J-f

Po. 373

IRREVERENCE: I ?AN INTERPRETATION OF THE COMIC DRAMA

' Laurence J. Tret1er

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

June 1976

BOWLING 6REEK STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 14

© 1976

LAURENCE JOSEPH TRETLER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 11

ABSTRACT

Society insists that people revere certain phenomena. This reverence is an imposition which causes resentment; this resentment must be released. Psychologists agree that laughter is one release. Throughout the ages theorists have been aware that comedy provides a safe way of laughing at those elements which one usually venerates in life. This dissertation will explore this apparently important aspect of comic drama: irreverence. What is the nature of irreverence in comedy? How does comedy permit its audience to be irre­ verent?

Four categories (the home, the man-woman relationship, the father and death) were chosen. These are phenomena which society usually venerates. Then, several plays were selected under each of these "fields" that deal with that subject area to some degree. Each comedy was then examined intrinsically to determine how that script enables an auditor to laugh irreverently at the home, or death.

It was found that playwrights use a variety of devices in comedy. Some of these devices ("charges") permit the auditor to laugh at sacred phenomena, at the same time, making this ridicule "safe." Also, irreverence in comedy does not imply an attack, like satire. Irreverence is an attitude toward another attitude, not necessarily meant to change the object of laughter. Irreverence exists in many comic styles, and alters as society alters. Ill

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND...... 1

THE LARES...... 23

THE LOVERS...... 61

THE PATERFAMILIAS...... 92

THE DANSE MACABRE AS COMEDY...... 117

THE IMPLICATION OF IRREVERENCE IN THE COMIC DRAMA...... 144

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 166 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

To what do audiences respond in comedy? What, in comic drama, triggers mirth and laughter? Theorists through­ out the ages have tried to provide those answers. Aristotle claims that comedy arises from the harmless debasing of low-ranking personages. Renaissance theorists remind their readers that the innocent depiction of vice, deception and cruelty makes people laugh. Hazlitt cites surprise and contrast, and Samuel Johnson the despicable and the absurd when they try to appear dignified as laugh provoking agents.

Bergson names incongruity and automatism as two triggers of mirth. The modern philosopher, James Fiebleman, claims that laughter arises from one’s perception of distortion in the categories of actuality.

The problem with so many of these theories is that one can simply find so many exceptions to them; there are so many scripts in which they play a minor role. None of them embraces comedy quite fully; none draws an adequate correlation between the technical skills of the playwright and the audience's response of laughter: except perhaps one.

Just what do writers do in comedy that makes their work acceptable on the stage? To what does the auditor respond in comedy? After surveying a cross-section of the dramatic

1 2

repertoire called "comic" by concensus, one item may be

isolated: irreverence. Irreverence seems to be the one factor

common to most comedies, not at the core of each, but somehow

important to each. This study examines irreverence in the

comic drama by studying a carefully selected sample of scripts which contain some sort of mockery of a venerated subject.

"How does irreverence function in comedy?" "How does comedy

fulfill people’s need to be irreverent?" These are the questions asked by this study.

For the purposes of this dissertation, comic irrever­ ence is defined as the conscious or unconscious awareness of the toss of dignity of any phenomenon previously exalted in human attitude, leading to a release of tension through mirth or laughter. The source of mirth and laughter in comedy is socially licensed irreverence toward phenomena usually dignified by social convention. The "social license" is at the heart of the social function of comedy:

Reverence taxes the lives of human beings. Society insists that certain concepts, people and institutions be dignified with a reverent attitude. This attitude, because it is an imposition, causes tension which wants release.

When something suggests that the supposedly dignified is not what it seems to be, that it is as fallible as human nature itself, an audience’s attitude becomes "irreverent."

Irreverence implies a prior reverence.

Of course, all irreverence is not comic. One could 3

easily watch a royal personage (like Lear) debased onstage

and feel no urge to laugh. Yet, in the cartoon "The Little

King" and Ionesco's Exit the King, the fact that there are

kings carrying on so accounts for many laughs. It all

depends upon the artist's handling of his subject matter.

The response must be triggered in the audience; something

must tell the auditor that the "irreverence license" has

been granted, that people are free to laugh at something

as exalted as kingship in these proper circumstances.

Laughing at the exalted has long been accepted as a major

part of social behavior. The social harmony of early Greece

occasionally yielded to the Megarian insult parade; the

very institutions of reverence, medieval monasteries, permitted

their monks the sacrilegious Feast of Fools.

This study explores the manner in which comedy permits

its audience to experience a release from those strictures

imposed upon it by society. The findings will hopefully provide a better understanding of, not only the comic drama, but of peoples' response to their societies.

The Theoretical Background

Although there have been no studies of comedy from the point of view of pure irreverence, a look at past critical theories demonstrates that many thinkers have touched upon the idea in some form or other. Aristotle suggested (in what remains of his notes on comedy) that laughter arises 4

in the presence of assimilation, deception, the impossible,

the possible and the inconsequent, the unexpected, debased

personages, clownish pantomime, human stupidity and narrow­

ness, and disjoint of story. Despite its distortion, the comic mask shows no pain; comedy deals with the low.^

Aristotle was the first to assign comedy the role of safe

degradation.

Renaissance theorists very often followed Aristotle.

However, they placed stronger emphasis on mental and physical

deformities. Deformities can be funny, according to Vicenzo

Maggi, if they seem painless to the audience. Castelvetro

held that watching others duped is laughable only because

". . . this laughter is the sin of our first parents, which

so corrupted our nature that we rejoice at the bad fortune

of others as well as our own good fortune." Castelvetro

resorted to his catechism, but might well have said that

laughter is man's irreverent tendency lashing out against

the repressions of human charity. He continued to recall

that deformities are funny when people think that they are

laughing at something else. A crowd of bystanders only mocks

authority and dignity by laughing at the gentleman in the

top-hat and tails who falls on a banana peel; they can only

laugh at marriage if presented in a stage farce. Comic

business "makes innocent" the true subject matter, a point well taken by the suspicious Pierre Nicole when, in 1671,

he insisted that the comic fragments "Christian vigilance" 5

by disguising the not-so-innocent thought in innocent entrap- 2 ments. Hence, the Renaissance saw comedy as a convenient

means by which to laugh at serious elements.

The idea that comedy actually vents man’s rebellious will continued well past the Renaissance. By 1751, Samuel

Johnson claimed that any subject matter was potentially

laughable. In fact, greatness and royalty lend themselves to mockery as, ". . . thoughts or incidents, in themselves ridiculous, grow still more grotesque by the solemnity" of noble personages: "that which is despicable and absurd will not, by any association with splendid titles, become rational or great," as "robes of royalty can give no dignity to 3 nonsense or folly." A king's prat-fall during a procession may seem far funnier than a buffoon’s tumble during a wine cellar theft. Royalty sets up much more of an expectation; there is more to collapse.

William Hazlitt seemed to understand this when, in

1819, he wrote:

The ludicrous, or comic, is the unexpected lessening or relaxing this stress below its usual pitch of in­ tensity, by such an abrupt transposition of the order of our ideas, as taking the mind unawares, throws it off its guard, startles it into a lively sense of pleasure and leaves no time nor inclination for painful reflection.

The stress of expectation relaxes. The more that people expect, the more abruptly will the diffusion of their expecta­ tion bring about laughter. Subjects are more "laugh vulner­ able" if approached initially with great veneration. Nine­ 6

teenth Century theorists, unlike the classical and neo­

classical thinkers, acknowledged the fact that laughter at

respected phenomena may be even heartier than that directed

at base personages.

Other Nineteenth Century theorists took up the notion

of laughter at the exalted. It may seem incongruous to

mention Bergson and Freud in the same category, but they

have much in common. Both were highly influential comic

theorists; both pioneered the field of consciousness; both

tried to relate an external "trigger" of laughter to some

pre-set human attitude.

Bergson, famous for his theory of the élan vital,

tried to pinpoint several comic mechanisms: automatism, in­

congruity, and the ludicrous. Perhaps Ralph Piddington is

correct in criticizing Henri Bergson’s "intellectualist

theories" for failing to properly correlate the mechanism 5 of comedy with the attitude of the percéiver, for the nature

of the ludicrous, for instance, never received sufficient

explanation. Yet, Bergson's rationale for why "something

mechanical encrusted on the living" is funny warrants mention.

He recalled that the human mind perceives the total person

as a free entity, constantly changing, an organism of infinite variety. Suddenly a man appears to be a jack-in-the-box.

That notion is undercut. Automatism startles the auditor

into a momentary suspicion that humans are less than free.

Bergson, like Hazlitt, based laughter on a triggering of an 7

attitude pre-set in consciousness; Bergson only recruited

more psychological data. Also, one must not forget Bergson's

respect for Alexander Bain's theory of degradation: something

appears mean which was previously dignified. If not cause

enough for laughter in and of itself, certainly a strong

potential exists.

But Bergson, in all his copious attempts to explain

the comic, lacked a convincing scientific basis. He simply

did not know what human psychology that later research

afforded. Sigmund Freud had yet to relate the symptom of

laughter to consciousness. The Austrian psychiatrist explained

laughter in the following way:

The irrational processes which occur in the psych­ ical apparatus are the primary ones. They appear where- ever ideas are abandoned by the preconscious cathexis, are left to themselves and can become charged with the uninhibited energy from the unconscious which is striv­ ing to find an outlet.?

Freud linked "comic irreverence" to repression in society:

It is our belief that civilization and higher edu­ cation have a large influence in the development of repression, and we suppose that, under such conditions, the psychical organization undergoes an alteration (that can also emerge as an inherited disposition) as a result of which what was formerly felt as agreeable now seems unacceptable and is rejected with all possible psychical forces. The repressive activity of civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment, which have now, however, been repudiated by the censorship in us, are lost to us. But to the human psyche, all renunciation is exceedingly difficult, and so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the renunciation and retrieving that was lost. When we laugh at a refined obscene joke, we are laughing at the same things that make a peasant laugh at a coarse piece of smut.8 8

Society presents repressions. Laughter coughs all of those

repressed attitudes to the surface again; unable to digest

the repression that psychic censorship imposes, conscious­

ness releases them through laughter. The theory is akin

to that used by G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin in their

1897 study, "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the

Comic." Laughter, these men asserted, expresses freedom;

be it a release from sexual or religious restraints, the joy 9 of freedom from oppression triggers laughter. Sylvia Bliss took up this Freudian viewpoint in her article, "The Origin of Laughter" :

Regarding emotion in its essence as the state of tension occasioned by delay between impulse and act, desire and fulfillment, hunger and satisfaction, and perceiving that the primary emotional difference be­ tween animals and men consists in the fact that the latter, of their own volition, to serve certain ends, carry on the work of restraint and delay initiated by nature, eventually pushing into the subconscious region tendencies at variance with the slowly forming social code, we discern the conditions ripe for laughter. For laughter is the result of suddenly released repression, the physical sign of subconscious satisfaction. and

Psychology makes it plain that our present equipment has been slowly and painfully acquired and a certain strain in maintaining that high attitude is inevitable. This tension is relieved by nonsense and by the portrayal in humorous anecdotes and on the stage of evasions of conventions and infractions of the prevailing code of manners and of morals.10

Freud and his disciples claimed, in summary, that comic laughter is a unique process. 1) Part of the price men pay for civilization is repression; people cannot express 9

what they feel at most times. 2) These tensions of re­

pression do not "go away," but remain to be disposed of by

the psyche. 3) Laughter is one way of dispelling such

tensions. 4) The nature of jokes and other laugh matter often

reflects the repressions to be dispelled.

Before taking up the question of consciousness and

its processing of laughter, a brief review of the discussion

to this point may be in order. For convenience, one might

apply the attitudes towards comedy so far discussed to one

simple example: a man walks down the street and slips on

a banana peel while the bystanders laugh at the incident.

Aristotle would claim that as long as that man was a person

of base character and/or social rank, one could understand

the humor. Maggi and Castelvetro might say that the harm­

lessness of the fall and the distortion of walking create

the comedy. Nicole would suspect the laughter, claiming

that the bystanders really responded to deeper elements than pure deformity or painless pain. Dr. Johnson would hold that if the faller wore an evening regalia, or, better, a crown, the fall would seem even more ridiculous. Hazlitt might agree and add that the additional laughter arose from the deflatation of the crowd's expectations. Bergson would identify the fall as a mechanism which robs the man of his self esteem. The Freudians would claim that, given the man did weave evening dress, the people laugh because the associ­ ation of the person's dignity with the irregularity of the 10

fall permitted them to cleanse their psyches of accumulated resentment toward all dignitaries; the laughter releases resentment that accompanies civilization as one of its dis­ contents. Theory of comic laughter has been moving closer and closer to explaining laughter in terms of referents in the psyche of the laugher. Even more modern thinkers have come to generalizations that will help lay the groundwork of this study: that there are general attitudes toward certain phenomena in the world, and when these attitudes are belittled

(treated irreverently) they do, under certain circumstances, become laugh-objects. First, one must deal with the attitudes

Carl Jung followed the Freudians in stating that men adopt a "civilized consciousness." Men suppress their instincts for the benefit of societal harmony. Marriage, for instance, serves society and warrants reverent regard.

Yet, other instincts tell man that nothing should be revered, and, as Jung states, "these instincts have not disappeared.

They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect 11 fashion." There is a dualism in human consciousness.

Robert Ornstein, in The Psychology of Consciousness, speaks of the actual physical division of the modes of consciousness. The human body is "programmed" to respond to different sorts of data. The left side of the body

"knows" the non-rational; the right side of the body "knows" the rational. Ornstein agrees with Jung that, "man's real 11

life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites . . . 12 Life is a battleground."

"All of us," Ornstein says, "within a given culture,

share a set of 'unconscious assumptions* given us by the

very organization of the culture." Society raises its

children with what Roger Gross, in Understanding Play scripts,

terms "universal responses." One may not be aware of how

his response to paternity, marriage or religion came about. 13 The response, Gross explains, is "an automatic one."

Reverence for a Godhead, for people in certain positions,

for concepts like honor are "universal responses," and the

reverence forms part of the attitude of consciousness. Man

cannot help his veneration of certain phenomena; reverence

is "built into" his responses to the world around him.

Ralph J. Hallman has the notion that man is con­ ditioned, for society's good, to revere certain phenomena when, in The Psychology of Literature, he claims that

man must live his entire lifetime under those restraints and prohibitions which will guarantee that the cosmic forces will not become unbalanced and which will there­ fore promote his survival. To prevent man from violat­ ing those conditions which bring on excessive and de­ structive responses from nature, early man developed a constellation of prohibitions which acted as social controls over individual behavior.14

This "constellation of prohibitions" includes irreverence towards the venerated matter in cultural life. D. G. Monro, in The Argument of Laughter, holds that people, "build up special attitudes of mind toward particular persons and institutions. Some of these are private . . . the vast 12 . 15 majority are common property." Many modern theorists,

then, agree that members of society, in the process of living

in society, develop what may be called "unconscious assump­

tions," and special attitudes." At any rate, these account

for much of the rational response of consciousness. The mind cannot help but think of certain elements in a particular way? marriage and religion are imprinted as noble ideas in the individual’s mind. The rational mind wants to revere, but at the same time, another part of the consciousness wants to desecrate.

Freud might call this continual need to shatter the reverent attitude one holds toward certain phenomena the

"id." The irreverent part of man belongs to the irrational, the "other drive of man," the counterpart of the rational, selective consciousness. Erich Neumann explains the duality in terms of rigidity and chaos. Society presents the rigidity in its burdening of the individual with "universal responses."

It heaps attitudes of reverence upon the individual. The individual's psychology rationally accepts these strictures

(they are evidently part of his price for life in the social order), but on the other hand, his psychology rebels against all strictures which force a particular response, universal, unconscious or otherwise.^

The non-rational part of the psyche rebels against reverence. It longs for disorder and evil. Ornstein is only one major thinker who links the splitting of the 13 consciousness (with the non-rational side of the body being the left) with society’s association of wickedness and anarchy with the "left" of elements: "sinister" means "left" in

Latin; the anarchist is on the political far-left; the Hell

Mouth of the medieval mansion stage was stage left; villains entered from the left in melodrama, etc. Nietzsche saw humanity as a duality between the Apollonian and the Dionysian

Just as consciousness responds to what Freud would call the

"unlust" with a fascination for evil and the irrational, so the psyche may rebel against its strictures with laughter.

Plato connected laughter with the irrational, and this study has already quoted several who regard laughter as a release 17 of repression of any sort. Morton Gurewitch's study of comedy as a psychological catharsis mentions that comic laughter rebels against the rational mind:

By rejecting the emasculating forces of propriety and conformity, it purges the impacted craving of poisonous resentments that debilitate the psyche. As the most lawless and lunatic of the arts—it unleashes into the drawing room of civilization the happy beasts of sexuality aggression, scatology, cynicism, nonsense, and madness— farce, with incomparable outrageousness, helps man abjure social discipline . . . That is why the farceur, that natural enemy of the saint, the sobersides and the good citizen, is the darling of the id and the thau­ maturge of psychological primitivism.18

Comic theorists have grown, then, more and more aware of the relation between the laughter of man and his attitudes toward the world. By the time of the Freudians, men saw that society imposed many attitudes upon its members for the sake of order. Theorists noted, in the consciousness, 14

an ability to process universal attitudes on one level and rebellions against those attitudes on another level. The rational consciousness accepts, the non-rational rebels against the imposed attitudes of society. Laughter is part of this rebellion.

All of this relates to comedy as such: the subject matter of comedy grows out of the "constellation of pro­ hibitions," from the "unconscious assumptions" made by the psychology about the world. Part of this matter is the unconscious assumption that certain phenomena deserve reverence

Marriage and motherhood, heroism and old age warrant respect.

Such is the universal attitude within many cultures. At the same time, the comic point of view (that those subject matters should be laughed at) grows from the non-rational.

The two attitudes collide in the irreverent comic situation.

The Design of the Study

Going on the assumption that laughter is, indeed, a release of rebellious attitudes at times, and that laughter often takes as its object matter which society venerates, this study will analyze a number of playscripts representative of the dramatic repertoire. This critical analysis will be, for the most part, intrinsic, using the scripts them­ selves as focal points. But extrinsic elements, such as sociology and other criticism, can hardly be avoided.

The nature of the irreverence in each of the scripts 15 will be analyzed. How does irreverence operate? What does an audience find to laugh at? What differences are there in the irreverence of various dramas? What generalizations may be made about the nature of comedy? These are some of the questions with which this study will deal.

In order to approach these questions several major subject areas have been selected: the family, the man-woman relationship, the father and death. Each is a concept or a personage long venerated by society. The very fact that comedy so often deals with these sacred subjects (which will later be termed "fields") is significant if laughter does result from the belittling of revered phenomena. These four subject areas, although not the only ones with which comedy deals, are highly representative of comic drama.

Within each of these subject areas, several comedies have been selected. That the overall selection demonstrates a wide variety of chronological and stylistic diversity is an important consideration. Of course, each comedy must deal to a certain extent with the family or the man-women relationship if it is to be studied in that category. The following playscripts have been chosen to provide varied examples of the related subject matter areas: The Lares

(irreverence toward the household): Moliere's The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer,

Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, Eugene Ionesco's

Jacques, Harold Pinter's The Homecoming; The Lovers (the 16 man-woman relationship): Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Shakes­ peare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Giordano Bruno's II Candelaig,

Neil Simon's Plaza Suite-, The Paterfamilias (the father-

figure) : Menander's Dyskolos, Terence's Phormio, Moliere's

Tartuffe, Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Pay cock’, and The

Danse Macabre (death): Ben Jonson's Volpone, Shakespeare's

Measure For Measure, John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, Hecht and MacArthur's The Front Page.

Besides examination of the texts themselves, the study will, when of interest, analyze other critics' remarks about the works and/or draw upon historical data relevant to the plays.

A few disclaimers are needed here.

First, the above groupings should not imply that those plays under the category of "The Lovers," say, or

"The Paterfamilias" have purely those subjects as their focal points. Tart’uffe concerns many more things above and beyond irreverence toward fatherhood. The categorizing merely accomodates better focus on the subject areas. Second, irreverent laughter need not be the main source of comedy in these scripts; irreverence is only the concern of this study. The study attempts, more than comprehensive play analysis, to draw inferences about a variety of comic laughter: the irreverent variety. Third, although attempts will be made to speculate on the comic value of these plays within their own age, the principal concern is with their impli­ cations for a Twentieth Century audience. Laughter changes 17

so radically in its objects from society to society, one

can only hope to come close to its sources.

Definition of Terms

Comic irreverence has.been defined previously as the

conscious or unconscious awareness of the loss of dignity

of any phenomenon previously exalted in human attitude,

leading to a release of tension through mirth or laughter.

The situation results in comic irreverence when two elements

are present: the subject matter and the laugh trigger, both

of which occur in the consciousness. Subject matters will

be referred to as fields. A field is the topic of the

dramatic situation, an element or combination of elements

drawn from real life against which is set the dramatic action

of the play. The fields in this study are, therefore, the

home, the man-woman relationship, the father and death. These

exist in real life and are used by dramatists as a departure point for action.

The "laugh trigger" may be called a charge. The charge is that verbal or non-verbal activity which gives shape and energy to the dramatic field. Falling down is a charge; automatism is a charge; surprise is a charge. The dramatic shape of the play depends on the relationship of the charge to the field. An example may help to clarify the relationship of these two terms in comedy. They derive from both heraldry and electricity. In heraldry, the field is 18 the pattern or color on the shield; the charge is the symbol invested upon that background. In electricity, the field is a space within which electrical charges are present.

This is the example:

A husband hides in the closet while his wife takes a lover into bed. The wrathful mate bounds out of his lair, bent on murder. At once, he stubs his toe on the dresser, drops his .38 and,.holding his foot, sits crying like a baby while the lovers comfort him. The fields may be 'friarriage,"

"honor," "fidelity," or "vengeance." A playwright assumes the audience’s universal attitude toward the situation.

The charge is incongruity: such a revenger should not meet with such inappropriate limitations and respond to them like an infant. The charges permit the auditor to laugh at the field; the charge makes ridiculous that which the auditor reveres.

The implied attitude of the auditor toward a field may be called his reverent identity 3 the awareness that one must maintain a certain amount of deference to a given phenomenon. It describes the feeling that one must treat a person3 institution or idea with dignity. One maintains a reverent identity toward marriage and fatherhood; the reverent identity is the audience's universal attitude toward those elements. 19

Review of the Literature

There have been several studies where the outlook

and methodology have paralled those of this dissertation.

Preston Heath Tuttle’s dissertation, "Comedy as a Repro­

jection of Childhood Experience: A Study of the Process by

Which Emotional Content Determines Dramatic Form" takes a

similar approach. Comedy is psychically determined, an

expression of "unconscious material generated in childhood 19 life." Tuttle uses Freud in relating Farce, Old Comedy

and New Comedy to the stages of Infancy, Latency and Adoles­

cence in human development. Comedy enacts the impulses of

these three periods.

In 1967, three years later, John J. McLaughlin’s

Ph.D. dissertation, "Cruelty and the Comic: A Study of

Aggression in Drama," continued the Freudian approach to comedy. Mr. McLaughlin studied the combatant relationships of comedy, from.the beginnings of that genre. Aggression changes very little be it in Punch and Judy or Who ' s Afraid 20 of Virginia Woolf? Watching playful violence m comedy purges people of their aggressive impulses.

Three other dissertations bear mentioning. Lois

Hofstad ("The Comic Use of Family Relationships, 1760-1790") explores the reluctance of Eighteenth Century dramatists to ridicule the father-figure in their plays. This timidity, which threatened the actual effectiveness of the plays, came 20

about because playwrights feared to challenge, even in fun,

the absolutism of paternity in English society. Marjorie

Lewis studies the use of the duelling code in Shakespeare's

comedies. Modern audiences, she says, miss much of Shakes­

peare's humor because of their ignorance of the duello.

Norman McWhinney implies, in "Sex, Time and Laughter" that mature laughter results from man's awareness of his future 21 (death). Laughter releases man's everpresent fear of dying.

These works share something in common : all imply that laughter exists in a situation where the laughter venerates the object of laughter. Eighteenth Century English comedy was weak because the mockery of the venerable father was taboo; a modern audience has no ability to identify the duelling code in Shakespearean comedy; laughter is a repressed measure­ ment of time to live.

This section may conclude with Ellen Walker's con­ clusion in "Varieties of Comedy." She compares Molière,

Jonson and Shakespeare and realizes that man seeks, through comedy, an escape from civilization's rigidity. Man thinks himself more important than society; through comedy he 22 creates his "golden age" of freedom, Eros and immortality.

These studies have used many of the assumptions used by this study. Yet, none focus quite as carefully on irre­ verence as that element deserves. 21

Footnotes to Chapter I

l"Tractatus Coislinianus," trans, by Lane Cooper, in Theories of Comedy, Ed. Paul Lautier (N.Y.: Anchor Books, 19.64); In An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (N.Y. : Harcourt, - Brace and Co., 1922) Lane Cooper speculates on Aristotle's implications about the overtly comic: ". . .we should be cured of a desire to laugh at the wrong time, and at the wrong things, through being made to laugh at the proper time by the right means." (p. 70) Cooper infers a comic catharsis from Aristotle and traces the idea through critical theory. 2 "On the Ridiculous," in Lautier, p. 73; "Commentary on The Poetics" in Lautier, p. 94; "Of Comedy," in Lautier, p. 165. 3 "The Rambler," in Lautier, p. 254. 4 From "Lectures on the Comic Writers, Etc., Of Great Britain," in Lautier, p. 226. $The Psychology of Laughter (N.Y.: Gamut Press, 1963). Piddington summarizes his objections to Bergson and the other "intellectualist theories" (p. 23): (1) They are mainly concerned with the nature of the ludicrous situations, without dealing with the relations of such situations to the psychophysical reaction of laughter. (2) We must allow that everything ludicrous presents some incongruity, but, as we have seen, not all incongruity is ludicrous. No intellectualist theory has given an adequate account of what institutes ludicrous incongruity.

"Laughter" in Comedy, p. 81, edited with an intro­ duction by Sypher (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubelday, 1956); p. 141. 7 The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V, trans, by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), p. 605. 8 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. by Strachey (N.Y.: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963), p. 101. g The American Journal of Psychology, X (Oct., 1897): 1-4. 10"The Origins of Laughter," The American Journal of Psychology, XXVI (April, 1915): 240-1. H"Approaching the Unconscious," in Man and His Symbols p. 52. Ed. by Jung (N.Y.: Dell, 1968). 22 12 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1972); Jung, p. 75. 13 Ornstein, p. 37; (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1974), p. 65. 14 (N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1961), p. 56. 15 (Notre Dame, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1963), p. 62. 16 Art and the Creative Unconscious (N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 162. Rigidity and chaos are two evils in man's unconscious; he wants and fears both. 17 The Republic in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, p. 633 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974). Plato (trans, by P. Shorey) contends that, "when one abandons himself to violent laughter his conditions provokes a violent reaction." Laughter would be forbidden the leaders of the Republic and should not be depicted in the gods. 18 Comedy: The Irrational Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 130. 19 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Illinois, 1963). 20 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of California at L.A., 1966) . 21 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Case Western Reserve, 1967); (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Kansas, 1967); (Ph.D. Disserta­ tion, Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1968). 22 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Connecticut, 1971) . CHAPTER II: THE LARES

The household may be seen as the nucleus of Western

society, representing warmth and security. People have

revered the household since the beginnings of Western civil­

ization. The Romans decorated their homes with statues,

the domestic deities called "lares." These protected and

made sacred the Roman hearth. Roman families decorated the

lares when the household head returned from battle. The lares

may serve as a symbol of man's veneration of the household which, social scientists agree, forms an important part of man's consciousness.

M. E. Elmer says, "The family is a social institution which provides the mechanism through which the social heritage works. . . ," and; "no other division or unit of society has been able to meet the primary emotional and spiritual needs of the individual."1 The family situation creates and satisfies emotional dependence. One's primary introduction to the world is through the household, as Clifford Kirkpatrick claims in The Family: as Process and Institution:

The family is important as the setting for the most intense emotional experiences which the individual has in the course of a lifetime. Birth, puberty, marriage, and death are family experiences. The family is the source of serene security, of anguished insecurity, or love and hate, pride and shame, of ecstasy and anguish.

23 24

One manifestation of man's universal attitude of

reverence for his lares is his development of family ritual.

A whole pattern of behavior exists in man's relation to

his domestic situation. James H. S. Bossard and Eleanor S.

Boll have researched a great deal in the area of family

ritual.'; One of their studies concludes:

Applied to the field of family living, we are defining ritual ... as a prescribed formal procedure arising out of a family interaction, involving a pattern of defined behavior which is directed toward some specific end or purpose and which acquires rigidity and a sense of rightness as a result of its continuing history. This defined, ritual develops in connection with many aspects of family life, but clusters chiefly about such things as holidays, anniversary days, meals, vacations, religious worship, and collective ways of using leisure time.3

Ritual serves as the guardian of the lares. Like

the lares, ritual embodies the sanctity of the household.

It should come as no shock then that when comedy seeks to

make fun of the lares it should strike at domestic ritual.

The men treated in this chapter all have that activity

in common: they seek to promote laughter in their audiences

at, among many other elements, the expense of the household

ritual. Moliere's The Doctor In Spite of Himself, Goldsmith's

She Stoops to Conquer, Ionesco's Jacques and Kaufman and

Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner, as well as Pinter's un­ comfortable The Homecoming all contain irreverence for the

field of the lares. All permit an audience to vent its irreverent impulses toward that institution so imbedded in its reverent identity: the household. 25

M. Molière and the Bourgeois Family

Perhaps no comic writer is held up as frequently

by theorists to show what comic artistry should be as is

Molière. Bergson finds universal comic tricks abundant in

Molière, and Meredith considers him the ideal of genteel,

corrective laughter. One has no need of another essay to

remark that Molière directs, "his attention on the objectively discernible failure of his characters" to carry off their pettiness and/or to complete their social climb.1

More often than not, Molière depicts folly by focusing on the bourgeois family itself. There are two sound reasons for this. First, as Paul Bemichou reasons in his essay

"The Anti-Bourgeois," the middle-class family was already infected with a reputation of having stock traits. Both the upper and the lower classes now could snicker at the foibles of the pretentious, miserly or self-indulgent bourgeoisie.

The Court now found it harder to censure Molière after he 2 poked such fun at his own class. Second, as Ramon Fernandez observes

the ethical code of a middle-class family of that period was an altogether and more serious affair, more sub­ stantial, more austere, and more consonant with realities than the values current in worldly society. . . .8

The bourgeois family served Molière in two ways: 1) his non-middle-class audience could laugh fEeely and familiarly at it; and, 2) it maintained its own reverent identity, taking its own behavior quite seriously. 26

Molière mocks the lares of the bourgeois home which, if other classes did not take it seriously, at least revered its own conceits. But what are the implications of Moliere's choice of field for other societies? As W. G. Moore claims,

Molière probably had no idea of the universalities in his choices of subject matter, but

Like wine, comic drama improves with age: the convention of laughter on which it is originally based may change, has changed, so we late comers, so to speak, get a double absurdity, the one set up to be mocked, and perhaps another, unknown to the author.'

Molière may not have known when he chose to berate the middle- class family that he was being irreverent toward the Western family itself, the bastion of civilization. Such general- g ization is "woven into the web" of his comedy which may, indeed, account for Moliere's long life as a produced dramatist.

One example of Moliere's irreverent comedy is The Doctor

In Spite of Himself (Le Médecin malgré lui). An examination of this script will not only explore the ways in which Molière works his irreverent comedy, but will also present a chance to discuss farce.

Farce, going by the most common definitions of that genre, depends upon the visual: absurd physical activity and precise timing are crucial. Bergson's automatism runs rampant in farce. Whatever ideas exist in farce (granted that "ideas" are the last interest of this type of comedy, the laugh being the primary consideration) only survive in the icon (the non-discursive symbol). Words drown in the color, 27

the slapstick and the caricatures. If the attitude of ir­

reverence exists in such a comedy as The Doctor in Spite of

Himself, it only exists in the broadest sense. One might

easily miss the forest of comic irreverence for the trees

of zany comic business.

The plot, as always in Farce, an Atlas supporting

the slapstick humor, is typically simple. Martine gets

revenge on her lazy, whiskey-saturated husband, Sganarelle, by presenting him as a doctor to two lackeys who serve Geronte, a country squire whose daughter suffers from lovesickness.

Sganarelle succeeds in nothing except being beaten and inducing the youthful Lucinde to avoid the old but wealthy gentlemen (her father, Geronte's, marriage choice for her) and run off with her beloved, the young Leandre. The couple run off, but return to the distraught Geronte when Leandre suddenly inherits a fortune; he is now a proper match for

Lucinde in her father's eyes.

The plot is no grand creation and Moliere's principal interest (as in The Imaginary Invalid) may well be the folly of contemporary medicine. But using the charge of mistaken identity, a bumpkin perceived as an innocent-false-doctor,

Moliere taunts the field of lares in his farce.

Act I introduces Sganarelle and his wife, Martine.

She is as sharp-tongued a wench as he is a rogue. Sganarelle, right out of the Commedia, is himself a violator of the family: he shuns the cozy warmth of his tumbledown house; he lets 28

his children sleep on the floor, crying from hunger. He

prefers the gluttonies of drink and debauchery to the re­

sponsibilities of the lares. When the infants cry, "Give

them a good whipping. When I have had plenty to eat and

drink, I like everyone in the house to have his bellyful."

This is Sganarelle’s answer to domesticity. With Sganarelle,

Molière establishes the field of the lares in his comedy.

But Sganarelle is abducted and lands in another house­

hold, also in a state of chaos, which is attended by still

a third household. Old Géronte’s answer to his own child

parallels that which Sganarelle proffers to his offspring:

while his social position remains stable, let his daughter

marry the highest bidder. Acquisition of land means more

to Géronte than the happiness of Lucinde, just as Sganarelle’s

material delights mean more to him.

The third family includes the wet-nurse, Jacqueline,

and her lackey husband (ripe for cuckoldry), Lucas. Her

voluminous breasts become the persistent quest of the would-be

physician, a quest she seems not too unwilling to fulfill.

Are no families virtuous or even content? Perhaps Leandre

and Lucinde may be, but they fall into that primitive category

of "the young lovers"; they are more a symbol of love than

a potential family.

Molière presents family upon family, all in their

respective states of chaos, all in the temper of self-love, blind (or almost so) by stupidity. The veins of materialism 29

and debauchery run alive in The Doctor in Spite of Himselft

a juxtaposition of domestic situations. But Molière knows

the theatre with which he deals. He is not much interested

in making his audience laugh consciously at the family.

Molière is more interested in simply making people laugh.

Perhaps that is the functional reason for the bit-part of

M. Robert in Act I.

M. Robert, a helpful neighbor, intrudes upon Sganarelle's beating of Martine. Martine is the first to jump at the peacemaker: "Will you take a look at this butter-in, who wants to prevent husbands from beating their wives?" Robert

can do nothing but agree to their mutual abuses (now husband and wife have a common victim), and he runs out, beaten by

the both of them. Moliere knows that the situation of Sgan- arelle and Martine exists too often in actuality. He includes

Robert to tell his audience: "Please do not take this domestic problem to heart right now!" Through Robert’s scene, the playwright warns the audience against too quick a judgment— after all, this is a comedy. Families, throughout France and elsewhere, have tremendous problems, but far be it from

Molière to act the part of Robert and intrude.

At the same time, Molière does not insist on banishing all gravity from his familial farce. There is a fourth family in this script. A father and son beseech Sganarelle, in their ignorance of his sham role, to save the wife and mother of their home. The pair appear no more in the script; 30

they have no bearing on the plot. Sganarelle’s mocking of them is irreverence of the grossest variety. In doing so, the false-doctor mocks both their domestic fealty and human life itself. It reminds the audience of the gravity of play­ ing the man of medicine. Sganarelle would rather see the mother die than betray his false role. In this small scene,

Molière also reminds the reader, lest he/she forget in this myriad of petty families, that love and devotion do exist in households. The playwright gives his audience a standard against which to measure to irreverent follies of the other petty personae.

In The Doctor in Spite of Himself, Molière sets up four domestic situations. Within that mulitple existence of lares, the writer sets the rapid machinery of beatings, mistakes, rapid resolutions, disguises—the engines of farce—- into operation. Whatever they touch diminishes in import for the moment.

The exterior of farce offers the front door to irre­ verent laughter. In the presence of such zany business, how can one seriously consider the subject matter? The field of the lares in its gravity (the sickness of the fourth families’ mother) and its play (the intrusion of Robert) rest quietly on the ground while the tumult of farce rages above. 31

Goldsmith's Radical Irreverence

"For modern theatre goers," says Lois Hofstad in her impressive dissertation in Eighteenth Century English comedy,

"the most significant fact about Goldsmith and Sheridan is that at a time when most authors found it hard to see comedy in family relationship, these two men created unforgettable symbolic individuals in vigorous comic conflict with their 9 nearest relatives." Goldsmith and Sheridan wrote plays far more daring than their contemporaries. Delicate senti­ mental comedies tyrannized the English stage in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century. These plays never made more than the most modest fun of the English family; they never permitted the father figure to be ridiculed. Any irreverence of this sort threatened, as Ms. Hofstad explains, the landed aristocratic structure of English society.

She Stoops to Conquer transcends its period. Al­ though the humor in Goldsmith's play seems genteel to the modern auditor, She Stoops to Conquer may be considered an irreverent play in its own time. William Woodfall's review, published in Monthly Review, March, 1773, illustrates a con­ temporary suspicion:

His [Goldsmith's] merit is in that sort of dialogue which lies on a level with the most common understand­ ings; and in that low mischief and mirth which we laugh at, while we are ready to despise ourselves for so doing. This is the reason why the Reader must peruse the present Comedy without pleasure, while the representation of it may make him laugh.10 32

This might as well be Nicole speaking. Woodfall

implies that if an audience thought for a moment about what

they were actually laughing at, it would cease to be funny.

And among those elements in She Stoops to Conquer at which an

audience laughs is a mockery of the lares. From that per­

spective, Goldsmith's play may now be examined. 11 Oliver Goldsmith's "attack on sentimental comedy,"

She Stoops to Conquer (or Mistakes of a Hight) commences

with a dialogue between Hardcastle and his spouse. The tone

of their conversation sets the warm, secure serenity of the

Hardcastle home. The world goes on busily outside (Hard­

castle: "In my time the follies of the town crept slowly

among us, but now they travel faster than a stage coach");

the Hardcastle family, like its namesake—a humorous nom- 12 ination, sits within an "old rumbling mansion, that looks

for all the world like an inn, but that we never see company."

Old Mr. Hardcastle is himself a fortress protecting the old rituals, the old values: "I love every thing that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines; and, I believe, Dorothy, (Taking her hand) you'll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife." The Hardcastle home is a bastion of the lares.

The dialogue of domestic harmony runs upon the reef as Tony Lumpkin enters their conversation. He is Mrs, Hard- castle's son by a previous marriage, and his surname alone removes him from the lares of Hardcastle. Household ritual 33 is a joke to Tony Lumpkin, as Mr. Hardcastle explains

If burning the footmen’s shoes, frightening the maids, and worrying the kittens be humour, he has it. It was yesterday he fastened my wig to the back of my chair, and when I went to make a bow, I popt my bald head in Mrs. Frizzle’s face.

Goldsmith sets his audience up for irreverence toward the lares. The introduction of Tony, an "anti-domestic," prepares one for the larger scale irreverence toward the home brought about by Marlowe and Hastings, though more unwittingly.

Tony’s gods more closely resemble Bacchus than the little

Roman home-statues. He longs to be gone from the warmth of home; he seeks his more comfortable element in drink and

Big Bet Bouncer.

Mrs. Hardcastle: Tony, where are you going, my charmer? Won't you give papa and I a little of your company, lovee?

Tony. I'm in haste, mother, I cannot stay.

The "Three Pigeons" expects me down every moment. There's some fun going forward.

Despite his mother's attempt to haul him physically back to family life, Lumpkin is off to the wine and wench world.

But Tony's half-sister, Kate Hardcastle, makes up for her brother's roving. She embodies domestic devotion, her father's joy, but is not without some infection of the world outside:

Hardcastle: (solus) . . . But is not the whole age in a combination to drive sense and discretion out of doors? There's my pretty darling Kate! The fashions of the times have almost infected her too. But living a year or two in town, she is as fond of gauze and French frippery as the best of them.

Goldsmith, perhaps in reaction to sentimental comedy in which 34

a home became the savior of youth, presents in the initial moments of She Stoops to Conquer the following conflict:

the sacred home versus the outside invader. The invader may be the robust world of Tony, or it may be the French

frippery which so attracts Kate. The invader may also appear in the form of Marlowe and Hastings.

These young men, lost on their journey to the Hard- castle estate, ask directions at a tavern. They meet, above all people, Tony, who convinces them that they are far from their destination and that taking residence in a nearby inn for the night is advisable. The "inn" is the Hardcastle home where

. . . the landlord is rich, and going to leave off business? so he wants to be thought a gentleman, saving your presence, he! he! he! He’ll be for giving you his company, and ecod, if you mind him, he'll persuade you that his mother was an alderman, and his aunt a justice of the peace.

Landlord.’. A troublesome old blade to be sure; but a' keeps as good wines and beds as any in the whole country.

Marlowe: Well, if he supplies us with these, we shall want no further connexion. We are to turn to the right, did you way?

And so the major joke of She Stoops to Conquer begins.

The joke is a case of mistaken identity, but it is a house­ hold itself which becomes mistaken. In the course of the play, one watches the sacredness of the home derided, al­ though innocently, by being taken for a public inn.

Marlowe and Hastings arrive at the Hardcastle "inn" prepared (as world-weary travellers) to be victimized by 35 predatory hostel-keepers. Goldsmith makes Marlowe a seasoned

journeyer with enough nerve and know-how to deal domineeringly with ruthless inn-keepers who might take advantage of desperate itinerants:

Marlowe: Travellers, George, must pay in all places: the only difference is, that in good inns you pay dearly for luxuries; in bad inns you are fleeced and starved.

Hastings: You have lived pretty much among them. In truth, I have been often surprised, that you who have seen so much of the world, with your natural good sense, and your many opportunities, could never yet acquire a requisite share of assurance.

Old Hardcastle welcomes the youths with courtesy, even treating them to battle stories which openly bore

Marlowe and Hastings. Hardcastle is much too presumptuous as an innkeeper:

I see this fellow wants to give us his company, and forgets that he's an innkeeper, before he has learned to be a gentleman.

What may be accepted behavior for the gentleman host is outrageous for the innkeeper. At the same time, what may be an honest response for a guest enduring a chatty landlord is curt irreverence for a young man facing his future father- in-law. Old Hardcastle persists with war tales; the men want their supper:

Instead of the battle of Belgrade, I believe it's almost time to talk about supper. What has your philosophy got in the house for supper?

The impertinence continues. Hardcastle repeats that the young suitors may take their liberty with his home, and the young suitors comply with brazen willingness. But Marlowe 36

still cannot get over the forwardness of the innkeeping staff.

They obviously do not know their roles as professional hosts:

The assiduities of these good people tieze me beyond bearing. My host seems to think it ill manners to leave me alone, and so he claps not only himself but his old-fashioned wife on my back. They talk of coming to sup with us too? and then I suppose, we are to run the gauntlet through all the rest of the family.

But Marlowe is different with his peers. Actually he is a shy young man, especially with the ladies. He cannot court Kate Hardcastle unless he thinks her to be a serving wench, and then Marlowe pursues her with a bold aggression that by far exceeds propriety. Marlowe's mistake makes him irreverent even in the love ritual.

Goldsmith uses one pervasive charge in She Stoops to

Conquer’. The age old trick of mistaken identity. But it is a big charge. An entire world, the sober lares of Hard­ castle, is mistaken for a different world. With this mistaken identity, the characters can be totally outrageous. Young

Marlowe can speak to his future father-in-law with unabashed frankness. He can tell the old man to shut up about his war stories and fetch some decent food and drink—the travellers are tired—with no social inhibition. Through the safety of mistaken identity, Marlowe can court Kate lustily and mock the ritual demeanor of his society. In short, Goldsmith's comic charge permits his characters, and, hence, his audience to be irreverent toward the lares.

Goldsmith's audience, quite aware of the lads' mistake, 37

shares in the irreverence. Now they can watch the sacredness of the home belittled. They can hea,r rude, but honest remarks hurled at the venerated household with no regard for propriety.

An audience member, well aware of the strain of "being polite" as another's household guest, of putting up with a well- meaning host's tedious stories, or of "decent courtship" when one feels physically attracted, will readily release these tensions by laughing at the unwitting mistakes. An auditor, through Goldsmith's charging of his field, becomes a tem­ porary Tony Lumpkin.

Although She Stoops to Conquer retains some elements of the sentimental comedy (like Tony's duping of his mother 13 in the garden ) it does, in agreement with Lois Hofstad's analysis, strike a bolder pose. It dares, by Goldsmith's skillful manipulation of the running joke, mistaken identity, permit its audience abundant irreverent license. She Stoops to Conquer deals with a great many universal attitudes, the lares among them. Perhaps this boldness allows Goldsmith's work to live much longer than most of his contemporaries' works.

Mr. Sheridan Whiteside: Master of Revels

When Kaufman and Hart wrote The Man Who Came to Dinner

(which opened in New York in the Fall, 1939), they no doubt had in mind that irreverent critic, Alexander Woolcott, one of the "three fat fates" of Broadway, whose critical notes 38

on the New York Seasons drew much of the non-threatre-oriented

public into the entertainment sections of the newspaper.

But the play (beyond depicting the irreverence of the title

character's "real life" model) is far from biographical.

A brief plot summary may help to describe the nature of the

comedy in The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Sheridan Whiteside, "critic, lecturer, wit, radio

orator, intimate friend of the great and near great," finds

himself temporarily incapacitated by an ice-fall and unable

to budge from the home of the Stanleys of Mesalia, Ohio,

where Mr. Whiteside has been a dinner guest. He cannot get

back out into his world of stars, glamour and eccentricity,

so Mr. Whiteside brings that world to Mesalia. The "thread

of action" involves Whiteside’s secretary's involvement with

a local newspaper reporter—Sherry doesn't want to lose a

good girl-Friday—and plots to foil Maggie's romance. But

that merely gives shape to the comedy. The real mirth explodes

in the comings and goings of Whiteside's friends: a cockroach

scientist, convicted murderers, a worldly "Noel Coward," a decadent film queen, a zany, and an assortment of parcels from absent acquaintances (ranging from penguins to mummy case). All impose themselves on the well-ordered domus of

Mr. and Mrs. Stanley. The household, the bastion of bourgeois order, falls to the desecrations of a Hollywood world which cares nothing for order or security, only excitement. Sheriden

Whiteside embodies that world, sits, in his wheelchair, at 39

the hub of it. He, the perfect revels master, even sends

the Stanley children off seeking their own hearts’ dreams:

the boy to a career of adventure, the girl to elopement with 14 a labor organizer. The lares yield to the disorder of

glamour.

Some directors choose to depict Sherry as a grump, scowling and grumbling about his bad luck at being confined in middle-class Middle America. Indeed, Whiteside does a bit of grumbling, but only as a reaction to those things which are no part of his life: the icons of domesticity. He tolerates the autobiography of old Dr. Bradley and the services of his prim house-nurse, but not easily. He scorns Mr. Stanley's attempt to oust him from the Stanley residence when Whiteside's intrigues make it inconvenient for him to go. He resents

Maggie's involvement with Bert Jefferson (her submission to the bourgeois life). However, his phone conversations and receptions of both friends and gifts reveal a Falstaffian love of life, or, at least, the glamourous life of his own world. A cockroach village and an entire radio network (which

Whiteside moves in for his Christmas broadcast) are no strangers to him. Only in the middle-class home do they seem strange, and if an audience finds such intrusions outrageous, irreverence towards the domestic situation is well at work!

For the Stanley domus embodies the field of family sacredness. The authors set up the typically American home at the very start: neighbor ladies, thrilled to glimpse a 40

celebrity, a would-be humanitarian doctor, a horn^-rimmed

nurse, an excited lady-of-the-house, and a father who has

to leave all the festivities for work. Whiteside's famous

first line, delivered to this entire gathering, sums up the

action of the entire script, or at least Sherry's opinion

of Mesalia, Ohio: "I may vomit." The rest of the play merely

snowballs this reaction. The Sherry world and the Stanley world exchange blows.

Like She Stoops to Conquer, The Man Who Came to

Dinner develops one irreverent joke. In the former it was mistaken identity; the latter uses a clash of incongruous worlds. Both plays feature warm "castles" that have their peace shattered by the irreverent outside. Both "strangers"

(Marlowe's mistakes and Sherry's world) impose themselves heavily on the lares. Both scripts depict comically what happens when a serious home is ravished by those who either do not recognize it for what it is or simply do not care!

Yet, both scripts do reinforce the basic goodness of the lares

Goldsmith's play ends in double betrothal; Whiteside consents to release Maggie from his world so that she may begin a middle-class home with Bert.

Yet, in the process of arriving at these ultimate, inevitable conclusions, the tedium of the household becomes the butt of a joke. There is something beyond the lares which may be much more exciting (like Tony's alehouse world and Sherry's Hollywood world). The Man Who Came to Dinner, 41

like She Stoops to Conquer, bows courteously to the lares—

but not until it has made a mincemeat of them.

Ionesco: irreverence in Metaphysical Farce

"This non-Aristotelian theater," says J. S. Doubrovsky

of Eugene Ionesco's work, "presents us with a problem which

Aristotle had not forseen: that of pity and fear for which

laughter is a catharsis." The problematic pity and fear of

which Doubrovsky speaks often results from a less than

flattering depiction of some bourgeois institution or behavior

in what Rosette C. Lamont terms Ionesco's "metaphysical farce"; 15 "Above all, ideologies would be demystified."

The lares, especially those of the bourgeois family

structure, are certainly among the foremost ideologies which

Ionesco "demystifies" and Jacques, or Obedience is a prime

example. As in his other plays, Ionesco reflects the macro­

cosm by pinpointing a microcosm onstage: "this tattered and

disjointed inner world is in some way a reflection or a symbol of universal disruption." For Ionesco

A play is a construction made up of a series of states of consciousness, or situations, which grow more intense, more concentrated, and then knit together either to be unraveled or to end in inextricable and unendurable confusion.

Jacques, a microcosm, reflects the lares' macrocosm. At the same time, the play reflects a series of conscious states which live in the reverent identity of the audience toward the household. Like the more traditional farce of Molière, 42

Eugene Ionesco's metaphysical farce depends on a tableau of

confusion and disharmony. Absurdist theatre, however, takes

no care to limit its argument to the specifics of the day;

it confronts life on a purposely broader level. Just as

Ionesco says, "When I speak about death everyone understands 17 me. Death is neither bourgeois nor socialist," so when

he deals with the lares, he reaches universal assumptions.

The plot of Jacques, like that of most farces, is

trivial. Jacques' family badgers him to submit to two

obediences. One, he must save the honor of his family by

admitting that he likes potatoes in their jackets. Two,

he must obey his family's wish (not to mention his own 18 physical attraction) and accept Roberta as his bride.

Jacques submits to both familial demands, but only after much

strife.

The often nonsensical, but nonetheless earnest argu­ ment between Jacques and his family, Jacques and Roberta, and Jacques and the Family Robert reflect Ionesco's micro- cosmic impression: in preserving the lares human beings force and break the will of other human beings. Family dignity comes at the expense of freedom. Ionesco's families are obsessed with conformity. Jacques' reluctance to yield on even the trivial matter of the potato is a hubris against the lares.

Although Ionesco deals with other elements (such as love and physical desire) in Jacques, the household is a 43

principal concern. He takes care to name his characters

according to their respective families (another humorous

nomination): Jacques Father, Jacques Mother, Jacqueline,

Roberta I and II, Robert Mother, Robert Father, etc. Also,

the family members are well represented from little sister

to grandparents. Even the environment suggested by the

playwright serves as an icon of domesticity.

Scene: A dull, grey-looking set; s dingy untidy room. Backstage, on the right, a narrow, rather low door. An eerie light reaches it through a window, backstage centre, with dirty curtains. There is a picture re­ presenting nothing at all; an old dusty well-worn arm­ chair in the centre of the stage; a bed-side table; and a number of undefined objects which are both strange and ordinary, such as old slippers, perhaps a broken- down couch in a corner, rickety chairs.19

The home, like the picture, embodies emptiness; just the

shell exists. The world of Jacques is crowded with elements

that once, to this home, had meaning. Now, like the lares,

the objects of the home are well-worn and pretentious about

their significance.

The household members are no better. The families

operate not only as individual members, but as a single

force. Each family is a machine grinding out intimidations.

The machine is self-perpetuating, feeding on guilt. In the

following speech by Jacques Mother, Ionesco captures a part

of the eternal sense of guilt inflicted- on the individual by the lares.

{weeping) My son, my child, after all we’ve done for you! After all our sacrifices! I should never have thought this of you. You were my brightest hope . . . 44

You still are, for I can’t believe, no, I just ca,n't believe, ÿzy tha,t you'll be so stubborn! You can't love'your Dad anymore, your sister, your clothes your grandparents ! ! ! Don't you remember, my boy, re­ member how I fed you on the bottle, how I left you to dry in your nappies, just like your sister. . . .2®

The appeal is sincere, at least within the context of the script. It might be substituted for a number of speeches in dramatic situations, both in dramatic art and real life. Of course, Jacques Mother has no compunction about equating clothes with family love. The lares of Ionesco's families are as sacred to them as Hardcastle's are to him.

Yet, they struggle for trivial goals, and that is what makes

Jacques an irreverent play. Ionesco's characters have what the Queen in Exit the King accuses her young competitor of having: delusions of triviality.

The honor of the lares depends on Jacques' liking for jacketed potatoes and his acceptance of three noses on his bride. The household dignity is belittled by Ionesco in his "naturalistic comedy" as these trivialities are raised to extreme emotional importance. Esslin very aptly describes

Ionesco's comic technique:

The pattern of Ionesco's plays is one of intensifi­ cation, acceleration, accumulation, proliferation to the point of paroxysm, when psychological tension reaches the unbearable—the pattern of orgasm. It must be followed by a release that relieves the tension and sub­ stitutes a feeling of serenity. This liberation takes the form of laughter. And that is why Ionesco's plays are comic.21

In Jacques the "tension" exists in Ionesco's use of the household as a field. The tension becomes "serenity" in 45

laughter (another reference to Ionesco's comic catharsis) when the lares lose their dignity, not only by the absurdity

and triviality of those elements which must uphold the lares, but by Ionesco's famous use of language.

Language, with Ionesco, as with Synge, is an important comic charge. How can one take subject matter seriously when Jacques Father calls his boy "praticide," or when he calls Jacques' submission a "libelie"? Jean Vannier claims that

His [Ionesco's] entire work bears witness to the same purpose: that of reducing language to absurdity, by considering it simply as sonorous matter, and by systematically emptying that matter of meanings it is supposed to carry.22

Ionesco has no compunction about emptying established objects of reverence of their meaning. His language, like his absurd subjects of conversation, is just another way of doing it.

Ionesco's playscript, Jacques, uses the field of the lares against which to play its absurd comic charges. The families force Jacques into submissions lest he refute the lares by self-assertion. The actual obediences of this play are to a potato, to a three-nosed girl, while the emotions around them become ridiculous in the process; in­ congruity of emotion versus actuality is an important comic charge. Language, very often "sonorous matter," is another charge which reduces the importance of the characters' con­ cerns , at least in the audience's regard.

Ionesco plays with his audience. He sets up a. situation 46

that permits an auditor to laugh at another family’s lares:

although trivial, the families will risk destruction and

create foolish turmoil to maintain their lares. How might

an audience's unconscious assumptions about familial devotion

look from afar? The incongruity of man's emotional attach­

ment to the lares versus the actual importance of these

man-made objects of veneration may seem as absurd as those

in Jacques!

The Homecoming: Ritual Irreverence

Discussing the dramatic art of Harold Pinter, Katherine

Burkman makes this observation:

beneath the daily secular rituals which Pinter weaves into the texture of his plays—'the taking of a toast and tea'—beat the rhythms of ancient fertility rites, which form a significant counterpoint to the surface rituals of the plays which often lend the dramas their shape and structure.23

Ms. Burkman is not alone in perceiving ceremonies of violence,

lust and competition as Pinter's subtexts. Pinter's morose

sense of humor, his baffling sense of language and his . . 24 diverse sense of dramatic action versus dramatic activity have sent many scholars, armed with critical scapels, into the depths of the playscripts. Very often one finds drama centered upon the family.

The Homecoming is a "family" comedy. Like The Birthday

Party and The Caretaker, The Homecoming confounds those who expect intelligibility of "message" or even traditional mirth. Margaret Croyden calls the work, "a comedy of primitive 47

ritual on the one hand, and a comedy of manners on the other."

Steven Aronson claims that any sincere appreciation of The

Homecoming depends upon awareness of Pinter’s "knowledge and expectation of how the family works which gives his play its 25 economy and sculptured shape." Critics have been able to see importance in Pinter’s depictions of both the specific

(the London family) and the universal (the archetypal rituals of mankind). Some have even seen the "battle" over Ruth as a continuation of the age-old struggle over woman in pursuit of her as a lover and mother. Such "ritualistic" interpretations are certainly interesting and surely valid, but perhaps a simpler critical treatment of the ritual in

The Homecoming is in order for the purposes of this study of irreverence toward the lares.

Pinter uses the family unit as the core of The

Homecoming. The play follows a course of stinging irreverence toward many elements which are common, not only to the London family, but to the Western family in general. Lenny works as a pimp to support his old "da"; the brothers usurp their sister-in-law. But these are the more brazen aspects with which Pinter endows his household. "Very well," Pinter might say to one's conceptions of the household, "a good son should support his old father and a family should welcome its sister-in-law. I'm only demonstrating how far these may go!"

Besides these gross distortions of household propriety, 48

Pinter contains some additional, subtler sacrilege. Ike

Homecoming abounds with incidents that begin as recognizable

family rituals, only to end in crushing cynicism. Some

of the more important domestic ceremonies depicted by Pinter

are: 1) the dependent relative in the home; 2) the senti­ mental recollection of the past; 3) the new bride; and,

4) familial assistance. All of these remain fixed in the universal attitudes of most people brought up in Western family life. And so, the playwright may assure himself of his audience's reverent identity of them; all recall a ritualistic behavior towards which the playwright may be irreverent.

For instance, a dependent relative, be he or she a distant cousin or grandparent, survives in a peculiar position in the household. That person is destitute and probably quite useless, often in the way. Only a parasite- host relationship exists. Yet, it seems inhuman to turn out the unfortunate kindred. With this very delicate priority, the household members walk on the eggshells of the dependent’s pride. No one mentions the burden of this useless, and perhaps overbearing destitute uncle who lost his money in the stock market, or grandmother who's husband left her nothing. Children inquiring, "Why is he here?" or, "What does she do for us?" are quickly silenced. It offends the lares to recall the truth. But Pinter is ruthless about offending the lares. 49

Max and his brother Sam are both dependents of a

sort. The position makes Max a recollector, reminiscing of

a time when he and his friend, MacGregor, would terrorize

the pubs. As dubious as those adventures might be, they

represent, for Max, strength and independence, the very

qualities he lacks now. Now, Max must hint for such practical

items as clothes. He depends on his son, Lenny, for even

a cut-price, Navy surplus vest. Lenny greets his dependent

father's quests for attention with, "Plug it, will you, you

stupid sod, I'm trying to read the paper." Lenny has no

sentiment toward his father's old memories. The son even attacks what little Max contributes to the household, the cooking:

I want to ask you something. That dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it?

Pause

Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.

Instead of protecting the dependent, Lenny rubs Max's nose in his destitution. The positions are reversed? the father becomes the babbling child. Lenny warns Max not to talk in "that tone of voice." He taunts Max's impotent threat of caning with childish words, chanted from an all too grown­ up perspective:

Oh, Daddy, you're not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh? Don't use your stick on me, Daddy. No, please. It wasn't my fault, it was one of the others. I haven't done anything wrong, Dad, honest. Don't clout me with that stick, Dad. 50

Security, not accident of birth, decides who the "parent"

is.

But Max behaves no more reverently toward his dependent

relatives. Sam is not financially destitute as Harold Pinter

tells his audience. Max's brother contributes to the family

whatever he earns as a limousine driver. Still, Sam is an

old bachelor with no other home. His dependence on Max

and the family is an emotional one. All he can. contribute

is his salary. For that, one feels, the family tolerates

him. Max has no intention of letting Sam forget that fact:

all he is good for is his money:

Max: Why do I keep you here? You're just an old grub?

Sam: Am I?

Max: You're a maggot.

Sam: Oh yes?

Max: As soon as you stop paying your way here, I mean when you're too old to pay your way, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to give you the boot.

Sam: You are, eh?

Max: Sure, I mean, bring in the money and I'll put up with you. But when the firm gets rid of you—you can flake off. .

Sam: This is my house as well, you know. This was our mother's house.

Max: One lot after the other. One mess after the other.

In Pinter's complex jungle characters say things in

"touchy" family situations which may be merely thought, or felt unconsciously, in "normal" homes. Punishing Max for his dependence and threatening to give Sam "the boot" 51 may well reflect the subtext of many families. Part of the

liberation of comedy is the speaking of the unspeakable.

One may laugh at these outrages, giving vent to the suppres­ sions that remain unspoken. One laughs "outrageously" at the dependent relative onstage and, hence, laughs and mocks all such people. The sensitive situation bursts, but it takes Pinter’s personae to break the reverent silence.

Just as he uses the ceremony of complacency toward the dependent relative, Pinter elicits laughter at another object of veneration: the sentimental recollection of an old father toward his young children. Only Pinter refuses to indulge an old widower’s reminiscence of his late wife and toddling children. Act II gives one a fuller picture of Max's past life (again, an audience may find it difficult to separate the.truth from the fiction). As sugary as Max's memories may be, they do reflect an attitude which many take seriously; he paints a design of domestic bliss. After prais­ ing his late wife Jessie, the "backbone" of his family who had a "heart of gold and a mind," Max recalls the following:

Mind you, I was a generous man to her. I never left her short of a few bob. I remember one year I entered into negotiations with a top-class group of butchers with continental connections. I was going into asso­ ciation with them. I remember the night I came home, I kept quiet. First of all I gave Lenny a bath, then Teddy a bath, then Joey a bath. What fun we used to have in the bath, eh, boys? Then I came downstairs and I made Jessie put her feet up on a pouffe—what happened to that pouffe, I haven't seen it for years—she put her feet up on the pouffe and I said to her, Jessie, I think our ship is going to come home, I'm going to treat you to a couple of items, I‘m going to buy you a dress in pale corded blue silk, heavily encrusted in pearls, and 52

for casual wear, a pair of pantaloons in lilac flowered taffeta. Then I gave her a drop of cherry brandy. I remember the boys came down, in their pyjamas, all their hair shining, their faces pink, it was before they started shaving, and they knelt down at our feet, Jessie’s and mine. I tell you, it was like Christmas.

Max's more realistic revelations several lines later shatter the fantasy with no little roughness: the butchers are a bunch of criminals and the dream characters are "three bastard sons" and "a slutbitch of a wife."

Pinter holds the blissful picture up merely to slap it away. Max and his family are used to such rough trans­ itions of thought. Perhaps all have learned not to take such rosey drivel seriously—but how about an audience?

To an audience Max's phantom hope for the happiness of his family, his domestic tableau in the family filled living room is real. The lares has bred reverence for such a cameo.

That is the reverence which Pinter shatters. The vulgar, honest utterance slashes the family dream.

Meeting the new bride is as important a ritual as deference to the dependent and the blissful reminiscence, and any person who has ever been introduced to a new bride, or bride-to-be, in the family knows of the platitudes required.

One must remark of the lady's charm and beauty (whether they exist or not) as part of the welcoming rite. Above all, the groom's father should pull his son aside and assure the lad of his approval of his new daughter-in-law. Pinter once more makes use of some ceremony imbedded in Western Conscious­ ness as he depicts the introduction of the new bride, but in 53 the world of The Homeeoming.

Teddy has been away from home for years. He returns from America with his wife. Teddy and Ruth have been married for some time and even have small children, but she has never met the family. They return in the night, when Ruth meets

Lenny. But their encounter becomes less a ritual and more a battle of peers. The real ceremonial expectations arise in the morning when Max awakes asking suspicious questions about what his long-absent son, Teddy, is doing in the house with a strange woman. Max ignores his son’s attempted cordial ities.

Teddy: . . . Uh . . . look, I’d . . . like you to meet . .

Max: How long you been in this house?

Teddy: All night.

Max: All night? I'm a laughing stock. How did you get it?

Teddy: I had a key.

Max whistles and laughs.

Max: Who's this?

Teddy: I was just, going to introduce you.

Max: Who asked you to bring tarts in here?

Teddy: Tarts?

Max:.Whoasked you to bring dirty tarts into this house?

Teddy: Listen, don't be silly—

Max: You been here all night?

Teddy: Yes, we arrived from Venice— 54 Max: We’ve had a smelly scrubber in my house all night. We've had a stinking pox-ridden slut in my house all night.

Teddy: Stop it! What are you talking about?

Max: I haven't seen the bitch for six years, he comes home without a word, he brings a filthy scrubber off the streets, he shacks up in my house.

Teddy: She's my wife! We're married!

Pause

Max: I've never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother died. My word of honor, (to Joey) Have you ever had a whore here? Has Lenny ever had a whore here? They come back from America, they bring the slopbucket with them. (To Teddy) Take that disease away from me. Get her away from me.

Teddy: She's my wife.

Max: (to Joey) Chuck them out.

Critics have seen Teddy as the outsider. He is the member of the family with the black fleece. Teddy leaves his ill-fitting household for America. Even in this scene

Teddy seems to be innocent of Max (and, perhaps, even an audience has lost its innocence at this point in the script).

He answers his Dad as any son would. Teddy does not expect the outrages of Max. Teddy responds to his father's irrational­ ities with logical explanation, a poor weapon in The Home- coming household.

But Max's accusations are true (although one might only suspect that at this time). Ruth is a whore; she is at home in her environment now. Teddy understands none of this. He addresses himself to propriety. His initiation of the new bride into the household is the "proper" one, 55

recognizable to the audience. Max's initiation of the new

bride is also proper for his own perverse household. The

universal response to such a ceremony finds itself on unholy

ground.

Teddy's words reflect the audience's reactions on

witnessing this outrage against the introduction ritual;

Max speaks from the world of the play. The incongruity

creates a ludicrous situation. Like Teddy, the auditor is

quite taken aback by the old man's onslaught, but (unlike

the attack on Hero's virtue by her father-in-law-to-be in

Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing) the assault comes from

an impotent old man. Only to the ritual does the attack

present a danger. And to the breaking tension of this lares-

imposed ritual may an audience address its laughter.

Another family ritual which Pinter includes in The

Homecoming is familial assistance. This differs from support

of the destitute. A family offers assistance by lending

a member money, by setting him/her up in business, by putting

a member through school. A mutual respect is implicit: the

assistant has faith in the relative's ability to make the

most of the assistance; the relative, in thanks, works to

his utmost. A father putting his son through a professional

school offers advice and encouragement. A brother-in-law

setting his sister-in-law up in his business offers respectable prospects. At least, an audience expects such situations

of family aid to be so. In The Homecoming the ceremony of 56

domestic assistance no more caters to an audience's expecta­

tions than do the other rituals.

Joey spends him time before the mirror, training to be a boxer. Max supports his quest to be a prizefighter and offers the following advice:

I'll tell you what you've got to do. What you've got to do is you've got to learn how to defend yourself, and you've got to learn how to attack. That's your only trouble as a boxer. You don't know how to defend yourself, and you don't know how to attack.

What remains? Whether Max actually thinks that he is giving good advice, or whether he is being deliberately sarcastic depends on the director's interpretation. In either case, the encouragement so much a part of familial ritual becomes absurd. The old father's advice is nill; it becomes a cruel or ignorant triviality.

The Homeeoming family also lends assistance to Ruth.

In the last act, Pinter presents an outrageous subject dis­ cussed in a businesslike context. The following is merely an example of the extended conversation in which Ruth and her in-laws discuss her employment in one of Lenny's houses of prostitution:

Ruthz You'd supply my wardrobe, of course?

Lenny: We'd supply everything. Everything you need.

Ruth: I'd need an awful lot. Otherwise I wouldn't be content.

Lenny: You'd have everything.

Ruth: I would naturally want to draw up an inventory of everything I would need, which would require your signatures in the presence of witnesses. 57

Lenny: Naturally.

Ruth: All aspects of agreement and conditions of employ­ ment would have to be clarified to our mutual satisfaction before we finalized the contract.

Lenny: Of course.

Pinter's very formal language is a comic charge on the field of family ritual. A woman coolly discusses leaving her husband and children to pursue a career as a professional and domestic prostitute. Lenny’s obliging concessions and

Ruth's material considerations (like Max's advice to Joey) mock the family ritual of assistance by taking it to an absurd degree.

The Homecoming, in summary, contains a variety of rituals which, in their external form, are easily identified by an audience. In the absurd context of the play, however, those very ceremonies become occasions for cruelty and immorality. By including these elements in family rituals,

Pinter releases his audience's irreverent emotions. An auditor may laugh harmlessly at these distortions when, in fact, he may have wanted to say the outrageous things that Max and

Lenny say at the very occasion of meeting the new bride or confronting the family dependent. The lares' code forbids man to vent those aggressions (which may arise only because they are forbidden); one may vent them through the characters who have no regard for the lares as the world knows them.

In this chapter several plays have been studied which contain a common element: all find a way of permitting an 58

auditor to become irreverent safely toward the lares. The

lares, being that part of man’s unconscious assumption which

dictates that the household is particularly sacred and, hence,

a prescribed pattern of reverent behavior must exist in the

home, may be safely made fun of in comic drama. Moliere

depicts irreverence toward the household in The Doctor In

Spite of Himself by portraying several households concerned

with nothing but pettiness. Goldsmith permits a safe derision

of the lares by the use of pure mistake: Marlowe and Hastings

treat a sacred home like a vulgar inn merely because they

know no better. Sherry belittles the middle-class household

by demanding Hollywood luxuries of it, and by imposing his

colorful world upon it. It cannot maintain either. Ionesco

exposes man's foolish bourgeois values by depicting the

individual at the mercy of his petty and overbearing family

in Jacques. Mr. Pinter presents family rituals with sordid

content. All are apt triggers for an audience's irreverent

laughter toward the lares, the code of behavior in the house­ hold, which operates, like many fields, as a benevolent tyrant. 59

Footnotes to Chapter II

1 Sociology of the Family (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1945), pp. 37, 12. 2 (N.Y.: Ronald Press Co., 1963), pp. 5-6. 3 "Ritual of Family Living" in Sourcebook in Marriage and the Family, ed. by Marvin B. Sussman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963), p. 276; Susanne B. Langer in Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Mentor Books, 1951) claims (p. 134) that ritual comes about when spontaneous feeling for the event cannot be maintained by the célébrants. When, for instance, the ecstasy of religion was no longer felt by early man he developed prescribed behaviors, rituals, to substitute for the ecstasies. The rituals of family life in the home also come about when devotion to the lares cease to be organic. 4 Eugene H. Falk, "Moliere the Indignant Satirist: Le Bour­ geois Gentilhomme," Tulane Drama Review V (Sept. 1960): 79. 5 Mo Here : A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Jacques Guicharnaud (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964), pp. 60-68. * g Moliere: The Man Seen Through the Plays, trans, by W. Follet (N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1958), p. 195. 7 Moliere: A New Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 127; "Moliere: the Comic Paradox," Modern Language Review (68), p. 772. g Falk, p. 82. 9 Hofstad, p. 245. ^Monthly Heritage (March, 1773) in Goldsmith: the Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ?), p. 118. 11 Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, edited with an intro, by G. A. F. M. Chatwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. ix. 12 Humorous nomination is the term that will be applied to those names of dramatic characters which reflect something of the temprament of the characters. Volpone and Mosca are both humorous nominations: the names reflect the characters. The name Hardcastle, in the case of Goldsmith’s play, tells something about the character: he is secure in his household. 60 13 Rather than depict a father as being a fool, senti­ mental comedy often depicted the mother of the family as the one befooled. 14 June’s boyfriend is a labor organizer who has been rallying the workers at Mr. Stanley's factory. In this case the father of the household also represents the con­ servative establishment: capital. 15 "Ionesco and the Comic of Absurdity," in Ionesco: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by R. C. Lamont (Engle­ wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958), p. 19. 16 "Notes and Counter Notes" In Genet/Ionesco: A Theatre of the Double, ed. by Morris Kelly (N.Y.: Bantam, 1969), p. 123; p. 137. 1^"Notes and Counter Notes," p. 134.

18 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 98. 19 Ionesco, Jacques or Obedience (London: John Calder, 1961), p. 121.

Jacques, p. 122. ^Esslin, p. 133.

22 Theater of the Double, p. 145. 23 The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter (Columbus, State University Press, 1971), p. 10. 24 By "action" one means the psychic event, the subtext of the drama at any moment. By "activity" one means the physical event that takes place onstage. Hence, Ruth's activity might be to drink a glass of water; her action would be to seduce Lenny or to intimidate him. 25 A Casebook on Harold Pinter’s "The Homecoming," ed. by John Lahr (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1971), p. 45; p. 67. 2 6 Some scholars claim that Ruth is a reincarnation of Jessie. The title would refer then to Jessie, the mother's homecoming. CHAPTER III: THE LOVERS

Comic playwrights have made tremendous use of the

man-woman relationship throughout the history of drama.

People laugh at what they understand, and people of every

culture understand the joys and problems of the sexual union.

The relationship between the sexes seems not to change

drastically from society to society. A Nineteenth Century

French audience can laugh sympathetically at a young fellow

in a Roman comedy trying to dupe an old man out of the maiden

that he himself loves. A modern American audience laughs

at a domestic spat between husband and wife in an African

skit or Commedia dell’ arte bit. "Man with woman" is a

universal topic.

"The Lovers" does not refer only to the young, ro­ mantic variety, but to a H stages of the man-woman relation­

ship. Comedy depicts so many aspects of the eternal duo.

Lois Hofstad divides those many aspects into two main cate­ gories. First, writers have produced many young lovers in comedy. One never thinks of these amoretti bothered with housework and laden with children. Rather, comedy’s youthful romantics recall ancient fertility rites; they symbolize fertile Spring overcoming Winter. Second, older married

"lovers" appear in comedy. These Punches and Judies are long bound to the yoke of wedlock; they are used to it, and

61 62

tired of it all. They complain, bully, suspect, cuckold,

beat, fool, and badger their mates. But to learn how a

playwright really feels about marriage, the ultimate man- woman relationship as society knows it, look not to the youths but to the old marrieds.^

This chapter deals with both types as it asks, "What have comic playwrights found to be irreverent toward in the man-woman relationship?" The scripts are chosen to show a variety of phases in the lovers' association from the young betrothed of A Midsummer Nightrs Dream to the fossil­ like old figures in Beckett's All That Fall. But, since irreverence is based on a reverent identity, some notes on

Western society's universal attitudes toward the lovers is in order.

Man venerates his relationship to the opposite sex as carefully as he venerates his lares. But reverence toward the man-woman consociation is more complicated. Most people are aware of their sexual needs, but society has demanded that such gratification be institutionalized. As social scientist George H. Seward claims, culture regulates individual behaviour and the sexual relationship is no exception. Sex, once an "accesory to reproduction" has taken on phenomenal 2 social significance. Part of that significance is the insti­ tutionalization of sex: marriage.

Marriage is society's way of regulating its members' sexual behavior. Society has made sex inconvenient in most 63

other contexts, has made even the subject taboo as Havelock

Ellis notes:

Of all the taboos in civilisation up to recent years none has been stronger than that against speech on matters of sex. It is all the more powerful because it is one of the taboos which have been inherited by civilisation from savagery, and in transfer has grown even s tronger.3

Marriage becomes an appropriate embodiment for the

sexual appetite. Through the proper marital relationship

men and women, following St. Paul’s maxim "better to marry

than to burn," guard public acknowledgment of their drives.

And marriage takes its price for this luxury, extorting

numerous responsibilities. A modern "handbook" for young

lovers reminds them of that price:

If Judith and Harry love each other so much, let them get married, even if it means other hardships. At least their love will not be irresponsible and para­ sitic; they are meeting their own problems together and protecting rather than endangering its emotional and moral roots.4

This Pauline attitude, right or wrong, summarizes the view of society toward the man-woman relationship. Non- marital sex is irresponsible and parasitic; marriage protects morality. Putting aside the ideals of eternal devotion and the practicalities of mutual interests, to what does such a societal attitude reduce marriage? For one, marriage becomes an unspoken sexual haven, the only respectable outlet for one’s bodily desires. Secondly, the price of that sexual haven, the responsibilities of wedlock, become weighty debts. Maintaining those payments is tiresome. Man does 64

not want to owe society for a biological need.

To summarize, worldly cultures have made sex, the

most fundamental man-woman relationship, inconvenient outside

of wedlock. Man tries to compensate for this extortion by

endowing marriage with certain ideals. One does not degrade

the institution by associating it with sex or tedious re­

sponsibility.

People are too reverent towards the lovers for such

inference. Irreverent comedy often goes to the opposite

extreme by reducing the man-woman consociation to nothing more than a sexual feast or a daily, domestic drudge. The plays that are studied in the following pages offer further comment on this familiar irreverence.

Lysistrata: The War Between the States

Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata in 412 B.C. hoping, as one scholar observes, to "amuse the Athenians with a grim subject—their lost peace." War versus Peace seems to be the essential conflict in Lysistrata Aristophanes’ plot

(a women's strike for peace) highlights the very absurdity of Greek fighting Greek. Yet, the subject matter of war rests patiently in the background. The issue initiates the actions, motivates the characters and serves as an occasional conversation topic. The exploration of the man-woman relation­ ship really seems to interest the playwright more. And he approaches that subject with a boldness that even draws praise 65

from Edith Hamilton: "He is so frank, so fearless, so completely

without shame, one ends by feeling that indecency is just a part of life."5

Aristophanes' choice of the lovers as a means by which

to discuss the issue of war is not merely accidental. Robert

Flaceliere notes that Greek attitudes toward women were

changing:

Nevertheless the very choice of such subjects seems to me a sign of the times. For much other evidence con­ firms the supposition that the Athenian woman of the fourth century was starting to free herself a little from the almost suffocating grip of the conventions from which her mother and grandmother had suffered.6

Among the oppressions suffered by the Athenian woman was a denial of her sexuality on the part of society. One has only to read Plato's Symposium to learn that "refined" love was not associated with women. Their love is of the basest, animal variety. One married a wife for bearing of legitimate children and for administrating the household, not to have a lover. Husbands could acceptably take on male consorts, or mistresses (concubines- and hetairas) to satisfy their "baser" desires. A wife was for more practical uses.

Her quality was gauged, as some historians claim, not only by her effectiveness as a child-rearer and domestic coordinator, but by her moderation of sexual appetite! Scholar Hans

Lict, supports this contention and adds that, as a result of sexual repression, women in Greece compensated by attain­ ing intellectual superiority and social power as the Hellen­ istic age approached.? I

66

With the above implications in mind, one may approach the irreverent humor of Aristophanes exemplified in Lysistrata.

His irreverence transcends the anti-war notion and deals with the even more immediate problem of man and women in

Greek society. Lysi strata explores a war, not only of the

Greek states, but also a war between the states of being a man or a woman and the states of strong sexual drive therein implied.

One finds this especially obvious in such a colloquial translation as Dudley Fitts’s; it brims with sexual allusion.

Among the major confrontations in the war between the states are: that Lysistrata herself knows that the worst thing she can deny the warriors is sexuality; the women cannot bear the sexual abstinence; even the old men and women struggling for the Acropolis are highly charged sexually; the strike for peace frustrates both sides, Athenians and Spartans; more attention goes to the erect phalluses of the Greek comic costumes than in any other extant comedy—as Aristophanes gives justification for the phallic garb by virtue of the situation by constructs.

War and patriotism are two important fields in Lysistrata.

The lovers is another. Aristophanes is irreverent toward the man-woman relationship, as it existed in Greece and as it existed (and exists) in other societies by drawing over­ whelming attention to little other than the lovers’ sexual drives. Woman has an even stronger sexual appetite than her 67

husband; that appetite is not easily forgotten even in old

age. Men depend so on their wives for genital gratification

that it even interferes with the war. Even in the finale

the ambassadors, while listening patiently to Lysistrata,

cannot tear their eyes from the statue of the naked girl

named Reconciliation brought onstage:

A Spartan: A well shaped speech.

An Athenian: Certainly It has its points.

Males call upon Apollo during the show, but cannot depend on him. They are slaves of the females' divinity,

Aphrodite. Men cease to be interested in war, and their interest in women is certainly beyond the domestic capacity!

Aristophanes reminds the husbands in his theatre, by these implications, that humans are bound to their biologies.

Women, pushed to the back of the sexual bus in wedlock, are no exceptions.

This may also be one of thr reasons why Lysistrata ranks among the most popular of the classical comedies: it deals with the man-woman relationship, a fundamental issue for mankind. It is unique among Aristophanes' works, which often include subtle political references which only his con­ temporaries understand. The official parabasis, usually a social commentary on some Athenian issue, becomes an energetic debate between Man (the Old Man Chorus) and Woman (the Old

Woman Chorus) on the natures of Man and Woman. The topic is an ever important one. Indeed, the very splitting of the 68

Chorus into those of men and women clarifies Aristophanes' interest all the more. Even the name of Lysistrata takes on meaning in the sexual context. It means "seperation of the armies"—not only those of the military sort, but the sexual denial of the female camp to the male camp.

Aristophanes' interest in Lysistrata seems to be as much in the lovers as it is in peace. He charges the man- woman relationship be viewing it in a ridiculous context: an extortion by sexual deprivation. Yet Aristophanes in this exaggeration, arrives at some basic truths. He asserts the intellectuality of the woman, but, most of all, he asserts the biological need for sexuality in the marital relationship of the lovers. In his diatribe on war, Aristophanes offers an explication on marriage which confronts one of the most unspoken aspects of it: desire.

A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Identity of Desire

Shakespeare, like Aristophanes, never feared to confront the physical relationship of man and woman. A Midsummer

Night's Dream, being a classic, raises many issues there.

A "romantic" comedy, Midsummer is more white than black.

Death is farther off than in The Merchant of Venice or

Measure for Measure. No character is really hurt or humili­ ated in the play. The trickery binds the lovers closer to­ gether. Puck is careless, but not dangerous. Oberon's jest on Titania is well controlled by the tyrrany of magic. What 69 possible irreverence is contained, toward the lovers or toward anything else, in this merry, docile script?

Midsummer is an excellent example of a drama which, while behaving with gentility on a surface level, grapples with the "basics" of the lovers: physical desire. Jan Kott calls A Midsummer Night’s Dream the "most erotic of Shakes- g peare's plays." Shakespeare brings about the major con­ frontations of the characters with love and desire by two principle plot conventions: the confusion of the love object by the lovers (Lysander pursues Helena) and the confusion of Titania over Bottom. Both are contribed by magic.

Puck puts the potion into Lysander’s eyes. The young lover awakes to find himself in love with Helena, who pursues young Demetrius; Lysander repudiates his Helena as he vows

Not Hermia, but Helena I love: Why will not change a raven for a dove? The will of man is by his reason sway’d, And reason says you are the worthier maid. Things growing are not ripe until their season; So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason; And touching now the point of human skill, Reason becomes the marshall to my will. (II.iii.,111-120).

Lysander confuses reason with irrationality. Both may have been contained in his love for Hermia, but now he sees them in a different light. Lysander denies that anything but the id drove him after Hermia. Now, in the true irrationality of Puck’s unguent, Lysander thinks he is in reason. Skakes- peare begins the confusions on this note: in love one knows nothing past desire, not its origin, not its ultimate reason. 70

That may also be why Lysander and Demetrius, Shakes­ peare’s gentleman rivals, appear to have so little difference at a perfunctory glance. Of course, any actors playing those leading men will hopefully find many uniquenesses; a thorough linguistic and imagistic individuation of Lysander and

Demetrius would likewise reveal differences in the two. But as a first impression, Lysander and Demetrius are physically and tempramentally alike, even as they compare with their ladies. H. B. Charlton boldly states that, "There is little to choose between Demetrius and Lysander," while Kott claims the "lovers are exchangeable." Stephen Fender recognizes 9 that, "the lovers are not individuals, they are ’lovers.'"

What are the implications of this similarity which appears in Shakespeare's lovers? C. L. Barber gathers that,

"The comedy's irony about love's motives and choices expresses love's power not as an attribute of special personality but as an impersonal force beyond the,persons concerned.

What difference does it really make to Lysander whom he loves?

And what if Helena responded to him? Is he that much different from Demetrius?

These questions may comprise what Northrop Frye calls the "green world" (i.e., the "erotic world") of comedy. Kott claims that Shakespeare's foursome are reduced to "love partners." Fender even goes so far as to minimize the difference between the female lovers in Midsummer, taking their "maypole-acorn spat" as a search for their rational 71

identity in this green world where everything suddenly becomes

disembodied desire. "The episode shows," says Fender, "the

lovers clutching pathetically at apparent distinctions as a

defence against the haunting fear that perhaps each of them

really is interchangeable with another in other people’s „11 eyes.

There is reason for such fear. Recall the waking of poor Hermia after Lysander, love-drugged by Puck, has just

repudiated her for Helena. She clutches for him in nightmare:

Help me. Lysander, help me! do thy best To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast. Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here! Lysander, look now I do quake with fear; Methought a serpent eat my heart away, And you sat smiling at his cruel prey. (II.ii.,145-50)

Lysander has gone to chase his irrational love of

Helena. The serpent which gnaws Hermia has served as an emblem of desire since the Eden fable. One needn’t look to

Freud and Jung for an interpretation. The snake represents desire, and that is what disturbs Hermia's rest. Her cries to Lysander are futile; irrational love has swept him away.

Both the romantic love of Lysander and Hermia (Spring symbols overcoming Winter—Aegeus) and that of Helena for Demetrius

(unrequited love) are stung by inexplicable attraction.

The "id" of the fairy world undermines the logical choices of the romantic world. Unexpected and jolting affection upsets the harmony; there is something "comically irrational in these transformations. In particular, the lover's per- 12 ception of his beloved. ..." One sees the results of 72

mistaken eroticism. Shakespeare raises the question what

difference, once that drive is there, it all makes.

Shakespeare's blending of worlds in A Midsummer

Night’s Dream is a stroke of genius. Of course, the mechan­

icals playlet is blatantly irreverent toward romantic love,

being even a parody on the master's own Romeo and Juliet.

But an even stronger bit of irreverence toward the lovers

may be found in the "seduction" of Bottom by Titania.

Jan Kott makes much of this bestiality. He sees

the fairies in Midsummer as offering their mistress up to 13 a monster. Sex is a cruel joke. But with Titania it is

no crueller a joke than with Helena. In the former Shakespeare

is much more conscious of the absurdity. Titania falls victim

to the same potion Lysander does, falling in love with the

most famous ass in literature, the "translated" Bottom:

I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again: Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note; So is mine ear enthralled to thy shape; And thy fair virtue's force, perforce, doth move me, On the first view, to say, to swear I love thee. (Ill.ixx.,144-48)

This to an ass! And on the first meeting! Yet, Lysander speaks none too differently to Helena at the first awakening under the love spell. Shakespeare depicts the ultimate of irrational love; the desire of beauty seeks out the beast.

Shakespeare is wise enough to confront the desires of the man-woman relationship with the exaggerations of fantasy: fairies, magical vapour, a transformed bumpkin. An audience can easily accept his essay on the biological versus the 73

romantic conceptions of love in such a package. "The play

is aware," says Alexander Leggatt, "of both extreme attitudes

to sex but steers a civilized middle course appropriate to comedy.

Just as Aristophanes used a male and a female chorus in Lysistrata, so Shakespeare uses various choruses of lovers

They represent several stages in the man-woman consociation.

The four youngsters are the Spring symbols, the unmarried sort; the marrieds are the king and queen of Athens and their counterparts in the fairy kingdom. The unmarrieds find it necessary to flee civilization to know themselves by trial and error in the green world. The marrieds recall each phase of that encountered by the youngsters. Theseus and Hippolyta belong to the civilized world. Oberon and Titania belong to the non-rational world. So much of civilization pollutes the wedding of the Athens due: Theseus has won his bride in combat; one notices in Theseus, even in his call for revels, a singular dependence upon law and time; he will not hesitate, even at his wedding, to have Hermia slain if she disobeys the law. Despite the pagan heritage of Theseus and Hippolyta, they are, in Shakespeare’s play, embodiments of institution­ alized love. Oberon and Titania reign far outside of this world in a shadowy green world of their element. They are long married, long feuding over many things—now a changeling child. Oberon uses the weapon of his element on Titania: the irrational. 74

The wedded lovers recall the ambivalences of marriage:

marriage as an institution, and marriage as an erotic coupling

One stands on ceremony, the other on will. The unmarried

lovers, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, drift in and out of

both as, indeed, man has need of both cultural stricture

and abandonment to his desires. Shakespeare presents many

aspects of the lovers and resolves his experiment comfortably

with the rustics' silly rendition of romantic love: is the

love which an audience has observed in the behavior of the

couples any less silly than the would-be tragedy of Pyramus

and Thisbe? Doesn't romantic love boil down to such a skit

as the mechanics perform?

With this buffoonery fresh in the auditor's mind,

Theseus orders all couples off to bed. The young lovers,

having run the gauntlet of purely erotic love and proven

unable to handle it, accept Athens and institutionalized

wedlock. But Oberon blesses them all; the king of the erotic

jungle restates what Tiresias prophesies in Euripides'

Baeehae, that Dionysius will always remain with man, and

man had best never forget his irrational nature.

One may agree with Lois Hofstad in saying that A

Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the "great love comedies"

in its prudent study of romantic love in which Shakespeare

tries to gauge its relationship to everyday physical attraction

For, indeed, from Lysander's jolt of attraction for Helena

(and just as curt rejection of Hermia) to the fairy queen's 75

courtship of the jackass, romantic love bears the brunt of

the joke. The charges of fantasy and exaggeration help to

keep the joke safe. J. L. Styan summarizes Shakespeare’s

accomplishment with these words:

Laughter follows the shocks of the feather-weight irony. As each group, acting in its own plane of reality, taking its own standards of conduct so seriously, is juggled by the conjurer, romance is made an object of fun.10

Il Candelaio: The Marriage Dilemna

Giordano Bruno dedicated his life to the determina­ tion of the universe's scientific basis. He formulated theories which equated man’s nature to the rest of nature.

Trained in a monastery he quite literally removed the icons from the walls as earnestly as he rejected the blind acceptance of "truths" inherited from the Middle Ages. Imprisoned for years, Bruno refused to recant his Sixteenth Century radicalism and was burned at the stake. Even in the flames Bruno averted his eyes from the crucifix, the symbol of institution­ alized faith.

Bruno wrote The Candle Bearer (Il Candelaio) in

1582. The script is long and abundant with characters. Like many Italian Renaissance pieces, Il Candelaio deals with the confusions of adultery. Unlike many of its counterparts, there are no handsome, young amoretti in the script. The personae are often old and grotesque—middle aged married folk with no "Spring figures" to carry hope. 76

The portions of II Candelaio 's many-webbed plot that

concern this chapter are these: Bonifacio pursues Vittoria,

a beautiful courtesan, although he is wed to another, the

also beautiful Carubina. Carubina is half Bonifacio’s age.

A sub-plot involves Bartolomeo, an old man married to a

hunchback, Marta, who is even older. Bartolomeo's adventures with alchemy have removed him from Marta's bed, and she, well-versed in lovemaking since twelve, wants him back.

Vittoria tricks her suitor, Bonifacio, by arranging to make

love to him but, at the last minute, substitutes his own wife in her bed. Bonifacio enjoys himself with his beloved prostitute, unaware that it is really Carubina.

Bruno, an angry young man of the Renaissance, takes many areas of civilization to task. The above summary only focuses on those areas relating to the lovers. Bruno presents no ideal. No one is content, or even on the way to becoming content with their partners. Bonifacio, the "candle-bearer" lives in insatiable lust despite his lovely young wife;

Bartolomeo scorns lust for the pleasures of alchemy, which may yield riches. These are the male lovers, rejecting their females for the unattainable. Bonifacio sees himself as a great lover, but is warned to "think less of candles and more of—thimbles" (I.viii.). Age turns the potent lover's fire into ash despite one’s self-concept. Bartolomeo's exploits are attempts to delude his self, perhaps the major symptom in II Candelaio's personalities. 77

But it is not just the men who chase hopeless dreams.

Marta, the hunchbacked wife of Bartolomeo, is much more

sexually vibrant than Bonifacio—but by deprivation. Her

meeting with him (IV.viii.) is a perfect pairing of equals.

Marta asks how his "purse" is, the one "lower down." Bonifacio

advises her that women over thirty-five should retire from

sex; no one wants to light a candle where there is no one

to receive it. Their reparte could top any by Beatrice and

Benedick in wit and bawdiness; these older lovers have been at it much longer. Their minds run in the same alleys.

Bruno uses them to comment on marriage; they are the "pros," the eternal mis-matched ones. Bonifacio and Marta can laugh together, and she can prescribe a love potion for him:

Recipe, water from the kidneys, grease from the back; liquor from the penis and manna from the balls . . . And take care to keep your feet in the stirrups, for you'll gallop so fast the saddle bow might break your rump for you.

Sex remains on the brinks of their minds, for surely it does not live in their marriages. Marta (IV.ix.) dreams of having her husband back to his old tricks: "We used to play at this side, that side, horse and mare, at your turn, my turn, and suck the lollipop." She even donates to the churches, that the saints might recall her husband to her bed.

Where marriage is concerned, sex is an outsider, and hence, the joke on Bonifacio. Carubina, his wife who has just passed for his lover, assails him on the street (V.xxiii.) for being a "wife-seducer." Momentarily humbled by the fact 78

that he could actually enjoy his wife sexually, Bonifacio

swears repentence. But his promise to be a good husband

may well be, as one character claims, of no greater sincerity

than that of the wife when, in throes of childbirth, she

renounces sexual intercourse forever.

In his "proprologue" Bruno promises a picture of love

in II Candelaio:

You will witness purposeless purposes, feeble plots, trivial thoughts, idle hopes, bursting hearts, bared breasts, false surmises, alienation of wits, poetic furies, clouding of the senses, perturbations of the imagination, wanderings of the intellect, perfervid faith, senseless anxieties, dubious studies, untimely germinations, and the glorious fruits of madness. In a lover you will behold signs, tears, irresistable yawns, terrors, dreams erections, and a heart roasted in the flames of passion. . . . you will see the bow of love, which is like the rainbow in that you can't see it from right below but only from a distance, for lovers can only see the folly of others and never their own.

Bruno does an exceptional job of pointing out the

follies. His lovers are ridden with vice and pettiness in

Il Candelaio. The field of the lovers is charged with the

exaggerations of unabashed complaint and gross neglect;

when one lover is not hurling insults at his/her mate,

another is doing the best one can to avoid his/her mate.

Husbands take whores as love objects (and cannot even satisfy

them), while wives must steal physical love by masquerading

as whores. Bruno’s portrait of the lovers in this comedy

is a celebration of viciousness and frustration. Men are out of touch with their natural desires, and their women suffer for it. 79

All That Fall: Irreverence of Corrosion

Samuel Backett's work travels what Ruby Cohn aptly

titles The Comic Gamut. Beckett’s picture of the universe

is crowded with ancient men and women, toothless, ragged

and unfragrant waiting in their own preoccupations forever.

They are all used to their lives of expectation and are

resigned to exist while the hope of "something" flickers

faintly in their minds. A great number of Beckett's people

form comic relationships with each other. Gogo and Didi

are loyal attenders on a "Godot"; Hamm and Clov share a

servant-master relationship; Krapp shares a relationship with

his past self (his tape recordings). But the man-woman re­

lationship is also an important part of Beckett's picture of

the universe, in both his dramatic and non-dramatic works.

All That Fall is the prime example. This play, while written

for radio is conveniently adaptable to stage performance; it embodies Beckett's conception of the final phase of the

lovers in deteriorated old age.

Beckett's choice of age for his. characters, Dan and

Maddy Rooney, is part of his irreverently comic craft. His

"heroes are old fools in the old fool tradition of the one who gets slapped, but Beckett inveighs us to laugh at the 17 slap and the slapper, as well as the one who gets slapped."

All That Fall is one such case. Maddy and Dan are old fools, married from time immemorial, together for so long that they symbolize the "eternal lovers," the end products of man and 80

woman's lifelong bond. The lovers have their finale with

obese old Maddy and blind Dan. Lovers do not grow more mellow

with age like wine; they grow stale and fester.

Among the symptoms of this corrosion in Maddy's

sexuality. Age and obesity have long marred her sexual attract

iveness; her last sexual encounter lies beyond memory. Yet,

an Almost unrecognized desire for physical gratification

burns within this "heap" called Maddy Rooney. Her meetings

with several neighbors on the way to meet Dan at the railroad

station reveal this. She pleads with one:

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris house butcher's regular, what normal woman wants af­ fection? A peck on the jaw at morning, near the ear, and another at evening, peck, peck, till you grow whiskers on you. . . .

This is the supplication of the aged female lover, disregarded

only because she has been there so long! Sex remains in

Maddy's consciousness. Her preoccupation with her need

slips through in all contexts, like her meeting with

Mr. Tyler, who has a flat tire on his bicycle:

Heavens, you're not going to ride her flat! (Mr. Tyler mounts.) You'll tear your tube to ribbons! (Mr. Tyler rides off. Receding sound of bumping bicycle. Silence. Cooling.) Venus birds! Billing in the woods all the long summer long. (Pause.) Oh cursed corset! If I could let it out, without indecent exposure. Mr. Tyler! Mr. Tyler! Come back and unlace me behind the hedge! '(She laughs wildly, ceases.) What's wrong with me, never tranquil, seething out of my dirty old pelt, out of my skull, oh, to be in atoms, in atoms.

But all the men leave Maddy. An old lover, used to ful­

filling her needs by any means, she can even make most of 81

getting into an auto:

Mr. Slocum: (in position behind her) Now, Mrs. Rooney, how shall we do this?

Mrs. Rooney: As if I were a bale, Mr. Slocum, don’t be afraid. (Pause. Sounds of effort.) That’s the way! (Effort.) Lower! Wait! (Pause.) Suppose I do get up, will I ever get down? • • • Oh! . . . Lower! . . . Don’t be afraid! . . .We’re past the age when . . . There! . . . Now! . . . Get your shoulder under it . . . Oh! . . . (Giggles.) Oh glory! . . .Up! Up! . . .Ah! . . . I'm in! (Panting of Mr. Slocum. Re slams the door.) . . .

One must imagine this over the radio. Beckett's implied

activity recalls the sexual encounter. The rhetoric of the

above beat implies that getting into the car is Maddy's

substitution for genital sex.

This trip to the railway station highlights M&ddy

Rooney's comic grotesqueness. She propositions the world.

For Beckett, the folly of the human condition parallels the folly of the aged, obese lover. Dreams and desires remain encrusted in the pathetic shell of a body. At the end of the excursion, Dan Rooney appears. The pair is complete.

They are the archetype of corroded love, a pair that remain with each other because, like Gogo and Didi, they have no -i 17 one else.

Ma Rooney recoils at the thought of her husband retiring to live at home. Da Rooney can abuse Maddy, but he must do his part, treading the cursed steps of the station and trudging the hellish road home, back and forth to whatever work he does. The situation is externally common for men 82

and women: he works and his wife waits for him. The condition

has existed forever, for Dan and Maddy and all lovers.

Blind and with a coronary, on his one hundredth birthday,

life shows no signs of letting up for Dan. The man-woman

relationship pants on.

Among the themes of the man-woman field which Beckett

uses in All That Fall are, besides sex and work, children.

How could lovers continue to reporduce themselves without

the products of sexual love, offspring? The Lynch twins

jeer at this eternal couple. Children reject Ma and Pa

Rooney, Mr. Rooney even wonders if the brats will pelt them with mud as they go by. "Did you ever wish to kill a child?

(Pause) Nip some young doom in the bud," says Rooney. The

thought smacks of abortion; Dan has no desire to perpetuate

his state, as a lover or as a human being.

Maddy, however, waxes more genteel toward children.

She is, after all, the female lover with an inclination to motherhood. Maddy relates a doctor’s tale about how he killed a little girl during an operation. Maddy pays particular detail to the pathos of the child; one feels that she might be moved. But Beckett permits no such indulgence. She can only conclude her speech with, "He spoke throughout with­ out notes. (Pause.) I left before the end." Her motherly tenderness yields to trivialization. She has been, after all, as amazed by the doctor’s memory and bored by the lecture as she was moved by the child's plight. 83

Both attitudes toward children are negative. Dan's

is violent; Maddy's shows a glimmer-df hope, but she has

become disinterested. The toughness of age guards them from

such sentiment. At the end of the script, Jerry, the only

child that Dan tolerates, and then because he is in need of

the services of a "guide dog," makes a startling report.

Mr. Rooney's train was late because a child "fell" out of one of the carriages, onto the tracks. Dan Rooney, one feels by this time, is not above suspicion.

Ruby Cohn distinguishes between the liberal and the illiberal jests. The liberal invites laughter with', the illiberal invites laughter at. The illiberal interests

Samuel Beckett. He is not afriad to laugh at any aspect of man, including the relationship of the lovers. His char­ acters, in All That Fall and many other works, are grotesque, dirty, degenerate, old, deformed, ugly, fat, eccentric, impotent, brutal and full of absurd ambitions. Yet, as one critic notices about All That Fall, it presents, "ordinary people living and moving in the commonsense world and they are concerned with everyday matters." This is the paradox that makes Beckett's play an irreverent comedy. It pictures man, in this case, the lovers, in activities and with emotions typical for lovers. The Rooney's have human needs and follow a human routine. Yet, they are grotesques. One can laugh at the corroded lovers because Beckett uses the charge of general exaggeration. An audience thinks that, rather than 84

laughing at lovers, it is laughing at clowns.

But the Rooneys represent the lovers, corroded by

time and life with each other. Beckett's conception is

not a pretty one, as Ms. Cohn notes: ". . . It is a cruelly

comic Beckett paradox: While we live, we die; we must compose 19 while we decompose." The lovers are not exempt from de­

composition.

Plaza Suite, Act I: Some Lousy Couple

Plaza Suite, like All That Fall, concerns lovers

who have spent much of their lives together. Neil Simon's

lovers, like Beckett's, also face corrosion, but corrosion

of a more recognizable nature. Simon examines American marri­

age in the 1960s.

Plaza Suite contains three related acts, but each

could stand as an independent one-act script. One segment

is a seduction scene. A Hollywood producer, using his West

coast mystique and numerous vodka Stingers, returns East to

court his ex-sweetheart, now married with a family. Another

act is a blatant farce. A couple, on their daughter's wedding morning, try to convince the bride to come out of the hotel bathroom to face the ceremony. But Simon's first act is

of a different texture; it involves people who hurt each other.

A forty-eight-year-old woman tries to recapture some of the romance in her stale marriage. While their suburban 85

house is being painted, Karen rents for herself and her

husband, Sam, what she thinks was their Honeymoon suite in

the Plaza Hotel. She tries to recreate the blissful initia­

tion of her marriage with canapes and champagne, but Sam has

no interest. He is infatuated with his business and having

an affair with his secretary; his emotional and sexual

interests are spoken for. Sam has none in Karen. After some

painfully mirthful confrontations, Sam Nash leaves Karen

alone in the Honeymoon suite and pursues an evening of business

and extra-marital lovemaking.

Classical comic theorists would never accept Simon's

first act of Plaza Suite: the comic mask is unable to maintain

its grin in the face of pain; Punch and Judy draw blood.

Sam and Karen are real, and their situation is immediate.

Karen Nash is, in many ways, an alazon figure (the pretender, the impostor). She pretends that her husband has the faintest interest in being with her. She imposes herself on his outside interests. Karen tries to interest Sam in her sentiments, tries to share things with him, tries to enact the rituals of the "in-love" lovers. Sam only tries to push her aside in his life. Karen is an innocent alazon figure, an intruder in her rightful position.

But Sam is also an alazon. At age fifty-one he tries to be a youngster. He struggles with his diet; he works out; he caps his teeth; he medicates his eyes; he takes a young mistress. Sam barges in, like an Aristophanic alazon, 86

on a phase of life, youth, of which he is no longer a part.

Unlike the Miles Gloriosus, though, Sam's characteristics

do hurt people. He has to be exposed, beaten and driven off.

Karen at least exposes him, and that exposure before

the audience accounts for some of the relief in this first

segment of Plaza Suite. For Karen is also an eiron. She

can bounce back again and again. She can forsee the inevitable

and perceive undercurrents. She can even "work off" her

husband1s arrogance:

Karen: We're not married twenty-four years today?

Sam:;No.

Karen: We're not married twenty-four years?

Sam: No.

Karen: We're not married?

She has the elasticity necessary to contend with an alazon

like Sam, and that sense of humor grants her some comic safety. For Sam never sees the humor. He indicts Karen's ineptness with dates and figures as harmful to "people's lives." But Karen can recall sentiments much more accurately, and that is of more import to lovers.

As eiron, Karen is well aware of the inevitable in life. She knows that Miss McCormack and her husband are planning a rendezvous as surely as she knows the Plaza Hotel kitchen will send up anchovies with the rest of the canapes against her request for them not to. That is what one must expect. Middle age is no different. Karen has no fear of 87

accumulating pounds or years. She has no use for her husband's

business day if it protrudes into her night to be alone with

her husband. Sam suffers in contrast. He thinks he can

fool Karen as surely as he expects the kitchen to comply

with his request for lean roast-beef. His petty vanity

seems superficial and silly. Like a little boy who plays

"cowboy," Sam plays "youth." Sam’s business is another toy

to help his make-believe, so is Miss McCormack. Karen can

cut through such nonsense and expose this alazon, and if,

indeed, Simon incorporates comic safety in his treatment of

this hurtful relationship, it is the audience's identifica­

tion with the eiron; an audience watches the just exposure

and takes pleasure in the unmasking.

But Karen, as much as she reduces the pretensions

of Sam to fears and insecurities, really suffers the most.

Sam emotionally abandons Karen during a lonely time of her

life. She refuses to yield to society's demands which enslave

Sam, youth and success; now she can only serve as a reminder

that Sam's idols are graven. The dilemma means trouble.

Plaza Suite does not avoid that fact; Karen and Sam

are in trouble. That increases the reverent identity, for

few audiences laugh at true distress. Feydeau's A Flea in

Her Ear also deals with marital difficulty, but it contains

enough revolving beds, disguises and leaps from closets to diffuse the seriousness. Simon depends on more subtle comic

charges: momentary quips, verbal games and the unmasking of 88

a grown-up child. Although Karen endures much, one feels

she has the elasticity and wisdom to withstand mirth; one

laughs with her and at her arrogant husband. In this context,

Simon can be irreverent toward the lovers in trouble, and

permit his audience to laugh at them.

Besides, one must not forget, in this study, that

Neil Simon follows this act with two more which treat marital

failures to communicate in more mirthful manners. ("Suite"

may refer to, besides the hotel room where all three episodes

occur, Simon’s conception of each playlet as part of an overall design. A "suite" is a set of connected rooms, match­

ing furniture pieces or instrumental musical movements.)

An auditor does not depart with the taste of Act I; he retains the farce of the last play foremost in his consciousness, with its emergence of the bride from the bathroom to carry on (for better or worse) a new generation of lovers.

Plaza Suite, Act I, comes closer to a "real" situ­ ation than any of the previous comedies studied. For that reason, it only succeeds as a comedy when handled delicately by the director. The Nashes are not spatting lovers as in

Il Candelaiothey are not grotesque like Beckett's lovers.

They are simply, as Karen says, "some lousy couple." Suddenly finding the taxation of his marriage too costly, Sam withdraws his love. But even at that one needs to laugh.

These comedies of irreverence toward the lovers do not "attack" love and/or marriage as much as they give the 89 audience a chance to deride some of the mystiques built around thé man-woman relationship. Love and marriage, associated in universal attitude with romanticism and domestic devotion, at once becomes a sexual romp or a grim taxation of one's freedom. Lysistrata, for instance, builds a whole scheme for Graecian peace upon the assumption that man and wife cannot do without each other sexually. Even a romantic comedy like A Midsummer Night 's Dream shuffles through the pre­ tensions of the male-female consociation to discover physical desire an important factor. Il Candelaio's characters find no sexuality in their marriages; wedlock is a bore which holds one back from the important pursuits of alchemy and whoring. Al I That Fall depicts the lovers at the end of their eternity together, still cruel, petty and bothered by un­ identifiable desires. Plaza Suite's first act makes a joke out of the all-too-true fact that the man-woman relationship becomes a bore at times. All deal in comic variations on the universal field of the lovers. 90

Footnotes to Chapter III

^Hofstad, p. 9. 2 Sex and the Social Order (N.Y. and London: McGraw Hill, 1946), p. 1. 3 More Essays of Love and Virtue (London: Constable and Co., 1931), p. 91. 4 Peter A. Bertocci, The Human Venture in Sex, Love and Virtue (N.Y.: Association Press, 1949), 1965, p. 77 (revised). 5 Dudley Fitts, Aristophanes: Four Comedies (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1962), p. 3; Alexis Solomos, The Living Aristophanes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 183; The Great Age of Greek Literature (N.Y.: W. W. Norton and Co.), p. 158. g Love in Ancient Greece (N.Y.: Crown Publishers, 1962), pp. 121-22. 7 Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Ed. by Edith Hamilton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 534; A. W. Gome and F. H. Sandback, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 28-35: the Concubine was one’s constant mistress, even though she was paid and kept, whereas the Hetaira was a high-class, promiscuous prostitute that served many customers; Victor Ehrenberg, The People of Aris­ tophanes (N.Y.: Shocken Books, 1962), pp. 194-200; Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (N.Y.: Barnes Noble, 1966), p. 58. g Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 212. ^Shakespearian Comedy (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1938), p. 115; Kott, p. 212; Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream (London: Edward Arnold, Ltd. 1968), p. 20. ^Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 130. ^Kott, p. 213; Fender, p. 19.

12 Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare ' s Comedy of Love (London: Methuen and Co., 1974), p. 93. 13Kott, p. 219.

14 Leggatt, p. 111. 91 15 Hofstad, p. 33; The Elements of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 180. 16 The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), p. 285. 17 Ms. Cohn suggests that Maddy and Dan (Ma and Da) are humorous nominations for the mother and father figures. 18 Cohn, p. 286; G. C. Barnard, Samuel Beckett: A New Approach (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1970), p. 110. 19 Cohn, p. 286. 20 The alazon figure from old comedy suggests the intruder, the unworthy one pretending to a celebration where he has no place. In new comedy he becomes the braggart soldier, the loud-mouth who is all talk, nothing behind it. the eiron is the Socratic figure, making little presumption to intelligence, but having much more than he lets on. CHAPTER IV: THE PATERFAMILIAS

Few Roles are as venerated in society as that of the

paterfamilias, the father of the family. In actuality and

in symbol he is often an object of fear and veneration.

Sigmund Freud offers his primal horde theory in explanation:

the collective unconscious, to atone for prehistoric outrages

committed against fathers by sons, continually dignifies

the paterfamilias; he is a symbol of guilt. Men have made him the godhead, the avenger and lawmaker in religion, while his female counterpart becomes the earth-mother, compassionate and mellow. But reverence for the paterfamilias goes beyond religion. Kings are "fathers" of their nations, even re­ flections of the heavenly father. Laws of primo geniture insure continual kingly power, passed from old father to new father. Matriarchy, government by a woman on the regency level and/or the domestic level, remains a rare case. The father figure rules the tribe and the nation, his leadership is reflected in the domestic paterfamilias.^

With this overwhelming influence, security of the paterfamilias' dignity has always been necessary. In Western society especially, both civil law and cultural behavior dutifully guard the father's power. For the Greeks, according to E. R. Dodds, a "shame culture" yielded to a "guilt culture."

Associating loss of parental authority with cultural breakdown,

92 93

the pre-Hellenic Greeks took great care to maintain the power of the paterfamilias. They set him up as the tyrant of the home. Children were bound to obediance until his death. Greek religion (reflected in myths and, later, in drama) supported this; by substitution, the "father" became the "god."

Like the father, one must obey the gods, especially the supreme god. And their laws can be tough. They deprive their children of their hearts' desires. Father Zeus showers nemeses upon his children when their hubris (self-assertion) threatens the order of obedience. In the process of psychic transference, tragedy reflects the Greek conception of the paterfamilias. He is powerful, awesome and swift with vengeance.2

Even Plato, who protests the undignified manner in which Homer depicts Zeus and the other gods, will hear of nothing but reverence for the paterfamilias:

Moreover, all his life through, a man should ob­ serve particular reverence of tongue toward his parents, for light and winged speech brings heavy doom; right has her appointed measure, Nemesis, to keep watch over the matter. So one should yield to them when they feel anger, and discharge it, in word or deed, and under­ stand that 'tis but natural in a father who thinks him­ self wronged by his son to be moved to uncommon anger.3

Children should, under pain of severe heavenly "Nemesis," tolerate abuse from the father. Greek tragedy is a prime manifestation of this "guilt culture" concept. Mortals like Oedipus are struck down when they dare too much.

But if tragedy upheld the strictures against 94

irreverence toward the father, comedy in Greece provided a

release from paternal veneration. No wonder that the pater­

familias became a popular comic field. Dodds recalls Aris­

tophanes’ Cloudcuckooland, where a man gains heroism by beating his father—The Birds was a wish-fulfillment for the Greeks. The field of fatherhood continued to predominate in domestic comedy: the New Comedy of the Greeks and their . . 4 imitators, the Romans.

European culture continued the tradition of the patrilineal society. Fatherhood, which only the most stringent 5 of societies hold in such esteem, continued to be revered.

The "safety valve" of domestic comedy, which often made a fool of the paterfamilias, survived in the bargain. Shakes­ peare usually treated the paterfamilias gently in comedy, but both Moliere and the Commedia showed him little mercy.

The Restoration easily scorned fatherhood, although the following century (as Ms. Hofstad's study of English comedy, previously discussed, indicates) grew apprehensive of such irreverence. Hence, Eighteenth Century English comedies suffered; only such "daring" playwrights as Goldsmith and

Sheridan surpassed their weak contemporaries by risking some outrages.

There may be many reasons for the frequent treatment of fathers in comedy. Northrop Frye claims that, "the comic dramatist as a rule writes for the younger men in his audience, and the older members of almost any society are apt to feel 95 that comedy has something subversive about it."^ Or, one

may simply see in this the ritualistic theme of Old Man

Winter driven forth by Spring in so many cultural ceremonies.

And, indeed, comedy may contain both aspects. The "sub­

version" spoken of by Frye may be the instinct of irreverence

against the unconscious assumption that fatherhood must be

venerated. Since the very words "father" and' "pater" have

acquired meaning far beyond the domestic situation, people

are ripe to abuse them through comic laughter.

People are simply more ready to laugh at venerated 7 paternity (even more so than at maternity ). The same

figure audiences tremble at, and have trembled at since the

dawn of civilization, in the personage of nemesis-wielding

Zeus, or in that of a king, they laugh at in comedy. Here

is the chance to undermine the dignity of an important figure

in the collective unconscious. Patriarchy is more than a

social situation, more than a domestic situation; it is a

psychological state. It may be to this imposition that comedy

irreverent to the paterfamilias addresses itself.

The first two plays discussed are of importance as

embryos of such comic irreverence. Dyskolos, produced in

the Fourth Century B.C. is the earliest extant domestic

comedy. Phromio continues the tradition, but more genteelly,

Tart'uffe, usually remembered for its indictment of religious hypocrisy, really directs much laughter at the paterfamilias.

Juno and the Payeook, a bittersweet drama, depicts a family 96

and society significantly endangered by the weakness of the

father; yet, Sean O'Casey discovers laughter even in such

a situation.

Dyskolos: Father as Bad-Tempered Man

Menander's Dyskolos (written in the Fourth Century

B.C. and translated "the grouch" and "the bad-tempered man")

is the world's oldest specimen of New Comedy. In the tradi­

tion of this domestic comedy, which the Romans eagerly adopted,

the paterfamilias becomes the dupe, cheated by his son out

of a lover, or, at least, out of having his own way. Northrop

Frye sees a reflection of the Oedipus motif in such a

situation, but a reversed Oedipus motif. Eros, "the presiding

genius of comedy," endows the incest myth with a totally

different outlook. The age-old fears are now fantastic wish

fulfillments as sons overturn and steal their brides from fathers.8

Dyskolos is an early example in which such irreverence

exists. Cnemon, a sour-tempered old farmer, lives with his

daughter whom he shields from the world. One day, Sostratus,

a wealthy youth, falls in love with the girl. The old grouch will hear nothing of courtship. Only after Cnemon falls in

a well and is helped up by Sostratus is the old man humil­

iated and grateful enough to relent. He puts the fate of

his daughter into the benevolent hands of her step-brother,

Gorgias, who arranges for her wedding with Sostratus. 97

Cnemon, the title personage, is very much a father,

not only to his natural child, but to his stepson (the grouch

made life so miserable for his wife, Myrrhina, that she had

to.move out, taking her son by her deceased husband with her)

Both Pantalone and Shylock may trace their ancestry to

Cnemon; he is cheap, introverted, anti-social and can be

cruel. He makes impositions on his children which must be

overcome. In short, Cnemon reflects the Greeks’ conception

of their own fathers, the tyrant paterfamilias.

He is no longer a reflection of Zeus; Zeus is no

longer a reflection of the father. In tragedy, heroes

(children) could be punished for sins against the deities

(fathers). Now in New Comedy this arrogant bully may be

exposed at last^ Cnemon, who supports his daughter but rules

her will in the bargain, takes the role of alazon and may

be driven out of his childrens' lives. But Menander protects

himself against a too-overt attack on the paterfamilias by making his villain a caricature of anti-sociality; Cnemon's extremity is a comic charge:

Wasn't that fellow Perseus the lucky one! For two reasons. First, he had wings so he never had to meet anyone walking around the ground. Second, he had some sort of gadget to turn anyone who bothered him into stone. I wish I had it right now—I'd fill the place with statues. (Act I)

Cnemon is not for real. Fatherhood should not feel too threatened. Another comic charge used by Menander is what Renaissance theorists might call "the ridiculous."

The playwright places Cnemon in a silly situation—falling 98

into a well. Sicon, a cook with whom Cnemon has just quarrel­

led, rejoices at the mishap of the toppled paterfamilias:

I'll be damned! Now I believe in Providence. Cnemon, you cheapskate, so you won't lend people a measly pot for a sacrifice, you have to begrudge it, eh? Now that you're down there, drink the well dry so you won't have to share the water with anyone. . . .

Odious behavior receives its deserts, but the behavior

it too odious and the deserts too absurd. The real comic

irreverence is to be found, immediately after this segment

in Act IV. Sostratus comes back from the rescue operation

at the well:

.. Gentlemen! I swear to you, on my honor, .by heaven by all that's holy, I never in my whole life saw anyone pick a better moment to miss drawning by a hair. What a marvelous time I had! The minute we get inside there, Gorgias jumped into the well. The girl and I just waited around the rim. What else was there to do? Except that she kept tearing her hair and beating her breast and crying her eyes out and I, (arohily)' the fine fair­ haired boy, stood by and played nursemaid. I kept beg­ ging and pleading with her not to carry on so, and all the time I just couldn't take my eye off her. She's a work of art! And no ordinary one either. I forgot all about the old man groaning down there—except that it was a real nuisance to have to keep hauling away at him all the time. As a matter of fact, I nearly sent him to his grave: I was so busy looking at the girl that I let go the rope a couple of times. . . .

The tableau is significant. The paterfamilias is

in the well. The son (Gorgias) jumps in to rescue the old man; the other son (Sostratus) stays above to pursue the

daughter at the expense of the old man. The young men are

"alter egos"; they reflect the ambivalent attitudes toward

the father of all young men. One must save him; yet one can only accomplish one's dreams while the father is out of the 99 way.

Old Cnemon repents after the incident. His estranged wife returns, and the old miser thinks something of his future. Cnemon "gives up" his fatherhood, badgered by the persistence of Sostratus and the benevolence of Gorgias.

He hands over to his step-son both the fatherly authority over his daughter and the dowry money. Gorgias becomes the new father. Winter yields to Spring. At the end of the play, crippled and resigned, Cnemon is carried in to join the community of dancers. Only exposure, humiliation and surrender of his paternal authority make the paterfamilias fit to join the community.

Menander's Dyskolos permits an audience to laugh at the paterfamilias even though, with the playwright's many charges, that laughter seems to be directed at some­ thing else. Menander paints an old grouch who deserves 9 what he gets (Cnemon's greatest crime seems more to be his rejection of the world), but that is how fatherhood may have looked to the Greeks, even in the Fourth Century, B.C.

T. B. L. Webster, in an essay on this script, "The Birth of

Modern Comedy of Manners," claims that, "The Dyskolos is not only the first modern comedy," as "the awakening of sympathy for a traditionally unsympathetic character which we find also in other plays of Menander, makes it good humanism as well as good comedy.

Perhaps the "awakening of sympathy" and "humanism" 100

of Menander's Cnemon serves the irreverent purpose of the

play even more. With those characteristics, one does not

laugh at a pure grouch; one laughs at an arrogant human being

who happens to be a father. What little sympathy the play­

wright introduces to make his paterfamilias more real only

increases awareness that the irreverent object is an authentic

pater.

Phormio: The Genteel Irreverence

Roman playwrights often took up the field of the

paterfamilias in comedy. The situation in which, as Frye

says, "the hero's society rebels against the society of the

senex and triumphs," prevails in the comedies of Plautus and

Terence. The senex, a descendant of Cnemon, is the ideal

butt-of-the-joke. He represents the Roman paterfamilias

that one did not dare deride in society. And, "Only by under­

standing Roman society," Frye maintains, "can we understand the psychological release of the comedy."11 A few words on

that society may therefore be in order.

The home was extremely important to the Romans,

important enough to be assigned lares to protect it. Un­ written codes of behavior for the individual in the home arose.

These domestic demeanors, called "pietas," even went so far

as to prohibit certain thoughts and attitudes. Irreverence to the paterfamilias was taboo, and wishing one's father 12 dead, as Erich Segal recalls, grossly violated the pietas. 101

It is no wonder then that the Romans, like the Greeks, developed

a comedy which permitted them to vent their irreverent attitudes.

So much of Roman comedy contains what George Duckworth

describes as "an aged paterfamilias" who "loses his dignity 13 and becomes ridiculous when he is deceived." By watching

the folly of the senex, Romans could be irreverent toward

their pietas which forbade any such real life attitude. But

it is usually Plautus who is given credit for the irreverence.

Segal ranks Plautus first among the Roman playwrights in comic irreverence while stating that, "there are no out­ rages to the pietas -in Terence." Duckworth also claims that 14 Terence treated his subjects with "more subtlety." Terence is genteel and for that reason few link him with desecrations of the venerable. But Terence deserves attention in this study, not only because criticism of Plautus’ irreverence is available elsewhere, but because such attention will raise questions about the role of gentility in irreverent comedy.

Terence’s Phovmio, a genteel play, is an excellent specimen of subtle comic irreverence.

Like Dyskolos, Phovmio features the plotting of children against their father. This time, two cousins fall in love with two young women, each lad knowing that his father will prevent the marriage. One girl is a visitor to Athens whose mother has just died; the other girl is a musician in the service of Dorio, a pimp. Antipho loves the orphan;

Phaedria loves the musician. Left in the watch of Geta by 102

their fathers (who are brothers), the cousins enlist Phromio,

an adventurer, to help them in their suits. Phormio tricks

the old fathers, when they return, out of enough money to

free Pamphila from her pimp and to bring about the "legal"

marriage of Antipho to the orphan girl. When pressured to

dissolve that marriage, Phormio reveals to Nausistrata, Chremes'

wife, that Antipho’s lady is Chremes* daughter by a bigamous

marriage. The fathers are foiled; the sons get their brides.

Phormio bears some similarities to Dyskolos, but

contains even more differences. The traditional situation

is present; the old grump depriving his child of his desired

marriage. In both cases, pure headstrongedness enforces the

fathers’ states of mind; both are grouches. But Cnemon is

more of a caricature while Demipho and Chremes are more "real."

Patrician arrogance governs their behaviors. They need more

than a convenient topple into a well to change them; they

need Phormio.

The character of Phormio is a charge in itself. He

stands between the fathers and the sons. He is Terence's

dramatic device for being irreverent while seeming genteel.

The sons do not personally dupe their fathers; they work

through Phormio. Terence would never have the audacity to

depict a son affronting Demipho the way Phormio affronts him. At first, the old man questions Phormio about the legal entanglements of Antipho's marriage. The adventurer just puts him off and flaunts the youthful pleasures of marriage 103

that his son will enjoy: "If you could reconcile yourself

to her you'd have someone to amuse you in your old age.

You're not getting any younger you know." Could the father's

arrogance have its root in sexual jealousy? That may well

be Phormio's implication.

The fathers in Terence's play who so terrorize their

children have no importance for Phormio. He is beyond them,

as the playwright paints Phormio as a wanderer, detached

from any home, with no hint that pietas inhibit Phormio in

the least. He may be an "alter-ego," an "id" belonging to

the two young men. Phormio is a sub-conscious force detached

from social strictures, retaining no fear of the paterfamilias.

In the character of Phormio, Terence embodies a subtle force, existing in the world of the play and in the real world, which succeeds in putting the paterfamilias in his place, for the characters and the audience as well.

Phormio's victims, the fathers, are those who will deprive their children of their hearts' delight. Phormio unmasks Chremes' second marriage and badgers him into accepting his son's marriage with the musician. Phormio hucksters

Demipho into accepting the pseudo-legality which binds his son to Chremes' unknown daughter. He does what the sons find impossible on their own; he delights in his work of fast talk and muck-raking, phormio embodies the will of the children.

When Moliere based his farce, Les Fourbrieres de 104

Scapin, on Phovmio, he took even more care with the irreverence

than did Terence. Scapin, at the end of a line of fast-witted

valets to emerge from the Commedia, takes even greater pride

in his work than Phormio. Duping fathers is ample reward

for his efforts. But, unlike Phormio. Scapin goes beyond fast

talk in coaxing Geronte into a sack and, in the guise of a

bravo, beating the old paterfamilias soundly. Even more

energetic than Phormio, Scapin is likewise the Peer Gynt of

the children's ego, the unleashed force through which the son

defeats the father.

The use of "a Phormio" has not, therefore, been con­

fined to Terence’s comedy. Such a go-between in domestic

comedy does several things. One, he permits the children

to get the best of the father without seeming to be irreverent

in themselves. Two, because he is a disinterested party,

the Phormio character uses abundant freedom in his escapades;

his irreverence may go to any bounds. Three, he embodies

the spirit of the will of the child. An audience watches

the outrage of disrespected fathers without its seeming like

an outrage. Gentility in irreverent comedy is no contra­

diction in terms. As in phovmio, where the go-between becomes

a buffer, "gentility" makes the irreverence seem otherwise.

Tartuffe: The Father as Dupe and Hypocrite

The controversy raised by Tavtuffe when it opened in

Paris, May 12, 1664 has become famous. Religious forces in 105

France objected to Moliere's irreverence toward a, member of a sacred fraternity; no Brother should be depicted as slothful, greedy, lustful and vicious as Molière's title character is. Still, a more lenient critic might view Tartuffe as an attack, less on the Church, and more on hypocrisy in general.

Using the name of the Church in one's vices only increases the wickedness of the hypocrisy. But one cannot be "irreverent" toward hypocrisy; that is, unless one has ever revered it, for irreverence implies a prior reverence.

What irreverence is there in Tartuffe? Of the many elements Moliere handles in his play, one must say that the greatest irreverence is directed toward the paterfamilias,

Orgon. Molière makes him, as Peter Nurse says, the real 15 comic fool. Tartuffe is much too sharp of a character to be a dupe.

As vile as his moral character may be, Tartuffe has remarkable savoir faire; he knows, at every moment, how to play his game. Tartuffe excels in manipulation. When the impulsive Damis, Orgon's son, confronts Tartuffe with his vices before Orgon, the Brother makes no defense. He accepts the charges humbly, and the move works. Orgon banishes Damis in favor of Tartuffe. A director has several choices with

Tartuffe. He may conceive of him as obese and philistine, assaulting Dorine during the handkerchief scene (II.ii.), a walking figure of Vice. A director can also make Tartuffe charming, young and sweet, courting an older Elmire—the son 106

figure that no Orgon could see starve himself in a cathedral;

and any member of the audience could be fooled by such a

charmer as easily.

With Orgon, one has none of that variety. He is a

good man, but a dull man. His most outstanding characteristic

is that he can be so blind for so long. What is it he really

sees in Tartuffe? Translator, Richard Wilbur remarks in

his introduction that Orgon is both "Tartuffe’s victim and 16 his unconscious exploiter." If that is so, what does Orgon

hope to gain?

In answering this question, one may discover the comic

irreverence toward the father. Orgon, paterfamilias, sees

himself as an audience sees him: colorless and inadequate

(believable traits for a bourgeois father) and, in trying

to be otherwise, he behaves a bigger fool than ever. He seeks

something more than religious faith when he adopts Tartuffe; his fascination is more with the man, less with the message.

Orgon moves Tartuffe into his own roles as paterfamilias as surely as he tries to take on Tartuffe’s qualities.

Dorine (I.i.)-complains that Tartuffe "usurps the master's place," "preferring him to mother, child, or wife"

(I.ii.). The "Ah. And Tartuffe?" sequence (made famous by

Bergson as an example of automatism) bears this out. The comic charge is the automatic rigidity of the jack-in-the- box, but it falls on the field of fatherhood. Orgon minimizes his true duties as father. He outrages his role by neglecting 107

his commitments.

Yet, Orgon has not ceased to command fatherly authority.

That makes him dangerous. He demands that his family oblige

Tartuffe. Mariane, dreading her marriage to the Brother,

laments the all-too-true fact that, "A father’s power is

great" (Il.iii) and fears to oppose it. The venerated position

of the paterfamilias works, in this case, to the detriment

of the family. Orgon's stupidity degrades his role, for it

is now Tartuffe that is given command of the home, even to

the extent of seducing the mother.

Tartuffe is an alter-ego of the paterfamilias. He

and Orgon call each other "brother." They complement each other. Tartuffe runs the household; Orgon strives for religion.

When Orgon assails his family for plotting against Tartuffe, his words could be said to reflect the paranoia.of the pater­

familias. By substituting the word "father" for "him" in the next speech, one has a father's unconscious awareness of his families hidden resentments:

I know your motives; I know you wish him ill: Yes, all of you—wife, children, servants, all— Conspire against him and desire his fall, Employing every shameful trick you can To alienate me from this saintly man. Ah, but the more you seek to drive him away, The more I'll do to keep him. Without delay, I'11 spite this household and confound its pride By giving him my daughter as his bride.

The god punishes the resentment of mortals. Tartuffe is the thunderbolt of Orgon, the weapon with which the paterfamilias lashes his household for their self-assertion. 108

In summary, spectators at Tartuffe find themselves

laughing at the stupidity of a father, and all that results

from that. He makes Tartuffe virtual despot of the home.

With this substitution safely made, Orgon's family may

soundly attack the paterfamilias, now Tartuffe. The family

can attack him for his lust, gluttony, hypocrisy, economic

tyranny and control of others' lives—in short, the very

qualities which characterize the paterfamilias, but could

never be said to him. Only to Tartuffe can such irreverence

be acceptable. Through Tartuffe, the alazon paterfamilias

can be exposed and driven out.

Like Terence's gentle Phormio, Molière uses a third

party between family and paterfamilias. Instead of a Phormio-

figure to embody the will of the children, Molière uses a

usurper to embody the negative qualities of the paterfamilias.

The charges, ranging from automatism to surprise, are numerous,

and also aid in deflecting the attention from Tartuffe 's

function as an irreverent comedy. One of Molière's soundest

devices is M. Pernelle, Orgon's mother. Even after the

father learns of Tartuffe’s evil, the old woman persists in

her faith. One has a final impression, not of Orgon's folly, but of the grandmother's. For in Tartuffe’s usurpation of

the household power, one feels free to cast stones against

the paterfamilias safely assured that religious eccentricity and fraud take the blows. 109

Juno and the Paycock: Alazon of the Tenement

"O'Casey's world is chaotic and tragic but his vision,"

remarks David Krause, "is ironically comic." Several theorists

conclude that modern writers find it impossible to perceive

the world with a totally tragic vision; they cannot resist

the snicker at tragic circumstance. There is much to "tragify"

modern playwrights might say, but there is so much to laugh

at in the same situations. O'Casey, for instance, is the

first to laugh at the problems of his revolutionary Ireland.

He is first to indicate the destructive, yet somehow marvel­

ously funny forces which confine Erin to its oppressed

position. Juno and the Payooek is the outstanding example

of such an ambivalent view of the situation. James Agate quite appropriately calls the play, "as much a tragedy as

Maobeth, but it is a tragedy taking place in the porter's

family. . . ;" the tragic elements occupy no more than twenty minutes.

Sean O'Casey's vision of Ireland in her troubles is exemplified in his characterization of Capt. Boyle and, his projection and foil, Joxer Daly. These personae, which

Bernard Bernstock describes as the "indolent, self-indulgent braggart ... at the crux of the paralytic condition of

Irish life, but whose boisterous wit and elan always brought 18 him at least halfway back to redemption," appear often in both O'Casey's drama and in Irish society. 110

Capt. Boyle, paterfamilias, avoids work and responsi­ bility. He would rather parade in the pubs like a peacock than support his family. Boyle's comrade, the flattering parasite, Joxer Daly follows the Captain about for a free glass of porter every now and then. Mrs. Juno Boyle is the actual backbone of the family.

A distant relative dies suddenly, leaving the family a fortune. Boyle spends it all before he has it in his hand, then learns that the will is so full of flaws that his inheritance is next to nothing. Having overspent his few resources, the final curtain finds Boyle and Joxer in the bare tenement, the furniture having been repossessed.

Besides, Boyle's daughter, Mary, is pregnant by a suitor who has fled to England; Boyle's son, Johnny, has been murdered by the political faction he betrayed. Boyle and Joxer can still sing their tunes.

The disastrous situation is funny because of the way O'Casey treats his subjects. Boyle is more than a uni­ versal paterfamilias; he is an Irish father. A father's place is Irish society is less with his family and more with his comrades at the pub. The family unit in Ireland is bound more strongly around the mother than the father. The Boyle family is not atypical. The play, like Death of a Salesman could be "serious" if so many traditional comic devices were not included.

One such charge is automatism. Boyle's consistent Ill

reaction (Act I) to work is automatic. Like a jack-in-the-

box, Capt. Jack’s pain pops up whenever having a job threatens

him. Joxer's use of "darlin1" is a similar charge. By

overuse, the word loses meaning and trivializes anything to

which it is applied. Joxer.can also change according to the

most convenient situation. He backs Boyle when Boyle seems

to be wealthy, but assures everyone that Boyle should have

known better when the fortune loses its reality. But Jack

Boyle does the same. His reactions to the Church and to

people like Bentham depend entirely on whether Boyle is

affluent or poor at the moment. O'Casey's two comic comrades

carry their automatism with them through the most dismal

of situations, but rather than a mere physical encrusting,

the automatism is a psychological encrusting. For laughter

or disaster, Boyle and Joxer Daly simply cannot be serious.

Another comic charge is language, almost always a major part of Anglo-Irish drama. Even in argument Boyle and

Daly cannot overcome their fascination for words. When the

Captain assaults Joxer with, "I always knew you were a prog­ nosticator and a procrastinator" (III), the joy of using the potent-sounding words seems by far to outweigh Boyle's senti­ ment. What words one chooses becomes much more important than the issues at stake.

Both the automatism and the language (as well as his association with Joxer, also governed by both) in this context create Boyle's pomposity. As paterfamilias, he is a self­ 112

righteous failure, for the Captain would much rather seem

to be saying the proper thing with the most eloquent words

than really concern himself with the problems of his household

or his country. Even upon learning of the catastrophes of his daughter’s betrayal and his son's execution, he constantly bounces back to fault someone else. Boyle, as paterfamilias,

is an alazon in a dangerous position.

Besides presenting a picture of Irish fatherhood,

O'Casey addresses himself to fatherhood in general. The

Captain entertains with his ability to wind out of a situation

(like employment) and twist it into something else (like a

Church issue, Act I). He can wax sentimental about the sea as easily as he recalls his leg pains when the question of 19 gainful employment arises. The nickname "Pay.cock" puts

Boyle in perspective. The paterfamilias is all show, no strength. If one views him (or he views himself) as a pillar of the social structure, it is merely because that is the traditional view of the father, not because Boyle has deserved such reverence. The title "paterfamilias" does not make a man more competent, only more capable of causing harm.

Boyle's misdirection as a father accounts a great deal for the destruction of his family, and, on a larger scale, for the sad state of Ireland. O'Casey's comic charges (automatism and language, chiefly) turn this dramatic action from pure social critique to didactic, but thoughtful and clever, comedy.

The paterfamilias, being an archaic symbol of social 113

stricture and order, has provided comedy with a convenient

field. Old Comedy, the first genre to focus on the domestic

situation, was also the first form to use the theme of

father-duping as the core of its plays. In watching old

grouches like Cnemon, Demimpho and Chremes outwitted by

their children, the Greeks and Romans could be irreverent

toward societal attitudes which insisted upon respect for

their actual fathers. Menander’s charges, exaggeration

and the ridiculous, and Terence's charges, mostly the inclusion

of a third party between parent and child, make such laughter

innocent.

Moliere's Tavtuffe also directs laughter at the field

of the paterfamilias. Not only does it present Orgon as a

dupe, sucked in and swindled by an obvious impostor, but the

playwright permits an audience to see the two—father and

hypocrite—switching places. Tartuffe becomes the paterfamilias

In that role the family can indict him and banish him.

Orgon, in defending Tartuffe, can indict his family for

what resentment he suspects them of. The principal charges

are role-reversal, automatism, exaggeration and surprise.

In Juno and the Payoook, Sean O'Casey fuses comedy

and tragedy. Unlike the older comedies which contain a silly

or arrogant paterfamilias, this drama does end in disaster.

Jack Boyle is neither enlightened nor overcome. As much as

one laughs at him, he causes serious problems on all levels of society. Boyle's blindness saves him from both pity and 114

fear. He simply can't see his harmfulness; like the miles

gloriosus, Boyle values the glitter, the sound and the fury

of the role. O'Casey's characterization of the Captain, a

variation of the braggart soldier, charges the field of the

paterfamilias with comedy. This charge of exaggeration, as

well as those of automatism and language, grant the irreverence

license for Juno and the Payooek.

In all of these scripts, the father becomes the

butt of a joke, the comic alazon pretending to power to which

he has no title; a dispenser of punishment and begrudger of

his children's desires gets the tables turned on him. As

Martin Grotjahn claims in Beyond Laughter, tragedy implies

the piling of guilt on the son; in comedy the father is 20 . guilty. Irreverence toward the father in comedy, like comic

irreverence elsewhere, permits the aggressive, but safe,

ridicule of a venerated universal figure. 115

Footnotes to Chapter IV

X Totem and Taboo, trans, by James Strachey (N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1950). Freud’s Primal Horde Theory holds that at one time in prehistory, during ancient tribal life, the father of the family made himself the autonomous head of the household. All the women of the family belonged to him. His sons were a threat and so, they were banished. The exiled sons banned together and returned, overcoming and killing their father to possess his mistresses, their sisters. Man has spent all of civilization atoning for this revenge which, according to Freud, took place in all areas of the Earth. 2 The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

The Laws, p. 1308/ 4 Dodds, p. 47. 5 Edwin Sidney Harland, Primitive Society (London: Methuen and Co., 1921). Hartland makes a case of the fact that patriarchies developed social stringencies in relation to sex and other behaviors. Matriarchies have always been benevolently free. 6 "The Structure of Comedy" In Eight Great Comedies (N.Y.: Mentor, 1958), p. 462. 7 . . One can think of very few comedies which direct irreverent laughter at the mother. Many of the Eighteenth Century sentimental comedies did make the mother ridiculous but that may have been a compromise, the father being an untouchable in comic drama. The plays were not very strong as comedies. Reverence for the father has simply been greater than for the mother in society. He, therefore, makes a better comic butt! g "The Mythos of Spring" in Comedy: Meaning and Form, ed. by Corrigan (Scranton, Pa.: Chandler Publishing, 1965), p. 158. g There is a slight element of sacriledge in Cnemon's character which provides a "comic hubris." He refuses to lend the cook a pot for sacrifice, even though he is the only one with a vessel large enough to suit the celebration. ^Australian Humanities Research Council (Adelaide: Griffin Press, 1959), p. 13. 116 11 "The Structure of Comedy," p. 468; p. 462. 12 Roman Laughter (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 19. 13 The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 318. l^p. 19; p. 393.

15 "Moliere and Satire," University of Toronto Quarterly XXXVI (Oct., 1966): 121. -j °Moliere, Tartuffe (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. x. 17 Sean O'Casey: The Man and His Work (N.Y.: Macmillan Co., 1960), p. 71; "Juno and the Payeook" in Sean O'Casey: Modern Judgements, ed. by Ronald Ayling (London: Macmillan and Co., 1969), p. 76. 18 Sean O’Casey (Lewisburg: Buchnell University Press, 1970), p. 53. 19 Juno’s name serves many functions. It reflects the way Captain Boyle sees the world (Juno=June), but it also universalizes the situation. The name suggests that Captain Boyle is the universal father, the Zeus figure from whence reverent conceptions of the father derive. Also, being of Roman mythological origin, "Juno" links the play to Roman comedy. 20 (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1957), p. 86. CHAPTER V: THE DANSE MACABRE AS COMEDY

Human attitude, even before Antigone earned tragic heroism by honoring the corpse of her brother, has revered death. The Egyptians used pyramids to contain the souls of their leaders, just as the Scandinavians burned their heroes’ bodies out at sea in their longships. Eastern

Europeans have sprinkled libations at their loved ones' tombs and the Chinese, rice. Modern man has continued the tradition (to say the least) with pompous funeral arrangements abounding in flowers and fashionable grave sites. Besides such public rituals, human death has been a time for reverence in the home too. The Jewish shiva and the Western custom of hanging and wearing "mourning" are two examples, not to mention the quietly sympathetic way one must behave during a funeral and in the house of the deceased.

There are several explanations as to why such vener­ ation has always, in just about every culture, surrounded death. Freud claims that reverence to the dead arises be­ cause one fears the unknown spirit of the dead person. For instance, a warrior risks his own life to exterminate an enemy. Once that rival combatant is killed, the warrior turns penitent, praying that the dead man forgive him.

Reverent ritual for the dead arises out of guilt feelings

117 118 and fear of the deceased.^"

Less radical explanations, like B. C. Dietrick's,

claim that man revers death because he knows so little about

it, yet it is so potent. Man cannot even link death to a

benevolent religion; it is too indiscriminate. Death is

"blind," and, ". . .no one may escape her toils." Death

is an ungodly deity which baffles human beings. And, rather

than look at death with objectivity and inquiry, man, as

Warren Shibles explains, looks to "remote ritual, custom,

confusion, habit or mechanical responses." This is so,

according to another sociologist, Edgar Jackson, because

one lives for the moment and does not want to confront the

real emotions of death. In any case, death is fearsome and 2 ritual veneration helps man to cope with this evasive terror.

But such universal attitudes toward death, especially in their mystery and their gravity, need occasional release.

People need to relax their reverence toward mortality as much as they need to relax their veneration of the home, the man-woman relationship and the paterfamilias. But death, being even more universal than all of these and more terrible, may be harder to laugh at safely. That is why the metaphor of the Medieval danse macabre is used; it is the perfect example of "outrageous" comic irreverence even in the face of a grim field.

Florence Warren's Danae of Death (and the brilliant essay by Beatrice White preceding the edition) explains the 119

spectacle in which Medieval man mirthfully confronted the

ogre of Death, which threatened him daily in constant war

and the Black Plague. Ms. White quotes one Slavic description

written in the Fifteenth Century of the danse macabre:

In the Dance of Death the guests paired off, and young and old began to dance merrily with joyous chat­ tering and laughter, but suddenly the music stops with a shrill note and deep silence falls on the assembly; shortly after a low melancholy tune is heard, which ultimately develops into a dead march, as played at funerals. A young man of the company has now to throw himself on the ground and play the dead man, the women and girls dance round him with graceful motions, en­ deavouring to caricature mourning for the dead in as comical a manner as possible; at the same time they sing a dirge, but sing it so merrily that it produces general laughter. On the completion of the dirge the women and girls, one after another, go up to the dead man and kiss him, till a round dance of the whole com­ pany terminates the first part of the dance. The second part resembels the first, only that now the men and youths dance round a dead woman or girl. When now the kissing part came the fun was great, for the dancers endeavoured to inflict the kiss as tenderly and comic­ ally as possible.3

Merry dancing the kissing games are charges which make light of death. The men and women mock the Reaper, especially busy during the Black Death, to his face. There is comic irreverence. The pressures of the time demand the mirth as a means of coping with death. English morality plays do the same by personalizing Death, making it a character who flippantly beckons all men as such:

Dethe to the Mynstralle--

0 thow Minstral/that cannot so note & pipe Un-to folkes/for to do pleasaunce By the right honde (anoone) I shall the gripe With these other/to go vp-on my daunce Ther is no scape/newther a-voy daunce On no side/to contrarie my sentence 120

For yn musik/be crafte & accordaunce Who maister is/shew his science.4

Here too, men must laugh at death, and such "daunces of

death" as the Slavic festivity and the Medieval English play

merely prefigure later comic dramas which will also permit

audiences to laugh at the fearsome spectre. This chapter

will examine examples of such comedy.

The first two scripts, Volpone and Measure for Measure,

hail from a time that still retained many of the Medieval

preoccupations with death, the Elizabethan-Jacobean period.

Theodore Spencer, in Death and Elizabethan Tragedy, claims

that the English of that era were taught to "continually

despise the present life, meditate on death as a punishment

for sin, think of the moment of death as one of extreme

importance, and contemplate the tortures of the other world."

Such attitudes fascinated Hamlet, but made other Englishmen

ripe for laughter at them. Volpone and Measure for Measure

answered that need. In the same way, The Playboy of the

Western World and The Front Page are modern equivalents of

the danse macabre. None of these plays are "about" death, but all permit audiences to laugh at that "familiar event 5 . . . that arouses intense emotion."

Volpone and Double Exposure

Volpone has been a "problem" comedy, perhaps because of its preoccupation with cruelty and death. The permeating morbidity in Ben Jonson's comedy has even driven one critic, 121

Elizabeth Woodbridge, to catalogue it out of the very genre

Volpone is the one of Jonson's comedies least like comedy. In its tone, in its characters, in its story, in its structure, it leans toward tragedy. Perhaps the best thing to do with it would be to class it with Sejanus and Catiline as ironic drama.®

Apparently Ms. Woodbridge takes a questionable stance. She

defines the whole by what should be the logical sum of its parts. Do the elements she mentions really add up to non­

comic drama? What about the impression of Volpone on an audience? Actually, it may be a very funny play which may seem odd, given its often dismal preoccupation with death.

Several critics notice this persistence of death in Volpone. Ian Donaldson claims that the characters seem,

"drawn relentlessly downward and towards death." Harriet

Hawkins sees death in Volpone as a metaphor for folly—it too is incurable; Volpone’s act, "firmly forces him into a find of living death." Alexander Leggatt sees Volpone*s pretension as a morbid thrill, one of the rare pleasures left to a life-glutted magnifico. Now he can only test his 7 craft at his own destruction, fired by a death-wish.

But shouldn’t this persistence, as Ms. Woodbridge suggests, deprive the play of its comedy? What is funny about it? From an irreverent point of view, the very fact that Volpone deals with such an uncomfortably venerated field should increase its potential as a laugh vehicle. One may proceed to examine Volpone now from that viewpoint. 122

An Italian Magnifico, Volpone, dupes three greedy

acquaintances out of their treasures by pretending to be

ill. Hoping to be remembered in Volpone's will, they visit him daily with wealthy tribute, which includes Celia, the young bride of one predator. Complications (which involve the sub-plot of Sir Politic Wouldbe, of no concern here) bring Volpone and his predators before the Venetian judiciary for painful punishment. The death field appears throughout.

Volpone pretends to be at the brink of death. Even the trickster's mountebank disguise suggests a pretended cure for the incurable. The predators, Corvino, Voltore and

Corbaccio, do not merely reflect birds of prey—they reflect birds which prey on the flesh of the dead. The predators are past youth, near death (especially Corbaccio) both literally and morally. Even young Mosca, Volpone's most adept servant, has a humorous nomination which suggests a fly, an insect which feeds on and, as Renaissance people believed, regenerates from the dead. At the end, Volpone appears

"dead" before the court, just before his unmasking when he faces the punishment of a living death.

Mortality permeates the script, but in comic context.

For instance, Volpone muses (I.i., 445-59) at Corbaccio’s aspiration to rejuvenate himself:

So many cares, so many maladies, So many fears attending on old age. Yea, death so often called on, as no wish Can be more frequent with 'em, their limbs faint, Their senses dull, their seeing, hearing, going, All dead before them; yea, their very teeth, 123

Their instruments of eating, failing them; Yet this is reckoned life! Nay, here was one, Is now gone home, that wishes to live longer! Feels not his gout nor palsy! feigns himself Younger by scores of years, flatters his age With confident belaying it, hopes he may With charms, like AEson, have his youth restored; And with these thoughts so batters, as if fate Would be as easily cheated on as he, And all turns air! . . .

One living corpse laughs at another living corpse, only the

second doesn’t know any better. The speech sets the tone of the play. An audience can, with Volpone, safely laugh at those who try to fool others and fool themselves, even if it means laughing at death.

So much of the comedy rests in the mental association of such a serious phenomenon as death with the trivialities of sham and pure greed. For instance, during Voltore’s visit, Volpone acts the perfect death throes:

I feel me going—Uh! uh! uh! uh! I am sailing to my port—Uh! uh! uh! uh! And I am glad I am so near my haven. (I.i.245-47)

The above game of pretending to be near death occurs time and time again in Volpone. The idea of death exists as a reality for Voltore, yet, childish imitation charges this reality along with the base motives of material gain. The very fact that Volpone makes such a game out of death demeans the venerated field of actual death. Freud calls this "uni­ fication"; Bain calls it "degradation"; Monro calls it "in­ appropriate." An exalted phenomenon is treated in a baser way than the auditor is used to having it treated. The reverence for death is trivialized by the game of Volpone and 124

the greed of Voltore.

For after hearing these cries Voltore can only inquire,

"Pray thee, hear me. Am I inscribed his heir for certain?"

Again, the idea of death submits to the base reality of

self-interest. Just as Orgon cheapens the sacredness of

marriage with his mechanical concern for the impostor ("et

Tartuffe?"), so Volpone's predators and Volpone himself cheapen

death by their mechanical interest in the material.

Corbaccio has already been mentioned. He is even

more a fool than Voltore; Corbaccio has so little time on

earth to enjoy riches. Yet, automatism prevails. His in­

stinct for wealth draws him to the dying. The instinct makes him unaware of a more imminent death: his own. Ben

Jonson chooses to show his audience a pure predator, hobbling in his infirmities after any hope of money. An auditor can safely laugh at this automaton. He is a "jalopy," rumbling along on greed. Corbaccio is so oblivious to death, even his own, that he reduces that phenomenon to a triviality.

By the time Corvino visits Volpone, the Fox decides to act the incoherent, and the audience enjoys the rare luxury of laughing at a babbling vegetable on the brink of death. Both Corvino and Mosca yell insults at the mental cripple. Mosca offers, in Volpone's presence, to murder his master for Corvino. The context of the game makes one laugh easily at these horrors. Only in such comic framework can one hear the usually austere attitude toward death so 125

safely insulted:

Mdsoa: The pox approach, and add to your diseases, If it would send you hence the sooner, sir! For your incontinence it hath deserved it Throughly and throughly, and the plague to boot— You may come near, sir.—Would you would once close Those filthy eyes of yours, that flow with slime, Like two frog pits; and those same hanging cheeks, Covered with hide instead of skin—nay, help, sir.— That looks like frozen dish clouts set on end! (I.i.513-21)

Mosca speaks what no actual person dares speak at the death­

bed of another human being.

Although the fact of Volpone's death does not threaten,

the spirit of Volpone*s death is everpresent. Against that

field, Ben Jonson works his comic irreverence. The predators

are automatons with one-track minds set on wealth and in­

different to life. The boldness of their greed and Volpone*s

pretension permits the audience’s release of their appre­

hension about death; that forced respect eases in the comedy.

This constant association of base ambition and game

playing with death seasons the entire script. An auditor may classify Volpone as "corrective comedy," greed and folly being exposed. But this is not the only exposure. In per­ mitting his audience to laugh at foolish deception, Ben

Jonson also allows laughter at death (it being a governing spirit in the play); he "exposes" his audience's irreverent attitudes. This "double exposure," instead of avoiding the issue of death, which so many critics find a problem in the comedy, uses death as a motif. Through Volpone one can laugh at the Reaper as those in the danse macabre did, confronting 126

that revered field in the guise of a game.

Measure for Measure; Love for Death

Roger Sale’s essay, "The Comic Mode of Measure for

Measure reflects a common attitude toward that play.

Mr. Shakespeare, Sale suggests, entered a dismal period of his life at the time of Measure for Measure, and so the bard was capable of no romantic comedy, only tragedy and tragi- g comedies like this one. Sale’s point of view is typical.

No Shakespearean comedy causes as much discomfrot as this one.

Such critics as Sir Edmund Chambers have rushed to the defense of Measure for Measure as a comedy. He claims that the moral issues, the question of steadfast chastity and the substituted bride, would have been taken with much less reserve by the Jacobeans than by contemporary audiences.

David Lloyd Stevenson and Donna B. Hamilton both suggest that the moral issues serve to implicate all of the audience in the action; the issues address themselves to the needs and drives of man. Herbert S. Weil agrees that any other name than "comedy" will misconceive Measure for Measure, for it is not as "dark and cynical as most of its critics have argued." The moral problems stir up the audience's interest, but the audience knows that they will be worked out in the end. Josephine Bennett builds an entire case for the play’s comedic value by asserting that Measure for Measure provided royal entertainment at the Revels of James I; no monarch 127 9 would darken his festivity with a dismal play.

These perceptions are sound. They make no attempt

to deny that a play with "grim" subject areas is a comedy,

and the subject area they try hardest to explain is the

question of Isabella: is her moral dilemma selfish or sound?

But there is another'‘field less dealt with by the critics,

that of Claudio's execution. This impending death is struc­

turally vital to the script. It forces Isabella's dilemma

to the surface; it "ups the stakes" on everyone in the world

of the play. It creates a sense of urgency and suspense.

The motif of death in Measure for Measure does even more:

it provides laugh matter.

Death is, as Caroline Spurgeon would say, a "pervasive

image" in Measure for Measure. It is not the only comedy

in which Shakespeare deals with death. A Comedy of Errors

is framed by the potential execution of Egeon, but an audience has few reminders that death is imminent in the course of the action. The merriment of Love 's Labors Lost is disturbed by Marcade who brings word of the Princess' father's death, but an audience never sees, and seldom hears of the man before. For Measure for Measure death is more than a plot thickener and more than a Morality Play impersonation of

Dethe. Shakespeare takes care to maintain attention on the death of Claudio; his very use of the words "death" and "die" in Measure for Measure by far exceeds his use of those words in other texts. 128

These constant reminders of death do not reduce the

comedy, any more than the danse macabre reduced its partici­

pants' festive spirit. They may increase the comic value

of the play. Act III, Scene i, is a suitable example. The

Duke dressed as a friar, visits doomed Claudio in his prison

to offer words of comfort. The "friar" spews out a thirty-six

line sermon to shame the memento mori poetry of the Middle

Ages. Using logic that would have humbled Boethius, the

Duke consoles the convict:

. . . What's yet in this That bears the name of life? Yet in this life Lie hid moe thousand deaths; yet death we fear, That makes these odds all even.

Claudio: I humbly thank you. To sue to live, I find I seek to die, And seeking death, find life: let it come on.

One could take the answer in two ways. Claudio

understands the beauty of death, or Claudio begins, really

for the first time, to think seriously about the dread of

mortality. The second answer is the more comic interpretation,

for one can imagine the courageous Claudio about to endure

his fate like a soldier when, with the "comfroting" words

of the Duke, his face grows Suddenly more dismal. All of the

Duke's philosophy (which seems an attempt to show off to him­

self that he, the Duke, can really play the role of friar)

succeeds in driving what little courage one should expect

in a doomed man from Claudio. After the speech, Claudio no longer wants to confront mortality; the Duke has made 129

it too real. The Duke departs with, "Dear sir, ere long

I’ll visit you again." Claudio, now disheartened, answers,

"Most holy sir, I thank you." The parting words may be

said to reflect the above reading of this scene. The one

thing the now dismal Claudio doesn't need is another cheery

visit from the Duke; Claudio thanks him for reminding him

of the reality of his death.

The same pattern appears in the next beat. Isabella

responds to her brother's question: "Now, sister, what's

the comfort?" (Claudio's hoping that she will restore some

of his heart, lost in the friar's visit) with

Why, As all comforts are: most good, most good indeed.

The crestfallen Claudio perks up: some hope of something.

Then:

Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven, Intends you for his swift ambassador, Where you shall be an everlasting leiger; Therefore your best appointment make with speed; Tomorrow you set on.

Again she deflates his hopeful spirits; her very words most

clumsily dash his hopes. Claudio prods and prods her until

finally she reveals Angelo's bargain of her virtue for the

life of Claudio, love for death. Again Claudio rises from

dejection, this time with wrath for Angelo. Now, assured

of his sister's honor and forgetting the miseries of his death, Claudio signs, "Thanks, dear Isabel." The comfort of a sister's virtue should be enough to send any man to his death in glad peace. But no one seems to let him forget his 130 fate. Isabella refrains, "Be ready, Claudio, for your death tomorrow." He can no longer endure it. Isabella has shattered his comfort for the last time, and he is determined now to live. Claudio then proceeds with his request that his sister sleep with Angelo as payment for his life.

It may be useful to summarize the inferences drawn from Ill.i. of Measure for Measure. Shakespeare plays comic games with death. Claudio's impending execution provides the death field. His cell is invaded by people who simply don't know how to talk to a condemned man. The Duke and

Isabella raise him up and flop him down time and time again.

The Duke's discourse depresses Claudio more than mere silence would have done. Isabella, without meaning to, keeps reminding him that he will die. The condemned man, willing to accept his fate, is disuaded by the ones who give him heart. One can find comic incongruity in the situation, as well as the automatism of inflation and deflation. The comic treatment of Claudio's death (very real to him) is irreverent.

A very different scene, akin to gallows humor, is

IV.iii. The Duke, to delay the killing of Claudio, has the bawds-turned executioners, Pompey and Abhorson, execute

Barnadine, a long-time prisoner. But unlike Claudio, Barnadine is used to impending death; he passes his days in drunkenness no longer in fear of the sentence. The situation provides a bit more heavy-handed comic scene. Pompey calls Barnadine to meet his execution with 131

Master Barnadine, you must rise and be hanged, Master Barnadine.

and

. . . You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death.

Barnadine is not ambitious to meet his doom. Pompey repeats

the enticement that Barnadine will have ample time to sleep

his drunkenness off—after the execution. Just as had been

the case with Claudio, the friar-clad Duke stays at Barnadine*s

side, to "comfort and pray" with him. Barnadine lends no

willing ear like Claudio; his mind is made up:

Friar, not I; I have been drinking hard all night and I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets. I will not consent to die this day, that’s certain. (50-3)

and

I swear I will not die to-day for any man's persuasion. (56-7)

Not only is the disturbance of Barnadine for Claudio's

benefit within the plot, but the scene itself keeps the

comedy focused on the death motif. An auditor may laugh even

more freely at this farce scene; slapstick executioners

calmly persuade a drunk to die. The low comic tone trivial­

izes death.

Conveniently enough, for Shakespeare and the characters

alike, Ragozine, a pirate, dies in prison of a fever. Now

his head may be (and is) brought forth as Claudio's. But why does Shakespeare bring the gruesome object before his audience when he might have simply spoken of it? Perhaps, 132

by this point in the play, the comic irreverence has been

so much toward death that the head will appear nothing more

than an object of comic business (like the substituted over­

coat in Lady Gregory's play, the substituted briefcase or

letter in so many other farces). If Shakespeare had not meant death to play an important part in the comedy of

Measure far Measure he would have left Ragozine's head a verbal reference; since death has already provided so much comic matter already, there is no need to cease the fun now.

As major as love or honor may be in Measure for Measure, death is also an important motif. Death may even be equated with love and honor: Angelo will trade a measure of love for a measure of death; the substituted bride and the sub­ stituted head save the day. The Duke, saving the life of

Claudio, demands his measure of love in wedding Isabella.

Like Ben Jonson, Shakespeare treats death as some­ thing which may be laughed at in the proper context. Both playwrights are careful not to make such laughter too blatant.

Jonson draws so much attention to constant duping of the greedy. Shakespeare balances the serious subject matter and the comedy in such a way that an audience never expects serious catastrophe, as in a cartoon or a roller-coaster ride.

The thrill of danger exists, without the actuality. As

Josephine Bennett explains

It is a witty play, in the Elizabethan sense of 'wit.' What Shakespeare has done by having the men sentenced to death for adultery and saved by the women is to 133

turn a normal situation upside down, and this paradox (once it is recognized) removes the-action from reality as effectively as Prospero's magic wand removes The Tempest .H

With so many charges for safety, Shakespeare grants

the irreverence license. Measure for Measure allows the

auditor to enjoy a well-guarded laugh at, among other elements,

death.

A Fine Bit of Talk and the Dance of Death

Like Volpone and Measure for Measure, John Millington

Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World permits its audience

to laugh in the midst of some rather grim subject matter.

For Playboy has much to do with violence and its ultimate consequence, death. R. Reed Sanderlin observes that the villagers find two fascinating qualities in Christy Mahon: his poetic imagination and his violence. Patricia Meyer

Spacks considers the "emotional weight" of the play to be on the characters' perception of violence and murder; to them such things are noble. In an article entitled, "Synge's

Playboy and the Proximity of Violence," Harry W. Smith notices the same technique in Synge's play as that which Johson used in Volpone', that is actual death does not occur, only pretended or imagined death are important:

That Old Mahon never really died lessens somewhat the grotesque emotional impact on the audience and heightens the wit of the comic structure, but it does not mitigate the readiness with which the village had lauded the heroism of the parricide. The form of the play defines the formation of a hero, and the foundation of that form is clearly the community's attitude toward violence. 134

The death of Christy's father is real both to Christy and

to the villagers (as real of Volpone's death was to his

predators). Death, mistaken or real, is an issue.

Of Synge, Yeats recalls

He loves all that has an adge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough in the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that stings into life the sense of tragedy. . . .13

Death is a "salt of the mouth" in Playboy, a subject that

Synge brings up time and time again in his script.

Michael Flaherty, at the opening of the play, leaves

his daughter, Pegeen Mike, to attend a wake with his cronies.

All this is even before one knows that Christy Mahon, the

man who "murdered" his da lurks out in the bogs. The Irish

wake is the perfect specimen of the danse macabre, filled

with anything but grim sorrow—fine songs, poetic eulogies

and much drink. This is what an auditor may very rightly

associate with this Celtic folk-celebration, an expectation

which, in Act III, if fulfilled by Michael's description of

the event to Christy:

. . . and wasn't it a shame I didn't bear you along with me to Kate Cassidy's wake, a fine, stout lad, the like of you, for you'd never see the match of it for flows of drink, the way when we sunk her bones at noon­ day in her narrow grave, there were five men, aye, and six men, stretched out retching speechless on the holy stones.

The colorful narrative supports nothing in Playboy 's plot, much in Playboy's tone. The same is true of the drunken conversation between Philly and Jimmy. They, admirers of

Christy's murder, are fascinated by the macabre in general. 135

The lads fantasize about digging for potatoes and shovelling up the halves of Old Mahon's skull; Philly and Jimmy enjoy the recollections of a travelling showman who exhibited human skulls.

. . . when I was a young lad there was a graveyard beyond the house with the remnants of a man who had thighs as long as your arm. He was a horrid man, I'm telling you, and there was many a fine Sunday I'd put him together for fun, and he with shiny bones, you wouldn't meet the like of these days in the cities of the world. (Ill)

This is just before Old Mahon, the personification of "living death," surprises them, making much of his own cloven skull.

But such dialog only maintains the irreverent tone of the play towards death. Death also plays a major part in the plot. Thinking that Christy killed his da, the villagers enshrine him. Christy makes to kill Old Mahon a second time

(for which the villagers try to bring Christy to his fate) and threatens to kill him a third time (and one feels that this last instance, if it came about, would have done Old

Mahon in). Young Christy is a comic alazon, taking credit for that which he has no title to, murder. Old Mahon is also a comic figure, in many ways a walking corpse. Synge chooses dismal figures to transport his laughter!

What Smith calls the "subtext of violent metaphor" may be seen in the language of Synge's Mayoites. They wax poetic about death, as everything, offering a fine bit of 14 talk about mortality—as long as it remains far away. For instance, the villagers hold the Widow Quinn in a gentle awe 136

because, somehow or other, she may haye killed her husband.

It is "distant" death (Like Christy's father, at first), and

the people can tolerate the fantasy. The villagers are quick

to allude to the brutal specifics of death, as when young

Jimmy, unprovoked, offers this legent:

. . . I knew a party was kicked in the head by a red mare, and he went killing horses a great while, till he eat the insides of a clock and died after. (Ill)

They even love to talk about Old Mahon's bloody pate and picture, before his appearance, his corpse rotting out in the fields. The frequence and grossness of the Mayoites well-constructed eloquence is a comic charge which helps

Synge's audience make light of death; the grim reality becomes less grim by becoming "over-grim"! Smith's phrase "subtext of violent metaphor" is well chosen. The "fine bit of talk" used by Synge's folk transports Playboy from the macabre to the comic.

Just as comic trickery and unravelling in Volpone and Measure for Measure alienate those plays' death fields from too severe an association on the audience's part, so does Synge's language in Playboy. Besides, the script contains a strong running joke, as Patricia Spacks notes; the irony between Christy's image as a hero and his actual incompetence as a man. Rural savagery underlies all of this; people find death titillating. The Mayoites' language is the music of this West Ireland danse macabre.

Yeats, again speaking of J. M. Synge, claims that all 137

the muses need is that an artist speak his emotions "without

fear of moral ambitions, to come out from under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to be utterly oneself. ..." Synge, in Playboy of the Western World, accomplishes this unabashed confrontation of self and emotion.

He vents his own irreverent instincts toward death. No wonder his original Dublin audience rioted. The Abbey audience was too sensitive to Synge's brazen irreverence; he hit too close to their reverent identity. It may be for this reason that Donna Gerstenberger compares Playboy to the film

Bonnie and Clyde. Both confront their audiences with their anxieties; ". . .in both cases, play and film, the greatest shock of recognition for the audience comes precisely at the moment of realizing that we who have laughed are also 15 guilty." Whenever an audience finds itself laughing at a man with a split head, almost murdered, or delighting, with the Mayoites, in Christy's heroism as a father-killer, that moment arrives.

The Front Page; Comedy of Detachment

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's comedy The Front Page opened in New York on August 14, 1928. Since then it has enjoyed frequent revivals by various theatre operations and become a "standard" popular comedy. One of The Front Page 's most attractive characteristics is the world with which it deals. Just as O'Neill's early plays dealt with the rough 138

sea-faring man and the Bow’ry Boys plays dealt with the tough

Irish-American fire fighter, The Front Page introduces a

new type of rough, American character: the newspaper reporter.

The plot of this comedy is simple. An anarchist,

condemned for the killing of a black policeman, awaits

execution. His death will mean a feather-in-the-cap for

the corrupt Chicago political machine; the prisoner's real

crime is Communism. He escapes his death-cell and hides in

the prison press-comm,aided by two hard-nosed crusading newsman,

Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns, who are anxious to expose

the politicians. A governor's reprieve, deus ex machina,

saves the convict. Within this framework is Hildy's problem:

he wants to leave the tough newspaper world and settle, with

new bride, into a pat advertising position in New York.

Hildy's newsman-fetters still bind him to reporting with the

gruff editor, Burns; he loves the life and can't escape it.

This "life" adds color to the play; the press-room

sets the tone of it. The press-room world is a headquarter

of comic irreverence at its most detached. The reporters

see the most earnest of humanity's problems, the grim horrors

of life on a daily basis. Everything reduces to one drive:

getting the story out. The playwrights' initial stage notes

describe this calloused breed as they play cards to pass time while waiting for the Communist's hanging:

Here is the rendezvous of some of the most able and amiable bums in the newspaper business; here they meet to gossip, play cards, sleep off jags and date up 139 waitresses between such murders, fires, riots and other public events as concern them.- -

The authors construct an atmosphere where nothing is sacred, even that which may be sacred to the audience.

These men see misery and death every day and are toughened by it, as Hildy describes:

Journalists! Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines like a lot of coach dogs! Waking people in the middle of the night to ask them what they think of Mussolini. Stealing pictures off old ladies of their daughters that get raped in Oak Park. A lot of daffy butinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants, borrowing nickels from office boys! And for what? So a million hired girls and motormen's wifes'll know what’s going on. (Act I)

They have rendered their human feelings down to a by-line.

Through the detached sympathies of the reporters, an audience hears of the most frightful incidents in a so-callous-that-its-funny manner. Death is ever present: the guard testing the gallows in the yard, the constant phone calls relating all sorts of violent murders, the attempted suicide of the prostitute, the great attention paid to the execution—not whether it may be humane or not, right or wrong, but its value as a story. The auditor, with a "normal" reverence for death, confronts totally non-reverent attitudes which are carried to such an extent that they become humorous.

The playwrights use exaggeration as a major charge on the field of death as well as automatism. Not only is the re­ porters’ attitude "over-tough," but it becomes automatic.

Each new bit of information they receive sets off a mechanism automatically which must grind out a story. The newsmen 140

become story machines. The elements of their world are not

very different from each other:

Endicott; Anyhow, this looks like the last hanging we'll ever have to cover.

Schwartz: Yeah. Can you imagine their putting in an electric chair? That's awful.

Endicott: Going to toast them, like Lucky Strikes.

Murphy: Who opened?

Schwartz: What's the matter? Got a hand? (Act I)

Being machines, the newsmen can afford such rudeness towards death; it is only a part of the everyday grind, part of the small talk in the card game.

The exalted is demeaned through the mechanisms of the everyday. The life of the newsmen is the great objectifier, demeaning that which an audience revers: human life. The

Front Page is not "about" death anymore than Volpone may be; yet, it comprises so much of the comic matter. The casual attitudes of the characters toward murder and execution make death funny; an audience laughs unwittingly, even the audience for whom the script was written in the wake of the

Sacco-Vanzetti executions. Death, by the comic charges which turn those who deal with it into "story machines," becomes a joke which persists indelicately throughout The Front Page.

This study of comic irreverence towards death began with a description of the danse macabre of the Middle Ages.

Just as the Europeans of that age relaxed their reverent identity towards mortality by making a festivity of it, so 141 does, in, more subtle ways, the comic drama. Volpone concerns

itself primarily with greed and folly, Measure for Measure

with love, The Playboy of the Western World with concept

versus reality, and The Front Page, with crooked government.

Yet, in each and every one of these comedies, the field of

death plays a most important part. Being comedies, of course,

each contains many jokes, and death is only one.

But death is an important one. The playwrights have

gone to great trouble, in these scripts and others, to permit laughter at reverent attitudes toward death to happen with great innocence. The comic charges in these scripts

labor to detract attention from this most awesome comic

field; so the laughter may seem to come from any other place than from one's attitudes toward death. Like the frolickers in the Black Plague era, people need to laugh at the venerated, feared Reaper. Comedy presents such a satisfaction for that need. 142

Footnotes to Chapter V

A prime example of such guilt-ridding in a drama is Sartre’s Les Mouches, a-retelling of the Orestes legend. The townsfolk of Argos assemble once a -year for a guilt­ cleansing. All the ghosts of their dead return on this day and torment the people, but they would rather undergo this purgation than eliminate evil from their society! 2 Death, Fate and the Gods (London: Athlone Press, 1965), pp. 5-6; Death: An interdisciplinary analysis (Whitewater, Wise.: Language Press, 1974), pp. 94-5; "Attitudes Toward Death in Our Culture: in Death and Bereavement, pp. 212-18, ed. by Austin H. Kutscher (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1969). 3 The Dance of Death (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931), p. xiv. 4 Warren, p. 60. From Daunce of Death, Ellesmere MS. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 8; Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Rand (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960), p. 27. § Studies in Jonson's Comedy (N.Y.: Gordian Press, 1966) , p. 72. 7 "Volpone: Quick and Dead," Essays in Criticism, XXI, (1971): 121-34";'."Folly, Incurable Disease and Volpone," Studies in English Literature, XIII (1968): 338; "The Suicide of Volpone," University of Toronto Quarterly, XXXIX (1969/70): 19-32. g Shakespeare Quarterly, XIX (April, 1968): 55-61. 9 The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (Oxford: University Press, 1937); The Achievement of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); "The Comic Vision of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968); "Shakes­ peare's Comic Control in Measure for Measure: Sub-Plot as Key to Dramatic Design: (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford Uni­ versity, 1968); Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (N.Y. and London: Columbia University Press, 1966). ^Martin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (Hildesheim: Georg 01ms Verlags- buchhandlung, 1968). Measure for Measure, by the word-counts 143

in this concordance, contains abundant references to death and dying, especially compared to other comedies by Shakes­ peare:

Play References to "death,1' "dying," "die/1 etc.

The Tempest 21 Two Gentlemen of Verona 19 Merry Wives of Windsor 21 Comedy of Errors 17 Much Ado About Nothing 53 Love 's Labors Lost 22 A Midsummer Night 's Dream 41 Merchant of Venice 25 As You Like It 36 Taming of the Shrew 15 average:30 All's Well That Ends Well 47 Twelfth Night 23 Winter’s Tale 52

Measure for Measure 102 11 The Duke, for instance, is a "safety device." One is assured by his constant presence, incognito, that every­ thing will turn out well for everyone. He is really in command; Bennett, p. 158. 12 "Synge’s Playboy and the Ironic Hero," Southern Quarterly, VI (April, 1968): 289-301; "The Making of Playboy," Modern Drama, IV (December, 1969): 315; Quarterly Journal of Speech, LV (December, 1969),: 385. 13 "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Playboy of the Western World, ed. by Thomas R. Whitaker (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 27-8. 14 Smith, p. 385. In his essay, Smith makes the case for the villagers' fear of death in actuality, but admiration of it "at a distance." The same is true, Smith claims, with society. Death, shocking to men, can be fascinating as an idea that presents no immediacy. l^Yeats, p. 33; Modern Drama, XIV (September, 1971): 231

16 Sixteen Famous Famiercan Plays, ed. by Bennet Cerf and Van H. Cartness (N.Y.: Modern Library, 1941), p. 59. CHAPTER VI: THE IMPLICATIONS OF IRREVERENCE

IN THE COMIC DRAMA

The nature of laughter remains evasive. This study has only examined one significant element of laughter: irreverence. Looking back, irreverence in comedy is a much more dominant factor than previous theorists have indicated.

As seen in this survey of dramatic literature, comic irre­ verence is to be found in all periods and all styles of comedy. Such explanations of the comic as being the result of "the ugly that is not painful" (Aristotle) and automatism

(Bergson) merely deal with ways of being irreverent in comedy; they do not address themselves to the human consciousness of the auditor in the comic experience. That auditor brings his own experience of life to the theatre with him and finds it easy to laugh at something he recognizes onstage. The only theorist who comes close to explaining the experience of that audience member is D. H. Monro. Monro synthesizes laugh*-matter and laugh-theory and arrives at a term which incorporates the comic experience: inappropriateness. "In­ appropriateness" results from "universe changing" and atti­ tude mixing "; one perceives one phenomenon in terms of another phenomenon; one associates the apples and oranges of the life experience. Usually, one element is "high," the other "low." A Connecticut Yankee, with all the blunt

144 145

ingenuity and hardcore practicality that such a person

implies, being in the much romanticized Court of King Arthur

is an example of attitude mixing, universe changing. The

same may be said by Monro's other example. A newlywed hus­

band awakes in the morning with his bride and discourses

about the spiritual bliss of marriage—they are awaking to

their dawn of devotion and romantic bliss. The man then

proceeds to arise and gather up several days' worth of news­

papers and milk bottles. The mixture of "ideal" marriage and

raw sex is the joke. A customs' officer on a ship, rescuing

some emaciated survivors of a nautical disaster asks them

if they've anything to declare; the universe of the glory

of human life (field) and the cold practicality of the world (charge) mix.'*'

This attitude changing and universe mixing is "in­

appropriate. " One does not want to think, of callous modern

Americans in the world of Launcelot, nor of raw sex with

blissful wedlock, nor of such a petty thing as customs' tax

when, by God's grace, men have survived the ordeal of ship­

wreck. Such association may as well be called that of fields

and charges; Monro's term, "inappropriateness," denotes the

experiences accurately, but it is much too genteel a word

to carry the emotion of that experience. "Irreverence" does

carry that emotion. It is not often a pleasant word, and

it is not a delicate word, but neither are some of the im­ pulses which create comedy. Most often these impulses are 146

destructive, but in a positive sense. They tear down atti­

tudes, momentarily and safely, which impose themselves upon human consciousness. Comic irreverence, in the drama as in the joke, lends direction to these impulses. The impli­ cations of this study may now be summarized. They are:

1) that irreverence is a comic common-factor; 2) that irre­ verence is a primary cause of laughter in many instances ;

3) that comic charges grant the auditor the irreverence license; 4) that fields change perspective with changing society; 5) that comic irreverence is not an "attack";

6) that a script may deal with many fields as laugh-matter.

Each of these warrants individual explanation.

Conclusions of the Study

The Comic common Factor

The plays examined here are a carefully picked sample of the comic drama. Given the entirely to those plays generally agreed to be comedies in the dramatic repertoire, one would expect case after case where human idols are treated with irreverence. The comedian's ways of dealing with his subjects vary. He may be genteel (as in Terence’s irreverence toward fatherhood) or he may be vitriolic (as in Neil Simon's view of the lovers). The comic playwright, to make people laugh, confines his subject matter to the familiar. Tragedy may be a lonesome experience; the tragic hero may cast all the world off. Comedy must incorporate the community. 147

Everyone must understand the "inside" joke to make it funny,

and laughter is contagious. Let the comedian soar too high

above the immediate world, and thought will step in the way

of laughter.

For this reason the comic playwright chooses his

matter from daily human experience. People can deal with

obscurity in tragedy; the plight of the tragic hero need not be recognizable. What young girl, however empathic with

Antigone, enjoys her purgation of pity and fear only because

she knows what it is like to defend her principles to the death before the Prime Minister and both Houses of Parliament?

Comedy addresses itself to the world around every person; it is interested in man, not Man. Society must in "in" on the joke.

The playwright chooses, therefore, the universals of daily life with which to work. Marriage, parents, patriotism, human life and death may be viewed on a conceptual or spiritual level, but on a day to day level also. When these fields become matter for laughter, they risk losing spiritual dignity in the context of the comic vision. Comedy invites mirthful degradation of whatever society holds up as an idol. Comedy invites laughter at the recognizable, which is so often the venerated. Playwrights include the venerated so often in their comedies because it is so assailable; irreverence appears so often because one recognizes it so easily. 148

The Primary Cause of Laughter

Irreverence is not only frequent, it is often at the

heart of that which makes the script funny. Of course, one

laughs also at the joy of lovers reconciling after their

silly spat, and at the cute antics of a kitten or child.

But, in comedy, the greater part of the audience’s laughter

may arise from the irreverent. The comic spirit embraces

the archaic Greek insult parade and the Medieval Feast of

Fools celebration. The playscripts examined in this study

have been shown to contain numerous irreverent attitudes,

and that is by virtue of the printed text alone. In production

the patterns of irreverent comedy may well increase.

The subject matter, the field, provides the basis for

laughter in so many instances, not the automatism or surprise,

or whatever comic theorists have cited in the past. These

charges are laugh-triggers. They function, as Monro might

say, to mix attitudes and change universes. Charges are mechanisms with which one might treat a field. The release of comic laughter arises, however, from the perception of that field treated in an irreverent manner.

Charges and the Irreverence License

One must not deprive charges of their import. As was said, charges, not the basis of irreverent comedy, are the triggers of laughter. But people do not acknowledge their desire to belittle phenomena which they venerate easily. 149

"Accepted" comedy often masks what an audience pearly laughs

at. A comic charge, besides serving a,s an "attitude changer"

also serves as a buffer, deflecting the attention of the

auditor (like a magician when he waves his wand, thereby

yanking away his spectators’ attention just long enough to

permit the girl to slip out of the casket or for him to

switch top hats) from the real object of comedy. A charge

like exaggeration, making the predators in Volpone seem

over-greedy, or the married folk in II Candelaio seem

over-lusty, permits an audience to think it laughs at the

excess, not at death or marriage. Charges grant the irreverence

license.

Some comedy lacks the right balance of charges with

fields. That comedy often becomes "distasteful," banned

from any but the most crude of social gatherings. "Helen

Keller" jokes and "dead baby" jokes are branded as "sick"

and "not funny"; they are banned from polite company. Yet,

they do the same thing as most comedy: permit an audience

to forget its reverence for an almost deified woman and the

disaster of infant mortality. Funeral jokes and hospital

jokes may do the same thing, but they are less "raw" and to

the point. Hence, they are more acceptable.

Comic drama often makes that compromise. Comedians

confront reality often by removing their characters from reality. In The Homecoming, for instance, Pinter gives his characters sudden reversals of speech. They start on one 150

topic and end up by disavowing it all, or they answer a

question with great energy, but total irrelevance. These

quirks also remove the characters from reality. One may feel

free to laugh at them because something in the way these

people communicate says that they are only close semblances

to veal people.

Irreverent license, manipulation of the subject matter

so that it may be socially acceptable to laugh, is the business

of the comic charge. An audience feels free to chuckle at

the reduction of marriage, and all the ideals associated with

it, to pure sex in Aristophanes because the playwright charges

his field with an absurd situation, a sex-strike for peace.

An audience can laugh at the unwitting, but ungentle, degrad­

ation of a home in She Stoops to Conquer because Goldsmith

buffers such behavior with the charges of mistaken identity

and disguise. A charge makes the irreverence in comedy appear

to be something other than irreverence.

Changing Fields in Changing Societies

Irreverence is an attitude toward another attitude.

The conditions of that attitude may be in the mind of the

playwright and/or it may be in the audience's mind. Irre­

verence may be unintentional in comedy, like a child's when he is given, with great ceremony, a silver dollar by his grand aunt and proceeds to throw the treasure into the air with a loud "whoop." The child is not aware of his irreverence, 151

but the family may still laugh at the innocent disregard of

propriety. The actor, George Maharis, while visiting Latin

America with only a smattering of Spanish language proficiency,

declared, while removing his coat one sultry day, "Me caliente."

Literally the sentence means, "I am warm," but the connotation

is, "I am sexually bothered." The openness of the stranger’s

remark, like the brazenness of the child’s gesture, may seem

irreverent in all its innocence. The mis-said phrase brought

laughter from the Latin hosts, because Mr. Maharis disregarded

the sexual taboos of the culture? he shattered the idols of

sexuality and proper social decorum. His hosts, because of

their guest’s innocence, could laugh freely; the visitor's,

like the child’s, innocence, frees the audience.

An audience may experience an irreverent laugh-release even if the author (as in the case of the two above "authors") is not aware of providing that. Freud, in Jokes and Their

Relation to the Unconscious cites a remarkable example of an

"author" being unconsciously irreverent. A pre-adolescant brother and sister enact a play for their family: A husband goes to sea to earn his fortune abroad, leaving his young wife at home for many years. Upon his arrival, he brags of his acquired treasures and exploits—but his wife has not been idle either in all those absent years. She proudly displays a large variety of dolls to the sailor; the bride has been producing numerous children while her husband was away! Of course, the adult audience, aware of the implications 152

about adultery and the sanctity of marriage so openly ignored

by the young players, laughed unrestrainedly. That which

seemed perfectly normal to the children's society was comically 2 irreverent to the adult society.

A playwright can be, in the same way, an unwitting

comic-irreverent author. Perspectives changes from society

to society. Restoration playwrights, products of their world,

may have never inferred that their audience venerated marriage.

Much of their treatment of marriage in comedy is harsh, al­

though these writers did not have the reverence for wedlock

to be irreverent. But a Nineteenth or Twentieth Century

audience, with a veneration for marriage, can experience a

relaxing of that tension of reverence while watching marriage

so lightly treated in The Country Wife.

A Twentieth Century American audience might laugh at Lysistrata because it associates modern women's movements with Aristophanes' dramatic action. When Brian Bedford, playing Arnolphe in Moliere's School for Wives, discoursed on the "place" of women at the service of men—something modern wives seldom understand—the New York audience met the speech with mixed cheers and boos. The spectators could see Moliere predominantly in terms of modern America. Both playwrights, the Greek and the French, address themselves to the auditor's perception of current events and attitudes, quite unwittingly.

Some societies may be too close to a field to gain 153

that comic safety, even with the playwright's charges. Th,e

Hdmeeorhirig which, despite all the arguments supporting its

comic value, may still seem uncomfortable in America, is

especially so in England. Pinter's comic technique, a delicate

veil which does little to hide the brutality in his play,

may be just enough for an America, but not enough to a

Londoner. The comic value of The Homecoming changes as one

crosses the ocean.

Fields which have only minimal significance to a

playwright may, then, provide seething comic irreverence in

a different society, and vice versa. So many of Aristophanes'

political fields, which probably amused his audience tre­

mendously, soar above a modern auditor's head. Even a satire

such as Macbird ceases to be funny as Lyndon Johnson ceases

to be an appropriate target for fun. Such scripts were

written to be comically irreverent, but lost their potency

as the changing social order removed from the audience's

reverent identity any awareness of Athenian politics or

President Johnson. A spectator ceases to laugh at what he

ceases to recognize.

Irreverence As No Attack

Satire implies an attack. With satire, playwrights accost people, principles, systems and ideas. Sometimes

such an assault may result in change, or at lea,st, hopes to result in change. When Shaw assails industrialism or the 154

organized Church, when Aristophanes assails his politicians,

the satire should make for improvement. Sometimes satire

may have no "noble" ambitions? it may be for the sake of pure

fun. Satire may certainly be comic irreverence, but it is

only a portion of irreverence. One must not make the mistake

of assuming that irreverence in comedy always attacks that with which it deals, either for fun or for change. It may

not attack at all; it may be non-destructive most of the

time.

To recall the non-destructive function of comic irreverence, one must return to some earlier observations.

Irreverence is an attitude toward another attitude; irreverence is often just another way of regarding something. Society, one’s parents or even oneself, impose universal attitudes upon one's psyche: "You will greet this person or idea with an attitude of veneration." Indeed, such a sentiment may be beneficial to the social order, but just or unjust, the consciousness nurtures rebellion toward that sentiment.

Irreverence is a transient "alternative" to veneration; the passing suggestion that the object of veneration has lost its dignity, is not what consciousness cranks it up to be.

But this momentary release gives one the toleration to continue venerating that object when the laugh is over.

Just as the adept lecturer uses an occasional joke, even in the most serious contexts, to "refresh" his audience’s minds, making them even more ready to digest the more somber elements 155

of the talk, so does comic irreverence permit that refresh­

ment in life. As Fiebleman suggests in in Praise of Comedy,

comedy gives man enough of a release to make those elements

one upholds in society tolerable. Comic irreverence does

not "tear down" in its ultimate effect. Like the husband

and wife who vent their frustrations with each other by

harmless joking, so comedy, even when it is irreverent, makes

man’s relationship with his society stronger.

Aristophanes may have born no grudge against marriage

(his grudge was against war); perhaps even the Greek con­

ception of marriage did not disburb him. Yet, Aristophanes’

comic imagination led to a conception of a society in

lysistrata where marriage played upon no pretenses, and his

depiction of the "irreverent" comic world should not be taken

as a crusade to change marriage. Aristophanes only confronted

marriage without the inhibitions with which people usually

confronted marriage.

The Helen Keller joke does not aim to abolish or

even criticize brave Helen Kellers; it merely releases tension wrought by constant veneration even of such marvels. Neither does Dyskolos, Phormio or Les Fourbrieres de Seapin seek to undermine the power of the paterfamilias in the real world.

Indeed, some fields of reverence cannot be abolished.

Can one end the reverence of death, that great mystery? One may deal with mortality philosophically and theologically; its emotional impact is quite another matter. "Playboy" 156

and The Front Page do not crusade for a change in philosoph­

ical attitudes toward death. Rather, the authors use death

as a sub-theme at which to poke irreverent fun, fun which

relaxes tension, even toward this most feared experience.

Comic irreverence may support people's attitudes by

making their attitudes more tolerable. Comic irreverence

may, but need not, rally to produce a change in the way people

regard certain phenomena. Meredith's appeal for laughter

as a corrective has not gone unheeded by the playwrights

in this study. Two examples of corrective comic irreverence

are Neil Simon's Plaza Suite and Sean O'Casey's J'uno and

the Paycoek. True, Simon draws laughter toward marriage in

general, but in so much of his laughter he is dead serious.

Men and women are having terrible difficulties, as any divorce statistics will show, in mid-Twentieth Century America.

Sean O'Casey makes even Irish people laugh by his comic description of that old alazon, Jack Boyle, but he also indicates an important shortcoming in Gaelic society. Fathers refuse to play the leader in their families; the Irish have a destructive preference for wit and show over confrontation with their more serious problems. Both playwrights find much to draw irreverent laughter in their subjects; both have corrective motives. But that is only an added benefit of comic irreverence.

Many Fields in Play

This study has tried to make it clear throughout that 157 categorizing The Playboy of the Western World, for instance,

under the danse macabre should not indicate that death is

the only, or even the principal field of that play. Playboy

may elicit irreverent laughter toward dying, but it may

well have been included among those plays irreverent toward

the paterfamilias or the lovers. Irreverence toward the

lares is an important part of the comedy in The Man Who Came

to Dinner, but the lares is by no means the only field-

American society and show-business, even insanity (Miss Stanley,

the axe murderess, kept in the attic) are also comic fields.

Ionesco’s Jacquesr perhaps even more conveniently, could

have been studied along with the lovers in irreverent comedy.

A comedy, to earn the distinction that those represented

in this study have, must have many facets; people tire of

one joke. The need for variation implies numerous fields.

Implications for Performance

So far this study, by necessity, has examined only

the "first dimension" of these plays, the actual playscripts.

As much as one might say about the text, one knows that it

is only a beginning, an implication of dramatic action; the

real "study" of a play can only take place in production.

What implications does this study draw for the play director?

One might divide those implications up into three major

areas: 1) interpretation of playscript; 2) communication with actors; and 3) awareness of audience. 158

Interpretation of Playscript

The first item on the production agenda involves

the director and the script. Alone now with that, he must

try and make some sense out of that jumble of dialogue and

stage directions. The director may confine himself to his

old assumptions about categorizing and genre; "irreverence"

may mean "satire," "burlesque" or "sacrilege" to him. This

study prescribes a more open approach to comic drama.

Irreverence is not an attack; it is not necessarily blatant.

A certain attitude may be affected, grossly or subtly. Any director trying to conceptualize a script should leave him­ self open to identify fields and charges and to recognize elements in a script which may appeal to a modern audience's sense of the irreverent.

A director examining a comedy in terms of comic irreverence may find that both the Phormio and The Homecoming contain the same comic vein. He will not confine himself to conceptualizing comedy as genteel or satiric; irreverence includes both and an abysmal middle-ground. He may even be able to make comic sense out of a "problem" comedy like

Measure for Measure ,ify.again, he leaves himself open enough not to be frightened away by the intrusion of a death theme in Shakespeare's play. Approaching the script with the confidence that even the seemingly grim provides an especially effective comic field will change the director's perspective. 159

"Problem" scenes, like Claudio's death-cell scene, no longer

seem to be out of the comic rhythm. An audience needs to

laugh at many things, more so those things it venerates

and/or fears. The director will be more aware of the alienat­

ing, or safety buffers, in the comic script: the charges.

He will be more aware, at the interpretation level of pro­

duction, of the playwright's craft.

Communication with Actors

For many of the same reasons that the openness of

the director's approach to comedy will affect his playscript

interpretation, so will it give him a better vehicle with which to communicate with his actors. The director may

explain why they should not be afraid of a laugh'at this moment, even though they seem to be at a serious moment in

the show. What seems serious to the actors, after long deliberation and rehearsal, may touch the reverent identity of the audience and seem ridiculous for a moment. The drunk wandering through the property in The Cherry Orchard may seem to be a sad comment on the fading society of M. Ranevskaya, but the actors should, not be surprised if an audience finds that moment funny. Chekhov may have been aware of that reaction when he wrote it. A director may be able to explain why, in terms of comic irreverence, that moment strikes up laughter.

Besides, a director with a clear concept of comic 160

charges and comic fields will be more adept at handling

comic business with his actors. Having, in the interpretive

stage, identified what charges the playwright uses in his

comedy, the director may suggest business better to his

players. For instance, in Twelfth Night the serenity and

self-indulgence of Olivia's court shatters, in one scene, when Sir Toby staggers drunkenly in and belches. The director may return to an explanation of the field (the court) being

irreverently charged (the belch) to set the timing and tone of that comic moment with the actors. It will help them understand "what happens" in many beats, what the audience should be perceiving, and how.

Awareness of Audience

After the director has explained the drama to himself and to his actors, the audience remains the final phase of communication. A director should be aware of the psy­ chology of consciousness. This will take much extra-theatrical study, but from a simple point of view he should know how to balance fields and charges. For instance, one theatre audience broke up in laughter when Olivia de Haviland collapsed near the end of Gone With the Wind. It was not meant to be a funny moment, but the director did not consider the attitudes of his future audiences when he showed person after person falling dead in the film. By the time Miss Haviland's turn came, dying became automatism; the audience's tolerance was 161

pushed across that fine line. Death became a comic field

and automatism became its comic charge.

An audience, a director should realize at this point, will laugh at any subject area presented in the proper way.

The field of love or death may elicit an audience's immediate reverent identity when introduced into a play', but that attitude may easily turn irreverent. Any subject is po­ tentially funny, especially "serious" subjects. In the same way, comic charges are no assurances for laughter.

They too must be placed against the proper fields. A pie fight may not be as funny in the context of a teenage beach party as at a formal society gathering. The latter contains more irreverent value; dignity and propriety are at issue, not adolescents having fun. If anything, the director should be motivated to probe mass consciousness and universal re­ sponses to become more and more aware of what his audience will be most likely to feel at various moments in the show.

Irreverence is only one among many attitudes that an audience may contain; the director's alertness to these attitudes is crucial to his communication.

Comic Irreverence in Non-Comic Drama

This study has dealt only with plays which are gen­ erally regarded as comedies. But comic irreverence has long been a part of tragedy and other serious drama. One uses the term "comic relief" to explain why a gravedigger with 162

a morbid sense of humor appears in Hamlet just when the prince

has to realize that Ophelia is dead. "Comic relief," many

will say, "makes the tragic weight more bearable." But all

comic relief is, by nature, comic irreverence. Any laugh

provoding agent momentarily tends to rob the surrounding

seriousness of its dignity. Only in tragedy, comic irreverence

has the ultimate effect of being a white spot which blackens

the pervading darkness even more by association. Shakespeare

uses comic irreverence notoriously.

In Act V of Antony and Cleopatra a bumpkin delivers

the Queen's instrument of death, a snake. The clown wants

to discourse on the snake; Cleopatra would rather get on

with her suicide. He only leaves after proudly wishing the

Queen good luck with his product. After Duncan's murder and

the subsequent guilt-rantings of the Thane, Scotch noblemen who might discover the crime pound on the courtyard door.

Only a drunken porter attends to the untimely admission, but not until, in all the urgency of the night, he is finished with much loud and silly conversation (Roman Polanski, in his film, justifies the porter's hesitancy by having the old gent urinate the while the lords banged on the portals— a vicious, but comic contrast). In Henry IV, Part I, just after Prince Hal slays Hotspur, Falstaff wounds the corpse in the leg and carries it about like a trophy to his own

"valor."

What is the function of these attitude mixings? 163

Some have stagecraft functions (the porter gives the Macbeths

time to wash their hands)? some increase tension by delaying

the climax (as in Cleopatra's scene). But, even more, these

"inappropriate" bits of comedy remind the auditor, at the

very moment of tragic elevation, that Man is man. They serve

the same function as the slave who ran behind the chariot

of the every victorious warrior in Rome. As the hero rode

through cheering crowds which wrapped him in laurel, that

slave would shout continually, "Remember that you are mortal!"

lest, even in this passing moment of grandeur, the hero

commit the hubris of forgetting that!

No matter what aspirations fill man's mind, he is

limited in his abilities. His soul may soar, but his humanity

confines him to the earth. Cleopatra's death is more business

for the snake-seller. It matters nothing to the porter who sits on the Scots' throne. The death of a noble opponent

is just another braggardly jest for Falstaff. These comic moments are charges themselves on the field of Man's self-

concept.

In modern serious drama, comedy seems unavoidable.

Chekhov cannot resist calling his works comedies. As dismal

as his worlds may be, he cannot resist laughing at them.

As serious as the plights of Willy Loman and Blanche DuBois may be, Miller and Williams find places during which to laugh at them. Modern drama sees much more of a mixed mode in life. Tearing down of the ideal is almost the rule. 164

Comedy is a many headed monster that still runs untamed. Even its result, laughter, cannot be satisfactorily explained. Why, many have asked, does an Aran Island mother feel free to laugh hysterically at the agonizing pain that a toothache causes her daughter? This dissertation might answer that the Aran Islander exists in such constant threat of finitude by sea or starvation that any "false threat" to life in the form of non-lethal pain presents an irreverent release of that awesome death anxiety. But that is a highly speculative justification. So much more study of conscious­ ness remains to be done. This study has only dealt with one aspect of the comic drama, irreverence, and that applied'to certain parts of a few selected scripts. Comedy, as Suzanne

Langer calls it, ". . . at once religious and ribald, knowing and defiant, social and freakishly individual... . ,pro­ vides a wealth of interpretations to baffle theorists for ages to come. 165

Footnotes to Chapter VI

Argument of Laughter (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1963), pp. 62-3. 2 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 183-4. 2 Feeling and Form (N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p. 331. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CONSULTED

Playscripts and Criticism

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Aristophanes. Four Comedies. Translated with an introduction by Dudley Fitts. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962.

Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1959.

Barrault, Jean-Louis. "Le Bourgeois Ou La Poesie Du Rire." Modern Drama 16 (September, 1973): 113-17.

Beckett, Samuel. All That Fall. New York: Gfcove Press, 1957.

Bemichou, Paul. "The Anti-Bourgeois." In Moliere: A Collect­ ion of Critical Essays, pp. 60-80. Edited by Jacques Guicharnaud. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964.

Bennet, Josephine. "Measure for Measure" As Royal Entertain­ ment. N.Y. and London: Columbia University Press, 1966.

Bernstock, Bernard. Sean O'Casey. Lewisburg: Buckwell University Press, 1970.

Burkman, Katherine H. The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1971.

Chambers, R. W. "The Jacobean Shakespeare and Measure for Measure." Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy. Oxford: University Press, 1937.

Chapman, Percy Addison. The Spirit of Moliere. Princeton: University Press, 1940.

Charlton, H. B. Shakespearian Comedy. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1938.

166 167

Cohn, Ruby. Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1962.

Donaldson, Ian. "Volpone: Quick and Dead." Essays in Cri- tisicm 21 (1971): 121-34.

Doubrovsky, J. S. "Ionesco and the Comic of Absurdity." In Ionesco : A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 11-29. Edited by Rosette C. Lamont. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958.

Ehrenberg, Victor. The People of Aristophanes. New York: Shocken Books, 1962.

Eustis, Alvin. Moliere as Ironic Contemplator. The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Company, 1973.

Falk, Eugene H. "Molière the Indignant Satirist: Le Bour­ geois Gentilhomme." Tulane Drama Review V (September, 1960): 73-88.

Fender, Stephen. Shakespeare : "A Midsummer Night's Dream." London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1968.

Fernandez, Ramon. Moliere: The Man Seen Through the Plays. Translated by Wilson Follet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958.

Gerstenberger, Donna. "Bonnie and Clyde and Christy Mahon: Playboys All." Modern Drama -XIV (September, 1971): 227-31.

Goldsmith, Oliver. She Stoops to Conquer. Edited with an introduction by G. A. F. M. Chatwin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Gome, A. W. and Sandback, F. H. Menander : A Commentary. Oxford: University Press, 1973.

Hamilton, Donna B. "The Comic Vision of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1968.

Hawkins, Harriet. "Folly, Incurable Disease, and Volpone." Studies in English Literature 8 (1968): 335-48.

Hofstad, Lois Valborg. "The Comic Use of Family Relation­ ships, 1760-1799." Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1967. 168

Hogan, Robert. The Experiments of Sean O’Casey. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960.

Hecht, Ben and MacArthur, Charles. The Front Page. In Sixteen Famous American Plays. Edited by Bennet Cerf and Van H. Cartmell. New York: Modern Library, 1941.

Ionesco, Eugene. Jacques or The Obedience. In Ionesco, Vol. I. Translated by Donald Watson. London : John Calder, 1961.

Johnson, Ben. Volpone. Edited by Jonas A. Barish. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1958.

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______. "The Suicide of Volpone." University of Toronto Quarterly 39 (1969/70): 19-32.

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McLaughlin, John Joseph. "Cruelty in the Comic: A Study of Aggression in Drama." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1966. 169

Menander. The Plays of Menander. Edited and translated by Lionel Casson. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

Molière. The Imaginary Invalid. Translated by Mildred Marmur. In The Genius of the French Theatre. Edited by Albert Bermel. New York: Mentor, 1961.

______. Moliere's Comedies:- Translated by F. C. Green. Two Volumes. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1961.

______. The Physician In Spite of Himself. Translated by Morris Bishop. In Fight Plays by Moliere. New York: Modern Library, 1957.

______. Tartuffe. Translated by Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963.

Moore, W. G. Moliere: A New Criticism. London: Clarendon Press, 1959.

______. "Molière: The Comic Paradox." Modern Language Review 68 (October, 1973): 771-75.

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Pinter, Harold. The Homecoming. New York: Grove Press, 1965 and 1966.

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Sale, Roger. "The Comic Mode of Measure for Measure." Shakespeare Quarterly 19 (April, 1968):55-61.

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Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by Willard H. Durham. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918.

Simon, Neil. Plaza Suite. New York: Samuel French, 1969. 170

Smith, Harry W. "Synge’s Playboy and the Proximity of Violence." Quarterly Journal of Speech LV (December, 1969) : 381-7.

Solomos, Alexis. The Living Aristophanes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974.

Spacks, Patricia M. "The Making of Playboy." Modern Drama TV (December 1961): 314-23.

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Synge, John Millington. The Playboy of the Western World. In The Complete Plays of John M. Synge. New York: Vintage Books, 1960.

Terence. Phormio and Other Plays. Translated by Betty Radice. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967.

Vannier, Jean. "A Theatre of Language." In Genet/Ionesco: The Theatre of the Double,pp. 142-48. Edited by Kelly Morris. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.

Walker, Ellen Louise. "The Varieties of Comedy: A Study of the Dramatic Comedies of Moliere, Jonson and Shakes­ peare." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1971.

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Related Dramatic Theory

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher with an introduction by Francis Fergusson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969.

Bentley, Eric. "The Psychology of Farce." In The Genius of the French Theatre, pp. 540-53. Edited by Albert Bermel. New York: Mentor, 1961.

Bergson, Henri and Meredith, George. Comedy • With an intro­ duction and appendix by Wylie Sypher. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956.

Bermel, Albert. "The Comic Agony." Communiculture I (Winter, 1975): 5-11.

Cook, Albert. The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean. New York : W W. Norton and Comapny, 1966.

Cooper, Lane. An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy. New York : Harcourt , Brace and Company, 1922.

Clark, Barret H. Editor. European Theories of t'he. Drama, Newly revised by Henry Popkin. New York: Crown Publishers, 1972.

Eberhart, Richard. "Tragedy as Limitation: Comedy as Control and Resolution." Tulane Drama Review 6 (June, 1962): 3-15.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1961.

Fiebleman, James G. In Praise of Comedy. New York: Horizon Press, 1970.

Frye, Northrop. "The Mythos of Spring." In Comedy: Meaning and Form. Edited by Robert W. Corrigan. Scranton, Pa.: Chandler, 1963.

..... "The Structure of Comedy." In Eight Great Comedies, pp. 461-69. New York: Mentor, 1958.

Gross, Roger. Understanding Playscripts. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1974.

Gurewitch, Morton. Comedy: The Irrational Vision. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975. 172

Hallman, Ralph J. Psychology of Literature- New York: Philosophical Library, 1961

Ionesco, Eugene. From "Notes and Counter-Notes." In Genet/Ionesco: A Theatre of the Double, PP- 119-41. Edited by Morris Kelly. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.

Langer, Susanne.K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.

Philosovhu in a New Keu- New York: Mentor Books, 1951.

Lautier, Paul. Editor. Theories of Comedy- Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1964.

McWhinney, Norman N. "Sex, Time and Laughter (A New Theory of the Comic)." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1968.

Monro, D. H. Argument of Laughter. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1963.

Olson, Elder. The Theory of Comedy- Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1968.

Raphael, D. D. The Paradox of Tragedy- Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1959.

Spencer, Theodore;.. Death and Flizabethan Tragedy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Styan, J. L. The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. Cambridge: The University Press, 1962.

______. The Elements of Drama. Cambridge: The University Press, 1960.

Swabey, Marie Collins. Comic Laughter: A Philosophical Essay. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961.

Tuttle, Preston Heath. "Comedy as a Reprojection of Child­ hood Experience: A Study of the Process by Which Emo­ tional Content Determines Dramatic Form." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1963.

Vos, Nelvin. The Drama of Comedy: Victim and Victor. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1966. 173

Background Material

Bertocci, Peter A. The Human Venture in Sex, Love and Marriage. New York: Association Press, 1965.

Bliss, Sylvia H. "The Origin of Laughter." American Journal of Psychology XXVI

Bossard, James H. S. and Boll, Eleanor S. Ritual in Family Living. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950.

Dietrick, B. C. Death, Fate and the Gods. London: Athlone Press, 1965.

Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Ellis, Havelock. More Essays of Love and Virtue. London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1931.

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