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Black and White and Red All Over: Bloody Performance in Theatre and Law

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Black and White and Red All Over: Bloody Performance in Theatre and Law 23 GARY WATT Black and White and Red All Over: Bloody Performance in Theatre and Law Legal ritual is for the most part performed in black and white – not only with black letter texts, but also by means of the black textiles that make up lawyers' gowns and suits. Only occasionally, but then most significantly, the law has allowed the bloody hue of red to seep through; most notably in the sanguine form of a red wax seal. There is nothing more significant than blood – it is the original sign – and the Latin for "small sign" gives us the word "seal." Small in size it may be, but in legal documentary contexts it is a concentration or distillation of the great sign ('signum') of blood. A red seal set on a legal form shows that the law's social performance has operative power. As the seal of red wax on documentary formality is, or was, the preeminent signifier of the ritual performance of a legal text, so in terms of textile, the bloody red of the judge's silk signals the office of judgment. It is not by accident that the lead prosecutor, on the fateful final day of the trial of Charles I, was, "for the first time, robed in red" (Wedgwood 1964, 154). The red of judgment contrasts with the black and white office of advocacy. I am here recalling a description of lawyers that Jonathan Swift placed in the mouth of Captain Lemuel Gulliver. Lawyers, he said, are "a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid" (Swift 1726, IV.5). Legal commentators have for the most part lacked the imagination to see that, in the context of courtroom ritual, the red textile of judgment is the red of blood; and that the blood is signaling the essentially violent nature of legal performance. Dramatists, in contrast, have seen the signal and have alerted their audiences to it down the centuries.1 The process by which law frames rules and documents and judgments to rectilinear lines can be termed a process of "performance," because it produces forms to which the fluid shapes of life must conform. Lawyers are the architects – the master technicians – of social structures. Legal frames set bounds to the ambit of human expression and the flow of life in something like the way that structural engineers limit the flow of liquid concrete to the shape of pre-fabricated "forms." Even in the world of theatre, the effect of a dramatic performance is in some sense violent in so far as it artificially frames life to the script, and the artefacts, and the architecture, of the dramatic scene. Blood serves as a shared sign of legal and theatrical performance because blood is expressed when life is compressed. To illustrate this claim, I will focus on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599) and two domestic tragedies by anonymous authors: A Warning to Fair Women (c.1590)2 and A Yorkshire Tragedy (performed 1605, published 1608).3 Each of these plays explores 1 For an earlier, French language, version of this article see Gary Watt, "Le symbole du sang dans la performance légale et théâtrale de l'Angleterre du début de l'époque modern," Littératures classiques 3/2010 (N°73), 311-323. (www.cairn.info/revue-litteratures-classiques1-2010-3-page-311.htm). 2 In terms of date, all that can be said for certain is that the play was written sometime between the mid 1580s and the date of 1599 which appears on the title page of the first edition (Canon 1975). 3 A Yorkshire Tragedy was probably written by Thomas Middleton (Cawley and Gaines 1986; Kirwan 2010). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 28.2 (September 2017): 23-33. Anglistik, Jahrgang 28 (2017), Ausgabe 2 © 2017 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 24 GARY WATT themes of legitimacy and illegitimacy, of natural inheritance and unnatural bloody murder, through the violent issue of blood. In the theatre of early modern England at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, the stain of blood, especially that which marks white flesh and white cloth, connects murderous deeds and executions to the legal "execution" of documen- tary "deeds." Bloodied innocent flesh and bloodied white clothes and bloodied white handkerchiefs are juxtaposed in text, and as tangible stage properties, to legal matters and to the physical materials of legal documentary formality, notably square-cut sheets of parchment (blanched animal flesh) sealed with blood-red wax. The sign of blood on white skin and white sheets performs violence and makes a memento of it; and, when it is juxtaposed with legal materials and legal matters, serves to signify the violence inherent in the demand that human life should conform to the formal con- straints of law. When early modern playwrights employed physical properties of red on white to signify the bloody nature of legal performance they were no doubt appropriating the symbolic power of medieval hagiography, which frequently employed the relic of a martyr's blood to recall the murder of the saints and the crucifixion of Christ himself. In this, they were following a practice that dominated medieval drama (Gatton 1991); but they were also reviving a motif, though they might not have been conscious of it, which the ancient Greek dramatists had employed in their plays. An example appears in Sophocles' Antigone. Creon, King of Thebes, had decreed that Polyneices (eldest Winter Journals son Oedipus' incestuous union with his mother Jocasta), having died in an assault upon his native Thebes, must be left unburied as a punishment for his supposed treachery. Antigone, a sister of Polyneices, insisted upon laying him to rest and was imprisoned at Creon's command when it emerged that she had secretlyPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) performed burial rites for her brother. In the following passage of text, Antigone expresses the conflict between the law of the State and the laws of life laid down in blood and for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution brotherhood and religious belief. She considers the perpetual and unalterable laws of life, death and blood to be more fundamental than the ephemeral and variable laws of the State and to be more fundamental, even, than laws governing the legal status of marriage: Had I had children or their father dead, I'd let them moulder. I should not have chosen In such a case to cross the State's decree. What is the law that lies behind these words? One husband gone, I might have found another, or a child from a new man in first child's place, but with my parents hid away in death, no brother, ever, could spring up for me. Such was the law by which I honoured you. (Wyckoff 1954, 900-920) Sophocles' Antigone (c.442 BC) might have been influenced by the conclusion of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes (467 BC). Aeschylus depicts Antigone's dilemma, which is the classic conflict between the fixed and enduring law of familial blood and the changeable law of the State, as a conflict between the State and the blood of the whole race. The chorus having been split in two by the dilemma, one half says: Let the State do, or not do, as it will. We here will follow Polyneices to his Grave, And take Part in his burial. This sorrow belongs to the whole race of Cadmus; Anglistik, Jahrgang 28 (2017), Ausgabe 2 © 2017 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER: BLOODY PERFORMANCE IN THEATRE AND LAW 25 And what a State upholds as just Changes with the changing of time. (Vellacott 1961, 1051-1078) In Sophocles' play, the climax of the conflict is the imprisonment of Antigone, her death by hanging in her cell and the death of her lover Haemon, Creon's son. Over- come with grief when he discovers Antigone's corpse and impassioned with rage at his father when he arrives at her dungeon grave, Haemon inadvertently kills himself upon his own sword. The line that sets the seal on the tragic scene is delivered by a messenger to Haemon's mother Eurydice. He reports the death of Haemon (the "man of blood") in appropriately bloody terms. We are told that in his final embrace with Antigone, "he gasped out blood, red blood on her white cheek" (1238-1239). The symbolism of the red on white is multi-layered. It performs a ritual remembrance of death; of the sort that achieves pre-eminence in the white host and red wine of the Christian communion rite.4 This memorial aspect is attested to elsewhere in Greek drama, for example in Euripides' The Suppliant Women (422/3 BC). Euripides' play records how the Argive invaders of Thebes, allies of Polyneices, had been denied burial by Creon who kept custody of their corpses. When the mothers of the slain went to the Temple of Demeter to make supplication for her aid, the attendants to the goddess urged them to "Bloody the white fingernail along the cheek, and stain the skin!" for "To mourn the dead brings honour to those who live" (Jones 1974, 139). The red on white is also symbolic of loss of innocence. The authors of the article "What Is Antigone Wearing?" conclude that Antigone's white garb is her wedding dress: But she does not shed her blood in the ensuing gamos of a bridal bed, not even in the dutiful lacerations of her cheeks in mourning for her brother at the grave, that promise renewal of life.
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