmic order, as well as his ability to envision his future. "Festivity, with its essential ingredients—excess, celebration, and juxtaposition—is itself an essential ingredient in human life" (Cox 26). Festivity allows man to feel anchored in a higher scheme, a divine order, that reconstitutes the balance between man's mortal state and his divine nature. Similarly, ' 'Fantasy is the richest source of human creativity. . . . it is the image of the creator God in man" (Cox 59). It institutes a link for mankind between daily reality and the realm of the possible, providing a way for uniting both man's divine essence and his human form. Another theological argument can be made whereby the Bishop of Fools can be seen as impersonating the folly inherent in the very person of Christ. As Erasmus pointed out, folly finds its roots in the most sacred: Christ too, though he is the wisdom of the Father, was made something of a fool himself in order to help the folly of mankind, when he assumed the nature of man and was seen in man's form; just as he was made sin so that he could redeem sinners. Nor did he wish them to be redeemed in any other way save by the folly of the cross and through his simple, ignorant apostles, to whom he unfailingly preached folly. He taught them to shun wisdom, and made his appeal through the example of children, lilies, mustard-seed and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things, which live their lives by natural instinct alone, free from care or purpose. (198-199)
104
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
By bringing to light the scatological and carnal dimension of existence within the domain of the sacred, the Bishop of Fools can be seen as the symbol of the human presence of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, the paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation.
CRITICAL RECEPTION With these different views in mind, it is possible to see the Bishop of Fools as a figure that incarnates the essential paradox of Christ's message. By impersonating a superior in an irreverent and scatological fashion, the Bishop of Fools portrayed a higher being in the carnal and animalesque dimension that is common to all, ecclesiastical authorities and lowly clerics alike. In this impersonation, the Bishop of Fools embodies a paradox. As Gilhus correctly points out, the elevation of the lower clergy to the seat of the powerful was a ' 'paradoxical elevation of lowness still being low, not of lowness becoming highness" (Gilhus 42). The lowly impersonated the powerful, not in their preeminence, but as fools. The role reversal enacted by the Bishop of Fools creates a new sphere of existence for all the participants. The higher domain of divine rites, ecclesiastical authority, and sacred mysteries is derided and brought down to the level of earthly, animalesque, and primal carnal impulses. Another entirely different dimension is brought to human experience. The customary notions of duality, low/ high, human/divine, body/soul, and lowly/powerful are fused together, confused, altered. For a moment in time, the participants of the Feast of Fools—powerful prelates, lowly clerics, and the different ranks of the faithful who partook of this unique Mass—existed in the essence of the Christian experience, of the divine brought down to the carnal, of the powerful brought down by the lowly. For a brief moment, the unlikely, precarious, and temporary fusion of two eternally opposed realms of existence converged in the scurrilous ridicule of the sacred led by the Bishop of Fools.
NOTE 1. My translation of "jamais, a bien y regarder, la fete des Fous n'a quitte la constellation du sacre."
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Chambers, E. K. The Medieval Stage. Oxford: Clarendon, 1903. Hone, William. Ancient mysteries described, especially. . . the festivals of fools and asses, the English boy-bishop.. . . London, 1823.
The Bishop of Fools
105
Secondary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Boucquey, Thierry. Mirages de la farce: Fete des fous, Bruegel, et Moliere. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991. Bristol, Michael. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, 1985. Cox, Harvey. The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969. Erasmus, Desiderius. Praise of Folly. Trans. Betty Radice. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1971. Gilhus, Ingvild Salid. "Carnival in Religion: The Feast of Fools in France." Numen 37.1 (1990): 24-52. Heers, Jacques. Fetes des fous et carnavals. Paris: Fayard, 1983. Knight, Alan E. "The Image of the City in the Processional Theater of Lille." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 30 (1988): 153-165. . ' The Sponsorship of Drama in Lille." In Studies in Honor of Hans-Erich Keller, ed. Rupert T. Pickens. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1993. 275-285. Lever, Maurice. Le sceptre et la marotte. Paris: Fayard, 1983. Morley, John David. The Feast of Fools. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. Swain, Barbara. Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. New York: Columbia UP, 1932. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1974.
George Burns and Gracie Allen
The Jewish Vaudeville Tradition
(United States: Burns, 1896-1996; Allen, c. 1906-1964)
Marcia B. Littenberg BACKGROUND Vaudeville offered a venue for many Jewish comics, allowing them to transplant the irony, verbal incongruity, wit, timing, and comic delivery of Yiddish humor into American theaters. To put a "vaudeville shine" on a story is to exaggerate its comic potential, to lie a little bit, to emphasize the ironic incongruities of a situation through the retelling of those comic moments when everything seems awry. American vaudeville attracted many Jewish comedians who simply transplanted a long history of Jewish verbal humor onto the American stage and added physical gestures and exuberant silliness to the more cerebral comic irony of shtetl humor. Jewish actors and comedians also gravitated to vaudeville because they could find work there. When they went for a job in vaudeville, what mattered was what they could do, not who they were or where they were born. As Irving Howe writes in World of our Fathers: "In every gang of kids spilling into the streets of the ghettos of 1900 or 1905, kids whose mothers hoped they would grow up to be manufacturers, accountants or doctors, there was bound to be one who dreamed of breaking in with a comic act or vaudeville troupe'' (556). Youngsters like Nathan Birnbaum (who would try out a number of names before he settled on George Burns), Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Fannie Brice, and Sophie Tucker were lured by the promise of vaudeville because it represented the fastest and seemingly the easiest, most glamorous way off the streets and onto the highway of American success. It helped that the managers of New York vaudeville theaters and national vaudeville circuits were
George Burns and Gracie Allen
107
often Jewish entrepreneurs, like Marcus Loew and Adoph Zukor who owned the famed Orpheum Circuit. Entertainers worked in vaudeville, Burns and others suggested, because if they were good they could. Even if at first an act was not very good, it might start out as a second or a filler, and eventually move on to become a first act, as did Burns and Allen. Although many orthodox Jews saw vaudeville as sacrilegious, first-generation Jews felt the promise of employment was stronger than religious prohibition. Many Jewish-American vaudeville comedians found some of the richest sources of their comic material in the actions, speech, and mannerisms of the immigrant "greenhorns" trying to cope with the unfamiliar life in America. Vaudeville comedians presented exaggerated images of the "greenhorn," providing their largely working-class audience with an inexpensive escape from reality, a fleeting sense of superiority to the butt of the comic jest, and relatively clean, family entertainment. By laughing at comics who exaggerated the pitfalls of everyday life, men and women in the audience testified to their own assimilation into American culture. They spent an afternoon or evening in one of the gilded and crystal-hung vaudeville "palaces" and shared, for a nickel or dime, the illusive American dream. Vaudeville translated into spectacle many of the ironies of the working-class immigrant experience. It was possible to laugh at the comics' exaggeration of life's frustrations and ironies, whether it was trying to get a date or a job or impress one's family. The comic antics on stage helped one forget one's own troubles, even if they often began as exaggerations of real-life situations. BIOGRAPHY Like many others who found fame and employment, if not always fortune, in vaudeville, George Burns, born Nathan Birnbaum on January 20, 1896, grew up in a poor family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He came from a large family, seven girls and five boys. The Birnbaums were Orthodox Jews who had migrated from Eastern Europe and, like so many immigrants, lived at first in one room in a tenement. As the family grew they moved to "grander quarters," a three-room cold-water walk-up flat at 259 Rivington Street (Gottfried 15). Louis Birnbaum worked in a kosher butcher shop and was an assistant cantor at the neighborhood synogogue. Dora Birnbaum, according to all accounts, was a formidable matriarch who ran her household and tried to feed her children on pennies. At the age of forty-three she was widowed, with no money and twelve children, the youngest of them six months old, when Louis died, at forth-seven, of the 1904 influenza epidemic (Gottfried 16). Burns bitterly recalls his mother scrounging for nickels to pay for mourners to say Kaddish for his father. He once told a friend that this incident turned him against religion. Although Burns never denied his Jewishness, being Jewish was not part of his private or public identity. Show business became his religion and his life (Gottfried 17).
108
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
After his father's death, Nathan earned money hawking newspapers and shining shoes. Like many other poor children, he dropped out of school early, finding more excitement and getting his education on the streets rather than in P.S. 22. He started dancing on Bowery street comers at the age of seven with three other boys who called themselves "the Pee Wee Quartet." "When people began clapping for me, I got my first feel of an audience," Bums recalls in various autobiographies, "and I was hooked on show biz" (Gottfried 17). Before teaming up with Gracie Allen in 1923, Bums was a dancer, singer, and comedian with various acts, including a talk and singing act with Sid Gary. Once, when the duo heard that there was an opening for a dog act, they went out and found two stray dogs and brought them on stage. "That's a description of the act, not a critique," Bums writes. "We brought the dogs onstage with us, let them do whatever they wanted to do, and we did our song and dance act" (Bums 35). This act was never repeated. Bums fared better when he met Gracie Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen, who was bom around 1906 in San Francisco, the daughter of Edward Allen, a song and dance man in vaudeville and musical reviews. Gracie had performed since the age of three, including a song and dance act with her three older sisters. Before meeting George Bums, who was playing on the same vaudeville bill as her roommate Renee Arnold and Jack Benny's girlfriend Mary Kelley, who introduced them, Gracie had toured with the vaudeville act Larry Reilly and Company. She was the "Company." When Reilly dropped the "and Company" from the bill, she quit. Gracie approached Bums about forming an act. Recalling this meeting, Bums says with characteristic humor, "the moment I heard her voice I figured she had to be a dancer. She sounded like the bird who had been thrown out of the nest for singing offkey" (Burns 40). Bums at the time was part of a singing act with Billy Lorraine, who stuttered whenever he was not on stage. This, he notes, was probably why Gracie asked him and not Billy. Bums continues the rumor that he cheated Reilly because he fell in love with Gracie and wanted her as a partner on stage and off. They began working regularly in vaudeville together. Their act began as a "flirtation" routine but gradually changed and developed as Grade's unique comic talents emerged. In 1930 they made their radio debut in London, which led to a nineteen-year mn of "The George Bums and Gracie Allen Show," a type of sitcom utilizing comic banter. Within two years they had a movie contract and made over a dozen films. In 1950 they began their half-hour television series, which lasted eight years (Unterbrink 52). Their love and affection continued until Grade's death from cancer in 1964. Until he became "God" for a whole new generation in 1977, George Bums believed he could never succeed without his partner.
George Burns and Gracie Allen
109
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Bums and Allen began as a song, dance, and talk act, with George as the comic and Gracie as the foil, but as Bums recalls in Larry Wilde's book The Great Comedians Talk about Comedy: [The audience laughed] at her straight lines and they didn't laugh at my jokes. If she asked me a question, they would laugh and I didn't expect a laugh there. . .. I knew right away that there was a feeling of something between the audience and Gracie. They loved her, and so, not being a fool and wanting to smoke cigars for the rest of my life, I gave her the jokes, (quoted in Wertheim 197) On the vaudeville stage and later in radio comedy and film, Gracie Allen played a nonsensical woman who made ludicrous statements that followed their own illogical logic. Although Bums wrote most of their routines, the delivery depended on Grade's ability to transform the stock vaudeville "Dumb Dora" routine into a style uniquely her own. When Gracie said a line, no matter how ludicrous its premise, she delivered it as if she really believed it. ' 'Grade could do the wildest kinds of jokes and make people believe them," Bums said (quoted in Wertheim 198). Because the audience believed that Gracie believed what she said, it was doubly funny. Part of her humor depended on taking everything George said literally, seemingly impervious to the playful, figurative potential of language, while he would rapidly offer material she could turn into non sequitors. The following is an example of such characteristic banter: Gracie: On my way in, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, "Hiya cutie, how about a bite tonight, after the show?" George: And you said? Gracie: I said, "I'll be busy after the show but I'm not doing anything now," so I bit him. George: Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby? Gracie: On, no we couldn't afford a nurse, my mother had to do it. (quoted in Wertheim 199) Grade's innocence, her apparently genuine naivete, and her seeming lack of awareness that her speech inverted normal dialogue made audiences love her even as they laughed at her. No thought was irrelevant; ideas and words veered off one another, like bubbles, in a series of non sequitors, all delivered with sweetness and conviction in her high piping voice. Bums writes that what made Gracie different was her sincerity. "Onstage Gracie was totally honest, and honesty is the most important thing a performer can have. If a performer can fake that, he can do anything" (Bums 45). Bums and Allen began by using a stock flirtation routine that generally show-
110
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
cased the male comedian's witty remarks, but they inverted this convention still further by having George's witty remarks and gentle insults miss their mark. Instead of Gracie getting insulted when George said, "You're dizzy," Gracie replied, "I'm glad I'm dizzy. Boys like dizzy girls and I like boys." So began one of the lengthiest jokes in their routine, which they often repeated during the nineteen weeks they played the Loew's vaudeville circuit and for many years on radio (Wertheim 198). Then they escalated the confusion: George: I'm glad you're glad you're dizzy. Gracie: And I'm glad you're glad I'm glad I'm dizzy, [and so on] Both language and intent were turned around so many times in this repetition, that the audience too got dizzy until it finally joined in the laughter signaled by George Bums's signal, a puff on his cigar, the intake and exhale that told the audience it was time to laugh. Although there were a number of male-female song, dance, and talk acts in vaudeville, most depended on physical humor and stock jokes ("Take my wife, please") and drew on comic stereotypes, like the schlemiel or fool. The key to Bums and Allen's success, instead, was Grade's inversion of conventional logic. Gracie always answered George's questions with sincerity and seemed genuinely surprised when the audience laughed. She appeared to find her upside-down logic perfectly plausible. The routine that eventually replaced "Dizzy" was written by Al Boasberg in 1926 and was known as "Lamb Chops." In it George's attempts at flirtation are foiled by Grade's literal answers: George: Do you like love? Gracie: No. George: Do you like to kiss? Gracie: No. George: What do you like? Gracie: Lamb chops. George: A little girl like you, can you eat two big lamb chops alone? Gracie: No, but with potatoes I could, (quoted in Wertheim 199) Gracie was a natural performer whose conventional ladylike manner emphasized the zaniness of her totally unconventional replies. Bums notes of his partner, "She could make the audience believe that she really believed that by shortening the vacuum cleaner cord she could save on electricity. And because she said her lines differently every performance, those lines always sounded fresh" (Bums 51). Like the "natural" fool, Grade's "illogical logic" exposes the absurdity on which our own, more limited logic rests. If we can believe that by investing our
George Burns and Gracie Allen
111
money in one bank we can earn 5 percent interest, why wouldn't investing it in two yield 10 percent? All one needs to do is think as literally as Gracie Allen. Bums and Allen's comic routines worked because they made fun of our all-toohuman ludicrous attempts to cope with the chaos and confusion of real life; they acknowledged that in spite of our best efforts, life does not make much sense, but we muddle through as best we can. The vaudeville audience loved Gracie and identified with George's patient, obviously affectionate exasperation. He once said of her, "She made me famous as the only man in America who could get a laugh by complaining 'My wife understands me' " (Bums 15). She always dressed and acted in a ladylike manner, often wearing a hat and gloves; all the humor rested on her verbal play, in her high-pitched delivery that accentuated her sweetness and vulnerability, and in her impeccable timing. Unlike many vaudeville acts, Bums and Allen played to each other, not to the audience, and the palpable affection between them encouraged the audience to believe their routines and to compare Gracie to their sisters, wives, or girlfriends. Once Burns fed Gracie the initial line that set Grade's inane stories or explanations in motion, he became the baffled respondent, remaining deadpan, with an air of wry modesty and tolerance. His calm sanity, even when repeating her upside-down observations, provided a visual and emotional contrast to her zany observations and twisted logic, making them even funnier because we observe with Burns what it is to be liberated from the banality of ordinary thought. This sense of enduring the assaults on normal reason by his dizzy wife was central to Bums' role as straight man and was almost as important as his impeccable timing and clever writing. Bums' reactions clearly signaled to the audience, "Look at her—isn't she crazy and wonderful. It's the rest of us who are too dull to see the world as Gracie does, forever yielding new possibilities." Because Burns and Allen's comic humor rested on word play and on the illogical logic of Grade's responses and stories, not on physical comedy, they were the only male-female comedy team to successfully make the transition from live theater to radio and thus to survive and prosper after radio replaced vaudeville as family entertainment. What they have in common with other vaudeville comedians, like their lifelong friend Jack Benny, was the ability to exaggerate and invert everyday experiences. We may not have a brother who has an appendix scar on his forehead because he's ticklish or who wears both pairs of pants that came with his suit, but through George Bums and Gracie Allen's comic routines, we can laugh at someone whose natural foolishness releases us from the ordinariness of our own stupidity. Gracie Allen is never defeated by life's difficulties because she focuses only on what is immediate, literal, and, from her naively optimistic point of view, totally plausible. For example, during one Depression-era joke she remarked how smart it was that filling stations had gasoline wells located right under the busiest streets (Unterbrink 53).
112
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
CRITICAL RECEPTION Ranked as "the greatest husband-and-wife comedy team of all time" (Unterbrink 50), Bums and Allen's career stretched from 1922 through 1958 and included successes in vaudeville, radio, movies, and television. Although Bums credits Allen with the greater comic skill, both were responsible for the success of their achievement. Allen would get laughs by innocently opening her eyes and asking how their television sponsor could get milk from carnations or who advised keeping the emergency brake on at all times in case of an emergency (Unterbrink 53), but Bums signaled how and when the audience should respond. Although returning as a solo act after Grade's death was difficult, Bums eventually developed the familiar wry, deadpan monologue about his longevity, his cigars, and his life without Gracie. Opening at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas in May 1967, he entered following the signature puff of cigar smoke blown from the wings and noted, "I got a standing ovation just standing" (Gottfried 206). Although George Bums booked the London Palladium for his one hundreth birthday, remarking in his last years that he could not die because he was booked, he never made this last performance. He is probably showing God that famous card trick just before he says goodnight to Gracie. Bums and Allen remain an indelible part of American comic history. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bums, George. Gracie: A Love Story. New York: Signet, 1991. Gottfried, Martin. George Burns and the Hundred Year Dash. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Slide, Anthony, ed. Selected Vaudeville Criticism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988. Staples, Shirley. Male-Female Comedy Teams in American Vaudeville 1865-1912. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1984. Stein, Charles W., ed. American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries. New York: Knopf, 1984. Unterbrink, Mary. Funny Women: American Comediennes, 1860-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987. Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio Comedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.
The Camp
(Worldwide: Throughout History)
C. Todd White BACKGROUND A drag queen is a male who celebrates and impersonates the feminine aesthetic with grand and meticulous finesse. All motions, expressions, and articulations exude le femme. Fashion is on the cutting edge, complete with regal entourage. But a campy queen, sometimes called a "skag" or "transey" queen, burlesques romance and glamour, and even other queens. With her humorous observations she behaves as a wise fool or trickster, adding yet another dimension to her enigmatic gender role. An affinity for camp humor pervades the homosexual subculture, yet camp is not an exclusively gay phenomenon. Bette Midler is one modem Queen of Camp, and before her, Milton Berle. Camp might be manifested in a janitor-ess, a la Carol Bumette or "Baby" Jane Hudson. Camp is not exclusively gender related. In Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America, ethnographer Esther Newton notes that "any very incongruous contrast can be campy. For instance, juxtapositions of high and low status, of youth and old age, profane and sacred functions or symbols, cheap and expensive articles are frequently used for camp purposes" (107). Susan Sontag illustrates how Art Nouveau objects such as Tiffany lamps are campy because they typically "convert one thing into something else" (279). However, though people and objects are often said to be campy, ' 'Camp inheres not in the person or thing itself but in the tension between that person or thing and the context or association" (Newton 107). This is perhaps why Sontag calls camp a "sensibility," meaning that it should never be "crammed into the mold of system, or handled with the rough tools of proof" (276).
114
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Yet camp is associated with the gay world and has been lauded as the "grandest manifestation of the gay subcultural aesthetic" (Meyer 68). The term itself derives from the effeminate behavior acted out by men in vaudeville, burlesque, and slapstick theater. In these genres, camp is subdivided into levels. In the 1920s and 1930s, Variety magazine featured advertisements placed by comics who could perform either high camp or low. Jack Benny and Edward Everett Horton were the overall favorites of the day (Karlen 308). Newton describes the levels of camp with the following analogy: "If high camp is Snow White, then low camp is the evil queen" (56). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS At its heart, camp is theater and as such has a long-standing tradition in carnival, theater, and circus. Ancient Rome popularized Saturnalia, a week-long festival where slaves ranted at masters, men dressed as women, and a commoner was crowned Lord of Misrule. The tradition diffused throughout medieval Italy, Spain, and France. In many cases, an elected representative of the lower class was designated King of Fools, and he presided throughout the subsequent revelries (Frazer 674-679). During his reign, "all sanctity toward religion and authority was suspended. The mass was burlesqued, asses were led into church, and priests and clerks wore masks, danced in the choir, and dressed as women" (Hay 48). Goethe described comic cross-dressers during Roman Mardi Gras at the close of the eighteenth century. He noted that the spirit of the occasion was one of festive mirth, involving camp both high and low: "It cannot be denied that Columbine sometimes is unable totally to hide her blue beard'' (quoted in Hirschfeld 351). Perennial festivals such as Mardi Gras and Carnival continue to burlesque race, status, and gender—often all at once. The American fool societies that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Cowbellion de Rakin of Mobile and the Mistick Krewe of Comus in New Orleans, have continued the Roman tradition into the present (Kinser 78, 88-89). The Queen of the Comic Cowboys Society of Mobile has been a cross-dressed male since the role was created in 1917. In 1930, the figure became a campy burlesque of gluttony when played by three-hundred-pound Charlie Blanchard and later by Johnny Loris, whose placard pronounced him "A Quarter Ton of Queen" (Kinser 125-126). A cross-dressed Queen of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was first chosen in 1923, and the tradition lasted for a decade, using camp to ridicule both the "grandes dames of New Orleans elite society" and the honorable Rex (Kinser 233-234). It must be remembered, however, that not all cross-dressing may be counted as campy drag or even as drag. In European drama, males traditionally played the most somber of female roles since the days of the ancient Greeks. In Germany, female roles were played by males well into the seventeenth century
The Camp
115
(Hirschfeld 350-352), and Goethe noted that the Romans maintained this tradition as late as 1790, which he attributed to the particularly Roman penchant for cross-dressing in masquerade (48). The English Tudor stage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is well known for its all-male actors, with cross-dressing boys playing the female roles, particularly in the plays of Shakespeare. We can only speculate whether any of these roles were played campily and whether the resulting androgyny was a weakness or a strength of the productions. C. J. Bulliet quipped early in this century, "May not Shakespeare have taken pleasure in designing Desdemona for the pretty 'Dickie' Robinson, or Ophelia for 'Nat' Field, or Lady Macbeth for 'Alex' Cooke, or Cleopatra for 'Bobbie' Goffe, or Rosalind for 'Willie' Ostler?" (132). With boy actors playing such serious and tragic female roles as Cordelia, any hint of campy drag would be anathema, but comedy, of course, is another matter. How boy actors, playing women who masquerade as men, may have played their cross-dressing roles in such comedies as Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It remains a mystery. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, however, Shakespeare clearly creates a campy tone when Ford mistakes Falstaff for his maid's aunt, whom he deplores, beats soundly, and casts out of the house (4.2). In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom pleads to be allowed the role of Thisbe, which he campily mocks: "I'll speak in a monstrous little voice:—'Thisne, Thisne!' " (1.2.13-^-4). Finally, in Antony and Cleopatra, the great heroine contemplates with despair her destiny, when a cross-dressing boy actor will debase her grandeur. She predicts, "Some squeaking Cleopatra [will] boy my greatness. In the posture of a whore" (5.2.220221). In any case, such cross-dressing remained the British convention until well into the seventeenth century. As late as 1629, a French troupe attempting to introduce females to the London stage was driven off when the audience threw rotten eggs and fruit (Hirschfeld 349). The mistaken identity derived from cross-dressing is a powerful and popular element of comic plot development. The Italian opera Achilles in Sciro (Antonio Draghi, libretto by Cav. Ximenez, 1663) tells of the days of Achilles's youth, when he lived disguised as a maiden in an effort to escape his destiny as a soldier in the war with Troy. Achilles, popularly known as the maid Artamene, appeared to be such a charming lass that King Lykomedes, the king's confidante, and the King's daughter were all stricken by her beauty and conspired to win her hand. The game was up when Artamene (Achilles) grasped a sword and consequently was recognized by Ulysses as Achilles (Hirschfeld 357-359, Bulliet 14-16). Ben Jonson employed a similar theme in Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman (1609). Epicoene's climactic unveiling restores some slight honor to her husband, Morose, and exposes Daw and La Foole, who claimed to have carnal knowledge of the bride, for the frauds that they were (5.4). In each work mentioned here, cross-dressing has a similar function in the plot: it is a temporary act of rebellious subversion and disappears when the
116
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
conflict and climax move into the denouement. Gordene Olga MacKenzie observes that even today, audiences usually expect "that at the end of the show the performer will return to 'normal' dress and the appropriate bipolar gender role and behavior" (111). She notes the "crucial difference between comediennes and performers who cross-dress to evoke laughter and transgenderists and cross-dressers who appear in order to validate and defend their lives" (111). Members of both groups may be successful because of the outrageousness of their camp appearance. Historian Martin Duberman tells of New York crossdresser Sylvia Rivera, who, like Achilles, used cross-dressing in an effort to escape the draft. Appearing before the draft board in high heels and a miniskirt, Sylvia was placed on a bus headed for the induction center in Newark. Upon arrival, she was presented to the camp psychiatrist, who immediately released her from duty and stamped "HOMOSEXUAL" in bold red letters across her induction notice. "Knowing she had gotten off, Sylvia giddily opted for one last bit of grandstanding camp. T ain't got no money to go home,' she announced with maximum petulance. 'You all brought me here, now you all got to get me home.' And damned if they didn't drive her all the way to Jersey City" (127-128). Not all more subtle masquerades have such happy endings. For example, Hirschfeld reported a truly tragic event that occurred in March 1905 at a masquerade in Hungary: A woman of attractive appearance formed the center of society and was wooed by all. At the height of the festivities, the lady removed her mask, and her dance partners recognized her as Johann Antal, the carpenter's apprentice. . . . According to the New Free Press, "several of the dancers became so enraged that they came at him with knives" (Hirschfeld 368).
It is a melancholy fact that the same incongmities that make the drag queen exciting and attractive also make her hated, so much that observers often call her dysphoric, a term laden with pejorative connotations of sadness and depression. Camp characterizes a raucous performance of inversion; but the dysphoria arises when the curtain falls. True to such classics as Torch Song Trilogy and Cabaret, the same crowd that lauds the drag queen in the evening will lynch her in the morning. Viktor und Viktoria debuted in Germany in 1933, the same year that Hitler became chancellor, and the same year that camp became a deadly serious matter as the first Homosexuellen were shipped to Dachau and Fuhlsbuttel (Plant 108). But sensibilities are changing. Today, through media and popular culture, those individuals who themselves identify with the transgendered sensibility are discovering a heritage formerly denied them. Even in remote areas, crossdressing has become a common occurrence in contemporary American culture, and young gays are discovering early on that they are not alone. For instance, one man told of his idolization of Freddie Mercury, the "man who put the
The Camp
117
queen in Queen'': ' 'Although I did get beat up for my junior high attempt at glitter-rock drag, Mercury and others suggested another world where you wouldn't be despised for being yourself, even if that meant donning gold-lame frocks, six-inch platform shoes, and black nail polish" (Leap 130). Television and motion pictures have become an important force guiding the acceptance of the drag queen and "especially of gay camp" (Leap 55-56). Since Lucille Ball's campy antics in the early days of television, cross-dressing has become a common sight on network television. Milton Berle first donned a dress in 1947, and Jonathan Winters soon followed suit (MacKenzie 110-111). In the early 1970s, the most famous black woman on television was Flip Wilson as Geraldine Jones (Baker 241). Soon after, Lily Tomlin camped it up on Laugh In, and Monty Python's Flying Circus introduced transvestite lumberjacks and dirty vicars to the BBC. The Church Lady rejuvenated Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s, and one could catch a camp character on any episode of In Living Color in the early 1990s. More recently, one campy episode of The Simpsons featured Marge as a felon, Homer in a wedding dress, and the transvestite "Bart-ina." In The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, three drag queens trek across Australia in an immense lavender bus on their way to a gig in the Outback. In the climactic "message scene" of the film, one of the three heroines is surprised and delighted that as a homosexual drag queen, she is accepted, loved, and even admired by her young son. A second, a male-to-female transsexual, also finds love and acceptance and potentially even a mate. A similar troupe of cross-dressed "career girls" makes a trek into rural America in To Wong Foo} Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995). On their way from New York to Los Angeles, they become stranded in a small town. During their stay, the "girls" enlighten the locals as they entertain. By the end of the film, a dumb woman speaks, several jerks become gentlemen, and every potential princess becomes a full-fledged queen. Our heroines seem to triumph, yet the heroine, Veda Boheme, who adapted to "gypsy life" after being shunned by her rich family, remains estranged from them, still hated and feared by the "dullards" of the world. It is undeniable that social acceptance of drag queens remains tenuous. At the close of Mother Camp, Esther Newton depicts female impersonators in the United States as living in "an isolation beyond the pale, comparable to the position of lepers or untouchables" (129). She concludes that many professional cross-dressers help to perpetuate their low social status ' 'by blaming themselves more than the straight world for their lowly estate" (129). Yet Newton published her study in 1972, a time when drag shows were a low-class art form in America. While certain clubs in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City featured female impersonators, Newton reports that the only two "chic" nightclubs to feature drag on a regular basis were in San Francisco and New York, and "only T. C. Jones, the best known female impersonator, has ever to my knowledge worked in the Mecca of nightclubs, Las Vegas" (120). Today, most American cities
118
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
feature a venue for this vaudevillian renaissance. Cosmopolitan gay bars throughout America and Europe customarily feature a drag show at least once a week—even on the Las Vegas Strip. In Kenny Kerr's Boylesque, one of the longest-running shows in the nation since opening in 1977 at the Silver Slipper, within five years of Newton's observation, camp both high and low may be experienced nightly. Attitudes toward the drag queen are changing, and it is the campy queen, with her exaggeration, self-parody, and wit, who makes drag more joyful to the gay world and less threatening to the straight society.
CRITICAL RECEPTION Whether it is for fun, money, or self-expression, cross-dressers, particularly campy queens, remind us that gender is made identifiable through performance. When there are polarized and ascribed gender roles, campy queens will burlesque and invert them. The campy queen serves the function of the fool or trickster. As a fool, she is, according to Mark Thompson, one of the "most enduring of all archetypes," who turns a situation inside out. Like that of all fools, her gender is unclear. Often cross-dressed or adorned with both masculine and feminine symbols, this merry prankster "chases through history, holding up a looking glass to human folly" (52). The campy queen, with her ironic perspective, reveals the social role playing of gendered behavior, with its highly conventionalized and formalized scripts, costumes, and props. She makes us see the truth of RuPaul's observation, " W e ' r e born naked and the rest is drag" (quoted in Baker 112).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Roger. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. New York: New York UP, 1994. Bulliet, C. J. Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human. 1928. New York: Bonanza Books, 1956. Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Plume, 1994. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 1922. Abridged ed. New York: Collier, 1963. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. "Women's Parts Played by Men in the Roman Theater." Trans. Isa Ragusa. In Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hay, Harry. Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Hirschfeld, Magnus. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress. Trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. A translation of Die Transvestiten. Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910; 2 Aufl., Leipzig: "Wahrheit" F. Spohr, 1925. Karlen, Amo. Sexuality and Homosexuality: A New View. New York: Norton, 1971.
The Camp
119
Kinser, Samuel. Carnival, American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Leap, William L. Words Out: Gay Men's English. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. MacKenzie, Gordene Olga. Transgender Nation. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1994. Meyer, Moe. "Unveiling the Word: Science and Narrative in Transsexual Striptease." In Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1992. Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Noonday, 1966. Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin's, 1987.
Canio-Pagliacco and Petrouchka
Two Contrasting Images of Pierrot
(Canio-Pagliacco: Italy: In Ruggiero Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci, with libretto by the composer: 1892; Petrouchka: Russia: In Igor Stravinsky's ballet Petrouchka: 1911)
William D. West BACKGROUND Ruggiero Leoncavallo's / Pagliacci is often categorized as a "verismo" work, that is, an opera emerging in Italy during the late nineteenth century from the short-lived ' 'realist'' school. Such operas, filled with highly charged emotional music, tell of everyday people in familiar situations who behave impetuously and feel primitive emotion. Yet / Pagliacci really remains true to the great nineteenth-century romantic tradition of Italian opera. The music is filled with lusciously romantic harmonies and is conservative when compared to the prior chromatic achievements of Richard Wagner and the contemporary sounds of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Giacomo Puccini. Moreover, by permitting his actors to perform the roles of commedia dell'arte characters who live out their passions both onstage in the fantasy portion of the libretto and off in the real-life sections, Leoncavallo follows the device of a play-within-a-play that was used by that protoromantic, William Shakespeare, whom the nineteenthcentury romantics venerated, and that would be copied time and again thereafter. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The passions revealed amid / Pagliaccfs real-life ambiance are those of lower-class entertainers trying to eke out a living through their itinerant performances in small Italian towns in the 1890s, but they and their emotions are as large and exaggerated as those of many medieval and Renaissance heroes and heroines of the earlier romantic operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi.
Canio-Pagliacco and Petrouchka
121
Moreover, the commedia deH'arte figures who comically play out these emotions before a local audience in the second act are those we associate with traditional commedia deH'arte performances that persisted into and through the nineteenth century, at the center of which are Pagliacco (Pierrot), Columbine, and Harlequin. What makes the opera so effective, apart from the concise exposition of plot in act 1, is the manner in which Leoncavallo skillfully transforms the act 2 commedia dell'arte performance into a "real-life" enactment of the passions of its actors. The possessive and jealous Canio is Pagliacco, the Pierrot figure. His fickle wife, Nedda, is just as obviously Columbine, while Beppe, who plays the Harlequin role in the commedia, is in "real life" Silvio, Nedda's lover. The ugly Tonio plays the part of Taddio, the one who would love Columbine but who is spurned. In "real life" it is he who, out of revenge, reveals Nedda's and Silvio's affair to Canio, thus opening the floodgates for the tide of Canio's wrath to vent itself in the commedia performance. If this is a slice of real life, as Tonio in his Prologue would have us believe, it is a highly romanticized slice, which in no way detracts from its effectiveness as drama. When Tonio, stands before the two dead bodies of Silvio and Nedda at the close of the opera, he utters the words "La commedia e finita." Leoncavallo has achieved his purpose: the commedia within the story is indeed over, but not the tragedy of the opera itself. That lingers on in our thoughts long after a good production of / Pagliacci. Human foibles, laid bare in the commedia so that we may smile at them, are revealed as potentially lethal. The stage audience (the townspeople) watching the commedia have come for light entertainment. We notice their increasing discomfort: "Is this commedia or could it just be for real!" Unease turns to shock and horror as Pagliacco becomes Canio, plunges his knife into Nedda, and steps into the audience to finish off her lover. The downtrodden, maligned, and betrayed Pierrot has had his revenge and will no doubt hang for it. We in the audience, just like those in Leoncavallo's stage audience, cannot escape involvement. In true romantic fashion, the artist engages our feelings, as he does those of his stage audience. With Ballets Russes' Petrouchka—the Pierrot figure as re-created by Serge Diaghilev's company in 1911, nineteen years after Leoncavallo's opera—the commedia clown's image has changed, in accord with the perspective of his new Russian creators. Romantic realism makes way for a theater now feeling the influences of impressionist and symbolist literature and art; also a theater increasingly engaged in scenic and dramatic experiment. As Victor Borovsky has indicated in his article "Stravinsky's Theatre," the youthful Stravinsky shared much common ground with the leading Russian figure in these experiments, Vsevolod Meyerhold: "The vital role played by the grotesque, the interest in the traditional Italian Commedia dell'Arte, the play-acting and the use of different masks hiding the actors' faces, the subordination of the actors to the complicated counterpoint of the music's rhythm and plasticity" (Schouvaloff and Borovsky 17). No one was more open to such novel ideas than the impre-
122
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
sario and producer Diaghilev, who had that uncanny knack of bringing together some of Europe's most gifted creative artists. Stravinsky initiated the Petrouchka project when he was working on a Konzertstuck for piano and orchestra. In his autobiography he records: I had in my mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet. Having finished this bizarre piece, I struggled for hours . . . to find a title which would express in a word the character of my music and, consequently, the personality of this creature. One day I leapt for joy. I had indeed found my title—Petrouchka, the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries. (31-32) Diaghilev liked the idea; Alexandre Benois was brought in to establish the scenario, and Michel Fokine to do the choreography. Two scenes representing the inner world and soul of Petrouchka were to be framed by two outer crowd scenes set during the Shrovetide winter festivities in Admiralty Square in the heart of St. Petersburg. Thus the overall structure resembled superficially that of / Pagliacci. In each case the drama begins and ends in public view amid spectators unaware of any conflict (until toward the end in / Pagliacci), while the inner drama (the emotional core of each work) is confined to the middle, private scenes. Ambiguity is at the heart of Stravinsky's ballet. Musically this is reflected in a piercingly dissonant C-major-F-sharp chordal conflict that repeatedly returns to haunt the ear with its shattering bitonality. Is Petrouchka a mere puppet, a fantastical creation of his master the Showman-Magician, or is he alive and human? Like Canio-Pagliacco, he too loves his Columbine, this time in the form of a pretty Ballerina, and feels only hatred for his opponent in love, a particularly exotic form of the Harlequin figure, the menacing Blackamoor, who engages in a vacuous romance with the Ballerina. Ironically, although Petrouchka is only a puppet, he takes on more of the characteristics of Canio than the latter's foolish commedia equivalent, Pagliacco. He displays all the signs of insecurity and selfhatred, curses his own ugliness, and despises his physical limitations and ineptitude, especially his failure to attract the young Ballerina. Treated offhandedly by his creator, spurned by the object of his love, and brutally mishandled by the Moor, this Pierrot is a despairing figure. Benois had suggested that in his desperation (like Canio-Pagliacco) Petrouchka should finally kill his opponent, the Moor, before the ShowmanMagician dismantles them all (Schouvaloff and Borovsky 25). This was changed, however, at Stravinsky's instigation. Thus suddenly, in the fourth and final tableau, amid all the carnival festivities, we hear a pitiful scream (a muted trumpet crescendo) come from within the theater. Out rushes Petrouchka, chased
Canio-Pagliacco and Petrouchka
123
by the Moor, who cuts him down in full view of the spectators. The Ballerina, hysterical by now, has tried to intervene, but to no avail. Yet these are only puppets, after all. Petrouchka is a mere ragbag of wood, sawdust, and cloth now torn to shreds. The Showman, conceived by Benois as Petrouchka's creator and manipulator and the perpetrator of all his woes, now reassures the crowd, which drifts from the square as darkness falls. There are faint tremolos, with horns softly muted, lulling us into a relaxed mood, when unexpectedly and abruptly, in a brilliant coup de theatre, dissonant muted trumpet arpeggios pierce the silence. From the rooftop Petrouchka's spirit shakes its angry fist in bitterness at his creator: the spirit of the seemingly vanquished "little man" scornfully mocks the oppressor who earlier that day had breathed life into his ragged form. It might seem ironic to suggest that ultimately Stravinsky's puppet presents a more meaningfully realistic Pierrot image than does Leoncavallo's Canio. Not that Canio's distress does not signify something intensely real for himself and for countless others who have had to deal with marital infidelity and its concomitant emotions. But of the two, Petrouchka approaches closer to the level of a reality that finds its highest expression in a universal truism. Precisely because this Pierrot is a puppet, he can, and does through the sheer power of artistic invention and creation, become a spokesperson for suffering humanity. Of course, Leoncavallo's Pierrot figure, in the "real-life" form of Canio, certainly suffers, and agonizingly so; moreover, he does not solve anything by his vengeful murderous actions. Indeed, he only augments the wretchedness of his already miserable life. Pagliacco acts for himself and must accept the inevitable consequences, which are his alone to endure. The townspeople as stage audience can only feel shock, but at least they are involved, and so are we in the audience. However, a strange detachment pervades the atmosphere of Petrouchka. Petrouchka's death is an abrupt interlude amid the festive spirit of Shrovetide. The St. Petersburg crowds, sharply delineated in Fokine's choreography and Stravinsky's music as they go about their carnival pleasures amid various entertaining diversions, are stopped in their tracks by what is after all an unusual occurrence—but only briefly. The Showman reassures the crowd, and off they go. It is in the silence of a dark, deserted St. Petersburg square, as if from the dead and with no crowds to observe, that there sounds forth a single, isolated cry of outrage and anger, a solitary tormented spirit hurling defiance against its tormentor. Stravinsky's shrill trumpet arpeggios resonate with symbolic power. Only a puppet, yes, and a dead one at that; but in Petrouchka we hear the voice of Stravinsky and our century. It is the solitary, uncomprehending, yet defiant voice of one who refuses to remain silent, who shakes a fist at injustice, manipulation, and oppression. Yet there is the matter of Petrouchka's famous chord. It would be reassuring if it were tonal and direct. But that is exactly what it is not. Its very bitonality is meant to generate a feeling of unease and uncertainty. Even Petrouchka's
124
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
seemingly invincible spirit offers us no assurances for a century that has, in retrospect, been filled with more than its fair share of malignant surprises and shocks. Uncertainty and ambiguity are at the heart of human nature and experience. If Leoncavallo's Pierrot, in the form of Canio-Pagliacco, addresses such matters, it is on a more down-to-earth personal level, through the directness of elemental passions. The ballet, Petrouchka, is more subtle and suggestive and accordingly makes its address to humanity in general terms. Diaghilev, who was so excited when he first heard Stravinsky's earlier musical images of Petrouchka on the piano, felt that the composer had ended his score with a huge question mark. He was right. CRITICAL RECEPTION Both Leoncavallo's / Pagliacci and Stravinsky's Petrouchka were enthusiastically received at their premieres. Leoncavallo well knew of Pietro Mascagni's great success with Cavalleria rusticana in 1890, and building upon Italian audiences' new enthusiasm for verismo opera, in large part generated by Cavalleria, Leoncavallo worked hard to duplicate that success. When the young Arturo Toscanini conducted the first performance of / Pagliacci at Milan's Teatro Dal Verme on May 21, 1892, the composer knew that he had succeeded. It soon became the usual companion piece to its now-famous predecessor, a position it has held to this day. Similarly, Stravinsky's Petrouchka rode upon the success of an earlier work, his own first ballet composed for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, The Firebird. When Petrouchka was first performed in Paris on June 13, 1911, there were a few carping critics who disliked the more dissonant trends in Stravinsky's music, but overall the production compounded the success of the earlier ballet and only added to the excitement already surrounding Diaghilev's innovative company. Above all, Vaslav Nijinsky's performance as the much-abused puppet received accolades from everyone, including Stravinsky, who later expressed his ' 'heartfelt homage" to the dancer for his "unsurpassed rendering of the role." In his An Autobiography, Stravinsky also observed that the press and the cogniscenti of the art world were powerfully affected after attending the dress rehearsal of Petrouchka at the Chatelet. Furthermore, he claimed, "It gave me the absolute conviction of my ear just as it was about to begin The Rite of Spring [Le sacre du printemps].'' It is interesting to note in this respect that the composer, now basking in the reputation gained from these first two ballets, and having in fact conceived the idea of Le sacre du printemps before the creation of Petrouchka, would soon be at work on his Russian estate composing his third ballet, briefly postponed, the one that would truly shake the musical world, bringing him initial notoriety and then lasting fame.
Canio-Pagliacco and Petrouchka
125
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Scores Leoncavallo, Ruggiero. Pagliacci: Drama in Two Acts (full orchestra and vocal score). New York: Broude Brothers, n.d. Stravinsky, Igor. Petroushka: A Burlesque in Four Scenes. Kalmus Miniature Orchestra Scores. No. 79. New York: Kalmus, n.d. . Petrushka: An Authoritative Score of the Original Version Backgrounds, Analysis, Essays, Views and Comments. Ed. Charles Hamm. Norton Critical Score. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967.
Recordings of I Pagliacci Bjorling, Jussi, tenor; Renato Cellini, conductor; RCA Victor Orchestra and Robert Shaw Chorale. RCA Victor LM 6106-2, 1953. Corelli, Franco, tenor; Lovro von Matacic, conductor; Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro alia Scala, Milan. Angel 35943, 1960. Del Monaco, Mario, tenor; Alberto Erede, conductor; Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome. London LL 880/881, 1953. Gigli, Beniamino, tenor; Franco Ghione, conductor; Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro alia Scala, Milan. Seraphim Mono IB 6009, 1934.
Recordings of Petrouchka: Abbado, Claudio, conductor; London Symphony Orchestra. Original 1911 version. Deutsche Grammophon 2532 010 (LP), 400-042-2 (CD), 1981. Haitink, Bernard, conductor; London Philharmonic Orchestra. Original 1911 version. Philips 6500 458, n.d. (LP). Leinsdorf, Erich, conductor; New Philharmonia Orchestra. Original 1911 version. London Concert Series SPC 21058 (LP). Monteux, Pierre, conductor; Paris conservatoire Orchestra. Revised 1947 version. RCA Victor Red Seal LM-2113 (LP), Muti, Riccardo, conductor; Philadephia Orchestra. Revised 1947 version. EMI Records CDC 7474082 (CD), 1982. Stravinsky, Igor, conductor; Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Revised 1947 version. Columbia Masterworks D3L-300/DL 5504 (LP), Yuri, Temirkanov, conductor; Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. Revised 1947 version. Quintessence PMC-7147 (LP),
Book Stravinsky, Igor. An Autobiography. New York: Norton, 1962.
Secondary Sources Asaf'yev, Boris. A Book about Stravinsky. Trans. Richard F. French. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1982.
126
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992. Boucourechliev, Andre. Stravinsky. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987. Donington, Robert. Opera and Its Symbols: The Unity of Words, Music, and Staging. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Drummond, John D. Opera in Perspective. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980. Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Griffiths, Paul. Stravinsky. The Master Musicians Series. New York: Schirmer, 1992. Henry, Barbara. "Pierrot in Petrograd, Commedia deH'Arte" (review). Slavonic and East European Review 73 (April 1995): 300-301. McKee, David. "Send in the Clowns: Pagliacci on Disc." Opera Quarterly 9.3 (Spring 1993): 31-47. Sadie, Stanley, ed. History of Opera. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Sansone, Matteo. "The 'Verismo' of Ruggero Leoncavallo: A Source Study of Pagliacci." Music and Letters 70 (August 1989): 342-362. Schouvaloff, Alexander, and Victor Borovsky. Stravinsky on Stage. London: Stainer & Bell, 1982. Van Den Toom, Pieter C. The Music of Igor Stravinsky. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983. Vlad, Roman. Stravinsky. London: Oxford UP, 1978. Walsh, Stephen. The Music of Stravinsky. London: Routledge, 1988.
Charlie Chaplin
(England, United States, and Switzerland: 1889-1977)
Daniel Green Few comic artists in any form have transformed such real-life misery into such consoling laughter as did Charlie Chaplin. Perhaps only Charles Dickens, who might have found in Chaplin's life ample inspiration for one of his own novels, has so convincingly shown that comedy can be a satisfying response to even the direst of circumstances.
BACKGROUND Chaplin's early years seem to have been almost unrelievedly grim, although it is notable that the more disturbing details about his youth are to be found in the biographies (primarily those of Manvell and Robinson) rather than in his own autobiography, which is remarkably free of self-pity in its depiction of Chaplin's troubled family. Chaplin and his older brother, Sydney, were raised by their mother, Hannah Chaplin, after Charles, Sr., departed because of his excessive drinking, from which he died prematurely. Mrs. Chaplin became progressively unable to provide for her two sons, and the three of them moved into shabbier and shabbier quarters. The family situation became so desperate that at one point conditions compelled them to enter a workhouse, where Charles and Sydney were separated from their mother and from each other. Eventually, through whatever combination of inherent mental instability and shame at her reduced circumstances, Hannah Chaplin lost her sanity, which by most accounts she never fully recovered. Both Mr. and Mrs. Chaplin were music-hall performers, and one could say that their inspiration in this area was the only real blessing they were able to
128
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
confer on young Charles. Even as his living conditions continued to deteriorate, he began finding work as a child actor in various theatrical productions, including a production of Sherlock Holmes that did much to establish the theater as Chaplin's chosen profession and to set him on the path that would lead to fame and fortune. In 1908 Chaplin joined the Fred Karno comedy troupe following his brother Sydney, who had signed with Karno two years earlier. There his comedie gifts were quickly discovered and rapidly developed. By the following year he was being featured in The Mumming Birds, a sketch that allowed him to begin assembling some of the components of what would become the familiar Chaplin persona, and in 1910-1911 he successfully toured the United States for Karno, an experience that additionally convinced Chaplin that his future was in America. On a second tour of America Chaplin received a telegram from a Hollywood movie company that would prove the fateful event in soon making his name known around the world, although ironically the telegram asked for "a man named Chaffin . . . or something like that." Chaplin writes in his autobiography: Mr. Charles Kessel, one of the owners of the Keystone Company, said that Mr. Mack Sennett had seen me playing the drunk in the American Music Hall on Forty-Second Street and if I were the same man he would like to engage me to take the place of Mr. Ford Sterling. I had often played with the idea of working in films, and had even offered to go into partnership with Reeves, our manager, to buy the rights of all Karno's sketches and make movies of them. But Reeves had been skeptical, and sensibly so, because we knew nothing about making them. (138) Chaplin's understated account belies his apparently instinctive understanding of the possibilities of film, as well as the incredible speed with which he would master and advance the techniques of filmmaking. The chronology of Charlie Chaplin's glory years is by now well known: one year with Keystone and eighteen months with Essanay, during which time he became internationally famous on a scale heretofore unknown in movies and perhaps unsurpassed since; eighteen months with Mutual, for whom he made what is now considered his first great series of short films; four and one-half years with First National, for whom he made his first feature film, The Kid (1921). In 1923 Chaplin cofounded United Artists and began his career as an essentially independent filmmaker, a period that covered the remainder of his working life and included all of his subsequent feature comedies. During the roughly fifty years of his career as a film actor and director, Charlie Chaplin created a body of work rivalled by few, if any, of his fellow filmmakers. At least half a dozen of his films must be considered among the best ever made, and he must also be counted, with D. W. Griffith, as one of the first true artists in the form. Unfortunately, the overwhelming success that Chaplin earned as an artist was
Charlie Chaplin
129
perhaps matched, at least until his marriage to Oona O'Neil, by personal turmoil and controversy. On this side of his life after 1914 Chaplin in his autobiography is understandably but frustratingly reticent, so again many of the details about these years are provided only in the biographies. Chaplin was married four times and involved in numerous other relationships with women, but found lasting happiness only with O'Neil, whom he married in 1943. Most of his relationships ended in acrimony, and a paternity suit brought by Joan Barry, an actress who briefly worked for him, did much to tarnish Chaplin's reputation in his adopted country. Chaplin's decline in popularity was exacerbated by accusations (discussed most thoroughly by Charles Maland) that he was a Communist sympathizer. The cumulative effect of the personal attacks against him led Chaplin to leave the United States in 1952. He and O'Neil settled in Switzerland in 1953, and they apparently lived happily there together until Chaplin's death in 1977. His later years provided a vindication of sorts, as he was awarded an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, and his films were universally recognized as among the most important in the history of film. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The essence of Chaplin's achievement as a comic filmmaker is his creation of the character of the little tramp. Chaplin described the origins of the tramp's appearance in this way: I had no idea what make-up to put on. . . . However, on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small mustache, which, I reasoned, would age without hiding expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully bom. When I confronted Sennett I assumed the character and strutted about, swinging my cane and parading before him. Gags and comedy ideas went racing through my mind. (144) Until he abandoned the tramp character after Modern Times (1936), Chaplin fashioned the plot of every film in which he appeared (approximately seventy shorts and five features) around the inherent comedie possibilities of this character. As Chaplin realized immediately, the tramp brought along his own iconic characteristics, which offered the opportunity for potentially limitless variation. What would soon become evident was that the tramp evoked an image with universal appeal, recognizable across cultures and time periods. In short, the tramp was a figure of archetypal proportions. Although Chaplin by conventional usage has long been labeled a film
130
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
"clown," the tramp truly can be seen as furthering a comic tradition, built on the antics of the clown, stretching back through centuries of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "popular laughter." Among Chaplin scholars, Parker Tyler (1947) was perhaps the first to elaborate extensively on Chaplin's ties to court jesters and fools, placing Chaplin ultimately in the line of theatrical clowns that "stem[s] more directly than elsewhere from the Commedia dell'Arte traditions of Pierrot and Harlequin" (42). The most productive way to look at Chaplin's relationship to this historical tradition, however, is provided by Bakhtin and his analysis of the role played by the clown in the development of Western cultural forms. Bakhtin is best known for his formulation of such concepts as the "carnivalesque" and for his special emphasis on the grotesque (both of which are relevant in a consideration of clown comedy), but more central to the comedy of Charlie Chaplin is Bakhtin's specific discussions of the uses to which "images" of the clown, as well as related images of the "rogue" and the "fool," have been put over the course of Western cultural and literary history. For Bakhtin, the clown embodies the essence of the comic attitude toward the world, the attitude he attributes more generally to the liberating activities of carnival, those festive occasions during which all that is ordinarily taken most seriously is held up for ridicule. Where the rogue practices ' 'gay deception'' as a way of deflating pretension, and the fool in his perpetual incomprehension works to reveal the fake and the pompous, the clown adopts the features of each as a deliberate comic strategy; in Bakhtin's words, the clown "is a rogue who dons the mask of a fool in order to motivate distortions and shufflings of languages and labels, thus unmasking them by not understanding them" (404^05). In Bakhtin's account, the clown, although rising from popular culture, has also been an important influence on literature—especially in the development of the novel. However, in Chaplin's case, the ties to the clown's real roots in the soil of popular laughter are both obvious and more direct, given film's origins in such forms of popular entertainment as music hall and vaudeville. Chaplin's films thus seem an especially striking example of the enduring potential of the kind of clown comedy Bakhtin highlights. One might say that in moving from popular theater to film, Chaplin initiated an evolution of the clown's role handed down through centuries of popular tradition and reconceived and represented in a new aesthetic context not unlike that employed by the "serious" literary artists discussed by Bakhtin. In so doing, Chaplin not only rejuvenated the clown tradition but provided the primary inspiration for the long line of film comedy that has been one of the greatest accomplishments of cinema. Although Chaplin's early shorts, both with Sennett and on his own, are clearly apprentice efforts, they still show Chaplin to be an innately gifted comedie actor. What is most remarkable, however, is how quickly he learned to harness his own talents to the new possibilities he discovered in his adopted medium, possibilities inherent in the visually kinetic nature of film, in its relative permanence as a record of performance, and in the opportunity it afforded because of these
Charlie Chaplin
131
two qualities to extend the reach of clown comedy in a way unprecedented in the mode's previous history. By the time Chaplin signed with Mutual in 1916, he was ready to create the series of inspired comedies that stretches roughly from The Floorwalker to The Pilgrim (1923), Chaplin's final short film. At this time Chaplin also assembled the supporting cast, including Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Albert Austin, and Henry Bergman, that would provide these films with an extra element of stability and continuity. Purviance in particular is inextricably linked to Chaplin through her performances as the fresh-faced girl whom Chaplin often pursues and usually wins, frequently by overcoming the obstacles put in his path by the characters played by Campbell and Bergman. Of course, the greatest obstacle in the little tramp's path to success and prosperity is provided by the world at large. No matter that in a given film the tramp might triumph over the oppressive conditions in which he finds himself; in the next film we will again find him cast out, consigned to the margins in a society that does not recognize the tramp's dual need for both freedom and respectability. One can perhaps best understand the tramp's immense popularity by noting his evident desire to be accepted by society coupled with his equally evident inability to accept society's restrictions on his autonomy. Far from lacking ability or initiative, the tramp seems instead to have a built-in resistance to pretension, hypocrisy, and outright stupidity that prevents him from conforming for very long to conventional pieties. In this way, the tramp is clearly a Bakhtinian clown "who dons the mask of a fool in order to motivate distortions and shufflings of languages and labels" as he improvises his way along in a world that insists that it be taken on its own inflexible terms. A full appreciation of the way in which Chaplin uses the tramp to tell this overarching story requires that we see all of Chaplin's post-Essanay films, but if any one of these films could be said to illustrate the story's salient features, such a film might be A Dog's Life (First National, 1918). Here the little tramp's defining characteristics, as well as Chaplin's typical comedie strategies, are all on display. The film begins with an image that expresses with particular clarity the tramp's eternal predicament. Literally without a home, Charlie lies one morning in a boarded-up empty lot, trying to catch some last-minute sleep. Predictably enough, he is soon confronted by the tramp's most implacable and ubiquitous foe, a policeman, setting the film's very loosely structured plot into motion. This initial encounter with official authority sets the stage for similar encounters with other hostile or indifferent forces as the film unfolds: the chaos of the employment agent's office where Charlie seeks honest labor, the dance hall where he meets Edna (playing a discontented bar singer) but from which he is repeatedly removed forcibly. The potential for pathos in such a scenario, however, is undercut in A Dog's Life by the matter-of-factness with which Charlie faces his difficulties and, more importantly, by Chaplin's transformation of even the tramp's lowest moments into the most startling and perfectly executed comedy. Thus, although Charlie at first seems the victim in the employment-agent scene, ultimately one must
132
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
say that it is his impeccable timing and inexhaustible energy that are most amusing in his attempts to find a place in line. In effect, it is the little tramp who remains in control, as his ingenuity and balletic grace always prevail. During a later scene, the tramp shows even greater skill when he successfully pantomimes the arm gestures of an otherwise unconscious man and manipulates his partner (both men are thieves) into turning over a walletful of money that will eventually enable Charlie and Edna to start a new life together. In Charlie's triumph over all that seeks to impose its own necessity on him, we can see in A Dog's Life the upending of accustomed norms that is the clown's eternal task. The most persistent criticism of Chaplin's films is that they are irretrievably sentimental. This is largely a canard resulting from a myopic focus on the Victorian plot conventions inherited not only by Chaplin but by all of silent cinema. By and large, plot is the least important element in a Chaplin film, and while in many cases Chaplin merely uses his audience's familiarity with the melodrama plot as a way of putting the tramp's dilemma into maximum relief, in others he explicitly burlesques his own story's conventions. The latter happens at the end of A Dog's Life when we are set up by the pastoral image of farmer Charlie working his field to expect the requisite portrayal of familial bliss. Indeed, Charlie and Edna have been united in their new rustic environment, but when the camera frames them with the inevitable baby basket, we discover that it is Charlie's dog Scraps (the film's true costar) who has produced a family. In the way that Chaplin clearly makes the story's conclusion affect our appreciation of the film's primary goal—to make us laugh—A Dog's Life bears comparison with Chaplin's best, most carefully crafted films: such shorts as The Pawnshop, Easy Street, The Immigrant, Shoulder Arms, and The Pilgrim, as well as such feature-length masterpieces as The Gold Rush, The Circus, Modern Times, and, especially, City Lights. The famous irresolution at the end of that film might be Chaplin's most explicit acknowledgment of the tension between comedy and sentiment in his work, although finally his inability to allow the tramp a satisfyingly happy reunion with the flower girl only reinforces the tramp's status as a perpetual outcast who must remain apart from what he desires most in order to show us how comical the world created by our social conventions really is. Yet the tramp is by no measure simply a victim, nor is Chaplin merely a satirist. Perhaps this misimpression is fostered by the fact that one of his greatest films, Modern Times, is both a satire and his final film to feature the little tramp. Charlie Chaplin's true genius is in reminding us, with seemingly inexhaustible variety, that we human beings are laughingly consistent in our ability to discourage our own best instincts. CRITICAL RECEPTION It is testimony to Chaplin's immediately apparent skills as performer and filmmaker that he was recognized as a serious artist almost from the beginning of his career in movies—a remarkable accomplishment considering that movies
Charlie Chaplin
133
themselves were hardly taken seriously at the time—and, if anything, his body of work has grown in stature in the years since he ceased filmmaking. However, assessing the reaction to Chaplin's films requires looking separately at the reception accorded the films by Chaplin's peers, by contemporaneous commentators, and by more recent scholars and critics. There can be no question of Chaplin's influence on his fellow comedians and filmmakers. The emerging genre of slapstick comedy was shaped by him into perhaps the single most enduring tradition in American film, and all later screen clowns, from Buster Keaton to the Three Stooges, owe some (in some cases, most) of their comedie inspiration to Chaplin. Moreover, Chaplin's influence extended beyond the movies, as evidenced by his impact on such literary figures as Hart Crane and Samuel Beckett and by the admiration professed by such modern artists as Pablo Picasso. Unfortunately, Chaplin's undeniable importance as an artist was overshadowed in Hollywood when the spectre of anticommunism branded any suggestions for modification of the status quo a cultural crime. One must take the 1976 special Oscar awarded to Chaplin as an admission on Hollywood's part of its own crime against a great comic artist. The shift from adulation to ostracism can also be seen in the critical writing about Chaplin during the Hollywood years (see Gehring for a sampling of Chaplin criticism of the era). From near-universal acclamation during the period of his greatest popularity, critics and columnists had by the release of Modern Times come to decry Chaplin's unhealthy interest in social change through a euphemistic rhetoric (see Maland) that would not cease until Chaplin's "voluntary" exile in the McCarthyite 1950s. At the same time, critics found Chaplin's adherence to the aesthetic values of silent cinema hopelessly oldfashioned, as if to demand that he be both more and less progressive in his vision of what comedy films might do. The partial eclipse of Chaplin's critical reputation in the final years of his career could not prevail, however, once the benighted atmosphere of the time began to give way to a more enlightened scrutiny of Chaplin's accomplishments by film historians and scholars. With the rise of film studies as an intellectually respectable endeavor in the 1960s and 1970s—first in the newly created film journals and then through the establishment of film study as an academic discipline—Chaplin's silent comedies would be recognized unequivocally as among the most important films ever made. Most of the books and articles listed in the Selected Bibliography are a product of the renewed attention given to American film comedy in general and Chaplin's work in particular. The discussion of Chaplin in Walter Kerr's Silent Clowns represents perhaps the most admirable general appreciation of the films, whereas the one indispensable book about Chaplin himself may be David Robinson' s Chaplin: His Life and Art. The more specialized studies attest as well to the films' richness and their continuing relevance to students of what Gerald Mast calls "the comic mind."
134
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Filmography In order of release: Keystone (1914): Making a Living, Kid Auto Races at Venice, Mabel's Strange Predicament, Between Showers, A Film Johnnie, Tango Tangles, His Favorite Pastime, Cruel, Cruel Love, The Star Boarder, Mabel at the Wheel, Twenty Minutes of Love, Caught in a Cabaret, Caught in the Rain, A Busy Day, The Fatal Mallet, Her Friend the Bandit, The Knockout, Mabel's Busy Day, Mabel's Married Life, Laughing Gas, The Property Man, The Face on the Bar Room Floor, Recreation, The Masquerader, His New Profession, The Rounders, The New Janitor, Those Love Pangs, Dough and Dynamite, Gentlemen of Nerve, His Musical Career, His Try sting Place, Tillie 's Punctured Romance, Getting Acquainted, His Prehistoric Past Essanay (1915): His New Job, A Night Out, The Champion, In the Park, A Jitney Elopement, The Tramp, By the Sea, Work, A Woman, The Bank, Shanghaied, A Night in the Show 1916: Charlie Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen, Police Mutual (1916): The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond, One A.M., The Count, The Pawnshop, Behind the Screen, The Rink 1917: Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant, The Adventurer, First National 1918: A Dog's Life, The Bond, Shoulder Arms 1919: Sunny side, A Day's Pleasure 1921: The Kid, The Idle Class 1922: Pay Day 1923: The Pilgrim United Artists: A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952) Attica-Archway (1957): A King in New York Universal (1967): A Countess from Hong Kong
Secondary Sources Agee, James. Agee on Film. Vol. 1. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Vol. 2. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. Gehring, Wes. Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983. Huff, Theodore. Charlie Chaplin. New York: Amo, 1972. Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: Knopf, 1975. Maland, Charles. Chaplin and American Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Manvell, Roger. Chaplin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. McCabe, John. Charlie Chaplin. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. McCaffrey, Donald W., ed. Focus on Chaplin. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
Charlie Chaplin
135
Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1968. . "Charles Spencer Chaplin." In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Richard Roud. New York: Viking, 1980. Smith, Julian. Chaplin. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Sobel, Raoul, and David Francis. Chaplin: Genesis of a Clown. London: Quartet Books, 1977. Stewart, Garret. "Modem Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflexiveness." Critical Inquiry 3 (1976): 295-315. Tyler, Parker. Chaplin: Last of the Clowns. New York: Vanguard, 1948.
The American Circus Clown (United States: c. 1785-Present)
Del Ivan Janik P. T. Barnum is said to have remarked that "elephants and clowns are the pegs upon which circuses are hung" (Ogden 100), and in the twentieth century in America and Europe the definition seems to hold true; the words "circus" and "clown" have become almost inextricably intertwined. It was not always so: the modern circus began as a predominantly equestrian exhibition, and the tradition of clowning that is now identified primarily with the circus was mainly a theatrical entertainment well into the nineteenth century. While aspects of modern circus clowning can be traced back to medieval and even classical foolery, the ritualistic and even religious overtones of these antecedents have to a certain extent been smoothed out, if not erased. If the circus clown is still in some small way a cultural or social commentator who offers a release valve for some of the tensions of everyday life, he or she is today primarily a provider of light entertainment.
BACKGROUND Philip Astley, an English military horseman who was born in 1742, is generally credited as the inventor of the modern circus. In 1766 he left the army and opened a riding school in Lambeth; by 1770 he had opened the Amphitheatre Riding House, "a simple wooden structure, with a great circular ring open to the sky and enclosed by railings, overlooked by covered grandstands 120 feet long." Mornings were devoted to riding lessons, but in the afternoon Astley would present programs of entertainment that emphasized equestrian stunts but included acrobatics, tightrope and slack-wire artists, and dancing dogs (Murray
The American Circus Clown
137
79-80). These ancillary entertainments were derived largely from those associated with itinerant mountebanks and the market fairs, such as the famous Bartholemews Fair at Smithfield, that had been an English tradition since at least the twelfth century (59). Among the standard equestrian elements in Astley's program was a skit called "Billy Button, or the Tailor's Ride to Brentford," which traded on the notion that military tailors were ludicrously unable to deal with horses; its creators, riders named Saunders and Fortunelli, have been called the "first comics on horseback." Another member of Astley's troupe, a comic acrobat named Porter, performed at times on foot rather than on horseback, and, according to Marian Murray, "in doing so achieved the metamorphosis from the comic rider to what we think of as the circus clown" (81). A slightly later feature of Astley's show was verbal byplay between the riding master and a clown called Mister Merryman—a routine that survives in modern circus clowns' mockery of the pomposity of the ringmaster (Towsen 96-98). By 1774 Astley's program, which was now given in a fully enclosed structure renamed Astley's Royal Amphitheatre, incorporated pantomime performances, and by the early 1800s the company included at least three clowns plus William Wallett, who was billed as a "Shakespearian Jester" (90). The style of clowning that became a hallmark of the circus did not descend directly from the tradition of the court jester, however, but from the Italian commedia deH'arte aH'improvviso. The commedia may have had its roots in Roman comedy, but by the time it was documented in literature in the middle of the sixteenth century, it had developed its own distinctive character and its stock cast of comic types associated with various regions, including the merchant Pantaloon from Venice, the Neapolitan Pulcinella, and the "zany" servant Arlecchino, from Bergamo (Welsford 293). Arlecchino, dressed in motley patches and wearing a black mask, fused during the commedia's importation to France with Harlequin, the survival of a folkloric figure who was the "demonic leader of lost and wandering souls" (292). The commedia was largely improvisatory, using stock scenarios and exit lines but relying on individual actors' imaginations for the dialogue, which Murray characterizes as "witty, allusive, and often very obscene," as well as the appropriate introduction of lazzi—crude slapstick routines and practical jokes (72). In England the commedia inspired the development of the pantomime, "a kind of entertainment in which some story from classical mythology was interspersed with a comic fable concerned with the loves of Harlequin and Columbine," which dominated the stages at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields during the eighteenth century (Welsford 301). Gradually the mythological (or later, fairy-tale) element was edged out by the "harlequinade"; the central character of Harlequin, now not a comic servant but a young lover, was himself edged into the background by a new servant figure, Clown, an oafish lout in the tradition of the rustic "natural," and words and music were eventually reintroduced (Murray 106). The great genius among English pantomime clowns was Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837), who, although he was exclusively a theatrical performer, is uni-
138
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
versally considered the prototype of the modern circus clown. The son of an Italian-born dancing master and pantomimist, Giuseppe Grimaldi, and a Londonborn dancer, Grimaldi made his stage debut at Sadler's Wells before he was three years old (Towsen 150). Grimaldi may be said to have invented the whiteface clown by adding red triangles on the cheeks, prominent eyebrow paint, and a blue wig to the white makeup of a Pierrot. His most characteristic costume "consisted of an ornamented red shirt, cut away at the chest and waist to reveal another shirt underneath, [and] blue and white breeches that did not quite reach his knees" (Towsen 155)—an outfit that, along with the baggy polka-dotted pantaloons he sometimes wore, set the fashion for generations of British and American whiteface clowns. But Grimaldi varied his costumes imaginatively, sometimes exaggerating the dress of a London dandy or of a hussar (with coal scuttles for boots). Grimaldi was known for his comic songs, but even more for his excellence as a mime whose "expression was in his face and body" (156) and for his comic inventiveness: "A comic costume could be extemporized in a moment. In one pantomime, during which a wicker basket turned into a fashionable carriage, as the driver [he] wore a coat made of a blanket with tin plates for buttons. He topped it off with a pie-plate hat, and carried a bouquet of carrots and greens" (Murray 108). Contemporary accounts describe Grimaldi's success both in much-beloved set pieces and inspired improvisation. Grimaldi's career was relatively short—he was forced by illness to retire in 1828—but his contribution to the development of modern clowning cannot be underestimated; witness the widespread use in circus slang of the term "Joey" to mean any clown, whether whiteface, auguste, or tramp.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Circus entertainment came to America not long after its inception in England, taking much the same form. John Sharp gave riding exhibitions in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1771, and two years later a program put on in New York and Philadelphia by Jacob Bates included "The Tailor's Ride to Brentford." In 1785 a Mr. Poole organized a circus in Philadelphia that in addition to equestrian stunts included "a clown to 'amaze' between the acts" (Murray 118), and in 1793 John Bill Ricketts, who had been an associate of Charles Hughes, Philip Astley's first rival as a London circus entrepreneur, gave in Philadelphia "what is now recognized as the first complete circus performance in America," including the antics of a clown named Mr. McDonald (119). Two years later Ricketts hired John Durang of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, ' 'the first known native American clown" (Towsen 108). In addition to clowning on foot and on horseback, Durang wrote the jokes, did straight ropewalking and equestrian feats, danced, played Harlequin in the pantomime, tumbled, and produced fireworks exhibitions (108). Such versatility was common in early American circuses, which were small in personnel as well as physical size, consisting of
The American Circus Clown
139
one ring and often employing only one clown. According to John Towsen, a circus might succeed or fail on the popularity of its clown (109). Another function of the relative intimacy of the one-ring circus was the popularity of the talking clown, whose joke telling and dialogue (usually with the ringmaster) might be seen as a cyclical reversion, after the vogue of pantomime that culminated in Grimaldi, to the verbal foolery of the early commedia and even the Renaissance court jester and theatrical clown. The Englishman William Wallett brought his "Shakespearian Jester" act to America (Murray 302) and soon found a native partner, imitator, and competitor in Dan Rice (1823-1900), who is widely considered the single most important American circus clown of the nineteenth century. Born Daniel MacLaren in New York City, Rice was orphaned at the age of eight and supported himself as a jockey and then a riverboat gambler until he became an apprentice in the Nicholls Circus in Pittsburgh in 1840. As "Yankee Dan," dressed in a red, white, and blue costume, Rice performed a ring act of topical comic songs, weightlifting, and tricks by his trained pig. After a stint at P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York and a tour of Europe, Rice joined Spalding's North American Circus in 1844 (Towsen 131-133). By 1848 Rice had formed his own circus, which traveled by steamboat; had perfected the costume that was popularized by Thomas Nast as ' 'Uncle Sam''; and had developed his own Shakespearean routines, including a retelling of Romeo and Juliet "in backwoods vernacular" (Ogden 286-287). Rice was a public figure beyond the world of the circus. In 1848 he actively aided the presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor (Verney 41); before the Civil War he was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee (Ogden 287); he was an outspoken advocate of temperance, civil liberties, and the abolition of slavery; he owned a liberal newspaper; and he was a Democratic candidate for Congress in 1866 and two years later was briefly the subject of a presidential draft movement (Towsen 130-131). His steamboat-based circus was successful until 1871, but then Rice's fortunes, popularity, and health declined precipitously, although he continued to perform intermittently until 1887. In spite of his great popularity in his prime, in retrospect Rice might be seen as being outside the mainstream of the development of American circus clowning. In a twentieth-century context he could be most meaningfully compared with comedians like Will Rogers, Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson, whose topical humor won them friends among the powerful politicians of their times and, due to the wide impact of radio and television, even gave them some influence over public opinion. The role of the American circus clown and the nature of the typical clown act were shaped, to an extent, by the changes in the physical layout and size of the typical circus. Early on, American circuses were presented in purpose-built amphitheaters like that evolved by Philip Astley, or in large multipurpose arenas, much as they have been again in the last half of the twentieth century. It was not until 1830 that Aron Turner first put a circus show under a tent—a round canvas tent ninety feet in diameter, with a single ring and stands for about one
140
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
hundred spectators (Murray 131). The traveling circus was limited in size by its mode of transportation; significant expansion was impossible as long as it had to rely on wagons that were subject to being mired in the mud of primitive American back roads, but with the development of the railroad these limitations were overcome. In 1872 the Great Eastern Circus expanded to two rings, and "by 1888 Barnum & Bailey was performing in three rings, with stages between the rings, and the whole surrounded by a hippodrome track" (Towsen 256). In the "big top," with its spectacle of multiple simultaneous performances by acrobats, animal trainers, trapeze artists, equestrians, and even troupes of elephants, there is no room for talking or singing clowns or even for the subtle clowning of a Grimaldi. Clown acts were increasingly visual, and the comedy was ever broader. By the time of the advent of the three-ring circus, several distinct types of clown had become differentiated, and they were to evolve further in the new atmosphere of enforced pantomime. In The Fool and His Scepter William Willeford examines the derivations of the words "fool" and "clown" in a way that suggests the difference between two basic clown types as they have appeared in the American circus and the European traditions from which it derives. The term "fool" derives from the Latin follis: " 'a pair of bellows, a windbag.' A fool is like a pair of bellows in that his words are only air, empty of meaning" (10). Further, Willeford reports that lexicographer Ernest Weekley associates follis in this context with its specialized meaning of "scrotum," thus emphasizing the traditional bawdiness of fools and their ancient association with fertility myths (11). A "clown," on the other hand, was originally, as Willeford quotes Eric Partridge, "a farm worker, hence a boor, hence—boors seem funny to townsmen—a funny fellow, a buffoon, a jester"; Willeford points out that "clod" and "clot" are cognates in related languages (12). John Towsen notes that the interplay between the two types, fool and clown, trickster and simpleton, has long been characteristic of clowning. In the commedia dell'arte Arlecchino (Harlequin) began as the slowwitted buffoon, victimized by the crafty Brighella, but he evolved into the clever trickster who typically made a comic butt of Pedrolino (Pierrot) (207). In the Anglo-American tradition of clowning, the whiteface clown developed by Grimaldi held the stage—or the ring—alone, without a distinctive foil, until the simpleton returned in the form of the "auguste" (208). Towsen, Ogden, Verney, and others recount the accidental invention of the auguste clown, whose trademark is flat-out slapstick clumsiness, by the American acrobat Tom Belling when he was appearing in Renz's Circus in Berlin in 1869. Belling had failed to execute a simple acrobatic turn and was suspended without pay; he was passing the time backstage amusing his fellow performers by dressing up in a curly wig twisted into a knot, and an inside-out riding coat, in parody of his employer. Belling either backed accidentally into the ring or was sent there by a surprised but delighted Renz and promptly fell on his face; the spectators began to shout, "AugusteV" (Berlin dialect for "stupid"). Shaken and genuinely confused and angry, Belling stumbled about in a daze, to uproarious audience
The American Circus Clown
141
reaction. Renz was pleased, Belling's contract was extended, and a new type of clown was born. In contrast to the whiteface clown, who makes up in some variation on the pattern invented by Grimaldi and typically wears a conical hat and a stylized costume of breeches or pantaloons, the auguste uses no white makeup base beneath his pattern of "color spots, swirls or decorations" and fashions his costume from found materials or exaggerated versions of street clothes (Ogden 17-18). In this costuming sense the tramp clown or Charlie, who developed later, might be seen as a variation on the auguste. Tom Belling's career as an auguste was relatively short, but the type was further developed by James Guyon, who popularized it in Europe, and another Englishman Chadwick, who brought it to America via the Barnum and Bailey circus in the 1890s (Towsen 209-211). The auguste typically plays two related roles in the modern circus: that of the clumsy oaf who gets in the way of the other performers and circus workers, and that of the stupid foil, the perennial victim, of the clever whiteface clown. The advent of the two- and three-ring circus and the development of the auguste as a slapstick physical comedian and a foil to the whiteface clown set the stage for the evolution of the types of clowning familiar in the twentiethcentury American circus. Peter Verney describes four types of clown act: Reprise clowns are those who interrupt serious turns and make amusing nuisances of themselves; musical clowns, who can usually play a bewildering selection of instruments; entree clowns, or gag clowns—the clowns supreme of the circus; and carpet clowns, also called run-in clowns who are those who come in to fill an interval between acts while scenery or props are being shifted, and who often mix with the audience. (174) In the three-ring circus, clowns have been essentially silent, bringing the cycle back again to the pantomimes of Grimaldi's day. In fact, by 1885 in the Barnum circus "there was a rule that any clown who opened his mouth was automatically fired" (Towsen 257). At worst, Towsen observes, "the three rings reduced the clown to a kind of pantomimic horseplay, a rough-and-tumble slapstick comedy totally lacking in characterization and plot" (257); but the new conditions "led to an enrichment of the repertoire of comedy acrobatics and to an expansion of the clown's range of pantomime" (260). Clown acrobatics sometimes took over a ring, as did extended clown skits or "gags" and solo pantomime routines by clowns like Slivers Oakley, Lou Jacobs, and Emmett Kelly, whose names became at least as well known as those of other performers like the animal trainer Clyde Beatty or the acrobats the Flying Wallendas. Many of the clown gags extant in the modern American circus derive from the entrees of the smaller-scale nineteenth-century European circus, but just as makeup has had to be exaggerated to make an impact in the huge tents and, later, arenas, the gags have been simplified to conform to a faster pace, usually lasting no more than five to seven minutes. Gags that are sometimes featured
142
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
in the center ring include clown boxing matches, mock weddings, and chases. In the clown doctor gag, "a 'patient' is, after much comic persuasion, placed on a gurney for an operation. The clown is covered with a cloth; the 'doctor' and 'nurse' . . . begin their procedure, using a giant rubber saw. All sorts of comic props are supposedly 'removed' from the insides of the invalid" (Ogden 98-99). In an extended car gag starring the late Lou Jacobs, a tiny car drove noisily around the hippodrome track, eventually pulling up at a filling station manned by dwarf clowns. The six-foot-tall Jacobs would gradually emerge from the tiny vehicle, huge clown shoes first. Disputes between Jacobs and the attendants involving byplay with water and various explosions were finally interrupted by the arrival of a clown policeman, whom Jacobs eluded by squeezing back into the car and driving away (Towsen 277). In a variation, the tramp clown Otto Griebling constructed a trick car that allowed twenty-six clowns to emerge from it in turn (Ogden 99). Another standard routine is the washerwoman gag, in which two male clowns dressed as women (androgyny or at least cross-dressing has carried over from the earliest traditions of foolery) wash clothes in tubs of dirty water, splashing each other at first "accidentally" but then in an extended water fight that culminates in a bucket of what turns out to be confetti being thrown into the audience (98). Perhaps the best-remembered and most elaborate extended gag involved a clown fire company: a flimsy building in the center ring was engulfed in flames, and tiny but noisy fire engines brought inept clown firemen to the scene: Water is squirted in the wrong places,firementrip over hoses, ladders are climbed the wrong way, axes almost chop off a few heads, and real flames scorch the asbestos pants of one of the clowns. While the firemen hold a net under one window, a dummy representing a clown jumps from another window. . . . Real clowns follow in a series of dives from the top of the building to the net, culminating with a leap by the mother of the household, played by a clown in drag. (Towsen 277) According to Towsen, modern fire regulations spelled the end of this gag, but a version has been preserved on film in Walt Disney's Dumbo with animated elephants in the clown roles. Much of the clowning in the modern circus is more limited in scope, forming part of the grand entry or functioning as a distraction from the rerigging of aerial or other equipment. In the "clown walkaround" the clowns promenade around the ring, pausing occasionally to do a brief solo gag or "clown stop" for a section of the audience, such as Felix Adler's tricks with his trained pigs or Lou Jacobs's motorized bathtub and his living hot dog, a giant roll containing a pet chihuahua. Otto Griebling, a tramp clown, often worked a more extended gag as the audience were taking their seats, a routine in which he had the task of delivering a huge cake of ice, carried in iron tongs, to a mythical Mrs. Schultz; unable to find her, Griebling returned to the ring at intervals, always with a
The American Circus Clown
143
smaller piece of ice—finally a tiny cube—until his mission had completely melted away. Many walkarounds and brief gags take place in the context of the "spec," or spectacle, during which the entire clown company appears, often changing costumes to give the illusion of a larger cast, entertaining small segments of the audience in turn; but in spite of the relative anonymity enforced by the walkaround and the spec, a few individuals like Adler, Jacobs, and Griebling emerged as performers whose fame, at least among circus aficionados, could be compared to that of a Grimaldi or a Dan Rice. The one individual circus clown of the twentieth century who most closely approached the status of a universal celebrity was another tramp clown, Emmett Kelly (1898-1979), whose character Weary Willie was featured in several circuses, on Broadway, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, on television, and in the 1950 film by Cecil B. DeMille, The Greatest Show on Earth (Ogden, 223-224). Kelly's persona was not an original invention but the epitome of a type that had appeared as early as 1882 (Towsen 284). W. C. Fields had worked as a tramp juggler in vaudeville at the turn of the century, and of course the quintessential tramp character was created by Charlie Chaplin in a Mack Sennett film in 1914 (295). Kelly could be said to have backed into his role as Weary Willie, in that he began as a would-be cartoonist and entered the world of the circus first as a sign painter, then an acrobat, and eventually a whiteface clown. Weary Willie began his existence as a character in a comic chalk-talk that Kelly had developed for vaudeville, was brought to life briefly in the John Robinson Circus in 1924, and finally became a staple of a succession of circuses beginning in 1933 (Ogden 223). Willie's battered hat, ragged clothes, downturned mouth, burnt-cork stubble of a beard, and kelly-green shirt were squarely in the tradition of the tramp clown but sufficiently distinctive to make him individually memorable. Kelly's success was perhaps as much a matter of timing as of talent, in that Willie appeared at the height of the Great Depression and embodied the combination of disappointment and determination that so many of his audience must have shared: I am a sad and ragged little guy who is very serious about everything he attempts— no matter how futile or how foolish it appears to be. I am the hobo who found out the hard way that the deck is stacked, the dice "frozen," the race fixed and the wheel crooked, but there is always present that one tiny, forlorn spark of hope still glimmering in his soul which makes him keep on trying. (Kelly 125-126)
Kelly adapted many traditional routines, but he invented several that brought him special attention. In one, Kelly would single out a female member of the audience and stare at her dolefully while he slowly munched on a cabbage leaf or a loaf of bread. The premise was extremely simple, and it depended as much on the wise choice of a subject as on anything Kelly actually did. In another simple turn, Kelly was given a peanut by a child in the audience and attempted to open it with a sledgehammer; there are elements of slapstick here, but the
144
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
routine really depends upon the clown's quietly earnest but hapless persona. Kelly's unique effectiveness as a solo performer was recognized by his being exempted from the specs and other large production numbers when he joined the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus in 1942: he was allowed to maintain complete identification with Weary Willie and to free-lance throughout the show, developing his routines at a leisurely pace that contrasted with the frantic activity of most modern clowning (Kelly 196-197). In the center ring Kelly was similarly successful at engaging the audience's long-term attention. His most famous routine involved Willie being assigned to sweep the arena but finding himself stymied by a pool of light: It is obvious to everyone but Kelly that its source is a distant spotlight. He tries to sweep it away. It gets smaller but refuses to disappear. If he tries to leave, it follows him. Finally, his ingenious solution is to "sweep" it under a canvas ground cloth, ending the routine. (Towsen 298) In his autobiography Emmett Kelly observed that "one of the fundamentals of clowning is to start out doing something that looks serious and then have it pay off in a ridiculous manner" (261). This may be an oversimplification of the method and function of the modern American circus clown, but it calls attention to the fact that while modern clowning has adapted many of the timeless characteristics of the ancient traditions of foolery, such as sexual ambiguity and the trickster/dupe dichotomy, and is in its own way as stylized as the commedia dell'arte, it derives its effectiveness from the close derivation of its subjects from the situations and frustrations of everyday life. Otto Griebling's failure to find Mrs. Schultz in time to deliver his perishable goods mirrors the difficulty we all encounter at times in carrying out the simplest tasks; the clowns' service station or fire department is an image of the apparent disorder of modern organizations and institutions; like Weary Willie with his peanut, we often find ourselves without the proper tools to accomplish our goals. The circus clown exaggerates everyday problems to the point of visual and situational absurdity and in doing so allows spectators to laugh at them, put them in a larger perspective, and gain relief from their anxieties. CRITICAL RECEPTION With the advent of commercial television in the middle of the twentieth century the circus was finally displaced as a major source of inexpensive popular entertainment, and the notoriety of clowns like Adler, Jacobs, and Kelly was never matched after they left the scene; it is unlikely that another genuine circus clown will ever gain their level of national recognition. At the end of the twentieth century the only clown image most American children can be expected to recognize is that of the generic whiteface Ronald MacDonald, a trademark of a fast-food chain, who has only visual and human incarnations but no real exis-
The American Circus Clown
145
tence as an active entertainer. However, many of the traditions of the circus clown have been carried over into the media of film and television. The elephant-cast clown firehouse routine in Disney's Dumbo is the most obvious example of a clown gag in animated film, but cartoon shorts, particularly the ' 'Tom and Jerry" and "Road Runner" series, often imitated some of the more violent gags used in the circus. A silent whiteface clown named Clarabelle was featured in "Howdy Doody," the first nationally successful children's program on television, from 1947 to 1960 (McNeil 360). One of the most enduring television series has been the syndicated program "Bozo the Clown," which first appeared in 1956 (105). The tradition of the tramp clown was carried over into the early years of television in the form of Red Skelton's "Freddie the Freeloader" and Jackie Gleason's "The Poor Soul," and the slapstick of the modern whiteface clown has been an influence on film and television comedians from Jerry Lewis to John Belushi, Steve Martin, and Jim Carey. It is unlikely that contemporary American circus clowning will draw significant journalistic or academic critical attention in the foreseeable future, but traveling circuses, though marginalized in comparison with their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, still attract customers, and many of the traditions of circus clowning survive in the modern mass media, entertaining audiences in ways that would be familiar to clown pioneers like Joseph Grimaldi, Dan Rice, and Emmett Kelly. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Eckley, Wilton. The American Circus. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Kelly, Emmett. Clown. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954. McNeil, Alex. Total Television. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin, 1991. Murray, Marian. Circus! From Rome to Ringling. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956. Ogden, Tom. Two Hundred Years of the American Circus. New York: Facts on File, 1993. Towsen, John H. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn, 1976. Verney, Peter. Here Comes the Circus. New York: Paddington, 1978. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Commedia dell'Arte (Italy: 1550-1750)
Angelica Forti-Lewis BACKGROUND The commedia dell'arte was a unique development in the history of the theater in Western Europe. It flourished in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century it was a less important factor in the theater, although its influence cannot be said to have died out. Before commedia dell'arte became a firmly established genre, it had its history of development, like any other literary movement. It inherited a fragmentary legacy from many sources: from the commedia erudita (written comedy) of the Renaissance; from the clowns and variety artists who entertained at the festivities of the nobles, especially during the months of Carnival; from the jesters, the minstrels, jongleurs, and medicine shows that in the medieval days attracted crowds of spectators on popular streets; from the Latin comedies of Terence and Plautus; from Atellan farces in Rome; and even from Asiatic mimes. Although all these elements contributed to the formation of the commedia dell'arte, the influence of each was completely submerged and scarcely recognizable when the genre reached maturity in the hands of the notable player companies that started to form after 1550. Commedia dell'arte means literally "comedy of the actors' guild" and was essentially improvised comedy that followed a plot outline, called a scenario, rather than a written dialogue. The players consisted of a dozen or so stock characters, several of whom wore masks, and two or more zanni (servants), whose lazzi (actions) ranged from comic intonations through acrobatics to ob-
Commedia dell'Arte
147
scene gestures. This assortment of roles remained almost constant throughout the life of the genre, and the types were invariably the same, although the names often changed from troupe to troupe. In commedia dell'arte, by virtue of its partial derivation from Carnival, personality disappeared to be replaced by type: the personality of the actor is thus overtaken not by the author's scripted character, but by the persona of the mask to be played. In the commedia "masks" refers to character types and includes all individual masks or types. Thus the Zania (maidservant) or the Lovers are still masks, even though they do not wear actual masks. Grammelot, the language spoken by the masks, should also be seen in the same light, as a ' 'babel of sounds which, nonetheless, manage to convey the sense of speech... an onomatopoeic flow of a speech, articulated without rhyme or reason, but capable of transmitting, with the aid of particular gestures, rhythms and sounds, an entire rounded speech" (Fo 36).
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS At the very center of the commedia dell'arte were the four original masks, arranged in twinlike pairs. These were the two vecchi, or older men, and the two zanni, or servants. One of the very first references to commedia dell'arte performances alludes to these four characters as the magnifichi (the magnificent ones) and the zanni: Pantalones (Trousers, heads of households) and their serving men. A century and a half later Riccoboni speaks of "the four masked actors of our theater, the Venetian Pantalone, the Bolognese Dottore, and the two servants, now identified as Arlecchino the Bergamask and Scapino the Lombard" (Histoire 49-50). Later still the four figures were named by Goldoni as Pantalone, Dottore, Arlecchino, and Brighella (Nicoll, World 40). The arrangement of these four characters in pairs is by no means fortuitous. While the immediate practical value is the opportunity for delivering the dialogue, another and deeper value is the twin-sided mirror such pairing provides each couple. But to think of these characters simply in pairs means that we shall impose upon an art of infinite modulations a dull and static design that does no justice to what these performances offered. Of the two older characters, the Venetian Pantalone, invariably a miser (Pantalone de' Bisognosi), is essentially a peace-loving man. He is represented as an old merchant or a rich man retired from business, and if he is married, his wife is always young (much too young for him) and never misses an opportunity to deceive him. Just like Pantalone, the scholarly Dottore, with his advanced degree from the University of Bologna, is the victim of the pranks of his servants, daughter, and wife. In general, although both figures are gulled or tricked, the role of the Dottore provides a foil for Pantalone, one that can stand alongside his and yet become at times rather less serious, deviating more frequently from the former's gravity. The Dottore generally shows himself as more pompous
148
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
and certainly more lascivious than his companion, and his adventures with serving maids and others are numerous. The servants were originally numerous and not identifiable, so that many of the early companies' zanni would also use their last names, both for the actors as well as the masks, for example, Zan Padella, Zan Capocchio, and Zan Ganassa. If the names of Dottore and Pantalone for the magnifichi are selfexplanatory, the term "zanni" for the servants is believed to originate either from the Latin Sannio (buffoon) or, more probably, as a derivation from Giovanni because in Lombardy g is pronounced and often written as a z, and this is particularly true of Giovanni and his diminutive Gian (Schwartz 34). Zanni, from whose name the English word "zany" derives, always speaks in a loud, coarse voice because his comic type is based on that of the Venetian market porter who had to make himself heard offering his service above the clamor of the piazza and the rest of the traders if he was not to go hungry. A Bergamask peasant up from the country, seeking to earn a living portering and odd-jobbing in the town of northern Italy, Zanni is at the bottom of the pecking order. He is that regrettably eternal unfortunate, the dispossessed immigrant worker. With his baggy, white costume, originally made of flour sacks, Zanni suffers from the spasms of an ancestral hunger, which is his basic, everyday condition. Starting with the earliest commedia dell'arte, the scenarios had at least two zanni, if not more: the first one foxy and astute, the second more naive and silly (// furbo and il stupido). The evolution of the first zanni in Scapino and later on in Brighella and of the second zanni in Arlecchino is, although accurate, overly simple. There are many early plays of the sixteenth century where both Zanni and Arlecchino appear, side by side, although by the beginning of the following century in northern Italy the name Zanni is usually replaced by Scapino (scappare, to run away) or, later on, by Brighella and Arlecchino for, respectively, the first and second zanni. In southern Italy the second zanni, still wearing the same ample white zanni frock, takes the name of Pullicinello and later on Pulcinella (little chick), the ancestor of Punch and Judy. There are important, consistent differences between the first and second zanni. The first one (Brighella) hesitates at nothing. He has no conscience, while his assistance is invaluable in executing such trivial commissions as the murder of a rival. If a love intrigue is to be planned and carried out, or some money is to be removed from the guarded possession of Pantalone or Dottore, Brighella is the inventive genius who will find a way. Women do not like him. If they suffer his insolent advances, it is because they fear him. His full name is Brighella (from briga, trouble, and cavillo, pretext) because of his ability to find a solution for every difficulty. With his green and white valet uniform, whenever he appears he is always the first zanni, the boss of all servants. All his relationships are exploitative, and he loves nobody, contrary to the second zanni (Arlecchino), who instead is always in love, albeit unfaithfully so. The second zanni or Arlecchino, who became more and more famous in the
Commedia dell'Arte
149
French interpretation of the commedia dell'arte (la comedie italienne), was also born a citizen of Bergamo in the Val Brentana, like Brighella. It was said that folk from lower Bergamo were always buffoons (nai'fs or gulls), while upper Bergamo produced the tricksters or wise fools. Each part of the town produced a clown for the commedia dell'arte: Arlecchino from lower Bergamo and Brighella from the upper town. Arlecchino, whom both Riccoboni and Goldoni signalized as the more comical of the zanni, exists in a mental world where concepts of morality have no being, and yet, despite such absence of morality, he displays no viciousness. Scholars who favor the connection between Roman mimes and the actors of the commedia dell'arte assert that the patches of his costume have their origin in the tiger's skins worn by the ancient actors who played the part of the young Satyr. Yet another explanation is given in the form of a naive and enchanting French story. On Mardi Gras every child, boy and girl, enjoyed being dressed up in specially fine clothes once every year. But Arlecchino's parents were very poor, and they could not afford an elegant costume for their child. Thus all his friends consulted together and agreed that each should give him a piece of the cloth from his own costume, although not one color matched another. The great day arrived and Arlecchino, to the delight of his friends, put on the multicolored suit his mother had made from all the beautiful pieces (Niklaus 22-23). Theories for the origin of the name Arlecchino include extreme suggestions, from a magic water bird to his being called like one of Dante's Inferno's demons. But in Italian the suffix "ino" is a diminutive, and all of Arlecchino's younger brothers have a similar ending to their names, from Frittellino to Trivellino and Truffaldino. Similarly to Pulcinella (little chick), the most important connotation of Arlecchino's name seems to simply be little one or, possibly, little devil. Arlecchino is always desperately (or happily) in love with the little servant girl, originally called Zania, later on Franceschina and Smeraldina, and finally, for the most part, Colombina. Who is this young maidservant, this Zania/Colombina, who is both the object of Pulcinella's and Arlecchino's love? While the female parts were played by boys in the regular written dramas and in earlysixteenth-century commedia dell'arte, we soon have a change in the improvised comedy with the first and much-appreciated appearance of women on the stage. The two most important female roles, to duplicate the original two pairs of magnifichi and zanni, are the innamorata or amorosa (the lover) and her pretty servant girl, the servetta birichina, who in France became soubrette, the title still used by the young lead dancer/singer of contemporary vaudeville shows. The early commedia dell'arte maidservant was older, lustier, and more buxom than the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Colombina, who, as well as being younger and more graceful and engaging, was always an accomplished dancer and singer. In borrowing from the commedia erudita, which had a tradition of the maid appearing in place of the mistress, the servetta had a great deal to do. But once the lovers appeared on stage, she was reduced to the role of a confi-
150
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
dante and a message carrier. It seemed too small a part to be afforded by the traveling commedia dell'arte's troupes, who would need their second actress to carry an equal share. A new part was thus worked out in which the servetta became a counterpart of zanni in function, a zania, while maintaining her role as a reflection of her mistress in manner and mood. Traditional costumes for the women players never developed. When the seventeenth-century Colombina appears in France as Arlecchina or Pierrette, the costume she wears is simply a feminine version of the costume of Arlecchino, and no mask is worn. Colombina in her role of faithful maid and faithless lover is often led by the necessity of her many intrigues to assume disguises, nearly always designed to hide the fact that she is a woman. When she appears as a doctor, a poor scholar, or a lawyer, she wears the recognizable dress of the character she is impersonating. Her costume as Arlecchina, which underlines her close relationship with Arlecchino, is in the fashion of the seventeenth century, but is also covered with patches of different colors. Much better dressed than the male servants, since she is a lady's maid, Colombina does love Arlecchino, but sees through him. Therefore she scolds him, punishes him, deserts him, and takes him back, but in the end he does not change, and she accepts him for what he is. Autonomous and self-sufficient, Colombina sometimes seems to be the only lucid, rational mask in the commedia dell'arte. Just like the lovers and the magnifichi, Colombina can read and write; in fact, she is very fond of books and owns many. The main difference between Arlecchino and her is that while he thinks on his feet, Colombina uses her brain and thinks things through. She sings, dances, captivates, and has gone beyond her go-between origins to become a self-educated woman. In this respect Colombina is influenced by her contact with her mistress, the innamorata. The prima donna innamorata, usually the daughter of Pantalone, is also beautiful, flirtatious, and provocative, but she is so stubborn and headstrong that she usually gets her own way, even over her father. The lovers (amorosi or innamorati) needed for a full scenario are Arlecchino's master and Colombina's mistress. They belong to the aristocracy, and while they do not wear an actual mask, they are always heavily made up. The instructions provided in the scenario for the interpretation of these roles are all in general terms, and thus our imagination becomes essential if the force of the lovers is to be appreciated. Fashionably dressed and elegant in their demeanor, all of the innamorati—no matter whether they are the children of the Venetian Pantalone or the Bolognese Dottore—must speak good, almost precious Tuscan. Their sublime dialogues often seem drawn from the poetry of Petrarch's sonnets, and this imparts a subtle, comical effect to their characters, while the actors portraying these roles make, probably more than any other mask, great use of the discorsi obbligati, the memorized dialogues. These dialogues, so highly mannered as to deserve the titles of arias, are introduced deliberately to keep the lovers in harmony with the comedy as a whole. The
Commedia dell'Arte
151
love theme is constant, but the varieties of its presentation are infinite, while complications, misunderstandings, and outbursts of jealousy sweep across the stage in dark, comic despair. Occasionally, one of the men goes mad for love, but the women are always undergoing the frenzy of love, and their scenes of pazzia (madness) are ever due for applause. The innamorata, whose purity is as absolute as it is unassailable and whose love is genteelly, albeit possessively, bestowed upon her innamorato, always desperately needs Colombina's and Arlecchino's help, together with her beloved, in order to oppose Pantalone's and/or Dottore's plans. There is no special costume for either one of the lovers, and little also to indicate the mistress or the serving maid. The only differences between the costume of the innamorata and that of the servetta are of degree, not of kind, with one dressed in beautiful, heavy silk, satin, or brocade, and the other in light cotton or muslin. Where Colombina is iridescent, a bubble light as air, her mistress is opalescent, clouded with untouchable reserves. Colombina is frank, lucid, a pagan amoralist. Her mistress is hidden, emotional, and secret. As a servant to Isabella, Colombina lucidly remonstrates with her mistress, who is usually desolated at the prospect of being forced to marry a man she does not love: You will live as live the majority of wives in Paris.... You will be prodigal and when you shall have consumed the greater part of your husband's fortune in gowns, equipages, and jewels, you will part company with him; your marriage portion will be returned to you, and you will live thereafter as a great lady.... Do you think that rich men are married to be loved? (Arlequino Proteo, Sand 165) Thus the narrative purpose of the second zanni, now Arlecchino, and of his fiancee Colombina is to intensify and confuse the dynamics of the amorous tension between the lovers. Arlecchino and Colombina both help their master and mistress attain their love and at the same time, Arlecchino especially, create a great deal of comical confusion on stage. With their own love, the servants consistently offer an amusing and sexually frank parody of their masters' sublime relationship. Often they mimic a love scene, standing behind the two lovers and parodying them in an overtly sexual way. Are we seeing four characters, or perhaps the conscious and unconscious longing of love itself? By bringing a different, coarser, and more realistic mood to the same feeling, Arlecchino and Colombina amplify the theatrical representation of love while turning every stereotypical facet of the innamorati's exchange into a bawdy, comical parody. The majority of commedia dell'arte plays give over much of their action to the fortunes of the lovers, and it is obvious that the audiences both delighted in watching intricate variations played on familiar themes and were prepared to accept the repetition, in a different key, of certain common conventions. Only very occasionally among the scenarios do we find any elements that are truly new.
152
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Peculiarly, the conventions of commedia dell'arte are the same as those popular on the Elizabethan as well as the Spanish Siglo de Oro stage: the characters are continually resorting to disguises. Even in Scala's scenarios, where this trick does not appear inordinately, many plots, such as that of II finto Tofano, would fall to pieces were costume transformation omitted. The same could be said of the many disguises adopted by Don Juan and his servant in the numerous commedia dell'arte scenarios dedicated to the Don Juan myth. When the lovers do meet on stage, they are usually so much in love and tongue-tied, with their beautiful speeches, that their need for their servants as interpreters becomes prominent. Zanni/Arlecchino and Zania/Colombina proceed to misinterpret the lovers' statements either through stupidity (Arlecchino) or calculated self-interest (Colombina). Thus the innamorato and the innamorata are as indispensable to the development of the plot as were the original four masks of magnifichi and zanni. Without the innamorati and their inability to resolve their own problems, there would be no function for Zanni and Zania, no struggle between the ineffectiveness of youth and the implacability of age. The lovers are never alone on stage, as it would not have been proper for two young people in love to be alone in real life. On stage, they always have someone watching over them spying, or translating their emotions. They need a whole troupe of actors helping or hindering them, before they can finally reach the ultimate conclusion of their love and get married. CRITICAL RECEPTION The dynamic relationship between innamorati and servants maintains the same relevance even in recent times. This can be seen in Dario Fo's and his wife Franca Rame's Arlecchino Show. Against the background of instinctive sympathy for the commedia dell'arte, Dario Fo came to his Arlecchino production in 1985 as a result of the prompting of academics. Fo's radical left-wing ideological stance from the 1970s prompted the playwright to see in Arlecchino a universal gadfly, a creature di disturbo (of trouble/interference). Arlecchino is thus interpreted by Fo as a subversive personality, which, he feels, simply broadens the function and applicability from Zanni (who must always be the servant, always inferior, physically and visually lower than the Magnifico) to a greater diversity of roles, impersonating both society's servant and also society's inquisitor (Fo 70-71). In the show performed in the winter of 1986, an extended monologue was inserted for Franca Rame in which she relates the story of the Magnifico's wife Isabella, sexually frustrated, who must learn from the prostitute her husband is known to frequent how to win him back. The lesson given to the wife by the prostitute, Eleonore, provides the actress with a unique opportunity to instruct all women in the audience (replete with mime, obscene details, and voice effects) in the techniques of seduction. The monologue is a translation into period costume, with the license conferred by the commedia dell'arte, of the love chase
Commedia dell'Arte
153
from a female viewpoint. While this dialogue is not substantially different from the old Colombina/Isabella exchange in the scenario quoted earlier, here it is also an ironic treatment of feminist polemic. Franca Rame has devoted her professional life to creating an essential comic space for a satire that is directed first at social conventions and then is focused more sharply on the unfairness of the economic and political conditions of contemporary society. First known for her 1950s dumb-blond film roles, in the late 1960s Rame became involved with roles that were increasingly politically committed. Since 1977, beginning with Parliamo di donne (Let's Talk about Women) and Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (A Woman All Home, Bed, and Church), Franca Rame openly revealed Fo's and her concern for the condition of women in Italy. The actors of the original commedia dell'arte were too concerned with their immediate survival to bring forth authentic, socially subversive messages in their plays. Fo simply uses an adaptation or selection of styles from past commedia plays (mostly taken from old scenarios belonging to Rame's family) to bring us face-to-face with contemporary social and political causes of a deep-rooted European theatrical tradition. Accordingly, he proves that commedia dell'arte is an actual language, and that if there is to be a regeneration of the theatrical medium in the next century, it must come via the reempowering of the performer, rather than the continued hegemony of playwright and director. In conclusion, if we reexamine the term ' 'commedia dell'arte," we must stress that arte can be translated into English not only as art, but also as craft, and know-how. Dario Fo underlines that it also indicates license: the granting to actors of a professional and therefore protected status. History has not settled on the most accurate locution of commedia dell'arte, according to Dario Fo: "I find correct, in fact, the idea proposed by some scholars of calling this genre instead of Commedia dell'Arte, comedy of the comedians or, more specifically of the actors. The entire theatrical translation rests on their shoulders: The actor as histrion and author, stage manager, storyteller, director" (14-15). SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Arlequin et ses masques: Actes du Colloque Franco-Italien de Dijon. (5-7 Septembre 1991). Dijon: Publications de l'Universite de Bourgogne, 1991. Beaumont, Cyril W. The History of Harlequin. London: Beaumont, 1926. Cairns, Christopher. "Dario Fo and the Commedia dell'Arte." In Studies in the Commedia dellArte, ed. David J. George and Christopher J. Gossip. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1993. 247-265. Cottino-Jones, Marga. "Franca Rame on Stage: The Militant Voice of a Resisting Woman." Italica 72.3 (Autumn 1995): 321-339. Daniel, Howard. The Commedia dellArte and Jacques Callot. Sydney: Wentworth, 1965. Duchartre, Pierre Louis. La comedie italienne. Paris: Librairie de France, 1925. Enciclopedia Garzanti dello Spettacolo. Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Falavolti, Laura, ed. Commedie dei comici dell'arte. Turin: UTET, 1982.
154
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Fido, Franco. "Dario Fo e la commedia dell'arte." Italica 72.3 (Autumn 1995): 298306. Fo, Dario. The Tricks of the Trade (Manuale minimo dell'attore). Trans. Joe Farrell. London: Methuen, 1991. Forti-Lewis, Angelica. Maschere, libretti, e lihertini: II mito di Don Giovanni nel teatro europeo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Goldoni, Carlo. Tutte le opere. Ed. Giuseppe Ortolani. Milan: Mondadori, 1959. Gordon, Mel, ed. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dellArte. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983. Grano, Enzo. Pulcinella e Sciosciammocca: Storia di un teatro chiamato Napoli. Naples: Berisio, 1974. Mic, C. La commedia dell'arte. Paris: Schiffrin, 1927. Molinari, Cesare. La commedia dell'arte. Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Nicolini, Fausto. Vita di Arlecchino. Milan: Ricciardi, 1958. Nicoll, Allardyce. Masks, Mimes, and Miracles. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. . The World of Harlequin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963. Niklaus, Thelma. Harlequin Phoenix. London: Bodley Head, 1956. Pandolfi, Vito. La commedia dell'arte: Storia e testo. 6 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 19571961. Riccoboni, Luigi. Discorso: della commedia alVimprovviso e scenari inediti. Ed. Irene Mamczarz. Milan: II Polifilo, 1973. . Histoire: du theatre italien depuis la decadence de la comedie latine. Paris: Delormel, 1728. Rudlin, John. Commedia dell'Arte: An Actor's Handbook. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco). Teatro. Ed. Ludovico Zorzi. Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Sand, Maurice. The History of the Harlequinade. 2 vols. London: Seeker, 1915. Scala, Flaminio. Scenarios of the Commedia dell'Arte. Trans. Henry F. Salemo. New York: New York UP, 1967. Scherillo, Michele. La commedia dell'arte in Italia. Turin: Loescher, 1884. Schwartz, I. A. The Commedia dell'Arte audits Influence on French Comedy. New York: Paris Publications, 1933.
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles (North America: Prehistory-Twentieth Century)
Ellen Rosenberg Primal scatologist and scandalous omnivore, sacred progenitor and witness to creation, serial corpse and mythomaniacal traveling id, Coyote is one of the most ancient and important of the Native trickster figures of North America. A magical protobeing existing in a mode somewhere between demiurge and American Indian commedia dell'arte figure, he has endured since prehistory in extemporized and fixed spoken, performed, and written configurations in the full spectrum of Native American "literary" 1 and cultural genres. Coyote and related tricksters appear in children's, adults', and initiates' narrative variants, both in sacred and profane oral storytelling and performance, song, chant, ritual, verse, and dance. The archetype whose counterparts appear in cultures worldwide, Coyote is, depending upon the tale, cycle, and culture in which he occurs, quintessential wanderer, transformer, narcissistic glutton, clown, and a host of other personas that provide audiences with more than cathartic entertainment or social commentary. Since, for many Native cultures, language creates reality rather than describes it, Coyote's game is the word incarnate.
BACKGROUND The range of names given to Coyote in Native languages conveys a matrix of meanings referring to the animal, the personification of Coyote power, the character, and the symbol of disorder in the myths (Toelken, "Ma'i Joldloshi" 204). To the Dine (Navajo), he can be "Ma'ii," a word meaning the entire matrix of "Coyote" (Bright 20), or, sometimes, "Doo Yildinf," "the one who is despised" or the "outcast" (Toelken, "Coyote, Skunk" 591). The Tonkawa
156
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
name, "ha.Csokonay," means "the owner of the earth" (Hymes, "Tonkawa Poetics" 55). Even the Aztecs, before mistaking Cortes for the returning Quetzalcoatl in 1519, featured a god named Huehuecoyotl, meaning "Old Man Coyote," whose repertoire included dance (Bright 187). A number of tricksters who are not called "coyote" per se are, nonetheless, the same figure—Old Man, Shitty Old Man, even Fox and Wolf—when their repertoires coincide with Coyote's. The very name "Trickster" often refers to the same character or characteristics, as in the "Wakdjunkaga," the Winnebago word for "the tricky one." Whatever name he goes by—Isk'ulya (Wasco-Wishram), Eshin or Ashni (Kalapuya), Spilyai (Sahaptin)—Coyote is to chaos and imperfection what DNA is to carbon-based life. He is the nucleus in which the unity of paradox is selfevident. He is the irrepressible wrong that happens when it can, the essential paradisiacal deconstructionist. In the traditional "literatures" of the six major continental North American Native cultural areas,2 trickster figures have been omnipresent since some point from 50,000 to 30,000 years B.C.E., when migrating peoples of or passing through northern Asia brought to the Americas a range of shamanic religions and associated Emergence, Earth-Diver, and Trickster narratives. Figures such as Rabbit or Hare, Raven,3 Spider, Tortoise, Wolverine, and Coyote were ubiquitous in the performative and oral literary canons of the several hundred or so linguistically distinct cultures that were viable on the North American continent before the onset of Anglo-European cultural dislocation and supplantation in the fifteenth century C.E. Despite the fact that this displacement resulted in the extinction of numerous original Native cultures and languages, many tricksters survived the total biological, theological, cultural, and military annihilation of their creators. It is fitting that Coyote, who is the mythic survivor, continues to exist in many Native cultures and languages, including, but not limited to, Blackfoot,4 Clackamas and Kathlamet Chinook, Hopi, Karok, Kiowa, Maidu, Mescalero Apache, Navajo, Nez Perce, Paiute, Sahaptin, Shoshone, Takelma, Tonkawa, and Wasco-Wishram. Some of the cultures that gave rise to Trickster, in general, and to Coyote, in particular, were already at their zenith in 1500 to 1300 B.C.E. Coyote was well established by this time in the Southwest, for example, especially among Pueblo peoples, who continued to be a source of this lore long after the golden age of their culture diminished. The Pueblos were there when the Navajos appear to have migrated from the Canadian Yukon around 1500 C.E. They arrived in the Southwest with oral narratives the original morphological development of which did not seem to contain Emergence/Trickster tales. After long association with the Pueblos, however, the Navajos adapted Pueblo myths into their own cosmological view and made Coyote a central reality. Since the sixteenth century, when the American Southwest was the furthest outpost of the Spanish New World, Native storytellers have often imported features of Catholic/Christian, white social value, structure, and content. Despite uneven incorporation of such components, tricksters often remain outriders of
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles
157
the unfamiliar to audiences who may be accustomed to belletristic and graphological traditions as well as to American literary sanitation. Challenging non-Native criteria for morality and comprehensibility, Coyote tales are often rife with incest and transvestism, talking feces and talking anuses, detachable body parts, and "grandmothers"5 who bid Coyote fetch them their dildos. Logical, aesthetic, and epistemological features, for example, Coyote's ability to survive death, or the Beauty way of the Navajo implied by Coyote's misfeasance, or the purposeful inversion of values and rituals, are typical in the narratives. Many of the stories contain less outrageous themes; their humbleness makes them no less consequential. The Salish-Blackfoot "Coyote and the Rolling Rock" (Brown 109-111), for example, demonstrates the disruption in relations between elements of the natural world caused by Coyote's decision to reclaim the gift of a blanket he presented in gratitude to a rock upon which he and Fox sat. For readers coming from other cultural backgrounds, and in an effort to avoid trivialization of Native literatures or, worse, aggrandizing the "primitive," whether "brutish" or "noble," a few things should be said. Understanding Coyote's valency in some Native traditional cultures may be facilitated by touching upon some epistemological determinates in Native cognitive perspectives.6 First, not all knowledge is considered by Native cultures as public domain, even if it was "collected" and published. Dislocating performatives and other materials from their first and proper contexts creates a distortion that cannot be healed. Second, although Natives are stereotyped as "stoic" and "grave," many cultures value and even thrive upon humor and the joke; the comedie is often connected to the sacred. Laughter is used in some groups to signify to the hearer behavior or attitudes dangerous to the well-being of the society. Adult laughter when Coyote stories are told to children may be used in this way to draw attention to miscreance. The comedie is appreciated as an essentially communal dynamic. That is, the significance of tribalism is that the one finds meaning through the many. The fool who wanders the Earth in a vacuum, without even an implied audience, is a figure of tragedy (Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse" in Lindquist and Zanger 72). Third, all knowledge is integrated; conceptual divisions do not exist between "disciplines" like literature, medicine, religion, art, history, and so on.7 This integration explains why Coyote manifests meaning in so many cultural domains on so many levels. Fourth, all things in the universe are viewed as being interrelated: people, tribes, nature. In Navajo culture, for example, health and order (Toelken and Scott, "Poetic Retranslation" 88) are indistinguishable as central social and religious concepts. If Coyote is dis-order,8 then he is also systemic dis-ease. To heal, then, the ordered language of ritual and performative are invoked, since there is an ontological correlation between language and reality. The creation of language, therefore, has the power of mediation between what is ordered and healthy and leads to a smoothly working society and what is not. This interrelatedness is associated with concepts of the circular constitution of
158
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
reality, a cycle of return or a balance devoid of notions of hierarchical progress, contrary to American dominant culture, which is linear, progressive, and hierarchical. Finally, Native concepts of time and space differ from dominant-culture views. Native American cultures view the past with respect and as having occurred in different phases. Narrative cycles, performatives, and other literature, both nongraphological and written, correspond to and reflect the concerns of the five successive phases. The cardinal events of these phases across the nations are similar. The ' 'origin era'' explains the beginning of the past. Reductively, a spiritual, asexual entity that remains forever uncreated gives rise to sky parents whose union, in turn, creates antithetical worlds. The reconciliation of these worlds may be achieved in narratives that articulate either of two myth types: Ascent myths and correlated Emergence narratives (predominant in Southwestern, Southern, and Northwest Coastal Native literatures); and Descent myths and correlated Earth-Diver narratives (prominent in Northern, Plains, Eastern, and other continental Native literatures). In both types, the Native view of space incorporates the Sky, the Earth, and a subsurface world. In many Ascent myths, the earliest people emerge from the Earth Mother, to whom they will eventually return, by traveling through a succession of wombs or worlds floating one above the other starting at the center of the planet. The surface is regarded as the fourth or, sometimes, fifth womb or world (thus setting culture numbers that differ from the Eurocentric three or seven). Earth-Diver myths chronicle a fall associated with a flood, after which Earthmaker creates land, or a fall from the Skyworld that is accompanied by corresponding losses and gifts. To mediate between worlds, figures like Navajo Changing Woman or the Woman Who Fell from the Sky are incarnated. They bring spirituality to the Earth's surface as well as corporeal reality, for example, in the form of First Plants and Animals that arise from their "bodies" upon decease in some cultures. The worlds and the human beings who eventually come to inhabit the Earth are often derived in this way from the creators' own substances. Origin narratives thus chronicle and preserve the deep past while providing foundational wisdom and philosophical directionality. The subsequent "transformation era" begins with First People, who generally appropriate one or several primary roles. In some cultures, such as Algonquian, a figure may be an integrated trickster/transformer with the power to metamorphose into either role. In other cultures, tricksters themselves or transforming figures may give rise to culture heroes, other tricksters, twin heroes or rivals, or the very world as we know it. Whichever morphological details predominate, the important features of the transformation period, First People, and Tricksters are that they bring social and physical order to the world. Here, as the consummate holy bungler, transformer, and culture hero who brings traditions, death, sex, and fire, Coyote makes his appearance.
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles
159
As prototypic figures who appear in the margin between original cosmic entities and humans on Earth, First People may have animal, human, or plant names and may sometimes appear as such by virtue of their shape-shifting magic. First People are anthropomorphic demigods, however, and should not be regarded as animals. Morphologically, then, Coyote belongs to the transformation era, which ends when the figures of myth disappear and the first humans are created. The Old Stories of the next phases recount legends of the time since the arrival of the People; subsequent historical events; and more recent events. Coyote's potency as well as the vitality of Native imagination and creativity are attested by the many tales that have placed him into "dream times" or "once upon a time" after transformation and into the present. In tracking the literatures across the Americas, it appears that the further south Coyote occurs, the more easily he shifts from mythic to contemporary time, and the fewer his redeeming or endearing features (Bright 19).
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS In the pantheon of Native American tricksters, Coyote stands out as a pivotal First Person who manifests a charismatic indifference to and disregard of standards of ethical behavior and good sense. He is a shape shifter who uses his magic to meet his objectives and to express his complex nature; a bumbler, clown, fool, or buffoon who fulfills the roles of schlemiel and schlimazel.9 Coyote is confidence artist, practical joker, lecher, rapist, defecator, sage, culture hero, and more. He is often a cautionary illustration of taboo and error, even as he accidentally sets physical reality and ritual for all time. The tales create possibility through comic negativity, satire, parody, slapstick, and placed laughter. As performatives, they are delivered through story-theater features and dynamic interaction with the audience. The renditions employ a variety of metonymic and elliptic gestures, emblems, symbols, and allusions, as well as storytellers' body languages, vocal changes, and the nuances of stylistic difference between one storyteller and another and between traditional community storytellers and more modern single artists. Often set in the radically simple, unpretentious language conducive to remembering extensive narratives and common to oral performance literature, the tales display a candid acceptance of body functions, sexuality, cross-gender identifications, violence, and other human affairs. The more acculturated to dominant society the storyteller, the more closely the tales resemble Euro-American narratives. Some stories serve the same purpose as "just-so" stories, although conclusions are generally inferred rather than stated. While Coyote is frequently punished through his own agency, the "point" resides in the process and texture of the narrative rather than in a comeuppance. The tales should not be confused with Aesop-like fables,10 although they are told to children and adults in order,
160
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
among other functions, to convey tribal values and to invite the speculation of the audience as to the possibilities opened by Coyote's actions. In some cultures, Coyote tales are only told in winter, until the first spring thunderstorm; thus he is frequently associated with rain. While the Navajo may refer to him in summer, especially if it will promote healing, in other cultures, he is not mentioned until the onset of winter. The Tonkawa tell Coyote narratives as part of their "night stories." Tales are usually told one or two at a time, or several at a time during a group gathering for a variety of purposes. Although Paul Radin's definitive study of the Winnebago Trickster cycle seems to demonstrate a sequential build, a progress of themes and enlightenment, there is little extant research to show a similar structure in other "cycles" per se. To readers familiar with the epistemological perspectives of the AngloEurocentric American canon, tales of Coyote will appear at once recognizable and alien. Archetypes, motifs, and infrastructure resemble now ancient GraecoRoman mythology, now European picaresque fiction.11 Wayilatpu's Nez Perce myth "Coyote and the Shadow People" (Phinney 282-285), for example, is representative of the extensive body of Native North American orphic myth as well as being one of numerous tales in which Coyote is associated with the bringing of death to humans. It is among the most similar to Greek tradition, and its themes resemble those of a number of myths, like that of Persephone. Couched in the structural elements of narrative symmetry, dramatic strategies, and foreshadowing, here is the theme of the grieving husband's journey to a shadow world to retrieve the beloved wife. Clearer of vision in the dark of night than in the light of day, Coyote sees and interacts with his wife in the shadow lodge until he must take her on the journey from death. He sets the permanence of death through his inability to keep his hands, not his eyes, off his wife. At this point the Native and the Greek myths diverge, and Coyote reenacts a sequence of important rituals through a doubling theme that recurs in other variants, such as William Hartless's "Coyote, Master of Death, True to Life," the fourth story of a complex origin or creation myth (Hymes, "Coyote, Master of Death" 284-306). Both protagonists are weak and teach acceptance, but Coyote ordains ritual, demonstrating both its emptiness and its mediational power, while at the same time, his inability to control his impulsivity and his lust gives rise to the permanence of death. Numerous related variants ordaining death, like the Caddo "Coyote and the Origin of Death" and the Wintu "Coyote and Death" (Astrov 117, 261) differ in structure and emphasis. In many narratives Coyote's own child is the first one to die. In the Yana "Sex, Fingers, and Death," Coyote objects to every element of creation set by First People Cottontail, Lizard, and Gray Squirrel, and he insists upon introducing the idea of death with no return to life. Other variants exist in which it is Old Woman Coyote who makes the choice for death. In yet another variant, Coyote laughingly asks the people where they intend to put everyone if no one dies. In other tales, Coyote is a Prometheus-like benefactor, as in the Mescalero Apache tale in which he finds out where fire is kept, sticks his tail into it, and
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles
161
runs around setting forest fires of which humans avail themselves. Where Prometheus is noble and suffers as a martyr, Coyote is a sacred anarchist whose chaos sets order in the guise of the length of tails for all time. Like the picaresque tales, Coyote narratives are peripatetic formula stories. Unlike them, the traditional ones have neither European beginnings nor endings, but rather "liminal" or mediational dynamism (Ellis 55), allowing for the formation of "cycles." The narratives' "interlocking" connectives, as it were, are universal rather than singular to one tale or type. It is the very circularity of the stories that serves as a model. Nothing in the tales indicates a hierarchical order between them; this is a fitting structural resonance to Coyote's symbolic character. Ordinarily containing at least two parts, a coming and a going, the narratives nearly always begin in the middle of Coyote the quintessential wanderer's objectiveless amble through the protoworld. "Coyote was traveling there" or some similar phrase is accompanied by a narrative particle or marker like "they said" or "it is said." These markers signal the audience to anticipate a performative, set time in the transformation era or in a dream time, and act as disclaimers by the storyteller to having actually witnessed the events, establishing the cultural authority of a retelling (Binali Biye' 601). The tales end with Coyote taking off again for parts unknown. Coyote has always been old, although he typifies energy and movement. His impulsivity is usually associated with the young, so it is not surprising that his physical nature is rarely geriatric or frail. He may mask his objectives, however, under a range of signs of social and physical weakness. In many narratives, he begs for things like food, shelter, sex, or weapons, a laughable position to Native Americans who know that begging represents weakness. In related fashion, the weakness of the flesh takes on layers of significance in numerous variants in which Coyote sleeps with his daughter. In one tale, he summons a medicine man to poison him so that he may appear to his daughter to be dying. After his death, he returns in the disguise of a stranger and couples with his daughter. When she notices coyote hairs sprouting from her body, she understands what her father has done, and she kills herself. Coyote is generally not described, because his features would have been well known to his audiences; when he is described, he is usually scraggly, with a scruffy coat, worn-down claws or missing teeth, and telltale stench. Clothes are mentioned when they (1) suit necessity, as in the Kiowa variant of "Coyote and the Stranger," in which Coyote countercons the white rider out of his clothes, which Coyote experiences as "alien" (Blaeser, "Trickster" 53); or (2) undergo some form of destruction. When they are returned to Coyote, they are in rags and strings, conveying the sense of manginess of his coat. Coyote is not immortal, but he never dies. Mutilated, buried, eaten, drowned, burned, or dying from catastrophic falls or suicides, the unkillable Coyote nonetheless always returns, having sustained numerous body alterations that serve as templates for humans and other beings. He also causes transformations in others.
162
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
In the hilarious, brief, frank Northern Paiute variant "How Her Teeth Were Pulled," we learn that whenever the idea of sexual intercourse "was invented it died with the inventor," since women's genitals once "had teeth in them." One night, Coyote "took Numuzoho's lava pestle / to bed with a mean woman / and hammer hammer crunch crunch ayi ayi / all night long" (Ramsey 22). For transforming the vagina and introducing sexual intercourse into the world, Coyote is celebrated, says the tale, by the Paiute, who wear necklaces of fangs in commemoration. A transformer associated with the creation of the Earth itself, Coyote is pictured in one poem as floating in the waters of the protoworld, singing back at Earthmaker as the latter searches for bits of dirt to make land. More commonly, Coyote changes the physical world that was first formed through a sort of extemporaneous process of manufacture. As an untutored and prankish meddler (Ramsey 25; Bright 35-55), he cannot restrain the impulse to tinker with the elemental components of the protoworld. In the Hopi narrative ' 'Coyote Places the Stars," he accompanies the War Twins in that task. Reversing the ritual north-to-west directionality, they carefully place several recognizable constellations. Then Coyote tires of the job and flings the remaining stars helter-skelter. The people scold him, but Coyote answers that it is good to finish a big job in this manner. He is unrepentant. In some stories, Coyote is married and has children, a circumstance that never stops him from being a whorish fellow. He beds everything from Old Woman Coyote to ducks, mice, chieftains' sons, and his own daughter. His gluttony extends to every arena of human sexuality, including necrophilia, as in "Coyote and the Eagle's Daughter," and autofellation, as in "Coyote Sucks Himself." Interestingly, here, he is most concerned that no one be told of his deed; but the news of his gross eroticism has leaked out between the rocks, which are part of the interrelated universe. Coyote appears in related tales and variants in which misfeasance, buffoonery, or beneficence result in the setting of ritual. In the Clatsop Chinook "Coyote Establishes Fishing Taboos," when Coyote catches some salmon, he cooks and eats them right away. When he returns for fish over subsequent days, there are none. To understand, "He took a shit" and asked "his shit. . . why?" He is told that when the salmon are first caught, they must be cut up right away. Over the course of the narrative, Coyote continually breaks taboos, which are explained to him by his feces, and rituals for the catching of salmon are eventually all articulated: "When salmon are caught, / then they're cut up in the afternoon. . . . the people . . . will not catch salmon / if they are murderers, / corpsehandlers, / menstruating girls, / menstruating women, / widowed people. / These are all the taboos, / for the generations to come" (Bright 38-42).
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles
163
CRITICAL RECEPTION OF THE TRADITIONAL MYTH AND THE NEW COYOTE TRADITION To speak of Native North American "critical reception" of Coyote in traditional narratives and performatives is to discuss, on a one-by-one basis, the variable elements of storytelling that accrue to individual performers or writers. This body of response is largely unknown and so multitudinous as to lose meaning. Various Native American cultures, furthermore, deem some Coyote literature so potent that they see no reason to make the texts public or to discuss what these texts mean to them. Finally, in some Native sectors, there is a resistance to further invasion and decimation by assimilation or comprehension. In the event, "critical reception" implies readings and understandings by dominant-culture audiences in Euro-American epistemological terms, an approach that conjures up notions of cultural, racial, or intellectual colonialism and issues of otherness that are not conducive to cross-cultural insight. Several issues have shaped the existing body of Native literature, filtered as it has been through Anglo-Eurocentric America, and pointing them out may be a more productive way to talk about critical reception. The body of written Coyote material falls into one of two categories: "collected" and recently written or graphologically encoded. In the first group we face the complex issue of field collection and translation. The fact is that some "stories" are only available in field transcripts recorded by ethnographers who sometimes did not fully understand Native custom and/or language. Many transcripts are corrupted by translations that are rendered either grammatically bizarre or linguistically and prosodically poor because they may have been executed by social scientists, rather than poets or literary translators. Further, since whole Native cultural universes have been extinguished over the last several hundred years, in some cases, no one is now living who can elucidate the texts. Numerous primary materials only appear embedded within ethnographic or critical exegeses, making them objectionable because information about the "genre" traditions of the narratives was and is sparse outside of American Indian cultures, and Eurocentric interpretations are confounded by such limitations. Laudably, almost all of the seminal non-Native studies of the trickster tales and cycles address these admitted issues of comprehensibility of culture, value, genre, sound, text, and so on. Actually, this approach creates yet another layer of distortion; that is, dominant-culture commentary may shape even the comprehension of the material. In addition to the already-shifting quality of Trickster's nature, then, readers must cope with the procedural problems that overlay comprehensibility (Wiget, Native 4-15). As the tales have increasingly appeared in American English, their genre placement has been problematic. Sometimes they have been interpreted as poetry and, therefore, have been forced to reflect Anglo-European versification; sometimes they have been interpreted as tale and "cleaned up" of such elements as
164
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
marker repetitions. They are frequently mistaken as children's stories only. In addition, reading audiences cannot "see" the performance signifiers that hold meaning for traditional spectators, and they cannot grasp typical features devolved from myriad retellings of variants. Comprehension is, therefore, further diminished and fragmented. These issues have stood in the way of making the tales accessible to modern Native and non-Native Americans alike who have shown a growing affinity for Coyote. Despite the passage of time, the enormous textual distortions, and the cultural and functional simplifications of texts, Coyote is both changed and relatively unscathed; who he is, however, depends upon who is now producing him. A second wave of written Coyote material, tales written down by Native tellers and those who understand the various cultures, is flourishing. This new work has given rise to what one Coyote connoisseur calls a "neopoetic" tradition of American Coyote literature (Bright 13). In this context Coyote has evolved as a culture hero and a fool claimed by Indian and other American literary artists alike. He has been co-opted by dominant-culture cartoon moguls and media marketers and incarnated as Wile E. Coyote and a pitchman for a line of cafes. While these characters may not be considered bad by some audiences, they are no more Native than Tonto or cigarstore chieftains. The Coyote of the traditional mythography, however, is being reinterpreted or reinvented by modern Native American and mixed-blood novelists and poets, such as Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Peter Blue Cloud. A few non-Native writers, including Gary Snyder, have assayed to bridge the divide between cultural consciousnesses by assimilating Coyote into their creative stewpots. In modern performatives and in written fiction, poetry, and drama variants, Coyote has survived as the consummate representative of Native cultural sensibility, even as he has undergone cultural cross-pollination and hybridization and flourished to become one of the best-known and charismatic of endemic characters in contemporary Native and Anglo-Eurocentric American lore and literature. Perhaps the appeal of Old Man Coyote to all of us is that he is never safely dead. NOTES 1. "Literary" and "literature," as used here and elsewhere in this entry, include all genres and structures that may carry the notion of "text" and need not necessarily be "penned" or graphologically rendered. 2. Eastern Woodlands, Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River, and from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico; Northern, most of the Canadian semiarctic; Northwest Coastal, along the Pacific from northern California to southern Alaska; Plains, grasslands from the Mississippi River to the Rockies and from southern Canada to California in the West and touching areas of the Southwest; and Southwestern, from Texas west to the Pacific and, Southern in modem times, stopping (artificially) in the South at the Mexican border.
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles
165
3. Raven is a Tlingit trickster figure. 4. "Na'pi," the Blackfoot word for Old Man, is certainly related to Coyote (Bright 117). 5. In the Native American view of reality, humans are interrelated to all animate, inanimate, and, sometimes, abstract realities connected with the Earth. Thus stones, insects, plants, animals, and others are frequently addressed by such familial names as "grandmother," "uncle," "little sister," and so on. 6. This section in no way pretends to cover the myriad elements of native epistemologies. 7. Western civilization also begins with a primary epistemology that, through the tangent of Ages of the Church, Reason, Enlightenment, and Science, is later ' 'unraveled'' into discrete subjects or disciplines. Thus in our modem society, where everybody "specializes," "wholism" appears to be a novel, "alternative," or "primitivistic" notion. 8. In a formative essay in Paul Radin's seminal study The Trickster, Carl Jung provides a psychological, European analysis of Trickster. He calls the figure ' 'undifferentiated human consciousness corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level" (Radin200). 9. Related Yiddish words: the schlemiel is the jerk, the clownish bungler who creates mischief for others; the schlimazel is the recipient, the one to whom all mischief comes. 10. The metamorphosis of the B'rer Rabbit-type fables best known through Joel Chandler Harris's 1880 Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings is a good example of this confusion. African slaves carrying their own Trickster and animal tales encountered and assimilated Native American materials into their own context in a language that was neither African nor native. Harris closely reproduced these stories in phonetic transcriptions of oral and performative slave literature. In the mid-twentieth century, corporate Walt Disney subjugates the material to mesh with dominant American, Christian, AngloEuropean aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology and trivializes the material and infantilizes the audience by rendering the stories as animations geared for children. 11. "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology," Karl Kerenyi's essay, and Jung's essay in Radin's Trickster emphasize these similarities, but Jung has lent a degree of malevolence to the Trickster that ignores the power of humor and laughter Native cultures imbue in characters as well as the process, sending non-Native critics forever on a wild-goose chase.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Astrov, Margot, ed. American Indian Prose and Poetry. New York: John Day, 1972. Reprint of The Winged Serpent. 1946. Benedict, Ruth. Tales of the Cochiti Indians. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 98. Washington, DC: GPO, 1931. Bierhorst, John, ed. The Sacred Path: Spells, Prayers, and Power Songs of the American Indians. New York: William Morrow, 1983. Binali Biye', Todich'ii'ni (Timothy Benally, Sr.). "Ma'ii Joodlhoshi Hane: Stories about Coyote, the One Who Trots." In Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations
166
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of the Native Literature of North America, ed. Brian Swann. New York: Random House, 1994. 601-613. Blue Cloud, Peter. Back Then Tomorrow. Brunswick, ME: Blackberry Press, 1978. . Elderberry Flute Song: Contemporary Coyote Tales. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982. Boas, Franz. Chinook Texts. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 20. Washington, DC: GPO, 1894. . Kathlamet Texts. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 26. Washington, DC: GPO, 1901. Bright, William. A Coyote Reader. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Dobie, J. Frank. The Voice of the Coyote. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. Hymes, Dell. "Coyote, Master of Death, True to Life." In Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America, ed. Brian Swann. New York: Random House, 1994. 286-306. . Fivefold Fanfare for Coyote. Portland, OR: Corvine Press, 1978. Kendall, Martha B., ed. Coyote Stories II. International Journal of American Linguistics, Native American Texts Series, Monograph 6. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Koller, James, ed. Coyote's Journal. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow, 1982. Kroeber, Karl, ed. Traditional Literatures of the American Indian. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981. Lamadrid, Enrique R. Cantos del Coyote. Albuquerque: Associated Gold Street Olive Press, 1972. Lopez, Barry. Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America. Kansas City: Sheed Andrews & McMeel, 1977. Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket). Coyote Stories. 1934. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. Phinney, Archie. Nez Perce Texts. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology 25. New York: Columbia UP, 1934. Radin, Paul. The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian: Life, Ways, Acculturation, and Peyote Cult. 1920. New York: Dover, 1963. . The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. 1956. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. Roessel, Robert A., and Dillon Platero, eds. Coyote Stories of the Navajo People. 2nd ed. Phoenix: Navajo Curriculum Center Press, 1974. Rothenberg, Jerome, ed. Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1972. Sanders, Thomas E., and Walter W. Peek, eds. Literature of the American Indian. Beverly Hills and London: Glencoe Press/Collier Macmillan, 1973. Sapir, Edward. Southern Paiute. 3 vols. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 65. Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1930. . Yana Texts. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 9, no. 1. Berkeley: U of California P, 1910. Shipley, William, ed. and trans. The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc'ibyjim. Berkeley, CA: Heydey Press, 1991. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Seaver, 1981. Snyder, Gary. "A Berry Feast." Evergreen Review 2 (1957): 110-114. Swann, Brian, ed. Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. New York: Random House, 1994.
Native American Coyote Trickster Tales and Cycles
167
Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians. New York: Dial, 1972. Toelken, Barre. "Coyote, Skunk, and the Prairie Dogs." In Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America, ed. Brian Swann. New York: Random House, 1994. 590-600. . "Ma'i Joldloshi [sic]: Legendary Styles and Navajo Myth." In American Folk Legend, ed. Wayland Hand. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 203-211. . "The 'Pretty Languages' of Yellowman: Genre, Mode, and Texture in Navajo Coyote Narratives." In Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos. Austin: U of Texas P, 1976. 145-170. Toelken, Barre, and Tacheeni Scott. "Poetic Retranslation and the 'Pretty Languages' of Yellowman." In Traditional American Indian Literatures, ed. Karl Kroeber. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981. 65-116. Vizenor, Gerald. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992.
Secondary Sources Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. New York: MLA, 1983. Babcock-Abrams, Barbara. " 'A Tolerated Margin of Mess': The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered." Journal of the Folklore Institute 9 (1975): 147-186. Blaeser, Kimberly M. "An Introduction." In Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds, ed. Mark A. Lindquist and Martin Zanger. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. 3-8. . "Trickster: A Compendium." In Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds, ed. Mark A. Lindquist and Martin Zanger. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. 4766. Brown, Dee. Tepee Tales of the American Indian. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; London: Chatto & Windus, 1979. Ellis, Larry. "Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal." SAIL 5.4 (Winter 1993): 55-68. Fleck, Richard F., ed. Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1993. Hymes, Dell. ' 'In Vain I Tried to Tell You'': Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981. . "Tonkawa Poetics: John Rush Buffalo's 'Coyote and Eagle's Daughter.' " In Native American Discourse: Poetics and Rhetoric, ed. Joel Sherzer and Anthony C. Woodbury. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 17-61. Jung, Carl. "On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure." In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, by Paul Radin. 1956. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. 195-211. Kelley, David H. "Quetzalcoatl and His Coyote Origins." El Mexico Antiguo 8 (1955): 397-416. Kerenyi, Karl. "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology." In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, by Paul Radin. 1956. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. 173-191. Krupat, Arnold, ed. New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
168
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Lindquist, Mark A., and Martin Zanger, eds. Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds: The Survival of American Indian Life in Story, History, and Spirit. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994. Marriott, Alice, and Carol K. Rachlin. Plains Indian Mythology. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975. Ramsey, Jarold. Love in an Earthquake. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1973. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, and Jerry Ward, Jr., eds. Redefining American Literary History. New York: MLA, 1990. Ruppert, James. Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Sherzer, Joel, and Anthony C. Woodbury, eds. Native American Discourse: Poetics and Rhetoric. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 13. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Tedlock, Dennis, and Barbara Tedlock, eds. Teachings from the American Earth. New York: Norton, Liveright, 1975. Trejo, Judy. "Coyote Tales: A Paiute Commentary." Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974): 66-71. Tyler, Hamilton. Pueblo Animals and Myths. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1975. Vizenor, Gerald. "Trickster Discourse." American Indian Quarterly 14.3 (Summer 1990): 277-287. Wiget, Andrew. Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985. . "Telling the Tale: A Performance Analysis of a Hopi Coyote Story." In Rediscovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 255-296.
The Drag Queen (Worldwide: Throughout History)
Carl Bryan Holmberg The drag queen is neither a simple phenomenon nor is she isolated to the twentieth century. An important differentiation may serve as a preliminary guide to the world of drag. A real or Active person who does drag on a regular basis may be considered a "drag queen," a label particularly applied to a man masquerading as a woman. Someone Active or real who dresses in drag temporarily, for convenience or necessity, is considered to be "doing drag." Both the drag queen as an ongoing individual profession and dressing in drag may offer comedic impact, serving to comment upon the plot of a story in which the drag appears or indeed upon the culture the drag queen reflects.
BACKGROUND Wearing attire and cosmetics conventionally assigned to the opposite sex is nothing new. Boys and girls still sometimes trade clothing for Halloween costumes in traditional Ireland just as many of their ancestors did to celebrate the holiday in fun and prankery; this serves as a rite of reversal. Actors wore women's clothing in early performances of Shakespeare as well as in Japanese Noh drama and Kabuki theater. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dressed in drag to escape trouble in Some Like It Hot, and Uncle Miltie appeared as Carmen Miranda on the cover of Newsweek in 1949. Yet some two thousand years earlier Euripides used drag in The Bacchae to criticize the then quickly growing threats of rigid sex roles enforced by patriarchy and military violence. Similarly, the title character in Aristophanes' Lysistrata wore full military regalia to defend
170
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ancient Athens and to solidify support for women among women while the men were away in Sparta fighting a stalemated war. The modern and late modern period witness new instances of drag, so much so that it is wise to be privy to the terminology that performers themselves and other professionals employ. As a generic term, drag refers to wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. A cross-dresser is anyone who wears an ensemble of clothing traditionally assigned to the opposite biological sex, male or female, but is not necessarily masquerading as the other biological sex. Women wear jeans—once assigned only to men and cowboys—and men wear robes and skirts as priests. In addition, someone who cross-dresses may or may not identify with the gender role attributed to the garb, which is to say that the attire may or may not make a statement about the individual person's sexual orientation. Transvestites, however, assume the look of the opposite sex more as a statement of personhood. Many transvestites are heterosexual, yet they would rather wear the attire of the opposite sex and do so most usually at home or in private rather than in public or for performance purposes. Illusionists are performers who do their best to create the illusion of being of the opposite sex, but they do not modify all their behavior—they do not mimic voice, for example, in everyday or performance life. They lip-synch prerecorded vocalists, usually for entertainment purposes. Actors performing drag roles in plays, skits, or situation comedies are usually illusionists and employ artificial voices instead of carefully delineated, realistic vocals. A female impersonator actually mimics the voice and sings without the benefit of the vocal sound recording of the person she impersonates. Furthermore, she impersonates every sartorial and gestural detail, sometimes subtly, sometimes in caricature. It is one thing to create the illusion of Ethel Merman's looks; it is another to sound like her and walk like her. Thus the drag queen is an illusionist or female impersonator. By this terminology, Hugo Weaving as Mitzi and Guy Pearce as Felicia within the story line of The Adventures of Priscilia, Queen of the Desert are technically illusionists, though in the film they are called "female impersonators." Terence Stamp as Bernadette technically is a woman who has undergone various transgendering procedures; in her younger days Bernadette was an illusionist because "she" used to be a "he" who did drag. All three characters speak with mostly undisguised male voices and rarely in falsetto. The three lead roles in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar are not so much drag queens, which is their label in the script, as they are transvestites since they never wear male clothing. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The variety of drag queens and performers doing drag is expanded by the broad range of entertainment formats in which they appear. Least conservative
The Drag Queen
171
are theater and clubs. Drag queens are known for their comedie, often biting interaction with audiences; their humor onstage varies from sight gags to irony, wit, and camp. "Camp" is a concept defined as ironic overstatement, particularly in style, attire, makeup, gesture, and dialogue. For instance, a drag queen in "high-camp" mode is not satisfied with regular or stubby high heels but wears the highest possible spikes. In theatric and club venues the wit of a drag queen is often her hallmark since she must deflect catcalls and taunts as well as the interruptions of unruly revelers. One-line putdowns delivered in a catty voice may not only quell her detractors, they will usually earn her crowd approval. Whatever the thematic basis of her act, seduction is a primary characteristic. A drag queen's performance is usually an act of seduction: getting an audience to find her beautiful, appealing, and/or entertaining. In this sense drag is a sort of magical persuasion fraught with subtlety and finesse like RuPaul's or flaunted with excess like Dame Edna's. To say that drag queens work seduction is not to say that they all work to become objects of desire. "Divine" is seductive as a campy entertainer but does not necessarily function as a sex object for the audience members. Just as there are variant terms for "drag," there are different kinds of stage drag queen. The classy singer or "diva" most often wears a slinky or beaded gown and high spiked heels. Her hair or wig may be extravagantly coif fed. Divas may emote histrionically with broad gestures. African-American drag queens frequently personify elegant celebrities like Diahann Carroll, Donna Summer, and Diana Ross. The "trampy street girl" is done up to pose slatternly ways, and a favorite persona to adopt is Cher. Tramps usually have long dark hair, sometimes with curls, and wear tight pants or a pants suit. Sometimes the "tramp" performs a Madonna dance routine in the style and fashion of Madonna's latest music video. Perhaps the most comedie stereotypes of drag queen take on the look of a slovenly housewife, with curlers, housedress, and floppy slippers, or of a classy kept woman waiting for her errant male to arrive home. They may clown to songs like "Stand by Your Man" or "This Girl Is a Woman Now"; they may vamp to "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right out of My Hair"; or they may wax tragic to "The Man That Got Away." The "working-girl" persona will vary from a waitress wearing a teapot hat singing ' 'Nine to Five'' to a maid in mesh stockings, short skirt, and buxom, frilled top. Since country music clearly overstates the lovelorn distresses of womanhood, country singers such as Dolly Parton, Barbara Mandrell, and Tammy Wynette are favorites to imitate. Very different are the men doing drag on television, who are usually heterosexual men being comic. Television situation comedies are no strangers to drag illusionists and impersonators. Corporal Maxwell Klinger, played by Jamie Fanon the television series "M*A*S*H," only wants out of the military. His main strategy is to dress as a woman, to be declared crazy and hence unfit for duty, and then to be sent home. For the Active Korea of the 1950s, cross-dressing is pathologized as a sickness. Yet the irony is that everyone knows that it is a
172
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ploy, and no one will declare Klinger insane and send him home. "Bosom Buddies" was another early (1980) entry into sitcom drag. Henry (Peter Scolari) and Kip (Tom Hanks) are roommates and happen to work together in a New York City advertising agency. When their apartment house is unexpectedly demolished, they are left without digs until their friend suggests that they move into her building—but with one catch: the Susan B. Anthony Hotel is strictly a women-only residence. Henry becomes Hildegarde and Kip becomes Buffy, leading dual lives as men and women, generating all sorts of dilemmas such as finding women attractive when they themselves are in drag. More recently, Martin Lawrence's show "Martin" sometimes features him in drag in perhaps unflattering African-American stereotypes. Variety shows sometimes highlight drag. Milton Berle pioneered drag on television in the 1950s in the "Milton Berle Show"; he is credited with explaining his popularity by saying, "Gay is just another way of life." Later Flip Wilson played "Geraldine" on the "Flip Wilson Show." All five lead performers on the "Kids in the Hall" television series regularly played wives, secretaries, girlfriends, and hookers. Drag occurs on the "Benny Hill Show" as well as "Monty Python." The singular and most lasting arena for the exploration of drag comedy on television has been "Saturday Night Live." Dan Ackroyd's imitation of the Public Broadcasting chef Julia Child spoofed elite pretension while delivering the black-comedy effect of Julia bleeding from having absent-mindedly cut her finger. Dana Carvey's Church Chat Lady became a regular character in the 1980s with her famous lines attributing the motivation of all immoral acts to "S-s-s-s-atan!" and her wrenched, pursed lips saying, "Well, isn't that special?" Mike Myers's Linda Richman was the Jewish raconteuse whose local television show "Coffee Talk" invited phone calls that made her verklempt. Finally, film has presented many men doing drag and, more recently, drag queens. Of course, film predated television and was itself predated by theater. It was one thing for Oscar Wilde to appear doing drag in the lead role of his play Salome—but not for comedie purpose; it was another for the stage play Charley's Aunt to be transferred to the screen in 1941 for Jack Benny to create the fiction to the film audience that he indeed is not a female or Charley's Aunt but Lord Fancourt Babberly, Charley's friend in drag. South Pacific memorializes Mitzi Gaynor as a sailor and Ray Walston as a hula girl in "A Hundred and One Pounds of Fun." In Some Like It Hot, two musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), find themselves in the predicament of witnessing the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, thus necessitating that they hide from the mob. They disguise themselves as Josephine and Daphne, respectively, and join an all-girl band on its way by train to Florida to escape. Their situation becomes complicated by Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) and Osgood (Joe E. Brown). Joe/Josephine falls immediately for Sugar, leading Joe to assume a further masquerade as a Cary Grant clone to woo her. Jerry/Daphne is in turn wooed by Osgood, a
The Drag Queen
173
millionaire, and eventually absurdly accepts his proposal of marriage because she/he has never before had the opportunity to be a millionaire. Hence the title Some Like It Hot refers to their taking the heat, being on the lam, performing "hot" music, using drag disguises, and being trapped in the subsequent romantic and economic dilemmas that are due to their drag ploy. Torch Song Trilogy uses dark humor to depict the world of drag queens. Starring Harvey Fierstein, it offers a touching yet almost seedy view of a drag queen who both impersonates and creates female illusions. The role is certainly not representative of all drag culture and performers, nor is it to be taken as ethnographically sound. Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie is a case of drag necessitated ostensibly by lack of work. Michael Dorsey is a brilliant yet abrasive actor who cannot get a job. However, when he dresses as "Dorothy Michaels" and wins a role on a soap opera, it increasingly becomes evident to Michael/Dorothy that Michael is an acting failure because he is sexist. His friends and colleagues are alienated by his pompous high standards and aggressiveness. Dorothy, in comparison, is assertive without friction and thus is more successful professionally and personally. He begins to see his own failings through Dorothy's eyes but also falls for his soap-opera costar, Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange). Eventually Michael/Dorothy confesses to Julie, "I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man." In the popular movie Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams plays Daniel Hilliard, a recently divorced man who by court order is severely limited from seeing his three children. Thus he creates a role for himself, Iphigenia Doubtfire, a British nanny and housekeeper who is both far more responsible and more nurturing than he was as a father. Like Michael in Tootsie, Daniel becomes transformed by having to live as a woman. In this case the comedy works since Williams's character is not initially "into" dressing up as a woman save only as a ploy to see his kids. However, he must necessarily maneuver past numerous characters, including his wife, his wife's new boyfriend, a social worker, and his boss from the television station where he works part-time. Not only does he pass as the older woman, but his act becomes a new job for him as a successful host(ess) of a children's show. Other famous film stars who did drag for comedie purposes include Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, Cary Grant, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, and the Three Stooges. Traditionally accepted as humorous entertainers, drag queens have been devaluated over the past twenty years; as a result, new interpretations have emerged about them, creating an ideological controversy. Feminists Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, and Carole-Anne Tyler claim that drag queens parody women and by so doing defame and subordinate them. Therefore, they suggest that drag is misogynous and hateful of women (Butler; Garber; Tyler). Sometimes members of local communities stigmatize local and regional drag performers. Unlike big film and television stars who perform drag as a sometime role, such local and regional illusionists and impersonators are often marginal-
174
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ized as less competent than their screen counterparts even though many of them perform drag during long, grueling circuits at various clubs, theaters, and bars. They may also be further stigmatized as abnormal or unsavory by factions both within and without the gay community. To stereotype all the members of an already-stigmatized minority—in this case, drag queens—as being misogynous, untalented, or neurotic is at best incorrect and at worst morally wrong. Drag queens are diverse in their attitudes, preparations, and performances. In fact, one assessment of drag voiced in men's studies (commonly called the "changing men" perspective) notes that many drag queens go to great lengths to personify elegant women to the extent of shaved body hair, careful makeup, poised comportment, and high-fashion clothing. Some drag entertainers report how much they admire and wish to emulate women. Desire is their objective— for themselves. While in some instances drag does excoriate women by taking the illusion only so far and then transparently mocking women, not all drag parody comments negatively upon women. In fact, some drag parody targets society's narrow stereotypes of women as sex objects and hyperfeminine china dolls. In this sense some drag is highly critical not of women, but of the sorts of female stereotypes many feminists find objectionable. Thus drag queens sometimes deconstruct and destabilize received norms for women. Perhaps most notable in this regard is Lypsinka (John Epperson), whose cabaret show tours worldwide. Drag queens are often taken to be spokespersons for the gay community, a fact that some members of that community applaud and others bemoan. Because drag queens dress and act flamboyantly and are highly vocal, they attract attention, particularly of paparazzi and journalists. Some drag queens, however, do not see themselves as leaders of the gay community and do not wish to represent the gay community, although they may appear at charity events, fund raisers, and pride marches. CRITICAL RECEPTION Drag queens and performers doing drag are a permanent and successful element of art, although toleration for the obviously gay drag queen in mainstream popular culture changes with social mores. Drag, however, remains fascinating, whether practiced by the clearly heterosexual male dressing in women's clothing strictly for laughs or by the gay male dressing in women's clothes in order to be honestly seductive to gay men. The reasons for viewers' fascination may vary. First, the notion that the more socially powerful male dresses in the clothes of the socially weaker woman is disordering, a step taken against expected order and an absurdity at which one laughs. Second, the drag queen symbolizes the confusion of signs. With drag, the substance is male but the image is female; therefore the assignment of a male or female pronoun to the drag queen is a conscious, ideological, and unsatisfactory decision. Even if one argues the transcendent strength of an androgynous being, the drag queen's collapse of the
The Drag Queen
175
visual and verbal sign cannot be ignored. Finally, drag queens inspire questions about what makes females different. The viewer may ask whether it is their vanity in dress, their languorous movement, or their linguistic assaults on men. Or, on the other hand, perhaps it is their attention to aesthetic pleasure, their joy in their entire bodies, and the value they place in language as not a mere system of signs but rather an active, participating physical construct. Interestingly, it must be noted that the implications of these two sets of questions reflect far more upon the nature of the questioner than upon drag queens themselves. Thus whether it is Rosalinde and Celia in the Forest of Arden, Coyote in the myths of Native America, or Dame Edna and RuPaul, the elusive image of the drag queen fluctuates, blurring social assumptions. Like the image of the fool, it enlarges and hovers, superimposed, upon the audience itself. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bullough, Vem L., and Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." In Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13-31. Chermayeff, Catherine, Jonathan David, and Nan Richardson. Drag Diaries. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995. Evans, Arthur. The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness ofDionysos. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Tyler, Carole-Anne. "Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag." In Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 32-70.
Sir John Falstaff
(England: In William Shakespeare's Middle Play of the Second Lancastrian History Tetralogy, Henry the Fourth, Part J, c. 1596, and Henry the Fourth, Part II, c. 15971598; Offstage Death Detailed in the Tetralogy's Last Play, Henry the Fifth, c. 1599; Main Character in The Merry Wives of Windsor, c. 1597-1601)
Alan Lutkus BACKGROUND In the history plays, Falstaff is the central character at the London Eastcheap Tavern habituated by young Hal, Prince of Wales and later King Henry V, estranged from his father Henry IV (usurper of the throne in Richard the Second (R2), the tetralogy's first play). For the first half of Henry the Fourth, Part I (1H4), Falstaff embodies tavern-world "holiday" influences (1.2.192), keeping Hal from helping his father's side as Henry IV faces mounting threats—rebel forces, particularly—in what has become the everyday world of civil war. Unknown to Falstaff, Hal in an early soliloquy (1.2) marks his intention of rejecting the tavern crew; he shows himself largely distinct from them at Gadshill, where Falstaff's band robs a group of pilgrims, while Hal robs Falstaff (2.2) and later has the loot returned to the pilgrims (2.4). In partly comic charade, Hal playing King Henry to Falstaff as Prince, Hal rejects Falstaff (2.4), yet then protects him from a tavern search by the law. The play subsequently traces Hal's turn back toward his father as Falstaff raises troops for the impending climactic Shrewsbury battle with the rebels. There Hal rescues his father's life and in single combat kills his heroic rebel rival Harry Hotspur, "king of honour" (4.1.10) in the play. Hotspur's heroic notions of honor are also dangerous, as Falstaff makes clear with a realistic if cowardly counterassessment of their costs: "Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No" (5.1.131). At the play's end Falstaff gains public credit for dispatching Hotspur because Hal is willing to "gild" a lie for Falstaff (5.4.153),
Sir John Falstaff
177
who knows full well that Hal is due the credit, having witnessed the fight while pretending to be dead, then rising. Henry the Fourth, Part II (2H4), with its own near-climactic battle against the rebels at Gaultree, repeats some of lH4's dramatic structure. Falstaff is faced down by Hal in both plays' act 2, scene 4, tavern scenes; Hal is again far from his father Henry IV in the opening acts and again reconciles at his dying father's act 4 bedside; Falstaff is again rejected, now seriously, when Hal becomes King Henry V in act 5, scene 5. The body of 2H4, however, shows Falstaff on his own, apart from Hal, who is a reduced presence in 2H4, with only half the lines (9.5 percent) he had in 1H4 (19 percent); Falstaff retains his same 20 percent (Spevack 268, 309, 393, 438). Falstaff is a man on the make, thanks to his Shrewsbury-based soldierly reputation, which allows him to insult England's lord chief justice with impunity (1.2.42-178), prey inventively on two rural justices, Shallow and Silence, as he again recruits troops (3.2), and capture a Gaultree rebel, who gives up on the strength of Falstaff's fame alone (4.1.367-368). In public, he speaks for youth (1.2.137-151) and modern fashion (21-35), yet privately he worries over age and failing health (1.2.190-193), admits to prostitute Doll Tearsheet that he is old (2.4.244), and arrives late and out of fashion for Hal's coronation—"O, if I had had time to have made new liveries" (5.5.9-10). Age is his downfall; the new king's disavowal of Falstaff finds his former influence out of date literally and symbolically: "I know thee not, old man" (5.5.43). Henry the Fifth (H5) bars Falstaff from the stage, but sympathetic reports of his death (2.1.64-71, 93-104; 2.3.3-36) darken the portrait of heroic—or jingoistic—military Henry V. The new king never asks after his old companion, never even utters Falstaff's name. Henry's staff, however, reminds the audience (though not Henry) of the rejection of Falstaff (4.7.39^11), a reminder contributing to Hal's "loss of humanity" as king (Melchiori 12). The Merry Wives of Windsor (MWW), purportedly fulfilling Queen Elizabeth I's wish to see Falstaff in love (Craik 4-5), presents a far less resourceful Sir John, one humiliated throughout the play. Impelled by his amorous sense of self and the unreasonably jealous husband Master Ford, Falstaff is duped perpetually both by members of his tavern crew from the histories, who turn upon him as a "varlet vile" (1.3.90), and by the faithful Windsor wives Mistresses Ford and Page, upon whom his desire falls. He barely escapes discovery with Mistress Ford twice, once carried away crammed into a washbasket filled with dirty laundry and thrown into the river Thames (3.3.131-150, 3.5.110), then exiting dressed as an old woman whom Ford cudgels (4.2.170-72); by the play's end Falstaff is tricked into standing in a forest wearing deer antlers and waiting for yet another assignation, frightened by (playacting) fairies before he is revealed— "Fie on lust and luxury!" (5.5.93)—to everyone. Falstaff's final "Use me as you will" (5.5.162-163) both acknowledges final defeat and summarizes his humiliations throughout the play. During the 1580s and 1590s, England saw no obvious successor to the last
178
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of the Tudor line, aging and heirless Elizabeth and the consequent political uncertainty probably dictated the late-sixteenth-century vogue for onstage histories. Chief among them were plays like 1H4 and 2H4, detailing the last era of civil turmoil, the fifteenth-century War of the Roses (Hosley xviii), which suggested a perhaps hopeful pattern surfacing from unrest. That war's vexed succession of the English Crown involved foreign and domestic conflict, but from it finally emerged the strong Tudor line of monarchs, liberally assisted by providence, at least in Tudor propagandistic accounts of the war. Henry the Fourth, Part I partly stems from a source steeped in providential design, as J. Dover Wilson (20) emphasizes—the Prodigal Son story, "most common" of earlier morality interludes and plays (Melchiori 15, 17). Hal, rejecting Falstaff as "that reverend Vice, that grey iniquity. . .that vanity in years" (2.4.437-438), briefly addresses Falstaff in the language usually leveled at Vice in moral drama, after Falstaff himself has threatened Hal with Vice's usual stage prop, the "dagger of lath" (131; Bevington, 1H4 24, 185). The Prodigal Son pattern perhaps derives from an earlier dramatic version of Hal's story, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which lacks a Vice figure (Melchiori 11). If so, Falstaff as Vice in the Henry the Fourth plays is new, the old play locating vice in young Hal, who later undergoes a St. Paul-like transformation. Shakespeare shifts culpability to Falstaff and his tavern crew, who become convenient scapegoats for Hal's behavior (Bevington, 1H4 22). Yet Falstaff fails to meet Vice's job description fully. In 1H4 he enters literature not scheming to corrupt Hal, but fast asleep; in 2H4 he is hardly around Hal enough to win his spleen, let alone his soul—the two are together in two scenes for 132 lines in 2H4, 4 percent of the play, contrasted to more than 1,000 lines over eight scenes in 1H4, almost a third of the play. For Giorgio Melchiori (17), 2H4's aging Falstaff represents from morality models not Vice but a figure of "Old Mortality," a man on his way out despite his arguments for modernization. Other background areas perhaps help explain Falstaff's departures from simple moral Vice in 1H4 and 2H4. Renaissance political theory for E.M.W. Tillyard (235) suggests that Hal is a young prince confronted with models of political virtues and their opposites: Falstaff is a type of dishonorable action set against Hotspur's notion of honor in 1H4\ and in 2H4 he contrasts with the lord chief justice's embodiment of legal order. Expansion beyond Tillyard's use of Aristotle's ethical teachings allows Sherman Hawkins, for Hal's education as prince, to have more joy of Falstaff, who is not just a contrast to Hotspur but a corrective to his excesses in pursuing honor. Stage traditions underscore political and ethical matters. E. E. Stoll (427) finds Falstaff the stage stereotype of distorted honor, displaying features of the braggart soldier, whether derived from Roman comedies' miles gloriosus or the later capitano figure of Italian commedia dell'arte. Joseph A. Porter suggests that medieval philosophy and linguistics link with Falstaff on the subject of honor, tying him to nominalism, the denying of meaning to abstract words, Falstaff reducing ' 'honor'' to the element
Sir John Falstaff
179
producing its sounds: "What is honor? A word. What is that honor? Air" (1H4 5.1.131-134). Biblical tradition may also figure here. Porter (3-4, 71) sees the plays R2 to H5 as an analog to post-Babel linguistic collapse, and Falstaff's nominalism is a logical degenerative stage following on King Richard's earlier worry over adequate nomenclature once a rightful (pre-Edenic) king is deposed. But Porter (4) admits to finding no explicit Babel reference. James L. Calderwood's similar but nonbiblical argument may be preferable. Falstaff is for him simply lying's "human form" (68). Religious tradition figures more convincingly in C. L. Barber's (213) discussion of folk celebrations of Lent, with their ritual if reluctant exile of the holiday impulse in expelling celebratory Carnival. The Carnival pageant is always corpulent, as is "fat-kidneyed" and "fat guts" Falstaff (1H4 1.2.5, 31). Religious tradition allies with clown theory for Roy Battenhouse, who, even more than Hawkins, refreshingly rejects the modern consensus of Falstaff the misleader (32); he is instead Christian fool, "spirit of play amid a world of utilitarianism," whose veiled and often scriptural comments reveal Henry IV as thief of the crown, honor as a hollow value, and Hal's claims of repentance as a sham (34-35, 41^2). The Merry Wives of Windsor barely mentions Falstaff with prince, king, or court (3.2.65, 4.5.88-94), emphasizing domestic and not political virtue and vice. But political realities of Elizabethan society provide a telling if ambiguous framework for the play. Sixteenth-century patriarchal values dominate MWW for Marilyn French (108), who highlights the wives' obsession with demonstrating what their husbands want: chastity. But disruption of male dominance is Peter Erickson's reading (119) of women controlling M W s men. Successful feminine plotting parallels "queen-dominated court politics," which "arouses . . . male uneasiness," an uneasiness most obviously embodied in Falstaff's onstage humiliation and lengthy rueful reflections on being "cozened and beaten too" (4.5.88; see also 3.5.88-112; 4.5.107-113; 5.5.118, 121-127, 160-164). England's rigid class structure is for Erickson (124) also invoked, the middle class besting a corrupt aristocracy in Falstaff, the titled knight. Stage tradition again partly accounts for M W s Falstaff, Leo Salingar (231— 232) noting the braggart soldier's conventional pretensions as lover. Sexual proclivities, however, also appear clearly in M W s likely source, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's novelle II pecorone, whose oversexed student is a Falstaff prototype (Craik 14-15). Elizabethan folk practices may also be important to MWW. Jeanne Addison Roberts (134) sees Falstaff as a domestic scapegoat, a threatening spirit of fertility symbolically castrated at play's end. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Over four hundred years, audiences have seen a range of Falstaffs, including seventeenth-century countertextural svelte and beardless twentieth-century portrayals (Wiles 121, Craik 43). The twentieth century's versions have been "ma-
180
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
jestic" but "too jovial. . . too nice" or, antithetically, "belligerent" (Brewster Mason [1975], Joss Ackland [1982], in Wharton 61-65), with Ralph Richardson (1945) giving Falstaff a "magnanimity and grief," Hugh Griffith (1964) making him "Rabelaisian" and "a grey-bearded Mephistopheles," Orson Welles (1966) on film showing him "manipulated," and Anthony Quayle (1979) on BBC videotape indicating Falstaff's "intelligence" (McMillan 23, 61, 81, 100). Yet T. F. Wharton (59) rightly finds a simple dualism in twentieth-century variety, one Falstaff a "boisterous merry maker," the other "a more complex, endearing, but never quite convincing, facade," a disjunction probably begun in eighteenth-century portraits. David Bevington (1H4 73) opposes Edward Berry's "beerhouse Falstaff" to James Quin's "judicious" one, who "betrayed a surliness beneath his assumed gaiety." Twentieth-century portrayals also often sacrifice some of lH4's fun-loving Falstaff to the diseased 2H4 version. Academic criticism's usual moral view of Falstaff as Hal's misleader here takes the stage in production emphasis on the history plays as a cycle. Henry the Fourth, Part I requires a Falstaff who clearly manifests qualities Hal rejects in 2H4, seen by the same audience sometimes the next day; Quayle in an early appearance as Falstaff (1951) unsuccessfully protested loss of comedie moments (McMillan 48) and in 1979 was a Falstaff obviously "dangerous" to Hal (McMillan 100). There is a related bias against broad comedy from Falstaff; stage critics see "childishness" in the gags and outlandish costume of John Woodvine's clownlike 1986 portrait (McMillan 110-111). Nonetheless, Shakespeare very likely created Falstaff's role for a clown—a sensible notion even for those holding to the view that Falstaff simply is Vice, since, as Wiles notes, "the clown's ancestry in the Tudor Vice is a generally accepted fact of theater history" (1). The presence of Richard Tarlton, a clown well remembered even after his death in 1588, hovers around if not always in Shakespeare's text; Falstaff's use of religious reformers' language echoes Tarlton's routines (Bryant 156). It is a significant echo, given Tarlton's appearance in Shakespeare's source play, Famous Victories, perhaps as Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle, Falstaff's likely original name in 1H4. Conjecturally, the burlesque Oldcastle offended his descendants and prompted a name change (Bevington, 1H4 3-10; the new name comes from cowardly Sir John Falstolfe of Shakespeare's (Henry the Sixth, Part I). A less spectral presence is Will Kemp, clown of Shakespeare's company through 1599. Editors barely acknowledge the presence of Kemp, unmentioned by Melchiori and Craik, noted only in passing in Bevington (1H4 32). Wiles, however, finds Falstaff a role "written for Kemp," one in which "Kemp's trademarks are obvious" (116-120)—obvious and congruent with themes in all three Falstaff plays, though Wiles only sometimes elaborates on theme. But Kemp's "characteristic slowness" (120) visually prolongs Hal's delay in joining his father. Kemp's established persona as "plain man" of the lower classes (99100) perpetually contrasts with Falstaff's knightly title—comic reflection of a
Sir John Falstaff
181
king who as usurper is also not a proper king. Kemp's 2H4 costume is out of place, employing an underclass cap and an out-of-date doublet (123-124), clown commentary on aspirations to fashion including, perhaps, Hal's father king masquerading as a king. Kemp's prop weapon is actually an apprentice's wooden sword, a literal "false staff" (122-123), fit for an underclass clown and also a visual reminder that soldierly Falstaff parodies soldiers. Kemp's seemingly adlib verbal dexterity (129-130) underscores a Falstaff constantly searching out the right face-saving line, consistently debasing language, so that his nominalism is no surprise. Kemp, like other clowns, cultivated an image of sexual potency combined with onstage thwarted satisfaction (111), which accords with M W s lecherous-but-denied Falstaff. In Wiles's formulation (128-129) Kemp's position as clown leads to a different sense of Henry V's rejection of Falstaff, an act over which such modern commentators as J. Dover Wilson (122) wring hands and hearts. It is the clown Kemp whom the first audience saw every bit as much as the character Falstaff, as modern audiences at once see a Jerry Lewis performance and character in the Devil in Damn Yankees. Expectations for the clown from that first audience colored the plays. Some in the audience knew how the clown as Vice—or Carnival—must finish; most knew that rejected or not as a character, the clown would be back—as he may be in 2H4 almost immediately. Wiles speculates that Kemp delivered that play's epilogue, in which its speaker dances—a Kemp specialty. This was the conventional ending for the clown, his part always "a progress toward the jig," a moment for release for the spectators, who joined in verbally and in other ways during the "enactment of misrule" that was the jig (Wiles 110-111). For Wiles, 2H4 then ends with the anarchy expected from the clown, balancing and even calling into question King Henry V's stuffy rejection of misrule from Falstaff, whom he calls "the tutor and feeder of my riots" (5.5.58). The first audience lost Falstaff; it still had Will Kemp. To date, no production of a Falstaff play has embraced any of Wiles's arguments, many of which of course have no obvious modern analogues. However, a coming generation might see a Falstaff enacted not by a skilled legitimate actor, a Richardson, Wells, or Quayle, but rather by a modern clown comparable to a Jackie Gleason or a Benny Hill. CRITICAL RECEPTION Within a short time of Falstaff's first stage appearance, his dialogue was already linguistic common currency enough to appear in a 1598 stage document, one index of the "instantaneous immortality" Bevington sees the public according to him (1H4 3). Falstaff contributed importantly to the continuing popularity of 1H4, Shakespeare's most reprinted play in his lifetime (Bevington 2). Falstaff is featured with Hotspur on all surviving title pages, as Prince Hal was not; Falstaff is also featured prominently on the title pages of the quarto-format text of 2H4 (Melchiori 4) and two quartos of MWW (Craik 48, 53). When other
182
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Elizabethan dramas later became unprofitable to revive, Falstaff's presence alone made 1H4 worth staging; a Falstaff skit is recorded even during the Puritan 1642-1660 closing of English theaters (Bevington, 1H4 69-70). A brief earlynineteenth-century absence aside, 1H4 has held the stage fairly consistently until now, Thomas Betterton's Falstaff a hit of the 1699-1700 season, Richardson's similarly effective nearly a quarter of a millennium later (Bevington, 1H4 71, 74, 80). The play's continuing influence is suggested by Gus Van Sant's 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, which grafts a modern gay story line onto lH4's framework. The other Falstaff plays lagged in acceptance. Henry the Fourth, Part II disappeared onstage for a century, brought back in the early 1700s perhaps only because of Falstaff's popularity in 1H4 (Bevington, 1H4 71). Despite more favor from the mid-nineteenth century on, 2H4 has since rarely been staged without an accompanying 1H4 (Melchiori 40-44). The Merry Wives of Windsor has done far better, at least since the later seventeenth century (Craik 25-26), and has served as libretto for five operas, from Antonio Salieri's to Ralph Vaughan Williams's (1796, 1799, 1838, 1849, 1929: Craik 25-26n; Campbell-Quinn 571). Verdi's 1893 Falstaff combines MWW, 1H4, and 2H4, as does Welles's film Chimes at Midnight, which also injects bits of H5, R2, and Holinshed's Chronicles. Commentators took to Falstaff enthusiastically and at least as early as John Dryden in 1668 (in Hemingway 403). A century and a half of early criticism is largely subsumed in A. C. Bradley's early-twentieth-century rejection of MWW s Falstaff as "not the real" one because he is so humiliated (77), while the histories' audiences are unable to condemn a Falstaff who is "so extraordinary" a being that "our hearts go with" him (87); this implicitly acknowledges both nineteenth-century romantic interpretations like Hazlitt's, celebrating Falstaff's "freedom from restraint" (56), and eighteenth century appreciations like Morgann's, who cannot "conceive Shakespeare ever meant to make Cowardice an essential part of [Falstaff's] constitution" (15). Even Samuel Johnson in 1765 partly exculpates Falstaff, though seeing clearly enough that he is ' 'loaded with faults" (8). Mid-twentieth-century commentary found an eminently rejectable Falstaff as it placed him within theatrical, literary, and other traditions. Stoll (415) emphasizes clown practices of roaring and falling flat in establishing why Falstaff must be seen as coward; other censuring approaches, suggested in the "Background" section, came from Wilson (acknowledging his debt to Johnson), Tillyard, and Barber. Later commentators on the histories have partly reacted against such strictures. Hawkins and Battenhouse were considered earlier; Sigurd Burckhardt (293) replaces Tillyard's Falstaff as defeated dishonor with a Sir John who is "the reality principle incarnate" when he rises at Shrewsbury, while Macdonald (370-371) sees Falstaff's language not as degenerative nominalism or simple lying but as necessary progress over outdated linguistic practices of the past. The Merry Wives of Windsor's Falstaff has been spared a similar evolution
Sir John Falstaff
183
because, as Craik argues (44^18), Falstaff's credentials as rejectable scapegoat in Merry Wives of Windsor are far less convincing than in the histories, and so no extensive moral framework ever evolved around him for commentary now to begin disassembling.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Between first performance and publication in 1623's posthumous First Folio collection of Shakespeare's work, 1H4 appeared in seven quarto editions (1598 [two]; 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622: Bevington, 1H4 2); a single quarto was published of 2H4 (1600: Melchiori 2), two of MWW (1602, 1619: Craik 3, 48). Bevington, David, ed. Henry IV, Part I. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Cited as Bevington 1H4. 1H4 references are from this edition. Craik, T. W., ed. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989. MWW references are from this edition. Gurr, Andrew, ed. King Henry V. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992. H5 references are from this edition. Hemingway, Samuel Burdett, ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Henry the Fourth, Part I. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1936. Melchiori, Giorgio, ed. The Second Part of King Henry IV. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. 2H4 references are from this edition.
Secondary Sources Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. 1959. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1963. Battenhouse, Roy. "Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool." PMLA 90 (1975): 3252. Bevington, David, ed. Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1986. Cited as Bevington 1H4-2H4. Bradley, A. C. "The Rejection of Falstaff" (1902). In Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Berington. New York: Garland, 1986. 77-98. Bryant, J. A. "Shakespeare's Falstaff and the Mantle of Dick Tarlton." Studies in Philology 51 (1954): 149-166. Burckhardt, Sigurd. " 'Swoll'n with Some Other Grief: Shakespeare's Prince Hal Trilogy" (1968). In Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington. New York: Garland, 1986. 289-314. Calderwood, James L. Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: Richard II to Henry V. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Erickson, Peter. "The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor." In Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor. New York: Methuen, 1987. 116-141.
184
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
French, Marilyn. Shakespeare's Division of Experience. New York: Summit Books, 1981. Hawkins, Sherman. "Virtue and Kingship." English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 313-343. Hazlitt, William. "Henry TV in Two Parts" (1817). In Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington. New York: Garland, 1986. 55-64. Hosley, Richard, ed. Shakespeare's Holinshed: An Edition of Holinshed's Chronicles (1587). New York: Capricorn Books, 1968. Johnson, Samuel. "Notes from the Plays of William Shakespeare" (1765). In Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington. New York: Garland, 1986. 7-8. Macdonald, Ronald R. "Uneasy Lies: Language and History in Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy" (1984). In Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington. New York: Garland, 1986. 359-385. McMillan, Scott. Henry IV, Part One: Shakespeare in Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991. Morgann, Maurice. An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1711). In Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington. New York: Garland, 1986. 15-40. Porter, Joseph A. The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Roberts, Jeanne Addison. Shakespeare's English Comedy: "The Merry Wives of Windsor" in Context. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979. Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Spevack, Marvin. A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. Vol. 2. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968. Stoll, E. E. Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method. New York: Macmillan, 1927. Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare's History Plays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1944. Wharton, T. F. Henry the Fourth, Parts 1 and 2: Text and Performance. Frome, UK: Macmillan, 1983. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. Wilson, J. Dover. The Fortunes of Falstaff. New York: Macmillan, 1944.
Feste
(England: In Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare: c. 1600)
Neil Novell! BACKGROUND The story of Twelfth Night, set in Illyria, centers on the twins Viola and Sebastian, each of whom believes the other to be lost at sea. Duke Orsino is romantically fixated on Countess Olivia, who rejects him. Viola disguises herself as a boy (Cesario), enters Orsino's service, and falls in love with him. Orsino sends Viola as a love messenger to Olivia, but Olivia falls in love with Viola in her male disguise. Meanwhile, an unruly group (Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew, Fabian) trick Malvolio, Olivia's killjoy steward, into acting on the mistaken notion that Olivia loves him. Alleged to be insane or possessed, Malvolio is locked up in a "dark room," where Feste disguised as a curate taunts him. Olivia meets Sebastian, mistaking him for "Cesario," and they marry. In the last scene brother and sister are reunited, and various misunderstandings are cleared up. Orsino welcomes the knowledge that Viola is a woman and says that she will be "Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen." Malvolio is freed and promises to "be revenged." All but Feste exit, and his final song, "When that I was," serves as epilogue. Feste appears in the following scenes: 7.5: Having been absent without permission, he refuses to tell Maria where he has been. Despite Olivia's initial hostility, he jests his way back into her good graces. 2.3: He entertains Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in their night revelling, and then he joins them in insulting Malvolio, who has come out to quiet them.
186
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
2.4: He is summoned by Orsino to sing "Come away, come away, death." 3.1: He and Viola (Cesario) banter, and he describes himself as Olivia's "corrupter of words." 4.1: Sent to summon Viola (Cesario), he mistakes Sebastian for her. 4.2: At Sir Toby and Maria's behest, he masquerades as the curate Sir Topas and visits Malvolio in the "dark room." Under pretense of comforting and examining Malvolio, Feste torments him further but then, shifting into his own person, agrees to enable Malvolio to write to Olivia. 5.1: Feste at length delivers Malvolio's letter to Olivia, and when Malvolio is freed, he reminds him of his attempts to quash Feste's work. Left alone on stage, he concludes the play with his song. Feste does not steadily participate in the plot but rather, in his capacity as professional entertainer, moves freely among the other characters. Although he is sometimes mistakenly described as the instigator of the scheme against Malvolio, that is really Maria's doing; Feste's only participation comes in 4.2. Although a court fool was at times a simpleton or ' 'natural'' whose inanities might amuse the lord who maintained him, by Shakespeare's time the court fool was often a professional entertainer. Henry VIII' s well-known jester was Will Sommers. The Elizabethan public was very much aware of fool-like entertainers whose style of foolery in taverns, as well as on stage, was often rowdy or confrontational. Actors doing the clown roles in plays seem not to have submerged themselves in the fictional characters but to have kept their own identities. Thus, when comedians such as Richard Tarlton or Will Kemp came on stage, the very point of their comedy was to intrude into the flow of plot and theme, even to wrench the audience's attention away from "some necessary question of the play" as they improvised to a greater or lesser degree. When Robert Armin, however, succeeded Kemp as principal comedian with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, he and Shakespeare seem to have collaborated to create a new kind of fool, for example, Feste, in which the actor stayed in character, used wit rather than rough raillery, provoked thought as he commented on life around him, and supported the play's thematic development rather than disrupting it. Armin did not submerge his own identity to the extent that many modern actors do, but nevertheless he apparently kept his comedy within the limits of the fictional character and did not intrude into the action as Kemp did (Wiles, Mann, Butler). David Wiles concludes on the basis of evidence internal and external to Twelfth Night that as Feste, Armin was dressed in wide breeches (gaskins), a style some twenty-five years out of date; a short coat if any; and some kind of fool's cap, probably conical. Fabrics were probably bright-checkered or particolored, as was common for certain costumes of stage fools (182-88). Armin seems to have been a skilled mimic, and this accords with Feste's routines; he is also described as short and stocky, and although this trait is not essential to
Feste
187
the character of Feste, it does create a comic aura around the lines ' T am not tall enough . . . nor lean enough" (4.2.6-10) (Wiles 136-158; Mann 56-58; Butler 181-182). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Feste is Shakespeare's most fully detailed fool and, at the same time, an enigmatic fool. When we first see Feste (1.5.1-31; citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. B. Evans), he has been absent without permission from Olivia's court, but where and why he went and why he has returned can only be conjectured; although Maria pries, he keeps his own counsel about this and, throughout the play, about other matters. It is clear that he considers himself a professional entertainer, ready to sing, joke, tell riddles, mimic voices, and collect tips. It is also obvious that in the centuries-old tradition of the fool, Feste brings others to face truth in the mirror of comedy, sometimes via wit and wordplay, sometimes under the guise of nonsense. When he calls on his muse to inspire him, he invokes the paradoxical Socratic interplay between humility and wisdom: Wit, and't be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those wits that think they have thee do very oft prove fools; and I that am sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man. (1.5.32-36) Malvolio, Olivia's other working-class servant, unhesitatingly reveals his inner identity, plainly an oppressive, self-righteous one. In contrast, although Feste seems to have a clear and inviolable inner identity, he never unmasks it. We do not even know if he really has a "leman" (2.3.25) or a house "by the church" (3.1.5-7); both sound like the fictions of comedy routines. He is a good reader of people, as Viola notes (3.1.60-68). His ever-renewed motivation—which is linked to his comic method—is to stay one step ahead of others and to rise above a situation by means of detached ironic comment, usually with a touch of disillusion or melancholy. His intelligence and his verbal skills enable him to do this handily, although he cannot answer Malvolio's crushing "I saw him put down the other day" (1.5.84-86), and he seems flummoxed by Sebastian's behavior in act 4, scene 1. He does not know everything, but his perceptiveness cuts through follies and pretensions. Feste's place in Olivia's household is none too secure. His old master, Olivia's father, has died, as has Olivia's brother, and Feste is no longer young. Olivia's announced purpose to observe seven years of mourning, although it proves evanescent, may have made Feste feel threatened. Most immediately threatening, however, is Malvolio's steady disapproval of playfulness; with Malvolio in a powerful household position, jesting is likely to be uphill work. It is a mistake to take Feste at face value when he calls himself not Olivia's fool (jester) but her "corrupter of words" (3.1.36). Feste's word twistings, a
188
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
stock-in-trade for Shakespeare's fools, tend to have a substantial satiric target, unlike the ' 'Call me a taxi'' school of verbal humor, for example, and unlike the insolent wordplay of the First Gravedigger in Hamlet (5.1.117-183). Paradoxically, however, although intense efforts have been made to descry sense under Feste's apparent nonsense, there are times when, whatever the underlying logic, the overt effect that Feste intends is nonsense. "Malvolio's nose is no whipstock" is, after all, spoken to the lamebrained Sir Andrew, who considers double-talk and non sequitur to be "the best fooling" (2.3.26-30). Feste's first jabbering monologue, "Two faults, madonna," is probably a floundering attempt to make Olivia laugh at trivia, after which in desperation he goes for the joke that is funniest and truest—but also riskiest: Olivia is behaving like a fool (1.5.43-74). Feste's complaint that "words are very rascals" (3.1.21) describes the semantic situation in Illyria; with so much masking and confusion, apparently honest words can seldom be trusted. Almost always he prefers to put his trust in wordplay and indirection, either to express his insights or, at times, as with Viola in 3.1 and Sebastian in 4.1, to maintain his distance and poise. Feste's most consistent behavioral trait is his detachment from other characters. This is of course a requisite if he is to be the objective truth teller, but it is also part of the character. Although some productions depict Feste as emotionally close to Olivia or Maria, the script does not assign Feste any functional intimacy, bonding, or sustained sharing of interest with any other character in the play, and he resists Viola's cheery overtures with "in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you. If that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible" (3.1.28-30). This detachment, along with caution about risking himself in a potentially disastrous venture, perhaps at first keeps Feste from taking part in the letter plot. Feste is the most musical of Shakespeare's jesters, with four songs plus snatches of other music. Armin was probably a skilled singer, a countertenor (Wiles 159-161), and that may be why Shakespeare wrote so many songs for Feste; but in any case music is natural to a festive atmosphere, and the play begins and ends with music. Feste uses music as he does his other routines, gearing the songs to his hearers. The night revellers get a carpe diem love song, followed by a catch (2.3); Orsino gets an extravagantly melancholy song of love-despair (2.4); Malvolio gets the teasing "I am gone, sir" (4.2); and the audience at the close gets the valedictory "When that I was and a little tiny boy" (5.1). Any interpretation of Twelfth Night must take special account of act 4, scene 2, Malvolio in prison. Many critics see this as the point where festivity overleaps itself and must at last be reined in. The scene simply does not lend itself to light humor, and Feste's lines are calculated to push Malvolio further and further into desperation. The best analysis of the scene that I know comes from actor John Seidman, who performed Feste at Syracuse Stage in 1995 under William Woodman's direction: Feste feels forced into the sport by Sir Toby and Maria, but he handles it competently as a job, getting some satisfaction because he
Feste
189
resents Malvolio's past treatment of him. Increasingly, however, Feste is appalled both by the magnitude of Malvolio's suffering and delusion and by the knowledge that he is very near to pushing Malvolio over the edge into real madness. Without allying himself to Malvolio, and keeping an antic style, he agrees to bring Malvolio "light and paper and ink" (Seidman). Hotson claims that Olivia's "Besides, you grow dishonest" (1.5.42) means that Feste is licentious. To be sure, Feste does have some mild double entendres (e.g., "good hanging," 1.5.19), but he simply does not sound like a salacious comedian. Besides, if, as Hotson argues, ribaldry was expected of jesters {First Night 167-69), why should Olivia be surprised or upset? Critics often feel the need to explain away Feste's cadging extra coins. Tips, however, are a normal part of his service outside of Olivia's household, and part of his skill is to turn the building of tips into pleasing comic finales that engage and flatter his hearers, perhaps paraphrasable as "leave them giving more" (3.1.43-55, 5.1.27^9). It is a mistake, of course, to imagine that he tries to reject Orsino's money at 2.4.67-71 (Bradley 19). He merely says that he has enjoyed being of service; he is not sending the money back to Orsino's coffers. Shakespeare reaches the peak of his comic writing in some of the scenes in Twelfth Night, and the scale of laughter and foolery in the play creates the feelings of largesse, freedom, and generosity of spirit that go with genuine celebration. In this play, matched only by Henry the Fourth, Part I, Shakespeare captures the intricate interplay between festive and mundane, and the character of Feste knits the two together. The atmosphere in Illyria, true to the title Twelfth Night, or, What You Will, is one of festivity carried to excess, self-indulgence, and self-delusion—the Feast of Fools, in short. Amid the extensive follies of the other characters, Feste is not the Master of Revels but rather a center of lucidity, self-awareness, and controlled purpose, a reminder that festivity—the very festivity that he helps to provide, often in the form of extravagant nonsense—has its limits, and that the everyday world still has its claims. Feste alone, with the partial exception of Viola, remains clear-headed about who he is, conscious of what he is doing when he plays a role, and able to assess the follies of others. His own foolery is paradoxically a part of his work, which is providing entertainment for those who are at leisure; only when they turn to other matters is Feste at liberty, his time his own. Many of the characters are suspended in time-free states. Orsino, for example, bends every effort to remain hovering in deliciously painful adoration of Olivia; Sir Toby refuses to concede that it is ever too late or too early to party; and Viola seems trapped forever in the role of a boy. Feste, by contrast, is aware that time is finite, that the "whirligig of time" inevitably brings change, and that "pleasure will be paid, one time or another." Feste's final song, delivered when the script calls for him to be alone on stage, seems partly for the audience and partly for himself. It recapitulates in droll, nursery-rhyme fashion the play's central action: transformation in time through the stages of maturity, always with a sense of incompleteness and res-
190
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ignation, "for the rain it raineth every day." Moreover, along with a summation of Twelfth Night, the song occasions yet another transformation that happens before our eyes. We first saw Feste in act 1, scene 5, talking below stairs with Maria; at Olivia's entrance he assumed the mask of Feste the jester, and he has worn some variant of that mask through the following scenes, excepting only perhaps the first moments of act 3, scene 1, when he is alone playing his tabor; and now at the very close he becomes Feste—but which Feste?—alone with the audience. Free now to do what he will, he launches into his sad/funny bit of doggerel; and then just at the end, with "But that's all one, our play is done, / And we'll strive to please you every day," we are suddenly in the presence not of Feste but of the actor whose afternoon's work has been to create a festive event; and in a moment, as we leave the theater, that actor will shift from his public persona to a more private one backstage. The song neatly fuses the festive with the mundane and the world of art with the world of daily life. It sends the audience back into their own lives, yet simultaneously invites them to return another day, presumably paying money to support their entry into yet another imagined world. CRITICAL RECEPTION Feste did not come in for much attention in performance or criticism until the turn of the twentieth century. Earlier, the play was typically taken as a romantic frolic, and Feste was expected to be merely a cheerful jester. Samuel Johnson found the play "elegant and easy, and . . . exquisitely humorous," but short on "credibility [and] proper instruction," failing to exhibit a "just picture of life" (326). Now, however, the pendulum has swung fast and far in the opposite direction. In an invaluable survey article about Feste on stage, Karen Greif points out that Feste's ironic, elusive style alienated romantic and Victorian audiences, and that in any case the growth of the star system in the nineteenth century meant that lesser roles were diminished; but that increasingly, Feste has become the pivotal role in many productions. Harley Granville-Barker's Savoy Theatre production in 1912 restored virtually the entire text of Twelfth Night, allowing space for Feste's bittersweet mix of qualities that productions later in the century would emphasize (Styan 9095; Greif 63-64). Peter Hall's landmark production in 1958 at the Royal Shakespeare Company made Feste a rather embittered entertainer presiding over the romantic follies of the other characters of the play; it ended with the others dancing away behind a scrim, while Feste sat sadly alone downstage (Greif 6668; Walker). In an NET production (1968, directed by John Russell Brown and Kirk Browning), Stacy Keach took Feste to far reaches of pain and alienation; he recalls that he "strapped shoes to his knees and played Feste as a dwarf [whose] songs reveal the soul of the character, sad, bitter, melancholic—a quality rarely seen in his interaction with others" (Keach; Gould). John Barton's production
Feste
191
for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1969 was acclaimed for its breadth, combined wisdom, compassion, and irony, all focused in the person of Feste (Emrys James). Ron Pember as Feste for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974 (directed by Peter Gill) was a caustic malcontent. In 1979, Terry Hands directed a production in which a "gnomish," genial Feste (Geoffrey Hutchings) was onstage almost all the time—watching, creating, participating, even helping change the set (Greif 71-76). At the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in 1985, with David Giles directing, Edward Atienza was a small, senescent Feste in a tattered costume, given to napping under tables; yet when the spirit of fun possessed him, he flew about like a leaf in the wind, singing in a plangent voice that seemed to come from some space beyond his own vocal cords. Brian Bedford's Feste at the same Stratford (1994, directed by Richard Monette) wore a greyedout white clown's smock; tottery of gait, he delivered his lines with the wan, tolerant irony of one profoundly ill (Stratford Festival archives). Any stage character is, of course, a function of overall production style, and the jolly, uncomplicated Feste is far from done with; in the BBC production of Twelfth Night in 1980 directed by John Gorrie, Feste (Trevor Peacock) was a relentlessly smiling presence. On the whole, however, twentieth-century productions of Twelfth Night, trying to grasp the complexities of the play and of the characters, have given Feste an imaginative and satisfying range of interpretations. Criticism has followed a roughly parallel course. Interestingly, Furness in the Variorum Edition cites a number of mid-nineteenth-century critics who foreshadow later critics and directors in seeing Feste's role as central: "The meaning of the poem is, so to say, centred in him" (Ulrici); "a guide through the most important points of the comedy" (Gervinus); "the only cool and consistent character in the play" (Weiss). Feste's last song is typically dismissed as "wretched stuff" (Warburton) or "some buffoon actor's composition" (Steevens), but Furness gives an editorial pat on the back to Knight, who calls it "the most philosophical Clown's song upon record," and to Weiss, who calls the song a "benediction" that encapsulates the play's many moods (Furness 313317, 402-406). Bradley too adumbrates later criticism. True, he sentimentalizes Feste as a man who lives content in the "sunny realm" of his own mind; he strikes a tone of pity as he conjectures a Feste who must waste his talents in the degrading life of a jester; and he hints with awe that Feste may be an alter ego for Shakespeare himself. Bradley also, however, notes the scope of Feste's perceptiveness, the hard realities of his precarious position in Olivia's household, and his essential isolation from all others. Critics no longer interpret Twelfth Night as sheer gaiety or Feste as "a merry fellow" who "car'st for nothing" (3.1.26-27). Instead, Feste is seen as the link between the play's lighter and darker aspects. For those who find Illyria to be a fundamentally harmonious society restoring itself through a cathartic Saturnalia, Feste is usually a benign figure helping to restore health via festivity.
192
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
C. L. Barber describes Feste as a man easy in his courtly environment, able to "radiate in his songs and banter a feeling of liberty based on accepting disillusion" (252-53). Summers sees a Feste who finds it increasingly difficult to play his jester's role, but who at the end can knit up the play's conflicts in a comic song. On the other hand, critics who see Illyria as divided beyond repair see Feste as an embodiment of the rift. For Logan, Feste's humor is not very funny, and the somber vision in Twelfth Night is that "our drives to pleasure" may be destructive and irreconcilable with order and harmony. Levin describes Illyria as a place of "spiritual malaise" and "keen competition for social rewards"; Feste, for whom professional and personal life have both soured, is "the single most important guide to Twelfth Night—at least to its antiromantic aspects" (117, 155-60). Yet a third range of critics, acknowledging that the conflicts in Illyria defy resolution, find that Feste's artifice, in Leggatt's phrase, "goes some way towards drawing together the broken world of Illyria" (230). For Anne Barton, Feste is the only character who can mediate between ' 'the world of the romantic lovers" and the disenchanted world of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Malvolio. Feste's "curiously consoling" final song, she says, is "a triumph of art," tinged with a resignation that lets us accept the contradictions in the play, even as we draw away from its revels and its romance and turn to our own everyday lives (309-310). SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources The only authority for later editions of Twelfth Night is the version that appeared in the First Folio (1623). Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Furness, Horace Howard, ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Vol. 13. Twelfe Night, or, What You Will. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904.
Secondary Sources Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. Barton, Anne. "Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending in Twelfth Night." In Twelfth Night: Critical Essays, ed. Stanley Wells. New York: Garland, 1986. 303-10. Bloom, Harold, ed. William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bradley, A. C. "Feste the Jester." In Twelfth Night: Critical Essays, ed. Stanley Wells. New York: Garland, 1986. 17-24. Butler, Guy. "Shakespeare and the Two Jesters." Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 11 (1983): 161-204.
Feste
193
Gould, Jack. "TV: An Evening with Twelfth Night." New York Times, January 16, 1968: 79. Greif, Karen. "A Star Is Bom: Feste on the Modem Stage." Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 61-78. Hotson, Leslie. The First Night of Twelfth Night. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Johnson, Samuel. Johnson on Shakespeare. Vols. 7 and 8 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale UP, 1968. Keach, Stacy (
[email protected]). "Re: Feste?" E-mail to the author (
[email protected]) September 10, 1996. Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Methuen, 1974. Levin, Richard. Love and Society in Shakespearean Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Content. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1985. Logan, Thad Jenkins. "Twelfth Night: The Limits of Festivity." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 22 (1982): 223-238. Mann, David. The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representation. London: Routledge, 1991. Seidman, John. Interview with author, December 30, 1995. Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or, What You Will. Dir. John Gorrie. The Shakespeare Plays. BBC-Time/Life, 1980. Stratford (Ontario) Festival archives. Videotapes, reviews, articles, promptbooks. Styan, J. L. The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Summers, Joseph B. "The Masks of Twelfth Night." University Review 22 (1955): 2532. Reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Twelfth Night, ed. Walter N. King. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 15-23. Walker, Roy. "Peter Hall's Production of Twelfth Night." In Twelfth Night: Critical Essays, ed. Stanley Wells. New York: Garland, 1986. 83-87. Wells, Stanley, ed Twelfth Night: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1986. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
W. C. Fields
(United States: 1880-1946)
Carl Bryan Holmberg One of the most celebrated icons of the silver screen with his cocky top hat, bulbous nose, and pained expression, bibulous W. C. Fields also starred on stage, penned newspaper cartoons, and performed on radio as well as in film. Known for his mumbling jabs and sight gags, Fields is perhaps best remembered as the loser who kept succeeding despite himself, Egbert Souse (pronounced soo'-say) in The Bank Dick (1940).
BACKGROUND Fields was born in Philadelphia, probably on January 29, 1880, and promptly was named William Claude Dukenfield. The date is debated and may have been in 1879, but no records were kept (Deschner 19). The first of five children, the lad showed little interest in the family produce business, except for juggling the current stock as a sales gimmick, and struck off by himself at eleven. Sometimes relying upon his grandmother, Fields variously became a pool shark and street rogue, supporting himself with periodic stints as a juggler at local, often church, events. By his midteens, he began to open as a juggler for vaudeville shows and eventually joined a burlesque troupe and traveled the eastern United States on tour, then calling himself "W. C. Fields." From the early 1900s, Fields's popularity grew nationally and internationally. He fetched an increasingly sizable weekly salary, and through his various theatrical runs with the Ziegfeld Follies and others, he was a top money earner after numerous tours overseas. Florenz Ziegfeld was what was then known as a "showman," and he wanted to give thrills to his audience. Thus he once decided
W. C. Fields
195
to juice up one of Fields's routines by having a lovely, scantily clad Ziegfeld showgirl walk across the stage, walking a Russian wolfhound. Fields knew to go along with the situation, though it had absolutely nothing to do with his bit. Just as he was capturing his audience and building their interest, on walked the lady, one Dolores, and her dog. Evidently the audience immediately was confused and grew quiet. So much for showmanship. But to his credit, Fields saved the day and quipped, "That's a very beautiful horse" and brought down the house. Dolores was so dismayed that her vampy moment was turned into hilarity that she picked up the dog and huffily carried it offstage. Big mistake. The audience roared louder in tribute to Fields's improvisational genius (Deschner 30). His down-on-his-luck childhood served him well as he developed his career. While he spent the first fifteen years or so on the stage never uttering a word during his juggling and pool demonstrations, the pool-playing routine became the focus of his first silent film, Pool Sharks (1915). No athletic slouch, Fields also pioneered tennis and golf routines, each of which helped to develop his comedie timing. Fields eventually became a verbal comic and wrote scripts for various theatric pieces, many of which later saw their way to the screen with himself as the screenwriter and lead. However, changes were necessitated since the American stage at the time was quite bawdy, while film was not. Evasion of censorship was Fields's constant vocation and diversion. Fields was so popular that imitations of him appeared during his lifetime. Of special note are the various cartoon versions from the 1930s and the radio impersonations. Fields's popularity had been demonstrated earlier by his inclusion in a series of what were called "cigarette cards," free pictures distributed with packs of cigarettes starting in the 1920s. Fields died of pneumonia on Christmas Day, 1946. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS According to William Willeford's The Fool and His Scepter, early clowns could be found among the Romans, particularly after the fall of Rome. Typically, the entertainers were crippled, blind, or paralyzed (13-14). While in the late twentieth century the presumption that a physically challenged person is innately funny and thus an object of laughter is politically incorrect if not plain impolite, the ancient, physically unusual clown served as a model for Fields. In the twentieth century, W. C. Fields cultivated his so-called deformity—his odd nose, sartorially masked chubbiness, and snide, nasal voice—in order to create humor and to maintain his clownlike separation from the rest of humanity. Additionally, Willeford notes that a hallmark of late Roman fools is the character type of the quack doctor (14). Fields renovates the quack doctor figure in his stage play and Mack Sennett short film The Dentist (1932). Typically, Fields pushes the limits of raciness; on the relatively liberal stage, he used risque and
196
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
sometimes explicit dialogue and visually provocative interactions, such as Fields's dentist extracting a tooth from a young maid who had her legs wrapped about his waist, writhing in agony. Needless to say, that particular bit did not make it into the film. Willeford emphasizes one almost universal feature of the clown: the interplay between apparent madness and the chaos it brings (12, 26). Indeed, the double entendres of Fields's dialogue offer simultaneous meanings: sexual puns and innuendoes that children in the audience may well find zany and illogical but that adults instantly find at least mildly provocative. For instance, in My Little Chickadee, Mae West (Flower) and Fields (Twillie) meet on the train. Twillie finds Flower to be lovely, and Flower admires his money. They marry. Once they arrive at their destination, they decide to book a room at a hotel. Flower finagles a suite separate from Twillie, but even then he persists in his love fantasies, even though she closes the door to her suite in his face. He attributes her behavior to honeymoon nervousness. He stands outside her door. Twillie: Come, my phlox, my flower. I have some very definite pear-shaped ideas I'd like to discuss with thee. Come—open. Flower: You can't come in now. Go away. I'm dressing. Twillie: I'm as gentle as a forest bred lion. Flower: Get away from my keyhole. Twillie: It was the cat, dear. .. . Listen, didn't you promise to love, honor, and be obedient? Flower: Oh, don't be old fashioned. Be a good boy and run along. Why don't you look the town over? Twillie: What an unselfish little rose petal you are, to be sure. (Anobile 170-173)
Twillie leaves with a pained, sour look on his face. Chaos rules in The Bank Dick. Fields (Egbert Souse) accidentally falls into becoming a film director, though he has spent his life carousing at the local Black Pussy Cat Cafe. Later, a bandit trips over his feet, and Egbert is declared a hero for having captured the crook. He is given a job as a bank guard—the bank dick. In the meantime, he is conned into buying fake stock, seeks money, and tricks his future son-in-law into misappropriating bank funds, only to have a bank examiner appear whom Egbert must then delay. Eventually, another bandit absconds with bank funds but kidnaps Souse in the process and forces him to drive away. What ensues is a film and fool classic. They are hounded by police, and the faster they go, the more their auto rattles apart, with Souse handing the bandit the gearshift and steering wheel unperturbed. Willeford interprets this film sequence as the material object, the car, taking on the inner chaos of the fool (111-114). Souse is once again declared a hero, is rewarded with $15,000, and as a result, finds his financial and family problems settled.
W. C. Fields
197
CRITICAL RECEPTION Though Fields was a famed comedian for most of his lifetime, his film career had its ups and downs. The Old Fashion Way (1934) highlighted his juggling skills. It's a Gift (1934) won critical acclaim of the negative sort that drives audiences to the box office. Andre Sennwald wrote in the New York Times, ' Tt is about time that the Fields enthusiasts got together and demanded their hero have a production worthy of him" (Deschner 105). It is significant that Sennwald did not fault Fields but maligned the production values over which in this case Fields exercised little or no influence. Fields's radio "feud" with Edgar Bergen's Charlie McCarthy is immortalized in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939). Of special interest to Fields fans is his appearance in David O. Selznick's version of David Copperfield (1935) as Micawber; Fields himself was enamored of Dickens's writing. His screen rendition received mixed reviews, though he was credited as the spitting image of Dickens's Micawber—type casting—and perhaps was overevaluated in his diction and acting ability. Also, in one of the famed movie's twists of fate, Fields turned down the role of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz. One of his last films costarred Mae West, My Little Chickadee (1940). By many accounts the film is not the best work of either star. Yet despite his less successful artistic efforts, W. C. Fields remains one of the most imitated and admired entertainers of the twentieth century. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Anobile, Richard J. A Flask of Fields: Verbal and Visual Classics from the Films of W. C. Fields. New York: Crown, 1972. Deschner, Donald. The Films ofW. C. Fields. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1966. Fields, Ronald J., ed. W. C. Fields by Himself: His Intended Autobiography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Gehring, Wes D. W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Rocks, David T. W. C Fields: An Annotated Guide. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Folly in the Enduring Tradition
(England and Holland: In Desiderius Erasmus's Encomium Moriae: 1509)
Charles M. Kovich BACKGROUND Every great literary and cultural theme has a thousand roots sinking deep into the fertile soil of the past so that it may bloom into present ripeness. So it is with the notion of "folly" as expressed by Desiderius Erasmus in his great work of the Renaissance, which seems at first blush to have Folly praise foolishness itself in a solipsistic monologue, as base and undignified as such praise may seem. These roots extend back to the classical period of Greece and Rome, as would be expected in the Renaissance, which thought of itself as a time of "rebirth" of classical models and standards. Several arguments may be offered from classical rhetoric for the presentation of Folly's foolish self-praise. (The classical notion of nugas agere, "to play the fool," was well known and was used by Cicero.) Classical writers including Cicero recognized the forensic forcefulness of antonomasia (name calling, both positive and negative). In his Rhetoric Aristotle describes the categories of this device—praise and blame for both the noble and base—while Plutarch demonstrates its practice, praising noble Greeks and Romans. Likewise, many classical writers praised "things without honor," a tradition handed down through the medieval period to the Renaissance of Erasmus. The laudationes covered a wide range of material; they spanned rivers and mountains, climbing from the concrete objects for praise to the realm of the arts and the abstract virtues. Polycrates, for example, praised mice and pebbles; many in the classical world expressed praise for the "base" Helen of Troy. This effortless rhetorical method of gaining an audience's attention was a valuable device handed down from
Folly in the Enduring Tradition
199
these classical authors. Introducing the unexpected was a sure way to force others to take heed. In his Rhetoric Aristotle gives the reason for performing this rhetorical scheme: to apprehend what is noble and lofty, one must also be aware of the mean and commonplace to find true perspective. He writes, "We have next to discuss virtue and vice, the noble and the base; for these are objects of praise and blame.... Now praise may be serious, or it may be trivial; nor does it always concern a human being or god, for often enough it is to inanimate things, or to some insignificant animal" (Bk. 1, Sect. 9, p. 46). But these essential rhetorical categories also provide enormous practical value. For example, Aristotle lists in the Rhetoric methods of courtroom accusation: "Another way, available for the accuser, is to praise at great length some trifling merit of the accused, and then to put great slur on him concisely" (Bk. 3, Sect. 15, p. 228). It is clear that Erasmus had learned this scheme well when he had Folly speak of merchants, theologians, friars, and monarchs while quoting adages, for example, "his net catches for him even while he sleeps." Praise of the commonplace in the classical era offered broader value. The rhetoric of Greece and Rome was rich in topoi or loci communi, metonyms or symbols where orators and writers might find the universal ideas and topics that would appeal as common ground to an audience. These symbols or paradigms also reflect the requirements of the oral or semioral cast of thought in the classical era. Things had to be differentiated sharply, or no one would remember them. Isocrates, the long-lived Greek teacher of rhetoric, claimed that the finest orator must demonstrate that he can exploit the common stock of ideas more readily and more artistically than anyone else. A notion like ' 'Time, the devourer of things" could be extended through the copious use of the commonplace tradition almost indefinitely. Desiderius Erasmus found that his Adagia, essentially a continuation of this tradition into the Renaissance, was a best-seller. In this work he took notions like Ignavis semper feriae sunt ("For the lazy it's always a holiday") or Aut fatuum aut regem nasci oportere ("Kings and fools are born, not made"). The debt of Erasmus to this classical tradition is made clear through his notable rapid-fire mention of such worthies as Annaeus Seneca, Tacitus, Claudius Caesar, Crassus, and others, all within a few lines. Thus the rhetorical history of "things without honor" always gave an orator or writer an open topic; it provided a necessary copiousness. If someone had said something in praise of a noble topic, he could always counter with something foolish in the opposite manner. This paradigm worked well as a mnemonic device for organizing knowledge in this tradition. In the classical semioral world a speaker had to keep up the flow, the copia, the abundance of words to hold an audience enthralled. Something must always be in constant performance verbally because classical audiences saw the word as an event. An orator might pause for dramatic effect, but he could never be at a loss for words. Thus the classical world of Greece and Rome, the cradle of rhetoric, with highly personal
200
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
and semioral rhetorical usages, is in fact the beginning of the tradition that continued to grow through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Another oral form that lent itself to the tradition of fools was the theater in classical times. The parts for foolish characters in comedies were so deftly written that they delight audiences even to the present day. Aristophanes paved the way for later authors like Erasmus by making clear the intense relationship of satire and these fools. In dramas like The Birds, The Clouds, and The Frogs Aristophanes perfected the combination of doltish, ineffectual characters and the satirical comment on the society around them. Ancient Rome played its part too in the development of this tradition. The stupidus attempted an imitation of the words and gestures of the regular actors, but of course he forever got everything wrong. Combined with the rhetorical tradition of praise and blame for the supposedly noble or base by people like Gorgias and Cicero, the classical models provide a sure groundwork to support the continuing tradition through the ages. It is in this tradition that Erasmus squarely places himself in the Encomium Moriae. Enid Welsford understands the intent of Erasmus in The Fool: His Social and Literary History: The Praise of Folly was written in 1509 during a visit of its author to Sir Thomas More... . Erasmus himself spoke slightingly of it, as being a mere trifle, but this was affectation, for he knew quite well that his indictment of society was no mere frivolity, but the fruit of many anxious meditations and long discussions between himself and his likeminded friends, More and Colet, concerning the prevalent social evils brought about by . .. unscrupulous money-loving princes and the alarming alliance between greed and superstition which was threatening the structure of the Catholic Church. (236)
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the great Christian humanist and biblical scholar of the Renaissance, was the first to broach the use of the special rhetorical scheme, the commonplace tradition of "things without honor," and Erasmus had not mice, not pebbles, not mountains, not Helen, but rather Folly itself praised. This act might seem absurd for the man who wrote the Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian soldier) and the Novum Instrumentum; but he, like the classical authors who preceded him, had his own special rhetorical ends in doing such. The Novum Instrumentum was the first published version of the Greek New Testament with notes and a translation that differed from the Vulgate, which had been in church use for more than a thousand years. It was in this vein that the Renaissance humanists like Thomas More, Juan Luis Vives, John Colet, and Erasmus made their battle cry "Ad fontes!" (Back to the sources!) in the true Renaissance tradition. The Encomium Moriae is not a polemic dialogue, as was so popular in this
Folly in the Enduring Tradition
201
literary period; rather, it is a solipsistic monologue by Folly in praise of herself, who "plays" in sparring verbal fashion with the serious moral and spiritual issues of the day, all under the guise of speaking about "foolishness" in society. Both lay and ecclesiastical society are roundly satirized. Of course, by adopting such a format, Erasmus was able to hide behind the mask of Folly in his characteristic fashion. (Erasmus was known to avoid contentiousness; it took years for him to speak out on the side of Catholicism in the Reformation controversy.) In a letter to his humanist colleague and friend Thomas More, Erasmus makes clear his classical use of the necessary rhetorical juxtaposition of the foolish and the important: And so, [if they wish,] they can imagine that I was simply playing with pawns for my own amusement or, if they prefer, that I was riding my own hobbyhorse like a child. But, surely, since we grant every other state in life its own recreations, it is quite unfair to allow students no amusement at all, especially if trifles lead to serious ideas and if a frivolous subject is handled in such a way that a reader who has any sense at all can profit by it a good deal more than he can from the forbidding and showy subjects undertaken by some writers. (4) Erasmus is never random in what he does. As Clarence Miller indicates: "The first section is devoted to the ironical thesis that the happiest life is the fool's life.... The third section is based on a paradox which seems directly opposed to the first part: the folly of Christian fools throws them out of step with society at large. The sort of folly . . . separates them from the world and its values.... Placed between these two contradictory paradoxes, the middle section is essential to the whole work. .. . The medial survey not only leads us out of Folly's first paradox, but also prepares us for the Christian paradox of the third'' (Introduction xxii-xxv). It is essential to consider Folly's oration as a whole if we are to understand the classical art that Erasmus uses in his development of the tradition. Because it is a mock declamation in the classical style, Folly's oration can find the fool in everything and treat all things in the grand oratorical fashion through the satiric mode that Erasmus had mastered. Folly contrasts her joys with those of the god of wine and revelry, Bacchus: Now, among the many benefits for which Bacchus is praised, the chief one is held (and rightly so) to be that he clears the mind of its troubles and that only for a short time, since as soon as you have slept off your little wine-drinking spree, all your anxieties come rushing back.... But how much more ample and lasting is the benefit I provide, a sort of continuous inebriation which fills the mind with joy, delight, and exquisite pleasure and all with no effort from you. (73) As in the classical models, the abstract can be used as well as the concrete. Laughter itself is mocked by Folly along with the whole class of friars: "Finally, they have learned that the rhetoricians have something to say about laughter and
202
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
hence they also take pains to sprinkle in a few jokes. . . . Sometimes they are also satirical, but in such a way as to titillate rather than wound. . . . no one can doubt that the friars learned their rhetoric from the peddlers or the peddlers from the friars" (Miller 106). The commonplace tradition is also manifestly clear in a passage that uses the well-known topics of the society with the use of incremental repetition of minitales of foolishness: Good lord, what a theater, how manifold the feverish fretting of fools! For I too sometimes take my regular seat in the ranks of the [poetic] gods. One man is head over heels in love with a wench, and the less she responds, the more helplessly he loves her. Another marries the dowry, not the wife. One man sets his own wife to sale. Another thinks the highest pitch of happiness is to impoverish himself in order to enrich his heir. Another would rather seek riches in warfare than lead a safe and leisurely life [at home]. (76-77) "One m a n " does such a thing; "another m a n " does something else in a similar vein; we have a rhetorical compendium of the Renaissance "merry tale" practice of storytellers unfold in summary fashion before our eyes as examples of modern "fools." Later Folly pokes fun at those who spend their lives writing and issuing books (a wonderful topic for this solipsistic oration published and being read in the form of a book): Of the same stripe are those who strive to win eternal fame by issuing books. All of them owe a great deal to me, but especially those who scribble pages of sheer nonsense. As for those who write learnedly for the judgment of a few scholars and would not hesitate to have their books reviewed by such true judges as Persius or Laelius, they seem to me more pitiable than happy because their work is a perpetual torment to them. They add, they alter; they blot something out, they put it back in. They do the work over, they recast it, they show it to friends, they keep it for nine years, and still they are never satisfied. At such a price they buy an empty reward, namely praise, and that from only a handful. (82) Only a prolific writer like Erasmus could feel the depth of those who write in this manner. His critique is certainly on the mark for those who have engaged in the frustration of attempting such "foolishness." Folly, however, indicates that authors dedicated to her as their goddess have a richer sense of what they do: "But my writer is far more happily deluded, as he writes away without any t h o u g h t . . . for he knows that the more trivial the trifles he writes, the larger his following will be, made up as it is of all the fools and dolts" (83). Finally, Folly achieves a climactic point amid what seems to be episodic wanderings, although in context the tripartite structure leads to this culmination of thought:
Folly in the Enduring Tradition
203
[And in Luke, Jesus called the two disciples who joined him on the road "fools."] I hardly know whether that is so very surprising, since [that godlike Paul] attributes something of folly even to God himself: "The folly of God is wiser than men." For Origen in his interpretation will not allow you to say that God is foolish only in the opinion of men, as you can for that other text, ' 'The doctrine of the cross, to those who are perishing, is indeed foolishness." (128) Rosalie L. Colie comments on this theme: "Obviously, Folly (to say nothing of Erasmus) is engaged in serio ludere, playing with the crucial problems of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual life, playing also with the men who take them too seriously, as well as with the men who do not take them seriously enough" (23). In keeping with the great Christian humanist tradition, Erasmus took the topos of "things without honor" and baptized it into a religious sensibility that would proclaim his message under the guise of a ' 'foolish'' oration. In the view of Folly (and Erasmus), to be saved is to be lost in divine madness, to reckon things not as the world sees them but as God does sub specie aeternitatis. Who else but those considered to be "fools" would grasp the Christian message so antithetical to the values of the world? Who but a "fool" would worship a humble carpenter crucified? This reversal of values leads to the literary technique of the Encomium Moriae: the fools in the work are not the court jesters, not the knaves, not the Harlequins, but rather the kings, merchants, writers, and friars—those whom the world esteems. It is not the outward trappings, not the motley coat, not the ass's ears, that make one a fool according to Folly; rather, it is the interior values determining what is ultimately important in human life. Folly continues to affirm the point in the work: "God was pleased to save the world because it could not be redeemed by wisdom" (128-29). Who is it that recognizes what is truly wise and noble and what is finally base and stupid? Can the estimation of the world, with its purely material rewards, be the final source of merit? Or is the reckoning of God, however foolish it seems, to be held first? Indeed, it is no wonder that this message is couched in the form of a monologue rather than in dialogue; a dialogue admits of challenge and debate, but a monologue is completely self-contained in its expression. Such a deep spiritual truth as that contained in the climactic moment of the Encomium Moriae does not admit any disputation; it must, like God's personal call to Abraham, simply be heard and affirmed. It must also be remembered that a ludic or playful nature in a work does not exclude serious themes. The entire history of world literature from Aristophanes and Horace through Chaucer and Walter Map to Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes gives certitude to the belief that the gravity of the subject cannot be deduced from the sportive nature of its treatment. Johan Huizinga, noted Erasmus scholar and cultural critic, affirms in his Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture that "a certain play factor was extremely active all through the cultural process and that it produces many of the fundamental forms of social life" (173). Indeed, he looks at "western civilization sub specie ludV and finds
204
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
that "civilization is, in its earliest phases, played," and that the playful spirit, in the form of art and literature, among other elements, stays with a civilization throughout its growth. Occasionally, he says, this essence activates itself in a single individual: "Erasmus! His whole being seems to radiate the play-spirit. It shines forth not only in the Colloquies and in the Laus Stultitiae but in the Adagia, that astonishing collection of aphorisms from Greek and Latin literature commented on with light irony and admirable jocosity" (181). An enormous sense of fun runs through each of these works, but even the satirical elements have a humane and constructive purpose: to make actual the potential that God put in his creation. This goal was the one that all of the Renaissance Christian humanists sought to achieve in their diverse writings. CRITICAL RECEPTION William Willeford picks up this theme in The Fool and His Scepter in saying that the ' 'fool who nonsensically plays in the present with what might be may at the same time remind us of a past that precedes all of us, fools and nonfools alike, and that remains important to us" (72). The fool is allowed to cross or ignore boundaries that others must keep, as in the case of court fools like Will Sommers for Henry VIII or the sage, unheeded Fool for Lear. The final, ultimate boundaries, ones that many fools toy with, are those of death and ignorance. It was with these issues that Shakespeare did so much through Lear and his Fool. Yet perhaps the answer is that something lies beyond the boundaries. Did Erasmus realize this with Folly? Willeford comments on the importance of theme: At the borders of consciousness the fool has seen and heard the transcendent value that, according to St. Paul and Erasmus, is only available to fools. And yet he has not the means to make it intelligible to us. Seeing and hearing and speaking, he is blind and deaf and dumb. From the absolute border of folly, he babbles like the fool he is and was and will be, whether enlightened or not. He bears the value of a transcendent perfection and is the living reminder among us of its inaccessibility. (138)
Erasmus himself would no doubt agree with this statement. His playful hopes of awakening people to their folly in his work of 1509 were dashed in the bitterness that followed the Reformation after 1517. The transcendent value can be glimpsed, "as through a glass darkly," but there seems to be no sure way of communicating it "to those who will not hear," so aptly put in the biblical phrase. Erasmus stayed away from controversy as long as he could, but the world caught up with his noble efforts and tried to overrun them. In a sad letter composed at the height of Reformation polemic, he wrote, ' 'The other friends who from time to time honoured me with letters and gifts now send nothing and write nothing from fear, and accept nothing from anyone, as if under every stone there slept a scorpion" (Huizinga, Erasmus 252). For a man who was
Folly in the Enduring Tradition
205
"born for friendship," as those who knew him affirmed, this state of affairs was the final, frustrating irony. Perhaps in a bittersweet nostalgia Erasmus could look back at the conclusion of the Encomium Moriae (the title is also a pun on the name of his friend Thomas More, now executed by Henry VIII) and think of his own sensibility expressed through the words placed in the mouth of Folly: So much beyond the body are the things of the spirit; things unseen, beyond what can be seen. . . . Those who have the privilege of experiencing this (and it happens to very few) undergo something very like madness: they talk incoherently, not in a human fashion, making sounds without sense.. . . They do not remember what they heard or saw or said or did except in a cloudy way, as if it were a dream. All they know is that they were never happier than while they were transported with such madness. (137-138)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Source Miller, Clarence H., ed. and trans. The Praise of Folly. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. This edition is cited.
Secondary Sources Aristotle. The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Trans. Lane Cooper. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1932. Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke. Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Dickens, A. G. The English Reformation. New York: Schocken, 1964. Dorey, T. A., ed. Erasmus. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1970. Dresden, Sem. Humanism in the Renaissance. New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Huizinga, Johan. Erasmus and the Age of Reformation. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. . Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Kaiser, Walter Jacob. Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. Kennedy, George. The Art of Persuasion in Greece. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. The Classics and Renaissance Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1955. Mason, Harold. Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. Phillips, Margaret Mann. Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1949.
206
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber & Faber, 1935. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
The Fop
"Apes and Echoes of Men": Gentlemanly Ideals and the Restoration (England: 1660-1710)
Moira E. Casey BACKGROUND The character of the fool surfaces in the Restoration comedy of manners as the fop, an aristocratic gentleman who comically and overzealously attempts to exemplify the height of wit and fashion.1 One character, Sparkish, from William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), refers (in a typically self-reflexive moment by Wycherley) to the transformation of the fool from the serving-class buffoons of earlier drama into the gentlemanly fop: Damn the poets . . . they make a wise and witty man in the world, a fool upon the stage.. . . Their predecessors were contented to make serving-men only their stagefools: but these rogues must have gentlemen, with a pox to 'em, nay, knights; and indeed, you shall hardly see a fool upon the stage, but he's a knight. (94-95)
Sparkish's frustration is appropriate; most fops hold titles—Sir Fopling Flutter, Lord Plausible, Sir Novelty Fashion—and the ones without titles are still considered to be gentlemen. Sparkish does not, however, tell why the playwrights turn the gentleman into the clown of the Restoration. When Charles II was restored to the throne and the theaters were reopened in 1660, theatergoing became primarily a privilege of the upper class and was especially enjoyed by courtiers. The licentious Restoration court heavily influenced the theater, more than the Puritanical citizenry, and so the comedy of manners became a representation of as well as a commentary on the values of the court. Restoration comedy, then, takes as its clown the fop, an aristocratic
208
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
figure who represents the false wit, exaggerated fashions, and superficial aspirations of pretentious Restoration courtiers. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The fop's interests within these plays lie mainly in his precise adherence to current fashion, both of manners and dress, and in the display of such trivialities. The fop usually functions as a gull and thus as a foil to the hero; his vanity and self-absorption cause him to be easily deceived and laughed at by the other characters, for he never perceives himself the way the other characters do; in other words, when other characters insult the fop, as a fool, he either does not understand the insult or mistakes it for friendly raillery. When the fop does pay attention to others, he usually tries to promote his reputation as a wit and a gallant, frequently and hilariously passing judgment on the wit, fashion sense, and manners of the other characters. Although some critics have attempted to read the fop as an individual rather than a stock character, the fops all serve common functions within a variety of comedie plots. Perhaps one of the more interesting conventional roles that the fop plays is that of the foil to the ultramasculine rake of Restoration comedy.2 As such, he shows cowardliness, a meticulous adherence to trivialities of style, a ridiculously extreme attention to fine points of etiquette, and an overemphasis on fashion and adornment—all corresponding to Restoration notions of femininity. Women, not men, are thought of as timid and fearful, as carefully constructing their outward appearance, and as fretting over their reputations in society. When examined, then, in contrast to the other men in these plays, the fop appears as an effeminized man. Although the fop often holds an inflated sense of his sexual prowess, he is either laughed at, despised, or viewed indifferently by the more astute female characters. Indeed, the fop's obsession with himself usually precludes his being able to have and maintain a romantic relationship, unlike the rake, whose sexual appetite is genuine, and whose virile masculinity is always gratified in some way. Berinthia, in Sir John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696), compares the rakes to "those shadows of 'em, the beaux": These have brains: the beau has none. These are in love with their mistress: the beau with himself. They take care of her reputation: he's industrious to destroy it. They are decent: he's a fop. They are sound: he's rotten. They are men: he's an ass. (446) Clearly the women have little respect for the fop as a suitor, although some of the female characters in these plays hold the fops (who often provide the women with gossip and entertainment) in slightly less contempt than does Berinthia.
The Fop
209
It is important to note that the fop is never a homosexual. Foppish characteristics in male twentieth-century popular culture figures almost always equal homosexuality, but such an equation did not hold true in the Restoration. As the statement by Berinthia makes clear, the fop, despite his effeminate nature and negligible sexual appetite, still poses a threat to women's reputations. The fop values his reputation as a ladies' man, and although his attempts to seduce women usually fail, he still tries. If a woman is seen to be or heard to have been alone with a fop, she will be considered to have slept with him, just as she would if she were left alone with a rake. Thus the fop plays a sexually marginalized role in these plays; he endeavors so industriously to be the ideal gentleman that he ironically becomes effeminized in the process. He can succeed neither in heterosexual relationships with women nor in the homosocial world of the Restoration rakes; despite the fop's consistently good nature, the men seem almost unanimously to despise him, except when he unintentionally proves to be either useful or entertaining, and they frequently exercise their wits at his expense. The fop's marginalized position in the sexual world of these plays reveals much about ideal traits of both masculinity and femininity during the period of the Restoration. It also is a manifestation of the asexual nature of the fool, who regularly speaks bawdily of sex both directly and through equivocation, but rarely is personally involved. Sir Fopling Flutter, a classic fop and the title character of George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), demonstrates all of the typical fop characteristics. He constantly draws attention to his dress, he affects French fashion and vocabulary,3 and he remains unconcerned when he is finally jilted by Mrs. Loveit, the woman who has been leading him on all along. In classic fop fashion, he states that an "intrigue" would only detract from his dancing. For a fop such as he, as well as for most fools, "no one woman is worth the loss of a cut in a caper" (241). Throughout the play, Flutter's effeminacy indicates that he will never succeed with a woman. When Harriet suggests in one scene that Sir Fopling dance to entertain the others, he balks until he receives a compliment; in an aside, Medley comments with a sexual simile, "Like a woman I find you must be struggled with before one brings you to what you desire" (213). The larger metaphor in this scene—sex disguised as dancing—plays on the pun of Sir Fopling being able "to rise," a decidedly masculine metaphor. This metaphor, combined with Medley's comment, illustrates the dual nature of the fop—the effeminized man in a masculine sexual role. Again, the blurred gender roles or even androgyny of the fool are present in the fop. However, Sir Fopling's first appearance in the play clearly aligns him not with the women, except with regard to his apparel, but rather with the homosocial world of the men. He enters in act 3, scene 2, and virtually ignores Emilia, showing more deference to the play's rake, Dorimant. Lady Townley reproaches him: "Wit, I perceive, has more power over you than beauty, Sir Fopling, else you would not have let this lady stand so long neglected" (195). Ironically, his
210
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
preference for Dorimant's conversation effectually emasculates Sir Fopling; he defers not to the beauty of women, but to the wit of men. Once Flutter has engaged in repartee with Dorimant, he draws attention to his clothing, pointing up his feminine affectations, both physical and fashion related—affectations referred to in act 1 when Medley describes Flutter's looks as "more languishing than a lady's when she lolls at stretch in her coach" (168). Later in the same scene, Flutter fishes for compliments, a typical fop characteristic, on the cut of his coat, among other items of apparel, and Dorimant comments on the femininity of his style: "That's the shape our ladies dote on" (194). Sir Fopling is also wearing an "orangerie" perfume, which he acknowledges will be familiar to the ladies. These scenes may be contrasted with an earlier scene (1.1) in which Dorimant is dressing. Dorimant admits that he "love[s] to be well dressed," but he draws the line at using perfumes, stating that he "will smell as [he does] to-day, no offence to the ladies' noses" (167). He goes on to decry the association of apparel and a man's worth: "That a man's excellency should lie in neatly tying of a ribband or a cravat! How careful's nature in furnishing the world with necessary coxcombs!" (168). This scene indicates that the ideal gentleman pays attention to his clothes and dresses fashionably, but at the same time does not overly concern himself with his scent and appearance. A certain nonchalance when it comes to fashion is clearly valued over the fastidiousness of a Sir Fopling Flutter. Fools like him are not actually accepted in the general society; thus their appearance is often noticeably unusual, whether it is the ostentatiously fashionable dress of Sir Fopling Flutter or the flamboyant motley, eclectic robes, or wrongly sized suits and shoes of other fools. A similar misdirection in wit emerges out of the personage of the fop. The fop typically attempts to be witty, but usually falls short, particularly in comparison to the other gentleman wits of these plays. The characters consider the fop's wit false because it is unoriginal and affected and because the fop vainly praises and values his own trite and common similes; the fop further earns their scorn by not understanding when the others' wits have turned against him. According to Congreve in the dedication to The Way of the World, the fop's flaw is not a "natural Folly" but "an affected Wit; a Wit, which at the same time that it is affected, is also false." The Way of the World has as its fop the aptly named Sir Wilfull Witwould. Mirabell, in a speech that could easily apply to fops in general, describes Sir Wilfull: A fool with a good memory, and some few scraps of other folks' wit. He is one whose conversation can never be approved, yet it is now and then to be endured. He has indeed one good quality, he is not exceptious; for he so passionately affects the reputation of understanding raillery, that he will construe an affront into a jest, and call downright rudeness and ill language, satire and fire. (526) Indeed, fops rarely can be described as exceptious due to their inability to judge accurately their status among ladies and true gallants.
The Fop
211
Yet despite the scorn with which the fop occasionally is treated, the character is "not dangerous, vicious, or evil; he is not a blackmailer, thief, murderer, or maniac. . . . the difficulties that he causes are understood to be temporary, survivable, avoidable, or doomed to failure" (Heilman 364).4 Part of the function of the fop within the plots of these plays, then, is to create certain dramatic "difficulties"; the playwright uses the fop as a comic obstacle to the final resolution. In Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, Sir Novelty Fashion courts Hillaria and thereby makes her lover jealous.5 In The Man of Mode, Dorimant, plotting to abandon his mistress in favor of Harriet, a young beauty newly arrived in town, accuses Mrs. Loveit of encouraging the attentions of Sir Fopling Flutter. Whatever the particular plot structure, the fop always functions as an amiable foil for the rake and as an example of gentlemanly breeding taken too far. Thus despite the fop's marginalized sexual role in plays that revolve around plots of seduction, he still plays a vivid and crucial part in the plot structure and satire of Restoration comedy. The fop may be a faded version of a man, a "shadow" or an "echo" of the gallant, then, due to his effeminate traits and the fact that he wields little power over women in these plays. However, the fop's harmlessness, when presented in contrast with the rake, makes the rake seem potentially dangerous—if the difficulties a fop causes are innocuous, then his foil, the rake, is capable of succeeding in causing permanent, disastrous, or unavoidable problems, particularly in light of the rake's power over women. The fop is far more the gull than the trickster fool; and ultimately, however ridiculous, effeminized, and powerless the fop may seem, his costume, ceremony, false wit, and antics still endear him to the audience. A very appropriate pun, vocalized by Elder Worthy in Love's Last Shift, describes the fop as "a very pleasant comedy, indeed . . . and dressed with a great deal of satire" (28). CRITICAL RECEPTION Although the fop was considered a "very pleasant comedy," it was "dressed with a great deal of satire" and he attracted the attention of Restoration critics, who took their comedy very seriously. In his 1722 essay "A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter, critic John Dennis writes that comedy's "proper business" is "to expose persons to our view whose views we may shun and whose follies we may despise; and by showing us what is done upon the comic stage, to show us what ought never to be done upon the stage of the world" (Loftis 429). Dennis appreciates the character of Sir Fopling Flutter largely for his French affectations; in fact, his essay ignores Flutter's other foppish qualities, an omission that seems to indicate that for Restoration critics, the fop's most instructive quality was his embodiment of the France-England competition. "What true Englishman is there," Dennis asks, "but must be pleased to see this ridiculous knight made the jest and the scorn of all the other characters for showing, by his foolish aping foreign customs and manners, that he prefers another country to his own?" (432). Young Englishmen watching Sir Fopling would, according
212
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
to Dennis, not simply be "pleased," but would learn how and how not to act upon returning from their travels in France and Italy. Modern critics, while not ignoring the fop's satirical implications, have also begun to examine the gender roles, sexual power relationships, and homosocial character groupings of these plays; such readings, obviously, must include discussions of the fop's effeminacy and innocuous ineffectiveness in comparison to the other characters. Critics, sexual historians, and philosophers have tracked the developing tendency in the eighteenth century to label homosexual men as a deviant species, entirely separate from heterosexual men. Such a historical perspective may change our readings of some of the later fops. Perhaps due to the burgeoning popularity of gay-lesbian theory (queer studies), the fop will continue to be read and reread from new perspectives, particularly since the character surfaces in contemporary popular culture consistently as a homosexual man. NOTES 1. Although true fops are men, certain fop characteristics can be found in female characters. Narcissa of Love's Last Shift and Olivia in The Plain Dealer are both depicted as women with foppish tendencies, and Heilman points out that Mrs. Fantast in Shadwell's Bury Fair, Belinda in Congreve's The Old Bachelor, Lady Fancyfull in Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife, and Emilia in Shadwell's Sullen Lovers could all be considered fops. Of course, the effeminization of the male fop does not apply to the female fop, nor can the process be reversed (the female fop is not "emasculinized" by her foppery). 2. For a more complete discussion of the rake hero, see Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986). 3. For further discussion on the adoption of French styles and manners and the economic implications of fop fashions, see Charles H. Hinnant, "Pleasure and the Political Economy of Consumption in Restoration Comedy," Restoration 19.2 (1995): 77-87. 4. Heilman's article on fops provides an extensive discussion of the social worth of the good-natured fop. 5. Although he is not discussed at length here, Colley Cibber is the playwright most often associated with fops because he created memorable fop roles that he himself enjoyed playing on the stage. Cibber's fops are discussed at length in Kristina Straub's Sexual Suspects.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Behn, Aphra. The City Heiress. In vol. 2 of The Plays, Histories, and Novels of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn. 6 vols. London: John Pearson, 1871. 169-263. . The Town Fop. In vol. 3 of The Plays, Histories, and Novels of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn. 6 vols. London: John Pearson, 1871. 3-87.
The Fop
213
Cibber, Colley. The Careless Husband. Ed. William W. Appleton. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966. . Love's Last Shift. Vol. 17 of Bell's British Theatre. 34 vols. London: John Bell, 1776. Congreve, William. The Double Dealer. In William Congreve (Complete Plays), ed. Alexander Charles Ewald. London: Ernest Benn, 1961. . Love for Love. In William Congreve (Complete Plays), ed. Alexander Charles Ewald. London: Ernest Benn, 1961. . The Way of the World. In William Congreve (Complete Plays), ed. Alexander Charles Ewald. London: Ernest Benn, 1961. Crowne, John. Sir Courtly Nice. Ed. Charlotte Bradford Hughes. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Etherege, Sir George. The Man of Mode. In Restoration Plays, ed. Brice Harris. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. 155-244. Vanbrugh, Sir John. The Relapse. In Restoration Plays, ed. Brice Harris. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. 415-514. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. In Restoration Plays, ed. Brice Harris. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953. 59-154. . The Gentleman-Dancing-Master. In The Complete Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Gerald Weales. New York: New York UP, 1967. 125-250. . Love in a Wood. In The Complete Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Gerald Weales. New York: New York UP, 1967. 1-124. . The Plain Dealer. Ed. James L. Smith. New York: Norton, 1979.
Secondary Sources Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970. Brown, Richard E. "The Fops in Cibber's Comedies." Essays in Literature 9.1 (1982): 31-41. Bums, Edward. Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. Heilman, Robert B. "Some Fops and Some Versions of Foppery." English Literary History 49 (1982): 363-95. Hughes, Derek. "Cibber and Vanbmgh: Language, Place, and Social Order in Love's Last Shift." Comparative Drama 20 (1986-1987): 287-304. . English Drama, 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. . ' 'Vanbmgh and Cibber: Language, Place, and Social Order in The Relapse.'' Comparative Drama. 21 (Spring 1987): 62-83. Kimmel, Michael S. "From Lord and Master to Cuckold and Fop: Masculinity in Seventeenth Century England." University of Dayton Review 18 (1986/1987): 9 3 109. Loftis, John, ed. Restoration Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
214
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Patterson, Frank M. "Lord Foppington and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme." Notes and Queries 31 (1984) : 377-378. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr. The Ethos of Restoration Comedy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971. Sharma, R. C. Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners. New York: Asia Publishing, 1965. Smith, John Harrington. The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1948. Staves, Susan. "A Few Kind Words for the Fop." Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 413-428. . "The Secrets of Genteel Identity in The Man of Mode." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 19 (1989): 117-128. Straub, Kristina. Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Gimpel
(In "Gimpel the Fool" by Isaac Bashevis Singer: 1945)
Alice R. Kaminsky BACKGROUND Isaac Bashevis Singer (July 14, 1904-July 24, 1991) was born in Leoncin, Poland, the son of a rabbi, Pinchos-Mendel Singer, and a rabbi's daughter, Bathsheba Zylberman. He lived in Warsaw and was a proofreader for a Yiddish literary magazine, which helped inspire him in 1917 to write in Yiddish himself. In 1935 he moved to New York City and became a free-lance writer for the Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward. His first wife gave him his only son, Isaac. He lived the rest of his life with his second wife Alma. In 1933 he began to write the novels and stories that earned him a Nobel Prize in literature in 1978. "Gimpel Tarn," "Gimpel the Fool," Singer's most famous and most anthologized story, was written in Yiddish in 1945 and translated into English by Saul Bellow in the Partisan Review in 1953. It belongs to the tradition of the schlemiel school of comedy of Yiddish writers, such as Sholom Aleichem's Menahem Mendl or I. L. Peretz's Bontsha. A schlemiel is a foolish and powerless but sometimes also wise and saintly individual. Ruth Wisse claims that the most important fact about "Gimpel" is its date of composition. It is "a rare example of the schlemiel figure in post-war Yiddish fiction" (60). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The story is told from Gimpel's point of view. Since we are often able to know what Gimpel really thinks, we understand at the outset that Gimpel is no
216
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
simple fool. On the one hand, he is the exemplar of the gulled character whose credulity makes him the source of humor in the tale. On the other hand, he is the insightful narrator who comments on the events and characters in his shtetl, the East European town of Frampol. So we have the oxymoronic protagonist, the wise fool who in his wisdom chooses to be a fool, reminding us, in this single way, of the fool in King Lear. Gimpel tells us in the first line of the story, "I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary." He remembers the names he was called in school: "fool, imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool." He is considered a fool because he believes everything he is told. His credulity becomes the source of entertainment for the townspeople. They enjoy lying to him because he is so gullible. Gimpel explains, however, that he believes everyone because everything is possible and because the townspeople will be angry if he does not believe them. In other words, to preserve the peace, he believes them, and he adds, characteristically, "I hope at least that did them some good" (300). Clearly Gimpel is a pragmatist; he pretends to believe in order to keep the peace. In this sense he is not a mere simpleton. When Rietze tells him that his father and mother have arisen from the grave, Gimpel, who does not believe that this is possible, "takes a vow to believe nothing more" and plans to leave Frampol (301). Obviously Gimpel is at times a schlemiel who knows he is being manipulated. Then Singer incorporates into the story the classic farce of the shrewish wife and the cuckolded husband. The people of Frampol hound Gimpel into marrying Elke, hiding from him the fact that she is a smelly, loud-mouthed whore whose little brother is really her bastard. She gives birth to a son who is not his, but she swears that the child is premature. "To tell the plain truth," Gimpel admits, "I didn't believe her. But when I talked it over next day with the schoolmaster he told me that the very same thing had happened to Adam and Eve. Two they went up to bed, and four they descended" (304). Gimpel cannot refute the logic of the statement that all women are the granddaughters of Eve. ' 'But then, who really knows how such things are?" (304). Gimpel's skepticism is transformed by the emotion of love. Even though he is often the battered husband because his wife curses him and gives him bloody wounds, he tolerates her behavior because he loves her and his child. But when he discovers Elke in bed with another man, Gimpel chooses not to believe anymore. He is not going to be a sucker all his life. "There's a limit even to the foolishness of a fool like Gimpel" (306). But even this self-awareness does not prevent Gimpel from longing to return to his family after the rabbi orders him to divorce Elke for her adultery. Love makes him rationalize his wife's betrayal: he was hallucinating and did not actually see what he thought he saw. With the introduction of the authority of Maimonides, Singer moves the tale onto another level dealing with the role of authority in relation to faith and skepticism. The rabbis agree that Gimpel can return to his wife because an
Gimpel
217
obscure reference in Maimonides favors his case. "Maimonides says it's right, and therefore it is right!" Gimpel resolves to always believe what he is told. "What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God you won't take stock in" (307-308). The rabbi has told him, "Belief in itself is beneficial. It is written that a saint lives by his faith" (310). Thus the tale moves from a consideration of belief in a secular sense to its ultimate meaning, religious faith. Elke and Gimpel have six children during the twenty years of their marriage. Before Elke dies, she confesses that Gimpel is not the father of any of her children. The spirit of evil, or the Devil, convinces Gimpel that he should seek revenge for this deception, and for a while Gimpel believes the Devil, who assures him that there is no God and no afterlife. As a baker, Gimpel seeks revenge by urinating on the dough he makes to bake bread. But when Elke in a dream warns him not to be false as she was, Gimpel buries the contaminated dough, thereby avoiding the loss of eternal life. He makes a choice, believing in God rather than the Devil. After Gimpel leaves Frampol, he becomes the Wandering Jew, experiencing the good in people and telling stories about the improbable, devils, magicians, and windmills. As he grows older, he resolves the issue of faith and skepticism. Whether this makes him a fool or a wise man is left ambiguous in an open ending. Gimpel contends that there really are no lies. Everything that can possibly happen will happen either in reality or in dreams. "No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world but it is only once removed from the true world. . . . When the time comes, I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived" (313). Thus Singer seems to say that truth exists only in the true world of God where no man is a fool. CRITICAL RECEPTION Inevitably, critics have interpreted the story in different ways. Although Singer himself characterizes Gimpel as a comedie character whom we pity (Conversations 39-40), many readers view Gimpel as a very serious spokesman on the meaning of life (Malin, Isaac Bashevis Singer 72). For Paul Kresh, Gimpel "is the quintessential Jew taunted and dispossessed but preferring to wait for his reward in the next world rather than seek revenge on his tormentors in this one" (204). Ruth Wisse suggests that Gimpel's innocence and gullibility parallel the refusal or inability of the Jews "to face reality" when they were being herded into and annihilated in concentration camps. The Jews' faith in God made them disbelieve in the possibility of their extermination. Thus Wisse accepts the view that the Holocaust victims believed and thus were like Gimpel, who believed despite the evidence to the contrary (66-67). But Edward Alexander denies that religious faith betrayed the Jews. It was
218
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
not their faith in God but rather their faith in mankind and the world that destroyed the Jewish people. "If, Gimpel might say, you disbelieve the nations who threaten to remove the Jewish people from the face of the earth, you will disbelieve everything" (52-53). Thus in Gimpel, Singer is attacking worldliness that disbelieves everything, for Gimpel believes everything. These contradictory and convoluted interpretations are based on the either/or view that Gimpel either believes everything or disbelieves everything. But as we have seen, Gimpel sometimes believes and sometimes does not believe. Grace Farrell Lee argues that Singer was influenced by the Zohar Lurianic Kabbalah. The Kabbalistic view is that the empirical world is insubstantial. "The mere mention of 'God' in a Singer story, then, serves not to affirm a traditional religious transcendence, as it is so often presumed to do, but rather to suggest cosmic exile, inscrutability, concealment and silence. It evokes a universe which remains a riddle, a teasing puzzle which we long to comprehend but never can" (15). "Gimpel the Fool" is a "sophisticated dialectic in which, while Gimpel moves steadfastly in the path of faith, the reader is pushed along a counterpath of skepticism and disbelief until the paths cross and both character and reader must face the central question of faith" (17). This question of faith in the existence of God is a baffling problem not resolved by the ending. Is Gimpel a fool because he acknowledges the existence of God? Or is Gimpel ultimately the wisest of men because he accepts "a greater and eternal reality that transcends human mortality" (Malin, Critical Views 118)? What is indisputable is that "Gimpel the Fool" is a prime example of how schlemiel humor can be converted into religious epiphany.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Singer, Isaac Bashevis. "Gimpel tarn." Yidisher Kemfer 24, whole no. 593 (March 30, 1945): 17-20. Signed Yitskhok Bashevis. . "Gimpel the Fool." Trans. Saul Bellow. Partisan Review 20 (May 1953): 300313.
Secondary Sources Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Kresh, Paul. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street. New York: Dial, 1979. Lee, Grace Farrell. From Exile to Redemption: The Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Malin, Irving. Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972.
Gimpel
219
, ed. Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: New York UP, 1969. Singer, Isaac Bashevis, and Richard Burgin. Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. Wisse, Ruth R. The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971.
Joseph Grimaldi (England: 1778-1837)
Nancy J. D. Hazelton The play, Aristotle explains, comprises six elements; of these, plot is of the first importance, spectacle the last. Clearly the nineteenth-century British pantomime was never dreamt of in this philosophy: an audience of golden-age Athenians would be hard pressed to find anything decorous in the limber antics of that King of Clowns, Joseph Grimaldi. Conversely, a London audience, circa 1806, out for a bit of foolery at the panto, would look for the soul of such a production as Harlequin and Mother Goose not in its plot, but in the spectacle of its King of Clowns.
BACKGROUND Born into a theatrical family,1 Joseph Grimaldi was pressed into service young; his father, Signor Giuseppe Grimaldi, ballet master at Sadler's Wells, introduced his three-year-old son to his first audience on Easter Monday, 1781. During his apprenticeship at the Wells, and then at Drury Lane, Grimaldi performed in a multitude of roles, not all comic;2 pantomime, however, best suited his gifts and his temperament. In the autumn of 1805, Joseph Grimaldi departed Drury Lane in a dispute over terms and was engaged by Thomas J. Dibdin at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden. With Dibdin and his brother Charles, and later Charles Farley, Grimaldi managed to "articulate a style of pantomime which for decades influenced the entire tone and method of pantomime production" (Mayer, Harlequin 3). On December 29, 1806, Dibdin's Christmas pantomime offering at Covent Garden was Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The Golden Egg, and it was ' 'from the
Joseph Grimaldi
221
golden egg of the magic goose the Clown was hatched" (Willson Disher 99). The career of Joseph Grimaldi had begun its ascendancy and would continue for over thirty years. At the age of forty-nine, the King of Clowns retired, having for years effectively supported Covent Garden's more serious fare with such lucrative jewels as Harlequin and Padmanaba; or, The Golden Fish (1811); Harlequin and the Swans; or, The Bath of Beauty (1813); Harlequin and Friar Bacon; or, The Brazen Head (1820); and Harlequin and the Ogress; or, The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood (1822). Grimaldi had primed his only son, J. S. Grimaldi, to follow him. But after some early successes, young Joe sadly played his anarchic parts on the streets rather than the stage, and he predeceased his father, who died in 1837, the year Victoria became queen. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Locked into a formulaic bipartite structure, pantomime charmed earlynineteenth-century English audiences with theatrical elements decidedly unliterary. For the opening segment, pantomime "arrangers" raided the existing depositories of legend or myth, nursery story, or popular literature; unlike Sophocles or Shakespeare, however, they did not transform the dross of borrowed tale into the gold of great poetry. The familiar story, tendered usually in rhymed or blank verse, gave way in the second part to the longer harlequinade, a largely nonverbal descendant of commedia dell'arte, peopled by the traditional—though Anglicized—stock characters and situations. Connections between the opening and the harlequinade were slight: characters were "transformed," and time and place were altered willy-nilly as the chase progressed. Although the ur-plot of the harlequinade involved impeded lovers (Harlequin and Columbine) and their frenzy to escape together, audiences found delight not in the achievement of the resolution, but in the obstacles thereto. These obstacles gave rise to subplots in which Clown, especially once Grimaldi had assumed the role, was ascendant. Before Grimaldi took on the role, the clown functioned in the harlequinade as a minor character, a rustic servant or yokel, a bumbling ' 'Clodpate'' or ' 'John Trot." 3 Unsophisticated in the ways of the urban metropolis, he had, as one might expect in a fool, "difficulties with physical objects, with social forms, and with the rules that govern both" (Willeford 27); his inept and stupid responses in knockabout situations provoked derisive laughter. In an audience, such clowns invite neither sympathy nor empathy; if they are trod upon, they are only getting what they deserve. But Grimaldi's physical elegance and keen wit urged a different role for Clown and a different relationship with his audience. In the opening scene of Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The Golden Egg in 1806, the production that began his innovative career, Grimaldi played Squire Bullface Bugle, the inappropriate and aged—though rich—suitor to Colinette, the sweet young thing, beloved of Colin. The Squire's abduction schemes fall
222
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
afoul of Mother Goose, whose obstructing magic profits the young lovers (she grants them the magic goose) while thwarting the repulsive Bugle's schemes (she calls upon the ghost of his dead wife). But the goose's golden eggs provide the familiar temptation, and Colinette's guardian, Avaro, proposes to cut it open. This action precipitates the transformation that begins the harlequinade: Mother Goose reclaims the threatened bird and changes all the characters, the young lovers becoming Harlequin and Columbine. Clown, erstwhile Squire Bugle, now shifts interest to himself; the "main plot" of the lovers' plight pales against the cunning physical comedy for which Grimaldi became so famous. Famous also was his traditional appearance. Grimaldi dressed in red, white, and blue motley, signaling "Joey" to the audience with costume and makeup: the chalky face was cut with a gaud of red paint on each cheek, and a blue, crested wig capped the expressive countenance. A contemporary enthusiast describes the plasticity of Grimaldi's face: His eyes large, globular, and sparkling, rolled in a riot of joy. His mouth, capacious, and as if endued with a never-ending power of extension, seemedfittedto express every physical enjoyment or disgust. His nose! but who can portray that mobile proboscis which adorned the centre of Joe's frontispiece?... Its contortions, its twistings—now lateral, now upwards, now downwards. (Miles 4-5) Grimaldi's acrobatic agility and physical derring-do were likewise renowned; it was said that he strode the stage in just four steps, and that he tumbled and leapt with "eloquence" (Findlater 154). His Clown spoke when absolutely necessary and sang when called upon, but his comedie grammar was essentially nonverbal, rendering it difficult for us now to find contemporary accounts of his routines "funny." An appreciative spectator catalogued some of the situations Joey mastered: Whether it is to rob a pieman, or open an oyster, imitate a chimney-sweep, or a dandy, grasp a red-hot poker, or devour a pudding, take snuff, sneeze, make love, mimic a tragedian, cheat his master, pick a pocket, beat a watchman, or nurse a child, it is all performed in so admirably humorous and extravagantly natural a manner, that spectators of the most saturnine disposition are irresistibly moved to laughter. (Broadbent 166-67) In Harlequin and Mother Goose, Clown marauds through scenery familiar to the London audience—Vauxhall Gardens, St. Giles, a grocer's shop, a post office—stealing, fighting, and generally causing civil mayhem. Grimaldi's Clown is no Clodpole; he may serve the gods of misrule, but he always manages to be well fed. When, in the improbable world of pantomime, a duck emerges from a pie, Clown absconds with the duck (and the sausages, and the wine, and whatever can be consumed), much to the delight of his audience. Joseph Grimaldi's audience was a mixed one; Regency London theaters had
Joseph Grimaldi
223
not yet sorted out the classes. An evening's bill at Covent Garden might begin with Hamlet, proceed to the pantomime, and conclude with a moving panorama.4 Theatrical broadsides, stickered about to announce the next day's bill, signaled the real draw: pantomime scenes and characters were listed, and actors—especially Grimaldi—were prominently identified. Grimaldi's appeal was cross-class and cross-generational; younger spectators responded to his broader strokes, while their elders were seduced by his satiric take on modern life.5 Almost nothing was sacrosanct: virtue, loyalty, honor, class, economics, nationalism, progress, government, empire, the military, fashionable society, the arts, popular entertainment—Grimaldi held all up to ridicule, offering no apology for the sensibilities he offended. Mother Goose established the "Joey" Clown; he was amoral, wily, manipulative, greedy, sadistic, but nonetheless endearing. In Harlequin in His Element, for example, the 1807-1808 Covent Garden pantomime, Clown officially serves "the antiquated beau" Sir Feeble Sordid, but his real master is chaos.6 In at least two scenes of the harlequinade, the appointed protectors of the righteous are characterized as fitting dupes to his Clown. The Watchman whom Clown abuses fails in his role: in scene 4, ' 'The guardian of the night is now fast asleep in his box," so Clown (full of wine) steals his uniform. ' 'He then shuts the sleeper into his box, and with the lantern and rattle parades the stages, crying the hour in a ludicrous tone" (Booth 7879). Later in the same pantomime, a beadle serves as an object of derision. In scene 10, Grimaldi executes one of his signature constructions, created from filched bits and then animated by the magic bat of Harlequin. First, he steals a bandbox from a milliner, then "purloins the best pair of boots" from a boot maker. A woman "with a basket of vegetables" and a fishmonger enter, and "CLOWN is not idle, but commits sad depredations on the OLD WOMAN'S garden stuff. He steals a piece of salmon from the MAN, and substitutes a bunch of turnips in its place." When the milliner returns with a beadle, Clown "steals his large hat, clapping a bunch of turnips in the stead on the bushy wig of this important personage." Thus provided with his raw material, Clown fashions a "curious figure," with a head of salmon, with boots and gloves, and a beadle's hat (Booth 83). As Clown's anarchic behavior gave rise to his comic antics, the keepers of the peace were common butts of his contempt, and his audiences clearly appreciated the displays of judicial fecklessness.7 Within the role, Grimaldi could take on the current doings of officialdom with the impunity of a court fool; the persona licensed his withering topical satire. The same audiences who demanded the high tone of ethical closure in their melodramas—the villains must get their due—were hardly so sober at the pantomime: We were quite blind to the moral delinquency of Mons. Clown's habits; he was a thief—we loved him, nevertheless; a coward . .. still we loved him; he was cruel, treacherous, unmanly, ungenerous, greedy and the truth was not in him—yet, for all this . . . we loved him, and rejoiced in his successes. (Miles 6-7)
224
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
When he sang, Grimaldi transformed his audiences into collaborators. "Hot Codlins," introduced into his act in 1819, recounts through numerous verses the travails of an old woman apple (codlin) seller, who warms herself with spirits; whenever Clown searches for the rhyme to end a verse, the audience supplies " G i n ! " and then joins in on the chorus. Like the Clown he created, Grimaldi's song remained in the pantomime trunk long after he had left the stage. Serving as the Clown anthem, it was "demanded by the gallery every Christmas as an inalienable right and glorious tradition" (Findlater 139).
CRITICAL RECEPTION Known as the "Michael Angelo of buffoonery," 8 Joseph Grimaldi constructed a theatrical self that Regency audiences of all classes embraced as one of their own. During the thirty years in which he dominated the form, pantomime—though fraught with hyperbolic characters and grotesque behaviors— chronicled its age, with Grimaldi as chief satirist. Changing mores and audiences, however, diminished the Clown-dominated pantomime; 9 yet absent the harlequinade, pantomime survived the Victorian years and indeed persists in our own time. In an age with a mad king, with Napoleon making his way through Europe, and with sixty-seven nights of rioting in the theatre, 10 Grimaldi conjoined with his audience in acknowledging the absurdity of modern life. With his audiences, Grimaldi laughed at "the owlish gravity of these times of solemnity" (Miles 8). When we need a physic for these equally solemn days, we must look for Joey's descendants not on the stage, but under the big top. NOTES 1. His father's family, originally from Genoa, included many dancers: "A long line of Grimaldis have successively ministered to the public gratification" (Miles 9). His father, a dancer and acrobat, was renowned for his Pantaloon. 2. Grimaldi performed the "desperate ravin" in the tragedy Ko and Zoa; or, The Belle Savage at Sadler's Wells in 1803. It was said of his death scene, "We do not believe the finest tragedian of the day can produce any finer effect or portray a more faithful picture" (Willson Disher 96). 3. See Findlater 143-46 for discussion of these earlier clown types. 4. A broadside for the week following Thursday, January 31, 1828, announces "THE NEW PANTOMIME EVERY EVENING." Coupled with Harlequin and Number Nip; or, The Giant Mountain are, successively, School for Scandal, The Seraglio (opera), and Artaxerxes (opera), along with Katherine & Petruchio, Hamlet, and The Merchant's Wedding; or, London Frolics in 1638 (comedy). (Author's collection.) 5. But the audience for early-nineteenth-century pantomime was primarily adult (Mayer, Harlequin 10). 6. All references here are to the Scales text of Harlequin in His Element reprinted in Booth, 76-89.
Joseph Grimaldi
225
7. See Mayer's discussion of prevailing attitudes toward the law and the legal system (Harlequin 259-269). 8. Mr. Harley, of the Drury Lane Fund, said that Grimaldi's death "has hushed . . . the mortal Jupiter of practical Joke, the Michael Angelo of buffoonery, who if he was Grim-all-day, was sure to make you chuckle at night" (quoted in Broadbent 163). 9. See "Harlequin Out of Place" for discussion of changes in pantomime after Grimaldi in Mayer, Harlequin, chapter 9, 309-327. 10. These were, of course, the OP (Old Price) Riots at the reopening of Covent Garden Theatre (1809), which had been reconfigured with additional private boxes and higher prices. Willson Disher says of Grimaldi, "Even during the O. P. Riots at Covent Garden, when no actor could be heard, his dumb show performance of Scaramouche in 'Don Juan' was uninterrupted" (102). In his edition of Grimaldi's Memoirs, Dickens embellished the story: "Grimaldi was greeted with applause [by the rioters]. . .. Kemble was delighted; he shook Grimaldi warmly by the hand, exclaiming, 'We have them now, Joe!' " (2:85). Grimaldi's biographer Henry Downes Miles dismisses this tale as poppycock, a "pleasant figment" (162), as does Richard Findlater (125-127).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Baer, Marc. Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Booth, Michael R., ed. English Plays of the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 5. Pantomimes, Extravaganzas, and Burlesques. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Broadbent, R. J. A History of Pantomime. 1901. New York: Blom, 1964. Dibdin, Thomas John. Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The Golden Egg. In The Writings for the Theatre of Thomas John Dibdin (1771-1841), ed. E. Rimbault Dibdin, vol. 3, no. 38. Liverpool: n.p., 1919. Dickens, Charles. Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. Edited by "Boz." London: R. Bentley, 1838. Disher, M. Willson. Clowns and Pantomimes. London: Constable, 1925. Findlater, Richard. Grimaldi: King of Clowns. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1955. Frow, Gerald. "Oh, Yes It Is!": A History of Pantomime. London: BBC, 1985. Mander, Raymond, and Joe Mitchenson. Pantomime: A Story in Pictures. New York: Taplinger, 1973. Mayer, David. Annotated Bibliography of Pantomime and Guide to Study Sources. London: Commission for a British Theatre Institute, 1975. . Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806-1836. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969. Miles, Henry Downes. The Life of Joseph Grimaldi; With Anecdotes of His Contemporaries. London: Charles Harris, 1838. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Forrest Gump Innocent Fool
(United States: In Winston Groom's Forrest Gump and Robert Zemeckis'sfilmForrest Gump: 1986; 1994)
James M. O'Brien BACKGROUND America in the 1990s remains haunted by the 1960s. Though the two narratives of Forrest Gump in the novel (1986) and on film (1994) provide a snapshot survey of America's incidents and institutions in the 1960s and 1970s, the essential backdrop for the narratives is the dark, unresolved presence of Vietnam and pervasive racism; that is, their unresolved shadowing of the American psyche. In the novel, Vietnam is just one more example of America's pointless exercises in power and technology, like college football and NASA, with social institutions indifferent, if not oblivious, to the individuals they process and exploit. In the film, America's racial divisions are foregrounded, as are the plight of the Vietnam veteran in the postwar United States and that of the lost, doomed, countercultural flower child Jenny. Gump, the holy innocent fool, offers a nonjudgmental acceptance and single-minded fidelity that transform the lives of Lieutenant Dan and Jenny and realize, postmortem, the dreams of Bubba the shrimp man. There are, of course, two Gumps, the ubiquitous cinema Gump, crafted by director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, and actor Tom Hanks, and the ur-Gump of Winston Groom's 1986 novel. Groom's Gump as innocent fool, awash in guileless purity, unquestioning trust, and quixotic unpredictability, has a clear and acknowledged literary genealogy, including Faulkner's Benji, Prince Myshkin of The Idiot, Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, and especially Lennie from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Although Groom does not specifically allude to it, Gump's progress through American history is very much like
Forrest Gump
227
Candide's progress through the eighteenth-century Western world. Just as Candide reveals man's inhumanity to man in all his innocence, Gump ingenuously exposes the stupidity and inhumanity of America's institutions. In the film, Tom Hanks's Gump evokes memories of intellectually challenged film heroes from Dustin Hoffman's Raymond in Rainman to Peter Sellers's Chance in Being There and, distantly, a trio of Jimmy Stewart roles as the earnest naif in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, and Harvey. Both the literary and the cinematic Gump easily fit the conventions of the innocent fool. Like the Jewish schlemiel classically represented in Isaac Bashevis Singer's character Gimpel, the innocent is both victim and victor. Because he is both unsuspecting and unselfishly loving, he fails to comprehend or acknowledge the politic nature of society, never questioning either his own acts or those of others. He behaves with a consistent goodness that, according to the arbitrary rules of the convention, carries him safely through the minefields of his world and drops him into the seat of the victor. It is as if his prelapsarian mindset sweeps clean his path through the postlapsarian world. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Comparing the two Gumps is useful in that each is a variation of the conventional innocent fool, surviving in spite of and because of his peculiar assemblage of characteristics. Winston Groom's literary Gump is very large: six feet two inches tall and 242 pounds. His size saves him from incarceration in a mental hospital and gives rise to his football career. Although repeated testing suggests an IQ near 70, he is an idiot savant with an intuitive grasp of higher physics, chess, and music. The protagonist addresses the reader directly, his often crude, colloquial speech represented in literal if unorthodox spelling. Despite his apparent limitations, he is capable of subtle distinctions, as between idiot, imbecile, moron, half-wit (which he prefers), and Mongolian idiot. While flunking basic courses, he passes an advanced physics course entitled Intermediate Light. Borrowing a friend's harmonica, he teaches himself to play well enough to join a band. He also reveals that he is well read in the literature of idiocy and admits that he is probably a great deal brighter than people think, and the reader is permitted to agree. But as a participant-observer in society, Gump tends to be nonjudgmental, going along with the "program," whether it be football, the military, or NASA. Tom Hanks's Gump is a normally built man who is given to odd head movements and speaks with a halting, oddly inflected southern accent. His naivete permits him to ignore social rebuffs, and his persistent amiable reminiscences gradually draw in a series of strangers. He also scores 70 on a dubious IQ test and is equipped with heavy leg braces to cure a twisted spine—possibly a misdiagnosis. Harrassed by bullies, he discovers a gift for running that results in football stardom and All-American status, without ever grasping the game. Additionally, he is a natural Ping-Pong wizard. His assessment of situations is
228
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
literal and unsophisticated. For example, he expresses surprise that blacks want to go to college with whites, but no dismay. He is proud of the origin of his name, traced to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, but his voice-over understanding of the Klan makes the whole idea appear silly and childish. Groom's Gump is sexually initiated by a boarder at his mother's home, but on a date with Jenny, he accidently rips open her blouse and is accused of attempted rape. Many chapters later, when Jenny initiates sex between them, he turns out to be a gifted, tireless lover. Both Jenny and a female psychiatrist are impressed with Gump's genital endowments, a conventional trait of the closeto-nature innocent-fool figure. Hanks's Gump is sexually naive. Seeing Jenny making love in a car, he attacks her lover, assuming that she is being assaulted. As the innocent, he has no comprehension of the somewhat aggressive nature of sexual desire. Later Jenny asks him if he has ever been with a woman, and he replies that he sits next to them all the time in home economics. When she places his hand on her breast, he climaxes, much to his surprise and embarrassment. Much later she comes into his bed and they make love, perhaps for the only time. Groom's Gump is a clumsy hulk in situations other than war or sports, where he excels. Apart from the Jenny "rape" incident, he trashes a Harvard drama class and unravels Raquel Welch's dress as she runs through a jungle. Hanks's Gump is physically graceful, given to violence only in defense (sometimes inappropriately) of Jenny. Groom's Gump is ethically neutral since as the innocent, he does not possess sufficient mental power for sophisticated ethical analysis. Although much put upon, he rarely protests, assuming that these smarter people must have some reason for what they are doing. The reader is permitted to draw his/her own conclusions about the situations. Asked to explain why his friend Bubba was killed in Vietnam, he offers, "We was tryin' to do the right thing, I guess. We was just doin' what we was tole." Asked if the war was worth all the lives, he replies, "I'm jus' a idiot, but if you want my real opinion, it was just a bunch of shit." Hanks's Gump is a moral figure of saintly stature, like Prince Myshkin of The Idiot. As the unquestioning innocent, his supreme virtue is fidelity, to his friends and to his one love, Jenny. This fidelity is transformative in their lives. If the central social problem in the story is the Vietnam War, Gump's opinion is deliberately withheld from the viewer, leaving him neutral on the meaning of the war. However, he is explicit in his opinion about the GIs, saying that "some of America's finest young men were there." The cliche is given moral force by his naivete and solemnity. Nature is little present in Groom's Gump, apart from the graphic physical unpleasantness of wartime Vietnam. However, the innocent fool is often closely associated with nature. Consequently, in the film, the beauty of nature is centrally thematic; gorgeous sunsets and panoramic views of scenic America are presented as signs of divine blessing. Even wading through swamps in the pour-
Forrest Gump
229
ing rain, Gump lyricizes about the varieties of rain, to comic effect. Under Gump's influence, even the bitter and blasphemous Lieutenant Dan moves into harmony with nature. He purgatively dives from the shrimpboat into the sea after the hurricane, the sun and clouds pronouncing a forgiving benediction. As Gump walks away from their favorite oak tree after his eulogy at Jenny's graveside, a flight of birds takes wing, a literal answer to Jenny's childhood prayer. Groom's Gump concludes his story by admitting that he often thinks about how things might have been. "And then, all of a sudden, I'm forty, fifty, sixty years old, you know." Life passes by, unbidden, its meaning a mystery. The film's Forrest Gump valorizes Mamma Gump's dictum that "death is a part of life" by associating her death and the death of Jenny with beautiful sunsets. Hanks's Gump, searching to find his destiny, concludes that an individual life is a combination of chance and destiny, a conclusion symbolized by the floating feather that opens and closes the film. Characteristics of the novel, including its first-person narration; its mockjourney structure, designed for satiric rather than mimetic purpose; its pervasive longing for romantic wish-fulfillment; and its confession of failure in life, all mark the central character as a picaro, though he is less roguish than some (Brownlee 27-29). As Richard Bjornson notes, the picaresque novel offers "episodic, open-minded narrative in which lower-class protagonists sustain themselves by means of their cleverness and adaptability during an extended journey through space, time, and predominantly corrupt social milieux" (4). While Gump cannot be labeled "clever," he is indeed adaptable; and he clearly survives in a world of "socially corrupt milieux." But as innocent fool, he survives because that corrupt world also adapts to him, often tidying itself up a bit and embracing him as its victor. CRITICAL RECEPTION Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, published in 1986, received a mixed reception from reviewers. While New York Times reviewer Jonathan Baumbach called the book "a kind of defanged 'Candide,' an unabrasive satire of the idiocy of life in our time," in which the free-floating injustices of the time repeatedly defeat the hero, he noted that Groom softens the satire to achieve charm at the cost of outrage (31). The film's critical reception was mixed, though largely positive. Critics faulted the manipulative use of popular music as a shortcut to emotion, but most praised the persuasive central performance of Tom Hanks. Film Comment writer Dave Kehr, responding to left-leaning critics who read the film as a conservative tract, situates the movie in a context of films by Robert Zemeckis and argues that Forrest Gump is anything but a paean to America in its representation of recurrent random violence and the aimlessness and chancedriven lives of the central characters (46-51). Peter Chumo sees Gump, the movie, as a "fantasy of national reconciliation" that unites the races, the Vietnam hawks and doves, and even the East and West. Gump is represented, both
230
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
dramatically and visually, as a messianic figure who transcends the divisions of American society and invites us to put the past behind us (2-7). While Winston Groom's 1986 novel is a relatively gentle satire on the follies of American life and aspirations, Robert Zemeckis's 1994 film is no satire at all. It is, rather, a technically accomplished and emotionally manipulative appeal to the American public to put their bitter divisions of race, war, and culture behind them and to focus their aspirations on work, on friends, on family. The ingenuous, innocent fool serves as both metonym and messenger for this messianic request. The enormous public acceptance of the film suggests that we are ready to hear the message, if not to carry out its dictates. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986. Zemeckis, Robert (director). Forrest Gump. Paramount, 1994.
Secondary Sources Baumbach, Jonathan. "A Pretty Interestin' Life." New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1986: 31. Bjornson, Richard. The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977. Brownlee, Marina S. "Discursive Parameters of the Picaresque." In The Picaresque, ed. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michale Zappala. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1994. 27-29. Chumo, Peter N. "You've Got to Put the Past behind You Before You Can Move On: Forrest Gump and National Reconciliation." Journal of Popular Film and Television 23.1 (Spring 1995): 2-7. Kehr, Dave. "Who Framed Forrest Gump?" Film Comment 31.2 (March-April 1995): 46-51.
Hamlet
(England: In Hamlet by William Shakespeare: c. 1600-1601)
Malcolm A. Nelson BACKGROUND Elizabethan Englishmen entered the 1590s with an optimistic, golden sense of the potential of man and his institutions; yet the decade (and the century) ended with a melancholy emphasis on the problems and puzzles of human existence. Shakespeare's Hamlet admirably represents both the golden potential and the new note of doubt, fear, and pessimism: Hamlet exults, "What a piece of work is a man!" (2.2.300), yet in a few breaths he recognizes that man is also nothing but "this quintessence of dust" (2.2.304). The golden age in which Leon Battista Alberti said, "Men can do all things if they will," is transmuted into the skepticism of Montaigne's "What do I know?" The sources of Hamlet's rich and complex character are to be found more in this rich historical paradox than in the actual historic sources of the character and his story, which are poor and mean. They include a crude twelfth-century account of Danish dynastic misbehavior, written by a monk now known as Saxo Grammaticus, meaning simply "the Saxon who can read and write"; a sixteenth-century French version of the story; and a play now lost, known as the Ur-Hamlet, probably by Thomas Kyd, popular about a decade before Shakespeare's version. It is also worth noting that Shakespeare wrote this play about the death of a father in the year of his own father's death, and only four years after the death of his only son, a boy named Hamnet.
232
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Hamlet is, of course, anything but a fool. He is commonly and correctly called the most intellectual hero in literature. He is intelligent, skeptical, perceptive, thoughtful, cautious, creative, witty, and foresighted. He thus has something in common with Shakespeare's motley fools, but, as a prince, does not have to wear cap and bells, sing funny songs, do dances, or amuse an employer. The only such fool in the play is the "quite chapfall'n" (5.1.180) Yorick of the graveyard scene—a skull, more of the dust that oppresses the prince. The closest Hamlet comes to being called a fool is quite characteristically in his own selfdeprecatory cry, as he angrily says of the king's minions, "They fool me to the top of my bent!" that is, either they treat me as though I were a fool, or they force me to play the fool. Yet Hamlet does have an appearance that is almost as distinctive as the motley of a jester; he defends his "customary suits of solemn black" in his first scene (1.2.78), in contrast to the bright court clothing of the other characters. He is not a fool, but he is, like motley fools, and like Jaques in As You Like It, alien, other, different, an outsider. The word "fool" or one of its cognates, such as "foolish," appears nine times in the play. ' 'Jester'' appears once, to identify Yorick. The play has several characters who are recognizably foolish, most notably Polonius, who is fond of the word "fool" himself and is given the appellation three times by Hamlet, once, prophetically, when he tells Ophelia that her father should stay at home and play the fool "nowhere but in's own house" (3.1.134), sound advice in retrospect. He also makes Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Osric appear to be foolish, indeed stupid. Even Claudius, his intelligent adversary, is made to look a fool by Hamlet's wit. But Hamlet, surely, is nobody's fool, except in the ironic modes that so dominate this play; and there, of course, he is a fool, in several important ways: in his use of feigned madness to protect himself and attack his enemies; in his frequent conscious acting and role playing; in his own harsh self-deprecation, mentioned earlier; in his dialogue with the Clown, another kind of fool; and in the sense that all tragic characters are, as Northrop Frye put it, "fools of time," a reference to Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. The question of whether Hamlet's madness is authentic or counterfeit has occupied critics for centuries. A good middle ground was struck in Coleridge's conclusion that Hamlet's behavior is "less than madness and more than feigning"; in other words, Hamlet is not mad but often sorely distracted, and he adopts the pose not just as protection but also as the reflection of his state of mind. But whatever we may conclude about his theatricality, Hamlet also clearly pretends madness and plays the fool many times in the play: to keep counsel, as after seeing the ghost of his father ("wild and whirling words," 1.5.133); to throw enemies off the track and often insult them at the same time, as in the nunnery scene (3.1) or after killing Polonius (3.4 and 4.3); and to release unbearable emotion, as in act 1, scene 5, after he hears the ghost describe his own
Hamlet
233
murder, and in his posturing over the corpse of, and in the grave of, Ophelia (5.1). The most foolish action in the play is Hamlet's "rash and bloody deed" (3.4.28) that kills the "rash, intruding fool" (3.4.32) Polonius and reverses the movement of the play. This murder stands stunningly near the center of the play, in high contrast to the preceding scene of Hamlet's most unrash, highly reasoned refusal to kill Claudius because he is praying, and two scenes after the even less rash, almost obsessively planned play-within-a-play, "The Mousetrap." Indeed, the many critics who have called Hamlet entirely indecisive, or passive, or meditative, have overlooked his foolish, rash action at the eye of the play and its terrible consequences: Hamlet's tragic error is impulsiveness, not indecisiveness. Hamlet's theatricality is not confined to madness and acting: he is also a director, with strong opinions on acting, and particularly urges the players to make their clowns stick to the script and avoid an ad-lib, which is "villainous" behavior in "the fool that uses it" (3.2.43). Ironically, the most villainous adlib in the play is Hamlet's own at the arras with Polonius. But his smooth rewriting and directing of "The Mousetrap" literally brings Claudius to his knees. Hamlet is famous for its wordplay and its many uses of "act," "stage," and "play," contrasting inaction in the real world with action and inaction in the theater, as in the "Hecuba" soliloquy. The most famous speech in the play, "To be or not to be," is in part a meditation on the nature and meaning of human action and inaction. Hamlet himself often plays the fool in comic (often bitter) interactions with other characters, as in his obscenities and ambiguities with the bewildered Ophelia, whom he sarcastically instructs to marry a fool because "wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them" (3.1.139). Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most tragic plays, but it is also, surprisingly, one of his funniest. Hamlet is almost always the one who delivers the punch lines—wry, bitter, witty, parodic, or nonsensical. The one exception to this is in 5.1, when the Clown, sometimes called the First Gravedigger, engages in a dialogue with Hamlet that could be an exchange between Groucho and Chico— and Hamlet is Groucho the straight man. When the Clown shares gossip with Hamlet (whom he does not recognize), telling him that the Prince of Denmark— Hamlet—became mad by losing his wits, Hamlet asks, "Upon what ground?" Amazed at such a foolish question, the Clown responds, "Why, here in Denmark" 5.1.152-153). It is very funny, partly because it is the only time in the play when Hamlet is verbally bested—and by none other than a fool. The humor is strongly reminiscent of the imbecilic wisdom of some of Shakespeare's more famous named clowns, especially Dogberry and Bottom. It is also very funny because of the grim ironic gap between what we and the clown know, and Hamlet (as yet) does not: that the grave that served for Yorick and hence occasioned Hamlet's crucial meditation on death will also serve for the girl Hamlet
234
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
has helped to destroy. Hamlet plays the fool in this scene in ways that are quite new to him—by being ignorant of the coming horror and by playing second banana to a dim clown. The intersection of philosophy and death and grim humor only underscores the power of casting Hamlet, for once, as a real fool. Finally, Hamlet is a fool as all of us are, fools of time caught in a mortality he only begins to understand and accept in the last act of the play: "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. . . . Let be" (5.2.209-211). This is the wisdom of acceptance, far beyond the understanding of the morose young prince of act 1. Now he knows that life is a mortal joke on all of us, but now he appreciates it, and he is ready for whatever fate brings. This wisdom would not have been achieved without the path of folly that leads to it. Hamlet the fool and Hamlet the hero are now one; "the rest is silence" (5.2.247). None of us likes to watch the death of such a bright and vital specimen of humanity—it reminds us of our own foolish mortality and so is almost unbearable. That is, indeed, part of the point of the play. At the same time, Hamlet does succeed, at a great cost, in the task he is set in act 1. Denmark is indeed "set. . . right." That helps to make his mortality, and ours, acceptable. We have also enjoyed some hilarious folly along the way—just as we do in life.
CRITICAL RECEPTION Hamlet has always been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, and Hamlet is his most discussed character. The prince has been a mirror in which individuals and audiences and nations and ages have seen themselves reflected, so much so that the nature of the character has often been obscured by excessive political and social symbolism. The earliest criticism did not speak of mysterious delay and saw him as decisive enough, simply unable to do a nearly impossible tragic task. The romantic age emphasized his delay and turned him into a Werther, a sensitive plant, indecisive and ineffectual, as in Goethe's "Germany is Hamlet." Nineteenth-century productions and discussions of the play stressed internality and character over drama, thus increasing emphasis on finding a psychological explanation for Hamlet's inaction, rather than the commonsense "no delay, no play." The twentieth century has emphasized a Hamlet reflecting its own enormous preoccupation with sexuality, particularly the unresolved juvenile sexuality of the Oedipus complex, now a standard rationalization for his alleged inaction. It is a rare modern Hamlet that does not require the prince to fumble and tumble his mother in the closet scene. Though the stage directions say nothing about a bed, one is almost always present. Brilliant but quirky readings of the play have even denied the reality of the ghost, or exculpated Claudius, or put most of the blame for the problems of Denmark and the play on Hamlet himself. The most
Hamlet
235
famous negative critic, T. S. Eliot, wanted us to believe that the play is "an artistic failure," though that absurdity has largely been laid to rest. We have also seen many political Hamlets, stressing the Brechtian "Denmark's a prison." This at least has the virtue of giving Claudius back his rightful role as Hamlet's "mighty opposite" and reminding us that the play is about the struggle for the throne and the soul of a kingdom, not just a squabble in a rich, dysfunctional family. Hamlet has never been off the stage or screen or out of the consciousness of the English-speaking world. Elsewhere, it has been played and filmed with huge success in Russia, Germany, and Italy. Major stage and television productions of Hamlet are commonplace. This, the most lengthy of Shakepeare's plays, is also the most famous, and its hero, in his grand quest for justice that also leads to his isolation as a fool, is perhaps the richest image of man ever created in art.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources The number of editions of the play is almost endless. It first appeared in print in 1603 in an awful, unauthorized, butchered version (perhaps half transcribed, half remembered), known as Ql (the First Quarto). Shakespeare's company rectified that disaster by printing a much more authoritative Quarto (Q2) the following year; and in 1623, a quite different text, also substantive, appeared in the First Folio (Fl). There is no evidence that Shakespeare himself had a hand in any of the three editions, though Q2 would be the likeliest for him to have overseen. It is usually the basis of modern editions. Modern texts of Hamlet are syntheses of these three (Ql cannot quite be ignored), and modern productions rarely play the resulting enormous text. Such productions have been wryly called "eternity versions," taking a minimum of four and a half hours. Surely, Shakespeare's company did not perform that sort of script; yet an understanding of Hamlet, as fool or prince or both, depends on knowing the whole text. The many excellent inexpensive modern editions of the play are among the benefits of more than two centuries of diligent bibliographic and editorial work. At least two English-language films are readily available in cassette: Olivier's (1948) and Zeffirelli's, starring Mel Gibson (1990). Both have value, though both display huge cuts and simplistic distortions. Olivier's is the better. Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Harbage, Alfred, ed. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969. Wilson, John Dover, ed. The Works of Shakespeare Edited for the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. The New Shakespeare. London: Cambridge UP, 1969.
236
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Secondary Sources Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan, 1905. Calderwood, James L. To Be or Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in ' 'Hamlet.'' New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Frye, Northrop. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. U of Toronto P, 1967. Frye, Roland M. The Renaissance "Hamlet": Issues and Responses in 1600. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Hawkes, Terence. "Telmah." In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London: Methuen, 1985. Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. London: V. Gollancz, 1949. Knight, G. Wilson. The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies, Including the Roman Plays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1931. . The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1930. Levin, Harry. The Question of "Hamlet." New York: Oxford UP, 1959. Mowat, Barbara A. "The Form of Hamlefs Fortunes." Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 97-126. Weitz, Morris. "Hamlet" and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964. Wilson, J. Dover. What Happens in "Hamlet." Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935.
Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus Jesters to the Gods
(Greece and Rome: Myth: Second Millennium B.C.EPresent)
Margery L. Brown BACKGROUND One of the puzzling aspects of deity is the trickster. The trickster occurs as a type of shaman, a being who is divinely elected, attains mastery of his vocation through suffering, and becomes some combination of the following: poetprophet, magician, priest, or guardian of arcane lore, either medicinal or religious. But the trickster is not an ordinary god or even an ordinary shaman. His role is to be perverse, to challenge the existing order, to create mischief. Often, as in the case of Prometheus and Hephaestus, he is chosen to create human beings, imbuing them with his spark of chaos and preventing them from attaining divine status. Although the trickster is clever and inventive, anything he creates or invents has a dark side. He is also a deceiver who sometimes becomes a victim of his own cleverness. The trickster, in spite of his considerable power, is often a figure of fun, laughed at by other gods. The question one may ask is why a god of considerable power would court derision. The answer is twofold: First, it is his nature, and second, in spite of the laughter directed at him, the trickster retains control of the situation, whereas direct confrontation would lead to his defeat by an older or more powerful god. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS As a smith, Hephaestus represents a combination of the guardian of arcane lore and the magician. His divine choosing is evident in his parentage; he is the parthenogenic child of Hera, queen of the Olympian gods, according to both
238
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Hesiod and the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo. Hera herself provided his suffering, throwing him out of Olympus because he was lame and weak: But my own boy, Hephaestus, the one I myself gave birth to, was weak among all the gods, and his foot was shriveled, why it was a disgrace to me, a shame to heaven, so I took him in my hands and threw him out, and he fell into the deep sea. The daughter of Nereus, Thetis, with her silver feet, took him and brought him up with her sisters. {Hymn to Pythian Apollo 168)1 This plunge beneath the sea can be viewed not only as a symbolic death, but also as a purifying of Hephaestus, allowing him to move to a more exalted plane of existence. His fall from Olympus can also be viewed as symbolic of the lightning falling from the sky to strike the earth. Indeed, Hephaestus has many connections with lightning and fire. He is the smith god, a preeminent user of fire as well as the forger of Zeus's lightning bolts. Ancient poets use his name by metonymy to mean "fire," and in The Iliad (book 21), he actually becomes fire to rout the rebellious Scamander River. As a smith, Hephaestus would have mined ore from Mother Earth and used it to fashion various objects. This production of products from Earth is a type of "arming." The connection of sex and smithing is also apparent in popular language, which tended to refer to sexual intercourse in terms of forging as well as plowing. Moreover, Hephaestus is a maker of chains and rings, traditionally regarded as having binding powers. His most famous concoctions in this line are the robe and necklace he presented to Cadmus and Harmonia as wedding gifts. Because of the curses forged within these gifts, the House of Cadmus's misfortunes began. Hephaestus is also the maker of "robots," giving life to inanimate metal. He is the maker of the gold and silver guard dogs of Alkinoos: and there was a silver lintel above, and a golden handle, and dogs made out of gold and silver were on each side of it, fashioned by Hephaistos in his craftsmanship and cunning, to watch over the palace of great-hearted Alkinoos, being themselves immortal, and all their days are ageless. (Odyssey, book 7.113) Alkinoos also possesses young male servants and maidservants made of gold and animated by Hephaestus. Hephaestus is also credited with the manufacture of the bronze giant Talus, who guarded Crete. In addition to these clearly non-
Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus
239
human products, Hephaestus is credited in Hesiod's Theogony with the creation of the first human female, produced at Zeus's orders to punish males for the sins of their creator, Prometheus: At the orders of the son of Cronus, the famous lame smith-god shaped some clay in the image of a tender girl. (Theogony, book 9.69) Hephaestus's power appears also in the story of his revenge on Hera. Angered at her rejection of him, he makes her a gorgeous throne. However, when she sits on it, she cannot rise. Others try to release her, including Ares, but without success. Hephaestus, who has left Olympus, does not agree to release her until he is plied with drink by Dionysus. He does so on condition that he be allowed to wed Athena. In the written form of the myth, he is hilariously unsuccessful at bedding the sworn virgin, spilling his semen on the ground and fathering a monstrous child, the snake-legged Erichthonius. But it is entirely possible that the comic scene was added later, in keeping with Hephaestus's role as the buffoon and after Athena's virginity became immutable. Certainly Athena's interest in and fondness for the unattractive child is explainable if she is his mother rather than an angry virgin who has been the victim of attempted rape. Clearly, Hephaestus is a powerful god well able to get what he wants directly and without subterfuge. Why then does he so often play the fool? The answer is that he does it to control situations where direct confrontation will not work. The most famous example of his buffoonery is prominently mentioned by both Homer (Odyssey, book 8) and Ovid (Metamorphoses, book 4). In this story, Hephaestus is being cuckolded by his wife Aphrodite and his brother Ares. The cuckolded husband is a laughable, most often unsympathetic figure in literature. Any protest on his part usually results in more laughter at his expense. Hephaestus is looked on with derision by the other gods, who are well aware of Aphrodite's indiscretion. Instead of launching futile protests, which Aphrodite and Ares would undoubtedly ignore, Hephaestus sets them up as the objects of derision by booby-trapping his bed with a diamond net to trap them in the act of intercourse. He then pretends to leave, knowing that they will immediately set up a tryst. When they are completely ensnared, Hephaestus returns and summons the male gods to laugh at them in their shame. The gods, the givers of good things, stood there in the forecourt, and among the blessed immortals uncontrollable laughter went up as they saw the handiwork of subtle Hephaistos. And thus they would speak to each other, each looking at the god next to him: ' 'No virtue in bad dealings. See how the slow one has overtaken the swift, as now slow Hephaistos has overtaken Ares, swiftest of all the gods on Olympos, by artifice, though he was lame, and Ares must pay the adulterer's damage." (Odyssey, book 7.129)
240
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Furthermore, Hephaestus does not let the adulterers go until Poseidon begs him to and promises that if Ares does not pay the damages, Poseidon will. When Hephaestus frees them, the lovers depart separately to hide their shame, Ares to Thrace, Aphrodite to Cyprus. Ovid's version is more abbreviated, but the events are the same. He says in book 4 of The Metamorphoses'. "Vulcan's bedroom shook with godly laughter" (117). Hephaestus has correctly gauged his audience. His companions transfer their derision to the adulterous couple and draw moral conclusions about their behavior. By using humor, Hephaestus wins a match he probably would have lost had he attempted to physically assault Ares. He also wins sympathy that would not have been forthcoming had he simply whined about his plight. In another Homeric instance (Iliad, book 1), Hephaestus uses humor to deflect Zeus' s anger from Hera. The king and queen of the gods have been quarreling over Zeus's attention to Thetis when Hephaestus intervenes. He says that their quarreling will spoil the gods' feast and enjoins Hera to stop nagging because it is dangerous to anger the most powerful of the gods: For if the Olympian who handles the lightning should be minded to hurl us from our places, he is far too strong for any. (Iliad, book 1.74) He even mentions to Hera that his physical intervention in a previous quarrel had had disastrous consequences for him: There was a time once before now that I was minded to help you, And he caught me by the foot and threw me from the magic threshold, And all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset I landed in Lemnos, and there was not much life left in me. (Iliad, book 1.74-75) After saying this, Hephaestus begins to caper around serving wine to all the gods. Apparently this service was regarded as most amusing by the other gods: But among the blessed immortals uncontrollable laughter went up as they saw Hephaistos bustling about the palace. (Iliad, book 1.75) The good humor lasts throughout the feast, and Zeus and Hera retire to sleep together, all quarreling forgotten in the wake of Hephaestus's comic performance of butler's duties. Like Hephaestus, Hermes is divinely chosen by virtue of his birth, the son of Zeus and the nymph Maia. Although Hermes does not seem to suffer directly in order to acquire his powers, he does do penance for some of his misdeeds; for instance, the other gods stone him for the killing of Argus. On the other
Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus
241
hand, Hermes is skilled at jobs traditionally reserved for tricksters: thief, crosser of boundaries (particularly the boundary between life and death), inventor, musician, and friend to humans. Hermes thief, cattle-rustler, carrier of dreams, secret agent, prowler. (Hymn to Hermes 22-23) According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, his first deed, on the afternoon of his birth, is to invent the lyre and music. He goes on to steal Apollo's sacred cattle in the evening. Naturally, he is caught by the older, wiser god, but he manages to evade both direct confrontation and punishment by means of his trickery. Like Hephaestus, Hermes performs distracting maneuvers to evade direct confrontation. His most famous "trick" is detailed in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (1). Having stolen fifty of Apollo's cattle, Hermes brings them home undetected by the ruse of having them walk backwards at first to throw off trackers. When he reaches a stopping place, he invents fire—a boon for human beings—to cook the meat of two of the cattle. He then hops back into his cradle and pretends to be a baby. But he does not fool his mother who calls him "a big headache to gods and men" (Homeric Hymn to Hermes). Hermes answers that he wants the same glory as Apollo and that he means to get it by thievery if he must, and he brags that he is ' 'capable certainly, / to be the number one thief" (Homeric Hymn to Hermes). When Apollo tracks the stolen cattle to Maia's dwelling, Hermes continues to pretend to be a newborn. But Apollo is not deceived, and he threatens to throw Hermes into Tartarus: I'm going to take you and throw you into black Tartarus, into a hopeless darkness. What a terrible end! And neither your mother nor your father will bring you back to the light of day! (Hymn to Hermes 1.39-40) Far from being frightened by this threat, Hermes denies any part in the theft and adds that he does not know which cattle were stolen, having never seen them. Amused at his boldness, Apollo laughs and dubs Hermes "prince of thieves." When he takes Hermes to heaven, the child-god charms Zeus with his impudence, and Zeus proclaims him to have the makings of a herald (crosser of boundaries). Hermes lies to Zeus and swears his innocence. But Zeus is not
242
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
fooled and orders the return of the cattle. When Apollo comes upon the hides of the two slain cattle, he marvels at the power of the infant Hermes: I'm shocked myself to think of what your power will be like later on. (Hymn to Hermes 1.49-50) Clearly, Hermes is a force to be reckoned with, but he prefers trickery to direct confrontation. The poet says this overtly: It was very easy for him to soothe the Archer, son of glorious Leto, as he wanted to do, even though he was so strong. (Hymn to Hermes) Hermes prefers to subdue Apollo with music and picks up his lyre. Enchanted by the music, Apollo trades the fifty cattle for the instrument and agrees to give certain honors to Hermes, including a herald's staff to mark his position as messenger of the gods. By his trickery and inventiveness, Hermes not only wins over the powerful Apollo, but charms his way into the Olympian company: And Hermes mingles now with all men and gods. (Hymn to Hermes 1.60-61) Hermes' musical talent also informs his trickery of Argus. When Hera was anxious to prevent Zeus from a liaison with Io, she set Argus, a hundred-eyed, ever-wakeful monster, to watch over her. To counter this, Zeus sent the wily Hermes to lull the monster to sleep. Hermes did this, according to Ovid, by a combination of tale telling and music: With this as invitation Mercury Talked like a metronome for hours; he piped, He hummed, each tune a soporific. (Metamorphoses, book 1.50) In addition to fooling gods and men, Hermes fathered a renowned mortal trickster, Autolycus, grandfather to yet another trickster figure, the great Odysseus. According to Ovid, Hermes fathered Autolycus on Chione by tricking both the girl and Apollo, who also lusted after her: In due time she gave birth to Autolycus A son of Mercury, wing-footed, as if bom With all his father's cleverness and speed, He made black look like white and white black. (Metamorphoses, book 11.308)
Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus
243
Autolycus went on to fame as a cattle thief. He later became great friends with another trickster, Sisyphus, who, according to one story, became the biological father of Odysseus by Autolycus's daughter. Certainly, Hermes reveled in trickery, never telling the truth if a lie would do and avoiding confrontation with powerful figures. His preference for trickery was passed on to his offspring, and it is tempting to believe that the colorful trickster Sisyphus is the true father of Hermes's great-grandson, the wily Odysseus. The last of the trickster figures is Prometheus. According to early myths, he is of divine birth, the son of a Titan, Iapetus, and one of the Oceanides. Other stories make him the son of Hera sired when she was raped by a giant. Prometheus has many affinities with the trickster Hephaestus: if Hera is truly his mother, he is Hephaestus's brother. He also shares Hephaestus's connection with fire. Moreover, like Hephaestus, he is a craftsman who shapes products from raw material by using fire. In some stories, particularly accounts of the birth of Athena, Prometheus takes Hephaestus's place. Certainly Prometheus suffers for his craft, having his liver eaten by a bird for ten thousand years. Hesiod's Theogony, book 1, leaves little doubt as to his nature, repeatedly calling him "the cunning trickster" and "cunning Prometheus." Hesiod goes on to tell how Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting the worst part of sacrificed animals, the fat and the bones, by hiding the best parts, the meat and organs, inside the unappetizing stomach. Thus humans were allowed the sustenance of meat and burned only the useless parts of the animal for the gods. However, Zeus was angered at the deception and in return withheld fire from humans. Ever the friend to humans, Prometheus arranged to steal the withheld fire: But the bold son of Iapetus tricked him again: he stole the radiant light of allconsumingfirein a hollow stalk. This bit deeper into the heart of Zeus the thundergod: he was enraged when he saw mankind enjoying the radiant light of fire. In return for the theft of fire he instantly produced a curse to plague mankind. (Theogony, book 9.69) Prometheus's concern for humans seems misplaced unless the reader remembers that in many stories Prometheus is the creator of humankind, forming them from the crude clay figures shaped by Zeus after one of the floods. (Because of this, he was particularly revered by the potters of Athens.) With Athena's help, he gives humans life and intelligence. But he ruins the relationship between gods and men by attempting to hug Athena, the touch-me-not virgin goddess. Humans also betray their teacher after he has lived among them teaching them to read, write, and use numbers; cultivate the land; and engage in other civilizing functions. It is mortals who tell Zeus who stole the sacred fire, a theft for which Prometheus and mortals will pay—mortals by accepting Pandora; Prometheus in another way. In addition to angering Zeus by the theft of fire and the worthless sacrifice,
244
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Prometheus compounds his errors by withholding valuable information about Zeus's future. For all these reasons, Prometheus is chained to a mountain and has his liver eaten daily by an eagle. Ironically, it is his counterpart Hephaestus who is charged with restraining him. Hephaestus recognizes their kinship in reluctantly carrying out the task in the prologue to Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound: I have not the heart to bind violently a God who is my kin here on this wintry cliff. Yet there is constraint upon me to have the heart for just that, for it is a dangerous thing to treat the Father's words lightly. (Prometheus Bound, 12-17) But he is urged on by his helper Might, who recognizes Prometheus's cunning: Hammer it more; put in the wedge; leave it loose nowhere. He's a cunning fellow atfindinga way out of even hopeless difficulties. (Prometheus Bound, 58-59). But even chained as he is, Prometheus still has a few aces up his sleeve. As he boasts to the chorus, he has foreknowledge about Zeus's future and intends to use this knowledge to free himself: He shall need me then, this president of the Blessed— to show the new plot whereby he may be spoiled Of his throne and his power. Then not with honeyed tongues Of persuasion shall he enchant me; he shall not cow me with his threats To tell him what I know, until he free me from my cruel chains and pay me recompense for what I suffer. (Prometheus Bound, 169-78) Throughout the play, Prometheus brags of his benevolence to humans and boasts of how he bested Zeus and how he alone holds the key to Zeus's future. He keeps up his defiance, knowing that he will be freed eventually by Zeus's own son Heracles. Thus even in his suffering, the trickster maintains the upper hand—he alone controls the fate of the king of the gods. CRITICAL RECEPTION Although these three tricksters have different characters as well as different roles in myth, they all revel in trickery and cunning. They are all creative, bringing forth marvelous inventions, including language, music, mathematics, agriculture, and many other boons to humans. All of their inventions are twosided and can be used for evil as well as good—language is used by demagogues as well as statesmen; mathematics allows the production of buildings, bridges,
Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus
245
and other necessities, but also the production of weapons. As tricksters, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Prometheus embody both good and evil, just like the humans they are often credited with creating. As such, they remain key figures, serving as metonyms, analogies, metaphors, and dynamic symbols throughout Western culture.
NOTE 1. The translations of classical Greek literature do not always correspond line for line with the Greek originals. Moreover, some editors divide a translation into books, sections, or acts as a convenience for readers even when such divisions do not occur in the original.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. David Grene. In Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960. Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Norman O. Brown. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. 1951. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. . The Odyssey. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. The Homeric Hymns. Trans. Charles Boer. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1970. Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Horace Gregory. New York: Mentor, 1958.
Secondary Source Hathom, Richmond Y. Greek Mythology. Beirut: American U of Beirut, 1977.
The Heyoka of the Sioux (American Great Plains: Pre-Columbian-Present)
Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson BACKGROUND The heyoka, or thunder dreamers, are found throughout the Sioux Indian nations of the American Great Plains. These sacred fools/clowns participated in vision quests in which they dreamed of the Thunder-beings. Such visions gave the individual (usually male) great power and an equally great fear of thunder and lightning. If the heyoka neglected his vision and the duty that came with it, he and/or his people would be struck down by the powerful Thunder-beings. The thunder dreamers were obliged to perform a heyoka ceremony for the benefit of the people. In this ceremony, the hey okas "played the role of Thunder's messengers, acting clownishly, doing all things backward, making themselves the objects of the peoples' laughter" (DeMallie 6). Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux and perhaps the best-known heyoka, details his role as heyoka in Black Elk Speaks. There he describes the rationale of the heyoka ceremony: "Everything is backwards, and it is planned that the people shall be made to feel jolly and happy first, so that it may be easier for the power to come to them" (Neihardt 159). The great truth of the heyoka's vision is bestowed on the people after they are made happy. This is the opposite of the order of a thunderstorm—the terror of the storm rolls through; then people are happy. The heyoka reverses all things to please the Thunder-beings. The contrariness of these Plains Indian clowns "is too widespread and too old to fix any center of origin or to work out definite lines of diffusion" (Steward 50). Such fools are also found in other Plains tribes, including the Cheyenne Contraries, Ponca Heyoka, Arikara Foolish People, and Arapaho Crazy Lodge.
The Heyoka of the Sioux
247
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The heyoka dress, act, and speak in contrary ways. Black Elk's description of his heyoka ceremony illustrates this. "We had our bodies painted red all over and streaked with black lightning. The right side of our heads were shaved, and the hair on the left side was left hanging long" (Neihardt 161). The meaning inherent in this odd hairstyle was that when the heyokas were facing south, the bare side was toward the west, the direction from which the Thunder-beings come, and it signified their humility in the face of such awesome power. Heyokas often dressed in the shabbiest of clothes or wore their clothes wrong side out or turned around. Another part of their contrary behavior consisted of shivering in the sun's heat or running around nearly naked in the depths of winter. They rode miserable old ponies and often mounted them backwards, wearing their boots backwards as well. Speech was also contrary. Heyokas will say "yes" when they mean "no" and sing all together instead of one at a time. These contrary actions had the effect of producing laughter among their people. ' Tn the process of getting a good laugh at the backwards-forwards, coldhot contraries, the people were opened to immediate experience'' (Tedlock and Tedlock 106). When heyokas performed in very solemn religious ceremonies, their antics caused the people to laugh at medicine men or holy men. This might appear to have weakened the cohesiveness of Sioux religion or community, but the opposite is true. Heyoka practices revitalized the people by showing them higher truths (Tedlock and Tedlock 109). When a Sioux man had a vision of the Thunder-beings, he was obligated to become a heyoka and perform the heyoka ceremony lest he be killed by lightning. "The heyoka ceremony centers on the ritual boiling of a dog; pieces of cooked meat are removed with bare hands by the heyoka dancers, and they splash boiling water about" (DeMallie 105n). The boiling-water trick is a staple of the heyoka's repertoire. "The heyoka dancers rubbed their hands and arms with a paste made by chewing red false mallow which prevented them from being scalded" (DeMallie 234n). The fullest account of a heyoka ceremony is retold in Black Elk Speaks. This ritual consisted of required components, interspersed with improvisation by the heyokas—foolish tricks to make the people laugh. Black Elk and his fellow heyokas carried long crooked bows and arrows. Heyokas often turned these upon themselves and would fall as if they were dead when they missed. The dog is killed without making any scars, "as lightning kills, for it is the power of the lightning that heyokas have" (Neihardt 160). The dog is then offered to the west and the Thunder-beings, and then to the other five directions. Sacred heyoka songs are sung. The heyokas dance and fight over the pieces of dog in the boiling water. "Then the meat was divided up among the people and this was like giving them medicine" (DeMallie 234). Black Elk describes the happy feelings of his village after the heyoka ceremony: ' They were better able now
248
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
to see the greenness of the world, the wideness of the sacred day, the colors of the earth, and to set these in their minds" (Neihardt 163). The life of a heyoka was often a difficult one. He was expected to wear old, torn clothing and live in a ragged tipi. ' The heyoka was often a lonely person— avoided and ridiculed by other people. Only the most able were revered and honored; many were sad and forlorn" (Hassrick 272). A heyoka used his power to save his people from death at the hands of the Thunder-beings, yet he received nothing in return save ridicule. A heyoka, a thunder dreamer, is given a vision with an ambivalent blessing. "Each vision carried with it handsome responsibilities, but none was tinged with the tragedy which the Thunder demanded" (Hassrick 277).
CRITICAL RECEPTION Anthropologists have studied the Native Americans and their clowns for decades. Short accounts of their appearance, ceremonies, and functions within certain tribes have been written as part of larger studies. For too long, however, Native American culture has generally been neglected. It is fashionable today to study these Native Americans and glean what information we can. Dissertations and books on clowns are available, but there are few on the bookshelves. Heyokas have been dealt with in various works in this century, but great critical attention has not been given to them. They are an integral part of Sioux society as clowns, healers, and holy men.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Source Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. New York: Washington Square, 1959.
Secondary Sources DeMallie, Raymond J., ed. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. DeMallie, Raymond J., and Douglas R. Parks, eds. Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Hassrick, Royal B. The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1964. Lowie, Robert H. Indians of the Plains. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1963. Sandoz, Mari. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961. . These Were the Sioux. New York: Dell, 1961.
The Heyoka of the Sioux
249
Steward, Julian Haynes. The Clown in Native North America. Ph.D. diss., U of California, 1929. New York: Garland, 1991. Tedlock, Dennis, and Barbara Tedlock, eds. Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy. New York: Liveright, 1975.
Clowns of the Hopi
(American Southwest: Pre-Columbian-Present)
Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson BACKGROUND The Pueblo people of the American Southwest are a group of distinct Native American nations who have "a well-developed clown system" (Wright 1). There are six separate linguistic groups represented in over thirty villages in New Mexico and Arizona. They include the Tiwan pueblos of Taos, Sandia, Picuris, and Isleta; the Tewa pueblos of Santa Clara, San Juan, San Ildefonso, Nambe, and Tesuque; the Keresan pueblos of Cochiti, Santo Domingo, Santa Ana, Zia, Acoma, and Laguna; the To wan pueblo of Jemez; the Zuni pueblo; and the Shoshonean Hopi (1-2). Each village has sacred clowns who perform in traditional ceremonies throughout the year. Roles differ depending on the pueblo and type of clown. Hopi clowns act as a catharsis for audiences during solemn ceremonies; they can also intensify that seriousness through their contrasting behavior. Clowns can divert the power of evil witches. Hopi clowns also target nonconformists in the village by mocking their conduct. Their mockery targets such issues within the village as marital problems, political struggles, land disputes, or occurrences in the surrounding Anglo communities. No one in the pueblo is immune to such ridicule. ' 'The result is that the clown is the ultimate keeper of tradition. . . . All of their humor, however, is designed to ridicule unseemly actions and to bring about uniformity of behavior by presenting life as it should not be lived" (Wright 3-4). The Hopi believe that the Underworld is the antithesis of this world (the Upper World). Seasons, beauty, everything is reversed there. Hopi clowns mirror
Clowns of the Hopi
251
the Underworld by reversing their speech and actions. For the Hopi, the word "kachina" may refer to three things: (1) spirits (good or evil) who influence pueblo life and are revered, (2) masked dancers who represent these spirits in pueblo ceremonies, and (3) wooden figures/dolls, handcarved by pueblo artisans, that represent both of these embodiments of kachinas. Hopi clowns, in their contrary manner, care for the kachinas' appearances as they dance, "and serve as interpreters between the two worlds" (Wright 4). There are four groups of Hopi clowns: the Tsukuwimkya; the Paiyakyamu (Kossa or Koshari); the Koyemsi; and the Piptuyakyamu. The first and last groups are native to the Hopi. The second and third groups are fusions of indigenous clowns (Hopi) and eastern pueblo clowns (Zuni and Tewa). The Tsukuwimkya and Paiyakyamu are sacred clowns; the Piptuyakyamu are secular; the Koyemsi fill several roles beyond clowning. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Identification and delineation for non-Hopis are difficult; similar names and appearances, and similarities to kachinas, add to the confusion. Barton Wright's Clowns of the Hopi is an invaluable resource for its clear, concise discussion of all types of clowns and of their appearance and function. He describes the following clown groups:
Tsukuwimkya The Tsukuwimkya are unmasked clowns who perform traditional routines during spring and summer plaza dances. This group is divided into several subdivisions, which include the Yellow Clowns, the Red-striped Yellow Clowns, the White Clowns, and the Hair Knot Clowns. However, their paraphernalia is basically the same: old kerchief around the neck, black yarn at wrists and knees, breechclout, small bag of cornmeal, bandoleer filled with journey food, mismatched shoes, and hoofs or horns on one leg as a rattle (Wright 13). The different types of Tsukuwimkya vary in body paint (colors, stripes), hair ornamentation (hair knots, cornhusks), and face paint (stripes, dots, colors). They enter the plaza from the rooftops and behave loudly and foolishly, provoking much laughter from the villagers. They harangue the graceful kachina dancers and perform skits that become more and more outrageous. Warrior kachinas threaten them into pleading for forgiveness. The Tsukuwimkya do atone by ' 'confessing'' to outlandish offenses, usually sexual in nature. They end their performance in an unusually serious manner by sprinkling cornmeal on the kachinas in traditional fashion.
Paiyakyamu (Kossa or Koshari) The Koshari is the most recognizable clown of the Hopi and the most frequently carved as kachinas. The Koshari is of Tewa, not Hopi, origin. The term
252
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
"Kossa" refers to "both the Kwirena, or Winter Clowns, and the Koshari, or Summer Clowns" (Wright 35). The Kossa are the fathers of the kachinas, "the purveyors of village mores, and the keepers of tradition" (35). The unmasked Koshari paint their bodies black with corn smut or soot and stripe themselves (horizontally) in broad white strokes. A black line encircles the eyes and continues to the temple; a similar black line around the mouth continues across the jaw to the ear. The most recognizable feature of this costume is the tall horns worn on the clown's head. "The horns are of untanned sheepskin stuffed with a heavy grass and tassled at the tips with crinkled cornhusk strips" (Wright 40). These, too, are black-and-white striped. The Koshari also wear worn moccasins, breechclouts, and rattles and carry bandoleers. Like the Tsutskutu, the Koshari perform only at spring and summer dances. These clowns are also known as the Hano Gluttons for their gluttonous behavior when fed by villagers. They amuse the people by showing how life should not be lived. One of their favorite skits ' 'involves tying an equal number of Koshari together by their penises and then proclaiming a tug of war" (Wright 44). The Koshari also partake in improbable, humorous curing ceremonies or hop on one leg around the plaza. Koyemsi The Koyemsi is better known as the Mudhead. His proper Hopi name is Tachukti or Tatsi'oktu, which means "Ball on the Head." The term "Mudhead' ' is a kind of misnomer—early traders believed that these clowns had balls of mud stuck on their heads, and the masks were mud colored. The Mudheads look comical, and they are clowns, but they are much more to the Hopi. A Koyemsi can be "a curer, a magician, a dance director, a warrior, a messenger, a sage, or a fool" (Wright 68). The Koyemsi are not kachinas, but they are their assistants and must live apart from the worlds of both kachinas and men. Koyemsi intercede between kachinas and humans. They are announcers and translators and often give information in a contrary manner. While they often inject humor into the most solemn ceremonies, the Koyemsi "pause and deliver a serious harangue in the midst of their tomfoolery, for they are spokesmen for spiritual rules and values" (Wright 72). The original Hopi Koyemsi (Tachukti) wore kerchiefs around their necks and aprons that left the buttocks exposed. The mask was a tan color with white eyes ringed in black, and on the forehead and cheeks were marks referred to as ' 'bean sprouts." "The head. . . was decorated with only three nodules, one at either side above where the ears would normally be and the other at the rear of the head" (Wright 78). A fourth ball was occasionally added to the forehead. Those Hopi Koyemsi adopted from the Zuni changed in appearance so much that many varieties of Koyemsi developed among the Hopi. They differ in costume and function, and some are not considered clowns. The Starter Mudhead (Kuikuinaka Koyemsi), for example, is not a clown. He begins the kachinas'
Clowns of the Hopi
253
songs (hence his name) and dances with them. The Kipok Koyemsi, or Warrior Mudhead, is a fighter, not a clown. Piptuyakyamu The Piptuyakyamu are nonsacred and "do not follow a prescribed routine when they come nor do they have a traditional appearance, other than a tendency to whiten their bodies and faces" (Wright 100). Costumes vary with the skit being performed and usually caricature whatever person or group is being satirized. The Piptuyakyamu usually accomplish this satire in the most obscene fashion possible. Some of the lampooned groups include Navajos, white schoolteachers, white storekeepers, Plains Indians, and Anglo photographers. These buffoons dress accordingly, exaggerating actions for a humorous effect. The short skits are usually based on some current incident affecting the pueblo and involve the use of clowns as "straight men." CRITICAL RECEPTION Noted anthropologists such as Elsie Clews Parsons, J. Walter Fewkes, and Adolph Bandelier did early studies of the Pueblo Indians and took note of their clown societies. These Anglos, however, were often horrified by the obscene and vulgar displays inherent in clowning at some pueblos. The number and variety of clown kachina dolls carved by Pueblo Indians demonstrate growing public interest in this subject. These dolls represent all types of Pueblo clowns and can be found in gift shops and museum collections throughout the country. The beauty and intricate detail of these clown kachina dolls, and the history behind them, help give Hopi clowns importance and attention not only in Pueblo culture, but now in Anglo society as well. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Bandelier, Adolph F. A. The Delight Makers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1890. Hieb, Louis Albert. "The Hopi Ritual Clown: Life As It Should Not Be." Ph.D. diss, Princeton U, 1972. Ortiz, Alfonso, ed. Handbook of Native American Indians. (Vol. 9). Southwest. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1979. Steward, Julian Haynes. The Clown in Native North America. Ph.D. diss., U of California, 1929. New York: Garland, 1991. Tedlock, Dennis, and Barbara Tedlock. Teaching from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy. New York: Liveright, 1975. Wright, Barton. Clowns of the Hopi: Tradition Keepers and Delight Makers. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland, 1994.
Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson (England: 1572-1637)
Elizabeth Quay Sullivan BACKGROUND Ben Jonson was born in London or its environs in 1572 to a widowed mother; his father (who had become a minister after his lands were confiscated by Queen Mary) died a month before his birth. His mother remarried a master bricklayer who apprenticed Ben to the craft in 1589 after he had graduated from the Westminster School. To avoid the boredom of bricklaying, he escaped to enlist in the Flanders War, where he apparently killed a man in hand-to-hand combat. Upon his return, he became an actor and then an apprentice playwright. He married in 1595 to a wife who bore him three children. None of them survived him, and he and his wife later separated. The Isle of Dogs, written with Thomas Nashe, his first play (now lost), was produced in the summer of 1597. It was so controversial that he and Nashe were imprisoned, not to be released until October. He worked for Philip Henslowe, producing A Tale of a Tub and The Case Is Altered in 1597-1598, and other pieces of unknown name. In 1598 Everyman in His Humour was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Company and secured his reputation, but in the same year he killed a man in a duel and was imprisoned, this time being released by pleading benefit of clergy. He converted to Roman Catholicism while incarcerated. He continued to poke fun at contemporaries, ridiculing John Marston and Thomas Dekker successively in Everyman out of His Humour (1599) and Cynthia's Revels (1600). The years 1599-1601 marked the "war of the theaters" between the select playhouses in London and the public playhouses at Bankside; Jonson contributed "comical satires" to the public theater. With the accession to the throne of James I in
Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson
255
1603 began the era of masques and court entertainments that were to sustain Jonson's career in his later years. In 1605 Jonson chose to go to prison with his collaborators on the comedy Eastward Ho, critical of the Scots; influential friends saw to their release. The composition and performance of several major plays ensued, including Volpone in 1606, Epicoene in 1609, The Alchemist in 1610, and Bartholomew Fair in 1614. Persecution continued during these years, for Jonson and his wife, both Catholics, were ordered to appear in court in 1606 for failing to take communion in the Church of England. In 1616 Jonson published his collected plays in a folio volume, The Works of Ben Jonson, the first such collection in the history of English printing. Relative prosperity allowed him a trip to Scotland in 1618, where he visited William Drummond of Hawthornden, who recorded some conversations with him that were published in 1711 (abridged) and in 1833 in their entirety. His library burned in 1623, and in the same year he contributed commendatory verses to the First Folio edition of Shakespeare. For roughly the next decade, he wrote masques and entertainments, quarreling on and off with the court architect, Inigo Jones. Though in 1628 he became paralyzed, he continued to act as mentor to younger writers, who called themselves "the Sons of Ben." In 1637 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey; the epitaph "O Rare Ben Jonson," inscribed on a flagstone, has been stolen. Critics of Ben Jonson's plays all agree that they are informed by a moral and aesthetic structure. Some attribute the structure to the influence of classical Greek and Roman authors, and others emphasize philosophical and religious commonplaces of medieval and Elizabethan England, like the ordering of the universe in the hierarchical great chain of being. Harry Levin sees Jonson's allegiance to classical thinkers, especially those of the Roman Silver Age, like Martial and Tacitus, as a function of the disillusionment with the exuberant wealth getting of the Renaissance that occurred in the "last decade of Elizabeth's reign," where "we can watch the sentiment of expectation change to a sense of wariness, depression, and disillusionment" (46). This was an age that encouraged satire and the polarization of tragedy and comedy: "If tragedy can scoff, comedy can scorn" (Levin 46). Levin suggests that Jonson is so concerned with justice that he tries to "regulate his comic satires by a more rigorous ethic than life itself ever provides," and that Jonsonian comedies move "in the direction of an arraignment" (48). In all the plays, as T. S. Eliot has prompted, Jonson is to be appreciated "in the design of the whole" (128). This design is the highly patterned conflict between the gulls or fool victims and the smarter and more inventive knaves within the moral and aesthetic context based on classical, Christian, and contemporary influences that inform each play. This is clearly demonstrated in Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair.
256
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Northrop Frye discusses the types of characters of comic action in his Anatomy of Criticism, dividing them into two kinds, the eiron and the alazon (175176); Jonas Barish's categories of creative mimic and butt closely correspond. The eiron usually benefits from, even controls, the comic action. He or she is the one who speaks asides to the audience and makes fun of other characters on stage. In this class Frye includes heroes and heroines; the dolosus servus, or tricky slave, who usurps power when the master is away; such characters as Shakespeare's Puck and Ariel, who represent the comic spirit; the usually harmless comic villain or vice; and the master who is generally sympathetic to comic action, like Love wit in The Alchemist and Prospero in The Tempest. Frye notes that the vice figure is especially useful to the comic dramatist because he acts from his own propensity for roguish play, thus saving the trouble of inventing motives for him. Clearly the trickster fool may be categorized within any of the four latter groups. The alazon class includes characters who usually do not benefit from and are opposed to comic action. This includes the fool victim or the butt. Whereas the eiron makes fun in asides, the alazon "complacently soliloquizes." These humorous blocking characters of comedy, says Frye, "are nearly always impostors, though it is more frequently a lack of self-knowledge than simple hypocrisy that characterizes them." One of the most central alazon figures is the senex iratus or heavy father, who, with his rages and threats, his obsessions, and his gullibility, seems closely related to some of the demonic characters of romance, such as Polyphemus (172). Others within the alazon class include the miles gloriosus (braggart soldier), the pedant, the fop, the coxcomb, and other narrowly onedimensional humor characters. Jonson's knaves and fools, actors in ironic comedies, can be ranked in a long continuum descending from those who plot and disguise very cleverly down to those who are most easily gulled. The former, the witty and successful disguiser, in Jonson's plays has his origin in the tricky-servant plays of Plautus and other classical dramatists as well as in the Vice figure of the medieval morality plays. Often within the course of the plot, the roles of seemingly clever eiron and gullible alazon are reversed. Many times Puritans rank at the top of the chain of fools, scorning any disguise at all, while would-be mimics who are inventers of poor, cumbersome disguises fall into the gull category (Sullivan 107). Just such a gull appears in Epicoene. Morose, the senex iratus, has threatened to disinherit his nephew Dauphine, who cleverly counterplots to regain the inheritance. As an alazon figure with an absurd sensitivity to noise, Morose, the fool victim or butt, has characteristics in common with the so-called humor character, driven by one emotion or humor, and with refusers of festivity like Shakespeare's Jaques and Malvolio, and Surly in The Alchemist. While Morose's only ostensible target is his nephew, it is soon apparent that Dauphine and Dauphine's companions represent the whole disguise world of the play and, as
Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson
257
one critic has suggested, humanity in general (Barish, Language 183). Morose is not consciously a disguiser, and we do not expect him to be—his character is of the rigid, inflexible sort that disguises neither comfortably nor easily, if at all. But the way he pours all of his energies into the making of his silent world recalls makers of elaborate bad disguises like Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone, whose tortoise disguise is notorious. Morose, like Sir Politic, sets himself up for his undoing by his "own device"—a variation on a clown's cap, "a huge turbant of nightcaps on his head, buckled over his eares" (1.1.143-145). One of the obvious limitations of such a garb, which Morose wears throughout most of the play, is that it prevents him from hearing even an inkling of the plot against him. Because he cuts himself off from knowledge of the world of the play, he lets the other characters embroil him further in their plot. The maker of cumbersome disguises puts himself in a trap that denies him either the knowledge or mobility to respond to the play world. In Morose, a single-minded humor, of which most ordinary gulls are victims, achieves immense proportions and prevents adequate knowledge of the motives and designs of others, the context in which Morose must function. In Epicoene, Dauphine, the inventer of the silent-woman disguise, is the eiron character who creates the dramatic context that dupes Morose. Yet he has Truewit do the work for all the other deceptions and thus keeps himself removed from the action of the play: he, unlike Volpone and the rogues in The Alchemist, is not the wearer of the disguises he invents, and therefore his disguises do not reflect back upon him to satirize him. In a variation on the conventional androgyny of the fool, the trickster Dauphine invents Epicoene (played by a boy actor), a boy disguised first as a silent woman and then as a noisy woman. Since we the audience, like the gull Morose, are tricked until the end of the play into believing that the "lady" Epicoene is actually a woman, relationships do not become satirically important until then. At the beginning of the play we assume that a child actor, a boy, is playing a talkative woman, who is temporarily pretending to be silent. The childlike physical appearance of the actor is important because it suggests an innocence that contrasts the sophistication of Dauphine's trick on his uncle, Morose, and the corrupt life of the court within the play. The play's emphasis is not, as one modern critic, Richmond Barbour, has suggested, on the erotic potential of boys acting as women (1006-1022), but on this satiric stab. That the silent woman turns out to be noisy, and then yet again turns out to be a boy, furthers the play's satire on the deceptiveness of appearances at court, where one has to question what lurks beneath makeup and fashionable dress and discourse, where one need only be peruked, powdered, and perfumed to be considered a woman. The eiron role played by Dauphine in Epicoene is taken up in The Alchemist by Subtle and Face. They represent an unusual refinement of the eiron type. Unlike Dauphine, who has an identity as a potentially dispossessed heir, these two are completely dependent on their disguises for their identities. They are closer to the relatively motiveless vice or trickster figure than Dauphine, though
258
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
like him they have a larger view of the play world that helps prevent them from being the dupes of others. Their progress through the play suggests that the vice figure and his descendants are not, as Frye suggests, just generic conveniences that save the dramatist the trouble of inventing motives (171-175); rather, the lack of motivation convinces us that the vice or eiron figure is wholly detached and therefore able to concentrate his full energies on disguise and invention. These rogues have initial identities so tenuous that each claims to have invented the other out of almost nothing (with obvious self-satire on the title and theme of the play). Face first insults Subtle, telling him that he found him absurdly impoverished, "Taking [his] meal of steam in from cookes stalls," starving and pockmarked (1.1.25-31); Subtle counters: "Thou vermine, have I tane thee, out of dung / So poore, so wretched, when no living thing / Would keepe thee company, but a spider, or worse?" (1.1.64-66). As Subtle continues, he lards his speech with terms of alchemy that Jonson underlines, turning the speakers into the butts of their own humor. Their ambiguous initial identities, typical of fools, which their names, "Subtle" and "Face," underscore, extend the double role of the traditional comic usurping servant to a triple role: Initially they are nothing, then they are servants, and then they are usurping servants. Subtle and Face then don a succession of roles until they have invented more disguises than their slight bodies can assume in the ever-thickening plot. Since fools straddle the edge of reality and fantasy, the multiplication of characters' roles calls into question whether these characters have any substance at all apart from their disguise roles. Subtle and Face are eventually made gulls by their own overingenious capacity for invention, but not before they have duped a succession of less witty characters into thinking that their alchemical work is real and that they have a real stake in it. These gulls are single-minded characters who have minimal imaginations and some burning but questionable ambition prompting their desire for the services of Face and Subtle. The lawyer's clerk Dapper, for example, wants to improve his luck at gambling. Drugger wants to know how he can set up his shop "by necromancy" so that it will prosper. Kastril, the angry boy, wants to learn how to fight so that he can be paid to fight duels for others. Epicure Mammon, knight and voluptuary, perhaps the greatest fool in this play, seeks the "philosopher's stone," which he hopes will bring not only wealth but renewed youth. He touts the virtues of this stone to the doubtful Surly. Mammon, who undergoes something very like a religious conversion when the alchemical works explode, is a close foil in the play to the Puritans, Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias. Like Volpone, this play is an indictment of greed, but the denouement and punishments allotted the witty offenders are mild; the worst, given to Abel Drugger, is a beating (5.5.121). Lovewit disposes the justice, but Face gives the last speech, saying, "My part fell in this last scene / Yet 'twas decorum" (5.5.158-159), reminding the audience at once of his tenuous hold on identity— if his face falls, what is left?—and that it has all been a play and for fun. The
Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson
259
reality of fools is, after all, dubious. He then offers to have a feast for the audience using the ill-gotten gains, or "pelf," to pay for it. Bartholomew Fair is likewise gentle toned and even better illustrates the range of characters along the continuum of eiron to alazon, including the absolute gull, Cokes, the quintessential puritan, Rabbi Busy, and a nicely modified senex iratus or alazon in Justice Overdo. Dominating all, however, is the formidable Ursula, keeper of the pig booth, which Overdo dubs "the very womb and bed of enormity" (2.2.101). Bartholomew Cokes's height gives him the fool's idiosyncratic physical appearance and makes his gullibility conspicuous, so much so that he is the only apparent example in Jonson of the unaspiring gull; thus he does not fit Barish's definition of a gull as one who disguises to flatter his ambition. He thinks of himself as a grown man, but, as the fool, he often behaves like a mentally limited child. Somewhat like a natural fool, Cokes is wholly complacent, never attempting disguise nor recognizing the importance of artifice in any of his dealings. He plans to marry Grace, who derides him throughout the play, but fools rarely follow through in love or lust, and he never woos her. It is probably no accident that Cokes is an aristocrat. His lack of powers of invention is related to his naivete as an audience. To him the fair and the puppet show that occurs at the end of the play are episodic series of wonders. He has no idea that one of his experiences might be related to another, or that the scenes of the puppet show might have a pattern. What he cannot understand, Cokes tries to appropriate. With a love of ownership characteristic of aristocrats, he remarks that Bartholomew Fair is really his fair because he shares his given name with it (his last name means gull). By reckless spending and allowing his pockets to be picked, he is soon parted from most of his money and finally from his cloak, hat, and sword as he scrambles to pick up pears from the costermonger (4.2). Yet because Cokes understands neither himself nor his fellow sojourners at the fair, he simplemindedly attributes all his misfortunes to bad luck. While Cokes does not disguise or dissemble because he cannot, Puritans represent calculated opposition to the comic disguise world of the play. They are the targets of the play's foolery, with their moral and ethical pretentiousness, and have the top place in Jonson's hierarchy of gulls, a dubious distinction. Puritans pretend to be perfect, or at least better than all their fellows. They channel all their mental energies into maintaining this pretense, flaunting virtue at the cost of logic and truth. Self-righteously they shun any reliance on their own devices and reject worldly knowledge that would allow them to be successful mimics and therefore successful movers. Rabbi Busy's prescription for the righteous life in Bartholomew Fair appears to leave him little recourse except to be gulled:
So, walk on in the middle way, fore-right Turn neither to the right hand nor to the left.
260
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History Let not your eyes be drawn aside with vanity, Nor your ear with noises. (3.2.27-29)
Somewhat recollective of Morose, Busy consciously incapacitates two of his five senses. The knowledge that Puritans deny themselves, or pretend to deny themselves, includes not only knowledge of the present world of the play, but knowledge of the past. "I hate traditions/ I do not trust them—," exclaims Ananias in The Alchemist (3.2.108). Similarly, Bartholomew Fair's Quarlous tells us of Rabbi Busy: By his profession he will ever be i' the state of innocence, though, and childhood; derides all antiquity; defies any other learning than inspiration; and what discretion soever years should afford him, it is all prevented in his original ignorance. Ha'not to do with him; for he is a fellow of a most arrogant and invincible dullness, I assure you. (1.4.132-137) Busy's decisions are based on inspiration after inspiration. When Quarlous last saw him, Busy was a baker, specializing in such profane feasts as "bridals, maypoles and morrises" (1.3.113-114). Suddenly and for no other apparent reason, inspiration moves him to become a Puritan and, toward the end of the play, an avid theatergoer (5.5.104-105). Jonson also implies that the Puritan's extravagant pretense of perfection masks the extravagant lusts of the profligate. Puritans appear to put much stock in principles and maxims, yet they are quick to rationalize deviations from such principles when they appear to be unworkable or inconvenient, as when Busy decides that it is all right to eat pork (1.6.6374). One thing that Puritans are always quick to rationalize and accept is punishment. Puritans do not consider their misfortunes something they could have avoided through their wits, nor, like Cokes, do they attribute them to bad luck. To the Puritan, suffering is part of a divine plan, or at least he pretends to think so. Busy therefore "rejoiceth in his affliction" (4.6.79) when confined to the stocks and considers it a "miracle" when he is rescued (4.6.154). The somewhat lesser wits who are rogues in Bartholomew Fair all socialize in the booth of Ursula, the pig woman, a female fool figure somewhat akin to Falstaff in appearance and outlook. Among these rogues are Lantern Leatherhead, a hobbyhorse seller, Joan Trash, a gingerbread woman, Ezekiel Edgworth, the cutpurse, Nightingale, a ballad singer who diverts people so Edgworth can steal their purses, Mooncalf, the tapster, Jordan Knockem, a horse courser, Val Cutting, a roarer, and Captain Whit and Punk Alice, a pimp and prostitute. Successful in their tricks and scams, they gain cover for their deceptions from Ursula and her booth. The spiritual, or carnal, center of the fair, she says:
Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson
261
I am all fire and fat, Nightingale; I shall e'en melt away to thefirstwoman, a rib again, I am afraid. I do water the ground in knots as I go, like a great garden pot; you may follow me by the S's I make. (2.2.46-51) Ursula makes herself appear like one of the pigs that she roasts. Her fat at first appears to be her fool's costume, a superficial covering that when stripped away will reveal her essential self, "the first woman," or, further reduced, a rib. But this metaphor of rendering actually makes her fat, like the fool's motley or Vice's coat, essential. Functioning as a disguise, the flesh is in a sense hiding a rib, but the flesh and fat, as disguises also do, reveal her: She is "all fire and fat." Because the melting of fat also hints at a movement backwards in time, her fat, really her essence, appears the accumulation of centuries. This traditional flesh, as it sweats (or urinates), fertilizes the ground in great winding knots. She is the play's catalyst for creativity, Jonson's symbol of the union of flesh and tradition that serves as a clever and effective answer to the Puritans. She is a striking opposite to the foolish gull Busy with his straight, unknowing path and his renunciation of tradition and flesh. Just as Jonson manipulates the relationship between the characters and the foolery of their disguises, he controls the initial outside world of the play and the often subversive magical disguise world at its center. Frye compares this satirical, even cynical middle world in Jonson's plays to the romantic and pastoral one in Shakespeare's comedies (177-185). Jonson's disguise worlds, though not wholly like Shakespeare's green world, since they are peopled by greater numbers of fools, are equally focused upon discerning and rediscovering positive values so that an enlightened order can be restored. The three plays under consideration differ decidedly, however, in the spirit of disguise and in the tone of and relationship between the two worlds. In all the comedies the characters dig their own holes—ranging from mild censure to very real hell. Such consequences are appropriate because these are satires, a fact that some recent critics seem to ignore. Haslem, for instance, complains that Jonson highlights conventional humiliation of the female body; Roland-Leone that he contributes to ignorance about women's bodies. Do we care if women, like Bartholomew Fair's highly stylized Ursula the pig woman, are portrayed as fat, sweating, promiscuous, and incontinent if most of the male characters, ranging from Bartholomew Cokes, the brainless aristocrat, to lowlevel swindlers like Edgworth and Nightingale, are no prettier, no better morally, and a lot less powerful on stage? For Jonson, presenting attractive female characters is far less important than encouraging audience disdain for polyglot characters. He must oppose the vice and chaos that he chronicles. Thus in order to satirize Puritans, he makes his chief Puritan character in Bartholomew Fair a. rabbi, obviously because Jews were fair game while Christians could not be criticized. Whereas vices and human error are the stuff that gets plays going, in life their triumph is all too common. Thus it is especially important in art not merely to identify such vices precisely, but to control them. Jonson's fools are
262
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
essential to such identification, and his plots, so-called arraignments, are carefully designed to respond to the specific type, tone, and magnitude of the offenses in each play. CRITICAL RECEPTION Jonas Barish writes of Jonson, "Probably no major author in English has suffered such a catastrophic decline in popularity since his own day as Ben Jonson. Certainly none has been so punished for the crime of not being Shakespeare" (Critical Essays 1). He points out that seventeenth-century critics like Dryden tended to rank the two dramatists equally as giants of their era, but by the end of the century the ' 'luckless Jonson'' had been ' 'yoked to Shakespeare in an odious tandem." Some late-eighteenth-century critics merely misread the prologue to Everyman in His Humour as a mean-spirited indictment of Shakespeare. Another, the Scotsman Robert Shiells, forged his own detractions of Jonson into Jonson's Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden when he reprinted them in 1753 as part of Cibber's Lives of the Poets (Critical Essays 3). The Shakespearean actor Macklin presented Jonson as "insatiable in his malice against Shakespeare," and once in print, the calumny was almost impossible to eradicate (Boswell I, 403). Shakespeare had become a Christ figure, and Jonson his Judas. The poet and editor of the Quarterly Review, William Gifford, attempted a thoroughgoing review of the charges against Jonson and exonerated him from most of the personal attacks, but unfavorable reviews of his works with their humor and fool characters continued by both English and German romantics. T. E. Hulme's 1914 essay on classicism and romanticism, though it does not mention Jonson directly, is credited by Barish with initiating revisionist views of classical writers in the postromantic period (Barish, Critical Essays 9), and above all, T. S. Eliot's two reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the Atheneum, later combined into one essay and printed in The Sacred Wood, rescued Jonson from the indictments of romantic critics by insisting that the "design of the whole" be considered when reading Ben Jonson (9). Added to Eliot's efforts were those of C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, whose Complete Works of Ben Jonson in eleven volumes was published between 1925 and 1952 and reprinted by Oxford in 1986. The first volume contains an unbiased biographical sketch (though Barish sees Herford's judgments of the works as somewhat biased by nineteenth-century presuppositions about drama). Noting T. S. Eliot's observation that Jonson's appeal is mainly to the intellect and not therefore widely popular, Barish goes on to assess the commentary of Edmund Wilson, Jonson's most famous modern detractor, who compares him unfavorably to Shakespeare, and who, after unleashing Freudian theory wholesale to call him an anal-retentive personality, grudgingly attributes the success of plays like The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair to conflicting aesthetic achievements: The Alchemist is well unified and Bartholomew Fair is his "least
Knaves and Fools in Ben Jonson
263
strained and inhibited" (Critical Essays 71). Recent critical interest in Jonson has been high, and his plays are still being produced and well received in theaters worldwide.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Adams, Robert M., ed. Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques. New York: Norton, 1979. Herford, C. H., Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson. Ben Jonson: The Man and His Work. 11 vols. 1925-1952. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Keman, Alvin B., ed. The Yale Ben Jonson. New Haven: Yale UP, 1962- .
Secondary Sources Aggeler, Geoffrey. "Ben Jonson's Justice Overdo and Joseph Hall's Good Magistrate." English Studies 76 (September 1995): 434-442. Barbour, Richmond. "When I Acted Young Antinous": Boy Actors and the Erotics of the Jonsonian Theater." PMLA 110 (October 1995): 1006-1022. Barish, Jonas A. Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960. , ed. Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1963. Bednarz, James P. "Representing Jonson: Histriomastix and the Origin of the Poets' War." Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (Winter 1991): 1-30. Boswell, James. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespare. London: n.p., 1821. Butler, Martin. "Ecclesiastical Censorship of Early Stuart Drama: The Case of Jonson's The Magnetic Lady." Modern Philology 89 (May 1992): 469-481. Carrithers, Gale H. "City-Comedy's Sardonic Hierarchy of Literacy." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29 (Spring 1989): 337-355. Crockett, Bryan. "Cicero, Ben Jonson, and the Puritans." Classical and Modern Literature 15 (Summer 1995): 375-376. Davidson, Clifford. "Judgment, Iconoclasm, and Anti-theatricalism in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair." Papers on Language and Literature 25 (Fall 1989): 349-363. Eliot, T. S. "Ben Jonson." In Selected Essays. New ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960. 127-139. Evans, Robert C. "Jonson and the Emblematic Tradition: Ralegh, Brant, the Poems, The Alchemist, and Volpone." Comparative Drama 29 (Spring 1995): 108-132. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1967. Haslem, Lori Schroeder. " 'Troubled with the Mother': Longings, Purgings, and the Maternal Body in Bartholomew Fair and The Duchess of Malfi." Modern Philology 92 (May 1995): 438-459. Haynes, Jonathan. "Representing the Underworld: The Alchemist." Studies in Philology 86 (Winter 1989): 18-41. Knights, L. C. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937.
264
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Lanier, Douglas. "Masculine Silence: Epicoene and Jonsonian Stylistics." College Literature 21 (June 1994): 1-18. Levin, Harry. "An Introduction to Ben Jonson." In Selected Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Harry Levin. New York: Random House, 1938. Reprinted and abridged in Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jonas Barish. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 40-59. Lyons, Charles R. "Silent Women and Shrews: Eroticism and Convention in Epicoene and Measure for Measure." Comparative Drama 23 (Summer 1989): 123-140. Mirabelli, Philip. "Silence, Wit, and Wisdom in The Silent Woman." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29 (Spring 1989): 309-336. Pinciss, G. M. "Bartholomew Fair and Jonsonian Tolerance." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 35 (Spring 1995): 345-359. Roland-Leone, Erin. "Jonson's Vessels Runneth Over: A Look at the Ladies of Bartholomew Fair." English Language Notes 33 (September 1995): 12-14. Sullivan, Elizabeth Quay. "Functions of Disguise in Ben Jonson's Comedies." Doctoral dissertation essay, Rutgers University, 1975: 92-189.
Buster Keaton (United States: 1895-1966)
Alan Lutkus BACKGROUND Son of Myra and Joseph, Sr., Joseph Frank Keaton, Jr., performed in stage, film, circus, and television; he also directed, produced, and wrote films. After gaining vaudeville stardom in the family act, "Three Keatons" (1900-1917), serving a film apprenticeship with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1917-1919), and appearing in his own nineteen comedy shorts (1920-1923) and four features, Keaton became a film star in The Navigator in 1924, third in popularity after Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd (Brownlow and Gill 1; Dardis 128). Keaton starred in six more independent features, one of which, The General, is among the American Film Institute's 1977 five best silent films. Between 1928 and 1933 Keaton starred in nine films at MGM, but personal and artistic difficulties severed his MGM tie. Although Keaton's career did not fail with the coming of film sound, and all his talkies were financial successes (Dardis 230), he was a single star after this only in three foreign films. However, his popularity returned modestly with his rediscovery in the 1950s. Three artistic traditions inform film-clown Keaton: the Christian fool, France's nineteenth-century victim Pierrot (Towsen 79, 82), and the physically versatile eighteenth-century British Harlequin (Billington 89). He is the "holy fool" (Moews 279) whose "Zen-like acceptance" (Wead and Lellis 11) trusts "regular behavior of forces greater than he" (Kerr 150). During a tornado in Steamboat Billy Jr., Keaton remains passive when a wall inexorably falls to crush him, but this is a salvific passivity since he is standing where the only open window lands around him, leaving him the small holy place that saves him. He is a
266
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
version of flour-dusted melancholy Pierrot. Critics often find his victimized, white-faced character sad (McCaffrey 84; Kerr 149; Moews 10), as in Day Dreams, where Keaton is perpetually pummelled and finally botches his filmending suicide. Finally, he is the adept Harlequin who escapes through clever stunts, a stage antecedent ignored by most film commentators despite their awe for "winged Buster" (Kerr 213) with his "agility and daring" (Robinson 61; see also McCaffrey 86; Lebel 32; Moews 34). In Sherlock, Jr. Buster eludes villains by leaping out a window and donning women's clothes in midair in view of the audience but not the baffled villains, who are then confronted by a street scene of one solitary old woman. Gerald Mast (131) is effusive about this gag, rhetorically questioning if anyone else could elude his foes "in such an incredible way and with such an incredible means to an incredible disguise"; but Mast's query illustrates film critics' innocence of Harlequin and the nineteenth-century Harlequin-tradition pantomimist James Powers, inventor of the stunt's elements (Towsen 145-146). Keaton's awareness of such traditions probably stems from his father, Keaton's only acknowledged influence apart from Arbuckle (Brownlow and Gill 2). Joe, Sr., receives direct credit for one stunt, the jump in Sherlock, Jr. through an associate's stomach (Brownlow and Gill) that in fact elaborates a Harlequin "vampire trap" escape (Towsen 143-145). Keaton's overall physicality certainly comes from his father's lessons in vaudeville stage knockabout (Keaton 12). Keaton as Pierrot replicates his usual "Three Keatons" role: "kick him in the face . . . throw him through a piece of scenery" (Dardis 14). Additionally, Keaton as holy fool perhaps begins in Joe, Sr.,'s press-agentry for his son—as a baby he supposedly flew safely across town in a tornado, a myth now dispelled (Meade 19, 385). Keaton, however, embellished a providentially protected infancy with a Harlequin tutelary genius; he credits his nickname "Buster" to magician and escape artist Harry Houdini because Keaton supposedly survived a staircase fall as a toddler—another myth (Meade 101). Other influences were Arbuckle, Keaton's first marriage, and opposition to urban turn-of-the-century comedy. With Arbuckle, Keaton became fascinated by film technique (Blesh 88), and this affected both his later directorial cinematic illusions, such as having nine interacting Busters simultaneously on frame in The Playhouse, and his complementary rejection of technical tricks—"No faking!"—for physical comedy (Blesh 127-128). Sherlock, Jr.'s Buster scampers over moving boxcars and then jumps to a waterspout that gushes him to the ground, all in a single forty-second long shot. Here Keaton was a decades-early precursor of film realism and a directorial contrast with Chaplin, who favored cutting to close-ups, partly for their sentimental resonance (MacCann 147). Keaton's disastrous marriage to Natalie Talmadge, of Talmadge Hollywood aristocracy, arguably contributed to Keaton's films the presence of heroines unlike Chaplin's and Lloyd's innocents, as well as a Keatonian interest in class distinctions. Aside from Sherlock, Jr.'s resourceful heroine, Keaton's were normally stupid and were therefore punished (McCaffrey 102). In The General,
Buster Keaton
267
Annabelle Lee confuses a locomotive's hotbox; consequently, she is smashed about at a watertank. Working-class Busters in 1921-1922's shorts aspire to aristocratic women, sometimes succeeding (Blacksmith), sometimes failing (Day Dreams, Cops), but compromising Jean-Pierre Coursodon's description of Keaton's "univers sans classes" (323-326), which is valid only for pre-Natalie marriage/courtship films (One Week, Neighbors). Coursodon, however, accurately reads Keaton himself as classless, capable from his 1920s Saphead role of aristocratic as well as proletarian status, making his well-remembered working man's vest and porkpie hat only semi-iconic. Keaton early met resistance to his "anarchistic comedy," the loosely structured violent doings of Keystone Kop films, early comic strips, and vaudeville (Jenkins 5). The knockabout family act often battled the Gerry Society, which was concerned for young Keaton's safety (Meade 30-31). Such well-meaning moral antipathy later allied with Hollywood finance, personified in Keaton producer and backer Joseph Schenck, who was concerned for larger audiences. But Schenck gradually restricted Keaton's independence (Dardis 122-148), finally closing Keaton's studio and suggesting the move to MGM, where he lost all creative control. It was the "worst mistake of my life," Keaton wrote (199). In the process, Keaton changed; vaudeville's "Human Mop" was transformed into a staid classics professor by 1930 in Free and Easy. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Keaton's two comic icons were his kinetically charged body and—or versus—the "Great Stone Face," his Hollywood nickname (Keaton 11). In starring roles that face smiled only once, when Keaton was forced into a distended parody of mirth in Go West. The source and meaning of that icon are debated. Marion Meade (32-36, 71) and Tom Dardis (10-11) see Keaton's facial stasis as based in his youthful terror of breaking his alcoholic father's directive against smiling—it hurt the act. Keaton's face was left pathologically frozen. But Keaton implicitly (31-35) and his associates explicitly (Brownlow and Gill 1) deny an equation between Keaton's characteristic deadpan face and such tragic sadness beyond Pierrot (Pierrot himself is traditionally a facial exhibitionist: Towsen 79). J. P. Lebel (22-23) emphasizes impassivity, a link with the Christian fool's serenity; but Robert Benayoun (28-33, 37, 44-45) uncovers myriad emotional subtleties in the face and notes a sincere Arbuckle-period smile. Joe, Sr., though surely the source of Keaton's athleticism, is probably not the source for all his associated Harlequinesque traits. Harlequin's primary attribute was escape (Towsen 144), an element of the Joe, Sr.-inspired stomach leap, which relied also on a secondary emphasis of the Harlequin, stage machinery (Towsen 142143). But Joe, Sr., has no link to Keaton's broader interest in machines, to The Electric House's elaborate Keaton-designed machinery that first works, then malfunctions; and nothing ties Joe, Sr., to two other Harlequin-based traits. First, Keaton transforms objects—ladder to teeter-totter (Cops), bass drum to boat
268
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
(The Playhouse)—the "visual pun" (Moews 28) on things that then become "instantly functional" for Keaton (Kerr 149); this is a mannerism of muchimitated early-nineteenth-century clown Joseph Grimaldi, "Harlequin's successor" (Billington 80), who turned coal scuttles into boots (Towsen 157-160). Second, Keaton himself seems to be the source of "near miss gags" (MacCann 151) like Sherlock, Jr.'s athletic boxcar feats culminating not in escape but in defeat. Much of the shorts' comedy lies in Keaton's dizzily changing his clown roles from one archetype to another. He is clearly a guilty Pierrot when in Cops his open moving van lands in a police parade and he awaits punishment for acts like slugging a policeman with a boxing-glove turn signal; then, like a Christian fool, he accepts his new parade status, acknowledging the crowd's cheers by tipping his porkpie. A bomb lands next to him and he is Harlequin, instantly adapting its burning wick to light his cigarette: Harlequin's speedy object transformation joins the Christian fool's sense of safety in a lethal situation. He holds the bomb too long and is ambiguous between Pierrot and Christian fool—uncomprehending? awaiting annihilation? trusting he will not be hurt? Soon enough Harlequin again emerges safely to elude the police; yet Keaton finishes as Pierrot, turning himself in. The quirks of the Keaton persona survive in features, only with the clown parts redistributed in a formulaic character; in other words, the initial doofus "ordinary social identity" evolves into the hidden, deft, "more heroic individuality" (Seidman 141; see also Mast 134-135 and Moews). Now victim Pierrot appears early, successful Harlequin late, Christian fool as either passive victim who survives or passive successful hero fitting anywhere. In College, Buster is antiathletic Ronald, who reads How To sports books and diligently tries out for baseball in order to win "the girl" Mary. He spreads initial comic ineptitude across the diamond by imitating a successful hitter's three-bat warm-up and managing three cranial insults. But by the film's end, feats from rowing and football to track take him to Mary's dorm, where his boat paddle bats a thousand as he knocks back objects thrown by his romantic rival Jeff. Keaton here is in "comedian comedy" (Seidman 55), balanced between the anarchistic and the refined, between "eccentric behavior (counter-cultural drives)" and, with reallocated clown parts, "social conformity (cultural values)" (5). The balance is Keaton's try for audiences accustomed to standard stories—a balance denied him in late MGM sound films, in which abrasively voiced Jimmy Durante has the anarchistic role, Keaton largely the doofus part as Durante's foil (Jenkins 109). Even in Keaton's independent films the balance sometimes fails comedically. College endorses dominant cultural cliches, particularly the Horatio Alger mythology that diligence conquers all. Contrastingly, Cops proffers a clown's satirical countercultural claims. In this film Keaton is "the boy Alger didn't write about" (Blesh 202) despite his accepting the Algerean myth. He becomes a business success at the request of his hoped-for girl, the mayor's daughter, but he does it with unintentionally stolen money and property—stolen
Buster Keaton
269
from cops. The final chase is a surrealist nightmare of overclass protectors turning on Keaton; and in the end the mayor's daughter rejects him. Keaton can subvert the formula. College tries with final flash-forward dissolves of ageing Mary and Ronald, concluding on Cops-like tombstones, an ending, however, flawed with its abrupt switch to melancholy after much optimism (Robinson 156). The General succeeds in subversion. Keaton is a Civil War-era train engineer from the South named Johnnie Grey, an only partial doofus, troubled when surrounded by nature but master of his locomotive and skillful with related machinelike moves, turning up first in an early enlistment line after ruthless application of first-in-line order and motion. His main failures stem from ignorance of the railroad's use in warfare, something Union forces nastily teach him as he chases them north. On the answering chase south, Johnnie treats his pursuers to versions of northern tricks. The final battle's ending logically extends the implications of machine-man: replacing the Ronald-Jeff single confrontation in College is Johnnie's damdestroying use of a machine, the cannon. He has some Pierrot-like fear of the cannonball, whose trajectory seems straight up; but the shot's ultimate success— it drowns Union troops—elicits the darker side of the holy fool, who is personally saved from disaster while dealing death elsewhere. The success also recalls Harlequin deftness, Keaton having learned earlier that cannonballs take Johnnie's own preferred straight-line route. Here is the somber underside of the Algerean myth: Johnnie is the boy Alger wrote about, committed to being first in line and eminently qualified through ruthless Harlequin efficiency to get there. In a war where machines rule, so do Johnnie and his General. His methods are disturbing, but inevitably dismiss the competing romantic notion of war—a Confederate general loses the battle as he conducts it from noble horseback (no locomotive) with noble sword (no machine); and a Union General loses his troops through mechanical ignorance, unaware that a packed train cannot pass over a weakened bridge. Indeed, Johnnie's methods cannot be blinked away. CRITICAL RECEPTION Keaton's art was not fully recognized until the 1960s, despite much notice in the first third of the century. The praise from 1900 to 1924 was largely limited to vaudeville and film trade press. Mass-audience publications of the 1920s were indecisive, newspapers disagreeing on Keaton. Four New York dailies damned The General, six were lukewarm, and one was positive (Dardis 144); even largely admired Keaton films rarely won approval from New York Times Keaton skeptic Mordaunt Hall (Moews 322). Yet by Keaton's 1934 screen departure, more serious—mostly European— commentary had laid a critical groundwork. Andre Beucler in 1926 claimed Keaton as absurdist hero (Wead and Lellis 86), a position developed in 1927 by Judith Erebe (Rapf and Green 112-113), and also appreciated not merely his face—Americans had done that—but his mechanized bodily motion (Wead and
270
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Lellis 88). In 1929 Robert Aron explored similarities between Keaton and surrealists Man Ray and Luis Bunuel (Rapf and Green 113); Bunuel himself had already in 1927 noted Keaton's lack of sentimentality in contrast with Chaplin (Wead and Lellis 87). The first book on Keaton's art, Lebel's, appeared only in 1964, the first biography in 1966 (Blesh), all well after Agee in 1949 jogged criticism's faulty memory about Keaton and other silent comics. The 1949-1964 interim denied Keaton his due, symbolized by publishers' rejection of Blesh's manuscript from 1955 on (Dardis x). To be fair, that era also only slowly rediscovered both Keaton's heretofore lost work (Meade 263) and Keaton himself, on television and (supporting) on screen, and latterly granted such awards as a special Oscar in 1960 (Rapf and Green 219-220), the year of his autobiography. The 1960s initiated interest that by 1980 found Keaton "the master of movie comedy most admired by Americans seriously interested in cinema'' (Macdonald 33), Keaton's unsentimental vision unseating Chaplin's for a post-Holocaust generation. This era saw a second biography, Dardis correcting Blesh's and Keaton's errors; Wead and Lellis's checklist of articles, books, and films; reprints of Keaton interviews; university dissertations (Rapf and Green 88-90); and a dozen scholarly books in five languages on Keaton alone, with film-journal articles and parts of books on silent comedy also analyzing Keaton. Many major commentators' positions have been mentioned earlier—for older or inaccessible Europeans', see Rapf and Green (94-95)—but divergences are hardly indicated. Behind the Stone Face, as noted, may lie sadness or impassive acceptance; but is intelligence also sited there (Mast 128; Kerr 145), or is Keaton a "dunce-clown" (McCaffrey 84)? Is his surrealism Kafkaesque (Blesh 199; Benayoun 53-62), like or unlike Dadaism's (Benayoun 101-105), Sartre's (Kerr 222), or Heidegger's (Dardis 90)? Does it simply reflect a realist's occasional doubts (Robinson 162) or adolescent fantasies of "self-transcendence" (Moews 32-33)? This period ended in the 1980s; Moews (319) claims that interest waned even earlier. In Sight and Sound's once-a-decade international film critics' poll in 1972 and 1982, Keaton was judged one of cinema's best directors and The General among its best films, yet in 1992 both went unmentioned ("Top Ten" 25). Commentary, however, may simply have paused reflectively. Kline's 1993 filmography updates Wead and Lellis's and Maryann Chach's (in Dardis 285317). Rapf and Green's work also supplements Wead and Lellis, with a bibliography extending through 1994. Meade's full-length 1995 biography expands Rapf and Green's modernized short life, demythologizing more Keaton legends and supplementing but not replacing Dardis and Blesh, whose critical assessment is work Meade eschews (3). These books offer few new critical insights, but a new generation of thinking about comedy appears in Jenkins's and Seidman's remarks on Keaton, drawn upon those mentioned earlier. They question what the last generation cheered: where McCaffrey (152) praises change between shorts and features as concern for giving a good story, Jenkins (57) wonders
Buster Keaton
271
about Hollywood's altering slapstick to satisfy studio "interests in standardized production." Keaton, then, still does draw critical interest and has 1990s fans, with new scores provided for the centennial laserdisc edition of his films (Watrous C13, C24) and "http://www.ids.net/picpal/bkhome.html," his address on the World Wide Web. But it is now not clear, as Macdonald held in 1980 (38), that for appreciators of silent comedy this is the "Age of Keaton" rather than the final movement of a "Keaton Vogue."
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Filmography Keaton's independently produced films in order of release: Shorts: 1920, One Week, Convict 13, The Scarecrow, Neighbors', 1921, The Haunted House, Hard Luck, The High Sign (shot first, delayed in release), The Goat, The Playhouse, The Boat, The Paleface; 1922, Cops, My Wife's Relations, Blacksmith, The Frozen North, Day Dreams, The Electric House; 1923, The Balloonatic, The Love Nest. Features: 1923, Three Ages, Our Hospitality; 1924, Sherlock, Jr., The Navigator; 1925, Seven Chances, Go West; 1926, Battling Butler, The General; 1927, College; 1928, Steamboat Bill, Jr. MGM-produced (Metro-produced) and foreign-produced features (sound films after 1929): 1920, The Saphead; 1928, The Cameraman; 1929, Spite Marriage; 1930, Free and Easy, Dough Boys; 1931, Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, Sidewalks of New York; 1932, The Passionate Plumber, Speak Easily; 1933, What! No Beer?; 1934, Le Roi de Champs Elysees (French; world release as Champ of the Champs Elysees; no U.S. release); 1936, The Invader (British; in the United States, An Old Spanish Custom); 1946, El Moderno Barba Azul (Mexican; no U.S. release). For television work, Meade (363-375) supersedes Kline, the source otherwise for films about Keaton, the fifteen Arbuckle shorts, fifty-four credited (and twenty other) film appearances, and twenty-nine films he wrote or directed or on which he advised. Secondary Sources Agee, James. "Comedy's Greatest Era." Life 27 (September 5, 1949): 70-88. Benayoun, Robert. The Look of Buster Keaton. Trans. Randall Conrad. New York: St. Martin's, 1983. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. Blesh, Rudi. Keaton. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Brownlow, Kevin, and David Gill, writers-producers. Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow. Episodes 1-3. Thames Productions, 1987. Coursodon, Jean-Pierre. Buster Keaton. Paris: Seghers, 1973. Dardis, Tom. Keaton, the Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down. 1979. New York: Limelight, 1988. Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts? New York: Columbia UP, 1992. Keaton, Buster, with Charles Samuels. My Wonderful World of Slapstick. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960.
272
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: Knopf, 1975. Kline, Jim. The Complete Films of Buster Keaton. New York: Citadel, 1993. Lebel, J[ean]-P[atrick]. Buster Keaton. Trans. P. D. Stovin. 1964. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1967. MacCann, Richard Dyer. The Silent Comedians. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993. Macdonald, Dwight. "A Vote for Keaton." New York Review of Books 27 (October 9, 1980): 33-38. Madden, David. "Harlequin's Stick, Charlie's Cane." Film Quarterly 22 (Fall 1968): 10-26. Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. McCaffrey, Donald W. Four Great Comedians: Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Langdon. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968. Meade, Marion. Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Moews, Daniel. Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Rapf, Joanna, and Gary L. Green. Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. Robinson, David. Buster Keaton. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1969. Seidman, Steve. Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1981. "Top Ten: 250 Verdicts." Sight and Sound, n.s. 2.8 (1992): 18-30. Towsen, John H. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn, 1976. Watrous, Peter. "Eclectic Composer Gives Buster Keaton a Modem Voice." New York Times, February 24, 1994: C13, C24. Wead, George, and George Lellis. The Film Career of Buster Keaton. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977.
William Kemp (England: 1585-1603)
James P. Bednarz BACKGROUND One of the best-known celebrities of the Elizabethan period, William Kemp was both a solo performer, who projected the persona of a rustic clown/musician/ dancer, and one of the original members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who premiered in the clown's role in several of Shakespeare's early plays. Traces of original stage directions in the first printed editions of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado about Nothing prove that he played the Capulets' festive servant Peter in the former and the ridiculous constable Dogberry in the latter (Chambers 326). Modern scholars speculate that he also appeared as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and became the first Falstaff (Wiles 73-82). But it is possible that the tension between his desire to improvise and the need for him to subordinate his peculiar talents to the script caused his break with the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1599, after which he was replaced by Robert Armin, whose wit tended to be more self-consciously urbane and intellectual. Shakespeare wrote for a repertory company and had to have the specific skills of its clowns in mind when he composed his plays. Armin would consequently premiere as the professional jester Touchstone in As You Like It (Felver 9-14). Nothing of Kemp's early life is known. He first surfaces as a servant to Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, with whom he is connected in 1580. From 1585 to 1586, he was one of Leicester's Men during the earl's appointment as the governor of the Low Countries. Having been sent to London on a diplomatic mission, bearing letters concerning negotiations with the king of Denmark, Kemp
274
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
accompanied the foreign diplomats back to Denmark with a small troupe of five English "instrumentalists and tumblers" (Wiles 32-33). The company arrived at Elsinore in June 1586 with two individuals, Thomas Pope and George Bryan, who also later became members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. By 1590, Kemp was back in London and had already become famous, since Thomas Nashe dedicated An Almond for a Parrot to him as "that most Comicall . . . Cavaleire Monsieur de Kempe." One of Kemp's strengths was his physical humor, and he was especially known for his athletic morris dancing and theatrical jigs (four of which were registered for publication between 1591 and 1595). At about this time he became a member of Lord Strange's Men, and in June 1592 the company produced A Knack to Know a Knave, with a separate episode entitled "Kemp's applauded merriments of the men of Gotham." This comic interlude portrays an attempt by a smith and miller to prevent the mayor of Gotham, Jeffrey the cobbler, from delivering a ludicrous petition to the king requesting permission to brew ale. After Lord Strange's death, Kemp joined the newly constituted Lord Chamberlain's Men between 1594 and 1595, which performed primarily at the Curtain Theatre. Indeed, he was one of three players— along with Richard Burbage, the heroic lead, and William Shakespeare—who were paid for the troupe's holiday performance at court. Yet for all the company's success, Kemp sold his shares and severed his relationship with it soon after the lease on the new Globe Theatre was signed on February 21, 1599 (Chambers 326). A year later he devised a publicity stunt that made him even more famous when he wagered that he could dance a morris from London to Norwich in nine days. The morris dance was a comic performance that traditionally involved the Robin Hood legend and featured Maid Marian and Friar Tuck. But it also designated, in a broader sense, any exhibition of fantastic folk dancing. Kemp thus set out with Thomas Slye, a musician who supplied pipe and drum music, William Bee, his servant, and George Sprat, an "overseer" to judge his efforts. Kemp, however, allowed himself a whole month (from February 11 to March 11, 1600) to complete his task, since he did not count rest days in his shortened tally. Soon after his return, he chronicled his deed in Kemps Nine Dales Wonder, his only extant publication. The title-page woodcut shows him dressed in a leafpatterned shirt and wearing bells, dancing to Slye's rhythm. Recalling the honor that Nashe had previously paid him, Kemp now called himself "Cavaliero Kemp, head-Master of Morrice-dauncers" (5). Discussing the reason for his morris from London to Norwich, Kemp indirectly comments that it was connected to his break with the Lord Chamberlain's Men: "Some sweare in a Trenchmore [a brisk country dance] I have trode a good way to winne the world: others that guesse righter, affirme, I have without good help daunst my selfe out of the world" (1). Obliquely referring to the Globe as "the world," Kemp implies that his solo performance was the result of his having danced his way out of Shakespeare's company a year earlier. But his cryptic phrasing conceals far more than it reveals.
William Kemp
275
The text of Kemps Nine Dales Wonder re-creates his itinerary on each of the nine days he danced and highlights, with anecdotes, each of his stops along the way. In remembering how he left the city at Whitehall, he relates how he turned down "those who would have urg'd me to drinking," since he knew its enervating effect (6). There was always a measure of calculation behind his persona as the spirit of festivity, and if the morris dance began as a communal expression of festive release, for Kemp it became a vehicle for the expression of professional mastery. This agonistic sense of performance is revealed on the third day, when at Chelmsford, a girl of fourteen was given permission to "daunce the Morrice" with him in "a great large roome." After she was fitted with bells, they fell to their "jumps," until after an hour, fatigue forced her to quit, leaving Kemp triumphant. "I would have challenged the strongest man in Chelmsford," he boasts, "and amongst many I thinke few would have done so much" (11). The next day two would-be contenders try to follow as he jumps over a ditch and leaves them behind, in the mire "like two frogges" (12-13). On the fifth day, a butcher from Sudbury similarly wants to match his endurance but capitulates in less than a mile. "For indeed," Kemp adds, noting his speed, "my pace in dauncing is not ordinary." The butcher is even shamed by a "lusty Country lasse" who calls him "a faint-hearted lout for giving up before a mile" and matches that measurement herself. "My merry Maydemarian," he writes, "shook her fat sides: and footed it merrily to Melfoord." "I bad her adieu," he concludes, spicing his memory with wordplay, "and to give her her due, she had a good eare, daunst truely, and wee parted friendly" (14-15). Although each contest was calculated to demonstrate his superiority, he always confesses the joy such challenges aroused. Kemp's project generated considerable public attention, and he describes the crowds that would greet and follow him along the road, to either spur him on or try to keep pace with his quick athletic leaps. Following his morris, Kemp traveled to Germany and Italy, as he promised to do at the conclusion of his Nine Dales Wonder, but returned to England by September 2, 1601 (as recorded in the diary notation of William Smith of Abingdon) and became one of Worcester's Men, a newly organized company. One cannot help but think that Kemp's association with this company was a step down from the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and that his departure was a pivotal moment in his career, one that gave him initial fame with his dance from London to Norwich, but that deprived him of a potentially lucrative and stable affiliation with a superior troupe. His fellows are silent about his death. More than 30,000 Londoners perished during the summer plague of 1603, and it is possible that he never made it through the year. The last we hear of him is probably when "Kempe a man" is listed as being buried at St. Savior's, in the Southwark parish where he resided, on November 2, 1603.
276
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS What kind of comic persona did Kemp present? He primarily projected himself as a plain-speaking rustic clown. Beyond that, his performances included a range of sometimes incompatible qualities. He came across as either idiotic or shrewd, in varying degrees, depending on the requirements of his different roles. As Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing, he exhibited his skill in acting stupid, especially by abusing language through a series of ridiculous malapropisms. Dogberry reminds one of his fellow watchmen, "You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch.... This is your charge: you shall comprehend all vagrom men" (3.3.22-25). Clowns can either master or be mastered by language, and how we perceive them depends in large measure on their verbal dexterity. Constables were often depicted as morons on the Elizabethan stage, and although Dogberry resolves the drama, he nevertheless remains a lower-class comic butt who garbles English. This is the same mode that Kemp had previously devised for himself in the "Merriments" he wrote for A Knack to Know a Knave, in which the miller suggests, ' 'Now, let us consult among ourselves, / How to misbehave ourselves to the king's worship" (Hazlitt 504). But Kemp was never entirely defined by verbal ignorance. He was also capable of presenting himself as the opposite of the dim-witted bumpkin. In his Nine Dales Wonder, he depicts himself as a shrewd character of incredible strength and endurance, performing a feat that none of his contemporaries could match. Certainly, his dance from London to Norwich was ridiculous, but that was the point. It was an act of whimsy calculated as a diversion to catch the popular imagination through its excessive absurdity. Yet nowhere in his account does Kemp represent himself as a buffoon. On the contrary, he always appears to be seriously engaged in demonstrating his prowess as a dancer, and whatever wordplay he engages in is completely self-conscious. In commenting on the pain he endured after he strained his hip on his second day out, he quips that "it came in a turne, and so in my daunce I turned it out of my service againe" (8-9). The character Kemp in Nine Dales Wonder, unlike Dogberry in Much Ado, achieves mastery over his body and mind by dominating the physical and linguistic realms of experience. Plays in the Elizabethan public theater customarily ended with a comic jig, and in the jigs that Kemp wrote for the stage, he might have consequently starred as either the fool or the knave. It is therefore important when evaluating him to keep in mind the variety and range of his self-presentation. He provided an image of the common man, with a pronounced plebeian emphasis, yet his persona was extremely malleable. Oddly enough, Kemp does not seem to have used his lower-class persona to rail against the conservative organization of society. His function was, instead, to use his status as every man to bridge social classes. He deliberately mentioned all classes among the members of his audience and sought to become a symbol of cultural unification, based on his universal appeal. Still, through him a lower-class figure
William Kemp
277
came to represent the national identity in its most ebullient mode. Divergent classes could see in him their own anxieties about being country bumpkins, of confronting the modern world with its wrenching personal and intellectual dislocations. One of the major problems in assessing Kemp's career involves the extent to which his skill at comic improvisation conflicted with the desire of Elizabethan dramatists to control the nuances of theatrical performance. The Renaissance clown has roots in the classical slave of Latin comedy and the medieval Vice, who communicated directly with the audience. This medieval tradition of direct address, coupled with the clown's tendency to improvise, made the character especially dangerous for authors like Ben Jonson, who wanted to be sure the message of their works was not distorted. This inherent tension between the clown and his role is particularly relevant in the case of Kemp, who might have been a popular but disruptive influence during performances of Shakespeare's plays. That Shakespeare recognized the clown's potentially disastrous effect on the comprehension of his own densely rhetorical art is apparent in Hamlet, where (shortly after Kemp left the Lord Chamberlain's Men) the hero advises the players (who come to Elsinore without a clown) to let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be consider'd. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. (3.2.38-45) In a play teeming with metatheatrical allusions, Shakespeare might have prompted his audience to remember specific acts of disruption when hearing this passage. This is, at any rate, what happened when the compositor of the pirated first quarto of Hamlet (1603) cited examples of unwanted clowning in an addendum to the passage just quoted. Here, Hamlet continues (in English I have modernized): And then you have some again, that keep one suit of jests,... and gentlemen quote his jests down before they come to the play, as thus: "Cannot you stay till I eate my porridge?" and: "You owe me a quarter's wages!" and "Your beer is sour!" and blabbering with his lips . . . , when God knows, the warm clown cannot make a jest unless by chance, as a blind man catcheth a hare. (597-598) It is possible that this interpolation records the kind of show-stopping ' 'improvisations" that Shakespeare lamented: those that involved stock phrases that the clown was prone to repeat in lieu of actual ad-libs. The clown's concern for his uneaten porridge and sour beer identifies him with the bodily appetites. The phrases within quotation marks might conceivably have been punchlines in Kemp's comic routines or antics capable of stopping the progress of the drama.
278
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Imagine the chaos that would have ensued if the clown refused to leave the stage until he finished his meal or demanded immediately to be paid for acting the part of a servant. CRITICAL RECEPTION Kemp's place in Elizabethan theater history will always be inextricably bound up with that of Robert Armin, who replaced him as the principal clown of the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1600. In the transition from Kemp to Armin, critics have for the most part perceived a gain rather than a loss. Through Armin, a comedian known for his singing rather than his dancing, and for his greater intellectual sophistication, Shakespeare is usually said to have found a fitter vehicle for the dense verbal wit he was interested in conveying through artificial fools like Touchstone and Feste. Kemp's replacement by Armin thus marks a transition in Shakespeare's comedy from plays with boorish "clowns" like Dogberry to those with perceptive "fools" like Touchstone. One important difference between these comic types was their varying degrees of linguistic mastery. Shakespeare often imagined Kemp as a clown whose linguistic deficiency made him a comic butt. But even then, Kemp was occasionally given some lines—like Bottom's moving recollection of his dream—that indicate the wisdom of folly. It would be absurd to posit too firm an opposition between the clown and the fool, however, even if we agree that they should be distinguished. Some of Kemp's clowning matches Armin's foolery, and Armin succeeded Kemp in acting the role of Dogberry. Nevertheless, at the end of the Elizabethan period, under the pressure of Jonson's neoclassically inspired attacks on the disruptive influence of the clown in drama, Kemp was replaced by Armin. One of the effects of this change in personnel was that it allowed Shakespeare to make his fools into defenders of clowning in a more complex manner, to meet growing criticism of the fool's function. As You Like It and Twelfth Night stress how Touchstone and Feste are "wise enough to play the fool." Kemp and Armin, however, were comedians associated with Richard Tarlton, the legendary Elizabethan clown about whom jest books were composed, and it is possible to view Kemp's and Armin's performances, according to Robert Weimann (47-48), as part of a continued development of Elizabethan and, later, Jacobean popular culture. Still, the prime difference was that Armin's approach incorporated the self-conscious skepticism of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly. There has been a tendency in modern criticism to romanticize the plebeian origin of Kemp's clowning. He has become a symbol of the native origins of Renaissance theater and its close connection to the carnival traditions of inversion that supplied a comic counterpoint to depictions of romance and tragedy. Nevertheless, Kemp never took on the role of the lower-class truth teller and social critic with any conviction: he is not known for becoming the vox populi, like his rustic relative, the more sober satirist of Piers Plowman.
William Kemp
279
The clown's presence in drama rather introduced the need to establish a contrary perspective to the play's main plot, to enjoy a degree of detachment to its main action that greatly improved the quality of Renaissance theater, despite what neoclassical critics claimed. Had the clown been muzzled, as neoclassical critics like Sidney and Jonson suggested, we never would have experienced the rich polyphony his voice can afford. But, again, had Shakespeare not taken criticism of the clown to heart, as he seems to have done in Hamlet, he never would have complicated his own presentation of the clown as fool in order to meet this objection. He thus might never have produced the brilliant comic dialogues between the Fool and the monarch in King Lear. Robert Weimann comments that even though the "ritual context" of Kemp's dance ' 'had become quite irrelevant, a residue of mimetic magic survived'' that made spectators marvel at his performance (47). Yet, as Max Thomas observes, Kemp's project was to thoroughly commercialize communal festival forms for a growing market of London consumers (511). He was prepared to treat his dance as a commercial venture, making bets and writing a book to finance it and further ventures. Thomas, however, seems to idealize festivity so thoroughly that he entirely severs it from direct contact with commerce, and this, I believe, is a mistake. Some performers at medieval festivals were paid for their particular skills, and festivals included competitive games at odds with the conception of simple communal bonding that critics following the social theory of Mikhail Bakhtin have recognized. Kemp tried to extend the range of an audience prepared to spend money for their amusement, even if only to hear a minstrel's tune or purchase some refreshments. The transition from parish festival to commercial theater was probably less stark than Thomas supposes. Although Kemp is now commonly called the greatest of Shakespeare's clowns, fulfilling that very function might have led to his estrangement from the Lord Chamberlain's Men. David Wiles, the author of one of the few modern books on the clown and Kemp's most sympathetic modern advocate, challenges us not to be so eager to accept the tyranny of the script over performance. Because Kemp's art was quite ephemeral, literary historians will always tend to view Kemp's departure as a sign of the times and credit it to Shakespeare's need to move on. Still, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he proved convenient for Shakespeare during the first decade of his career, but that once the Lord Chamberlain's Men moved to the Globe, he had outlived his capacity to enunciate Shakespeare's interests. Thus in appreciating As You Like It and Twelfth Night as comic masterpieces especially written for Armin's considerable talents, we can only reluctantly conclude that the company's alienation from Kemp in 1599 seems to have had a positive impact on Shakespeare's drama.
280
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Hazlitt, W. Carew. A Select Collection of Old English Plays. London: Reeves and Turner, 1874-1876. Kemp, William. Kemps Nine Dales Wonder: Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich. London: Printed by E. A. for Nicholas Ling, 1600. Reprinted in Kind Hartes Dreame and Nine Dales Wonder, ed. G. B. Harrison. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966.
Secondary Works Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Barton, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962. Baskervill, Charles. The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1929. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. Bristol, Michael. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, 1985. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. Felver, Charles. Robert Armin, Shakespeare's Fool: A Biographical Essay. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1961. Garry, Jane. "The Literary History of the English Morris Dance." Folklore 94 (1983): 219-228. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. . Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto. Ed. Michael Allen and Kenneth Muir. Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. Thomas, Max W. "Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market." PMLA 107 (1992): 511-523. Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber & Faber, 1935. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy Yin and Yang
(United States: Stan Laurel: 1890-1965; Oliver Hardy: 1892-1957)
Douglas Brode The team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy is generally considered the greatest screen comedy team; the precision of their timing, the exquisiteness of their acting, and the surprisingly subtle nuances they achieved in their contrasting characters has made them respected—hallowed, almost—in a way Abbott and Costello (skillful, though decidedly lowbrow) or Martin and Lewis (occasionally clever, overly commercial, a bit crass) are not. They managed this without ever slipping into the artsy pretentiousness that sometimes undercuts Chaplin's appeal or reaching Buster Keaton's pinnacle of art in front of, as well as behind, the camera.
BACKGROUND The idea of such a Fat and Skinny team was nothing new when Laurel and Hardy paired off for the first time at Hal Roach's studio in 1926. In fact, Hardy himself had tried just such a routine with the all-but-forgotten Bobby Ray several years earlier. Their films were mediocre, so each went his separate way. Oliver Norvell Hardy, born in Harlem, Georgia, in 1892, had earlier considered careers as everything from soprano to lawyer to professional soldier, eventually managing a movie theater. Watching others act, he wondered whether perhaps he could do it too. So he headed for Jacksonville, Florida, finding work with the local Lubin film company. Then, touring in such roles as the Tin Woodsman in a 1925 Wizard of Oz, he landed a job with Hal Roach. Arthur Stanley Jefferson, born in Ulberstone, Lancastershire, England, in 1890, came from England with the Fred Karno Company, the same troupe of
282
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
traveling vaudevillians that allowed Chaplin his entrance to America. Laurel was signed by Universal Pictures to play Hickory Hiram in a series of rube comedies that proved popular in the rural South. The team-to-be actually brushed against one another when Hardy was hired for a bit part in one of Stan's shorts, 1917's Lucky Dog. They then parted, each enjoying modest success in silent films until fate eventually brought them together at Roach's fun factory one year before the arrival of sound. Like Mack Sennett's reigning comic studio in the newly formed world of competing Hollywood companies, Roach, the only real rival, hired a stock company of funny faces and ever more famous people. A process of comedie survival of the fittest ensued, in which those who could not measure up were gradually dismissed. Hardy, nicknamed "Babe," was typed as a bumbling heavy; Laurel, a dumbfounded rube. They appeared in the same films, though not necessarily sharing any scenes. Then something magical happened when the two rubbed against one another and a comic spontaneous combustion took place. There was never a conscious decision to team the two; it simply happened, before everyone's eyes, a natural evolution of what apparently was meant to be. Slipping Wives was a satire on the "sophisticated" films Ernst Lubitsch was then producing about upscale ladies who consider a forbidden affair; Hardy was cast as a selfimportant butler, with Laurel a hapless house painter who arrives on the scene. The script called for them to appear together in a single scene, Hardy assuming an air of superiority while proving himself the lesser man. No sooner was the sequence concluded than everyone at Roach implicitly understood that a great comic team had been born. In their popular image, Hardy would always be the dominant figure, Laurel his put-upon little pal. In real life, their relationship was something altogether different. In fact, just before his surprise teaming with Hardy, Stan Laurel had considered giving up acting. Hyped in 1923 as a star to rival Chaplin and then popular baby-faced comic victim Harry Langdon, Laurel had been sorely disappointed that his career never hit the big time. A gifted writer and natural-born director, he was ready to settle for a decent living behind the scenes, guiding such luminaries as Mabel Normand, the Lucille Ball of her time, and, perhaps surprisingly, the sex-symbol vamp Theda Bara to their best performances. Laurel might have emerged as another Frank Capra (who began as a gag writer for both Sennett and Roach) if the unexpected had not occurred. When lightning struck, it was Laurel who immediately managed their careers. Laurel was the intellectual genius and intuitive force who made all the decisions; Babe, apparently without hubris, was content to sit back and accept whatever Laurel, whom he idolized, decided. Laurel was a savvy businessman as well as sharp-witted artist, always as in control of their career as he was out of control in charming little comedies on the brink of outright tragedy.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
283
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Several reasons may be offered to explain Laurel and Hardy's unusual success. First, they are two clowns bouncing off one another, rather than a single clown and a traditional straight man. Stan Laurel, of course, is "the little guy": Chaplinesque (although this has been overemphasized), vulnerable, and shy, always in danger of being battered about by a nasty world that fails to recognize his innocent and, in truth, fey delicacy. Hardy is equally funny. He continues the tradition begun with John Bunny and, through temporary scandal, passed on to Fatty Arbuckle: the corpulent clown, overbearing but inwardly insecure. He bullies his little buddy in misplaced vengeance for his own mistreatment by everyone else in the world. Usually he is the butt of women—in particular, any one woman who happens to be his wife in the movie at hand. Second, Laurel and Hardy are the only comic entities (team or single performer) unaffected by the advent of sound. Many great silent performers, like Keaton, were decimated by the arrival of the new technology, his gravelly voice conflicting disastrously with his epicene good looks. Others, including W. C. Fields, were catapulted into the first ranks of stardom owing to an ability to deliver even ordinary lines brilliantly; in silent films, Fields had always seemed imitative of others, a fat Chaplin who had never risen to the highest ranks. The careers of Laurel and Hardy were literally untouched by sound, each man's voice perfectly consistent with the screen persona he had already established. Stanley's pathetic whine was exactly what audiences expected; Ollie's attempts to sound tough only revealed his inner weakness. Had either opened his mouth and revealed a voice that seemed all wrong, it might have been all over by 1930. Audiences listened and immediately sensed that what they heard was right. Third, the world of their films was, in their most characteristic shorts and features for Hal Roach, identifiably modern. Sons of the Desert (1933), the silent short Big Business (1929), and the sound featurette The Music Box (1932) are about ordinary men inhabiting a recognizable early-twentieth-century landscape, thanks to Culver City locations. The heroes, or, rather, comedie antiheroes, are workingmen: they vacation in Sons of the Desert, and they are seen in the latter two films working as door-to-door salesmen and moving men; they are also carpenters in The Finishing Touch, process servers in Bacon Grabbers, and musicians in Below Zero. Always, the humor derives from their inability to master any trade, coupled with their heightened desire to succeed. Again, this distinguishes them. Keaton's genius was evident in his presenting an audience with a face in the crowd who works at specialized occupations, excelling without proper appreciation: private detective in Sherlock, Jr., locomotive engineer in The General. Chaplin's tramp attempts to find normal jobs ranging from Easy Street to Modern Times, but he is too much the philosopher-poet-as-clown to succeed. Not so Laurel and Hardy: They work these grueling jobs, often in Sisyphus fashion. In their endless struggles and pathetic failures, we see some
284
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of our own exhaustion and imperfection in accomplishing what are supposedly everyday tasks. No wonder, then, that in the 1930s, John Grierson, always as interested in social activism as he was in mainstream cinema, named Laurel and Hardy ' 'the Civil Servants of comedy" (Matlin, Comedy Teams 103). This was a time when America, surviving the Great Depression, saw the idealization of the anguished workingman in novels by John Steinbeck, plays by Clifford Odets, songs by Woody Guthrie, and murals painted on post-office walls, often by anonymous artists. Mailmen, farmers, cowboys, factory workers, and nurses were all seen together, arm in arm, marching off at sunrise to proudly work at their respective jobs. They—not the Rockefellers, the Gettys, or the Carnegies—were, such paintings visually implied, the real Americans. Somehow, Laurel and Hardy escaped that sociopolitical ideological trap to which Chaplin fell prey. While he may have been the more politically outspoken, their movies packed more of a wallop, if quieter and less obvious, than his. These two were American workingmen, not some romanticized notion of saviorlike outsiders. Unlike Chaplin's, their films were subtle rather than narrowly didactic: a humorous rendering in Big Business of the American Dream showing common men going about their daily business, sometimes with manic intensity; a portrayal in The Music Box of the impossibility of workers' tasks, even as simple as pushing a piano up toward a cliff house. Through these and other work situations, the fat guy and his skinny companion attempt to maintain their ultraserious facade that derives from true dedication. Besides characterization, artistic technique is also responsible for their success. The team's director was originally Leo McCarey, through whom Stan's own ideas were filtered, although he often edited the final results. McCarey was no hack; he understood pacing and how the two played off one another. McCarey was the one who decided that the best results might be achieved by going against the grain of comedy considered de rigueur at that time. Most of Roach's directors, taking their cue from concurrent work at Sennett, created a comic climate best described as "busy": as many gags as possible in a short time, each following the previous joke so fast it mattered little if any one failed, since the next would follow fast; one good gag out of three was enough. Sennett even decreed that no gag ought to last more than one minute and fifteen seconds, time enough to milk all possible humor from it. But under McCarey's direction, Laurel and Hardy followed a softer, slower style. The two played with any gag for as long as they liked; their instincts and McCarey's watchful eye dictated how long the situation should last. Furthermore, McCarey did not use his camera subjectively, thrusting it within situations; rather, he left it at a cool distance to record funny events occurring in front of it. "The audience laughed," McCarey once recalled, "because we remained serious" (Maltin 108-109). Today, the approach might be called minimalist; in 1927, there were no such pretentious terms. The clowns and their
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
285
directors were trying to find an original approach that would click; they succeeded in making slapstick appear subtle for the first time. The approach reached its zenith in Big Business, generally considered one of the most perfect short comedie films of its era. Laurel and Hardy are Christmastree salesmen trying to unload their wares on an ironically hot July day. James Finlayson is the grumpy suburbanite whose home they approach. When he slams the door in their faces, their tree is caught and crushed; immediately, they knock once more, to exact some small revenge. But their action precipitates an even greater reaction, the process endlessly escalating until an outright war has them demolishing his house while he destroys their car. The symbolically inclined have likened the results to a representative study of all human conflict owing to misinterpretation of motives, even seeing it as an allegory for wars between major countries. Perhaps; then again, it may just be a funny anecdote, existing as entertainment. Either way, the approach is a volley of attacks, the comedie thrust of Laurel and Hardy at their height. As Leonard Maltin described the process in Movie Comedy Teams, ' Tt consists of the victimized party of some indignity . . . facing his problem with no outward display of anger, but merely a determined act of revenge" (19). Each violent act is a little larger and meaner than the previous; each clearly precipitates a slightly greater reaction from the antagonist. But nothing ensures its success more than the supreme calm of Laurel and Hardy watching Finlayson scurry about like a crazy man, the seriousness of their attitude, and the seemingly sane calm with which they approach their next zany act. Such understatement sets them apart from all the muggers and madcaps who would have twisted the comedie situation for every drop of laughter. They are clowns who do not appear to be clowning. Laurel and Hardy throw pies, as had so many silent zanies before them. But, as Maltin noted, "for the first time, there was a raison d'etre for every pie hurled in a victim's face." When the era of pie hurling gave way to retorts of gag lines, they delivered dialogue just as well. In The Music Box, they proved that physical comedy could survive in the sound era with limited dialogue and background noise. The nearly two dozen sound shorts were as fine for their era (1929-1935) as the equal number of silents (1926-1929) had been for theirs. But if Laurel and Hardy could easily survive the coming of sound, they could not accommodate the changing nature of feature films. Their films had always been brief, and they had played themselves. At sixty-nine minutes, Sons of the Desert barely qualifies as a full-length feature; it is one simple idea, fully developed, then abruptly concluded. As always, Laurel and Hardy play Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, whereas Chaplin was always some generalized symbol ("the tramp") and Keaton a specific character ("Johnnie Grey" in The General). Like cowboy heroes who use their own names in B movies (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers), Laurel and Hardy create a unique identification with their audience for their time, achieving the familiarity of a television host today. They decide to
286
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
trick their wives, temporarily escape, are caught, and fall down on their knees to apologize sobbingly. Not so in the films to follow. By the mid-1930s, Hollywood had become convinced that clowns must be incorporated into all-star extravaganzas, offering a little bit of everything for everybody. In Swiss Miss (1938), what would have been a pleasant featurette of perhaps twenty-five minutes taking place in the Alps is expanded into a routine story about young lovers in peril in a largescale operetta; the two clowns are reduced to one element of a cinematic club sandwich—comic relief in a full-length film. Their comic impact is diminished by being spread out. Only one such film really clicks: Babes in Toy land (March of the Wooden Soldiers), Victor Herbert's holiday operetta. Perhaps it works because Laurel and Hardy look so right when cast with traditional fairy-tale characters; simply, they fit in as no other comic performers would with the Three Little Pigs and Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. Furthermore, the cutting edge of the early work was gone in large part because of their move to MGM, the superstudio then busily acquiring comic talent much as a millionaire investor might grab up common stocks, disinterestedly waiting to see which ones pay off. The Marx Brothers had likewise been picked up by MGM when their Paramount contract was terminated following the financial debacle of Duck Soup (1933), but after masterpieces like A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937), they were consigned to ever more conventional fare, like Go West (1940). Not surprisingly, Laurel and Hardy were sent in the same misdirection (Way Out West, 1937). By the mid-1940s, they quietly retired, though not before Hardy temporarily replaced George (Gabby) Hayes as John Wayne's sidekick of choice for The Fighting Kentuckian. The Marx Brothers left MGM at about the same time for the same reasons. After Irving Thalberg died in 1936, Louis B. Mayer transformed MGM into a busy, high-style, inhuman assembly line for mass-producing pictures, hardly a conducive climate for innovative, improvised exercises in clowning. CRITICAL RECEPTION Over the following decades, a virtual Laurel and Hardy cult evolved. Even before home video made old movies readily available, throughout the 1950s and 1960s there were screenings of Sons of the Desert at Elks lodges, showings of Big Business at Harvard, and presentations of Babes in Toyland on television matinee movies every Christmas. The Sons of the Desert International was created as a society of devoted fans. Laurel and Hardy refused to fade away; though Hardy died in 1957 and Laurel followed in 1965, their movies continue to grow in popularity. Then, in the early 1970s, something unexpected happened to lend them an entirely new dimension. One outgrowth of the late 1960s sexual revolution era was the advent of gay liberation and the admission of—as one notable book called it—"the celluloid closet," images of gay life subtly permeating main-
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy
287
stream movies. Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a man's tux, briefly fondled a pretty girl in Blonde Venus', John Wayne kissed sidekick Walter Brennan's bald pate in Rio Bravo. And, of course, there were Laurel and Hardy, whose work was reexamined in this emerging light. Laurel and Hardy had regularly been portrayed in their nightshirts, going to bed together. There was a certain innocence to this, as there was to their every action; while watching them tuck one another in, few observers would ever assume that any sexual contact was in the offing. Though there is no overt homosexuality in any Laurel and Hardy film—almost always, Stan and Ollie are each married—there is, all the same, a clear element of homoeroticism. Their wives, especially Ollie's, are Thurberesque: overbearing to the point of driving a man away to some solace. Ollie is too shy and too physically unattractive to find solace in the arms of some cutie. Instead, he retreats to Stanley, whom he can verbally bludgeon as a substitute for the wife he loathes and fears. Stanley's vulnerability makes their relationship seem almost an abusive husband-wife pairing. He whines and whimpers, tries to explain his incompetence, and then forgives his partner all those brutish insults. Despite such endlessly unpleasant give-and-take between the two, what overrides all the momentary nastiness is a sense of love, perhaps a comedie variation on the husband and wife who cannot live with or without each other. In a way, they resemble George (Hardy) and Martha (Laurel) in Edward Albee's comically tragic play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, tearing each other apart to the consternation of a seemingly "normal" young couple, the audience eventually realizing that the older people love each other far more deeply, if imperfectly, than the young people do. In fact, rumor has it that Albee based George and Martha on a gay couple he knew, though even Broadway was not ready in the early 1960s to handle such stuff. Ultimately, it matters less whether one buys the homosexual reading of Laurel and Hardy's "love" than that they are indeed perceived as loving each other. Whether it is homosexual or platonic is none of our business. Early in Big Business, the two squabble about who will carry the Christmas tree. At the close, when they drive away from Finlayson, escaping the late-arriving cop and everyone else in the area, they turn to each other and exchange the most wonderful pair of smiles in the history of film. That is what their movies are about. It is easy enough to show near-perfect, adorable characters who love one another, quite another to give us flawed, little people who feel that way and win us over to their side by the extent and enormity of that love. The only similar team may be Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. Laurel and Hardy's love, apparently, was genuine. Billy Gilbert, a comic who played supporting roles in many of their films, once said: ' 'There was no rivalry between them. Babe would do anything Stan suggested. To him [Stanley] was a god, and he had the greatest respect for Stan's genius." Hardy concurred; when asked why he always kept his eyes on Stanley during any gag sequence, despite the building crescendo of angry people around them, the corpulent clown
288
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
sighed and said: " I guess it's because the character fascinates me so. He really is a funny, funny fellow." That kind of love and respect shows through on film. We do not believe that underneath the endless small arguments between Abbott and Costello or Martin and Lewis there is an abiding affection. We believe it with Laurel and Hardy, which explains their continued preeminence among teamed cinematic clowns.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Agee, James. "Comedy's Greatest Era." In Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. 1-21. Brownlow, Kenneth. The Parade's Gone By. New York: Knopf, 1968. Byron, Stuart, and Elisabeth Weis, eds. The National Society of Film Critics on Movie Comedy. New York: Viking, 1977. Everson, William K. The Films of Hal Roach. New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1971. . The Films of Laurel and Hardy. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1967. Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: Knopf, 1975. Maltin, Leonard. The Great Movie Comedians, from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. New York: Bell, 1982. . Movie Comedy Teams. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Lear's Fool
(England: In William Shakespeare's King Lear: 1605)
Alan Eager BACKGROUND Robert Armin, the man of many voices in Shakespeare's repertory company (the King's Men, formerly the Lord Chamberlain's Men), must have played Lear's Fool, probably the most paradoxical and ambiguous of William Shakespeare's many court jesters, and one of the last. As a traditional stock character, Fool descends from (1) the medieval court jester, probably a half-wit retainer in uniform in the feudal era; (2) the many myths surrounding an early Tudor satiric poet, John Skelton; and (3) the wise fool Stultitia (Folly) who delivers Desiderius Erasmus's Encomium Moriae (Praise of Folly, Praise of More, SelfPraise by Folly) of 1509. As in the drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger and others accompanying early texts of Praise of Folly, Lear's Fool should wear the soft crenelated hat with a floppy top with bell called the coxcomb. Thus the hat suggests both the rooster's comb and the crown. Fool offers his coxcomb, in a typical move, to both Kent and Lear. They are the real fools. Fool's body should be clothed in a tight-fitting patchwork outfit of all the colors, which Stultitia mentions to her audience of ass-eared fools, which costume connects him with Arlecchino (Harlequin) of the commedia dell'arte. He should carry a soft scepter called a bauble whose top represents a grotesque head or the tip of a penis. Post-Victorian fools often have a death's head on the tip, and then the bells on the coxcomb, sometimes in the form of a monk's cowl, take on religious significance. But a religious connection, say, to the Feste of Twelfth Night is, I feel, only accidental.
290
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Lear's Fool operates in this world, not the next, and if he is not terribly funny, the play simply does not work. The purpose of the licensed jester, as Shakespeare's Olivia indicates of Feste in Shakespeare's earlier comedy Twelfth Night, or, What You Will (1600), is to be antiflatterer for the ruler and court. Chiding her upstart "puritan" steward Malvolio's scorn of her court jester, she says, "There is no slander in an allowed fool though he do nothing but rail" (Harbage, 1.5.88). His railing or barbed critiques, even if they are continuously abrasive, are legitimized by his position. The same is true of Fool's place in the world of King Lear until the king disenfranchises himself. Not found in any of the sources of the story of Lear, Fool's critiques are generally directed at the king's oddly egotistical naivete in giving up his kingdom to his daughters, and at the material and rapacious character of those daughters. But he also rails at cosmic and social disorder from a Utopian position. His method is always indirect and witty and sometimes bawdy. He may be wearing an elephantine codpiece as well as swinging the bauble. Paradoxically obscene yet androgynous—Erasmus's Stultitia, of course, is necessarily female—a sage fool like Lear's must use indirection, jesting, and buffoonery to overcome the tendency of royalty and aristocracy to have that inevitably inflated opinion of their capabilities. Thus Lear's Fool must run counter to the normal and constant activity of the court or coterie that surrounds the prince: their praise for his favors. Because of his function as antiflatterer, Shakespeare's Fool is cruelly missed in the first scene of Shakespeare's tragedy, where, in the distribution of parcels of his kingdom of England, King Lear ties his largesse to preposterous compliments from his two elder daughters, Regan and Goneril. The utterly licensed wise fool or jester, like Lear's Fool, is, of course, always something of a dramatic fiction, although the Tudor and Stuart rulers, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, all had official fools. Lear's Fool, as we have seen, must scourge pride (both vanitas and superbia) in the court. Thus he suggests the antiruler, somewhat like the Lord of Misrule of certain topsyturvy Saturnalian festivals in England such as the carnivalesque celebrations surrounding Epiphany and May Day. This function is symbolized by his trappings, as we have seen. The Jughead-like, coxcomb-shaped hat parodies the crown. The outfit of patchwork—not hand-me-downs but mere sewn-together patches of hand-me-downs (symbolizing absolute poverty)—parodies the ruler's opulent dress. He holds that absurd soft scepter of office. Lear's Fool's immediate background lies in the patches or clowns or jesters of Shakespeare's earlier comedies. As far back as 1594 or so, Two Gentlemen of Verona presents us with two jesting servants possibly in motley outfits, Speed and Launce. As far forward as 1603 or so, shortly before King Lear was written, All's Well That Ends Well again gives us two court jesters, the Countess Rossillion's Lavatch and, at the end of the play, in a new role for him, Lord Lafew's newly redeemed boasting soldier, Parolles. Over his career, Shakespeare's jesters and fools generally evolve into figures
Lear's Fool
291
of greater wisdom, emotional control, wit, and sometimes distance from the action at hand. Not that the early clowns fail as hilarious observers and critics of folly. The ventriloquist Launcelot Gobbo of Merchant of Venice (1595) is brilliant but not an entire master of his situation, drifting throughout the play to his ultimate proper location, Belmont. A remarkable analyst of the world's false idealisms, the Touchstone of As You Like It (c. 1599-1600) gets involved in a strange marriage based strictly on sexual longing with the unidealized shepherdess Audrey. Thus Touchstone is a descendant of the Costard of Love's Labour's Lost (1595) who was briefly involved with the "country wench" Jaquenetta. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Like Feste and Lavatch, Lear's Fool can, on occasion, come close to being spokesman for his author. After all, if the prince can live beyond ordinary mortals—and thus become godlike—in his unpoliced power over humans, his counterpart the fool, in his alert poverty, is capable of knowledge that is equally godlike. His lack of sexual or monetary interest in society—he is a mendicant— makes him capable of seeing through all human pretense. He never hedges because he has no need to hedge. Shakespeare's fools generally have close attachments to women in the plays, often including strong but asexual sentiment—Launcelot Gobbo to Shylock's daughter Jessica, Touchstone to Rosalind and Celia, Feste to Olivia, Lavatch to the Countess, and especially Lear's Fool to Cordelia. We hear, for example, early in the play that "since my young lady's gone into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away" (Harbage, 1.4.70). This comment by one of Lear's knights helps explain the fool's absence after several requests for his presence by the former king. We guess that he should be "pined" or skinny. His age, the subject of much debate because Lear calls him "boy" and he seems to cower in front of the sisters and the storm and perhaps in front of the "spirit," "Poor Tom," I think should be that of nondescript grownup. Lear's Fool is the third and most developed of Shakespeare's tragic clowns. The Yorick of Hamlet appears in the play only in the gravediggers' scene in the form of a skull and in the ruminations of Prince Hamlet and of the ordinary "clown," who comes upon and recognizes the skull in his labors. The clown of Othello makes two brief but telling appearances in order to make suitably bawdy jokes in a love tragedy and anatomize the tricky nature of the word "lying," so central to an understanding of the play. The background of the fully developed tragic fool of King Lear lies in Feste in his prominence and in his songs, and in the legendary John Skelton of the jestbooks, although he also shares some of the biting satire, pith, and technique of that remarkable poet himself from the age of Henry VII and Henry VIII, and of his enemy, sometime ruler of England, Cardinal Wolsey. Like Feste, Lear's Fool is, as we have seen, notably absent at the beginning
292
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of his play when the moment is ripe to scourge the king's folly. But unlike Feste, Fool is also absent at the crucial end of his play, even though he does borrow Feste's final refrain from Twelfth Night, singing, "With heigh ho, the wind and the rain" and "the rain it raineth every day"—midway in the tragedy (3.2.74). In fact, we miss him so much at the end of King Lear that when the ex-king announces that his "poor fool is hanged" (5.3.306), the audience thinks of the clown and the actual referent, Cordelia, in the same breath. We do not know what happened to this wanderer and laggard, and we want him back. And we are afraid that he is hanged. It is entirely suitable that our last thought for Lear's fool be part of an ambiguity. Ambiguity in his words, notably in his archaic skeltonics (breathless rhymed trimeters), always reigns in his own scenes, whether he speaks of' 'fool'' with all its other meanings as also a custard or trifle, or of punishment he may or may not have received for holding his peace/piece. But unlike the comic jester who gets the last word in Twelfth Night, this tragic allowed fool is quiet or uncommunicative or in some sense infertile too often—although I disagree with Welsford, Harbage, and others that his mind is in any way "maimed" (Harbage 1062). Unlike Feste, he is unable to exercise his full revenge on the up-and-coming bourgeois or unmedieval materialism of Lear's daughters' households with their taste for quiet and the veneer of propriety and decorum, and, of course, their tendency to hypocrisy, best symbolized by Goneril's steward, Oswald. Whether or not we are being fair, we in the audience wish that Fool were able to arrange to lock Oswald in a dark room and give him the third degree in several voices as Feste did with Olivia's would-be upstart steward Malvolio. Before he drops out of the play a little beyond halfway, Lear's Fool appears in five scenes and has variable numbers of lines because the rough Quarto text of 1608 ("Pied Bull" Q) contains three hundred or so lines missing from the relatively clean First Folio text of 1623 (which contains approximately one hundred lines—many belonging to Fool—that are not in Pied Bull Q). There are in fact some indications that certain of the Fool's lines in the Quarto, especially on monopolies, were censored before 1623. With Edmund, Fool is a fine dramatic scene opener and closer. In 1.4, Fool is called for by the ex-king, and when he appears, he immediately offers to pass on his coxcomb to a disguised Kent for joining up with a foolish man who has given away his kingdom to two harridan daughters. On the whole, he scourges Lear as a fool and remarks on his not being paid, and he probably receives money from Lear. He also delivers telling skeltonics on virtue and its absence in the world. He ends the scene with the bawdy couplet "She that's a maid now, and laughs at my departure, / Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter" (1.4.41). I suppose that he is threatening the sisters at least with seduction. Here, his purported outsized codpiece and mime's cutting motion may be called for. Outside of Regan's castle in 2.4, Fool again notes his affinity with Kent, now
Lear's Fool
293
in the stocks, wittily explains Lear's inevitable loss of retainers, and goes silent at the advent of Regan and Cornwall. In 3.2, during the prodigious storm, Fool delivers his final Utopian skeltonics mugging as a soothsayer, and ends the scene with "This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time" (3.2.95). In his final two scenes on the heath (3.4 and 3.6), he rues the storm, takes part in the mock trial, and disappears from the play. His final words tell us that he plans to "go to bed at noon" (3.6.82), and we hope he can.
CRITICAL RECEPTION In the neoclassical age that followed Shakespeare's, Lear's Fool was considered indecorous and was removed, for example, in Nahum Tate's adaptation of the play in 1680, with its sudden happy ending in the odd and forced marriage of Edgar and Cordelia. This version held sway through the age of Samuel Johnson. Johnson's baffling preference for Tate's ending at least has sometimes led to Johnson's discredit in some later criticism. But Johnson seems to have found the play as written unbearably sad for personal reasons. In the loving reconstruction of Shakespeare largely as poet rather than dramatist in the early romantic period, John Keats defined the importance of Lear's Fool. He says, in a rare qualification of the critic William Hazlitt, "Does not the fool by his very levity—nay it is not levity—give a finishing touch to the pathos; making what without him would be within our heart-reach nearly unfathomable. The Fool's words are merely the simplest translation of Poetry as high as Lear's" (White 181). Keats says several things here. First, the irony of Lear's Fool tempers and completes Lear's curses, lamentations, and mad wit. Second, the Fool's words are never purely humorous. They may—or in fact must—be funny, but they are always personal and social criticism in edgy form. Third, the Fool's poetry may be elementary, but it is as highly poetical as Lear's. Noting wisdom in Lear's Fool has generally found favor among critics as diverse as A. C. Bradley, Harley Granville-Barker, and John Dover Wilson. In the 1930s, G. Wilson Knight saw the Fool as a remarkable critic and psychologist, plumbing the depth of Lear's childishness by unsuccessfully trying to make him laugh at himself. Among recent critics, Marvin Rosenberg connects some of the fool's trappings with a monkish background and scoffs at any attempt to turn the Fool into a half-wit. He aptly connects Lear's Fool with the court jester James I brought with him from Scotland, Archy Armstrong, the scourge of Archbishop Laud and certainly a dangerously outspoken man. Most recently, Stephen Booth has performed magical analyses of the various puns Fool uses to surprise Lear, notably on the word "kindly" meaning "caring" yet quite the opposite, "according to the nature of the sisters," and on "crab" as "crabapple daughters, identical yet at war," and "pinching maritime beasts." But most recent criticism of King Lear and its Fool has been too caught up with narrow worries about the two texts and the possibility of censorship.
294
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Harbage, Alfred, ed. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969. Wilson, John Dover, ed. The Works of Shakespeare Edited for the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. The New Shakespeare. London: Cambridge UP, 1969.
Secondary Sources Booth, Stephen. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983. Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Meridian, 1955. Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. New York: New Directions, 1951. Goldsmith, Robert H. Wise Fools in Shakespeare. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1955. Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946. Knight, G. Wilson. The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies, Including the Roman Plays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1931. . The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1930. Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of King Lear. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. Welsford, Enid. The Fool Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1961. White, R. S. Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Loki, the Norse Fool (Scandinavia: Ancient Nordic Myth)
Carl Bryan Holmberg BACKGROUND Of all the Norse gods and goddesses, Loki is perhaps the most misunderstood and maligned. Though he began as a relatively benign trickster and fool who merely demonstrated the foibles of the other gods, he became a most feared spirit to the extent that no shrines were held sacred to him, and the folk of the north would not name him or honor him directly. As a deity, he helped create humans, giving them the gifts of motion and blood. As a force of nature, he personifies fire and lightning. Yet he is a liar and a prankster whom the Norse gods learned to mistrust much too late. Despite his association with ultimate evil, Loki represents the power of light and the power of words, which together reveal and persuade others of the truth and of the fact that even the gods are not all-powerful. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS As a companion of Thor, who represents thunder, Loki is lightning. Of course, it is no accident that Thor alone can regularly subdue Loki. Symbolically, Thor also signifies strength and order, while Loki signifies pleasure and fun. Though often considered one of the gods of Asgard, Loki may have emerged from an older tradition of nature spirits, resulting in his unique nickname among the other deities, "stranger." Like other trickster fools, then, Loki may be seen as operating in a king-fool construct, and his name suggests that he arises from mysterious and hazy nature.
296
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Like other tricksters, Loki offers both aggravations and benefits. Although he works mischief and annoys the gods and goddesses, his pranks usually result in some sort of boon or benefit. For instance, one time Loki stole Sif 's long golden tresses, about which she was quite vain. Thor, her spouse, immediately insisted that Loki replace the hair. To do so, Loki persuaded a clever dwarf, Dvalin, to make the new hair. The dwarf not only made the hair but also an unerring spear and a magical ship. Loki declared all three marvels the most clever of smithery. Another dwarf, Brock, overheard Loki's declaration and boasted that his brother Sindri was more skilled than Dvalin. This tempted Loki to wager his own head to see whether this were true. Brock blew the bellows for Sindri's smithy fire, and Sindri warned his brother Brock that his work must be unceasing so as not to mar his smithing. Sindri proceeded to make three objects, a golden boar, a magic ring, and a hammer. With each creation, Loki transformed himself into a biting fly to sting and thus stall Sindri. But he succeeded only the third time, thus causing the hammer to be marred with an unusually short handle. When Sindri completed his tasks, Brock noted their great quality and demanded Loki's head, but Loki pointed out the imperfection in the hammer and fled Asgard with the hair, the spear, and the ship Dvalin had made. Subsequently Brock himself appeared to give the golden boar to the god Odin, the magic ring to Freya, and the hammer to Thor. Loki then returned with his own placations, including the golden hair for Thor and Sif. When Brock again claimed Loki's head, the assembled deities agreed, declaring Loki's head forfeit despite the gifts. But Thor loudly observed that Loki's neck was not part of the wager. Thus Loki escaped punishment and at the same time enriched the gods and goddesses by his cunning. It was only Thor's new hammer, when wielded by Thor himself, that could protect the rest of the gods from their enemies, the frost giants. Without Loki, neither the hammer nor the other five objects would have been created. Loki is also a master of disguise, able to change his shape at will. Once Loki's transformative power became useful when Odin and the other gods agreed to give Freya's hand in wedlock to a giant architect who, in return for Freya, promised to build them an impregnable fortress before the conclusion of winter. He used his stallion to transport the building materials and, to the gods' dismay, handily sped toward the completion of the fortress. Alarmed at the impending loss of Freya, the gods begged Loki to use his cunning in order to save them. Just as the giant's horse was carting the final building blocks, Loki transformed himself into an exciting mare and enticed the steed from his harness to chase her and to mount her. Naturally, the fortress was not completed by the end of winter. The gods got their impregnable fortress, and Odin additionally received the offspring of the equine union, subsequently his favorite steed, an eight-legged horse. Yet Loki became increasingly jealous of Baldr, a male god who personified innocence and goodness. Baldr was also a rival of Loki, eclipsing Loki's fire because he was the god of light. So dear was Baldr to the rest that everyone and everything under the sun took a vow not to harm him. However, disguising himself as an old woman, Loki learned from Freya that the lowliest of plant
Loki, the Norse Fool
297
parasites, mistletoe, had yet to take the vow. In the meantime, in their folly the gods had been hurling all sorts of missiles at Baldr. None of them, however, allowed their weapons to strike Baldr, keeping true to their vow. This ongoing proof of the vow produced great delight and laughter among the gods. Then Loki convinced Baldr's blind brother Hodr to take a shot at Baldr with a dart Loki provided him. Loki, of course, had magically fashioned the dart from mistletoe. Loki guided blind Hodr, and the dart mortally wounded Baldr. From the moment the light of Baldr died, the twilight of the gods was upon everyone, and the end of the world as they had known it became far closer than they had dreamed. Even then, Baldr's consignment to Hel enabled the remaking of a new world after the old world ceased to exist. Once more, the mischief that Loki visited upon the world became a good thing. CRITICAL RECEPTION Loki's omnipresence throughout Nordic folklore suggests important observations on the ancient peoples' view of themselves and of their relationship to the world and to fate, particularly as fate is manifested in accident, chance, prevarication, and humor. Cunning in itself is neutral and can produce either good or evil—sometimes both. Predating the other gods, Loki and his pleasure and fun are predecessors of Thor with his strength and order. The ancient peoples perhaps saw Loki in themselves and knew that unbalanced by Thor, unbridled pleasure and wit could wreak havoc. Since it has become popular in the late twentieth century to claim that European culture has tainted the Western worldview and the world, Loki may be seen as representative of a more ancient tradition that easily predates the Western, Judeo-Christian cultures. As a trickster, Loki has his counterparts in many ahistoric, indigenous cultures of the world and is not representative of a single historic culture save as conveyed by later cultures. As such, Loki's wit, biting tongue, boldness, and cleverness reflect the worldview of an ancient collection of indigenous peoples who experienced a mystic communion with the forces of nature around them. Because nature is not under human control, neither is Loki entirely controllable. While Loki's actions precipitate evil and eventually the unmaking of the world, they also permit rebirth. Hence the last day of the week, what in the West is now called Saturday after the Roman god Saturn, was hallowed to Loki as wash day. The onerous work of cleaning up for a new week is Loki's legacy; it symbolizes the chaos and misrule that enable a new order to begin. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Boult, Katharine F. Asgard and the Norse Heroes. New York: Dutton, 1914. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Guerber, H. A. The Norsemen. London: Bracken Books, 1985.
The Marx Brothers
(United States: Leonard [Chico]: 1887-1961; Adolf [Harpo]: 1888-1964; Julius [Groucho]: 1890-1977; Milton [Gummo]: 1893-1977; Herbert [Zeppo]: 1901-1979)
Vicki K. Janik BACKGROUND When the Marx Brothers were born, 80 percent of the population of Manhattan had foreign-born parents (Arce 29).l So did the Marx Brothers. Simon ("Frenchie" Marrix) Marx was born in the French province of Alsace (1861-1933), and Minnie Schoenberg near Hanover, Germany (1864-1929). Both immigrated to New York, where they met while working in the garment district, married, and eventually had six sons (Manfred, the first son, died as a baby). Minnie had grown up in a family of entertainers in Germany. Thus both her nature and her nurture directed her sons to a show-business career, as did the family desire to eliminate the vagaries of the low-income, immigrant life of New York City. By 1905 Groucho was touring with the Leroy Trio; in 1907 Gummo joined Groucho and Mabel O'Donnell in the Three Nightingales; Harpo became a fourth Nightingale, wetting his pants in his 1908 debut; and Chico, the wayward son, returned to the family and entered their act in 1912.2 Gradually the success of this traveling troupe increased until they ventured on a disastrous European tour in 1922. An English audience bombarded them with pennies on the stage. Through these years (1912-1922), however, Chico married his fellow performer Betty Karp in 1916 (whom he later divorced) and had a daughter, Maxine; Groucho married dancer Ruth Johnson in 1920 (whom he divorced in 1942 and replaced with wives Kay Gorcey in 1945 and Eden Hartford in 1954) and had a son Arthur in 1921 (other children include Miriam in 1927 and Melinda in 1946); and all the brothers save Gummo avoided the draft because of age, infirmity, or career. The family had bought
The Marx Brothers
299
a farm in La Grange, Illinois, so that they could become farmers and thereby be exempt. In 1923 the brothers' success was restored in New York. They had starring roles in the Broadway play I'll Say She Is!, which was followed by even greater triumphs: George S. Kaufman's and Irving Berlin's The Cocoanuts (1925), introducing Margaret Dumont as a fourth Marx; and Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind's Animal Crackers (1928), so successful that scalpers claimed to be able to get $100 for a pair of tickets. Both were made into successful films in Paramount's Queens studio in 1929 and 1930. These New York years saw the brothers gain national fame and wealth. In April 1929 they earned an unprecedented $7,000 per week at the Palace, more than the Palace had ever paid. But the October stock-market crash destroyed the financial security of both Harpo and the frugal Groucho. Free-spending, gambling Chico said of Groucho, ' 'He saved every nickel, and look what happened. I had fun, and he didn't, and now we're both the same" (Arce 163). But the truth is that fun was a goal for all the brothers. Groucho, so nicknamed because of his temperament, particularly enjoyed his friends such as writers Norman Krasna and Arthur Sheekman, spent a great deal of money buying and reading books, wrote essays and scripts, engaged in discreet liaisons with women—a sharp contrast to the well-known womanizing of his brothers—and assaulted the world with a constant barrage of wisecracks and practical jokes. Chico, lover of chicks, spent a lifetime gambling (along with Harpo, one of the best card players in the United States, said Groucho) and seducing women, often pretending to be Harpo since the latter was conveniently unmarried for fifty years. Clever with numbers and charming in negotiations, Chico was the manager of the group, while harpist Harpo, the third-grade dropout, least keen of mind and sweetest of disposition, was perhaps the most personally popular, being the darling of the members of the Algonquin Round Table and Alexander Woollcott in particular. In 1931 the brothers moved to California in order to focus on the lucrative motion-picture industry. Still working for Paramount, they made Monkey Business (1931), which broke box-office records in ten cities (Arce 196); Horse Feathers (1932), S. J. Perelman's last collaboration with the brothers and the film that made them Paramount's box-office leaders (Arce 206); and Duck Soup (1933), judged today to be their best, but ironically, coolly received by both critics and audiences. Partially because of Chico's friendship with Irving Thalberg, the brothers then moved to MGM, where they made A Night at the Opera (1935), which Wes Gehring writes was the product of Thalberg's MGM homogenizing of the Marxes (Arce 117). The film offered a love story, less irrationality, and appeal to a female audience. Following this was the even more successful A Day at the Races (1937), for which Margaret Dumont received a well-deserved Screen Actors' Guild award for best supporting actress. When they moved to RKO for the filming of Room Service, a Broadway script the company had bought for a
300
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
record-breaking $255,000, receipts fell flat, and the film earned only 93 percent of the RKO average. After this their final three films for MGM, At the Circus (1939), Go West (1940), and The Big Store (1941) lacked the luster of the earlier films. Joe Adamson writes that the brothers were reduced to "sniveling, weaseling nitwits" (270), and the "Age of Heroic Comedy" had ended. Even the great Buster Keaton was working as a writer at MGM for a lowly $100 per week. The audience of 1940 sought new genres—epics of morally righteous romance—and the brothers moved on to separate careers, uniting briefly in two more films, A Night in Casablanca (1946) and Love Happy (1950). Almost as an epitaph to the Marx Brothers films, Groucho wrote in 1939, "I'm kind of sick of the whole thing" (Arce 271). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Neither novelty nor faddishness is responsible for the still-growing popularity of the Marx Brothers. Clearly, their remarkable popularity rests on their successful use of techniques common to clowns in many other cultures in many other times. This includes a broad range of gags from slapstick to subtle literary parody; it also requires their remaining outside the existing "natural order" inhabited by a set of flat but "real" characters; and finally, it results in exploding nearly anything, bursting the insubstantial bubble of social and linguistic order. But interestingly, each of the Marx Brothers accomplishes this in a different way with a different goal. All clowns highlight the undependability and ultimate ineffectiveness of human understanding in three areas: desire, discourse, and action. Thus clowns comment on humanity, a humanity that insists that it is perpetually seeking truth as it refuses to recognize that desire—avarice or lust— is its underlying motivation. Second, clowns show that discourse, humankind's only real power, is always restricted by language and reason. Finally, they reveal the limitation on human action that is ultimately mortality itself. The three Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, like all great clowns, point up the absurdity of desire, the frailty of discourse, and the ineffectiveness of action. Each of the Marx Brothers targets one of these three admittedly overlapping domains. Groucho underscores the folly of human desire; Chico proves the inadequacies of discourse composed of language and patterned in reason; and Harpo emphasizes the inconsequence of action. The brothers use three very different and highly exaggerated personas to accomplish this: Groucho, who is most closely intertwined with the other characters in the plot, parodies with exaggerated imitation and mocks with ridicule the human desires of those other characters. Chico dissolves discourse by demonstrating the elusiveness of meaning in language as he equivocates and obscures intention. Harpo's mute clown regularly both receives and dispenses physical abuse and is often victorious at the end when he performs the script's final, successful, and seemingly spontaneous nonverbal attack upon the blocking figures.
The Marx Brothers
301
It is obvious, however, that the brothers do not function in mutually exclusive domains. Desire, discourse, and action are entwined. I will examine each of the brothers' absurd and exaggerated film personas, focusing especially on the Marx Brothers as they appear in four of their first five films made at Paramount and their two earliest films at MGM. Mocking and parodying desire, Groucho is kin to the Vice character of early Tudor interludes and morality plays. In Shakespeare's Clown, David Wiles claims that the Vice has a dual role. Referring to the character Mischief in Mankind, he says that the Vice is the "personification of a particular [venal] sin" and "a carnivalesque celebrant" (2) who also serves as a link between the real world of the audience and the imaginary world of the play (6). Groucho operates as such a link, first as a personification of desire, namely, greed, sloth, and lust, and second, as a celebrant of their existence in himself and everyone else. Groucho is regularly the first brother to enter the plot in the films, before Chico and Harpo. Serving as a traditional antihero (Gehring 114), he immediately establishes his always-unrealized goals: to get rich, to expend little effort in the process, and to enjoy the most sexually interesting female. The two former often involve courting Margaret Dumont's character, while all three goals require that he try to stiff creditors, outcon any available con persons, and speak as bawdily as the precode movies would allow. The Cocoanuts opens with a scene in which Groucho, the manager of the Hotel de Cocoanuts, has failed to pay his employees, and he now must respond to their frustrated complaints. He convinces them that money is a bad thing and clearly a commodity they should shun. Finally, he closes by offering these hotel employees a nonmonetary bonus. "Extra blankets in all your rooms. And there'll be no cover charge!" The employees cheer with pleasure. Groucho's flourishing greed is cause for celebration. In Animal Crackers he enters in a sedan chair in which four men have supposedly carried him all the way from Africa. He talks his way out of paying for the ride and begins singing "I Must Be Going," which includes the lyric, "I never take a drink, unless someone's buying." Then he tries to sell Mrs. Rittenhouse an insurance policy for $1,500. Again his greed and sloth are so exaggerated so quickly that they become absurd parody. Similar expositions begin A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup, in which Margaret Dumont's wealthy Mrs. Teasdale is the financial support of the nation of Freedonia to the tune of $200,000,000. When asked for more money, she refuses unless her Groucho is made the ruler of the land. Soon Groucho makes his familiar plea to Mrs. Teasdale and her money: "Can't you see what I'm trying to tell you? I love you! I love you!" In response, Mrs. Teasdale rejoices for Groucho, commenting on his newly acquired post as ruler of Freedonia, "This is indeed a gala day for you!" He responds, "Well a gal a day is all I could handle!" Within Groucho's first scene his parodied greed and lust are established.
302
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
In the opening scene of Horse Feathers, however, Groucho mocks the desire and pretension of other characters far more than he parodies them in himself. After the Gilbert and Sullivanesque song and dance, he uses puns to ridicule the speech of the pompous president of the Board of Trustees of Huxley College. "I thought my razor was dull until I heard you." He adds that the president should go home to his wife. Then, on second thought, he changes his mind. "No," he adds. "I'll go home to your wife. And except for the improvement, she'll never know the difference." Groucho's appearance further contributes to his parody of foolish desire. It is not as much a matter of dress as of mask. His greasepaint mustache, whiteface, wire-rimmed glasses, and cigar deprive his face of its natural appearance. Only the tricky, harsh-looking, grasping persona remains. Of all the brothers' costumes, his most hides the appearance of the real man. Other elements of his appearance are his height and posture. Like the other brothers, Groucho is usually shorter than most of the cast. Like many Renaissance clowns, Groucho exaggerates his shortness. For example, in Horse Feathers Groucho's head is at the voluptuous Thelma Todd's neck as they sit on a sofa, and in the canoe scene Groucho reclines under an umbrella and plays a guitar while Thelma Todd sits erect rowing the canoe. He is, after all, only the parodied personification of desire, and he will neither attempt nor manifest sexual action. In the same film he also takes a lower and off-centered position in the classroom as he paces in his usual bent posture in the lower left and upper right of the screen. Meanwhile, the biology professor lectures, standing tall and sternly in the center. At times in the film, Groucho, the college president, parodies the traits of a mercenary college administrator, yet here he mocks the pretensions of the earnest self-important college professor. Like the medieval and Renaissance Vice, Groucho appears to be tricky and devious, stooped in a posture at once silly and secretive, disordering and distorting. As both a critic and satiric exaggeration of desire that is not compelled to really act, he ferrets out the basest motivations of others with overt derision, caricature, and mimicry. Chico, whose dress is most nearly like that of the fool's motley and pointed hat, does not bother to comment on anyone's motives. His is a response to method; that is, to language itself. As Groucho mocks desire, Chico mocks language, Groucho's best weapon against others. According to Wes Gehring, his is the "undisciplined mind" that fractures "reason and the language" so that the "disciplined mind of Groucho" is eventually defeated (114). Concerned only with the moment, he responds only to the last word, ignoring both causes and consequences. He is most reminiscent of Erasmus's narrator, Folly, who warns of the danger of using language as a tool for understanding. "You are just too foolish," she says, "if you suppose that after I have poured out a hodgepodge of words like this I can recall any thing that I have said. . . . I hate a hearer that remembers any thing" (120). Language is a pleasant momentary experience, but, Chico implies, it is a very tricky substance from which to form logical discourse.
The Marx Brothers
303
Chico reminds us of this throughout the films. In most, he enters after the exposition has been established and Groucho has presented his own acquisitive agenda. In The Cocoanuts Chico saunters into the Hotel de Cocoanuts with Harpo. Stepping over to Groucho at the front desk, he announces, "We want a room, no bath." Groucho answers, "We got no vacancy." Chico comes right back. "That's all right," he assures him. "We want a room." Chico cannot acknowledge that any two words, "vacancy" and "room," can be synonyms. Individual words, he suggests, are individual. Meanings cannot overlap, and word A cannot equal word B. In A Night at the Opera Chico denies the logic of the discourse of protocol and social order. He asks the mailroom worker, "You got some mail for me?" The mailroom worker dismisses him, "You don't work here." But Chico protests. "Where am I going to get mail? I don't work anywhere!" Chico highlights the foolish but implied logic of the language that suggests that only employed people may receive mail. Soon follows the famous dialogue between Chico and Groucho in which they edit Ricardo's singing contract. Even though Chico is Ricardo's manager, Groucho dismisses Chico's need to read the contract. "No need of reading that because they're duplicates." Chico stares at him. "Don't you know what duplicates are?" Groucho finally asks. "Yeah," answers the unruffled Chico. "Five kids up in Canada." Misunderstood sounds confuse discourse as successfully as the dismissal of synonyms. Then the editing begins. In the film, as Groucho and Chico each hold a copy of the contract, Groucho begins: "The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part. .. want to hear some more?" Chico answers, "Only the first part." Groucho seeks clarification, "The party of the first part?" "No," continues Chico. "The first part of the party of the first part." "Well," Groucho reads, "it says 'the first part of the party of the first part shall be known in this contract' Look! Why should we quarrel about a thing like that?" (he tears off the offending clause) "We'll take it right out." Chico takes his lead and tears the top from his copy of the contract. "Sure," he agrees. "It's too long anyhow. Now what have we got left?" Groucho examines the document. "Well, I've got about a foot and a half. . .. Now then, The party of the second part shall be known in this contract as the party of the second part.' " Chico dissolves this one with a pun. "Well, I don't know. I don't like the second party either." Groucho then enters into the equivocated meaning of "party" generated by Chico. "You should have come to the first party. We didn't get home till around four in the morning. I was blind for three days." They tear off this aggravating second clause and continue, eliminating the several subsequent clauses. The scene concludes with its famous finale: Groucho points out the so-called sanity clause. Chico pauses and then looks up at Groucho and grins. "Hey, you can't fool me! I know there aint no Sanity Clause!" Chico destroys the meaning of the contract's legalese, jargon, and wordiness both figuratively and literally.
304
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
We must, however, understand the distinction between many of Groucho's puns and those of Chico. We recall Groucho's punning lines mocking the president of the Board in Horsefeathers, ' T thought my razor was dull until I heard you." He has introduced an equivocating word, "dull," in order to mock another character. Chico, on the other hand, uses puns in the reverse way: to eliminate meaning from another's lines. When Chico is on trial in Duck Soup, Groucho, the attorney, asks him, "Now, I ask you one. What is it has a trunk, but no key, weighs two thousand pounds, and lives in a circus?'' The prosecutor interrupts. "That's irrelevant," he admonishes. But Chico brightens. "A relevant! Hey that's the answer! There's a whole lotta relephants in the circus!" The judge agrees with the prosecutor. ' That sort of testimony we can eliminate." Again Chico returns. "I'd like a lemonade!" While Groucho equivocates by taking a term from outside the plot and using it to attack someone within the plot, Chico equivocates on a term from within the plot and moves it away, thereby creating absurdity. It is almost as if equivocation is a verbal grenade. Groucho picks a word from the outside world and, turning it inside out, aims it very carefully at a particular target in the plot; Chico takes a word from the scripted plot and lobs it to explode as far away as possible. A final example of Chico's disintegration of the logic of discourse occurs in Horse Feathers when straight man Groucho, the president of Huxley College, tells Chico, "Fix it for our team to win. . . . You have to kidnap two players on the Darwin team." "You bet," agrees Chico. "First I call them up on the telephone. Then I send my chauffeur." Groucho is amazed that Chico has both a car and a chauffeur. So Chico explains, ' T no got a car. I had one, but it cost too much money to pay for a car and a chauffeur. So I sold the car." Groucho continues to set him up. "Now you know I'm funny, but I would have kept the car." "But I need a chauffeur," Chico complains, "to get to work!" "How,— without a car?" Groucho asks. "It's no problem," Chico assures him. "I no got a job." In this scene Chico has dissolved the real subjects under discussion—the kidnapping, the chauffeur, the car, and the job—by ignoring the context in which they are first mentioned. Not one term remains a valid signifier throughout the entire interchange. What is the point, then? Perhaps the nature of language is the issue. Chico's responses to Groucho suggest that discourse does not clearly represent the present physical world. If we expect it to function in this way, it will only lead to a dead end—no kidnapping, no car, no chauffeur, no job. Rather, language is itself a fluid part of the present physical world. Finally, we look at Harpo, usually regarded as the most friendly and pleasant of the brothers even by Groucho. In the films he highlights neither desire nor discourse, but action. He dresses in something similar to what Enid Welsford calls the "lumpish" costume of the medieval or Renaissance clown, much like the dress of modern tramplike circus clowns. Like such clowns, Harpo uses visual and physical tricks. Since he has no language, his methods necessarily vary from those of Groucho and Chico. His is the sphere of action, but
The Marx Brothers
305
it is spontaneous action without clear motive or plan, and it brings no unpleasant consequence. He is acted upon by the rest of the world in often violent ways, and he himself acts similarly, but neither he nor anyone else suffers serious consequences. Thus he highlights the folly in our belief that actions have causes and consequences. Harpo's first scenes in the films determine this role. In The Cocoanuts his activities as an arriving guest at the Hotel de Cocoanuts are to rip up mail, eat the glue and the flowers, and drink the ink. Throughout the entire scene this continues with gusto and with no apparent ill effect. In Duck Soup his first responsibility is to drive Groucho in the sidecar of his motorcycle. Harpo starts the engine and drives off, but the sidecar and Groucho remain stationary at the curb. Later in the film the same thing happens; finally, on the third try Groucho shrewdly takes a seat on the motorcycle itself, forcing Harpo to ride in the sidecar. When the engine starts, Groucho and the motorcycle remain still, but Harpo in the sidecar drives away in a cloud of dust. Harpo can always act and move, even though he has no reason to move nor any particular place to go. More unusual is his first scene in A Night at the Opera, in which he dresses himself in the clown costume of the opera's leading performer, Rudolfo Lassparri. When Lassparri discovers him, he angrily chases him around the room and beats him. Finally Harpo takes off the costume, and beneath it he wears the costume of the leading lady. This is an interesting presentation of the clown as hermaphrodite, but it also reveals his invulnerability. Lassparri's beating causes no suffering; there is no consequence of the painful actions of others. This is much like the invulnerability of Lucky to the attacks of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. Like the actions of other clowns, Harpo's arise from nothing and nowhere. But at random moments they have benefits. In the final scene of Animal Crackers, Harpo produces an insect sprayer that he uses to put the entire cast to sleep in Mrs. Rittenhouse's library. Gradually he sprays them all, even Chico, and they sink to the floor in unconsciousness. Finally Harpo himself is the only one left standing. He peers around, stepping over the prone and sleeping bodies, and suddenly spots a beautiful blond passed out on the floor. He looks at her, smiles to himself, and standing directly over her, sprays himself with the gas, tumbling down asleep directly on top of her. The action has no real consequence, but at that single moment, it is clearly the best action to take. No single brother is a universal clown, mocking all elements of life and culture. Each focuses differently. In a sense this represents the mirror phase in human development identified by Jacques Lacan that necessitates the splitting of the perceiving " I " from the perceived " I . " That is, as a human being develops, she or he develops a notion of the self, which is necessarily less than the entire self. This self-image is always in process and is always incomplete. Likewise, each brother represents one aspect of humanness. This is particularly relevant to the famous mirror scene in Duck Soup, a scene Allen Eyles calls "Harpo's tour de force" (106) and Wes Gehring assesses as "argumentatively
306
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
the greatest of all Marx Brothers scenes" (114). Groucho peers into what once was a mirror. As he slowly steps forward, his image appears, played by Harpo. Groucho begins to walk and jump and tiptoe back and forth across the mirror's frame. His image reflects back his movements. Then suddenly a second image of Groucho appears in the mirror, following Groucho's actions, and there are three Grouchos. The identity between self and self-image undergoes a Lacanian revelation: I am mysteriously more than any image of me. Clowns acknowledge their own incomplete self-images, and they laugh at and rejoice in their own limited vision, encouraging us to go and do likewise. CRITICAL RECEPTION The Marx Brothers have always been popular, but during the iconoclastic 1960s their films began to receive even greater interest and sometimes near reverence, which continues today. Gehring notes four areas of comedy in which they are most influential: they demonstrate "the potential comic artistry of sound films" (118); they present the "complex, multifaceted nature" of twentiethcentury comedy (117); they serve as icons of so-called pure comedy and the antiestablishment spirit (110); and they are key figures in the antiheroic school of comedy and black comedy. Eugene lonesco claimed that the brothers were the single greatest influence on his work. Neither innovative formal culture nor fashionable popular culture has the powerful effect of the Marx Brothers. Their artistry merged formal and popular culture so that both the permanence of aesthetic design and the uniqueness of artistic implementation were immeasurably strengthened by one another. NOTES 1. See Arce and Gehring (1-107) for major biographical details in the lives of the Marx Brothers. Other texts listed in the bibliography cite additional information. 2. Serving consecutively as straight men for the team, neither Gummo nor Zeppo enjoyed show business, and both left the team as quickly as financially possible, in 1917 and 1934, respectively.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Selected Filmography See Gehring for complete filmography. Animal Crackers. Dir. Victor Heerman. Paramount, 1930. The Cocoanuts. Dir. Robert Florey and Joseph Santley. Paramount, 1929. A Day at the Races. Dir. Sam Wood. MGM, 1937. Duck Soup. Dir. Leo McCarey. Paramount, 1933.
The Marx Brothers
307
Horse Feathers. Dir. Norman McLeod. Paramount, 1932. A Night at the Opera. Dir. Sam Wood. MGM, 1935.
Secondary Sources Adamson, Joe. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Arce, Hector. Groucho. New York: Putnam's, 1979. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. Trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1941. Eyles, Allen. The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy. 1966. New York: Paperback Library, 1971. Gehring, Wes D. The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Marx, Arthur. Son of Groucho. New York: McKay, 1972. Marx, Groucho, and Richard J. Anobile. The Marx Bros. Scrapbook. New York: Crown, 1973. Marx, Harpo, with Rowland Barber. Harpo Speaks! New York: Freeway, 1974. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Merry Report
(England: In John Heywood's The Play of the Wether: c. 1533)
Vicki K. Janik BACKGROUND Merry Report "the Vyce" appears as the dominant character in The Play of the Wether, first published in 1533 in London by William Rastell, John Heywood's brother-in-law. The play is classified as a Tudor interlude because of its date, its brevity (1,254 lines), and its humor, although the term "interlude" was often used interchangeably with "play." It was probably acted by a company of boys, possibly the St. Paul's Boys, for members of the English court of Henry VIII at Christmas in 1527 (Heywood, ed. Robinson, 80). The play presents eight petitioners who arrive one by one at the court of Jupiter. Each requests a particular type of weather that will be beneficial to his or her own most important activity. Before the petitioners arrive, Jupiter opens the play with a long encomium to himself in which he explains to the audience that he has been given the power of all the gods to set aright the weather on earth, and he has descended to "satysfye and content / All maner people whyche have ben offendyd / By any wether" (88-89). He requests a volunteer to serve as his "cryer" and selects Merry Report from among the audience. Jupiter then exits and only periodically reappears during the petitioning process, while Merry Report remains onstage for nearly the entire play, listening to, taunting, and teasing the procession of English citizens. These include a gentleman who seeks fair weather for hunting, a merchant who desires wind for sailing trading ships, a ranger who wants violent wind to blow down trees and branches, two bawdy millers who debate the value of their wished-for wind and rain to energize and move their millstones, a fine lady wishing to protect her beauty
Merry Report
309
with windless and temperate weather who debates a bawdy laundress who needs sunshine to dry her laundry, and a playful young boy who wishes for snow. Finally Jupiter returns and determines that he shall wisely grant each petitioner some of the weather requested, but' The dyrreccyon of that doutless shall stande / Perpetually in the power of our hande" (1202-1203). The petitioners are amazed at the brilliance of this solution; it is Merry Report alone who drily observes, "Syrs, now shall ye have the wether even as yt was" (1240). Jupiter has the final speech, in which he predicts that upon his return to heaven, he will be "gloryfyed most tryumphantly" (1249). The play, performed in the court of King Henry VIII in England, was written by John Heywood, who was known as an entertainer. Heywood was born in 1496 or 1497, probably in Coventry; he briefly attended Oxford and is recorded as a singer in the king's court in 1519. His wit was appreciated highly enough by King Henry that he overlooked both Heywood's overt Catholicism after the royal annulment granted by Archbishop Cranmer in 1533 and the entertainer's clear allegiance to the disinherited Princess Mary. Heywood remarkably remained in favor during the reign of King Edward VI, predictably reaped financial rewards in Queen Mary's reign, and under Queen Elizabeth was finally forced to flee England in 1564 for Belgium, where he died shortly after 1578 (Heywood, ed. Robinson, 26^10). John Heywood was an important member of the Sir Thomas More Circle. More had been the under treasurer for Henry VIII until 1529, when he replaced as chancellor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who had served since 1515. Wolsey had lost favor because of his intentionally weak support of Henry's sought-after annulment of his marriage to his wife, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of Charles V, the emperor of Spain. Henry chose More, a political progressive, humanist and intellectual, and devout Roman Catholic, possibly because of the artistic, musical, and scholarly interests they shared, and clearly because of More's loyalty and devotion. More served for two and one-half years but left "with the kynges favor" (Roper 95). While More's political strength never approached that of Wolsey before him, his intellectual powers made him the center of philosophy and art in the first half of the sixteenth century in England. Beginning as a strict Roman Catholic, More mellowed after meeting Desiderius Erasmus, with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. His followers came to be known as the Sir Thomas More Circle, a group whose members shared humanistic beliefs and a playful, witty outlook in their writings. Heywood was an intimate member of this circle, having married More's niece, Joan, the daughter of John Rastell and More's sister, Elizabeth. (See Bolwell, Hogrefe, Johnson, Reed, and Heywood, ed. Robinson, for details of all biographical material.) As a member of the More Circle, Heywood was a devout Roman Catholic and did not support the Act of Supremacy, but he also held the more radical beliefs of the group: common ownership of property, the abolition of inheritance, and the election of the monarchy—without violent insurrection. Heywood,
310
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
More, and the others held that the affairs of men were only a very small part of God's universe; consequently, they could not be taken entirely seriously. Heywood, described by the Protestant John Foxe as "a man both Witty and learned," was "a most noted poet and jester of this time . . . and made . . . most notable work of the clergy" (Foxe 99). In a conversation recorded between Queen Mary and Heywood, she is said to have told him that the priests must forgo their wives. He responded with a pun on "lemons" (citrus fruit and mistresses): "Your Grace must allow them Lemons then, for the clergy cannot live without sauce" (Camden 314). Heywood's exact activities at court between 1519, when court payments to him were first recorded, and 1533, when Wether was first published, are unknown. Operating in sixteenth-century society, which was more fluid than any until the nineteenth century, Heywood probably began as a popular court entertainer, as a jester or minstrel who was highly favored by the king. Perhaps he performed in Henry VIII's splendid masques and entertainments, but he probably worked in many capacities—as a director, writer, producer, musician, and performer, and he probably had a strong affiliation with more than one children's company. His work was popular both during his service at court and afterwards. Four editions of The Play of the Wether were published between 1533 and around 1569. The court of Henry VIII, particularly Henry himself and Cardinal Wolsey, appreciated artistic creativity, especially French style, in fashion, poetry, music, or even language. Thus it is not surprising that Heywood's Wether seems influenced by French drama, specifically the farce and sottie of the fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries (Maxwell 13-55). These are brief plays of 400 to 600 lines with trifling plots based on perhaps a fabliaux, a jest, a secret, or adultery. Acted by sots or fool characters, the French sottie begins a distinguishable lineage to The Play of the Wether. Wether is influenced by other artistic traditions as well that were popularized by members of the More Circle in their writings and performances. As evidenced by its overall debat and petition structure and its many classical references, Wether is certainly influenced by Greek and Roman writings, such as the Dialogues of Lucian and the mythological poetry of The Metamorphoses by Ovid or the tales of Aesop. Finally, the native English influence of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales is apparent in the conventions manifested in the petitioners with whom Merry Report often spars (Heywood, ed. Robinson, 85-89). Merry Report himself seems most clearly influenced by Erasmus's Folly in his Encomium Moriae (The Praise of Folly), since Erasmus was a close friend of Sir Thomas More, who himself was a friend of Heywood. Both wise fool characters force the audience to shift their points of view toward them, mock the foolishness of others, and maintain a lighthearted mood. Additionally, Merry Report is influenced by the medieval vice or fool (the two terms were often used interchangeably), characters who played major roles in the plays and courts of England as early as the fifteenth century. Finally, the French sot of the sotties
Merry Report
311
and farces informs Merry Report. This character wore motley and bells and often performed the function of rapporteur, in one instance, like Merry Report, he played the role of comic attendant fool. Thus while Wether derives from a mix of dramatic and poetic genres—farce, debat, and morality—in its structure, its theme emanates from the Christian-humanist tradition as most immediately interpreted by Erasmus and More. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Merry Report is characteristic of the Tudor fool-vice figure who fulfills many of the functions of the so-called vice in medieval drama, who mirrors the language and perspectives of Folly in Erasmus's Praise of Folly (1509), and who prefigures the fools and clowns of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Stuart dramatists, although an unbroken line has never been established showing the evolution of the vice, clown, or fool. Merry Report is the first character to be identified as a "vice" in the dramatis personae. He is a conventional fool figure first in his appearance. From scant internal evidence, Merry Report is said to be wearing "light... araye" (110), gay and perhaps humorous. Additionally, he refers to his dress as "fryse or fethers" (134), that is, coarsely woven heavy material and perhaps the coxcomb of the fool. Finally, he mentions his "gowne" (801), conventional fool dress more common in the time of Shakespeare and perhaps similar to the "Jewish gabardine" worn by Shylock. Such dress represents the fool's dramatic function. He is a man, yet he does not dress like one. He is both within and without reality, perhaps a fantasy, perhaps a grotesque, both real and nonexistent. He appears as ambiguity and illusion and forces us to question the truth of any appearance of truth. Merry Report is the most important character in The Play of the Wether, being onstage during 80 percent of the play. While Jupiter may be the highest being on the hierarchical scale, it is Merry Report who interacts with all the other characters. He screens the petitioners for Jupiter, but he is not submerged in the plot. In fact, he thrives because of his indifference to the world and his noninvolvement in its activities. He does not show interest in the bribes that the Gentleman and the Merchant offer him, and he alone can say to Jupiter, "For all wethers I am so indyfferent / Wythout affeccyon" (154-155). He exists both within and without the plot and within and without time and space. For example, when Jupiter requests a crier, Merry Report enters from the audience, not the world of the play, and his first lines are addressed to a torchbearer standing among the audience. Only then does he enter the fantasy space of Jupiter, from which he periodically chides and comments directly to the audience. After his first exit, he returns claiming to have traveled to forty actual cities in England. He has, then, passed from the real world of the audience to the fantasy world of the acting space to the real world of England within the fantasy world, all without moving through earthly time. When and where he
312
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
actually functions is unanswerable. Time and space, fact and fantasy, are ambiguous and unordered. Merry Report's position in the plot is central, but his universe consists only of him; he is the only member of the ordered system. He confirms this to Jupiter: Some say I am I per se I But what maner I so ever be I I assure your good lordshyp I am I. (104-106) But it may be incorrect to conclude that Merry Report is therefore some sort of existential being floating around in nothingness. He may be a mere illusion, consisting of the airy substance of language alone, as his name implies. At one point, he boasts of his success at making a loving wife happy over the news of her husband's death: "She thanked me hartely for my mery tydynges" (146). The illusion of happiness is created in the wife; but he is only the airy substance of a tale within that of a play, surrounding the illusory figure of the fool, Merry Report. Yet Merry Report provides refreshingly honest perspectives on the world. He points out the foolishness around him. Caustically and critically, he provides a choric commentary on the selfishness and pettiness of the petitioners. He calls the launder "a raylynge hore" (937); scorns the wrathful Ranger, "I set by your charyte / as much in a maner as by your honeste" (430^131); and acidly comments when the two millers exit, ' 'Now be we ryd of two knaves at one chaunce / By Saynt Thomas, yt is a knavishe ryddaunce" (764-765). This objectivity transfers into Merry Report's relationship with women. While he may claim to suffer unquenchable lust, only his words verify this. Merry Report may then be seen not as lustful in act but as bawdy in word. This is like the conventional fool, nearly a fertility symbol, who is a nonparticipating catalyst who loosens human bonds to rational order so that individuals may acknowledge and revel in their natural existences. Merry Report's language focuses upon the body, both a joyous and a humbling perspective. But following the clue in his name, Merry Report also comments on language itself. He serves as a metonym of language that is exploded by laughter into its physical parts—sound and rhythm—and consequently diminishes as a verbal or graphic representation of the natural world. Merry Report's extensive use of puns and equivocation underscores the sound of language, which denies its denotative and connotative meaning. His lines are also the most rhythmically patterned, stressing their aural qualities. For example, the following passage clearly belongs to Merry Report, not merely because of the opening sexually suggestive proverb, but because of the rhetorically patterned language containing internal rhyme, puns, alliteration, and symploce (clauses that begin and end with the same word): Longe be women a bryngyng up and sone brought down; So fete yt is, so nete yt is, so nyse yt is, So trycke yt is, so quycke yt is, so wyse yt is. (859-861)
Merry Report
313
Such language uses sound to either enlarge and enliven meaning or corrupt and cover it and thereby create ambiguity. As the fool, Merry Report uses language for both purposes. Double entendres are representative of Merry Report's linguistic ambiguity. Suggesting both the scabrous and astronomical meanings of "moon" and "makyng," Merry Report describes Jupiter's ongoing offstage activities: Even now is he makynge of a new moone He sayth your old moones be so farre tasted That all the goodness of them is wasted. (796-798) His double entendres also deflate and dissolve characters and events. Speaking to the audience, he describes the first petitioner, the upper-class Gentleman who argues for temperate weather that will best serve his favorite sport, hunting: "[Ladies, he] comyth to make you sporte" (248). The pun hints that the Gentleman may be a noble huntsman or may also be a common skirt chaser. He later mocks the Merchant as a cuckold. "I pray you," Merry Report asks, "how doth my mastres your wyfe?" (330). Merry Report's corrupted language introduces new understanding even as it questions old suppositions. Merry Report may be described as one who provokes laughter and offers ironic insights into the weaknesses of other characters, but is also the repository of folly himself. He reflects for us the folly within ourselves. At the climax of the play, Jupiter presents a happy solution for each petitioner's meteorological request. But Merry Report cries, "Syrs, now shall ye have the wether even as yt was" (1240). The meteorological reality is unchanged, but words have given it a new perspective. Merry Report's comment thus forces a questioning of the value of Jupiter's words and even of their very reality. Order, implies Merry Report, originates in the mind of man, where folly also resides. Merry Report forces the question that order and folly may be one and the same. He suggests that man must forgo the pointless quest for wisdom and admit that he possesses the vision of the fool, never focused but, perhaps as a consequence, joyous, as God is allowed to "devyse for us all." Thus illusory, man-made philosophical and social order is razed by the early-sixteenth-century fool, leaving only the true order of God. CRITICAL RECEPTION For several decades the wise fool was overshadowed by the natural, the clown popularized by such individuals as Will Sommers (Heywood's contemporary), Richard Tarlton, and Will Kemp. But in the later plays of Shakespeare at the turn of the century, the fool returns in greater glory, a theatrical, dramatic evolution of Erasmus's Folly combined with the Fool-Vice, who even more entertainingly disassembles the ideological constructs of the day, perhaps,
314
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
however, not in order to reveal, as he had so many decades earlier, an underlying order of God. As the wise fool waned in popularity in the seventeenth century, Merry Report, as well as Heywood himself, moved out of favor partially, at least, because of their Roman Catholic associations. Indeed, the many editions and printings of Heywood's plays that had continued through the sixteenth century ceased. Although Merry Report's Wether was never as highly acclaimed as Heywood's more conventionally plotted farce, Johan Johan, or even his debut The Foure PP, in 1903 Alfred W. Pollard recognized John Heywood's overall excellence and first named him "the Father of English comedy" because he "was the first to understand that a play might be constructed with no other objects than satire and amusement" (17). At the close of the twentieth century, however, the words of Heywood, in his character Merry Report, have yet another value. They offer the persistent, questioning refrain that the postmodern period requires, even embraces, as an essential element of order itself. There can be no order without the questions; there can be no voice without the fool. He ensures the necessary polyphony or perhaps the cacophony of expression in contemporary society. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Heywood, John. The play of the wether: A new and a very mery enterlude of all maner wethers, w Rastell, 1533. . The Play of the Wether. In Tudor Facsimile Texts. Vol. 14. 1909. New York: AMS, 1970. . The Play of the Wether. In A Critical Edition of "The Play of the Wether" by John Heywood, ed. Vicki Knudsen Robinson [Janik]. New York: Garland, 1987.
Secondary Sources Bolwell, Robert. The Life and Works of John Heywood. New York: AMS, 1966. Busby, Olive. Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama. London: Oxford UP, 1923. Camden, William. Remains Concerning Britain: Their Languages, Names, Surnames, Allusions, Anagrams, Armories, Moiries, Impresses, Apparel, Artillerie, Wise Speeches, Proverbs, Poesies, Epitaphs. London: John Russell Smith, 1607. Cameron, Kenneth Walter. John Heywood's "Play of the Wether": A Study in Early Tudor Drama. Raleigh, NC: Thistle, 1941. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. Trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1941. Foxe, John. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, Vol. V. 1841-1849; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1969. Hogrete, Pearl. The Sir Thomas More Circle. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1959.
Merry Report
315
Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare's Motley. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Johnson, Robert Carl. John Heywood. New York: Twayne, 1970. Maxwell, Ian. French Farce and John Heywood. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1946. Pollard, Alfred W. "Critical Essay." In Representative English Comedies: From the Beginnings to Shakespeare, ed. Charles Mills Gayley. 1903. New York: AMS, 1969. Reed, A. W. Early Tudor Drama: Medwall, The Rastells, Heywood, and the More Circle. London: Methuen, 1926. Roper, William. The Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly Greatness, or the Life of Sir Thomas More, Knight. London: Chatto and Windus, 1909. Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Paul the Apostle
(Jewish Diaspora and Christian World: c. 54 c.E.-Present)
Mary A. Maleski In his epistles to the Corinthians, St. Paul profoundly transforms the thentraditional concept of the fool into a pattern for human perfection. He does this by exhorting his audience of fledgling Christians to be fools, that is, to embrace the folly of the cross, which for them remained a cultural symbol of dire disgrace. Ultimately, his translation of Christ's cross from a sign of foolish weakness to that of glorious spiritual power would inspire not only his contemporaries but also reformers such as Martin Luther, religious communities such as the Franciscans, and major writers such as Erasmus, Donne, and Shakespeare. Paul's peculiarly Christian fool does, of course, mimic the characteristics of other fools: entitled to be in the company of the worthies, she or he gets away with saying things at times comic, at times outrageously forthright, even disarmingly wise. Paul's original ideas about the power and wisdom of Christ (the Christian) as fool depend, however, on his own privileged mystical experience (see Segal), and they fit within the larger context of his apocalyptic vision of salvation history (see Beker, Paul the Apostle; Alexandra Brown). They also derive from the Jewish and Hellenistic cultures that nourished him. Thus in his fool talk, as in all else he does in his mission to convert the Gentiles, Paul fixes his gaze on Christ crucified, whom he loves. Hans Kung stresses that "the crucified Jesus Christ who has been raised to life by God stands in the centre of Paul's view of God and man. So in favour of human beings, there is a christocentricity which is grounded and comes to a climax in a theocentricity" (Kung 22-23; see also Fitzmyer, "Pauline" 1388:28). Paul's fool of 1 and 2 Corinthians, the key texts, is essentially a theological creation; nevertheless, it would radically alter the literary as well as the religious expres-
Paul the Apostle
317
sion of folly in the future. This entry aims to be useful, then, in suggesting a context for understanding Pauline folly and, by implication, its successors.1
BACKGROUND Paul wrote his letters in Greek, and so we might profitably first question whether "fool" and its cognates meant the same then and in that language as they do today in English. Yes and no. To designate "fool," the apostle uses both moria (1 Cor. 1:18, 20, 21, 25, 27; 2:14; 3:18, 19) and aphron (1 Cor. 15: 36; 2 Cor. 11:1, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23; 12:6, 11). In early Hellenistic literature aphron could mean "lack of understanding" (Kittel and Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, hereafter TDNT, 9.220), and it could describe one who stupidly boasted: "Vaunting human reason is folly before God" (TDNT 9.225). The term might also convey "the secondary sense of a 'denier of God' who contemptuously disrupts fellowship between God and man" (TDNT 9.225). Now the translators of the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint, most often use aphron for "fool," while New Testament writers favor moria (TDNT 4.837). Considering that the pre-Christian Paul was a Pharisee, it may be useful to remember that in admonishing that group for their hypocrisy, Jesus calls them fools, aphron (Luke 11:40). Although Luke, traditionally recognized as a friend of Paul, penned his gospel decades after Paul wrote Corinthians, he likely based his text on earlier written sources as well as the oral tradition of the words of Jesus (see Raymond Brown and Collins 1043-1048). "The Lord's saying is a judgment on the basically false approach of the Pharisees and it uses the common Rabbinic address 'fools' in the sense of 'ungodly men' " (TDNT 4:230). Perhaps little wonder, then, that in 2 Corinthians Paul chooses aphron rather than moria to speak of the "fool" in a wholly negative way, even to the point of sarcasm when he taunts the wayward Corinthians: "For you gladly put up with fools, being wise yourselves! For you put up with it when someone makes slaves of you, or preys upon you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or gives you a slap in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!" (2 Cor. 11:19-21 ).2 But very significantly, Paul transforms the sense of folly from a sign of disgraceful weakness to one of wisdom, honor, and power when he chooses the term moria rather than aphron in 1 Corinthians. He will not boast, he says, except in the folly of the cross; thus he affirms himself a fool for Christ's sake—no longer a foolish Pharisee (aphron) to be admonished, but a foolish Christian (moria) worthy of imitation.3 The reliable primary source for all we know about Paul's life and mission remains the New Testament, specifically Luke's Acts of the Apostles and Paul's epistles;4 of those letters attributed to him, biblical critics generally conclude that Paul definitely authored seven: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon (Segal 11). "Most modern scholars agree that Acts is best read for historical purposes in the light of the Epistles,
318
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
not conversely" (Schroeder, New Catholic Encyclopedia 11:2, hereafter NCE); see also Pritchard 209). Paul was born a Jew of the diaspora: he lived outside the land of Palestine, in the Roman city of Tarsus, Cilicia (Acts 21.39). In Acts Luke gives us the early biography. Assuming Paul's voice, he speaks to those Jews who attack him on a visit to Jerusalem: he says that he was ' 'brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law" (Acts 22:3). Paul thereby became a Pharisee, one who observed the authority of a Jewish oral tradition as well as that of the Pentateuch, ' 'the only Scripture accepted by the Sadducees" (NCE 11:252), priestly rivals of his predominantly lay group. As a faithful Pharisee (Acts 26:5), Paul opposed the followers of the new Christian sect to the extreme of persecution: he undertook a voluntary mission to Damascus to arrest those Jews who followed Christ (Acts 9:1-2). But along the way, he experienced his remarkable conversion, which Luke recounts three times in varying contexts (Acts 9:3-9; 22:6-11; 26:12-18). Common to all versions are the appearance of a sudden light from heaven and the voice of Jesus speaking to Paul. In the first two accounts Paul loses his sight, later to be restored by Ananias, who then reveals God's commission for Paul (the physical blindness transparently a metaphor for the spiritual). Luke has Paul narrate the third version for King Agrippa in a defense of his evangelizing mission; here Christ tells all directly to Paul, and so the apostle can plausibly argue to Agrippa that he must obey the divine command. In any case, the vision that appeared along the way converted Saul, a man enflamed with hatred for the Christians, to Paul (the Roman version of his Hebrew name),5 one who burned with zeal to teach all the world of Christ the savior. That first mystical experience seeded the fool in Paul; it was the bridge to his new life as an apostle wherein he would find strength in the weakness of the cross. Paul refers to this Christian epiphany in the letters only glancingly, in Galatians 1:13-16, 1 Corinthians 15:8-9, and Philippians 3:4-11, where he again speaks "foolishly." He writes of exchanging worldly things for the cross. As a Pharisee, a scrupulous upholder of Judaic law, he had learned of the curse—the shame—of the cross full well. Thus he could argue: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree' " (Gal. 3:13). It is written in Deuteronomy (21:23), the Hebrew book of laws. Paul the Jew fervently embraced Christ the Jew as his savior and moved to preach his doctrines to other Jews and especially to the Gentiles. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Paul scripts the Corinthian letters that deal with his transformation to people he has already converted to Christianity. Rather than construct a systematic theology, he, like Augustine after him, writes in response to his community's needs. These people of cosmopolitan Corinth have in various ways fallen short
Paul the Apostle
319
of the doctine he preached, and so in each letter, Paul admonishes them about their wayward behavior. In 1 Corinthians he corrects their abuses and answers questions concerning topics as diverse as sexual behavior and the liturgy; but it is the divisions they had been propagating among themselves that elicit his message on folly. These new Christians focused energy on belonging to the most knowing and thereby, one suspects, most worthy group—Cephas's, Apollo's, Paul's, or even Christ's. But other divisive forces influenced the new Christians too; Giinther Bornkamm notes, "Whatever the composition and rival standpoints of the parties, the really dangerous thing which Paul had to tackle in 1 Corinthians was the sudden appearance in the life of the church of people filled with the spirit ('enthusiasts'). These fanatics boasted that they and they alone had already reached the state of 'perfection' " (71; see also Perrin and Duling 176). These people (perhaps Gnostics)6 believed themselves already living in the world to come and, so privileged, held an elite position above the rest of humanity and were not at all responsible for the well-being of the unwashed others. Paul disabused those who would glory in the wisdom of this world by redirecting their attention to Christ, about whom he and his followers taught: But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor. 1:23-25) The inspiring and no-doubt comforting verses that promise a supernatural reward soon follow: "No eye has seen . .. what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor. 2:9-10). The Corinthians learn that their boasting should be only in the Lord and that altering their desires to seek God's wisdom rather than the world's wisdom is finally to have "the mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16). Not only does Paul strike the now-familiar paradox of the wise fool in these early chapters, he also uses his own apostolic situation, whereby he has suffered greatly, as an exemplar of powerful and otherworldly behavior (1 Cor. 4:9-13). God's wisdom demonstrates itself, after all, in electing the weak and the foolish. But Paul moves beyond simple paradox to manifest God's wisdom in choosing the cross as a sign of power (of the spirit) in weakness (of the world): Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God's Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else's scrutiny. (1 Cor. 2:14-15) Recall that with a touch of humor, Paul reminds his people that in choosing them, God chose the weak rather than the rich and powerful (1 Cor. 1:26-29). And so the stage is set for the fool's talk of 2 Corinthians. Once again Paul's
320
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
converts have succumbed to the teaching of false preachers, of superapostles (their identity is a point of controversy); now, however, these others have vilified and denigrated Paul to the extent that he must reconstruct his reputation. Needing stronger medicine for the cure, then, Paul represents his theological convictions with all the force of an ace debater. As Jerome Murphy-O'Connor so well puts it: In defiance of his own refusal to boast (10:17) or to accept comparison as a valid criterion (10:12), Paul decides to adopt the procedure of his adversaries. The situation at Corinth (11:3) left him little choice. Even though he knew it to be foolishness (11:1, 16; 12:13), he had to show that he could beat his rivals at their own game (4:18; 5:12; 11:18), as he had already done to the "spirit-people." . . . In so doing, he contradicts the charge of 10:10c (cf. 11:6) by displaying his knowledge of the rhetorical conventions of his day, notably, self-display, comparison, irony, and parody. His form of preaching (1 Cor 2:1-5) was by choice, not by necessity. (826) So he boasts that he has suffered more and better than those who "are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ" (2 Cor. 11:13). Cleverly, he turns all into human weakness, something of which he can boast, as a fool, aphron. But then comes the piece de resistance: he boasts in his visions and revelations, telling here the truth and giving credit, not as the superapostles would, to himself, but rather to Christ, whose weakness is ironically the power that gives Paul the strength to endure. In specific terms—not so relevant to a consideration of the fool—he defends himself against the slanders of the superapostles. Together with the historical and textual context with its hermeneutical relevance, biblical scholars tend to focus on the apocalyptic and/or the mystical aspects of Paul's theology in 1 and 2 Corinthians, the central texts dealing with Pauline folly. Etymologically, "apocalyptic" derives from a Greek root meaning unveiling or revelation (see Sturm 17; Alexandra Brown 1). That the term has gathered the meaning of endgame through, for instance, its use as the title of the last book of the New Testament, variously called the Apocalypse or Revelation, presents only one of many problems for readers (Sturm traces the history of the word's usage in both literary and theological criticism). Clearly Paul reveals the nature of God's wisdom to the Corinthians when he turns the traditional opposition of wisdom and foolishness to a virtuous identity in the suffering of Christ, and in that sense his teaching is apocalyptic (1 Cor. 2:6-10). Certainly when he "boasts" of being taken up into the third heaven and there learning secrets that he cannot share, he at least reveals that God has revealed the supernatural to him (2 Cor. 12:1-7). In fact, Paul's entire mission after his conversion involved the revelation of Christ the Messiah to anyone who had the will to hear. A reader might recall how the fool of Shakespeare's King Lear possesses the wisdom to counsel his wayward master as he does—"Thou
Paul the Apostle
321
shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise" (1.5.44-45); that fool likewise reveals his wisdom to all who will hear, who can see. Paul's focus demands another turn, however, since like Erasmus's funnier Folly, he wants to teach his readers about the powerful foolishness of the cross. Not to be missed, of course, is the humor of Paul's boasting in Christ's weakness and so aligning himself with divine wisdom: not even the superapostles could top that. But in insisting on Christocentricity, Paul concurrently preaches an endgame, an eschatological apocalyptic. For the Christian, Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament; his resurrection and promise of a life to come give credence to yet another fulfillment. Being a fool for Christ's sake will yield a reward: the secrets of the wisdom of Paul's vision of paradise will finally be revealed; "For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ" (1 Cor. 15:21-22). Using speech-act theory (Austin, Petrey), Alexandra Brown moves a step beyond what has already been said to demonstrate the transformative power of Paul's revelatory language in 1 Corinthians: The way these themes—perception, cross, and apocalypse—combine in our text leaves little doubt that Paul's aim in preaching the cross is to alter his hearers' perception of the world in such a way as to alter their experience in the world. In the preaching of the cross, something is unveiled that moves the one who perceives it from one world to another, from the divided mind to the "mind of Christ" (2: 16). (xviii) Paul's very pronouncement of the folly of the cross—that is, of the wisdom and the power of one who loves so greatly that he gives his very being for the beloved—moves not just the text but the very hearts of those who can and who will hear to be radically changed: "We have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor. 2:16). "One who receives this mind perceives anew who God is, that is, the selfgiving God of the cross, and is thus reoriented toward reconciling service toward God and the world" (Alexandra Brown 146). Whatever richness they may glean, writers who adapt Paul's ideas probably have little hope of having such transformative theological potency. Apocalyptic eschatology grows once again from the roots of Paul's Judaism. By his Old Testament, his covenant with his chosen people, God promised his continuing presence and indeed a messiah. Paul embraced Jesus as his savior, but now looked forward to a second coming according to the new covenant revealed through Christ. In that sense, Paul became a new leader to the Promised Land, to the New Jerusalem, as the literature to follow would have it. In unpacking a theory of symbols, Northrop Frye posits a convergence of the apocalypse and the imagination in literature worth noting: Apocalypse means revelation, and when art becomes apocalyptic, it reveals. But it reveals only on its own terms, and in its own forms: it does not describe or
322
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
represent a separate content of revelation. When poet and critic pass from the archetypal to the anagogic phase, they enter a phase of which only religion, or something as infinite in its range as religion, can possibly form an external goal. The poetic imagination, unless it disciplines itself in the particular way in which the imaginations of Hardy and Houseman were disciplined, is apt to get claustrophobia when it is allowed to talk only about human nature and subhuman nature; and poets are happier as servants of religion than of politics, because the transcendental and apocalyptic perspective of religion comes as a tremendous emancipation of the imaginative mind. (125)
By such thinking, Pauline folly in all its turns and forms can free, and has so liberated, the poetic imagination. Paul narrates his conversion, his personal revelation, as well as the later fool's talk of 2 Corinthians, as mystical experiences. Given the fullness of his immersion in his Jewish faith, Paul's mysticism is hardly surprising: according to Margaret Smith, mysticism "is not to be regarded as a religion in itself, but rather as the most vital element in all true religions, rising up in revolt against cold formality and religious torpor" (3). Paul the Pharisee had strictly adhered to the Jewish law; transformed into an avid apostle of Christ, he foreswore the constriction of that Jewish law. Yet, as Alan Segal proposes, "Paul considered himself as part of a new Jewish sect and hoped to convince both fellow Christians and Jews of his vision of redemption" (xiv). Jewish mysticism of Paul's time centers on the image of God's Glory (Kavod) proclaimed by Ezechial in the recounting of his ecstatic vision of a heavenly chariot (Segal 9, 10, 39-41). Surely elements of that Old Testament story—Ezechial's falling to the ground, the glorious light, the voice of the Lord—play a role in Luke's recounting (creation?) of the particulars of Paul's transforming vision. Whatever we may think of Paul's radical conversion, Luke rehearses that event in a rather straightforward fashion: an audience can readily perceive that this incident changed Paul's very being. Luke tells of other visions Paul has, for example that in Acts 18, wherein the Lord comforts and assures him of his protection. In both of these and again in the Lord's appearance spoken of in Acts 22.17-21, Paul remains on earth. In the fool's talk of 2 Corinthians, however, the convert deliberately "boasts" of a journey to Paradise:
It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the tmth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is
Paul the Apostle
323
seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. (2 Cor. 12:1-7) This noetic and ineffable experience,7 this "fool's talk," lifts Paul and elevates Paul's narrative to the level of those written by the mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross centuries afterwards. As spiritual fool, Paul held a privileged position: he could boast, and he could speak the truth people would rather not or indeed could not hear, and he would "get away with it." Mystics after Paul often were ignored by church authorities; their knowledge direct from God and unmediated by ecclesiastical approval might, after all, prove dangerous to promulgated doctrine. Consider the medieval mystic Juliana with her theology of Jesus as Mother, something, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, "straightway dangerous" ("Much Madness Is Divinest Sense" 7). But the anchoress Juliana quietly wrote her revolutionary theology. The very public and active mystic Joan of Arc, on the other hand, provoked ecclesiastical wrath with fatal consequences. When Paul tells King Agrippa about his mystical conversion and the concomitant consequences he has suffered in following his Christian vocation, the procurator Festus denounces all as folly: "You are out of your mind, Paul! Too much learning is driving you insane!" (Acts 26:24). Paul denies it simply: "I am speaking the sober truth" (26:25), a defense that all too seldom works for foolish ones. CRITICAL RECEPTION The reader's response to Paul's fool's talk presents a unique interpretative complication since it depends quite radically on his/her religious disposition toward the text. For many, the real author of the Bible is God. When Paul communicated with his audience, after all, he held the privileged position of one who had directly received a divine commission. In Luke's third telling of the conversion story, Jesus appears in a vision to Paul and says, ' T will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me" (Acts 26:17-18). His contemporaries might simply dismiss that narrative, but in time the Christian community would regard the Bible as the inspired word of God. Extolling the Septuagint, Augustine says, "Hence even I, in my small measure, follow the footsteps of the apostles, because they themselves quoted prophetic testimonies from both sources, from the Hebrew and the Septuagint; and I have assumed that both sources should be employed as authoritative, since both are one, and both are inspired by God" (18:44, 823). Many today would yet adamantly agree. The responses of Paul's Jewish and Gentile contemporaries—as well as our own responses—depend on perspective. If we stand inside the religion, really or vicariously, we might well admire Paul and even be in awe of his communion
324
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
with divinity; we might then and therefore also catch the humor in his boasting in the face of the recalcitrant Corinthians. If we stand outside the ken of faith, however, perhaps to the extent of disdain, we might indeed also chuckle, but now at the naivete of the wannabe apostle: we may think him foolish, simply humorous, even silly, rather than profoundly religious. Feminist readers may have special difficulty appreciating Paul's seminal contribution to an understanding of the wise fool because they/we unhappily recall Paul's (culturally bound but seemingly sexist) admonition to the Corinthians that they should not allow women to speak in important public situations: "Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church" (1 Cor. 14.34-36). The New Revised Standard Version encloses that passage in parentheses to indicate a "later addition," while other editions, for example the New English Bible, make no such provision; in any case, the statement remains part of the biblical canon. Elaine Pagels astutely cites several passages to remind readers that Jesus "showed a remarkable openness toward women" (73). Paul imitated that sensitivity to an extent in, for instance, his acknowledging women disciples and even naming the woman Junia as one "prominent among the apostles" (Rom. 16:7).8 But, however ambivalently, Paul does insist on male precedence: "For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God, but woman is the reflection of man" (1 Cor. 11:7). Here again, though, he tempers that hierarchical pronouncement with a characteristically Pauline parallel by further stating that "just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God" (1 Cor. 11:12). Regardless, Paul's sexist attitudes surely helped controvert the Christian woman's moving in step with the liberation that Greek and Egyptian women experienced in those early centuries of the church (Pagels 74-75). "While Paul acknowledged women as equals 'in Christ,' and allowed for them a wider range of activity than did traditional Jewish congregations, he could not bring himself to advocate their equality in social and political terms" (Pagels 74). Furthermore, Paul's idea of the fool might be interpreted as a masculinization of the traditionally feminine concept of wisdom. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly presents wisdom as feminine; throughout Proverbs, for example, where Solomon says "the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction" (1:7), he personifies wisdom as feminine (see 8:1-36, e.g.), as do the writers of Ecclesiasticus and of Wisdom, apocryphal books included in the Septuagint.9 Traditional Greek philosophy does the same femininization, to at least some readers' chagrin. I. T., for example, in his 1609 translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, finds it necessary to demur (and we might chuckle) that Lady Philosophy, an allegorical wisdom figure, appears as a woman ' 'because in Latine and Greeke Philosophy is the feminine gender" (28 n. 1).
Paul the Apostle
325
When Paul writes that "the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Cor. 1:18), he makes power the antithesis of folly. Certainly this idea of power quickly transforms to wisdom because it is paradoxically the powerful weakness of the cross, the wisdom of God, that stands opposed to and by the wisdom of the world. Nevertheless, wisdom resides in embracing the cross of the Lord, and the feminine concept is at least submerged. A full history of response to Pauline folly (impossible here) would yield readings ranging from the expected sobriety of Thomas Aquinas, who in his Summa Theologiae one-dimensionally concludes, even while citing Paul, that folly is indeed a sin opposed to wisdom (2.2.46.1-3), to Erasmus's multidimensional, wildly ironic Folly in his Encomium Moriae. Willy-nilly, the Christian idea of the fool becomes commonplace after Paul, and so while his text seeks to breed sacred wisdom, it begs our attention for more secular interpretative purposes as well. We might profitably note, for instance, that Shakespeare's Bottom of A Midsummer Night's Dream falls far short of the Pauline pattern for human perfection manifested in the folly of the cross. A weaver (of visions?), Bottom has entertained countless audiences by unwittingly mixing the senses in his famous epiphany speech of act 4, scene 1, of the play. Having been magically (and rightly) translated into an ass, he stumblingly attempts to recognize his reality: Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but [a patch'd] fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was (4.1.206-211). These mangled, misquoted lines (see 1 Cor. 2:9) reveal more than the humor of this pathetic fellow's mismatched faculties, though; they resonate with the Pauline defense of self, with his mystical visions and revelation, with every person's need for humility. (Would Paul use aphron or moria were he to translate the text to Greek?) In any case, Paul added a theological dimension to our understanding of the fool that allows and invites profundity. NOTES 1. I am particularly grateful to my colleague Jennifer Glancy, associate professor of religious studies, for carefully reading this entry and for making wise suggestions. Blame the author, of course, for anything foolish said here. 2. Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version. 3. Erasmus, a biblical scholar par excellence, wisely chose moria to designate his "folly" because of the play on Thomas More's name, of course, but also no doubt because of Paul's usage in relating the Christian message. 4. Fitzmyer details Hellenistic influences in both the form and substance of the letters
326
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
("Pauline" 1385). See also Michael Goulder's chapter in Alter and Kermode's Literary Guide, 479-502. 5. For more on the name, see Fitzmyer, According to Paul 1-2. 6. ' 'Gnosticism is a religion of redemption, salvation, liberation. Its most distinguishing feature is that salvation is accomplished, not by the power of God nor by human faith nor by cooperation with the will of God, but by the assimilation of esoteric knowledge" (NCE 6:526). See also Pagels. 7. According to William James, "ineffability" and a "noetic quality" characterize the mystical experience (380). 8. That "Junia(s)" refers to a woman remains a controversial issue. See, for instance, Cervin's article for a summary of the scholarship, which, as he sees it, leads incontrovertably to the conclusion that Junia is female. 9. According to the Kabbalistic tradition, however, wisdom (hokhmah) is a masculine attribute of God. Kabbalah, "the major technical term for Jewish mysticism" (Neusner and Green 2:361), develops later than Paul, perhaps in the second century, but especially during the Middle Ages (but see Neusner and Green). Here "the rabbinic concept of Shekhinah, divine immanence, blossoms into the feminine half of God, balancing the patriarchal conception that dominates the Bible and the Talmud" (Matt. 1). I am grateful to my colleague Rabbi Michael Kagan, associate professor of philosophy, for pointing me toward this information. I say "toward" because I suspect that the Kabbalah is sacred "secret writing" that requires a special gift for understanding.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Dual-language ed. Trans, and ed. Thomas R. Heath. Vol. 35. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Augustine. Concerning The City of God against the Pagans. Trans. Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972. Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books. New Revised Standard Version. Nashville: Nelson, 1989. Kohlenberger, John R., Ill, ed. The Precise Parallel New Testament: Greek Text, King James Version, Rheims New Testament, Amplified Bible, New International Version, New Revised Standard Version, New American Bible, New American Standard Bible. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Marshall, Alfred, trans. The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1975. New English Bible with the Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
Secondary Sources Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962. Becker, Jtirgen. Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles. Trans. O. C. Dean, Jr. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993.
Paul the Apostle
327
Beker, J. Christiaan. Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. . "Paul the Theologian: Major Motifs in Pauline Theology." Interpretation 43 (1989): 352-365. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. I. T. Ed. William Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1963. Bomkamm, Gunther. Paul. Trans. D. M. G. Stalker. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Brown, Alexandra R. The Cross and Human Transformation: Paul's Apocalyptic Word in 1 Corinthians. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. Brown, Raymond E., and Raymond F. Collins. "Canonicity." In The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990. 1034-1054. Cervin, Richard S. "A Note Regarding the Name 'Junia(s)' in Romans 16:7." New Testament Studies 40 (1994): 464^170. Fitzmyer, Joseph A. According to Paul: Studies in the Theology of the Apostle. New York: Paulist, 1993. . "Introduction to the New Testament Epistles." In The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990. 768-771. . "Pauline Theology." In The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990. 1382-1416. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Goulder, Michael. "The Pauline Epistles." In The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1987. 479-502. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Ed. Martin E. Marty. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1982. Keck, Leander E. "Paul and Apocalyptic Theology." Interpretation 38 (1984): 229-241. Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Trans, and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964-1976. Kummel, Werner Georg, ed. Introduction to the New Testament. Trans. A. J. Mattill, Jr. 14th rev. ed. Nashville: Abingdon, 1966. Kung, Hans. Great Christian Thinkers. New York: Continuum, 1994. Martyn, Louis J. "Paul and His Jewish-Christian Interpreters." Union Seminary Quarterly Review 42 (1988): 1-15. Matt, Daniel C. The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism. San Francisco: Harper, 1996. McCant, Jerry W. "Paul's Thorn of Rejected Apostleship." New Testament Studies 34 (1988): 550-572. Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome. "The First Letter to the Corinthians" and "The Second Letter to the Corinthians." In The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990. 798-815 and 816-829. Neusner, Jacob, and William Scott Green, eds. Dictionary of Judaism in the Biblical Period: 450 B.C.E. to 600 C.E. 2 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. New Catholic Encyclopedia. Ed. Staff, Catholic University of America. 15 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random/Vintage, 1981. Perrin, Norman, and Dennis C. Duling. The New Testament, An Introduction: Procla-
328
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
mation and Parenesis, Myth and History. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Petrey, Sandy. Speech Acts and Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1990. Pritchard, John Paul. A Literary Approach to the New Testament. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1972. Saward, John. Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Schroeder, F. "Paul, Apostle, St." In New Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: McGrawHill, 1967. 11:1-12. Segal, Alan F. Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Smith, Margaret. An Introduction to Mysticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Sturm, R. "Defining the Word 'Apocalyptic' " In Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, ed. J. Marcus and Marion Soards. Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1989. 17-48. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966.
IVnilsiir of Bali Sacred Clowns
(Bali: Fifteenth Century-Present)
Ron Jenkins Defying demons of all descriptions, clowns in Bali offer laughter as an antidote to annihilation. Trained as philosopher priests and revered as sources of laughing wisdom, they help maintain the dynamic balance that the Balinese have established between the historical forces that sustain the integrity of their traditional culture and the contemporary forces of Westernization that are poised to destroy it.1
BACKGROUND Throughout its history Bali has skillfully resisted the potentially devastating influence of military and cultural invasions from other parts of the world. Like the resilient clowns who appear in their temple ceremonies, the Balinese owe their success to the art of improvisation. They have adapted their traditions to accommodate changing circumstances, ingeniously preserving their heritage through indirect assimilation rather than direct defiance of their invaders. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the island absorbed the migration of the Hindu Majapahit Dynasty from East Java, resulting in a hybrid form of animistic Balinese Hinduism that is unlike any other branch of that religion in the world. At the turn of the twentieth century the Balinese were the last major Spice Island to resist colonization by Holland, and even after their surrender to the Dutch army in 1908, the Balinese continued their traditional lifestyle with only slight modifications. The Japanese occupation during World War II was equally ineffective in changing Balinese traditions. Now, although they are ostensibly part of an independent Indonesian state, Balinese villages continue to
330
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
govern themselves according to timeless customs that have nothing to do with the practices of the Javanese, Muslim majority that dominates the country's politics. Bali's ability to maintain its cultural identity is rooted in a unique relationship between art, life, and religion that is reinforced by the artistry of the island's clowns. The people's spiritual beliefs are affirmed and renewed in the temple festivals held regularly throughout the island and attended by almost every resident of the village that sponsors them. Essential to the success of these festivals are performances that transmit cultural values through theater, song, and dance. At the heart of these performances are the clowns who adapt to the unexpected with ingenious improvisations that enable them to negotiate their way through the dangers posed by fiery-tongued demons, invading monarchs, and other threats to their island home. Because they are the only characters who speak directly to the audience, the clowns are responsible for making sure the traditional values inherent in the story are communicated to the public. This is usually done through improvised jokes and topical commentary that give contemporary meaning to the ancient legends enacted in the plays. None of the other seven thousand islands in the Indonesian archipelago have preserved their culture as successfully as the Balinese, and at least part of the island's good fortune can be attributed to the irrepressible resourcefulness of its clowns. Inspiring their audiences to be equally shrewd in preserving the integrity of their island, the clowns insert contemporary anachronisms into ancient myths in order to highlight the conflict between tradition and modernity that their audiences face every day. Evil spirits are dressed in Western galoshes. Legendary heroes are introduced to government family planning. Fifteenth-century battles are interrupted by tourists trying to take a photograph. Displaying deft abilities to outwit the demons, bureaucrats, and sightseers that threaten their homes, Balinese clowns personify the resilience of their culture. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS These comic conflicts are played out in a variety of public spectacles that range from sacred ritual to secular entertainment. Like patron saints hovering over a tropical paradise, Bali's clowns are watchfully attuned to the island's most immediate dangers. In the midst of disorienting modernization, clowns connect the audience to an extended family of ancestors, gods, kings, demons, politicians, and heroes, forming a cultural defense mechanism that combats the tyranny of change. Two comic zanies appear in most Balinese plays as servants to whichever gods or kings are being featured in that evening's plot. Serving as narrators of the ancient legends, translators of their masters' Sanskrit pronouncements, and ironic commentators on the modern implications of the story, the comic pair is referred to collectively as "penasar," which is Balinese for "foundation." The
Penasar of Bali
331
name provides a clue to the deep cultural significance of these clowns. They are viewed as the foundation on which the plays are built. The plays, in turn, are fundamental elements of the temple ceremonies that are absolutely essential to the preservation of the island's religious heritage, a blend of Hinduism, Buddhism, and animism. Since it is the religious faith of the Balinese people that has enabled them to maintain the integrity of their traditions despite the influence of tourism and development, the clowns can be seen as cornerstones of Bali's cultural identity, laughing bulwarks against the erosion of the island's values. The language spoken by the clowns is a key factor in linking the meaning of a performance to the rhythms of everyday life. As mediators between the world of the audience and the worlds inhabited by gods and kings, the clowns serve as translators between realms that might otherwise remain distant from one another. The clowns break down that distance by bantering with the spectators, teasing the royal characters, and making ironic comments about the sacred Sanskrit songs that are sung in praise of the gods. Their words shift easily from ancient Kawi (a Sanskrit variant used in prayer) to high Balinese (spoken to royalty) to low Balinese (spoken to commoners) to Indonesian (spoken in reference to official government business) to an occasional phrase of English (spoken in mockery of tourists). Their poly glottal fluency creates the feeling that all these levels of Balinese life have achieved a balanced coexistence, and their multilingual punning is playful proof of the fun to be had in bringing them all together. In the annual ceremony in which Rangda, the most evil of the Balinese gods, is exorcised, the crossing of boundaries suggested by the linguistic play of the clowns is mirrored most clearly in the movement patterns of the audience during the performance. Spectators begin their visit to the temple by praying in an inner courtyard. Their prayers are accompanied by the clanging cadences of the same gamelan gong orchestra that will be used during the play. They eat, laugh, and gossip as they walk to the performance space in the temple's outer courtyard. The transition from prayer to entertainment is barely noticeable. There is no physical barrier between the backstage area where the performers prepare and the space where the spectators gather. High and low castes will dance together in the play just as they mingle together in the audience. Later in the ceremony, when some spectators actually go into a trance, possessed by the spirit of Rangda, there is no formal ending of the performance. Without being asked, people move back to the courtyard where they had been praying before and begin a sacred vigil for these victims of the trance. The clowns in the play had joked about the evils that threatened the community, and now the spectators are confronted with one of their demonic manifestations: those beset by the trance. They are living through the hardship that was the subject of the play, and they drift naturally from the playing space of the clowns to the sanctuary of the priest with no sense of incongruity. The ceremony itself begins well before Rangda appears. The first "scene" focuses on a clown figure, Celuluk, a monstrous creature with huge fangs and
332
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
bulging eyes, who stops to giggle before creeping up behind the village guards and swinging her pendulous breasts in their faces. It is past midnight, and the eerie comedy is being enacted under the stars as part of a sacred temple ceremony in the outskirts of Bali's capital city, Denpasar. The actors playing the guards are skilled clowns, and the audience howls with laughter each time Celuluk scares them into a pratfall. The trio's absurd antics are performed in an artificial slapstick style that is reminiscent of old silent movies, but the growing tension in the crowd makes it clear that the buffoonery is rooted in genuine fear. Children sitting on the dusty ground of the temple courtyard stop laughing and lunge into their parents' arms when the monster comes too close. The elders of the temple look anxiously toward the closed curtains at the top of a bamboo platform and huddle together in a formation that shields their children from the stairway leading down from it. Eventually the bumbling guards manage to chase Celuluk from the temple, but their clowning turns out to be a prelude to the second, more difficult exorcism. The curtains at the top of the platform open suddenly to expose a performer wearing the mask of Rangda. Rangda, the most spiritually potent manifestation of evil in the Balinese pantheon, has her mask removed from the inner sanctum of the temple only once a year, when tradition requires that her ceremony be danced. Each year the wearer of the mask is in danger of being possessed and driven mad by its power, but the ceremony must be performed to neutralize Rangda's demonic influence on the spiritual health of the village. As Rangda walks slowly down the steps, the terror in the audience is palpable. Hundreds of people who had crowded their way closer and closer to the playing space during the clown scene now draw back and stand up to prepare themselves for what might happen. A full moon shines on the red velvet tongue that hangs from Rangda's mouth down to her waist. Embellished with gold-leaf trimmings, the tongue is said to represent the flaming intestines of the victims she has eaten alive. The grotesque creature menacingly waves her ten-inch claws at the actor who waits at the bottom of the stairs holding the unsheathed blade of a sacred kris. Suddenly, before a ritual battle can begin, three men leap screaming out of the audience, limbs flailing and spittle dripping from their lips. They have been driven into a trance by the intensity of the encounter and are forcibly restrained from hurling themselves into battle against Rangda. Bystanders are knocked down in the melee, and all semblance of an orderly performance ends when the body of the man inside the Rangda mask stiffens into a trance state. The man and mask are lifted up over the heads of the crowd and carried toward a priest who ministers sacred offerings to the mask while sprinkling holy water over the trance victims. It takes almost an hour to restore the men to their senses, and the crowd waits silently in front of the temple gate, their faces burdened with the worried looks one finds in the waiting room of hospital emergency wards. Women breast-feed their babies. Old men smoke cigarettes and spit red betel-nut juice into the dirt.
Penasar of Bali
333
The priest calls for more holy water, and the crowd parts silently as his assistant hurries to fulfill the request. Meanwhile, the mask of Rangda has been restored to the inner sanctum of the temple, where offerings of flowers and incense have been placed beneath its hideous tongue. As dawn approaches, all the people hold their hands out, palms up, to receive the holy water that the priest sprinkles over them. They are as vulnerable to the powers unleashed by the performance as are the men being revived from their trances. Finally, the priest announces, "sampun puput" (it is finished), and the crowd disperses. The forces of evil represented by Rangda's mask have been confronted in the light of the full moon and subdued for at least another year. The ceremony has served its purpose, reassuring the community that it can withstand the dangers that threaten its survival. The mask of Rangda was a focal point, but the ritual would not have been complete without the participation of the clowns. Their opening slapstick exorcism of Rangda's comic alter ego Celuluk helped pave the way for the successful recovery of the trance victims at the end of the ceremony. The performance was based on the legend of Calonarang, which has been reenacted all over the island since the fourteenth century. In Calonarang and other major forms of Balinese temple performances, clowns are integrated into even the most terrifying and tragic stories. Combining the roles of holy men, comedians, and town criers, these philosopher fools provide a clue to the island's remarkable sense of cultural continuity. In the Calonarang play described earlier, the clowns preceded their comic exorcism with a scene about specific evils that affect the lives of everyone in Bali: progress, development, and tourism. These three words (maju, pembangunan, and pariwisata in Indonesian) are heard constantly throughout the island, and no village is immune to the stresses they cause. The two penasar clowns opened the play with an improvised dialogue about the signs of progress that could be seen all over Bali. One sign of progress they noted was that children were learning English in schools so that they could speak to foreigners and help the development of the tourist industry. "My son learned English," quips one of the clowns. "Now he can say, 'Good morning, Dad. I need some money.' " The theme of tourist dollars led the clowns to hold a mock English lesson for the children in the audience, in which they were encouraged to communicate with a tourist who had found his way to the performance. Unlike the fake trance dances that are staged in Bali's hotels, this performance was meant for the worshipers of the temple, and the presence of an outsider was felt to be mildly invasive. The clowns skillfully rendered the intruder harmless by making fun of him on the same level that they made fun of the schoolchildren. Their jokes defused the awkwardness of the situation by according him the status of a guest while indirectly defining the limits of his participation as an outsider. Essentially, the clowns treated the tourist in the same way that they treated the witch, respectfully acknowledging his attendance while doing everything possible to neu-
334
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
tralize the negative impact he might have on the ceremony. The same kind of joking occurs when no foreigners are present. The tourist industry is a popular subject for clowns in Bali. The island is being transformed by development projects spurred by the profits of tourism, and the clowns help their audiences adapt to this "progress" with comic routines that highlight the necessity of preserving tradition in the wake of change. Since the late 1960s the tourist invasion has loomed as a bigger threat to the harmony of village life than were the military invasions of the Japanese or the Dutch. Miraculously, the island's culture has survived intact with the help of temple clowns whose jokes exorcise the disruptive influence of tourism as effectively as the priest's holy water exorcises the evil spirits from the victims of Rangda's trance. Their comedy suggests that the closest earthly manifestation of Rangda might be the tourist himself, and that running amok for dollars is the modern Balinese equivalent of demonic possession. CRITICAL RECEPTION The Balinese audience's receptiveness to their clowns is an extension of the culture's emphasis on the unity between art, spirituality, and everyday life. Clowns are respected for their knowledge of holy books and the theatrical skill with which they translate the teachings of the gods into terms that have practical consequence. The power of the clown's words is linked to the power of the rituals with which they are associated. Just a generation ago, many village clowns were also revered as village healers who dispensed herbal medicines and magical charms when they were not dispensing jokes in the temples. The shamanistic roots of the clowns can still be seen in performances like Calonarang where they play the roles of guards who are asked to protect the village from the evil spirits that have unleashed a plague. The leyaks, who are disciples of Rangda's earthly agent Calonarang, act out the spreading of the plague by tearing the limbs off a baby doll wrapped in blood-stained sheets. In some temple performances, a real corpse is used. The clowns show up in the next scene to provide counterpoint to the horror of the leyaks with black humor and slapstick gags that sometimes include playing catch with the stillborn child's dead body. While modern Balinese clowns make no claim to having magical powers, they play a central role in the exorcistic ceremonies that the Balinese believe are essential to their well-being. The spectrum of Balinese performing arts ranges from purely sacred to purely secular, but even the most sacred plays, performed without an audience for the benefit of the gods, have an element of entertainment, and even the crudest popular entertainments acknowledge the significance of the gods. Across this wide range of performances there is almost always some element of clowning, because the Balinese believe that the gods enjoy the pleasure of laughter as much as humans do. Thus it is much more likely that the gods would grace a performance with their presence if they could be assured of a good laugh.
Penasar of Bali
335
Laughter in this sense renders the temple more sacred because it ensures a visitation by the gods. Most clowns are deeply aware of their responsibility to both their human and supernatural audiences and use their joking to find a balance between the conflicting pulls of the spiritual and mundane worlds. As there is no greater threat to that balance than the changes wrought by tourism, progress, and development, these have emerged as major themes in the Balinese comic repertory. Mocking the disruptive potential of these modern forces, clowns in Bali help the islanders to integrate the traditions of the past with the demands of the present. Performing in temple spectacles whose origins go back to the fifteenth century, Balinese clowns appear as servants, storytellers, and lovers, but whatever form they take, their function is seen as necessary to the preservation of the island's cultural identity. They bring the community together with threads of laughter that connect the audience to their gods, their history, their ancestors, and each other. NOTE 1. Material for this essay was collected throughfieldworkcompleted by the author.
Pierrot
Dramatic and Literary Mask (Europe: 1650- )
John D. Anderson The evolution of Pierrot extends from the French commedia at the end of the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. The image of Pierrot began as "the quintessential hapless lover, the born loser" (Ritter 195) and evolved into a chameleonic role-player, closely identified with the role of poet and its omniscience. Characteristics associated with the later Pierrot include broodiness, sensitivity, sincerity, isolation, indifference, dreaminess, ennui, selfconsciousness, unmanliness, and a touch of madness. A comprehensive survey of Pierrot's career such as Robert F. Storey's Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (1978) would extend far beyond article length. Consequently, this entry will focus on five major avatars of the mask, those of the actor Giuseppe Giaratone (7-1697), the painter Antoine Watteau (16841721), the mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846), the writer Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), and the poet Jules Laforgue (1860-1887).
BACKGROUND Pierrot's origins extend to the commedia dell'arte, a form of popular theater that arose in sixteenth-century Italy. Working improvisationally from plot outlines called "scenarios," commedia companies were comprised of about a dozen performers, each of whom specialized in a recognizable type of role. Because most of these types were easily identifiable by the conventional masks they wore, the term "mask" is used as a synonym for character or type in a commedia context. One of the major groups of commedia masks was the zanni, comic valets who often served to complicate the plot by causing confusion,
Pierrot
337
either intentionally or inadvertently. There were two ranks of zanni, Pedrolino being a representative of the first rank. A first zanni kept the plot in motion through his cleverness in thwarting the sexual or romantic intrigues of the other characters. A second zanni (such as Arlecchino), lacking wit, accomplished similar ends inadvertently. Constant Mic explains in La commedia delVarte that the first zanni "incarnates the dynamic, comic element of the play, the second its static element" (Mic 47). Storey further describes Pierrot as a hybrid of the Italian Pedrolino with a seemingly opposite type, the English Hamlet. ' 'Like the melancholy Dane, Pierrot is largely a static figure, one who is even given to occasional fits of morose brooding. Yet he shares with his predecessor of the commedia dell'arte a dogged talent for multiplication" that Storey labels "protean," "chameleonic" (Pierrot 73), but the necessary means by which the first zanni, Pedrolino, exerts his "omniscient authority" (22). Eventually, actors who inherited the role of Pedrolino transformed the first zanni into the passive and potentially creative dreamer known as Pierrot, just as the role of the second zanni evolved into a more aggressive character known as Harlequin. As a result of such convoluted evolution, the original distinction between first and second zanni has become blurred. Once Pedrolino became Pierrot, he continued to evolve. He first appeared under his gallicized name and in his signature costume of floppy hat and loose white suit with a ruff at the neck during the second stage of the commedia's development in France at the end of the seventeenth century, when his greatest interpreter was Giuseppe Giaratone. The visual artist Antoine Watteau influenced the next phase of Pierrot's evolution by further elaborating the character of the mask in his paintings. In the 1830s and 1840s, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, "the greatest of recorded Pierrots," yet further crystallized Pierrot. It was Deburau who first wore a black skullcap instead of a floppy hat and omitted a ruff around the neck, establishing the image that the name Pierrot still evokes today. Pierrot continued to evolve, however, reflecting characteristics of the romantic and decadent movements as he became associated with the figure of the sad clown (Ritter 205). Pierrot, a theatrical character type, finally evolved into a modern cultural icon, a manifestation of what Martin Green and John Swan call the "cult of commedia" between 1890 and 1930. At the height of this period, Pierrot was the emblematic hero of sensibility, the archetype of the sensitive artist. The theatrical history of this mask reveals his evolution into "the quintessential masker himself, Pierrot, the darling of the Symbolists and early Modernists alike" (Sensibar xvii). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS When Italian players settled in Paris in the early seventeenth century, French audiences and imitators (including Moliere) exerted the gallicizing influence on Pedrolino that resulted in his evolution into Pierrot. At first portrayed as a peas-
338
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ant but later often as a servant, the early French Pierrot had a personality "compounded of that engaging mixture of simplicity and intelligence, of independence and naive candor that seems to characterize the earlier Pedrolino" (Storey, Pierrot 22), although Pierrot was often clumsy and even stupid at times. Essentially honest, he could also engage in duplicitous trickery and intrigue when the plot demanded. In the hands of the actor Giuseppe Giaratone, however, who became identified with the role of Pierrot between 1684 and 1697, Pierrot seemed to stand apart from the other players, evincing a delicacy and sensitivity not associated with the earlier first zanni, Pedrolino. Pierrot's isolation from other commedia masks stemmed in part from a unity (or sincerity) of actor and type. Other commedia masks became culturally acclimated to France by coalescing into types that the audience recognized as performers beneath a mask rather than as dramatic characters. But, as Storey observes, Pierrot's pathetic white face could "not be unmasked," so the performer and the role he played became one quasi-dramatic, quasi-real being (Storey, Pierrot 30-31). While masks like Harlequin became more individualized and satirical, Pierrot, whose very skin was his mask, could not become sufficiently exaggerated to become satiric, and thus he developed into the role of "straight man" for the topical jokes of the other characters. In most of the plays collected by the last Harlequin, Evaristo Gherardi, the character Pierrot is nearly always on the periphery of the group and the action (Storey, Pierrot 27-28). Following the convention of clowns and fools, he comments, interprets, and evaluates, but rarely participates. The image of Pierrot as isolated and somewhat strange was enhanced by Antoine Watteau, the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century painter who immortalized the Pierrot of the Italian players in his paintings of Gilles (a clown who is closely related to Pierrot). Art critic Pierre Schneider identifies Watteau's Gilles as a "melancholy dreamer among gay doers, solitary in the thick of society.. . . They are a dream he is dreaming" (99). Watteau contributed to the transformation of Pedrolino's impudent authority into the internalized solipsistic omniscience of a dreamer who creates the world of the dream. This image of the dreamer is closely related to the image of the artist and his or her omniscient control of the world represented in a work of art. As a result, Pierrot becomes a symbol of the artist himself, exemplified in the contributions of both Watteau and (later) Deburau. Schneider suggests that Watteau unconsciously identified with this fictional creator of a dreamworld. Watteau regularly included this figure in his paintings, as if ' 'the burden of his secret weighed so heavily on Watteau that he could not refrain from presenting us a lucid if coded confession" (Schneider 99). Storey concurs, noting that in the painting Les comediens italiens the Gilles-Pierrot figure is set apart from the rest of the acting company, seemingly naive, sincere, and, in the words of Allardyce Nicoll, "likeable but strange" (27). It is just this isolation and delicacy that created his popularity with the later romantics. But by 1697, the satirical bent of the Italian players had gotten them into
Pierrot
339
trouble with the king of France, and they were closed down by royal decree. However, the puppet theaters and street fairs, not affected by the ban, picked up the commedia characters and plots in a somewhat coarsened form. Storey claims that during this stage of his evolution, "Pierrot's character [began] to fragment, to cleave into the pieces that Giaratone, by the force of his personality and the undemanding naturalism of his role, had been able to hold tightly together" (Pierrot 53-54). The integrity of Pierrot's mask was rescued by Jean-Gaspard Deburau in 1825 when he created his famous character for the first time in the new costume described earlier. In addition to changing the costume, however, Deburau also introduced some new dimensions to the performed version of the type, the first of which Storey labels "absolute indifference," often associated with the fool, and "placidity" (96). Deburau's legendary success as Pierrot resulted in the mask taking on roles of unprecedented importance, roles that restored to Pierrot some of the authority and impudence of Pedrolino. But a third quality is somewhat more elusive: a tone of sadness and horror that Green and Swan propose emanates from "a touch of madness in Deburau's Pierrot, who seemed driven to the verge of insanity by life's remorseless frustration of all his desires" (11). As occurs so frequently with the actors who play Pierrot, Deburau seems to have identified with Pierrot, just as Watteau did with Gilles. This identification is the subject of Marcel Carne's film Les enfants du paradis (1945), starring Jean-Louis Barrault, a romantic treatment of Deburau's career. This powerful identification of the artist with the mask spoke to the popular imagination so that the combination of laughter, sadness, and horror became what Green and Swan call "the purest form of aesthetic experience" (11). Such feelings formed a hinterland to Deburau's Pierrot performance and became a foreground in, for instance, T. S. Eliot's early poems, inspired by Jules Laforgue (Green and Swan 11). This horrible fascination with Deburau's Pierrot anticipates the next stage in the evolution of the mask, which occurred in 1842. The writer Theophile Gautier attended a performance of a new play about Pierrot, Le marrchand d'habits [sic]. The plot focuses on Pierrot, obsessed by a duchess, but too impoverished and poorly dressed to court her. Consumed by his desire for her, he stabs and kills a peddler who sells used clothes so that he can dress in clothes fine enough to court the duchess. He is blissfully successful, and soon a marriage is planned. But as the wedding takes place, the ghost of the dead merchant appears and, after a frightening dance, stabs Pierrot with the same sword that Pierrot had used to murder him. Pierrot dies, chaos reigns, and the curtain falls (Storey, Pierrot 104). Gautier's stunning review of the play synthesized the new developments in Pierrot's character, marked by the influence of the romantic imagination. A significant aspect of romanticism's appropriation of Pierrot was his potential for violence and cruelty and his proletarian commonness, which, in a democratic age, made him an object of sympathy rather than derision, as he had often been
340
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
in the classical era. In 1847, Gautier described Pierrot as "the ancient slave, the modern proletarian, the pariah, the passive and disinherited being" (quoted in Storey, Pierrot 109). Presented in this light, Pierrot had great appeal to the romantic sensibility. But Pierrot continued to evolve, and as the romantic era lapsed into decadence, he became more and more neurasthenic and subject to the malaise and ennui endemic to the fin de siecle. In most interpretations during the 1880s, Pierrot was a superficial screen for adolescent excesses of passion. Pierrot's only occasional interpreters during this period got away with such hyperbole only through the irony inherent in the mask. Storey offers the example of the young romantic [Paul] Margueritte, who claimed that he "wanted too much to live a magnificent novel to be able to write it" (quoted in Storey, Pierrot 125), Pierrot was his ideal mask because he was able to express emotion that would "seem unconscionably extravagant were it not for the white flour on his cheek and the billowy blouse on his back" (Storey, Pierrot 125). The only inhabitant of Pierrot's mask at this crucial stage able to identify with Pierrot deeply enough to fuse with it was the poet Jules Laforgue, the only decadent poet "who in fact thought he lived the life of the clown" (Storey, Pierrot 138), and who was the period's greatest influence on Pierrot's evolution. Storey detects underneath this malaise-ridden phase of Pierrot's development an identity crisis stemming from an overabundance of self-consciousness. In other words, in Pierrot's vacillations between the poles of Pedrolino and Hamlet, Laforgue represents an imbalance toward the solipsism of the Hamlet pole. However, even though Laforgue's interpretation of Pierrot was somewhat distorted, it was extremely influential for some of the key figures of modernism, particularly T. S. Eliot. Laforgue often wrote poetry in the voice of Pierrot, notably in Les complaintes (1885), a collection of poems that parodied popular ballads of the time. Some of the tendencies Storey associates with this voice are indifference, aloofness, voyeurism, and dilettantism. In these poems and in L'imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886), Laforgue portrays the moon as a solipsistic reflector of Pierrot's self-consciousness, thereby describing an unmanly, lunar-related sexuality in Pierrot. Green and Swan assert that this tendency lurks in commedia art in general, which presents the character who is "socially elusive, psychologically eccentric, intellectually oblique, with abysses of metaphysical melancholy within, and lifelines of frail humor, hypersensitive and hypersubtle." They further analyze the psychology of Pierrot as lacking the "broad, warm, genial gestures and opinions by which a man asserts his membership of the club of men." Thus Pierrot and his fellows must move through their existences "masked and muffled, denying even their gender identity." (They deny their other social identities, too, or assert only blatant travesties, but their denial of gender best accounts for their buttoned-up self-denial.) Green and Swan conclude that manliness and womanliness were necessary to public art in the nineteenth century, and their antithesis, the denial of manliness and womanliness,
Pierrot
341
thus became an essential part of commedia modernism (26-27). The "unmanliness" of Pierrot in the age of decadence identifies the mask with the figures of the dandy and the aesthete, but it also asserts the androgyny and the absence of sexual involvement that are regularly characteristic of the clown. CRITICAL RECEPTION It is important to note that the Pierrot figure that continued to influence twentieth-century imaginations is a further evolution of the type, modified by the "cult of the commedia" that arose between 1890 and 1930 and was influenced by the French symbolists such as Laforgue and modernists such as Eliot. Green and Swan distill the essence of this evolution when they say that by 1932, "Pierrot embodied the artist, all artists, in all humanity; he was the emblematic hero of sensibility" (9). The changing figure of Pierrot exhibits an array of qualities; he has been omniscient, powerless, brooding, manipulative, obsessively passionate, isolated and indifferent, dreamy, violent, filled with ennui, self-conscious, unmanly, in love, and slightly mad. Pierrot lives on as the embodiment of the soulful, melancholy fool, continuing particularly to reflect the preoccupations of the various performing, visual, and literary artists who identify with him. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Gautier, Theophile. The Complete Works of Theophile Gautier. Trans, and ed. F. C. De Sumichrast. 12 vols. New York: Bigelow, Smith, 1910. Gherardi, Evaristo, ed. Le theatre italien, ou le recueil de toutes les scenes frangaises qui ent ete jouees sur le theatre italien de I'Hotel de Bourgogne. 6 vols. Paris: Cusson et Witte, 1700. Laforgue, Jules. Poesies completes. Ed. Pascal Pia. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
Secondary Sources Came, Marcel, dir. Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise). S. N. Pathe Cinema, 1945. Dick, Kay. Pierrot. London: Hutchinson, 1960. Green, Martin, and John Swan. The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Mic, Constant. La commedia dell'arte. Paris: Schiffrin, 1927. Nicoll, Allardyce. Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre. 1931. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. Ritter, Naomi. Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer since Romanticism. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989. Schneider, Pierre. The World of Watteau, 1684-1721. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1967.
342
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Sensibar, Judith L. The Origins of Faulkner's Art. Austin: U of Texas P, 1984. Storey, Robert F. Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. . Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969.
Plautus's Clowns (Roman Republic: c. 250-184 B.C.E.)
Aaron W. Godfrey Assessments of comedy vary. In the surviving part of Poetics Aristotle describes tragedy in detail but offers only a tantalizingly brief observation that "comedy represents men worse than the average . . . [more] Ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly" (101). The antagonist in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose summarizes the fear and scorn for humor of many religious writers, poets, and scholars: "Laughter is weakness, corruption. . . . It is the Peasant's entertainment . . . a mystery desecrated for the plebeians" (576-577). Some philosophers too disdain, dismiss, or overanalyze laughter and comedy. But others, like Jerome Miller, recognize in laughter and comedy the most appropriate response to philosophy: "The most laughable thing in the whole universe [is] . . . philosophy itself with its pretension to be ultimately serious . . . exempt from fallibility. What engenders laughter is philosophy's very attempt to subsume laughter. . . . What is funniest of all is the humorlessness of philosophy itself" (217-218). Thinking of what makes us laugh often is embarrassing, for we laugh at situations and words that may not be considered proper in polite society—sex, scatology, and the inversion or perversion of such institutions as marriage, religion, and social structure. These situations and words may include pratfalls, insults, and bawdy or sacrilegious wordplay filled with double meanings and innuendo. Yet comedy, like tragedy, offers a catharsis for our worst fears—our terror of purposeless mortality in a chaotic universe. In achieving a cathartic victory over this horror, the clowns of Plautine comedy have remained a successful convention for over two millennia.
344
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
BACKGROUND Among others, three theatrical comic traditions were important influences on Plautus. From earliest times, before recorded history, the towns in the south of Italy held local religious holiday festivals that often included dramatic performances. The Oscans developed fabulae Atellanae (Atellan farces) in Atella in Campania. These were short three-hundred-line situation comedies about life in the villages and towns that included obscenity, puns, and embarrassments that delighted the audience (for more detailed description, see Duckworth 10-13, 16-17). The characters are usually the same stock four and may be aligned with more general fool types: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Maccus, the clown and buffoon (the natural fool or innocent) Bucco, the glutton (often a hybrid of the other three) Pappus, the naive old man who was easily gulled (the fool victim) Dossennus, the cunning hunchback who outwitted the other characters (the trickster)
A fifth character, Manducus, with chattering jaws, may have been a later adaptation of Dossennus. He is described by Labrax, a pimp and fellow clown figure, who complains, "What if I hire myself at the games as Manducus . . . because of the wonderful way I gnash my teeth" (Plautus, Rudens 535-537). By the middle of the third century B.C.E. these plays used eight stock characters, all of whom may be found in the works of Plautus. None of the farces survive in their entirety; it is possible that they were part of the oral tradition, perhaps improvisations from a rough outline. Their popularity is affirmed by the fact that the Italian commedia dell'arte and the Punch and Judy puppet shows are direct descendants of the fabulae Atellanae. Similarly, court fools adopted traits from these theatrical stock characters. These individuals existed, however, in the outside world beyond the theatrical play space, generally in the homes of kings and noblemen. Gilbert Highet observes that these fools, the characters in the commedia, and Punch and Judy all have much in common "with the spirit of the comedies of Plautus" (140-141) since they all share an origin from Atella. A second influence on Plautus was Old Comedy, produced in Athens during the fifth century B.C.E. Old Comedy had outrageous plots that ridiculed prominent people in politics and society. The actors wore grotesque masks and were supported by a homogeneous chorus of such creatures as wasps, clouds, birds, or frogs. Only the works of Aristophanes remain as examples of this style. A third antecedent to the comedies of Plautus was Greek New Comedy. Beginning in the last part of the fourth century, New Comedy, composed in regular verse and no longer using a chorus, often centered on such melodramatic or unrealistic situations as the discovery of long-lost children. Incorporating the Greek Old Comedy and the Atellan farce into New Comedy, Plautus molded a
Plautus's Clowns
345
genre for the serious Roman audience that kept them amused during the difficult period of the Punic Wars when the continued existence of Rome was very much in question (Duff 119). From a probable canon of 130 plays, his 20 surviving plays have continued to influence writers of comedy until the present time. It is clear that Plautus, like Shakespeare, wrote for a broad audience rather than for scholars, the court, or the elite like the later Roman comic dramatist Publius Terentius Afer (Terence, 195-159 B.C.E.). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Titus Maccius Plautus lived up to the expectations of his name. Romans, like later Italians, adopted family names from nicknames of famous forebears; thus Cicero means chickpea, Muco or Mucius is snotnose, Varus is knock-kneed, and Fabius is bean. As an actor, Plautus probably performed as a country clown or buffoon in Atellan farces, thereby giving him the name Maccius or Maccus, "clown," and Plautus, "flat-footed." The mirthfulness generated by his plays was quite un-Roman, and the comic situations he created were very much at variance with the mos maiorum (the custom of the ancestors). The action always took place in Greek cities, usually Athens. This helped Plautus's bawdy language and plots remain uncensored since the association of less high-minded behavior with Greece was consistent with state views. Still, the atmosphere and institutions were distinctly Roman, and Romans continued to laugh at the antics of the actors, the disrespect to parents and masters, the convoluted and unlikely plots, and the continuous clowning and buffoonery. Until recently, for some reason, the theater, at least popular theater, has been relatively exempt from censorship. Perhaps it is because actors and playwrights were not considered respectable until the nineteenth century, and even then respectability was marginal. Actors, even great ones, were considered disreputable. What went on in theater was not really fact and therefore was not taken seriously. Had much of the material in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson appeared in a political pamphlet or essay, the authors would have regularly landed in jail or exile. Similarly, had Plautus's assaults on societal values appeared in another form, he would probably have been in serious trouble. At the opening of a Plautine play, a prologue often sets the mood and theme so that the audience can follow the plot. Sometimes it includes a raucous exchange of insults between slaves, accompanied by buffets and outrageous puns. It is this verbal clowning and the slapstick, which often have little to do with the story, that delighted the general audience and have accounted for Plautus's continued popularity. In these plays a slave or parasite usually plays the fool because it would be unsuitable for a (Roman) citizen of property to be the obvious butt of jokes or to behave with amoral trickery and self-interested carnality and gluttony. It was not proper for an adult Roman male to be frivolous, at least in public. The
346
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Romans valued the virtues of seriousness (gravitas), loyalty (fides), duty (pietas), and perseverance (constantia), which were often disregarded in the comedies of Plautus. The humor in the plays of Plautus includes the horseplay of farce as well as absurd inversion of societal status, relationships, and the hierarchical order of existence. Usually the more physical slapstick is the responsibility of the slaves, and the toppling of social order is achieved by the cooks or parasites. Pimps, too, are often clownlike, but they become the butt of abuse. In the opening scene of Mostellaria, the dim-witted country bumpkin slave is mocked by the cook, reminding us that the English word "clown" is derived from the Latin "colonus," which means country clod, husbandman, or peasant. Generally the abused, buffoonlike slapstick clown/slave is paired with a second fool figure who is the parasite or dependent. This character may be called a professional moocher, constantly in search of a free meal or another handout. As a trickster, he provides information or entertainment for anyone willing to pay. "Parasite" in Greek means "fellow dinner guest," one who is invited because he is entertaining or, more specifically, ridiculous. The parasites in Plautus also serve as catalysts for the action of the play, a conventional fool function. Their very names are bawdy or demeaning—Peniculus (sponge or diminutive of penis) in the Menaechmi, Ergasilus or Scortum (strumpet) in the Captivi, Gelasimus (laugh or sneer) in Stichus, and Curculio (weevil) in Curculio. These trickster-parasites generally introduce themselves with self-demeaning lines that make the audience laugh. Ergasilus comes to the stage saying: "The young men have given me the name Strumpet because I am usually 'called' to be in the banquet. Those who make fun of me say it is a ridiculous name, but I say it is proper .. . and like mice we are always eating another's food" (Captivi 69 ff.). Peniculus in the Menaechmi begins, "The young men have given me the name Sponge because when I eat, I wipe the table clean" (77-78). Gelasimus in Stichus introduces himself: ' T suspect Hunger herself was my mother, for after I was born I have never eaten enough. . . . She carried me in her womb ten months and I have carried her in my stomach more than ten years and she gave birth to me, a little boy, and I think I reduced her labor... but I boast a big and heavy hunger" (155 ff.). Curculio does not make his appearance until the middle of act 2, crying, "Get out of my way everyone known and unknown while I do my duty here. Flee, get out of the way so that I do not hit anyone walking with head, elbow, chest, or knee" (Curculio 280 ff.). For Plautus, the parasite is one of the stock characters used to evoke amusement. He is always the source of laughter, cheerfully acknowledging his own desires, aware of the weaknesses of others to varying degrees, and sometimes coming to an unfortunate end. Another stock trickster-clown is the cook. In the Aulularia (Pot of gold), the slave, Pythodicus, and the cooks, Anthrax and Congrio, engage in badinage
Plautus's Clowns
347
about the parsimoniousness of their master Euclio, similar to the standard jokes about the thriftiness of the Scots (original translation): Pythodicus: Pumice stone is not as dry as this old guy. He puts a bag over his throat... so he won't lose any breath when he is asleep. . . . And he also stops up his throat so he won't lose any breath while sleeping. . . . When he takes a bath, it kills him to throw away the water. .. . Recently when the barber trimmed his nails, he collected the clippings and brought them home. (296 ff.) In the opening scenes of the Mostellaria (The haunted house) and the Casina, dialogue between slaves is characteristic. The scatological language, the violent physicality, and the hyperbolic name calling emphasize the physical, fleshly realm of the fool. The sober Roman world of reason thus temporarily loses its power. Setting the tone for the subsequent action in the Mostellaria, Grumio, a dull farm slave, confronts Tranio, the clever house slave (original translation): Grumio: Come out of the kitchen you rascal. .. come out of the house you pile of rot.. . come out you smell from the kitchen. Tranio: Go to the country. Get away from the house, (hits him) Grumio: Why are you hitting me? Tranio: Because you're alive.... May Jove and all the gods ruin you. Phew, you smell of garlic, real filth, hick, billy goat, pigsty, dung mixed with muck. (1 ff.) The action of Casina begins with the following dialogue between Olympio, a slave of the father, and Chalinus, his son's slave (original translation): Olympio: Can't I speak and think as I wish without you? Why are you following me? Chalinus: I will follow you wherever you go, even if you want to go to the gallows. . . . Why aren't you at the farm—in your own space? Stay away from city business! Olympio: I have not forgotten my duty.... I came to the city to marry the girl you are crazy over, pretty and sweet little Casina. .. . Chalinus: You turd dug from the dung heap. Do you think she is your booty? Olympio: You'll see. Chalinus: A curse on you. Olympio: I'll torment you at my wedding.. . . I'll make you my wife's bridesmaid. . . . You will be tied to the window from which you can hear me kissing her and her saying sweet things to me. Then, you scoundrel, you will wiggle like a mouse in the middle of the wall. (89 ff.) Another of Plautus's stock self-serving tricksters is the pimp who owns the female slave/courtesan who is the object of the young protagonist's attention.
348
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Such a conventional, covetous character appears in five plays, and while he is never a savory sort, he usually ends up being thrashed or deprived of his property since his tricks do in fact harm others. Ballio in Pseudolus is duped at the end of act 4, and Labrax in Rudens (The rope) laments, ' T believe pimps are the offspring of Joy and consequently all mortals are joyous if anything bad happens to a pimp" (1284-1285). Scenes of this sort greatly amused the audience, which delighted in the wordplay, bad language, and innocent and clownish violence that characterize these comedies. The outrageous behavior of the fools pleased the Romans for the same reason that we too enjoy slapstick and vulgarity—because they are outside the limit of accepted behavior. The clowns or buffoons may say things that we dare not utter, and, consequently, they receive abuse that we dare not impose on anyone. Freed by the license allowed through play form and costume, Plautus's clown figures, like those of earlier and later generations, speak truths that we may be too embarrassed to articulate, truths that belong to us all. Subtly, the clown reveals that behind mask and clowning, a human being like us is concealed— saying the words that Canio sings in Pagliacci, "I am not a clown, but a man." CRITICAL RECEPTION Plautus is the earliest Roman writer for whom we have an extant canon, although the dramatists Livius Andronicus and Gnaeus Naevius precede him. Erich Segal notes the irony that he is "the least admired and the most imitated"—"serious" scholars find him insignificant while serious writers find him indispensable (1). But his accomplishment is remarkable, even more because as a non-Roman born at Sarsina in Umbria, he was "a stranger from the Gallic frontiers . . . [able] to erect one of the immortal monuments of Latin language and literatures" (Duff 119). After Plautus died, he was held in far less acclaim than Terence, the later and more intellectual writer, by the Scipionic circle and the later Augustans. Quintilian found the mixed rhythms of Plautus's verse to be inferior to the regular poetry of Terence; Horace agreed that his work was hybridized and trivial. Only the first-century B.C.E. Varro in De poetis acknowledged the importance of Plautus's contribution to laughter, jesting, and theatricality in drama (Corrigan 15). With the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, a more somber mood fell on Western Europe, and Plautus's plays dropped even further out of favor because of their perceived immorality, relaxed ethics, and lasciviousness. In the fifth century, St. Jerome, in his famous dream sequence, writes of the punishment he received for reading Plautus because he disdained the ' 'uncouth style" of the church fathers. Jerome says that he was transported to the tribunal of heaven and underwent the lash because, as the judge accused, he "was not a Christian but a Ciceronian" (Jerome, Select Letters 22:30). One does not hear much of Plautus during the Middle Ages, nor does there seem to be any evidence that his plays were performed openly. The texts of his
Plautus's Clowns
349
plays remained through actors' copies that survived church authorities. Unfortunately, the copies that were handed down were probably altered to meet the circumstances of time and audience, so currently extant texts may have been mutilated or interpolated (Duff 119). During the Renaissance, the works of Plautus underwent a revival, profoundly influencing writers for the theater including Lope de Vega, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Moliere. The first English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, written by the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall, combines material from Plautus's Miles Gloriosus and Terence's Eunuch. Ralph is abetted in his swaggering clownishness and resultant thrashing by Matthew Merry greek (a term for clown), which shows the author's familiarity with Latin comedy. The surviving plays continue to be mined for material. In the 1962 musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which won an Academy Award for best musical score in 1966 in its film version), Plautus is reinvented by stitching together names, plots, and situations from many of his plays to create a story about a clever slave who plots his freedom in ancient Rome. Unquestionably, the slapstick improvisation of Maccus the clown, the wit and wordplay of Plautus the playwright, and the chaos they grant and embrace in the playworld continue to strike responsive chords in contemporary audiences. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Aristotle. Poetics. In Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. 1964. New York: Penguin, 1965. Jerome, St. Select Letters. Trans. F. A. Wright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Plautus, T. Maccius. Comoediae. Ed. W. M. Lindsay. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1903.
Secondary Sources Beacham, Richard C. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. Corrigan, Robert W. Introduction. In Roman Drama, ed. Robert W. Corrigan. New York: Dell, 1966. Duckworth, George E. The Nature of Roman Comedy. 1952. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994. Duff, J. Wight. A Literary History of Rome. 3rd ed. London: E. Benn, 1962. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. New York: Warner, 1983. Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967.
350
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Konstan, David. Roman Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983. Miller, Jerome A. "Laughter and the Absurd Economy of Celebration." Cross Currents, Summer 1995: 217-225. Segal, Erich. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Slater, Niall. Plautus in Performance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Puck/Robin Goodfellow (England: c. 1300-1700)
Jonathan Gil Harris BACKGROUND Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin, is one of Shakespeare's best-known and most beloved characters. The "shrewd and knavish sprite" (2.1.33-34) of A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595) who bowls, hides in gossips, misleads night wanderers, interrupts wise aunt's tales, and rejoices in his many practical jokes is by no means Shakespeare's invention, however. His Puck is but one dramatic rendering—albeit a complex and in some ways nontraditional one—of a mischievous prankster who pops up repeatedly in Tudor and Stuart writing, and who, prior to his emergence as a literary and theatrical character, had enjoyed a long but somewhat ambiguous history in English popular folklore. Although Shakespeare conflates them (see 2.1.34, 40), Puck, Robin Goodfellow, and Hobgoblin were separate entities in medieval and early modern English folklore. Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) provides a catalogue of the various bogeys with which nurses would frighten small children: ' 'changelings, Incubuss, Robin Goodfellow . . ., the Puckle, Tom Thumb, the Hobgoblin... and such other bugs" (86). Edmund Spenser likewise distinguishes between Puck and hobgoblins in Epithalamion: "Ne let the Pouke, nor other evil sprites / . . . Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not / Fray us with things that be not" (341, 343-344). How much Puck and Robin Goodfellow were identified with each other prior to A Midsummer Night's Dream, if at all, is uncertain. After Shakespeare, they were frequently conflated; for example, Puck is referred to in The Coleorton Masque (c. 1618) as both "honest
352
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Puck" and "Robin" (lines 18, 15), and he is again called by both names in a fragment entitled "Puck's Pranks on Twelfth-Day" (1655). As the example from Scot shows, however, even if Puck and Robin Goodfellow were not one and the same prior to Shakespeare's play, they were still closely linked in the early Tudor imagination as somewhat scary "bugs." The more malevolent dimensions of Puck can be discerned in the origins of his name. "Puck" is related to both the Old English word paecan, to deceive, and the Gaelic puca, a malicious spirit, which later became a common term for the devil. The mid-nineteenth-century philologist William Bell claimed to have traced the etymology of ' 'Puck'' back even further; he argued that the name is a local Celtic variant of "Bog," a pre-Christian Aryan deity from whom the Greek god Bacchus is also allegedly descended (and from whom most Slavonic languages still derive their word for God). According to Bell, this deity's various local incarnations—including Puck—were literally demonized in most parts of Europe with the onset of Christianity. For all that, Bell's speculations are inconclusive; it is nonetheless notable how the very few literary references to Puck before A Midsummer Night's Dream invariably style him as a sinister, almost satanic bogeyman, and not the fun-loving sprite with which modern audiences and readers of Shakespeare's play are familiar. The etymology of Robin Goodfellow's name is less clear than Puck's. "Robin" was in medieval times a generic term for a knave, linked to "robbing." In Robin Goodfellow's case the name may also have been related to the "hob" in Hobgoblin, but there is little evidence to suggest that Robin was regarded as an inhabitant of fairyland prior to the sixteenth century. Despite his surname, which ostensibly refers to both the good domestic deeds he was believed to perform and his "merry," jesting disposition, Robin Goodfellow, like Puck, was often associated with Satan in the literature of medieval and Tudor England. The earliest surviving reference to Robin and his pranks, in an undated medieval text from the beginning of the fourteenth century, allegorizes him as the devil (Halliwell-Phillips, ed., Illustrations xiv); in Anthony Munday's comedy Fidele and Fortunio, the Two Italian Gentlemen (1584), a character who conjures up a body from the dead adds ' 'Robin Goodfellowe'' to a list of evil spirits that includes "the devill and his dam" (sig. C4v); and in the pamphlet Tell-Trothes New-Yeares Gift (1593), Robin visits "from hell" (sig. A2). Puck and Robin's demonic associations are compounded by the debts that their incarnations in Tudor and Stuart literature and drama owe to the Vice figure of mystery plays. Like the Vice, Shakespeare's Puck delights in making mischief and enjoys a unique conspiratorial rapport with his audience. The Robin Goodfellow of the anonymous play Grim the Collier (published in 1662, but probably written in the late sixteenth century) apes the Vice by administering a severe beating to a priest and identifies himself as the devil in doing so (447-^148). Another distinctive trait of the Vice—his gleeful "ho ho ho"—was incorporated into most late Tudor and Stuart representations of Puck/Robin. With a few notable exceptions, however, Puck/Robin is represented in the late Tudor and early
Puck/Robin Goodfellow
353
Stuart period not as a devil or demon, but as a harmless, albeit mischievous, prankster who has more in common with continental folk trickster figures like Till Eulenspiegel. The relatively abrupt emergence of Puck/Robin in the literature and drama of late Elizabethan England as a playful rather than sinister sprite can be attributed to at least five factors. The first is the discrediting of popular superstition in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Reginald Scot, attempting to disprove the existence of witches, observes that "heretofore Robin goodfellow and Hob gobblin were as terrible, and also as credible to the people, as hags and witches be now" (74). Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatorie (1589) also reports that Robin Goodfellow is "famozed in every old wives chronicle" (sig. A3). This indicates that by the 1580s, fairies had by and large lost their power to terrify; no longer "credible," let alone demonic, they were now creatures who might suitably inhabit the page, the stage, or "old wives" tales, but not the "real" world. In fact, much literature in which Puck/Robin appears is self-conscious about his innocuous fictionality, as Puck's famous concluding lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream demonstrate: "If we shadows have offended" (5.1.409 ff.). The second is the humanist fascination with classical mythology. Fairies were increasingly regarded by Elizabethan writers as the modern counterparts of fantastical Greek creatures, which had come to enjoy a certain fashionability in much of the literature of the time. Thomas Nashe, for example, claimed that "the Robin Goodfellowes, elfes, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age" were identical to those beings "which idolatrous former daies, and the phantastical world of Greece, ycleped fawnes, satyres, dryades, and hamadryades" (1.347). The third is the vogue for fairies in Elizabethan court literature and pageants of the early 1590s. The popularity of fairies in court entertainments coincided with a burgeoning (and largely aristocratic) nationalist impulse that also found expression in Spenser's re workings of "British," fairy-ridden Arthurian legends as allegories of Elizabeth and her power. Homespun sprites such as Puck or Robin, while not deriving from Arthurian source materials (although verse called "The Pranks of Puck," sometimes attributed to Ben Jonson, claims that he has "nightly revell'd" since "Merlin's Time" [169]), arguably added to the distinctively and self-consciously English cultural significations of fairy literature, lending it in the process a potentially populist dimension. The fourth is the increased literacy of the rural yeoman and middle classes. This crucial development helped produce writers like Shakespeare who were well versed not only in classical literature, but also in the oral traditions of rural English superstition, which viewed Robin Goodfellow in a far less straightforwardly negative light than did the "official" religious and courtly literature of the previous two centuries. Shakespeare's fairy world is thus populated by a syncretic blend of powerful yet for the most part benevolent spirits taken from the seemingly disparate domains of Greek mythology, courtly romance, and village folklore; even his Puck is a composite of "high" and "low," owing as
354
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
much to Neoplatonic conceptions of Cupid as to the Robin Goodfellow of popular tradition. The fifth is the considerable impact of Shakespeare's Puck. This last factor should not be underestimated. Prior to the publication of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1600, Puck/Robin appears as a character in only two literary works of which we can be certain; in the decades after the play's publication, he features in at least twelve plays, masques, poems, and pamphlets, many of which contain recognizable echoes of Shakespeare's play, and most of which follow Shakespeare in presenting him as a predominantly mischievous, rather than demonic, prankster. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Although the majority of Pucks and Robins after A Midsummer Night's Dream display the same flair for merry mischief as Shakespeare's creation, they are by no means identical to him. Puck/Robin's constant refashioning by writers throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods demonstrates how he is not a singular, consistent figure whose essence can be readily distilled, but a mutable, hybrid ensemble of high and low, English and continental, secular and superstitious, and classical and contemporary traditions of representation, any of which could be mobilized for a variety of different artistic, religious, and/or political ends. Indeed, the double name of Shakespeare's sprite serves as an emblem for the hybridity of Puck/Robin in virtually all his incarnations. This hybridity is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the two very different frontispieces of an anonymous two-volume pamphlet published in 1628 entitled Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests, a collation of diverse and often contradictory tales, ballads, and superstitions concerning Robin. The woodcut on the first volume's frontispiece depicts Robin as a gigantic, naked satyr, holding a broom in one hand (a detail to which I shall return) and a torch in the other; he is priapically erect and dances on his goat's hooves in a fairy ring comprised of miniature sprites. This portrait confirms the text's observation that Robin was accustomed to go about his business naked and deeply resented any attempts to clothe him (16). Reginald Scot echoes this detail: "He would chafe exceedingly, if the maid or goodwife of the house, having compassion of his nakednes, laid anie clothes for him" (48). Robin's large stature in the first volume's woodcut also supports Robert Burton's observation in The Anatomy of Melancholy that Hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellowes are a "bigger kinde" of fairy (168-169). William Warner, who may have seen an earlier version of the first volume of Robin Goodfellow and its woodcut, similarly characterizes him in the 1610 edition of Albions England as a goblin of "bigger bulke and voyce" than his fellow fairies, tiny creatures who dance around him (172). Nevertheless, the priapic, naked satyr of Robin Goodfellow's first volume is at stark odds with the Robin who appears on the cover of the second. This other Robin is apparently human, assuming the guise of a huntsman, with a bugle and
Puck/Robin Goodfellow
355
spear, and is also clothed. A number of literary works similarly humanize him, and others, particularly plays that required in performance a costumed Robin, also repudiate his nakedness, lavishing considerable attention on his distinctive garments. Grim the Collier's Robin enters "in a suit of leather . . . his face and hands russet-colour" (442); in Wily Beguilde (c. 1606), Robin wears a "great carnation nose" and a "rowsing Calveskin sute" as he performs his pranks (33). This attire is redolent of not just the fool, but also the traditional calfleather garments of Christmas revelry, with which Puck/Robin seems to have been repeatedly associated. Thomas Heywood observes in his "Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels" that "Pugs and hob-goblins" keep "Christmas gambols all night long"; Ben Jonson's masque Love Restored, which commences with a long exchange between Robin Goodfellow and Plutus, was staged on the last day of Twelfth Night in 1612; and an account of "Puck's Pranks on TwelfthDay," the final day of Christmas, was published in 1655. Interestingly, some of the details of Robin's Christmas incarnation seem to have been displaced onto Santa Claus, who shares with Grim the Collier's Robin his "russet-colour" and his "ho ho ho." Robin Goodfellow offers the most extensive collection in Tudor and Stuart literature of tidbits concerning Robin's birth and childhood. The pamphlet presents him as the offspring of a he-fairy, who at the beginning of the first volume may or may not be the unnamed Fairy King, but by the second volume is said to be Oberon. That his mother is a fair country maid places him in the continental tradition of half-mortal, half-supernatural tricksters such as Dionysus and Till Eulenspiegel. At an early age, Robin tires of his mother's control of him and escapes from her. This detail finds parallels in many other Puck/Robin stories, which frequently present him chafing against and/or abandoning female authority figures: Shakespeare's Puck plays practical jokes on Fairy Queens and "wisest aunts" alike; Robin Goodfellow in the anti-Cavalier tract "The Midnight's Watch" (1643) deserts his "fairy mistresse" so he can visit England (273). After leaving his mother, Robin is apprenticed to a tailor, whom he serves diligently before destroying his merchandise as a prank. The episode with the tailor not only takes up a whole chapter in the pamphlet but is also given extensive attention in a ballad called "The Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow," possibly penned by Ben Jonson. The tale may cast light on a strange moment in A Midsummer Night's Dream: when the storytelling "wisest aunt," mistaking Puck for a three-legged stool, topples and cries "tailor" (2.1.54), she may be in the midst of relating the story of Robin Goodfellow's childhood. After his encounter with the tailor, Robin has a dream that reacquaints him with the details of his supernatural origin. From this time on, he is endowed with special powers that he uses for a number of activities. These activities fall roughly into four groups, each of which crops up in other literature about Puck/Robin, albeit with significant variations. The first is shape shifting. In Robin's dream about his fairy origin, he is told, "Thou hast power to change thy shape / To horse, to hog, to dog, to ape" (8).
356
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Although this power is shared by most versions of Puck and Robin, Shakespeare's Puck is perhaps the most committed and skillful shape shifter. In performing his pranks, Puck turns himself into a roast crabapple, a three-legged stool, and a variety of other forms: "Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound, / A hog, a headless bear, a fire" (3.1.103-104). Puck's language is every bit as fluid as his physical appearance; he skillfully mimics Lysander's and Demetrius's voices and moves back and forth between the pentameter of "high" dramatic poetry and the tetrameter couplets of "low" ballads and rhymed incantations, so that it becomes difficult to tell what his "true" voice is. Despite the protean, unfixed quality of his language, however, he does employ certain catchphrases that audiences would have recognized as unique to him. His response to the rude mechanicals, ' 'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?" (3.1.73), recalls two phrases that both Scot and the author of Robin Goodfellow attribute to the prankster, "What have we here?" and "hempen hampen." Not all versions of Robin possess Puck's supernatural powers of selftransformation; the Robin of Wily Beguilde regularly changes his costume, but cannot change his actual physique. Puck/Robin's polymorphous attire, shape, and language, instrumental to his merry jests, were for the most part viewed as harmless, but on occasion acquired negative associations. In Edward Guilpin's Skialethia (1598), for example, "Opinion" is lambasted as "Fools bawble, innovations mistris, / The Proteus, Robin good-fellowe of change" (sig. D8v). The second is domestic chores. As I have noted, the first volume of Robin Goodfellow depicts him with a broom. The second volume of the pamphlet remarks that he carries one with him wherever he travels at night, so that he can sweep houses while people sleep (28); Shakespeare incorporates this convention into the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream (5.1.375-376). Puck/ Robin's nocturnal chores usually involved more than just sweeping, however. Reginald Scot tells his readers that "your grandams maides were woont to set a boll of milk . . . before Robin Goodfellow, for grinding of malt or mustard." Scot notes also that Robin's "standing fee" was a "messe of white bread and milke" (48). If he did not receive this "fee," his punishment could be malicious. In A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), Samuel Harsnet explains that "if that bowl of curds and cream were not duly set out for Robin Goodfellow . .. why then, either the pottage was burned the next day in the pot, or the ale in fat never would have good head" (134). Some texts, however, imply that these punishments were the rule rather than the exception. Grim the Collier's Robin remarks that he plans to "fleet" dairymaids' "cream-bowls night by night, / And slice the bacon-flitches as they hang" (443); Shakespeare's Puck also seems to obstruct rather than expedite domestic chores traditionally completed by women (2.1.36-38). Warner's Robin is outspoken in claiming that he does no good domestic deeds: he dupes women into thinking that he has done their chores for them, when in fact he has deviously "in their deadest sleepe / . . . puld them out their beds, and made / themselves their houses sweepe" (173).
Puck/Robin Goodfellow
357
The third is outdoor nighttime pranks. As the preceding examples show, Puck/ Robin was generally regarded as a spirit of the night. His nocturnal activities were not confined to domestic chores, however. Of his habitual midnight pranks, references to his misleading night travelers crop up most frequently. A number of literary and dramatic works replicate an episode from Robin Goodfellow in which Robin leads a company of men "up and down the Heath a whole night" (17). The interpretation of Puck/Robin's nighttime pranks varies from text to text and often within any one text. In both Robin Goodfellow and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck/Robin describes the hours of darkness and his activities during them in decidedly ominous, incantatory language (35; 5.1.358-376); Shakespeare's Puck even intimates that he is in protovampiric exile from the sunlight (5.1.369-371). For the most part, though, Puck/Robin's nocturnal pranks tend to be regarded by early modern English writers as less demonic than mischievous. Like Shakespeare's hobgoblin, the Puck of Michael Drayton's mock romance Nymphidia (c. 1620) sets things right after his pranks: "leading us, [Puck] makes us to stray / Long winters nights out of the way / And when we stick in mire and clay, / He doth with laughter lead us" (204). The fourth is erotic misadventures. In contrast to Shakespeare's Puck, who interferes in others' romantic pursuits but has no apparent sexuality of his own, Robin Goodfellow's title character delivers on the bawdy promise of the frontispiece's priapic satyr. In one chapter, Robin cuckolds his master; in another, he sings a rude song: "I give my homes to other men, / And ne're require them againe. / Then come away you wanton wives / That love your pleasures as your lives" (29). This erotic mischief is a feature also of Wily Beguilde, in which Robin proclaims that ' 'the chief course of all my life, / Is to set discord betwixt man and wife" by "dayly tumbling" (61). Puck/Robin's lascivious interest in young women might be linked to another commonly reported prank of his. Like a large number of earlier Robins, the Robin Goodfellow of "The Midnights Watch" rejoices in pinching "many a loose wench," giving each "a blue and secret nip on the arm" (275). It is difficult to tell, however, whether this trick is an erotic prank, a punishment for female "looseness," or both. Other episodes contradict Robin Goodfellow's and Wily Beguilde's portraits of Robin as a lustful and somewhat malicious cuckold maker. In the manner of Cupid, Shakespeare's Puck causes romantic mayhem but ensures that each "Jack shall have Jill" (3.2.461); Robin protects two "faithful" country lovers in Grim the Collier (446); even Robin Goodfellow's title character comes across at times as a sort of fairy Yente, helping "true lovers" to come together (10). Puck/Robin's shape shifting, midnight housework, nocturnal pranks, and bawdy interludes are the distinguishing features of the upside-down world he inhabits in virtually all his incarnations, a world in which authority is mocked, stable identities are disrupted, night takes precedence over day, and carnality governs reason. As the examples given repeatedly show, his topsy-turvy antics are presented in any of three ways. Usually they are styled as "merry pranks"; sometimes as selfless interventions on behalf of good, honest folk; and occa-
358
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
sionally as malicious and outright demonic attacks on mortals. In the process, accounts of Puck/Robin participate in three competing conceptions of the world turned upside down. The first is carnivalesque: his practical jokes poke harmless fun at the existing order and renew it. This perspective is perhaps most evident in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Puck mocks Titania's folly in love so that she may rediscover her love for (and subjection to) Oberon. A second, Utopian or populist view presents the topsy-turvy world embodied by Robin as morally preferable to the present one. This attitude informs Samuel Rowlands's More Knaves Yet? (1612), which bemoans the passing of Robin and his "nightmates" and the advent of an age of urban crime; instead of "good-fellow sprites," Rowlands complains, "We meet with Robin Bad-Fellow a-nights, / That enters houses secret in the darke, / And only comes to pilfer, steale, and sharke" (170). The populist Robin Goodfellow, champion of the people, is evident also in "The Midnight's Watch," where Robin sides with the Parliamentarians against the Cavaliers. In contrast to these largely positive perspectives, however, Puck/Robin's topsy-turviness is on occasion considered to perform the devil's work. Warner represents Robin Goodfellow as a demonic supporter of papist conspirators such as Guy Fawkes; and a manuscript of uncertain date, entitled "Of Spirits Called Hobgoblins, or Robin Goodfellowes," demonizes Robin and his ilk even more explicitly: "In truth, if they had free power to put in execution their mallicious desire, we should find these pranks of theirs not to be jests, but earnest indeed, tending to the destruction both of our body and soul" (290). The fact that all three perspectives can coexist in any one text underlines the complex disjunctions of Puck/Robin's popular and literary representations. In Robin Goodfellow, there are moments when his jests are simply mischievous pranks, as in his misleading of night travelers. Elsewhere he emerges as a defender of the common country man and woman: ' 'Robin always did help those who suffered wrong, and never would hurt any but those that did wrong to others" (18). At yet other moments, he seems dangerous and even sinister. For example, he arbitrarily attacks a group of men at a wedding, "so that there was not one of them but had either a broken head, or a bloody nose" (25); more ominously, his fairy friends "walk with the Diule" (38). Shakespeare's play displays this trifurcation too: Puck mocks Titania; he altruistically helps "Jacks" and "Jills"; he also serves Hecate (5.1.370). To draw attention to such disjunctions is not to deny the primacy of the merry but harmless prankster in Shakespeare's and others' works. It is to insist, however, that Puck/Robin is more of a palimpsest, a multilayered site of competing and often contradictory cultural inscriptions, than is usually acknowledged. CRITICAL RECEPTION Not surprisingly, most critical attention to Puck/Robin's various incarnations in folklore, literature, and drama has been subsumed within studies of Shake-
Puck/Robin Goodfellow
359
speare's Puck. With overwhelming regularity, scholars have flattened out Puck's complexities and contradictions by attempting to distill his "true," singular essence from his purported origin. What exactly this origin is, however, has been the subject of considerable debate. The Victorian philologist William Bell sees Puck as a recovery of the demonized Aryan, pre-Christian ' 'universal deity Bog" (343-344); at the end of the nineteenth century, Alfred Nutt wrestles with the question of whether Puck is a "Teutonic" or a "Celtic" fairy. More recent scholars of English fairylore, such as Katharine Mary Briggs and William H. West, have been inclined to view Puck as a distinctively English sprite and have resorted to the taxonomies of Tudor fairylore in order to "classify" him. Briggs, for example, asserts that Puck "shares the traits of the Bogy Beast, the Brag and the Grant" (44), trickster sprites who assume animal form. The search for Puck's origin begins to shift away from the terrain of religion and popular superstition in the 1930s with the publication of M. W. Latham's study of Elizabethan fairies and Enid Welsford's social history of the fool, both of which located Robin Goodfellow's origins in continental and English traditions of the clown or practical joker. In the wake of Latham's and Welsford's works, studies of Puck/Robin have tended to emphasize his affiliations with popular festive rather than demonological tradition, but have also complicated the question of his origin by insisting on its diffuseness. C. L. Barber's ground-breaking study of Shakespeare's festive comedy persuasively demonstrated that Puck not only derives from conventions of popular superstition and festivity, but also owes a great deal to courtly conventions of pageantry. Oddly enough, the new festive criticism endebted to Mikhail Bakhtin's work on carnival has paid Puck next to no attention, instead focusing almost exclusively on Bottom and the transgression of social and bodily boundaries implied by his relationship with Titania. A notable exception to this trend has been Jan Kott, who sees in Puck a carnivalesque blend of classical and popular conventions of representation. Assembled in equal measure from Ovidian and early modern mythological materials, Puck provides Kott with proof that Shakespeare is "a legatee of all myths" (61). Robert Weimann, from a somewhat different perspective, shares Kott's assessment: Shakespeare's Puck was at once a product of the popular imagination as well as a part of the more literary traditions of Cupid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. This variety of sources for Puck's character basically reflects the broad sociological foundation upon which [the play] is built. .. plebeian craftsmen, upper-middleclass lovers and the ducal couple mix freely. (196) Other recent criticism has abandoned altogether the origin-hunting tendencies of much scholarship on Puck. In his study of the trickster figure in Shakespearean drama, Richard Hillman adopts a somewhat ahistorical approach, citing Jung's identification of the trickster with the shadow, the archetype that for him embodies the primitive and instinctual side of the psyche. Jung's term resonates
360
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
with the language of Puck's last speech (5.1.423 ff.), which prompts Hillman to assert that Puck "is the most obvious trickster figure of all, the disembodied embodiment of self-delighting mischievous energy" (7-8). It is odd, therefore, that Puck is virtually absent from Hillman's extended analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Criticism informed by poststructuralist thought has been more interested in Puck. For Terry Eagleton, Puck is the very embodiment of Derridean differance: "Like desire itself, he is everywhere and nowhere, a transformative, teasingly ambiguous language in which assured identities are decomposed" (25). For all the differences of their critical approaches, it is notable that Kott, Weimann, and Eagleton each emphasize Puck's nonsingularity; their conclusions serve as fruitful points of departure for a thorough and theoretically rigorous study of the representational hybridity of Puck/Robin in early modern English culture. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith. New York: Tudor, 1941. The Coleorton Masque. In Court Masques, ed. David Lindley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 126-135. Drayton, Michael. Nymphidia. London, 1627. Grim the Collier of Croydon. In Five Anonymous Plays, ed. John Stephen Farmer. London: Early English Drama Society, 1908. Guilpin, Edward. Skialetheia, or, A Shadowe of Truth, in Certain Epigrames and Satyres. London, 1598. Harsnet, Samuel. A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. London, 1603. Heywood, Thomas. "The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels." In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. Halli well-Phillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 271-272. Jonson, Ben. Love Restored. In Court Masques, ed. David Lindley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 66-73. . "The Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow: Very Pleasant and Witty." In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. Halli well-Phillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 155-165. . "The Pranks of Puck." In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. Halli well-Phillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 165-169. "The Midnight's Watch, or Robin Goodfellow His Serious Observation." In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. HalliwellPhillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 273-278. Munday, Anthony. Fidele and Fortunio, the Two Italian Gentlemen. London: Malone Society, 1909. Nashe, Thomas. The Terrors of the Night. In Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow. Vol. 1. London: A. H. Bullen, 1904.
Puck/Robin Goodfellow
361
"Of Spirits Called Hobgoblins, or Robin Goodfellowes" (manuscript Harleian 6482). In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 289-290. "Puck's Pranks on Twelfth-Day." In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 286. Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranks, and Merry Jests, Full of Honest Mirth, and Is a Fit Medicine for the Melancholy. 2 vols. London, 1628. Rowlands, Samuel. More Knaves Yet? The Knaves of Spades and Diamonds. London, 1612. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. New York: Dover, 1972. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. London: Methuen, 1979. Spenser, Edmund. Epithalamion. Ed. Robert Beum. Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1968. Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, &c. Published by an Old Companion of His, Robin Goodfellow. London, 1589. Tell-Trothes New-Yeares Gift. Beeing Robin Goodfellowes Newes out of Those Countries Where Inhabites Neither Charity Nor Honesty. With His Own Invective against Ielosy. 1593. New Shakespere Society, ser. 6, no. 2. London: Trubner, 1876. Warner, William. "A Shepherd's Dream." In Albions England. A Continued Historie of the Same Kingdome, from the Originals of the First Inhabitants Thereof. 1602. In Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. 171-175. Wily Beguilde. London: Malone Society Reprint, 1911.
Secondary Sources Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. Bell, William. Shakespeare's Puck, and His Folkslore, Illustrated from the Superstitions of All Nations, But More Especially from the Earliest Religion, and Rites of Northern Europe and the Wends. 3 vols. London, 1852. Briggs, Katharine Mary. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 1959. Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Hillman, Richard. Shakespearean Subversions: The Trickster and the Play-Text. London: Routledge, 1992. Kott, Jan. The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1987. Latham, Minor White. The Elizabethan Fairies, the Fairies of Folklore, and the Fairies of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia UP, 1930. Nutt, Alfred. The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare. 1900; Reprint New York: Haskell House, 1968. Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Ed. Robert Schwartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
362
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. West, William H., Ill, ed. Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests, Full of Honest Mirth and Is a Fit Medicine for the Melancholy. Redmond, WA: Green Man Historical Foundation, 1989.
Punch and Judy (England: 1682-Present)
F. Scott Regan and Bradford Clark BACKGROUND The trickster character Punch and his wife Judy (also known as "Joan") have been associated with the English puppet tradition from the seventeenth century to today. Although Punch and Judy are perhaps not as popular now as they were during the early Victorian era, their presence is still felt through street performances, children's books, opera, film, and video. While the origins of Punch remain shrouded in mystery, there are certain comic prototypes that display similarities to the puppet trickster. Both the ancient Atellan farce and the French folk tradition featured stock characters with physical attributes that resemble those of Punch. Many scholars believe that the English Punch evolved from the relatively minor Italian commedia dell'arte figure Pulcinella. This lazy, gluttonous, obese, and hunchbacked character provided the comic prototype for comic figures in many countries, including the French marionette Polichinelle, the Russian Petrushka, and the English Punchinello, who at some undetermined point became Punch. Judy emerged as his female equivalent. Italian puppet plays, possibly integrating the marionette Punchinello, were seen by Samuel Pepys in England as early as 1662, and one of the earliest references to "Punch and Mrs. Punch" occurs in 1682, again in England. Early references to the name "Joan" or "Judy" date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and include two made by Henry Fielding in Author's Farce and Tom Jones (Leach 40). Initially a secondary character, usually brought on as comic relief during more serious fare, Punch eventually became the protagonist,
364
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
dominating the action of the play. There is much speculation as to precisely when the stringed marionette version of Punch was superseded by the more dynamic hand or glove puppet version that is the familiar form of the character today. The first published Punch script was John Payne Collier's "transcription" of a show performed by the Punchman, the Italian hand puppeteer Piccini. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy remains the bestknown Punch and Judy script, although it is not produced as often as more recent, less violent versions. Unfortunately, the accuracy of Collier's transcription and the accompanying background "history" have been called into question, largely because of Collier's reputed forgery of other works. Robert Leach, while believing that the Piccini script was based on an actual performance, suggests that the script may document an atypical presentation affected by the presence of Collier, who admitted to stopping and starting the performance for the sake of his illustrator and later embellishing the script with additional songs. In any case, Piccini's importance as a performer is attested by Henry Mayhew's source, who claimed that Piccini was the "real forefather" of Punchmen to come. While there are many versions of the basic plotline, the Piccini script remains the best-known and the basis of many variations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many attempts were made to "tame" Punch, and this gentler version of the hero has survived until the present day. With a few exceptions, the Punch and Judy show has generally become a children's entertainment, far removed from its roots in violence, biting social satire, and street entertainment. Concerns about violence and children have greatly damaged Punch's reputation among educators; a contemporary script has been published that purports to be a completely nonviolent version of the traditional Punch play, a seeming contradiction in terms. Still, Punch is well known today as a literary symbol of rebellion and social comment (as evidenced in the British satirical magazine Punch), and Leach refers to several contemporary performers who look back to the harder edge of Piccini's show as the inspiration for their often politically charged performances. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Punch is usually portrayed with a large, curved belly. His large hooked nose is prominent throughout his history, as is a hunched back, often represented as merely a curved "fin" in the middle of his back. Almost inevitably, Punch's mouth is pulled back, exposing his white teeth in a wicked grin. Some historians doubt that there is evidence to suggest a direct relationship between Punch and earlier comic servant types, such as Bucco and Maccus of Roman farce, but the resemblance is striking. Leach suggests that Punch's nose and garb were meant to represent those of Thomas Cromwell since puppet plays were permitted in England throughout the Commonwealth era when legitimate theaters were for-
Punch and Judy
365
bidden as immoral. George Speaight, on the other hand, believes that Punch's curved back came from the French folk tradition of the Fool. Punch's size in most productions is similar to that of other characters, no doubt due to the common denominator of the size of the performer's hands; still, Punch always gives the sense of being a little man, put upon by those bigger and more powerful than himself. Early illustrations portrayed Punch sporting the tall "sugarloaf" hat of Punchinello; Collier's illustrator George Cruikshank provided the puppet with a red coat and a jaunty tricorner hat. The characteristics of Judy's dress do not appear to be as consistent as those of Punch, but facially she usually shares similar features, with a large nose and toothy grin. However, Punch's dialogue often indicates that she is a beauty, at least to him. Punch's dialogue is full of puns and wordplay, often based on his supposed misunderstanding of another character's dialogue. In fact, these misunderstandings often become the motivational force for his violent attacks. In the early days of the Punch and Judy show and until the beginning of this century, the Punchman performed for adults as well as children. By the beginning of this century, the scripts were "toned down" considerably and focused more on an audience of children. In his earlier incarnations, Punch appeared to function somewhat as a satirist and social critic. In some instances a Puritan-like character interrupted the show to point out its immoral aspects. No doubt topical references accompanied the basic dialogue, and certainly Punch's adversaries, lawyers, policemen, judges, and the like, reflected certain recognizable power figures. Sexual sublimation may also have been part of the mixture that led to his popularity. Leach refers to the phallic nature of both Punch's nose and hump, and Punchmen have been known to refer to the sexual characteristics of Punch's physical attributes. While sexual double entendres are not a major part of the traditional script, street performers have been known to adapt and improvise depending on the mix in the audience. One might argue that the immense energy and anger in the character stem from cultural frustration with sexual restrictions. Punch and Judy share a prototypically dysfunctional relationship, one of violence, murder, and mayhem. However, Punch does not exhibit actual hostility toward women in particular; in many versions of the script, he is initially affectionate toward Judy and has a mistress, Polly, with whom he appears to share a romantic relationship. He appears to be rebelling against the institution of marriage more than against Judy. Punch's ability to revolt when he feels oppressed by the daily cares of family life is probably less a reflection of misogyny than of misanthropy. Still, childlike, he appears to enjoy society and the company of women as long as they do not demand anything from him. One cannot reflect upon the popularity of Punch as street entertainment without also thinking of the violence in family life prevalent throughout the Victorian era—a time when wife beating was legal—which is reflected in the works of Charles Dickens and others. The contrast between society's "elevation" of
366
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
women during this period and the private demimonde of London life and its associated denigration of women may have provided fertile ground for the Punch play and may help to explain its appeal to the audiences of the time. Punch is the primary mover of plot, and, in fact, there is virtually no time when he is not on stage, with the exception of "specialty" puppet interludes, which are designed to show off a trick of manipulation performed with a specially designed figure, but do not move the plot forward. The story, being exceedingly simple in most versions, traditionally begins with Punch failing to quiet his baby; frustrated, he throws the child out of the window. When his wife Judy returns and realizes what Punch has done, she attacks him with a stick or a variation thereof; they battle, and Punch ultimately triumphs, beating his wife to death, usually with the traditional slapstick. After getting bitten on the nose by his dog, Toby, he flees the scene of the crime and for the remainder of the play attempts to escape the figures of authority who are sent to capture, judge, and execute him. In each case, through either trickery or brute force, he either eludes or beats down his opponents, leading up to a final confrontation with the devil himself. In Piccini's script and other early versions, Punch defeats the devil; but later, he is sometimes carried off, and a moral lesson is appended to the play. Victorian, Edwardian, and twentieth-century versions continue to soften the hard edges of the earlier Punch performances. From defeating the devil in mortal combat, Punch goes on to be ignominiously devoured by a crocodile. In most cases, the plot exists only insomuch as Punch pushes it forward; other major characters exist only to provide him with antagonists and irritants. Whatever sense of right and wrong Punch possesses appears to be completely overwhelmed by his desires of the moment. It must be noted that in each case of violence, Punch responds to a given provocation, and however inappropriate the degree of his response, he is never portrayed as being an aggressive personality; he does not go seeking trouble, but trouble, in the form of demanding family members, mistresses, the law, or Final Judgment, comes after him; and he responds according to his darkly childlike nature. Punch has no conscience about any of his actions, and while his violence starts with his child and continues with all he encounters after that point, he does not appear to take as much pleasure in the actual murders as in the elimination of those he perceives as irritants. This is a key point, because if he were portrayed as having the same kind of personality as, say, Dickens's Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, it is not likely that he would have been acceptable even in Victorian England (in fact, he has been criticized all the same throughout his history for his possible effect upon children). It cannot be forgotten that Punch is a puppet, a trickster that exists in order to act out our own power fantasies. Because he is a tiny, physically unimposing figure with many of the characteristics of a small child—unsophisticated emotions, violent responses to provocation, strong desires and quick frustration, and
Punch and Judy
367
continual conflict with authority figures—it is easy if perhaps a bit disconcerting to see why Punch has been so popular with both children and adults. Some historians indicate that Punch began as a marionette or an actor; in any case, he quickly evolved into his natural realm, the hand puppet. The standard Punch and Judy figures are both hand (or glove) puppets, and it is this fact that determines both their appearance and their actions. Unlike marionettes, hand puppets are ideally suited for picking up and grasping objects, such as the baby or the Hangman's gallows, and wielding weapons, such as Punch's slapstick. Hand puppets can wrestle one another and are ideal for characters like the crocodile in the later versions, whose large snapping jaws are best manipulated by a hand within the head. The wooden head of the Punch figure is also resilient, allowing for rough handling and stage business, including Punch's (real) dog Toby's bite upon his nose. The action is fast and furious, and a large part of the master Punchman's performance lies in his ability to vary the rhythms and techniques of the various murders. The actual sound of the slapstick striking the puppet has a percussive quality that is almost musical, and the Punchman's ability to interpolate dialogue, the traditional squeak of Punch's voice, the crack of the slapstick, and even the laughter of the audience require the same physical and vocal sensitivity as is evidenced by the best of stand-up comics. Punch displays some terpsichorean talents as well: in the Piccini script, he performs a dance sequence with Pretty Polly. Punch is a musical soul, and the Piccini script contains parodies of wellknown London popular songs. One has to question how intelligible these parodies and excerpts are, of course, due to the use of the "swazzle" device that has become a signature of the Punchman. The swazzle, two bowed pieces of silver forming an oval with a short length of dampened cotton tape stretched between them, is inserted into the Punchman's mouth. It causes him to speak in a highly pitched squeak, not dissimilar to that of a kazoo. This speaking technique was one of the Punchman's most closely guarded secrets. Music is very important to Punch, as the Punchman was usually accompanied by a "bottler," frequently a percussionist, who attracted audience members, passed the hat, and occasionally provided a partner for dialogue. As evolved in the Russian Petrushka scripts, this musicant's participation is absolutely essential to the performance; his responses in the dialogue provide Petrushka with much of his motivation. The puppet Pulcinella spawned offspring throughout Europe. Perhaps closest in spirit to Punch is the Russian, Petrushka, who began to appear in Russian fairgrounds at the end of the nineteenth century. Although somewhat less violent than his English counterpart, Petrushka is very similar in character, and many of his existing scripts follow a plot pattern similar to that of Punch. His battles with the hangman and the devil suggest the German folk characters Till Eulenspiegel and Faust. Punch functions in the classic "Trickster as Everyman" mode: he reflects our
368
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
own frustrations and annoyances and our own secret, dark desires to deal with these annoyances in as simple a manner as possible, that is, through the complete elimination of the irritant. It is significant that as he works his way through life, Punch's irritants expand from those in his immediate circle—his wife, child, dog, and mistress—to those of society, the law, and ultimately God. When Punch battles the Devil for his very soul, he is expressing our own desire for immortality and complete control over our destiny, unfettered by the laws of God or Man. When, against all odds and through sheer force of will and personal cunning, he succeeds, it gives us hope of some day cheating death ourselves. The fact that Punch appeals to both children and adults is significant because it illustrates that although as adults we may feel more in control of our lives than we did as children, we are forever in thrall to higher authority and will always possess a desire to escape our servitude. CRITICAL RECEPTION Punch, as a street theater performer, has received a surprising amount of attention in early popular culture studies. One of the earliest and best sources is Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which includes an extensive interview with a Punchman and a version of the Punch play. The Collier script, however suspect, remains the best-known version of the play and has been reprinted countless times, although his accompanying notes have not been reprinted nearly as often. Many other Punch scripts have been published as well, although only a handful remain in print. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers made frequent reference to the character of Punch, often with a sense of unconcealed nostalgia. True critical attention has more often been paid in our own time. Punch has maintained a presence throughout his life in the works of others, attesting to his importance in the popular culture of the eighteenth century until the present day. Dickens refers to him several times in his works; and to this day, Punch, having become a true symbol of satire and anarchy, continues as the inspirational mascot for the English humor magazine Punch. He has appeared in street performances in both the United States and England, Terry Gilliam's film Time Bandits, the Czech film animator Jan Svankmeyer's haunting Punch and Judy, Harrison Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy, a music video by the group Men in Hats, Safety Dance, and even in postapocalyptic form in Russell Hoban's novel Ridley Walker. Punch's continual presence in both popular and "high" culture appears to be assured.
Punch and Judy
369
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Adams, A., and R. Leach, eds. Punch and Judy Playtexts. London: Harrap, 1978. Byrom, Michael, comp. Punch and Judy: Its Origin and Evolution (scripts). Aberdeen: Shiva, 1972. Collier, John Payne. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy. London: Prowett, 1828. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. New York: Dover, 1968.
Secondary Sources Baird, Bil. The Art of the Puppet. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Byrom, Michael. Punch in the Italian Puppet Theatre. Fontwell, Sussex, England: Centaur, 1983. Kelly, Catriona. Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Leach, Robert. The Punch and Judy Show: History, Tradition, and Meaning. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Speaight, George. The History of the English Puppet Theatre. 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southem Illinois UP, 1990. . Punch and Judy: A History. Boston: Plays, 1970. Stead, Philip John. Mr. Punch. London: Evans, 1950.
Francois Rabelais (France: c. 1494-1553)
William J. Kennedy BACKGROUND The paradoxes apparent in Francois Rabelais's life suggest how his enormous prose fiction, known to us as Gargantua and Pantagruel, would forever change the late medieval sense of folly and recast it in a distinctively early modern form. An ordained priest and noteworthy surgeon, one of the first to dissect a cadaver in public, he was immensely learned in philosophy, theology, astrology, law, folklore, and a dozen other fields. Born as the son of a provincial lawyer in the Touraine-Loire region of western France, he embarked upon a remarkable career that took him from the monastery and the university to the commercial and cultural centers of sixteenth-century Europe, the Holy See, and the court of the French king. By 1520 he belonged to a Franciscan monastery at Fontenayle-Comte, but wishing to pursue his studies in Greek, no doubt to read medical treatises by Hippocrates and Galen, he transferred five years later to the more liberal Benedictine order. As a young man, he already corresponded with Desiderius Erasmus and the eminent French humanist Guillaume Bude. Upon receiving his bachelor of medicine degree at Montpellier in 1530, he moved to Lyon to practice surgery at the Hospital of Lyon. There in his spare time he wrote Pantagruel (hereafter P), published in 1532, and after its unforeseen success a prequel about the hero's father, Gargantua (hereafter G), published in 1534. With his patron, Bishop Jean Du Bellay, he traveled to Rome to intercede for reconciliation between the Protestant Reformers and the Holy See. Though he had long since left his monastery, he remained for the rest of his life a secular
Francois Rabelais
371
priest in allegiance to the pope. By 1537 his fame as a surgeon won him an appointment as physician to the king of France. Royal patronage failed to protect him from censure by the Sorbonne when his Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel (hereafter TB) appeared at the height of the Reformation controversy in 1546. If the Parisian theologians objected to his emphasis on scriptural reading, Protestant theologians such as John Calvin denounced him for his attachments to Roman dogma. Rabelais spent many of his remaining years in transit from Metz to Rome to Lyon, where he published his Fourth Book (hereafter FB) in 1552. His Fifth Book, possibly completed by a disciple, appeared posthumously in 1564. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Rabelais's characters and many of their actions derive from popular legends and pulp fiction, especially the Grands chroniques (Big chronicles) about the giant Gargantua (Stephens, Weinberg). The latter relates how Gargantua, recruited by Merlin to aid King Arthur, inadvertently destroys the Ardennes Forest by the sheer bulk of his size, consumes the milk of a thousand cows for an ordinary meal, and floods the city of Paris with a single urination. Rabelais's genius is to rework these popular materials so as to challenge the sagacity of a self-styled intellectual elite in its mindless pursuit of a "science without conscience" (P 196; chap. 8; this and following citations from P, G, TB, and FB will include page number[s] and chapter number[s] from the Cohen translation). Following stories about Gargantua, Rabelais narrates the exploits of the latter's son Pantagruel (all-thirsty one), whose career follows the trajectory of his father's: both are born and educated (G chaps. 1-24; P chaps. 1-22), are pressed into military service to defend their ancestral estates (G chaps. 25-58; P chaps. 23-34), and are encouraged to marry and beget a new generation of giants who will extend their patrilineal heritage (P chaps. 1-3; TB chap. 48). Pantagruel furthermore helps his friend Panurge to consult various legal, medical, philosophical, and theological authorities to decide whether he should marry (TB), and he accompanies the latter to receive an answer from the Oracle of Bacbuc (FB, Fifth Book). Along the way, Rabelais's characters come into contact with the dominant social, political, cultural, and intellectual institutions of their time—the church, schools, the military, judicial courts, and marketplaces of a fantastically imagined sixteenth-century Europe—and they interact with a gallery of fools and knaves, hypocritical monks and feeble-minded pedants, conniving lawyers, pompous bureaucrats, and crazed rulers. Rabelais's world is a universe of words in palpable contestation with one another. As they rub together, their friction produces endless puns, double entendres, multiple ambiguities, and infinite wordplay (Cave, Kennedy). The baby giant is born wailing "abwah," syllables that sound like the French words a boire, "drink" (G 52; chap. 6). His father names him Gargantua by exclaiming in French "Car grand tu as" (What a big one you've got), referring demurely
372
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
to his throat (G 53; chap. 7). The full-grown Gargantua names the city of Paris when he floods it with urine "par ris" (for a laugh) (G 74; chap. 17). In his study of jokes Freud associates laughter with a nervous response to feelings and emotions that civilization has taught us to repress. It furnishes us with a means of regaining pleasures that have been disapproved by censorship. We can easily associate such laughter in Rabelais with obscenity, bodily functions, and coarse behavior that society would have us regulate. Beyond this gross indecency, however, looms a more serious, more subtle, more nuanced affront to our unwarranted confidence in the power of society to achieve its goals. The vehicle by which it might do so, civilized persuasion, seems itself unequal to the task. Rabelais's vibrant satire aims at those who misuse language for defective ends. Its objects are philosophers, theologians, politicians, doctors, lawyers, clerics, and pedants who try to frame their ideas immutably, unequivocally, incontestably in words and phrases that resist control (Greene). How could their formulations be immutable if language itself is historical and changes over time? How could they be unequivocal if syntax and semantics overlap in illusory patterns of consonance and homonymy that generate confusion? How could they be incontestable if words exist only in the dialogual give-and-take of human discourse? Only a fool would think otherwise, and representative fools in the Rabelaisian world include the tyrant Picrochole, a figure for the contemporary Emperor Charles V, who wants to control the universe by saying so: "Let's go on. I fear nothing" (G 112; chap. 34). Another is a scholar from Limoges "trying to imitate the Parisians' language. But all he is doing is murdering Latin" (P 185; chap. 6). Triboulet, a "morosoph" (wise fool) (TB 414; chap. 46) whom Panurge consults about his plans to marry, leaves him and Pantagruel with exactly opposite impressions about the meaning of his advice. The latter interprets his words in a negative sense, the former in a positive sense so that "I should be a raging fool if, being a fool, I did not consider myself one" (TB 415; chap. 46). Panurge serves as Rabelais's archetypal fool, a problematic figure because in addition to folly he exemplifies profoundly disturbing behavior associated with diabolism and misogyny alongside garden-variety trickery and deceit (Kaiser). Introduced in chapter 9 of Pantagruel immediately after Gargantua's famous letter to his son at the university exhorting the latter to perfect his knowledge of ancient and modern languages, Panurge addresses Pantagruel in a dozen foreign tongues that the latter does not understand. His plea is simple enough—he is begging for bread, pain (bread) urgent (asking for), a pun on his name, whose Greek etymology, pan (all) orge (eagerness for), alternatively suggests "apt at everything, skilled in every possible way"—but the impression persists that Panurge is deploying his linguistic skills to confound and confuse others in his own interest. Verbal chicanery belongs to Panurge's baggage of mischief for committing fraud, though he remains "otherwise the best fellow in the world" (P 222; chap. 16). In the Third Book he beguiles Pantagruel with a sophistic argument
Francois Rabelais
373
in praise of debtors—"a world in which each one lends and each one owes" (TB 299; chap. 5)—but it is difficult to know whether Panurge is practicing one more scam or whether he foolishly believes that such a world truly exemplifies the precepts of Christian charity. Toward the end of his journey to the Oracle of Bacbuc he encounters on the Sea of Thawed Words the sounds of ancient speech released from temporal captivity. His response is to panic, then to hoard the strange commodities; but Pantagruel deters him, asserting that "it is folly to store up things which one is never short of, and which are always plentiful" (FB 569; chap. 56). With his severely limited, wholly materialistic dependence on craven urges, Panurge misses the point of his friend's superior wisdom. CRITICAL RECEPTION After Mikhail Bakhtin's revisionary study of carnival and drawing upon poststructuralist critiques of language and the social construction of reality, scholarship and criticism have focused on Rabelais's complex textuality and its relationship to dynamic social and cultural change in sixteenth-century Europe. Linking carnival to moments of crisis in the life cycles of nature and society, Bakhtin emphasized its logic of inversion whereby fools momentarily become kings, servants lords, monks devils, and scholars dunces. Such inversions liberate the populace from slavery to custom and convention, enabling it to develop a new outlook on life. From this perspective Rabelais becomes the spokesperson for a forward-looking egalitarianism. Others view the process as a form of social control, acting as a safety valve so that after a temporary release affairs revert to the status quo. It amounts to a form of subversion and repression as it overthrows settled norms only in order to secure a more pervasive domination (Berrong, Schwartz). From this perspective Rabelais belongs to the old order, though in a new guise; vanquishing medieval dogmatism, he nonetheless resists emergent Protestantism and its challenge to the authoritarian rule of church and state. This darker view might more productively yield to a consideration of conflict and contestation as part of a process in which the victory of neither side is ever achieved once and for all. From this perspective Rabelais emerges in a moving equilibrium as a trenchant critic of both old and new ideas, exploring unsuspected connections among them in continual negotiation and articulating their unforeseen consequences with radical irony. Parody allows Rabelais myriad forms for his dynamic critique. Letters, lists, formal disputations, dialogual debates, poetic riddles, epic narrative, farcical tale, and even scriptural parody all pass through his stylistic crucible. A carnivalesque inversion of familiar archetypes, textual models, literary and linguistic forms, and rhetorical conventions forces an examination of cultural assumptions based upon them. The spirit that motivates Pantagruel, as Rabelais frequently reminds us, is good cheer: "He took everything in good part, put favorable interpretation on every act, never tormented himself, and was never scandalized" (TB 293; chap. 2). Pantagruel does not compromise with scoundrels such as King Anarch
374
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
(Misrule) (P chaps. 23-34) or the Papimaniacs and Popefigs, fanatical supporters and enemies of Rome (FB chaps. 45-54), but he holds them all to the standard of charity. As Lord of Utopia he rewards the just, punishes the wicked, and pardons the repentant. Pantagruel's relationship with Panurge has attracted much critical attention. If Panurge is alternately a fool, a rogue, and a scoundrel, why does the hero befriend him? Panurge's misogyny draws particular notice (Jordan, Kritzman). The trick that he plays when he incites dogs to piss on a Parisian noblewoman who rejects his sexual advances (P chaps. 21-22) typifies his aggression against women in later books when he looks for a suitable wife. Biblical intertexts suggest analogies with Satan, but the character's verbal virtuosity lends him a redeeming if ambivalent moral power (Rigolot, Screech). Pantagruel's tolerant responses to his friend's sometimes outrageous behavior exemplify the charity demanded of a Christian, advancing the hero's typological significance as a figure of Christ (Duval). Just as Jesus redeems the sin of Adam, so Pantagruel redeems the sin of Adam's son, Cain, resolving fratricidal discord, racial enmity, and tribal alienation in an act of brotherly love. If we moderns object to the sexism implied in that last term, we can only recall the New Testament's claim that sex alone is not a differentiating characteristic since all baptized Christians are potentially equal in the eyes of God. Scholarship on Rabelais necessarily requires a survey of translations currently available in English. The formidable task of translating his puns, literary allusions, verbal inventions, technical jargon, scientific references, and historical citations requires an arsenal of skills. Gray translates about a quarter of the work into highly readable English. Putnam translates about two-thirds of it more freely but with valuable annotations. Among complete translations, Le Clercq's takes the most liberties, while Cohen's remains the most literal; Raffel offers ingenious interpretations of obscure passages; and Frame preserves a scholar's accuracy with imaginative flourish. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Boulenger, Jacques, ed. Oeuvres completes. Editions Pleiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Cohen, J. M., trans. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Frame, Donald M., trans. The Complete Works of Franqois Rabelais. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Gray, Floyd, trans. Gargantua and Pantagruel: Selections. Crofts Classics. Arlington Heights, IL: H. Davidson, 1966. Le Clercq, Jacques, trans. The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel. New York: Modern Library, 1936. Putnam, Samuel, trans. The Portable Rabelais. New York: Viking, 1946. Raffel, Burton, trans. Gargantua and Pantagruel. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Francois Rabelais
375
Secondary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Berrong, Richard. Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Duval, Edwin. The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Greene, Thomas M. Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. Kennedy, William J. Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978. Kritzman, Lawrence. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Rigolot, Francois. "Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity." PMLA 109 (1994): 225-237. Schwartz, Jerome. Irony and Ideology in Rabelais. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Screech, Michael. Rabelais. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979. Stephens, Walter. Giants in Those Days. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. Weinberg, Florence. The Wine and the Will: Rabelais's Bacchic Christianity. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972.
Martha Raye
(United States: 1916-1994)
Bruce Henderson BACKGROUND Martha Raye was born Margaret (or Margie, as some sources give it) Yvonne Reed on August 27, 1916, in a charity ward in Butte, Montana, to a showbusiness couple (Van Gelder B16; unless otherwise noted, all biographical information comes from Van Gelder's Times obituary cited in the Selected Bibliography). In interviews, she declared that she began working at three; at fifteen, already a seasoned professional on the vaudeville circuit, she picked the name Martha Raye from a telephone directory and adopted it as her professional moniker. To her friends and coworkers, she was always known as "Maggie"; to the soldiers she entertained in the Vietnam War, she was ' 'Boondocks Maggie." By the mid-1930s, like many other young women and men, she had migrated to Hollywood in hopes of breaking into show business. She sang and entertained in nightclubs until, in legendary fashion, she was discovered by producer Norman Taurog. She made her film debut in 1936 in a Bing Crosby film, Rhythm on the Range, in which she sang what was to become her signature piece, "Mr. Paganini." A number of film roles followed, but, as is often the case with the gifted female performer, Hollywood was not sure what to do with her. On the one hand, her "generous" mouth and animated verbal and physical style typed her as a comic figure; on the other hand, her physical figure, including what were always noted as "shapely legs" and an "ample bust," made most producers decide that she needed to be presented as a siren or romantic lead. Raye, in interviews, always stated that she knew her metier: "Let's face it, I'm not a glamour girl, I'm a clown" (Van Gelder B16).
Martha Raye
377
Hollywood dropped her contract, and in 1940 she appeared in Al Jolson's Broadway production Hold onto Your Hats, winning new audiences with her vaudevillian comedy and Broadway belt. Throughout the 1940s she worked more comfortably in radio and nightclubs, though she made occasional forays into film. Two particularly notable ventures were Four Jills in a Jeep (1944), which dramatized her experience entertaining the troops in World War II, and 1947's Monsieur Verdoux, in which she gave what is considered her most important film performance, as Annabella Bonheur, opposite Charlie Chaplin. Her other major film role, fifteen years later, was as Lulu, Jimmy Durante's "fiancee" of fourteen years, in the Rodgers and Hart circus musical Billy Rose's Jumbo. The growth of television in the 1950s proved a boon to entertainers like Raye, whose many different talents could be more easily accommodated in the varietyshow format, allowing her both to sing and clown, as she did in her nightclub act. For several years, she hosted her own series, "The Martha Raye Show." In the 1960s and 1970s, she took on supporting roles on television shows, including a children's series and a part as foil to Rock Hudson and Susan St. James on "McMillan and Wife" (Parish and Leonard 525-526). Final appearances included cameos in movies and on television, as well as becoming spokesperson for the denture paste Polident as "the Big Mouth." Her private life was far less happy than was represented by the public grin of the "Big Mouth." All of her marriages except her last ended in divorce, and only two of them lasted more than about a year. Bouts with alcoholism and depression plagued her, and in 1956, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, which she survived but which created a nightmare of bad publicity for her. Similarly, her service as an entertainer during the war years seems to have had a mixed effect on her career: she received commendations from military officials and earned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1969, but she also thought that others viewed her as a ' 'warmonger'' (Parish and Leonard 525) and avoided working with her for that reason. Nonetheless, she continued to perform, redefining the old theatrical term "trouper." She spent six months as one of many replacements in Hello, Dolly!, with which she toured in Vietnam, and she barnstormed the dinner-theater circuit in such vehicles as Everybody Loves Opal. In 1991, she married for the last time and also suffered a stroke. The marriage was a controversial one: she wed Mark Harris, an entrepreneurial entertainment "manager" and sometime hairdresser thirty years her junior. Many believed that Harris had taken advantage of Raye's loneliness and diminished mental capacities; at the same time, never losing her feistiness, Raye told such people to mind their own business. In addition, in 1992, just two years before she died, Raye unsuccessfully sued the producers of the Bette Midler film For the Boys, claiming that they had filmed her life story without permission or compensation. After her death at age seventy-eight, Raye's sole offspring, her daughter Melodye, and Harris fought bitterly in a lawsuit over Raye's estate.
378
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
DESCRIPTION AM) ANALYSIS Martha Raye, like Lucille Ball, is an important figure in the history of clowning because she provided a new way of embodying the female clown as comic text. While she did not have the same degree of impact as Ball, partially because she did not have as consistently large an audience as Ball's various television series garnered, she remains a critical part of the development of the female fool in midcentury media. As her biography suggests, Raye was multitalented, and her body could be "read" in many contradictory or conflicting ways as viewed by the lens of 1940s and 1950s patriarchal commodification of the female body. This was liberating and also limiting at the same time. She was one of the great popular singers of her era in the tradition of the big-band or Broadway ' 'belt''; she was alternately praised for her legs and figure and lampooned for the size of her mouth. Given the fact that in many of her movies from the 1930s and 1940s she was depicted as the aggressive, sexually voracious woman, always in pursuit of a man, it is difficult to ignore the degree of misogyny under which she typically operated. Without descending too deeply into easy Freudian readings of the body, it is probably not coincidental that the size of her mouth was fetishized in many of her appearances, suggesting either the vagina dentata or at least the male-centered oral nightmare of being devoured by the unnatural sexual appetite of a woman like Raye. It is interesting also to consider that, once past what American culture considered a woman's sexual prime, Raye had a second career as a kind of neutered, comic "crone" figure, and that in her children's series, "The Bugaloos," she played "Benita Bizarre," a campy, almost postmodernist witch out of "Hansel and Gretel." But despite all of the cultural anxieties that may be seen as limiting Raye's opportunities as an artist, she has a permanent place as a clown, if for no other reason than her performance in Charlie Chaplin's 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux, in a role Chaplin is said to have written expressly for her (Mast 119). While Chaplin certainly worked with other comic women such as Mabel Normand, Edna Purviance, and Paulette Goddard, with the exception of Marie Dressier most of them fell into the romantic leading-lady or ingenue category: foils for his Little Tramp's erotic fantasies. It is in Raye and in her Annabella Bonheur that Chaplin finds an equal as a physical and verbal clown. Monsieur Verdoux is Chaplin's postwar version of the Bluebeard tale, set in depression-era France. Verdoux is a banker who has been let go because of economic hardships and turns to serial murder of wealthy women whom he first woos, then weds, then kills. He does this in order to support his "real" wife, who is confined to a wheelchair, and his young child, both of whom are presented as angelic and both of whom die offscreen, thus completing the bitter, ironic vision of the film. Most of the women Verdoux has murdered are dead before the film begins and therefore have no dramatic reality and garner little
Martha Raye
379
or no sympathy from us. Interestingly, the one "wife" Verdoux murders during the actual film (the murder is offscreen) is a dour, miserly harridan. The other two "wives" he woos survive him: both are attractive and likable. The livelier of the two is Annabella Bonheur, played by Raye. Interestingly, Raye is the only performer to receive featured billing just below the title, and it is clear that Chaplin has invested much in creating a role that will both highlight Raye's clownish talents and also be a match for Verdoux. Annabella is the only woman Verdoux "marries," apparently in a common-law marriage, whom he does not also kill; additionally, in one of the film's funniest sequences, she is the cause of his failure in marrying one more time. Unexpectedly, she shows up at the wedding ceremony as the date of another guest. Raye's Annabella is a creation worthy of the French boulevardier farceurs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is loud, garish, and vulgar, and her primary motivations are sensual and self-centered: food, clothes, low and jovial company, and money fulfill her needs. Yet despite all this, there is something of the amoral life force in her—amoral, as opposed to Verdoux's immorality. When she fires her maid in a fit of temper, she then rehires her later the same day, but not with a sense of moral appropriateness. Quite the contrary; she sees no moral basis for such decisions to begin with. In this sense, she is almost childlike in her ethics—in Christian terms, permanently locked into an age antecedent to that of reason or responsibility. Her lack of a moral center places her in a rather different tradition from Chaplin's clown or fool, whether within the confines of this film or in his career as a whole. His Verdoux is a villain, one we enjoy and with whom we have some sympathy, but, despite his deathhouse sermon to the audience, who, after all, have seen the horrors of World War II, there is no real question that he has transgressed the lines of acceptable behavior. Annabella, on the other hand, ultimately seems exempt from such moral judgments and, in her own words, is "lucky." Indeed, she survives a number of Verdoux's attempts on her life, including a very funny sequence in a rowboat that, as Gerald Mast suggests, parodies Dreiser's An American Tragedy (Mast 119). She is indestructible, principally because she is so guileless. Whatever her limitations, she is implicated in the moral failings of the world only through the irony that she is the one who, lacking both moral centeredness and immoral intent, survives and thrives. Raye and Chaplin are careful not to sentimentalize nor to mythologize Annabella as fool. If she is protected, it seems purely by the randomness produced by her lack of consciousness; she is no holy fool, no "Gimpel." Raye's Annabella is not as radical an advance on the female clown as, say, Lucille Ball's Lucy Ricardo, because Annabella still remains an object. But Chaplin's contextualization of her within a complex moral universe and Raye's magnificent comic technique, both in terms of physical humor and theatrical characterization, combine to raise her to the level of high art. If nothing else
380
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
remained but her performance as Annabella Bonheur, Raye's contribution to the female clown and to the moral contexts of the fool would be significant. CRITICAL RESPONSE Current critical response to Raye's work is perhaps clouded by the notoriety of her later life: to a recent generation of audiences, she is best known for her Polident commercials, for her lawsuit against the Bette Midler film For the Boys, and for the publicity-laden marriage she made three years before her death and the subsequent legal squabble between her heirs. What is sad about this is that it reifies some of the earlier, more negative images of the female clown, in a sense depicting Raye the woman as an "old fool," unable to see that she is being flattered and duped by a younger man of, at least according to the attendant publicity, dubious motives and sincerity. Earlier critical responses, in both journalistic and academic settings, give Raye more credit as an artist and as a popular entertainer of the highest order. That she was not only a gifted clown but a talented singer and a fine comedie actress was consistently noted, both in the popular press and in scholarly assessments of film and television of the midcentury. In particular, critics writing about Chaplin's work uniformly identify Raye's performance as Annabella Bonheur as crucial to that film's artistic success. While Monsieur Verdoux has had an inconsistent critical reception as a film, Raye is always praised for the high artistry of her low-comic role. It is for this work and perhaps for other rediscovered film and television performances, as they travel to video, that one hopes that she will be remembered, rather than for the sad ' 'backstage'' of her life. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Selected Filmography Rhythm on the Range. Paramount, 1936. The Boys from Syracuse. Universal, 1940. Hellzapoppin'. Universal, 1941. Four Jills in a Jeep. 20th-century Fox, 1944. Monsieur Verdoux. United Artists, 1947. Billy Rose's Jumbo. MGM, 1962. Pufnstuf. Universal, 1970. Airport '79. Universal, 1979.
Selected Television Appearances "The Martha Raye Show." NBC, 1953-1956. "The Bugaloos." NBC, 1970-1972. "McMillan and Wife" (also "McMillan"). NBC, 1976-1977.
Martha Raye
381
Secondary Sources Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. "Mighty Mouth." People, October 31, 1994: 110. Parish, James Robert, and William T. Leonard. "Martha Raye." In The Funsters. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1979. 519-527. "A Star's September Song." People, January 27, 1992: 84-85, 87. Unterbrink, Mary. Funny Women: American Comediennes, 1860-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987. Van Gelder, Lawrence. "Martha Raye, 78, Singer and Comic Actress, Dies." New York Times, October 20, 1994: B16.
Rigoletto
(Italy: In Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave, 1851; based on Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo, 1832)
Peter N. Chetta BACKGROUND When Victor Hugo's play Le roi s'amuse was produced in 1832, it was banned after the first performance because of the sensitivity of the bourgeois Bourbon King Louis-Philippe to any criticism of a monarch. The play depicts Francis I of France as a debauched, lecherous figure whose jester, Triboulet, aids and abets him in his philandering. Triboulet had been created in the sixteenth century by Francois Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, where he is described in a catalogue of characteristics taking up three pages (Rabelais 392-396). But Hugo transformed him (Godefroy 194-195), describing him in his preface to Le roi s'amuse as being deformed, sick, a court jester—"a triple misfortune which makes him evil" (Budden 478). Indeed, the tradition of a deformed person, in this case a hunchback, being used to amuse a decadent social class is longstanding. But the play attracted Giuseppe Verdi as a possible source of an opera as early as December 1849 (Osborne 213), and the resulting opera is extremely faithful to the play. Librettist Francesco Maria Piave's Italian is, "for the most part, a direct, though necessarily abridged translation of Hugo" (Osborne 235). A few changes were made, however. While in the Hugo play the jester is a figure in a royal court, Piave and Verdi place him in a ducal court. Although the period of the opera is the same as that of the play, the locales are changed (Godefroy 196), probably because of problems with the censors, who, for political reasons once again, opposed an onstage depiction of a proposed assassination of a royal monarch.
Rigoletto
383
Verdi was most attracted to the character of the jester, although he and Piave changed the name of the jester from Triboulet to Rigoletto, taken from the French rigoler, "to guffaw" (Osborne 230). In a letter to Piave, Verdi wrote, "In my view, the idea of this character, outwardly ridiculous and deformed, inwardly filled with passion and love, is superb" (Osborne 228). He called it "one of the greatest subjects and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times" (Osborne 227).
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The irony of the devoted husband and father, Rigoletto, forced by circumstance to play a fool in the duke's court, is one of the factors that make him appealing. The greatest irony is that his jesting brings down on him the curse of another father, Count Monterone—a curse that issues from the duke's abuse of Monterone's daughter. Because Rigoletto is a hunchback and a fool, he cannot display the deep emotions of other men (Godefroy 203). This gives the librettist and the composer the opportunity to contrast the two sides of his character, the public and the private. In the first scene of the opera, amid festivities, the Duke of Mantua reveals that he has been pursuing a beautiful young girl whom he first saw in church. This, of course, is Rigoletto's daughter, Gilda. But in the course of the evening, he dances with the married Countess Ceprano. The Duke's jester Rigoletto then enters and insults the Countess's husband, Count Ceprano. Rigoletto's blackly comic threats at Ceprano, namely, prison, exile, and execution, are taken as going too far even by the Duke (Budden 489). While the Duke, the Countess, and Rigoletto go off to another room, a courtier named Marullo announces that he suspects that Rigoletto meets each night with a mistress. He is mistaken, however, since the woman is Rigoletto's daughter Gilda. Yet because all the courtiers have been the butts of Rigoletto's venomous tongue, they agree when Count Ceprano suggests getting revenge on Rigoletto by abducting his "mistress." When the Duke and Rigoletto return, their frolic is coincidentally interrupted by Count Monterone, whose daughter has been seduced by the Duke. When Monterone accuses the Duke, the latter and his fool mock and revile him. Then the Duke has him arrested; but as he is led off, he curses the Duke and Rigoletto with a father's curse. In the next scene, Rigoletto displays in rapid succession the two sides of his personality. First, as he approaches his home, Rigoletto is accosted by a professional killer who offers his services in case they are ever needed. Rigoletto soliloquizes how strange it is that they are both killers, he himself with his tongue and the other with his sword. Then he becomes the devoted but somewhat foolish father, entering the enclosed terrace and greeting his naive daughter. Julian Budden observes, "He brings up his child in innocence, in faith and
384
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
chastity. His greatest fear is that she may fall into evil, since being evil himself, he knows what suffering it causes" (Budden 479). Since he abets the Duke in vice, his attempts to rear his daughter in virtue must backfire. But as Hugo intended, the victim of Monterone's curse cannot be Rigoletto the jester, because jesters have little to lose and conventionally lack the human relationships necessary for suffering. The victim must be a fallible human being; Rigoletto, the father of a daughter, can indeed suffer as a victim (Godefroy 189). One of the meaningful deviations from the play is the location of Rigoletto's musing on his similarity to the killer—outside his gate rather than inside, as in the play. This separates his home more completely from the rest of the world (Godefroy 204). As Rigoletto indicates, this home and his late wife have been the solace of his existence. At home his garb also is not that of the jester that he wears during the first scene. In fact, his daughter has no knowledge of his role at the court. The appeal of the character is the humanization of the clown, no longer a figure of ridicule or ridiculing, but rather a nervous, pathetic soul who attempts a normal family existence away from the employment forced on him by circumstance. It is through the clash of the two worlds that Rigoletto's tragedy occurs. The jester will be caught in a jest more destructive than any he could contrive himself. In the next scene, after Rigoletto leaves his daughter in the care of her nurse, the Duke, who has bribed the nurse, courts Gilda in the guise of a student. She is completely enthralled by him and pledges her love. When he leaves, the courtiers arrive to carry out their revenge on Rigoletto with the planned abduction of this girl whom they take to be his mistress. Melodramatically, Rigoletto returns and is convinced by the courtiers to help them abduct Countess Ceprano from the house across the lane from his. They blindfold him with the excuse that they are all disguising themselves with masks. This fool is easily gulled. Godefroy remarks, "All through the play at crucial moments he is slow in the uptake" (Godefroy 207). After Gilda is carried off and Rigoletto realizes his stupidity, he recalls Monterone's curse. When Rigoletto taunted Monterone, he combined buffoonery and evil (Budden 490), but now the buffoon is deflated and becomes an unwitting victim of the curse. In a sense, his physical deformity has contributed to and represents his moral deformity. But whether physical or moral, his deformity is only partial. He has greater magnitude than the crippled body or the warped mind. This unmeasurable dimension of the fool/man is what appealed to Hugo and Verdi and what has appealed to audiences ever since. Rigoletto next determines to locate his kidnapped daughter. His feeble attempts to maintain his jesting facade among the courtiers are touching. When he reveals that Gilda is his daughter, the courtiers are surprised but not upset. In this scene, Rigoletto echoes exactly the notes sung by Ceprano, an indication of his lack of real wit. "It is sour and ineffective and the courtiers laugh outright" (Godefroy 208). Gilda suddenly rushes in. She sees her father in his
Rigoletto
385
jester's garb for the first time. Rigoletto dismisses the courtiers, and then, as Monterone passes by on his way to his executioner, Rigoletto promises to wreak vengeance on the Duke. In the final act, the Duke has been lured to the assassin's lair. Rigoletto has arranged for the murder of the Duke. In the ultimate ironic joke, Gilda substitutes herself for the Duke, and Rigoletto eventually discovers the exchange before he can dump the body (enclosed in a sack) in the river. The curse has been fulfilled. The jest has defeated the jester. Verdi and Piave made two significant omissions from the play. The first is the omission of the scene in which the daughter (Gilda) is brought before the king (Duke) and asked to become his mistress. She then runs into another room that turns out to be the king's bedroom, where he follows her and rapes her. The second omission is in the last scene of the play. After the jester realizes that the body in the sack is his daughter, dead, a crowd assembles and a doctor pronounces the girl dead. Triboulet exclaims, ' T have killed my child'' (Osborne 235-236). The opera thus achieves greater subtlety with these omissions. It also achieves the unnameable effects of music that a play cannot. Although Hugo resented the popularity of the opera, after hearing it, he was forced to admit its greatness. He remarked that he wished he could have had four characters speaking at the same time so that he too could have created the artistic effect of the quartet in the final act (Osborne 230). Both Hugo and Verdi had strong identification with characters such as Rigoletto. Their respective times and nations were in the throes of revolutionary change. The creation of a sympathetic, victimized underdog was part of the fabric of their works. For Verdi there were further motives. Because he had lost his first wife and two children early in his career, his depiction of a touching father-daughter relationship sprang undeniably from deeply felt personal emotion. But the father is not portrayed as the cliche of a doting parent. There is an evil, destructive side to the hunchback's nature illustrated in his mocking of the outraged Monterone and the taunting of Ceprano (Osborne 238). Furthermore, there are parallels with King Lear, which Verdi had regularly considered making into an opera for years. Both King Lear and Le roi s'amuse are dramas of paternity, and both feature a court buffoon (Budden 484). But the difference is that Lear's Fool has no distinct personality or personal life other than as an emblem of reason opposed to Lear's foolishness. Rigoletto is a character with a personal life and dimension that complement in a grotesquely ironic way his status as a buffoon. Rigoletto's jesting hurts others, and eventually he is hurt in turn. The effect on the audience is painfully touching. "He is all the more terrible in his tragedy, for he is fundamentally the superior of his betters, and only debased by his contact with them'' (Godefroy 202). An interesting variation of the clown thus occurs in this nineteenth-century romantic work. The fool loses his entirely emblematic role and gains the tortured humanity necessary for pain and sadness. Thus the fool becomes more nearly a
386
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
human representation of every man; he is not merely an icon of chaos but rather an individual who experiences chaos himself. Rigoletto may be compared to other fool characters in opera. The title character in Wagner's Parsifal is not a clown or a trickster or a clever jester but a guileless fool or innocent needed to bring cleansing religious redemption to the order of the Knights of the Holy Grail. While he is indeed a fool, Parsifal belongs in the category of the stultus, who is not motivated by avarice, lust, or trickery. Somewhat closer to Rigoletto is the Simpleton in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. The function of this character, who appears in only two scenes, is to portray the suffering of the Russian people. His lament is first directed at the czar and then at the world after a rebel uprising begins and he is left alone on stage. As the fool, he is destined to remain an isolated character. On a comic level, in Smetana's The Bartered Bride, the character of Vasek comes close to being a fool clown. He is a stuttering bumpkin nearly forced into a marriage by his parents but rescued from it at the last minute by a wonderfully contrived coincidence and mistaken identity. In Leoncavallo's / Pagliacci, the plot concerns a troupe of commedia dell'arte players and their offstage intrigues. The play-within-a-play furnishes the audience with a glimpse of some of the traditional commedia characters, but the opera's true-life characters parallel only the surface of their comic stereotypes. Rigoletto stands out as a superb depiction in words and music of the clown hoist on his own petard. This nineteenth-century clown is not a source of fun but rather a source of bitter irony.
CRITICAL RECEPTION Rigoletto has been an enormous success ever since its premiere. When it opened on March 11, 1851, Carl Engel notes that "it set Venice literally wild with enthusiasm" (547). Today it remains a masterpiece of operatic art and is maintained in the repertoires of the major (and minor) opera houses of the world. The character of Rigoletto himself is so intriguing that even today a critic such as Vincent Godefroy speculates as to his actions after the close of the opera. What will the jester do? Will he go back to the court or continue his vendetta? (223). Thus with thrilling operatic music, the story of the duality of the nineteenth-century jester—taunting, licensed fool and tortured, loving father—draws us, mocking our sympathy for him and shaming our judgment.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Budden, Julian. The Operas of Verdi: From Oberto to Rigoletto. New York: Praeger, 1973. Edwards, Samuel. Victor Hugo: A Tumultuous Life. New York: David McKay, 1971.
Rigoletto
387
Engel, Carl. "Guiseppi Verdi." In The Music Lover's Handbook, ed. Elie Siegmeister. New York: William Morrow, 1943. Godefroy, Vincent. The Dramatic Genius of Verdi: Studies of Selected Operas. Vol. I. New York: St. Martin's, 1975. Osborne, Charles. The Complete Operas of Verdi. New York: Knopf, 1970. Rabelais, Francois. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Baltimore: Penguin, 1974. Richardson, Joanna. Victor Hugo. New York: St. Martin's, 1976.
Schlemiels and Schlimazels (Jewish Diaspora: Before Nineteenth Century-Present)
Joel Shatzky BACKGROUND Although used almost interchangeably, the terms "schlemiel" (badly done) and "schlimazel" (bad luck) are really complementary in Jewish folklore because they represent fool figures who create laughter for others. For illustrative purposes, the schlemiel is the one who spills his drink at the dinner table; the schlimazel is the one who gets the drink on his new suit. Originating in medieval ghetto folklore, these two comic characters exemplify some of the ways in which the ghettoized Jews of middle Europe used humor and the fool figure as a means of dealing with their plight. Both the schlemiel and the schlimazel are variations of the innocent fool, one who is, for whatever reason, without self-serving motivation and thus does not easily recognize cause and effect in the behavior of others. But the unfortunate consequences of ineptness experienced by the schlimazel make him an obvious fool victim or gull as well. The schlemiel is first mentioned in literature by the German author Adelbert von Chamisso, who wrote a story, "Peter Schlemiel" (1814), about a man who sold his shadow to the Devil in exchange for an inexhaustible bag of gold. The use of the term and its counterpart, however, is considerably earlier, if only in folklore. Opera lovers may recall the character Schlemil who is fatally wounded in a duel with the hero of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman. One theory concerning the origin of the Jewish schlemiel is a folktale about one Schlemiel who left his wife on a one-year journey and returned, only to find that she had given birth. The local rabbis, however, were able to convince him, using the involved logic usually mastered by rabbis alone, that the child was his.
Schlemiels and Schlimazels
389
Jewish folklore has, in fact, created an entire village of schlemiels and schlimazels known as Chelm, in which, by accident, a bag of foolish souls being carried by the Angel of the Lord was torn open, and they all were born in one place instead of being distributed evenly throughout the world. An example of Chelmite logic is their solution to a murder case: the murderer was a carpenter; but since he was the only carpenter in the town, justice was served when one of the two roofers in the village was hanged in his place. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The schlemiel is more noted for his awkwardness than his stupidity. He cannot cope with the simplest tasks in life and is a bane to those he tries to help as well as to himself. In the 1920s, he was reincarnated as Moishe Kapoir (Moses Upside-Down) for Jewish-American readers of Der Tag, one of the more prominent New York Yiddish newspapers, and was rendered on stage by Yiddish actors like Ludwig Satz and Menasha Skulnick. Earlier, the three great figures of modern Yiddish literature, Mendele Mocher Sforim (Sholom Jacob Abramowitz [1836-1917]), I. L. Peretz (1851-1915) and, most well known of the three, Sholom Aleichem (Sholom Rabinowitz [18591916]), delved into the bittersweet world of the schlemiel and schlimazel. To American readers, Sholom Aleichem's most familiar literary character is Tevye, the dairyman, who is ' 'blessed'' with five daughters and whose troubles in trying to get them married are known to American audiences through the commercialized version of the tale, the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Less popular but more typical of the schlemiel in Sholom Aleichem's work is the character Sholem Schachnah, nicknamed "Rattlebrain," in the short story "On Account of a Hat." Suddenly awakening in a train station after having paid a porter to rouse him in time to catch the train, he mistakenly places the hat of a Russian official on his head and is treated by the Gentile populace with such respect that when he sees himself in a mirror, he exclaims: "All my bad dreams on Yeremei's head and on his hands and feet, that lug! Twenty times I tell him to wake me and. . . and what does he do . .. but wake the official instead. And he leaves me asleep on the bench!" (Gross 117). The comic aspects of these figures have their poignant side as well. Mendele's tale "Bontsha Schweig" (Bontsha the silent) is about the quintessential schlimazel, a man unlucky from the moment of his birth who never utters a word of protest to the mistreatment he has suffered in the world. When he enters Paradise and is told that he can ask for anything and his wish will be granted, he can only reply, ' 'Well then . . . what I would like, Your Excellency, is to have, every morning for breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter" (Gross 230). In this case, the schlimazel is a saintly man who has endured the ironies of a life filled with bad luck through silence—more tragic than comic. In another of Mendele's works, "Fishke the Lame," first published in 1869,
390
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
"Mendele assembled characters who were to become the stock type of Yiddish humor" (Pinsker 34), the essence of which is self-mocking irony, a trait of the wise fool. In his study Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud observed: The occurrence of self-criticism as a determinant may explain how it is that a number of the most apt jokes . . . have grown up on the soil of the Jewish popular life. They are stories created by Jews and directed against Jewish characteristics. . . . I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character, (quoted in Pinsker 15) In contemporary literature, the elements of the schlemiel and schlimazel characters can be found in the works of many Jewish-American writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" is so credulous that he is convinced that the town whore is a fitting bride for him and allows himself to rationalize her many infidelities. When his wife gives birth to a boy only four months after the wedding, he says: She told me then he was premature. I said "Isn't he a little too premature?" She said she had had a grandmother who carried just as short a time and she resembled this grandmother of hers as one drop of water does another. She swore to it with such oaths that you would have believed a peasant at the fair if he had used them. To tell the plain truth, I didn't believe her. But when I talked it over next day with the schoolmaster he told me that the very same thing had happened to Adam and Eve. Two they went up to bed, and four they descended. (Howe, JewishAmerican Stories, 41) Gimpel becomes a holy man at the end of his life, but the many jokes played upon him by the people of the town of Frampol and the ease with which they fool him are part of the tradition of the schlemiel. It is almost as if Gimpel, the innocent fool, is made holy through a martyrdom he suffers in Frampol. There is, in fact, much of Bontsha Schweig at the gates of Paradise in Gimpel. Bernard Malamud's comic characters often exhibit the traits of the schlemiel in his short stories in such collections as The Magic Barrel and Pictures of Fidelman, but his more memorable schlimazels are far more tragic than comic, such as the unlucky Morris Bober, the impoverished grocer in The Assistant, and the fictional Yakov Bok, based on the historical figure Mendel Beiliss, in The Fixer. Mendel Beiliss was falsely accused of killing a Christian boy to make the Passover matzoh at a time just a few years prior to the Russian Revolution. He was acquitted in a famous trial in which the case made against him by the government was so inept that a jury of Gentile Russians found no reason to convict him. The fictional Bok is the archetypal schlimazel, a man so unlucky in his life that he could echo the plaint of the first great schlimazel, the twelfthcentury poet Abraham ibn Ezra:
Schlemiels and Schlimazels
391
If I sold shrouds, no one would die, If I sold lamps, then in the sky, The sun, for spite, would shine by night. (Ausubel 343) When admonished by his father-in-law not to forget God, Bok replies: "Who forgets who? . . . What do I get from him but a bang on the head and a stream of piss in my face. So what's there to be worshipful about?" (Malamud, Fixer 20). Yakov eventually finds himself accused of committing the heinous crime of child murder, but through his suffering, he realizes his own Jewish identity. Examining these stories and novels, it is clear that the comic and tragic elements of the schlemiel and schlimazel lie close together. In fact, the very nature of Jewish humor has that bitter irony one finds in Groucho Marx's famous line, "I wouldn't want to join a club that would have me as a member." The schlemiel and schlimazel, by their very plight, had to find a comic twist to their misery in order to survive. If there were such a thing as "Jewish blues," it would be sung off-key by the schlemiel, accompanied by the schlimazel guitarist whose strings would break in the middle of the song. A more intellectual version of these comic types is Saul Bellow's character Herzog, who is the embodiment of the modern schlemiel. He is the intellectual who is so involved with his work and thoughts that he does not recognize how the people he believes are closest to him make a mockery of his life. Bellow's comic sense is often ignored by critics who do not recognize the irony of his stance toward his characters. When confronted by his ex-wife in an embarrassing situation, Herzog assesses his own behavior: "Ah yes,. . . Ikey-Fishbones has dropped another pop fly in left field. The other team is scoring—clearing all bases" (Bellow 300). Herzog is "the lovable bumbler," the academic schlemiel who had "once tucked [his] jacket into the back of [his] trousers coming from the gentlemen's room and walked into class." His is the ironic vision that can catch itself reading Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death and say, "Nice reading for a depressive!" (Pinsker 156). A characteristic of the schlemiel and schlimazel that transcends their ineptness or bad luck is their optimism. This is not so evident in a character like Yakov Bok, but is certainly obvious in more traditional figures like Bontsha and Gimpel. Nathan Ausubel explains their positive outlooks: In order to survive they had to be eternally hopeful, untiringly enterprising, and yet—by the very nature of circumstance and their personalities they were pathetic flops. The many anxieties of their family life, the uncertainties of their sustenance which became a daily harassment, brought a haunted apologetic look into their eyes. (344) These figures were given the name "luftmensch" by the turn-of-the-century philosopher and Zionist Max Nordau. They were characters who literally had to find their means of survival in the very air.
392
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Philip Roth's portrait of the hardworking, luckless father in Portnoy 's Complaint is another example of the lovable schlemiel. In this case, it is the father's inept failures at fulfilling his son's expectations that create the humor. Portnoy narrates how, trying to show his son his mastery of baseball, the father manages to do almost everything wrong: "Okay, Big Shot Ballplayer," he says and grasps my new regulation bat somewhere near the middle—and to my astonishment, with his left hand where his right hand should be. I am suddenly overcome with such sadness: I want to tell him, Hey, your hands are wrong, but am unable to, for fear I might begin to cry— or he might! "Come on, Big Shot, throw the ball," he calls, and so I do—and of course discover that on top of all the other things I am just beginning to suspect about my father, he isn't "King Kong" Charlie Keller either. (Roth 11) Within the tradition of the schlemiel and schlimazel come different character types: the streetwise hustler whose tips never amount to anything; the scholar who can never find a trade; the little shopkeeper with little to sell; and the henpecked husband, perhaps one of the most common types from Jewish folklore. One tale tells of such a married man who has a shrewish wife. Once, when she has several women friends calling on her, she decides to show off before them by showing what absolute control she has over her husband. "Schlemiel!" she orders, "get under the table." Without a word the man crawls under the table. "Now, schlemiel, come out!" she again commands. "I won't I won't!" he defies her angrily. "I'll show you that I'm still master in this house" (Ausubel 345). Although there are many other varieties of these characters, perhaps the one who best embodies the humor of the schlemiel and schlimazel is a quasihistorical figure by the name of Hershel Ostropolier. Although noted as a court jester in the same mode as the fictional Till Eulenspiegel, Ostropolier lived from about 1750 to the early 1800s. Where he departs from Till is that while the latter is a trickster, known for his pranks on other people, Ostropolier is capable of the self-irony of the wise fool. Ostropolier was born in Balta in the Ukraine and began his formative years as a poverty-stricken luftmensch, unable to find any trade in which to prosper. His first career was as a shohet (ritual slaughterer), but he antagonized his clientele and, in his wanderings around Podolia, came to be known for his wit and clever jests. Around 1770 he became the "court jester" to Rabbi Boruch of Miedziboz, the hereditary tzaddik (holy man). Rabbi Boruch was the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov (Rabbi Israel Baal Shem), the founder of the Hasidic sect of Judaism. But although he had inherited the position, Rabbi Boruch did not have the temperament of his saintly grandfather and suffered from melancholia. It was Ostropolier's function to cheer him up. In fact, it was due to the rabbi's vanity that he employed Ostropolier at all. From the "redemption fees" that were given to him by his parishioners, he wanted to imitate the lavish lifestyle
Schlemiels and Schlimazels
393
of the Polish lords, and having his own "court jester" was a sign of his affluence (Ausubel 286-87). Ostropolier's quick wit and self-deprecatory humor are illustrated in the following two stories: A rich man once said to him, "Hershel... if you'll tell me a lie without thinking, I'll give you a ruble." "What do you mean one ruble," Hershel responded, "You just said two!" (Ausubel 314) One night some thieves crept into Hershel's house. They searched and searched and found nothing. His wife shook Hershel. "Wake up! there are thieves in the house." "Be still," answered Hershel. "If we're quiet, maybe they'll leave us something when they go." (Howe, and Greenberg 618) Ostropolier's exploits were first spoken tales but later were made into booklets that appeared until the twentieth century. He has been the subject of several novels and plays, but few of his stories have ever been translated into English (Encyclopaedia Judaica 12:1515). CRITICAL RECEPTION The schlemiel and schlimazel have their current counterparts in popular culture in many films and television situation comedies that have become part of mainstream American humor. The jingle that began the comedy series "Laverne and Shirley" opened with the words "Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hassenfeffer Incorporated," and although many people did not know quite what to make of it at first, the antics of Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall, two bachelor women whose ineptness was the source of their humor, gave these words a clarity that needed no translation. The appeal of Woody Allen, whose great variety of schlemiels appear in such guises as the inept bank robber in Take the Money and Run and the pathetic lover, Alvie Singer, in Annie Hall, rests perhaps in the recognition that the macho image of the Western hero has its absurd side as well. The mock-heroic stance of the many comic figures embodied by the schlemiel and the schlimazel have a resonance in today's complex world that was anticipated by the Jews of Europe centuries ago. It is a humor that, at the turn of the twentieth century in America, would have been greeted with derision and contempt by Americans who felt that they had complete control over their destinies and that the world was an ordered place. Today, as a new century is about to begin, a different America looks at the ironies in the lives of schlemiels and schlimazels with an empathy that makes their humor more accessible to all who are willing to laugh at themselves and at the illusion of control and order that their greatgrandparents accepted.
394
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Ausubel, Nathan. A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. New York: Crown, 1948. Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York: Viking, 1964. Gross, Theodore, ed. The Literature of American Jews. New York: Free Press, 1973. "Hershel Ostropolier." Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 12. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Howe, Irving, ed. Jewish-American Stories. New York: New American Library, 1977. Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. New York: Schocken, 1974. Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant. New York: Dell, 1974. . The Fixer. New York: Dell, 1974. Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. Roth, Philip. Portnoy's Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969.
The Sleary Circus
(England: In Charles Dickens's Hard Times: 1854)
Anthony Giffone BACKGROUND In the nineteenth-century English novel—whether the "great tradition" of the realist novel that begins with Jane Austen and that includes George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, or the countertradition of the "romance" novel that begins with Sir Walter Scott and that includes the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy— the clown figure or the fool is markedly absent. This is not to say that there are not comic characters in these novels; the nineteenth-century English novel is indeed filled with comic characters who take on the function of the fool or clown figure, providing levity to pomposity, deflating ego, and puncturing the official voice of authority and of society. Most notable among these comic fools is Tony Welder in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (his first novel and in many ways more of an eighteenth-century picaresque comic novel than a nineteenth-century realist novel) and Sarah Gamp in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. Significantly, in the works of Dickens, the most popular of the nineteenth-century English novelists both in his day and ours, these comic characters are often cockney characters who share with the more traditional fool characters a linguistic playfulness and a linguistic speech pattern rooted in their social status that separates them and marks them as "other." But the Sleary Circus in Dickens's Hard Times stands out in the Dickens canon and in the nineteenth-century English novel because its performers not only take on many of the traditional functions of characters who act as comic foils, but they are indeed professional fools and clowns. According to Paul Schlicke, in creating portraits of the circus, Dickens drew
396
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
on his childhood memories of the Astley Circus that he had visited in his youth and about which he had written in Sketches by Boz, though Dickens was a patron of circuses in his adulthood as well. The veracity of his portraits has been demonstrated by critics, notably Schlicke, through comparisons to the historical records of Victorian circuses, most notably the Astley Circus, from which Dickens even borrowed some characters' names, and the various circus acts he described. Antecedents for the Sleary Circus in the Dickens canon do exist. The circus can be considered a variation on a type that appears in many earlier Dickens novels, such as the Crummies Theatre Company in Nicholas Nickleby; Mr. Codlin and Mr. Short, who run the Punch and Judy show; and Mrs. Jarley, who runs the waxworks in The Old Curiosity Shop. These theatrical and entertainment characters, all of whom are on the geographic margins of society, come to symbolize an alternative to the rigidity of social norms and social structures with which they are contrasted in the novel, often providing alternative families and alternative communities for the protagonists. The Sleary Circus is arguably the most important of these types of characters in that Hard Times is philosophically and politically a more important novel than Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Originally titled Fact or Fancy, Hard Times is Dickens's attack on utilitarianism and industrialization. Set in a fictional industrialized city in the north of England, Coketown, the novel contrasts two worldviews: the world of "facts . . . nothing but facts" (1) of the schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind and the world of fancy and imagination represented by the Sleary Circus, which is presented as a philosophical counterpoint to the utilitarian worldview. Caught between these two worldviews are several young children: Gradgrind's children Louisa and Tom, who are raised on facts, but who early in the novel are seen peering into the Sleary Circus, and Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a runaway clown who is sent to be educated at the Gradgrind school. The Sleary Circus does not have a major role in the novel in the number of scenes it which it appears, but it has a pivotal role thematically in the novel. Mr. Sleary articulates the philosophical thesis of the novel: "People mutht be amuthed. . . . They can't be alwayth a working, nor yet they can't be alwayth a learning" (44). The circus is more than just a view of the imagination or fancy as a means of providing momentary retreat from the hardships of the Industrial Revolution; Dickens is using the values embodied in the circus world as a philosophical alternative to the values of capitalism, industrialization, and utilitarianism. Sleary's circus represents the idea, again in Sleary's words, "that there ith a love in the world, not all thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different" (322). Sleary's sentiments and viewpoints are later rearticulated by the omniscient narrator's homiletic sermon that closes the novel.
The Sleary Circus
397
The Sleary Circus consists of ' 'two or three handsome young women . . . with their two or three husbands, and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine little children who did the fairy business when required" (39). The circus is an extended family, but very few of its members function as members of a complete nuclear family; rather, the circus subverts traditional ideas about the family. The major members of the Sleary Circus include Mr. Sleary, his daughter Josephine, the clown Jupe, his daughter Sissy, Mr. E.W.B. Childers, and his child Kidderminster. Whenever it is presented, the circus is seen in great physical animation—tumbling, climbing—the physical fluidity of action suggesting an embodiment of the fluidity and lack of rigidity of their social arrangements. The father of one of the families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster for the apex and himself for the base; all the fathers would dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing. (39) In addition, the circus members are physically marginalized by deformity just as they are socially marginalized by their position on the outskirts of town. Mr. Sleary is "a stout man . . . with one fixed eye and one loose eye" (39); there is the suggestion that Childers is a dwarf, as his legs are described as very robust but "shorter than legs of good proportions should have been" (32). Traditionally, fools have subverted the rigidity of binary gender roles. There is less of this in Dickens, but circus members are dressed in costumes that blur other binary distinctions: those of man and animal, or of childhood and adulthood. Childers is introduced dressed in his costume of the ' 'Wild Huntsman of the North American prairies." Dickens describes him thus: "He was dressed in a Newmarket coat and tight-fitting trousers; wore a shawl round his neck; smelt of lamp-oil, straw, orange-peel, horses' provender and sawdust; and looked a most remarkable sort of Centaur, compounded of the stable and the playhouse. Where the one began and the other ended, nobody could have told with any precision" (33). Kidderminster, described as a "diminutive boy with an old face" (33), is dressed as Cupid, "made up with curls, wreaths, wings, white bismuth and carmine"; but he also has "an extremely gruff voice" (33) and an unangelic manner. Horses and dogs figure prominently in the acts: Josephine Sleary performs an "equestrian Tyrolean flower-act" (12); Jupe performs with his ever-faithful dog Merry legs. Linguistically, the members of the circus are not educated nor refined in their manner of speaking. ' 'The combined literature of the whole company could have produced but a poor letter on any subject" (39). But they are very direct in their utterances, articulating, as we have seen, the thesis of the novel. The witty repartee and retorts often characteristic of fool figures are not characteristic of
398
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
the Sleary Circus, whose members are sincere and earnest. An artful use of language often escapes them. Although Dickens's use of the Sleary Circus to represent a philosophical position can be considered highly romantic (Dickens's concept of fancy has been compared to Coleridge's idea of the imagination), Dickens's presentation of the circus is not romanticized. Instead, he often emphasizes the hardships of circus life. Mr. Sleary's speech patterns may be asthmatic in origin; his daughter Josephine "had been tied on a horse at two years old, and had made a will at twelve which was always carried about with her" (40). Sissy Jupe carries nine oils with her with which she rubs her father when he is bruised in the ring. Sissy's father deserts the circus because "his joints are turning stiff" (35), and as a result he is "short in his leaps and bad in his tumbling" (34). If the novel could be considered to have a principal heroine, the role belongs to Sissy Jupe. Her father, a clown, wants her to have an education, so she is sent to the Gradgrind school; and after her father deserts her, she is sent to live with the Gradgrind family. But Gradgrind is less successful in instilling his beliefs in Sissy; the circus world cannot be weeded out of her system. She provides a constant foil to Gradgrind's ideology, whether it is on aesthetic or economic principles. When Gradgrind's daughter Louisa leaves Bounderby, the banker she has married for utilitarian rather than emotional reasons, it is Sissy who brings her back to her father's house; and when Gradgrind's son Tom is found to have robbed Bounderby's bank, it is Sissy who arranges for him to escape from Coketown by traveling abroad with the Sleary Circus. The circus once again provides a safe haven and alternative to the world of Coketown. Hard Times has a unique position in the Dickens canon. Critics, such as F. R. Leavis, who often dismiss Dickens reserve special praise for Hard Times, while critics who affirm Dickens's central place in the English novel often dismiss it as a minor work. Both schools tend to emphasize Dickens's depiction of the Industrial Revolution, of factory conditions, and of his indictment of utilitarianism. George Bernard Shaw was an early admirer of the book's political ideology. The circus world, however, has received less commentary in general discussions. Critics have seen the circus as an inadequate and unrealistic alternative or solution to the economic problems that Dickens delineates elsewhere in the novel. As Paul Schlicke notes, "The circus performers of Hard Times exist more as idealized alternatives to pernicious attitudes than as actual representatives of the Victorian business of entertainment. Dickens has less to tell us about the directions entertainment was to take after he wrote than about reasons why it is an activity vital to the individual and to society" (9). Despite its roots in realistic observation, the Sleary Circus remains more symbol than reality.
The Sleary Circus
399
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Source Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. In Complete Works: Centennial Edition. Geneva, Switzerland: Heron Books, 1970.
Secondary Sources Butt, John, and K. Tillotson. Dickens at Work. Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1958. Cockshut, A.O.J. The Imagination of Charles Dickens. New York: New York UP, 1962. Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971. Connor, Steven. Charles Dickens. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Dyson, A. E. The Inimitable Dickens. London: Macmillan, 1970. Flint, Kate. Dickens. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986. Ford, George, and Lauriat Lane, Jr., eds. The Dickens Critics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1961. Garis, Robert. The Dickens Theatre. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Goldberg, Michael. Carlyle and Dickens. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1972. Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 1952. Rev. and abridged, New York: Viking, 1977. Kincaid, James. Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Kotzin, Michael C. Dickens and the Fairy Tale. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1972. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. 1948. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967. Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis. Dickens: The Novelist. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1970. Manning, Sylvia. Dickens as Satirist. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971. Schlicke, Paul. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Allen & Unwin, 1985. Shaw, George Bernard. "Introduction to Hard Times." In The Dickens Critics, ed. George Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1961. 125-134. Stone, Donald. The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. Williams, Raymond. The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence. London: Hogarth, 1984. Winters, Warrington. "Dickens' Hard Times: The Lost Childhood." Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1971): 217-236.
Socrates as Fool in Aristophanes and Plato (Ancient Greece: 469-399 B.C.E.)
David Luljak BACKGROUND Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.) was a historical figure, a philosopher who lived in Athens during its "golden age," but we know of him chiefly through dramatic and philosophical works with a decidedly literary character. Therefore, we must discuss how the literary figure "Socrates," not the historical person, plays the role of the fool. Our primary sources for this inquiry are the comic poet Aristophanes and the philosopher Plato. For Aristophanes, Socrates was the person through whom philosophy could be satirized. The poet wrote an entire comedy, Clouds (423 B.C.E., revised c. 418 B.C.E.), that revolves around the philosophical school headed by Socrates. Plato, born in 427 B.C.E., became familiar with Socrates toward the end of the latter's life and immortalized him after his death in a series of sophisticated philosophical dialogues. There, also, although to a lesser extent, we find Socrates presented in a humorous aspect. The two literary portraits of Socrates concur in presenting something foolish about him, but they differ in their presentation of the source and significance of that foolishness. Aristophanes, writing while Socrates was still alive and when Plato was only a young child, pokes fun at the Socratic life for its divergence from convention, common sense, and practicality, while Plato, several years later, finds in that divergence evidence for the superiority of the Socratic life and the presence of a higher, metaphysically based comedy. The Aristophanic view of Socratic foolishness is expounded thoroughly in Clouds, a comedy in which Socrates appears as the leader of a philosophical
Socrates as Fool in Aristophanes and Plato
401
school whose art of sophistry is sought by a typical Athenian youth. The longterm impact and effectiveness of Aristophanes' characterization is made clear in the Apology of Socrates written by Plato. There Plato has Socrates refer to "some comic poet" whose caricature of him has become the harmful stereotype that has led to his being charged with offenses against Athens's traditional beliefs and its youths' morals. That Plato singles out a comic poet in Socrates' defense speech is significant. While Plato wrote the Apology as a defense of Socrates, he also was constructing a philosophical analysis of the man, his life, and his philosophy. Plato's emphasis on the comic suggests that viewing Socrates from the ccmic perspective must be taken seriously and indeed is the best means of gaining insight into Socrates as a man and philosopher.1 This suggestion is strengthened by the fact that Plato created in the Symposium a masterful comic "rebuttal" to Aristophanes' treatment of Socrates, and in the Phaedo he suffused the tragedy of Socrates' last day on earth with a persistent air of comedy and humor. These two dialogues are especially important in this context, for together they represent Plato's most philosophical portrait of Socrates and keenest depiction of Socrates' comic essence. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS As Aristophanes' work comes earlier, it must be asked, what is the essence of his rendering of Socrates as fool? In good comic fashion Aristophanes brings the high low by deflating Socrates' reputation as a lofty intellectual. Aristophanes spoofs this reputation literally by introducing Socrates suspended in a basket above the stage claiming that he is "looking into heavenly doings." By the end of the play the philosopher's antagonist, Strepsiades, has turned the tables on him, making much the same claim as he climbs atop the roof of Socrates' school to set it afire. The theme of Socrates', and therefore philosophy's, being out of touch with reality is pursued throughout the comedy. Socrates' behavior does not fit the conventions of Athenian life. He is barefoot and dirty, defying accepted standards of personal appearance, and his pale complexion indicates that he eschews the typical outdoor activities of Athenian men. His lack of common sense is suggested by the elaborate scientific experiments and explanations he devises; among his subjects are the distance of a flea's jump and the mechanism of a gnat's flatulence. Finally, he is shown to be completely impractical. Socrates is barely able to feed and clothe himself and his disciples, and he is prone to lapsing into fits of abstraction. One incident sums up Socrates' foolishness from the ordinary person's perspective. Socrates attempts to teach Strepsiades the art of philosophizing by first instructing him to lie in a bed. He then tries to develop Strepsiades' mental processes by asking him challenging questions, only to be foiled by Strepsiades' inability to expand his mind to consider those questions outside the confines of
402
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
common sense. Finally, the entire experiment is ruined when the continual biting of bedbugs destroys Strepsiades' ability to follow a line of thought. Aristophanes' satire of the school of philosophy thus contrasts the philosophical with the commonsense perspectives, demonstrates that Socrates' impracticality jeopardizes the very philosophical process to which he is devoted, and provides a succinct image of the philosopher as a layabout. Aristophanes' Clouds throws open to the light of day the strange practices of philosophy and exposes the threat of corruption they pose for the Athenian community. Philosophy is depicted as not only foolish, but potentially dangerous. In response to Aristophanes' representation, Plato, rather directly in the Symposium and implicitly elsewhere, shows Socrates' comic aspects in a different light. He is a "divine fool" whose marginality results from his superior character and intellect. In the Symposium, for instance, he penetrates the sphere of ordinary life and through his discussion of eros with his contemporaries (including Aristophanes) exposes the follies and dangers of the nonphilosophical life. In fact, the Symposium associates corruption and death with Aristophanes rather than with Socrates and, moreover, links the latter with the dialogue's main emphasis on education and the vital spirit. The Socrates who emerges triumphant at the end of the all-night symposium wins both the thinking and the drinking contests and creates a symbol of the renewal brought by philosophy as he exits into the dawn on his way to a bath. He has clearly outcomicked the comic poet. In Aristophanes' Peace, a figure named Trygaeus climbs on a dung beetle to mount the heavens in order to find Peace and establish her reign. This is a beautiful comic plot, for it combines high aspirations with ridiculous means. Plato's Symposium parallels Aristophanes' Peace in addressing issues of aspiration, fulfillment, and the means to achieving that satisfaction. In the comedy of life to which the Symposium speaks, ultimate fulfillment is variously presented as the good, the beautiful, or immortality. The dialogue depicts three protagonists in this quest: Socrates, Eros, and the erotic student of Diotima's account. Consistent with a comic perspective on life, there are plenty of obstacles and opportunities for things to go wrong: Socrates must contest against the obstacles of various nonphilosophical ways of life and his own shortcomings, Eros must try to overcome his own nature, which combines poverty with resource, and the erotic student must progress through many attractive and distracting forms of beauty. Yet, although the full-blown happy ending is mitigated in the Symposium, casting doubt on the possibility of the impossible (a key element of the comic vision), the "things go right" principle appropriately prevails. Furthermore, that principle is given more substance here than it is in comedy because it is associated with the metaphysical and ontological security provided by the Forms or the Good. The Socratic philosopher as portrayed in the Symposium, buoyed by the security of the Forms, thus fulfills the archetype
Socrates as Fool in Aristophanes and Plato
403
of the comic fool in his high aspirations, ridiculous pursuit of their fulfillment, and achievement of satisfaction. Along the way, Plato manages in the Symposium both to paint a comic portrait of the eccentric Socrates and to defend him from the ridicule to which Aristophanes' Clouds had subjected him. The foibles singled out by Aristophanes are turned to Socrates' advantage. Socrates is introduced in the dialogue in the act of cleaning up and putting on beautiful sandals to attend the symposium, proving that he is as capable of fulfilling social expectations as anyone else. His peculiar demeanor is cited by Alcibiades (in a direct quotation from Clouds) as evidence of his bravery in war, and his fits of abstraction are taken as signs of his wisdom and determined intellectualism. The Symposium is one grand comic plot, and Socrates the philosopher is shown to be the best of comic protagonists. His odd philosophical ways are shown to be the best means of achieving the wisdom and happiness to which all humans aspire by nature. His symbolic triumphs at the end are not only that, as they would be in comedy, but are meant to inspire readers to see in what ways they too can be triumphant through rigorous examination of Socrates' life and thought. Socrates' profound philosophical significance is thus linked directly to his comic foolishness. Where the Symposium emphasizes the comic trajectory of life, the Phaedo focuses on the element of incongruity. In this apparent narrowing of focus, Plato reveals the essence of Socratic philosophy and, interestingly, a fundamental affinity between Socratic philosophy and comedy. The first hint that incongruity in the Phaedo is regarded as comic rather than, as one might expect, tragic is provided by the fact that more laughter occurs in this dialogue than in any other. That is just one of the incongruities that provide a thematic underpinning to this ultimate examination of Socrates' life and thought. The entire dialogue is animated by the incongruity of Socrates as he is forced to discuss immortality while literally seated on his deathbed. Incongruity bears greater philosophical significance as well when it is discovered to be at the heart of the elenchos, or method of philosophical examination, that Socrates practices. Crucial to our inquiry is the fact that elenchos is intended to expose ridiculous inconsistencies and shortcomings. Such revelations are closely akin to those kinds of exposure that are fundamental to comic ridicule. The link between the comic and Socratic visions can now be made clear. Comedy itself involves the incongruous union of positive and negative, or of the fulfilling vision and the exposure of shortcomings, or of celebration and criticism. Incongruity is not merely the mechanism by which the comic functions; it expresses the very nature of the comic. What is the relevance of this understanding of comedy to Socratic philosophy? Socratic argument is predicated on the existence of the Forms, which embody the fulfillment or pinnacle of what is good and true. But in practice that argument (the elenchos) results in a constant exposure of shortcomings, not only of Socrates' interlocutors, but of Socrates' own understanding, and, by extension, of
404
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
human understanding in general. The foundation that the Forms provide for the Socratic vision gives it an underlying sense of security, but since that vision constantly seeks justification by argument, and all arguments prove inadequate, that security is simultaneously undermined. Socratic philosophy is thus characterized by an essential incongruity between fulfillment and shortcoming, between security and risk, between celebration and criticism. In this oscillation and ambivalence, it recalls the comic vision. Socrates' laughter in the Phaedo is described as "gentle." Any ridiculing laughter is left to his companions. This gentleness arises from Socrates' belief in the true and good foundation of the world, which enables him to manifest a secure and generous spirit. Yet it remains impossible for Socrates to account for a belief in the good and pure because accounting, or giving a logos, can only occur after the commitment to logos and an edifying view of the cosmos has already been made. This results in an incongruous situation similar to what David Hume identified as the "whimsical condition of mankind." The philosopher's "last laugh" in the Phaedo, called forth by the ultimate questions concerning life and death, illuminates this double significance of the human condition especially intensely, simultaneously indicating the paltry and inadequate efforts and results of human words and deeds to grasp the nature of the cosmos and act in harmony with it while, in spite of this acknowledgment, pointing trustfully to the rational and good basis of the world that provides both a standard of judgment and a promise of security for human thought and action. CRITICAL RECEPTION The ultimate meditation on the significance of the Socratic life that Plato provides in the Phaedo and that provides the basis for such a great portion of Western thought confirms the comic foolery of the philosopher but shows its profound metaphysical roots. The Socratic and comic visions share a generous spirit and promise of security that is very appealing, but their very workings undercut what they seem to establish. In this incongruous tension between fulfillment and falling short, between having it all and having the rug pulled out from under one, what is left but, as happens periodically during Socrates' last discussion, to laugh? NOTE 1. Most modem commentators do not follow this line of thought. Although it is not unusual to ascribe a humorous quality to Socrates, it is typically confined to his eccentricities and ironic banter.
Socrates as Fool in Aristophanes and Plato
405
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Aristophanes. Aristophanis Comoediae. Ed. F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1906-1907. Plato. Platonis Opera. Ed. J. Bumet. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1900-1907.
Secondary Sources Clay, Diskin. "The Origins of the Socratic Dialogue." In The Socratic Movement, ed. Paul A. Vander Waerdt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994. . "The Tragic and Comic Poet of the Symposium." Arion, n.s. 2 (1975): 238261. Dover, Kenneth J. Aristophanic Comedy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. . "Socrates in the Clouds." In The Philosophy of Socrates, ed. Gregory Vlastos. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971. 50-77. Edmunds, Lowell. "Aristophanes' Socrates." In Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. John J. Cleary. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1986. 209-230. Greene, William Chase. "The Spirit of Comedy in Plato." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 31 (1920): 63-123. Guthrie, W. K. C. Socrates. New York: Cambridge UP, 1971. Havelock, Eric A. "The Socratic Self as It Is Parodied in Aristophanes' Clouds." Yale Classical Studies 22. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972. 1-18. Hyland, Drew. "Why Plato Wrote Dialogues." Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 3850. Kleve, K. "Anti-Dover or Socrates in The Clouds." Symbolae Osloenses 58 (1983): 2 3 37. Lacey, A. R. "Our Knowledge of Socrates." In The Philosophy of Socrates, ed. Gregory Vlastos. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971. 22-49. Nussbaum, Martha. "Aristophanes and Socrates on Learning Practical Wisdom." Yale Classical Studies 26. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. 43-97. . "Commentary on Lowell Edmunds' 'Aristophanes' Socrates.' " In Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. John J. Cleary. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1986. 231-240. Rankin, H. D. "Laughter, Humor, and Related Topics in Plato." Classica et Mediaevalia 28 (1967): 186-213. Reckford, Kenneth J. Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy. Vol. 1. Six Essays in Perspective. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. 1964. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Whitman, Cedric H. Aristophanes and the Comic Hero. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964.
Will Sommers (England: 7-1560)
Andrew Vogel Ettin BACKGROUND Famous jester to England's King Henry VIII, Will Sommers (sometimes spelled "Somers") also served Henry's next two successors, his children Edward VI and Mary, though he was less prominent during their reigns. Said to have been a native of Shropshire and a household servant of Richard Fermor, Sommers came to Henry's notice in 1525 through his badinage and was promptly installed as court jester. Numerous royal household accounts through the years attest to outlays for his clothing. Sommers was, in Tudor parlance, an "artificial" rather than a "natural" fool: that is, he was not what his contemporaries would have labeled a "simpleton" nor a "madman" nor a "freak," but rather, he was a talented performer. His specialty was verbal wit more than physical antics, though he could mug funny faces and bizarre gestures. In centering his humor on clever play with language and extemporaneous versifying, he can be considered at the very least the first notable comedian of the English Renaissance, a jokester for the humanist age. He was also the first whose fame greatly outlasted his own lifetime. Most of what we know about Sommers comes from the Elizabethan and Jacobean comic actor Robert Armin's A Nest of Ninnies, which was based on eyewitness recollections. An anonymous "Pleasant Historie of the Life and Death of William Sommers," indiscriminately mingling presumed fact and undeniable apocrypha, appeared in 1676 and, though biographically unreliable, is notable in attesting to the persistence of Sommers's remarkable reputation (Welsford 166). Earlier he was memorialized as a character in Thomas Nashe's
Will Sommers
407
Summers Last Will and Testament (c. 1593), Thomas Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), and Samuel Rowlands's Good News and Bad News (1622) (Welsford 166). Other period allusions to him have been suspected in wordplay involving "summer" and "will." DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Sommers's close personal rapport with the king seems to have made him more of a household than a court figure; at least, he was not principally a performer brought forth to entertain before the visiting notables. His style seems to have been rugged, often silly, but at times topically satirical. Indeed, he mocked the powerful; but as a result, it was they who lost favor rather than he. In particular, Sommers and Cardinal Wolsey appear to have had a mutual antipathy toward one another. Enid Welsford suggests that Sommers contributed to the fall of the cardinal when once he visited the cardinal's fool Patch. Both went to the cellar to tap one of the cardinal's hogsheads. When it would not yield wine, they broke it and found gold, which they subsequently found in all the hogsheads. Sommers told his master the king, and so began the fall of the avaricious Wolsey (169). John Heywood, dramatist, court entertainer, and wit in the Sir Thomas More Circle, also held disdain for the less intellectual and sophisticated Sommers. In his Dialogue concerning Witty and Witles, Heywood wrote contemptuously of Sommers and his humor: "Master Sommers of sots not the best" (Heywood 266). We cannot say to what degree their enmity and perhaps envy was mutual. Though Heywood's criticism certainly owes much to court rivalry and his own disappointed hopes, as well as to a considerable difference in social class and learning, it is not without point. Few of the jokes, rhymes, or other witticisms (whether true or invented) ascribed to Sommers are likely to amuse or entertain the modern reader; Shakespeare's fools are infinitely more clever and funny. Although Sommers's verbal art was surely ephemeral in its effects, undoubtedly dependent on situation and delivery, it was perhaps equally dependent on the ineffable personal sympathy between the artist-jester and the patronmonarch. King Henry enjoyed rhyming games with him; trading or capping one another's verses was a pastime that apparently amused the king when ill health or the problems of state or matrimony left him seemingly beyond solace. Armin writes, "When he was sad, the king and he would rime: / Thus Will exiled sadness many a time" (41). One touching anecdote, attested by contemporary witnesses, tells of a morose, restless Henry moved to comic relief by Sommers's leaping from behind a curtain to ask three ridiculously pointless riddles, after which the king "laught hartely, and was exceeding merry," then went to bed while "Will laid him downe among the spaniels to sleep" (Armin 46). Yet Sommers's contemporary reputation stemmed not only from his comedy but also from his compassionate character. In The Dictionary of National Biography, Sir John Harington is cited for his reference to Sommers's reputed
408
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
' 'kindly if hasty temper''; the former trait is evinced in the tale describing his particular consideration and gentleness toward the raging "natural" fool whom the despised Wolsey gave to the king. Various accounts tell of Sommers interceding with the king in some good cause. Armin eulogized him, noting that "nee was a poor mans friend / And helpt the widdow often in the end" (41). Clearly the populace seems to have loved him for his charity and kindness, since they would have had scant firsthand acquaintance with his wit. That "the World was in love with this merry foole" (Armin 42) is demonstrated in several stories that Armin relates. Once Sommers fell asleep leaning against a stile at the entrance to the park at Greenwich. Believing that he would fall, a "poore woman" fetched a cushion and a rope, the latter to tie him to the post so he would not fall and the former to place behind his head. There she stood by him "attending as the groom of his chamber" so he might safely continue his nap (Armin 42). He repaid her kindness by gaining a pardon for her son, who was to be hanged for piracy three days hence. He was ' 'beloved'' at court because he did not seek his own enrichment but "wished the king to do good deeds." One story holds that he encouraged Henry to rectify an injustice done to his "uncle," who was visiting him in London, and others from Terrils Frith, the area where Sommers said that he had grown up. Sommers pleaded the case for those who lived there because they had been deprived of grazing land for their cattle since a "gentleman" had enclosed it with a fence. The people on the heath thus had no livelihood and were suffering. Sommers claimed that if the king could make his "uncle" rich, then Sommers himself could in turn make the king rich. When the king pressed for an explanation of how he could derive such a benefit from his fool, Sommers replied that ' 'the poor will pray for thee and thou shalt be rich in heaven even as thou art on earth." The king granted that the heath return to the people (Armin 44). We cannot know how much romanticizing, if any, has entered these accounts; but the legends acquired their own life. This much is sure: In that highly factionalized court environment, Sommers clearly remained independent from intrigues or power struggles and in his later years continued to serve very different sovereigns, both of whom he had known and entertained as children. Two remarkable contemporary portraits (reproduced in Neville Williams's Henry VIII and His Court) attest to Sommers's special status in the private circle of the royal court. A painting of the king and Princess Mary poses Sommers in the center, somewhat behind the two widely separated royal figures, and holding one of the spaniels. A presence visually odd in this composition, he is the only one of the three who is not a masklike icon. The image confirms descriptions of him; "leane he was, hollow eyde" (Armin 41). His sallow, unsmiling visage may remind a modern viewer of Buster Keaton. Perhaps even more striking is the double portrait of him and the king painted as an illumination in Henry's psalter. Like David, the monarch strums a harp, while the jester in the foreground (perhaps to compensate for his reportedly diminutive height), now with a grizzled short beard, attends gravely, the king's
Will Sommers
409
sole auditor. Here too the deep-set eyes are notable; also visible are the reported stooping shoulders (Armin 41) and the trappings one might trace back to entries in the household accounts (Welsford 171): a green hooded tunic, blue hose, and a black velvet purse. Whether in the foreground, as here, or in the background in the other painting, he draws the eye and seems to hold the stage. Knowing his identity deepens the paradox that the socially least significant figure is the one with which the visual artist has most vividly connected. It is his sober expression that remains most unsettling. One might take him to be a seasoned family retainer or even a pensioned bodyguard; no one of his social class could look less like a court jester. CRITICAL RECEPTION That with so little public exposure and in such a fleeting medium Sommers became what a later age would call a "star" is itself testimony to the undoubted impact he had in his role at the court, one that led Neville Williams to claim that in Henry's last decade this jester was possibly the single individual closest to Henry VIII's heart. More than a performer, he was at once a commoner and court insider who could use his position and talent to do good; a faithful companion, he seems genuinely to have cared for the well-being and well-doing of the man he served. The later works making use of his name or persona suggest that his image transcended his reality: he became virtually eponymous for the shrewd and sometimes sharp-tongued yet honest and well-intentioned court wit in residence. Surely along with the generic antecedents of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage fool we should include this famous exemplar, whose name still evoked such strong associations at the end of the century. Here was someone from the not-so-distant past who embodied the salient characteristics of the later figures and indeed seems to define the type. Playing with language is only one major component of this pattern. Significant also is the close personal relationship of the fool with the monarch, and the fool's compassionate attention to the poor and powerless. Finally, like Sommers, some of his stage successors evinced an independent moral outlook that encompassed both satire and earnestness, showing themselves at once comedians and moralists. Compounded of contradictions, a widely known public figure about whose private life we know virtually nothing, one with a jester's tongue and physique but the face of an ascetic homilist, a man with no apparent education who charmed a humanist king by linguistic cleverness, a professional court fool who pled the causes of widows and others in need, Will Sommers continues to surprise and delight with the force of his commitment to good humor, even when we cannot quite say what is amusing. He is the figure jumping out from behind a curtain with three riddles that make no sense; yet we find the performance oddly, humanly comforting, even to the last image, the actor laying himself down to sleep on the floor "among the spaniels," a touch of heart-tugging comic
410
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
pathos with its deeper resonances of kindness and humility in his character. Perhaps that last word "character" helps us get closer to the essence of Sommers's hold on the imagination of the later generations: not that he was one, but that he had it. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Armin, Robert. A Nest of Ninnies. 1608. In Fools and Jesters with a Reprint of Robert Armin's A Nest of Ninnies, ed. John Payne Collier. London: Shakespeare Society, 1842. Heywood, John. Dialogue concerning Witty and Witles. In The Dramatic Writings of John Heywood, ed. John S. Farmer. 1905. Guildford, England: Traylen, 1966. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961. "Will Sommers." In The Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford UP, 1937— 1939. Williams, Neville. Henry VIII and His Court. London: Sphere Books, 1973.
The Sottie, the Sots, and the Fols (France: 1420-1571)
Donald Perret Performers who are members of companies of fools, or societes; red, yellow, and green costumes of motley with coxcombs or asses' ears on the hoods; the sounds of bells that dangle from performers' clothes; slapstick with baubles as weapons; acrobatics; spitfire dialogue filled with contemporary satire, puns, and wordplay: these are among the most striking characteristics of a highly theatrical genre, unique to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France, known as the sottie, or fool's play.
BACKGROUND One critic, Ida Nelson, counts forty-two extant sotties (or soties) from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. However, generic distinctions between the sottie and its companion form, the farce, prove difficult. Much of the debate revolves around the character of the fool and his presence in a given comedy. Eugenie Droz, in her collection, maintains that there is no difference between sotties and farces other than a style of acting. Emile Picot's edition separates the two forms, as do studies by Jean-Claude Aubailly and Barbara Bo wen, who subsequently distinguishes some 150 farces. Alan Knight, on the other hand, follows the practice of the late Middle Ages and groups all the comedies as farces, proposing to classify what the contemporary authors and printers alternatively entitled sotties or farces moralisees as a subgenre of the typical farce. In so doing, he respects their differences while he preserves the notion that they all belong to the same "folly-ridden world." As an initial, general distinction, the typical farces, with the exception, that
412
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
is, of the well-known Farce de maitre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1460), are short comedies of approximately four hundred lines in octosyllabic verse with characters from real life. Their plots, usually ending in the "trickster tricked," depend on stock situations: husbands and wives fight, merchants and customers cheat each other, stupid students study Latin, soldiers brag, priests seduce, women lie, and old men are duped. On the other hand, the sotties and farces moralisees, of virtually the same length as the farces, display a greater variety of versification. Also, the characters are anonymous (Premier Sot, Deuxieme Sot) or allegorical, personifying abstract ideas (Vertu, Malice, Grosse Despense), institutions (Honneur Spirituel, Marchandise), or social types (Les Gens Nouveaulx, Le Monde). Along with these can come a whole following of fools with thoroughly carnivalesque names (Croulecul, Platebourse, Baillevant). They all delight in topical, political references such as the quarrel between Louis XII of France and Pope Julius II in Le jeu du Prince des Sots et de la Mere Sotte (1512) or the misfortunes brought on Francois I by his mother, Louise de Savoie, in Les trois pelerins (1523). They also revel in ambiguous situations of the kind that foreshadow the modern theater of the absurd. In two sotties from Geneva, Les beguins (1523) and Le monde (1524), the same fools, from the first play to the second, pass their time waiting for Bon Temps. He never arrives, their Utopian dream is frustrated twice over, and yet, at the end, they wait. With this said, any further attempt at a separation of kinds is nowhere near as neat. Drama in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is slippery here, precisely because it is not genre-bound; rather, it enjoys a great deal of mixing and overlapping of species. Folly is the theme of both the farces and sotties. Yet in the typical farce, real-life characters such as the cuckolds, the naive servants, and the shrewish wives are only made to look foolish; they are not professionals playing fool types at a particular time of year or within a particular celebratory context. In the sotties and farce moralisees, however, we are confronted with artificial, performing "fools"—the term translates as either sot or fol in French, a distinction not made in English. These clowns are by no means interchangeable (Nelson wrongly says that they are nearly synonymous), and the distance in interpretation between these two foolish types is often confusing. As Cotgrave's dictionary of 1611 quotes, "Le fol est sot quant et quant, mais tout sot n'est pas fol." In addition, both sots and fols may appear in the same plays, sotties, or farces moralisees. Indeed, the fools themselves, in comedies like Tout le monde (1535) and Les sobres sots (1536), make a game of deciding who is a fool and who is not. It is again Knight who provides the most workable distinctions between the two characters. The sot is a wise but benign fool, a clown (or clod, the word's origin according to Willeford), a jester, and an acrobat whose purpose on stage is to reveal and ridicule the madness of the world. The folly that he performs is sottise, or foolishness. For example, in the Sottie des rapporteurs (1480),
The Sottie, the Sots, and the Fols
413
when the sots are called together by the Prince des Sots, they report that all the evils of existence have been made good: birds fly without wings, rabbits chase dogs; in short, the world has been turned upside down. The fol, conversely, tends to be a dangerous, malicious character whose purpose is to personify the vices of the moral and social order. The folly that he performs is folie, or madness. In Folle Bobance (1500), the character Folle Bobance, a variant of Mother Folly, creates a parody of three estates of ' 'meschans fols desservellez," with the aim of encouraging them to lead a life of meanness and extravagance. Thus it would seem, when setting side by side the two types of French theatrical fool, that it was the role of the sot to criticize and correct the fol for the sad state of world affairs. Olga Dull's study supports this division of folly as wisdom (the Erasmian stance) and folly as vice (Brant's Ship of Fools).
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS In order to consider both the purpose and the performance of the sotties, one must answer a number of pertinent, even basic questions. Where were the sotties played? At what time of year were they played, and for which specific events? Who was the public? What did the shows look like? How were the sots costumed? In conjunction, one must examine the membership and organization of the famous societes joyeuses, which were generally charged with staging the sotties, and the onstage and offstage roles of the principal members of these companies, particularly the Prince des Sots and the Mere Sotte. Like much medieval spectacle—royal entry pageants, tableaux vivants, mimes, dramatic monologues, even traveling charlatans—the sotties were staged outside, in the marketplace, on an echafaud, or raised platform, supported by trestles or barrels, and in view of the general populace. Regarding performance space, titles are explicit, for example, the Sottie a dix personnages jouee a Genveve en la place du Molard le dimanche des Bordes Van 1523. Although the sotties were probably a part of a day-long dramatic series—crye, sottie, morality or mystery play, and farce—the texts themselves indicate that the sotties were performed independently. Their virulent invective and strong critique of contemporary morals and politics would seem to confirm that they were hitand-run engagements, much like modern guerrilla theater. Given their topical nature, it is not likely that the scripts were composed with posterity in mind. Fifteenth-century texts, such as Menus propos (1461) or Mallepaye et Baillevant (n.d.), are filled with contemporary local references, current cliches and proverbs, isolated remarks, and Ionesco-like truisms, all without logical connections, which made the scripts opaque and obscure by the seventeenth century. A discussion of the location of sottie performances leads naturally to the question of when they were staged, a double-edged sword. More than anything else, two important cultural phenomena determine the periods of performance
414
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of comedy in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance: the liturgical calendar and the great fairs, that is, church and commerce. Such diverse researchers as E. K. Chambers, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ida Nelson, and Heather Arden have tied this theater to the festive impulse or, more specifically, to the carnivalesque celebrations that punctuate the Christian year. They note with interest the coincidence of two ongoing occurrences during the fifteenth century: the gradual suppression of the Feast of Fools—revels, remnants of the primitive Saturnalia, introduced into the liturgy itself between Christmas and the Epiphany by the lesser clergy to parody the Mass and Ceremonial Office—and the gradual increase in the production of complete, profane plays whose performances were intended to preserve the ludic character of the feast. Secularization of the "fete" was a year-round activity, however. Large commercial centers such as Paris, Rouen, and Lyon sponsored great international fairs to coincide with various holy days, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Midsummer Day, and saints' days. These served almost as seasonal feasts, which, according to Bakhtin, were vestiges of ancient agricultural traditions honoring fertility, sacrifice, and renewal. The movement was from inside the church before a pious congregation outward to the echafaud and a popular audience in search of relevant if rowdy entertainment and belly laughs. This transition also had an effect on the material parodied. The principal fools were no longer the pope and the bishop, but representatives of a more worldly hierarchy, the prince and the mother; it follows that the subject of the satire was no longer the liturgy but politics and society. In fact, as early as 1450, in Amiens, a Fete du Prince des Sots was celebrated at Yuletide. An international public, like that at the fairs, would, as well, have required additional performance elements to assure comprehension beyond the text alone. Even though many of the foreigners who came to the fairs spoke French—the language of the sottie—and took pleasure in the insults and metaphorical obscenities, there were nonetheless problems understanding the more oblique allusions as well as difficulty in simply hearing what was said. Compensation, as always in comedy, was found in the supplemental elements of staging: a particular acting style, an immediately identifiable costume, and a unique prop. Rapid delivery and abundant acrobatics, among the simplest yet most meaningful devices in comic theater, characterized the performances of the sots—in a genre where wordplay is to be taken seriously, the term "sot" immediately elicits its homonym "saut," a jump or leap in French. The bounds and somersaults were calculated not only to add lightness and gaiety to the fool's character but to generate comic frenzy in the audience. In Povre Jouhan (n.d.), for example, the sot enters spreading panic ("Le feu est ceans") as he runs about frantically ("Et moy j'ay le cours"). Nelson underlines the otherwise rudimentary quality of the shows. The aforementioned platform included a plain curtain as background, suspended between two posts; there were no wings, and actors, if not on stage from the beginning,
The Sottie, the Sots, and the Fols
415
climbed up by ladders in view of everyone. Petit de Julleville explains that all roles were played by men; women, he asserts, did not appear on the French stage until late in the sixteenth century. The motley costume has been cause for much speculation. While the ecclesiastical fools wore masks and women's garments, paintings by Bosch and Breughel show the earliest secular fools in suits of earthen colors. But by the end of the fifteenth century, the prominent companies such as the Parisian Enfants sans Soucis and LTnfanterie Dijonnaise had adopted an emblematic system of colors as their uniform, red for virility, yellow for gaiety, and green for renewal. The multicolored, patchwork dress is, according to Willeford, in keeping with a universal principle in the clown's costume that signifies the disorderly nature of folly itself. The chaos, most apparent in the fool's jokes and tricks, is thus echoed by his outward appearance. Similar to the recorded attire for real lunatics, wild men, and mummers, the fool's costume also incorporated animal elements, most notably coxcombs and asses' ears—signs of creatures famous for their sexuality. There were also, in some instances, calves' skins and foxtails. Again, the presence of animal parts has been read in a variety of ways, from Nelson's homosexual interpretation to Allardyce Nicoll's and Chambers's understanding of it as a conventionalized survival of earlier pagan festivals and the sacrificial exuviae. The fool's decorations and props, bells and baubles, offer even more mixed signals about the sense of the costume. Hanging from the elbows, ankles, and knees, from the fringes of the belt and the tips of the asses' ears, the jingling bells contributed to the character's lightness but, at the same time, created a distraction both from what the fool said and what the audience heard. Of course, the sound of bells in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was never an innocent occasion; rather, it was charged with a multiplicity of meanings. Bells sounded time, served as a warning, called to worship, rang in feasts, provided music, and, finally, hung round the necks of cows, horses, sheep, and sheep-herding dogs. The bauble, or marotte in French, a short stick decorated at the tip with the likeness of a fool's head or with a puppet, was the parodic scepter. A stuffed pig's bladder might also be attached to the stick; formed into the clear representation of a phallus, it could also be used to strike out at others, much like the slapstick of vaudeville and the music hall. In describing the elements that constituted the costume of the French sot, one has to beware of smoothing over the basic ambivalence manifest in the nature of the character. Motley, bells, and baubles purposely conveyed a kind of polyvalence that could capture the attention of a vast, popular audience. In attempting to iron out what we moderns see as contradictory, we run the risk of sliding into anachronism. As M. Willson Disher points out, the clowns of Greek and Roman comedy, of medieval drama, the Italian commedia, and the modern circus possess certain common traits, yet none of these types is simply borrowed or copied; rather, they are "spontaneously created afresh" to correspond each
416
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
time to new historical, social, and cultural contexts. In Disher's words, "At each metamorphosis, the world has to hatch another clown from a clod." It remains to answer those questions concerning the nature of the societes joyeuses and the participation within the sotties of the Prince des Sots and the Mere Sotte. Here, a separation ought to be made between the fools' societies and two other theatrical associations of the period, the Basoche, attorneys and law clerks who staged farces and judicial satires, and the Confrerie de la Passion, tradesmen who performed the mysteries after their representation passed from the clerics to the laymen in 1402. Although overlapping was always possible and members of the different troupes did play on the same stage, the societes joyeuses specialized in sots and fols, in sotties and farces moralisees. A lay survival of the Feast of Fools, as we have seen, their activities took the form of processions as well as dramatic performances. Their members did not belong to any specific profession or guild but were a collection, motley as well, of citizens, bourgeois, and young men of good family and learning. These societes flourished throughout France, particularly under Louis XII (1498-1515), who not only enjoyed their brand of scathing satire but found it politically useful. The best-known companies were the Enfants sans Soucis at Paris, the Infanterie Dijonnaise, the Connards or Cornards at Rouen and Evreux, and the Suppots du Seigneur de la Coquille at Lyon. Beneath the audible associations of sots and societes lies another kind of playfulness, that of imitation. These fool societies duplicated the strict hierarchical structure of actual society, albeit in a topsy-turvy, upside-down design. The principal figures were the Prince des Sots and the Mere Sotte, although variants were possible: a Roy des Sots, a Seigneur de Joye, or a Seigneur de Gayecte et Joyeusete for the prince; a Sotte Folle, a Grand Mere Sotte, or even a Haulte Follie for the mother. Familial relations were also part and parcel of the game; for example, the Seigneur de Joye was the son of the prince; Bon Temps was the reputed husband of Mere Sotte. A switch, of the carnivalesque kind, operates here. The foolish prince, a jester turned king, is the comic representative of authority, in place of the pope, while the mother figure, no longer a churchly bride of Christ, becomes the terrestrial guardian of the fool's childishness. Concerning the authorship of the sotties and leadership of the societes joyeuses, little information exists. The large majority of the texts are anonymous. However, the few recognized authors, Pierre Gringore, Andre de la Vigne, Roger de Collerye, and Amedee Poral, were also acknowledged leaders of their societies and performed in the plays that they themselves wrote for the companies. Gringore, the most notorious Parisian sot, was a Mere Sotte and chief of the Enfants sans Soucis. He composed and acted in the best-known of French fool's plays, Le jeu du Prince des Sots et de la Mere Sotte (1512). Elsewhere, the chroniclers, Rabelais, Sebillet, and other writers of the period speak of such professional sots as Jean du Pont Allais (or Alletz), imprisoned in 1516 for
The Sottie, the Sots, and the Fols
417
satirizing the queen mother in the guise of a Mere Sotte, or Triboulet, court fool to Louis XII and Francois I. CRITICAL RECEPTION The French sottie, with its sots and fols, even if tightly bound to a period, to its language and topics, to a place and moment of performance, or, finally, to the comic-satiric drive of its participants, nevertheless leaves us with abundant evidence of the value of and concern for folly in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance and of the virtuosity of the professional fool, sot or fol. While this level of interest was not sustained through the ensuing centuries, clearly a renewed interest in folly and its disordering/ordering role in art and society is growing today. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Cohen, Gustave, ed. Recueil de farces frangaises inedites du XVe siecle. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1949. Droz, Eugenie, ed. Le Recueil Trepperel: Les sotties. Geneva: Droz, 1935. Picot, Emile, ed. Recueil general des sotties. 3 vols. SATF. Paris: Firmin Didot, 19021912. Secondary Sources Arden, Heather. Fools' Plays: A Study of Satire in the Sottie. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Aubailly, Jean-Claude. Le monologue, le dialogue, et la sottie. Paris: Champion, 1976. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Bowen, Barbara C. Les caracteristiques essentielles de la farce frangaise et leur survivance dans les annees 1550-1620. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1964. Chambers, E. K. The Mediaeval Stage. Oxford: Clarendon, 1903. Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. 1611. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1950. Dane, Joseph A. "Linguistic Trumpery: Notes on a French Sottie." Romanic Review 71 (1980): 114-121. Disher, M. Willson. Clowns and Pantomimes. 1923. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968. Doran, John. The History of Court Fools. London, 1858. Dull, Olga Anna. Folie et rhetorique dans la sottie. Geneva: Droz, 1994. Fabre, Adolphe. Les clercs du palais. Lyon: Scheming, 1875. Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. Knight, Alan. Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983.
418
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
. "The Medieval Theater of the Absurd." PMLA 86 (1971): 183-189. Lefebvre, Joel. Les fols et lafolie. Paris: Klincksieck, 1968. Nelson, Ida. La sottie sans souci. Paris: Editions Honore Champion, 1977. Nicoll, Allardyce. Masks, Mimes, and Miracles. 1931. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. Petit de Julleville, Louis. Les comediens en France au moyen age. Paris: L. Cerf, 1885. Swain, Barbara. Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. New York: Columbia UP, 1932. Tietze-Conrat, Erika. Dwarfs and Jesters in Art. New York: Phaidon, 1957. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. London: Faber & Faber, 1968. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. 1969. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1980.
South African Political Clowning Laughter and Resistance to Apartheid (South Africa: Twentieth Century)
Ron Jenkins In the twentieth century the Union of South Africa offers no single clown figure as representative of the black and colored peoples' battle against apartheid. Yet a powerful presence in this struggle is the variety of clown figures mocking the absurdity of the dominant white order.1
BACKGROUND Battered by the long-term effects of racial injustice and political violence, South Africans display a sense of humor that is rooted in their will to survive. Their laughter signals a refusal to surrender their lives, their identities, or their dignity to the dehumanizing tyranny of apartheid and its aftermath. The slow and painful transition from institutionalized racism to a black majority government has been lubricated by a remarkable outpouring of ridicule, mockery, and mirth. The darkly comic aspects of South African public discourse can be found in newspaper headlines, political speeches, theater performances, protest demonstrations, and the graffiti that are scrawled on the country's walls. Laughter in South Africa is part of the process through which blacks and whites come to terms with the brutal facts of their political landscape. In the absence of mutually agreeable solutions to their problems, they answer each other's challenges with taunting one-liners. When it became clear that white South Africans were terrified by the idea of giving equal rights to the black majority, the Pan African Congress developed a ghoulish slogan that parodied the unfulfilled promise of "one man, one vote." The militant black organization
420
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
asked white colonialists to consider instead the possibility of "one settler, one bullet." The phrase caught on and became an endless source of defiant humor for blacks and whites alike. It was carved into the back of a wooden bench in the Johannesburg magistrate's courtroom where blacks are regularly arraigned for trespassing. White extremists retaliated with their own variation of the slogan, painted onto a wall near a highway in Johannesburg, "One bomb, many kaffirs." (Kaffir is the Afrikaans equivalent of nigger.) A colored humorist performing in a Grahamstown cultural hall called the 1820 Settlers' Monument expressed his opposition to the white colonists memorialized in the building's name by suggesting that it be changed to "1820 Settlers, 1820 Bullets." In the Johannesburg daily newspaper even a seemingly innocent photograph of a woman feeding crumbs to the birds was accompanied by a caption that kept the ironic dialogue going: "One pigeon, one mealy pip." At the heart of this ongoing comic dialogue is the fundamental human need for a home. The violence and political hypocrisy that dominate the South African landscape make it impossible to build a family life with any sense of security. Jokes cannot change the circumstances, but shared laughter can minimize the paralyzing impact of fear and fuel a hope for change. It provides a tentative foundation on which South Africans can begin to imagine a future where having a safe home is a possibility for everyone. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The forms of clowning in South Africa that elicit this laughter are the clowns serving purely political functions, the citizenry clowning spontaneously, and the clowns of contemporary drama and the stage. A clown served politics when Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress (ANC), called for a mass-action march against the white government in Pretoria on August 5, 1992. Nearly a hundred thousand black demonstrators showed up to stage the largest protest in the history of the South African capital. Thousands of people lined the city's main street to cheer the protestors as they swarmed toward the Union buildings that housed the offices of President F. W. de Klerk. At the head of this historic parade, leading the masses to the spot where Mandela would make a speech demanding majority rule, was a clown. The clown that led the marchers was not an ordinary figure of fun. His motley was woven from the cloth of political violence. Wearing the khaki uniform of the ANC's military branch, he carried a painted toy machine gun made of wood and entertained onlookers with wild acrobatic stunts. The comic commando performed dazzling flips, rolls, and somersaults, but always managed to land in a combat-ready position with his machine gun poised to fire. His feistiness tickled the audience into laughter and applause. There was an edge of tension to the crowd's laughter. No one was pretending that violence was an insignificant issue. On the contrary, killing and torture had
South African Political Clowning
421
marred the struggle over South Africans' future with increasing frequency ever since February 1990 when the ANC had been unbanned and legally permitted to pursue its goal of majority rule. By playing with the theme of violence, the clown soldier was cutting to the heart of the nation's fears. The link between the comic warrior and real political violence became more apparent as the parade continued. Occasionally the clown would stop to pull a walkie-talkie from the inside pocket of his uniform. He looked down the street at the territory the parade was about to enter and spoke into the handset to report the conditions to his colleagues in the rear of the procession. The acrobatic commando was in fact a security guard helping to clear the path for the ANC dignitaries who were marching behind him. His charade of imaginary gunfire was intended to ensure that no real bullets would be fired that day. The strategy worked. There were no injuries during the demonstration, a remarkable achievement given the volatile climate of the country at the time. Of course, the success of the demonstration cannot be attributed to the clown. He was only a figurehead, but his comic defiance crystallized the gathering's spirit of carnival vitality. People were marching to reclaim their homeland, and like the comic soldier who was leaping, shooting, and dancing ahead of them, they were convinced that nothing could block their path. Mandela greeted them on the capitol lawn wearing a blue track suit, brown moccasins, and a jaunty cap that matched the festive atmosphere of the event. His speech was peppered with ironic jabs at President de Klerk, who had accused him of intimidating blacks into staying away from work during the recent ANC boycotts. Wryly claiming to be flattered that de Klerk considered the ANC powerful enough to intimidate millions of people, Mandela urged de Klerk to give blacks the vote. "I can't see him here," said the ANC leader with a smile as he turned to the windows of the president's office behind him, 4 'but I hope he's listening." The audience hooted their approval. They had come to take back their home and were convinced that the next time they gathered on this lawn they would be celebrating Mandela's installation in the president's office now occupied by de Klerk. For them the march was a carnival of inversion. Disenfranchised citizens were voting with their songs. The derisive chanting had reduced de Klerk to a laughingstock, and for a day at least, the capitol belonged to the powerless who had planted green, yellow, and black ANC flags all over the government lawns. The crowd celebrated with a joy that emerged from centuries of bottled-up frustration. Marching behind a mock soldier with a toy gun, they had taken over the capitol and hoped that their symbolic toppling of the government would soon become real. When Mandela looked at them spread out in front of him by the tens of thousands, singing, dancing, and shouting for their rights, he called them part of a ' 'tidal wave'' for democracy. It does not diminish the seriousness of the march to acknowledge that a motley clown soldier was riding the crest of its tidal wave toward freedom. His presence was simply a visible manifes-
422
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
tation of the comic subtext that has always infused the nation's ongoing dialogue on democracy. The same satiric songs that were sung in Pretoria were sung by the citizens themselves in demonstrations throughout the country. Mock trials in which de Klerk and his followers were subjected to vicious ridicule became common forms of citizens' political protest. Striking workers in squatter camps paraded past tin shacks where bare-bottomed children and their mothers laughed and pounded out the beat to freedom songs on plastic laundry buckets in the street. Sometimes the impromptu nature of this public comic dialogue can lead to tense confrontations. During a march in Soweto, strikers engaged the police in a sarcastic duel of words. "Do you know who you look like?" shouted a protestor into a police van. "Who?" shot back the cop. "You look like me!" taunted the marcher. "I'm no kaffir," barked the policeman, using the highly insulting Afrikan's word for "black." "Yes you are," taunted the marcher. "Haven't you ever seen a black asshole? It's pink like yours. That makes you nothing but a white kaffir." The policeman was infuriated by the marcher's reversal of the racial slur, but his fellow officers laughed at the absurdity of anyone being called a "white kaffir." The nearby marchers laughed too, and the fury of the moment subsided. The incident was fraught with the same kind of tensions that existed between the clown soldier in Pretoria and the policemen who warily watched him shoot his wooden rifle. In both cases risky humor played a part in defusing an explosive situation. The volatile relationship between rage and humor in South Africa was acknowledged by Mandela when he urged the protestors in Pretoria not to taunt the police as they left the demonstration. His parting advice to the crowd was an indication that he understood how potent a weapon laughter can be. The clowns of contemporary drama create such laughter as a part of the growing black rage aimed at the hypocrisy of the white government. This government had freed Mandela from prison and unilaterally declared the existence of a "New South Africa" without making any fundamental changes in the economic and political systems. Whites had created the illusion of reform without giving blacks any real freedom. The absurdity of the situation made audiences particularly receptive to comedy that lampooned the hypocrisy of double standards. When South African President P. W. Botha first introduced the idea of a "New South Africa" in 1981, a series of cosmetic changes were introduced. "Colored" citizens were given the right to elect representatives, but their delegates had no power. "Independent" black homelands were established under the leadership of repressive puppet dictators who were totally dependent on subsidies from Pretoria. Gradually, apartheid laws were taken off the books, but economic discrimination left blacks as impoverished as ever. The "New South Africa" was a hoax invented by an illegitimate white government to convince
South African Political Clowning
423
the world to lift trade sanctions against it. South Africans dedicated to genuine reform responded to the government's hypocrisy with a spirit of ironic skepticism. The clash between the illusion of a ' 'New South Africa'' and the racist reality experienced by its citizens gave birth to a powerfully subversive style of comedy that expressed the nation's outrage. The extraordinary enthusiasm with which this comedy was received by black and white audiences across the country suggests that it fulfilled an essential public need to come to terms with contradictions that the government was content to ignore. Given this close bond between South African laughter and South African politics, it is not surprising that the two most influential satires in the country's history premiered in the year that President P. W. Botha publicly introduced the idea of a "New South Africa." In a 1981 speech that is still quoted regularly, Botha shocked his white constituents by declaring that the apartheid system would have to change and challenging them to "adapt or die." The grim choice marked the beginning of a crossroads in the country's history, but the bleakness of the language used by Botha to define the situation did not deter the nation's comic artists from translating the crisis into unique South African forms of laughter. One of the two great comedies that opened in 1981, entitled Woza Albert, ridiculed the supposedly "Christian" principles on which Botha's party had governed the nation for decades by speculating on what would happen if Jesus Christ chose the land of apartheid as the site of his second coming. The other took its title from a pun on Botha's ultimatum: Adapt or Dye. Reverberations from both these plays continue to have an impact on the interracial dialogue in South Africa more than a decade after their premieres. Woza Albert, one of the enormously popular plays of 1981, went on a successful world tour that launched the international careers of its creators, Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon. The original version of the play ran until 1985 and was revived in 1990 by Peter Brook's Paris-based company, which toured it around the world yet again. The play's brutally comic depiction of the South African political and economic system sparked off debates that continue to inform the public's response to the current work of its creators. Mtwa and Ngema both brought subsequent plays to Broadway and Lincoln Center, where they played a role in fueling the international public outrage against apartheid that helped force the white South African government to repeal many of the country's most unjust laws. Woza Albert is the quintessential South African comedy. While entertaining its audiences with virtuosic turns of slapstick, singing, and satire, the production draws on the history of South Africans' racial strife with journalistic immediacy. Mtwa and Ngema performed the piece in a dynamically charged physical style that still sets the standard for young South African actors today. Their technique combines the precision of a documentary film with the free-form delirium of a jazz improvisation. Created by the two black actors in collaboration with white
424
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
director Barney Simon, Woza Albert captures the complexity of South African culture in a multifaceted collage of oral history, physical comedy, investigative muckraking, penny-whistle harmonies, political protest, scatological humor, social analysis, and ridiculous flights of fancy. Woza Albert was created during a time when censorship laws in South Africa were tightly enforced. Black people had no opportunity to see their suffering portrayed realistically in films, television, or newspapers. The play's gritty comic realism fulfilled their hunger to see the hypocrisy of white authorities publicly unmasked. Nothing like this had ever been seen before on the South African stage. Audiences in black townships like Soweto thronged to performances and responded to its bleak humor with wild enthusiasm. From the opening sequence they were totally engaged in the play's mockery of the white regime that had restricted their movements, limited their economic opportunities, and imprisoned their heroes. In the repressive conditions of 1981 all this injustice had to be endured without question. Laughing at Woza Albert was the only permissible form of public insubordination. Woza Albert is an archetypal black South African comedy. Its protagonists are put in jail, but they find freedom. Its heroes are killed, but they come back to life. There is much suffering at the hands of the whites, but there is also much laughter at their expense. The play is imbued with the same irrepressible spirit displayed by the clown commando at the head of the march on Pretoria when he challenged the government's soldiers with a mock machine gun. Displaying the power of the powerless, the characters created by Mtwa and Ngema use laughter as a survival tactic when the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them. Steeped in pain, their comedy celebrates human perseverance in the face of injustice. Each performance gives new life to the hope for a place where life is worth living. Such a place is Ekhaya, the Zulu word for home. Many young black South African theater artists are working in a bold style of epic comedy that recalls the hard-edged integrity of Woza Albert. Prince Dubul, a political activist who spent five years incarcerated on Robben Island, joined forces with a group of actors from his neighborhood in Soweto to create a play about their township's violent past. Entitled Which Way, Ma-Afrika?, the play depicts police brutality, political rioting, and children's funerals with a combination of grim humor and stark realism. The performers have lived through these hardships and make no attempt to soften the facts. Which Way, Ma-Afrika? is a heartfelt cry from a community trying to come to terms with its past. Its laughter exposes the hypocrisy of white authority figures and salvages the dignity of their victims. Unwilling to surrender their right to Ekhaya, a home where life is worth living, black South Africans demonstrate their collective will to survive by thumbing their noses at death. One of the characters created by white satirist Pieter Dirk Uys in Adapt or Dye still appears regularly in popular plays, television shows, and films. Known as "Evita Bezeidenhout," the character, played by Uys in drag, is the ambassador to the fictional black homeland of Bapetikosweti. One of the most instantly
South African Political Clowning
425
recognizable stage personalities in the country, Evita is a blatantly racist member of the "South African diplomatic corpse" who unwittingly demonstrates the absurdity of apartheid through the wacky logic with which she defends it. Evita is famous for the comic stubbornness with which she refuses to either "adapt" or "dye." Her popularity as a cultural icon has led to her receiving fan mail from real political celebrities of all persuasions. In July 1992 the Sunday magazine of the Johannesburg Times ran an article featuring Evita as one of the decade's ten most influential South Africans, a list that included former President P. W. Botha and Nelson Mandela. In 1995 Nelson Mandela and other ANC officials appeared with Evita on her weekly television talk show to demonstrate that the ANC welcomes everyone. White South Africans are also deeply concerned about their homes, and like their black neighbors they realize that the resolution of their country's racial conflicts is a matter of life and death. When President Botha urged his constituents in 1981 to "adapt or die," he was speaking to the white population, and they responded to his unsettling ultimatum with conflicting emotions of fear, greed, anger, compassion, and guilt. Because whites are not dreaming of new homes, but desperately trying to hold onto the homes that they already have, their anxieties give birth to laughter that reflects their confused attempts to "adapt or die." Evita is not simply a comic character; she is a cultural phenomenon embodying the ambiguities and hypocrisies of the "New South Africa." An aristocratic matron with shapely legs and a crafty smile, Evita epitomizes the "New South Africa" by being firmly rooted in the old South Africa. She is a politician who owes her career to the apartheid system and is clearly unwilling to adapt to anything new. The genius of Uys's characterization and the source of Evita's enormous popularity is the astonishing degree to which this fictional transvestite comes across as a plausible representative of South African politics. Everyone knows that Evita is really a man in woman's clothing, but Uys plays her with such understated dignity that she becomes a completely believable and sympathetic character. She is so charming that one wants to believe in her sincerity, but looking closely at the substance of what she says reveals that it is founded on the same deceptions and lies that have led to decades of injustice. "There are two things I can't stand about South Africa," she confesses in an attempt to demonstrate her dedication to reform, "apartheid and the blacks." Like a kindly aunt encouraging a child to take its medicine, Evita reminds us that "hypocrisy is the baseline of political intercourse." Evita's ironic manipulation of fact and fiction is perfectly pitched to the anxieties of a period in South African history when everyone knows the political situation will change, but no one believes anyone else's version of what the country will become. These anxieties of life in the "New South Africa" are manifested in the questions asked by the public when they have a chance to speak directly to Evita. In August 1992 Uys staged a performance in Johannesburg called An Audience with Evita. Every evening for three weeks Evita fielded questions on apartheid, sex, and democracy. She became the South African Ann
426
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Landers in drag, a sounding board for the doubts and fears of the nation. People asked how Evita would cope with a transition to real democracy in which the black majority actually controlled the government. Would she join the African National Congress? Would she learn to dance the toyi-toyi? Would she move in with the newly divorced Nelson Mandela? Evita's dialogue with the audience is an extension of South Africa's ongoing dialogue with its own conscience. Powerful emotions are exposed in a comic context, and because Evita is not real, the public airing of fear, anger, and guilt is not as threatening as it would be in a political gathering. People feel free to reveal themselves more openly in their questions and their laughter than they might in other circumstances. Uys keeps the conversation centered on the nation's most explosive issues, so that the stakes are high. The subject being examined and debated in the playful exchange between Evita and her public is nothing less than the survival of the nation. White South Africans are terrified of what the future will be like when the black majority is given the vote. Their encounter with Evita's comedy is a tentative exploration of the consequences of real democracy. Evita is a creation of apartheid, and it is both funny and reassuring to watch her cope with its demise. Evita's satiric persona and Woza Albert's aggressive comic style both emerged at the beginning of a tortured period of transition ushered in by Botha's 1981 command to "adapt or die." The "New South Africa" that was promised has yet to come into being, and these two distinctively South African comic forms reflect the absurdities of life in a country undergoing enormous transformation. The continuing success enjoyed by the creators of both these comic masterpieces has a great deal to do with the ways in which their respective audiences have tried to come to terms with Botha's ultimatum. Blacks and whites are all coping with political changes of enormous importance, and the invigorating, comforting release of laughter is one of the forces that helps them endure the difficulties of these changes. The racial turmoil in South Africa does not provide much opportunity for blacks and whites to laugh together, but when they do, it is a sign of their mutual desire for some kind of Ekhaya. Ekhaya is also the title of a comic play by Matsemela Manaka that links the longing for home with the longing of black Africans for political and economic equality. The play's drunken narrator stumbles onto the stage in a comic stupor that mirrors the confused state of the nation and reminds the audience that ekhaya is ' 'not just the home where you were born, but home where you can make life worth living." The satire in Manaka's play is part of an ongoing comic assault against the prejudices that prevent people from feeling at home in their own country. The nation's sense of humor helps subvert the forces of oppression and nourish a nascent hunger for freedom. In the tumultuous political landscape of South African society, defiant laughter is the birth cry of democracy.
South African Political Clowning
427
CRITICAL RECEPTION The clowns of South Africa are essential in presenting the fears and frustrations of the country; consequently, they are enormously popular. In a 1992 comedy about racial reconciliation called Born Again (both the title and style owe much to the spirit of Woza Albert), the Sakhile players of Springs joke that the nation's predicament likens it to a zebra: "It doesn't matter if you shoot it on a white spot or a black spot. The zebra will still die." The issues raised in the most trenchant South African comedies are linked to the nation's survival. The laughter they evoke is a necessary part of coming to terms with the future. NOTE 1. Research for this entry is original and involves no written sources.
Country Squires and Bumpkins (England: In Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama: 1660-1773)
Janet S. Wolf In a period as renowned for its comedy and satire as the English Restoration and eighteenth century, we would expect the drama to be rich in fools and jesters, and that is exactly what we find. The rake hero has affinities with the trickster, and another type of fool in this period is the fop. Older tyrannical parents who arrange their children's marriages for financial gain or who deceive themselves about their continued attractiveness to the younger generation also behave foolishly. Restoration and eighteenth-century plays have their share of tricky servants. Contemporary undergraduates, if asked to identify the fool in a Restoration comedy, are most likely to name the women who are seduced by the rake. In other words, there is hardly a single character type in Restoration comedy who could not qualify as the fool or jester. The country squires and bumpkins, however, are the figures who best sustain the Elizabethan traditions of the natural and the wise fool. In this entry, I will concentrate on six squires and bumpkins: Margery Pinch wife in William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), Sir Credulous Easy in Aphra Behn's Sir Patient Fancy (1678), Prue Foresight and Ben Legend in William Congreve's Love for Love (1695), Sir Wilfull Witwould in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), and Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
BACKGROUND The Restoration period in England is characterized by rebellion against Puritan repression and by sexual license and decadence. Restoration dramatists tend to be promonarchial and to celebrate urban sophistication and upper-class lit-
Country Squires and Bumpkins
429
eracy and culture, but while celebrating libertinism to the extent of rewarding the libertine hero at the end of the comedy, they are very critical of upper-class decadence, materialism, hypocrisy, triviality, and artificiality. The criticism is supplied by a character whose values contrast with the dominant culture, in this case, an outsider from the country whose naive questions and comments penetrate and expose the follies of urban society. Immediate English predecessors to the Restoration country squire are the Elizabethan and Jacobean fools, both natural fools like Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and wise fools like Feste in Twelfth Night. English Restoration drama was strongly influenced by Moliere, in whose comedies clever country bumpkins can be found. For example, Sganarelle in Le medecin malgre lui is a fool who makes fools of the other characters and who helps the hero and heroine outwit the heroine's father. The paysans Georgette and Alain in Uecole des femmes also make knowing comments on the follies of the other characters. Other ancestors of Restoration rustics are the characters of ancient Roman Atellan farce, which may have influenced the commedia dell'arte. The medieval French farce Pierre Pathelin features a peasant who is thought to be dim-witted but outsmarts a corrupt lawyer. The zanni of commedia dell'arte had rural origins and are thought to be based on actual peasants from Bergamo who worked in Venice. The plays of Angelo Beolco (c. 1502-1542) feature a garrulous peasant, II Ruzzante, who makes stinging observations about his superiors and about war. Other sources and analogues for the clash of values between country innocence and town corruption in Restoration comedy are pastoral poetry, the fortunatus nimium or "happy man" motif, and the idea of the noble savage, which was being given fictional treatment during the Restoration and eighteenth century in works like Behn's Oroonoko, John Gay's Polly, and, in a very exaggerated way, the fourth book of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Country squires are found in the eighteenth century in novels (Squire Western in Tom Jones) and in poems (Gay's The Birth of the Squire). The use of the naif as a persona is common in satire. Restoration country squires and bumpkins differ from clown figures of earlier periods in being drawn from the upper classes, the same class as the witty hero and heroine whose sophistication the playwright admires. I suggest later that one reason for this is the function of the country squire in the plot. Another, of course, might be the actual presence in England of an independent, landed squirearchy whose members came up to London occasionally and who might have been sitting in the theater audience. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Restoration playwrights obviously wanted the entrance of a country squire or bumpkin to be noticed; the characters are anticipated by being discussed by other characters before they enter, and their entrance is delayed. Usually some
430
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
comment is made about the squire's dress and demeanor (Sir Wilfull Witwould is teased about the mud on his riding boots and about pulling off his boots in the hall). The squires' and bumpkins' dress probably had two functions: such rustics are plain dealers in speech and action, and the plainness of their dress could seem a virtue as it contrasted with the extravagant overdress of modish Restoration lace and ribbons, but their costumes may have been a source of physical comedy in themselves. Several plays have sight gags when the bumpkin, aspiring to be citified, dresses like a fop. The rustics probably had regional accents, and often the squire has a signature linguistic trait, frequently an avoidance cuss word like Sir Credulous Easy's " 'zoz" and the "adsheartlikins" of another Behn bumpkin, Blunt in The Rover. Squires' language is vivid and colorful; that Ben in Love for Love uses nautical language no matter what the subject is adds greatly to the hilarity of Congreve's play. Tony Lumpkin's verbal signature is a loud shout; his stepfather complains that he "whoops like a speaking trumpet." Contributing to the vivid physical presence of the squires onstage is a healthy, outdoor athleticism that becomes klutziness in the drawing room, a hearty conviviality, and a love of alcohol, music, and dancing. Their main occupations back home are hunting and drinking. Sir Credulous enters disconsolate over the death of his favorite horse. Margery Pinch wife's first line is to inquire about places to walk in London, a request that prompts her more sophisticated sisterin-law to label her a horse in need of exercise. Unlike Restoration and eighteenth-century women, whose drinking had to be private (as with Congreve's Lady Wishfort and Homer's mistresses in The Country Wife), a squire's drinking is exuberant, loud, and accompanied by song and dance. The dance of Ben's sailor friends, Sir Wilfull's hymn to Apollo (the sun god and god of wine whom Sir Wilfull imagines as being on a bender each time he sets in the ocean), and Tony Lumpkin's tavern song are memorable scenes in these plays. Sir Credulous loves a party with dancing: " 'Zoz, I love to be jigging." Sir Wilfull closes his play by calling for a celebratory dance. The main difference between Restoration country squires and bumpkins and Elizabethan and other fools is one of class. Country squires are not from the lower classes but from the landed gentry, the same class as the witty hero and heroine whose sophistication the playwright so admires. Margery Pinchwife's brother has a title, Sir Wilfull is the older brother and head of his family, and Ben is the younger brother who might inherit his rich father's estate. One reason for the high social class of the Restoration or eighteenth-century fool compared to fools from earlier periods is that they are involved in the romantic plots, often as potential partners in inappropriate, arranged marriages. Margery Pinchwife's marriage to Mr. Pinch wife, she tells Horner, was "none of my making." The elder generation in Love for Love has arranged a union between the two bumpkins; Prue is supposed to marry sailor Ben, a union that another character calls the coupling of a "sea-beast" and "a land monster." Sir Wilfull is supposed to marry the sophisticated, cultured Millamant, Sir Credulous has been told to
Country Squires and Bumpkins
431
woo Lucretia, and Tony Lumpkin is supposed to marry his cousin Constance. In most of these situations, the parties have not met their partners prior to the arrangement of the marriage, and each of the last three women mentioned is in love with someone else. Both squires and bumpkins are ardent but ineffectual lovers. Behn's Sir Credulous and Congreve's Sir Wilfull are out of their depth in courting the sophisticated heroines of their plays. Sir Wilfull means well but is tongue-tied and bumbling, and Sir Credulous vainly tries to impress his bride-to-be by serenading her from the back of an elephant. Bumpkins like Margery and Prue are earthy and refreshingly honest about their sexual desires compared with their hypocritical town counterparts, but their innocence makes them easy to seduce, and they become corrupted by the end of their plays. Every character here mentioned ends the play without a partner, except for Margery, the country wife, who is unhappily married before the play opens to the tyrannical and unappreciative Pinchwife. Although they are of the landed gentry, squires fare better back home with girls from the lower classes. Although they are scorned for their lack of sophistication and although they have no inhibitions about saying what they think, squires are always agreeable, well meaning, and polite and want to see others happy. They may temporarily accede to the schemes of mercenary parents by consenting to arranged marriages, but they are ultimately on the side of the protagonists. Sir Wilfull Witwould, Sir Credulous Easy, and Tony Lumpkin play an active role in helping to bring about happy endings for the true lovers. They are fun-loving and uphold the comic spirit; they are, like Feste vis-a-vis Malvolio, merrymakers who oppose killjoys like Sir Patient Fancy, Pinchwife of The Country Wife, and Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World. When Sir Wilfull calls for a dance at the end of The Way of the World, he tells the protagonists, " 'Sheart, you'll have time enough to toy after you're married; or if you will toy now, let us have a dance in the meantime, that we who are not lovers may have some other employment besides looking on." Squires' satisfaction in witnessing the union of hero and heroine at the end, as witnessed by Sir Wilfull's Oberon-like blessing, suggests that they share the fool's traditional function of engendering sexuality and fertility in others (Willeford 183, who notes, along with Geoffrey Bush, that Shakespeare's fools usually remain unmarried). Country squires and bumpkins can be classified into two kinds, corresponding roughly to the Elizabethan clown and fool, or natural and wise fool. Generally, bumpkins are naturals, wide-eyed innocents who are easily gulled. Squires are wiser and remain uncorrupted. Congreve's Sir Wilfull and Behn's Sir Credulous Easy, however, are both naive/gullible and wise. Whether out of naivete or stubbornness, country squires and bumpkins are truth-tellers, making penetrating observations about a decadent society. They are the satiric spokespersons for the author's criticism of his society. Margery Pinchwife is one of the few honest people in The Country Wife. Her honesty is admirable, but sometimes honesty can be dangerous, as Margery
432
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
shows at the end of the play when she lacks the sense to keep her mouth shut about the fact that Horner is no eunuch. Margery Pinchwife, along with Prue in Love for Love, comes the closest of these characters to a natural, but all of them have an irrepressible impulse to speak their minds and to speak truths. A proverb quoted by Robert Goldsmith in his study of Elizabethan fools is pertinent here: "Children and fooles they say can not ly." Prue and Ben are the natural and wise fools in Love for Love. Prue gets corrupted by Tattle, but Ben, although initially deceived by Mrs. Frail, eventually can see through her avarice. Both Ben and Prue see right away that the distinguishing characteristic of urban society is dishonesty, but Prue is delighted with this difference from country morality. When Tattle teaches her how to be affected and coy, she cries, ' 'O Lord, I swear this is pure. I like it better than our old-fashioned country way of speaking one's mind." In their disastrous courtship scene, the only thing they agree on is the futility of lying. "As long as one must not speak one's mind, one had better not speak at all, I think, and truly I won't tell a lie for the matter," Prue decides. Ben agrees: "It's but a folly to lie; for to speak one thing and to think just the contrary way is, as it were, to look one way and to row another." Similarly, Swift, thirty years later, would contrast European values with those of the rational Houyhnhnms, who have no word in their vocabulary for lying. Ben also makes shrewd observations about ridiculous contemporary hairstyles, about the folly of marrying for lust, vanity, and power rather than love, "as if . . . you should sail so far as the Straights without provision," about two people who marry for money rather than love, "a couple of privateers . . . looking for a prize," and about the dishonesty of lawyers, "Lawyer, I believe there's many a cranny and leak unstopt in your conscience." Love for Love has another version of the fool in addition to natural Prue and wise fool Ben, and that is the hero as fool. Just as Hamlet feigns madness to deceive a tyrannical stepfather and is given the fool's license to criticize, Valentine Legend feigns madness to deceive his tyrannical father and briefly takes over from Ben as satiric spokesman. In his mad scene, he makes prophecies that attack society in general ("knaves will thrive"), religion ("prayers will be said in empty churches at the usual hours"), the immorality of the city, and the corruption of the court. "What will be done at court?" asks the old astrologer Foresight, who knows what is going on in the heavens better than what is going on in his own bed. "I am Truth," says Valentine, "and I never come there." Congreve uses Valentine as the blessed fool, the sane madman in a play full of characters madly pursuing sex, money, arcane knowledge, prestige, and power rather than love; and Valentine's insightful madness is endorsed when the appropriately named Angellica blesses Valentine by rejecting Tattle's selfish advances: "A passionate lover and five senses in perfection! When you are as mad as Valentine, I'll believe you love me, and the maddest shall take me." His maddest act is to renounce his patrimony so that Angellica can have it, and for this mad act of generosity, he is rewarded at the end of the play with the woman he loves and the money.
Country Squires and Bumpkins
433
The satiric observations made by Sir Wilfull Witwould in The Way of the World are not so wide-ranging as Ben's and Valentine's, but there is a good deal of criticism in his comment on the decadence of a society where the women can sleep until noon and the men spend a fortune on clothes. Sir Wilfull is astounded at the "polite" world whose values allow his own brother to be ashamed of him and to refuse to show any sign of affection. Congreve delays Sir Wilfull's entrance, and after three acts of treacherous men, catty women, unhappy marriages, unhappier affairs, gossip, backbiting, closet drinking, plotting, and counterplotting, the appearance of blunt, honest Sir Wilfull is a refreshing change. Country squires are men of action, and at the end of the play, Sir Wilfull shows what he thinks of the villainous Fainall's document entitling him to his wife's money, his mother-in-law's money, and his wife's cousin's money: he threatens to tear it to shreds with his sword. Several pages later he defends Mrs. Fainall from being killed by her own husband. Country squires are unlettered, but Sir Willful, who thinks the seventeenth-century poet Suckling is a kind of pig, is willing to learn some French and travel the continent. Until fairly recently, when Aphra Behn's plays became more widely known, Sir Wilfull, because of his friendly good nature and effort to help the hero and heroine, was the country squire most beloved by the critics. Equally likable is Behn's well-meaning Sir Credulous Easy. Throughout most of Sir Patient Fancy, Sir Credulous, like Margery and Prue, is a natural, innocent and easily duped. He is fooled out of his money and valuables and then persuaded to woo his fiancee by giving her a parade, complete with elephant and band, in the middle of the night. His reward for his earnest efforts is to be attacked by the Puritan neighbors, who think that music is a popish plot. He seems illiterate— he swears once "by Helicon and the other devils"—but he shows that he has done some studying when he says that his fiancee, Lucretia, "makes a very Tarquinius Sextus out of me." At the end of the play he is persuaded to disguise himself as a doctor in an effort to talk the hypochondriac Puritan alderman Sir Patient Fancy out of his illness. Sir Credulous shows great inventiveness in this scene, rivalling Feste's ability to enact a curate. He addresses his colleagues in mock-medical Latin, he suggests that the doctors need to share a few bottles of wine before they can come up with a good diagnosis and some expensive fees, he coins medical jargon and pronounces that Sir Patient suffers from "whirligigoustiphon" and "stronggullionibus," and he tops a prescription of ridiculous medications for Sir Patient (which includes "merda queorusticon") with his own "aqua tetrachymagogon" (probably something like "water from four juices"). Like Congreve and Wycherley, Behn is attacking arranged and loveless marriages, avarice, foppery, and decadence, and like Moliere, on whose Malade imaginaire this play is loosely based, she is attacking contemporary medicine, but her satire is also targeted against hypocritical Puritans. Sir Patient Fancy, who fancies himself a sick patient and a patient invalid and is neither, represents the Puritans. The experience of discovering that his doctors are as phony as he is cures Sir Patient, who reforms at the end of the play by becoming a royalist
434
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
and a rake. Sir Credulous mocks both the doctors by being more ridiculous than they are and the Puritans by using his doctor pose to insult Sir Patient's "stinking breath," "ugly face," and voracious appetite. Sick as he is, Sir Patient manages to eat four hearty meals a day, plus snacks, at which Sir Credulous comments "an the whole bench were such notable swingers, 'twould famish the City sooner than a siege." Sir Credulous plays an important role in Behn's political satire of Puritan values. Tony Lumpkin is the most ignorant of the country bumpkins—even Margery Pinchwife knows how to read and write—celebrating the virtues of ignorance in his ode to his favorite local tavern and admitting later in the play that the only part of his correspondence he can read is the greeting. He is obsessed with dogs and horses, drinking, and the only woman who interests him, Bet Bouncer, a local girl. "Betty" was appropriately a generic servant's name, usually of lower class. Besides being a natural, Tony shares affinities with the trickster. All the tricks conceived by the rake heroes of the plays mentioned are failures— Mirabell's plan to blackmail Lady Wishfort in Way of the World is a fiasco, Valentine learns that honesty is the best policy, Horner is almost caught because of Margery's naive honesty, and, in a subtle feminist touch, Aphra Behn's rake hero Witmore (whose name means that he needs more wit) admits to his mistress that he is the "dullest dog at plotting, thinking, in the world." She Stoops to Conquer reverses our expectations that the rake hero will be a manipulative trickster and reverses them again when the trickster, who turns out to be the country bumpkin, is successful. She Stoops also reverses our expectations from the comedies of the previous generation that the rake hero will be a wit. In She Stoops, the hero is completely inarticulate and the country bumpkin, although ignorant, is voluble and self-assured. Tony initiates the trick that enables the inarticulate hero to find a voice in order to court a respectable and attractive woman. At the end of the play, he plays another trick that allows Hastings and Constance Neville, the star-crossed lovers of the subplot, to elope. There are other reversals in She Stoops besides a hero who cannot speak and a clever country bumpkin who drives the plot. The same country/town contrasts of previous plays are there—town sophistication and affectation versus country ignorance and innocence—but this play takes place in the country. The city dwellers are the interlopers, out of place and lost. The only character who longs to visit London is the affected and pretentious Mrs. Hardcastle, and punishment for her affectation is having her coach dragged through a horse pond. Her son, the natural, immerses his unnatural mother in a thoroughly natural element. The fact that Tony is an admirable character is not new—we have seen that pattern since the plays of the 1670s—but the fact that he dominates the play's actions and that the setting is his milieu anticipates romantic treatments of the country and rural inhabitants. The Restoration squires and bumpkins whom I have described here inherit the tradition of English Elizabethan and Jacobean stage fools. They display many of the qualities noticed in earlier fools by scholars like Busby, Goldsmith,
Country Squires and Bumpkins
435
and Willeford. They have a hearty appetite for sex and drink (though not for food; these are not starving commedia servants, after all). Sir Wilfull, especially, comes close to being divinely possessed in his drunkenness. They love to dance and make music. They can be coarse (Sir Wilfull drunkenly speaks of Millamant's maidenhead and potential pregnancy), but they always use words colorfully. When they fall in love, the situation is hopeless. They are usually convinced that their opinion is the right one, and it frequently is. They further the happiness of others, showing their affinity with fertility spirits. Moreover, they are frank and innocent and leave the audience with a sneaking suspicion that these characters who seem so out of place are the only sane ones on stage. Above all, they are mouthpieces for the author's satire, an important function in a drama one of whose aims was instruction. The satiric dimension gives the plays moral and intellectual seriousness. But while the squires are truth tellers, they are at the same time very funny. For all its sparkling wit and seeming sophistication, Restoration comedy was farcical and physical. These reincarnations of earlier fool figures contributed to its boisterous physicality. CRITICAL RECEPTION From the beginning, squires have been popular figures with audiences. Ben is one of only two characters mentioned by Samuel Johnson in his discussion of Love for Love. Colley Cibber, the leading eighteenth-century interpreter of fop roles, praised the actor (Thomas Doggett) who played Ben and modeled some of his own performances after John Nokes, originator of Sir Credulous, about whom he wrote the following: In the ludicrous Distresses, which, by the laws of Comedy, Folly is often involv'd in, he sunk into such a mixture of piteous Pusillanimity and a Consternation so ruefully ridiculous and inconsolable, that when he had shook you to a Fatigue of Laughter it became a moot point whether you ought not to have pity'd him. . . . In some of his low Characters, that became it, he had a shuffling Shamble in his Gait, with so awkward Absurdity in his Gesture, that had you not known him, you could not have believ'd that naturally he could have had a Grain of common Sense. (Highfill, Bumim, Langhans 43)
This could serve as good advice to a modern actor about how to play Sir Credulous. Restoration comedy fell out of favor with audiences and critics in the nineteenth century and was reinstated in the twentieth. Two books, those by Jantz and Sharma, have brief chapters on country figures. Schneider's book is especially useful in showing that country characters share the virtues of the heroes and heroines (plain dealing, generosity of spirit, honesty), and Hoffman has insightful comments on the symbolic connection of Sir Wilfull with the protagonists of the play. Birdsall also sees parallels between the rustic innocents and
436
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
the protagonists and considers Margery Pinchwife to be the heroine of Wycherley's play. Sir Wilfull, Ben, and Margery all possess the exuberant vitality and freedom from hypocrisy Birdsall sees as the essence of comedy. Both Schneider and Hoffman give attention to Valentine as blessed madman. Country squires and bumpkins have not received as much attention as the rake heroes and the fops and deserve more, since a much-debated question from the end of the seventeenth century has been the degree to which these plays contain moral values and how they are presented. Cibber's observations about Nokes give us ample testimony that squires delighted the audience, but in speaking unpalatable truths, they instructed as well. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn. Ed. Janet Todd. Vol. 6. The Plays, 1678-1682. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996. Congreve, William. The Complete Plays of William Congreve. Ed. Herbert Davis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967. Goldsmith, Oliver. Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith. 5 vols. Ed. Arthur Friedman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. Wycherley William. The Plays of William Wycherley. Ed. Arthur Friedman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Secondary Sources Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970. Busby, Olive Mary. Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama. London: Oxford UP, 1923. Goldsmith, Robert Hillis. Wise Fools in Shakespeare. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1955. Highfill, Philip, Kalman Bumim, and Edward Langhans. "John Nokes." In A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. Vol. 11. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Hoffman, Arthur W. Congreve's Comedies. Victoria, British Columbia: U of Victoria P, 1993. Holland, Norman. The First Modern Comedies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959. Jantz, Ursula. Targets of Satire in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Salzburg, Austria: Institut fiir Englische Sprache and Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1978. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr. The Ethos of Restoration Comedy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971. Sharma, R. C. Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners. New York: Asia Publishing, 1965.
Country Squires and Bumpkins
437
Weber, Harold. The Restoration Rake-Hero. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986. Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969. Wolf, Janet S. " 'The Lip to the Glass': Depictions of Drinking in Plays by Men and Women, 1660-1800." Paper read at the South Central Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1990.
The Three Stooges (United States: Moe: 1897-1975; Larry: 1902-1975; Curly: 1903-1952)
Henry Sikorski The Three Stooges, Moe Howard (Harry Moses Horowitz), Curly Howard (Jerome Horowitz), and Larry Fine (Louis Feinberg), united as a team to make their first two-reeler for Columbia Pictures, Woman Haters, in 1934. The date is significant in that this film and the two immediately following, Punch Drunks (1934) and Men in Black (1934), nominated for an Academy Award, established their individual comic personalities and gave the trio an identity that remained a trademark until their last film as the original Stooges, Half-Wits Holiday {19 Al).
BACKGROUND The first Stooges were the two brothers, Moe and Shemp Howard (Samuel Horowitz, 1905-1955), who, after teaming up with vaudevillian Ted Healy in 1923, became known as "Ted Healy and His Stooges." Larry Fine joined the act in 1928. The trio and Healy were a commercial success in several Broadway reviews and appeared in a Hollywood movie, Soup to Nuts (1930), written by Rube Goldberg. However, in 1933 Shemp, frustrated at constantly having to follow Healy's lead, left the act, and his younger brother, Curly, replaced him; but by 1934 Moe, Larry, and Curly also made a complete break with Healy, and the three began making two-reelers (twenty-minute shorts), or curtain raisers, for Columbia. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the Stooges achieved fame, and their shorts, always simple in plot, consistently made audiences laugh. The act became so popular with movie audiences that when Columbia surveyed theater managers nationally regarding audience response to the two-reelers, it
The Three Stooges
439
learned that the Stooges were largely responsible for maintaining box-office revenues. As Stephen Bowles explains: By '35 the Three Stooges had their comic formula well established: a minimum of plot and character, a maximum of fast action and sight gags; no sex, no thinking, no complexity, no logic; turn every situation into a laugh. With the assistance of several talented directors (Del Lord, Preston Black, Charlie Chase, Jules White, and Edward Bemds), the Stooges achieved unprecedented success and longevity in their seemingly tireless production of shorts. (404) Moe, Larry, and Curly made ninety-seven shorts between 1933 and 1947 and in all likelihood would have continued working had not Curly, the most popular Stooge, suffered a disabling stroke on the set while making Half-Wits Holiday. During his illness Curly could not work, although he tried (he made a cameo appearance in 1947 in Hold That Lion), and he was finally replaced by his older brother, Shemp. Shemp, Moe, and Larry made over thirty films; however, Curly's retirement was a turning point in the professional lives of the Stooges. They would never regain the magic they had had because of the versatility of Curly. As Leonard Maltin points out: Shemp was a fine comic, but his shorts with the Stooges couldn't match those with Curly. Curly added a dimension of unreality to the act that was impossible to replace (try to imagine the Marx Brothers without Harpo!). . . . Shemp delivered his fair share of laughs throughout his nine-year mn with the Stooges—and the only thing one could say against this experienced comic was that he wasn't "another Curly." {Movie Comedy Teams 198-199) After retiring to the Motion Picture Country Home, and following several strokes, Curly died in 1952 at the age of forty-nine. He was survived by his widow, Valerie Howard, two daughters, and three former wives. During the Curly years, the Stooges produced their best films, partially because of the efforts of a stock company that accompanied the trio in most of the films. Vernon Dent, a large man with a stern demeanor who was usually cast as a businessman or other official, and Allen Jenkins, a poker-faced individual vaguely resembling Buster Keaton who often played the role of detective or gangster, along with Bill Jamison, "the guy next door," rounded out the cast of mainstays and provided the framework for the trio's mayhem. Symona Boniface, Christine Mclntyre, and Dorothy Appleby were also regulars who often received a pie in the face. In addition, as Maltin points out, a number of established and up-and-coming actors enhanced their careers through appearances in the shorts; these included Walter Brennan {Woman Haters, 1934, and Restless Knights, 1935), Lucille Ball {Three Little Pigsters, 1934), Lloyd Bridges {They Stooge to Conga, 1943), and Jock Mahoney {Out West, 1947). Although a fine actor, Shemp was remarkably different from Curly, and he could not delight audiences the way his younger brother could; in addition, he
440
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
continued to resent being cast as Curly's replacement. Ironically, in too many ways Shemp was similar to Moe in appearance, gesture, and even voice and could never fully distinguish himself from his brother. Still, the Stooges remained in the limelight. When Shemp died in 1955, Columbia suggested Joe Besser (1907-1988) as a replacement. Besser, a talented comic who had worked with Abbott and Costello and Olsen and Johnson, completed sixteen shorts with the Stooges, but like Shemp before him, he never quite "fit" the Stooges; he was too well known as an actor in his own right to blend with Moe's and Larry's slapstick antics. In 1958, following the death of Harry Cohen, head of Columbia, the shorts department was dissolved, and the Stooges' contract was canceled. However, Moe and Larry refused to quit show business and, instead of retiring, began searching again for a new partner. Ironically, at the time when their future appeared most bleak, the Three Stooges began a comeback due to Screen Gems' (Columbia's subsidiary) release of approximately seventy-five Stooge shorts and some two-reelers to television. With the shorts available to a mass audience consisting of children who had never even heard of the Three Stooges, the trio's popularity once again grew. Consequently, the Stooges recruited veteran comic Joe DeRita (Joseph Wardell, 1909-1993), who looked like Curly, as the third Stooge; DeRita remained a Stooge until 1971. Due to their renewed appeal, the trio made feature-length films, appeared on television on a number of children's programs, and were able to interest audiences in their act well into the 1960s. As Maltin explains: In their later years, the Stooges stood as symbols of a bygone era. To some TV and movie executives, they were has beens. To children, and longtime fans, they were a one-of-a-kind trio of living caricatures whose slapstick antics and vaudeville/burlesque routines were light-years away from the "typical" TV comedy of the 1960's. {Movie Comedy Teams 208) Larry died in 1975. Although Moe wanted to revive the act a final time with Emil Sitka taking Larry's role, it was not to be. Moe died in the same year, and Joe DeRita in 1993. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS It is agreed today that the Stooges made their best shorts for Columbia between 1934 and 1947 when the group consisted of Moe, Larry, and Curly. Critics Maltin, Bowles, Mark and Ellen Scordato, and even Moe himself in his autobiography {Moe Howard and the Three Stooges) concur that without Curly the act never really clicked. Throughout these years the Stooges followed a set pattern in each plot: in each short Moe is the leader of the group. He is the boss who punishes his partners, physically and verbally, for their inability to execute his commands effectively and immediately. Inevitably, Larry and Curly never
The Three Stooges
441
fail to err, and their mistakes in judgment, and consequently in deed, often compounded by Moe's inability to set the correct course of action in the first place, form the basis of the comedy. Their failures to execute a task, and thus temporally master their environment, make the Stooges comic caricatures. Very much like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Harry Langdon, each Stooge attempts to make sense of a world that is neither hostile nor benevolent, but simply exists to provide equal opportunities for success and failure. His inevitable failure in completing a desired chore, and his subsequent frustration and anger for having overlooked the obvious and often profoundly simple solution to a dilemma, delight the audience. However, the audience is always sympathetic to the protagonist's attempt to deal with a difficult situation and, in the case of the Stooges, is secretly pleased by their overreaction and resort to crude behavior in an attempt to vent frustration at having run amok. As onlookers understanding the predicament each situation presents for the Stooges, audience members identify with their frustrations and are pleased by their immediate and often violent catharsis, often wishing to throw the pie themselves. In the sense that a clown is a "comic performer who engages in eccentric or stupid behavior, in particular one who specializes in physical comedy" (Towsen 374), the Stooges are, individually and collectively, clowns of the first order. The Stooges react physically to each other and to all who thwart their progress. Their ability to demean or destroy those persons or objects standing in the way of their success liberates them from their circumstances and allows them to try again for personal fulfillment in a different place and at another time. The audience identifies with the trio's often inadequate attempts to control their lives; however, there is little time in any Stooges film, due to the rapid nature of their gags and verbal quips, for sentimentality or for seeing the trio as hopeless victims of a world to which they can never belong. As clowns, they turn their environment upside down and, in so doing, make their viewers laugh. In addition to their actions and gestures, the Stooges also appear clownish in their dress. Moe as antagonist and leader wears the garb of a leader. He is most often attired in pseudoformal clothing: a suit, the pants too short, the jacket too large, and a necktie covering his chest or a bow tie either much too large or too small for his stature. His hair is always styled as an upside-down sugar bowl. Curly, on the other hand, is always found wearing outfits several sizes too small, the pants far above his ankles. His sport coat, stretched across his stomach, is always fastened with only one button. He too is made to appear farcical in his outlandish "business attire." Larry also frequently sports semiformal attire that almost fits. All his clothes are too large: his jacket reaches almost to his knees, and his pants are forever dragging on the ground. The wardrobe of each Stooge is chosen to fit the personality of his character. Moe, as leader, has a stern demeanor and the garb of the official to match. Curly, the patsy of the group, has a personality that blends childlike naivete with downright insanity. He appears to be growing out of his jacket and pants, and the style of his shirts, ties, pants, jackets, and shoes suggests the outfits of a madman. Larry, the hapless
442
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
middleman who must go along with his partners' madness, is always clothed in outfits that hang on his frame and make him seem small and ineffective. As fools, all three fail to fit their clothes just as they fail to fit in society. The Stooges never stop trying to succeed, and by continuing to fail they also show us how absurd the world created by convention and social structure can be. Frequently, in their best shorts, an underlying element of satire forms the groundwork on which the comedy is based. This is the case in such films as Three Sappy People, Slippery Silks, Hoi Polloi, or Meet the Baron, where there are one or more high society types. Deflating the egos of such characters as those played by Vernon Dent or Edna May Oliver (a Margaret Dumont double) always delights the audience, since it can identify with the Stooges' need for prosperity and acceptance, if not always with their methods. Hoi Polloi, written by Felix Adler and directed by Del Lord, is a slapstick adaptation of Pygmalion. In this short, a rich professor (Bud Jamison) makes a wager with a friend that he can ' 'remake'' the Stooges into refined society types in less than one month. Moe, Larry, and Curly are taught to appreciate the arts, music, and literature, as well as to speak and act correctly. Their learning experience is a parody of pretentiousness and insincerity. Once the professor feels that they are ready to meet high society, he gives a coming-out party for the Stooges. Initially, the boys behave the way they "should"; however, they soon return to their natural selves and bring chaos to the formal affair; by the time the evening ends, the ballroom is destroyed and the guests are covered with food. In an ironic twist, the Stooges leave the affair disgusted at the baseness of upper-crust behavior. In Moe's and White's favorite short, You Nazty Spy (directed by Jules White), the Stooges parody an even more stilted group of individuals, Hitler and the Third Reich. The film is considered by most viewers one of the trio's best, and Moe's Hitler impersonation is flawless and hilarious. In addition to the usual slapstick, the film is full of satirical comments, verbal gags, and ridiculous wordplay. Throughout You Nazty Spy, Hitler and his crew of generals are made the butts of nearly every joke. The film begins with three ministers of Moronica meeting together to bring their nation out of economic chaos. They can come up with only one solution, war; war is good business. In order to achieve their goal, they must put into power a dictator who will help achieve their aims. It just so happens that Moe, a painter, is wallpapering the house of one of the ministers. Moe accepts the job offer, once he learns what dictators do for a living: nothing. In preparing for his newfound employment, Moe accidentally gets some black paint smeared under his nose; the paint will not come clean, but he is told by his ministers that since it gives him a distinguished appearance, he should keep it. He insists that his two partners also be given cabinet posts and has Curly appointed field marshall and Larry appointed minister of propaganda. Moe as Hitler addresses huge gatherings of Moronicans; however, not satisfied with their allegiance to him, he becomes a merciless ruler. The masses, no longer able to tolerate such a leader, storm his palace. The dictator, his
The Three Stooges
443
generals, and his ministers run for their lives and by mistake enter a den of hungry lions kept to eliminate all enemies of the state. The film's final scene is a shot of the three lions resting comfortably after a good meal; the Stooges are nowhere to be seen. CRITICAL RECEPTION The Stooges have often been accused of crude slapstick and of depending too heavily for laughs on gouges to the eyes and bops on the head. To some degree, this has kept the trio from ever gaining the critical acclaim it deserved. Complaints about the graphically violent behavior of the Stooges became common when the team's popularity reached its zenith during television runs of the shorts. In the 1930s and 1940s adult audiences knew that the violence was pure fiction, and that no one ever was injured as a result of a Stooge ' 'poke in the eye" or "pie in the squash." Fools are, after all, inherently physical and often violent, but without the power to do permanent injury. In an interview for TV Guide Moe tried to clarify the Stooges' dependency on the crass and gross to provide laughs: People want to laugh with their mouths, not their minds. Audiences want belly laughs. Rarely will a subtle line or a cute phrase get them into a laughing jag. It is the old pratfall, a pie in the face, a good chase or a bop on the casaba to keep a laugh going. That's what we give 'em. (Bowles, 406) He also argued that American westerns and detective/police films did far more to demoralize a viewing audience than he and the Stooges ever did. Stephen Bowles further points out that "the violence of Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Coyote [Road Runner] cartoons and countless others tends to be forgiven, while the violence of the Three Stooges is constantly considered a blatantly anti-social behavior model" (407). In many films, Charlie Chaplin was not above severely punishing those antagonists he felt were impeding his efforts to raise himself from tramp to a semirespectable member of society. When all else failed, Chaplin often resorted to kicks and punches to make his point (see Easy Street with Eric Campbell). Laurel and Hardy also frequently used physical violence and directed such behavior at themselves and at others who challenged their struggle to gain respectability. In addition, Laurel and Hardy, perhaps more than any other comedy team including the Marx Brothers, frequently engaged in the wanton destruction of property, including automobiles and houses (see Big Business with James Finlayson). The same can be said of Buster Keaton and, to a lesser degree, Harry Langdon. In one sense the Stooges should be held blameless for their aggression and nasty pranks, since the directors for whom they worked often required the team to engage in such conduct. Jules White, for example, took a "no-holds-barred" attitude and even encouraged the boys, especially when things were not working
444
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
well during filming, to fall back on the techniques they had used in the earlier shorts. Gents without Cents (1944) and Loco Boy Makes Good (1942)—in which Moe drives a nail into a wall using Curly's head as a hammer—are two particularly violent films directed by White. The Stooges' popularity, however, has lasted almost seven decades. The original Stooges, plus Shemp, Joe Besser, and Joe DeRita, produced over 190 shorts and over 15 feature films. They outlasted every other comedy act in Columbia's short-film unit and were the most successful and prolific filmmakers in Hollywood history. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Secondary Sources Bowles, Stephen E. "The Three Stooges: A Brief Pathology." Films in Review 26.7 (August-September 1975): 403-418. Howard, Moe. Moe Howard and the Three Stooges. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1977. Maltin, Leonard. The Great Movie Comedians, from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. New York: Bell, 1982. . Movie Comedy Teams. New York: New American Library, 1970. Scordato, Mark, and Ellen Scordato. The Three Stooges. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Towsen, John H. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn, 1976.
Taishu Engeki
Subverting the Patterns of Japanese Culture (Japan: Seventeenth Century-Present)
Ron Jenkins Taishu engeki is a deliriously uninhibited form of vaudeville popular in contemporary Japan.1 In a culture where dutiful reverence is ingrained in the population from childhood, taishu engeki theaters offer their audiences an orgy of insubordination. The national addiction to etiquette is undermined by comic outbursts of unruly passion and eccentric breaches of decorum. Where else in Japan can you see a samurai with a baby in his arms brandish a broomstick instead of a sword, or a blind masseuse stick a pair of chopsticks in his ear?
BACKGROUND The subversive pleasures of taishu engeki are rooted in its teasing challenges to the tyranny of cultural expectations. Typical Japanese social encounters are filled with formal speech and behavior patterns known as ' 'kata'' that everyone is expected to use. There is a formulaic kata for almost every imaginable situation: a way of bowing, a way of eating, a way of apologizing, a way of expressing gratitude. In Japan there is only one way of doing things, the Japanese way, but these time-honored rituals of propriety are systematically ridiculed, inverted, and ignored by the comic heroes of taishu engeki. Part of the fun is in the way the kata are painstakingly evoked before being unceremoniously debunked. Traditions are celebrated one moment and mocked the next. Obligatory social codes are followed with polite reserve only to be demolished with unfettered abandon. Sex roles are faithfully obeyed and defiantly transgressed. Beneath its iconoclastic stance, taishu engeki has a fundamental respect for Japanese tradition. The genre earns its right to lampoon rigid social conventions
446
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
by embracing the principles of human decency that underlie them. Heartwrenching stories of characters trapped by traditional obligations alternate with lighthearted tales of reversal and escape. The comic release is predicated on a tragic sense of bondage. Taishu engeki actors do not completely eliminate kata from their interactions. They slyly adapt them to the changing circumstances of the melodramatic plots. But even small deviations from the norm are perceived as radical departures by Japanese audiences whose upbringing has taught them to subjugate their feelings to their sense of duty. Taishu engeki exists on the margins of society, but the fanaticism of its audience suggests that it fulfills an urgent need for release that cannot be satisfied in the emotionally restrictive environment of the culture at large. When one imagines all the kata people have obediently performed and all the obligations they have reluctantly fulfilled, the public's fanatical attraction to the free-spirited antics of taishu engeki is not surprising. By smashing taboos the Japanese have been forced to respect for a lifetime, taishu engeki taps into an enormous reservoir of bottled-up frustration. This licensed liberation occurs throughout the country. Audiences roar with delight and cry in anguished empathy when gangsters, prostitutes, samurai, and monks break the rules of social conformity. In the irreverent world of taishu engeki the repressed impulses of a nation enslaved by etiquette are unleashed in a liberating torrent of tears and laughter. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS On a tiny side street near Tokyo's temple to the goddess of mercy, paper snow is falling on the rickety facade of an old Japanese teahouse. It falls on actors in cheap gaudy costumes as they play out the melodramatic story of an outlaw's anguish over the death of his mother. The snow falls in such abundance that the audience in the front rows of the run-down theater is covered with white paper flakes. The toothless old women, gawky young girls, and half-drunken men are so absorbed in the action on the stage that they do not bother to brush the snow out of their hair or wipe the tears from their faces. Immediately after the tragedy, the actor who plays the hero, still in costume, but freed from the ropes, emerges from behind the curtain to welcome the audience and engage them in informal comic banter. ' Tee cream, a hundred fifty yen," he sings out in a shaky nasal voice that jokingly imitates the sales call of the ancient woman shuffling through the aisles with a sack of ice-cream sandwiches on her back. He is soon back again in a new costume, doing a warrior dance that concludes with a crowd-pleasing display of samurai swordsmanship. A few minutes later he reappears as a woman, draped in the exquisitely gaudy kimono of a nineteenth-century geisha. Each new incarnation is greeted with cheers of '' Yo-chan'' from the audience, who feel intimate enough with the actor onstage to call him by the diminutive form of his real-life first name. He reciprocates by stepping off the stage to shake their hands as he sings steamy love songs in a black tuxedo. Even during
Taishu Engeki
447
the tragic play, he had occasionally stepped out of character to address them directly in erotic comic asides. An unusually resilient tragic hero, Yo-chan escapes the hopelessness of his fate with jokes that poke fun at his pain. The same irrepressible irreverence animates his postsuicide resurrection as a samurai, geisha, ice-cream vendor, and rock star. Yo-chan's virtuosic display of self-transformation mirrors the contradictions of his country's ongoing self-renewal. Saddled with the burden of defeat in World War II, Japan has reinvented itself by merging traditional values with contemporary innovations. The cultural tension generated by this hybrid fusion of conflicting values is evident in the schizophrenic style in which Yo-chan reinvents himself throughout the course of the evening. Rap music and electronic gadgets appear regularly in his plays about seventeenth-century samurai, geisha, highwaymen, and monks. Yo-chan redefines these conventional Japanese roles with an infusion of modernity that unleashes an invigorating clash of the old and the new. The love of ancient customs coexists with the hunger for the latest trends. Medieval gangsters are portrayed as models of honor, while modern businessmen deal in scandal. All the paradoxes of the nation's character come to life in Yo-chan's carnival blend of underworld intrigue, samurai swordplay, domestic heartbreak, and erotic transvestism. This wildly eclectic form of Japanese burlesque is known as taishu engeki (literally translated as "popular theater"). Yo-chan, whose full name is Satomi Yojiro, is the twenty-eighty-year-old star of a fourteen-person troupe that plays month-long stands in theaters and hot-spa resorts from Tokyo to Hiroshima. A typical program of taishu engeki lasts three and a half hours and includes singing, dancing, and two forty-minute plays. The repertoire of tragicomic plays changes daily, so that a faithful fan can see sixty different plays in a month. There are more than fifty taishu engeki companies touring throughout Japan. Each of them is headed by a "zacho" like Yo-chan who draws working-class audiences by combining the quick wit of a Catskills top banana with the romantic appeal of a swashbuckling heartthrob. Unlike the more elite theater form of Kabuki, which is marketed for tourists and subsidized by the state, taishu engeki offers glimpses into the recesses of Japanese culture that never make their way into the guidebooks. The history of taishu engeki is consistent with its status as an enclave of forbidden pleasures. Yo-chan, whose cherubic charm has made him one of the country's most popular zachos, traces the origins of taishu engeki back to a seventeenth-century priestess, shrine dancer, and prostitute named Okuni. Okuni is also credited with inspiring Japan's first Kabuki troupes, but while Kabuki has gradually gained respectability over the ages, taishu engeki remains a marginal form of popular entertainment that is still fueled by the subversive sensuality of the genre's source. Taishu engeki is a celebration of the human eccentricities that are not tolerated in the mainstream of Japan's orderly, efficient, and productive society. Safely hidden away in marginal neighborhoods, taishu engeki theaters are year-round
448
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
festivals of nonconformity. Cultural taboos are bent, broken, and inverted. Genders are reversed. Patterns of kata are stretched and distorted. Barriers of social status are dissolved. Everyone sits together on the floor, exchanging gifts, sharing food, shedding tears, and laughing freely without regard for the rules of propriety. The village atmosphere in taishu engeki is charged with the passion of its audience's unbridled response to whatever is happening on the stage. Even when there is no paper snow to mark the bond between actors and spectators, the connection can be felt in the waves of shifting emotions that ripple through the crowd. Refined audiences in Kabuki theaters express their appreciation of a performer by shouting out the actor's family name during the climactic pauses in their speeches. This old custom requires the spectator to time the shout so that it fits precisely into the heightened emotional rhythms of the speech. Taishu engeki actors employ variations of the same emotionally charged speech patterns used in Kabuki, but their audiences respond with shouts of a much more anarchic nature. They break the kata of conventional audience responses found in Kabuki and pierce the air with grunts, shrieks, and cries that obey no rules of order. These impulsive outbursts feed the actors' creativity, even when they verge on being disruptive. One night a drunk in the audience interrupted a scene in taishu engeki by shouting abuse at the stage and stomping toward the exit door. Yo-chan, who was playing a sake-drinking scene at the time, impulsively decided to include the drunk in the play. "There's a man who's drunker than I am," improvised the actor. "Maybe I'll invite him to go out with me for a bottle of sake." The audience roared its approval, encouraging him to continue responding to the laughs, sobs, and murmurs of the crowd. Energized by the contagious spirit of public revelry, Yo-chan launched into five minutes of impromptu comic dialogue with the drunk before returning to the plot of the play. This style of ironically self-conscious improvisation seduces the public into an interactive relationship with the stage. The formal barriers that separate the audience from the play are melted by the myriad ways in which taishu engeki integrates the audience into the action. Actors drink sake on stage while spectators take swigs of whiskey from bottles passed back and forth across the aisles. Occasionally a comic character will spray the spectators with water or take a pratfall into their laps. Yo-chan even makes sure that his fingers are scented with perfume when he shakes hands with the audience, so that they can watch him sing a tender ballad with a flower in his hand and smell its fragrance from their seats. In Kabuki there is a ramp known as a hanamitchi, or flower path, that runs from the stage through the audience. It enables actors to get closer to the public by making entrances and exits directly through their midst. Taishu theaters are often too small to include a formal hanamitchi, but its actors take Kabuki's concept of audience involvement to even greater extremes. Yo-chan's perfumed handshakes, along with taishu's other participatory elements, have widened the
Taishu Engeki
449
flower path so that it reaches every seat in the house. From the taste of sake to the touch of a paper snowflake, the frenzied intimacy of taishu engeki engages all the senses in a theatrical feast of slapstick and sentiment. At the heart of the relationship between taishu engeki actors and their audience is their mutual delight in puncturing the orderly patterns of Japan's katabound society. Every performance is riddled with challenges to the myth of Japanese social obedience. Foreigners are always amazed by Tokyo's spotless subways and the well-mannered conduct of its passengers. Even the savagery of rush hour is muted by the calming presence of civil servants in white gloves who push the commuters into the suffocatingly overcrowded trains to make room for the doors to close. In the subways, as in other spheres of life, the public acquiesces to the firm shove of authority so that they can preserve the sense of order that is central to their Confucian system of values. But beneath the official display of good citizenship, there is, of course, a natural human yearning to break free from this well-regulated existence. This is the need that is satisfied by taishu engeki's unpredictable outbursts of eccentricity. The liberating anarchy of a taishu engeki performance is embedded in the style of its acting. The actors do not have the refined techniques of Kabuki stars, but they make up for their lack of grace with an exhilarating sense of recklessness. Yo-chan's charismatic appeal owes much to the raw impulsiveness of his stage actions. No matter what character he plays, Yo-chan projects the image of an individual whose feelings are so volatile that they can barely be contained. He is so responsive to his inner drives that he seems to be propelled instinctively from one action to the next. A sudden surge of anger sends him rushing unarmed toward a sword-bearing enemy. A flood of sympathetic tears washes over him as he witnesses a gangster humiliating his lame wife. A nonsensical song flies out of his lips as he sits drinking with a fellow traveler, and Yo-chan cannot resist the urge to get up and dance to its infectious beat. Sometimes Yo-chan's urges push the plots toward exciting climaxes, and sometimes they lead to absurd digressions, but his improvisations can always be counted on to season the predictable plays with a delicious sense of risk. The idea of attempting to do something in a way that has never been done before simply does not occur to people who are conditioned by patterns of kata from the cradle to the grave. This tradition of respect for patterns makes Japanese audiences particularly susceptible to the comic effect of breaking kata on the stage. Because they do not expect a pattern to be ruptured, the effect is doubly delightful when it happens. Like innocent children discovering the joys of disobedience for the first time, the audience at taishu engeki squeals with pleasure at the toppling of their culture's taboos. One of the plays that typifies the kata-busting comic spirit of taishu engeki is called Kenka Bozu (Fighting priest). Since Buddhist priests are not permitted to engage in violence, the title of the play is an oxymoron that sets the mood for a humorous assault on the rules of the priesthood. Yo-chan plays the title role, a yakuza gangster who escapes the police by taking refuge in a monastery
450
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
and becoming an apprentice priest. His first indiscretion occurs while he is chanting prayers at a Buddhist altar. Yo-chan uses the sacred bells to syncopate the rhythms and draw out the beats of the chants and cannot stop himself from improvising scatological variations to the words. When he is sent on an errand by the head priest, he ends up getting drunk and stealing money from the donation box to help a beautiful young woman in distress. Throughout the play Yo-chan engages in these unpriestly activities in white holy robes that are loose-fitting enough to reveal the trademark tattoos of a yakuza that cover his body under the clothing. Yakuza gangsters are among the most celebrated nonconformists in Japanese society, and their startling body tattoos are one of the ways in which they proudly set themselves apart. Interestingly, like other Japanese attempts at nonconformity, the tattoos of the yakuza conform to an accepted standard. Their beautifully ornate patterns are painstakingly composed of traditional designs that cover the skin of the torso, legs, and arms. Yakuza characters are a staple of taishu engeki, and intricately patterned leotards are standard undergarments for the actors who want to simulate the body tattoos of the underworld characters they portray. While breaking the rules of the priesthood in Kenka Bozu, Yo-chan stays faithful to the code of yakuza honor that has been established in films and Kabuki plays. Like Jirocho of Shimizu, the archetypal Robin Hood figure, the outlaw priest comes to the aid of a woman who is being cheated by unscrupulous loan sharks. Ever the polite gangster, he prostrates himself in front of the head priest to apologize for stealing the money to help the girl and humbly begs for permission to continue protecting her from the threats of her crooked creditors. When the aged holy man grants his request, Yo-chan leaps to his knees and expresses his thanks in formal phrases of gratitude that end with a stylized gesture of appreciation and the words "Thank you, oyabun." On the surface it seems to be a simple ending to a simple scene, but the audience roars with laughter at the multiple levels of kata that are broken by Yo-chan's calculated choice of words and movement. The most obvious joke is in Yo-chan's reference to the priest as "oyabun," a yakuza term of respect that is the equivalent of "godfather." But, as in all Japanese interactions, the deeper meanings are found in the intonations, associations, and implicit understandings embedded in the encounter. Yo-chan's words of gratitude are delivered in a heightened vocal style that mimics the emotionally charged speech patterns of the Kabuki theater. This mode of speaking sets up the expectation of a serious climax, an expectation that is comically shattered when Yo-chan ends his florid thank-you with the oyabun joke. The reference to the stately art of Kabuki is also reinforced by the way Yo-chan positions himself on his knees beside the priest. With one arm upraised and his face looking out directly toward the audience, Yo-chan swivels his neck and jolts his head into a static freeze. This arresting pose of condensed emotion, known as a "mie," is timed to punctuate the climactic rhythm of the heightened speech and increases the audience's receptivity to a moment of serious reflection.
Taishu Engeki
451
A Kabuki actor would not use a mie as the setup for a gag about gangsters and priests. Yo-chan's irreverent use of the eloquent Kabuki convention in this farcical situation is part of the ongoing parody of Kabuki kata that runs through every taishu engeki performance. Dozens of mie patterns are performed in every play, sometimes seriously, sometimes mockingly, so that the audience never knows what to expect. In this way taishu engeki satisfies the public's need to have heightened passions safely packaged in familiar patterns at the same time that it mocks the absurdity of depending on a formula for the expression of human feelings. Yo-chan is not the only zacho to self-consciously parody taishu's stylistic connection to Kabuki. Tomio Umezawa, whose fame as a zacho has been boosted by regular appearances on national television, occasionally stops in the middle of a mie to chide his audience for not shouting out his name the way the audience does at Kabuki. "I'm working very hard to act in the Kabuki style," jokes Umezawa, "and I'd appreciate it if you'd show your appreciation in a Kabuki-like manner." At the same time that Yo-chan's comic thank-you to the priest mocks the kata of Kabuki, it also refers indirectly to the samurai warriors who are Kabuki's principal heroes. The gangster's loyalty to his oyabun (replaced in the gag by the priest) mirrors the samurai's loyalty to his feudal lord, and the kabuki mie patterns used by the characters in taishu engeki reinforce this connection. Plays like Kenka Bozu blur the distinction even further by emphasizing the similarity between the samurai code of chivalry ("bushido") and the unwritten code of honor followed by others of lower caste. Yo-chan's fighting priest breaks the rules of the priesthood to stay true to the code of helping to redress injustice. "It gives me a good feeling when I help people," says Yo-chan when he comes to the aid of the girl being hounded by her creditors. The phrase is a formulaic kata spoken regularly by both these heroes and the samurai heroes in taishu engeki. Plays about samurai alternate irregularly with plays about yakuza in the repertoire of taishu engeki, and the two types of plays are almost indistinguishable. The samurai carry two swords instead of one and wear their hair with a forelock combed down the center of their shaved scalps, but other than that, the samurai character types are played in the same style by the same actors who play the yakuza. "Historically, of course, the samurai and the yakuza inhabited completely different realms of life," explains Yo-chan while eating sushi one night after a show. "But for an ordinary audience, looking at them from a distance, they seem the same." To illustrate his point, Yo-chan sets up a diagram on the table in which the samurai are represented by a tall tinted bottle of Sapporo beer and the role of the yakuza is played by a short, squat glass of Suntory whiskey. The alcoholic beverages merge together as they are viewed by the fingers of Yo-chan's right hand, standing in for the eyes of the public. This whimsical after-dinner demonstration of Japan's popular icons is consistent with Yo-chan's ironically playful attitude toward Japanese culture heroes on the stage. He de-
452
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
fines, inhabits, and rearranges their attributes with the dizzying agility of a shellgame operator. CRITICAL RECEPTION For Japanese audiences who spend most of their time in tradition-bound offices and homes, the taishu engeki theater is an extraordinary place of unrestricted passions, comically scrambled behavior patterns, and fluid sexual identities. By breaking the rules of decorum and turning etiquette on its head, taishu engeki transforms a colorless corner of urban life into a carnival of uninhibited fun. Painful obligations become liberating sources of pleasure. Barriers of status and wealth dissolve in a mist of dry ice and rock and roll. Order and reserve are overturned by chaos and passion. Even the shyest of the revelers is given a moment of applause in the spotlight. The powerless and disenfranchised are crowned as emperors and empresses of a realm without limits where anything is possible. There is even all the ice cream you can eat. For the weary, obedient, and polite citizens of Japan's highly regimented society, the zacho is a modern-day shaman, conjuring storms of paper snow and laughter that transform his shabby theater into a garden of anarchic delights. NOTE 1. Material for this entry is based onfieldworkby the author.
The Tarot Fool
(Europe and the United States: 1440-Present)
David Conford BACKGROUND The Tarot Fool is the most important card in the tarot deck. The tarot at its most elemental level is a deck of cards: twenty-two (usually) numbered and labeled unsuited major trumps, including the Fool, and fifty-six cards arranged in four suits from ace to king, the court cards consisting of page, knight, queen, and king. Neither the origin of the deck nor that of the term itself is known. The earliest reference to the trump cards dates from 1442 at Ferrara, Italy. The earliest extant set of twenty-two trump cards dates from the same general time and place and was probably painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Sforza family in the 1440s in a similar location (Giles 4). Although suited playing cards predate tarot decks by close to a century, the fifty-six minor trumps of the tarot with their suits of swords (spades), wands (clubs), cups (hearts), and coins (diamonds) are inarguably the progenitors of today's standard deck. The Fool (joker) is the only major trump to survive that transformation, and, as in the tarot deck, the two fools or jokers in the suited deck are, by default, the two most powerful cards and, when included in a game, may trump any court card or serve as an invincible wild card. Like all elements of tarot card design, the Fool in tarot has remained similar in design during the deck's history of more than 550 years. In particular, the symbolism of the major trumps has been carefully preserved. While there is no proof that the major (trump) and minor (suited) arcana were originally designed as one deck, it may be contended that they have both played a part in the Western world's cultural history.
454
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Originally the seventy-eight-card tarot deck was used for the trick-taking game called tarocchi, and later in variations such as tarock, tarocchini, and minchiati (sometimes with modified decks). Although cartomancy was common enough from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the tarot was not used for divinatory purposes until the end of the eighteenth century. Today the deck is used exclusively and increasingly for this purpose. But this divinatory function may take two paths. As Rosemary Guiley puts it, "We can approach the Tarot in two . . . ways: to glimpse the future, and to discover meaning . . . in our lives. The first approach can be fruitful, b u t . . . the Tarot is much better suited to . . . gain knowledge of the Self" (1). Cynthia Giles agrees. Rather than serving as a tool for mere fortune telling, the deck offers insights into human existence because over the past century people have been "looking for some way of restoring connections between the material and immaterial worlds" (43). A key question, however, is how the twenty-two major trumps in the tarot deck became "a sacred technology by means of which the ordinary range of human experience can be expanded'' (Giles 59). Are the tarot trumps merely a kind of Rorschach card game lost in a 500-year-old fog? Or are they more? To answer these questions, it is vital to understand certain currents in the late medieval and early Renaissance Zeitgeist, when the cards were first designed as game cards in northern Italy. First, the horror of the Black Death of the fourteenth century led to an erosion in papal authority and the erosion of the Scholastic system. This resulted in an increased acceptance of the mysticism of charlatans, witch doctors, and seers, as well as a 180-year economic depression. Life was uncertain, and clerical authority was no shield against either plague or depression. A second factor contributing to the mysticism of tarot was the corruption of the Avignon papacy and the Great Schism (1378-1418), which loosened respect for traditional church orthodoxy. These forces led to a third influence: the growth of late medieval magic, which, unlike religion, could coerce spiritual forces rather than merely supplicate. When people are desperate, even illusions of power may comfort them. In the fifteenth century, elaborate forms of divination also became popular at all levels of society, even though the traditional view was that they were possible only with demonic aid. Wayne Shumaker observes that ' 'the Renaissance thirst for synthesis, for syncretism, was unquenchable: platonism . . . with Christianity . . . Hermetic doctrine and the cabala. . . , astrology, numerology, alchemy and much else" (205). Both Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were by any standards occultists. All forms of knowledge, even spurious, may comfort the uncertain. These currents of spiritual ferment, loss of faith in the established church, economic uncertainty, and wars and rumors of wars in the ducal courts of northern Italy were all forces contributing to the rich occult symbolism included in the iconography of the trump cards of the tarot deck by the first Renaissance artists. Yet not until 1776 was the symbolism embedded in the icons first ac-
The Tarot Fool
455
knowledged and recorded by Antoine Court de Gebelin, a minister, Freemason, and gentleman scholar. He hypothesized that the deck held fabulous ancient knowledge of a vanished civilization recorded by the Egyptian god Thoth (Giles 23). Other occultists suggested mystic tarot origins to be Egyptian, Romany (Gypsy), Jewish, and medieval Fez. Throughout the romantic era, which focused on mysticism, the tarot deck was increasingly used as a tool of divination and fortune telling. The fortune teller and cartomancer Eteilla and later, Eliphas Levi, linked the deck to the Kabbalah, and Paul Christian argued the bond between tarot and an Egyptian mystery religion. France was the center of tarot studies through the 1890s; however, the most influential attacks against the dying Enlightenment made by the study of tarot were those of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, centered in London. Their roster included MacGregor Mathers, William Butler Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and A. E. Waite. This group's achievements include a sort of unified field theory of the occult, some of the twentieth century's finest poetry, at least two widely used new tarot decks, and some careful scholarly work on the history and practice of magic and alchemy. The most influential American scholarship came from the Builders of the Adytum, especially from two of its leaders, Paul Foster Case and Jason Lotterhand, both of whom emphasized equally Kabbalah and Jungian psychology. Jung is something of the patron saint of modern tarot studies even though he only wrote one sentence on the subject in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious'. "It also seems as if the set of pictures in the Tarot cards was distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation" (Guiley 52). Even though the legitimacy of Jung's research is currently being questioned, his ideas on the collective unconscious and its archetypes remain important icons of modern thought, even modern tarot thought since the trump cards are said to "represent symbolically those instinctual forces operating autonomously in the depths of the human psyche which Jung has called the archetypes" (Nicols 9).
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The Fool trump card by no means has an identical representation in the various tarot decks that have been designed over their history of more than 550 years. The single most influential figure in the deck, the Fool may appear with feathers in his hair, dressed in rags or motley, having a vacuous, sinister, twisted, delighted, or preoccupied expression on his face, and being surrounded by children, animals, mountains, trees, or nothing at all. The first Fool in tarot history in the Visconti-Sforza deck holds a painted staff or club in his right hand and slants it back over his right shoulder. Seven feathers are in his tousled hair, and he wears a patched and belted coat over a light shirt. He wears no trousers, but has rolled-up calf-high hose. His face is mild and his small beard forked. There are no background details in his card. After this deck, most other depictions of
456
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
the major arcana of this period are numbered and labeled, with the Fool given the almost universal attribution of zero. In the influential Marseilles tarot deck of the sixteenth century, the Fool ("Lemat," literally, the dull one) has a pointed jester's cap, a staff in his right hand, a stick with a sack in his left hand, and, over his left shoulder, a scalloped coat. A dog leaning his forepaws against his leg is tearing a sizable hole in the right leg's hose. The landscape is rough and treeless. Because historically the fool had many guises in royal and noble courts, he was painted in many guises. Bill Butler writes of the Tarot Fool that ' 'it is with his madness, that of the Fool of God, that the cards are illuminated" (Butler 110). The most influential modern deck is the Rider-Waite tarot of 1910, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, working with A. E. Waite, both Golden Dawn members. Over six million decks have been sold. This Fool is a young person (neither recognizably male nor female) dressed in an elegant surcoat and rolled boots with a staff over the right shoulder and a pack suspended from it. He/she has a feather or plume in the hair and a white rose in the left hand, the sun shines on his/her back, and a dog frisks near his/her left leg. Gazing at the sky, not the path, the Fool strides toward the edge of a cliff. Today there are at least a hundred different packs, and through them all, the Fool marches on. And why not? He is "the most powerful of all the Tarot Trumps" (Nicols 23), "the spirit in search of expertise" (Waite 155), and "the most important key in the pack" (Lotterhand 2). While divinatory significance is not the issue here, the various current interpretations of the Fool's spiritual meaning are important in modern culture. The Fool as an Archetypalfigureis . . . one of the most important symbols of the unconscious mind. Among other legendary meanings he is the self at the beginning of the journey . . . the fool who has lost his wits [or] .. . abandoned them for something better. (Butler 109) Like the wandering fools of Europe's fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Fool is always concerned both with journeys and with homecoming. He is seen by most American interpreters as closely connected to Jung's idea of Self. Nicols describes this Jungian concept: The Self is . .. the center of the entire psyche, a center of expanded awareness and stability. The Self is there in the beginning. The ego is . .. made, but the self is given. It exists at our birth—and before our birth and after our death. It is . .. waiting for us to come home and yet urging us on for. .. our voyage... is a circular one. (42) The Self, then, identifiable with divinity and the Fool (a bit touched, but touched by whom?), "is our Inner Self about to engage in another adventure which will move around in a circle" (Lotterhand 1, 9).
The Tarot Fool
457
That the number on the Fool card is zero is significant. Richard Cavendish notes: The Fool is the Spirit of God about to descend into the nothing . . . at the beginning of creation. And the Fool is also the perfected spirit of man approaching the One. The One pervades all things and is free of all limitations. It contains all qualities and yet has no qualities. . .. The Fool is the 0 which contains all things but is nothing. (114) "Nothing will come of nothing," King Lear says and learns that everything comes of nothing and then returns to nothing. The zero is the great mystery, the attempt to express the inexpressible. It is no accident that at the same time the tarot enters Western history, so does the zero enter Western mathematics. The zero symbol was used as a secret sign for decades after to represent mystery, while the word itself comes from the same etymological root as the verb "decipher." While it may be noted that the divination or fortune-telling interpretation of the Fool includes "audacity," "the slave of materialism," "inevitable ruin," "the dreamer," and "willpower," occult, Kabbalistic, and Jungian interpreters prefer the Fool as the Great and Mysterious Zero, the Alpha (and sometimes the Omega) of the twenty-two tarot trumps. CRITICAL RECEPTION While the tarot, including the Tarot Fool, has been an important influence on major writers of the twentieth century, it has only rarely been the subject of literary scholarship. Charlene Gates's 1982 study, The Tarot Trumps: Their Origin, Archetypal Imagery, and Use in Some Works of English Literature, is listed in the bibliography of Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot (volume 3). A book by Kathleen Raine, Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn (now out of print) is the only other full-length study of the subject that has come to light. Studies of the Tarot Fool per se are invariably included in books of tarot studies. The Kaplan, Giles, Butler, and Guiley books noted are the most useful. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Butler, Bill. Dictionary of the Tarot. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Cantor, Norman F. Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Cavendish, Richard. The Black Arts. 1967. New York: Perigee/Putnam, 1983. Friedrich, Otto. The End of the World: A History. New York: Fromm, 1986. Gates, Charlene. The Tarot Trumps: Their Origin, Archetypal Imagery, and Use in Some Works of English Literature. Eugene: U at Oregon P, 1982. Giles, Cynthia. The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore. New York: Paragon House, 1992. Gray, Eden. The Tarot Revealed. 1960. New York: Signet, 1969. Guiley, Rosemary. The Mystical Tarot. New York: Signet, 1991.
458
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Hadfield, Alice. Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Work. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Kaplan, Stuart R. The Encyclopedia of Tarot. 3 vols. New York (vol. 1) and Stanford, CT (vols. 2-3): US Games Systems, 1978-1990. Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Lotterhand, Jason C. The Thursday Night Tarot. North Hollywood, CA: Newcastle, 1989. Metzner, Ralph. Maps of Consciousness. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Nicols, Sallie. Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1980. Shumaker, Wayne. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. Waite, Arthur E. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. 1910. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1987. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966.
The Tarot Fool in English and American Novels (England and the United States: 1932-Present)
David Conford The Tarot Fool has a major role in five American or English novels in the twentieth century. THE GREATER TRUMPS Background Charles Williams's 1932 novel The Greater Trumps is the earliest fictional reflection (in any but an incidental way) of the tarot. Williams was a member of the Golden Dawn, an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, the deviser of the Thoth tarot deck, and a friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot. His fascination for the occult, nearly mystic Christian sympathies, and involvement with the leading fantasists of the early twentieth century were to prove rich sources for his books. The plot of The Greater Trumps is relatively simple. Lothair Coningsby, a stodgy, conservative egotist, inherits from a friend the original tarot cards (not the fifteenth-century Visconti-Sforza deck, but the "true originals"). Henry Lee, who is engaged to Coningsby's daughter, Nancy, is aware of their powers because his Gypsy family holds a great secret: seventy-eight golden figures who weave through an elaborate self-generated dance and are the mystical doubles of the tarot cards. Henry wants Coningsby's cards, for with that deck and the golden figures, magic of the highest power may be wrought. Since Coningsby will not give up the deck, Henry steals it and sets loose a snowstorm on Coningsby. Nancy surprises Henry, who drops some of the cards, loosing an even
460
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
greater storm that could end all life on earth. Coningsby's sister Sybil (with Nancy and Henry's help) puts all to rights. Description and Analysis The theory of correspondences, familiar not only to occultists, but to students of medieval and Renaissance culture, is a key to Williams's use of the tarot. Henry explains: "All things are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement. Without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth" (53). As the oldest occult chestnut puts it, "as above, so below." But in this case, magical power and knowledge are dependent upon the knowledge of the Fool. The moving golden images contain in their center an unmoving Fool who prevents readers of the cards or images from fully understanding or using their import. In this book "there are no writings which tell us anything at all of the Fool" (39); however, Sybil can see the Fool "moving . . . quickly . . . dancing with the r e s t . . . always arranging itself in some place which was empty for it" (80). Sybil is called "fool, and the sister of a fool" (90) with "eyes . . . perpetually dancing" (75). She is clearly intended to be the earthly equivalent of the Fool. At the critical moment in the storm, Sybil grasps that if the Fool is still in the pack, then the dance can never become a chaotic killer. She tells Nancy, ' T know the dance and the figures that make the dance. The crown's gold over them . . . do you think the Tarots can ever escape while the Fool is here to hold them?" She rightly concludes, "There's no figure anywhere in heaven or earth that can slip from that partner. They are all his forever" (139-140). At the novel's end, with the storm calmed, opposites reconciled, and the estranged lovers reunited, Sybil sees ' 'the vivid figure of the Fool. He had come from all sides at once, yet he was not one. All-reconciling and perfect" (219). He is the source of golden light, one step from divinity, the demigod who dances unity into variety. The influence of Golden Dawn occult study is obvious here. The fool figure depicted on Coningsby's deck of tarot cards has never appeared on an actual deck, but rather is a combination of details from fifteenthand nineteenth-century decks. Dressed in four-color motley, he has bare legs, arms, and hands, is carrying a staff and bag, and is placed on the card with no background. Significantly, the card is "numbered nought" (31); he is the mysterious, all-inclusive, and perfect zero. In his state of delight and constant motion, he is the magical fool, not a court jester or village idiot. He is the Fool of God, entirely appropriate to a Christian occultist. THE CASTLE OF CROSSED DESTINIES
Background In The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1979), Italo Calvino's uses are quite different, running the entire gamut of both the traditional fool depictions and
The Tarot Fool in English and American Novels
461
their literary reflections as well. This loosely woven collection of tales concerns a group of travelers struck dumb by their experiences, who in a castle in the middle of a dense wood exchange stories by using a deck of tarot cards (actually two decks: the Visconti deck and the Marseilles). The Fool occurs in a number of tales in a traditional role—traditional for fools, that is, not Tarot Fools. First, the Fool symbolizes the madness of Roland in a variation of Orlando Furioso, "Roland descended into the chaotic heart of things . . . the point of intersection of all possible orders" (330), and again in the next story, "The Tale of Astolpho," "Roland . . . in his folly . . . runs through the woods, decked with birds' feathers and answers only the chirping of those creatures" (36). Next, in "All the Other Tales," the Fool card in the tarot deck represents both the court fool of Helen of Troy and a youth, beloved by a queen, who escapes captors in the disguise of a vagabond (42). The Marseilles deck is used in the third story, "The Tale of the Forest's Revenge," which portrays the fool telling the heroine that "no cities, no empire, no roads exist" (68). Next, the Marseilles Fool pops up in "The Surviving Warrior's Tale" as a wounded, limping soldier flees the battlefield and advises the knight protagonist to do likewise. The Fool in "The Tale of the Vampire's Kingdom" is a wise court fool who advises his king of the unsuspected chaos and evil in his land, finally telling him of the death of his vampire queen. His advice is profitless, however, since the citizens wrongly assume that the king is a vampire himself and try to kill him (80-88). Good advice is not always a remedy for the irrational in life. In "I Also Try to Tell My Tale," the Fool stands for Laius at the moment of his death at the hands of Oedipus, and in "Three Tales of Madness," the Fool becomes Lear's "only support and mirror of his madness" and Hamlet's feigned madness as well (115). Description and Analysis Thus the Fool mutates from the image of madness to the wandering wretch to the court jester who dispenses unheeded, useless warnings and observations in both tale and tragedy. With the exception of "The Tale of the Vampire's Kingdom," the Fool is a minor character, a way station on the road to knowledge. The Tarot Fool is here only a sign to indicate a conventional fool, one whom society traditionally fails to respect, and as different from Williams's demigod as it is possible to imagine. QUEEN OF SWORDS
Background William Kotzwinkle plays yet another variation on the malleable fool in Queen of Swords, his well-constructed 1983 novel, the title of which is another tarot card. A middle-aged writer, Eric, married to a painter, Janet, becomes
462
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ensnared by Nora, the widow of an avant-garde composer. Eric moves into her house, falls apart morally, ethically, mentally, and artistically, and comes to the realization, too late, that Janet was the source of the best in himself. When he tries to return to Janet, she is literally sailing away with Eric's friend Heinz. The inverted spiral of the plot traces the journey of a fool, but instead of radical innocence at the book's end, we return to square one of the journey at a higher level of understanding.
Description and Analysis The text begins with quotations from Aleister Crowley's The Book ofThoth and "an old French tarot." The reader is not shocked to find Eric describing his situation: ' There were no omens . . . but the mysterious birds of message must have been informing other fools of their fate" (9). Eric is restless, delusional, one who follows dreams off a hundred cliffs. He "felt he could run right up a moonbeam" (17). "I love motion," he explains (50). "I live in a permanent state of excessive haste" (55). "Have I also said that my flute case was on my back?" (65). He meets Nora, the Queen of Swords, at an EST-like meeting. This is ominous since the standard readings of the Queen of Swords card include "people who work to rule, malice, artifice, deceit," "a bad woman," and "destruction bearing fruit" (Butler 104-105). Eric has two doubles in this book: one is the town lunatic who directs imaginary traffic, and the other is Heinz, a failed novelist who becomes a millionaire drug dealer and sails off with Janet at the book's end. In parallel fashion, Eric has some success as a novelist while married to Janet, falls apart with Nora, is involved in minor drug deals, and loses Janet to Heinz. While he is with Nora, his writing deteriorates from "mindless doodles" (196) to the pornography he wrote before meeting Janet. He slowly comes to understand that it was Janet who had "shattered the porcelain bowl of my mind and freed me to see instead—the stars" (161). He believes that he can pull his life together again by returning to his wife ' 'to regain the ornamental plume of high endeavor" (161). But this fool will never be plumed again. He was reversed from the start, a bad position for this card. He notes at the beginning that he had performed yoga postures in the inverted position (134), almost an omen that his life is circling in the wrong direction. His belief that he can start over again with Janet shows him to be unaware of this direction in his life. He is not the fool as much as he is just plain foolish. Kotzwinkle's postmodern realism swallows the Tarot Fool whole and uses it as a typical twentieth-century antihero: the novelist as an egotistical schmuck.
The Tarot Fool in English and American Novels
463
HALF ASLEEP IN FROG PAJAMAS Background Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Tom Robbins's 1994 novel, like that of Kotzwinkle, uses the Rider-Waite Fool as inspiration for the central character, Gwen Mati (Le Mat is the Fool in French decks; II Matto in Italian). In fact, Robbins even includes the face of the card as an introduction to the last chapter. The story takes place over a single long weekend and involves Gwen Mati's journey to a higher understanding of both herself and the infinitely elastic nature of reality. According to her tarotmancer, Q-Jo Huffington, the Fool is Gwen's card. Q-Jo says: The whole tarot deck may be read as the fool's journey. And it doesn't matter whether the quest starts with the fool or ends with him because it's a loop anyhow. When the naive young foolfinallytumbles, he falls into the world of experience. Now the journey has really begun. The fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the fool. (91)
Description and Analysis Early in the novel, Gwen replies snappishly, "Anyone who doesn't build themselves a fortune of money is a fool." "Exactly so," replies Q-Jo (91). In her earliest reading of Gwen's cards, Q-Jo tells her that she has either chosen the wrong goals or the wrong way to pursue them (17). Gwen is a Seattle stockbroker, neither particularly ethical nor particularly successful. She believes that money will be her raison d'etre. She is foolish. Gwen's journey is started by Larry Diamond, a former ace, a sometime major broker. The Ace of Diamonds (Coins) has a divinatory meaning of "prosperity," "profit," "the most favorable of all cards," and "a beginning" (Butler 1718). Larry's treasure, which may or may not be fool's gold, includes theories on interstellar influence on early African cultures, and on the malleability of material existence. He urges Gwen to move past "job fixation" (195). He compares her to a "television set that can only bring in two or three channels. I want to hook you up to cable" (288). When Gwen finally begins to shift her perspective and becomes alive to the tools in her fool's bag, "the world around [her] seems alive in a way it never was before" (331). She discovers joy. Larry leaves for Timbuktu, telling her, "Only a fool wouldn't have second thoughts about Timbuktu" (376), and the last message Gwen receives is an oversized Fool card with Q-Jo's greeting, "See you in Timbuktu" (386). The implication is strong that both Q-Jo and Gwen will be there too. Gwen, like Kotzwinkle's Eric, has made the big Circle, but has won, not lost. The novel is a tarot-flavored bildungsroman, the Fool's coming-of-age party.
464
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
LAST CALL Background A second novel of the 1990s is Tim Powers's Last Call (1993), a genre novel that rises above its own genre. It is an occult thriller, a fantasy involving a modern reworking of the Grail materials, a game called Assumption Poker, the mathematics of randomness, Jungian tarot interpretations, and large dollops of film noir, sex, and violence in modern Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The two major characters are Georges Leon and his son, Scott Crane. Leon has learned a way of achieving immortality by connecting to the archetypal powers of the tarot and winning bodies of opponents in a poker game played with a powerful old tarot deck. He is wounded by his wife and thus is turned into a modern Fisher King. References to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance are scattered throughout the book. Scott, who as a child loses an eye to Leon and is saved by his doomed mother, will eventually break Leon's grip on the Wasteland by tricking him in Assumption Poker and becoming the new tarot Emperor, identified here with the Fisher King. Description and Analysis There are two fools in the novel. One is Scott, a sometime pro poker player who often draws the Jack of Hearts and the Joker. The only fool aspect used for Scott by the author is the circular quest. The fool who becomes the archetype is the sometimes dangerously mad Dondi Snayheever, raised by Scott's father Leon in a card-covered shack in the desert. On April Fools' Day Snayheever buys a inexpensive feathered Indian headdress because he had to wear feathers. He dresses in a tattered coat and speaks in scraps of rhyme, babble, and startling locutions. At the book's climax, he becomes his archetype to save Scott's chance of healing the land. Like the Rider-Waite card, he prances on the edge of a clifflike coping, kicking his feet and swinging his arms, with his feathered headdress and long, worn coat flying in the air. He seems taller than the mountains in the distance (508). He is also centrally within the fifteenth-century traditions of both wanderer and court fool. Snayheever is a wounded child who becomes his own archetype, ensuring the land's salvation. He is the fool who becomes Christ. CRITICAL RECEPTION While these novels have received conventional reviews, there is no analysis of them in terms of the tarot. But the possibilities of the Tarot Fool as a literary device are just beginning to be explored. As apocalyptic millenarianism grows and materialism shows itself to be more and more threadbare as a way of life, interest in and use of tarot imagery by novelists will undoubtedly grow as well.
The Tarot Fool in English and American Novels
465
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Kotzwinkle, William. Queen of Swords. New York: Putnam, 1983. Powers, Tim. Last Call. New York: Avon, 1993. Robbins, Tom. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. New York: Bantam, 1994. Williams, Charles. The Greater Trumps. New York: Avon, 1969. Secondary Source Butler, Bill. Dictionary of the Tarot. New York: Schocken, 1975.
Touchstone
(England: In William Shakespeare's As You Like It: c. 1599-1600)
Alan Lutkus BACKGROUND Touchstone in William Shakespeare's As You Like It {AYLI) begins as a shrewd but inefficacious fool at the dangerous court of Frederick, usurper of the dukedom of Frederick's older brother, Duke Senior, now exiled in the Forest of Arden. Touchstone mockingly questions the honor of an associate of Frederick (1.2.59-76) and wrestling as fit court entertainment for Frederick's daughter Celia and niece Rosalind, Duke Senior's daughter (123-125). But when Duke Frederick enters and speaks churlishly to the assembled group (135-214), Touchstone is quiet, mute testimony to Celia's comment that "since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show" (82-85). Touchstone is less reticent in AYLTs remaining four acts, which take place in the Forest of Arden, to which Celia and Rosalind take him as they flee Frederick. A tenth of the lines are his (Spevack 909). Other characters praise the pastoral surroundings; not so Touchstone, the sensible bad traveler, who observes, "When I was at home I was in a better place" (2.4.15-16). He maintains this view, first confounding the shepherd Corin with arguments showing court ways superior to country ways (3.2.11-81) and then the rustic William, a rival suitor for Touchstone's country-bred beloved, Audrey (5.1.10-58). Other characters delight in the romantic and spiritual dimensions of love, particularly Rosalind, who is worshiped by another exile, Orlando; not so Touchstone. His apparently purely sensual attraction to Audrey reminds everyone of the sexual
Touchstone
467
basis of love. When Jaques asks him if he will marry, Touchstone answers that "wedlock would be nibbling," for "man hath his desires" (3.3.73-74). A fool's views predictably receive comment themselves. Jaques, Duke Senior's melancholy observer, satirizes Touchstone's love of city ways (2.7.12-42) and later tries to dissuade him from a hasty marriage to Audrey (3.3.75-85). Touchstone's act 5 marriage ironically does indeed leave him, the outspoken court partisan, wed to a rustic. Yet Touchstone's views are respected at least equally to those of others by the end of the play. Based on the seven degrees of lying, the elaborate protocol used by courtiers, Touchstone mockingly solves two of the play's problems, oath breaking and violence (5.4.66-98). This impresses Duke Senior, who is about to have his dukedom restored and who approves rather than suppresses a fool's wit. He praises Touchstone as one who "uses his folly like a stalking horse, and under the presentation of that he schools his wit" (101-102). A job offer seems possible. Audrey and Touchstone are allowed—in Touchstone's revealing phrase for those partaking of the sacrament of marriage in the final scene—"amongst the rest of the country copulatives" (54-55), while Jaques has no hope for the union (185-186). The performer of the rites, Hymen himself, who perhaps is authoritative in such matters, sees the two "sure together / As the winter to foul weather" (130-131). By the time of AYLI, England had long viewed city and court values refracted in the purifying lens of natural settings, the pastoral perspective presented from 1579 in Edmund Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, through the 1590s and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd (the main AYLI source), to book 6 of Spenser's Faerie Queene in 1596. All are a legacy of Renaissance humanist reinvigorations of classical literary models, Virgil's verse Eclogues or Longus's prose Daphnis and Chloe; pastoral elements in drama, despite a lack of classical sanction, appear from 1579 on (Brissenden 43-44). A pastoral landscape easily enough allies with the parallel medieval tradition of a "golden world" (1.1.113), which Charles the wrestler sees in Arden. It is for him Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest (110-111); but the phrase has wider overtones. The Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses details the successive fall of the ages from gold to bronze to a present iron age, when people live "by stealth." The classical story readily adheres to biblical headings; "Arden" itself is close in sound to "Eden" (Brissenden 41-43). Edenic parallels within A YLI are hardly difficult to sustain, with the play offering a brother-versus-brother, Cain-and-Abel confrontation outside Arden that is overseen by the elderly Adam (1.1.1-80); and within Arden "under an old oak" is "a green and gilded snake" (4.3.104, 109). Clearly "Arden" transcends the French Ardennes region it ostensibly occupies in the play, since it is assigned both "a palm-tree and a lioness" (Charles Knight [1849] in Knowles 41) and is a magical place where Hymen himself performs marriages. Touchstone's entrance into this mythographic perfection is a breath of foul air—one of the first jokes leveled against him is a fart gag (1.2.98). The concept
468
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of an existent natural paradise is qualified by the very fact of Touchstone's being a "natural." David Wiles provides the specifics on the physical but not the mental aspects of Touchstone as "natural" fool (148, 150), noting that he is an aberration of one sort or another against perfected nature. His advocacy of court values supplants golden-age truisms with iron-age boons, and his sensuality undercuts any Edenic romantic/intellectualized view of courtship. The fool is here in his element, an unfallen world unprepared for a fallen-world fool. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Touchstone is "this new kind of clown" for Felver (43), the "motley fool" (2.7.13) Jaques discovers and wonders over in Arden. Touchstone is literally new, the first of the court jester figures Shakespeare later develops in Feste and Lear's Fool, a figure in AYLI very probably drawing on the talents of Robert Armin, the new fool for the Globe Theatre, whose past as apprentice goldsmith may be invoked by Touchstone's name—the touchstone identifies what is valuable (Knowles 5-6; see Welsford 249). But it is the ambiguity of Touchstone that makes him new to the forest world of A YLI: he may identify the gold in others, but he himself is a largely unknown quantity. Jaques identifies him as fool by costume; it is not, however, the time's usual iconography for a fool (Wiles 186-187; Hotson 89). Others in the play see him differently; Corin calls him "gentle sir" (2.4.69), and William doffs his cap and also says "sir" (5.1.15-17). At the play's end, Touchstone himself says that he has indeed been a gentleman (5.4.40^46). But this ambiguity is hardly resolved, as Felver suggests (45), because Touchstone can parody anything he has heard or read, probably including, as George S. Gordon details, court language (Knowles 602). Touchstone twice sides with prevarication as a positive virtue, in detailing the seven degrees of the lie and in holding that "truest poetry is the most feigning" (3.3.16-17). In fact, no character in the play but Touchstone, no member of the audience, and no critic can know who joins the marriage dance at play's end: Touchstone the gentleman, regaining his place in society, or Touchstone the glib, socially mobile fool. All this broadens the ambiguity that critics like Samuel L. Bethell feel at the start of the play, when Touchstone is announced as "natural" and may even be costumed in the idiot's long coat, but is found immediately "not a natural, but a mordantly satiric wit" (Knowles 604). Armin's stock in trade was a refusal to be clearly either natural or artificial fool (Wiles 139), an opposition Shakespeare helps muddy later with Touchstone's natural lust mingling with his support for court artifice. But this is new to Shakespeare's stage. His company's last clown, Will Kemp, had been a clearly underclass ' 'plain man'' with a penchant for physical comedy (Wiles 101). With Armin's replacement of Kempe, a disturbing but also liberating ambiguity clings to the new fool. Wiles argues convincingly (146) that Touchstone's besting of symbolically named William, twice called "clown"
Touchstone
469
(5.1.10, 46), metadramatically replaces old clown with new. Class lines are blurred, and AYLI licenses no audience member to laugh at the underclass because it alone is obviously foolish—it no longer is. AYLI rather asks closer examination of all classes, since the fool among us may be anyone, even a gentleman—the point Touchstone with his parodies of Orlando and others has been making all along. CRITICAL RECEPTION For much of his existence, Touchstone received neither public nor critical attention. Only the last half-century perhaps fully recognized his importance to AYLI. The play never saw print in Shakespeare's lifetime (Brissenden 2), and Richard Knowles speculates that it may not have reached the stage until 1740, nearly a century and a half after its composition, despite conjectured earlier performance dates (629-635). Various post-1740 acting versions severely shortened Touchstone's part; some cuts curtailed bawdiness, while others simply condensed the play overall (Knowles 654-655). Tradition largely persists into Paul Czinner's 1936 British filmed version of AYLI, whose Touchstone plays a much-diminished role; he says nothing in act 1, is deprived his "seven degrees of the lie" speech in act 5, and never is wedded to Audrey in act 5 and in act 3. He is not among act 5's final dancing "country copulatives"; indeed, he never speaks that phrase in the film, though some bawdy is retained elsewhere. Perhaps consequent to such cuts, he has not drawn major talents to his part, while less tampered-with Jaques has, having been portrayed both by Brian Bedford and Anthony Quayle (Brissenden 76, 78). Reviewing a quarter of a millennium of performance, Brissenden notes ten memorable Jaqueses to five Touchstones (52-81). Early commentary certainly appreciated Touchstone, who was to Hermann Ulrici (1836) a "genuine old English clown" with "keen perception of the faults . . . of mankind," even if Ulrici disdained clowns' "capricious folly" (Knowles 597). William W. Lloyd (1856) even acknowledged Touchstone's sensuality, noting the lust for Audrey, then deploring it as "the grossest exposition of the hold that wild uncultured nature. .. can assert over the most sophisticated mind" (Knowles 597). Touchstone's stage purification affected critics, despite full texts open before them: what else explains two 1895 evaluations, one recognizing Touchstone as an emblem simply of "reason" (Henry J. Ruggles in Knowles 600) and the other as "daintiest fool in the comedies" (S. E. Winbolt in Brissenden 26)? Only recently has Touchstone's lasciviousness received thoughtful recognition, John Palmer (1946) seeing that the "wooing of Audrey is . . . burlesque and true reflection in nature of the three romantic courtships among which it intrudes" (Knowles 605), while William Empson (1951) links sensuality for the first time with Touchstone's role as fool: "Clowns of course are expected to be lustful as well as to make jokes about lust" (Knowles 605). Other recent provocative commentary focuses on Shakespeare's shaping
470
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
his work to fit the actor Robert Armin. Finally, a suggestion of rising interest in Touchstone may lie in Hans Werner Henze's 1976 guitar composition "Touchstone, Audrey, and William" from Royal Winter Music, which was adapted and used for a ballet in 1986 (Brissenden 80).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources AYLI had no quarto editions during or after Shakespeare's lifetime and appears only in the posthumous 1623 First Folio of his collected works. Brissenden, Alan, ed. As You Like It. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Citations from the play are from this edition.
Secondary Sources Felver, Charles S. Robert Armin, Shakespeare's Fool: A Biographical Essay. Kent State U Bulletin 49.1; Research Series 5 (1961). Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1961. Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare's Motley. 1952. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Knowles, Richard, ed. As You Like It: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. New York: Modem Language Association, 1977. Spevack, Marvin. A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Drama and Character Concordances to the Folio Comedies. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber & Faber, 1935. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays (England: 1370-1500)
David N. DeVries "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide." —Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel As David Bevington writes, ' 'Vice is more appealing than serious moral instruction" (Medieval Drama 798). Or, to put it another way, evil is fun. Throughout the Middle English drama, and particularly in the morality plays, it is evil that gets the laughs. Thus vice is humanized through the agency of comedy, and temptation is made comprehensible and, in a sense, contained precisely because we can laugh at it. Like much medieval humor, the comedy of the vice is rough; and its very roughness indicates something about its social status within the symbolic economy of late medieval English culture. So effective is much of the drama in its work of laughing that some readers have been put off altogether. For instance, one late Victorian apologist for the "moralities" felt compelled to defend the plays by pointing out their moral purpose: "First, and most important, is the reminder that the Morality, though usually exhibiting a most disgusting freedom of language in its scenes of vice, coupled often with a purely animal and sensual joy in the luxury of sin, had as its constant purpose a desire to edify" (Mackenzie, viii). How the plays were able to exhibit appealingly "disgusting" characters and "edify" at the same time is my central topic. As I shall argue, it is the Vice figure himself who does much of the double work of the plays.
472
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
BACKGROUND The coarse scatological nature of much of the Vices' speech draws its energy from its immersion in the language of other "vicious" characters in Middle English literature. Geoffrey Chaucer's Miller, Friar, Summoner, and others are, of course, prominent examples. But William Langland's description of the drunken Gluttony's stumble from the pub is a locus classicus for the motif: There was laughynge and lourynge and 'Lat go the cuppe Bargaynes and beverages bigonne to rise; And seten so til evensong, and songen umwhile Til Gloton hadde yglubbed a galon and a gille. His guttes gonne to gothelen as two gredy sowes; He pissed a potel in a Paternoster-while, And blew his rounde ruwet at his ruggebones ende, That alle that herde that horn helde hir nose after And wisshed it hadde ben wexed with a wispe of firses. {Piers Plowman 5:337345) Gloton proceeds to fall out the door and v o m i t ' 'up a cawdel in Clementes lappe / Is noon so hungry hound in Hertfordshire / Dorste lape of that levynge, so unlovely it smaughte!" (355-357). In short, the scatology of the devil is an ancient and well-attested characteristic of Satan and his retinue. Margaret Jennings encapsulates this aspect of the devil's work, as reported in countless tracts from throughout the Middle Ages, with an image that succinctly captures the quality of "the lower bodily stratum": "Frequently, these demons manifested themselves to the elder monks as dirty pigs spreading excrement amidst the brethren who, when they finally turned from secular to edifying conversation, would have to be cleansed by attendant heavenly spirits" (Jennings 4). The reference to Kent in Belial's speech in the early fifteenth-century morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, also suggests a contemporary relevance: Kent was the center of agitation during the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, and again during Jack Cade's rebellion seventy years later. Thus Kent was often synonymous with rural insurrection. Additionally, in this context, Kent, an extreme southern town with Carlisle as an extreme northern one, also stands as one pole of England—hence all England is implied. The localizing to England anticipates what will also become a common strain in English morality plays: the specifying of a local habitation and a name for evil. Belial's clarion call to his minions again summons the energy of the Vice: Gadyr you togedyr, ye boyis, on this grene! In this brode bugyl a blast w[h]anne I bio we Al this world schal be wood, iwis, as I wene, And to my biddinge bende. Wythly on side
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays
473
On benche wil I bide, To tene, this tide, Al-[w]holy Mankende. (lines 227-234) The whole world will be made mad by his work. The relevance of the localizing specificity noted earlier becomes clear when we recognize that a common theme of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historiography is precisely the extent to which the world seemed to have gone mad. Plague, rebellion, war—these were the common factors of English political and cultural life in the years between 1370 and 1500. As Thomas Walsingham, a monastic chronicler of the times, put it in relation to the Peasants' Revolt in June 1381, "At about this time the kingdom of England suffered—as a chastisement for its sins—a great and unexpected calamity not experienced by previous ages" (Walsingham 132). When Walsingham turns to relate the revolt's outbreak at Bury St. Edmunds, where the rebels "captured Lord John Cavendish, Chief Justice of the kingdom, beheaded him and shamefully placed his head on the pillory in the market-place" (244), and captured and killed the prior of the abbey, Walsingham's fury at the rebels is expressed in language that anticipates some of the descriptions of the diabolical crews of the fifteenth-century stage: On that same Saturday, so general seemed to be the prevailing tempest, God showed the anger of his displeasure in the areas of Suffolk and Norfolk. There He sent as His harbingers of suffering certain wicked angels [per angelos malos], namely some of the most dangerous men from the perfidious inhabitants of Essex; they were angels of Satan [angelis Sathanae] who incited a peaceful and innocent people to disturbances similar to their own, and turned the hearts of the serfs against their lords. (244) In fact, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were fertile ground for apocalyptic movements in literature and society. One of the most famous of Middle English sermons, Thomas Wimbledon's "Redde rationem villicationis tuae," begins by retelling the parable of the vineyard and then allegorically interpreting it. The sermon concludes with a consideration of the coming end of the world. According to Wimbledon, the world had entered the final phase: "The grete Anticrist schulde come in the fourtenthe hundred yeer fro the birthe of Crist, the whiche noumbre of yeeris is now fulfillid not fully twelue yeer and an half lackynge" (Knight 116). He bases his calculations upon an anonymous "doctour in a book that he makith of the ende of the world" (116), though he hedges his bets somewhat: "This resoun put I not as to schewe any certeyn tyme of his comynge, sith y haue not that knowlechynge, but to schewe that he is nyy, but how nyy I wote neuere" (116-117). Earlier in the century, in a poem attributed to Richard Rolle, the poet claimed to hear the trumpet of doom blowing in his ear:
474
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History The beme blawes at owre hand, the dome es fast by. The kyng comes with hys hoste, to fell his enemy; And al the prowde wyth thair boste he demes to dy. My thynkes it rynges in mi nere: "Dede ryse, to be demed!" (Allen 39).
At the end of the century, apocalyptic imagery permeates John Gower's reactions to the Peasants' Revolt in book 1 of Vox Clamantis. It is surely significant that a dramatic form arises that takes as its typical plot the approach of a representative human figure to doom and judgment in a time so tempered by apocalypticism. But the energy of the Vice did not originate in The Castle of Perseverance, nor in the general tenor of apocalypticism. As F. P. Wilson, with ironic understatment, remarked, "The Vice has more ancestors than can be counted on the fingers of one hand" (62). Perhaps instead of ferreting out the innumerable possible sources for this or that aspect of the Vice figure, it would be more useful to sketch out a general picture of the moral system, the moral atmosphere, really, in which such figures took life. The dominant color of such a picture, would be the color of evil. Throughout the medieval period, and especially in the fifteenth century in England, evil was an acknowledged, feared, and pervasive presence. Evil had a comprehensible, if awesome, role in the imaginative economy of the period because it functioned as the necessary pole of the binary structuring principle of that economy's symbolic universe: the story of Satan's ancient battle against the forces of God. As Walsingham's interpretation of the Peasants' Revolt makes clear, that narrative structure conditioned medieval intellectual and theological speculation on all aspects of life. In fact, Satan's appearances in both the Hebrew Genesis and the Christian gospel stories manifest one of the earliest appearances in the European tradition of a possible ancestor for the Vice. It is particularly to Matthew's and Luke's versions of the temptation of Christ that we should turn to find the elements that will recur throughout the later dramatic tradition's development of the Vice figure's seductive arsenal. Satan's temptation of Christ, especially as related by Luke, serves as a paradigm of seduction and refusal against which the typical morality plot can be usefully compared. Luke specifies that Jesus wandered in the desert lacking food and was, hence, in a weakened condition: "And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the desert, for the space of forty days; and was tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended he was hungry" {Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version, Luke: 4:1-2). Satan's first temptation is directed at the physical weakness of the human Christ: "If thou be the Son of God, say to this stone that it be made bread." Christ, of course, refuses with a citation from Scripture. As innumerable commentators have argued, Christ's behavior indicates the first and most powerful line of defense against the Devil: the Bible. Satan's next temptation specifies the territory of his power, a range that, again, we hear echoed through the
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays
475
morality tradition up to Marlowe's Mephistopheles: "And the devil led him into a high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and he said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them" (4:5-7). The world as the arena of the Devil's work is a commonplace throughout Christianity, and of course the body, the flesh, is the portal through which the Devil's enticements enter. In these first two temptations of Christ, then, appear the three elements that will become hypostatized as the prime agents of human corruption: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Thus, in Wisdom, the eponymous character warns Anima, "Ye have thre enmyes; of hem be ware; / The Worlde, the Flesche, and the Fende" (lines 293-294). In the early Tudor play Nature by Henry Medwall, the character Reason amplifies Wisdom's warning in a speech to Man: In suche case and maner of condycyon Is wreched Man here in thys lyfe erthly Whyle he abydeth wythin the garyson Of the frayll carcas and carynouse body, Whom to impugn laboreth incessantly The Worlde, the Flesche, the Enemy—these thre— Hym to subdue and bryng into captyvyte. (Medwall 127) Satan's final temptation of Christ is directed at his vanity: And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and he said to him: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence. For it is written, that He hath given his angels charge over thee, that they keep thee. And that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone. (Luke 4:9-11) Christ again repulses Satan by quoting Scripture and banishes the Devil from his presence. His immediate victory is rewarded by hosts of angels who come to minister to him. But the final line of the episode echoes ominously down the centuries: "The devil departed from him for a time." Here in outline is the plot of the morality: a representative human figure in the weakened condition of his physical state is assailed by tempters offering success and delight in this world. A commentary on this scene from PseudoBonaventure's Meditations on the Life of Christ (a work that Gail McMurray Gibson has called ' 'probably . . . the single most influential literary text [apart from the Bible and apocryphal gospels] upon the vernacular English drama"[10]) specifies the importance of Christ's temptation in terms extraordinarily apt for the morality play: With this example learn from Him how to exercise yourself in these things. Here we are concerned with four things that are good for spiritual exercise and assist
476
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
each other in a marvelous way, that is, solitude, fasting, prayer, and corporal suffering. Through these things we may truly arrive at purity of heart, which is greatly to be desired, for within itself in some way it comprises all the virtues. It includes charity, humility, patience, and all virtues, and the removal of all vices, for with vice and lack of virtue there can be no purity of heart, (xvii, 117) Hence the story of Christ's resistance to temptation is meant to act as an example of the way to find a remedy for the danger of vice. As Robert Potter argues at length, the morality play serves a similar function: In summary, the so-called "vices" of the early moralities are more properly to be seen as agents of temptation, with the ritual function of leading mankind into a state of sin. The opposing function is performed by the so-called "virtues" of the moralities, who have the role of instructing Mankind and leading him to repentance. . . . [The virtues] are remedia or antidotes to the seven deadly sins .. . explicit embodiments of the idea of repentance. (39) In a chapter entitled "Knowing Evil," Wayne Meeks argues that the narrative structure of a battle between vice and virtue renders a moral map that makes comprehensible the apparent confusion of the world. Meeks begins his chapter with a statement that succinctly states the raison d'etre of the morality play: The moral landscape—the picture of reality that, just beneath the level of conscious reflection, shapes our moral institutions—requires dark colors as well as light. We need to know, at some level of awareness, what stands over against that which we take to be right and good. We require explanation for the retarding frictions that sometimes inhibit our affirming the good, some myth to render graphic and plausible the conflicts that arise in our willing. We must, therefore, know about evil. (Meeks 111) As Meeks goes on to describe it, the world of the early Christian was "a bipolar division that was fundamentally moral.... On the one side are God and his 'messengers' or 'angels'; on the other are Satan and his 'demons' " (115). One of the strands that link the early Christian ethos of the Mediterranean and the later Middle Ages is precisely the notion of a divided world, a "divided, apocalyptic universe," as Meeks calls it (117). The belief in a divided universe, in fact, was one of the planks of English Christian faith to survive the Protestant Reformation. We find Calvinist writers in the seventeenth century still warning that demons "appear to men in divers shapes, disquiet them when they are awake; trouble them in their sleeps; distort their members; take away their health; afflict them with diseases" (Calfhill, quoted in Thomas 472). According to another, "The Devil is a name for a body politic, in which there are very different orders and degrees of spirits, and perhaps in as much variety of place and state, as among ourselves" (Thomas 470). The belief that the world is dense with the dangerous lures of a devilish crew
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays
477
suggests a medium out of which the dramatic configurations of virtue battling vice grew. That this plank of faith survived the dissolution of the monasteries indicates one reason for the increasing popularity of the morality play through the sixteenth century. For a more specific source, and one closer to home, for the kinds of language and behavior attributed to the Devil and his minions in the early English moralities, we turn to the Fasciculus morum, a handbook for preachers that was compiled in early fourteenth-century England. It is a long work organized around the Seven Deadly Sins and their respective remedies. It offers a wealth of theological and narrative material for the aspiring preacher to draw upon in composing his sermons. It is to sermons, as G. R. Owst has persuasively argued, that we should turn for both local and global sources for medieval drama (471-547). The dramatists (if we can speak of dramatists in reference to the communal works of the medieval stage), the actors, and the spectators all learned their theology at the foot of the altar. The Fasciculus represents, by the fullness of its coverage, a fairly complete etching of the moral and theological map by which late medieval piety negotiated the battlefield of the divided, apocalyptic universe. Midway through its analysis of sloth, the Fasciculus expatiates for thirty-four pages on "De pugna contra mundum," the battle with the world (Wenzel, Fasciculus 557). The writer identifies the purpose of the section by naming the principal enemies of mankind: "We must now further treat of that spiritual activity which consists in the battle against our three main enemies, that is, the world, the flesh, and the devil" (557). The description of the modus operandi of the world, the flesh, and the Devil anticipates the behavior of the diabolical figures in the morality plays of the next two centuries: First the world and the flesh try to lure us to sin, but the devil tries to min us completely with their help. For the flesh seeks what is soft, the world prepares the wood, and the devil brings fire to it. .. . Further, the flesh is our domestic foe [hostis domesticus] who persuades [suadens] us to seek softness, by lechery and carnal pleasure, by which it pushes us below ourselves. The world is a sophist, a tricky foe [hostis sophisticus] who persuades [suadens] us to seek vain things, by avarice and covetousness, with which he draws us outside ourselves. But the devil is a secret enemy [hostis occultus] who draws [suadens] us the worst, namely to pride, wrath, and envy, with which he lifts us above ourselves. (557)
Siegfried Wenzel has argued in his essay, "The Three Enemies of Man," that by the fourteenth century, the three enemies of humanity ' 'had become at best a structural device and at worst one of those commonplaces which just had to be cited whenever moral matter was being discussed" (66). Wenzel's learned article, tracing the development of the theme through a myriad of texts from the patristic period through the end of the Middle Ages, underscores the fact that the unholy trinity was a code phrase, a convenient tag like "family values" or "welfare queen" from our own moral and political discourse, that masquer-
478
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
aded as serious thinking. The drama, however, employs the three faces of evil in ways that complicate our reactions. It is because the dramatists were sensitive to the dramatic possibilities of the standard tag lines that their work is often so compelling. The writers were able to link such possibilities with other traditional material to render characters of scope and style. For instance, in the passage quoted earlier from the Fasciculus, there is a stress on the persuasive capabilities of the enemies—on their sophistry—that links their methods quite precisely to the admonitions against the dangers of rhetoric, of persuasive language, admonitions that also have an ancient lineage. Mercury, the god of rhetoric, was also, after all, the god of flattery and thieves. Indeed, Mercury appears as Belial's "sidekick" in the Digby Conversion of St. Paul. As the Fasciculus puts it, Satan's power rests in his ability to deceive: "When the devil wants to invade man, he behaves like a flatterer [adulator], who begins by telling a person delightful things so that he can later deceive him more craftily" (Wenzel 604-605). When Mary Magdalene, in the Digby Mary Magdalene, first falters, it is because, as she puts it, Lechery's "tong is so amiabyll devidyd with reson" (Baker, Murphy, and Hall, line 451). One of the chief characteristics of the ancestors of the Vice figure in fifteenth-century morality plays, as in the Tudor Vice himself, is, as F. P. Wilson describes it, ' 'nimbleness of speech" (65). Perhaps the most important of these philological Vice figures is Titivillus, the recording demon. He announces himself in the Towneley Iudicium, or Final Judgment, repeating what had become by the time of the play's composition his identifying tag line, Mi name is tutiuillus, my home is blawen; ffragmina verborum tutiullus colligit horum, Belzabub algorum belium doliorum. (England, lines 249-252) Though modern editors have characterized his words as "gibberish in Latin" (England 375), the Latin phrase appears in innumerable contexts from throughout the medieval period and describes his typical function quite succinctly. Titivillus was one of the demons who paid particular attention to the words people spoke. He was figured as roaming the globe with a sack in which to collect the hurried, mumbled, truncated, or otherwise butchered prayers and ecclesiastical language of religious worshipers. His intention was to spill the contents of his bag at the last doom in order to force the idlers and slothful to confront their own linguistic sins. In other words, he functioned as a kind of monitor, a means to enforce due respect for the language of the orthodox. In addition, the three enemies of man are described in the Fasciculus as domestic and occult. Again, these are characteristics that are played out on the stages of medieval England over and over again. As I have argued, one of the common traits of the depiction of vice in the early moralities is to localize, to
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays
479
domesticate, the tempter by giving him an address, as it were, around the corner. In The Castle of Perseverance, the Devil's span reaches from Carlisle to Kent. In Wisdom, during a Devils' Dance, a company of six jurors from "The quest of Holborn" (721) enter. Later in the play, Understanding, Will, and Mind anticipate scenes of degeneration and sin in contemporary London, specifying Westminster, "the nex terme xall me sore avawnce" (790); St. Paul's; and the city's brothels, anticipated by Will: "Wen I com lat to the cyte / I walke all lanys and weys to myn affynyte; / And I spede not ther, to the stews I resort'' (798-800). It is surely not accidental nor without significance that the scenes of the Soul's sinful degradation are given the local habitations of London. In Mankind (505-515), we find a list of localized place names and people that Eccles's notes inform us are found in and around Cambridgeshire, the probable place of composition. Beyond whatever local associations such names had, they function like the specificity of the London and Westminster references in Wisdom to suggest the contemporary and localized effects of the Devil. The (almost certainly) monastic authors of these plays are situating vice in a particular context. This localizing goes back to a fragment of the earliest surviving English morality, Pride of Life, where Mirth, a proto-Vice figure, embarks on a journey, "Hen to Berewik opon Twede" (Davis, line 285). The Towneley Iudicium is interesting in this regard in that it combines the localizing with a particularly marked attention to social and political matters. As the final trumpet is sounded, the demons discuss answering the call and decide to follow the famed "watlyn strete" (126) to judgment. When Titivillus joins them, he expands on his identification by informing the demons of his function in terms that resonate with political energy: I was youre chefe tollare, And sithen courte rollar, Now am I master lollar, And of sich men I mell me. (211-214) The terms "tollare," "courte rollar," and "master lollar" may be glossed as "tax-gatherer," "officer of court records," and "Lollard, heretic." Although Jennings questions the gloss of Lollard for lollar, preferring instead to ' 'mutter or mumble" (60), she admits that these lines and much of the speech of the demons are filled with "political and social satire" (60). It is worth remembering that the royal tax collectors, "tollares," sent through the kingdom to collect Richard IFs poll tax were the spark that ignited the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, and that taxation remained a vexing issue for the English polity throughout the period. In fact, Titivillus promises that, in addition to the "fals swerars" (279), the "rasers of the fals tax / and gederars of greyn wax" (282-283; Bevington glosses the latter group as "green [i.e., fresh] wax on their bogus commissions," 647) will "with us won in hell for ever more" {Medieval Drama 281).
480
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The earliest surviving complete English morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, was compiled sometime between 1400 and 1425 somewhere in the east Midlands (Eccles x-xv). The play describes the fall and subsequent redemption of Humanum Genus, or Mankind. In fact, this is the basic plot of most of what we have come to call morality plays. As Bevington puts it, "We can define the morality play as the dramatization of a spiritual crisis in the life of a representative mankind figure in which his spiritual struggle is portrayed as a conflict between personified abstractions representing good and evil. The plot most commonly found in morality plays is that of a soul-struggle in which the mankind hero succumbs to vice but is finally restored to grace" {Medieval Drama 792). In addition to the paradigmatic plot, The Castle of Perseverance contains many elements that were repeated, echoed, adapted, and copied through the following centuries. Chief among these elements, as Bevington's comments suggest, are the band of "personified abstractions" who do battle. It is in the evil group that we find the dramatic seeds for the Vice figure. Belial's first words encapsulate the purpose of the Vice figure, which is expressed in wonderfully alliterative exuberance: Now I sitte, Satanas, in my sad sinne, As devil dowty, in draf as a drake. I champe and I chafe, I chocke on my chinne, I am boistows and bold, as Belial the blake. What folk that I grope, they gapyn and grenne. Iwis, fro Carlylle into Kent my carpinge they take! Bothe the bak and the buttoke brestith al on brenne; With werkys of wreche I werke him mikyl wrake; In woo is al my wenne. In care I am cloyed, And fowle I am annoyed But Mankinde be stroyed By dikys and by denne. (196-208) This speech is a perfect expression of the Vice's nature: the frantic, frenetic activity; the topsy-turvy subversion of the normal ("In woo is al my wenne"); the pervasiveness of his influence; and the self-consciousness of his purpose— all these qualities extend right through the Vice tradition up to Iago. In addition, the focus on the "material of the lower bodily stratum" (20), as Mikhail Bakhtin put it, indicates a common preoccupation of the Vice figures, and the very one that worried our Victorian reader (Mackenzie 368-436). Later in The Castle of Perseverance, during the first assault of the vices upon the virtues (an assault that is repulsed with flowers, itself a somewhat comic gesture), Invidia exclaims: "Al mine enmite is not worth a fart; /1 schite and schake al in my schete!" (2208-2209). The whole section, in fact, is permeated with
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays
481
the "lower bodily stratum" and its functions. In Mankind, the vices' attack on Mercy's "Englysch Laten" (124) demonstrates both the lower bodily focus and the way that the vices typically subvert orthodox language. For instance, this speech by Nowadays indicates one possible attitude toward Lydgatean-style poetry and preaching: I prey yow hertyly, worschyppull clerke, To have this Englysch mad in Laten: ' 'I have etun a dyschfull of curdys, Ande I have schetun yowr mowth full of turdys." Now opyn yowr sachell wyth Laten wordys Ande sey me this in clerycall manere! (lines 129-134) This passage also initiates the scatological and frankly obscene banter these characters share. When Nought answers Nowadays's demand, he is rebuffed and rejoins with the information that he has a pardon from "Pope Pokett" that offers absolution if Nowadays "wyll putt yowr nose in hys wyffys sokett, / Ye xall have forty days of pardon" (lines 144-146). In Mankind's first speech the flesh is described as "that stynkyng dungehyll" (204). He also characterizes the relationship between the soul and the body using the age-old metaphor of varieties of master/servant relationships, including a proverb: "Wher the goodewyff ys master, the goodeman be sory" (200; cf. Eccles's note). Mercy's speech develops the contrast using the metaphor of a horse and his rider (242), suggesting that the rider should not overfeed the horse, both of which images are picked up in a comic and nearly obscene manner by New Gyse apparently somewhere offstage: Ye sey trew, ser, ye are no faytour. I have fede my wyff so well tyll sche ys my master. I have a grett wonde on my hede, lo! and thereon leyth a playster, Ande another there I pysse my peson. And my wyf were yowr hors, sche wolde yow all to-banne. (245-49) In the Digby Mary Magdalene, "an hethen prest and his boye" (stage direction) conduct a parodic mass for "Mahond" in gibberish Latin that does, however, contain recognizably paronomastic phrases. They perform the service for the king and queen of Marseilles, who have been loyal, if somewhat insecure, devotees of Mohammed. The "service" begins with the boy reading from "Lectio Mahowndis, viri fortissimi Sarasenorum" (The Book of Mohammed, most mighty man of the Saracens). The rest of the "reading" consists of words rhyming on "urn," including "Gormondorum alocorum," "fartum cardiculorum," "Slaundri stroumppum," "castratum ratirybaldorum," and so on. The boy concludes his reading with an English "benediction,"
482
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History Howndes and hogges, in hegges and helles, Snakes and toddes mott by yowr belles; Ragnell and Roffin, and other, in the wavys, Grauntt yow grace to die on the galows. (1198-1201)
Later in the play Mary Magdalene works to convert the king and queen from their false religion to her truth by presenting her own reading from the Bible, an adaptation of the Hexaemeron as proof of the power of the Christian ''Verbum" (1481-1526). As we have seen, the use of the Bible to counteract the influence of the diabolical forces is a widespread motif that has as its ultimate precedent Christ's rebuffing of Satan's three temptations in the wilderness. CRITICAL RECEPTION As should be clear, the Vice figure in all of his guises was an important figure in the imagination of late medieval culture. Tempe Allison, in an important article from 1924, has drawn the main lines of the Vice figure's role in terms of the psychomachian battle at the heart of medieval morality. As an example, Allison cites a report from the "Gild of the Oratio Domini" (789) from York in 1389. The report indicates one stated purpose of the moralities: As to the beginning of the said gild, be it known that, once on a time, a play setting forth the goodness of the Lord's Prayer was played in the city of York: in which play all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn, and the virtues held up to praise. This play met with so much favour that many said:—"Would that this play could be kept up in this city, for the health of souls and for the comfort of the citizens and neighbors." Hence, the keeping up of that play in times to come, for the health and amendment of the souls, as well of the upholders as of the hearers of it, became the whole and sole cause of the beginning and fellowship of the brethren of this brotherhood. And so the main charge of the gild is to keep up this play to the glory of God, the maker of the said prayer, and for the holding up of sins and vices to scorn. (789) Clearly the purpose of the morality play was to serve as a didactic as well as an entertainment spectacle. The gist of Allison's article is that the Vice figures function to make the human central character vulnerable to sin; that the Vices represent what patristic writers call the vitia, the human weaknesses that precede sin: "Vitium . . . is the appetite or desire for sin which precedes or provokes consent. . . vice was regarded as a weakness in the nature of man which preceded actual sin, and further, that it was this weakness which provoked man's consent to sin" (796797). Although Morton Bloomfield cautions against this (364, n. 135), it does seem to fit the pattern of many of the plays, like, for instance, Medwall's Nature, where Sensuality and Worldly Affection—the Vice figures—prepare the way for Pride and the other sins' eventual (although temporary) victory over Man.
The Vice Figure in Middle English Morality Plays
483
One could argue that this continues as the function of the Vice figure through Shakespeare, where Iago is the Vitium, and Othello commits the sinful act.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Baker, Donald C , John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, eds. The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and e Museo 160. EETS os 283. London: Oxford UP, 1982. Bevington, David, ed. The Macro Plays, The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind: A Facsimile Edition with Facing Transcriptions. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. . Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Davis, Norman, ed. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments. EETS ss 1. London: Oxford UP, 1970. Eccles, Mark, ed. The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind. EETS os 262. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. England, George, ed. The Towneley Plays. EETS es 71. London: Kegan Paul, 1897. Contains Iudicium. Gray, Douglas, ed. The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Includes Mankind. Medwall, Henry. The Plays of Henry Medwall. Ed. Alan H. Nelson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980. Skelton, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. John Scattergood. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
Secondary Sources Allen, Hope Emily, ed. English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit ofHampole. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963. Allison, Tempe E. "The Paternoster Play and the Origin of the Vices." PMLA 39 (1924): 789-804. Ashley, Kathleen M. "Titivillus and the Battle of Words in Mankind." Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975): 128-150. Bevington, David M. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984. Bloomfield, Morton. The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature. 1952. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1967. Cox, John D. "The Devil and Society in the English Mystery Plays." Comparative Drama 28 (1994-1995): 407^138. Cushman, L. W. The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature before Shakespeare. Studien zur englischen Philologie 6. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900. Davenport, W. A. Fifteenth-Century English Drama: The Early Moral Plays and Their Literary Relations. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982.
484
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
. "Peter Idley and the Devil in Mankind." English Studies 64 (1983): 106-112. Gibson, Gail McMurray. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglican Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Happe, P. "The Vice: A Checklist and an Annotated Bibliography." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 17-35. . "The Vice and the Folk-Drama." Folklore 75 (1964): 161-193. Harris, Max. "Flesh and Spirits: The Battle between Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Drama Reassessed." Medium Aevum 57 (1988): 56-64. Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version. Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1971. Jennings, Margaret. "Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon." Studies in Philology 74.5 (1977): 1-96. Katzenellenbogen, Adolf. Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art from Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1964. Kimminich, Eva. "The Way of Vice and Virtue: A Medieval Psychology." Comparative Drama 25 (1991): 77-86. Knight, lone Kemp, ed. Wimbledon's Sermon Redde Rationem Villicationis Tue: A Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1967. Mackenzie, W. Roy. The English Moralities from the Point of View of Allegory. Harvard Studies in English, vol. 2. Boston: Ginn, 1914. Mares, F. H. "The Origin of the Figure Called 'the Vice' in Tudor Drama." Huntington Library Quarterly 22 (1958): 11-29. Meeks, Wayne A. The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Owst, G. R. Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London: Routledge, 1975. Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner's, 1971. Walsingham, Thomas. Historia Anglicana. Ed. and trans. R. B. Dobson. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381. London: Macmillan, 1983. . Historia Anglicana. Vol. 2. Ed. H. T. Riley London: Rolls Series 28, 1863— 1864. Wenzel, Siegfried. "The Three Enemies of Man." Medieval Studies 29 (1967): 47-66. , ed. and trans. Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher's Handbook. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989. Wickham, Glynne. The Medieval Theatre. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Wilson, F. P. The English Drama, 1485-1585. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. Withington, Robert. ' 'Braggart, Devil, and 'Vice': A Note on the Development of Comic Figures in the Early English Drama." Speculum 11 (1936): 124-129.
The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature (England: 1500)
David N. DeVries This entry provides a detailed look at the Vice figure in operation in fifteenthcentury English drama, and specifically at the manner in which one play, Henry Medwall's Nature, presents the conventions of this figure.
BACKGROUND One of the major characteristics of the Vice figure is his ability to twist and turn language in order to twist and turn the moral compass of a person. The Bible provides a number of sources for this aspect of the Vice. According to Ecclesiastes: The words of the mouth of a wise man are grace: but the lips of a fool shall throw him down headlong. The beginning of his talk is a mischievous error. A fool multiplieth words. A man cannot tell what hath been before him: and what shall be after him, who can tell him? The labour of fools shall afflict them that know not how to go to the city. (Douay-Rheims 10:12-15) For countless exegetes through the Middle Ages the city referred to in the last line was the Heavenly Jerusalem. According to the standard reading, the perversion of folly presented a mortal danger to all who wished to make the journey to that city, to all who desired Christian salvation. St. Paul supplemented the warning with an extended discussion of the upheaval stultitia, or foolishness, wrought in the world. The specific focus of his anger is those thought to be wise, and his condemnation leads to a ringing hyperbolic catalogue of vicious-
486
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ness, a veritable dramatis personae for the medieval morality play. I quote at length because Paul's words echoed so powerfully across the medieval stage: For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the tmth of God in injustice: because that which is known of God is manifest to them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of fourfooted beasts, and of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonor their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the tmth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, having the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they that consent to them that do them. (Rom. 1:18-32) Much of the literature and drama of late medieval England was concerned with investigating and demonstrating the relevance of Paul's powerful indictment for local conditions. In Langland's Piers Plowman, for instance (B version), Dame Studie reproaches Wit for teaching "flaterers or to fooles that frenetike ben of wittes . . . With swiche wise wordes to wissen any sottes" (10:6, 8). She identifies such fools as those who "sheweth by hir werkes / That hem were levere lond and lordshipe on erthe, / Or richesse or rentes and reste at hir wille / Than alle the sooth sawes that Salamon seide evere" (10:13-16). According to Langland, vicious foolishness, or foolish vice, was linked to an attachment to earthly things, to an inordinate love for and desire for things of this world. The honest preacher is contrasted with Harlotes for hir harlotrie may have of hir goodes, And japeris and jogelours and jangleris of gestes; Ac he that hath Holy Writ ay in his mouthe
The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature
487
And kan telle of Tobye and of the twelve Apostles Or prechen of the penaunce that Pilat wroghte To Jesu the gentile, that Jewes todrowe— Litel is he loved or lete by swich a lesson sheweth, Or daunted or drawe forth—I do it on God hymselve! But thoo that feynen hem foolis and with faityng libbeth Ayein the lawe of Oure Lord, and lyen on hemselve, Spitten and spuen and speke foule wordes, Drynken and drevelen and do men for to gape, Likne men and lye on hem that leneth hem no yiftes— Thei konne no moore mynstralcie ne musik men to glade Than Munde the Millere of Multa fecit Deus. (10:30-44) Langland goes on to bemoan the influence such have on ' 'kyng . . . knyght. . . canon of Seint Poules" (10:46). The Macro play Wisdom carries such specificity of evil into its very structure. The play is divided into four scenes by Mark Eccles. The first and final scenes are nearly static representations of divinely ordained order, while the middle two scenes are the busy intercourses of the Vice figures at their work of temptation. W. A. Davenport's summary of the visual and poetic power of the play's structure is instructive: It is poetic drama and a set of patterns and pictures. As with the individual parts, so with the whole play: the constmction is symmetrical. In the final scene the repeated procession, the return to Wisdom and Anima and to the theme of the love between God and the Soul reinforce the impression of the drama as a patterned dance of figures and themes. The central scenes of the play are simply an expansion of the ideas in Wisdom's initial teaching, as if the Soul has to re-live the loss of first perfection brought by Adam's sin: so the scenes grow, like flashbacks or a re-living of experience in a dream. Of the medieval moral plays, this is the most suggestive and evocative of the sense that experience is a constant repetition of an existing pattern of being. (91) The play ends with the effects of the second fall, the actual sins, removed not through any explicit action, but through meditation and calling to memory the lessons of the opening scene. The power of sin is localized, to London and to an agent, the Devil; and it is contained in the graphic and dramatic spacing of the play. That is, sin is encompassed within the framing scenes of original cohesion and recapturing of that cohesion through the acts of penance and the acts of confession.
DESCRIPTION AM) ANALYSIS The linking of flattery, vain words, worldly ambition, evil intention, and domestic influence in William Langland's "Harlotes" or Meditations on the Life
488
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
of Christ and the Fasciculus Morum provides a pattern of diabolic behavior that is consistent throughout the morality plays' depiction of the vicious forces of Satan. As a way to demonstrate how all these elements cohere in the drama, I would like to examine Henry Medwall's Nature. The play comes into being on the cusp of the modern world, its nature firmly, if paradoxically, rooted in the past and the future. The obvious debts of Nature's opening speech need little rehearsal, though, as its editor Alan Nelson suggests, its commonplace qualities situate the play in a definite tradition (Medwall 195). Nature concludes her speech to Man with a commission that she is placing him under the authority of Reason and Sensuality: Lo here Reason to goveme the in thy way And Sensualyte upon thyn other syde. But Reason I depute to be thy chyef gyde, Wyth Innocencye that ys thy tender noryce, Evermore to wene the from thappetyte of vyce. (101-105) This serves to locate Sensuality's place in the camp of vice. When Nature reiterates her charge to follow Reason, Sensuality pipes in a protest that plays on the layered meanings of the word "nature": What, lady Nature! Have I none intresse As well as Reason or Innocency? Thynke ye thys, lady, a good processe, That they are avaunced and I let go by? Ye knowe ryght well that I ought naturally Byfore all other to have of hym the cure— I am the chyef perfeccyon of hys nature. (169-175) The three versions of the emphasized word in this excerpt decline nature through the semantic field of its Middle English connotations and mark a trajectory from the divinely instituted subdeacon (as Alan of Lille described her, followed by Chaucer and numerous other writers) through the fallen state of creation and humanity. That Sensuality identifies herself as the "chyef perfeccyon of hys nature" suggests Man's fallen, bodily nature. She goes on to enumerate her "powers" over Man's "sely body" as the engine, as it were, that drives his corporeal nature. In the process she continues the playful double-entendre language games: without me, she claims, Man would "But be as other incensate bodys be—/ In mouche wurs case than wormes of the grownde / In whyche unneth any tokyn of lyfe ys founde" (180-182), lines that, of course, emphasize the eventual fate of the body in the wormy mold. Nature, however, reiterates her advice to Man that he follow Reason, and in so doing she drops the other shoe: "Thou shalt be the fyrst that shall repent / If ever thou fle Reason and sue Foly" (229-230): hence Sensuality is linked to
The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature
489
Vice and Folly, which are themselves treated as interchangeable (cf. line 272). The foolishness of vice, or the foolishness into which vice leads, plays on a standard interpretation of the intellectual nature of the battle between the forces of good and evil, an interpretation of some importance for a study of the medieval English Vice and the Fool. For instance, in The Castle of Perseverance, Mundus identifies his trusted allies as Lust, Foly, and Veynglory; as Voluptas says, "Whoso wil with Foly rewlyd be, / He is worthy to be servaunt here, / That drawith to sinnys sevene" (484-486). Stultitia's (Foly's) first speech, "Schal nevere man in werld moun wende / but he have help of me / That am Foly, fer and hende" (509-511), expresses the sense that worldly success is foolish, and that the world is the proper arena of the foolhardy. This sententia is given a handy exposition in William Langland's Piers Plowman in the passage quoted earlier. The message continued to echo through the fifteenth century and later. The early Tudor play Magnyfycence by John Skelton includes as one of the vice characters Foly, and his influence on the world is summed up by one of Foly's allies, Crafty Conveyaunce: "It is wonder to se the worlde about, To se what foly is used in every place" (1326-1327). In Medwall's Nature, the world is revealed after Nature leaves Man to the care of Reason and Sensuality. They fall to a debate about whether Reason or Sensuality should have the upper hand. Reason's retort to Sensuality's claim repeats the relationship between the various senses of nature outlined earlier, and further situates Sensuality's nature in the domain of vice and folly: And where thou sayst thou art so necessary That man wythout the can have no lyvng, As in that poynt we shall not myche vary. I wote thou art necessary to hys beyng, But be thou sure, that ys not the very thyng That maketh hym to appere so wonderouse And to be in hys nature so noble and precyouse. It ys a thyng that doth ryght far excede All other perfeccyons and vertuouse naturall, For Sensualyte in very dede Is but a meane whyche causeth hym to fall Into moche foly and maketh hym bestyall So that there ys no dyfference in that at the lest Bytwyxt man and an unresonable best. (281-294) Reason argues that the essence of Man's gift from God, the gift that sets Man apart and makes him to God's "owene semblaunce" (297), is reason and, more specifically, the ability to discern "Suffysant dyfference bytwyxt good and bad, / Whyche ys to be left and whyche ys to be had" (300-301). Innocencye claims, following St. Paul, that Mankind will fall: "Ys onys ye assent to foly in your mynde" (504). Ironically, the Worlde describes the life into which Man is going
490
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
as "a straunge place / Wherin he ys but alyand and straunger" (561-562). The echo of Augustine's land of unlikeness is ironic, because the Worlde is looking to appoint a special guide for Man, and the guides the Worlde designates are those "Be they never so vycyouse or abhomynable" (585): "Worldly Affeccyon" (595) and Sensuality (581-622). This is typical of the Vice figure: he echoes orthodoxy in a heterodox fashion. Once Man accepts the Worlde's advice, Worlde's intentions are expressed with less irony and more directly vicious intention: I tell you, every man wyll despyse you As long as ye be ruled by Innocency. To folow suche counsell yt ys but foly, For he can neyther good neyther evyll, And there he ys taken but for a dryvill. (632-636) Hence the language of the Vice figures becomes more directly subversive of the orthodox intention. Up to this point their language reflected a partial understanding of such words as natural, good, evil, folly, and so forth; but from this point in the play there is no longer any ambiguity or partiality. Once Innocence (and, as the editor wisely suggests, Reason) departs, Sensuality completes the subversion by consigning them "to the devyll of hell" (656). Hence the Fall of Man is signaled by a perversion of the language of orthodoxy and an increasing coarseness and directness in the language of the vicious. As the second part opens, Man falls again after Reason delivers a homily on our life as a castle besieged by the World, the Flesh, and the Devil (enemy). Immediately Bodily Lust and Worldly Affection rouse Man's interest in the stews, Margery (an earlier love interest), and a new woman. Bodily Lust describes his interruption of the new woman in her lustful adventure with some other man: I rang her knyll That waked her from her slepe. I gave her a pele for her frendys soulys— A man myght have hard the noys from Poulys To the farthest ende of Chepe. (275-279) Like so many other examples from the moralities, this serves to localize the scene of sin, in this case to a mile-long stretch of market streets and stews that has a long history in the social dynamics of medieval London. It is there that we should leave the Vice figure, on the verge of his coming into being, walking from "Chepe" onto the Tudor stage. The bulk of Medwall's play follows the basic plot of the morality through the regeneration of Man until Reason can pronounce a benediction upon him:
The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature
491
Than art thou fully the chyld of salvacyon! Have good perseveraunce, and be not in fere: Thy gostly enemy can put the in no daunger, And greter reward thou shalt therfore wyn Than he that never in hys lyf dyd syn. (1401-1405)
CRITICAL RECEPTION As we have seen, the Vice figure's lineage is long and, in a fashion, honored. He carries the energy and humor of his precursors, if he lacks a little in the theological and moral gravity that undergird their laughter. The Devil and his servants served a purpose on the medieval stage and in the medieval imagination beyond the relief they might have offered in the form of laughter. The words of Keith Thomas gesture toward the weighty place of Satan, and of the Vice figure more broadly: Many social purposes were served by this belief in an immanent devil. Satan was a convenient explanation for strange diseases, motiveless crimes, or unusual success. . . . By providing a sanction for conventional morality they discharged the same purpose as the other stories of "judgments" and "providence." . . . Above all the immanent Devil was an essential complement to the notion of an immanent God. The early Hebrews had no need to personify the principle of evil; they could attribute it to the influences of other rival deities. It was only the triumph of monotheism which made it necessary to explain why there should be evil in the world if God was good. The Devil thus helped to sustain the notion of an allperfect divinity. (466-467)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources Baker, Donald C , John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, eds. The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and e Museo 160. EETS os 283. London: Oxford UP, 1982. Bevington, David, ed. The Macro Plays, The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind: A Facsimile Edition with Facing Transcriptions. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972. . Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Davis, Norman, ed. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments. EETS ss 1. London: Oxford UP, 1970. Eccles, Mark, ed. The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind. EETS os 262. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. England, George, ed. The Towneley Plays. EETS es 71. London: Kegan Paul, 1897. Contains Iudicium.
492
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
Gray, Douglas, ed. The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Includes Mankind. Medwall, Henry. The Plays of Henry Medwall. Ed. Alan H. Nelson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980. Skelton, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. John Scattergood. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
Secondary Sources Allison, Tempe E. "The Paternoster Play and the Origin of the Vices." PMLA 39 (1924): 789-804. Ashley, Kathleen M. "Titivillus and the Battle of Words in Mankind." Annuale Mediaevale 16 (1975): 128-150. Bevington, David M. From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984. Bloomfield, Morton. The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature. 1952. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1967. Cox, John D. "The Devil and Society in the English Mystery Plays." Comparative Drama 28 (1994-1995): 407-438. Cushman, L. W. The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature before Shakespeare. Studien zur englischen Philologie 6. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900. Davenport, W. A. Fifteenth-Century English Drama: The Early Moral Plays and Their Literary Relations. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982. . "Peter Idley and the Devil in Mankind." English Studies 64 (1983): 106-112. Gibson, Gail McMurray. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglican Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Happe, P. "The Vice: A Checklist and an Annotated Bibliography." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 17-35. . "The Vice and the Folk-Drama." Folklore 75 (1964): 161-193. Harris, Max. "Flesh and Spirits: The Battle between Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Drama Reassessed." Medium Aevum 57 (1988): 56-64. Holy Bible, Douay Rheims Version. Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1971. Jennings, Margaret. "Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon." Studies in Philology 74.5 (1977): 1-96. Katzenellenbogen, Adolf. Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art from Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1964. Kimminich, Eva. "The Way of Vice and Virtue: A Medieval Psychology." Comparative Drama 25 (1991): 77-86. Mackenzie, W. Roy. The English Moralities from the Point of View of Allegory. Harvard Studies in English, vol. 2. Boston: Ginn, 1914. Mares, F. H. "The Origin of the Figure Called 'the Vice' in Tudor Drama." Huntington Library Quarterly 22 (1958): 11-29. Meeks, Wayne A. The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Owst, G. R. Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
The Vice in Henry Medwall's Nature
493
Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London: Routledge, 1975. Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner's, 1971. Walsingham, Thomas. Historia Anglicana. Ed. and trans. R. B. Dobson. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381. London: Macmillan, 1983. . Historia Anglicana. Vol. 2. Ed. H. T. Riley London: Rolls Series 28, 1863— 1864. Wenzel, Siegfried. "The Three Enemies of Man." Medieval Studies 29 (1967): 47-66. , ed. and trans. Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher's Handbook. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989. Wickham, Glynne. The Medieval Theatre. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Wilson, F. P. The English Drama, 1485-1585. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969. Withington, Robert. "Braggart, Devil, and 'Vice': A Note on the Development of Comic Figures in the Early English Drama." Speculum 11 (1936): 124-129.
Mae West
(United States: 1893-1980)
Marlene San Miguel Groner BACKGROUND The daughter of a prizefighter and a corset model, Mae West began her stage career in an amateur-night performance as Baby Mae when she was eight. The crowd, as West later recalled in her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, roared its approval and mirth when she refused to come out on stage to perform her song and dance routine without a spotlight (9-10). Leaving school at thirteen, she was already an established vaudeville performer as well as, with her mother's approval and encouragement, sexually active. Thus while on tour and still underage, she secretly married a dancer named Frank Wallace early in 1911 to protect herself from scandal should she become pregnant even though she never lived with him and even went on to deny the relationship until the 1930s. More important for West's career was her Broadway debut in A la Broadway, which also took place in 1911. Although the show closed after only nine performances, West received good reviews for her comic and undirected use of dialect. Intuitively understanding that she needed a distinct stage personality, one that would be indelibly linked to her, West was already developing the earthy persona that would become her trademark, would transform even her most simple statements into sexual innuendo, and would lead to trouble with critics, censors, and police. In 1918, while playing the lead in the musical Sometimes, she was the first to introduce white audiences to the infamous shimmy dance that she had learned by visiting black nightclubs in Chicago. Despite the shock and titillated attention she received for this performance and others during
Mae West
495
the early 1920s, West realized that she needed to hone her style rather than rely on fad, fashion, or mere shock value to retain her audiences. Thus in 1926, she adapted John J. Byrne's Following the Fleet, renaming it Sex and causing New York newspapers to refuse advertising for a show so titled. The show was a melodrama focusing on the lives of prostitutes in New York's Bowery. Although it presented no overt sexuality, certainly no nudity, and no obscene language and was a roaring success among New York audiences despite the advertising ban, West was arrested and convicted of injuring the morals of minors a year after its opening. She served ten days in prison; nonetheless, Sex, with its prostitute heroine, became the prototype of all of West's subsequent work. Pushing at the envelope of current sexual mores, Sex examined sexuality in a realistic yet comic manner, one that did not take itself seriously while still rising above mere burlesque. Even as she was performing in Sex, West wrote and produced the first realistic portrayal of male homosexuality. Entitled The Drag, the play was performed to overflow audiences in Paterson, New Jersey, since New York's censorship restrictions made its topic and its tolerance of homosexuality taboo. From 1926 to 1929, West wrote and performed in The Wicked Age (1927), a beauty-contest expose; Diamond Lil (1928), a nostalgic presentation of the 1890s Bowery; and The Pleasure Man (1928), another melodrama that included homosexual portrayals and also resulted in another prosecution for immorality that West won this time. In 1930, West began to look beyond Broadway. She wrote a novel called Babe Gordon, later retitled The Constant Sinner, and a novelization of Diamond Lil. The former provides the first popular treatment of black Harlem. While West was by this time certainly successful, she was not yet a star, and so in 1931, she accepted an offer from Paramount Studios to make films. Although she was tempted to return to Broadway after many idle months, she ultimately was given a role in Night after Night (1932) and allowed to rewrite the dialogue to fit her persona. An immediate hit, West was credited in 1933 with saving Paramount Studios from financial ruin, first with an adaptation of Diamond Lil renamed She Done Him Wrong, with Gary Grant in his first starring role, and then with Fm No Angel, for which she wrote the entire screenplay. Following these in 1934 was Belle of the Nineties, for which she also wrote the screenplay and which is notable because it broke the color barrier; West insisted on using a black jazz band in the movie, and since she had a clause in her contract granting her final artistic approval for the finished film, she got her way. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS Throughout her professional career, Mae West challenged the social and sexual mores of her time. That she was so successful came solely from the selfconscious irony that permeated her stage and film persona. The persona, a quintessential bad girl with a heart of gold, is first and foremost theatrical. Emerging as it does from the vaudeville tradition, it is a caricature. Interestingly,
496
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
most often her characters are actors or performers, so that we are constantly aware that West is a performer playing a performer. That this performer is no less than a star is always quickly made self-evident. First, her entrance is always delayed, allowing for anticipation to build in the audience. For example, in She Done Him Wrong, a sixty-five-minute film, West's entrance as Diamond Lil is delayed a full ten minutes. In these ten minutes, we hear a wide variety of men express their desire and admiration for Lil, and we learn that these men equate power and success with possessing her. We also catch a very brief glimpse of a nude portrait said to be of her that her current man, Gus Jordan, has hanging in his saloon—directly over the free lunch counter. Besides building anticipation, this technique, repeated throughout her films, establishes her characters as beautiful and captivating through language rather than through any sustained, direct evidence of our senses. Yet what do we see when West finally appears? We see a vamp, a woman literally encased or armored in corsets, bustles, long sleeves, and feathers. Often dressed in the garb of the 1890s, West wears clothing that conceals; indeed, for so long were West's legs hidden behind long skirts that rumor had it that she was a female impersonator and not a woman at all. Yet the pinched waists coupled with West's characteristic hand on hip or body stroking accentuate the role she is playing—that of a star, that of an object of desire; indeed, not a woman at all. That she is role playing is reinforced by the many scenes showing her dressing or preparing to dress or undress as she plots for the fulfillment of her desires. Further, she is surrounded by elaborate sets suggesting that she is a bat, a rose, a spider, a predator. She is not threatening, however, because she is so clearly an object, a caricature even to herself as she narcissistically looks at herself in mirrors and in pictures of herself that she carries. The appearance of licentiousness is merely that: appearance. She mimics the poses and gestures of the seductress, and the artifice distances the viewers and makes for sexual parody. The artifices of dress and set are reinforced by the artifice of her verbal wit and manner. Simple lines of bawdy double entendre, such as "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better"; "I used to be Snow White but I drifted"; or "Between two evils I always pick the one I've never tried before," are reinforced by the visual caricature she presents; thus everything West says assumes a humorous sexual subtext that reinforces one of the central tenets of West's oeuvre: that while sex may be an expression of love, it is also most emphatically fun and sometimes even profitable; further, it is an integral part of all that we do. Indeed, censors had a difficult time determining which of the many innocuous lines in West's scripts should be censored in anticipation of her racy delivery. Regardless of delivery, the lines Mae West gives her heroines often serve to attack standard morality by presenting a character who has a distinctly different moral perspective. In She Done Him Wrong, Diamond Lil fully recognizes who and what she is. In her first scene, she greets a woman and her young child and
Mae West
497
is told "You're a fine woman." She replies, "Finest woman walking the streets." Clearly she is not, as she puts it, "walking the streets," but as Ruth Rosen points out, she knows that "all too often, a woman had to choose from an array of dehumanizing alternatives: to sell her body in a loveless marriage contracted solely for economic protection, to sell her body for starvation wages as an unskilled worker, or to sell her body as a 'sporting woman.' Whatever the choice, some form of prostitution was likely to be involved" (xvii). Indeed, it is this understanding that makes Lil wish that her portrait over the free lunch counter be moved. All the men who surround her hope to possess her and thus establish their prowess as men, but in reality all they succeed in doing is enriching Diamond Lil. The diamonds they shower on her in return for her favor are worth over a million dollars, we are told, and this wealth, in turn, ironically ensures that Lil will retain her independence; it allows her, as she puts it, to keep the wolf at the door as well as to pick and choose her lovers because she does not, ultimately, need any of them. Further, she fully recognizes her symbolic worth: she acknowledges this to Cary Grant, a detective posing as a Salvation Army captain. As long as men perceive her as the symbol of their success, "they can," she confides, "be had." He and all men can be "had" because she plays their game, allowing them to believe that they can, in fact, own her, that they control her destiny. But contrary to all the songs that she and others perform suggesting that it is men who always do women wrong—cheating, abandoning, lying—Lil knows that men succeed in these wrongs only because women are economically and socially conditioned to allow the mistreatment to continue. As Colette explains, West "alone, out of an enormous and dull catalogue of heroines, does not get married at the end of the film, does not die, does not take a road to exile, does not gaze sadly at her declining youth in a silver-framed mirror in the worst possible taste; and she alone does not experience the bitterness of the abandoned 'older woman.' She alone has no parents, no children, no husband. This impudent woman is, in her style, as solitary as Chaplin used to be" (62-63). Nonetheless, Colette might have added, West triumphs. More important, in the acquisition of power, money, and respectability, her characters overtly acknowledge the link between gender and power and show that poor, uneducated women, those most frequently kept outside of mainstream society, can achieve success without fundamentally changing themselves or their morality, a much more subversive message than one that simply celebrates sexuality. Even at the end of She Done Him Wrong, when it looks as though Lil has barely escaped going to prison and has acquired a respectable man whom she is in fact attracted to, she clearly has no intention of changing her ways. When Cary Grant successfully captures all the villains in the movie, leaving him the most powerful man by default, he places a diamond ring on Lil's finger, claiming her as his prize, and playfully chides her, calling her "a bad girl." Her reply, "You'll find out," tells us that he will indeed.
498
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
CRITICAL RECEPTION Successful as West's early films were, they and other works like them underwent increasing attack from official America. By 1936, the Hayes Office was censoring the language and plots of films as they were actually being made. Subsequent West films, Klondike Annie (1936), Go West, Young Man (1936), Every Day's a Holiday (1938), and even the memorable My Little Chickadee (1940) with W. C. Fields, so carefully monitored, lacked in West's judgment and the judgment of later film historians the verve of her earlier ones. Thus West returned to Broadway in 1944 with a lavish production of Catherine the Great, followed by Come on Up (1946) and Diamond Lil (1949) on London's West End and on Broadway. By 1954, no longer physically able to star in a play, West began touring in a nightclub act with a chorus of musclemen all seemingly devoted to West the Sex Goddess. Later, in 1958, West made her television debut singing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with Rock Hudson at the Academy Awards. She was still shocking audiences; her "Person to Person" interview after the publication of her autobiography was banned in 1959 as being too suggestive, although she did go on to have guest roles in a number of television shows, including "Mr. Ed." When she was seventy-five years old, West was offered a role in the screen adaptation of Gore Vidal's camp novel Myra Breckinridge (1968), and although the film was not well received overall, being poorly edited and in spots seemingly incoherent, it encouraged West to do one final film, Sextet (1978), which was soundly panned as a series of cliched sexual innuendoes. Well into her eighties, West was visibly too frail for the role of sex goddess determined to save the world from the violence and control bred by sexual repression. Additionally, the script, lacking any characterization, presented no reasons that West's character would be attractive to the hordes of young men who surround her. Sextet was West's last performance; a series of strokes resulted in her death in November 1980. Although Mae West has often been credited with doing more than anyone else to introduce censorship to American films, it is equally true that she consistently wrote and performed works that defied contemporary mores by presenting people enjoying unpunished sexual lives, and that she opened the doors for others to follow. Furthermore, a long line of performers owe a debt to her, including Joan Blondell, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, Barbra Streisand, Madeline Kahn, Dolly Parton, Bernadette Peters, Bette Midler, and Madonna. Revivals of her plays, including her earliest work Sex, continue, and she remains famous not only for her flamboyant public personality but for her consistent attacks on social hypocrisy, sexual double standards, and pretension.
Mae West
499
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources West, Mae. Babe Gordon. 1930. Retitled The Constant Sinner. New York: Sheridan House, 1949. . Diamond Lil. 1932. New York: Sheridan House, 1949. . The Drag. In Three Plays by Mae West, ed. Lillian Schlissel. New York: Routledge, 1997. . Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959. . The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West. Ed. Joseph Weintraub. New York: Putnam, 1967.
Secondary Sources Cashin, Fergus. Mae West: A Biography. Westport, CT: Arlington House, 1981. Colette. Colette at the Movies: Criticism and Screenplays. Ed. Alain Virmaux and Odette Virmaux. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Eells, George, and Stanley Musgrove. Mae West: A Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1982. Mellen, Joan. Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film. New York: Horizon, 1973. Rosen, Ruth. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Tuska, Jon. The Films of Mae West. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1973. Ward, Carol M. Mae West: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood, 1989.
The Yankee
(United States: Nineteenth-Century Theater)
Jack Hrkach BACKGROUND The stage Yankee represents the earliest attempts to portray the "American" character in the theater. As the United States created itself, the question of what it meant to be American craved attention, and one of the most popular answers was offered in the form of the Yankee, a seemingly dim-witted fellow from somewhere in New England, endowed with common sense and often even guile, but also basic honesty and continuing pride in being American. The Yankee was a caricature, a clown. In his definitive study Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850, Francis Hodge states that if the picture of the Yankee was an external one, and not always flattering, it was a symbol of the American democracy (4-5). Arthur Hobson Quinn describes the Yankee as a figure in whom most Americans proudly noted "traits they liked to believe were national, while they were quite willing to laugh at his ignorance, credulity, and uncouthness on the stage" (294). Constance Rourke, in her study American Humor, argues that writers and actors who developed the Yankee character used the caricature to mock old values and to define, to an extent, new ones. To her, the Yankee is "a symbol of triumph, of adaptability, of irrepressible life—of many qualities needed to induce confidence and self possession among a new and unamalgamated people" (35). The origins of the stage Yankee are obscure. Rourke writes that although there seem to be some connections to the Yorkshire yeoman of British literature, the Yankee seemed to leap into existence from almost nowhere, first as the subject of the song "Yankee Doodle," then onto the stage in Royall Tyler's
The Yankee
501
The Contrast, and soon into the heart of America, an established folk figure ("Rise" 117-118). DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The Contrast (1787), universally accepted as the first significant treatment of the Yankee on stage, offered the first detailed comparison between a quiet, tough, straightforward American set of values, embodied in Colonel Manly, and the foppish, effete and affected British values, exemplified by Dimple. The farcical subplot mirrored the main action by contrasting Jonathan, Captain Manly's servant, with Jessamy, Dimple's valet. In one sense, he is similar to Arlecchino, the servant or zanni in commedia dell'arte who, mirroring the main action of the play, is a naive bumpkin from the country who is easily led around. But unlike Arlecchino, Jonathan is well served by his common sense and honesty in his dealings with Jessamy throughout the play. Jonathan was easily the most popular character in Tyler's play. Colonel Manly produced a noble but rather dull brand of the "American." Jonathan's bumblings and misunderstandings, on the other hand, engaged the audience hilariously and served as a comic commentary on American attitudes and on the evolution of its culture (Richardson 50-51). For example, in the most famous scene in the play, Jonathan describes to Jessamy his wandering into a strange place. When Jessamy tells him that the place was a theater, Jonathan denies it vehemently: "Why, did you think I went to the devil's drawing room? . . . Oh! no, no, no! you won't catch me at a playhouse, I warrant you" (Tyler 47). He then describes what he saw: ' 'They lifted up a great green cloth and let us look right into the next neighbor's house" (Tyler 47). Jonathan is finally convinced that he has been to a theater, that the "great green cloth" was the curtain, and that the people in "the neighbor's house" were players. Light dawns on Jonathan, and he says, "Why, I vow, now I come to think on't, the candles seemed to turn blue, and I am sure where I sat it smelt carnally of brimstone" (Tyler 47). Shortly after this wonderfully metatheatrical scene, Jonathan sings "Yankee Doodle'' to a young woman who is out to trick him, then kisses her. When she slaps him, Jonathan decides that the city is not for him, and that he will take his pleasures back home: ' 'If this is the way with your city ladies, give me the twenty acres of rock, the Bible, the cow, and Tabitha, and a little peaceable bundling" (Tyler 49). At the end of the play Jonathan rushes to the defense of Charlotte, a woman who has been attacked by Dimple. When Colonel Manly calms him by saying that Dimple does not wish to hurt her, Jonathan replies, "Gor! I—I wish he did; I'd shew him Yankee boys play, pretty quick.—Don't you see [to Dimple] you have frightened the young woman into the histrikesT' (Tyler 58). Thus was the Yankee character established. Jonathan is a clown, a country boy lost in the city, neither sophisticated nor intellectual and with no desire to
502
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
be. He opts for simplicity and loyalty, knowing right from wrong, and acting on it. As silly as Jonathan seems, Kent Gallagher emphasizes that his ' 'laudable characteristics of patriotism, loyalty to Manly, honesty, constancy, and frugality are never seriously questioned by rendering them ludicrous through jest" (64). Later Jonathans might vary in some of these traits, but Tyler's play created the prototype. Jonathan was certainly the best-written role in The Contrast, but it was also well played by the major comic talent in America at that time, Thomas Wignell, the first of many actors who saw the opportunities in portraying stage Yankees. Indeed, after The Contrast, the actor, more often than the playwright, would bring the stage Yankee into prominence. The Yankee character was attempted in several plays during the early years of the nineteenth century, most notably Jonathan Postfree; or, The Honest Yankee (1807) by Lazarus Beach, Love and Friendship; or, Yankee Notions (1809) by A. B. Lindsley, and The Yankey in England (1815) by David Humphreys. The "Yankey" in Humphreys's play adds an element not present in Royall Tyler's Jonathan and is described by the author as "made up of contrarities— simplicity and conniving" (quoted in Hodge 54). Jonathan of The Contrast had not a conniving bone in his body, but Humphreys's Yankee began to evolve into a more complex creature. In the preface to his play Humphreys described the Yankee in detail, which can serve as a basic checklist of Yankee characteristics: Inquisitive from natural and excessive curiosity, confirmed by habit; credulous, from inexperience and want of knowledge of the world; believing himself to be perfectly acquainted with whatever he partially knows; tenacious of prejudices; docile, when rightly managed; when otherwise treated, independent to obstinacy; easily betrayed into ridiculous mistakes; incapable of being overawed by external circumstances; suspicious, vigilant and quick of perception, he is ever ready to parry or repel the attacks of raillery, by retorts of rustic and sarcastic, if not of original and refined wit and humor, (quoted in Hodge 54)
Several events occurred during the mid-to-late 1820s that solidified and popularized, even mythologized, the Yankee character. The Yankee became the subject of essays and poems, including Thomas Chandler Haliburton's Sam Slick and James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers, and most notably Seba Smith's stories of Major Jack Downing (Meserve, Outline 68-69). The costume Smith described for Downing became common wear for stage Yankees as well: "a white bell-crowned hat, a coat with long tails that was usually blue, eccentric red and white trousers, and long boot-straps" (Rourke, American Humor 25), not unlike the costume of Uncle Sam. The political climate was right for the burgeoning of the Yankee, especially after Andrew Jackson was elected president. Jackson's validation of the common American and his emphasis on nationalism found an excellent mouthpiece in the stage Yankee (Meserve, Outline
The Yankee
503
66). Ironically, this uniquely American character was not fully realized in the theater until a British performer, Charles Mathews, impersonated the Yankee in 1824. A few years later an American comedian, James Henry Hackett, exploited Mathews's material to make the Yankee immensely appealing to American audiences; and in 1825 one of the most successful and ubiquitous Yankee vehicles, Samuel Woodworth's The Forest Rose, or, American Farmers, was first produced. Charles Mathews (1776-1835) offered his impersonations of the Yankee to British audiences in 1824, after an extended tour of America. Mathews was an actor of some merit, but excelled more at evenings that he called "At Homes" than in the standard comic repertoire. In these solo tours de force he impersonated all sorts of different character types, using stories, songs, and sketches with tremendous skill and humor (Hodge 60-62). For his "At Home" in 1824, which he called A Trip to America, Mathews created a "monopolylogue" in which he played several of the types he had met on his journey, including "Colonel Hiram Peglar, a Kentucky shoemaker; Agamemnon, a poor, runaway Negro; Jonathan W. Doubikins, a real Yankee; Monsieur Capote, a French emigrant tailor; and Mr. O'Sullivan, an Irish improver of his fortunes" (Meserve, Emerging 295). Of all the characters he introduced in A Trip to America, Mathews's delineation of Jonathan was so successful that Richard B. Peake, a successful English comic playwright, wrote a farce called Jonathan in England in 1824, aided by Mathews, who also played the Yankee role. In these two pieces Mathews introduced to British audiences his version of a "real" American: a clumsy country buffoon who is somehow able to drive a hard bargain. Charles Mathews's caricature of the "Yankee" offended many Americans, who were only just beginning to define themselves and did not appreciate this British mockery of their traits. One American comic actor, however, saw in Mathews's portrait an opportunity to celebrate the Yankee while still poking mighty fun at the type. For James Henry Hackett (1800-1871), the Yankee offered an opportunity to present "the American common man of the 1830s raised to the artificial, caricatured level of farce comedy" (Hodge 81-82). Hackett borrowed Mathews's style and even several of his pieces but created his own version of Yankees, whom he described in his notes: "Enterprising and hardy— cunning in bargains—back out without regard to honour—superstitious and bigoted—simple in dress and manners—mean to degree in expenditures—free of decep.—familiar and inquisitive, very fond of telling long stories without any point" (quoted in Hodge 91). In the late 1820s Hackett's star began to rise, especially with his own adaptation of British writer George Colman's play Who Wants a Guinea?, which he retitled John Bull at Home, or Jonathan in England. Hackett replaced Colman's character Solomon Gundy with Solomon Swap, a Yankee trader from New Hampshire hijacked and brought to England by the British navy. He opened the piece in December 1828 and made a tremendous success with it, retaining it in his repertoire until the mid-1830s, when competition from other Yankee actors
504
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
caused him to drop most of the stage Yankees he had played from his repertoire. It was easy enough for Hackett to do this, because he had made other great successes as the comic Dutchman, Rip Van Winkle; the backwoodsman Nimrod Wildfire in The Lion of the West (a character type many scholars find closely related to the Yankee); and perhaps his most famous role, Sir John Falstaff in Henry the Fourth, Part I (Hodge 136-139). Samuel Woodworth's The Forest Rose (1825) is an important play for reasons other than its elaboration on the Yankee theme. Richard Moody refers to it as "the nineteenth-century Oklahoma!" pointing out that no play was more popular in America throughout the antebellum years (147). As a Yankee piece, Woodworth's play offered a more fully drawn stage Yankee than had yet appeared on the stage. Jonathan Ploughboy in The Forest Rose was more tied to the plot of the play than his predecessors, and he had been "promoted" from servant status to a shopkeeper, a small businessman who knows how to drive a sharp bargain. He sells a little bit of everything, and when he is accused of trying to cheat or "shave the natives," he replies, "No, sir; everybody shaves himself here. There is no barber nearer than Paris" (Woodworth 161). The Yankee as a man who loves a bargain became much more vital and integral to the character of the stage Yankee from The Forest Rose forward. Jonathan Ploughboy still exhibits the Yankee traits of naive common sense and honesty, but it becomes harder to reconcile these with the money put in his hand by a clever British dandy who wants him to lure a young woman to a rendezvous where she will lose her honor. In true Yankee fashion Jonathan deliberates the pros and cons in a long speech: I don't calculate I feel exactly right about keeping this purse; and yet, I believe, I should feel still worse to give it back. Twenty-three dollars is a speculation that an't to be sneezed at, for it an't to be catch'd every day. But will it be right to keep the money, when I don't intend to do the job? Now if I was at home, in Taunton, I would put the question to our debating society; and I would support the affirmative side of the question. (Woodworth 169)
He goes on to enact the debate and concludes that even though "some folks would keep it, out and out. I wouldn't serve a Negro so" (Woodworth 169). Having made the "right" decision, Jonathan helps to save the day. The character of Jonathan Ploughboy was seized upon by several of the finest Yankee delineators, each of whom was well equipped to fit the role to his particular specialties. Three of the most important of these stage Yankees were George Handel Hill, Danforth Marble, and Joshua Silsbee. George Handel "Yankee" Hill (1809-1849) began his career in 1826 doing solo readings and songs in the style of the Yankee. It was not until 1832, while performing at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, that Hill performed in The Forest Rose, so successfully that he was declared the major exponent of the Yankee style, easily dethroning Hackett as king of the genre. Hill kept
The Yankee
505
Jonathan Ploughboy as a staple of his repertoire for the next fifteen years, playing the role throughout America and making a tremendous impression in England in 1836 (Moody 147-149). If Hill was the most successful stage Yankee, Dan Marble (1810-1849) became a very popular exponent of the Yankee character as well, and like Hill, he made good use of The Forest Rose, performing Jonathan regularly in his career from 1837 at the Park Theatre, New York, until his last appearance on the stage in 1849. Marble, however, was more frequently associated with a series of plays about Sam Patch, such as Sam Patch, or, The Daring Yankee and Sam Patch in France (Meserve, Heralds 106). He was also well known for his portrayal in Cornelius Logan's The Vermont Wool-Dealer (1838) of Deuteronomy Dutiful, a country trader who sells "notions of all sorts by hullsale" (quoted in Hodge 234). He proposes marriage to a rich heiress, Amanda Waddle, who makes a fool of him by agreeing to put on a veil and steal away with him. The veiled woman Deuteronomy actually meets is Amanda's maid, Betty. Amanda tells Deuteronomy she loves another, and although foiled, he Dutiful-ly buys champagne for the wedding (Meserve, Heralds 92-93). Josh Silsbee (1813-1855) made as much use of The Forest Rose as any of the other Yankee performers. He first played the role in 1842, but after the deaths of Marble and Hill, Silsbee was touted as the best Yankee living and played Jonathan Ploughboy at London's Adelphi Theatre for 123 consecutive performances, the longest run of any Yankee play (Hodge 240). Silsbee borrowed freely from the repertoires of Hackett, Hill, and Marble and did very well for himself, even taking the Yankee farther afield than any other Yankee delineator in Cornelius Logan's The Celestial Empire, or, Yankee in China. Still, Hodge assesses him as merely "a copyist of the first order" (241) and not one of the creators of new Yankee material. CRITICAL RECEPTION Silsbee's death in 1855, however, marked the end of the Yankee heyday. There were several reasons for this. By the 1850s the stage had become glutted with Yankee plays and players, and Yankee roles that had little to do with the action turned up in all sorts of other plays, including Gumption Cute, comic relief in Uncle Tom's Cabin (Hodge 256-259). Most of the Yankee plays were vehicles, or "momentary" plays, as Walter Meserve {Heralds 89-90) calls them, in that they were never meant to endure, but rather to provide a clever performer the chance to shine in a specialty. At approximately the same time, playwrights began writing scripts that used Yankee traits, but in a more serious, or at least more sentimental, and less comic manner. Although portrayed as a New Englander, the Yankee character came to represent traits of all Americans, traits that many "liked to believe were national" (Quinn 94), traits that seemed to embody the common man in the age of Jackson. The stage Yankee offered a naive, simplistic definition of what it was to be
506
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
American versus anybody else on earth. It was a clown's view, but a highly popular one, and the caricature offered many insights into the "contrarities" of the American character. Other American "types" began to appear on the stages of America during the antebellum years, such as the backwoodsman, the American Indian, the Negro, and the immigrant (especially Irish and German) characters; none of them was as universally enjoyed as the Yankee (Hodge 5). Although few Yankee plays are revived with any regularity today, interest in the Yankee character has not completely disappeared—witness the stage manager in Our Town; Ali Hakim, the peddler in Oklahoma!; and very recently Forrest Gump in the South—perhaps because many Americans still enjoy viewing their country, at least on occasion, from this ingenuous viewpoint.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources English and American Drama of the Nineteenth Century: American Plays (1831-1900). New York: Readex Microprints, 1965-1984. Tyler, Royall. The Contrast. In Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909, ed. Richard Moody. Cleveland: World, 1966. 33-59. Wells Henry Willis, ed. Three Centuries of Drama: American (1741-1830). New York: Readex Microprints, 1953-1962. Woodworth, Samuel. The Forest Rose. In Dramas from the American Theatre, 17621909, ed. Richard Moody. Cleveland: World, 1966. 155-174.
Secondary Sources Gallagher, Kent. The Foreigner in Early American Drama: A Study in Attitudes. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Hodge, Francis. Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850. Austin: U of Texas P, 1964. Meserve, Walter J. An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. . Heralds of Promise: The Drama of the American People during the Age of Jackson, 1829-1849. New York: Greenwood, 1986. . An Outline History of American Drama. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1965. Moody, Richard, ed. "Critical Essays: The Forest Rose, or American Farmers, Samuel Woodworth.'' In Dramas from the American Theatre, 1762-1909. Cleveland: World, 1966. 143-154. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951. Richardson, Gary A. American Drama from the Colonial Period through World War I: A Critical History. New York: Twayne, 1993.
The Yankee
507
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. 1931. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1953. . "The Rise of Theatricals." In "The Roots of American Culture" and Other Essays, by Constance Rourke, ed. Van Wyck Brooks. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1965. 60-160.
Zanni
(Europe: 1550-1750)
James Phillips BACKGROUND The origin of the zanni has been debated, although the term itself probably derives from the name Giovanni, the most common name in the northern mountains of Italy. Giovanni was often corrupted into Zoan or Zuano in the Lombard dialect. Allardyce Nicoll disagrees with this theory, however, arguing that zanni derived from the nominative form of sannio, the name of the classical fool. Zanni was used both as a character name, as in the scenarios collected by Museo Correr, or as a label for all of the comic servant characters, as in the scenarios of Flaminio Scala. The zanni were direct descendants of the Atellan sannio. These were the fools of ancient improvisational theater, and many of their conventions, notably masks and slapstick, are found in the zanni. There is also some evidence that the zanni descended in part from the devils of medieval religious drama. In the sixteenth century, T. Garzoni insisted that the zanni were imitations of the peasants of northern Italy, specifically those from the town of Bergamo. Supporting this, some early scenario texts list the zanni as "Bergamask servant" (Nicoll 265). After Bergamo was conquered by Venice in the sixteenth century, the trade that had kept alive the city and many of the towns of northern Italy was strangled by the flood of cheap goods from the East that passed through Venice and Genoa. The people of the smaller cities and towns were left without any source of income, and many fled to the cities to become servants, the very cities that had caused their ruin. These Bergamese peasants were known for their strength and carrying abilities. Garzoni said of them: 'The facchini ["carriers of bun-
Zanni
509
dies"] are as tough as timber, but not bulky, the sturdiest people you ever saw, and except for a few who have become lean with hardship, they are as round as the bottom of a barrel and as fat as the broth of macaroni" (Smith 56). The early commedia actors imitated these servants both in appearance and status. They of course exaggerated these traits, but essentially the zanni of northern Italy were imitations of the facchini. Nicoll states that the first reference to zanni was made in 1514, although as a nondramatic character. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the zanni were firmly established in Italy. In 1553 Girolamo Rofia wrote of "the zanni whom you have every evening in the piazza at your town." There was mention of zanni at the 1555 Roman Mardi Gras. There was even a song, "Canto di Zanni e Magnifichi," written by Grazzini in 1559, that describes the work of the zanni. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The zanni almost always appear in pairs, although in // baron todesco, of the Correr collection, there is only one, and in Li duoi scolari, of the same series, there are three. Within the normal pairing there is always one witty character, // furbo, and one stupid character, // stupido. E. Petraccone said that // furbo "must be clever, apt, witty, keen; one that can perplex, cheat, trick, and delude everyone." Of // stupido he said that he "must be foolish, clumsy, dull, so that he cannot tell his right hand from his left" (quoted in Nicoll 265). This pairing may owe its origin to the composition of Bergamo. Built on a hill, it has two levels, and the people from the upper level were reputed to be more lively and witty than the people from the lower level. // furbo controlled and manipulated the plot and relied less on improvisation because the resolution often depended on him. Everyone from his master to the young lovers sought his advice, though his character was of lower status. He was not without his own comic routines, but it was always necessary that he come back to the story. // stupido, by contrast, used his stage time primarily for slapstick comedy and amazing acrobatic feats. The zanni, like most commedia characters, wore leather masks during their performances. The early masks were bald and featured warts, like those of the sannio. Nicoll supposed that these warts may have been borrowed from the wartcovered masks of medieval devils. The length of the nose on these masks was said to correspond directly to the stupidity of the character. The early zanni costume consisted of a simple white shirt, loose pantaloons, and a peaked hat. // stupido carried a wooden slapstick, or batte, with which he would attack other characters. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the zanni characters had become more individualized, and each character developed his own costume, with each actor adding his own personal touches. Lazzi, prepared comic routines that were inserted into scenarios as needed, were often the property of the zanni. The lazzi were usually either sexual, scatological, or violent. For example, the lazzo of the enema has Pantalone unwill-
510
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
ingly receiving an enema from a zanni; in the lazzo of the chair, Arlecchino pulls a chair out from under the Captain just as he sits. The zanni would use the lazzi either as an interruption to the plot or to cover the mistakes of other actors. Each zanni had his own set of trademark lazzi. These were rarely written down by the commedia companies, because the actors did not want their lazzi to be copied by other actors. Most of what is known about lazzi comes from observers' descriptions and simple lazzi notations within the scenario outlines. The most famous pair of zanni was composed of Brighella (il furbo) and Arlecchino (// stupido). In fact, Pierre Louis Ducharte goes so far as to say that all the zanni characters derived from this pairing. Arlecchino's probable origin is the French religious drama of the Middle Ages, which incorporates elements of the spirit to create the fiery dragon's mouth, la chappe d'Hellequin. Herlichini is such a spirit of the dead from the eleventh century and evolves finally into a comedie character who then becomes a comic type in French secular drama. Nicoll records that the entertainer Alberto Ganassa, who visited Paris in the late sixteenth century, took the character back to Italy and re-created him as a Bergamese servant. As evidence, Nicoll notes that the first reference to an Italian Arlecchino occurs in 1572 when Ganassa took the stage name Zanni Arlecchino. This may also explain the use of the French word Harlequin or Arlequin in the name of this character. Thus Arlecchino undoubtedly owes at least part of his origin to France, but he also was influenced by the Roman theater's characterization of African slaves. The lenones of the Roman theater were the portrayers of African slaves, and similarities exist between their black mask and the black half-mask of the early Arlecchino. As an innocent fool, Arlecchino juxtaposed extreme stupidity with wisdom and grace and was a master of physical comedy and acrobatics. Luigi Riccoboni described Arlecchino onstage: "The acting of the Harlequins before the seventeenth century was nothing but a continual play of extravagant tricks, violent movements, and outrageous rogueries. He was at once insolent, mocking, inept, clownish, and emphatically ribald" (Nicoll 125). The actors who portrayed Arlecchino were frequently described as performing amazing physical tricks. Tomasso Vicentini, a popular French Arlequin in the early eighteenth century, was said to be able to climb the proscenium, walk on his hands around the balcony railing, and descend down the other side. An early wood carving from the Receuil Fossard shows an Arlecchino posed on stilts. Other carvings from that same collection show various Harlequins performing handstands, flips, cartwheels, and other acrobatic tricks. Arlecchino's traditional costume of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries consisted of trousers and jacket of multicolored patches and a black half-mask. The patches were irregular, and the colors varied depending upon the actor. By the end of the seventeenth century these patches had become more regular, taking a diamond or lozenge shape. Arlecchino also wore a small hat
Zanni
511
with a feather or foxtail, a tradition in classical theater. The tail was placed on characters as a sign of ridicule. Arlecchino's influence on commedia is extensive. Several characters descended from him, including Trivelino, Truffaldino, and Bagatino. There were also many famous portrayers of Arlecchino. Alberto Ganassa remains the sixteenth century's most famous Arlecchino player. In the seventeenth century Giuseppe Domenico Biancolelli, Giovan Battista Andreini, Evaristo Gherardi, and Girolamo Garavin were renowned for their portrayals. Antonio Vincentini, Ignacio Casanova, and Antonio Constantini played Arlecchino in the first half of the eighteenth century (Nicoll 155). Tracing the influence of Arlecchino's partner Brighella is much more difficult. While the characters of Beltrame, Scapino, Mezzetino, and Gradelino are generally said to have descended from Brighella, the only famous portrayer of Brighella was the seventeenth-century actor Domenico Bononcini. Brighella's name most likely derived from briga (trouble), brigare (to intrigue), and imbrogliare (to deceive or confuse). Ducharte traces his evolution to the Roman slave Pseudolus, but undoubtedly his character was influenced by the servants of Bergamo. While he was a well-known character, Brighella does not appear in many of the extant scenarios. Such an anomaly exists perhaps because the character now known as Brighella often was played under the name of Buffetto. His French counterpart, Briguelle, was famous in the late seventeenth century, which lends further evidence to Brighella's influence. The Brighella of the Renaissance was a master trickster and con artist. After he stole every purse that he found, he would spend every cent at the tavern. He was rarely liked, but always respected and feared, and he had a contempt for all men no matter how foolish or wise. By the end of the Italian Renaissance, he had become less of an adventurer and more of a valet. Though milder in temperament, he remained a first-class liar. His traditional costume consisted of a jacket and trousers with a green braid at the seams. As his character changed, his costume took on a white coat, while the trimmings of green on the trousers remained. Brighella was frequently seen carrying a guitar, and often he serenaded other characters. The zagne were the female counterparts of the zanni. The zagne were also comic servants with functions similar to those of the zanni. Although the zagne were always women characters, at times they were portrayed by male actors. The zagne were famous for their malicious wit and gossipy gaiety. They frequently served as confidantes and messengers for the lovers. While they were capricious toward the zanni, they often ended up marrying them. Their costumes consisted of brightly colored bonnets, skirts, and aprons. Franceschina, Oliva, Spinetta, and Colombina were the most famous of the zagne.
512
Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History
CRITICAL RECEPTION The zanni, most notably Arlecchino and Pedrolino, appear in every one of Flaminio Scala's collection of scenarios, // Teatro delle favole rappresentative. This collection, the first known to exist, dates to 1611 and shows the early importance of the zanni characters. The zanni are also present in every other major scenario collection, including the Locatelli, Correr, Biancolelli, and Adriani texts. The zanni are also seen in every major collection of drawings and carvings of the commedia dell'arte. The Receuil Fossard in particular contains several carvings featuring nameless zanni as well as Harlequins. The collection at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris also contains several prints of various zanni. The dramatic tradition of Europe is unmistakably stamped by the zanni. The zanni influence the writings of both Shakespeare and Moliere. Nicoll claims that descendants of zanni characters are found in both Love's Labour's Lost and Twelfth Night, and Mel Gordon finds the stage business of Stephano and Trinculo in The Tempest to be reminiscent of the zanni. Moliere uses both the zanni and zagne as inspirations for his comic servants, and Scapino even appears as the title character in Les fourberies de Scapin. Gordon further suggests that the ganassas of Spanish Carnaval festivities were named after the famous sixteenthcentury harlequin, Alberto Ganassa. The theater of Eastern Europe also owes a debt to the zanni, as both the commedia dell'arte and the zanni were leading forces in the development of the German, Polish, and Russian theater traditions. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Gordon, Mel, ed. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia delVArte. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983. Scala, Flaminio. Scenarios of the Commedia delVArte: Flaminio Scala's II teatro delle favole rappresentative. Trans. Henry Salemo. New York: New York UP, 1967.
Secondary Sources Ducharte, Pierre Louis. The Italian Comedy. Trans. Randolph Weaver. New York: Dover, 1966. Nicoll, Allardyce. Masks, Mimes, and Miracles. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. Sand, Maurice. The History of the Harlequinade. 2 vols. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968. Smith, Winifred. The Commedia delVArte. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964.
Selected General Bibliography Adamson, Joe. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Agee, James. "Comedy's Greatest Era." In Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. 1-21. Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. New York: Modem Language Association, 1983. Arden, Heather. Fools' Plays: A Study of Satire in the Sottie. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Armin, Robert. A Nest of Ninnies. 1608. In Fools and Jesters with a Reprint of Robert Armin's A Nest of Ninnies, ed. John Payne Collier. London: Shakespeare Society, 1842. Armstrong, Archibald. Archy's Dream, Sometimes lester to his Majestie; but exiled the Court by Canterburies malice. With a relation for whom an odde chaire stood voide in Hell. London, 1641. Askenasy, J. J. M. "The Functions and Dysfunctions of Laughter." Journal of General Psychology 114.4 (October 1987): 317-334. Ausubel, Nathan. A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. New York: Crown, 1948. Babcock, Barbara. "Arrange Me into Disorder: Fragments and Reflections on Ritual Clowning." In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984. Babcock-Abrams, Barbara. " CA Tolerated Margin of Mess': The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered." Journal of the Folklore Institute 9 (1975): 147-86.
514
Selected General Bibliography
Baker, Roger. Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. New York: New York UP, 1994. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. 1965. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. 1959. Cleveland: Meridian, 1963. Barish, Jonas A., ed. Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Battenhouse, Roy. "Falstaff as Parodist and Perhaps Holy Fool." PMLA 90 (1975): 3252. Beaumont, Cyril W. The History of Harlequin. London: Beaumont, 1926. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. Birdsall, Virginia Ogden. Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970. Bloom, Harold, ed. William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House, 1992. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Boyd, Tom W. "Clowns, Innocent Outsiders in the Sanctuary: A Phenomenology of Sacred Folly." Journal of Popular Culture 22.3 (1988): 101-109. Brater, Enoch, and Ruby Cohn, eds. Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990. Briggs, Katharine Mary. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 1959. Bright, William. A Coyote Reader. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bristol, Michael. Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, 1985. Bums, Edward. Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. Busby, Olive Mary. Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama. London: Oxford UP, 1923. Calderwood, James L. To Be or Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in ' 'Hamlet.'' New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. Clausius, Claudia. The Gentleman Is a Tramp: Chaplin's Comedy. Berne: Lang, 1989. Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1962. , ed. Samuel Beckett: "Waiting for Godot": A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1987. Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966. Cox, Harvey. The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969. Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982.
Selected General Bibliography
515
Cushman, L. W. The Devil and the Vice in the English Dramatic Literature before Shakespeare. Studien zur englischen Philologie 6. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900. Disher, M. Willson. Clowns and Pantomimes. 1923. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968. Doran, John. The History of Court Fools. London, 1858. Dorcy, Jean. The Mime. New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1961. Dover, Kenneth J. Aristophanic Comedy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. Ducharte, Pierre Louis. The Italian Comedy. Trans. Randolph Weaver. New York: Dover, 1966. Duckworth, George E. The Nature of Roman Comedy. 1952. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. 1509. Trans. John Wilson. 1668. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Rev. ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Everson, William K. The Films of Laurel and Hardy. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1967. Fletcher, Ian, ed. Romantic Mythologies. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Atheneum, 1967. . Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. U of Toronto P, 1967. Garry, Jane. "The Literary History of the English Morris Dance." Folklore 94 (1983): 219-1228. Gerhring, Wes D. Charlie Chaplin: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983. . The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987. . W. C. Fields: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984. Giles, Cynthia. The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore. New York: Paragon House, 1992. Goldsmith, Robert Hillis. Wise Fools in Shakespeare. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1955. Green, Martin, and John Swan. The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Greene, William Chase. "The Spirit of Comedy in Plato." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 31 (1920): 63-123. Gross, Theodore, ed. The Literature of American Jews. New York: Free Press, 1973. Guiley, Rosemary. The Mystical Tarot. New York: Signet, 1991. Gurr, Andrew The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. Halli well, J. O., ed. Tarlton's Jests, and News out of Purgatory: With Notes, and Some Account of the Life of Tarlton. London: Shakespeare Society Reprints, 1844. Happe, Peter. "Fansy and Foly: The Drama of Fools in Magnyfycence." Comparative Drama 21A (Winter 1993-1994): 426-452. Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987. Havelock, Eric A. "The Socratic Self As It Is Parodied in Aristophanes' Clouds." Yale Classical Studies 22. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1972. 1-18. Herford, C. H., and Percy Simpson. Ben Jonson: The Man and His Work. 11 vols. 19251952. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Heywood, John. The Play of the Wether. In A Critical Edition of ' 'The Play of the
516
Selected General Bibliography
Wether" by John Heywood, ed. Vicki Knudsen Robinson [Janik]. New York: Garland, 1987. Hillman, Richard. Shakespearean Subversions: The Trickster and the Play-Text. London: Routledge, 1992. Hirschfeld, Magnus. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress. Trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. A translation of Die Transvestiten. Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910. 2 Aufl., Leipzig: "Wahrheit" F. Spohr, 1925. Hodge, Francis. Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850. Austin: U of Texas P, 1964. Holland, Norman. The First Modern Comedies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959. Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare's Motley. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Howe, Irving, ed. Jewish-American Stories. New York: New American Library, 1977. Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. New York: Schocken, 1974. Huizinga, Johan. Erasmus and the Age of Reformation. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. . Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Jantz, Ursula. Targets of Satire in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Salzburg, Austria: Institut fur Englische Sprache and Literatur, Universitar Salzburg, 1978. Josefsberg, Milt. The Jack Benny Show. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977. Jung, Carl. "On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure." In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, by Paul Radin. 1956. New York: Schocken, 1972. 195-211. Kaiser, Walter Jacob. Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963. Kenner, Hugh. Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Kerenyi, Karl. "The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology." In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, by Paul Radin. 1956. New York: Schocken, 1972. 173-191. Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: Knopf, 1975. Kincaid, James. Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Knight, Alan. Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983. . "The Medieval Theater of the Absurd." PMLA 86 (1971): 183-189. Konstan, David. Roman Comedy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983. Kritzman, Lawrence. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Krupat, Arnold, ed. New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Leach, Robert. The Punch and Judy Show: History, Tradition, and Meaning. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Methuen 1974. MacCann, Richard Dyer. The Silent Comedians. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993. Maltin, Leonard. The Great Movie Comedians, from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. New York: Bell, 1982. . Movie Comedy Teams. New York: New American Library, 1970.
Selected General Bibliography
517
Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Maxwell, Ian. French Farce and John Heywood. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1946. McCaffrey, Donald W. Four Great Comedians: Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Langdon. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968. Mic, Constant. La commedia dell'arte. Paris: Schiffrin, 1927. Morley, John David. The Feast of Fools. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. Murray, Marian. Circus! From Rome to Ringling. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956. Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Nicoll, Allardyce. Masks, Mimes and Miracles Studies in the Popular Theatre. 1931. New York: Cooper Square, 1963. . The World of Harlequin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1963. Nicols, Sallie. Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1980. Pearce, Richard. Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971. Rabelais, Francois. The Complete Works of Francois Rabelais. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. . The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Trans. Jacques Le Clercq. New York: Random House, 1944. Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. 1956. New York: Schocken, 1972. Rankin, H. D. "Laughter, Humor, and Related Topics in Plato." Classica et Mediaevalia 28 (1967): 186-213. Rapf, Joanna, and Gary L. Green. Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of King Lear. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972. Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Sand, Maurice. The History of the Harlequinade. 2 vols. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968. Saward, John. Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr. The Ethos of Restoration Comedy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971. Schwartz, I. A. The Commedia delVArte and Its Influence on French Comedy. New York: Paris Publications, 1933. Scordato, Mark, and Ellen Scordato. The Three Stooges. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Segal, Erich. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
518
Selected General Bibliography
Seidman, Steve. Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1981. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Sharma, R. C. Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of Manners. New York: Asia Publishing, 1965. Slater, Niall. Plautus in Performance. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Slide, Anthony, ed. Selected Vaudeville Criticism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988. Smith, Julian. Chaplin. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Smith, Ronald. The Stars of Stand-up Comedy: A Biographical Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1986 Smith, Winifred. The Commedia dell'Arte. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964. Somerset, J. A. B. "Shakespeare's Great Stage of Fools, 1599-1607." In Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984. 68-82. Speaight, George. The History of the English Puppet Theatre. 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southem Illinois UP, 1990. Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Staples, Shirley. Male-Female Comedy Teams in American Vaudeville, 1865-1932. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984. Stevens, Martin, and James Paxson. "The Fool in the Wakefield Plays." Studies in Iconography 13 (1989-1990): 48-79. Steward, Julian Haynes. The Clown in Native North America. 1929. New York: Garland, 1991. Storey, Robert. Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. . Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Swain, Barbara. Fools and Folly during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. New York: Columbia UP, 1932. Tietze-Conrat, Erika. Dwarfs and Jesters in Art. New York: Phaidon, 1957. Towsen, John H. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn, 1976. Unterbrink, Mary. Funny Women: American Comediennes, 1860-1985. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987. Vizenor, Gerald. "Trickster Discourse." American Indian Quarterly 14.3 (Summer 1990): 277-87. Ward, Carol M. Mae West: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Wells, Stanley, ed. Twelfth Night: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1986. Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. 1935. London: Faber & Faber, 1968. Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio Comedy. New York: Oxford UP, 1979. West, William H , III, ed. Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests, Full of Honest Mirth and Is a Fit Medicine for the Melancholy. Redmond, WA: Green Man Historical Foundation, 1989. Wickham, Glynne. The Medieval Theatre. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Wilde, Larry. The Great Comedians. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1973. Wiles, David. Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Selected General Bibliography
519
Willeford, William. The Fool and His Scepter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1969. Wright, Barton. Clowns of the Hopi: Tradition Keepers and Delight Makers. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland, 1994. Zimbardo, R. A. "The King and the Fool: King Lear as Self-deconstmcting Text." Criticism 32 (Winter 1990): 1-29.
This page intentionally left blank
Index Page numbers in bold refer to chapter titles. A la Broadway (West), 494 Abbott and Costello, 15, 281, 288 Abraham ibn Ezra, 390 absurd theater, 79 Achilles (Achilles in Sciro), 115-16 Achilles in Sciro (Draghi), 115 Ackroyd, Dan, 172 Acoma Indians, 6 Adagia (Erasmus), 199, 204 Adam, 321, 374 Adamov, Arthur, 79 Adamson, Joe, 300 Adapt or Dye (Uys), 424 Adler, Felix, 142-44 Adriani collection, 512 Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The (Weaving and Pearce), 117, 170 Aeschylus, 244 African National Congress (ANC), 42021, 425-26 Agrippa, 323 Aguecheek, Andrew (Twelfth Night), 185, 188, 192
Ain-i Akbari, 94, 95 Akbar (India), 91-96 Alan of Lille, 488 alazon, 80, 256, 259 Albee, Edward, 287 Alberti, Leon Battista, 231 Albions England (Warner), 354 Alchemist, The (Jonson), 255-57, 260, 262 Alcibiades, 403 Aleichem, Sholom, 215, 389 Alexander, Edward, 217 Algonquian, 158 Allais, Jean du Pont, 416 Allen, Edward, 108 Allen, Fred, 87 Allen, Gracie, 8-9, 13, 106-12 Allen, Gracie Ethel Cecile Rosalie. See Allen, Gracie Allen, Woody, 9, 25-32, 393 Allison, Tempe, 482 AlVs Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 290 Almond for a Parrot, An (Nashe), 274
522 American circus clown, 136-45 American fool societies, 114 American Humor (Rourke), 500 American Tragedy, An, 379 amorosa. See innamorata Amphitheatre Riding House. See Astley's Royal Amphitheatre anaphora, 14 Anarch, 373 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 256 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 354 Anderson, Eddie (Rochester), 2, 88 Anderson, Hans Christian, 3 Andreini, Giovan Battista, 511 Andronicus, Livius, 348 Animal Crackers (The Marx Brothers), 8, 299, 301, 305 animism, 331 Annie Hall (Allen), 30, 393 Anouilh, Jean, 80, 83 anthropology of fools, 33-40 antitheater theater, 79 antonomasia, 198 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 115 apartheid, 419, 422-23, 425-26 Aphrodite, 239-40 aphron, 317, 320, 325 Apollo, 241-42 Apollo (early Christian), 319 Apology of Socrates (Plato), 401 Appleby, Dorothy, 439 Aquinas, Thomas, 325 Arapaho Crazy Lodge, 246 Arbuckle, Fatty, 28, 265-67, 283 Arbuckle, Roscoe. See Arbuckle, Fatty Arcadia (Sidney), 467 arcana, major, 453 arcana, minor, 453 Archbishop of Fools, 100 Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The (Jung), 455 Archy's Dream (Armstrong), 52 Arden, Heather, 414 Arden (As You Like It), 10, 466-68 Ares, 239-40 Argus, 240, 242 Ariel, 256
Index Arikara Foolish People, 246 Aristophanes, 80, 169, 200, 203, 344, 400-405 Aristotle, 17-18, 18, 31, 198-99, 225, 343 Arlecchina, 150 Arlecchino, 137, 140, 147-52, 289, 337, 501, 510-12 Arlecchino Show (Rame, Fo), 152 Arlecchino the Bergamask. See Arlecchino Armin, Robert, 4, 6, 7, 9, 41-49, 186, 188, 273, 278, 289, 406-8, 468-69 Armstrong, Archy, 50-54, 293 Arnaz, Desi, 62-63, 65-66 Arnaz, Desi, IV. See Arnaz, Desi, Jr. Arnaz, Desi, Jr., 63 Arnaz, Lucie, 63 Artaud, Antonin, 72, 79 Arthur, King, 371 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 9, 13-14, 16, 44, 115, 273, 278-79, 291, 466, 468-69 Asgard, 295 asinaria festa, 98 Askenasy, J.J.M., 33 Assistant, The (Malamud), 390 Astley Circus. See Astley's Royal Amphitheatre Astley, Philip, 136-39 Astley's Royal Amphitheatre, 136-37, 396 "At Homes," 503 At the Circus (The Marx Brothers), 300 Atellan farce, 146, 344-45, 363, 429 Atellan sannio, 508 Athena, 239, 243 Aubailly, Jean-Claude, 56-57, 411 Audience with Evita, An (Uys), 425 Audrey, 10, 13, 466-67, 469 Augustans, 348 auguste clown, 140-41 Augustine, 318, 323, 490 Aulularia (Plautus), 346 Austen, Jane, 395 Austin, Albert, 131 Ausubel, Nathan, 391 Author's Farce (Fielding), 363
Index Autobiography, An (Stravinsky), 124 Autolycus, 242-43 avant-garde theater, 79 Aztecs, 156 Baal Shem Tov, 392 Babe Gordon (West), 495 Babe. See Hardy, Oliver Babes in Toyland (March of the Wooden Soldiers) (Laurel and Hardy), 286 Baby Mae. See West, Mae Bacchae, The (Euripides), 169 Bacchus, 201 Bacon Grabbers (Laurel and Hardy), 283 Badaoni, 92-93, 95 Badin, The, 55-61 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 12, 16-17, 19, 45, 102, 130-31, 279, 359, 373, 414, 480 Baldr, 296-97 Bali, 329-35 Balinese Hinduism, 329 Ball, Lucille, 36, 62-70, 117, 378-79, 439 Ballerina (Petrouchka), 122 Ballets Russes, 121, 124 Bandelier, Adolph, 253 Bank Dick, The (Fields), 194, 196 Banquet of Jests, A (Armstrong), 53 Baptiste. See Deburau, Jean-Gaspard Bara, Theda, 282 Barber, C. L., 179, 182, 192, 359 Barbour, Richard, 257 Barish, Jonas, A., 256, 262 Bamum, P. T., 136 Barnum & Bailey, 140^11 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 71-78, 339 Barry, Joan, 129 Bartered Bride (Smetana), 386 Bartholemews Fair, 137 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 255, 259-62 Bates, Jacob, 138 Battenhouse, Roy, 179, 182 Baumbach, Jonathan, 229 Beach, Lazarus, 502 Beckett, Samuel, 10, 133, 79-84 Beckett's clowns, 79-84 Bedford, Brian, 469
523 Behn, Aphra, 428-29, 431, 433-44 Beiliss, Mendel, 390 Belch, Toby (Twelfth Night), 185-86, 189, 192 Belethus, Joannes, 97 Belial, 472, 478, 480 Bell, William, 352, 359 Belle of the Nineties (West), 495 Belling, Tom, 140-41 Bellow, Saul, 215, 390-91 Below Zero (Laurel and Hardy), 283 Bembo, Bonifacio, 453 "Benny Hill Show," 172 Benny, Ben. See Benny, Jack Benny, Jack, 2, 7, 13, 85-90, 106, 108, 111, 114, 172 Benois, Alexandre, 122-23 Beolco, Angelo, 429 Bergamask servant, 508 Bergen, Edgar, 197 Bergman, Henry, 131 Bergman, Ingmar, 25, 31 Berinthia (The Relapse), 208-9 Berle, Milton, 106, 113, 117, 169, 172 Berlin, Irving, 299 Besser, Joe, 440 Bethell, Samuel L., 468 Betterton, Thomas, 182 Bevington, David, 181, 471, 479-80 bhakti, 93 Biancolelli, Guiseppe Domenico, 511 Biancolelli collection, 512 Big Business (Laurel and Hardy), 28387 Big Store, The (The Marx Brothers), 300 Big Street, The (Ball), 63 Biglow Papers (Lowell), 502 billingsgate, 16 Bir Bar. See Birbal Birbal, 91-96 Birds, The (Aristophanes), 200 Birdsall, Virginia Ogden, 435-36 Birnbaum, Dora, 107 Birnbaum, Nathan. See Bums, George Birth of the Squire, The (Gay), 429 Birtwistle, Harrison, 368 Bishop of Fools, 97-105 Bjornson, Richard, 229
524 Black Elk, 246-47 Black Elk Speaks (Black Elk), 246-47 Blackamoor (Petrouchka), 122-23 Blacksmith (Keaton), 267 Bloomfield, Morton, 482 Blunt (The Rover), 430 Bober, Morris, 390 Boethius, 324 Bok, Yakov, 390-91 Bon Temps, 416 Bonaventure, Pseudo, 475 Bonheur, Annabella, 377-80 Boniface, Symona, 439 Bononcini, Domenico, 511 "Bontsha Schweig" (Mendele), 389 Book of Thoth, The (Crowley), 462 Booth, Stephen, 293 Boris Godunov (Mussorgsky), 386 Bomkamm, Gunther, 319 Boruch, Rabbi, 392 Botha, P. W., 422-23, 425-26 Bottom (A Midsummer Night's Dream), 5, 115, 233,273 Bounderby (Hard Times), 398 Bowen, Barbara, 411 Bowles, Stephen E., 439^0, 443 Boy Bishop, 97 Boylesque (Kerr), 117 "Bozo the Clown," 145 Bradley, A. C , 182, 191, 293 Brahma Kavi. See Birbal Brant, Sebastian, 4, 55 Brennan, Walter, 439 Brice, Fanny, 66, 68, 106 Bridges, Lloyd, 439 Briggs, Katherine Mary, 359 Brighella, 140, 147-49, 509-11 Briguelle, 511 Brock, 296 Bronte sisters, 395 Brown, Alexandra, 321 Bruce, Lenny, 26 Bryan, George, 274 Brydges, Giles, 42, 44 Brydges, William, 42-44 Bubba (Forrest Gump), 228 Bucco, 344, 364
Index Budden, Julian, 383 Bude, Guillaume, 370 Builders of the Adytum, 455 bumpkin, 428 Bunny, John, 293 Burbage, Richard, 274 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 182 Bumette, Carol, 113 Bums, George, 9, 106-112 Burton, Robert, 354 Busby, Olive, 434 bushido, 451 Butler, Bill, 456 Byrne, John J., 495 Cabaret (Gray), 35, 116 Caddo Indians, 160 Cadmus, 238 Caesar, Sid, 26 Cain, 374 Calderwood, James L. 179 Calonarang, 333-34 Calvin, John, 371 Calvino, Italo, 460 Camber, Jemy (Jack), 7, 46 camp, the, 113-19, 171 Campbell, Eric, 131 campy drag, 113-14, 118 campy queen. See campy drag Candide, 227 Candide (Voltaire), 229 Canio-Pagliacco (/ Pagliacci), 120-26 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 310 Cantor, Eddie, 106 capitano, 178 Captivi (Plautus), 346 Carmichael, Lucy ("The Lucy Show"), 63,67 Came, Marcel, 73, 75-77, 339 carnival, 16, 55, 59, 114, 146-47, 179, 278, 359, 373 Carson, Johnny, 26 cartomancy, 454 Carvey, Dana, 172 Casanova, Ignacio, 511 Case, Paul Foster, 455 Case Is Altered, The (Jonson), 254
Index Casina (Plautus), 347 Castle of Crossed Destinies, The (Calvino), 460 Castle of Perseverance, The, All, 474, 479-89 Catherine of Aragon, 309 Catherine the Great, 498 Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni), 124 Cavendish, John, 473 Cavendish, Richard, 457 Celestial Empire, or, Yankee in China, The (Logan), 505 Celia (As You Like It), 17, 466 Celuluk, 331-33 Cephas, 319 Ceprano, Count, 383, 385 Ceprano, Countess, 383-84 Cesario. See Viola Chambers, E. K., 414-45 Chandos, Mary, 42 Chandos, Lord, 42-44 Chaplin, Charles, Sr., 127 Chaplin, Charlie, 5, 7, 15, 27, 36, 76, 80, 82-83, 127-35, 143, 265, 270, 281-85, 377-80, 441, 443 Chaplin, Hannah, 127 Chaplin, Sidney, 127, 128 Charles I (England), 50-51, 290 Charles II (England), 207 Charles V (France), 372 Charles V (Spain), 309 Charles (Prince of England). See Charles I (England) Charlie. See tramp clown Chaucer, Geoffrey, 203, 310, 372, 488 Chelm, 389 Cheyenne Contraries, 246 Childers, E.W.B. (Hard Times), 397 Childers, Kidderminster (Hard Times), 397 Chimes at Midnight (Wells), 182 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian, Paul, 455 Chronicles (Holinshed), 182 Chumo, Peter, 229 Cibber, Colley, 211-12, 262, 435 Cicero, 198, 200
525 circus, 81-83 circus clowns, 11-12 Circus, The (Chaplin), 132 City Lights (Chaplin), 132 Clarabelle, 145 Claudius (Hamlet), 232-34 "Clodpate," 221 Clouds, The (Aristophanes), 200, 400, 402-3 Clowns, The (Fellini), 82 Clowns of the Hopi (Wright), 251 Cochiti, 10-11 Cocoanuts, The (The Marx Brothers), 299, 301, 303, 305 Cohen, Harry, 440 Cohen, J. M., 374 Cokes, Bartholomew (Bartholomew Fair), 259, 261 Coleorton Masque, The, 351 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 232 Colet, John, 200 Colie, Rosalie L., 203 College (Keaton), 268-69 Collerye, Roger de, 416 Collier, John Payne, 364, 368 Colloquies (Erasmus), 204 Colman, George, 503 Colombina, 149-53 Columbine, 114, 121-22, 137, 221 Comedie Francaise, 72-73 Come on Up (West), 498 comedy of manners, 207 commedia. See commedia dell'arte commedia dell'arte, 76, 120-21, 130, 137, 139-40, 144, 146-54, 155, 178, 289, 336, 344, 363, 386, 415, 429, 501, 511-12 commedia erudita, 146, 149 Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, 73 Complete Works of Ben Jonson, The (Herford and Simpson), 262 Confrerie de la Passion, 416 confreries, 101 Congreve, William, 210, 428, 431-33 Connards, 416 Consolation of Philosophy, A (Boethius), 324
526 Constant Sinner, The. See Babe Gordon (West) Constantini, Antonio, 511 Contrast, The (Tyler), 501 Conversations (Jonson), 262 Conversion of St. Paul (Digby), 478 Copeau, Jacques, 72-73 copia, 199 Cops (Keaton), 267-69 Cordelia (King Lear), 291-93 Corin (As You Like It), 14, 466, 468 Correr, Museo, 508 Correr collection, 509-12 Costard (Love's Labour's Lost), 291 Costello, Lou, 8 Country Wife, The (Wycherley), 207, 428, 430-31, coyote, 37, 155-68, 443 Craik, T. W., 180, 183 Crane, Hart, 133 Cranmer, Thomas, 309 Creation, The (Wakefield cycle), 4 Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen), 30-31 Cromwell, Thomas, 364 Cronus, 239 Crosby, Bing, 376 cross-dresser, 170-71 cross-dressing, 114-18 Crowley, Aleister, 455, 459, 462 Cruikshank, George, 365 Crummies Theatre Company, 396 Cupid, 13, 354, 357, 359 Curculio (Plautus), 346 Curtis, Tony, 169, 172 Cynthia's Revels (Jonson), 254 Czinner, Paul, 469 Dame Edna, 171 Danga, 7 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), 467 Darwin, Charles, 33 Das Narrenschiff. See Ship of Fools, The Dauphine (Epicoene), 257 Davenport, W. A., 487 David (Israel), 16, 408 David Copperfield (Dickens), 197 Day, Dennis, 88
Index Day at the Races, A (The Marx Brothers), 299 Day Dreams (Keaton), 266-67 de Klerk, F. W., 420-22 De poetis (Varro), 348 de Vega, Lope, 349 Dean of fools, 99 debat, 314 Deburau, Jean-Gaspard, 73, 75-77, 336-39 Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, A (Harsnet), 356 deconstructionist philosophy, 18, 20 Decroux, Etienne, 72, 76 "Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter, A " (Dennis), 211 Dekker, Thomas, 254 DeMille, Cecil B., 143 Dennis, John, 211-12 Dent, Vernon, 439, 442 Dentist, The (Fields), 195 Der Tag, 389 DeRita, Joe, 440 Derrida, Jacques, 19-20, 360 Desilu, 63, 69 Diaghilev, Serge, 121-22, 124 Dialogue concerning Witty and Witles (Heywood, J.), 407 Dialogues (Lucian), 310 Diamond Lil (West), 495-98 Dibdin, Charles, 220 Dibdin, Thomas J., 220 Dickens, Charles, 225, 365-66, 368, 39599 Dictionary of National Biography, 407 Didi, 14, 79-84 Din-i-Ilahi, 92, 94 Dine. See Navajo Dionysus, 239, 355 Diotima, 402 discorsi obbligati, 150 Discoverie of Witchcraft, The (Scot), 351 Disher, M. Willson, 415 Disney, Walt, 142, 145 diva, 171 Divine, 171 Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing), 4, 44, 48, 233, 273, 276-78
Index Doggett, Thomas, 435 Dog's Life, A (Chaplin), 131-32 dolosus servus, 256 dominus festi, 101 Don Juan myth, 151 Donne, John, 316 Don't Drink the Water (Allen), 27 Dorimant (The Man of Mode), 210-11 Dossennus, 344 Dottore, 147-51 Douce, Francis, 6 drag, 169-73 drag queen, 13, 113, 116-18, 169-75 Drag, The (West), 495 Draghi, Antonio, 115 Drayton, Michael, 357 Dreiser, Theodore, 379 Drummond, William, 255 Drury Lane, 220 Dryden, John, 182, 262 Du Bellay, Jean, 370 Ducharte, Pierre Louis, 510-11 Duck Soup (The Marx Brothers), 299, 301, 305 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 273 Duke Senior, 466-67 Dukenfield, William Claude. See Fields, W. C. Dull, Olga, 413 Dullin, Charles, 72 Dumbo (Disney), 142, 145 Dumont, Margaret, 3, 299, 301 Durang, John, 138 Durante, Jimmy, 268 Dvalin, 296 dysphoria, 116 Eagleton, Terry, 360 Earth-Diver narratives, 156, 158 Eastward Ho (Jonson), 255 Easy, Credulous (Sir Patient Fancy), 42835 Easy Street (Chaplin), 283 Eccles, Mark, 479, 487 Ecclesiasticus, 324 echafaud, 413 Eclogues (Virgil), 467
527 Eco, Umberto, 343 Edgar (King Lear), 293 Edmund (King Lear), 292 Edward VI (England), 6, 309, 406 eiron, 256-57, 259 Ekhaya, 424, 426 Ekhaya (Manaka), 426 Electric House, The (Keaton), 267 elenchos, 403 Eliot, George, 395 Eliot, T. S., 235, 255, 262, 3 3 9 ^ 1 , 459, 464 Elizabeth I (England), 178, 290, 309 Elke ("Gimpel the Fool"), 216-17 emergence narratives, 156, 158 Empson, William, 469 Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Erasmus), 20 encomium, 308 Encomium Moriae. See Praise of Folly, The Encyclopedia of Tarot (Kaplan), 457 Endgame (Beckett), 81 Enfants sans Soucis, 415-16 Engel, Carl, 386 English music hall, 82-83 Epicoene (Jonson), 115, 255-57 Epithalamion (Spenser), 351 Erasmus, Desiderius, 2, 6, 8, 12, 55, 103, 198-205, 278, 289-90, 302, 309-11, 313, 316, 321, 325 370 Erichthonius, 239 Erickson, Peter, 179 Eros, 402 Estragon. See Gogo Eteilla, 455 Etherege, George, 209 Eunuch (Terence), 349 Euripides, 169 Eve, 4 Every Day's a Holiday (West), 498 Everyman in His Humour (Jonson), 254, 262 Everyman out of His Humour (Jonson), 254 Evita Bezeidenhout, 424-25 Eyles, Allen, 305 Ezechial, 322
528 Fabian (Twelfth Night), 185 fabulae Atellanae. See Atellan farce facchini, 508-9 Face (The Alchemist), 257-58 Fact or Fancy, Hard Times. See Hard Times Faerie Queene (Spenser), 467 Falstaff, John (Henry the First, Part I), 4, 7-8, 10, 176-84, 260, 273, 504 Falstolfe, John (Henry the Sixth, Part I), 180 Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The, 178, 180 farce, 56, 319,411 Farce de maitre Pierre Pathelin, All farces moralisees, 412 Farley, Charles, 220 Fair, Jamie, 171 Fasciculus morum, 477-78, 488 Fashion, Novelty (Love's Last Shift), 211 Faust, 367 Faustus, 16 Feast of Fools, 11, 55, 97-103, 414, 416 Fellini, Frederico, 29, 82 Felver, Charles S., 468 female impersonators, 117 Fermor, Richard, 406 Feste (Twelfth Night), A, 7, 15, 44, 47, 185-93, 278, 289-92, 429, 431 Festus, 323 Fewkes, J. Walter, 253 Ficino, Marsilio, 454 Fiddler on the Roof (Aleichem), 389 Fidele and Fortunio, the Two Italian Gentlemen (Munday), 352 Fielding, Henry, 363, 429 Fields, W. C , 143, 194-97, 283, 498 Fierstein, Harvey, 173 Figaro, 59 Fine, Larry, 438^4 Finishing Touch, The (Laurel and Hardy), 283 Finlayson, James, 285, 287 Fiorentino, Ser Giovanni, 179 Firebird, The (Stravinsky), 124 First Folio (Shakespeare), 255
Index First Gravedigger (Hamlet), 233 first zanni. See Brighella "Fishke the Lame" (Mendele), 389 Fixer, The (Malamud), 390 Floorwalker, The (Chaplin), 131 Flutter, Fopling (The Man of Mode), 207, 209,211 Fo, Dario, 152-53 Fokine, Michel, 122-23 Folle Bobance, 413 Following the Fleet (Byrne). See Sex Folly: (Nature), 488-89; (The Praise of Folly), 1, A, 8, 10, 12, 55, 198-206, 289-90, 302, 321, 325 fols, 411-18 fool societies, 1 Fool and His Sceptre, The (Willeford), 140, 195, 204 Fool: His Social and Literary History, The (Welsford), 200 Foole upon Foole, or Six sortes of Sottes (Armin), A6-41 fop, 2, 207-14, 256, 428 For the Boys (Midler), 377, 380 Foresight, Prue (Love for Love), Al%, 43132 Forest Rose, or, American Farmers, The (Woodsworth), 503-4 forms, 402-4 Forrest Gump: (Groom), 226, 229-30; (Zemeckis), 12, 226, 229-30 fortunatus nimium, 429 fou, 55, 57, 101 Four Jills in a Jeep (Raye), 377 Foure PP, The (Heywood, J.), 314 Foxe, John, 310 Frame, Donald M., 374 Francis I (France), 382, 412, 417 Francois I. See Francis I Fratellini Brothers, 80-81 Fred Karno Company, 128, 281 "Freddie the Freeloader," 145 Frederick (As You Like It), 17, 466 Free and Easy (Keaton), 267 French, Marilyn, 179 Freud, Sigmund, 372, 390 Freya, 296
Index Frogs, The (Aristophanes), 200 From Ritual to Romance (Weston), 464 Frye, Northrup, 232, 256, 258, 261, 321 Fete du Prince des Sots, 414 Furness, Horace Harding, 191 galant, 55 Galatians, 317 Gallagher, Kent, 502 Gamp, Sarah, 395 ganassa, 512 Ganassa, Alberto, 510-11 Garavin, Girolamo, 511 Gargantua, 371 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 4, 11, 370-71, 382 Gargantua. See Gargantua and Pantagruel Garzoni, T., 508 Gates, Charlene, 457 Gautier, Theophile, 336, 339-40 Gay, John, 429 Gaynor, Mitzi, 172 Gebelin, Antoine Court de, 455 Gehring, Wes, 299, 302, 305-6 General, The (Keaton), 265-66, 269, 28384 Genet, Jean, 79 Gents without Cents (West), 444 ' 'George Bums and Gracie Allen Show, The," 108 Gherardi, Evaristo, 338, 511 Giaratone, Giuseppe, 336-39 Gilbert, Billy, 287 "Gild of the Oratio Domini,'" 482 Gilda (Rigoletto), 383-85 Giles, Cynthia, 454 Gilles, 338-39 Gilles-Pierrot. See Gilles Gilliam, Terry, 368 Gimpel (Gimpel the Fool), 215-19, 227, 379, 390-91 "Gimpel Tarn." See "Gimpel the Fool" "Gimpel the Fool" (Singer), 215, 218, 390-91 Gleason, Jackie, 145 Gluckman, Max, 34-35
529 Gluttony (Piers Plowman), All Go West (Keaton), 267, 300 Go West, Young Man (West), 498 Goddard, Paulette, 378 Godefroy, Vincent, 384, 386 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 114-15 Gogo (Waiting for Godot), 11, 14, 79-84 Gold Rush, The (Chaplin), 132 Goldberg, Rube, 438 Golden Dawn. See Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Goldoni, Carlo, 147, 149 Goldsmith, Oliver, 428 Goldsmith, Robert, 432, 434 Goneril (King Lear), 290 Good News and Bad News (Rowlands), 407 Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (West), 494 Gordon, Gale, 63, 66-67 Gordon, George S., 468 Gordon, Mel, 512 Gorgias, 200 Gower, John, 474 Gradgrind, Louisa (Hard Times), 396, 398 Gradgrind, Mr. (Hard Times), 396, 398 Gradgrind, Tom (Hard Times), 396, 398 Grammaticus, Saxo, 231 grammelot, 147 Grand Mere Sotte, 416 Grande Procession in Lille, 101 Grands chroniques, 371 Grant, Cary, 495, 497 Granville-Barker, Harley, 190, 293 Gray, Floyd, 374 Gray, Joel, 35 Grazzini, 509 Great Eastern Circus, 140 Great Stone Face, 267 Greater Trumps, The (Williams), 459 Greatest Show on Earth, The (DeMille), 143 Green, Martin, 337, 339-41 Greif, Karen, 190 Griebling, Otto, 142^4 Grierson, John, 284
530 Grim the Collier (anon.), 352, 355-57 Grimaldi, Guiseppe, 138, 143, 220 Grimaldi, J. S., 221 Grimaldi, Joseph, 137-41, 145, 220-25, 268 Gringore, Pierre, 416 Groom, Winston, 12, 226-30 Guiley, Rosemary, 454 Guilpin, Edward, 356 gull, 27, 149, 208, 256-57 Gulliver's Travels (Swift), 429 Gump, Forrest, 12-13, 226-30 Guy on, James, 141 Hackett, James Henry, 503^1 Haddinton, Lord Viscount, 42, 44 Hair Knot Clowns, 251 Hal. See Henry V Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (Robbins), 463 Half-Wits Holiday (The Three Stooges), 438-39 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 502 Hall, Peter, 190 Hamlet, 231-36, 291, 340 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 47, 188, 231, 27778 hanamitchi, 448 Hanks, Tom, 172, 226-29 Hannah and Her Sisters (Allen), 26, 30 Hano Gluttons, 252 Harbage, Alfred, 292 Hard Times (Dickens), 395-99 Hardy, Oliver, 7, 281-88 Hardy, Ollie. See Hardy, Oliver Hardy, Thomas, 395 Harington, John, 407 Harlequin, 2, 6, 121, 130, 137-38, 140, 221-23, 265-69, 337-38, 510, 512 Harlequin and Friar Bacon; or, The Brazen Head, 111 Harlequin in His Element, 113-1A Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The Golden Egg, 220-21, 223 Harlequin and the Ogress; or, The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood, 111 Harlequin and Padmanaba; or, The Golden Fish, 111
Index Harlequin and the Swans; or, The Bath of Beauty, 111 Harlequinade, 137, 221, 224 "Harlotes" (Langland), 487 Harmonia, 238 Harris, Mark, 377 Harris, Phil, 88 Harsnet, Samuel, 356 Harvey, Gabriel, 42 Haslem, Lori Schroeder, 261 Hayes Office, 498 Hazlitt, William, 182, 293 Healy, Ted, 438 Hel, 297 Henry (Prince of England), 51 Henry IV (England), 176-79 Henry V (England), 8, 91, 94-95, 17681 Henry VII (England), 291 Henry VIII (England), 6, 186, 204, 29091, 308-10, 406-9 Henry the Fourth, Part I (Shakespeare), 8, 176-82, 189, 504 Henry the Fourth, Part II (Shakespeare), 177-82 Henry the Fifth (Shakespeare), 177-79 Henslowe, Philip, 254 Henze, Hans Werner, 470 Hephaestus, 237^15 Hera, 237-41, 243 Heracles, 244 "Here's Lucy" (Ball), 63, 67 Herford, C. H., 262 Hermes, 38, 237-45, 478 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 45556, 459-60 Herzog (Herzog), 391 Hesiod, 238-39, 243 Heyoka of the Sioux, 246-49 Heywood, Joan Rastell, 309 Heywood, John, 5, 8, 308-15, 407 Heywood, Thomas, 355 "Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels" (Heywood, T.), 355 Highet, Gilbert, 344 Hill, George Handel, 504-5 Hillman Richard, 359-60
Index History of the two Maid of More-clacke, With the life and simple maner of Ihon in the Hospitall, The (Armin), 43-45 Hoban, Russell, 368 hobgoblin, 351, 357 Hodge, Francis, 500 Hodr, 297 Hoffman, Arthur W., 435-36 Hoffman, Dustin, 173 Hoi Polloi (The Three Stooges), 442 Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 6, 20, 289 Hold onto Your Hats (Raye), 377 • Hold That Lion (The Three Stooges), 439 Holinshed, Raphael, 182 holy fool, 265-66 Homer, 238-40 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Huizinga), 203 Hope, Bob, 9, 35, 63, 67, 87 Hopi, 3, 8, 11-12, 36, 162, 250-53 Hopi Koyemsi. See Koyemsi Horace, 203, 348 Horse Feathers (The Marx Brothers), 15, 299, 302, 304 Horton, Edward Everett, 114 Hotson, Leslie, 189 Hotspur, Harry (Henry the Fourth, Part I), 176, 178, 181 Houdini, Harry, 266 Howard, Curly, 438-44 Howard, Moe, 438-44 Howard, Shemp, 438-40 Hudson, "Baby" Jane, 113 Hudson, Rock, 377, 498 Hughes, Charles, 138 Hugo, Victor, 382, 384-85 Huizinga, Johan, 203 Humanus Genus (Castle of Perseverance), 480 Hume, David, 404 Humphreys, David, 502 Hymen, 467 Hymn to Hermes, 1AI-A1 Hymn to Pythian Apollo, 238 hystoires, 101 / Pagliacci (Leoncavallo), 120-26, 348, 386
531 "I Love Lucy" (Ball), 5, 63, 66-69 Iapetus, 243 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 226, 228 Iktomi, 37 // baron todesco, 509 il furbo. See Brighella il Matto, 463 // pecorone (Fiorentino), 179 il stupido. See Arlecchino // Teatro delle favole rappresentative (Scala), 512 Iliad, The (Homer), 238, 240 I'll Say She Is! (The Marx Brothers), 299 illusionists, 170 I'm No Angel (West), 495 impersonator, 170 In Living Color, 111 incipiens, 2, 16 innamorata, 149-52 innamorato, 152 Innocencye (Nature), 489 innocent fool, 3, 226, 228-30 interlude, 308 Io, 242 lonesco, Eugene, 79, 306 Isle of Dogs, The (Jonson and Nashe), 254 It's a Gift (Fields), 197 ludicium (Final Judgment), Townley cycle, 478-79 "Jack Benny Show, The " 85, 87-88 Jack Cade's Rebellion, 472 Jack Pudding, 6 Jackson, Andrew, 502, 505 Jacobs, Lou, 141-44 James I (England), 42, 44, 50-52, 254, 290, 293 James VI (Scotland). See James I (England) Jamison, Bill, 439 Jaques (As You Like It), 131, 256, 46768 Jean Baptiste. See Deburau, Jean-Gaspard Jefferson, Arthur Stanley. See Laurel, Stan Jemez, 6, 15 Jenkins, Allen, 439
532 Jennings, Margaret, 472, 479 Jenny (Forrest Gump), 116, 228-29 Jesus Christ, 316-28, 374, 473-77 Jewish vaudeville tradition, 82-83, 10612 Jim Crow, 5 "Joey," 138, 222-23 Johan Johan (Heywood, J.), 314 John of the Cross, 323 John Robinson Circus, 143 "John Trot," 221 Johnson, Samuel, 182, 190, 293, 435 Jolson, Al, 377 Jonathan (Contrast), 501 Jonathan in England (Peake), 503 Jonathan Postfree; or, The Honest Yankee (Beach), 502 Jones, Inigo, 255 Jones, T. C , 117 Jonson, Ben, 115, 254-64, 277, 279, 340, 349, 353, 355 Judy. See Punch and Judy Jughead, 290 Juliana, 323 Jung, Karl, 359, 455-56 Junia(s), 324, 326 Jupe (Hard Times), 397-98 Jupe, Sissy (Hard Times), 396-98 Jupiter, 308-9, 311 Kabbalah (Zohar Lurianic Kabbalah), 218, 455 kabuki, 447-51 Kabuki theater, 169 kachina, 8, 11, 36,251-53 Kapoir, Moishe, 389 Karno, Fred, 128 kata, 445-51 Kaufman, George, S., 299 "Kavi Rai," 92 Kawi, 331 Keach, Stacy, 190 Keaton, Buster, 7, 66, 80, 83, 133, 18384, 265-72, 281, 300, 408, 439, 441, 443 Keaton, Joe, Sr., 265-267 Keaton, Joseph Frank, Jr. See Keaton, Buster
Index Keats, John, 293 Kehr, Dave, 229 Kelly, Emmett, 5, 10, 141, 143-45 Kemp, Will, 5, 41-43, 47, 180-81, 186, 273-80, 313, 468 Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (Kemp), 27476 Kenka Bozu, 449-51 Kent (King Lear), 289, 292 Keresan pueblos, 250 Keystone Company, 128 Keystone Kops, 267 Kid, The (Chaplin), 128 King of Clowns, 220-21 King of fools, 114 King Lear (Shakespeare), 7, 216, 279, 290-93, 320, 385 king-fool pair, 91, 93-94 King's Men, 289 Kiowa, 161 Kipok Koyemsi, 253 Klatsop Chinook, 162 Klondike Annie (West), 498 Knack to Know a Knave, A, 11 A, 276 Knight, Alan, 411-12 Knight, G. Wilson, 293 Knowles, Richard, 469 Konigsberg, Allen Stewart. See Allen, Woody Koshari, 6, 251-52 Kotzwinkle, William, 461-62 Koyemsi, 251-53 Krasna, Norman, 299 Kresh, Paul, 217 Krishna, 93 ksl, 1 Kubelsky, Benjamin. See Benny, Jack Kuikuinaka Koyemsi. See Koyemsi Kung, Hans, 316 Kyd, Thomas, 231 La commedia dell'arte (Mic), 337 Lady Philosophy (The Consolation of Philosophy), 31A Laforgue, Jules, 336, 339^41 Langdon, Harry, 282, 441, 443 Langland, William, 472, 486-87, 489 Last Call (Powers), 464
Index Latham, M. W., 359 Laud, William, 51-53, 293 laudationes, 198 Laugh In, 111 Launce (Two Gentlemen of Verona), 290 Launcelot Gobbo (The Merchant of Venice), 290, 429 Laurel and Hardy, 281-88, 443 Laurel, Stan, 7-8, 281-88 Laus Stultitiae (Erasmus), 204 Lavatch (AlVs Well That Ends Well), 290 "Laverne and Shirley," 393 Lawrence, Martin, 172 lawyers' Basoches, 101 lazzi, 137, 146, 509-10 Le Clercq, Jacques, 374 Le jeu du Prince des Sots et de la Mere Sotte, All, 416 Le marchand d'habits [sic], 339 Le marchant d'habits (Baurrault), 73 le Mat, 463 Le medecin malgre lui (Moliere), 429 Le monde, All Le roi s'amuse (Hugo), 382, 385 Leach, Robert, 364-65 Lear, 18-19, 289-93 Lear's fool, 3, 6, 8, 18-19, 25, 44, 47, 204, 216, 279, 289-94, 385 Leavis, F. R., 398 Lee, Grace Farrell, 218 Legend, Ben, 428, 432-33, 436 Legend, Valentine, 432-3 Leguise, Jean, 100-1 Leicester's Men, 273 Lemat, 456 Lemmon, Jack, 169, 172 Leonard (Foole upon Foole), 46 Leoncavallo, Ruggiero, 120-26, 386 Leone, Ronald, 261 Leroy Trio, 298 Les beguins, All Les complaintes (Laforgue), 340 Les enfants du paradis (Baurrault), 73, 7577, 339 Les sobres sots, All Les trois pelerins, All Levi, Eliphas, 455 Levin, Harry, 255
533 Lewis, C. S., 459 leyaks, 334 Lieutenant Dan (Forrest Gump), 226, 229 "Life With Lucy" (Ball), 63 Lindsley, A. B., 502 literary puys, 101 "little tramp, the," 129-32, 378 Lives of the Poets (Cibber), 262 Livingstone, Mary, 13, 88 Lloyd, Harold, 66, 265 Lloyd, William W., 469 Locatelli collection, 512 Loco Boy Makes Good (The Three Stooges), 444 Lodge, Thomas, 467 Loew, Marcus, 107 Logan, Cornelius, 505 logos, 404 Loki, the Norse Fool, 295-97 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew), 368 Longus, 467 Lord of Mismle, 114, 290 Lord of Utopia, 374 Lord Chamberlain's Men, 5, 46, 254, 27375, 277-79, 289 Lord Chandos's Company, 43 Lord Strange's Men, 274 Lorraine, Billy, 108 Lotterhand, Jason, 455 Louis XII (France), 412, 416-17 Louis-Philippe (France), 382 Louise de Savoie, 412 Love and Friendship; or Yankee Notions (Lindsley), 502 Love for Love (Congreve), 428, 430, 432 Love Happy (The Marx Brothers), 300 Love Restored (Jonson), 355 Loveit, Mrs. (The Man of Mode), 209, 211 Love's Labour's Lost (Shakespeare), 291, 512 Love's Last Shift (Cibber), 211-12 Lovewit (Alchemist), 258 Lowell, James Russell, 502 Lucian, 310 Lucky (Waiting for Godot), 14, 79-84 Lucky Dog (Laurel and Hardy), 282
534 Lucy character, 63, 65-69 "Lucy Desi Comedy Hour, The" (Ball), 63 "Lucy Show, The" (Ball), 63, 67 "luftmensch," 391-92 Luke, 317, 322 Lumpkin, Tony, 428, 430-31, 434 Luther, Martin, 316 Lypsinka, 173 Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 169 L'imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (Laforgue), 340 LTnfanterie Dijonnaise, 415-16 Maccus, 344, 349, 364 MacDonald, Ronald, 144 MacLaren, Daniel. See Rice, Dan Magic Barrel, The (Malamud), 390 magnifichi, 147^9, 152 Magnyfycence (Skelton), 489 Mahesh Das. See Birbal Mahoney, Jock, 439 Maia, 240^41 Maimonides, 217 Majapahit Dynasty, 329 Malade imaginaire, 433 Malamud, Bernard, 390 Mallepaye et Baillevant, 413 Maltin, Leonard, 439-40 Malvolio (Twelfth Night), A, 17, 185-89, 256, 290, 292 Mamma Gump (Forrest Gump), 229 Mammon, Epicure (The Alchemist), 258 Man (Nature), 488, 490 Man. See Mankind (Mankind) Man of Mode, The (Etherege), 209, 211 Manaka, Matsemela, 426 Mandela, Nelson, 420-22, 425-26 Manducus, 344 Manhattan (Allen), 26, 30 Mankind, 301, 481 Mankind (Mankind), 479, 481, 489 Mantua, Duke of, 383-85 Marble, Danforth, 504-5 Marceau, Marcel, 73 Mardi Gras, 36 Margueritte, Paul, 340 Maria (Twelfth Night), 15, 185-88, 190, 192
Index Marlowe, Christopher, 475 Marot, Clement, 58 marotte, 415 Marseilles tarot deck, 456, 461 Marshall, Penny, 393 Marston, John, 254 "Martha Raye Show, The," 377 Martial, 255 Martin and Lewis, 281, 288 Martin Chuzzlewit (Dickens), 395 Marullo, 383 Marx, Adolf (Harpo), 3, 5, 8, 10, 13, 15, 298-307 Marx, Herbert (Zeppo), 298-307 Marx, Julius (Groucho), 3, 6-9, 15, 29, 233, 298-307, 391 Marx, Leonard (Chico), 3, 6, 9-10, 15, 233, 298-307 Marx, Milton (Gummo), 298-307 Marx, Minnie Schoenberg, 298 Marx, Simon ("Frenchie Marrix"), 298 Marx Brothers, The, 3, 13, 15, 286, 298307, 443 Mary I (England), 6, 254, 309-10, 406 Mary Magdalene, 478, 482 Mary Magdalene (Digby), 478, 481 Mary, Princess. See Mary I (England) Mascagni, Pietro, 124 "masks," 147 masque, 255 Mast, Gerald, 266, 379 Mathers, MacGregor, 455 Mathews, Charles, 503 Mayhew, Henry, 364, 368 McCarey, Leo, 284 McCarthy, Charlie, 197 McDonald, Mr., 138 Mclntyre, Christine, 439 "McMillan and Wife," 377 Mead, Margaret, 34 Meditations on the Life of Christ: (Bonaventure), 475; (Langland), 487-88 Medwall, Henry, 475, 482, 485-93 Meeks, Wayne, 476 Meet the Baron (The Three Stooges), 442 Melchiori, Giorgio, 178, 180 Memoirs (Grimaldi), 225 Memories for Tomorrow (Baurrault), 71 Menaechmi (Plautus), 346
Index Menus propos, 413 Mephistopheles (Dr. Faustus), 17, 475 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 115, 291,429 Mercury. See Hermes Mercury, Freddie, 116-17 Mercy (Mankind), 481 Mere Sotte, 413, 416-17 Merlin, 293, 353, 371 ' 'Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow, The," 355 Merry Report, 5, 8, 9, 13, 18, 308-15 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare), 13, 115, 177, 179-82 Mescalero Apache, 160 Meserve, Walter, 505 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 239-40, 242, 310, 359, 467 Mic, Constance, 337 Midler, Bette, 113, 377, 380 "Midnight's Watch, The," 355, 358 Midsummer Night's Dream, A (Shakespeare) 12, 115, 325, 351-60 mie, 450, 451 Miles Gloriosus (Plautus), 178, 256, 349 Miller, Clarence, 201 Miller, Jerome, 343 mime, 72, 76-77, 146, 149, 152 Mirabell (The Way of the World), 210 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico, 454 Mirth (Pride of Life), 479 Mischief (Mankind), 301 mise-en-abime, 103 Mister Merryman, 137 Modern Times (Chaplin), 15, 129, 13233, 283 Moe Howard and the Three Stooges (Howard, Moe), 440 Moliere, 337, 349, 429, 433, 512 Molloy (Molloy), 81 Molloy (Beckett), 81-82 momentary plays, 505 Monkey Business (The Marx Brothers), 299 Monsieur Verdoux (Raye), 377-80 Montaigne, Michel de, 231 Monterone, Count, 383-85 "Monty Python," 172 Monty Python's Flying Circus, 111
535 Moody, Richard, 504 Moor. See Blackamoor morality (play), 471, 475-77, 488 More, Elizabeth, 309 More, Thomas, 200-201, 205, 309-10 More Circle, Sir Thomas, 309, 407 More Knaves Yet? (Rowland), 358 moria, 317, 325 Morose (Epicoene), 256-57, 260 morris dance, 274-75 Morton, Gary, 63 Mostellaria (Plautus), 346-47 Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Newton), 113, 117 Mother Goose, 222-23 "Mr. Paganini," 376 Mrs. Doubtfire (Williams), 173 Mtwa, Percy, 423-24 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 44, 273, 276 Mudhead. See Koyemsi, Munday, Anthony, 352 Murphy-O'Connor, J., 320 Music Box, The (Laurel and Hardy), 28385 Mussorgsky, Modest, 386 My Little Chickadee (Fields and West), 196-97, 498 Myra Breckenridge (Vidal), 498 Naevius, Gnaeus, 348 naif, 149, 429 Name of the Rose, The (Eco), 343 Narenschiff, Das. See Ship of Fools, The Nashe, Thomas, 42, 254, 274, 353, 406-7 Nast, Thomas, 139 Nature (Medwall), 475, 482, 485-93 Nature (Nature), 488-89 Navajo, 155-58 Navigator, The (Keaton), 265 Nedda (I Pagliacci), 111 Neighbors (Keaton), 267 Nelson, Alan, 488 Nelson, Ida, 411, 414-15 Nest of Ninnies, Simply of themselves without Compound, A (Armin), 5, 7, 47, 406 New Comedy, Greek, 344 New Gyse (Mankind), 481
536 "New South Africa," 422-23, 425-26 Newton, Esther, 113-14, 117-18 Nez Perce, 160 Ngema, Mbongeni, 423-24 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 396 Nicoll, Allardyce, 338, 415, 508-10, 512 Nicholls Circus, 139 Night After Night (West), 495 Night at the Opera, A (The Marx Brothers), 11, 13,299, 301, 303, 305 Night in Casablanca, A (The Marx Brothers), 300 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 124 Noh drama, 74, 80, 169 Nokes, John, 435 Nordau, Max, 391 Normand, Mabel, 282, 378 Northern Paiute, 162 Norton, Ed ("The Honeymooners"), 7-8 Nought (Mankind), 481 Novum Instrumentum (Erasmus), 200 Nowadays (Mankind), 481 Nutt, Alfred, 359 Nymphidia (Drayton), 357 Oakley, Slivers, 141 Oates, Jack (Foole upon Foole), 5, 7, 46 Oberon, 355 Odin, 296 O'Donnell, Mabel, 298 Odysseus, 242-43 Odyssey (Homer), 239 "Of Spirits Called Hobgoblins, or Robin Goodfellowes," 358 Offenbach, Jacques, 388 Offcium Circumcisionis in usum urbis Senonensis, 98 Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 504, 506 Okuni, 447 Old Comedy, Greek, 344 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), 396 Oldcastle, John, 180 Oliver, Edna May, 442 Oliver Twist, 366 Olivia (Twelfth Night), A, 17, 185-90, 290 "On Account of a Hat" (Aleichem), 389
Index O'Neil, Oona, 129 One Week (Keaton), 267 Ophelia (Hamlet), 232, 233 Oracle of Bacbuc, 371, 373 Orlando (As You Like It), 466, 469 Oroonoko (Behn), 429 Orpheum Circuit, 107 Orsino (Twelfth Night), 185-56, 188-89 Oscar Wilde, 172 Osric (Hamlet), 232 Ostropolier, Hershel, 392-93 Othello (Shakespeare), 29 Our Town (Wilder), 506 Ovid, 239, 242, 310, 359, 467 Owst, G. R. 477 oyabun, 450 P. T. Barnum's American Museum, 139 Paar, Jack, 26 Pagels, Elaine, 324 Paiyakyamu, 251 Palmer, John, 469 Pandora, 243 Pantagmel (Gargantua and Pantegruel), 371, 373-74 Pantagruel. See Gargantua and Pantagruel Pantalone, 147-48, 150-51, 509 Pantaloon, 137n. 224 pantomime, 72-73, 82-83, 137, 141, 22122, 224 Panurge (Gargantua and Pantagruel), 1112, 371-74 Papimaniacs (Gargantua and Pantagruel), 31A Pappus, 344 Parliamo di donne (Rame), 153 Parolles (All's Well That Ends Well), 290 Parsifal (Wagner), 386 Pascal, Blaise, 80 Patch, 407 Paul the Apostle, 16, 178, 316-28, 48586, 489 Peace (Aristophanes), 402 Peake, Richard B., 503 Pearce, Guy, 170 Peasants' Revolt, 472-74, 479 Pedrolino, 140, 337^40, 512
Index Penasar, 329-34 Pensees (Pascal), 80-1 Pepys, Samuel, 363 Perelman, S. J., 299 Peretz, I. L., 215, 389 Peter (Romeo and Juliet), 273 "Peter Schemiel" (von Chamisso), 388 Peter the Great, 9 Petit de Julleville, 415 Petraccone, E., 509 Petrarch, 150 Petrouchka, 120-26, 363, 367 Petrouchka, 120-26 Phaedo (Plato), 401, 403-4 Philemon, 317 Piave, Francesco Maria, 382-83, 385 picaresque novel, 229 picaro, 229 Picasso, Pablo, 133 Piccini, 364, 366-67 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens), 395 Picot, Emile, 411 Picrochole (Gargantua and Pantagruel), 372 Pictures of Fidelman (Malamud), 390 Pierce's Superogation (Nashe), 42 Pierre Pathelin, 429 Pierrot, 6, 73, 75-76, 120-26, 130, 138, 140, 150, 265-68, 336-42 Pierrot; A Critical History of a Mask (Storey), 336 Piers Plowman (Langland), 278, 486, 489 Pilgrim, The (Chaplin), 131 Pinchwife, Margery, 428, 430-32, 434, 436 Piptuyakyamu, 251, 253 Plato, 20, 400-405 Plautine comedy, 343 Plautus, Titus Maccius, 146, 256, 343-50 Plautus's clowns, 343-50 Play of the Wether, The (Heywood, J.), 5, 18, 308-15 Play It Again, Sam (Allen), 27 Playhouse, The (Keaton), 266, 268 Pleasant Historie of the Life and Death of William Sommers (anon.), 406 Pleasure Man, The (West), 495 Plutarch, 198
537 Poetics (Aristotle), 17, 343 Polichinelle, 363 Pollard, Alfred, W., 314 Polonius (Hamlet), 47, 232-33 Polycrates, 198 Ponca Heyoka, 246 Pool Sharks (Fields), 195 "Poor Soul, The," 145 Pope Julius II, 412 Pope, Thomas, 274 Popefigs (Gargantua and Pantagruel), 374 Poral, Amedee, 416 Porter, 137 Porter, Joseph, A., 178-79 Portnoy's Complaint (Roth), 392 Poseidon, 240 postmodernism, 80-81 Potter, Robert, 476 Povre Jouhan (anon.), 414 Powers, James, 266 Powers, Tim, 464 Pozzo, 14, 79-84 Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus), 2, 4, 20, 55, 200, 302, 202-3, 205, 278, 289, 310, 325 "Pranks of Puck, The," 353 Pride (Nature), 482 Pride of Life (anon.), 479 Prince des Sots, 413, 416 Prince Dubul, 424 Prince Mishkin (The Idiot), 226, 228 Prince of Wales. See Henry V Prodigal Son, The, 178 Prometheus, 237-45 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 244 Prose of the Ass, 99 Prevert, Jacques, 72, 76 Pseudolus (Plautus), 348 Puck, 12, 256, 351-62 "Puck's Pranks on Twelfth-Day," 352 Pueblo, 156, 250 Pueblo Indians, 253 Pueblo tribes, 35 Pulcinella (second zanni), 137, 148^49, 363, 367 Pullicinello. See Pulcinella Punch. See Punch and Judy
538 Punch and Judy, 148, 344, 363-69 Punch and Judy: (Birtwistle), 368; (Svankmeyer), 368 Punch and Judy show, 396 "Punch and Mrs. Punch." See Punch and Judy Punch Drunks (The Three Stooges), 438 Punchinello, 363, 365 Punchman, 364-65, 367-68 Puritan, 45, 258-61, 365, 428, 433-34 Purviance, Edna, 131-32, 378 Putnam, Samuel, 374 Quayle, Anthony, 179, 181, 459 Queen of Swords (Kotzwinkle), 461 Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 500 Quintilian, 348 Quips upon questions, or a clownes conceite on occasion offered (Armin), 43 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 4 Rabelais, Francois, 4, 12, 16, 56, 203, 370-75, 382 Radin, Paul, 160n. 163 Raffel, Burton, 374 Raine, Kathleen, 457 Raja Ram Chandra, 91 rake hero, 428 Ralph Roister Doister (Udall), 349 Rame, Franca, 152-53 Rangda, 331-34 rapporteur, 311 Rasputin, Grigory, 34 Rastell, John, 309 Rastell, William, 308 Rationale Divinorum Offciorum (Belethus), 98 Ray, Bobby, 281 Raye, Martha, 376-81 Reason (Nature), 475, 488-89, 491 Receuil Fossard, 510, 512 Red-striped Yellow Clowns, 251 "Redde rationem villicationis tuae," 473 Reed, Yvonne. See Raye, Martha Reflections on the Theatre (Baurrault), 71, 76 Regan (King Lear), 290, 292 Reilly, Larry, 108
Index Relapse, The (Vanbmgh), 208 Renaud, Madeleine, 72-73 Renz's Circus, 140—41 Restoration comedy, 207-8, 211-12 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 198-99 Rhythm on the Range (Raye), 376 Ricardo, Lucy ("I Love Lucy"), 5, 7-8, 13, 63, 66-67, 379 Ricardo, Ricky ("I Love Lucy"), 65-66 Riccoboni, 147, 149 Rice, Dan, 139, 143, 145 Richard II (England), 179, 479 Richard the Second (Shakespeare), 176, 179 Richardson, Ralph, 180-82 Ricketts, John Bill, 138 Rider-Waite Fool, 463, 464 Rider-Waite tarot deck, 456 Ridley Walker (Hoban), 368 Rigoletto, 382-87 Rigoletto (Verdi), 382 Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, 144 Rite of Spring, The (Stravinsky), 124 Rivera, Sylvia, 116 Roach, Hal, 281-83 Robbins, Tom, 463 Roberts, Jeanne Addison, 179 Robin Goodfellow, 351-62 Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests, 354, 356-58 Robin Hood, 274 Roccoboni, Luigi, 510 Rofia, Girolamo, 509 Rolle, Richard, 473 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 139, 273 Room Service (The Marx Brothers), 299 Rosalind (As You Like It), 175, 466 Rosalinde. See Rosalind Rosalynd (Lodge), 467 Rosenberg, Marvin, 293 Rosencranz and Guildenstem (Hamlet), 232 Roth, Eric, 226 Roth, Philip, 390, 392 Rourke, Constance, 500 Rover, The (Behn), 430
Index Rowland, Samuel, 358, 407 Rowley, Thomas, 407 Roy des Sots, 416 Royal Winter Music, 470 Rudens (Plautus), 348 RuPaul, 118, 171, 175 Ryskind, Morrie, 299 Sacred Wood, The (Eliot), 262 Sadler's Wells, 138, 224 Sahl, Mort, 26 Salingar, Leo, 179 Salish-Blackfoot, 157 Sam Slick (Haliburton), 502 Sambo, 3, 5, 7, 11 samurai, AA5-A1, 451 sannio. See Atellan sannio Sanskrit, 331 Saphead (Keaton), 267 Satan, 472-76, 478, 482, 488, 491 Satomi Yojiro, 447 Saturday Night Live, 111, 111 Satz, Ludwig, 389 Saunders and Fortunelli, 137 Scala, Flaminio, 508, 512 Scapino (the Lombard), 147^8 scenario, 146, 148, 150-53, 508-12 Schachnah, Sholem, 389 Schenck, Joseph, 267 schlemiel, 108, 159, 215, 218, 227, 38894 Schlicke, Paul, 395-96, 398 schlimazels, 159, 388-94 Schlemil, 388 Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr., 435-36 Schneider, Pierre, 338 schnook, 87 Schweig, Bontsha, 390-91 Scipionic circle, 348 Scolari, Peter, 172 Scordato, Mark and Ellen, 440 Scot, Reginald, 351, 353-54, 356 Scott, Sir Walter, 395 Sebastian (Twelfth Night), 185-88 second zanni. See Arlecchino Segal, Alan, 322 Segal, Eric, 348 Seidman, John, 188
539 Seigneur de Joye, 416 Selznick, David O. 197 senex iratus, 256, 259 Sennett, Mack, 128-30, 143, 195, 282, 284 Sensuality (Nature), 482, 488-89 Septuagint, 324 Serre, Jehan, 58 servetta birichina, 149, 151 Seven Deadly Sins, 476-77 Sex (West), 495, 498 Sextet (West), 498 Sforim, Mendele Mocher, 389-90 Sforza family, 453 Shakespeare, William, 44, 47, 115, 120, 169, 176-84, 185-93, 203, 231-32, 273-74, 277-79, 289-90, 316, 325, 345, 349, 351-60, 466, 512 Shakespeare's Clown (Wiles), 301 shaman, 36, 237 Sharma, R. C , 435 Sharp, John, 138 Shaw, George Bernard, 398 She Done Him Wrong. See Diamond Lil She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 428, 434 Shepherd's Calendar (Spenser), 457 Sherlock, Jr. (Keaton), 266, 268, 283 Shiells, Robert, 262 Ship of Fools, The (Brant), 4, 55 Shoshonean Hopi. See Hopi Showman-Magician (Petrouchka), 122-23 shtetl, 106, 216 Shumaker, Wayne, 454 Sidney, Philip, 279, 467 Sif, 296 Siglo de Oro stage, 151 Silent Clowns (Kerr), 133 Silsbee, Joshua, 504-5 Silvio-Beppe (/ Pagliacci), 111 Simon, Barney, 423-24 Simpson, Evelyn, 262 Simpson, Percy, 262 Simpsons, The 111 Sindri 296 Singer, Alvie (Annie Hall), 393 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 215-18, 227, 390 Sioux, 246-48
540 Sir Patient Fancy (Behn), 428, 433 Sir Politic Would-be (Volpone), 257 Sir Thomas More Circle. See More Circle Sisyphus, 243 skag, 113 Skelton, John, 289, 291, 489 Skelton, Red, 145 Sketches by Boz (Dickens), 396 Skialethia (Guilpin), 356 Skulnick, Menasha, 389 Sleary, Josephine (Hard Times), 397, 398 Sleary, Mr. (Hard Times), 397, 398 Sleary Circus, 395-99 Slippery Silks (The Three Stooges), 442 Slipping Wives (Laurel and Hardy), 282 Smetana, Bedrich, 386 Smith, Margaret, 322 Smith, Pamela Colman, 456 Smith, Seba, 502 societes joyeuses, 56, 101, 413 Socrates, 400-405 Solomon, 16, 18, 324 Some Like It Hot (Curtis and Lemmon), 169, 172 Sometimes (West), 494 Sommers, Will, 6, 7, 9, 34, 46, 91, 9495, 204, 313, 406-10 "sons of Ben, the," 255 Sons of the Desert (Laurel and Hardy), 283, 285-86 Sontag, Susan, 113 sot, 55, 57, 81, 310, 411-18 Sotte Folle, 416 sottie, 56, 310, 411-18 Sottie des rapporteurs, All soubrette, 149 So up to Nuts (The Three Stooges), 438 Spalding's North American Circus, 139 Speaight, George, 365 Speed (Two Gentlemen of Verona), 290 Spenser, Edmund, 351, 467 Squire Western (Tom Jones), 429 St. James, Susan, 377 St Jerome, 348 St. Paul. See Paul the Apostle St. Paul's Boys, 308 Stage Door (Ferber and Kaufman), 64 Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Keaton), 265 Steward, Julian, 34, 36, 38-39
Index stichomythic dialog, 14 Stichus (Plautus), 346 Stoll, E. E., 178, 182 "Stone Pillow" (Ball), 63, 67 Storey, Robert, F. 336, 338-40 Strange Newes (Nashe), 42 Stravinsky, Igor, 120-26 Strepsiades, 401-2 stultitia, 485 Stultitia. See Folly stultus, 2, 386 stupidas, 200 Subtle (The Alchemist), 257-58 Sullivan, Ed, 26, 86 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 325 Summers Last Will and Testament (Nashe), 406-7 Suppots du Seigneur de la Coquille, 416 Surly (The Alchemist), 256, 258 Svankmeyer, Jan, 368 Swan, John, 337, 339-41 Swift, Jonathan, 429, 432 Swiss Miss (Laurel and Hardy), 286 symploce, 312 Symposium (Plato), 401-3 Tacitus, 255 Taishu Engeki, 445-52 Take the Money and Run (Allen), 27, 393 Tale of a Tub, A (Jonson), 254 Tales of Hoffman (Offenbach), 388 Talmadge, Natalie, 266 Talus, 238 tarn, 1 Taos Pueblos, 36 Tarlton, Richard, 34, 41^43, 46-47, 180, 186, 278, 313 Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatorie, 353 tarocchi, 454 tarot, 453 tarot fool, 453-58, 459-65 Tarot Trumps: Their Origin, Archetypal Imagery, and Use in Some Works of English Literature (Gates), 457 Tate, Nahum, 293 Taurog, Norman, 376 Ted Healy and His Stooges, 438 Tell-Trothes New-Yeares Gift, 352 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 512
Index Terence, 146, 345, 348^9 Terentius Afer, Publius. See Terence Teresa of Avila, 323 Tevye, 389 Tewa pueblos, 250 Thalberg, Irving, 286, 299 Theater and Its Double (Artaud), 79 Theatre Royal Covent Garden, 220-21, 223, 225 Theogony (Hesiod), 239, 243 theory of correspondences, 460 Thetis, 240 Thomas, Keith, 491 Thor, 295 Thoth, 455 Thoth tarot deck, 459 "Three Enemies of Man, The" (Wenzel), 477 "Three Keatons," 65, 266 Three Nightingales, 298 Three Sappy People (The Three Stooges), 442 Three Stooges, The, 36, 133, 438-44 thunder dreamer, 245, 247 Thunder-beings, 1A6-A1 Till Eulenspiegel, 353, 355, 367, 392 Tillyard, E.M.W., 178, 182 Time Bandits (Gilliam), 368 Titan, 243 Titivillus, 478-79 Tiwan pueblos, 250 To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, 111 Tom Jones (Fielding), 363, 429 Tom Thumb, 351 Tomio Umezawa, 451 Tomlin, Lily, 117 Tonio-Taddio (/ Pagliacci), 111 Tonkawa, 155, 160 Tootsie (Hoffman), 173 topoi, 198 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein), 116, 173 Toscanini, Arturo, 124 Touchstone (As You Like It), 9-10, 1314, 44, 47, 273, 278, 291, 466-70 "Touchstone, Audrey, and William" (Henze), 470 Tout le monde, All Towan pueblo, 250
541 Towsen, John, 139-40 Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy, 364 tramp, 2, 5, 27, 82 tramp clown, 138, 141-43, 145 transsexual, 117 transey queen, 113 transvestites, 117, 170 Triboulet, 372, 382-83, 385, 417 trickster, 2-3, 66, 88, 113, 156-61, 163, n.165, 237, 241-44, 256 Trip to America, A (Mathews), 503 tripudia, 98 Trollope, Anthony, 395 Trygaeus, 402 Tsukuwimkya, 251 Tsutskutu, 252 Tucker, Sophie, 106 Turner, Aron, 139 Turner, Victor, 102 Tutch (The History of the two Maids of More-clacke), 43^45, 47 Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (Rame), 153 Twelfth Night, or What You Will (Shakespeare), 4, 15-16, 115, 185-93, 27879, 289-90, 292, 429, 512 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare), 290 Tyler, Carole-Anne, 173 Tyler, Parker, 130 Tyler, Royall, 500-501 Udall, Nicholas, 349 Ulrici, Hermann, 369 Uncle Miltie. See Berle, Milton United Artists, 128 Ur-Hamlet, 231 Ursula (Bartholomew Fair), 260-61 Uys, Pieter Dirk, 424-26 Van Sant, Gus, 182 Vanbmgh, John 208 Vance, Vivian, 65-66 Varro, 348 Vasek, 386 vaudeville. See Jewish vaudeville tradition vecchi, 147 Verdi, Guiseppe, 382-85
542 verismo, 120, 124 Vice, 2, 4-6, 178, 180-81, 256, 261, 276, 301-2, 308, 310, 313, 352, 413, 47184, 485-93 Vicentini, Tomasso, 510 Victoria (England), 221 Vidal, Gore, 498 Vigne, Andre de la, 416 Vincentini, Antonio, 511 Viola (Twelfth Night), 185-89 Virgil, 467 Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, 455, 459, 461 Vishnu, 93 vitium (pi. vitia), 482-83 Vives, Juan Luis, 200 Vladimir. See Didi Volpone (Jonson), 255, 257-58 von Chamisso, Adelbert, 388 Vox Clamantis, A1A vyce. See Vice Wagner, Richard, 386 Waite, A. E., 455-56 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 11, 14, 7984, 305 Wallace, Frank, 494 Wallett, William, 137, 139 Walsingham, Thomas, 473-74 Walston, Ray, 172 Wandering Jew, 217 Warner, William, 354, 358 Wasteland, The (Eliot), 464 Watteau, Antoine, 336-39 Way of the World, The (Congreve), 210, 428, 431, 433-34 Weary Willie, 143-44 Weaving, Hugo, 170 Weimann, Robert, 278-79, 359-60 Welder, Tony, 395 Welles, Orson, 180-82 Welsford, Enid, 200, 292, 359, 407, 477 Wenzel, Siegfried, 477 West, Mae, 6-8, 196-97, 494-99 West, William H. 359 Westminster School, 254 Weston, Jessie L., 464 What's New, Pussycat? (Allen), 26-27, 30
Index When You See Me You Know Me (Rowley), 407 Which Way, Ma-Afrika? (Dubul), 424 White, Jules, 442-43 White Clowns, 251 whiteface clown, 138, 140-41, 144-45 Who Wants a Guinea (Colman), 503 Wicked Age (West), 495 Wignell, Thomas, 502 Wile E. Coyote, 36 Wiles, David, 180-81, 186, 279, 301, 468 Wilfull Witwould (The Way of the World), 428, 430-31, 433, 435-36 Willeford, William, 5, 10-11, 140, 19596, 204, 415, 434 William (As You Like It), 466, 468 Williams, Charles, 459 Williams, Cindy, 393 Williams, Neville, 409 Williams, Robin, 36, 173 Wilson, Don, 88 Wilson, Earl, 26 Wilson, Edmund, 262 Wilson, F. P., 474, 478 Wilson, Flip, 117, 172 Wilson, J. Dover, 178, 181-82, 293 Wily Beguilde, 355-56 Wimbleton, Thomas, 473 Winchell, Walter, 26 Winnebago Trickster cycle, 156, 160 Winters, Jonathan, 117 Wintu, 160 Wisdom, 475, 479, 487 Wisdom (Nature), 475 wise fool, 3 Wisse, Ruth, 215, 217 Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (Freud), 390 Witwould, Wilfull (The Way of the World), 210 Wolsey, Thomas, 9, 291, 309-10, 407-8 Woman Haters (The Three Stooges), 438 Woodsworth, Samuel, 503—4 Woolcott, Alexander, 299 Worcester's Men, 275 Works of Ben Jonson, The (Jonson), 255
Index
543
world, the flesh, and the devil, the, 47577, 490 Worldly Affection (Nature), 482 Worthy, Elder (Love's Last Shift), 111 Woza Albert (Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon), 423-24, 426-27 Wright, Barton, 251 Wycherley, William, 207, 428, 433, 436
Yellow Clowns, 251 Yiddish humor, 106 Yo-chan, 446-51 Yorick (Hamlet), 232-33, 291 You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (Fields), 197 You Nazty Spy (The Three Stooges), 442
yakuza, 449-51 Yana, 160 Yankee, the, 500-507 Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825-1850 (Hodge), 500 "Yankee Dan." See Rice, Dan Yankey in England, The (Humphreys), 502 Yeats, William Butler, 455 Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn (Raine), 457
zacho, 447, 451 zagne, 511 Zania, 147, 149, 152 zanni, 146-52, 336-37, 429, 501, 508-12 Zemeckis, Robert, 226, 229-30 Zeus, 38, 44 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 62, 194 Zukor, Adolph, 107 Zuni, 252 Zuni clowns, 35 Zuni pueblo, 250
This page intentionally left blank
About the Editor and Contributors JOHN D. ANDERSON is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston. He has published articles on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and performance artist Marilyn Arsem in Text and Performance Quarterly, for which journal he serves as book-review coeditor. He performs oneperson shows nationwide on Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and Henry James. DANA E. ASPINALL is completing his dissertation, a reception study of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon during the seventeenth century, at the University of Connecticut. He has published articles in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and has reviewed several books for Renaissance Quarterly and Sixteenth Century Studies. His primary interests lie in Jacobean drama and its manipulations during the English Civil War and Interregnum years. JAMES P. BEDNARZ is Professor of English at Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus, where he specializes in Renaissance literature and theater. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University published articles in journals that include ELH, Renaissance Drama, Huntington Library Quarterly, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in English, Shakespeare Studies, and Library Quarterly. He recently completed a book on theatrical rivalry, Shakespeare and the Poets' War: The Crisis of Self-Reflection in Late Elizabethan Drama. DOUGLAS BRODE is a screenwriter, author, film historian, and professor at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, Onondaga
546
About the Editor and Contributors
College, and Le Moyne College. He has published several books on film, including studies of films of the 1950s, the 1960s, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Steven Spielberg, crime, and Denzel Washington. Additionally, his original script, Midnight Blue, starring Dean Stockwell, has been produced for the Motion Picture Corporation of America. MARGERY L. BROWN is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, where she also directs the Writing Center. She received both her B.A. and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her major fields of interest are classics and medieval studies, and science fiction/fantasy. BARRY JOHN CAPELLA is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, where he serves as department chair. He has been the editor of Esprit, a humanities journal, and has also presented and published on Shelley and Dante, S. Weir Mitchell, and nurse Edith Cavell. Currently he is researching the Stuart Rebellion of 1745. MOIRA E. CASEY teaches part-time at the University of Connecticut, where she is a Ph.D. candidate. She is specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury British literature. PETER N. CHETTA is Associate Professor of English at Iona College. He received his Ph.D. from Fordham University. He received a New York State Department of Education Grant in Chinese Literature at Columbia University and through a Fulbright Scholarship earned a Certificate in Chinese Civilization, U.S.E.F., at Tunghai University in Taiwan. BRADFORD CLARK is Assistant Professor of Theatre Design at Bowling Green State University. He studied puppetry with Francois Martin of the Tantamount Theatre and Balinese maskcraft with Ida Bagus Anom. He received his M.F.A. in theater from Mankato State University. SIMONETTE COCHIS is Instructor of French at New York University, where she is completing her Ph.D. She has published several articles on Antoine de La Sale, and her doctoral dissertation is entitled "Antoine de La Sale's Mirrors for the Prince: Instruction, Memory, and Recreation in Late Medieval Moral Narratives." DAVID CONFORD is Professor of English at State University of New York at Farmingdale. He was educated at Hofstra University and the University of New Mexico. DAVID N.
DEVRIES
is Assistant Professor of English at Hobart and William
About the Editor and Contributors
547
Smith colleges. He received his Ph.D. from New York University and has published on Chaucer and fourteenth-century London, Dunbar and the medieval dream vision, and Alan of Lille. ANDREW VOGEL ETTIN is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is a graduate of Rutgers College and Washington University. He is the author of several articles on Renaissance drama in addition to three books: Literature and the Pastoral, Betrayals of the Body Politic (on Nadine Gordimer), and Speaking Silences: Stillness and Voice in Modern Thought and Jewish Tradition. ANGELICA FORTI-LEWIS is Associate Professor Emerita of French and Italian at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and is currently an adjunct professor in the extension film studies program at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to several articles, she is the author of Italia autobiografica, a study of Italian autobiography from Petrarch to the nineteenth century, and Maschere, libretti, e libertini: II mito di Don Giovanni nel teatro europeo, dedicated to the Don Juan myth in European theater. ANTHONY GIFFONE is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. He has published articles on Dickens and Thackeray and is a frequent contributor to Victorian Studies Bulletin as well as a member of the bibliography committee for Victorian Studies. His most recent publication is a forthcoming article on the representation of Victorian England in contemporary detective fiction. AARON W. GODFREY serves as Director of the Classics Program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has taught classics and comparative literature there for the last thirty years. His publications include Introducing Latin and Medieval Latin as well as articles for Classical World and Monastic Studies. DANIEL GREEN is Professor of English at Pittsburg State University. His published work includes articles on such comic filmmakers as Woody Allen and Albert Brooks and on the role of comedy in contemporary American fiction. He is especially interested in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin as it relates to the analysis of film and literary comedy. MARLENE SAN MIGUEL GRONER is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. She is the coauthor of A Blueprint for Writers as well as the author of numerous articles on twentieth-century British literature, women's studies, and philosophy. Groner was a 1993 recipient of the State University of New York's Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
548
About the Editor and Contributors
ALAN HAGER is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Cortland, where he teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature. He has also taught at the University of Oklahoma, Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of two books, Shakespeare's Political Animal: Schema and Schemata in the Canon (1990) and Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (1991). JONATHAN GIL HARRIS is Assistant Professor of English at Ithaca College. His book Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England is forthcoming. His articles on Shakespeare and early modern English drama have been most recently published in Shakespeare Quarterly and Acta. NANCY J. D. HAZELTON is Professor of English at Rockland Community College. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Shakespearean Staging and the coeditor of Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage. She has published articles in Theatre Survey, Theatre History Studies, and Nineteenth Century Theatre. BRUCE HENDERSON is Associate Professor of Speech Communications at Ithaca College, where he teaches courses in the performance of literature, folklore, storytelling, and performance theory. He is coauthor (with Carol Simpson Stern) of Performance Texts and Contexts and has published articles on such figures as Marianne Moore, Lillian Heilman, and Paula Fox, as well as of folklore, children's literature, and queer performance/aesthetics. CARL BRYAN HOLMBERG is Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, where he received the Master Teacher Award in 1985. Current research interests include gender studies, social gathering, and horror fictions. He is the director of the Midwest Popular Culture and Midwest American Culture associations and enjoys composing music. JACK HRKACH is Professor of Theater at Ithaca College, where he teaches theater history and introduction to theater. His major area of research is antebellum American theater, particularly as it was offered to the villages of central New York. His most recent article, "Music, Drama, and Horsemanship!: Hippodrama in the Circuses of Antebellum New York State," appeared in the MidAtlantic Almanack in 1995. DEL IVAN JANIK is Professor of English at the State University of New York College at Cortland and has been Fulbright Exchange Lecturer at the University of North London. His publications include a book on D. H. Lawrence's travel writings and essays and reviews on Lawrence, Flann O'Brien, Gary Snyder,
About the Editor and Contributors
549
Graham Swift, and other contemporary British novelists and on literature and ecology. VICKI K. JANIK is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has taught at Hofstra University and Ithaca College. Her publications and presentations include A Critical Edition of ' 'The Play of the Wether" by John Heywood (1987) and articles and reviews on drama, Renaissance literature, film. RON JENKINS conducts cross-cultural research on comedy. His fieldwork in Bali, South Africa, and Japan was supported by grants from the Thomas Watson Foundation, the Japan Society, the Whiting Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and a Sheldon Post-Doctoral Fellowship from Harvard University. The author of Acrobats of the Soul and Subversive Laughter, Jenkins holds a doctorate in education from Harvard and a master's in buffoonery from the Ringling Brothers College of Clowns. ALICE R. KAMINSKY is Professor Emerita of English at the State University of New York College at Cortland. She received her master's and Ph.D. at New York University and has taught at Hunter College, New York University, and Cornell. Her publications include The Victim's Song (1985), Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde" and the Critics (1980), and George Henry Lewes as Literary Critic (1968). JANICE KELLER is Professor Emerita at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center at City University of New York and three master of arts degrees from Northwestern and Hofstra universities. Before coming to Farmingdale, she worked as a reporter and public relations writer. WILLIAM J. KENNEDY is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has written Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral, Authorizing Petrarch, and various articles on literary theory and Renaissance literature. CHARLES M. KOVICH is Professor of English at Rockhurst College. He received his Ph.D. from St. Louis University, where he was Director of Freshman and Sophomore English and developer of interdisciplinary programs. Author of numerous articles on Renaissance literature, the seventeenth century, pedagogy, and orality and literacy studies, he is currently working on an annotated, indexed bibliography of the complete works of orality-and-literacy scholar Walter J. Ong. YVONNE
LEBLANC
is Professor of French at the Culinary Institute of Amer-
550
About the Editor and Contributors
ica and received her Ph.D. in French literature from New York University. As well as producing and acting in several early French farces, she is author of Va Lettre Va: The French Verse Epistle (1400-1500) and several articles on medieval literature. MARCIA B. LITTENBERG is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. She received her master's degree at Ohio State and her Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has published articles and book reviews on female American writers, twentiethcentury Jewish writers, and eighteenth-century novelists. DAVID LULJAK is Lecturer in Philosophy and Art History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and an M.A. in art history and criticism from Stony Brook. ALAN LUTKUS is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York College at Geneseo, where he teaches linguistics, Shakespeare, and film. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Indiana, he served in 1990 as chief linguistic consultant for the vocabulary series Wordscape and is coauthor, with Owen and Irene Thomas, of the textbook series World of Spelling. MARY A. MALESKI is Associate Professor of English at Le Moyne College, serving nine years as Director of the Integral Honors Program. Editor of A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, she is currently writing a volume of the annotated Chaucer bibliographies. She has twice directed the Le Moyne Forum on Religion and Literature. EDMUND MILLER is Associate Professor of English at Long Island University's C. W. Post Center, where he serves as Chairman of the English Department. He has a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and is author of Drudgerie Divine: The Rhetoric of God and Man in George Herbert and George Herbert's Kinships: An Ahnentafel with Annotations, editor of Mount-Orgueil; or, Divine and Profitable Meditations by William Prynne, and editor with Robert DiYanni of Like Season'd Timber: New Essays on George Herbert. He has also published six books of poetry. ELIZABETH HOFFMAN NELSON is Lecturer in English at the State University of New York College at Fredonia. She is the area chair of American Indian Literatures and Cultures for the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association. She has written on Leslie Marmon Silko, Mari Sandiz, and Navajo enterprise. MALCOLM A. NELSON is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the
About the Editor and Contributors
551
State University of New York at Fredonia, where he teaches freshmen and graduate-student composition, poetry, and Shakespeare. He has written on Robin Hood, Renaissance drama, poetry and music, gravestones and burying grounds, and the American West. NEIL NOVELLI is Professor of English at Le Moyne College and drama critic for the Syracuse, New York, newspapers. He received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in medieval and Renaissance studies. He produced six touring Shakespeare plays in the 1970s and in 1984-1985 played Feste in a Le Moyne production directed by William S. Morris. JAMES M. O'BRIEN is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the College of New Rochelle, where he teaches broadcasting and film courses. He also conducts film series at various locations in the region. He is presently researching audience perceptions of Woody Allen and working on a book about popular films and their novel sources. DONALD PERRET is Assistant Professor of French at Emerson College. He writes on French theater for both American and European journals. His book Old Comedy in the French Renaissance, 1576-1620 (1992) describes a littleknown corpus of sixteenth-century experiments in comedy. In addition, he performs dramatic monologues and farces from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance in the original French. JAMES PHILLIPS has an M.A. in theater education from Emerson College and a B.A. in theater and radio/television from Morehead State University. He is active as a professional actor, technician, and theater educator. F. SCOTT REGAN is Professor of Theater at Bowling Green State University, where he directs the Treehouse Troupe Theatre for young audiences. He has served as a national officer for the Children's Theatre Association of America and the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. ELLEN ROSENBERG is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. She received her Ph.D. in English with minors in American studies and folklore from Indiana University. A published poet, she complements her work in Native American and other American literature and cultures with research on psychobiography and creativity process. JOEL SHATZKY is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Cortland. He is the author of numerous articles on Jewish-American literature and editor of Theresienstadt: Hitler's Gift to the Jews by Norbert Troller (1991). He is also coeditor, with Michael Taub, of Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Greenwood, 1997).
552
About the Editor and Contributors
HENRY SIKORSKI is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. He received his Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Warsaw in Poland. His specialty is Joseph Conrad and twentieth-century literature. ELIZABETH QUAY SULLIVAN is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at the State University of New York at Farmingdale. She received her Ph.D. at Rutgers University and has served on the State University of New York computer-assisted instruction initiative, IDEAL. She contributed the entry on Robin Morgan to the award-winning reference work Jewish American Women Writers edited by Ann R. Shapiro, and she is a frequent contributor to Beacham's Guide to Popular Fiction. KAREN TREANOR is Adjunct Professor of English at Long Island University's C. W. Post College. She is working on her dissertation at New York University. She has lived in northern India and has studied the Hindi language and Eastern religions. WILLIAM D. WEST is a faculty member at Syracuse University, where he teaches arts seminars in the Honors Program and humanities in the Adult Education Program. He received a Ph.D. in humanities and an M.A. in musicology from Syracuse University. He is the program annotator for the Syracuse, Illinois, Chattanooga, Greensboro, Lake Forest, and Santa Fe Symphony orchestras and is an opera critic for Opera News and Opera Canada. C. TODD WHITE is completing a master of arts degree in anthropology at University of Nevada at Las Vegas, specializing in gender studies and Native American issues. He received a master's degree in English from the University of Missouri and is interested in the integration of cultural studies in the English classroom. JANET S. WOLF is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Cortland, where she teaches eighteenth-century literature and drama. She received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University, has taught at Syracuse and Le Moyne College, and has written several articles in her specialties.
