Drama for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 20

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DRAMA for Students

National Advisory Board Susan Allison: Head Librarian, Lewiston High School, Lewiston, Maine. Standards Committee Chairperson for Maine School Library (MASL) Programs. Board member, Julia Adams Morse Memorial Library, Greene, Maine. Advisor to Lewiston Public Library Planning Process. Jennifer Hood: Young Adult/Reference Librarian, Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland, Rhode Island. Certiﬁed teacher, Rhode Island. Member of the New England Library Association, Rhode Island Library Association, and the Rhode Island Educational Media Association. Ann Kearney: Head Librarian and Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Miami, Florida, 1982–2002. Thirty-two years as Librarian in various educational institutions ranging from grade schools through graduate programs. Library positions at MiamiDade Community College, the University of Miami’s Medical School Library, and

Carrollton School in Coconut Grove, Florida. B.A. from University of Detroit, 1967 (magna cum laude); M.L.S., University of Missouri– Columbia, l974. Volunteer Project Leader for a school in rural Jamaica; volunteer with Adult Literacy programs. Laurie St. Laurent: Head of Adult and Children’s Services, East Lansing Public Library, East Lansing, Michigan, 1994–. M.L.S. from Western Michigan University. Chair of Michigan Library Association’s 1998 Michigan Summer Reading Program; Chair of the Children’s Services Division in 2000–2001; and Vice-President of the Association in 2002–2003. Board member of several regional early childhood literacy organizations and member of the Library of Michigan Youth Services Advisory Committee. Heidi Stohs: Instructor in Language Arts, grades 10–12, Solomon High School, Solomon, Kansas. Received B.S. from Kansas State University; M.A. from Fort Hays State University.

DRAMA for Students Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas

Volume 20 Anne Marie Hacht, Project Editor Foreword by Carole L. Hamilton

Drama for Students, Volume 20

Project Editor Anne Marie Hacht

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Table of Contents GUEST FOREWORD

“The Study of Drama” Carole L. Hamilton . . . . . . . . . vii INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . .

ix

LITERARY CHRONOLOGY . . . . . . . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . CONTRIBUTORS

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. . . . . . . . . . xix

ANGELS FALL

Lanford Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

Joseph Kesselring . . . . . . . . .

23

BENT

Martin Sherman . . . . . . . . . .

35

THE DESPERATE HOURS

Joseph Hayes . . . . . . . . . . .

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THE IMAGINARY INVALID

Molière . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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THE LION IN WINTER

James Goldman . . . . . . . . . .

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MISTER ROBERTS

Thomas Heggen . . . . . . . . . . 120 OTHELLO

William Shakespeare . . . . . . . . 136

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PLAY WITH A TIGER

Doris Lessing . . . . . . . . . .

A THOUSAND CLOWNS

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ROCKET TO THE MOON

Clifford Odets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Maxwell Anderson . . . . . . . .

261

THE YOUNG MAN FROM ATLANTA

214

Horton Foote

. . . . . . . . . .

288

GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS . . . .

305

.

339

NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY INDEX . . .

345

. . . . . .

351

CUMULATIVE AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX

SUBJECT/THEME INDEX

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WINTERSET

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STRANGE INTERLUDE

Eugene O’Neill

Herb Gardner . . . . . . . . . .

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The Study of Drama We study drama in order to learn what meaning others have made of life, to comprehend what it takes to produce a work of art, and to glean some understanding of ourselves. Drama produces in a separate, aesthetic world, a moment of being for the audience to experience, while maintaining the detachment of a reﬂective observer. Drama is a representational art, a visible and audible narrative presenting virtual, ﬁctional characters within a virtual, ﬁctional universe. Dramatic realizations may pretend to approximate reality or else stubbornly defy, distort, and deform reality into an artistic statement. From this separate universe that is obviously not “real life” we expect a valid reﬂection upon reality, yet drama never is mistaken for reality—the methods of theater are integral to its form and meaning. Theater is art, and art’s appeal lies in its ability both to approximate life and to depart from it. For in intruding its distorted version of life into our consciousness, art gives us a new perspective and appreciation of life and reality. Although all aesthetic experiences perform this service, theater does it most effectively by creating a separate, cohesive universe that freely acknowledges its status as an art form. And what is the purpose of the aesthetic universe of drama? The potential answers to such a question are nearly as many and varied as there are plays written, performed, and enjoyed. Dramatic texts can be problems posed, answers asserted, or moments portrayed. Dramas (tragedies as well as

comedies) may serve strictly “to ease the anguish of a torturing hour” (as stated in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream)—to divert and entertain–or aspire to move the viewer to action with social issues. Whether to entertain or to instruct, afﬁrm or inﬂuence, pacify or shock, dramatic art wraps us in the spell of its imaginary world for the length of the work and then dispenses us back to the real world, entertained, purged, as Aristotle said, of pity and fear, and ediﬁed—or at least weary enough to sleep peacefully. It is commonly thought that theater, being an art of performance, must be experienced—seen—in order to be appreciated fully. However, to view a production of a dramatic text is to be limited to a single interpretation of that text—all other interpretations are for the moment closed off, inaccessible. In the process of producing a play, the director, stage designer, and performers interpret and transform the script into a work of art that always departs in some measure from the author’s original conception. Novelist and critic Umberto Eco, in his The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Indiana University Press, 1979), explained, “In short, we can say that every performance offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot simultaneously give all the other artistic solutions which the work may admit.” Thus Laurence Olivier’s coldly formal and neurotic ﬁlm presentation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet

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(in which he played the title character as well as directed) shows marked differences from subsequent adaptations. While Olivier’s Hamlet is clearly entangled in a Freudian relationship with his mother Gertrude, he would be incapable of shushing her with the impassioned kiss that Mel Gibson’s mercurial Hamlet (in director Franco Zefﬁrelli’s 1990 ﬁlm) does. Although each of performances rings true to Shakespeare’s text, each is also a mutually exclusive work of art. Also important to consider are the time periods in which each of these ﬁlms was produced: Olivier made his ﬁlm in 1948, a time in which overt references to sexuality (especially incest) were frowned upon. Gibson and Zefﬁrelli made their ﬁlm in a culture more relaxed and comfortable with these issues. Just as actors and directors can inﬂuence the presentation of drama, so too can the time period of the production affect what the audience will see. A play script is an open text from which an inﬁnity of speciﬁc realizations may be derived. Dramatic scripts that are more open to interpretive creativity (such as those of Ntozake Shange and Tomson Highway) actually require the creative improvisation of the production troupe in order to complete the text. Even the most prescriptive scripts (those of Neil Simon, Lillian Hellman, and Robert Bolt, for example), can never fully control the actualization of live performance, and circumstantial events, including the attitude and receptivity of the audience, make every performance a unique event. Thus, while it is important to view a production of a dramatic piece, if one wants to understand a drama fully it is equally important to read the original dramatic text. The reader of a dramatic text or script is not limited by either the speciﬁc interpretation of a given production or by the unstoppable action of a moving spectacle. The reader of a dramatic text may discover the nuances of the play’s language, struc-

ture, and events at their own pace. Yet studied alone, the author’s blueprint for artistic production does not tell the whole story of a play’s life and signiﬁcance. One also needs to assess the play’s critical reviews to discover how it resonated to cultural themes at the time of its debut and how the shifting tides of cultural interest have revised its interpretation and impact on audiences. And to do this, one needs to know a little about the culture of the times which produced the play as well as the author who penned it. Drama for Students supplies this material in a useful compendium for the student of dramatic theater. Covering a range of dramatic works that span from 442 BC to the 1990s, this book focuses on signiﬁcant theatrical works whose themes and form transcend the uncertainty of dramatic fads. These are plays that have proven to be both memorable and teachable. Drama for Students seeks to enhance appreciation of these dramatic texts by providing scholarly materials written with the secondary and college/university student in mind. It provides for each play a concise summary of the plot and characters as well as a detailed explanation of its themes. In addition, background material on the historical context of the play, its critical reception, and the author’s life help the student to understand the work’s position in the chronicle of dramatic history. For each play entry a new work of scholarly criticism is also included, as well as segments of other signiﬁcant critical works for handy reference. A thorough bibliography provides a starting point for further research. This series offers comprehensive educational resources for students of drama. Drama for Students is a vital book for dramatic interpretation and a valuable addition to any reference library. Source: Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Indiana University Press, 1979.

Carole L. Hamilton Author and Instructor of English Cary Academy Cary, North Carolina

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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Drama for Students (DfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying dramas by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s “For Students” literature line, DfS is speciﬁcally designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering speciﬁc plays. While each volume contains entries on “classic” dramas frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-ﬁnd information on contemporary plays, including works by multicultural, international, and women playwrights. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the play and the work’s author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in a drama; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given character’s role in the drama as well as discussion about that character’s relationship to other characters in the play; analysis of important themes in the drama; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the play. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the play itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work. This includes a historical context essay, a box

comparing the time or place the drama was written to modern Western culture, a critical essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the play. A unique feature of DfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each drama, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each play, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading suggestions for works of ﬁction and nonﬁction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on each drama.

Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of DfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed included: literature anthologies; Reading Lists for College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; textbooks on teaching dramas; a College Board survey of plays commonly studied in high schools; a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) survey of plays commonly studied in high schools; St. James Press’s International Dictionary of Theatre; and Arthur Applebee’s 1993 study Literature in the Secondary School: Studies of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States.

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Input was also solicited from our advisory board, as well as from educators from various areas. From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of “classic” dramas (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary dramas for which information is often hard to ﬁnd. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women playwrights. Our advisory board members—educational professionals— helped pare down the list for each volume. If a work was not selected for the present volume, it was often noted as a possibility for a future volume. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.

How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in DfS focuses on one play. Each entry heading lists the full name of the play, the author’s name, and the date of the play’s publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: • Introduction: a brief overview of the drama which provides information about its ﬁrst appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conﬂicts or themes within the work. • Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author’s life, and focuses on events and times in the author’s life that inspired the drama in question. • Plot Summary: a description of the major events in the play. Subheads demarcate the play’s various acts or scenes. • Characters: an alphabetical listing of major characters in the play. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character’s role in the play, as well as discussion of the character’s actions, relationships, and possible motivation. Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the Stage Manager in Our Town—the character is listed as “The Stage Manager” and alphabetized as “Stage Manager.” If a character’s ﬁrst name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by the name. Variant names are also included for each character. Thus, the nickname “Babe” would head the listing for a character in Crimes of the Heart, but below that listing would

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be her less-mentioned married name “Rebecca Botrelle.” • Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the play. Each theme discussed appears in a separate subhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/Theme Index. • Style: this section addresses important style elements of the drama, such as setting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary. • Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the play was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the play is a historical work, information regarding the time in which the play is set is also included. Each section is broken down with helpful subheads. • Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the play, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older plays, this section includes a history of how the drama was ﬁrst received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent plays, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included. • Criticism: an essay commissioned by DfS which speciﬁcally deals with the play and is written speciﬁcally for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available). • Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material used in compiling the entry, with full bibliographical information. • Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. It includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation.

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In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: • Media Adaptations: if available, a list of important ﬁlm and television adaptations of the play, including source information. The list may also include such variations on the work as audio recordings, musical adaptations, and other stage interpretations. • Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the play. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. • Compare and Contrast: an “at-a-glance” comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-ﬁrst century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientiﬁc, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the drama was written, the time or place the play was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box. • What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured play or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of ﬁction and nonﬁction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.

Other Features DfS includes “The Study of Drama,” a foreword by Carole Hamilton, an educator and author who specializes in dramatic works. This essay examines the basis for drama in societies and what drives people to study such work. The essay also discusses how Drama for Students can help teachers show students how to enrich their own reading/ viewing experiences. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the DfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the DfS series by nationality and ethnicity.

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A Subject/Theme Index, speciﬁc to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Signiﬁcant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the speciﬁc theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. Each entry may include illustrations, including photo of the author, stills from stage productions, and stills from ﬁlm adaptations, if available.

Citing Drama for Students When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Drama for Students may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLA style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from DfS that is not attributed to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format should be used in the bibliography section: “Our Town.” Drama for Students. Eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 227–30.

When quoting the specially commissioned essay from DfS (usually the ﬁrst piece under the “Criticism” subhead), the following format should be used: Fiero, John. Critical Essay on Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Drama for Students. Eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 247–49.

When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of DfS, the following form may be used: Rich, Frank. “Theatre: A Mamet Play, Glengarry Glen Ross.” New York Theatre Critics’ Review Vol. 45, No. 4 (March 5, 1984), 5–7; excerpted and reprinted in Drama for Students, Vol. 2, eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 51–53.

When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in a volume of DfS, the following form may be used: Kerr, Walter. “The Miracle Worker,” in The Theatre in Spite of Itself. Simon & Schuster, 1963. 255–57; excerpted and reprinted in Drama for Students, Vol. 2, eds. David Galens and Lynn Spampinato (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 123–24.

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We Welcome Your Suggestions The editor of Drama for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest dramas to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via Email at: [email protected]. Or write to the editor at: Editor, Drama for Students The Gale Group 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331–3535

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Literary Chronology 1564: William Shakespeare is born on April 23 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

1919: Doris Lessing (Doris May Tayler) is born on October 22 in Persia (later renamed as Iran) to English parents.

1604: William Shakespeare’s Othello is published. 1616: William Shakespeare dies on April 23, his ﬁfty-second birthday. 1622: Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) is born on January 15 in Paris, France. 1673: Molière dies on February 17. 1673: Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid is published. 1888: Eugene O’Neill is born on October 16 in New York City. 1888: Maxwel Anderson is born on December 15 in Atlantic, Pennsylvania. 1902: Joseph Kesselring is born on June 21 in New York City. 1906: Clifford Odets is born on July 18 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1916: Horton Foote is born on March 14 in Wharton, Texas. 1918: Joseph Hayes is born on August 2 in Indianapolis, Indiana. 1919: Thomas Heggen is born on December 23 in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

1927: James Goldman is born on June 30 in Chicago, Illinois. 1928: Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude is published. 1933: Maxwel Anderson is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play Both Your Houses. 1934: Herb (Herbert) Gardner is born on December 28 in Brooklyn, New York. 1935: Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset is published. 1936: Eugene O’Neill is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, becoming the ﬁrst American dramatist to receive the award. 1937: Lanford Wilson is born on April 13 in Lebanon, Missouri. 1938: Martin Sherman is born on December 22 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1938: Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon is published. 1941: Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace is published. 1948: Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts is published.

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1949: Thomas Heggen dies on May 19 of an apparent overdose of barbiturates at his apartment in New York City. 1953: Eugene O’Neill dies of pneumonia on November 27 in Boston, Massachusetts. 1955: Joseph Hayes’s The Desperate Hours is published.

1966: James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter is published. 1967: Joseph Kesselring dies on November 5, 1967. 1978: Martin Sherman’s Bent is published. 1980: Lanford Wilson is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play Talley’s Folly. 1982: Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall is published.

1959: Maxwel Anderson dies of a stroke on February 28 at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. 1962: Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns is published. 1962: Doris Lessing’s Play with a Tiger is published. 1963: Clifford Odets dies of cancer.

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1995: Horton Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta is published. 1998: James Goldman dies of a heart attack on October 28 in New York City. 2003: Herb Gardner dies of lung disease on September 24 in New York City.

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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Drama for Students (DfS). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN DfS, VOLUME 20, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: Daily Variety, March 12, 1999. Reproduced by permission.—Denver Post, April 22, 2003. Reproduced by permission.—Doris Lessing Newsletter, v. 11, fall, 1987 for “Doris Lessing, Women Playwrights, and the Politics of Dramatic Form,” by Susan L. Carlson. Copyright © 1987 by Susan L. Carlson. Reproduced by permission of the author.— Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, v. 2, July 31, 1995. Reproduced by permission.—Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, fall, 1990 for “An Interview with Lanford Wilson,” by John Tibbetts. Copyright © 1990 by the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall

Center for the Humanities and the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045, U.S.A. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Modern Drama, v. 7, September, 1964. Copyright © 1964 by the University of Toronto, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama. Reproduced by permission.—Nation, v. 194, May 5, 1962. Copyright © 1962 by The Nation Magazine/ The Nation Company, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—New Leader, v. 80, March 24, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by The American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—New Republic, v. 118, March 8, 1948. Copyright © 1948 by The New Republic, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the New Republic.— New York Times, January 11, 1941. Copyright © by the New York Times Co. Reproduced by permission.—North Dakota Quarterly, v. 38, winter, 1970. Copyright 1970 by The University of North Dakota. Reproduced by permission.—South Atlantic Quarterly, v. 77, spring, 1978. Copyright © 1978 by Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Used by permission.—Time, v. 51, March1, 1948. Copyright © 1948 Time, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.—World Literature Written in English, v. 15, November, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by World Literature Written in English. Reproduced by permission. COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN DfS, VOLUME 20, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:

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Barnett, Gene. From “Angels Fall,” in Lanford Wilson. Edited by Warren French. Twayne, 1987. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.— Barnwell, H. From Molière: “Le Malade Imaginaire,” Grant & Cutler Ltd, 1982. Copyright © Grant & Cutler Ltd. 1982. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Bates, Catherine. From “Weaving and Writing in Othello,” in Shakespeare Survey 46. Edited by Stanley Wells. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press.—Bermel, Albert. From Molière’s Theatrical Bounty: A New View of the Plays. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Albert Bermel. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Southern Illinois University Press.—BrenmanGibson, Margaret. From “Rocket to the Moon,” in Critical Essays on Clifford Odets. Edited by Gabriel Miller. G. K. Hall, 1991. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Dinapoli, Russell. From “Maxwell Anderson’s Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset,” in Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama. Edited by Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam LopezRodriguez. P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002. Copyright © by P.I.E.-Peter Lang. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Gassner, John. From Eugene O’Neill, University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Copyright © 1965 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.— Manheim, Michael. From Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship, Syracuse University Press, 1982. Copyright © 1982 by Michael Manheim. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Orgel, Stephen. From “Othello and the End of Comedy,” in Shakespeare Survey 56: Shakespeare and Comedy. Edited by Peter Holland. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN DfS, VOLUME 20, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: 2003 stage production of Arsenic and Old Lace at the Strand Theatre in London. Robbie Jack/ Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—A scene from the movie still Strange Interlude, written by Eugene ONeill. Bettman/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Anderson, Maxwell, photograph. The Library of Congress.—Barbara Harris and Jason Robards in the 1965 movie A Thousand Clowns, Harrell Prods/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Clive Owen in a 1996 movie production of Bent, written by Martin Sherman. Channel

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4/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Fonda, Henry and James Cagney, in the movie Mister Roberts, 1955, photograph. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Fonda, Henry, in a scene from the 1948 stage production of Mister Roberts, photograph. Time Life Pictures/ Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Foote, Horton, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Gardner, Herb, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Gazzarra, Ben, and Jane Fonda in a 1963 stage production of Strange Interlude, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Goldman, James A., photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Hayes, Joseph, with his wife and son, Gregory, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Heggen, Thomas, photograph. Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.— Humphry Bogart and Mary Murphy in the 1955 movie The Desperate Hours, written by Joseph Hayes. John Springer Collection/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Ives, Burl, and Daliah Lavi in the 1967 ﬁlm Rocket to the Moon, photograph. American International Pictures Express. Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Jason Robards in a scene from Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Kingsley, Ben (left) as Othello and David Suchet as Iago, in a scene from William Shakespeare’s Othello © Donald Cooper/Photostage. Reproduced by permission.—Lessing, Doris, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Massey, Raymond (l to r), Cary Grant, and Peter Lorre, in the ﬁlm Arsenic and Old Lace, photograph. The Kobal Collection/Warner Bros. Reproduced by permission.—Meredith, Burgess, and Margo in a 1936 ﬁlm adaptation of Winterset, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Molière, engraving. The Library of Congress.—Movie still from the 1968 production of James A. Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. AVCO EMBASSY/The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Newman, Paul, Patricia Peardon, and Nancy Coleman in a 1955 stage production of the play The Desperate Hours, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—O’Neill, Eugene G., photograph. The Library of Congress.— O’Toole, Peter, and Catherine Hepburn in a 1968 ﬁlm version of The Lion in Winter, photograph. Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Odets, Clifford, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Orson Welles as Othello and Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona, in

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a scene from the 1952 ﬁlm Othello, directed by Orson Welles, based on the play by William Shakespeare. The Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission.—Playbill cast list from the The Young Man from Atlanta, written by Horton Foote, illustration. Performing Arts Books, NYC. PLAYBILL (®) is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Playbill cast list from Winterset, written by Maxwell Anderson, illustration. Performing Arts Books, NYC. PLAYBILL (®) is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Playbill cover for the The Young Man from Atlanta, written by Horton Foote, illustration. Performing Arts Books, NYC. PLAYBILL (®) is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Scene from the stage production of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, also known as The Hypochondriac, illustration. Photostage, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.— Shakespeare, William, illustration. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.—Sherman, Martin, 1984, photograph by Mark Gerson. Repro-

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duced by permission of Mark Gerson.—Showbill cast list from Angels Fall, written by Lanford Wilson, illustration. Performing Arts Books, NYC. PLAYBILL (®) is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Showbill cover for Angels Fall, illustration. Performing Arts Books, NYC. PLAYBILL (®) is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated, N.Y.C. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Stage production of Bent, starring Ian McKellen and Tom Bell, written by Martin Sherman, photograph. Photostage, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—Stage production of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, also known as The Hypochondriac, starring Emily Morgan, Clive Arrindell and Daniel Massey, photograph. Photostage, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—Stage production of Rocket to the Moon, starring David Burke and Annabel Leventon, written by Clifford Odets, photograph. Photostage, Ltd. Reproduced by permission.—Wilson, Lanford, New York City, 1980, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

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Contributors Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. Entries on Mister Roberts and Strange Interlude. Original essays on Mister Roberts and Strange Interlude. Cynthia Bily: Bily teaches literature and writing at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. Entry on A Thousand Clowns. Original essay on A Thousand Clowns. Liz Brent: Brent holds a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan. Entry on The Lion in Winter. Original essay on The Lion in Winter. Kate Covintree: Covintree is a graduate student and expository writing instructor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College. Original essay on The Desperate Hours. Carol Dell’Amico: Dell’Amico is an instructor of English literature and composition. Entry on Play with a Tiger. Original essay on Play with a Tiger. Tamara Fernando: Fernando is a freelance writer and editor in Seattle, Washington. Original essay on The Young Man from Atlanta.

Sheldon Goldfarb: Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. Original essay on The Lion in Winter. Diane Andrews Henningfeld: Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College who writes widely on literature for educational publishers. Entry on Othello. Original essay Othello. Catherine Dybiec Holm: Holm is a genre, literary, and nonﬁction author. Original essay on The Lion in Winter. David Kelly: Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at two colleges in Illinois. Entry on The Desperate Hours. Original essay on The Desperate Hours. Lois Kerschen: Kerschen is a freelance writer and part-time English instructor. Entry on Bent. Original essay on Bent. Anthony Martinelli: Martinelli is a Seattle-based freelance writer and editor. Original essay on Bent . Wendy Perkins: Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and ﬁlm. Entry on

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Arsenic and Old Lace. Original essay on Arsenic and Old Lace.

the Moon. Original essays on Angels Fall and Rocket to the Moon.

Annette Petruso: Petruso holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in screen writing from the University of Texas. Original essays on Bent and Mister Roberts.

Dustie Robeson: Robeson is a freelance writer with a master’s degree in English. Entry on The Young Man from Atlanta. Original essay on The Young Man from Atlanta.

Doreen Piano: Piano is a Marion Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Entries on Angels Fall and Rocket to

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Scott Trudell: Trudell is a freelance writer with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Entries on The Imaginary Invalid and Winterset. Original essays on The Imaginary Invalid and Winterset.

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Angels Fall More than twenty years after its debut, Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall continues to be a little-known and rarely produced play. Commissioned by the New World Festival of Miami, Florida, in 1982, it moved to the Circle Repertory Theater in New York later that year. In 1983, despite a brief run on Broadway, New York drama critic John Simon judged it as the best American play that season. Unlike the familiar urban and Midwestern settings of Wilson’s previous plays, Angels Fall is set in a church in the desert of the American Southwest. The catalyst for the play’s action—a nuclear accident at a uranium mine that forces a group of people to take refuge at a Catholic mission—is more overtly political than many of his other plays and can even be seen, particularly through the ﬁgure of Father Doherty, as a morality tale about the nuclear age.

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Although the accident at Chin Rock mine alludes to a broader theme of Wilson’s that concerns the destruction of the national heritage as found in the stark natural beauty of the Southwest, another key theme unravels as the characters gathered at the church begin to interact. What is most compelling about the play is its ability to conjure up complex feelings in the characters about the direction their lives have taken, particularly as it concerns their occupations. For some, such as the tennis player Zappy, there is no ambivalence regarding vocation. Contrast that with Don Tabaha, whose choices will have an effect not just on him but the community of Native Americans with whom he has spent his life.

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Thus, a main question that Wilson pursues throughout the play reveals a concern with being satisﬁed with the kind of work one has chosen to do. One’s work or vocation must have a function that moves beyond economic need. For this cast of professionals, work must be meaningful or else one’s life has not been lived as fully as it could have been. The absent presence of an environmental disaster as a backdrop to the play compels the characters to confront, if it is only momentarily, how to live fully in the time given doing work that is satisfying.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Dramatist Lanford Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri, on April 13, 1937. An only child of divorced parents, Wilson spent most of his younger years with his mother in Missouri, only reuniting with his father in California after his freshman year of college. After only a year in San Diego where he attended San Diego State College, Wilson moved to Chicago, spending six years there working as a copywriter in advertising while pursuing his writing career. In 1962, Wilson moved to New York and became involved with the experimental drama scene at off-off-Broadway theaters such as Caffe Cino and Cafe La Mama Experimental Theater. In 1963, his ﬁrst play So Long at the Fair was produced at Caffe Cino. While many of his early plays were produced at these experimental theaters, it was not until the late 1960s when Wilson, along with three of his friends involved in theater, founded the Circle Repertory Company that he began to garner a reputation as an important American playwright. It was at this venue that many of his best known plays Hot l Baltimore (1973), Talley’s Folly (1979), and Burn This (1987) had their premieres; many of them moving to Broadway theaters after receiving critical reviews. During the 1970s, Wilson gained recognition as a major American playwright. In 1973, he received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and an Obie for Hot l Baltimore. Two years later, The Moundbuilders won an Obie, an award that recognizes outstanding off-Broadway productions. In 1980, Wilson received a Pulitzer Prize for Talley’s Folly, the ﬁrst of three plays that followed several generations of an American family. One of his less well-received plays, produced in 1982 for the New World Festival of Miami, Florida, Angels Fall later opened at the Circle Repertory Theater and eventually moved to

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Broadway where it had only a short run before closing. Lemon Sky, another play that did not do well on Broadway during its ﬁrst appearance in 1970, was later revived successfully and adapted to television in a PBS American Playhouse production. In the past decade, Wilson has continued to write plays and collaborate with long-time friend and fellow Circle Repertory Company founder, Marshall Mason. In 1995, after nearly thirty years of being its playwright-in-residence, Wilson resigned from his position. Since then, he has held a number of artist-in-residencies at theaters such as the Signature in New York and at university theater departments such as the University of Houston and Arizona State University. When not in residence, he lives in Sag Harbor on Long Island, New York.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 The setting of Angels Fall is a small, plain adobe church in northwestern New Mexico. The play takes place during an afternoon and early evening. As the play begins, Don Tabaha is sitting in the church staring at the wall. Momentarily he walks into the residence where he, his mother Maria, and Father Doherty live. As the play begins, two of the main characters, Niles and Vita Harris, are heard offstage. From their conversation, it appears that they have been turned back by the highway patrol and have sought refuge from the heat in the church. After they enter the church, Vita goes off to make a phone call to Dr. Singer who runs the mental health institute where Niles is going for therapy. As they wait for Dr. Singer to call, Don walks into the church and tells them that the church is closed on Saturdays. Soon after this exchange, voices are heard approaching. Momentarily, Marion and Zappy enter the church and head toward the phone. A few minutes later, Father Doherty enters the church and assumes Vita and Niles are here for a conference or appointment which he cannot remember making. When Vita explains that there was a bridge out at the fork, Doherty claims there is no problem with the bridge at this time of year, but that it must be ‘‘some problem with the nuclear thing again.’’ When they inquire about it again, he brushes them off and asks if they have seen Don whom he describes as ‘‘short, dark, surly.’’ When Vita tells the priest that Don left on his motorcycle, the priest

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appears disturbed, then looks out the window and sees Don arguing with Arthur, the highway patrol ofﬁcer who is also his uncle. Niles pursues Doherty about the nuclear accident and Doherty explains that the whole area is surrounded by uranium mines, nuclear power plants, and toxic dumps that often experience accidents. Soon Marion and Zap enter the church again and the priest enters his living quarters. Zap tells them that something went wrong when some yellow cake was being loaded at the Chin Rock mine and that trafﬁc is being stopped for a hundred miles. Marion tells Vita and Niles that they are due in San Diego tomorrow for a tennis match and need to catch a plane at the local airport. While talking about what route to take to leave the area, they hear a helicopter approach. A voice from a speaker proclaims, ‘‘Stay indoors. The roads are temporarily closed.’’ When it is clear everyone in the church must stay there for a while, the priest has his housekeeper make them lemonade. Meanwhile, Don enters the church, demanding to learn what Marion knows about the Chin Rock mine accident. He is furious that Arthur will not allow him to travel on the road. He is supposed to be leaving for Berkley that evening to take up a position as a researcher. While Vita is once again talking to the clinic in Phoenix, Marion and Niles discover they are both involved with art, he as an art professor and she as a gallery owner. Niles also learns that Marion is the widow of Ernest Branch, a well-known regional artist. Although she lives in the area, she is about to move, having sold most of her late husband’s work to various museums around the country. Father Doherty returns with the lemonade and acknowledges Don, who has been sitting quietly while the others talk. Tension erupts between Don and the priest and Don leaves again. The priest explains to the others that, instead of administering medicine to his people, the Navajo, Don has decided to take a research position at a famous cancer institute. Afterwards, the characters begin to express frustration about not being able to leave. Meanwhile, Niles reveals that he is not returning to the college where he teaches since undergoing a ‘‘willful suspension of disbelief.’’ He and Vita then describe the reason why he is on his way to the mental health clinic. Don and Zap enter the church again, Don with a newspaper and Zap with earphones, listening to the radio. He tells everyone that someone has died at the mine already and that a truck overturned, blowing yellowcake dust all over. Everyone becomes nervous and begins discussing

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the difﬁculties of living in the southwest. Discussion turns toward Don about his decision. Soon, Don and Father Doherty are bickering about his decision. When Niles gets involved, Don accuses him of not living in the real world and mocks his decision to go to Dr. Singer’s where all the wealthy professionals go. Niles leaves in a huff. Don who is tired of hearing the priest press him to stay, also departs. By the end of the ﬁrst act, Vita is the only one left in the church. She holds Niles’s jacket and turns toward the altar.

Act 2 The second act begins at dusk with a discussion between Vita and Father Doherty about the work that he does in the area. Zap, who is listening to the radio, tells them that trafﬁc is beginning to move and that the road should be cleared by 8:00. After Father Doherty leaves the church, Marion and Vita discuss the difﬁculties of moving and getting rid of personal effects. Marion is putting together a show of her late husband’s that will be exhibited in Chicago and other cities around the country. Soon after Don returns to the church, Niles enters and apologizes to him for his behavior. Meanwhile, Marion tells Zap about the schedule he will be playing in the tennis tournament. Each of his contenders appears to be easily defeated. While he and

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Don are talking, Father Doherty comes in and again begins goading Don about his decision. This time, the priest chides him for moving to Northern California where, unlike his current situation, he will be living among very well-to-do people. Niles seems to be getting upset again and suddenly claims that he and Vita are leaving. However, he takes ill and falls to a bench. Don immediately begins to diagnose him, asking questions and making him drink lemonade. After a while, Niles recovers from what Don has tentatively described as a hypoglycemic, or low blood sugar, attack. This scare allows him to discuss his departure from the college and his feelings about his profession as a teacher and scholar. The priest joins in the discussion, claiming that teaching is a calling much like Don’s calling to medicine, and his to the priesthood. Zap also chimes in claiming that tennis was a calling to him at a very young age and recounts the story of how he knew he was a tennis player without ever really playing the game. Overhead, a voice announces from a helicopter that the road is clear. On hearing this, Father Doherty runs outside, shouting that the road is not clear. Back inside, he resumes hounding Don about his decision to leave the indigenous people who have very little health care available to them in the area. At this point, Niles intervenes again but more aggressively pointing out the priest’s inability to see Don’s decision for what it is—his own. Suddenly, after a pause in the argument, the priest understands what he has been doing to Don, denying him the freedom to make his own decision. He wishes Don good luck and begins to get ready for mass that evening. As the characters depart, they treat each other with newfound respect and intimacy. Niles and Vita decide to remain for evening mass but go and take a walk beforehand. In the ﬁnal moments of the play, Don says his goodbye to Father Doherty. They make gestures of reconciliation toward each other and then Don leaves, crying. The play ends with Father Doherty ringing the church bells for mass to begin.

CHARACTERS Marion Clay Marion Clay is the widow of a well-known New Mexico artist who is dating a younger man, Salvatore Zappala or Zappy. Her vocation in life has been to run an art gallery in Chicago where she has

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sold her husband’s and other contemporary artists’ work successfully. When the play begins, Marion is in the midst of selling her dead husband’s effects so that she can leave the southwest and attend to her gallery as well as her lover’s career as a professional tennis player. However, even though she is portrayed as an independent woman, she has a very maternal relationship to Zappy, indulging him as one would a child about his health and well-being.

Father William Doherty Father Doherty is the parish priest of the New Mexico mission where the play takes place. As a mentor to Don Tabaha, the young half-Navajo studying medicine, Father Doherty tries to convince him to stay in New Mexico and administer to the Native Americans who live in the vicinity rather than pursue a career as a researcher at UC Berkeley. Their conﬂict acts as the nexus for the other ‘‘couples’’ in conﬂict: Niles and Vita Harris and Marion and Zappy. Despite his ofﬁcious nature, the priest reveals himself to have only good intentions, even if they are misguided. Throughout the play, he acts as a unifying force among the strangers gathered at the church. His friendly overtures include serving lemonade, giving counsel to Niles Harris, the professor who has recently undergone a nervous breakdown, and his wife, Vita, and providing comic relief during the tense hours when everyone is trying to ﬁgure out the effects of the nuclear accident. However, despite his whimsical nature, often twisting popular song lyrics to suit his own situation, he is quite serious about persuading Don to stay and administer medicine to his people. Just as Doherty had a calling to the priesthood, he is intent on convincing Don that being a doctor and not a scientist is his vocation.

Niles Harris Niles Harris is a middle-aged art history professor who is on his way to a mental health clinic in Arizona with his wife, Vita. After suffering a nervous breakdown in the classroom due to what he refers to as ‘‘my willful suspension of disbelief,’’ Niles is asked to take a temporary leave at the university in Providence, Rhode Island where he works. On route to Phoenix, Niles and Vita stop at the mission to use a phone and end up staying for several hours while a nearby nuclear accident is being contained. It is clear that the professor is not mentally alert and often appears to be forgetful and daft despite his erudition. He is querulous and difﬁcult at times, sarcastic and biting, especially toward Don who mocks him for his position in the

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ivory tower. After experiencing a slight case of hypoglycemia that Don diagnoses and then treats, Niles calms down, confessing the details of his midlife crisis candidly with Don and the priest. Of all the characters in the play, Niles appears to be most changed by the hours spent conﬁned with strangers. His momentary health crisis leads him to appreciate Don’s generosity of spirit and to connect with Father Doherty about their callings as teachers despite their differences. Finally, in the last scene he comes to the aid of Don by defending his decision to leave New Mexico for California. Speaking from experience, he derides Father Doherty by exclaiming, ‘‘You cannot hold power over another man; even for his own good.’’

Vita Harris As the young wife of Niles Harris, Vita Harris is exceptionally pretty, thin, and smart. Whereas Niles is cantankerous, Vita is upbeat and charming. Throughout the play, she is the paragon of the protective and supportive wife, providing Niles with as much care as she can while also gently chiding him for his cantankerous ways. As a former student of his, Vita shares his love of art and history. Although she does not have a major role in the play, Vita acts as the backbone to the relationship, making sure they are in touch with the mental health institute where they are going, providing support when Niles’s faculties are quite weak and being amenable to his various whims.

Don Tabaha Intentionally unfriendly and belligerent at times toward the other characters, Don Tabaha, a young half-Navaho, has given up his intention to be a doctor in the Indian community in northern New Mexico to take a high level position as a research scientist near San Francisco. It is his decision to take the position that results in continual conﬂicts between him and his mentor and substitute father, Father Doherty, who wants him to practice medicine among his people. His torment is exacerbated by the nuclear accident which prevents him from leaving, and thus allows Father Doherty to harp on his decision to leave. Toward the end of the play, Don reiterates the famous line delivered by James Dean in Rebel without a Cause as he declares to the priest, ‘‘You are tearing me apart.’’ Throughout the play, Don appears on the periphery of the action, trying to keep to himself and dissuade others from engaging with him, yet when Niles experiences a hypoglycemic attack, it is Don who administers aid

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and provides comfort. At the end of the play, he breaks down crying as he leaves the priest, thus capturing the difﬁculty of his decision.

Salvatore Zappala Referred to as Zappy, the young lover of Marion Clay aspires to be a champion tennis player. Although he has a rather minor role in the play compared to the other characters, his youth and vitality are contrasted to the diminishing health and well-being of Niles Harris. Whereas Niles’ career is viewed as over because of his failing state of mind, Zappy is on his way to the top if he is given a chance to show his talents as a tennis player. Throughout the play, Zappy plays a marginal role, acting out childish whims about the upcoming tournament he is about to play, obsessing about his health, and even at times trying to undermine himself by belittling his abilities. However, like Marion, he understands who he is and what he wants. His determination to be a contender on the tennis circuit is witnessed by the way he recounts playing tennis for the ﬁrst time and knowing that was what he wanted to do. Although he may be younger than the other characters, his understanding of who he is and what he wants to do is quite certain.

Zappy See Salvatore Zappala

THEMES Following One’s Calling A central theme of following one’s calling or vocation emerges most frequently in the bitter exchanges between Don Tabaha and Father Doherty over Tabaha’s decision to become a research scientist and the more philosophical discussions between Niles and Father Doherty over Niles’s loss of faith in his scholarship and its effect on his teaching art history. The ability to follow one’s calling despite occasional lapses is witnessed in Doherty himself. For example, he describes his church service to Vita as one where ‘‘Twelve, ﬁfteen stoic Navahos shufﬂe in, kneel, I mumble sincerely, they mumble sincerely, and they shufﬂe out.’’ For Father Doherty, administering religion to a congregation that may not be particularly attuned to everything that Christianity has to offer may be daunting but it is what he does. His insistence on the importance of vocation is most dramatically seen in the encounters he has

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • After reading Wilson’s play Angels Fall, read other ‘‘sealed-room’’ plays that conﬁne characters to a particular place such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and William Inge’s Bus Stop. Compare the settings of these plays—a church, a spare room, and a snowbound bus stop—noting the use of a speciﬁc setting for its symbolic effects. In what ways do these conﬁned settings illustrate a major theme found in the plays? What symbolism is provoked by the setting? What is the signiﬁcance of the characters’ inability to leave? • The historical period in which Angels Fall takes place is the height of the nuclear arms build-up between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s. Research this decade for other plays, works of ﬁction, and popular ﬁlms that dramatize the effects of a possible nuclear catastrophe. In what ways are they similar to Angels Fall in theme and setting? In what ways are they different? • Tennessee Williams, best known for his plays

with Don whom he thinks was meant to be a local doctor. Yet Don’s decision is based on what he considers ‘‘a very special talent for research.’’ On a more positive note, the priest encourages Niles to return to teaching which he sees as being part of his vocation as a priest. In nearly all of the characters, a desire to do something with one’s life involves work. For Marion, it is selling the work of contemporary artists; for her lover, Zappy, it is playing tennis, a talent he discovered having while in grade school. What these chance encounters among the characters engender is a reassessment of what is most important, particularly with the threat of nuclear contamination occurring nearby.

Skepticism about Technology The nuclear accident at the Chin Rock mine acts as a reminder that dangerous technologies

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie, is one of the most highly acclaimed American dramatists. Critics have noted that Wilson’s plays bear a strong semblance to Williams’s in terms of their poetic lyricism and sentimentality. Compare a Williams play to Angels Fall, noting what critics have said about these two playwrights, then write an argumentative paper that agrees or disagrees with these critics’ comparisons. • Some critics, such as Susan Harris Smith, have noted that the female characters—Vita, Maria, and Marion—in Angels Fall are not very signiﬁcant characters and do nothing more than provide support and encouragement to the men in the play. Other critics such as Richard Wattenberg suggest the opposite, claiming that the female characters are strong and central to the play’s themes. After reading these two critics, choose one couple and analyze their gender roles. In what ways do you agree with either Smith or Wattenberg’s assessment and in what ways do you disagree?

threaten mankind. Although the setting of the accident is offstage, reference is made to it throughout the play as a way of drawing danger close enough to the characters to have a feeling of unease. However, more pertinent are Father Doherty’s comments that make it clear how technology has contributed to the destruction of the natural environment in the Southwest as well as to its native peoples, many of whom are employed in the nuclear industry. Describing the frequent accidents that occur at the various nuclear mines, reactors, and waste dumps in the vicinity as ‘‘the Perils of Pauline,’’ Doherty expresses his disgust at the government’s inability to consider the dangers of its policies. Particularly via the character of the priest, Wilson reveals a cautious attitude toward embracing the concept of technology as improving the quality of life. Instead, Doherty ﬁxates on how these technologies have contaminated

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natural resources and endangered human lives. In addition, Don Tabaha’s decision to abandon his adolescent dream of being a local doctor to pursue genetic engineering reveals how the pursuit of scientiﬁc knowledge can be highly seductive.

Crisis of Faith Isolated from the rest of the world due to the nuclear accident, several of the characters, particularly Niles, Don, and Father Doherty, reveal in obvious and oblique ways that they are undergoing a crisis of faith regarding their work. This crisis is most outwardly expressed in Niles Harris, who admits that while reading his life’s work, he experienced ‘‘a willful suspension of disbelief’’ that made him realize that his scholarship was a farce. This leads him to comment that for thirty years he had been ‘‘brainwashing the little bastards’’ in the classroom. After breaking down in the classroom, he was told to take a leave from the university where he taught. In contrast to Niles’s open confession of his crises, Father Doherty appears to be projecting his own crisis of faith onto Don. The priest does not seem to get much satisfaction out of his work in this remote parish, partly because it seems as if he is not really needed. Still, he is unable to leave because he is so attached to the region and its people. Don, on the other hand, seems overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done in terms of providing good health care to the Navajos. His crisis stems from his fear of failure as is witnessed when he lists major diseases affecting the Navajo and ends by saying to Vita, ‘‘there’s no time for one person in a hundred years to begin to correct a millennium of genetic neglect.’’ Compared to these men, minor characters such as Marion, Zappy, and Vita appear stable and content with their life’s decisions although their social roles do not have as much import as a doctor, priest, and professor does.

STYLE Dialogue The dialogue in the play is marked by fastpaced one-liners interspersed with monologues that slow down the pace of the play. The bitter and detailed exchanges between Don and Father Doherty reveal a complex history of expectations and obliga-

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tions that leave others who do not know them outside the loop. In contrast, Wilson employs monologues to reveal autobiographical details that bring understanding and empathy to the listeners. Throughout the play, these two kinds of dialogue create a rhythm, at points highlighting the intensity of the accident occurring offstage, while at others marking the passing of time for people who are in transit. At moments throughout the play, Wilson uses overlapping dialogue to convey a rush to gain understanding of someone or something. He also peppers his dialogue with popular sayings, passages from the Bible, and popular song lyrics as found in the sometimes solemn, sometimes humorous speech of Father Doherty.

Genre The dramatic structure of Angels Fall is best described as a ‘sealed-room’ play in which characters who may not know each other or who are very different from each other are forced together due to an unforeseen or unknown circumstance. The accident at the Chin Rock mine results in the characters not being able to go anywhere until notiﬁed by authorities. All of the characters are affected in different ways by this news in terms of where they are supposed to be going, yet having their plans on hold allows each of them to take the time to interact with people whom they may not typically meet. Thus, a priest, a professor, a tennis player, an art gallery owner, and a scientist are brought together, each with his or her particular worldview. Although these world views clash throughout the play, there are occasional moments of understanding. The accident literally seals the characters off from the world, except for the radio and phone, thus allowing time to be placed on hold.

Setting Wilson uses the setting of a church in the New Mexican desert to highlight his themes of ﬁnding one’s calling, being skeptical of technology, and undergoing a crisis of faith. In particular, the church symbolizes the need for a sanctuary in a world that is increasingly dehumanized through modernization, commercialization, and militarization. Thus, even though the church provides sanctuary, its modern day counterpart, the Chin Rock mine acts as a more compelling but absent setting. Whereas the nuclear accident symbolizes the destruction of the natural world, the church promotes preservation of traditional values. However, that the church is lo-

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cated in the desert reveals its marginalized position from the mainstream. Although the church may have an impact on the few humans it serves in the area, it has little effect on the economic and political realities represented by the uranium mine, which though never stated in the play, contributes to the creation and continuation of the military-industrial complex.

Symbolism It is also signiﬁcant that the church is located at a crossroads since many of the characters in the play, particularly Niles and Don, ﬁnd themselves at a moment in their lives where they are experiencing indecision about their life’s work. Whereas Niles must determine whether he can return to the classroom, Don must decide whether to stay among his people or leave to pursue an illustrious career as a scientist. Each of these decisions is based on what their vocation is in life. It is the priest, acting as a mediator, who both thwarts (as in the case of Don) and facilitates (as in the case of Niles) these decisions. Another important symbol conveying the inability of these characters to make a decision is the helicopter that appears like a modern deity to warn the neighboring areas around the mine that ‘‘The road is closed.’’ That the road is closed metaphorically may mean that there is a temporary inability to move forward in life as represented by Don and Niles’s indecisiveness. Later, at the end of the play, the helicopter reappears, signaling that the road has reopened and that both Don and Niles can now make their way.

Allusion The title of the play is taken from a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem that compares the condition of humans whose lives for the most part are ordinary and often times lackluster to the dramatic story of fallen angels who rise and fall majestically. The contrast between the eternal and temporal which Hopkins explores in the poem poses this question: if humans cannot live on the grand scale that angels do, what can they do to make their lives have signiﬁcance while here on earth? The need to ﬁnd a calling seems to be the answer in this play. For the short time that the characters are gathered at the church, they seem to come to some realization that they only have a short time in which to do what they can to improve life on earth, regardless of how small these actions may appear. A similar allusion to the theme of how to live one’s life gracefully and fully within the time that

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one has is posed by Father Doherty when he quotes from the Bible: ‘‘Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness?’’ The quote as found in the New Testament alludes to the possibility of an apocalypse and challenges its readers to live life in a manner in which confronting death will not be frightening. As a contemporary example, the play provides a situation in which the characters face an environmental disaster that is highly suggestive of an even bleaker possibility, the end of the world due to nuclear war. For these characters, undergoing even a slightly deeper understanding of themselves may be the only possible course of action, but it will be one that is true to themselves.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT As a playwright coming of age in the 1950s, Wilson, like his other dramatic cohorts, drew his inspiration from the social and historical conditions that transformed the United States into a superpower after World War II. Despite the general optimism buoyed by post-war economic growth throughout the 1950s, the rush towards building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal ready to be deployed at any moment resulted in social anxiety and occasional panic about the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In Drama Since 1960: A Critical History, Matthew Roudane notes that ‘‘Some of our dramatists lived through many of these historical and social experiences, and their plays reﬂect an uneasiness with an increasingly atomized and mechanized postwar America.’’ The growth of the military state resulted in the production of thousands of warheads capable of reaching the Soviet Union at any time. In addition, the conservative cultural climate of the cold war provoked anti-Communist sentiment in the 1950s, known as the McCarthy Era, which involved an attempt to root out American Communists. Many people lost their jobs and went to jail, often times for little more than being a member of the American Communist Party. Others were falsely accused of spying for America’s nemesis, the Soviet Union. Along with the social panic incited by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the fear of nuclear war came an understanding of the cold war’s impact on the environment through the production of uranium and

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1980s: Nuclear accidents, such as the meltdowns at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, awaken Americans to the dangers of radiation from nuclear energy. Because of these accidents and the build-up of nuclear arms, an international grassroots movement forms to protest the use of nuclear energy. Environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, pressure governments to rethink their environmental policies.

matic standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War II, reaches its zenith under Ronald Reagan’s U.S. administration from 1980 to 1988. Billions of dollars are spent building nuclear missiles that are hidden in various parts of the country that can be deployed at any moment. In addition, the Reagan administration lobbies heavily for funding of a defense plan popularly known as ‘‘Star Wars,’’ which is meant to repel incoming nuclear missiles.

Today: In the United States, a moratorium is placed on the building of nuclear energy plants. However, because of its lengthy shelf life, hazardous waste from uranium mining in the southwestern United States continues to be a problem in terms of its handling, transportation, and storage.

Today: In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union is dismantled and the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union comes to an end. However, because of the enormous trafﬁcking in nuclear weapons, not only do many developing nations such as North Korea, India, and Pakistan acquire missiles, they continue to build them as a defense system against invasion.

• 1980s: The Cold War, which began as a diplo-

the testing of missiles. Starting in the 1950s and continuing today (despite the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s), the United States military has used the West and Southwest as a testing ground for missiles. In addition, the region’s rich mineral resources, particularly uranium, are needed to fuel nuclear power plants. Thus, it is not surprising that throughout the play, references are made to the deadly costs of building military strength. Literally, the deaths of workers at the Chin Rock mine reﬂect the dangers inherent in the industry. In particular, it is Father Doherty who addresses the potential environmental hazards that surround his parish. ‘‘[W]est are about seven mines and mills, and east of here the Rio Puerco goes awash with some kind of waste. . ., and of course there’s the reactor at Los Alamos and the missile base at White Sands.’’ His anger and distrust of the nuclear industry acts as the moral barometer for a nation obsessed with its own technological achievements. Because the play takes place in the early 1980s, during an accelerated build up of nuclear missiles under the administration of Ronald Reagan,

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an underlying theme is that Americans have lost sight of what really matters. Thus, the setting of a church during a time where the end of the world is near signiﬁes that spiritual and traditional values are being replaced by the gods of technology and notions of progress. Father Doherty expresses this when yelling at the helicopter after it has announced that the road is now clear: ‘‘The road is not clear! You’re sick as cats! You’ve made the bomb your god and you’re praying for the bomb to call in the number.’’ During an age when super powers have jurisdiction over whether or not the world will end, Angels Fall provides a bleak yet realistic view of the role of technology in the culture of the United States.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW At the time that Angels Fall was written and produced in the early 1980s, Lanford Wilson had already established himself as an exceptional drama-

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tist with compelling Broadway plays such as The Hot l Baltimore (1973), The Fifth of July (1978), and Talley’s Folley (1979). As Gerald Berkowitz notes in American Drama of the Twentieth Century, Wilson’s plays, from the mid-seventies onward, had ‘‘the ability to depict the complex emotions and relationships of a group of characters through a domestic realism given a lyrical tone by a musical and poetic use of language.’’ More than one critic has noted that Wilson’s emphasis on family relations combined with lyricism and compassion evoke Tennessee Williams, a playwright Wilson deeply admired. His emphasis on the digniﬁed struggles of ordinary people in contemporary times has lead drama critic Anne Dean, in her book Discovery and Invention: The Urban Plays of Lanford Wilson, to note that Wilson is concerned with capturing ‘‘the dramatic and poetic essence of a particular social milieu’’ similar to the work of Charles Dickens, whom Wilson cites as a major inﬂuence. She continues to examine these two writers’ similarities, suggesting that in both their works ‘‘metaphorically heightened messages about the unhappy state of the world abound.’’ Probably no other play of Wilson’s illustrates the polemicist side of him than Angels Fall, which depicts the incidental gathering of a group of people in a New Mexican church during a nuclear accident at a nearby uranium mine. What strikes many critics of this play is its atypical setting which might account for critics’ inability to designate this play as one that ﬁts into the schemata of Wilson settings— Midwest, New York, West Coast. However, like his other plays, the setting of the play is extremely important to the play’s themes and outcomes. The church setting shelters an ensemble of characters who may not be completely shunned from society as other misﬁt casts he has created in plays like Hot l Baltimore but it represents, according to Thomas Adler in his article ‘‘The Artist in the Garden: Theatre Space and Place in Lanford Wilson,’’ ‘‘an oasis . . . whose inherent beauty has been threatened by contemporary man’s idolization of technological progress at the expense of human values.’’ In this way, as noted by Mark Busby in Lanford Wilson, the contrast of the church in the desert surrounded by the waste products of the modern age reveals a juxtaposition of the eternal past (the natural world, the spiritual world) with the temporal present (industry motivated by capitalism). This theme of past and present in conﬂict with each other is also a key foundation to the crises of faith that the art professor, Niles Harris, and the parish priest, Father

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Doherty, undergo in their inability to accept the shift in thinking that the modern world demands— that truth has become relative. Most critics agree that Wilson’s solution to this crisis of faith is found in the concept of vocation, which is offered as a solution to threat of nuclear war and ultimately death. This is seen in the passage from the New Testament that incites people to do goodwill and thus death becomes less fraught, which Father Doherty recites to the other characters. As Gene Barnett, writing in Lanford Wilson, suggests, the play’s major theme is that ‘‘in ﬁnding our own profession, we are able to face death in the knowledge that life has been lived well.’’ In this way, both the professor and priest must engage in rediscovering their abilities to teach in order to make their lives fulﬁlling. The ‘‘road’’ that is referred to in the play as ﬁrst being closed and then opened act has both a literal and metaphorical meaning. In his article, ‘‘‘Above Time’ in the Present?: Emerson’s ‘SelfReliance’ and Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall,’’ Richard Wattenberg describes the road as denoting both the route of the characters’ lives as well as the course of the lives they currently lead, particularly as it refers to their work. However, as Susan Harris Smith, in her article ‘‘Angels Fall: An American Melodrama of Beset Manhood,’’ points out, having one’s work be a solution to the environmental and political crises that nuclear technologies engender displaces one’s commitment to community to that of the self. The true problem, contends Smith, is that this group ‘‘disbands for individual realization and does not coalesce around the pressing issue that should unite them permanently, namely the threat of nuclear catastrophe.’’ As other critics have noted about Angels Fall, the play lacks any resolution and provides little redemption in relation to the epiphanies the characters’ experience. What it does offer, notes Berkowitz in American Drama of the Twentieth Century, is its ability to show ordinary people enduring life, not necessarily in a triumphant way, but in a way that is reassuring.

CRITICISM Doreen Piano Piano is a Marion Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Geor-

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gia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In this essay, Piano explores how strangers who inadvertently gather at a church during an environmental accident struggle to understand the importance of their lives in relation to their work. Written in 1982 for the New World Festival of Miami, Florida, Angels Fall depicts a group of people, some of whom are strangers, who take refuge in a church during an accident at a nearby uranium mine. Set in New Mexico, the action takes place over the course of an afternoon and early evening. Both the desert setting and the use of a ‘‘sealed-room play’’—a plot device that forces a group of people to interact with each other—increase their feeling of being isolated from the rest of the world. It is only through ﬁnding out small bits of information that the characters are able to piece together what has happened nearby. This isolation creates both a sense of fear in terms of the proximity to the disaster as well as a sense of timelessness since the characters cannot go anywhere and thus their plans are in abeyance. By disrupting the timetables of these characters, Wilson creates a space for them to examine their lives. In particular, through dialogue and setting, he addresses the need for people to have a speciﬁc calling or vocation that gives their lives meaning beyond material comfort. Despite the characters’ differences which are most apparent in the dialogues between them as well as their chosen professions—a priest, a professor, a research scientist, an art gallery owner, a children’s book illustrator, and a professional tennis player— they are able to come together if only momentarily to understand each other and in some small way provide comfort during a brief crisis. By drawing together a variety of disparate people during an environmental disaster, Wilson is able to show how people react differently to confronting the possibility of death by stepping away from their day to day lives to ﬁnd out what is really important to them. The nuclear accident that propels the characters together forms a perfect backdrop for their internal conﬂicts. Although the accident occurs at some distance to the church, it is present both as a topic of conversation among those characters who are not familiar with each other and as a source of anxiety and anger. While Father Doherty appears to take the accident all in stride, referring to it as another one of these ‘‘little emergencies,’’ Niles and Vita attempt to deduce from his descriptions of these catastrophes how harmful they are. Throughout the play,

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Showbill cover for Angels Fall

references to what is occurring at the Chin Rock mine remind the audience of why the characters are gathered and contribute to the internal turmoil that some of the characters are experiencing. For example, two of the characters, Niles Harris, the art professor, and Don Tabaha, the young half-Navajo, are at a crossroads in determining what to do next in their chosen professions. For Niles, it is a crisis of faith that erupted while reviewing his life’s work and realizing that ‘‘to every didactic, authoritative sentence I had written, I said: ‘Yes, of course, and exactly the opposite could be as true.’’’ This evaluation stirs him to repudiate his life’s work. Don, on the other hand, must decide between being a doctor in the poor, rural area in which he grew up, or working as a cancer researcher with a famous scientist at Berkley. Because of the accident, these two men are forced to interact with each other and to reﬂect on their life’s choices. At ﬁrst, their relationship is antagonistic, with both men making assumptions about each other, particularly Don, who accuses Niles of ‘‘working in your ivy-covered ivory towers back East.’’ However, by the second act, especially after Niles’s hypoglycemic attack in which Don helps him recover, the two men have come to an understanding that they have more in common than

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Contemporary Native American writer Sherman Alexie in his novel Reservation Blues (1996) explores the complex historical relationship between indigenous cultures and Christianity in the United States which is alluded to in Angels Fall through the relationship between Father Doherty and Don Tabaha. • Drama scholar Christopher Bigsby, in his Contemporary American Playwrights (1999), analyzes the contemporary American theater scene by focusing on ten playwrights who have secured major reputations in drama but who may not have garnered major academic interest. His study includes chapters on Marsha Norman, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson. • In New American Dramatists 1960–1980, Ruby Cohn covers a range of contemporary playwrights who have inﬂuenced American theater. Whereas the actual coverage of individual works is cursory, the book, published in 1981, provides an important overview of drama during an experimental and fertile period of American drama.

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arsenal, and the contemporary uses and effects of uranium in communities through photographs of those who work in the nuclear industry as well as those who have been affected by it. • In Drama since 1960: A Critical History (1996), Matthew Roudané discusses over two dozen contemporary playwrights, focusing especially on the political and social histories in which they wrote. Particular attention is paid to African American and women playwrights as well as to themes in drama that explore myths of rebellion and resistance, of confrontation and expiation, and of the American dream. • As a contrasting example of a ‘‘locked-door’’ play similar to the format of Angels Fall, JeanPaul Sartre’s existential play No Exit, originally written in French in 1944, depicts a concept of Hell that involves a group of strangers locked in a room who are forced to interact with each other.

• Robert Del Tredici’s At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (1987) documents the history of nuclear power, the rise of the United States’ nuclear

• Wilson’s award-winning play Hot l Baltimore (1975) provides an interesting comparison in setting, theme, and characterization to Angels Fall in its sympathetic look at a group of urban misﬁts mostly prostitutes, occupying a hotel that is about to be demolished.

ﬁrst imagined—as each is undergoing a professional crisis. Being holed up at the church provides a respite from their daily lives, a temporary sanctuary from the world’s demands, that allows them time to evaluate their choices. As Christopher Bigsby notes in Contemporary American Playwrights, ‘‘The intensity of the situation raises the stakes for those who ﬁnd themselves suddenly shaken out of their routines, nudged off the paths they believe themselves to have chosen.’’ Although the meeting does not engender any radical action from either of the men, the accident at the mine facilitates an exchange between them that brings richer understanding of why they do what they do.

The theme of making the most of one’s life through one’s work is most prominently displayed by the parish priest, Father Doherty. Although Doherty’s work at the mission is not exactly what he himself had hoped for as a parish priest, he has a keen understanding that his purpose in life transcends the rather uninspiring aspects of his job. When Vita asks him how many parishioners he has in the area, he honestly tells her very few. But despite the few attendees, he is committed to his task. After describing the services to Vita, he tells her later, ‘‘It’s what we live for.’’ The sense of vocation that Doherty illuminates is also what he advocates most incessantly in his encounters with

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Don, whom Doherty has known for his whole life. Don’s decision to leave medicine for research infuriates Doherty as he views it as a cop-out. Referring to the inadequate health care in the area, he says to Niles late in the play, ‘‘The need here is something you can’t comprehend.’’ For Father Doherty, Don’s departure is viewed as an escape from a world that he longs to forget, one that is full of misery and pain. As Don himself acknowledges, in reference to the health problems among the Navajo, ‘‘There’s no time for one person in a hundred years to begin to correct a millennium of genetic neglect.’’ Throughout the play, the priest badgers Don about why he is leaving the area, often getting others to side with him. Yet by imposing his own views of what Tabaha should do, Doherty is not granting him the freedom to make his own decision. In American Drama of the Twentieth Century, Gerald Berkowitz notes that it is this realization, more than Don’s decision to leave medicine and Niles’ decision to leave teaching, that produces the most dramatic moment of the play. Having listened to their barbed conversations for most of the afternoon, toward the end of the play Niles comes to Don’s defense, exclaiming to the priest, ‘‘You cannot hold power over another man; even for his own good. . . . I’ve seen it with teachers a dozen times. I’ve done it myself.’’ By intervening into the debate between Don and Father Doherty, Niles extends himself outward, seeking a common ground, ﬁrst by defending the young man who appears extremely different from him, and second, by acknowledging to the priest that as teachers they are similar in their shortsightedness as well as their good intentions. Although the uranium accident does not have any immediate dire effects on the characters gathered, it does provide a setting for several of the characters to respond at least internally to the understanding that their time on earth is limited and thus making the best of it through valuable work is urgent and necessary. This message is conveyed most overtly by the Biblical passage Doherty reads to them, ‘‘Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be?’’ When the helicopter arrives toward the end of the play to announce that the road has been cleared, the characters, except for Doherty, leave the church, reentering the world of temporal time. They may not necessarily have undergone a profound change, but because their paths have crossed, they may have a deeper understanding of the need to continue on with their own speciﬁc journeys.

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FOR FATHER DOHERTY, DON’S DEPARTURE IS VIEWED AS AN ESCAPE FROM A WORLD THAT HE LONGS TO FORGET, ONE THAT IS FULL OF MISERY AND PAIN.’’

Source: Doreen Piano, Critical Essay on Angels Fall, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Lanford Wilson and John C. Tibbetts In the following interview, Wilson expounds on his background and early days as a struggling playwright in New York, and his association with Off-Off-Broadway. At the beginning of Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky, the character of Alan comes downstage out of the darkness. ‘‘I’ve been trying to tell this story, to get it down, for a long time,’’ he says to the audience, ‘‘— for a number of years, seven years at least—closer to ten.’’ Alan’s lament is the playwright’s dilemma. He explains that the story has been told dozens of times to friends, each time with different starts and different endings. He adds that the characters often disrupt matters and go off on their own, wilfully, sometimes destructively. ‘‘They wouldn’t have any part of what I wanted them to say. They sat down to coffee or some damn thing.’’ For thirty-four years, ever since Lanford Wilson’s arrival in New York City in 1956 at the age of nineteen, he has fought and wrestled that stubborn, sometimes pliant, sometimes recalcitrant raw material of theatrical stuff. Now one of America’s most successful and respected playwrights, he is turning his energies increasingly to that kind of theatrical trench warfare known as the ‘‘staged reading.’’ He is in Kansas City at the moment visiting the Missouri Repertory Theater’s Second Stage to direct a reading of Timothy Mason’s new play, Babylon Gardens. Obviously, he identiﬁes with this play—like Lemon Sky it is about a young man trying to cope with memories of a difﬁcult relationship with his father. It will go through many hours of rehearsal (or ‘‘discovery’’ as he puts it) before facing three days’ worth of paying audiences. Then it will go back to New York for a

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FOR THIRTY-FOUR YEARS,

als before tomorrow’s ﬁrst public reading have been intense. Wilson’s soft Missouri drawl belies a quick volatility that seems to prowl around, restless, even at this late hour on a wintry February evening.

EVER SINCE LANFORD WILSON’S ARRIVAL IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1956 AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN, HE HAS FOUGHT AND WRESTLED THAT STUBBORN, SOMETIMES PLIANT, SOMETIMES RECALCITRANT RAW MATERIAL OF THEATRICAL STUFF.’’

possible premiere. Ask Timothy Mason, who is also here, just how possible that premiere is, and he only shrugs. His play isn’t ﬁnished yet. Lanford Wilson agrees. ‘‘It’s very strange,’’ Wilson says. ‘‘You never know where a play comes from. You may have had the idea for ﬁve years; you still don’t know where it came from or where it’s going to hit you; or when you’re going to actually sit down and write the darned thing. And when you do sit down to write, you may write something completely different.’’ His own Lemon Sky, to stay with that example for a moment, is a case in point. One early version was given a staged reading at the O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwright’s Conference in 1968. In 1970 a different version came to Buffalo’s Studio Arena Theater.

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‘‘I love these readings,’’ he is saying. ‘‘We have them at Circle Rep, too. We have a Friday reading every week of a new play. It’s either one that a company writer is working on; or one that we found, the library department has found from outside from a new writer. Sometimes we invite the writer to come and hear it. And many times it’s the ﬁrst time he’s heard his work read in public. It’s not for an audience—just an audience of Circle Rep members, which is about two hundred.’’ Incidentally, these Circle Rep readings have become notorious for playwrights like John Patrick Shanley. In a recent interview during the release of his ﬁlm, Joe Versus the Volcano, Shanley told me there comes a time in his work when he has to cut that umbilical cord. ‘‘I’ll do a couple of readings, maybe two or three, but that long, developmental process Lanford has, well—God bless him—but I wouldn’t want to do that! When it comes to playwriting, they all have their own way of working. Lanford comes from Circle Repertory, which has a tradition of taking ten years to get it right. And I’d die! I’d say—chain me to a wall. I couldn’t do it!’’ Wilson is looking about at the tight circle of empty chairs. Dozens of coffee cups and ashtrays piled with mangled cigarette stubs are strewn about the table in front of us. Timothy Mason has joined in the conversation. By contrast to Wilson’s thatched hair, furious eyebrows, and restless manner, Mason is tidy and self-contained.

Then it moved to an Off Broadway theatre for a brief run later that May. It was revived after more changes ﬁfteen years later at The Second Stage in New York in 1985. When it was printed in the May 1986 issue of American Theatre, it revealed still more changes.

‘‘You ﬁnd acute ears among the listeners who come to these readings, in New York, or here in Kansas City,’’ he says. His Minnesota voice is a pleasant counterpoint to Wilson’s. ‘‘People rediscover they have ears for the theatre. They get attuned to just the sounds of the readings very quickly.’’

‘‘What drives me crazy is having to ﬁnally say—OK, you can print it. Because I keep wanting to tinker with it and fuss with it. And my publishers hate me, because they send me page proofs and I send them back with marginalia all over them and they say—Lanford, this costs a fortune to re-do. I just never—I always want to change things.’’

Wilson laughs sharply, agreeably. ‘‘I sometimes ﬁnd that the readings are more important than the subsequent productions. When you have a reading without all the trappings, without the stufﬁng, your mind has to work and you make the set and costumes and the changes. You end up becoming the director.’’

We are sitting in Room 119 of the Missouri Repertory Theater’s Stage Two. The actor rehears-

The Circle Rep ﬁrst discovered Mason when his unsolicited manuscript for a play called Levita-

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tion appeared in the mail. Wilson became Mason’s dramaturge and invited him to come to New York. Now Mason is a company playwright and has had three plays produced by the organization. Wilson is satisﬁed that history is repeating itself. He himself is a product of regional theatres and noncommercial theatres. ‘‘I was born in Lebanon, Missouri and graduated from high school in the town of Ozark, where I had moved to go to high school. My father had left a long time ago and my mother had remarried. But I got out of Missouri as soon as I could. I thought, I’ve got to get the hell out of here. And I left, went out to San Diego. My father, whom I hadn’t heard from in thirteen years, said—why don’t you come out to San Diego? And I split as quick as I could. And then we didn’t get along at all well. So I went to see some friends of mine in Chicago and fell in love with Chicago. I always thought I was going to be a painter. I thought I was going to do that. I was the best artist at Ozark High School. There were ten people in the art department and I was the best one. And then I went to San Diego State and I wasn’t the best one anymore. But still I thought I was going to be a painter. Actually, I was interested in advertising and advertising illustration, editorial illustration— or even produce illustration. My writing was just an avocation then. Sometimes I would write stories and send them off and I got a collection of rejection slips from the best magazines in the country. One day in Chicago I was working in an ad agency and started a new story. I said, you know what?—this doesn’t sound like a story, this sounds like a play! I got halfway down the page, no more than that, and said—I’m a playwright. It was just as clear as day. I had an actual talent for writing dialogue and no talent at all for writing narrative. Writing down the way people spoke in a room was suddenly incredibly exciting. It was one of those life decisions where you know immediately—you’re never going to get to the bottom of this thing. And what more could you want than something that you’re never going to—that’s never going to satisfy you completely? And I just saw this as an enormous, great challenge that was going to be worth banging away at for the rest of my life.’’ At that time in the mid-ﬁfties Chicago was primarily a stop for touring plays. Wilson saw Night of the Iguana with Bette Davis before it opened on Broadway. He saw Brendan Behan’s The Hostage with Joan Littlewood. ‘‘I think I tried to write my version of The Hostage for the next ﬁve years.’’

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An erstwhile playwright now, Wilson came to New York in 1956. Disgusted at Broadway, he turned to a number of new, small theaters. The movement we now call ‘‘Off-Off Broadway’’ was just beginning. ‘‘I found the Caffe Cino in New York. That was the very beginning of ‘Off-Off Broadway.’ They hadn’t even named it yet. I had the ﬁrst play that I wrote in New York done within three months of my arrival. I’ve since learned that’s not the typical story . . . There was the Judson Church, the Cafe La Mama, and of course the Caffe Cino. And there were about 15 playwrights in New York City that worked there. And that’s all. Now, there are about 40,000, it seems! It was a great apprenticeship, but we didn’t know it. We just were working and you couldn’t have more than a half-hour play because the audiences’ butts couldn’t stand to sit on the edge of a milk carton for more than a half hour! Also, the Caffe Cino was so hot you couldn’t keep it closed, locked from the street for more than thirty minutes.’’ He pauses to light another cigarette. There’s a slight clatter behind us as two stagehands begin packing away the scattered chairs. We talk about his founding of the Circle Repertory Company in 1968. ‘‘I had had no real success. I got sort of minor awards and minor grants from people because, as I said, there weren’t many of us. But I didn’t have any real success or any real recognition until The Hot L Baltimore in 1973, I don’t believe. That was for Circle Rep. I had also written Rimers of Eldritch and Balm in Gilead. But you understand, they only ran for a week. So you couldn’t get—there isn’t much satisfaction in something running a week! Maybe that’s why you have to be so proliﬁc—the plays were on such a short time you had to write something very quick to get something back on! ‘‘I was one of the founders of Circle Rep. At Off-Off Broadway we all worked together. There was sort of a loose collective of writers and designers and actors and directors. The Caffe Cino had folded and there was no place for us to go. So we started our own theatre to be as much like the Caffe Cino as possible. Except we were a little more professional than that. So we started up above a McCann shoestore on Broadway—but about 70 blocks north of the Broadway anyone’s heard of. After about four or ﬁve years we moved to a professional house that used to be called Sheridan Square Playhouse; and now it’s Circle Repertory Company. We’re in Greenwich Village at 7th Avenue South and West 4th Street at one of the great old

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intersections in the Village. We’re in our 21st or 22nd year now. It’s amazing—it sure doesn’t seem like it.’’ All of Wilson’s subsequent major works premiered there—besides The Hot L Baltimore, there have been The Mound Builders (1975), Serenading Louie (1976), Angels Fall (1982), and the ‘‘Talley Trilogy’’ (5th of July, Talley’s Folly, and Talley and Son). Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Talley’s Folly. Many other productions and many newcomers got their start at Circle Rep. ‘‘Let’s see, there was When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder—that started there. There was a play that toured all over the country, called Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein. We did the ﬁrst New York production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. John Malkovich came to us from Steppenwolf in Chicago. William Hurt came from Juilliard to us. Christopher Reeve—just at the time he was auditioning for Superman in London. Swoozie Kurtz, Richard Thomas. We found Timothy Mason in our ‘slush-pile.’’’ Mason explains he had sent Levitation to Circle Rep. ‘‘I feel fortunate that Circle Rep opened that envelope and responded to that ﬁrst play I sent out. Without Circle Rep, I would be hopeless, without a theatrical home—a playwright all alone in his room. With a theatrical home, I’ve got constant feedback, a venue to read embryonic scripts. Bill Hurt did a reading in New York and we knew the thing needed more work. So here we are.’’ This theatrical midwifery takes its toll, however. If a living income is difﬁcult enough in the commercial theatre, it’s all but impossible in the birthing rooms of noncommercial theatre. ‘‘Most of the theatre work we do ends up being pro bono,’’ Wilson says. ‘‘Serious plays haven’t made money for authors on Broadway for years. Since I’ve come to New York there’s not been more than a few plays on Broadway that made the author anything to speak of at all. There’s a new contract now where we get a minimum of $1,000 a week, which is very good, while a play is running on Broadway. But you really have to survive from other sources. My friend Tim here types for the National Kidney Foundation. I just ﬁnished roughing out a screenplay for Burn This. But it was rejected out of hand. It would make a terriﬁc movie. You hope it can get done, like Driving Miss Daisy, which is very close to the original work. Then, they just pour money onto you until you say, stop, that’s

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enough!’’ He laughs out loud. ‘‘I’ve had several plays on Broadway. And I go back and forth all the time about how I feel about the Broadway audience. I really have a feeling that I’m happier Off-Broadway and I’m happier in the regional theatres. Because, whatever the Broadway audience is going for, I’m not really quite sure that I’m pleasing them. It’s very strange, when you’re writing a play, you really don’t care who you offend or what you say. You just have to say it one way or the other and it comes out and you work very hard to keep it as true to your subject as you possibly can. And you really say, I do not care who this offends. And then the play gets on and the very ﬁrst person who gets up and walks, you say—My God, why is he leaving? Don’t tell me he didn’t like it! I’m so upset when somebody leaves. And you’ve put on the play with no compromises whatever and then someone is offended and leaves and you say—Lord, no, I hope I didn’t offend that person! But that’s just my old ‘wanting-to-be-liked’ nonsense. Fortunately, I don’t have that when I write. You can’t write a play to be liked.’’ We exchange anecdotes about authors driven to write, by that compulsion that twitches ﬁngers toward the pen and paper, or the typewriter, or the pad of paper. Wilson shakes his head ruefully. ‘‘Tennessee Williams used to write at night because he took change in the subway. He sold tokens in the subway. He felt very protected in the booth. He had the night shift. And he’d sit there and write on the pad. I wrote The Madness of Lady Bright on the Reservation typewriter at the Americana Hotel in New York. I was the Night Reservation person and nobody ever made reservations at night. So, it was a very good occupation for a writer!’’ The chairs have all been folded away by now. (Wilson and Mason look askance, as if their own will be whisked away from under them. I decide no better metaphor for life in the theatre could be found. There is time for a last question or two.) I ask how the Circle Rep in New York continues to encourage new playwrights and plays. ‘‘Oh, we have our ‘literary department,’’’ drawls Wilson, pufﬁng away at a last cigarette. ‘‘We have readers, they read unsolicited scripts. We’re the only theatre in the country, I believe, that reads unsolicited scripts. And comments on them. From anyone. They don’t even have to be submitted by an agent or anything anymore. And then we come to places like the Missouri Rep. We have an excellent cast here for the reading of Babylon Gardens. Some

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real discoveries. Missouri Rep called us, inviting us to come out here—and we said, would we ever! Plays have to have a long development process. And here things are completely—completely blind. We have no idea what the reception will be, what we’ve got. They will tell us.’’ He looks around the room, those bristling brows surmounting a sudden puff of smoke. ‘‘It’s like my work on the ‘Talley’ trilogy, you know? You don’t know what’s going to come out of it all. You have to learn so much about the characters and that takes time. You have to do so much research and so much of a—forgive this word—back story. You become interested in the background, like I did with the Talleys. And so—when I was working on 5th of July I had to get the story of Matt and Sally right. And I found that and thought, boy, that would be a really good story! So I wondered while writing Talley’s Folly just what was happening up on the hill in the main house during the dialogue at the Folly. I said, boy, I sure would like to know that. And then I wanted to know about the guy that had built that house. So out comes Talley and Son. Working on something, it generates in your mind the story of what happens earlier. There are a lot of plays that go backwards like that. ‘‘It’s those characters. They need time to live out a life and learn to talk to you. They really do. They really do pester and hound you. They yell— but it’s great, a healthy thing when they do. When they’re silent is when you start worrying!’’ Source: Lanford Wilson and John C. Tibbetts , ‘‘An Interview with Lanford Wilson,’’ in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 1990, pp. 175–80.

Gene A. Barnett In the following essay, Barnett examines the setting, plot, themes, and characters in Angels Fall. When the ﬁrst season of the New World Festival of Miami, Florida, was planned for 1982, several important dramatists, Wilson among them, were invited to contribute new work. Angels Fall was written on commission for the festival and ﬁrst performed there in June of the inaugural season, after which it opened at the Circle Repertory Theater in New York City the following autumn. The play was greeted with respectful reviews and moved to Broadway early in 1983 where, unlike the author’s two previous plays, it had only a short run. Angels Fall is a very earnest, very moral play— perhaps it is even a ‘‘morality play.’’ One critic

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Showbill cast list from Angels Fall

described it as ‘‘preachy,’’ while another called it ‘‘a parable.’’ In addition to the moral nature of its themes, it was also found to be ‘‘unself-consciously traditional’’ in structure, with its careful adherence to the classical unities. With a beginning, middle, and end, Angels Fall was considered to be ‘‘an exquisitely wrought old-fashioned new play.’’ While most reviewers applauded the fact that the play’s heart was in the right place and wrote glowingly of Wilson’s language and characterization, some also noted that it seem ‘‘contrived’’ and implied that this contrivance vitiated the dramatic energy of the play. Walter Kerr referred to ‘‘an artiﬁce of sorts,’’ while Variety commented that the situation and characters seemed more ‘‘authorial contrivances than spontaneous creations.’’ John Simon declared that Wilson’s ‘‘device smells a bit of device.’’ But after judging it to be a ‘‘relatively slight play,’’ he still recommended it, and when he reviewed the Broadway production in February 1983, he judged it ‘‘the best American play on Broadway this season.’’

A ‘‘Sealed-Room’’ Play Generically, Angels Fall is of the type often referred to as the ‘‘sealed-room play.’’ To put it another way, the ‘‘contrivance’’ the reviewers noted

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ANGELS FALL . . . IS A TRIBUTE TO THE HUMAN COURAGE IT REQUIRES TO LOOK FOR THE RIGHT ROAD, THE RIGHT CALLING.’’

is the ‘‘locked-room format’’: several people not previously acquainted are thrown together, by accident or design, in one setting or situation, and are forced to endure each other’s company for a period of time. This device is a variation of that used in The Hot-l Baltimore in which the setting permits a highly disparate group of people to assemble naturally. In Angels Fall, it is the ‘‘naturally’’ that is suspect. The hand of the dramatist was thought by some reviewers to be too obvious in several ways: in carefully arranging for these particular types of people to come together (i.e., a theologian, a scientist, a humanist, etc.); in symbolically convening them in a church; in adding an apocalyptic note to the proceedings; in somewhat methodically allocating personal problems to over half the characters; and in resolving their dilemmas with rather pat solutions. In short, is the play too carefully and systematically structured? The setting of Angels Fall is a small adobe Catholic mission in northwestern New Mexico Furnished only with wooden benches and a simple altar, the church is located in the country near a crossroads. A pay telephone outside the church is the only link with the outside world. If the immediately visible setting evokes a timeless quality, both in its architecture and in the faith the structure represents, the larger setting forcefully recalls for both characters and audience the age of high technology; the action takes place in the area of New Mexico where there is a good deal of nuclear testing going on. One character explains that a ‘‘dump site’’ is planned to the south; to the west are uranium mines and processing mills; waste is also being dumped into the Rio Puerco River to the east; to the south is the atomic reactor at Los Alamos and the missile base at White Sands; and ‘‘all kinds of things are seeping into everyone’s water.’’ On the day of the action, at one of the mines approximately twenty miles away, a truck being

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loaded with ‘‘this yellow cake stuff’’ backed up and broke open a container. The wind blew the chemical over the workmen, and helicopters were brought in to transfer those still living to a hospital. The ‘‘yellow cake’’ is pure uranium, which is reﬁned at the mill. The radio reassuringly declares that the level of pollution is minor, and, as one character says, ‘‘anybody not in the immediate area won’t get sick for about twelve years.’’ Clearly the playwright is expanding a familiar theme here; the ruin through pollution of the natural landscape. In addition, the deaths that result are variations on his theme of the destruction of the American heritage. And although the villains are faceless and nameless, the play seems an indictment of a national policy that permits the development of a nuclear program at the expense of both life and the quality of life. For behind the local law ofﬁcers (just outside the church but never seen) and the New Mexico State Patrol (heard through the loudspeakers in the helicopters) is the ominous presence of the United States government for which the uranium is being mined and which therefore bears responsibility for the leakage and pollution. In this respect, Angels Fall may be Wilson’s most obviously political play. The Catholic mission, traditionally a spiritual sanctuary, becomes brieﬂy a shelter from a chemical storm, a man-made apocalypse that threatens four travelers and two local people, thus forcing them to become acquainted as altogether they examine their lives and confront the possibility that the world could end quickly and violently. This new twist on a familiar Wilson theme is approached through the ‘‘locked-room format,’’ a device so traditional that reviewers of Angels Fall variously cited as ancestors of the play such theatrical works as Ten Little Indians, The Petriﬁed Forest, and Bus Stop. Sartre’s No Exit and the ‘‘Don Juan in Hell’’ act of Shaw’s Man and Superman could be added.

Plot Late on Saturday afternoon, four travelers retreat into a small church to take cover as instructed from nuclear fallout. Professor Niles Harris and his wife, Vita, are traveling from Rhode Island, where he has been teaching art history, to an Arizona clinic, where he is being sent to recover from ‘‘a traumatic nervous breakthrough.’’ The second, more unusual couple is Marian Clay, the widow of a renowned New Mexico artist, and Salvatore Zappala, a young tennis player of great promise. They are on their way to a tennis tournament in California. At

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the mission, these four encounter Father Bill Doherty, who ministers to the local Indians, and Don Tabaha, a young American Indian doctor doing his internship, whose mentor the priest has been. The plot follows traditional lines of exposition, confrontation, and resolution, but while all six characters have chances to present their personal stories, only three seem involved in conﬂicts that advance the plot. Most important is the young doctor’s dilemma: shall he complete his internship and return to his home area to treat members of his tribe who are badly in need of his skill and knowledge, or shall he accept a lucrative and more attractive offer that will allow him to spend his life in research. His dilemma is intensiﬁed and complicated by the priest’s strong insistence that, of course, he must return to care for his people. Young Dr. Tabaha makes his difﬁcult decision, and the priest learns to accept the fact that the younger generation not only has a right but a responsibility to make its own choices. Professor Harris realizes that, despite his disillusionment with a thirty-year teaching career, he is, after all, a teacher; he is ‘‘called’’ to that profession, as are the others to their professions or occupations, and to it he must return.

Theme: ‘‘What Manner of Persons . . .’’ The theme of Angels Fall is so clearly set forth in the play that it might indeed seem to be preachment. As these six people face the possibility of an atomic apocalypse on a summer Saturday afternoon, the priest raises the question that might naturally occur to those suddenly on the brink of the grave: how ought people to live that they may calmly face death satisﬁed with their lives. As the priest whimsically refers to these civil emergencies (of which he has evidently seen several) as ‘‘rehearsals for the end of the world,’’ he facetiously threatens them all with a sermon. The text, which comes from Peter’s Second Epistle (3:10–11) in the New Testament, is a dramatic description of the apocalypse in terms that strongly suggest an atomic explosion. The core of this passage poses a question: ‘‘Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness. . . ?’’ On the basis of this scripture, a warning of the destruction of the world and the end of time, Father Doherty ﬁnds it appropriate to remind them of their calling: ‘‘You are a teacher,’’ he tells Professor Harris; ‘‘one of those professions,

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I’ve always thought, one is called to. As an artist is called, or as a priest is called, or as a doctor is called.’’ Simply, one faces the end of the world— which is also a metaphor for he end of life—by pursuing one’s calling ‘‘in all holy conversation and godliness,’’ whatever that calling may be. This is pursuing one’s own salvation in a secular sense. Interestingly, Harris tells the priest that he ‘‘should have been a foot-washing Baptist,’’ a term Wilson has been known to use to describe himself. It is very tempting to impose an autobiographical point of view on this aspect of the play. Wilson was raised a Southern Baptist, and Baptists believe that their ministers are ‘‘called’’ into the ministry; it is not just a profession they voluntarily choose. Wilson spoke of his own profession in similar terms in an interview in the early 1980s. Asked if he had been at all inﬂuenced by the midwestern Protestant work ethic, he replied afﬁrmatively, adding, ‘‘if you have a gift, if you have something to give, it’s a sin not to do it.’’ This was ‘‘thoroughly ingrained.’’ This play is ﬁnally about ﬁnding our calling, our profession—our job, if you like. But also important, and reﬂecting Wilson’s own Protestant background, is the second half of this theme: in ﬁnding our profession, we are able to face death in the knowledge that life has been lived well, that we have, to paraphrase 2 Timothy, fought a good ﬁght, ﬁnished the course, and kept the faith (4:7). Certainly this is the theological implication of Wilson’s theme: how to live life meaningfully and how to face death gracefully.

Doctor and Priest The central conﬂict in Angels Fall is between young Dr. Tabaha and his lifelong friend and spiritual mentor, Father Doherty. Don is half-Indian, illegitimate, and quite bright. He has literally been raised in the church by his aunt who also cares for the mission. At eleven, he had knelt with the priest at the church altar to solemnize his call to medicine. He had planned to be a general practitioner, going from pueblo to pueblo to minister to his people, much as the priest does. As the play opens, however, he is going through what Father Bill calls ‘‘his lapsed phase.’’ While doing his internship he had discovered a talent for research and a particular interest in cancer-causing agents. Now he is mulling over an offer to work in a prestigious research lab in Berkeley, California, a position that would prevent him from practicing medicine, thus depriving the area, already underserviced, of his much needed skills.

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Father Doherty is disturbed that the young man may follow the lure of money and reputation, forgetting his true calling. Doherty is a lovable character who is on very familiar terms with God. He moves easily from serving lemonade to his guests to serving the host to his ﬂock. When he is angry at the ofﬁcial lies of the government and local law ofﬁcers (who say, for example, the roads are closed because a bridge is our where no bridge exists), he throws rocks at the helicopters that ﬂy over the mission with loudspeakers blaring. In the matter of Don’s professional choices, however, Doherty is adamant and loses no opportunity of reminding the young doctor of his obligation to his people, an attitude Don tolerates, sometimes not so good-naturedly. The hour of decision is determined, perhaps too neatly, when the road is pronounced clear and Don is free to leave if he chooses. In their ﬁnal confrontation, Doherty accuses his protégé of being bought, insisting that he ‘‘has been a doctor since he was ﬁve years old,’’ that he ‘‘has been called.’’ He challenges the young man to say he has been directed to alter his course. Don replies that he has discovered in himself ‘‘a very special talent for research; if that’s hearing a call, then I’ve been called.’’ Professor Harris points out that the priest does not seem to care for Don as a person: ‘‘You want that for you,’’ he tells Doherty. ‘‘You cannot hold power over another man; even for his own good.’’ The priest then admits that the professor is right. ‘‘I was thinking of myself. Well, well . . . vanity, vanity.’’ He nevertheless has a parting shot at Don: ‘‘But I’m right, young man, and you know it.’’ When they separate at the end of the play, Father Doherty admits, ‘‘I’ve been too fond.’’ ‘‘Me, too, Father,’’ Don replies, and he weeps gently as he leaves his mentor to follow a new calling. Of these two characters, Father Doherty is the more likable and the better drawn. His adversary, Don, is both prickly and reticent; genius is difﬁcult to dramatize. The struggle between them is not between good and evil; it is between two views of what is ‘‘good.’’ Wilson’s answer is that each must choose for himself, keeping in mind what manner of person he ought to be.

The Harrises: ‘‘A Nervous Breakthrough.’’ There is a quarter of a century in age difference between Niles Harris and his wife. He has recently

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interrupted a thirty-year teaching career during which he has authored three books of art history. The Harrises are on their way to Phoenix to what Don calls ‘‘a dude ranch psychiatric hospital,’’ where he has been sent, ‘‘tuition paid,’’ by the Board of Governors of his college. This enforced sabbatical came about as a result of a ‘‘nervous breakthrough,’’ which occurred one day in class when he experienced a ‘‘crisis of faith, or a disturbance in my willful suspension of disbelief.’’ This resulted, in part, from a rereading of his three books, an experience he found so disillusioning that in the presence of his class, he tore them up and announced that he no longer believed anything he had written. Niles is a man who has temporarily misplaced his verities. As Father Doherty points out, however, a ‘‘willful suspension of disbelief is believing.’’ This immediately leads him to his ‘‘little sermon’’ in which he reminds Harris of his calling: ‘‘you are a teacher. So you simply have to ﬁnd a way to teach.’’ At this New Mexico crossroads, ﬁguratively a crossroads in the lives of these characters, Niles takes new life from Doherty’s admonition. In the following scene, he ‘‘teaches’’ by reminding the priest that he may be acting selﬁshly in trying to dissuade Don. Both men are in positions to inﬂuence the younger generation, but Harris knows that teachers should not impose their own ambitions on their students. As he recommits himself to his calling, he ﬁnds the priest is his ﬁrst student. In that he both teaches and learns, is both healed and helps others, Niles Harris is the most functional of the group. Vita Harris, who writes stories for children, may be the nicest character of the lot. Having been Niles’s student, she now seems entirely concerned with the care and feeding of this rather difﬁcult and still quite brilliant man. Although some reviewers of the play pointed out that all the characters were in the midst of some kind of crisis of faith or at some decisive crossroads, Vita seems spiritually and emotionally a normal, healthy person.

Marion and Zappy: Mistress and ‘‘Boytoy’’ Marion Clay and Salvatore ‘‘Zappy’’ Zappala are the other May-and-December couple; he is twenty-one, and she is over twice his age. Marion, owner and operator of the Clay Gallery in Chicago, has only recently disposed of her late husband’s effects, including his studio located not far from the mission. She is not the kind of woman to live anxiously with a young lover, fearful he will leave her. Like Vita, she mothers her male, and young

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Zappy takes more than his share, for in addition to being a tightly strung tennis champion on the way up, he is a hypochondriac of the ﬁrst order. He is entirely content with his mother-mistress; if he is a ‘‘boytoy,’’ it does not bother him.

Source: Gene A. Barnett, ‘‘Angels Fall,’’ in Lanford Wilson, edited by Warren French, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, No. 490, Twayne, 1987, pp. 125–33.

This odd pair seem to be in the play both to balance the other older-younger couple and to ﬂesh out Wilson’s theme. When Doherty reminds Professor Harris that he must ﬁnd his way back to his ‘‘calling,’’ Zappy, surprisingly for one so young and immature, enthusiastically agrees, recounting something that happened the ﬁrst time he was on a tennis court. A total novice, he had embarrassed two high school players with his skill and intuition. ‘‘On the way home,’’ he says, ‘‘anybody had asked me what I did, right there I’d have said, ‘I play tennis.’ Didn’t know love from lob, didn’t matter. That’s what I am. ‘Cause once you know what you are, the rest is just work.’’

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Marion’s case is simpler. No artist herself, she has spent her life exhibiting the art of others. ‘‘I want to show artists’ work,’’ she had told Zappy once, ‘‘like Van Gogh’s brother.’’ She has accepted that the more modest calling of dealer is as necessary in its right as the artist’s. Marion is a happy and fulﬁlled woman who rejects young Zappy’s frequent proposals of marriage. These two characters have no problems that luck on the courts and in the bedroom cannot solve.

Alexie, Sherman, Reservation Blues, Warner Brothers Publishing, 1996. Barnett, Gene, ‘‘Chapter Sixteen: Angels Fall,’’ in Lanford Wilson, Twayne’s United States Author Series, No. 490, Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 125–33. Berkowitz, Gerald M., American Drama of the Twentieth Century, Longman Publishing, 1992, pp. 181–84. Bigsby, Christopher, ‘‘Chapter Ten: Lanford Wilson,’’ in Contemporary American Playwrights, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 417–21. Busby, Mark, Lanford Wilson, Western Writers Series, No. 81, Boise State University Press, 1987. Cohn, Ruby, New American Dramatists 1960–1980, Grove Press, 1981. Dean, Anne M., ‘‘Chapter Two: Concerns, Poetry, and Dramatized Experience,’’ in Discovery and Invention: The Urban Plays of Lanford Wilson, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994, pp. 30–60. Del Tredici, Robert, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, HarperCollins, 1987.

Conclusion Perhaps the playwright seems to urge his theme of the importance of ‘‘calling’’ as the answer to the scriptural question of ‘‘what manner of persons’’ we should try to be. Perhaps he skirts sentimentality in the rather easy answers his characters ﬁnd at the crossroads as they wonder if an apocalypse is upon them. Perhaps the play, unlike life, leaves few rough edges and unanswered questions. This is the way of plays. Sound construction, a sense of the importance of moral and spiritual matters, and a strong sentiment for people, ﬂawed and fallen, are not bad materials for a dramatist. ‘‘Angels fall, but we muddle through,’’ Wilson has said. People may, unlike angels, struggle, pick themselves up and try again. When angels fall, there is no crossroads; for most mortals, there are many crossings and many roads. Angels Fall—the title comes from ‘‘one of those incredibly crabbed poems’’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins—is a tribute to the human courage it requires to look for the right road, the right calling.

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Adler, Thomas P., ‘‘The Artist in the Garden: Theatre Space and Place in Lanford Wilson,’’ in Lanford Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Garland Publishing, 1994, pp. 3–20.

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Herman, William, ‘‘Down and Out in Lebanon and New York: Lanford Wilson,’’ in Understanding Contemporary American Drama, University of South Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 196–229. Jacobi, Martin J., ‘‘The Comic Vision of Lanford Wilson,’’ in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 21, No. 2, Fall 1988, pp. 119–34. Lawson, D. K., ‘‘Lanford Wilson,’’ in Contemporary Gay American Poets and Playwrights: An A–to–Z Guide, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, Greenwood Press, 2003, pp. 451–60. Roudané, Matthew, Drama since 1960: A Critical History, Twayne’s Critical History of American Drama Series, Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. 9–22, 151–54. Ryzuk, Mary, The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years, Iowa State University Press, 1989. Sartre, Jean-Paul, No Exit and Other Plays, Vintage Books, 1989. Smith, Susan Harris, ‘‘Angels Fall: An American Melodrama of Beset Manhood,’’ in Lanford Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Garland Publishing, 1994, pp. 103–18.

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Wattenberg, Richard, ‘‘‘Above Time’ in the Present?: Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ and Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall,’’ in Lanford Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Garland Publishing, 1994, pp. 85–101. Williams, Philip Middleton, A Comfortable House: Lanford Wilson, Marshall W. Mason, and the Circle Repertory Theatre, McFarland, 1993. Wilson, Lanford, Angels Fall, Hill & Wang, 1983.

FURTHER READING Barnett, Gene, Lanford Wilson, Twayne’s United States Author Series, No. 490, Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 125–33. Barnett’s book is a comprehensive study of the works of Wilson that includes detailed analysis of his early experimental works, his major and minor plays, work for opera and television, commissioned works, and biographical information. Bryer, Jackson R., Lanford Wilson: A Casebook, Garland Publishing, 1994. This anthology is the ﬁrst to compile a range of critical articles on the works of Wilson. Besides critical analyses of his plays, the author also covers historical and social aspects of Wilson’s work, inter-

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views the playwright, and has compiled an extensive bibliography. Busby, Mark, Lanford Wilson, Western Writers Series, No. 81, Boise State University Press, 1987. This very brief work offers a succinct overview of Wilson’s work that primarily investigates the inﬂuence of place on his plays. While providing biographical details that contribute to his analysis, Busby focuses on how aspects of the frontier myth are central to understanding major themes of Wilson’s plays. Herman, William, Understanding Contemporary American Drama, University of South Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 196–229. Covering a number of major contemporary playwrights, Herman dedicates a chapter to Wilson, explaining not only his major themes but analyzing his major works. Whereas little is mentioned speciﬁcally about Angels Fall, the chapter outlines a general reception of his work by critics. Ryzuk, Mary, The Circle Repertory Company: The First Fifteen Years, Iowa State University Press, 1989. As a tribute to an important theatrical institution, Ryzuk’s book provides an account of the Circle Repertory Company theater which Wilson helped to create and continues to be involved with since 1969. Covering its founders, productions, cast ensembles, and its ability to change with times, Ryzuk’s book gives an insider’s look at the historical and artistic development of an independent theater.

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Arsenic and Old Lace In 1941, New Yorkers were looking for some entertainment to take their minds off of the war in Europe and the growing fear that America would be pulled into it. On January 10, Broadway gave them exactly what they were looking for in the form of a hilarious new play by Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace. The play became an immediate critical and popular success, running for 1,444 performances. It also became a hit in England in 1942 as theatergoers who were suffering through post-blitz London lined up for tickets. In 1944, Hollywood produced a ﬁlm version staring Cary Grant that became a huge box ofﬁce success.

JOSEPH KESSELRING 1941

The play, a clever combination of the farcical and the macabre, centers on two elderly sisters who are famous in their Brooklyn neighborhood for their numerous acts of charity. Unfortunately, however, their charity includes poisoning lonely old men who come to their home looking for lodging. The two women are assisted in their crimes by their mentally challenged nephew who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt and who frequently blasts a bugle and yells ‘‘charge’’ as he bounds up the stairs. Matters get complicated when a second nephew, a theater critic, discovers the murders and a third nephew appears after having just escaped from a mental institution. In his adroit mixture of comedy and mayhem, Kesselring satirizes the charitable impulse as he pokes fun at the conventions of the theater.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Joseph Kesselring was born on June 21, 1902, in New York City, to Henry and Frances Kesselring. From 1922 to 1924 he taught music and directed student productions at Bethel College in Newton, Kansas. He turned to acting, producing, and writing from 1925 until 1933, when his ﬁrst play, Addie Appleby, Maker of Men, a domestic comedy, was produced. His second play There’s Wisdom in Women, produced in 1935, gained some attention but he would not experience real success until Arsenic and Old Lace hit Broadway in 1941. Kesselring continued his playwriting career until 1963, but his later plays never earned him the same popular and critical acclaim. He continued writing dramas and short stories until his death on November 5, 1967. Kesselring won further accolades for his screenplay of Arsenic and Old Lace, which became a commercial and critical success. The play continues to be a favorite production in amateur and community theater revivals.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Arsenic and Old Lace takes place entirely in the Brewster home in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. As the play opens, Abby Brewster, a sweet, elderly woman is pouring tea for her nephew Teddy and Dr. Harper, a local minister. All note how peaceful the house is, far removed from the war in Europe. They discuss their nephew Mortimer, a theater critic, and his relationship with the minister’s daughter Elaine. Two neighborhood policemen, Brophy and Klein, arrive to pick up toys for the local Christmas fund. Teddy asks them what news they have brought him. After saluting him, Brophy responds, ‘‘Colonel, we have nothing to report.’’ We later learn that Teddy thinks that he is Teddy Roosevelt, a delusion that family and friends accept. As Teddy draws an imaginary sword, yells ‘‘charge’’ and bounds up the stairs, the others pay no attention. The men discuss how charitable Abby and her sister Martha are. Brophy admonishes Teddy after he blows a bugle call, noting that he used to do that in the middle of the night. The ofﬁcers discuss the Brewster family’s history of mental illness.

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Martha arrives and helps Abby gather the toys for the ofﬁcers, who soon depart. Dr. Harper asks the sisters to make sure that Teddy signs admittance papers to Happy Dale Sanitarium, where he will go after their death. After the reverend leaves, Abby tells a delighted Teddy that he needs to go to Panama and dig another lock for the canal. Martha is also elated by the news, but at this point, the audience is not given the details of the situation. Elaine arrives looking for Mortimer, who soon appears. They discuss the play they will be seeing that night and casually ﬂirt with each other. Their talk turns more serious as they discuss getting married, and Mortimer insists that they should not wait more than a month. Elaine promises to talk it over with her father and to set a date. After warmly greeting Teddy, Mortimer informs Elaine that he has a brother Jonathan about whom the family does not like to talk. After Elaine leaves, Mortimer tells his aunts about his marriage plans, which elates them. As he searches for a chapter of a book that he is writing, Mortimer looks in the window seat and ﬁnds a dead body. He immediately assumes that Teddy has committed the crime and so tells the aunts that they must send him to Happy Dale at once. When Mortimer gently breaks the news of the body to his aunts, they insist he should ‘‘just forget about it,’’ and later explain that the man drank poisoned wine that Abby had given him. The aunts are quite nonchalant about the incident as Mortimer’s agitation increases. They try unsuccessfully to reassure him with their explanation that they will bury the body in the cellar with the eleven others they also poisoned. All were lonely old men who came to their home looking for lodging. Taking pity on them, the aunts decided to help each of them ﬁnd peace. Elaine soon returns excited about the wedding plans, but Mortimer tells her that something has come up and she should go home and wait for him. She leaves, confused and angry at Mortimer’s peculiar behavior. When an elderly man, Mr. Gibbs, rings the bell looking for lodging, the two aunts quiz him on his background and present situation. As they prepare the wine for Mr. Gibbs, Mortimer, pours himself a glass while talking on the phone to his editor. When he realizes that the wine is poisoned, he screams, which causes Mr. Gibbs to run out of the house. The sisters are crestfallen. Before Mortimer rushes out to review a play, he makes the

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aunts promise not to do anything until he gets back, including burying the body. They agree, but have no clue as to why Mortimer is acting so strangely. After Mortimer leaves, Jonathan arrives with Dr. Einstein. When the aunts do not recognize their nephew, he explains that Dr. Einstein has surgically altered his face. After Jonathan proves his identity, he tells them that he has come from Chicago where he and the doctor were in business. As the two obviously agitated aunts retreat into the kitchen, Einstein asks Jonathan what they should do, noting that the police are after them for murder and that they have a dead body in the car. Jonathan admits that he killed Mr. Spenalzo because the man said he looked like Boris Karloff after Einstein’s surgery. When the aunts return, they tell Jonathan that he must leave, reminding him that he was never happy in the house. Jonathan, however, convinces them to allow the two to stay for dinner. When Jonathan discovers that his grandfather’s laboratory is still upstairs, he determines that the house will provide a perfect operating room for Einstein to work on his face as well as those of other criminals who need disguises. Jonathan assures Einstein that the aunts will not be able to prevent them from staying. The act closes when the two men are startled by Teddy’s bugle blast and charge up the stairs.

Act 2 After dinner, the aunts renew their efforts to get Jonathan to leave, but he warns them how ‘‘disagreeable’’ he had been as a child and that ‘‘it wouldn’t be pleasant for any of [them]’’ if they tried to prevent him from staying. He informs the aunts of his plans for his grandfather’s laboratory, which they immediately reject. They do agree, however, to let him stay for the night. During this conversation, Einstein has gone with Teddy down into the basement to ‘‘inspect the locks in Panama.’’ When he comes back up stairs, Einstein informs Jonathan that he has found a place to bury Mr. Spenalzo, explaining that Teddy has dug a hole in the basement. While Jonathan and Einstein move their car to the back of the house, the aunts decide they will bury Mr. Hoskins, who is still in the window seat, as soon as the two men have gone to bed. When the house is quiet, Teddy brings the body down into the basement. Soon after, Jonathan and Einstein bring in Mr. Spenalzo’s body and put it in the window seat when they hear Elaine knocking at the door. She assumes the two are robbers until Jonathan informs

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her of his identity. Thinking that she saw the two bring in the dead body, Jonathan forces her into the cellar. Her screams bring down the aunts, who are dressed for Mr. Hoskins’s funeral. Elaine escapes just as Mortimer arrives. Jonathan and Mortimer quarrel until the aunts insist that they all settle down for the evening. Later when Elaine demands to know what is going on in the house, Mortimer informs her that they cannot marry because insanity runs in his family. When he looks in the window seat and sees Mr. Spenalzo’s body instead of Mr. Hoskins’s, he talks Elaine into going home. The aunts are quite confused about the identity of the new body in the window seat. When Mortimer realizes that the body is connected with Jonathan, he tries to blackmail his brother into leaving. Jonathan refuses to leave and threatens Mortimer with the same fate as that of Mr. Spenalzo. At that moment Ofﬁcer O’Hara arrives, concerned about the lights on so late at night. Mortimer, happy to see the ofﬁcer, convinces him to stay until Jonathan leaves. O’Hara is pleased to do so since this will give him the opportunity to discuss the play he has been writing. When Jonathan discovers Mr. Hoskins’s body in the cellar and threatens to tell O’Hara, Mortimer convinces the ofﬁcer that he will meet him later to discuss the play. The aunts admit to Jonathan that they have twelve bodies in the basement. The news hurts Jonathan’s pride as Einstein points out that the aunts have murdered the same number of men as Jonathan has. As a result, Jonathan determines that he will kill Mortimer and so tip the scale in his favor.

Act 3 Later that night, as Jonathan and Einstein are burying Mr. Spenalzo with Mr. Hoskins in the cellar, Mortimer arrives with a doctor’s signature on Teddy’s commitment papers. He explains to the aunts that he can protect them only if he lets Teddy take the blame for the murders. They threaten to go to the police if Mortimer does not ﬁnd a way to get rid of Jonathan in the morning. Jonathan tells Einstein to get his medical instruments as he plans Mortimer’s slow, painful death. After they bind and gag Mortimer, they pour two glasses of poisoned wine. Just as they are about to drink, Teddy blasts his bugle, and they drop the glasses, spilling the wine. As he is passing the house, Ofﬁcer O’Hara hears the blast and comes in to complain. Einstein explains that Mortimer is tied

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up because he was demonstrating what happened in a play he saw that evening. O’Hara decides not to untie Mortimer so that he will be forced to listen to the ofﬁcer’s summary of his play. By morning, O’Hara is coming to the end of his summary when Brophy and Klein arrive, looking for him. They announce that their lieutenant is determined to send Teddy away to Happy Dale because of all the complaints he is getting about the bugle blast in the middle of the night. Jonathan wakes up, sees the ofﬁcers, and mistakenly thinks he has been caught. When Klein mentions that he looks like Boris Karloff, Jonathan goes for his throat but is knocked unconscious by Brophy. Lieutenant Rooney then arrives and recognizes Jonathan as a wanted criminal and an escapee from an insane asylum. None of the ofﬁcers believe Jonathan when he insists that thirteen bodies are buried in the basement. Soon after Mortimer tells the Lieutenant that he has Teddy’s commitment papers, Elaine and Mr. Witherspoon, the superintendent of Happy Dale, arrive. Mortimer tells Elaine to ‘‘run along home’’ until he calls her, but she refuses to leave. Teddy agrees to go with Witherspoon, who he thinks will be his guide on an expedition to Africa. When the aunts insist that if Teddy goes to Happy Dale, they must go too, Mortimer agrees as does the lieutenant after they begin to talk about bodies in the cellar. After the aunts’ commitment papers are signed, they express concern over the validity of the signatures. They decide to tell Mortimer the truth—that he is not a Brewster. They explain that his mother was their cook and that he was born out of wedlock. Mortimer and Elaine are delighted at the news and leave for her house to get breakfast. The ofﬁcers arrest Einstein and Jonathan, who is content that the aunts will not be able to best his murder record. After they depart, the aunts quiz Mr. Witherspoon about his background and learn that he has no family. The play ends with them inviting him to breakfast and to sample a glass of their elderberry wine.

CHARACTERS Abby Brewster Abby and her sister Martha have interchangeable personalities in the play. Neither exhibits dis-

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tinct characteristics that are identiﬁable as separate from the other. Abby, like her sister Martha, is oldfashioned in an ironic sense. She appears to be a quite conservative elderly woman who values the conventions of the past. She attends church regularly and donates toys to the local Christian fund. Her traditional values, however, do not extend to her treatment of the elderly men who come to their home looking for lodging. While her desire to help the men ﬁnd peace is aligned with their Christian faith, her and her sister’s methods reﬂect modern, violent sensibilities as they resort to murder to achieve their goal. Abby is the one who gives the poisoned wine to the ﬁrst of their murder victims.

Jonathan Brewster Jonathan is a vicious criminal with a penchant for torture. Not much background information is given on him other than the details provided by Mortimer that he was ‘‘the kind of boy who liked to cut worms in two—with his teeth.’’ He has no consideration for his aunts as he plots to turn their home into a surgery for criminals who need to alter their appearance. When Mortimer threatens to interfere, he plans on causing a slow, painful death for his brother. His pettiness surfaces when he becomes jealous that his aunts have committed more murders than he has.

Martha Brewster Martha is as ironically old fashioned as her sister. She exhibits kindness and compassion with the neighbors and follows social conventions of behavior. For example, when Mortimer breaks tradition and asks Elaine to meet him at the Brewster’s instead of calling for her at her home, she criticizes him for his lack of chivalry. She also condemns the theater for its provocative subject matter and popular ﬁlms that frighten their audiences. Like Abby, Martha’s charity is limited by the macabre nature of the murders they commit and by their own prejudices. Abby would rather ignore the devastation of the war in Europe because it is beyond their scope. When Jonathan arrives, Martha, with Abby’s help, does everything in her power to get rid of him from the moment he walks in the door, insisting that he is too much trouble. The two also have no time for foreigners, refusing to let Jonathan bury one in their basement along with their ‘‘good Methodist’’ Mr. Hoskins.

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Mortimer Brewster Mortimer is teasing and ﬂirtatious with his ﬁancée Elaine and exhibits genuine affection for her, his aunts, and for Teddy. As soon as he discovers the dead body in the window seat, his immediate goal is to protect his aunts. He bravely stands up to his brother Jonathan at the risk of his own safety. His bravery, however, is tempered by his arrogance, which sometimes blinds him to what is happening around him. He insists that he is much more intelligent than the plays he must review and refuses to agree to Elaine’s claim that they often have a humanizing effect on him. His pride gets him in trouble when he does not take the proper precautions with Jonathan, and as a result, he almost loses his life. He also proves himself to be quite excitable and does not handle the stressful situation in the Brewster household very rationally. All ends well less through Mortimer’s actions and more through coincidence and the fact that the police cannot fathom the sweet Brewster sisters could ever have twelve bodies buried in their basement.

Teddy Brewster Teddy has lost all contact with reality, completely immersed in the delusion that he is Teddy Roosevelt. This static character is used primarily as a plot device. He covers up the aunts’ murderous activities as he buries the dead bodies in the basement, which he insists contains the locks of the Panama Canal.

Ofﬁcer Brophy Like the Brewster sisters, Ofﬁcers Brophy and Klein are interchangeable with no distinct personalities. They help the plot develop by providing background information on the Brewster family and rescuing Mortimer from Jonathan’s clutches. Brophy also provides some foreshadowing as he notes in the beginning of the play that Teddy has been disrupting the neighbors’ sleep with his midnight bugle calls.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Kesselring collaborated on a successful Hollywood screen version of the play, directed by Frank Capra in 1944. The ﬁlm starred Cary Grant as Mortimer, with Josephine Hull and Jean Adair recreating their stage performances.

as many men as he has. As a result, Jonathan decides to kill Mortimer so that he will tip the balance in his favor.

Elaine Harper Elaine exhibits a modern sensibility for a woman during this period. She is self conﬁdent, quick witted, and ‘‘surprisingly smart for a minister’s daughter.’’ She engages in witty, ﬂirty banter with Mortimer and shows a great deal of patience with him.

Reverend Dr. Harper Like the Brewster sisters, the Reverend Harper maintains old-fashioned values, appreciating the ‘‘gentle virtues’’ that have gone out of style in the twentieth century. His disapproval of the theater makes him initially wary of the union between his daughter Elaine and Mortimer.

Ofﬁcer Klein Klein, like his partner Brophy, appreciates the sisters’ charity and believes them to be among the kindest inhabitants of the neighborhood. He also serves as a plot device, especially when he suggests that Jonathan looks like Boris Karloff, which sends the latter into a murderous rage.

Dr. Einstein

Ofﬁcer O’Hara

Dr. Einstein, Jonathan’s evil sidekick, is little more that a stock ﬁgure. He adds to the comedy through his alcoholic tendencies, which cause him to remake Jonathan into the image of Boris Karloff. He also stirs up the action when he chides Jonathan about the fact that the aunts have murdered exactly

Ofﬁcer O’Hara distinguishes himself from his fellow ofﬁcers by the fact that he has written a play. He adds to the farcical action when he leaves Mortimer tied up all evening in order to ensure that the theater critic will listen to the entire summary of his play.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Some scholars suggest that Kesselring wrote the play as a thriller and then was prompted to turn it into a farce. Would the play work as a thriller? Propose a general outline of the play as a thriller and rewrite in detail a key scene that would illustrate this genre. • Compare and contrast the Broadway hit Sweeney Todd, another play in the comic/thriller genre, with Arsenic and Old Lace. • Research the treatment of the mentally ill in America in the 1930s and 1940s. Were there ‘‘Happy Dales’’ then that provided comfortable living arrangements for those like Teddy and the Brewster sisters? • Investigate the accepted theories on biological determinism during the 1930s and 1940s. Discuss the debate over nature versus nurture during this period.

THEMES Charity The theme of charity is satirized in the play. The Brewster sisters appear to be quite altruistic, providing help when needed for their neighbors as well as opening their door to strangers. They make soup for the sick, serve tea and cakes for the preacher and police ofﬁcers, collect toys for needy children, and provide lodging for lonely old men. They must be the right kind of men though. The sisters have their own rules about how far their charity will extend. They do not, for example, want to think about the devastation of the war in Europe, which to them has become inconvenient because it may cause them to use ‘‘that imitation ﬂour again’’ as did the ﬁrst world war. Also, the war involves foreigners, who are not acceptable to the sisters. They prefer ‘‘good’’ American Christians, more speciﬁcally Episcopalians. Methodists like Mr. Hoskins are

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welcomed into their homes, but only because the sisters are so ‘‘charitable.’’ Their own nephew Jonathan is not welcomed because his behavior throughout his life has been undesirable. Of course, the greatest problem with the sisters’ charitable activities is the fact that they have murdered eleven of the lonely men who have come to their home looking for lodging. They determine that they know best what these men need, and that only through death and a good Christian service at their burial will they ﬁnd the peace they deserve. The sisters, however, make the end as painless as possible as they poison the men with elderberry wine tainted with arsenic. They are pleased with the fact that one of the men actually praised the wine right before he expired.

Insanity The audience, along with Mortimer, soon learns that the sisters are as insane as the obviously deranged Teddy, who thinks that he is Teddy Roosevelt and so continually blows a bugle and charges up the staircase as if it were San Juan Hill. Because the sisters do not display such obvious outward signs, no one in the neighborhood believes Jonathan’s claims that there are twelve bodies buried in the basement. Mortimer also has difﬁculty believing that his aunts were responsible for the body in the window seat, blaming it instead on Teddy, until the aunts admit their responsibility. They handle the fact that they have just committed murder quite nonchalantly, with a cool remonstration to Mortimer to ‘‘forget you ever saw the gentleman.’’ They ﬁnd their actions perfectly justiﬁable and so go about their daily schedule. When Mortimer suggests that they did not tell the Reverend Harper about Mr. Hoskins because they felt guilty, they insist that the only reason they hid him was because it ‘‘would not be very nice’’ for the Reverend to view a body at tea. Abby adds, ‘‘I do think Martha and I have the right to our own little secrets.’’ Insanity runs in the family, as evidenced by reports of Teddy’s grandfather, a physician who made a fortune developing medicines that he tried out, sometimes with devastating results, on his patients. Jonathan also has the family curse, having killed twelve men and threatening to kill Mortimer by torturing him. He insists that his last murder was justiﬁed since the victim accused him of looking like Boris Karloff after Dr. Einstein had botched his reconstructive surgery. This genetic defect causes

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Mortimer to insist that he cannot marry Elaine until, to his immense relief, the aunts tell him that he is adopted.

Theater Kesselring also satirizes the conventions of the theater as well as those who critique it. The art of the theater reﬂects life only in the most absurd situations in this play. The farcical nature of the action ironically reinforces Mortimer’s claims that the theater does not reﬂect reality, but it certainly does provide good entertainment. This point is well proven during the absurd situation Mortimer ﬁnds himself in as he describes the plot of a play he has recently seen. He tells Jonathan and Dr. Einstein, who are trying to come up with a way to subdue Mortimer so that they can torture and kill him, exactly how the murderer captures the hero. Insisting that the characterizations reveal no imagination or any reﬂection of reality, Mortimer is blind to the fact that he is in the exact same situation as the play’s hero and has just given his brother the perfect method to carry out his murderous intentions. Kesselring effectively satirizes the arrogance of theater critics in his portrayal of Mortimer who insists that he is always disappointed by the uninspired plays he is forced to review. He receives his comeuppance not only by providing Jonathan with a successful method to set him up for murder, but also as he is forced to listen all night to Ofﬁcer O’Hara’s tedious summary of the play that he has written.

STYLE Farce and Melodrama Kesselring departs from dramatic tradition in his combination of farce and melodrama. Elizabethan tragedy contain scenes that provided audiences with comic relief, but they were not part of the main action of the play. Joseph Wood Krutch, in his review of the play for the Nation, notes that Elizabethan tragedies rarely ‘‘confuse[d] the comic and the tragic, since the comic characters and the tragic ones were kept separate and we were supposed to stop laughing when the porter went off and Macbeth came on.’’ He writes that plays during the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century, including some by George M. Cohan, began to mix drama and comedy, suggesting that ‘‘the audience was expected to

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laugh when the corpse fell out of the closet and to regard the more extreme forms of violence as comic per se.’’ Kesselring adopts this modern style as he integrates farce into the dramatic structure of the play, which focuses on the Brewster sisters’ murder of eleven lonely old men who come to their home looking for lodging. The murders take place off stage and so when the comedic elements are introduced, they are less shocking. The absurdity of the body switching scene becomes pure farce, removing the focus from the acts of murder to the efforts to hide them. Since the audience does not have to watch the murders take place, they are more open to accepting Mortimer’s comedic efforts to save his aunts. The only real suggestion of violence occurs when Jonathan threatens to torture Mortimer, but that threat deteriorates into farce when Ofﬁcer O’Hara appears and forces the bound Mortimer to listen to a summary of his play.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT World War II The world experienced a decade of aggression in the 1930s that would culminate in World War II. World War II resulted from the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. These militaristic regimes gained control as a result of the Great Depression experienced by most of the world in the early 1930s and from the conditions created by the peace settlements following World War I. The dictatorships established in each country encouraged expansion into neighboring countries. In Germany, Hitler strengthened the army during the 1930s. In 1936, Benito Mussolini’s Italian troops took Ethiopia. From 1936 to 1939, Spain was engaged in civil war involving Francisco Franco’s fascist army, aided by Germany and Italy. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria and in March 1939 occupied Czechoslovakia. Italy took Albania in April 1939. One week after Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed the Treaty of Nonaggression, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany after a U-boat sank the British ship Athenia off the coast of Ireland. Another British ship, Courageous, was sunk on September 19. All the members of the British Commonwealth, except Ireland, soon joined Britain and

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COMPARE & CONTRAST Today: The United States is engaged in a war in Iraq that is not supported by many countries around the world.

committed terrorist acts in several countries including the United States. The most devastating act of terrorism occurs on September 11, 2001, when terrorists ﬂy planes into the World Trade Center Towers in New York City and into the Pentagon, killing approximately 3,000 people.

• 1941: On December 11, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany, along with Italy, declares war on the United States.

• 1941: Arsenic and Old Lace begins its 1,444 performance run. Audiences herald the play’s successful mixture of farce and melodrama.

Today: The world is threatened by Islamic fundamentalist groups that have declared a holy war against the West. These radical groups have

Today: Films that spoof the thriller genre, like Scream, have gained signiﬁcant box ofﬁce success.

France in their declaration of war. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II.

Comedies, speciﬁcally drawing room comedies and vaudeville shows, also became a popular dramatic form in early decades of twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, comedic theater, dedicated to escapism during the depression and war years, became as popular as drama. This genre branched out into musicals, most notably with the ﬁrst of the Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpieces, Oklahoma in 1943, which helped deﬁne the musical play as a signiﬁcant American art form.

• 1941: On December 7, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and the United States enters World War II.

Theater in the 1930s and 1940s In the late nineteenth century playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen turned away from what they considered the artiﬁciality of melodrama to a focus on the commonplace in the context of everyday contemporary life. Their work, along with much of the experimental ﬁction written during that period, adopts the tenets of Realism, a new literary movement that took a serious look at believable characters and their sometimes problematic interactions with society. Dramatists who embraced Realism use settings and props that reﬂect their characters’ daily lives and realistic dialogue that replicates natural speech patterns. Realism remained a dominant form in twentiethcentury drama. In the 1930s and 1940s a group of playwrights, known as social realists, brought drama to American audiences that reﬂected the political and social realities of the period. Dramatists such as Lillian Hellman, Sidney Howard, Sidney Kingsley, and Clifford Odets examined political institutions such as capitalism, totalitarianism, and socialism along with social issues such as lesbianism and poverty.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW When Arsenic and Old Lace opened at the Fulton Theatre in New York City on January 10, 1941, it was an immediate success with the public as well as the critics. Rosamond Gilder, in her review for Theater Arts, noted its ‘‘continuous hilarity,’’ and deemed it ‘‘the ultimate in the genre. Arsenic and Old Lace lives up to its beguiling title and succeeds in turning homicide into side-splitting farce.’’ Brooks Atkinson insists in The New York Times that he does not exaggerate when he writes, ‘‘Joseph Kesselring has written [a play] so funny that none of us will ever forget it.’’ He adds, ‘‘swift, dry, satirical and exciting, Arsenic and Old Lace kept the ﬁrst-night audience roaring with laughter.’’

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Thelma Barlow, Rupert Vansittart, and Marcia Warren in the 2003 stage production of Arsenic and Old Lace performed at the Strand Theatre in London

The production ran for 1,444 performances, and along with four touring companies, earned more than four million dollars. In London, where it ran for 1,337 performances after it opened on December 23, 1942, the play became a favorite escape from the horrors of the post-blitz for Londoners who did not ﬂee to the countryside. Although Frank Rich of The New York Times found a 1986 revival dated, the play continues to be a favorite production for community theaters.

CRITICISM Wendy Perkins Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and ﬁlm. In this essay, Perkins examines the satirical structure of the play. Joseph Kesselring’s play Arsenic and Old Lace is one of Broadway’s most successful comedies. Brooks Atkinson, in his review of the play for The New York Times ﬁnds the play ‘‘hilarious’’ and praises its

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‘‘compact . . . plot and comic situation,’’ with its interplay of the macabre and the farcical. Yet as Atkinson notes, Kesselring ‘‘does not have to stoop to clutching hands, pistol shots or lethal screams to get his effects.’’ What has made this play an enduring classic is the playwright’s clever combination of murder, slapstick, and satire. The juxtaposition of dramatic and farcical elements underpins its ﬁnely tuned satiric structure. The play’s main satiric focus is on the ‘‘charitable’’ work of two of its main characters, Abby and Martha Brewster, Mortimer Brewster’s elderly aunts. Atkinson describes the aunts as ‘‘two of the nicest maiden ladies who ever baked biscuits, rushed hot soup to ailing neighbors and invited the minister to tea.’’ Kesselring takes his time establishing the aunts’ altruistic activities, which will set the stage for introduction of the dramatic and comedic action to come. The play opens with Abby praising the Reverend Harper’s Sunday sermons, which to her, reﬂect the ‘‘friendly’’ spirit of Brooklyn, as she serves him homemade biscuits and jam. Noting the aunts’ neighborliness, the reverend concludes that ‘‘the virtues of another day—they’re all here in this house. The gentle virtues that went out with candle-

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd (1979) is another Broadway hit that successfully combines farce with melodrama.

• Joseph Kramm’s popular play The Shrike (1952) takes a serious look at the treatment of the mentally ill in America in the 1950s.

• Jonathan Swift’s satire ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ (1729) suggests a ‘‘charitable’’ solution to the poverty and hunger in Ireland: babies should be bred and eaten.

• George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play You Can’t Take It with You (1938) earned rave reviews for its entertaining and witty view of an eccentric family.

light and good manners and low taxes.’’ Soon after, ofﬁcers Brophy and Klein arrive to pick up toys for the Christmas Fund. Abby brings Ofﬁcer Brophy beef broth for his sick wife, informing him that her sister is not with them that afternoon since she has taken the broth to a neighbor. After explaining how the aunts cared for his wife before she died, and him after, the Reverend Harper declares to the ofﬁcers, ‘‘if I know what pure kindness and absolute generosity are, it’s because I’ve known the Brewster sisters.’’ The ofﬁcers concur, pointing out that the aunts often take in boarders free of charge and that they are very indulgent with their nephew Teddy, who, they claim, is ‘‘so happy being Teddy Roosevelt.’’

Ofﬁcer Klein reinforces the satiric nature of the aunts’ activities when he insists, while discussing the impetus for his own charitable work, ‘‘you get tired playing cards and then you start cleaning your gun and the ﬁrst thing you know you’ve shot yourself in the foot.’’ The aunts have a similarly dubious motive for their actions. Their charity takes the form of murder followed by a Christian burial, which ensures, they insist, that the lonely old men who come to their Brooklyn home looking for lodging will ﬁnd appropriate peace.

After the discovery of the body in the window seat, however, it soon becomes apparent that the aunts have a quite unusual deﬁnition of charity. They have decided that they know best how to help the lonely people of the world, only, of course, if they are the ‘‘right’’ kind—Christian and American. The satirical nature of this situation is developed through the comically macabre details of their altruism, which are hinted at in the opening scene. Bothered by the rationing of ﬂour during the war, Abby admits in a wonderful example of comic understatement that she has determined ‘‘that Mr. Hitler isn’t a Christian.’’ She reveals the limited nature of her altruism when she declares, ‘‘Let’s not talk about the war.’’ The Reverend Harper unknowingly provides an ironic note when he suggests ‘‘that war and violence seem far removed from these surroundings.’’

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While their neighborliness initially appears to provide evidence that they are quite sane, the aunts soon prove to be as mentally unstable as their nephew Teddy, but Teddy’s eccentric behavior is harmless. The aunts exhibit a more dangerous form, as did Teddy’s grandfather, who, as the ofﬁcers and the reverend note, concocted medicines that he often tried out on patients, sometimes with disastrous results. This hereditary insanity at ﬁrst complicates Mortimer’s marriage plans until he discovers at the end of the play that he was adopted. The satiric nature of the aunts’ behavior is reinforced by the appearance of Mortimer’s brother Jonathan. The aunts’ generous temperament does not extend to their nephew. They try unsuccessfully throughout the evening to try to get Jonathan to leave, insisting to him, ‘‘you were never happy in this house and we were never happy while you were here.’’ Their activities ironically have the same consequences as does Jonathan’s more sinister ones— twelve dead bodies. The relationship between the aunts and Jonathan is further reinforced by the fact

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that their dead body, Mr. Hoskins, keeps getting confused with Jonathan’s, Mr. Spenalzo, in a slapstick corpse-swapping scene. The limits of their charitable nature are further highlighted by their insistence that ‘‘it’s a terrible thing—burying a good Methodist with a foreigner.’’ Another satiric focus involves Mortimer’s job as drama critic, with Kesselring poking fun at this profession as well as the theater itself. When Reverend Harper suggests his displeasure at his daughter dating a drama critic, Abby asks him not to think too harshly of Mortimer since ‘‘somebody has to do those things.’’ Feeling himself to be much cleverer than the plays that he hates to review, Mortimer insists that the theater is much too predictable these days. However, during the eventful evening at the Brewster home, he misses several instances where the action resembles the very plays he has been reviewing. Here Kesselring creates an ironic interplay of art and life, a self-conscious reference to the farcical nature of the action. As Mortimer describes the play he will review that night, he insists that, predictably, it will open with the appearance of a dead body just as he opens the window seat and ﬁnds a real one hidden inside. Later, he constructs his own fate as he unwittingly provides Jonathan and Einstein with an effective method to subdue him. Mortimer insists that people in plays do not act intelligently, explaining in one that he saw, a man who is ‘‘supposed to be bright’’ knows that he is surrounded by murderers and so ‘‘he ought to know he’s in danger. He’s even been warned to get out of the house.’’ But he stays there, not having ‘‘sense enough to be scared.’’ Mortimer’s conﬁdence in his own intelligence blinds him to the fact that he is in the exact same situation.

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THEIR CHARITY TAKES THE FORM OF MURDER FOLLOWED BY A CHRISTIAN BURIAL, WHICH ENSURES, THEY INSIST, THAT THE LONELY OLD MEN WHO COME TO THEIR BROOKLYN HOME LOOKING FOR LODGING WILL FIND APPROPRIATE PEACE.’’

Jonathan and Einstein are on their way to incarceration, and the aunts will join Teddy at Happy Dale where they will be prevented from helping lonely old men ﬁnd ultimate peace. In a clever closing twist, Kesselring suggests that the aunts will have one ﬁnal chance to perform a ‘‘charitable’’ act by adding Mr. Witherspoon’s body to the count in the basement and thereby besting Jonathan’s record. Through these satiric characterizations of the eccentric Brewster clan, Kesselring pokes fun at human foibles in an entertaining mix of comedy and mayhem. Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on Arsenic and Old Lace, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Brooks Atkinson In the following review, Atkinson calls Arsenic and Old Lace ‘‘so funny that none of us will ever forget it.’’

When Einstein asks how the murderers subdue the man, Mortimer readily provides an answer, noting that they tied him up with a curtain cord, which he declares is ‘‘a little too convenient.’’ In an inspired moment of lunacy, Einstein and Jonathan provide their own answer to Mortimer’s declaration, ‘‘when are playwrights going to use some imagination?’’ as they follow the details of Mortimer’s outline to the letter and effectively restrain him. Mortimer, however, suffers the greatest agony as he is forced to listen to the plot of Ofﬁcer O’Hara’s play. By the end of the play, all tensions are resolved as each character meets his/her appropriate fate. Mortimer is free to marry Elaine without the fear that he has inherited the Brewster family insanity,

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SOURCES Atkinson, Brooks, ‘‘Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace Turns Murder into Fantastic Comedy,’’ in the New York Times, January 11, 1941, p. 13. Gilder, Rosamond, Review, in Theatre Arts, March 1941, pp. 185–86. Kesselring, Joseph, Arsenic and Old Lace, Dramatists Play Service, 1995. Krutch, Joseph Wood, ‘‘Homicide as Fun,’’ in the Nation, Vol. 152, No. 4, January 25, 1941, pp. 108–09. Rich, Frank, ‘‘Arsenic and Old Lace Revival,’’ in the New York Times, June 27, 1986, p. C3.

FURTHER READING Blum, Daniel C., A Pictorial History of the American Theatre, 1860–1980, Outlet, 1983. As its title suggests, this book presents representative pictures of successful productions in American theater. Bordman, Gerald, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930. Oxford University Press, 1995. This volume traces the development of these two genres in American theater, providing an insightful background for an examination of the play’s roots. Coleman, Janet, The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre That Revolutionized American Comedy, University of Chicago Press, 1991. Coleman’s study focuses on how improvisational theatrical methods inﬂuenced comedy in America.

Source: Brooks Atkinson, ‘‘Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace Turns Murder into Fantastic Comedy,’’ in New York Times, January 11, 1941, p. 13.

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Wilmeth, Don B., and Tice L. Miller, eds., The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 1996. This comprehensive study traces the important trends in American theater.

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Bent Martin Sherman’s best-known work, Bent, ﬁts in both the categories of gay literature and Holocaust literature. Prior to Bent, there had been virtually no inclusion of gays in discussions about the Holocaust. Therefore, it had a groundbreaking impact when it was ﬁrst staged off-Broadway in 1978; an impact that continued when the play was performed in London the next year and then ﬁnally brought to Broadway. Although the play has ﬂaws, the uniqueness of the story line and the strength of its message about tolerance, love, and human dignity made the play successful. In fact, it was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1980.

MARTIN SHERMAN 1978

The time period of the play is also different from most other Holocaust literature. Rather than being set during World War II, the story begins in 1934 when Hitler’s purge of his Storm Troopers (SA) coincidentally led to the persecution of gays since the head of the SA was gay and his fall provided an excuse for going after other homosexuals. The play continues into 1936, when most of the world still had no idea that any concentration camps existed. The subject matter, nudity, and verbal sex in the play were controversial enough, but Bent ignited further controversy with its suggestion that the gays suffered more than the Jews during the Holocaust. Debate continues among historians about the situation of each group under the Nazis. In the meantime, the play was staged in more than thirty countries during the 1980s and continues to be produced by

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community theaters across the United States. As a book, the play is available as a 1979 publication of Samuel French, Inc.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Martin Sherman’s parents, Joseph T., an attorney, and Julia Shapiro Sherman, were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Sherman, their only child, was born on December 22, 1938, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but raised in Camden, New Jersey. His upbringing was such that he saw his ﬁrst theater production at age six. When he was twelve, he was privileged to see the great Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who dominated the theatrical world for many years. At that point, he joined a children’s theatrical group and toured around Pennsylvania in a version of Snow White. His interest in the theater was augmented by regular trips into Philadelphia to see stage plays and a once-a-year trip to New York City. Although he hated school, Sherman went to college and received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Boston University in 1960. While in college, Sherman realized that his calling was not in acting but in playwriting. After college, he joined the Actors Studio for further study. Sherman’s ﬁrst play was produced in 1963. A stream of other plays followed; most notably: Things Went Badly in Westphalia (1970), included in The Best Short Plays 1970; Passing By (1974), later included in Gay Plays 1 in 1984; and Cracks (1974), included in Gay Plays 2 in 1986. The play that merited both Pulitzer Prize and Tony nominations, Bent, was written in 1978. From 1976 to 1977, Sherman was the Playwright-in-Residence at Mills College in Oakland, California. He has received various awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1980 and a Rockefeller fellowship in 1985. After Bent, Sherman has written only ﬁve more plays that were presented in a stage production, but he has written various television plays and motion picture screenplays, including work for the BBC and CBS. The best known of his screenplays are Alive and Kicking (1997), the story of a dancer with AIDS and his AIDS counselor, and the ﬁlm version of his play Bent. In fact, Sherman considers himself to be a screenwriter as well as a playwright. Since 1980, Sherman has lived in London, England.

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In 1934, Nazi Germany, decadent Max Berger is living with a dancer, Rudy, while he frequents nightclubs and drags home one-night stands. The play opens on the ﬁrst morning after the start of the Night of the Long Knives in which Hitler purged his SA staff, including Ernst Röhm, who was gay and protected other homosexuals. Unfortunately, Max’s latest conquest is SA. The Gestapo arrives and murders the soldier in Rudy and Max’s apartment. They escape when the Nazis have their backs turned.

Act 1, Scene 2 Max and Rudy run to their friend Greta, a drag queen who owns the nightclub where Rudy works. Greta gives them the news about the purge and the crackdown on homosexuals, advises them to run, and gives them money.

Act 1, Scene 3 Two years later, in a park in Cologne, Max meets with his gay Uncle Freddie, the only family member from whom he is not totally estranged. Max and Rudy have moved from city to city staying one step ahead of the Gestapo. Finally, Max’s prominent family has decided to help, so Freddie gives Max papers and tickets that will get him to safety in Amsterdam, but Max insists on two sets so that Rudy can escape, too. Freddie says it is impossible until Max promises to fake being straight and come back to the family business in exchange for papers and tickets for Rudy. Freddie says that he will talk to Max’s father about the offer, and Max leaves.

Act 1, Scene 4 When Max returns to the forest camp where he and Rudy have been living, Rudy tells him that he took a job digging ditches, and that he has arranged a meeting with someone who might help them. Instead, the person tells the Gestapo where to ﬁnd Rudy and Max, and they are captured.

Act 1, Scene 5 Max and Rudy are put on a prisoner train headed to Dachau. Rudy is singled out and tortured in another compartment. Max meets Horst and learns about the pink triangle that gays must wear and what he must do to survive. After Max is forced to help beat Rudy to death, he is also taken away.

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Act 1, Scene 6 At Dachau, Max once again ﬁnds Horst. Max is wearing a yellow star as if he were a Jew because he thinks that will get him a higher status than being a homosexual. He confesses to Horst how he convinced the guards that he was straight so they would give him the yellow star: he had intercourse with a dead girl in front of the guards.

Act 2, Scene 1 A month later, Horst joins Max in a bizarre work detail of carrying rocks back and forth. It is designed to drive prisoners mad with its futility and monotony. Although they are not supposed to talk or touch, they do manage to talk without the guard noticing. Max reveals that, as a supposedly Jewish prisoner, he is able to get mail on occasion, and Uncle Freddie sent him money that he used to arrange Horst’s transfer so that he’d have someone with whom he could talk. Horst is angry that Max has selﬁshly interfered.

Act 2, Scene 2 After three days of silence, Horst begins to talk to Max. They talk about the heat, rumors, someone who died, their mutual sexiness, and then about sex in such vivid terms that they manage, through the power of imagination, to bring each other to climax.

Act 2, Scene 3 Two months later, Horst tells Max that he loves him. Max tells Horst not to love him because queers are not meant to love. Horst has developed a cough, but he makes Max promise that they will not help each other, but will save themselves.

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aware of this trick that electrocutes a prisoner when he retrieves his hat. Rather than go meekly, Horst charges the guard and is shot to death. Max is told to carry Horst’s body to a pit. As he does, he talks to the corpse and tells Horst that he loves him. Max returns momentarily to his work, then goes to the pit, takes off his coat with the yellow star and puts on Horst’s coat with the pink triangle. He then throws himself onto the electric fence.

Act 2, Scene 4 Another two months pass and Horst still has a cough. Max tries to convince him to ask for medicine and to work harder at staying alive. When imagining being in each other’s arms, Horst teaches Max to be more gentle, and Max tells Horst ‘‘as long as I’m holding you, you’re safe.’’

Act 2, Scene 5 Three days later, Horst is still coughing but getting better because Max got some medicine for him. Horst pesters Max to tell him how he got the medicine. Finally, Max admits that he performed oral sex on an SS captain to get it. Then the SS captain shows up to check on Max and realizes that Horst is the one with the cough. He then orders Horst to throw his hat into the electric fence. Horst is

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CHARACTERS Uncle Freddie Berber Max’s homosexual uncle, who pretends to be straight to stay in favor with their wealthy family, tries to arrange Max’s escape. He advises Max to marry for appearances, like he did, and just have boys on the side so that Max can rejoin the family and be safe. When Max offers to do the family’s bidding in exchange for help for Rudy, too, Freddie agrees to talk to Max’s father about the deal.

Maximilian Berber Max is the main character of the play that the audience follows from his decadent, directionless,

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and commitment, at the end of the play, Max accepts his sexual identity and refuses to live further with a lie, even if it means not living at all.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • A motion picture version of Bent was made in 1997 by the theater director-design team of Sean Mathias and Stephen Brimson Lewis. With a cast that includes Ian McKellen, Jude Law, and Mick Jagger, the movie is available in both VHS and DVD format from MGM/UA Studios.

homosexual lifestyle in Berlin to his metamorphic struggle for survival amidst the stark terrors of Dachau. At the opening of the story, Max is living in a perpetual state of escapism through sex, alcohol, and cocaine. Having been disowned by his wealthy family, he is behind in his rent and dependent on his childlike, but devoted lover, Rudy. Max is always trying to make a deal for money, but has sunk to dealing drugs. A handsome, charming weasel, Max fails to appreciate Rudy’s patience, tolerance, and loving care. Max uses people, including a steady stream of one-night stands. It is this promiscuity that brings about his identiﬁcation as a homosexual. When he unwittingly brings home a man wanted by Hitler’s SS, he winds up a hunted man himself. Surprisingly, despite his poor treatment of Rudy, he feels enough responsibility for his companion to insist that he will not make an escape attempt without Rudy. Consequently, Max misses his own chance for a passage to safety when they are captured. Ironically, his one refusal to act selﬁshly by abandoning Rudy to save himself ends up with Max being forced to kill Rudy to save himself. When Max meets Horst, he learns that gays are treated the worst of anyone in the concentration camps. So he fakes being straight and Jewish as a survival ploy. Max believes that he is a rotten person and that gay men do not love. With the guidance of Horst, he learns about real love and dignity. Although he continues to work deals, ﬁrst to get Horst’s companionship and then to try to keep him well, Max ﬁnally makes a valid connection with another human. In tribute to Horst’s bravery

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Captain It is with an SS Captain that Max barters sex for medicine. When the Captain realizes that the medicine was for Horst, he apparently feels betrayed and kills Horst, perhaps to teach Max a lesson or perhaps to eliminate a rival for Max’s affection.

Wolfgang Granz Wolf is the storm trooper Max picks up at Greta’s club on the night that turns out to be the start of Hitler’s purge of the storm troopers and gays. Wolf is tracked down at Max’s apartment and killed, but Max and Rudy escape.

Greta Greta is the drag queen owner of the nightclub where Rudy dances and Max hangs out. It is Greta who tells the SS where to ﬁnd Wolf, but Greta also helps Max and Rudy with advice and money when they go to him for help. Because of the crackdown on gays, Greta closes his club and returns to his straight life as a husband and father.

Guard The Guard who watches Max and Horst’s work detail eventually shoots Horst.

Guards Two SS Guards come to Max’s apartment to arrest Wolf, then murder him.

Rudolph Hennings Rudy is Max’s lover and a dancer at Greta’s nightclub. He is so devoted to Max that he puts up with all the other boys that Max drags home. More concerned about his plants and his dancing lessons than the Gestapo, Rudy is dreadfully naïve and never quite understands the danger that threatens them. Eventually, this innocence causes him to put his trust in the wrong person, and they are turned over to the Gestapo. Oddly enough, though, Rudy is more practical than Max when it comes to working and providing food. Rudy takes care of Max as much, if not more so, than Max takes care of Rudy.

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Horst Horst is the prison-savvy homosexual Max meets on the train to Dachau. It is Horst who advises Max about how to behave to survive and explains the pink triangle patch. Throughout the rest of the play, Horst tries to convince Max to be honest and wear a pink triangle, too. At ﬁrst, Horst resists Max’s pursuit of his friendship, but is sympathetic when Max explains how he got his yellow star. Later, Horst resents Max’s interference when Max arranges for Horst to join his lonely, maddening, work detail. For three days, Horst refuses to talk with Max, but ﬁnally their sanity-saving dialogue begins, and they discover that they can bring each other sexual pleasure just through words and imagination. Horst’s sarcastic humor shows a resilience that starts to fade when he becomes sick with a debilitating cough. He insists that they not try to save each other, but he has become Max’s soul mate, and Max needs him for mental and emotional survival. Horst has not only told Max that he loves him, but has taught Max to love. Ironically, it is Max’s deal-making to get medicine for Horst that causes Horst’s death. Just as Horst has always advocated preserving honor through the honesty of wearing the pink triangle and enduring whatever that symbol brings, Horst goes to his death with honor. He dies in an act of deﬁance rather than submit to the degradation of playing the Captain’s execution game.

places, Max and Horst maintained a sense of humor and gave each other hope through love. Despite the terror of their daily struggle for life, Horst clings to his sexual identity, while Max strengthens his. For Max, this tragedy may have been the only force potent enough to get him to face the truth about himself and truly care about another person. In the end, both choose dignity in death over humiliation and falsehood. Inherent in the concept of the human spirit is a sense of kindness and concern. Greta is an example of a human spirit determined to survive, but still capable of compassion for others. Greta sold the information about Wolf’s whereabouts to the Gestapo because, as Greta said, ‘‘You don’t play games with the SS.’’ Although Greta sacriﬁced someone else for his self-preservation, he turned around and gave his blood money to Max and Rudy to help them escape, and there is some redemption in that gesture. In addition, Greta recognized Rudy’s helplessness and stopped Max from leaving Rudy behind. ‘‘This one can’t handle it alone,’’ he said as he urged Max to take Rudy’s hand and stay with him. It may have been Greta’s directive that gave Max the sense of responsibility that caused him to insist on two tickets to Amsterdam. Ironically, this loyalty is what caused Max to be captured with Rudy and to be put in a situation where he would have to deny knowing Rudy.

The SS Ofﬁcer on the prisoner train is the one who tortures Rudy, forces Max to beat Rudy, and forces Max to prove that he is not gay.

In another sense, adversity affected Max’s family in a positive way. Although he had been estranged from them for ten years, the danger to Max prompted his family to take action to save him. The lesson again is that love, in this case familial love, can overcome disapproval and danger. Although it is conditional love, offered with the restriction that Max must leave Rudy, it is still a step toward reconciliation brought about by an evil environment.

THEMES

Gratuitous Love and Real Love

Ofﬁcer

The Human Spirit and Adversity What one learns from the Holocaust stories is that there is a tremendous strength within the human spirit that will rise up to meet even the most daunting of circumstances. In that sense, Bent is a typical Holocaust story demonstrating how good can come from evil, and how one can ﬁnd humor and beauty anywhere. Even though Dachau was the most evil of

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In the beginning of the play, Max knows only physical love, and it leaves him feeling empty. He runs away from emotional attachment through drugs, alcohol, and a continuous series of one-night stands. All the while, love is right next to him in the person of Rudy, but in his determination to be shallow, Max abuses and ignores that love. Perhaps Max does not want to believe in love because he thinks that he has lost his family’s love. If your own family does not love you, then who will? When Uncle

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • The play Bent mentions that, besides the yellow star worn by the Jews and the pink triangle worn by the homosexuals, there were other symbols for prisoners of the Nazis. Political prisoners wore a red triangle and criminals wore a green one. Research the designations and treatment of those who wore the red and green triangles. For example, people who sheltered Jews were considered political prisoners.

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statement diminishes the Jewish experience? What does Holocaust literature say about this issue? • Write a report on the ‘‘Night of the Long Knives.’’ How does it compare to other notorious Nazi massacres such as Kristallnacht? • Cabaret is another famous Broadway play/movie that depicts the decadent nightclub scene in 1930s Berlin. Compare the descriptions of this lifestyle as presented in the two plays.

• Some members of the Jewish community were offended that the character Horst said that the homosexuals were considered the lowest of the concentration camp prisoners, implying that they got the worst treatment. Do you think that Horst’s

• In the past twenty-ﬁve years, there has been an emergence of a subgenre of ‘‘gay’’ literature. List some of the more notable works included in this type of literature and comment on the acceptance that it has been given.

Freddie asks Max if he loves Rudy, he replies, ‘‘Don’t be stupid. What’s love? [b——sh——t].’’ When Rudy tells Max, ‘‘I really love you,’’ Max replies emphatically, ‘‘Don’t.’’ It is surely no accident that the line of the song that Max sings is ‘‘I cannot love for more than one day.’’

really odd that Max rediscovered love in what seems an unlikely place. The message of real love is that it can create heaven in the midst of hell, solace in the midst of sorrow.

When Max and Horst make love verbally, Horst says, ‘‘We made love. We were real. We were human.’’ Obviously, the message is that love is an important part of what makes us human. At that point, it is a lesson that Max still has to learn. When Horst tells Max that he loves him, Max warns him, ‘‘Don’t love me. . . I can’t love anybody back. . . . Queers aren’t meant to love.’’ Nonetheless, Max expresses love when he endangers himself to get medicine for Horst, encourages Horst to take care of himself, and tries to make Horst feel warmer. After Horst dies, Max holds the body and ﬁnally utters ‘‘I love you.’’ In a ﬂood of realization, Max admits that he thinks he loved Rudy and a boy at his father’s factory years before. It can be said then that Bent is a story about how a man who looked for love in all the wrong places ﬁnally found it amidst the horrors of the concentration camp. Max and Horst developed love as a buffer against their adversity, so it is not

Max tells Wolf that he is rich, Polish, and has a country house, none of which are true, but the fake accent Max assumes makes Wolf fall for the lie. Greta has been a drag queen at a Berlin nightclub, but he has a wife and children. Uncle Freddie hides his homosexuality in order to maintain his position in their wealthy family. Ironically, Max, who cannot seem to face any kind of reality, has not hidden his gay life from his family and has therefore been disowned. However, to get two tickets to Amsterdam for himself and Rudy, he is willing to promise his family to assume a fake life and marry a widowed business connection. After he is captured, Max has to deny that he knows Rudy, he has to fake being straight to save his life, and he chooses to fake being a Jew rather than admit that he is gay. The play is ﬁlled with one act of deception after another. In the end, though, Max sacriﬁces his life to the reality of his feelings and his sexual identity.

Appearances versus Reality

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STYLE Plot as a Piece of the Whole There was once a television show set in New York City that opened with a line explaining that the story being presented was only one of the millions of stories that could be found in that big city. Holocaust stories are like that. Millions of people were imprisoned in the concentration camps, and each one had his/her personal story. When a playwright chooses one episode out of a bigger story, there is more of a sense that the characters are victims of forces beyond their control. For example, the marriage of Romeo and Juliet was only one episode, albeit the ﬁnal episode, in a long-standing family feud. Consequently, they were subject to all of the problems brought on by other people and less able to make choices that would determine their own future. In like manner, Max, Rudy, and Horst are victimized by the political problems and social hatred of their culture and times. Their loss of freedom limits their ability to determine their fate, but as prisoners throughout time have known, the enemy cannot enslave your mind, your dreams, or your love. Horst tells Max that he dreams about him; that knowing that he will see Max helps to keep him going. When they make verbal love, Horst exclaims, ‘‘We did it. They’re not going to kill us.’’ At the time, Horst probably thought that their love would help them to survive. Ultimately, it meant that the Nazis could not kill their capacity to love. As only an individual part of an enormous event in history, much of the control over their survival was out of their hands and in the hands of fate.

Contrast of the Two Acts Bent has only two acts, and this division into two parts has a number of functions. Act 1 represents freedom and movement in a world ﬁlled with people, action, and color. There is a ﬂight from danger and from self. Act 2 represents imprisonment and movement only from one rock pile to another. Everything is grey, and there are, in effect, only two people, and they cannot ﬂee from danger but must face it and themselves. Act 1 characters talk without inhibition and often outrageously; in act 2, communication of any kind is forbidden and potentially fatal. Furthermore, in act 1, Freddie advises Max to hide his sexuality; in act 2, Horst encourages Max to proclaim his sexuality. Act 1 is Max and Rudy; act 2 is Max and Horst. The introduction of a new protagonist in the second

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act is a risky move dramatically, but is not unheard of. The bigger risk was probably reducing the setting to one barren spot. John Moore of the Denver Post notes: This conﬁned new premise simply should not work, dramatically. But it does, emphatically. . . . Max and Horst move only 20 feet back and forth in a straight line, yet they embark on epic character arcs.

Concerning Max, he shows virtually no character development in act 1, but he moves toward a total transformation of mind and heart in act 2. Thus, Sherman’s division of the two acts is an intentional and masterful separation of two worlds and two stages of the life and development of Max Berber.

Language and Dialogue In Bent, dialogue goes beyond being an element of stagecraft to qualifying as a theme. Dialogue serves to move the play forward while establishing mood, character, and situation. The campy exchange in the ﬁrst scene establishes Rudy as silly and immature and Max as irresponsible and always working on a deal. The dialogue also reveals the state of their relationship. The portrayal of their selfabsorbed situation with humor language heightens the contrast to the harshness of the Nazi purge that is about to come crashing down on them. Later in act 1, Uncle Freddie’s language reveals him to be an aristocrat with a delicacy that compels him to use the word ‘‘ﬂuffs’’ rather than ‘‘queers.’’ His sensibilities, and his phony life, prevent him from facing the connotations of the more derisive term. In the second act, language becomes a power that Max and Horst use for mental survival. It is the only thing left in their control, and even that is limited since they are not supposed to be talking to each other. Max tells Horst, ‘‘I got you here to talk.’’ He bribed the guard to get Horst transferred with money that he was not likely to have replenished; money that could mean life or death in another circumstance. This expenditure indicates the critical value of the companionship of communication. Max knew that he had to have someone to talk to or go crazy in his isolation. The emphasis on the importance of language to survival is taken to a new level by Sherman in the play’s most famous scene in which Max and Horst make love totally through language and imagination. This extraordinary dialogue gave the play tremendous impact. Later, Max tries to keep Horst warm with the same technique. Mind over matter is

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achieved largely through our mind’s language; in like manner, a successful play is achieved through the writer’s skillful use of language in dialogue.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1930s Germany and the Origin of the Holocaust From 1919 to 1933, the German government was known as the Weimar Republic. During this time, a rather avant-garde culture ﬂourished in ﬁelds such as theater, art, and architecture, and included Einstein’s physics and Heidegger’s philosophy. An off-shoot of this culture was a decadent nightlife in the major cities, particularly Berlin, where open homosexuality was tolerated. There was even an attempt to reform laws against homosexual acts. However, the coming of the depression brought political unrest and new fears that included a growing homophobia. According to a 1995 article by Raphael Lev in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review: The early and mid-30’s brought bar closings, surveillance, beatings, censorship, and tough anti-gay legislation. From the mid-30’s on, the campaign escalated, with stricter sentences, registration of homosexuals, ‘preventive detention’ in concentration camps for some, and the institution of the death penalty for homosexual activity in the SS and the police.

A large part of the reason for the increasing atmosphere of fear was the rise of Adolph Hitler to power. He became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and was soon in total control of the government, which he called the Third Reich. Already on March 21, 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was opened by Hitler’s top aide Heinrich Himmler for the purposes of punishment and terror. Dachau would later become the model for further camps and the murder school for the SS (Gestapo). One of Hitler’s top supporters and the head of the Storm Troopers (SA), also known as Brown Shirts, was Ernst Röhm. Because of his closeness to Hitler, Röhm’s homosexual lifestyle was tolerated until he fell out of favor with Hitler in 1934. In a purge of the SA called the Night of the Long Knives, which actually lasted from June 28 to July 3, 1934, Hitler arrested and later executed Ernst Röhm. In the process, the gay community was targeted and hundreds of homosexuals were murdered during this infamous week. Sherman’s play Bent opens on the ﬁrst day of the

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Night of the Long Knives. Supposedly, the boy that Max brought home, Wolfgang Granz, is the boyfriend of Karl Ernst, deputy to Röhm’s second in command. Consequently, the SS comes to kill Wolf, and Max and Rudy have to ﬂee for their lives. It is the subsequent persecution of gays that causes them to stay on the run for two years before ﬁnally being caught and set to Dachau.

American Theater in the 1970s Off-Broadway theaters were the center of American drama during the 1970s for two reasons. First, starting in the 1950s, production on Broadway had become too expensive for anything but safely conservative and highly commercial productions. During the 1960s, anti-establishment movements shunned anything conservative. At the same time, the competition from television and the movies for audiences caused theaters to turn to more experimental drama. These experiments, many quite radical, broke down some of the barriers between the spectators and the performers, thus challenging audiences. Some of the new drama presented hitherto unseen racial and sexual materials. Playwrights brought feminist, black, homosexual, and other minority issues to the stage. The more avant-garde theater companies that were established in this time period became known as off-off-Broadway. While the openness to any subject or form resulted in some positive creative growth, there was also a lack of attention to artistry as some experimental plays sank into gratuitous violence, excessive nudity, and selfrighteousness. By the late 1970s, the more radical and offensive experiments were rejected in favor of more conventional plays. Nonetheless, taboos of subject matter had been breached, a new creativity and vigor had swept through drama, and the tradition had been established concerning what one might ﬁnd in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theater. These expectations hold true to this day. Off-Broadway thereby became a testing ground for a number of upcoming artists, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard, who would later ﬁnd acceptance on Broadway and win Pulitzers. Serious plays, because of the high risk of investment, usually had to prove themselves off-Broadway and in London before producers would take a chance on them on Broadway itself. That was the route for Sherman’s Bent. It was ﬁrst performed at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut in 1978, then moved to the Royal Court Theatre in London, opening on May 3, 1979. Finally, on December 2, 1979, it opened in the New Amsterdam Theatre on

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • Mid-1930s: Although the international set, notably in Berlin nightclubs and in Hollywood, is notorious for homosexual activities, homosexuality is a taboo subject in American society. Late 1970s: Following the Stonewall riots in 1969, the struggle for homosexual equality gains intensity. Today: In 2000, a theater in St. Louis, Missouri loses state arts council funding for putting on Bent, and the FBI continues to investigate 1,500 new hate-crimes against gays every year. Nonetheless, gay rights activists are pushing for legalized gay marriages. • Mid-1930s: Hitler takes over complete control of Germany. He leads the world, including the United States, into World War II and becomes one of the worst dictators that the world has ever known. Late 1970s: The Ayatollah Khomeini takes over Iran, resulting in a tyrannical religious regime and the four-hundred and forty-four day-long hostage crisis for ﬁfty-three American embassy workers. Today: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein loses power after years of a murderous dictatorship and two wars with the United States and its allies.

Broadway. In 1980, Bent was nominated not only for a Pulitzer Prize, but also for a Tony Award as Best Play of the year. However, the Tony was given to Children of a Lesser God, another play that dealt with the special problems of a minority group.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Although Bent has received mixed reviews, it has attracted packed houses and serious acclaim because of its groundbreaking subject and emotional

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• Mid-1930s: The 1936 Summer Olympics are held in Berlin with 148 countries represented. Hitler tries to use the games as a show of Aryan superiority but is embarrassed when black American Jesse Owns wins four gold medals in track. Late 1970s: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan results in a boycott by 60 nations of the Moscow Summer Olympics, although 81 nations still take part. Today: The 2004 Summer Olympics will be held in Athens, Greece, the original home of the Olympics, with 202 countries participating. • Mid-1930s: The ﬁrst analog computer is built in 1933, in 1934 the ﬁrst bathysphere goes 3,028 feet down into the ocean, and radar technology is achieved in 1935. Late 1970s: NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) lands spacecraft on Mars for the ﬁrst time in 1976, the Apple II computer is produced in 1977, and the ﬁrst ATMs (Automated Teller Machines) are built in 1978. Today: Personal and laptop computers are common household items in the United States, cell phones allow instant communication, and NASA goes back to Mars for further exploration.

impact. A typical example of this response to Sherman’s masterwork is Walter Kerr’s review for the New York Times. Kerr reported that: ‘‘the open sound of dismay that washed across the auditorium on the night I saw Bent was one I have never quite heard before—belief, disbelief, shock and halfunderstanding all mixed together.’’ Kerr added that ‘‘dramatic blows do not often strike with this force.’’ Nonetheless, Kerr felt that Sherman was able to carry his ‘‘powerful sense of theatre’’ through only two-thirds of his ‘‘bizarre, bloody journey.’’ Kerr admitted, though, that the play ended with a ‘‘blistering climax.’’

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Ian McKellen and Tom Bell in a 1979 stage production of Bent performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London

A further example of a mixed review is Jack Kroll’s piece for Newsweek in which he commented: ‘‘It is a jolting, troubling, worrisome play that at times rises to real power and at times sideslips into special pleading and a coarsening of its own historical and moral imagination.’’ The Library Journal review of Bent says that Sherman’s message is more universal than historical, i.e., the Nazis simply represent the antagonistic society in which gays continue to experience prejudicial treatment. In addition, Sherman ‘‘has given us the homosexual hero as everyman. . . . He is a human being after all, a man, not a curiosity.’’ In other words, any one of us might have acted as Max did, given enough courage. The Library Journal review concludes that Bent is crafted ‘‘with illuminating economy’’ and is ‘‘a taut, highly charged (though not sensational) theater piece.’’ Liza Schwartzbaum, writing a review of the movie version of Bent in 1997 for Entertainment Weekly recalled that the stage version of the play was ‘‘brutal, effectively depressing’’ and groundbreaking. Other critics have commented on the predictable story line of the play and accused Sherman of crusading, overwriting, and getting maudlin. In fact, some critics felt that the script has enough

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weak spots to be reduced to melodrama if not handled carefully. Many critics used the word ‘‘power’’ in describing the play with adjectives such as visceral, raw, or crude. Most agreed that the play could hold an audience for two hours, even when they thought it started out slow. Finally, some critics thought the play was limp and that the action, though stunning, was not sustained if the Nazis were not around. The groundbreaking aspect of Bent lies in its depiction of a homosexual experience during the Holocaust. Writing for the Journal of European Studies, Eric Sterling describes Bent as ‘‘one of the few gay plays to receive much critical attention and acclaim, partly because it has, to some extent, become analogous to contemporary gay struggles against oppression.’’ Alan Sinﬁeld, author of Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, a book about twentieth-century gay and lesbian theater, says that Sherman’s play ‘‘has proved a signiﬁcant exploration of our part in a great historic oppression, and of the conditions that may promote and thwart gay love.’’ The 1995 Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review article by Raphael Lev also notes the historical importance of the play while otherwise ﬁnding fault with the play: ‘‘Bent’s

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greatest strength is shining a light on an unexplored region of the Holocaust Kingdom, but it is often one-dimensional, poorly written, dramatically unconvincing and even absurd.’’ The further opinion expressed in this article is that Bent portrays a distorted image of both the Holocaust and of gays, and that the play is more about sexual fantasy than gay pride or the nobility of human nature under horriﬁc circumstances. The bottom line for Bent seems to be that, no matter it faults, it is unique and powerful enough to be an unforgettable experience for the audience, and that no one comes away without having learned or experienced something new. The play, according to virtually all critics, is judged to be thought-provoking, emotional, disturbing, and a worthy tribute to the remarkable durability of the human spirit.

CRITICISM Lois Kerschen Kerschen is a freelance writer and part-time English instructor. In this essay, Kerschen examines the contradictions and the metamorphosis of Max Bergen. The character of Maximilian Berber in Martin Sherman’s play Bent not only carries the story, he is the story. Bent is about a wheeling-dealing homosexual, Max, whose promiscuity and drug use keep him in trouble. When the play opens, he is broke, behind on his rent, and unaware that he has seduced a Nazi storm trooper who is being hunted by the Gestapo. When SS soldiers raid their apartment, Max and his lover, Rudy, begin a life-and-death odyssey that will affect Max’s very heart and soul. There are so many contradiction in Max’s behavior that the question arises as to whether the character is believable. However, people are complex creatures who are not always consistent in their behavior. The central conﬂict for Max is the concept of love, and love is a complex subject, too. Max does not believe in love, he does not think he is worthy of love, and he does not love anybody, he says. Sherman reveals in snips of information that Max fell in love with a boy at his father’s factory when he was a teenager. His wealthy and powerful father, horriﬁed at this homosexual affair, paid Max’s lover to go away. As Max explained, ‘‘He

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went. Queers aren’t meant to love.’’ It is simple logic: if the boy had loved Max, he would not have left; since he did leave, he did not love Max and that must be because ‘‘Queers aren’t meant to love.’’ Perhaps it also means to Max that homosexuals in general are not allowed to love because speciﬁcally his father would not allow him to love. Max has watched his Uncle Freddie hide his homosexuality all his life to keep from scandal. In rebellion, Max has ﬂaunted his homosexuality. Although Max does not appear to have any crusading or noble intent, he nonetheless has deﬁed his family to be true to himself, even if it means being disowned. For someone as concerned as Max about making deals for big money, this refusal to knuckle under to his family seems a strange contradiction. However, it is understandable when one considers the possibility that his openness about being gay is intended to hurt his father, even if it hurts himself. Rudy loves Max, but Max has no appreciation of this fact. It is a convenience to have Rudy around to clean and cook and remind Max how badly he behaved the night before. Max is even foolish enough to think that Rudy likes Max to bring home other men. Despite this wretched treatment of Rudy, Max takes responsibility for him at Greta’s urging as Greta accurately assesses that Rudy is too naïve to take care of himself in their treacherous situation. Max seemed ready to leave Rudy behind as he started his escape from Berlin. It seems odd that he could so easily be chastised into taking Rudy with him. It has been suggested that because Rudy was so weak and knew so much about Max that Max realized that he had to keep Rudy with him to keep Rudy from informing on him. However, Max knew that he was already wanted, and that he was clever enough to get away to some place that Rudy would not know. So, that theory does not hold, especially since Max refused to go to the safety of Amsterdam without Rudy. He even went so far as to offer to give up Rudy and return to the family business in exchange for safe passage for Rudy. The reason for this loyalty comes at the end of the play when Max drops all of his pretenses and emotional walls and admits that he loved Rudy. It is likely that Max did not even know himself that he loved Rudy when he was making all those sacriﬁces for him. The phony front that he put up was so convincing that he had fooled even himself. If Max had not had a real love for Rudy, why then would he have blocked out Rudy’s name after being forced to participate in Rudy’s murder? Most likely, the memory loss was a traumatic amnesia.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Take Me Out, published as a book in 2003, is Richard Greenberg’s Broadway play about a professional athlete who announces that he is gay, and the ripple effect this news has on his team and the people around him.

• The Elephant Man, a play published by Bernard Pomerance in 1979, depicts the life story of Joseph Merrick, a British man afﬂicted with a disﬁguring disease and the problems he has in being accepted as an intelligent human.

• Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God beat out Bent for Best Play on Broadway in 1980. Later made into a movie that won an Oscar for Marlee Matlin, this story brought attention to the lives of the deaf.

• Gad Beck’s autobiographical story An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin is a nonﬁction complement to Sherman’s play.

Since Max was so open about his lifestyle among his friends and had endured the condemnation of his family for being gay, it is hard to understand why he was so determined to pass himself off as Jewish to the Gestapo. Perhaps the bottom line with Max was his own survival. He was gay while it was easy to be gay. Although he suffered an estrangement from his family and was continuously broke, it allowed him to hurt the father who had hurt him by sending his lover away. His lifestyle also allowed him to be irresponsible and decadent, even if it did not really make him happy, and he had to resort to alcohol and drugs for solace. It was ﬁne to throw his homosexuality in his father’s face, but not in the face of the Gestapo. As Greta said, ‘‘You don’t play games with the SS.’’ It was fun to live scandalously as long as his lifestyle was deﬁantly shocking to those he wanted to hurt, but the fun was over when his life was at stake. Then it was strictly a matter of survival, and Max was spoiled enough to want to avoid what he heard was the lowest level of prisoners. Even though Max refuses to accept the lowest status in the concentration camp, in his own mind he has sunk to the very lowest level of humanity. Already at the beginning of the play, his selfdestructive use of drugs and alcohol indicated a low self-esteem. Throughout the play he refers to himself as rotten and unlovable. Max tells Horst not to love him because he killed Rudy and will kill Horst,

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too, in his inevitably destructive way. His involvement in Rudy’s death and his sexual act with the dead girl have convinced him that he is totally contemptible and worthless. Robert Skloot, author of the Holocaust book The Darkness We Carry, concludes that Max’s success at getting a yellow star ‘‘comes at the price of denying his homosexuality, [and] is, according to Sherman, meant to be understood by us and, eventually by Max, as nothing less than self-annihilation.’’ This self-loathing is, in effect, an admission of guilt about his selfdestruction, just as his painful, halting confession to Horst is an admission of guilt. He has to tell someone what he did so that others will be as disgusted with him as he is with himself. They have to know that he is ‘‘a rotten person.’’ Needless to say, Max has trouble dealing with the tragic turn his life has taken. Anyone would. Sherman uses a repetition technique to illustrate Max’s feeble coping mechanisms, but it does not seem to work effectively in the story. Max’s tendency to count when he can’t face what’s happening does not come across well, perhaps because most people associate counting with an attempt to calm anger, not with avoiding reality. The repetition of ‘‘This isn’t happening’’ in various forms is probably more annoying to the audience than effective in portraying denial. It is ironic that Max does not want a pink triangle because of what Horst told him, and then it

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is Horst who tries to get Max to wear the pink triangle. Another irony is that Horst is the one who tells Max how to survive on the train, but later it is Max who tries to teach Horst how survive the physical torments of their imprisonments (e.g. through exercise), and tries to keep Horst from turning into one of the walking dead. Otherwise, Horst becomes Max’s teacher in many ways. He teaches Max about love, about being gentle, about being honest with one’s self, and about dignity in death. Before Horst, being gay to Max was simply a means of seeking pleasure. After getting to know Horst, Max learns that being gay can include loving someone, and that there is value in love. Max’s suicide at the end of the story may seem contradictory to his previous determination to survive. However, in his efforts to survive, Max had given up his identity as a gay person and had participated in acts that violated his sense of humanity. It is paradoxical that Max wanted to live when he thought himself not worth saving, then purposely went to his death when he ﬁnally found value in himself. As Eric Sterling speculates in a 2002 Journal of European Studies article analyzing Max’s self-destruction, Max apparently realized that the Nazis, not him, destroyed the bodies of Rudy and Horst. What he destroyed was his own soul. ‘‘Max cannot negate the damage he has inﬂicted upon others or even himself, but he may die with dignity, as the person he actually is—not as a fraud.’’ Sterling concludes that in suicide Max ﬁnally takes control over his own destiny. He will no longer allow his father, or social codes, or the Nazis to control him. The character of Max provokes many questions. How can someone so openly gay deny his sexuality? How can someone who says he does not believe in love sacriﬁce his safety for the sake of his lover? How does someone so selﬁsh evolve into a caring partner for Horst? How can someone so shallow carry such deep pain? The answer is that Max wore many masks. His childish attempts to avoid facing the reality of crisis were nothing compared to the avoidance of reality he had practiced for years. Max used a persona that was too cool to care about anything or anyone while all the time his soul was burning with shame, pain, and confusion. Some people have to learn the hard way, and for Max that meant reclaiming his humanity in the concentration camp, the most dehumanizing place on earth. Source: Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on Bent, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

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IT WAS FUN TO LIVE SCANDALOUSLY AS LONG AS HIS LIFESTYLE WAS DEFIANTLY SHOCKING TO THOSE HE WANTED TO HURT, BUT THE FUN WAS OVER WHEN HIS LIFE WAS AT STAKE.’’

A. Petruso Petruso holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in screenwriting from the University of Texas. In this essay, Petruso examines the three main characters of the play, arguing that Max has a very weak character compared to that of Rudy and Horst. In Bent, Max, who is the main character and supposed hero of the drama, is not heroic but rather is soft and weak. Max is generally selﬁsh, uncaring, and mean. Even the moments where he seems kind often serve his own agenda. While Max makes deals to survive, he also ensures that he will not have to be on his own. When he ﬁnally comes to terms with himself in a deeper sense, it is only in one aspect: his homosexuality. In contrast, two of the men Max is involved with are much more likable, honest, real, and heroic. Rudy and Horst are open about their homosexuality and about their lives in general. Both are nurturers who take care of Max in his own way. Both are loyal and caring and have strong characters. Rudy and Horst do not make deals and try to get out of uncomfortable situations like Max does; they want to confront them. They try to make the best of what they have, while dealing with Max and the problems that he brings. The pair patiently educate Max, who was raised in wealth but disowned by his family for his open—though somewhat superﬁcial—embracing of a homosexual lifestyle. That Max lives openly as a gay man is one of his strongest points. Max has not married a woman and had affairs with men on the side, which is what Max’s uncle (Freddie) has done in order to remain in good standing with the family. Though Max’s uncle supports Max by getting him a ticket and papers out of the country and sending him money in

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MAX IS NOT WILLING TO TAKE ANY PUNISHMENT FROM THE NAZIS FOR HIS HOMOSEXUALITY. HE INSTEAD INFLICTS HARM ON HIMSELF BY WALKING INTO THE ELECTRIC FENCE AND ENDING HIS LIFE.’’

the camp, Max’s uncle is a fraud who lives a dishonest life. Although Max is honest in the beginning about his sexuality, this character point is tempered because Max does not admit he loves the men he is involved with and later denies his homosexuality when faced with harsher treatment at the work camp. Max would rather wear a yellow star, which indicates that he is Jewish, than a pink triangle, which indicates he is homosexual. It is also telling that Max cannot stand to be alone and not have some sort of homosexual relationship. Max has been living with Rudy for some time, perhaps years, but later on cannot remember his name. When Greta tells Max not to leave Rudy after the Nazis storm their apartment, it is somewhat for Rudy’s beneﬁt. Greta believes that Rudy would not survive on his own and tells Max to take care of him. Though Max is compelled to stay with Rudy, Max also beneﬁts from the situation. Max does not have to face the world alone. Max tries to deny that he needs a relationship with Rudy or any man for that matter. In act 1, scene 3, Max will not take the single ticket and papers that will take him out of Germany and to Amsterdam. Instead, Max asks Freddie to obtain another ticket and papers for Rudy. Max will not admit the importance of his relationship with Rudy. Max tells his uncle ‘‘I just feel responsible.’’ Max’s issue seems to be more about being alone, for if he was traveling alone within Germany or out of the country, it would increase his chances of survival. After Rudy dies, Max immediately begins a relationship with Horst. Max takes risks to get Horst assigned to his work detail by using the money his uncle sent him to bribe the guard so that Max can interact with him. To keep Horst alive when he becomes ill, Max performs a sexual act on a captain

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to obtain medicine for him. This inadvertently leads to Horst’s death as the captain assumed Max was a heterosexual Jew and to perform such an act would humiliate him. When the Nazi ﬁgures out that Max is probably gay and did it for Horst’s beneﬁt, the captain kills Horst. Finally, alone with no potential relationships in sight, Max kills himself. While he does don Horst’s jacket with the pink triangle on it before his suicide, a symbolic acceptance of his homosexuality, he also admits he does not even want to try to survive on his own as a gay man. Max is not willing to take any punishment from the Nazis for his homosexuality. He instead inﬂicts harm on himself by walking into the electric fence and ending his life. Max readily admits his faults. He tells Horst in act 1, scene 6 ‘‘I’m a rotten person.’’ Max makes his living doing shady deals, including selling drugs. Though he lives with Rudy and is in a relationship with him, Max brings home a man, Wolf, whom he met at Rudy’s place of employment. This incident is after Max got so drunk that he does not remember what he did or how Wolf got there. Max and Rudy are forced to go on the run because of Wolf. Wolf was involved with a Nazi German ofﬁcial who was on the outs with Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and Wolf was arrested by the SS. If Max had not been so selﬁsh in his actions the night before the play begins, Max and Rudy might have survived and continued in their normal lives. Despite Max’s many ﬂaws, Rudy remains loyal. Rudy tells Max ‘‘I love you’’ in act 1, scene 1, even though Max embarrassed him at work and had sex with another man in their home. Rudy does not even want to tell Max what he did the previous night. He only does it when Max threatens Rudy’s precious plants, a symbol of his ability to nurture like Horst’s nursing. Max’s reliance on Rudy is underscored by Max expecting Rudy to make decisions for him like stopping him from acting as he did the night before. Rudy will not do that, but he also does not threaten back. Rudy accepts his actions. Rudy takes care of Max through his hangover, offering him food and drink, and though it is very awkward, takes care of Wolf by offering him a robe and coffee. After Max and Rudy are forced to go on the run, it is Rudy who again takes care of Max. In act 1, scene 4, in the tent city outside of Cologne, when Max says he has a temperature, Rudy feels his forehead and conﬁrms it. At the end of that scene, he touches Max’s face several times in a loving man-

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ner. Max pushes him away. Max then holds hands with Rudy, but only where no one can see. In the same scene, Rudy tells Max that he got a job digging a ditch so that he could buy them food, which Max refuses to eat. For Rudy, a dancer by training, this was a difﬁcult job. It does not seem that Max has ever done an honest day’s work. Rudy has also worked on ways of getting out of the country, discovering spots where one can walk over the border, but Max dismisses them. Also in act 1, scene 4, Rudy describes an opportunity to get out of the tent city and to possibly start a better life. Rudy caught a ride with a man who was attracted to him. Rudy believes that the old man might have allowed Rudy to stay with him and perhaps gotten him out of Germany. But Rudy, being loyal to Max, returned to the tent city and Max. Although at this point in the play, Rudy is somewhat resentful of Max and what Max has done to his life, he remains loyal. Max, while even more angry in some ways, is still afraid to leave him. Max makes meaningless promises about their life in Amsterdam, after telling his uncle in act 1, scene 3 that he would do whatever the family wanted—even marrying a woman to help with their business—if Freddie was able to get them both out of the country. All of Rudy’s loyalty to Max proves meaningless when in act 1, scene 5, Max contributes to Rudy’s death on the train to the work camp. When Rudy is targeted by the ofﬁcers, Max denies that he knows him. As Rudy is beaten by them, Max stands there, concerned only with saving his own life by not admitting he knows Rudy, has been with Rudy, and is homosexual himself. When the ofﬁcers order him to, Max pummels the already dying Rudy. Rudy whispers his name, but Max ignores him. Max does not need Rudy anymore. He has found a new man to have a relationship with: Horst. It was Horst who had advised him to ignore Rudy to ensure his own survival on the train. Rudy gave Max some idea of how to care for someone. Rudy showed love for Max until the end. In Max and Horst’s ﬁrst full scene together, Max tries to give Horst some of the vegetables from his soup because Horst was not given any by the Kapo because Horst is identiﬁed as homosexual. This is the kind of act that Rudy would have done for Max. Here, this act on Max’s part is manipulative because he wants another relationship to sustain him. When Horst tries to leave a short time later, Max whines ‘‘I don’t have anyone to talk to.’’

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While Max is still dishonest, Horst somewhat appreciates the connection Max is trying to make. Horst does not like the means (lying and manipulating) with which Max is trying to make the connection, but Max needs Horst to survive, much more than Horst needs Max. Like Rudy, Horst still acts as Max’s nurturer and conﬁdant despite Max’s faults. Though Horst knows Max is gay, he does not tell anyone else at the camp. As previously mentioned, it is Horst who advises Max on how to act on the train so that he can survive. After Max tells his story about how he obtained his Jewish star, Horst tries to touch his face. In act 2, scene 3, Horst admits that he loves Max and that their relationship, such that it is, is helping him survive the camp. Horst even devises a signal that tells Max that he loves him. As with Rudy, Max wants the relationship but will not accept the love that is part of it for the other man. Over the course of act 2, Horst becomes Max’s role model. Though Horst resents the fact that Max bribed a guard to get him assigned to his job at the work camp so that Max could have someone to talk to, Horst eventually breaks down and converses with him. After Horst apologizes for his behavior in act 2, scene 2, Max is able to say he is sorry later in act 2 because Horst has shown him how to express regret. Later, Horst initiates a sexual act with Max using only words in act 2, scene 2. When Max tries the same kind of sex act with Horst in act 2, scene 4, Max uses language that makes the act rougher, a fact that upsets Horst. Horst has also repeatedly tried to get Max to admit he is really homosexual and should be wearing the pink triangle. Horst shows Max that Horst tolerates abuse but has some dignity. When the SS captain tries to make Horst electrify himself on the fence, Horst refuses to die that way. He attacks the captain and is shot in the back. Max ﬁnally breaks down and admits he loved Rudy, Horst, and another man. Max then dons Horst’s jacket with the pink triangle but, instead of taking the lessons he learned from Rudy and Horst and trying to ﬁght his way out of camp, he decides to die. As with many other decisions he made in Bent, Max takes the easy way out and kills himself on the electriﬁed fence. Though ﬁnally willing to admit his homosexuality in a deeper sense, Max will not let himself have a reason to live. Source: A. Petruso, Critical Essay on Bent, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

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Although it is reported that Hitler was fond of Röhm, he was still under pressure to reduce the SA’s power. Hitler’s Nazi supporters were concerned with Röhm and the SA’s socialist inclinations. In addition, Röhm’s control of the 2.5 million strong SA division left many of Hitler’s subordinates alarmed, if not completely fearful. Members of the Nazi party viewed Röhm and other leaders of the SA with great distaste because they frequently practiced homosexual behavior. On ‘‘The Night of the Long Knives,’’ Röhm was arrested on the grounds of his homosexuality—behavior deemed incompatible with the Nazi party because homosexuals did not reproduce and perpetuate the master race. Röhm then declined the opportunity to commit suicide and was executed. This example, which demonstrates how Nazis felt about homosexuals, informs the reading of Bent.

Clive Owen in the 1996 ﬁlm adaptation of Bent

Anthony Martinelli Martinelli is a Seattle-based freelance writer and editor. In this essay, Martinelli examines the relation of love to identity as the main character, Max, struggles to survive Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Bent begins on an infamous night in gay history: June 29, 1934, also known as ‘‘The Night of the Long Knives.’’ On this night, the Nazis purged Germany’s old leadership and with it all of Hitler’s political opponents. The purge resulted from political quarrellings between Nazi leaders subordinate to Hitler. Most notable to Sherman’s play is the struggle between Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Röhm. Röhm was the head of the powerful Sturmabteilung leadership (SA) and, as it was, he was the leader of the only viable threat to Hitler’s power. The SA was an enormous armed assault division that functioned as the key paramilitary organization of the German Nazi Party. Himmler was aware of Hitler’s suspicion of Röhm and the SA and, thus, he fabricated evidence to defame Röhm and presented it to Hitler. This evidence fueled Hitler’s mistrust that Röhm intended to use his powerful position in the SA to challenge Hitler’s rise to power.

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The ﬁrst half of Sherman’s play is focused on a homosexual couple, Rudy and Max, as they attempt to ﬂee Germany after Hitler’s purge of homosexuals in the government. Knowing that if government ofﬁcials are arrested and executed based on their sexuality, the two understand that their only chance is to escape Nazi Germany and ﬁnd refuge outside of Hitler’s grasp. However, the lovers are captured in Cologne and sent to Dachau. On the train, Rudy is dragged away and murdered by the Nazis. Here, in the ﬁrst ﬁve scenes, Sherman dramatizes an important and often overlooked point—that homosexuals were also victimized by Nazis. Although countless books have been published about the persecution of Jews, there is only a limited number of works written on the suffering of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Soon after Rudy is dragged away by the Nazi ofﬁcer, Max meets Horst, a homosexual also bound for Dachau. Horst bears a mark of identiﬁcation—a pink triangle—registering that he is homosexual. Sherman writes HORST: I’ve been through transport before. They took me to Cologne for a propaganda ﬁlm. Pink triangle in good health. Now it’s back to Dachau. MAX: Pink triangle? What’s that? HORST: Queer. If you’re queer, that’s what you wear. If you’re a Jew, a yellow star. Political—a red triangle. Criminal—green. Pink’s the lowest.

Now, indubitably informed that as a homosexual he is the lowest and the most worthless of all prisoners, Max begins his attempt to erase his identity. His hope is for survival at all costs, to efface himself from his identity as a homosexual

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and become someone else. Max takes this desire for survival to the darkest levels of despair. To convince the guards that he is not a homosexual, Max is instructed to rape the corpse of a young girl. Max tells Horst of his experience And I said, I’m not queer. And they laughed. And I said, give me a yellow star. And they said, sure, make him a Jew. He’s not bent. And they laughed. They were having fun. But . . . I . . . got . . . my . . . star.’’

With this abandonment of self, Max wins himself a step up in the prison class system. He no longer wears the pink triangle. He is no longer viewed as queer. With this act, Max becomes a staunch survivalist. A survivalist is an individual who views survival, at all costs, as the primary object, especially in the breakdown of society. His postmortem violation of the teenage girl earns him the yellow star and solidiﬁes his position on survival at all costs, but with it Max completely destroys his identity and his conscience. Eric Sterling states in his article ‘‘Bent Straight’’ in European Studies The difﬁculty Max experiences in confessing [to the rape of the young, dead girl] to Horst, with his many pauses, demonstrates to the audience that he feels shame and recognizes that he has preserved his life at an exorbitant cost—his identity and his dignity.

In this moment of irony, Max’s actions increase his chance of physical survival, but he has selfexecuted that which is most important, i.e., his conscience and his identity. The second half of Sherman’s play is restricted to the wasteland conﬁnements of a prison camp. Here, Max carries rocks from one pile to the next, then back again, in an exercise of complete futility. His task of moving rocks back and forth represents the crisis of his identity. Max, through his survivalist blinders, is left without any purpose. He is not a Jew, even though he may wear the yellow star and, thus, he lacks the identity of Judaism. Although he is queer, he must constantly deny his identity in order to survive. Thus, just as he passes the rocks from one pile to the next in an endless cycle of futility, Max continues to lie about his beliefs and deny his true identity in an empty, repetitious pacing between his appearance and his true identity. Yet, regardless of this mind-numbing monotony, it is the safest work in the prison camp and, eventually, Max is able to bribe a guard to allow Horst to do the same. With this, Max again presents himself as a staunch survivalist. However, it also plays out as a crucial turning point in Max’s devel-

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MAX REALIZES THAT IT IS MORE IMPORTANT TO LIVE TRUTHFULLY, AS HORST DID ALL OF HIS DAYS, AND HAVE A SHORTER LIFE, THAN TO EXIST DISHONESTLY AND SURVIVE LONGER.’’

opment as he shows a desire to help Horst. This is unlike any of Max’s other actions. For example, when Max is speaking with his Uncle Freddie about tickets and papers to get Rudy and himself to Amsterdam, it is apparent Max is acting out of guilt, not love. When Freddie asks if he loves Rudy, Max responds ‘‘Don’t be stupid. . . . I’m a grown-up now. I just feel responsible.’’ Although Max uses the last of his monies to have Horst moved to the rock pile, Horst is still critical of Max’s denial of his true identity. Horst disapproves of Max’s masquerading as a Jew. Not because he is anti-Semitic, but because Max is denying his identity as a homosexual. As the two grow closer and closer over the time they spend moving rocks, Horst begins to chip away at Max’s survivalist unwillingness to wear the pink triangle, to admit to the world and to himself what and who he is. Oddly enough, it is at the rock piles (the representation of Max’s anonymous futility) that Horst forces Max to confront his true identity. He tells Max, ‘‘I’m the only one who knows your secret . . . That you’re a pink triangle.’’ In Sherman’s language of the play, Max’s denial of his homosexuality is not only an attempt to survive but is also an act of a man afraid to surrender to love. Max’s opinion on love is made clear in his discussion with Uncle Freddie. It is apparent that for Max, love is ‘‘[b——sh——t]’’ and with that, it seems, almost antithetical to survival. Nonetheless, Horst’s persistence eventually pounds home the message that love is, in fact, essential to survival. In a scene that is incongruous, emotional, and courageous, Max and Horst make love to one another with only words. Under the baneful stares of the Nazi guards, Horst and Max have an exhilarating exchange: HORST: We can feel . . .

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MAX: Feel what? HORST: Each other. Without looking. Without touching. I can feel you right now. Next to me. Can you feel me?

Their exchange continues, and the two men are left inspired by their love for each other. Here, in the most unlikely of settings, Max discovers through his verbal lovemaking with Horst that he is capable of expressing his true feelings. Max, for the ﬁrst time, feels love. Although he does not understand love, the discovery that he can express himself, even under such brutal conditions and stay alive, is a crucial breakthrough for Max. Still, though, Max’s true awakening to his identity and his understanding of love comes at another unlikely moment. In the closing scenes of the play, Horst becomes ill. He has a terrible cough. Without medicine, Horst will be incapable of continuing his work and will surely be executed. Again, Max shows his dedication to his survivalist nature. This time, however, his focus is not on his personal survival; it is wholly centered on Horst. Max suspects that a certain guard is homosexual and, with hopes of receiving special favors, Max offers to sexually please the guard for an exchange. Lucky for Max and Horst, the guard is indeed receptive to the sexual advance, and Max is able to acquire medicine for Horst. Max’s sexual act with a Nazi guard is indicative of his devotion to Horst because Horst beneﬁts from Max’s risk and sacriﬁce. Max, on the other hand, gains nothing and, in fact, places himself and his survival in harms way.

less class of individuals at the prison camp. For Max, he has restored his dignity. Finally, in these last moments, Max becomes a character of admiration, an individual who has loved, restored his conscience, and righted his identity. Although Max’s ﬁnal act is one of suicide, it is a statement to his liberation and ﬁnal empowerment. Of his own volition, free of both his pragmatic survivalist nature and the demands of the Nazis, Max walks into the electric fence ending his life with a clear understanding of his love for Horst and for himself. Source: Anthony Martinelli, Critical Essay on Bent, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

John Moore In the following review of a performance of Bent, Moore praise the play’s ‘‘timeless ability to deliver a jolt as lethal as one from an electric fence.’’

Until the end, both Max and Horst stick to their pragmatics. Max’s survivalist nature is embodied in his early selﬁshness but is also evident in his later actions at the rock pile and his acquisition of medicine for Horst. Even near the end of the play, Max says ‘‘My yellow star got your medicine.’’ However, it is not until the ﬁnal moments after Horst’s death that Max realizes it was not the yellow star that got them the medicine—it was their love for each other. Max realizes that it is more important to live truthfully, as Horst did all of his days, and have a shorter life, than to exist dishonestly and survive longer. Upon Horst’s death, Max puts on his lover’s coat bearing the pink triangle. At this moment, standing proud in front of the Nazi guards, Max completely regains his identity and his conscience. Paradoxically, the act of self-afﬁrmation also simultaneously results in a loss of status. In the eyes of the Nazis, Max has demoted himself to the most worth-

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Source: John Moore, ‘‘Hunger’s Bent Best of the Year,’’ in Denver Post, April 22, 2003, pp. 1–2.

Lev Raphael In the following essay, Raphael reviews works dealing with the gay Holocaust, including Bent, and opines that ‘‘it’s less the story of survival of human dignity . . . than it is a sexual fantasy.’’ There is an historical irony to the adoption of the pink triangle as one of the symbols of the gay and lesbian rights movement. We have actually known very little about what happened to gays and lesbians under the Nazis in the years 1933 to 1945. Our memory is in fact ‘‘empty memory,’’ in the words of Klaus Muller, a gay consulting historian to Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. Muller uses that term because we are not ‘‘haunted by concrete memories of those who were forced to wear [pink triangles] in the camps.’’

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WHILE BENT IS AT TIMES POWERFUL ART BASED ON GAY SUFFERING IN THE HOLOCAUST, IT’S SKEWED IN SOME NOT-SO-OBVIOUS WAYS, CREATING A DISTORTED IMAGE OF THE HOLOCAUST IN GENERAL AND THE ROLE OF GAYS IN PARTICULAR.’’

In his introduction to the new edition of The Men with the Pink Triangle, Muller notes that gays and lesbians have been among the ‘‘forgotten victims’’ of the Holocaust, rarely spoken of or studied. Likewise, homophobia has not been sufﬁciently examined ‘‘as an important part of Nazi propaganda, racism, and population politics.’’ Until this past year, Richard Plant’s meticulously researched The Pink Triangle (1986) had been the major work in English helping to ﬁll the historical void (Frank Rector’s 1981 The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals is full of blatant inaccuracies). Plant’s short study is valuable on many levels, not least for the clarity and strength of his writing.

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and politically. One of Plant’s most distressing observations is that charges of homosexuality emerged in Germany as potent political weapons used by many different parties, not just the Nazis. Plant describes the gay movement’s repeated attempts to repeal Germany’s anti-gay law, focusing on the major protagonist, Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was a walking composite of Nazi scapegoats: a liberal, Jewish, gay sexologist. His internationally renowned Institute for Sexual Research was one of the Nazis’ early targets, and its ransacking, followed by a bonﬁre of its books and ﬁles, came a year before the well-known Ernest Roehm Affair, or the ‘‘Night of the Long Knives.’’ It’s easy to misread the Affair as mainly a brutal expression of Nazi anti-gay sentiment, but Plant disabuses us of that notion. In the summer of 1934, Hitler ordered the purge of the Brown Shirts, the Nazi party’s long-time private army. While its leader, Ernest Roehm, Hitler’s friend and secondin-command, was openly gay, Plant says that his gayness was ‘‘a sideshow . . . never really the cause of his downfall.’’ Homosexuality was used as a propaganda excuse to explain the purge—along with the far more serious (but bogus) charge of plotting against Hitler. The Nazis would likewise later use false charges of homosexuality in an attempt to weaken the Catholic Church, to eliminate youth groups that rivaled the Hitler Youth, and to police the armed forces.

Plant ﬂed Nazi Germany for Switzerland in 1933, and ultimately ﬂed to New York. His book opens with a moving prologue in which he describes both his fear at the time, as the son of a Jewish socialist, and the ways in which he and so many other Germans that Hitler had declared enemies were unable to take Hitler seriously. One of Plant’s friends was gay and was smuggled into Switzerland after brutal treatment in jail, but others were not so lucky. The book is thus in part fueled by a personal wish to bear witness to the suffering of his friends, though it never becomes polemical. Plant also clearly demonstrates the widespread taboo among noted historians and biographers on reporting gay experiences in the Holocaust.

The Roehm purge served Hitler politically in a number of ways. Roehm wanted his SA to absorb the German army, a goal that made its generals his bitter enemies. Hitler wanted the army to swear allegiance to him personally, rather than to the German state. A deal was struck and Hitler got his loyalty oaths. Murdering Roehm and eliminating the SA also eased party conﬂicts between paramilitary and political factions. And the purge burnished Hitler’s ‘‘image as a tough leader capable of imposing discipline and high moral standards on his own party.’’ Far more insidiously, it established ‘‘the legalization of crime in the name of the state,’’ setting a precedent for the murder of any German group conceived of as a state enemy, whether Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses or anyone else.

Plant takes us from debates about the nature of homosexuality in 19th-century Germany through the Nazi persecution before the war and into the concentration camps. He starts the book with a crisp overview of German thinking about homosexuality and the ways this dialectic played itself out socially

Plant devotes a bizarrely fascinating chapter to explicating SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s background and the development of his ‘‘curious blend of cold political rationalism, German romanticism, and racial fanaticism.’’ Plant admits that despite all the details, as with other Nazi ofﬁcials, the bio-

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graphical facts explain only so much; one is still left puzzled by the cold ferocity of hatred translated into murderous policies. Himmler was in charge of the Final Solution, and his youth seems to have been ﬁlled with constant humiliation over his physical weaknesses and his family’s low status and ﬁnancial decline. Lots of adolescents harbor wild dreams of revenge against their perceived tormentors or as recompense for unbearable shame, but few get the power to enact them as Himmler did. His inner world eventually became a slumgullion of antiSemitism, superstition, homophobia, and paranoia about a Germany facing defeat by a low birthrate, and lunatic fantasies for turning the SS into Europe’s new nobility, with blond and blue-eyed Germans spreading across Europe. Among the groups Himmler loathed, homosexuals were stereotyped as effeminate, paciﬁst criminals, bearers of a dangerously contagious disease found only in the degenerate bourgeois and upper classes. This proﬁle was not exactly sui generis: it was composed of various views popularly held by a wide range of Germans. Some of them sound a very contemporary note, calling to mind anti-gay rhetoric in the U.S. Plant shows those policies being enacted into laws even crueler in practical effect than on paper, as judges in Germany were increasingly given the latitude to punish any act at all ‘‘if the inborn healthy instincts of the German people demand it.’’ In other words, they could completely overturn a basic principle of Western law, that only acts explicitly listed as criminal can be punished. Plant’s chronology at the end of the book usefully lists Nazi legislation and activity against gays, Jews, and other targets, year by year. More powerfully than the narrative from which it is drawn, this schedule shows growing Nazi lawlessness masked as law.

Life in the Camps Though gays could elude the Gestapo far more easily than Jews, once they wound up in concentration camps, they fared very badly, and were almost always among the numerically smallest of the various groups of prisoners. All prisoners were supposed to be brutalized, terrorized, and constantly reminded they were enemies of the State. But gays suffered in different ways. Homophobia existed in the camps just as much as elsewhere, here taking many forms like suspicion. Attempting to join an anti-fascist underground, you might be suspected of only being after sex, or of spying because you might trade sex and information to guards. Being classed

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as a State enemy didn’t automatically make other ‘‘enemies’’ feel any kind of bond, and gays were ‘‘blamed’’ for sadomasochistic acts of guards or kapos (the prisoners appointed by camp ofﬁcials to keep order). Plant estimates that as many as 15,000 gays were murdered by the Nazis. Because they came from such widely divergent backgrounds, gays never united with any sense of group solidarity as did other groups. Few gays became kapos (who were mostly criminals or anti-fascists) and thus they couldn’t intervene with camp ofﬁcials or guards to help other gays. Gay prisoners also rarely received mail or packages from families or friends, who were ashamed of their incarceration, or afraid of being caught in the net of Nazi terror themselves. Finally, homophobic ofﬁcials assigned gays to work details with the highest mortality rates, like quarries and cement factories. Some gays were also the victim of bizarre medical experiments attempting to alter their sexuality. Plant relays these horrors dispassionately, which is no easy achievement. But he warns that the persecution of homosexuals has a long history in Europe, and that the Nazi ‘‘hurricane of hatred’’ can be heard whistling in the rhetoric of Fundamentalists calling for a ‘‘holy war’’ against their society’s ‘‘most vulnerable and viliﬁed minorities.’’ The Pink Triangle is probably less well-known than the play, Bent, Martin Sherman’s 1979 opus about gays in the Holocaust. That’s unfortunate. While Bent is at times powerful art based on gay suffering in the Holocaust, it’s skewed in some notso-obvious ways, creating a distorted image of the Holocaust in general and the role of gays in particular. Bent is the story of Max, a shallow, cokedealing, S&M-loving Berlin homosexual who winds up in Dachau after a 1934 round-up of homosexuals. In the course of two acts, he helps murder his roommate by ﬁnishing the beating an SS guard began, commits necrophilia to prove to the SS that he’s straight and thus deserves a yellow star rather than the pink triangle, has ‘‘verbal sex with a fellow prisoner he comes to love,’’ sees that man killed, and kills himself—after donning the pink triangle. Max is a frivolous charmer, impossible to care about, a man whose deepest insight into himself is that he’s ‘‘a rotten person.’’ If the play is an attempt to show that even men like him can learn to respect themselves and to love, it seems extremely cruel. Does it take Dachau to make someone deepen as a

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human being? If so much suffering is necessary, he must be hopelessly unfeeling—which Max doesn’t seem to be—so the play fails as the portrayal of a man’s development into a mensch. Before Bent opened on Broadway in 1979, New York papers were ﬁlled with articles about the play’s success in London and interviews the author. The common theme was the controversy the play had caused by asserting that Jews had it better off in concentration camps than homosexuals. Sherman was reported again and again to have done ‘‘years’’ of research in the British Museum, and so the play was supposedly based on accurate information. One negative review said the only research you needed to write Bent was screenings of Cabaret and The Night Porter. I’d add: being tuned into urban gay life of the late 70’s, American style. I saw the original Broadway production and have read the play several times since. I still think it’s less the story of survival of human dignity under the most atrocious circumstances, or even of gay pride, than it is a sexual fantasy. The heavy sexual atmosphere is created in the opening scene with references to leather, chains, and cocaine, making the play feel at that point like a transposition of the late-70’s Village to Berlin in the 1930’s. The atmosphere is heightened when Max’s big blond pick-up of the night before struts out of the bedroom nude. In Dachau, Max’s new friend Horst is openly gay and pressures Max to admit the truth about himself. Remember—he’s not suggesting that Max come out to his parents at a family dinner—he’s telling Max to wear his pink triangle proudly in a concentration camp! It’s grotesque. So is the fact that despite lifting and carrying rocks 12 hours a day, they manage to chat and ﬂirt like they’re at a bar: Horst: Your body’s beautiful. Max: I take care of it. I exercise. Horst: What? Max: At night I do push-ups and deep knee-bends in the barracks.

Horst doesn’t believe it, but Max says he does it to stay strong, to survive. This ludicrous exchange is heightened on-stage by the actors’ undeniably healthy and attractive shirtless bodies that nothing can disguise. Even when it was Richard Gere, his beauty could not blind me to the fact that his line was ridiculous. The play titillates the audience here by offering beefcake and saying ‘‘Okay, pretend you’re in a concentration camp and there’s this really hot guy—!’’

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Max says that everyone in the camp talks about sex and misses it: ‘‘They go crazy missing it.’’ This is nonsense. Richard Plant points out, as many other writers about the camps have done, that in a brutal and unpredictable atmosphere of terror, torture, starvation, ﬁlth, with no medical care, most men’s sexual desires faded away. Prisoners were obsessed with food, not sex. While sex may have occurred, food was far more important, and in memoir after memoir about the camps, you encounter tales of dreaming about food, fantasizing post-liberation feasts, or memories of pre-war meals. Given the play’s sexual emphasis, it’s not surprising that its real highlight is an act of fantasy sex achieved through talking. This act ostensibly proves that Max and Horst are still alive, still human. If anything proved that during the war, judging by Holocaust victims’ stories, it was kindnesses like sharing food or helping the weak stand during a role call. Such acts challenged the barbarity of the camps and ‘‘salvaged the highest values’’ of Western civilization, in the words of Anna Pawelczynska, the Polish sociologist who was in Auschwitz and wrote Values and Violence in Auschwitz thirty years later. Max does perform such an act when he gets medicine for Horst’s cold, but once again sex is central in Sherman’s vision. To get the medicine, Max has to blow an SS captain. Bent’s greatest strength is shining a light on an unexplored region of the Holocaust Kingdom, but it is often one-dimensional, poorly written, dramatically unconvincing and even absurd. It’s believable and historically accurate when a guard throws a prisoner’s hat onto an electriﬁed fence so that, when forced to retrieve it, he’ll electrocute himself. But that’s undercut when a guard is unbelievably explicit and almost solicitous in his instructions to Max and Horst; he’d be more likely to shout some orders and beat the two men. The SS actually knock on Max’s door when they come to murder the man he picked up. The Nazis in this play can seem like ﬁgures out of a melodrama, but then the cardboard nature of the characters is well-suited to a sexual fantasy. Bent reveals the poverty of Sherman’s imagination: he could not conceive of gays in a concentration camp without sex being central. Ironically, he conﬁrms straight stereotypes about gay men, that even in that hellish environment, sex is still more important than anything else. Source: Lev Raphael, ‘‘Deciphering the Gay Holocaust,’’ in Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 31, 1995, p. 16.

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FURTHER READING

Kerr, Walter, ‘‘Stage: Bent, Starring Richard Gere,’’ in New York Times, December 3, 1979, p. C15. Kroll, Jack, ‘‘Bent,’’ in Newsweek, Vol. 94, December 17, 1979, p. 115. Molyneaux, Gerard M., ‘‘Bent,’’ in Library Journal, Vol. 105, July 1, 1980, p. 1536. Moore, John, ‘‘Hunger’s Bent Best of the Year,’’ in Denver Post, April 22, 2003. Raphael, Lev, ‘‘Deciphering the Gay Holocaust,’’ in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 31, 1995, p. 16. Schwartzbaum, Lisa, ‘‘Bent,’’ in Entertainment Weekly, November 28, 1997, p. 54. Sherman, Martin, Bent, Samuel French, 1979. ———, ‘‘Bent,’’ in Out Front, edited by Don Shewey, Grove Press, 1988, pp. 97, 104, 111, 118, 125–26, 141. Sinﬁeld, Alan, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 307. Skloot, Robert, The Darkness We Carry: The Drama of the Holocaust, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, p. 119. Sterling, Eric, ‘‘Bent Straight: The Destruction of Self in Martin Sherman’s Bent,’’ in Journal of European Studies, Vol. 32, Issue 4, December 2002, pp. 373–78.

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Friedman, Ina R., The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis, reprint ed., Houghton Mifﬂin, 1995. Blacks, clergy, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners, Gypsies, and homosexuals who survived Nazi persecution tell their stories, and the author provides historical background and aftermath information. Hammermeister, Kai, ‘‘Inventing History: Toward a Gay Holocaust Literature,’’ in the German Quarterly, Vol. 70, Winter 1997, pp. 18–26. This article discusses the controversy over the existence of a gay Holocaust literature and whether one is needed. He describes Bent as a good example of what such literature could be. Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals, Henry Holt, 1988. Written by a German refugee who came to America in 1938, this is the ﬁrst English-language book that comprehensively describes the Nazi campaign against homosexuals. Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Simon and Schuster, 1990. This bestselling classic, ﬁrst published in 1960, has remained the prime resource for a study of the era. The book covers Hitler, his staff, the camps, the effects on the German people, and the resistance plots as well as the political situation and much more. Sterling, Eric, ‘‘Bent Straight: The Destruction of Self in Martin Sherman’s Bent,’’ in Journal of European Studies, Vol. 32, Issue 4, December 2002, pp. 369–88. This lengthy article gives historical background, an intense look of the character of Max, and an analysis of the historical accuracy of Sherman’s story.

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The Desperate Hours JOSEPH HAYES 1955

The Desperate Hours (1955, New York) is a taut drama that follows what happens when the home of an ordinary family living in a Midwest suburb is invaded by a trio of escaped criminals. The author, Joseph Hayes, uses this situation to examine the clash of wills between the forces representing good and evil: Dan Hilliard, the husband and father who has to keep the situation calm for the sake of his wife and two children; and Glenn Grifﬁn, the leader of the criminals, bent on revenge against the policeman who arrested him and willing to do whatever it takes to secure his freedom. The situation is made more volatile by the personalities of Hilliard’s son, who is desperate to prove his maturity, and his daughter, a young career woman who will not allow herself to be intimidated. Glenn ﬁnds that he cannot count on the support of his fellow convicts, a harddrinking unconscionable killer named Robish and Glenn’s younger brother Hank, who does not know how to react to the crush he has on Cindy Hilliard. Hayes intercuts the action in the house with the developments at the police station, as the local police work with the state police and the FBI, closing in on the convicts and placing the lives of their hostages in mounting danger. The Desperate Hours won the Tony Award for best play for 1955, when it ran on Broadway for six months, with a cast that included Paul Newman and Karl Malden. It has been adapted to the silver screen twice, in 1956 and in 1990, with both screenplays co-written by Hayes.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Joseph Hayes was born August 2, 1918, in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is where this play takes place. In 1938, he married Marrijane Johnson, a freelance writer, who has been his frequent collaborator throughout the years. He attended Indiana University from 1938 to 1941, and then worked as an assistant editor for Samuel French Inc. of New York from 1941 to 1943. He authored a series of plays, beginning in 1944: The Thompsons (1944); A Woman’s Privilege (1945); The Bridegroom Waits and Home for Christmas (both 1946); and Too Young, Too Old (1948). In 1949, for the ﬁrst time, Hayes had a play produced on Broadway: Leaf and Bough. He is the solo author of eleven plays and the co-author, with his wife, of another ﬁfteen plays. He has also produced several Broadway plays, as a partner with Erskine and Hayes Productions. Hayes’s ﬁrst novel was The Desperate Hours, published in 1954. It was chosen as a Literary Guild selection. The following year, he adapted the novel for the stage, and it won a Tony Award for best play. Soon after, Hayes adapted The Desperate Hours for a Hollywood motion picture, which won him the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best mystery screenplay. He has gone on to publish thirteen novels, most of which are in the mystery or suspense genre. His book Act of Rage was published in 1989.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 The Desperate Hours begins in the police station. Deputy Sheriff Jesse Bard arrives in the morning and learns from the night shift that there has been an escape from the federal prison in Terre Haute, seventy miles away. The night deputy thinks the story is of minor importance, but Bard recognizes the name of Glenn Grifﬁn, who swore that he would take revenge on Bard. He immediately contacts the state police in order to monitor the search. Harry Carson, an FBI agent, comes to the station because he knows of Bard’s history with Glenn. The action shifts to the Hilliard house. Dan Hilliard leaves for work with his twenty-year-old daughter, Cindy. Ralphie, the Hilliards’ young son, runs off to school. Soon after everyone is gone, Eleanor Hilliard answers the front door and is pushed inside by Glenn Grifﬁn, wielding a gun.

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Glenn, his younger brother Hank, and a ruthless thug named Robish have chosen the Hilliard house to use as a hideout. They hide their stolen car in the garage and search the house, ﬁnding Dan’s pistol. Glenn explains that they plan to leave by midnight, when a woman accomplice is going to deliver some money. At the police station, there is news that Glenn’s girlfriend, Helen Laski, has been located. The police want to tail her, hoping she will lead them to the escaped convicts, but she leaves her hotel without detection. Cindy and Dan Hilliard arrive home at the end of the day and ﬁnd the convicts in their house. When Ralphie comes home, Robish moves to hit him, and Dan stands up to Robish, knowing that the criminals will not risk ﬁring a gun and attracting the neighbors. At the sheriff’s ofﬁce, it is 7:03. News comes that Helen Laski is headed for Indianapolis. It looks like the police will be able to follow her to Glenn, but she later escapes when a police car in Columbus tries to pull her over for a routine trafﬁc violation. At the Hilliard home, Ralphie suggests that he could sneak out for help, but Dan refuses to take chances. Cindy receives a phone call from her boyfriend, Chuck; she tries to dissuade him from

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coming over, but he is adamant. The convicts let her go out, and also send Dan out to ﬁll the car with gasoline and to bring back some liquor.

tions. Robish refuses to give Glenn back his gun; Hank will not give up the one they found in the Hilliard house, either.

When Dan comes home, Robish begins drinking. Dan frets to Eleanor about how helpless he feels. Cindy comes home and struggles to keep Chuck from entering the house with her. Robish, drunk, tries to frisk Cindy, but Hank Grifﬁn comes to her aid.

The police, ready to blanket the neighborhood where Patterson worked that morning, receive an anonymous note from Dan, telling them that his family will be in danger if they try to capture the fugitives. They decide to wait, but are suspicious of Chuck Wright’s Jaguar, which is circling around the neighborhood.

Robish wanders out into the yard, and Glenn follows him. Dan and Cindy manage to wrest the gun from Hank and force him out the door. For a moment, it seems that the criminals have been banished, but Eleanor notices that Ralphie has left the house. With Ralphie as a hostage, the three reenter the house and beat Dan.

Act 2 Eleanor nurses Dan’s wounds, while he expresses his anger and fear. Helen Laski calls, and Glenn tells her to mail the money she is bringing. Glenn talks with Hank about why he must stay in Indianapolis and get his revenge on Bard: Bard hit him as he surrendered with his hands in the air. In the sheriff’s ofﬁce, Bard tells Carson his version of Glenn’s surrender: Glenn emptied his gun into a policeman and then surrendered with a grin on his face, so Bard broke his jaw. ‘‘If I’d only arrested him . . . or shot him before he gave up . . . he’d probably’ve forgotten it. But according to his warped code, I double-crossed him,’’ Bard explains. In the morning, the criminals send Dan and Cindy back to work. Mr. Patterson, the old man who collects the Hilliards’ garbage, shows up at the door; while Eleanor is getting a check for him, he notices the mess of the house, and when he is by the garage, he looks in and writes something down. Robish takes Glenn’s gun and runs outside, jumping onto Mr. Patterson’s truck as it pulls away. That night, the police discuss ﬁnding the murdered body of Mr. Patterson outside of town. A paper in his pocket has the license number of the criminals’ stolen car, so they send ofﬁcers out to investigate the houses Patterson collected checks from that day. Ralphie’s teacher, Miss Swift, comes to the house to ask why he was not in school. She sees the house a wreck, with liquor bottles around. Dan, bringing Robish home, acts belligerent and drunk in order to make her leave without asking any ques-

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Hank, tired of waiting and feeling a sense of respect for the Hilliards, decides to leave on his own. After he is gone, Glenn becomes irrational. His discussion with Hank has stirred up resentment against his own abusive father, so he orders Dan to beat Ralphie for trying to slip a note to Miss Swift. Dan apologizes to his son, then hits him. At the police station, Chuck Wright describes the Hilliard house. From his description and Eleanor’s check, found in Mr. Patterson’s pocket, the police deduce that this is the house where the convicts are hiding. News comes that Hank has been killed in a shootout, and Chuck offers to sneak into the house with a gun and shoot both the remaining criminals. The police tell him to go home.

Act 3 Dan receives a phone call from the store where he works, saying the money Helen Laski sent has arrived. Glenn sends him to pick up the money and sends Cindy along to take two thousand dollars of it to meet the assassin he has hired to kill Bard. The police, in an attic across the street from the Hilliards’ house debate whether to rush the house. They hear a report that the assassin has been arrested. Chuck sneaks into the back door of the house. Dan is brought into the attic before he can return home, and he convinces the police to hold off from storming the place. They offer him a gun; he empties it of bullets before putting it in his pocket. When Dan reenters the house, Glenn frisks him and takes the gun. He goes upstairs to get Eleanor to take as a hostage when they leave, and Chuck sneaks up behind him and knocks him out. On his way downstairs, Chuck is shot by Robish and drops his gun. Robish goes to the door to shout to the police, but Dan runs up behind him and shoves him out, locking the door. Glenn holds Ralphie with a gun at his head, as Dan enters with Chuck’s gun. The police ﬂood the

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house with a spotlight and call through a bullhorn for Glenn to surrender. Dan tells Ralphie to run away, and when he does, Glenn ﬁnds out that the gun he has is empty. Dan tells him to leave. Glenn runs out into the spotlight with his gun in the air, and Bard shoots him down. In the end, Bard expresses his disgust with the human race, but Carson reminds him that the world is full of brave men like Dan Hilliard.

CHARACTERS Jesse Bard Jesse Bard is a deputy sheriff. He is put in charge of the investigation of the jailbreak because he has special knowledge of Glenn Grifﬁn. Seven years earlier, when Glenn was arrested, Bard was unwilling to see him taken to the safety of a jail cell, after shooting a policeman to death in cold blood, and so he punched Glenn as he surrendered, breaking his jaw. Glenn considered this act a betrayal, and vowed revenge. Glenn has come to Indianapolis to kill Bard. When he ﬁrst hears that Glenn is coming to town, Bard calls his wife and sends her into hiding, without telling her why. Later, Glenn sends money to a professional assassin named Flick to kill Bard, but the police intercept the money and arrest the killer before he can get to Bard. In the end, it is Bard who shoots Glenn as Glenn leaves the Hilliard house with his gun raised.

Harry Carson Carson is the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to Glenn Grifﬁn’s jailbreak. He goes to the Indianapolis police station because he knows of Glenn’s vow to take his revenge on Deputy Bard. As a result, he is present during much of the investigation, while at other times he calls in information on the radio. Carson serves as a conscience to Bard, reminding him that viciousness like Glenn Grifﬁn’s is rare.

Dutch Dutch is the dispatcher at the police station. He does not appear onstage; his voice is heard over the intercom system, announcing calls from outside.

Lt. Carl Fredericks Fredericks is a lieutenant with the state police. The search for the escaped convicts is in his jurisdiction. His voice, when it comes across the inter-

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • In 1955, the year for which The Desperate Hours won a Tony Award, it was adapted as a movie starring Fredric March and Humphrey Bogart. Hayes wrote the screenplay, and it was directed by William Wyler. It is available on VHS and DVD from Paramount Home Pictures. • Director Michael Cimino directed another ﬁlm version in 1990, with different character names and a modernized plot line. This movie also credits Hayes as a writer along with Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal. It stars Mickey Rourke and Anthony Hopkins and is available on MGM/UA video.

com at the police station, is described as ‘‘crisp, middle-aged, cynical.’’ He later appears onstage at the Indianapolis police station as the evidence indicates that the convicts are in town. Later in the play, it is Fredericks who advocates attacking the escaped convicts in the Hilliard house, preferring the chance that some of the Hilliard family will be injured to the idea of what would happen if these ruthless convicts escape into society at large.

Glenn Grifﬁn Glenn Grifﬁn is considered by the police to be a very dangerous prisoner, a threat of the highest order to society. He is young, not yet twenty-ﬁve, and already an infamous criminal mastermind. Seven years before the play is set, Glenn was involved in a shoot-out with the police. He killed an ofﬁcer and then, when he had no chance of escape, he surrendered, laughing. Jesse Bard broke his jaw while taking him into custody. Now that he has broken out of jail, Glenn is the leader of the trio of escaped convicts, the one with the brains and the nerve to control the operation. Glenn is motivated by two things in this play. One is his urge to take revenge on Bard, which has been his driving passion for the years that he has been in prison; it forces him to keep his gang in

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Indianapolis when it seems that they might have a better chance to elude capture if they kept moving. His other main motive is his protectiveness toward his younger brother, Hank. ‘‘Hank, you’re all I got,’’ he says at one point. ‘‘You know that. It’s you’n me against’em all!’’ This concern turns to a maniacal rage when Hank leaves, in part because of worry about Hank’s fate and in part because Glenn feels rejected. Psychologically, Glenn is at his most dangerous when he equates Dan Hilliard with his father. He looks with scorn at the domestic tranquility of the Hilliard household, contrasting it to the abusive situation in which he grew up and causing Glenn to do what he can to upset the household in ways that are not really necessary for his escape or revenge plans. He calls Dan Hilliard ‘‘Pop,’’ and at one point during an argument with Hank, Glenn says, ‘‘If Hilliard was our old man, he’d have something coming to him from way back!’’ Dan Hilliard sees this transference happening, and it drives him to action that he might not otherwise have to take: as he explains to Eleanor, ‘‘Grifﬁn hates me. He hated me before he even saw me. I can’t explain it. Every hour some new black hole appears in him. He’s cracking up, Ellie.’’ In Glenn’s ﬁnal moments, the division between fantasy and reality dissolves completely: he shouts at Dan Hilliard that he is leaving and taking Hank with him, and that the older man can never hurt either of them again, clearly thinking that he is talking to his own father.

Hank Grifﬁn Hank is Glenn’s younger brother. He was in prison for three years before escaping. Because of his youth, and the troubled family life that led him into crime, Hank has had little contact with ordinary, well-adjusted living. During the course of the play, it is clear from the way that he looks around the Hilliard house that he is just beginning to realize what he has missed. The main aspect about a non-criminal life that Hank seems to regret having missed is love. He looks longingly at Cindy Hilliard, who is about his age, and is protective of her when Glenn or Robish threatens her. He points out to Glenn that he has never had a date in his life, and Glenn tells him that when their escape is successful he will be able to date all the women he wants. The women that would be available to him, though, would be like Glenn’s girlfriend, Helen Laski, whom Hank rejects because ‘‘she’s a tramp.’’ Eventually, Hank decides to leave the hostage situation and strike out on his own; as he

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explains that he will not be caught, he calls Dan ‘‘Mr. Hilliard,’’ showing a degree of respect that infuriates Glenn. News comes later that Hank died in a gun battle with the police soon after leaving.

Cindy Hilliard Cindy is nineteen years old and works for a law ﬁrm, Swisshelm and Edwards. She is dating Chuck Wright, an attorney with the ﬁrm, of whom her father disapproves. Much is made of the fact that Cindy’s hair is red: Glenn often calls her ‘‘redhead,’’ so that, when her boyfriend calls her by that name, Cindy recoils in horror. Cindy has a strong disposition; she is willing to talk back to the convicts, telling them how much she despises them. She is also clever enough to trick them, feigning illness in order to take advantage of Hank Grifﬁn’s concern about her. Because she is a young woman and they are brutal men, the play hints that she might be abused by them at any moment when she is present. She is often gone from the situation, however; during the two days when the ordeal takes place, she goes off to work during the day, and in the evenings, she goes out with Chuck.

Dan Hilliard Dan Hilliard is the play’s main character, the protagonist. He is an executive with a department store and lives a stable family life. He has been married to the same woman for over twenty years and has a cheerful, easy rapport with his children. The events that occur in his house drive him to the verge of animalistic violence that he has never used before in his life. As Dan explains to Glenn, he ﬁnds that he has it within him to murder the convicts if any harm comes to his family. When he is ﬁrst faced with the fact that his home has been overtaken, Dan is cautious, willing to give the intruders whatever they want with the hope that they will go away. His son urges him to resist, but he tries to convince him that cooperation would be the better course of action. As the play develops, however, Dan sees the danger his family faces. He worries about the threat that Robish poses to Cindy’s virtue; he realizes that the kidnappers will want to take his wife and daughter as hostages when they leave; and he recognizes Glenn Grifﬁn’s growing hatred of him as a father ﬁgure. After being beaten by them at the end of the ﬁrst act, he decides that he can disable the convicts by making them empty their gun’s bullets into him, and he is ready to

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give up his life in this way until his wife, Eleanor, points out that the other family members will still be in danger. At the end of the play, Dan faces Glenn with a loaded gun, and the criminal taunts him, telling him to shoot. Dan realizes that he cannot; despite all that has happened, he really is not a killer, and he thanks God for it. Rather than resorting to murder, Dan asserts mastery of his domain by slapping the powerless Glenn and ordering him out of his house.

Eleanor Hilliard Eleanor is the mother of the Hilliard household. Whenever the other members of her family think of ways in which they can ﬁght against the convicts who have taken over their home, Eleanor ﬁnds herself in a position of begging them to keep calm and to give the intruders whatever they want, in order to ensure peace. In particular, she makes a concerted effort to stop her husband from provoking the criminals’ violence, telling him that he is the ‘‘hub’’ of the family and reminding him of the grave danger that she and the children would face, if anything should happen to him.

Ralphie Hilliard Ralphie is eleven years old and has an independent streak, as exempliﬁed by the way he reminds his father that his name is really ‘‘Ralph.’’ When he realizes that the family is being held by criminals, he concocts a plan to sneak out of an upstairs window and run for help; his father talks him out of it, but Ralphie is not clearly convinced that his father is not a coward. He escapes from the house at the end of act 1, but it just happens to be the time when the criminals have been forced outside, and Ralphie is taken captive. Later, he decides to act on his own by slipping a note into his essay for his teacher, which Dan intercepts before she can see it. In one of the play’s most poignant moments, Glenn Grifﬁn forces Dan to beat Ralphie, as punishment for the note to his teacher. Readers cannot see what effect this beating has on the relationship between father and son until the end of the play, when Glenn has a gun at Ralphie’s head and Ralphie has complete trust in Dan, who convinces Ralphie that if he runs away he will not be harmed.

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from prison in Terre Haute, the police ﬁnd her in Pittsburgh, but she manages to lose them. They pick up her trail again, but a routine trafﬁc stop in Columbus makes her nervous, and she goes into hiding, eventually just mailing the money she was bringing to Glenn, and arranging to meet him in Louisville.

Claude Patterson Patterson is the trash collector at the Hilliards’ house. He is sixty-three years old and arthritic. When he comes to the door for payment, he notices that the house is in disarray, and later the convicts watch him look through the garage window at their car, hidden there, and write down its license plate number. Robish runs out to Patterson’s truck, climbs in it, forces the old man to drive out of town, and shoots him.

Samuel Robish Robish escaped from the federal penitentiary, along with the Grifﬁn brothers. Of the three convicts, he is possibly the most dangerous because he is the most brutal. Still, he is not very intelligent, and knows he will have to rely on Glenn’s brains if the jailbreak is going to be successful. Early in the play, when Robish is drunk and threatening Cindy, Hank Grifﬁn hits him on the head to knock him out, and he realizes that he is the most expendable member of the gang. When Robish is sent out after Mr. Patterson, he gets his hands on a gun, and for a large section in the middle of the play, Robish feels he is in a position to give commands to the other convicts. In the end, he panics, running out to the policemen who are waiting outside.

Miss Swift Miss Swift is Ralphie’s teacher. When Ralphie does not come to school, she goes to the house, worried because he is otherwise such a ﬁne student. She sees the disruption caused by the convicts, including empty liquor bottles around the house, and becomes suspicious that the Hilliard household might be dysfunctional. Dan Hilliard, in order to get her out of the house without suspecting the presence of the convicts, plays an abusive drunk, encouraging her bad opinion.

Helen Laski Helen does not appear on stage, but is only discussed. She is Glenn Grifﬁn’s girlfriend, and is going to bring money to him. As soon as he escapes

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Tom Winston Winston is a deputy sheriff. At the beginning of the play, he is ﬁnishing a night shift, during which

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time he has taken the information that Glenn Grifﬁn and his associates escaped from jail, but he does not understand the signiﬁcance of the news.

Chuck Wright Chuck is a young lawyer in the ﬁrm where Cindy Hilliard works. He is in love with Cindy and asks her to marry him, but she is hesitant because she knows that her father objects to the idea. Throughout the play, he is frustrated because Cindy is cold to him; he does not realize that she is being cold in order to keep him away from the deadly drama in her house. When Chuck realizes that the escaped criminals who have been reported on the radio are in the Hilliard house, he offers to sneak into the house with a gun. The police tell him that such a plan would be foolish, but he goes ahead with it anyway. In the house, Chuck is shot by Robish. His effort is not wasted, though; Robish is subsequently shot by the police, and Dan uses Chuck’s gun in a face-off against Glenn Grifﬁn. Injured, Chuck is able to walk out of the house with Eleanor’s help, indicating that he will be all right.

THEMES Code of Honor Glenn Grifﬁn, the leader of the trio of escaped convicts, is, in his own way, a man of honor. His main motivation is not a desire for freedom, as would be expected of a man who is ﬂeeing from the jail that has held him for years; rather, he is willing to risk everything he has in order to avenge an insult visited upon him. He feels he was betrayed when he surrendered to the authorities; he came out with his hands in the air, and a sheriff’s deputy, Jesse Bard, hit him and broke his jaw. To Glenn, the idea that a lawman would strike a man while he is making himself vulnerable, holding his hands in the air and putting his faith in the legal system, is the worst betrayal imaginable, and so he is focused on killing Bard. Bard’s view of the story of Glenn’s surrender contains the same facts, but with a different focus. In the way he tells it, Glenn killed a policeman who was Bard’s friend, a policeman who was already out of bullets anyway. Glenn did not come out with his

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hands up to admit he was wrong, but only to save his own life. The fact that he was smiling indicated he thought the authorities would be forced to treat him kindly, even though he had no remorse about what he did. As Bard tells the details about the surrender to Carson, the FBI agent, he explains that Glenn, a sadistic killer, would have just forgotten the man he shot down if Bard had not hit him, and how, according to his ‘‘warped code,’’ Glenn had felt that being hit, with his hands in the air, was an act of betrayal. It is not entirely clear, though, that the playwright thinks that Bard is correct, as Carson notes quietly that hitting Glenn not only broke Glenn’s code, but ‘‘[u]nder the circumstances . . . police code, too.’’ He explains that Bard is required to follow the rules of society, and had no right to hit Glenn. ‘‘[C]ivilized men can’t let the slime on them drag us back down,’’ Carson says. ‘‘If we don’t live by the rules, the rules will soon disappear.’’

Oedipus Complex The theory of the Oedipus complex, formulated by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, proposes two related aspects for describing some human behaviors. Freud speculated that children were sexually attracted to parents of the opposite sex, and, in dealing with this attraction, subconsciously longed to kill the parent of the same sex, in order to take that parent’s place in the relationship. He named his theory after the Greek drama Oedipus Rex, in which a man unwittingly kills the father he does not know and marries that man’s wife, who turns out to be his mother. In The Desperate Hours, it is clear that Glenn Grifﬁn is driven by a psychological need to show his control over the powerful and abusive father who raised him to be the criminal he is. He associates Dan Hilliard with his father. From early in the play, Dan notices that Glenn has an irrational hatred for him, sensing that their relationship is based on more than just their acquaintance of a few hours. When his brother Hank calls Dan ‘‘Mr. Hilliard,’’ Glenn is at his most direct about his association of the two, telling Hank, out of the blue, ‘‘You’re talkin’ like Hilliard was our old man.’’ At the end, when he is beaten, Glenn calls out to his father, deﬁantly saying that he is escaping with Hank (whom he has just been told is dead). There is no evidence that the Oedipal complex applies here in the strictest Freudian sense, regarding Glenn Grifﬁn’s relationship with his mother. It is, though, very

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Research how many escapes there have been from United States prisons in the past year, and write a report on the most common methods used to break out of prison in the twenty-ﬁrst century. • In The Desperate Hours, Dan Hilliard loses his son’s respect by refusing to resist the criminals, then wins it back by facing down an armed convict. Write an essay about someone you know who you ﬁrst found unimpressive and then later came to see as brave. • Watch both the 1955 ﬁlm version of The Desperate Hours, which stars Humphrey Bogart as Glenn Grifﬁn, and the 1990 ﬁlm version, which stars Mickey Rourke as Glenn Grifﬁn. How do the two ﬁlm versions differ from each other and

clear that he feels the need to work out the conﬂicts of his childhood by defeating his father and taking the power that the older man had.

Domesticity The Hilliard household is presented in this play as the essence of order and domestic bliss. It is, in fact, chosen as a hideout by the escaped convicts because Ralphie’s bicycle on the lawn indicates to them that this home has a child, and therefore has a stake in maintaining stability. Before their home is invaded, the greatest conﬂict in the Hilliard household is that Dan Hilliard does not think his twentyyear-old daughter is old enough to become serious about the boy she is dating, while Eleanor supports the girl. When outsiders force their way into the Hilliard home, these criminals create a personal violation more terrifying than if this situation had occurred in a public place. At the end of the ﬁrst act, the situation seems momentarily settled, when the criminals are outside of the house and the family is inside. The scene in which the school teacher visits presents a new kind of trauma for the family; not

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from the play version? Why do you think the director of the 1990 version chose to alter the character names and the plot line? Do you think it is more or less effective than the 1955 version? Explain your answer. • In this play, the criminals receive sketchy news reports from the radio, and the police receive sporadic reports from the FBI. Research and write a paper on current law-enforcement methods used to track criminals. How are hostage situations typically handled by law enforcement in the twenty-ﬁrst century? In what ways do you think the hostage situation in the play The Desperate Hours would have been altered by twentyﬁrst century access to the Internet and to twentyfour-hour news reports?

only are they in mortal danger from armed criminals, but someone else from the community is viewing their house in disarray. For Dan Hilliard to pretend he is drunk in order to convince Miss Swift to leave is a huge indignity. It is signiﬁcant that the words that Dan Hilliard uses at the end, when he has defeated Glenn Grifﬁn, are ‘‘Get out of my house,’’ indicating that it is the household, more than the individual members within it, that is being defended.

Manliness This play reﬂects several differing aspects of masculinity. One is brute force, represented by Robish, who is big and crass, almost gleeful about killing, and not inclined toward thought. Robish is not taken seriously, though, because he is easy to trick. Hank Grifﬁn represents another kind of manliness, but he is almost too vulnerable to thought, allowing himself to show human concern for Cindy puts him in a position where Dan and Cindy take his gun from him. In the end, Hank is too aware of the innocence of the Hilliards to continue terrifying them, so he chooses to leave. Glenn Grifﬁn repre-

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sents a dangerous kind of manliness; he is cunning enough to spin a plan of revenge against his enemy Bard, but he is also impulsive enough to possibly kill someone without a second thought. He is willing to use people, especially women, and he promises his younger brother all kinds of easy thrills with anonymous relationships. The invasion of his home and the peril in which his family is placed make Dan Hilliard question his own manliness. When he is powerless against the men who have taken over his house, his self-esteem is crushed. He is opposed to taking orders, but he is practical enough to recognize the danger they present. At the beginning of act 2, Dan even expresses his willingness to die, but Eleanor talks him out of rash action and gets him to agree not to do anything dangerous. When he has Glenn Grifﬁn at gunpoint, Dan asserts his masculinity (which he has repressed throughout the play) by slapping Glenn’s face, a belittling gesture of masculine dominance in many cultures. Bard, disgusted with himself and the human race in general, is reminded of heroic, triumphant men like Dan Hilliard, indicating that his type of careful masculinity and his willingness to temporarily be emasculated are the characteristics of true heroism.

STYLE Protagonist and Antagonist Every literary work has a protagonist, or leading character. In some cases, this character might not be a human but an abstraction, such as an entire community or an inanimate object that is given a human personality. In The Desperate Hours, there can be some confusion about who is the protagonist. The most obvious candidate is Dan Hilliard; he is given the most dramatic choices in the play and is most involved in the action. On the other hand, the ﬁrst scene begins with Jesse Bard responding to the news of the prison break, and ends with Bard having his sense of the basic goodness of humankind restored. Bard’s story is secondary, though, to the main action, so Hilliard should be considered the play’s protagonist. There is no such ambiguity about who the play’s antagonist might be. The antagonist is the character who has the opposite qualities of the protagonist. In drama, the function of the antagonist

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is often to create trouble for the protagonist, in order to show aspects of the protagonist’s personality that might otherwise stay hidden. There are three criminals, but it is clearly Glenn Grifﬁn who is making the decisions. Also, it is Glenn who has a personal relationship with both Bard (against whom he wants revenge) and Dan Hilliard (whom he sees as a surrogate father). With a less motivated antagonist in this play, neither Hilliard nor Bard would be as clearly drawn.

Denouement The denouement of a literary piece is the part that comes after the climax. The word comes from the French, for ‘‘unraveling.’’ In this play, the climactic moment comes when Dan Hilliard slaps Glenn Grifﬁn and tells him to leave the house; no matter what happens after that, the story is settled, because Dan has reestablished his dominance over the household and is no longer held under the convict’s threat. What does happen next—Glenn runs into the police spotlight with his empty gun brandished and is shot down—is part of the denouement, the falling action that is the necessary result of the climax. Another part of the play’s denouement comes in the dialog between Bard and Carson, after the Hilliard family has been reunited. They talk about how the events of the play have affected Bard, creating in him a great cynicism about humanity but also a small degree of optimism. These comments are drawn from the play, but are after the play’s main action ends, and are thus considered part of the unraveling.

Suspense It hardly needs to be stated that The Desperate Hours is a suspense play. Every moment, from the ﬁrst mention of the prison break on the second page until the last prisoner is killed at the end, is calculated to make audiences wonder what is going to happen next. The play uses two obvious techniques to do this. First, it centers on a hostage situation with hostile parties forced together, so that at any given time one side or the other can be seen as winning. Second, Hayes gives both Glenn Grifﬁn and Dan Hilliard a degree of unpredictability, so that audiences cannot rely on either of them to behave rationally, in their own best interest. The situation might fall apart at any moment; readers have to pay close attention so that they do not miss something important.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1950s: During the cold war, Americans are afraid of inﬁltration by Communists. In Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee holds hearings to ﬁnd out if foreign elements have penetrated our nation’s security. Today: After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans are once again wary of the country being inﬁltrated by hostile outsiders. The Department of Homeland Security is a newly-formed agency assigned the task of preventing attacks within the United States. • 1950s: A young woman like Cindy Hilliard, working in a law ofﬁce, is most likely to be, as Cindy is, a secretary. Today: A young woman working in a law ofﬁce is just as likely to be a lawyer or a paralegal. • 1950s: Police are able to search for Glenn Grifﬁn’s girlfriend by monitoring all calls going from Columbus, Ohio, to Indianapolis over a four-hour period.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Suburbia The 1950s saw the rise of suburban living in America. After World War II ended in 1945, millions of soldiers returned from military service to enter civilian life. They soon married and started families. Eager to raise their children away from the clutter and dangers of cities, and able—often for the ﬁrst time in their lives—to afford their own homes (the war had been preceded by the Great Depression, which had lasted more than a decade), they accepted jobs in cities, but bought homes in the towns surrounding the cities, creating a boom in suburban housing. A milestone in suburban housing came in 1950, when William J. Levitt and his sons began a trend by building cheap, identical houses in a fabricated

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Today: With wireless communication and messages routed through various Internet providers, such a task as that mentioned above is impossible. • 1950s: Like most stores, gas stations close in the evening and open in the morning. The criminals in The Desperate Hours, who plan to ﬂee in the night, have to send someone out for gasoline before the stations close. Today: Except for the most rural reaches of the country, it is not difﬁcult to ﬁnd a gas station that is open all night. • 1950s: A teacher like Miss Swift in the play might stop by the home of a student who has called in ill. Today: Schools have social workers on their support staffs to handle any suspicions or concerns about a student’s home life, but it is rare for a teacher to visit a student’s home in person.

community called Levittown, on Long Island. The homes were functional and unimaginative, and sold so quickly that new Levittowns sprang up outside Philadelphia and in New Jersey. Developers followed Levitt’s lead, and began bulldozing acres of farmland in areas on the outskirts of cities, building whole communities of thousands of homes at a time. Throughout the 1950s, houses were built at a rate of 1.4 million per year, mostly in the suburbs. The lack of individuality that marked these homes, thrown together as they were under such industrial conditions, was mirrored in the sameness of the suburban residents. The overwhelming majority of suburban families were white and middle class, with two parents and a few children. Conformity was encouraged, and those who deviated from the norm were ostracized from the community. The racial segregation of the suburbs reﬂected society at large during the decade marked by struggle

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for integration in cities—in particular in northern cities, where social customs and not explicit laws kept whites and blacks separated. In addition, the suburbs also experienced gender segregation; though most households had both a male and a female, they separated by day, with the men driving off to their jobs in the city, leaving the suburban neighborhoods populated by wives and children.

Social Anxiety Compared to the 1940s, which witnessed the last World War, and the 1960s, which were marked by riots, the 1950s are remembered as a peaceful and prosperous time. These nostalgic memories, however, ignore the tensions underlying the basic social facts. The 1950s were, in fact, a period of unprecedented economic growth in America. Japan and most of the European economies had to suffer the burden of rebuilding after the war ended in 1945, having lost much manufacturing capability during the ﬁghting. The United States, as the only powerful nation that had not been the scene of combat, had actually grown ﬁnancially during the war, producing munitions and food that the other nations needed but could not provide. By the 1950s, America was an industrial and military superpower, rivaled only by the Soviet Union. The rivalry with the Soviet Union, dubbed the ‘‘Cold War’’ (to distinguish it from a ‘‘hot’’ war that would have actual ﬁghting with causalities), colored the political atmosphere of the 1950s with fear. Soviet spies were suspected to have inﬁltrated the government, and then the suspicion grew, so that other industries such as manufacturing and entertainment were examined with an eye for Soviet inﬂuence. The mere accusation of involvement with communists destroyed many careers, and the fear of being accused drove many law-abiding citizens to do whatever they could to avoid social attention. It was not, however, only political pressure that caused people to do what they could to blend into their environment. Conformity was the mood of the country. As early as 1950, this trend was documented by David Reisman, who in his book The Lonely Crowd describes how Americans had become ‘‘other-directed,’’ drawing their self-image from the opinions of others, rather than being ‘‘innerdirected.’’ Other writers of the decade, such as William Whyte (The Organization Man, 1956) and Vance Packard (The Status Seekers, 1959) examine conformity in the business world and the ways that

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middle-class families strove to be accepted as ﬁnancially prosperous in their communities, but otherwise tried to remain invisible.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW When it opened on Broadway, The Desperate Hours was clearly a beneﬁciary of what is now known as ‘‘marketing synergy.’’ Within one year, Joseph Hayes’s story was released as a novel, as a theatrical production, and as a motion picture. To some degree, the fact that it was in so many places at once must have helped it gain audience attention. This would not, however, account for the fact that the play was awarded the Tony Award for best play of 1955. More relevant, in fact, is that The Desperate Hours, in whatever form, tells a compelling (if familiar) story, and tells it in a powerful, focused way. As C. V. Terry explains in a 1954 review of the novel for the New York Times, ‘‘The story-line is a familiar one. . . . So, inevitably, are most plot patterns in novels of this genre: it is the treatment, not the ingredients, that really matters. Mr. Hayes has milked the last drop of horror from his macabre situation. As a Hitchcock-type nightmare, The Desperate Hours is a strictly Grade-A job.’’

CRITICISM David Kelly Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at two colleges in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly examines the different variations on the idea of family that are used in the play. It is not at all difﬁcult for audiences to pick up on the differences between the world of Joseph Hayes’s drama The Desperate Hours, written half a century ago, and the modern world. The striking difference is not, as one might expect, the observable cultural distinctions, because the play is conﬁned for the most part, to the personal space of the Hilliard family house, which has been invaded by a gang of escaped convicts. The lack of outside inﬂuence is in fact one of the play’s key points, and so there are few opportunities for dated material to prove a distraction for modern audiences. The only real notable indicators that this play takes place in an earlier time are the trash collector coming to the door to be paid and the letter that is mailed in Ohio

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one night and delivered in Indianapolis the following evening. These twists could easily be updated for a contemporary production, or left as reminders that this play takes place in a simpler time. Even the police procedure, which accounts for a signiﬁcant amount of the play, is not notably out of keeping with how audiences might expect the police to respond to a similar situation today. The element of the play that shows its age most is the one that the playwright gives the most focus: the sanctity of the nuclear family. Hayes proves determined to show that the Hilliard family is strong enough to weather the ordeal that he puts them through and to come out united in the end. This is not entirely convincing, in large part because the play gives audiences very little reason to ever doubt the security of the Hilliards’ commitment to each other, even though Hayes does try to stir up rumbles of discontent here and there. On the other hand, the play functions quite well as an examination of a successful family because it brings in other family models that can be compared to the Hilliards, as examples of the types of failure that they manage to avoid. The other families presented or hinted at in the play are all partial families, incomplete in one way or another. One example of this, though admittedly a sketchy example, is the marriage of Deputy Jesse Bard and his wife. Since Mrs. Bard never appears onstage, there is no way of really knowing the depth of their relationship. What one does know, however, is that there is concern, but not much in the way of communication. When Bard realizes that Glenn Grifﬁn, the convict who swore revenge against him, is on the loose, he understands that Glenn’s hatred might extend to harming his wife. He calls her and tells her to move to a safe place, his mother’s house, but does not trust her enough to tell her why she should do so. Katie Bard is mentioned just once more in the play—through the police receptionist; Katie conveys the message that Bard’s mother is boring her, and Bard jokingly dismisses her, still not telling her why she must stay away from home. This total dominance of the male, as Bard makes decisions for his wife’s well being and relegates her to the boring safety of the older woman’s domain, may have been unremarkable in the 1950s, but it stands out today as smug and patronizing. It resembles the Hilliard family in the way that the man is the decision maker, but the distance between the Bards, connected only by the telephone wire (and with Dutch the receptionist as intermediary), makes their relationship even more lopsided than the Hilliards.’

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Paul Newman, Patricia Peardon, and Nancy Coleman in a 1955 stage production of The Desperate Hours

The family unit that is held up most closely to the Hilliards is the gang of escapees. This is a family only in the abstract; one could easily say that any social unit constitutes some sort of family, or one could just leave it to stand as its own different type of social unit. The reason that the gang can be considered a family is that two-thirds of its members are related. There is no question that Glenn Grifﬁn is the father ﬁgure of this family unit, at least in a 1950s sense, with fatherhood equated with leadership. Of the three convicts, Glenn at least has a plan. If his plan were solely for the well-being of his ‘‘boys,’’ then he might even be considered a decent parent, but it is tainted by his own personal lust for revenge. The other two convicts really are boys by comparison. Hank Grifﬁn is an adolescent who behaves as if he has just discovered girls, in the Hilliards’ daughter Cindy; throughout the play he goes through adolescent rebellion, rejecting the values that Glenn has taught him, and striking out on his own. Robish is, of course, an infant: all id, ﬁxated on drinking and eating, turning violent when he is angry. Robish lacks the intelligence to be in command of his own fate.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Hayes has divided his writing career between writing for the stage and writing ﬁction. Most of his novels operate with the same sort of tension seen in The Desperate Hours. The novel upon which the play was based was published in 1954 and was reprinted in 1985 by Carroll & Graf. • Readers impressed by Hayes’s suspense writing can see another side of his stagecraft in his 1977 play Impolite Comedy: A Comedy in Three Acts. It is published by Hayes’s longtime publisher, Samuel French, Inc. • In 1936, Robert Sherwood wrote The Petriﬁed Forest, a play about a vicious gangster and his mob holding innocent people hostage in a diner. The role of Duke Mantee, the gang leader, was

As a parental ﬁgure, Glenn is quite a miserable failure. Both of the boys turn against him because he tries to handle them on his own terms, not their own, smacking Robish on the head to discipline him and offering Hank the sort of fast, loose-moraled women that he has come, through his contact with the Hilliards, to deplore. Glenn’s only understanding of the family dynamic comes from the brutality of his own father, which still haunts him. Without a female presence to balance him (his counterpart is Helen Laski who, like Katie Bard, is just a voice on the phone), he has no better response to adversity than violence and self-interest. As a lone desperado, these impulses serve him well, but Glenn’s unchecked machismo loses its effect the minute he does not have a gun in his hand. It is balance that makes the Hilliard family triumphant in this ordeal. Dan Hilliard is clearly the leader of the family, but he makes decisions with his family members in mind. He tries to reason with his son Ralphie, who imperils the family twice when he is caught acting against the criminals (sneaking outside, writing a note to his teacher). Dan even allows his wife Eleanor to talk him out of being

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Humphrey Bogart’s ﬁrst main gangster role in ﬁlm (Glenn Grifﬁn in The Desperate Hours was his last). The Petriﬁed Forest is available from Dramatist’s Play Service. • Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden (1991) uses some of the plot conventions that Hayes uses, but with much more weight. Like Glenn Grifﬁn, Dorfman’s Paulina takes a hostage, with revenge on her mind. Her revenge, though, is for a more intimate crime; she suspects that the man she kidnaps is the man who raped and tortured her while she was being held as a political prisoner ﬁfteen years earlier. She has doubts, however, about whether she is holding the right man. This play is available from Penguin USA.

heroic, yielding to her sensible explanation that the family would be in just as much jeopardy if he were to be shot with the last remaining bullets. If he were the sort of unilateral decision maker that Bard and Glenn are, Dan would leave his family open to destruction. The structure of this play seems designed to imply that Dan has to learn, through the course of this dangerous situation, to be open minded with his family. The last moments, before the curtain falls, show the Hilliard family gathered together, as if there had been some question throughout that they would end up going their separate ways. That image of family unity indicates a triumph over discord. This discord is hinted at throughout the play, most pointedly in the beginning of act 2, in which Dan, recovering from a pummeling at the hands of Glenn Grifﬁn and resigned to being unable to stop the hostage crisis, looks back on his weaknesses as a father. He regrets not having told Eleanor he loves her often enough and that he did not appreciate his son’s childish attempts at humor. ‘‘I’m feeling along a blank wall,’’ he tells his wife. He soon continues, ‘‘There’s light behind that wall, Ellie. I

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never knew how much. There was light there once and there’s got to be light again!’’ This sudden outburst of emotion implies that Dan’s relationship with his family has been static, aloof, and mechanical, and that the hostage crisis has made him realize that. Dan’s dramatic revelation does not work as drama, though, because the emotional distance that he has recognized is not presented onstage at the beginning of the play. The Hilliards are an intact and happy family from the beginning. In the breakfast scene at the beginning of the play, the family’s quarrels are so minor as to include Dan’s impatience with Cindy being late every morning, Ralphie’s desire to be addressed by the more mature name ‘‘Ralph,’’ and Dan and Eleanor’s disagreement about whether Cindy should be dating. Undoubtedly, Dan’s realization that he has taken his family for granted is a realization that many a careeroriented man could make when faced with death, but it simply does not apply to the speciﬁc family dynamic shown in this play. The end of the play gives audiences a different realization, though, one that is just as related to the ﬁxation with family and just as quixotic as Dan’s realization. The last spoken exchange is between Jesse Bard and FBI agent Carson. Bard, who has just shot Glenn Grifﬁn, pronounces himself ‘‘disgusted with the human race,’’ but Carson tempers his disgust by reminding him that there are men like Dan Hilliard in the world. Unfortunately, nothing is said about what particular attributes qualify Dan to be humanity’s redemption. The fact that he has beaten Glenn does not seem particularly noble, since it is a matter of survival, so Bard’s emphasis must be on how Dan triumphed: i.e., with the love and respect of his family intact. This makes sense out of the heartwarming scene of the Hilliards gathered together at the end; audiences who have never seen them at odds with each other might wonder what is so remarkable about their unity, but a man who lacks family connection, like Bard does, would ﬁnd them a wonder. And the greatest wonder appears not to be that the mother and children stay together, but that the man can ﬁnd it in himself to face down violence and still ﬁt in with his wife and children. The Desperate Hours is a play about guns and terror, but the thread that holds it together is family. It relies on dated ideas of the family, with the assumption that the father must lead and his wife and children serve best when they follow and en-

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UNDOUBTEDLY, DAN’S REALIZATION THAT HE HAS TAKEN HIS FAMILY FOR GRANTED IS A REALIZATION THAT MANY A CAREER-ORIENTED MAN COULD MAKE WHEN FACED WITH DEATH, BUT IT SIMPLY DOES NOT APPLY TO THE SPECIFIC FAMILY DYNAMIC SHOWN IN THIS PLAY.’’

courage him. Still, it also introduces modern ideas in the different views of family that it offers. The alternate families presented in the play are without children and women, and are therefore too heavily weighted toward the masculine perspective. The result is that the criminal ‘‘family’’ ends with everyone dead, and Bard, the isolated husband, is left to gaze on in awe and admiration. Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Desperate Hours, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Kate Covintree Covintree is a graduate student and expository writing instructor in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College. In this essay, she examines the idea of safety within the nuclear family as shown in Hayes’s suspenseful drama. In The Desperate Hours, the Hilliards have neither a fallout shelter nor a machine gun in their home, but they do have a loaded gun that is kept in the parents’ bedroom. This gun is a critical prop. It becomes the second gun for the convicts, the weapon used to murder the garbage man, and the object that leads the police to the criminals. Dan Hilliard hides the fact that he owns this gun from his son, Ralphie. When Glenn asks if there is a gun in the house, the audience knows the criminals already possess it. Still, it is Ralphie who says ‘‘no . . . we don’t.’’ As the stage direction makes clear, this admission is made ‘‘too quickly.’’ Through this and other scenes, Hayes shows that the nuclear family is partially held

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together by the idea of anticipating tragedy, while they are really unprepared for such a real event. The Hilliard family’s preparation with the gun in the bedroom does little to arm or protect them. As McConachie writes, ‘‘the business class pictured the nuclear family as a fortress protecting the family members from urban blight, teenage crime, and racial Others.’’ Hayes exacerbates this idea within his suspenseful drama. The Hilliards are literally trapped inside their own home once outside forces, or Others, enter uninvited. What is especially harrowing about this play is that a family is being threatened in their own home. In the ﬁrst scene with the Hilliard family, Hayes shows how safe and comfortable the members of the family feel within the house. Although it appears to stiﬂe them on occasion, it is a loving home where much care is taken. This is a space where they are supposed to have control, and the criminals take this safety away from them completely. Before the criminals arrive, the mother, Eleanor, voluntarily stays in her home. Like many mothers in 1950s American suburbia, Eleanor takes care of matters of the house. When the audience ﬁrst meets her she is sending everyone else in the family off to school and work, making a shopping list, and making a bed. There is the possibility that she will leave her house, because a car is at her disposal, but it is also likely that the majority of her time will be spent inside the home. Her behavior is a given and is established as part of the norm for the Hilliard family. When Eleanor has the opportunity to be aware of the outside world by listening to the news report, Hayes shows her miss critical information about the escaped convicts as she walks out of the room and then returns to change the radio station to music. Eleanor would rather remain in the presumed safety of her own home, oblivious to any danger. It is clear that the world outside of her home is removed from her. As it does not directly concern her, it is therefore unnecessary. For Eleanor, as with other members of her family, her house is her haven. This nuclear family, however, is no longer safe from harm. Their ignorance about the world makes the Hilliard family somewhat more susceptible to the world and its dangers. When faced with a real situation concerning life and death, their coping skills and resources shift. Dan Hilliard has no gun and he appears almost ineffectual at the beginning of the play, but he grows steadily ﬁercer as the play progresses. On more than one occasion, Glenn chides Dan by telling him that he too has a brutish

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side. It is this side that Eleanor reminds him to keep from their son. The behavior of the Hilliard children is also affected. The daughter, Cindy, pulls away from a man who wants to marry her. Ralphie attempts to escape, but this action only prolongs the hostage situation. The suburban community falls apart with the entrance of the criminals. Initially it appears that the Hilliard home and suburbia are a part of the same insular world. When Others, like Robish and the Grifﬁn brothers, come into the home, all of this changes. As McConachie writes, ‘‘most American families [during the cold war] tried to ignore [realities of the nuclear age] and relied on friendships [and] neighbors.’’ For the Hilliards, this outlet is no longer available to them. Since their friends and neighbors do not live directly in their home, they are not actually a part of the family, and cannot know the turmoil of the family’s situation. Community, for the Hilliards, has shrunk to the members of their immediate family. They are trapped and alone. The audience learns that suburbia cannot protect the family from the dangers of the world. When members of the community like Cindy’s boyfriend, Chuck, and Ralphie’s school teacher, Miss Swift, arrive at the scene, they cause more harm than good. Their ignorance of the family’s situation only brings more harm to themselves or the family. Mr. Patterson is murdered for looking into the garage. Whatever knowledge or concern these friends and neighbors show only puts them in harm’s way. Unfortunately, as these people are not immediate members of the household, those inside the Hilliard family cannot defend them, and will not risk their own lives for them in the same way they do for each other. Although Chuck Wright intends to marry Cindy, in her father’s house she is a daughter before she is a bride. As they are not yet engaged or married, Chuck is still separate from the family unit. He does not yet have the right or responsibility to take on the role of a family member. Still, his intimate care for one of the members of the family stretches the line of community involvement. It is as if the only true and stable community is the one within the fortress of a family’s four walls. Hayes shows the audience that at a community’s most crucial moments, it is really every family for itself. Oddly, this is the expected behavior for the nuclear family. Family, however, is shown in two extremes. Not only are the Hilliards a family, the criminals are also a family. Glenn and Hank are brothers, and their familial tie is a major reason that they are

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together. Glenn looks out for his younger brother, and it appears that Glenn was largely responsible for Hank’s upbringing. Hayes shows these two brothers as ones who grew up in a family starkly different from the Hilliards. This becomes extremely clear at the end of the play when Glenn breaks into a childlike state and talks to Dan as though Dan were his own father, ‘‘You hit me for the last godd— time . . . . You ain’t ever gonna hit Hank or me again. . . . I’m takin’ Hank along and you ain’t gonna see either one of us ever again!’’ Their abusive father clearly made Glenn and Hank’s childhood home dangerous and volatile. This is just the type of home life they inﬂict on the Hilliards. The stability of the Hilliard family has an effect on the brothers. Hank questions his role in the hostage situation because of the life Dan has made for his family. It is this ideal of ‘‘nuclear family’’ that breaks him from his criminal intent and separates him from his brother. Glenn’s good intentions of helping his brother escape their abusive father cannot replace the family life they missed having. Hank wants more than his family can provide. Hank is a tragic character, regretting his decision to leave once he sees the potential for a family and a suburban life that he has surely sacriﬁced. Hank wants to change, but Hayes shows such change would be difﬁcult, especially after Hank is caught trying to steal a car. Once again removed from a home life situation, Hank reverts to criminal ways to expedite change. Hayes demonstrates that the only successful family is the nuclear family, and despite its simplicity and, as Cindy sees it before the incident ‘‘a pretty dull life,’’ the stability it provides keeps this family safe. All of them seem to take their simple lives for granted. It is only with the intrusion of Glenn, Hank, and Robish, that they see what they already possess. The Hilliards are lucky and fortunate to live in a home that values life and family over selﬁsh interests. Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on The Desperate Hours, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

SOURCES Reisman, David, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, rev. ed., Yale University Press, 2001.

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THE STABILITY OF THE HILLIARD FAMILY HAS AN EFFECT ON THE BROTHERS. HANK QUESTIONS HIS ROLE IN THE HOSTAGE SITUATION BECAUSE OF THE LIFE DAN HAS MADE FOR HIS FAMILY. IT IS THIS IDEAL OF ‘‘NUCLEAR FAMILY’’ THAT BREAKS HIM FROM HIS CRIMINAL INTENT AND SEPARATES HIM FROM HIS BROTHER.’’

Terry, C. V., ‘‘Nightmare at the Hilliards,’’ in New York Times Review of Books, February 28, 1954, p. 5.

FURTHER READING Adler, Thomas P., American Drama, 1940–1960: A Critical History, Twayne Publishers, 1994. Adler provides a background of the theatrical scene at the time when The Desperate Hours appeared. Heilman, Robert Bechtold, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience, University of Washington Press, 1968. A famous drama critic examines the art and skill involved in writing a play in a generic form, studying the artistic precedents that go back to antiquity. Nathan, George Gene, The Theatre of the Fifties, Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Written at about the same time that Hayes was working in New York theatre and writing this play, Nathan gives an impressionistic sense of what life was like at the time. Rosen, Carol, Plays of Impasse: Contemporary Drama Set in Conﬁning Situations, Princeton University Press, 1983. Rosen does not speciﬁcally look at The Desperate Hours, but her book does examine the category of plays that this one falls into.

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The Imaginary Invalid MOLIÈRE 1673

Molière is the stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, one of the most important dramatists in French history. His plays have been delighting and intriguing audiences since they were ﬁrst performed in seventeenth-century France, at which time they pleased King Louis XIV and changed the face of French comic drama. A subtle and profound satirist, actor, philosopher, and master of character, Molière combined all of these elements into his plays, drawing heavily from tradition but also incorporating his own unique insights. Skillfully combining his acting and writing skills, he was also an incisive social critic, ridiculing institutions from organized religion to medicine, and poking fun at the Parisian bourgeoisie (the middle class made up of prosperous tradesmen). Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) was Molière’s ﬁnal play, ﬁrst performed in February 1673 in Paris. A satire of the medical profession and a comedy-ballet, or a comedy combined with song and dance, the play contains a good deal of farce and was written to amuse King Louis XIV. It is also a superb character study of a hypochondriac, or a patient obsessed with being ill, and it contains a brilliant social and political commentary on Paris in the 1670s. Many critics have even found a subtle but powerful philosophical strain in the work, and it is an excellent example of the stylized comedy-ballet popular in Louis XIV’s courtly theater. Molière himself played the main role of the hypochondriac Argan, and famously coughed up blood during his

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fourth performance, dying later that evening in what came to be known as a bitter irony, given the play’s subject of imaginary illness. The play is now widely available in collections such as the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of The Miser and Other Plays: A New Selection, in which it is translated as The Hypochondriac.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin on January 15, 1622, in Paris, Molière grew up in a wealthy bourgeois family. His maternal grandfather introduced him to the theater at a young age. Molière’s father sold upholstery to the king’s household. His mother died in 1631, and two years later, his father remarried. Molière went to a Jesuit college and worked in the court for his father. He left Paris to study law, but in 1642, Poquelin told his father that he was unsuited to a legal career. He soon signed a contract with Joseph Béjart and Béjart’s sister Madeline to set up a drama company called the Illustre Théâtre (Illustrious Theater). It was with the opening of this theater that Poquelin took the stage name Molière, a name which may come from one of thirteen French hamlets or from the obscure novelist Molière d’Essartines. Staging tragedies and tragicomedies, the Illustrious Theater was not very successful, and within eighteen months it was in enough debt that Molière was put in jail until his father helped the other members of the troupe obtain his release. With the patronage of a duke, the company then spent thirteen years touring the provinces, during which time Molière established himself as its leader both as a writer and an actor, and the Illustrious Theater performed its ﬁrst Molière comedy by 1655. In 1658, the troupe ﬁnally established itself in Paris, due largely to the fact that they pleased King Louis XIV, and he allocated them a space to perform during the off-days of an Italian troupe that normally performed there. Within two years, the troupe moved into the Théâtre du Palais-Royal (Theater of the Royal Palace), a prominent theater inside the Royal Palace of Paris. As the director of his troupe, Molière commissioned plays as well as staging his own work, which consisted largely of comedies and comedy-ballets. He became increasingly popular and played both to royalty and to a large bourgeois audience, but he came under intense criticism from religious conservatives for his por-

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trayal of marriage. This struggle culminated in a ﬁve-year ban of Tartuffe, a play about a religious hypocrite, until Louis XIV overcame opposition and allowed it to be staged in 1669. In 1665, Molière produced his famous play Dom Juan (Don Juan), about a seductive gentleman who deﬁes God. By this time he had married Armande Béjart, the much younger sister of his previous lover and fellow actor Madeline Béjart, and he had begun to decline in health. In 1673, he staged The Imaginary Invalid, acting in the main role of Argan until the fourth performance, during which he coughed up blood. Molière died that evening, February 17, 1673, at his home. His body was refused a Christian burial, as he was labeled an unrepentant actor, until King Louis intervened to have him buried, without ceremony, in the parish cemetery.

PLOT SUMMARY Prologue The play begins with a prologue and an alternative prologue. The ﬁrst prologue is titled ‘‘Eclogue,’’ which refers to a short poem that is usually ‘‘pasto-

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ral,’’ or reﬂecting idyllic, rural shepherd life. This eclogue involves a number of gods from classical mythology, including Flora, the Roman goddess of ﬂowers, and Pan, the Greek god of shepherds and fertility. After an introduction praising Louis XIV and stating that the comedy-ballet was ‘‘devised for his relaxation,’’ the prologue praises the king’s war efforts with a rustic song and dance, until Pan enters and says that the best way to serve Louis is to entertain and charm him. The much shorter alternative prologue is a monologue, or speech by a single character, in which a shepherdess laments that foolish doctors cannot heal the sorrows of her heart.

Act 1 Act 1 opens with Argan adding up his many doctor’s bills and ringing for the maid, Toinette, who reveals her impatience with Argan and goes to fetch his daughter, Angélique. Argan, who is a hypochondriac, then goes off to the bathroom while Angélique asks Toinette for advice about Cléante, the young man with whom she recently fell in love, and who has promised to ask for her hand in marriage. When Argan returns, Angélique is delighted to hear him tell her of a marriage he has arranged for her, until she discovers that she is betrothed not to Cléante but to Thomas Diafoirus, who is about to graduate from medical school. Toinette argues with Argan, but he threatens to put his daughter in a convent unless she marries Thomas, and he chases Toinette with a stick. Argan’s second wife, Béline, enters and consoles him, and Argan calls for a notary to discuss his will, since he would like to leave all of his money to his wife. Toinette warns Angélique that her stepmother is trying to undermine her interests, but Angélique is only concerned that her father does not arrange for her to marry a man she loves. Toinette promises to send word to Cléante about the arranged marriage by talking to Punchinello, an old moneylender. The scene then shifts to the ‘‘First Interlude,’’ in which Punchinello sings his lover a serenade, until he is interrupted by an old woman, a chorus of violins, and then a group of archers, who he bribes to avoid being arrested.

Act 2 Cléante enters disguised as a friend of Angélique’s music master, and Toinette shows him in to meet Argan and Angélique. Monsieur Diafoirus then enters with his son Thomas, who makes a fool of himself during his elaborate introductions. Argan asks for some music, so Cléante describes a story of

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a shepherd pained by his lover’s father arranging her marriage with another man (clearly inspired by his own predicament), and he and Angélique improvise a pastoral love song. After Argan interrupts them and Béline enters, Angélique avoids promising her hand to Thomas, and Argan threatens to put her in a convent if she does not agree to the marriage within four days. Thomas and his father leave after giving Argan ridiculous medical advice, and then Béline enters to inform her husband that she caught Cléante in Angélique’s room. Argan questions his younger daughter Louison about it, and she eventually admits that Cléante came in and kissed Angélique’s hands. Argan’s brother Béralde then arrives to tell Argan that he has an offer of marriage for Angélique. Béralde brings a company of gypsies with him who, in the ‘‘Second Interlude,’’ sing about young love and dance a ballet.

Act 3 After plotting with Toinette to prevent Angélique’s marriage to Thomas, Béralde argues to Argan that Argan is imagining his illnesses and that doctors are frauds. Monsieur Fleurant enters to give Argan an injection, and when Béralde objects, the doctor complains to his superior—Thomas’s uncle, Monsieur Purgon—who then enters and angrily tells Argan he will have nothing to do with him. Argan is very worried, until Toinette enters disguised as a doctor, pretending to be ninety years old, and claiming that Argan’s previous doctor is a fool. Béralde then says that Béline is trying to trick her husband, and Toinette suggests that Argan pretend to be dead so that he can discover the truth about his wife. Argan agrees, and Béline responds to her husband’s death by praising heaven, complaining about him, and plotting to get his money. Argan shocks her by sitting up, and then he tries the same trick on Angélique, who laments his death sorrowfully and tells Cléante that she wants to renounce the world and her engagement. Pleased with his daughter, Argan agrees to Angélique and Cléante’s marriage provided that Cléante becomes a doctor, but Béralde suggests that Argan become a doctor instead, and Argan agrees to undergo the medical-school graduation ceremony. The ‘‘Finale’’ of the play is a comical songand-dance graduation ceremony, written in a corrupt form of Latin that, in the original edition, contains enough French, Italian, and Spanish to make it comprehensible to Molière’s audience. Most

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English editions of the play have translated many of the words in the ballet into English, so readers who do not know any Latin can understand that Argan passes a short and absurd test and gains his degree, with the chorus celebrating.

CHARACTERS

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • The Imaginary Invalid was made into an audio recording in 1999 by L.A. Theatre Works.

Angélique Argan’s daughter Angélique is a kind young woman whose main goal in the play is to marry for love. She hopes to marry Cléante, with whom she fell in love when he came to her defense at the theater. Angélique always acts with deference to her father, although she protests against a marriage to Thomas and does not get along with her stepmother. When Argan pretends to be dead, it is likely that Angélique actually feels as devoted to him as she claims (although Toinette may have informed her of the plot beforehand) because she consistently defends her father and is genuinely affectionate towards him.

Argan The play’s main character, Argan, is a selﬁsh hypochondriac and a fool, with two daughters. He is obsessed with his own imagined illnesses to the point where he seems to think of nothing else, to the consternation of his brother and his daughter Angélique. He is also extremely gullible, allowing his doctors to overcharge him, his maid to trick and confuse him, and his wife (who calls him a ‘‘nuisance to everybody’’) to nearly manipulate him out of his fortune. Appearing to be almost a stock character, he is temperamental and explodes into a burst of comical anger when he is frustrated, and he is satirical of silly and selﬁsh bourgeois gentlemen. Molière pokes fun at this class of people chieﬂy through his characterization of Argan. Argan has a tender side as well, however, and the subtlety of his characterization is one of the chief accomplishments of the play. Eventually, he even endears himself to the audience by allowing them to sympathize with him as he is manipulated by everyone around him, and he reveals that he is basically kind by agreeing to allow his daughter Angélique to marry Cléante. He is very affectionate to his wife until he discovers that she is only interested in his money, and he does love Angélique in his own way, despite the fact that his overwhelm-

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ing priority in arranging her marriage is the satisfaction of his own petty interests. By the end of the play, he appears harmless and benevolent, however much he is a shallow and ridiculous father, which is why he is an appropriate main character for a comedy. Molière himself played the role of Argan during the ﬁrst four performances of the play, until Molière died of a lung disorder.

Béline Béline is Argan’s second wife. She is a manipulative woman interested only in Argan’s wealth, and she wants to send both of her stepdaughters to a convent so they will not receive their inheritance. Although she showers Argan with affection and pretends to indulge him in his imaginary illnesses, her true character is revealed when Argan pretends to be dead and he listens to her happy reaction.

Béralde Concerned about his brother Argan’s foolishness, Béralde is involved in the scheme to help Angélique marry Cléante, and he presents Cléante’s suit to his brother. Béralde continually calls Argan naive and attempts to bring him to his senses about doctors, his daughter, and his wife, but Argan tends not to listen. One of Béralde’s most passionate beliefs is that the medical profession is a sham, and he has a long scene in which he argues with his brother about doctors, belittling them and stressing their ridiculous failures. At the end of the play, he uses his inﬂuence to bring about the joke of Argan’s graduation from medical school.

Monsieur Bonnefoi Monsieur Bonnefoi is the notary who informs Argan of the Parisian law regarding inheritance. His

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name means ‘‘good faith’’ in French, which is an ironic touch because he is shady in his dealings, scheming to transfer Argan’s funds completely to Béline.

Cléante Angélique’s lover Cléante is a young gallant with whom Angélique falls in love at the theater. After he hears that Argan is arranging for his daughter’s marriage to another suitor, Cléante shows his resourcefulness by pretending to be Angélique’s music teacher and singing a love song with her. Angélique describes him as gentlemanly, chivalrous, and handsome, and he is equally devoted to her, willing to go to medical school if Argan requires it as a condition for their marriage.

Monsieur Diafoirus Monsieur Diafoirus is the doctor who, with Argan, arranges his son and Angélique’s marriage. The brother-in-law of Monsieur Purgon, he is very proud of his son Thomas and coaches him along in his speeches without recognizing that Thomas is making a fool of himself. He is also an incompetent doctor, since he makes a ridiculous and arbitrary diagnosis of Argan.

Thomas Diafoirus Angélique’s betrothed, Thomas is a ‘‘great booby.’’ As his father points out, he is dim-witted, persists in ridiculous arguments, and has a ‘‘blind attachment to the opinions of ancient authorities.’’ Argan likes him despite his foolish speeches and his indifference to Angélique’s feelings towards him, and despite the fact that Thomas is a poor doctor and a stubborn bore.

Monsieur Fleurant Monsieur Fleurant is an ‘‘apothecary,’’ an archaic word for a pharmacist, and an assistant to Monsieur Purgon. He is offended when Béralde convinces Argan to postpone an injection, and he complains to his superior.

Flora The Roman goddess of blossoming spring ﬂowers, Flora is also associated with fertility. She appears in the ﬁrst prologue to the play, inviting the shepherds to frolic and praising Louis XIV.

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Louison Louison is Angélique’s younger sister, who appears, according to Béralde, not to be in line to inherit any of Argan’s fortune. She loves her sister and attempts to disguise her knowledge of Cléante’s visit to Angélique from her father, but she admits what she has seen when her father threatens to beat her.

Pan Pan is the Greek god of shepherds and rural life, often represented as having the features of a goat. He appears in the prologue, urging the shepherds to amuse Louis XIV.

Punchinello Punchinello is the ‘‘old money-lender’’ who tells Cléante the news of the arranged marriage, and he sings and dances in the comical ﬁrst interlude. Toinette tells Angélique that this favor will cost her ‘‘a few buttery words,’’ presumably because Punchinello is a rich old man who likes to chase after young women.

Monsieur Purgon Argan’s chief doctor and Thomas Diafoirus’s uncle, Monsieur Purgon is a prime example of the incompetent and greedy doctors whom Molière mocks. His name means ‘‘cleanse’’ or ‘‘purge’’ in Latin, a joke relating to his preparation of enemas to clear Argan’s bowels. His only appearance in the play is to threaten and dismiss Argan after Monsieur Fleurant informs him that Argan has postponed an injection.

Toinette Toinette is the clever family servant and the chief schemer in the plot to arrange Angélique and Cléante’s marriage. Cunning and resourceful, she tricks and outsmarts Argan, pretends to take Béline’s side, disguises herself as a doctor, and organizes the ruse that Argan has died in order to reveal Béline’s and Angélique’s true feelings about him. Toinette is also the most astute of the characters, in part because she is not a member of the silly bourgeoisie Molière satirizes, and in part because her occasional snide comments and observations provide witty comedy. She is also quite selﬂess; she is devoted to Angélique and says she would ‘‘rather die’’ than desert her, which seems to be her entire motivation for plotting against Béline.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • The Imaginary Invalid is a comedy both in the classical sense of the word (a story with a happy ending) and in the sense that it is meant to be humorous. Seventeenth-century audiences found the play quite humorous. Explore the differences in humor between seventeenth-century France and twenty-ﬁrst-century America, and explain why certain parts of the play would have been humorous then, but are not as humorous now. What techniques and sources does Molière use to amuse his audience, and which comedic traditions are the most important to The Imaginary Invalid? • Molière was a masterful actor as well as a playwright, and he played the role of Argan for the ﬁrst four performances of The Imaginary Invalid. Research Molière’s life and discuss the reasons he might have chosen to write this role for himself. Consider how Argan’s imaginary illnesses might have related to Molière’s real illnesses, from which he died after the play’s fourth performance. Also, discuss more broadly

THEMES The Medical Profession It is immediately clear that Molière is interested in a pointed satire of the entire medical profession in The Imaginary Invalid, an agenda that is common to many of the dramatist’s works. In a manner that would have been familiar to contemporary audiences, the play constantly ridicules the pompous behavior, misuse and overuse of Latin, incompetence, ignorance, and selﬁshness of doctors. Monsieur Purgon and Monsieur Fleurant are mocked by their very names, which suggest ‘‘purging’’ and ‘‘ﬂowery,’’ respectively, and Monsieur Diafoirus and Thomas are shown to be incompetent doctors with intolerable personalities. Molière attacks doctors with satire that is not simply farcical, however; at the beginning of act 3,

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how you think Molière combined his acting and writing talents, and how each were affected by the other. • Read two or three other comedies by Molière, such as Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and/or Don Juan. Compare the common themes and techniques of the plays you read. Which of the plays do you ﬁnd most applicable to today’s concerns? What makes The Imaginary Invalid unique? Many critics have found themes that are present throughout Molière’s works; discuss some themes that you notice arising again and again, and compare how they are treated in each play. • Sometimes Molière’s comedy is difﬁcult to visualize on the page. Act out one of the more farcical scenes, such as act 2, scene 5, in which Argan and Monsieur Diafoirus keep attempting to speak at the same time. Then try performing or reading aloud your favorite scene in the play. Discuss how this reading/performance enhances your understanding of the scene.

Béralde’s discussion with Argan about the medical profession is an eloquent and even philosophical argument against the medical profession. Béralde questions the basic reasons for living, pointing out that nature should be left to itself. Although the claim that doctors are useless may seem doubtful today, it was not an extreme view during the seventeenth century, and the idea that nature is too complex for humans to understand and that life should be embraced as a phenomenon outside the realm of science is a philosophical notion to which modern readers can relate. Since Molière’s presentation of medicine is such a central theme in the play, it also relates to many of the dramatist’s other thematic ideas. For example, critics have connected Argan’s imaginary illnesses to the imaginative endeavor of a play, since these are both obsessions associated with the crea-

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tor’s pleasure; they are both spectacles that affect the subject psychologically, and they both must be reconciled with bourgeois demand for moneymaking and reasonable prices, which is why Argan is so interested in having a doctor in the family. Also, Molière’s ideas about the medical profession can be related to the ‘‘solipsistic’’ philosophy sometimes associated with him—the theory that one’s own existence is the only certainty.

Love and Arranged Marriage Love and marriage in seventeenth-century Paris are important themes both in the play itself and in its pastoral musical interludes, which involve shepherds, mythological ﬁgures, and gypsies dancing and singing. All the musical interludes, with the exception of the ﬁnale, dwell on the wonder and greatness of youthful love, which underlies the play’s main conﬂict of Angélique’s struggle to marry her true love, Cléante. The struggle exists between the force of young love and Argan’s bourgeois desire to save money and continue his absurd obsession, since Argan has complete control over his daughter’s wealth and love life. The villain in this struggle is Béline and the false love and greedy manipulation she represents. Molière portrays the young lovers as completely under the power of Argan’s wishes, although they do have the ability, like Béline, to manipulate him onto their side. It is possible that the play criticizes the father’s power over arranged marriages, since Argan is so selﬁsh and petty, although it is unclear that Molière would actually advocate any serious institutional change. Also, it is not necessarily clear that pleasure-seeking young love is actually the solution to the play’s problems of selﬁshness, greed, and incompetence.

Class and Politics The prologue establishes that the play was written chieﬂy for the pleasure of King Louis XIV, and seventeenth-century audiences would have realized that Molière was trying to secure further patronage and regain the favor he was in danger of losing to his previous collaborator, Jean-Baptiste Lully. Although the prologue is ambiguous and mildly ironic in its praise of Louis, arguing that the best way to praise the king’s military accomplishments is by performing for his idle pleasure, its ﬂattery is mostly in earnest, since Louis’s patronage was so vital to the playwright. And Molière indulges in something both he and the king thoroughly enjoyed: ridiculing the bourgeoisie.

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The bourgeoisie class, which comprised the majority of Molière’s audience, is one of the main objects of Molière’s satire. While ridiculing their silliness and greed, The Imaginary Invalid also attacks middle-class incompetence, immorality, shallowness, and the unsuitability of the bourgeoisie to hold so much power over their children. An important element of this satire is Toinette’s plot to manipulate Argan into supporting his daughter’s love, since she is a lower-class maid exerting power and inﬂuence over the middle-class father ﬁgure. Nevertheless, the bourgeois Béralde is vital to the success of this plan, and there is ultimately no real shift in the household’s balance of power. Molière, who is from a bourgeois background himself, pokes fun at the middle class to please the king and other noble patrons, but it is unclear that his representation of them goes beyond mild ridicule.

STYLE Comedy-Ballet Once his theater troupe was established in Paris, Molière knew he had to please both Louis XIV, his most important patron, and the bulk of the theater-going bourgeois audience. Perhaps his greatest innovation in this regard was the invention of the ‘‘comedy-ballet,’’ a form that combines song and dance with farce and ‘‘comedy of manners’’ (witty comedy that is satirical of a particular social class). Comedy-ballets were Molière’s most popular genre, and often, especially in The Imaginary Invalid, their musical intervals provide an important and insightful commentary on the main action. A good example of this is Cléante and Angélique’s pastoral song, which directly mimics their own situation. Comedies of manners originated in ancient Rome and, particularly in Molière’s work, are known for combining careful attention to character development with the use of characters of a certain ‘‘type,’’ meant to be representative of their social position. Molière’s comedies often contain an obsessive father, a reasonable brother, a manipulative second wife, and a plotting servant, although these characters are not merely stock types, but full and unique personalities. With over-elaborate plots that are often simply an unimportant backdrop to the

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characters and the social scene, comedies of manners provided an opportunity for theater audiences to laugh at themselves. Combining this convention with ballet was instrumental to Molière’s success, and it resulted in a very popular form that laid the foundations for later developments in theater and music, such as French opera.

same social functions. Also, bourgeois father ﬁgures had complete control over their wives and daughters, who had almost no ﬁnancial rights under the law, and these fathers tended to marry their daughters into other bourgeois families. These connections strengthened the sense of identity in the middle class, and tended to inspire economic growth in cities.

Farce

Outside the established traditions of the French court, however, the bourgeoisie met with a large amount of resentment and dislike as they became established. Although members of the bourgeois class were comparatively well educated, the gentry tended to stereotype them as ignorant and petty. Associated with vanity, miserliness (or ﬁnancial greed), and decaying morality, the bourgeois type was a favorite target of playwrights as well as conservative moralists. Many of Molière’s plays, including The Imaginary Invalid, include caricatures and broad satires of bourgeois types, and this seemed to please both the nobility that attended his plays and the bulk of the bourgeois theatergoing crowd that may have enjoyed laughing at themselves.

The Imaginary Invalid also contains elements of ‘‘farce,’’ or exaggerated and even bawdy comedy that often involves stereotypical characters and improbable situations. Farce originated in Greek and Roman drama, and the style gradually developed a reputation for crudeness and low comedy, but farce had been popular in the French theater since the ﬁfteenth century. Molière’s audiences continued to enjoy a certain amount of buffoonery, although Molière’s use of farce was one of the areas in which he encountered opposition in the church and among French moral conservatives. The Imaginary Invalid is most clearly farcical during its episodes of physical comedy, such as when Argan chases Toinette with a stick, although scenes such as act 2, scene 5, in which Argan and Monsieur Diafoirus continually attempt to speak at the same time, are also farcical.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Bourgeoisie During the mid-seventeenth century, a class of wealthy tradesmen and entrepreneurs who were not a part of the peasantry nor of the nobility began to increase in size in France. Known as the bourgeoisie, this increasingly powerful group lived in large towns, especially Paris, and largely worked as merchants, tradesmen, master-craftsmen, and professionals. Because of their ﬁnancial power, the bourgeoisie were able to inﬂuence local politics and enjoy a distinguished legal status; they were able to extend these privileges to their peers and divide themselves from the laboring masses. The bourgeoisie grew increasingly stable through the seventeenth century, and inspired a sense of belonging among its members. Business associations became personal and religious associations as bourgeois families met in church and attended the

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Louis XIV and the Nobility The most powerful and privileged persons in seventeenth-century France, whom Molière desired to please in order to survive as a dramatist, were the French nobility and particularly King Louis XIV. The well-established French nobility was an extremely exclusive group that married within its ranks; status came largely from birth and race, although the king could confer coats of arms, and certain ofﬁces earned their holders noble titles. Exempt from direct taxation, the nobility, together with the king, formed the power base of the government. They were also the key patrons of the arts; nobles such as Bernard de Nogaret de La Valette and Armand de Bourbon had been the chief means by which Molière’s troupe had funded its extended tour of the provinces. Louis himself was by far the dramatist’s most important patron during Molière’s time in Paris, however. The king not only funded Molière’s troupe; he provided them with a performance space and even interceded on the dramatist’s behalf when his play Tartuffe was condemned by moral conservatives, including Louis’s mother. Louis’s favor for Molière waned in the 1670s, however, and in 1672, the musician Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was Molière’s former collaborator, gained from the king the right to oversee all theater performed with music. Because

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1670s: Under French law, a father has complete authority over his daughter’s marriage, and a husband has complete authority over his wife and her wealth.

French government and tickets are more accessible to lower-income groups, but the upper middleclass continues to be the primary audience group in many Parisian theaters.

Today: In France, women are ﬁnancially equal under the law and no one requires his/her parents’ consent to marry, although males must be at least eighteen years old and females must be at least ﬁfteen.

• 1670s: Louis XIV is king of France, exerting increasing power over religious and state affairs, building an extravagant palace in Versailles, and pursuing an aggressive foreign policy agenda.

• 1670s: The Parisian theater is funded by a combination of the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the king, but most theatergoers are bourgeois. Today: Theaters are often subsidized by the

of Lully’s inﬂuence at court, The Imaginary Invalid premiered not in court for Louis but in Molière’s regular theater. The play is clearly designed to curry favor with the king; it contains precisely the mix of music and comedy that Louis enjoyed, and Molière knew Louis would laugh at its ﬂamboyant ridicule of the bourgeoisie. The late 1660s and early 1670s were periods of prosperity and expansion for the French monarch; he had spent large sums on his own grandiose lifestyle in order to impress on the nation his authority and power since his assumption of the role of ﬁrst minister, after the death of the powerful Italian minister Cardinal Jules Mazarin in 1661. Provoking a series of wars against his neighbors, expanding the French colonial inﬂuence, and building an enormous palace in Versailles, the king became known as Louis the Great and established France as the dominant European power. Louis had already begun to run out of funds by the time The Imaginary Invalid was performed, however, because of the expense of the palace at Versailles as well as military spending and lavish excesses. These spending sprees would contribute greatly to the decline in France’s power around the turn of the seventeenth century, as well as to the end of a golden age in French literature.

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Today: France is a democratic republic and has not had a monarch since 1848. Its president is the center-right politician Jacques Chirac, who, along with the German president, opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Commedia Dell’Arte In addition to the tradition of ‘‘comedy of manners,’’ described above, Molière was inﬂuenced by the Italian comic form, commedia dell’arte, which was ﬂourishing in Paris and throughout continental Europe. Known for its framework of stock characters present with only minor variations in all performances, commedia dell’arte would often consist of a situation such as a young couple’s love coming into conﬂict with their parents’ opposition. Actors typically used masks to portray the common ensemble of stock characters. When Molière’s troupe established themselves in Paris, they performed on the off days of a theater occupied by Italian players of commedia dell’arte.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Molière had developed numerous enemies among devout conservatives and jealous rivals by the time The Imaginary Invalid appeared. Tartuffe was banned for a period of ﬁve years because of its commentary on religion, before Louis XIV’s pious and conservative mother died and the king interceded to allow

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the play to be performed. But the personal, aesthetic, and moral criticism that peaked in the mid1660s had leveled off well before the performance of Molière’s ﬁnal play. His main concern at this point was not the view of the critical majority or his bourgeois audience; it was the favor of his long-standing and most important patron, Louis XIV, because the king had recently transferred his favor to Molière’s longtime collaborator, JeanBaptiste Lully. One of the dramatist’s main concerns in The Imaginary Invalid, therefore, was to please the king, and the play was received very well during its ﬁrst performances, until all of the reactions to it were dominated by Molière’s death. Since then, critics have frequently dwelled on the irony of this death due to a lung condition; Molière performed as the imaginary invalid Argan, and lung trouble is the condition that Toinette ascribes to all of Argan’s problems while she is disguised as a doctor. In his essay ‘‘The Doctor’s Curse,’’ J. D. Hubert writes, ‘‘Contemporaries of the author dwelled at length on this morbid paradox,’’ and he cites one of the epitaphs concerning Molière’s death by an anonymous author: ‘‘here lies Molière; since he was a great Actor, if he acts the part of an imaginary corpse, he does it very well.’’ Molière’s collected works were published in 1682, and since then, he has been widely recognized as an extremely important writer and actor. His acting style inﬂuenced the comic style for generations afterwards, his plays have been continually produced throughout the world, and many critics (including the Enlightenment-era philosopher Voltaire) have discovered profound philosophical ideas and systems in his plays. Twentieth-century critics have been particularly interested in the relationship between Molière’s theatricality and the content of the plays themselves, and The Imaginary Invalid has taken a prominent role in this discussion because of its irony related to Molière’s acting and his personal life.

CRITICISM Scott Trudell Trudell is a freelance writer with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay,

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Trudell discusses Molière’s self-consciousness about performance, reality, and the role of the theater in The Imaginary Invalid. Critics and scholars have long been fascinated by the self-conscious irony of Molière’s last play. The dramatist’s death only hours after the ﬁnale of its fourth performance, during which Molière, in the role of Argan, coughed up blood onstage, was long considered his ﬁnal, greatest joke, and countless commentators noted that actual life seemed to be merging with the theatrical world in a sort of triumph of illusion by the famous actor. Molière’s theatricality and showmanship continue to be common topics of discussion in criticism of the playwright and actor, including his ability to combine the arts of writing and acting, and his interest in incorporating the role of the artist and creator into the world of drama. One aspect of this self-conscious theatricality that is particularly important to The Imaginary Invalid is the idea of imagination and falsiﬁcation as it relates to art and performance. Elaborately theatrical, ﬂamboyantly dramatic, and speciﬁcally designed to please King Louis XIV, on the surface the play might seem to be a simple farce or an unsubstantial joke. Far from reinforcing the idea that the purpose of the theater is simply to divert and amuse its audience, however, Molière was interested in highlighting drama’s power to inﬂuence and attack society. This essay will argue that The Imaginary Invalid is a sophisticated and self-conscious critique of the function and purpose of the theater, the value of which, Molière suggests, lies in its intimate connection to reality. Aside from the prologue’s ironic insistence that the purpose of the play will be ‘‘to charm [King Louis’s] leisure. / And contribute to his pleasure,’’ the clearest hint that the play is a self-conscious analysis of theater is the insistent theatricality of its characters. Toinette, Béralde, and even Béline are all capable of theatrical creativity in the form of arranging and directing other people according to their own motives. Cléante and Angélique manage to subvert their real feelings into an improvisational musical performance, while Punchinello and the pastoral ﬁgures of the interludes comment on the themes of the play in the form of a ballet. Even the incompetent doctors are able to make a performance of their craft—in fact, since it has no substance and is something of an imaginary craft, medicine is shown to be nothing but a performance.

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A scene from the 1981 stage production of The Hypochondriac, a translated version of the The Imaginary Invalid, performed at the Olivier Theatre in London

Indeed, it soon becomes clear that every character in the play is a master of the art of performance, amusement, and trickery, with the important exception of Argan himself. Incompetent and gullible, Argan is unable to manage his own affairs or judge the true character of his loved ones. He is a stock character similar to Homer Simpson in the popular television show The Simpsons, for whom audiences feel a certain affection because of his childlike tenderness, despite the fact that he is an ignorant and dim-witted father ﬁgure. It is this tender aspect of Argan’s personality that leads Toinette to call him ‘‘kind-hearted.’’ Because of his innocence and his inability to decipher all of the theatrical manipulations at his expense, Argan inspires sympathy among the audience and endears himself to them. But it is fascinating and ironic that Molière would choose to render his main character, and the role he played, unable to participate in the games and performances of the other characters. Argan must be coached along in his every action, even in his bowel movements, whence comes a great deal of the play’s farcical humor. Argan continually alludes to his ‘‘bile’’ throughout the play, and a bowel movement serves as the excuse for Argan to leave

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the room two out of the three times he does so during the course of the plot. As Monsieur Purgon (whose name suggests cleansing or purging in Latin) notes while defending the injection that Argan has refused, it is Argan’s enemas, ‘‘which would have produced a startling effect on the bowels,’’ that cause him to rush to the toilet. Yet, in a typical and comical misidentiﬁcation, Argon says of Toinette: ‘‘She’s the cause of all the bile I make.’’ These references to bowel movements and enemas are important because they suggest that Molière uses Argan’s ‘‘bile’’ as a metaphor for the performance and theatricality that he is unable to effect by himself. The constipated Argan is always a mere tool of the manipulations around him, whether as a means for Béline to access his fortune, a means by which Angélique can marry her lover, or a means by which the doctors can marry into the bourgeoisie and take their money. And, as he ironically recognizes, his chief manipulator is his maid, Toinette, even more so than the scheming doctors. It is she who is ﬁguratively (or, through metaphor instead of literally) able to cause his bowel movements, because it is she who is most competent at manipulating Argan to effect what she desires.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? • Molière’s Don Juan (1665) is one of the dramatist’s most compelling and radical plays. It follows the adventures of the seductive and antireligious Juan of Spain, and it was banned throughout Molière’s lifetime by religious conservatives.

• The French philosopher Voltaire’s famous work Candide (1759) is a provocative and ironic attack on optimism by a thinker who valued the philosophy he found in Molière’s plays.

• William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), a satirical play about the settling of a fortune and the arrangement of a marriage, is one of the most inﬂuential English comedies of manners from the Restoration period.

• Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) is an example of a vibrant comedy of manners from a vastly different era, taking as its subject the vain and hypocritical English upper class of the late Victorian era.

• Phaedra (1677), by Jean Racine, is a tragedy based on the classical model. Although it is vastly different in style and content from any of Molière’s works, it reveals another major prodigy from this period of French history.

• Geoffrey Treasure’s Louis XIV (2001) is a comprehensive and readable guide to the life of the famous French king and the atmosphere of seventeenth-century France.

Molière’s choice to use bile as a metaphor for theatricality is partly a joke on the low reputation of the theater; biographers have speculated that the reason Molière took his stage name was to avoid the disgrace his father would endure to be associated with a dramatist. But, more importantly, the metaphor emphasizes the play’s distaste for cheap tricks and petty manipulations. To Molière, doctors were petty liars and thieves who survived by taking advantage of the public with elaborate ruses; their manipulations were offensive and absurd because they failed to appreciate that the human body is a mystery mankind cannot understand. Similarly, Béline’s trickery and the notary’s shrewdness are offensive because their only object is money. This is not to say that Molière views all theatricality in this light; Argan’s complete lack of the talent for performance is also undesirable, which is why he needs to learn how to become a doctor, and therefore an actor, in the course of the play. Indeed, Béralde’s and Toinette’s manipulations are seen in a comparatively positive light because the object of their endeavors is not money or selﬁshness but Angélique and Cléante’s marriage. Even these tricks are portrayed as inelegant and even vulgar, how-

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ever; at its best, trickery is portrayed as a shrewd joke. Theatricality and performance remain associated with bile, and it is worth asking why Molière seems to be devaluing his own craft. Since the answer to this question becomes clearer when taken in the context of Molière’s other self-conscious devices in the play, it will help to examine a few of these devices before making a conclusion regarding the dramatist’s apparent selfdeprecation. Perhaps the most obvious of these devices are the many instances of performances within the performance, from the musical prologue and interludes to Cléante and Angélique’s love song in act 2. Commenting on the action of the play more substantially than Molière’s previous comedy-ballet interludes, these episodes often come closer to what is really at stake in the play than does the main plot. Cléante and Angélique’s song is their only opportunity to express their true feelings to each other; Punchinello’s dance brings out the connection between love and money more forcefully and clearly than in the rest of the play; and the shepherds and gypsies meditate on young love and directly attack doctors without the need to code their social com-

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THEATRICALITY AND PERFORMANCE REMAIN ASSOCIATED WITH BILE, AND IT IS WORTH ASKING WHY MOLIÈRE SEEMS TO BE DEVALUING HIS OWN CRAFT.’’

mentary into metaphors or subtext. These interludes are not interludes at all, but real and direct commentaries on the themes of the play. Another example of this refusal to treat theatricality as merely a diversion comes in the ironic ﬁrst prologue, which, although it is earnest in its ﬂattery of the king’s recent military successes in the Dutch War, is nevertheless mainly a goodnatured joke about the ‘‘reign of love and pleasure’’ that characterized Louis’s home rule, referring to Louis’s many mistresses and extravagant idleness. Pan’s comment that ‘‘silence and sedateness / Serve best to sing his greatness’’ is entirely ironic, both because the prologue is nothing but a song of the king’s greatness and because Louis was known (and is still known) more than any other French monarch to favor ﬂamboyant and elaborate celebrations of his greatness. Instead of ‘‘silence and sedateness’’ on political themes, the goal of The Imaginary Invalid is to confuse reality with theater so that Molière’s commentary on the real world can be as cutting and real as is possible. Finally, Molière’s crafty showmanship is perhaps at its most obvious when, in act 3, Béralde and Argan argue about the plays of Molière. This is more than a clever joke; it sets up a confusing problem of perception for the audience by inverting the real world and the theatrical world. In discussing Molière’s plays about doctors, Argan and Béralde seem to be in the audience, while the audience naturally appears to be the play. Also, this is one of two scenes most strangely resonant with Molière’s actual death, since Argan forecasts that Molière will die from ignoring the beneﬁts of medicine. The other instance is Toinette’s appearance as a disguised doctor, in which she attributes all of Argan’s illnesses to the lungs, which is the condition from which Molière actually died.

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With these examples of Molière’s self-conscious adeptness at confusing theater with reality in order to make a more striking comment on the real world, it should be much clearer why the dramatist used bile as a metaphor for performance and seemed to devalue his own craft. It is the showperson’s classic trick of modesty, pretending to be simple and shallow in order to extend and substantiate the illusion. By establishing Argan, the role he played, as an incompetent and foolhardy person with no ability to perform or manipulate, Molière accomplishes his greatest illusion in the play, to make his artistic creation real. This is how the great actor was able to reach out and grab his audience, challenging their assumptions and forcing them to acknowledge that his satire, cloaked as a comedy-ballet and a pleasurable diversion, was incredibly real and urgent to their world. Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on The Imaginary Invalid, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Albert Bermel In the following essay, Bermel provides an overview of The Imaginary Invalid, examining the play’s theatricality, its central character, and themes of medicine and love. Did Molière’s last work kill him or keep him alive until he had brought it to life? After writing, staging, and playing the demanding lead in the three-act farce-comedy with spectacular trappings, he collapsed and died only four performances into the run of this anything-but-crazy quilt, sewn together, while he was gravely ill, from bits of his earlier comedies and farces, with the addition of swatches of new merriment, irony, and caustic observation. Of the staple ﬁgures the author adapts from his repertoire, as though pulling favorite old garments from a wardrobe, Argan belongs with the other masters of the house: he explicitly claims the right ‘‘to do what seems good to me’’ in his family (III, 3); this right includes offering his daughter the option of wedding the man of his choice (in this case, a young doctor) or going into a convent. The daughter, Angélique, like the nubile daughters in earlier Molière, has her heart set on somebody else, a scrupulous young man named Cléante, who resembles other jeunes premiers in ﬁnding himself compelled into trickery in order to woo her. Argan’s brother, Béralde, is the last in a line of interlocutors who are generous to a fault with their advice and, unless assigned to vivid or even eccentric actors, tend to disappear into their lines and become trans-

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parent. Toinette, the maidservant, has the motherliness of Nicole and Dorine, together with a dash of the wiliness and agility displayed by the playwright’s conspiratorial male servants. A notary, an apothecary, and several physicians, all derived from the pedants of the earlier writings, especially the ones in Doctor Love, round out the cast of familiar faces. Argan, like Orgon, has a young second wife, Béline, but she does not resemble Elmire or the other wives; she is more of an analogy with Tartuffe: an object of affection and, at the same time, a sweettalking, malicious hypocrite. Above all, Argan shares with other would-be masters of the house a hunger for something he does not have, which looks attainable but proves elusive. The Sganarelles of The School for Husbands and The Forced Marriage, Arnolphe, and Harpagon want a young and malleable bride; George Dandin hopes for the dissolution of an indissoluble marriage; Orgon seeks a spiritual son and heir; Monsieur Jourdain would break away from the mediocre middle; and Argan yearns for triumph over disease, a form of yearning for immortality. The only strict novelty in the dramatis personae is a signiﬁcant child’s role, that of Argan’s eight-year-old daughter, Louison (played in the original production by the daughter of Mlle Beauval, who took the part of Toinette). But as always, Moliéresque mannerisms and full-blown idiosyncrasies give a blunt or ﬁne freshness to each character, and most strikingly to the role designated for himself. Argan does not quite qualify as an imaginary invalid, despite the play’s title. He lives in a state of anxiety as he wavers between constipation and diarrhea. These he brings on by engorging a chemical banquet intended, in alternation, to scour and restabilize his bowels. In the play’s opening soliloquy, as he queries the charges on the bills submitted by his apothecary, he recites a catalogue of seventeenth-century purgatives, laxatives, softeners, hardeners, emollients, internal cleansers, and other agents that correspond to the items hawked during today’s dinner-hour television— only here they accumulate in an incantatory poetryby-listing reminiscent of the one declaimed by Volpone as he plays the charlatan Scoto of Mantua— or of the delicacies that Dorante in The Bourgeois Gentleman says he would have liked to prepare for the dinner party given by him and paid for by Monsieur Jourdain. Argan’s speech reveals a devout attitude toward medicine, a preoccupation with the expulsion of dirt, wind, and disorder, a vision of the body freed from the impurities of intrusive matter, a perfectly lubricated and impeccably or-

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MOLIÈRE’S COMIC AND FARCICAL ASSAULTS ON MEDICINE ARE OF A PIECE, THEN, WITH HIS ASSAULTS ON THE ABSOLUTIST (AND SOMETIMES INSINCERE AND GRASPING) THEOLOGIANS OF HIS TIME, AS IN TARTUFFE AND DON JUAN. . . .’’

ganized organism that is the counterpart of an immaculate soul. To Argan the notion of health, the ideal that is an absence, has its own mystique and can be attained only by a fervor that almost mounts to a belief in witchcraft. Like Beckett’s Krapp and Hamm, he spends much of his time awaiting the next internal spasm, his nearest equivalent to a sign of grace from on high. Molière only slightly tempers this dedication to medication. Just as Harpagon can, so to speak, step outside himself and pretend to become the loving father as he offers to give up his prospective bride to his son, and just as Monsieur Jourdain ‘‘lends’’ Dorante all the cash he asks for but keeps a notebook with a reckoning of the total debts, so Argan shows a streak of practicality as he cuts as much as two-thirds off the apothecary’s asking price for certain medicines. He is never altogether submersed in his fanatical devotions. By plotting the scene as a monologue, Molière shows us Argan at odds with himself, an eager imbiber of medicine pitted against a manager of the household accounts—like a millionaire, he plays Mr. Frugal when it comes to small expenses. The internal conﬂict ﬁnally erupts into anger, a ﬂow of bile, which generates fear. What harm will the bile do him? He realizes he is alone and vulnerable; he calls for help. And by the conclusion of the play’s ﬁrst speech we can diagnose his sickness as not imaginary but real, a chronic (and comic) terror that he may suddenly die unattended. This husband and father has his blind spots. The most obvious one, after his unbounded faith in physic and physicians, is his wife. He believes she loves him without reserve even in his supposedly ailing condition, while the others in the family have

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already taken her for the ‘‘gold-digger’’ she is. He conﬁdes that he wants her to bear his child (his doctor has said it can be done!) and that he means to disinherit Angélique and Louison in her favor and presumably the baby’s (I, 7). By contrast, Harpagon and Orgon never openly declare their similar intentions of acquiring new offspring to replace the present ones as legatees, although these intentions can be deduced from the plays. No doubt Argan expects to enroll the child as soon as possible in a medical school, but in the meantime he can bring a doctor into the family for free consultations by giving Angélique to Thomas Diafoirus, a recent medical graduate and another of Argan’s blind spots. Dr. Thomas and his father arrive for formal introductions (II, 5). Cléante, rejected as a suitor for Angélique, has already presented himself in the guise of a substitute for her music teacher (II, 4), and is invited by Argan to watch the proceedings, that is, to witness Argan’s pride at having lured a medico into the family. As often happens in Molière, no mothers take part in the marriage arrangements or, indeed, in the play, only Toinette as a pseudomotherly but skeptical presence. She has previously registered her protests about the alliance. Angélique, she says, is not ill and therefore doesn’t need to marry a doctor (I, 5). After an exchange of greetings, during which both fathers speak at once and do not hear each other or comprehend that this means they are at odds from the start, the senior Dr. Diafoirus (the name is a play on the French word for ‘‘diarrhea’’) boasts that his son holds tenaciously to ‘‘the old school of medicine’’; that he never changes his opinions; and that he vigorously disputes any new theories that come up, such as Harvey’s proposal that blood circulated throughout the body, not exactly a recent discovery, since it was published ﬁfty-four years before The Imaginary Invalid but remained in contention among French medical practitioners. Young Thomas may lack imagination and enterprise—did not begin to identify alphabetical letters until his tenth year—but now, according to his father, he has a reliable mind and the required temperament for fathering wellmade children. The young doctor more than lives up to some of these boasts. His physical potential for fatherhood is not tested in the play, but he shows off his reliable mind as he recites by rote some speeches, balanced in their rhetoric, hackneyed through and through, and evidently composed by his father. He follows his father’s instructions all the way, despite several lapses of memory and after he has directed the address meant for Béline to Angélique. He

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offers an engagement gift to his ﬁancée-to-be: a copy of his thesis attacking the ‘‘circulationists’’; he then invites her to a performance, not of a play, but of the dissection of a woman’s body, on which he will discourse. According to a stage direction, this mechanical monster programmed to appear human ‘‘does everything with bad grace and at the wrong moment,’’ an example—perhaps exaggerated only a little, if at all—of the new graduate who has capitulated to the rules banged into his head and calls his calling an art while regarding it as a literally prescriptive science. We soon learn the author’s purpose in keeping Cléante onstage during this scene. Argan retained him as a reciprocal measure: after one father has shown off his son, the other must show off his daughter. She will sing for the guests, accompanied by the tutor. Cléante sets up a pastoral duet in which a shepherd and shepherdess exchange vows. Argan grows displeased with the content of the song, especially when he peeks at the sheets of music and sees there are no words written on them. Cléante replies that a new form of notation, just invented, incorporates the lyrics in the music; but to the audience it has by now become obvious that he and Angélique are openly improvising (in rhyme) as they seal a secret love pact. This continuous, two-part scene (II, 5) lies at the heart of the play, not only in its structural placement, but also in its juxtaposing of the two types of wooing. The rigidity of the Diafoirus doctors, père et ﬁls, relying on unfelt, rehearsed sentiments, contrasts with the spontaneity of Cléante and Angélique as they give vent to their outbursts of feeling. Diafoirus senior speaks of treating patients by ‘‘following the current’’ and going ‘‘according to the rules,’’ but the method applies also to his and his son’s conduct in life beyond their professional practices. The bleak young graduate has dragged himself through his training by obedience and obduracy. In order to qualify as a candidate, he was forbidden to trust his own thoughts and feelings; his father and teachers have trained him to suppress any glimmer of initiative. Since The Imaginary Invalid is a divertissement, the three acts spill over into a balletic prologue, two intermissions, and a ﬁnale. But the drama itself can be broadly visualized as two connected parts. Part one consists of a demonstration of the follies and deﬁciencies of physicians and the foolish credulity of this one patient-victim; part two grows into an extended debate over whether medi-

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cine has any value at all, whether indeed it does more harm than good. The demonstration reaches one climax with the appearance of Dr. Diafoirus and his son. It rises to a second climax with the arrival of the apothecary, Monsieur Fleurant, syringe in hand, to administer an enema, which Argan declines to take after being pressured by Béralde, although he has strong reservations about giving it up (III, 4). With hardly any delay, Argan’s personal physician, Purgon, strides into the house and because of his patient’s refusal to follow orders, works himself up into a lather culminating in a curse: He wills Argan to sink into a succession of sicknesses (from bradypepsia to dyspepsia to apepsia to lientery to dysentery to dropsy) and thence, within four days, into death (III, 5). This second climax reduces Argan to a state of terror. As a third climax, Toinette impersonates an itinerant male doctor who claims to have lived for ninety hale years by following his own miraculous cures and has now sought out this ‘‘famous invalid’’ to be his patient. When Argan tells of his symptoms (headaches, blurred vision, heart pains, and the like), ‘‘Doctor’’ Toinette repudiates Purgon’s diagnoses, attributing all the maladies to Argan’s weak lungs. She pooh-poohs the remedies and diet decreed by Purgon and advises Argan to have a leg amputated and an eye put out, advice he is reluctant to follow but can’t quite bring himself to discredit, either (III, 10). The second climax and, even more, the third climax with its outrageous suggestions, push the action out of farcical satire and into the world of fantasy in which medicine sometimes operates, in both senses of the word, as they prepare us for the fantastic sequence of the ﬁnale. The other part of the play, the debate that punctuates these climaxes, takes place, on and off, between Argan and Béralde, and it too leads into the ﬁnale. Béralde asserts (III, 3) that Purgon would never dream of questioning the dogmas he lives and works by; that he bears his patients no ill will (this statement is strategically placed, shortly before Purgon utters his curse), for he would despatch them all, Argan included, no more remorsefully or malevolently than he would, if need be, kill off his own wife and children, or even himself, for the sake of going the limit with a ‘‘cure.’’ Argan counters weakly by accusing his brother of thinking he knows more than all the doctors put together. He protests that it is easy to argue against medicine when one is in good health and (as a smattering of his own malice pops out) wishes his brother were ill; then he might change his tune (III, 4). Béralde says

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that the only effective remedies are rest and the workings of nature without interference from the medical profession; Argan must have an uncommonly strong constitution for it to have withstood all the enemas, laxatives, and other drugs he has taken. In the course of the debate, Béralde proposes a visit to ‘‘a comedy by Moliére on this subject.’’ Argan badmouths Molière for making fun of doctors and patients. This touch of theatricalism reminds us that Argan enjoys robust health—physically, at any rate—but that his creator, while speaking the lines, is dying. How many ‘‘cures’’ had Molière been subjected to in the effort to preserve those organs ‘‘Doctor’’ Toinette blames for all Argan’s symptoms, the lungs? In the play’s ultimate scene (III, 14), Béralde, realizing that no argument can sap his brother’s faith in medicine, closes the debate by suggesting that Argan become a doctor and learn to cure himself. Toinette supports him by adding that there is no illness rash enough to attack a doctor. Béralde has hired some actors for the ﬁnale, as Covielle did in The Bourgeois Gentleman, to induct the hero into a new mode of being, only this time they dress up not as Turks but as members of the doctoral faculty, as the play’s two parts come together. In expressing his disgust with Molière’s plays, Argan complains that the dramatist makes fun of ‘‘decent people like doctors’’ (III, 3). Béralde replies that he does not make fun of doctors; he ridicules medicine. Even if this claim truly expresses the author’s intentions, and I am not at all sure it does, he or any other writer would have the utmost difﬁculty in separating out the practitioners from the practices, because of the nature of drama. Certainly, his mockery of doctoring and doctors begins early, with his second play, and continues intermittently to the end of his life. For several centuries, critics and biographers have been asking why. One obvious answer is that medicine repeatedly failed him. Ariane Mnouchkine in her televised version of the playwright’s life implied another cause. In her ﬁrst episode, the boy Molière watches a clutch of doctors attending his mother while she is dying; they seem indifferent to her plight and her family’s, more concerned with their fees and professional squabbles than with saving her. The memory of their callous behavior stays vividly with him for the rest of his life. Mikhail Bulgakov, in his bouncing, dancing, slightly ﬁctionalized biography of the playwright, refers similarly to the ‘‘succession of doctors’’ who attended Madame Poquelin; they came ‘‘mounted on donkeys and wearing sinister tall caps’’ (The Life of Monsieur de Molière, II).

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There are other plausible explanations: that in oral, written, and improvised plays, doctors were a traditional object of mockery; that in purporting to effect cures, they play God and therefore deserve to be cut down to size, as overweening heroes always were in Greek myth and tragedy, among them the ‘‘ﬁrst physician,’’ Asclepius, the son of Apollo, cruelly punished by Zeus. Without discounting any of these possibilities, one can hypothesize that Molière would not have mocked doctors who a) attempted ‘‘natural’’ healing, without the aid of drugs and paraphernalia; b) scorned rules and mechanical reasoning. What he appears to ﬁnd most objectionable in the doctors of his day—at least, the ones he made fun of—was their dogmatism. Memorized learning that leads to false certitudes and masquerades as science (while calling itself an art) is a sign of stasis, mental death in life. Hence, Thomas Diafoirus’ machinelike behavior. This character is often played as an idiot. The role might seem more persuasive in performance if the actor begins like a well-ordered machine that runs with admirable smoothness—it makes one early blooper in mistaking Angélique for Béline— but gradually runs down, as if its power were cut off. The Diafoirus dogmas then give way to the improvised love duet, inspired by impulse and passion, which are signs of humanity and life. Such an interpretation ﬂatly contradicts the old view of Molière as the apostle of rationality, but that view, in all its variations, was educed from favoritism, preferring some of Molière’s characters and their arguments to others, rather than gauging the meanings of the clash of characters and of their ideas. Molière’s comic and farcical assaults on medicine are of a piece, then, with his assaults on the absolutist (and sometimes insincere and grasping) theologians of his time, as in Tartuffe and Don Juan; on amorality in the legal profession, as in Scapin; on secondhand scholarship, as in The Learned Ladies; and on the unbending personal traits evinced by his ‘‘masters of the house,’’ from Arnolphe to Harpagon and Argan. The latter is nearly as dogmatic as his doctors are, and they in turn are nearly as miserly as Harpagon, in that they cling possessively to their bits of prejudice, which they look on as priceless possessions. Even so, the doctors in the play, who believe themselves repositories of the conventional medical wisdom of the age, prescribe differently. Diafoirus traces Argan’s illness to the spleen and recommends roast meat for it; Purgon, who blames the liver, recommends boiled meat. When told of these conﬂicting causes, Diafoirus protects the pro-

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fession by closing ranks quickly and says the spleen and the liver are ‘‘in sympathy’’ and that roast and boiled meat are ‘‘the same thing’’ (II, 6). Later, Toinette, playing the ninety-year-old quack, scorns all the previous medical advice Argan has received (III, 10). Doctors, in other words, exemplify blinkered attitudes, and Molière’s spectators are more likely to have been familiar with—and adversely affected by—medicine than by other professions. The doctors in this play may come across as ﬁgures of fun, but they are too humorously treated for us to regard them as willful villains, people who intend harm—even the incensed Purgon as he launches his curse. The action, however, does throw up one unmistakable villain, Argan’s wife, Béline, who aims to dispossess Angélique and Louison, the daughters of the earlier marriage, and would like to see Angélique sent to a convent. In the same scene (II, 6) in which Thomas Diafoirus hopes to win over Angélique by pointing out that ‘‘the ancients’’ used to seize their prospective wives by force in order not to give the impression that the young women went eagerly into their arms, Béline, also speaking to Angélique, appeals to the ‘‘old times’’ when daughters obeyed their fathers without question. She thereby aligns herself with the dogmatic doctors. But she has more medical discernment than they have. She has accurately diagnosed Argan’s complaint as a desire to be fussed over and cajoled like a small child: when he feels bilious, she calls him ‘‘my baby boy’’ (I, 6). His addiction to medicine conﬁrms that he ‘‘needs’’ such attentions. Because she plays up to his desire to be babied, much as Tartuffe plays up to Orgon’s desire to be considered a man of great moral worth, Argan trusts her more than he does the others. Béralde even compares Argan’s excessive fondness for medicine with his excessive fondness for Béline (III, 11). Bringing her insincerity into the open requires an old ruse suggested by Toinette, that Argan pretend to be dead so that he can hear how she will grieve over his body. As we expect, she sees him lying inert, is overjoyed, and looks forward to her inheritance. When Toinette then tells Angélique her father has died, she, by way of contrast, is stricken with remorse at having ﬂouted his wishes. But an actress who plays Béline as a villain from her ﬁrst appearance on betrays the role. If she convinces Argan that she loves him, she should be able to convince the audience, or at least keep them in a state of uncertainty about her aims, until Argan is induced to play dead and show her up for what she

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is. Until that late switch, the character puts on an act, but her performance should not appear crass when we notice her on the same side of the conﬂict as the doctors. Much as Toinette impersonates a doctor and Cléante a music teacher, Béline impersonates a loving wife. As for Argan, after impersonating an invalid, he will impersonate a doctor in the ‘‘third interlude,’’ which serves as the ceremonial ﬁnale. Molière based this ritual on the secret, almost masonic, solemnities at the University of Paris, held when the Faculty of Medicine submitted candidates for questioning and approval. He brings onstage a chorus of surgeons, other doctors, and apothecaries who dance and chant their verses in a hodgepodge of rhymed pidgin-Latin, French, and Italian. The candidate, Argan, promises the identical treatment for wildly varying ailments: he will administer a clyster (or enema), then a bleeding, and last a purgative. He swears to obey the faculty’s rules, never to swerve from ‘‘the opinions of the ancients,’’ and to apply only the remedies prescribed by the faculty members, even if the patient is dying. As the degree is conferred amid balletic caperings, a chorus repeatedly congratulates Argan and wishes him an uncommonly long life (‘‘a thousand, thousand years’’) in which to ‘‘eat, drink, bleed, and kill.’’ This farcical rendition, undertaken by the actors recruited by Béralde, must have gravely offended those doctors who heard about it; probably only a few saw the staging, since most of them considered it below their dignity to attend the theatre at all, and the title of the play provided sufﬁcient warning that Molière had once again attempted to lance their profession. Medicine and theatricalism may dominate the action and themes of The Imaginary Invalid, but like all of Molière’s plays, it contains a love story: Cléante wins Angélique; Argan loses Béline (the Béline he loved and trusted), although whether they remain married is unresolved in the action. Molière sustains the love motif in the prologue and the ﬁrst and second interludes, intricately rhymed pastoral ballet-operas with music composed by Charpentier, which are often dismissed as having no bearing on the play and omitted from some translations. There are actually two alternative prologues. The ﬁrst, an elaborate gathering of nymphs, shepherds, shepherdesses, the goddess Flora, and the god Pan, pays tribute to Louis XIV for the courage he showed during his recent wars in Holland, welcomes him home as ‘‘the greatest of kings,’’ and implies that his triumphs in battle have made France (and the prologue’s Arcadia) safe for lovers. The second

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prologue, a lament in four verses by a shepherdess, frets that conceited doctors with ‘‘their little knowledge and big Latin words’’ cannot cure her heartache: ‘‘Your idle chatter would be accepted only by an IMAGINARY INVALID.’’ Curtain up for act I. A slender thread ties that act to the ﬁrst interlude. Almost at the end of the act, Toinette remarks she will seek the help of her suitor, Polichinelle, to take a message to Cléante about the threatened marriage between Angélique and the young doctor. In the interlude, Polichinelle, the ancestor from the commedia dell’arte (Pulcinella) of Punch, comes to the house but doesn’t mention the message, and doesn’t seem equipped to halt the marriage, anyway. The old fellow stands outside and chides himself for being in love with a female dragon, neglecting his business (moneylending), missing food and sleep, losing his mind. He serenades Toinette in Italian; but his beloved does not appear at her window, only an old woman who answers him mockingly with a matching Italian song, as though he had addressed his fervor to her. Polichinelle has more serenades in store but, like Lyciscas in The Princess of Elis, he is interrupted—by violinists and then by watchmen and archers, who threaten to arrest him for creating a disturbance at night. He molliﬁes them with bribes, and the interlude comes to an end with the bribe takers ecstatic and Polichinelle as lovelorn as the shepherdess in the second prologue. Perhaps we are meant to assume that Polichinelle did deliver the message, after all, because the next act opens with the prompt arrival of Cléante, who poses as the substitute music teacher. If that ﬁrst interlude takes place in a new setting, with the exterior of Argan’s house in the background, the second interlude, which follows act II, goes on in the same setting as the play, as Béralde leads into view four gypsies in Moorish costume who dance and sing. The burden of their song compares with Feste’s carpe diem advice to Olivia (Twelfth Night, II, 3): Enjoy our young years while they last, it recommends—the springtime of our life; love brings anguish but also pleasures; ‘‘beauty passes, / effaced by time, / The ice age / Takes over.’’ The gypsies dance and display some performing monkeys they have brought with them. Once again the theme of spontaneity is sounded, the gypsies’ songs reinforcing Cléante’s pastoral duet with Angélique. Does Argan heed such sentiments? As the gypsies go off and the third act takes over in the drawing room, Béralde asks his brother, ‘‘Wasn’t

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that as good as a laxative?’’ and Argan replies with a line that has become a familiar French quotation, ‘‘Hm, nothing’s as good as a good laxative’’ (Hon, de bonne casse est bonne). Argan is incurable, even after his eyes are opened to his wife’s deceits. That is why, for the last interlude, or ﬁnale, Béralde will arrange for him to believe he has locked himself into the ritualistic rigidities of medicine. The occasion for the ﬁnale, according to Béralde, is Mardi Gras, although Argan has no idea, once it is over, any more than Monsieur Jourdain does, that he has taken part in a carnival, a pretense. As the actors troop out of the drawing room in their medical robes, they leave behind an incontestable master of the house, the imaginary doctor. Source: Albert Bermel, ‘‘The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire, 1673),’’ in Molière’s Theatrical Bounty: A New View of the Plays, Southern Illinois University Press, 1990, pp. 182–92.

H. T. Barnwell In the following essay, Barnwell examines Moliere’s use of comic devices, including ‘‘repetition, duplication, [and] duplicate mimicry,’’ to suggest automatism and rigidity in The Imaginary Invalid. In analysing aspects of plot, structure and characterisation, I have touched upon a number of points connected with the kind of theatrically comic devices and language which feature in Le Malade imaginaire—inevitably, because they are integral to the play and not gratuitous or decorative. ‘Le style est l’homme même’, wrote Buffon, and certainly their style characterises the stage-ﬁgures in Molière’s plays. The language of the theatre is not, however, the language of everyday life, for three reasons: ﬁrst, from a purely practical standpoint, the language of ordinary conversation would simply make no more impression on the audience than would the tones of voice of such conversation; second, that language would be inappropriate to something which is itself not a representation of day-to-day reality but an artistic and imaginative transmutation of that reality; and third, if language is to contribute to the total comic effect, one must expect to ﬁnd in the author, as has been said of Molière, ‘la volonté d’outrer les défauts et d’accentuer les ridicules’, linguistically as in other respects. Exaggeration of linguistic characteristics may seem to the reader, as opposed to the spectator, to produce crude effects, such as feature in those passages in which Argan’s medical treatment is discussed. Yet even those must be seen in their

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context: the world of his imagination, which he treats so respectfully and, at times, so lyrically, is concerned in fact with the grossest physical realities (see Béline’s account in III, 12). The language he uses, derived from the technical jargon of the doctors, is a source of comedy, not simply because it is extravagant, but because the form of the extravagance is so inappropriate to the expression of those realities and masks them in supposedly scientiﬁc verbiage. That verbiage, when used by lawyers and doctors, typiﬁes them as members of their professions and indicates their place in society—and that applies even to the ﬁnal intermède—but it is handled in such a way as to make us aware of its deceit: it is empty of real substance. Again we see the incongruity between their extravagant claims and what passes for their expert knowledge. Argan is ridiculous because we are made aware, through the comic action, of his failure to see it and of his entry into the world of extravagance. And language is inseparable from the form of the episodes and of the dramatic situations. In analysing aspects of it, I shall make no attempt to isolate it from them. Some of the most obvious sources of comic effect are certain kinds of repetition, duplication or deliberate mimicry, all of which suggest an automatism and rigidity alien to the suppleness and adaptability of the life of normal people. The cyclic sequence of some of the episodes in Le Malade imaginaire is an important aspect of comic repetition, because it enables Molière to represent the mechanical, ﬁxed, predictable nature of the responses of the characters, and particularly of Argan; but the fact that the repetition is never exact in form draws attention all the more clearly to that ﬁxity. Examples occur quite early in the play. Part of Act I, scene 5 is a second version of Toinette’s provocation of Argan’s anger in scene 2. Anger is established as his automatic response to contradiction. It is characteristic of the self-centred ‘imaginaire’, but it is comic precisely by virtue of being mechanical, and Toinette knows it. The terms of abuse addressed to her are one important factor in the automatism. In the same Act, one of the farcical episodes derived from the lazzi of commedia dell’arte—Argan, the invalid, being physically provoked (358–79)—is repeated, with variations, in the presence of Béline (432–46): on both occasions his anger enables him to exert himself in spite of his alleged weakness, just as his departure in the usual direction is so precipitate on one occasion (III, 1) that Toinette has to remind him to pick up his

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Emily Morgan, Clive Arrindell, and Daniel Massey in a scene from the 1981 stage production of The Hypochondriac, a translated version of the The Imaginary Invalid, performed at the Olivier Theatre in London.

walking-stick, itself a reminder of his asking for it earlier (I, 3), the stick having been picked up in the meantime as a weapon with which to strike her (363–64). All these things and others like them are on one level farcical and purely laughter-provoking, but they also contribute to our comic perception of Argan’s behaviour and are not, as are their equivalents in the lazzi, gratuitous improvisations contrived simply to enliven a ﬂagging action: they are integrated into the comic action because they express the character himself and arise from the attempts to dupe or to save him. The most elaborate example occurs in the mockdoctor scenes of Act III, which are also a parody— and therefore a partial repetition—of the real-doctor episode of Act II. In spite of the sheer fun, these scenes, too, are integral to the action, moving it on from the desertion of Fleurant and Purgon towards the solution of the dramatic problem in Argan’s acceptance of and involvement in the ﬁnal ceremony; and they demonstrate, in the most theatrical manner, the grip on him of his imagination. The solution of the dramatic problem, that of the marriage of Angélique, is twofold. First, Argan

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the ‘imaginaire’ being incurable, a way has to be found of using his imagination so as to make Cléante acceptable as a son-in-law and to provide a substitute for the departed doctors: the substitute is partly in Toinette’s impersonation, partly in the ﬁnal ceremony which will also turn Cléante, so Argan believes, as well as himself, into the much-desired doctor. Second, it is equally important both to reconcile Argan to Angélique and to make him well disposed to her marriage: her true feelings for him must be revealed, as must those of Béline, so that the work of disinheritance can be prevented or undone. Argan must be deceived with regard to the new doctors and undeceived with regard to his family. The means adopted for both processes is the same: pretence. The undeceiving (III, 11–14), its counterpart, follows immediately upon the deceiving (III, 8–10), a parallel without direct repetition, and one in which the part played by Argan is reversed. In the deceiving, he is the victim of the trick played; in the undeceiving, he is its agent. In different ways, his imagination is being played upon in both episodes— the old farcical idea of ‘le trompeur trompé’ being turned round into ‘le trompé trompeur’. The parallel

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THE CYCLIC SEQUENCE OF SOME OF THE EPISODES IN LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE IS AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF COMIC REPETITION, BECAUSE IT ENABLES MOLIÈRE TO REPRESENT THE MECHANICAL, FIXED, PREDICTABLE NATURE OF THE RESPONSES OF THE CHARACTERS, AND PARTICULARLY OF ARGAN. . . .’’

is, however, more complex than that suggests, because in ‘le trompé trompeur’ is expressed the change from Argan’s being taken in by Louison’s shamming to Béline’s and Angélique’s (and not Louison’s) being fooled by his. Such parallels and symmetries, both aesthetically satisfying and consistent with the dramatic and comic function of the play, are also instanced in Argan’s repeated outbursts of anger whenever the course of his delusion is disturbed: the intrusion of domestic reality into the world of the doctors (I, 1–2); the discovery of Angélique’s love for Cléante when acquiescence in the projected marriage to Thomas Diafoirus is expected (I, 5), etc. The sudden changes from affability to anger are in their turn paralleled by that in the doctors, all sweetness and light when Argan is the compliant dupe (II, 5–6) but quite the reverse when he is not (III, 4–5). His predictability is exploited by the other characters and our expectation of it raised when, on three successive occasions, Toinette and Béralde play the impresario: their common capacity for so doing is an important factor in their mutual understanding and their alliance. When Toinette announces the arrival of the doctors (II, 4), she enters into the spirit of Argan’s exaggerated respect for them (comically contrasted—see the stage direction, ‘par dérision’—with her real feelings: 868–73) and arranges a ceremonial entry, which duly takes place. Parallel to this are her announcement of her own entry as doctor (III, 7–8) and Béralde’s ushering in of the dancers before the second and third intermèdes.

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On each occasion, but in different ways, Argan’s imagination is being played upon, always with predictable—and therefore laughable—success. Indeed, so eager is he to put himself at its service that, when Diafoirus comes on the scene, he becomes involved in a ‘dialogue de sourds’ in which the two men talk simultaneously. On the one hand, this is comic because they behave like mechanical toys which have been wound up and put down together and go on working each in its own independent way. On the other, each pursues relentlessly, because self-centredly, his own greeting, but at the same time, if all the little pieces of the speeches are put together in the order in which they are printed, they make a different kind of sense, though not always perfectly coherent: three lines develop simultaneously, Argan’s, Diafoirus’s and the combined one, of which neither is aware. A comic perception is conveyed through the laughter, of the perversion of language: it is free to go its own way in spite of the single-mindedness of the speakers, and they are not in control of it. Immediately afterwards, Thomas delivers himself of the ﬁrst of his prepared speeches: this is a different kind of automatism, the mechanical repetition of verbiage learnt by heart: Toinette’s ironical comment (939; cf. 965–66, 970–71, 1181–83) draws the comic contrast between appearance and reality. The divorce between the realms of appearance (to which the doctors belong) and of reality is evident in the way in which Thomas addresses Angélique as his future mother-in-law (945–46). The actual words have no meaning for him—they are made up of distorted and disparate bits and pieces from Cicero and commonplaces of literary rhetoric—and he fails to perceive either the reality of the girl the fathers propose he should marry—although she is there, in front of him—or the incongruity of the language he has learnt by heart. The rote learning is itself rendered comic by the way in which, having delayed the entry of Béline, Molière arranges for the mechanism to start again in the following scene—when it breaks down. The mechanical nature of the greetings, emphasised by the false starts and the breakdown, is made comic by our attention being drawn to what Bergson calls the form of the social ceremonial and away from its substance. The ceremonial becomes meaningless, ‘une mascarade sociale’, inert, contrived, ready-made. These episodes follow hard on the heels of Cléante’s arrival at the house and his greeting of Argan. This, too, is comic not simply because, as

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has been said, ‘you cannot tell a hypochondriac that he is looking well’, but because Cléante, too, is merely repeating conventional social formulas without being aware or without taking account of the reality of the person in front of him. Thomas Diafoirus’s error may be more gross—and is the more laughable for following Cléante’s—but it is of the same kind and springs also from mechanical behaviour. Cléante, however, quickly recovers (though he will appear to make another mistake later (2167–68), when he inverts the medical hierarchy) and demonstrates his adaptability and quickwittedness in the remainder of the conversation with Argan and in the singing-lesson. Unaware of it though he is, Argan is greeted by the bogus doctor in a deliberately inverted way: instead of the doctor being famous (what, in real life, one would expect), the patient is ‘un illustre malade’ who has a great reputation (1910–13) and is evidently worth a doctor’s visit. The relationship between these parallel episodes is complex: each throws light on the other in such a way as to draw attention to empty automatism and to present, in the last case, a parody which escapes Argan’s notice—except that he is ﬂattered by it. That automatism is comic not simply because it is mechanical and made to seem inconsistent with the ﬂexibility of real life but because, very often, it is meaningless. When talking about his ‘illness’ and its treatment, Argan merely repeats the forms of words he has memorised. We actually see Thomas Diafoirus going through the process of automatically producing the theoretical answers to questions put to him in a diagnosis. He is learning his trade. In all such cases the expression bears a false relation or no relation to the reality. It is mere words. Another type of repetition occurs, as we saw earlier, in modes of address and terms of endearment. The dialogues between Argan and Béline (I, 6–7) are the most important instance. On the one hand, Argan repeatedly utters ‘mamie’, ‘mon coeur’, ‘mamour’, and means what he says. On the other, Béline uses similar expressions to encourage him in the mistaken belief that she loves him. Both the deception and the error are ﬁnally dissipated when it is Argan who adopts the pretence (III, 12) and addresses his wife simply as ‘Madame ma femme’ (2104) while she makes no reply at all. Further aspects of the comedy of the earlier dialogues are seen in Béline’s use of the expressions, ‘mon ﬁls’, ‘pauvre petit ﬁls’ (the maternal pose adopted by a wife much younger than her husband) and in the

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contrast between Argan’s language of endearment addressed to the wife who is a fraud and that of abuse to the servant who is honest. Then the scenes between husband and wife are echoed in Argan’s conversation with Louison (II, 8—immediately afterwards), ﬁrst in the girl’s repetition of ‘mon papa’ with all the variations of feeling from security and affection to dismay and contrition, and then in Argan’s insistent ‘Hé bien?’ and ‘Et puis après?’, the latter being repeated by his daughter. These elements, together with the similarities of rhythm and length of phrase and sentence, constitute part of what has been called the ‘ballet des mots’—another connexion between the ballet sequences and the comedy proper—which puts the emphasis on theatricality rather than realism and suggests mimicry, whether conscious or not, and lessons in good manners being as carefully observed as the medical formulations. Like other aspects of the play we have studied, the repetitions and variations form a pattern. They are akin to musical counterpoint and fugue. The most remarkable example is in Argan’s altercation with Purgon (III, 5). This scene falls into two main parts, the ﬁrst for three voices (Argan, Purgon, Toinette: 1762–1817), the second for two (Argan, Purgon: (1818–35). In the ﬁrst, Purgon utters complete phrases and sentences, relentlessly pursued despite Argan’s short attempted (and always incomplete) interuptions, while Toinette interpolates laconic comments putting the blame for the situation on Argan. The pattern is perfectly regular (as it is throughout the scene), Purgon having twice as many (and twice as long) speeches as the other speakers (voluble self-importance of the traditional doctor—and his refusal to listen), while the counterpoint, as it were, is provided alternately and in different directions by Argan and Toinette. Purgon’s theme reaches its climax and Toinette withdraws (1817). Then follow the curses and Argan’s repeated cries of despair and supplication: the pattern is exactly that of a litany, with variations in the petitions (here the curses) though not in their form, uniformity in the responses. This is of course entirely appropriate because Argan really does hold the doctors and their powers in religious awe, as we have already seen (‘les ordonnances de la médecine’, etc.) and his cries of ‘Monsieur Purgon!’ are the exact equivalent of the ‘miserere mei’. Purgon’s curses take the form of a sequence of names of illnesses, all Greek in origin and all ending in -ie, but the climax falls into bathos (1834–35)

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when the last words are no longer learned compounds but simple words of everyday speech with the same ending, vie and folie, which return Argan from fantasy to reality—and terrify him. Still, however, ‘la privation de la vie’ is a circumlocution for ‘la mort’ (the verbosity persists), and the irony is that if Argan were to die it would certainly be thanks to his ‘folie’ (madness of the ‘imaginaire’ as well as simple foolishness)—but not, as Purgon thinks, the folly of refusing medical treatment, rather that of accepting its surfeit. Highly farcical though the episode is in concept, it is also a most complex and sophisticated piece of writing, marking an important development in the action and putting the behaviour of both doctor and patient in a comic perspective. Pascal’s remark—‘Deux visages semblables, dont aucun ne fait rite en particulier, font rire ensemble par leur ressemblance’—applies not only to faces but to acts and words and suggests the mechanism that is at work in such examples as this. But resemblances run in families, and Thomas Diafoirus is very much a younger version of his father, showing what the father was like in his own student days, and the father showing what the son will eventually become. Angélique is also a younger version of her father in her persistence and outspokenness, but he does not show us what she will become because she is without his mania. Resemblances run in professions, too, and Purgon’s jargon (III, 5) echoes that of Fleurant (his bill in I, 1), but with violence, and that of Diafoirus (II, 6). Such resemblances are comic (and in the case of the doctors are accentuated by their garb) because they reveal habit which has become unthinking and mechanical. The middle scenes of Act II are important in this respect. The two fathers resemble each other in their unheeding pursuit of their own greetings, as we have seen, as well as in their determination to marry their children off and their anxiety to put them on show. But the children’s behaviour is strongly contrasted. Thomas can only mouth what he has learnt by heart and, in direct dialogue with Angélique, import into his would-be wooing the syllogistic and formulaic rhetoric of his studies. She, on the other hand, is straightforward and direct, and speaks her own mind in her own language. This immediately follows the scene in which she and Cléante have improvised their musical duet: that it expresses something spontaneous and natural beneath the appearance of artiﬁciality is evident even to Argan (1124–25—he speaks truer than he knows—and

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1160–62). We are allowed to perceive the comedy of the contrast between the mechanical, empty use of convention and its adaptable, signiﬁcant use. Closely allied to it is of course the use of jargon: the love-duet is couched in conventional, stylised language (the jargon of préciosité, with its ‘appas’, ‘transports’, ‘supplices’, etc.) but is made to express an authentic emotion, whereas the ready-made formulas of the doctors—another convention—, whether those of their profession or, in the case of Thomas, those of courtship, are mere words acquired at second hand and signifying nothing; but they are sufﬁciently impressive to dupe Argan, as Béralde clearly sees (1614–45). The difference is that between the mask deliberately donned to communicate something real in secret and the mask unconsciously worn to say openly something without substance. We are made aware, through this kind of contrast, of the gap between artiﬁcial verbiage and real experience which was particularly perceptible and comic to the ‘honnêtes gens’ whose rejection of jargon of any kind had been expressed in the doctrines of Malherbe and Vaugelas. But so much an ‘imaginaire’ is Argan that he accepts literally what Béralde, having drawn the distinction between ‘les discours’ and ‘les choses’ (1675–79), ﬁnally says: ‘L’on n’a qu’à parler; avec une robe et un bonnet, tout galimatias devient savant, et toute sottise devient raison’ (2188–89). It is no wonder that Argan is taken in by the verbal fantasies of Fleurant (I, 1) or by their parody by Toinette (III, 8, 10). In the same way, the comic view is suggested by contradictions between general principles (mental constructs) and particular instances (living realities), especially when Angélique and Argan or Toinette and Argan (I, 5), for instance, or Argan and Béralde (III, 3), agree on the ﬁrst and differ on the second. In such cases, the argument develops to establish agreement on the general principle and, when it stumbles against a particular reality which does not ﬁt, goes into reverse in the direction of dissension. Connected with this is the importance of set rules. Thomas Diafoirus observes them in his encomia—and they fail; and in his diagnosis—and it is at variance with that of an experienced doctor. Béralde argues that rules have no bearing on real life (1634–36, 1676–79), while Toinette-as-doctor produces a parody (III, 10) of a diagnosis carried out according to the rules (II, 6) in a parody of Argan’s ill-fated dialogue with Purgon: here it is the doctor’s repeated phrases which reply to the patient’s remarks, and the exclamations (‘Ignorant!’) are any-

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thing but helpless appeals. The pattern of the dialogue closely follows that between Argan and Purgon, but the roles and meaning are turned upside down. At the end, Toinette follows logic to its ridiculous conclusion in her prescription for amputation: at that point Argan does in fact awake to reality— ‘Oui, mais j’ai besoin de mon bras’ (2001)—though only ﬂeetingly. In L’Amour médecin (1665), Bahis had said: ‘Il vaut mieux mourir scion les règles que de réchapper contre les règles’ (II, 5). The contradiction between truth and illusion is evident even in the names given to some of the characters. While Fleurant and Purgon are aptly named for what seem to be their principal functions, Bonnefoy’s character is suggested by ironical antiphrasis. Béline’s activities and Argan’s blindness to their real nature are also indicated by her name: ‘béline’, meaning in Old French ‘sheep’, came to be used as a term of endearment, the equivalent of Argan’s ‘mamour’, etc. But it surely also gives a clue to her real character and behaviour: the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Diafoirus is usually held to suggest ‘diarrhoea’. But why not ‘diagnosis’, since the play features two? Molière may however have derived the name from the Greek ‘diaphotos’, meaning both ‘different’ (at variance) and ‘excellent’, and particularly appropriate to the controversies between the doctors in the play and to their (and Argan’s) estimate of their worth. Alternatively, the name could be of mixed and more fanciful derivation: Greek ‘dia’ (‘throughout’) and French ‘foi’ (‘faith’—on the part of Argan) and Latin sufﬁx (appropriate to the Latinised jargon of the pedant). All these possibilities suggest contradictions between appearance and reality. The episodes, the language adopted by the characters, their behaviour, all are in themselves theatrical and have to do with disguise, pretence, illusion, deception. Dressing-up (shepherds, actors of the commedia dell’arte, doctors real and unreal), deliberate play-acting within the play (Béline and Bonnefoy, Cléante and Angélique, Louison, Toinette,

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Argan himself), advancement of false arguments (Béralde), use of empty jargon (the doctors, imitated by Argan) combine to make Le Malade imaginaire not only a highly theatrical play but to suggest its theme: the ‘imaginaire’ duped by deceitful appearance. And it is that theme to which every episode, every dialogue, every word makes an indispensable contribution. Source: H. T. Barnwell, ‘‘Comic Devices and Comic Language,’’ in Moliere: ‘‘Le Malade Imaginaire,’’ Grant & Cutler Ltd, 1982, pp. 58–68.

SOURCES Hubert, J. D., ‘‘The Doctor’s Curse,’’ in Molière: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jacques Guicharnaud, Prentice Hall, 1964, pp. 134, 160–69. Molière, The Hypochondriac, in The Miser and Other Plays: A New Selection, Penguin Classics, 2000, pp. 217–99.

FURTHER READING Calder, Andrew, Molière: The Theory and Practice of Comedy, Athlone Press, 1993. Calder’s clear and useful analysis of Molière’s comedies discusses the dramatist’s works in terms of overarching themes. Fernandez, Ramon, Molière: The Man Seen through the Plays, translated by W. Follet, Hill and Wang, 1958. This slightly dated biography nevertheless provides an interesting psychological approach to the dramatist. Hall, H. Gaston, Comedy in Context: Essays on Molière, University Press of Mississippi, 1984. This collection of essays explores Molière’s comedies in terms of their literary context. Hubert, Judd D., Molière and the Comedy of Intellect, University of California Press, 1962. Hubert’s book approaches each play from the standpoint of its intellectual themes.

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The Lion in Winter JAMES GOLDMAN 1966

James Goldman’s historical play The Lion in Winter depicts the interpersonal relationships among members of the English royal family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of the year 1183. The play is set in the castle of King Henry II of England, located in Chinon, in the English-ruled region of France. Though it was not particularly well received in its debut as a Broadway play in 1966, Goldman’s screenplay adaptation of The Lion in Winter, which was released in 1968, won him an Academy Award. The Lion in Winter concerns the interpersonal dynamics and political wrangling of King Henry; his wife Eleanor, whom he has kept imprisoned in a tower for the past ten years; and their three sons, who are vying for the privilege of being named heir to the English throne. Eleanor, who has been let out of prison to celebrate Christmas with her family, favors Richard as heir, while Henry favors John. To complicate matters, the young King Philip II of France has arrived to remind Henry of a treaty he signed many years earlier, promising to marry his heir to Philip’s sister Alais. However, Alais has been Henry’s mistress for the past seven years, and Henry is hesitant to marry her off to any of his sons. The Lion in Winter explores themes of dysfunctional family, political maneuvering, war and peace, as well as aging, death, inheritance, and posterity. As the principle characters plot, scheme, conspire, and counter-plot between each other, the deepseated emotional ties between them get played out in the political arena, such that sibling rivalry and

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marital jealousy translate into civil war, treason, and perhaps even murder among the members of a royal nuclear family.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY James A. Goldman was born June 30, 1927, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of Chicago, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1947, and went on to complete a master’s degree and then a doctorate in 1950. Goldman then moved to New York City to pursue postgraduate studies in music criticism at Columbia University, but was drafted into the United States Army after two years of study. He served in the army from 1952 to 1954, during the Korean War. After being honorably discharged from the army, Goldman decided to become a playwright instead of pursuing a career as a music critic. His ﬁrst play, They Might Be Giants, was produced in 1961 at the Royal Theatre in Stratford, England. That same year, Goldman’s second play, Blood, Sweat, and Stanley Poole (1961), co-written with his younger brother William Goldman, was produced on Broadway. Goldman wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the book for the musical A Family Affair, a comedy about the families of a bride and groom bickering over their wedding preparations, which was produced on Broadway in 1962. The Lion in Winter, Goldman’s fourth play, was ﬁrst produced on Broadway in 1966. During that same year, he collaborated with celebrated composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim on a made-for-television musical called Evening Primrose (1966), about a group of people secretly living in a department store. Though not particularly successful as a stage play, the ﬁlm version of The Lion in Winter (1968), with a screenplay by Goldman, was a box-ofﬁce hit that won Goldman an Academy Award. A motion picture adaptation of They Might Be Giants, for which Goldman also wrote the screenplay, was produced in 1971. That same year, Follies (1971), a musical about a reunion of former chorus-line showgirls, for which Goldman wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Sondheim, was produced on Broadway. A revival production of Follies, com-

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pletely revised by Goldman, was produced in 1987. Follies was a popular and critical success, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical, as well as the Evening Standard Award and the Laurence Olivier Award for best musical. With the success of the ﬁlm adaptation of The Lion in Winter, Goldman earned a reputation as a screenwriter skilled at dramatizing the marital relationships of couples drawn from history and literature, such as Nicholas and Alexandria (1971), about the Russian Czar and Czarina; Robin and Marian (1976), about the legendary Robin Hood and Marian; and White Nights (1985), a spy thriller starring Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Goldman also authored four novels: Waldorf (1965), The Man from Greek and Roman (1973), Myself as Witness (1980), and Fulton County (1989). Goldman and his ﬁrst wife, Marie McKeon, had two children. Goldman and McKeon divorced in 1972. In 1975, he married producer Barbara Deren. His last completed play, Tolstoy (1996), concerns the ﬁnal weeks in the life of celebrated nineteenth-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Goldman died of a heart attack October 28, 1998, in New York City, at the age of seventy-one.

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PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 Act 1, scene 1 is set in the castle chamber (bedroom) of Alais (pronounced ‘‘Alice’’) Capet, a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman who is the mistress of King Henry. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s wife, has been imprisoned by Henry in a tower for ten years, but is being let out to join the family at court for Christmas. Henry explains that, since his eldest son Henry died the previous summer, he has yet to name a new heir to his throne. He tells Alais that, while he plans to name John as heir, Eleanor wishes to see Richard made heir. Henry, who is ﬁfty years old, points out that his primary goal is to ensure that the lands he has amassed under his rule will remain uniﬁed after his death, rather than being broken up by a civil war between his sons.

Act 1, Scene 2 Act 1, scene 2 is set in the reception hall of the castle. Richard, Geoffrey, and John, who are the sons of Henry and Eleanor, have arrived for the Christmas Eve festivities. Richard is twenty-six, Geoffrey is twenty-ﬁve, and John is sixteen. Soon Eleanor, who is sixty-one, and then Henry and Alais enter the hall. Finally, King Philip II of France, a young man of seventeen, arrives to discuss political matters with Henry. Based on a treaty between Henry and King Louis VII of France (Philip’s father) made sixteen years earlier, Philip’s sister Alais has been promised as the wife of whichever son Henry names as heir to his throne. As part of this treaty, Henry was given the French region of Vexin. Philip informs Henry that he must either marry his heir to Alais immediately, or he must return the Vexin region to French rule. Henry explains that he has not yet decided which of his three sons to name as heir and so cannot see Alais married until he has decided whom she is to marry. He points out that if he dies without an heir and without leaving all three sons contented with their lot, a civil war will break out over the question of who is to be the next king. Philip, however, maintains his stance that either Alais must be married to an heir immediately or Henry must return the Vexin region to France. After Philip leaves, Eleanor mentions the fact that she raised Alais, who was brought to Henry’s castle as a girl and grew up there. Alais and Eleanor

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exchange words, clearly regarding each other as rivals for Henry’s affections. After Alais leaves the room, Henry assures Eleanor that he will never set her free from imprisonment in the tower because she tried more than once in the past to lead a civil war against him. Eleanor asks Henry why he cannot simply return the Vexin region to Philip, but Henry explains that it is a strategically important territory that he cannot afford to forfeit.

Act 1, Scene 3 Act 1, scene 3 is set in Eleanor’s chamber at the castle, where Henry announces that he has decided to name Richard as his heir and that Alais will be married to Richard. After Henry, Alais, and John leave the room, Eleanor points out to Richard and Geoffrey that Henry is only blufﬁng with this proposal and that he has no intention of naming Richard as his heir, or of marrying Richard to Alais. Eleanor attempts to convince Geoffrey and Richard to scheme with her in order to ensure that Richard marries Alais and is made heir, but both men refuse her offer.

Act 1, Scene 4 Act 1, scene 4 is set in the reception hall, where a Christmas tree has been put up. Geoffrey convinces John to side with him and Philip in starting a war against Henry. After Henry and Alais enter and the others leave the hall, Henry explains to Alais that he has no intention of marrying her to Richard or of naming Richard as heir. Eleanor enters the hall with an armful of wrapped Christmas presents and begins to arrange them under the tree. Soon, Alais leaves the room, and Eleanor and Henry discuss the various ramiﬁcations of Henry’s supposed promise to name Richard as heir. Henry tells Eleanor that he wants to take the Aquitaine region from Richard and give it to John, as compensation for not naming John as heir. Eleanor, however, insists that he not give John the Aquitaine. She begs Henry to give the Aquitaine, which was hers before she married him, back to her. It seems that although the Aquitaine is under the rule of Richard, Eleanor has the legal authority to determine whether or not Henry transfers the land to John. Henry, however, proposes that he will set Eleanor free from imprisonment if she allows him to transfer the Aquitaine to John. Eleanor responds that she will only agree to this if Henry arranges for Richard and Alais to be married immediately. Henry agrees to Eleanor’s proposal, immediately calls his sons, as well as Alais and Philip,

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together and informs a castle priest that he is to marry Richard and Alais that very moment. Alais protests that she does not want to marry Richard, but she is physically dragged by the others to stand with Richard before the priest. Just as the priest is about to begin the marriage rites, Henry mentions that the marriage will go through only on the condition that John is given the Aquitaine. When Richard learns of this, he refuses to go through with the wedding, and it is called off. John is happy to learn that he is once again Henry’s choice for heir. Philip calls Richard a ‘‘dunce’’ for not realizing that Henry never intended him to marry Alais in the ﬁrst place. Philip then reminds Henry that he has a treaty to honor and that he must either marry Alais to his heir immediately or he must return the Vexin to France. Henry, however, asserts that he refuses to either see Alais married or return the Vexin, regardless of the treaty. After Philip leaves the room, Richard tells Henry that he is prepared to go to war against his father in order to secure the throne for himself. Henry responds by informing Richard that he will be kept prisoner in the castle until Richard agrees that John will inherit the throne.

Act 1, Scene 5 Act 1, scene 5 is set in Eleanor’s chamber at the castle, still on Christmas Eve. Eleanor learns that John had conspired with Philip to go to war against Henry. She explains to Geoffrey and Richard that, once she tells Henry of John’s scheme against him (which was made when John believed that Richard was going to be made heir), Henry will disinherit John, and Richard will once again be named heir. She tells Richard to go to Philip and ask for aid from his soldiers to help Richard (who has been imprisoned in the castle by Henry’s order) to leave the castle before she tells Henry of John’s treachery.

Act 1, Scene 6 Act 1, scene 6 is set in Philip’s chamber at the castle. Geoffrey knocks at the door and asks to talk with Philip, who is dressed for bed. Geoffrey informs Philip that once Henry learns that John betrayed him, he (Geoffrey) will become the favored son and be named heir. Geoffrey explains that if he is named heir, John, Richard, and Eleanor will band together to declare war against him. Thus, he asks Philip to promise to provide him with military support in exchange for which Geoffrey will give him all of England’s land holdings in France.

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Philip agrees to side with Geoffrey, when suddenly John, who has been hiding behind a tapestry, jumps out and accuses Geoffrey of betraying him. Geoffrey tells John that he was only blufﬁng and that John should have trusted him. John comments that he is not sure anymore who are his friends and who are his enemies. Just then, Richard knocks on Philip’s door. John and Geoffrey hide behind a tapestry before Philip lets Richard in. Richard tells Philip that if he provides military support for Richard to go to war against Henry for the throne, Richard will give Philip the Vexin territory as well as the region of Brittany. Richard and Philip discuss their friendship two years earlier in France, implying that they had been lovers at that time. Just then, Henry knocks at the door, and Philip directs Richard to hide behind the bed curtains. Henry asks Philip what his strategy is at this point, and Philip states that his strategy is patience—that while he himself is young and has time on his side, Henry is getting old and the rivalry among his sons will eventually weaken him politically. Philip then informs Henry that he and Richard were lovers when they were together in France. He explains to Henry that he never really loved Richard but that he became Richard’s lover so that one day he could destroy Richard politically by informing Henry of his son’s homosexuality, which would be considered a scandal. Hearing this, Richard jumps out from behind the bed curtains and insists that Philip is lying and that Philip had truly been in love with him. Geoffrey then jumps out from behind the tapestry and asks why he has never been considered as a possible heir to the throne, but Henry completely dismisses Geoffrey, saying he never thinks about him at all. Geoffrey then informs Henry that John has schemed against him, but Henry insists that John would never betray him. Geoffrey then pulls aside the tapestry and reveals John hiding behind it. Realizing that John has indeed betrayed him, Henry asserts that he has no sons, that he has disowned all of his sons, and that he will be recorded in history books as a king who never had sons. Emotionally shaken by his own words, Henry staggers out of the room, crying ‘‘I’ve lost my boys.’’

Act 2, Scene 1 Act 2, scene 1 is set in Henry’s chamber, where Henry and Eleanor discuss their marriage, family,

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and all the political scheming they have been engaged in. Henry informs Eleanor that he really wants to have their marriage annulled so that he can marry Alais and have a son with her, whom he will name as heir to the throne. He tells Eleanor that he plans on leaving that night to travel to Rome to seek the Pope’s permission to have their marriage annulled. Eleanor is clearly still in love with Henry and is devastated by the thought of him annulling their marriage and marrying someone else. She points out that, as soon as Henry leaves England to go to Rome, she, Richard, Geoffrey, and John will rise up against him and usurp his rule. Henry responds that in that case, he will lock up all three sons in the cellar while he travels to Rome, so that they cannot rise up against him while he is gone.

Act 2, Scene 2 Act 2, scene 2 is set in Alais’s chamber. Henry enters and informs Alais that he is taking her to Rome to seek the Pope’s permission to marry her. She points out that if they have a son together, Eleanor, Richard, Geoffrey, and John will conspire to murder the boy, so that they will not be disinherited. Alais refuses to marry Henry unless he agrees to imprison his sons for the rest of their lives. Henry responds that, in that case, he will ensure that all three of his sons are locked up forever.

Act 2, Scene 3 Act 2, scene 3 is set in the wine cellar of the castle, that same night, where Richard, Geoffrey, and John have just been locked up. Eleanor enters, carrying a tray of daggers, which she offers to her sons, bidding them to escape. They, however, agree that they do not want simply to escape, but to kill Henry. Henry then enters the cellar with Alais. He announces that he is prepared to sentence all three sons to death for treason. He raises his sword to kill Richard but fails at the last moment, ﬁnding that he cannot bring himself to murder his own children. The three sons then grab their knives and run out of the cellar. After Alais leaves to go upstairs, Henry and Eleanor are left alone together in the cellar. Husband and wife embrace, having reached a temporary truce. Eleanor mentions that he will be sending her back to prison for now, but Henry assures her that she will be allowed to join the family again for the Easter holiday.

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CHARACTERS Alais Capet Alais (pronounced ‘‘Alice’’) Capet is the mistress of King Henry II of England and the sister of King Philip II of France. Alais is a beautiful twentythree-year-old woman who has been Henry’s mistress since she was sixteen years old. In a treaty between France and England that was made when she was a young girl, Alais was promised in marriage to whichever of Henry’s sons he names as his successor. But Alais is deeply in love with Henry and does not want to marry any of his sons. However, she has no power whatsoever to determine her own future and is merely subject to the political wrangling of the other characters in the play. She describes herself as a ‘‘pawn’’ in the political maneuvering between Henry, Eleanor, Philip, and the three sons. Alais’s only source of power lies in Henry’s emotional attachment to her, although he makes it clear that he will not let his attachment interfere with his political decisions. Alais was brought to Henry’s castle when she was seven years old and was raised by Eleanor, but now she and Eleanor regard each other as rivals for Henry’s affections. Toward the end of the play, Henry announces that he is going to take Alais with him to Rome to have his marriage with Eleanor annulled, so that he can marry his young mistress and have a son by her, whom he will then name as his heir. Alais, however, points out that, if they have a son, Eleanor will help Richard, Geoffrey, and John kill the boy, so that they will not be disinherited. Alais thus tells Henry that she will only marry him if he promises to keep his other sons imprisoned for the rest of their lives. However, Henry ﬁnds that he cannot bring himself to imprison or execute his own sons, and so Alais is left to continue on as his mistress. The issue of which, if any, of Henry’s sons she will be forced to marry is left undecided.

Philip Capet Philip Capet, also known as King Philip II of France, arrives at the English court to negotiate with King Henry a sixteen-year-old treaty between France and England. At seventeen, Philip, who has been the King of France for three years, is described as handsome, impressive, and politically savvy. Philip confronts Henry to remind him of a treaty by which Henry promised to marry Alais to whichever of his sons will be the heir to the throne, in exchange for which France granted England a parcel of land

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known as the Vexin. Philip informs Henry that he must either marry Alais to his heir immediately, or he must return the Vexin region to France. Henry, however, points out that he has not yet decided which of his sons to name as heir, and so cannot determine which one will marry Alais; yet Henry also refuses to return the Vexin to France. Although Alais is Philip’s sister, Philip demonstrates no personal attachment to or interest in her, and completely disregards her personal wishes, considering her only as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Henry. Philip demonstrates himself to be as astute and wily as the Plantagenets in his efforts to out-scheme and out-maneuver each member of the Plantagenet family, skillfully playing them off against each other. While nothing is resolved by the end of the play—Henry still has not honored the treaty with France—Philip points out that, because he is young and Henry is old, he has the patience to wait out Henry on these disputed matters, and that France will eventually prevail.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Goldman wrote the screenplay for a 1968 ﬁlm adaptation of Lion in Winter, directed by Anthony Harvey. The cast includes Peter O’Toole as King Henry, Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Anthony Hopkins as Richard Plantagenet. Goldman won an Academy Award for best screenplay for Lion in Winter, while Hepburn won the Academy Award for best actress. • Goldman’s original screenplay adaptation of Lion in Winter was ﬁlmed as a made-for-television movie, broadcast on Showtime Network in 2004, starring Glenn Close as Eleanor and Patrick Stewart as Henry.

Queen Eleanor See Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor of Aquitaine

Geoffrey Plantagenet

Eleanor of Aquitaine, also known as Queen Eleanor, is the wife of Henry and the mother of Richard, Geoffrey, and John. Eleanor and Henry got married when he was eighteen and she was twentyeight. They have been married for thirty-two years. Ten years earlier, Eleanor attempted to start a civil war against Henry, for which he imprisoned her in a tower in England, where she has since remained, except on holidays, when she is allowed to join the family. She favors their son Richard as the heir to the throne, and is constantly plotting and scheming for Richard to be made the next king. When, by the end of the play, all of her schemes have once again failed, Eleanor embraces her estranged husband, and they seem to have reached a temporary truce. She knows that she will be sent back to prison, but looks forward to joining the contentious family circle again when she is released for the Easter holiday.

Geoffrey Plantagenet is the middle son of King Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and holds the political post of overlord of Brittany. While John is Henry’s favorite son and Richard is Eleanor’s favorite, Geoffrey is nobody’s favorite. Geoffrey, who is twenty-ﬁve, is described as ‘‘the owner of the best brain of a brainy family.’’ However, although it is understood that he is the smartest of the sons, and he is the second oldest after Richard, he is never even considered as a possible heir to the throne. Geoffrey attempts to scheme with all of the other characters at various points, hoping that if he can eliminate both Richard and John from consideration for the throne, Henry will have no other choice but to choose him as the next king. However, all of Geoffrey’s schemes fail, and he is left by the end of the play with the same inconsequential status in the family that he has always had.

Henry Plantagenet King Henry , II See Henry Plantagenet

King Philip See Philip Capet

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Henry Plantagenet, also known as King Henry II of England and Normandy, is a ﬁfty-year-old man. He has spent his life conquering regions of France and the British Isles, and now his life’s goal is to ensure that his territory remains uniﬁed after he dies. His eldest son, Henry, who had been named as

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the heir to his throne, died the previous summer, and now he must decide which of his sons to name as his new heir. He has promised the throne to John, the son he most favors, but he knows there is a threat of civil war breaking out over the question of who will be the next king after his death. Henry has kept Eleanor, his wife of thirty-two years, locked up in a tower for the past ten years, because of her efforts to start a civil war against him. He has taken Alais Capet as his mistress for the past seven years. Toward the end of the play, Henry decides that he really wants to go to Rome and ask the Pope to annul his marriage to Eleanor, so that he can marry Alais and have a legitimate son by her, whom he can then name as his heir to the throne. However, he realizes that Eleanor, Richard, Geoffrey, and John would try to kill this new son, if the child were born male. He is thus faced with the decision of whether or not to lock his sons, as well as his wife, in prison for the rest of their lives, so that he can safely produce an heir with Alais. In the ﬁnal moments of the play, Henry accuses Richard of treason and raises his sword to kill him, but ﬁnds that he does not have the heart to murder his own child. By the end of the play, Henry remains undecided as to whom he will name as his heir.

Richard Plantagenet Richard Plantagenet, also known as Richard the Lionheart, is one of the sons of King Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Richard, who is twenty-six, has been a famous soldier since he was sixteen, and he ‘‘looks like his legend.’’ Richard is the bravest and most soldierly of the three sons, and has always been his mother’s favorite. Throughout the play, Eleanor maintains that her wish is to see Richard named heir to Henry’s throne. Richard is a warrior through and through, and is determined to be the next king of England. Of the three sons, he is the most deﬁant against his father, insisting that he will one day take the throne by force, if it is not given to him. Nonetheless, at the end of the play, when Henry accuses Richard of treason and sentences him to death, Henry ﬁnds that he cannot bring himself to raise his sword against his own son.

Richard the Lionheart See Richard Plantagenet

THEMES Dysfunctional Family

John Plantagenet John Plantagenet is the youngest son of King Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine. John, who is sixteen, is described as a charming-looking boy who, despite the adolescent pimples on his face, is ‘‘sweet-faced and totally adorable.’’ Although he is neither brave like Richard nor smart like Geoffrey, John is his father’s favorite son, and expects to be made heir to the throne when Henry dies. John is the least savvy of all the characters in the play. Because he tends to be a bit dim-witted, he cannot keep pace intellectually with the plotting, scheming, doublecrossing, and deceptions by which all of the other characters operate. He is represented as an immature child who has been spoiled by his father, and who has grown up expecting to be made heir to his father’s throne, without having to prove himself or accomplish anything in order to achieve this position of power. When John for a time believes that Henry has decided to name Richard as his heir, Geoffrey talks him into scheming against Henry and Richard. Later, Henry once again changes his tactic and re-promises the throne to John. But when Henry decides instead that he wants to produce a new heir with Alais, John is once again disinherited.

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The central thematic focus of The Lion in Winter is on the interpersonal dynamics of members of a dysfunctional family. Goldman’s play is essentially a story about dysfunctional family writ large. Although the members of the family are kings, queens, and princes, their complex and troubled emotional attachments to one another are represented as an ampliﬁed version of the same kinds of problems people experience in modern families. As is often the case with twenty-ﬁrst-century families, the Plantagenet family in The Lion in Winter experience such problems as jealousy, sibling rivalry, parental neglect, parental favoritism, marital inﬁdelity, and factionalism among family members. The political implications of the characters’ interpersonal dynamics merely demonstrate these basic emotional relationship issues on a grand scale.

Political Maneuvering While the characters in The Lion in Winter are motivated by deeply personal feelings about each other, they are also engaged in real power struggles with vast political implications. The issue at hand concerns the outcome of three different questions: who will become the next king of England after Henry dies; who will marry Alais, the sister of the

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • The characters in Goldman’s play Lion in Winter are ﬁctional creations based on historically real ﬁgures from twelfth-century English and French royal families. Choose one of the following ﬁgures and learn more about the factual history of this person’s life and role in history and politics: King Henry II of England (Henry Plantagenet), Eleanor of Aquitaine, King Philip II of France (also known as Philip Augustus), King Richard I of England (also known as Richard the Lionheart), or King John of England. This person was a part of which major social, historical, and political events, and what role did he or she play in the outcome of these events? • Research and write a report on one of the following areas of the cultural arts in medieval French or/and English society: literature, music, the visual arts, or theater. How would you characterize the aesthetic principles of this area of cultural art during the Middle Ages? Who were some of the major writers/artists/musicians/dramatists in this area and what were some of their major works? Pick one of these works (a poem, song, play, painting, etc.) to describe and discuss in more detail.

French king; and who will control the important French regions of the Vexin and the Aquitaine? The answer to each of these questions implies a reordering of the existing political power dynamics within the royal family and between France and England. All of the principle characters thus plot and counterplot with and against each other in order to determine the outcome of these three questions.

War and Peace The political negotiations between the characters in The Lion in Winter will determine whether the outcome will be war or peace between the different factions. History tells us that the histori-

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• Lion in Winter is set in a royal castle and concerns the domestic relations of a medieval family. Research and learn more about the daily life of medieval people, such as living conditions, work, school, family life, clothing, food, etc. Then write an essay on ‘‘a day in the life’’ of an average person in the Middle Ages. Be sure to specify if this person is a man, woman, girl, or boy, and if he or she comes from the peasant classes or the landed gentry. Describe the types of work, housing conditions, food, dress, games, family life, and holiday or festival traditions of a medieval person from this social class. • Although it involves characters from a historically real royal family, Lion in Winter is essentially a play about the interpersonal dynamics that take place during a holiday celebration. Write your own original short play about the interpersonal dynamics of a family who have come together to celebrate a birthday, holiday, or other special occasion. Be sure to demonstrate through your characters’ interactions what each character is hoping to get from the other members of the family—such as love, money, recognition, freedom, or anything else a person might want or expect from his or her family.

cally real characters on which this play is based spent much of their lives enmeshed in wars between France and England over the French territories that had come under English rule, as well as in civil wars within the Plantagenet family over who would inherit the English throne. Early in the play, Henry comments that he has spent most of his life at war, and that he is sick of it. He explains that, in recent years, during which time there was relative peace between England and France, he has enjoyed the peacetime activity of overseeing the English legal system. History tells us that Henry II in fact did make considerable contributions to systematizing and modernizing English law.

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Eleanor later comments that wars are made by the decisions of individuals, not by abstract entities. She tells her sons: [W]e’re the origins of war. Not history’s forces nor the times nor justice nor the lack of it nor causes nor religions nor ideas nor kinds of government nor any other thing. We are the killers; we breed war. . . . Dead bodies rot in streams because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can’t we love one another just a little? That’s how peace begins.

The implication of Eleanor’s statement is that wars are not inevitable occurrences, but are the result of human choices, and that, therefore, it is possible to choose peace instead of war.

Aging, Death, Inheritance, and Posterity The Lion in Winter is also about aging, death, inheritance, and posterity. Today, a person who is ﬁfty years old is considered to be middle-aged, with many years left to live. In medieval times, however, a ﬁfty-year-old man was regarded as being close to the end of his life. Henry, who is ﬁfty, remarks at one point that he is the oldest living man he knows. Yet he is also aware of the fact that he is approaching death, which adds a sense of urgency to his need to decide on an heir. Early in the play, Alais asks Henry why he cares what happens to his land and kingship after he dies, since he will not be around to see it. Henry responds that he must know before he dies that his kingdom will remain intact, and not be splintered by civil wars. The tensions between the characters throughout the play are thus due largely to the competition between Henry’s sons over who will be heir to his kingdom. Henry’s obsession with his own posterity is at heart motivated by the fear of death and the desire for immortality. In the closing lines of the play, Henry says to Eleanor, ‘‘You know, I hope we never die,’’ to which Eleanor responds, ‘‘I hope so, too.’’ Thus, Henry’s inability to accept the inevitability of his own death is the subtext of his failure to choose an heir to his kingdom.

STYLE The Historical Play The Lion in Winter is a historical play in the sense that the characters are drawn from historically

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real ﬁgures in French and English history. The basic outlines of their place in history thus provide a context for the characters and relationships represented in the play. Goldman ﬁlls in much of this historical background through dialogue. At various points in the play, Eleanor and Henry explain the history of their lives and relationships to the younger characters. With this device, Goldman provides the reader with necessary historical information in a manner that blends naturally into the dialogue and action of the play. In reading a historical drama, it is important to remember that the details of the characters’ personalities and relationships, though based on real people, are ﬁctional creations of the author, and should not be regarded as necessarily factually accurate. As Goldman indicates in a ‘‘Historical Note’’ that precedes the printed version of the play, the facts we have, while clear enough as to the outcome of relationships—such things as who kills whom and when—say little if anything about the quality and content of those relationships. The people in this play, their characters and passions, while consistent with the facts we have, are ﬁctions.

Goldman further explains in his ‘‘Historical Note’’ that he combined two historically real events into one ﬁctionalized event. That is, he created an imaginary situation which combined a historically real meeting between Henry and Philip in the year 1183 with a royal court held in 1184 at Henry’s Windsor Castle in England into ‘‘a Christmas Court that never was.’’ Goldman is thus able to dramatize with more intensity the ways in which the political wrangling within Henry’s immediate family affected his political dealings with the French king.

Dialogue Much of the dialogue in The Lion in Winter is anachronistic (out of its proper historical context), in the sense that, while the play is set in the Middle Ages of the twelfth century, the characters tend to speak in a manner that sounds distinctly modern and twentieth-century. While many critics have criticized Goldman for his anachronistic dialogue, others have pointed out that it was an intentional choice on the part of the author. The modern-sounding way in which the characters express themselves causes them to come across to the modern reader more like everyday people, rather than depicting them as lofty legendary ﬁgures, as they are often portrayed in myths, legends, and historical accounts.

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Literary References The characters in The Lion in Winter make a number of references within their dialogue to classic mythology and literature. The reader’s appreciation of Goldman’s play is thus increased through an understanding of these references. For example, Henry at various points refers to his wife Eleanor as Medusa, Circe, and Medea. Medusa is a ﬁgure from Greek mythology whose hair is made of snakes, and who has the power to turn men to stone if they look at her. Circe is a beautiful sorceress from Greek legend who lives on an island and has the power to turn men into animals. In the play Medea, by Euripides (a ﬁfth-century B.C. Greek playwright), Medea is an enchantress married to Jason. After Jason forsakes her for another woman, Medea seeks revenge against him by murdering their two young sons. Henry compares his own wife to Circe, Medusa, and Medea in the sense that all three characters are women who have the power to seduce men and then destroy them.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT King Henry II of England King Henry II of England, also known as Henry Plantagenet, was born in the year 1133 in Normandy, in what is now northern France. Though he became the king of England, he spent most of his life in Normandy, and the spoken language of his royal court was French. Henry was given the title Duke of Normandy in 1150, while he was still a teenager, and he inherited the title Count of Anjou upon the death of his father in 1151.

Eleanor of Aquitaine Eleanor of Aquitaine was born about 1122 and lived to become one of the most inﬂuential and politically powerful women of her time. When her father died, Eleanor inherited the Aquitaine region, an area in western France that was larger than the domain ruled by the French king. While still a teenager, Eleanor married the heir to the French throne, who became King Louis VII soon afterward. This marriage brought the Aquitaine under French rule and made Eleanor the queen of France. Eleanor was married to Louis for ﬁfteen years, during which time she gave birth to two daughters, but no sons. She exerted signiﬁcant political inﬂuence over her husband’s reign. A daring and adventurous woman, she also traveled with him on the

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Second Crusade during the late 1140s. However, Louis eventually became jealous of Eleanor’s attentions to other men, and their marriage was annulled. With the end of her ﬁrst marriage, Eleanor was once again the sole ruler of the Aquitaine region.

Eleanor and Henry In 1152, just a few months after the annulment of her marriage to Louis, Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet, who was eleven years younger than she. With his marriage to Eleanor, Henry acquired the title Duke of Aquitaine. A year later, Henry invaded England and was granted by treaty the status of heir to the English throne. He was crowned King Henry II of England in 1154, making him the ruler of one of the largest territories in Europe, sometimes referred to as the Angevin empire, encompassing most of the British Isles and about half of France—a region stretching from Scotland in the north to the Pyrenees mountains in the south. Henry’s powers eventually extended to Ireland and Wales, as well. Eleanor was instrumental in the political administration of Henry’s kingdom, and she was also an important patron of the arts, promoting the development of courtly music and poetry. Henry and Eleanor together had eight children, some of whom died before reaching adulthood. The surviving daughters were married off to powerful dukes, counts, and princes throughout Europe. Their eldest surviving son, Henry, was named heir to the throne. In the early 1170s, Eleanor, young Henry, Geoffrey, and Richard supported a revolt against Henry and John, on the grounds that Henry was unfairly doling out parcels of land to his sons. Henry was able to put down the rebellion, and he forgave his sons, but he kept Eleanor imprisoned in a castle in England until his death. In 1181, another rebellion was incited by a quarrel between Richard and his brother, the young Henry, over the rule of the Aquitaine region. This dispute ended, however, when young Henry died in the summer of 1183. The following year, a dispute broke out between Richard, who controlled the Aquitaine, and John, who had been granted permission by his father to take over the Aquitaine.

King Philip II of France King Philip II of France, also known as Philip Augustus, was born in 1165 in Paris, the son of King Louis VII of France (Eleanor’s ﬁrst husband). Philip became king of France in 1179, at the age of

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1180s: King Henry II rules over a vast region, sometimes referred to as the Angevin Empire, that encompasses most of the British Isles, Normandy, and over half of France. King Philip II of France rules over the southern and eastern portions of France not included in Henry’s domain. The rulers of England and France engage in continual land disputes over the French regions held sometimes by English kings and sometimes by French kings. 1960s: England, Scotland, and Wales constitute Great Britain, which, together with Ireland, constitute the United Kingdom. The nation of France includes all of the French regions once held by English kings. France is among the original six nations of the European Economic Community (EEC), a multinational alliance formed in 1957. In 1961, Great Britain bids for membership in the EEC, but France vetoes it. In 1967, the EEC is reorganized into the European Communities (EC). Today: The United Kingdom and France are among the many member nations of the European Union, a multinational economic and political alliance that developed out of the EC. • 1180s: England is ruled by a feudal kingship, passed down from generation to generation through family inheritance or transferred from one ruler to another through war. King Henry II of England rules over most of the British Isles, and over half of France. 1960s: The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. Parliament consists of the monarch, the elected House

fourteen, inheriting the throne from his father. In 1180, he married Isabella. Throughout the reigns of Henry II and his heirs, Philip fought to regain the French territories that had come under English rule. By the time of his death in 1223, Philip was the wealthiest and most powerful king in Europe.

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of Commons, and the appointed House of Lords. The prime minister, who is the leader of the majority political party in the House of Commons, serves as head of government. The monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, serves as head of state. Citizens of the United Kingdom enjoy universal suffrage for all men and women. Today: The United Kingdom remains a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy with universal suffrage. Queen Elizabeth II continues to serve as head of state. As of 1999, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have their own national assembly of representatives, chosen by proportional representation, which have taken on some of the powers of the central Parliament of the United Kingdom, while remaining subordinate to it. • 1180s: France under King Philip II is ruled by a feudal kingship, passed down from generation to generation through family inheritance. 1960s: Since the ratiﬁcation of the 1958 constitution, the French system of government is a parliamentary constitutional democracy known as the Fifth Republic. The French president appoints the prime minister and serves as head of state. The French Parliament, headed by the prime minister, consists of the National Assembly and the Senate. French citizens enjoy universal suffrage for all men and women. Today: The French government of the Fifth Republic continues to be organized as a parliamentary constitutional democracy with universal suffrage.

King Richard I of England Richard Plantagenet was born in 1157. After his brother Henry died, Richard was the eldest surviving son of Henry and Eleanor. As a boy, Richard’s parents gave him the title Duke of Aquitaine and of Poitier. A celebrated soldier from

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an early age, Richard throughout his life incited rebellions against his father in efforts to win the right to inherit Henry’s throne as king of England. During the late 1880s, Richard allied with King Philip II of France in a revolt against King Henry and Richard’s brother John. In 1889, Henry was defeated by Philip and Richard and was forced by treaty to name Richard as the heir to his throne. Upon Henry’s death a few months later, Richard became the new king and Eleanor was released from prison. After ﬁfteen years of imprisonment, Eleanor once again took up an active and important role in the government of the realm. When Richard left England for three years to go on the Third Crusade, Eleanor ruled in his name. During this period, John attempted a rebellion to usurp the throne from Richard, but Eleanor’s forces defeated him. When Richard returned from the Crusades, he forgave John for rebelling and promised to name him as heir to the throne. Throughout their reigns, Richard and Philip ﬂuctuated between alliances, truces, and battles. While they fought on the same side during Richard’s ﬁnal rebellion against his father, they were more often ﬁghting in opposition to one another over French territories. Richard was killed in 1199, at the age of forty-two, during a local skirmish over a hoard of gold.

King John of England John Plantagenet, the youngest son of Eleanor and Henry, was born in 1167. After Richard I died without an heir, Eleanor was an important factor in securing the throne for John as his successor. Geoffrey, the middle son of Eleanor and Henry, had died by this time, but his son, Arthur, claimed himself as the rightful heir to the English throne, based on the fact that Geoffrey had been Henry’s next eldest son after Richard. Arthur was given support from King Philip of France in ﬁghting his uncle John over the English throne, but Arthur was captured and is believed to have been killed by John.

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so unpopular among the landed gentry, he was eventually forced in 1215 to sign the Magna Carta (Great Charter), a document which curtailed the powers of the monarchy and became the foundation of English government. When John died the following year, his son became King Henry III of England. When Philip died in 1223, he was succeeded on the French throne by King Louis VIII.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Lion in Winter received mixed reviews of its 1966 Broadway debut production, and was essentially a critical and commercial failure. However, the 1968 ﬁlm production of The Lion in Winter, based on a screenplay adaptation written by Goldman, was a critical and commercial success, winning Goldman an Academy Award. Since then, The Lion in Winter has been a favorite production for high schools and small community theaters. A Broadway revival of The Lion in Winter, produced in 1999, received mixed reviews. Critical responses to The Lion in Winter throughout the history of its production on stage and screen have generally addressed similar issues. The play’s critical supporters and detractors alike make note of Goldman’s anachronistic use of modern American dialogue in the mouths of twelfth-century French and English characters. Many critics fault the play for this quality, asserting that Goldman’s dialogue is ridiculously anachronistic, as well as sounding stilted and stagy.

Soon after ascending the throne, John signed a treaty with Philip, ceding important lands to France. Like Richard and Philip, John and Philip fought many battles over French lands, occasionally ending in treaties, but ultimately resulting in Philip’s recapture of most of France from the English crown. John’s mother Eleanor died in 1204, at the age of about eighty-two.

Other critics, however, ﬁnd that Goldman’s ability to portray historical ﬁgures in an updated manner is the greatest strength of the play, because of the way in which it demonstrates the timeless quality of family relationships. In a New York Times review of a 1981 production of The Lion in Winter, Joseph Catinella comments that Goldman’s play ‘‘takes many liberties with history,’’ but notes that it is ‘‘the human clashes that give the script its contemporary ﬂair and endow its people with genuine, not waxworks, emotions.’’ Hoyt Hilsman, in a Daily Variety review of a 1994 production of The Lion in Winter, similarly observes: ‘‘Set in Chinon, France, in 1183, when ‘dysfunctional’ royal families not only made each others’ lives miserable but sent armies after their relatives’ domains, Goldman’s story still has a very contemporary spin.’’

John has often been described as the worst king in the history of England. However, because he was

Critics likewise disagree over Goldman’s interweaving of humorous dialogue and situations with

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Peter O’Toole and Catherine Hepburn in the 1968 ﬁlm adaptation of The Lion in Winter

elements of drama. Some praise The Lion in Winter as a comic family drama that demonstrates the wit and humor of its characters as well as their deeply human qualities and the poignancy of their genuine need for love. In a New York Times review of a 1988 production, Leah D. Frank asserts, ‘‘while The Lion in Winter is, without question, a comedy, what makes it interesting is the underlying seriousness of a disputatious family caught in a historical vise.’’ James Lardner observes, in a Washington Post review of a 1981 production of the play, ‘‘Goldman’s entertaining notion was to portray this royal tribe as a family of shouting, feuding, pining, pouting, snapping, plotting, everyday folks.’’ Many reviewers comment that the dramatic core of The Lion in Winter lies in the tension between the estranged husband and wife, Henry and Eleanor, and the effects of that conﬂict on their children. As Marianne Evett highlights, in a Cleveland Plain Dealer review of a 1993 production, Goldman’s play ‘‘is full of family scenes—the kind of bruising, manipulative encounters that maybe only husbands, wives and children can deal out to each other and survive.’’ Evett further comments that the scenes between Eleanor and Henry express

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a complex love—of choices made, some of them terribly wrong; of treachery and mutual respect, hurts forgiven and unforgiven, memories of pain and of shattering happiness. In short, a sense of real life, lived and shared by two extraordinary people.

The Lion in Winter has frequently been compared to Edward Albee’s celebrated play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which similarly focuses on the bitter struggles between a husband and wife who simultaneously taunt and impress one another with their barbed wit and capacity to deeply wound each other. As Leonard Hughes notes in a Washington Post review of a 2000 production of The Lion in Winter: ‘‘Goldman’s disturbing story . . . is rather like King Lear meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’ Ben Brantley, in a New York Times review of the 1999 Broadway revival of The Lion in Winter, comments that Goldman’s play shares with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the quality of ‘‘a thoroughly modern examination of a destructive marriage.’’ Brantley continues, ‘‘Like Mr. Albee’s George and Martha, Goldman’s Henry and Eleanor have turned emotional vivisection into a savage parlor game, slashing away in marital disharmony while admiring each other’s skills in doing so.’’

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CRITICISM WHILE THE PLANTAGENET

Liz Brent Brent holds a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan. In this essay, Brent discusses the theme of the dysfunctional family in Goldman’s The Lion in Winter.

SONS ON ONE LEVEL ARE VYING FOR THE THRONE, THEY ALL AT VARIOUS POINTS EXPRESS THE SENTIMENT THAT WHAT THEY

The central dynamic in the Plantagenet family stems from the relationship between Eleanor and Henry. During the ﬁrst years of their marriage, they were strongly attracted to each other and deeply in love with one another. However, over time, they became estranged. Eleanor claims that their marriage fell apart sixteen years earlier, after Henry began an extramarital affair with a young woman by the name of Rosamund, whom he brought to live with them in the castle, thus displacing his wife in his affections. Henry, however, claims that their relationship started to fall apart before that. He tells Eleanor that after their son Richard was born she became so attached to her child that Henry felt rejected by her. After Rosamund died, seven years before the play takes place, Henry took Alais as his mistress. Although she often denies it, Eleanor admits at certain points in the play that she is still in love with Henry, and that all she really wants is for him to take her back. She is deeply bitter about his years-long affair with Rosamund and painfully jealous of his current relationship with Alais. Eleanor is pained by his rejection of her for Rosamund, and now Alais, more than she suffers over her imprisonment. However, Eleanor’s love for Henry is tangled with her jealousy, anger, and resentment toward him. All of Eleanor’s actions thus stem from this feeling of rejection by her husband. Since she knows he will never take her back, she can only express her strong feelings toward him by seeking revenge against him through political plotting. Because Henry favors John, Eleanor favors Richard, and the two parents act out their resentment toward one another through encouraging Richard and John to regard each other as rivals for the throne. Henry’s feelings for Eleanor are jumbled and not entirely clear. Although he was once deeply in love with her, they became estranged many years ago. Henry has good reason to distrust Eleanor because she incited their sons to military rebellion against him ten years earlier, and came close to killing him in the process. However, Henry clearly admires Eleanor for her feistiness and intellectual power, and enjoys the fact that she is his equal in

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REALLY WANT IS FOR THEIR PARENTS TO EXPRESS GENUINE LOVE AND AFFECTION TOWARD THEM.’’

verbal and political sparring, in contrast to which he occasionally ﬁnds Alais’s sweetness and goodheartedness somewhat dull and irritating. Although Henry claims that he no longer cares for Eleanor, he is still capable of jealousy over other men’s attentions to his wife in the past. On several occasions, Eleanor taunts Henry with the possibility that she may have had an affair with his father, who has been dead for many years. At one point, Eleanor claims that this was merely a rumor, and is untrue, but she later insists that Henry’s father had indeed been her lover from the very beginning of their marriage. Henry is enraged by this, prompting Eleanor to insist that he stills cares about her enough to be upset by the idea of her having had an affair. The feelings between Eleanor and Alais are equally complicated. Alais was brought to the castle at the age of seven, having been promised in marriage to Henry and Eleanor’s eldest son Henry (who has recently died). Alais was thus raised by Eleanor, whom she regarded as a mother. Alais tells Eleanor that, as a girl, she had always worshipped the queen and looked up to her as a role model. Now the two women, one in her sixties and the other in her twenties, regard each other as rivals for Henry’s affections. However, the deep mother-daughter sentiment that Eleanor and Alais still feel toward one another is expressed in one tender moment when Alais, overcome by the stress of the family situation, breaks into tears and Eleanor cradles the young woman in her arms to comfort her. While the Plantagenet sons on one level are vying for the throne, they all at various points

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express the sentiment that what they really want is for their parents to express genuine love and affection toward them. Thus, the desire to be loved by their parents is acted out through competition over who is to be made heir to the throne. Geoffrey, the middle child, expresses this sentiment most openly and strongly. On several occasions, he asks his mother and father why they have never paid any attention to him or expressed any love toward him. Throughout the play, Geoffrey points out to both of his parents that they have always expressed complete indifference to him, personally as well as politically—and both Eleanor and Henry openly admit to Geoffrey that they have never given him much thought. When Geoffrey asks his parents why they have always been so indifferent toward him and why they have never even considered him as a possible heir to the throne, they both brush him off without providing any explanation for their indifference. Geoffrey makes clear on several occasions that he does not really care who is made king, but that he wishes his parents would at least give him the consideration he deserves as their son. Geoffrey’s bitterness toward his parents for never giving him any love is expressed through his desire to be involved in the political plotting and counter-plotting between them. If he cannot win their love, he seeks revenge by pitting them against each other with complex conspiracies. Richard, by contrast, while emotionally neglected by his father as a child, was emotionally smothered by his mother. Richard was raised as his mother’s favorite, and expresses the sentiment that Eleanor’s intense love for him, and her possessiveness over him, was unnatural and selﬁsh. Richard points out to his mother that she never truly loved him, but that she only uses him to try to get back at Henry. On the other hand, Richard complains to Henry that he was never given any fatherly love or attention, and that all he ever wanted was for Henry to love him. Henry explains that Richard was always allied with Eleanor, and so Henry felt he never had a chance to give Richard any attention. Richard insists that all he ever really wanted was his father’s love. Henry, however, dismisses this plea, insisting that Richard only wanted his crown, not his love. John, who has always been his father’s favorite, is cold and distrustful toward his mother. However, although Henry repeatedly states that he loves John and John loves him, both express the feeling that the sentiment between them is not genuine love. While Henry maintains that John is the only son he

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loves, and that John loves him, the other characters point out that John’s attachment to his father is really only an expression of his greediness in assuming that he will be made the next king of England. Thus, when John’s betrayal of his father is exposed, Henry is devastated by the realization that John does not truly love his father, but only loves the power his father has promised to him. John, likewise, feels that his father does not genuinely love him, but only uses him in opposition to Richard, as a means of getting back at Eleanor. Thus, while all of the members of the Plantagenet family express the desire to be genuinely loved by the others, they all regard each other’s expressions of so-called love as a selﬁsh excuse for acquiring political power and seeking revenge against others. They all feel rejected and unloved by one another, and yet they all perpetuate this dynamic by using each other in elaborate political power games expressive of their deep-seated resentment toward each other for depriving them of real love. Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on The Lion in Winter, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Catherine Dybiec Holm Holm is a genre, literary, and nonﬁction author. In this essay, Holm looks at a variety of aspects of this play that make it a compelling classic. The Lion in Winter is full of the things that make for an excellent story. Its characters are extremely complex and face conﬂicts that are not easily resolved. It is tightly plotted, and the dialog is intelligent and riveting. The character motivations, dark as they may be, are portrayed convincingly. Throughout the play, commentary on the human condition can be read between the lines. The Lion in Winter is a compelling classic because it demands concentration from its audience but does so in a way that is enjoyable rather than burdensome. Goldman gets the attention of his audience immediately by making it known that power is a theme that deﬁnes this story. Every single character is struggling for power, some quite skillfully. Perhaps the least skillful character is Alais. With an economy of words, Henry’s ﬁrst line to Alais— ‘‘You must know that’s a futile gesture. Come along.’’—sets the audience up for power struggles ahead. Alais would like to be Queen and also to be Henry’s wife. She’s out of her league, however, compared to the incredibly scheming and very human Eleanor. With characteristic economy of lan-

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guage, Goldman’s Henry tells Alais that even if she tried to make trouble, it would be fruitless because she ‘‘doesn’t matter to the others; only me.’’ Truly, Alais lacks the amazing cleverness of Henry, Eleanor, and to an extent, Eleanor and Henry’s three sons. This is made clear on the second page of the play and sets the audience up for future danger. Yet, Alais is necessary to the story; she is a foil to Eleanor’s age and cleverness; she exposes a tender, loving side of Henry (and of Eleanor); and Henry almost decides to marry her. At one point, Alais reveals honest self-awareness of her powerlessness and the dangerous world around her when she admits that she is the most dangerous of all the characters, since she is a pawn. Much of this story resembles an inﬁnitely clever chess game, where the stakes are power, acquisition, and life or death. Right away, Goldman makes it known that there is at least one power struggle at stake in this story: the struggle for the crown. The jungle metaphor three lines into the play also foreshadows danger ahead. Henry says ‘‘It’s going to be a jungle of a day.’’ However, this metaphor is used again at the end of the play, with a greater sense of danger and futility implied: ‘‘We’re jungle creatures, Henry, and the dark is all around us. See them? In the corners, you can see the eyes.’’ At the end of the story, the jungle metaphor means much more. It not only alludes to the continuous power struggles between these characters but to the dangerous world they have, in part, created through their intricate efforts at scheming. Bigger than Alais’s wish for the crown, however, is the intense power struggle between Henry and Eleanor. Two willful, conniving, and intelligent people, locked in a struggle for power, who also still love each other although their love seems perilously close to hate—what could possibly be more compelling? They have stalemated each other into a corner. Because they cannot possibly give up their struggles for power (whether it involves land acquisition, choosing an heir, or allowing themselves to love each other), Eleanor and Henry are locked in an endless stalemate. They can, and will, connive against each other until they die, but nothing will truly be resolved. Such is the sense of futility that runs through the play, which the characters recognize. Henry: We’re in the cellar and you’re going back to prison and my life is wasted and we’ve lost each other and you’re smiling. Eleanor: It’s the way I register despair. There’s everything in life but hope.

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MUCH OF THIS STORY RESEMBLES AN INFINITELY CLEVER CHESS GAME, WHERE THE STAKES ARE POWER, ACQUISITION, AND LIFE OR DEATH.’’

Henry and Eleanor are back where they started. Neither has managed to get anything they wanted; Henry does not have Aquitaine, and Eleanor is still his prisoner. There are even times in the story when it seems that Goldman tempts the reader with the suggestion that Henry may actually love Eleanor more than Alais. Henry is every bit as complex as Eleanor; they are well matched and made for each other. When Alais leaves a scene at one point, Henry tells her he loves her ‘‘like my life.’’ After Alais is gone, Henry says ‘‘I talk like that to keep her spirits up.’’ Not to be outdone, Eleanor’s comments to Henry often walk a ﬁne line between sarcasm and true love: ‘‘I never could deny you anything.’’ Neither of these willful people can let their guard down for long enough to truly admit their love for each other. Amidst all the treachery and scheming in this play, Goldman still provides humor, although it is dark and dry, given the context of the story. Many of the lines are wonderful, almost brilliant in how they convey humor and danger at the same time. It is another dichotomy that is represented in this story, just like the dichotomy (or trichotomy) of Eleanor and Henry’s love and rage and scheming toward each other. Referring to the scheming that goes on in the royal household, Henry says that his house is full of intellectual activity. Geoffrey ‘‘hums treachery’’; Richard ‘‘growls out for gore’’; Eleanor thinks ‘‘heavy thoughts like molten lead and marble slabs.’’ Eleanor hopes that the French king is like his father—‘‘simon pure and simon simple.’’ Eleanor proclaims her son ‘‘dull as plainsong’’ and threatens to give him up out of boredom. Truly, as Dany Margolies wrote in Back Stage West, ‘‘The impression one retains of these family members is their unabashedly open loathing of one another and their ﬁght-to-the-death backstabbing.’’ This is true, but amazingly, the sarcasm can cross a ﬁne line into the realm of dark humor.

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Goldman’s economy of language works well in this play. Early on, the reader has been well prepared for Eleanor’s entrance, as well as her formidable presence and ability to wield power. In the previous pages, she has been referred to as ‘‘the New Medusa,’’ the ‘‘great [b——],’’ and the reader is aware that for some reason, she is locked up in a tower. Obviously, Eleanor has power that must be kept in check. In several concise lines of dialog, the reader is further introduced to Eleanor via her sons. The reader also immediately understands the sons’ own power struggles and their ability to scheme and connive, though they never achieve the brilliance of their parents. In a very few lines, the reader knows that the sons are struggling for the crown, they think little of their mother, John is less mature than the others, and Richard was once a favorite of Eleanor’s. The reader can intuit that there is at least a little fear and carefulness regarding Eleanor, although none of the sons will admit it out loud. Some of the most interesting things about The Lion in Winter are the internal conﬂicts that Henry and Eleanor struggle with. Although they are locked in a power struggle, they still, underneath all their plotting and scheming, love each other. It seems incredible that these two can so love and hate each other at the same time, yet Goldman makes it believable. These characters are casualties of the futile stalemates they have created for themselves and for each other, and they know it. Complex characters such as these are well-rounded and make for a compelling story and believable character motivations. Another interesting internal dichotomy of Eleanor’s is her genuine love for her husband’s mistress. Eleanor: I don’t much like our children. Only you— the child I raised but didn’t bear. Alais: You never cared for me. Eleanor: I did and I do.

Eleanor’s affection for Alais is demonstrated again. While this may seem incredible, Eleanor is created so convincingly that the reader is able to believe that she is actually strong enough, even noble enough, to put her love for the girl that she raised above her disappointment with not being able to claim Henry’s affections. Indeed, as scheming and incredibly bright as Eleanor is, she is also necessarily pragmatic. The reader is also given enough hints throughout the play to realize that Henry really does love Eleanor at least as much as

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Alais, though it is a different, tormented kind of love replete with its own passion and power struggles. These moments are all the more poignant and interesting because of the complexity of the two main characters. Henry: There are moments when I miss you. Eleanor: Many? Henry: Do you doubt it?

Eleanor calls Henry a ‘‘marvel of a man.’’ Henry recalls Eleanor’s spellbinding beauty when he ﬁrst met her. These two walk a tightrope of love, rage, and desire for power—the tension that holds this story together. Eleanor displays the same conﬂicting feelings for Richard. While there are times in the play that it seems she would not hesitate to disown all her sons (‘‘I don’t much like our children’’), scene 3 ends with genuine sentiment on her part, regarding Richard. See? You do remember. I taught you dancing, too, and languages and all the music that I knew and how to love what’s beautiful. The sun was warmer then and we were every day together.

Beyond all the scheming that royal life at that time in history necessitated and that these characters have brought upon themselves, they still display genuine human virtues. In the end, neither are able to kill their sons, though their sons’ existence will eventually put them in danger. They express regret for what could have been. Eleanor regrets losing Henry, and the fact that she cannot ever have him back. Henry regrets wasting fortunes, squandering lives, and spending ‘‘everything.’’ Yet, there is something compelling in their passion for each other even though they cannot and will not allow themselves to fully realize it. With the subtlety and economy that is typical of Goldman’s writing, he manages to make a few important observations about the human condition without hitting his readers over the head. Both of these are integral to the story and propel these characters’ motivations, even though the characters realize their utter futility or destructiveness. In a telling bit of dialogue, Eleanor likens her family to the ‘‘origins of war. . . . Dead bodies rot in ﬁeld and stream because the living ones are rotten.’’ Eleanor realizes that her and her family’s scheming actions propagate more of the same, but she and the others do not stop. Henry ﬁnds it incredible that he has ‘‘children who would murder children’’ even though ‘‘ﬁsh eat their young, and foxes: but not us.’’ Here,

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Henry is commenting on the animal instincts that lie beneath the surface in the human animal and that rise to the surface in dangerous and violent ways in this story. This play is rich with aspects that work together well to make it an exceptional story: complex characters with interesting internal and external conﬂicts, compelling dialog that often does double duty, and a poignant and dangerous look at the human condition and some unresolvable stalemates. Source: Catherine Dybiec Holm, Critical Essay on The Lion in Winter, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Sheldon Goldfarb Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, Goldfarb explores the signiﬁcance of the family struggles in Goldman’s play. Towards the end of the ﬁrst act of Lion in Winter, John, the youngest prince, is astonished and horriﬁed when his older brother Richard pulls a knife on him. ‘‘A knife,’’ he says, ‘‘he’s got a knife.’’ To which his mother, Eleanor, responds by saying: ‘‘Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It is eleven eighty-three and we’re barbarians.’’ This is a joke, of course; it is in fact the sort of easy laugh line that some commentators have complained about in Goldman’s play, but there are some interesting things going on in this passage nevertheless. The laugh itself derives from a sort of distancing effect reminiscent of the plays of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, with the character in effect stepping back to comment on herself, violating the rules of realism. It is this sudden violation that creates the laugh, but there is more than humor here. First of all, Goldman seems to ask his audience to notice how different these people from the Middle Ages are from modern people. In modern middleclass families, brothers do not normally pull knives on each other. But, before his modern audience can get too comfortable in feeling they are superior to these character, Goldman suggests that the differences are not really that great after all. Just a few moments after the knife scene, Eleanor realizes that she can use something John has said to get the better of him and to wound his father, her husband, Henry. John has let slip the fact that he has been plotting with Philip, the French king, to attack Henry. Eleanor

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knows that ﬁnding this out would hurt Henry because John is his favorite. ‘‘Oh, I’ve got the old man [Henry] this time,’’ she says. ‘‘The damn fool thinks he loves John, he believes it. That’s where the knife goes in.’’ The knife in this case is not a real knife but a metaphorical one. Eleanor is not planning to wound her husband physically, but emotionally, just as a modern person might do. Indeed, all of the wounding in this play is emotional. Real knives are seen on occasion, and there is talk of war and death but all that actually happens is that members of a family argue, plot, and hurl insults at each other. Most of the time, the characters seem more modern than medieval, which has led some commentators to criticize the play for not being historically accurate. ‘‘Goldman uses his historical setting merely as a subterfuge for romantic comedy,’’ says Robert Brustein, which does raise the issue of why Goldman chose to set his tale of family conﬂict eight hundred years in the past. Perhaps the point is to show that on a ﬁgurative level, the struggles that go on in a modern family are just as serious, dangerous, and wounding in their own way as the bloody struggles carried on by the people of 1183. ‘‘Knives, knives,’’ says Eleanor just after the knife scene and her comment about wounding Henry. It is not clear whether she is referring to physical knives like the one Richard carries or to emotional knives. Perhaps both. Perhaps the point is that there is little difference: emotional wounds can be as serious as physical ones and medieval struggles to conquer provinces and win thrones are just heightened versions of the struggles that go on in modern families every day. Goldman’s point seems to be that all families, whether modern or medieval, struggle. ‘‘What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?’’ says Eleanor in another of the play’s laugh lines. Again the message is contradictory. The line is funny because Eleanor’s attempt to make her family seem no worse than other families seems absurd at ﬁrst. She makes the comment just after telling Henry she once slept with his father; whether that statement is true or not (and characters in this play tell lies all the time, so it is hard to tell), this seems far beyond the sort of thing that would be said in most families. And yet, as Eleanor says, what family does not have its ups and downs? What family is free of squabbles and lies and hurtful actions? What do families squabble over? If Henry is to be believed, it is power. ‘‘Power is the only fact,’’

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The cast from the 1968 ﬁlm adaptation of The Lion in Winter

he says early in act 1. Indeed, the play on one level is all about the struggle for power: the struggle to decide who will inherit the throne of England and also rule over large areas of France. But, Henry does not seem quite correct. Power in this play is one fact, but not the only one. There is also love and lack of love. Geoffrey, for instance, the middle and always forgotten son, complains that he gets no love; his parents, he says, have never felt anything ‘‘warmer than indifference’’ for him. When he complains about being left out of the discussions of who will inherit the throne, his complaint is less about not having a chance to be a king but about being overlooked. ‘‘It isn’t power that I feel deprived of,’’ he says; ‘‘it’s the mention that I miss. There’s no affection for me here.’’ Similarly, Henry himself shows that more than power is at stake at the end when he ﬁnds he cannot kill his rebellious sons. Unable to strike them down, he collapses on the ﬂoor, saying, ‘‘Children . . . They’re all we have.’’ It seems he has real affection for his sons, or at least a sense of parental duty towards them. He even displays real affection for Eleanor despite all their verbal jousting and the fact that he keeps her locked up in a castle. Even their insults seem good-natured most of the time, which can be seen, for example, when they banter over

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headstones or about whether the sea parted on Eleanor’s voyage. At the end, Henry declares their great hope to be that they have each other. In fact, one of the most interesting points Goldman seems to be making is that the jousting and ﬁghting are all part of the love: one cannot have one without the other. It might be thought that peace and harmony would be preferable to all the maneuverings and deceit, and there is a moment in the play when Eleanor rhapsodizes over the possibility of peace. She calls on her sons to join her in putting an end to all the squabbling. ‘‘For the love of God,’’ she says, ‘‘can’t we love one another just a little? That’s how peace begins.’’ Eleanor’s sudden paciﬁsm, however, seems merely a result of her feeling defeated in the struggle with her husband. She has just ﬁnished telling Richard to accept the fact that the two of them have lost to Henry. A moment later, however, when it turns out that all is not lost after all, she forgets her yearning for peace and starts plotting anew, making her comment about sticking the knife in Henry. Tellingly, the stage direction at this moment, as she forgets about peace and returns to the struggle, is: ‘‘Alive again.’’ The peace she sought seems to have been connected to death; only when she struggles is she alive. Similarly, when Henry earlier in the play

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says he has grown tired of war and asks for peace, Eleanor says ‘‘How about eternal peace?’’—in other words, death. Peace is for the grave, the play seems to be saying; to be alive is to struggle.

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THE LAUGH ITSELF DERIVES FROM A SORT OF DISTANCING

This may seem like a gloomy attitude, but the play’s tone is far from gloomy or pessimistic. Goldman calls it a comedy, and in addition to the humor in it, the ending seems upbeat in its way. It is not a conventional happy ending. There is no reconciliation; there is not even a resolution of the conﬂict. Robert Brustein complains that the author never even bothers to resolve the issue of who will inherit the throne. Even Walter Kerr, a critic who praises the play, is troubled by the lack of resolution. There is no moral at the end, he says, no one to cheer for and no goal to look forward to. He does wonder if ‘‘the mazelike trickiness’’ of the play might be part of its meaning, and he is on to something there. Elsewhere he speaks of the play as being ‘‘a roundabout game,’’ and if he means that the play is something of a merry-go-round ride, then he is even closer to its essence. As the play ends, Henry invites Eleanor to return at Easter to ‘‘strike me down again.’’ Eleanor says she might just succeed next time. Henry say perhaps she will not. It sounds like an exchange between friendly rivals looking forward to their next competition against each other. It is also somehow reminiscent of ‘‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’’ an essay by Albert Camus, the French philosopher associated with the Theater of the Absurd. Although The Lion in Winter is different in many ways from the plays that are associated with the Theater of the Absurd, most notably Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, it does share an underlying attitude with them: the notion that the universe is absurd and meaningless. The Lion in Winter is much more conventional in style than the dramas of Beckett and others of his school; it does not indulge in nonsensical obscurities and does not abandon plot altogether. But, there is a sense of meaninglessness hanging over it. In the midst of the struggle over who will be the next king, characters ask why it matters. Eleanor notes that she and Henry will not live to see the succession, so why bother to ﬁght over it? The young princess Alais laughs at Henry over the notion that after death he might ‘‘look down from the clouds and see who’s sitting in [his] place.’’ The play suggests that there is nothing after death. As Eleanor says, ‘‘The world stops when I die.’’ There is just life, a life of ceaseless struggle.

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EFFECT REMINISCENT OF THE PLAYS OF THE GERMAN PLAYWRIGHT BERTOLT BRECHT, WITH THE CHARACTER IN EFFECT STEPPING BACK TO COMMENT ON HERSELF, VIOLATING THE RULES OF REALISM. IT IS THIS SUDDEN VIOLATION THAT CREATES THE LAUGH, BUT THERE IS MORE THAN HUMOR HERE.’’

This notion, however, is not a gloomy thing. In his essay on Sisyphus, Camus summarizes the story of the character in Greek mythology whom the gods had condemned to a horrible punishment: he was forced to roll a stone up a mountainside, and every time he succeeded in reaching the top, the stone would roll down to the bottom, forcing him to start over again. It is a dreadful punishment, says Camus, to be set to do such ‘‘futile and hopeless labour.’’ Sisyphus’s ‘‘whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing.’’ Yet, says Camus, there is strength and joy in the story: ‘‘The struggle itself . . . is enough to ﬁll a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’’ The same can be said of Henry and Eleanor in Goldman’s play. They struggle ceaselessly but do not achieve anything. At the end of the play, nothing is resolved, and all they have is a promise to resume the struggle next time, a struggle that hardly matters because they will die without knowing the ﬁnal result. Yet it is the struggle that brings these two characters to life. The play does have a moral after all: life is nothing without struggle, and love neither. Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on The Lion in Winter, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Charles Isherwood In the following review of a revival of The Lion in Winter, Isherwood remarks that the reputation of the play was helped greatly by the 1968 ﬁlm version and that the play ‘‘isn’t terriﬁcally distinguished.’’

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The 1968 ﬁlm version of The Lion in Winter is a sword that cuts all sorts of ways for the new Broadway revival of James Goldman’s play. If the movie hadn’t been such a critical and popular hit, the play easily might have sunk into obscurity—the original 1966 production opened to mixed reviews and ﬂopped quickly. But the picture won a trio of Oscars (one for Goldman included), and its success gave the play a stature that has kept it in the stock and amateur repertory for three decades. Unhappily for the Roundabout Theater Co., this ﬁrst Broadway revival reveals just how much of the ﬁlm’s acclaim was due to the fervid Panavision posturing of a cast that included Katharine Hepburn, Peter O’Toole and a young, astonishing Anthony Hopkins making his ﬁlm debut. Without such bravura performances, with each psychological nuance registering in eye-popping widescreen, the material isn’t terriﬁcally distinguished. The play is a literary conceit of sorts: The musty historical drama dusted off, dressed up in latter-day neuroses and half-played for laughs. There’s a certain rude pleasure in seeing historical ﬁgures, normally treated with reverence onstage and in ﬁlm, taken down a peg or two and exposed in all their squalid naturalness. But Goldman’s squalid naturalness is rather artiﬁcial: The play’s God-you’re-a-b—-but-so-am-I-darlingwe’re-made-for-each-other attitude is stagy, as is the familiar familial angst that ﬁnds all three sons of a royal mother at some point accusing her of not loving them enough in their childhoods. The play’s wit is mostly garden-variety sarcasm in chain mail and fancy language, its pretensions to high drama and poetry slightly embarrassing (King Henry to wife-enemy Eleanor: ‘‘You ﬁll me full of pity and terror. What a tragedy you are.’’). Among the extremely variable cast of Michael Mayer’s production, only the redoubtable Stockard Channing manages to hold her own against memories of her ﬁlm rival, the Oscar-winning Hepburn. She plays Eleanor of Aquitaine, estranged wife of Henry II (Laurence Fishburne), who has been released from genteel captivity in her own castle to attend a family gathering, where Henry plans to announce which of his three sons will be heir to the kingdom. Henry’s favorite (inexplicably) is the youngest, John, a sniveling bundle of teenage angst played with footstamping, nasal snarkiness by Keith Nobbs. Eleanor is allied with Richard, the eldest and strongest, though you’d never guess it from Chuma HunterGault’s less-than-lionhearted, ineffective performance. (When he and Channing share a scene together, she’s acting in a vacuum; the actor, making his Broadway debut, is simply out of his depth.)

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Middle child Geoffrey (Neal Huff) is the bitterest of the trio, and tries to improve his position by playing everyone against each other. Everything in the ﬁlm conspired to elevate the material: the authentic accents from a cast that included Timothy Dalton as the French prince Philip, the atmospheric location ﬁlming and John Barry’s surging score, the nearhysterical performances that gave a jolt of psychological depth to the backstabbing shenanigans (Even the trendy-feeling homosexual liaison between Richard and Philip rang true, thanks to Hopkins; it’s laughable here.). Only Channing’s performance turns the same trick in Mayer’s production. Her role is by far the strongest (Rosemary Harris won a Tony in the original), and she gives it the full beneﬁt of her considerable technique, turning sometimes thudding bits of business into glittering little shards of wit by a kind of acting alchemy. Eyes aglow with mischievous ﬁre, she alternately teases and torments her family as if plucking harp strings for her own amusement. When the stakes are raised in the late going and she’s required to take it all more seriously, Channing duly turns on the dramatics, but everybody has a lot less fun. Fishburne has a regalsounding voice and a powerful presence, but his Henry is never authoritative enough to counterbalance Channing’s charismatic queen; it’s hard not to think Eleanor could wipe the ﬂoor with him at any moment. Nobbs’ bratty John is fun to watch, and Emily Bergl is surprisingly touching as Alais, the king’s beloved new consort and a sadly self-aware pawn in this regal tug of war. The rest of the lackluster cast struggles with varying levels of success to stand out against David Gallo’s mudcolored set and to retain their dignity in Michael Krass’ unimaginative and sometimes unﬂattering costumes (Poor Roger Howarth as Philip plays his gay love scene in wispy linen shift and beige suede boots, an ensemble you might see pictured in Glamour magazine with the word ‘‘DON’T!’’ in screaming type beneath it.). As comedy gives way to melodrama in the last act, Mayer’s production ﬂags noticeably; it’s not easy to poke fun at conventional historical drama and then pull it off with the pomp fully intact, which is what Goldman’s play attempts. In any case, if you’re going to debunk the mythologizing treatment of historical ﬁgures, it helps to put forth something authentic in their place. Winter only substitutes more stageworthy myths, and in this production, they’re only intermittently entertaining. Source: Charles Isherwood, ‘‘The Lion in Winter,’’ in Daily Variety, March 12, 1999, pp. 1–2.

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SOURCES Brantley, Ben, ‘‘A Game of Feudal Feuding,’’ in New York Times, March 12, 1999, p. E1. Brustein, Robert, ‘‘A Question of Identity,’’ in The Third Theatre, Simon and Schuster, 1969, pp. 101–02. Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sysiphus, and Other Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien, Hamish Hamilton, 1955, pp. 96–99. Catinella, Joseph, ‘‘Lion in Winter at Theater Forum,’’ in New York Times, December 27, 1981, p. K21. Evett, Marianne, ‘‘Putting on Heirs: Henry II Shakes Family Tree in Vivid Play House Drama,’’ in Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), December 2, 1993, p. E7. Frank, Leah D., ‘‘Mid-Life Crisis,’’ in New York Times, October 9, 1988, sec. 12, p. 17. Goldman, James, Lion in Winter, in Best American Plays, 1963–1967, edited by John Gassner and Clive Barnes, Crown Publishers, 1971, pp. 277–309. Hilsman, Hoyt, ‘‘The Lion in Winter,’’ in Daily Variety, November 15, 1994. Hughes, Leonard, ‘‘A Royal Performance: Lion in Winter Feels Suitably Hotblooded and Cold,’’ in Washington Post, March 15, 2000, p. M29. Kerr, Walter, ‘‘Winking with Words,’’ in Thirty Plays Hath November: Pain and Pleasure in the Contemporary Theater, Simon and Schuster, 1969, pp. 112–13. Lardner, James, ‘‘A Lively New Formula for Lion in Winter,’’ in Washington Post, February 17, 1981, p. B7. Margolies, Dany, ‘‘The Lion in Winter at Theatre 40,’’ in Back Stage West, Vol. 11, Issue 10, p. 19.

FURTHER READING Bradbury, Jim, Philip Augustus: King of France, 1180–1223, Longman, 1998. Bradbury offers a biographical history of King Philip II of France, also known as Philip Augustus, who was born in 1165 and reigned from 1180 to 1223. Bradbury focuses on King Philip’s relationship with the Catholic Church and on the Battle of Bouvines in 1214. Church, S. D., ed., King John: New Interpretations, Boydell Press, 1999. Church provides a collection of essays by various authors presenting current reinterpretations of the controversial life and reign of King John of England. These essays cover such topics as: the early years of John’s reign; his relationship to his mother, Eleanor of

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Aquitaine; his dealings with the Norman aristocracy; his personal relationship with Isabella of Angouleme; his political dealings with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; his problems with the Roman Catholic Church; his system of justice; and his personal and political relationship with King Philip II of France. Clopper, Lawrence M., Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period, University of Chicago Press, 2001. Clopper explains the social, cultural, and political signiﬁcance of theater, games, and festivals in England from the eleventh through the ﬁfteenth centuries. Daniell, Christopher, From Norman Conquest to Magna Carta: England, 1066–1215, Routledge, 2003. Daniell offers a comprehensive history of society, culture, and politics in England from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the signing of the Magna Carta by King John in 1215. Daniell covers such topics as the Battle of Hastings and its aftermath, social and family life, court life, government and justice systems, religion, the economy, and the arts. Gillingham, John, Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry, and War in the Twelfth Century, Hambledon Press, 1994. Gillingham offers biographical and historical information on the life and reign of King Richard I of England (also known as Richard Coeur de Lion, or Richard the Lionheart), who was born in 1157 and ruled from 1189 to 1199. Gillingham discusses Richard’s role as King of England in the politics of his time, as well as his military engagements and his experiences ﬁghting in the Crusades. Parsons, John Carmi, ed., Medieval Queenship, St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Parsons provides a collection of essays by various authors on the social, cultural, political, and interpersonal roles of queens in England and Europe during the Middle Ages. Essays included in the volume cover such topics as family, sex, and power among medieval queens; mothers and daughters in the Plantagenet royal family; the representation of royal women in England; and the relationship of queens to the Catholic Church. Schlight, John, Henry II Plantagenet, Twayne Publishers, 1973. Schlight provides a historical and biographical overview of the life and reign of King Henry II of England, who was born in 1133 and reigned from 1154 until his death in 1189. Weir, Alison, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life, Ballantine Books, 2000. Weir provides a historical and biographical overview of the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most powerful women in English history, who was married ﬁrst to King Louis VII of France and then to King Henry II of England.

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Mister Roberts THOMAS HEGGEN 1948

Mister Roberts (1948), a play by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan, had a successful three-year run on Broadway from 1948 to 1951. It was adapted from Heggen’s novel of the same name, which was published in 1946. Mister Roberts takes place on a U.S. cargo ship that supplies the troops in the Paciﬁc during the ﬁnal months of World War II. Life on board is monotonous and tedious, and the men are frustrated and bored. They hate the tyrannical captain but feel great affection for Mr. Roberts, one of the ofﬁcers. The play is mainly about Roberts’s attempts to get transferred to combat duty, his relationship with his men, and his conﬂict with the captain. It also abounds in comic incidents, many of which originated from Heggen’s real experiences aboard the USS Virgo (AKA-20), on which he served as a lieutenant from 1944 to 1945. Captain Randall of the Virgo really did have potted palm trees set proudly on his bridge, just as the ﬁctional captain in Mister Roberts does, and these trees really were dumped overboard (by Heggen, as the story goes). As in the play, the crew of the Virgo spied on nurses in the showers, and in late 1944, Captain Randall forbad shore leave for his men the ﬁrst few days the Virgo was back in San Francisco. One of the more enduring plays to emerge from the World War II era, Mister Roberts shows, with a light touch, a side of war that is often forgotten—not the excitement or the heroism of battle, but the boredom of the men assigned to less glamorous

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work, where one’s enemies are as often as not the ofﬁcers who hold power over them, rather than the soldiers or sailors of the opposing forces.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Thomas Heggen was born December 23, 1919, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, the son of Thomas O. Heggen, a business owner, and Mina Amelia Paulson. In 1935, after the business failed during the depression, the family moved to Oklahoma. Heggen attended Oklahoma City University, Oklahoma A&M University, and the University of Minnesota. In 1941, he graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota. In December that same year, Heggen was working in New York City as an editor for Reader’s Digest when the United States entered World War II. He joined the U.S. Navy a few days later and was sent to an ofﬁcers’ training program at Notre Dame, after which he joined the tanker USS Salinas, which operated in the North Atlantic. After a six-month stay in the hospital with a serious hand injury, sustained during a ﬁght with an ofﬁcer, Heggen was assigned to another tanker, the USS Agawam, operating between New Orleans and the Caribbean. He requested a transfer and was assigned as assistant communications ofﬁcer aboard the USS Virgo, a cargo and troop ship in the Paciﬁc. On July 12, 1944, Heggen joined the Virgo at Eniwetok, in the Marshall Islands. During the fourteen months he served on the Virgo, Roberts wrote a series of amusing vignettes about day-to-day life on the ship. Following his discharge from the Navy in 1945, Heggen was encouraged by his cousin, novelist Wallace Stegner, to submit his stories for publication. Several of his stories appeared in Atlantic Monthly and Reader’s Digest, at which Heggen had returned to his old editorial job. Heggen then shaped the stories into the novel Mister Roberts, which was published in 1946. The book was well received by critics and became a bestseller. The success of the novel encouraged Heggen to adapt it into a play. Not satisﬁed with his own version, he enlisted the help of stage director Joshua Logan. The resulting collaboration, starring Henry Fonda as Roberts, had a successful three-year run on Broadway, from 1948 to 1951. It also won two Tony awards in 1948, one for best play and one for the authors. The play was made into a movie in 1955, starring Fonda as Roberts and featuring James Cagney and Jack Lemmon.

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Thomas Heggen

Heggen, however, was unable to build on his success. Despondent after his 1946 divorce from his wife Carol Lynn Gilmer, whom he had married in 1942, and unable to make progress on new projects, he began to drink to excess and to abuse prescription drugs. On May 19, 1949, Heggen was found dead in his bathtub in his New York City apartment. He had taken an overdose of barbiturates, and the death was ruled a probable suicide, although Heggen left no note. Friends believed his death was an accident, explaining that Heggen, who had been suffering from insomnia, had probably taken the drug and then fallen asleep in the bath.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1, Scene 1 Mister Roberts takes place aboard the U.S. Navy cargo ship AK-601, operating in the Paciﬁc. It begins a few weeks before V-E Day. Just after dawn, as the sleepy crew ignores the reveille call, Roberts reports to Doc that the previous night he observed a Navy task force stretching for miles on the horizon. He shows Doc a letter he has written requesting a transfer to combat duty. He writes these

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letters every week, but the captain never approves them. Dowdy tells Roberts the men must be given a liberty (time ashore), which they have not had for over a year, since the captain always denies their requests. The men straggle onto the deck. Insigna discovers he can spy on the female nurses as they shower in the hospital on the island. The men all rush to see, using their binoculars. Mannion and Insigna get into a ﬁght, and Roberts realizes he must get some shore leave for the men, to ease their frustration and boredom. The captain cancels the movie that night because a man was on deck without a shirt, a violation of orders.

cabin, but on the way, they run into the men. Insigna makes a remark that reveals the men have been spying on the girls. Miss Girard veriﬁes with a pair of binoculars what has been happening and promptly leaves, saying she has promised to help the girls put up curtains. The men are disappointed that their sport has ended, but Roberts cheers them up by announcing that they are going to Elysium Island, where they will have shore leave.

Act 1, Scene 5 As the ship approaches Elysium, the men eagerly anticipate getting off the ship. But the captain announces that because of cargo requirements and security conditions, there will be no liberty.

Act 1, Scene 2 Roberts tells Pulver his plan to get the men ashore. He has offered a quart of whiskey, which Pulver had been hoarding in a shoebox, to the Port Director, whose job it is to decide where the ship goes next. Pulver is dismayed because he has invited one of the nurses onto the ship, and now he has no alcohol for her. Doc solves the problem by making fake Scotch out of Coca-Cola, iodine, and hair tonic. Roberts teases Pulver that he is afraid of the captain and never carries out any of the pranks he thinks up, such as putting marbles in the captain’s overhead so they will roll around and keep him awake at night. In a conversation with Doc, Roberts repeats his desire to see combat. He knows the war is nearing its end.

Act 1, Scene 6 In the captain’s cabin, Roberts demands to know when the crew will be allowed to go ashore. The captain replies that the only way the crew will get liberty is if Roberts stops writing letters requesting a transfer. The captain hates Roberts but needs him. If Roberts leaves the ship, the captain will not be able to attain promotion to the rank of commander. Roberts at ﬁrst refuses to go along with the captain’s plan, but eventually agrees to it. The captain also gets him to promise not to talk back to him in front of the crew, or to tell anyone of their meeting.

Act 2, Scene 1 Act 1, Scene 3 As the men load up a Navy ship with supplies, Roberts disobeys the captain’s orders not to give out any fresh fruit. He also allows the men to remove their shirts. The captain summons Roberts, but Roberts sends word he is busy. The outraged captain comes on deck and picks a quarrel. He criticizes the wording in Roberts’s transfer request and tells him not to write any more. He orders the men to put on their shirts, but they refuse, until Roberts tells them to do so. The captain tries to punish Roberts, saying that he will be conﬁned to his room for ten days, but he backs down when he realizes that Roberts is indispensable to the running of the ship. The men are delighted to have observed Roberts getting the better of the hated captain.

Act 1, Scene 4 Pulver brings the nurse Miss Girard onto the ship. He pretends to have seen combat action and to be the executive ofﬁcer. He tries to take her to his

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It is 3:45 A.M., and the men straggle back from shore leave. Some are drunk, while others have been injured in ﬁghts that resulted after they gate-crashed a dinner-dance for Army personnel. Roberts deals with them mildly, allowing some of the men to go back ashore. He is pleased with them because they have bonded as a crew. After more trouble ashore, the captain is ordered to report to the island commander.

Act 2, Scene 2 The captain tells Roberts they are being kicked out of the port. He orders the men to work harder and hints to Roberts that he might get a promotion if he does a good job. He gives Roberts some orders, which Roberts obeys, to the consternation of the men. Dolan produces a bulletin that says there is an urgent need for experienced ofﬁcers aboard combat ships. But Roberts is reluctant to sign the letter Dolan has typed for him. The men do not understand why.

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Act 2, Scene 3 The crew think that Roberts has buckled under to the captain because he wants a promotion. He has also put Dolan ‘‘on report,’’ a disciplinary measure, which has further upset the men. Roberts begs Doc to transfer him to the hospital on the next island, but Doc refuses. After they hear an announcement on the radio that the war in Europe is over, they call for a celebration. Pulver tells of his latest scheme, to throw a ﬁrecracker under the captain’s bunk. He goes to the laundry room to test it, and there is a tremendous explosion. He returns, unhurt but covered in soapsuds. Roberts wants to make another ﬁrecracker, but Pulver says he has no more materials. He is disappointed that he has let Roberts down.

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announces what he has done. Then he challenges the captain about why there is to be no movie that night.

CHARACTERS The Captain

The men are cold towards Roberts. He apologizes to Dolan and takes him off report, but the men remain unfriendly. After the men exit, Roberts takes the palm tree from the container and throws it over the side. The captain enters, notices the absent palm tree, and orders the crew to battle stations. He demands to know who did the prank and guesses it was Roberts. Roberts denies any knowledge of it, and the captain gets so worked up he makes himself ill. After Roberts leaves the captain’s cabin, the men once more treat him with respect.

The captain is a petty tyrant who earns the enmity of all the crewmen. He is an absurd, ridiculous ﬁgure. He insists on imposing strict regulations, such as when he gives the order that the men may not remove their shirts, even though the weather is extremely hot. He cancels the nightly movie for any small breach in regulations. The captain also suffers from class envy, hating Roberts because Roberts has a college education. The captain’s smallness of mind is revealed by the fact that he cherishes the award he received, on behalf of the ship, for superior achievement in delivering supplies. The award was a potted palm tree, which he waters tenderly and displays with pride. The captain wants to build on this insigniﬁcant success and aspires to become a commander, which is why he needs Roberts to stay on the ship, since Roberts is highly competent and the captain is not.

Act 2, Scene 5

Doc

Roberts has gained his transfer, but he does not know how. Dolan tries to convince him that one of his old letters was ﬁnally approved, but Doc reveals that the men wrote a letter for him, forging the captain’s signature. The men enter and give him a going-away present, a brass medal shaped like a palm tree, attached to a piece of gaudy ribbon.

Doc is the ship’s doctor. He is between thirtyﬁve and forty years old and possesses a wry sense of humor. Roberts conﬁdes in him frequently and the two men sometimes argue. Doc debunks Roberts’s idea of heroism, saying that physical heroism is merely a reﬂex that occurs in a dangerous situation. He tries to persuade Roberts that he is doing as much good on the AK-601 as he would if he were in a combat zone. Doc participates in the captain’s name-signing contest, and he judges it as well. He also takes it upon himself to inform Roberts of the contest after it has taken place.

Act 2, Scene 4

Act 2, Scene 6 Some time has elapsed. The men are reading their mail. Pulver reads a letter from Roberts, dated three weeks earlier. He is aboard a destroyer that has been subject to four air attacks at Okinawa. He is happy to be in the war at last. He keeps the ‘‘medal’’ his men gave him on his desk, saying he would rather have it than a Congressional Medal of Honor. Pulver then reads another letter he has received from a friend who serves on the same ship. The letter informs him that Roberts is dead, following a Japanese suicide attack. Pulver throws the palm trees over the side, goes to the captain’s cabin, and

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Dolan Dolan is a young, garrulous, brash yeoman, who enjoys the fact that he is responsible for typing Roberts’s letters requesting a transfer. He also is well informed about Navy regulations. During the liberty on Elysium, he gets drunk and brings a goat back with him as a mascot, which happens to be the property of an admiral.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • In 1955, Mister Roberts was made into a movie, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Mister Roberts, Jack Lemmon as Ensign Pulver, and James Cagney as the captain. • A situation comedy version of Mister Roberts ran for one season on NBC during 1965 and 1966.

Lindstrom is one of the crewmen. He tries to stop the ﬁght between Mannion and Insigna, and he supplies the ribbon for the award that the men present to Roberts.

Mannion Mannion is a crewman who watches the women in the shower, while pretending to the others that no one is in the shower. He and Insigna are enemies but later become good friends. Mannion is the man appointed to present the award to Roberts; he made the medal himself in the machine shop.

Ensign Frank Pulver

Dowdy Dowdy is a hard-bitten man between thirty-ﬁve and forty years old. He has some authority over the men and hands out their tasks. It is Dowdy’s idea to award Roberts the brass palm tree.

Gerhard Gerhard is one of the quieter crewmen. He is part of a deputation that appeals to Doc and Pulver to persuade Roberts to take Dolan off report. He explains how the men have turned against Roberts.

Lieutenant Ann Girard Lieutenant Ann Girard is an attractive, blond nurse who is invited on the ship by Pulver, who plans to seduce her. When she discovers that the men have been spying on the nurses in the shower, she promptly leaves the ship.

Insigna Insigna is one of the crewmen. He is not noted for his intelligence, but it is he who discovers that the nurses can be spied upon with binoculars. Insigna does not get along with Mannion and starts a ﬁght with him after quarreling over spying on the women. But by the time the two men return from Elysium Island, where they have taken part in the ﬁght at the Army dance, they have become the best of friends.

Chief Johnson Chief Johnson is the ship’s chief petty ofﬁcer. He is a big man of about forty years old.

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Ensign Frank Pulver is an immature ofﬁcer who likes to spend a lot of his time sleeping. He is timid but boasts of his sexual conquests, although Doc and Roberts do not believe him. He is scared of the captain and never puts into practice any of the pranks he conspires against him, such as leaving marbles in the captain’s overhead so they will roll around and keep him awake at night, or putting a ﬁrecracker under the captain’s bunk. Roberts teases him about the fact that he never ﬁnishes anything he starts out to do. After Roberts leaves the ship, Pulver is promoted to Roberts’s position of cargo ofﬁcer. After he hears of Robert’s death, he ﬁnds the courage to stand up to the captain on behalf of the men.

Lieutenant Doug Roberts Lieutenant Doug Roberts is the cargo ofﬁcer, a position he has held for nearly two and a half years. Roberts has a college education and quit medical school in order to join the Navy. He is frustrated by the fact that he is on a cargo ship rather than in a combat role. He feels he has to prove himself by engaging in battle, and to that end he writes many letters to the authorities requesting a transfer. The captain refuses every request. He hates Roberts but cannot afford to lose him, since Roberts is a very competent ofﬁcer. Roberts is highly respected by the men. They love that he protects them from the captain’s pettiness and that he exercises his authority wisely. He never tries to bully the men, and he understands their boredom and frustration. Although at one point the men misunderstand him and think that he is getting tough with them because he wants a promotion, the misunderstanding is cleared up when

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Roberts tosses the captain’s palm tree overboard. The men then show their loyalty and respect for Roberts by forging the captain’s signature on a letter securing Roberts the transfer he wants. Before Roberts leaves, the men show their affection for him by giving him an award which they call the Order of the Palm. Roberts is killed in a Japanese suicide bombing raid, but not before he has written a letter showing his great affection for the men of the AK-601.

Stefanowski Stefanowski is one of the crewmen who spies on the nurses in the shower. He joins in the ﬁght in the ﬁrst scene, on Insigna’s side, and then ﬁghts with Wiley. Like the others, he is bored on the ship and wonders whether a man could get sent back to the States if he cuts off a ﬁnger. Stefanowski is the man who thinks up the words for the award the men give to Roberts.

Wiley Wiley is one of the crewmen. He joins in the ﬁght on Mannion’s side and then ﬁghts Stefanowski. During shore leave, he has a riotous time on Elysium.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Research how U.S. troops in the early 2000s cope with the boredom that can occur when they are inactive for long periods during deployment in a war zone. • Research the 1945 battle for Okinawa. How did the outnumbered U.S. forces manage to emerge victorious? • Write an essay about someone in your own life who serves as a ‘‘Mister Roberts’’ for you. What particular qualities does this person possess that win your admiration and respect? Why do you think the men in the play admire Roberts so much? • Watch the movie version of the play and discuss some of the differences in scenes and dialogue between the play and the movie.

a promotion. Respect is restored when Roberts shows his independence and tosses overboard the palm tree, a symbol of the captain’s authority.

THEMES Comradeship, Respect, and Loyalty At the beginning of the play, there is some disharmony amongst the crewmen, as shown by the ﬁght that breaks out between Mannion and Insigna, which also involves Wiley and Stefanowski. This scene suggests the corrosive effects of boredom and the denial of offshore leave. After the men return from Elysium, they have bonded as a group, and Insigna and Mannion are the best of friends. The change is so noticeable that Roberts remarks on it, saying that before, all he had was 167 separate men. Now he has a real crew. The respect the men feel for Roberts is also a key thematic element. They like him because they feel he is their ally against the captain and he treats them fairly. He does not behave as if he is superior just because he is an ofﬁcer. They only lose respect for him when they mistakenly think he is trying to curry favor with the captain in the hope of attaining

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After this incident, there are no limits to the loyalty the men show to Roberts, or the ingenuity with which they express it. They take great risks in taking it upon themselves to send out a letter approving Roberts’s transfer. They are even prepared to forge the captain’s signature. They also display creativity and team spirit when they work together to create a going-away gift for Roberts. Roberts is touched by their warmth and generosity, and feels as loyal towards them as they do towards him, although he is unable to ﬁnd the words to express his feelings for them until he writes to them from afar. In contrast, the captain, who has a petty bureaucratic mind and delights in exerting a tyranny over the men, fails utterly to win the men’s respect or loyalty. Respect is accorded only when it is deserved.

Attaining Manhood Roberts is presented as a mature man who is worthy of respect. In contrast, Ensign Pulver is

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immature. Pulver boasts about his imaginary female conquests, and although he pretends he wants to improve his mind, he rarely ﬁnishes reading any book he starts, nor does he ever follow through on the many pranks he plans against the captain. In fact, he is terriﬁed of the captain, as Roberts well knows. Roberts always encourages Pulver to show some mettle. In act 1, scene 2, Roberts tells Pulver that when he actually ﬁnishes one of his plans against the captain, ‘‘that’s the day I’ll have some respect for you—that’s the day I’ll look up to you as a man.’’ At the end of act 2, scene 3, it seems for a moment as if Pulver’s moment has come, since he shows he can make a ﬁrecracker work, and Roberts wants to help him make another one to put under the captain’s bunk. But it turns out that Pulver has used up all his materials and cannot make another ﬁrecracker. He feels this failure keenly. It was his chance to become a man in Roberts’s eyes, and although Roberts says he is proud of him, Pulver still feels upset because he thinks he let Roberts down. This theme of attaining maturity as a man is alluded to again at the end of act 2, scene 5, as Roberts is about to leave the ship, having gained his transfer. He turns to Pulver and says, ‘‘Remember, I’m counting on you.’’ Pulver nods. He knows exactly to what Roberts is referring. After Roberts leaves, Pulver is promoted to cargo ofﬁcer. Unlike Roberts, he allows himself to be dominated by the captain. When the captain cancels a movie in the evening, Pulver does not complain with sufﬁcient vigor. Dowdy tells him he has to keep needling the captain. Pulver is reminded of this again when he reads Roberts’s letter to the crew, in which Roberts alludes to Pulver’s need to be more assertive. He writes, ‘‘So, Doc, and especially you, Frank, don’t let those guys down. Of course, I know that by this time they must be very happy because the captain’s overhead is ﬁlled with marbles.’’ It is only when Pulver learns of Roberts’s death that he summons his courage to confront the captain. First he imitates Roberts’s act of tossing the palm trees overboard, and then he bursts in on the captain, admits what he has done (just as Roberts had challenged him to do earlier), and demands to know why there will be no movie that night. It is clear that he is now ready to assume Roberts’s role as defender of the crewmen.

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STYLE Symbolism Symbolism as a technique involves using an object, event, or person to represent an alternate meaning. For example, the small palm tree that sits in a ﬁve-gallon can outside the captain’s cabin symbolizes the smallness of the tasks in which the ship is engaged. Roberts explains that the palm tree was awarded to the ship for ‘‘delivering more toothpaste and toilet paper than any other Navy cargo ship in the safe area of the Paciﬁc.’’ It is not the sort of award that men ﬁght to win during a war. To the men, it is a reminder of their own boredom and sense of frustration and futility. The fact that the captain reveres his little trophy gives it an added signiﬁcance: it represents the captain’s vanity, his obsession with insigniﬁcant things, and his ambition, since he wants to use his ship’s success as a stepping stone to attain the rank of commander. The playwright ensures that as the symbol of the captain’s misplaced sense of self-importance, the palm tree is subject to some disrespectful treatment. During one comic moment, the goat the men have brought back with them from Elysium chews on the tree. Another moment, the captain puts a twenty-four-hour armed guard on the palm trees (he replaced the one tree Roberts tossed overboard with two new trees) and issues shoot-to-kill orders to protect the trees. The comedy arises from the disproportion between the nature of the object and the captain’s reverence of it. In a neat twist, however, the men manage to turn the palm tree into a positive symbol. They call the brass medal they give Roberts the ‘‘order of the palm,’’ because it is shaped like a palm tree. The brass palm tree signiﬁes respect, affection, and real service, as opposed to the real palm tree which signiﬁes only a petty man’s delight in distinctions of no importance.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT World War II Mister Roberts begins a few weeks before V-E Day, which would place it some time during April 1945, when World War II was drawing to a close. Throughout the early months of 1945, Germany’s position became more and more hopeless, as the invading Allied armies penetrated deeper into the

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1940s: The United States and Japan are at war. When the war ends in 1945, Japan submits to American occupation. Some Japanese military leaders are convicted of war crimes and are hanged. Japan is given a new paciﬁst constitution that prevents it from going to war. Today: Japan and the United States are close allies. In January 2004, Japan sends a small contingent of soldiers to Iraq to support the U.S.led coalition, which marks the ﬁrst time since World War II that Japan has sent troops abroad, except as part of United Nations peacekeeping operations. The Japanese troops provide humanitarian services and do not engage in combat. The Japanese government announces plans to revise Article Nine of its constitution, which bans the use of force to settle international disputes. • 1940s: World events are conveyed by newspa-

country. In March, Allied armies advancing from the west reached the German city of Cologne, and in April, the Rhineland and the Ruhr were captured by the Allies. Meanwhile, the Russians were advancing from the east, and on April 23, 1945, they reached the northern and eastern suburbs of Berlin. German leader Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 2, Berlin was captured, and on May 7, Germany surrendered unconditionally (as the crew of the AK-601 hear over the radio in Mister Roberts). In Britain, the royal family, as well as Prime Minister Winston Churchill assembled at the balcony of Buckingham Palace and greeted the huge crowds that had gathered in the streets to celebrate the end of war (this is the celebration the AK-601 crewmen hear described over the radio). After V-E Day, the war in the Paciﬁc against Japan still had to be won, but it had been apparent since the spring of 1945 that Japan could not resist for much longer. The USS Virgo, the model for the AK-601 in Mister Roberts, played a role in the

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pers and radio. News still moves comparatively slowly. Today: Communications are faster and more diverse than ever. The Internet and television provide up-to-the-minute news, with almost constant updates, in ways not possible a half century earlier. Battle scenes are often shown live on television and are instantly seen around the world. • 1940s: American public opinion wholeheartedly supports World War II, which is considered a war of national survival against an evil enemy. Today: Few subsequent American wars command such unanimous public support as World War II did. According to many opinion polls, the country is about evenly divided regarding the war in Iraq, in which a U.S.-led coalition ousted the dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. The coalition occupies Iraq in mid-2004.

Paciﬁc war, carrying U.S. Marine Corps equipment and becoming a unit of the Fifth Amphibious Force that was preparing for the invasion of the Gilbert Islands. American forces under General MacArthur captured the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, and the Marshall and Admiralty Islands fell in early 1944. The Philippines were re-taken in stages, with American troops entering Manila, the Philippine capital, in February 1945. U.S. forces also advanced relentlessly in the Paciﬁc, capturing Iwo Jima in March. The Virgo, with Lieutenant Heggen aboard, was stationed off Iwo Jima at this time, replenishing destroyers. In mid-June, American forces captured the island of Okinawa, in the Ryukyu Islands. The Virgo, with Heggen still aboard, anchored in Okinawa for ﬁfteen days and went to general quarters (a condition of readiness when naval actions are imminent) thirty-two times for air-raid alerts. It is at some point during the battle for Okinawa that Roberts, in the play, is killed by a Japanese suicide bomber.

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By the time Okinawa was captured, American forces had complete dominance in the air, and Japan’s factories and industries were steadily being destroyed by heavy bombing raids. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States called upon Japan to surrender or to face devastation of its homeland. On August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing thousands of people. Exact estimates of the death toll vary, but the city of Hiroshima in the 2000s puts the number of dead by December 1945 at about 140,000. (Thousands died of injuries and illness caused by radiation in the months that followed the dropping of the bomb.) Immediately after the blast, four square miles of the city were reduced to rubble. Two days later, Russia declared war on Japan. The United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, on August 9. The day after this bombing, the Japanese asked for peace, and on August 14, Japan ofﬁcially surrendered.

improved by its adaptation from novel into play. Although some of the characters in the novel were eliminated in the stage version, Brown thinks what was offered in their place more than makes up for the loss, while the play still retains the appealing simplicity of the novel. Brown admires the earthiness of the language and the skilful handling of ‘‘the affection that men feel for men,’’ an emotion often largely unexpressed. He singles out for particular praise the scene in which the men award Roberts the Order of the Palm. Brown also argues that although Mister Roberts might at times come close to slapstick, might lack importance, and is limited in emotional range by its ﬁdelity to the young men it depicts, it is nonetheless highly effective in achieving what it sets out to do:

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

CRITICISM

Mister Roberts was greeted with praise by reviewers when it began its run on Broadway on February 18, 1948, at the Alvin Theatre. A typical reviewer comment appears in Irwin Shaw’s assessment of the play in New Republic: ‘‘one of the funniest plays ever seen on the American stage.’’ John Lardner, writing in the New Yorker, declares the play is ‘‘almost as good as it could possibly be.’’ It remains true to the ‘‘sardonic tone’’ of the novel from which it is adapted, says Lardner, as well as to its main point: That a backwash war, funny and tragic as hell, was fought parallel with the shooting war; that the distance between the parallels could be ﬁve thousand miles in spirit as well as in space; and that the one kind of war damaged men who were caught in it as much as the other.

Lardner ﬁnds Roberts to be ‘‘a sweet and shadowy ﬁgure,’’ less satisfying a character than those characters around him, although ably portrayed by Henry Fonda. Lardner argues that the only ﬂaw in the play is that—unlike the story line in the episodic, plotless novel—the playwrights felt obliged to ‘‘invent a situation to tie up loose ends,’’ and so came up with the plot centering around Roberts’s deal with the captain and his subsequent misunderstanding with the men. John Mason Brown in the Saturday Review offers the opposing view that Mister Roberts is

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It is superlative theatre; a miracle of production in which the script, setting, acting, and direction all fuse to create one of the most uproarious, heartwarming, and yet touching evenings Broadway has yielded in many a long year.

Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the collaboration between Heggen and Joshua Logan as they adapted Mister Roberts from novel into play. Mister Roberts began its ﬁctional life as a novel, but after the success of the book, Heggen became aware that it had the potential to be turned into a successful play. The story of how Mister Roberts metamorphosed from novel into play is a fascinating one and is told in John Leggett’s imaginative biography of Heggen and Ross Lockridge, Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies, and in co-playwright Joshua Logan’s memoir, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life. Not entirely conﬁdent of his own abilities to write the play he had in mind, Heggen at ﬁrst turned to his friend, novelist Max Shulman, for assistance, and the two men agreed to collaborate. Shulman was aware that the novel was a series of largely unconnected episodes and that a play needed a real plot, with some dramatic tension. He thought this could be accomplished by creating a challenge to the Captain’s authority that the men could use to blackmail him. So he invented an incident in which

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the Captain was discovered with a native girl in his quarters. Nothing even remotely like this occurred in the novel, and when they completed the ﬁrst draft, Heggen was aware of what a poor effort it was. Shulman’s agent agreed it was inadequate, as did producer Leland Hayward, who was interested in a dramatization of Mister Roberts and had asked to see the draft. Hayward complained that Shulman and Heggen had veered so far from the original book that the spirit of it had been lost. At Hayward’s request, Heggen agreed to work on a new version, this time on his own. He sent the ﬁrst act to Hayward, who thought it had promise but was, like the novel, a series of fragments, without any connecting links. He decided to put Heggen in touch with Logan, who was a highly successful director of many hit plays, including the famous Annie Get Your Gun. Logan read Heggen’s draft, and for the most part agreed with Hayward, but there was one scene which he felt Heggen had got exactly right: the scene in which the Captain has just refused to grant his men a liberty as they arrive at Elysium. In the novel, the Captain suddenly and inexplicably changes his mind and allows the liberty, and the entire incident lasts only for a paragraph. But in his draft for the play, Heggen had expanded this incident into what became the central moment of the play: the pact that the Captain strikes with Roberts, which happens because of Roberts’s devotion to his men and his desire to secure them a liberty. The Captain will allow the liberty only if Roberts writes no more transfer requests. Logan saw that Heggen had created a dramatic scenario that would work on stage, and this enabled him to visualize the entire play. Logan then thought up the substance of the second act: how the crew would start to dislike Roberts because they thought he was angling for a promotion, and then they would by chance discover their mistake and in a burst of gratitude would hold a drunken contest to pick the best forgery of the captain’s signature. (In the novel, Roberts simply receives an order to return to the United States for reassignment, without any subterfuge on the part of the crew. No explanation is offered as to why the ofﬁcial order comes through, after so many requests have been refused.) Logan had all this in mind before he met Heggen, and when the two did meet, he soon convinced Heggen that he was the man who could turn Mister Roberts into a successful play. For three months during the fall of 1947, they worked together, Heggen staying at the Connecticut home of

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Henry Fonda in a scene from the 1948 stage production of Mister Roberts

Logan and his wife. They would start work at about ﬁve in the afternoon and work through the night until about six in the morning. According to Leggett, ‘‘Logan’s strength was conceptual, seeing Mister Roberts in scene and narrative, while Tom’s was in character and dialogue.’’ Together they came up with a number of incidents not in the novel, including Roberts’s bribery of the port director with whiskey taken from Pulver, which leads to the hilarious scene in which Roberts, Pulver, and Doc create fake Scotch out of Coca-Cola, iodine, and hair tonic. Logan also reﬁned the crucial scene between the Captain and Roberts that Heggen had created in his original draft: Roberts agrees to show the Captain more respect in front of the men and to keep their meeting absolutely secret. Logan knew this would add more tension to the second act for both Roberts and the crew. Another central point was the character of Roberts. Again, Logan was the instigator (at least according to his own account of their collaboration). He argued that Roberts should not be too perfect, that he had to possess a fatal ﬂaw that could be cured at the end of the play. There was nothing like this in the novel, so it had to be created from scratch. Logan was following a rule of dramatic structure

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LOGAN DESCRIBED THE THREE MONTHS HE WORKED ON MISTER ROBERTS WITH HEGGEN AS THE MOST EXHILARATING AND HILARIOUS TIME OF HIS LIFE, AND HEGGEN ALSO LOOKED BACK ON THIS PERIOD AS THE BEST OF HIS LIFE.’’

that one of his friends called Logan’s Law, but which Logan had in fact learned from playwright Maxwell Anderson. Logan’s Law stated that toward the end of any successful play, the protagonist must learn something about himself that changes his life for the better, as Logan relates in his autobiography Josh: The audience must feel and see the leading man or woman become wiser, and the discovery must happen onstage in front of their eyes. And that doesn’t mean a happy ending. If the hero is to die, then he just must make the discovery before he dies.

It is this change for the better that raises the moral stature of the protagonist and so allows the audience to grow too, along with the character. Logan and Heggen decided that Roberts’s ﬂaw is his snobbery. He thinks that the men on a combat ship are superior to those on a cargo ship. So the play must emphasize and explain his desire to see combat, which is accomplished in the ﬁrst two scenes. In the ﬁrst scene, Roberts reports to Doc, in a passage that does not appear in the novel, that he saw a huge naval task force pass by the previous night. It is made very clear that he would give anything to be a part of that task force. Then in scene 2, Roberts conﬁdes to Doc his sense of inferiority about being on the AK-601: ‘‘We’ve got nothing to do with the war. Maybe that’s why we’re on this ship—because we’re not good enough to ﬁght.’’ A moment later he says, ‘‘I’ve got to feel I’m good enough to be in this thing—to participate!’’ He sticks to his views even though Doc argues that physical heroism is overrated. Doc believes it is merely a reﬂex that three out of four men possess and would demonstrate if opportunity presented itself.

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But at the end of the play, Roberts reveals in his letter to the men that he has discovered something he was not aware of before. Now that he is seeing real combat, he is full of admiration for the ﬁghting men he is with, but he also realizes that the men who are involved in the more tedious tasks of war, ‘‘who sail from Tedium to Apathy and back again—with an occasional side trip to Monotony’’ have courage too. It takes courage and strength not to give into boredom, not to allow it to break the spirit. Roberts realizes that the men he sailed with on the ship they all called the ‘‘bucket’’ were every bit as brave as the men who have the opportunity to ﬁll combat roles. It is not a matter of one set of men being better than the other. In this way, Roberts overcomes his snobbery. Logan called this letter Roberts’s ‘‘selfrealization letter,’’ and it was greatly expanded from the letter Roberts wrote to the men in the novel, which is presented only brieﬂy and in a nondramatic way. Logan also placed extra emphasis on the growth of Pulver from immature loafer to mature ofﬁcer ready to defend his men. The novel ends with Pulver saying to the Captain, ‘‘I just threw your damn palm trees over the side.’’ In the play this is altered only slightly, but it becomes the penultimate, not the ﬁnal line. Logan added to it, ‘‘Now what’s all this crap about no movie tonight?’’ which he hoped would show the audience that, as he put it, ‘‘Pulver had become Roberts, and therefore Roberts would live—and take care of us all.’’ Logan’s judgment proved accurate, because when Mister Roberts began its long run on Broadway, that line produced not only the biggest laugh but also a cheer from the audience. The message had come across. Logan described the three months he worked on Mister Roberts with Heggen as the most exhilarating and hilarious time of his life, and Heggen also looked back on this period as the best of his life. However, their collaboration was not without its tensions. Heggen became uncomfortable with how much credit Logan—who co-wrote, directed, and co-produced the play—received for its success. Heggen also ﬂoundered when he tried to work on other projects. The creative energy that had produced the novel seemed to have dried up. At one point, Heggen believed he had become dependent on Logan’s creativity, and he insisted that they collaborate on another play. Logan was happy to agree to this idea, but the troubled Heggen died, apparently by his own hand, before any real work could begin on it.

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Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Mister Roberts, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

WHILE PLAYWRIGHTS

A. Petruso Petruso holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in screen writing from the University of Texas. In this essay, Petruso examines issues of leadership in the play.

HEGGEN AND LOGAN DRAW THE CAPTAIN WITH NO REDEEMING QUALITIES, THEY SHOW ROBERTS’S IMPERFECTIONS AS WELL. UNLIKE THE CAPTAIN, ROBERTS KNOWS HE

In Mister Roberts, issues of leadership and what makes a good leader are at the center of the play. The play is set on a U.S. Navy ship that has seen no action and is in the Paciﬁc theater during World War II. Boredom and lack of hope run rampant throughout the ranks. The captain of the ship provides little positive leadership, while his lieutenant, Doug Roberts, compensates with some success for his captain’s inadequacies. To be a leader in the situation presented in the play means to be in charge yet also to answer to and carry out orders from those above. A leader in this position should also have such qualities as compassion and understanding for the men he leads. The captain of the AK 601 does not have these qualities. It is often said that ‘‘war is hell.’’ This usually refers to the intensity of combat, but it can also refer to how boring inaction can be. The captain has isolated himself from his men and does not seem to care about their needs. He is more concerned with his potted palm than with the men who are serving on the ship. The captain is really only worried about his own standing with his admiral and being promoted to full commander. He does not care much about how he gets this promotion, nor how shaky his current command really is. His potted palm is a metaphor for his leadership on the AK 601 and what he perceives is a symbol of his competence as a leader. The captain has a sign on the plant that identiﬁes it as his property and orders his sailors to ‘‘keep away,’’ even though it is their work that helped him earn the award. In the description that sets the scene of the play in act 1, scene 1, Chief Johnson is described as spitting in the palm’s pot after making sure he is not seen. From the ﬁrst, it is clear that the men do not respect the captain and show their disrespect in subtle and not so subtle ways. When Roberts decides once and for all to stand up to the captain, he tosses the palm overboard. After the captain replaces it with two new

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IS A FLAWED, VERY HUMAN MAN. IT IS THIS SENSE OF HUMANITY AND AWARENESS OF SELF THAT HELPS MAKE ROBERTS AN EFFECTIVE LEADER.’’

palm trees, Roberts’s replacement, Pulver, also tosses the palm trees overboard after learning Roberts has died. One of the captain’s biggest failings as a leader comes in the way he treats his crew. He denies them liberty (a shore leave) for over a year. The only men allowed off the ship are ofﬁcers conducting ofﬁcial business. The captain fails to see how this conﬁnement negatively affects the men’s morale as well as their psyches. The men are literally cooped up like animals on the ship. The longer the men are not allowed any breaks, the more they act out. In act 1, scene 1, the crew goes a little crazy when, using a spyglass, they see female nurses on a nearby island. The captain has also canceled the men’s nightly movies for such minor transgressions as a sailor not wearing his shirt while working on deck, a pet peeve of the captain. While the captain, through bad leadership, causes his crew to suffer, Roberts suffers even more. Roberts wants to be off the ship and in combat. He left medical school to ﬁght in the war but is stuck in endless inactivity. To that end, Roberts has put in a request for transfer on a weekly basis before the action of the play begins. The captain repeatedly refuses to give his approval to it, meaning Roberts will not get it. If the captain would have compassion, Roberts would most certainly be gone. Roberts goes to great lengths in Mister Roberts to obtain his transfer and nearly goes crazy in the process. The

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captain believes that Roberts’s presence is essential to his own promotion because the admiral complimented Roberts’s abilities as a cargo ofﬁcer. The captain regularly seeks out Roberts to remind him that he is beneath him and that he, as captain, is in charge. At the beginning of act 1, scene 3, the captain is angry with Roberts when he will not respond immediately to the captain’s order to see him. Roberts is busy overseeing the transfer of a load to another ship. Roberts’s latest letter requesting a transfer upsets the captain because Roberts claimed there was ‘‘disharmony aboard this ship.’’ The captain goes on to humiliate Roberts in front of his men and puts them all on report. Though Roberts has little hope for himself, he wants his men to have it. The crew does not respect the captain, but they respect Roberts, who is much more of a leader among them than the captain. While talking about another matter in act 1, scene 1, the ship’s doctor, referring to Pulver, tells Roberts, ‘‘He [Pulver] thinks you are approximately God.’’ This is so because Roberts continually puts himself out on the men’s behalf. In addition, in act 1, Roberts maneuvers to secure the men a liberty. After the liberty is announced in act 1, scene 4, the captain takes it away in act 1, scene 5. In the next scene, Roberts agrees to sacriﬁce his campaign to get transferred from the ship and promises to be more yielding to the captain in front of the men in order to secure their long-awaited shore liberty. He also agrees to allow the captain some credit for the leave. This selﬂess act will make for a happier crew, as Roberts acknowledges. However, because of the sacriﬁce he had to make to get the liberty for the men, Roberts’s hope for his own happiness is nearly gone. He fears he will be stuck on the ship for the duration of the war. Throughout Mister Roberts, Roberts shows how generous and compassionate he is. At the beginning of act 1, scene 3, though the captain orders no fresh fruit to be given to other ships, Roberts gives some to the crew who have not seen such delicacies in months. Roberts gives the captain some credit for it. When the captain learns of Roberts’s generosity, he gives Roberts ten days in his room as punishment. However, because Roberts is too valuable, the captain does not enforce this order. Roberts also allows the men to take off their shirts because of the heat despite the captain’s standing order to the contrary. Roberts does not partake of the liberty and remains on the ship as the duty ofﬁcer. When the men go a little wild on shore by drinking excessively, break-

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ing into the home of the local French consul, crashing an American Army ofﬁcer’s dance, and stealing a goat, Roberts deals with the consequences of their actions. Roberts is the liaison with the shore patrolmen, who bring the drunken men back to the ship. Roberts assures the patrolmen that the crew will be penalized for their actions. Though Roberts sacriﬁces for his men, he also has faults of his own, but not nearly as many as the captain. While playwrights Heggen and Logan draw the captain with no redeeming qualities, they show Roberts’s imperfections as well. Unlike the captain, Roberts knows he is ﬂawed. It is this sense of humanity and awareness of self that helps make Roberts an effective leader. He knows that being stuck on the ship for months at a time is nearly intolerable. One way that Roberts demonstrates his own ﬂaws is by sometimes putting his needs ﬁrst. His obsession with being transferred to a different ship means leaving the crew at the mercy of the captain. Though Roberts works on getting the men a liberty at the end of act 1, scene 1, by going ashore himself to talk to someone, the trip also serves Roberts’s own agenda. He is not trying to make the best of his situation in one sense: he is just trying to get out. Roberts sometimes takes his frustrations out on his men. When Dolan learns that the Navy needs experienced ofﬁcers to transfer to ships, he types a letter for Roberts, not knowing about the private deal the captain and Roberts have made. Roberts will not sign it at the time and off stage puts Dolan on report for bothering him about it. Roberts later apologizes to Dolan and takes him off report, something the captain would never do. Roberts ﬁnally gets his transfer because of his success as a leader among the ship’s men. The crew risks their own freedom by faking a letter for Roberts asking for a transfer and forging their captain’s approval. Just before Roberts leaves the ship, the crew makes him a crude medal shaped like a palm tree. His abilities as a leader pay off with his desired reward, though it also ends in his death as the ship he is transferred to is hit with a suicideplane attack. This ending prompts the question of who really wins in the tug of war between the captain and Roberts, between the ineffective leader and the effective one. While the captain retains command of his ship, the crew feel no differently about him after Roberts is gone. He remains a very poor leader. Having served under Roberts changes the men. Roberts’s leadership skills have ensured that his spirit lives on in them.

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An undercurrent to the contrasting leadership skills of the captain and Roberts is social class. The captain is not educated. He worked in restaurants as a young man and came to the Navy after working in the merchant marine service. Roberts is educated, having spent time in medical school. The captain is threatened by Roberts’s social standing, while the men are indifferent towards it; they only care about whomever will take charge and be fair about it. Repeatedly throughout the text of Mister Roberts, the captain expresses anger about those who have looked down upon him and takes this anger out on Roberts and, indirectly, the crew. The captain often throws out the fact that Roberts is college educated when the captain is talking down to him. For example, in act 1, scene 6, the captain says, ‘‘I hate your guts. . . . You think you’re better than I am! You think you’re better because you’ve had everything handed to you!’’ It is in this scene that the captain denies the men’s liberty, but only gives it when he can make Roberts feel as bad he does. It might seem that Roberts is more developed as a character than the captain, but in fact it is that Roberts is more developed as a person and a leader than the captain will allow himself to be. Source: A. Petruso, Critical Essay on Mister Roberts, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Irwin Shaw In the following review, Shaw singles out Logan’s directing and calls Mister Roberts ‘‘one of the funniest plays ever seen on the American stage.’’ Although it is improbable that the last war will go down in history as the most amusing event of the century, Joshua Logan and Thomas Heggen, authors of Mister Roberts, have certainly used it as a basis for one of the funniest plays ever seen on the American stage. Taking the frail and pleasant little string of stories by Heggen as a starting point, they have shaped the material with a canny professionalism that approaches magic, into a roaring, fullﬂeshed play which leaves the audience limp, exhausted with laughter and profoundly satisﬁed. After the ﬁrst ﬁve minutes of the performance, a wonderful glow of anticipation settles on the spectator—a glow that comes from the realization that for this one night at least, the people responsible for your entertainment can do no wrong. There is the intoxicating feeling that everybody connected with Mister Roberts is at the very peak of his creative tide. If one person can be singled out for praise, it must be Joshua Logan, who, aside from aiding in the

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writing, directed the work with shrewdness, vitality and humor. He has obtained shining performances from veteran actors who are better in this than they ever have been, and he has made a host of youthful newcomers play as though they had been on the stage steadily since 1900. The scenes, whirling through Jo Mielziner’s ingenious and authentic representation of the Navy Cargo Ship, AK 601, are loud, lowdown, slapstick, wistful, bitter sentimental—it is all one to Logan. He handles each of them with the same sense of justice to its material, with boundless variety, with a strict observance of the proper limits of the character, and with a seemingly inexhaustible gusto.

Point of focus Henry Fonda as Mister Roberts proves how bitterly the theater has suffered by losing its best actors to the ﬁlms. He has a most difﬁcult assignment: quiet in the midst of an almost continual riot, serious in a thunderstorm of comedy. He has to center and concentrate the attention of the audience upon himself or have the play lose itself in a series of disconnected gags. He does it by the use of a technique that is difﬁcult to describe. He merely is absolutely real, and by that truthfulness he makes a simple grin, a weary lift of the shoulder, the ﬂat and honest reading of an ordinary line, events of great dramatic importance upon the crowded and uproarious stage. As the bed-loving Ensign Pulver, David Wayne, as nimble and artful an actor as we have around, paints a picture of a beautifully artless, naïve, heroworshiping boy that is wildly funny and, at the end—when it has to be—gently touching. William Harrigan, the absurd and monstrous captain of the ship, the enemy of every man aboard, the foe of all brotherhood and love, conducts his cranky feud with the crew with rasping integrity, his narrow, brooding virulence a perfect foil for the chaotic humors of the young men under his command. Robert Keith, soaked in fruit juice and medicinal alcohol, gives his best performance to date. He is the ship’s doctor—cynical, lounging, the invincible, irreverent civilian caught impermanently in the backwash of a war. A delicious affront to Annapolis and the American Medical Association, he adds the exact, necessary touch of shore-based acid to the seething dish. The enlisted men of the crew make a mass effect upon the spectator. Individually, perhaps,

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James Cagney and Henry Fonda in a scene from the 1955 ﬁlm adaptation of Mister Roberts

they are slighted, but the total impression is one of vitality and comic reality. You would not know any one of them if you met him at a bar, but you feel perfectly certain that as a group they could sail any vessel (cargo) anywhere and that the Navy would approve. They chip paint, stare through binoculars at a nurses’ shower room, and wear their dungarees and dress whites as though they were all in the middle of their third hitch.

Time In the following review excerpt, the reviewer calls Mister Roberts ‘‘a rowdy, romantic, sometimes rather touching . . . wartime chronicle.’’

If there is a fault with Mister Roberts, it is one that it is not quite fair to bring up. The play is broader than it is deep, but the authors were not trying to be deep. It avoids tragedy ﬁrmly, even though (curious departure in a comedy) the hero dies in the end. A war does not avoid tragedy, and a deﬁnitive play about war, even about such ludicrous rear areas as ‘‘Mister Roberts’’ covers, will somehow convey that fact. In a way, this criticism is a tribute, too. Mister Roberts is so good that it leads you to speculate, gently, on the breathless possibility of what it would have been like if it had been perfect. Source: Irwin Shaw, ‘‘Theater: The Hilarious War,’’ in New Republic, Vol. 118, March 8, 1948, pp. 29–30.

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Heggen, Thomas, and Joshua Logan, Mister Roberts, Acting Edition, Dramatists Play Service, 1948. Lardner, John, Review of Mister Roberts, in New Yorker, February 28, 1948, pp. 46–48. Leggett, John, Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies, Simon and Schuster, 1974. Logan, Joshua, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life, Delacorte Press, 1976, pp. 240–70. Shaw, Irwin, Review of Mister Roberts, in New Republic, March 8, 1948, pp. 29–30.

FURTHER READING Krutch, Joseph Wood, Review of Mister Roberts, in Nation, April 10, 1948, pp. 402–03. In one of the less laudatory reviews of the play, Krutch afﬁrms the value of Mister Roberts as popular entertainment but offers the view that it is adolescent and naïve.

Source: Time, ‘‘New Plays in Manhattan,’’ in Time, Vol. 51, March 1, 1948, p. 63.

Phelan, Kappo, Review of Mister Roberts, in Commonweal, March 5, 1948, p. 521. A short, enthusiastic review of the play, which Phelan regards as hilarious, moving, and sad. Phelan questions whether it should be rated as highly as some reviewers have done.

SOURCES Brown, John Mason, Review of Mister Roberts, in Saturday Review, March 6, 1948, pp. 24–26. Heggen, Thomas, Mister Roberts, Houghton Mifﬂin, 1946.

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Logan, Joshua, Movie Stars, Real People, and Me, Delacorte Press, 1978. This book contains some lively anecdotes about Logan’s experiences directing Mister Roberts and also contributing to the movie version.

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Smith, David P., ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Mister Roberts, Naval Institute Press, 1992. This introduction to the novel contains information about Heggen’s life, work, and tragic early death.

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Othello WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1604

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November 4, 1604, is the ﬁrst recorded date of a performance of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, although most scholars believe that is was ﬁrst performed in 1600 or 1601. All records indicate that the play was an immediate success, and interest in the story continued unabated for four hundred years. The story of Othello the Moor, his lovely wife Desdemona, and the dastardly villain Iago was enacted countless times on stage, reworked as an opera, choreographed as a ballet, ﬁlmed multiple times, and transformed into television shows, novels, and movies. The title role of Othello became the quintessential Shakespearean role for black actors, although many white actors acted the part as well, and the villainy of Iago remained one of the most complicated and contested issues of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship. For Americans, historic issues of slavery and race made Othello an especially troubling and problematic play. Likewise, issues of gender, postcolonialism, diversity, and global perspective continued to generate a lively critical debate on the play. The play is easily available to readers in many editions; one of the most useful for students is the Norton Critical Edition (2004), edited by Edward Pechter. As of the early 2000s, interest in Othello was unlikely to abate; it remained a towering story of passion and rage.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY William Shakespeare’s life was a source of mystery and controversy among scholars of English literature. What little was known of his life was gleaned from documentary evidence and writings of his contemporaries. Shakespeare himself left no writings concerning his personal life and thus remained a frustrating enigma for biographers and critics alike. Shakespeare was born to parents Mary and John Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Church records show that he was baptized on April 26, 1564; from this, scholars extrapolate that he was born several days earlier, and so April 23, 1564, is the traditional dating of his birth. Shakespeare’s father was a glover and was active in town government. That John Shakespeare’s fortunes began to decline in about 1576 suggested to some scholars that the family may have been Catholic or had Catholic sympathies at a time when membership in the Church of England was required for any kind of social or ﬁnancial standing. It was assumed that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school, where he would have learned Latin and studied the classics in depth, although little was known of his young life. In November 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. Hathaway was eight years his senior and was pregnant with their ﬁrst child at the time of their marriage. The couple had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, born in 1585. At this point, Shakespeare disappeared from records known as of 2004. Then he reappeared in 1592 in theatrical circles in London. Both Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe referred to Shakespeare in print. In 1593, poems by Shakespeare appeared in print. In all, Shakespeare composed some 154 sonnets during these early years. In 1594, Shakespeare, along with Richard Burbage (perhaps the greatest actor of the day) and six other actors, formed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting troupe. Over the next ﬁve years, Shakespeare both acted with the company and wrote plays for them. He was remarkably proliﬁc, writing primarily comedies and histories during this period, with the exception of the tragedy, Romeo and Juliet in 1595. In 1599, Shakespeare and his troupe began building the Globe Theater. In addition, around this time, Shakespeare began writing his great tragedies,

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William Shakespeare

including Othello. Some critics have suggested that this tragic turn was precipitated by the death of his son Hamnet and his father in a short space of time. Although these deaths were recorded in documents, there was no hard evidence, as of the early 2000s, linking Shakespeare’s change in writing to the events. The ﬁrst probable performance of Othello was in 1601 and 1602 and continued to be performed regularly in the following years. Shakespeare’s last recorded stage appearance was in a play by Ben Jonson in 1603. After this date, he seemed to have devoted himself solely to writing. By 1611, twentiethcentury biographers surmised he was living again in Stratford. In March 1616, Shakespeare changed his will, perhaps in anticipation of his own death. On his ﬁfty-second birthday, April 23, 1616, Shakespeare died in Stratford.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 The play opens in Venice, Italy, at night. Iago, General Othello’s ensign, and Roderigo, who is in

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love with Desdemona, are on the street outside of the home of Brabantio, Desdemona’s father. Iago tells Roderigo of his hatred for Othello, primarily because Othello has promoted Michael Cassio ahead of Iago. They call out to Brabantio, telling him in crude language that his daughter is having a sexual encounter with Othello. Brabantio, enraged, goes with his servants to ﬁnd the couple. Meanwhile, Iago goes to Othello to warn him of Brabantio’s anger. In the next scene, the duke and the senators discuss the Turkish threat on Cyprus. Brabantio, Othello, Cassio, and Roderigo, all enter and Brabantio levels his charges against Othello. Othello replies that he has not stolen Desdemona but has rather legally married her, although without her father’s consent. Desdemona is sent for, and when she arrives, she concurs with Othello’s summary of their relationship. The duke recognizes their marriage and tells Othello that he must go to Cyprus to defend against the Turks. Othello asks that his wife accompany him, and Desdemona says that she wants to go with him as well. The act closes with an exchange between Iago and Roderigo. Iago says that Othello will soon change his mind and that Iago will help Roderigo win Desdemona. After Roderigo’s exit, Iago reveals to the audience how much he hates Othello and Cassio and that he plans to ruin both of them.

Act 2 Act 2 opens in Cyprus in a storm. The Turks have lost their entire ﬂeet in the tempest. Ultimately, all the characters arrive in Cyprus, and Othello and Desdemona are lovingly reunited. Iago hatches his plot with Roderigo and instructs Roderigo to make Cassio angry this evening after Iago makes Cassio drunk. In the next scene, Othello leaves to celebrate his nuptials with Desdemona. After Othello’s departure, Iago manages to get Cassio to drink more than he should. As a consequence, when angered by Roderigo, Cassio gets into a ﬁght with him and ends up seriously injuring the Cypriot governor Montano. Othello is called from his chambers to resolve the crisis. Othello is very angry and dismisses Cassio as an ofﬁcer. Cassio is distraught and bares his soul to Iago, whom he thinks is his friend. Iago sets his second scheme in motion by instructing Cassio to try to get back into Othello’s favor through Desdemona.

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Act 3 As this act opens, Emilia speaks to Cassio and tells him she will work on his behalf with Desdemona. Then, Cassio speaks to Desdemona himself. Cassio leaves quickly when he sees Othello and Iago approaching. Iago makes an oblique comment about how he does not like seeing Cassio speaking with Desdemona. This begins to work on Othello and marks the beginning of his deterioration through jealousy. Desdemona and Othello make up, and Othello repeats his great love for her. However, Desdemona, through her unwitting support of Cassio to Othello, contributes to his growing jealousy. After Desdemona and Emilia exit, Iago goes to work on Othello again, suggesting that Cassio and Desdemona have betrayed Othello. He reminds Othello that Desdemona deceived her father when she married him, suggesting that Desdemona is not what she seems to be. When Iago exits, Othello in a soliloquy contemplates what he will do if he ﬁnds that Desdemona has betrayed him, yet when Desdemona and Emilia come on stage, he says that he will not believe she is untrue. They exit together, but Desdemona drops her handkerchief accidentally. Emilia picks up the handkerchief, saying that her husband has asked her to take it for him. She gives it to Iago then leaves the stage. Iago then says that he will leave the handkerchief in Cassio’s lodgings to be used as evidence against him. Othello returns, and Iago works on him further, ﬁnally convincing him that Desdemona has been unfaithful. He tells Othello that he has seen her handkerchief in Cassio’s possession. Othello vows to have Desdemona put to death. When Desdemona enters, Othello asks her for the handkerchief. Desdemona is unable to produce it, and Othello takes this as evidence of her betrayal. Othello exits, angry.

Act 4 In Act 4, Iago continues to torment Othello with innuendo and suggestions of Desdemona’s dishonesty. Othello has a ﬁt of epilepsy. When he recovers he sees Cassio and Iago speaking about Bianca, who arrives with the handkerchief that Cassio has given her. Othello recognizes it as Desdemona’s handkerchief and thus resolves to kill both Cassio and Desdemona.

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Emissaries from Venice arrive and observe Othello’s cruelty to Desdemona. They question Iago about Othello’s sanity, and Iago implies that Othello is if not mad, certainly dangerous. In the next scene, Othello interrogates Emilia concerning Desdemona’s ﬁdelity. He is clearly growing more distraught by the moment. Desdemona describes the drastic change in her husband to Iago and Emilia. After the women exit, Roderigo enters and accuses Iago of playing false with him. Iago makes up a story that convinces Roderigo that he should kill Cassio. Act 4 closes with Desdemona in her bedchamber, having been sent there with Emilia by Othello. There is a grim sense of foreboding over the scene.

Act 5 As the act opens, Roderigo seriously wounds Cassio. Iago appears to save Cassio and implicates Roderigo to Ludovico, and Roderigo is killed. In the next scene, Othello is in the bedroom with Desdemona as he prepares to kill her. Desdemona protests her innocence, but Othello does not believe her. He kills her by smothering her with a pillow. Emilia comes to the room; Desdemona revives for just a moment to tell Emilia that she has killed herself and then she dies. Othello tells Emilia that he has killed her and says that Desdemona was false. Emilia contradicts him and offers proof that it was Iago who plotted against the pair. Iago threatens Emilia with his sword as she testiﬁes against him, but he is stopped by Desdemona’s uncle, Gratiano, and placed under arrest. Othello ﬁnally understands that he has killed the innocent Desdemona and asks why Iago has treated him thus. Iago refuses to respond. Othello begs for Cassio’s forgiveness. Ludovico produces a letter from Roderigo that reveals the whole plan. There being no recourse, Othello kills himself with his own knife.

CHARACTERS Bianca Bianca is a courtesan. While some have interpreted this to mean a prostitute, it is not clear at all

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from the text that this is the case, since only Iago describes her in this way. Bianca is a woman with whom Cassio is having an affair. Her importance to the play concerns the handkerchief plot, and while her role is small, much turns on the scene where Othello observes Cassio and Bianca discussing the handkerchief.

Brabantio Brabantio is Desdemona’s father and a Venetian senator. A very powerful man in Venice, Brabantio has invited Othello to his home many times to talk about military matters. He is very angry, however, when he learns that Othello has eloped with his daughter. Brabantio only appears in the opening scenes of the play, yet in these scenes, he reveals much about not only himself but about the general attitude toward daughters and marriage in his time. He reveals his belief that a daughter is a possession of her father until the father arranges her marriage for her. This process often includes receiving money and property from the prospective groom in return for the daughter’s hand. Brabantio is clearly distraught over this aspect, as well as the fact that his daughter has married a foreigner and a black man. Ultimately, however, he blames Desdemona: he warns Othello that he should look to his wife, stating that her deception of her father might portend a similar deception of her husband. In the ﬁnal scenes of the play, the audience learns that Brabantio has died in Venice, the result of the grief he suffered over Desdemona’s marriage.

Michael Cassio Cassio is a lieutenant to Othello. A handsome and honorable man, Cassio receives a promotion from Othello that enrages Iago, beginning the action of the play. Cassio is tricked by Iago into becoming drunk and striking the governor of Cyprus. This action leads to his dismissal from Othello’s troop and the loss of Othello’s affection for him. Under Iago’s guidance, Cassio attempts to regain Othello’s favor through Desdemona. However, this action makes Othello very jealous of Cassio. In addition, Cassio’s interaction with the courtesan Bianca further enrages Othello. While Cassio is meant to be seen as the innocent wronged victim of Iago’s machinations, it is true that he is unable to hold his liquor, that he engages in a brawl, nearly killing an

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi adapted Othello into the opera Otello in 1887. Nearly one hundred years later, in 1986, ﬁlm director Franco Zefﬁrelli directed a ﬁlm version of the opera starring Placido Domino, Katia Riciarelli, and Justino Diaz. The ﬁlm was released in 2003 on DVD and VHS from MGM Home Video. • In another adaptation, choreographer Lar Lubovitch interpreted Othello as a ballet. Performed by the San Francisco Ballet and released on DVD in 2003, the ballet featured Desmond Richardson, Yuan Yuan Tan, and Parrish Maynard. It is available through Kultur Video. • A 2001 British television production set Othello in the contemporary London Metropolitan Police Department. While keeping the structure of the plot and story, the drama did not use Shakespeare’s language. Originally produced by London Weekend Television, the drama is available on DVD from Acorn Media. • Another ﬁlm that used the basic plot of Othello but transforms the play into a modern setting with modern language is O. Directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, and Julia Stiles, the ﬁlm is set in a

important man, and that he treats Bianca very badly. Ultimately, Cassio’s reputation is restored, and he becomes the deputy governor of Cyprus.

Desdemona Desdemona is a wealthy, beautiful, young Venetian woman who falls in love and then elopes with Othello. She is naive to the ways of the world; however, she is well spoken and conﬁdent, as revealed to her statements in Othello’s defense to the Venetian Senate. Desdemona leaves her home and family behind when she follows Othello to his posting in Cyprus. Unbeknownst to Desdemona,

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southern boys’ private school, and the action revolves around a basketball team. The original release of the movie was in 2000, and it was released on DVD in 2003, available from Vidmark/Trimark. • A more traditional ﬁlming of Othello was undertaken by the BBC as part of its Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare series. In 1981, the BBC produced Othello, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Anthony Hopkins and Bob Hoskins, available through the BBC. • Othello was adapted for ﬁlm in 1995 by Castle Rock Entertainment. It was directed by Oliver Parker and starred Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. It is available from Turner Home Entertainment. • Famed director and actor Orson Wells directed himself in another adaptation of Othello in 1952. The ﬁlm was released on DVD in 1999 and is available from Image Entertainment. • Stuart Burge and John Dexter II directed Laurence Olivier in Othello in 1965. The ﬁlm was released on VHS in 1996 and is available through Warner.

Iago uses her to plot against both Cassio and Othello. In Cyprus, Desdemona takes the part of the disgraced Cassio in pleading to her husband for clemency. This action, in turn, feeds Othello’s jealousy. Desdemona’s naivety prevents her from seeing that her pleading for Cassio enrages Othello. In addition, her innocent carelessness with the handkerchief that Othello has given her provides Iago with the vehicle he needs to ‘‘prove’’ Desdemona’s inﬁdelity to Othello. Desdemona proves herself to be brave, loving, and self-sacriﬁcial in her ﬁnal scene. Although she pleads for her life as she is being murdered, she continues to treat Othello with love. Indeed, when she rouses brieﬂy after being smothered, she tells

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Emilia that she has killed herself and that she alone is responsible for her death. In doing so, she tries to save Othello from the guilt of her death. However, she dies as she tells this lie, a particularly awful moment. From a Catholic perspective, because she dies in a state of mortal sin, she sacriﬁces her eternal soul in a futile attempt to save Othello.

Emilia Emilia is Iago’s wife and Desdemona’s lady in waiting. The two are good friends; yet Iago persuades Emilia to steal Desdemona’s handkerchief from her and give it to him. Emilia does so, but it seems clear that she has no idea of the terrible ramiﬁcations of this act. In the ﬁnal scenes, when she realizes what she has done, she condemns Iago to Othello and reveals her role in the handkerchief plot. In this moment, Iago runs her through with his sword, killing her. While Emilia is surely culpable for her part in the plot, her utter surprise at what Iago has done in some ways exonerates her. Her love for Desdemona is genuine, and if she had fully understood the depths of her husband’s villainy, it is unlikely that she would have cooperated with him. Nonetheless, she pays for her part in the deception with her death, although she dies in an honest confession of her own part, rendering her death less problematic than that of Desdemona.

Iago Iago is Othello’s ensign, or in some texts, ancient. Iago is arguably the most evil of all Shakespeare’s villains and, ironically, perhaps the most interesting character in the canon of Shakespeare’s work. He is complicated and difﬁcult to understand because his hatred seems so motiveless. Like Hamlet, Iago is a wordsmith. Shakespeare gives Iago more lines than anyone else in the play, and many of these lines reveal a highly intelligent, yet highly malignant character. Through the course of the play, Iago offers ﬁve different reasons why he hates Othello and wants to bring him to ruin: he is angry that Cassio has been promoted above him; he believes that Othello has slept with Emilia; he believes that Cassio has slept with Emilia; he mentions that he loves Desdemona himself; and he feels ugly when he is with Cassio. One of the most striking features of Iago is that he is so believable. He manages in the course of the play to deceive every character with whom he interacts. The deception is so complete that none of

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the characters doubts Iago enough to even double check the information. This point suggests that Iago is exceedingly persuasive, and his facility with language may be the reason for this. While Iago may appear fair, however, he is evil to the core. Perhaps the most evil action on Iago’s part in the play is not his betrayal of all the other characters but his refusal to reveal to Othello his motivation for doing so. In the end, Iago performs verbal suicide, refusing to speak another word.

Othello Othello is the Moorish general for whom the play is named. He is a middle-aged African, who has come to the aid of Venice in their war against the Turks. While in Venice, he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Desdemona. Against Venetian custom, he chooses to elope with Desdemona and must answer for his action to the Senate. At the same time, a new threat from the Turks means that the Venetians must send him to Cyprus. When the Senate approves of his marriage, Othello asks that his wife accompany him to Cyprus because he does not want to be without her. This request reveals his deep love for his wife, although it ultimately leads to her death. From all accounts, Othello is a brave and strong military man, capable of saving the Venetians through his cool command. Other characters often refer to him as the ‘‘noble’’ Moor, and there is reference to his princely caste in Africa. As a black man, Othello is both imposing and exotic, to the Venetian characters in the play. He is meant to be impressive as well to the audience. Yet the issue of Othello’s race was probably both enticing and troubling to Elizabethan audiences, as it certainly continued to be in the centuries of audiences to come. Like Iago, Othello is one of the most complicated of Shakespeare’s characters. He is, on the one hand, a larger than life hero. On the other hand, he seems to be preternaturally gullible in his impetuous acceptance of Iago’s ordering of reality. On the one hand, he is a crafty and intelligent military leader. On the other hand, he has been called stupid by critics of the play. On the one hand, he is a romantic and passionate lover. On the other, he is a coldblooded murderer. These inconsistencies or contradictions in his character are further complicated by the issue of race. It is difﬁcult to know just what Shakespeare intended for his audience to make of Othello. Is Shakespeare attributing Othello’s gulli-

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bility to his race? Or is he suggesting that it is because of his race that others choose to degrade him to such an extent? Is Othello heroic because he is black or in spite of it?

a common cultural fear) onto Othello, he is able to convince Othello that what he fears most, Desdemona’s betrayal, is a reality. It is jealousy that weakens Othello’s mind and reason, thus rendering him increasingly vulnerable to Iago’s plots.

Roderigo

In the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, some productions and some critics suggested yet another way that jealousy might work as a motivating force in the play. As Steven Orgel notes in his article ‘‘Othello and the End of Comedy,’’ ‘‘Tyrone Guthrie in 1938 had [Laurence] Olivier as a homosexual Iago furtively longing for Ralph Richardson’s Othello.’’ Such an interpretation suggests that Iago is in love with Othello himself or, alternatively, in love with Cassio. He concocts his dastardly plan as the result of jealousy, playing the role of spurned lover. While the interpretation may seem strange to some readers, it does reinforce the thematic concern over jealous rage. Furthermore, it provides motivation for Iago’s actions, something that troubled viewers and critics alike since practically the ﬁrst performance of the play.

Roderigo is a companion of Iago. A wealthy gentleman, Roderigo is in love with Desdemona. Iago uses Roderigo’s love for Desdemona as the device through which he gains both Roderigo’s ﬁnancing and complicity in his plots. Roderigo is villainous in the play; he works against particularly Cassio in what he thinks is a plot that will ﬁnally unite him in marriage with Desdemona. Of all the characters in the play, Roderigo is clearly the least intelligent. He plays the part of the heavy in Iago’s machinations. After tricking Cassio early in the play, he falls victim to Cassio’s sword at the end.

THEMES Jealousy Traditionally, Othello was read as a cautionary tale about the destructive nature of the green-eyed monster, jealousy. Certainly, the play is ﬁlled with examples of jealousy, each contributing to the claustrophobic atmosphere of plot and counterplot, all orchestrated by Iago. Iago himself attributes his hatred of Othello to numerous sorts of jealousy: he is jealous of Michael Cassio because he believes that Cassio has been promoted unjustly over him and because he believes that Cassio might have had an affair with his wife. Iago is jealous of Othello because he believes that Othello might have had sex with his wife and because he says that he loves Desdemona himself. It is almost as if Iago examines the various kinds of jealousy he ﬁnds in himself in order to exploit those jealousies in others. For example, he ﬁrst manipulates Roderigo. Roderigo, in love with Desdemona, is very jealous of Othello and by extension of Cassio. His jealousy makes him an easy dupe for Iago’s plotting. Likewise, Bianca is jealous of any woman in whom Cassio might be interested, and thus she also can be manipulated by Iago. Of course, the most destructive jealous rage that Iago incites is that within Othello. Iago uses his own fear of cuckoldry as the basis for his plot against Othello. By projecting his own feelings (and

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Sexuality Many of Shakespeare’s plays refer to sex through joke and innuendo. Some, such as Much Ado About Nothing, even use a sexual pun in their titles. However, Othello stands out among Shakespeare’s works as the most troublingly sexual of all plays. Indeed, it is the issue of sex that causes the downfall of both Othello and Desdemona. In the opening scene, Iago and Roderigo awaken Brabantio to inform him of Desdemona’s elopement. Their language is obscene and racist: ‘‘[A]n old black ram / [I]s tupping your white ewe,’’ Iago shouts, ‘‘[Y]our daughter / and the Moor are making the beast with two backs.’’ Further, Shakespeare calls attention to the nuptial night between Othello and Desdemona by having it interrupted several times, ﬁrst in Venice when Othello is called to the Senate and later in Cyprus when Cassio stabs Montano. This serves to produce extreme sexual tension; in the scenes shared by Othello and Desdemona, their language is highly charged with interrupted desire. For Othello, thoughts of sexual inﬁdelity are also at the heart of his total disintegration. After murdering Desdemona, the thoughts of her supposed promiscuity continue to eat at Othello. ‘‘Iago

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Read Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as well as descriptions of Venice written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What does the setting of Othello provide for the play thematically? What issues is Shakespeare able to explore in the play because of his choice of a Venetian setting? • Research the status of women in England around 1600 both through primary sources such as William Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties: Eight Treatises (1634) and through secondary sources such as Lawrence Stone’s Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500 1800 (1977). How does

knows / That she with Cassio hath the act of shame / A thousand times committed,’’ Othello says in his own defense. The fear of cuckoldry runs deep in many of Shakespeare’s plays; yet in most plays it is a matter of joke and play. In Othello, however, Shakespeare demonstrates how such fear, when attached with deeper issues of sexuality, can turn tragic.

STYLE Irony Harmon and Holman in A Handbook to Literature deﬁne irony as ‘‘a broad term referring to the recognition of a reality different from appearance.’’ Othello is an essentially ironic play in that Shakespeare creates such a wide divide between what appears to be real to the characters in the play and what appears to be real to the audience in the theater. He does this through several devices. In the ﬁrst place, Shakespeare offers Iago some of the best language in the playwright’s whole body of work. Consequently, Iago appears to the other characters

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an understanding of this status inform a reading of Othello? • Read accounts of the Moorish ambassador’s visit to England in 1600 as well as selections from popular travel writing of the day. How does this contemporary information affect portrayal of Othello in the play? • Watch at least four different versions of Othello or adaptations of the story of Othello on video or DVD. How do directorial decisions concerning casting, editing, and scripting affect an interpretation of the play?

as well spoken, appealing, and attractive. His language makes him someone they trust. This is evident from the number of times a character (particularly Othello) refers to Iago as ‘‘honest.’’ Iago does not look like the villain he is. In this, Shakespeare deviates from the traditions of the Middle Ages in which evil characters always exhibit some degree of the evil on the surface. Indeed, in medieval romance, characters are as they appear: an ugly character is inevitably evil. Shakespeare plays with both audience and character horizon of expectation here. The ﬁrst gap, then, is between what the characters and audience expect from such an attractive and well-spoken character and what he really is. Shakespeare also structures his scenes so that the play becomes increasingly ironic. Invariably, Iago speaks to other characters on stage, lying to them and manipulating them. Then, when the characters leave the stage, Iago reveals his inner thoughts to the audience. For example, in Act 1, Scene 3, Roderigo is about to lose heart in his attempts to win Desdemona. Iago engages in a long eloquent speech telling Roderigo to ‘‘put money in / thy purse.’’ The speech is intended to manipulate Roderigo to continue to ﬁnance Iago’s plans. As soon as he exits, Iago speaks aloud, although he is alone, in a soliloquy, revealing to the audience his feelings about

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Roderigo: ‘‘For I mine own gained knowledge should profane / If I would time expend with such a snipe / But for my sport and proﬁt.’’ Consequently, as the play continues, the audience knows increasingly more about Iago than do the other characters, intensifying the sense of irony in the play. In addition, the stature of Shakespeare and of this play contribute to the ironic atmosphere. Virtually anyone watching or reading the play knows the basics of the story: man meets woman, man marries woman, villain lies, man gets jealous, man murders woman. Consequently, a naive viewing of the play is exceedingly rare. Thus, lines such as Brabantio’s in Act 1, Scene 3, anticipate what is to come: ‘‘Look to her, Moor, if though hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee.’’ In this foreshadowing, the irony is doubled. Not only does the audience already know that Othello will believe that this prophecy has come to pass, the audience already knows that Othello will be wrong in that belief. Through devices such as this one, the play becomes thicker and thicker with irony.

Chronology One of the strangest features in the construction of this play is Shakespeare’s ordering of time or chronology. There are two chronologies functioning simultaneously in the play. As Orgel notes, ‘‘Credit for discovering the double time scheme in Othello is always accorded to two ingenious Victorian critics, Nicholas Halpin and John Wilson, writing in Blackwood’s in 1849; but they were merely the ﬁrst critics to treat it systematically and consider it a good idea.’’ Orgel goes on to summarize the problem. A careful reader notes that the opening act includes Othello and Desdemona’s elopement and their discussion with the Venetian Senate. The audience is informed that Cassio and Othello will leave immediately the next day while Iago, Emilia, and Desdemona will make whatever plans they need to make and then make their way to Cyprus. Orgel points out that there is a chronological gap here between Act 1 and Act 2. Othello and Desdemona are reunited on Cyprus, but their trips have taken varying lengths of time. At the point they are reunited, the action resumes continuously, and only takes about thirty-three clock hours to go from Desdemona’s arrival on Cyprus until her death. At issue is, then, that the characters accused of inﬁdelity with each other are never together at the same time and place for the inﬁdelity to take place. Although Iago is able to convince Othello that Desdemona and Cassio have had an intimate affair,

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careful readers and viewers know that there has been no opportunity for such indiscretions. Likewise, when has Cassio had the opportunity to start his affair with Bianca? The ‘‘past’’ that the audience believes to have been constructed disappears on closer examination. One could argue that this is Shakespeare not paying attention to the details; however, it is just as likely, as Orgel argues, that Shakespeare plays with the time in order to illustrate how easy it is to ‘‘dupe’’ someone like Othello—or an audience, for that matter.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Moorish Ambassador and the Banishment of Africans One of the large questions facing Shakespeare scholars was that of Elizabethan attitudes toward Moors and others of different races. It is difﬁcult to determine how many English people had actually even ever seen someone with a different color skin than their own. It is known that in 1596, Queen Elizabeth I ordered the banishment of ten ‘‘blackamoors’’ from her country. Shortly after this, English prisoners being held in Spain and Portugal were traded for ‘‘blackamoors.’’ Thus, while there were evidently people of color in England at the time, it seems likely they were exceedingly rare. In 1600, in an odd turn of events, Abd elOuahed ben Messaoud Anoun, the Moorish ambassador of Elizabeth I, came to England with his entourage. In a series of letters between Elizabeth and the king of the Barbary Coast, the two colluded for ways the North Africans and the English could work together against the Spanish. After a year or so of this fruitless negotiation as well as the frustration of the Englishman whose house had been commandeered as an embassy, the ambassador and his entourage left England. In the same year of 1601, Elizabeth ordered further expulsion of ‘‘blackamoors.’’ It seems likely that the two events were related; it also seems likely that Shakespeare would have been aware of the Moorish ambassador’s presence in London. How much of his play was inﬂuenced by these events is debatable, however.

Trade and Exploration The Elizabethan and Jacobean ages were times of great exploration and trade. Like the Venetians of Othello, Elizabethans were merchants and traders,

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1600s: By this date, it is estimated that some 900,000 Africans have been transported by English and other European slavers to the Americas. 2000s: Slavery has been abolished throughout the world, although many countries and people still feel the effects of the African Diaspora. • 1600s: Women generally have little or no career options other than marriage and motherhood and are subordinate to men in every way. 2000s: Women have equal rights with men and are able to pursue careers outside the home. • 1600s: Women are legally prohibited from acting on the stage so all female characters in Shakespeare’s plays are acted by young boys.

eager to open new avenues for raw goods and materials. Sometimes these goods also included trafﬁc in human beings; from 1562 through 1568, Sir John Hawkes and others began slave trading from Africa to the West Indies. This disturbing practice continued unabated throughout the sixteenth century, and by 1600, an estimated 900,000 Africans had been transported to the Americas as slaves. In the 1580s, English gentlemen such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh ﬁnanced colonies in Newfoundland and Roanoke Island in an attempt to make a permanent presence on the North American mainland. In 1607, the Jamestown colony was founded in Virginia. In 1600, Elizabeth also chartered the British East India Company for trade in the Eastern Hemisphere in an attempt to expand the British spice trade. Ultimately, the English conquered the whole of the Indian subcontinent through their ongoing mercantile expansion. Shakespeare’s interest in these explorations shows up clearly in the character of Othello as well as in plays such as The Tempest. The fascination

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2000s: Women actors play all female characters in Shakespeare; at times, women actors even play men’s roles. • 1600s: England is an absolutist state, although Elizabeth I demonstrates great ability to reach compromises with her various constituencies. James I, her successor, however, is a proponent of the absolute monarchy and attempts to control all functions of state. 2000s: The British monarchy is largely a ﬁgurehead, and Queen Elizabeth II, while important to her country as a symbol, has little or no political power.

with new frontiers and with new landscapes is also evident in the popularity of travel literature. For example, The History and Description of Africa, by Leo Africanus, was published in 1600. Thus, the seeds of empire and colonialism were sown during the sixteenth century; their harvest would be the globe-spanning British Empire of the nineteenth century.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Othello received considerable critical attention from the seventeenth century to the early 2000s. The earliest published critique of the play is that of Thomas Rymer in 1693. Rymer famously notes that the play serves as ‘‘a warning to all good Wives that they look well to their Linnen.’’ Rymer seems particularly concerned that Othello does not function properly within the traditions of either comedy or tragedy. He writes, ‘‘There is in this Play some burlesk, some humour, and ramble of Comical Wit; some shew, and some Mimickry to divert the spectators: but the tragical part is, plainly, none other than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour.’’

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Ben Kingsley as Othello and David Suchet as Iago in a scene from William Shakespeare’s Othello

Samuel Johnson, the inﬂuential eighteenthcentury literary critic and essayist also weighed in on Othello. He worried slightly that the strength of Iago’s character could evoke admiration from the viewer: ‘‘There is always danger lest wickedness conjoined with abilities should steal upon esteem, though it misses of approbation; but the character of Iago is so conducted, that he is from the ﬁrst scene to the last hated and despised.’’

‘‘Hamlet,’’ ‘‘Othello,’’ ‘‘King Lear,’’ ‘‘Macbeth’’ (1904). He focused on the feelings of the reader or audience of Othello, calling Othello ‘‘the most painfully exciting and the most terrible’’ of all Shakespeare’s plays. He continues, ‘‘From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation.’’

The pace of Shakespearean criticism picked up in the nineteenth century with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, among others writing on Othello. Like Johnson, Hazlitt was also concerned with the character of Iago. He writes, ‘‘The general groundwork of the character of Iago as it appears to us is not absolute malignity but a want of moral principle, or an indifference to the real consequences of the actions which the meddling perversity of his disposition and love of immediate excitement lead him to commit.’’

Subsequent criticism of Othello focused on issues such as gender, race, and history. John Russell Brown in his book Shakespeare: The Tragedies (2001) notes that Othello ‘‘may be judged the most innovative of Shakespeare’s tragedies with regard to sexuality, gender, racial inheritance, and social relationships.’’ Patricia Parker, writing in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context, focuses on the history of the word ‘‘dilation,’’ a word Shakespeare sprinkles liberally through his text. Parker succeeds in linking the word to issues of hiding, discovery, opening, closing, and female anatomy in her exploration of Othello.

In the early twentieth century, scholar A. C. Bradley wrote what many consider to be the most inﬂuential volume of Shakespearean criticism of the century, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on

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Race, likewise, is at the center of much contemporary criticism. Many take as their starting point G. K. Hunter’s seminal essay, ‘‘Othello and Colour

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Prejudice,’’ ﬁrst published in 1967 and reprinted in 1978. The essay was an early attempt to try to recover Elizabethan attitudes toward race. Karen Newman directly confronted both issues of race and sexuality in a 1987 chapter in the book Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. She writes, ‘‘[F]or the white male characters of the play, the black man’s power resides in his sexual difference from a white male norm.’’ Jyotsna G. Singh in 1998, on the other hand, considered how one teaches texts of ‘‘racial dissonance,’’ particularly in the American classroom. Singh focused on Thomas Jefferson’s use of literature for moral lessons and asks, ‘‘Given his naturalized fear of miscegenation, what moral lesson, one wonders, would Thomas Jefferson derive from Othello?’’ In an article that also appeared in 1998, Ferial J. Ghazoul enlarges the issue of race by exploring the role of the play in the Arab world. In doing so, he argues, ‘‘Othello offers a special case of relations among literatures. It is a product of an acculturation involving a double circulation of the Other and a complex intertwining that combines the effect of an African Arab (i.e., Othello and his background) on European imagination and, in a reversed way, its impact on Arabs/Africans.’’

CRITICISM Diane Andrews Henningfeld Andrews Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College who writes widely on literature for educational publishers. In this essay, Andrews Henningfeld argues that the main characters belong to differing linguistic and discursive communities and are thus tragically unable to understand each other. In Othello, Shakespeare offers several distinctive linguistic and discursive communities, including the patriarchal hegemony of the Venetian merchant class and the military hegemony of the soldiers on the ﬁeld and in Cyprus. A linguistic community is one that shares a common language, while a discursive community is one that shares common forms of discourse such as ideas about law, business, or women. Further, ‘‘hegemony,’’ according to Ross Murﬁn and Supryia M. Ray in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, is a term often used by literary and cultural critics to refer to ‘‘the

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pervasive system of assumptions, meaning, and values . . . that shapes the way things look, what they mean, and therefore what reality is for the majority of people within a given culture.’’ Thus, characters who ﬁnd themselves cast as outsiders for reasons of race, ethnicity, social class, or gender, do not know or understand the values and assumptions that shape the reality of a hegemony. They may act or speak in ways that reveal their inability to ‘‘read’’ the structures of the culture in which they ﬁnd themselves, sometimes with tragic results. Such is the case in Othello, a play about a black man attempting to function within a white mercantile culture, a white woman who marries a black military man, and a white Venetian soldier who destroys them both. To begin to understand the relationship between the Venetians and Othello, a reader needs to remember that Venice is a mercantile society, one whose values are based on the buying and selling of goods. Turks represent such a threat to the Venetians because they restrict trade, the life-blood of Venetian society, by restricting ship trafﬁc on the Mediterranean Sea. Othello is clearly an outsider in Venetian society. He is of a different race and different nationality, having come from North Africa to ﬁght for Venice against the Turks. Moreover, Othello comes from a different discursive and linguistic community; he is not a native speaker of the culture or the language of Venice. He tells the Senate, ‘‘Rude am I in speech . . . / And little of this great world can I speak / More than pertains to feats of broils and battle.’’ Othello is correct in this assessment. He does not speak the language of buying and selling, the guarded language of negotiation and barter, but rather speaks the language of a soldier, rough and rude, straightforward and without guile. His contribution to Venetian safety is welldocumented; he is called repeatedly the ‘‘noble Moor’’ or the ‘‘valiant Moor’’ or the ‘‘brave Moor.’’ Because of this record and reputation, he has been welcomed into the hearts and homes of Venetian citizens. Othello tells the Senate that Desdemona’s ‘‘father loved me, oft invited me, / Still questioned me the story of my life / From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes / That I have past.’’ Clearly, Othello has been an honored guest in Brabantio’s home. Yet Othello, as an outsider, fails to understand the hegemony of which Brabantio is a part. In believing himself welcome in Brabantio’s home, he has also believed himself worthy of Brabantio’s daughter. What Othello reveals, however, in his

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OTHELLO IS CORRECT IN THIS ASSESSMENT. HE DOES NOT SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF BUYING AND SELLING, THE GUARDED LANGUAGE OF NEGOTIATION AND BARTER, BUT RATHER SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE OF A SOLDIER, ROUGH AND RUDE, STRAIGHTFORWARD AND WITHOUT GUILE.’’

elopement with Desdemona is his failure to ‘‘read’’ the culture in which he ﬁnds himself. In Venetian culture, daughters obey their fathers, and fathers arrange marriages for their daughters. What Othello does not and cannot understand (as a linguistic and discursive outsider) is that an elopement is a kind of theft, depriving Brabantio of the money he could command from a prospective husband in the marriage market. While a military man takes what he wants, a merchant negotiates a sale. Thus, Othello and Brabantio are not only linguistically speakers of two different languages, they are also members of two radically different discursive communities.

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riage. Her worth, then, is of limited value to the hegemony, although her rebellion is a cause of grave concern to the patriarchal power structure. Yet an even graver danger looms on the horizon: the immediate Turkish threat to Cyprus. Thus, the second reason that the duke recognizes Othello’s marriage to Desdemona becomes clear. Venice needs Othello to go to Cyprus to quell the imminent danger from the Turks. Giving Othello a Venetian woman becomes a form of payment for Othello’s service. Moreover, because Othello wants Desdemona with him, the duke is able to remove the rebellious element from Venetian society. He is able, in this move, to accomplish several goals: he can pay off the Moor in female ﬂesh, a bargain for all the Venetians save Brabantio; he can protect his city-state from the Turks by sending the best soldier to lead the battle; and he can isolate Desdemona from other women of Venice who might be encouraged to form their own alliances with prospective husbands, thus depriving their fathers of their rightful marriage proﬁts.

At an even more fundamental level, Othello does not understand that he, like Desdemona, is a commodity; he has sold his military prowess to the Venetians for money. As such, he is ‘‘owned’’ by the Venetians, in much the same way that Desdemona is ‘‘owned’’ by her father. As such, according to Venetian hegemony, Othello does not have agency; rather, he is to be acted upon, rather than acting, to go where he is sent and do what he is told to do. Why then does the duke try to quell Brabantio’s objection to the marriage and seem to approve of the elopement?

Once removed to Cyprus, it is Desdemona who becomes the outsider. Not only is she far away from the protective patriarchal structures of Venetian society, a hegemony that she ﬂaunts in her choice to marry Othello, she is now in an entirely different discursive community, that of the military. She is surrounded by men who are pledged to ﬁght for and with her husband to the death. Her misunderstanding of this is evident in her willingness to speak for Michael Cassio to her husband. Were she a member of the military hegemony, she would know that a commander’s word cannot be undone. Once dismissed, Cassio is always dismissed. For Othello to do otherwise would be to undermine his command. Further, military language is masculine, and Desdemona also does not ‘‘speak’’ the language of men. If she were to speak it, she would also realize that her husband would ﬁnd her support of Cassio suspect. Her ignorance of the discursive communities and of their languages costs her dearly.

In the ﬁrst place, Venice is both a merchant society and a patriarchal society. As noted above, fathers control their daughters. Indeed, in all ways, men control the goods, products, and means of production in this society. Daughters are commodities, something that can be bought and sold on the marriage market. As such, Desdemona does not have intrinsic worth to the entire society; rather, her value is to her father in how much money he can accrue through the negotiations leading to her mar-

Shakespeare also puts one more ingredient in the mix: Iago. If Othello and Desdemona are outsiders, then Iago is the quintessential insider, a rare linguistic wizard, a polyglot who can speak the language of trade, of business, and of soldiering equally well. This facility with words and structures is what shifts the play from potential comedy to certain tragedy. As a native Venetian, Iago fully understands the sly wheeling and dealing of businessmen. ‘‘Put money in thy purse!’’ he admonishes

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Roderigo. He barters promises of Desdemona’s favor in exchange for Roderigo’s capital. He offers his comrades at arms advice. He entices his wife to betray her lady. In each of these dealings, using the deep structures of culture and language, he successfully moves himself toward his goal: the utter destruction of Othello. Finally, there is one more language Iago speaks, and he does so just as subtly and cannily as he does the others, so subtly and cannily that the audience is never fully aware of how they, too, have been duped. Iago speaks the language of theater. In many scenes, Iago cajoles and ﬂatters and has his way with the other characters. Once these characters leave the stage, however, Iago turns to the audience and reveals his ‘‘real’’ motivation. Theatergoers, too, belong to a hegemony of sorts and have unspoken, but ﬁrmly held, assumptions and values about what constitutes the ‘‘real’’ in a play. For example, an audience knows that when a character dies on the stage, the actor is not really dead. There is another assumption: soliloquies reveal the inner thoughts of a character. What the audience does not do, however, is to doubt the truth of what they hear in a soliloquy.

speak the language of Venice, and he dies in his own nearly wordless grief. He cries, ‘‘O Desdemon! dead Desdemon; dead. O, O!’’ And in the ﬁnal act, Iago, the polyglot, chooses to remain silent. Language does not desert him, as it does Othello; rather, he voluntarily leaves the discursive communities of Venice, the military, and of theater in his ﬁnal act of treachery, choosing to abandon his role as playmaker. ‘‘You know what you know,’’ he says to Othello and to the audience. It is left to the other characters to piece together the story, like foreigners speaking a second language, badly. Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on Othello, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Stephen Orgel In the following essay excerpt, Orgel focuses on themes of patriarchy and patronage in Othello in examining the play’s evolution from comedy into tragedy.

Iago is a troubling case, however. He demonstrates repeatedly that he does not speak the truth. ‘‘I am not what I am,’’ he says. Yet the audience believes whatever he tells them. He hates Othello because he is jealous of Cassio. He believes Othello has sexual intercourse with Emilia. He also think Cassio had intimate relations with Emilia. He loves Desdemona. All the while the audience wonders how it is that Othello can believe Iago’s obvious lies, the audience itself believes what Iago reveals when alone with them. As the play closes, each of the characters demonstrates his or her ﬁnal confrontation with the linguistic and discursive communities of the play. In the ﬁnal act, Desdemona plays out the role demanded of her by the patriarchal hegemony in which she has been encultured, a hegemony that demands devotion and obedience to a husband. She sacriﬁces her immortal soul in order to protect Othello. When Emilia begs her to tell her who has killed her, Desdemona replies, ‘‘Nobody. I myself.’’ In the ﬁnal act, Othello loses language altogether. As John Russell Brown suggests, ‘‘Increasingly during the last scene, Othello speaks of what is happening very simply, as if his ability to say more is entirely spent.’’ He can no longer even attempt to

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Orson Welles as Othello and Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona in a scene from the 1952 ﬁlm adaptation of Othello

Catherine Bates In the following essay, Bates examines how Shakespeare’s narrative choices, particularly those of word play and borrowing from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, drive the central themes in Othello.

Source: Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Othello and the End of Comedy,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 56, Shakespeare and Comedy, edited by Peter Holland, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 105–16.

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Pechter, Edward, ed., ‘‘Othello’’: Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism, by William Shakespeare, Norton, 2004.

Source: Catherine Bates, ‘‘Weaving and Writing in Othello,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 46, edited by Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 51–60.

Rymer, Thomas, A Short View of Tragedy, in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2, 1693–1733, edited by Brian Vickers, Routledge, 1974, pp. 26–30, 54, originally published in 1693. Singh, Jyotsna G., ‘‘Racial Dissonance/Canonical Texts: Teaching Early Modern Texts in the Late Twentieth Century,’’ in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 26, 1998, pp. 70–79.

SOURCES Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on ‘‘Hamlet,’’ ‘‘Othello,’’ ‘‘King Lear,’’ ‘‘Macbeth,’’ 1904, reprint, Macmillan, 1981, p. 176.

FURTHER READING

Brown, John Russell, ‘‘Othello: Sexuality and Difference,’’ in Shakespeare: The Tragedies, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 190–91, 225.

Bell, Millicent, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Moor,’’ in Raritan, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring 2002, pp. 1–14. Bell delivers an in-depth character analysis of Othello.

Ghazoul, Ferial J., ‘‘The Arabization of Othello,’’ in Comparative Literature, Vol. 50, No.1, Winter 1998, pp. 1–31. Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 7th ed., Prentice Hall, 1996, pp. 277–78. Hazlitt, William, ‘‘Iago, Heroic Tragedy, and Othello,’’ in ‘‘Othello’’: Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism, by William Shakespeare, edited by Edward Pechter, Norton, 2004, originally published in 1814. Hunter, G. K., ‘‘Othello and Colour Prejudice,’’ in his Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Liverpool University Press, 1978, pp. 31–59, originally published in 1967. Johnson, Samuel, The Plays of Shakespeare, in Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, edited by Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean O’Meara, Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 358–59, originally published in 1765. Murﬁn, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray, ‘‘Hegemony,’’ in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, St. Martin’s Press, Bedford Books, 2003, p. 197. Newman, Karen, ‘‘‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,’’ in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, Routledge, 1987, p. 151. Orgel, Stephen, ‘‘Othello and the End of Comedy,’’ in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 56, 2003, pp. 105–16. Parker, Patricia, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 229–72.

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Crowdus, Gary, ‘‘Sharing an Enthusiasm for Shakespeare: An Interview with Kenneth Branagh,’’ in Cineaste, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1998, pp. 34–41. Kenneth Branagh is a leading Shakespearean actor of the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries. This interview captures both his enthusiasm and his thoughts on playing Iago in the Oliver Parker ﬁlm. Erickson, Peter, ‘‘The Moment of Race in Renaissance Studies,’’ in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 26, 1998, pp. 27–36. Erickson offers a cogent discussion of the three ways race can be handled in a discussion of Othello. Hadﬁeld, Andrew, ed., A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s ‘‘Othello,’’ Routledge, 2003. Hadﬁeld has compiled a very useful and usable collection of primary sources and critical interpretations as well as providing chapters on the work in performance. McDonald, Russ, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents, 2d ed., St.Martin’s Press, Bedford Books, 2001. This book has useful introductory sections and a wealth of excerpts from primary documents, arranged thematically. O’Dair, Sharon, ‘‘Teaching Othello in the Schoolhouse Door: History, Hollywood, Heroes,’’ in the Massachusetts Review, Vol. 41, No. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 215–36. O’Dair offers a new historical approach to the play, examining particularly the implications of Othello in American classrooms.

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Play with a Tiger DORIS LESSING 1962

Doris Lessing wrote Play with a Tiger in 1958, some time before it was staged and published in 1962. She wrote it while working on The Golden Notebook and a third novel of the Children of Violence series. The action of the play resembles a section of The Golden Notebook, as it presents a similar contrast of characters. Anna Freeman of Play with a Tiger resembles Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook, and Dave Miller, with whom Anna is in love in the play, resembles a character who appears near the end of The Golden Notebook, with whom Anna Wulf falls in love. Both of Lessing’s Annas are highly serious women grappling with the major political questions of the day, and they are both unhappy about the traditional societal roles of men and women. These women resist marriage because they believe that the institution as it stands is a trap for women, and they experiment beyond the bounds of monogamous love. But whereas The Golden Notebook is about a long period in its heroine’s life, Play with a Tiger covers just a few hours. Play with a Tiger received mixed reviews when it was ﬁrst staged. Further, since Lessing is known as a writer of novels and short stories, not as a playwright, Play with a Tiger and her few other plays receive considerably less scholarly attention than her novels and short stories. Play with a Tiger dramatizes the difﬁculties of having high ideals and trying to live by them with as little compromise as possible. Anna turns out to be

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the strongest person of the play, but even she must compromise in certain situations. Further, she suffers a great deal for her convictions, as Lessing shows how people who depart from societal norms, and who are different, suffer loneliness and scorn. Play with a Tiger is no longer in print, although it is likely to be available at most any large library.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler, in Persia (later renamed as Iran) to English parents on October 22, 1919. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (later renamed as Zimbabwe) in Southern Africa, in 1924. There, Lessing left school at the age of thirteen, began working at ﬁfteen, and began a longtime involvement with Marxist politics. She was attracted to Marxism’s focus on workers’ rights. Further, in its Southern African form, Marxist politics was focused on the rights of blacks. The indigenous black populations in the region had been subjugated since the period of European colonialism. Lessing lived in Africa until she moved to London, England, in 1949. Lessing arrived in London with a manuscript of a ﬁrst novel, The Grass is Singing, which takes place in Zimbabwe and which made Lessing’s name as a writer. She followed this ﬁrst publication with three novels from what is, in total, a ﬁve-volume set entitled The Children of Violence series. Her next two novels were not parts of the series, and the sixth, The Golden Notebook, is the novel for which Lessing is most admired. It is revered as a classic of feminist writing and as a brilliant portrayal of social and political post–World War II English life. The novel also includes material that takes place in Africa, so that this novel, like so many of Lessing’s works, contributes to the body of work by writers whose journalism and ﬁction explore and contest the inequalities that followed from European imperialism in Africa. The ﬁfth novel in Lessing’s The Children of Violence series points towards the type of ﬁction she since has been most interested in, novels she calls ‘‘space ﬁction’’ but which are categorized in bookstores as science ﬁction. The distinction, Lessing has said, is that science ﬁction is interested in technology, and she is interested in imagining utopian and other possible future societies. Of the handful of plays Lessing has written, Play with a Tiger is most interesting for the way in

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which its themes and situations mirror many of those of the Golden Notebook. It attests to Lessing’s perennial interest in gender and political questions in a modern world that has witnessed the cold war between capitalist and communist regimes and great changes in the relationship between men and women and in the nature of families. The play was ﬁrst produced in London in 1962, the year it was also published. Lessing has been nominated for and has won a number of literary prizes throughout her career, such as Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for literature in 2001. In 1995, she received a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for an autobiographical book, Under My Skin, and an honorary degree from Harvard University. In 1999, Queen Elizabeth II of England appointed Lessing a Companion of Honour.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Anna Freeman and Tom Lattimer are in the midst of a heated exchange. Tom is trying to ﬁnd out why Anna has decided not to marry him. Anna avoids the subject. She responds to Tom’s words by

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talking about something completely unrelated. For example, she mentions the man she sees standing in the street outside, the man who often stands there, apparently because he is in love with a woman who lives in a nearby apartment. Finally, however, Anna explains herself. She says that she cannot stand the idea of Tom having taken a job at a popular women’s magazine. Tom accuses Anna of being a romantic, insisting that she will one day regret not having a regular job herself. They hear a noise at the door, the voice of the woman from whom Anna rents rooms. The woman is Mary Jackson; she is calling her cat. She enters the room not knowing Tom is there to ask Anna if she wants to go out for a cup of coffee. She sees Tom and ﬁgures out what is going on. She is cavalier about the situation, asking Tom how it was he thought the two of them would ever get married. They hear the doorbell ring. Mary exits and returns with the visitor. It is Harry Paine, one of Anna’s friends. Harry has come for sympathy from Anna. He is married but has affairs. His latest girlfriend has left him; she is going to marry. He wants Anna to go with him for a few drinks so that he can pour his heart out. Anna refuses. He asks Mary to go instead, and Mary is very pleased. As Mary does, Harry tells Tom that Anna would never have married him. He tells Tom that Tom is turning into a conventional person. Tom responds by telling Harry that Harry has a similar job, that they are not so very different. This makes Harry stop making fun of Tom. The four then begin to speak of Dave Miller, a friend of Anna, whom Harry says Anna should marry instead of Tom. Anna says she never will and predicts that Dave, despite his apparent unconventionality, will end up like Harry—married and routinely cheating on his wife. Harry is angry at Anna’s portrait of him. While they are talking, the doorbell rings again. Mary exits to see who it is. With Mary gone, Tom uses Mary to scare Anna. He says that Anna is on her way to becoming Mary, an older lady obsessed with cats, because cats will be her only company if she continues to refuse marriage proposals. Anna insults Tom, in turn, to defend Mary. Her last word is that she would rather be lonely and true to herself than a compromiser like Tom. Harry and Mary leave, and the person who rang the doorbell reaches Anna’s room. It is Janet Stevens, one of Dave Miller’s casual girlfriends. Tom leaves.

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With Tom gone, Janet explains why she has come. She is pregnant by Dave, having decided to trap him into marriage by not using birth control. She has not seen him for days and is fearful that he may have left her for good. She knows that Dave is in love with Anna. She wants Anna to tell Dave about her situation. She leaves upset but glad about what she has done. She says it will be good for Dave to settle down. Next, Dave arrives. Anna is by now deeply frustrated and upset. She has broken an engagement with a man she has been in love with. She is in love with Dave, and she knows that her relationship with Dave is bound to end as well. At ﬁrst, Anna behaves coldly towards Dave, and he does not know why. Finally, she melts. They sit cross-legged on the carpet facing each other, as if to begin a ritual, and it is clear they have done this before. The lights dim and the walls of Anna’s room fade away. The two seem to be ﬂoating in the midst of the great city of London.

Act 2 Anna and Dave are as they were at the end of act 1. Anna stands and becomes as she was when she was a child, mimicking her childhood Australian accent. She is speaking to her mother as she apparently did sometime in the past, declaring that she will never become like her mother: isolated, on a farm, tied to the home by endless duties. Next Dave goes back into his past. He acts out a scene from his childhood on the streets of Chicago. He is with friends. They are pretending that they are depression-era gangsters. He recalls how he had strong political convictions even then, going through anarchist and socialist phases. Dave next talks about how he once went to see a psychoanalyst. He begged the psychoanalyst to explain to him how to be content. The doctor tells him to marry and to have a couple children. Dave is both scofﬁng and nervous as he tells the story, as if he is worried that the analyst is right in telling him to live and believe like most everybody else. Dave also explains how his parents were hardly present as he was growing up. They were both union organizers and often traveled. They hear a commotion in the street. The women across the way are ﬁghting, as Anna says

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they did the previous night. Anna and Dave speak anxiously about wanting a better world and wanting to be better people themselves. Anna says she once tried very hard to conjure a vision of herself as an entirely different person. What she saw was a tiger. She called the tiger to her, and it was purring. Then it slashed her and began to snarl. Next she heard its keepers calling and wheeling out its huge cage. The phone rings, but Anna does not answer it. She tells Dave that his future might simply be marriage to a typical American girl. Anna announces that she is very tired of trying to be good.

Act 3 Anna turns on the light. The walls of the room return. She declares to Dave that her and Dave’s relationship is over. Dave is frustrated. He tries to force Anna to interact with him. She repeats that their relationship is over. She says that they are not so very special, that they are merely egotists. She says that egotists are people for whom self-respect is more important that anything else, even other people. She belittles herself and Dave. They speak brieﬂy of Anna’s child. Dave asks what the child means to Anna. She says the child gives her hope in a better future. Harry and Mary return; their drunken, boisterous voices are heard. There is the sense that Harry will spend the night with Mary. Mary enters but leaves shortly thereafter. Harry enters and says that Mary has fallen asleep. Anna tells Harry to go home to his wife, Helen, which angers Harry. The telephone rings. Harry is sure it is Tom. Anna repeats that Harry must go home to Helen. He does so. Anna ﬁnally tells Dave about Janet’s visit and her situation. Dave is not particularly shocked. He says that he will marry Janet if that is what she wants but that he will not really change. He accuses Anna of using Janet as an excuse to end their relationship. The telephone rings. It is Janet. Dave consoles her. He hangs up. Dave and Anna look at each other. He leaves. Anna begins to cry. She pours herself a drink. Mary comes in and takes the drink away from Anna. Anna says Dave has gone to get married. Mary says he was bound to. The play ends with the two women speaking about how Anna’s boy will be coming home from boarding school soon. The walls of Anna’s room once again dissolve. The curtain falls.

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CHARACTERS Anna Freeman Anna Freeman is the main character of Play with a Tiger. Over the course of the play’s action, she explains to her ﬁancé that she will not marry him, watches another man she is close to realize that he has been trapped into marriage, and interacts with a friend and with the woman from whom she is renting two rooms. Anna Freeman is an Australian woman who has lived in London long enough that she has lost her accent and speaks like any other middle-class Londoner. Her husband was killed in an unidentiﬁed war, perhaps World War II, and she has a child from the marriage. She supports herself by writing reviews of books, and the like, on a freelance basis. Lessing’s choice of surname for Anna is signiﬁcant, as much is made of Anna being ‘‘free’’ in the play. Yet, freedom is not a blissful state for Anna. To be free in the play means to be wholly independent of persons and institutions that conﬂict with one’s ideals. Anna’s ideals are that women should be considered the equals of men, that society should be less consumerist, and that governments should be more interested in equalizing society by improving the lot of the working classes. It is important to her not to take a regular job, as this would mean contributing to the strength of society as it stands. Thus, Anna is free at great emotional and ﬁnancial cost, making very little money and remaining alienated from the mainstream of society. Anna’s ideals also explain her decision not to marry. Her feeling is that the institution of marriage, as it stands in British society, does not work as well for women as it does for men. She believes that if she marries she will be compelled to fulﬁll a particular wifely role that will stiﬂe her individuality. Her feelings that marriage will weaken her ability to live according to her principles are strengthened by the fact that her ﬁancé, who used to support himself as she does, has taken on a regular job. He is sick of his ﬁnancially precarious existence, and Anna sees this as evidence that he is becoming a part of society’s mainstream.

Mary Jackson Mary Jackson owns the house in which Anna lives and rents rooms for herself and her child. She appears intermittently throughout the play. Like Anna, Mary is a widow with a child. She is about ten years older than Anna. In a way, she represents Anna ten years in the future. As such, she represents the difﬁculties of freedom, as Anna imagines free-

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dom. Mary is lonely, craving male companionship but ﬁnding that men of her own age gravitate toward women much younger than themselves. She is intelligent and emotionally strong, but there is the sense that her circumstances are wearing her down. There is much discussion of her and her cat, as if she is on her way to becoming a doddering old lady who does little else but talk to animals. Tom uses Mary to scare Anna, to make her think that she will be ridiculous, and lonely, in ten years’ time, when she is still unmarried and her child has gone off to college. At the end of the play, Anna and Mary stand together, as if to communicate that as long as women who refuse to compromise have each other, they will be able to withstand the difﬁculties of their circumstances.

Tom Lattimer Tom is the character with whom Anna is interacting at the beginning of Play with a Tiger. He appears only in act 1. He and Anna are discussing what was to have been their impending marriage and Anna’s decision to break the engagement. Like Anna, Tom is highly principled. Also like Anna, his means of ﬁnancial support are precarious. In fact, apparently motivating Anna’s decision to break off their engagement is his recent decision to take on a regular job as business manager at a woman’s magazine. There is the sense that he has taken this job partly in anticipation of his marriage so that the new household will be ﬁnancially stable. Anna sees this as evidence of a change in Tom’s character that does not bode well for her own future. She thinks that his decision to take the job is evidence that he is compromising his ideals, and she fears that in marrying him she will be drawn into a circle of compromise. Although Tom manipulates Anna into thinking twice about breaking off their engagement by exploiting her fears of being alone, he remains a mostly sympathetic character. He is intelligent, treats Anna as a friend and an equal, wants her to change her mind, but does not humiliate himself in his attempts to convince her to do so. Further, he knows that she might still be seeing another man and is bitter, but not abusive. He insists that he is the better choice for her and that ﬁnancial stability is something she should think about.

The Man Throughout Play with a Tiger, Anna refers to a man who stands vigil in the street below, looking up longingly at the window of some women who live in

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an apartment across from Anna. According to Anna, the man is in love with one of the apartment’s inhabitants.

Dave Miller Dave Miller is a U.S. citizen in his early thirties temporarily in London. He is the child of two labor activists and is active in international socialist politics himself. He is a vivid character, energetic yet tortured by self-doubt. He arrives at Anna’s house after Tom, Harry, and Mary have left and after Janet Stevens has visited Anna. He interacts with Anna after his arrival until nearly the end of the play. He and Anna are in love, even though their affair has been taking place with Anna still considering Tom as her primary partner. Dave encourages Anna to remain true to her ideals and not to marry Tom. His attitude about Tom might be motivated by possessive feelings, although he is supposedly above such sentiments. His attitude about Anna’s potential marriage is also ironic, as he ﬁnds out over the course of the evening that he himself will be marrying shortly; one of his casual girlfriends, Janet Stevens, is ﬁve months pregnant. He cannot shame the woman and let her have an illegitimate child, and so he will do what he has said he never would, and what Anna should not, and that is marry a conventional person. To Dave, this marriage means that he will be Janet’s husband in name, but not in spirit. Implicitly, he is claiming that his role will be, primarily, to provide ﬁnancially for her and the child. He insists that Janet’s pregnancy should have no effect on his and Anna’s relationship. But for Anna, the event of Dave’s marriage is the deﬁnitive end of their association. He will, after all, end up returning to the United States, and she knows that she is unlikely ever to see him again. Thus, Dave is a character prone to self-deception; he is far less able than Anna to remain true to his ideals, but he seems to believe that he is doing so.

Harry Paine Harry Paine is a man in his ﬁfties who has a job similar to Tom’s new one. He is married and has serial affairs. His wife, Helen, who is often referred to but never appears in the play, is ill and accepts his affairs, although they demoralize her. She accepts them in order to maintain the marriage. Much as Mary, as a character, functions to refer to Anna in the future, so Harry functions as a possible future version of Tom. In other words, Harry and Helen’s marriage is what Anna fears hers and Tom’s will become. Will Tom settle into his job and eventually

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come to take Anna for granted? Will he begin having affairs with younger women like Harry does? Will she accept these affairs as Harry’s wife does out of fear of change? Mary and Anna pamper Harry. It is clear that they are in the habit of listening to his woes and making him feel better when one of his young women leaves him. Indeed, he visits Anna and Mary for sympathy because his latest affair has dissolved. Considering that Anna and Mary identify with Helen and all other women in her position, their attachment to Harry causes them emotional conﬂict. Anna’s acceptance of Harry also demonstrates that her ability to avoid compromise is imperfect. She dislikes how married men in her society pursue affairs as a matter of course, yet Harry remains her close friend.

Helen Paine Helen never appears in Lessing’s play, but she is referred to often. She is Harry Paine’s longsuffering wife, putting up with his inﬁdelities because she cannot bear the thought of ending the marriage. She is ill, which makes Harry’s inﬁdelities seem crueler, yet he has no intention of changing his ways.

Janet Stevens Janet Stevens is a young U.S. citizen in her twenties, who is a lover of Dave Miller. She knows Dave well enough to know that he is unlikely to marry her, and Dave has told her that he is in love with Anna. She becomes pregnant in order to force him to marry her. She arrives at Anna’s home after Tom, Harry, and Mary have left and before Dave arrives. She has been unable to get in contact with Dave, and she knows that Dave, sooner or later, will see Anna again. She wants Anna to tell Dave that she is pregnant. She is somewhat ashamed of her dishonesty, but she is also deﬁant.

THEMES Activism Lessing’s introductory comments on her play, addressed to potential directors, state that Play with a Tiger is ‘‘about the rootless, de-classed people who live in bed-sitting rooms or small ﬂats or the cheaper hotel rooms.’’ ‘‘Such people,’’ she says, ‘‘are usually presented on the stage in a detailed squalor of realism which to my mind detracts from

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what is interesting about them.’’ Of interest to Lessing in particular appears to be the way in which many of these persons choose their peripheral status in their pursuit of alternative social and political convictions. To be sure, Lessing’s major characters in Play with a Tiger are, or until recently have been, committed political activists, wholly dedicated to their project of changing the world for the better. Their quick, complex speech is delivered with passion; their every act, every moment, is of the essence. Anna, Dave, and Tom’s desire to mold the world into the better one they envision involves their remaining peripheral to the mainstream, as to them all institutions and social practices as they stand perpetuate the tainted system they decry. Anna is just able to scrape together a living by freelance writing. Tom is perhaps ﬁnally giving up on his ﬁght, as he has just accepted the offer of a regular job. Similarly, Dave calmly accepts the news that a casual girlfriend is pregnant, and he must marry her. His equanimity suggests that his having been trapped into marriage is not so unwelcome after all, that he is somehow relieved at having been put in the position of having to give up on being different. However, despite the changes of heart the play’s principal men seem to be undergoing, it is understood that they are activists, committed to a vision of a changed and better world.

Freedom To be free in Lessing’s play means to be impervious to the traps of conventional society, to see that the truth lies in other ways of living. The value of this sort of freedom is seen in Lessing’s contrast of Harry and Helen’s conventional and problematic coupling and Anna and Dave’s wholly passionate liaison. Harry betrays the spirit of his marriage as a matter of course; Helen remains married to him, but unhappily. Clearly, they are not really a couple, despite their married state. The intimacy, passion, and comradeship of Anna and Dave stand out by contrast (even as Dave appears to be preparing to give up on his convictions). The two are intellectual partners, eagerly challenging each other and mostly happily agreeing on their aims. They are a ‘‘new’’ couple, man and woman, equal and not focused on their own private comforts but on the good of all. Yet, this sort of freedom takes its toll on its adherents. Anna and Dave suffer in their position on the fringes. They are lonely, as idealists of their ilk are few and far between. The smallness of their numbers means that they have to work for change

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

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• Governments have always employed spies to root out enemy and competitor secrets. Spy work ﬂourished in the West and the Soviet Union, especially during the cold war. One famous spy case concerned a group of four British men who were Soviet spies known as the ‘‘Cambridge Four’’: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Anthony Blunt. Research one or all of these four men, exploring his/their views and reasons for doing what he/they did.

• Research the mid-century group of British writers called the ‘‘Angry Young Men.’’ Based on how critics describe the concerns of these young men, argue whether Lessing’s Play with a Tiger is a work written by an ‘‘angry young woman.’’

• Many political activists today protest at meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank. These organizations are presiding over a developing system of global trade. Research the views of those who are protesting trade globalization. What are their concerns? What are the views of those who support trade globalization?

• London was repeatedly bombed by German warplanes during World War II. Yet, the city’s most historic constructions survived the war. Research World War II bombing protocol. What were the agreements among nations? Or, explore the problem of looting during World War II and the fate of famous artworks that disappeared during this time.

particularly diligently. Thus they are drawn to what they imagine are the solaces of accepting things as they are, for example a less stressful life.

suggesting that these radical views were appropriate in his youth but that greater wisdom, or greater age, entails ‘‘compromise.’’

Compromise

Love

The specter haunting every fervent, radical political idealist is compromise. These persons believe a changed world will be a better one so that participating in societal institutions as they stand is torture tantamount to supporting them. Yet the changes they desire are for the future to deliver, and so the possibility of not having to compromise is nearly impossible. As Lessing’s play shows, idealists can simply become weary with the effort of what Anna calls being ‘‘good.’’ Tom has compromised his ideals by having accepted a job as business manager in a typical (as opposed to progressive) women’s magazine, and Dave is on his way to becoming a husband and father in middle America. Tom is not particularly happy with himself, but he has arrived at the point where he can accuse Anna of being a hopeless romantic. In other words, he is

At the center of Lessing’s play are Dave and Anna. They kneel together on the ﬂoor, facing each other, engaging in explorations of their past and motivations. They feed off each other’s company and long for each other, as the play’s man in the street longs for the woman he does not yet know. Anna and Dave’s intense relationship points to a vision of love and togetherness extolled by many persons of Lessing’s generation. This is not a vision of coupling whose ﬁrst passion eventually wanes, transmuting into a comfortable, ﬁlial intimacy. It is love always ﬁery, the means by which people continuously grow as persons through a profound communion of minds. Sexuality is a core component of Lessing’s vision of perfect love; it is the engine that fuels lovers’ growth and deep togetherness.

• Research the U.S. cold war ﬁgure Joseph McCarthy, who headed a congressional committee aimed at suppressing U.S. communists. How were U.S. communists dissuaded from expressing their views?

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Like Lessing, many other, younger, midtwentieth-century Westerners were convinced that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations had been sexually repressed, caught in the belief that sex was shameful, missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures. Middle-class younger persons were also unhappy about the different sexual standards for men and women, with men given license to experiment sexually, at least before marriage, and with women expected to remain virgins. Further, in middle-class circles various nineteenth-century attitudes about women’s sexuality lingered, notions that many women were ready to contest. These were that women enjoyed sex less than men and that enjoying sex was in fact contrary to a true woman’s nature. These changes in people’s attitudes about sex, in conjunction with the notion that sexual activity was conducive to creativity and personal growth, led to the strong interest in sex that characterized the counterculture and other progressive social and political movements within the midtwentieth-century West.

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chairs or settees where the actors might lounge or sprawl. This stark set forces a certain formality of movement, stance, and confrontation.’’ Further, at the end of act 1, and for the entire act 2, the walls of Anna’s room are dissolved, so that the stage becomes even barer, and the room seems to be a part of the street. The starkness, strangeness, and formality Lessing strives for corresponds to her sense that ‘‘naturalism, or, if you like, realism, is the greatest enemy of the theatre.’’ By naturalism, Lessing means a play whose settings and action attempt to mimic those of real life. The physical discomfort of the actors that the play’s props and setting guarantee points to the difﬁculty and discomfort of their lives. It is difﬁcult to have high ideals and attempt to live up to them; it is difﬁcult to believe differently than other people and so not ﬁt into the mainstream; it is difﬁcult to change oneself and the world. The language of Play with a Tiger conveys these central ideas of the play as well. The characters are always highly passionate in their speech. They often hurt each other with their words, and they often argue. What this conveys, again, is the suffering, difﬁculties, and stresses of people who refuse to accept themselves and things as they are.

Parallel Characters

Symbol There are a great many symbols in Play with a Tiger. Symbols are places, persons, or things in an artwork that suggest a number of ideas, as opposed to just one. For example, the tiger that Anna says she once imagined may be a symbol of creative energy, the danger that trying to change society entails, and of the ideal society Anna wishes for. The man who spends his evenings looking up at the window of a woman he is in love with may symbolize yearning and passion in general and the deep passion of Anna and Dave’s love in particular. Anna’s room window is also a symbol. It is a symbol of her connection to others and to the outside world. Hence, when she is emotionally overwhelmed in the play, she closes the window, as if to retreat into the safer realm of a wholly private world.

Roughly speaking, there are three generations of characters in Lessing’s play. The children of Mary and Anna are the youngest generation. Anna, Tom, and Dave are another. Mary, Harry, and Helen represent a third, oldest generation. The children represent the future, which is as yet unknown and which may be, perhaps, a world closer to that which Anna desires. The rest of Lessing’s characters are doubles of each other. Tom and Dave might become Harry, who represents a typical, married British man of the time. He is complacent about his wife, certain that she will not cheat on him, and certain that he may cheat on her as much as he likes: Harry works; Helen, as a typical homemaker, does not; Helen for ﬁnancial reasons must put up with her husband and conform to his rules. Anna, for her part, might become Mary. Mary is lonely but still has her self-respect.

Setting and Props The setting of Play with a Tiger is, throughout, Anna’s room in Mary’s house. According to Lessing’s stage directions, it is a very large room, sparsely furnished. Lessing’s stage directions also indicate that the items that furnish the room, the stage ‘‘props,’’ are to be austere: ‘‘there are no soft

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Fantasy and Transformation In act 2, Dave and Anna relive moments in their past. They seem to become the children they once were. Anna also recounts a fantasy that seemed very real to her, like something she was actually experiencing. This is the story of the tiger on the loose that

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she tells to Dave. These moments of fantasy and transformation point to how the world will change for the better only if people try to imagine something new and different. Dave and Anna are willing to imagine; they are persons trying to usher in new and better ways of living.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Post-War Britain Britain was a thoroughly chastened nation by the end of World War II. Its vast world empire, which it had built up over the course of the nineteenth century, was unraveling. Many of its former colonies had achieved, or were in the process of ﬁghting for, their independence. Furthermore, London, amongst other cities, had been devastated by German bombing campaigns during the war. In addition to rebuilding and regaining economic stability, postwar Britain was experiencing signiﬁcant changes in its sociocultural makeup. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, roughly speaking, Britons tended to fall into either one of two major social groupings: the working class/small shopkeepers or the upper-middle/aristocratic classes. A modern, white-collar, middle-class population had begun developing in the 1930s, but its ranks were as yet quite small. The cultures of Britain’s two major class groupings were widely distinct. The urban working classes had come into being over the course of the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the nineteenth century. They were rural peasants who migrated into cities to become factory workers and the like. The upper-middle classes and aristocracy were made up of land owning families, industrialists, the small numbers of university-educated Britons, those who had beneﬁted from Britain’s imperial ventures abroad, and so forth. As the middle-class grew and more workingclass children took advantage of a greater access to education and university training, Britain’s traditional balance of classes and cultures was unsettled. The educated and upwardly mobile children of working-class parents had to deﬁne themselves as a new class, threatening the established upper classes in the process. Some of these newly educated,

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working-class persons became university professors. As academics, they began writing about the history, culture, and values of the English working class. They extolled working-class culture as an integral component of British life, upsetting members of the upper classes who had always identiﬁed the nation with their own culture and values. Also posing a challenge to British life and tradition, especially in the great cities, were the immigrants who began arriving from Britain’s colonies or former colonies. Indians, Pakistanis, and persons from Caribbean and African countries, for example, brought their distinct cultures to England and a different history of British imperialism. Whereas many Britons had liked to believe that the colonization of foreign territories had been mostly a boon to the colonized, the new immigrants made it clear that the story was otherwise. Colonization from the point of view of the colonized was a story of terrible oppression, a suppression of local belief and tradition, which resulted in nations of persons struggling to establish stable identities. They were no longer what they had been before they were colonized, but they were not British either. Certainly, they were welcomed to British soil by very few. Thus, Britons had to begin negotiating a new multiethnic, multicultural society.

Post-War British Theater Some histories of post–World War II British theater stress the way in which one play in particular reinvigorated the drama scene. This play is John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which was ﬁrst produced in 1956. Osborne’s play is highly serious. Its main character, Jimmy, is a young married man with a menial job. He is the son of working-class parents, and he is married to a woman of a higher social station. Jimmy is bitter, angry, and very clever. In his speeches, he attacks the stagnant conventionality of his fellow Britons, Britain’s class system, the pretensions of the upper classes, himself, his wife, and more. This play inaugurated a new trend of high purpose and social inquiry in drama. Before this play, after the war, drama was dominated by ‘‘drawing-room’’ comedies, or light comedies of manners, ‘‘whodunits’’ (murder mysteries), and similar light fare. Osborne is often grouped with other British authors of the era, such as Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe. This group of young writers came to be known as the Angry Young Man. More

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • Late 1950s–Early 1960s: The counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a major component of which will be devoted to ecological concerns, are getting their start. Today: Global warming, pollution, dwindling marine life and fossil fuel supplies, and use of pesticides and hormones in food husbandry are of concern to many.

• Late 1950s–Early 1960s: As yet, few persons from Britain’s former colonies are emigrating to Britain. Today: London is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the world, with Britain’s other larger cities and towns becoming increasingly diverse as well.

• Late 1950s–Early 1960s: Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, one of the ﬁrst books of a new feminist movement that will ﬂourish in the 1970s, is published in 1963.

• Late 1950s–Early 1960s: The cold war is at its height, with the United States government fearing that the nearby communist regime in Cuba will inspire other Central and South American states to become communist.

Today: Statistically, women continue to receive lower wages than men for the same work, but they are able to enter any profession they please.

Today: Cuba remains a communist state under the leadership of Fidel Castro.

• Late 1950s–Early 1960s: A number of Britain’s former colonies shake off imperial rule and gain their independence from Britain in wars of independence.

• Late 1950s–Early 1960s: Many communist party members leave the party in the West as news about Stalinist and other Soviet repressions become widely reported.

Today: Britain retains some scattered territories dating from the imperial era, such as the island of Grenada off the coast of South America.

Today: The Soviet Union has dissolved, and its member states having become, once again, independent nations.

than one critic called Lessing herself an angry young woman, as her novels addressed the same sorts of thorny social, political, and cultural issues that concerned this group of young men.

Soviet republics was unhappy with Moscow’s rule, then it should be allowed to determine its own future. Lessing and others at this time ﬁnally accepted the fact that Soviet leaders had given up entirely on working toward their democratic ideals and were perpetuating communism through dictatorial political methods.

The Communist Party of Great Britain The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), of which Lessing was a member until 1956, was formed in 1920. It gained members over the next decades and was most inﬂuential politically in the 1940s. In the 1950s, around the time Lessing left the party, the CPGB lost many of its members. Lessing and others were horriﬁed at the Soviet suppression of a popular uprising in Hungary, one of the Union’s member states. They felt strongly that if one of the

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In the 1960s, the party split into two factions: those who wished to distance themselves entirely from Soviet communism and those who wished to retain ties to Moscow. The former group, committed to what is known as ‘‘eurocommunism,’’ garnered more adherents and took over the party. In 1999, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CPGB decided to become a think-tank group known as the Democratic Left. Some mem-

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bers, however, were not satisﬁed with this decision and formed new communist parties under different names.

The Cold War After World War II (1939–1945), with Europe’s greatest powers devastated, two superpowers emerged in the world: the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or the Soviet Union). The USSR, which dissolved in 1991, was a group of mainly Eastern European and Asian nations. These two great unions were soon involved in a contest, with the United States dedicated to the spread of capitalism, an economic system based on private investment and ownership, and the Soviet Union dedicated to the spread of communism, a system based on collective ownership and the equal distribution of wealth. This conﬂict of ideology, or belief, is known as the cold war. It was a ‘‘cold’’ war because the United States and the Soviet Union never took up arms against each other; it was a serious battle nonetheless because both nations intervened extensively in other countries’ affairs in an effort to guarantee that its system would be adopted. Communists in the United States were vigorously suppressed during the period when the cold war was at its height, in the 1950s. This was a bleak period in U.S. political life, since the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and belief. Communists in various other democracies were not suppressed, and so communist parties had memberships in various countries around the globe, including the United Kingdom and Europe, especially the latter.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW In Doris Lessing, Mona Knapp writes that Lessing’s ‘‘main interest in the theater spans the years from 1958 to 1962, and was no doubt inspired by her work as a substitute theater critic for The Observer for a few weeks in 1958.’’ As Knapp says, the plays Lessing wrote during this period ‘‘were written concurrently with The Golden Notebook and are thematically related to it.’’ The play opened in London, in March 1962, to mixed reviews. Critics were appreciative of certain elements of the play and of the acting and staging but found fault with the play’s structure. In her review in Theatre World, for example, Frances

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Stephens writes that ‘‘the best passages are concerned with [Anna and Dave’s] ﬁerce self-analysis as each in turn looks back to childhood, his in America and hers in Australia. It is part of a desire to unravel the enigma of life and to stumble towards a philosophy that will both explain and justify their love.’’ Yet, as she says, only these ‘‘two of Doris Lessing’s characters are, strictly speaking, involved in the heart of the play . . . and the problems, hopes and fears of the remaining four scarcely move us at all.’’ Critic J. W. Lambert, writing in Drama, calls Anna’s character an ‘‘egomaniac bore.’’ To its credit, he says, the play ‘‘has pinned down something about the emotional and psychological rootlessness of much modern life.’’ When the play was staged in the United States, in New York, in 1965, it received similarly mixed reviews. A reviewer in Variety says bluntly that ‘‘Since the characters are loquacious, endlessly psychoanalyzing each other, and since the situation is not very original, the play is tiresome.’’ Edith Oliver, writing for the New Yorker, is less scathing. She writes that the play is ‘‘awkward and disappointing’’ but that it has ‘‘a few good moments.’’ She admires the play’s ‘‘vitality’’ and states that it has a ‘‘literary sureness of touch that is rare Off Broadway.’’ As Lessing’s biographer, Carole Klein, points out, just as Anna’s character grows out of Lessing herself, so Dave Miller is based on a love of Lessing’s life, the American political activist and author Clancy Sigal. In other words, Play with a Tiger is not autobiographical, but it is, nonetheless, informed by Lessing’s own experiences. Lessing was not happy with the 1962 London production of her play. Unlike its critics, she was displeased with the actors’ and director’s interpretation of her characters. She felt that the portrayal of Dave Miller was particularly off the mark and was irritated by the long, laborious process of booking actors and getting the play onto the stage. In a 1980 interview conducted by Tan Gim Ean and others, which was collected in Doris Lessing: Conversations, Lessing discusses the 1962 production. She remarks how seeing it performed soured playwrighting for her. As she says, a play, unlike a novel, is not entirely within its author’s control, as it must be given to directors and actors to do with what they think best: ‘‘That’s the agony of being a playwright. Why should one go through this humiliation and torture when you can write a novel and get it printed the way you wrote it?’’

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Play with a Tiger is rarely discussed in fulllength scholarly works on Lessing. Knapp’s book is one notable exception to this general rule. Since Lessing is well known as a novelist as opposed to a playwright and since The Golden Notebook, amongst other of Lessing’s novels, contains treatments of the same concerns and issues, critics tend to pass over the play, focusing their attention instead on The Golden Notebook or these other novels.

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THE NUMBER OF PERSONS WHO BELIEVE THAT SUDDEN, RADICAL CHANGE CAN OCCUR IN SOCIETIES DECLINED CONSIDERABLY FROM THE TIME PLAY WITH A TIGER WAS WRITTEN.

CRITICISM Carol Dell’Amico Dell’Amico is an instructor of English literature and composition. In this essay, Dell’Amico explores how Lessing’s reformist political convictions inform her play. Doris Lessing declined to renew her membership in the Communist Party of Great Britain for the year 1957. Like so many other persons with communist political convictions in the West at this time, she felt that she had to cut off ties with the Soviet Union whose communist order had devolved into a pernicious dictatorship. Yet the reformist political convictions that led her to join the party in the ﬁrst place never left her. Play with a Tiger is evidence of her continued concern with equality, for instance, as it is an examination of how marriage and gender norms contribute to women’s lesser status in the Western world. Anna Freeman, the play’s protagonist, would rather remain single, even if this means being lonely, as she believes marrying will compromise her independence. Further, the play questions the feasibility and desirability of monogamous relationships. For some communist thinkers, monogamy is seen as a form of ownership—the assumption that another person is one’s possession. These thinkers link monogamy to the larger capitalist economic system in which certain persons claim ownership of things as opposed to being interested in the collective good of all. Lessing’s exploration of monogamy and ‘‘free love’’ in Play with a Tiger is seen in Anna’s simultaneous relationships with Tom and Dave and the problems these relationships cause her. Play with a Tiger opens with Anna breaking off an engagement with her ﬁancé, Tom Lattimer. Yet, in very little time, the audience learns that she has been involved in an affair with another man as well, Dave Miller. Anna’s sense of freedom in matters of

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MOST REFORMIST THINKERS IN THE EARLY 2000S WORKED TOWARDS GRADUAL CHANGE.’’

love and sex would not have surprised Lessing’s 1962 audience. Audience members would have been familiar either with Lessing’s previous works, which also contain explorations of non-monogamous relationships between men and women, or they would have been apprised of such explorations by being attuned to the cultural climate of the time, in which monogamy was a subject of debate. At issue then, in the triangle of Anna, Tom, and Dave, is not cheating or inﬁdelity, which occurs when a couple has an agreement to be monogamous and one member of the couple does not live up to the agreement. Inﬁdelity as an issue is explored in the play through Harry and Helen Paine’s relationship. In the case of Tom, Anna, and Dave, the agreement, implicitly, is that each should be free to pursue whatever sexual relations he or she chooses. From the 1950s through the 1970s in Western culture, monogamy was vigorously questioned in a variety of quarters. Communist thinkers questioned the practice on the basis that it was an extension of the desire to own things, which for them was a problem in capitalist societies. The belief in private (as opposed to collective) ownership deprived too many, they believed, as persons with education or inherited wealth quickly claimed or bought up all that had been previously public and had the power to make laws protecting their possessions, when capitalism as a system began developing. They argued that the rise of middle-class values, which include a belief in monogamy, corresponds to the rise of capitalist ways of being. They pointed out, for example, that in some cultures or eras, monogamy in marriage is not automatic.

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Others in the mid-twentieth century questioned monogamy as well. These other doubters included those who believed that people cannot thoroughly explore their sexuality without experimenting with partners and that such explorations are imperative to happiness, self-discovery, and true creativity. These notions of the liberating power of sex were integral to the counterculture movements the 1960s and 1970s. Lessing’s experimenting couples undoubtedly derive from her interest in both communist and counterculture doctrine. The communist underpinnings of her questioning stance is seen in the way that Anna is leaving Tom partly because she believes that he is moving away from his far-leftist political convictions. His taking on a job as business manager of a popular women’s magazine is evidence of his doubt in these convictions. The audience understands that this is not a serious or feminist women’s magazine, rather a fashion or home publication. He will be working for an establishment that perpetuates women’s exclusive association with home and beauty matters. Moreover, as business manager, he will be making sure that the magazine turns a proﬁt. Thus, marriage to Tom would mean accepting the onus to be monogamous. Tom has compromised in the area of work, which may mean he is becoming fully conventional and so will embrace monogamy as well. What then of Anna’s attractions to men other than Tom, men like Dave with whom she falls in love, who challenge her intellectually? Yet, the fact remains that Anna agreed to being engaged to Tom. Does this mean that she too has considered embracing the monogamous standard? Certainly, Anna’s precarious emotional state and self-laceration suggests her doubts. Nevertheless, she chooses to leave Tom, and so she is, as yet, unwilling to give up her exploratory approach to love and relationships. The allure of intense relationships, such as the one she has with Dave, which challenge her to grow as a person, is obviously still strong. Besides its exploration of monogamy and free love, Lessing’s play considers other topics in love, sex, and marriage. For example, the marriage of Harry and Helen Paine is Lessing’s unﬂattering portrait of a typical British marriage of the time. Harry engages in serial affairs. His wife knows that he does, but she remains married to him, although she is terribly unhappy about his inﬁdelity. Helen, notably, never appears in the play (she is only referred to), and she is said to be ailing. Her absence and illness convey Lessing’s take on the situation of

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many wives of the time. Her absence from the play conveys her lack of power, that is, her inability to determine the rules of the marriage. Her failing health conveys her suffering, that she must accept Harry’s ways no matter how much humiliation and unhappiness this acceptance entails. Harry’s comfortable sense that he may do as he likes derives from his understanding that his wife is unlikely to leave him, no matter what he does. Clearly, Helen is like many women of the time, brought up to marry as opposed to seek a career. If she were to divorce, her social status would decline considerably for a number of reasons. First, child support and alimony laws were weak at the time. Second, older persons, especially older women, attempting to enter into a university for training in a profession was practically unheard of. Thus, without already having been trained in a profession, Helen would be compelled to take on a menial job, thereby losing her middleclass status. In contrast to Helen is Anna, who is able to support herself as a freelance writer. Evidently, Anna has been educated sufﬁciently to compete in a professional world dominated by educated men. This contrast of female characters points to Lessing’s learning from communism, which, like feminism, insists that women must be trained in professions in order not to be dependent on men for their ﬁnancial security. Such dependence, they say, encourages women to remain in unhappy or even destructive marriages. Communists and feminists argue, further, in a related vein, that preschool day care facilities should be extensively developed so that neither half of a married couple would ever have to leave the workforce. They point out that only those persons who stay abreast of developments within their profession remain competitive and employable, so that househusbands or housewives who attempt to enter the work force after many years’ absence rarely meet with much success. Certainly, in some Northern European democracies in the early 2000s, these ideas have been taken to heart. High-quality child care is readily available and easily affordable, and persons with children receive generous tax credits. The characters of Mary and Janet point to other of Lessing’s concerns about the status of women and gender norms in the mid-twentieth-century West. Janet’s decision to trap Dave into marriage points to how women felt that if they were not married at a young age, they would be looked down on by others. Though Janet is in love with Dave and does

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what she does partly because she wants him in particular, as a husband, her desperate and devious act suggests how she is compelled to marry as quickly as she can. Instead of taking her time to ﬁnd a more willing mate, Janet believes that marriage on any terms, even one initiated by manipulation, is better than not being married at all. Mary’s situation explains, to a certain extent, Janet’s desperation and rush. When the philandering Harry invites her out for a drink, she is thrilled. Her excitement over this paltry invitation from the questionable Harry conveys the limited nature of her social life. As Tom points out, she receives little attention from men, a fact that follows from her age. (She is in her mid-forties.) Certainly, Harry’s affairs are with much younger women, pointing to how older men do not feel obliged to seek out women of their own age. This element of the play refers to a problem that continues to plague Western culture, which is that society does not see beauty or desirability in older women. Older heterosexual women who are single remain sexual beings interested in the attentions of men, yet society associates female sexuality and desirability only with very young women. The sexual invisibility of middle-aged and older women is especially evident in the mainstream movie culture in the United States. The most sought-after female actors are the very young, and they are paired with aging male stars as love interests as a matter of course. This is not to say that they are not also paired with male actors of their own age but rather that younger woman/older man couplings are routine, whereas older women/younger men couplings are not. The number of persons who believe that sudden, radical change can occur in societies declined considerably from the time Play with a Tiger was written. Most reformist thinkers in the early 2000s worked towards gradual change. Nevertheless, reformist thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century achieved a great deal. They achieved free health care for all in Europe and other countries, for example, and women’s freedoms in the West as well as numerous other countries are solidly guaranteed. Still, reformists remain vigilant, watching carefully as governments legislate a women’s right to choose or the right of gay couples to enjoy the same ﬁnancial and legal beneﬁts as heterosexual couples. Source: Carol Dell’Amico, Critical Essay on Play with a Tiger, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

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Susan L. Carlson In the following essay, Carlson examines the relationship between Anna and Dave Miller in Play with a Tiger. In her best play, Play with a Tiger, Doris Lessing challenges conventions of both drama and society. Like The Golden Notebook, the play is about relationships between men and women. In it Lessing searches for a freedom in which men and women can coexist, and she demonstrates that such freedom is as rare in the dramatic realm as it is in the ﬁctive realm or in the world. In confronting the politics of both social and dramatic forms, Lessing reveals how inextricably linked they are. Through her stylized set—part of a London ﬂat ‘‘tall, bare, and formal,’’ a room designed to force ‘‘a certain formality of movement, stance and confrontations,’’ Lessing draws us into a world protestingly unconventional. In this discomforting room, Anna Freeman, Lessing’s main character, struggles to maintain her independence in love. By detailing the inadequacies of male-female relationships in our present society, Lessing creates, in Act I, the context in which we study the play’s main love relationship—that between Anna and Dave Miller. The act opens with Anna’s attempt to tell Tom Lattimer that she cannot marry him as she had agreed to do. By refusing Tom, Anna rejects a man she sees as a symbol of all she has fought so hard not to be—‘‘another good middle-class citizen . . . comfort-loving, conventionally unconventional.’’ In Anna’s ensuing dialogues with Tom, Harry Payne (an old friend), and Mary (her landlady), the talk continues to be of marriage. During the repartée, a fashionable disdain covers for the characters’ fear of relationship. In reviewing the failed marriages around them, Anna and the others are as dismayed by their limited options in forming relationships as they are by their helplessness in increasing them. The stage is thus set for Dave Miller’s entrance. We are prepared for Dave’s central role in Anna’s world both by the way thoughts of him punctuate her discourse on love and marriage and by the cameo appearance of Janet, the young woman ﬁve months pregnant with Dave’s child. When Dave ﬁnally appears near the end of Act I, with the cockiness and slightly disheveled nonchalance we expect, we are not prepared for the depth of the intimacy Dave and Anna share. Although Dave initially suffers a verbal and physical battering from Anna for his prolonged absence of several weeks,

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. . . IN ADDITION TO BEING A SYMBOL OF THE FUTURE ANNA AND DAVE CAN IMAGINE, THE TIGER BECOMES A SYMBOL OF THEIR STRUGGLE TO IMAGINE IT.’’

they slip quickly into the accustomed rhythms of their intimacy. They also reveal a vulnerability toward one another as Anna tells Dave, ‘‘You and I are so close we know everything about each other,’’ and Dave echoes back, ‘‘Anna, when I’m away from you I’m cut off from something.’’ As the two move through their mental strip-tease, rolling off the layers of protection they don for dealing with others, we too relax under the inﬂuence of their mutual trust and respect. At this point Lessing takes us, with Anna and Dave, out of the stylized façade of 1950s realism to a locationless, timeless exchange between man and woman—Act II. The conventional roles the two have played with others vanish along with the physical set: Anna slowly sits opposite him. He smiles at her. She slowly smiles back. As she smiles, the walls fade out. They are two small people in the city, the big, ugly, baleful city all around them, overshadowing them.

Very simply, in Act I Lessing has set up a conventional theater (although a slightly uncomfortable one) just so that she can shock us at the end of the act by discarding it. In her brief note on directing Tiger, Lessing comments that the play resulted from her never wanting ‘‘to write a naturalistic play again,’’ from her distaste for realism—‘‘the greatest enemy of the theatre.’’ To encourage her audience to do the sort of thinking she feels realism prohibits, Lessing has combined her attention to role playing and relationships with her Act II experiment in dramatic form. Act I ends with Dave’s question to Anna, ‘‘Who are you?’’; Act II opens with and answers the same question. The difference that separates the two acts is symbolized by the loss of a set and by Lessing’s answer to the question. Act II is a study in the symbiosis of two selves in relationship.

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While Anna and Dave’s ﬁrst exercise in role playing comes off sounding somewhat stiff, during the course of Act II the two lovers are able to identify the source of their relational prejudices by working back through the social roles that have necessitated the ﬁerce battles of their present love. In the acting out of the roles of her mother and of her earlier self, Anna identiﬁes the spectre of her mother’s life choices. She recognizes that her quest for freedom and her fear of giving herself are inextricably joined. Dave, playing the roles of his earlier, selves— an American child, a womanizer, and a psychoanalyst—ﬁnds himself similarly affected and repelled by convention. A persistent undertow, in the guise of Janet, tugs Anna and Dave back to convention as they restlessly don role after role. The key to the role playing of Act II rests not in the guises the two assume, nor in the speciﬁcs of their dialogues, but in the way role playing allows them to open themselves up to possibilities beyond the conventions that deﬁne them. In the rhythm of the act, all the ‘‘play’’ with roles is punctuated by the honest responses it releases. Such realizations are the whole point of the role playing: Anna: I only breathe freely when I’m with you. Dave: . . . sometimes I’ve reached what I’m needing . . . and under me America rocks, America rocks— like a woman. Anna: I hate you because you never let me rest. Dave: One of these days I’ll look in the glass, expecting to see a ﬁne earnest ethical young . . . and there’ll be nothing there. Then slowly, a small dark stain will appear on the glass, it will slowly take form and. . .

Such breakthroughs ready Anna and Dave for an attempt to map out something new to replace the old. Their epiphanies are the path of possibility. Late in the act, Dave tells Anna, somewhat mockingly, that the only medals God will ever award them will be for trying, for ‘‘keeping doors open.’’ Then Dave opens a door: Anna, look—the walls are down, and anyone or anything can come in. Now imagine off the street comes an entirely new and beautiful phenomenon, a new human being.

Whether the uncharted future is represented by Dave’s ‘‘superman’’ or Anna’s ‘‘superwoman,’’ it entails a transcending of the personal and the present. As both attempt to think beyond all they know, Anna imagines the future as a tiger. Between Dave’s sarcastic responses, she reveals the image that pulses with all the power of these people, this act, and this play:

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He walked in, twitching his tail. An enormous, glossy padded tiger. . . . The tiger purred so loud that the sound drowned the noise of the trafﬁc. And then suddenly. . . he lashed out, I was covered with blood. Tiger, I said, what’s that for. . . he backed away, snarling. . . But tiger, I said, I haven’t done anything for you, have I?. . . But he stared and he glared, and then he was off—down he leaped and out into the street, and off he padded with his yellow eyes gleaming into the shadows of Earl’s Court. Then I heard the keepers shouting after him and wheeling along a great cage. . . That was the best I could do. I tried hard, but that was the best—a tiger. And I’m covered with scars.

Many critics have recorded their reactions to this tiger and its mirror image in The Golden Notebook, citing its relation to sexuality— Anna’s, Dave’s, or anyone’s—and generally agreeing on its symbolic quality. Anna brings her tiger to life at the end of Act II, and, at that moment, in addition to being a symbol of the future Anna and Dave can imagine, the tiger becomes a symbol of their struggle to imagine it. In essence, the second act has been their tiger, the superhuman ‘‘baby’’ they have conceived, their best effort to bring to life the possibilities of their love. In its ambiguity, its unpredictability, and its brooding presence, the tiger (and the act) represents the power, both positive and negative, generated in relationships between men and women. It remains, at worst, an unpredictable animal and, at best, an ambiguous symbol. For Anna and Dave have as yet no paradigm of social relations to substitute for the one they know. The tiger represents their dream of a better world, but it remains a dream. Janet is the reality. Near the end of the act, Anna resigns herself to suggesting that the future for now lies not in the promise of her tiger but in the predictable ‘‘superman’’ Janet carries in her belly: I’ll tell you what’s funny, Dave Miller. We sit here, tearing ourselves to bits trying to imagine something beautiful and new—but suppose the future is a nice little American college girl all hygienic and virginal and respectable with a baby in her arms. Suppose the baby is what we’re waiting for—a nice well-fed, welleducated, psycho-analysed superman. . .

As Act II ends, Anna’s tiger is recaged, ironically powerless next to Janet’s much more frightening conventionality. The reappearance of Act I’s ‘‘realistic’’ set at the opening of Act III is our ﬁrst clue to the distance traveled between Acts II and III. The honesty and tenderness of Act II vanish quickly when Anna and Dave again deal with other characters. The brittle repartée of Act I resurfaces, as do the old male and

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female roles against which the characters bruise themselves. But perhaps we understand better now, after having experienced Act II, why Mary and Harry seem like caged animals, trapped in the circumference of the roles to which they are tethered. At the end of this ﬁnal act, just before Dave leaves to ﬁnd Janet, Anna confronts him with the results of their evening, their second act ‘‘play’’; however, Dave chooses, at least for a while, to settle for the conventional male role: he will marry Janet. He is not, Anna tells him, willing to expend the constant energy it takes to play with the tiger and live beyond conventional relationships: Anna: Here you are, Dave Miller, lecturing women all the time about how they should live—women should be free, they should be independent, etc., etc. None of these dishonest female ruses. But if that’s what you really want, what are you doing with Janet Stevens— and all the other Janets? Well? The truth is you can’t take us, you can’t take me, I go through every kind of bloody misery trying to be what you say you want, but. . .

After Dave leaves and Anna is alone on stage, the walls disappear again. Perhaps Anna will recommence her search for the superwoman; it will be a very different search, however, because she is very much alone. The innovation and excitement of this play are most intensely felt in Act II. Yet Lessing makes her point about the tiger of Act II by caging it between the bars of Acts I and III. Lessing provides no easy answers, but she shows us answers exist. She tells us, as Anna tells Dave, that new freedoms are hard to come by and that they may come only if we trade in some cherished old ones. The politics of social change, Lessing tells us, are frustrating. Lessing’s battering of realistic stage conventions is her main reinforcement of these messages; her use of comedy is another. Lessing is not known for her sense of humor, perhaps, as Judith Stitzel notes, because laughter ‘‘may sap us of the energy we need to shake that something—or someone— off, permanently.’’ In a 1972 postscript to the play, however, Lessing registers her dismay at seeing Tiger performed without humor, counseling future producers that ‘‘the undernote or ground of this particular play should be that humour which comes from growing older.’’ Although the play is not a comedy, it does use the leisure, self-consciousness, and openness that have made comedy our main conduit for dramatic portraits of love. Act II, for example, replicates the mood of relaxation and contemplation we feel when Shakespeare moves us

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from Duke Frederick’s court to the forest of Arden. The self-conscious role playing by Anna and Dave echoes the posturing so necessary to Congreve’s Mirabel and Millamant. Tiger’s mixture of moods and modes also suggests comic counterpointing: Lessing’s stage directions alert us to ‘‘parody,’’ ‘‘mimicking,’’ and ‘‘mocking.’’ In addition, precise comic timing is called for in the rapid shifts from role playing to physical abuse to tenderness. Lessing is often explicit about the comic expansiveness she is creating, as in this stage direction from Act II: They [Anna and Dave] look at each other, beginning to laugh. The following sequence, while they throw slogans or newspaper headlines at each other, should be played with enjoyment, on the move, trying to outcap each other.

Such directed moments do not transform Act II into comedy, but they do suggest Lessing’s awareness that the space and time of the comic world allow for a leisurely examination of relationships. While Lessing realizes the special freedoms comedy allows, especially for women, she also recognizes the boundaries of that freedom. She knows she cannot write a comedy to study roles and relationships because the genre, for all its expansiveness, cannot accommodate a woman like Anna, who ﬁnally refuses roles and molds. In her use of comedy, as in her use of realism, Lessing demonstrates a suitable apparatus for what she wants to promote. Writing in 1960 of contemporary British theater, Caryl Churchill berates the British dramatists of late 1950s realism for denying their audiences a future. Contending that ‘‘depressing’’ plays like Lessing’s earlier Each His Own Wilderness encourage us to wallow in despair, she calls for an active battle against dramatic convention. The way beyond dramatic convention ‘‘will not be ordinary, it will not be safe,’’ Churchill predicts, but it promises vital and fulﬁlling drama. Though Lessing and her earlier play Each His Own Wilderness serve as Churchill’s whipping posts, the anti-realism in Tiger (which was not performed until after 1960) ﬁts Churchill’s program for a new drama. Lessing’s Tiger distinguishes her from the ‘‘angry’’ writers Churchill chides and emphasizes her adherence to testing new dramatic formats. Lessing’s anticonventional drama may be most important today for its preﬁguration of the politics and tactics of such current British women playwrights as Pam Gems, Louise Page, Nell Dunn, and Churchill herself. Michelene Wandor has identiﬁed certain recurring motifs in contemporary Brit-

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ish women’s drama, two of which are central to understanding Lessing’s theater. First, the plays have the honest, direct approach to the body and sex that Wandor notes in most women writers. Lessing’s tiger calls attention to the dangerous freedom we associate with the body and sexuality. While Lessing’s stage images of sex pale in comparison to recent, more graphic treatment, as in Churchill’s Cloud Nine, Lessing’s images are emblematic of the power of the body for women writers. Second, Lessing’s plays urge qualiﬁcations to Wandor’s assertion that contemporary women playwrights focus on female friendship. Lessing’s plays do not focus on female friendships; rather, they are darkened by unfulﬁlled longings for such attachments. In Tiger, for example, Lessing lamely concludes with the brief reunion of Mary and Anna; their fumbling inarticulateness and the awkwardness of the experience point to the need both women have for an intimacy that goes unfulﬁlled. Lessing shares with contemporary women playwrights an acknowledgment that dramatic forms severely limit the possibilities for on-stage relationships. But while her contemporary counterparts press their belief that men prohibit women-to-women communication, Lessing continues to hold the belief that a new order must be charted by men and women together. This refusal to give up on man-woman relationships does separate her from current playwrights. Lessing wants to maintain her hope that the world can change and her belief in the transformative power of men’s and women’s love for one another. She succeeds in part, showing us that it is as difﬁcult in drama as it is in life to transcend roles and types. Source: Susan L. Carlson, ‘‘Doris Lessing, Women Playwrights, and the Politics of Dramatic Form,’’ in Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall 1987, pp. 5–7.

Agate Nesaule Krouse In the following excerpt, Krause identiﬁes commonalities between Play with a Tiger and Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook. Play with a Tiger, ﬁrst produced in 1962, shows one evening in the life of Anna Freeman, an Australianborn widowed writer living in London. In the course of the play, she breaks off her engagement to Tom Lattimer, who is on the point of conforming to middle class values; she talks to Harry, a friend strikingly similar to other philanderers created by Lessing such as Graham Spence in One Off the

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Short List and Richard Portmain in The Golden Notebook; she receives a visit from Janet Stevens, a naive young American woman, pregnant by Dave Miller; she talks intensely and intimately with Dave himself, a rootless American, and she recognizes that although she loves him and although they both understand each other and contemporary society, Dave is nevertheless walking out of her life and into marriage with Janet Stevens. Play with a Tiger has a direct relationship to the Anna/Saul sections of The Golden Notebook. Anna Freeman, the name of the protagonist in the play, is also the ‘‘maiden’’ name of Anna Wulf, the protagonist in the novel. Dave and Saul, political and disillusioned Americans, have similarities too numerous to list, including a driving indiscriminate sexuality they discuss in slightly off-key American slang. In both works, Anna describes a dream about a tiger in almost identical terms. Lessing herself has explicitly indicated the closeness of the play and the novel. After Anna in The Golden Notebook has the dream about the tiger, she thinks to herself, ‘‘I must write a play about Anna and Saul and the tiger.’’ And so we have a play by Doris Lessing about Anna and Dave and the tiger. Although Lessing has been justiﬁably annoyed by commentators who have regarded The Golden Notebook as primarily autobiographical, the very existence of Play with a Tiger suggests an especially close relationship between the sensibilities of author and character in the novel. Play with a Tiger develops some of the same themes and situations as The Golden Notebook, though more simply and brieﬂy because of dramatic requirements. One of the major themes in The Golden Notebook is that modern experience is chaotic, fragmentary and painful, yet acceptance of this truth can lead to new strength and creativity. The dialogue and staging of Play with a Tiger stress the value and necessity of openness to all kinds of experience. Dave insists that Anna leave the window open, that she not shut herself up against anything, no matter how painful or squalid. Although deeply disappointed in himself, Dave isolates the value of living the way he and Anna have: they have always been ready for ‘‘anything new in the world anywhere, any new thought, or new way of living, . . . ready to hear the ﬁrst whisper of it.’’ The unrealistic staging also emphasizes their openness; it underlines that they are very much part of the world that surrounds them rather than protected by slogans or self-created isolation. ‘‘The lights are out. The walls seem to have vanished, so that the room seems part of the street.’’

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PLAY WITH A TIGER DEVELOPS SOME OF THE SAME THEMES AND SITUATIONS AS THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, THOUGH MORE SIMPLY AND BRIEFLY BECAUSE OF DRAMATIC REQUIREMENTS.’’

The central symbol in the play, the tiger, stresses the power of imagination and the value of openness to experience as well. Both Dave and Anna despair because of their inability to imagine something better than themselves ‘‘to grow into.’’ Only once has Anna had a vision of something other than herself, an ‘‘enormous, glossy padding tiger’’ who ‘‘purred so loud that the sound drowned the noise of the trafﬁc.’’ The tiger lashed out at Anna, so that she was covered with blood, ‘‘. . . he stared and he glared, and then he was off. . . Then I heard the keepers shouting after him and wheeling along a great cage . . . That was the best I could do. I tried hard, but that was the best—a tiger. And I’m covered with scars.’’ The tiger of Anna’s imagination has some obvious literary parallels: as a representative of awesome power he is reminiscent of the tiger in Blake’s poem; as a portent of a terrifying future, he is similar to the ‘‘vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,’’ the ‘‘shape with lion body and the head of a man’’ of ‘‘The Second Coming.’’ He represents both the power and the limitations of the human imagination. On the one hand, he is beautiful and powerful and he purrs loud enough to drown out the trafﬁc; he represents an escape from the ugliness and loneliness of everyday existence, not by excluding all experience but by admitting it on a different level of one’s mind. On the other hand, he is vicious without provocation: in The Golden Notebook, the scars he gives in the dream are impermanent since Anna sees her arm is either not hurt at all or has already healed; in Play with a Tiger, however, Anna is ‘‘covered with scars’’ from her encounter with him. The tiger is also only momentarily free and wild before the keepers shut him in a cage. He is really no improvement over the human race: he is neither morally better nor existentially freer. He differs from ‘‘the golden spotted beast’’ who appears ‘‘as if . . . in a

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country where hostility or dislike had not yet been born’’ in Lessing’s Brieﬁng for a Descent into Hell. The tiger is, ﬁnally, a symbol of the male, who maims and hurts, but whose beauty and momentary freedom are desirable nevertheless. Even more speciﬁcally, he is Dave Miller. Considered as a companion piece to The Golden Notebook, Play with a Tiger underlines the richness of the novel. The Golden Notebook is an important treatment of the experience of modern women largely because it fully and speciﬁcally deals not only with their personal, but also their political, intellectual, and artistic commitments and problems. Necessarily narrower in scope, Play with a Tiger concentrates on the personal instead. Furthermore, Play with a Tiger indirectly underscores how crucial is Anna’s and Saul’s mutual descent into madness in The Golden Notebook, how the crackup restores sanity and creativity. Lessing has written that, ‘‘. . . nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled . . . as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war.’’ Play with a Tiger, however, is about the sex war, and it dramatizes fully the blows struck in it. But the sex war as presented by Lessing in Play with a Tiger is not entirely convincing, partly because dramatic form demands simplicity and partly because she relies excessively on stereotypes she uses with greater tact elsewhere. The monogamous female, the victim of male faithlessness or unfairness, appears in much that Lessing has written. So does the philandering male. He knows he causes women pain, but he refuses to change. He is usually dishonest, unfaithful, hypocritical, sentimental, unjust, or even all of these things. Contrasted to the women in the same work, he is a rat. While the view that women are morally better than men has been held by some feminists, it does violence to individuals, it is the basis of the double standard, and it can also limit the power of literature. In Play with a Tiger, as in much of Lessing’s work, marriage and other arrangements with men hold disadvantages for women. A repeatedly made, bitter criticism of female-male relationships here is that men successfully use clichés about women to evade their human responsibilities. Although his wife is ‘‘cracking up’’ as a result of his current affair, Harry has the ‘‘much used formula’’ that she likes weak men, that he can’t help himself, and that she doesn’t really mind his affairs. Dave Miller, in

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spite of his contempt for slogans, holds the trite but comfortable belief that women are tougher than men and that they don’t need to take men seriously if they have children. There are no exceptions to the rule that men are unfair to women in their behavior and assumptions. In this way Play with a Tiger differs from Each His Own Wilderness where at least one male character, Mike, is a good human being. Anna accuses both Tom and Dave of an unfairness similar to Harry’s, and there is no evidence she is wrong. Tom has made callous use of women [sexually]. Anna predicts that Dave when married will behave exactly like Harry: when his wife turns into a boring housewife with no choice but to stay married, he will have a succession of affairs, confess them to his wife, and even use her forgiveness as an added attraction to other women. Dave dishonestly uses one woman to keep free of others. Like the other men he expects this inﬁdelity to be accepted as a matter of course. He aggressively asserts his independence: he is not going to be ‘‘any woman’s pet’’ and he is not going to live ‘‘according to the rules laid down by the incorporated mothers of the universe.’’ He also cheerfully accepts the fact women have to suffer: he tells Anna mockingly, ‘‘Women always have to pay—and may it long remain that way.’’ Faced with dishonesty and philandering—two characteristics all males in the play possess—a woman just can’t win. Marriage, by its very nature, makes women dull, which in turn causes male unfaithfulness and the end of meaningful choice for women. It does not matter what kind of individual a woman is—she is likely to suffer at the hands of men. The philandering males cause pain to their housewifely wives, but they are even more destructive to women who have independence, intelligence, and integrity. Bored by stupid and dull women, they nevertheless are also unfaithful to women who could understand them and with whom they could have real intimacy. Janet Stevens, the pregnant young American woman who is so severely limited in insight she can only talk in awkward slogans, rather than Anna, gets Dave. Janet’s values are much inferior to Anna’s, who passionately wants an honest relationship with a man, and if she cannot have that, would rather be alone than compromise and accept the kind of self-deception and bitterness her parents had. Janet’s values are also different from and inferior to the values of openness and sensitivity held by Dave and explicitly endorsed by the play as a whole.

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The bitterest irony is that although men may verbally subscribe to advanced ideas about women, they nevertheless choose the limited and stupid ones. Dave recognizes Janet’s limitations perfectly, and he has also repeatedly lectured to Anna that women should be independent; yet he concedes that ‘‘some of the time’’ he can’t take women who live without ‘‘dishonest female ruses.’’ Anna is bitterly aware that although she and Dave share the same ethical concerns, he will choose Janet. Women, on the other hand, have more integrity in making their choices. As Anna remarks early in the play, ‘‘Perhaps she [Mary] prefers to be sex-starved than to [sic] marry an idiot. Which is more than can be said about most men.’’ Anna herself does not get what she wants: ‘‘Any man I have stays with me, voluntarily, because he wants to, without ties.’’ She suffers, but she does retain her integrity. Dave, however, in spite of his bitter and convincing understanding of the shortcomings of conventional life generally and Janet speciﬁcally, does the most conventional of things: he does right by the girl he has gotten pregnant. While one could expect predictable reactions from Tom and Harry (i.e., every Tom, Dick, and Barry) Dave is clearly meant to be exceptional. All the values of this play and all of Dave’s angry insights are violated by his decision to marry Janet. Furthermore, this decision makes Play with a Tiger extremely one-sided. In it, males use clichés or accept stereotypes about women when it is to their advantage to do so, even though their preconceptions are clearly wrong. On the other hand, although women, too, believe a number of trite things about men, these beliefs do not wound men, in spite of the fact that the structure of the play establishes that the female views are an accurate way of seeing reality. Lessing’s excessive reliance on the stereotype of men as dishonest and faithless makes the play disuniﬁed and limited. The ﬁrst and simplest problem is the discrepancy in Dave’s characterization, which is related to the question of how one is to regard the thematic values endorsed in the play. Dave’s decision to marry Janet is unbelievable on a realistic level. He has slept with women and left them before. He has not reﬂected, as Anna insists that he should, what happens to those women and what his responsibility is. He has been unquestionably courageous politically. He is aware of the meaninglessness of conventional life and of marriage to a stupid woman. Such a man, realistically, would not suddenly marry a silly young pregnant woman from Philadelphia just because she happens

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to cry on the phone—especially since he has not had other powerful forces of society marshalled against him. No rich daddy has appeared with threats or bribes, no dispassionate advocate has convinced him that responsibility to an individual woman is part of responsibility to the whole human race or that his failure to do his duty would make his statements about society hypocritical. His abrupt decision is totally unmotivated. That in itself would not matter so much, if it did not raise a more serious problem. Are we to regard Dave as a hypocrite, a label that ﬁts perfectly the other two men who behave like him? That implied answer provides an easy way out of the discrepancy in characterization, yet it does not work. Dave so obviously means it when he says society stinks and that he doesn’t want to be part of it. He has not been spouting advanced social ideas while secretly longing for the safety of marriage. But how seriously can one take his ideas, or his tormented longing for personal goodness, if the only real decision he has to make shows that he behaves according to the fact that he is male—in Lessing’s deﬁnition here— rather than human? In other words, she has developed a character who is interesting from an aesthetic, philosophical, and sociological point of view, but the resolution of the play either oversimpliﬁes him or undercuts the concepts he represents. It also trivializes the symbol of the tiger. Dave, like the tiger, is caught, and like him he is responsible for Anna’s being covered with scars. But one would hope to see the keepers of the cage. The resolution of the play suggests that they are nothing more than a young woman from Philadelphia. Lessing herself has sensed the one-sidedness of the play, but has blamed it on mistaken casting and unfair cutting of lines. In a postscript written in 1972, she has noted that ‘‘some Women’s Liberation groups’’ have cast Dave ‘‘as a fool, a stud, or a nothing man, making it ‘a woman’s play’ . . . a selfrighteous aria for the female voice.’’ She goes on to observe that unless Dave is ‘‘cast and acted so that he has every bit as much weight as Anna, then the play goes to pieces.’’ But even without indiscriminate cutting, the resolution of the play makes its vision of female-male relationships one-sided. Other problems in the play can also be seen by reference to the stereotype of the dishonest philandering male. A recurring theme is that the conventional beliefs of society are ridiculous and narrow. Both Anna and Dave are satiric toward them. And yet, Anna holds a highly traditional view

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of male sexuality and is shown to be right in holding it. The belief that men need more sexual outlets than one woman is not so different from the belief that society needs stable marriages. Both of these views are the basis of the double standard. But the men in the play, somewhat boringly, enact a cliché. Anna’s and Lessing’s irony does not extend to an examination of all assumptions of society. Instead, the irony is directed only against male beliefs and behavior. It is not all-encompassing. The play is also narrow in its human sympathies. It is Anna’s play: what hurts her is treated seriously, while parallel situations are dismissed, forgotten, or handled satirically. For example, Anna’s suffering is real and terrible when she loses Dave. On the other hand, Tom Lattimer, who loves her and whom she rejects, is shown to be pompous, hypocritical, and cruel. That he could suffer equally as a victim of the sex war is not a consideration. In the same way, Harry’s actions are shown to cause his wife pain, but his own anguish about the marriage of his mistress is not treated seriously. He dramatizes his problems, and he selﬁshly demands sympathy and sexual satisfaction. Unlike Anna, he is not covered with scars and never will be. The most interesting case of a character whose suffering is not taken seriously and whose situation is not related to a thematic motif is Janet Stevens. Pregnant, young, desperate, and uninteresting, she is about to marry Dave. She is clearly getting no prize. While she is not likely to suffer as intensely as Anna, she will suffer long, consistently, and fully according to her capacity. Harry’s wife, mentioned early in the play, probably foreshadows Janet’s future. Dave will not be responsible for turning Janet into ‘‘just another boring housewife’’—she already is that—but he is likely to be a terrible husband. Yet this connection is never made. Anna is sorry that it’s not her baby and she sarcastically says that she wasn’t as intelligent as Janet. But Janet is so stupid as to be almost a comic ﬁgure. The sympathy for all women as victims, which would follow logically from the assumption of male unfairness, is forgotten. Anna only, not Janet, is to be regarded as an object of sympathy. The kind of elementary sisterhood, so well treated by Lessing elsewhere, is not developed. Men are harder on intelligent women, but at least the housewifely women get the men. And, the play implies, that is a victory of sorts rather than the victimization that other motifs would lead one to expect. Anna keeps her integrity and suffers. She is superior to other women and all the men, but it is hard to accept her as an ideal in feelings or

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insights. She just happens to be right about femalemale relationships because of abrupt elements in the plot and in spite of the fact that her view does not include all the complex situations touched on in the play. And yet, Play with a Tiger cannot and should not be dismissed because of its ﬂaws. Its value lies not only in its relationship to The Golden Notebook, but also in its anger. Lessing dramatizes the problems, not the victories of an intelligent and independent woman, and it is as unfair to expect calm impartiality from a play produced in 1962 as it is today. Certainly, a generation that elevated the idiosyncratic Jimmy Porter of Look Back into Anger into a profound critic of society, needs to consider Anna Freeman as seriously. Probably more so. Source: Agate Nesaule Krouse, ‘‘Doris Lessing’s Feminist Plays,’’ in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 15, No. 2, November 1976, pp. 305–12.

Roger Gellert In the following review, Gellert praises the intent behind Lessing’s play but says the play suffers in performance. It is a brave man—and perhaps a braver woman— who attempts to expose on a stage the intimate mental gropings of lovers. Love shared is perfect to the sharers but embarrassing to observers; love illreciprocated gains at once in dramatic interest, but the necessary condensation of experience into a few pithy scenes leads almost inevitably to a bloating of life’s absurd delicacies, a kind of noisy, rhetorical sensitiveness that carries its own built-in alienation effect. Basically, one mustn’t funk it, Doris Lessing’s Play with a Tiger (Comedy) has a lot in common with, say, The Deep Blue Sea of Rattigan—the doomed love of a serious, mature woman for a callow, bumptious youth—and it’s surprising, looking back on it, how far Rattigan’s lack of profundity was made good by his crafty construction. In Mrs. Lessing’s play the pains of disparate love are more authentically probed, but they suffer by magniﬁcation and have little craft to cover the cracks. Anna Freeman (Siobhan McKenna) is a widowed Australian writer of 40 or so; she has a son away at boarding-school, and lives in a great, grey Earls Court bed-sitter, tapping out ‘little reviews on this and that’. She has been having an anguished affair with a young, ‘hip’ Jewish-American called Dave Miller (Alex Viespi), a hulking, oversexed, egocentric infant who buffoons his way from bed to

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bed with supreme indifference to the fate of their occupants. That’s why, Anna says, he calls every woman Baby—‘the anonymous Baby, in case you whisper the wrong name in the wrong ear in the dark’. All Dave wants is someone to lie with and talk at—anyone, as long as they are changed regularly, like sheets. Anna is a pretty good talker herself, and they have a mutual-analysis game called ‘Who are You?’ where they dim the lights and recall their childhood, interchanging reﬂections on marriage, parents, hypocrisy and truth, while the hidden London of Alan Tagg’s ﬁne set kindles and looms outside. The core of the play is devoted to a long session of this game, directed by Ted Kotcheff with a moody brilliance that exactly serves the tragicomic clash of Anna’s and Dave’s temperamental needs. The only trouble with these over-articulate jousters, as with Elaine Dundy’s thespians who preceded them at the Comedy, is that they are so word-perfect in their recriminations that one feels they are enjoying it all too much; and one begins faintly to resent the portrayal of left-wing love as all biting and ﬂyting. Other frauds, victims and failures hover at the edges of Mrs. Lessing’s canvas—Anna’s friend and landlady, Mary (most endearingly played by Maureen Pryor), an attractive eccentric losing her grip on life, growing deafer, drunker and sillier; the journalist Harry, philandering doggedly on, refusing to face his wife’s unhappiness; Tom, the young man from Birmingham into whose priggish embrace Anna rebounds during one of Dave’s absences; and Janet, a bourgeois American innocent whom Dave gets with child. These last two are mere caricatures, pathetic butts for Anna’s misery to chastise, but Mary and Harry are sympathetic studies of the sort of nice, disintegrating people we all know. For most of the time, however, we are alone with Anna and Dave locked in their indecisive brawling, until she concludes that ‘there are more important things than love’ and convinces Dave, momentarily, of his responsibilities. The protagonists are brought overpoweringly to life, but whether one feels elated or enlarged by an evening with them is less certain, for Miss McKenna (stern, beautiful and ravaged though she is) dangerously overstresses Anna’s self-pity and witheringly superior attitude to others’ feelings, while Mr. Viespi’s Dave, six foot of relaxed, rubbery egotism, is very funny (his account of treatment by a British psychiatrist is magniﬁcent) but ﬁnally insufferable. Source: Roger Gellert, ‘‘Liaisons,’’ in New Statesman, Vol. 63, No. 1620, March 30, 1962, p. 462.

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SOURCES Ean, Tan Gim, et. al., Interview, in Doris Lessing: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, Ontario Review Press, 1994. Klein, Carole, Doris Lessing: A Biography, Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2000. Knapp, Mona, Doris Lessing, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1984. Lambert, J. W., Review of Play with a Tiger, in Drama, Summer 1962, pp. 18–19. Oliver, Edith, Review of Play with a Tiger, in the New Yorker, January 9, 1965, p. 86. Review of Play with a Tiger, in Variety, January 13, 1965, p. 82. Stephens, Frances, Review of Play with a Tiger, in Theatre World, May 1962, pp. 5–6.

FURTHER READING Klein, Carole, Doris Lessing: A Biography, Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2000. Klein’s biography discusses Lessing’s life after the publication of The Golden Notebook. Knapp, Mona, Doris Lessing, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1984. Knapp’s text is a solid study of Lessing’s literary works, including her plays. Knapp’s study includes an excellent bibliography of Lessing criticism, reviews, and interviews. Lessing, Doris, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962, HarperPerrenial, 1997. This second volume in Lessing’s multivolume autobiography covers the period during which she wrote Play with a Tiger. Sprague, Claire, and Virginia Tiger, Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, G. K. Hall, 1986. Sprague and Tiger’s collection includes essays covering all aspects of Lessing’s literary career. It also contains a chronology of Lessing’s life and publications and a good introductory overview of her work and career. Wills, A. J., An Introduction to the History of Central Africa, Oxford University Press, 1973. Wills’s book covers the history of Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

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Rocket to the Moon CLIFFORD ODETS 1938

Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon was ﬁrst produced for the stage by the Group Theatre in New York in 1938. The play was the second Odets play produced by the Group Theatre after Odets’s return from a brief hiatus in Hollywood where he worked as a scriptwriter. Like its predecessor, Golden Boy, the play signaled a move on the part of Odets away from the more overtly political drama of his earlier plays towards a drama more focused on interpersonal relationships and the pressures of life on the individual. Set entirely in the waiting room of a dentist’s ofﬁce in New York City, the play focuses on the relationships between its central characters. In the play, dialogue is more important than action. The play takes place between June and August, and the oppressive heat of a stiﬂing New York summer serves as the backdrop to the play’s events. The play focuses on the mid-life crisis of a dentist, Ben Stark, who attempts to escape the conﬁnes of his life by having an affair with his secretary, Cleo. In the play, Odets develops many of the themes familiar to his audience from his earlier (and more overtly political) plays: economic pressures, the ability of the individual to rise above his circumstances, and the effects of personal responsibility on ambition. The play can also be seen as a meditation on the effects of marriage and personal relationships on the development of artistic talent.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Playwright Clifford Odets was born on July 18, 1906, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Louis and Pearl Odets, who were Jewish immigrants of Russian and Austrian descent. While Odets was a young boy, his family moved repeatedly between Philadelphia and New York before settling in the Bronx when he was six years old. By the time Odets entered high school, his father had become a successful printer who owned his own print company in New York. Odets senior wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. However, as a youth, Odets performed poorly in school but was a voracious reader and an ardent moviegoer. Despite his poor academic record, as a student at the Morris High School, Odets was an active member of the drama club. In 1923, at the age of seventeen, Odets dropped out of high school to pursue a career in acting. Odets’s desire to pursue a career on the stage conﬂicted with his father’s ideas of success and would be a source of conﬂict from which Odets would draw heavily during his later career as a playwright. Although he managed to secure a number of minor parts, Odets was unable to ﬁnd much success as an actor. In 1931, however, Odets’s luck changed when he was cast in a minor role in the ﬁrst production of Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg’s newly formed Group Theatre, The House of Connelly’ by Paul Green. Odets’s relationship with the Group Theatre would eventually result in the 1935 production of his own Waiting for Lefty, the play that established Odets as a playwright of note. Odets was to be associated with the Group Theatre until its demise in 1941. However, despite the critical and commercial success of Waiting for Lefty, Odets would never really achieve the success his early plays suggested he would. Although Odets wrote over twenty plays between 1935 and 1954, his career apparently failed to achieve the promise hinted at in his early plays. In 1936, Odets accepted a job writing scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and moved to Hollywood. There, he met and married the actress Luise Rainer on January 8, 1937. Odets’s stay in Hollywood lasted only two years. He eventually returned to New York where he wrote Rocket to the Moon in 1938. The marriage suffered from the distance, and the couple divorced in May 1940. Rocket to the Moon (1938) marked a shift in Odets’s focus from the overtly political drama of his

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early career to a more introspective and personal focus on interpersonal relationships, and his own roots as a second-generation Jewish immigrant. Despite its moderate success, Rocket to the Moon signaled the beginning of the end of the Group Theatre. In 1941, Odets returned to Hollywood and, while he wrote a large number of screenplays, his output for the stage declined markedly. He produced only three more plays before his death of cancer in 1963, at the age of 57. The last of these plays, The Flowering Peach, which was produced in 1954, was slated to receive the Pulitzer Prize. That award, however, was given to Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 The ﬁrst act of Rocket to the Moon opens with an argument between Ben Stark and his wife, Belle. Stark wishes to develop his dental practice by moving his ofﬁces to a more afﬂuent part of town and specializing in orthodontics. His father-in-law, a retired businessman, has offered to provide Stark with money for the move. However Belle—who

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hates her father—wants Stark to refuse his offer. While Belle sees her desire for Stark to stay where he is as a practical one, Stark believes that his wife is trying to limit his aspirations. Despite these misgivings, Stark gives in to Belle and agrees not to move. Stark’s colleague, Dr. Cooper, enters during this conversation to get a drink of water from the cooler. His presence reminds Belle that Cooper, who rents his ofﬁce from Stark, owes four month’s rent. Belle views Stark’s refusal to press Cooper for the money as weakness, and criticizes him for it. Belle tells Stark that she has been feeling depressed all morning and reminds him that it is the anniversary of the death of their son, who died during childbirth. At this point the play’s central female character, Stark’s secretary Cleo, enters and is immediately criticized by Stark (who is trying to mollify his wife) for taking a two-hour lunch break. When Dr. Cooper re-enters the waiting room, Belle demands that he pay Stark the money he is owed and accuses Cooper of drunkenness. Cooper tells Belle that he cannot even afford to pay the medical bills for his son, who recently broke his arm. Belle looks on Cooper more sympathetically and tells him to take another month before paying off his debts. As Belle leaves the ofﬁce, her father, Prince, enters. Prince sees Cleo and asks her who she is. This question prompts a long conversation between the two during which Cleo tells Prince that she does not like Belle. Prince is clearly attracted to Cleo and makes a number of attempts to impress her. Prince comes across as an energetic, playful, and intelligent man. Stark returns to the room and watches the two silently for a moment before Prince notices that he has returned. Stark tells Prince that he is rejecting his offer of ﬁnancial help. Prince blames Belle for this decision, and the two men talk at great length about the effects of marriage on a man. Prince describes his own feelings about marriage, telling Stark that if he had been single he might have become a great actor. After describing his own position, Prince criticizes Stark for letting Belle run his life and tells him that he should have an affair with Cleo. Stark laughs at Prince, but his mood abruptly changes to one of melancholy as the older man leaves. As Stark is contemplating the conversation with his father-in-law, Frenchy enters and the two begin a conversation that starts out where Stark’s conversation with Prince had left off. Stark tells Frenchy that he has slept through his marriage. Frenchy, who is a bachelor, cannot really compre-

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hend Stark’s concerns and is glad when Dr. Cooper enters the room and joins the conversation. Cooper tells Stark that Belle confronted him about his debts. Stark conﬁrms that he is not going to throw Cooper out despite Belle’s wishes. As their conversation winds down, Cleo comes back from her errand and Cooper leaves. Stark and Cleo are left alone and Stark, prompted by his conversation with Prince, begins to see her in a different light.

Act 2, Scene 1 Act 2 takes place about a month after act 1. The ﬁrst scene opens with Stark leaﬁng through a volume of Shakespeare and reminiscing about his youth. Cleo is very solicitous of Stark, bringing him a glass of water and giving him matches to re-light his pipe. Frenchy, also in the room, notices this and makes some pointed remarks about the effect of the heat on people’s sex lives. Cleo takes offence at Frenchy’s remarks, and the two begin to argue while Stark looks on. Once Frenchy leaves, Cleo and Stark discuss Stark’s marriage to Belle, and Cleo questions Belle’s treatment of Stark. Cleo tells Stark that she does not really need her job because her parents are wealthy. The two discuss one of Stark’s patients, Willy Wax, a choreographer whom Cleo wishes to meet. Stark and Cleo’s conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Belle and the later entrance of Prince, who is late for a dental appointment with Stark. Prince asks Cleo and Stark how their affair is going. After Cleo denies they are having one, Prince asks her out on a date. Stark expresses his jealousy and accuses Cleo of lying about her friends and her parents. Cleo admits that she has been lying and tells Stark that she loves him. Immediately after Cleo’s declaration of love, Cooper interrupts their conversation. Cooper is distraught about his life and tells Stark that he is going to sell his blood to make enough money to pay him back. The scene ends with Cleo confessing her love for Stark and the two embracing passionately.

Act 2, Scene 2 Scene 2 begins with an argument between Cleo and Stark about Cleo’s decision to accept Willy Wax’s invitation to lunch. As they argue, Prince calls on the phone and asks Cleo out on a date (which she refuses). Frenchy enters and warns Cleo not to toy with Stark’s affections. Cleo leaves for lunch with Wax, after an argument with Stark about the nature of their affair. Cleo is upset that Stark wants to keep their affair a secret and never takes her out in public. While Cleo is at lunch with Wax,

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Belle enters the ofﬁce and argues with Stark. She demands that Stark ﬁre Cleo and hire her, Belle, instead. When Stark refuses to ﬁre Cleo, Belle accuses him of conducting an affair with Cleo and locks herself in his dental ofﬁce. While Stark is trying to persuade her to come out, Cooper enters and gives Stark a check for thirty dollars, which he has earned by selling his blood. Belle leaves in disgust, telling Stark that he is an actor. Cooper leaves shortly thereafter, and Cleo returns from her lunch, followed by Willy Wax. Wax tells Stark that Cleo must be in love with him. The scene ends with Cleo and Stark in a passionate embrace.

most affected by the socio-economic climate of the mid-1930s. He is a veteran of World War I, but he has been severely affected by the depression. Dr. Cooper feels that he has been abandoned and forgotten by his country, even though he served in the military during the war. He is ﬁnancially unsuccessful and cannot afford to pay his rent or support his family. His young son recently broke his arm, and Cooper cannot afford to pay the doctor’s bills. His ﬁnancial straits are so bad he is forced to sell his blood in order to pay the rent on his ofﬁce. Dr. Cooper serves, in many ways, as a cautionary character for Ben Stark.

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Frenchy Jensen

Act 3 begins with Belle and Stark arguing about their marriage. Belle accuses Stark of having an affair with Cleo. After Stark admits his inﬁdelity, Belle tries to get him to admit that he does not love Cleo and that this was an affair of convenience. Belle tells Stark that if he commits himself to their marriage, she will change her ways. Stark cannot choose between Cleo and Belle. Belle tells him that she is going to leave him. Once Belle leaves, Frenchy enters. After a long conversation about love and marriage, he tries to help Stark sort out his problems. The entrance of Prince interrupts Frenchy’s efforts. Prince tells Stark that he intends to ask Cleo to marry him. The two men argue, furious with each other. Cleo returns, and she and Stark discuss their affair and profess their love for each other. Stark wants Cleo to understand the situation he is in and asks her to have patience with him. At this moment, Prince asks Cleo to marry him, telling her that he can provide her with security. Stark realizes that he cannot give Cleo what she needs and ends their affair. Cleo refuses Prince’s marriage offer and tells both men that she has gained a degree of maturity while working for Stark and can now go out into the world. Once Cleo leaves, Stark and Prince reconcile their differences. Stark tells Prince that he has also gained a new perspective on life. Prince leaves after asking Stark to return to his wife. The act ends with the exit of Stark.

CHARACTERS Dr. Phil Cooper Dr. Cooper is a dentist who rents an ofﬁce in Ben Stark’s building. Dr. Cooper is the most pathetic character in the play and seems to be the man

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Frenchy is a chiropodist who rents ofﬁce space from Ben Stark. Unlike the play’s other principle characters, he is happy with his lot as a single man and sees no need to embark on a romantic relationship. Frenchy believes that relationships impede a man’s progress. He is also sympathetic to the effects of modern life on women, arguing that a wife is shortchanged in marriage. Of all the characters in the play, Frenchy seems to be the most secure. He is often humorous and has an ironic outlook. However, Frenchy is the character that holds Cleo in the lowest regard. He is frequently rude to her and picks on her incessantly. Frenchy is also capable of being serious and forthright. When Ben Stark is at his lowest point, it is Frenchy who attempts to help him work through his problems.

Mr. Prince Mr. Prince is Belle Stark’s father, a retired but successful businessman. Mr. Prince continually encourages Ben Stark to go further in his life. He offers to provide Ben with the money he will need to expand his dental practice and encourages him to have an affair. Mr. Prince seems to have more energy and vitality than any of the other male characters in the play. He is learned, well read, and has a sense of humor. Like Ben Stark, Mr. Prince makes repeated references to Shakespeare. For example, he calls himself an American King Lear. Despite his outward appearance of happiness and wit, Prince is in many ways a bitter man. He believes that his wife held him back in life and that he could have been a great actor if he had not been married and had the responsibilities of a family. A widower, Mr. Prince is in love with Cleo and wants her to marry him. Despite Prince’s relative wealth and vitality, however, Cleo sees that he is only interested in her as a trophy and refuses his offer.

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Prince is able to quickly shrug off Cleo’s rejection of him and immediately returns to his old ways, forgiving Ben and establishing that, for him, nothing will have changed.

Cleo Singer Cleo Singer is Ben’s young secretary and is the most important and complex female character in the play. Cleo is youthful and vital and stands in contrast to the middle-aged characters. Cleo is in love with Ben and wants him to commit to their relationship by leaving Belle and marrying her. As the object of affection for almost all the men in the play, Cleo must contend with Belle’s jealousy, as well as numerous advances from Wax and Mr. Prince, both of whom Cleo rejects as unworthy of her affections. The men in the play repeatedly objectify Cleo. She is seen as something that can be used up and discarded and almost all of the men seem both beguiled by, and frightened of, her youth and beauty. Cleo begins the play as an insecure and ﬂighty woman who lies about her life and seems unable to carry out the basics of her job successfully. As the play progresses, however, Cleo appears to be the only character who really develops and grows. This is why, at the end of the play, she is the only one who can actually leave. All in all, however, Cleo is a relatively ambiguous character. Like Ben Stark, she lacks enough substance to be a compelling central focus of the play. Her ability to leave the conﬁnes of her affair with Stark, and the conﬁnes of her job at his dental practice, seemingly comes from nowhere. Despite this ambiguity, Cleo is an important and interesting character.

Belle Stark Belle is Ben Stark’s wife. She bears the brunt of his disillusionment with his life. Belle hates her father and persuades Ben to refuse his offer of ﬁnancial help. Belle believes that her father effectively killed her mother by treating her badly. Indeed, many of Belle’s actions seem to stem from her desire not to endure the same fate as her own mother. Despite Ben’s desire to expand his practice, Belle wants him to curb his ambitions and be content with what he has. She is, however, frustrated with her marriage to Ben, alternately blaming herself and Ben for the failure of their relationship. Her jealousy of Cleo leads her to demand (unsuccessfully) that Ben ﬁre his secretary and employ her instead. Because Belle is unable to bear children after the death of their son during childbirth, Belle represents for Ben everything he has failed to achieve

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and Ben’s inability to ﬁnd happiness. While Belle is a largely unsympathetic character, there are indications that she should not be seen solely in this way. If one views Belle’s actions from the perspective of Frenchy, for example, she appears to be as trapped by circumstances as her husband.

Dr. Ben Stark Ben Stark is a moderately successful dentist who owns the building in which all of the action of the play takes place. Unhappy with his life, Ben wishes to develop his dental practice by specializing as an orthodontist, but his wife dissuades him from doing so. Ben is bored and frustrated with both his home and professional life. Ben is in love with his secretary, Cleo, and embarks on a tentative affair with her as a way of escaping the ennui of his dayto-day life. However, Ben is ultimately unwilling to commit to a relationship with Cleo because he cannot choose between the possibilities she offers him and the security of his marriage. Unable to leave his wife or take the steps necessary to develop his dental practice, Ben Stark seems trapped between his ambitions and the comforts and securities of his current life. Caught between these competing imperatives, Ben represents the perils of middleclass life in which desire and expectations often overwhelm happiness and contentment. At the end of the play, Ben claims to have gained a degree of insight as a result of his affair with Cleo and the decisions he has been forced to make. What Ben decides to settle for, however, is the security of his current position. Because of this, Ben Stark is an ambivalent hero. While he is the central character, he is largely an ineffectual one. He seems unable to make decisions for himself and cannot even keep a pot of ﬂowers alive. Ben is unable to expand the horizons of his life beyond a nostalgic longing for his youth—when everything was still ahead of him and no decisions about his life had yet been made. He reads and quotes from Shakespeare on a number of occasions and seems to want to retreat into the prior life the English playwright signiﬁes for him.

Willy Wax Willy Wax is a choreographer and one of Ben Stark’s patients. Wax is enamored of Cleo and repeatedly tries to get her to join him for lunch. Wax is the least sympathetic character in the entire play. Indeed, he appears to be the type of man who often lures young, impressionable women into his ofﬁce. He is portrayed as a shallow, egotistical man who is only interested in himself and who attempts to

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parlay his modicum of fame into an affair with Cleo. When Cleo refuses his sexual advances, he accuses her of being old-fashioned and refuses to have anything more to do with her.

THEMES Marriage and Career Aspirations The major conﬂict of the play stems from Ben Stark’s desire to leave his general dental practice and to specialize as an orthodontist. Stark’s wife, Belle, persuades him to forego his dream and to be content with his mediocre but dependable general practice. While Stark agrees to Belle’s demands at the very beginning of the play, the ramiﬁcations of this decision are felt throughout it. Although Stark capitulates to Belle’s wishes, he feels conﬁned and stiﬂed by his present position. As a way to escape this feeling, Stark carries out a brief affair with his secretary, Cleo. Stark’s attempt to deal with his professional disappointments through an extramarital affair highlights one of the central themes of the play—the effects of marriage on a man’s career aspirations. In a conversation about the effects of marriage, Stark’s father-in-law, Prince, tells him that Belle’s mother had ‘‘a housewife’s conception of life’’ and that her limited view eroded his own ambitions, ‘‘drip, drip, the matrimonial waters go, and a man wears away.’’ Prince believes that Belle is having a similar effect on Stark. ‘‘You graduated ﬁrst in your class,’’ he tells him, ‘‘you played tennis, you were full of life and plans. Look, you don’t even resent me now.’’ Odets insists repeatedly that this winnowing away of ambition is the fault of the woman in a marriage. Stark tells Frenchy, for example, ‘‘a man would be an idealist to want a honeymoon all his life.’’ Frenchy replies, ‘‘No, he’d be a woman. A man can’t be both lover and banker, enchanter and provider. But the girls want those combined talents.’’ Therefore, the pressures on a man—both in marriage and in business—seem to leave him trapped between competing expectations. Frenchy avoids these twinned pressures altogether by eschewing romantic relationships and living alone. While Frenchy rejects romantic relationships, he is also the only male character who shows any consideration for the woman’s position. ‘‘In this day of stresses I don’t see much normal life, myself included,’’ he tells Stark. Frenchy alone seems to understand that the economic pressure to provide for a family often makes a man shortchange

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his wife. ‘‘The woman’s not a wife,’’ he says, ‘‘She’s the dependent of a salesman who can’t make sales and is ashamed to tell her so, of a federal project worker or a Cooper, a dentist . . . the free exercise of love, I ﬁgure, gets harder every day.’’ These comments introduce one of the play’s other central themes, the economic pressures of the Great Depression.

Economics and the Great Depression While Rocket to the Moon may be less explicitly political than Odets’s earlier plays, the effects of the economic pressures brought about by the Great Depression and the increasingly consumer-oriented nature of the American economy are central to the play. The inﬂuence of the Great Depression on the characters in the play can be seen most clearly in Cooper. A veteran of World War I, Cooper struggles to make ends meet because his dental practice is failing, and the economic demands of supporting a family exceed his income. By making Cooper a veteran, Odets is commenting on the contrast between the optimism of the post-war years and the realities facing many Americans after the crash of 1929. The depression is referred to explicitly on a number of occasions. For example, Frenchy reminds Stark that he is providing discounts to W.P.A. workers. Moreover, as Frenchy’s earlier remark that a woman is less a wife than the dependent of a salesman or a federal project worker makes clear, the Great Depression had a profoundly negative effect on the securities traditionally assumed to go along with marriage.

Artistic Aspirations and Constraints While he was working on the play, Odets was experiencing his own relationship troubles; his marriage was shortly to come to an end. Because of this, a number of critics have suggested that the play is as much about the constraints placed on artistic aspirations by marriage and other pressures as it is about the themes discussed above. This claim is perhaps best exempliﬁed in Prince’s statement to Stark that if he had not been married he could have been ‘‘one of the greatest actors in the world.’’ Instead, he is ‘‘an old man who missed his boat,’’ a man who has ‘‘disappeared in the corner, with the dust, under the rug.’’ Indeed, many of the play’s characters have artistic aspirations: Cleo wants to be a dancer, Willy Wax is a choreographer, and Stark retreats into Shakespeare on a number of occasions. Given the weight of examples such as these, there can be little doubt that, however much it was motivated by his

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • All three acts of the play take place in the same location—the waiting room of Stark’s dental practice. Because of this, the forward progress of the play relies heavily on the entrance and exit of characters and on the ways in which they interact in that conﬁned space. How would you direct the end of act 3 when Stark, Prince, and Cleo have their ﬁnal conversation? How would you pace the character’s dialogue and what decisions would you make about their movement both entering and exiting the stage? • The historical period in which Rocket to the Moon takes place is the Great Depression of the 1930s. This was a period of great social, political, and economic upheaval in the United States. Research the Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929. What were some of the causes of the crash and the Great Depression that followed? How did the country get out of the Great Depression? What have been some of the lasting effects of governmental policies from the period? • Clifford Odets was brieﬂy a member of the

own personal life, Odets clearly uses the theme of artistic exploration as a metaphor for the debilitating effects of marriage on a man’s ambitions.

Communist Party in the early 1930s. Because of his involvement with communism, Odets—like many other prominent American celebrities— had to testify in front of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Commission in the 1950s. Conduct research into the HUAC hearings and McCarthyism. What other noted celebrities were called to appear in front of the commission? What accounted for the rising fear of communism in America in the 1950s? • Rocket to the Moon is an example of social realism. Unlike in tragedy, farce, comedy, or romance, the play’s dialogue, characters, and events are intended to be as realistic as possible. Explore how Odets manages to produce realistic characters and to deal with common themes through an examination of the dialogue in the play. What aspects of the character’s interactions help provide a sense of realism? Do the themes Odets addresses in this play—the function of marriage, economic pressures, artistic aspirations, and others—resonate for readers in the early 2000s? How could you update the play to make it more relevant for an audience now?

the conversations between the characters, the conﬁnes of the single room help invoke the feeling that the characters, and Stark in particular, are trapped in their circumstances.

Imagery

STYLE Setting All of the action of Rocket to the Moon takes place in the waiting room in Ben Stark’s dental ofﬁce. Because of this single location, the focus of the play becomes the dialogue between the characters and their entries and exits from the stage. In the ﬁnal moments of the play, Stark refers to this room as a prison-ofﬁce. Mirroring the themes of many of

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Because the action of the play consists of the interactions between characters and their entrance and exit from Stark’s waiting room, almost all of the imagery of the play is embodied in the character’s dialogue and is developed through the repetition of thematic elements. The one signiﬁcant exception to this is the repeated focus on the Hotel Algiers seen through the window of the waiting room. In the ﬁrst act, Prince tells Stark that he once knew a bookie that used the hotel as an ofﬁce. The hotel signiﬁes a different type of life and the temptations that Stark

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overcomes at the close of the play. Another central image in the play is of Cleo as a consumable object. Frenchy refers to her as ‘‘Juicy Fruit,’’ for instance, and Cleo tells Wax that ‘‘No man can take a bite out of me, like an apple and throw it away.’’

Genre Rocket to the Moon is a work of dramatic realism. Its central subject concerns the everyday lives of its protagonists, and the setting and dialogue of the play focus on realistic subjects. The play attempts to reproduce the everyday speech of New Yorkers. The moments when Stark or Prince quote from Shakespeare, for example, contrast sharply with the rest of the dialogue.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT It is almost impossible to discuss the work of Clifford Odets without spending some time focusing on his relationship to the Group Theatre, of which he was an original member, and on the broader genre of American political theatre that arose during the Great Depression. The Group Theatre was, as Gerald Weales suggests in his essay ‘‘The Group Theatre and its Plays,’’ ‘‘a community of artists’’ and ‘‘the most successful failure in the history of American theatre.’’ The Group Theatre lasted as an organization for ten years spanning the decade of the 1930s. During that time they produced seven of Odets’s plays. Founded by George Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the group also started or signiﬁcantly directed the careers of actors, such as John Garﬁeld, and directors, such as Elia Kazan, who would later go on to direct some of the most important ﬁlms in the history of Hollywood cinema. The group leaned decidedly to the left, and a number of its members were also members of the Communist Party during the 1930s. Indeed, Odets and Kazan would discuss this fact at length when they both appeared before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Commission in the 1950s. Odets made a name for himself as a playwright with two plays produced by the Group Theatre in 1935, Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty. Both of these plays can be considered works of agitprop (agitation-propaganda), a type of progressive, politically serious drama produced in America after the stock market crash of 1929. Waiting for Lefty, written while Odets was a member of the Commu-

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nist Party, was the most successful of these plays. It eventually played in over one hundred cities in 1935 and was performed throughout the 1930s. On its opening night in New York, the audience responded to the play by rushing the stage to congratulate the actors after the ﬁnal curtain. Given that the play is about a conﬂict between striking New York cab drivers and a corrupt union boss, its reception was hardly surprising. As Christopher J. Herr points out in Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre, ‘‘in 1934 alone, almost 2,000 strikes had broken out across the country, including violent conﬂicts in Toledo, Minneapolis, Harlan County, Kentucky, and San Francisco.’’ Michael Denning notes, in the Introduction to The Cultural Front, that the national textile strike of 1934, involving over 400,000 workers, ‘‘became the largest strike in a single industry in American history.’’ Odets had found a set of themes that spoke to the millions of unemployed, under-employed, and disenfranchised citizens of America feeling the lasting and debilitating effects of the crash of 1929 and the depression that followed. That Odets had struck a cord with the American public is perhaps proved most effectively by the fact that Waiting for Lefty was, according to Wendy Smith (quoted in Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front), the ‘‘most widely banned’’ play in America. Given the social and economic conditions under which Odets and the majority of Americans were living, it is no surprise that he found his greatest early success with dramas about the socioeconomic conditions of the 1930s. Precipitated by the stock market crash of October 1929, the Great Depression affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Unemployment rates skyrocketed and farms and homes were repossessed by banks and lending companies.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The initial critical reception to Rocket to the Moon was mixed. While many critics believed that Odets was attempting to develop his understanding of social and interpersonal relationships, many found his efforts to be lacking. For example, in his New York Herald-Tribune review, Richard Watts Jr. begins by claiming, ‘‘Mr. Odets continues to be the most exciting and the most exasperating of the younger American dramatists.’’ Watts ends his review by calling the play a ‘‘bafﬂing combination of brilliance and confusion.’’ Like many critics, Watts believes that the play’s ﬁrst act is brilliant but that,

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1930s: Most women are expected to be housewives and, if they do choose to work, are limited to jobs as secretaries, assistants, nurses, or teachers.

Today: Since 1961, over four hundred people have visited outer space and NASA is making plans to send astronauts on a mission to Mars.

Today: Many women hold powerful and important positions in major companies. However, women still earn proportionally less than their male counterparts.

• 1930s: Three million American workers are members of unions.

• 1930s: Space travel only exists in the realm of fantasy and there is no federal space agency.

Today: The AFL-CIO alone has over thirteen million members from sixty-one different unions.

in the second half, the play loses its focus and ‘‘begins to languish.’’ Rocket to the Moon (along with Golden Boy) is commonly understood to mark a shift in Odets’s dramatic work from a politically aware playwright of the American left to one more focused on interpersonal relations. This claim is a persistent theme in contemporary reviews of the play. This opinion of the trajectory of Odets’s work is one that continued long after his death. In his 1989 book Clifford Odets, Gabriel Miller sees Rocket to the Moon as purely a romantic drama. Miller suggests, ‘‘Odets was torn between the desire to write about the sociopolitical situation and the increasing pressure of his personal troubles.’’ As Odets’s reputation gained in stature in the late 1990s, a number of critics argued that fewer political plays, such as Rocket to the Moon, are connected to Odets’s earlier work than contemporary reviewers might have thought. Christopher J. Herr, for example, argues in Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre, that, while the play ‘‘continue[s] his retreat from overtly political drama into a more generalized examination of American life,’’ the connections between it and plays such as Waiting for Lefty are many. The characters, Herr argues, are still driven by economic imperatives (much as the characters in Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!). Herr points out that the play is explicitly set against the backdrop of the Great Depression.

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CRITICISM Doreen Piano Piano is a Marion Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In this essay, Piano considers how the character Cleo Singer embodies the competing impulses of personal and economic pressure in the play. Rocket to the Moon is generally understood to mark Clifford Odets’s move from explicitly political subject matter, dealing with the social and economic conditions affecting Americans during the Great Depression, towards a drama more interested in interpersonal relationships and, more speciﬁcally, the subject of love. While there is undeniable evidence to support this claim, it is arguably overstated. Indeed, while plays such as Rocket to the Moon and Odets’s previous play, Golden Boy, certainly focus on the personal rather than the political, a focus on the economic and social conditions that affect the lives of Odets’s protagonists is never far beneath the surface. As such, Odets’s later plays should be understood to be drawing from the same well and embodying many of the same concerns as his earlier works. Christopher J. Herr, for example, states in his book Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre that, despite the less overtly political nature of these later plays, ‘‘the economic imperatives that

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David Burke and Annabel Leventon in the 1982 stage production of Rocket to the Moon performed at the Hampstead Theater in London

drive the characters remain strong.’’ A number of critics have suggested that, in the later plays such as Rocket to the Moon, Odets was trying to deal with broader social and economic issues and events in his personal life, such as his divorce from the actress Luise Rainer. Gabriel Miller, for example, suggests that during the late 1930s, as the world was on the verge of World War II, ‘‘Odets was torn between the desire to write about the sociopolitical situation and the increasing pressure of his personal troubles.’’ In Rocket to the Moon, these economic imperatives are paramount, and Odets successfully interweaves the personal motives of his central characters with a nuanced understanding of the effects of the Great Depression and the economic conditions of the 1930s on their desires, needs, and aspirations. These considerations can be seen both in the relationships between Ben Stark, the central protagonist of the play, and his male co-workers, and in the relationship between Stark and Cleo Singer, his secretary. If Rocket to the Moon should indeed be seen as a highly personal play in which the socio-economic conditions of the Great Depression serve as a backdrop to the interpersonal relations that compel its plot, then attention must be paid to the interrelationship between these two

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drives. Nowhere are these potentially contradictory impulses more apparent than in the character of Cleo Singer. From the very beginning of the play, issues of economics are highly evident. The play begins with an argument between Stark and his wife, Belle, about Stark’s desire to expand his dental practice by moving his ofﬁces to a more afﬂuent area of town and to specialize as an orthodontist. For a mixture of personal and ﬁnancial reasons, Belle does not want Stark to give up the security of his comfortable and moderately successful practice. Much of the remaining action of the play—particularly Stark’s affair with Cleo—can be understood to stem from Belle’s successful attempt to persuade Stark to remain where he is. Frustrated with his lot in life, Stark embarks on an affair with Cleo because she signiﬁes the possibility of change that Stark has been denied in his professional life. As Gabriel Miller suggests, Cleo ‘‘inhabit[s] a world beyond the Depression-decimated experience of the other characters’’ who live in a ‘‘world of loneliness, pain, separation, and exile.’’ While characters such as Frenchy and Cooper symbolize potentially moribund futures for Stark, Cleo offers the possibility of escape. She is, as Prince suggests, the ‘‘rocket to the

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FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE PLAY, CLEO SINGER SYMBOLIZES THE COLLATION OF THE PERSONAL AND THE ECONOMIC, AND HER PERSONAL VALUE IS EQUATED—OFTEN AMBIGUOUSLY—TO AN ECONOMICS OF CONSUMPTION IN WHICH THE INTERPERSONAL AND THE SOCIOECONOMIC WORLDS OF THE PLAY ARE BROUGHT TOGETHER.’’

moon’’ that will free Stark from his quotidian troubles and reinvigorate him. However, Cleo is an ambiguous outlet for Stark’s frustrations, both because of the ways in which Stark understands her and because she has her own desires and ambitions. In as much as Cleo embodies a symbol of escape for Stark, she is repeatedly imagined as an item available for consumption; the interpretation of Cleo as edible, expendable, or consumable is one of the most consistent patterns in the play. Indeed, each of the central male characters likens her to a commodity on at least one occasion. The idea that Cleo is a commodity available for consumption by the play’s male characters is expressed almost immediately when, in her ﬁrst conversation with Prince, Cleo says that she wants to be a dancer and that she has appeared on stage in a number of shows. As Cleo desires to use her own body as a commodity by becoming a dancer, each of the male characters refers to her at some point during the play in relation to food, something to be consumed and discarded. Moments later, Cleo seems to reject the position that her aspiration to be a dancer seems to establish, telling Prince that she does not ‘‘have to stand in Macy’s window.’’ In this reference to the famous New York department store, Cleo’s status in the play as an item of consumption is concretely established for the ﬁrst time. Despite her assertions to Prince in which she rejects the position as a consumable object, however, Cleo is repeatedly understood to be such by the play’s male characters. From the

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very beginning of the play, Cleo Singer symbolizes the collation of the personal and the economic, and her personal value is equated—often ambiguously— to an economics of consumption in which the interpersonal and the socioeconomic worlds of the play are brought together. Cleo’s youth and vitality stand in marked contrast to the vituperated natures of each of the play’s male characters and to the barren nature of Stark’s wife, Belle. Stark is undergoing a mid-life crisis, Prince is an old man, Frenchy is incapable of sustaining a romantic relationship, and Cooper has been turned into a shell of a man consumed by failure. Belle cannot bear children, is seen as a drain on Stark’s vitality, and has sapped him of his professional aspirations. Cleo, on the other hand, has a ‘‘jingling body’’ and, as Wax tells her, is ‘‘fresh and alive.’’ Quoting Shakespeare, Stark tells her that she is ‘‘green and fresh in this old world,’’ explicitly contrasting her youth to the aridity of the lives of the men she is surrounded by. Prince calls Cleo a ‘‘girl like candy,’’ comparing her youth to a food most commonly associated with children, something sweet but lacking in nutritional value. References such as these that equate Cleo to food and perishable consumables are not the only ways in which Cleo is symbolized as a source of life in the play. Cleo also brings Stark glasses of water from the water cooler and waters the geraniums he is unable to keep alive by himself. While Cleo stands in contrast to the male characters—young and full of vitality—her youthful charms are also understood to be temporary. As Herr suggests, the association of Cleo with ‘‘the natural abundance of fruit’’ is ‘‘ambivalent at best.’’ By associating her youthfulness with fruit, a commodity with a ﬁnite shelf life, Odets is revealing the limitation in these virtues as much as he is holding them up as possible routes of escape for men such as Stark and Prince. This, indeed, is the opinion of Cleo’s virtues held by Frenchy, who tells her, when he is warning her not to ruin Stark’s life, that he ‘‘knows the difference between love and pound cake.’’ Cleo’s appeal, Frenchy believes, is one that will fade as she ages and the luster of her youthful vitality wears away. Of all the characters in the play, Frenchy is the most hostile to Cleo’s presence and speaks of her most often in negative terms. For example, he tells her that he gave her the job as receptionist in ‘‘a moment of aberration’’ because she pushed her ‘‘jingling body in [his] face.’’ Later in the play he calls her ‘‘Juicy Fruit’’ and likens her to a spider weaving a web. For Frenchy, then,

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Cleo’s charms should not be trusted. Frenchy sees Cleo as a distraction from the real business of men’s lives. The inherent ambivalence of the imagery associated with Cleo is further complicated by the fact that she stands at the close of the play as the only character who is able to escape the dentist’s ofﬁce. Of the play’s central characters, Cleo alone is able to see a life for herself beyond the horizons of Stark’s waiting room. ‘‘I’m a girl,’’ she tells Stark and Prince at the close of the play, ‘‘and I want to be a woman.’’ She has learned that the options presented to her by both Stark and Prince—to wait in vain for Stark to leave his wife or to enter a loveless marriage of convenience with Prince—will take more out of her than she will gain in return. As the focus of the play shifts from Stark to Cleo (as it does in the third act), she rejects the way she has been used by the men and insists that she is more than a commodity to be eaten up and spat out. ‘‘No man can take a bite out of me, like an apple and throw it away,’’ she tells Wax after their failed date, and this sentiment applies equally to Stark and Prince. Moreover, this statement echoes the claim she makes to Prince at the beginning of the play that she does not have to ‘‘stand in Macy’s window.’’ Source: Doreen Piano, Critical Essay on Rocket to the Moon, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Margaret Brenman-Gibson In the following essay excerpt, Brenman-Gibson explores how Rocket to the Moon marks a ‘‘shift from the emotional currency of economics and politics to that of psychology,’’ and traces how emotional themes in Odets’s own life inﬂuenced the play. We must not lose sight of the fact that the creative process is not ﬁnally consummated until the artist’s experience—given form on paper, on canvas, or in stone—has reached an audience. Most particularly, the dramatist, that most topical of artists, must feel that he has succeeded in obliterating boundaries and established a union with the group assembled to watch his play. Proceeding from this assumption, the position of Rocket to the Moon in 1938—in Odets’ personal history as well as in the history of American drama—is pivotal. While, to be sure, even in so manifestly agitational a play as his early and slight strike play, Waiting for Lefty, Odets’ characters and dialogue are already characteristically vivacious, electric, and original, the shift from the emotional currency of economics and politics to

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that of psychology ﬁrst becomes evident in Rocket to the Moon. This cogwheeling of an artist’s personal themes with those of his society determines (aside from the size of his gift) his success or failure in his lifetime. It is not unusual that there is a lag in either direction. The manifest spine of the play Rocket is no longer politically messianic: unlike Odets’ early plays, addressed to the oppressed international proletariat, pleading with them to ‘‘awake and sing’’ in economic liberation; the appeal is, rather, for creative liberation. Odets told director Harold Clurman it was about ‘‘love and marriage.’’ On the one hand, this shift clearly reﬂects Odets’ own struggles with the crisis of intimacy. But that is not all. The cogwheeling turn of history was changing his audience: those who in 1935 had looked for ultimate salvation in the theory of Marx, the activities of the ‘‘working class,’’ and the model of the Soviet Union were becoming progressively cynical and wary. The peaceloving Russian comrades—hitherto embraced by idealistic Americans as apostles of the realization of individual potential and dignity—had lately made a pact of mutual defense with ‘‘imperialist’’ France, and, worse, had begun the systematic extermination of their own domestic enemies. The barbarous Moscow trials of these ‘‘enemies’’ were leaving an increasingly bitter taste, straining the loyalty of even the most devoted of American fellow travelers. In short, there no longer existed so credulous an audience as the one that had risen in joyous unison at the close of Waiting for Lefty to shout, ‘‘Strike!’’ The major critics dimly understood Odets’ shift away from the manifestly political as a ‘‘landmark in his growth.’’ Those writing for the communist press—missing entirely the point of the play: a plea for the liberation of creativity—mourned that he had given over his ‘‘magniﬁcent ﬂair for character study and dialogue’’ to such bourgeois concerns as ‘‘love and marriage.’’ Of the ﬁrst-line critics, only the sagacious Joseph Wood Krutch, writing for The Nation, understood the nature of Odets’ evolution as a playwright and the resultant shifts within himself, and, accordingly, the nature of his transactions with an equally changing audience: ‘‘The tendency still persists to make of Clifford Odets and his plays a political issue. That, I think, is a pity from any point of view now that the facts are becoming increasingly clear. Whatever his opinions may have been or, for that matter, may still be, those opinions are shared by many, while Mr. Odets reveals a gift for characterization and a gift for incisive dialogue

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CLEO, THE STORYTELLER— THE ARTIST—BECOMES NOW (PSYCHOLOGICALLY) THE CENTRAL IDENTITY ELEMENT IN THE PLAY, THOUGH NOT YET THE CENTRAL

the girl. The idea for this play had come to him, Odets said, when he was sitting in a dentist’s chair looking at the equipment and the water cooler, and wondering what kinds of emotional life were concealed behind the numb routines of this ofﬁce and behind the constricted face of the meek little dentist himself. Early notes, written by Odets at a time when he began to be in conscious conﬂict over his marriage, indicate the central theme would be ‘‘about love and marriage in America.’’

CHARACTER IN ITS FORMAL STRUCTURE.’’

unapproached by any of his Marxian fellows and hardly equaled by any other American playwright.’’ Another central point made by Krutch was that Odets—and correspondingly his audience—had gradually shifted from the manifestly political to the psychological arena. Keeping in mind as scaffolding Erikson’s new perspectives on the dream as well as his fourfold complementarity (that is, the writer’s history and his present stage of life plus the present state of his society and its history), I proceed to our play specimen. Odets’ ﬁrst jottings for Rocket to the Moon, made in 1937 when he was thirty-one, outline a play whose sensory quality and affective atmosphere are immediately reﬂected in its wasteland setting: in sharp contrast to the play’s title, the space is tightly, even suffocatingly, bounded. People and ﬂowers alike thirst, are dead, constricted, manifestly allowing little room for locomotion, ‘‘play,’’ or growth. With fewer characters than ever before, he gives these again neutral ‘‘American’’ names of indeterminate national origins. His earliest scribbled notes indicate Odets’ conscious intention to create as the protagonist of Rocket to the Moon, a frightened, ineffectual, submerged little dentist named Ben Stark, a man in a ‘‘mid-life crisis,’’ torn between his controlling, sterile wife and his juicy, aspiring secretary, and bitterly disappointed in his creative aspirations. Initially, it appeared the central action of the play would be his. The fourth, and perhaps the richest character is his wife’s father, Judah Prince, a man of the world, determined to ‘‘have love’’ before he dies. A man who prides himself on knowing ‘‘how to talk to a headwaiter,’’ he is the dentist’s rival for

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By way of this specimen play analysis, I will provide data which illustrate the two major hypotheses: ﬁrst, that play always deals at some level with the playwright’s view, conscious and unconscious, of the nature of the creative process itself, and secondly, that the playwright’s distribution of himself (of his identity elements), constitute the cast of characters, their conﬂicts and resolutions reﬂecting the playwright’s effort via Form to bring these dualities into harmony, restoring wholeness where there was conﬂict. Over a year had elapsed after his ﬁrst notes for Rocket, at the end of which time Odets’ own efforts at a faithful intimacy were reaching a bitter climax in the crumbling of his marriage. In response to his coldly detached reply to her telegraphed announcement from Hollywood that she was pregnant, his wife had aborted their ﬁrst and only child. Odets had ﬂed with the company of Golden Boy from New York to London, and in the fall of 1938, now thirtytwo, he drove alone to Canada, carrying with him, in addition to the few notes written the year before the ‘‘dentist play,’’ the manuscript of his labor play, as well as the play about the Cuban revolution. It is evident his necessity is to work, preferably on material manifestly tied to the ongoing historic upheavals. In his ‘‘General Notes,’’ from 1938, he had written: ‘‘The invasion of Prague, from news dispatches. Crowds of thousands stood, weeping silently, and then spontaneously broke into their national anthem! A policeman outside the city hall tried desperately to direct trafﬁc but was too blinded by his tears. Many of the Czechs covered their faces with their hands and turned away at the ﬁrst sight of the German troops. Well, can a writer write in the face of these things? Yes, he must write in the face of these things!’’ It troubled him, however, that a formal vessel by means of which he might explicitly unite these large and somber historic events to his own emotional urgencies continued to elude him. Finally, he stopped work on the manifestly ‘‘social-historical’’

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plays—all of which took as their theme the beginning of the end of the American Dream—and concentrated instead on what appeared to be the strictly ‘‘personal’’ struggles of three ordinary and lonely people, with Ben Stark, the passive, submerged dentist, trying to ﬁnd sufﬁcient courage to ‘‘take life by the throat’’ by having an affair with his childlike, attractive, and aspiring secretary, Cleo Singer. It is implied that his stiﬂed growth—his generativity— will thereby be given new impetus and he will escape the feeling he has ‘‘blown it.’’

with saying, ‘‘Undertake the visionary, the impossible.’’ He says to the only half-alive dentist, ‘‘Explode, take a rocket to the moon!’’ supplying here the title for the play eagerly awaited by director Harold Clurman and then-actor, Elia Kazan.

In the playwright’s original outline, written only a few weeks after his wedding, and during the ﬁrst of many separations, the dentist’s secretary succeeds in detaching Stark from his wife. After a year of intense emotional negotiation, Odets’ own marriage all but ﬁnished, he found as he was rewriting this play that the character, Cleo, had begun to take center stage away from Ben and to evolve as the ‘‘identity element’’ by now familiar to me from his earliest juvenile writing: the aspiring, unformed, even damaged, artist, or—as he liked to call her— ‘‘the moral idealist,’’ whose growth is in steady jeopardy of becoming fraudulent, or crippled by a premature restriction of options, manipulated by the seductive and worldly American businessman whose own innocence and idealism, like that of America, has long since disappeared.

So delighted were the Group Theatre actors that Odets had ﬁnally brought his new play that they swallowed their disappointment that he had completed only two acts. All agreed the three major characters were among his best and most mature yet. Director Clurman found himself, however, unsettled by what appeared from these two acts to be a signiﬁcant shift away from the original plan of the play about a constricted man who stops ‘‘playing it safe’’ and who bursts his bonds by a union with a liberating young anima, the girl Cleo. ‘‘Awakened’’ by his love for this girl, Odets had said, he would undergo a ravaging depth of experience which, despite the girl’s childish self-absorption, would increase his stature as a man and propel the growth hitherto blocked. As Clurman now listened to Odets read his ﬁrst two acts, it appeared to him that subtly, the play’s center—without sufﬁcient psychological justiﬁcation in Odets’ development of her character—had shifted to the girl Cleo and that the play’s focus had radically changed from that of a man torn between two women to a girl freeing herself from two men.

The dentist, Stark, a ‘‘second-class professional,’’ is a man who reads Shakespeare, but who would—according to Odets’ notes—be frightened even to get a passport and who ‘‘plays it safe’’ in his own work. He is in competition for this girl Cleo (that is, for the identity element we can call Odets’ Muse) with his father-in-law, who decisively proclaims, with no trace of his son-in-law’s shame and doubt, ‘‘I want what I want!’’ This is the polarity between that aspect of Odets’ identity structure which (like his mother’s) is deadened by a fearful, proper, and obsessional paralysis, and his insistence on a full, joyful, and maximal experience of life which would ‘‘exclude nothing,’’ and which he thought would therefore be ‘‘disobedient’’ and ‘‘evil.’’ Advising the meek Ben Stark he is an iceberg, half-dead, who excludes so much from awareness and action that there is no ‘‘play’’ in him, the older man recommends to the younger that he regain elbow room, leeway, and, thus, vitality before it’s too late: ‘‘You’ll be dead soon enough.’’ Judah Prince concludes with an extraordinarily bold, locomotive proposal which in 1938 was synonymous

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The other pole of Odets’ conﬂict is jotted in a ‘‘production note’’ in the margin: ‘‘Motto: ‘You don’t easily give up a home if you have been an orphan.’’’ This caution issues from a person terriﬁed to make a great leap lest he fall into an abyss.

Moreover, with a new prominence for the worldly Prince (a man who recommends himself as someone who ‘‘don’t look foolish before authority’’), quite a different triangle had been created, with the aspiring girl instead of the frightened dentist at its apex. The play’s theme had originally centered on the question of whether the timid and dependently vulnerable man could break through the enveloping, dead wasteland of his static and submerged existence by an explosive and creative thrust (a ‘‘rocket to the moon’’) toward a fresh, young (amorphously talented), girl in quest of both love and of self-expression. It had been conceived as the man’s play, and the struggle was to be his. Now, the theme appeared to have moved from him to the girl even as Odets had moved from his failed struggle for intimacy with his wife to the broader issues of his own creativity or generativity: Carrying the responsibility for the recent destruction of

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his ﬁrst unborn biological child, he deeply feared that his stagnation would extend to his ‘‘brainchildren’’ as well. The character, Cleo, his Muse, now bore the burden of reestablishing his generativity. It was disquietingly clear to director Clurman that something signiﬁcant in Odets’ emotional life had intervened between the ﬁrst outline of this play and the present two acts, throwing out of kilter the formal dramatic structure. He devoutly hoped the still unwritten third act would dispel his fear that the character, Cleo, had run away with the play, confusing its formal structure sufﬁciently to sabotage both its aesthetic unity and its commercial success. An interesting question for study here is: how had an experienced playwright of great skill begun with one play and ended with another? For over a year, Odets had been seriously blocked in his work, had had a dismaying sense of loss of emotional connection to his wife and of creative connection to the growing crisis in the immediate events of world history. He sensed only dimly that the deeper connection in his current work to the unfolding of history lay in its reﬂection of an increasingly urgent conﬂict between the values of salesmanship and an innocent creativity. His notes suggest he was seeing both his wife and his father as ‘‘the enemy,’’ while ﬁnding it increasingly difﬁcult to identify ‘‘the enemy’’ as a simple, politicaleconomic order with which he could do battle as he had in the past. The references in Rocket to the villainy of the economic system are perfunctory and hollow. Now that his marriage was coming to an end, it must have appeared to him that, despite his loneliness and shame at this failure, he had a second chance, a fresh start in his primary—his most ‘‘real’’—self-identity as an honest artist, if not as a husband or father. His anima (Cleo) says, ‘‘It’s getting late to play at life: I want to live it . . . something has to feel real.’’ It is as if Odets falls back to an earlier stage in his development and hopes this time for a ﬁrmer resolution at least of his work identity and for a renewal of his generativity as playwright. He will ﬁnd the ‘‘real reality’’ in his brain-children, a safer fatherhood, he felt, than of a ﬂesh-and-blood baby. In Rocket to the moon, for the ﬁrst time in his life, Odets was writing a play which does not culminate in some kind of crippling or catastrophe: injury to his creative ‘‘hands,’’ suicide, or death. A key tragedy of his childhood, it will be recalled, was

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the ‘‘abandonment’’ of him by his mother in favor of his crippled sister. It is this personal sense of disinheritance which had cogwheeled with the collective sense of disinheritance in the Depression era. Rocket is a desperate turn to a psychological instead of an economic deliverance. It is an adumbration of the reach in American cultural history—three decades later—toward self-actualizing (inner) values. In Golden Boy, written by Odets the year before, Joe Bonaparte, who has irrevocably lost himself as a violinist by crippling his hands in a prizeﬁght, cries out in a climactic, locomotor deﬁance of gravity, ‘‘We’re off the earth!’’ and—while the ‘‘money-men’’ are dividing shares of him—the speeding automobile incinerates Joe and his girl in Babylon, Long Island. It is the paradigm of the price paid for the machines and the worldly values inherent in the American dream. Here, while there recurs the image of an escape from the constricting pull of a ‘‘Mother Earth,’’ it is in a rocket, a machine even more powerful than an automobile and this time with the intrepid thrust of a conﬁdent citizen of a virile, technological worldpower. The emotional tone of the rocket image is not suicidal but freely adventurous and open; of a man still on an explosive American frontier. With the impulsive surge of personal liberation from the constrictions of immigrant terror, the image is of a twentieth-century American conquistador planting his ﬂag in unmapped territory (the feminine moon). Wholly different from the apocalyptic locomotor image which closes Golden Boy, or even from that of a businesslike astronaut, a ‘‘rocket to the moon’’ is ﬁlled with hope, initiative, and even a promise of a peak experience of freedom. I wish there were space to discuss Rocket to the Moon ‘‘beat by beat.’’ Only by following each of its dramatic moves in microscopic detail is it possible to see the speciﬁcity with which the data support the two working hypotheses I propose. I will try here to state the essentials. With a pace and a focus of intent rare in dramatic literature, Odets manages in the ﬁrst distilled ‘‘beat’’ of the very ﬁrst scene to get into the heart of the play’s conﬂict and its apparent theme: there is an immediate confrontation between the frightened, isolated dentist, Ben Stark and his scolding wife, Belle. Their conﬂict commences in a sensory web of heat and claustrophobic imprisonment. He wants to ‘‘specialize,’’ to grow, and she, like Odets’ father, gives practical reasons against it, reasons which stiﬂe his growth. By a most eco-

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nomic exchange, the playwright ends the ﬁrst round, with the controlling wife, Belle, the victor. Indeed, she has won even before the play opens and when she concludes the opening beat with, ‘‘Any day now I’m expecting to have to powder and diaper you,’’ she has established herself as the parent, the boss, the obstacle in the path of the aspiring Ben Stark’s creative growth. As the play opens the conﬂict between these two—husband and wife—appears to be its theme. The connective tissue of the play, as in a musical fugue, derives from fragments of this announced theme: Belle says her husband must not simply agree to do as she says; he must also ‘‘see that I am right,’’ play it safe, and not try to expand his practice and creative work. He, who was once a ‘‘pioneer with Gladstone in orthodontia’’ (in making straight and whole that which is crooked) has already lowered his creative sights to tooth pulling and to cultivating petunias in a ﬂower box, and his income to one-tenth of what ‘‘men with half my brains and talent are making.’’ ‘‘If he had to go get a passport, it would become a terriﬁc event in his life.’’ The fact that he is a dentist, not a doctor, is already a comedown in the ‘‘good prototypes’’ of Jewish middle-class life. But Belle does not approve his creative collaboration with Gladstone in dentistry, any more than did Odets’ father approve of Harry Kemp or his wife Luise Rainer approve his association with Clurman in the Group Theatre. Even Ben’s last-ditch attempts to nurture (to generate) his sadly drooping little ﬂowers which his secretary calls his ‘‘orphan babies’’ are immediately revealed in the ﬁrst few minutes as fumbling and inept: STARK: I wanted to do something . . . what was it? nor a drink . . . Oh, the ﬂowers! (He ﬁlls a paper cup, puts his pipe between his teeth and tries without success, one hand full to ﬁll a second cup.) BELLE: Try one at a time, dear. STARK: (Coolly) One at a time is a good idea. (At the window, right, he pours the water on a window box of drooping petunias. As he turns for more water he faces Belle who has brought him a second cupful.) Thanks. BELLE: (Smiling) Anyday now I’m expecting to have to powder and diaper you.

In these few lines between the initial major player and counterplayer, the husband and wife, there stands a distilled illustration of the way a playwright juggles and adjusts the conﬂicts and the ‘‘moves’’ of his internal ‘‘gallery of characters’’—

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that is, of his own identity elements and fragment— to the external masks of the people in his past and present worlds. In this short exchange much is reﬂected: Odets’ conviction at that time that his wife—like his father— chronically wished to criticize, denigrate, and control him and his work (Ben’s petunias), as well as to convert, reform, and direct him. There are reﬂected other paradigms as well. Odets has condensed in the dentist’s relation to his controlling, depressed wife not only his own responses to his father’s tyranny, but also to the mood of his melancholy mother and the steady (internalized) combat between his parents. Were it not for the fact of Odets’ own struggle between his longing to surrender, abdicating all autonomy, initiative, and responsibility (as he had long ago sat obediently for hours on his little chair, waiting), and his impulse to ‘‘explode,’’ there would be no conﬂict and no play. In his production notes, Odets wrote of Stark, ‘‘He is a man who suffers because he can’t make important decisions easily . . . fears scenes and ﬁghts. . . . If he feels it is a matter of principle, he can stand up, otherwise, he may cave in. . . . Principle is a shield where the self can be forgotten.’’ Ben Stark’s physical ineptitude, his indecisiveness, an expression of Odets’ own sense of incompetence, like his mother’s, takes its contemporary external shape, however, from Clurman’s clumsiness in practical undertakings. It was a steady source of banter in the Group Theatre that Clurman— like Ben Stark—could scarcely open a package of cigarettes, was unable to use a can-opener, and would say ‘‘Hello’’ without picking up the telephone receiver. Odets often said, ‘‘Gadg Kazan is Harold’s muscle and his legs.’’ Odets, himself, consciously thought of Ben Stark’s meek obedience to his wife’s disdainful will (‘‘You win, you win,’’ he says to her wearily) as simply a literal copy of Clurman’s compliance with the powerful Stella Adler. Not so. These characters are all conﬁgurations and subconﬁgurations of identity elements with Odets’ own self, organized long before he met Clurman or Stella Adler. Such are the complexities of joining an inner gallery of characters with the playwright’s actual contemporaries from whom he is said to have ‘‘taken’’ his cast of characters. This is a good example of how misleading it is to make a one-to-one biographic correlation between the playwright as protagonist, and the people in his life as ‘‘supporting cast.’’ To be sure, those in

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the playwright’s life space, most especially members of a family, or even of a gifted acting company like the Group Theatre, call out his own internal ‘‘gallery,’’ providing the masks for the characters who people his play. It is no accident, for example, that actor Morris Carnovsky always played the ‘‘spiritual’’ parts in Odets’ plays, while Kazan was usually cast, as Odets put it, as the ‘‘original getahead boy.’’ Odets regularly used each of the Group Theatre members as a mask for his own warring identity elements and fragments, and was actually helped to create whole persons (lovingly and fully) by reason of the independent existence of these excellent actors. As the play moves on through this ﬁrst act, with the playwright keeping the polyphonic conﬂicts alive while offering expository material, minor characters, crackling dialogue, and lovely jokes, we see reverberations not only of Odets’ struggles with his wife and of his grief about their aborted child, but also of his own earlier trail of dead or aborted children, creative as well as biological. This is a play in which the people steadily reveal themselves. Belle Prince Stark, ironically calling herself ‘‘your terrible wife,’’ as Odets’ wife, in fact, often had— says, in Luise Rainer’s actual words, ‘‘You have to love me all the time . . . a woman wants to live with a man, not next to him,’’ adding she has been ‘‘blue all morning,’’ thinking of their dead baby. Throughout this ﬁrst act of Rocket to the Moon, it is evident that the playwright initially intended the central question to be: Will this frightened individual summon the courage to break his bondage and fulﬁll his life by a love affair or will he play it safe, abdicate his growth, and be like the enslaved immigrant who continues to the end (in the words of Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman) to ‘‘passionately hate his life and likewise fear his death?’’ After the initial victory in the ﬁrst scene of the wife (Belle) over the husband (Ben), the girl (Cleo) enters, and the play appears ready again to move forward. We are forewarned, however, of the increasing imbalance in the play’s structure by the fact that the protagonist (Ben Stark) is, from the beginning, the least interesting character. He is the quiet observer, the static center, and, if the playwright had maintained him as the central character, the play would never have moved forward. Moreover, we have seen early hints that the new triangle is building, with the two men competing for the girl. While it is difﬁcult to care what will happen between Ben and the sexy, stockingless Cleo Singer,

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dressed in ‘‘angel-skin satin,’’ the interchange between the passionate old man and this girl is from the outset arresting, enlivening, and involving. Clearly it is in their relationship that the playwright sees the formidable threat to the American artist: in the struggle between worldly and creative values. To the extent that it was difﬁcult for the audience to see Cleo as a symbol of creativity, to that extent was the play a failure. Obviously unsuited to her job and as inefﬁcient in it as Odets in his youth had been in all of his, Cleo is like him, an insecure name-dropper and fabricator; she lies that her mother was an opera singer (her surname) in Europe and that ‘‘I come from a wellto-do family . . . I really don’t need this job.’’ Later, Ben says to her, ‘‘Everyone tells little fables, Cleo. Sometimes to themselves, sometimes to others. Life is so full of brutal facts . . . we all try to soften them by making believe.’’ Cleo, the storyteller—the artist—becomes now (psychologically) the central identity element in the play, though not yet the central character in its formal structure. The fables she tells are the effort to make life bearable by ‘‘making believe.’’ Precisely this is the work of a playwright: to make himself and other people believe in a reality he creates. Manifestly, however, at this early stage of the game, Cleo appears to be no more than a shallow rival to the oppressive Belle Prince Stark who is simultaneously patrolling many beats, strengthening her hand not only against the girl in this ﬁrst triangle but on all those who are making her husband’s ofﬁce ‘‘inefﬁcient.’’ She is calling everyone to heel and trying to hold her barren fort in a status-quo position. As she leaves the ofﬁce, we are introduced to the play’s third major character, Mr. Judah Prince. Odets describes him in terms clearly recognizable as belonging to his father, L. J. Odets, yet with more affection and empathy than usual. Consciously, he thought he had modeled this character after Stella Adler’s father, tragedian Jacob Adler, attorney Max Steuer, and the Yiddish actor, Tomashevsky: ‘‘He is near sixty, wears an old panama hat, a ﬁne Palm Beach suit of twenty years ago and a malacca cane. There is about him the dignity and elegant portliness of a Jewish actor, a sort of aristocratic air. He is an extremely self-conﬁdent man with a strong sense of humor which, however, is often veiled. He is very alive in the eyes and mouth, the rest of him relaxed and heavy.’’ His daughter no longer speaks to him because of the dreadful life he had given her dead mother, a punitive silence to be meted out much later by Odets

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to his own father. ‘‘I am the American King Lear,’’ says Mr. Prince, whose dreams of self-realization— like the secret aspiration of the senior Odets to be a writer—have come to nothing: ‘‘In our youth we collect materials to build a bridge to the moon,’’ Stark comments, ‘‘but in our old age we use the materials to build a shack.’’ The charged excitement between the sensual, worldly old man and the aspiring young person (read, artist)—as so often in an Odets play—is immediate and unmistakable; as it was between the equivalent characters of Moe and Hennie in Awake and Sing! or gangster Eddie Fuseli and ﬁghtermusician Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy. Structurally, it is clear something new is starting here: The old man tells the girl he likes her honesty and that ‘‘everything that’s healthy is personal.’’ He adds (as Odets’ father often said of himself and his son) that he and she are identical. She aspires to being a dancer and he, ‘‘without marriage’’ could have been, he thinks, ‘‘a great actor.’’ He was also once, he tells her, an idealist. In all of this, the old man is clearly making a move toward the girl. Structurally, by dint of this move, the play has shifted ground: alongside the original triangle of husband, wife, and aspirant girl there stands now a new one: that of husband, aspirant girl, and father-in-law. Prince, like Odets’ father, announces he has been made to ‘‘play safe’’ by his wife even as Belle (his daughter) now urges Ben, her husband to do. (‘‘A housewife rules your destiny,’’ says Prince to Stark, adding he had ‘‘disappeared in the corner with the dust, under the rug’’ and lives a dull life ‘‘where every day is Monday.’’) Although Judah Prince boasts that he still earns money, he bitterly asks to whom shall he leave it all, ‘‘to Jascha Heifetz?’’ Addressing himself, and simultaneously his son-in-law, he asks, ‘‘Is this the life you dreamed?’’ The answer is no, he thinks, for both of them and the path to salvation is clear: PRINCE: (Suddenly turning, hand on door knob, pointing his cane at Stark and lowering his voice to a near whisper) Iceberg, listen . . . why don’t you come up and see the world, the sea gulls and the ships to Europe? (Coming back into the room) When did you look at another woman last? The year they put the buffalo nickel on the market? Why don’t you suddenly ride away, an airplane, a boat! Take a rocket to the moon! Explode! What holds you back? You don’t want to hurt Belle’s feelings? You’ll die soon enough. . . . STARK: I’ll just have to laugh at that! PRINCE: Laugh . . . but make a motto for yourself: ‘‘Out of the cofﬁn by Labor Day!’’ Have an affair

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with—with—this girl . . . this Miss Cleo. She’ll make you a living man again.

By making himself one ﬂesh with an innocent, growing girl, Prince assures Ben he will be creatively activated by sex, a formula often alternated by Odets, in his own frenzied life, with sexual abstinence. It is as if (some of the time) he regarded the feminine aspect of himself as the source of his generativity which would be brought to life by sexual union. This element is in conﬂict with that of the worldly American businessman who, though magnetic, is ruthless, exploitative, senses-bound, self-centered, lonely and fundamentally out of touch with his own creativity, with the ‘‘play’’ in himself. By reason of his richness, this character, Judah Prince, threatens to ‘‘run away’’ with Rocket to the Moon, as does his equivalent character in so many of Odets’ plays. Act One closes with the inhibited Ben Stark looking out at the ‘‘Hotel Algiers,’’ modeled after the seamy Columbus Circle Hotel of Odets’s youth (a symbol to him of sexual vitality and forbidden freedom). At the windows of this teeming place, he used literally to peep at ‘‘real life,’’ in order, he reasoned, to gather material for his plays. As Cleo leaves, she reminds Ben of his dreary cofﬁn of an existence: ‘‘Your wife expects you home at seven.’’ It is not these routines Odets fears, rather it is that in the ‘‘real’’ intimacy of marriage he will disappear as an artist. (‘‘A man falls asleep in marriage,’’ says Ben.) Thus Odets, on some level, is convinced that a continuing intimacy with a woman threatens his creativity. The second act of Rocket to the Moon opens in sharp contrast to the ﬁrst: the girl, Cleo is offering Ben cool water to comfort him in the hellish heat of this summer. Unlike his wife, who wants him to play life safe, she does not deprive him, ﬁght him, seek to reform, and ultimately to possess and control, him as though he were her lost baby. Indeed, Cleo expresses her own reassuring determination never to marry: ‘‘It’s too sordid,’’ she says. By now, it is becoming apparent to Mr. Prince that his obsessive son-in-law—whose mentor for a fuller life he has tried to be—will not leave his wife, nor even seek to renew himself by having an affair— with Cleo. Accordingly, he makes his own dramatic ‘‘move,’’ and, in a richly ornamented (indeed brilliant) scene of power and restraint, he is on the seductive attack. Like Odets himself, he is a ‘‘student of the human insect,’’ ﬂirting, teasing, and promising. He tells her she is ‘‘talking to a man with

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a body like silk’’ who ‘‘possesses the original teeth, every one’’ (he has no need for a dentist!), and ‘‘in all the multitudes of your acquaintanceship you won’t ﬁnd a man with younger ideas than your present speaker.’’ True, he wears high-heeled shoes because ‘‘I don’t like to be so small,’’ but if she will put herself in his hands, he will help her to learn and to grow. Just as in Awake and Sing!, where the powerful racketeer Moe Axelrod offers Havana on a silver platter to the girl Hennie, or in Golden Boy where gangster Eddie Fuseli promises fame and fortune to the violinist-ﬁghter Joe, and the gangster Kewpie, a soft life to Libby in Paradise Lost, so now does Mr. Prince offer Cleo not only his money but his deep understanding of her needs (‘‘My girl, I studied you like a scientist’’). This same identity element would assume the form of the Hollywood ﬁlm executive in Odets’ later play, The Big Knife. The price, in each play, for material power (that is, attachment to the sense, not to money) is surrender of one’s integrity and freedom. Cleo, like an identity element of Odets himself, is naive, quick to take offense, frightened, fragile, and unsupported. She fears ridicule for her yearning to become a dancer (a clear echo of L. J. Odets’ taunts to his son when he aspired to being an actor) and is convinced no one loves her: ‘‘Millions of people moving around the city and nobody cares if you live or die.’’ She will, in revenge (as Odets had often, in fact, contemplated) ‘‘fall down on them all,’’ from a high building. It takes courage, says the girl, a courage she is not sure the dentist has, ‘‘to go out to things, to new experiences,’’ to seek an expansion, an intensiﬁcation of life: of one’s consciousness and expression (‘‘Don’t you think,’’ she says, ‘‘life is to live all you can and experience everything? Shouldn’t a wife help a man do that? . . . your wife broke up your courage.’’) Cleo clearly speaks Odets’ struggle to establish himself as the ‘‘center of awareness in a universe of experience,’’ unfettered by arbitrary inner and outer restriction. It is an innocent expression of Erikson’s description of the very nature of ‘‘I-ness.’’ A minor character cries, ‘‘Diphtheria gets more respect than me . . . why can’t they ﬁt me in, a man of my talents?’’ The nineteen-year-old Cleo replies, ‘‘Just because you’re sad you can’t make me sad. No one can. I have too much in me! . . . I have a throat to sing with, a heart to love with! Why don’t you love me Dr. Stark?’’ Ben, like Odets, smiles

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when he can’t meet a situation. As this ﬁrst scene in Act Two ends, Cleo announces that not Stark ‘‘or any other man’’ deserves her. This statement turns the central theme of the play from an inhibited dentist’s struggle over whether to have an affair, to the aspiration of a young, unfulﬁlled artist. Taking this initiative, her answer to the question ‘‘how should one live?’’—boldly or timidly—is unmistakable: CLEO: (Shyly) I’ll call you Benny in a minute! (after a throb of hesitation) Ben! Benny! . . . (They are standing off from each other, poised on needles) Don’t be afraid. . . . STARK: . . . No? . . . CLEO: Love me. . . . Love me, Ben. STARK: . . . Can’t do that. . . . CLEO: (Moving forward a step) Put your arms up and around me. STARK: Cleo. . . . (Now they move in on each other. Everything else gone, they are together in a full, ﬁerce embrace, together in a swelter of heat, misunderstanding, loneliness, and simple sex.)

The initiative must come from the girl; had Odets left it to the paralyzed identity element represented by the character of Stark, nothing would happen. Cleo, like Odets, always afraid of repudiation, is for the moment conﬁrmed, and Ben Stark is breaking his long sleep to give rein to his impulse, with this girl. Perhaps, he dreams, it will restore his ‘‘power for accomplishment’’ lost through ‘‘unhappy marriage.’’ A man who ‘‘don’t get much personal satisfaction out of his work . . . is a lost man.’’ Another minor character who functions psychologically as a negative identity fragment in the play ‘‘glistens with arrogance.’’ He, too, is trying to seduce Cleo, whose ‘‘jingling body’’ is a magnet. She is impressed by this man whose very name suggests a smooth, shiny surface: Willy Wax. ‘‘A man who gets his name in the paper so often,’’ she says, ‘‘must be important to some people.’’ Willy Wax is a caricature of the sexual predator who is at the same time a Spurious Artist. This is Odets’ unconscious fear of what he could become were he to accede to the worst of his father within himself. Group Theatre actor Sanford Meisner, cast in this part, recalled him with utter distaste, a man ‘‘with no redeeming feature.’’ ‘‘Movies,’’ says Wax, ‘‘started me off on my path of painless perversion.’’ Director Clurman told the cast about this character,

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‘‘He plays with his talents. His adjustment is a constant perversion of himself,’’ and Odets has added in the margin of the production notes, ‘‘He likes to astound and impress . . . actually he is worn out, alienated.’’ Not yet thirty-three, Odets’ terriﬁed vision of his future lay tucked into this distasteful minor character. It is not accidental that the play’s motion has been taken from the middle-aged, imprisoned dentist, Ben, and given to the nineteen-year-old anima, Cleo. Odets ﬁnds himself at this time in a new edition of his central—essentially unresolved—adolescent identity crisis: whether to play life safe and to become the kind of stereotyped householder his father wanted him to be, obediently writing advertising copy for the Odets Company, and rearing a family; or in the style of a priest (or a romantic artist) giving ﬁrst priority, before everything else, to the creation and communication of his vision of life. This was, of course, not a conscious, voluntary decision when he was nineteen, nor is it now at thirty-two. Art deals not in a deliberate choice among a number of possibilities, only in necessities. The ‘‘necessity’’ in this play is reﬂected ﬁrst in the creation of the submerged dentist as the central character. He is a man who has abandoned his creativity. But, it emerges, Odets could not emotionally ‘‘afford’’ to open up this static man and risk a violent confrontation with the powerful Mr. Prince. In the discussion which followed the original presentation of this material, playwright Arthur Miller said: . . . There is a terror underneath (this play), which stopped it from being written . . . my own feeling about the play (is that) there is a phantomlike quality about it, which was one of the things that always drew me to Odets. I could never understand how he was equated with realism, naturalism, or even social drama, after Waiting for Lefty. I think he is dealing with phantoms. . . . In this play, he is raising conﬂicts which he never engages in. There is a projection of myself into this, but that’s the way it is. . . This play is a measurement—not in a moral sense, but in another sense—of values, life values . . . and it seems to me that the showdown, the climax, the unveiling which he is always promising, will have to engage a real knockdown ﬁght, between the dentist and that old man. . . . Now there is a conceivable end to his play where the Life Force escapes all of them, and they are left in effect with no Force. Cleo, ridiculed, with her make believe and lying, a fairly pathetic creature, walks out and with her walks out (ironically enough) all their lives, because she somehow embodied their aspirations. There is a fear which is probably very

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complicated, of just the conﬂict he proposed . . . which is a very common thing in playwrights.

Miller continued: ‘‘It would involve some disaster which is too great a price to pay, and consequently the conﬂict is aborted before it got started. Of course, he can let her [Cleo] be free because her struggle is not a menace to him, that’s a freeﬂowing thing—he can create enough distance towards it to allow it to happen. But these other two— he has too much of an investment in, and they would really knock him to pieces if he would allow them to come to blows, and there would be nothing 1eft of him. [Italics mine.] That’s the kind of terror that casts a pall over the vividness.’’ The biographic data of Odets’ life support Miller’s impression of an overload of anxiety attached to the unconscious aspects of Odets’ conﬂict among the identity elements, experienced as the ‘‘corrupt’’ materialist (Prince), the innocent ‘‘idealist’’ (Cleo), and the obsessively blocked intellectual (Stark). Faced with this emotional dilemma, Odets tried thus in midstream to ﬁnd a safe structural solution by placing the heart of the play into the hands of the identity element, Artist, trapped in a family where they laugh at her wish to be a dancer. Here, he runs no risk of an unmanageable confrontation. However, it is precisely in this shift of focus that the play’s structure becomes confused, and for most critics (representing most audiences), difﬁcult to follow. The playwright does not quite succeed in persuading his audience that Cleo is the identity element representing their unconscious longing for creative fulﬁllment. The audience has not been sufﬁciently prepared for so large a responsibility to be put on the shoulder of a stockingless girl who wears ‘‘angel-skin satin.’’ With the Aspiring Artist Cleo at the center of the action, she is wooed by all the men in the play: Odets’ Muse is torn between the sybarite Mr. Prince (Artist Manqué), the safe Ben—who has sacriﬁced creativity for security—and the Corrupt Artist Willy Wax who warns her she is ‘‘living in the city of the dreadful night’’ wherein a ‘‘man is coarse or he doesn’t survive.’’ As for Cleo, ‘‘. . . even her breasts stand at attention. Alas, she is not yet wise in the ways of the world.’’ When the dentist’s controlling wife—who counsels security—suddenly appears in his ofﬁce, Ben is touched—Odets had often been by his own wife— by her loneliness and by her efforts to stir his jealousy. But her offer to replace Cleo as his assistant is an intolerable invasion, exactly like Odets’

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experience of his wife’s efforts ‘‘to help’’ him in his work and to make a mutual career of their marriage. (‘‘A man’s ofﬁce is his castle,’’ says the dentist.) His compassion and his tolerance come to an end as she states her suspicions. Finally he blazes out: ‘‘Will you stop that stuff for a change! It’s about time you began to realize there are two ends to a rope. I have needs, too! This one-way street has to end! I’m not going to stay under water like an iceberg the rest of my life. You’ve got me licked—I must admit it. All right, I’m sleeping, I don’t love you enough. But what do you give? What do you know about my needs?’’ Now, in a duplication of many such dialogues Odets had had with his wife, Ben continues: ‘‘It’s like we’re enemies. We’re like two exposed nerves! . . . These scenes go on . . . we’re always worried. We’re two machines counting up the petty cash. Something about me cheats you—I’m not the man to help you be the best woman it’s in you to be.’’ The internal subconﬁguration here is the struggle between the passive, deadened, and demobilized identity element of Ben Stark—which oppressed Odets’ mother and does now him—and his Muse, Cleo Singer, the ‘‘radium girl’’ who gives off heat, light, and creative energy. The inner war is between the playwright’s wish to be a ‘‘safe’’ householder and an adventurous Creator. The second act closes with the dentist making a declaration of love to Cleo; he is now desperately jealous of both his rivals: the urbane Prince as well as the Spurious Artist, Willy Wax. He says, ‘‘You’re more important to me than anything I know Cleo, dear,’’ and her closing plea is, ‘‘Don’t let me be alone in the world, Ben . . . don’t let me be alone.’’ The girl is using all power at her disposal to force the relationship with the dentist into an overt sexual affair. Here again these externalized relationships mirror the internal struggle. If this exchange is understood solely on its manifest level—as it was by the critics in 1938—it is bafﬂing what it is that has moved the dentist to the conviction that this storytelling, naive child who is steadily ‘‘making believe’’ has become ‘‘more important than anything I know’’ in Ben’s life. If, however, we assume the identity element of the innocent Cleo to be Odets’ anima, the Aspiring Artist, rather than simply the ‘‘jingling body’’ of a lovely girl, his capitulation to her makes sense. The confusion of these two levels of meaning has issued in many bafﬂed discussions in drama textbooks.

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The third act opens with the dentist and his wife silent, ‘‘each one revolving in his own tight little world.’’ She is ready in her desperation to ‘‘forget’’ his affair with the girl if he will agree ‘‘it was only a thing of the moment.’’ Impulsively (‘‘anything to blot out this pale ghost before him’’) he cries, ‘‘Yes, yes!’’ but immediately ﬁnds himself twisting and saying, ‘‘It can’t be settled in a minute, Belle. . . . I have a responsibility.’’ He cannot agree to his wife’s scream, ‘‘Your ﬁrst responsibility’s to me! You hear that?’’ Again, unless we seek a meaning beyond the manifest level, Ben’s statement is bafﬂing. The key to this mysterious exchange lies in the word ‘‘responsibility.’’ On the surface, it makes no sense that a man uses this word to his wife to describe his duty to a nineteen-year-old paramour. If, however, we ask what is the latent meaning—the underlying structure—of the word ‘‘responsibility’’ here, it begins to hang together. If refers to Odets’ allegiance to his own talent (‘‘Talent must be respected,’’ he said). Their heated exchange sums up the position of an artist battling for his creative life. The struggle is only manifestly with his wife’s demand that he give up the girl. Unaware that his underlying dilemmas in the play issue in part from his own current struggles with intimacy and generativity, Odets has his protagonist, the dentist (who is almost forty and yet ‘‘feels like a boy’’), ponder what people get out of life ‘‘anyway’’ when he asks Frenchy, a bachelor chiropodist, if he does not want marriage and children. In their ensuing dialogue on the nature of love and the difﬁculty of discovering it ‘‘in this day of stresses,’’ this ‘‘nervous time,’’ Frenchy declares happy marriages are rare ‘‘like the dodo bird’’ and sternly advises his friend to be practical, ‘‘leave the morals out. . . . Never mind the shame and guilt’’: FRENCHY: (With extreme seriousness) Love? Depends on what you mean by love. Love, for most people, is a curious sensation below the equator. . . . STARCK: You’re that good, you think? FRENCHY: (correcting him): That bad, Doc! She’ll have to be the good one. This is why: Love is a beginning, a jumping-off place. It’s like what heat is at the forge—makes metal easy to handle and shape. But love and the grace to use it! To develop, expand it, variate it!—Oh, dearie me, that’s the problem, as the poet said!

Frenchy now offers a deﬁnition of love singularly close to Erikson’s view of the developmental achievement of intimacy:

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FRENCHY: Who can do that today? Who’s got the time and place for ‘‘love and the grace to use it’’? Is it something apart, love? A good book you go to in a spare hour? An entertainment? Christ, no! it’s a synthesis of good and bad, economics, work, play, all contacts . . . it’s not a Sunday suit for special occasions. That’s why Broadway songs are phony, Doc!— Love is no solution of life! Au contraire, as the Frenchman says—the opposite. You have to bring a whole balanced normal life to love if you want it to go!

What Odets called his ‘‘slow exhaustion, this shame’’ over his failed marriage and his fear of precisely the kind of intimacy he has just described is promptly retracted in Frenchy’s next words, which would be a pleasure to any member of a contemporary women’s liberation front: FRENCHY: In this day of stresses I don’t see much normal life, myself included. The woman’s not a wife. She’s the dependent of a salesman who can’t make sales and is ashamed to tell her so. . . .

Odets thus tries to understand his marital failure, his isolation, and the nature of his creative struggles in terms of the ‘‘stresses of the time.’’ He is, of course, both right and wrong. As the cynical chiropodist leaves this scene with the injunction that the dentist must choose between the girl and his wife—reviving the manifest conﬂict which opened the play—the latent meaning is once again underscored: the playwright must choose between his own development as an artist and the demands of a ‘‘normal, married life.’’ His (partly unconscious) dilemma lies in whether he is wedded to the ‘‘real’’ world of relationships with other living humans or to a constructed world, peopled by the characters into whom he breathes life, who are, of course, the distribution of himself. It is a world he hopes to control. When Belle, his wife, pushes him to make this choice, it is more on the basis of a moral obligation than a mutually nurturant relationship. Moreover, real children, unlike brainchildren, ‘‘break too easy,’’ he says, and become (in Bacon’s words) ‘‘hostages to fortune.’’ At this point, the other major threat to Odets’ creativity reappears: Carrying an umbrella with a ‘‘fancily carved dog’s head of ivory’’ for a handle (‘‘A quiet dog always bites,’’ he says, smiling smoothly), Mr. Prince, calling himself ‘‘King Midas,’’ conﬁdently announces his intention to marry ‘‘Miss Cleo.’’ Having dreamed the ‘‘secret of the world,’’ namely, that ‘‘It is not good for Man to live alone,’’ he is determined to capture his prize by offering her ‘‘maturity and experience in everything—love, what to eat, where, what to wear,

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and where to buy it—an eye turned out to the world!’’ Translation: The identity element which is ﬂooded with desire for sensual and material fulﬁllment and power competes now with creative aspiration: the eye turned in. When the dentist says, ‘‘And you dare to think you’ll buy that girl? You’re a damned smiling villain!,’’ Judah Prince replies with a remarkable and passionate speech which signaled the by-now bewildered critics that the play’s theme was ‘‘man’s search for love’’: PRINCE: Listen, a man in the fullness of his life speaks to you. I didn’t come here to make you unhappy. I came here to make myself happy! You don’t like it—I can understand that. Circumstances insulted me enough in my life. But your insults I don’t need! And I don’t apologize to no man because I try to take happiness by the throat! Remember, Dr. Benny, I want what I want! There are seven fundamental words in life, and one of these is love, and I didn’t have it! And another one is love, and I don’t have it! And the third of these is love, and I shall have it! (Beating the furniture with his umbrella.) De Corpso you think! I’m dead and buried you think! I’ll sit in the long winter night with a shawl on my shoulders? Now you see my face, Dr. Benny. Now you know your fatherin-law, that damned smiling villain! I’ll ﬁght you to the last ditch—you’ll get mowed down like a train. I want that girl. I’ll wait downstairs. When she returns I’ll come right up, in ﬁve minutes. I’ll test your sanity!—You, you Nobel prize winner! (He stops, exhausted, wipes his face with a large silk handkerchief, does the same to the umbrella head and then slowly exits).

The identity element embodied in Mr. Prince is not simply the negative aspect of Odets’ partial identiﬁcation with his salesman father. Indeed, when this many-faceted character protests he will have love, it is Odets’ own passionate statement that he cannot live a life without human intimacy. (‘‘I love your needs!’’ Prince says to Cleo.) But this longing for intimacy wars with his wish to be a self-sufﬁcient artist responsible only for what he generates on the stage, and not for a ﬂesh-and-blood wife or their children. Just as Prince is more interesting than Ben Stark precisely because he harbors many strong polarities, so is Rocket to the Moon a more interesting play than the ‘‘political’’ Waiting for Lefty, where one end of a conﬂict is ploughed under, leaving a cast of simple characters in a simple play, all on one note. There occurs now a short interlude between the dentist and the Spurious Artist, Willy Wax. The latter, just come from his own unsuccessful attempt to seduce the girl, says, ‘‘Your little Neon light

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spluttered right in my face,’’ adding she is oldfashioned and ‘‘belongs somewhere in the last century.’’ This is Odets speaking not so much of a sexpot as of the virtues of integrity and of creative conscience. Ben Stark pleads with Wax, here representing artistic prostitution, not to corrupt the aspiring girl, to ‘‘keep away from her,’’ as she is ‘‘young, extremely naive. . . . You might warp her for life. . . . She’s a mere mechanism to you.’’ This sentence expresses Odets’ steady fear that his own identity fragment (Spurious Artist) could seduce him into an abdication of his gift, and into the ﬁlm industry. Cleo, however, turns in a fury on this would-be seducer, Wax, saying, ‘‘Mr. Wax, we don’t want you around this ofﬁce. You make love very small and dirty. I understand your type very well now. No man can take a bite out of me, like an apple and throw it away. Now go away, and we won’t miss you.’’ When she turns back to the helpless dentist, a man as ‘‘mixed up as the 20th Century,’’ she ﬁnds him evasive, collapsed, on the point of tears, and unable to leave either his wife or the ‘‘prison ofﬁce’’ of his life. He can say to her only, ‘‘Help me.’’ Only the small voice of that fragment of himself represented by the chiropodist, Frenchy, asks the opposite question, ‘‘What can I do for the girl, Cleo? What will she be in ten years with my help?’’ The indomitable old man makes one last strong bid for the girl. She, in turn, asks the dentist if he will leave his barren wife, and he—consumed with fear and guilt—can say nothing at all. He is chained and sterile. The dentist’s ‘‘decision’’ occurs by default; it is helplessly passive, not active. With the character of Stark having clearly gone beyond his emotional depth, and unable to handle the ‘‘mistake’’ of his intimacy with the girl, he is inarticulate. When Cleo asks, ‘‘What do you say, Ben?’’ Odets writes, ‘‘Stark (lost): Nothing. . . . I can’t say. . . . . . . nothing.’’ Here is a good example of the reﬂection in the play’s overburdened structure of the playwright’s inner fractures. Given the premises of the opening of the play (a man who will be forced to a choice between a wife and a mistress), the closing climax should be Ben choosing between Belle and Cleo. But, as we have seen, there slowly emerged on this initial triangle a superimposed one, among Ben, Prince, and Cleo, and the play took on the fuzziness of a double exposure, with the playwright emo-

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tionally unable fully to loose the players and counterplayers into the struggle in either triangle. Thus, with Ben (the character originally at the play’s center) immobilized, it falls to the characters of Cleo and Prince to propel the play to its end. Prince says of Stark, ‘‘He won’t leave her. That needs courage, strength, and he’s not strong.’’ Cleo makes a last stab at passing the initiative back to the evasive, lost Ben. His response is soft and defeated: ‘‘Listen, Cleo . . . think. What can I give you? All I can offer you is a second-hand life, dedicated to triﬂes and troubles. . . . and they go on forever. This isn’t self-justiﬁcation . . . but facts are stubborn things, Cleo; I’ve wrestled with myself for weeks. This is how it must end.’’ When Judah Prince asks Cleo what she’d have to lose by a union with him, she replies, ‘‘Everything that’s me.’’ The underlying meaning here is Odets’ conviction that the core of his identity lay in resisting his father’s bids to surrender to him and to his values (arising from power hunger and sense satisfaction), and to become instead an honest artmaker. As in the closing of Odets’ earlier play, Awake and Sing! (equally confusing to the critics), the powerful older man, identity element of Odets’ father, moves in, making a real ‘‘pitch’’ for the girl: ‘‘And I offer you a vitalizing relationship: a father, counselor, lover, a friend!’’ In Awake and Sing! the ‘‘equivalent’’ girl Hennie—mother of an illegitimate child and subsequently married by a weak man called Sam Feinschreiber (ﬁne writer)—succumbs and runs off with another old sybarite called Moe (roughly the equivalent of Judah Prince). In Rocket to the Moon, however, the Aspiring Artist (Cleo) makes the ﬁnal active statement of the play. Manifestly, she is ‘‘looking for love,’’ but Prince sees beyond this: he tells her she will never get what she is looking for, namely a life with the purity of an aesthetic creation: ‘‘You want a life like Heiferz’ music—up from the roots, perfect, clean, every note in place. But that, my girl, is music!’’ In other words, says the playwright, only in that transcendent distillation of experience we call Art can there be found the precision, the intensity, the conﬁdent joy and serenity, and above all, the integrated and liberating wholeness she seeks. When Prince says to her, ‘‘You’ll go down the road alone—like Charlie Chaplin?’’ Cleo’s response

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and Prince’s rejoinder ﬁnally clinch the hypothesis that this girl represents for Odets the identity element, Aspiring Artist: CLEO: Yes, if there’s roads, I’ll take them. I’ll go up all those roads till I ﬁnd what I want. I want a love that uses me, that needs me. Don’t you think there’s a world of joyful men and women? Must all men live afraid to laugh and sing? Can’t we sing at work and love our work? It’s getting late to play at life; I want to live it. Something has to feel real to me, more than both of you. You see? I don’t ask for much. . . . ’’ PRINCE: She’s an artist. [Italics mine]

Whereas Odets’ initial, conscious intention had been for the character of Ben to emerge with greater stature and conﬁdence from the overwhelming experience of his love for this girl, it is now in fact Cleo who announces such growth: ‘‘Experience gives more conﬁdence, you know. I have more conﬁdence than when I came here. Button my coat, Ben.’’ It is she who escapes the airless constriction of the dental ofﬁce, not he. It is clear he will not return to ‘‘creative orthodontia,’’ whereas her future is open-ended. Prince says, ‘‘Yes, you love her. But not my iceberg boy, we have both disappeared.’’ In these two short sentences, there stands distilled a paradox ﬁlled with grief. On the one hand, the identity element I have called Aspiring Artist determinedly walks away, free alike from the vacillating, timid dentist lacking self-esteem, and from the sensual, worldly predator, both of whom have abandoned their creativity. Manifestly, Prince is saying both men have lost their chance for ‘‘love’’ (‘‘. . . we have both disappeared’’). Beneath the surface, however, Odets is saying that he stands now in mortal dread that if this Muse escapes him— as Cleo does in the play—he will be left only with the internal war between the elements of a weak, constricted, and guilt-ridden indecisiveness and a strong, aggressive, and commanding sensuality. In their actual lives, both Odets and his father consciously felt themselves to the end of their days to be artists manqués, from whom their creativity had somehow slipped away. Stark, in a desperate postscript, eyes ﬂooded with tears, says, ‘‘I insist this is a beginning. Do you hear?—I insist. . . . For years I sat here, taking things for granted, my wife, everything. Then just for an hour my life was in a spotlight. . . . I saw myself clearly, realized who and what I was. Isn’t

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that a beginning? Isn’t it? . . . And this is strange! . . . For the ﬁrst time in years I don’t feel guilty. . . . But I’ll never take things for granted again. You see? Do you see, Poppa?’’ The play closes with Stark ‘‘almost laughing,’’ confessing his ignorance of life: ‘‘Sonofagun! What I don’t know would ﬁll a book!’’ The ﬁnal image is of an empty room, lit only by the lights of a hotel (where real—forbidden—life is lived) the locale of so much of Odets’ actual peeping and listening: ‘‘Prince exits heavily. Stark turns our the last light, then exits, closing the door behind him. The room is dark, except for red neon lights of the Hotel Algiers and a spill of light from the hall . . . Slow curtain.’’ This last stage direction distills Odets’ sense of the playwright as ‘‘witness,’’ the man who, like all artists, cannot help distancing himself and watching his life’s experience—and transposing it by way of Form—even while he lives it. In making art one is free from inhibition and masking of emotions and fear of encounter. One ranges freely, taking painlessly all sides. Inactive, incapacitated, passive, arid and sterile, aware but unable and helpless—in art one becomes freely a man of action and all is possible! In this world, one may always be the hero—loved, pitied, magnanimous, stern, strong, successful against men, women and dragons; one may forgive and even pity others—it is something god-like and absolute that the artist becomes with the exercise of what is usually his only talent. . . . ’’

Although there is evident strain and self-doubt in Ben Stark’s triumphant announcement that his identity has been signiﬁcantly illumined and integrated by the play’s events (‘‘. . . for an hour my life was in a spotlight. . . . ’’) it does afﬁrm that aspect of Odets which takes nothing for granted (a creator). Ben declares, moreover, that ‘‘For the ﬁrst time in years I don’t feel guilty.’’ While neither of these afﬁrmations of enlightenment and freedom is persuasively buttressed in the play, we can decode the playwright’s latent wish: he is saying (defensively) for the ﬁrst time in any of his plays that he is determined not to surrender his creativity to the other pulls within him: the identity element of his Muse (Cleo) rejects not only the weak identity element which has fearfully abdicated created powers (Ben), but also those which have ‘‘sold out’’ to the vulgarizations of Art (Willy Wax) and to worldly fulﬁllment (Judah Prince). Moreover, he is here liberated from the guilt evident in all his work (even in an adolescent novel wherein the career of a

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promising young pianist is ‘‘cut short by an accident to his hand’’) and later in all his plays, wherein the moral idealists—after compromising themselves in their creativity—commit suicide, are murdered, or meet violent death. Odets was always plagued by a lack of ‘‘aesthetic inevitability’’ in this play, and wondered if his wife had been correct that the seeker, Cleo, should after all surrender to the rich old sybarite, as Hennie had done in his Awake and Sing! Displacing his creative discontent, he would remain forever resentful on several counts: that director Clurman was so ‘‘full of ideas as to what my play was about’’ and had never raised the production money; that he had no leeway in which to rework the play, that he was always under emergency pressure to provide the Group Theatre with a brain-child which they would immediately gobble up; and ﬁnally, that he could not even protect his newborn progeny by directing the play himself. Almost three decades later, the memory of this time and his anger toward Clurman still fresh, he provided rich data illuminating the creative process: He ﬁnally got to think that I was kind of like a cow who dropped a calf, didn’t know anything about it. I think he still thinks that. He still thinks that when I write a play I have no idea what’s in it. That I’m some kind of mad genius who just sort of drops a calf. Because this is what happened in the Group Theatre and I was very resentful of it. I dropped this calf and some people would rush up and grab it, wipe if off and take it away, and I would be left there bellowing. And while they were hustling this calf around you’d think that I had no relationship to it. I let them, too. I would let them do it, but with a great deal of resentment. I never would have let any private producer do anything of this sort. They’d go to work on it, and this one would be assisting Clurman. All the time I wanted to direct the play myself. But in order to direct the play I would have to have at least some decent distance between myself and the play. Well, that never happened. They had to have those veal chops on the table. For the next week or so everybody would go hungry. So in a certain way this gifted calf that I’m talking about, that I dropped, was also veal chops for everybody to eat.

It was Odets’ conviction that Clurman, together with this ‘‘sturdy crutch’’ Elia Kazan and the Group business manager, ‘‘ran everything, had all the fun, all the excitement and I would just stand there on my legs, like a bellowing mother cow who couldn’t locate that calf I just dropped.’’ If this playwright’s image of himself as a ‘‘bellowing mother cow,’’ unable to locate her

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newborn child—the metaphor of pregnancy and an anxious delivery—were an isolated instance, or peculiar to Odets, we could not make much of it. However, the image of creation as a birth followed by the eating of ‘‘the child’’ (or of the forbidden fruit) occurs over and over not only in Odets’ writings, but in those of a variety of creators as well as in folk legends, myths, and holy scriptures. This image appears to be one of the archetypes of the general argument I have been setting forth: this is the way a new ‘‘wholeness’’ emerges: by integrating the contrarieties, including feminine and masculine identity elements. Thus is a new organism created (be it a theory, a scripture, or a play), an organism that simultaneously ‘‘feeds’’ its originator and its audience. This originator is not far from the image of a Lord of Creation who gives manifest, concrete form to the eternal, the boundless, who breathes life into an Adam and creates an Eve from a fragment of him, who in turn instigates the eating of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge or, as it is sometimes called, ‘‘The Tree of Life.’’ That this player and counterplayer are then together banished from the innocent joy of trusting, unashamed celebrant children playing in Paradise, to the suffering toil of self-conscious Man—whose ‘‘plays’’ are now ‘‘works’’—reﬂects a writer’s witness to the vicissitudes, the joys, and the penalties of his own creativity. Source: Margaret Brenman-Gibson, ‘‘Rocket to the Moon,’’ in Critical Essays on Clifford Odets, edited by Gabriel Miller, G. K. Hall, 1991, pp. 196–218.

SOURCES Clurman, Harold, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties, Hill and Wang, 1945. Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, Verso Books, 1998, pp. xiii–xx. Herr, Christopher J., Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre, Praeger, 2003, pp. 27–102. McElvaines, Robert S., The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941, Times Books, 1984. Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman, Penguin USA, 1998. Miller, Gabriel, Clifford Odets, Continuum, 1989, pp. 94–124. ———, Critical Essays on Clifford Odets, G. K. Hall, 1991. Odets, Clifford, Rocket to the Moon, Random House, 1939.

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———, Waiting for Lefty and other Plays, Grove Press, 1993.

general issues in American society during the years in which his plays were produced.

Smith, Wendy, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940, Grove Press, 1992.

Demastes, William W., Clifford Odets: A Research and Production Source Book, Greenwood Press, 2001. This book contains plot summaries and critical overviews for each of Odets’s plays. The book also includes primary and secondary bibliographies of works by and about Odets.

Watts, Richard, Jr., ‘‘Rocket to the Moon,’’ in Critical Essays on Clifford Odets, edited by Gabriel Miller, G. K. Hall, 1991, pp. 25–26. Weales, Gerald, ‘‘The Group Theatre and Its Plays,’’ in American Theatre, Edward Arnold, 1967, pp. 67–86.

FURTHER READING Cooperman, Robert, Clifford Odets: An Annotated Bibliography, 1935–1989, Meckler, 1990. This book provides an exhaustive bibliography of work by and about Clifford Odets. The book is intended for both dramatists and scholars. The section on critical work includes criticism on Odets and

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Herr, Christopher J., Clifford Odets and American Political Theatre, Praeger, 2003. This book explores the links between Odets’s plays and the political theatre of the 1930s through the early 1950s. The book’s chapters move chronologically through Odets’s career. Herr also focuses on Odets’s career as a Hollywood screenwriter. Miller, Gabriel, Clifford Odets, Continuum, 1989. In this book Miller divides Odets’s plays thematically and traces the evolution of the playwright’s thematic vision through his career. ———, Critical Essays on Clifford Odets, G. K. Hall, 1991. This collection contains contemporary reviews of Odets’s major plays and a number of critical essays on individual plays by a range of scholars. The book also contains three interviews conducted with Odets in the 1950s and 1960s.

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Strange Interlude EUGENE O’NEILL 1928

Strange Interlude (1928), by American dramatist Eugene O’Neill, was a huge success when ﬁrst produced by the Theatre Guild at the John Golden Theatre in New York City in 1928. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became the most successful American play to date. The play covers a period of twenty-ﬁve years in the lives of mostly upper-middle-class East Coast characters. It centers on Nina Leeds, a passionate, tormented woman whose ﬁancé was killed in World War I and who spends the remainder of her life searching for an always-elusive happiness. This is a very long play, lasting over ﬁve hours in performance. The story is not especially complex, and the length of the play derives from O’Neill’s revival of two theatrical devices that had fallen out of use for nearly a century: the soliloquy, in which a character alone on the stage speaks his or her thoughts aloud, and the aside, which enables characters to reveal their thoughts to the audience but not to the other characters on stage. These devices, which O’Neill employed at length, enabled the playwright to probe deeply into his characters’ motivations. The soliloquies and asides reveal the discrepancies between what the characters say and do, and what they really feel. Strange Interlude was a controversial play because it dealt openly with such topics as adultery and abortion. Although it was rarely revived in the

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early 2000s, it was generally regarded as the ﬁrst of O’Neill’s works in which he revealed his full power as a dramatist.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in New York City, the youngest son of James (an actor) and Ella Quinlan O’Neill. O’Neill was educated at a Catholic boarding school and at Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut, before attending Princeton University in 1906. He was dismissed from Princeton a year later because of a poor scholastic record. In 1909, O’Neill married Kathleen Jenkins and went to Honduras to join a goldprospecting expedition. He returned to New York in 1910, the year his son, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill Jr. was born. In 1910, O’Neill sailed to Argentina, returning destitute the following year. He then shipped as a seaman from New York to Southampton, England, returning in August. O’Neill’s personal life was chaotic, and he drank heavily. O’Neill was divorced from his wife in 1912. Later in 1912, he attempted suicide by taking a drug overdose. After his recovery, he discovered he had tuberculosis, and he entered a sanitarium, where he remained for six months. In the sanitarium, he read widely and conceived his desire to become a playwright. In 1913, he wrote his ﬁrst play, A Wife for a Life, as well as eight one-act plays and two long plays. O’Neill continued to write as he attended Harvard University from 1914 to 1915, during which time he completed one year of George Pierce Baker’s playwriting course. The ﬁrst of his plays to be produced, by an amateur group later known as the Provincetown Players, were Bound East for Cardiff and Thirst in 1916. Greater success was not long in coming. In 1920, Beyond the Horizon brought O’Neill the ﬁrst of his four Pulitzer Prizes, and in the same year, The Emperor Jones was staged internationally. In 1921, Anna Christie won a Pulitzer Prize, and the following year The Hairy Ape solidiﬁed his reputation as the foremost American dramatist. The ﬁnancial success that went with this enabled him to buy a

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farm at Ridgeﬁeld, Connecticut, where he lived with his wife Agnes Boulton, whom he had married in 1918. From 1923 to 1927, O’Neill wrote some of his major plays, including Desire Under the Elms (1925), The Great God Brown (1926), Lazarus Laughed (1927), and Strange Interlude (1928), which won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1927, O’Neill left his wife and two children for Carlotta Monterey, with whom he traveled to Europe and Asia. They married in 1929. Plays of this period include Dynamo (1929), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), the comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933) and Days without End (1934). In 1936, O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the ﬁrst American dramatist to do so. O’Neill’s two greatest plays were both written toward the end of his career: The Iceman Cometh in 1939 (produced in 1946), and A Long Day’s Journey into Night, written in 1941, but not staged until three years after his death. It won O’Neill a fourth Pulitzer Prize. Ill-health prevented O’Neill writing any plays during the last decade of his life. He died of pneumonia on November 27, 1953, in Boston, Massachusetts.

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PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Strange Interlude begins in August, 1919, in the library of Professor Leeds’s home in New England. Marsden has just returned from World War I in Europe, although he did not serve in the military. He and Leeds discuss Leeds’s daughter, Nina, who has had a nervous breakdown following the death of her boyfriend, Gordon, in the war. Leeds believes that Nina has turned against him because he persuaded Gordon to postpone their marriage until Gordon had safely returned from the war. Nina informs her father that she intends to work as a nurse at a sanatorium for wounded soldiers. She still grieves for Gordon and feels this is her duty. Leeds opposes her wish and confesses that he was jealous of Gordon because he wanted to keep Nina’s love for himself. But he ﬁnally agrees to let Nina go.

Act 2 A year later, Leeds has just died and Nina returns, accompanied by Sam Evans, who is in love with her, and Ned Darrell, a young doctor friend. Evans tells Marsden, whom he regards as Nina’s guardian, that he wants to marry her, but Marsden points out that Nina still loves Gordon. Darrell conﬁdes in Marsden that Nina has a morbid love of martyrdom and has been giving herself to the wounded soldiers in the hospital. He says that the best thing for her would be to marry Evans, which would help her regain her emotional balance. For her part, Nina is scared that she is no longer able to feel anything, including grief for her deceased father. She feels guilty about the way she has been behaving, and Marsden advises her to marry Evans, even though she does not love him. She consents.

Act 4 Seven months later, Evans is trying unsuccessfully to write advertising copy. Nina, who has been ill since the abortion, is contemptuous of him, even though she has tried to love him. Marsden, and later Darrell, come to visit. Marsden is worried about his mother’s health, and Darrell advises him to consult a doctor immediately. After Marsden and Evans depart on an errand, Nina and Darrell are left alone. Nina tells Darrell about her abortion and Mrs. Evans’s advice to have a baby by another man. Darrell agrees, saying it is her duty to her husband. They agree that Darrell will be the father of the child, convincing themselves that this will make all three of them happy.

Act 5 Five months later, in April, 1922, in a suburb near New York, Nina is happy to be pregnant, but has not told her husband of her condition. Evans is doing poorly in his career and believes she does not love him. He decides to grant her a divorce for her sake, but he lacks the courage to tell her. She despises him and treats him badly in front of Darrell, with whom she has fallen in love. Darrell desires her but tells himself he is not in love. Marsden enters, in mourning for his dead mother, and senses the attraction between Darrell and Nina. After Marsden exits, Darrell tells Nina he has a guilty conscience and wants to end their affair. But Nina says that only his love can make her happy. She wants a divorce so she can marry Darrell, but he will not hear of such a thing. Instead, Darrell tells Evans that Nina is pregnant and then says he is sailing for Europe in a few days. Nina is distressed at Darrell’s sudden departure. She tries but fails to tell Evans that he is not the father of her child.

Act 6 Act 3 Seven months later, Nina is pregnant, but she has not told Evans, her husband. Marsden guesses her secret but says nothing. He is jealous, since he also loves Nina. When Evans’s mother ﬁnds out that Nina is pregnant, she begs her to have an abortion. She explains the long history of insanity in the family, saying that Nina should never have a child by Evans. Instead, she should take a lover, and raise the child as if Evans were the father. Otherwise the strain of raising a child would affect Evans’s sanity. Once Nina has recovered from the shock of this information, she agrees to get an abortion.

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Over a year later, Evans has matured into a conﬁdent businessman, and Nina is happy with her son, Gordon. Marsden intends to ask his sister Jane to live with him, and Nina teases him about being a bachelor. He lets on that he has seen Darrell in Munich with a woman, which makes Nina jealous. Evans returns and talks of his business plans, hoping to encourage Marsden to invest in him. Darrell arrives and when he and Nina are alone, they embrace passionately. Darrell wants Nina to go away with him, but Nina refuses to leave her husband. When Evans and Marsden return, Nina sits them all down at a table, where they remain en-

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grossed in their own thoughts, while Nina exults in the desire that all three men have for her. When she goes to bed, the eyes of the men follow her.

Act 7 It is now 1934. In the Evans’s apartment on Park Avenue, New York City, Gordon’s eleventh birthday is being celebrated. Gordon resents the presence of Darrell, who has given up his medical career. Darrell has adopted biology as a hobby and set up a research station in Antigua. He is bitter about his continuing relationship with Nina, and Nina begs him to go away for two years. When they kiss goodbye, Gordon sees them, and this further alienates him from Darrell, and also from his mother. Gordon gets closer to his father instead. Nina notices this and resolves to get her son’s affections back. She speaks disparagingly of Darrell to dismiss the importance of the kiss.

Act 8 It is ten years later, in June, 1944. Gordon is competing in a college rowing race, and Nina, Darrell, Marsden, and Madeline Arnold, Gordon’s ﬁancée, have assembled on Evans’s cruiser to watch. Nina is jealous of Madeline for taking Gordon from her, and Marsden is in mourning for his sister, who died two months before. When Marsden, Madeline, and Evans go into the cabin for a drink, Darrell and Nina agree that their passionate relationship is a thing of the past. Nina tries to persuade him to stop Gordon from marrying Madeline. Darrell refuses. Nina then tries to get him to join her in telling Evans that he is not Gordon’s real father. Meanwhile, the drunken Marsden confesses his love for Nina and his desire to marry her. Nina tries to tell Madeline about the insanity that runs in the Evans family, but Darrell prevents her. Gordon narrowly wins the race, but Evans, as a result of his excitement, has a stroke.

Act 9 Several months later, Evans dies, and Gordon and Madeline mourn him. Gordon tells her that he believes his mother and Darrell were in love. Gordon still dislikes Darrell and slaps him hard across the face. He immediately apologizes and explains that in reality, he admires the fact that Darrell and Nina were in love but did not act on it out of consideration for Gordon’s father. After Gordon leaves, Darrell asks Nina to marry him, but she refuses because she no longer loves him. Then, she admits to Marsden that she loves him, and they

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agree to marry. Gordon’s plane circles overhead, and Nina calls out to him that he must be happy, but she realizes that her son was unable to give her happiness. Nina resolves to grow old in peace with Marsden. She falls asleep and Marsden watches her contentedly.

CHARACTERS Madeline Arnold Madeline Arnold is the nineteen-year-old ﬁancée of Gordon Evans. She is pretty, tall, and athletic, with a direct personality. She knows what she wants and is accustomed to getting it, although she is also a good loser. She is popular with both men and women. Madeline is exasperated by Nina’s hostility towards her, but she later admires the older woman for the way she nursed her husband after his stroke.

Edmund Darrell Edmund Darrell is Nina’s lover and the father of her son, Gordon. A neurologist, Darrell ﬁrst becomes acquainted with Nina at the hospital for World War I veterans where she works. He is shocked by her promiscuous behavior there, which he believes is due to a martyrdom complex that she has developed following the death of her ﬁancé, Gordon Shaw. Darrell suggests a marriage to Evans as a way of restoring Nina to a more healthy frame of mind. Darrell has a scientiﬁc, objective mind, and analyzes life dispassionately. When Nina tells him that she wants him to father her child, but to raise it as Evans’s, he agrees to the proposition because he believes it will be the best thing for Nina and Evans. He also considers it an interesting experiment. But he does not realize that in carrying out the plan he will fall in love with Nina. Their tempestuous affair goes on for years, and he is unable to end it, even though he wishes to. He loses interest in his career and eventually takes up biology as a hobby, setting up a research station in the West Indies. He resents the fact that Gordon Evans, his own son, is being raised by Sam Evans to resemble the dead Gordon Shaw. This leads him to dislike them both, secretly wishing for Sam’s death, and for Gordon to lose the college race. After Sam Evans’s death, Darrell realizes that he no longer cares for Nina, but he still

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Strange Interlude was ﬁlmed by Metro-GoldwynMayer in 1932. It was directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starred Norma Shearer as Nina and Clark Gable as Darrell.

asks her to marry him, because it is what Gordon, who has guessed that his mother and Darrell were in love, expects. Nina turns down the proposal, as Darrell had wanted her to. He then gives his blessing to the marriage of Nina to Marsden.

Mrs. Amos Evans Mrs. Amos Evans is the mother of Sam Evans. She is a frail, tiny woman of about forty-ﬁve, but she looks at least sixty. When she learns that Nina is pregnant she urges her to have an abortion, explaining that there is a history of insanity in the family. She had married while ignorant of this history, and she and her husband had not planned to have any children. Sam’s father eventually went insane, and Mrs. Evans believes the stress of having to raise Sam was the cause. She urges Nina to have a child by another man and raise it as if it were Sam’s.

looks and dresses like a college student. Sam falls in love with Nina, who, following Darrell’s advice, marries him, even though she does not love him. Sam goes into the advertising industry but does not do well, making little money and moving from job to job. He feels insecure and knows that his wife does not love him. But when Nina gives birth to Gordon, whom Sam thinks is his own son, his life changes. Sam becomes more content and conﬁdent, and he starts to be more successful in business. Eventually he makes a lot of money, and Marsden and Darrell become wealthy through investing in him. Sam raises his son to be like Gordon Shaw, his old friend from college, and is rewarded when Gordon lives up to his expectations. Sam suffers from high blood pressure and dies seven months after having a stroke, which was caused by overexcitement as he watched Gordon win a college rowing race.

Professor Henry Leeds Professor Henry Leeds is Nina’s widowed father. He is a timid, intellectual man, a professor of Classics who tends to live in the past because he cannot face the realities of the present. He persuaded Gordon Shaw not to marry Nina until after he came home from the war because he did not want to lose his daughter. He also thought that Gordon was not good enough for Nina because his family was not wealthy or distinguished. Leeds was secretly glad when Gordon was killed. Nina realizes the negative role her father played in her relationship with Gordon and turns against her father because of it.

Nina Leeds Gordon Evans Gordon Evans is Nina’s son. His biological father is Darrell, but he is raised as Sam Evans’s son. He never discovers who his real father is, and he dislikes Darrell, whom he has to refer to as Uncle Ned. Gordon grows up to become a strong, athletic, capable young man who resembles Gordon Shaw, the young aviator killed in World War I. Engaged to the attractive Madeline Arnold, Gordon is bound for success in life.

Sam Evans Sam Evans is Nina’s husband. They ﬁrst meet, through their mutual acquaintance Edmund Darrell, when Sam is twenty-ﬁve years old. He is amiable but not very mature or accomplished, and he still

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Nina Leeds is Professor Leeds’s daughter who marries Sam Evans. She is tall and athletic with straw-blond hair. As a young woman, she fell in love with Gordon Shaw, a college student and outstanding athlete. But her father persuaded Gordon to postpone their marriage until after the war. Because Gordon was killed in the war, their love was never consummated. Devastated by Gordon’s death, and angry at their self-denial, for which she blames her father’s interference, she has a mental breakdown. When she recovers, she feels it is her duty to become a nurse in a hospital for veterans. While she is there, she indulges in promiscuous behavior with the patients as a way of making up for the self-denial that she and Gordon had imposed on themselves. When she returns home after her father’s death, she agrees to Darrell’s suggestion that

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she marry Sam Evans, even though she does not love him. She is still not free of the memory of Gordon. Married and pregnant with Sam’s child, she agrees to have an abortion after Sam’s mother explains the history of hereditary insanity in the family. Nina then deliberately has a child by Darrell and raises it as if it were Sam’s son. She does this to make Sam happy and keep him from the madness that afﬂicted his father. But Nina falls in love with Darrell, and they have an affair that continues for many years, although it brings them no happiness. At one point Nina wants to divorce Sam and marry Darrell, but Darrell will not agree. Later, the situation is reversed, with Darrell wanting her to run away with him, but he is unable to persuade her. Nina ﬁnds some degree of happiness as she raises her child, Gordon. She is never completely content with any of her relationships with men, whether the man is father, husband, lover, or son. By the time Nina is forty-ﬁve, she is dispirited and exhausted. Not only has she lost her one true love, Gordon Shaw, but her son Gordon has now left her to marry Madeline. She turns to Marsden, whom she has known since she was a child and regards as a father ﬁgure, and agrees to marry him. All her passion for living gone, she expects only a quiet life for the rest of her days.

Charles Marsden Charles Marsden is a tall, slender bachelor who is thirty-ﬁve years old when the play begins. Marsden has a quiet charm, is always ready to listen and be sympathetic, and wants to like people and be liked. He is a successful novelist who writes comedies of manners. Always immaculately dressed, Marsden has a certain feminine quality about him. He may be a latent homosexual or bisexual, but he has shied away from the physical aspects of love ever since an unfortunate encounter with a prostitute when he was sixteen. He is somewhat afraid of life and this renders him less effective than he might otherwise be. It also means that Darrell, Sam, and later Gordon Evans have little respect for him. Marsden lives with his mother, to whom he is extremely attached. He is devastated when his mother dies of cancer. Marsden is a friend and former student of Professor Leeds, and he has known Nina since she was a child. He is in love with her, and she is fond of him, but only in the way she might love an uncle. Marsden is jealous of Darrell because he guesses

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that Nina loves him, but as the years go by he waits patiently for Nina, always ready to be a friend. Eventually, she turns to him for protective companionship, which is the only kind of relationship he is able to offer her, and they marry. Marsden decides that they will return to Nina’s childhood home, where they will live out the rest of their lives quietly.

THEMES Happiness versus Morality Nina is motivated by an all-consuming search for happiness, and she believes that conventional morality is an obstacle to the attainment of it. It was conventional morality, instilled in her by her upbringing, that made her hold back from having a sexual relationship with Gordon Shaw because they were not married. Nina therefore rebels against this restrictive morality by becoming sexually involved with the veterans at the military hospital where she works. After marrying Evans, she meets Mrs. Amos, who gives her a different perspective than that supplied by her father. Mrs. Amos believes that the greatest duty is to be happy. ‘‘Being happy, that’s the nearest we can ever come to knowing what’s good!’’ Mrs. Amos counsels Nina to ignore accepted notions of morality and take a lover who will father her child. Mrs. Amos is convinced that this will enable her son Sam to avoid the insanity that runs in the family. Nina accepts the argument that it is her duty to be happy, but she has guilty feelings about the prospect of committing adultery. Darrell talks her into it, though, by supporting Mrs. Amos’s position. He urges her to ‘‘throw overboard all such irrelevant moral ideas.’’ He argues that guilt arises only if a wife neglects her duty to provide her husband with a healthy child. Ironically, the only character who attains happiness through the adultery of Darrell and Nina is Sam Evans. Darrell ﬁnds that his arrangement with Nina is not as simple as he thought it would be. He believes at ﬁrst that a scientiﬁc mind such as his should be able to stay aloof from any emotional involvement. The scientist should use his rational knowledge to manipulate people for the sake of their own happiness. But his strategy fails when he falls in love with Nina. Their affair produces guilt and distress for them both.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Are certain types of mental illness hereditary, as the play suggests, or was that an invention by O’Neill for dramatic purposes? Is heredity a factor in common mental illnesses such as depression? If heredity can contribute to mental illness, can this be predicted and prevented in individual cases? • Write a short scene in which two people meet, perhaps on a ﬁrst date. Use the technique of the aside, as O’Neill does in the play, to show the discrepancy between what each person is saying, and what he or she is thinking. • Why is Sam Evans the character in the play who comes closest to attaining happiness? What is the cause of the anxiety, unhappiness, and neuroses suffered by Nina and Darrell? Is Nina right to blame conventional morality for her plight? • Investigate Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex, and show how the theory is relevant for the character of Marsden.

Indeed, only for a short period in her life does Nina attain the happiness she so passionately seeks. This comes at the end of act 6, shortly after the birth of her child, when her husband, her lover and her older admirer (Marsden) all desire her, and when she believes she is in complete control of the situation. But this does not last, and she never fully shakes herself free of the memory of Gordon Shaw and the life they might have had together. She names her son after Gordon, but the young Gordon is not able to bring her happiness either, since he must inevitably leave his mother for another woman. Finally, Nina gives up the quest for happiness and accepts a quiet, peaceful life with Marsden instead.

Purgatory Marsden interprets the twenty-ﬁve years that followed Nina’s ﬁrst involvement with Gordon Shaw as a kind of purgatory. Although purgatory is a Christian theological term that refers to a place

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where sins are expiated through suffering, the term can also refer to any place of temporary suffering. Marsden tells Nina to regard those twenty-ﬁve years ‘‘as an interlude, of trial and preparation, say, in which our souls have been scraped clean of impure ﬂesh and made worthy.’’ This is the ‘‘strange interlude’’ to which the title of the play refers, a time in which each character must go through a process of puriﬁcation. Nina has to act out and exhaust all her passions and desires and break all her illusions about what life is or can be, before she can return to the peaceful, untroubled life that she knew as a child, thus putting an end to the ‘‘strange interlude.’’

The Two Aspects of God At various points in the play Nina refers to the two aspects of God—God the Father and God the Mother. God the Father is stern, judgmental, and punishes sins. It is God the Father who instills guilt in people, and Nina blames Him for her marriage to Evans, which she entered into because she felt guilty and believed she needed to be punished. She sees this aspect of God as ‘‘a male whose chest thunders with egotism and is . . . thoroughly comfortless.’’ Against this, Nina sets her concept of God the Mother. She regrets that men created God in a male image, telling Marsden that We should have imagined life as created in the birthpain of God the Mother. Then we would understand why we, Her children, have inherited pain, for we would know that our life’s rhythm beats from Her great heart, torn with the agony of love and birth.

God the Mother embodies love, the values of the heart not the intellect, and understands human suffering because she shares it. God the Father, on the other hand, is aloof and does not permit human happiness.

STYLE Soliloquies and Asides The major dramatic devices employed in the play are the soliloquy and the aside. A soliloquy is when a character is alone on stage and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. A dramatist uses this device to give the audience direct information about a character’s motivation or state of mind. The convention is

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that the character always speaks the truth as he or she understands it. Acts 1 and 2 both begin with long soliloquies by Marsden; Acts 1 and 5 with a soliloquy by Nina; and act 4 with a soliloquy by Evans. A related device is the aside, a convention in which a character speaks his or her thoughts aloud but these thoughts are inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Both the soliloquy and the aside were staples of Elizabethan drama but fell into disuse in the nineteenth century. When O’Neill revived them, he also expanded the possibilities of the aside. Traditionally, the aside was only a short speech, employed occasionally during a play. The asides in Strange Interlude, however, are not only much longer than their earlier models, they are also used much more frequently, so that they become a fundamental part of the structure of the drama. O’Neill’s use of this device enabled him to show not only the discrepancy between the inner thoughts of the characters and their outer words and actions, but also the contradictory nature of the thoughts themselves, according to which a character may think one thought followed by another that ﬂatly contradicts it, followed by yet another thought in which the original idea reasserts itself. This technique has something in common with the stream of consciousness technique used in ﬁction (also sometimes referred to as interior monologue), which attempts to portray the continuous ﬂow of thoughts and feelings within a character’s mind. Those terms are better left to characterize ﬁction rather than drama, but O’Neill’s development of the aside tends to give the play the ﬂavor of a novel, especially when it is read rather than seen in performance. When Strange Interlude was staged, while characters were speaking their asides, the other characters would freeze in place, thus making it clear to the audience that they could not hear the aside.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT World War I The United States entered World War I in April, 1917. Conscription was introduced, and the ﬁrst U.S. troops arrived in Europe in June. By July, 1918, over one million American troops were in

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Europe. The war ended in November, 1918. The United States suffered a total of 320,710 casualties, including 116,708 dead. The ﬁctional Gordon Shaw in Strange Interlude was based on the real-life soldier, Hobart Amory Hare Baker (1892–1918). Like Gordon, Baker was an outstanding college athlete, playing baseball, football and hockey at Princeton University. He enlisted in the army and departed for Europe in August 1917, and by April 1918 he was serving with the Lafayette Escadrille (103rd Aero Squadron). Just as in the play, in which Gordon Shaw is killed in an airplane accident, on December 21, 1918, Baker was killed when the plane he was ﬂying crashed.

The Boom of the 1920s Whereas Europe would take many years to recover from the four-year carnage of World War I, the impact of the war on America was less profound. There had been no ﬁghting in the United States itself, American casualties were only a fraction of those suffered by the other belligerents, and the U.S. economy remained strong. The 1920s was therefore an optimistic era, and there was an economic boom (which is the background for Sam Evans’s business success in Strange Interlude). Fortunes were made, ordinary people had money in their pockets to spend, and unemployment was low. Part of the boom was due to the growth in ‘‘assembly line mass production methods that created more consumer goods and made them available at lower prices. A Ford automobile cost $290 (average earnings were $1,236 per year). Also, consumers were able to acquire more because of the introduction of credit plans, under which goods could be bought and then paid for over an extended period of time. The growth of mass advertising through radio, magazines, ﬁlm and billboards also boosted consumerism (so it is not surprising that in the play, Sam Evans goes into advertising and makes a fortune from it). Another reason for the boom of the 1920s was the introduction of high tariffs on the import of foreign goods. This system, which is known as protectionism, meant that American goods remained cheaper than those of their foreign competitors, thus ensuring that American industries continued to prosper. The economic boom ended suddenly with the unexpected stock market crash of October 29, 1929, a day known as Black Thursday. From 1929 to

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1920s: The movie industry based in Hollywood develops rapidly, and cinema replaces the theater as a means of mass entertainment. This last decade of the silent movie nurtures stars such as Charlie Chaplin. Today: Hollywood retains its preeminence as the movie capital of the western world. Going to the movies is the favorite cultural activity of millions of Americans. • 1920s: The Volstead Act becomes effective in 1920 and bans the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor throughout the United States. Prohibition fails, however, because it is impossible to enforce. Alcohol is sold illegally in bars known as speakeasies. There are several thousand speakeasies in New York alone. Prohibition also produces an increase in organized crime, since large proﬁts can be made from the sale of illegal alcohol. Today: Alcohol abuse is a signiﬁcant social problem. Alcohol is a contributing factor in thousands of trafﬁc fatalities. In 2001, 17,400 people were killed in crashes involving alcohol, representing 41 percent of the 42,116 people killed in all trafﬁc crashes. Alcohol abuse is also

1931, stock losses were estimated at $12 billion, and the worst depression in American history began. By 1932 there were twelve million unemployed. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New Deal, a series of economic and social measures designed to alleviate the effects of the depression.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW When ﬁrst produced by the Theatre Guild at the John Golden Theatre in New York City in 1928, Strange Interlude was an unexpected success. The play lasted nearly ﬁve hours (not including the one-

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a factor in criminal behavior such as domestic abuse and other kinds of violence. • 1920s: On August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment becomes law, giving all women the right to vote. In the presidential election of 1920, women vote in patterns similar to men, dividing along party lines according to class, economic, regional, and other factors. In 1924, in Wyoming, Nellie Tayloe Ross is elected governor, the ﬁrst female governor in the United States. Today: In the presidential election of 2000, women make up 52 percent of all voters. Political analysts study the so-called gender gap, which reveals that women are more likely than men to vote for Democratic candidates. According to the Center for Policy Alternatives, a non-partisan policy center, if only women’s votes were counted, Democratic candidate Al Gore would have won the popular and electoral vote in 32 states and tied in Colorado, giving him a landslide victory. In the elections of 2000, the number of female governors increases from three to ﬁve, the number of female senators from 9 to 13, and the number of female representatives from 56 to a record 59.

hour interval for dinner) and held the audience’s attention throughout. It went on to become the most successful American play produced up to that time, with 426 Broadway performances in its ﬁrst production. According to literary critic Travis Bogard, writing in Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, audiences at the time regarded it as a play ‘‘which dealt seriously with facets of human nature not yet fully explored’’ and which were just becoming more widely known in the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and James Joyce. However, not all reviewers shared the enthusiasm of the play-going public. Bogard points out that some regarded it as ‘‘naïve in its use of psychological theory, overly long and unclear in its theme.’’ The play was also

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controversial and was banned in Boston because its content included topics such as abortion and adultery. Strange Interlude was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1929, and when published, it became a national bestseller, the ﬁrst time a play had attained this status. Over one hundred thousand copies were sold. Largely because of its length, Strange Interlude was not performed frequently. But there was a production at the Hudson Theatre, New York City, in March 1963, which ran for 104 performances. Another revival on Broadway in 1985, starred Glenda Jackson as Nina. In the early 2000s, Strange Interlude was generally regarded as the ﬁrst play that revealed O’Neill’s full power as a dramatist, although it was not considered the equal of his greatest plays, such as The Iceman Cometh and A Long Day’s Journey into Night.

CRITICISM

Ben Gazzarra and Jane Fonda in a 1963 stage production of Strange Interlude

Bryan Aubrey Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the inﬂuence of Eastern religious thought, as well as that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, on O’Neill’s play. O’Neill believed that serious drama should probe the depths of existence and examine the role of human beings in the universe. It should reveal what the history and development of religion also revealed: the inner life of man. O’Neill’s work is therefore informed by various philosophical and religious ideas that he gleaned from his wide reading. This is especially apparent in Strange Interlude, which reveals his interest in Eastern religious thought, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, and his interest in the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work has much in common with Indian thought. O’Neill read Schopenhauer with enthusiasm when he was young and re-read him shortly before he wrote this play. What O’Neill absorbed from Schopenhauer was a pessimistic vision of human life, in which suffering, rooted in the endless striving of human will and desire, was inevitable. The only way to end suffering was to end desire.

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The character in the play who most embodies desire is Nina Leeds. The play revolves around her relationships with the various men in her life: father, father ﬁgure (Marsden), romantic ideal (Gordon Shaw), husband, lover, and son. It is her need to fulﬁll every aspect of herself as a woman that drives the plot. The goad for this obsession on the part of Nina is her anger and guilt, which she feels because she allowed the moral taboo against pre-marital sex to thwart the ﬂow of her desire for Gordon Shaw. With Gordon’s death, her desire for a child by him can never be fulﬁlled. Her attempt to compensate for this loss is what drives her on throughout the long ‘‘strange interlude.’’ All her men are a part of this passionate quest, which is at times touched with a kind of mysticism. Nina is searching for what, in popular parlance, might be called her ‘‘inner goddess.’’ She wants to believe in a deity that is more in harmony with her being as a woman than the distant, punitive God the Father of Judeo-Christian tradition. For Nina, this female deity is associated with procreation, and with the great rhythms of the cosmos. One of Nina’s happiest moments comes when she is pregnant with Darrell’s child. In her soliloquy that begins act 5, she becomes a part of God the Mother in a vision of unity and peace:

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SCHOPENHAUER SAW THE INNERMOST NATURE OF LIFE AS NOTHING MORE THAN THE BLIND STRIVING OF AN IMPERSONAL WILLTO-LIVE, A ‘UNIVERSAL CRAVING FOR LIFE’ WHICH MANIFESTS MOST STRONGLY IN SEXUAL DESIRE, SINCE THIS IS HOW EACH SPECIES PERPETUATES ITS OWN EXISTENCE.’’

my child moving in my life . . . my life moving in my child . . . the world is whole and perfect . . . all things are each other’s . . . life is . . . and this is beyond reason . . . questions die in the silence of this peace . . . I am living a dream within the great dream of the tide . . . breathing in the tide I dream and breathe back my dream into the tide . . . suspended in the movement of the tide, I feel life move in me, suspended in me . . . no whys matter . . . there is no why . . . I am a mother . . . God is a Mother.

The imagery here suggests moon goddess, fertility goddess, and earth mother all rolled into one— all aspects of the cosmic feminine that historically have been excluded from orthodox Christian thought. In addition, nestling unobtrusively in Nina’s meditation are concepts that show O’Neill’s interest in Eastern mysticism: the oneness of all things (as opposed to the separation between God and His creation in Western thought) and the ultimate reality of life that is unchanging and eternal, lying beyond the senses and beyond desire and thought. According to the Upanishads, which constitute some of the core texts of Hinduism, this state of pure, silent consciousness, known as Brahman, is also the essence of the individual self. To know Brahman is to know the eternal nature of the self. This is a state of knowingness, in which, as Nina intuits, questions die, because questions are only the products of the restless intellect and cannot be answered at the level at which they are asked. The answer to the question is to transcend the question altogether, exactly as Nina does in this brief moment of contemplation. Unfortunately for Nina, she cannot maintain this state of being for more than a few moments. It dissolves as soon as her husband enters and she is

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brought back into the world of human interaction. Then the whole restless process, so well created by O’Neill in the characters’ stream-of-consciousness asides, begins again as she thinks of her lover Darrell, wants a divorce from Sam, bemoans how she has sacriﬁced her life to him, and then immediately regrets all these thoughts as being unjust. This unremitting procession of unquiet thoughts is what Schopenhauer called the ‘‘endless stream of willing’’ to which all humans are subject and which ensures that no one ever knows contentment for more than a ﬂeeting moment. Schopenhauer saw the innermost nature of life as nothing more than the blind striving of an impersonal will-to-live, a ‘‘universal craving for life’’ which manifests most strongly in sexual desire, since this is how each species perpetuates its own existence. In Strange Interlude, Schopenhauer’s notion lies behind the desire of Nina and Darrell to conceive a healthy child that will not be subject to hereditary insanity. As a man of intense passion who thinks he has made himself immune to love by cultivating the detached manner of the scientist, Darrell thinks that he can conceive the child as an experiment and not get drawn into an obsessive desire for Nina. He is, of course, quite wrong. Desire takes hold of him too, just as it has Nina, and buffets them both as it carries them along helplessly, like a boat swept downstream by a fast current. All the characters, especially Nina and Darrell, but also Evans and Marsden, are helpless in this grip of desire. Their plight crystallizes in another of those ﬂeeting cosmic moments when Nina seems to become larger than life and sees herself as an embodiment of the universal mother god who absorbs the many into the one. This moment comes at the end of act 6, when Darrell, Marsden, and Evans are all contemplating her with different degrees and kinds of desire. She is acutely aware of all their desires, and her desire dominates and absorbs theirs in a kind of maternal cosmic womb: My three men! . . . I feel their desires converge in me! . . . to form one complete beautiful male desire which I absorb . . . and am whole . . . they dissolve in me, their life is my life . . . I am pregnant with the three! . . . husband! . . . lover! . . . father! . . . and the fourth man! . . . little man! . . . little Gordon! . . . he is mine too! . . . that makes it perfect!

But once again, it is perfect only for a moment. Salvation for Nina comes not in one of these inspired, mystical balancing acts, since life is continually in ﬂux and cannot be frozen in one particular moment that happens to be pleasing to the desire-

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bound personality. Only when Nina lets go of the whole business of desire can she be free. But in her case this comes not through some deliberate act of detached contemplation—the Eastern ideal—but when desire simply exhausts itself, leaving behind it only a longing for rest and peace. And this is where Charlie Marsden becomes important. Marsden is different from the other male characters, Darrell and Evans. Although he has an emotional attachment to Nina, it is not a sexual one. Sexually, he is undeveloped, and in that sense he is always beyond desire. The reasons for his sexual abstinence are a combination of latent homosexuality, an unfortunate encounter with a prostitute as a teenager, a naturally reﬁned sensibility, and a neurotic attachment to his mother. He is also, as he admits to Nina, afraid of life, afraid of grappling with the really deep issues. When he is in Europe in the aftermath of World War I, he is unable to write because the issues are too large for him to deal with: ‘‘how answer the ﬁerce question of all those dead and maimed? . . . too big a job for me!’’ One of the key images of Marsden occurs in act 1. It is thought by Nina, who in this scene regards him with a kind of affectionate contempt: What has Charlie done? . . . nothing . . . and never will . . . Charlie sits beside the ﬁerce river, immaculately timid, cool and clothed, watching the burning, frozen naked swimmers drown at last.

These words are prophetic on Nina’s part, since the ﬁerce river is the river of desire that eventually will pull everyone under. In contrast, Marsden sits apart from the river, observing it. This remarkable image surely owes much to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs about the enlightened man, established in the eternal nature of the self, detached from the stream of desire which he observes without being affected by it. In this view, ‘‘being’’ is more important than ‘‘doing,’’ and this is exactly the attitude that enables Nina and Marsden to ﬁnd some peace and contentment at last. ‘‘God bless dear old Charlie . . .’’ Marsden says to himself, alluding to how Nina has always regarded him, ‘‘who, passed beyond desire, has all the luck at last!’’ The Eastern metaphysical framework does not explain everything about Strange Interlude, which also draws on Freudian and perhaps Jungian thought, as well. But it does give insight into an aspect of O’Neill’s thought, nourished by his wide reading in comparative religion and philosophy, that was an important part of his life and work in the 1920s.

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Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Strange Interlude, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Michael Manheim In the following essay excerpt, Manheim discusses the episodic sequencing of Strange Interlude and the relation of each part’s themes and action to O’Neill’s own life. In Strange Interlude, the emphasis shifts away from Jamie, though when one recalls the very distorted Jamie of Lazarus Laughed, it is quite possible he may appear in guises here still more difﬁcult to recognize than in that play. The emphasis in Strange Interlude seems again primarily on O’Neill himself trying to cope with all the deaths around him and, as always, with that one awful shock of his adolescence, his mother’s addiction. Like so many others, the play explores his attempts to escape the pain associated with those events. If in two previous plays O’Neill had been ‘‘much possessed by death,’’ he was absolutely obsessed with it in Strange Interlude. While death, except in the early scenes, is not so explicit a subject of the play as it is in Lazarus Laughed, it is heavily in the background from beginning to end, tormenting all the characters in a variety of ways and directly affecting their responses and behavior. There are seven deaths referred to in this play, deaths of individuals closely related to central characters. There is the death of Professor Leeds’s wife before the play opens, which the Professor ﬁnds himself unable to face. There is the earlier death of the airman Gordon Shaw, Nina’s ﬁrst lover, which Nina ﬁnds herself unable to face. There is the death of Professor Leeds himself, which Nina cannot ‘‘feel’’ anything in response to. There is the death of mad old Mr. Evans, Sam Evans’s father, which his strange wife is still trying to cope with. Not long after, there is the death of Charlie Marsden’s mother, whose apron strings Charlie could never cut and whose memory possesses him throughout the rest of the play. There is the death of Charlie’s sister referred to in Act Eight, which Charlie responds to precisely as he had to the death of his mother. And ﬁnally there is the death of Sam Evans, which no one seems to know how to respond to. In addition, these deaths are all linked by the fact that the character closest to the deceased either has trouble feeling the death, or facing it—which amounts to the same thing in the context of the play. The incapacity to feel is presented as simply an early manifestation

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. . . THESE FOUR EPISODES

And these four episodes follow the major preoccupations of O’Neill’s adult existence: the deaths in his family, the addiction of his mother, his affair with Carlotta, and his fear of the future.

FOLLOW THE MAJOR PREOCCUPATIONS OF O’NEILL’S ADULT EXISTENCE: THE DEATHS IN HIS FAMILY, THE ADDICTION OF HIS MOTHER, HIS AFFAIR WITH CARLOTTA, AND HIS FEAR OF THE FUTURE.’’

of the incapacity to face. And so with O’Neill himself toward the deaths around him. First he could not feel them, then he could not face them. But while death is extremely important as a force which generates people’s responses and behavior, it is not the immediate or surface subject of the action. Rather, the subject is a life story, the life story of Nina Leeds, told more as a novel might present it than as a play. It is also a disguised version of the life story of Eugene O’Neill, from the great disillusionment of his adolescence up to his involvement with his later wife Carlotta Monterey. Not for the ﬁrst time and not for the last, O’Neill disguises an identity by changing the sex of the person intended, a simpler disguise than some because he might thereby treat certain topics more directly. The central agonies of Nina’s young adulthood parallel the agonies that haunted O’Neill’s existence. Although in the course of the play other characters reenact important aspects of O’Neill’s attitudes and behavior, it is Nina who most comprehensively lives out the long-range fears, guilts, and frustrations which O’Neill felt were leading him to total despair. The nine acts of this enormous play may be broken into four episodes, three relatively short, and one quite long. The ﬁrst centers on Nina’s relationship with her father and her response to his death; the second tells the strange tale of madness and death in the family of Sam Evans; the third traces the long, chaotic love affair of Nina Leeds and Ned Darrell; and the fourth predicts a desperate future. Although O’Neill divides the play into two major parts denoting a break of ten years, the natural story lines actually fall into the four I shall be discussing.

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Professor Leeds, the subject of the ﬁrst episode, is described in terms, and acts in ways, which suggest Mary Tyrone. The change in sex from mother to father is consistent with the change that makes Nina represent O’Neill. We meet the Professor as the play opens living on the same seacoast as Mary (New Haven substituted for New London), longing for a recently deceased (and, we infer, dominant) spouse, compulsively dedicated to the past, and unable to confront the problems of the present. He is described, like Mary, as ‘‘a fugitive from reality,’’ ‘‘over-reﬁned,’’ and ‘‘temperamentally timid.’’ He concentrates most of what he has to say in his brief appearance on his personal insecurity and on the guilt he feels toward his daughter, the recent death of whose lover both he and his daughter feel, quite irrationally, he has helped to bring about. The lover was an airman shot down during World War I, but Nina feels that had her father not prevented their marriage before the lover’s departure, the lover might not, somehow, have died. Both see Gordon Shaw’s death as the cause of Nina’s recent nervous breakdown, and the Professor fears he may have been to blame. Nina is described from the start in terms which suggest the young O’Neill both in appearance and in his struggle with disillusionment and guilt: Her face is striking, handsome rather than pretty, the bone structure prominent, the forehead high, the lips of her rather large mouth clearly modelled above the ﬁrm jaw . . . . Since Gordon’s death [her eyes] have a quality of continually shuddering before some terrible enigma, of being wounded to their depths and made deﬁant and resentful by their pain. Her whole manner, the charged atmosphere she gives off, is totally at variance with her healthy outdoor physique. It is strained, nerve-racked, hectic, a terrible tension of will alone maintaining self-possession. (I. 12–13)

Like Nina, the active, athletic O’Neill was ‘‘nerve-racked,’’ not by the idealized image of a dead airman but by the equally idealized image of a dead mother. The Gordon Shaw theme parallels that motif of a lost ideal past O’Neill represented earlier in the image of childhood to which Jim and Ella Harris long to return. With the memory of Gordon Shaw representing O’Neill’s distorted recollection of his mother ‘‘before the fall,’’ the guilt of Profes-

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sor Leeds then stands for his mother’s guilt after she had revealed her great crime. The nervous breakdown Nina is recovering from is symptomatically no different from the whole set of reactions O’Neill experienced following the great trauma of his adolescence. Both feel inexpressible loss and inexpressible guilt, and both try to escape into a life of unabated debauchery. To parallel his own tuberculosis sanatorium, O’Neill includes a battle-fatigue sanatorium for Nina, where she ‘‘gives herself’’ to patients as O’Neill ‘‘gave himself’’ to whores and drink. O’Neill has combined in Nina’s story the debauchery of his late teens with his experience in the sanatorium. Ned Darrell makes the point about Nina that she will shortly ‘‘dive for the gutter just to get the security that comes from knowing she’s touched bottom,’’ an idea which describes O’Neill’s early adult life as accurately as any. The second act of the play, which concludes this ﬁrst episode, deals with Nina’s ﬁrst reactions to the death of her father and grows out of O’Neill’s ﬁrst reactions to the death of his mother. Nina keeps repeating in a voice ‘‘ﬂat and toneless’’ that she is utterly unable to ‘‘feel anything at all’’ about her father—as O’Neill confessed that he could feel nothing at all about his mother’s death. It is in response to this inability to feel that Nina decides to accept marriage. Since there is nothing, she reasons, that can replace her mutilated ideal, she decides that she must assume the outward characteristics at least of adult behavior, a compromise O’Neill felt he had made in his marriage to Agnes Boulton and in his early career. O’Neill’s understanding of his own condition is suggested by the physician Ned Darrell’s diagnosis of Nina. Ned clinically announces that Nina’s inability to feel (like O’Neill’s) is only a result of shock, that her feelings (like his) are actually very great. O’Neill writing Strange Interlude had come to understand, as he had not earlier, the nature of his supposed lack of feeling; and the play’s opening episode reveals the nature of the understanding. But he was far from able to ﬁnd hope in that understanding. The second of the play’s four episodes is much shorter and quite different in tone from the others. It is a melodrama in one act (Act Three) presenting the same disillusionment and fear of the opening episode from a different, less reasoned perspective. Now married to Sam Evans and pregnant, Nina is brieﬂy happy at the prospect of becoming a mother. But she soon discovers the illusory nature of her new happiness, just as she had discovered the

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illusory nature of her old ideal. We meet Sam Evans’s mother, who is described in the old familiar terms. She is . . . very pale. Her big dark eyes are grim with the prisoner-pain of a walled-in soul. Yet a sweet loving-kindness, the ghost of an old faith and trust in life’s goodness, hovers girlishly, ﬂeetingly, about the corners of her mouth. . . . (I. 53)

But despite the familiar description, it is not Mrs. Evans who reminds us of Mary Tyrone in this scene so much as it is the late, withdrawn, and unstable Mr. Evans described by Mrs. Evans, and the insane sister she also describes locked away in an upstairs room (the spare room motif), who sits laughing to herself without a care in the world. The mood of the play suddenly becomes gothic. Nina’s emotion as she learns that her late father-in-law’s ‘‘madness’’ is an inherited one is one of horror. Her ﬂicker of hope at the prospective child is quickly doused. The effect of the family past is haunting to her. Thus the atmosphere of the brief second episode repeats the underlying elements of the ﬁrst episode but strongly counters its reasoned, clinical tone. Both the clinical and the gothic were parts of O’Neill’s complex perspective of the 1920s. The solution proposed by Mrs. Evans—that Nina have an abortion and ﬁnd a substitute father for her children—leads into the play’s long and best-remembered third episode, which begins with Act Four and runs through Act Seven. This is on the surface a modish 1920s love story which in its time was undoubtedly rather titillating. The relationship between Nina and Ned precisely parallels the boiling affair between O’Neill and Carlotta. ‘‘Oh, those afternoons!’’ the lovers murmur through much of their anguished dialogue, afternoons certainly paralleling those O’Neill spent on his increasingly long and frequent trips to New York in the mid-twenties, ostensibly to work on rehearsals, but actually to yield to the very real attractions of a quite provocative actress. Here, of course, Ned Darrell is O’Neill, as his ‘‘dark, wiry’’ appearance suggests he sooner or later must be. But he is only O’Neill the attractive lover succumbing to a forbidden passion, not the O’Neill viewers of the plays know better, the terriﬁed victim of an incomprehensible guilt. That O’Neill in this episode is the province of the enigmatic Charlie Marsden, a ﬁgure I shall consider in a moment. The reason the Nina-Ned episode is so predominantly a soap opera is that, like O’Neill’s

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earlier play on the subject of his marital and amatory problems, Welded, it is so engagingly superﬁcial. It deals with that fascinating subject of people struggling with forbidden sexual attraction. It in no way deals with the conditions or causes which lead them to such activity. O’Neill did something here he would never do again. He dramatized effects— which so many second-rate writers do—rather than causes, and the results were immensely successful commercially. The popularity of Strange Interlude was in fact very much the popularity of soap opera. These episodes are saved from utter banality, however, by Charlie Marsden, who keeps us in touch with the emotions O’Neill could not escape from, try as he might. In this episode at least, Marsden stands for O’Neill himself, more or less in the way William Brown did. Like O’Neill, Brown and Marsden are successful artists unsure of their own talents and plagued by the commercial appeal of their works. And both are, like O’Neill, overly sensitive, devastatingly self-critical, and unsure of their abilities as lovers. That last may seem strange in the light of O’Neill’s active sex life, but extreme ambivalence in this area was a hallmark of all the O’Neill’s. O’Neill’s puritanical Roman Catholic upbringing was so full of taboos and his adolescent sexual experiences so fretted with fear and guilt that both his marriages were seriously affected by frequent periods of sexual disgust and inadequacy. The pervasive presence of that disgust in the plays is suggested by Charlie as he encounters Nina and Ned in the midst of their yearning for one another: lust in this room! . . . lust with a loathsome jeer taunting my sensitive timidities! . . . my purity! . . . purity? . . . purity? . . . ha! yes, if you say prurient purity! . . . lust ogling me for a dollar with oily shoe button Italian eyes! (I. 100)

These lines anticipate that potent atmosphere of sexual disgust particularly evident in the later plays: in the professional remarks of Cora and the Italian Pearl in Iceman, Edmund’s recollections of his sexual initiations in Long Day’s Journey, and Jamie’s drunken sexual attitudes and behavior in A Moon for the Misbegotten. The Charlie Marsden we encounter in these scenes is the O’Neill who could be terribly, viscerally disturbed at the subject of sex even as he had, like his Ned Darrell, exceptional sexual appetites and, intermittently, prowess. But more revealing still are other attitudes of Charlie Marsden’s, especially in Act Six: his selfpitying lament for his dead mother and his contempt

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for himself as a writer, which are signiﬁcantly related. He criticizes himself from the beginning of the play for being unwilling to dig deeply in his novels, afraid that he will ‘‘meet himself somewhere.’’ In Act Six he links that fear, signiﬁcantly, to the death of his mother: I couldn’t forget Mother . . . she haunted me through every city of Europe. . . (Then irritatedly) I must get back to work! . . . not a line written in over a year! . . . my public will be forgetting me! . . . a plot came to me yesterday . . . my mind . . . is coming around again . . . I am beginning to forget, thank God! . . . (Then remorsefully) No, I don’t want to forget you, Mother! . . . but let me remember . . . without pain! . . . (I. 112–13)

O’Neill’s recurrent periods of inability to write are well-known, and his desire to remember his mother ‘‘without pain’’ is the futile effort of all these plays. Charlie tells us more a bit later: . . . but I might have done something big . . . I might still . . . if I had the courage to write the truth . . . but I was born afraid . . . afraid of myself. . . (I. 120)

If the audiences of 1928 were puzzled about the precise nature of that truth, those of Long Day’s Journey some thirty years later would not be. While Marsden and Nina represent O’Neill’s anxieties about his art and about his past, Ned Darrell reﬂects the domestic O’Neill, revealing his guilt at having to confront his betrayed children. In Act Seven, Nina and Ned are still, in this manyyears-later scene, the on-again off-again lovers, unable to part, unable to join, unable to be anything but deceptive and manipulative. Nothing new is provided about their relationship because O’Neill had nothing new to provide about his with Carlotta at that point. But what he adds, quite poignantly, is his fear concerning his children. The treatment O’Neill lets young Gordon Evans give Ned Darrell, his secret father, is treatment Shane O’Neill was not too young to have awarded his father on his infrequent trips home during the courtship of Carlotta; and it feels in the play like treatment O’Neill felt he deserved. As in other instances in which guilt and hurt can be felt most intensely in O’Neill’s plays, the intensity here seems the direct result of immediate experience. But it is still essentially unexplored experience— or experience at one remove from its source. O’Neill is here dealing with behavior and responses which are the result of earlier unrelieved agonies, and it is only when O’Neill deals more directly with those

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earlier agonies that the plays probe deeply into human experience. Notwithstanding O’Neill’s characterizations of Charlie Marsden and little Gordon Evans, the long third episode is maudlin. If O’Neill went further in representing the ‘‘inner’’ lives of his characters than he had ever gone before, he did not go much further, largely because in this play he did not have much further to go. He was mired in immediate domestic problems and in a love affair, both of which grew out of deeper problems of his past; and while he sensed the connections between past and present, he understood neither. The tedious third episode of Strange Interlude sheds little real light on the nature of human relationships. The last episode of the play (Acts Eight and Nine) represents O’Neill’s attempt to achieve an idyll of withdrawal, a death in life, that condition later paralleled by Deborah Harford’s in More Stately Mansions. It is written out of O’Neill’s despair, of both past and present, and his desire to ﬁnd the kind of escape the residents of Harry Hope’s saloon ﬁnd through their pipe dreams and their nickel whiskey, but which O’Neill never could ﬁnd by such methods. There are many elements of the play present in the last episode, not all of them successfully drawn together. I shall concentrate only on those clearly enough related to O’Neill’s deeper feelings to make them relevant to this study. The end of the play can best be understood through its three central characters—Sam Evans, Nina Leeds, and Charlie Marsden—in that order. For out of these characters can be seen O’Neill’s two alternative routes to the eternal oblivion his despair had led him to seek in all these plays. To begin with, Sam is O’Neill’s image of what is best in life. His life and death call to mind Larry Slade’s dark quotation from Nietzsche: Lo, sleep is good; better is death; in sooth. The best of all were never to be born.

Sam lives with his illusions intact and he dies a sudden death. Because he never knew the real conditions of his life—the madness in his family, his wife’s true affections, the real paternity of his son—it could be said that he had lived a long sleep. Sam’s life was a healthy pretense to O’Neill. Free from the burden of knowing reality, completely protected in his illusions, Sam has been able to achieve material success and bring security to those around him. These are qualities O’Neill envies him, and still more does he envy him his sudden death. And Sam’s ‘‘son’’ Gordon is following directly in his supposed father’s footsteps when he refuses to

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believe that his mother could ever be unfaithful, unable even to comprehend the news that Ned Darrell is his real father. The Evans men are of the genus that sensitive and disturbed people envy for the impenetrability of their illusions, though by the time he wrote Iceman O’Neill believed no one could be entirely protected from his ghosts. More important in the episode is Nina, who represents O’Neill himself in the overall design of the play as a life story, but who from time to time suggests other important women in O’Neill’s life. Her agonized exchanges with Darrell, for example, suggest Carlotta. In the last episode, through signals we are well acquainted with, she anticipates Mary Tyrone. At the point in Act Eight when her selﬁsh clinging to her son is frustrated and she is prevented by Darrell from trying to break up her son’s planned marriage, she becomes increasingly remote and her thoughts become vague and confused. She imagines Charlie to be her long-dead father and confesses the great sin of her life to him in tones which suggest Mary’s narcotic withdrawal. It is quite reasonable, of course, that at this point in the play, when Nina has become the mother of a young adult, she should follow the pattern of so many troubled matrons before and after her in O’Neill’s plays. What is surprising is that the character who began the play as the author’s representative should end as his mother’s. In fact, she represents both at the end of the play. What we see O’Neill doing in this ﬁnal episode is dramatizing that aspect of his fear in which he identiﬁed with his mother’s desire to withdraw. As Nina, like Mary, seeks a death in life, an insulation from all feeling, so O’Neill, nervous and guilt-ridden like both, longed for such a release so much that he was willing to betray those closest to him to ﬁnd it. The Nina of the ﬁnal episode is a fusion of O’Neill’s anxieties concerning his mother and his anxieties concerning himself and his future—a fusion which would be central in plays to follow, especially More Stately Mansions. Nina’s ‘‘strange dark interlude called life,’’ then, is O’Neill’s. The play is a not-so-brief abstract of O’Neill’s emotional history—‘‘a long drawn out lie with a snifﬂing sigh at the end,’’ says Nina. Now unwilling to write in the courageous if essentially suicidal terms of The Great God Brown, O’Neill seeks an escape in this life, and he does so through a totally new version of his Earth Mother, his Cybel, the comforting bosom on which he ‘‘might cease upon the midnight with no pain.’’ He assigns this

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role to the altogether surprising ﬁgure of Charlie Marsden. The ubiquitous Charlie has represented several facets of O’Neill’s experience in this play, and there are many ways to approach him, almost all of them accurate but none of them complete. We have most recently heard him uttering O’Neill’s most self-pitying thoughts and thus representing O’Neill’s self-condemnation in these plays. But in this ﬁnal episode, he becomes something quite different from the embodiment of O’Neill’s uncertainty about his talent. The ﬁrst overt indication of this larger function in the last episode is when he begins thinking to himself in terms one might associate with a narcotic withdrawal: My life is a cool green shade wherein comes no scorching zenith sun of passion and possession to wither the heart with bitter poisons . . . my life gathers roses, cooly crimson, in sheltered gardens, on late afternoons in love with evening . . . roses heavy with after-blooming of the long, day, desiring evening . . . my life is an evening . . . Nina is a rose, my rose, exhausted by the long, hot day, leaning wearily toward peace. (I. 187)

He becomes the embodiment, in short, of escape.

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mother with the stain of his real mother’s guilt removed. Which is to say, he sought his Earth Mother, and created her in various versions in his plays. Possibly the strangest version of all is Charlie Marsden. Several things Charlie does and says earlier in the play foreshadow this idea. He clings to Nina the way O’Neill’s thoughts about the past clung to him, and he says he cannot decide whether he is a man or a woman. While the latter may suggest homosexuality, there is nothing notably homosexual about the Charlie of this play. He has lost his lust, he tells us, as the result of an encounter with a whore—an experience which ﬁts a number of O’Neill’s characters, most notably Jamie Tyrone, in whom it would be difﬁcult to identify homosexual tendencies. The point O’Neill seems to be making about Charlie is simply that he is asexual, and that is precisely what he is supposed to be at the end: an asexual, protecting comforter for Nina in her dark, despairing wait for death. Nina’s ﬁnal gesture in the play is to fall asleep with her head on Charlie’s shoulder. Her much-misunderstood declarations earlier in the play on behalf of ‘‘God-the-Mother’’ are thus ﬁnally realized in the triumph of ‘‘good old Charlie Marsden.’’

In line with this function, Charlie becomes a kind of father ﬁgure to Nina. She has identiﬁed him with her father throughout the play; here she calls him father, and she yields to his love as a daughter would to a comforting father. Yet Nina has also throughout the play protested her rejection of fathers and father ﬁgures. She declares any number of times that she no longer believes in God-the-Father but has instead become a believer in God-theMother, the provider of nurture and comfort, a conception not far removed from O’Neill’s Earth Mother, especially as she is represented in the goddess-like Cybel. So Nina’s escape in the end into the embrace of a re-incarnation of her father seems contradictory—unless we recall (1) who her real father represented in the play, and (2) the androgynous terms in which Charlie earlier describes himself.

In dividing Strange Interlude into what I see as its four major episodes, I have sought to cut this sprawling play down to size. Its inordinate length, like that of plays to follow, grows out of O’Neill’s persistent harassment by hostility and guilt, followed by panic and withdrawal. The ﬁrst two episodes re-enact his familiar set of contradictory responses to his mother’s addiction and his mother’s death. The third and fourth reenact the escape, the third his escape through marital inﬁdelity, and the fourth his desire for total oblivion. The play, like those immediately before and after it, is an extended set of variations on the theme of O’Neill’s hardening despair.

At the start of the play, when Nina could be identiﬁed simply as a young O’Neill disguised largely by a change in sex, the Professor by the same token could be identiﬁed as a version of O’Neill’s mother. Nina, of course, rejects her guilty father and has difﬁculty facing his death, as O’Neill rejected his mother and had difﬁculty facing hers. In her despair late in the play, Nina seeks the forgiveness and comfort of a father—but not the still stained memory of her real father. What she seeks is that father with the stain of his guilt removed. And so O’Neill with the memory of his mother. He sought a

Before going on to the other plays of this most desperate period in O’Neill’s writing, however, I ought to say a word more about the play’s interior monologues and their relation to the theme of kinship. Despite their frequent banality, they at times embody elements of the kind of dialogue O’Neill wrote earlier and would return to later. While the lines the characters speak to one another are usually deceptive or manipulative, the lines they think to themselves, when not simply self-pitying, often recall that antiphony of contradictory feelings O’Neill used so extensively in his earlier plays and would

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one day make basic to his language of human kinship. But although these rhythms do occur, the more important point is that they are almost always limited to the characters’ thoughts. Rarely do the characters reveal their irrational reverses in feeling to others, and thus rarely are the characters in actual communication. Despite his obvious attempt to make the characters reveal their inner states, there is no true self-revelation in the play because the characters are rarely honest and direct with one another. Having told Nina that he loves her, for example, Ned Darrell thinks to himself that he is unsure that he loves her. It is quite convincing that his feelings might be so divided, but because of his fear of being hurt, Ned never makes this natural division in his feelings known to Nina. The result is the soap opera effect of pointless and ceaseless suspicion and distrust with no one the wiser or better off. There has been little real emotional confrontation, and there is little really ‘‘Freudian’’ about the play at all, despite the supposedly Freudian overtones of the interior monologues. For contrast, such passages might be set beside encounters between father and son, mother and son, and brother and brother in Long Day’s Journey. Whatever the characters in this later play feel is ultimately spoken aloud, and the result is a good deal of hurt and resentment but also a good deal of enlightenment. Only the ﬁgure of Mary, who ﬁnally must hide entirely behind her morphine screen, evokes the kind of despair that emanates from practically every scene of Strange Interlude. The men survive at the end of Long Day’s Journey because they have made contact with one another— as do all three characters in A Moon for the Misbegotten. It is all a matter of whether the terrible extremes of human emotion are held in, breeding an aura of human separateness and despair, or whether they are released, breeding an aura of kinship. As O’Neill was far remote from any aura of kinship in his personal life of the late 1920s, so are his plays of that period. Source: Michael Manheim, ‘‘Strange Interlude and Dynamo,’’ in Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship, Syracuse University Press, 1982, pp. 60–71.

John Gassner In the following essay excerpt, Gassner discusses the staging of and the response to O’Neill’s Strange Interlude.

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Source: John Gassner, Excerpt, in Eugene O’Neill, University of Minnesota Press, 1965, pp. 27–30.

Barrett H. Clark In the following essay excerpt, Clark provides an overview of Strange Interlude, using his acquaintance with O’Neill to discuss the playwright’s intent and the ‘‘dramatization of the motives of his people.’’

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STRANGE INTERLUDE When I saw O’Neill in June, 1926, he told me about one of the new plays he was working on. The idea sounded preposterous: there were to be nine acts, and all the characters were to speak their thoughts aloud, with no regard for the ordinary conventions of the theater or of normal social intercourse. ‘‘And why not?’’ he asked. ‘‘Everything is a matter of convention. If we accept one, why not another, so long as it does what it’s intended to do? My people speak aloud what they think and what the others aren’t supposed to hear. They talk in prose, realistic or otherwise—blank verse or hexameter or rhymed couplets.’’ Then he went on to outline the story. The actual writing of Strange Interlude was done in Bermuda and Maine in 1926 and 1927. The Theatre Guild contracted for the play, and early in 1928 it was produced. The Guild people have a way of doing things well. We know from the published letters of O’Neill that the Guild had turned down The Fountain when the prestige of a production by them would have helped immensely, and the royalties have eked out an income that was none too large; and there had been misunderstandings about other early MSS. But to the Guild O’Neill owes adequate, careful, and on occasion superb productions, and it is likely that if that group had not produced Strange Interlude and Dynamo, he might have had a hard time in those years ﬁnding other producers willing or able to take chances on them. Let me begin my remarks on Strange Interlude by saying that the producers and director spared no pains or expense in doing ample justice to the drama. There have been few plays that required more tact and skill and imagination than this ambitious and subtle play in nine acts. Philip Moeller never directed anything that called for greater intelligence and a more sympathetic understanding. He brought into relief as much as was possible in a work that has so little that is conventionally theatrical. There is not much of that ‘‘pointing,’’ straining after effect, that has marred certain other Guild productions. Strange Interlude is many things, almost as many things as it has been called. The ﬁrst point to make is that from 5:30 P.M. until after eleven, except for eighty minutes’ intermission for supper, it holds the audience. Yet not primarily by means of theatrical trickery. It is not the story, which could easily have been condensed into three acts; it is not the strangeness of the asides and monologues (that

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O’NEILL KNOWS THAT STRANGE INTERLUDE IS HEAVY WITH SUSPENSE, AND FOR THIS REASON HE THROWS OVERBOARD MOST OF THE DEVICES BY WHICH DRAMATISTS USUALLY CREATE IT.’’

novelty wears off in a few minutes); it is no more nor less than the triumph of O’Neill’s art, his amazing gift for understanding and laying bare some of the complexities of the human mind and heart. He was clearly unwilling to make use of the traditional dramatic form which, in its latest manifestations, does not admit the aside and the soliloquy, and refuses to allow the dramatist much more than two or two and a quarter hours’ time. He had therefore, with a characteristic disregard of current fashions, elaborated what might otherwise have been a commonplace plot into nine acts, with a total playing time almost twice as long as what we are used to. There is more to hold the attention in Strange Interlude than there is in Parsifal. There is less ‘‘literature’’ but far more drama than there is in Faust. Strange Interlude carries four characters through their chief emotional crises during twenty-seven or -eight years. Nina Leeds, daughter of a college professor, loses her ﬁancé shortly after he goes to war to be an aviator. Her puritanical father has prevented the consummation of their union, which precipitates her decision to leave home. At ﬁrst she becomes a nurse, then she seeks other outlets for her more or less imperfectly adjusted desires and aspirations. As she enters the main action of the play she has already begun to take on the appearance and characteristics of woman—with a capital W—to symbolize the Earth Spirit; she is a close relation of Cybel in The Great God Brown; she is mother, wife, mistress, adultress, materialist, idealist. Into her life are woven strands from the lives of many men: of Gordon (a romantic memory and an ideal); of the patient mother-ridden Charles Marsden; of Sam, her husband; of Edmund Darrell, her lover; and later of her son Gordon. For this woman no one man is enough. This epic creature, endowed with an inordinate thirst for life, takes on the proportions of a superwoman. With dreams that

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can never quite be fulﬁlled, held in check by inhibitions, forced onward by appetites, she is the incarnation of vitality, a creature that is driven to meddle in the lives of others in order that her own life may be ﬁlled to overﬂowing. No one is a match for her; nothing arrests her progress, nothing but old age. At last she is defeated by time and by that very spirit of youth (in the person of her son) that urged her on to rebel when she was young. The boy Gordon and the girl he is determined to marry leave her, even as she had left her helpless father. This, essentially, is the ‘‘story’’ of Strange Interlude. There are several plot incidents, absorbing in themselves, but introduced principally to throw the character of Nina into sharp relief. I see in the play no ‘‘moral,’’ no ‘‘intention,’’ indeed very little of any deﬁnite philosophy. This in spite of what O’Neill and some of his interpreters have said on the subject. It was O’Neill’s aim to expose imaginatively a chain of events in which a few people exhibit to us their thoughts and motives over a long period of years. Life offers us problems, joys, tragedies; it seems to take shape occasionally as a thing of beauty, but oftener as a senseless and cruel joke; yet it is an exciting process, a great adventure. The puppets we call ourselves are momentarily selfimportant with their little schemes for cheating death and avoiding unhappiness, but ultimately they lose bit by bit their desires and the ﬁerce impulses of youth, declining slowly into a sunset period where peace alone seems worth having. Thus Nina seems to outgrow and cast off her sex, to embody and to be identiﬁed with the life instinct. Because she is conceived by the dramatist as a woman, each situation in her life is symbolized by a man, possessing something that she needs, has needed, or will need at last. In the case of Marsden we see her carefully appraising him in the ﬁrst act and marking him out for use at some future time; at the end of the ninth act, when everything else has gone, she falls into his protecting arms, there to pass peacefully the remaining days of her life. I have not yet touched on the essential element in Strange Interlude—the thing that makes it, with all its faults, a masterly creation. This is no more nor less than the dramatist’s divination and dramatization of the motives of his people. As I have said, he could easily have told his story in three acts, but he extended it to nine in order that he might not have to say, ‘‘If I had had time, I might have told you everything essential about these people.’’ He did have time, because he took it; he probably took a

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little too much time, not his own, but ours; there are places where he has insisted on making his characters explain to us what has already been clearly shown. We are almost immediately let into the secrets of these characters: they tell us a great deal of what they think and feel. Not everything, of course, for that would be impossible and not at all necessary, but enough for the purpose at hand. The thoughts expressed aloud cannot at best constitute more than a fraction of those half-thoughts, hints and shadowings that haunt the subconscious mind, but they are enough for O’Neill. Shakespeare did much the same thing, and so did Goethe. O’Neill has tried to go a little farther, and has used the device somewhat more realistically. If he had been a Shakespeare or a Goethe he could have succeeded where they did, and with less ado. Simple and crude as it is, the device he uses is occasionally very effective. That is why there is no surprise in the ordinary sense; no suspense, and no curiosity of the sort aroused in conventional ﬁction. O’Neill knows that Strange Interlude is heavy with suspense, and for this reason he throws overboard most of the devices by which dramatists usually create it. He never releases the tension in his pursuit of the motives of human activity; this is his aim throughout. Like a surgeon he cuts deep, knowing always just what he is after. While he has succeeded in showing a series of events each of which throws into relief some basic characteristic of one or more persons; and while he has conceived largely and written nobly, I feel that Strange Interlude is not the perfect work it might have been. For one thing, the shade of Strindberg hovers too close over it all: there is something strained, a bit diagrammatic and intellectualized in the character of Nina. She is rather too special—too much the female of the species. Woman as a beast of prey is Strindberg’s invention, and I don’t think O’Neill’s vision of the world is as narrow and warped as that of the Swedish poet. Technically, what of the asides and the nine acts? Is it always necessary in a play to express aloud what one thinks and feels? Cannot the actor occasionally show it? I believe that perhaps half of all the words not intended to be heard by the other characters might have been omitted without the loss of anything essential. O’Neill has overworked his device. Finally, there is something lacking in the last three acts. They are somewhat repetitious, and might well have been condensed into one.

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In these acts we notice again the dramatist’s tendency to get lost in the mazes of his own rhetoric, not because he is trying merely to write for the sake of writing, but because he insists on exploring to the utmost the darkest corners of the mind and heart. In becoming familiar with the shape and color of words every writer has to guard against the temptation to create ‘‘mere’’ literature, or what looks like it, for he too often becomes the slave, as Stevenson and Wilde did, of the thing he thinks he has conquered. Throughout Strange Interlude, particularly in the asides, there are some lapses into ‘‘ﬁne’’ writing. Of course, I am not insisting that one’s thoughts ought not to be well expressed, but good expression does not of course mean ‘‘ﬁne’’ writing, and some of O’Neill’s ﬁne writing is not good expression. In his attempt to avoid the banalities of surface realism he sometimes falls into another sort of error. Source: Barrett H. Clark, Preface, in Eugene O’Neill: The Man and His Plays, Dover Publications, 1947, pp. 111–16.

SOURCES Bogard, Travis, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 297. Carpenter, Frederic I., Eugene O’Neill, Twayne, 1964, pp. 121–27. O’Neill, Eugene, Strange Interlude, in The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 1, Random House, 1964, pp. 2–200. Ranald, Margaret Loftus, The Eugene O’Neill Companion, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 648–71.

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Robinson, James A., Eugene O’Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision, Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, pp. 147–61. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne, Dover, 1969, Vol. 1, p. 196; Vol. 2, p. 350.

FURTHER READING Alexander, Doris, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924–1933, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 103–28. Strange Interlude is one of nine plays analyzed in detail. Alexander shows how O’Neill resolved his personal struggles through his plays. Floyd, Virginia, The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: A New Assessment, Ungar, 1987, pp. 334–52. Floyd traces the growth of the play from O’Neill’s early notes and scenarios, and analyzes it act by act. She argues that the plot is weak, and the strength of the play lies in the characterization. Mannheim, Michael, Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship, Syracuse University Press, 1982, pp. 60–71. Mannheim emphasizes the autobiographical elements in the play, which represent O’Neill’s attempts to escape the pain associated with the deaths of many close to him, and his discovery of his mother’s drug addiction. Mannheim, Michael, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, Cambridge University Press, 1998. This volume of essays contains studies of O’Neill’s life, his intellectual and creative forebears, and his relation to the theatrical world of his creative period, 1916–1942. There is also a production history on stage and screen.

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A Thousand Clowns HERB GARDNER 1962

A Thousand Clowns was ﬁrst presented at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York City on April 5, 1962, with Jason Robards in the role of Murray Burns. Herb Gardner’s ﬁrst full-length play, it was nominated for the Tony Award for best play and was so successful commercially that Gardner, named the most promising playwright of 1961–62, was able to turn to playwriting full time. A few years later, Gardner wrote the prize-winning screenplay for a ﬁlm adaptation of A Thousand Clowns, also starring Robards. The play tells the story of Murray Burns, a cheerful eccentric raising his nephew, a twelveyear-old genius, in New York City. Murray believes in living life fully, even if that means going to the movies instead of looking for a job. When social workers from the Bureau of Child Welfare come to investigate, he must decide whether to accept some level of conformity in order to show himself a ﬁt guardian. The play is episodic and funny, as Murray meets all challenges to his lifestyle with irreverent humor. The text is available in Herb Gardner: The Collected Plays, published in paperback in 2001 by Applause Books.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Herbert Gardner was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 28, 1934. His grandfather owned a neighborhood bar, the Silver Gate, in Manhattan’s 2 3 6

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Lower East Side. Gardner attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York City and then the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he studied sculpture and drama. Gardner’s Jewish heritage and his experiences listening to conversations in his father’s bar provided background for several of his plays and characters. A man of many interests and abilities, Gardner wanted to be a sculptor but did not think he would be able to make a living at it. In the 1950s, he drew a comic strip called The Nebbishes for the Chicago Tribune. The strip became popular and was widely syndicated. The income from the strip and related merchandise made it possible for Gardner to act on his dissatisfaction, like Murray Burns, and end his career. Turning his attention to writing longer works, in 1958 he published his ﬁrst and only novel, A Piece of the Action. This was followed by his ﬁrst full-length play, A Thousand Clowns, which opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway on April 5, 1962. In recognition of the play, Gardner was named the ‘‘promising playwright of 1961–62’’ by the New York Drama Critics. Over the next forty years, Gardner had a relatively small but signiﬁcant output. He wrote one-act plays, and ﬁve more full-length plays, including I’m Not Rappaport, which won the 1986 Tony Award for best play. All of his longer plays were produced on Broadway. He wrote the screenplay for the ﬁlm version of A Thousand Clowns (1965), and ﬁve more screenplays based on his work. He also wrote television plays, short stories, reviews and columns. He died of lung disease on September 24, 2003, in New York City.

PLOT SUMMARY Act 1 Before the lights come up on A Thousand Clowns, the voice of Chuckles the Chipmunk, an inane children’s television host, can be heard in the darkness, carrying on a perky conversation about ‘‘Chuckle-Chip Dancing’’ with a screaming crowd of children. The curtain goes up to reveal the cluttered one-room apartment of Murray Burns, every surface covered with clocks, broken radios, hats and other items. Although it is 8:30 on a Monday morning, the only light in the apartment is

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the light from the television, as Nick, Murray’s nephew, watches the Chuckles the Chipmunk show. Murray, who has just gotten out of bed, enters from the kitchen with a cup of coffee, and the two begin their day. Murray is a free spirit with an offbeat sense of humor. He phones the weather service to get the day’s forecast and carries on an extended conversation with the recorded message on the other end. He has been unemployed for several months, having quit his job as a writer for Chuckles the Chipmunk because he fears becoming trapped in normal middleclass life. Although he has been promising Nick that he will look for a new job, he has no intention of doing so today, because he is celebrating the birthday of Irving R. Feldman, the owner of his favorite delicatessen. Nick, who is twelve, has decided to skip school in honor of the occasion as well. Clearly, Murray and Nick are fond of each other, and just as clearly, Murray has unconventional ideas about raising children. Nick, in some ways the more mature of the two, warns Murray that they are about to be visited by a social worker from the Bureau of Child Welfare. Murray promises to behave himself and considers again the possibility of looking for a job, but the prospect depresses him. Instead, he suggests a trip to the Statue of Liberty.

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Before Murray and Nick can leave, they ﬁnd at the door Albert Amundson, a social worker, and Sandra Markowitz, a psychologist, both from the Bureau of Child Welfare. Murray has been ignoring their phone calls and letters for eleven months, and they have come to see whether he is a ﬁt guardian for Nick. Murray answers their serious questions with jokes and non sequiturs. Albert is earnest and stuffy, and he has no appreciation for Murray’s whimsical sense of humor. Sandra, on the other hand, ﬁnds Murray and Nick charming. Murray and Nick truly are charming. They show off by guessing where Albert and Sandra grew up, based on their accents. Nick can also do imitations of Peter Lorre and James Cagney, famous movie actors from the 1940s and 1950s. Sandra is impressed by Nick’s intelligence, but Albert refuses to be distracted from his list of prepared questions. Sandra draws Nick aside to talk, and Nick does his best to tell her what he thinks she wants to hear about ‘‘educational-type magazines’’ and ‘‘wholesome and constructive-type games.’’ When asked about his favorite toy, Nick produces an electric statue of a topless hula dancer whose breasts light up. Nick has an ironic appreciation for how tacky the statue is, but Albert and Sandra try to establish deep psychological meanings for it. Murray explains that Nick’s mother, Murray’s sister, abandoned Nick years before. She never even gave her son a name. ‘‘Nick’’ is just a name the boy is trying out; he is to choose a permanent name when he turns thirteen in a few weeks. Sandra can see the humor in the way Murray and Nick live and in the inadequacy of the investigators’ probing, but Albert cannot. When Albert asks Sandra to be quiet and let him complete the investigation, the two quarrel, and Albert leaves, threatening to have Nick placed in foster care. With Albert gone, Sandra begins to cry. She knows she is not well suited for her job, because she becomes too involved with the people she is studying. She is romantically involved with Albert, but she knows that the relationship is also hopeless. She is worried about Murray and Nick and their chances for staying together. Nick is disappointed, but not surprised, that Murray was unable to behave during the interview. To cheer everyone up, Murray picks up his ukulele and begins to sing an old song, ‘‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.’’ Soon Nick picks up his own ukulele and joins in the rousing performance, complete with dance steps. Before the song is over, Nick

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looks thoughtfully at Murray and Sandra, sees that they are acting like a couple, and grabs his pajamas so he can spend the night with a neighbor.

Act 2 Act 2 opens in Murray’s apartment the next morning, where Sandra has spent the night. While Sandra is getting dressed, Murray’s brother Arnold stops by with his daily delivery of a bag of fruit. Arnold is also Murray’s agent, and he tells Murray that he has two job prospects for him. Arnold knows that the Child Welfare Bureau is investigating Murray, and he wants to help him get a job so he will look more reliable. Murray refuses to discuss work, and Arnold leaves. When Sandra emerges, they have a few moments of tension before they realize they are both happy about their night together. As Sandra delights in her new-found independence and spontaneity, Albert returns to the apartment. He informs Murray that a hearing will be held in two days to determine whether he may continue as Nick’s guardian. When Albert leaves, Murray tries to convince Sandra that Nick would be better off in foster care. He is unable to convince Sandra—or himself—that he is indifferent to Nick. Instead, he heads off to buy a new suit and get a job. The next scene takes place in Arnold’s ofﬁce, where Arnold is talking on a speakerphone with Leo Herman, also known as Chuckles the Chipmunk. They are negotiating a new offer for Murray, who is on an interview with another man named Sloan. Leo wants Murray back, but only if Murray can be more respectful. Murray comes into the ofﬁce and reports that he has not taken the other job because ‘‘Sloan is an idiot.’’ He has decided to work with Leo again. But while talking with Leo, Murray is unable to hide his dislike. He tosses the speaker phone in the wastebasket while Leo is talking and storms out. The third scene is back in Murray’s apartment, but it is an apartment transformed. Sandra has been tidying and redecorating, putting all of the broken clocks and radios in boxes, and adding new bedspreads and pillows. Nick arrives and is pleasantly surprised to see Sandra still there and to see the changes she has made. The two chat in a friendly way. Murray comes home in a cheerful mood, but Sandra slowly realizes that he has not gotten a job and that Nick will have to leave. Disappointed with Murray, she leaves, too.

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Act 3 About thirty minutes later, act 3 ﬁnds Murray alone in his apartment, which he has restored to its original chaotic condition. Arnold comes in and tries to have a serious conversation with Murray about the future. Murray accuses Arnold of having given up all of his youthful dreams, but Arnold insists that he is content with his job, his home, his wife, his children. He refuses to apologize for not living like Murray and proclaims ‘‘I am the best possible Arnold Burns.’’ Arnold leaves and Nick comes in. He proudly announces that since Murray has gone out and gotten a job, he has decided to complete his own unﬁnished business: he has decided to take ‘‘Murray Burns’’ as his permanent name. Murray is touched by this but tries to convince the boy to choose another name. Leo arrives to try to talk Murray into coming back to work. Leo is a pathetic ﬁgure; he is neither warm nor particularly funny, and it bothers him that he cannot get Nick to like him. The more he tries to amuse Nick, the duller he appears. As Nick sees how empty a man Leo is, he understands why Murray does not want to work for him, and he tries to chase Leo away with another chorus of ‘‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.’’ But Murray knows now that he loves Nick, and he will do what he has to do to keep Nick with him. He quiets Nick and accepts Leo’s job offer. He will be back to work in the morning. Leo leaves, and Sandra returns. She hints at ideas for ﬁxing up the apartment again, and Nick encourages her. For now, the three are a family, and Nick and Sandra will unite to keep Murray in line. Murray resignedly accepts his fate, and the curtain comes down.

CHARACTERS Albert Amundson Albert Amundson is a social case worker with the New York Bureau of Child Welfare, sent to investigate Murray’s ﬁtness as a guardian for Nick. Albert is a stuffy, no-nonsense man. He takes his job seriously and wants to do it well, but he has no afﬁnity for children and makes no attempt to talk with Nick when he visits the apartment with his partner, Sandra Markowitz. In fact, he suggests repeatedly that Murray send Nick away while they discuss the ‘‘case.’’ He is not impressed by Nick’s

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • A Thousand Clowns was made into a feature ﬁlm in 1965, with Gardner’s screenplay receiving an Academy Award nomination. Directed by Fred Coe, it stars Jason Robards as Murray, reprising his Broadway role. It is available on video and DVD from MGM Home Entertainment.

ability to identify where Albert has lived by listening to his accent nor amused by Nick’s impressions or his song-and-dance number. He scolds Sandra— who is also his ﬁancé—because she allows herself to become emotionally involved in cases. Albert intends to stay detached and scientiﬁc as he explores other people’s lives. His conclusion, after meeting Nick and Murray, is that Nick must be moved to foster care for his own protection; he does not see any value in the way Murray is bringing him up. He quarrels with Sandra over this conclusion, but uses his seniority with the bureau to remove Sandra from the case. In act 2, Albert returns to announce the board’s ﬁndings: Nick will be removed in three days unless Murray can prove that he is reliable. Albert comes personally to deliver the news and explains that while he admires Murray’s affection for Nick, he believes that Nick is not receiving the kind of emotional support he needs. He knows that Murray is incapable of understanding this decision, but he is conﬁdent in it, and he accepts his role in the drama: ‘‘Your villains and heroes are all so terribly clear to you, and I am obviously one of the villains.’’

Arnold Burns Arnold Burns is Murray’s brother and also his agent. He is the most successful and stable member of the family, working for a large company of theatrical agents in downtown Manhattan and living a normal home life with a wife and children. Arnold looks after Nick and Murray, bringing them a bag of fresh fruit every day and arranging job interviews for Murray. Twenty years earlier, Arnold shared

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Murray’s sense of humor, and he lost his job as a salesman for Harry the Fur King because he did not behave maturely enough. Now he has a large ofﬁce with a spectacular view on the twenty-second ﬂoor. In Murray’s eyes, Arnold has given up his personality and free spirit in pursuit of money and conformity. But Arnold feels at peace with his compromises. He refuses to apologize for the way he lives and tells Murray proudly ‘‘I am the best possible Arnold Burns.’’

As the play progresses, Murray tries to maneuver a course between being carefree and being responsible. For him, there is no middle ground, no compromise, so every attempt to become just a little more conventional ends in failure when he abruptly changes course. In the end, Murray seems to accept having a regular job, a neat apartment and a steady relationship with a woman as the price he must pay to keep Nick in his life. The audience has to wonder, however, how long this apparent stability will last.

Murray Burns

Nick Burns

Murray Burns, the protagonist of the play, is an unemployed television writer and the uncle and unofﬁcial guardian of Nick. He had a successful job as head writer for the Chuckles the Chipmunk show until ﬁve months before the play begins, but he quit suddenly without notice, as he had quit several other writing jobs before that. Murray is a free spirit, an independent thinker, and he cannot be tied down to a nine-to-ﬁve job, wearing a suit and answering to a boss. Instead, he has spent the last ﬁve months going to the movies, visiting the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and practicing his ukulele. Murray is the sort of person who notices and takes great pleasure in simple things: the smell inside a movie house, good pastrami, his collection of hats and broken radios, and watching ocean liners set sail. He enjoys every minute of his life, as perhaps only a person with no responsibilities can.

Nicks Burns is Murray and Arnold’s twelveyear-old nephew, the son of their sister Elaine and one of her long string of irresponsible men. When Nick was ﬁve, Elaine left him at Murray’s apartment and took off, returning only once to pick up a suitcase; she showed so little concern for Nick from the beginning that she never even named him. Murray has had an agreement with the boy: he can try out any name he likes for as long as he wants to, and when he is thirteen he will choose a permanent name and have it approved by the courts. Nick is an unusually bright child, and he attends a special school for gifted children. He has blossomed under Murray’s eccentric style of parenting. He is independent, caring, sociable, and funny—a likeable kid who charms Sandra right away. In many ways, he is more mature than Murray, and he understands, when Murray refuses to, the danger they will be in if Murray will not behave himself when the social workers come and if he will not get a job.

As a substitute parent for Nick, Murray has strengths and weaknesses. Nick seems to have no doubt about Murray’s love for him, and he has grown into an intelligent and independent boy. But Nick knows Murray is not reliable about practical things, and like an adult he does worry when the rent is not paid for months or when Murray risks having Nick put in foster care by refusing to look for a job or say the right things to the social workers. The problem with Murray is that he cannot keep his mouth shut. When Albert and Sandra, case workers from the New York Bureau of Child Welfare, come to investigate, Murray acts silly and insults Albert. When Arnold tries to help Murray ﬁnd a job, Murray insults him and his family. When Leo tries to patch things up, Murray insults him, too. What Murray does not insult he ignores, including eleven months’ worth of calls and letters from the bureau and the job offer from Sloan, another television host. There is no real meanness in Murray. Somehow, as irresponsible as he is, he is charming, and Sandra falls in love with him in less than twentyfour hours.

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Nick thinks he can read people and that he is skilled at telling them what they want to hear, but he is probably better at conning other twelve-year-olds than adults. When he tells Sandra that he and Murray ‘‘play many wholesome and constructivetype games together,’’ or thanks Leo for the cardboard Chuckles the Chipmunk with ‘‘imagine how pleased I am to receive it,’’ they see through him. Nick loves Murray and wants to stay with him, and he tries desperately to convince the other adults to appreciate Murray the way he is. He is attracted to Sandra because he thinks she will be able to help him mold Murray just enough to get by in the real world. To show his affection for Murray, Nick brings home a library card ﬁlled out with what he has chosen for his permanent name: Murray Burns. This act so ﬂatters and confuses Murray, who has almost convinced himself that he and Nick would be better off without each other, that Murray accepts Leo’s job, assuring that he and Nick can stay together.

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Chuckles the Chipmunk See Leo Herman

Leo Herman Leo Herman, forty-one, is the star of the Chuckles the Chipmunk children’s television show on NBC. While he is in character as Chuckles, Leo is wildly cheerful and saccharine, prone to saying things like the play’s ﬁrst sentence: ‘‘Goshes and gollygoods, kidderoonies; now what are all us Chippermunkies gonna play ﬁrst this ﬁne mornin?’’’ Off camera, he is insecure and depressed. He knows that children do not like him, and he suspects that he is not even funny. He tries too hard; he does not know how to reach people. As he says about himself, he is nothing but ‘‘the biggest phony you ever met.’’ When he visits Murray and Nick at their apartment, he brings Nick a gift of a life-sized cardboard cutout of himself, a Chuckles the Chipmunk hat, and a bag of Chuckles the Chipmunk potato chips. Although Nick accepts the gifts gracefully, Leo eventually realizes that they only demonstrate his own big ego. Until six months before the play opens, Murray was the head writer for the show. Since he quit abruptly, the quality of the show has slipped, and Leo would very much like to get Murray back. But as much as he respects Murray’s talents as a writer, he cannot accept Murray’s disrespect for Leo and for the show. Meeting Nick and seeing the apartment, Leo realizes the extent of Murray’s quirkiness. He accuses Murray of ruining Nick’s life and is about to walk out when Murray stops him. Over Nick’s objections, Murray soothes Leo’s hurt feelings, assures him that he is funny, and agrees to report back to the show in the morning.

Sandra Markowitz Sandra Markowitz, just a few months out of graduate school, is a psychological social worker with the New York Bureau of Child Welfare. With her partner and intended husband Albert Amundson, she has been sent to investigate Murray’s ﬁtness as a guardian. Unlike Albert, Sandra is charmed by Murray and Nick’s humor and intelligence, and she would like to ﬁnd a way to keep them together in spite of what the regulations say. Sandra is ill-suited to her work for the bureau. Although she has a doctoral degree and Albert does not, her lack of conﬁdence usually leads her to bow to his professional judgment. Worse, she cannot help but become emotionally involved in her cases, taking a dislike to one little boy and ﬁnding herself delighted

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by Nick and Murray. When she refuses to back down and follow Albert’s lead in this case, he leaves the apartment angrily while Sandra stays behind, weeping. Murray tells her she is well rid of Albert and of her job—that this is her opportunity to look for real happiness. As act 2 opens, it is clear that Sandra has continued her impetuous behavior and stayed the night with Murray. She is both happy and insecure about it, and when Albert returns to the apartment she hides in the closet so he will not ﬁnd her there. Sandra is attracted to Murray’s eccentricity, but she is not willing to give up conventional life to the degree he has. Knowing that the bureau really will have Nick removed from his home if Murray does not show some responsibility, she urges him to get a job. While Murray is out, she cleans up the apartment, getting rid of all the broken clocks and hats and buying new bedspreads and pillows. She imagines that she has reformed Murray overnight, that he will be willing to make changes for her sake or for Nick’s. Crushed when he admits that he has turned down two jobs, she leaves, telling him, ‘‘Maybe you’re wonderfully independent, Murray, or maybe, maybe you’re the most extraordinarily selﬁsh person I’ve ever met.’’ In the end, Sandra comes back, and she and Nick team up to keep Murray somewhat under control.

THEMES Self-concept and Selﬁshness When Sandra discovers that Murray has been offered two jobs but has not accepted either of them, she expresses her disappointment in a line that expresses the play’s central question: ‘‘Maybe you’re wonderfully independent, Murray, or maybe, maybe you’re the most extraordinarily selﬁsh person I’ve ever met.’’ The line between self-awareness and self-centeredness is the line that Murray must establish as he moves through the play, and it is this line that determines whether other characters ﬁnd Murray enchanting or exasperating. Murray is not close to many people. He is not married and seems to have no friends. He dates many women, but none for long. His sister Elaine is in Europe. His brother Arnold is kind and loyal, but Arnold’s relationship with Murray seems entirely one-sided. Nick is a twelve-year-old boy. In Murray’s eyes, he is independent and free, with no one

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • The job of the New York Bureau of Child Welfare in the play is to determine whether or not Murray and Nick function well as a family. They seem particularly interested in the fact that Nick’s birth parents were not married to each other. What different kinds of families do the people you know live in today? What are the qualities that make up a good parent or a functioning family?

• A director of a stage play or a ﬁlm works with the script on the page, but can guide the way an audience interprets a character by choosing who will play the parts and how they will deliver the lines. How would you cast a stage or ﬁlm production of A Thousand Clowns? Which actors working today capture the essential qualities of each character as you perceive them?

• The Chuckles the Chipmunk television show seems to be about equal parts entertainment and advertisement for Chuckle-Chip potato chips. In that regard, do you think television aimed at children has improved or deteriorated since the 1960s? Are children’s programs today intended more for providing entertainment or for selling products?

• A few years after its Broadway opening, A Thousand Clowns was made into a ﬁlm. Instead of conﬁning the action to Murray’s one-room apartment and Arnold’s ofﬁce, the ﬁlm was able to move throughout the city of New York. If you were making a ﬁlm version of the play, what scenes would you add or relocate to take advantage of this opportunity?

telling him what he should be or do. He forms no attachments; he is not in debt to anyone for anything, and he does not ask for anything from others except to be left alone. Only by living this way, he believes, can he maintain his self-image, because intimacy with another person would create demands that would change who he is. And to maintain his uniqueness, he believes, is a high and noble calling. It is all he wants for Nick: ‘‘I want him to get to know exactly the special thing he is. . . . I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair.’’ For Murray, it is more important to be true to oneself than to make compromises that please others.

away.’’ Albert cannot understand why Murray is not ‘‘at all willing to answer some questions, to give some evidence’’ to support his case and ultimately ﬁnds him guilty of ‘‘libertine self-indulgence.’’ Leo Herman, repeatedly humiliated by Murray, criticizes: ‘‘the way you brought this kid up, Murray, grotesque atmosphere, unhealthy, and you’re not even guilty about it.’’ These characters ﬁnd Murray selﬁsh, not a free spirit; they do not long for the unfettered life he leads. At the end of the play, Murray’s choice is clear: If he loves Nick, he will hang on to his job with Leo Herman, whether he ﬁnds it personally satisfying or not. The question hanging in the air as the curtain goes down is: Will he do it?

To other people—those who love Murray and those who do not—Murray’s striving to maintain his self-concept is mere selﬁshness. Arnold, who feels responsible for supporting his wife and children, challenges Murray’s refusal to work. It is not a highly developed dislike of mediocrity that informs Murray’s choices, Arnold claims, but simply ‘‘Other People; taking up space, bumping into you, asking for things, making lines to wait on, taking cabs

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Middle-class Life Large groups of people in a given class share values and beliefs as well as social and economic status. Sociologists describe, for example, a set of values and beliefs found in capitalist societies among the middle classes. The middle classes, they observe, are particularly driven by a work ethic, a

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belief that people’s worth derives chieﬂy from the work they do. People meeting each other for the ﬁrst time are apt to identify themselves by their jobs, rather than by other characteristics—it is normal and acceptable to ask a new acquaintance ‘‘What do you do?’’ For people who hold the work ethic, a person who does not work is strange, someone to be avoided or examined. Other qualities embraced by the middle class grow out of the workplace and its need for structure and order. Middle-class values as they are commonly referred to include a preference for punctuality, an acceptance of hierarchy, including respect and submission to those higher up on the corporate ladder, and an acceptance that the schedules and demands of work will shape one’s daily life. Accompanying these values are fear and suspicion of anyone who does not adhere to them. Murray Burns’s greatest fear is that he will join the middle class and lose himself. He loves Nick and wants to keep him, but not if it means, as he says, ‘‘being judged by people I don’t know and who don’t know me.’’ He wants to live on his own schedule, create his own holidays, because ‘‘You have to own your days and name them, each one of them, every one of them, or else the years go right by and none of them belong to you.’’ He worries that if Nick is placed with a normal family ‘‘He’ll learn to know everything before it happens, he’ll learn to plan, he’ll learn how to be one of the nice dead people.’’ The people who disapprove of Murray’s way of life do not think he is evil or dangerous or unkind; they see that he is different, and they assume that different is bad. If he were independently wealthy or chronically impoverished, people around him might question less his decision not to work. In practical terms, Murray’s struggle is not within himself but is rather a struggle to maintain his chosen way of life within and yet outside the middle class.

STYLE Setting A Thousand Clowns is set in New York City, speciﬁcally in the borough of Manhattan, the cultural and economic center of the city. Gardner and his characters know the city well and use references

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to its boroughs and neighborhoods as a kind of shorthand. Murray and Nick, for example, live above an abandoned Chinese restaurant in a brownstone on the lower West Side, an area that in the 1960s was home to struggling artists, writers, and other nonconformists who were attracted to its interesting nineteenth-century architecture and its low rents. Neighborhoods offered a blend of residential space and small businesses including shops and delicatessens, often combined in one building. Brownstones, deep and narrow apartment buildings made of brown sandstone, provided small and inexpensive living space. Sandra has grown up in the Bronx, another of New York’s ﬁve boroughs. Murray and Nick suspect from her accent she is from the Mosholu Parkway neighborhood, but she grew up in another neighborhood, Grand Concourse. Both were areas of relative wealth, with tree-lined streets offering shade to the middle-class residents who had earned and saved enough to escape Manhattan (and to send their daughters to graduate school). Albert’s origins in New Jersey make him an outsider even before he begins to speak. The play is sprinkled with other speciﬁc references to neighborhoods and streets. Arnold’s ofﬁce faces the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center, a center for television production in the heart of Manhattan. His ofﬁce on the twenty-second ﬂoor of a building in this part of town demonstrates that Arnold is successful and important. Murray has lunch with Sloan on East Fifty-Third Street and takes Nick to the El Bambino Club on Fifty-Second. He also visits or mentions the Empire State Building, New York Harbor where he watches ocean liners arrive and depart, the Central Park zoo, the Statue of Liberty, Park Avenue, Macy’s, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Gardner’s original Broadway audiences would have recognized these references and made inferences about the events surrounding them based on their awareness that midtown Manhattan is the business center, Park Avenue is home to wealthy people, and so on. Gardner’s challenge is to provide enough context so that non-New Yorkers can get a sense of what he is suggesting by each location, without providing so much exposition that the jokes are lost.

Antihero The traditional literary hero demonstrates particular virtues, such as courage, nobility, or integ-

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rity. The term ‘‘hero’’ is sometimes used simply to mean the central character of a work of ﬁction (also called the ‘‘protagonist’’), whether or not this character is more worthy than other characters, but more commonly the term refers to a central character who displays or acquires these heroic qualities. When the protagonist of a modern work lacks heroic qualities, as Murray Burns does, he or she is referred to as an anti-hero. Murray is not just a common man, no more or less noble than people usually are. He is extraordinarily lacking in certain qualities. For all his talk about wanting to be true to himself, he has little knowledge of his own impulses and desires; he believes, for example, that his attachment to Nick is weak and impermanent. He sleeps with a lot of women, but he is unable or unwilling to establish emotional intimacy. He is not brave enough to confront Sloan or Leo Herman directly but resorts to rudeness and jokes. He is not merely a little selfcentered, but may be, as Sandra considers, a ‘‘most extraordinarily selﬁsh person.’’ Murray is not quite capable of living in the real world and facing its challenges, but he is charming and sensitive and generally likeable. Ultimately, whatever his faults, the audience is on his side.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Anti-Communism and the 1950s During the 1950s, there was a widespread belief in the United States that members of the Communist Party posed a serious threat to national security. Although the American Communist Party had existed in the United States since the 1920s as a vocal but ineffectual political force, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States led many to see communists as allies of the enemy. This in turn led to a restriction of civil rights for those who were members of the Communist Party and even for those who were only suspected of being communists. In the federal government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee worked in secrecy to identify suspected communists and pressured employers to dismiss them. Many people lost their jobs at universities, in labor unions, and in government ofﬁces, because of suspected communist activities. In Hollywood and New York, a list of writers who were suspected communists was circulated among the major studios; no one whose name

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appeared on the ‘‘blacklist’’ could be hired to work on any television show or Hollywood movie. This is what Arnold refers to when he chastises Murray for turning so many employers against him: ‘‘Why did you have to go and build your own personal blacklist; why couldn’t you just be blacklisted as a Communist like everybody else?’’ But the impact of anti-communism was felt far beyond a few industries. For most of the 1950s, average citizens felt unusually constrained, afraid to challenge or question the government, for fear that someone would suspect them of being unpatriotic. There were no outspoken mass movements critical of the president or of government actions. Popular media presented conventional happy families cheerfully engaged in working toward the American Dream. People internalized these images and became relatively passive and accepting; they believed in their government, in hard work, and in trying to get along. In the last two or three years of the 1950s, the communist scare relaxed. President John Kennedy was inaugurated in 1960, ushering in a period of optimism, youth, and idealism. It was in this new climate that offbeat characters who challenged the status quo—characters like Murray Burns—seemed generally appealing and amusing to a mainstream audience. A Thousand Clowns was not the ﬁrst work to feature an unconventional character; it is one play among many works that celebrated nonconformity during the early 1960s.

The 1960s and Ethnic Comedy During the 1960s, many writers and executives in the stage, ﬁlm, and television businesses were Jewish, but few central characters in the media were. It was thought—probably correctly—that the largely Christian middle-class white audiences for these productions would not be interested in Jewish or other ‘‘ethnic’’ characters. One of the most popular television shows of the decade, The Dick Van Dyke Show, which ran from 1961 to 1966, featured a main character who was a white AngloSaxon Protestant writer for a television series. The creator of the program, Carl Reiner, was Jewish, and he had modeled the show after his own experiences as a television writer, but studio executives did not think viewers wanted to laugh week after week at the work and home life of a Jewish man, and the role was given to Van Dyke. (In 1968, the television show Julia became the ﬁrst situation

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1960s: Children’s television shows like Chuckles the Chipmunk are produced locally in most major cities. Broadcast live and staged in front of a live audience, they typically feature a male host who shows cartoons, reads the comics from the local newspaper, and does short comedy sketches. Today: With the exception of a few locally produced Public Television programs, nearly all children’s programming is produced in New York or California and broadcast over the major networks or cable channels.

and satellite networking. Speaker phones are small, inexpensive, and found in many private homes. • 1960s: An administrative assistant in an ofﬁce in a large city makes a starting salary of about ninety dollars a week, or less than $5,000 a year. It is enough to support a single person in a small apartment. Today: An administrative assistant in an ofﬁce in a large city starts at about $20,000 to $25,000 dollars a year. Rents are so high that most singleincome families at this income level cannot afford to live in Manhattan.

• 1960s: Business ofﬁces use the latest communications technology. Arnold Burns’s New York ofﬁce has a ‘‘special speaker-phone’’ with a separate speaker attached so others in the room can hear a phone caller. Gardner needs three sentences to explain this technology in his stage directions.

• 1960s: To get relatively up-to-the-minute weather information, residents of cities can dial a local phone number twenty-four hours a day and listen to a recorded message. Another call to another number gives the accurate time of day.

Today: Businesses still are the ﬁrst market for new communication technologies, such as computer servers and routers, video conferencing,

Today: Cable weather channels give frequently updated world, national, and local weather information, as do many Internet sites.

comedy starring an African American woman who did not play the role of a domestic servant. There were no major Latino, Asian, Muslim, or gay characters on any comedy show.)

Amundson. Murray’s name, his love of pastrami and other delicatessen food, and his sense of humor, would have signaled his heritage to an attuned audience, but nothing about ethnicity is overtly mentioned in the play. Gardner’s next successful play, I’m Not Rappaport, repeats the pattern of characters with Jewish names who never mention their Jewishness. Not until 1991, with Conversations with My Father, would Gardner write a play that dealt directly with the ethnic identities of his characters.

In her essay ‘‘The Struggle to Afﬁrm: The Image of Jewish-Americans on Stage’’ Glenda Frank explains: Until the 1980s most prominent Jewish playwrights kept ethnic issues at arm’s length. Their characters and themes were as American as blue jeans and apple pie. Their protagonists were Melting Pot Everymen, even when identiﬁed by ethnic surnames.

In A Thousand Clowns, the references to ethnicity are subtle but would have been noticed by Gardner’s New York audiences. Murray and his family are Jewish, as are Sandra Markowitz, Leo Herman and the deli owner, Irving R. Feldman; the character who is not is the buttoned-down Albert

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW A Thousand Clowns was almost universally praised when it opened on Broadway in 1962. John McClain

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of Journal American called it ‘‘Merely the best comedy of this season,’’ and Howard Taubman of the New York Times found the play ‘‘sunny and wistful, sensible and demented, and above all, unfailingly amusing.’’ Some critics commented that the plot was a bit thin and predictable, but agreed that the play as whole was entertaining. John McCarten observed in the New Yorker that Gardner is garrulous, repetitive, and undisciplined, but also pretty funny, and if you ignore the plot of his comedy, which never does resolve itself, and just watch his characters capering about, it should give you a pleasant enough evening.

A Thousand Clowns was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963, and Gardner was named ‘‘promising playwright for 1961–62’’ by the New York Drama Critics on the strength of this, his ﬁrst full-length play. When the play was revived in 1996 and again in 2001, reviews were less favorable. Although Murray Burns was played by popular actors Judd Hirsch (1996) and Tom Selleck (2001) who created engaging performances, the characters and jokes seemed dated to many reviewers. Thirty or forty years after the play’s ﬁrst opening, audiences were used to more outrageous behavior and language on stage, and it was much more difﬁcult to delight them with mild wackiness. Of the 1996 production, Irene Backalenick commented in Back Stage that ‘‘What might once have been seen as zany, unconventional behavior now seems tame.’’ Charles Isherwood, reviewing the 2001 production for Variety, echoed Backalenick’s judgment, noting that ‘‘much of Gardner’s once-disarming irreverence seems tame and contrived.’’ Only one serious critical article has examined A Thousand Clowns, Thomas J. Scorza’s ‘‘On the Moral Character of the American Regime’’ (1978). Scorza, a political scientist, uses the play to examine how American culture ‘‘understands itself’’ and ﬁnds that the play ‘‘ultimately defends the moral character of conventional American life.’’ The article echoes the sentiments of those drama critics who, even in 1962, interpreted Murray’s behavior throughout the play and his decision to get a job at the end of the play as reinforcement of the conventionality Murray purports to argue against. Harold Clurman commented on this idea in the Nation when the play was new, observing that ‘‘Gardner’s merits . . . are at the service of what they deride. The play’s anti-conformity is but a reﬂex of conformity.’’

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CRITICISM Cynthia Bily Bily teaches literature and writing at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In this essay, Bily examines Gardner’s play as a lesson in integration and compromise. In one of the most important speeches in A Thousand Clowns, Murray explains to Sandra Markowitz that it is a grand thing to not quite know who one is. It’s just that there’s all these Sandras running around who you never met before, and it’s confusing at ﬁrst, fantastic, like a Chinese ﬁre drill. But god damn, isn’t it great to ﬁnd out how many Sandras there are? Like those little cars in the circus, this tiny red car comes out and putters around, suddenly its doors open and out come a thousand clowns, whooping and hollering and raising hell.

What Murray wants Sandra to understand is that she does not have to limit herself to one image of herself, that she is richer and more interesting than she realizes. Ironically, this is a truth that Murray cannot accept about himself. He is locked into one way of thinking about who he is, and he feels that any attempt he might make to explore the other Murrays would be a threat to his selfhood. For Murray, the world exists only in black and white. He is either free or trapped. His only choices are ‘‘life in the . . . job-hunting raw on the one hand, and eleven ﬁfty-cent double features on the other.’’ If ‘‘most things aren’t funny’’ then life is just ‘‘one long dental appointment.’’ He can be either the carefree nonconformist, or a dull business drone with no imagination and no personality. There is no middle ground. Any step toward what the rest of the world calls responsible or stable behavior will destroy him, turn him into ‘‘an ash tray, a bowl of corn ﬂakes, I wouldn’t know me on the street.’’ Murray also believes that other people are one way or another, good or bad. He is only half joking when he tells Sandra that ‘‘People fall into two distinct categories . . . people who like delicatessen, and people who don’t like delicatessen.’’ Albert tells Murray, ‘‘Your villains and heroes are all so terribly clear to you, and I am obviously one of the villains.’’ And Murray refuses Sloan’s job offer because ‘‘Sloan is an idiot.’’ Murray makes quick judgments about people and does not change them. Of course, Murray is right in what he tells Sandra about those clowns. People have many fac-

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ets to their personality and part of being mature and whole is balancing the competing demands that arise from this internal complexity and the complexity of the world. People learn as they grow up that they can and ought to behave differently in different situations and that managing varying expectations is necessary for thriving in the adult world. Through the course of the play, Murray has to learn to reject his all-or-nothing way of seeing himself. He has to learn to compromise. As he encounters the other adult characters in turn, he has the opportunity to see how degrees of this kind of integration lead people to succeed or fail in their lives. The least compromising character is social worker Albert Amundson. When he is working, he is all business, and he will not be distracted from his prepared list of questions, even by the humor and charm of Nick and Murray. The people he meets in his work are not individuals, but cases, and he treats every family the same way. His greatest worry during his investigation of Murray is that he and Sandra have ‘‘lost all control,’’ as of course they have. The humor in the exchanges between Murray and Albert in act 1 derives primarily from the conﬂict between two bull-headed people. Although viewers sympathies lie more with Murray than with Albert, they understand immediately that the two men do not speak the same language, and they ﬁnd humor in their inability to understand each other. Murray and Albert are decent men, and both want what is best for Nick, but because neither man has the will at this moment to see the world through more than one lens, neither can reach a resolution. Because neither will take even one step toward the other, they will never meet in the middle. As rigid as Albert is at work, Sandra admits that he does have a more ﬂexible side and that ‘‘He’s really a very nice person when he’s not on cases.’’ Albert has learned one thing that Murray has not: that it is possible to adopt a professional demeanor for work and relax into another personality the rest of the day. In Albert’s line of work, it is often more appropriate to behave with some detachment, as experienced social workers know. And in act 2 Albert shows kindness and decency in coming in person to deliver the news that there is to be a hearing to determine Murray’s ﬁtness as a guardian. Albert comes back because he has done what Murray cannot do: he has reconsidered the conversation of the day before and thought about it from Murray’s point of view. In this second visit, Albert knows that he will not be received cordially, he

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Jason Robards in a scene from A Thousand Clowns

knows that he cannot hold his own in a conversation with Murray, but he tries anyway to see and articulate the complexity of Murray’s situation, only to be met with more mockery. Albert says sadly, ‘‘You can’t really listen to me.’’ Another character who tries to help Murray is Arnold, who used to be as carefree as his sister and brother. Twenty years earlier, he enjoyed startling people just for fun, and he once got himself ﬁred from a salesman job by pulling a practical joke. But now Arnold has a wife and children, and he is responsible for supporting them. He has clients, including Murray, who depend on him and television executives who rely on him to deal with them honestly and fairly. Arnold has accepted his responsibilities. When Arnold says, ‘‘business, like they say, is business,’’ he demonstrates his understanding that some things are not business. When he says, ‘‘I’m lucky. I’m gifted. I have a talent for surrender,’’ he is not being ironic or self-pitying. Part of being a functioning adult is knowing when to give in. Arnold knows how to compartmentalize, to inhabit different worlds, to compromise. This does not make Arnold weak or confused; he has a strong sense of self and of self-worth. He is ‘‘the best possible Arnold Burns.’’

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closet than I do.’’ What should he make of the examples of Arnold and Albert? Is their daily choice to take their jobs seriously a denial of a facet of their personality or an acceptance of another?

HE IS: A FUN-LOVING, ENTHUSIASTIC FREE SPIRIT. ARE THERE MORE MURRAYS TRAPPED INSIDE HIS CAR, WAITING TO COME OUT?’’

Leo Herman, who makes his living playing a character, Chuckles the Chipmunk, demonstrates the multifaceted self at its least effective. Leo is a children’s television host who does not really like children, a comedian who isn’t funny. When Murray sees Leo, he sees a man who does not know who he is and does not like who he is. Murray has worried that if he goes back to work he will cease to be himself, and this does seem to have happened to Leo, who says, ‘‘I keep touching myself to make sure I’m still there. Murray, I get the feeling, maybe I vanished when I wasn’t looking.’’ Leo is what Murray is afraid of becoming: not a healthy multifaceted adult but ‘‘the biggest phony you ever met.’’ One character just outside the play stands as a cautionary example to Murray, showing him what he could become if he followed his dedication to nonconformity to its logical conclusion. Murray’s sister Elaine is the extreme free spirit, the completely selﬁsh person who allows nothing—not even the responsibility of being Nick’s mother—get in the way of her own enjoyment. Her ‘‘wellpracticed theory on the meaning of life’’ falls, as Murray describes it, ‘‘somewhere to the left of Whoopie.’’ Like her brother Murray, she moves from lover to lover and from interest to interest without committing to anyone or anything. Perhaps she is leading the life Murray would lead if it were not for Nick. But because of his love for Nick, Murray sees clearly that Elaine’s selﬁshness is indefensible. So what is Murray to do? He does not want to be as selﬁsh as Elaine or as phony as Leo. He thinks he knows who he is: a fun-loving, enthusiastic free spirit. Are there more Murrays trapped inside his car, waiting to come out? Sandra has told him, ‘‘I think, Murray, that you live in a much, much larger

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Sandra’s challenge is the opposite of Murray’s. Sandra begins the play with no sense of self; she allows herself to be manipulated and deﬁned entirely by the world around her. Murray is right about her needing to ‘‘meet all these Sandras’’ to ﬁnd out who she is. She has only recently ﬁnished graduate school and admits that ‘‘The minute I got out of school I wanted to go right back inside.’’ Although she has a doctorate in psychology and Albert has only a bachelor’s degree, she tends to defer to Albert, even when she disagrees with him. As a psychological case worker, she is called upon to be detached and disinterested about the cases she handles, but after making a few mistakes in her ﬁrst three months on the job she concludes, ‘‘I am unsuited to my profession.’’ Sandra still lives with her parents and allows her mother to pick out her clothes, ‘‘which are obviously more suited to a much older woman.’’ When Sandra quarrels with Albert and then decides to stay the night with Murray, she is taking a step toward independence. She is beginning to assert herself and to ask herself what she wants. (But it is only a small step: she does hide in the closet when Albert arrives.) Her taste still runs toward the conventional, and when she redecorates Murray’s apartment she removes all traces of his unique personality to create something that reﬂects neither her own taste nor Murray’s, but looks like a page from the Ladies’ Home Journal. Presumably, as Sandra continues to develop, she will move past rejecting other people’s ideas about her and strengthen her sense of when not to give in. She will face all those Sandras one by one and ﬁnd a place for each one. As the play ends, Murray has agreed to come back to work for Leo, and he stands helplessly as Nick and Sandra put away his clocks and radios. According to the stage directions, he knows he cannot stop their redecorating, so he ‘‘shrugs, defeated.’’ Audiences ﬁnd the ending of A Thousand Clowns to be mixed. Murray clearly makes the right decision in going back to the television show so he can keep his family together. Murray and Sandra will be good for each other. With his encouragement, she will explore more possibilities, and she will help Murray stay focused. Still, it is hard not to feel disappointed that Murray has to sacriﬁce him-

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self for the cause. Murray would feel better about his new life if he would embrace his own metaphor, if he would only believe that Murray the funny writer, Murray the respectful employee, Murray the responsible father, and Murray the carefree soul are just a few of his thousand clowns. Source: Cynthia Bily, Critical Essay on A Thousand Clowns, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Thomas J. Scorza In the following essay, Scorza examines how A Thousand Clowns ‘‘may reveal those important popular views which ‘great literature’ either disdains or conceals.’’

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Source: Thomas J. Scorza, ‘‘On the Moral Character of the American Regime: A Thousand Clowns Revisited,’’ in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 77, Spring 1978, pp. 225–41.

Harold Clurman In the following review of the initial staging of A Thousand Clowns, Clurman recognizes Gardner’s talent but asserts that the play is overlong and that its ‘‘anti-conformity is but a reﬂex of conformity.’’ Herb Gardner who wrote A Thousand Clowns, his ﬁrst play (Eugene O’Neill Theatre), has talent. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is adept. He is astute and can write funny lines. One of the ads has it that the play provides ‘‘a thousand laughs.’’ Half as many would have been more than enough. The play might be described as a comic paean to nonconformity. Our audiences, being trapped in the contraptions of our civilization, seek escape: they ﬁnd it in such plays as A Thousand Clowns. It reminds one of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. (The earlier play offered relief during the depression; A Thousand Clowns offers it in our prosperity.) But notice: the audience that suffers from its conformism cannot break with it, and the play which notes its dilemma ends not only by illustrating conformity but by defending it. Murray Burns is a lively young freelance writer of television scripts. His last assignment was to an idiotic children’s program performed by a dynamic oaf pathetically caught in the tic of commercial vitality. Murray cannot stand the gaff. He quits his job, ﬁguratively thumbing his nose at his employer

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Barbara Harris and Jason Robards in the 1965 ﬁlm adaptation of A Thousand Clowns

and all that he represents. But Murray has a ward, his nephew, a precocious wonder boy of twelve. (Unwittingly the author has made him a true child of Madison Avenue.) Murray has taken care of the boy for ﬁve years but, being something of a playboy anarchist in retreat from employment, he rears his charge in a rather loose round of fun and games. The Child Welfare Board wants to remove the boy from Murray’s haphazard guardianship. Since Murray loves his nephew and ﬁnds that there is no getting out of the rat race of the networks (television or whatever), he returns to his job of collaboration with the obnoxious comic of the children’s program. The play—very thin in plot—is built up in a series of improvisations or sketches—each of which is ﬁlled with surprise quips and cute gags. The play also gives evidence of a facility in quick characterization of recognizable contemporary types. One of the best is that of Leo Herman, Murray’s television boss, who is a compound of monumental egotism. self-abasement, insecurity and hysterical energy. The scene in which Herman is heard in a harangue over an interofﬁce speaker is almost insufferably apt. (When Herman himself appears in the last act his presence is anti-climatic: we know all about him through that one long yelp over the intercom.)

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I laughed with everyone else, though surely not as often. But as the play proceeded (it struck me as at least twenty minutes too long; the author is inexhaustibly clever), I grew uncomfortable amid the hilarity. Even Mr. Gardner’s merits became a source of irritation, for they are at the service of what they deride. The play’s anti-conformity is but a reﬂex of conformity. Murray Burns has abandoned his job to avoid the irksome conﬁnement of a meaningless trade. What does he do with his freedom? He visits the Statue of Liberty, the movies, he indulges in delicatessen delights, he plays around with girls; above all he shouts eccentrically amusing insults and charming inconsequentialities to all and sundry. He’s full of beans and his credo is that everyone else ought to be. But this is nothing but freshman prankishness. It is high spirits in vacuo—entirely self-centered. The nonconformist in a society such as ours has to be twenty times as disciplined as the man of ordinary occupation. To achieve freedom, the rebel must possess a steadiness of judgment, a strength of will, a clarity of purpose beyond anything the simple citizen can realize. To be a real person, and to enjoy life truly, are not a matter of ‘‘having a sense of humor’’ or giving off sparks like a ﬁre- (or wise-)

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In the following introduction to A Thousand Clowns, Gardner expounds on the difﬁculty of writing this introduction and on what it means to him to be a playwright.

two clocks, all of them with a different time and all of them wrong, a straw hat, a derby, a steel safe with a doily and a bowl of ﬂowers on it, the cabin of a Ferris wheel, a rotting BLT and a rocking chair. The objects stand in some order, ready for use. As always, I’m sure there is a pattern to this debris, and as always I don’t know what it is. In the wings an ancient stagehand sits with half a pastrami sandwich, dozing; he awakens brieﬂy, smiles at me, offers a wink of recognition and whispers the word ‘‘Schmuck.’’ He is my muse. He whispers the word again; I tell him that I am a playwright. There is always a confusion between us on this issue. Actors and actresses of various ages and in various shapes and sizes wait in positions around the stage, in doorways, at the top of stairways, one is behind the wheel of a taxi and another is mumbling under a trapdoor at my feet. ‘‘Please wait,’’ I say, ‘‘I’ll be ready soon.’’ In the back of the theatre a whitehaired man is speaking calmly into a walkie-talkie, arranging a lawsuit. He is the producer. ‘‘Please wait,’’ I shout to him, ‘‘I’ll be ready soon.’’ I hold on to the card table and we shake together. I look down at the manuscript; it is entitled ‘‘Please Wait.’’ I feel a strange mixture of terror and comfort, I am in that familiar anxious place: a theatre. I am where I have always wanted to be, wondering what I will do there. A barefoot tap dancer with marvelous plans, a hopeful amnesiac waiting to remember. The conspiracy is clear and the dream is complete; the players, the playgoers, and the playwright wait for the play.

In this dream I always have I am sitting on the stage of the Morosco Theatre wearing a tuxedo, writing the third act of a play. Unfortunately, it is the opening night of the play I’m writing, and the opening night audience is ﬁling into the theatre. They come down the aisles and take their seats; I hear the familiar and expectant buzz of well-wishers and killers. I scratch away with dried-out felt-tipped pen on loose-leaf paper on a trembling card table, around me the crisp opening night air of Bar Mitzvah and execution. I wave to them. I offer a comforting smile. I am cordial; they are restless. I keep writing. I hold my free hand up from time to time as though to say, ‘‘Please wait, I’ll be ready soon.’’ The stage is littered with props, parts of costumes, and pieces of sets. I look around for clues: there is a trampoline and a piece of a train, the outside motor of a forties icebox is strangely new and polished, a school desk and a U-boat periscope, an abandoned sneaker lies on a witness stand, a ﬁve-string banjo and a Dodgers’ cap, a battered phone booth; twenty-

The editor of this volume, a hopeful and kindly fellow, has been waiting for this introduction for two months. I have offered him a series of deadlines, lies, promises, and apologies which we have both decided to believe. How do I explain that I write plays, that I speak in the voices of other people because I don’t know my own; that I write in the second person because I don’t know the ﬁrst; that I have been writing plays most of my adult life waiting to become both an adult and a playwright, and that it takes me so many years to write anything that I am forced to refer to myself during these periods as a playwrote? I have tried to write this introduction at desks, in taxis, on long plane rides; I have worked on it at thirty thousand feet and in bathtubs; I have spoken it into tape recorders and the ears of friends and loved ones. There are several problems: I can’t seem to invent the character who says the lines; I am writing words that won’t be spoken aloud and in a strange language, English— my ﬁrst, last, and only language; and, most impor-

cracker, but of being committed to a deep impulse within oneself that is rationally objectiﬁed in some goal outside oneself—a goal set up on behalf of others with whom one feels indissolubly connected. Because its high pressure requires relief, a mechanized society adores its thousand clowns. The laughprovoking bum is one of society’s most useful safety gadgets. Mr. Gardner’s play will please hordes and make a million. Its production is expert. Fred Coe’s direction is unrelentingly efﬁcient. The casting and cast are ﬁrst-rate. Jason Robards, Jr., though essentially a tragic actor, plays comedy with sure command. Barry Gordon, as the infant prodigy, is almost frighteningly proﬁcient. William Daniels is just right as the Child Welfare investigator: sincere, obtuse, funny despite himself. Sandy Dennis has freshness, ease, an unconventional attractiveness— though she becomes vocally monotonous after the ﬁrst act. Larry Haines is sympathetically direct and wholly plausible as Murray’s brother, a contented mediocrity, and Gene Saks renders to perfection the exposed nerve of the terrible TV puppet. Source: Harold Clurman, Review of A Thousand Clowns, in Nation, Vol. 194, No. 18, May 5, 1962, p. 408.

Herb Gardner

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tantly, I cannot offer an explanation for why I wrote this play because there is none. Playwriting is an irrational act. It is the Las Vegas of art forms, and the odds are terrible. A curious trade in which optimism, like any three-year-old’s, is based on a lack of information, and integrity is based on the fact that by the time you decide to sell your soul no devil is interested. Your days are spent making up things that no one ever said to be spoken by people who do not exist for an audience that may not come. The most personal thoughts, arrived at in terrible privacy, are interpreted by strangers for a group of other strangers. The fear that no one will put your plays on is quickly replaced by the fear that someone will. It’s hard to live with yourself and even harder for people to live with you: How do you ask a kamikaze pilot if his work is going well? The word Playwright looks terrible on passports, leases, and credit applications; and even worse in newspaper articles alternately titled ‘‘Where Did These Playwrights Go?’’ and ‘‘Why Don’t These Playwrights Go Away?,’’ usually appearing in what The New York Times whimsically refers to as the Leisure Section. The most difﬁcult problem, of course, is that I love it. God help me, I love it. Because it’s alive. And because the theatre is alive, exactly what is terrible is wonderful, the gamble, the odds. There is no ceiling on the night and no ﬂoor either; there is a chance each time the curtain goes up of glory and disaster, the actors and the audience will take each other somewhere, neither knows where for sure. Alive, one time only, that night. It’s alive, has been alive for a few thousand years, and is alive tonight, this afternoon. An audience knows it’s the last place they can still be heard, they know the actors can hear them, they make a difference; it’s not a movie projector and they are not at home with talking furniture, it’s custom work. Why do playwrights, why do we outsiders and oddballs who so fear misunderstanding, use a medium where we are most likely to be misunderstood? Because when this most private of enterprises goes public, and is responded to, we are not alone. Home is where you can tell your secrets. In a theatre, the ones in the dark and the ones under the lights need each other. For a few hours all of us, the audience, the actors, the writer— we are all a little more real together than we ever were apart. That’s the ticket; and that’s what the ticket’s for. Some words of advice about reading this play, or any play for that matter. Sometimes I’m out in the street and I think of a character or a scene; on the

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FOR A FEW HOURS ALL OF US, THE AUDIENCE, THE ACTORS, THE WRITER—WE ARE ALL A LITTLE MORE REAL TOGETHER THAN WE EVER WERE APART. THAT’S THE TICKET; AND THAT’S WHAT THE TICKET’S FOR.’’

way upstairs to my desk I lose ﬁfty percent. While translating these captionless pictures into intelligible language I lose another twenty-ﬁve. A good actor can put back the seventy-ﬁve percent I lost on the way to my desk. So I ask you, for whatever might be good in this play, read it like a good actor; because a play on paper is only a code book, signals, notes for emotions, vague road maps for countries in constant border dispute, and nothing without you. Also, of course, this play is not ﬁnished; but please wait, I’ll be ready soon. Source: Herb Gardner, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in A Thousand Clowns, Penguin Books, 1961, pp. vii–x.

SOURCES Backalenick, Irene, Review of A Thousand Clowns, in Back Stage, Vol. 37, No. 30, July 26, 1996, p. 44. Clurman, Harold, Review of A Thousand Clowns, in the Nation, May 5, 1962, p. 408. Frank, Glenda, ‘‘The Struggle to Afﬁrm: The Image of Jewish-Americans on Stage,’’ in Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort, Peter Lang, 1995, p. 245. Gardner, Herb, A Thousand Clowns, in Herb Gardner: The Collected Plays, Applause Books, 2001. Isherwood, Charles, Review of A Thousand Clowns, in Variety, Vol. 383, No. 8, July 16, 2001, p. 24. McCarten, John, ‘‘Assorted Oddballs,’’ in the New Yorker, April 14, 1962, p. 106. McClain, John, ‘‘Best Comedy of the Season,’’ in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 1962, p. 303, originally published in Journal American, April 6, 1962.

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Scorza, Thomas J., ‘‘On the Moral Character of the American Regime: A Thousand Clowns Revisited,’’ in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 77, Spring 1978, pp. 25–41. Taubman, Howard, ‘‘Theatre: A Thousand Clowns Opens,’’ in the New York Times, April 6, 1962, p. 31.

FURTHER READING Greenﬁeld, Thomas Allen, Work and the Work Ethic in American Drama 1920–1970, University of Missouri Press, 1982. This book, as its title suggests, explores dramatic treatments of work life. A Thousand Clowns is mentioned only brieﬂy, as an example of how work divides people, especially among the middle class. Greenﬁeld places Gardner in this regard alongside Neil Simon and Edward Albee, who also dealt in the 1960s with issues of work.

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Guernsey, Otis L., Jr., ed., ‘‘Humor,’’ in Broadway Song and Story: Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers Discuss Their Hits, Dodd, Mead, 1985, pp. 371–83. This chapter is a transcribed conversation between Gardner and Russell Baker, Jules Feiffer, Terrence McNally, and Joseph Stein, about how they write comedy for the theater and about the early radio comics who inspired their work. Hollis, Tim, Hi There, Boys and Girls: America’s Local Children’s TV Programs, University Press of Mississippi, 2001. This serious review of the history of children’s programming is written with a great deal of humor. It covers the genre from its beginnings in the 1940s until the demise of local programming in the 1970s, describing shows and their hosts in every state. Unger, Irwin, and Debi Unger, eds., The Times Were a Changin’: The Sixties Reader, Three Rivers Press, 1998. This anthology, compiled by a historian and a journalist, includes more than ﬁfty essays, articles, and other documents that chronicle the major social, cultural, and political issues of the 1960s in the United States. The editors’ commentary is balanced and provides necessary and insightful contextual information.

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Winterset Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset (1935) is one of the most important verse dramas, or plays written largely in poetry, in the twentieth century. Produced on New York City’s Broadway at the height of the Great Depression, Anderson’s play is a striking tragedy that deals indirectly with the famous SaccoVanzetti case, in which two Italian immigrants with radical political beliefs were executed. With its combination of ‘‘low’’ prose and ‘‘high’’ poetic verse, which enables it to be sharply realistic while simultaneously commenting on universal philosophical themes, Winterset is widely considered Anderson’s best verse drama. Its ambitious political and philosophical agenda, as well as its elegant poetry, earned Anderson the Drama Critics’ Circle Award of 1936. The style of Winterset has inspired many critics to compare the play to a Shakespearean tragedy.

MAXWELL ANDERSON 1935

The plot of Winterset follows Mio Romagna’s quest to prove his father’s innocence in the years after Bartolomeo Romagna was executed for a robbery and murder he did not commit. This quest is complicated by Mio’s newfound love for Miriamne Esdras and the difﬁcult ethical decisions that result from his connection with her family. A challenging political play, with philosophical meditations on faith, truth, justice, love and duty, Winterset not only alludes to Shakespearean and Judaic philosophy; it develops a profound moral system of its own. Available in individual editions such as that published by Anderson House in 1935, Winterset is a

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landmark in American drama universalized by its superbly crafted poetry and its profound philosophical assertions.

during a series of ﬁnancial difﬁculties, and the suicide of his second wife. He died from a stroke on February 28, 1959, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PLOT SUMMARY

Anderson was born on his grandmother’s farm near Atlantic, Pennsylvania, on December 15, 1888, but he moved westward with his father, a Baptist minister, and went to high school in Iowa. After graduating from college in North Dakota, Anderson married a classmate and taught English in a high school for two years before moving to San Francisco and earning a master’s degree at Stanford University. He returned to teaching, but was ﬁred from a headteaching job at Whittier College in 1918 because he defended a student whose antiwar articles were censored from the college newspaper. He then began writing for various newspapers and pursued his interest in poetry, which he had been writing and occasionally publishing, since he was in college.

Act 1

Anderson’s theatrical career began with the production on Broadway of the tragedy White Desert in 1923, and, although this play failed after twelve performances, his anti-war collaboration with Laurence Stallings entitled What Price Glory (1924), was a huge success. Continuing to write plays throughout the 1920s, Anderson developed a habit of referring to and borrowing from playwrights and authors from the past. He also expressed a desire to write plays in verse but did not do so until the 1930s, when he wrote the verse dramas for which he is most famous, including the historical Elizabeth the Queen (1930) and Winterset (1935). Anderson continued to write in various other styles as well, however, including satires such as the Pulitzer Prize– winning Both Your Houses (1933), and a musical play entitled Knickerbocker Holiday (1938). In the years that followed the ﬁnancial success of this musical, Anderson wrote a number of plays dwelling on spiritual themes that were less critically successful. Then he turned to the subject of fascism and World War II with such plays as The Eve of St. Mark (1942), which was dedicated to his nephew, who was shot down over the Mediterranean. After the war, Anderson turned back to his interest in historical drama, and he continued writing plays

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Act 1 begins with the gangster Trock Estrella talking to his sidekick, Shadow, in a New York City riverbank tenement. Trock has six months to live. He wants to make sure none of the people in the tenement will share evidence that could send him back to jail for the rest of his life. Miriamne Esdras ﬁnds out that her brother Garth knows that Estrella is guilty of a murder for which a radical thinker named Bartolomeo Romagna was executed. After hearing that a professor is causing a new stir about the case, Trock visits Garth to threaten him. In scene 3, Judge Gaunt of the Romagna case enters the tenement street scene and argues that he was right to give the death sentence. Then Mio Romagna enters, telling his friend Carr that he has come to the tenement to prove his father’s innocence. Mio is struck by Miriamne’s beauty, and they dance to the music of Lucia’s barrel organ until a policeman enters and tells Lucia to stop playing it. A young radical preaches against the oppression that this represents. Mio tells the policeman that he is stupid and handled the situation badly. Mio then has a passionate discussion with Miriamne until they are interrupted by Trock talking with Shadow. While Mio and Miriamne hide behind a rock, Trock has Shadow shot by two thugs because Shadow knows too much.

Act 2 That evening, Esdras and Garth talk with Judge Gaunt, whom they have taken into their home fearing that Trock would kill him. Then Mio enters the cellar apartment, asking what Garth knows about his father. Garth denies any knowledge. Judge Gaunt argues with Mio that Romagna was guilty. Esdras then leaves with Judge Gaunt. Mio is left with Miriamne, whom Garth directs not to reveal anything. Upset by what he thinks is a dead end in proving his father’s innocence, Mio tells Miriamne that a relationship between them could come to nothing because love is not for him. Garth reenters

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to ask Mio to leave, and Miriamne says she loves Mio. The hobo then enters to ask to stay under the pipes. Mio tells Miriamne he loves her too. Esdras enters with Judge Gaunt, followed by Trock. After asking the hobo and Mio who they are, Trock tells Garth he is going to take Judge Gaunt for a long ride. As Trock is going to leave and kill Judge Gaunt, lightening ﬂashes, and they wait inside. Shadow, who is bloody but still alive, then enters and says he is going to kill Trock, but he cannot see and goes instead to lie down. Mio then starts questioning Trock with Judge Gaunt acting as a judge over them until Trock, enraged, tells him that Shadow committed the murder. Judge Gaunt admits to Mio that he knew Romagna was not actually guilty but that it was better for him to die for the ‘‘common good.’’ Mio vows to proclaim the truth. Trock threatens that it will not go far, but then the policeman and his sergeant enter, looking for Judge Gaunt. Although Mio accuses Trock of two murders, the policemen do not believe him because they do not ﬁnd Shadow’s body. Garth and Miriamne deny everything. Mio ﬁnally admits, at Miriamne’s silent request, that he was dreaming. After they and Trock leave, Mio discovers Garth’s role in the crime and accuses Miriamne of trapping him into the lie.

Act 3 When Mio leaves the apartment, Miriamne follows him out and tries to advise him about an escape from Trock. They watch Garth and the hobo bring Shadow’s body down to the river, and Mio philosophizes about his situation. Esdras then tells Mio to wait inside while he calls the police, which he is willing to do even if Mio implicates Garth in the crimes. Carr arrives and offers his help. Mio refuses it and does not tell Carr what he has found because Mio does not want to implicate Miriamne’s brother by telling the truth. Miriamne tells Mio that his father would have forgiven the people that actually committed the crime. They declare their love for each other. Arriving back with a cut on his head, Esdras tells Mio that Trock would not let him pass to call the police, and he goes to look for a passage on the roof. Esdras waves from above that it is not safe. Miriamne suggests that Mio try another path, but when he does so, Trock’s thugs are already waiting for him. They shoot him with a machine gun. Mio comes back and dies in Miriamne’s arms. Miriamne

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walks out to declare to the gunners that she will tell the truth. They shoot her too. Garth and Esdras mourn her death, Esdras saying that they were noble and it is wiser to die young and pure while proclaiming the truth.

CHARACTERS Carr Mio’s intelligent and devoted friend, Carr is an old acquaintance that Mio has not seen for many years. Carr is native to New York City and understands the danger of the tenement very well. Although Miriamne describes Carr as Mio’s ‘‘angel,’’ Carr is ultimately unable to help his friend or spread the word of Romagna’s innocence, because Mio keeps his conﬂict to himself.

Garth Esdras Garth is a former member of Trock’s gang who saw Trock commit the murder for which Romagna was executed. A violinist who has abandoned any involvement in crime, Garth suffers because of his family’s poverty but has little opportunity of advancing. He is timid, afraid that Trock will kill him

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • Winterset was adapted into a ﬁlm that was nominated for two Oscars. The ﬁlm version signiﬁcantly changed the ending of Anderson’s play. Directed by Alfred Santell, it appeared in 1936 and is available in VHS format from Timeless Video.

or that he will be punished for his involvement in the crime. Garth refuses to tell the police anything. However, he is tormented by his role in Romagna’s execution. He admits his knowledge to Miriamne and his father. At the end of the play, Garth blames Mio for his sister’s death.

Miriamne Esdras An innocent and idealistic girl of ﬁfteen whom Mio describes as ‘‘clean and sweet,’’ Miriamne falls deeply in love with Mio. Charmed by Mio’s romantic observations about the world and his steadfast love of truth, she has a number of realizations herself, such as her awakening belief in spirituality and the mystery of life. Miriamne is torn between her lover, who must proclaim the truth about his father in order to live, and her brother, who withheld information from the court and has been threatened with murder by Trock. She refuses to give up her brother when the police are asking questions in their apartment. She changes many of her own convictions in the course of the play, and she is wracked with guilt about failing to stand up for Mio when he needs her. When she sacriﬁces herself for Mio, it comes too late for him to realize, and she dies in despair.

Rabbi Esdras Garth and Miriamne’s wise father, Esdras is continually providing moral and philosophical advice. His bleak view of life’s struggle, in which he believes there is no truth, comes from his long experience and his reading of the Talmud, the vast

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collection of Jewish laws and traditions. He pleads with his children and others to let the past be and forget guilt, since it is better to live and lie, than to die trying to tell the truth. Esdras tries to provide humane advice to his children and friends. In his ﬁnal speech, however, deeply affected by his daughter’s and Mio’s deaths, Esdras seems to come to some new conclusions by proclaiming that they were better to die young and pure than to suffer as long as he has.

Trock Estrella Trock is a ruthless gangster just released from prison. He is the actual murderer who committed the crime for which Romagna was convicted. He runs the riverbank tenement and wants to make sure no one gives any evidence on him that could send him back to prison for the ﬁnal six months of his life, which is all he has left according to the prison doctor. Not only does Trock threaten and beat the residents of the tenement, he shows no remorse over killing anyone that might be a problem for him, including his close friend and accomplice, Shadow. Anderson is careful to emphasize the darkness of Trock’s personality with such techniques as making sure the gangster and his two thugs are continually lurking in the shadows. Trock’s success in suppressing the truth and murdering Shadow, Mio, and Miriamne is central to the melancholy vision of the play, though Trock will die himself within six months.

Judge Gaunt The judge in the Romagna case, Judge Gaunt is an ‘‘elderly, quiet man.’’ He is plagued by guilt and doubt over sending Romagna to be executed. His doubt plagues him to the point where he is paranoid, desperate, and on the edge of sanity when he comes to the New York tenement, stopping people on the street to argue that his verdict was correct. Like Esdras, Judge Gaunt believes that only the young love truth and justice, although he is obsessed with the unwavering uprightness of the courts. Judge Gaunt ﬁnds the squalor of the tenement disgusting. He never admits his error in the Romagna case, although he is delusional and shattered by the end of the play.

Herman A ‘‘gawky shoe salesman,’’ Herman forces himself upon a girl, who gives in out of pity, and he wants to marry her afterwards.

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Professor Hobhouse Professor Hobhouse does not appear in the play, but he is the person trying to open the Romagna case to further investigation.

Hobo The hobo who lives under the bridge is generally a silent observer of what is happening around him, although he assists in disposing of Shadow’s body. He tells Trock he is called ‘‘Oke.’’

Lucia Lucia is a poor street vendor with a barrel organ that is operated by turning a crank. The police ban him from using the barrel organ.

Piny The apple-woman of the tenement, Piny is Lucia’s friend and lives in the shack next to his. Apple-selling was a common trade amongst the poor and unemployed during the Great Depression.

Policeman The district policeman, who is from Ireland, is bullying and slightly brutish. Mio comments on his incompetence and stupidity.

executed for murder and pay roll robbery, and his mother died of grief, Mio was asked to leave his hometown. Since then he has drifted around the country in despair. Mio is an intelligent, well read, and passionate person. His sleuthing does uncover the truth of his father’s innocence, although Mio does not proclaim it to the world according to his original plan. Despite Mio’s profound sadness, and his inability to live and forget what happened to his parents, he falls in love with Miriamne. Their relationship is a glimmer of hope in the play, although Mio recognizes that his character is not suited for love because he cannot live without proclaiming the truth about his father. At ﬁrst Mio feels Miriamne has betrayed him by refusing to tell the truth to the police, but then he forgives her and realizes that she could not give up her brother. In fact, it is out of love for her that he does not ask Carr for help in spreading the truth about his father’s innocence, which would send her brother to prison. Associated with Christ although he is an atheist and often speaking in mystical and lofty verse, Mio ﬁnds that the real world is not suited for him. He is continually making literary references from a wide variety of sources, and his romantic philosophizing reveals his view of a vengeful and evil world full of lies. This view ﬁts with Mio’s fatalistic personality, and he thinks of himself as speaking ‘‘from a high place, far off, long ago, looking down.’’

Radical The young radical who appears in act 1, scene 3, of the play protests against the policeman’s ‘‘capitalistic oppression,’’ defends the freedom of speech, and stirs the emotions of the crowd.

Sailor The sailor is part of the crowd dancing to Lucia’s barrel organ.

Bartolomeo Romagna

Sergeant

Romagna is Mio’s father, the Italian immigrant executed for a murder he did not commit. Romagna was a social and political radical, which is why he was blamed for the crime. Mio remembers his father’s love for him.

A fairly unobservant policeman, the Sergeant enters the Esdras apartment to take Judge Gaunt home. He is suspicious about Mio’s claims but fails to discover what has happened.

Shadow Mio Romagna A melancholy boy of seventeen, Mio (short for Bartolomeo, after his father) has been so thoroughly ‘‘[cut] off from the world’’ that his only desire is to prove his father’s innocence. After his father was

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Shadow is Trock’s gangster sidekick, who was involved in the murder for which Romagna was executed. Trock has Shadow shot because he refuses to kill Judge Gaunt. Shadow tries to convince Trock to stop killing in order to cover his tracks, and

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he vows never to tell the police anything, but Trock does not believe him. After Trock has him shot, Shadow manages to walk all the way to the Esdras house, but he cannot see well enough to shoot Trock himself, and he dies in the apartment. Shadow likes to joke occasionally and is a contrast to Trock’s earnest, dark personality.

have been better to die young and pure like they do than to lie and live to old age. Also, the historical context of the play, which makes direct reference to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, suggests that it is vital to proclaim the truth about a historical injustice.

Love and Duty

THEMES Truth and Justice Mio’s principal struggle in Winterset is to ﬁnd proof of the injustice done to his father and publicly proclaim this truth; he is so obsessed with this one truth that he believes his life has no purpose other than to ﬁnd and preach it. It is not necessarily clear in the melancholy world of the play, however, whether it is possible or desirable to achieve this revenge and approach life with the burning truth of a past injustice. The play continually tests and questions not only whether truth should be proclaimed and justice done, but whether truth exists and justice is possible. These philosophical questions are addressed in Mio’s eloquent speeches, in Esdras’s wise observations, and in Judge Gaunt’s obsessive self-defense, as well is in the convictions and actions of other characters and in the plot. Until he falls in love with Miriamne, Mio believes that truth is all-important. He feels so cut off from the world that he does not care if he dies proclaiming the truth. But Mio’s love, and his knowledge of the consequences for Miriamne’s brother if he unearths the truth, eventually cause him to abandon his original purpose. Esdras’s observations about the lack of any real truth, and the fact that the world is built on lies and injustice, also seem to affect his decision. As does Judge Gaunt’s questioning of whether anyone can be objective, and whether justice should actually serve not to proclaim truth but to protect society. Anderson does not abandon the idea that truth and justice are important, however. Esdras’s monologue to close the play honors Mio and Miriamne’s desire for these noble ideas, and he says it would

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Mio and Miriamne’s love is the pivotal factor in the play. As Miriamne tells Garth, ‘‘the world’s all changed’’ after she meets Mio. Love changes their basic convictions as moral duty comes into conﬂict with family obligations and the choices they must make become much more unclear and complex. Miriamne must choose between saving her brother from jail and supporting her lover. Mio feels he cannot carry out his revenge, fulﬁlling his duty to his father, without sabotaging his lover’s family. Ultimately, they try to choose each other over their duties to their families and their previous moral convictions, but this choice results in their deaths. In arranging a tragedy with such difﬁcult choices, Anderson forces his audience to evaluate the importance of love and duty and to question how far one ought to be willing to go to uphold his/her convictions. Mio decides that protecting his lover’s family is more important than his revenge, but this turns out to be as fatal, as does Miriamne’s passionate declaration that she will uphold the truth. The audience, like Esdras, may admire the purity of this decision, but they also may be skeptical of whether this is the correct choice. Anderson therefore does not necessarily attempt to resolve the complex and contradictory demands of love and duty, although he provides a profound insight into the problem.

Radicalism With its atmosphere of extreme opinions and desperate circumstances, Winterset is a play about radicalism. The young radical who complains about the ‘‘capitalistic oppression’’ of the New York mayor and the police force provides some of the politically radical ideas in the play, which might be connected to socialist thinking. Other characters such as Esdras challenge a variety of other mainstream convictions. It is Mio, however, who provides the bulk of the controversial and visionary ideas, some of which relate to the anarchism and socialism associated with his father. But many

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Winterset has been compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as to King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. Read Hamlet or another of these tragedies, and compare it to Anderson’s play. How would you characterize each playwright’s use of language, and what do these approaches have in common? How does the use of historical material compare in each play? Discuss the elements of Shakespeare’s style, themes, and plot that you ﬁnd in Winterset, and share how your reading of Shakespeare affects your understanding of Anderson’s play. • Winterset is normally considered a tragedy in a contemporary setting. Do you think it is a tragedy? Explain why or why not. Research the classical deﬁnition of a tragedy and discuss why and how Anderson uses various tragic conventions, as well as why the play is generally considered to be a tragedy. Then imagine a variety of different outcomes to the play and consider how they would have changed its meaning. Do you prefer any of your new endings to Anderson’s? Would you change the play if you could, or do you think it needs to be in its current form? Explain why or why not. • Do some reading about the Sacco-Vanzetti case on which Winterset is indirectly based, and research the events of the trial and the history of the investigations afterwards. Do you think Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty? Why or why not? What would have been your vote if you were in the jury, or your verdict if you were the trial

of the ideas are Anderson’s own inclusions, such as atheism, Freudian psychology, fatalism, and materialism. Anderson bases his main plot on a historical case famous for the political extremism of its defendants, and he includes a variety of competing opinions and philosophies that radically depart from social norms. The play does not necessarily advo-

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judge? Explain your decision. Also, discuss the results of the trial, its effect on American society, and its representation in the news media. How do you think Sacco and Vanzetti would have been treated in the early 2000s? • Winterset contains a variety of references to radicalism as well as a variety of radical ideas. What do you ﬁnd radical about the play? Explain why you ﬁnd certain ideas radical. Then make a list of all ideas that you would consider radical. How do you think radicalism has changed since the 1930s? Which, if any, radical ideas out of those you have listed do you think are important or true? Why have you chosen them? In what ways can radicalism be useful, and in what ways can it be dangerous? What do you think Anderson would have to say about this topic? • Some critics complain that Winterset is not realistic. Research and discuss the concept and practice of realism in the theater. Do you think Anderson’s play is realistic? Why or why not? Discuss whether the play’s poetry, plot, and characters are realistic, and whether you think Anderson is attempting to be realistic. Read another 1930s play, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, and describe whether you think it is more or less realistic than Winterset, and in what way you think so. Do you think realism in the theater is important or desirable? Discuss your feelings about realism and how they affect your views on Winterset.

cate these ideas, but Anderson does think seriously and philosophically about them, and he is certainly interested in questioning mainstream assumptions. He recognizes that the poverty of the tenement and the general desperation of many of its characters tend to make radical ideas appealing. He may be

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suggesting that the state of the United States during the Great Depression required a drastic change from the predominant ideology.

STYLE Verse Drama One of the best-known aspects of Winterset is the fact that it is a verse drama, written in poetic lines whose meter and length determine the visual and auditory rhythm of the text. T. S. Eliot was one of the most important early-twentieth-century advocates of verse drama, which he considered the highest form that a play could take. But few playwrights even attempted it and fewer still have met with any success. Anderson taught William Shakespeare’s verse dramas, and had a long-standing interest in poetry. It was only with this experience, and after many previous attempts, that Anderson was able to write such effective and successful dramatic poetry. Ambitious and sophisticated in its style, Winterset often uses ‘‘blank verse,’’ or unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter, which is a meter of ﬁve two-syllable units that was also used by Shakespeare. But Anderson varies the verse greatly throughout the play, using different meters and styles, and he often includes prose sections, which are in paragraph format. As in Shakespeare, the balance between these styles allows a great ﬂexibility in theme, and Anderson makes full use of the ‘‘high’’ (poetic and universal) or ‘‘low’’ (common and realistic) emphasis that his poetic structure provides in order to bring out certain themes and balance the universal with the speciﬁc. Also, the combination of the play’s philosophical meditations with realistic voices and a contemporary setting allows Anderson to contemplate themes of wide philosophical signiﬁcance while remaining grounded in a real and immediate story. Mio’s poetic monologues, for example, are balanced with his authentic speech patterns and the gritty reality of his fate.

Literary and Theological Allusions Winterset includes allusions to a wide variety of authors and works, in speciﬁc phrases, in theme, and in the very structure of the play. Carr alerts the audience to this fact when he recognizes Mio’s allusions to the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tenny-

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son and the English Renaissance writer Ben Jonson. But most of Anderson’s literary allusions, from classical mythology to T. S. Eliot’s poetry, are not cited. Two of the most important allusions, that are more than simple references, are to Shakespeare and to Judeo-Christian religious texts, as many critics have noticed. The theme of avenging one’s father is similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Mio’s comment to Miriamne in act 2 that she should leave him and keep herself chaste, is similar to Hamlet’s famous speech in which he tells Ophelia to become a nun. Mio and Miriamne also have many similarities with Romeo and Juliet, including their selfdestructive love and their nearly dying together. Aside from Esdras’s comments related to the Jewish Talmud and elements in common with Judaic lore and the Book of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible, Mio is something of a Christ ﬁgure in his transcendent view of another world, his wandering as a teacher and a beggar who is shunned by society, and his desire to preach the truth. All of these allusions add depth and signiﬁcance to Anderson’s themes, as well as adding substance to the play’s philosophical content.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Sacco-Vanzetti Case In May of 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants known to be anarchists and labor union organizers, were arrested in Staughton, Massachusetts and charged with the murder and robbery of a paymaster and his security guard. Sacco was found in possession of a .32 caliber pistol that, ballistics experts claimed, contained the same kind of bullets used in the crime. Several eyewitnesses positively identiﬁed them. In the spring of 1921, a jury found the two men guilty of the crimes, based largely on circumstantial evidence. The trial judge sentenced both men to death by electrocution. Sacco and Vanzetti initially had little popular support because of their radical views and their Italian accents, but their lawyers managed to stay the execution for several years. During this time, liberals and intellectuals reevaluated the case and began to believe that the men were condemned simply because of their political views. By 1925, a defense committee formed, holding demonstrations throughout the country, enlisting the help of a new lawyer, Michael A. Musmanno.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST • 1930s: The Sacco-Vanzetti case remains a controversial issue. To many people, it represents a miscarriage of justice and discrimination against racial minorities and those with radical political views. Today: The trial of O. J. Simpson in 1995 remains controversial, since many people believe his acquittal was a miscarriage of justice because he was guilty of murdering his wife. • 1930s: The effects of the Great Depression are being felt across the United States, and an attitude of pessimism about the economy is widespread. Today: The economy may be recovering from the economic slump that coincided with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. • 1930s: Welfare is a new concept that has not taken effect in slums similar to the one portrayed in Winterset.

Today: The unemployed are eligible for economic assistance from the government, but this is not a comprehensive system, and there remain areas of stark poverty in most American cities. • 1930s: The crime rate is high, corruption is widespread, and gangs are a major problem in inner-city New York slums. Today: The crime rate in New York City remains high and gangs have a signiﬁcant inﬂuence, but conditions have improved in many low-income areas. Corruption has decreased, and gangs are less powerful than they were in the 1930s. • 1930s: Verse drama, although it is not popular or widespread, is in vogue amongst adherents of T. S. Eliot’s literary theory. Today: Verse drama has all but disappeared from the mainstream theatrical repertoire.

Public pressure eventually led to the Massachusetts governor organizing a commission to investigate the case, headed by Harvard Professor A. Lawrence Lowell, which completed its inquiries in June of 1927. The Lowell Commission upheld the validity of the verdict, despite widespread accusations of a government whitewash. The Supreme Court denied appeals from Musmanno and other defense lawyers to stay the execution. On August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. There is still considerable controversy over whether they were actually guilty.

(1928), which was a failure on Broadway. Winterset seems less politically motivated because it is distanced from the speciﬁcs of the case and because it takes on a variety of wider moral and philosophical issues. However, it does contain numerous references to the execution and its implications, from its imagery of lightening and electricity to Anderson’s choice of Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s ﬁrst name to that of Mio and his father.

By combining characteristics of Sacco and Vanzetti into the ﬁctional character of Mio’s father, Anderson takes the stance that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Anderson is critical of the system that condemned them. Critics have noted, however, that Anderson was less forceful in his condemnation of the justice system in Winterset than he was in his previous play on the subject, Gods of the Lightening

In October of 1929, the United States stock market crashed, marking the beginning of a period of extremely high unemployment and ﬁnancial difﬁculty for many Americans. The optimism that characterized the 1920s, which was a prosperous era for the middle and upper classes, had come to an end. While the Great Depression affected nearly all aspects of society in some way, however, its spe-

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The Early Years of the Great Depression

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ciﬁc effects varied sharply depending on social class and source of income. Members of the upper class largely remained ﬁnancially secure, while lower class workers and farmers often found themselves out of work or bankrupt. Many in the working class found that their situations had not drastically changed from the 1920s. Middle class jobs were more difﬁcult to ﬁnd, and often both parents of a family would try to seek jobs in order to live comfortably. With the ﬁnancial desperation of the 1930s came increased activism on the part of socialists and union organizers, and many workers unionized to demand better conditions from employers and the government. Activism among radical groups was particularly high in the slums of big cities, such as that portrayed in Winterset, where many former workers were reduced to street peddling in order to survive. City unions asked for mandates requiring electricity and heating companies to maintain the supply when bills had not been paid. Thousands of workers marched on Washington in 1932 to demand bonuses, but the government was largely unsympathetic; President Herbert Hoover violently quashed the 1932 march by calling in the army. This reﬂected the upper and middle class distrust and fear of radical groups. Most political participation came in the form of voting for the Democratic party, however, which made enormous gains in the 1932 election. Franklin Delano Roosevelt remained in power from 1932 until the end of the Great Depression, instituting the New Deal, a series of reforms meant to create jobs and institute social services and welfare. The New Deal did create jobs and had wide support in the lower class, although it is unclear whether it actually contributed to the recovery of the economy or whether it addressed the problem of extremely high rates of poverty among racial and ethnic minorities. Among the hardest hit by the depression, ethnic minority groups encountered widespread racism and economic oppression.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW Winterset was a success on Broadway and was largely met with reviews that praised Anderson’s ability to combine poetry with realistic contemporary drama. Some critics found the play’s Shakespearean themes jumbled and its poetic voices unconvincing, but these critics were in the minority. In

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1936, the play was awarded the newly created Drama Critics’ Circle Award, which led to its popularity across the country for ﬁve years. Later critics, while sometimes ﬁnding fault with aspects such as its melancholy ending, tended to agree that the play was one of Anderson’s ﬁnest achievements and one of the best American verse dramas of the twentieth century. In his article, ‘‘Winterset and Some Early Eliot Poems,’’ Perry D. Luckett characterizes the substance of the critical approaches to the play as follows: Critics initially concerned themselves with its use of verse, a major experiment in a theater devoted largely to prose, and only later began to examine the play’s theme and characters to determine whether it had anything important to say.

As Luckett goes on to acknowledge, many critics, such as Francis E. Abernethy in his article, ‘‘Winterset: A Modern Revenge Tragedy,’’ highlight the play’s many sources and allusions. Abernethy argues that the play is a revenge tragedy heavily indebted to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, Robert L. Gilbert states in his article, ‘‘Mio Romagna: A New View of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset’’ that ‘‘Winterset is not ‘a revenge play.’’’ In addition to discussing the inﬂuence of Shakespeare, Judaic lore, and T. S. Eliot over the play, later critics have explored its themes of love and justice, its view on traditional values, and its politics. The play, along with Anderson’s other works, was rarely performed in the early 2000s, but it was still considered one of the most notable twentieth-century verse dramas.

CRITICISM Scott Trudell Trudell is a freelance writer with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses the techniques Anderson uses to develop and test the philosophical assertions of his tragedy. Profound and thematically ambitious, with commentaries on the nature of truth, existence, religion, love, death, and many other fundamental values and ideas, Winterset is a philosophical play. Anderson does not merely imitate Shakespeare in style; he follows the famous playwright’s tendency to present and examine a number of philosophies and

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traditions that are represented and expressed by various characters. For example, Mio’s contemplative speeches have roots in Senecan (based on Seneca, the ancient Roman writer of revenge tragedies) and Shakespearean philosophical traditions. Also, Esdras’s wise commentaries owe much to Judaic lore and the biblical book of Job. As Robert L. Gilbert points out in his essay, ‘‘Mio Romagna: A New View of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset,’’ Anderson does not rely entirely on these traditions. In fact, the philosophies expressed in Winterset are often quite original. But Anderson expresses and tests these unique ideas both in the contemporary world and in the context of a long-standing philosophical tradition. Vital to this interaction with tradition is the play’s unique verse form. Anderson’s style of verse drama, which often uses the blank verse characteristic of Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, is perhaps the main feature for which the play is known. This poetic form, which recollects not only Shakespeare and the English tradition, but verse drama reaching back to the ancient Greeks, was a style advocated by one of the period’s most important literary scholars and poets, T. S. Eliot. Thought to elevate the lines to a greater and even universal signiﬁcance, verse had long been a means by which playwrights could declare the importance and vitality of what they wrote, and the technique was experiencing a minor resurgence in the 1930s. The language and poetic style used to express the various philosophical themes of Winterset are therefore quite useful in determining the tradition and source of various philosophies, as well as highlighting which are most important to Anderson. With its atmosphere of desperation which tests its characters’ beliefs to the extreme, Anderson’s play is committed to bringing out the essence of the philosophies that each character holds and expresses. For example, Anderson was criticized for setting the speeches of gangsters into verse—many felt this was asking for an impossible suspension of disbelief—but the poetic form of their dialogue is extremely effective in establishing the true nature of their function in the play. Trock is not simply a selﬁsh and petty crook; because his poetry connects him to the theater’s greatest villains and ancient evils, the gang leader seems to have accumulated the ills of the entire world. When he says, ‘‘They’ve soaked me once too often / in that vat of poisoned hell,’’ Trock gathers not just one man’s misfortune but the wider signiﬁcance of evil, which he comes to represent in an abstract and philosophical manner.

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Playbill cast list from Winterset performed at the Lyceum Theatre in 1935

Each character’s worldview does not necessarily remain the same as the drama progresses, however. Trock’s philosophy becomes increasingly dark and destructive because he becomes increasingly unable to forgive anything or to accommodate his world view to something more meaningful than his petty fears. In fact, many characters go through a sincere change in outlook before the play is complete because this is one of Anderson’s most effective methods for comparing and evaluating their philosophies. The hypocrisy of Judge Gaunt’s belief system drives him insane with guilt and reduces him to a desperate attempt to convince himself, through an inconsistent muddle of philosophy, that he was right to execute Romagna for the welfare of the community. Esdras’s experience in sorting through a philosophy based on life experience and the dramatic events of the plot is perhaps a clearer example of how Anderson develops and considers philosophies through his characters, a technique made possible through the playwright’s careful use of language. Esdras initially reveals his commitment to the relativity of truth, and the arbitrary nature of guilt, in a world of shadows in which ‘‘There’s no guilt under

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UNIVERSAL AND ABSTRACT PHILOSOPHIES SUCH AS MIO’S MUST ALWAYS, FOR ANDERSON, BE BALANCED WITH CONTEMPORARY POLITICS AND THE INDIVIDUAL

whatever the cost. The high style of the monologue’s verse is vital to its success and believability in this regard. Its repetition of words and sounds, such as ‘‘Mio,’’ ‘‘died,’’ ‘‘star,’’ and ‘‘yet,’’ reinforces the insistent and unﬂinching conviction of the speech. Although the lines do not rhyme, their dramatic rhythm and meter also reinforce the sense that Esdras is rising above his background, belief system, and previous convictions in order to declare something permanent and meaningful.

CONCERNS OF THE CHARACTER, A DUALITY THAT IS REFLECTED IN THE PLAYWRIGHT’S LANGUAGE.’’

heaven, / just as there’s no heaven, till men believe it—/ no earth, till men have seen it, and have a word / to say this is the earth.’’ As Esdras points out in act 2, this philosophy, which maintains that ‘‘truth’s a thing unknown’’ and justice remains undone, comes from his reading of Jewish Talmud. It seems to embody everything Esdras stands for in the play, as he tries to convince Mio and the children to expect less from the world, to recognize that there is no justice, and to survive however they can. However, after Esdras endures the knowledge of his son’s complicity in Trock’s original murder, recognizes his daughter’s love for Mio, is plagued by guilt for being a part of a major injustice, and realizes that he has failed to protect his family, the old rabbi is severely shaken—enough to reconsider his world view. Esdras does not entirely or unrealistically transform his character, but his ﬁnal monologue reveals that he has been pushed beyond his capacity to endure injustice. Valuing Mio and Miriamne as greater than ‘‘all / a city’s elders’’ in their wisdom, a statement that contradicts the Jewish value system, Esdras signals a conversion from the Judaic philosophical tradition as he sees it: ‘‘I wish that I’d died so, / long ago; before you’re old you’ll wish / that you had died as they have.’’ It is signiﬁcant that Anderson chooses to end the play in this manner; had it come in another place, or had it not been written in blank verse, it might have signiﬁed a moment of desperation after which Esdras would return to traditional Judaic philosophy. But as the ﬁnal monologue, which in a Shakespearean tragedy normally marks a return to a world of order with justice having been served, it represents an afﬁrmation of love, truth, and justice at

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Miriamne also experiences a traumatic test of her philosophical convictions, which are initially summarized by the disillusioned response she makes to Mio’s question of what she believes in: ‘‘Nothing.’’ Yet she changes her convictions to center on her love for Mio, and she comes to believe in this so strongly that she dies attempting to prove her devotion to him. This gesture comes too late, however, after Miriamne feels that she has betrayed Mio by refusing to give away her brother to the police and thus verify Mio’s proclamation of his father’s innocence. Anderson reinforces the inconstancy of Miriamne’s convictions and the impressionability of her youth by leaving her lines short and choppy, seldom giving her any substantial speeches, and even associating her with the moral degeneration of T. S. Eliot’s famous Wasteland, which is characterized by a widespread lack of faith: Oh, Mio, Mio, / in all the unwanted places and waste lands / that roll up into the darkness out of sun / and into sun out of dark, there should be one empty / for you and me.

This darkness and faithlessness is, for Anderson, very dangerous ground, and perhaps this is why Miriamne is the one to draw Mio away from his martyr’s faith in truth and justice. In his 1947 essay, ‘‘Whatever Hope We Have’’ Anderson reinforces this idea in a quote that Perry D. Luckett uses to associate Anderson’s philosophy with that of the devout Christian T. S. Eliot: ‘‘we must have a personal, a national, and a racial faith, or we are dry bones in a death valley, waiting for the word that will bring us life.’’ It is therefore appropriate to Anderson’s philosophical agenda that Mio, by far the most substantial philosopher in the play, with his numerous monologues contemplating everything from honor and freedom to truth and enduring love, answers the above question simply, ‘‘No.’’ There is no empty wasteland away from the troubles of the world for Mio because he is committed to wide and uncompromising justice and the public proclamation of the truth.

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Yet Mio also experiences a traumatic test of his convictions that brings him to change his initial philosophy. Ultimately, he alters his own commitment to truth and justice in order to spare his lover’s brother from jail. Remaining silent about his knowledge, instead of passing it on to Carr in act 3, Mio reverses his previously exclusive desire to proclaim his father’s innocence. Instead, he comes to value the ‘‘enduring love’’ that he previously told Miriamne exists only in books. More so than any other character, Mio is allowed to express his convictions and observations about the world in elegant and dramatic verse, but when it comes to explaining his reversal of philosophies he can only say, ‘‘it strangled in my throat’’ and ‘‘It stuck in my throat.’’ It is actually Miriamne who causes her lover to understand the change in his thinking when she says, ‘‘He would have forgiven,’’ which refers to his father but also alludes to one of the central premises of Christian philosophy: Jesus’ forgiveness of sins. Once he understands this, Mio is able to provide a number of transcendent and romantic explanations of his new convictions, universalized by Anderson’s carefully crafted verse. Mio’s philosophical journey therefore results in a conviction in faith and forgiveness, but it only becomes a convincing and powerful declaration after it has been tested by the desperate realities of the drama. Universal and abstract philosophies such as Mio’s must always, for Anderson, be balanced with contemporary politics and the individual concerns of the character, a duality that is reﬂected in the playwright’s language. Winterset is powerful and unique because it is able to articulate this interplay between the universal and the speciﬁc, through the sophisticated use of verse, which represents the highest philosophical convictions of a character without reaching outside that character’s realistic voice and distinctive personality. Anderson ties together high and low, universal and speciﬁc, and abstract and real through his careful use of language. It is in these combinations that the play establishes a philosophy of faith and hope. Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on Winterset, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Russell Dinapoli In the following essay excerpt, Dinapoli examines the inappropriateness of the Elizabethan structure of Winterset and asserts that Anderson wrote the play for commercial rather than artistic reasons.

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This essay will focus on the verse drama Winterset, Maxwell Anderson’s second play on the subject of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. It will brieﬂy compare the drama, which I believe was inappropriately written in the style of an Elizabethan tragedy, with Gods of the Lightning, a propaganda play written in collaboration with Harold Hickerson and staged soon after the two anarchist immigrants were put to death in Massachusetts in 1927. The essay asserts that unlike his ﬁrst play on the subject of the case, in Winterset Anderson exploited the Sacco-Vanzetti issue for other than artistic reasons, to wit: he knew the topic would entice audiences to see the play, which opened on Broadway in September 1935, and earned the playwright his ﬁrst Drama Critics Circle Award. The drama, however, has since been virtually forgotten. I maintain that this is in large part because an issue as sensitive as the Sacco-Vanzetti case was in the 1930s, and to some extent still is, cannot be represented in arcane terms and in a tragic-verse style. Maxwell Anderson was granted the most prestigious awards an American playwright can receive: the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Critics Circle Award (twice) and, like Eugene O’Neill before him, the Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to Buchanan, ‘‘In volume of work alone Anderson stands above most of his contemporaries, and in variety both of subject matter and dramatic form he has few if any peers’’ (Playwright’s Progress 60). Yet the dramatist has practically been forgotten. As the playwright’s son afﬁrms, ‘‘Considering his prominence, critical acclaim, and popular success among theater audiences over a period of thirty years, it seems puzzling’’ (‘‘Maxwell Who?’’ 171). It is my belief that Maxwell Anderson in large part lost credibility as a serious playwright in the mid-1930s in part as a result of his insistence upon writing verse plays in the Elizabethan style on current issues—most notably his use of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial as the background for Winterset (1940). The Sacco-Vanzetti trial began on 31 May 1921 in the town of Dedham, Massachusetts, and a subsequent appeal for a new trial after the defendants were convicted lasted several years. The case captured the attention not only of the American public but of people all over the world. As Prior observes, it was an ‘‘episode which touched on some of the most serious issues of the life of our times’’ (324). Before the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, the ‘‘Red Scare’’ had swept the country in large part because of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s

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I BELIEVE THAT AS A PLAY WINTERSET WAS A FAILURE IN THE LONG RUN BECAUSE THE SACCOVANZETTI CASE IS A SUBJECT THAT CANNOT BE DEPICTED OBLIQUELY IN VERSE.’’

highly publicized crusade against suspected radicals in 1919 and 1920. With the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 as a basis, Palmer ordered his agents to round up thousands of suspects in cities across the country, disregarding the basic civil liberties of many of them. Aliens were especially targeted during the campaign. Thus, when Fredrick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Beradelli, a guard, were gunned down in a robbery in South Braintree, foreign radicals immediately became the prime suspects. The Sacco-Vanzetti trial came on the heels of two years of national hysteria, in which foreigners were believed to be trying to overthrow the government. From the very beginning of the trial it was feared that the two Italians would not get a fair trial, for they were both aliens and radicals. Judge Webster Thayer—later personiﬁed in Anderson’s Winterset—presiding over the trial and subsequent hearings for a retrial, ‘‘was accused by some of ‘extreme bias’ in conducting the case’’ (Nannes 92). In addition, Avrich notes: ‘‘Outside the courtroom, during the trial and the appeals which followed, he made remarks that bristled with animosity towards the defendants. (‘Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them a while’’’ [3–4]). In the Transcript of the Record of the Trial, W. G. Thompson and H. B. Ehrmann, both of whom served as counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti, attest that ‘‘the state of mind and conduct of Judge Thayer made a fair trial impossible,’’ adding, ‘‘It has been established by incontrovertible evidence that from the very beginning he entertained a strong prejudice and hostility against both defendants by reasons of their anarchistic views’’ (Massachusetts Dept. of Justice 1929, 5352). In order to forestall a growing belief that prejudice had informed Thayer’s judg-

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ment, the Governor of Massachusetts, Alvan T. Fuller, called on a number of inﬂuential citizens to review the case. The special advisory committee sanctioned the conviction. Avrich notes, ‘‘The Lowell Committee, as it became known, though ﬁnding Judge Thayer guilty of a ‘grave breach of ofﬁcial decorum’ in his derogatory references to the defendants, nevertheless concluded that justice had been done’’ (4). Nevertheless, many Americans continued to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti had been treated unjustly. Signiﬁcantly, sixteen years after the two anarchists were executed, the popular magazine Vogue referred to them as having been ‘‘legally killed for their convictions, not their crimes’’ (‘‘Maxwell Anderson’’ 81). Fraenkel asserts that Thompson, Sacco and Vanzetti’s attorney, remarked about the judge that refused to allow a retrial. ‘‘I could not honestly say that I think Judge Thayer is all the time a bad man or that he is a conﬁrmed wicked man. Not at all. That isn’t so.’’ But, Thompson adds: ‘‘his categories of thought are few and simple—reds and conservatives, and ‘soldier boys.’ No margin between them. No intermediate ground where people cannot be placed in the one class or the other. He knows only a few simple things; the country, the war, the reds’’ (546). It is noteworthy that Fraenkel’s book, The Sacco-Vanzetti Case, which was reprinted in 1969, was originally published in 1931. (The two anarchists were put to death at midnight, on 23 August 1927.) This is a clear indication that the case was still a matter of public concern four years after the execution had taken place. Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that Anderson, a man who had earlier expressed a strong interest in the case, might well have been acquainted with Fraenkel’s book prior to writing the ﬁnal draft of Winterset. Echoing Thompson’s conciliatory description of Thayer, Anderson depicts the judge in Winterset as a man who ﬁrmly believes, if erroneously, that he is protecting society: ‘‘I have sent men down that long corridor into blinding light and blind darkness! [He suddenly draws himself erect and speaks deﬁantly] And it was well that I did so! I have been an upright judge!’’ (37–38). Seven years after Anderson’s ﬁrst Sacco and Vanzetti drama, Gods of the Lightning (1928), was dismissed by critics and audiences, in large part for being too quixotic for Broadway, Anderson returned to the Sacco-Vanzetti theme in his play Winterset. The difference was patent. In the earlier drama his intentions had been clearly propagandistic. Gods of the Lightning, which relied heavily on

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realistic dialogue and journalistic comment, was an outcry against the injustice committed. Shivers observes, ‘‘It incurred attempts at censorship, e.g., at Boston, not because of its language but because of its supposed inﬂammatory subject matter’’ (4). In Winterset, however, the playwright handled the subject in a more complaisant manner, using verse and Hamlet-like philosophizing. The premiere of Winterset on 25 September 1935 caused a critical stir in the United States that lasted for several years. According to Wall, ‘‘Winterset was attended by as much criticism as was Victor Hugo’s Ernani’’ (156). Political attitudes affected the reception of the play, as Anderson, an experienced Broadway playwright, must have known they would. Woodbridge notes the effect on the reception of the play as a result of ‘‘the intense feeling which the case aroused’’ (59). Fraenkel observes, ‘‘The prominence accorded the case in the press becomes strikingly evident from a review of the following headlines in the New York Times’’ (4). The author then proceeds to list 22 case related headlines for the month of August 1927, among which the following serve as examples: ‘‘World Stir Over Decision’’ (August 5th); ‘‘British Labor Makes Protest’’ (August 9th); ‘‘Rome Relies on our Justice’’ (August 12th); ‘‘Boston Besieged; Scores Arrested’’ (August 23rd); ‘‘Paris Mobs Loot Shops’’ (August 24th). Furthermore, whole sectors of Boston were closed off in the days leading up to their executions; protesters were herded off to jail, and in the ﬁnal hours, ‘‘outside the barred area around the prison great crowds gathered’’ (4). It is hard to imagine a professional dramatist of Anderson’s caliber ignoring the political uproar that the case had caused and that the staging of his play was likely to produce. Judge Thayer’s home was bombed in 1932, thrusting the Sacco-Vanzetti case back into the news in the early 1930s. Avrich suspects the bombing ‘‘originated among the Needham anarchists’’ (215). Would a Broadway producer risk a large sum of money on a play that might fuel either an anarchist bombing spree or a conservative boycott? I do not think so. I suspect that Anderson knew that the memory of the SaccoVanzetti affair alone would publicize his play, and he judged that if he handled the subject in a way that did not infuse the potentially explosive event with newfound political life, a ﬁnancial success might be achieved. It is not unreasonable to suppose that, as a veteran professional playwright, Anderson would

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have been careful not to alienate his paying audiences. Hence, although he alludes to injustice in Winterset. ‘‘And there you see it, the perfect example of capitalistic oppression!’’ (35), he nonetheless avoids offending conservatives by absolving the judge, who is sympathetically depicted as a man who suffers for having done his patriotic duty by sending two anarchists to their deaths in the electric chair: ‘‘Nay, it avails nothing that you are the law— this delicate ganglion that is the brain, it will not bear these things—!’’ (42). Initially, the media in New York showed its approval of Anderson’s depiction of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair in Winterset by awarding the playwright the Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The play had 179 performances. However, during its second engagement it was only performed sixteen times. Buchanan holds that in writing Winterset, Anderson was ‘‘risking failure’’ (‘‘Rules of Playwriting’’ 63); and even Flexner, one of Anderson’s strongest critics, acknowledges, ‘‘In Winterset Anderson unquestionably set himself his most difﬁcult task to date’’ (103). But as it turned out, the risk was not so much the subject matter as the way it was handled. There is nothing unusual about a dramatist catering to audiences. Shakespeare was a master at writing for both the nobility in the balconies and the groundlings in the pit. My concern with Winterset is that, unlike the historical subjects depicted by Shakespeare, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was not an appropriate topic for the sort of Elizabethan verse tragedy that Anderson wrote. That the dramatist chose to write his ﬁrst verse play on a modern theme using the Sacco-Vanzetti case as its background is troubling for two reasons: ﬁrst, the issue had not been resolved by their deaths; and second, Anderson had decided to leave matters that way. Moreover (and what is more alarming), I suspect that Anderson was aware of the impact the subject matter would have on his audiences when he sat down to write the play, and that he ultimately devised it in an ethos perfectly suited both to liberals and conservatives. It is therefore not surprising that Rodell observes that in Winterset ‘‘Mr. Anderson refuses to take a chance’’ (274). In my opinion, Anderson played both sides of the ideological fence in his treatment of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. He deliberately made Winterset abstruse so that the greatest number of people would leave the theater untroubled by the way the Sacco-Vanzetti affair had been handled. Hence, by swathing the Sacco-Vanzetti tragedy ‘‘in layers of poetic disguises’’ (Block 240), the playwright avoided dealing with some of the outstanding questions stemming from the case.

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(For example, was the FBI involved? Was the Jury’s verdict the result of the ‘‘Red Scare’’? Should Judge Thayer have been dismissed after making biased statements in public?) Anderson attempted to modernize the Elizabethan style and thereby make it more appealing to American playgoers. Many critics applauded the dramatist’s efforts in this respect. Cantor comments that during its run on Broadway, Winterset was considered an ‘‘Elizabethan East Side’’ drama (34). Similarly, Ferguson uses the term ‘‘East River Hamlet’’ to describe the play and Gabriel characterizes it as being ‘‘Shakespearean? Precisely, patently—and successfully’’ and he insists that even though Winterset is Shakespeare in shirt-sleeves,’’ it is ‘‘not a jot incongruous because of that undress’’ (465); moreover, Hewitt remarks that the play takes a look back, ‘‘with nostalgia on the days and ways of Bill Shakespeare’’ (396). Finally, Prior observes, ‘‘For all its modernity of setting and theme, Winterset is an elaborate and original combination of Shakespearian situations’’ (321). Anderson clearly relied on Shakespearianisms in several of the plays he wrote in the 1930s—most notably in the ﬁrst two Tudor plays, Elizabeth the Queen and Mary of Scotland; and in Winterset, a play on a modern theme. Colum notes that the Shakespearianisms are ‘‘deliberate’’ (345). The other plays he wrote that are Shakespearean, but to a lesser degree, are Valley Forge, The Wingless Victory, High Tor and Key Largo. There is nothing unusual about authors making literary allusions in their works. Literary cross-reference, when skillfully done, can be very effective: the Elizabethans in particular borrowed extensively from authors of other periods. Nor was their use of ancient parallels and motifs random. The Elizabethan playgoer was expected to recognize the literary allusions and to appreciate them in the context of the play. So too did Anderson expect his audiences to identify the allusions he employed. In this respect, Kernodle notes, ‘‘The resemblance to the older plays gives breadth and universality to the modern ﬁgures’’ (331). In Anderson’s Tudor dramas, the Shakespearianisms were generally acceptable to critics and audiences alike. However, when the playwright chose to write a Shakespearean drama on a modern subject as controversial as the Sacco-Vanzetti case, critics were divided in their opinions. At ﬁrst, those authors who were positive in their assessments of Anderson’s Shakespearean modern drama Winterset were foremost. The New York Times critic Brooks

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Atkinson found it ‘‘courageous’’ (‘‘The Play’’ 19) and ‘‘overwhelming’’ (‘‘Mr Anderson’’ 1); the drama critic for Theatre Arts Monthly called it ‘‘magniﬁcent’’ (Gabriel 465); and William R. Benet, writing for Saturday Review of Literature, claims he ‘‘deeply enjoyed it’’ (16). Furthermore, David Burton holds that ‘‘the slings and arrows of good fortune’’ (2) accompanied the play, which, as I have already mentioned, won the ﬁrst New York Drama Critics Circle Award ever presented. Joseph Krutch— a member of the New York Drama Critics Circle at the time—writes in The American Drama since 1918 that he approves of Anderson’s ‘‘attempt to treat some of the material of contemporary life in a manner more richly imaginative than the method of realism permits’’ (296). He ﬁnds it agreeable that ‘‘even the lowest of his characters is, like the characters in Shakespeare, permitted to be both a poet and a philosopher’’ (297). Moreover, Krutch takes issue with those who would criticize the play because ‘‘‘gangsters’ don’t speak verse,’’ calling such an attitude ‘‘frivolous,’’ and adds, ‘‘Neither do fourteen-year-old Italian girls, early Danish princes or, for that matter, any other persons whatsoever’’ (298). Contrary voices had been raised against the prospect of writing modern verse dramas even before Winterset opened at the Martin Beck Theater in 1935. Claiming that the Elizabethan verse style is out of place in modern drama, Zabel asserts, ‘‘it is one thing for an audience to attend an Elizabethan play, with its sanctions of tradition and reverence, and quite another to ﬁnd the same literary process applied to the events and speech of contemporary life’’ (153–4). Furthermore, the inappropriateness of a drama in verse about the Sacco-Vanzetti case was observed by several authors. They did not agree with authors like Wyatt, who praised the play for ‘‘presenting a poetic theme in a gangster setting’’ (600). To many, representing an international cause célèbre ‘‘swathed in poetic disguises’’ (Block 240) was simply wrong. Young remarks that in Winterset, ‘‘we have only verses that are sucking a sugar-teat in the Muses’ nursery’’ (365). Similarly, Edmund Wilson states that before seeing the play he heard that Winterset was a ‘‘great American poetic drama on the theme of Sacco and Vanzetti,’’ only to discover that ‘‘what I was confronted with when I got into the theater was a belated and disembodied shadow of the productions, so unpopular in their day—universally neglected by the critics—of the old New Playwrights’ Theater in Grove Street’’ (193). He further remarks,

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There were the Jews out of Em Jo Basshe’s ‘The Centuries,’ the street scene, with its agitators and policemen, out of Dos Passos’s ‘Airways,’ and a general inﬂuence of the open-air stages of John Howard Lawson. During the ﬁrst act, I became interested, as it seemed to me that the writers of the New Playwrights might have founded a school, after all, and that Mr. Anderson might have improved on his originals.

In addition, ‘‘the revolutionary social content had been extracted,’’ and in short, what remained was simply Shakespearean form, which the playwright seemed to be forcing on a modern subject. Wilson concludes that Anderson is trying to ‘‘impose an old technique which has nothing to do with his material’’ (194). Along similar lines, Colum notes that though Shakespearianisms have been ‘‘imposed’’ on the play, ‘‘its conception is very far from Shakespearean,’’ and the result is that, for a play about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, ‘‘Anderson did not really achieve the proper form’’ (345). Some authors, however, claim that the verse style is hardly detectable when spoken on stage. Remarking that it is not ‘‘the blank verse of Shakespeare’s time,’’ Arthur Hobson Quinn further observes that it is a ‘‘ﬂexible, four-stressed measure which is quite natural in its expression and which never gets between the audience and the idea’’ (3). Film versions of Anderson’s Shakespearean plays were made, but the screenplay adaptations of the play scripts were written in prose. RKO/Radio released Anderson’s second Tudor play, Mary of Scotland in 1936, with Katherine Hepburn and Fredric March in the title roles and under the direction of John Ford. Vanderlane asserts, ‘‘The ﬁlm does not succeed,’’ and ‘‘a good deal of the fault can be found in the material with its lack of historical balance’’ (1549). In 1939, Warner Brothers released the ﬁlm version of Anderson’s ﬁrst Tudor drama—the original playscript title was changed to The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex—starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. With regard to the quality of the ﬁlm, Robert Morsberger remarks, ‘‘Despite the spectacle of Elizabeth and Essex, the pageantry is too often static, too often a series of tableaux’’ (1387). The ﬁlm Winterset was released by RKO/Radio in 1936. According to Ralph Angel, the ﬁlm version of the award winning drama ‘‘achieves no higher status than the general gangster melodrama’’ (1860). Similarly, Otis Ferguson asserts, ‘‘What we have here is little more than a sort of Hamlet of the gangster ﬁlms—without Hamlet, of course’’ (‘‘Hamlet I’’ 328). Elsewhere, while reviewing the ﬁlm, he states, ‘‘The movie covers up

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some of the play’s weak spots, manufactures some of its own, and places others in merciless focus,’’ adding that ‘‘a stageful of corpses at the curtain does not necessarily make tragedy’’ (‘‘Hamlet II’’). Also, Van Doren mentions that the ﬁlm ‘‘bears only the most superﬁcial resemblance to the tragedy which won prizes’’ (741). The stage productions of Anderson’s Shakespearean plays were successful, though the ﬁlm versions, which had eliminated the Shakespearianisms, were not. Ironically, however, while in the postwar period the once popular stage versions have all but been forgotten, occasionally the ﬁlm versions can still be seen on television. I believe that as a play Winterset was a failure in the long run because the Sacco-Vanzetti case is a subject that cannot be depicted obliquely in verse. This is especially so when, as Avrich notes, ‘‘Millions were convinced of their innocence, and millions were convinced that, guilty or innocent, they had not received impartial justice’’ (4). Anderson tried to get the audience to suspend judgment and to accept the stoic notion that the worldly power brokers inevitably triumph on earth, while victims like Sacco and Vanzetti are truly noble. That sort of thinking may have been appropriate enough for Anderson’s Tudor plays, where the events had occurred in the distant past. But it rings hollow when the subject is one that is as controversial as the Sacco and Vanzetti case was in 1935. In ‘‘A Prelude to Poetry in the Theatre,’’ an essay that was included in the originally published version of Winterset, Anderson wrote that a playwright ‘‘who thinks more of his job than his fame will therefore play safe by repressing his personal preferences and going all the way in the direction of what he believes the public wants.’’ It would seem that this line of reasoning was at the core of Anderson’s ﬁnal draft of Winterset. That Anderson exploited the Sacco-Vanzetti tragedy is further supported by the fact that he authorized a watered down Hollywood ﬁlm version of the play. Furthermore, in an article by Anderson, which the New York Times took the liberty of subtitling ‘‘Veteran Dramatist Reveals He Began Writing Plays Mainly for Money,’’ the playwright acknowledges that Winterset did not earn enough money, and so ‘‘I went back to prose with ‘Star Wagon,’ another pot-boiler’’ (‘‘A Confession’’); and he alludes to Molière, who also aimed ‘‘at quality and perfection as well as immediate receipts.’’ In one of his last interviews, Anderson reﬂected on What Price Glory—a play which took

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Broadway by storm with its strongly critical attitude toward World War I and especially American involvement in it. He called the play ‘‘‘a pot-boiler’’’ (Nichols 5). With its fast paced and realistic language, it inﬂuenced American theater in the early 1920s. John Brown mentions that Sherwood Anderson decided ‘‘‘it would be a wonderful thing to be a playwright’’’ after seeing What Price Glory performed (163); and Morris Freedman calls it one of the two ‘‘most successful plays in the twenties’’ (82). However, regarding this fairly important event in the history of the American theater. Anderson confesses, ‘‘I wrote it just because I wanted to make some money’’ (Nichols 5). That statement may have raised the eyebrows of more than one reader— it certainly did mine. As it stands, then, the question may well be asked, though never satisfactorily answered: how much of Winterset was just another pot-boiler? Source: Russell Dinapoli, ‘‘Maxwell Anderson’s Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset,’’ in Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama, edited by Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam Lopez-Rodriguez, P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 101–11.

Robert L. Gilbert In the following essay, Gilbert reviews critical response to the subject of Mio’s revenge in Winterset. He then argues that Anderson does, despite criticism suggesting otherwise, lay a logical groundwork for the concluding sequence of events in the play. Winterset has prompted more critical comment than any of Maxwell Anderson’s other attempts at tragedy. It has been described as a romance and a revenge play. The drama involves the attempt of an adolescent, Mio Romagna, to avenge his father’s death. In 1928, Anderson had collaborated on a conventional protest play, Gods of the Lightning, sections of which were adapted from the SaccoVanzetti trial. With Winterset, Anderson again proposed to dramatize an action suggested by this event. The drama opens about thirteen years after the Romagna trial. Romagna was executed for a crime committed by the Estrella gang of which Garth Esdras was a member. The events of the trial contributed to a national controversy which is still going on. The play is set in a tenement district near a Manhattan waterfront. Its inhabitants include Garth Esdras, his sister, Miriamne, and his father. Two principals in the Romagna case visit Garth, who has recently been implicated in the crime. Trock Estrella

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threatens to murder Garth, and Judge Gaunt—who ofﬁciated at the trial and has since lost his sanity— appeals for Garth’s silence. Mio Romagna doesn’t meet Garth until the middle of the play and by that time he has fallen in love with Garth’s sister, Miriamne. When Mio learns that Trock’s gang is guilty, he can’t expose them because he doesn’t want to hurt Miriamne. The third act ﬁnds Mio torn by this dilemma and he turns to Miriamne for help. She reminds him of his father’s last words which called for love. Mio forsakes revenge, but is machine-gunned by Trock’s men when he tries to escape. Miriamne shouts Trock’s guilt and is also shot. Her father, an aging rabbi, delivers a eulogy over their bodies to close the play. He begs them to ‘‘forgive the ancient evil of the earth’’ and praises their deﬁance: Oh, Miriamne, and Mio—Mio, my son—know this where you lie, this is the glory of earth-born men and women, not to cringe, never to yield, but standing, take defeat implacable and deﬁant, die unsubmitting. I wish that I’d died so, long ago; before you’re old you’ll wish that you had died as they have. On this star, in this hard star-adventure, knowing not what the ﬁres mean to right and left, nor whether a meaning was intended or presumed, man can stand up, and look out blind, and say: in all these turning lights I can ﬁnd no clue, only a masterless night, and in my blood no certain answer, yet is my mind my own, yet is my heart a cry toward something dim in distance, which is higher than I am and makes me emperor of the endless dark even in seeking! What odds and ends of life men may live otherwise, let them live, and then go out, as I shall go, and you. Our part is only to bury them. Come take her up. They must not lie here.

Political attitudes affected the reception of the Broadway production of Winterset. Many critics saw in Winterset a regression from Anderson’s previous treatment of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Anita Block wrote that ‘‘Gods of the Lightning should have met a response that would have sent this stirring play across the country,’’ but she considers Winterset an ‘‘insidious’’ form ‘‘of escape.’’ Eleanor Flexner evaluated Winterset in her contemporary survey subtitled The Theatre Retreats from Reality. She notes that Esdras’ eulogy ‘‘cannot hide the fact that to submit is exactly what Mio did when he abandoned the defense of his father’s good name for the love of a girl he had known only a few hours.’’ Flexner is disturbed that Anderson allows

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Burgess Meredith and Margo in a 1936 ﬁlm adaptation of Winterset

Miriamne to intrude upon the drama. She quotes from the recognition scene in which Mio pleads ‘‘Miriamne, if you love me / teach me a treason to what I am and have been / till I learn to live like a man!’’ These words strike one like a blow. They smack of the weakling and the renegade. It is perfectly possible that a boy who suffered as Mio might be seized with the horror of the agony which has constituted his entire life. But Anderson has taken pains to show us that Mio is no ordinary boy. He is of heroic stuff, he is hardboiled, he is a fanatic with a single obsession.

Flexner believes her assessment of Mio is based upon the text and not her commitment to social issues. She writes ‘‘it is imperative that it [Winterset] be analyzed without reference to any . . . external consideration, solely from the point of view of the dynamics of the play itself.’’ She concludes: For an act and a half Anderson is writing a play about a boy whose sole purpose in life is to clear his father’s name, if not to avenge him. Suddenly, however, he allows him to abandon the purpose which is the root action of the play, and, violating every principle of character which he has so carefully established in the ﬁrst act, brings about a catastrophic dénouement which he invests with a completely false aura of tragic inevitability, since dramatically there is nothing inevitable about it. Why doesn’t Mio jump into the East River, always full of passing boats, and swim for safety?

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Such an observation is not conﬁned to the thirties. In 1957, Robert C. Roby compared Mio with Shakespeare’s Romeo. He writes: The playwright’s problem is that of a revenge play which must meet its resolution not in the accomplishment of revenge but in willful forebearance of it. . . . Shakespeare’s dramatic problem lay in involving Romeo in a family feud from which he wished to remain aloof; Anderson’s is in separating Mio from a quarrel which he has striven to keep alive. Shakespeare’s answer came in Mercutio’s duel with Tybalt which involved Romeo’s loyalty. In Anderson’s play, however, the conﬂict between love and loyalty allows no simple resolution; his ethic cannot be presumed as was Shakespeare’s, but must be presented through adequate exposition. Consequently, the resolution comes piecemeal, with a lack of coordination of thought and feeling. Mio reluctantly foregoes his advantage because he realizes that Miriamne wishes it; only after the opportunity for revenge has passed does she point out to him that his loyalty to his father, who loved mankind, has taken the perverted form of hate. This is resolution by rationalization: Mio has been a coward by instinct.

Roby also notes that Esdras’ eulogy can’t excuse Mio’s failure to reveal his father’s innocence to the public: Mio dies not gloriously, but like a trapped animal. . . . Forgiveness and love have no perceptible effect beyond that on the two lovers. . . . In the interest of a

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WINTERSET DEMONSTRATES A VISION OF FUTILITY. ANDERSON WROTE THE PLAY AND IT WOULD BE FOOLHARDY TO DENY THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE PLAYWRIGHT HAD KNOWLEDGE OF HIS OWN TEXT.’’

mysterious higher truth, simple justice and right are forgotten. . . . Love is portrayed as better than hate, but in the play a just and purposeful hate bows to an impotent love which can lead only to defeat.

The critics to whom I have referred have made a similar assumption about Winterset: that Mio is capable of accomplishing the task he has set for himself, and that the obstacles which he confronts justify neither his failure, nor the alternative they feel he chooses. In other words, playwright Anderson ‘‘does not follow the logic’’ of his action. This is the complaint of Gerald Rabkin who, in his recent survey of political elements in American theater of the thirties, writes: The problem in Winterset lies in the fact that the central crisis presented—the recognition scene in which the truth about the Romagna case is revealed— leads logically not to an alteration of Mio’s passionate resolve but rather its afﬁrmation. Had it been discovered that Romagna had indeed been guilty. Mio’s pessimism would have made more dramatic sense. Thus Anderson asserts a fatalistic position without demonstrating it.

I shall turn to the text to prove that Rabkin and his predecessors are mistaken. The problem is that Winterset is not ‘‘a revenge play.’’ Its conﬂict cannot be deﬁned in terms of truth and justice and its central character is not made of ‘‘heroic stuff.’’ Mio neither pursues revenge with ‘‘passionate resolve,’’ nor makes love like Romeo. My examination of Winterset shall concentrate upon Anderson’s treatment of Mio. I hope to show that there is thorough preparation for the reversal that takes place and that the critics have responded only to areas in the text that would deny its preparation. In his ﬁrst appearance (I/iii) Mio clearly indicates his desire for revenge. His friend, Carr, tries to dissuade him because Carr believes that society

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doesn’t want the truth. Mio responds, ‘‘For my heritage / they’ve left me one thing only, and that’s to be / my father’s voice crying up out of the earth.’’ Moments later, he adds: I’ve tried to live and forget it—but I was birthmarked with hot iron into the entrails. I’ve got to ﬁnd out who did it and make them see it till it scalds their eyes and make them admit it till their tongues are blistered with saying how black they lied.

Mio is prone to this type of rhetoric. Yet we must imagine a character not only by what he says, but also by what he does and by what other characters say and do with reference to him. It is a mistake to accept Mio’s characterization of himself without considering his expression in the context of the action as a whole. As a matter of fact, there is some action in I/iii which precedes the talk about revenge and in which Anderson brings another dimension to his hero. Miriamne comes out of the tenement and Mio initiates the dialogue: MIO. What’s the matter kid? MIRIAMNE. Nothing. Nothing. MIO. I’m sorry. MIRIAMNE. It’s all right. [She withdraws her eyes from his and goes out past him. He turns and looks after her] CARR. Control your chivalry. MIO. A pretty kid. CARR. A baby. MIO. Wait for me? CARR. Be a long wait. [Mio steps swiftly out after Miriamne, then returns] Yeah? MIO. She’s gone.

Mio then shifts the topic of conversation to the way in which he has been persecuted since his father’s death: MIO. It probably gave them a headache just to see me after all that agitation. They knew as well as I did my father never staged a holdup. Anyway, I’ve got a new interest in life now. CARR. Yes—I saw her. MIO. I don’t mean the skirt.

I don’t wish to make too much out of Carr’s comment, but his assumption that Mio’s ‘‘new interest’’ is Miriamne indicates how the text implies in small as well as large ways the presence of another drive in Mio which has little to do with revenge. For the sake of discussion I shall call it the love motif. Anderson introduces it at the same time as the revenge motif and what is more important is

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that he exploits it ﬁrst. When a street dance begins Mio does not enter the tenement to question Garth; instead he pursues Miariamne. The dance begins as a protest against the police who ordered Lucia, the piano man, off the streets because he had no license to play his machine. A radical climbs upon his soap box and complains about capitalistic oppression and when the policeman gets excited Judge Gaunt rebukes him. But Mio isn’t satisﬁed with the crowd’s protest. He confronts the policeman: I have an old score to settle with policemen, brother, because they’re fools and fat-heads, and you’re one of the most fatuous fat-heads that ever walked his feet ﬂat collecting graft! Tell that to your sergeant back in the booby-hatch.

I should like to contrast Anderson’s treatment of Mio thus far with the work of another twentieth century playwright. In this one-act play, The Measures Taken, Bertolt Brecht deals with a hero who can’t accomplish the revolutionary tactics of his party. He continually exposes himself to the enemy instead of functioning in the anonymous manner which is demanded of him. The hero is executed—a solution to which he agrees—not by the enemy but by the party whose goals he had wanted to realize. Brecht issues no judgments about his action— in a sense he indicts the party because it uses the hero with full knowledge of his fatal idealism—nor does the playwright explore his hero’s motives beyond the political and social realm. Anderson treats Mio in a more comprehensive way, but Mio’s behavior in the street scene is similar to that of Brecht’s hero. Mio swerves from action that might accomplish his goal and needlessly involves himself with the enemy. He must shout, even to those who cannot understand, the misery with which they are afﬂicted. Perhaps the deranged Judge Gaunt makes the best assessment of Mio’s behavior when he tells the policeman that the crowd’s ‘‘threats are childish.’’ The love scene which follows does little to alter this assessment. The stage directions read Mio ‘‘stands at a little distance from Miariamne.’’ Looks like rain. [She is silent] You live around here? I guess you thought I meant it—about waiting here to meet me. [She nods again] I’d forgotten about it till I got that winter across the face. You’d better go inside. I’m not your kind. I’m nobody’s kind but my own. I’m waiting for this to blow over. [She rises]

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I lied. I meant it— I meant it when I said it—but there’s too much black whirling inside me—for any girl to know. So go in. You’re somebody’s angel child, and they’re waiting for you. And tell them when you get inside where it’s warm and you love each other, and mother comes to kiss her darling, tell them to hang on to it while they can, believe while they can it’s a warm safe world, and Jesus ﬁnds his lambs and carries them in his bosom.—I’ve seen some lambs that Jesus missed. If they ever want the truth tell them that nothing’s guaranteed in this climate except it gets cold in winter, not on this earth except you die sometime.

Mio seems to assume that his lot is worse than anyone else’s; he has the immediate need to express his bitterness. He strikes a he-man pose, yet at the same time reveals his weakness. He asserts that he asks for nothing, yet as soon as Miriamne offers herself he is moved to expose his life and purpose. Again, he speaks with characteristic invective; again, the statement that he is driven to avenge the wrong done his father, but for one who envisions himself as an avenger his behavior is strangely passive. Act II brings Mio to a confrontation with Garth, Judge Gaunt and Esdras. Mio enters the tenement after the three men have agreed to remain silent about the Romagna case. Mio appeals: I’ll be quick and brief. I’m the son of a man who died many years ago for a pay roll robbery in New England. You should be Garth Esdras, by what I’ve heard. You have some Knowledge of the crime, if one can believe what he reads in the public prints, and it might be your testimony, if given, would clear my father of any share in the murder. You may not care whether he was guilty or not. You may not know. But I do care—and care deeply, and I’ve come to ask you face to face.

The three men deny Mio’s plea whereupon he accuses them of perpetuating his father’s guilt. The tactic which this supposed avenger utilizes to reveal the truth actually reveals his own inadequacy. Though his rhetoric condemns the individuals whose complicity allowed his father to die, he allows himself to be seduced by their denial. ESDRAS. If he were innocent and you know him so, believe it, and let the others believe as they like. MIO. Will you tell me how a man’s to live, and face his life, if he can’t believe that truth’s like a ﬁre, and will burn through and be seen

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though it takes all the years there are? While I stand up and have breath in my lungs I shall be one ﬂame of that ﬁre; it’s all the life I have.

Mio’s speech is quoted by Rabkin to deﬁne his conception of Winterset’s conﬂict. But in the context of the scene in which it is placed it serves to expose Mio’s doubt. The speech has two parts; the ﬁrst is a question and the second, an assertion. The question detracts from the force of the assertion. We imagine a character not only by what he says, but by whom he says it to—Mio is asking Esdras ‘‘how a man’s to live’’ when the old rabbi has shown Mio how he lives by giving succor to his mortal enemy. That Mio identiﬁes himself immediately and confronts Judge Gaunt and Garth with no support other than the appeal which has been rejected throughout his life implies his inadequacy; that he succumbs to their casuistry intensiﬁes it. As the scene progresses, the forces that actually drive Mio become clear. He is left alone with Miriamne who tells him ‘‘never believe them,’’ yet for some reason Mio doesn’t pursue her remark. Mio knows that she is Garth’s sister, she has told him not to believe her family or the judge, yet he doesn’t ask her to supply information which would clear his father. We imagine a character by what he doesn’t say as well as what he does—the implication is clear—Mio has been so moved by Gaunt and Esdras that he believes his father guilty or is so afraid he might be guilty that he is immobilized by this fear. But Mio is not silent; his dialogue with Miriamne follows the pattern established in the previous act—Miriamne offers and Mio rejects— but this time he admits why: MIO. What do you want? Your kisses burn me—and your arms. Don’t offer what I’m never to have! I can have nothing. MIRIAMNE. They can take away so little with all their words. For you’re a king among them. I heard you and loved your voice. MIO. I thought I’d fallen so low there was no further, and now a pit opens beneath. It was bad enough that he should have died innocent, but if he were guilty— then what’s my life—what have I left to do—? The son of a felon—and what they spat on me was earned—and I’m drenched with the stuff. Here on my hands and cheeks, their spittle hanging! I liked my hands because they were like his. I tell you I’ve lived by his innocence, lived to see it ﬂash and blind them all— MIRIAMNE. Never believe them, Mio, never. MIO. But it was the truth I wanted, truth—

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not the lies you’d tell yourself, or tell a woman or a woman tells you! The judge with his cobra mouth may have spat truth—and I may be mad! For me— your hands are too clean to touch me. I’m to have the scraps from hotel kitchens—and instead of love those mottled bodies that hitch themselves through alleys to sell for dimes of nickles. Go, keep yourself chaste for the baker bridegroom—baker and son of baker, let him get his baker’s dozen on you!

The critics who have asserted that Mio’s purpose beﬁts an action which might deﬁne or indicate solutions to contemporary problems are blind to the conﬂict within the hero. This conﬂict is implied in the ﬁrst act and all but explicit in the second. I shall phrase the conﬂict as it has been suggested by my examination of the text: If my father was guilty, then I am guilty and deserve the treatment I have received. If my father was innocent, then I am innocent and deserve the love and acceptance other people receive. I hate people for putting me in this position, yet I long for their help.

The critics to whom I have referred would interpret Mio in the following manner: My father was innocent. Society has perpetuated a fraud Society is rotten and powerful, but I will expose that fraud or die in the process for life isn’t worth living if I can’t.

I would suggest that the ﬁrst conception of the conﬂict will help justify Mio’s behavior throughout the play, whereas the second doesn’t account for his vacillation before the reversal, nor justify the reversal itself. The critics whom I have quoted have responded only to those places in the text wherein Mio indicates his desire for revenge and have disregarded those which indicate the ambivalence that explains his passivity. In a sense, they accept Mio’s fantasy as actuality and then deride him when he proves incapable of transforming that fantasy into action. Their bias allows them to respond imaginatively to only a portion of the text, whereas the complete text suggests characterization that is consistent and complete. Of course Mio does learn the real nature of the crime for which his father was executed, but his participation in the discovery is made possible by an event far more fortuitous than the manner in which he is to die. To return to the action of the second act: Mio admits he loves Miriamne but is about to leave because he isn’t good enough for her. At this point Trock enters. The gangster had shot his henchman, Shadow, at the close of the ﬁrst act because he refused to murder Judge Gaunt. But Shadow, armed

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and bloody, fresh out of the river in which he was dumped returns to haunt his boss. Trock becomes hysterical and admits his gang committed the crime. The steps by which Anderson created the situation which allowed Mio to learn the truth are traced by Laurence Avery: Shadow’s return from an ostensible grave is a crucial incident in the play’s structure, because it establishes once and for all Mio’s certainty about his father’s innocence. But despite its importance, the incident was thought of no earlier than the third phase of the play’s development, after Anderson had twice outlined Act II and started through it again.

In the early stages of the play’s development, there was no provision ‘‘for Mio to learn the truth.’’ Later Anderson made a notation: ‘‘Mio disc.—Trock was guilty.’’ But it is not until a third set of notes that Anderson indicates how Mio will make the discovery: ‘‘Shadow enters—reveals the secret to Mio.’’ The point I wish to emphasize is that at no stage in the writing of Winterset did Anderson seem to make provision for Mio to discover the truth through a confrontation which he initiates. I don’t condemn the playwright for this—the point is that Mio cannot do it alone. Nor can Mio make use of the truth once he has found it. Miriamne asks Mio to remain silent for the sake of her brother. He does so and the Judge and Trock escape. Mio wants the love which Miriamne offers and he thought that if he could prove his father innocent he would merit that love. He now realizes that his revenge won’t guarantee Miriamne’s love, it may destroy it. He forsakes revenge for the moment, but is unable to reconcile the turn of events and at the close of the second act rejects Miriamne: The bright ironical gods! What fun they have in heaven. When a man prays hard for any gift, they give it, and then one more to boot that makes it useless. You ask too much! Your brother can take his chance! He was ready enough to let an innocent man take certainty for him to pay for the years he’s had. That parts us, then, but we’re parted anyway, by the same dark wind that blew us together. I shall say what I have to say.

The third act ﬁnds Mio outside the tenement as Trock and his men lurk in the dark waiting to silence him. He admits to Miriamne that he cannot implicate her brother. But he refuses the help of Esdras and Carr; his dialogue suggests he would rather die than act either way. He begs Miriamne ‘‘teach me how to live / and forget to hate!’’ She reminds him of his father’s last words:

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I have only this to leave you, that I love you, and will love you after I die. Love me then, Mio, when this hard thing comes on you, that you must live a man despised for your father.

Mio responds: He’d have forgiven— Then there’s no more to say—I’ve groped long enough through this everglades of old revenges—here the road ends.—Miriamne, Miriamne, the iron I wrote so long—it’s eaten through and fallen from me. Let me have your arms.

Anderson’s supporters accept this romantic statement and those which follow as if the love motif had completely preempted the revenge motif. The temptation to do so is great. Witness these lines for example: ‘‘if I should die, Miriamne, this half-hour / is our eternity. I came here seeking / light in darkness, running from the dawn / and stumbled on a morning.’’ Such afﬁrmations prompt Mabel Driscoll Bailey to make the following interpretation: When the opportunity for revenge, or for vindicating his father presents itself—it is part of Mio’s tragedy that he confuses the two— . . . he is unable to go through with his purpose. . . . [Miriamne’s] love redeems him from the bitterness and hate which have for so long been his daily companions. But, with true classic irony, his bitterness has already laid a snare which is to trap him just as he emerges from the shadow of despair.

Winterset does not allow such a simple resolution. Concurrent with Mio’s afﬁrmation of love is a continuation of the fatalism and resentment which characterized his behavior before the reversal. Mio calls to his ‘‘ironic gods’’ and Miriamne cautions him: ‘‘Oh, Mio— / if you pray that way, nothing good will come! / You’re bitter, Mio.’’ Before Mio goes to meet his death, he asks from Miriamne the ultimate commitment: ‘‘Kiss me. You’ll hear. But if you never hear— / then I’m the king of hell, Persephone, / and I’ll expect you.’’ His last words undermine the romantic quality of the lines which precede it: ‘‘You didn’t want me to die, did you Miriamne—? / You didn’t send me away?’’ The critics who attack Anderson for sentimentality and the critics who accept the lovers’ romantic testaments are equally unaware that while Anderson allows his lovers free expression, he also continues action which undermines their afﬁrmation. Miriamne responds not to what she has taught Mio, but to what he has taught her. Mio dies questioning her love, and Miriamne dies attempting to prove it. Over his body she cries:

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Mio— I’d have gone to die myself—you must hear this, Mio, I’d have died to help you—you must listen, sweet, you must hear it— [She rises] I can die, too, see! You! There! You in the shadows!—You killed him to silence him! [She walks toward the path] But I’m not silenced! All that he knew I know, and I’ll tell it tonight! Tonight— tell it and scream it through all the streets—that Trock’s a murderer and he hired you for this murder! Your work’s not done— and you won’t live long! Do you hear? You’re murderers and I know who you are! [The machine gun speaks again. She sinks to her knees. Garth runs to her]

She rejects her brother, ‘‘Don’t touch me!’’, and crawls back to Mio: Look, Mio! They killed me, too. Oh, you can believe me now, Mio. You can believe I wouldn’t hurt you, because I’m dying! Why doesn’t he answer me? Oh, now he’ll never know!

These are Miriamne’s last words in the play. It remains for Esdras to deliver his eulogy. It has been observed that its content is inconsistent with the action which has preceded it. Yet it has not been pointed out that it is perfectly consistent with what Esdras knows about that action. He was not on stage when Mio gave up his quest for revenge and justice. His assumption that Mio as well as his daughter took ‘‘defeat implacable and deﬁant’’ is easily justiﬁed. There is no doubt that Esdras intends his speech as an afﬁrmation; however, too much stress has been placed upon his intention and too little upon the meaning of the words he chooses. Esdras is not moved to alter his basic conception of the world in which Anderson has placed him. Man’s fate is defeat, he looks ‘‘out blind,’’ and it is only the seeking which makes him ‘‘emperor.’’ It is doubtful that he will ever reach his goal on earth. Esdras will not discard the coward’s cloak, nor will Garth; their ‘‘part is only to bury them.’’ It is not necessary to agree with Esdras’ sentiments, but Anderson has committed no dramatic sin by ending his drama with them. The rabbi’s words, as I respond to them, merely intensify the irony; even at the last man is blind. The ‘‘ancient evil’’ of the earth has been portrayed consistently; civilized society is dramatized in a manner which implies that the playwright considered it almost as primitive as the origins from which it grew.

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Why did Anderson allow his play to end with the eulogy? It is impossible to speak for his beliefs. His essays indicate great similarity between his character’s sentiments and his own. The conclusions which may be reached from this non-dramatic material are obvious: either Anderson was as blind as Esdras, or he sought to impose an afﬁrmation, however weak, because he couldn’t face the implications of the action he had created. Yet there is another alternative. Must we presume that his essays are deﬁnitive sources? These essays are public, not private, statements, in which Anderson writes of an imperfect world. It is quite possible that he was unwilling to indicate the extent of that imperfection except in his plays. Winterset demonstrates a vision of futility. Anderson wrote the play and it would be foolhardy to deny the possibility that the playwright had knowledge of his own text. His title supports this conclusion; it comes from Mio’s prayer to the ‘‘ironic gods’’: Now all you silent powers that make the sleet and dark, and never yet have spoken, give us a sign, let the throw be ours this once, on this longest night, when the winter sets his foot on the threshold leading up to spring and enters with remembered cold—let fall some mercy with the rain. We are two lovers here in your night, and we wish to live. Source: Robert L. Gilbert, ‘‘Mio Romagna: A New View of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset,’’ in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1, Winter 1970, pp. 33–43.

Francis E. Abernethy In the following essay, Abernethy examines Winterset’s ‘‘revenge-tragedy characteristics’’ and its similarity to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Maxwell Anderson’s recognition of Elizabethan England and the drama of that period needs little emphasis; to him the Age of Elizabeth was one of the ‘‘few mountain peaks of achievement,’’ sharing this distinction with the Periclean Age and the Italian Renaissance. As a critic, especially in Off Broadway, a collection of critical essays, his major points of reference were the classics; and he consistently used the Elizabethans, especially Marlowe and Shakespeare, as touchstones of greatness. And just as Elizabethan drama was a criteria for his critical opinions, so was the Elizabethan scene an inﬂuence on much of his creative writing: for the return to poetic form in Winterset; for his following the Elizabethan practice of using the past to reﬂect universal concepts, as Joan of Lorraine deals with

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the character of heroism and The Masque of Kings with the idealist in revolutionary movements; and for the subject matter of the Tudor trilogy—Anne of A Thousand Days, Mary of Scotland, and Elizabeth the Queen. Anderson’s dramatic fundamentals were derived from the Greek and Elizabethan classics, and Winterset is a result of an application of some of these classical fundamentals to a modern play. It is the purpose of this paper to show that Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset is a modern revenge tragedy with every characteristic of the classical revenge tragedy except the revenge conclusion. I wish to show that of all the revenge tragedies, Winterset is most like Hamlet, but the character of this Hamlet, the protagonist Mio, is allowed by the mores of modern society to follow a course of love instead of hate and blood revenge. The customs and mores have changed since Hamlet, and it is no longer required that a man seek his own vengeance; the state does it for him. The theater is governed by the customs of the time, and Anderson recognizes this in ‘‘The Essence of Tragedy.’’ For the audience will always insist that the alteration in the hero be for the better—or for what it believes to be better. As audiences change, the standards of good and evil change, with the centuries. One thing is certain: that an audience watching a play will go along with it only when the leading character responds in the end to what it considers a higher moral impulse than moved him at the beginning of the story, though the audience will of course deﬁne morality as it pleases and in the terms of its own day. It may be that there is no absolute up or down in this world, but the race believes that there is, and will not hear of any denial.

Today the ‘‘higher moral impulse’’ precludes the revenge violence that brought the classical revenge tragedy to such cataclysmic conclusions. Let us now examine Winterset in some detail in order to note its revenge-tragedy characteristics and its similarity to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Both plays have as the central problem the revenge of a son for a father. Mio is much like Hamlet; his father is killed and his mother is dishonored. In this case, however, the father, Bartholomeo Romagna was electrocuted in the 1920’s after being wrongly convicted of murder by a biased judge and jury who were prejudiced against him because he was a confessed anarchist. Mio’s mother was dishonored not by an incestuous marriage but by being unceremoniously interred after dying in the poor house. Like Hamlet, Mio feels that there was shady business behind his father’s death, but desires proof.

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. . . MAXWELL ANDERSON’S WINTERSET IS A MODERN REVENGE TRAGEDY WITH EVERY CHARACTERISTIC OF THE CLASSICAL REVENGE TRAGEDY EXCEPT THE REVENGE CONCLUSION.’’

Unlike Hamlet, Mio does not want blood revenge but revenge in the form of public acquittal of his father. He feels that he has lost his place in society, that the event has ‘‘popped in’’ between himself and society and has left him an outcast. Therefore, he must regain his rightful place by disclosing his father’s murderers. A ghost crying for vengeance is characteristic of the revenge tragedy. Romagna’s ghost lacks the corporeality of the elder Hamlet, but he serves the same purpose. The ghost of Romagna is his memory that is conjured out of the past by a Professor Hobhouse, who is agitating for a new investigation of the Romagna trial. Romagna’s ghost haunts all of the principals and motivates the action from the ﬁrst scene on. Spurred on by this ghost-memory, Mio, like Hamlet, leaves his school to return to the site of the murder. And one time when he almost forgets his purpose while talking to Miriamne, his Ophelia, the ghost returns and prompts him anew: ‘‘Lie still and rest, father,’’ Mio replies; ‘‘I have not forgotten.’’ Like Hamlet, also, he is not absolutely convinced of his father’s innocence; therefore, Mio feels that the ghost might be evil, a ‘‘goblin damn’d,’’ leading him to hell. From the modern point of view, the ghost at the ﬁrst of the play is damned because Mio misunderstands him and is seeking revenge. The ghost is recognized as good at the climax of the play when Mio realizes that love rather than vengeance is what the ghost desires. Necessary also to the revenge tragedy is an able and scheming villain. Trock Estrella amply fulﬁlls these qualiﬁcations. The gun he carries and his desperation arising out of fear of further imprisonment allow him to dominate the play physically, and he gains depth and some of the reader’s sympathy only because we know he is dying with consumption. The Hamlet parallel in villains is further en-

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forced by the presence of the ‘‘adders fanged,’’ the two men in blue serge who assist Trock in his knavery. Within the play there is both real and feigned insanity. Judge Gaunt, who presided at Romagna’s trial and whose instructions prejudiced the jury, is driven to real insanity by the knowledge that he has violated his code of ethics by not conducting a fair trial. His failure to call an important witness is central to Professor Hobhouse’s attack on the old judge. And like the deranged Ophelia, he quotes bawdy ballads in his madness. The antic disposition characteristic of Hamlet and revenge tragedies in general is represented by Mio. When Mio ﬁrst visits Esdras seeking the missing witness, Esdras’ son Garth, he confuses the family by stating that he is peddling magazines and collecting old papers to pay tuition fees. Later when he is under Trock’s surveillance, he says that he is ‘‘a little touched in the head,’’ is a ‘‘half wit’’ whose name is Theophrastus Such. Both Mio and Hamlet use the antic disposition to further their investigation and to protect their lives. Like the Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Winterset is freighted with sensational and horrible scenes. Mio reveals the horror in his own state of mind in an early speech in which he vividly describes the electrocution, evisceration, and burial in quicklime of Old Romagna. On stage Trock steadily coughs himself to death with tuberculosis. And any revenge tragedy would be proud of the scene in which Shadow, Trock’s murdered gunman, returns from his river burial, bloody and dripping, to take vengeance on his would-be killers. At Shadow’s ﬁnal burial his grisly corpse is displayed to the audience as he is carried back to the river on a door by a demented hobo and Garth. The catastrophe is also properly violent and sensational. Mio is machinegunned when he tries to escape and dies bloodily onstage. His sweetheart calls the killer’s gun down on herself, is machine-gunned, and dies by Mio’s side. And Esdras philosophically surveys the holocaust and concludes with a statement that carries the essence of tragedy: this is the glory of earth-born men and women not to cringe, never to yield, but standing, take defeat implacable and deﬁant and unsubmitting. . . .

In the manner of the revenge tragedy, a play within the play reveals the guilty party. When all the principals gather at Esdras’ basement home, the senile old Judge is trapped by Mio into staging a mock trial, during which Trock and Garth confess

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their part in the murder-holdup for which Romagna was electrocuted, and the Judge recognizes and confesses his own guilt. It is at this point that Mio ﬁrst becomes sure of his father’s innocence and the judge’s guilt. The ‘‘mouse trap’’ works as effectively for Mio as it did for Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Mio is not a man acting coldly and deliberately, and he hesitates and has difﬁculties arriving at a positive decision. He has an opportunity to kill both Trock and Judge Gaunt, the authors of his misery, but he lets them go. His original purpose was to clear his father’s name by publishing the names of the true killers, but when he realizes the connection between the girl he loves and Garth, one of the antagonists, he loses some of his desire for revenge. This is the beginning of his growth as a character. He leaves Esdras and Miriamne, still determined to spread the news that will incriminate Garth. Mio’s growth is furthered when old Esdras offers to help him escape Trock and his gunmen, which is the same as sacriﬁcing his son Garth. Miriamne concurs in her father’s decision, and Mio completes his growth by realizing that the force of love is still powerful in the world and is the force which motivated his father. Guided by what he concludes to be the tenets of Old Romagna, he refuses to send out word by Carr, his Horatio, word that would clear his father’s name and implicate the guilty. He is ﬁnally cornered and machinegunned by Trock, but he has grown to realize that forgiveness is ‘‘a higher moral purpose’’ than revenge. Thus Old Hamlet’s cryptic injunction, ‘‘taint not thy mind,’’ becomes more understandable as Old Romagna’s words of love passed on to Mio. At the climactic recognition point, Mio realizes that revenge is not necessary, that his father would not want revenge; and the audience agrees with Anderson that Mio at the end of Act III is much wiser and nobler than Mio at the beginning of the play. Hamlet and Winterset have much the same revenge-tragedy characteristics until we arrive at the climax. The theme of both is the revenge of a son for a father. There are the ghosts from the past demanding retribution. There is hesitation by the heroes, real and feigned insanity, and a play within the play to reveal the guilt of the antagonists. And there is noble philosophizing coupled with the most sensational of horrors. But the conclusion makes the difference. Hamlet expired in a holocaust of bloodshed, savagely revenged at last, and the mores of the period were fulﬁlled and the audience was satisﬁed that the proper end had been made of the affair. Mio dies just

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as violently and the catastrophe is just as satisfying to a modern audience, but for a different reason. Three hundred years have made the difference, and to a certain type of modern audience the Christian gospel of love and forgiveness is a higher moral impulse than the Hebraic code of an eye for an eye.

Luckett, Perry D., ‘‘Winterset and Some Early Eliot Poems,’’ in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Summer 1980, pp. 26–37.

Source: Francis E. Abernethy, ‘‘Winterset: A Modern Revenge Tragedy,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. 7, No. 2, September 1964, pp. 185–89.

FURTHER READING Anderson, Maxwell, Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912–1958, edited by Laurence G. Avery, University of North Carolina Press, 1977. This collection of letters that span Anderson’s life shed light on his working life, his relationship to the theatrical world, and his views on his own plays.

SOURCES Abernethy, Francis E., ‘‘Winterset: A Modern Revenge Tragedy,’’ in Modern Drama, Vol. 7, 1964, pp. 185–89. Anderson, Maxwell, ‘‘Whatever Hope We Have,’’ in Off Broadway Essays about the Theater, William Sloane Associates, 1947, p. 42, quoted in Perry D. Luckett, ‘‘Winterset and Some Early Eliot Poems,’’ in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Summer 1980, p. 36. ———, Winterset, Anderson House Publishers, 1935. Gilbert, Robert L., ‘‘Mio Romagna: A New View of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset,’’ in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 38, No.1, Winter 1970, pp. 33–44.

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Bailey, Mabel Driscoll, Maxwell Anderson: Playwright as Prophet, Abelard-Schuman, 1957. Bailey provides a critical interpretation of Anderson’s work with a focus on the playwright’s religiosity. Clark, Barrett Harper, Maxwell Anderson: The Man and His Plays, S. French, 1933. Although it was written before Winterset ﬁrst appeared, Clark’s biographical study is a useful contemporary view of the playwright. Hampton, Wilborn, ‘‘Back to the Shadows of Sacco and Vanzetti,’’ in the New York Times, April 23, 1999, p. B3. Hampton reviews a production of Winterset in New York City.

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The Young Man from Atlanta HORTON FOOTE 1995

The Young Man from Atlanta was ﬁrst performed by the Signature Theatre Company in New York City in 1995, as part of a four-play series of Horton Foote’s work. It was the third play produced during the season, following Talking Pictures and Night Seasons. The year concluded with Laura Dennis. Publication of The Young Man from Atlanta followed in American Theatre magazine during the same year. Subsequently, multiple publishers produced copies of the play, all of which were as of 2004 out of print or required special ordering. Interestingly, three of the work’s main characters, Will Kidder, Lily Dale Kidder, and Pete Davenport, are characters from Foote’s earlier plays. All three characters appear in works that are a part of Foote’s nine-play cycle called The Orphan’s Home, which he concluded writing in the 1970s. Although Foote began writing The Young Man from Atlanta in the early 1990s, the play is often considered to be a part of the cycle because of the Kidders’ and Pete’s reappearance. Foote’s writing career began in the late 1930s, so The Young Man from Atlanta is obviously one of the later works in his oeuvre. As an experienced writer, Foote does not shy away from sensitive and contemporary themes. In The Young Man from Atlanta, Foote explores grief, religious faith, homosexuality, suicide, race relations, the American dream, and deceit. As Ben Brantley remarked in his 1997 review for the New York Times, Foote is ‘‘a sly, compelling quiet playwright’’ who ‘‘operates from

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the assumption that life is a slow, steady series of unanswerable questions and losses against which there is ﬁnally no protection.’’ According to Brantley, much of Foote’s work is informed by the precept that ‘‘if you don’t talk about the darkest aspects of life, then they don’t exist.’’ Indeed, Foote leaves much in this work unsaid, and for some, that is its greatest strength.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Horton Foote was born on March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Texas, to Albert and Hallie Foote. Foote is one of America’s most proliﬁc and well-known stage, television, and screen writers. As a young man, Foote pursued the stage as a performer and published his ﬁrst play while he was working as an actor in 1939. From 1933 to 1935, he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theatre, and from 1937 to 1939, he attended the Tamara Darkarhovna School of Theatre. Foote later worked as an elevator man on Park Avenue and a teacher prior to starting a Washington D.C. theatre school and theatre with his wife and theatrical producer, Lillian Vallish. Foote married Vallish in 1945; the couple had four children. Following their time in Washington D.C., the Footes returned to New York, where eventually Foote’s career took off. Some of his plays are Laura Dennis (1996), Taking Pictures (1996), Night Seasons (1996), and The Last of the Thorntons (2000). Foote’s more than sixty works have earned him great praise, including an Emmy Award nomination in 1958 for Old Man; a best screenplay Academy Award for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) as well as a nomination for Tender Mercies (1985). He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta in 1995. As Foote approached his seventies and eighties, he continued to earn accolades and numerous awards including an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for The Trip to Bountiful (1985), a Screen Laurel Award from the Writers Guild of America (1993), a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America (1999), a Master American Dramatist Award of the Pen American Center (2000), and the National Medal of Arts (2000). In addition, Foote was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1996 and into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. Foote has also

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received honorary degrees from Drew University, Austin College, Spalding University, and the American Film Institute.

PLOT SUMMARY Scene 1 The ﬁrst scene of The Young Man from Atlanta opens with one of the main characters, Will Kidder, having a conversation with his co-worker, Tom Jackson, at their ofﬁce at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery. While reviewing the architectural plans for his new house, Will boasts that his home is worth more than two hundred thousand dollars. Will becomes winded and tells Tom that his doctor told him that he has a slight heart condition. Tom asks Will why he wanted to build such a big house when there are only Will and his wife living in it. Will replies that it is because he grew up very poor after the death of his father and now only wants ‘‘the biggest and best’’ of everything. Their conversation then turns to the state of the company. Tom expresses concern that the company is no longer doing very well, while Will assures him that with Will’s competitive spirit, the company will right

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itself. Will then shows Tom a picture of his son, Bill, who has passed away recently. Will describes Bill as nothing like himself, but with a keen mind for math and education. After volunteering for the Air Force, in which he was a bombardier, Bill returned to the United States and took up work in Atlanta. Will recounts that during a business trip to Florida, Bill, who could not swim, walked into a lake and drowned. Will believes that his son committed suicide. During their conversation, Will’s secretary interrupts to let him know that his son’s former roommate from Atlanta, Randy Carter, is calling again. Will refuses to take the call and learns that Randy is in Houston staying at the YMCA. As their conversation continues, Will tells Tom that he is buying his wife a new car to celebrate the new house. Tom tells Will that their company has lost another three accounts, including Carnation Milk, which had been with the company since the beginning. Surprised that he was not told about the loss of Carnation, Will continues to assure Tom that the company survived the depression and that everything will work out. Will and Tom’s boss, Ted Cleveland Jr., then comes into the ofﬁce and asks for time alone with Will. Ted tells Will that the Carnation account left because of him and that the company needs younger men to do business successfully. Ted gives Will three-months notice. However, Will says that he’d like to leave right away to start his own business. Will cancels the order for his wife’s new car and conﬁdes in Tom that his release from the company is coming at a ﬁnancially difﬁcult time. He trusts his relationships with the banks will help him with his new venture and that Tom will join him one day. Tom lets Will know that despite his efforts to help Will, Ted has given Will’s job to him. The scene ends with Will contacting a bank to discuss ﬁnancing.

Scene 2 Scene 2 opens the next evening in the Kidders’ new den, where Lily Dale, Pete, and Will have gathered after dinner. Lily Dale recounts that during WWII, Eleanor Roosevelt organized the maids in Houston to not show up for work for new employers as a way to purposely ‘‘disappoint white people.’’ Will argues that such a thing never occurred and then relinquishes his protest when Lily Dale assures him her facts are correct. Will, obviously affected by the previous day’s events, tells Lily Dale that her new car will have to wait until he pays off the house and the new furnishings. Before Will goes off to bed, he tells Lily Dale that Randy is in Houston and

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that she should tell him that they want nothing to do with him if he calls. Lily Dale is perplexed by Will’s attitude toward Randy and proceeds to admit to Pete that she likes Randy, has been in contact with him, and has given him money. Lily Dale and Pete also discuss Lily Dale’s encounter with Alice Temple, an atheist friend, who asks Lily Dale how God could have allowed Bill to commit suicide. While recounting this event, Lily Dale insists that Bill’s death was an accident. Just as Lily Dale tells Pete that Randy has been to the house twice that day, Will returns to the den unable to sleep and tells Lily Dale about the previous day’s events. He tells her that the money ($100,000) he had given to Bill was spent and then asks to borrow the money ($75,000) that he had given to her over the past ﬁfteen Christmases. Will goes back to bed, and after admitting that she had given $35,000 to Randy, Lily Dale asks Pete if she can borrow the same amount from him so that she can give the money to Will. Pete agrees; however, Will returns for a second time and requests to borrow $35,000 from Pete. Lily Dale begins to cry and admits to Will that she gave $35,000 to Randy as a gift. Will is very angry that Lily Dale lied to him and that Randy duped her with stories of his job loss, mother’s surgery, and his sister’s husband running out on their three children. Will storms out and Pete follows him only to quickly return to ask Lily Dale to phone Will’s doctor. Will has suffered a heart attack.

Scene 3 A week later in the Kidders’ study, Lily Dale tells Clara how horribly she feels about being deceived by Randy and about being dishonest with her husband. Clara assures Lily Dale that God will take care of her. The women are soon joined by Pete and Carson, Pete’s great-nephew, who is just in from Atlanta. Will is up out of bed just as Tom Jackson rings at the door with ﬂowers for him. To Lily Dale’s delight, Clara conﬁrms that her friend Lucille had heard about the Disappointment Clubs. Will tells Tom that he is not having any luck with the banks, but that he will not be able to work for some time anyway. Randy comes to the door and Clara is told to tell him that the family is busy and not to come again. Will tells Tom that he would rather not have Ted stop by the house, and Carson conﬁrms that Randy is ‘‘bad news.’’ After Tom leaves, Will admits that he has hard feelings for Tom and laments that he should have saved more money. Lily Dale tells Will that she put the money in his account and Will tells Pete that he does not need his money

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now. Will asks not to have Tom’s ﬂowers in his sight, and as the scene ends, he tears up the threemonth’s severance check that Tom left for him.

Scene 4 The next day, in the Kidders’ study, Clara tells Lily Dale that she met Etta Doris Meneffree, a woman who used to work for the Kidders when Bill was a baby. Pete and Carson come down, and Pete tells Lily Dale that the doctor has told Will that he cannot work for six months. Pete also tells her that he is going to take a trip to Atlanta with Carson, and he is going to loan Carson’s sister at least $5,000 and help Carson pay for school. When Will comes downstairs, he asks to have Carson drive him downtown to First Commerce Bank, who phoned him about his loan request. Will asks Pete for the $35,000 again and Pete tells him that he has promised some money to Carson and his sister because Will had said he did not need the money. Pete talks Will into accepting $25,000, and despite Lily Dale’s protests that he should not go downtown, Will and Carson leave for the bank. At the same time, Clara enters to announce that Etta Doris has come by to say hello. Lily Dale heads out of the house to go downtown alone and says goodbye to Pete, who is leaving for Atlanta.

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she can get Will to talk with him. Will comes into the den and apologizes to Lily Dale for his ill temper. Will and Lily Dale have a heart-to- heart talk and Will tells her that he believes that Bill killed himself. Will tells Lily Dale that he feels that he failed his son and that he never got to know him as he should have. In the midst of the conversation, Lily Dale admits that she once brought two men back to the house with her cousin, Mary Cunningham. She also conﬁdes in Will that Mary Cunningham and their other cousin, Mabel Thornton, claimed that Pete once made advances toward them when he was married to Lily Dale’s mother. Will tells Lily Dale that he may swallow his pride and talk to his old boss about the position Tom mentioned, and Lily Dale says that she may start teaching music to help the family ﬁnancially. In the end, Will still refuses to talk with Randy because he fears that should they meet he would have to make certain inquiries that he would rather not know the answers to. He also tells Lily Dale that in Bill’s safety deposit box Will found canceled checks totaling $100,000 made out to Randy. Lily Dale sends Randy away, and Will calls Tom and sets up a time for the next day to come in to talk to him.

CHARACTERS

Scene 5 Later that afternoon, Will and Carson return. Will was denied by the bank and is surprised that he thanked his old boss for offering him a job. After making polite conversation with Etta Doris, Will calls Tom Jackson and tells him that once he is feeling better he may come in to talk with Ted about the position Tom mentioned. Pete and Carson depart for Atlanta after Carson helps Will back to bed.

Scene 6 In the ﬁnal scene, Lily Dale and Clara are again in the Kidders’ den. Clara tells Lily Dale that she talked with her friend again and that she had not heard that Mrs. Roosevelt was involved with the Disappointment Clubs. Lily Dale admits that she spoke with Randy again because he was waiting in the Kidders’ driveway as she pulled the car out to go downtown. They drove all over Houston together and Randy refuted everything that Carson told the Kidders about him, qualifying his denial with the statement that Carson ‘‘is known as a notorious liar all over Atlanta.’’ Convinced that he was telling the truth, Lily Dale hides Randy in her car in the hopes

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Carson Carson arrives in Houston and tells Pete that he is his great-nephew. Carson is responsible for exposing what he claims to be the lies that Randy has told to Lily Dale about Bill. Primarily, he tells her that, having known Randy for his entire life, he is certain that Randy has no living relatives and that Randy’s claim about Bill’s religious fervor is false. Carson tells Pete and the Kidders that he lived in the same boardinghouse with Bill and Randy and that no one ever heard Bill praying and that Randy is ‘‘bad news.’’ The Kidders and Pete believe Carson not only about Randy but about his claim to be Pete’s great nephew. All of this comes into question, however, at the end of the play when Lily Dale has a ﬁnal conversation with Randy. According to Randy, Carson is ‘‘known as a notorious liar all over Atlanta.’’ This revelation, which may or may not be true, becomes interesting in light of the fact that Pete ‘‘wouldn’t have recognized’’ his own sister in the picture that Carson brought to Houston and the fact that Carson and his sister stand to beneﬁt

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS • The Young Man from Atlanta is available on audiocassette. The unabridged reading, which stars Shirley Knight and David Selby, was published in 1999 by L.A. Theater Works. This reading can be downloaded from http://www. audible.com or purchased through online or local booksellers.

Grocery. Ted’s father originally hired Will, and together they grew the company through the depression and World War II. Following the death of his father, Ted took over the company. Not much of Ted is seen in the play; however, his actions reﬂect his desire to prevent his father’s company from failing. Despite Will Kidder’s loyalty to his father and the company for nearly forty years, Ted lets Will go for what appears to be performance issues with at least one of the company’s largest accounts, Carnation Milk. Although Sunshine loses the Carnation account because of Will, Ted gives him three-month’s notice and later extends an offer to him for another, albeit lower-ranking, position with the company. Ted appoints Tom to Will’s previous position because he feels that more youthful leadership will be a boon for his family’s company.

Pete Davenport ﬁnancially from Carson’s newly formed relationship with Pete. Carson says that he is twenty-seven years old.

Clara Clara is the Kidders’ maid and cook. She serves as Lily Dale’s conﬁdante throughout the play, offering her reassurance and comfort. As the Kidders’ domestic help, Clara must also have direct contact with Randy Carter when he comes to call at the Kidder home. In all cases, Clara is asked to tell Randy that the Kidders will not see him—that they are busy or not at home. At Lily Dale’s request, Clara also does research for Lily Dale about the Disappointment Clubs that Lily Dale believes Eleanor Roosevelt established in Houston during the war because of her dislike for the South. Clara’s friend, Lucille, conﬁrms that she had heard about the clubs but that she was not involved in them and did not know about Mrs. Roosevelt’s participation in them. The 1950s were a politically and socially charged time in the United States due to the issue of civil rights for blacks. The characters of Clara and Etta Doris, along with Lily Dale’s persistent inquiry into the Disappointment Clubs, play an important role in exposing one slice of life perspective on the day-to-day happenings between blacks and whites during this time.

Ted Cleveland, Jr. Ted Cleveland Jr. is Will Kidder and Tom Jackson’s boss at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale

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Pete Davenport is Lily Dale’s stepfather. He is originally from Atlanta; however, he has lived in Houston for thirty years. Pete’s wife (Lily Dale’s mother) passed away ten years prior and Pete has just come to live with Will and Lily Dale. Through Pete’s conversation with Carson, who claims to be Pete’s great-nephew, the audience learns that Pete was a Southern Paciﬁc Engineer and that he began working at the age of fourteen with just a seventh grade education. Pete says that he never had a drink in his life, and he appears to be a respectable, hardworking, honest man. He helps Lily Dale navigate her communication with Will about her ﬁnancial dishonesty. Nonetheless, toward the end of the play, Lily Dale conﬁdes in Will that her two cousins, Mary Cunningham and Mabel Thornton, claim that Pete made passes at them while he was married to Lily Dale’s mother. Likewise, although Pete appears to have sound judgment in his counsel to Lily Dale, his judgment about Carson is called into question by Randy Carter’s claims that Carson is a known liar throughout Atlanta. Early in the play, Pete tells Will that Randy is certainly not a relation of his from Atlanta, even a distant one. If he were, Pete claims that he would recognize a likeness in him. Later, however, when Carson arrives in Houston with a picture of Pete’s sister (Carson’s grandmother), Pete says that he ‘‘wouldn’t have recognized her.’’ Pete’s lack of recognition does two things. First, it calls into question whether or not Randy may be a distant relative of Pete’s. Second, it calls into question whether or not Carson is truly his great-nephew or someone who is simply playing Pete for a gullible old fool.

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Etta Doris Etta Doris is a past domestic employee of the Kidders. She comes by the Kidders’ new house to see the family and to express her condolences regarding Bill’s death. Through Etta’s remembrances and conversations with Lily Dale and Will, the audience learns more about Bill as a child. She remembers him fondly as a friendly and polite boy, who despite his father’s attempts, was not athletic.

Tom Jackson Tom is Will Kidder’s coworker at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery who is given Will’s job after Will is let go from the company. Foote describes Tom in the scene’s opening description as a thirty-ﬁve year old ‘‘colleague and close friend’’ of Will’s. Will hired and trained Tom and obviously feels close to him professionally and personally. In the opening scene, Will conﬁdes in Tom, telling him that he believes that his son’s death was a suicide. Will also tells Tom that he thinks of him as a son. Tom demonstrates loyalty to Will when he tells him that their boss told him that there was nothing Tom could do to save Will’s job. Tom brings ﬂowers to Will after his heart attack, and despite his previous relationship with Tom, Will admits to his family that he has hard feelings for Tom. Nevertheless, in the end, Tom is the person whom Will contacts about possibly coming back to resume a new position with Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery.

Lily Dale Kidder Lily Dale is one of the main characters in The Young Man from Atlanta. She is the wife of Will Kidder and the mother of Bill Kidder, their deceased son. She is also Pete Davenport’s stepdaughter. In the wake of her son’s death she is said to have become religious. Lily Dale’s primary action in the play takes place offstage when she has secret meetings with Randy Carter, Bill’s former roommate from Atlanta. During these meetings, Lily Dale gives the young man $35,000, money that she received as Christmas gifts from her husband. Lily Dale meets with Randy behind her husband’s back and ultimately has to confess to the meetings, as well as to the amount of the ﬁnancial gifts that she has given to Randy. Lily Dale’s main moral dilemma revolves around her need to feel close to someone who professes to have been very close to

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her son and her need to be a dutiful and honest wife. Lily Dale has been ﬁnancially well taken care of by her husband and appears to some readers and critics to be a spoiled housewife who is both gullible and naïve. In his review for the New York Times, critic Ben Brantley characterizes Lily Dale as ‘‘a woman frozen in the role of petulant, spoiled child bride.’’ Despite the couple’s dire ﬁnancial situation, one of her main concerns during the play is to ﬁgure out if Eleanor Roosevelt was responsible for organizing civil disobedience among the domestic workers in Houston during World War II. In the end, Lily Dale comes to some understanding about their ﬁnancial reality and offers to take up teaching music to contribute to the household’s income. In another turnabout, Lily Dale puts her husband above her own needs when she sends Randy away, presumably ending her relationship with him.

Will Kidder Will Kidder is one of the main characters in The Young Man from Atlanta. He is the father of Bill Kidder, who dies prior to the play beginning, and is the husband of Lily Dale. At the opening of the play, Will works for the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery, a company he has been with for thirtyeight years. In the ﬁrst scene, he is let go from the company and rejects his superior’s offer to stay for another three months. Instead, Will says he will leave the company immediately so that he can start his own business venture. Having just ﬁnished building and furnishing a $200,000 home, Will ﬁnds himself hard pressed for cash and asks his wife to give him back some of the money that he has gifted to her over the years. In the unfolding events, Will learns that she has no longer has the full amount because she has given it to their son’s exroommate, Randy Carter. Lily Dale’s actions are an affront to Will, not only because he has developed a strong inclination against Randy but because her actions were dishonest and contrary to his repeated requests that she not have contact with the young man. Will is a proud and boastful man, who grew up in an impoverished life after the death of his father and vowed to only have the best of everything. In the beginning of the play, sixty-four year old Will believes that he is invincible—ﬁnancially, professionally, and personally. As the play unfolds, however, the audience watches as he comes to face some difﬁcult truths. Eventually, Will realizes that, in-

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stead of spending his personal assets, he should have saved more of them. He also comes to terms with the fact that, at his age, his marketable skills and professional prospects are not what they used to be. Lastly, Will must confront the fact that his son’s suspected suicide is likely linked to a lifestyle involving Randy that Will never wants to know about. While Foote never makes the statement outright, Will’s reluctance to meet with Randy seems based in his belief that his son was gay. In the end, Will regains a bit of his earlier optimism, telling Lily Dale, ‘‘everything will be all right.’’ While hopeful, even this ﬁnal statement is measured by Will’s new understanding of himself and his current realities.

THEMES Dishonesty and Deception Dishonesty and deception are central themes in The Young Man from Atlanta. In fact, all of the relationships between the central characters seem to involve one or the other. In some cases, it is clear that someone has lied to or deceived another. In other cases, the audience viewers must decide for themselves if someone is lying or telling the truth. Lily Dale’s dishonesty with her husband, as evidenced through her later confessions, is very clear. She lies to Will about having the money that he gave her over many Christmases, and she also lies to him about her having had contact with Randy. Will’s struggle with dishonesty and deception seems to be primarily with himself. From the beginning, one gets the feeling that he is deceiving himself about his career and his professional capabilities. While he is at ﬁrst boastful and conﬁdent about his abilities, in the end he claims to have lost his spirit and his youthful outlook. Though he recovers his hope to a certain degree by the end of the play, his call to Tom about the position with his old employer reveals a man grounded in the reality of his circumstance rather than a man who is proud and naïvely optimistic about his ability to go into business for himself for the ﬁrst time at the age of sixty-four. Despite Will’s self deception on the

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career front, he seems to be more honest about his son’s relationship with Randy and the nature of his death. Whereas Lily Dale convinces herself that Bill’s death was an accident, Will admits that it was likely suicide. While Lily Dale never hints that there may have been a homosexual relationship between Bill and Randy, Will notes that there were things about his son that he would prefer not to know. Although Will’s denial suggests his interest in continuing to live without knowing the truth about his son, his willingness to admit his denial proves him to be more in tune with the truth than his wife. Randy Carter and Carson are also clearly central to the development of the themes of dishonesty and deception. Both characters claim that the other is lying to the Kidders and each can be seen as having something to gain from his deception. In Randy’s case, the potential dishonesty about Bill comforts Lily Dale and encourages her kindly donation of thousands of dollars to him. In the case of Carson, his potential dishonesty allows him to forge an alliance with the Kidder family and prevents the family from unquestioningly believing Randy’s revelations about Carson. Carson’s new relationship clearly beneﬁts him, as well as his sister, in terms of educational funding. Interestingly, the play ends without a clear resolution about who is indeed telling the truth and who is not, leaving the decision for the audience to ponder.

Suicide and Death Suicide and death are pervasive in The Young Man from Atlanta. In addition to the central suicide of Bill Kidder, Lily Dale’s friend, Alice Temple, and her husband both commit suicide. Additionally, Ted Cleveland Sr., Lily Dale’s father, Will’s father, and Pete’s wife (Lily Dale’s mother) also die. Interestingly, suicide and death act as catalysts for the action in the play. Bill’s death puts Randy’s contact with the Kidders into motion and enables Randy to beneﬁt from Lily Dale’s compassion. At the same time, his contact also inspires Lily Dale to be dishonest with her husband. Ted Cleveland Sr.’s death ultimately triggers Will’s termination and puts him in a ﬁnancially dour situation. As a result, by the end of the play, Will is forced to be more honest with himself about his professional prospects and capabilities. Following the death of his wife, Pete eventually comes to live with the Kidders. His presence in the Kidder home facilitates honesty

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY • Research Eleanor Roosevelt’s stand on civil rights. Given your ﬁndings, do you agree or disagree with Lily Dale that Eleanor Roosevelt ‘‘took out all her personal unhappiness on the South?’’ • In 1948, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) ended its support of the separate but equal doctrine in favor of a policy of integration. One year later, South Africa instituted apartheid. These events reﬂect an international community with differing views on the treatment of black people. If the Kidders’ had to vote for integration or apartheid, how do you think they would vote? Explain your decision. • Some critics believe that Bill Kidder is a homosexual character. What can you gather from the text that either supports or contradicts this opinion? • Honesty, and the lack of it, is an important

and communication between Lily Dale and her husband. It also allows Carson to enter their lives, which in the short term unites the couple in the belief that Randy deceived Lily Dale. Later, the couple’s conversation about Randy’s assertion that Carson is a liar inspires Will to be more honest with Lily Dale, telling her that there are things about his son he would rather not know.

Race Relations and Civil Rights One of the more subtle themes in The Young Man from Atlanta entails race relations and civil rights. Lily Dale makes persistent and often inappropriately timed inquiries about the Disappointment Clubs, which she believes Eleanor Roosevelt started in Houston because of her strong dislike for the South and her desire ‘‘to disappoint white people.’’ The clubs, Lily Dale claims, were set up to encourage domestic help to engage with new employers and then not show up for work. Interestingly, Roosevelt was in fact a strong propo-

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thematic element in this play. In the end, it is difﬁcult to know who to believe. Is there any evidence in the text that you can point to that would make you believe Randy Carter or Carson? Is it possible that they are both being dishonest or is it possible that there is some truth in the claims that they each make? Whom do you believe most and why? • Research the economy of the United States from 1940 through 1950. In your opinion, could the state of the economy have hurt the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery company’s proﬁtability, or was the company’s downslide more likely a result of Will’s failing, old-style business practices? • Read Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. How are Willy Loman and Will Kidder similar? How are they different?

nent and advocate for civil rights who was known for her support of civil disobedience. In 1945, Roosevelt served on the board of directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality and had a clear concern about race relations and employment. In fact, she took her concerns directly to the top and lobbied President Truman’s administration to create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Roosevelt’s involvement with these organizations proves that, contrary to Lily Dale’s opinion, the previous ﬁrst lady was not motivated by her dislike for the South, but rather by her strong belief in racial equality. Lily Dale’s superﬁcial understanding about the clubs as well as Will’s somewhat curt demeanor with Etta Doris demonstrate the couple’s less than progressive attitude toward the treatment of black people. Foote perhaps included this element to reinforce the idea that the Kidders are conservative people who are not likely to embrace change or values that are nontraditional. This characterization

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of the couple ﬁts well with Will’s wish not to learn more about Bill’s life and particularly his life as it involved Randy.

STYLE Exposition In drama, exposition is a technique that playwrights use to inform the audience about past events that are relevant to their understanding of the play. For example, exposition is common in the historical plays of William Shakespeare, where Shakespeare uses his characters early in each play to describe or discuss historical events that are pertinent to the action that ensues. In The Young Man from Atlanta, the clearest example of exposition occurs in the ﬁrst scene during Will’s conversation with Tom. Through this conversation, the audience learns about Bill’s death and Will’s belief that it was a suicide. The audience also learns that Will recently spent a signiﬁcant amount of money building the Kidders’ new home. This conversation also allows Foote to reveal some information about Will’s tenure with Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery. Another example of exposition in The Young Man from Atlanta occurs while Lily Dale conﬁdes in Clara and Pete. During these confessional scenes, the audience learns about Lily Dale’s personal and ﬁnancial dealings with Randy.

Climax and Crisis In drama, the climax of a play, or the point at which all of the problems and complications culminate, is brought on by a series of crises. In The Young Man from Atlanta, the crises begin with Bill’s death and continue with Will losing his job and his discovery that Lily Dale has given a large sum of money to Randy. The progression of these crises is called the rising action. The climax in The Young Man from Atlanta occurs when Will has his offstage heart attack.

Denouement Denouement is a French term that describes the unraveling or sorting out of a play’s main plot

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problems or conﬂicts. In the case of The Young Man from Atlanta, much of the denouement involves Will and his realizations about himself personally and professionally. In the ﬁnal scenes, Will comes to the understanding that he will not be able to start his own business and that, despite his pride, he will need to approach Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery for a lesser position. Another important moment in the play’s denouement occurs when Will admits to Lily Dale that he believes their son’s death was a suicide and that there are things about his son he would rather never know.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The 1940s and 1950s in the United States Following the end of World War II in 1945, the United States found itself embroiled in a period of massive military demobilization. With 35,000 service personnel being discharged per day in 1946, the country faced short-term economic and social problems, including inﬂation, consumer goods shortages, and strained labor relations. On the political front, conﬂict continued despite the end of the war. By the 1950s, the Cold War was well underway. In 1950, the United States announced that it had the HBomb under development shortly after Russia touted its ownership of the A-Bomb. Tensions mounted between East and West, and on the home front, Senator Joseph McCarthy fueled the fear of communism by claiming that communists were not just abroad, but working side-by-side with America’s best democracy-loving citizens. McCarthy even claimed to know the names of communists working in the State Department of the United States government. Investigations ensued and fear continued to grow as people began to suspect even their friends, neighbors, and colleagues of being communists. Despite such challenges and anxieties, Lois and Alan Gordon note in American Chronicle: Year by Year through the Twentieth Century, ‘‘a peacetime ethos of the pursuit of personal happiness replaced the wartime one of sacriﬁce.’’ With an accumulation of personal savings, Americans began to spend and spend well. (The price of a loaf of bread in 1950 was fourteen cents and a pound of coffee cost ﬁftyﬁve cents). Traditional values reigned, the suburbs grew, and the American dream took strong root in the nation’s communal consciousness. By the spring of 1950, however, the United States was on the

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brink of another war. This time, communist North Korea had invaded South Korea. Despite President Truman’s optimistic projection that the United States’ involvement in the conﬂict would be swift, communist China (Russia’s ally) came to the aid of North Korea and the war continued well beyond the nation’s expectations. As a result of this turmoil, in 1952, according to Lois and Alan Gordon, ‘‘Dwight Eisenhower swept into ofﬁce on a campaign against Korea, Communism, and Corruption.’’ In the eyes of many, communists were not the only threat to American security. Lizabeth Cohen and Mark Tebeau note in the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, In the context of the Cold War, supporters of traditional family norms cast homosexuality as a menace to the American moral order. In their eyes, not only were homosexuals moral perverts, they were also national security risks. In the 1940s and 1950s, homosexuals were clearly considered deviant and their lifestyle threatened traditional heterosexual family values.

During the 1940s and 1950s, civil rights issues were also heating up in the United States. In 1941, President Harry Truman, fearing a march on Washington, signed Executive Order 8802, which outlawed the prejudicial treatment of blacks working in the federal government and defense industries. With membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reaching 500,000 during World War II, the organization was gaining political clout. In 1948, Truman signed two additional executive orders (9980 and 9981), which prohibited racial discrimination in the civil service and required equal treatment and opportunity for all of the people in the armed forces. That same year, the NAACP endorsed a policy of integration rather than the separate but equal doctrine that had governed race relations since the late 1800s. All of this was of course laying the groundwork for the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in the Brown vs. The Board of Education case, which made the doctrine of separate but equal unconstitutional in public schools.

The 1990s in the United States The early 1990s were a time of growing international political stability and declining economic conditions for the United States. In 1989, the Cold War ended, and in 1993, President Bill Clinton and Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin signed the Start II missile reduction treaty. Despite these successes, the United States had a new battle on its hands. Recession and high national debt were current con-

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cerns. Mainstay companies, such as the top three automakers, were posting record losses and corporate icons, such as the investment bank Drexel Burnham, were declaring bankruptcy. To the country’s great dissatisfaction, George H. Bush raised taxes in an effort to reduce the deﬁcit by $500 billion despite his earlier pledge that such taxation would not occur. Despite Bush’s successful liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi invasion, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992. By the mid-nineties, the economy was on an improved footing, posting the best economic indicators in close to thirty years. On the social and cultural front, the country was still a nation divided. Rodney King’s beating by four Los Angeles police ofﬁcers in 1991 and the race riots that followed their acquittals bespoke a vehement demand for racial equality and justice in the United States. Civil rights had come a long way from the times of racial segregation, separate-butequal policies, and integration efforts; however, for many, the struggle was still a day-to-day fact of life. For homosexuals, as with racial minorities, equality and acceptance were still not the status quo. Although the AIDS epidemic brought homosexuality into the popular consciousness of the nation, many in the United States were not yet ready to view the lifestyle as valid. In 1990, new medical studies suggested that the genetic and physiological basis for homosexuality, and topically, it was becoming more mainstream. In 1993, Angels in America, which explores homosexuality, AIDS, and politics, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, yet close to this same time, Clinton endorsed the ‘‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy about gays and homosexuals in the United States military. With the GOP’s sweep of Congress in 1994, conservatives like Trent Lott continued to endorse a conservative picture of family values that clearly excluded homosexual lifestyle.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The Young Man from Atlanta was ﬁrst produced off-Broadway by the Signature Theater Company in 1995 as part of a season dedicated to Foote’s work. This performance, like those that followed in various locations throughout the United States, including a Broadway premier in 1997, received strong reactions, both positive and negative, from critics. On the positive side, Foote was praised for the strength yet subtle quality of his writing and for the play’s emotional depth. Everett Evans, writing for the Houston Chronicle in 1996, noted that ‘‘Young

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Man may not be Foote’s sturdiest play, but with its elusive theme and autumnal mood, it is perhaps his most intriguing and deeply felt.’’ He further commented that ‘‘The Young Man from Atlanta proves a thought-provoking study of family values—all the more haunting for leaving its most crucial questions not only unanswered, but unasked.’’ Richard Christiansen, who wrote his review of the play in 1995 for the Chicago Tribune, would likely agree. He wrote that The Young Man from Atlanta ‘‘is a wonder of strong drama built through ordinary talk and everyday incident.’’ Further, he noted that ‘‘the play is very strong and solid, its power carried by the author’s remarkable writing skills and by his delicate probing of deep family truths.’’ Dick Scanlan, writing in the April 1997 issue of the Advocate, summarized it best, perhaps, when he wrote that ‘‘at 81, Foote’s artistic heart remains in good shape his instinct for truth intact.’’ While these critics and Foote’s Pulitzer Prize for the work attest to the merits of this play, other critics have been perplexed by the praise. In a scathing review of the 1995 production, John Simon wrote in the New York Magazine, ‘‘How many times can he, as proliﬁc as Miss Oates and nearly 80, keep writing the same sentimental, pathetic, oldfashioned, terminally boring play?’’ More sedately, Michael Feingold noted that same year in the The Village Voice that The Young Man from Atlanta is ‘‘a very sparse return for the ticket price, yet Foote’s plays keep getting produced, applauded, praised.’’ Critic John Lahr would concur. Writing for the New Yorker about the 1997 production, he notes that The Young Man from Atlanta ‘‘opened to high—and somewhat bewildering—praise. The drama is a house of cards propped up on the foundation of powerful performances by Rip Torn and Shirley Knight.’’ He further commented that, ‘‘despite Foote’s wry compassion, there’s less here than meets the eye.’’ Writing similarly unfavorable critiques, critics Robert L. King and Greg Evans took issue with speciﬁc aspects of the play that they found lacking. In the North American Review, King notes that Boston’s Huntington Theatre production was not well received, saying that ‘‘the Boston audience felt so put upon that many began laughing at the play’s predictability, including Will’s offstage heart attack.’’ For Evans, writing for Variety in 1997, Foote’s characters were the problem. He wrote that ‘‘Carson is a device, and an awkward one at that, his arrival in town too coincidental, his character too thin.’’ He then goes on to say that Foote’s other

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‘‘disparate characters and their respective loose ends lend the play a rather meandering feel, and some of the encounters seem more padding than substance.’’ Stefan Kanfer, writing for the New Leader in 1997, found fault with Foote for not exploring many of the plays compelling problems or questions and notes that sadly, ‘‘The cast far outshines this inadequate material.’’ For him ‘‘inspiration, like the piano that Lily Dale refuses to play, is nowhere to be seen.’’

CRITICISM Dustie Robeson Robeson is a freelance writer with a master’s degree in English. In this essay, Robeson discusses the ways in which Lily Dale and Will Kidder inspire compassion and disdain in audiences and readers. In The Young Man from Atlanta, Foote explores the issue of death and its impact on the lives of parents. In the process, he delves into the lives of his living characters and seems to ask the question, what type of a life is worth living? For Will and Lily Dale Kidder, life seems divorced from many realities. Michael Feingold, who reviewed the play in 1995 for the Village Voice, posed an interesting question. He asked, the ‘‘desperate desire not to face reality is certainly very American, but does Foote want us to indict it or empathize with it?’’ In the end, Foote creates two characters who inspire both empathy and contempt from audiences and readers. For Lily Dale, living a life that is not grounded in reality is the status quo. Ben Brantley, writing in the New York Times, calls her a ‘‘petulant, spoiled child bride.’’ Indeed, Lily Dale’s life is much like that of a spoiled child rather than a mature adult. She calls her husband ‘‘daddy’’ and tells Pete that ‘‘anything I ever wanted, Will got for me.’’ Lily Dale so easily parts with $35,000 that one might easily criticize her for having a juvenile understanding of the value of money (particularly in light of the fact that the average annual salary in 1950 was less than $3,000). In addition to living a sheltered and pampered life that freed her from most adult responsibilities and thus adult realities, Lily Dale seems ill equipped to deal with some of life’s larger and more serious issues, including civil rights and the nature of her son’s death.

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As alluded to in earlier commentary about the play’s themes, Lily Dale has a superﬁcial understanding of race relations. This lack of awareness surfaces when she discusses the Disappointment Clubs that she believes Eleanor Roosevelt started in Houston during World War II. For Lily Dale, Roosevelt was motivated by her desire to ‘‘disappoint white people’’ and she ‘‘took out all her personal unhappiness on the South.’’ In reality, however, Roosevelt was deeply committed to social justice and the rights of black people in America. Clearly, Roosevelt’s cause and the plight of black Americans are lost on the self-centered Lily Dale. When it comes to the death of her son, much seems similarly lost on her. When her friend Alice Temple questions her religious faith in light of Bill’s suicide, Lily Dale is shocked. She insists, ‘‘His death was an accident’’ and fails to grasp the very real possibility that Bill did indeed take his own life. Despite Lily Dale’s narcissistic and sheltered life, audiences and readers are likely to feel some compassion for her. It is often said that the death of a child is one of the most difﬁcult losses that a person can experience. Lily Dale’s grief is palpable in her raw vulnerability and is expressed in her uncontrollable need to connect with Randy. Of her conversation with Alice she tells Pete, And she upset me so, Pete, that I couldn’t stop trembling and my heart started racing so, I thought I would have a heart attack. And I just had to call that sweet roommate of his in Atlanta, even though Daddy had told me never to, and I told him exactly what Alice had told me. He said there was not a world of truth in it. . . . I felt very relieved after that, and I thanked God, got on my knees and thanked God for sending this sweet friend of Bill’s to tell me once again of Bill’s faith in God.

Lily Dale desperately misses her son and will do anything to touch a piece of him. In scene 2, she conﬁdes in Pete, ‘‘Every time I feel blue over missing Bill, I call his friend and I ask him to tell me again about Bill and his prayers and he does so so sweetly.’’ Lily Dale’s need to connect with someone that she believes was close to Bill is understandable. However, her actions are not without a cost—a cost that ends the empathy that most might initially feel for her. Although Lily Dale’s grief moves audiences to be somewhat forgiving of her childishness and selfcenteredness, in the end, she does not inspire longterm empathy. Lily Dale’s need to connect with Randy is understandable; however, her willful dishonesty with Will is not. Her relationship with

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Playbill cover for The Young Man from Atlanta performed at the Longacre Theatre in 1997

Randy and her donation to his questionable causes is damaging to her marriage, both emotionally and ﬁnancially. For this, many audiences and readers tend to hold her accountable. Instead of looking vulnerable and grief stricken, her actions make her appear shallow, unintelligent, and gullible. Ironically, even when Lily Dale comes to grips with the error of her ways, it is difﬁcult to feel compassion for her. She says, ‘‘I have been deceived, I have been so deceived it has broken my heart. . . . I feel so betrayed, so hurt, so humiliated.’’ Although she blames herself for Will’s heart attack, she fails to recognize that her feelings of betrayal must be nothing compared to those that her husband might be feeling about her dishonesty with him. In the end, Will’s assessment of her comes through as absolutely correct: she had ‘‘been taken for a fool,’’ because of her unwillingness to accept some difﬁcult truths about her son and Randy. Because of her selﬁshness and less than admirable handling of her relationship with her husband, Lily Dale’s lowest moment in the play, is likely the time that audiences feel the least amount of compassion for her. While audiences and readers come to dislike Lily Dale as the play progresses, Will seems to

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LILY DALE AND WILL ARE TWO CHARACTERS THAT INSPIRE BOTH COMPASSION AND DISDAIN. THEY EACH LIVE WITHIN A SHROUD OF IGNORANCE AND DENIAL, AND ARE THUS DIFFICULT TO ADMIRE OR EVEN LIKE. AS THE PLAY PROGRESSES, HOWEVER, EACH GIVES AUDIENCES AND READERS REASONS TO RELATE AND EMPATHIZE WITH THEM. BUT ARE THESE REASONS ENOUGH TO REDEEM THEM?’’

inspire a somewhat different reaction. At ﬁrst, he lives in a world outside of reality that makes him come across as boastful and overly conﬁdent, particularly as it comes to his perceptions about his career. Despite Will’s claims that his clients respect him and that he is ‘‘a born competitor,’’ he can no longer perform in the competitive marketplace. As his boss, Ted, puts it, ‘‘It’s a new age. . . . It’s a different ball game, Will. What worked forty years ago, or twenty, or ten, doesn’t work anymore.’’ Following his termination, Will’s self-delusion persists. Although he left the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery to pursue his own business venture, Will is unable to secure funding from the banks. This is proof yet again that Will had an inﬂated, if not wholly inaccurate, understanding of his professional relationships. In this case, none of the ﬁnancial institutions with whom he has worked over the years would extend credit to him for a new business. In addition to the fact that Will has a professional life that is not grounded in reality, his personal life seems similarly tainted. In his initial conversation with Tom, Will boasts that he has ‘‘the best of everything.’’ Will includes his career, his house, and his wife in this assessment. Sadly, as with his career, Will comes to ﬁnd out that not everything in his life is what it appears to be on the surface. Not only does he realize that he has overestimated himself professionally, but the cost of building his house has put him in severe ﬁnancial straits

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given his termination. Further, he learns that his wife, ‘‘the ﬁnest wife a man could have,’’ has been dishonest with him. Ironically, these realizations help make Will a more likable character who is possibly more deserving of empathy than contempt. As Will’s world of artiﬁce comes tumbling down, he becomes a more humble and honest man. In the midst of facing realities about his professional capabilities and prospects, he must also come to terms with his ﬁnancial affairs, his marriage, and of course, the facts surrounding his son’s life and death. Although Will comes to terms with all of these issues, one might argue that he falls a bit short when it comes to Bill. Although Will readily admits that he believed Bill’s death was a suicide very early in the play, he refuses to explore the nature of his son’s involvement with Randy. The unspoken assumption that permeates this play is that Bill and Randy were involved in a homosexual relationship. Of Bill, Will says to Lily Dale, ‘‘there was a Bill I knew and a Bill you knew and that’s the only Bill I care to know about.’’ He refuses to meet with Randy because he says, ‘‘there are things I’d have to ask him and I don’t want to know the answers.’’ One can read this ﬁnal decision of Will’s as the last vestige of denial that prevents him from living fully in reality. Were he to confront the issue of his son’s sexuality, all that he had previously denied, ignored, or lied to himself about would be cleared up; however, he refuses the meeting and asks Lily Dale to send Randy away for the ﬁnal time. Interestingly, Will’s refusal demonstrates his clear desire to stay in the dark about his son’s sexuality, and in one sense this does indicate another way in which he will continue to live in a world that is not based in reality. At the same time, Will’s admissions to Lily Dale indicate that he has to some extent already reached an understanding about his son’s lifestyle and sexual preferences. By refusing to meet with Randy, Will demonstrates that he is indeed already aware that Bill and Randy’s relationship was more than a simple friendship. Lily Dale and Will inspire both compassion and disdain. They live within a shroud of ignorance and denial and are thus difﬁcult to admire or even like. As the play progresses, however, each gives audiences and readers reasons to relate and empathize with them. But are these reasons enough to redeem them? In the end, Foote leaves that question for his viewers and readers to answer. Most likely, people who encounter this play will ﬁnd themselves with divided opinions. Perhaps Foote’s lasting point

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is that one’s ability to face reality is not a consistent trait, and thus progress and failure to do so are both an inherent part of the reality in which everyone lives. In this way then, Lily Dale and Will are, in fact, more of a reﬂection of reality than an exception to it. Source: Dustie Robeson, Critical Essay on The Young Man from Atlanta, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

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THE PURSUIT OF THE HAPPINESS PROMISED BY WEALTH HAS NOT NECESSARILY MADE THE KIDDERS HAPPY AND HAS INSTEAD LED THEM TO EMOTIONAL LOSSES

Tamara Fernando Fernando is a freelance writer and editor in Seattle, Washington. In this essay, Fernando argues that Foote’s play is a deconstruction of the American dream. The Young Man from Atlanta opens with Will Kidder, age 64, sitting in his ofﬁce at the produce ﬁrm for which he has worked since his early twenties, examining the plans for a luxurious new home he has just ﬁnished building for himself and his wife, Lily Dale Kidder. When his colleague Tom questions him about the extravagance of the new house, Will answers ‘‘I want the best. The biggest and the best. I always have. Since I was a boy. We were dirt poor after my father died and I said to myself then I’m not going to live like this the rest of my life.’’ This short bit of dialogue succinctly and clearly establishes Will Kidder as a rags-to-riches character—that is, a person who has moved from poverty to material wealth and, therefore, happiness and fulﬁllment. The rags-to-riches character is a type that is echoed throughout American folklore and history—from the true story of Andrew Carnegie to the wildly successful early twentieth-century formulaic novels by Horatio Alger—and reﬂects the ideal of the American dream, which is that anyone, no matter what his/her background, has the equal opportunity to attain ﬁnancial success. Kidder has indeed attained the American dream of material success. His attainment of wealth is merely a prologue to the plot of the play: Kidder’s complete loss of that wealth and ﬁnancial security and how this loss changes his life. In effect, Foote creates a riches-to-rags story, rather than a rags-to-riches story, thereby accomplishing a deconstruction of that mainstay of American storytelling. By turning upside-down the rags-to-riches convention, Foote effectively deconstructs two intertwined ideologies that it presumes: the virtuousness of the competitive drive for the acquisition of material wealth and the value placed on material wealth itself as the ultimate form of happiness. The pursuit of the happiness

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IN THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OTHER.’’

promised by wealth has not necessarily made the Kidders happy and has instead led them to emotional losses in their relationships with each other. The opportunity to compete freely for business is an essential component of a free market economy like that of the United States. In the formulaic American rags-to-riches stories, the equal opportunity to compete for wealth is an assumed constant, and, most importantly, the ability to make the most of opportunity is regarded as a moral virtue and is therefore rewarded with material wealth. Will is a wholehearted believer in opportunism and the free competitive economic system. In the opening scene, Will admires the plans for his extravagant new home, as if basking in the wealth he has managed to amass during his career at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery. Will has been rewarded with wealth for succeeding in the competitive market. He says to his colleague Tom We have the best products in the city of Houston, and those we don’t have we just have to aggressively compete for. I’m a competitor, son. A born competitor. Nothing ﬁres me up like competition. . . . My brother, may his soul rest in peace, wasn’t [competitive]. He didn’t have a competitive bone in his body. All he ever thought about was where his next drink of whiskey was coming from.

Will’s belief and participation in the system reveals his unquestioned belief not only that the economic system is morally and ethically sound but also that subscribing to it is a guaranteed way to attain ﬁnancial success. On the other hand, he blames a lack of ﬁnancial success on a lack of competitive drive, which he places on par with the vice of alcoholism. He sees the failure to attain ﬁnancial success as a direct indication of a lack of the virtue of competitiveness.

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Will’s view of the competitive system is idealistic; it echoes the idealism with which other ragsto-riches stories exalt the opportunism of the competitive free market economy. But idealization, as is its nature, simpliﬁes and narrows one’s outlook. As soon as Will’s idealization of the system is established, the play begins the deconstruction of his one-dimensional view of the competitive marketplace. The process of deconstruction is started when he is ﬁred from his thirty-eight-year position at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery by Ted Cleveland Jr., the son of the ﬁrst owner of the produce chain. Ted says to Will: ‘‘It’s a new age, Will. My father wouldn’t recognize business the way it’s done today. Very competitive.’’ When Will protests that he is a proven competitor, Ted explains that he is no longer competitive enough: ‘‘My hands are tied, Will. . . . We’re not competing any longer. . . . We need younger men in charge here.’’ In this conversation between Ted and Will, Foote employs a very blunt irony that contrasts Ted’s particular language with Will’s ideas regarding the competitive marketplace. This irony is a tool by which Foote begins the deconstruction of Will’s unquestioning idealization of the economic system. In the quote above, Ted speciﬁcally cites the company’s dwindling competitive edge—that very same competitive power that had brought Will his ﬁnancial success—as the reason that Will must be ﬁred from the company. Despite his belief that hard work and a competitive drive will continue to lead to ﬁnancial success, Will gets handed a particularly brutal ﬁring: he is 64 years of age and just months from retirement. He has just tied up all of his capital in the house he has just built, and he has just undergone another even more painful loss in the mysterious drowning of his son, Bill. Will now ﬁnds himself suddenly thrust from wealth and ﬁnancial security to the brink of ﬁnancial ruin. For the ﬁrst time, the system has worked against him. And for the reader/viewer of the play, if not yet for Will, the virtue of this competitive work ethic that he extolled are directly brought into question by Ted’s act. Will’s initial response to being ﬁred is to stay optimistic and, rather than give up on the system he believes in, enter into competition against Ted’s company by immediately opening his own produce business. He is, however, sadly set up for failure despite his experience in the business and, most importantly of all, despite his vision and competi-

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tiveness. Throughout the second and third scenes of the play, obstacles continually barrage him. It becomes obvious that he will fail to open his business. He has made the mistake of tying up his cash in his extravagant new home, and he is put in the humiliating position of having to ask his wife for her savings—only to ﬁnd that she has been swindled out of most of her money by a con artist. Will is denied time and time again by the banks who he initially believed would ‘‘stand by me until I’m on my feet once again.’’ Because of the stress of his sudden dire situation, Will has a serious heart attack and ﬁnds himself housebound, unable to work, for six months. By the end of the third scene, Will is transformed from the ‘‘burly man with lots of vitality’’ of the opening scene, to a housebound invalid facing sudden ﬁnancial crisis. He says to his family: ‘‘Thirty-eight years. Where did they go? . . . I saw the city growing all around me. There was no stopping it, I thought, and there is no stopping anyone with vision and competitiveness.’’ The system has failed to reward him with riches for his years of hard work and, most of all, for his vision and competitiveness. Instead, the system has brought him to ruin, and the experience has shattered his idealism. By the end of the third scene of the play, Foote’s complete reversal of the rags-to-riches plot is complete. Rather than be rewarded with wealth by the system for his competitiveness and hard work, Will has been ﬁred from his job and has lost his wealth in the name of that system of competition. The story could have ended here, at the end of the third scene, as a tragedy closing with the embitterment of a man whose illusions have been crushed. But even though those fairy-tales inevitably end on a happily-ever-after note, Foote resists fulﬁlling a complete reversal by taking the play to such a dismally opposite end. Instead, throughout the remaining three scenes of the play, Will is transformed from the idealist he was before to a realist. This transformation is indicated by Will’s slowly and quietly realizing that he will need to accept the menial job at the produce company that Ted Cleveland Jr. has offered him. The most powerful moment of Will’s transformation from idealist to realist occurs at the closing of the last scene. In a moment of completely open and honest conversation between Lily Dale and Will, Lily Dale reveals that, despite being provided with extravagant material comforts and a life of leisure, she has been lonely and unhappy, even to the point of considering

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unfaithfulness to her husband: ‘‘I get lonely, Will, you’ve always had your work, gone away so much of the time.’’ Will confesses that, although their son Bill has recently died, Will had lost him long before his death, his long work hours not allowing him to ever get to really know his son: ‘‘I never tried to ﬁnd out what he would want to do, what he would want to talk about. . . . I was never close to him, Lily Dale.’’ Although this closing scene is an eye-opening admission of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and failure for both Lily Dale and Will, the play itself does not ultimately end on a note of fatality. Rather, Foote closes the play with a simple statement from Will to his wife: ‘‘Everything is going to be all right. If I go back to work and you start teaching, everything will be all right.’’ His words reveal, despite the tragedies of loss he has experienced, a heartening resilience of spirit, and Foote thus closes the play with a redemptive glimmer of optimism. Source: Tamara Fernando, Critical Essay on The Young Man from Atlanta, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Stefan Kanfer

Playbill cast list from The Young Man from Atlanta performed at the Longacre Theatre in 1997

In the following review, Kanfer calls The Young Man from Atlanta ‘‘inadequate.’’ As for Will, is he a sensitive soul locked in a massive, suffering body? Or is he really a loutish Texan who drove his kid to misery? And what of Lily Dale? Is she the long-suffering soul she appears to be? Or is she a pampered beauty gone to fat, weeping for the woman who was, rather than for the son who kept his distance? Any of these problem might have made a compelling play; none is explored. Whether the son, the man from Atlanta and Carson were part of a gay cabal is hinted at—and then left for the audience to wonder about. We can see that the Kidder marriage, like their big house and its trappings, suffers from an excess of surface and deﬁciency of substance. But this is hardly a startling revelation. John Cheever anatomized the Good Life in suburban America more than 20 years ago; the sardonic title of his last book, Oh, What a Paradise It Seems, said more in six words than The Young Man from Atlanta does in two hours. The cast far outshines this inadequate material. Torn specializes in windy, vulnerable types, and he gives Will a sad dignity that will not be found in the script. In the unrewarding part of Lily Dale, Knight

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is believable if not interesting; and the supporting men—particularly McGuire—lend the proceedings an authenticity of place and period. Even so, the two best performances are by black actresses in small domestic roles. They have nothing to do with the plot, but everything to do with the time. As Clara, the maid and cook, Jacqueline Williams exhibits a forbearance and dignity that her employers cannot manage, and as Etta Doris Meneffree, a former servant, Beatrice Winde purloins the show when she comes to call, speaking about the departed with an affection and understanding that seem beyond the reach of his parents. Thomas Lynch’s set evokes the 1950s in a way that makes one glad to be living in the 1990s. The same must be said for David C. Woolard’s costume designs. Robert Falls’ direction is a reﬂection of the play itself: never less than competent and never more than professional. For in The Young Man from Atlanta, inspiration, like the piano that Lily Dale refuses to play, is nowhere to be seen. Source: Stefan Kanfer, Review of The Young Man from Atlanta, in New Leader, Vol. 80, No. 5, March 24, 1997, p. 22.

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SOURCES

Simon, John, ‘‘With Blunt Tools,’’ in New York Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 9, February 27, 1995, pp. 115–17.

Brantley, Ben, ‘‘Comfortable Fortress Suddenly under Siege,’’ in the New York Times, March 28, 1997, p. C1. Christiansen, Richard, ‘‘Foote’s Young Man Wonderfully Detailed,’’ in the Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1995, p. 6. Cohen, Lizabeth, and Mark Tebeau, ‘‘Gender Issues,’’ in the Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, edited by Stanley I. Kutler, Scribner, 1996, pp. 104–05. Evans, Everett, ‘‘Foote Captures Couple Perfectly in Young Man,’’ in the Houston Chronicle, February 23, 1996, p. 1. Evans, Greg, Review of The Young Man from Atlanta, in Variety, March 31–April 6, 1997, p. 98. Feingold, Michael, ‘‘The Normal Foote,’’ in the Village Voice, Vol. XL, No. 6, February 7, 1995, p. 81. Foote, Horton, The Young Man from Atlanta, Dramatists Play Service, 1995. Gordon, Lois, and Alan Gordon, ‘‘The Fifties,’’ in American Chronicle: Year by Year through the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 473. ———, ‘‘The Forties,’’ in American Chronicle: Year by Year through the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 379. Kanfer, Stefan, Review of The Young Man from Atlanta, in the New Leader, Vol. 80, No. 5, March 24, 1997, p. 22. King, Robert L., ‘‘Eastern Regionals,’’ in the North American Review, Vol. 281, No. 2, March/April 1996, p. 44. Lahr, John, ‘‘Husbands and Wives: A Triumphant Doll’s House and The Young Man from Atlanta,’’ in the New Yorker, April 14, 1997, pp. 86–87. Scanlan, Dick, Review of The Young Man from Atlanta, in the Advocate, No. 732, April 29, 1997, pp. 61–62.

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FURTHER READING Evans, Harold, The American Century, Knopf, 1998. In this New York Times bestseller, Evans chronicles United States history from 1898 to 1989. Chapters ten and eleven span the years 1941 to 1956. Foote, Horton, Beginnings: A Memoir, Scribner, 2001. In this continuation of his ﬁrst memoir, Foote catalogs his transition from actor to writer. ———, Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, Scribner, 2000. In his ﬁrst memoir, Foote focuses primarily on his youth in Wharton, Texas, and on the people whose lives intersected with his, and hence, greatly inﬂuenced him and his career. ———, Genesis of an American Playwright, edited and with an introduction by Marion Castleberry, Baylor University Press, 2004. In this autobiography, Foote tells the story of his life and career, including stories about his childhood in Wharton, Texas, and a dedicated concentration on the people and events that shaped the man and his craft. This book is essential for anyone looking to know more about Foote as a person and artist. Klarmon, Michael J., From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, Oxford University Press, 2004. Klarmon explores the issue of racial equality in the United States from the late 1800s through the 1960s through the lens of the Supreme Court’s rulings.

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Glossary of Literary Terms A Abstract: Used as a noun, the term refers to a short summary or outline of a longer work. As an adjective applied to writing or literary works, abstract refers to words or phrases that name things not knowable through the ﬁve senses. Examples of abstracts include the Cliffs Notes summaries of major literary works. Examples of abstract terms or concepts include ‘‘idea,’’ ‘‘guilt’’ ‘‘honesty,’’ and ‘‘loyalty.’’ Absurd, Theater of the: See Theater of the Absurd Absurdism: See Theater of the Absurd Act: A major section of a play. Acts are divided into varying numbers of shorter scenes. From ancient times to the nineteenth century plays were generally constructed of ﬁve acts, but modern works typically consist of one, two, or three acts. Examples of ﬁveact plays include the works of Sophocles and Shakespeare, while the plays of Arthur Miller commonly have a three-act structure. Acto: A one-act Chicano theater piece developed out of collective improvisation. Actos were performed by members of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino in California during the mid-1960s. Aestheticism: A literary and artistic movement of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement believed that art should not be mixed with social, political, or moral teaching. The statement ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ is a good summary of aestheticism. The

movement had its roots in France, but it gained widespread importance in England in the last half of the nineteenth century, where it helped change the Victorian practice of including moral lessons in literature. Oscar Wilde is one of the best-known ‘‘aesthetes’’ of the late nineteenth century. Age of Johnson: The period in English literature between 1750 and 1798, named after the most prominent literary ﬁgure of the age, Samuel Johnson. Works written during this time are noted for their emphasis on ‘‘sensibility,’’ or emotional quality. These works formed a transition between the rational works of the Age of Reason, or Neoclassical period, and the emphasis on individual feelings and responses of the Romantic period. Signiﬁcant writers during the Age of Johnson included the novelists Ann Radcliffe and Henry Mackenzie, dramatists Richard Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, and poets William Collins and Thomas Gray. Also known as Age of Sensibility Age of Reason: See Neoclassicism Age of Sensibility: See Age of Johnson Alexandrine Meter: See Meter Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters representing things or abstract ideas are used to convey a message or teach a lesson. Allegory is typically used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but is sometimes used for satiric or political purposes. Examples of allegorical works include

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Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Allusion: A reference to a familiar literary or historical person or event, used to make an idea more easily understood. For example, describing someone as a ‘‘Romeo’’ makes an allusion to William Shakespeare’s famous young lover in Romeo and Juliet. Amerind Literature: The writing and oral traditions of Native Americans. Native American literature was originally passed on by word of mouth, so it consisted largely of stories and events that were easily memorized. Amerind prose is often rhythmic like poetry because it was recited to the beat of a ceremonial drum. Examples of Amerind literature include the autobiographical Black Elk Speaks, the works of N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Craig Lee Strete, and the poetry of Luci Tapahonso. Analogy: A comparison of two things made to explain something unfamiliar through its similarities to something familiar, or to prove one point based on the acceptedness of another. Similes and metaphors are types of analogies. Analogies often take the form of an extended simile, as in William Blake’s aphorism: ‘‘As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.’’ Angry Young Men: A group of British writers of the 1950s whose work expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Common to their work is an anti-hero who rebels against a corrupt social order and strives for personal integrity. The term has been used to describe Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Wain, and others. Antagonist: The major character in a narrative or drama who works against the hero or protagonist. An example of an evil antagonist is Richard Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, while a virtuous antagonist is Macduff in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Anthropomorphism: The presentation of animals or objects in human shape or with human characteristics. The term is derived from the Greek word for ‘‘human form.’’ The fables of Aesop, the animated ﬁlms of Walt Disney, and Richard Adams’s Watership Down feature anthropomorphic characters. Anti-hero: A central character in a work of literature who lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heros

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typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals. They generally feel helpless in a world over which they have no control. Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts. A well-known anti-hero is Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. Antimasque: See Masque Antithesis: The antithesis of something is its direct opposite. In literature, the use of antithesis as a ﬁgure of speech results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Technically, it is the second portion of the statement that is deﬁned as the ‘‘antithesis’’; the ﬁrst portion is the ‘‘thesis.’’ An example of antithesis is found in the following portion of Abraham Lincoln’s ‘‘Gettysburg Address’’; notice the opposition between the verbs ‘‘remember’’ and ‘‘forget’’ and the phrases ‘‘what we say’’ and ‘‘what they did’’: ‘‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’’ Apocrypha: Writings tentatively attributed to an author but not proven or universally accepted to be their works. The term was originally applied to certain books of the Bible that were not considered inspired and so were not included in the ‘‘sacred canon.’’ Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston all have apocrypha. Apocryphal books of the Bible include the Old Testament’s Book of Enoch and New Testament’s Gospel of Peter. Apollonian and Dionysian: The two impulses believed to guide authors of dramatic tragedy. The Apollonian impulse is named after Apollo, the Greek god of light and beauty and the symbol of intellectual order. The Dionysian impulse is named after Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and the symbol of the unrestrained forces of nature. The Apollonian impulse is to create a rational, harmonious world, while the Dionysian is to express the irrational forces of personality. Friedrich Nietzche uses these terms in The Birth of Tragedy to designate contrasting elements in Greek tragedy. Apostrophe: A statement, question, or request addressed to an inanimate object or concept or to a nonexistent or absent person. Requests for inspiration from the muses in poetry are examples of apostrophe, as is Marc Antony’s address to Caesar’s corpse in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I

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am meek and gentle with these butchers!. . . Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!. . . ’’ Archetype: The word archetype is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. This term was introduced to literary criticism from the psychology of Carl Jung. It expresses Jung’s theory that behind every person’s ‘‘unconscious,’’ or repressed memories of the past, lies the ‘‘collective unconscious’’ of the human race: memories of the countless typical experiences of our ancestors. These memories are said to prompt illogical associations that trigger powerful emotions in the reader. Often, the emotional process is primitive, even primordial. Archetypes are the literary images that grow out of the ‘‘collective unconscious.’’ They appear in literature as incidents and plots that repeat basic patterns of life. They may also appear as stereotyped characters. Examples of literary archetypes include themes such as birth and death and characters such as the Earth Mother. Argument: The argument of a work is the author’s subject matter or principal idea. Examples of deﬁned ‘‘argument’’ portions of works include John Milton’s Arguments to each of the books of Paradise Lost and the ‘‘Argument’’ to Robert Herrick’s Hesperides.

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performance, including plays, poetry readings, speeches, and concerts. Jane Austen’s parody of the gothic novel, Northanger Abbey, was originally intended for (and also pokes fun at) an audience of young and avid female gothic novel readers. Avant-garde: A French term meaning ‘‘vanguard.’’ It is used in literary criticism to describe new writing that rejects traditional approaches to literature in favor of innovations in style or content. Twentieth-century examples of the literary avantgarde include the Black Mountain School of poets, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Beat Movement.

B Ballad: A short poem that tells a simple story and has a repeated refrain. Ballads were originally intended to be sung. Early ballads, known as folk ballads, were passed down through generations, so their authors are often unknown. Later ballads composed by known authors are called literary ballads. An example of an anonymous folk ballad is ‘‘Edward,’’ which dates from the Middle Ages. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’ and John Keats’s ‘‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’’ are examples of literary ballads.

Aristotelian Criticism: Speciﬁcally, the method of evaluating and analyzing tragedy formulated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics. More generally, the term indicates any form of criticism that follows Aristotle’s views. Aristotelian criticism focuses on the form and logical structure of a work, apart from its historical or social context, in contrast to ‘‘Platonic Criticism,’’ which stresses the usefulness of art. Adherents of New Criticism including John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks utilize and value the basic ideas of Aristotelian criticism for textual analysis.

Baroque: A term used in literary criticism to describe literature that is complex or ornate in style or diction. Baroque works typically express tension, anxiety, and violent emotion. The term ‘‘Baroque Age’’ designates a period in Western European literature beginning in the late sixteenth century and ending about one hundred years later. Works of this period often mirror the qualities of works more generally associated with the label ‘‘baroque’’ and sometimes feature elaborate conceits. Examples of Baroque works include John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Luis de Gongora’s Soledads, and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Art for Art’s Sake: See Aestheticism

Baroque Age: See Baroque

Aside: A comment made by a stage performer that is intended to be heard by the audience but supposedly not by other characters. Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude is an extended use of the aside in modern theater. Audience: The people for whom a piece of literature is written. Authors usually write with a certain audience in mind, for example, children, members of a religious or ethnic group, or colleagues in a professional ﬁeld. The term ‘‘audience’’ also applies to the people who gather to see or hear any

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Baroque Period: See Baroque Beat Generation: See Beat Movement Beat Movement: A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s—including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—who rejected established social and literary values. Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-inﬂuenced free verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind—generated by religious ecstasy or the use of

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drugs—the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter. Kerouac’s On the Road is perhaps the bestknown example of a Beat Generation novel, and Ginsberg’s Howl is a famous collection of Beat poetry. Black Aesthetic Movement: A period of artistic and literary development among African Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the ﬁrst major African-American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance and was closely paralleled by the civil rights and black power movements. The black aesthetic writers attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the black masses. Key ﬁgures in black aesthetics included one of its founders, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones; poet and essayist Haki R. Madhubuti, formerly Don L. Lee; poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez; and dramatist Ed Bullins. Works representative of the Black Aesthetic Movement include Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, a 1964 Obie award-winner; Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Baraka and playwright Larry Neal and published in 1968; and Sonia Sanchez’s poetry collection We a BaddDDD People, published in 1970. Also known as Black Arts Movement.

district of London, from around 1907 to the early 1930s. The Bloomsbury Group held no uniform philosophical beliefs but did commonly express an aversion to moral prudery and a desire for greater social tolerance. At various times the circle included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. Bon Mot: A French term meaning ‘‘good word.’’ A bon mot is a witty remark or clever observation. Charles Lamb and Oscar Wilde are celebrated for their witty bon mots. Two examples by Oscar Wilde stand out: (1) ‘‘All women become their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’’ (2) ‘‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.’’ Breath Verse: See Projective Verse Burlesque: Any literary work that uses exaggeration to make its subject appear ridiculous, either by treating a trivial subject with profound seriousness or by treating a digniﬁed subject frivolously. The word ‘‘burlesque’’ may also be used as an adjective, as in ‘‘burlesque show,’’ to mean ‘‘striptease act.’’ Examples of literary burlesque include the comedies of Aristophanes, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote,, Samuel Butler’s poem ‘‘Hudibras,’’ and John Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera.

Black Arts Movement: See Black Aesthetic Movement Black Comedy: See Black Humor Black Humor: Writing that places grotesque elements side by side with humorous ones in an attempt to shock the reader, forcing him or her to laugh at the horrifying reality of a disordered world. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 is considered a superb example of the use of black humor. Other well-known authors who use black humor include Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter. Also known as Black Comedy. Blank Verse: Loosely, any unrhymed poetry, but more generally, unrhymed iambic pentameter verse (composed of lines of ﬁve two-syllable feet with the ﬁrst syllable accented, the second unaccented). Blank verse has been used by poets since the Renaissance for its ﬂexibility and its graceful, digniﬁed tone. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is in blank verse, as are most of William Shakespeare’s plays. Bloomsbury Group: A group of English writers, artists, and intellectuals who held informal artistic and philosophical discussions in Bloomsbury, a

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C Cadence: The natural rhythm of language caused by the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. Much modern poetry—notably free verse— deliberately manipulates cadence to create complex rhythmic effects. James Macpherson’s ‘‘Ossian poems’’ are richly cadenced, as is the poetry of the Symbolists, Walt Whitman, and Amy Lowell. Caesura: A pause in a line of poetry, usually occurring near the middle. It typically corresponds to a break in the natural rhythm or sense of the line but is sometimes shifted to create special meanings or rhythmic effects. The opening line of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Raven’’ contains a caesura following ‘‘dreary’’: ‘‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary. . . . ’’ Canzone: A short Italian or Provencal lyric poem, commonly about love and often set to music. The canzone has no set form but typically contains ﬁve or six stanzas made up of seven to twenty lines of eleven syllables each. A shorter, ﬁve- to ten-line ‘‘envoy,’’ or concluding stanza, completes the poem.

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Masters of the canzone form include Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Torquato Tasso, and Guido Cavalcanti. Carpe Diem: A Latin term meaning ‘‘seize the day.’’ This is a traditional theme of poetry, especially lyrics. A carpe diem poem advises the reader or the person it addresses to live for today and enjoy the pleasures of the moment. Two celebrated carpe diem poems are Andrew Marvell’s ‘‘To His Coy Mistress’’ and Robert Herrick’s poem beginning ‘‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. . . . ’’ Catharsis: The release or purging of unwanted emotions— speciﬁcally fear and pity—brought about by exposure to art. The term was ﬁrst used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics to refer to the desired effect of tragedy on spectators. A famous example of catharsis is realized in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus discovers that his wife, Jacosta, is his own mother and that the stranger he killed on the road was his own father. Celtic Renaissance: A period of Irish literary and cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement aimed to create a romantic vision of Celtic myth and legend. The most signiﬁcant works of the Celtic Renaissance typically present a dreamy, unreal world, usually in reaction against the reality of contemporary problems. William Butler Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin is among the most signiﬁcant works of the Celtic Renaissance. Also known as Celtic Twilight. Celtic Twilight: See Celtic Renaissance Character: Broadly speaking, a person in a literary work. The actions of characters are what constitute the plot of a story, novel, or poem. There are numerous types of characters, ranging from simple, stereotypical ﬁgures to intricate, multifaceted ones. In the techniques of anthropomorphism and personiﬁcation, animals—and even places or things— can assume aspects of character. ‘‘Characterization’’ is the process by which an author creates vivid, believable characters in a work of art. This may be done in a variety of ways, including (1) direct description of the character by the narrator; (2) the direct presentation of the speech, thoughts, or actions of the character; and (3) the responses of other characters to the character. The term ‘‘character’’ also refers to a form originated by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus that later became popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a short essay or sketch of a person who prominently displays a speciﬁc attribute or quality, such as miserliness or ambition. Notable characters in lit-

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erature include Oedipus Rex, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Macbeth, Candide, Hester Prynne, Ebenezer Scrooge, Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Scarlett O’Hara, James Bond, and Kunta Kinte. Characterization: See Character Chorus: In ancient Greek drama, a group of actors who commented on and interpreted the unfolding action on the stage. Initially the chorus was a major component of the presentation, but over time it became less signiﬁcant, with its numbers reduced and its role eventually limited to commentary between acts. By the sixteenth century the chorus—if employed at all—was typically a single person who provided a prologue and an epilogue and occasionally appeared between acts to introduce or underscore an important event. The chorus in William Shakespeare’s Henry V functions in this way. Modern dramas rarely feature a chorus, but T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge are notable exceptions. The Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town performs a role similar to that of the chorus. Chronicle: A record of events presented in chronological order. Although the scope and level of detail provided varies greatly among the chronicles surviving from ancient times, some, such as the AngloSaxon Chronicle, feature vivid descriptions and a lively recounting of events. During the Elizabethan Age, many dramas— appropriately called ‘‘chronicle plays’’—were based on material from chronicles. Many of William Shakespeare’s dramas of English history as well as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II are based in part on Raphael Holinshead’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Classical: In its strictest deﬁnition in literary criticism, classicism refers to works of ancient Greek or Roman literature. The term may also be used to describe a literary work of recognized importance (a ‘‘classic’’) from any time period or literature that exhibits the traits of classicism. Classical authors from ancient Greek and Roman times include Juvenal and Homer. Examples of later works and authors now described as classical include French literature of the seventeenth century, Western novels of the nineteenth century, and American ﬁction of the mid-nineteenth century such as that written by James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. Classicism: A term used in literary criticism to describe critical doctrines that have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and art. Works associated with classicism typically

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exhibit restraint on the part of the author, unity of design and purpose, clarity, simplicity, logical organization, and respect for tradition. Examples of literary classicism include Cicero’s prose, the dramas of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the writings of J. W. von Goethe, G. E. Lessing, and T. S. Eliot. Climax: The turning point in a narrative, the moment when the conﬂict is at its most intense. Typically, the structure of stories, novels, and plays is one of rising action, in which tension builds to the climax, followed by falling action, in which tension lessens as the story moves to its conclusion. The climax in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans occurs when Magua and his captive Cora are pursued to the edge of a cliff by Uncas. Magua kills Uncas but is subsequently killed by Hawkeye. Colloquialism: A word, phrase, or form of pronunciation that is acceptable in casual conversation but not in formal, written communication. It is considered more acceptable than slang. An example of colloquialism can be found in Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-room Ballads: When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre He’d ’eard men sing by land and sea; An’ what he thought ’e might require ’E went an’ took—the same as me! Comedy: One of two major types of drama, the other being tragedy. Its aim is to amuse, and it typically ends happily. Comedy assumes many forms, such as farce and burlesque, and uses a variety of techniques, from parody to satire. In a restricted sense the term comedy refers only to dramatic presentations, but in general usage it is commonly applied to nondramatic works as well. Examples of comedies range from the plays of Aristophanes, Terrence, and Plautus, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Francois Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua, and some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s tales and William Shakespeare’s plays to Noel Coward’s play Private Lives and James Thurber’s short story ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’’ Comedy of Manners: A play about the manners and conventions of an aristocratic, highly sophisticated society. The characters are usually types rather than individualized personalities, and plot is less important than atmosphere. Such plays were an important aspect of late seventeenth-century English comedy. The comedy of manners was revived in the eighteenth century by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, enjoyed a second revival in the late nineteenth century, and has endured

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into the twentieth century. Examples of comedies of manners include William Congreve’s The Way of the World in the late seventeenth century, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in the eighteenth century, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in the nineteenth century, and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Circle in the twentieth century. Comic Relief: The use of humor to lighten the mood of a serious or tragic story, especially in plays. The technique is very common in Elizabethan works, and can be an integral part of the plot or simply a brief event designed to break the tension of the scene. The Gravediggers’ scene in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a frequently cited example of comic relief. Commedia dell’arte: An Italian term meaning ‘‘the comedy of guilds’’ or ‘‘the comedy of professional actors.’’ This form of dramatic comedy was popular in Italy during the sixteenth century. Actors were assigned stock roles (such as Pulcinella, the stupid servant, or Pantalone, the old merchant) and given a basic plot to follow, but all dialogue was improvised. The roles were rigidly typed and the plots were formulaic, usually revolving around young lovers who thwarted their elders and attained wealth and happiness. A rigid convention of the commedia dell’arte is the periodic intrusion of Harlequin, who interrupts the play with low buffoonery. Peppino de Filippo’s Metamorphoses of a Wandering Minstrel gave modern audiences an idea of what commedia dell’arte may have been like. Various scenarios for commedia dell’arte were compiled in Petraccone’s La commedia dell’arte, storia, technica, scenari, published in 1927. Complaint: A lyric poem, popular in the Renaissance, in which the speaker expresses sorrow about his or her condition. Typically, the speaker’s sadness is caused by an unresponsive lover, but some complaints cite other sources of unhappiness, such as poverty or fate. A commonly cited example is ‘‘A Complaint by Night of the Lover Not Beloved’’ by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Thomas Sackville’s ‘‘Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham’’ traces the duke’s unhappiness to his ruthless ambition. Conceit: A clever and fanciful metaphor, usually expressed through elaborate and extended comparison, that presents a striking parallel between two seemingly dissimilar things—for example, elaborately comparing a beautiful woman to an object like a garden or the sun. The conceit was a popu-

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lar device throughout the Elizabethan Age and Baroque Age and was the principal technique of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets. This usage of the word conceit is unrelated to the best-known deﬁnition of conceit as an arrogant attitude or behavior. The conceit ﬁgures prominently in the works of John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. Concrete: Concrete is the opposite of abstract, and refers to a thing that actually exists or a description that allows the reader to experience an object or concept with the senses. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden contains much concrete description of nature and wildlife. Concrete Poetry: Poetry in which visual elements play a large part in the poetic effect. Punctuation marks, letters, or words are arranged on a page to form a visual design: a cross, for example, or a bumblebee. Max Bill and Eugene Gomringer were among the early practitioners of concrete poetry; Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos are among contemporary authors of concrete poetry. Confessional Poetry: A form of poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman wrote poetry in the confessional vein. Conﬂict: The conﬂict in a work of ﬁction is the issue to be resolved in the story. It usually occurs between two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist, or between the protagonist and society or the protagonist and himself or herself. Conﬂict in Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie comes as a result of urban society, while Jack London’s short story ‘‘To Build a Fire’’ concerns the protagonist’s battle against the cold and himself. Connotation: The impression that a word gives beyond its deﬁned meaning. Connotations may be universally understood or may be signiﬁcant only to a certain group. Both ‘‘horse’’ and ‘‘steed’’ denote the same animal, but ‘‘steed’’ has a different connotation, deriving from the chivalrous or romantic narratives in which the word was once often used. Consonance: Consonance occurs in poetry when words appearing at the ends of two or more verses have similar ﬁnal consonant sounds but have ﬁnal vowel sounds that differ, as with ‘‘stuff’’ and ‘‘off.’’ Consonance is found in ‘‘The curfew tolls the knells of parting day’’ from Thomas Grey’s ‘‘An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard.’’ Also known as Half Rhyme or Slant Rhyme.

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Convention: Any widely accepted literary device, style, or form. A soliloquy, in which a character reveals to the audience his or her private thoughts, is an example of a dramatic convention. Corrido: A Mexican ballad. Examples of corridos include ‘‘Muerte del afamado Bilito,’’ ‘‘La voz de mi conciencia,’’ ‘‘Lucio Perez,’’ ‘‘La juida,’’ and ‘‘Los presos.’’ Couplet: Two lines of poetry with the same rhyme and meter, often expressing a complete and selfcontained thought. The following couplet is from Alexander Pope’s ‘‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’’: ’Tis Use alone that sanctiﬁes Expense, And Splendour borrows all her rays from Sense. Criticism: The systematic study and evaluation of literary works, usually based on a speciﬁc method or set of principles. An important part of literary studies since ancient times, the practice of criticism has given rise to numerous theories, methods, and ‘‘schools,’’ sometimes producing conﬂicting, even contradictory, interpretations of literature in general as well as of individual works. Even such basic issues as what constitutes a poem or a novel have been the subject of much criticism over the centuries. Seminal texts of literary criticism include Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie, John Dryden’s Of Dramatic Poesie, and William Wordsworth’s ‘‘Preface’’ to the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads. Contemporary schools of criticism include deconstruction, feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, new historicist, postcolonialist, and reader-response.

D Dactyl: See Foot Dadaism: A protest movement in art and literature founded by Tristan Tzara in 1916. Followers of the movement expressed their outrage at the destruction brought about by World War I by revolting against numerous forms of social convention. The Dadaists presented works marked by calculated madness and ﬂamboyant nonsense. They stressed total freedom of expression, commonly through primitive displays of emotion and illogical, often senseless, poetry. The movement ended shortly after the war, when it was replaced by surrealism. Proponents of Dadaism include Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and Paul Eluard. Decadent: See Decadents

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Decadents: The followers of a nineteenth-century literary movement that had its beginnings in French aestheticism. Decadent literature displays a fascination with perverse and morbid states; a search for novelty and sensation—the ‘‘new thrill’’; a preoccupation with mysticism; and a belief in the senselessness of human existence. The movement is closely associated with the doctrine Art for Art’s Sake. The term ‘‘decadence’’ is sometimes used to denote a decline in the quality of art or literature following a period of greatness. Major French decadents are Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. English decadents include Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Frank Harris. Deconstruction: A method of literary criticism developed by Jacques Derrida and characterized by multiple conﬂicting interpretations of a given work. Deconstructionists consider the impact of the language of a work and suggest that the true meaning of the work is not necessarily the meaning that the author intended. Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie is the seminal text on deconstructive strategies; among American practitioners of this method of criticism are Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller. Deduction: The process of reaching a conclusion through reasoning from general premises to a speciﬁc premise. An example of deduction is present in the following syllogism: Premise: All mammals are animals. Premise: All whales are mammals. Conclusion: Therefore, all whales are animals. Denotation: The deﬁnition of a word, apart from the impressions or feelings it creates in the reader. The word ‘‘apartheid’’ denotes a political and economic policy of segregation by race, but its connotations— oppression, slavery, inequality—are numerous. Denouement: A French word meaning ‘‘the unknotting.’’ In literary criticism, it denotes the resolution of conﬂict in ﬁction or drama. The denouement follows the climax and provides an outcome to the primary plot situation as well as an explanation of secondary plot complications. The denouement often involves a character’s recognition of his or her state of mind or moral condition. A well-known example of denouement is the last scene of the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, in which couples are married, an evildoer repents, the identities of two disguised characters are revealed, and a ruler is restored to power. Also known as Falling Action.

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Description: Descriptive writing is intended to allow a reader to picture the scene or setting in which the action of a story takes place. The form this description takes often evokes an intended emotional response—a dark, spooky graveyard will evoke fear, and a peaceful, sunny meadow will evoke calmness. An example of a descriptive story is Edgar Allan Poe’s Landor’s Cottage, which offers a detailed depiction of a New York country estate. Detective Story: A narrative about the solution of a mystery or the identiﬁcation of a criminal. The conventions of the detective story include the detective’s scrupulous use of logic in solving the mystery; incompetent or ineffectual police; a suspect who appears guilty at ﬁrst but is later proved innocent; and the detective’s friend or conﬁdant— often the narrator—whose slowness in interpreting clues emphasizes by contrast the detective’s brilliance. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ is commonly regarded as the earliest example of this type of story. With this work, Poe established many of the conventions of the detective story genre, which are still in practice. Other practitioners of this vast and extremely popular genre include Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie. Deus ex machina: A Latin term meaning ‘‘god out of a machine.’’ In Greek drama, a god was often lowered onto the stage by a mechanism of some kind to rescue the hero or untangle the plot. By extension, the term refers to any artiﬁcial device or coincidence used to bring about a convenient and simple solution to a plot. This is a common device in melodramas and includes such fortunate circumstances as the sudden receipt of a legacy to save the family farm or a last-minute stay of execution. The deus ex machina invariably rewards the virtuous and punishes evildoers. Examples of deus ex machina include King Louis XIV in Jean-Baptiste Moliere’s Tartuffe and Queen Victoria in The Pirates of Penzance by William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Bertolt Brecht parodies the abuse of such devices in the conclusion of his Threepenny Opera. Dialogue: In its widest sense, dialogue is simply conversation between people in a literary work; in its most restricted sense, it refers speciﬁcally to the speech of characters in a drama. As a speciﬁc literary genre, a ‘‘dialogue’’ is a composition in which characters debate an issue or idea. The Greek philosopher Plato frequently expounded his theories in the form of dialogues.

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Diction: The selection and arrangement of words in a literary work. Either or both may vary depending on the desired effect. There are four general types of diction: ‘‘formal,’’ used in scholarly or lofty writing; ‘‘informal,’’ used in relaxed but educated conversation; ‘‘colloquial,’’ used in everyday speech; and ‘‘slang,’’ containing newly coined words and other terms not accepted in formal usage. Didactic: A term used to describe works of literature that aim to teach some moral, religious, political, or practical lesson. Although didactic elements are often found in artistically pleasing works, the term ‘‘didactic’’ usually refers to literature in which the message is more important than the form. The term may also be used to criticize a work that the critic ﬁnds ‘‘overly didactic,’’ that is, heavy-handed in its delivery of a lesson. Examples of didactic literature include John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, JeanJacques Rousseau’s Emile, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Simple Story. Dimeter: See Meter Dionysian: See Apollonian and Dionysian Discordia concours: A Latin phrase meaning ‘‘discord in harmony.’’ The term was coined by the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson to describe ‘‘a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.’’ Johnson created the expression by reversing a phrase by the Latin poet Horace. The metaphysical poetry of John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, George Herbert, and Edward Taylor among others, contains many examples of discordia concours. In Donne’s ‘‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,’’ the poet compares the union of himself with his lover to a draftsman’s compass: If they be two, they are two so, As stiff twin compasses are two: Thy soul, the ﬁxed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do; And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Dissonance: A combination of harsh or jarring sounds, especially in poetry. Although such combinations may be accidental, poets sometimes intentionally make them to achieve particular effects. Dissonance is also sometimes used to refer to close but not identical rhymes. When this is the case, the word functions as a synonym for consonance. Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many other poets have made deliberate use of dissonance.

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Doppelganger: A literary technique by which a character is duplicated (usually in the form of an alter ego, though sometimes as a ghostly counterpart) or divided into two distinct, usually opposite personalities. The use of this character device is widespread in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, and indicates a growing awareness among authors that the ‘‘self’’ is really a composite of many ‘‘selves.’’ A well-known story containing a doppelganger character is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which dramatizes an internal struggle between good and evil. Also known as The Double. Double Entendre: A corruption of a French phrase meaning ‘‘double meaning.’’ The term is used to indicate a word or phrase that is deliberately ambiguous, especially when one of the meanings is risque or improper. An example of a double entendre is the Elizabethan usage of the verb ‘‘die,’’ which refers both to death and to orgasm. Double, The: See Doppelganger Draft: Any preliminary version of a written work. An author may write dozens of drafts which are revised to form the ﬁnal work, or he or she may write only one, with few or no revisions. Dorothy Parker’s observation that ‘‘I can’t write ﬁve words but that I change seven’’ humorously indicates the purpose of the draft. Drama: In its widest sense, a drama is any work designed to be presented by actors on a stage. Similarly, ‘‘drama’’ denotes a broad literary genre that includes a variety of forms, from pageant and spectacle to tragedy and comedy, as well as countless types and subtypes. More commonly in modern usage, however, a drama is a work that treats serious subjects and themes but does not aim at the grandeur of tragedy. This use of the term originated with the eighteenth-century French writer Denis Diderot, who used the word drame to designate his plays about middle-class life; thus ‘‘drama’’ typically features characters of a less exalted stature than those of tragedy. Examples of classical dramas include Menander’s comedy Dyscolus and Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex. Contemporary dramas include Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, and August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Dramatic Irony: Occurs when the audience of a play or the reader of a work of literature knows something that a character in the work itself does not know. The irony is in the contrast between the

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intended meaning of the statements or actions of a character and the additional information understood by the audience. A celebrated example of dramatic irony is in Act V of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where two young lovers meet their end as a result of a tragic misunderstanding. Here, the audience has full knowledge that Juliet’s apparent ‘‘death’’ is merely temporary; she will regain her senses when the mysterious ‘‘sleeping potion’’ she has taken wears off. But Romeo, mistaking Juliet’s drug-induced trance for true death, kills himself in grief. Upon awakening, Juliet discovers Romeo’s corpse and, in despair, slays herself.

Boccaccio, Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Jonathan Swift, and Louis MacNeice also wrote eclogues.

Dramatic Monologue: See Monologue

Edwardian Age: See Edwardian

Dramatic Poetry: Any lyric work that employs elements of drama such as dialogue, conﬂict, or characterization, but excluding works that are intended for stage presentation. A monologue is a form of dramatic poetry.

Electra Complex: A daughter’s amorous obsession with her father. The term Electra complex comes from the plays of Euripides and Sophocles entitled Electra, in which the character Electra drives her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her lover in revenge for the murder of their father.

Dramatis Personae: The characters in a work of literature, particularly a drama. The list of characters printed before the main text of a play or in the program is the dramatis personae. Dream Allegory: See Dream Vision Dream Vision: A literary convention, chieﬂy of the Middle Ages. In a dream vision a story is presented as a literal dream of the narrator. This device was commonly used to teach moral and religious lessons. Important works of this type are The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Piers Plowman by William Langland, and The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Also known as Dream Allegory. Dystopia: An imaginary place in a work of ﬁction where the characters lead dehumanized, fearful lives. Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale portray versions of dystopia.

E Eclogue: In classical literature, a poem featuring rural themes and structured as a dialogue among shepherds. Eclogues often took speciﬁc poetic forms, such as elegies or love poems. Some were written as the soliloquy of a shepherd. In later centuries, ‘‘eclogue’’ came to refer to any poem that was in the pastoral tradition or that had a dialogue or monologue structure. A classical example of an eclogue is Virgil’s Eclogues, also known as Bucolics. Giovanni

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Edwardian: Describes cultural conventions identiﬁed with the period of the reign of Edward VII of England (1901–1910). Writers of the Edwardian Age typically displayed a strong reaction against the propriety and conservatism of the Victorian Age. Their work often exhibits distrust of authority in religion, politics, and art and expresses strong doubts about the soundness of conventional values. Writers of this era include George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad.

Elegy: A lyric poem that laments the death of a person or the eventual death of all people. In a conventional elegy, set in a classical world, the poet and subject are spoken of as shepherds. In modern criticism, the word elegy is often used to refer to a poem that is melancholy or mournfully contemplative. John Milton’s ‘‘Lycidas’’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘Adonais’’ are two examples of this form. Elizabethan Age: A period of great economic growth, religious controversy, and nationalism closely associated with the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603). The Elizabethan Age is considered a part of the general renaissance—that is, the ﬂowering of arts and literature—that took place in Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. The era is considered the golden age of English literature. The most important dramas in English and a great deal of lyric poetry were produced during this period, and modern English criticism began around this time. The notable authors of the period—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and John Donne—are among the best in all of English literature. Elizabethan Drama: English comic and tragic plays produced during the Renaissance, or more narrowly, those plays written during the last years of and few years after Queen Elizabeth’s reign. William Shakespeare is considered an Elizabethan dramatist in the broader sense, although most of his work was produced during the reign of James I. Examples of Elizabethan comedies include John

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Lyly’s The Woman in the Moone, Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, or, Moll Cut Purse, and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Examples of Elizabethan tragedies include William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Tragedy of the Duchess of Malﬁ. Empathy: A sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself. Empathy is often used to describe the response of a reader to a literary character. An example of an empathic passage is William Shakespeare’s description in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis of: the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain. Readers of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Windhover may experience some of the physical sensations evoked in the description of the movement of the falcon. English Sonnet: See Sonnet Enjambment: The running over of the sense and structure of a line of verse or a couplet into the following verse or couplet. Andrew Marvell’s ‘‘To His Coy Mistress’’ is structured as a series of enjambments, as in lines 11–12: ‘‘My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow.’’ Enlightenment, The: An eighteenth-century philosophical movement. It began in France but had a wide impact throughout Europe and America. Thinkers of the Enlightenment valued reason and believed that both the individual and society could achieve a state of perfection. Corresponding to this essentially humanist vision was a resistance to religious authority. Important ﬁgures of the Enlightenment were Denis Diderot and Voltaire in France, Edward Gibbon and David Hume in England, and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in the United States. Epic: A long narrative poem about the adventures of a hero of great historic or legendary importance. The setting is vast and the action is often given cosmic signiﬁcance through the intervention of supernatural forces such as gods, angels, or demons. Epics are typically written in a classical style of grand simplicity with elaborate metaphors and allusions that enhance the symbolic importance of a hero’s adventures. Some well-known epics are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Epic Simile: See Homeric Simile

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Epic Theater: A theory of theatrical presentation developed by twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht created a type of drama that the audience could view with complete detachment. He used what he termed ‘‘alienation effects’’ to create an emotional distance between the audience and the action on stage. Among these effects are: short, self-contained scenes that keep the play from building to a cathartic climax; songs that comment on the action; and techniques of acting that prevent the actor from developing an emotional identity with his role. Besides the plays of Bertolt Brecht, other plays that utilize epic theater conventions include those of Georg Buchner, Frank Wedekind, Erwin Piscator, and Leopold Jessner. Epigram: A saying that makes the speaker’s point quickly and concisely. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote an epigram that neatly sums up the form: What is an Epigram? A Dwarﬁsh whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul. Epilogue: A concluding statement or section of a literary work. In dramas, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the epilogue is a closing speech, often in verse, delivered by an actor at the end of a play and spoken directly to the audience. A famous epilogue is Puck’s speech at the end of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Epiphany: A sudden revelation of truth inspired by a seemingly trivial incident. The term was widely used by James Joyce in his critical writings, and the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners are commonly called ‘‘epiphanies.’’ Episode: An incident that forms part of a story and is signiﬁcantly related to it. Episodes may be either self-contained narratives or events that depend on a larger context for their sense and importance. Examples of episodes include the founding of Wilmington, Delaware in Charles Reade’s The Disinherited Heir and the individual events comprising the picaresque novels and medieval romances. Episodic Plot: See Plot Epitaph: An inscription on a tomb or tombstone, or a verse written on the occasion of a person’s death. Epitaphs may be serious or humorous. Dorothy Parker’s epitaph reads, ‘‘I told you I was sick.’’ Epithalamion: A song or poem written to honor and commemorate a marriage ceremony. Famous examples include Edmund Spenser’s ‘‘Epithala-

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mion’’ and e. e. cummings’s ‘‘Epithalamion.’’ Also spelled Epithalamium. Epithalamium: See Epithalamion Epithet: A word or phrase, often disparaging or abusive, that expresses a character trait of someone or something. ‘‘The Napoleon of crime’’ is an epithet applied to Professor Moriarty, arch-rival of Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s series of detective stories. Exempla: See Exemplum Exemplum: A tale with a moral message. This form of literary sermonizing ﬂourished during the Middle Ages, when exempla appeared in collections known as ‘‘example-books.’’ The works of Geoffrey Chaucer are full of exempla. Existentialism: A predominantly twentieth-century philosophy concerned with the nature and perception of human existence. There are two major strains of existentialist thought: atheistic and Christian. Followers of atheistic existentialism believe that the individual is alone in a godless universe and that the basic human condition is one of suffering and loneliness. Nevertheless, because there are no ﬁxed values, individuals can create their own characters— indeed, they can shape themselves—through the exercise of free will. The atheistic strain culminates in and is popularly associated with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Christian existentialists, on the other hand, believe that only in God may people ﬁnd freedom from life’s anguish. The two strains hold certain beliefs in common: that existence cannot be fully understood or described through empirical effort; that anguish is a universal element of life; that individuals must bear responsibility for their actions; and that there is no common standard of behavior or perception for religious and ethical matters. Existentialist thought ﬁgures prominently in the works of such authors as Eugene Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus. Expatriates: See Expatriatism Expatriatism: The practice of leaving one’s country to live for an extended period in another country. Literary expatriates include English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats in Italy, Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in England, American writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway in France, and Trinidadian author Neil Bissondath in Canada.

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Exposition: Writing intended to explain the nature of an idea, thing, or theme. Expository writing is often combined with description, narration, or argument. In dramatic writing, the exposition is the introductory material which presents the characters, setting, and tone of the play. An example of dramatic exposition occurs in many nineteenth-century drawing-room comedies in which the butler and the maid open the play with relevant talk about their master and mistress; in composition, exposition relays factual information, as in encyclopedia entries. Expressionism: An indistinct literary term, originally used to describe an early twentieth-century school of German painting. The term applies to almost any mode of unconventional, highly subjective writing that distorts reality in some way. Advocates of Expressionism include dramatists George Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Luigi Pirandello, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O’Neill, and Elmer Rice; poets George Heym, Ernst Stadler, August Stramm, Gottfried Benn, and Georg Trakl; and novelists Franz Kafka and James Joyce. Extended Monologue: See Monologue

F Fable: A prose or verse narrative intended to convey a moral. Animals or inanimate objects with human characteristics often serve as characters in fables. A famous fable is Aesop’s ‘‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’’ Fairy Tales: Short narratives featuring mythical beings such as fairies, elves, and sprites. These tales originally belonged to the folklore of a particular nation or region, such as those collected in Germany by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Two other celebrated writers of fairy tales are Hans Christian Andersen and Rudyard Kipling. Falling Action: See Denouement Fantasy: A literary form related to mythology and folklore. Fantasy literature is typically set in nonexistent realms and features supernatural beings. Notable examples of fantasy literature are The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake. Farce: A type of comedy characterized by broad humor, outlandish incidents, and often vulgar subject matter. Much of the ‘‘comedy’’ in ﬁlm and television could more accurately be described as farce.

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Feet: See Foot Feminine Rhyme: See Rhyme Femme fatale: A French phrase with the literal translation ‘‘fatal woman.’’ A femme fatale is a sensuous, alluring woman who often leads men into danger or trouble. A classic example of the femme fatale is the nameless character in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, portrayed by Marilyn Monroe in the ﬁlm adaptation. Fiction: Any story that is the product of imagination rather than a documentation of fact. characters and events in such narratives may be based in real life but their ultimate form and conﬁguration is a creation of the author. Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind are examples of ﬁction. Figurative Language: A technique in writing in which the author temporarily interrupts the order, construction, or meaning of the writing for a particular effect. This interruption takes the form of one or more ﬁgures of speech such as hyperbole, irony, or simile. Figurative language is the opposite of literal language, in which every word is truthful, accurate, and free of exaggeration or embellishment. Examples of ﬁgurative language are tropes such as metaphor and rhetorical ﬁgures such as apostrophe. Figures of Speech: Writing that differs from customary conventions for construction, meaning, order, or signiﬁcance for the purpose of a special meaning or effect. There are two major types of ﬁgures of speech: rhetorical ﬁgures, which do not make changes in the meaning of the words, and tropes, which do. Types of ﬁgures of speech include simile, hyperbole, alliteration, and pun, among many others. Fin de siecle: A French term meaning ‘‘end of the century.’’ The term is used to denote the last decade of the nineteenth century, a transition period when writers and other artists abandoned old conventions and looked for new techniques and objectives. Two writers commonly associated with the ﬁn de siecle mindset are Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. First Person: See Point of View Flashback: A device used in literature to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. Flashbacks are often introduced as the dreams or recollections of one or more characters. Flashback techniques are often used in ﬁlms, where they

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are typically set off by a gradual changing of one picture to another. Foil: A character in a work of literature whose physical or psychological qualities contrast strongly with, and therefore highlight, the corresponding qualities of another character. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle portrayed Dr. Watson as a man of normal habits and intelligence, making him a foil for the eccentric and wonderfully perceptive Sherlock Holmes. Folk Ballad: See Ballad Folklore: Traditions and myths preserved in a culture or group of people. Typically, these are passed on by word of mouth in various forms—such as legends, songs, and proverbs— or preserved in customs and ceremonies. This term was ﬁrst used by W. J. Thoms in 1846. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is the record of English folklore; myths about the frontier and the Old South exemplify American folklore. Folktale: A story originating in oral tradition. Folktales fall into a variety of categories, including legends, ghost stories, fairy tales, fables, and anecdotes based on historical ﬁgures and events. Examples of folktales include Giambattista Basile’s The Pentamerone, which contains the tales of Puss in Boots, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, which represent transplanted African folktales and American tales about the characters Mike Fink, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and Pecos Bill. Foot: The smallest unit of rhythm in a line of poetry. In English-language poetry, a foot is typically one accented syllable combined with one or two unaccented syllables. There are many different types of feet. When the accent is on the second syllable of a two syllable word (con-tort), the foot is an ‘‘iamb’’; the reverse accentual pattern (tor -ture) is a ‘‘trochee.’’ Other feet that commonly occur in poetry in English are ‘‘anapest’’, two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable as in inter-cept, and ‘‘dactyl’’, an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables as in su-i-cide. Foreshadowing: A device used in literature to create expectation or to set up an explanation of later developments. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the graveyard encounter at the beginning of the novel between Pip and the escaped convict Magwitch foreshadows the baleful atmosphere and events that comprise much of the narrative.

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Form: The pattern or construction of a work which identiﬁes its genre and distinguishes it from other genres. Examples of forms include the different genres, such as the lyric form or the short story form, and various patterns for poetry, such as the verse form or the stanza form. Formalism: In literary criticism, the belief that literature should follow prescribed rules of construction, such as those that govern the sonnet form. Examples of formalism are found in the work of the New Critics and structuralists. Fourteener Meter: See Meter Free Verse: Poetry that lacks regular metrical and rhyme patterns but that tries to capture the cadences of everyday speech. The form allows a poet to exploit a variety of rhythmical effects within a single poem. Free-verse techniques have been widely used in the twentieth century by such writers as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams. Also known as Vers libre. Futurism: A ﬂamboyant literary and artistic movement that developed in France, Italy, and Russia from 1908 through the 1920s. Futurist theater and poetry abandoned traditional literary forms. In their place, followers of the movement attempted to achieve total freedom of expression through bizarre imagery and deformed or newly invented words. The Futurists were self-consciously modern artists who attempted to incorporate the appearances and sounds of modern life into their work. Futurist writers include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

G Genre: A category of literary work. In critical theory, genre may refer to both the content of a given work—tragedy, comedy, pastoral—and to its form, such as poetry, novel, or drama. This term also refers to types of popular literature, as in the genres of science ﬁction or the detective story. Genteel Tradition: A term coined by critic George Santayana to describe the literary practice of certain late nineteenth-century American writers, especially New Englanders. Followers of the Genteel Tradition emphasized conventionality in social, religious, moral, and literary standards. Some of the best-known writers of the Genteel Tradition are R. H. Stoddard and Bayard Taylor.

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Gilded Age: A period in American history during the 1870s characterized by political corruption and materialism. A number of important novels of social and political criticism were written during this time. Examples of Gilded Age literature include Henry Adams’s Democracy and F. Marion Crawford’s An American Politician. Gothic: See Gothicism Gothicism: In literary criticism, works characterized by a taste for the medieval or morbidly attractive. A gothic novel prominently features elements of horror, the supernatural, gloom, and violence: clanking chains, terror, charnel houses, ghosts, medieval castles, and mysteriously slamming doors. The term ‘‘gothic novel’’ is also applied to novels that lack elements of the traditional Gothic setting but that create a similar atmosphere of terror or dread. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is perhaps the best-known English work of this kind. Gothic Novel: See Gothicism Great Chain of Being: The belief that all things and creatures in nature are organized in a hierarchy from inanimate objects at the bottom to God at the top. This system of belief was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A summary of the concept of the great chain of being can be found in the ﬁrst epistle of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, and more recently in Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Grotesque: In literary criticism, the subject matter of a work or a style of expression characterized by exaggeration, deformity, freakishness, and disorder. The grotesque often includes an element of comic absurdity. Early examples of literary grotesque include Francois Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, while more recent examples can be found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene Ionesco, Gunter Grass, Thomas Mann, Mervyn Peake, and Joseph Heller, among many others.

H Haiku: The shortest form of Japanese poetry, constructed in three lines of ﬁve, seven, and ﬁve syllables respectively. The message of a haiku poem usually centers on some aspect of spirituality and provokes an emotional response in the reader. Early masters of haiku include Basho, Buson, Kobayashi

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Issa, and Masaoka Shiki. English writers of haiku include the Imagists, notably Ezra Pound, H. D., Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams. Also known as Hokku. Half Rhyme: See Consonance Hamartia: In tragedy, the event or act that leads to the hero’s or heroine’s downfall. This term is often incorrectly used as a synonym for tragic ﬂaw. In Richard Wright’s Native Son, the act that seals Bigger Thomas’s fate is his ﬁrst impulsive murder. Harlem Renaissance: The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is generally considered the ﬁrst signiﬁcant movement of black writers and artists in the United States. During this period, new and established black writers published more ﬁction and poetry than ever before, the ﬁrst inﬂuential black literary journals were established, and black authors and artists received their ﬁrst widespread recognition and serious critical appraisal. Among the major writers associated with this period are Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Works representative of the Harlem Renaissance include Arna Bontemps’s poems ‘‘The Return’’ and ‘‘Golgotha Is a Mountain,’’ Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem, Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, Langston Hughes’s poem ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’’ and the journals Crisis and Opportunity, both founded during this period. Also known as Negro Renaissance and New Negro Movement. Harlequin: A stock character of the commedia dell’arte who occasionally interrupted the action with silly antics. Harlequin ﬁrst appeared on the English stage in John Day’s The Travailes of the Three English Brothers. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is one of the few modern groups to adapt Harlequin to the needs of contemporary satire. Hellenism: Imitation of ancient Greek thought or styles. Also, an approach to life that focuses on the growth and development of the intellect. ‘‘Hellenism’’ is sometimes used to refer to the belief that reason can be applied to examine all human experience. A cogent discussion of Hellenism can be found in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Heptameter: See Meter Hero/Heroine: The principal sympathetic character (male or female) in a literary work. Heroes and heroines typically exhibit admirable traits: ideal-

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ism, courage, and integrity, for example. Famous heroes and heroines include Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the anonymous narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Heroic Couplet: A rhyming couplet written in iambic pentameter (a verse with ﬁve iambic feet). The following lines by Alexander Pope are an example: ‘‘Truth guards the Poet, sanctiﬁes the line,/ And makes Immortal, Verse as mean as mine.’’ Heroic Line: The meter and length of a line of verse in epic or heroic poetry. This varies by language and time period. For example, in English poetry, the heroic line is iambic pentameter (a verse with ﬁve iambic feet); in French, the alexandrine (a verse with six iambic feet); in classical literature, dactylic hexameter (a verse with six dactylic feet). Heroine: See Hero/Heroine Hexameter: See Meter Historical Criticism: The study of a work based on its impact on the world of the time period in which it was written. Examples of postmodern historical criticism can be found in the work of Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jonathan Goldberg. Hokku: See Haiku Holocaust: See Holocaust Literature Holocaust Literature: Literature inﬂuenced by or written about the Holocaust of World War II. Such literature includes true stories of survival in concentration camps, escape, and life after the war, as well as ﬁctional works and poetry. Representative works of Holocaust literature include Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, Czeslaw Milosz’s Collected Poems, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Homeric Simile: An elaborate, detailed comparison written as a simile many lines in length. An example of an epic simile from John Milton’s Paradise Lost follows: Angel Forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge Aﬂoat, when with ﬁerce winds Orion armed Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perﬁdious hatred they pursued The sojourners of

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Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their ﬂoating carcasses And broken chariot-wheels. Also known as Epic Simile. Horatian Satire: See Satire Humanism: A philosophy that places faith in the dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature. ‘‘Humanists’’ typically believe in the perfectibility of human nature and view reason and education as the means to that end. Humanist thought is represented in the works of Marsilio Ficino, Ludovico Castelvetro, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Dean John Colet, Desiderius Erasmus, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Matthew Arnold, and Irving Babbitt. Humors: Mentions of the humors refer to the ancient Greek theory that a person’s health and personality were determined by the balance of four basic ﬂuids in the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A dominance of any ﬂuid would cause extremes in behavior. An excess of blood created a sanguine person who was joyful, aggressive, and passionate; a phlegmatic person was shy, fearful, and sluggish; too much yellow bile led to a choleric temperament characterized by impatience, anger, bitterness, and stubbornness; and excessive black bile created melancholy, a state of laziness, gluttony, and lack of motivation. Literary treatment of the humors is exempliﬁed by several characters in Ben Jonson’s plays Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour. Also spelled Humours. Humours: See Humors Hyperbole: In literary criticism, deliberate exaggeration used to achieve an effect. In William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth hyperbolizes when she says, ‘‘All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand.’’

I Iamb: See Foot Idiom: A word construction or verbal expression closely associated with a given language. For example, in colloquial English the construction ‘‘how come’’ can be used instead of ‘‘why’’ to introduce a question. Similarly, ‘‘a piece of cake’’ is sometimes used to describe a task that is easily done. Image: A concrete representation of an object or sensory experience. Typically, such a representation helps evoke the feelings associated with the

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object or experience itself. Images are either ‘‘literal’’ or ‘‘ﬁgurative.’’ Literal images are especially concrete and involve little or no extension of the obvious meaning of the words used to express them. Figurative images do not follow the literal meaning of the words exactly. Images in literature are usually visual, but the term ‘‘image’’ can also refer to the representation of any sensory experience. In his poem ‘‘The Shepherd’s Hour,’’ Paul Verlaine presents the following image: ‘‘The Moon is red through horizon’s fog;/ In a dancing mist the hazy meadow sleeps.’’ The ﬁrst line is broadly literal, while the second line involves turns of meaning associated with dancing and sleeping. Imagery: The array of images in a literary work. Also, ﬁgurative language. William Butler Yeats’s ‘‘The Second Coming’’ offers a powerful image of encroaching anarchy: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart. . . . Imagism: An English and American poetry movement that ﬂourished between 1908 and 1917. The Imagists used precise, clearly presented images in their works. They also used common, everyday speech and aimed for conciseness, concrete imagery, and the creation of new rhythms. Participants in the Imagist movement included Ezra Pound, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell, among others. In medias res: A Latin term meaning ‘‘in the middle of things.’’ It refers to the technique of beginning a story at its midpoint and then using various ﬂashback devices to reveal previous action. This technique originated in such epics as Virgil’s Aeneid. Induction: The process of reaching a conclusion by reasoning from speciﬁc premises to form a general premise. Also, an introductory portion of a work of literature, especially a play. Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘‘Prologue’’ to the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Sackville’s ‘‘Induction’’ to The Mirror of Magistrates, and the opening scene in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew are examples of inductions to literary works. Intentional Fallacy: The belief that judgments of a literary work based solely on an author’s stated or implied intentions are false and misleading. Critics who believe in the concept of the intentional fallacy typically argue that the work itself is sufﬁcient matter for interpretation, even though they may concede that an author’s statement of purpose can

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be useful. Analysis of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads based on the observations about poetry he makes in his ‘‘Preface’’ to the second edition of that work is an example of the intentional fallacy. Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which characters’ thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The interior monologue typically aims to reveal the inner self of a character. It portrays emotional experiences as they occur at both a conscious and unconscious level. images are often used to represent sensations or emotions. One of the best-known interior monologues in English is the Molly Bloom section at the close of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The interior monologue is also common in the works of Virginia Woolf. Internal Rhyme: Rhyme that occurs within a single line of verse. An example is in the opening line of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Raven’’: ‘‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.’’ Here, ‘‘dreary’’ and ‘‘weary’’ make an internal rhyme. Irish Literary Renaissance: A late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement in Irish literature. Members of the movement aimed to reduce the inﬂuence of British culture in Ireland and create an Irish national literature. William Butler Yeats, George Moore, and Sean O’Casey are three of the bestknown ﬁgures of the movement. Irony: In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated. The title of Jonathan Swift’s ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ is ironic because what Swift proposes in this essay is cannibalism—hardly ‘‘modest.’’ Italian Sonnet: See Sonnet

J Jacobean Age: The period of the reign of James I of England (1603–1625). The early literature of this period reﬂected the worldview of the Elizabethan Age, but a darker, more cynical attitude steadily grew in the art and literature of the Jacobean Age. This was an important time for English drama and poetry. Milestones include William Shakespeare’s tragedies, tragi-comedies, and sonnets; Ben Jonson’s various dramas; and John Donne’s metaphysical poetry. Jargon: Language that is used or understood only by a select group of people. Jargon may refer to terminology used in a certain profession, such as

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computer jargon, or it may refer to any nonsensical language that is not understood by most people. Literary examples of jargon are Francois Villon’s Ballades en jargon, which is composed in the secret language of the coquillards, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, narrated in the ﬁctional characters’ language of ‘‘Nadsat.’’ Juvenalian Satire: See Satire

K Knickerbocker Group: A somewhat indistinct group of New York writers of the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. Members of the group were linked only by location and a common theme: New York life. Two famous members of the Knickerbocker Group were Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. The group’s name derives from Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York.

L Lais: See Lay Lay: A song or simple narrative poem. The form originated in medieval France. Early French lais were often based on the Celtic legends and other tales sung by Breton minstrels—thus the name of the ‘‘Breton lay.’’ In fourteenth-century England, the term ‘‘lay’’ was used to describe short narratives written in imitation of the Breton lays. The most notable of these is Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘‘The Minstrel’s Tale.’’ Leitmotiv: See Motif Literal Language: An author uses literal language when he or she writes without exaggerating or embellishing the subject matter and without any tools of ﬁgurative language. To say ‘‘He ran very quickly down the street’’ is to use literal language, whereas to say ‘‘He ran like a hare down the street’’ would be using ﬁgurative language. Literary Ballad: See Ballad Literature: Literature is broadly deﬁned as any written or spoken material, but the term most often refers to creative works. Literature includes poetry, drama, ﬁction, and many kinds of nonﬁction writing, as well as oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions not necessarily preserved in a written format, such as ﬁlms and television programs. Lost Generation: A term ﬁrst used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of

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American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. Lyric Poetry: A poem expressing the subjective feelings and personal emotions of the poet. Such poetry is melodic, since it was originally accompanied by a lyre in recitals. Most Western poetry in the twentieth century may be classiﬁed as lyrical. Examples of lyric poetry include A. E. Housman’s elegy ‘‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’’ the odes of Pindar and Horace, Thomas Gray and William Collins, the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rainer Maria Rilke, and a host of other forms in the poetry of William Blake and Christina Rossetti, among many others.

M Mannerism: Exaggerated, artiﬁcial adherence to a literary manner or style. Also, a popular style of the visual arts of late sixteenth-century Europe that was marked by elongation of the human form and by intentional spatial distortion. Literary works that are self-consciously high-toned and artistic are often said to be ‘‘mannered.’’ Authors of such works include Henry James and Gertrude Stein. Masculine Rhyme: See Rhyme Masque: A lavish and elaborate form of entertainment, often performed in royal courts, that emphasizes song, dance, and costumery. The Renaissance form of the masque grew out of the spectacles of masked ﬁgures common in medieval England and Europe. The masque reached its peak of popularity and development in seventeenth-century England, during the reigns of James I and, especially, of Charles I. Ben Jonson, the most signiﬁcant masque writer, also created the ‘‘antimasque,’’ which incorporates elements of humor and the grotesque into the traditional masque and achieved greater dramatic quality. Masque-like interludes appear in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. One of the best-known English masques is John Milton’s Comus. Measure: The foot, verse, or time sequence used in a literary work, especially a poem. Measure is often used somewhat incorrectly as a synonym for meter. Melodrama: A play in which the typical plot is a conﬂict between characters who personify extreme good and evil. Melodramas usually end happily and

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emphasize sensationalism. Other literary forms that use the same techniques are often labeled ‘‘melodramatic.’’ The term was formerly used to describe a combination of drama and music; as such, it was synonymous with ‘‘opera.’’ Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, The Colleen Bawn, and The Poor of New York are examples of melodramas. The most popular media for twentieth-century melodramas are motion pictures and television. Metaphor: A ﬁgure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the ﬁrst object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object. An example is ‘‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’’ in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Here, Juliet, the ﬁrst object, is identiﬁed with qualities of the second object, the sun. Metaphysical Conceit: See Conceit Metaphysical Poetry: The body of poetry produced by a group of seventeenth-century English writers called the ‘‘Metaphysical Poets.’’ The group includes John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The Metaphysical Poets made use of everyday speech, intellectual analysis, and unique imagery. They aimed to portray the ordinary conﬂicts and contradictions of life. Their poems often took the form of an argument, and many of them emphasize physical and religious love as well as the ﬂeeting nature of life. Elaborate conceits are typical in metaphysical poetry. Marvell’s ‘‘To His Coy Mistress’’ is a wellknown example of a metaphysical poem. Metaphysical Poets: See Metaphysical Poetry Meter: In literary criticism, the repetition of sound patterns that creates a rhythm in poetry. The patterns are based on the number of syllables and the presence and absence of accents. The unit of rhythm in a line is called a foot. Types of meter are classiﬁed according to the number of feet in a line. These are the standard English lines: Monometer, one foot; Dimeter, two feet; Trimeter, three feet; Tetrameter, four feet; Pentameter, ﬁve feet; Hexameter, six feet (also called the Alexandrine); Heptameter, seven feet (also called the ‘‘Fourteener’’ when the feet are iambic). The most common English meter is the iambic pentameter, in which each line contains ten syllables, or ﬁve iambic feet, which individually are composed of an unstressed syllable followed by an accented syllable. Both of the following lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s

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‘‘Ulysses’’ are written in iambic pentameter: Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to ﬁnd, and not to yield. Mise en scene: The costumes, scenery, and other properties of a drama. Herbert Beerbohm Tree was renowned for the elaborate mises en scene of his lavish Shakespearean productions at His Majesty’s Theatre between 1897 and 1915. Modernism: Modern literary practices. Also, the principles of a literary school that lasted from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of World War II. Modernism is deﬁned by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values. Many writers are associated with the concepts of Modernism, including Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and James Joyce. Monologue: A composition, written or oral, by a single individual. More speciﬁcally, a speech given by a single individual in a drama or other public entertainment. It has no set length, although it is usually several or more lines long. An example of an ‘‘extended monologue’’—that is, a monologue of great length and seriousness—occurs in the oneact, one-character play The Stronger by August Strindberg. Monometer: See Meter Mood: The prevailing emotions of a work or of the author in his or her creation of the work. The mood of a work is not always what might be expected based on its subject matter. The poem ‘‘Dover Beach’’ by Matthew Arnold offers examples of two different moods originating from the same experience: watching the ocean at night. The mood of the ﬁrst three lines— The sea is calm tonight The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straights. . . . is in sharp contrast to the mood of the last three lines— And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and ﬂight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. Motif: A theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. For example, the various manifestations of the color white in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a ‘‘speciﬁc’’ motif, while the trials of star-crossed lovers is a ‘‘conventional’’

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motif from the literature of all periods. Also known as Motiv or Leitmotiv. Motiv: See Motif Muckrakers: An early twentieth-century group of American writers. Typically, their works exposed the wrongdoings of big business and government in the United States. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exempliﬁes the muckraking novel. Muses: Nine Greek mythological goddesses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory). Each muse patronized a speciﬁc area of the liberal arts and sciences. Calliope presided over epic poetry, Clio over history, Erato over love poetry, Euterpe over music or lyric poetry, Melpomene over tragedy, Polyhymnia over hymns to the gods, Terpsichore over dance, Thalia over comedy, and Urania over astronomy. Poets and writers traditionally made appeals to the Muses for inspiration in their work. John Milton invokes the aid of a muse at the beginning of the ﬁrst book of his Paradise Lost: Of Man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit of the Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who ﬁrst taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos. . . . Mystery: See Suspense Myth: An anonymous tale emerging from the traditional beliefs of a culture or social unit. Myths use supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They may also explain cosmic issues like creation and death. Collections of myths, known as mythologies, are common to all cultures and nations, but the best-known myths belong to the Norse, Roman, and Greek mythologies. A famous myth is the story of Arachne, an arrogant young girl who challenged a goddess, Athena, to a weaving contest; when the girl won, Athena was enraged and turned Arachne into a spider, thus explaining the existence of spiders.

N Narration: The telling of a series of events, real or invented. A narration may be either a simple narrative, in which the events are recounted chronologically, or a narrative with a plot, in which the account is given in a style reﬂecting the author’s artistic concept of the story. Narration is sometimes used as

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a synonym for ‘‘storyline.’’ The recounting of scary stories around a campﬁre is a form of narration. Narrative: A verse or prose accounting of an event or sequence of events, real or invented. The term is also used as an adjective in the sense ‘‘method of narration.’’ For example, in literary criticism, the expression ‘‘narrative technique’’ usually refers to the way the author structures and presents his or her story. Narratives range from the shortest accounts of events, as in Julius Caesar’s remark, ‘‘I came, I saw, I conquered,’’ to the longest historical or biographical works, as in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as well as diaries, travelogues, novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other ﬁctional forms. Narrative Poetry: A nondramatic poem in which the author tells a story. Such poems may be of any length or level of complexity. Epics such as Beowulf and ballads are forms of narrative poetry. Narrator: The teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Huckleberry Finn is the narrator of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Naturalism: A literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement’s major theorist, French novelist Emile Zola, envisioned a type of ﬁction that would examine human life with the objectivity of scientiﬁc inquiry. The Naturalists typically viewed human beings as either the products of ‘‘biological determinism,’’ ruled by hereditary instincts and engaged in an endless struggle for survival, or as the products of ‘‘socioeconomic determinism,’’ ruled by social and economic forces beyond their control. In their works, the Naturalists generally ignored the highest levels of society and focused on degradation: poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, insanity, and disease. Naturalism inﬂuenced authors throughout the world, including Henrik Ibsen and Thomas Hardy. In the United States, in particular, Naturalism had a profound impact. Among the authors who embraced its principles are Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Frank Norris. Negritude: A literary movement based on the concept of a shared cultural bond on the part of black Africans, wherever they may be in the world. It traces its origins to the former French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Negritude poets, novelists, and essayists generally stress four points in their writings: One, black alienation from tradi-

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tional African culture can lead to feelings of inferiority. Two, European colonialism and Western education should be resisted. Three, black Africans should seek to afﬁrm and deﬁne their own identity. Four, African culture can and should be reclaimed. Many Negritude writers also claim that blacks can make unique contributions to the world, based on a heightened appreciation of nature, rhythm, and human emotions—aspects of life they say are not so highly valued in the materialistic and rationalistic West. Examples of Negritude literature include the poetry of both Senegalese Leopold Senghor in Hosties noires and Martiniquais Aime-Fernand Cesaire in Return to My Native Land. Negro Renaissance: See Harlem Renaissance Neoclassical Period: See Neoclassicism Neoclassicism: In literary criticism, this term refers to the revival of the attitudes and styles of expression of classical literature. It is generally used to describe a period in European history beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting until about 1800. In its purest form, Neoclassicism marked a return to order, proportion, restraint, logic, accuracy, and decorum. In England, where Neoclassicism perhaps was most popular, it reﬂected the inﬂuence of seventeenth-century French writers, especially dramatists. Neoclassical writers typically reacted against the intensity and enthusiasm of the Renaissance period. They wrote works that appealed to the intellect, using elevated language and classical literary forms such as satire and the ode. Neoclassical works were often governed by the classical goal of instruction. English neoclassicists included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, John Gay, and Matthew Prior; French neoclassicists included Pierre Corneille and JeanBaptiste Moliere. Also known as Age of Reason. Neoclassicists: See Neoclassicism New Criticism: A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of literature. The New Critics saw little merit in historical and biographical analysis. Rather, they aimed to examine the text alone, free from the question of how external events—biographical or otherwise— may have helped shape it. This predominantly American school was named ‘‘New Criticism’’ by one of its practitioners, John Crowe Ransom. Other important New Critics included Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. New Negro Movement: See Harlem Renaissance

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Noble Savage: The idea that primitive man is noble and good but becomes evil and corrupted as he becomes civilized. The concept of the noble savage originated in the Renaissance period but is more closely identiﬁed with such later writers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Aphra Behn. First described in John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada, the noble savage is portrayed by the various Native Americans in James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘‘Leatherstocking Tales,’’ by Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and by John the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

O Objective Correlative: An outward set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events corresponding to an inward experience and evoking this experience in the reader. The term frequently appears in modern criticism in discussions of authors’ intended effects on the emotional responses of readers. This term was originally used by T. S. Eliot in his 1919 essay ‘‘Hamlet.’’ Objectivity: A quality in writing characterized by the absence of the author’s opinion or feeling about the subject matter. Objectivity is an important factor in criticism. The novels of Henry James and, to a certain extent, the poems of John Larkin demonstrate objectivity, and it is central to John Keats’s concept of ‘‘negative capability.’’ Critical and journalistic writing usually are or attempt to be objective. Occasional Verse: poetry written on the occasion of a signiﬁcant historical or personal event. Vers de societe is sometimes called occasional verse although it is of a less serious nature. Famous examples of occasional verse include Andrew Marvell’s ‘‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from England,’’ Walt Whitman’s ‘‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’’— written upon the death of Abraham Lincoln—and Edmund Spenser’s commemoration of his wedding, ‘‘Epithalamion.’’ Octave: A poem or stanza composed of eight lines. The term octave most often represents the ﬁrst eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet. An example of an octave is taken from a translation of a Petrarchan sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt: The pillar perisht is whereto I leant, The strongest stay of mine unquiet mind; The like of it no man again can ﬁnd, From East to West Still seeking though he went. To mind unhap! for hap away hath rent Of all my joy the very

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bark and rind; And I, alas, by chance am thus assigned Daily to mourn till death do it relent. Ode: Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and digniﬁed style. An ode usually concerns a single, serious theme. Most odes, but not all, are addressed to an object or individual. Odes are distinguished from other lyric poetic forms by their complex rhythmic and stanzaic patterns. An example of this form is John Keats’s ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale.’’ Oedipus Complex: A son’s amorous obsession with his mother. The phrase is derived from the story of the ancient Theban hero Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Literary occurrences of the Oedipus complex include Andre Gide’s Oedipe and Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale, as well as the most famous, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Omniscience: See Point of View Onomatopoeia: The use of words whose sounds express or suggest their meaning. In its simplest sense, onomatopoeia may be represented by words that mimic the sounds they denote such as ‘‘hiss’’ or ‘‘meow.’’ At a more subtle level, the pattern and rhythm of sounds and rhymes of a line or poem may be onomatopoeic. A celebrated example of onomatopoeia is the repetition of the word ‘‘bells’’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘‘The Bells.’’ Opera: A type of stage performance, usually a drama, in which the dialogue is sung. Classic examples of opera include Giuseppi Verdi’s La traviata, Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme, and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Major twentieth-century contributors to the form include Richard Strauss and Alban Berg. Operetta: A usually romantic comic opera. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Richard Sheridan’s The Duenna, and numerous works by William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan are examples of operettas. Oral Tradition: See Oral Transmission Oral Transmission: A process by which songs, ballads, folklore, and other material are transmitted by word of mouth. The tradition of oral transmission predates the written record systems of literate society. Oral transmission preserves material sometimes over generations, although often with variations. Memory plays a large part in the recitation and preservation of orally transmitted material. Breton lays, French fabliaux, national epics (including the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the Spanish El Cid,

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and the Finnish Kalevala), Native American myths and legends, and African folktales told by plantation slaves are examples of orally transmitted literature. Oration: Formal speaking intended to motivate the listeners to some action or feeling. Such public speaking was much more common before the development of timely printed communication such as newspapers. Famous examples of oration include Abraham Lincoln’s ‘‘Gettysburg Address’’ and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. Ottava Rima: An eight-line stanza of poetry composed in iambic pentameter (a ﬁve-foot line in which each foot consists of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable), following the abababcc rhyme scheme. This form has been prominently used by such important English writers as Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and W. B. Yeats. Oxymoron: A phrase combining two contradictory terms. Oxymorons may be intentional or unintentional. The following speech from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet uses several oxymorons: Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing ﬁrst create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold ﬁre, sick health! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

P Pantheism: The idea that all things are both a manifestation or revelation of God and a part of God at the same time. Pantheism was a common attitude in the early societies of Egypt, India, and Greece— the term derives from the Greek pan meaning ‘‘all’’ and theos meaning ‘‘deity.’’ It later became a signiﬁcant part of the Christian faith. William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among the many writers who have expressed the pantheistic attitude in their works.

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paradox. Literary examples include Francis Bacon’s statement, ‘‘The most corrected copies are commonly the least correct,’’ and ‘‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’’ from George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Parallelism: A method of comparison of two ideas in which each is developed in the same grammatical structure. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘‘Civilization’’ contains this example of parallelism: Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Parnassianism: A mid nineteenth-century movement in French literature. Followers of the movement stressed adherence to well-deﬁned artistic forms as a reaction against the often chaotic expression of the artist’s ego that dominated the work of the Romantics. The Parnassians also rejected the moral, ethical, and social themes exhibited in the works of French Romantics such as Victor Hugo. The aesthetic doctrines of the Parnassians strongly inﬂuenced the later symbolist and decadent movements. Members of the Parnassian school include Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Albert Glatigny, Francois Coppee, and Theodore de Banville. Parody: In literary criticism, this term refers to an imitation of a serious literary work or the signature style of a particular author in a ridiculous manner. A typical parody adopts the style of the original and applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect. Parody is a form of satire and could be considered the literary equivalent of a caricature or cartoon. Henry Fielding’s Shamela is a parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.

Parable: A story intended to teach a moral lesson or answer an ethical question. In the West, the best examples of parables are those of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, notably ‘‘The Prodigal Son,’’ but parables also are used in Suﬁsm, rabbinic literature, Hasidism, and Zen Buddhism.

Pastoral: A term derived from the Latin word ‘‘pastor,’’ meaning shepherd. A pastoral is a literary composition on a rural theme. The conventions of the pastoral were originated by the third-century Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote about the experiences, love affairs, and pastimes of Sicilian shepherds. In a pastoral, characters and language of a courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting. The term pastoral is also used to classify dramas, elegies, and lyrics that exhibit the use of country settings and shepherd characters. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘Adonais’’ and John Milton’s ‘‘Lycidas’’ are two famous examples of pastorals.

Paradox: A statement that appears illogical or contradictory at ﬁrst, but may actually point to an underlying truth. ‘‘Less is more’’ is an example of a

Pastorela: The Spanish name for the shepherds play, a folk drama reenacted during the Christmas season. Examples of pastorelas include Gomez

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Manrique’s Representacion del nacimiento and the dramas of Lucas Fernandez and Juan del Encina.

are Edmund Husserl, George Poulet, Marcel Raymond, and Roman Ingarden.

Pathetic Fallacy: A term coined by English critic John Ruskin to identify writing that falsely endows nonhuman things with human intentions and feelings, such as ‘‘angry clouds’’ and ‘‘sad trees.’’ The pathetic fallacy is a required convention in the classical poetic form of the pastoral elegy, and it is used in the modern poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists. Also known as Poetic Fallacy.

Picaresque Novel: Episodic ﬁction depicting the adventures of a roguish central character (‘‘picaro’’ is Spanish for ‘‘rogue’’). The picaresque hero is commonly a low-born but clever individual who wanders into and out of various affairs of love, danger, and farcical intrigue. These involvements may take place at all social levels and typically present a humorous and wide-ranging satire of a given society. Prominent examples of the picaresque novel are Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, and Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe.

Pelado: Literally the ‘‘skinned one’’ or shirtless one, he was the stock underdog, sharp-witted picaresque character of Mexican vaudeville and tent shows. The pelado is found in such works as Don Catarino’s Los effectos de la crisis and Regreso a mi tierra. Pen Name: See Pseudonym Pentameter: See Meter Persona: A Latin term meaning ‘‘mask.’’ Personae are the characters in a ﬁctional work of literature. The persona generally functions as a mask through which the author tells a story in a voice other than his or her own. A persona is usually either a character in a story who acts as a narrator or an ‘‘implied author,’’ a voice created by the author to act as the narrator for himself or herself. Personae include the narrator of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Personae: See Persona Personal Point of View: See Point of View Personiﬁcation: A ﬁgure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects. William Shakespeare used personiﬁcation in Romeo and Juliet in the lines ‘‘Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,/ Who is already sick and pale with grief.’’ Here, the moon is portrayed as being envious, sick, and pale with grief— all markedly human qualities. Also known as Prosopopoeia. Petrarchan Sonnet: See Sonnet Phenomenology: A method of literary criticism based on the belief that things have no existence outside of human consciousness or awareness. Proponents of this theory believe that art is a process that takes place in the mind of the observer as he or she contemplates an object rather than a quality of the object itself. Among phenomenological critics

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Plagiarism: Claiming another person’s written material as one’s own. Plagiarism can take the form of direct, word-for-word copying or the theft of the substance or idea of the work. A student who copies an encyclopedia entry and turns it in as a report for school is guilty of plagiarism. Platonic Criticism: A form of criticism that stresses an artistic work’s usefulness as an agent of social engineering rather than any quality or value of the work itself. Platonic criticism takes as its starting point the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s comments on art in his Republic. Platonism: The embracing of the doctrines of the philosopher Plato, popular among the poets of the Renaissance and the Romantic period. Platonism is more ﬂexible than Aristotelian Criticism and places more emphasis on the supernatural and unknown aspects of life. Platonism is expressed in the love poetry of the Renaissance, the fourth book of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, and the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Friedrich Holderlin, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Play: See Drama Plot: In literary criticism, this term refers to the pattern of events in a narrative or drama. In its simplest sense, the plot guides the author in composing the work and helps the reader follow the work. Typically, plots exhibit causality and unity and have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, however, a plot may consist of a series of disconnected events, in which case it is known as an ‘‘episodic plot.’’ In his Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster distinguishes between a story, deﬁned as a ‘‘narrative of events arranged in their timesequence,’’ and plot, which organizes the events to

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a ‘‘sense of causality.’’ This deﬁnition closely mirrors Aristotle’s discussion of plot in his Poetics. Poem: In its broadest sense, a composition utilizing rhyme, meter, concrete detail, and expressive language to create a literary experience with emotional and aesthetic appeal. Typical poems include sonnets, odes, elegies, haiku, ballads, and free verse. Poet: An author who writes poetry or verse. The term is also used to refer to an artist or writer who has an exceptional gift for expression, imagination, and energy in the making of art in any form. Wellknown poets include Horace, Basho, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, George Gordon, Lord Byron, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, and Sylvia Plath. Poetic Fallacy: See Pathetic Fallacy Poetic Justice: An outcome in a literary work, not necessarily a poem, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, especially in ways that particularly ﬁt their virtues or crimes. For example, a murderer may himself be murdered, or a thief will ﬁnd himself penniless. Poetic License: Distortions of fact and literary convention made by a writer—not always a poet— for the sake of the effect gained. Poetic license is closely related to the concept of ‘‘artistic freedom.’’ An author exercises poetic license by saying that a pile of money ‘‘reaches as high as a mountain’’ when the pile is actually only a foot or two high. Poetics: This term has two closely related meanings. It denotes (1) an aesthetic theory in literary criticism about the essence of poetry or (2) rules prescribing the proper methods, content, style, or diction of poetry. The term poetics may also refer to theories about literature in general, not just poetry. Poetry: In its broadest sense, writing that aims to present ideas and evoke an emotional experience in the reader through the use of meter, imagery, connotative and concrete words, and a carefully constructed structure based on rhythmic patterns. Poetry typically relies on words and expressions that have several layers of meaning. It also makes use of the effects of regular rhythm on the ear and may make a strong appeal to the senses through the use of imagery. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘Annabel Lee’’ and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass are famous examples of poetry. Point of View: The narrative perspective from which a literary work is presented to the reader.

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There are four traditional points of view. The ‘‘third person omniscient’’ gives the reader a ‘‘godlike’’ perspective, unrestricted by time or place, from which to see actions and look into the minds of characters. This allows the author to comment openly on characters and events in the work. The ‘‘third person’’ point of view presents the events of the story from outside of any single character’s perception, much like the omniscient point of view, but the reader must understand the action as it takes place and without any special insight into characters’ minds or motivations. The ‘‘ﬁrst person’’ or ‘‘personal’’ point of view relates events as they are perceived by a single character. The main character ‘‘tells’’ the story and may offer opinions about the action and characters which differ from those of the author. Much less common than omniscient, third person, and ﬁrst person is the ‘‘second person’’ point of view, wherein the author tells the story as if it is happening to the reader. James Thurber employs the omniscient point of view in his short story ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.’’ Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’’ is a short story told from the third person point of view. Mark Twain’s novel Huck Finn is presented from the ﬁrst person viewpoint. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City is an example of a novel which uses the second person point of view. Polemic: A work in which the author takes a stand on a controversial subject, such as abortion or religion. Such works are often extremely argumentative or provocative. Classic examples of polemics include John Milton’s Aeropagitica and Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis. Pornography: Writing intended to provoke feelings of lust in the reader. Such works are often condemned by critics and teachers, but those which can be shown to have literary value are viewed less harshly. Literary works that have been described as pornographic include Ovid’s The Art of Love, Margaret of Angouleme’s Heptameron, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; or, the Life of Fanny Hill, the anonymous My Secret Life, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Post-Aesthetic Movement: An artistic response made by African Americans to the black aesthetic movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. Writers since that time have adopted a somewhat different tone in their work, with less emphasis placed on the disparity between black and white in the United States. In the words of post-aesthetic authors such

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as Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and Kristin Hunter, African Americans are portrayed as looking inward for answers to their own questions, rather than always looking to the outside world. Two wellknown examples of works produced as part of the post-aesthetic movement are the Pulitzer Prizewinning novels The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Prologue: An introductory section of a literary work. It often contains information establishing the situation of the characters or presents information about the setting, time period, or action. In drama, the prologue is spoken by a chorus or by one of the principal characters. In the ‘‘General Prologue’’ of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer describes the main characters and establishes the setting and purpose of the work.

Postmodernism: Writing from the 1960s forward characterized by experimentation and continuing to apply some of the fundamentals of modernism, which included existentialism and alienation. Postmodernists have gone a step further in the rejection of tradition begun with the modernists by also rejecting traditional forms, preferring the antinovel over the novel and the anti-hero over the hero. Postmodern writers include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, Adolfo Bioy-Casares, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Prose: A literary medium that attempts to mirror the language of everyday speech. It is distinguished from poetry by its use of unmetered, unrhymed language consisting of logically related sentences. Prose is usually grouped into paragraphs that form a cohesive whole such as an essay or a novel. Recognized masters of English prose writing include Sir Thomas Malory, William Caxton, Raphael Holinshed, Joseph Addison, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway. Prosopopoeia: See Personiﬁcation

Pre-Raphaelites: A circle of writers and artists in mid nineteenth-century England. Valuing the preRenaissance artistic qualities of religious symbolism, lavish pictorialism, and natural sensuousness, the Pre-Raphaelites cultivated a sense of mystery and melancholy that inﬂuenced later writers associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. The major members of the group include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and Walter Pater. Primitivism: The belief that primitive peoples were nobler and less ﬂawed than civilized peoples because they had not been subjected to the tainting inﬂuence of society. Examples of literature espousing primitivism include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, the poems of Robert Burns, Herman Melville’s stories Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, many poems of William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, and William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. Projective Verse: A form of free verse in which the poet’s breathing pattern determines the lines of the poem. Poets who advocate projective verse are against all formal structures in writing, including meter and form. Besides its creators, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, two other wellknown projective verse poets are Denise Levertov and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). Also known as Breath Verse.

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Protagonist: The central character of a story who serves as a focus for its themes and incidents and as the principal rationale for its development. The protagonist is sometimes referred to in discussions of modern literature as the hero or anti-hero. Wellknown protagonists are Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Protest Fiction: Protest ﬁction has as its primary purpose the protesting of some social injustice, such as racism or discrimination. One example of protest ﬁction is a series of ﬁve novels by Chester Himes, beginning in 1945 with If He Hollers Let Him Go and ending in 1955 with The Primitive. These works depict the destructive effects of race and gender stereotyping in the context of interracial relationships. Another African American author whose works often revolve around themes of social protest is John Oliver Killens. James Baldwin’s essay ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’’ generated controversy by attacking the authors of protest ﬁction. Proverb: A brief, sage saying that expresses a truth about life in a striking manner. ‘‘They are not all cooks who carry long knives’’ is an example of a proverb. Pseudonym: A name assumed by a writer, most often intended to prevent his or her identiﬁcation as the author of a work. Two or more authors may work together under one pseudonym, or an author may use a different name for each genre he or she publishes in. Some publishing companies maintain

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‘‘house pseudonyms,’’ under which any number of authors may write installations in a series. Some authors also choose a pseudonym over their real names the way an actor may use a stage name. Examples of pseudonyms (with the author’s real name in parentheses) include Voltaire (FrancoisMarie Arouet), Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte), Ellis Bell (Emily Bronte), George Eliot (Maryann Evans), Honorio Bustos Donmecq (Adolfo Bioy-Casares and Jorge Luis Borges), and Richard Bachman (Stephen King).

tive experience. Seminal authors in the tradition of Realism include Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James.

Pun: A play on words that have similar sounds but different meanings. A serious example of the pun is from John Donne’s ‘‘A Hymne to God the Father’’: Sweare by thyself, that at my death thy sonne Shall shine as he shines now, and hereto fore; And, having done that, Thou haste done; I fear no more.

Renaissance: The period in European history that marked the end of the Middle Ages. It began in Italy in the late fourteenth century. In broad terms, it is usually seen as spanning the fourteenth, ﬁfteenth, and sixteenth centuries, although it did not reach Great Britain, for example, until the 1480s or so. The Renaissance saw an awakening in almost every sphere of human activity, especially science, philosophy, and the arts. The period is best deﬁned by the emergence of a general philosophy that emphasized the importance of the intellect, the individual, and world affairs. It contrasts strongly with the medieval worldview, characterized by the dominant concerns of faith, the social collective, and spiritual salvation. Prominent writers during the Renaissance include Niccolo Machiavelli and Baldassare Castiglione in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega in Spain, Jean Froissart and Francois Rabelais in France, Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney in England, and Desiderius Erasmus in Holland.

Pure Poetry: poetry written without instructional intent or moral purpose that aims only to please a reader by its imagery or musical ﬂow. The term pure poetry is used as the antonym of the term ‘‘didacticism.’’ The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine, Paul Valery, Juan Ramoz Jimenez, and Jorge Guillen offer examples of pure poetry.

Q Quatrain: A four-line stanza of a poem or an entire poem consisting of four lines. The following quatrain is from Robert Herrick’s ‘‘To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses’’: Round, round, the root do’s run; And being ravisht thus, Come, I will drink a Tun To my Propertius.

R Raisonneur: A character in a drama who functions as a spokesperson for the dramatist’s views. The raisonneur typically observes the play without becoming central to its action. Raisonneurs were very common in plays of the nineteenth century. Realism: A nineteenth-century European literary movement that sought to portray familiar characters, situations, and settings in a realistic manner. This was done primarily by using an objective narrative point of view and through the buildup of accurate detail. The standard for success of any realistic work depends on how faithfully it transfers common experience into ﬁctional forms. The realistic method may be altered or extended, as in stream of consciousness writing, to record highly subjec-

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Refrain: A phrase repeated at intervals throughout a poem. A refrain may appear at the end of each stanza or at less regular intervals. It may be altered slightly at each appearance. Some refrains are nonsense expressions—as with ‘‘Nevermore’’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Raven’’—that seem to take on a different signiﬁcance with each use.

Repartee: Conversation featuring snappy retorts and witticisms. Masters of repartee include Sydney Smith, Charles Lamb, and Oscar Wilde. An example is recorded in the meeting of ‘‘Beau’’ Nash and John Wesley: Nash said, ‘‘I never make way for a fool,’’ to which Wesley responded, ‘‘Don’t you? I always do,’’ and stepped aside. Resolution: The portion of a story following the climax, in which the conﬂict is resolved. The resolution of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is neatly summed up in the following sentence: ‘‘Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang and every body smiled.’’ Restoration: See Restoration Age Restoration Age: A period in English literature beginning with the crowning of Charles II in 1660 and running to about 1700. The era, which was characterized by a reaction against Puritanism, was the ﬁrst great age of the comedy of manners. The ﬁnest literature of the era is typically witty and

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urbane, and often lewd. Prominent Restoration Age writers include William Congreve, Samuel Pepys, John Dryden, and John Milton. Revenge Tragedy: A dramatic form popular during the Elizabethan Age, in which the protagonist, directed by the ghost of his murdered father or son, inﬂicts retaliation upon a powerful villain. Notable features of the revenge tragedy include violence, bizarre criminal acts, intrigue, insanity, a hesitant protagonist, and the use of soliloquy. Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy is the ﬁrst example of revenge tragedy in English, and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is perhaps the best. Extreme examples of revenge tragedy, such as John Webster’s The Duchess of Malﬁ, are labeled ‘‘tragedies of blood.’’ Also known as Tragedy of Blood. Revista: The Spanish term for a vaudeville musical revue. Examples of revistas include Antonio Guzman Aguilera’s Mexico para los mexicanos, Daniel Vanegas’s Maldito jazz, and Don Catarino’s Whiskey, morﬁna y marihuana and El desterrado. Rhetoric: In literary criticism, this term denotes the art of ethical persuasion. In its strictest sense, rhetoric adheres to various principles developed since classical times for arranging facts and ideas in a clear, persuasive, appealing manner. The term is also used to refer to effective prose in general and theories of or methods for composing effective prose. Classical examples of rhetorics include The Rhetoric of Aristotle, Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, and Cicero’s Ad Herennium. Rhetorical Question: A question intended to provoke thought, but not an expressed answer, in the reader. It is most commonly used in oratory and other persuasive genres. The following lines from Thomas Gray’s ‘‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’’ ask rhetorical questions: Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the ﬂeeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death? Rhyme: When used as a noun in literary criticism, this term generally refers to a poem in which words sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines. Rhymes are classiﬁed into different types according to where they fall in a line or stanza or according to the degree of similarity they exhibit in their spellings and sounds. Some major types of rhyme are ‘‘masculine’’ rhyme, ‘‘feminine’’ rhyme, and ‘‘triple’’ rhyme. In a masculine rhyme, the rhyming sound falls in a single accented syllable, as with ‘‘heat’’

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and ‘‘eat.’’ Feminine rhyme is a rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as with ‘‘merry’’ and ‘‘tarry.’’ Triple rhyme matches the sound of the accented syllable and the two unaccented syllables that follow: ‘‘narrative’’ and ‘‘declarative.’’ Robert Browning alternates feminine and masculine rhymes in his ‘‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’’: Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence! Water your damned ﬂower-pots, do! If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, God’s blood, would not mine kill you! What? Your myrtle-bush wants trimming? Oh, that rose has prior claims— Needs its leaden vase ﬁlled brimming? Hell dry you up with ﬂames! Triple rhymes can be found in Thomas Hood’s ‘‘Bridge of Sighs,’’ George Gordon Byron’s satirical verse, and Ogden Nash’s comic poems. Rhyme Royal: A stanza of seven lines composed in iambic pentameter and rhymed ababbcc. The name is said to be a tribute to King James I of Scotland, who made much use of the form in his poetry. Examples of rhyme royal include Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, William Morris’s The Early Paradise, and John Maseﬁeld’s The Widow in the Bye Street. Rhyme Scheme: See Rhyme Rhythm: A regular pattern of sound, time intervals, or events occurring in writing, most often and most discernably in poetry. Regular, reliable rhythm is known to be soothing to humans, while interrupted, unpredictable, or rapidly changing rhythm is disturbing. These effects are known to authors, who use them to produce a desired reaction in the reader. An example of a form of irregular rhythm is sprung rhythm poetry; quantitative verse, on the other hand, is very regular in its rhythm. Rising Action: The part of a drama where the plot becomes increasingly complicated. Rising action leads up to the climax, or turning point, of a drama. The ﬁnal ‘‘chase scene’’ of an action ﬁlm is generally the rising action which culminates in the ﬁlm’s climax. Rococo: A style of European architecture that ﬂourished in the eighteenth century, especially in France. The most notable features of rococo are its extensive use of ornamentation and its themes of lightness, gaiety, and intimacy. In literary criticism, the term is often used disparagingly to refer to a decadent or over-ornamental style. Alexander Pope’s ‘‘The Rape of the Lock’’ is an example of literary rococo.

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Roman a clef: A French phrase meaning ‘‘novel with a key.’’ It refers to a narrative in which real persons are portrayed under ﬁctitious names. Jack Kerouac, for example, portrayed various real-life beat generation ﬁgures under ﬁctitious names in his On the Road.

dane. Russian symbolists include Aleksandr Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Fyodor Sologub, Andrey Bely, Nikolay Gumilyov, and Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov.

Romance: A broad term, usually denoting a narrative with exotic, exaggerated, often idealized characters, scenes, and themes. Nathaniel Hawthorne called his The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun romances in order to distinguish them from clearly realistic works.

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Romantic Age: See Romanticism Romanticism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it refers to a European intellectual and artistic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought greater freedom of personal expression than that allowed by the strict rules of literary form and logic of the eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The Romantics preferred emotional and imaginative expression to rational analysis. They considered the individual to be at the center of all experience and so placed him or her at the center of their art. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination reveals nobler truths—unique feelings and attitudes—than those that could be discovered by logic or by scientiﬁc examination. Both the natural world and the state of childhood were important sources for revelations of ‘‘eternal truths.’’ ‘‘Romanticism’’ is also used as a general term to refer to a type of sensibility found in all periods of literary history and usually considered to be in opposition to the principles of classicism. In this sense, Romanticism signiﬁes any work or philosophy in which the exotic or dreamlike ﬁgure strongly, or that is devoted to individualistic expression, self-analysis, or a pursuit of a higher realm of knowledge than can be discovered by human reason. Prominent Romantics include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Romantics: See Romanticism Russian Symbolism: A Russian poetic movement, derived from French symbolism, that ﬂourished between 1894 and 1910. While some Russian Symbolists continued in the French tradition, stressing aestheticism and the importance of suggestion above didactic intent, others saw their craft as a form of mystical worship, and themselves as mediators between the supernatural and the mun-

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Satire: A work that uses ridicule, humor, and wit to criticize and provoke change in human nature and institutions. There are two major types of satire: ‘‘formal’’ or ‘‘direct’’ satire speaks directly to the reader or to a character in the work; ‘‘indirect’’ satire relies upon the ridiculous behavior of its characters to make its point. Formal satire is further divided into two manners: the ‘‘Horatian,’’ which ridicules gently, and the ‘‘Juvenalian,’’ which derides its subjects harshly and bitterly. Voltaire’s novella Candide is an indirect satire. Jonathan Swift’s essay ‘‘A Modest Proposal’’ is a Juvenalian satire. Scansion: The analysis or ‘‘scanning’’ of a poem to determine its meter and often its rhyme scheme. The most common system of scansion uses accents (slanted lines drawn above syllables) to show stressed syllables, breves (curved lines drawn above syllables) to show unstressed syllables, and vertical lines to separate each foot. In the ﬁrst line of John Keats’s Endymion, ‘‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever:’’ the word ‘‘thing,’’ the ﬁrst syllable of ‘‘beauty,’’ the word ‘‘joy,’’ and the second syllable of ‘‘forever’’ are stressed, while the words ‘‘A’’ and ‘‘of,’’ the second syllable of ‘‘beauty,’’ the word ‘‘a,’’ and the ﬁrst and third syllables of ‘‘forever’’ are unstressed. In the second line: ‘‘Its loveliness increases; it will never’’ a pair of vertical lines separate the foot ending with ‘‘increases’’ and the one beginning with ‘‘it.’’ Scene: A subdivision of an act of a drama, consisting of continuous action taking place at a single time and in a single location. The beginnings and endings of scenes may be indicated by clearing the stage of actors and props or by the entrances and exits of important characters. The ﬁrst act of William Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale is comprised of two scenes. Science Fiction: A type of narrative about or based upon real or imagined scientiﬁc theories and technology. Science ﬁction is often peopled with alien creatures and set on other planets or in different dimensions. Karel Capek’s R.U.R. is a major work of science ﬁction. Second Person: See Point of View

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Semiotics: The study of how literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language. Semioticians include Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.

works ﬁrst appeared during the abolition movement of the 1830s through the 1850s. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African and Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are examples of the slave narrative.

Sestet: Any six-line poem or stanza. Examples of the sestet include the last six lines of the Petrarchan sonnet form, the stanza form of Robert Burns’s ‘‘A Poet’s Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter,’’ and the sestina form in W. H. Auden’s ‘‘Paysage Moralise.’’

Social Realism: See Socialist Realism

Setting: The time, place, and culture in which the action of a narrative takes place. The elements of setting may include geographic location, characters’ physical and mental environments, prevailing cultural attitudes, or the historical time in which the action takes place. Examples of settings include the romanticized Scotland in Sir Walter Scott’s ‘‘Waverley’’ novels, the French provincial setting in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the ﬁctional Wessex country of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and the small towns of southern Ontario in Alice Munro’s short stories. Shakespearean Sonnet: See Sonnet Signifying Monkey: A popular trickster ﬁgure in black folklore, with hundreds of tales about this character documented since the 19th century. Henry Louis Gates Jr. examines the history of the signifying monkey in The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, published in 1988. Simile: A comparison, usually using ‘‘like’’ or ‘‘as’’, of two essentially dissimilar things, as in ‘‘coffee as cold as ice’’ or ‘‘He sounded like a broken record.’’ The title of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘‘Hills Like White Elephants’’ contains a simile. Slang: A type of informal verbal communication that is generally unacceptable for formal writing. Slang words and phrases are often colorful exaggerations used to emphasize the speaker’s point; they may also be shortened versions of an oftenused word or phrase. Examples of American slang from the 1990s include ‘‘yuppie’’ (an acronym for Young Urban Professional), ‘‘awesome’’ (for ‘‘excellent’’), wired (for ‘‘nervous’’ or ‘‘excited’’), and ‘‘chill out’’ (for relax). Slant Rhyme: See Consonance Slave Narrative: Autobiographical accounts of American slave life as told by escaped slaves. These

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Socialist Realism: The Socialist Realism school of literary theory was proposed by Maxim Gorky and established as a dogma by the ﬁrst Soviet Congress of Writers. It demanded adherence to a communist worldview in works of literature. Its doctrines required an objective viewpoint comprehensible to the working classes and themes of social struggle featuring strong proletarian heroes. A successful work of socialist realism is Nikolay Ostrovsky’s Kak zakalyalas stal (How the Steel Was Tempered ). Also known as Social Realism. Soliloquy: A monologue in a drama used to give the audience information and to develop the speaker’s character. It is typically a projection of the speaker’s innermost thoughts. Usually delivered while the speaker is alone on stage, a soliloquy is intended to present an illusion of unspoken reﬂection. A celebrated soliloquy is Hamlet’s ‘‘To be or not to be’’ speech in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem, usually composed in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes. There are three major types of sonnets, upon which all other variations of the form are based: the ‘‘Petrarchan’’ or ‘‘Italian’’ sonnet, the ‘‘Shakespearean’’ or ‘‘English’’ sonnet, and the ‘‘Spenserian’’ sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave rhymed abbaabba and a ‘‘sestet’’ rhymed either cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave poses a question or problem, relates a narrative, or puts forth a proposition; the sestet presents a solution to the problem, comments upon the narrative, or applies the proposition put forth in the octave. The Shakespearean sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a couplet rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet provides an epigrammatic comment on the narrative or problem put forth in the quatrains. The Spenserian sonnet uses three quatrains and a couplet like the Shakespearean, but links their three rhyme schemes in this way: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The Spenserian sonnet develops its theme in two parts like the Petrarchan, its ﬁnal six lines resolving a problem, analyzing a narrative, or applying a proposition put forth in its ﬁrst eight lines. Examples of sonnets can be found in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, Elizabeth Barrett

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Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, and Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘‘The Insusceptibles.’’ Spenserian Sonnet: See Sonnet Spenserian Stanza: A nine-line stanza having eight verses in iambic pentameter, its ninth verse in iambic hexameter, and the rhyme scheme ababbcbcc. This stanza form was ﬁrst used by Edmund Spenser in his allegorical poem The Faerie Queene. Spondee: In poetry meter, a foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables occurring together. This form is quite rare in English verse, and is usually composed of two monosyllabic words. The ﬁrst foot in the following line from Robert Burns’s ‘‘Green Grow the Rashes’’ is an example of a spondee: Green grow the rashes, O Sprung Rhythm: Versiﬁcation using a speciﬁc number of accented syllables per line but disregarding the number of unaccented syllables that fall in each line, producing an irregular rhythm in the poem. Gerard Manley Hopkins, who coined the term ‘‘sprung rhythm,’’ is the most notable practitioner of this technique. Stanza: A subdivision of a poem consisting of lines grouped together, often in recurring patterns of rhyme, line length, and meter. Stanzas may also serve as units of thought in a poem much like paragraphs in prose. Examples of stanza forms include the quatrain, terza rima, ottava rima, Spenserian, and the so-called In Memoriam stanza from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem by that title. The following is an example of the latter form: Love is and was my lord and king, And in his presence I attend To hear the tidings of my friend, Which every hour his couriers bring. Stereotype: A stereotype was originally the name for a duplication made during the printing process; this led to its modern deﬁnition as a person or thing that is (or is assumed to be) the same as all others of its type. Common stereotypical characters include the absent-minded professor, the nagging wife, the troublemaking teenager, and the kindhearted grandmother. Stream of Consciousness: A narrative technique for rendering the inward experience of a character. This technique is designed to give the impression of an ever-changing series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories in the spontaneous and seemingly illogical order that they occur in life. The

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textbook example of stream of consciousness is the last section of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Structuralism: A twentieth-century movement in literary criticism that examines how literary texts arrive at their meanings, rather than the meanings themselves. There are two major types of structuralist analysis: one examines the way patterns of linguistic structures unify a speciﬁc text and emphasize certain elements of that text, and the other interprets the way literary forms and conventions affect the meaning of language itself. Prominent structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roman Jakobson, and Roland Barthes. Structure: The form taken by a piece of literature. The structure may be made obvious for ease of understanding, as in nonﬁction works, or may obscured for artistic purposes, as in some poetry or seemingly ‘‘unstructured’’ prose. Examples of common literary structures include the plot of a narrative, the acts and scenes of a drama, and such poetic forms as the Shakespearean sonnet and the Pindaric ode. Sturm und Drang: A German term meaning ‘‘storm and stress.’’ It refers to a German literary movement of the 1770s and 1780s that reacted against the order and rationalism of the enlightenment, focusing instead on the intense experience of extraordinary individuals. Highly romantic, works of this movement, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen, are typiﬁed by realism, rebelliousness, and intense emotionalism. Style: A writer’s distinctive manner of arranging words to suit his or her ideas and purpose in writing. The unique imprint of the author’s personality upon his or her writing, style is the product of an author’s way of arranging ideas and his or her use of diction, different sentence structures, rhythm, ﬁgures of speech, rhetorical principles, and other elements of composition. Styles may be classiﬁed according to period (Metaphysical, Augustan, Georgian), individual authors (Chaucerian, Miltonic, Jamesian), level (grand, middle, low, plain), or language (scientiﬁc, expository, poetic, journalistic). Subject: The person, event, or theme at the center of a work of literature. A work may have one or more subjects of each type, with shorter works tending to have fewer and longer works tending to have more. The subjects of James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain include the themes of father-son relationships, religious conversion, black life, and sexuality. The subjects of Anne Frank’s

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Diary of a Young Girl include Anne and her family members as well as World War II, the Holocaust, and the themes of war, isolation, injustice, and racism. Subjectivity: Writing that expresses the author’s personal feelings about his subject, and which may or may not include factual information about the subject. Subjectivity is demonstrated in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Subplot: A secondary story in a narrative. A subplot may serve as a motivating or complicating force for the main plot of the work, or it may provide emphasis for, or relief from, the main plot. The conﬂict between the Capulets and the Montagues in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is an example of a subplot. Surrealism: A term introduced to criticism by Guillaume Apollinaire and later adopted by Andre Breton. It refers to a French literary and artistic movement founded in the 1920s. The Surrealists sought to express unconscious thoughts and feelings in their works. The best-known technique used for achieving this aim was automatic writing— transcriptions of spontaneous outpourings from the unconscious. The Surrealists proposed to unify the contrary levels of conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into a new level of ‘‘super-realism.’’ Surrealism can be found in the poetry of Paul Eluard, Pierre Reverdy, and Louis Aragon, among others. Suspense: A literary device in which the author maintains the audience’s attention through the buildup of events, the outcome of which will soon be revealed. Suspense in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is sustained throughout by the question of whether or not the Prince will achieve what he has been instructed to do and of what he intends to do. Syllogism: A method of presenting a logical argument. In its most basic form, the syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. An example of a syllogism is: Major premise: When it snows, the streets get wet. Minor premise: It is snowing. Conclusion: The streets are wet. Symbol: Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their con-

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texts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in speciﬁc literary works. Examples of symbols are sunshine suggesting happiness, rain suggesting sorrow, and storm clouds suggesting despair. Symbolism: This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the ﬁve senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion ﬁgured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identiﬁable with the individual poet. The principal aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term ‘‘symbolism’’ refers to the use of one object to represent another. Early members of the Symbolist movement included the French authors Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud; William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot were inﬂuenced as the movement moved to Ireland, England, and the United States. Examples of the concept of symbolism include a ﬂag that stands for a nation or movement, or an empty cupboard used to suggest hopelessness, poverty, and despair. Symbolist: See Symbolism Symbolist Movement: See Symbolism Sympathetic Fallacy: See Affective Fallacy

T Tale: A story told by a narrator with a simple plot and little character development. Tales are usually relatively short and often carry a simple message. Examples of tales can be found in the work of Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Saki, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and Armistead Maupin. Tall Tale: A humorous tale told in a straightforward, credible tone but relating absolutely impossible events or feats of the characters. Such tales were commonly told of frontier adventures during the settlement of the west in the United States. Tall tales have been spun around such legendary heroes as Mike Fink, Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, and Captain Stormalong as well as the real-life William F. Cody and Annie Oakley. Liter-

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ary use of tall tales can be found in Washington Irving’s History of New York, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and in the German R. F. Raspe’s Baron Munchausen’s Narratives of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia.

cruelty was theorized by Antonin Artaud in his Le Theatre et son double (The Theatre and Its Double), and also appears in the work of Jerzy Grotowski, Jean Genet, Jean Vilar, and Arthur Adamov, among others.

Tanka: A form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku. A tanka is ﬁve lines long, with the lines containing ﬁve, seven, ﬁve, seven, and seven syllables respectively. Skilled tanka authors include Ishikawa Takuboku, Masaoka Shiki, Amy Lowell, and Adelaide Crapsey.

Theater of the Absurd: A post-World War II dramatic trend characterized by radical theatrical innovations. In works inﬂuenced by the Theater of the absurd, nontraditional, sometimes grotesque characterizations, plots, and stage sets reveal a meaningless universe in which human values are irrelevant. Existentialist themes of estrangement, absurdity, and futility link many of the works of this movement. The principal writers of the Theater of the Absurd are Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.

Teatro Grottesco: See Theater of the Grotesque Terza Rima: A three-line stanza form in poetry in which the rhymes are made on the last word of each line in the following manner: the ﬁrst and third lines of the ﬁrst stanza, then the second line of the ﬁrst stanza and the ﬁrst and third lines of the second stanza, and so on with the middle line of any stanza rhyming with the ﬁrst and third lines of the following stanza. An example of terza rima is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘The Triumph of Love’’: As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay This was the tenour of my waking dream. Methought I sate beside a public way Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream Of people there was hurrying to and fro Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,. . . Tetrameter: See Meter Textual Criticism: A branch of literary criticism that seeks to establish the authoritative text of a literary work. Textual critics typically compare all known manuscripts or printings of a single work in order to assess the meanings of differences and revisions. This procedure allows them to arrive at a deﬁnitive version that (supposedly) corresponds to the author’s original intention. Textual criticism was applied during the Renaissance to salvage the classical texts of Greece and Rome, and modern works have been studied, for instance, to undo deliberate correction or censorship, as in the case of novels by Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. Theater of Cruelty: Term used to denote a group of theatrical techniques designed to eliminate the psychological and emotional distance between actors and audience. This concept, introduced in the 1930s in France, was intended to inspire a more intense theatrical experience than conventional theater allowed. The ‘‘cruelty’’ of this dramatic theory signiﬁed not sadism but heightened actor/audience involvement in the dramatic event. The theater of

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Theater of the Grotesque: An Italian theatrical movement characterized by plays written around the ironic and macabre aspects of daily life in the World War I era. Theater of the Grotesque was named after the play The Mask and the Face by Luigi Chiarelli, which was described as ‘‘a grotesque in three acts.’’ The movement inﬂuenced the work of Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, author of Right You Are, If You Think You Are. Also known as Teatro Grottesco. Theme: The main point of a work of literature. The term is used interchangeably with thesis. The theme of William Shakespeare’s Othello—jealousy—is a common one. Thesis: A thesis is both an essay and the point argued in the essay. Thesis novels and thesis plays share the quality of containing a thesis which is supported through the action of the story. A master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation are two theses required of graduate students. Thesis Play: See Thesis Three Unities: See Unities Tone: The author’s attitude toward his or her audience may be deduced from the tone of the work. A formal tone may create distance or convey politeness, while an informal tone may encourage a friendly, intimate, or intrusive feeling in the reader. The author’s attitude toward his or her subject matter may also be deduced from the tone of the words he or she uses in discussing it. The tone of John F. Kennedy’s speech which included the appeal to ‘‘ask not what your country can do for you’’ was intended to instill feelings of camaraderie and national pride in listeners.

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Tragedy: A drama in prose or poetry about a noble, courageous hero of excellent character who, because of some tragic character ﬂaw or hamartia, brings ruin upon him- or herself. Tragedy treats its subjects in a digniﬁed and serious manner, using poetic language to help evoke pity and fear and bring about catharsis, a purging of these emotions. The tragic form was practiced extensively by the ancient Greeks. In the Middle Ages, when classical works were virtually unknown, tragedy came to denote any works about the fall of persons from exalted to low conditions due to any reason: fate, vice, weakness, etc. According to the classical deﬁnition of tragedy, such works present the ‘‘pathetic’’—that which evokes pity—rather than the tragic. The classical form of tragedy was revived in the sixteenth century; it ﬂourished especially on the Elizabethan stage. In modern times, dramatists have attempted to adapt the form to the needs of modern society by drawing their heroes from the ranks of ordinary men and women and deﬁning the nobility of these heroes in terms of spirit rather than exalted social standing. The greatest classical example of tragedy is Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The ‘‘pathetic’’ derivation is exempliﬁed in ‘‘The Monk’s Tale’’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Notable works produced during the sixteenth century revival include William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Modern dramatists working in the tragic tradition include Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O’Neill. Tragedy of Blood: See Revenge Tragedy Tragic Flaw: In a tragedy, the quality within the hero or heroine which leads to his or her downfall. Examples of the tragic ﬂaw include Othello’s jealousy and Hamlet’s indecisiveness, although most great tragedies defy such simple interpretation. Transcendentalism: An American philosophical and religious movement, based in New England from around 1835 until the Civil War. Transcendentalism was a form of American romanticism that had its roots abroad in the works of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of intuition and subjective experience in communication with God. They rejected religious dogma and texts in favor of mysticism and scientiﬁc naturalism. They pursued truths that lie beyond the ‘‘colorless’’ realms perceived by reason and the senses and were active social reformers in public education, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Promi-

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nent members of the group include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Trickster: A character or ﬁgure common in Native American and African literature who uses his ingenuity to defeat enemies and escape difﬁcult situations. Tricksters are most often animals, such as the spider, hare, or coyote, although they may take the form of humans as well. Examples of trickster tales include Thomas King’s A Coyote Columbus Story, Ashley F. Bryan’s The Dancing Granny and Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red. Trimeter: See Meter Triple Rhyme: See Rhyme Trochee: See Foot

U Understatement: See Irony Unities: Strict rules of dramatic structure, formulated by Italian and French critics of the Renaissance and based loosely on the principles of drama discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics. Foremost among these rules were the three unities of action, time, and place that compelled a dramatist to: (1) construct a single plot with a beginning, middle, and end that details the causal relationships of action and character; (2) restrict the action to the events of a single day; and (3) limit the scene to a single place or city. The unities were observed faithfully by continental European writers until the Romantic Age, but they were never regularly observed in English drama. Modern dramatists are typically more concerned with a unity of impression or emotional effect than with any of the classical unities. The unities are observed in Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Polyeuctes and Jean-Baptiste Racine’s Phedre. Also known as Three Unities. Urban Realism: A branch of realist writing that attempts to accurately reﬂect the often harsh facts of modern urban existence. Some works by Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emile Zola, Abraham Cahan, and Henry Fuller feature urban realism. Modern examples include Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Ron Milner’s What the Wine Sellers Buy. Utopia: A ﬁctional perfect place, such as ‘‘paradise’’ or ‘‘heaven.’’ Early literary utopias were included in Plato’s Republic and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, while more modern utopias can be found in

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Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Theodor Herzka’s A Visit to Freeland, and H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia. Utopian: See Utopia Utopianism: See Utopia

erature include the poetry of Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the criticism of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, and the novels of Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy. Also known as Victorian Age and Victorian Period. Victorian Age: See Victorian

V Verisimilitude: Literally, the appearance of truth. In literary criticism, the term refers to aspects of a work of literature that seem true to the reader. Verisimilitude is achieved in the work of Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, among other late nineteenth-century realist writers. Vers de societe: See Occasional Verse Vers libre: See Free Verse Verse: A line of metered language, a line of a poem, or any work written in verse. The following line of verse is from the epic poem Don Juan by Lord Byron: ‘‘My way is to begin with the beginning.’’ Versiﬁcation: The writing of verse. Versiﬁcation may also refer to the meter, rhyme, and other mechanical components of a poem. Composition of a ‘‘Roses are red, violets are blue’’ poem to suit an occasion is a common form of versiﬁcation practiced by students. Victorian: Refers broadly to the reign of Queen Victoria of England (1837–1901) and to anything with qualities typical of that era. For example, the qualities of smug narrowmindedness, bourgeois materialism, faith in social progress, and priggish morality are often considered Victorian. This stereotype is contradicted by such dramatic intellectual developments as the theories of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (which stirred strong debates in England) and the critical attitudes of serious Victorian writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In literature, the Victorian Period was the great age of the English novel, and the latter part of the era saw the rise of movements such as decadence and symbolism. Works of Victorian lit-

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Victorian Period: See Victorian

W Weltanschauung: A German term referring to a person’s worldview or philosophy. Examples of weltanschauung include Thomas Hardy’s view of the human being as the victim of fate, destiny, or impersonal forces and circumstances, and the disillusioned and laconic cynicism expressed by such poets of the 1930s as W. H. Auden, Sir Stephen Spender, and Sir William Empson. Weltschmerz: A German term meaning ‘‘world pain.’’ It describes a sense of anguish about the nature of existence, usually associated with a melancholy, pessimistic attitude. Weltschmerz was expressed in England by George Gordon, Lord Byron in his Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in France by Viscount de Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset, in Russia by Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, in Poland by Juliusz Slowacki, and in America by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Z Zarzuela: A type of Spanish operetta. Writers of zarzuelas include Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon. Zeitgeist: A German term meaning ‘‘spirit of the time.’’ It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era. Examples of zeitgeist include the preoccupation with the more morbid aspects of dying and death in some Jacobean literature, especially in the works of dramatists Cyril Tourneur and John Webster, and the decadence of the French Symbolists.

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Drama for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 20

Drama For Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 22

Drama for Students, Volume 17: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas

Drama for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 23

Drama for students: presenting analysis, context and criticism on commonly studied dramas. Volume 18

Drama for Students, Volume 25: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas (Drama for Students)

Drama For Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Crticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 21

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 20

Short Stories for Students: Volume 4 Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 7

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories (Volume 8)

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 12

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 14

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 35

Poetry for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry, Volume 36

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 6

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 12

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 9

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 8

Short Stories For Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 21

Short Stories for Students: Volume 3 Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 4

Poetry for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry (Volume 27)

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 9

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 17

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 25

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 2

Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 10

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 18

Short Stories for Students : Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 1

Drama for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 20

Drama For Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 22

Drama for Students, Volume 17: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas

Drama for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 23

Drama for students: presenting analysis, context and criticism on commonly studied dramas. Volume 18

Drama for Students, Volume 25: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Dramas (Drama for Students)

Drama For Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Crticism on Commonly Studied Dramas. Volume 21

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 20

Short Stories for Students: Volume 4 Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 7

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories (Volume 8)

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 12

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 14

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 35

Poetry for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry, Volume 36

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 6

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 12

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 9

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 8

Short Stories For Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 21

Short Stories for Students: Volume 3 Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 4

Poetry for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry (Volume 27)

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 9

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 17

Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 25

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 2

Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 10

Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels Volume 18

Short Stories for Students : Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 1

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