Irony In The Drama Irony in the Drama: An Essay on Impersonation, Shock, and Catharsis. Contributors: Robert Boies Sharpe - author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1975 IRONY IN THE DRAMA An Essay on Impersonation, Shock and Catharsis

By ROBERT BOIES SHARPE

GREENWOOD PRESS, PUBLISHERS WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Sharpe, Robert Boies, 1897Irony in the drama.

Reprint of the ed. published by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

1. English drama -- History and criticism. 2. Irony in literature. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Criticism and interpretation. 4. American drama -- 20th century -- History and criticism. 5. Catharsis. I. Title. [ PR635.I7S5 1974 ] 822'.009 74-8121 ISBN 0-8371-7552-6

Copyright, 1959, by The University of North Carolina Press

Originally published in 1959 by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

Reprinted with the permission of The University of North Carolina Press

Reprinted in 1975 by Greenwood Press, a division of Williamhouse-Regency Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-8121

ISBN 0-8371-7552-6

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS Introduction vii I. What Is a Drama? 3 II. Irony and Impersonation 18 III. The Levels of Impersonation 30 IV. Forms of Irony in Drama 42 V. William Shakespeare, Ironist 52 VI. The Cathartic Process, Shock, and Classical Tragedy 82 VII. The Cathartic Process from the Middle Ages to the Present 104 VIII. A Theory of Comic Shock 121 1 Irony In The Drama IX. Comic Shock and Comic Catharsis in Practice 135 answers, or at least right enough to be useful ones. Mr. Purdom's is a very welcome X. Modern Trends in Comedy 153 statement of the need for a working solution of a problem which has been wrongly considered XI. Modern Trends in Tragedy 180 academic. XII. Conclusion 204 Index 217 Drama is impersonation. This is our answer, in a nutshell. Any play's being is not a stasis but a functioning. If we come out of this investigation with this finding, that the heart of drama is -v- impersonation -- the actor's playing of a role -- this surely is a beating heart, not a dead one. Hence, drama is an especially active form of artistic imitation. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the University Research Council for generous aid in the publication of this book, and to the Ford Foundation for a grant under its program for In the minds of playwright, director, actor, and audience (all must co-operate to make a assisting American university presses in the publication of works in the humanities and the play), the drama is perceived by the senses and felt in the emotions as art, that is, as reality social sciences. or "nature" heightened for beauty by human means. This is a mixed, complicated, even somewhat sophisticated perceptive state or mood. It is a mood which we call ironic, because of its simultaneous perception of the two concepts art and nature as at the same time R. B. S. contradictory and harmonious, untrue and true. In the ironic mood one is conscious of contradictions but is above being frustrated by them; rather, one includes them in a single -vi- perception of living beauty.

Working with these two terms, impersonation and irony, singly or in combination, we may INTRODUCTION hope to discover the artistic reasonableness of such phenomena of the world's drama as dramatic irony, "convoluted" impersonation, and the employment of the horrible and the shocking, not only in melodrama, satire, and low comedy but in the highest, most dignified What is drama? What, essentially, is a play? tragedy, and to find a reasonable relation between some or all of these phenomena and the mysterious psychological process Aristotle called dramatic catharsis. And having discovered Critics are unpopularly supposed by the criticized to bring up this question on only two sorts reasonableness in artistic principles fundamental to the drama, of occasions: either when they wish to destroy some hopeful creative enterprise in the theater by the conclusion that it is "not a play," or when they retire into their ivory towers for a -viii- season of decadently useless critical metaphysics and semantics.

we may achieve a dearer and more useful vision of their practicability for dramatic artists. Yet a worker of distinction in the British theater recently bade the critics rouse themselves and do their duty by the drama -- not only to ask this question again, but this time to answer it for the practical benefit of the stage: The actor's form of impersonation (not a swindling in the street but a playing on the stage) is inherently ironic, as we see by its paralleling the verbal or "straight" form of irony we often call sarcasm. Ironic praise is not meant to deceive or to flatter, but to be seen through and to . . . in my experience the shortage of good plays is due not so much to the lack of theatrical gain its abrasive effect by the artistic contradiction of word by meaning; similarly, the actor technique, nor to the absence of ideas or themes, but to insufficient knowledge of what a play does not wish us to believe that he is Hamlet, but to admire his artistic imitation of Hamlet. essentially is. Every writer knows that a play is a highly concentrated work designed for The sarcastic man's irony is not a lie; the actor's impersonation is not a fraud. severely restricted conditions, and he knows too that the work must contain characters, tension, and conflict, but that is all. The would-be dramatist gets no further help from the critics. When Mr. Eliot advises writers of poetic plays that poetic drama must be dramatic It will be shown that there are levels of impersonation to be distinguished, ranging from even at the expense of poetry, he does not say what "dramatic" is, and his own practice does "straight" roles to roles containing disguises and other pretenses which demand not indicate that he knows. . . . Of the 22 straight plays at present running in London impersonation convoluted within impersonation. And it will appear that the values of these (excluding Shakespeare) I doubt if there are half a dozen that show any sign of it. I suggest levels for dramatic purposes can be assessed by valuing the ironies an actor playing on them that this accounts for the poverty of our drama; and for this ignorance should not the critics employs and appeals to. For irony, at least as it permeates the art of drama, is two things: (I) of drama be held responsible? a view of life, a mood, a psychological state (brief or sustained), which in the theater is communicated from playwright, by way of director and actor, to audience; and (2) the artistic means to the communication of that mood of irony, the techniques used by playwright, Thus says Mr. C. B. Purdorn in The Times Literary Supplement for September 5, 1952. He director, and actor to put the audience into that psychological state. suggests, apparently,

H. M. Chevalier The Ironic Temper: Anatole France and His Time ( 1932) contains the best -vii- available bibliography of critical works dealing with irony, although several important books have come out since: G. C. Sedgewick Of Irony, Especially in Drama ( University of Toronto that he has some of the answers, though I do not know what they may be. We believe that lectures, 1934, published in book form in 1949); David Worcester The Art of Satire ( 1940), some answers can be offered too, in the present essay, much of which was already written with its two chapters on irony, "The Ally of Comedy" and "The Ally of Tragedy"; and Alan R. and laid aside to mellow when his letter appeared. I hope that they may prove to be the right Thompson's The Anatomy of Drama ( 2nd ed., 1946), containing conclusions about irony which, as the author says, "are developed at length" 2 Irony In The Drama -ix- I. I. Ironies of artistic device, or technical ironies A. A. Verbal irony, including sarcasm, B. B. Dramatic (or situational) irony in The Dry Mock: A Study of Irony in Drama, 1948. All these books contain useful definitions C. C. "Ismic" ironies, such as expressionism and symbolism. of such types of irony as verbal or direct irony, irony of fate or events, irony of character or II. II. Ironies of philosophical theme, or cosmic ironies pretense, dramatic irony, and Socratic irony. Perhaps those given by Worcester and A. R. A. A. Irony of fate Thompson are the most complete. B. B. Man as ironic paradox C. C. Recoiling or "boomerang" irony My own justification for writing in a field apparently covered by so many good recent books is D. D. Circular or recurring irony threefold: I am especially interested in the matter of impersonation, its relation to drama in III. III. Ironies of psychological process, or subconscious ironies its essence on the one hand and to irony on the other. I hope to develop critical concepts A. A. Minor "steps to catharsis," such as hypnosis and hybris which apply impartially to all Western drama, whereas these books I have listed all seem to me to be specialized in their applications. And, as is perfectly normal in a critic, I do not -xi- exactly agree with any one of these other critics, much as I admire and appropriate from them all. B. Shock -- the stirring up of suppressed emotions for more complete discharge in catharsis It may be helpful to others, as well as fair dealing on my own part, if I specify the way in C. Catharsis -- the ironic purgation of repressed pity and fear through an "imitation" of which I consider each of these critics of irony to have slanted his book. J. A. K. Thomson pity and fear Irony ( 1926) deals mainly with Greek tragedy, especially that written by Sophocles. D. Synthesis -- the ironic harmonizing of "death and victory" at the end of a tragedy Chevalier, of course, confines himself rather strictly to the highly individualistic Anatole France and his non-dramatic satirical ironies. Professor Sedgewick's interest is in tragedy, and for illustrative material to discuss he centers on the Clytemnestra plays of the three great In all artistic appreciation -- whatever the particular art concerned -- there is irony, because Greek tragedians and on Othello. David Worcester, as his title indicates, is discussing satire of the nature-art contradiction-synthesis which we have mentioned. Art itself might be and subordinating irony to it. Alan Thompson points his discussion toward the admiring defined as an honest imitation of nature, intended not to deceive but to be ironically illumination of the spirit of Henrik Ibsen, whom he considers the supreme dramatic ironist of perceived. But, I believe, drama is of all the arts the most ironic, the most dependent upon all time: ironical effects and the most capable of producing them, inherently through the fact that to all plays, impersonation adds an extra dimension of irony. A play is first a work of literary art, therefore an imitation of life intended for ironic appreciation; then when acted, either in the Of all the great dramatists, we have found not Sophocles but Euripides and Ibsen to be the imagination or in the theater, it gains this new capacity for ironic devices and achievements chief ironists. And we shall hardly be wrong if we say that not even Euripides used irony as through the players' ironic impersonations of the author's characters. Ibsen did -with such power and depth, such subtlety and complexity, such relentless soul- searching. . . . Irony [is] the dominant quality of his drama. Although impersonation seems to be the only completely distinctive trait of drama, playwrights who know their art and craft show their consciousness of the drama's particularly -x- close affinity to irony by stressing in their plays the constant and varied use of four types or sub-types of irony: verbal or "straight" irony and sarcasm, irony of fate (and other cosmic or He not only employs the familiar forms of dramatic irony with great power, but he has philosophical ironies), dramatic irony, and ironic shock. All four of these may be found in non- devised a new form of irony -- one which so far as I know is unique in him, -- the irony which dramatic fiction, but verbal irony can be delivered best by an actor on stage, irony of fate uses a complete dramatic action to contrast the "surface likeness" and the hidden truth seems inseparable from our idea of tragedy, just as ironic shock is a necessary part of the "Ibsenian irony." cathartic process, and dramatic irony (the setting up and exploiting of situations where the audience knows more than some of the stage characters) is or should be the very staple of good plays of every genre. Now, I find myself unable to go quite as far as Dr. Thompson in admiration of Ibsen; and I go farther -- perhaps as far as J. A. K. Thomson, the admirer of Sophocles -- in my estimate of the emotional range of irony. The table of contents of Alan Thompson The Dry Mock reveals -xii- the carefully reasoned limitations he draws around irony: Stimulated by Mr. Purdom's suggestion that the modern playwright falls short of drama Part One: Emotional Discord: The Nature of Irony. Part Two: Self-Mockery: "Romantic Irony." because he does not know what, essentially, the dramatic is, I have found and shall present Part Three: Painful Laughter: Comic Irony. Part Four: Mockery of Ideals: Tragic Irony. evidence that the modern dramatist's reaction against the stale devices of the "well-made' Conclusion: The Limitations of Irony. play has caused him to employ dramatic irony somewhat too little and not always with sufficient skill. It is my own feeling that, useful as these critical limitations are for some purposes, irony in drama can and does reach beyond the discord, the mockery, the pain, of life's contradictions And as for ironic shock, the drama's highest achievement in the communication of emotion is into a loftier harmony, a vision of two warring truths reconciled by a divine third, a high irony the ironic psychological state Aristotle called catharsis. One reaches it, he says, through the of compassion.At this point I should like to suggest my own Outline of Ironies. It is partly paradoxical method of purging, through pity and terror, these and similar emotions. Is it not adapted from others, and it is not complete; but it brings together in an orderly scheme the ironical to purge pity by means of pity, terror by means of terror? And the purged or purified chief ironies I intend to discuss: state in which one is left at the end of a great tragedy is an ironic mood in which good and

3 Irony In The Drama evil, triumph and disaster, are somehow balanced, harmonized, and transcended. In a play which aims at catharsis -- and I do not think this aim is entirely confined to tragedy -- the IRONY IN THE DRAMA catharsis must be worked toward through a series of steps themselves more or less clearly ironic in nature. Of these the most commonly employed (it is as approximately universal as dramatic irony) is shock -ironic in comedy in its juxtaposition of bawdry and romantic -1- refinement, of pain and laughter; ironic in tragedy in its combining grotesque abasement with superb dignity, horrors with exaltations. I have rather arbitrarily designated nine Steps to Catharsis -- ironic steps up which impersonation (itself ironic) conveys the drama's beholder Chapter I ? to the ironic purification. Shock is one of these steps. WHAT IS A DRAMA In this introduction there has been no space for illustrations; but in the pages that follow I have ranged widely over the Western world's drama, exemplifying the best playwrights' use in In approaching this fundamental problem, what is a drama, we are not going to talk about the many times, places, and forms, of the drama's unique aptitude for artistic communication unities, about acts and scenes, about stage-directions, "business," soliloquies and asides, or through irony coupled with impersonation. In Chapter 5, "William Shakespeare, Ironist," my even about comedy and tragedy. Our concern in this chapter is simply with the essential approach through the theater's own aspects and uses of nature, the definition, of this artform we call drama.

-xiii- To accomplish this, let us try to define drama in its strict sense, the sense in which "a drama" is synonymous with "a play"; for certainly one is constantly hearing these two expressions interchangeably used. The term drama is, to be sure, sometimes felt to be more inclusive, in irony works out into a systematic demonstration of the ways a great man of the theater's some vague fashion, than the term play. I have made an effort to work out such a distinction apprehensions and employments of the many ironies available were interwoven in his art to but have not found it convenient or even feasible to state one and carry it out logically and shape his great career. In this chapter, too, I find that some of the recent synthesizing clearly. With this apology, therefore, I warn the reader to expect the words drama and play to Shakespeare critics -- such men as Heilman, Traversi, G. W. Knight, Bethell -- have centered be employed interchangeably. I shall, however, draw a distinction between things which are particularly on the harmonized complexities of Shakespeare's last plays, especially The strictly dramas (or plays) and those which may only loosely be called dramatic. Tempest and The Winter's Tale, because here they see in Shakespeare's own work his crowning syntheses of themes and images. Thus I can fit them into my own observed pattern of Shakespeare's growth through ironies up to the harmonized ironies of his last plays, with Much of what I shall say is based upon my belief that the moods of actor and audience are Bethell's synthesis through religious themes fitting, perhaps, most closely with my own mixed rather than single or simple, and may therefore be thought of as ironic, and that conclusions. dramatic writing must take these mixed actions and reactions in the theater into account to be successful, and may in special cases make use of them to express the most superb ironies possible to art, those of poetic tragedy. I have examples, then, from the greatest; but my wide scope of choice renders them at best all too scattered and brief. Even so, may they serve to convince the reader that in the ironic art of impersonation we have identified the unique quality which differentiates drama as an -3- art and which, when properly emphasized, inspires and shapes the finest examples of that art. For it seems to me that a more complete understanding of irony should be of help to playwrights, actors, and directors as well as to critics, audiences, and readers, since a great I believe that impersonation, the actor's ostensibly pretending to be a character, is at the part of this enlarged understanding of irony is the concept of the uniqueness of drama as the very heart of the dramatic mystery. I believe too that we can learn something very important ironic art-form. Drama is by no means merely fiction written as dialogue, but by reason of its about impersonation from the nature and frequency of certain special devices employed by power to demonstrate ironies by means of impersonation and situation it is set apart as the dramatists, apparently to heighten the sense of play-acting in both their actors and their art to be acted. The concept of drama as the ironic imitation of life should, I hope, bring to audiences. We constantly see the actor, impersonating a character, proceed to complicate the readers of this essay, and through them to audiences of fine plays well played, a deeper theatrical situation by taking on a second impersonation, a different character which the understanding, too, of the ironic art of living. original character temporarily pretends to be. This phenomenon occurs, for instance, very clearly in the "play within a play" and in disguising; but it happens also in hypocrisies of various sorts and in mimicries. A couple of examples may be helpful. To me, then, and I trust to the reader, these ideas about irony make this book essential to an understanding of the drama in stage production and thence to hearing more clearly and Let us imagine ourselves, for a few moments, at a performance of William Shakespeare's Richard III. Not many lines before, Richard of Gloucester and his accomplice Buckingham -xiv- have been vaunting their skill at an art which, as amateurs, they find extremely useful: loving more richly the ironic harmonies of the Muse herself. For if the ancients actually named Glou. Come, cousin, canst thou quake and change thy colour, Murder thy breath in middle of no Muse of Irony, surely twenty-five hundred years of immortal ironies have made it appear a word, And then again begin, and stop again, As if thou wert distraught and mad with terror? necessary that one now be invented and appointed to preside over the theater of our ironic Buck. Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian, Speak and look back, and pry on every side, century. Tremble and start at wagging of a straw, Intending deep suspicion. Ghastly looks Are at my service, like enforced smiles; And both are ready in their offices At any time to grace my stratagems. -xv-

4 Irony In The Drama Now we are in Baynard's Castle; and Buckingham, first as director and then as fellow-actor, the flood-gates of her eyes. Host. O Jesu, he doth it as like one of these harlotry players as stages Richard's appearance before the Mayor and Citizens "aloft, between two Bishops" to ever I see! trick them by his pretended pious, timid reluctance into urging him to accept the crown. We now have not only an audience, but an ironically critical comment on actors' old-fashioned -4- appeals "in King Cambyses' vein" to vulgar audiences' naïve delight in play-acting, even to marvelling at the actor's ability to keep his face straight during his preposterous impersonations. Buck. The Mayor is near at hand. Intend some fear; Be not you spoke to but by mighty suit; And look you get a prayer-book in your hand And stand between two churchmen, good my lord, -For on that ground I'll make a holy descant -And be not easily won to our request. Play Fal. Peace, good pint-pot; peace, good tickle-brain. Harry, I do not only marvel where thou the maid's part, still answer nay and take it. spendest thy time, but also how thou art

The sense of play-acting is reinforced by the ironies in Richard's words of acquiescence which -6- crown the successful playing of this scene within a scene: accompanied; for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet [Glou.] Cousin of Buckingham, and sage, grave men, Since you will buckle Fortune on my youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears. That thou art my son, I have partly thy back To bear the burden whe'er I will or no, I must have patience to endure the load. But if mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villanous trick of thine eye and a foolish black scandal or foul-fac't reproach Attend the sequel of your imposition, Your mere hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the enforcement shall acquittance me From all the impure blots and stains thereof; For God doth point; why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a know, and you may partly see, How far I am from the desire of this! micher and eat blackberries? a question not to be asked. Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses? a question to be asked. There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch, as ancient For a somewhat parallel and similarly revealing set of enriched impersonations, we may shift writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou keepest; for, Harry, now I do not our minds' eyes to the great tavern scene in the first part of Henry IV. After putting on his speak to thee in drink but in tears; not in pleasure but in passion, not in words only but in unliterary, almost mindless scene of arranged farce with Poins and the Drawer, in which he woes also; and yet there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I plays himself "straight," Prince Hal has proposed that he and Falstaff amuse themselves by know not his name. playing the character roles of Hotspur and Lady Percy, respectively. This project, although not carried into action, prepares the audience for what follows later. After the "men in buckram" interlude (itself foreseen and in a sense staged, with Falstaff doing himself straight but with To the deep enrichment of the impersonation, the character Falstaff distorts his assumed outrageous exaggeration), Hal plays himself as a "stooge" on the carpet before Falstaff in the character of King Henry the Fourth into that of a feebly euphuistic rhetorician, while making character part of his father, the King; then in a mixture of straight and character acting, Hal, his deep genuine concern about his son's conduct stray helplessly into comic doubts of Hal's dissatisfied with Falstaff's royal manner, deposes him, and they mother's virtue and uncharacteristic ignorance of the name of his chief misleader. The Prince, king-to-be in his imagination, can no longer bear this belittling of royalty when in his next speech Falstaff as his "father" addresses him as "thou naughty varlet." -5-

Hal. What manner of man, an it like your majesty? Fal. A goodly portly man, i'faith, and a exchange roles, the whole process obviously and prophetically inflaming Hal's imagination of corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his himself as king-to-be. age some fifty, or, by'r lady, inclining to three-score; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff. If that man shall be lewdly given, he deceiveth me, for, Harry, I see virtue in his Falstaff. Well, thou wilt be horribly chid tomorrow when thou comest to thy father. If thou looks. If then the tree may be known by the fruit, as the fruit by the tree, then, peremptorily love me, practise an answer. Hal. Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the I speak it, there is virtue in that Falstaff; him keep with, the rest banish. And tell me now, particulars of my life. Fal. Shall I? Content. This chair shall be my state, this dagger my thou naughty varlet, tell me, where hast thou been this month? Hal. Dost thou speak like a sceptre, and this cushion my crown. Hal. Thy state is taken for a join'd stool, thy golden king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father. Fal. Depose me? If thou dost it half so sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown! gravely, so majestically, both

Here the stage is being set and costumes and roles assumed for an impersonation within an -7- impersonation. Also, Prince Hal calls attention to the grotesque makeshifts of the stage, the joint-stool throne and the leaden dagger. Shakespeare appears to assign to such things an in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker or a poulter's hare. Hal. artistic value; we should call it an ironic value. Well, here I am set. Fal. And here I stand. Judge, my masters.

Fal. Well, an the fire of grace be not quite out of thee, now shalt thou be moved. Give me a Notice that Mistress Quickly and the rest of the riff-raff "audience" now are made judges of cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I have wept; for I must speak these rival impersonations as Falstaff and the Prince reverse their redoubled roles. in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses' vein. Hal. Well, here is my leg. Fal. And here is my speech. Stand aside, nobility. Hostess [Mistress Quickly]. O Jesu, this is excellent sport, i'faith! Fal. Weep not, sweet queen, for trickling tears are vain. Host. O the father, how he holds his countenance! Fal. For God's sake lords, convey my tristful queen; For tears do stop 5 Irony In The Drama Hal. Now, Harry, whence come you? Fal. My noble lord, from Eastcheap. Hal. The complaints I it, that they wish us to be very conscious that they are imitating life artistically, that they are hear of thee are grievous. Fal. 'Sblood, my lord, they are false. -- Nay, I'll tickle ye for a "playing." Sometimes they call attention to this fact quite blatantly, as when the boy- young prince, i'faith. impersonator of Cleopatra demurs at the prospect of seeing

Falstaff's "aside" -- his saying, "Nay, I'll tickle ye for a young prince," to Prince Hal -- is a Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I'the posture of a whore; peculiar one, aside from his assumed character of Prince Hal before the King. The Prince replies with a pleasantly vigorous distortion of his father's powers of invective as seen against or when Webster has his actors say, at the sanguinary conclusion of The Duchess of Malfi, Mortimer -- ironically aimed against the character Falstaff who stands before him but whom Falstaff the impersonator of Prince Hal must defend as absent. Adding to the fun we have his willingness to praise himself highly in absentia. But Hal is too rapt in his own dream of Malateste. Thou wretched thing of blood, How came Antonio by his death? Bosola. In a mist; I kingship to be swayed even by such sincere eloquence. know not how. Such a mistake as I have often seen In a play.

Hal. Swearest thou, ungracious boy? Henceforth ne'er look on me. Thou art violently carried Actors have a pride in their art; and Shakespeare wrote his plays for both himself and his away from grace. There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man fellow-actors to perform, for the anticipated rewards of adequate acting in fine parts: artistic is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that boltinghutch of pleasure, fame, and money. In his preface to The Six of Calais G. B. Shaw says, "Now a beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack; that stuff'd cloak-bag playwright's direct business is simply to provide the theatre with a play." The dramatist has, of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that he says, one especially important function: "As I write my plays it is continually in my mind grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and very much to my taste. This function is to provide an exhibition of the art of acting." And and drink it? wherein neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning, but the American Sidney Howard, introducing his Lucky Sam McCarver, put it even more boldly: in craft? wherein crafty, but in villainy? wherein villanous, but in all things? wherein worthy, "The drama does not spring from a literary impulse, but from a love of the brave, ephemeral, but in nothing? Fal. I would your Grace would take me with you. Whom means your Grace? beautiful art of acting." Bold as it seems, this statement is certainly correct historically; for the word literary to mean something written merely for silent reading is a recent, artificial development. Formerly, some sort of performance of a visible and audible nature was always -8- in a writer's mind.

Hal. That villanous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan. Fal. We have heard Hardin Craig assert that drama is three things: impersonation, action, and My lord, the man I know, Hal. I know thou dost. Fal. But to say I know more harm in him dialogue. This is another way of saying that drama is acting, for impersonation is histori- than in myself, were to say more than I know. That he is old, the more the pity, his white hairs do witness it; but that he is, saving your reverence, a whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many -10- an old host that I know is damn'd. If to be fat is to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, cally the first thing which differentiates drama from the generally dramatic; it is what marks being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish not him thy the Quem Quaeritis Easter trope of about 900 A.D. as the first drama to appear in the Harry's company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world. Hal. I do. I will. Christian liturgy. If we accept the late J. Q. Adams reasonable interpretation of the Latin text (in his Chief PreShakespearean Dramas), impersonation emerges even there in company with both dialogue and action, and on an elevated place before an audience; hence, acting makes The reader or audience may observe that the amateur actors, Falstaff and Prince Hal, are its first entrance, if not full-blown, at least complete in its three elements. seldom for long wholly submerged in any impersonation; Falstaff, especially, shows dolphin- like his own plump back above the waves of his pseudo-princely eloquence. I have chosen these scenes, rather than the somewhat similar enhancements of the play-acting magic in The relationship between these three elements of acting, impersonation, action, and dialogue, characters like Rosalind and Iago, because Shakespeare, as we see, has called attention to needs to be examined a little further. Is any one more important than the others? For in a them especially by putting them up as if on stages before an audience and by giving them a maimed sort of way each can, admittedly, stand alone. group quality. We notice an enriching of the sense of dramatic impersonation, a stepping up to impersonation within impersonation. Why should a dramatist do this? Is it primarily to Impersonation alone gives us tableau, a dramatic picture which suggests arrested action (and imitate the hypocrisies, pretenses, impersonations of real life? Or is it, rather, mainly to often arrested dialogue also). double our sense of the theatrical spell, our sense of voluntary submission to an artistic illusion? Dialogue can exist alone in various literary forms; but as soon as action is suggested we have at least a dramatic form, though not a form of drama -- a "dramatic scene" in a novel by There should be nothing very strange to us in the conception that the dramatist and his Thackeray or Henry James, a "dramatic monologue" like one of Browning's. In a novel, for actors have no intent to deceive the audience into thinking they are giving real life; instead, instance, impersonation may enter the dramatic picture when a character makes pretense, we have constant evidence, if we care to watch for with or without material disguise, of being someone or something else than he actually is. It seems that it is not until we have added an imaginative feeling of stage performance that we -9- recognize the artistic form we call closet drama, practically indistinguishable from the drama itself.

6 Irony In The Drama Action, alone or with dialogue, without impersonation, is life itself, not drama. With Yet in spite of exceptions we ought to bar out of our definition these off-stage dramas of real impersonation but without dialogue, action may give us pantomime, a form of drama in which life. At the other extreme of the series -- social life, the stage, and the study, with the stage, the third element, dialogue, is strongly suggested. of course, occupying the central position in our present interest -- we should consider "closet drama," written, according to the usual definition, in the dramatic art-form but with no expectation of actual stage production. Does its existence invalidate our proposed definition, We judge, then, that all three elements are required to provide complete acting and therefore "A drama is a piece for stage acting"? I think not; nor am I sure that there is such a thing as complete drama; for no one of them can really stand alone without ceasing to be in the fullest closet drama, as so defined. This is my chief reason for refusing to distinguish drama from sense acting, while all three go together to make the play. Practically all so-called closet dramas have been written by men who vigorously imagined them as staged, and they have been kept from popular production largely by their -11- authors' lack of actual stage experience and therefore of intimate, practical knowledge of stage requirements. This seems to be true of the dramas of Spenser, Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, and also of Milton Samson Agonistes and Shelley The Cenci, which have had complete "beautiful art." No two are sufficient; for impersonation plus action equals artistically successful private productions. I am not even certain that Shelley Prometheus pantomime, impersonation plus dialogue equals static drama, and dialogue plus action equals Unbound is an absolute exception to the general assertion that all dramas are plays if they one of the commonest aspects of everyday life. are written in an imaginative form

But impersonation does, from the time of the early liturgical dramas, have a kind of historical -13- primacy over the other two elements, and this may on examination prove to represent a functional primacy also. We see it appear in the Easter trope as something of a catalyst, turning a combination of the others, action and dialogue, which had long existed both singly calling for impersonation by actors on a stage, however difficult the practical obstacles in the and together in the church services, into drama: "Out of three sounds we make, not a fourth way of production may be. We should remember what challenges to production have been sound, but a Star." offered -- and triumphantly met -- in plays ranging all the way from Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, and The Tempest to Eugene O'Neill Marco Millions and The Great God Brown. Closet drama, then, I believe, comes under our definition. A closet We may now observe that if we take impersonation and dialogue and add action, or if we take drama is a play. impersonation and action and add dialogue, the results are considerably less striking. Impersonation and dialogue provide a static moment of drama (sadly, in modern practice often far more than a moment), talkative but lacking "business"; adding action, however, This seems to be the place to take up a question that is likely to be raised: is the business of although an improvement, brings about no fundamental change. Impersonation and action the stage entirely within the same circle as the art-form we call drama, or should these areas provide an active, pantomimic moment of drama, too busy for talk; adding dialogue is be represented as two intersecting circles? Or, rather, since we have seen that the drama enriching from a literary standpoint but, again, is no fundamental change. exists entirely as stage acting, actual or imaginary, and may be thus defined, should we draw an inner circle of drama within a larger circle of stage performance? My belief is that this last figure is the correct one, and that reflection will show that all those aspects of "show Of the three, therefore, impersonation is the chief, the essential, the catalyst; because adding business" which are outside the area of drama as we have defined it -- kicking choruses, impersonation to dialogue and action changes living into acting, -- or changes life, which is trained seals, marionettes, animated cartoons, and so on -- lie also outside the area of not an art-form, into drama, which is. impersonation. Hence impersonation (or the complex of impersonation-dialogue-action) again reveals its importance in marking off the area strictly called drama, in life, in literature, and Recognizing that acting is based primarily on impersonation, but needs both dialogue and on the air, stage, and screen. action for completeness, may we now tentatively define drama as "a piece for acting"? Is this enough, or should we add the word stage to say, "A drama is a piece for stage acting"? I With our definition now firmly in hand, let us try to visualize its significance through a believe we should; for to make the drama an art-form we must have an actor who does not simplifying "myth" which, I admit, owes a good deal to Plato's Cave: let us assert our right, try to deceive, but rather who engages in a conspiracy of illusion with conscious, willing that of all critics who honestly desire to be good critics, to imagine ourselves completely "victims," his audience. detached and taking our places as disembodied observers along the shadowy benches of a vast, circus-like arena surrounding a lighted central space which represents the world. In this -12- cosmic audience we may find ourselves rubbing elbows with monstrous and godlike beings from Swift's Brobdingnag, Goldsmith's China, Milton's Heaven and Hell, and C. S. Lewis's planets, all detached like ourselves Impersonation as it goes on constantly in real, comparatively inartistic life produces dramatic effects, to be sure, even passages which might be staged as bits of artistic drama; but off the stage we seldom if ever get the voluntary conspiracy between artist and audience in its -14- complete form. I dare not say that we never do: think of the dining-room scene when a worldly family entertains the preacher and his wife -- everybody on his best behavior, and all and therefore all in a way critics too, as we look out upon man on earth in his endless in a general, willing conspiracy to ignore some customary artificialities. (Even servants and dramatic performance -- living life and imitating it, acting now with direct sincerity and now in children may constitute an appreciatively critical audience.) Possibly the drama can at times the involuted, insincere way we call impersonation, sometimes on the common ground with intrude into life, as life does sometimes intrude upon the stage when the scenery catches fire, intent to deceive (or sometimes merely to co-operate socially) and sometimes on a stage, in or the rubber stiletto turns out to be a real one. an artistic conspiracy with an audience for its instruction and delight.

7 Irony In The Drama What would we not give to see Shakespeare rehearsing one of his own plays, written for his Still, through all these complexities we must cling to this: that the art-form which we call expert fellow-actors out of his intimate acquaintance over years of repertory production with drama consists in literary pieces framed for acting on a stage. The fact that this stage acting them? In this arena our "thoughts that wander through Eternity" are not bound to time or can exist in the imagination too is very fortunate, for if it could not, drama could neither be space. Here in our dream of world drama we have no trouble in recognizing him, over at that conceived in the mind of the dramatist nor exist as literature apart from the theater; yet spotlighted scaffold, writing the part for the player of Richard of Gloucester, scribbling and every dramatic production in the imagination of playwright or reader is potentially one on a directing, observing the historical Richard called by his own imagination from the pages of the real stage, with a real audience to connive in the ironic illusion, "the brave, ephemeral, chronicles, and turning from him to penning his foolscap pages, to exulting or disputing with beautiful art of acting." the actor in his hunchbacked costume, or to putting down his pen to step away from the stage into the necessary and expedient impersonations of his everyday London life. -17-

At the same time we see at a scuffed oak desk a modern Shakespearean scholar. Like us, he is watching the lines and the action on Shakespeare's stage. He is also comparing the historical Richard with the Elizabethan actor and with other players on later stages (not far Chapter II away we see a Richard dressed rather like George Washington); and presently he, too, IRONY AND IMPERSONATION wanders away from his study, to live and to impersonate elsewhere in this arena, the world.

In Chapter 1 the art of acting proved to be of primary importance in our answer to the Observe, from our circus bench, how complex this matter of drama-acting-impersonation is, question, what is drama. In fact, I very nearly replied simply, drama is acting. And even in this incompletely imagined myth which is intended to simplify our conception of it. impersonation showed itself to be of central importance in the art of acting. This is where the Certainly it is yet more complex on our earth, itself a stage, bearing scattered about it complications began to appear: impersonation, in life and on the stage, is very far from a smaller, loftier, better lit simple matter, as the myth of the arena attempted to make vivid to the imagination. We saw Shakespeare apparently using intensifications or convolutions of impersonations in order to -15- enrich his fellow-actors' opportunities. Thus they could display the fullest scope of their art in creating on the stage the roles he was creating for them in the "warm, phantasmagoric chambers" of his brain. stages whereon some rather ordinary man, even a naturally shy one perhaps, may successfully carry on his professional impersonation of an exhibitionistic actor impersonating a hypocritical villain, who in turn mounts higher still, "aloft" like Richard upon the board At the start, when we look at it in its simplest, most obvious form, stage impersonation seems scaffoldings, to impersonate a saint. easy enough: an actor makes an obvious pretense of being someone he is not, by taking on the name and nature of a character in the play someone has written for his troupe or for an earlier one to perform. The fact that it is an obvious pretense makes the situation ironical for This convolution of impersonations appears to lie very close to the essential heart of drama, both actor and audience, both of whom are in an ironically mixed mood of simultaneously as it does to that of acting, giving a far greater richness to such roles as Richard, Iago, and knowing it is a pretense and "playing" that it is not one. Of course we know that the ease is Hamlet than is present in those which are to be played relatively "straight," such as Hastings, illusive, that there is much art in the good playing of even the "straightest" or the most "type- Cassio, Horatio. Yet this convolution has never, as far as I know, received carefully analytical cast" role; but the difficulties are not of a nature which just now concerns us, belonging as or even discriminatingly appreciative critical attention from persons interested in the drama, they do in the field of acting technique. No, it is when we although some very interesting aspects of it can be seen to put themselves forward at once.

-18- For example, an actor who makes a double impersonation -as Richard playing a saint or as Prince Hal playing King Henry -- often gets subtle effects by allowing the character's true self to appear through chinks in his assumed one: note Gloucester's self-revealed ironies and find the playwright asking the actor to dive downward into impersonations enfolded within Hal's foreseeing himself as king. impersonations, like boxes nested in boxes or lodes of precious metals locked in the folded strata of a mountain, that we get the kind of enriching convolution which a playwright as writer can provide for the actor. Another point is that the device of adding still another convolution seems to be too artificial and too subtle for frequent successful use in life or on the stage. A girl pretending jealousy to tease her sweetheart, who pretends also to try to conceal her jealousy, is liable to find her What is happening when, to take a relatively simple case of impersonation within technique over-subtle for her audience; and Thomas Heywood seems too artificial for his impersonation, an actor plays a character pretending to be someone else? Edgar, the when in Four Prentices of London he makes a boy actor impersonate a girl who, while ingenuous good son of the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, duped by his machiavellian half- impersonating in disguise a boy page, is called on by the plot to impersonate a girl! brother Edmund into fleeing for his life in the fantastic disguise of the lunatic beggar Tom o' Bedlam, is a fair example; for Edgar as Edgar presents a comparatively straight role -- that is, the stage character has few peculiarities to differentiate him from any decent, rather naïve In these examples we should also notice that the art of acting (probably simply because it is young actor who might be cast in the part. an art) always adds one degree of intricacy to the convolution of impersonations, by introducing one degree of artistic removal from that which we call real life. But Edgar as Tom o' Bedlam enriches Shakespeare's great play with aesthetic effects of the kind we are used to calling ironies without much concern for definition. We feel confident that, -16- in going on now to talk about Edgar-Tom, the terms irony and ironic can be used freely, although any further attempt at defining them is deferred a little. 8 Irony In The Drama Edgar's is an ironic situation. Although innocent, he is being hunted down, marked for death When the grand twelve million jury Of our sins and sinful fury 'Gainst our souls black verdicts as would-be murderer of his father, on the strength of a letter forged by the bastard Edmund. give, Christ pleads his death, and then we live. Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, Numerous added ironies are made possible by the wildly tousled hair, smeared face, thorn- Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder; Thou movest salvation even for alms, Not with a bribed stuck arms, and ragged blanket about the loins of the lunatic beggar, Mad Tom. lawyer's palms.

In terms of dramatic situation, Shakespeare thus plays upon the ironies in Edgar's contacts Spenser's stanzas describing the Cave of Despair, strewn with the bones and fatal weapons of with the various architects of his fate, especially King Lear and his own father Gloucester. suicides, are among his most impressive. Hamlet suspects that his father's ghost may have Absorbed in their personal tragedies they fail to recognize him; but he is unaware of their been a false appearance: absorptions and, fearing that they may recognize him, he plays mad frantically -- that is, in an ironic complication of assumed madness and suppressed frenzy which suggests Hamlet's The spirit that I have seen May be the Devil; and the Devil hath power T'assume a pleasing "antic disposition" too. Later, shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. -19- But, as a good Christian, he is sure that suicide is contrary to divine command: in horror and compassion he leads his blinded, suicide-bent father to the verge of Dover Cliff and there, in ironic contrast to the trick Edmund has played with the letter, dupes Gloucester -21- into believing that he has taken the leap and been miraculously saved. A little later, in the anonymity of full armor with visor down, he challenges and mortally wounds Edmund. As Edmund is dying both brothers stress the irony of their situation: Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Edm. What you have charg'd me with, that have I done; And more, much more; the time will bring it out. 'Tis past, and so am I. But what art thou That hast this fortune on me? If thou'rt noble, I do forgive thee. Edg. Let's exchange charity. I am no less in blood than thou art, Edgar consoles himself with pagan philosophy but tries to comfort his father with at least a Edmund; If more, the more thou'st wrong'd me. My name is Edgar, and thy father's son. The considerable mingling of Christian thinking, first, in the storm scene. gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us; The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. Edm. Thou'st spoken right, 'tis true. The wheel is come full circle; I am here. [The open country. Before a hovel. Enter Edgar as Mad Tom.] Lear. Didst thou give all to thy daughters, and art thou come to this? Edg. Who gives anything to poor Tom? Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; Notice how evidently conscious Shakespeare himself is of these effects we call irony. I have that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge; not mentioned the ironies in Edgar's encounter as a "country fellow" with Oswald, the made him proud of heart, to ride on a bay horse over four-inch'd bridges, to course his own degenerate serving-man of Goneril. And there are other ironies of this type in Edgar's role. shadow for a traitor. And of other types, too. Here we have the devilish temptation to suicide. Next morning, outside Gloucester's castle, The irony of his disguise is a subordinated but poignant strain in the great symphony of the same conflict: madness, the storm scenes. The tempest crashes and screams over the heads of Lear, titanically going mad from the wrongs inflicted on him by his ungrateful daughters, of the Fool, pitifully, congenitally mad, and of Tom o' Bedlam, so wracked by injuries, fears and Edg. Welcome, then, The unsubstantial air that I embrace! The wretch that thou hast blown hardships that he is hardly sure whether he is mad by craft or mad indeed. unto the worst Owes nothing to thy blasts. [Enter Gloucester, led by an Old Man.] But who comes here? My father, poorly led? Old Man. You cannot see your way. Glou. I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen, Our means secure us, -20- and our mere defects Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar, The food of thy abused father's wrath! Might I but live to see thee in my touch, I'd say I had eyes again! Edg. [Aside]. O gods! Who is't can say, "I am at the worst"? Moreover, it is through Edgar in his disguise that Shakespeare makes his profoundly ironic comments on despair and suicide. The events of the play are supposed to occur in preChristian Britain; so the philosophies in it are a mixture of Druidic nature worship with -22- non-indigenous classic stoicism and anachronistic Christian concepts. Shakespeare knew no more than we know what the Druids thought of self-slaughter. In his Roman plays his suicides are noble stoic pagans, falling on their swords in the "high Roman fashion." But one of the I am worse than e'er I was . . . And worse I may be yet; the worst is not So long as we can medieval legacies of Renaissance English thinking was the Christian concept of suicide as a say, "This is the worst." Glou. Is it a beggar man? Old Man. Madman and beggar too. Glou. mad act induced by devilish temptation to the horrible sin of despair -- horrible because it He has some reason, else he could not beg. I' th' last night's storm I such a fellow saw, Which rejects the hope in the Christian doctrine of atonement. Thus Raleigh, once notorious as an made me think a man a worm. My son Came then into my mind, and yet my mind Was then "atheist," when expecting death on the block, says scarce friends with him. I have heard more since. As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport. Edg. [Aside]. How should this be? Bad is the trade that must play fool to sorrow, Angering itself and others.

9 Irony In The Drama Then, at Dover Cliff, after he has told his father that he has made the leap and has been them too. And it would be valuable to consider how the ironies are made visible on the stage strangely buoyed up: by means of costume, grouping and movement, facial expression, the gestures of madness and blindness, and so on. Edg. This is above all strangeness. Upon the crown o' th' cliff, what thing was that Which parted from you? Glou. A poor unfortunate beggar. Edg. As I stood here below, methought All these ironic elements -- Edgar's realization of ironies, his father's, their joint ironies in his eyes Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses, Horns whelk'd and waved like the conversation and adventure, and the audience's recognition of the inclusive dramatic ironies enridged sea. It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father, Think that the clearest gods, (we see Regan make Gloucester also a fugitive with a price on his head before the wanderers who make them honours Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd thee. Glou. I do remember reach Dover Cliff, for instance) -- are placed before us with a pleasing intricacy of variation on now. Henceforth I'll bear Affliction till it do cry out itself, "Enough, enough," and die. That the general theme. In taking them further the playwright intermingles them with the ironies thing you speak of, I took it for a man; often 't would say, "The fiend, the fiend!" He led me of still other roles, real and pretended. There is Edgar's shift from Mad Tom to Country Fellow, to that place. first to repudiate his former assumed self as a suicide-tempting demon and then to encounter and kill Oswald. There is irony in this final appearance of Oswald with his cowardice, his bluster, his sword, and his death by Edgar's quarter-staff. There are deep ironies in After the battle, Edgar returns to his father. Gloucester's encounter with the mad Lear and in his wishing, while Edgar is reading the letter found on Oswald and planning ahead in his own real person, that he might go mad himself Edg. Away, old man; give me thy hand; away! King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en. and so escape his consciousness of sorrow now that he has given up his project of suicide. Give me thy hand; come on. Glou. No further, sir; a man may rot even here. Ironic too is the son's comforting his father, "Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither," and his revealing himself and asking his father's blessing (on his project to kill his brother) just before the old man's ironic death between joy and grief. After his -23- combat with Edmund we see Edgar finally emerge from disguise at

Edg. What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming -25- hither; Ripeness is all. Come on. Glou. And that's true, too.

just the right time to produce the deep and consciously savored ironies of his words with his This is the last we see of Gloucester in the play. He is now almost ripe for dying, as his son is dying brother. now ripe for living.

Interwoven with all this Edgar-Gloucester irony, the audience perceives and feels those In the denouement, Edgar explains to Albany: gigantic ironies of Lear's own story to which Edgar's are but the counterpoint. These we see embodied in the poor old madman fantastically crowned with nettles, prancing skittishly away . . . in this habit Met I my father with his bleeding rings, Their precious stones new lost; from those sent by Cordelia to succor him. And we are shown the corollary ironies of his two became his guide, Led him, begg'd for him, sav'd him from despair. Never, -- O fault! -- wicked daughters' plots and counterplots over Edmund, the mild Albany restraining himself reveal'd myself unto him, Until some half-hour past, when I was arm'd. Not sure, though from strangling with his own hands the princess-wife who vulgarly mews and makes faces at hoping, of this good success, I ask'd his blessing, and from first to last Told him our him, and the ironic hybris of the arrogant Edmund on seeing himself so near the possession of pilgrimage; but his flaw'd heart Alack, too weak the conflict to support! 'Twixt two extremes the kingdom, belittling the sinister Goneril and Regan and oblivious to his other, even greater of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. danger, seen clearly by the audience, his wronged brother Edgar's vengeance.

Here are very plentiful and rich ironies, made the richer by Shakespeare's artistic playing of All these interwoven ironies are, in the end, ready to be gathered up by the strong and subtle their music as he brings forward now one, now another, now several at once in a harmony. hand of the masterdramatist into the firm grandeur of the play's tragic close. And the final For instance, in the scene of Edgar's first confrontation with his newly blinded father we hear feeling is ironic; the audience that sees Lear die over the body of Cordelia, deeply involved in first Edgar's own ironic reflections, solus, on his visibly low estate, and then we hear sympathy though it is, still feels detached enough to accept the plea of Kent, the man who Gloucester's own on his own tragic blundering, as he comes on led by an Old Man. Then we loved Lear most: have the shocked asides in which Edgar shows that he now perceives the irony of his own philosophy, followed by Gloucester's cryptically ironic speeches to the Old Man, some of which Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world apparently are not overheard by his son. And finally we hear the irony-loaded speeches of Stretch him out longer. father and son to each other. Meanwhile the audience is strongly affected by dramatic irony, knowing as it does more than the characters and therefore being aware of more depths and doublings, of meaning in their words. This is what I meant by saying that a playwright, especially when he employs the device of impersonation within impersonation, digs down into rich veins of ironies. Now, what is irony? In all the arts, our half of the twentieth century considers itself the Age of Irony. A painting -24- by Dali or Picasso, a poem by T. S. Eliot, a novel by Maugham or Huxley, a play by O'Casey, O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, or Arthur Miller, a modern ballet or symphony -- all are Shakespeare is not only highly perceptive of the ironies in character and situation as a writer. considered ironic Because his art necessitates his working through impersonation he makes his characters conscious of these ironies in part; so they are brought out in the lines of Edgar and -26- Gloucester for the actors to see and feel them and in turn to make the audience see and feel 10 Irony In The Drama by their creators or are called ironic by critics. And some admirable current volumes of -28- criticism deal most interestingly with irony. Have, as I do remember, done me wrong; You have some cause, they have not. Cordelia. No Intellectually, irony is the perception of incongruity, of dilemma, of paradox. Emotionally, in cause, no cause. . . . the feelings that go with this intellectual perception of things contradictory, we think and speak of irony as an attitude, a temper, a spirit in which one looks at life and art. It brings to Are not these passages ironic? And is not their irony compassionate? light and emphasizes by art the contradictions of living. The ironist recognizes that in man two contradictory things can be present at the same time: the beast and the angel, the miser and the dreamer. And he sees that these contradictions do not cancel each other, but that, on In proceeding to discuss more analytically the levels of impersonation, now that I have tried the contrary, both are equally and simultaneously true. Critical concepts of irony have vastly to make clearer that they represent levels of irony too, my intention is not to slant this study broadened. The Eiron of Greek drama was a knavish tricker of the honest. The Arte of English toward Shakespeare in the way that these other books are slanted. Shakespeare is used Poesie, 1589, speaks of "the figure Ironia, which we call the drye mock" -- somewhat as the predominantly, though not exclusively, for illustrative material, because he is the most unliterary man today knows irony consciously only as "sarcasm," a snarling or catty voicing of universal of world dramatists, because he has no detectable bias in religion, philosophy, the opposite of what one really means and wishes to be understood as meaning. The little boy sociology, or politics (which is another way of calling him universal); and because he is the in Riley's "The Old Tramp" is learning about sarcasm when the tramp calls back to the hired most familiar of playwrights, at least to English-speaking readers. man who has chased him out of the orchard, -29- You're a purty man! -- You air! -With a pair o' eyes like two fried eggs, An' a nose like a Bartlutt pear! Chapter III But Anatole France said, "Without irony, the world would be like a forest without birds; irony is the gaiety of meditation and the joy of wisdom." THE LEVELS OF IMPERSONATION Impersonation not only displays irony; it produces irony. The very fact that an actor is impersonating a character produces a certain depth -- using the miners' term I call it the first A. R. Thompson defines this phenomenon less poetically when he says of irony that "its effect level -- of irony; for the actor is in the ironic situation of both being and not-being both is emotional discord we feel when something is both funny and painful." But G. E. Sedgewick himself and the character he is playing, while the audience is in the ironic attitude of detached holds that irony "in some form is a practically inevitable result, almost a corollary, of the observation of life and acting. We shall see that the second level provides the richest working of dramatic principle." This is because the spectator at any play ex- opportunities for ironic impersonation. The third level throws an excessive emphasis upon situation to the disadvantage of characterization, while a conceivable fourth level and possible -27- still lower ones, following the same trend, would inevitably become increasingly freakish and sterile.For clearness I shall present my analysis first in outline form: I. First level: actor's role a single impersonation periences a "fusion of superior knowledge and detached sympathy" which Sedgewick calls A. The actor as himself "general dramatic irony," a "pervasive sense of Reality controlling Appearance." To A. C. 1. Under his own name Bradley, Sophoclean irony is found where "a speaker is made to use words bearing to the 2. Under another name (often a sort of allegory) audience, in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, hidden from himself, B. The straight role, uncomplicated, much like the actor himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage"; and J. A. K. Thomson cries, "Why, a 1. Characterization slight, mainly actor's personality Greek tragedy is all Ironical; it is Ironical in its very nature!" in his fine book, Irony: an 2. Characterization of a "simple soul," like Horatio Historical Introduction ( 1926), in which through a nobly sympathetic appreciation of Greek C. The straight role with glimpses into complex depths of character tragedy he extends the highest reach of irony in drama to the supreme paradox of 1. Sane, growing characters like Romeo and Edgar contradictory human feelings -- the compassion we audaciously consider godlike. 2. Madness

What do we feel when Sir Andrew Aguecheek bleats wistfully, "I was adored once, too," and -30- when Falstaff's hearty growl, "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow," is echoed in an old man's thin quaver, "That we have, that we have, that we have; in faith, Sir John, we have. Our watchword was 'Hem, boys!' " Or when another old man weakly awakens D. The character role, markedly different from the actor's own personality, but still a single from his madness: impersonation II. Second level: one or more impersonations within the original impersonation (with or without actual material disguise) Lear. Pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an A. One false or pretended character hour more or less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should B. Two or more false characters similar to each other know you, and know this man; Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant What place this is, C. Two or more dissimilar false characters and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last III. Third level: impersonation within impersonation within impersonation night. Do not laugh at me; For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. A. Intrigue farce, with little subtlety of characterization Cordelia. And so I am, I am. Lear. Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not. If you have B. Characterization stressed (no clear example available) poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me; for your sisters

11 Irony In The Drama On the first level, created by the very fact that the actor is acting, his single impersonation As you from crimes would pardon'd be, may range in complexity from a mere walk-on as himself to an elaborate structure of Let your indulgence set me free. costume, make-up, and business which makes a young player into an old man or a romantic heroine. Shakespeare's friend Dick Burbadge, the male lead of the King's Men, appears under -32- his own name in Webster's Induction to Marston's The Malcontent. In a case like this, the actor apparently makes no change from his street appearance and manner, unless to heighten his voice and broaden his gestures somewhat in order to project his natural If this be Shakespeare, recanting as Boccaccio and Chaucer recanted, here lies some of personality to the playhouse audience. There is a certain amusing irony in seeing an actor in Shakespeare's most deeply personal irony; moreover, it is, we see, projected in the his own person, where, in that naked state, he least of all belongs -on stage after curtain characteristic playwright's fashion, by means of impersonation. time. We enjoy a greater element of art, along with a greater feeling of illusion when the actor appears as himself but under another name, especially when the characterization reaches beyond realism into allegory. In their very nature, examples of this phenomenon are In the next step, the straight role, the actor does not play himself directly, but himself as a debatable; but I suggest the last, gallant but pitiable stage appearances of John Barrymore as character not markedly different. This is frequent in plays written for male movie stars and an old rake ad-libbing between hiccups. Less certainly, we have the strong suggestion of Ben matinee idols up to middle age, and for females at all ages. First they are juveniles and Jonson as Crites and Horace in his plays of the "Poetomachia" period; he may have acted as ingenues; later, on maturing, they have to be type-cast in roles much like their offstage well as written these roles, for he had been an actor, although like Shakespeare somewhat natures, for either they have failed to develop artistically to be able to produce stage illusion ashamed of in dissimilar parts or they have, if successful in youth, so endeared their own personalities to audiences that their public will not accept them in character roles. Either or both may be the case; an actor's life is as ironic as that of a politician or a confidence man (or a banker; see -31- Marquand warmly ironic novel, Point of No Return). My impression is that Shakespeare's urge toward deeper characterization kept him from writing many such roles after he drew the young ladies and noblemen of such early plays as Love's Labour's Lost and Henry VI; later he the profession. The irony of Jonson's representing himself as an arrogant critic in his own wrote for mature fellow actors and experienced apprentices, whose abilities he very well plays considerably outraged his lesser rivals, Dekker and Marston, but no doubt amused his knew, and kept the thin parts for "hired men" and new apprentices. audiences. As for allegory, it has been widely believed that the actor-playwright expresses himself and comments on his own life in Strindberg's Father for example, and in the character of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest: A different sort of simplicity is seen in a character like Horatio, who is presented as a person uncomplicated in soul, whoever his actor may be -- and unfortunately he usually isn't anybody very much. Other examples might be Poins in Henry IV and Cassio in Othello. It is I have bedimm'd interesting that we feel these young men to be well liked by Shakespeare, probably because The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds, they are well liked by Prince Hal, Othello, and Hamlet respectively, Hamlet voicing for Horatio And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault a kind of envious admiration, that of complexity for simplicity: Set roaring war,...... graves at my command Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd and let 'em forth Since my dear soul was mistress of my choice By my so potent art. But this rough magic And could of men distinguish, her election I here abjure, and, when I have requir'd Some heavenly music, which even now I do, . . . I'll break my staff, -33- Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound Hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been I'll drown my book. As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards And the old actor-playwright, in person or by deputy, reappears alone in Prospero's costume Hath ta'en with equal thanks;. . . . to speak the Epilogue: . . . Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of hearts, Now my charms are all o'erthrown, As I do thee. And what strength I have's mine own, Which is most faint. . . . But release me from my bands That is, these simple souls are liked by characters who have our With the help of your good hands. respect. On the other hand, Poins is disliked by Falstaff, who is jealous of him for numerous . . . Now I want reasons; Cassio by Iago, who confesses, Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, He hath a daily beauty in his life Unless I be reliev'd by prayer, That makes me ugly; Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. and Horatio, it seems logically necessary, by all Hamlet's enemies and false friends, though Shakespeare does not bother to give us any glimpses of their attitudes in the dialogue. 12 Irony In The Drama When the straight role begins to be illuminated by flashes of insight into deeper vistas of expression, voice, and action, a new personality. Probably most of the richer, more complex, character, the playwright is clearly seen to be displaying his own powers and those of his more fully developed characters in world drama are designed to do this in one way or actor at adequate stretch. Here, I should say, we have Romeo when his real love for Juliet another. We in the twentieth century look on disguise with some scorn as a stage trick lacking annihilates his fancied love for Rosalind as if it had never existed and when the news of his in verisimilitude; but we ought to remember that in variously bearded (and frequently bride's supposed death turns a homesick boy into a grimly determined man in an instant. masked) historical periods such as the Renaissance, and in all periods of more visibly marked Edgar, when he speaks as himself and not as Mad Tom, is another ingenuous character who social stratification than our own (that is to say, in all periods before our century), disguise grows up; we have seen him maturing, especially in the scenes with his blinded father, and at was not an unrealistic device. We may be thankful, for it has produced not only fascinating the end Albany recognizes his full maturity by asking him to share the rule of Britain. These plots, comic and serious, but also rich effects of dialogue, characterization, and stage action, are sane, growing characters. The prayer of King Claudius, Clarence's dream, and numerous very many of them ironic. utterances in uncontrolled passion also provide rifts through which we see deeper into character. Madness (true madness, not assumed) is vividly revealing. In case we cannot help preferring the device without the disguise, we can always enjoy what Alan Thompson calls -34- Irony of Character (irony of manner). A person's true character is shown to be in painfully I do not consider that in playing a character who goes mad, an actor is necessarily entering a comic contrast to his appearance or manner. second level of impersonation, although he does so, of course, when in going or pretending to go mad the character becomes a different person, like Edgar as Tom o' Bedlam; but this is This definition applies particularly well -- although we would extend it to include tragedy also not the same as playing Hamlet when he "puts an antic disposition on." If Hamlet here is -- to the hypocrisies and affectations of thoughtful and satirical comedy: to Ben Jonson's false impersonating, it is because he is already so deeply enmeshed in second-level complications, or affected "humours" created to be unmasked, like the country and city gulls and Bobadill of playing so many roles that he cannot himself, for all his agonized probings, disentangle the Every Man In His Humour real Hamlet from the seeming.

-36- Fifty years of royal conformity torn away, mad Lear reveals a most bitter criticism of social hypocrisies. Timid and conventional in her sane mind, Ophelia mad shows nakedly her conflicting loves for Polonius and Hamlet. When sane, Lady Macbeth has a lack of imagination Humour, to the misogyny of Benedick, to Molière's Tartuffe, and to many characters in Ibsen which makes her strong as steel; when she has become mad, her thick-thronging fancies and Maugham. drive her to suicide. For a modern instance, Judge Gaunt of Anderson Winterset only in madness can release the guilt which preys upon his heart; and as in most stage madness through the ages, in revealing what most deeply troubles him he lets out evidences also of For the audience's enjoyment of the ironies which such pretenses spawn, the greater repressed sex. dramatists always provide the plotdevice of dramatic irony, which lets the spectator in on things which are not yet revealed to some of the characters on the stage, and they exploit it by allowing the actor to make his "real" character show through the false one in soliloquies, The last sub-division of the first level is the character role, markedly different from the actor's asides, slips hastily caught, wry grimaces, near-unmaskings, and so on. In the next chapter own personality (and usually from his everyday appearance), but still a single impersonation. we shall have more to say about such devices, especially as Shakespeare employs them. Such are Shakespeare's Bardolph, Roderigo, Osric, and Mistress Quickly, the fantastics and grotesques of Aristophanes and Peer Gynt, Anderson's gangster Trock, and the Chinese of O'Neill Marco Millions. The tyro actor often finds such impersonations easier than straight No two cases of dramatic irony seem to be alike. Rosalind's disguise as Ganymede and Viola's roles, because even when not protected from the audience by elaborate costume and make- as Cesario are intensified as double impersonations by the change of sex -- a single change up he feels his own personality, the part of him vulnerable to stage-fright, somewhat masked on the modern stage, but on the Elizabethan boards a crisscross, boy actor to girl to boy page by his alien assumed one. And when his or her straight stage personality has been based on again, which seems to have titillated the Globe and Blackfriars audiences while vastly youthful beauty and charm, the aging actor or actress can still use accumulated stage offending the Puritans. Rosalind reverses again, as we shall notice. Edgar disguises both as experience effectively Mad Tom and as the Country Fellow, then in complete armor becomes unrecognizable to his brother. Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, in Measure for Measure puts on the habit of a friar without any noticeable alteration of personality, and Parolles in All's Well resembles rather -35- closely Jonson's braggart soldier Bobadill, a pretended humour. in character parts. Often the irony of contrast is particularly enjoyed by the audience, rather Perhaps the majority of Shakespeare's second-level characters adopt more than one false naïvely when it sees a highschool boy tottering and quavering in a cotton beard, a little "seeming." Very obvious examples are his supreme hypocrites: Richard of Gloucester, really a cruelly when a former Juliet plays a slatternly hag. In artistic quality, depending on how the cold, heartless villain, pretendedly a gallant lover, a bluff friend, and "honest" conciliator, a lines have been written and how they are read, these roles range from stereotypes and rough pious saint; and "Honest Iago" presenting his various, though similar, false faces to Othello, caricatures to high ironic art, full of amused, pitying compassion for poor, life-distorted mortal to Cassio, to Roderigo, to Desdemona, and to his wife Emilia. These are multiplied, false, men and women. assumed characters which are similar among themselves. We find other roles, in their complexity highly rewarding to versatile actors, in which We now come to the second level of impersonation. Here, the actor, already playing a part, takes on a second, a different character -- either by taking a new name, with or without -37- material disguise of clothing and false whiskers, or by hypocritically assuming, in facial

13 Irony In The Drama the numerous assumed characters are of great diversity. Supreme among these is, of course, plays as well as in the wildest intrigue-farces. The melodramatic quality of Elizabethan tragic Hamlet; but we could examine also the varied disguises of the hero of Chapman Blind Beggar and tragicomic plots rather lends itself to artificial twists. One might so interpret the death of of Alexandria, Falstaff's chameleon-like mimicries, and the flashing poses of Rostand's Mommina in Pirandello To-Night We Improvise. Cyrano. In such roles, too, the pretended personalities are constantly played off ironically against the true or original character assumed by the actor in the first place. -39-

At the third level, impersonation within impersonation within impersonation, or an actor What is happening in the way of impersonation and irony when, for example, Hamlet's "antic playing a character who pretends to be someone else and in that second impersonation takes disposition" takes him, on the second level of impersonation, into bawdy remarks to Ophelia on still another pretended character, we leave the realm of high dramatic art and enter that and Poloniuswhich belong really in the territory of comedy -- or when Ophelia in' her mad of highly artificial contrivance. Thomas Heywood sixteenth-century Four Prentices of London songs similarly trespasses? Is this another level of impersonation? I should visualize it rather aims at romantic adventure and pathos; but it becomes unintentionally farcical when his as two adjacent mine-shafts, one driving down into a lode of tragedy, the other into one of French princess (played, of course, by a boy actor) follows her lover undetected, as his male comedy. On each level, horizontal tunnels, "drifts," connect the mines and the ore-bodies. So page, and then, as part of the thickening plot intrigue, dresses again as a boy pretending to Hamlet crosses over on the second level from tragedy into comedy. We have a new sort of be a girl. Examples of this bewildering trick seem, happily, extremely few. irony here, but not an additional level of impersonation.

The Heywood case displays sheer farcical or melodramatic handling, with little or no subtlety In Henry IV we see Shakespeareexploiting both mines, mostly in alternate scenes. We note of characterization. More artistic triple impersonation might accompany pretended madness in the powerful irony when Hal is playing king to Falstaff's prince. He has been doing it on the an assumed character, although it cannot quite be said to do so in Edgar's disguise, because second, comic level; but filled with the role and his own dream of kingship, he suddenly leaps Tom o' Bedlam's character is madness. True, Mad Tom does tell Lear what he was before he away from Falstaff to the other, the tragic mine, and stuns the fat knight with his prophecy of lost his sanity: banishment.

A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curl'd my hair; wore gloves in my cap; serv'd If we have open drifts connecting the two lodes of comedy and tragedy, we may have miners the lust of my mistress' heart and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I clashing with each other in the tunnels where the two properties adjoin. It used to happen in spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven: one that slept in the contriving of the Comstock Lode under old Virginia City quite often. This, I believe, is what happens when lust, and wak'd to do it. Wine lov'd I dearly, dice dearly: and in woman out-paramour'd the comedy makes use of the device we call burlesque. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the Turk: false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in dramatist lets down his comic characters, Bottom and the rest, to the second level, where greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. they go through the motions of acting the tragic interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe. The irony lies in the fact that they perform to our present imaginations in plain sight of the old- -38- fashioned tragedians whom Shakespeare and his audience had in mind to burlesque, who are putting on their parallel, serious performance in the same gallery. And the fact that the Athenian artisans are being perfectly serious makes the burlesque all the funnier and at the This is certainly a "character" in the Renaissance sense; but there is room to doubt whether it same time all the more painful to the rival company. represents a sane full dramatic character behind the mad one Edgar assumes. Shakespeare seems to intend social satire rather than depth of characterdrawing. And the passage provides a curious oblique comment on Oswald, who was such a serving-man. -40-

What of Rosalind? Dwelling in Arden as the male youth Ganymede, she might have teased her The ironical delight in dramatic burlesque, then, does not involve a change of levels in suitor Phebe by pretending love-madness, of which there was plenty in that woodland air. impersonation; but it depends, in both dramatic and non-dramatic literature, on the ironic Instead she plays her amorous game with her unwitting sweetheart Orlando by making him comparison between its own intentionally clumsy gambolling and the seriousness of the pretend that she, Ganymede, is herself, Rosalind. Thus, apparently, a second-level artists in the works that are being burlesqued. impersonation returns by a delightful trick to the first level, that of simple impersonation by the actor. In a way it might be called a third-level involution, but at the same time by turning In conclusion, let me repeat that the chief artistic values are found on the first and second back upon itself it appears as something we ought to call a convolution. At any rate the art is levels, especially (if the reader turns back to the outline) from I, C, the straight role with here, in plenty. glimpses into complex depths, through II, C, the putting on by the original character of two or more dissimilar, pretended personalities. I, A tends to fall short of full impersonation, and I, B Theoretically, fourth and still deeper levels might be found somewhere in world drama. All the often lacks artistic richness and subtlety of the highest degree. III, as we have just observed, playwright would have to do is ask his actor to add one or more further impersonations within runs into farce or perhaps sometimes melodrama, both of which sacrifice characterization and those already existing on the third level. Practically, for both literary and theatrical purposes, dialogue, wherein lie the great artistic values of drama, for plot and sensation. we seem already to have gone beyond the artistic limit. Do playwrights dig deeper, since the richest veins of irony lie nearer the surface? The levels of impersonation are, we see, closely associated with the dramatic riches of irony. But they do not continue to yield more abundantly as one goes deeper than the second level. A fourth level might occur in a "play within a play," if an actor playing a character (for instance, that of Old Hieronimo in Kyd The Spanish Tragedy) took on, as indeed Hieronimo We shall turn next to a more detailed examination of the forms of irony to be seen in drama does, a role in the play within the play and in that role pretended, as Hieronimo does not, to and then to that great ironist William Shakespeare, merely adding here the testimony that, be someone else. I have no example to cite; but if I were hunting I should look in plays within 14 Irony In The Drama wherever I have looked into his plays, I have found that convolution of impersonation is his audience even of some fifteen hundred in a large outdoor theater like the Globe. Hamlet's favorite technical means for achieving enriched and deepened ironies, one of his chief demands for delivering the speech "trippingly on the tongue" and for restrained gestures that aesthetic ends. do not saw the air are also suggestive. The leading comedians too, such as Kemp and Armin, were very prominent in the Elizabethan -41- -43-

Chapter IV troupe. Comedians are trained to make points clearly -- otherwise they may miss their laughs. I venture to say that many of the clearest enunciations to be heard in today's FORMS OF IRONY IN DRAMA theaters are those of comedians.

We may define dramatic irony as both the device and the feeling produced when the audience I am not unaware that our modern forms of mechanically reproduced drama -- movies and is "let in on" something in the stage situation of which one or more of the characters are not television -- have their advantages for the projection of irony by those actors working for yet aware. Dramatic irony may be looked on, then, as one method or technique of employing these media. Adequate volume, for instance, can be attained without straining of the voice to stage impersonation to produce more effective psychological states of the general type we the point where fine shadings of tone are lost. Movements are slower, and meaningless call ironic. In the sense that all ironic feeling is the result of a perception of two or more crossings of the stage do not tempt the director. To the sight, the close-ups on the screen are contrasting or contradictory levels of truth simultaneously, at a viewpoint detached from both, excellent for niceties of facial expression, minute business with the hands, and significant dramatic irony is evidently related, in ways which criticism has never fully worked out, to the manipulations of small, symbolic objects, all of which would be lost beyond the first few rows "straight" irony or sarcasm which, like the Raggedy Man's, produces a statement the reverse in a legitimate theater. of the meaning, "You're a purty man! You air!" and to the more dignified "irony of fate" or "poetic justice" in which the higher powers reverse man's intentions and cause his purposeful acts to swoop back like a boomerang at his own head. Both these forms of irony can be But to return to dramatic irony, it basically works through the plotting and is effective vigorously and subtly presented to the audience so that it is able to feel them strongly anywhere that a play can be staged. It consists in preparing the audience for the ironic (though not always consciously) through this stage device of dramatic irony. It is so situation by letting them in on something not all the characters know. The spectators know admirably effective as a tool of playwright and actor because in the theater actor and that Richard of Gloucester is a villainous hypocrite, because in the opening soliloquy of audience are both found in ideally ironic attitudes: the actor because he is consciously and Richard III he has told them so; they know that the high-jacking of the thieves' spoil in 1 publicly impersonating, the audience because its conscious co-operation in the theatrical Henry IV has been faked in order to expose Falstaff's lies, because they have seen Poins. and illusion gives it that detached point of view which is necessary Prince Hal plan it. "Tell 'em what you're going to do, then let 'em see you doing it, then run over for 'em what you've done," is standard advice to playwrights. How else extract the full savor of irony, serious or comic? "The camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it -42- grows." Only in a minor way is the technique of dramatic plotting one of surprise. Richard is a known villain, although some of his knavish tricks are amazing; Falstaff is exposed according for the ironic appreciation of the co-existence of two or more conflicting levels in the stage to plan as a liar and coward, although his trick of escape (and we know it is a lie, too) is one situation. of the most delightful surprises in literature:

The actor conveys these ironies through the infinitely broad and subtle means of his art: by -44- voice, gesture, attitudes, business, and facial expression and basically by an intelligent understanding of his role, which enables him to live in the part and at the same time to By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye. Why, hear you, my masters. Was it for me project consciously his feeling of the values, especially the ironic values, in each situation to kill the heir-apparent? Should I turn upon the true prince? Why, thou knowest I am as wherein the character he is impersonating finds himself. valiant as Hercules; but beware instinct; the lion will not touch the true prince.

He may not always play his part for its fullest ironic values. His style of acting may be too It is only in lesser, divergent dramatic forms that surprise, which is not irony-producing, formal, too conventional or "stylized"; he may be a natural comedian out of place in a tragic becomes dominant -- in the plotting of some farces, melodramas, and mystery-thrillers. role, or vice versa; or his conditions of performance may hamper or mislead him. I have These diverge toward the periphery of drama, as discussed in the first chapter, because recently been listening to some phonograph records made by a leading contemporary actor centrally drama is an intensifier through impersonation of the ironies of life and therefore in which impress me by their unintelligibility because of mechanical sound-distortion and the its essential nature ironic. Drama holds up before its beholders life in the form of a seeming actor's stage-Oxford accent and by their effect of his over-straining because of a habit of for comparison with life as being, or reality. It is the actor's impersonation which conveys this shouting, in its turn probably traceable to the necessity of being heard throughout a large effect, for impersonation is a seeming; therefore acting is per se an ironic art. theater without mechanical aids. Such constant sound and fury seem to me destructive of irony, which calls for repressed, reason-controlled passions, known to be there because they are suggested by the character's efforts at control and burst through only at high dramatic It follows from these facts, basic to drama as they are, that the audience does not and must moments. Ideally, at least, as we judge from such references as Hamlet's advice to the not have a complete illusion of reality; it must recognize what is before it as a seeming in players, the Elizabethan actors' voices were controlled and clear. Boys have clear voices, and order to appreciate the irony which is drama. Hence we have the reminder, "This is like the older apprentices had been taught control. The great adult actor Richard Burbadge something in a play," located at a point such as the ending, where the irony needs to be apparently had sufficient physical force to make himself heard without straining to an underlined, fortified, and pressed home, and hence, conversely, the comparative dramatic

15 Irony In The Drama weakness and rarity of devices for complete illusion, such as the planting of actors in the scanning and comparing, past to future and back again. Happiness and sorrow are not only audience. comparative; they are comparisons.

Compare fiction. Defoe's verisimilitude and Poe's hoaxes, although admired, are not admired To give an audience a sense of a situation artistically resembling a moment of life, playwright as fiction on the highest level. Fielding, the greater ironist, is also and probably therefore a and actor, then, must successfully suggest past, present, and future time at once. This seems greater novelist than his rival, Richardson. The same, I think, holds for Thackeray, at his best, an impossible demand, yet does not appall the artist, who knows in his bones that all art is a in comparison with Dickens. Sterne, whatever his weaknesses -- although to some modern reaching for the unattainable. And author and actor, like composer and musician, help each critics he is the greatest of the eighteenth-century group -- is a superb ironist; as Drummond other. Since, as viewed this way, time itself in these units of dramatic situation is seen said of Ben Jonson and strong drink, irony is the element in which he lives. detachedly as made of simultaneous diversities, the stage situation is itself ironic. Hence it will be well to recur to the levels of impersonation discussed in Chapter 2, in order to see how well any series of situations in which a character may find himself is adapted, according to the -45- level on which he operates, for the production and manipulation of the audience's ironic feeling. But we need not repeat at length, for we remarked there on the Mark Twain is a great ironist, at his best. And there is Jonathan Swift. -47- Before proceeding, let us try to scotch the "linear error." Because of certain limitations in his dialogue-action medium for telling his story, the playwright has to handle time less subtly ironic values involved -- slight in those first-level occurrences where the element of than the novelist does. Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller are more obvious, more theatrical, impersonation is less because the character's personality differs little from that of the actor, than Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf in presenting the relativity, the interpenetration of past richly rewarding in the rest of the first level, including character roles, and throughout the and present times in their characters' natures. As one result, dramatic critics may be second level, that of impersonation within impersonation, and distinctly inartistic in the third responsible for more than their share of a mistaken criticism of various forms of narrative art level and beyond. The better dramatists seem to have an instinctive sense of the limits of based on the erroneous conception of an action (story, plot) as a series of causally connected ironic feeling mass-produced in a theater, hard though these limits would be to define. They events occurring as a strict linear sequence in time, because supposedly in life. Supposedly, I realize, apparently, that enough is enough. It might be pleasant to make the critics suffer, but say, because events really do not occur so in life. We look before and after. Each step into, let us not torment the paying customers into biting their nails. each guess about, the future, is along the projection of a line already drawn in the past.

We have said that the device called dramatic irony is found in any situation where the The artist gratifies his audience's sense of life and enhances it by presenting parallel actions audience knows something which some of the characters do not. At least three main varieties (the tortured heroine and the hero galloping to her rescue), by "flash-backs" into the past, are distinguishable: (1) the play within a play, which produces ironies by projecting through a and by looks into the future (premonitions, omens, prophecies, "if he had only known"). His veil of pretense the deeper meaning and intentions of the characters, (2) the situation where audience sees in the book or on the stage two or more time-place-action complexes at once - one or more characters who are conscious of the ironies produce by ironic words and visible as is frequently true in life, the audience realizes -- and through comparing and contrasting means a sense of cross-purposes, and (3) the situation where all the characters are them gets the sense of irony which both the playwright, working through the actor, and the unconscious of the irony which the audience perceives. audience demand of mature artistic work.

Variations of (1) are seen in the Hamlet Mouse-trap play, in The Spanish Tragedy, in Experience, either real or artistic, is nothing so narrow and shallow as a line. This linear error Massinger The Roman Actor, and in the Falstaff-Hal improvisations. We find (2) in many is indeed one of the greatest of critical heresies, for experience is rather a multidimensional situations in Richard III and in the remarkable scene in Heywood A Woman Killed with spatial concept, potentially one as vast as is Milton's ranging through space and time from the Kindness, where innuendoes over a game of cards fiercely illuminate Anne Frankford's Garden in the moment of Adam's first meeting Eve to Heaven and Hell beyond the moon and adultery with her husband's friend, before an audience which knows of it, while an innocent stars, and Time before Creation, and neighbor of the Frankfords sits unaware that the husband's treacherous friend is flaunting his ironies before an informed husband who is topping his double meanings like a man hurling -46- back a grenade at his enemy before it can explode. To illustrate (3) we might take the earlier discussions of Hamlet's madness by Claudius and after Judgment Day -- "Those thoughts that WANDER through Eternity." -48- The events of a play are best conceived of, not as a series of happenings, but as a series of situations, usually, although in recent times not always, arranged in chronological order. Each Polonius, although there seems to be a little conscious, polite irony in the King's attitude of these situations is, both intellectually and emotionally speaking, not a point but an area. toward the old man; or better, the Polonius-Laertes-Ophelia scene, wherein only Ophelia Think back to Falstaff's play-acting as Prince Hal before the Prince as king or to King Lear's shows the slightest consciousness of irony in her relatives' treatment of her affair with reconciliation with Cordelia. These characters are not only apprehending and exploiting their Hamlet. Perfect examples of (3) may perhaps be rather rare. If so, it is because the present situations; they are thinking and feeling their way back to the longed-for and audience's sense of irony is best stimulated from the stage by means of the visible, audible regretted past, forward to the dreaded and hoped-for future. We are often exhorted to "live in awareness of a character upon it. Of course I am speaking now of the play as a self-contained the present moment." Can we? Can a bullet flying to its mark pause to enjoy itself? Only as a piece of artistic contrivance, not as it may possibly be based on history or legend that may humming-bird hovers "motionless" in the air by opening and closing its wings so rapidly that make its outcome known to some part of its audience. they become a blur -- so rapidly does our sense of "the present" sustain and feed itself by

16 Irony In The Drama Dramatic ironies could also be classified as active and passive, the first occurring where the Religion and crime character (for instance, a machiavellian villain) sets out to produce ironies which often he Truth and treachery (in love and friendship) consciously savors; the second, where the "straight" character is acted upon by any or all of the three main types of irony -- verbal irony, dramatic irony, and irony of fate. In large Such a list could, naturally, be increased, shortened, modified, or re-combined almost at will. measure Romeo's role is passively ironic. For an actor, the "fattest" role appears to be the And it would be interesting to make such lists for some of the great comedies of Western actively ironic one: Richard III, Falstaff, Hamlet, Medea, Candida, Cleopatra. Sophocles drama. provides the most striking example of how both types may be combined to gain an intensified irony, when Oedipus discovers how mistaken he has been to imagine that he has outwitted the Fates. Falstaff alone, just in his own portion of 1 Henry IV, provides not only the linked ironic themes of honor and cowardice (or witty self-preservation, if one prefers to take that side of the old critical debate about this great comic character) but also age and youth, corpulence Very potent in breeding irony is the method of comparison, with emphasis of course on and slenderness, wit and stupidity (with Quickly and Bardolph), practical joking and witty contrast. This is the basis of the effectiveness of the comic "humours" perfected and jesting, sensual realism and Puritan cant, sloth and activity, and so on indefinitely. Such ironic popularized by Jonson. These, as Jonson defines them in the Prologue to Every Man Out of themes, it is obvious, generate richly ironic situations, usually several situations per theme, His Humour, are states in which all the thoughts, actions, passions of a character are "made as well as ironic dialogue in plenty. to run one way" by an over-ruling bias, an obsession. Jonson treats them as true, ingrained psychological states -- Kitely, Downright, and Justice Clement in Every Man In, Morose in Epicoene -- which may be reproved or punished if reprehensible, -51-

-49- Chapter V but not cured; and as false or affected ones -- the gulls Stephen and Matthew and the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, IRONIST braggart coward Bobadill -- which can sometimes be cured by unmasking and ridicule. (Dr. Snuggs in a recent article suggests a third type of humour, the eccentricity; but this is less easily distinguished and is not necessary to our point concerning ironic contrast.) In The great dramatist William Shakespeare is also one of the world's great ironists. Shakespeare I consider Dogberry a true humour, Jaques and Parolles affected ones. Now, the foundations of Shakespeare's ironies, like anyone else's, whether he is a writer or In humour roles irony is projected by holding, for the audience's comparison, the divergence not, must be imbedded in his attitudes toward life, here and hereafter, and in his standards of up against the norm. The character may be made to do it himself, either consciously or beauty and conduct. At once we encounter a serious difficulty, Shakespeare's "objectivity." unconsciously; or the divergence may be displayed and commented upon by other characters. We know his characters' various, often contradictory, attitudes and standards; we can only It is sometimes comical to see the latter done innocently and inadvertently, and the effect guess doubtfully at those of their creator. Dowden's four periods -- "In the Workshop," "In the then is a very goodnatured one. Jonson prefers to have other characters unmask the World," "In the Depths," and "On the Heights"n -- although continually under critical fire, are humour's discreditable oddity, especially when it is an affectation, consciously and also inescapably useful to teachers. The main objection to them is that they seem to assert intentionally. Thus Young Knowell brings his silly cousin Stephen into London in order to show too great a knowledge of Shakespeare "the Man"; and we have all too little objective him off to his friend Wellbred, with a challenge to the latter to "smoke" or see through him; knowledge of that sort. Anyone who has worked for a few decades in Shakespeare studies and at the end of Every Man In all the humour characters are publicly displayed for purposes feels that he somehow does know the man as acquaintance, friend, and master; but of ridicule and reform in the police court of the merry Justice Clement. whenever he slips into some assertion using such knowledge, he very quickly finds that it is challenged as subjective and can hardly find any tenable ground on which to defend it. Another splendid producer of irony through contrast is a method verging on the philosophical, which may be called linked themes -- general themes, recurrent through the play, which I suggest that some re-naming of Dowden's four periods on the more strictly aesthetic basis encourage philosophical commentary on the part of the characters, either of the Jonsonian of his development as a dramatic artist might seem, at least, to offer less dangerous type in thoughtful comedy or of the Senecan type in Elizabethan tragedy. Let me make myself assertions about Shakespeare's private experiences and opinions as a man. Let us say that clearer by suggesting several such linked themes which the reader might pursue through Shakespeare's first period, from his beginnings as a playwright to about 1595, was one in Hamlet as Shakespeare projects them dramatically by conflict and contrast, but with subtle which his variations and complications: -52- Responsible kingship and illegal violence Madness and sex work was based upon an acceptance of the attitudes and standards of others; his second, from about 1595 to 1599, was one in which he was asserting his own; his third, about 1599 -50- to 1607, was a period of questioning his own standards; and his fourth and last period, from 1607 to the end of his writing career about 1613, was a return, a great deal less assertively, to such standards of his own as, chastened by life, he found he could still hold as valid. Sincerity and play-acting ("seeming") Reason and passion Action and contemplation We are such stuff

17 Irony In The Drama As dreams are made on. . . . Much more could be said about these transitional plays. But now let us look at the characteristic uses and techniques of Shakespeare's irony in each period by itself, leaving further remarks on transitional phenomena to be made as they seem appropriate within the That is the ultimate acceptance of life's ironies that we hear from him -- that and "Every third discussion of each period. It appears to me (naturally enough, perhaps) that a great deal of thought shall be my grave."Such an outlining of Shakespeare's changing attitudes toward the interesting recent Shakespeare criticism, such as that of Bethell, Heilman, G. Wilson standards, his own and those of others, suggests that the third period, the time of his Knight, and Traversi, in its varied and copiously illustrated approaches to the plays through questioning of his own standards in his great tragedies and satirical comedies, should theme and image, can be fitted into this pattern of Shakespeare's changing ironies. I shall naturally have been that of his fiercest, most agonized ironies. And is this not true?The other mention these critics whenever their ideas are particularly applicable, especially in discussing three periods might fall into this arrangement, based on intensity of ironies: second, his Shakespeare's last period, where, as stated in the introduction, these modern critics are second period, that of asserting his own standards against those of others which he had making a special point of demonstrating a synthesizing and harmonizing of the dramatist's previously been accepting; third, his first period, of asserting the standards of others, a whole "mind and art" in the thematic imagery of his last plays. period of ironies strongly stated but uncertainly held; and last, his fourth period, of a serenity and tolerance allowing little in the way of bitter intensity, but much in that of a cosmic, almost godlike irony such as Prospero's.In historical and biographical studies one often finds it First period ( 1590- 1595), acceptance of the standards of others. Comedies: The Comedy of particularly useful to look for transitional phenomena at the points of change from one phase Errors ( 1591), Two Gentlemen of Verona ( 1592), Love's Labours Lost ( 1594); histories: 1, to the next. For these periods of Shakespeare as ironist, the following plays would repay 2, 3 Henry VI (1590-92), Richard III ( 1593), King John ( 1594); tragedy: Titus Andronicus ( examination as transitional: 1592). In going along with the fashionable literary, ethical, and courtly standards of his time, 1. Toward the close of his first period and near the beginning of his second, A Shakespeare had little occasion to be original in his ironies. Usually in this period they arise as Midsummer Night's Dream ( 1595? we should expect from the comparison of fashionable standards with unfashionable ones and are worked out for the stage through the use of conventional and often rather crude stock situations. -53-

-55- datings are approximate) as comedy and the two parts of Henry IV ( 1596-7) as history. At this time we should expect to see Shakespeare beginning to assert his own standards of ethics and manners against those he had formerly been accepting from The Comedy of Errors has as its center the slapstick ironies generated by mistakes over others without question, but at the same time trying to cling to some of the current twins, imitated by Shakespeare from Plautus and the common Plautine comedies of the attitudes of his contemporaries. Hence, I think, Duke Theseus is a somewhat wistful Elizabethans. Shakespeare rather unimaginatively doubles the twins, in the hope that two idealization of the great Renaissance gentleman whose weaknesses the dramatist was pairs will provide twice as much fun. He frames the farce comedy with romantic comedy, already beginning to see through; and the rationalizing of Prince Hal's conduct, derived from the Greek romances and also very commonly dramatized by his contemporaries, particularly his repudiation of Falstaff -- "I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers" uses a few of the pathetic ironies whereof he was later to prove such a master, and ends with -- is a clinging to certain current ideas of the public as opposed to the private moral a stock recognition scene from the same romantic repertory. He uses dramatic irony virtues which Shakespeare in the sequel, Henry V ( 1599), was to question very constantly and skilfully; he never lets the audience become confused, only the characters. seriously and with deep irony. 2. For the transition between periods two and three, All's Well ( 1602) as comedy, and Two Gentlemen of Verona gives us the pretty irony of the loving maid disguised in boy's Hamlet ( 1601) as tragedy. In All's Well Helena is forced to carry an idealized womanhood clothing, a device which seems to have been rather newly introduced from Italian like Rosalind's through some quite realistic mud, whereas Isabella in Measure for Measure Renaissance drama via the universities' amateur theatricals. Shakespeare was later to ( 1604) turns our sympathy for romantic idealism into irony when she sacrifices her develop its humorous-pathetic possibilities much further; in this early play he rather sacrifices brother's hope of life for her chastity. Many ironies of the second period are being clung them to the conventional courtly theme of love as traitor to friendship. to and at the same time questioned. Hamlet, earliest of the great tragedies, clings to the orthodox Christian religion, indeed to Romanism, the "Old Faith," although from no necessity of the historical setting -- less than in Othello and Macbeth, which hardly In Love's Labour's Lost we are made to enjoy the stock ironies of young men's falling in love mention strictly religious considerations, and no more than in Lear, set dramatically in after protesting their immunity, ironies artfully dressed up in ultra-fashionable ideological pre-Christian Britain as Hamlet was traditionally in pre-Christian Scandinavia. garments from the Italian academies, jeered at by the more realistic Biron. The stage 3. And in Antony and Cleopatra, between periods three and four, we see sexual love situation of Biron up the tree, with its mechanical series of exposures, shows the playwright between mature men and women glorified, apparently a last assertion of a personal as already a skilled comic artisan; but in the finale Rosaline's adjuration to the scoffing conviction of the playwright's own mature years which had lost its importance in his heart courtier to "move wild laughter in the throat of death" reveals an urge toward tragic irony and his writings by the time of Cymbe- which is out of place here, although it is perfectly fitting in the characterization of Lear's Fool.

-54- The Henry VI plays need hardly be examined. Their doubtful authorship and undistinguished dialogue and characterization keep their fairly workmanlike ironies of situation from being of much interest. line, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest ( 1610-11). Timon of Athens ( 1607) and Coriolanus ( 1608), too, have an uncertainty, a lack of firmness in their fiercest ironies, which may indicate a weakening of the author's trust in the passionate skepticism which had filled the -56- "dark comedies" and great tragedies of his third period. Richard III may be said to raise the simpler forms and devices of irony to their highest power. Richard at the very beginning tells in soliloquy his intention to rise through the arts of 18 Irony In The Drama hypocrisy; and as a result, almost the whole play is a series of dramatic ironies, episodes in and Shakespeare's demon of observation was beginning urgently to tell him so. In the next which the audience gasps in amazement at his audacities while sympathizing with his dupes. period his great tragic heroes were all to be great gentlemen, even the black Othello and the If there were any clear demarcation between tragic and comic devices, this sort of bloodstained Macbeth, but how differently from this duke's retouched urbanity! Take, for machiavellian knavery, with its resemblance to the primal Greek Eiron, would be necessarily instance, Theseus' fine compassion for stageplayers: comic and Richard's frequent verbal ironies would be as funny to the audience as they are to him. But the general feeling of the play is tragic. The usurper's remorseless, bloody rise to Hippolyta. This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard. power, his arrogant hybris, and his downfall before the finally aroused moral forces of the nation form a tragic pattern derived from the Greeks, a pattern emphasized by a dark feeling of Nemesis brought into this play of Christian England by Shakespeare's alteration of history. Theseus. The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination For he keeps the old Queen Margaret from her grave to utter dark prophecies that we see amend them. come true, one by one. Hip. It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs. King John is to some extent conventional, in some ways transitional. The Hubert-Prince Arthur situation is exploited for a sentimental sort of irony already sketched in Richard III. The irony in the bastard Faulconbridge's attitude toward his parents is stylistically imperfect in its The. If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent expression, but it is of a mature sort and theatrically very fine. men. Here come two noble beasts in, a man and a lion.

Viewing this first period as a whole, uncertainty of dating makes us hesitant about general How much experience of the sufferings of life must this playwright's tragic heroes undergo, to trends. But if we imagine we see a general development toward ironies which are maturer, transmute these kindly, highly civilized ironies into Prospero's compassion for all poor players! more original, and in the broadest sense more humane, it is a movement in the direction of the plays of the second period as we shall see them. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The Second period ( 1595- 1599), assertion of his own standards. Comedies: A Midsummer solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this Night's Dream ( 1595), The Merchant of Venice ( 1596), The Taming of the Shrew insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

-57- In The Merchant of Venice the great courtroom scene of Shylock's hybris and overthrow is written in a combination of comic and tragic techniques, as far as dramatic irony goes; and ( 1596), Much Ado About Nothing ( 1599), As You Like It ( 1599), The Merry Wives of Shakespeare's greater maturity has by this point so permeated our understanding of Shylock Windsor 1599), Twelfth Night ( 1600); histories: Richard II ( 1595), 1 Henry IV ( 1597), 2 with the deeper irony coming from Shakespeare's grasp of social and religious intolerance Henry IV ( 1598); tragedies: Romeo and Juliet ( 1595), Julius Caesar ( 1599). One has only that the audience feels the scene's impact as more tragic than to glance over this list to feel that it offers ironic riches too great for more than the sketchiest treatment of a meager selection of specimens. This and the next period are Shakespeare's greatest in every way, irony included. He has reached artistic maturity, and before he starts -59- down the farther slope he will have gone through the most productive artistic ordeal of passionately thoughtful creation that a dramatist ever underwent. Thoughtful passion, comic. H. Granville-Barker makes a clear point of the exactness in the "boomerang" irony that passionate thought -- if irony is a key to drama, so is this tragi-comic mismating in the house recoils upon Shylock in the courtroom scene. He does not call it philosophical or cosmic irony of the mind a key to irony. by that name, but he does mention "these quibbling ironies" in reference to some of the legalistic details. It is in the great romantic comedies of this second period that we see Shakespeare as the complete, conscious, almost careless master of the technique of his comic art. Look at the The Taming of the Shrew is stock farce in its origin and its general structure. It contains little wonderful, apparently ramshackle architecture of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the ironical irony on levels deeper than those of contrived situation and extravagantly violent character- counterpoint of its whimsically contrasted sets of lovers: Theseus and Hippolyta, the young sketching. Yet I believe Shakespeare realized all along the irony in Petruchio's taming Athenian couples, Oberon and Titania -- and Pyramus and Thisbe! When Hermia and Helena Katherine by violence, and knew that his audience would realize it, too. At the end Lucentio, a and their sweethearts wander confused in the moonlit woods and when the fairy queen dotes minor character, remarks like a chorus, " 'Tis wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so." on Bottom the Weaver in his ass's head, it is as if Shakespeare said to his fellow-playwrights, And Fletcher had evidently the same confidence in his audience when he wrote, a few years "Well, here are things that have been done before. Who'll do 'em better -or as well? " Only, later, A Woman's Prize: or, The Tamer Tam'd, wherein Petruchio, now a widower, is tamed in not being Ben Jonson, he probably did not say it. Duke Theseus, as I have remarked, is his turn by his second bride. interesting as transitional. To make this ideal Renaissance great gentleman, Shakespeare has suppressed the Duke's raffish classical and Renaissance reputation for "loving and leaving" ladies like Ariadne all round the eastern Mediterranean littoral, and has made him perfect in The next comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, ironic in its title, which puns on nothing-noting, is courage, dignity, tact, and courtesy. But the great Elizabethan gentleman was not by any full of delightful ironies: the intrigue which brings together the love-heretics Beatrice and means perfect, Benedick, the recognition irony of Hero's reappearance as Claudio's substitute bride after being supposed dead, the humorous irony in having the wily conspirator Don John upset by the blundering Dogberry and Verges. The only deeper irony that strikes us is a mere flash: -58-

19 Irony In The Drama Benedick. Come, bid me do anything for thee. tricks of Cupid on Viola, Olivia, Orsino, and Sebastian, is adorned too with a window through which we see, irony beyond irony, deep into the heroine's heart. She is disguised as Orsino's page, Cesario, we remember, who has the distasteful duty of wooing Olivia on behalf of her Beatrice. Kill Claudio. master, whom she loves:

As You Like It resembles A Midsummer Night's Dream in that its weakness of plot is cancelled Vio. Good madam, let me see your face. by superb technical skill in other respects. Certainly, as we have noted, it contains, in Rosalind's making Orlando woo her as if she were herself, the most wonderful and delightful of all flourishes beyond the second level of impersonation, even though the idea did come Oh. Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of from the play's non-dramatic source. Here, too, Shakespeare your text, but we will draw the curtain and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was -- this present. Is't not well done? -60- Vio. Excellently done, if God did all. seems to say, "Ne plus ultra." Of somewhat greater interest in his artistic biography might be his playing, in Jaques and his critics, with the literary ethics of satire, a form which he Oli. 'Tis in grain, sir; 'Twill endure wind and weather. approaches here with a squeamish distaste but with some evidence of the fascination which was to lead him to Troilus and Cressida a couple of years later. Vio. [Sincerely]. 'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white Nature's own sweet and cunning band laid on. Lady, you are the cruellest she alive If you will lead these graces to the grave Jaques. Invest me in my motley. Give me leave To speak my mind, and I will through and And leave the world no copy. through Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world. . . . Duke Senior. Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin. For thou thyself hast been a libertine, As sensual as the brutish sting itself; Of the second period histories, Richard II owes much to Marlowe Edward II. In Edward II, And all th' embossed sores and headed evils That thou with license of free foot hast caught Marlowe presented the irony of England's being ruled by a finely courageous giant who was Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world. also loutish, of sub-normal intelligence, and inclined to sodomy. Shakespeare also presents an unfit king, but his Here Shakespeare is at least conscious of the irony in the exiled Duke's discharging at Jaques the scurrilous kind of language for which the satirists Hall, Harvey, Nash, and Marston were -62- becoming notorious. For us there is the additional irony of seeing the playwright hesitating between old Roger Ascham's feeling that an Englishman Italianate was a devil incarnate, and his own railing Thersites, mad Lear, and misanthropic Timon. Richard is a refined, sensitive, sentimental hedonist in a world too harsh and too money- minded for him. So the ironies are more delicate, and Shakespeare can set against Richard another complex personality, Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV, a good man distorted into a Closer to the general spirit, idyllic but mixed, of As You Like It than this harsh comment upon usurper (and in effect a murderer) by the necessities of power politics. This method of bitter satire are the comments of Harold Jenkins, who has caught the spirit of Shakespeare's producing ironies by contrasting characters, giving his hero one or more "foils," becomes romantic comedy very well, both with this play and with Twelfth Night. With little or no use of prominent for a while in Shakespeare's work: Prince Hal of the Henry IV plays has Hotspur as the actual term irony, he nevertheless points out how Shakespeare has put into this play by his chief foil and several lesser foils; Hamlet has Fortinbras, Laertes, and Horatio to reflect as means of paradoxes and "comic juxtaposition at its subtlest" a "criticism of the ideal world young men prominent in his surroundings every facet of the action-contemplation, right in the center of it," that is, of the ideal world itself -- an ironic achievement if there ever reasonpassion themes. L. F. Dean, in Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theater, has was one. collected an impressive series of "play-acting" and other theatrical images from that play. Richard himself is presented as a man charmed by his own performance. There are only two more comedies in this period. The Merry Wives, a relapse into practically pure farce, can be briefly disposed of. The plausible legend that Queen Eliza I have discussed the ironies produced in I Henry IV by Hal and Falstaff's playful fondness for impersonation within impersonation, play-acting within the play itself. Hal mimics Hotspur, -61- too, and Hotspur mimics some unnamed carpetknight from the court who had annoyed him on the battlefield, and the superstitious Welsh gentleman, Glendower. C. L. Barber in his article "Saturnalia in the Henriad" shows himself especially interested in the ritualistic aspects beth insisted on seeing "Falstaff in love" before Shakespeare killed him suggests another of the plays of this group and prominently (somewhat like Dover Wilson) in Falstaff as irony surrounding the whole play, which must have been quite perceptible to the author and scapegoat. He mentions "ironic perceptions," the relationships of tragic and comic irony (for audience -- that of seeing the wonderful fat rascal made a helpless butt throughout, without the scapegoat idea is important in tragic theory, as one of the steps to catharsis), and, recourse to the triumphant wit he had flaunted in the Henry IV plays. somewhat confusingly, "dramatic irony," not in the sense in which I am employing the term.

In Twelfth Night, light as it is, we can perceive the whole great range of ironies possible in the In addition to his important Shakespeare: The Last Phase, Derek Traversi has written a book romantic comedy form. The stock device of the forged letter is employed not only for farcical on the histories and has a thoughtful chapter on Henry V in An Approach to Shakespeare. irony, but also for the display of Malvolio's true -- and incurable -- humour. Sir Andrew is a Here he shows that he perceives clearly the conflicting stresses gull who gets plentiful exposure through Sir Toby's jokes, little as he needs it. The conventional girl-page disguise, interwoven with a wryly humorous exploitation of the ironic 20 Irony In The Drama -63- -65- in the hero-king, pointing out how Hal, now that he is king, needs "self-domination" so Through this second period, then, we have seen Shakespeare moving, whether in comedy, complete that he cannot help its showing cracks in the form of "egoistic passions released by history, or tragedy, toward deeper, more serious ironies based on standards which are the Dauphin's jest" of the tennis balls and in his artificial rhetoric at Harfleur. But he does not becoming, with his maturity, more profoundly felt and more confidently held because of their employ the term ironies or discuss the subtleties of Shakespeare's ironies of kingship versus independent growth out of his personal experience, observation, and thinking. We move on the human condition in this play. now to his third period, that of tragedy and of "dark," satirical comedy and tragi-comedy in the types of plays and that of passionate questioning of his own standards in our interpretation of his artistic development from the standpoint of the ironies in the plays. In For as King Henry V, Hal carries on the serious ironies wherein his father had become this period we have the most deeply ironic conflicts, shattering to heart and mind, between entangled by his usurpation. The real Henry V was a little-eyed, long-nosed, cold-hearted, man and fate, man and society, and man and himself. Quite possibly, at the same time that eminently practical fellow. He had his old crony of tradition, Falstaff's prototype Sir John the conflicts grow more personally intense for the characters, they grow also more generally, Oldcastle, roasted over a slow fire; Shakespeare (if we may be allowed a very common irony, even universally applicable, as war, sex, money, and family, to the common experiences of all that of understatement) merely has him banish Fat Jack from his presence and thus break his men: see Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and in a high sense, heart. The playwright makes us perfectly aware that this is ironic necessity. Spenser's "Letter King Lear. to Ralegh" explaining The Faerie Queene outlines his plan for treating in King Arthur the public moral virtues, differentiated from the private moral virtues displayed in him as prince. That there was a difference was familiar political science to the Elizabethans, with or without Third period ( 1599- 1607), questioning of his own standards. Satirical comedies and tragi- benefit of Machiavelli. This same ironic necessity, that of being a good king, forces Henry V to comedies: Troilus and Cressida ( 1602), All's Well That Ends Well ( 1602?), Measure for doom to death for conspiracy his intimate friends Grey and Cambridge and to lead his country Measure ( 1604); tragedies: Hamlet ( 1601), Othello ( 1604), King Lear ( 1605), Macbeth ( into a war against France on a pretext about which he is cynically skeptical until the Dauphin's 1606), Timon of Athens ( 1607), Antony and Cleopatra ( 1607). Under the relentless pressure gift of tennis balls inflames his passion. Before the battle of Agincourt he feels the whole of Shakespeare's love of truth in human character and conduct, his standards for his world -- ironic weight of the responsibility this necessity lays upon a king's shoulders: standards painfully set by independent experience -- were crumbling now in his later maturity; and it was far more painful to see them crumble than it had been to set them up. Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls, Our debts, our careful wives, Our children and our sins lay on the King! We must bear all. O hard condition, Twin-born with greatness, subject to The comedies of this period appear to be ironic predominantly in a social sense. Not that they the breath Of every fool whose sense no more can feel But his own wringing! What infinite are, in modern terminology, "socially conscious" attacks on the actual social structure of late heart's-ease Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy! Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, but rather

-64- -66-

Having reached this abyss of irony, as deep as one can bear to see into the soul of a hero- that they constitute attacks on the literary idealization of the world's social standards. O. J. king, Shakespeare abandoned the English history play. Campbell has written vigorously on these plays in his Tragi-comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Satire, including Timon of Athens and Coriolanus in his discussions quite reasonably from the satirical point of view. S. L. Bethell ( Shakespeare and the Popular The two tragic plays of the period differ greatly both in theme and in the ironic feelings they Dramatic Tradition) takes a somewhat less secular view of the satire in Troilus and Cressida induce. Both produce tragic ironies through the familiar tragic conventions of fate, chorus, and treats it in the morality-play tradition, as some treat Measure for Measure. He shows the omen prophecy, premonition, and the like, so that by one means or another the audience is characteristic dualisms of the morality, its sharp contrasting of playworld and real world, past aware throughout of tragic doom for the protagonists. But the ironies of starcrossed young and present time, story and philosophy, character as representative and as allegorical. We love are different in feeling -- irony is in part a feeling -- from those of the downfall of Julius should see ironies here, for example in his pointing out that certain incidents in the play are Caesar, in Carlyle's sense one of the world's greatest heroes. The feeling in Romeo and Juliet significant both naturalistically and allegorically. is lyrical; among the chief ironic themes ( Caroline Spurgeon, Leading Motives in the Imagery of Shakespeare's Tragedies, has a stimulating treatment of theme through image) are youth and age, religion and love-intrigue, and the intensity and the brevity of youthful passion. That Troilus and Cressida dissolves the whole literary cult of Homeric and chivalric war in a puddle of Julius Caesar is historical; the themes have to do with the public and the private moral of acid spat out by the railing fool Thersites. Helen and Cressida become shoddy courtesans, virtues, with the character-types seen in statesmen, and with power politics. So the former Patroclus is Achilles' "male whore," Menelaus a common cuckold, Ajax a stupid oaf, and play stems from the type seen in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night; the latter, Ulysses a crafty politician. It is Shakespeare's most bitterly satirical play, and its feeling about from the Henry IV-Henry V development of historical insight into the ironies of public men at war is the irony of utter disgust. The play could be interpreted as satire on satire, character. The central irony of Romeo and Juliet is that the "stars," the tragic bias of events, following out the line of Duke Senior's reproof to Jaques. I shall speak later of envy as its make the general impetuosity of the characters produce, by an eyelash, a tragic outcome to dominant vice. good and promising actions. That of Julius Caesar lies in Brutus's tragic mixture as saintly private stoic and bloody public assassin. Brents Stirling Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The All's Well (we have mentioned it as perhaps transitional) appears to make some attempt to Interplay of Theme and Character points out how in mitigation of this savagery Shakespeare preserve our sympathy for Helena as she chases down a reluctant young man to make him makes Brutus insist on the ritual killing of Caesar as a "ceremonial sacrifice." He keenly notes, her husband and the father of her child. But her Bertram, although seemingly intended to be too, a characteristically subtle Shakespearean touch of ironic burlesque in Antony "mockery" a promising, ingenuous fellow, heart-set on military glory rather than love and misled by false in counterritual." estimates of bad companions like Parolles, comes through to the reader as selfish, sullen, and

21 Irony In The Drama stupid. And the young couple's elders arrange the match with the same kind of eye on their Claud. Ay, but to die and go we know not where; own obligations and disregard of the young To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, . . -67- . . . . 'tis too horrible! people's feelings that in Shakespeare's own world produced plentiful marital trouble, much of The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay which failed to turn out as well as in his play. on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

Northrop Frye in "The Argument of Comedy" ascribes many of the puzzling features of All's Isab. Alas, alas! Claud. Sweet sister, let me live. What sin you do to save a brother's life Well to Shakespeare's fondness for a "second," a "green world" of comedy, a conception Nature dispenses with the deed so far That it becomes a virtue. which "bursts the boundaries of Menandrine comedy." "The normal comic resolution," he declares, "is the surrender of the senex to the hero, never the reverse. Shakespeare tried to Isab. O you beast! reverse the pattern in All's Well That Ends Well, where the King of France forces Bertram to marry Helena, and the critics have not yet stopped making faces over it." In this essay he speaks of other matters of ironic significance: the comic moral paradox, that comedy "finds Here naturalism comes crashing in on romanticism with a vengeance! The scene is great, but the virtues of Malvolio and Angelo as comic as the vices of Shylock"; of comic catharsis and as painful, I think, to ritual; of the ironic fact that "tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy [and] that comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself." And in The Tempest, "Shakespeare endows both [real or waking and dream] worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite -69- to one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other." Thus this critic, too, manages to raise highly important problems in "ironics" (to coin a word), Shakespeare as to us. It took a different kind of ironist, Voltaire, to enjoy himself making the without any prominent mentioning of irony. same point, when he related the story of how a wife sacrificed her honor for her husband's safety three times on one journey. An article by M. C. Bradbrook, "Authority, Truth, and Justice in Measure for Measure", treats the play as a sustained allegory. One might say that R. W. Battenhouse does the same, in his Shakespeare's great tragedies are packed with ironies that would justify a book of "Measure for Measure and the Christian Doctrine of the Atonement." On much the same basis commentary for each play. In Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, Shakespeare does of symbol-inaction (one working definition of allegory), Harold S. Wilson studies this play in something in characterizing his main tragic figures which critics have described as creating a combination with another in Action and Symbol in Measure for Measure and The Tempest. new character greater than the traditional actions the source story requires him to perform. I Pointing out the justice and "grace" (mercy) of the ending of the former play, he declares that do not know, of course, how far the process was conscious with the playwrighti but it seems its purpose is "to bring the proud and erring to repentance." This it does through "sym- to me that Shakespeare, forced by his job to provide his company with at least two plays annually, looked about in print and selected wherever he could find them old stories of "great -68- men" doing shocking but theatrical deeds. His next step was motivated by his genius for poetry, his love of great acting, and his passion for truth of character. He transformed these crude oafs -- the sources show that I am not exaggerating -- Hamlet the cruel and crafty bolic action"; that is, the theme of the play emerges out of the pattern of the action. Wilson Dane, Othello the murderous blackamoor, Lear the senile king of a primitive Britain, Macbeth seems the most irony-conscious of these three critics. the rough and bloody Scot, transformed them by his magic into great Renaissance gentlemen all. "Could a really great man do these things?" If Shakespeare did not ask himself this question in words, he does ask it through these plays; and the appalling answer brought his Measure for Measure strikes a jarring, modernistic harmony of two ironic themes: an age's greatest secular ideal crashing about his head. For his plays say "Yes!" and their easygoing Duke of Vienna appoints a puritanical deputy, who is confronted by the loose audiences believe. What harder, more painful irony can there be than this, that men and morals of the Duke's subjects; and a brother's life is set against his sister's chastity by the women at their highest worldly reach, that conceived in the Renaissance ideal, are capable of deputy's effort to enforce the harsh laws which had been neglected. The Duke's disguise as a such things? In each play, particularly in Macbeth, we suffer with fine human beings who friar to watch the deputy and the struggle of the deputy's conscience against his passion for seem to be in a nightmare of impossible guilt from which, with an agonizing struggle, they Isabella, the sister, are ironical in familiar ways. But a new irony enters serious drama (it had waken -- to find that the blood is real. On the vastest of scales the irony of this been often exploited by clowns) when Claudio demurs at dying for his sister's honor. In disillusionment with civilized humanity is certainly common enough romantic drama, of course he would accede gladly to the sacrifice, and the playwright would know perfectly how to work out the rest of the plot. But here: -70- Isab. What says my brother? today; but I believe that the greatest art brings it out, not in the tragedy of the mass but in the tragedy of a great individual. Claud. Death is a fearful thing.

With Shakespeare's great tragedies critics deal analytically but admiringly in a great variety of Isab. And shamed life a hateful. ways and with a wide range of scope -- all the way from the broadest aesthetic considerations such as Francis Fergusson's "tragic rhythm" of action, which he works out for Oedipus and 22 Irony In The Drama applies to Hamlet in his Idea of a Theater, to a study as minute but logically and practically by the images they use. Hamlet, for instance, because of his strong sense of reality, his usual valuable as Una Ellis-Fermor's comparison of King Claudius' public and private imageries, avoidance of hyperbole and extravagance, and his abrupt changes of mood, needed verbal which I shall speak of again. These critics touch on, hint at, or imply ironies again and again, ironies or "ambiguities" to feed his "antic disposition": quibbles and puns, ambivalent images especially, I think, as they reach out for broader syntheses and more complex harmonies. and parables. "The other characters do not understand him and continue to think he is mad, Granville-Barker's excellent production notes for Lear and Hamlet make beautifully clear a but the audience [this is dramatic irony, of course] can gain an insight into the true situation." modern actor-director-playwright's vision of the possibilities for putting Shakespeare's words And Clemen calls attention in a note to Una Ellis-Fermor's distinguishing between the imagery into action; these potentialities include, naturally, both as means and as effects, a great many of Claudius' public language and that of his private ( The Frontiers of Drama, 1945). This ironies, particularly those of the technical group. The dramatic ironies, for example, are subtle difference is an ironic one, created by Shakespeare's skill to sharpen our sense of the placed where they should be, in the theater. quality of seeming in the character of the usurping king.

A broad sweep is taken in by Arthur Sewell ( Character and Society in Shakespeare) in placing Naturally, Shakespeare as a practical writer continues to be dramatic craftsman as well as the protagonists of the tragedies in varying moral relationships to the social order. In this dramatic poet. The trick of dramatic irony still intensifies situation after situation and is set up light he looks at certain scenes in Lear which I have called powerfully ironic, and he half- by the old devices: disguises, self-exposing soliloquies, forged letters, planned intrigues, and reveals great possibilities for irony when he calls Renaissance tragedy in general the product what not. But the great soliloquies of the chief protagonists no longer, like Richard of of a new scepticism. Its typical hero, he declares, "will not resign himself to confinement in Gloucester's, set up a strictly dramatic irony; this is left for villains like Edmund and Iago. The the secular world, but he has no certitude of status in a world more absolute." If Sewell is soliloquies of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth reach down into the deepest ironies of working out a synthesis through social morality, J. F. Danby Shakespeare's Doctrine of disillusionment. They are almost too familiar to quote. Yet we should, I believe, remind Nature: A Study of King Lear shows by its title its synthesizing intention. Every critic ourselves that the very disillusionment is ironic to the audience. Macbeth muses, more than appreciates the Fool's ironic function, in some terms or other; but Danby's insight is original sadly: when he points out that the Fool's "Unillumined head -- the intellect . . . sees every- I have liv'd long enough. My way of life Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf; And that which -71- should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but in their stead, Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare no thing as a see-saw. . . . He can discern in his cold light the alternatives between which he cannot choose." -73- Robert Heilman ( Magic in the Web: Action and Language in "Othello") attempts to synthesize action and language, as do a number of other contemporary critics, through images. Love as Macbeth, in a way, is just realizing that there is poor reward in kingship bought by the theme of Othello is developed by a system of imagery in which witchcraft serves as a treacherous murder. But the audience has under Shakespeare's guidance felt that way all metaphor for love. Here I sense an approach to the complex relationships of image-symbol- along, has seen Macbeth's own premonitions of the truth, and deeply feels the irony of his metaphor in their revelations of character in action, a matter of great and worthy concern to now perceiving it only when doom is approaching his very threshold with mailed footsteps. modern critics. Complexities of relationship tend to beget ironies: Heilman remarks on some refinements of dramatic irony in Iago's methods. Two more tragedies remain. Timon of Athens is so disputed a play that one dares venture little about Shakespeare's mood when he wrote (or revised) its strange misanthropies. The A somewhat different view of theme, employing different tragedies and emphasizing aesthetic dramatic ironies are conventional to the point of palpable artificiality. If Shakespeare did lay it and technical considerations less, is taken by F. M. Dickey Not Wisely But Too Well: down unfinished, this action may help to mark the transition to his serene fourth period. Shakespeare's Love Tragedies ( 1957). This view is that in Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra "Shakespeare is dramatizing the progress of lovers from Antony and Cleopatra, last of his tragedies, is a very great play, intense in its passions, vast happiness to wretchedness in accordance with the Renaissance view that 'ungovernable in its scope. I have suggested that it may be considered transitional in its ironies, that passion breaks the universal moral order,' " as reported in a review (in Renaissance News, Shakespeare has thrown out Antony's Spring, 1958) by Vernon Hall, who feels that Dickey has gone rather far toward asserting that Shakespeare has taken sides in these discussions of the love theme. I should agree with the reviewer that this moral doctrine is merely one of the sides taken in the theme's dramatized Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space! treatments, and I think this partly because, much as it is difference of opinion that makes horse races, it is dramatic discussion of themes without resolving them that makes effective irony in the theater. as a final assertion of the supremacy of passionate love, just before turning to the calmer domestic ideals of his dramatic romances. Please do not take me to mean that Shakespeare was renouncing sex. He was forty-two or -three. But there appears in his work about 1607 or Returning to the critics' approach through imagery, we find in W. H. Clemen The Development 1608 a shift in emphasis. The ironic themes change. Certainly that of Antony and Cleopatra is of Shakespeare's Imagery some valuable demonstrations that Shakespeare could make his love versus empire. In his last writing years he uses nothing of the sort again. But that a characters reveal their innermost natures to his audiences and to us through the hints and transitional lookingforward to the ironic harmonies of compassion of such late plays as The suggestions afforded Tempest may be present is suggested to me by Mark Van Doren's beautiful essay, "Antony and Cleopatra," in his Shakespeare ( 1939). Blended with Van Doren's fine extended poetic figure of wateriness, of the Mediterranean world with its range and its light, are the -72- observations that Antony and Cleopatra live "in the full light of accepted illu-

23 Irony In The Drama -74- The romantic tragi-comedies or dramatic romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, may show some technical influences of the new dramatic type launched by Beaumont and Fletcher in Philaster about 1608. In spirit, however, in the mellow, resigned, sion, "comfortable in "the humorous knowledge they have of each other." There is banter tolerant, and compassionate tone of their ironies, they make an impression quite foreign to "from a queen who is herself a consummate actress, and she knows Antony knows it." that given by Beaumont or Fletcher, fitting

When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies. ( -76- Sonnet138)

instead very closely the general development of Shakespeare the ironic artist as I have been "Each knows the other to be a liar, and ultimately does not care if this is so." outlining it.

The holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. As mentioned in the introduction, modern' Shakespeare critics have been focussing especially on the last plays, wisely seeing in their wonderfully harmonized complexities of theme, "Her greatness cannot be distinguished from her littleness, as water may not be defined in character, action, and poetic speech their opportunity to bring out clearly (usually through water." detailed analysis) a critical synthesis of their own. And we remarked also that these efforts fit quite well with our concept of Shakespeare's ironies as developing through his career until at the end they have broadened into a compassionate, all-inclusively harmonized view of man, Fourth period ( 1608- 1613), Shakespeare's self-reconciliation to those standards which he nature, and spirit expressed through an art now almost perfectly harmonious and in the can still hold. Comedies (dramatic romances): Pericles ( 1608), Cymbeline ( 1610), The highest sense ironic. Winter's Tale ( 1611), The Tempest( 1611); history: Henry VIII ( 1613); tragedy: Coriolanus ( 1608). I should like first to dispose of Coriolanus and Henry VIII. Neither is typical of this final period, which is concentrated more narrowly than any of the others upon romantic tragi- We just now saw G. W. Knight stressing the harmony and the inclusion, in Henry VIII, of comedies. Coriolanus, a Roman tragedy, belongs in the tone of its ironies to the third period. man's making peace with himself and with God. Writing about The Winter's Tale (in The Whatever is left after Troilus of respect for political man is dissolved in this play's complete Crown of Life) he touches impressively on the harmonizing of comedy and tragedy there: disillusionment about the plebeian and the aristocrat alike. More clearly than any other tragic concerning the scene in which Hermione's statue comes to life he says, "Nor is it just a hero, Coriolanus suffers from the faults of his virtues and is torn down by his own strength. reversal of tragedy; rather tragedy is contained, assimilated, transmuted; every phase of the Love of self and of class fights love of family and of country; the battle wavers, and the resurrection scene is soaked in tragic feeling, and the accompanying joy less an antithesis to outcome is disaster. sorrow than its final flowering." So too does Theodore Spencer place emphasis on harmonies and inclusions in The Tempest (Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 1942). He speaks of a synthesis I call one of the highest of ironies, "the three levels in Nature's hierarchy -- the In Shakespeare's Satire ( 1943) O. J. Campbell calls Coriolanus, after Timon of Athens, animal, the human, and the intellectual -- which are the bases of Shakespeare's view of Shakespeare's second and more successful tragical satire. "Full of the spirit of derision," the man." Then he goes on in praise of the last great harmony: "At the heart of The Tempest "play is crowded with satirical commentators" such as the pungent Menenius. Campbell there is an incantation which accepts things as they are, a tone which has forgotten tragedy, stresses the ironic indignity of the conqueror's "quailing" before his mother. "Derision," an order melted at the edges into a new unity of acceptance and wonder. . . . But the literal reality is there just the same, in a garland of flowers, in a harmony of music, as the basis for -75- the acceptance and the wonder." he remarks, "unless associated with moral indignation, does not easily awaken aesthetic -77- pleasure." I think this may be because derision is a destructive jeering at the dignity necessary to true tragic effect. G. W. Knight and Derek Traversi ( The Crown of Life by the former; Shakespeare: The Last Phase, 1953, by the latter) make the most detailed efforts at synthesis. Each of the books Henry VIII was written by Shakespeare (and Fletcher, I, believe) to celebrate the marriage of contains a long chapter on The Winter's Tale, and the treatments are very similar, being Princess Elizabeth. A historical play, rather standard in most of its technical devices, it may largely eclectic critical comments on the play, almost line by line. I have quoted Knight on the reveal in its treatment of Wolsey's downfall more of Shakespeare's final reconcilement with "resurrection scene." Let me quote Traversi on the play as a whole: "Behind the repeated religion than most modern critics have cared to notice. In The Crown of Life: Essays in stress laid on the fact that we are following a fable, a 'tale' not subject to the normal laws of Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays ( 1947), however, G. Wilson Knight gives his last probability, lies a consistent desire to make this action, this fable, the instrument of a chapter to Henry VIII and the Poetry of Conversion." This is an interesting blend of prosodic harmonious reading of human experience." How well this phrases what we have been trying controversy and spiritual character interpretation: the controversy appears in his assertion to say! But I should not fail to repeat once more that I consider irony at its highest to be a that the "Fletcherian" pathetic style in certain speeches with a marked combination of end- harmonizing of the apparent discords of life. stopped lines and feminine endings is not Fletcher's, but represents Shakespeare's "falling style." This leads to the spiritually repentant character. "When the speaker's cause is lost and But, as suggested before, perhaps this modern synthesizing interpretation of Shakespeare's he is severed from all worldly ambition, the run-on ceases, the lines are simple, falling units last plays is summed up best by a critic whose central interest was religious, S. L. Bethell, in with a delicate but reiterated stress on personal pronouns in collaboration with feminine The Winter's Tale: A Study ( 19321947). endings. It is . . . the speech of lonely souls, of persons rejected, thrown back on themselves . . . . Though a bitter self-concentration may be involved, it is most naturally used for the language of renunciation and acceptance." 24 Irony In The Drama The happy ending depends as much on Hermione's self-denial as on Perdita's self-fulfilment, same time that he is being both. We know that when he wrote The Tempest Shakespeare had and both are overruled by an oracular Providence which directs their lives. The love theme been reading Montaigne, because he has his characters paraphrase part of one of that thus reflects the more general synthesis of humanism and asceticism we have already ironist's essays. I think that about the same time he must have run across one of the tolerant considered. Natural and supernatural, humanism and asceticism, the life-affirming and the French skeptic's wisest statements: "My conscience is at ease; not as the conscience of a life-denying, are seen to be mutually necessary and interdependent in a world where sin horse, nor as that of an angel, but as the conscience of a man." interferes with the pattern of natural goodness, and grace must redintegrate our fallen nature. The medieval tension has become a synthesis and the implications of the Thomist The Tempest may not be an allegory. Like S. L. Bethell, I prefer to take it as one, although philosophy have been worked out in the concrete detail of human life. In psychology, the life not merely as one. Prospero may not speak Shakespeare's valedictory as an artist. I prefer to of the senses and the life of the spirit; in devotion, affirmation and denial of the flesh and the read his lines so. Ariel and Caliban may not allegorize this angel-beast paradox. I think they world; in society, a balance of the natural agrarian life and the graces of courtly civility which at least illuminate it. Ariel is all spirit (though not quite angel, for he has a streak of Lucifer's are nature too; in the broad sweep of religious thought, the natural order and the independence), and he lacks the earthy warmth to make him man. Caliban is all flesh (or is it supernatural, time and eternity; these are not alternatives but mutually necessary, and their fish?) except a touch of wistful poetry like that we imagine into a dog's eyes, and lacks the bit integration brings a foretaste of heaven into the life of earth. This is a statement in thin of spirit to raise him to man's level from the beast's. Yet from these ingredients here abstraction of what seems to be Shakespeare's poetic vision in separated into Ariel and Caliban, Shakespeare has made his men and women, as from them, if we were only Shakespeares, we could make living characters, too. -78- Ariel. Your charm so strongly works 'em That if you now beheld them, your affections Would The Winter's Tale. I think it is not too much to claim that the play represents an important become tender. moment in the history of Christian civilisation. Prospero. Dost think so, spirit? Shakespeare's ironies now, in these final plays, are consolatory. Marina, heroine of Pericles, saved unspotted from the brothel in a recognition-reconciliation of far wanderers, brings us -80- home after many years to the spirit of the frameworkstory Shakespeare placed about The Comedy of Errors. In The Winter's Tale Hermione and Perdita and in Cymbeline Imogen are brought back to loving arms after unjust accusations and perilous voyages. Prospero's magic Ari. Mine would, sir, were I human. storm brings about not only his restoration to his dukedom, but the marriage of his daughter Miranda and his own reconciliation with his brother. "All losses are restored and sorrows end." Pros. And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd The ironies, compared to those of other periods, seem middle-aged, parental. Shakespeare than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th' quick, Yet with my nobler has seen too much ever to be sentimental about willful fools and vicious rascals; but he reason 'gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They seems to smile tenderly at those of his characters who are halfway worthy of it, as a father being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. pities his children. He makes us love his young heroines, Marina, Perdita, Imogen, and Miranda, as if they were our daughters, as in less degree he makes us look on Mammillius, Florizel, Guidarius, Arviragus, and Ferdinand, as sons. We see that they are but froward -81- children, and we feel that we love them nevertheless. This is the maturest irony, and we may grow up to it with Shakespeare and life t ripen us. Chapter VI In these dramatic romances all seems relaxed and easy. Shakespeare seems careless about THE CATHARTIC PROCESS, SHOCK, AND the opening exposition of The Winter's Tale, and so slipshod with the denouement of Cymbeline that one cannot blame Shaw for tightening it up. For his dramatic irony this skilled CLASSICAL TRAGEDY playwright who in As You Like It had shown obvious delight in his own technical fireworks now falls back on the devices he had adopted in his earliest plays from the unfashionably popular romances. And his plays' general structure may be strictly unified ( The Tempest I propose to deal next with a much narrower field of dramatic aesthetics than the very inclusive one of ironic impersonation which I have been treating up to this point, the concepts of catharsis and shock. To remind the reader how these phenomena can be relevant to an -79- essay on the Muse of Irony, the outline of ironies in the introduction has three main categories: (I) Device or technical ironies, (II) Philosophical or cosmic ironies, and (III) pest) or laxly rambling and subversive of all classical standards ( Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Psychological or subconscious ironies. Catharsis, as I intend to show, is part of this third and Cymbeline); either method, he seems to murmur carelessly, is equally easy for him. And group, along with such steps toward producing in the spectator the psychological state called sometimes he sings like a bird, in pure effortlessness. catharsis as hypnosis, hybris, empathy, and (of special importance and hitherto unrecognized in this function) shock.

Shakespeare has now made his peace with God and man. He has accepted his universe and has succeeded in finding detachment from even that most torturing ironic paradox, that man So this study enters the debated ground of catharsis, both tragic catharsis and (more is both beast and angel -- or rather, he has humanized the paradox by discovering in it the uncertainly, of course) catharsis traced through its gradations in tragi-comedy, serious ironic harmony which makes it possible to live with it: man is neither beast nor angel at the drama, and satirical comedy into comedy itself. And within this study of catharsis my aim is at 25 Irony In The Drama the explanation of a quite specific phenomenon, that of shock, as an ironic part of the process more generally accepted and clearly understood. Whatever I can establish to my own whereby the playwright leads up to the ironically experienced cathartic paradox. satisfaction for tragedy I shall then try to fit, with alterations as needful, to comedy.

The reader will hear about shocking things -- rape, murder, torture, rivers of blood, lecheries Almost intolerably much has been written about Aristotle's pioneering phrase -- not only the and perversions of most sorts, brutal coarseness, filth, rotting corpses, and loathsome meaning of his Greek words but also that of the modern words of the standard translations. If diseases -- specimens of all the vices, sins, pangs, and disgusts that flesh is heir to. Why? I feel impelled to add here the ultimate or penultimate straw to the load of commentary, it is Because these are, in one aspect or another, simply to call attention to the ironic nature of the psychological state which Aristotle's words describe, in order to determine the function of ironic shock in a dramatist's production of that state in his audience. -82-

I consider Aristotles catharsis to be the audience's pouring out at the end of the play its present in all great plays, from highest tragedy to lightest comedy. It is highly ironical that accumulated emotions. These have been induced and cultivated by the dramatist throughout they should be present at all in these works of acknowledged art, to say nothing of their being the play, while at the same time the audience has been brought omnipresent. I hope to explain tragic horrors and comic bawdry, within my general framework, as shock devices ironic in themselves and productive of the drama's most important ironies through drama's special ironic means, impersonation. -84-

True, the opinion has always been prevalent that shocking elements are written into plays by to a sympathetic identification with the hero, an "empathy." In the audience, purged by the venal dramatists with the eager connivance of mercenary actors in order to pander for money pouring out of its emotions along with the hero's ebbing life, the final state is one of to the basest desires of audiences. If this is true, tragedy is morally little better than a gory detached, ironic recognition, both intellectual and emotional, of a heart-shaking paradox -- spectacle in a Roman amphitheater, or comedy than an obscene show in a bawdy-house. the hero's defeat and death felt as simultaneously and equally true with his immortal victory. Moralists writing against the theater have indeed made just this accusation, and the tendency of the unregenerate has been to admit it ruefully while continuing to produce and enjoy plays. I interpret the presence of shocking elements as the tragic dramatist's application of a special But all loving critics of the dramatic art deny it vehemently as a general charge. We believe ironic device to produce the accumulation of emotional tensions I have mentioned. By that all great drama is basically moral, that it means intensely and means good, that it offending the moral feelings and at the same time appealing by suggestion to the repressed reveals man to himself in order to elevate him. desires, shocks are in themselves ironically contradictory in their immediate effects. Also and perhaps more significantly they increase the range of the audience's emotions and the depth I hold that if all great drama contains shocking things, and I believe we must recognize that it in the conscious and unconscious levels of being to which they are felt, and they make does, then they must be present not to pander to our appetites and titillate our perversities possible the audience's identification with the hero on all levels, not merely the conscious one. but for some artistic purpose; and it is that purpose which I shall try to make clear. Thus ironic shocks aid greatly in the preparation for catharsis.

So far I have been making particular use of Shakespeare's plays to show how much a great Impersonation, too, assists in many ways. Although identification with the hero and therefore master of playwriting relies on irony, how wide is the range and variety of the ironic devices some degree of cathartic experience can exist in non-dramatic literary works telling tragic that he employs, and how broad too the range of ironic perceptions and feelings he induces stories, this identification is greatly furthered in drama by the visible and audible presence of thereby; also, incidentally but importantly, how closely tied is all this artistry to the essential the actor and also by the ironic detachment we have seen to be inherent in theatrical dramatic art of impersonation, to the inherent irony in acting. Meanwhile I have said but little productions by reason of the audience's feeling that this is a play, that the characters are about Shakespeare's arrange- being impersonated by actors who are at the same time both themselves and not themselves.

-83- In tragedy we shall see the dramatist leading up to catharsis by a series of steps (for convenience I reckon them as nine in number), among which shock is a highly important one. Tragic shocks, generally called "horrors," build up tension by stirring up the audience's ment of ironies for the building up of tensions, for the contrivance of suspense to lead toward emotions, conscious and unconscious, and by stimulating antagonisms among these feelings. whatever he intends to be the psychological state of his audience at the conclusion of any In tragedy only a minor part of this tension is discharged before the climax by "comic relief" given play. So I should take up next those ideas which we derive from Aristotle concerning (and also by something we might call "pathe- the nature of that final state for the spectators of tragedy, and proceed from catharsis to the steps to catharsis and the position of shock as a very important step. -85- Aristotle observed an ultimate psychological reaction in the Athenian audiences of tragedies. He called it catharsis, saying that through pity and fear, tragedy, as he observed it, effected a tic relief"), producing partial intermediate relaxation of the emotions through laughter or purging of these and similar emotions. Aristotle never lectured on comedy; or if he did his tears. In the end, at a point of very high tension, the tragic catharsis carries irony to a level opinions are represented badly if at all by the fragment Lane Cooper edits with admirable above this earth, a level at which the purged spectator perceives the greatest of paradoxes, critical caution in An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy. In spite of doubts about the fragment, that death can be swallowed up in victory. Cooper suggests, as have other critics, that something like catharsis may happen to comedy audiences too. I shall try, therefore, to apply the principles of ironic impersonation to both In comedy the steps taken by the dramatist toward a more doubtful catharsis seem less clear tragedy and comedy, but to tragedy first because the concept of tragic catharsis is by far the in both nature and number. Shock, however, is certainly one of them. In comedy it is often 26 Irony In The Drama called bawdry. But in comedy the shocks appear to build up less tension than in tragedy, first betterment, physical and mental, and even in the physical analogue, spiritual, since physical because they strike the audience more on the conscious level and hence stir the unconscious purgatives were employed by the Greeks as part of the purification for certain religious rites. emotions less deeply, and second because the techniques of comedy make for more frequent Similarly, we tend to visualize psychoanalytic therapy as opening a sort of manhole cover into and complete relief through more copious and violent laughter and weeping. Some sort of the patient's subconscious mind, to relieve him by dredging out matters more repulsively comic catharsis in all probability does take place; but it is less impressive and definable than shocking than any mere sewage could be. tragic catharsis for several reasons. Less emotional tension has been built up and held. The unconscious has been less deeply stirred. And the resolution felt by the audience takes place In fact, we modern students of the drama who wish to understand better what catharsis is, on a lower moral level, since the justice of comedy is dispensed in and for this mundane life. how it works, and how dramatists obtain it, quite naturally call to our aid the familiar ideas of The comic catharsis seems less ironic, too. There is some irony in seeing the villain's plans psychologists and anthropologists of our own age: Freud for the repressed unconscious, Jung overturned and the hero rewarded for his struggles, and more complex ironies are possible to for the tragic hero as empathic symbol, Frazer for the hero-villain as scapegoat. the conclusions of satirical plays. But there is nothing so inevitably ironic here as the great paradox of the tragic catharsis. A tragedy is an artistic unit. Its end is foreseen by its author from the beginning. It follows that the tragic process which culminates in catharsis must be a spiritual, therapeutic The tragic catharsis seems to be ironic per se. However we look at it, it is an ironic state treatment which begins at the curtain's rise, proceeds through numerous steps or stages that arrived at through a process involving a series of ironic states. When we feel at the end of a have never met with orderly analysis outside the creative process itself and lack as yet a great tragedy this purgation of pity and terror through these same emotions of pity and terror complete nomenclature, and ends (although its results do not) only with the curtain's ultimate we must be in a final state of ironic semi-detachment wherein these emotions, although still fall. vibrating, have passed through us to leave a sense of elevation and purification, simultaneously with a heightening A reconnaissance suggests that the chief steps in this process may be somewhat as follows: -86- First, the concentration of the audience's attention, the rhythms of prose and poetry in the actors' speech, the music, the lights, the calculated groupings, poses, and movements, begin consciousness that we are, no matter how close an identification our empathy with the hero their work of partial group-hypnosis upon the audience -suggesting, as Freud says, eine has reached, yet in the theater and soon to issue from it into our common streets and lives. Verlockungsprämie, a forepleasure. J. I. M. Stewart in his Character and Motive in Hence tragic catharsis may be called the climax of dramatic irony. Shakespeare ( 1949) enlarges interestingly on this possibility, asserting that this fore- pleasure Only that simultaneous, harmonizing perception of incongruities called irony can explain the state in which an audience is able to experience, as the single deeply satisfying emotion -88- called catharsis, such a mixture of feelings as we have when some fine actor has whispered, "The rest is silence"; our pity for the sweet murdered Prince is mingled with the terror of the violence barely over, our vision of his savage killings is not quite erased by that of flights of induces us to abandon our normal and socially controlled manner of taking experiences, in angels bearing him to his rest, and we honor poet and impersonator while we are still being favour of ways more satisfying to our deeper selves. When the drug works we are seduced shaken by the passionate reality of the joint product of their arts. into admitting to our view numerous ulterior significances of human action and human fantasy which the requirements of our culture constrain us normally to obscure; and this momentary glimpse and acknowledgment of life's hidden face has a resolving or composing or In time, as we feel time, pity, terror, and purgation co-exist at such a moment, not one by releasing effect -- the catharsis of Aristotle -- of which the sign is a pleasure far greater than one, but all three together. Have we been brought to this ironic state where they are that proceeding from mere aesthetic delectation. combined by going through a process during which we have felt pity and terror separately and without as yet the sense of purgation? Apparently. Emotions such as pity and fear are not, taken by themselves in life, necessarily ironic; but emotions felt in the theater are But Mr. Stewart has gone a little rapidly here. We should note several intermediate steps necessarily so, as I have explained. So it seems that in catharsis we have a series of leading up to catharsis, although we must keep in mind that these steps are not clearly shocking, or at least disturbing, ironic emotions leading up to an ironic fusion called purgation successive, but overlap intricately and merely seem to come to the forefront in approximately which is not disturbed, but serene. this usual order.

It is significant that Aristotle fell back on figurative language in his speculative description of Second, then, comes the introduction of the hero. We are made to feel that he is worthy of this psychological process. We shall not condemn him for this, or distrust him as unscientific, our concern, of our increasing identification or empathy, by various devices which establish if we realize that the Freudian and Jungian terms we use so commonly (levels of his "magnitude" -- physical, mental, moral, social, political, and so on. consciousness, complex, censor, repression) are also figures or metaphors to describe the intangible. As a Greek, Aristotle with naïve frankness compared the tragic purification of the soul to the results of taking a Third, as soon as the hero is well introduced, we are made to hear a suggestive tolling of the bells of doom. The earliest strands of action may be in themselves ominous or may be rendered so by imagery. The Duchess of Malfi, just after her departing brothers have blackly -87- warned her against remarriage, calls in her major-domo to propose to him. She can think of nothing for him to write down but her will, and woos him by protesting, dose of salts. He was evidently thinking of analogies in both the process (an ingestion, a churning, and a riddance of undesirable matter) and the result, a general feeling of 27 Irony In The Drama This is flesh and blood, sir; It is strictly materialistic tragedy that may be proved impossible by a logic based on the 'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster necessity of catharsis. Kneels at my husband's tomb. And thus, ninth and finally, is completed the purgation, through pity and terror, of these and And her maid Cariola gazes soberly after them, as after their secret marriage they go other like emotions in the audience, the last step in the play-long process of catharsis, and together into the bedchamber, and muses, the step toward which each of the preceding eight (or whatever the number may actually be) has been pointed. And this catharsis is, as we have been coming to realize, a state of high irony -- in fact the highest of ironies, that of purification through compassion. Whether the spirit of greatness or of woman Reign most in her, I know not; but it shows A fearful madness. I owe her much of pity. Our age's pervasive Freudianism has obviously affected this attempt to name and make clear the steps leading up to Aristotle's catharsis. Now it impels the modern reader to ask, "How far does this process resemble psychoanalysis?" "Does . . . this driving of shafts, as it were, deep -89- into the mind," Mr. Stewart inquires, "constitute the cathartic function of drama; and is the growth of such a science as Freud's, therefore, a function of the atrophy of such great public Fourth, action and struggle, building up toward the turning point, intensify greatly our taking arts as Shakespeare's?" In another place he declares, of sides with the hero in the violent, passionate game against whatever or whoever his antagonist may be. -91-

Fifth, shocks to our sense of order, decency, and decorum, produced by visible "horrors" or The work of art -- and typically a tragedy -- is thus analytical, and the clarification it effects through imagery, stir us to emotional depths far beneath the everyday level of the conscious allows of something the same sort of beneficial emotional discharge as should occur in the mind. It is these shocks, delivered with the aid of impersonation and strikingly ironic in both course of analytic therapy. their nature and their effects, which will be my major interest in the next few chapters.

I should reply to such questions and suggestions that there are, certainly, strong Sixth, at a point just before the final catastrophic downturn of the hero's fortunes, a fallacious resemblances between the two processes: both are psychological purifications, obtained by brightening of his hopes expressed in some sort of fate-provoking hybris strikes us with great means of hypnotic, associative, and finally identificative experiences which delve into the ironic force, for here the playwright blinds his hero to what the audience sees, that it is deeper emotions of the subconscious mind. And I must admit honestly that I cannot say hybris. And its effect on us is subconscious, arrived at through reminding us of our repressed exactly how far they are parallel processes, because both therapies are, for different reasons, superstitions. Whatever we moderns believe about fate, we feel uneasy at seeing it defied. rather vague to me, although not so vague that I fail to perceive some differences too. Purgation by drama appears to differ from therapy by analysis in being a group experience, in Seventh, the hero has by now (and probably not completely until now) become what Jung objectively probing first into the stage character, and in being kept on the aesthetic level by calls a symbol, Fraser a scapegoat, to the audience -- that is, a human figure upon whom we the theatrical device of ironic impersonation. It seems to differ, by varying amounts, in are able to load our emotions, from our loftiest to our lowest, our hopes and our sins, through purpose, means, sensations experienced, and results (not to mention expense). My such a deep and complete emotional identification that he can carry them away with him into conclusion, for the present, is that the parallel is interesting, certainly helpful to the drama heaven or the wilderness and so free us of the burden and the tension of keeping them for student at some points, but too imperfect to be made practically useful by trying to apply ourselves. This empathic identification is not in itself irony but becomes, combined with other closely the details of one technique to those of the other. feelings, a part of the ironic state, catharsis. Empathy is chiefly an approaching, irony a distanced harmonizing of the opposities, embracing at the same time both an approaching Another psychological process reasonably analogous to catharsis is the religious one of and a recoiling. confession, repentance, restitution, penance, and absolution. This process of the soul, worked out upon the stage in the hero and passed through empathically by the audience, may have Eighth, then, is the hero's death. Ironically, he wins and loses; but the finality of death is made its mark on the Christian tragedy of the Renaissance as well as on the drama of the immensely important to the elevation of the symbol or the eviction of the scapegoat, and Middle Ages. It can still be traced in some modern plays and perhaps even in Greek tragedy, for the Greeks shared with other ancient peoples some knowledge of it as a religious therapy. In the theater, sin and crime uncovered on the stage shock the members of the audience -90- when their sympathy makes them discover similar sin and crime in their own secret hearts. hence to the final effect of tragedy. By an ironic paradox this finality is not utterly final. The -92- audience feels that the hero's being goes on, after his death, in some purified form; and this feeling parallels the audience's about itself, that its life goes on, but purified by the tragedy it has witnessed and shared. No tragedy, I think, can exist that destroys identification with the I believe there is value, how much I am unable to say, in this analogy too. hero's fate by making the audience feel that his end means annihilation. And therefore I feel that it is an error to assert, as some do, that Christian tragedy is impossible. To me, Hamlet However, a much simpler analogy may be helpful at this point -- simpler than Mr. Stewart's and Doctor Faustus are both Christian tragedies, while no tragedy, Christian or not, which Freudian analysis, less offensive to modern taste than Aristotle's purge of the bowels, and utterly denies either an after-life or at least some resolution involving eternal, non-secular more universally applicable to world tragedy than confession-absolution. I take down from the values seems to me capable of producing catharsis, according to my conception of catharsis. shelf a bottle of some liquid mixture that has been standing forgotten until it has divided into

28 Irony In The Drama two levels, a precipitated sediment at the bottom, a clear fluid on top. I wish to pour it out thoroughness of the preliminary release of the subconscious from repression. A play which and have the bottle left empty. What do I do? Why, of course, I shake the bottle until lower produces in its audience feeling merely on the conscious, rational level cannot be expected to sediment and upper fluid are completely mixed into a uniform turbidity, then pour, and the produce any cathartic effect whatever -- Shaw, with his theory of passionate ratiocination, whole contents run out cleanly. notwithstanding.

The bottle with its contents represents, of course, the psyche of any member of the audience. I most assuredly do not wish to belabor this point by compiling an anthology of horrors from The clear fluid above is his conscious mind, the sediment below is his unconscious. The great tragedy; yet I cannot in critical fairness merely assert that great tragedy consistently tragedy he witnesses, through some part of the step-by-step process here sketched, makes use of them. But before we set down a few of the facts that suggest the universality of somehow manages to shake up the spectator emotionally until he becomes an intense (but the practice among successful tragic playwrights, let us remember once more that in the still theatrically ironic) participator, his unconscious thoroughly mingled with his conscious theater these grim and disgusting aspects of life are drawn a little apart from the audience's mind. The tilting down of the bottle corresponds to the downfall of the hero, with whose assessment of reality, are set in the drama's characteristic framework of ironic impersonation psyche that of the audience has become symbolically identified; and the pouring out of the by actors and ironic perception by spectators, thus giving the mitigating sense that all is "a hero's life gives the audience its sense of an emotional and spiritual "clean sweep." play."

What shock methods are used by tragic playwrights to shake up the unconscious? And why "In show bu-business," said the stuttering manager, "nothing succeeds like su-sex." He stir it up, unless to prepare the audience for purgation? Has it been a general practice in great probably didn't go on to say, "Because the theater depends on arousing the customers' tragedy (the only tragedy to which we commonly allow cathartic effect) down through the emotions, and sex is the royal road to doing that." But he doubtless knew it. The theater has ages? Can we observe anything definite about its special techniques? always obviously known it, from Aeschylus and Aristophanes through Shakespeare, Moliére, Congreve, and Goethe, to Bernard Shaw and Tennessee Williams. Freud and Jung described and analyzed partly by using the Greek, the Elizabethan, and the German dramatists' "Why," asks any squeamish beginning reader -- and young students are often very proper -- characters as case histories; and they gave us a literary vocabulary of sex, which terms we "does this tragedy by this renowned playwright go out of its way to lug in disgusting use today. But the Greeks had words for most of these things; medieval moralists classified human sins and vices carefully and elaborately; and the Renaissance psychologist Robert -93- Burton had, through his Anatomy of Melancholy, an influence on the dramatist John Ford very similar to Sigmund Freud's on Eugene O'Neill Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra. Dramatists have always known somehow, if only by their specially developed horrors -- filth, cruelty, perversion, savage bloodshed, corpses, and incest?" I am rather ashamed that I have heard this question answered by teachers I respected (and by me, too, before I began to try to think the thing out) somewhat like this: "Maxwell Anderson did it -95- because he studied the Elizabethans to find out how they wrote tragedy. The Elizabethans did it because they modelled their tragedies on Seneca, the Roman, who modelled his on the sympathy with the ordinary human heart, the potency of sexual suggestion in the theater. Greeks. The Greeks did it because their tragedy originated in religious representations of the Greek myths, which were primitively bloody, sexy, and dirty." Very strong in great world tragedy, strong enough for many dramatic purposes, the great moving force which is present as young love in Romeo and Juliet and as late love in Antony My sense of shame for this answer is caused by my feeling that it is mechanical; it disregards and Cleopatra is straightforward physical desire between man and woman, the passion we art. Great tragedy is great art; and great artists, although they often follow conventions, do make sound Freudianly exotic and a little nasty by calling it "normal heterosexuality." not accept them unless they can feel their artistic validity. I cannot believe that tragic horrors Suggested on the stage, even these normal passions can disturb profoundly the unconscious have survived without an enduring recognition of their artistic value, creatively expressed as feelings of the audience, because normally the feelings are conventionally repressed. How a feeling on the part of the playwrights (perhaps unconscious and certainly not clearly much more shocking, churning, releasing effect must there be when the playwright, through formulated, I grant) that they have an important artistic function. his actors, suggests the abnormalities, the perversions of sex? Psychologists say that these are present in plentiful variety in everyone's unconscious. There they are, waiting to be The reader must be quite aware by now that I am advancing a sort of neo-Aristotelian roused from off the fiery lake in the nether regions of the spirit, not to be approached without explanation of catharsis, a combination of ancient and modern psychology which makes this agonies of the mind. Yet each in turn of the great tragic dramatists has assertion: the purgation produced by certain great plays is accomplished by first getting the audience into an emotional state which unlocks the repressions and mingles the ordinarily Nathless. . . so endured, 'till on the beach suppressed unconscious feelings with the conscious ones before they can be purged by the Of that inflamed sea he stood, and called death of a hero upon whom they have been conferred by the process which has made him . . . so loud that all the hollow deep into a symbol. Of Hell resounded.

A secondary assertion goes with this, pertaining also to my venture in a later chapter into a Just to mention a few perverted-sex aspects in the tragedies of Shakespeare, Titus study of catharsis in comedy: the catharses of different types of plays may differ in degree, Andronicus displays sadistic mutilation and cannibalism (necrophagy), Romeo and Juliet, but this is probably a matter of completeness of emotional purgation, and completeness of necrophily, Hamlet, incest, Macbeth, blood-lust and the desire for unsexing (castration purgation depends on the complex), Othello, sadi-masochistic complexes of the rape-murder sort, and King Lear, nymphomania, exhibitionism, and enough suggestions of variegated physical torment for an -94-

29 Irony In The Drama orgy of sadism and masochism. As Caroline Spurgeon says in Shakespeare's Imagery and In the first chorus of Agamemnon Aeschylus deftly sets the blood-and-sex image of eagles What It Tells Us: tearing a pregnant hare. Clytemnestra soon brings in the theme again, together with dramatic irony, declaring to Chorus and Herald, . . . we are conscious all through of the atmosphere of buffeting, strain and strife, and, at moments, of bodily tension to the point of agony Pleasure with man beside, or rumoured shame No more I know than -- how to dye a sword. -96- Then Cassandra, bearing her ironic gift of prophecy, enters with Agamemnon, who treads the purple proudly to his death within, leaving her to give, in a frenzy of second-sight, a mad, . . . of a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, horror-filled description of the murder going on behind the palace doors, a description packed scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack. with such images as shambles, blood-reeking hall, blood-trail, butchered children's roasted flesh. She seems to see the Thyestean children sitting on the palace roof, In Timon of Athens we find prostitution; in Coriolanus, as in Macbeth, the blood-lust of battle. In Julius Caesar Portia's self-wounding to prove her constancy and her chosen form of suicide Grasping their hearts, their entrails, full in view, suggest sexual self-mutilation impulses. Antony and Cleopatra, Freudians would say, is a Most piteous load, which their own father ate. classic example of obsessive sexual fixation (and, I would add, Shakespeare appears to suggest that the great lovers are polymorphous-perverse in their delights). Troilus and Cressida (although not precisely classifiable as a tragedy or as any other form) makes the Entering the palace, she recoils from the smell of death. Her corpse and Agamemnon's are only direct reference to homosexuality I know of in Shakespeare, when Thersites calls shown by the opening of the back- Patroclus the "male whore" of Achilles. -98- I confess to a feeling of insufficiency, which I imagine some of my readers share, about basing a classification of all emotions on sex in the Freudian manner. It may be scientific, scene, and Clytemnestra boasts how her husband's blood spurted over her. Aegisthus, her although some psychologists nowadays dispute that; anyway I am not scientific in my paramour and accomplice in the murder, renews the theme of cannibalism with a horribly Freudianism here, but am merely using unscientific, popular, modern psychology to help graphic description of the feast of Thyestes. In this play, then, Aeschylus can hardly be said clarify this subject of tragic catharsis for me as well as for others. It may well be that a to be sparing of the shocking details. completely scientific' Freudianism is unsuitable for the historical criticism of drama because, being scientific, it is amoral, whereas in Western drama the aesthetic tradition has throughout been basically moral. And very clearly so in tragedy. Moreover, Renaissance drama at least The Choephorae, next play of the trilogy, gives a comparative respite from specific, detailed (and a case could certainly be made for Greek tragedy, too) makes the chief and original sin horrors; and although it culminates in the slaying of his mother and her paramour by Orestes, of passion to be pride, not lechery, which is the sin of sexual lust, subordinate to pride in the scene is neither staged nor described in particularly gory fashion. Clytemnestra's reported medieval and Renaissance moral thinking. dream of suckling a serpent-babe introduces a psychological sex-horror image in a way we are inclined to think quite modern, although examples are well scattered down through literature. Introducing Orestes' nurse just before the slaying, for a slackening of dignity and Accordingly I have not even tried to be strict in my use of modern psychological terminology, tension which approximates Shakespearean comic relief, Aeschylus shows ingenuity in although I have begun in the modern fashion with discussion of sex. And hereafter I shall not varying his shocks to the viscera: attempt to classify all moral shocks used by dramatists

Nurse. All ills beside with patience still I bore: -97- But dear Orestes, love-load on my heart, Whom from his mother I received and nursed- in the cathartic process under sex -- or, indeed, under pride or by any other formal moral Oft his shrill nightly summons broke my sleep: system. Aye, many a fruitless hardship I endured: For the unreasoning babe, like some young beast, Sooth, must ye rear with mother-wit for guide; Let me run over, in rough chronological order, some of the world's outstanding tragedies, to For no speech hath the child in swaddling-clothes point out how consistently they use various kinds of horror-shock to prepare the audience for To tell of hunger, thirst, or nature's need; purgation. And straight the young frame heeds the imperious call. Forewarned hereof, yet oft-time caught, I wot, It may well be true that the Greek tragedies dealt with incest, cannibalism, matricide, and the Unwares, 'twas mine to cleanse his swathing-bands; like criminal horrors because the religious origins of tragedy imposed such themes from So had the nurse the fuller's office, too. prehistoric myth. Familiarity of the Greek audience with the mythical themes may also have weakened somewhat their shocking effects. Do we find Aeschylus and the others, working on Last of the trilogy, The Eumenides exploits with calculated art the horrible appearance of the these themes as artists, contributing as far as they can to such a weakening by softening the Furies. They are first described by the Priestess, to arouse expectation, then they are shown details? Or do they appear to be conscious as artists that, carefully placed, shocking details to the audience. The Ghost of Clytemnestra may have had some shocking effects; stage have a place and a purpose in tragedy? ghosts often achieve

30 Irony In The Drama -99- But if the reader will agree that it is unimportant in this study to compare playwrights in detail or to pursue their variations of practice through the lists of their works, let him note only one more example, one atrocity-crammed passage from Euripides. This is a messenger's speech this through something charnel in their appearance. And the outburst of Apollo against the in Medea and comes to the audience's imagination mainly through the ear, although the Furies is filled with sadistic images. player, as Hamlet points out, can give such a "nuntius" description a powerful visual effect. The translation used here is by A. S. Way; Robinson Jeffer's recent version is freer and even To cite only the most renowned Greek tragedies, what do we find in the Oedipus of amplifies and intensifies the horrific details. Sophocles? Here again we have a general horror in the theme of the hero's unwitting murder of his father and incest with his mother. Sophocles produces the most heart-wringing Upstarting from her seat, she flees, all flame, dramatic ironies through the gradual discoveries by Oedipus of the facts of his past, before Shaking her hair, her head, this way and that, the play began, discoveries in which he is always preceded by the audience as they make it To cast from her the crown; but firmly fixed clearer, step by step, that he is the guilty one whom he is seeking. The horrors of the plague The gold held fast its grip: the fire, whene'er caused by his crimes are not stressed by Sophocles in detail, but those of patricide and incest She shook her locks, with doubled fury blazed. are kept hanging over the minds of the audience as they hover closer and closer to the doomed king himself. Such graphic, concrete horrors as there are in the play are concentrated by the dramatist, both verbally and visibly, upon the hero's climactic self- -101- blinding. Then agony-vanquished falls she on the floor, The messenger rushes on to report that Jocasta has hanged herself "in the bridal room," that Marred past all knowledge, save for a father's eyes. Oedipus has found and cut down her corpse, and that No more was seen her eyes' imperial calm, No more her comely features; but the gore Dripped from her head's crown flecked with blended fire. . . . he tore away The flesh-flakes from her bones, like the pine's tears The tiring-pins wherewith she was arrayed, 'Neath that mysterious drug's devourings melted. . . . And, lifting, smote his eyeballs to the root; . . . not once, but oftentimes He drave the points into his eyes; and soon Her father fell upon the corpse in grief, then tried to rise The bleeding pupils moistened all his beard . . . Yet clave, as ivy clings to laurel boughs, To the filmy robes: then was a ghastly wrestling; The rear portals of the stage then open; and as Oedipus shows himself, ghastly, to an For, while he strained to upraise his knee, she seemed To upwrithe and grip him: if by force audience thus prepared, the leader of the chorus exclaims, he haled, Torn from the very bones was his old flesh.

O horror of the world, A little later, Medea, to add a touch of directly visual horror, appears above the palace roof in Too great for mortal eye! her dragon-drawn chariot, displaying the bodies of her children, whom she has butchered.

If we attempted at this point to draw a comparison between Aeschylus and Sophocles, we After the Greeks, the Roman dramatic poet and rhetorician Seneca provides the next might hazard that Sophocles landmarks in the development of the use of horrors. His plentiful employment, in fact, very powerfully influenced the tragic writers of the Renaissance, who supposed (as we do not now) that they were written to be staged and were therefore to be considered genuine tragedies, -100- possessing (as far as the Renaissance knew of Aristotle's theory) cathartic power. But Seneca's present lack of highest standing, I judge, may excuse us from dwelling here on the seems the more restrained in his selection and placing of concrete, sensual, detailed shocks detailed, protracted, emetic horrors of his Thyestes. A milder selection, from his Agamemnon, of horror. I do not really feel that such comparisons, especially if quantitative, are important has some interest as a step in the long history, as old as literature itself, of the art of setting to my contention that both dramatists make artistic use of them. The nature and amount of horrors in a gloomy, mysterious, imaginative atmosphere. This one is a "mad" speech, for that use appear to vary from play to play, in Aeschylus even between Agamemnon and again Cassandra is raving in her prophetic trance (and this too, then, occurs in a scene of Choephorae in the same trilogy. Sophocles in his Philoctetes dwells repeatedly and lingeringly dramatic irony): on the details of the stinking wound in the foot of the marooned hero and calls on the actor in the role to display his agonies almost masochistically to the spectators. His Trachinian They press on, the squalid sisters, their bloody lashes brandishing; Maidens does not stress its hero's torments as Seneca does in Hercules Furens, but Sophocles their left hands half-burned torches bear; bloated are their pallid cheeks, almost casually describes with repulsive realism his spilling of Lichas's brains. The Electra is and dusky robes of death their hollow loins encircle; the fearsome quite mild in specific horrors; and only slightly less mild is Antigone -- save when we are told that Haemon, finding the heroine hanging in a cave, stabbed himself so that his blood spurted on her face. And, to glance at one more play, the mad Ajax is described with a considerable -102- number of gruesome details as not merely slaying but torturing the animals he imagines to be his enemies. cries of night resound; and a huge body's bones, rotting with long decay, lie in a slimy marsh.- 31 Irony In The Drama et ossa vasti corporis dumb show the fable of breaking the sticks, to project a sort of dramatic irony into the corrupta longinquo situ succeeding act. Preston Cambises is crudely bathetic; it flays a man, even, "with a false skin," paluda limosa iacent. to no tragic effect. There is, perhaps, some irony in the tyrant's accidental death by his own sword. I do not know whence Seneca drew this feeling for what we now call Gothic atmosphere. Greek drama? Homer? Besides drawing on Seneca for the device, the Renaissance dramatists, Shakespeare's immediate forerunners, the "University wits," produced a few tragedies of who employed it frequently and supremely well, went to examples in Virgil, Ovid, and acknowledged passionate greatness. Fewer still of these are purely tragic in type, even to probably Apuleius. And in their turn Gothic, Romantic, Victorian, and modern writers have in critics by no means strictly Aristotelian. But I believe the following would be conceded to using it been indebted in varying degrees to all their predecessors. produce genuine tragic effects, if not complete catharsis: Marlowe Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, and Edward II; Kyd Spanish Tragedy; and perhaps Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Greene James IV, and Peele David and Bethsabe and Edward I. It would be tedious to enumerate or even to -103- classify the horrors of sex (normal and perverse), bloodshed, and death in the first four or five of these plays. Marlowe shows himself a master of ingeniously horrible stage spectacle: Chaper VII Tamburlaine making draft-animals and footstools of THE CATHARTIC PROCESS FROM THE MIDDLE -105-

AGES TO THE PRESENT conquered kings, Bajazet dashing out his brains against the bars of his cage, Barabas precipitated into his boiling caldron. He is ingenious also in opening Tamburlaine and Edward Between Seneca and the Renaissance there are no real tragedies. The Christian epic II with prettified but shocking homosexuality, before proceeding in the first play to more dramatized in the craft cycles of the Middle Ages contains many episodes capable of inspiring "normal" horrors, in the second to the violent brutalities of Edward's murder in a prison fetid tragedies; but such tragedy-like psychological effects as certain of the mysteries produce as a sewer. He also administered violent shocks to the audiences of his time through the seem to be natural, not artistically calculated. It is quite possible, to take the most promising blasphemies of his characters; and in Faustus, where the blasphemous type of horrors is example, that the graphic details put into the crucifixion episodes for realistic purposes especially prominent, he accompanied them with appearances of devils so graphic that, we prepared the audience through horror-shock for a feeling of purgation achieved in some know from contemporary evidences, the spectators were violently shocked and terrified. And measure by the resurrection episodes which had grown out of the Quem Quaeritis. of this group of plays under consideration, Dr. Faustus is the one of most undeniably cathartic final effect. The ironies in Faustus are discussed elsewhere.

In the Renaissance, even disregarding comic shock and other comic ironies, the field of horrors is vast and various. The dramatists reveal both genius and ingenuity in their Thomas Kyd Spanish Tragedy forces its audience to view hanging corpses, stabbings, and a employment. "Tragedy of horror" becomes a recognized, Senecainfluenced type. Of course I tongue bitten off and spat out upon the stage. The later "additions" by another hand, shall not compile an anthology of the shocking, but I shall just outline a map to suggest the probably Ben Jonson's in 1602, show an interesting tendency to provide the atmospheric type extended use of horrors as a step in the cathartic process and draw on it, in the fashion of of gloom as a setting for the horrors. Renaissance maps, a few of the most interesting monsters of horrific ingenuity. Hieronimo. . . . Let the clouds scowl, make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the winds The Renaissance saw the great flowering of tragedy in England. On the Continent little or no blowing, the bells tolling, the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the tragedy of lasting renown was produced before Corneille and Racine, who belong more to the clock striking twelve. And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man hanging, and tottering and neo-classical movement of the seventeenth century. The Spaniard Calderon is Renaissance in tottering, as you know the wind will wave a man. . . . spirit and strong on the philosophical ironies, such as "life is a dream." I have selected these examples as intrinsically interesting and striking. But please notice, too, -104- the strong ironies they are intended to project through impersonation -- not only the basically ironic idea behind tragic horror, the beast against the angel in every man (or, as Marlowe objectifies it, man's bad angel against his good angel), but specific ironies of situation: the The Italian Renaissance playwrights were most influential and are best remembered in reversal of fortune in Tamburlaine's captives and King Edward, the "biter bit" when Barabas pastoral and comedy. From them Shakespeare got his dramatic irony of the girl-page plunges to the torment he has prepared for his enemies, and the ironic pathos in the romantic disguise. Germany had some English dramas, played in both English and German versions by traveling companies of English actors. Horror phenomena in Continental Renaissance drama would bear investigating, but let us confine ourselves here to the -106- tragedies written in England, since they seem to represent the main line the art was following at that time. mad Hieronimo's telling the Painter how to depict his finding of his murdered son.

The earliest attempts, such as Gorboduc and The Misfortunes of Arthur, employ horrors of As for Shakespeare, I have merely touched on the sexual shocks to the unconscious mind of war and family strife but lack the passion which makes the cathartic process work. Sackville the audience which are rather obvious in his tragedies. How many separate examples of and Norton appear to feel intensely only the political (therefore, rather general) horror of an shock through horror, of all kinds, are there in his "great tragedies" alone? Would anyone be unsettled royal succession, and the other authors show only a literary passion for forcing the likely to guess a number of less than three figures? And to these we should add those in the Arthurian legend into Seneca's mold for the House of Atreus. Sackville and Norton employ in 32 Irony In The Drama tragic histories like Richard III, and, if we consider plausible the idea of an intermediate Well, as we go on to Shakespeare's later contemporaries and successors we shall need many catharsis to be found when a play is partially but not finally tragic in effect, we should have to an ounce of civet, unless we make wary choice of tamer illustrations. Even outside the works add such histories as 1 Henry IV, and the tragicomedies of various types, such as The of Shakespeare the Jacobean period abounds in valid tragedies (if they can ever be said to be Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline. A well-classified, wellillustrated really plentiful); and there are a notable few in the period of decline from 1625 to 1642. critical survey, "Shock Effects and Catharsis in Shakespeare's Tragic Writing," might perhaps Outstanding examples, of widely varying types, are Heywood A Woman Kill'd with Kindness, be compressed into a single, solid volume, one which should also look into the concurrences Jonson Sejanus, Chapman Bussy D'Ambois, Tourneur The Revenger'sTragedy of dramatic irony with shock. -108- Here is a single example, chosen to suggest that in some cases the administration of shock to the audience's unacknowledged feelings is the only reasonable purpose that can be assigned Tragedy, Webster The Duchess of Malfi, Middleton and Rowley The Changeling, Beaumont and the playwright, considering the nature of the imagery in the light of the character who uses it Fletcher The Maid's Tragedy, Ford The Broken Heart and ' Tis Pity She's a Whore, and Shirley and the probable character of the author of the lines. The lines are from the scene where Lear The Cardinal. Of the plays named, Heywood's, which is domestic, makes the least display of at his maddest comes upon Gloucester and takes him for "Goneril with a white beard." The horrors, Tourneur's, highly Italianate and Senecan, the most. Nearly all of them show a very passage contains biting satire on law and justice. There is ironic shock in "a dog's obeyed in high incidence of horror-shock. A study of individual differences should reveal differences of office," and natural and literary taste, whim, obsession, and ingenuity in their authors. Dramatic and cosmic ironies are frequent, and "boomerang" irony very striking in the death of Shirley's Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Cardinal. Jonson's classicism restrains him far less than Racine's, especially in "nuntius" Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back; speeches. Chapman is ingenious in horrific atmosphere. Tourneur brilliantly highlights lust in Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind the charnel-house. Middleton and Rowley bring together spoiled beauty and lecherous beast For which thou whip'st her. over the corpses of their obstructors. Beaumont and Fletcher shock by regicide and blasphemy against love and marriage, Ford by incestuous love and hate between brother and sister, and Shirley by religious hypocrisy, lust, and poison. But what congruence to Lear's established character, even allowing that he is mad, or what reasonable indictment of Again only one illustration -- and please notice, in reading this, the powerful, varied ironies -- from John Webster The Duchess of Malfi, a play which deserves a whole essay to defend its -107- splendid psychological horrors from the reiterated charges that they are nothing but unmotivated sensationalism. The great Duchess's neurotic brother, Ferdinand of Aragon, has society by Shakespeare lurking for safety behind the stalking horse of the mad character, is been trying to drive her mad by all sorts of horrors -- a dead hand, a dance of howling there in the savage, nihilistic cynicism of this? madmen, and a convincing waxwork show of the bodies of her husband and child. He is under an obsessive compulsion to break her will by shattering the reason, on which the will depends. Her tragedy is that her will has not always obeyed her reason and so she must die Behold yon simp'ring dame, murdered; but her victory is that she dies with her reason steady, her will unbroken and fixed Whose face between her forks presages snow, on heaven. That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure's name, -- The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't -109- With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, The greatest horror she is made to face is none of these sensational physical shows which I Though women all above; have mentioned. Some of us moderns are liable to underestimate it because its quality of But to the girdle do the gods inherit, shock, on the Duchess and on the audience, is religious. It is a horror which appears in King Beneath is all the fiends'; Lear as an ironic theme in Edgar's keeping his blinded father Gloucester from suicide, the There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit, fruition of the horrible spiritual sin, despair. To urge this sin was considered fit province only Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! for a devil; and Ferdinand's spy and agent in murder, Bosola, here disguised as an old man, speaks to the horrified audience's ear in the insinuating cadences of Satan himself: Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. Bos. I am come to make thy tomb. Duch. Ha! my tomb! Thou speak'st as if I lay upon my The rhythmic arrangement of these lines calls for them to be delivered in panting, irregular deathbed Gasping for breath: dost thou perceive me sick? bursts, rising to a fiend's climactic howl of ecstasy just before the fall into prose revulsion and self-disgust. Shakespeare did not know that his audience possessed an unconscious mind, but Bos. Yes, and the more dangerously, since thy sickness is insensible. Duch. Thou art not mad, he knew very well by what artistic means to play upon its repressed sexuality. Rhythmically, sure: dost know me? the lines are a piece of music celebrating the sexual act; verbally they constitute a violent satirical denunciation of it; and the speaker's mad accompanying action provides an ironic commentary on the discords. Bos. Yes. Duch. Who am I?

33 Irony In The Drama Bos. Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this But in this, from Britannicus, observe the disciplined beauty of the rapier thrust which carries flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puffpaste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper- the shock of Nero's sadism into the very groin of the audience: prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earthworms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little She raised her tear-stained eyes to Heaven. turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable They shone amid the flash of swords and spears -- knowledge of the small compass of our prison.

-111- Duch. [clutching at her pride] Am I not thy Duchess?

A beauty unadorned, in simple dress, Bos. Thou art some great woman, sure; for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in grey As when they seized her sleeping; and I know not hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse Whether that turmoil, and the torch-lit darkness, should be forced to take up her lodging in a cat's ear; a little infant that breeds its teeth, The cries breaking the silence, and the faces, should it lie with thee, would cry out as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow. The savage look of those who took her captive, Made sweeter still those sweet and timid eyes. Duch. I am Duchess of Malfi still. Bos. That makes thy sleep so broken. It is an ironic perversity which derives pleasure from another's pain. Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright, But looked to near have neither heat nor light. Returning to England, we note that Dryden, Lee, and Otway wrote tragedies of some importance between 1660 (the Restoration of Charles II) and 1700. The first is best known -110- for All for Love, his skilful recasting into neo-classic mold of Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra. It is decidedly his best tragedy; and his others, for example Tyrannic Love, are The Duchess remains unbroken by horrors, physical or spiritual, and in the end bids her distinctly bad and bathetic in comparison. Frank and able critic, firm and vigorous versifier stranglers though he was, he never seemed able to strike and hold a consistent tone in drama of any type, though he showed that power in several kinds of prose and non-dramatic poetry. I suspect that this was because, torn between the neo-classic taste of his own age and his Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength fondness for Elizabethan freedoms, he never quite made up his mind about artistic means and Must pull down heaven upon me: purposes (especially in tragedy), wavered between one tone and another, and allowed an Yet stay, heaven-gates are not so highly arched expedient catering to popular bad taste to fill the vacuum with heroics and smut, to his own As princes' palaces; they that enter there subsequent repentance. I fear his use of horrors was largely purposeless. Must go upon their knees.

Nathaniel Lee, often called the most Elizabethan dramatist of his time, employed horrors in Thus, above a duchess's pride and a tempter's despair she chooses Christian humility and such tragedies as The Rival Queens in a rather Fletcher-like mingling of heroic ranting and hope. scruples of honor, the tearful "softer passions," and erotic sadism, the last, as with Fletcher, furnishing many of the shocks. With Racine we enter almost another world of the tragic spirit. After the blare and blast, dirt, gore, and stench of Elizabethan horrors, we are brought into a different air, one of controlled, Venice Preserved, by Otway, is flooded with tears shed by its heroine. In this it looks toward quietly intense emotions. The horrors are there; but they are economized, and they are kept the next century's sentimental fashions in both tragedy and comedy. It uses rather abstract, presented in intellectual terms, and neither externalized in violent show and action nor allowed to escape in the form of unrestrained verbal imagery. Yet there is plentiful horror for tragic purposes in Racine's themes and situations, sometimes, like those of -112- Phaedra, from Greek drama. And Racine manages very skilfully to keep them just sufficiently shocking to his audience. This, from Athalie, is not typical Racine, but it provides a transition plentiful horrors of the Renaissance type -- images of the sack of cities, detailed preparations from, say, Tourneur: for execution on the wheel, stabbings, ghosts, madness, and suicide. A peculiar scene, explained as either comic relief in bad taste or political lampooning in worse, may possibly 'Twas deepest night, when horror falls on man; introduce erotic shock for a dimly discerned psychological purpose when the Venetian senator My mother Jezebel before me stood . . . plays little dog and snaps at his mistress's ankles, pleading for his "Nacky" to kick him. Her spectre o'er my bed appeared to bend; Masochism is almost as ironic a perversion as sadism. But are not both violent weeping and I stretched my hands to clasp her; but I found violent laughter, when induced in the audience, of doubtful tragic value? Are they not likely to Only a hideous mass of flesh and bones, discharge tensions prematurely, thus weakening or even destroying catharsis? And Horribly bruised and mangled, dragged through mire, unrestrained, unbalanced emotions in an audience probably tend to contravene irony. Bleeding and torn, whose limbs the dogs of prey Were growling over with devouring greed. In England, at least, the decline continues through the eighteenth century, which has no great tragedies and few interesting ones. Addison Cato has great dignity, but its few and conventional horrors lose any possible cathartic effect because the audience is unable to take 34 Irony In The Drama the intermediate step of empathic identification with the hero. Cato, the patriotic stoic, is so Goethe claimed not to have seen a copy of Doctor Faustus before he had finished his own poised above the storms of passion that ordinary, emotional human beings cannot bring their play. The question of influence does not concern us. We do notice in rereading Faust that the hearts into contact with his: Cato is unshocked, the audience remains unshocked too. horrors employed, their techniques of use, and our sense of their pre-cathartic purpose constantly remind us in Faust's own personal tragedy of Marlowe's play, and in Marguerite's of several of Shakespeare's, particularly Romeo and Juliet and Othello. Both Faust plays set up a Lillo bourgeois tragedy, George Barnwell, or, The London Merchant, tells the story of an high, pervasive irony through their opening pacts for the hero's soul. The most shocking apprentice led to theft, murder, and execution by an adventuress. Its denouement is scene, in our sense, is the Walpargisnacht. As Faust and Mephistopheles, pick their way up to Christian; and its well-placed horrors, strong passions, and natural characters would make it the flaming Brocken among the swarming, hastening witches and demons, the successive a powerful play and a fine example of successful Christian tragedy, were it not for the frightful shocks of vigorous, living, incarnate evil pack themselves into a macabre comic relief -- as if miscegenation of prose and blank verse which renders its style intolerable, such as the Macbeth's witches and Hamlet's gravediggers were mixed and stirred into a brew with all following, which serves, along with Cambises, only as a horrible example. literature's other horrid ingredients, and celebrated in song by Iago and Thersites to an accompaniment of jeering fiends. -113- Modern tragedy may be said to begin with Ibsen, rather late in the nineteenth century, when George Barnwell, the young hero, is soliloquizing on a walk in a wood, just before murdering he turned from historical drama using mainly the older horror-devices, as historical drama still his benefactor uncle to get money for his devouring mistress: generally does, to writing tragedy with contemporary themes and settings. With him and Strindberg and their successors, who tend to imitate them when not setting Barnwell. A dismal gloom obscures the face of day; either the sun has slipped behind a cloud, or journeys down the west of heaven with more than common speed to avoid the sight of -115- what I'm doomed to act. Since I set forth on this accursed design, where'er I tread, methinks, the solid earth trembles beneath my feet. Yonder limpid stream, whose hoary fall has made a their plays in the far past, we begin to find new shock-images and ideas mingled with the old. natural cascade, as I passed by, in doleful accents seemed to murmur, "Murder." The earth, For audiences, as noted earlier, both change and remain the same as to the things that shock the air, the water, seem concerned; but that's not strange, the world is punished, and nature them. Syphilis, for example, was a subject for jest -- not invariably even satirical -- in the feels the shock when Providence permits a good man's fall! Renaissance. It became available for powerfully shocking tragic use in Ghosts, apparently because under a century or more of repression it had acquired such tension that its release as Most English tragedy of the nineteenth century, until Ibsen began to be an influence, harked a theme on the stage was no longer funny. And there is much in plays like Hedda Gabler and back either to the Renaissance or directly to the Greeks, and in either case was likely to make The Master Builder that might have had only slight shock effect or none on the playgoer of use of horrors in the manner of its models. If these Romantic and Victorian poets in their ancient Athens or Renaissance London. As social, moral, and religious ideas and conventional dramatic ventures modified their horrors to the contemporary taste, they might achieve the manners change, some details of the shock-process change with them, but not the general stage; if not, their dramatic poems remained "closet drama" as had Milton Samson Agonistes, process, and by no means all the details. a really great, catharsis-producing tragedy on Greek lines which produced cosmic-irony shock in unpopular ways. It might be illuminating to compare the nineteenth-century horrors with One of the most interesting and effective users of horrorshock in our twentieth century is those employed by the Restoration tragedians I have commented upon. Maxwell Anderson. His historical tragedies may be passed over here, for the reasons suggested, but in Winterset he makes a consciously daring experiment in tragedy with a We could group the English nineteenth-century plays so as to suggest lines of investigation. contemporary theme and setting. I judge from his own published statements as well as Shelley The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound and Byron Manfred achieve tragic power by evidence in the play that he proceeded by making a synthesis of great tragedies, centered on pitting the soul's nobility against the shocks of physical and mental torments. In specific kinds Shakespeare but reaching out to the rest of the Renaissance and to the Greeks. Thence he of shock used and in their specific emotional products, Prometheus goes back largely to the derived a recipe for combining the chief ingredients great tragedies have in common, working Greeks, The Cenci to Tourneur, Webster, and Ford in the Renaissance, and Manfred perhaps from the playwrights' practice rather than from Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian tragic to the late eighteenthcentury Gothic writers and Kotzebue. The Victorian poetdramatists theory. That he recognized catharsis as an end-result to be sought through a play-long suggest by the period-settings of their plays that process is evidenced by the presence in Winterset -the dish he cooked by this recipe -- of all nine of the steps I have enumerated: hypnotic rhythm, establishing of a character as hero, the tolling of doom, the audience's sharing of the hero's struggle, recurring shocks of horror, -114- the hybris of vain hope, the molding of the hero into symbol, the hero's death, and their inspiration is Renaissance; but Tennyson's historical dramas give us Shakespeare so -116- diluted with morality and sentiment that they are to be compared with Rowe Jane Shore and such "she-tragedies" of the early 1700's, while Browning Blot on the 'Scutcheon seems rather close to Otway The Orphan, only a little earlier than Rowe in date, and proves that dramatic finally the achievement of a purgation which makes this play, in my opinion, the finest irony is not enough, by itself, to make a tragedy. tragedy of its half-century.

For the nineteenth century's greatest tragedy most would agree that we should turn to the Anderson's use of horrors is varied, artistically ingenious, and powerful. The gunman Trock Continent, to Germany, and not to anything of Schiller's but to the first part of Goethe Faust. opens viciously:

35 Irony In The Drama You roost of punks and gulls! Sleep, sleep it off, O'Neill is by no means the only contemporary who has modernized Greek tragedy: Anderson whatever you had last night, get down in warm Wingless Victory derives from Medea, Cocteau The Infernal Machine from Oedipus, and Sartre one big ham-fat against another -- sleep, The Flies from the Oresteia. cling, sleep and rot! Rot out your pasty guts with diddling. . . . Much seriously impassioned modern drama which makes use of tragic techniques to gain tragic impact is not avowedly tragedy but passes as realistic or naturalistic social drama or as Horrors of crime, disease, hunger, vice, and squalor are blended in an atmosphere of night -- expressionism. It seems to me that some of it, usually that which is not very far to the left in a river black and chill as Styx, and Lear's own storm of thunder, lightning, and sleet. Inside respect to the playwright's the basement room, pipes writhe like the intestines of dinosaurs. In situations of intense dramatic irony, passionate young love is pitted against sterile old hates and fears. Judge -118- Gaunt's remorse-induced madness and Shadow's ghastly resurrection from his grave in the river ring high notes of horror that call up to the sudden death, hovering so long to pounce at last upon the lovers. And at the end, though no angels bear Mio to his rest, old Esdras, rabbi ideology, is practically tragedy in all but the label the author has chosen to give it. Here we turned skeptic, makes the audience follow his spirit some little way into a sort of stoic after- should class Galsworthy Justice, with its finely calculated scene of horror when Falder's mind life, a wandering among the stars: cracks under solitary confinement and its ironic catharsis in the lines spoken over him after his plunge to death: On this star in this hard star-adventure, knowing not Ruth (in a whisper). What is it? He's not breathing. (She crouches over him.) My dear! My what the fires mean to right and left, nor whether pretty! [In the outer office doorway the figures of men are seen standing.] Ruth (leaping to a meaning was intended or presumed, her feet). No, no! No, no! He's dead! [The figures of the men shrink back.] Cokeson (stealing man can stand up, and look out blind, and say: forward. In a hoarse voice). There, there, poor dear woman! [At the sound behind her Ruth in all these turning lights I find no clue, faces round at him.] Cokeson. No one'll touch him now! Never again! He's safe with gentle only a masterless night, and in my blood Jesus! [Ruth stands as though turned to stone in the doorway staring at Cokeson, who, no certain answer, yet is my mind my own, bending humbly before her, holds out his hand as one would to a lost dog.] yet is my heart a cry toward something dim in distance, which is higher than I am and makes me emperor of the endless dark The Curtain Falls even in seeking! There is similar irony in the closing speeches of Strife, which ends in the bloodied deadlock of The avowed tragedies of our time all go more or less openly to the elder tragic traditions for two heroic opponents. their techniques of Tragic drama by the more extreme leftist playwrights (perhaps I should not be specific about -117- names and titles) seldom calls itself tragedy, but nevertheless gains powerful tragic effects, sometimes by the use for horror of sordid naturalistic detail, a technique derived possibly from Zola, and sometimes by the more generalized, strident pageantry of horrors featured in horror. Yeats, Synge, Lorca, along with lesser figures like Pinero, Jones, and the earlier German expressionistic drama. Hauptmann, seem either poetically romantic or romantic with realism of details. I venture to suggest that propaganda drama does not call itself tragedy because it does not Who was the first dramatist to make use of Freudian theory? It may have been Strindberg, aim at complete tragic catharsis. It aims to move its audience, not to a purgation by whose use of horrors would make a good study. I suspect Freud was used first, and lightly, in sympathetically accompanying the dying hero to an idealistic fulfillment beyond this earth, Vienna or Budapest, then seriously in Germany. I think Freudian tragedy came of age in but to an emotional march -- to the picket-line or the barricades. Such drama can work O'Neill Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra. The horrors in the former are rather powerfully within its self-imposed limits of materialistic philosophy and working-class modern in the Ibsen-Strindberg manner, though they are mostly introduced in the revived sympathy. But it must restrict its shocks to device of asides. In the latter, they tend to be Greek horrors modernized, because the trilogy is, of course, a Freudianized Oresteia in a nineteenth-century New England "Greek revival" setting. O'Neill's modern psychology in these plays has been reasonably criticized on the -119- ground that it is too obviously a system imposed by the playwright. Perhaps in future tragedies the Freudian basis, although helpful to the writer in understanding his characters those which can be made to appear imposed by capitalism. The audience must not be and projecting them to his audience, will be kept better concealed, save in cases where the brought, by complete dredging of its subconscious, to the humility which has to look for characters themselves, being modern, naturally employ Freudianism in their thoughts, acts, purgation to something idealistic and spiritual, beyond the body of this death. The great world and speeches. For this, we may have to look beyond Tennessee Williams. At all events, the tragedies are not limited so. recognition by dramatists of the psychology of the unconscious has served to prepare dramatic criticism to recognize its part in the cathartic process. Such very recent American tragic dramas as Anderson Anne of the Thousand Days, Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, and Arthur Miller immensely successful Death of a Salesman offer fascinating studies in the current use of 36 Irony In The Drama ironies and horrors to anyone who cares to make them. Their other steps toward catharsis are As for the after-effect of comedy, it may not be wholly different from that of tragedy: an interesting, too, for example, the use of rhythm by all three playwrights and Miller's reasoned elevated calm, or tranquillity of soul, with clear mental perspective and freedom from claim that his hero has tragic greatness because he is ready to fight to the death for his disturbing emotion. Probably the arousal and relief of emotion of any one sort would tend to dignity as an individual. free the soul from harmful emotion in general.

Today, as throughout the history of tragedy, the shocking is artistically used for the Many critics, and many rather uncritical drama lovers, have felt that there is some sort of psychological purpose of purging the emotions, through pity and terror, of these and similar purged or relieved feeling produced by comedy, but that it is slighter than the corresponding emotions. Seduced by a harlot, tricked, shamed, blinded, whipped to work at the mill with feeling in tragedy. I shall try to show that this difference (assuming it to exist, on the basis of slaves, the hero Samson regains his spiritual sight only to die shattered among his enemies in my own experience as well as of this widespread feeling) may be explainable as much by blood and dust. Yet the stars shine still: intermediate relief, spread through the play and weakening the intensity of the final purgation in comedy -- relief through laughter and tears -- as by any important differences in the way of intensity and shock. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair, I intend, then, in this chapter to bring to recognition the artistic purpose of such comic And what may quiet us in a death so noble. "horrors" as bawdry. For the sake of doing so fairly clearly and reasonably briefly, I shall try to avoid becoming lost in the mazes of those two excessively puzzling aesthetic problems, the psychology of laughter and the existence of a comic catharsis. Let us try to get along by -120- thinking of laughter as a release of some emotion or complex of emotions, and by treating comic catharsis as an undefined but informally recognized fact.

Chapter VIII We do, in fact, go to comedies for emotional relief (some sort of purgation or release of A THEORY OF COMIC SHOCK tensions); and we do feel more confident of finding it there than at some new tragedy, for we do not expect catharsis except from the great tragedies. The belly-laugh and the aching diaphragm are far more familiar experiences than are spiritual purgations or yearning in the All gall and copperas from his ink he draineth; bowels of our compassion. Nevertheless, our customary imagery tends, as we see, to be Only a little salt remaineth, visceral (in psychology practical- Wherewith he'll rub your cheeks till, red with laughter, They shall look fresh a week after. -122-

So says Ben Jonson's Induction, proclaiming his purpose as author of his great comedy Volpone. And it is without doubt truly a comedy, although the playwright in his Address to the ly equivalent to emotional) in both the comic and the tragic situations. Reader reveals his own suspicion that he was a little too serious in spots, especially in his assignment of final punishments to his hero-rogues. Today, seeing the play performed, we Near the end of the previous chapter I made some remarks on the cathartic process as seen are impressed by its almost farcical liveliness; but in the study we notice how many things in in certain serious modern dramas which, though not assertedly tragedies, may be so the way of moral themes, characterization and motivation, and even such devices as horror- classified by their general method, tone, and effect. If we can move on along the same road, shock and hybris, remind us of standard tragedy. And other ironic features are much the through tragi-comedy and thoughtful social satire, we shall find that we have an easy and, I same. hope, a fairly cogent transition to the evidences of the cathartic process, including pre- purgative shock, in comedy itself. Such phenomena in tragi-comedy, where we might expect them, and in comedy, where we might not, are really not at all uncommon. Their occurrence raises very puzzling questions, Greek tragedy ends in catharsis without the death of the hero in several cases; one recalls especially now to us who have just finished considering the relationship of tragic horrors to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Aeschylus' Eumenides. The latter, indeed, allowing to its hero tragic catharsis. What is the nature of comic shock? Can we distinguish it, in materials or Orestes a brightened future in this life, comes rather close to being a tragi-comedy in form. techniques, from its tragic counterpart? And what is it for, assuming that it may probably Even closer comes Euripides' Alcestis, where the return of Alcestis, brought back from Hades have an artistic as well as a commercial purpose? And it follows, from our assigning to tragic by Hercules to her husband, ends the play (somewhat as The Eumenides) with a restored horror-shock the purpose of stirring up the audience's emotions to prepare for their equilibrium, a reconciliation among gods and men. Among these three Greek dramas, of purgation, that we must ask which only the Oedipus is incontestably tragic, the employment of horror-shock varies widely, yet according to reasonable expectation: strong and important in Oedipus, as pointed out -121- already, in The Eumenides it is very vivid especially at the beginning, while in Alcestis it is not at all prominent -- at least to our time the play has a pathetic nobleness which rather obscures some elements which seem likely to have been shocking to the Greeks, among them whether comedy may be considered as having any recognizable (though probably dissimilar) the revelry of Hercules in the house of mourning; in this situation, as so often in Greek catharsis to prepare for. drama, dramatic irony is very strong.

Lane Cooper says: John Marston's Jacobean tragi-comedy The Malcontent greatly stresses the satirical; a few years later a different literary atmosphere suffuses John Fletcher pastoral tragicomedy The 37 Irony In The Drama Faithful Shepherdess. In both plays erotic shock is very strong and frequent. Both plays, by ending, no matter how tragic the preparations, how horrible the shocks, they proceed to "happy" endings, cheat their audiences out of tragic catharsis. What sort of discount the terrors, settle back, and await the inevitable rescue. Serious drama then becomes melodrama, which in attempting to bring the audience forward in their seats again piles on the shocks until they become absurd, both in their sensationalism and in their futility -123- -- final psychological relief was intended by their authors it is hard to say, although both, again, The Maiden, lashed to railroad track, take care to bring about some sort of equilibrium. Saved by the Hero, just in time, Pushing the locomotive back. Shakespeare Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure are less overtly satirical than The Malcontent. The former is somewhat more bloody in the shocks it administers, the latter more What the psychological effect may be which the serial melodrama substitutes for catharsis, I bawdy. In neither does Shakespeare appear to intend a tragic purgation. He ends both with shudder to consider. Certain- the finality of marriage, in the romantic comedy tradition. Here, too, equilibrium is restored; traditionally such marriages are to be felt by the audience as lasting "happily ever after." -125- The later tragi-comedies of Shakespeare, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, we feel to be ultimately plays of reconciliation. They employ horrors of blood and of sex much as ly something ignoble, a perverse union of titillation and frustration of the emotions. Even their author had previously used them for tragic ends; but the whole atmosphere is somewhat without melodramatic serials, a play-going public which has been conditioned to expect a gentler, in preparation for the serene endings which reconcile the elders while smoothing the happy ending at any artistic cost is a public that has been degraded. way for the younger generation to journey on. The strong satirical leanings in Marston's tragi-comedy lead us naturally to satirical comedy. It is interesting here as a sidelight that Paul Green has had such conflicting advice (and Jonson invented the term tragi-comical satire, and Shakespeare may have been consciously perhaps these contradictions were added to some artistic dubieties of his own) that his House using that frame, as O. J. Campbell suggests, in his Troilus and Cressida, which is a cruel, of Connelly and The Field God have been provided, at one time or another, with both sorts of disgusting, puzzling, fascinating, and frustrating play, as we have noted. Neither side, Greek endings, the tragic and the tragi-comic. Both are plays of marked tragic dignity, poetry, and or Trojan, arrives at any satisfactory conclusion. There is no purgation to be seen or felt. horror. I find my own judgment confused in deciding which endings I prefer for these two Troilus is left jealously yearning for the faithless Cressida; Achilles, after slaying Hector basely plays; I find that the element of hope in the happier conclusions, hope for the farming South in revenge for his "male whore" Patroclus, grinds on with the unending war. The whole and its people, helps me to feel in the endings with restored equilibrium rather more intolerable tone of the play is set and dominated by the bitter, filthy railing of the archsatirist emotional satisfaction than in the tragic endings, which should be artistically the more Thersites, who condemns everybody and is despised by all; and his dominant passion is envy. powerful. I think much of Green's work contains a delicately balanced compassionate irony Now envy is of all the evil passions the one which is totally insatiable. As the medieval which tips quite easily toward the hopeful side. To me his most moving drama is The Lost moralists recognized, the other sins, pride, lechery, wrath, gluttony, avarice, and sloth, are all Colony (not comedy or tragedy or tragi-comedy, but the finest blending of pageant with play), capable of intermediate relief and of temporary satiety and appeasement. Envy alone gnaws and its most moving scene, ceaselessly:

-124- And next to him malicious Envy rode Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw Betweene his cankred teeth a venemous toad, the colonists' march out at the end from the pitiful shelter of their doomed Fort Raleigh into That all the poison ran about his chaw; the unknown -- into oblivion, the audience knows, yet supported and borne along upon a But inwardly he chawed his own maw. . . . song of their new-found country's future. The audience experiences a catharsis filled with compassionate irony. He hated all good workes and vertuous deeds, And him no lesse, that any like did use; A great deal of irony is inherent in the tragic catharsis of the classic type, where the hero is And who with gratious bread the hungry feeds, beaten but triumphant, dying but entering an immortal life. With other endings the ironies His almes for want of faith he doth accuse; becomes less clear and less potent. We have seen that to allow cathartic effect to a great deal So every good to bad he doth abuse: of drama, even to numerous tragedies generally felt to produce it, we need to entertain a And eke the verse of famous poets witt broader concept of "finality." And since nothing on this earth is more final than death, this finality of reconciliation, of equilibrium restored on a higher moral level, is less final; and it grows still less so, and hence less satisfying and efficacious as a purgation, when we extend it -126- to cover progressively less dignified and serious dramatic forms, represented by plays with less and less serious and dignified endings -- as we move on, that is, through the tragi-comic He does backbite, and spightfull poison spues borderland into the domains of comedy. From leprous mouth on all that ever writt. Such one vile Envy was, that fifte in row did sitt. Historically, tragi-comedy has done great harm to the dramatic art whenever it has become dominant in an era over tragedy. When playgoers become accustomed to expect the happy

38 Irony In The Drama To apply this conception to Troilus and Cressida, if the pervading passion of the play is envy, -128- then there can be no final purgation, tragic or comic, and, as far as this omnipresent shock and passion of envy is concerned, there cannot be even any temporary, intermediate relief ness of its final psychological effect. Maugham satire in plays like Our Betters and The Circle from tension, for the emotional tension of envy is not relievable. If Shakespeare intended this seems to me a little weakened by an incongruous romanticism, possibly commercial, result -- and I am a steady believer in the integrity of his artistic intentions and the instinctive especially apparent in the endings. His fine short stories do not have this fault. soundness of his methods -- it follows that he has written here the ultimate thing in dramatized satire, and in the process has demonstrated to the hilt the great weakness of such drama. That weakness is, I think, satire's lack of human warmth, the power to inspire Shaw is always delightfully hard to pin down. But he is certainly a major figure, and probably sympathy, sympathy which is a necessary step toward catharsis. At the end of Troilus we find the greatest in modern satirical comedy. He knows the tricks of shock thoroughly and uses that we have identified ourselves with no hero, sympathize with nobody in the play, are quite the most common, erotic shock, with vast ingenuity not only of wit and taste but of ready to curse both their houses. Yet we may have noticed that the unsatisfactory moral characterization and dramatic construction also. The result is that without sentimentalism movement of the play has been eased somewhat in its jolting progress from shock to shock even in Mrs. Warren's Profession his leading character keeps some of our sympathy, and we by frequent and skilful dramatic ironies. always come out at the end of a Shaw play, however shocking to our ideas, our morals, and our passions, with at least an illusion of balance, even though we may have it not. It is my belief, moreover, that those Shaw plays which are often called tragedies, Saint Joan and It has always troubled me to reconcile Shakespeare's satirical attitude toward the satirist Heartbreak House, are no exceptions. Jaques in 1600 with his giving us Thersites. (and allowing him to set the whole tone of the play, too) only a couple of years later. I have wavered unsatisfied between the explanations of literary fashion and of personal disillusionment. Here is a motive which seems consistent: Eric Bentley's book on Shaw goes further into the techniques of his wit than does anything Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida is a reductio ad absurdum of satirical drama, a else I have read on the subject. I find it especially interesting in the region of his irony. The demonstration that carried to this extreme it is the negation of all that Shakespeare stood for full flavor of Shaw's satirical comedy, however, the complete impression it makes, includes a as an artist in the way of human sympathy and audience purgation -- a satire on tragi- warmth, a sympathy with the characters, an ability to give and take satirical shocks without comical satire. I know of no other satirical play so extreme in its negation of all purgative offense and disillusionments without bitterness. Shaw manages to balance humor and satire effects. If Shakespeare was trying for cathartic effects in his tragedies, with a mysterious skill, so mysterious that the critic is often tempted to give up the effort of analysis and fall back on "personality" and "Irish charm." -127- One possible method of getting at such a problem, the problem of determining the psychological effects, in detail, of artistic devices on theater audiences, is audience-watching. here he was intending emetic effect without satisfaction, as the retching frustration of No doubt this has always been practiced more or less, but in desultory, haphazard fashion as seasickness. Jonson's tragi-comical satires do not give such an impression, nor do they far as I know, excepting for some recent studies of the psychology of children at the theater suggest similar purpose; his strong bias toward moral didacticism carries them to at least a sense of moral equilibrium at the close. -129- Many plays that we might bring together, not entirely without violence, as comic satires use similar kinds of shocking devices and deal according to their times and their authors with the and the moving pictures. Some photographs published about ten years ago show a startling same problems in reconciling satirical contents with ultimate effects that will give audiences diversity of strained expressions on the faces of children at a tense moment in the movies. some sense of emotional satisfaction. All those I am about to mention use erotic shock, Could a series of such pictures be taken of adults at a play with super-sensitized film using subject, I think, to changing tastes. All make some use of intermediate reliefs of tension only the light from the stage to avoid distracting flashes? By such means -- we might gain (partial purgations, if we wish to call them so); all strive for some empathy, some audience some more exact knowledge of the way individuals and groups at a play react emotionally to identification with a character or characters, with the ultimate aim of achieving something humor and satire and to shocks of bawdry and blood, of when and how they show resembling catharsis. intermediate relief of tension by laughter or tears, and of the prevalence of any sort of cathartic serenity at the final curtains of comedies. And could even an appreciation of irony somehow reveal itself in a few faces? I rather imagine that such audience-watching might The Restoration shows us "manly" Wycherley in his PlainDealer passing out brutal shocks in show reactions more varied in comedy than in tragedy. Not only do comic dramatic forms the course of satirizing false friends, false mistresses, false lawyers, everything false in a appear to be more varied, from play to play, but even within some plays shifts from humor to highly corrupt society. The girl who serves the hero in boy's attire is shockingly handled, as pathos to satire should produce rather strikingly diverse emotional reactions. Humor her prototype Viola was not; and the hero himself brutally plans revenge by rape on his false (including pathos) and satire are usually mixed in literature, or in any one comic writer's art, mistress, ironically named Olivia. Yet all comes out, with our sympathy for the hero not although one or the other usually predominates. entirely lost, in his finding out who his true friends are. Congreve uses all his far greater urbanity to keep the worst of his moral shocks associated with his lesser characters, and to bring his Mirabel and Millamant to a final harmony with which we can sympathize. Humor and satire may be roughly opposed to each other somewhat in this fashion: with humor on the stage, the audience gets ironic pleasure from recognizing its own likeness to the comedians; with satire, the irony lies rather in a sense of unlikeness and may be both Rice, in his Adding Machine, employs expressionistic fantasy to keep us sympathetic, I cannot more conscious and less deep. And in general we recognize that humor is the more emotional say quite how, with the pitiful eternal slave, his "hero," Mr. Zero. Awake and Sing by Clifford form of the comic, satire the more intellectual. Humor is subjective; the author (and so his Odets mingles leftist ideology with human warmth, naturalistic detail with human hopes. It comic character) invites the audience to laugh with him at himself and, empathetically, at may be that the frequent emotional relief this play allows through tears and laughter is partly themselves. Satire is objective; the satirical author bids us laugh at the character, not at responsible for the comparative weak- ourselves and not sympathetically. So in humor the laughter is indulgent, in satire scornful. In

39 Irony In The Drama its tolerant way, humor tends to be middle-of-the-road, static in manners and morals, and comic equilibrium or reconciliation -- very possibly here also comedy, having more varied disinclined toward change, while satire is extreme, urgent for change whether reformist or (in means, produces more varied reactions. the true Whether faces do or do not show reactions to drama legibly, the final test of a play, tragic or -130- comic, takes place in its audience's hearts. The above is of course merely a suggestive presentation of a commonly granted fact which has never been analyzed in detail -- that an audience does have a series of emotional reactions to a comedy just as it does to a tragedy sense) reactionary. To things as they are, satire prefers things as it imagines they were in a and that these reactions must be in some degree readable on the faces. Perhaps we can golden past or should be in a future whereof I need not specify the hue. proceed from this to granting that some sort of comic purgation is probably produced in the spectators through the emotions associated with humor and satire and that these emotions In a somewhat more general view, the audience emotion induced by humor tends to be are, in the comic process, in some way the counterparts of tragic pity and terror. sympathy, with outgoing feeling for others and tolerance for its own human failings. Satire tends to negate sympathetic feelings; some satire probably makes its audience feel an -132- ingrowing self-pity. But where humor, especially when mingled with pathos, rather easily makes an audience feel compassion, satire usually induces scorn, although I think there are examples where great satire of a high universal sort paradoxically akin to tragedy does induce I have not named these emotions, for I have found no accepted names to separate them, as a higher compassion than any that humor can give. In Aristotelian terms humor may more they should be separated to avoid logical confusion, from their tragic parallels. "Comic pity" readily lead its audience to pity, less mixed with fear because of the commingled feelings of and "comic terror"? Even these might mislead by confusing feelings which are burlesqued on tolerance for oneself and community with others. Satire, on the other hand, may bring the stage with emotions felt by the audience. At any rate, whatever names we might give something like terror, less mixed with pity or reassurance because of a sense of isolation in them, they are the emotions felt by an audience as the impact of the comic playwright's hatred, loathing, and scorn for oneself and others. I am tempted to carry this still a step humor and satire, hurled at them over the footlights by the comic actors. To the eye of an farther morally, and suggest that humor as a social virtue is not always unmixed with the sin observer such as Daumier they express themselves much more violently, in laughter, facial of complacent sloth; satire can become perverted into an anti-social vice in that, despite its grimaces, contortions of the body, even tears, than do the emotions of tragedy. And vigor in branding evil, it is sometimes conducive to the prime sin of pride. probably, through such violent expressions of emotion, they afford some intermediate relief to those tensions which in tragedy would be building up toward the final catharsis. We should expect a series of photographic studies to show on audiences' faces in response to humor, sympathetic smiles, warm and friendly laughter, tears of uproarious, helpless They seem like pity and terror, only more violent and at the same time not so sustained or so laughter, of pathetic sentiment, and of sympathetic relief, and various expressions of deep. I employ the word deep here as a psychological metaphor in reference to the depth to compassion; in response to satire, scornful curlings of the lip, prideful or malicious intellectual which these emotions churn the unconscious. delight with critical dissection and sadistic device, jeering laughter, cold contempt, and rarely, a lofty ironic compassion for what Mark Twain in pity called "this damned human race." I suggest, then, that these emotions which lead the audience toward the lesser, comic catharsis are shallower but more violent in expression and less dignified, therefore, than I have seen, a few times, audiences take to violent laughter simply as a psychological defense those of tragedy, but are similar in general nature and are facilitated artistically by ironic against excessive shock. But devices which are also similar, but less deeply disturbing to the unconscious feelings than those employed in tragedy. -131- These ironic devices, used for purposes of shock as are tragic horrors, cover a wide range, probably quite as wide as do the shock devices of tragedy. In comedy, however, the ones such shock might be applied in a bad tragedy or melodrama as well as in a comedy of almost based on sexual themes, those I shall speak of as "bawdy shock," seem more dominant over any sort that was written in bad taste. I do not see how a playwright could ever find this a other forms than they do in tragedy. If this is a real difference, it may derive from some such desirable reaction unless he was writing a horror-burlesque. phenomenon of "discounted shock" in the audience countered by exaggerated shock tactics in the dramaturgy as I suggested in speaking of the development of one line of melo- Might we be able to tell, just from the photographed faces, whether an audience was witnessing humor or satire in a comedy? I hope so, but confess that I am not sure; those -133- pictures of children reveal so many ways of showing what ought to be approximately the same emotion, for all are watching the same tense bit of action on the screen. drama out of tragi-comedy. For if in comedy the tensions are constantly being reduced through laughter and tears, the playwright may feel he has to pile on the pressure if he is to Could we even expect to tell from a series of pictures whether the stage performance was a bring his audience to the end of his play with any accumulated tensions still to be relieved. comedy or a tragedy? Here are some differences we might look for. The tragic audience (see Daumier's famous pictures for his impressions) ought to show a graver, more uniform intensity. The comic audience should distort its faces more variously and more violently. -134- Dignity, perhaps tragedy's most obvious and necessary attribute, should communicate itself from the stage to the audience. On both sides of the footlights tragedy and comedy have their different decorums. At the final curtains we might recognize different faces for tragic catharsis

40 Irony In The Drama Chapter IX -136- COMIC SHOCK AND COMIC CATHARSIS IN from play to play and period to period, but the pattern is obscure. Some things do appear to hold steady: one might call them moral attitudes. Mr. Partridge points out a consistent PRACTICE preference for strong, "normal" heterosexuality. To me it appears that Shakespeare parallels this attitude with a steady prejudice against promiscuity, seen in his careful protection of his finer characters from the imputation of it, even in thought and word. Prince Hal is an If there does exist in drama such a phenomenon as comic catharsis, it is, like tragic catharsis, interesting example. Falstaff jests about Hal's wild oats; but we never see anything to a psychological one; and we may expect to find it being prepared for, as tragic catharsis is, contaminate Hal, and the effect of Falstaff's allusions is as evanescent as that of any other by some form of shock -- let us call it comic shock. In the introduction, in categorizing the jest. forms of irony we placed catharsis and the ironies to be found in the steps leading up to catharsis (shock being prominent among them) in a group called ironies of psychological process, or subconscious ironies, because they operate on the subconscious mind of the As another example, the comic nature of the passages justifies the use of Romeo and Juliet. spectator, not predominantly on his conscious recognition of the ironical as do mostly the To quote J. I. M. Stewart once more: technical and the philosophical or cosmic ironies. So comic shock, with some related phenomena of the theater, constitutes one of the psychological, subconscious ironies. But Mr. Granville-Barker [Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series] has shown how sharply and subtly dramatic is its setting in that whole scene in which Romeo overhears Mercutio's Earlier in this study the problem of finding familiar illustrative materials was solved by bawdy talk. Indeed, Mercutio and the Nurse, both abundant in appropriate bawdry are, in [ J. centering certain investigations of irony upon Shakespeare. There is no need to collect Dover Wilson's] words, "two pillars which support the whole dramatic structure." Any person examples of his sexual comic shocks, however: Eric Partridge has done this and made useful of merely salacious mind in Shakespeare's audience who should say, "These characters have interpretations, linguistic and biographical, in his Shakespeares Bawdy; without going far into been put in for me" would be altogether misestimating the situation. Mercutio and the Nurse aesthetics he compiles the examples of Shakespeare's use of bawdry. Our purpose here is to have been put in for Romeo and for Juliet, and their loose talk helps to constitute for us the show, if possible, the general artistic purposes behind Shakespeare's use, beyond a simple lovers' passion for what it is. commercial purpose, which actually governs only a small percentage of occurrences, of making the groundlings guffaw and the punks pretend to blush. That is to say, it is a flesh and blood passion, but not merely fleshly; and Shakespeare artistically keeps the love solidly human and sexual by assigning the suggestive, bawdy talk -135- about it to Mercutio and the Nurse and allowing the lovers themselves to express its less carnal poetry. A beautifully subtle way of handling the flesh-versus-spirit irony in love without allowing it to become a dilemma! Only a very tenuous line can be drawn between the erotic horrors of tragedy and the bawdry of comedy. The latter we might tentatively define by its apparent result, as an erotic suggestion which is shocking in a light way. When we look at everything of the sort found in The notable exceptions to Shakespeare's practice of guarding his finer characters from sexual Shakespeare by Partridge, we see bawdry spoken by characters ranging from Hamlet, coarsenesses, especially those suggesting promiscuity, occur mainly in tragedy, for it is in Othello, and Lear through Enobarbus and Mercutio to Iago and Costard, with no dear division tragedy that such characters go mad and talk bawdy. But between tragic and comic sexual shock anywhere to be discerned. It is everywhere apparent that Shakespeare was writing for his actors, with full realization of their need of opportunities -137- to suggest sex on many levels, and also of their need for supporting moral disciplines, restraining artistic patterns, humane norms, ironic appreciations, to play around. the erotic imagery of Lear's and Ophelial's mad speeches does not contaminate them, for it does not touch our feeling about their real moral natures. Somewhat the same rule must Concentrating a little more narrowly on the comic bawdry, we find examples of coarseness apply in Love's Labour's Lost and All's Well That Ends Well, when fine young ladies talk (sometimes a mixture of sex and scatology), of verbal bluntness (the four-letter word sort), obscenities with clowns and fools, who are privileged as not quite right in the head, and it is of mere realism or naturalism, of light and laughable or prettily pathetic sadism and good manners to humor them, apparently. masochism (although this never goes so far as in Fletcher), of punning and double entendre ranging from courtier to clown, of sensuous beauty, and of obscene gesture (in unknown amounts, but certainly there in performance, as witness Hamlet's warning to the clown and Let us run lightly through Shakespeare's comedies, pointing out here and there interesting Feste's epilogue-song). examples of shock technique, of whatever nature. As I have said, I think that the bawdy ones predominate; but I recognize that this may be an illusion caused by the effect on me of their deeper penetration of the unconscious. Whatever one's pretext for rereading Shakespeare, Shakespeare is both humorist and satirist; so we find in his comedies both the humorous, the temptation to quote becomes severe, but we shall resist it as well as we can. Especially, tolerant, emotional attitude toward sex as something very human and the satirical, we shall try not to quote the smuttiest things, for out of their context -- and their real context intellectually intolerant attitude toward its "brutish sting" which makes sex repulsive. is lusty acting in a laughing theater -- their power to shock offensively is disproportionately emphasized. An examination of Shakespeare's works for comic uses of bawdry should be, for more reasons than one, rather guarded. One pursuing it chronologically should beware of reading into it a To begin with what is probably his earliest comedy, one expects its range of shock devices to development from youthful lusciousness and heat to cold and dry age. I have not yet be somewhat limited by the conventionality of its Plautine model. Still, one can use The convinced myself of a progressive development of that or any other sort. Phenomena vary, Comedy of Errors for rather clear evidence that comic shocks, only in part of a bawdy sort,

41 Irony In The Drama tend to be grouped on more than one social and intellectual level. On the higher level here we Cuckoo, cuckoo," -- O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! have the images connected with Adriana's jealousy of her husband with the courtesan, at least part of the supernatural imagery (really shocking to the Elizabethan audience), and the The serene midsummer moon of Shakespeare's next comedy looks blandly down on a references to madness as caused by the devil. Farcical slapstick invades this realm in the smoothed-out Attic landscape. But under the dreaming magic the sort of examination which form of Pinch the schoolmaster and his attempt to confine Antipholus as a madman, just as a one cannot help feeling a little ashamed to make reveals a beautifully intricate pattern of tiny, clown's foolishness is aimed at gentlefolk's appreciation of wit in Dromio's paradoxical balanced shocks, many of them erotic if we look closely enough and some of them ' argument in favor of baldness. And we find ourselves on a low level, that of "Grobianism" (or undeniably bawdy. The general emotional setting is the amorous tension of Theseus and sex, gross manners, and scatology), in Dromio's description of Hippolyta's delayed consummation. Theseus warns Hermia vividly against becoming a nun, to chant faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon. His own scandalous past and Hippolyta's milder -138- one, though veiled to save their poetic dignity, are alluded to in Oberon's quarrel with Titania. Bottom and his companions manage to produce some genuine low bawdry, for instance the Wall's stones and kissing the Wall's hole, in their interlude before the court, while the quaint his being pursued and overwhelmed by the "kitchen wench, all grease." and strangely beautiful passion of Titania for the ass-headed Bottom is not wholly ethereal save in its poetry: Like several other plays Two Gentlemen of Verona is placed in a general suspenseful atmosphere of potential erotic shock by having Julia follow her Proteus disguised as a boy Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower. The moon methinks looks with a watery eye; page. As usual, Shakespeare avoids overt bawdry in this situation, whether to observe good And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my taste, to preserve the character's charm, or to keep up the tension. However, the clowns are love's tongue, bring him silently. allowed to jest about her more bawdily than about her fellow heroine, Silvia.

-140- We find a familiar medical jest, "These follies . . . shine through you like the water in an urinal, that not an eye that sees you but is a physician to comment on your malady." This is on the upper social level, as is the very shocking and surprising offer of rape by Proteus to There is even erotic shock, lightly applied, in the lovers' lying down side by side in the wood, Silvia -- and not in jest. On the lower level (but how beautifully done!) is the humorous gem in the pretty pregnancy of the Indian mother befriended by Titania, and in Oberon's blessing of the play, the mildly scatological scene of Launce and his dog: of the bridal beds.

Thou think'st not of this now. Nay, I remember the trick you serv'd me when I took my leave 1 might omit The Merchant of Venice as not a comedy, yet a large part of its shock devices of Madame Silvia. Did not I bid thee still mark me, and do as I do? When didst thou see me are associated with the strong romantic comedy element which pervades and concludes the heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale? Didst thou ever see play. As appropriate to the near-tragic quality of his part of the drama, Shylock goes me do such a trick? surrounded with images of sadism. But he is made to perpetrate an unintentionally bawdy jest, "My own flesh and blood to rebel!" And his daughter Jessica and servant Gobbo draw on much of the play's below-the-belt wit and humor. In connection with Gobbo, indeed, some Love's Labour's Lost instances a phenomenon we have previously noted: the Princess and the Grobianism may be discerned. Then the Belmont scenes close the play in an atmosphere of King are left comparatively untouched by bawdry, excepting insofar as, when used by the "sweet, reluctant, amorous" delayed consummation, like that of A Midsummer Night's Dream. other characters, it extends to them the implication that they are of flesh and blood Here there is no lack of gently bawdy humor in the girls' teasing of their young husbands constitution and capable of witty, sexy, French jesting. Working downward from this rarefied about the rings, with suggestive use of their sex symbolism and that of the lawclerk's pen. level, we observe that Biron's skepticism about Navarre's academy extends to its ban on sex. The Costard-JaquenettaArmado triangle which amuses the gentry is made and kept very suggestive. The risqué duet of courtier and lady, How often Shakespeare and his contemporaries make central use of the motif of ironic situations of acknowledged lovers kept from bed in their romantic comedies! Yes, and romantic fiction uses it extensively, too, right down to the present day. Its history is older Rosaline. Thou canst not hit it, hit it, hit it, Thou canst not hit it, my good man. than the Greek romances, as old as folklore; and we shall never be without it as long as art bases itself on both tradition and reality, not even if we should abolish matrimony. The two -139- words, delayed and consummation, describe the most natural of all motifs for producing in an audience a series of emotions, a tension and release, a comic catharsis. We have already used for the ultimate feeling intended by comedy such terms as relief, restoration of Boyet. An I cannot, cannot, cannot, An I cannot, another can . . . , equilibrium, and relaxation. We should add now consummation. is followed directly by another lady, Maria, encouraging the clown Costard in some of the I have not until recently recognized The Taming of the Shrew to be at all this sort of comedy, smuttiest double-meanings anywhere to be found in Shakespeare, which are put in their true, for it has seemed sub-basement position by the gusto of Costard's approval:

-141- O' my troth, most sweet jests! most incony vulgar wit! When it comes so smoothly off, so obscenely, as it were, so fit. dominantly farcical, even anti-romantic. The rough stuff and the almost sexless wedding night of Petruchio and Katherina blinded me to the sex frustration of the Sly prelude and the fact And the whole play is rounded off with the disturbing ironies of the epilogue song, 42 Irony In The Drama that the leading couple do not really go to bed together until after the banquet of the last act. Mrs. Quickly, as usual, welds her shallow mind, hasty tongue, and loose past into delightfully I even overlooked most of the bawdry, so that some of the interchanges of wit in Petruchio's bawdy errors. wooing have managed to shock me by surprise. I refuse to quote, since modern auditors of an expurgated text can derive sufficient erotic shock unconsciously, through the visual William. Genitive, horum, harum, horum. Quickly. Vengeance of Jenny's case! Fie on her! suggestions from the madcap couple's wrestling and scuffling. But, I repeat, the long delay, Never name her, child, if she be a whore. well punctuated with bawdy commentary, builds up ironic tension toward the relief of consummation, a comic catharsis. Slender, the feeble youth, carries with him, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, more than a suggestion of sexual insufficiency. But In discussing so far a half-dozen Shakespeare comedies, we have touched on many of the more important and recurrent shock phenomena; so we shall treat the rest even more summarily. -143-

Much Ado About Nothing strengthens its tragi-comic element by such devices. Hero, the lady Falstaff is at the heart of it all. This is that same Falstaff of the Boar's Head, only here he is maligned through a dirty conspiracy to besmirch her by a faked assignation, is carefully kept demonstrating that even a Falstaff's wit can be stultified by Eros: so pure in speech and manners -- even in the things said to her up to the time she is accused at the wedding -that she seems like an object of exaggerated whiteness against an artificially darkened background. The comic lovers, Beatrice and Benedick, are allowed rather free Now, the hot-blooded gods assist me! Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa . . . a tongues but talk only average bawdry. Benedick does engage in very broad chat with swan for love of Leda . . . When gods have hot backs, what shall poor men do? For me, I am Margaret, a typically naughty-tongued maid-confidante: here a Windsor stag; and the fattest, I think, in the forest. Send me a cool rut-time, Jove, or who can blame me to piss my tallow. Who comes here? . . . My doe with the black scut!

Marg. Give us the swords; we have bucklers of our own. Ben. If you use them, Margaret, you must put in the pikes with a vice; and they are dangerous weapons for maids. Marg. Well, I Much of the charm of Twelfth Night, most perfect of romantic comedies, consists in will call Beatrice to you, who I think hath legs. indelicacies delicately applied. The Countess Olivia's heat of love is kept as ladylike, as dignified, as possible. The Duke Orsino appreciates the sexual attractiveness of his page "Cesario," the disguised Viola, and with the prettiest irony falls subconsciously in love with her As You Like It has an atmosphere of pastoral dream that calls on a shock technique similar to while he believes he is being platonically drawn toward him. The Renaissance friendship-love that for Theseus' Athens. Touchstone the Fool, as expected, provides a realistic, earthy between Sebastian and the older Antonio, as usually, I think, in Shakespeare, is artistically kept clean of homosexuality while existing in a sensuous though romantically idealized erotic atmosphere. Sir Andrew is but, as Thomas Hardy phrases it, "the tames of a man." And part -142- of the ingenious denigration of Malvolio is giving his indecorous aspiration to Olivia a repressed sexuality which writhes through his day-dreams: bawdry; and Jaques the melancholy-cynical observer adds another type, satirical where Touchstone's is humorous -- or rather threatens it, before the Duke blasts it back into his Mal. Having been three months married to her, sitting in my state; calling my officers about curdled system. me, in my branch'd velvet gown, having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping . . . and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my -- some rich jewel. Shakespeare does not, however, rely entirely on free-spoken males to establish our feeling that Rosalind, the breeched "Ganymede," and her friend Celia are made of warm flesh and Or, reading Olivia's supposed letter, blood. Rosalind speaks of her "child's father," and evidently enjoys the series of bawdy images wherewith Touchstone caps Orlando's love-rhymes. Celia tells her, "So you may put a man in your belly." And Rosalind says, of Celia and Oliver: . . . these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's; and thus makes she her great P's. . . .

. . . they made a pair of stairs to marriage which they will climb incontinent, or else be Feste's epilogue song, interpreted with the help of his probably suggestive manipulation of his incontinent before marriage. They are in the very wrath of love [like dogs], and they will be "bauble," may be in- together. Clubs cannot part them. -144- This is in a way her retaliation to Celia's threat, "We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest." terpreted as the pathetic history of a Fool's love life, beginning with

The farcical Merry Wives of Windsor naturally draws much of its bawdy from "humour" characters on several social levels. The wives are gaily and confidently free-spoken about When that I was and a little tiny boy, A foolish thing was but a toy, Falstaff: Mrs. Ford hopes he'll fry "till the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease"; Mrs. Page declares, "I had rather be a giantess, and lie under Mount Pelion." The and ending with the philosophy of the stray stanza in King Lear: French Doctor and the Welsh Parson make bawdy fritters of English: Dr. Caius utters the threat, "I will cut all his two stones." Evans inquires, "Will you take up your wife's clothes?" He that has and a little tiny wit -With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain, -- 43 Irony In The Drama Must make content with his fortunes fit, For the rain it raineth every day. -146-

The pattern of All's Well That Ends Well resembles that of As You Like It on the one hand and brings out clearly how the fat knight's sensual vices have crippled him for any real concern that of Measure for Measure on the other. Perhaps some readers would prefer to work this out with the time of day in the state. for themselves. I provide these hints: the play has a clown whose bawdry is humorous, and it has Parolles, who is smutty and cynically satirical. The heroine chats freely with both. Helena Fal. [yawning] How, Hal, what time of day is it, lad? Hal. Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking herself reveals a buried masochism rather like Isabella's. And Bertram, though unlike Angelo of old sack and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon benches after noon, that in being a callow, sulky boy, comes to a good equilibrium in the end through a like process of thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast erotic bafflement. thou to do with the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun I cannot refrain from the possibly irrelevant remark that the detestable style of Diana's himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so paradox-crammed jingle in the closing scene must be due, not to the sexual content, but to superfluous as to demand the time of the day. the riddle tradition: And notice how strongly rhythmed this speech is, as if Shakespeare felt that it was insufficient He knows himself my bed he hath defiled, And at that time he got his wife with child. Dead to have set his blank verse rhythm in the first scene for the King, so that he must also give though she be, she feels her young one kick; So there's my riddle: one that's dead is quick; the comedy of the play its own prose rhythm in the second. And now behold the meaning. [Re-enter Widow, with Helena (visibly pregnant?)] In the opening scene of Ben Jonson's play Volpone's luxury and his satanic pride in the Here I shall leave my survey of Shakespeare's comedies, for I have already written of his late intellectual manipulation of others' vices prepare us for his ultimate and unlamented downfall tragi-comedies and of Measure for Measure as satirical tragi-comedy. The latter is no true as a scapegoat. In The Merchant of Venice we have a glimpse of things that happen when the comedy in tone, in spite of its ending in a set of patched- position of hero is shared. The bells that ring for the melancholy merchant Antonio are gently, mysteriously sad; those for Bassanio and Portia are clear but distant wedding bells presaging a romantically delayed consummation; Shylock's bells jangle out a harsh summons for him to -145- be the scapegoat. up marriages, none of which, however, gives the audience a sense of consummation, since In the fourth step the tragic hero's struggles are, we saw, so presented as to gain for him the none has previously engaged its sympathetic anticipation. empathy of the audience, its sympathetic emotional identification with him and his further fortunes. The nature of comedy makes this step very dependent on the character type Even in my cautious selection of examples the shocking power of bawdry is very evident. But represented by the comic hero and on the tone the playwright gives to his treatment of him. as readers of comedy and of criticism of comedy we must be careful to keep in mind that on An audience identifies itself easily with Hal as hero and probably also with Falstaff as the stage shock materials in comedy are actually less shocking than in tragic, "problem" scapegoat. It feels greater empathy for Bassanio and Portia than for Antonio, whose humour drama. Broadway observers like George Jean Nathan have been bitterly remarking for years of melancholy tends to isolate him save when he is being actively that a comedy, especially if "musical," can enjoy a practically endless run on a track paved with bawdy, scatological, and generally subversive materials, one hod of whose cinders would -147- close up a serious play almost before it could open.

threatened. And perhaps the sympathy Shakespeare allows us to feel for Shylock makes him, I think we now have enough material before us to return to the possibility of a general as apparently it does Falstaff, all the better scapegoat. Empathy seems also to vary with the cathartic process in comedy. Let us see whether the nine steps I have outlined for tragedy type of comedy in general. Romantic comedy and any other comedy possessing humorous can be chiseled into an approach to the comic problem. warmth operate on the audience's hearts readily and directly. A satirical treatment of the hero, on the other hand, repels our sympathy, tending to fit him rather for scapegoat than for First is the step of hypnotic rhythm. Verse, since the sixteenth century, has been increasingly symbol. Modern naturalistic drama often succeeds in employing emotional warmth to good uncommon in comedy, and so has rhythmic prose of the poetic sort. But a great variety of effect, for example Clifford Odet Awake and Sing. other prose rhythms, from Falstaff's jovial invective to the smoothly balanced epigrams of Congreve and Wilde, has been widely and effectively employed. The fifth step, the application of comic shocks, we have already shaped. It is the frequency and relative completeness of intermediate relief of the tensions resultant from comic. shocks, Second is the introduction of the hero, often in comedy not singled out so clearly as in relief through laughter and tears, which mark their different use and lesser final effectiveness tragedy, but sometimes introduced with a fanfare of preparatory description like Volpone or in comedy. Millamant; and third comes the inception of his struggle, accompanied by presaging mood- imagery, in tragedy the "bells of doom." Are not these premonitions of the outcome Step the sixth, the tragic hybris, is employed in comedy with surprising frequency. For discernibly present in good comedy, although in the nature of things both less seriously examples look just before the turning points of the most powerful comedies the reader presented and more lightly felt? Prince Hal scolds Falstaff extravagantly for asking the time of knows. Some of the clearest instances I have noticed occur in comedies of a satirical tinge day, which King Henry in the previous scene has made clear to be almost tragically late for which come rather close to tragedy in some of their other techniques also. Jonson Volpone his crown, and in the course of the scolding and Molière's Tartuffe are enough to name.

44 Irony In The Drama The seventh step, having the audience's empathy with the hero transform him into a symbol English Renaissance comic practices have received all the space possible in our survey of (or a scapegoat) to be loaded with the whole theater's emotions, certainly does occur in Shakespeare. Jonson, his greatest contemporary, employs shock tactics mainly satirical, comedy, and frequently, it seems to me. For contemporary critics who deal with the idea, see although he does have a broad vein of humor only slightly restrained by his standards of neo- the chapter on Shakespeare as ironist. We have mentioned Volpone, Prince Hal, Falstaff, classic decorum. Shylock, among others. And what of such heroines as Rosalind and Viola? As I have suggested, it may be in comedy more often than in tragedy a double practice, packing the The commedia dell' arte must have taught Molière, among other things, how to administer "good" emotions onto a hero, the "bad" onto a butt or scapegoat. In all cases, if, as we think, shock, especially bawdy shock, through pantomime. A good example is the farcical Doctor in any intermediate relief through the tears and laughter of comedy lightens shock and keeps Spite of Himself, where Sganarelle's violent courtship of (or rather series of assaults on) a tension down, so does it also conceivably limit identification with the man's wife before his face has the crude, bawdy audacity of a Harpo Marx. In general the conventions of his time made Molère employ other forms of shock than verbal bawdry. His -148- style compared with Shakespeare's is direct rather than figurative, thus, sparser in imagery. His ladies are more loose in deeds and therefore do not have, for shock purposes, to be so suggestive in language. He did manage to shock his times, and perhaps more deeply than hero. And so does any failure of comedy to stir emotions deeply enough to produce sympathy compatible with his intentions or his safety, by offending religious groups with his Don Juan on the unconscious as well as the conscious level. and Tartuffe. And the fine compassionate irony of his Misanthrope probably shocked the gentlemanly code of his day, as it would have that of a Jacobean England, by suggesting that Eighth, then, the hero's death, can hardly occur in comedy. We look rather for the lesser a man's love for his wife might force him to condone her gallantries. finalities, which we have called consummations, restorations of equilibrium, and the like. Combining our discussion of this step with the ninth, as we found desirable with tragedy, we French drama lost many of its constraints, especially in the way of verbal decorum, when the see that the comic catharsis will, if parallel to the tragic one, consist in a sense of purgation romantic Victor Hugo broke and elevation accompanying the sense of finality in the defeat or victory of the hero. The basic difference here appears to be that in tragedy the sense of readjustment to a restored equilibrium on a higher plane is largely, when the hero dies, on a more spiritual, a more -150- strictly immaterial level, while in comedy it adjusts the audience to a continuation of living "happily ever after," that is, on a sounder moral basis in this material world. out the way to freedom; and since the mid- nineteenth century it has had the reputation of frankness in the use of shock throughout its development of realistic drama and on into its We have nine steps for comedy then; but we have had to chip them down like an unskilful most "advanced" modern forms. mason, so that they are rough, awkwardly jointed, and lower in the risers; and our climb up them to the comic catharsis carries us, although to a lower elevation than that of tragedy, England, in a contrary historical development, enjoyed hearty comic bawdry to about the end with noticeably less ease and safety to accompany our critical ascent. of the seventeenth century. With the close of the Restoration, decorum and sentimental gentility, more and more associated with middle-class morality, began a reign which has However, one does come out with the general feeling that the tragic and comic arts, in lasted quite through nineteenth-century Victorianism and down to our own day. For who working on the same audiences, use similar and profitably comparable psychological would say that even up to and past 1950 English comedy was not verbally decorous? techniques and use them to at least broadly similar ends in some sort of final satisfaction which may, peace be to Aristotle, be called a catharsis. Not without occasional pin-pricks, of course. It is charming to see Shaw bring up all the batteries of his artistry to discharge, in Pygmalion, the single dreadful word bloody against Our survey for comic shock of Western comedy in general will be a very sketchy one indeed, English respectability. The way he prepares for and so enhances its effect reveals his mastery particularly when one thinks of the vast and varied wealth of available materials. of the most powerful forms of ironic impersonation; here the word comes from an actress exploiting a second-level impersonation in a scene of rich dramatic irony. We recall that the linguist Higgens has, on a bet, been training a London flower-girl to pass as a lady, and Aristophanic comedy, until tyranny silenced it, relied very much on political shocks welcomes a rather premature opportunity to introduce her to some lady callers in the intermingled with literary and religious ones. Its erotic shocks had to be of a perfectly presence of his mother. Liza is, then, impersonating a lady, with the audience, Higgens, and outrageous voltage, applied as they had to be to an audience buzzing with his mother anxiously looking on. She sets out beautifully, and gets in a bit of parroted science on the subject of the weather. But on the mention of influenza she becomes emotionally -149- involved and launches, in gutter dialect, upon her dark suspicions that her mother really was done in by them as wanted to pinch 'er 'at. With fine comic irony the horror of her patrons is unnecessary, for the callers never suspect that this is the real Liza; they admire it as "the Dionysiac wine and used to taking as a matter of course comic actors who wore the phallus. new small talk." And then in parting, asked whether she means to walk across the park, Liza launches the thunderbolt: "Walk! Not bloody likely! " Well, Mr. Shaw's Roman comedy was forbidden to use political shock; the plays of Plautus and Terence were domestic, and even in that restricted realm were apparently forced by social decorum to -151- assign bawdry to Greeks and slaves. The broad comic effects of medieval drama seem gauged to the manners of their audiences; and the earlier comedies and comic interludes of the Renaissance drew their shock weapons from both arsenals, the medieval and the Latin. escapade made quite a flutter, but his naughty word brought down no walls of Jericho.

45 Irony In The Drama Early in our century Dublin reacted, even to the extent of riots in the Abbey Theatre, to the -153- attempts of Synge and O'Casey to use various kinds of shock more freely. They were successful, too; at least, they managed to write and get produced the finest and freest out end. I hope that the attempt in Chapter 8 to analyze provisionally the emotional effects of dramas of the century's early decades. But plays like The Playboy of the Western World and humor and satire on the stage may be of some help in assessing the varying values and Juno and the Paycock are not coming out in Dublin today, and it may not be only because audience reactions for such things as impersonation, ironic shock, tensions, and reliefs in O'Casey is self-exiled and Synge under the sod. some or all of the dramatic types today current.

The revolution on the western shore of the Atlantic was successfully led by O'Neill, Stallings, Serious dramas and problem plays have been very important among our better dramas since and Anderson in the twenties; the vanguard plays were The Hairy Ape and What Price Glory? Ibsen, who is the dramatist selected by A. R. Thompson in his recent study of irony, The Dry These fighters for verbal freedom used ingenious and amusing devices to screen their aims Mock, as the culmination and supreme model of dramatic irony. The Ibsen technique of story- and keep their explosives from blasting back into their faces, but they won their battle, they telling (or, as it is often called in his case, exposition) is quite similar to that of Oedipus Rex; and their followers. Of the situation today we may say this: in general, dramatists no longer that is, it begins with the latest possible stage of a situation and works back into the past need to fear that their words and allusions will shock standard audiences more deeply or in which shaped that situation by means of a series of ironic shocks of discovery. We can different ways than they intend them to be shocked. observe this technique and at the same time the importance of dramatic irony and erotic shock to it in Ghosts. This method of exploiting ironic shock has never, I think, been common, There are bound, of course, to be exceptions. Even in the United States audiences can differ although Arthur Miller has recently been employing something like it with success. widely. England appears rather less free than America or France. And important exceptions are all those areas where ideologies -- religious, economic, and political -- manage to Twentieth-century playwrights all over the Western world have been very active in dominate so much of the twentieth-century Western world. experimentation with subtleties and novelties of impersonative technique. I should rule out, as circus tricks, as show business, or as gimmicks destructive of the true impersonative Yet a dramatist can, anywhere that he finds himself free enough to be a dramatist at all, find magic, such devices as interruptions from the audience, juries chosen from their number to shock devices suitable to the shockability of his audience; and we trust that this chapter has sit on the stage, and other such trite "novelties." But interesting things are being done with explained the necessity that the comic dramatist is under to do this somehow, in the practice dramatic irony itself which play dangerously with the confusing of impersonation and of his ironic art, actuality.

-152- Pirandello is addicted to such risks. His As You Desire Me leaves unsolved the problem whether the heroine's role is a first- or a second-level impersonation. Standard practice would be to let the audience know of the character's pretending to be someone else at first, for the Chapter X sake of dramatic irony. Keeping it back for a surprise would be a violation of ordinary

MODERN TRENDS IN COMEDY -154-

What can we say now of the present condition of ironic impersonation and its attendant technique, but one with some sporadic historical standing. Leaving the matter unsolved techniques? We have been, of course, carrying the several strands of our argument down to seems new, and puzzling. Is it good? our mid-twentieth century. But a sound general estimate would require a basis, in reading and in examples, that would call for another book -- a sequel to this one, founded on the principles here suggested and, I trust, established well enough for application to the Eric Bentley ( In Search of Theater, p. 288) suggests that Pirandello tries an extra depth in immensely various and active field of our contemporary drama. what we have called the levels of impersonation, in the case of "Mommina, dying in a play within a play while singing in a play within a play within a play." The play is Tonight We Improvise; and if we recognize the character Mommina's self-identification with the It is difficult enough to make quantitative estimates of the technical phenomena even for operasinger, when she sings the Trovatore aria with tears streaming down her cheeks, we do periods where the criticism has been immense and the leading plays have been agreed upon, have a fourth-level impersonation. But I do not feel sure she is not impersonating Leonora and exemplary material can be selected which will be familiar to most readers. These are not (the Trovatore character), a character-to-character short cut which would yield no such at all the conditions we face in considering the drama of our own time. But we have seen excessive impersonative depth. indications that the techniques discussed here are widespread, practically universal, in Western drama. They seem to appear most clearly and prominently in the masterpieces of tragedy; but this might be due to the fact that of all plays these have been the most I could cite some other modern examples of partially rubbing out the line between the acted intensively studied by critics. character and the member of the audience. Sometimes the actor is on stage but not impersonating any character in the plot; he may be a commentator, a member of the stage crew, and so on. In The Glass Menagerie one actor serves as both commentator and one of We have developed, and in this century are actively producing, such a diversity of dramatic the characters; in Our Town, as commentator, one of the characters, and stage hand. Let us types that Polonius himself would hardly be long-winded enough to reel off a classified list: look for light on the possible purposes of the authors in experimenting with such devices. historical dramas of all sorts, tragi-comedies, serious, socially conscious, and problem dramas, comedies of manners, fantasies, bitter and satirical comedies, and so on, almost with- Pirandello, confusing impersonations at various levels in a sort of play within a play, may be aiming his Six Characters in Search of an Author at a paradoxical (and ironic) simultaneous

46 Irony In The Drama intensification of the conflicting senses of theatricality and actuality. I rather think Thornton back to the Greek idea of circling Time, embodied by Shelley in the final chorus of his Hellas, Wilder may have the same general aim in his Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. which begins joyously, Particularly in the former, such realistic pantomiming as the getting of breakfast without stove or utensils throws a peculiarly vivid imaginative sense of actuality across the footlights. But in The world's great age begins anew, both of Wilder's plays his special techniques, developed slowly through careful The golden years return, experimentation in his short pieces, serve also the cause of compression; his sketchy, The earth doth like a snake renew suggestive staging helps Her winter weeds outworn:

-155- and ends despairingly, him to condense years of living, feeling, and philosophy into the one play, eons into the other, Oh, cease! must hate and death return? by a kind of shorthand. Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Maxwell Anderson Joan of Lorraine employs more seriously than most back-stage plays the Of bitter prophecy. device of showing actors impersonating actors who are rehearsing roles in a play. This is a The earth is weary of the past, fairly simple involution and would not call for special mention here had not the playwright Oh, might it die or rest at last! revealed his additional, and probably main, purpose of working in by this method some rather important dramatic criticism -- of acting, of playwriting, of certain dramas -- as well as a I am afraid that this circular form of futility offers no satisfactory catharsis. And I may be philosophy of artistic compromises and their limits. confessing to an occupational prejudice, but I see too many very young writers enamoured of the device to hope very much from it in the way of mature artistry, that is, in the way of We may recall Shaw's similar working into Fanny's First Play of a clever criticism of the critics serious or tragic dramaturgy. Somerset Maugham's comedy of manners The Circle, which of his own plays, and also Wycherley's more violent but equally funny attack on the critics of his Country Wife by means of dialogue in his PlainDealer. -157-

What happens psychologically when, in Eliot Murder in the Cathedral, the knightly assassins advertises this device in its title, does not seem so futilitarian as these other plays. Its tone is of Becket step forward and speak their apologies directly to the audience? Clowns have been lighter, far from despairing. Perhaps the circular ending is sufficient for a comic catharsis? doing this for centuries, and we laugh a little at these fellows of Eliot's too. But their speeches Still, it gives rather an effect of mechanism, which makes the comedy that uses it lean in the also have a powerfully serious contemporary impact. direction of farce.

And has our century discovered (and already almost abandoned) a new catharsis, that of These contemporary examples show ingenuity, some of it no doubt perverse but some of it futility? Possibly Galsworthy looked toward it in the battered, futile, deadlock ending of his highly promising. But what of today's standard uses of impersonative irony and the cathartic strike play, Strife. Barrie Dear Brutus gives its characters another chance, an opportunity to processes? That is a much harder question to answer. go back and live part of their lives over; but they find this futile, also.

It is said by Mr. Purdom that the real reason why we do not have great plays is that our The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in our selves, that we are underlings. playwrights of today do not know how to write them -- do not understand basically what a play is. Others say the obstacle is political. Perhaps it is a complex problem, as most We did not begin to talk about "futilitarian" literature, though, until about the time that problems today seem to be, and not least the problems involving the inhibitions of the artist. Hemingway came along, between wars. Perhaps the drama showed its traditional ideological But while I have no answer for the political problem, not even an estimate of its actual lag by keeping its patrons waiting some time for Robert Sherwood importance in the British and American centers of drama being written in English, I do, I believe, have a radical answer in the field of technique: it has been forgotten that at the very heart of drama is impersonation in depth; and that this depth is to be secured for the actor by -156- the playwright's provision of irony, particularly dramatic irony.

Idiot's Delight with its feeling of both the futility of war and the futility of trying to do anything I do not mean to say that dramatic irony is no longer employed. It is used with much variety to prevent it. Sherwood outgrew this play, as Anderson has his futilitarian What Price Glory? and effect, and plays can hardly be composed without it; only it is used haphazardly, with Noel Coward shows only occasional and thus far disappointing signs of outgrowing the similar little apparent calculation, and as far as I can tell, with almost no assistance from mood of his comedies, or farces, of manners, Private Lives, Design for Living, and so on. contemporary critical theory.

A kind of modern futility, too, but one which tries to escape from the mood by means of ironic What has happened to this principle of impersonation in depth through dramatic irony? mysticism, is represented by Priestley An Inspector Calls. Here a smug family is put under Though never codified, it was potent in the great practice of drama from Aeschylus to, say, great pressure by a detective, who has at last just been proved to be either an imposter or a Addison. And I think it was whittled down, emasculated, strained away, and pettified into just supernatural being when a real inspector calls, and the whole business starts over again as one more "contrivance" by an eighteenth and a nineteenth century of poetaster tragedians, the curtain descends. This circular irony, an endless return of things to their beginnings, harks 47 Irony In The Drama cheap melodramatists, and shallow fabricators of wellmade "drama." By the time a Zola and a a plough-boy, nor like Sir Charles Coldstream acting the plough-boy. So little regard has he to Strindberg came truth, that he does not even remove the rings from his white fingers, although a jeweled hand is not usually seen directing a plough. Nor when the farmer is absent does the removal of such a constraint make any change in his voice and bearing. The situations of this act are -158- funny, and the amused spectators perhaps enjoy the broad contrast between the elegance of Sir Charles and the homeliness of the plough-boy; but an accomplished comedian like Charles along, the architectural planning of a play was an undignified, gingerbready, contemptible, Mathews ought to have seized such an opportunity of revealing the elegant and refined almost shameful occupation; and a great Ibsen and a great Shaw practically had to work out coolness of the man under the necessary coarseness of his assumed character. The their own devices (which still puzzle us by their originality) because the new movement in the alternations are just the sort of effects which one could fancy must be tempting to an artist drama had thrown out the most important device as well as the cheap tricks. conscious of his powers. It is, however, plain to anyone who is sufficiently critical to discriminate between the acting and the situation, that Charles Mathews has no distinct conception in his mind of any character at all placed in this difficult situation, but that he Let us first consider Eugene Scribe ( 1791-1861) as described by S. A. Rhodes in Clark and abandons himself to the situation, and allows the fun of it to do his work. In other words, it is Freedley's History of Modern Drama: farce, not comedy: whereas the first act [where Mathews was playing "the languorous man of fashion"] is comedy, and high comedy. Skillful at weaving amusing and striking situations, at arousing curiosity and suspense, at tying and untying impossible knots, he had, in addition, the secret of imparting the illusion of -160- reality to arbitrary intrigues and characters. The latter were sentimental and gay marionettes no less theatrical than the cardboard heroes of the romantic drama, even though Scribe controlled their simulated movements on the stage with more dexterous fingers. His theatre, Reacting against the Scribean triviality of content, Augier and Becque introduced the "thesis in brief, was an exhibition of showmanship rather than an expression of life. He formalized play." But Scribean comedy did not die; it had a new lease on life with Victorien Sardou A and systematized dramatic creativeness, spontaneity, reality, and truth in the theatre. He Scrap of Paper, Let's Divorce, Fedora, and Madame SansGêne. Sardou gave a gay illusion of converted playwriting into a craft which aspiring dramatists studied afterwards, using his well- reality; he could treat serious subjects lightly, and he could manipulate his puppet made plays as textbooks. But though his influence was persistent and widespread, and "characters" ingeniously to their happy endings. Sardou's use of irony was, like Scribe's, because of it, it proved to be detrimental to genuine dramatic creation for a legion of cleverly trivial. A "small prop," like Scribe's glass of water, a love letter, becomes the scrap of followers and descendants who adhered to his system slavishly. Because of it, Emile Zola paper that (by a dramatic irony about on the level of highschool farce) makes the comedy observed, "the dramatic art was dying of inanity." famous. It is hidden under a bust of Flora; it passes from hand to hand, contended for by two characters who know, as the audiences know, what it is, but who wish to use it for conflicting purposes; and at the very end it is burnt in the presence of everyone, including a prying Scribe slighted character, built for situations -- using, of course, dramatic irony to hand his person whose hands are audaciously kept occupied in holding coffee cups and a taper. As in audience the extra knowledge necessary to give the situation tension, but not using dramatic Scribe, the dramatic irony is used for an intrigue concentration on a gimmick-prop, a gadget, irony to give the characters more depth for the actors to depict. rather than on character; hence we may blame the kings of the well-made play for shuffling out of sight irony's real and deepgoing values for impersonation in depth. Scribe's admiring contemporaries would focus on his "stunts," such as making great political affairs at the court of Queen Anne turn on a trifling property, the famous Verre d'eau. It may be observed that meanwhile Augier and Becque had not restored the powers of Dramatic irony had to be used to build up the scene, to give the manipulation of the glass of dramatic irony for characterization, and thus had not interrupted its decline through Scribe water meaningful suspense for the audience. But what was admired was the "gimmick," not and Sardou. Instead, the interest of Augier and Becque was in theme more than character. the technical, ironic contrivance for spotlighting Theirs was the thesis play. Social theme and thesis became dominant and influential, while ironic devices more and more became the mere technical contrivances of playwrights, -159- irksome necessities of the craft, unworthy of serious consideration by criticism as art. it; so when Scribe became despised by later dramatists and critics as a mere carpenter of Augier's solid, moral, rather realistic but also rather unimaginative dramas were also, well-joined plays, the dramatic irony was rejected too as just one of the shallow devices technically and from the viewpoint of ironic impersonation, rather uninteresting. which went to make the "contrived," the "well-made" play. Today John Gassner and Eric Bentley are praising most highly Becque sardonic Vultures, on George Henry Lewes ( 1817-78) made concerning the acting of the famous Victorian the theme of the buz- comedian Charles Mathews in a play called Used Up a criticism which brings out very well the nature and seriousness of the loss to acted drama from the failure of playwrights and actors -161- to understand and stress ironic impersonation:

zards gathering to prey on a woman newly widowed and her helpless daughters. In the end But in the second act, where the man of fashion appears as a plough-boy, all sense of artistic one of the rascals marries a daughter and takes the whole family under his wing, and drives truth is wanting. There are two methods of carrying out the dramatic conception of this act -- off the other vultures. "Since your father's death, my child," he remarks to his Marie, "you one which should present a plough-boy, with enough verisimilitude to deceive the farmer and have been surrounded by a pack of scoundrels." This is good irony, yet character is delight the audience; the other, which should present a gentleman acting the plough-boy, and overshadowed by theme. every now and then overacting or forgetting the part, and always when alone, or with Mary, relapsing into his native manner. Now Charles Mathews misses both these. He is not at all like 48 Irony In The Drama Becque's most dazzling technical coup, the opening of La Parisienne, is a double twist, a false So Ibsen's great ironies miss understanding study by becoming confused with the despised dramatic irony cancelled by surprise. Walkley called it "one of the most complex hoaxes ever contrivances of the well-made play. devised by a playwright." For some ten minutes the audience is led to feel "let in on" Clothilde's attempt to conceal her unfaithfulness from her jealous, brawling husband. Then Like Ibsen, Strindberg developed out of the deep needs of his own dramaturgy powerful she cries, "Look out, here comes my mari" -- and we learn that the first man is her lover and ironies which seem to have gone that the real irony lies in Becque's theme, that a "settled" affair like this has all the disadvantages of matrimony. How much character is brought out through this tricky bit of impersonation is certainly questionable. -163-

Antoine at the Theatre Libre and the realistic-naturalistic movement with Zola at its head almost unstudied. O'Neill acknowledged his influence as long ago as 1924, in his Provincetown continued, more or less inadvertently, to diminish the attention of playwrights to dramatic Theatre days. Like Strindberg, he needed ironies that would express with dramatic irony. But it was one Jean Jullien who coined the expression "slice of life" for the free completeness what he called "the characteristic spiritual conflicts that constitute the drama"; naturalistic drama which, he said, must be contrasted to the well-made play in its liberty from more personally, he needed to express his own tragic, tearing inner divisions. formally contrived exposition and denouement. Holding life as Zola did to be a drifting at the mercy of "determinisms" -instincts and pressures hereditary and evolutionary, economic, social, and psychological -- did not necessarily bar the playwright from using irony to enrich Strindberg's furious genius [ Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times, p. 171] has certainly not impersonation. But the reasoning seemed to be: drama must seem natural, therefore it must embodied itself in our later dramatists as it did in O'Neill, which may be a pity when we at all costs avoid appearing "contrived," therefore structural arrangements such as dramatic consider the electric power such plays as Beyond the Horizon, All God's Chillun Got Wings, irony calls for must go out the window. Some such reasoning began and ended Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, and Strange Interlude derived from the Strindbergian whirlpool of sex ambivalence and inner chaos.

-162- "But," Gassner proceeds, in attitudes which still affect most playwriting that leans toward naturalism. we favor extroversion, whereas Strindberg is almost always introverted. That which made him so important to modernism in the theatre, his locating of dramatic conflict within the soul, This is no place to deal seriously with the great Ibsen's powerfully individual provision of frequently his own, limits his communication with a people that strains mostly outward. ironies to be acted. John Gassner ( The Theatre in Our Times, pp. 376-7) talks of "pseudo- Ibsenism" in such a way as to clarify -- if a muddle, a fog, can be clarified -- our uses of such ironies in the 1950's: Hence, perhaps even less than Ibsen's has Strindberg's characteristic irony been studied or imitated, with one exception of some importance, Strindberg's influence on expressionism, which as we may perceive in Death of a Salesman has certain ironic methods distinguishably In Ghosts, an entire world of so-called morality and an entire way of viewing reality are its own. challenged with irony while the consequence of immoral "morality" (immoral, in Ibsen's opinion, because false to nature and detrimental to individuality) is blasted and then buried in its own rubbish heap. Although George Bernard Shaw declared himself an "Ibsenite," he was no solemnly imitative, unimaginative pseudoIbsen, because he really did not try to imitate Ibsen. Both his nature and his touch were far too light for that. Ibsen had some comedy in his plays; Shaw was a In Echegaray's commonplace realistic imitation, The Son of Don Juan, "the conventional comic genius, the comic genius of our time. immorality of a philanderer is conventionally 'punished' when Don Juan's son has inherited venereal disease from his amorous father." On the ironic side, most of Shaw's ironies and ironic devices, both conventional and original, are comic ones. But when Edmund Wilson called him a "triple thinker" his concept was that of Of Shaw The Quintessence of Ibsenism Gassner declares: an ironic inclusion of opposites in a third, higher synthesis. Shaw loves to tell us himself in his Prefaces, as well as to have his characters tell us in the plays, cynically or icono- . . . only genius can glimpse the genius in a genius as Shaw did in Ibsen. Those who lack even a particle of genius have long prated about those attributes of Ibsen's work that -164- manifest his skill or talent rather than his genius. Hence they have reduced Ibsen to the level of "problem play" writers, and given Ibsen the title of "father of the modern drama" on the grounds that he has fathered a long line of mediocre realistic plays. . . . Extremely clastically, that something is "nothing-but" something else. Or he fixes us suddenly with some commonplace playwriting has been patterned after the mirage of Ibsenism, which should be alternative shattering to our politics, economics, religion, or morals -- something must be called pseudo-Ibsenism. [ Odets, Hellman, and Miller] have escaped banality, . . . because "either-or," this or that; and before we can think of a possible third choice, the satanic they couldn't quite manage to be consistently commonplace. [But most playwrights] have Shavian has hustled us on to another paradox, another tongue-in-cheek challenge. But preferred to follow the example of abysmally commonplace Ibsenites who were themselves beyond nothing-but and either-or, and representing the quality of thinking that makes Shaw copies of earlier commonplace Ibsenites. In this way [they] ultimately bypass Ibsen entirely, himself a genius and not merely the wittiest of propagandists, is his power of seeing the and return to their real ancestors, who are Sardou, Dumas fils, and Scribe. "both-and" ironic synthesis of opposites and contradictions, the insights beyond antitheses, the illuminations beyond paradoxes, the transcendences beyond limitations. Here Shaw stands, thinking greatly, among the truly great.

49 Irony In The Drama As for comic ironies, he has them, like his other tricks of construction and style, in richly Somewhat like antithesis, but only half verbal, we have the ironic contradiction of a bewildering variety. Seriously he can say (in the Preface to his 1898 volume of plays): character's words by his actions: in Major Barbara Lady Britomart's domineering demand on her son, "Advise me!" and the expected surprise when we learn that she has forestalled her son's advice by acting before consulting him. To me the tragedy and comedy of life lie in the consequences, sometimes terrible, sometimes ludicrous, of our persistent attempts to found our institutions on the ideals suggested to our imaginations by our halfsatisfied passions, instead of a genuinely scientific natural history. Or, antithesis will mutate into paradox, long recognized as one of Shaw's basic witty devices (his triple thinking can show itself in this form); and paradox will suggest fundamental Shavian ideas, as in the Preface to the same play -- the gay Salva- Here he seems to see an irony which contains within itself both drama and the negation of drama, at the same time including in his vision the drama-defeating naturalism of the extremist Zolaists. Under the heavens of Shaw's socialism there will be no more drama! -166-

But Shaw is envisioning something beyond this world, millennial. Pushing away out toward tionists versus the gloomy Theatre-Goers (alliteration too, we observe), and the Religious this area, however, in Back to Methuselah, he stubbornly remains "as far as thought can character of Drama set beside the Dramatic character of Religion. And in Heartbreak House reach" the comedian: Shaw the moralist:

He-Ancient. When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth. Strephon. Yes, and take all Mangan. How are we to have any self-respect if we don't keep it up that we're better than we the fun out of it. really are?

Shaw the comedian ranges in his ironies all the way from the slightest and lightest of stylistic Poor "Boss" Mangan, the financial promoter, suffers a whole complex or sequence of ironical flicks and flickerings to deep social, even humane, considerations which approach tragedy and contrivances in the situation which commences with the girl Ellie hypnotizing him in his chair to relieve his headache. There follows a conventional situation of dramatic irony in which the audience knows that Mangan is only hypnotized while the women on stage think him dead. -165- Ellie comes on and clears this up, but even farcically rough treatment cannot make him show any sign of consciousness; so now we have a slightly different sort of ironic situation (still in approach at the same time Shaw's own limitations, which he seems at times to recognize. But the tradition, see Volpone) of the women's discussing him loudly as a mere thing or object, in of that more later. his presence. But when Ellie finally releases him from his trance, he angrily reveals that, though paralyzed and unable to move, he has been helplessly hearing every belittling word. The women now act out the shock of retrospective irony. Then Hesione assures him that he To begin with tricks of style: somewhat as the later Robert Frost enjoys allowing his rhymes merely dreamed it all. Apparently nobody really believes this, but at least now we have the to tease his wit into brilliance, so Shaw at times gives rein to alliteration: quasi-irony of the hopeful lie in an ironic situation. The scene then tends to deeper, more humane ironies; Mangan weeps in his hurt and shames Hesione into weeping too: Don Juan. . . . that the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and the fleas and the Fathers of the Church. . . . Ana. I most emphatically disagree as Mangan. I shan't forget, to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that time in regards the Fathers of the Church. the garden, you were making a fool of me. That was a dirty low mean thing to do. You had no right to let me come near you if I disgusted you. . . . There are things no decent woman This trick gets repeated in a later play: would do to a man -- like a man hitting a woman in the breast.

Fox. Four thousand years seem an eternity to a mayfly, or a mouse, or a mitred fool called an The women have now realized the compassionate irony in the triple thought that Mangan is archbishop. . . . not any longer nothing-but a

Mrs. Basham. . . . to call an archbishop a mitred fool and compare him to a mouse is beyond -167- endurance. boss and a butt -- a thing -- and not either-or, a thing or a man, but both man and boss in a Antithesis as used ironically by Shaw seems both less artificial and more serious, probably kind of ironic synthesis. because it is so important a step in the irony-generating dialectic. For instance, in John Bull Other Island: Using dramatic irony to set up his major comic and farcical situations, in such plays as Arms and the Man, The Devil's Disciple, Pygmalion, Caesar and Cleopatra, and many others, Shaw Keegan. . . . Standing here between you the Englishman, so clever in your foolishness, and usually (and here he resembles Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest) tries to laugh off this Irishman, so foolish in his cleverness, I cannot in my ignorance be sure which of you is his falling back for structure onto the well-made play contrivances of Scribe and Sardou by the more deeply damned . . . . pretending to be only burlesquing them. To his mood this appears to be like using dialect pronunciation in jest, or bad grammar, or dressing up as Napoleon for a fancy-dress party, or having himself photographed in the nude posing as Rodin "Thinker". Still, it is a very useful And a series of amazing cartwheels of wittily ironical antitheses follows. jest; and what Shaw's dramatic structure would be without Sardou et al. one hesitates to 50 Irony In The Drama think of, even though one might be able to find examples, Getting Married perhaps, while stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor . . even there the burlesque goes on in spite of the collapse of general architecture. . .

In Arms and the Man and the plays mentioned with it, the main device is disguise, revealed Back to Methuselah contains a passage which indicates to me Shaw's very complete first to the audience, followed by suspense through the clever manipulation of situation, understanding of the ironic use of theatricalism to make an audience satirically conscious of finally relieved by surprise to the uninitiated characters. But even late in Shaw's career he itself as an audience -- being taken in and knowing it and loving it: descends into petty farcical surprises which in more polemic if no more dignified moments he would surely have stigmatized as nothing but the merest Sardoodling. In Back to Methuselah -169- we first see the Elderly Gentleman sobbing into his hands. Hay fever, it turns out to be! And somewhat later the lady Oracle shoots down Napoleon. Immediately on her turning away into the Temple he jumps up again. Zoo [impatiently]. I wonder what Zozine is doing. He ought to be here to receive you.

Napoleon. Murderess! Monster! She-devil! Unnatural, inhuman wretch! You deserve to be The Elderly Gentleman. Do you mean that rather insufferable young man whom you found hanged, guillotined, broken on the wheel, burnt alive. No sense of the sacredness of human boring me on the pier? life! No thought for my wife and children. Bitch! Sow! Wanton! [He picks up the pistol.] And missed me at five yards! That's a woman all over. Zoo. Yes. He has to dress up in a Druid's robe, and put on a wig and a long false beard, to impress you silly people. I have to put on a purple mantle. I have no patience with such Of course we should do Shaw the justice of noting how he has exploited this cheap, trivial, mummery; but you expect it from us; so I suppose it must be kept up. . . . farcical surprise by showing us the The Envoy. My good lady, is it worth while dressing up and putting on false beards for us if -168- you tell us beforehand that it is all humbug? ironical aspects of Napoleon's deep regard for the sacredness of human life -- when it Zoo. One would not think so; but if you won't believe in anyone who is not dressed-up, why, happens to be his life. we must dress-up for you. It was you who invented this nonsense, not we.

It is interesting to find once more (in Heartbreak House) that Shaw is even capable of using Eld. Gent. But do you expect us to be impressed, after this? one of the most doctrinaire of traditional employments of irony, Ben Jonson's irony of the unmasking of affected "humours": Zoo. I don't expect anything. I know, as a matter of experience, that you will be impressed. The oracle will frighten you out of your wits. Hector. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-theworld pose, which you carry so well in other respects. And the audience is impressed, even the reader; and at the end of the oracular "hearing," ironic theatricalism takes the form of a stunning anticlimax: Randall. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a gentleman without being accused of posing. The Oracle. Go home, poor fool. [She vanishes; and the atmosphere changes to prosaic daylight. Zoo comes off the railing; throws off her robe; makes a bundle of it; and tucks it Hector. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find under her arm. The magic and the mystery are gone. . . .] out the man under the pose. . . . The very title of this section of Back to Methuselah is compassionately ironic, "The Tragedy of This was the very game played by the two young friends, Knowell and Wellbred, in Every Man an Elderly Gentleman." In His Humour. The old courtier Lafeu in Shakespeare All's Well That Ends Well liked to play it too and triumphed in the smoking out of Parolles. In Jonson, Shakespeare, and Shaw it seems to be a sport for aristocrats, like court tennis. But the irony of the false humour The Oracle returns, on a slightly different level of impersonation, as a hooded priestess: stripped may serve as a transition to more serious ironic approaches and devices, for it drives down into both character and social satire. Shaw's irony can also be inclusive enough to see The Oracle [with grave pity]. Come: look at me. I am my natural size now: what you saw the world itself, as Shakespeare did, to be a theater: there was only a foolish picture of me thrown on a cloud by a lantern. How can I help you?

Don Juan. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, And she replies to his plea by ending his life. saints and sinners; . . . . But here [in Hell] you can call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, . . . no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a The Oracle [looking down at his body]. Poor shortlived thing! What else could I do for you? universal melodrama. . . . If the play still goes on here and on earth, and all the world is a As Shaw said in his 1898 Preface: 51 Irony In The Drama -170- Adam. . . . Why? Whither? Whence? We were well enough in the garden. And now the fools have killed all the animals; and they are dissatisfied because they cannot be bothered with their bodies. Foolishness, I call it! . . . we only cry now in the effort to bear happiness, whilst we laugh and exult in destruction, confusion, and ruin. When a comedy is performed, it is nothing to me that the spectators laugh: any fool can make an audience laugh. I want to see how many of them, laughing or Lilith. They have accepted the burden of eternal life grave, are in the melting mood. . To Shaw the social fact itself may be ironic and so may serve to provide the ironic framework of a whole play. In this way both Pygmalion and Major Barbara are stiffened to the temper of The Epilogue of Saint Joan is completely steeped in irony. The ghost of Brother Martin, who toughness -- what Bentley calls Shaw's "toughest dialectic" -- and yet both, ironically, are at had held the cross for the Maid at Rouen, comes to tell Charles of the process that cleared the same time humanely compassionate. The former play is based upon the ironic importance Joan of witchcraft, and then, with others, comes Joan herself, to be knelt to by her enemies of pronunciation as a social fact; the latter on the paradoxical "social facts" (in the Shavian and friends but left alone, ironically rejected by all as a troublesome revenant, and to bring sense at least) that big business can represent virtue, while poverty can be a crime and down the curtain with her questioning prayer that rings with the irony of faith that doubts charity an abetter of crime. because it is faith:

Reversing this, he may give us satire on the grand scale, that of "this whole damned human Joan. O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How race," but making of it only a small unit in one of his most "cosmic" plays, Back to long, O Lord, how long? Methuselah. The episode of the synthetic man and woman in As Far as Thought Can Reach is a Swiftian irony (man as capax rationis, only potentially reasonable), built up with preparation, running commentary, and so on, to violence and anti-climactic death, of an This is about as far into the dignity and the passion of tragedy as even the greatest comic emotional, non-intellectual, "romantic" Mankind. But this is done almost without compassion; ironist can go. Why Shaw was not a tragedian, probably could not be one, is suggested by a and it takes compassion to make grand-scale satire really grand. Shaw makes these male and number of his own critical statements; and these deal with mat- female puppets die in a burlesque of romantic tragedy and be carried off to destruction as "laboratory refuse." I suspect that he rather means to suggest that we are all just laboratory refuse. -172-

At least twice, with a full and deep seriousness, excepting only, as always with this great ters rather closely associated with his theory and practice of irony. They show a nearly comedian, the mocking quality in his ironies, he uses at the end of a great play the device of complete recognition of his limitation to the role of comic ironist and a well-rationalized if not ghosts who engage in ironic recapitulation. In Back to Methuselah it is the ghosts of Adam, always completely consistent set of theories to explain why he could not reasonably attempt Eve, Cain, the Serpent, and Lilith: to go beyond these self-set limits.

-171- I have given an example, that of the staged oracle, for Shaw's theatricalism. His poses of burlesque, too, again and again call attention to the fact that "this is just a play," and that this is quite all right because all of us are constantly impersonating, always posing. The Lilith. I suffered unspeakably; I tore myself asunder . . . to make of my own flesh these difference from Shakespeare in this respect appears to be that Shakespeare is not ashamed twain, man and woman. And this is what has come of it. . . . of his theater's efforts at theatrical illusion; at the Globe he and his fellows just did their best and prayed their audience, "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts." Shaw, on the other hand, is constantly saying contemptuous things about the theater and its devices and Adam. I made the earth bring forth by my labor, and the woman bring forth by my love. . . . about his own comic efforts in comparison to his serious socialistic purpose; he at least adopts a pose of cynicism about theatrical illusion, and that, I take it, is what lies behind the Eve. I nourished the egg in my body and fed it with my blood. And now they let fall as the "presentational" or "theatricalist" dramaturgy of Brecht, also. birds did, and suffer not at all. . . . In Heartbreak House Shotover and Mangan try to be King Lear, and Hector tries to be Othello. Cain. I invented killing and conquest and mastery and the winnowing out of the weak by the We are given the impression that this is not only a particularly insincere kind of play-acting, strong. And now the strong have slain one another, and the weak live for ever; and their but it is primitively emotional, unworthy of modern, feministic, intellectual, Fabian, Shavian deeds do nothing for the doer more than for another. man.

The Serpent. I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now But how can modern man be tragic without being passionate? Even if he has to do it with the there is no evil, and wisdom and good are one. . . . help of Shakespeare, at second hand?

Cain. There is no place for me on earth any longer. . . . Out, out, brief candle! Being himself so violently anti-romantic that he is afraid not to seem matter-of-fact, Shaw cannot allow tragic, poetic dignity to his greatly imagined puppets. He deals, he says, "in the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination" (Preface to Eve. . . . the diggers and the fighters have dug themselves in with the worms. My clever ones have inherited the earth. 52 Irony In The Drama Major Barbara). When the men of Heartbreak House feel Shakespearean emotions and take Most serious as a limitation, it seems to me, is Shaw's theory that mercy itself is a romantic tragic poses, they are punctured by the women, and the fiction. His Preface to Major Barbara propounds "the inexorability of the deed once done."

-173- Forgiveness, absolution, atonement, are figments: punishment is only a pretence of cancelling one crime by another; and you can no more have forgiveness without vindictiveness than you can have a cure without a disease. You will never get a high morality from people who passionate breath goes out of them with a ridiculous expiring squeak: conceive that their misdeeds are revocable and pardonable. . . .

Mrs. Hushabye. Oh, I say it matters very little which of you governs the country so long as we What then becomes of the great ironic mystery in the interpenetration (in our highest govern you. idealism) of justice and mercy? So the dream of a sinless, crimeless, painless social Utopia costs a great playwright his power of reaching that compassionate irony of the forgiving judge Hector. We? Who is we, pray? which crowns Shakespeare's work in The Tempest.

Mrs. Hush. The devil's granddaughters, dear. The lovely women. But if we feel that we ought to be more definitely speaking of tragedy, such tragedies as Oedipus and Othello perhaps, we may notice in the Preface to Androcles and the Lion how Shaw's dramatic vision of the ironies in sex is clearly not a tragic but a comic one: Hector [raising his hands as before]. Fall, I say; and deliver us from the lures of Satan!

In our sexual natures we are torn by an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming Ellie. There seems to be nothing real in this world except my father and Shakespeare. repugnance and disgust. We have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and Marcus's tigers are false; Mr. Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and chastity. true about Hesione but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. . . . Shaw is not the complete sex-loathing satirist, but leans rather into the bisection of an angle between that attitude and one favoring the social reforming (and selective abolition) of Mangan [wildly]. Look here: I'm going to take off all my clothes. [He begins tearing off his sexfounded institutions: coat.]

We are thus led to devise marriage institutions which will at the sametime secure Lady Utterword. I quite sympathize with you, Mr. Mangan. . . . Our family habit of throwing opportunities for the gratification of sex and raise up innumerable obstacles to it; which will stones in all directions and letting the air in is not only unbearably rude but positively sanctify it and brand it as infamous; which will identify it with virtue and with sin dangerous. Still, there is no use catching physical colds as well as moral ones; so please keep simultaneously. Obviously it is useless to look for any consistency in such institutions. your clothes on.

-175- Mangan does so.

I need not repeat here the long and elaborate examination of them that I prefixed to my play In my opinion, Shaw is self-limited by a violent reaction against romanticism and idealism entitled Getting Married. which had its roots in rejection as a child and in young-adult fighting against the adolescent reaction of romantic day-dreaming. It is not hard to find his own statements. In the Preface to his 1898 volume he gives his definition, "romantic: that is, spurious, cheap, and vulgar." It Shaw's handling of comic ironies is superb in its suppleness, variety, and force -- in its is inevitable," he asserts, exploitation of the possibilities of irony in comedy all the way out to the dim, fascinating territory through which ramble the unsurveyed borders of serious and intellectual comedy, extravaganza, and fantastic farce. He is, I believe, the model and the guide into these rich that actors should suffer more than most of us from the sophistication of their consciousness but unmapped regions for the modern comic playwright, who, however, must not let himself by romance; and my view of romance as the great heresy to be swept off from art and life -- be scared away from Shaw's gold mine of contrivances for comic irony by his flapping his as the food of modern pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect, is far more puzzling to arms and going "Boo! Sardou!" This is why his theory and practice have been cited rather the performers than it is to the pit. extensively here, in order to employ him as the chief example for the use of dramatic ironies in modern comedy. (For modern tragedy Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller will be the central He finds that romance and idealism yield ironic effects only when seen through, "for idealism, illustrative figures.) which is only [nothing-but] a flattering name for romance in politics and morals, is as ob- Shaw's friend William Archer, translator of Ibsen and author of the well-made light -174- melodrama, The Green Goddess, wrote a book, Playmaking, a Manual of Craftmanship ( 1912). His ninth chapter, 'Curiosity' and 'Interest,' states very well indeed the advantages of foreknowledge over surprise in arousing curiosity and sustaining and increasing interest. Yet, noxious to me as romance in ethics or religion." And in Don Juan's view of Hell we find he says, "Experience shows us that dramatic interest is entirely distinct from mere curiosity, "nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama." and survives when curiosity is dead." I think this is not entirely true; even when we know

53 Irony In The Drama quite well what is going to happen we retain a curiosity as to how and as to the character's Only then I shall scarcely be able to await what is to become of them when I am able to reaction as displayed in the actor's performance. As Archer goes on to say, compare that which they really are with that which they would do.

In many cases, indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with realized Baker quotes with approval Archer's rejection of curiosity in favor of foreknowledge -- "the anticipation. . . . Regarded in this aspect, a great play is like a great piece of music: we can audience . . . as gods looking before and after." From this he proceeds to discuss climax; that hear it again and again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex is, he treats these previous matters as devices for pre-climactic suspense. This is interesting harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of each particular rendering. in view of certain practices to be found in Arthur Miller.

-176- Clayton Hamilton's useful and influential So You're Writing a Play came out in 1935. He approves Archer's opinion of the comparatively slight value of surprise compared with foreknowing: But the "inmost secret" Archer recognizes to lie in dramatic irony (although he does not employ exactly this term), as he demonstrates by a discussion of Sheridan's famous "screen scene" in The School for Scandal. About 1902 he had written: William Archer launched a noble phrase when he spoke of the "Godlike spectator." The Greek playwrights, when they summoned the entire city of Athens to the southern slope of the Acropolis, permitted these assembled spectators to look down upon the legendary action from Curiosity . . . is the accidental relish of a single night; whereas the essential and abiding the point of view of a deific station on Olympus. Hence the tradition -- which I deem to be pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the well-founded -- that the audience should be allowed to know more about the story and the audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste for a moment characters [my italics] than is known to the characters themselves. the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their groundless panic. To keep a secret from us is to reduce us to As example he cites Othello. "The poignant suffering of the spectators is posited upon the fact their level . . . ; the theatre is in its essence a place where we are privileged to take off the that they have been taken into Iago's confidence from the outset. . . ." But he has admitted bandage we wear in daily life, and to contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold that the soliloquy (and he cited Iago's) is now outmoded. Indeed, he asserts that the Greeks gambols of our neighbors. had no need of exposition and

It is interesting that in his chapter on Keeping a Secret Archer accuses Shaw of "wholly -178- inartistic secrecy" in a scene of The Devil's Disciple. But he does not assert that this is habitual. could get their irony purely by pre-knowledge of the story. In Oedipus

The American critic Brander Matthews published in 1919 his Principles of Playmaking. His the fundamental irony of this dramatic situation arose from the fact that these Olympian "Three Theorists of the Theater" are Aristotle, Lessing, and Sarcey, but at the end of the spectators knew much more about the past Oedipus than the King at that moment knew chapter he calls William Archer "that acutest of British dramatic critics." Earlier in the book (p. himself; and they settled back to watch, with God-like premonition, the horrible progress of 18) he says, "that is a sound Rule which bids the playwright not to keep a secret from the those successive revelations through which King Oedipus discovered what all of them had audience. . . . Yet . . . the Rule . . . is only a rule-ofthumb. It is not one of the permanent previously known. principles of playmaking. . . ." But Matthews cites as Archer's "essential element of drama" the dramatist's looking "primarily to character, letting action look after itself," and fails to bring out the importance of impersonation irony to characterization. The adult form of suspense, he goes on to explain, may be formulated in the question, "When and where and under what circumstances shall we witness those events which we perceive already to have become inevitable?" George Pierce Baker, our greatest teacher of playwriting, brought out, also in 1919, his Dramatic Technique. He does not discuss drama-making in terms of the ironies. But he handles the issue of surprise against suspense (pp. 212-4) by effec- By a process which was defined happily by William Archer as "foreshadowing without forestalling," the average contemporary playwright endeavors to suggest what must happen, in advance of the event, without predicting the environing conditions under which this -177- preconceived eventuality will finally occur. tively quoting Lessing Hamburg Dramaturgy. Lessing highly favored dramatic irony, although Thus the playwright "stimulates desire" in the spectators and "makes them wait." he does not use the term:

[But] a final unsatisfied suspense will be immeasurably less effective than no suspense at all. Why have certain monologues such a great effect? Because they acquaint me with the secret [And] no surprise can really be effective unless it has been discounted in advance to such an intentions of the speaker and this confidence at once fills me with hope or fear. If the extent that it is reduced to no surprise at all. . . . The theatre-going public enjoys much more condition of the personages is unknown, the spectator cannot interest himself more vividly in keenly the exercise of pretending to be surprised than it can possibly enjoy the experience of the action than the personages. But the interest would be doubled for the spectator if light is actually being surprised; for this latter experience violates the age-old tradition of the thrown on the matter, and he feels that action and speech would be quite otherwise if the Olympian spectator and disturbs the God-like point of view. personages knew one another.

54 Irony In The Drama We may agree at this point that the most influential modern experts on how to construct Numerous playwrights and showmen have made the modern chaos colorful, exciting, even plays have respected, and almost clearly isolated, the central principle of dramatic irony, stimulating and moving. And the orderly world of "Aristotelian" drama has been splintered ironic characterization through impersonation in a situation prepared by giving the audience even by realists such as Chekhov and O'Casey. partial foreknowledge. But Archer and Matthews and Baker and Hamilton have neither quite fully isolated nor precisely named -- and therefore have not with full effectiveness taught -- It is by no means certain, however, that men of talent have not been deceived by their anti- this all-important playwriting principle. Aristotelian bias. To try to match chaos with chaos is to succumb to a sort of genetic fallacy. It does not follow that art must be disorderly because life is. . . . If Sophocles and -179- Shakespeare had given us disordered plays to match the disorder of their times, we should hardly think much of them today as dramatists. . . . Aristotle . . . could only have an ideal, orderly, form-giving imitation in mind. . . . A modern playwright who makes his fantasy as Chapter XI bewildering as the world is actually a naive imitator in art. He photographs disorder.

MODERN TRENDS IN TRAGEDY Even milder anti-Aristotelian modernism moves toward a culde-sac. . . Because there are no plots in most lives, it does not follow that there is greater art in not having a plot than in I should say that at present the two leading American critics of modern drama are Eric having one. Most "static" plays have been as poor as if they had a naive overabundance Bentley and John Gassner (that is, theoretical critics rather than first-night reviewers). I am taking up Bentley first, although he is the younger man, because Gassner has published the -181- most recent book relevant to my subject of irony.

of action. Chekhov, it is true, prevailed with a seemingly casual and wayward kind of Mr. Bentley, an influential critic since his The Playwright as Thinker came out in 1946, has playwriting, but it is no secret that efforts to write "Chekhovian" drama have been singularly been particularly interested in, and encouraging to, the liberal, intellectual, experimental, or unsuccessful. His imitators have had no difficulty disintegrating plays. What they were unable non-realistic type of play and play-maker. Apart from Shaw (who attracts him by being to learn from Chekhov was how to integrate them. liberal-intellectual and apparently scornful of the well-made play), he scorns most "realistic" playwrights, including O'Neill, and is enthusiastic over Sartre, Lorca, Pirandello, and Brecht -- in general attitudes, strongly ironic playwrights who, in the matter of structure, more or less In the same volume, Gassner has an interesting section (p. 541) called "Find the Spine," by stem from Zola and the "slice of life" by way of Strindberg and who tend to have thrown out which he means the ironic thesis of a play. On Synge Playboy of the Western World he has the baby of dramatic irony along with the dirty bath-water of Sardoodling contrivance. The just remarked: baby of dramatic irony, notice, for they are modern ironists who prefer the philosophical and the psychological to the technical sorts of irony. They incline to narrate and orate and exposit If irony had been more sharply defined in the production . . . the result would have been very rather than to dramatize in the full sense of the word. much more comic. The saturnine Synge was a comic genius.

And yet this is no very safe ground for generalizing. We shall see that in ways that are He is discussing the Bergner revival of The Duchess of Malfi when he offers his definition: important to irony O'Neill belongs with this group at least as much as Shaw belongs among the contrivers of ironies. And highly interesting dramatic The spine is an ironic statement on the contradictions of human behavior and "society", including the contradictions between consciousness and the fantasia of the unconscious. -180-

This critically rich volume of nearly six hundred pages indexes only a half-dozen references to ironies can be found in some if not all of the others. But the distinction may help to explain irony and none of these are to the technical device of setting up an impersonation-deepening Bentley's largely ignoring the chief device for ironic impersonation, dramatic irony. stage situation in which such dramatic ironies as those afforded by hypocrisies or by predetermined dooms may be artistically developed. But Gassner says excellent things on the John Gassner has been longer connected than Bentley with play carpentry, play production, deeper aspects of general irony and especially (p. 472) on "tragic realism": and the teaching of playwriting, as well as with criticism. He tends to be a little more conservative in all respects than Bentley, to be more interested in comedy and farce, less For a long time critics have deplored the fact that there has been too little tragic art in the afraid of both realism and sentiment, and less scornful of contrivance as an element of drama modern theatre. . . . The reason is certainly not that we have had too much realism, as some construction. writers allege, but that we have had too little of the genuine article; for true tragedy is always supremely realistic in the fundamental sense of the term. It encompasses both sides of the His Form and Idea in Modern Theatre ( 1956) is built on the thesis that modern American phenomenon of man: that is, his magnificence and horribleness, his reason and unreason, his drama must rely chiefly and increasingly on a basic realism, a fundamental conservatism of angelic and his demonic nature. Tragic realism consists of this double vision, possessed only structure. The "isms" have all been tried since 1920, have been gutted without being fully by those with unclouded eyes. Moreover, genuine tragedy makes its ascent from the solid developed artistically, and so have been either thrown aside or turned into mere contrivances, ground of a recognition denied to sentimental- tricks, and gimmicks themselves. But Gassner had already taken a characteristic stand in The Theatre in Our Times ( 1954, p. 81): -182-

55 Irony In The Drama ists of all persuasions (Positivists and Liberals included) that there are natural limits to human cripple! Now I take him out under the sky, where I can watch his monkey tricks, where there power and human possibilities. . . . Today, much of our drama is actually sentimental and is space for laughter and where this new joy, your love of me, may dance! palliative rather than genuinely realistic. Our plays, for the most part, are merely dressed up in realistic detail. . . . [And] most American efforts at irony in the theatre are lamentably This is the dialogue of a playwright who has a deep feeling for the human irony, but almost crude or covered with a thick sauce of sentiment. none for the ironic tone, for its dryness, its nearly inarticulate tidal depths, its understatement, and its restraint under great pressures from conflicting passions. Lazarus In most plays, in fact, we are not given an attitude toward life at all, but a theatrical pose that Laughed has an ironic theme on a very high level indeed. But it is not the way of the great passes for reality only by grace of whatever dimensions of character one or more actors dramatists to hail life's tragic ironies by continually exclaiming, "How very ironical this is!" manage to convey. . . . The performers often express a marked personality, whereas the There is a tragic lack of dignity in O'Neill's tone. This is one of the most important respects in playwrights do not. which his reach exceeds his grasp as a poet, in verse and prose.

The seriousness of this defect Gassner states on an earlier page: -184-

Great drama coincides with a view of life that postulates for man a high degree of individual O'Neill's uses of irony are difficult to arrange because they are not employed in any orderly identity, sense of direction and responsibility, and capacity for making decisions as well as design governed by clear theoretical understanding. But they are certainly interesting enough resorting to action with a total personality. to deserve some exemplifying, although my attempt at organization will involve skipping about among the plays. John Gassner, then, points out that modern dramatic practice is chaotic. Like the earlier critics from Archer on, he brings the theory of irony in drama most of the distance from chaos O'Neill, no shaper of subtleties, employs straight irony mainly in a harsh, bitter, and rather into workable order -- but only most of the way, not all. So playwriting practice remains crude form of sarcasm: chaos. Paddy [with heavy, biting sarcasm]. 'Twas love at first sight, divil a doubt of it! If you'd seen Eugene O'Neill, leader of American tragic drama, is also leader of the chaotic, indiscriminate the endearin' look on her pale mug when she shriveled away with her hands over her eyes to handling and mishandling of irony that has been going on in that field of the playwriting art. shut out the sight of him! Sure, 'Twas as if she'd seen the great hairy ape escaped from the He uses ironic titles, such as Marco Millions, The Great God Brovm, The Iceman Cometh, Zoo! pointing to general ironies in his concepts of themes. He uses also, more or less well but never seeming to understand quite fully what he is doing, straight (sarcastic) irony, irony of The asides in Strange Interlude frequently reveal a character to be thinking the opposite of fate, and dramatic irony -- the last-named kind the least skilfully, and often not at all in what he openly says. But the speech that follows the thought voiced as an aside is rarely places where his play structure needs it most. But on this point he is unpredictable: The Hairy either wittily or sarcastically ironic. O'Neill's instinct is right. It wouldn't do, for example, to Ape is practically without it, while Desire Under the Elms uses it powerfully throughout. He read in Richard III: was misled about the chief means of ironic impersonation

Gloucester [aside]. I believe I'll say something sarcastic now to my stupid brother Clarence. -183- He won't get it, but it will be such fun for me! And how I can chuckle over it while he's being led off to prison! by other modern dramatists and by contemporary authorities on play construction, as I have shown. He employs ironic shock powerfully and at times, I feel, achieves ironic catharsis. Now this would be gilding the lily!

Moreover, O'Neill was primarily a story-teller. Both he and Thomas Wolfe, George Pierce O'Neill's use of dramatic irony, as I have said, is quite unpredictable -- weak or strong without Baker's two greatest pupils, were story-tellers, narrative-descriptive writers, O'Neill more the much detectable reason. Moderate and conventional in Beyond the Horizon, it is weak in The novelist, Wolfe more the spinner of yarns: O'Neill's characters tangle, each of Wolfe's goes his Emperor Jones, which opens with the pantomime where Smathers catches one of the own way. So O'Neill, although he is constantly seeing ironies, develops dramatically only the Emperor's subjects sneaking away behind her ruler's back. Smathers tries to exploit this a more conventional ones, and in the conventional manner of the well-made melodrama which little with the ironically unknowing Jones but soon drops the device. The experimental was his father's chief support, The Count of Monte Cristo. movement of the play backward through the Emperor's regression into racial fears, with the silver bullet motif placed at beginning and end, does possess a little of the irony that is The ironies O'Neill felt independently, deep in his own tragic heart -- for he had a personal technically dramatic, but expresses more feeling of the irony of fate. tragic greatness of struggle and suffering -- these ironies he exclaimed over. Many an O'Neill passage which could have been great in tragic irony is a distressing string of exclamation -185- points:

Desire Under the Elms, on the other hand, exploits dramatic irony fully and effectively. First Lazarus. Go out under the sky! Let your heart climb on laughter to a star! Then make it look we have Ephraim's sons plotting in his absence to exchange the right to the farm for the down at earth, and watch Caligula commanding Life under pain of death to do his will! [He money to go to California; this built-up situation enhances the actor of Ephraim's ironic laughs.] Caligula [laughing]. I will! I do! I laugh at him! Caligula is a trained ape, a humped impersonation in a double way against him when he meets his gold-seeking sons in ignorance 56 Irony In The Drama of their new power and its source, and for him when, still in ignorance of the full situation, he contribute to the tragic catharsis, whether that consummation be disregarded, evaded, shakes the plan of his other son, Eben, to get the farm, by introducing his new, young bride. attempted, or actually achieved. O'Neill's most mature approach to tragedy is through the But the real sensation in the way of dramatic irony comes by means of the cut-out set of the irony of fate, for although he is fascinated by farmhouse (first sketched by O'Neill himself) which enables the audience to see at once both of the two upstairs front bedrooms, Ephraim and his bride in the one, Eben, who has fallen in -187- love with his stepmother, pressing his ear to the wall in the other.

the Greek feeling of fate as divinity hostile to humanity's will and tries his best to express this Strange Interlude, if we dismiss the ironic effect of the asides, does show some rather feeling in terms of modern determinisms, social, hereditary, and psychological, he never perfunctory dramatic irony. The opening exposition, set up mainly through Marsden's long leaves out of his tragedy the absolutely necessary quality of will -- human, individual, striving interior monologue, casts some general dramatic irony over the things that follow by letting and suffering, but free. Thus he sometimes achieves catharsis, and his tragic heroes almost the audience share some secrets withheld from some of the characters. And there is some always leave us with a feeling at least of magnificence in failure. dramatic irony here and there in the numerous sexual intrigues, coming to a climax in the stock scene of the son's unwittingly striking his father -- in the presence of his mother, too! The Emperor Jones is drawn by an irony of atavism, of racial terrors, back and back to the rhythm of the Congo drums. The heroine of Strange Interlude, her life's skein ravelled out by Mourning Becomes Electra shows an interesting variant, somewhere between the fate- her father, at last regresses to the lap of the old family friend who has become her father- foreknowledge irony of the Greeks and the dramatic type, in the pictorial irony achieved by image. "Electra" Mannon goes slowly up the steps and between the porch pillars carrying her O'Neill through having the portrait of Ezra Mannon, robed as a judge, watch over his wife and crimes and her remorse back into the womb of the shuttered Greek-style house of the daughter as they expect his homecoming, as later it presides over the scene where the Mannons. Marco Millions, with only partial suitability, exploits the method of circular irony by unfaithful wife sends her sweetheart Adam Brant for the poison to murder him. This portrait is opening as well as closing the play, in which twenty-three years elapse, with the Chinese carefully brought to the spectator's ironic consciousness. In the earlier scene Lavinia, the princess lying dead on her bier. The pathetically ironic closing scene has her grandfather "lose daughter, "goes to it and puts her hand over one of the hands with a loving, protecting his way to grief" like Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy; and his finding of his grief again gesture." The portrait's ironic resemblance to the emphasizes the tragic insight that all our lives are but temporary detours on that road to death. -186- Kublai [after a pause, gets up and descending from his throne, slowly approaches the faces of wife, daughter, and Brant is also remarked on. And at the end of the second scene in catafalque, speaking to the dead girl softly as he does so, with a trembling smile]. I think you its presence, Christine's are hiding your eyes, Kukachin. You are a little girl again. You are playing hide and seek. You are pretending. . . . eyes are caught by the eyes of her husband in the portrait and for a moment she stares back at them as if fascinated. Then she jerks her glance away and, with a little shudder she cannot But finally he comes to the full chord of complete ironic recognition: repress, turns and walks quickly from the room and closes the door behind her. [He no longer tries to control his grief. He sobs like a simple old man, bending and kissing his We notice here the clear call for ironic impersonation by the actress, through pantomime. granddaughter on the forehead -- with heart-breaking playfulness.] I bid you welcome home, Little Flower! I bid you welcome home! The opening exposition of Lazarus Laughed may be held to throw a dramatic irony over the whole play, by letting the audience know that Lazarus has a unique knowledge of values in -188- the form of his laughing irony, brought back from beyond death. The elaborate masks in this play operate ironically through symbolisms, as do mainly those in The Great God Brown, Long Day's Journey into Night at the very least achieved for O'Neill himself the personal, which also produce surprise-shock in some places, and rarely, truly dramatic irony at times therapeutic catharsis he sought in writing it. The fate of the Tyrones lies in themselves, in when the audience is made to conspire with the character's flurry to resume his mask and not their quarreling and making-up, loving and hating, family character. And O'Neill treats his be caught without it. This, of course, is almost exactly the technique used for irony with family with the ironic compassion of high tragedy. He explains in his Dedication: disguise in the Renaissance and with pretense in almost any good second-level impersonation. For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a And we can find rather effective dramatic ironies as early in O'Neill career as Anna Christie day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and (the conversation in the bar which sets the audience up for the father's shock of tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write disillusionment about his daughter's virtue), and as late as Long Day's Journey into Night, this play -- write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted suspensefully giving the audience secret foreknowledge of Edmund's tuberculosis and of his Tyrones. mother's relapse into drug-taking.

The symbols in this play are familiar and not especially noteworthy: on stage the books and Irony of fate in these plays is often pointed by O'Neill's insistent use of symbols that serve to furniture, the drinks, and the wedding-dress; off, the lawn-mower and (imagined for the give the mood visible embodiment. Symbol and shock can both be used ironically and as "touch of the poet") the sailing ship in moonlight. In general, O'Neill's symbols are most heightening aids to either fatal or dramatic irony; and all kinds and combinations may effective, I think, when simple, even familiar -- the throne, the drums, the jungle, the silver 57 Irony In The Drama bullet in The Emperor Jones, the Congo mask in All God's Chillun, the stony land to symbolize deal differently with ironies because they concentrate less on the irony-of-fate effects forced possessiveness in Desire Under the Elms, the creeping fog and "dat ol' davil sea" in Anna by determinism and more on the tragic struggle and suffering of the individual faced with an Christie. He is less successful in transmitting his ironies when he makes his characters into opposition of outer and inner "fatal" forces to his freely willed moral choice. symbols, especially when he does it by a complicating use of masks ( Lazarus Laughed and The Great God Brown). But he was quite convincing with Yank as his symbol of man caught The line of dramatic descent in which Williams is found tends to be morally defiant, "off-beat," between his imagined angel in white (Mildred) and the beast he tries to join when rejected, as we say; and in this Williams most closely resembles the German, Wedekind, for he too the caged gorilla; here O'Neill achieved vividly the ironic paradox of man suspended between mixes ironic compassion with tragically aberrant sex. His Spring's Awakening is a rather angel and brute, unable to belong to either. And his symbols, even when not quite so good as Williams-like play. Such ironies belong among those sometimes called Freudian. They are this, are always brave attempts to make his ironies visible. dramatized by the methods developed from Greek tragedy for dramatizing irony of fate, because they belong among things felt as fatal, irresistible by the individual human will on Shaw and O'Neill are the great dead of recent playwrights. And perhaps the greatest still account of the psychological variety of determinism. In the plays of Tennessee Williams we writing, in English, is Sean find them both commonly and strongly present and ably managed, while dramatic irony as a means of setting up situations seems to be rather neglected; perhaps it is even despised by this able playwright as a mere contrivance. -189-

-191- O'Casey. Both too impassioned and too compassionate for pure comedy and too light-hearted and undignified for tragedy, O'Casey has puzzled and delighted his audiences and critics by his very mixed effects, his practically indescribable ironies, such as are furnished by the These qualities show quite well in Williams masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie. The symbols extraordinary ambivalences of The Plough and the Stars. The patriotic bearers of the flag are perfectly and delicately handled as glass animals should be; only the symbolic horn of the flaunting these emblems of the Irish Republic, highly exalted but at the same time very tiny unicorn gets broken -- only that and Laura's timid heart. The author's distancing of the drouthy from responding emotionally to the exhortations to blood and glory from a platform play by making it a memory tends to strengthen its feeling of fatality, while weakening any just outside, display their comic humanity to barman and prostitute in a Dublin pub. This dramatic ironies it might have. In fact, Williams carefully avoids dramatic irony in the central happens on the eve of the Easter 1916 Rising (the temporary defeat about which Yeats wrote, "courtship" scene between Laura and the Gentleman Caller by holding back for a surprise the "A terrible beauty is born"). We in the audience can hear parts of the speech, of which the fact that the Caller is already engaged. Still, in its own way -- and it seems exactly the proper core comes word for word from one made about three years before by the schoolmaster way for this particular drama -- The Glass Menagerie has the tragic irony and the tragic Pearse who was to become one of Eire's martyrs, shot by the English for his leadership in the dignity necessary for catharsis; the closing, fading pantomime, "Blow out your candles, same Easter Rising. If ambivalence has something to do with an ironic confusion of values, Laura," wrings and purifies the heart. And notice the careful recognition, in the stage what of O'Casey's here -- patriotic and pacifistic, Irish and Communistic, satirical and direction, of the necessity for dignity at this point of the impersonation: compassionate? [Now that we cannot hear the mother's speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and But one cannot take up all of our modern playwrights, variously interesting as they are, for tragic beauty. . . . Amanda's gestures are slow and graceful, almost dance-like, as she even a slightly detailed and very selectively illustrated critical analysis of their uses of irony comforts her daughter.] beneath the shadow of confusion left over them by practitioners and critics alike. I regret being unable to discuss here as ironists a good many of our modern playwrights whom I find The last words of Amanda's that we heard, just before this, were to the son Tom, "Go, then! interesting either singly or in groups: Barrie, Dunsany, and Synge; Hellman, Odets, and Rice; Then go to the moon -- you selfish dreamer!" These words embody much irony of theme and Saroyan, Sherwood, and Fry; Sartre, Brecht, Giraudoux, and Wilder. Then there is the most of character. The son at whom she is screaming "selfish dreamer!" is, it is true, a dreamer recent group, including Rattigan, Robert Anderson, Inge, and Osborne. In what direction or and selfish. But his dreams are those of a poet, and his selfishness lies in his torturing need directions do they pursue irony, as far as we can tell up to the present? to get away, out of this family, out of this home, before he too becomes psychologically crippled, a prisoner for the rest of his life. His mother, with her memories of the mob of The contemporary leaders still are Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. On the former I shall gentleman callers back home in Mississippi, is the selfish dreamer she calls Tom, yet ironically make a few remarks here, and then on the latter I shall speak a little more fully and so through her justification that she has been fighting with a love both selfish and unselfish for her children's support in the depression and for -190- -192- provide an analysis of Death of a Salesman for its outstanding ironic interest. control over their lives. In its fashion, this is a great ironic play. Important as Williams is, as influential too on his younger contemporaries, what I have to say about him will consist of remarks only, because his play-making techniques fall into line with John Gassner says ( The Theatre in Our Times, p. 352): the followers of Strindberg, Zola, and Brecht -- those who scorn the well-made play along with all its associated contrivances. This is a line, generally speaking, of determinists; the Except in Camino Real, in fact, the underlying fascination of Williams's work, as distinct from deterministic handling of fate and of will leads to a different handling of ironies from that its more obvious interest to playgoers, has come from contrasts between realistic and practiced by the other line of modern playwrights, the one descending from Ibsen by way of symbolist writing; and from contrasts, too, between the reality of characters and Shaw and O'Neill to Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller. For this tends to be a line of environment, on one hand, and the theatrical deployment of his material, on the other. It individualists and moralists (leftish though some of their politics may be). As dramatists they 58 Irony In The Drama may be that this is what casual commentators mean when they refer to him as a "poetic" Arthur Miller senses the ironic very strongly, and with an admirably increasing subtlety. In his realist. . . . candid self-critical introduction to his Collected Plays ( 1957) he shows irony to be a most important element in his themes and in his manipulation Summer and Smoke has a basic ironic structure that could be called biological, a fated, determining cross-up of the central pair: when he desires her, she is not biologically ready; -194- and when she comes to desire him, he no longer is. Gassner writes disapprovingly of the symbols Williams uses here: of his themes as he shapes them into plays. His over-all purpose is, he says, "to write so that one's changing vision of people in the world is more accurately represented in each He may overstress symbolism when he resorts to the civic statue of "Eternity" to signify succeeding work." And with Miller the vision is clearly an ironic one. Alma's virginal idealism or "soulfulness," . . . since these traits are more than sufficiently stressed in action and characterization. But the "symbol" is put to effectively ironic use when Miller's early, "desk-drawer" plays show ironic themes. The Man Who Had All the Luck centers it is at the foot of this statue that Alma ultimately renounces her purity. The skeleton or on the ironic superstition of the Greeks, that too much good fortune calls down retribution, "anatomy" hanging in her lover's office contrasts "body" -- that is, the wild young doctor's that the gods are jealous. He began a play "about two brothers caught on either side of physical desire for her -- with "soul," or Alma's revulsion against sexuality. This symbol is radicalism in a university, then a play about a psychologist's dilemma in a prison where the employed too obviously. But it furnishes the occasion for a strong dramatic scene between sane were inexorably moving over to join the mad, a play about a bizarre ship's officer whose the two characters. desire for death led him to piracy on the high seas. . . ."

A Streetcar Named Desire savors in its title the irony of Eros as a common carrier. Probably His concept of utter realism for the surface of All My Sons was combined with a highly ironic the play's most effective symbol, and its most pervasive, is Blanche's incessant, compulsive image of the play as a "sapping operation . . . to take place without a sound beneath a clear bathing. The motive of homosexuality seems rather dragged in here, weakening the play as it landscape in the broad light of a peaceful day." And the inception was a tragic irony in actual does Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and partly for this, partly for other reasons, our empathy wavers family relations: from one character to another. Such ambiguities of sympathetic identification are rather ironic, calling attention as they do to an ironic quality in life itself; but they weaken catharsis by pulling out one of the steps to it. During an idle chat in my living room, a pious lady from the Middle West told of a family in her neighborhood which had been destroyed when the daughter turned the father in to the authorities on discovering. that he had been selling faulty machinery to the Army. -193-

As the chosen title shows, the central interest was shifted from child to father, the The ironies in The Rose Tattoo are rather poor, I think; and the play itself is one of curious relationship from daughter to son, and the central irony became the demonstration that effects produced by curious assumptions as to what represents normal heterosexuality. But Keller's crime against other men's sons doomed his own son too. the titular symbol is itself perverse.

Dominant at the inception of Death of a Salesman, its author says, was an ironic concept of In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the strong potential dramatic irony in the held-back family time. His chronology in All My Sons had been knowledge of the old man's approaching death by cancer is rather unfortunately shelved for the more weakly motivated and less completely dramatized theme of homosexuality as a block between the young husband and wife. Excellently theatrical employment of the crutch linear or eventual in that one fact or incident creates the necessity for the next. The Salesman symbol, however, goes a good way toward bringing together the motifs. The brother and his image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes "next" but wife and brats are fantastically unreal satirical puppets -- I do not see why they had to be; that everything exists together and at the same time within us; . . . a human being . . . is his, and the sudden thundershower in one of the third acts (the one written to satisfy the director, Elia Kazan, I believe) is in the extreme slice-of-life manner, quite irrelevant to the play's structure. What value can Williams place on construction, when he lets these two third acts -195- go into print this way, side by side, take your pick? past at every moment. . . . The present is merely that which his past is capable of noticing Camino Real, of course, is as full as a packed parking lot of symbols and frantic with and smelling and reacting to. expressionism. Chaotic irony might be the term to fit it. Like Lazarus Laughed, the whole play is a miming of the exclamation, "How ironic as all get-out this stuff is!" This ironic paradox is dramatically made visible by Miller's giving us his hero Willy Loman "at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the The line of development in which Williams creates his ironies is one of off-beat cadences, wild voice of the present. In dramatic terms the form, therefore, is this process, instead of being a impressions, unexpected intuitions, and haggard surprises. We may expect from it always the once-removed summation or indication of it." unexpected ironic insight, not that born of carefully planned artistic construction. And from Williams we get, by this method, much fine work -- more plays above the "B" level than we We notice also the ironical quality of the images from which, he states, the play grew: the have as yet from Arthur Miller. But different. little frame house, the car polishing, the family hubbub of important trivialities, the growing old under the next generation's "hard, public eye," and "the image of ferocity when love has turned to something else and yet is there, is somewhere in the room if one could only find it."

59 Irony In The Drama The question of "recognition" in this play has been much debated. Miller asserts that Willy -197- achieves recognition but cannot express it save in his act of suicide for his son. He "has achieved a very powerful piece of knowledge, which is that he is loved by his son and has know the good. Evil is not a mistake but a fact in itself. . . . I believe merely that, from been embraced by him and forgiven." Willy is "no dumb brute heading mindlessly to the whatever cause, a dedication to evil, not mistaking it for good, but knowing it as evil and catastrophe" but "actually a very brave spirit who cannot settle for half but must pursue his loving it as evil, is possible in human beings who appear agreeable and normal. I think now dream of himself to the end." He merely lacks "fluency to verbalize his situation." that one of the hidden weaknesses of our whole approach to dramatic psychology is our inability to face this fact -- to conceive, in effect, of Iago. "But it seems to me" -- and this seems to me a very fine concept of tragic irony -- "that there is of necessity a severe limitation of self-awareness in any character, even the most knowing, And he remarks (to recur to the recognition problem) that his "course in The Crucible should which serves to define him as a character; and more, that this very limit serves to complete have been toward greater self-awareness" in the characters. the tragedy and, indeed, to make it at all possible." On this point Brents Stirling makes an interesting comparison, though an odd one, between Willy and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. This comes at the end of his Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy ( 1956). Antony and In connection with A Memory of Two Mondays, which he calls "a pathetic comedy," he Cleopatra "has the stature, whether or not the hero at- mentions still another possible irony, one of hope: "I hope to define for myself the value of hope, why it must arise, as well as the heroism of those who know, at least, how to endure its absence." -196-

Behind A View from the Bridge was again a story Miller had heard, years before. But its irony tains greatness; and it, not Antony or Cleopatra, embodies the ultimate insight intended for was felt by its writer as a Greek or Elizabethan one, that of fatal passion. It an audience. Antony and Cleopatra asserts human dignity, value, because it confronts defeat with a superb expression of ironical truth." And, comparing Miller play, "if Death of a Salesman . . . faces truth honestly and with appropriate art, it is tragedy in a long recognized was written experimentally not only as a form, but as an exercise in interpretation. . . . [My] tradition, and nothing in the tradition requires that Willy Loman comprehend what the reading was the awesomeness of a passion which, despite its contradicting the self-interest of dramatist reveals. It is the actual point of his play that a mode of life can produce an the individual it inhabits, despite every kind of warning, despite even its destruction of the understanding so disordered that it cannot perceive its disorder. This . . . is also the point of moral beliefs of the individual, proceeds to magnify its power over him until it destroys him. Coriolanus. . . ." In its London production with a more elaborate and realistic set than the New York one, Miller Illuminating as this is, Miller own article on his The Crucible ( New York Times, February 8, feels that the play achieved the catharsis it aimed at. Eddie, the hero, could now be seen as 1953) alludes to Death of a Salesman in a way suggesting to me that he then felt Willy had the recognition but could not "verbalize" it: a creature of this environment as well as an exception to it. . . . Where originally there had been only a removed sense of terror at the oncoming catastrophe, now there was pity and, I And the great rock, standing mum over the Bay, . . . here hung Rebecca, John Proctor, think, the kind of wonder which it had been my aim to create in the first place. It was finally George Jacobs -- people more real to me than the living can ever be. The sense of a terrible possible to mourn this man. marvel again, that people could have such a belief in themselves and in the rightness of their consciences as to give their lives rather than say what they thought was false. Or, perhaps, they only feared Hell so much? Yet Rebecca said, and it is written in the record, "I cannot In concluding his introduction Miller states: belie myself." And she knew it would kill her. I have stood squarely in conventional realism; I have tried to expand it with an imposition of My friends return, the men of my own life -- in the hotel taproom, a circle of salesmen. . . . various forms in order to speak more directly, Another day, another chance to find out who they are. . . . -198- The rock stands forever in Salem. They knew who they were. even more abruptly and nakedly, of what has moved me behind the visible façades of life. And this, in a way, seems to include Willy Loman, at least as among those who, as long as they have another day, have another chance to find out who they are. By this, I think, he means irony. And his peroration declares the basic irony of man as something beyond the implacable opposition of determinism against free will: In writing this play of Salem witchcraft, The Crucible, Miller found what was to him a new irony, that of the existence of absolute evil; and he regrets that, in mitigating Danforth's evil, The idea of realism has become wedded to the idea that man is at best the sum of forces he failed to get this concept fully expressed in the play. working upon him and of given psychological forces within him. Yet an innate value, innate will, does in fact posit itself as real not alone because it is devoutly to be wished, but because, I believe now, as I did not conceive then, that there are people dedicated to evil in the world; however closely he is measured and systematically accounted for, he is more than the sum of that without their perverse example we should not I his stimuli and unpredictable beyond a certain point. A new poem will appear because a new balance has been struck which embraces both determinism and the paradox of will.

60 Irony In The Drama He ends with a paradox that sounds existential -- "If there is one unseen goal toward which Catherine [kissing his face]. Now! every play in this book strives, it is that very discovery and its proof -- that we are made and yet are more than what made us." [He turns her upstage. They walk embraced, her head on his shoulder, and he sings to her softly. They go into a bedroom.] One should not be surprised, with a playwright of such broad grasp of ironic principles, such flexibly changing and searching critico-creative thought, to find him trying almost anything [A pause. Ships' horns sound in the distance. Eddie enters on the street. He is unsteady, with dramatic irony. Naturally his tendency to stress the philosophical type of ironies, moral, drunk. He mounts the stairs. The sounds continue. He enters the apartment, looks around, religious, and fatal, might cause a certain disregard of that especially technical irony which takes out a bottle from one pocket, puts it on the table; then another bottle from another bears the name dramatic. And so perhaps might some habit of denigrating the well-made play pocket; and a third from an inside pocket. He sees the iron, goes over to it and touches it, and all its contrivances. On the other hand, Miller's declared interest in clear realistic pulls his hand quickly back, turns toward upstage.] Eddie. Beatrice? [He goes to the open presentation of his themes might have the opposite effect -- and to a considerable extent it kitchen door and looks in. He turns to a bedroom door.] Beatrice? [He starts for this door; it does, at least in All My Sons. Here we find an interesting structural and emotional use of the opens, and Catherine is standing there; under his gaze she adjusts her dress.] dramatic irony device. The process is under way of forcing Joe Keller's guilt over the faulty airplane engine-blocks into the open. A pretended sudden attack of 'flu' is "planted" as a suspicion. The scene builds up tension until his wife innocently gives the thing away. And this Catherine. You got home early. tension through dramatic irony prepares the audience for Kel- Eddie [trying to unravel what he senses]. Knocked off for Christmas early. [She goes past him -199- to the ironing board. Indicating the iron:] You start a fire that way. ler's confession of guilt to his son, the turning point of the play, which immediately follows. Catherine. I only left it for a minute.

Much the same technique is used incidentally but effectively in Death of a Salesman, within [ Rodolpho appears in the bedroom. Eddie sees him, and his arm jerks slightly in shock. one of Willy's flash-back memories as he compulsively gropes for the guilty secret of his Rodolpho nods to him testingly. Eddie looks to Catherine, who is looking down at the ironing failure with his son. Here we build up dramatic irony tension with Willy's trying to get rid of as she works.] the half-dressed "other woman" in his hotel room while his son Biff knocks on the door -- Willy's frantic efforts to keep him, first from the room, then from understanding of the situation. This tension leads again to a turning point, Biff's repudiation of his father; through Rodolpho. Beatrice went to buy shoes for the children. Willy's memory we and Willy turn it up at the same time as the buried crucial secret of disaster. Miller makes the action that follows turn immediately toward the decision of the play and the catastrophe. Going on to The Crucible we find yet again the same "one-two punch" combination. Judge Danforth makes Proctor's trial for witchcraft turn on his testimony that his accuser, the So this use of a sub-scene of strong dramatic irony to build up tension for a play's turning servant girl Abigail, was put out of the house by his wife as a whore. Proctor's wife is then point immediately to follow seems to be a favorite device of Miller's; and an interesting and called in. Proctor is forced to turn his back to prevent her taking counsel of his face. And in a important employment of dramatic irony it surely is. scene of powerful dramatic irony she lies in the effort to save her husband from the charge of adultery, thus upsetting his impeachment of the witness and so dooming him. The turning point which follows is delayed a little by Hale's expostulation. Danforth hesitates. But Abigail Such dramatized bits of action from the past of a character as we watched in Willy Loman's sways both tense crowds, courtroom and theater, into the terrifying scene in which the hotel room are commonly called flash-backs, and some say they originated in the movies. hysterical girls see the evil "yellow bird" among the rafters. Miller asserts that those in Death of a Salesman are not true flash-backs, and this may be because he realizes that the true flash-back has serious limitations to its ironies.

A similar bit of strong dramatic irony in A View from the Bridge is placed shortly before the turning point of that play. Notice how in the stage directions Miller calls on the actors to carry Let us help ourselves to see this with a simple figure: much of the irony by pantomime. Catherine is Eddie's beloved niece, Rodolpho is her lover, Beatrice is Eddie's wife. A [B] C

Rodolpho. . . . [He breaks off, seeing the conquered longing in her eyes, her smile.] Catherine -- -201-

Catherine. No. There's nobody here. Let this figure represent the whole scene in which the flashback (B, in square brackets) occurs. The line A represents the ordinary sequence, chronological, of events before the flashback, that marked C represents the story-line resumed after the flash-back. -200-

Rodolpho. Oh, my little girl. Oh God! 61 Irony In The Drama Events in A cannot well be given additional irony by the flash-back except as we might see the flash-back coming on. In C the audience does enjoy added dramatic irony from knowing, Chapter XII perhaps, more about the events revealed in the flash-back than do some of the characters on the stage; but events usually hasten on to the end of the scene without exploitation of this CONCLUSION benefit, though if a character like Willy was represented as himself seeing the flash-back his impersonative irony is deepened. As for B, the flash-back itself, we have seen that important We approach the end of this book under the scourge of ironic necessity; for, in order to pull dramatic irony can be contrived within the frame of the flash-back itself ( Willy hearing Biff's together these ideas about the drama, impersonation, irony, the cathartic process, and shock, knocking on his door). But this dramatic irony appears to gain little or nothing from being I must go back to the beginning now and summarize. within the flash-back.

A play or drama, we have found, is something existing at the center of a larger, quite Miller says, in the introduction I have been quoting, "There are no flash-backs in this play, but indefinite area we call the dramatic. A play is a piece written to be presented by actors to an only a visible concurrency of past and present." For Willy is unchanged, and the place does audience, that is, to be projected, using for the purpose dialogue and action, by not change; we merely watch him having a memory (or a hallucination sometimes with Uncle impersonation on a stage or other definite playing space. Ben). The play's failure as a movie was due to its pictorial literalness, producing a loss of this concurrency. Imitations of the play had to collapse for the very same reason, for the device works only with a hero who is in this particular stage and state. Willy's visualized, dramatized At the heart and center of the play is impersonation. By considering the great variety of "memories" served as "a resolution for the problem of keeping the past constantly alive; and known dramatic forms in their relation to impersonation we are able to distinguish those that friction, collision, and tension between past and present was the heart of the play's works and performances which are central from those which are farther out toward the particular construction." periphery of everything we can truly call a play or a drama. Beyond this periphery we find many forms of pageantry, ritual, and "show business" which are rightly enough called dramatic, but which are certainly not truly plays. In other words, Miller was providing for the actor's ironic impersonation of Willy; we are to see him ironically in the present, surrounded by his present family and problems, even Impersonation, moreover, is the key to the purpose and effect of drama, the audience's emotional reaction, its feeling, its mood. -202-

The theatrical situation is per se ironical. The audience is emotionally aware, simultaneously, while his dream, itself ironical or not as it may happen, comes to him like a flash-back into his of the contradictory truths that Hamlet is a character and an actor named, say, Olivier past. impersonating Hamlet. All of an audience feels this irony.

In the main this works, and works well. It seems to me that in the theater a couple of -204- difficulties are apparent. For one, the audience tends to take the flash-back or memory events rather simply as narrative portions of the detective operation it is sharing with Willy, the hunting in Willy's past for the reason for the trouble with Biff. For the other, we have to Some of the members make no distinction between Hamlet as a real person and Hamlet as a accept the changing ages of the characters, particularly the boys, at the various points in the fictional character, artificially created by the dramatist before being recreated by the actor; course of their growing up. I take it that Willy is not supposed to change in visible age, but those who do, add a third dimension to their ironic state -- and any who compare Olivier's that the boys are; it would seem that they must, to avoid the ludicrous when they steal interpretation with those of other actors may be said to add a fourth, so that they perceive cement, wash the Chevvy, and toss the football. This makes for awkward staging; yet it is not simultaneously the actor, the character, the real person named Hamlet, and whatever actor quite an impossible illusion to demand from excellent actors. besides Olivier they have in mind.

Arthur Miller evidently considers himself worth at least his own critical study as a dramatist; Impersonation itself in every play adds to the ironies in the audience's conscious and that is why he has given us this fascinating, valuable fifty-five page introduction. And I unconscious mind by multiplying the levels of impersonation, of pretense, on which a given heartily agree with him: he is well worth study. He does not perhaps altogether know what he actor can play at one time, with his audience -- through dramatic irony, source of the is doing. What creative artist does -- or should? But he is trying critically to follow himself as audience's special knowledge provided by the plot-handling -- simultaneously reacting on all he advances creatively in his art. And from the point of view of my own particular interest in these levels. irony, I hail him as contributing, so far, at least two important things: one, his discovery or rediscovery of the value of building tension by dramatic irony just before a play's turning On the first level (and we should remember that this too is a level of irony, removed one point; the other, Willy's modified form of ironic self-expression through a memory variant of degree from actuality by the fact of impersonation) the straight role may give us the actor the flash-back (we might call it the recognition hallucination) which does not sacrifice the being very much like his actual, off-stage self. The character role makes him strikingly chief actor's ironic impersonation while the flash-back is going on. different. The second level of impersonation doubles the pretense by adding (to the first-level role) hypocrisy or disguise; the actor thus impersonates a character who, in turn, I trust that we may expect from Arthur Miller more such contributions to the art, craft, and impersonates something or somebody else. And we have had glimpses of even third and theory of playwriting. fourth levels.

-203- As for irony itself, this has been called the Age of Irony; and much that is being said, written, and thought about this psychological state (for irony is an intellectual perception accompanied 62 Irony In The Drama by its own characteristic feeling or emotion) is today powerfully affecting both literary dramatically as comic bawdry. And shock for cathartic purposes is traceable, too, through criticism and literary creation. world comedy, though more variously and less definitely than tragic shock through world tragedy. It would seem more like a broad path that breaks down into a skein of wandering trails all leading roughly in the same direction -- but traceable still, especially as bawdry, from In drama as in other literary forms we find simple or straight irony, dramatic irony, and irony Aristophanes to the newest comedy hit on Broadway. of fate. It does not seem necessary to re-define these terms here. But to understand irony, as a feeling accompanying the simultaneous perceptions of contradictory truths, we must be careful to avoid the linear error. This is the mistake of conceiving time as a series In the course of this study I employed illustrations, sometimes in the form of considerable quotations, to illustrate specific points. It was not always convenient, especially before the latter stages of my argument had been developed, to point out how some of my selections -205- exemplify the use of several of the above-summarized aesthetic principles in combination. Now I can ask my reader, if he will, to reconsider for instance the passage quoted in Chapter of points along a line. Actually, the present moment is felt, in life as in the theater, as an 1 from the great comic scene in the first part of Shakespeare Henry IV. In the scene we have infinitely rapid back-and-forth scanning between past and future. It is this that makes the plainly a combination in comedy of the techniques of impersonation, irony, shock, and balanced, complex emotion of irony possible. On the stage there are many ways of projecting catharsis. True, at the end of this play no purgation is connected with Falstaff's exit. He irony, ways that call on all the resources of the playwright's, producer's, and actor's art. The staggers off carrying hopefully the symbolic weight of an enormous lie -- the corpse of production of ironic feelings in the audience requires that such feelings be present in the Hotspur whom he claims to have author and the actor also. -207- Studied specifically as an ironist, Shakespeare reveals that his commonly accepted four periods of playwriting may be interpreted as four phases in the development of his irony: his killed. But already, in the play-acting scene with Prince Hal, he has felt the shocking breath of acceptance of the aesthetic and moral standards of others, his asserting of his own his doom in the prophetic words, "I do. I will." His banishment and his death, although independent standards, his questioning of his own standards, and his chastened return to a strangely separated by the exigencies of Renaissance playwriting, make together the comic selection from the standards he had set up as his own in the second period. We found it catharsis of the dramas in which he is the massive central figure. helpful to test these four stages by giving special attention to the transitional plays. We also studied his ironies play by play through each period, using them to trace his change and growth, both technical and personal, as a dramatic artist. Similarly, the King Lear passages concerning the ironic relations between the disguised Edgar and his blinded father Gloucester show Shakespeare working through impersonation (as in Falstaff's case, some of it is on the second level), irony, and shock toward two balanced minor That emotion, felt by an audience at the conclusion of certain plays, which after Aristotle we catharses of the tragedy -- Edgar's coming of age through suffering, and Gloucester's death call tragic catharsis, depends on the combined principles of ironic impersonation and ironic 'twixt joy and grief. shock. The feeling of purgation, connected as it is with the tragic hero's simultaneous death and victory, is itself ironic. One of the early scenes of Marlowe Doctor Faustus makes a good additional example for showing how impersonation can build up satire until it becomes lofty tragic irony, as in Impersonation has been necessary to build up the requisite sympathetic tension in the Chapter 7 we saw it do in Lear's mad invective against the lechery of women. The sinfully audience's feeling for the hero. Shock is provided in tragedy largely by that pervasive (even, proud, intellectually curious, and overweeningly ambitious Faustus uses his black arts to call we find, omnipresent) element we call horror. Its function is to stir up the audience's up a devil, who appears in horrible guise as we can see him depicted on the title page of the unconscious feelings, its repressed emotions, so that they can be finally discharged along with old play. Faustus commands: its conscious ones.

I charge thee to return and change thy shape; Thou art too ugly to attend on me. Go, and Out of these general psychological rules concerning tragic catharsis we have derived nine return an old Franciscan friar; That holy shape becomes a devil best. steps for the cathartic process: hypnotic rhythm, the introduction of the hero, ominous images To his pride and delight Mephistophilis does his bidding, returning dressed as a friar, thus becoming for the remainder of the scene a second-level satirical impersonation as a symbol of -206- hypocrisy. of doom, empathy produced through the hero's struggles, horror-shocks, hybris or elation Meph. Now, Faustus, what wouldst thou have me to do? Faust. I charge thee, wait upon me before catastrophe, the hero's becoming a symbol, the hero's death, and finally the whilst I live, To do whatever Faustus shall command. . . . Meph. I am a servant to great purgationelevation of catharsis. This step-by-step aesthetic process we found to be traceable Lucifer, And may not follow thee without his leave: No more than he commands must we throughout world tragedy, from Aeschylus to Maxwell Anderson. perform.

A parallel aesthetic process employing similar steps is used, we find, in comedy for producing -208- a similar emotional result which we feel reasonably justified in denominating comic catharsis. Comic shock we observe to be produced by means even more various than those for tragic shock; but just as in tragedy, horrors, often strongly sexual, are the most prominent device, Faust. Did he not charge thee to appear to me? Meph. No. I came hither of mine own accord. so in comedy we are especially impressed by the shocking qualities of sex expressed Faust. Did not my conjuring speeches raise thee? Speak. Meph. That was the cause, and yet 63 Irony In The Drama per accidens; For when we hear one rack the name of God, Abjure the Scriptures and his Is there dramatic irony here too? Does the audience know or think it knows something Saviour Christ, We fly in hope to get his glorious soul; Nor will we come, unless he use such Faustus does not? Yes, I believe the spectators at this point feel certain that the hero's soul is means Whereby he is in danger to be damned: Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring Is not yet utterly lost, and anxious lest it be lost. So they are tense with horror when Faustus stoutly to abjure the Trinity, And pray devoutly to the Prince of Hell. Faust. So Faustus hath sneers in stupid arrogance at his adversary's terror: Already done, and holds this principle: There is no chief but only Belzebub, To whom Faustus doth dedicate himself. This word "damnation" terrifies not him, For he confounds Hell in What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate For being deprived of the joys of heaven? Learn Elysium; His ghost be with the old philosophers! But leaving these vain trifles of men's souls, thou of Faustus manly fortitude, And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess. Tell me, what is that Lucifer thy lord? Meph. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits. Faust. Was not that Lucifer an angel once? Meph. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God. Faust. How comes it then that he is prince of devils? Meph. Oh, by aspiring pride and insolence, For And they shudder to see Faustus rush on to doom himself eternally when, blinded by his which God threw him from the face of heaven. Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer? hybris and his lust for worldly knowledge and power, he leaps at the idea that he has already Meph. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, Conspired against our God with Lucifer, And are damned himself by blasphemy -- forever damned with Lucifer. Faust. Where are you damned? Meph. In hell. Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell? Meph. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it; Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten . . . the shortest cut for conjuring Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity And pray devoutly to the thousand hells, In being deprived of everlasting bliss? O Faustus! leave these frivolous Prince of Hell -- demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul. and therefore proceeds to offer his soul to Satan in exchange for four and twenty years of -209- having his every desire. As Mephistophilis leaves, the audience sees Faustus hugging himself over the bargain. But the spectators do not miss the irony; every one knows in his heart that Faustus' bargain is a most terrible cheat. Faust. What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate For being deprived of the joys of heaven? Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess. Go bear these tidings to great Lucifer: Seeing Faustus hath incurred eternal death By desperate Surely, though, it is unnecessary for me to underline further these tremendous ironies of thoughts against Jove's deity, Say he surrenders up to him his soul, So he will spare him four Marlowe's? Or the highly effective ways in which the dramatic form of art enables him to and twenty years, Letting him live in all voluptuousness; Having thee ever to attend on me; exploit them? To give me whatsoever I shall ask, To tell me whatsoever I demand, To slay mine enemies and aid my friends, And always be obedient to my will. . . . -211-

Faustus continues solus after the devil's exit: And how well may we hope that our current playwrights and those to come will employ ironies? Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis. By him I'll be great Emperor of the World, And make a bridge thorough the moving air, To pass the ocean with a I feel convinced that they are being employed, and frequently very well indeed. Is their band of men: I'll join the hills that bind the Afric shore, And make that country continent to employment in general less constant, less able, less varied, than in other periods of the Spain, And both contributory to my crown. The Emperor shall not live but by my leave, Nor world's drama? If we compare our own time only with the English Renaissance we shall be any potentate of Germany, Now that I have obtained what I desire. misled; for in number of characters, intricacy of plot, range of ideas advanced, and variety of objects satirized, any one of our plays is thin in comparison with a play by Shakespeare or A mighty demon has stood before Faustus, hands clasped in his sleeves, head bowed in one of his contemporaries. But these Elizabethan plays are richer, as a class, than any other seeming submission under the hood of a holy friar. Marlowe's audience is throughout standard commercial plays, either before or since; so they do not provide a fair comparison. conscious of the irony in this visible hypocrisy at the same time that it is latently aware, as We may say that the drama of the first half of the twentieth century has been, on the whole, always in the theater, of the fact that these two characters are being impersonated by actors in very good technical health. It will remain so, Deo volente, in our time. neither of whom is really either a mighty magician or a friarimpersonating devil out of hell. Consider what places, what times, what conditions, have in the past produced great drama, What is Truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. One of the very greatest and where we can say that it is being produced today. The dramatist must deal with the ironies we know is this individual human being, his free mind, his free will, and his immortal soul. Tyrannical repression, doctrinaire fanaticism, force him into becoming a mere propagandist. Propaganda is present in a great deal of drama, but it must not devour the free humanity there present -210- with it, or it slays the drama. Great drama does always hope, but not with the specific, practical, operative hoping offered by propaganda. careless asking the deepest question in philosophy of the only man ever on earth who might have answered it. Marlowe takes a very similar question, what is hell? and has it asked before The playwright of today sees the very pressure of his time ironically. He is full of ironies he our eyes, with the extra irony of impersonation, of a spirit who has just come from there and wants to get into his play. He only needs to know, whether by theory, imitation, or instinct, who answers Faustus with another staggering irony -- that he is there still. "Why, this is hell, how best to do it. We have found that our consideration of ironies -- even in the very titles of nor am I out of it." many modern plays -- leads us not only to the playwright's themes, issuing from his own ironic feelings, but also to an estimate of his technical competence to get these ironic themes dramatically onto 64 Irony In The Drama -212- through a cathartic process which employs shock, of the emotions. To this consummation the central dramatic techniques all contribute; and by means of these techniques and in the light of this purpose all of Western drama may be profitably studied, presented, enjoyed, and the stage. Here is where the techniques of ironic impersonation come in. critically judged.

We have found the device of dramatic irony struggling along with indestructible vitality but As for the writing of drama, apparently some playwrights are interested in critical theories constantly being beaten down by the critics' confusing it with the artificial, lifeless trickeries of about the structure and style of plays, but by no means all, or all the great ones. As far as the well-made play. Recent drama seems on this point not quite fully aware, inclined to follow for suspense the old rule, "Make 'em wait," but to wait without enough specific anticipation of something promised through the special inside knowledge that dramatic irony vouchsafes to -214- an audience. Moreover, under symbolist influences poetic dramatists like Yeats and Eliot proffer their inside knowledge too enigmatically. they prefer to feel free of such considerations (which they may feel are too curious) let us leave them free on condition that they write us good plays -- whether by instinct, imitation, or The irony chiefly felt and somewhat cloudily expressed by our attempters of tragedy is the the study of criticism or textbooks is probably none of our business. At least, I have not ancient irony of fate, modified in an O'Neill by our modern theories of necessity which can written this book to exhort playwrights, but to assist myself in the teaching and others in the drive man helpless to his doom -- social and psychological determinisms of all sorts. These appreciation of plays. If I should find that I have helped any practicing writers or critics, I fatal ironies seem particularly modern to us when they crush the little man under an would feel flattered indeed. economic doom or grind him into the gears of a war brought on in spite of every effort to avert it. And circular irony, though ancient indeed, seems new to each generation as it My Muse is divine Irony. She is not one of the ancient nine, but she is known of old to the matures far enough to observe the possibility that in the end it may come out by that same writers of plays and for many centuries has been whispering to them some of the best kept door wherein it went. Such modern tragedy -- all modern tragedy -- uses shock, whether by secrets of their art. She views our human dilemmas, incongruities, and paradoxes from a lofty instinct or observation of models. Conscious technique might employ it better sometimes. but compassionate distance, before the starry threshold of Jove's court, and there she weaves Except when an Anderson bases a Winterset on a study of the traditional techniques, the nine the ironies sent up to her by dramatic purgation into harmonies with the music of the circling steps to catharsis are often incomplete, while catharsis itself in modern tragedy is often weak planets -- or even lacking.

where those immortal shapes Of bright aerial Spirits live insphered In regions mild of calm All too much modern drama is indeterminate in central ironic mood -- neither comic nor and serene air, Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call Earth, and with low- tragic. One may suspect that its writers have not mastered the ironic means at their disposal thoughted care, Confined and pestered in this pinfold here, Strive to keep up a frail and for achieving truly comic or truly tragic effects. Some of those who more successfully lean feverish being, Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives, After this mortal change, to her true toward comedy or tragedy have servants Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats. Yet some there be that by due steps aspire To lay their just hands on that golden key That opes the Palace of Eternity. To such my -213- errand is. shown original power by writing plays suggesting the existence, as feasible concepts, of -215- special ironies capable of stiffening whole plays at their core or spine of ironic meaning: compassionate irony ( The Time of Your Life) and irony of paradox ( Mister Roberts), for example. Williams and Miller are both good at this. INDEX Abbey Theatre, 152 On the whole, our survey has indicated that our best modern playwrights are vigorously Acting, as the ironic art, 45 ; mentioned, 10, 12, 43, 44, 160, 206, 213 original and deeply sincere as ironists; and our contemporary drama is thoroughly alive and Action, 11 -12 capable of employing magnificently the techniques of irony, old and new, if and when these Adams, J. Q., 11 Addison, Joseph, 113 become generally available and understood. In this crucial area a critical understanding may Aeschylus, 98 -100, 123 serve to hasten the creative one. Allegory, ironic, 68, 69 All's Well That Ends Well, 54, 67, 68, 145, 169 Ambiguity, ironic, 73 In brief, finally, here is the heart of what I have been trying to say in this book: Ambivalence, ironic, 190 Anderson, Maxwell, Winterset, 35, 116, 117, 213 ; What Price Glory? 152 ; mentioned, 94, 120, 156, 157 The center of the play -- and therefore the center also of the larger concentric area containing Anticlimax, 170 everything dramatic -- is irony. In all drama, irony is projected to the audience by the means, Antithesis, ironic, 166 unique to the dramatic form of art, of the actor's impersonation. Antoine, 162 Antony and Cleopatra, 54, 74, 75, 96, 97, 196, 197 Archer, William, 176 -79 Ironic impersonation is the thing that, in the theater, raises actuality to the nth power (the Arena, myth of, 14 -16, 18 exponent is unknown because the possible range of impersonation is unmeasured). Aristophanes, 149, 150 Impersonation lies at the heart of that ironic satisfaction of the audience which is the aim, Aristotle, theory of catharsis, 84 -91; mentioned, xiii, 181, 206 more or less clearly visible, of all great plays, tragic, mixed, or comic -- the purgation, Aside, ironic, 8, 185, 186 65 Irony In The Drama As You Like It, 39, 60, 61, 142, 143 Despair, in Spenser, 21 ; in Hamlet, 21, 22 ; in Lear, 21 -26 mentioned, 110, 111 Atmosphere, Gothic, 102 -3 Determinism, 162, 188, 191, 199, 213 Audience, 129 -33, 205, 206 Dialectic, 166, 171 Augier, G. V. E., 161 Dialogue, 11, 12 Baker, G. P., 177, 179, 184 Dickey, F. M., 72 Barber, C. L., 63 Dignity, tragic, 75, 76, 192 ; Mentioned, 132, 184 ; 197 Barrie, Sir James, 156 Disguise, 168, 187 Barrymore, John, 31 Disillusion, irony of, 70, 71, 73, 74 Battenhouse, R. W., 68 Drama, definition of, xiv, 3 -17, 204, 214 ; in real life, 13 ; types of, 153, 154 ; Renaissance, 212 ; Bawdry, in tragedy, 40 ; in comedy, 135 -52; definition, 136 ; types of, 136 ; verbal, 136, 150 -52; central process of, 214 mentioned, 83, 122, 207 Dramatic irony, definition, 42, 179 ; three chief kinds, 48 -49; active and passive, 49 ; in girl-page, Beaumont, Francis, 76, 77, 109. See also Fletcher 105 ; in dumb-show, 105 ; in modern comedy, 153 -79; versus surprise, 176 -79; in modern tragedy, Becque, Henri F., 161, 162 180 -203; in O'Neill, 185 -87; in Miller, 199 -201, 203 ; at present, 213 ; mentioned, xi, 24, 37, 43 - Bentley, Eric, 129, 155, 180, 181 47passim, 57, 71, 72, 73, 87, 115, 117, 123, 151, 205, 211. See also Irony Bethell, S. L., 67, 78 -80 Dramatists, recent, 190 Boomerang irony. See Irony, of fate Both-and, 164, 165 Dream, sex-horror, 99 ; mentioned, 203 Bradbrook, M. C., 68 Dryden, John, 112 Bradley, A. C., 28 Dublin, 152 Brecht, Berthold, 173 Echegaray, José, 163 Browning, Robert, 115 Edgar, ironic role in Lear, 19 -26, 34, 35, 38, 39 Burbadge, Richard, 31 Eiron, 27, 57 Burlesque, 40, 41, 65, 168, 171 Either-or, 164, 165 Burton, Robert, 95 Eliot, T. S., 156, 213 Byron, George, Lord, 114 Ellis-Fermor, Una, 71, 73 Calderón, Pedro de la Barca, 104 Empathy, 90, 148, 193 Cambises, 105 Envy, 67, 126, 127 Campbell, O. J., 67, 75, 76, 126 Equilibrium, 124, 125, 132, 149 Catharsis, comic, 84, 86, 121 -34, 135 52, 207 ; steps to comic, 146 -49; tragic, 82 -103, 104 -20; Euripides, Alcestís, 123 ; mentioned, 101, 102 steps to tragic, 88 -91, 206, 207, 213 ; and the unconscious, 931 ironic, 119 ; in O'Neill, 188 ; Existentialism, 199 therapeutic, 189 ; weakened, 193 ; in Miller, 198 ; minor, 208 ; mentioned, xii, xiii. See also Steps to Expressionism, 118, 119, 164, 194 catharsis Expressiveness, 196, 197 Chapman, George, 38, 108, 109 Falstaff, 5 -9, 44, 45, 51, 207, 208 Character, as ironic symbol, 189 Fate, 191 Character role, 31, 35 -36. See also Impersonation Fergusson, Francis, 71 Chekhov, Anton, 182 Fiction. See Novel Chevalier, H. M., ix Finality, tragic, 90, 91 ; mentioned, 124, 125, 149 Christian tragedy, 111 Flash-back, 201 -3 Clemen, W. H., 72, 73 Fletcher, John, The Faithful Shepherdess, 123, 124 ; mentioned, 60, 76, 77, 109 Climax, 178 Ford, John, 95, 109 Closet drama, 11, 13, 14 France, A., defines irony, 27 Cocteau, Jean, 118 Frazer, Sir James, The Golden Bough, 88 Comedy, satirical, 126 -29; Roman, Freedom, verbal, 150 -52 Freud, Sigmund, 87, 88, 91, 95, 97, 118, 191 Frye, Northrop, 68 -217- Futility, catharsis of, 156 -58 Galsworthy, John, Justice, 119 ; mentioned, 156 Gassner, John, 161 -64, 180 -83, 193 150; modern trends in, 153 -79. See also Shock, comic Gentleman, Renaissance, 58, 59, 70, 71 Comedy of Errors, 56, 138 Goethe, Faust, 115 Commedia dell' arte, 150 Granville-Barker, H., 60, 71 Commentator, 155 Green, Paul, 124, 125 Compassion, ironic, 28, 36, 59, 74 ; purgation through, 91 ; and justice, 175 ; mentioned, 124, 170, Greene, Robert, 105 171, 189, 214 Grobianism, 138, 141 Confession, 92 Hall, Vernon, 72 Congreve, William, 128 Hamilton, Clayton, 178, 179 Consummation, delayed, 140 -49 Passim Hamlet, 54, 70 -75, 96 Contrast, irony of, 49 Happy endings, 126 Convolution. See Impersonation, enriched Cooper, Lane, 84, 122 Coriolanus, 75, 76, 97 -218- Coward, Noel, 157 Craig, Hardin, 10 Criticism, dramatic, 214, 215. See also Shakespeare, critics of Cymbeline, 79, 80, 124 Harmony, ironic, 77 -81 passim, 215 Danby, J. F., 71 Heggen, Thomas, 214 Daumier, Honoré, 132, 133 Heilman, Robert, 72 Dean, L. F., 63 Hellman, Lillian, 191 Decorum, verbal, 150 -52 Hemingway, Ernest, 156

66 Irony In The Drama Henry IV, 5 -9, 54, 63, 137, 146, 147, 207, 208 Medieval drama, 104 Henry V, 54, 63 -65 Henry VI, 56 Henry VIII, 76 -219- Heywood, Thomas, 16, 38, 49, 108, 109 Horror, horror-shock. See Shock Melodrama, 125, 126 Horrors, Renaissance, 104 -11; burlesque, 132 ; mentioned, 95 -103 passim Memory, 202, 203 Howard, Sidney, 10 Merchant of Venice, 59, 124, 141, 147 Hugo, Victor, 150, 151 Merry Wives of Windsor, 61, 62, 143, 144 Humor, 130, 131 Middleton, Thomas, 109 Humours, false, 169 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 40, 53, 54, 58, 59, 140, 141 Hybris, in comedy, 121 ; mentioned, 26, 57, 90, 211 Miller, Arthur, as critic, 194, 195, 199, 203 ; early plays, 195 ; All My Sons, 195, 199 ; Death of a Hypnosis, 88, 89 Salesman, 195 -97, 200 ; The Crucible, 197, 198, 200 ; A Memory of Two Mondays, 198 ; A View from Hypocrisy, 36, 37, 208, 210 the Bridge, 198, 200, 201 ; mentioned, 120, 154, 178, 191 Ibsen, Henrik, x, 115, 116, 154, 163, 191 Milton, John, Samson Agonistes, 13, 120 ; Comus, 215 ; mentioned, 114 Illusion, 17, 45 Mimicry, 63 Imagery, ironic, 55, 71 -75, 196 Mohire, 148, 150 Imitation, ironic, xiv Monologue, dramatic, 11 Impersonation, levels of, ix, 30 -41, 47, 48, 205 ; enriched, 4 -16, 18, 19, 39, 41, 151, 158 -79 Montaigne, Michel de, 80 passim, 187, 208 ; ironic, 18 -29, 158 -79 passim; and catharsis, 85 ; mentioned, viii, 4 -17, 202, 203. Mood, ironic, 213 See also Acting Morality, 191 Insight, ironic, 194, 195 Moral virtues, 64, 65 Involution. See Impersonation, enriched Movies, 44 Ironists, modern, 180 Much A do About Nothing, 60, 142 Irony, definition of, ix, 26 -29, 205 ; varieties of, x, xi, 82, 205 ; Muse of, xv, 82, 215 ; impersonative, Muse of Irony, xv, 82, 215 18 -29, 41 ; visible, 25, 189 ; age of, 26 ; compassionate, 28, 29, 124, 125, 167, 168, 214 ; straight, Myth. See Arena 42 ; of fate, 42, 60, 187 -89, 213 ; cosmic, 53 ; pathetic, 56, 106, 107, 188 ; tragic, 56, 196, 208, 210 Nathan, G. J., 146 ; sentimental, 57, 183 ; of disgust, 67 ; tragi-comic, 68 ; parental, 79 ; of situation, 106 ; with humor Naturalism, 162, 163, 165 and satire, 130 ; circular, 157, 158, 188, 213 ; retrospective, 167, 192, 203 ; Swiftian, 171 ; Necessity, ironic, 64, 213 exclamatory, 184, 194 ; in stage set, 186 ; of regression, 188 ; of theme, 192 ; of character, 192 ; of Nemesis, 57 absolute evil, 197, 198 ; of hope, 198 ; of fatal passion, 198 ; of hidden truth, 199 ; of paradox, 214. Norton, Thomas, 105 See also Dramatic irony Nothing-but, 164, 165 Jenkins, Harold, 61 Novel, irony in, 11, 45, 46 Jonson, Ben, humours, 36, 37, 49, 50 ; Volpone, 121, 147, 148 ; mentioned, 31, 32, 106, 108, 109, Nuntius, 109 128, 150, 169 O'Casey, Sean, The Plough and the Stars, 190 ; mentioned, 152 Julius Caesar, 65, 97 Odets, Clifford, 128, 148 Jullien, Jean, 162 Olivier, Laurence, 204, 205 Jung, Carl, 87, 88 O'Neill, Eugene, The Hairy Ape, 152, 185 ; and Strindberg, 164 ; Lazarus Laughed, 184, 187 ; Strange Justice, comic, 86 Interlude, 185, 186 ; The Emperor Jones, 185 ; Desire Under the Elms, 186 ; Mourning Becomes Juxtaposition, comic, 61 Electra, 186, 187 ; The Great God Brown, 187 Anna Christie, 187 ; Long Day's Journey Into Night, 187, Kazan, Elia, 194 189 ; Marco Millions, 188 ; mentioned, 95, 118, 180, 183, 213 King John, 57 Othello, 70 -75, 96 King Lear, 19 -26, 28, 29, 70 -75, 96, 97, 107, 108, 208 Otway, Thomas, 112, 113 Knight, G. Wilson, 76 -78 Pantomime, 11, 150, 185, 187, 192, 201 Kyd, Thomas, 39, 105, 106, 188 Paradox, ironic, 80, 85, 86, 165 -67, 196, 214 Laughter, 122, 134, 171. See also Catharsis, comic Partridge, Eric, 135 -37 Lee, Nathaniel, 112 Pathos, 130, 131 Lessing, G. E., 178 Peele, George, 105 Levels. See Impersonation, levels of Pericles, 79, 80 Lewes, G. H., 16 Pirandello, Luigi, 39, 154, 155 Lewis, C. S., 14 Pity and terror, comic, 133. See also Aristotle Lillo, George, 113, 114 Play. See Drama Linear error. See Time Playwrights, current, 212 -15 Logan, Joshua, 214 Playwriting, books on, 176 -79; mentioned, 203, 215 Lorca, F. G., 118 Poetic justice, 42 Love's Labour's Lost, 56, 139, 140 Pretense. See Hypocrisy Macbeth, 70 -75, 96 Pride, 97 Madness, 35, 138 Priestley, J. B., 157 Marlowe, Christopher, Edward II, 62 ; Dr. Faustus, 208 -11; mentioned, 105, 106 Propaganda and catharsis, 119, 120, 212 Marquand, J. P., 33 Properties, ironic, 6 Marston, John, 123, 124 Psychoanalysis, 88, 91, 92 Masochism, 145 Purdom, C. B., vii, 158 Massinger, Philip, 48 Purgation, partial, 128 ; mentioned, 94, 95 Mathews, Charles, 160 Quem Quaeritis, 11 Matthews, Brander, 177 Racine, Jean, 111, 112 Maugham, Somerset, 129, 157, 158 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 21 Measure for Measure, 54, 68 -70, 124, 145, 146 67 Irony In The Drama Realism, tragic, 182, 183 ; ironic, 195 ; mentioned, 162, 163, 181, 198. See also Synthesis Synthesis, ironic, 71, 72, 77 -81 passim, 164, 165, 168 Recognition, ironic, 188, 196, 197, 203 Tableau, 11 Reconciliation, 125 Taming of the Shrew, 60, 141, 142 Relief, comic, 85 ; pathetic, 85, 86 ; intermediate, 122, 128, 133 Television, 44 Rhodes, S. A., 159 Tempest, 32, 33, 59, 68, 77, 79 -81, 124 Rhythm, prose, 146, 147 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 115 Rice, Elmer, 128 Tension, premature discharge of, 113 ; mentioned, 84, 85, 134, 135, 139, 141, 199 Richard II, 62, 63 Theatricalism, ironic, 169, 170 ; mentioned, 10, 155, 156, 173 Richard III, 4, 5, 57 Theme, ironic, 50, 51, 65, 74, 161, 162, 183, 184, 195, 212, 213 Romeo and Juliet, 65, 96, 137 Therapy, cathartic, 88, 91 -93, 189 ; religious, 97 Rowe, Nicholas, 115 Thesis play, ironic, 161, 182 Rowley, William, 109 Thompson, A. R., ix, 27, 36, 154 Sackville, Thomas, 105 Thomson, J. A. K., x, 28 Sarcasm, xii, 27, 42, 184 Time, in Death of a Salesman, 195 -97; mentioned, 46, 47, 87, 157, 202, 205, 206 Sardou, Victorien, 161, 168 Timon of Athens, 74, 97 Saroyan, William, 214 Titles, ironic, 183, 184, 212 Titus Andronicus, 96 Tom o' Bedlam. See Edgar -220- Tourneur, Cyril, 108, 109 Tragedy, Christian, 91 ; materialistic, 91 ; classical, 98 -103; Jacobean, 108 - Sartre, Jean-Paul, 118 Satire, social, 123 ; tragi-comical, 126 ; comic, 126 -29; high, 131 ; as tragic irony, 208 ; mentioned, -221- 61, 75, 76, 130 Scapegoat, 63, 88, 90, 148 Scatology, 136, 138, 139. See also Bawdry 11; eighteenth-century, 113, 114 ; nineteenth-century, 114 -16; twentieth-century, 116 -20; Scribe, Eugène, 159 -61, 168 modern trends, 180 -203 Sedgewick, G. C., ix, 27, 28 Tragi-comedy, 121, 123 -26 Self-awareness, 196, 198 Traversi, Derek, 63, 64, 78 Seneca, 94, 102, 103 Triple-thinking, 164, 165 Sentimentality, 183 Troilus and Cressida, 61, 67, 97, 126 28 Sequence, ironic, 167, 168 Turning-point, dramatic irony before, 199, 201, 203 Sewell, Arthur, 71 Twelfth Night, 62, 144, 145 Sex, interchange of, 37 ; for tragic shock, 95 -100 perversions, 96, 122, 113, 191 ; shock to Two Gentlemen of Verona, 56, 139 repressed, 108, 116 ; for comic shock, 135 -52; mentioned, 207 Unconscious, the, 118, 133 Shakespeare, William, as ironist, xiii, 52 -81, 206 ; critics of, xiv, 55 ; "straight" young men, 33 -34; Universality, 66 late plays, 55, 76 -81; romantic comedies, 58 -62; satire, 67 ; erotic shock in comedy, 135 -52; Van Doren, Mark, 74, 75 horror-shock in tragedy, 107 ; mentioned, 15, 16, 29. See also individual plays Voltaire, 70 Shaw, G. B., on acting, 10 ; Pygmalion, 151, 152, 171 ; Fanny's First Play, 156 ; on Ibsen, 163 ; Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, 89, 109 -11, 182 ; mentioned, 10 ironies, 164 -76; and tragedy, 165, 166, 172 -75; Back to Methuselah, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172 ; Man Wedekind, Frank, 191 and Superman, 166, 169 ; John Bull's Other Island, 166 ; Major Barbara, 166, 171, 175 ; Heartbreak Well-made play, xiii, 158 -79, 213 House, 167 -69, 173, 174 ; Getting Married, 168 ; St. Joan, 172 ; and Shakespeare, 173 ; anti- Wilde, Oscar, 168 romantic, 173 -75; Androcles and the Lion, 175 ; and sex, 175, 176 ; mentioned, 95, 129 Wilder, Thornton, 155, 156 Shelley, Percy B., plays, 13 ; mentioned, 114, 157 Will, free, 188, 191, 199, 212 Sheridan, Richard, 177 Williams, Tennessee, The Glass Menagerie, 192, 193 ; Camino Real, 193, 194 ; Summer and Smoke, Sherwood, Robert, 156, 157 193 ; A Streetcar Named Desire, 193 ; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 193, 194 ; The Rose Tattoo, 194 ; Shirley, James, 109 mentioned, 118, 120, 190, 191 Shock, tragic, 82 -103, 206 ; comic in tragedy, 99 ; religious, 110 ; comic, 121 -34, 135 -52, 207 ; Wilson, Dover, 63 erotic, 128, 129, 133, 154, 207 ; excessive, 131, 132 ; political, 149, 150 ; mentioned, xii, xiii, 187, Wilson, Edmund, 164, 167 213 Wilson, Harold S., 68, 69 Situation, 47, 168 Winter's Tale, 77 -80, 124 Slice of life, 162, 194 Wolfe, Thomas, 184 Sophocles, 100, 101, 123, 154 Worcester, David, ix Spencer, Theodore, 77 Wycherley, William, 128, 156 Spenser, Edmund, 126, 127 Yeats, W. B., 118, 213 Spurgeon, Caroline, 65, 96, 97 Zola, Émile, 119, 162, 163 Steps to catharsis, listed, 88 -91; in Winterset, 116, 117 ; comic, 146 -49; mentioned, xi, xiii, 85. See also Catharsis Stewart, J. I. M., 88, 89, 91, 92, 137 -222- Stirling, Brents, 65, 196, 197 Straight role, 30, 33 -35. See also Impersonation Strindberg, August, The Father, 32 ; mentioned, 115, 118, 163, 164, 191 Surprise, versus dramatic irony, 176 79; mentioned, 44, 45, 162, 168 Suspense, 84, 177 -79 Symbol, ironic, 187, 192, 193 ; in O'Neill, 189 ; mentioned, 90, 148, 194 Sympathy, 127 Synge, John, 118, 152, 182

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