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The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:24

THE MONSTER IN THEATRE HISTORY

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Monsters are fragmentary, uncertain, frightening creatures. What happens when they enter the realm of the theatre? The Monster in Theatre History exploresFOR the cultural genealogies of monsters as they appear in the recorded history of Western theatre. From the Ancient Greeks to the most cutting-edge new media, Michael Chemers focuses on a series of ‘key’ monsters, including Frankenstein’s creature, werewolves, ghosts, and vampires, to reconsider what monsters in performance might mean to those who witness them.NOT This volume builds a clear methodology for engaging with theatrical monsters of all kinds, providing a much-needed guidebook to this fascinating hinterland.

Michael Chemers is an Associate Professor of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz.

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THE MONSTER IN THEATRE HISTORY

This Thing of Darkness

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FOR Michael Chemers

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First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Michael Chemers The right of Michael Chemers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarksDISTRIBUTION or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data FOR A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data [CIP data]

ISBN: 978-1-138-21089-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-21090-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-45409-2 (ebk) NOT Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

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In Memoriam: Gene Wilder (1933–2016) for bringing a loving Frankenstein full circle DISTRIBUTION

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CONTENTS

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List of ﬁgures ix Foreword xi Mike Carey FOR Acknowledgements xvi

Introduction: the dramaturgy of empathy 1 Why study monsters? 5 The act of fear 10 NOT The monster as surrogate 13

1 Caliban’s legacy 21 How to hunt monsters: the seven theses for the stage 27

2 Prometheus the thief 43 Monstrous transgressions 45 Regarding parenting 47 The modernPROOFS Prometheus 48 3 Presumption 54 “———” 55 The prerogative of God 64 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

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4 The vampire trap 70 Back from the dead 71 The rise of Ruthven 73 Angels of Hell 78 Wicked souls, wise purposes 83 The love that is death 86 The haemosexual agenda 91

5 Toys are us 98 The uncanny 98 The Jew’s monster 100 The Golem on the pulpit 105 An angel come too late 114 The techno-legacy of the Golem 116 DISTRIBUTION 6 Boo 121 Phantom history 121 Who’s there? 123 The spectre of war 127 FOR Aristotle, revenant 129 The Romantic geist 134

7 Hairey Betwixt 145 The werewolf problem 146NOT Horrifying transformations 147 Lupus est homo 156

Conclusion 163 Defense against the dark art 163

Bibliography 172 Index 181 PROOFS

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1.1 Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban dancing; detail from Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s The Tempest, II. Source: Cornell University Library.FOR 22 1.2 Charles A. Buchel’s depiction of Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Caliban, from Shakespeare’s Comedy The Tempest (London: J. Miles & Co, 1904). Courtesy of the British Library. 24 1.3 Djimon Hounsou as CalibanNOT in Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010). © Touchstone Pictures. 25 1.4 Poster for “Der evige Jude” exhibition (1937) 34 1.5 Anti-Semitic propaganda poster produced by Nazi Germany’sPropagandaministeriumfordistributionin Russia (1943) 35 1.6 Roy Eric Peterson, caricature of Osama bin Laden (2003) 36 3.1 Nathan Whittock’s drawing of T. P. Cooke as the Demon and James William Wallack as Frankenstein in Presumption;PROOFS or, the Fate of Frankenstein, English Opera House (1823). Housed at the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. 59 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

x List of ﬁgures

3.2 Front cover of the ﬁrst edition of Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein. Dicks’ Standard Plays, 1823. 60 7.1 Zodiac Man. MS. Ashmole 391, part V. fol. 9r, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 157

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FOREWORD

Mike Carey

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Monsters have always been with us, but in the modern world they are an obsession. It has never been easier to make one or to become one. In that sense, as in a great many others,FOR this book feels both timely and topical. It is also, it must be said, so vast in potential scope that it curves around to embrace and engulf much of our shared culture and our social discourse. Faced with a potentially infinite frame of reference, Michael Chemers has chosen as his central focus monstersNOT in theatrical performance. “When a monster is not merely discussed or represented but performed,” he tells us in his prefatory remarks, “it enters [an] embodied realm.” Performance, seen from this point of view, is different from other creative endeavours because it summons the monster into our presence, into the physical space we occupy, and thereby makes possible an imaginative and emotional confrontation that is often lost or evaded in other narrative contexts. I found myself thinking, as Michael defined his terms of reference and set out his analytical tools, of a performance of The Tempest I saw in London ten years ago, directed by Rupert Goold. Goold’s Prospero was vividly and poignantly portrayedPROOFS by Patrick Stewart, but it was Julian Bleach’s Ariel that electrified me. Summoned by his master, he rises out of a garbage bin in which a fire has been set – and rises, and rises, and continues to rise, until he towers over Prospero and has to lean down, bending in what seem to be all the wrong places, to hear his commands. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

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Normally, when The Tempest is performed, Ariel is not the monster. Here he was most definitely monstrous, and as such he became the walking, talking representation of the moral compromises Prospero has made for his art, for his power. The terrible temptation that he eschews when, at the end of the play, he chooses to break his staff and drown his book. I’ve never thought of the play the same way since. That performance irrevocably changed the conceptual terrain for me. So I welcome – and feel as though I will greatly profit from – a critical investigation that leans upon the performative aspects of monster narratives. I should offer a disclaimer at this point. My own professional experience almost completely excludes performance (the “almost” in that sentence representing two radio plays and a movie screenplay). I do have a good working knowledge of monsters, though. For a long time I lived on intimate terms (one script every four weeks for seven years) with the fallen angel, Lucifer, and in The Unwritten, again collaboratingDISTRIBUTION with artist Peter Gross, I introduced the Creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a regular supporting character. It’s this more recent experience I’d like to offer up here, with a view to illustrating one or two of the key arguments of this fascinating and invaluable book in a sphere other than the theatrical. The Unwritten is a story about a man,FOR Tom Taylor, who fears he may be someone else’s fictional character. Frankenstein’s Creature seemed to me and Peter to be the perfect foil for Tom because of his very turbulent relationship with the man who made him. Even more than Lucifer he was the rebel whose biggest ontological burden was his own origin – a fictional creation who could stand, metatextually,NOT for any invented character who has a quarrel with his creator, including our own much put-upon protagonist. We were aware that in doing this we were twisting the character away from the dense and powerful network of metaphors that define his meaning in the novel. But we had the very best of intentions. One of our goals, which we never got to achieve, was to introduce the original Creature (or our version of him) to his underachieving twin brother, the shambling pre- verbal nebbish from James Whale’s 1931 Hollywood movie. We had a point to make about how monsters can sometimes be emasculated and robbed of theirPROOFS subversive power when their story falls into the hands of huge commercial corporations with a vested interest in the status quo. Universal weren’t the only ones to get Frankenstein badly wrong. My own musings on the subject started at the age of seventeen when I came across a copy of Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell in my school library and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

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read it from cover to cover. I was already addicted to speculative fiction in all its forms, and I was thrilled to discover that someone had taken on the task of writing a historical and thematic study of science fiction, linking the genre’s current practitioners to their great forebears. For the most part I thought Amis did a solid job of teasing out the social and technological concerns underlying the sci-fi of the post-war years. But even as a teenager with all the critical understanding and discrimination of the average prawn I could see that Amis had hit a reef when it came to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “Frankenstein,” Amis wrote, “in the popular mind, when not confused with his monster, is easily the most outstanding representation of the generic mad scientist who plagued bad early-modern science fiction.”1 This is about as wrong as it’s possible to be. In defining Shelley’s novel as a cautionary tale about the overweening presumption of science, Amis completely misses her uncompromising social message. As MichaelDISTRIBUTION Chemers forensically argues in this volume, Shelley does not locate Victor Frankenstein’s tragic flaw in his recklessly taking on an aspect of God’s creative power. On the contrary, his imagination and ambition are his foremost claims on our imaginative sympathy. It’s through his inability to recognise and embrace his responsibilities to the life form he has createdFOR that he brings about his own downfall. Shelley was a political radical, intensely interested in the ways in which societies shape and constrain the relationships between their individual members – and in the ways in which individuals reframing and redefining those relationships can in turnNOT exert a shaping force on society itself. Through the enmity and interdependence between Victor and his grotesque creation she provides a powerful lens through which we can view relationships between the generations, the classes and the sexes in her time and in our own. Monsters don’t spring out of nowhere. Their etiology is tortured and piecemeal, an arduous, broken trail running back and forth on itself across different cultures and eras. One of the purposes of this volume is to follow and document this trail and to explore the layered multiplicities of meaning to which it gives rise. It’s the diachronicPROOFS aspect of Michael Chemers’ present study that I find most exciting and revelatory, along with his refusal to collapse the history of the monsters he examines down into a single discourse. I was already well aware that the meaning of any given text is both reinforced and undercut by its own prehistories, acknowledged or otherwise, but I had never T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

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considered before now (with the exception of that 2006 Tempest) how performance both enacts and modifies meaning. Nor, perhaps, had I given that concept – performance – its full weight and scope. While Chemers is most concerned with performance as narrative he warns us that it’s a slippery term that can also be applied to “any of a wide variety of human social activities, including rituals, religious events, and even ordinary everyday human interaction.” Every iteration of the monster invites and partakes of a redefinition, a negotiation of its meanings. Writing in early January 2017, I find this warning both salutary and bittersweet. I can’thelpbutthinkofthecircumstancesinwhichMary Shelley first imagined her Creature, and the circumstances in which we consume it now. The summer of 1816, historical accounts tell us, was appallingly cold, wet and bleak. The eruption of Mount Tambora the year before had heaved vast quantities of ash and chemical contaminantsDISTRIBUTION such as sulphur into the upper atmosphere, lowering global temperatures to the point where crops failed and cattle died in the fields. Temperatures stayed below freezing across much of the Northern Hemisphere well into May. In Europe 1816 is memorialized as the year there was no summer. In the US, especially along the upper Eastern Seaboard, it has theFOR even more resonant monicker “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” It must have felt like the end of the world – and it probably informed some of the more lurid passages in Mary Shelley’s later work The Last Man. But at the time she was writing Frankenstein, and its impact on that work (if it’s present at all) remains largelyNOT subliminal. Perhaps the novel’s framing narrative, set in a desolate Arctic landscape dominated by thick fog and mountains of ice, owed something to the unending winter that met Shelley’s gaze whenever she looked up from her page and out of the window. But if she was haunted, if she was afraid for the future, she sublimated it in a story where it surfaces only as mood and metaphor. Exactly two centuries later, on 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom, which was Shelley’s home country and is mine, voted to leave the European Union – a vote propelled in large part by the fear and demonising of the Other about which she wrote so eloquently. The referendum campaign was dominated byPROOFS openly racist attacks on immigrants and on the European principle of free movement. Political leaders used the language of epide- miology to describe the arrival of European migrants on British shores, whether they were coming here from elsewhere in the EU to work or as refugees from foreign conflicts we had in large part instigated. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

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Migrants are often criminals, we were told, mad or bad or most often both. They steal our jobs, but also enjoy a life of luxury on state benefits. They put intolerable strain on local services. They bring disease (the UK Independence Party’s campaign literature cited the entirely made-up statistic that 60 per cent of people in the UK with AIDS or HIV were immigrants). Nigel Farage, fronting the Leave campaign, posed in front of a photo of endless refugees queuing up at a checkpoint, with the banner headline “BREAKING POINT!” The checkpoint was in Slovenia and the people in it were refugees from the conflict in Syria, but it’s hard to fight a good story with a handful of facts, and that photo certainly told a story. In fact it told the same story as Der Ewige Jude, a German propaganda film from 1940 that is considered in some detail in this book. The poster reproduced some of the iconography of that film and its accompanying exhibition with striking exactitude. Oh yes, performance matters. And yes, it reinvents monsters, polishes them off and gives them a new coat of paintDISTRIBUTION for a new social context. Whether this process is therapeutic or malign will vary from one text to another. As a writer, in horror and other related genres, my job involves the creation of new stories from old ingredients – including old monsters. Most often I’m to be found walking that brokenFOR trail of earlier narratives, looking for images and insights that I can incorporate into my own novels and comic books and screenplays, sometimes with the serial numbers filed off so they look like they’re mine … all mine. It’s important, therefore, that books like this exist. That the lineages of our monsters can be traced andNOT their origins understood. George Santayana said that those who could not remember the past were condemned to repeat it. He was being way too optimistic, in my opinion. As nations and as individuals, we are all of us repeating the past all the time. We can only understand that process from the inside, as it were, and on the move. But understand it we must, in order to make sense of our own motivations and to be delivered from the worst of our fears, which are (unsurprisingly) the control panel through which our more unscrupulous leaders seek to manipulate and contain us. That, for me, is why this book is important; why its insights, while giving a unique perspectivePROOFS on the nature of theatrical performance, have such a broad applicability in other arenas. It’s why I hunt monsters, and (I believe) why Michael Chemers hunts them too.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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No project of this kind is completed in isolation, and a historian’s work is only the visible tip of many years of supportive collaboration in research and the construction of ideas. This researchFOR was ten years in development, and so involved the talents and energies of many people to whom I acknowledge deep gratitude. To Mike Carey, one of the great horror writers of our age, whose visionary work Lucifer inspired me to begin my inquiry into the therapeutic possibilities of monsters a decade ago, of which this book is the culmination. To Talia Rodgers,NOT editor extraordinaire, who encouraged me to develop the idea into a book and was a friend and supporter at all stages. To Alexander Miller, who has been with me since the beginning of my research process as a student, graduate student, teaching assistant, and ﬁnally as my primary research assistant on this work. To my colleagues whose interest in monsters and in dramaturgical empathy helped to focus and legitimize my work: Joseph Roach at Yale University; Kristina Straub and my mentor the late Brian Johnston of Carnegie Mellon University; James Harding of the University of Maryland; James Bierman, Kirsten Brandt, David Cuthbert, Sean Keilen, and Amy Ginther of the University of California Santa Cruz;PROOFS Natalya Baldyga of Tufts University; and Nick Moschovakis for his editorial eye on ghosts. Thanks to Dorit Yerulshalmi at Tel-Aviv University for help tracking down golems, and Florian Evers at the University of Berlin for help tracking down werewolves. To Erik Butler, Dave Crellin, Joy Pearson, Jay Ball, Barbara Goza, Martin Chemers, Wendy Burr, and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

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Faye Rosenbaum for being sounding boards, and to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Asa Mittman for encouraging words. To my colleagues and friends, actor Danny Scheie and dramaturg Philippa Kelley, whose Irma Vep at California Shakespeare Theatre left me nearly dead with laughter and rolling with new ideas. To Ben Piggott and Kate Edwards at Routledge for seeing me through a surgery during the final phase of the writing. But it has been my students who have really contributed a great deal with their interest, critiques, support, and application of theories to the creation of their own monsters in theatre, film, and scholarship: Ismail Smith Wade-El, Elias Diamond, Nicole Lauren, Anthea Carns, Catherine Rodriguez, Jessica Greenstreet, Elizabeth Bejanaro, Richard Rossi, Patrick Denney, Kerri Blake-Cavanaugh, Mc Ruppel, Stephen Richter, Monica Andrade, Lucas Brandt, Kieran Beccia, Jen Schuler, Liana Kiddy-Gan, Christopher Rodriguez, Victoria Gardiner, Quest Zeidler, and the more than 1,000 students of my Monsters classes between 2007 and 2017. And thanks of courseDISTRIBUTION to my son Zain Chemers and my spouse Farhana Basha, to whom I owe my sanity.

Note 1 Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A SurveyFOR of Science Fiction(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 32.

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INTRODUCTION The dramaturgy of empathy

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This is a book on the dramaturgy of empathy. Taken as a whole, this book strives to explore some of the less-traveled alleyways of theatre history, focusing on key monster-making momentsFOR in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then placing that history into particular interpretive contexts with social history and other arts in order to draw certain conclusions about the effects of the monster in performance on the human capacity (or lack thereof) for compassion. A result of more than a decade of con- centrated research, this book selectsNOT certain monsters prominent in popular culture at the time of writing (Frankenstein’s Creature, the vampire, the artificial intelligence, the ghost, and the werewolf), and seeks to enrich the reader’s understanding of the role that theatre and other forms of live performance have played in the evolution of these figures. It is a sad fact that most scholars of the modern monstrous devote their energies to literary and cinematic achievements, giving short shrift (if any) to theatrical history – this omission, as we will see, leaves critical gaps in our understanding of what monsters are and what effect they may have on the development of individual conscience and ideas of social justice. Many termsPROOFS must be carefully defined before such a task can begin, including performance, history,andespeciallymonster. No doubt readers will take some exception to the boundaries I place around these notions: for some, my definitions will prove too inclusive; for others, too exclusive. Consider this book, then, as a starting place for the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

2 Introduction

discovery of what monsters in performance might mean to those who witness them. Performance is a term that has undergone a great deal of scholarly scrutiny in the past few decades, and debates rage on about what may or may not constitute such an event. The term, scholars have found, is not a docile one that can be applied merely to an event that is self-consciously “performative,” like a play or a musical concert, but may also be applied to any of a wide variety of human social activities, including rituals, religious events, and even ordinary everyday human interaction. Indeed, this book will, in the end, probably only serve to make those boundaries even murkier. However, there are a few unique characteristics encompassed by the term performance that make it a valuable descriptor of a speciﬁc kind of activity. This study focuses on performance as storytelling. When humans perform stories, they do not merely tell them but embody them, and in so doing collapse certain boundaries which are otherwise usually consideredDISTRIBUTION inviolate. Through a process the poet Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief,” now becomes then, here becomes there, fantasy and reality blur together, and new ways of being and knowing become available. Revelations about oneself and one’s role in society that are not discovered through other kinds of discourse become possible. When aFOR monster is not merely discussed or represented but performed, it enters this realm. The great theatre theorist Eric Bentley, speaking of monsters, writes:

In the theatre, phenomena like Svengali or even Dracula are not eccentricities but prototypesNOT… there is no comparison, in either case, between the potency of novel and acted play. Physical presence on stage makes an essential diﬀerence here. It is not in the quiet of libraries, bedrooms, or kitchens that devotees of hypnosis or bloodsucking shriek and swoon. It is in the theatre, where such carryings-on constitute a tradition reaching back to the Greeks.1

Unlike a monster in a novel, short story, poem, or even a ﬁlm, a theatrical monster does not merely exist in the mind – it lives. Because of performance’s unique qualities, it has provided a happy home for monsters as far back in timePROOFS and across human cultures as history reveals. The study of monsters, then, must perforce enrich both our understanding of our own culture and of history in general. History, too, is a term that requires much unpacking. The Monster in Theatre History seeks primarily to assemble some much-overlooked historical T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

Introduction 3

evidence in such a way as to generate a coherent, but by no means definitive or exhaustive, understanding of the theatrical evolutions of certain popular modern monsters, and in so doing make some observations about how ideas that foster empathy move through societies. This evidence takes the reader from pre-biblical times to today, but tends to congeal around key moments in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre history in England, France, Germany, and Russia. Even the selection of this evidence must reveal my own biases. Interested as I am in Western monsters and Western theatre, the book must confine itself (with some exceptions) to those monsters that appear in European and US cultural history, although it will become clear to the reader that the traditional boundaries of “the West” are themselves somewhat murky and not well respected by monsters. This focus is determined by the limits of my own scholarly expertise (and my minimal felicity with translation outside of Spanish and French), but I hope that my work will inspire others to investigate the monstersDISTRIBUTION of the world in performance even as I continue to strive to expand my own knowledge. Also, I have been somewhat constrained by the evidence available in the historical record to examine theatrical works largely authored by men, although I have striven to apply the lessons of feminist criticism to this material and to underscore wherever possible the roleFOR that women writers and thinkers played in this history. The Monster in Theatre History cannot be exclusively yoked to a particular theatre historiographical school or single domain of critical theory outside of Cohen’s “Monster Theory” (see below). Following Rosemarie K. Bank, these chapters seekNOT“spatial histories” that allow the subjects to circulate, revealing more polymorphous and indirect relationships than have been previously acknowledged.2 Bank’sapproachavoidstwo unhelpful critical positions. Firstly, it avoids a “positivist” view of cultural history as teleological, tracking an “evolution” of culture from a presumed less sophisticated state into the presumed heightened and elevated state it now enjoys, as this notion is easily disproved by even the briefest glance at almost all modern cultural products. Secondly, it avoids a historicizing gaze that sees culture as discrete from the other historical forces that move asociety,aseitherreflective of or inciting “what’sreallygoingon” in the society. ThisPROOFS is a particular danger when studying monsters, because they often appear in “popular culture,” aformoftenunexaminedby“serious” cultural historians who – in my view paradoxically – conclude that because something is popular it must therefore be unimportant. As a result, I believe, many scholars who are interested in monsters have largely T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

4 Introduction

ignored the theatrical historical record, jumping instead from folklore to literature to cinema. Instead, following Bank, I wish to investigate theatre and other forms of performance as a fundamental tool for human education, self-awareness, and empathic connection, one that does not reflect culture but embodies it as a form of self-discovery made possible when we fantasize about who we would be if we were someone else. Most artistic products do this in one way or another, expanding our psychic horizons and our empathic abilities by reframing the way we experience reality; but performance, which is as much real (insofar as it consists of real bodies acting in real time and space) as it is representational, is special for its presence and corporeality. This is a historiography that has abandoned, and does not particularly value, completeness. It will not content itself with one story where there are many stories to be told, with important dialogues to be had in the spaces between the stories. These interspaces interestDISTRIBUTION me as a historian quite as much as do the historical events themselves. If “perversity” is defined as a quality of willful obstinacy towards acceptable or predictable behavior, then human culture is quite perverse; monster culture doubly so. The historical record, too, is incomplete in a way that might be considered perverse – theatre archives, newspaperFOR articles, advertisements, memoirs, and scripts are often themselves fragmented, just as significant for what they do not record as for what they do. Different critical apparatuses can be applied to different congeries of evidence in order to make them historically meaningful not in one way only, but in multiple, even perverse, ways, in order thatNOT the historian is given the ability to occupy several positions at once. The technique that emerges generates “monstrogenealogies”– chronological developments of theatrical monsters over time and across cultures. As monsters are made of semiotic fragments, tracking their startling transformations over time can provide resonant recognitions of how societies evolve and individuals act. The creation of spatial histories surrounding monsters in performance reveals to the reader that our history is sometimes less progressive and teleological than we might hope, and as humans we are often uncomfortably well prepared to call up ancient horrors to justify modern marginalization,PROOFS persecution, and even atrocities. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”3 However, these case studies likewise reveal that some modern problems have ancient solutions – that we, like our forebears, have a choice: to be victimized by the monsters in our heads, or to employ them in our ongoing quest for individual T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

Introduction 5

and social self-discovery and, hopefully, genuine progress towards a more harmonious and empathetic society. Any study of this kind must be interdisciplinary. This book combines traditional theatre history and dramaturgy with cultural anthropology, social psychology, media studies, myth criticism, and even criminology and legal studies. The book takes as its methodology Roachian “surrogation,” a critical perspective on performance that is both broad and deep, and subjects both material practice and theoretical frameworks to analysis. Each chapter examines the emergence of a monster in performance within a compre- hensive understanding of the societies that generated it, and follows that monster’s evolution from its origins to modernity, going wherever the evidence leads and employing analytical tools from whichever domains of human inquiry seem most productive to the purpose. The third question of what actually constitutes a monster in the theatre is so complex that it needs its own chapter (Chapter 1),DISTRIBUTION and furthermore its own critical vocabulary in order to bring the multifarious and often contradictory sources of evidence and interpretation into an intelligible whole. Let us begin, then, with an explanation of why an enterprise as strange, inordinate, and difficult as this is worth pursuing as a field of inquiry in cultural studies, and then go on to put some boundaries onFOR the limits of our study by defining monsters and speculating on why they so dominate the human imagination.

Why study monsters? Anthropologists, social psychologists,NOT and folklorists as well as cultural historians have long recognized the benefits of taking monsters seriously, but it was Jeffrey Jerome Cohen who inaugurated “Monster Theory” as, if not a wholly self-contained critical model, then at least as an indiscrete field of inquiry – or perhaps as a discrete subsection of multiple fields of inquiry.4 In the first chapter of his anthology on monster scholarship, Cohen locates Monster Theory firmly within cultural studies insofar as its central emphasis is an inquiry into cultural practices, seeking to unlock the mechanics of identity construction. Cohen demonstrates that monsters are particularly revelatory of the processes by which societies define and decide how to punish differencePROOFS and deviance, 5 but also emphasizes that one of the goals of Monster Theory is to problematize traditional cultural studies, to tremble its various orthodoxies in the hope of shaking new discourses loose; to desta- bilize coherent chronologies, for instance, and to resist the collapse into singularity of cultural practices (including criticism) that are really multiple. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

6 Introduction

Monsters – uncertain, fragmented, perverse, polysemous, and unstable – resist classification, and Monster Theory must embrace a similar messiness in order to engage with the discourses monsters offer. In effect, Monster Theory produces critical texts, like the one you are now reading, that are monsters themselves; and we must not be too surprised if they reflect their creators in unintended, even horrific, ways. In the introductory essay to his volume, Cohen lays out what he calls a “method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender.”6 Even at the time, it was not precisely revolutionary to examine monsters as a sort of encoded description of various social or personal anxieties. But Cohen’s work codifies this potential in a manner precisely designed to inform (and shiver) the inquiries of traditional cultural studies, and his essay has therefore become an important landmark in the process of navigating the difficult but exciting discourses in which monsters prowl. The serious student of monsters should become intimately acquainted with thisDISTRIBUTION essay, but in the interest of completeness I will provide some commentary that will lay a foundation for a discussion of the specific importance of theatre history and performance studies to the ongoing development of Monster Theory. Cohen goes a long way towards defining Monster Theory’s jurisdiction by asking what, exactly, constitutes a monster?FOR Monster Theory is located primarily, if not exclusively, in bodies, but Cohen dismisses actual corporeality in favor of the semiotic body – a cultural body; the one that means, rather than the one that merely exists. A semiotic body is constructed not of organ and muscle but of signs that generate specific meanings for a human interpreter. He writes: NOT [The monster is] an embodiment of a cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster always signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gapPROOFS between the time of upheaval which created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again.7

Here the monster theorist is clearly distinguished from, for example, the cryptozoologist, who looks to prove the material existence of, say, an actual T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

Introduction 7

Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster, as some exotic lusus naturae. The monster theorist seeks evidence in books, histories enscribed and oral, poetry, performances, myths, laws, religious texts and rituals, customs, trends, art, music, and games. It is the semiotic body thus constructed by the cultural product that interests us; if a real werewolf were to cross the campus quad under the full moon in search of the cafeteria, it is the concern of a biologist (or perhaps a manufacturer of very expensive ammunition) rather than a monster theorist.8 What kind of creature may be specifically called a monster is a subject of no small amount of debate, but there is a general agreement that wherever that boundary is drawn, the monster can be a powerful cultural tool for the expression of social tensions; in some cases, no better lens exists for deci- phering a society’s greatest hopes and darkest fears (indeed, the root of the word is the Latin monstro: “to warn,” but also “to teach”). Whatever its form or context, the monster is a creature that crossesDISTRIBUTION borders and boundaries, manifesting in ways that undergo constant change. A monster is a creature of fragments, never behaving exactly as expected, and never wholly dismissed as fiction. As cultural artifacts, monsters are composed of signs, but they obey certain unique semiotic rules. Monsters may, sometimes quite brilliantly, reflect both the perturbationsFOR of an individual mind (the product’s author) and the social or economic forces that shape those anxieties. Monsters both incite social anxieties and relieve them. The monster may not walk the earth, but it is nevertheless quite real. Cohen refers to the monster as a “glyph that seeks a hierophant”–that is to say, a sign seeking an interpreter.NOT We humans, who are as much slaves to language as served by it, live in a social universe composed of and defined by signs, and our ability to communicate, to function normally, and even to remain sane requires a reliance on the stability of sign systems – in order to mean, signs need to behave predictably within their systems. Anything that threatens the stability of that system can be very frightening indeed, which is perhaps what prompted Gilles Deleuze to warn that we should “beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for.”9 But this destabilization can also be therapeutic. The monster threatens this stability,PROOFS or more accurately reveals that this stability does not in fact exist, by presenting a deviant semiotics. Since they have no existence except through interpretation, monsters argue against the stability of sign systems in ways that reveal an uncomfortable, but often thrilling, insecurity about what Goblet d’Alviella, writing in 1894, called “the migration of symbols”–the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

8 Introduction

dynamic and sometimes arbitrary (or even perverse) instability of how signs come to mean what they mean.10 In Cohen’s framework, the monster is a sort of free radical in the semiotic systems in which humans operate – an element of potential meaning that is unfixed to any stable network, and has the potential to disturb such “stable networks” quite profoundly and spectacularly. And yet, it is grounded in an aesthetic language all its own, which we sometimes call “the grotesque.”11 Claws, fangs, the eyes of a predator glittering in the firelight – bestial imagery we associate with the amoral violence of the natural world – are drawn upon to compose demons, werewolves, and other images of primal evil and spiritual degradation. Rotting skin, a fleshless skull, a body cold or contorted, swollen or shriveled – all reminders of our fragile and mutable corporeality – are drawn upon to give a face and body, a location and identity, to the concept of death. In monsters, forbidden behaviors that become attractive through whateverDISTRIBUTION occult operations govern the working of our minds (violence, necrophilia, or cannibalism, to name a few) are given forms with which we can engage both pruriently and therapeutically, provocatively and narcotically, monolithically or polymorphously. When grotesque images are woven with images we recognize and enjoy – including erotic ones, beautifulFOR ones, humorous ones, or those that remind us of childhood – the unique alchemy of the most prolific and longest-lived monsters is complete. In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Richard Kearney writes of monsters that they correspond to our confusionNOT about our genesis – the fact that we derive from autochthonous origins, regardless of how much we have evolved. Our rational consciousness is forever haunted by unconscious demons … the atavistic demon we disinherit is also the double we never fully leave behind.12

The monster’s origin and its sustenance are deep in the human psyche. They originate in our fears (conscious or otherwise) and anxieties (whose sources are clear or unclear). They originate in our fantasies that delight and titillate, enrage and provoke, soothe and relax, or disturb and subvert – or, in Kearney’sPROOFS observation, mask our terror about how much of ourselves we really do not know. They originate in our primal lusts, what Freud called Triebe, or “plots,” which the historiographer Hayden White locates in both the urges of the unconscious mind and the various schemes we undertake to satisfy them.13 In a 1972 essay, White writes: T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

Introduction 9

In times of socio-cultural stress, when the need for positive self-definition asserts itself but no compelling criterion of self-identification appears, it is always possible to say something like, “I may not know the precise content of my own felt humanity, but I am most certainly not like that,” and point to something in the landscape that is manifestly different from oneself. This might be called the technique of ostensive self-definition by negation.14

White notes that this process is “especially useful for groups whose dis- satisfactions are easier to recognize than their programs are to justify.”15 Evidence supporting this observation that socio-cultural stress generates a need for a self-definition that proves elusive is manifest in the rhetoric of those who seek to address (and in some cases magnify) that stress. Culture responds accordingly in this attempt to alleviate stress ostensibly to self- define. Monsters are, as we shall see, particularlyDISTRIBUTION useful in this process as they can help to create convenient real-world targets for negation with its attendant relief of stress. I believe it is productive to consider monsters in this manner, as a form of cultural polemic, but with unique characteristics that can, potentially, be read to turn that polemic inward for theFOR purposes of self-discovery. Indeed, monsters may be essential to this process, because they are specifically designed to define normality by negation. Monsters may be indispensable. White argues that the very act of writing history itself, because history is also an expression of culture, is monstrous, “for it is the monstrous that is the norm of all real bodies; theNOT normal representative of a species can have no history since it serves as the ground against which the kinds of changes we call ‘historical’ can be measured.”16 Indeed, White observes, normality has no history at all, since its only use to a historian is to be a sort of neutral background against which historical events, by their nature abnormal, can be described; because it is unexceptional, normality is unhistorical. The study of the monster in culture, then, is ultimately not only the study of the atavistic, transgressive, and invidious “plots” of the psyche but of the most significant ways that culture responds to those plots when they are felt collectively, and of how different cultures with different sources of stress respondPROOFS differently. This book’s concern, however, is specifically with monsters in performances of various kinds, how and why they are constructed, and their very real impacts on the lives of real people. The next section builds on White’s observations to define why performance is particularly salient to the discussion of monsters, and vice versa. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:25

10 Introduction

The act of fear Today, the study of fear is usually the jurisdiction behavioral psychologists.17 At the risk of being reductive, but in order to establish a necessary vocabulary for this study, let us provisionally accept that fear is a neurobiological response to certain stimuli, usually those that represent some serious danger, which we experience as a powerful emotion. Fear is evolutionarily advantageous – learning to fear is a key element in developing good survival strategies. Fear (of death, mutilation, punishment, loss, isolation, and the unknown) is a great motivator – perhaps the great motivator – of human behavior. And like all emotions, fear can be overpowering, paralyzing, and irrational. But this definition is hardly sufficient for the task of a cultural history, because it is not adequate to describe the lived experience of fear, particularly in response to aesthetic stimuli. Individuals describe the experiences of the same types of fears and anxieties very diffDISTRIBUTIONerently. Commonly held definitions of various types of fears change over time and across cultures. In her excellent Fear: A Cultural History, Joanna Bourke explains the reluctance of historians to interfere into this psychological discourse:

Fear acquires meaning through cultural language and rites. Analysis of these “texts” allows historians to pursueFORfluctuations in the nature of “fear” as the emotion is rendered visible in language and symbols. Emotions enter the historical archive only to the extent to which they transcend the insularity of individual psychological experience and present the self in the public realm.18 NOT Bourke goes on to recall Geertz’s observation that “not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man.”19 Because not only what we fear but also how we conceive and define what we fear change, as does our experience of fears both individual and collective. Playwrights and other makers of culture are responsible neither to the scientific rigors of psychologists nor to the evidentiary rules of historians – they create what they hope will be powerful emotional or intellectual experiences for their audiences, and any aspect of human experience that can be represented theatrically is their raw material, and fair game. However, performance bears many interestingPROOFS similarities to psychology. Brenda Laurel writes:

Both [psychology and theatre] observe and analyze human behavior, but each employs those means to diﬀerent ends: in general, psychology T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

Introduction 11

attempts to understand what goes on with humans in the real world with all their fuzziness and loose ends, while theatre means to represent a kind of thing that might go on, simpliﬁed for the purposes of logical and aﬀective clarity. Psychology explicates human behavior, while theatre represents it in a form that provides intellectual and emotional closure. Theatre is informed by psychology, but it turns a trick that is outside of psychology’s province through the direct representation of action.20

It is this “direct representation of action” that concerns the playwright; in this case, the representation of “being afraid” or “experiencing fear.” Shakespeare in Hamlet provocatively suggests that Bernardo and Marcellus, upon confronting the ghost of Hamlet’s father, are “distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear” (I.ii.206), where he might easily have written, for instance, “the effect of fear.” The study of fear, and how it may be represented,DISTRIBUTION is primal to the study of performance. In his Poetics (350 BCE), Aristotle described the incitement of fear as indispensable to the purpose of tragedy: katharsis or emotional and spiritual purification. In Aristotle’s scheme, fear is one of two powerful, necessary emotions triggered by watching a tragic protagonist undergo his or her struggles; the other is pity. Fear inFOR performance, he observes, requires a deep empathic connection to a character on stage; the better the audience can see reflections of their own struggles in the struggles of the character, the greater the emotional impact of watching the story unfold. The morally complex tragic protagonist is doomed by virtue of some aspect of character to make a mistake that willNOT cause catastrophe. This causes oppositional emotional reactions: pity and compassion for a character suffering more than she or he deserves, but also fear of the impending doom. But it is important to note that, for Aristotle, the fear reaction derives as much from the anticipation of the potential injury done to others as to oneself as a result of this mistake. The protagonist believes they are acting rightly, and only later will they suddenly recognize how those actions resulted not only in personal pain and loss but injury to others. This, Aristotle argues, increases empathy, as the audience fears its own potential to bring unforseen disasters upon others not through malefic intent but by virtue of a mistake resulting from some moral failing.PROOFS Purification comes only after recognition of the error and sincere repentance, and the audience experiences this vicariously.21 Not only do we experience fear differently according to how we understand it; we can also experience fear with a variety of wildly different emotional responses. In her 2014 study of classical aesthetics, Tragic Pathos, T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

12 Introduction

Dana LaCourse Munteanu explores Aristotle’s notions of “aesthetic fear,” that which is derived vicariously by watching performers (as opposed to fear of real- world threats, which Munteanu calls “ordinary fear”) even more deeply, comparing them to those of other classical dramaturgs, including the Indian sage Bharatamuni, author of the ancient theatre training text Natyasastra.Munteanu’s investigations recognize that there are many flavors of fear that can be represented and vicariously triggered in performance. We distinguish our reactions to immediate threats (such as the direct, visceral fright of being mutilated in an accident) from our contemplation of potential threats (such as the gnawing, fretting anxiety of losing a job). We may define dread as the anticipation of an inevitable, unavoidable threat. Some fear involves extreme physiological responses; we call it terror when it threatens to paralyze our ability to react, or panic when it overwhelms us and forces us to act irrationally.22 Although these emotions are wildly different, even contradictory or mutually exclusive in affect, we group them into a single kind of experienceDISTRIBUTION as “fear.” The multiplicity of fears engendered by monsters, however, usually includes horror. This, writes Munteanu, “represents a reaction to an aversive object, which is not necessarily construed, however, as possible (as in the case of fright) or imminent (as in the case of dread) threat.”23 I would observe that the adverse reaction MunteanuFOR describes is engendered specifically by a grotesque stimulus that directly challenges the viewer’s understanding of how the universe works. This is a unique kind of fear, one we experience not as a momentary fright or even a deeper terror or panic, but as an ontological threat to a sense of one’s own nature and one’s place in the universe. Horror destabilizesNOT the ordinary systems of signification that underlie the assumptions upon which we rely to make meaning of our lives. Unlike other flavors of fear, horror does not dissipate but persists, as if once we allow the image of the unfeasible, impossible alternate reality into our minds, the possibility of it latches on to our imagination and grows there, manifesting as nightmares and an amorphous sense of creeping doom that might last a very long time indeed. Why, then, do we enjoy it so much? Romantic philosophers, who were much enamored of the potential thrills and self-inquiry represented by horror, favored Aristotle’s arguments on the pleasurable,PROOFS therapeutic nature of fear. In 1792, for example, German playwright Friedrich Schiller wrote:

Experience teaches us that painful aﬀections are those which have the most attraction for us, and thus that the pleasure we take in an aﬀection T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

Introduction 13

is precisely in an inverse ratio to its nature. It is a phenomenon common to all men that sad, frightful things, even the horrible, exercise over us an irresistible seduction, and that in the presence of a scene of desolation and terror we feel at once repelled and attracted by two equal forces.24

Here again is the Aristotelian dichotomy: the power of performance to generate oppositional reactions (repulsion and attraction, aversion and empathy) contains the potential for genuine, powerful, and therapeutic emotional experiences which audiences crave. The writings of Schiller and other Romantics focus on the potential of horror for self-discovery and individual psychological experiences, and indeed this may be why so many of the most iconic monsters of our age, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature, were conceived by Romantics, as we will see in the chapters that follow. This howeverDISTRIBUTION is also insufficient to answer a critical question about monsters in performance: why do monsters persist in the collective, social imagination? Why, specifically, do they thrive in the theatre? Why do audiences crave to see their monsters resurrected and made to repeat their horrific plots? FOR The monster as surrogate In 1996, Joseph Roach described what he calls “surrogation,” a historiographic model that is well anchored in rigorous analysis in evidence, but also supple enough to engage with theNOT dynamism of human activity, in order to describe the social impact of performance.25 This process of surrogation works in accord with White’s observation above, applied to a collective memory rather than an individual one; that the absence of a perfect, harmonious, and unified community triggers deep anxiety that can be alleviated only by an attempt by the community to define itself as perfect, harmonious, and unified. This process is particularly incited by any kind of serious crisis, when a void or failure of some kind is suddenly recognized or a terrible loss is experienced. Roach observes that performance (construed broadly), particularly live performancePROOFS of the kind experienced in oral storytelling, religious or social rituals, games and sports, and, perhaps most of all, theatre, can be profoundly effective in the relief of social anxiety. It appears to derive this utility from its quality as a reality-simulator – it can provide a kind of psychological closure. It can reimagine the world as a place of harmony, where T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

14 Introduction

crises are resolved, lessons are learned, and peace and prosperity are restored.26 Aristotle called this mimesis; Laurel describes it as “direct representation of action,”27 but may we go further? Live performance is not merely the direct representation of action, but also action itself. Although it represents a fantasy, it is embodied in reality as “restored behavior.”28 It occurs in time and space, and through its actors it literally breathes and perspires. It observes its audience and reacts dialectically to them in the moment of its creation. It engages. It exists, and therefore grants existence to the fantasy world it represents. In fact, live performance does more than represent an alternate reality; it creates one, however fleetingly, and that alternate reality has the potential to wield significant social power. Non-live performance, such as film, television, and the various new media (including video games), also has such power, as a reconstruction of action, although I will argue it is somewhat diluted by its more limited interactivity, despite being more reproducible and accessible.29 DISTRIBUTION This process is not a trick – it requires, in fact, willing complicity between the audience and the creative team. Theatre lovers describe with joy the moments when they temporarily let slip from their minds the skepticism, or at least the urge to disbelieve, and instead accept the proffered reality on its own terms and for its ownFOR merits, at least provisionally. Culti- vating empathy is not a science – it can be contradictory, even perverse. Human social interaction of all kinds is messy, particularly in the highly fraught and contested sites30 occupied by theatrical events. Audiences are not always, and not uniformly, in a mood to be unfailingly self-critical and deeply conscientious when attendingNOT a performance – particularly one that does not represent itself as “high art,” and particularly in times of great social stress. Popular performance is messy, but it is also profoundly influential. In the real world, how often is the symbol mistaken or surrogated, consciously or not, for reality? The prevalence of monsters suggests that this happens often enough to play a significant role in the process of coping with anxiety. Performance accomplishes this coping in a number of ways, the most common of which is the creation of an alternate reality that is soothing and reinforces deeply held beliefs and norms – one in which villains are caught and punished, or in which clever characters solve problems that initially seem insurmountable,PROOFS or in which the gods intervene to reward the faithful and punish the wicked. In so doing, these affirmative performances must define those beliefs and norms – the “core values” of their communities. However, Roach observes that any attempt to alleviate social anxiety affir- matively in this way is a priori doomed to failure, because there really is no T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

Introduction 15

unified core community outside of the idea of one. Roach calls this “a convenient but dangerous fiction.”31 The idea is dangerous because it is fictional – the inevitable revelation that the social order is not unified but in fact failing in many ways to live up to its own professed values and ideals, and failing to cope with the constant disappointments of reality, will ultimately only increase social anxiety. To alleviate anxiety, the performance must direct attention away from the (imaginary) center of society and towards the (imaginary) margins of society, where it can examine the collisions between those who belong to the (non-existent) “core” and those who do not. Following White, we might call this “ostensive social definition by negation,” describing the internal dialogue of an individual that goes along the lines of “I do not really know what it is to be a member of my community, but I do know that it is certainly not that,” and point at someone in the landscape who resists, or can be depicted as resisting, some value of professed importance to the community or, in the case ofDISTRIBUTION horror, the very nature of “normal” existence. This kind of performance is popular, in the short term, because it provides temporary relief from anxiety and replaces it with an opportunity for the audience to congratulate itself for living in such a harmonious and perfect society, or one that would be perfect andFOR harmonious if it were not for the outliers, aliens, traitors, subversives, or monsters just identified. In the long term, of course, those inevitable disappointments of reality will, unfortunately, loom up again to challenge conventional wisdom and break the crust on this carefully nurtured self-satisfaction. A reasonable alternative wouldNOT be to call attention both to the problem and to the failure of society to anticipate or address it, and to propose reasonable solutions that would be subjected to intelligent debate. Roach argues that such a response is rarely popular because it only increases anxiety, which is not merely unpleasant but provides an additional disincentive for rational thought to enter the equation. Far more common, he observes, is repetition of the original act that brought about the closure, however false, and the relief from anxiety, however fleeting. This kind of performance becomes, in Roach’s terms, a “public enactment of forgetting.”32 The greater the anxiety, the more the need for such amnesia, and the more popular the enactment ofPROOFS forgetting becomes, while the didactic performance lingers on the margins of the cultural conversation. The more popular the affirmative event becomes, the greater the need for repetition, and the attendant need to increase the fictive qualities of the event in order to mask the incon- sistencies between itself and reality effectively. The culture creators become T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

16 Introduction

locked in a cycle of erasure that may, and often does, eventuate in a massive collective revision – a desperate creation of a new and wholly false social narrative that even reinscribes the community’s origins to fit the new anxiety- reducing, self-affirming imaginary, which grows increasingly bizarre and perverse, and demands constant revision and re-erasure as its own failures become harder to mask, or until the anxiety eventuates in a serious social schism. “The search for the purity of origins,” Roach writes, “is a voyage not of discovery but of erasure.”33 I find Roach’s paradigm attractive because it does not attempt to reduce to oneness things that are multiple, and so allows us to understand a cultural product (like a monster) to occupy many social, political, and even psychological positions, even contradictory ones, simultaneously, as an act that facilitates anxiety-reducing amnesia. It embraces rather than eliminates the complexity and perversity of a society in motion, which opens up possibilities of understanding representations of monsters in performanceDISTRIBUTION not as accidents or frippery, but as ideologically grounded, carefully premeditated acts of erasure that are potentially both therapeutic and pernicious. Looking at monsters in performance from a Roachian perspective complements Cohen’s examination of monsters in literature to suggest a productive and fertile new field of inquiry – one in whichFOR multiple decodings are sustained and put into dialogue. One aim of this book, then, is to apply Roach’s model to explain the significance as well as the behavior of monsters in performance. This enterprise cannot hope to be exhaustive, only suggestive. Because Roach’s model focuses on popular performance,NOT my rationale has been to choose monsters that are very popular at the time of writing, and examine their cultural genealogies to enrich our understanding of what each is up to, beyond even the intentions of its creator, when it appears on stage or screen. Limited as I am by time and space, I have chosen some particularly iconic monsters with important theatrical histories – Caliban, Prometheus, Frankenstein’s Creature, the vampire, the Golem, the ghost, and the werewolf – while leaving some other theatrically significant monsters by the wayside. (I regret particularly that I was unable to deal with witches, devils, and certain ghosts, including Sutter in August Wilson’s Piano Lesson and the Weeping WomanPROOFS in La Llorona , but perhaps I will have an opportunity to discuss them in future work.) I hope that this volume will provide a new way of approaching the study of both monsters and theatre history to inspire other monster-hunters, particularly those writers and artists who will take it upon themselves to create the next generation of horrors, which will, T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

Introduction 17

in the words of John Keats, haunt our days and chill our dreaming nights.34 It is for this reason that I am deeply obliged to author and screenwriter Mike Carey, one of my all-time favorite maker of monsters for novels, television, comic books and films, for the Foreword to this volume: critics like myself are useful only when they have something to criticize, and for that the brave makers like Mr. Carey are required to walk in darkness, and report back, so that the rest of us may better know the darkness in ourselves. Chapter 1: “Caliban’s Legacy” begins the study of stage monsters with one of the most famous, Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This “brave monster” leads the way into a discussion of the application of Cohen’s Monster Theory specifically for dramaturgical hermeneutics. The chapter expands upon each of Cohen’s “seven theses” in order to make them specifically useful to the analysis of a performance in its historical context, to give the reader a clear method for engaging with theatrical monsters of all kinds. DISTRIBUTION Chapter 2: “Prometheus the Thief” examines the major themes of monstrosity, transgression, and ethics in Aeschylus’ fifth-century BCE play Prometheus Bound, then goes on to fulfill Mary Shelley’s tacit request to compare her novel Frankenstein to that ancient play. In so doing, this chapter raises some hitherto-unexploredFOR thematic questions about the most significant monster that haunts the nightmares of modernity. Chapter 3: “Presumption” is a history of the early staging of Shelley’s novel in the melodramas of her age. This chapter demonstrates how immediately and indelibly the newly created myth of the ambitious scientist and his violent monsterNOT were altered to fittheneedsoftheliving stage, and how deeply indebted the modern vision of the Creature is to the early stage versions of the play, rather than the novel. By the time Boris Karloff embodies the Creature, its evolution and therefore its moral commentary about science without ethics, which would come to dominate the many filmic retellings of the story, have occurred almost exclusively on stage. Chapter 4: “The Vampire Trap” examines the theatrical evolution of a creature with origins in Balkan folklore, but which was fundamentally revamped by the same night of creative darkness that gave birth to Fran- kenstein. ThePROOFS vampire’s theatrical journey closely parallels that of Shelley’s monster in nineteenth-century melodrama. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, seen in the light of the theatrical developments of the vampires that preceded it, appears to owe as much to a theatrical tradition with an obsession for advances in special effects, including the “Vampire Trap,” as to any literary T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

18 Introduction

or folkloric ones. As the nineteenth century surged forward vampires on stage grew more psychologically complex, more difficult to dismiss as mere nocturnal demons, and more able to insinuate themselves in all manner of social discourse. But this, after all, is the vampire’s greatest talent – that of the actor, to perform itself as something other than it is, until it is too late. This is how the vampire can be, in the words of Vladislav from What We Do in the Shadows, both the bait and the trap.35 Chapter 5: “Toys Are Us” searches for the theatrical roots of a monster closely related to Frankenstein’s Creature: the robot. The modern demon of artificial intelligence, so prevalent in our culture of rapidly advancing technology, has roots in an ancient Jewish monster, the Golem, created by magic to defend the defenseless. At the turn of the last century, the rise in fascism and anti-Semitism across Europe would incite a popular reinvention of the Golem that included a 1921 play so influential it would define Jewish theatre. Using Freud’s contemporary essay “TheDISTRIBUTION Uncanny” as a guide, this chapter seeks to identify the powerful and prophetic fears prompted by the increasing political chaos of the period. No mindless automaton, the Golem’s monstrous struggle lies at the heart of ethical behavior, forcing the audience to face the challenge of a compassionate response to a world filled with hatred and violence made easier byFOR technological advances. Unfortu- nately, the lessons of the twentieth century appear to be unlearned by the twenty-first, which may go some way to explaining why the Golem’s descendants remain so prevalent in our modern-day monsters. Chapter 6: Boo strays away from the modernist monster to inquire more deeply into fundamental problemsNOT of monsters in theatre. Beginning with a discussion of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, this chapter visits the eighteenth century to witness an important argument between Voltaire and Lessing about the role of ghosts in the drama that spans millennia and has important implications for our understanding of the plethora of ghosts that appear, or are merely suggested, on our contemporary stages. Chapter 7: Hairey Betwixt is a monstrous departure from traditional theatre history. It examines the performativity necessary for legal systems to operate by looking at the jurisprudence of lycanthropy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The subject is the werewolf – for centuries understood first asPROOFS a kind of witch, then as a sufferer from mental illness, rather than as the bestial monster we know today. Compared to other important monsters discussed in this volume, the werewolf appears in relatively few plays, but it provides critical food for thought in the study of monsters in performance. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

Introduction 19

Notes 1 Erik Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 177. 2 Rosmarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2–8. 3 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun(New York: Vintage, 2011), 73. 4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture,Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–25. 5 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 6 Ibid., 3. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 The monster theorist, then, is very careful to distinguish between the cultural body of the monster and the real, material body of, for instance, a serial killer or a frightening and ferocious animal. The monster theorist must discern that “Jack the Ripper,” a semiotic construct, enjoys a cultural existence separate from the actions of the real person (or persons) who committed horrifying murders on the streets of nineteenth-century London. The murdererDISTRIBUTION was a historical subject; the “Ripper” is a monster that grows from the fears the murderer’s actions engendered. A white shark is frightening, to be sure, but it is a natural creature that inspires the monster that appeared in the film Jaws. This caveat may seem pedantic at first, but it is absolutely crucial to our understanding of how monsters operate in cultures. The most salient danger, monsterization, is present when the material and the monstrous are confusedFOR (see Chapter 1). 9 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. David Lapoujade, ed.; Ames Hodge and Mike Taormina, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 16. 10 Count Eugene Goblet D’Alviella, Symbols: Their Migration and Universality (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003; reprint of The Migration of Symbols (Westminster: Constable and Co., 1894)), 32–44 for the Count’s discussion of the gammadion or swastika, which demonstrates how historical eventsNOT can conspire to alter the way signs generate meaning. The swastika has generated many meanings since our Neolithic ancestors used it as a decorative feature on mammoth-tusk carvings more than 10,000 years ago. In ancient Persia, Greece, India, China, and Europe it has been a symbol of luck, a ward against evil, and a shorthand for certain astrological phenomena. The Count could not anticipate, of course, that in 1907 the swastika would begin to be associated with white supremacy and “racial hygiene,” or that the German National Socialist Party would eventually use it to replace the German national flag in 1933. Over the next decade the actions of the Nazis would powerfully (and so far irrevocably) associate this Neolithic symbol with the crimes of that regime, such that even by the time of writing, in 2017, displaying such a symbol in the West is a priori a political act that constitutes a threat of racist violence, and is indeed a crime in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Brazil. Among Buddhists and Hindus, however, the swastikaPROOFS remains an important religious symbol. 11 For an extensive discussion on the grotesque as an aesthetic tradition, see Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

20 Introduction

12 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), 117. 13 Hayden White, “Bodies and Their Plots.” In Choreographing History, Susan Leigh Foster, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 229–34. 14 Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness.” In The Wild Man Within, Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, eds. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 3–38 (3–4). 15 Ibid., 4. 16 White 1995, 233. 17 See Jeffrey A. Gray, Psychology of Fear and Stress (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1991) for a detailed summary of the work of twentieth-century behaviorists on fear. More to the purpose, however, is Stephen T. Asma, “Monsters on the Braid: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror.” Journal of Social Research 81:4 (2014): 941–68. 18 Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 7. 19 Ibid. 20 Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2014), 13. 21 I am indebted to my colleague and friend Dr. James Bierman for this critique of the Poetics. For a fuller description of Aristotle’s treatmentDISTRIBUTION of fear as part of the tragic equation, see “Catharsis” at his web resource Classical Tragedy. http://tra gedy.ucsc.edu/ (accessed August 10, 2016). 22 Dana LaCourse Munteanu, Tragic Pathos, Pity, and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 30. 23 Ibid. 24 Friedrich Schiller, “On the Tragic Art.”FORIn Schiller ’s Works: Aesthetical Letters and Essays, Nathan Haskell Dole, ed.; Percy Pinkerton, trans. (Boston: Dana Estes, 1902), 61. 25 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 26 Ibid., 2–3, 5–6. 27 Laurel, 13. 28 Roach, 3–4, 27. NOT 29 Roach here is building on observations made by Richard Schechner in Between Theatre and Anthropology(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36–7. 30 I use the term “contested sites” as defined by Bank, 72–4. 31 Roach, 5. 32 Ibid., 3. 33 Ibid., 6. 34 John Keats, “This Living Hand.” In Keats’s Poetry and Prose, Jeffrey J. Cox, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 378. 35 Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, writers and directors, What We Do in the Shadows (Unison Films, 2014). PROOFS

1 CALIBAN’S LEGACY

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In the ﬁnal scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero, a sorcerer and the former Duke of Milan who is now in exile on a distant island, has just completed an intricate scheme to restore his position. Using his magical powers and those of his unearthly servants,FOR Prospero has brought all his enemies together and exposed the schemes against him, including a rather shaky plot to murder him and take over the island by the jester Trinculo, the butler Stephano, and Caliban, a monster. Trinculo and Stephano are servants of Prospero’s enemy Alonso, so Prospero charges him to “know and own” them – to take responsibility forNOT their actions. The third conspirator, Caliban, the “thing of darkness,” Prospero acknowledges as “mine” (V.i.2346–50). Prospero is in a forgiving mood, since his own schemes have come to fruition. Moreover, his magical powers render him immune to such a threat, so it seems he does not take the plot very seriously; nor do Trinculo or Stephano, who were blind drunk during the whole aﬀair, and whose sobriety has brought abject contrition along with the clarity of a hangover. Caliban, on the other hand, was deadly serious. Native to the island, Caliban is the son of Sycorax, an Algerian witch who was banished to the island years earlier; his father was, according to Prospero, some sort ofPROOFS demon. Sycorax was immensely powerful in magic – Prospero attests that she could “control the moon” (V.i.2344). Prior to his arrival with his daughter Miranda, Sycorax was the undisputed queen of the island, but due to her own evil she grew herself “into a hoop” (I.ii.260) and died, leaving Caliban alone with the many strange creatures of the place until Prospero and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:26

22 Caliban’s legacy

Miranda appeared. As to Caliban’s exact form, Shakespeare gives us very little direction – like all the best playwrights, he leaves signiﬁcant artistic leeway to his actors and costume designers. We do, however, have Prospero’s ungracious description: “Then was this island/Save for the son that did litter here/A freckled whelp, hag-born, not honor’d with a human shape” (I.i.285–7) Although this last phrase –“not honor’d with a human shape”– is often taken out of context to describe Caliban, the somewhat convoluted grammar of the full sentence actually insists that Caliban does have a human (albeit freckled) shape. To Prospero, he barely counts as human in any case. But he is not precisely human: later, Alonso will call him “as strange a thing as e’er I looked on” (V.i.290) and Prospero replies that he is “as dis- proportion’d in his manners/As in his shape” (V.i.291–2). Meanwhile, the jester Trinculo seems to think he smells like a ﬁsh, which has led several artists – including Johann Heinrich Ramberg – to represent an ichthyoid Caliban, even though Trinculo is clearly an idiotDISTRIBUTION (see Figure 1.1).

FOR

NOT

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FIGURE 1.1 Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban dancing; detail from Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s The Tempest, II Source: Cornell University Library. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:34

Caliban’s legacy 23

But Herbert Beerbohm Tree, represented in a drawing by Charles Buchel (see Figure 1.2), played a more mammalian, proto-human monster in a 1904 revival at His Majesty’s Theatre, with shaggy hair covering his body, claws on his hands and feet, garbed in leaves, with pointed ears and wicked fangs. A century later, Djimon Hounsou played the role with his body unadorned except by patches of vitiligo, strange scales, and ritual scars in a 2010 film directed by Julie Taymor (see Figure 1.3), perhaps to emphasize a postcolonial critique (see below). It is tempting to see Caliban’s monstrous appearance as a sign of some inner moral turpitude, but such an equation is not quite so simple. When Prospero and his daughter first arrived on the island, years before the play’s action begins, Caliban was quite impressed by the new immigrants. He reminds Prospero that the sorcerer was kind to him, and instructed him how “to name the bigger light, and how the less/That burn by day and night” (I.ii.334–5). In return, Caliban revealedDISTRIBUTION the island’s natural and supernatural secrets to Prospero, facilitating his quest to fill the power vacuum created by the death of Sycorax. Prospero’s daughter Miranda also once had a close relationship with the monster. “I pitied thee,” she reminds him, “Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/One thing or anotherFOR” (I.ii.353 –5). But the Edenic happiness of these initial encounters was disrupted when Caliban attempted to rape Miranda, for which crime he is severely, and continually, punished. Prospero subjects Caliban to innumerable abuses – verbal, corporeal, psychological, or magical in nature. Unrepentant and rebellious, Caliban assumes a role familiar to ShakespeareNOT ’s audience – that of the comic, truculent servant. But unlike Ariel, Trinculo, and Stephano, Caliban is not a servant, and this tinges his comic behavior with deadly malice. He is a slave, held against his will and forced into servitude. Prospero makes no bones about this – he and Miranda refer to him as a slave with punishing regularity. Unlike a servant, a slave has no contract, no rights, no privileges, and no expectation of betterment, and for this reason a twenty-first-century Western reader, with twenty-first-century Western prides and prejudices, will find it difficult to discover a clean moral perspective from which to regard Caliban. His attempted rapePROOFS of Miranda is deplorable, inexcusable. At the same time, many postcolonial critics of Shakespeare have argued convincingly that Caliban’s situation mirrors in many ways that of the colonial subject. King of his island, Caliban was displaced by invaders who seemed like friends, but turned out to be conquerors. A monster, Caliban’s agency is likewise T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:34

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NOT

FIGURE 1.2 Charles A. Buchel’s depiction of Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Caliban, fromPROOFSShakespeare’s Comedy The Tempest (London: J. Miles & Co, 1904) Source: Courtesy of the British Library.

Caliban’s legacy 25

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FIGURE 1.3 Djimon Hounsou as Caliban in Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010) Source: © Touchstone Pictures. FOR monstrous. What choices can he make apart from violence and horror? And what can he do but fail, and fail again? So this, then, is the “thing of darkness”: suﬀering evil but capable of evil on his own; able to learn but also to twist knowledge to a darker purpose; a creature who did not know himself until he was taught that he was a monster. This is what makesNOT Prospero ’s acknowledgement of Caliban as “mine” so compelling. Is the old wizard ﬁnally accepting the totality of his own failures as a master, and his own responsibilities for Caliban’s monstrosity, including that the possibility that his project to “civilize” Caliban has failed due not to Caliban’s weaknesses, but his own? Prospero has rewritten his own sad story, and now almost everyone is forgiven, liberated, or getting married. Prospero forgives Caliban for being a monster, after which the monster says he will “be wise hereafter/And seek for grace,” but will this search be on Caliban’s own terms, as a restored king and a “natural man” with all the tools he needs to become enlightened, or is he merely to be abandonedPROOFS on a barren island, native rendered an exile in his own land, a king with no subjects? In acknowledging that Caliban, warts and all, is “mine,” does Prospero not recognize another monster – the one he sees in the mirror?1 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:56

26 Caliban’s legacy

Ultimately, of course, neither Prospero nor Caliban may be said to have “agency” for they are not real, living subjects, only characters in a play written four centuries ago. They are doomed to reinscribe one another’s monstrosity perpetually, or at least as long as this play is read and performed. These are cultural products, and as such they have no particular rights for which to fight. We are free to dissect them as we will, and perhaps we will be forgiven if we repeat the error of centuries of theatre historians and critics who “read too much” into Shakespeare. At the end of the day, after all, The Tempest is not about magicians and monsters, but about us – we who watch the parade of transient theatrical productions for the joy of coming to grips with this text in a new way every time. What gives significance to Prospero’s actions is the direct relation we make to our own actions, for the enrichment and betterment of our own persons and societies. Not for nothing, then, does Jeffrey JeromeDISTRIBUTION Cohen cite Prospero’s description of Caliban as a “thing of darkness” in his landmark essay.2 I use the phrase as the subtitle of this book because I, inspired by Cohen’s essay, aspire to recognize myself mirrored in the monsters I see in my culture. No life lesson can be more confusing than the realization that the thing of darkness we despise is housedFOR within, not without. To take on the all-too-necessary step of coming to terms with our demons in order first to understand and then, perhaps, expel them (or at least put them to some productive work) is perhaps the most difficult human journey. There is no knowledge that we resist with greater persistence and invention, perhaps becauseNOT we know, deep down, that the thoughts we publicly ascribe only to monsters are, in fact, our own; to snatch, to devour, indeed to rape and kill – to take what we want, to give vent to the poisons that torment our minds by becoming one of that supernatural ilk who, unbound by human decency, do what they wish without fear or guilt or remorse. To what lengths will we go to avoid such self-examination? Our impulse instead is to revise our favorite stories, and even our personal or social histories, in an attempt to render any stain invisible. But as we focus exclusively on the light, we give our monsters room to grow and be about their businessPROOFS in the unexplored darkness. Predictably, the more we attempt to erase our monsters, the more often they appear. Is it any wonder that at the time of writing this book, the culture of monsters is as vibrant as ever, with its endless procession of books, movies, and plays that rehash and reinvent monster tales? T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:56

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How to hunt monsters: the seven theses for the stage In the Introduction to this volume, I articulated why the study of monsters is culturally signiﬁcant, and why the study of monsters in performance is particularly meaningful. In this chapter, we will discuss the mechanics of the application of Cohen’s Monster Theory to performance analysis. In his 1996 essay, Cohen lays out seven key ideas for engaging with what he calls “monster culture.” These ideas provide a foundation for a variety of approaches to the study of monsters, and I have found them very productive for generating methods for application in performance.

Thesis One: The monster’s body is a cultural body Cohen envisions the monster as a “free radical” in the systems of cultural exchange humans generate, and the important roleDISTRIBUTION that performance plays in the generation of “hierophants”–or interpreters – of the “glyphs” that monsters represent. All cultural products perform this act in one way or another – all must employ the library of signs available to the communities in which they appear, or they will not be understood. They may also create new signs, of course, but these must also be explained and linked to an extant matrix of semiosis, or they willFOR leave audiences scratching their heads. But performance is particularly grounded in the particular moment of its creation. Fuseli’s horriﬁc painting The Nightmare, currently residing in the Detroit Institute of Arts, is unchanging (except by the arbitrary ministrations of time that may decay its paint), but it is available to be interpreted and reinterpreted by each of us asNOT a self-contained semiotic ecology. Perfor- mance, on the other hand, comes into being and then vanishes in the same moment, so it must be perpetually recreated. It is experienced in time and space as reality, not as an abstraction or representation of reality. Of course, a rational audience understands, intellectually at least, that there is a diﬀerence between the action that is happening and the action that is represented, and willingly suspends disbelief in order to allow the performance to weave together fantasy and reality. The experience of being profoundly moved by a performance is not one that can be adequately described with purely rational language – it involves a kind of provisional contract with the imagination that inPROOFS other contexts would be considered psychotic. It is a liminal space; not insane but not completely sane, not pure fantasy but not pure reality either – a space in which things that are separate can become joined, in which things that are singular can become multiple. We value this T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:56

28 Caliban’s legacy

because it is deeply important to our construction of identity both social and individual, but also because it is thrilling and wondrous. All performance involves this liminality, but monsters are special. They add to this complex alchemy another unstable element: fear. Reading Shelley’s Frankenstein or Poe’s “The Raven” in the comfort of one’s home, or contemplating Fuseli’s The Nightmare, can certainly provoke a horrific confrontation with darkness. We may change as we engage these cultural objects, we may undergo processes of discovery and transformation, but they do not. Performance changes constantly; in fact it may be said to be in a permanent state of transformation. It provides visceral immediacy. It is as capable of provoking terror as it is of evoking horror – outright fear as well as deep anxiety. Turner conducted research that demonstrated how people in audiences at performances exhibit neurobiological ergotropic reactions, including increased physical arousal, heightened emotional response, and augmented sympathetic discharges, such as increasedDISTRIBUTION heart rate, blood pressure, and sweat secretion, pupillary dilation, and inhibition of digestion; the same reactions, in short, that are produced by certain psychotropic drugs. They experience this systematic physical change as what Turner calls a “ritual trance,” a state of mind that is ideal for suspension of disbelief; and in that suspension, transformation occurs.3 FOR Any number of studies seek to ascribe belief in a particular monster to supernatural interpretations of some social-biological phenomenon: that, for example, belief in witches can be ascribed to hallucinations resulting from mass ergot poisoning; or that belief in werewolves began among humans who suffered from porphyria;NOT or that belief in vampirism stems from poor understanding of rigor mortis; or that there really is a plesiosaur in Scotland or an evolutionary throwback in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. I am uninterested in such theories for two reasons: firstly, because there are too many variations and discrepancies among these etiologies; and, secondly, because humans have never needed much real-world evidence to support their monsters. If there is some obscure biological phenomenon at the root of the belief in a monster, it is akin to the piece of sand that irritates the oyster and incites the creation of the pearl – in and of itself, it is worthless and uninteresting compared to the cultural jewel that accretes around it. Cohen’s fiPROOFSrst thesis reminds us that the monster does not exist in nature; only in culture. But this does not mean that the monster is not “real.” Monsterization occurs when we lose our grasp of the slippery line between fantasy and reality, and this happens with regularity in performance. On the other hand, Turner observes that only in these liminal states are we capable T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:56

Caliban’s legacy 29

of certain types of self-realization and introspection of the kind that are therapeutic and can assist in our psychological maturation into compassionate and stable adults. The following chapters will detail the walking of this obscure and haunted path.

Thesis Two: The monster always escapes Alice Cooper (stage name of rock musician and songwriter Vincent Damon Furnier) was particularly famed for bringing horror imagery to rock ’n’ roll performance. For more than 40 years, the “Alice” character was a tatterde- malion, gender-bending murderer who was known for being executed on stage in various ways, including hanging and beheading, at the end of the shows. In 2013, Cooper reﬂected on these executions:

Well, we ﬁgured that if you are a villain – I donDISTRIBUTION’t care if it’s Shakespeare or Vampire Diaries – the bad guy needs to get it in the end … and we felt that Alice is playing the villain through the whole show … so that character needs to be punished.4

The monster, by its very nature, is deviant,FOR and the audience (prepared by millennia of dramatic convention in such matters) expects that deviance to be ultimately challenged and expelled, if not eradicated. As seductive and fascinating as the monster’s boundary-breaking behavior may be, the audience derives an undeniable satisfaction from seeing the threat addressed and eliminated. Indeed, the seductivenessNOT of the monster is due in no small part to its vulnerability. This is one of the major sources of the monster’s pathos – from its conception, it is doomed. But part of what makes a monster a monster is that it is not eliminated by normal means. Born of a confluence of forces neither physical nor supernatural, the cultural body of the monster is a semiotic one sustained by anxieties both personal and social. Insofar as those anxieties persist, the monster can always find a new manifestation or the revitalization of an old one. Certain monsters, as we will examine in the chapters that follow, can even shift and flow into new meanings, embody new anxieties, and so live on. Because ofPROOFS the continuous exposure of the fictive social order, the surrogative performances must be continually refreshed and renewed – the glyph must continually seek new hierophants. Keeping in mind that this is a process of erasure and revision as much as it is of memory, each new hierophant must interpret the old glyph a little differently to adapt to new T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:56

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revelations of failures of the social order, and to their attendant anxieties. Witnessing monsters undergo this process can be particularly revelatory. For instance, Cohen writes of the slight but significant differences in the vampires that appear between Bram Stoker’s and those of Anne Rice, reading each against particular events or movements as well as in conversation with its predecessors, and so describes each reappearance as “a double act of construction and reconstitution.”5 In performance, this reconstruction is constant – not merely from script to script but even, in microscopic but measurable degrees, performance to performance, night to night. Actors respond to their audiences and generate new meanings in dialogue with them every time a new performance is executed. Actors discuss a phenomenon they describe as their own “discovery” of a play’s internal meanings and possibilities only after they perform for a live audience. This observation leads the monster theorist toDISTRIBUTION explore genealogies of particular monsters, to witness the transformations over time and from place to place that monsters undergo in order to keep their fear-generation powers fresh. In modern times fans may sometimes be dismissive of Holly- wood “reboots,” but the practice has roots in very ancient theatre. As long as historians have tracked theatre, playwrightsFOR have tapped extant narratives and tropes and consistently revised them into new forms, to give new contexts and new meanings to familiar tales. Monsters especially require reboots to remain current and capable of generating the fear they need to exist. Indeed, we might go so far as to observe that if a monster proves incapable of surrogation – thatNOT is to say if it cannot transform to match newly emergent anxieties – it will cease to be frightening, and will drop into obscurity. The history of the zombie in cinema6 is particularly revelatory of this process. The 1932 film White Zombie, in which Bela Lugosi plays a Haitian voodoo priest who turns a visiting American woman into a sex slave, speaks to fears of the occult and the foreign. Other early film zombies have been thinly disguised members of the underclass or racial minorities, while Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) seems to offer the zombie as an analogy for the fear of communism overtaking American life. Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002)PROOFS inaugurates the zombie, now fast and even clever, as a metaphor for pandemic disease, while Foster’s World War Z (2013), with its agile, world-traveling undead, may be read as a manifestation of a fear of unrestrained globalism. Many more interpretations of these films are available, but few would argue that the sluggish, clumsy undead of the 1930s and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:56

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1940s, scary enough in their time, are sufficient to embody the fears of the twenty-first century. The monster’s power to sustain fear is incumbent upon its ability to reincarnate itself as an allegory of real anxieties. If it cannot transform and return, it is consigned to the dustbin of cultural history, joining the amphisbaena, the far darrig, and the triffid, whose heydays of troubling the sleep of humans are long gone. Maybe.

Thesis Three: The monster is the harbinger of category crisis The monster is a liminal figure which exists as a combination of states that, under normal circumstances, cannot be combined. The vampire is both alive and dead. The werewolf is both human and animal. The Creature is both real and artificial. The monster, hybrid and composed of fragments, represents a self-contained dialectic. The appearanceDISTRIBUTION of the monster is ontologically impossible, and so resists ontology, providing what Barthes calls jouissance – a playful space in which new conversations might be had.7 “The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster’s body,” Cohen writes, “in the fact of the monster, scientific inquiry andFOR its ordered rationality crumble.”8 This liminality is certainly part of the joy of monster culture, which shares with other kinds of fantasy the thrill of imagining other modes of being. But the monster troubles those binaries and hierarchies necessary for the continued operation of the status quo – this is what makes them frightening – so they can be particularly dangerousNOTfi gures to contemplate. They may put transgressive ideas into play where none existed before – all the more insi- dious for their apparent innocence: “Come now, it’s only a story …” This hybridity is exacerbated in performance, which is, as Turner noted, already a liminal event in which then becomes now, there becomes here, and fantasy blends into reality in sometimes astonishing ways. For this union to exist, it is not necessary that the audience undergo a psychotic break with reality, only that they admit the possibility of another way of thinking, even just for a moment. All theatrical characters behave like this; all performances create a sort of “third term,PROOFS” a union of a fi ctional character and a real actor into a third hybrid – and highly temporary – entity. But the monster, wrapped in fear and fun, a profound dialectic disguised as a phantasmagoria, provides a sort of subversive back door to Roach’s recognition of the difficulty of creating genuinely didactic theatre. The monster’s didacticism is self-contained and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:57

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subtle – harder to spot and more interesting to engage than a preacher’s sermon or some ham-ﬁsted political agitprop. Monstrous performance has therefore the potential to be radical and transgressive in a way that other performance never can be.

Thesis Four: The monster dwells at the gates of difference In 1937, an art exhibition entitled “Der evige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”) opened in the Library of Munich’s German Museum. This was just one of the “degenerate art” exhibitions sponsored by the Nazi government of Germany to demonize Jews. The title of the exhibition refers to a very old story, dating back at least to the thirteenth century, of a Jewish man who, while witnessing Jesus carrying his cross, made a joke at the Savior’s expense, and is therefore forsaken by Heaven and doomed to aimless, immortal wandering of the earth.9 The Eternal JewDISTRIBUTION is a monster – his body is purely cultural, he supernaturally disobeys both physical and moral laws (the one reflecting the other), and he suffers punishment for his deviance – and all living Jews, invariably and eternally, take part in this monstrousness, evinced by their resistance to genocide. The legend had grown increasingly popular in the seventeeth and eighteenthFOR centuries, and by the early twentieth century had inspired Thomas Percy, Gustave Doré, Percy Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, Mark Twain, O. Henry, and even Søren Kierkegaard, among many others. In many versions of the tale, the Eternal Jew is a figure deserving of compassion, but sometimes of scorn. Nazi curators of the exhibitionNOT must have been aware of at least two theatrical pieces on the subject written by Jewish authors: Fromental Halévy’s opera Le Juif errant, which premiered at the Paris Opera in 1852 with a libretto by Eugéne Scribe; and another written in Hebrew and staged at Moscow’s Habima Theatre in 1919 (and revived in 1926 in New York City).10 A British film, The Eternal Jew, released in 1934 by Gaumont– Twickenham Film Studios and starring Conrad Veidt, took pains to represent Jews as a people who had been unjustly persecuted. Although it is presented as a historical fantasy, the repudiation of Nazism cannot be omitted from any analysis of this film.11 Partially asPROOFS a direct reaction to the British film, Nazi propagandists saw this legend as an opportunity to justify their persecution of Jews, to foment anti-Semitic feeling in Germany, and in many other ways to advance the political agendas of National Socialism by employing monsterization – mapping the monstrous evige Jude onto real people to facilitate the atrocities T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:57

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that were already under way. The exhibition of “degenerate art” was only the first step. The legendary figure is retooled as a genuine monster in a poster made for the exhibition in 1937. Wearing an Eastern-style kaftan, the Jew has a long black beard, a tremendous nose and ears, and a protruding lower lip. He is dressed like a pauper but has a huge handful of gold, which occupies all his attention. His back is curved and bent, and he carries a map of Germany stamped with the Hammer and Sickle insignia of the Bolshevik Party. It is all a cohesive attempt to appropriate the ancient monster as a modern threat of real Jews attempting to infiltrate and conquer Germany with the backing of Russian Communists (see Figure 1.4). This traveling exhibition incited anti- Jewish demonstrations and violence in every city in which it appeared. A film followed, Der ewige Jude, directed by Fritz Hippler under the tight scrutiny of Joseph Goebbels, purporting to be a documentary on the natural depravity and monstrosity of Jews, who are depicted as sorcerers.DISTRIBUTION The anti-Communist, anti-Russian aspect of the portrayal did not prevent the Nazi Propaganda Ministry from producing another poster in 1943, this one for distribution within Russia. Above the Russian caption “Jews – A People of Contagion!” the Eternal Jew sits on a mound of skulls, his attention absorbed by the bag of goldFOR coins in his lap. His huge nose and ears, his protruding lower lip, and his long black beard mark him for the monster he is, while a sun shaped like the Star of David rises over a landscape, presumably Russian, dominated by a burning city (see Figure 1.5). The Nazi propaganda machine clearly felt the monster was malleable enough to adapt to a RussianNOT sensibility. After the fall of the Nazis, depictions of the Eternal Jew character were considered explicitly anti-Semitic and mainstream artists avoided them for decades, although they still appear with disheartening regularity on anti- Semitic websites and in publications that specifically target Jews. What, then, can be made of a third image, drawn by the Canadian cartoonist Roy Eric Peterson and featured in his collection Drawn and Quartered (see Figure 1.6)? This cartoon, which appeared in the Vancouver Sun in 2003, is a caricature of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian leader of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, by then established as the mastermind behind the devastating attacksPROOFS against the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. The kaftan is replaced with a turban, but the rest of the “Eternal Jew” is there: the huge nose and ears, the long black beard, the protruding lower lip, the bent back, the pauper’s clothes, the piles of treasure (American dollars, in this case), and the territory he wishes to dominate. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:02:57

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FIGURE 1.4 Poster for “Der evige Jude” exhibition (1937) Source: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste/Museum für Gestaltung Zürich/ Plakatsammlung. PROOFS

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FIGURE 1.5 Anti-Semitic propaganda poster produced by Nazi Germany’sPropa- gandaministerium for distribution in Russia (1943)

Although this example is from the world of visual art rather than performance, it suPROOFSﬃces to demonstrate the perversity of monsterization in action. That the pre-monsterized Jew can be put into the service of monsterizing Muslims, to alleviate social anxiety about the unknown through mockery of the familiar, is a tactic that is many centuries old, as I have discussed elsewhere.12 Peterson’s image was only one of thousands of similar representations T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:28

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NOT FIGURE 1.6 Roy Eric Peterson, caricature of Osama bin Laden (2003)

of the Muslim terrorist as a minimally retooled ewige Jude that have become common over recent decades. The glyph of the diabolical Eternal Jew seeks its hierophants, and so perverse is the process that the hierophants need not even be Jewish – only malleable enough to act as a vessel for fear and hatred. Embodied in these drawings, the Eternal Jew returns as surrogate, alleviating anxiety about the unfamiliar Other by substituting a familiar monster, already proven “true” through repetition, its power to alleviate anxiety now enhanced by its abilityPROOFS to lump all the enemies of right-thinking folk into one easily identifiable and therefore targetable group. The monster returns. People suffer. The monster’s “difference” need neither begin nor end with physical difference – the Jew’s nose, the werewolf’s claws, the vampire’s fangs. Often T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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it is far more important to track the monster’s identity and its constructed difference from what is “normal”: foreigner, homosexual, cannibal, pervert, woman, racial other, or any other thing that can be easily identified as a threat. Most monsters are polymorphously perverse, and embody more than one difference. Identifying the various lines a monster crosses and putting them in a genealogy, like the one above, is critical to its analysis. Through its various transformations, the monster reveals ever more about those who try to employ it as a manifestation of the anxiety du jour.

Thesis Five: The monster polices the borders of the possible It should be clear by now that the monster is not merely a transient phenomenon or opportunity for short-term titillation. By its very nature as a repeated and ritually embodied cultural product, the monster is decidedly in the realm of myth – part of the very social fabric thatDISTRIBUTION defines the life of every human, that describes our values and collective goals and delineates the consequences of deviance from social norms, the “social cement” of Émile Durkheim. The monster is “that which warns,” and the specific nature of the warning is very ancient. The Mesopotamians believed that cosmic events were reflected in quotidian ones,FOR so observable variations in the real world, particularly abnormal births, could be advance notice of an intended cosmic upheaval. Some of the most ancient texts that survive on clay tablets are teratologies – discussions of how to interpret these “monster” births. The monster exists at least partially to serve a cultural role that the mythographer William Doty describedNOT as maieutic, drawing on the Socratic idea that discourse is a sort of “midwife” for knowledge. But maieutic can also mean “mothering” (a perhaps unnecessarily gendered way of saying “parental”). Doty stresses that myths function as parents in teaching socially accepted behaviors:

Myths are normative in supporting particular types of behavior and association and rejecting other exemplary models … Providing social cohesion by creating a shared symbolic articulation of social patterns and relations, they can lead to a releasing of tensions (as in rituals betweenPROOFS age groups) or to blocking nonapproved explorations of relationship or behavior or inquiry.13

It is in the “blocking of nonapproved explorations” that the monster often functions. The existence of the Creature is Frankenstein’s punishment for T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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playing in God’s domain; the vampire’s horriﬁc existence is the price for immortality; having given in to his bestial side, the werewolf lives twenty- nine days of every month in terror of what he might do on the thirtieth; the witch pays for her illicit knowledge with ugliﬁcation and damnation. Little Red Riding Hood was warned not to stray from the path, and lupine ingestion is a natural consequence. Conformity, the monster says by its very existence, may be stultifying and unpleasant, but the consequences of deviance are dire; to move in forbidden zones is to become inhabited by dark powers that ineluctably transform the transgressor. A superhero or a god, like the Greek Apollo, can harmoniously embody oppositional forces: in The Iliad, Apollo’s arrows carry disease as well as healing. This reconciliation of binary opposites is possible for Apollo because he is not human; he is more than human and therefore not limited by human contradictions, even semiotic ones.14 But the monster is, more or less, mortal. Many of the most enduring monsters were onceDISTRIBUTION humans who because of some transgression – the witch with her unholy knowledge; the vampire who cheats death by stealing life from others; the brash scientist who unwisely plays in the creative domain of God – will eventually pay a terrible price. The nature of the monster’s liminality is not transcendence but deviance into forbidden behavior, and soFOR is not harmonious like a saint’s or a god’s but unstable, painful, horrifying, even tragic. Made of nothing but signs, monsters are, in the end, fragile. Exposed to a source of semiotic purity, like sunlight or silver or salt, the monster’s unholy duality is disrupted and the laws it cheats suddenly assert themselves. In the wholesome light of day, the vampire, forNOT example, suddenly becomes what he should have become centuries ago: a pile of dust.

Thesis Six: The fear of the monster is really a kind of desire But the heuristic potential of the monster is not merely to warn us away from wrong behaviors. It is also to remind us that wrong behaviors are often very seductive. Dracula provides an ideal example when Jonathan Harker writes of his encounter with the vampire’s wives: I was afraidPROOFS to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s ﬂesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer – nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.15

Harker is disturbed by Dracula’s wives’ overt, aggressive sexuality, and by the fact that they wish to “penetrate” him, instead of vice versa, as any Victorian male would expect. But most disturbing of all isDISTRIBUTION his realization that he is aroused by this unconventional behavior. This is what most incites Harker’s horror. Dracula and his wives are undead, certainly, and most humans ﬁnd themselves in a primarily esculent relationship with them, but they also enact very human behaviors that scared Bram Stoker and his audience: the necrophile, subversive, enslaver, foreigner,FOR rapist, traitor (particularly to his social class), and, in the most modern sense, sexually queer. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, Henry Jekyll takes his terrible drugs to cure himself of what he calls “a certain impatient gaiety of dis- position”16 that he is unable to reconcile with his public persona, and even after his transformations JekyllNOT still succumbs to “undigniﬁed pleasures.”17 Too Victorian to speak plainly about such matters, Stevenson perhaps clues us in by naming his antagonist after Hyde Park, then notorious as a playground for London’s homosexuals. Undeniably, part of the attraction of the monster is that, among other things, it manifests an alternative to a mundane life – alifeofplayingby the rules, following the herd, keeping one’sheaddown.Themonster rejects stultifying conformity and embraces an alternative, forbidden exploration of self. According to the laws of Rochian surrogation, there is usually a terrible price to pay, as the social order eventually reasserts itself via the (temporary)PROOFS destruction of the monster, just as physical laws cannot be avoided for ever. But as long as there are stultifying social norms, there will be monsters to provide embodied, repeated fantasies of freedom, along with the terrible fears of what might happen if we dare to follow the path of the deviant. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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Thesis Seven: The monster stands on the threshold … of becoming Monsters are dangerous. They are well known for disobeying their creators, but also for signifying things that their authors never intended. Monsterization occurs when a monster’s cultural body can be eﬀectively mapped onto the real body of a real human, and little good can follow. Recognizing that danger, however, arms us well to defend against it and to exploit the monster’s real potential for transformation – this time of ourselves, and for the better. Cohen writes:

Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowingDISTRIBUTION our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge – and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside.18

This “Outside” is not outside of human experience, but a realm of human experience that is outside the normal – unavailable for discussion under ordinary circumstances. Ironically, it isFOR more “ inside” than anything else. Psychologists tell us that one’s conscious self, one’s “ego,” floats like a tiny boat on the storm-tossed seas of the subconscious, where all the important stuff happens – the endless tempest when the biological imperatives of the id smash against the psychic barrier of the superego, when what one wants to do collides with what one oughtNOTto do. The part of ourselves of which we are aware at any given time, they say, is a very small and transient part of the total psychological landscape – only the moment-by-moment result of that ongoing interior struggle. The monster’s power, then, is like a shaman’s: the monster steps into another mode of being, a forbidden and alien one that is normally unseen, and returns hideously changed but loaded with new perspectives, new interpretations, and an arsenal of hermeneutic weaponry to deploy against our various assumptions, prejudices, mores, and self-imposed limits. Because the monster’s body is cultural, it can appear in multiple social sites, and canPROOFS to a certain extent mutate to new requirements of anxiety expression. In performance, because it is embodied and repeated, the monster becomes a prime example of a Roachian surrogate, able to effect erasure (and social amnesia) or to be employed in the service of social self-criticism. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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Because the monster is pleasurable, we allow it in. Because it is horriﬁc, it can touch us where we are most vulnerable – our fear. Because we know it is doomed, we permit it to do its transgressive work, until we cannot stand it anymore, and then it is caught and destroyed. Because it escapes and returns, it can keep on doing that work as long as we have anxieties to fuel it and writers, designers, and actors to rescribe, reconceive, and reembody it in the endless and critically important cycle of surrogation. All that is required of us to gain the best from our monsters and to avoid the worst is that we, like Prospero, acknowledge that the monsters we fear the most are ours. We fear them the most because they best describe us. It requires courage and a certain capacity for irony to acknowledge this; it requires a willingness to investigate our own failures to fall short of our values and goals, and an embrace of the desires we have for the forbidden, even for the obscene and the wicked, although – and perhaps even because – we never intend to act upon thoseDISTRIBUTION desires. Like Arjuna, we must be prepared to confront horror in our quest for knowledge and understanding – the horror that the real monsters are not the ones on the stage or the screen, or the police, or the government, or our parents, or even our childhood bullies. The search for monsters, ultimately and inevitably, turns inwards. FOR Happy hunting.

Notes 1 See Stephen E. Forry, Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia:NOT University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 22. 2 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture,Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–25. 3 See Victor Turner, “Body, Brain, and Culture,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 18:3 (1983): 221–45. 4 “Not My Job: Three Headless Chicken Questions for Alice Cooper.” Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! National Public Radio, Chicago, 18 May 2013. 5 Cohen, 5–6. 6 Zombies, unfortunately, are one of the monsters I have chosen not to pursue in this volume, largely because the theatrical tradition surrounding these monsters is rather thin, unless I am much decieved. Two notable exceptions are the comedy Prom Night of thePROOFS Living Dead by Brad Fraser, which can be found in The Wolf Plays (Edmonton: NeWest, 1993) and Jennifer Haley’s truly haunting and magnificent Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (Los Angeles: Samuel French, 2009). 7 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14 passim. Miller translates jouissance as “bliss.” T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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8 Cohen, 6–7. 9 The oldest published version of this story is thought to be the one in the Flores Historarium (1228), by Roger of Wendover. See: Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, J. A. Giles, trans. (London: Bohn, 1849), 513. The Jew is a shoemaker called Ahashueros, or sometimes a porter called Cartaphilus who works in Pilate’s palace. I believe that the joke itself, which also changes, is important to relate. Roger has the Jew say: “Go quicker, Jesus, go quicker, why do you tarry?” Jesus replies: “I am going, and you will tarry till I return,” or else says: “I will rest a moment, but you will go on to the Last Day.” Both of these versions may be found in Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Rivingtons, 1877), 1–31. In Bulgaria, in 2008, I heard another version of the tale in which the Jew says: “Jesus, when you are cruciﬁed on Calvary, you will be able to see my house!” Jesus replies: “I hope you are still laughing when I get back.” 10 See Raikin Ben-Ari, Habima (New York: Thomas Yoseloﬀ, 1957) for an account of this production, particularly pages 96–110. See also Chapter 5 for more on the Habima theatre troupe. 11 See Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1938–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 19. 12 See: Michael M. Chemers, “Anti-Semitism, Surrogacy,DISTRIBUTION and the Invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the Sacrament,”Comparative Drama 41:1 (2007): 25–55. 13 William Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2000), 68. 14 I am indebted for this observation to a line from a television show: “Bastille Day,” Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel, November 1, 2004). 15 Bram Stoker,Dracula (London: Penguin,FOR 2003), 45 –6. 16 Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Penguin, 2003), 49. 17 Ibid., 53. See Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for a discussion of the role that Hyde Park and other West End locations played in this context. 18 Cohen, 20. NOT

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2 PROMETHEUS THE THIEF

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There is, perhaps, no single monster more recognizable at the time of writing than the Creature of Mary Shelley’s 1819 novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. He is perfectly suited toFOR express the anxieties of modernity, including the increasing popularity of psychoanalysis and the explosive, seemingly unrestrained advance of technology, as well as more primal and deep-seated fears of death and loss. But the image of the Creature that dominates the monstrous popular imagination is a performative rather than a literary one, and owes at leastNOT as much to a performance tradition that is thousands of years old as to Shelley’s novel. Further, few scholars of Shelley and her monstrous legacy have deeply explored the relationship between her novel and Aeschylus’ ancient play Prometheus Bound. I therefore wish to begin my monstrous genealogies by exploring the theatrical legacy of Frankenstein’s Creature. To come to the deepest possible understanding of the Creature and his astonishing impact on our culture, we must delve deeply into a theatrical tradition that is very ancient indeed. The myth upon which Aeschylus drew for inspiration remains well known by any aﬁcionado of Greek mythology. Long before humans appeared inPROOFS the world, so the tradition goes, the earth and cosmos were dominated by a race of powerful divine beings, the Titans. Their king, Kronos, became the ﬁrst hero when he rose up against his abusive father, Uranos (the night sky, who created all life on earth by raping his wife, Gaia, the earth, every night as he spread himself across her). To defend his T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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mother, Kronos castrated Uranos, cut him to pieces, and spread him around the universe. Reflecting on this series of events, Kronos came to believe that his own children could be a threat to him, so, as they were born, he ate them. But his youngest son Zeus escaped this fate and grew up to free his siblings, the gods, and to lead a revolutionary war against his father and the Titans, assuming the mantle of all-father, ruler of the universe. Prometheus, whose name translates to Forethought, was the son of Kronos’ sister Themis, who still embodies justice to this day. (For instance, she stands, holding her scales and the sword that cleaves fact from fiction, as the golden statue “Lady Justice” on the roof of the Old Bailey in London.) As children of Justice, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus were among the very few Titans to defect to the side of the gods in the great war against the tyrannical Kronos and his kin. Prometheus’ wisdom and strategy were critical to the victory of the gods. After the fall of the Titanomachy, Pro- metheus also helped Zeus to administrate his newDISTRIBUTION regime, assigning various powers and privileges to the other gods. It was Zeus who commanded Prometheus to fashion the human race from water and earth. After he had created humans, Prometheus observed them to be frightened, cold, starving, and mindless, not knowing themselves as humans. Zeus ordained the destruction of humanityFOR (in favor of creating a better species), but Prometheus disobeyed his command. From Zeus’ own primary weapon, lightning, Prometheus took fire and bestowed it upon humanity, saving his creations. As punishment for stealing fire and other actions that showed preferential treatment for humans, Zeus ordered Prometheus to be chained to the bare face of a highNOT mountain, and sent a vicious bird of prey to devour his liver, which regenerated each day. In the myth, Zeus also attempted to wipe out humanity with a great flood, but here he was again outmaneuvered by Prometheus. Humanity was saved by Prometheus’ own human son, Deukalion, who used the skills he had learned to build an ark. After 10,000 years of suffering, Prometheus was finally freed by the hero Herakles.1 Aeschylus’ play is only one of many ancient sources of the biography of Prometheus, and it presents a few unique elements not found in other tellings. For the purposes of this study, three are of particular significance: thePROOFS presence of monsters; “blind hope”; and the responsibilities of creators to their creations. A close reading of the text reveals some striking discoveries that help us understand the play’s centrality to the study of monsters in modernity, and these will become foundational to the discussions that follow in this volume. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:36

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Monstrous transgressions The play introduces us to two undeniably monstrous characters: Κράτος (Kratos), translated by David Grene as “Might,”2 but which other translators have named “Power”; and Βία (Bia), whom Grene calls “Violence,” but other translators have named “Force.” The play gives us no clues as to the appearance or origin of these creatures; we know only that they are supernatural creatures of malice who serve Zeus as enforcers. Their names compel us to examine them as allegorical figures, stand-ins for the complex political concepts the play’s author wishes to examine. In the first minutes of the play, these characters appear with Hephaestus, son of Zeus and a cousin and friend of Prometheus. As the god of smiths, Hephaestus is, like Prometheus, a pioneer and teacher of technology, but now his skills are used to imprison and torture the rebel Titan. This is a gruesome task – Hephaestus must chain Prometheus to fetters nailedDISTRIBUTION to the rock, rendering his arms, legs, and waist immobile, and drive a stone wedge through his chest. Prometheus can survive this, as he is immortal, but it is unclear how the play’s author intended this brutal action to be staged. Like all Greek plays, this one has no original stage directions – we infer the action of the scene from the dialogue between Hephaestus and Power. Hephaestus has a lot to say – he is veryFOR keen to communicate to Pro- metheus his distaste for the task and reluctance to commit this atrocity on his friend. “For myself,” he says, “I have not the heart to bind violently a God who is my kin here on this wintry cliff. Yet there is constraint upon me not to treat the Father’s words lightly” (ll. 14–17). Hephaestus cannot bring himself to disobey Zeus,NOT so instead tries to assuage his conscience by begging Prometheus for forgiveness. The demonic Power has a great deal to say as well; secure in its role as proxy for the ruler of the universe, it asserts – unconvincingly – that it takes no delight in the efficient execution of its duties. It lambastes Prometheus, mocking him for his rebellion, but does not spare Hephaestus either, excoriating him for his reluctance and threatening divine retribution if the smith fails to display loyalty to Zeus. For all its monstrosity, Power is only a mouthpiece, with no power of its own, save to abuse and humiliate, and it resembles nothing so much as an officious bureaucrat reveling in momentary superiority. The other monster, Force, saysPROOFS nothing, although the reader must infer that it is quite busy holding Prometheus still and forcing the Titan into his restraints as Hephaestus prepares them. It is no surprise that Force is mute; it is a brute, mindless and with no other purpose than to cause pain. Both monsters, the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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play seems to argue, are important tools for a tyrant, who requires self- important administrators and unquestioning, gleefully violent enforcers to maintain control. Prometheus could destroy both of them quite easily, but instead allows himself to be fettered and transfixed to the rock. The other character that does not speak in this scene is Prometheus himself. If the other three characters are allegorical, it makes dramaturgical sense to consider Prometheus as an allegory as well. He appears as the theatrical embodiment of Knowledge, which is to say the kinds of beneficial truths that are revealed by reason and scientific inquiry. As humans watching the performance, we are sympathetic to the Titan in this scene, considering he must endure not only torture and pain but trumped-up bureaucratic demons and his friend’s betrayal for a “crime” which amounted to humanity’s salvation. So Prometheus’ silence, like everything he does, is carefully calculated. As the embodiment of Knowledge, he has nothingDISTRIBUTION to say to either Power or Force. Power’s abuses and barbs do not touch him, because Prometheus is in no way surprised by this turn of events. Prophetic, he has always known that Zeus would punish him, and in what manner. Dialogue with these little monsters is pointless. His silence to Hephaestus, on the other hand, is eloquent. Hephaestus, his cousinFOR and erstwhile collaborator in the improvement of the human condition, pleads for Prometheus to alleviate the crushing guilt he feels for not taking his own principled stand against tyranny, but Prometheus refuses to reply, which makes him the most theatrically potent character in the scene, even though he is mute, imprisoned, and tortured. His silence condemnsNOT Hephaestus and forces the god to take responsibility for his own role in supporting a tyrant. Prometheus’ meek cooperation with his own imprisonment at the hands of lesser beings is a sign of his noble character; this is, after all, civil disobedience. Greek mythology abounds with crimes, peccadilloes, and outrages perpetrated by the gods, who are like children with ridiculous power, but only Prometheus is punished in this unique way, because his crimes were specifically contrary to Zeus’ own authority. Prometheus is not merely a criminal but a rebel, taking a just stand against tyranny. This brings into focus a politically inconvenient truth: Zeus was once a rebel himself, and he has become a tyrantPROOFS in his own right. The Machiavellian Zeus must punish the friend who helped him to dominion horribly and publicly, so that everyone in his unruly, powerful family understands the price of rebellion. Pro- metheus is cast in the role of monster – outsider, throwback to a darker age, threat to the new social order. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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But again, Prometheus has thought this project through with great care. He knew that Zeus would punish him and how, so his submission to that punishment is itself an act of defiance which makes visible the moral contradictions necessary to a tyrannical reign. “Pitiless is he that thus chastises me,” he says, “aspectaclebringingdishonortothenameof Zeus” (ll. 242–4). In his wisdom, he knows that his punishment will have alimit,andhewilleventuallybefreedandreconciledwithZeusbecause of some knowledge Prometheus has withheld that concerns Zeus’ own political survival. In the play, Hermes does his best to threaten and coerce that information out of Prometheus, to no avail, and we infer that the play ends with Prometheus taking a punitive strike from the thunderbolt of a distant, but carefully watching, Zeus. Prometheus willingly subjects himself to this suffering for the noblest reason a human being can imagine: to alleviate the suffering of his children. DISTRIBUTION

Regarding parenting Fire, Prometheus explains in the play, “became the teacher of each craft to men” (ll. 111). Prometheus lists these craftsFOR to the Chorus of sea-nymphs who come to comfort him. They include the construction of brick buildings, woodworking, the creation of a calendar for planting crops, astronomy, mathematics, language, the domestication of animals, shipbuilding, medicine, prophecy, mining, metalworking, the art of pleasing the gods with sacrifices, and even harnessing solar power;NOT indeed, he brags, “every art of mankind comes from Prometheus” (ll. 450–505). It was, then, not exactly fire that Prometheus gave to men but tekne: the knowledge of how to use that fire in the service of the development of science and technology that improves human life and makes civilization possible.3 Tekne is one of the attributes of humanity that defines what it is to be human. But it is what this gift removed from humanity that is, in the end, far more important. Consider this exchange between the Titan and nymphs:

CHORUS: Did you perhaps go further than you have told us? PROMETHEUS:PROOFSYes. I stopped mortals from forseeing doom. CHORUS: What cure did you discover for that sickness? PROMETHEUS: I sowed in them blind hopes. CHORUS: That was a great gift that you gave to men. (ll. 249–53) T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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Possibly because Prometheus created humans in his own image, humans at one time had an innate ability to prophesy; and considering their circumstances, they unsurprisingly prophesied doom. As a mortal being, there can be only one fate for any individual human: death. Hope for the future, then, blinds humans to that mortality and makes possible advancements that extend the longevity and success of the species. It is stimulating to imagine this hope-inspired blindness as a metaphor for a phenomenon of the sensitivity of the human eye to intense light sources, like fire. Every human knows that bright light will spoil a human’s night vision, rendering the world beyond the glow into a black abyss. Blinding us with fire to the terrors waiting in the darkness, to the inevitability of our own individual deaths, Prometheus saved our species, which now uses tekne to improve the lives of each succeeding generation, until our status comes to rival that of the gods themselves, and beyond. Prometheus knew that this double gift of fire, whichDISTRIBUTION empowers humanity to create but also strips away our (unhelpful) foresight, would result in ten thousand years of exile and torture for himself. In the play, the Titan willingly subjects himself to this because his sense of obligation to humanity – his creation – is stronger than his fear of Zeus. This is the greatest contrast between the two divine beings: Zeus,FOR as all-father and king, should be compassionate and kind to those who are under his care, but instead he shows the callous disregard of a tyrant, while Prometheus models a more nurturing conscientiousness of his role as creator. His punishment itself excoriates Zeus for his failures as a surrogate father to Prometheus, even as Prometheus sacrifices everythingNOT for his own children. The implications of this conflict have important consequences for the analysis of monsters in performance in the modern era.

The modern Prometheus Prometheus received much attention from the Romantic crowd of artists and thinkers of which Mary Shelley was an important member. As a character from the Ancient Greek culture that European intellectuals idolized, and from a classical source as unimpeachable as pious Aeschylus, Prometheus was an idealPROOFS vehicle for a Romantic attack on traditional forms of authority. Blake, Coleridge, and Goethe each invoked him as an exemplar of creativity, compassion, and self-sacriﬁce in the face of hegemonic tyranny.4 In 1816, Byron published his poem “Prometheus,” in which he praises the protagonist of Aeschylus’ play as a champion of humanity. In his willingness T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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to speak truth to power and suffer the consequences for the benefit of humanity, the Titan more closely resembles (to Byron) a martyred Jesus than a rebellious Satan. Percy Shelley would write his own play on the subject in 1820 – Prometheus Unbound. This context is important in our process of divining why Mary Shelley subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus and then never mentioned the unhappy Titan again. We must consider it an invitation to compare her tale of a misguided scientist with the classical play. This invitation is usually only cursorily accepted by critics and historians, who do little more than observe that both the titular character and the tortured Titan transgressed against God in the ostensible service of humanity and were therefore punished.5 This critique misses what may be Shelley’s most significant themes, and it is important to understanding the ensuing two centuries of performative reimaginings of the novel. Mary Shelley met Byron just before he publishedDISTRIBUTION his “Prometheus.” By that time, she had been exposed to extraordinary thinkers and suffered terrible losses in her nineteen years. Her own mother, the pioneering feminist philosopher and reformer Mary Wollstonecraft, contracted puerperal sepsis from the doctor who helped to deliver Mary6 in 1797 and died of a fever ten days later. As a child, Mary idolizedFOR her deceased mother and her father William Godwin, a principled intellectual and progressive political reformer; together, they had been among the most famous radicals of their era. In 1801, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, a tempestuous companion whom Mary would grow to despise. Their first child together, William, was stillborn in 1802, but anotherNOT son (also named William) was born the following year. Mary was raised in a household that was visited by the most famous intellectuals of the day as well as erudite students who sought out Godwin’s mentorship; one of the latter was Percy Bysshe Shelley, a brilliant poet and idealistic humanitarian who had been expelled from Oxford for authoring a tract on atheism. Percy, who was twenty and married when he met the fifteen-year-old Mary, became a fixture in the Godwin household and a financial supporter of William Godwin in his old age. Percy and Mary had expressed their love for one another by 1814. Mary became pregnant,PROOFS but her daughter was born premature in February 1815 and did not live long. Mary was heartbroken and traumatized, and suffered vivid nightmares involving her dead baby; Percy apparently did not share her grief, distracted perhaps by Jane “Claire” Clairmont, Mary’sstepsister.7 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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Sometime in 1815, Claire became the lover of Lord Byron, whom she met through their mutual involvement in the Drury Lane Theatre. Mary and Percy had a son, William, in January 1816. Three months later, Byron left England for Switzerland in a cloud of scandal, never to return. Clairmont, by now pregnant with his daughter, determined to pursue him, with Percy and Mary as chaperones. They secured a chalet on the shore of Lake Geneva, close to Byron’s, and according to their diaries became great friends in short order. Byron was another great admirer of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, and was, by all accounts, happy to engage in serious philosophical and political conversations with both Shelleys. He was deeply supportive of Mary’s literary efforts, especially Frankenstein, which was originally Mary’s contribution to a famous ghost-story writing contest that also gave birth to what would eventually become Dracula (see Chapter 4 for more on this momentous evening). It is difficult to resist drawing parallels betweenDISTRIBUTION Mary Shelley’s life and that of her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein. Victor has an infant brother named William (Shelley’s father’s name and the names of her two half- brothers – one living, one stillborn), whose mother died in childbirth (as did Shelley’s). Still tormented by the premature death of her own child and her husband’s callousness over it, scarred overFOR her own mother’s death and her role in it (however innocent), and angry at her illustrious father for his disregard of her emotional needs, Shelley would be sympathetic not only to the unnaturally minded Victor but also to his unnaturally natured Creature. Furthermore, as we shall see, to accept Shelley’s invitation to compare her novel to Prometheus Bound isNOT to recognize that the Creature’s monstrosity has much more to do with nurture than nature. Early in the novel, Victor envisions himself in Promethean terms, albeit not explicitly. After he discovers the secret of bestowing life on inanimate matter, he dreams that “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their beings to me.”8 But when he has finished his task, he is overcome by horror:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such inﬁnite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?PROOFS His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and ﬂowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.9

Victor’s horror multiplies when he realizes he has succeeded, and the Creature is imbued with life to become “such a thing as even Dante could not have conceived.”10 His reaction to his creation, desperate and wretched, is to abandon it, which could not be more diametrically opposed to Prometheus’ attitude to his. Victor’s behavior from this point on is far more akin to that of the tyrannical Zeus – lacking in pity, decency, and accountability. In fact, the Creature later makes it perfectly clear to Victor that his abandonment when newly risen was the source of his malicious behavior:

I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to everyDISTRIBUTION other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and aﬀection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and goodFOR– misery made me a ﬁend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.11

The Creature maintains, and there is no reason to disbelieve him, that it was not any innate unnatural qualify within himself that made him evil, but rather Victor’s abandonmentNOT which left him emotionally unequipped to deal with the harsh realities of human social interaction. Artificial himself, he is an embodiment of “natural” virtue (or, he argues, would have been with proper parenting), and wants nothing more than to live in an Edenic state of harmony with a female companion and then redress Victor’s failures by being, himself, a better parent. Victor, true to his own character, vacillates. He gives in to the reasonableness of the request, conceding to build his Creature a mate, but later rejects it with horror and destroys his own labors at the thought of this female Creature giving birth – a horrific reversal from his original vision of himself as the lionized progenitor of a superior species. The Creature,PROOFS true to his word, destroys everything Victor loves in retalia- tion; and in one final vacillation, Victor finally takes responsibility for his Creature by vowing to destroy it utterly. Even on his deathbed, as he recounts his tragic tale to Walton by way of warning him away from his own ill-considered dreams of glory and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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progress, Victor seems unaware that his miseries were caused not by his failure to be an obedient servant of God and nature, but by his failure to act as a responsible parent to his oﬀspring. This observation rather complicates the usual conclusion that, as Martin Tropp argues,

if Mary Shelley’s hero is a “modern Prometheus,” then he is a Faustian and not a [Percy] Shelleyan Prometheus. The subtitle is a reminder of the disastrous consequences of attempting to control higher powers for earthly purposes. Her Promethean scientist plays God, building a creature that he hopes will be the ﬁrst of a “new species [that] would bless me as its creator and source” but which turns out to be the vulture that carries out his eternal torment.12

Here, Tropp’s excellent study succumbs to a common misreading of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound that, I argue respectfully,DISTRIBUTION leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of Frankenstein’s errors and punishment. He is, after all, a modern Prometheus, and the Romantic view of modernity, with its willingness to embrace novelty without considering the costs, is dim indeed. For Shelley, modernity represents a failure in the blindness to our own mortality that results from the glimmeringFOR brilliance of tekne and its vast potential, of empathy. Since Prometheus is the one who brought us fire, perhaps this is part of the blindness that he also delivered. But Pro- metheus is not a creator who abandons his creations when they fall short of his expectations; he is a nurturing, selfless father who suffers over the fate of his children, looks upon themNOT with love, not horror, and sacrifices himself to prevent their murder rather than trying, as Frankenstein does, to commit it. Frankenstein, in his modernity, fails not when he conceives the idea to create life, but when he neglects the offspring he has brought into the world. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is an immensely complex novel, fraught with these and other ambiguities and contradictions that render it productively dialectical and aesthetically compelling two centuries after the death of its author. It has seized hold of popular cultural consciousness in societies all over the world. It behooves us, not just monster theorists, toPROOFS understand the relationship of the Romantic novel to its ancient theatrical companion. But this is only the beginning of the exploration of the cultural power of this story; the rest of the story, as we shall see in Chapter 3, has more to do with theatre than with the novel itself. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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Notes 1 I look to the authority of Robert Graves for background on the Prometheus mythology (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin, 1960), 138–149). The Hebrew tradition of Noah and his ark is only one of many biblical stories that appear to be in direct dialogue with tales from Greek mythology. Like the God of Genesis, Prometheus crafts humans from water and earth. Moreover, Prometheus’ father is the Titan Iapetus, which translates into Hebrew as “Japeth,” the name of one of Noah’s sons (Graves, 142). 2 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. In Aeschylus II (2nd edn), David Grene and Rich- mond Lattimore, eds.; David Grene, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Grene’s translation is used for all subsequent extracts from the play. 3 I am forever indebted to my friend and mentor, the late scholar Brian Johnson, for suggesting this concept to me. 4 Blake in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” Coleridge in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (which Mary heard Coleridge himself recite in her own home in 1806), and Goethe in his play Prometheus. SeeAnne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989), 11, 71. 5 See Martin Tropp, Mary Shelley’s Monster: The StoryDISTRIBUTION of Frankenstein (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 56–7, for an immensely valuable dissenting view. 6 I am acutely sensitive to a certain convention among historians to refer to their male subjects by their surnames, but their female subjects by their given names, and how this can imply or even incite a sexist underestimation of or an inap- propriate familiarity with female subjects. This is a particular danger with Mary Shelley, who has suffered from a great dealFOR of undeserved calumny from historians who have dismissed her writings, particularly during this period, as “minor” works or even as plagiarisms of her husband, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. Therefore, I have generally attempted to refer to Mary Shelley in this book as “Shelley.” However, I find myself in difficulty if I write, for example, “Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to Shelley,” which generates considerable confusion since her name was “Mary Godwin” at the time of her birth, and indeed she was still technicallyNOT Godwin when she wrote Frankenstein. Further confusion arises from the fact that there were not only many Marys in Shelley’s family but also a great crowd of Percys and Williams, most of whom died tragically and/or violently. I therefore ask the reader to recognize that, knowing I must err, I hope at least to err for the sake of clarity. 7 In my opinion, Mellor, 1–37 provides the most insightful and well-researched biography of Mary Shelley’s early life. 8 Mary Shelley, . Frankenstein: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Johanna M. Smith, ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 58. 9 Ibid., 60. 10 Ibid., 61. 11 Ibid., 93. 12 Tropp, 57.PROOFS

3 PRESUMPTION

DISTRIBUTION

Playwrights inspired by Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus wasted no time in adapting the novel to the stage, buoyed by the explosive popularity of the novel and undeterred by the toothlessFOR copyright laws of the era. Stage recreations would continue to be so popular over the next hundred years that it should come as no surprise that many important early films would take the story as their theme. Unfortunately, most critics of Frankenstein in performance give short shrift to this century of theatrical production in their impatience to get to the films.NOT1 Very few acknowledge, as Jeanne Tiehen recently has, that “the silent monster Karloff crafted was indebted to the Frankenstein plays that were performed in England and France nearly a hundred years prior.”2 It is true that these plays reflect the expectations of nineteenth-century audiences of popular theatre (as opposed to the licensed theatres that operated under royal patents, the only theatres in London permitted to present conventional dramas), and they are rich in high melodrama, sensationalism, and sumptuously violent special effects, not to mention massive revisions between revivals. A close look at this history, however, reveals two significant truths: first,PROOFS that the early productions of the play have interesting elements in common with Prometheus Bound; and, second, that the iconic film versions of the story that have come to dominate our modern understanding of this popular monster owe at least as much to the tale’s theatrical legacy as to the original novel. As we will see, this two-century-old T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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tradition of theatre-making results in a popular conception of Frankenstein that diverges in several significant ways from the original novelistic telling of the tale, and leaves us with a monster that carries a very different set of meanings into the twenty-first century.

“———” The first stage adaptation of Frankenstein was Richard Brinsley Peake’s Pre- sumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, which premiered at the English Opera House in London in 1823, starring the celebrated stage villain Thomas Potter Cooke in the monstrous role.3 Peake’s play is particularly important for several key features it adds to the character of the Creature, who is unnamed, referred to only as “———” in the dramatis personae and as “The Demon” in the stage directions.4 In addition to other infidelities to the novel but in keeping with other melodramasDISTRIBUTION popular in the era, Pre- sumption adds songs, a fetching “Arabian girl,” a band of colorful Gypsies, a couple of romantic subplots, and a comic malapropist servant, Fritz, who would become a staple of future adaptations under other names. When the play opens at Frankenstein’s Gothic house in Geneva, Fritz confesses that he believes Frankenstein is dealing with darkFOR spirits, “like Dr. Faustus” (I.i). This direct mention of Faust seems to support the conventional analysis of Frankenstein, punished, like Faust, for his own hubris rather than for his failures of empathy. But Clerval, betrothed to Frankenstein’s sister Elizabeth, mocks the superstitious peasant and assures him that nothing but science is afoot. Frankenstein enters shortlyNOT thereafter, his health evidently destroyed by his manic devotion to his studies. When he is alone, he breaks into a soliloquy in which he brags that “like Prometheus of old, have I daringly attempted the formation – the animation of a Being!” (I.i). By mentioning Prometheus, Peake’s Frankenstein already shows somewhat more mythic self-awareness than Shelley’s; but otherwise, this monologue is pirated nearly verbatim from Chapter 3 of the novel.5 Two scenes later, Frankenstein completes his quest, and the presence of a storm factors heavily. He declares: “A storm has hastily arisen! –’Tis a dreary night – the rain patters dismally against the panes –’tis a night for such a task –PROOFSI’ll in and attempt to infuse the spark of life” (I.iii). The presence of a storm is the first unprecedented element of this monster tale that will become central to future retellings. In the novel, Frankenstein’s success in animating the Creature occurs on “a dreary night of November.”6 No storm is mentioned; rather to the contrary, it is only “by the dim and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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yellow night of the moon”7 that Frankenstein beholds the wretched creation that so horrifies him. Despite the interest of the Byron circle in recent experiments to animate dead animal tissue through galvanism,8 Shelley gives no indication whatsoever that electricity is involved in the animation of the Creature. Storms abounded in melodramatic plays of the period, to be sure, and there is no specific indication that the storm is necessary to the creation of the monster; not yet. Instead, the moment is acknowledged by a light in a “small high lattice window of the laboratory”–into which Fritz is peeping with the aid of a footstool – that changes from blue to red. However, the presence of a storm would become sine qua non for this moment in almost all subsequent theatrical and cinematic retellings. Peake may have added the storm simply to increase the dramatic effect and to make use of the resources of the English Opera House, which specialized in supernatural melodramas (see Chapter 4) and was equipped to generate all manner of sensational effects. But in Prometheus Bound, withDISTRIBUTION which Peake was clearly familiar, the symbolism of the storm is important: it signifies the presence of a wrathful Zeus hurling a thunderbolt at the imprisoned Titan for his refusal to submit. At the moment the light changes, Frankenstein (offstage) cries: “It lives! It lives!” This is the first appearance ofFOR that signature phrase which would come to be synonymous with the Frankenstein story itself. This, again, is a significant departure from the novel, in which a horrified Frankenstein is so overwhelmed by the success of his experiment that he flees in terror. The enthusiasm of Peake’s Frankenstein is short-lived, however, and after a moment’s reflection the scientistNOT wails: “What have I accomplished? The beauty of my dream has vanished! And breathless horror and disgust fill my heart.” He goes on to describe the monster that is rising just offstage, which, despite blatant plagiarism from Shelley, again represents a major divergence from the novel. Here, a presumptuous but naive Frankenstein is suddenly confronted by the primal wrongness of his “impious” actions, a sudden realization of his own foolish and wicked attempt to play God, and this anagnoresis (which came upon him in a flash of insight) is what fills him with his hatred for his creation. The monster retains a bit of depth and demonstrates at least a minor capacity to becomePROOFS something other than a twisted killer, but it is already too late for him. As soon as Frankenstein finishes speaking, the Demon smashes through the locked laboratory door, wreathed in smoke and flame, as if emerging from a medieval Hell-mouth. His actions are violent and quick, but he approaches Frankenstein “with gestures of conciliation.” T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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Frankenstein, having already made up his mind to destroy his “impious” work, responds by pulling a sword from the wall and threatening the Demon. The monster seizes the sword, snaps it in two, throws Frankenstein violently to the floor and disappears into the stormy night. Act II finds Frankenstein at Elizabeth’s villa, Belrive, fleeing from the Demon and regretting his creation of “a creature powerful in form, of supernatural and gigantic strength, but with the mind of an infant.” The notion that the Demon has a childlike mind is also quite unprecedented. Shelley’s Creature is anything but childlike: although he is created with an unfilled mind and explores the world with a certain nescience, he is capable of critical analysis and when he confronts his creator he speaks with the erudition and authority of a moral philosopher. Another change: Frankenstein is already preparing himself to murder the Demon. By the analogous point in the novel, Victor is trying to forget the entire experiment and has no knowledge of whether the Creature is alive or dead.DISTRIBUTION The Demon, on the other hand, spends Act II exploring the world with mute innocence. He eventually stumbles upon Old DeLacey, a blind exile who attracts the monster by playing the lute (II.iii). In return, the monster shows affection to the old man by bringing him wood for his fire, a mystery that delights DeLacey as well as hisFOR son and daughter, who are soon involved in tangled subplots: Felix is enamored of the “Arabian girl,” Safie, who escaped her own repressive culture to join him in his father’s exile; and Agatha was betrothed to Frankenstein but feels that he has abandoned her to follow his scientific pursuits. A chance meeting between Felix, Frankenstein, and the Gypsies clues the scientistNOT to the whereabouts of the Demon. In Scene V, the Demon reveals himself to Agatha near DeLacey’s cottage; horrified, she falls into a stream but the monster rescues her. He is standing over DeLacey and the reviving Agatha “with fondness” when Felix and Frankenstein burst in. Felix shoots the Demon; wounded, the monster rushes at Felix with a burning branch, but, clapping eyes on his creator, exits the house “in agony of feeling.” However, he soon returns to burn down the cottage “with malignant joy” as the Gypsies sing. At no point in Act II does the Demon utter a single word. As far as his muteness is concerned, the Demon has less in common with Shelley’s eloquent Creature thanPROOFS with the stoically silent Prometheus, who refrains from speaking in the presence of his tormentors even as he is nailed to the mountain peak in the first part of Aeschylus’ play. The muteness of the character instantly becomes one of his performative hallmarks, despite its disloyalty to the novel. Another trait that features prominently in this play is T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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the monster’s attraction to music; this is indicated but not particularly emphasized in the novel. Reviews noted that the actor, Cooke, played up this trait, which gave his silent character psychological depth and vulnerability. This too would become a hallmark of later theatrical and eventually cinematic versions of the story. At the start of Act III, Clerval and Elizabeth welcome the DeLacey entourage into their house, and perhaps naively hoping that the upset will not delay their wedding plans. Frankenstein is discovered consumed by fear, rage, and guilt, remarking: “My hours pass in dread, and soon the bolt may fall which will deprive me of existence!” This reference to a bolt again seems far stronger in reference to Prometheus Bound, wherein the hero is shattered by a bolt from Zeus, than to any particular point in the novel, and lightning will play an expanding role in future productions. Frankenstein has convinced himself that the Demon is plotting malice and must be destroyed. The Demon kidnaps Frankenstein’s youngDISTRIBUTION brother William from under Fritz’s nose. Later, he mutely taunts Frankenstein, using William as a human shield, and lures his creator away. A frightening scene follows in which the Demon sneaks past Frankenstein and into Agatha’s room and strangles her to death. Frankenstein witnesses the crime in the reflection of her glass bedroom door. FOR Finally, the scientist and the monster meet high in the mountains. Frankenstein fires a musket at the monster, which causes an avalanche to fall and annihilate both himself and his creation. The remaining characters gather as snow falls and loud thunder is heard. This final confrontation between the major players onNOT a bleak mountaintop is denied to the novel but present in the final beats of Prometheus Bound, and it will be emphasized in subsequent stage adaptations (see below). One final piece of interesting evidence to examine is the costume worn by Cooke, for whom the monster was a career-making role that he would reprise – along with other monsters – for the rest of his life. In a famous drawing of the actor in the role, he appears in a Greek-style chiton with long, wild hair – invoking the fallen Titan far more than anything in Shelley’s novel (Figure 3.1; see also Figure 3.2). The impact of the play was instant and enormous. The English Opera House, alsoPROOFS known as the Lyceum, boasted one of the few stages with interior gas lighting and could seat 1,500 patrons. Although exact atten- dance figures are not available, contemporary sources attest to the play’s sudden popularity. A review in the London Morning Post on Tuesday, July 29, 1823 reads: T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:37

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DISTRIBUTION

FOR

NOT

FIGURE 3.1 Nathan Whittock’s drawing of T. P. Cooke as the Demon and James William Wallack as Frankenstein in Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, English Opera House (1823) Source: Housed at the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. PROOFS There is something in the piecemeal resurrection eﬀected by Frankenstein, which, instead of creating that awful interest intended to arise from it, gives birth to a feeling of horror. We have not that taste for the monstrous which can enable us to enjoy it in the midst of the most startling absurdities.9 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:03:50

DISTRIBUTION

FOR

NOT

PROOFS FIGURE 3.2 Front cover of the ﬁrst edition of Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein Source: Dicks’ Standard Plays, 1823. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:08

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The critic would soon be proven to have drastically underestimated London audiences’“taste for the monstrous.” The show was a respectable success. The following day’s Post contained another, far more appreciative, review:

The representation of this piece upon the stage is of astonishing, of enchaining, interest. In the novel the rigid moralist may feel himself constantly offended, by the modes of reasoning, principles of action, &c. – But in the Drama this is all carefully kept in the back ground. Nothing but what can please, astonish, and delight, is there suffered to appear; Frankenstein despairingly bewails his attempt as impious, and suffers for it; partial justice is rendered; and many more incidents in the novel might have been pourtrayed, of harrowing interest! Though without infringing good taste. As it stands, however, as a drama, it is most effective; and T.P. COOKE well pourtrays what indeed it is a proof of his extraordinary genius so well toDISTRIBUTION pourtray – an unhappy being without the pale of nature – a monster.10

This reviewer, it seems, finds the hyperbolic and slapdash plot of the stage version less offensive to his morality than the more complex and nuanced novel. The review notes that FrankensteinFOR’s anagnoresis is that his act of creation is impious and it is for this that he suffers, while “———” is merely an innocent who, the review continues, “is good … disposed to be affectionate” until the cruelty of others excites his “malignity” and urge for revenge. A third reviewer was MaryNOT Shelley herself, who returned from a tour of Europe in time to catch the August 29 performance. In a letter to Leigh Hunt dated September 9, 1823, she writes:

But lo & behold! I found myself famous! Frankenstein had prodigious success as a drama & was about to be repeated for the 23rd night at the English opera house. The play bill amused me extremely, for in the list of dramatis personae came, ——— by Mr. T. Cooke: this nameless mode of naming the un[n]ameable is rather good … The story is not well managed – but Cooke played ———’s part extremely well – his seekingPROOFS as it were for support – his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard – all indeed he does was well imagined & executed. I was much amused & it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience – it was a third piece a scanty pit ﬁlled at half-price – & all stayed til it was over. They continue to play it even now.11 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:08

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Shelley also displays an attitude which seems cavalier to a modern critic: apart from noting that the story is “not well managed,” she seems quite willing to see the forest for the trees as a member of her own eager (if scanty) audience. The show ran for a total of thirty-seven performances, ending in October, but was revived the following year. The production moved to Covent Garden later that year, and to Paris’ center of horror theatre, the Grand Guignol, in 1826. Cooke would play the role of the monster some 365 times over the next seven years. The play’s popularity also incited several burlesques, including Another Piece of Presumption (also by Peake, at the Adelphi, 1823), Frankenstitch; or, the Needle Prometheus (Surrey, 1823), and Frank-in-Steam (Olympic, 1824).12 The next serious London adaptation of the play premiered at the Royal Coburg on July 3, 1826 – Henry M. Milner’s The Man and the Monster! Or, the Fate of Frankenstein. O. Smith13 was cast as theDISTRIBUTION still-unnamed monster. Two years earlier, he had portrayed the monster in a low-budget Theatre Royal (Birmingham) production of Peake’s play, in which the avalanche was represented by a whitewashed canvas elephant cannibalized from another play that was pushed over the flies too early, leaving Smith to improvise his death.14 In Milner’s play,FOR the action unfolds in Tuscany, where the Prince of Piombino has become the patron and protector of Frankenstein. “I feel most deeply,” Frankenstein tells the Prince’s sister Rosura, “that rank and opulence can never do themselves greater honour than by protecting genius. The prince who, rewards, assists, and forwards it, not only reaps the fruit of his sublimeNOT discoveries, but becomes the sharer of his immortality” (I.i).15 Rosura is clearly taken by the scientist, although Frankenstein is betrothed to another new character, Emmeline. The third scene of the Act I contains the first onstage theatricalization of what would become one of the most well-known scenes in popular culture, the vivification of the creature:

FRANKENSTEIN: (music – he rolls back the black covering, which discovers a colossal human ﬁgure, of a cadaverous livid complexion; it slowly begins to rise, gradually attaining an erect posture, Frankenstein observing with intense anxiety. When it has attainedPROOFS a perpendicular position, and glares its eyes upon him, he starts back with horror) Merciful heaven! And has the fondest visions of my fancy awakened to this terrible reality; a form of horror, which I scarcely dare to look upon; instead of the fresh colour of humanity, he wears the livid hue of the damp grave. Oh, horror! Horror! Let me ﬂy this T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:08

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dreadful monster of my own creation!While Frankenstein buries his head in his hands, the Monster ﬁgures out how to use his limbs, and reaches out tenderly to Frankenstein, but the scientist draws his sword and attacks his creation. The Monster easily overpowers Frankenstein and leaps through the window. The Monster’s costume is described as: “Close vest and leggings of a very pale yellowish brown, heightened with blue, as if to show the muscles, &c., Greek shirt of very dark brown, broad black leather belt.” This description renders the Monster similar to Peake’s Demon in coloring but with a shirt that is recognizably “Greek,” perhaps in a conscious attempt to invoke the fallen Titan.

The next scene repeats the sudden conversion of Frankenstein’s triumph into horror:

FRANKENSTEIN: Have all my dreams of greatnessDISTRIBUTION ended here? Is this the boasted wonder of my science, is this the offspring of long years of toilsome study and noisome labour? Is my fairest model of perfection come to this – a hideous monster, a loathsome mass of animated putrefaction, whom but to gaze on chills with horror, even me, his maker? How, how shall I secreteFOR him, how destroy – ? Heaven! to think that in the very moment of fruition, when all my toils were ended and I should glory in their noble consummation, my first, my dearest, only wish, is to annihilate what I have made! Horrible object, wretched produce of my ill-directed efforts! never must thou meet another eye than mine, neverNOT must thou gaze upon a human being, whom thy fell aspect sure would kill with terror!(I.iv)

The storm arrives in the following scene, causing great discomfort to Frankenstein’s estranged wife Emmeline, her father Ritzberg, and her crying baby, Frankenstein’s child. The Monster arrives during the storm; Emmeline shrieks in terror, but the Monster is nothing but tender to the child. Even after Ritzberg shoots the Monster, he gently puts the child down before rushing Ritzberg and departing the hut. Embittered now, the Monster murders the next person he meets, which turns out toPROOFS be the Prince’s son, Julio. Frankenstein is accused of the murder, and true to his ambivalent character both confesses and insists he is innocent:

FRANKENSTEIN: I say that I am guilty, guilty a thousand times! ALL: Ha! T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:08

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FRANKENSTEIN: Not of the crime of murder. I could not lay a ﬁnger in the way of violence on that innocent child. Mine is a guilt a thousand times more black, more horrible. I am the father of a thousand murders. Oh! presumption, and is this thy punishment? has my promised triumph brought me but to this? PRINCE: Frankenstein, for mercy’s sake explain. What horrid mystery lurks beneath thy words?(I.viii)

Presumption, again, is the hamartia for which Frankenstein is punished. But this interrogation is interrupted by the sudden appearance of the Monster. Chased by furious peasants, he dashes his creator to the ground; then, using his immense strength, he turns a court official into a human shield and runs off laughing. (This is the only utterance he makes in the play.) Later, Frankenstein chances upon Emmeline at Ritzberg’s cottage. The two have a touching reunion and resolve to flee,DISTRIBUTION but again the Monster interrupts, this time by burning down the cottage and kidnapping Emmeline and the child. He takes his victims to the summit of Mount Etna, where he binds Emmeline – Prometheus-like – to a “conspicuous pillar of rock” (II.iv). Frankenstein climbs the peak and falls to his knees to beg his creation for his family’s life. The Monster is eloquentFOR in his muteness, engaging in an extended pantomime during which he contrives to express “that he would willingly have served Frankenstein and befriended him, but that all his overtures were repelled with scorn and abhorrence” (II.iv). He then becomes entranced by music, allowing the peasants to bind him to the rock, while Strutt mocks him. ThisNOT scene strongly recollects the first scene of Prometheus Bound. His tormentors leave the Monster tied to the mountain peak, but he escapes to wreak more havoc. Another chase back to the summit of Mount Etna, which is now erupt- ing with smoke and fire, allows Frankenstein and his Monster their final confrontation. The Monster fatally stabs Frankenstein and then, surrounded by enemies, leaps into the caldera of the active volcano.

The prerogative of God The era ofPROOFS popular dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein in London would persist for many decades,16 with each new play bringing its own contribu- tions and variations on the theme, but (the burlesques excepted) sticking largely to Milner’s decision to localize Frankenstein’s hamartia in the act of conceiving and building the monster, for which he is vicariously punished T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:08

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by God through the monster itself. However, of significant concern to monster theatre students is Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre (1927), which was conceived as a sort of narrative crossover with Hamilton Deane’s play Dracula. Forry gives a detailed account of this play’s reception and history,17 which I will not summarize except to note that it enjoyed modest success in England before it was purchased by Universal Studios, who commissioned John Balderston to adapt it into a screenplay. (He would perform the same function for Deane’s Dracula.) Despite being influenced by Capek’s R.U.R. (see Chapter 5), Murnau’s Nosferatu, and the bloody offerings of the Grand Guignol, which had recently appeared in London, Webling’s play was a lackluster affair. Balderston’s version, however, bears little resemblance to the final print of the Universal film, which itself went through some monstrous contortions (including two directors, two endings, and two actors playing the Creature – the first of whom was Bela Lugosi) before it became the iconic version ofDISTRIBUTION the Frankenstein legend. Many of our contemporary conceits regarding the legend can be laid on Webling’s shoulders. It was she who switched the names of Victor and Henry, first called the monster itself “Frankenstein,” and first presented the act of creation as a modernist psychomachia over the scientist’s soul, explicitly equating the act of scientific discoveryFOR with the satanic sin of pride.18 In Webling’s version, the potential for the Creature to be something other than a fiendish killer is erased: born from a sinful act, he is innately savage, violent, and literally primitive, even going so far as to worship the sun. For Webling, the Creature’s maturation process is merely one of growing into his own evil and selfishness. SheNOT restores Shelley’s scenes in which the monster demands a mate and Frankenstein partially builds one, then destroys it, sending the monster into a murderous rage. Balderston’s screenplay began life in 1930 as an unpublished, unproduced playscript. This adaptation also owes a great deal to the theatrical history of Frankenstein, particularly Peake’s play. For instance, it includes the detail of an idyllic childhood home in “Belrive” and the key repetition of the word “presumption” in defining Frankenstein’s moral failings. However, in this version, the scientist does his best to look after the monster, who is willful and violent from the moment of his awakening. Ultimately, the monster’s lust for a femalePROOFS character (Amelia) provokes him to rebellion against Frankenstein, although the audience is left feeling such a rebellious act was inevitable. Conceived by an evil act, the monster is a priori evil. Henry Frankenstein goes so far as to suggest impiously that God is a sort of “cosmic ray” with life-giving powers. He will repent of this near-atheism T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:08

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after he begins to recognize the inherent evil in the monster’s character, and describes the horror of his own anagnoresis in decidedly religious terms (remember, in this version, “Henry” is Frankenstein):

HENRY: Yes, pride! Pride was the sin of the fallen angel. I might have done great work, and now I have damned myself in life and in death. WALDMAN: My son, pray for guidance, as I pray for you.

[…]

HENRY: (to Waldman) You warned me, and in my mad presumption I would not listen. I usurped the prerogative of God, I tried to make myself His equal. (I.ii)19 DISTRIBUTION Here again the sin of Lucifer – presumption – is explicitly linked to the act of scientific discovery, and the very word “presumption” connects this play not with Shelley’s novel but with Peake’s melodrama. Waldman’s piety rings hollow, because earlier in the play he, too, was sufficiently enthralled by the possibilities of Frankenstein’s workFOR to ignore the potential ethical implications. Later, upon realizing that Frankenstein intends to build a mate for the monster, Waldman calls him “Satan, the Anti-Christ” and the scientist meekly agrees.20 When Frankenstein tears up the half-finished mate, the monster kills him, then lives just long enough to discover (through Waldman) the possibility of Christian forgivenessNOT before he is rather precipitously struck by lightning and dies, absolved and with a “look of peace.”21 Although this play also explicitly links scientific discovery to the sin of Lucifer, it does so against a backdrop of highly sophisticated special-effects equipment, which would be another hallmark of the film versions. This is the model of Frankenstein’s monster that would come to dominate the next century: the product of science without ethics, discovery without morality, invention without the guiding hand of the divine. Even after the film versions began to appear, further stage adaptations of Frankenstein continued this trend of laying the source of horror at the feet of the presumptuous andPROOFS impious scientist. Indeed, in Victor Gialanella’s 1979 script, Frankenstein’s project actually fails until a bolt of lightning strikes the resurrection machine. (The theatrical history of lightning in such plays rather unambiguously identifies the Creature’s true animator as God, bent on punishing Victor not for creating the monster, for his hubris in T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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attempting to do so.)22 As the century progressed, adaptors became more convinced that the scientist’s crime lay in the inception of the transgressive idea of creating life. As a result, the Creature is no longer a blank slate who, without the guiding hand of his creator, learns evil at the hands of a short- sighted and fearful society; instead, he is inherently evil and naturally prone to violence. Shelley’s masterpiece serves as an indictment of a social matrix she found abusive and uncaring, but the dramatic tradition shows a marked aversion to this didacticism. In the plays and films, presumption is Frankenstein’s crime – presumption to play the creative role of God. Therefore, his humanitarian project is a priori doomed to horrific failure and divine punishment. Compare this to the novel’s far bleaker, far more complex narrative of a deeply humanist scientist whose failures lie ultimately in the realm of compassion and empathy, not of understanding, and for whom, in the end, the destruction of both monster and creator is deeply tragic and bereft of palliatives. Roach’s model of surrogation (see Chapter 1) predictsDISTRIBUTION how this powerful, complex critique would be reduced to an affirmative expression of the anxieties of modernity, in which the unethical scientist is satisfyingly punished by his own creation, who is then removed from the scene by God in the form of a lightning bolt (from Zeus) or a raging fire (Prometheus’ gift). In the universe of signification that surroundsFOR this monster, anxieties about the potential abuse of knowledge by “godless scientists” are embodied, allowed to play out, and ultimately alleviated with the restoration of godly order. The members of the audience, then, are spared the difficult task of self-criticism and its attendant obligation to be more empathic and compassionate. Instead, they canNOT merely congratulate themselves on always knowing better, secure in the knowledge that they possess a higher moral understanding than the educated but atheistic scientist, and satisfied, not crushed, by the destruction of that scientist and his monster. But, as Roach’s model also predicts, this project of anxiety-relieving, self- congratulatory performance is ultimately ineffective at addressing the core anxiety over the long term. So the monster must rise again and again, to continue to draw out those anxieties with horror and violence, before being detroyed, again and again, to satisfy our sense of our own righteousness. Until the next time. PROOFS Notes 1 Albert J. Lavalley, “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey.” In The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, George Levine and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 243–89, goes into some detail about Peake’s play but is more interested in looking forward to the films. Unfortunately, Martin Tropp devotes only a page to nineteenth-century stage productions and describes them as “forgettable” in his otherwise excellent Mary Shelley’s Monster (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 85. Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein: Exploring the Myths behind Mary Shelley’s Monster (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1996; reprint of 1975 original text), 163–71, provides a more detailed analysis of the plays, as does William Christie, “‘Trifling Deviation’: Stage and Screen Versions of Mary Shelley’s Monster.” In Victorian Turns: NeoVictorian Returns,PennyGay and Judith Johnson, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 158–70. However, any serious student of stage adaptations of Frankenstein and its evolution and social impact can do no better than Stephen E. Forry’s magnificently researched Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 2 Jeanne Tiehen, “Frankenstein Performed: The Monster Who Will Not Die,” Popular Culture Studies Journal 2:1–2 (2014): 65–87 (67). 3 In addition to Forry’s analysis (3–25) and editionDISTRIBUTION (135–60) of this play, I am indebted to the superior historical and editorial work of Stephen C. Behrendt, which can be found in his online article “Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein.” Romantic Circles, August 1, 2001. www.rc.umd.edu/editions/ peake/index.html (accessed August 30, 2016). All extracts from Peake’s play are from Behrendt’s article. 4 Inspired, perhaps, by Victor’s own descriptionFOR of the monster in Volume II, Chapter 10 of the novel as a “daemon”. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Com- plete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Johanna M. Smith, ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 93. 5 Ibid., 56. 6 Ibid., 60. 7 Ibid., 61. NOT 8 See ibid., 23. In her introduction to a later edition of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus(London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), Shelley writes: “[Byron and Percy Shelley] talked of the experiments of Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin, (I Speak not of what the doctor really did, or said that he did, but as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him) who pre- served a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move … Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.” 9 See Stephen C. Behrendt, “The First Reviews of Presumption.” Romantic Circles, August 1, 2001. www.rc.umd.edu/editions/peake/apparatus/reviews.html (accessed August 30,PROOFS 2016). 10 Ibid. 11 Mary Shelley, The Mary Shelley Reader, Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 404–5; see also Florescu, 164–7. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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12 Florescu, 166–7; Stephen C. Behrendt, “The Cast and Characters.” Romantic Circles, August 1, 2001. www.rc.umd.edu/editions/peake/apparatus/cast-chara cters.html (accessed August 30, 2016). 13 That is, Richard John Smith. “O” was a nickname Smith earned playing another monstrous but soulful character – Obi (short for Obeah) – a runaway Jamaican slave who turns to black magic for revenge in John Fawcett’s 1801 play Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack (Christie, 164). 14 See Forry, 7–10. 15 All extracts from Milner’s play are taken from Henry M. Milner, Frankenstein; or, The Man and the Monster(London: John Duncombe, 1826). 16 Forry (79, 101n, ff) suggests that the closing of Frankenstein; or, the Vampire’s Victim on April 27, 1888 marked the end of the first great era of Frankenstein adaptations, but it is difficult to ignore the many adaptations that have since populated stages. 17 Ibid., 90–100. 18 Frankenstein purists see these as failures on the part of fans to be familiar with the source material, but perhaps it is merely a case of, as Borges observed of the Vathek of William Beckford in 1943, the original being unfaithful to the translation. See ibid., 96. DISTRIBUTION 19 All quotes from Balderston’s version of the story are taken from John L. Balderston, Frankenstein: A Play(Albany, GA: Bearmanor Media, 2010). See also Forry, 260. 20 Forry, 285. 21 Ibid., 286. 22 Gialanella’s adaptation, which was quite successfulFOR prior to its disastrous Broadway retooling, appeared at the Palace on January 4, 1981. Murdered by reviewers including Frank Rich, it became one of the biggest flops in Broadway history, closing just three days later. See Frank Rich, “Theatre: ‘Frankenstein’ Has Premiere at Palace.” New York Times, January 5, 1981. www.nytimes.com/1981/01/05/ theater/theater-frankenstein-has-premiere-at-palace.html (accessed January 2, 2017). NOT

PROOFS

4 THE VAMPIRE TRAP

DISTRIBUTION

As with Frankenstein, the theatre has played a significant (and under-researched) role in the development of the vampire as we know it. The theatrical history of the vampire predates the appearanceFOR of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) by seventy-seven years, and that novel drew upon a flourishing tradition of vampire culture stoked as much by the theatre as by literature. This chapter investigates the contours of the theatrical tradition that, like Frankenstein, unites the aesthetic philosophy of Romanticism with the popular manifes- tations of melodrama, and isNOT usually given short shrift by historians who jump from literature to the cinema and omit the thriving theatre culture that contributed to its development. This omission leaves us with a rather exsanguinated view of an important relationship – as much as the vampire relied on the theatre, the theatre came to rely on the vampire, as the monster was a testing ground not only for new aesthetic ideas but even for new technologies. In this chapter we will investigate the sudden incursion of vampires into Western European culture in the eighteenth century and the even more sudden appearance of the vampire as an important and very specific character type in popularPROOFS melodrama. Of the hundreds of vampire plays of the nineteenth century, I have chosen three in particular (Nodier’s Le Vampire, Planché’s The Vampire; or, Bride of the Isles, and Dumas’s Le Vampire, drame fantastique) as among the most significant in the development of a performance tradition that precedes and informs the now more commonly T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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known representations of vampires. I have ignored the many burlesques, satires, parodies, and more blatant plagiarisms in favor of those dramas that approach their subject with some degree of seriousness. This inquiry reveals that the vampire is possibly the most theatrical monster of all.

Back from the dead “Blood,” writes Roland Barthes, “is the cardinal substance of History.”1 Most vampirologies2 begin their discussions with ancient evidence in folklore, but Erik Butler3 has gone to some lengths to historicize the vampire as we know it (as distinguished from strigoi, moroi, mara, draugr, varcolacs, vudkolaks, Nachzehreren, bodachs, ghûls, zombis, and other unquiet corpses that can be found in cultures across the world) as a very modern, very Western monster, with origins in the eighteenth century. DISTRIBUTION This vampire makes a rather explosive entry into Western cultural consciousness in two reports from Austrian military medical officers (dated 1725 and 1732) that describe groups of Serbians disinterring dead bodies, driving stakes through them, and burning them in response to their belief that the corpses were climbing out of their gravesFOR at night and spreading a wasting disease. Such creatures were called vampyri. It was the 1732 report, by a certain Flückinger, that caught the imagination of Europe. Articles mentioning vampires suddenly started appearing in periodicals all over the German-speaking world, with translations into French and English, and vampires were the subject of atNOT least twelve books and four dissertations by the following year.4 Only the least critical writers of the eighteenth century failed to dismiss these stories as examples of at best superstition or at worst mass hysteria brought about by the hardships endured by the Balkan people, who had suffered decades of authoritarian violence and political instability. Erik Butler has argued that the Flückinger report was so popular largely because of vampires’ facility to be put into service of many different political and theological causes du jour: Habsburg Monarchist Catholic writers used them to disparage peasant superstition as part of a local Counter-Reformation; Protestant writersPROOFS used them to disparage Catholics.5 For whatever reason, a vampire mania gripped the West, particularly the French. One of the more influential publications to emerge from this sudden interest in undead bloodsuckers was the Lettres juives (published from 1738 to 1742), a sort of epistolary novel written by the Enlightenment author Jean-Baptiste de T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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Boyer, the Marquis D’Argens, who, in the tradition of his friend Voltaire, used fiction as a vehicle for discussing Englightment values. The letters are supposedly the work of five Jewish writers in the Levant who discuss various matters of science, faith, and politics. In the fifth volume, the correspon- dents discuss stories of the exhumation and staking of corpses in Balkan countries, particularly Transylvania and Kossovo (sic). The fictional writers treat these incidents as examples of peasant superstition and communal delusion, and attempt to find scientific explanations for the suspicions of the Balkan people that support the practice, although they also suggest a parallel to the Christian notions of resurrection and stigmata.6 A second source that would become very influential was the Dissertation sur les vampires (1746), written by a Benedictine monk, Augustin Calmet. Calmet responds to D’Argens:

Each century, each people, each country hasDISTRIBUTION… its own maladies, its own fashions, [and] its own inclinations, which characterize them …; often, what seemed admirable at one time becomes piteous and ridiculous at another … In this century, a new scene has presented itself to our eyes …: people see, they say, dead men … come back, speak, plague villages … suck the bloodFOR of their intimates, make them sick, and, ﬁnally, cause their death.7

Calmet’s methodology here is that of the monster theorist who understands the role that culture plays in the contingent existence of vampires; he ultimately dismisses vampires asNOT“illusion, superstition, and prejudice.” It was inconceivable to Calmet that God would allow such a violation of natural and spiritual law as to permit someone to return from the dead in order to feast on the living, but this did not prevent Sebastian Mercier (in 1770), Voltaire (in 1772), and the Marquis de Sade (in 1784) from drawing deeply from Calmet’s writing for their own vampiric creations.8 Both D’Argens and Calmet would become important source material for English Romantic poets, including, significantly for our study, Lord Byron. In response to the translation and wide distribution of the Flückinger report, English journalists, poets, and pamphleteers, including Charles Forman, OliverPROOFS Goldsmith, and Robert Burns, would add fuel to a growing British preoccupation with vampires.9 By the 1740s vampires were sufficiently well known to be mentioned rather offhandedly by both Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding (in Tom Jones).10 In this period, vampires appear in English writing largely as dirt-encrusted, hideously fanged and clawed T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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allegories for political corruption, death or madness. As the century waned, however, Romantic writers – seeking explanations for parts of the self ignored by the Enlightenment’s reliance on logic and dismissal of the chthonic and irrational aspects of human existence – would ﬁnd themselves seduced by vampires as well, and by the second decade of the nineteenth century the Enlightenment’s derision of Eastern “peasant superstition” would give way to a general embrace of the vampire.

The rise of Ruthven The story of the vampire as we know it today really begins with the author Lady Caroline Lamb, a fiery, independent, cross-dressing aristocrat of the “Holland House Set.” This elite social group consisted of luminary authors, scientists, and politicians, including a young poet: George Gordon, Lord Byron. In 1812, Lamb had a tempestuous affairDISTRIBUTION with Byron, who at the time was married to a woman whose rectitude and respectability made her as uninteresting to him as Lamb’s husband (who would eventually become Prime Minister) was to her. Byron was, in this period, enjoying celebrity not only for the quality of his early literary works but for the titillating rumors of his own libertinage, sexualFOR profligacy, political radicalism, and atheism (many of which had been spread by the poet himself). When Byron extricated himself from Lamb, having found another lover in Lady Oxford (he wrote the breakup letter to Lamb on Lady Oxford’s stationery and sealed it with her crest), Lamb was inconsolable. She spent years in isolation, writing. In May 1816, she releasedNOT a novel entitled Glenarvon, published by Henry Colburn, who advertised it as a thinly disguised kiss-and-tell (or, as Byron styled it, a “fuck-and-publish”) of the author’s famous affair with Byron. Glenarvon is a breathless and meandering but also wryly satirical Gothic romance in which the callous, diabolical, and attractive Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon, seduces the protagonist Calantha.11 Glenarvon does not make a personal appearance in the novel until Chapter 35, although word of his criminally dangerous character has already reached Calantha and titillated her somewhat. When she finally spies him, she is instantly attracted: PROOFS It was one of those faces which, having once beheld, we never afterwards forget. It seemed as if the soul of passion had been stamped and printed upon every feature. The eye beamed into life as it threw up its dark ardent gaze, with a look nearly of inspiration, while the proud T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt; yet, even mixed with these fierce characteristic feelings, an air of melancholy and dejection shaded over and softened every harsher expression. Such countenance spoke to the heart, and filled it with one vague yet powerful interest – so strong, so undefinable, that it could not easily be overcome.12

Calantha grows increasingly distracted by Glenarvon, despite learning that he travels in a cloud of violence. A debased and dissipated nobleman cheated of his rightful place in society and turned rebel and criminal, he has become vengeful and cruel. In love with liberty and revolutionary ideals but sanguine about death and other material horrors, he is tormented by inner demons and his own genius. Calantha becomes convinced that he is the “spirit of evil,”13 and he himself warns her away, saying, “my love is death,”14 yet her obsession with him grows. He insinuates himselfDISTRIBUTION in her society and turns his attentions to her; although he professes to be unable to love due to some “horrid secret, which weighed upon his mind,”15 it is too late for Calantha. She succumbs to a prolonged sado-masochistic relationship against her own volition and better judgement. He actively seeks to transform her into a soulless creature, like himself: “FORWeep,” he commands her at one point. “I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue.”16 He is by turns cruel and loving, betraying confidences, ruining her reputation, driving her to the brink of madness and, finally, to death. At the hour of Glenarvon’s own death, during a sea battle, Calantha’s spirit appears to him, and he is made to sufferNOT all the torments he inflicted on others before he, too, is seized with madness, leaps into the ocean, and drowns. Lamb’s Clarence de Ruthven is not a vampire, as such – at the time, vampires were known only as unquiet dead who spread death and disease – but he is a diabolical manipulator who uses an almost supernatural seductive power to leach emotional energy from his victims. This is a strong early example of the Romantic hero – a doomed but psychologically complex character whose sophistication, arrogance, and disdain for society (and himself) inspire both attraction and fear. So strongly associated with Byron’s own work and attendant celebrity was this figure that it would come to be called the “ByronicPROOFS hero.” Lamb ’s novel was intended to wound her former lover and the other members of the Holland House Set, but by the time it was published Byron’s fall from the grace of British high society was already under way. Continuing rumors of his profligacy, radicalism, atheism, and infidelity, which included suspicions of an affair with his half-sister, Augusta T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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Leigh (possibly the “horrid secret” alluded to by Lamb), eventually turned his celebrity against him. Denied access to the best houses, widely traduced, and even spat upon in public, Byron became, in Twitchell’s words, “cast in the role of social pariah, almost a vampire among men.”17 There is some irony here, as Byron was one of the luminary Romantic poets to employ vampiric imagery in his own work, as in the 1813 poem “The Giaour”:

But ﬁrst on earth, as Vampyre sent, Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent; Then ghastly haunt thy native place, And suck the blood of all thy race; There from thy daughter, sister, wife, At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet, which perforce Must feed thy livid living corse.18 DISTRIBUTION

In March 1817, Byron wrote a review of Glenarvon that amounted to just two lines of poetry:

I read Glenarvon, too, by Caro LambFOR– God damn!19

When he penned these lines, Byron was already in self-imposed exile in Europe – he had departed England in April 1816 in the company of his personal physician, John Polidori.NOT As a traveling companion, it has to be said, Polidori had his shortcomings. Vain, prone to sulks, diﬃcult to please, and increasingly resentful of living in Byron’s shadow, he often quarreled with the poet and his friends. E. F. Bleier reports an account in which Polidori suddenly asked Byron:

“Pray, what is there excepting poetry that I cannot do better than you?” Byron calmly faced him and replied, “Three things. First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damn good thrashing.PROOFS”20 Things were already somewhat tense between the two men when Byron’s pregnant lover Claire Clairmont, in the company of her half-sister Mary Godwin and Mary’s paramour, the famous poet Percy Shelley, met Byron’s T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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retinue on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. The now- legendary events of an evening that summer at the Villa Diodati, when Byron determined to while away the stormy night with his guests by engaging in a competition of ghost-story writing, are well recorded by literary historians for giving birth not only to Frankenstein but to Byron’s contribution: an eight-page fragment of a story, never completed.21 The story follows a man whose traveling companion, one Augustus Darvell, suddenly falls ill. After instructing the narrator to perform some complex magical rituals and making him swear an oath never to reveal his death to anyone, Darvell dies. The narrator returns to London to find Darvell has come back from the dead and is sating his vampiric bloodlust on English society; bound by his oath, the narrator says nothing. Byron never developed the story beyond this fragment. In September 1816, after a series of spats and scrapes with the local authorities, Byron dismissed Polidori, who tookDISTRIBUTION the opportunity to launch his own literary career. He had little success at this (or indeed anything else), and after accruing many debts was forced to return to England, which depressed him. His efforts at writing included the “The Vampyre,” a novella loosely based on Byron’s Darvell fragment.22 The protagonist is Aubrey, a virtuousFOR if naive young man chosen by a mysteriously compelling older gentleman with a “dead grey eye”–Lord Ruthven – as a traveling companion for a Grand Tour of Europe. (Ruthven must leave England because of his “embarrassed” affairs there.)23 On the journey, Ruthven takes advantage of Aubrey’s naivety to draw him into scandalous adventures, libertinage,NOT gambling, and general dissipation. Aubrey notices that Ruthven takes special pleasure in deceiving innocents, although he never seems to find the right time to bring up the matter with his companion. Finally, scandalized by Ruthven’s attempt to violate a young lady’s virtue, Aubrey breaks company with him and continues to Greece on his own. On arriving he falls in love with the innocent Ianthe, who regales him with the local folklore surrounding bloodsucking undead fiends that reminds Aubrey of Ruthven. While riding, Aubrey is caught in a storm and seeks shelter in a hut, whereupon he apparently surprises one of these vampires in the predatory act. With superhuman strength, the unseen fiend throws AubreyPROOFS to the ground before being driven off by approaching villagers. In the hut lies Ianthe, victimized by the vampire, who opened the vein of her neck and drained her of life. Unexpectedly, Ruthven soon appears and commits himself to reviving Aubrey to health. The two commence traveling together but are set upon T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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by bandits. Ruthven is shot and within two days appears about to die. He compels Aubrey to swear an oath to keep his death secret for a year and a day, then dies laughing. Going through Ruthven’seffects, Aubrey finds a dagger that he previously saw in the hut, which convinces him that Ruthven murdered Ianthe. Tormented by these memories, he returns home, where his sister is to be married to a certain Earl of Marsden. His sister shows him a portrait, which to Aubrey’s horror resembles Lord Ruthven. Desperate to save her, but bound to silence by his oath, Aubrey’s behavior becomes erratic and he’s confined to bed. Ruthven marries Aubrey’s sister, and Aubrey lives just long enough to be released from his oath and tell the servants what he knows. But it is too late: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared,” we are told, “and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”24 This story would catapult Polidori to rather uncomfortable fame in 1819, when London’s the New Monthly Quarterly magazineDISTRIBUTION– under the direction of Henry Colburn, who had made a great deal of money from Glenarvon three years previously – published it as “The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron,” complete with an appendix entitled “Letter from Geneva,” which suggested that Polidori had willfully colluded with the magazine to produce one of Byron’s tales.25 Furthermore,FOR it was announced that a London publishing house was planning to release a book edition. Stott has argued convincingly that Polidori’s collusion in this misrepresentation was unlikely, given his efforts to correct the question of authorship (and thus payment) with Colburn, who continued to cheat Polidori out of his royalties.26 When Byron himself learnedNOT of the publication he roundly denied it, writing to his publisher John Murray: “Damn ‘the Vampire.’ What do I know of Vampires? I have a personal dislike to ‘Vampires,’ and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets.”27 Byron denounced Polidori as a plagiarist, and sent his own Augustus Darvell fragment to London for publication.28 Perhaps partially because of the plagiarism scandal, “The Vampyre” achieved instant and explosive popularity, igniting editions in the United States and translations into five languages – one of them Henri Faber’s Le Vampire, nouvelle traduite de l’anglais de Lord Byron (1819), which hardly settled the authorship question. Polidori continuedPROOFS to receive little remuneration. It adds to Polidori’s personal tragedy that, after attaching himself to Byron in the hope of fostering his own literary fame and naming his character “Ruthven” undoubtedly to make the reader think of Glenarvon and therefore of Byron, and considering that Colburn published his tale specifically T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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because of his personal relationship with Byron (and the obvious associations readers would draw between that relationship and the events of the story), he should have gone to such lengths to divorce himself from the more famous poet. The rapid staging of sensationally successful melodramas in the summer of 1820 in Paris and London (see below) earned Polidori not a single penny,29 which depressed him further. The following year, after a debauched visit to Brighton, during which he gambled away a great deal of money, he returned home and committed a lengthy, painful suicide by drinking prussic acid.30 By then, he had nearly single-handedly created – and in some ways become the ﬁrst victim of – a ﬁgure that continues to dominate monster culture two centuries later.

Angels of Hell

Positive truths do not flatter the imagination, whichDISTRIBUTION so loves untruth that it prefers frightening illusions to the depiction of an agreeable, but natural emotion. This latest shift in human idiosyncrasy, tired of ordinary emotions, is what is called the romantic genre … In poetry, we have reached the age of the nightmare and of the vampires. 31 FOR (Charles Nodier, 1819) These two works of fiction (Glenarvon and “The Vampyre”), which intentionally magnified Byron’s international infamy and infused it with Gothic supernaturalism, would completely revamp the monster.32 Exit the ghoulish, filth-encrusted revenant, skulking through the night in the remote villages of Eastern Europe, clawed handsNOT and bloody fangs caked with grave dirt and the blood of victims. Enter Lord Ruthven, a demonic creature whose power to seduce and destroy is predicated on his ability to appear to be a sophisticated nobleman of the Byronic ilk – devilishly handsome, suave and intelligent, but cruel, abusive, and obviously (and profitably) a stand-in for Byron himself, whose notoriety would only grow after his sudden, premature death in 1824. Ruthven continued to enjoy almost a monopoly on the next century’s vampiric theatrical offerings.33 Shortly after the Faber translation of “The Vampyre” was published, the first known vampire play was staged in Paris on June 13,PROOFS 1820, at the fashionable Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin – Le Vampire, melodrama en trois actes avec un prologue – by Charles Nodier, Pierre François Adolphe Carmouche, and Achille, Marquis de Jouffrey d’Abbans.34 Nodier was a prominent writer and critic who had already ventured into T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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the realm of supernatural horror, as can be seen in the extract from his review of the Faber translation of “The Vampyre” at the start of this section. The play’s prologue reveals the heroine, Malvina, seeking shelter in the Cave of Staffa (more commonly known today as Fingal’s Cave) in Scotland. In a dream, she has a vision of a bard, Oscar – a reference to the fictional Scottish poet Ossian – who speaks of vampires as “malefic dead souls,” given new life through a horrible ritual permitted by “a power, which does not permit us to understand its irrevocable ends.”35 Oscar identifies this tale’s villain as “Rutwen,” a venerable predator who now has three days to feed on virgin blood or be destroyed for ever. Rutwen himself appears as a shrouded spirit, crying out to Malvina. Oscar abjures Rutwen, reminding him of the nothingness that awaits him, and Malvina awakens. The story then picks up at the point in Polidori’s tale where Aubrey (here Aubray) has returned from Greece, but theDISTRIBUTION events are ordered differently. It is revealed that Rutwen saved Aubray’s life before being murdered by bandits, so Aubray has no idea of Rutwen’s true undead self. Out of respect for Rutwen’s memory, Aubray has given his sister (Malvina) in marriage to Lord Marsden, whom Aubray believes to be Rutwen’s younger brother. But it is Rutwen who appearsFOR to claim Malvina’s hand. He explains to Aubray that he was saved from the bandits at the last second. Aubray is overjoyed, but Malvina recognizes Rutwen from her dream in the cave. She wonders, in an aside, what “inconceivable charm” moves her, while Rutwen presses his suit to Aubray, imploring him that “this angel alone can hold me to life.”36 AgainstNOT her better judgement, Malvina agrees to obey her brother and proceed with the marriage. Rutwen is quite charming and a bon vivant, but he soon begins to show his true colors. Forced by a storm to delay his wedding to Malvina, he fixes his attention on Lovette, a peasant girl who lives on his estate and the bride of his servant Edgar. At her own wedding party, Rutwen dotes on Lovette until an old, impoverished bard (Oscar in disguise) sings a song in honor of the bride that warns her of his attentions:

When the sun of these deserted places No longerPROOFS gilds the mountain peaks, Then the angels of hell Come to caress their victim. If their sweet voices hypnotize you, Recoil! … Their hands are icy! T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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Guard yourself, young bride, From the love that brings death.37

Rutwen rises, barely able to contain his fury. He complains that the song has lowered his spirits, and Aubray sends Oscar away. “Your songs have upset the Lord,” a servant says. “I believe it,” mutters Oscar.38 In a moment alone with Lovette, Rutwen showers the young bride with phrases that appear to be the typical rhetoric of an overheated lover, but in retrospect carry a deeper meaning. “Hell pursues me,” he tells her. “My life depends on you … and tomorrow it is happiness or death.”39 She wisely balks; he then gives her a purse of money to keep her quiet as everyone else returns. In the festivities that follow, Lovette is oppressed by guilt and shame and flees the wedding, and Rutwen follows her. Edgar notices Lovette has gone and searches for her, only to find her screaming for help with Rutwen hot on her heels. Edgar shootsDISTRIBUTION Rutven. Dying, Rutwen makes Aubray promise not to reveal his death to Malvina for twelve hours, and to expose his body to moonlight. (The stage direction provides that this scene begins cloudy, but as it progresses moonlight is caught by the clouds and the sky gradually clears until the moon is shining brightly on the scene.) The next day at the Aubrays’ GothicFOR manor, Oscar is full of dire predic- tions. Aubray returns only to find that Rutven has already arrived and is professing eternal love to Malvina and getting ready for their wedding. Flabbergasted but bound by his oath to keep Rutven’s secret, Aubray behaves in an agitated manner. Rutwen calls the servants to confine Aubray, and insists that MalvinaNOT must marry him immediately:

RUTWEN: I am far from reproaching you, but at long last, Malvina, if you love me … MALVINA: Ah! If you doubt it, how unhappy I should be! RUTWEN: Well then, my dear Malvina, on your love depends my peace, my happiness, my entire future … upon your love my life depends … Swear to me to forget these vain terrors, and never to be anything except mine, and mine alone! MALVINA: I swear by the god who can read it in my soul! RUTWEN: OPROOFS happiness! … Then it is done, you are mine, receive the sacred ring that binds you for ever. MALVINA: (giving him her hand) Ah! Given. [RUTWEN: Je suis loin de vous le reprocher, mais enﬁn, Malvina, si vous m’aimez … T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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MALVINA: Ah! Si vous en doutiez, combien je serais malheureuse! RUTWEN: Eh bien, chère Malvina, de ton amour depend mon repos, mon Bonheur, toute ma destinée … de ton amour dépend ma vie … Jure-moi donc d’oublier de vaines terreurs, et de n’être jamais qu’à moi, à moi seul! … MALVINA: J’en jure par le dieu qui peut lire en mon ame! RUTWEN: O bonheur! … c’en est donc fait, tu es à moi, reçois l’anneau sacré qui t’engage pour jamais. 40 MALVINA: Ah! donne.] But Aubray escapes and interrupts the wedding. Luckily, the very instant he appears, the twelve hours of his oath expire, so he is free to tell Malvina the truth. Rutwen draws his dagger and attacks Aubray, Malvina faints, then thunder roars and shadowy spirits rise from the earth. An angel appears in a cloud, lightning arcs, and the phantoms engulf Rutwen as a rain of fire falls on the stage. DISTRIBUTION Nodier was as well versed in Byronic lore as he was in that of vampires. The supertextual references of Le Vampire are unmistakable: set in Scotland, like Glenarvon, with characters lifted directly from Polidori’s tale, Nodier obviously intended the audience to associate Rutwen with Byron, whose infamy was at that time much discussedFOR in Paris. Like both Lamb’s and Polidori’s Ruthvens, Rutwen’s power over the noble hero reaches only as far as his ability to deceive him. Like Lamb’s Ruthven, Nodier’s Rutwen is affable and sophisticated but conceals dark desires and a diabolical inner nature in the best Byronic tradition. Like Calantha and Polidori’s Aubrey, Malvina is possessed of supernaturalNOT insight about her attacker’s true character and ignores it at her peril. Rutwen’s goal is to disguise his nature long enough to sate his bloodlust, matching his deception to the hero’s oaths and love of truth, but in this he ultimately fails and, exposed to the light of truth, is damned to nothingness. Le Vampire may be broadly defined as a melodrama, but heroes and villains in traditional melodrama tend to be rather one-dimensional – the heroes are as blameless as Galahad and the villains are as diabolical as Sauron. Heroes of Romantic literature and drama (particularly those based on Byron’s prototype) tend to be more complex, self-reflective, and possessed of an inner freedomPROOFS that cannot seem to find expression except in the pain of others. The vampire, with its dependence on subterfuge, is a productive surrogate for the Byronic hero, really an anti-hero with a dark but beautiful power that eclipses and destroys the normal humans to whom it is revealed. Roxana Stuart describes Rutwen as “a fallen angel, lonely and desperate for T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:09

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human love.”41 Angels, fallen and otherwise, are certainly a recurring motif in Le Vampire, but casting a skeptical eye over Rutwen’s behavior in this play reveals an even more monstrous secret. After all, thanks to Oscar’s revelation in the prologue, the audience knows that whatever power permits Rutwen to suspend the ordinary laws of physics and metaphysics will fail him if he does not feed on a virgin’s blood within three days. Those statements that his victims interpret as a lover’s hyperbole (“My life depends on you,” and so on) – perfectly appropriate for a sentimental melodrama – are therefore literally true. The exchange with Malvina in which he reveals his loneliness and desperation amounts to an ironic confession of his true nature, which she had always suspected. Rutwen is, in a sense, a Byronic hero masquerading as a melodramatic villain masquerading as a melodramatic lover. When this complicated deception fails, so will his un-life. The Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin needed Le Vampire. During Napoleon’s dictatorship at the start of the nineteenthDISTRIBUTION century, Parisian theatre had been kept on a short leash – from 1807, only eight theatres were granted licenses to perform (Porte-Saint-Martin was not one of them, although it petitioned several times), and they were restricted to a narrow repertoire and tight censorship under the Ministry of Justice. Napoleon’s defeat and exile in 1815 loosened these restrictionsFOR and permitted the Porte- Saint-Martin to rise to prominence with high-budget melodramas, complete with all the special eﬀects demanded by the vision of Le Vampire’s designer, the legendary Ciceri.42 Despite a rather supercilious reception from the critics, who thought the play was at best cheap sensationalism without literary merit and at worstNOT blasphemy, Le Vampire was a commercial blockbuster; the play also sold immensely well when it was published in book form.43 The royal family were regular members of the audience at the Porte- Saint-Martin so the theatre became highly fashionable, which inspired other venues in Paris to hop on the vampiric bandwagon. As would be the case with Frankenstein in London a few years later, many of the plays they staged were farcical burlesques or parodies, including one by Eugène Scribe, also called Le Vampire.44 Not one to give up before the source ran dry, in 1826 the Porte-Saint-Martin hosted Nodier’s French adaptation of Frankenstein, entitled Le MonstrePROOFS et le magicien and starring T. P. Cooke, who had origi- nated the role of the Creature in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption in 1823 (see Chapter 3). In turn, this spawned a host of French imitations. For melodramatic theatre, vampires were simply good business – such good business that London immediately took notice. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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Wicked souls, wise purposes In August 1820, when Nodier’s play was not yet two months old, James Robinson Planché introduced Ruthven to the English stage in The Vampire,45 an undisguised piracy of Nodier that would meet with similarly outrageous success and lead to a fleet of imitators and parodists. T. P. Cooke starred as the title character, inaugurating his career of playing monsters on both sides of the Channel. This play also begins in the caverns of Staffa, where the heroine, Lady Margaret, is discovered sleeping. The spirits Unda (of the Water) and Ariel (of the Air) appear to explain that Margaret, daughter of the Baron of the Isles, is betrothed to the Earl of Marsden, who is in fact a vampire. Vampires, in this context, are “wicked souls” who “for wise purposes” are permitted to possess dead bodies, but must wed some “fair and virtuous maiden” and drain her of blood to continue their hellish existence.DISTRIBUTION46 Unda reveals that this particular vampire is the spirit of a long-dead Scottish king, “Cromal, called the bloody,” damned for his crimes to become a vampire and now facing total extinction if he cannot drain a virgin before the moon sets the following day. The spirits summon a vision of the vampire to fix his identity firmly in Margaret’s mind. Margaret’s father Lord Ronald has agreedFOR to marry his daughter to the Earl of Marsden, whom he has never met, out of an obligation to Marsden’s older brother, Ruthven. In exposition, Ronald reveals he met Ruthven some years previously in Athens, where he found him caring for Ronald’s ailing son (as Polidori’s Ruthven had cared for Aubrey). Nevertheless, the son perished, and thereafter RonaldNOT and Ruthven traveled together for a while. “The more I saw of him, the more I admired his extraordinary talents,” Ronald tells Margaret. “In my eyes he appear’d something more than human, and seem’d destin’d to fill that place in my affections which had become void by my son’s decease.”47 Ruthven, however, sacrificed himself to save Ronald during a bandit attack and, dying, extracted a promise from Ronald to place his body where it would be struck by moonlight. When Marsden arrives, Ronald immediately recognizes him as Ruthven, who explains that his death was averted by help arriving at the last second. When Margaret lays eyes on Ruthven, however, she recognizes him from her vision, shrieks,PROOFS and faints. When she recovers, she determines to obey her father’s will despite her supernatural insight (like Calantha, Aubrey, and Malvina), and Ruthven requests an immediate wedding. Ronald agrees, leaving Ruthven alone. The vampire then soliloquizes: T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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Daemon, as I am, that walk the earth to slaughter and devour the little that remains of heart within this wizard frame – sustained alone by human blood, shrinks from the appalling act of planting miser in the bosom of this veteran chieftain. Still must the fearful sacriﬁce be made! And suddenly; for the approaching night will ﬁnd my wretched frame exhausted – and darkness – worse than death – annihilation is my lot! Margaret! Unhappy maid! Thou art my destined prey! Thy blood must feed a Vampire’s life, and prove the food of this disgusting banquet.48

Ruthven then agrees attend the wedding of Ronald’s servant Robert to Effie, a member of his own retinue, perhaps hoping to find in Effie an alternate source of sustenance so as to spare Margaret. He and Ronald depart. Catching Effie alone, Ruthven attempts to seduce her, but she resists, and the vampire is forced to remove her bodily from the stage. Robert tracks them down and shoots Ruthven, who staggers onstage,DISTRIBUTION dying, as the moon descends through the sky. Ruthven compels Ronald to conceal his death until the moon sets the following night and begs him to leave his body in the moonlight. Then he dies. As in the French play, Ronald returns to his castle to find Ruthven already there. Bound by his oath, he behavesFOR strangely and is taken for mad and confined by his servants, only to escape just in time to interrupt Margaret’s marriage to Ruthven. They fight, and the moon sets:

MARGARET: Hold! Hold! – I am thine; – the moon has set. RUTHVEN: And I am lost! NOT A terriﬁc peal of thunder is heard; Unda and Ariel appear; a thunderbolt strikes Ruthven to the ground, who immediately vanishes. General picture. The curtain falls.49

The differences between Nodier’s version and Planché’s are minor, but telling. Planché was, like Nodier, well versed in vampire lore. In the “advertisement” of the publication, he apologizes for transplanting the “Levantic Superstition” to Scotland, but explains that he did so to replicate thePROOFS“Dramatic effect ” of its successful French predecessor. In his Recollections and Reflections (1872), he asserts that it was the play’s producer, Samuel James Arnold, who “set his heart on Scotch music and dress”50 and compelled him to keep his vampire in Scotland. Also, the theatre already had some Scottish costumes, left over from an earlier play. But surely the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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potentially proﬁtable connection to Lord Byron, who in 1820 was still publishing profusely and pursuing even more infamous romantic liaisons, must have played some role in the decision, too. Planché certainly makes grand use of Scottish songs and ethnic stereotypes throughout the play. It is Ruthven’s “disgusting banquet” soliloquy, however, that gives a more profound psychological depth, and Romantic character, to his play. The soliloquy, by its very nature as a theatrical device, is truthful – what reason would Ruthven have to lie to himself? This addition certainly makes him more convincingly tormented and therefore, perhaps, a more compelling anti-hero. But does it make him a better vampire? Stuart writes:

This change shows the weakness of Planché’s concept of the vampire’s nature, and detracts from the character’s persona in two ways: ﬁrst, his reasoning is, if someone must be raped and murdered, better a lower- class girl than a high-born lady. Second, it attributesDISTRIBUTION his power of seduction to magic; this diminishes the vampire and vitiates the sexual content.51

Stuart laments Ruthven’s moralizing as Planché’s misunderstanding of the eroticism that always exists between the vampire and his victim. Nodier, she writes, possessed a greater “insight intoFOR human nature,” which compelled him to make his vampire darker, more overtly sexual, less reliant on supernatural forces to win his victims’ hearts.52 Perhaps Planché made these changes in the hope of making his vampire more palatable to English melodramatic audiences, or possibly to heighten the excellent surprise at the play’s sensational climax, whenNOT Cooke, his disguises penetrated and his time spent, cast himself through the stage and into the abyss. The English Opera House, a London stage of marginal repute that was well suited as a venue for melodrama, developed a piece of stagecraft specifically to facilitate Ruthven’s sudden disappearance at the end of the play. The “Vampire Trap,” a spring-loaded hinged door or double-door embedded in the stage floor, normally secured from beneath by a sliding panel, allowed Cooke to drop out of sight as instantly as gravity could yank him. Stuart quotes the actor–manager John Coleman’s youthful recollection of seeing it in action: PROOFS When I recall that gruesome Scottish horror feeding upon the blood of young maidens and throwing himself headlong through the solid stage, and vanishing into the regions below amidst flames of red fire, I protest I shudder at it even now.53 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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Nina Auerbach describes the trap as a device that “made the actor alternately body and spirit,”54 which not only underscores the liminality of a vampire’s existence on the fragile boundary between life and death, but also theatrically manifests the sudden discorporation that can be his only true death. Like its French predecessor, The Vampire’s success (and the defanged copyright laws of the period) spawned a host of imitators, blatant pirates – such as W. T. Moncrieff, whose The Vampire (1820) changes the heroes’ names back to Malvina and Edgar but otherwise follows Planché’s script almost line for line – and parodists. The latter included Planché himself, who lampooned the vampire genre with his Giovanni the Vampire! Or, How Shall We Get Rid of Him? (1821). The craze blossomed further – and generated even greater schlock – after 1824, when Byron died from fever while fighting for Greek independence in Missolonghi. DISTRIBUTION The love that is death Alexandre Dumas reports in his memoirs55 that he met Charles Nodier in 1823 at a performance of Le Vampire, which Dumas loved. The two men became friends, despite Nodier’s exceedingly eccentric behavior, and the older writer then helped Dumas launchFOR his literary career. Twenty-eight years later, in December 1851, Dumas made his own foray into the supernatural when Le Vampire, drama fantastique premiered at Paris’s Ambigu-Comique to great acclaim.56 Dumas’s play begins in an overcrowded Spanish inn, where one of the customers is a mysterious MoorishNOT woman who delights the innkeeper because she eats very little. The aristocratic Juana appears and announces that she wishes to travel to a nearby ruined castle, but no one will accompany her there due to the place’s evil reputation. More aristocrats then arrive. Their leader is the protagonist, Gilbert, who is drawn to the Moorish woman, just as she is drawn to him. But there is no room at the inn, so Gilbert gallantly agrees to escort Juana to the ruined castle, despite the dire warnings of the locals. Juana admits to Gilbert that she is on the run from a convent and has arranged to meet her lover, Don Luis, at the castle. But the Moorish lady gets there beforePROOFS them. She is a supernatural entity who has already murdered and glutted herself on the hapless Don Luis before Gilbert, Juana, and the rest of their party arrive. Cryptically vowing to see Gilbert in a year’s time, she flies out the window before he enters. On arriving at the castle, Juana is overcome with supernatural dread and worry that something has happened T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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to Don Luis, but Gilbert reassures her that the worst they will ﬁnd is a hideout for bandits. When pressed, however, he admits that he believes in the supernatural, and even oﬀers a rational basis for it:

GILBERT: There are so many imperceptible animals that one cannot see except by means of a microscope, invented last year, I believe. Well, as far as that goes, for six thousand years, one did not see these animals for want of a microscope, does it follow that these animals did not exist for these six thousand years? If there are beings infinitely small, invisible thanks to their smallness, can there not be creatures invisible because of their transparency, and to whom God, of whom they are the messengers, sometimes allows to revert to human form to show us some joy or warn us of a misfortune? Oh, Marquis, do not laugh at such enormities as these. In our land, we do not have one peasant who does not possess his goblin, who tangles theDISTRIBUTION manes of his horses or his daughter’s weaving; we do not have one miller who does not have his will-o’-the-wisps dancing on the marshes and ponds, not one fisherman who does not have his undine predicting storms and fair weather, telling him when he can venture onto the sea or when he must return to port. FOR [GILBERT: Il y a des animaux tellement imperceptibles, qu’on ne peut les voir qu’àl’aide d’un microscope inventé l’an passé, je crois; eh bien, de ce que, depuis six mille ans, on ne voyait pas ces animaux faute d’un microscope, s’ensuit-il que ces animaux n’existent pas depuis six mille ans? S’il y a des êtres infinimentNOT petits, invisibles à cause de leur petitesse, ne peut-il pas exister des créatures invisibles à cause de leur transpar- ence, et à qui Dieu, dont ils sont les messagers, permet quelquefois de revêtir la forme humaine pour nous révéler une joie ou nous avertir d’un malheur? Oh! marquis, n’allez pas rire de ces énormités-là. Chez nous, nous n’avons pas un paysan qui ne possède son lutin, qui mêle le crin de ses chevaux ou la quenouille de lin de sa fille; nous n’avons pas un meunier qui ne possède ses follets dansant sur les marais et sur les étangs, pas un pêcheur qui n’ait sa dame des eaux lui prédisant l’orage et le beau temps, lui disant quand il peut s’aventurer sur la mer ou quand ilPROOFS doit rentrer dans le port.]57 This passage is of particular interest. It seems to refer obliquely to Lessing’s critique of Voltaire on the subject of ghosts in drama (see Chapter 6), but it is also the first instance of an author connecting vampirism to advances in T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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science and technology; previously, the vampire had always traced its origins to the benighted folklore of the pre-Enlightenment, leaving the critique of technological advances to Frankenstein.58 Gilbert’s Enlightened self-assurance fails to survive the night. An Englishman appears and identifies himself as Lord Ruthwen, another traveler in search of shelter. Sophisticated, generous, and witty, Ruthwen charms the other aristocrats, who eventually retire to separate rooms. Gilbert and the servant Lazare discover the body of Don Luis, at which point Juana screams in terror. Gilbert rushes to her room, Ruthwen emerges, and Gilbert strikes him a fatal blow with his sword. Dying, Ruthwen asserts that he was only running to help Juana himself, and agrees to pardon Gilbert if the latter agrees to take his corpse to a mountain and expose it to the moonlight. In an astonishing scene, Gilbert carries Ruthwen’s cadaver to a mountain peak and leaves it there. Moonlight slowly infuses the corpse. Ruthwen awakes, smiles lugubriously, grows huge wings, andDISTRIBUTIONflies away. Act III takes place at Gilbert’scastleinBrittanyayearlater.Gilbert returns with Lazare to discover thathissisterHélèneisengagedtoa Scottish baron, Georges de Marsden. (George was Byron’sgivenname.) The latter is, of course, Ruthwen, who claims to have miraculously survived his ordeal and inherited the titleFOR of Marsden from a relative. Gilbert is suspicious, but distracted by a fitofcoughing.TheMoorish lady then appears in disguise among the peasants who have gathered to welcome Gilbert home. She tells him to sleep in aparticularroominthecastlethat contains a tapestry of the fairy Mélusine, a supposed ancestor of Gilbert’s. He is inclined to trust her because,NOT as we discover in the next act, she prevented an assassination attempt against him earlier in the day, so he follows her command. That night, the tapestry comes to elaborate life: a ballet ensues during which Mélusine appears to warn Gilbert that Ruthwen is a vampire and the murderer of Juana. (She does not, however, mention the Moorish lady.) Act IV begins with Ruthwen bribing Lazare to gaslight Hélène and Gilbert by agreeing with everything he says. Ruthwen begins to sow doubts in Hélène’s mind about Gilbert’s sanity. When Gilbert arrives to stop the wedding and confront Ruthwen on the subject of Juana’s murder, the bribed LazarePROOFS backs Ruthwen ’s version of events. Gilbert, desperate to be heard, blurts out all he knows about Ruthwen: “[T]hat this man is a vampire! That his love is death!” [[C]’est que cet homme est un vampire! C’est que son amour, c’est la mort!].59 Hélène asks how Gilbert knows this terrifying information, and Gilbert admits he learned it from Mélusine, the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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fairy of the tapestry. Hélène is now convinced that Gilbert has lost his mind, and the servants escort him away. When Ruthwen is alone, he casts a spell to summon the only person who could have disguised herself as Mélusine and disclosed his secrets to Gilbert – the Moorish woman – who is now revealed to be “the Ghoul.” He confronts her and accuses her of trespassing on rights granted to him by their mutual, mysterious “master.” The Ghoul admits that she disguised herself to frustrate Ruthwen’s attack on Gilbert:

RUTHWEN: And why did you tell him this? THE GHOUL: Because I love him. RUTHWEN: You love … you? Can we love? THE GHOUL: I love him, I tell you! RUTHWEN: And you think he will return your love? THE GHOUL: I hope he will. DISTRIBUTION [RUTHWEN: Et pourquoi lui as-tu dit cela? LA GOULE: Parce que je l’aime. RUTHWEN: Tu aimes … toi ? Est-ce que nous aimons, nous? LA GOULE: Je l’aime, te dis-je! RUTHWEN: Et tu crois qu’il répondra àFOR ton amour? 60 LA GOULE: Je l’espère.]

Because it would destroy Gilbert, the Ghoul will not permit Ruthwen to kill Hélène. Ruthwen replies that Hélène’s death is necessary for his survival. Ghoul and vampire therefore declareNOT war. In the next scene, Lazare, troubled with a guilty conscience, confesses his subterfuge to Hélène and reveals that Ruthwen is a revenant. She now can see him for the cold, animated corpse he is, but it is too late – Ruthwen murders her seconds before Gilbert arrives. Together, Gilbert and Lazare overpower Ruthwen and cast him out of a window. Then they examine Ruthwen’s body, broken by the fall, and – foolishly, given the circumstances – determine that he is dead. The ﬁnal act takes place in a castle in Circassia, where Ziska, a Circassian maiden (once again the Ghoul in disguise), has helped Lazare and Gilbert’s ﬁancée AntoniaPROOFS escape Ruthwen ’s revenge. Gilbert recognizes the Ghoul as the woman who saved his life in Brittany, and demands to know what manner of creature she is who can change her shape at will. “Alas,” cries Ziska, “if I could only change my heart.” [Hélas! que ne puis-je aussi changer de coeur!]61 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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Ziska falls short of confessing her true nature to Gilbert, but she does offer him eternal life if he returns her love: “all your life of mortal happiness with Antonia will last no longer than a kiss in our immortal ecstasy!” [toute ta vie de bonheur mortel avec Antonia durera moins qu’un baiser de notre immortel délire!].62 Gilbert refuses, breaking the Ghoul’s heart, but soon learns that Ruthwen has arrived and promises to consent to the Ghoul’s wishes if she will save Antonia from Ruthwen. The Ghoul replies, repeatedly, with a single word: “Impossible.” Instead, she gives Gilbert poison, then leaves after snatching up his sword. While Gilbert is trying to talk Antonia into a double suicide, the Ghoul returns, having had the sword consecrated, and explains to Gilbert that he now has the means to annihilate Ruthwen. She has violated the sacred pact of secrecy by revealing this information and consequently bursts into flames, willingly sacrificing herself to protect Gilbert and Antonia. In the final scene, Gilbert gives Ruthwen a chanceDISTRIBUTION to save himself by renouncing Satan, but the vampire refuses. Gilbert runs him through the heart with the consecrated sword then seals him in a tomb with a sign of the cross that becomes luminous. The sky fills with angels who have come to deliver the resurrected Juana and Hélène and receive the Ghoul, who rises to Heaven. Expanding his mentor’s three-act plotFOR to fi ve, Dumas paints a more complex portrait not specifically of Ruthwen, but of vampires in general. The Ghoul, by dint of her self-sacrifice, gains the redemption that none of the Ruthven/Ruthwens achieve (or even seek). As a foil to Ruthwen, her capacity for love and her willingness to renounce her treasured immortality enhance his own evil by contrast,NOT but simultaneously grant a new level of pathos and tragedy to the vampire. The Ghoul, once we finally learn more about her in Act V, turns out to be a sympathetic and even endearing character: sarcastic and clear-eyed, with her single-word responses in a play that is otherwise full of swooning lovers and melodramatic rhetoric, she proves to love more deeply than anyone else in the end. Throughout the play, however, she is a much better performer than Ruthwen. Although she turns out to be the more truthful of the two bloodsuckers, she is a master of disguise, effectively concealing her own identity through a series of virtuouso performances while simultaneously exposing the meticulously woven lies ofPROOFS her supernatural enemy. There are many more plays to be examined in this tradition, but the last of the serious vampire melodramas is probably Dion Boucicault’s two-act The Phantom (1852; originally a three-act play entitled The Vampire, a Phantasm in Three Dramas), which brought the genre to the Americas in T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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1853. Stuart reports that Boucicault’s first version of the play was similar to Dumas’s Le Vampire,63 but his revision is rather more original. In the first act, which takes place in Wales during the time of Charles I, innkeepers Janet and Davy are preparing to wed when Lucy, the landlord’s daughter, asks Davy to escort her to the ruined Castle Raby to meet her lover, Roland. There they meet a man who claims to be a Puritan but is actually Alan Raby, a vampire. As in Dumas’s version, the lover winds up dead, the lady screams and dies, and the vampire is struck a mortal blow, but before dying convinces his slayer to expose him to the moonlight, whereupon he is rejuvenated. The second act takes place a hundred years later. A certain Colonel Raby is now convening the village to determine who will marry Ada Raby, a mysterious girl who is said to have died before being brought back to life by an unknown creature. It is discovered that Alan Raby is still alive, having made fraudulent wills to bequeath his estate to various versions of himself. However, before he can force Ada to marry him,DISTRIBUTION he loses a duel and is cast into a dark abyss so that the moon can never touch him.64 After Boucicault, the vampire on stage would lose much of its pathos and would primarily appear as a figure of satire, notably in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddygore (1887), whose protagonist, Ruthven Murgatroyd, is a rather reluctant bloodsucker. This decline parallelsFOR the wane in the popularity of theatrical melodrama generally; in the twentieth century, serious drama would focus on realism, while vampires and their ilk would find a new home in cinema. Nevertheless, novelists would continue to take the vampire seriously, notably James Malcolm Rymer in his “penny-dreadful” serial Varney the Vampire in the 1840NOT’s. Infused with models from the theatre, more novels abounded, with the most influential those by the Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu, including Uncle Silas (1864; the vampire’s full name is Silas Ruthvyn) and Carmilla (1872), which carried the vampire forward to Stoker’s Dracula (1897). That novel, of course, spawned its own vibrant cinematic and theatrical legacies in the twentieth century, but that is another subject entirely and outside the claim staked by this book. Having reviewed this theatrical history, what may the theatre vampirol- ogist glean about the nature of what compels us to embody this singular creature again and again on the stage? PROOFS The haemosexual agenda What is the vampire really up to? To answer this is to attempt to define a monster that by its very nature resists definition, one that relies on a high T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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degree of transformation and camouflage to operate. As a cultural surrogate, the vampire’s success is largely due to its flexibility in accommodating a variety of deep-set anxieties wholly apart from the more obvious fears about death and disease that vampires represent. Butler calls the vampire “a metaphor run amuck”65 for good reason. Among the cultural anxieties vampires have been employed by authors to embody are those of sexual deviance and queerness, incest, sexual repression, female sexual domination, Eastern mysticism, Satanism, immigration, racial impurity, class warfare, political corruption, Jews and other ethnic minorities, and even the artist’s relationship to his own work, among much more. As a result, vampires from different cultural products may share few traits in common. As we have seen, some but not all are harmed or even temporarily killed by bullets, but restored by moonlight. Some require staking, some require burning, some require the intercession of divine forces or consecrated swords to be permanently destroyed; others just need to be tossedDISTRIBUTION into a deep hole. Some are revenant corpses while others are evil spirits or demons that possess human bodies. Some are beyond redemption while others ascend to Heaven. From 1897 onward, vampires tend to be obliterated in the purifying light of the sun, while others merely sparkle. But all have returned from the dead, and all must drain the blood ofFOR the living to survive – this blood- drinking requires penetration and suggests a level of carnal intimacy (richly fostered by the melodramatists, who could only imply sexual behavior on stage); for this reason, Christopher Frayling has coined the neologism “haemosexual” to describe the sanguinary relationship between vampires and their prey.66 NOT Bloodsucking has to do, in Butler’s view, with the “redistribution of energy,” and not only the physical energy represented by blood (which inside the body is a sign of strength and heritage, but outside of weakness and death).67 Indeed, wherever a vampire goes a great deal of energy – not just physical but emotional and even spiritual – is removed from the social matrix. When the vampire becomes aristocratic in 1816, that comes to include capital. Lord Glenarvon certainly exhibited this trait intensely enough to cause a shattering of the natural order (when Calantha’s aggrieved spirit appears to him before his death) without being an actual vampire himself,PROOFS while Polidori ’s Ruthven uses webs of lies to protect his true identity while he sucks both blood and cash out of his victims. In any event, the vampire is in all cases a social parasite who is able to exploit a variety of human shortcomings to slake his thirst. Butler writes: “the vampire represents a disease that corrupts the social body, but this body T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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is already unhealthy and predisposed to illness because of its licentiousness and thrill-seeking,”68 and this predisposition might also be said of Calantha, who actively seeks a thrill in her romance with the diabolical Glenarvon, or later of Dracula’s aristocratic victim Lucy Westenra. But in the theatre, the vampire’s horror is not predicated on its predations against those who deserve it. Instead, it is the very decency of the heroes that the vampire is able to exploit – their compassion, their faith in God, their honorable refusal to be forsworn even in the face of horrific consequences, and their Enlightenment propensity to ignore superstition and premonition. Although Lord Ruthven seems to have a taste for blue blood in all of his incarnations, he represents a danger to all classes of people (he will happily dine on peasants when aristocrats cannot be found) and it is mainly innocence that facilitates his predations. In the plays, the vampire’s existence represents a ridiculously unfair failure of not only social but also physical and metaphysicalDISTRIBUTION laws. This fact is not lost on more religiously oriented vampirologists. Risen from the dead, with an esculent relationship to blood, the vampire has the capacity to be a dark reflection of Christ, with all the perverse thrills and subversive seductions such a reflection offers. But the vampire’s seductiveness is also grounded in fantasy-fulfillment – it embodies a deviantFOR immorality as much as a deviant immortality. These are the fantasies fulfilled by Byron both in his public persona and in the Romantic heroes who bear his name. Darkly attractive, perversely compelling, sexually profligate, psychically superior but evil by necessity and deeply tortured about it, their very existence a dangerous act of rebellion against stultifyingNOT conformism, vampires are strong candidates for Byronic anti-heroes. The vampire’s deviance must be punished, but the punishment itself is merely fuel for its return, as wicked as ever. One way or another, the vampire is evidence that things have gone terribly wrong on the material plane, so wrong that God would permit this terrible suspension of the natural and supernatural order – innocents must suffer so that the guilty, who appear to prosper, actually live in eternal torment. Even so, why would a merciful God allow such inequity and deviance? For Calmet, no such thing is possible outside superstition and delusion; for Summers, the danger is all too real.69 The playwrightsPROOFS of the nineteenth century are willing to raise this profoundly ontological question to magnify the horror of the vampire, the better to fill theatre seats, but they are not much concerned with providing a highly nuanced answer. For them, the vampire’s time runs out more or less as soon as the heroes solve the riddle of its identity; or, more accurately, T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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when their vampire plays stop playing to full houses. As far as the theatre is concerned, even more than revenance and bloodsucking, what unites modern vampires is performance: the subterfuge necessary to keep their game going. All vampires are masters of disguise, identity theft, and manipulation of perception; these qualities distinguish them from other corporeal undead whose myths precede the modern vampire. The vampire’s existence ultimately depends on its skill as a performer; it is never annihilated except when it fails as an actor to disguise its true nature. Performance, ultimately, is the vampire’s trap. Perhaps this is why the theatregoing audience of the nineteenth century so adored this monster and why it continues to enjoy such a vibrant relationship with the theatre.

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Michelet, Richard Howard, trans. (NewDISTRIBUTION York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 119. 2 I provide the interested reader with this incomplete list of mythographic vampirologies which have been useful during my research: Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, eds., The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Madison: WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013); Erik Butler, Meta- morphoses of the Vampire in Literature andFOR Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933 (Rochester, NY: Camden, 2010); Alan Dundes, ed., The Vampire: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Christopher Frayling, Vampyres (London: Faber and Faber, 1991); Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994); Jan L. Perkowski, Vampires of the Slavs (Cambridge, UK: Slavica, 1976); Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Bowling Green, OH:NOT Bowling Green State University Press, 1988); Montague Summers, The Vampire (London: Senate 1995; reprint of 1928 original text); and James Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981). 3 Butler, 4–5. 4 Butler 28–9; see also Twitchell 8; The Balkan practice of disinterring dead bodies and transfixing them with a stake, or mutilating them in other ways to prevent revenance before reburial, is, in fact, entirely verifiable. The practice persisted at least to December 2003, when in the remote Romanian village of Marotinu de Sus the recently deceased Petre Toma was disinterred and mutilated after allegedly visiting his nephew’s family and making them physically ill. Gheorge Marinescu, the deceased’s brother-in-law, told investigators: “When we lifted the coffin his arms were not on his chest as we had left them but at his sides. HisPROOFS head was turned to the side and his lips were stained with dried blood.” According to another account, the dead man’s ribcage was then split with a pitchfork, his body was staked, his heart was removed and burned, and the ashes were mixed with water and drunk by the villagers. Investigators found evidence of some twenty previous exhumation incidents in the area. See Justin T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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Sparks, “Vampire Slayers in Grave Trouble.” Sunday Times, April 11, 2004. www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/world_news/article217698.ece (accessed December 21, 2016); Daniel McLaughlin, “A Village Still in Thrall to Dracula,” Guardian, June 18, 2005. 5 See Butler 36–45. It is interesting to note that McLaughin’s article ends with a discussion of Romania’s desire to become part of the European Union in 2007 – a cynical reader might notice again a derision of vampires employed to disqualify the Balkan people from full citizenship in the Western world, her- alding a spate of journalism over the next decade decrying the EU for allowing impoverished (and benighted) Eastern Europeans to pollute the utopia of Western Europe. 6 See Julia Gasper, The Marquis D’Argens, a Philosophical Life (Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2014), 97–8. 7 Dom Augustin Calmet, Dissertation sur les vampires (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 1998), 29–30. Quoted in, and translated by, Butler, 4–5. 8 Butler, 54. 9 Ibid., 53. 10 Twitchell, 9. 11 Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon (London: Henry Colburn,DISTRIBUTION 1816). 12 Ibid., 29–30. 13 Ibid., 105. 14 Ibid., 229. 15 Ibid., 183. 16 Ibid., 253. 17 Twitchell, 104. FOR 18 George Gordon Byron, Poetical Works, Frederick Page, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 259. 19 This is the last couplet in the poem “I Read the ‘Christabel.’” See George Gordon Byron, “Letter 267: To Mr. Moore, March 25, 1817,” in The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, ed. (London: John Murray, 1866), 344–5, n.3. See also Andrew McConnell Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre (New York: Pegasus, 2014), 153NOT–5. 20 Recounted in the introductory material of E. F. Bleier, ed., Three Gothic Novels (New York: Dover, 1966), 23–4. See also Stott, 109. 21 For instance: Butler, 85–6; Stott, 145–9; Twitchell, 103–13; Bleier, 24–8; Auerbach, 13–21; see also Basil Copper, The Vampire in Legend, Fact, and Art (New York: Citadel, 1973), 57–63. The evening in question was also dramatized by Stephen Volk for a 1986 film, Gothic, directed by Ken Russell. 22 “The Vampyre” was first published in the April 1819 edition of New Monthly Magazine, but for the purposes of this study I will use the first book edition, which properly credits Polidori (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1819). 23 Ibid., 32 24 Ibid., 72. 25 Stott, 240PROOFS–1; see also Summers, 290–1. 26 Stott, 239–46. 27 In a letter to Douglas Kinnaird, quoted in ibid., 246. 28 It appeared in Mazeppa (London: John Murray, 1819). Despite Byron’s and Polidori’s agreeing protestations that Polidori was the author of “The Vampyre,” T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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publishers continued to include it in collected anthologies under Byron’s name for quite some time (see Stott, 290). 29 Stott, 274; see also Butler, 93; Auerbach, 15–16. 30 Stott, 285–7. 31 Taken from Nodier’s review of the first French translation of Polidori’s tale, by Henri Faber, in the Journal des Debats, July 1, 1819, quoted in Stuart, 46. 32 No doubt the contemporary prevalence of the vampire in satirical journalism as a political metaphor for corrupt elites sucking the lifeblood out of the common people added to the public readiness for a more refined undead monster, whose refinement is a composite part of the horror he incites. See Butler, 52–82. 33 Undoubtedly the best scholarly resource available on the subject of stage vampires is Roxana Stuart’s Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century Stage (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1994) to which I am deeply indebted for the material in these sections. Dedicated students will find thorough analyses of these plays and many more, including those of German origin, in Stuart’s book, which we are prohibited by lack of space from examining here. 34 Originally published as Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche and Alexandre Piccinni, Le Vampire: mélodrame en trois actes, avec un prologue: par MM. ***: musique de M. Alexandre Piccini, décors de M. Ciceri; représenté,DISTRIBUTION pour la première fois, à Paris, sur le théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, le 13 juin 1820 (Paris: Chez J.-N. Barba, libraire, 1820). Available at: Nineteenth Century Collections Online. tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/4AXXi6 (accessed December 27, 2016). Wherever possible, I use Roxana Stuart’s excellent translations from the original French for Nodier’s play and that of Alexandre Dumas (269–71 and 289–94), but where she has not provided a translation I am forcedFOR make do with my own. Le Vam- pire is corroborated by several sources (Summers, 290; Stuart, 47; Butler, 94) to be the earliest example of a clearly identified vampire in European theatre. In the interest of completeness, however, the reader will want to know that by the time Le Vampire made its Paris debut there was already a vibrant tradition of Gothic supernaturalism in the theatre. I direct the reader’s attention to, for example, John Francescina, ed., Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British Women, 1790– 1843 (New York: Garland, 1997),NOT a collection of plays by female authors whose work influenced horror fiction writers like Sheridan Le Fanu (see below); even though these are not explicitly vampire plays, it seems wise to consider monsters like the Bodach Glas in St. Clair of the Isles (225–84), written in 1838 by Elizabeth Polack (the first Jewish woman melodramatist), in the context of the relationships between vampire-like creatures and Scottish noblemen, although that is outside the scope of the present study. See also Copper, 62; Butler, 94–8. 35 Stuart, 269. 36 Stuart’s translation, 49. 37 Ibid., 271. 38 Nodier, 36; my translation. 39 Ibid., 39–40; my translation. 40 Ibid., 51–PROOFS2; my translation. 41 Stuart, 48. 42 See ibid., 44–5. Stuart (58–9) wonders if Rutwen, the powerful lord who brings violence and death, might even have suggested Napoleon himself, or the Reign of Terror, to Parisians. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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43 Ibid., 52–3. 44 See ibid., 55–6; Summers, 303. 45 I refer to James Robinson Planché, The Vampire; or, Bride of the Isles (Cambridge, UK: Chadwick-Healey, 1996). 46 Ibid., 6. 47 Ibid., 15. 48 Ibid., 20. 49 Ibid., 36. 50 James Robinson Planché, Recollection and Reﬂections (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1872), 27; see also Stuart, 65. It was during his work on this melodrama that he became acquainted and friendly with Richard Brinsley Peake, author of Presumption (see Chapter 3), who was the treasurer of the English Opera House (Planché 1872, 27–8). 51 Stuart, 77. 52 Ibid., 80. 53 Quoted in ibid., 79; see also Planché 1872, 27; Summers, 306. 54 Auerbach, 23; see also Stuart, 78–9. 55 Alexandre Dumas, The Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas (Père), A. F. Davidson, trans. Volume 2 (London: W. H. Allen, 1891), 41–56.DISTRIBUTION During the performance, Nodier corrected the actors’ diction, complained about the poor writing, stormed out during the entre’acte, then returned to hiss at the actors, at which point he was ejected by the police. Dumas does not learn Nodier’s identity until the next day, when his co-worker reads about the incident in the newspaper (64; see also Stuart, 134–5). 56 Alexandre Dumas and M. Auguste Maquet,FORLe Vampire, drame fantastique en cinq actes, en dix tableaux (Montreal, CA: Le Joyeux Roger, 2015). www.alexandreduma setcompagnie.com/images/1.pdf/LeVampire.PDF (accessed December 30, 2016). 57 Dumas, 35–6; my translation. 58 See Butler, 96. 59 Dumas, 114; my translation. 60 Ibid., 115–17; my translation. 61 Ibid., 140–1; my translation. NOT 62 Ibid., 142; my translation. 63 Stuart, 145–50. 64 Dion Boucicault, The Phantom (New York: Samuel French, 1856). 65 Butler, 5. 66 Frayling, 388. 67 Butler, 11. 68 Ibid., 89. 69 Montague Summers has provided the researcher with a great deal of excellent material both in his capacities as a theatre historian and as a demonologist. However, his insistence on the existence of the supernatural repeatedly leads him into error, including, as Twitchell puts it, “his mistaking of a ‘penny- dreadful’ PROOFSfor a scholarly dissertation on vampires” (4). For this reason I have not relied upon Summers much for this chapter.

5 TOYS ARE US

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The uncanny In 1919, Sigmund Freud self-consciously ventured into the realm of aesthetic theory (not for the last time) in orderFOR to describe that particular type of horror experienced when people or objects we find familiar suddenly, by virtue of a change in perspective or circumstance, appear terrifyingly alien.1 Using the German term unheimlich – in opposition to heimlich, with its connotation of homeliness, belonging, and comfortable familiarity – Freud focuses on those objects or personsNOT in particular that incite uncertainty as to whether they are actual, living subjects, or nonliving figures or automata. Wax figures or lifelike dolls, he writes, can trigger this experience – so too can a person who suffers a sudden seizure or onset of insanity, which gives the spectator the impression of watching failing mechanical processes in what was once a human subject.2 This uncertainty triggers great anxiety in the viewer. Freud cites the automaton Olympia who in Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann famously confuses the protagonist Nathaniel, who falls in love with her to the detriment of his sanity.3 Freud is dismissive of the anxiety provoked in a child by having a doll come to life – it might be, he speculates, aPROOFS delightful event. 4 Looking back to Cohen’s fifth thesis, however (see Chapter 1), we are reminded that one of the key traits of the monster is that it inhabits contradictory states disharmoniously. While a friendly childhood doll might be a welcome animated playmate, or while T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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reanimation of the dead can be fairy-tale fare (as in Snow White) or even sacred (as in the case of Jesus Christ), the same creatures enter the uncanny world of the monstrous when their perceived internal contradictions are at war with (rather than transcend) the viewer’s understanding of the natural world. A subtle hermeneutic maneuver is all that is required to render the sacred profane, the miraculous necromantic, and the playful diabolical. Even more bewildering and frightening, and related to this hermeneutic problem, is what Freud calls “the phenomenon of the double.”5 Doubles occur, in this context, when humans create unliving versions of themselves; these may be dolls to play with, statues to revere, reﬂections in mirrors, or even “souls” that make possible the contemplation of a consciousness beyond knowable existence. The double’s purpose is initially to reassure the viewer, to alleviate anxiety about mortality by representing an existence beyond the limits of a natural human life, and also, according to Freud, justifying an infantile narcissism. The automaton inDISTRIBUTION such cases is harmonious, not yet a monster. So long as the double remains in the realm of ordinariness and familiarity, it appears harmless; but when the viewer is suddenly alienated from this understanding, and this primal narcissism is threatened by a suspicion that the universe might not work as one expects, the uncanny monster appears from hitherto cannyFOR surroundings. This phenomenon occurs, rather often, when anxieties overwhelm reason. Freud writes:

an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded asNOT imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices. The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the overaccentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality.6

When the subject’s conﬁdence in the dividing line between reality and fantasy is blurred as a result of some anxiety, the double will take on a less friendly aspect, horrifying in that it no longer alleviates anxiety about mortality, but exacerbatesPROOFS it – ghostly apparitions, walking corpses, dismembered body parts that dance by themselves, Frankensteinian creatures, and other monsters that straddle the barriers between the living and the dead can generate and multiply such this particular ﬂavor of horror.7 The superstitions of the past, the subject is aghast to discover, have not been surmounted and conquered, T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:10

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merely temporarily repressed. What results is a ripe opportunity for Roachian surrogation; such anxiety can be alleviated by an embodied, repeated performance that validates the imaginary threat and generates a narrative by which this threat is addressed and overcome. Particular monsters, of course, lend themselves well to these particular surrogative performances. This chapter interrogates one of them, the Golem of Prague, in the context of its emergence in early twentieth-century European theatre, and examines how its uncanny legacy proliferated in the popular horror of today.

The Jew’s monster When Freud completed his essay in 1919, Europe was experiencing a rise in anti-Semitism unparalleled since the Middle Ages. Part of the nineteenth- century industrialization of Europe meant increasingDISTRIBUTION mobility and metropolitization, especially of ethnic minorities. By 1870, the number of Jews in what is now Russia and Western Europe had reached four million (probably about 1.3 percent of the total population), most of whom had historically lived in rural communities (shtetls) but were increasingly concentrating in urban ghettos in cities like Warsaw,FOR Budapest, Odessa, Łódz´, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. These numbers included, in part, significant percentages of Jews fleeing persecution and economic degradation in Eastern and Central Europe. In many parts of Western Europe, Jews suffered legal restrictions on their movement and other basic privileges; these also contributed to the growth of ghettos, despite theNOT number of Jews who emigrated to the United States, where Jews enjoyed the same civil rights as other white Americans. By 1900, three million Jews had left Europe, two-thirds of whom went to the United States. The ghettos inhabited by the Jews who remained became known for poverty and overcrowding.8 The metropolitization of European Jews in these slums became a source of anxiety for many non-Jewish Europeans. Racial and ethnic tensions flared up, anti-Semitic libels and conspiracy theories with origins in the Middle Ages experienced a surge in popularity, and new canards, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were widely distributed during the first decades of thePROOFS twentieth century. 9 In plays and early films, Jews became strongly (and paradoxically) associated with both the spread of Bolshevism and the dangers of rampant commercialism, with both iconoclasm and toxic miscegenation, and with their susceptibility and contribution to urban blight and corruption. Violence against Jews, particularly in Russia and Germany, T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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rose precipitously. In 1919, the year Freud published “The Uncanny,” more than 60,000 Jews died in pogroms in Ukraine. During this period Jewish migration was forcibly stopped, conﬁning Jews to ghettos and refugee camps. This would spell disaster for millions in the coming decades.10 In the midst of these troubled times, a very ancient, uncanny monster suddenly enjoyed an unexpected resurrection that would, in various forms, dominate the last century of monsters in performance. This ancient monster was the Golem, drawn from a very old Jewish legend about a rabbi in Eastern Europe who, in anticipation of anti-Semitic violence against his community, creates a powerful living servant out of clay to aid the Jews. Gershom Scholem, one of the great rabbinical scholars of the twentieth century, traces the legend to ancient sources that describe the creation of Adam (also, traditionally, made out of dead clay), the earliest being Psalm 139:13–16: DISTRIBUTION For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. FOR My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written,NOT every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

Scholem observes that most of the many tales of the Golem and its mis- adventures share three characteristics in common: the Golem possesses great size and strength; the Golem possesses a (Promethean) power to see the future; and the immense danger to the creator who attempts such an act of major creation. He continues: The sourcePROOFS of danger, however, is not the golem or the forces emanating from him, but the man himself. The danger is not that the golem, become autonomous, will develop overwhelming powers; it lies in the tension which the creative process arouses in the creator himself. Mistakes in carrying out the directions do not impair the golem; they destroy its T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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creator … if he makes a mistake in applying the instruction, he is sucked in by the earth.11

The creator is, after all, just animated clay as well, and destabilizing the foundations of life can cause a sudden revocation of the creator’s own special status as a living being. Scholem also notes that by the beginning of the twentieth century the story of the Golem is told in association with a real historical figure – Rabbi Judah Lowe (or Lovv, or Löw, or Lev, or Leyb, or Levi), called the Maharal (an acronym meaning “Our Teacher, Rabbi Lowe”) – who was one of the senior Jewish religious figures of the late sixteenth century.12 The historical Rabbi Lowe, although an accomplished theologian and student of mystical Judaism, was an unlikely candidate to attempt to raise a magical automaton to defend himself against his non-Jewish neighbors in Prague. He was a dedicated rationalist and ethicistDISTRIBUTION who published many learned treatises and had the ear of the Bohemian Emperor Rudolf II, who was friendly to Jews and other religious minorities and interested in Jewish spiritualism. Legends ascribing the creation of the Golem to Rabbi Lowe do not begin to appear in print until the mid-nineteenth century.13 Indeed, the publication that seems to have been responsibleFOR for the explosive popularity of the Golem among European Jews was Yudl Rosenberg’s 1904 Yiddish chapbook The Golem; or the Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Leyb.14 This quickly became the standard version of the myth that would inspire a generation of Jewish writers and link astonishingly well into the genealogy of the monstrous automaton. NOT In Rosenberg’s version, Rabbi Leyb is a figure embodying from his birth an almost messianic force for truth and righteousness against the baseless accusations of Jew-hating Christians. The fictional Leyb’s life is marked by his struggle to debunk the Blood Libel, a thousand-year-old false accusation that Jews require the blood of Christians to make matzah.15 Rosenberg has Leyb engaging in learned debate with Catholic priests perpetuating the libel. He convinces the Emperor to sympathize with the unjustly accused Jews, and thereby earns the enmity of the priest and magician Tadeush. Rosenberg provides a first-hand account of the Golem’s creation, and makes severalPROOFS humorous observations about the ridiculous literalness of the Golem (whom they name Joseph). For instance, the Golem is sent to fish in the river. When he is summoned back to the rabbi, the Golem simply takes the huge quantity of fish he has caught and dumps it back into the river before responding, as he has been given no clearer instructions. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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But the Golem’s main function is to protect the Jewish community from Christians determined to incriminate Jews with the Blood Libel. Leyb learns in a prophetic dream that Tadeush has abominably planted a dead Christian child in the cellar of the synagogue, wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl with its blood poured into vials marked in Hebrew with the names of the rabbi and his children. Forewarned, Leyb uses the Golem to transport the corpse secretly to the cellar of Tadeush’s own church. Tadeush reports the Jews to the authorities, who search the Jewish quarter but find nothing. When the child’s body is discovered weeks later in the church, Tadeush’s guilt obvious. After the Golem helps to thwart another nasty episode of libel, the Emperor issues a moratorium on such accusations and Leyb orders the Golem to retire to an attic, where he dispels the forces that animate the monster, returning it to lifeless clay.16 This is a joyous ending to the tale, but in other popular versions of the myth Rabbi Lowe is forced to deactivate the GolemDISTRIBUTION only after it has used its immense strength to commit violence and mayhem among the Jews, having been mistakenly left active during the Sabbath. Many popular versions end with a confirmation that the unliving remains of the Golem are stored in the attic of a Prague synagogue,17 implicitly available for when the Jews next face an existential threat. FOR Despite the uncanny dangers of a monster that sits disharmoniously between the living and the nonliving, the Golem is designed as an anxiety- relieving monster that fulfills the fantasy that persecuted Jews might defend themselves. Rosenberg published his chapbook in Yiddish, and the explosive popularity of this folktale amongNOT Jews is evidence of its anxiety-alleviating qualities. Within a few decades, the Golem’s reach would extend far beyond the Jewish communities. Paul Wegener, a former student of and trouper with the renowned German-Jewish theatre actor Max Reinhardt, became fascinated with the Golem legend and made three films on the subject. The third, titled Der Golem: Wie Er in die Welt Kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World),18 was released in 1920 and became an instant classic, to this day considered a landmark of German Expressionist cinema. In the film, Rabbi Löw creates the Golem (played by Wegener himself), having prophesied a pogrom against the Jews of Prague following an edict from the EmperorPROOFS exiling them from their ghetto. The ghetto is depicted as a labyrinth of twisting streets and warped buildings, filled with a swarming press of Jews cut off from the rest of the city by thick walls and an impenetrable gate. In the film, Rabbi Löw uses his magical powers to create visions of biblical Jews in Exodus – uncanny doubles of those in the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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ghetto – to remind the Emperor of the Jews’ heritage. But Miriam, the rabbi’s daughter, becomes romantically involved with the imperial courtier Florian, enraging the rabbi’s scheming assistant Famulus, who tampers with the Golem, causing it to run amok and kill several people, including Florian. Unstoppable, the monster smashes through the huge gate of the ghetto to encounter a group of non-Jewish children. Entranced by their innocence, it picks one up. The child, out of curiosity, removes the magical amulet that animates the monster, and the Golem returns to its natural state of lifeless clay. Although Wegener’s film employs certain stereotypes about urban Jews (lascivious, scheming, impoverished, and sorcerous), condemning it as a document of anti-Semitism would be facile and inaccurate. In the years to come, Wegener would collaborate with the Nazis to create cultural products, but he would also become a prominent figure in the de-Nazification of Germany, playing the Jewish title character in theDISTRIBUTIONfirst post-World War II production of Lessing’s masterpiece of religious tolerance, Nathan the Wise. Noah Isenberg argues convincingly that Wegener’s film is not an example of toxic hate speech but rather exemplifies a certain fetishization of the Jewish identity as a monstrous double for non-Jewish Europeans, as described many years later by the social critic TheodorFOR Adorno. Isenberg writes:

The masses of Jews projected onto the screen in the Golem cannot possibly reflect the individuality of the living Jew. Rather, as Adorno would argue, they merely represent one-dimensional replicas of the absent object that can neverNOT fully be reproduced.19 Through performative association with this unliving monster, the ghettoized European Jew himself becomes uncanny – the familiar face suddenly rendered into an alien invader, a revealed threat to the European state – in a way that reflects the tensions about increasing Jewish populations in Europe with great clarity. Isenberg writes that the film fosters “a clear division between the dark mysterious ghetto and the enlightened empire, between Jewish sorcery and German culture, between the perceived threat of Jewish power and the German state.”20 The Jews of Prague in this film suffer more from their isolationPROOFS from the rest of the city than from any innate Jewish quality: when their monster becomes uncontrollable and breaks free from the ghetto, it is mercifully destroyed by its liberating exposure to the larger community. Ultimately, Isenberg argues, the film exploits the Golem to mystify and mythologize Jewish “Otherness” in a way that “radically T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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accentuates common perceptions of Jewishness” into a perceptible and direct threat.21 Wegener himself expressed concern about film’s tendency to reinforce dangerous stereotypes to misrepresent individuals or communities in such a one-dimensional way.22 These nuances aside, it is difficult to overestimate the role that rising anti- Semitism in Europe would play in cementing the film’s initial popularity. The Golem had been translated from an obscure monster of Jewish folklore into an instantly recognizable figure of popular culture that would inspire generations of writers. Its effect on Jewish theatre in particular would be immediate and long lasting.

The Golem on the pulpit In his introduction to The Great Jewish Plays, Joseph C. Landis traces the origins of Jewish theatre to the taverns of EasternDISTRIBUTION European shtetls in the second half of the nineteenth century, when local performers started to incorporate plot and dialogue into more traditional musical entertainments. This tendency was enhanced in the early decades of the next century by a number of American playwrights, who created fare for the waves of Jewish immigrants. In czarist Russia, however,FOR Yiddish or Hebrew plays were prohibited, although some young Jewish actors rose to greatness in mainstream Russian theatre and Yiddish plays were performed in translation in cities like Odessa. After the 1905 revolution, the Soviet government began funding a vibrant tradition of ethnically diverse theatre that would include the professionalization – in 1917NOT– of the Habima (Pulpit), a Moscow-based Hebrew-language theatre company led by Nahum Zemach under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky and later his pupil, Eugene Vakhtangov. The Habina would collaborate with such eminent theatre artists as Vsevelod Meyerhold and Marc Chagall.23 Among the Habima’s most famous plays was The Golem, written by H. Leivick (the pseudonym of Leivick Halper) in 1921, which received its premiere in Moscow in 1925, directed by respected Moscow Art Theatre director Boris Ilyich Vershilov, and featuring Baruch Tchemerinsky as the Maharal and Aaron Meskin as the Golem.24 Leivick had survived an impoverishedPROOFS childhood in a Minsk ghetto only to be arrested in 1905 and thrown in prison for demonstrating against the Czar when he was still a teenager. Still deﬁant after two years of imprisonment, he was sentenced to exile in the Siberian gulag, from which he escaped, managing to ﬂee to America in 1913. The Bolsheviks embraced Leivick as an author and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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moralist until he publicly split with them in 1929, repudiating their justification of the massacre of Jewish settlers in Hebron and refusing to be included in Communist Party publications. In 1946 he visited Holocaust survivors in Germany as a representative of the Jewish World Congress, and continued to be an ambassador of a culture of compassion until his death in 1962.25 Leivick’s play26 unmistakably draws on both Rosenberg’s text and Wegener’s film as source material, but profoundly expands the scope of the drama to include some powerful ruminations on human ethics and subjectivity. In the first scene, Rabbi Levi (Lowe), the Maharal of Prague, concerned about rumors of Blood Libel on the rise in the city, uses his vast Kabbalistic knowledge and insight to prepare an unliving servant out of river clay. Things start to go wrong immediately. The night is filled with strange presences, including the spirit of the not-yet-animated Golem, which appears to the rabbi as a shadowy figure andDISTRIBUTION begs not to be created:

Create me not! You see: the stars go out, each one. So will the light go out In every eye that looks on me; FOR And where my foot will tread, A blight will grow upon that place; And what my hand will touch, To dust and ashes it will crumble. Do not exchange my darknessNOT and my stillness For the tumult of the streets and for the noise of men. […] The whole night through you kneaded me; With coldness and with cruelty you shaped me. How good it was to be mere clay, To lie, lifeless and calm, Among the sands and stones of earth Between eternities.27 The unbornPROOFS creature’s anxiety about being created seems to be in conscious contradiction of the sentiment expressed by the grateful Adam to God in Psalm 139 (see above), which Scholem has identiﬁed as the earliest recorded source of the term “Golem.”28 It is certainly not what the rabbi was expecting; but trusting in his faith, he dispels the spirit and ﬁnishes T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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creating his monster. Before departing, however, the spirit crosses itself and prays to Christ, an unexpected gesture that will become increasingly meaningful as the play goes on. In the ensuing scenes the Golem, as in Rosenberg’s version, joins the Jewish community of Prague and is called “Joseph.” Like its relationship with its creator, the Golem’s existence within the community is from the ﬁrst deeply uneasy. Compelled to obey the Maharal, the Golem is tormented by supernatural visions of the coming pogrom as well as by its status as a thing between two worlds. Enslaved, the Golem’s own body rebels. “Something within me rises up and chokes me,” it laments, “I want to run, and yet I cannot go.”29 Leivick is not content with Rosenberg’s tragicomic monster – an unthinking automaton in a folksy (if bloody) fairy tale – or Wegener’s Frankensteinian violent but innocent brute. His Golem rails vehemently against the cruelty and injustice of its existence asDISTRIBUTION a prisoner to the will of the Maharal, who, believing it to be unfeeling clay, is deaf to its lamenta- tions and blind to his own callousness. This tension is only exacerbated when the Golem meets, and is sexually attracted to, Devorale, the Maharal’s daughter. The Maharal tells Devorale and the other members of the ghetto that Joseph is an impoverished wanderer,FOR perhaps a war refugee, upon whom they are commanded by God to give charity, but the community is disturbed by his alienness. Joseph is given a space in a ruined tower, called Tower Five, where he will sleep with beggars and other outcasts, and laborious work to do. But to alleviate their fear of Joseph (and, no doubt, the impending pogrom), theNOT townsfolk take to mocking him for his strangeness. Forbidden by the Maharal’s command from replying or doing violence to its persecutors, the Golem bears the degradation as best it can, taking little solace from the Maharal’s exhortations that its purpose is much grander: it will be called upon to defend the lives of the very people who treat it so cruelly. Late in Scene IV, the wicked anti-Semitic priest Thaddeus enters Tower Five with one of his henchmen, and the Maharal commands the Golem to observe them while remaining invisible. Thaddeus is also unexpectedly complex: while he rails about the Jews of Prague, contesting without evidence that eachPROOFS of the beggars is secretly fabulously rich, he also reveals something about the tormented nature of his own hatred, which drives him to persecute the Jews against his own better nature. He berates the Jews in Tower Five: “Have we not tortured you enough?” he cries, claiming to be weary of his own hatred, violence, and cruelty – ironically blaming the Jews T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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for refusing either to die or assimilate, thus necessitating this exhausting and un-Christian behavior. “You sit upon our conscience and our brain,” he laments, “like black spiders in a knot. And weave and weave the nets of nightmare.”30 Thaddeus, then, is also a prisoner – to his hatred and his faith. He resents the Jews for surviving centuries of persecution yet remaining separate from Christianity. He tells them he cannot coexist with them, cannot be “warmed by the same sun,” invoking the humanitarian argument of Shylock’s “hath not a Jew eyes?” speech in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (III.i.58–68), but in reverse. Thaddeus feels bound by his faith to reject any notion that Christians and Jews can coexist, but his conscience is tossed by the Jewish refusal either to admit to their guilt of the libels or to do something to ﬁght back against those who, time and again, attempt to exterminate them. (Either course of action would provide the causus belli for Thaddeus to complete his project of ethnic cleansing.)DISTRIBUTION This moment is key to understanding the central theme of Leivick’s Golem, addressing the reason why the Jews in the play will neither submit to assimilation nor respond to violence with violence. Fundamental to the spiritual ethics of Judaism is a concept the Ashkenazim call mentschlekhkayt, which might be translated as “humanityFOR” in the sense of “compassion” or “empathy.” This quality is a conscious decision to act righteously and honorably, and to avoid causing unnecessary harm to any living thing, even – or especially – when one’s enemies act unrighteously and violently. Mentschlekhkayt is the most important element of a “Jewish heart.” Landis explains: NOT [To have a Jewish heart] meant to have a great aversion to violence, a deep distrust of its ultimate eﬃcacy, and a suspicious disdain for the violent. To have a Jewish heart meant to admire gentleness and kind- liness and modesty. The Ashkenazic Jew’s aversion to violence was not based on any sentimental exaltation of weakness or of “the power of powerlessness,” but on a principled repudiation of force as bestializing and on a faith in the ultimate victory of reason and morality.31 This compassionatePROOFS aversion to violence is brought into a deeply nuanced engagement in Leivick’s play. The mentschlekhkayt of the Jewish community of Prague frustrates Thaddeus to the point of violent acts he himself abhors but feels bound to enact; it torments his conscience with nightmares. Furthermore, the Maharal knows through his supernatural visions that the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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Jews of the city are facing an existential threat, and Thaddeus and his followers will not be defeated by a few clever bait-and-switch operations, as they were in Rosenberg’s text. Forbidden by his own mentschlekhkayt from taking direct action against this violence, the Maharal has created an automaton, a soulless monster (or so he thinks), to do grim tasks on his behalf and shield his own soul (or so he thinks) from evil. So, although the impoverished Jewish inhabitants of Tower Five meekly depart under Thaddeus’s taunts, the invisible Golem is under no such inhibition, and vents its rage by ﬁrst bloodying Thaddeus and his companion with blows and then (perhaps appropriately, considering the play’s location) defenestrating them. But the Golem’s existence as a proxy for necessary violence comes at an emotional cost to itself, unpredicted by the Maharal. The creature is so deeply torn about the nature of its own existence that it comes to see itself as a monster:

Beware to look upon my face. DISTRIBUTION I am condemned to suffer here. I do not want to any more. I am revolted by my flesh, By my staring, glassy eyes, By the muteness that I hate. FOR My days and nights grow dusty here, A longing drives me on to flee myself, To fly into the distance. The time has come. See how I spurn myself NOT As I would spurn a worm.32

It is the Golem’s capacity for self-reflection and self-loathing that gives this play its emotional depth and theological complexity, and renders the creature more compelling than a mindless automaton or a simple-minded brute. Mentschlekhkayt is brought into a further critical dialogue as the play progresses. Scene V occurs in a nearby field, where the Maharal meets two of the beggars from the previous scene: an Old Beggar (who is really the Prophet Elijah) and a Young Beggar (who is really the Messiah). Elijah is a prominent PROOFSfigure in Jewish mysticism and eschatology, prophesied to accompany the Messiah on the Day of Judgement, when all human suffering will cease (Malachi 4:5–6). The Maharal recognizes the beggars for who they are, but, surprisingly, drives them away with great vehemence, even cruelty. Horrified by a vision of the coming pogrom, the Young Beggar T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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begs to be allowed to give succor to the dying, but the Maharal explains that this is impossible. The Messiah cannot come while the world is in such a degraded spiritual state; he cannot be asked to “murderously smash in skulls” and spill blood, yet this is necessary to prepare the world for his arrival. The Maharal explains:

There is another one to do my bidding. The only one permitted to be dark, Permitted to spill blood for blood. The world deserves no other to chastise it, And we, as yet, no better to defend us.33

The Maharal’s terrifyingly bleak vision of the spiritual state of the world is clear: before the Messiah can come and justify the empathic faith in the futility of violence, an era of violence must reignDISTRIBUTION on earth, and the Maharal has prepared for this by creating the Golem as an agent of retribution against the coming pogrom. But the Golem, continually tortured by the contradictions of its own existence, begins to disobey the Maharal. In Scene VI, against the Maharal’s explicit instructions, the Golem speaksFOR at length and reveals its true nature to the madman Tankhum and later to the rabbi’s wife and daughter. It asserts that it is a Messianic agent, come to deliver the women from the coming violence, and is “brighter” than “the young wanderer, and brighter than the Rabbi.”34 Even as it promises to protect the terriﬁed women, its speech becomes full of violentNOT threats with horriﬁc sexual overtones. But in the end, it escorts the women to safety, and back in Tower Five has a more rational encounter with Tankhum:

GOLEM: I spoke to you with angry words When I departed. But even in my anger, You must have heard the augury of my return, The portent of my longing and my love. TANKHUM: I heard. Of course, I heard. 35 GOLEM: My brightness has corroded my own vision. PROOFS The Golem’s self-awareness invokes Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, in which Prometheus explains to the Chorus of sea-nymphs that his gift of ﬁre has stripped humanity of the ability to prophesy (ll. 249–53; see Chapter 2). The madman and the Golem share a moment of intimacy, and the Golem T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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falls into a deathlike sleep for two days before he is awakened by the Maharal and sent on his final mission: to look for blood in the caverns beneath Tower Five. The Golem’s journey into darkness, in Scene VII, is as much a spiritual journey as a physical one. Thaddeus and his assistant have murdered a Christian child and collected the blood in bottles in order to frame the Jews. In hot pursuit, the Golem travels alone through a cavern filled with supernatural horrors, evil spirits bent on stopping him. It was for this that the Golem was created, as the Maharal cannot withstand the spirits. After nightmarish torments, the Golem finds the bottles of blood Thaddeus has hidden, then enters a magical circle where he is joined by the Messiah (as the Young Beggar) and a third savior, the Man with the Cross. The presence of the Christ figure in this sacred trinity in a moment of relative peace in the play advances Leivick’s engagement with mentschlekhkayt by linking this very Jewish notion to a Christian ethos ofDISTRIBUTION universal compassion and redemption, one very much at odds with Thaddeus’s self-consuming hatred. In this way, Leivick focuses the audience’s attention on the impossible paradox the Golem embodies – it cannot be awake and sentient without also yearning for redemption and a higher purpose than violence; and it cannot avoid violence if it is to play itsFOR role in preparing the world for the Messiah – and expands what might be considered merely a Jewish call for compassion and empathy into one that is far broader. The Golem becomes an Everyman, and in so doing renders anti-Semitism a mortal sin against not only Jews but all humanity. The last scene of the playNOT takes place in the synagogue. The audience must infer that, somehow, Thaddeus’s plot has been revealed by the Golem’s actions and the Blood Libel has, once and for all, been exposed as fraudulent. The Jews of Prague are safe. The Golem, its last mission completed, has been abandoned by the Maharal, and finds itself alone and disoriented. As it meets the Jews of Prague, who have no idea that it has saved their community and their lives, the Golem is subjected to further torments and persecution. The Jews know the Golem is unnatural and that it does not belong in the peaceful community it has helped to maintain. The Golem turns violent until the Maharal enters and calms it with a word. The MaharalPROOFS explains that the Golem is free to live like any other human, but the Golem explains that it cannot bear to be separated from its creator. Abandoned, the Golem turns its rage on the Jews of Prague, who still taunt it, killing two of them. The Maharal returns and experiences the powerful anagnoresis that forms the core of the play’s message – that the Maharal T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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cannot dodge the requirements of his own ethics by doing violence by proxy. He laments the unfairness of this stricture:

On my head falls the blood. On my head. He came to save and yet he shed our blood. Are we thus punished for our joy, Oh Lord? Are we chastised because we wished to save ourselves?36

The Maharal’s realization is that the Golem’s actions are extensions of his own, and these murders of Jews therefore fall upon his own head. It is provocative to hear these lines as echoes of those spoken by Frankenstein in Milner’s The Man and the Monster (1826): “I am the father of a thousand murders. Oh! Presumption, and is this thy punishment?” (I.iv). But Fran- kenstein’s transgression was one of pride, while the Maharal saw his actions in the context of an existential threat to his people,DISTRIBUTION and a key ingredient in the bringing about of the Messianic Age. If the Jews of Prague are forbidden by God from defending themselves, how will they survive? It is difficult not to see Leivick’s play as part of Jewish cultural resistance to the rise of European anti-Semitism during the last decades of the nineteenth century that spilled over into theFOR twentieth with a rise in anti-Jewish pogroms and discriminatory laws.37 Jews around the world celebrated the 1905 revolution in Russia, which had several prominent Jewish leaders, as a victory against anti-Semitism; and the Czar lifted his ban on Jewish theatre after several years of debate among Russian cultural critics. With substantial government support, the HabimaNOT Theatre would become celebrated around the world, particularly for its production of three monster plays: The Dybbuk by Solomon Ansky (a ghost story), The Eternal Jew by David Pinksi, and Leivick’s Golem.38 The Bolshevik censors redacted only the scene with the cave spirits (for “fostering superstition”) from the Habima production.39 During one performance, when the madman Tankhum cried out, “Who will save us?” voices from the audience responded, “We will!” and several members spontaneously stood and sang “The Internationale.”40 The Golem ran for 340 performances in its first production,41 but even after such success the Habima’s days as part of the Soviet theatre apparatus were numbered.PROOFS Although its three avant-garde, highly stylized monster plays gained the company worldwide attention, the Communist Party’s appetite for theatre in Hebrew, and its inferred Zionism, was limited. With anti-Zionist sentiment on the rise, the Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, to which ethnic minority theatres reported, waged a campaign against T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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Habima in the 1920s that was undoubtedly advanced by the death of the company’s director and champion Vakhtangov in 1922. The Habima troupe found Russian audiences increasingly unresponsive. Permitted to tour abroad, the Habima was criticized alternately for being a propaganda tool for the Soviets or for Zionism. Its productions were a huge success in Jewish strongholds like Kovno and Bialystok, but in Poland official state anti- Semitism nearly prevented the company from performing.42 Outside the USSR, the Habima itself resembled a Golem – created to protect Jewish culture within Bolshevism, it came to be viewed as Bolshevism, or simply Jewishness, out of control and a threat to the good people of Europe. In 1928, the company traveled to New York, after a warm invitation from the large immigrant Jewish community, who saw the troupe as a symbol of the survival of Jewish culture after the persecution of the previous half-century. However, they were immensely disappointed to find audiences in the “land of milk and honey” accustomedDISTRIBUTION to a less sophisticated, highly commercialized form of theatre. Indeed, Raikin Ben-Ari remembers that the New York production of The Golem had to close early when the Habima’s financial backer precipitously abandoned the company, having left a message that asserted he “would gladly finance us to his last cent, if we would only give our plays happy endings.FOR”43 Deeply concerned about their financial future and riven with internal disagreements, the troupe divided. After a desultory return to Western Europe, those that remained jumped at an offer from the future president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, to defect and become a Palestinian national Hebrew theatre.44 The Golem, chosen to launch the Habima’s much-anticipatedNOT Palestinian era on April 1, 1928, sold out. The Jews of Palestine saw the Habima as heroic preservers of Jewish culture in an anti-Semitic Europe. The critics were less generous. The reviewer for Ha’aretz wrote:

[The Golem] has rather cheap moments which probably cause a great deal of enthusiasm among Jews in the Diaspora and among the Gentiles, but Palestine does not like it. We speak of the excessive exploitation of the synagogue and religion in general. Neither will Palestine accept all that ghost business; we here have conquered many ghosts,PROOFS or we at least make eﬀorts to conquer them.45 This review leads to another inevitable comparison between the unhappy situation of the Habima and the role the Golem itself plays on stage: both are rejected by the very communities they have struggled so hard to rescue T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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and represent. The monsters of The Golem were too Jewish (and too Zio- nist) not only for the Soviet censors but for the theatre critics of Zion itself. Yet Habima remained popular in Palestine for decades, and would revive The Golem in New York in 1948 to great critical acclaim. The reviewer from the New York Times, untroubled by his inability to understand Hebrew, lauded the “dramatic rightness” of the performance.46

An angel come too late Undoubtedly news of the Holocaust, during which eleven million people, including six million European Jews, were systematically exterminated by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945, played a role in the positive reception of a play once considered too melancholy for the Jewish theatregoers of New York. Exposure of this genocide, the sheer scale of which had been previously unthinkable, was historicized as the culminationDISTRIBUTION of the rise in European anti-Semitism. The representation of Jews as an impoverished, iconoclastic ethnic minority seeking to drain Europe’s resources was quickly replaced by one of Jews as a people unfairly persecuted since ancient times. In a 1957 speech entitled “The Jew – the Individual” Leivick himself would write of the terrible anxiety he had felt asFOR a seven-year-old boy studying the biblical story of Abraham’s near-murder of his son Isaac, stopped at the last second by the intervention of an angel:

I am pursued by Isaac’s lying bound upon the altar, his looking at the raised knife until the angelNOT of God announced that it was but a trial; and like a decree as well as a refrain my childish question still pursues me: “What would have happened had the angel come one moment too late?”47

For Leivick, the Holocaust was evidence that the angel had been late not once but six million times for this test of faith. “Have we not had enough of sacrificial altars,” he continues. “I ask, have we not had enough?”48 That question of what is proper behavior in a world filled with violence and irrational hatred inspired a revival of Leivick’s play in April 2002 at the Manhattan TheatrePROOFS Ensemble, adapted by artistic director David Fishelson and starring Robert Prosky as Rabbi Levi and Joseph McKenna as his monster. Fishelson had determined to adapt the play in response to the rise in violence and civil strife associated with the Palestinian Intifada, which had rehashed some anti-Semitic canards as partial justification of violent T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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political action against Israel. But in the context of a New York still reeling from the devastating terrorist attacks of the previous September, he writes:

A theatergoer’s instinct might be to draw an analogy to recent Jewish history: in the wake of the Holocaust, the Jews of the world “armed” themselves by creating the state of Israel (a “Golem”) to stay further genocide. But now, they – like the Jews of Prague – ﬁnd themselves caught in a cycle of violence that appears to have no end … The Golem is not, in this light, a denial of the necessity of resorting to violence. It is the lament of its necessity on this earth.49

Fishelson’s ambivalence here reflects that of Leivick, writing in a very different context at a very different time, on the difficulty of finding an ethical middle ground between an idealistic pacifism and an indulgence in vengeful violence. But for Leivick, it was not merely a questionDISTRIBUTION of lamenting necessary violence; it was rather his keen awareness of the detrimental effect of unrighteous behavior on the psychology of the individual who commits those acts. The Golem, as a theatrical performance, embodies in real time and space this difficult dialectic and compromised moral position that has become, if anything, even more difficultFOR to resolve in the context of a horribly violent new century. Alisa Solomon, who reviewed Fishelson’s production in the New York Times, observes:

If the play seems especially vital now, it is not only because some Jews continue to yearn for messianicNOT redemption. It is also because the current generation has a diﬀerent relationship with the idea of Jewish power than their grandparents, and thus the ability to consider the play’s challenging themes anew. A century ago, the fantasy of a brawny and indestructible protector provided a compelling answer to Jewish vulnerability – even beyond the realm of the theater … Taking the logic further, one confronts the most troubling question that some Israelis and American Jews are beginning to raise: Has the militarily mighty Jewish state become a golem for the 21st century, promising protection but leading to peril?50 PROOFS Solomon’s critique would probably have both pleased and dismayed the deeply ethical but deeply anxious Leivick, who brought a Christ ﬁgure into conversation with his Golem to expand his critique of hatred beyond a critique of anti-Semitism and into a more universal lesson in which T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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compassion is held as a sine qua non of civilized human interaction. Violence may be necessary to survive in a violent world, but the violation of one’s mentschlekhkayt renders one less than human, unfeeling, partially dead: uncanny. Leivick’s Golem provides little practical advice in a world where racist violence is increasingly normalized, but it remains an eloquent reminder that the struggle for a better world must be as internal as it is political.

The techno-legacy of the Golem Genesis 2:7 assures the reader that God crafted humanity out of unliving earth; Greek mythology confirms that Prometheus did the same; and Gershom Scholem can point to several recipes in the Kabbalah for replicating these results. But because we are humans, not gods, our attempts to usurp the creative role will inevitably result in monsters.DISTRIBUTION Scholem’s research into the origins of the Golem was occasioned by the startup of an Israeli supercomputer, called “Golem Aleph” or “Golem No. 1,” at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot on June 17, 1965, for which Scholem gave the inaugural address.51 The novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer made a similar observation regarding a 1984 productionFOR of The Golem, directed by Richard Foreman for the New York Shakespeare Festival and starring F. Murray Abraham as Lowe and Randy Quaid as the Golem. Anxious about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Singer warned: The resemblance of this golemNOT to the golems of our nuclear age staggers the imagination. While we attempt to surpass our enemies and to create new and more destructive golems, the awful possibility is lurking that they may develop a volition of their own, become spiteful, trea- cherous, mad golems. Like the Jews of Prague in the sixteenth century we are frightened by our golems. We would like to be in a position to erase the uncanny power we have given them, hide them in some monstrous attic and wait for the time when they too will become fiction and folklore.52 There is littlePROOFS doubt that, as much influence as the rise of the Prague Golem legend – and Wegener’s film – had on the prevalence of Golems in the theatre, it also incited a related but distinct theatrical tradition with respect to another uncanny monster: the robot, an unliving monster that embodies the fear of advancing technology ungoverned by ethics. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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The term “robot” was famously coined by Czech playwright and humanist Karel Cˇ apek in his play R.U.R., which premiered on January 25, 1920, at the National Theatre of Prague. This play – in which a group of short-sighted businessmen mass-produce artificial humans (who are flesh, not mechanical) that run amok and destroy humanity – is usually interpreted as a Marxist allegory, written in response to increasing anxiety about the mechanization, and attendant dehumanization, of modern life. But it is hard to imagine that Cˇ apek, growing up in Prague, would not have been influenced by stories of the Golem. Owing, no doubt, to the prevalence of that anxiety as the Computer Age continues unabated, with new life-changing technologies emerging constantly, Cˇ apek’s robot’s popularity surged during the 1950s as a staple of science-fiction plays and films. The great American playwright Arthur Miller would write about Cˇ apek’s work:

We were great believers in Science in theDISTRIBUTION Thirties, the Depression time. Our problem seemed to be that scientiﬁc objectivity was not being applied to social problems, like that of scarcity in the midst of plenty, for instance, or unemployment. But here were stories warning against the tyranny and unreasonableness of the rational. They were fancifully put, to be sure, but surprisinglyFOR easy to imagine as the oncoming reality.53

Miller here captures the essence of the anxieties that monsters like the Golem may continue to embody in performance. To this day, a full understanding of the uncannyNOT mechanical monsters of Westworld, The Matrix, or The Avengers: Age of Ultron must recognize the role played by the original tortured defender of the ghetto.

Notes 1 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy- chological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, James Strachey, ed. and trans. (New York: Vintage, 2001), 217–56. 2 Ibid., 226. 3 Ibid., 227–30. 4 For Freud, the recurring motif of injury to the eye in this piece is far more anxiety-producing:PROOFS he sees it as a displacement for childhood castration anxieties. I do not believe it is necessary to explore that aspect of his analysis further in this book. 5 Freud, 234. 6 Ibid., 244. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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7 Freud also ascribes the feeling of uncanniness to the misattribution of coincidence to magical forces (which Freud sees as “the subject’s narcissistic overvaluation of his mental processes”), the presence of the evil eye (which he sees as a projection of the subject’s own feelings of envy), and other “residues” of animism and superstition which, despite our ostensible advance towards rationalism, continue to plague us when anxieties run high (ibid., 239–40); see also ibid., 241, 244. 8 Tobias Brinkmann, “Jewish Migration,” European History Online, December 3, 2010. http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/jewish-migration (accessed March 16, 2017). 9 It is told in graphic form, but Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Norton, 2005) is an excellent history of this pernicious document. 10 Brinkman, 29 11 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, Schocken, 1965), 191–2. 12 Ibid., 202; see also Arnold Goldsmith, The Golem Remembered, 1909–1980: Variations of a Jewish Legend (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981), 16. 13 Goldsmith, 21–30. He finds the earliest version of the raising of the Golem attributed to Rabbi Lowe of Prague in the prefaceDISTRIBUTION of the 1847 Sippurim by L. Weisel (35–6); see also Elizabeth Baer, The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post- Holocaust Fiction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 17–28; and Cathy S. Gelbin, The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808–2008 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 7–15. 14 Reprinted in Joachim Neugroschel, The Golem (New York: Norton, 2006). 15 Despite multiple denunciations of the libelFOR by senior religious figures, including popes, as early as 1247 (for a full history, see Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews (The Vatican: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1991), 188–208), the Blood Libel has persisted, experiencing notable revivals in the nineteenth century and again in more recent history, as evinced by a book written (and published) by Syrian military commander Mustafa Tlass: The Matzah of Zion (Aleppo: Tlass Books, 1983). For a discussion of current resur- gences of the Blood Libel in theNOT Arab world, see David Lev’s “Blood Libel Alive and Well in the Muslim World,” Arutz Sheva, March 25, 2013. 16 See also Goldsmith, 38–50. 17 Scholem, 202. 18 Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, directors; Henrick Galeen and Paul Wegener, writers, Der Golem: Wie Er in Die Welt Kam (Projektions-AG Union, 1920). 19 Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 88–9 20 Ibid., 90. 21 Ibid., 104. 22 Ibid., 89, 182 n.34 23 Joseph Landis, The Great Jewish Plays (New York: Horizon, 1972), 1–12; see also Raikin Ben-Ari,PROOFSHabima (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957),115–30. 24 Ben-Ari, 118 ff. 25 Landis, 74–8. 26 I draw upon Landis’s translation of The Golem in ibid. (223–356) for all the quotes from the play. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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27 Ibid., 226. 28 Scholem, 161. “Golem” in this context means “unliving earth,” and became an insult, just as someone might be disparagingly called a “clod.” In the interest of completeness, and since readers may be familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy tales The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it seems that despite the speculation of many critics a direct connection between the ancient Hebrew term “Golem” and the Tolkien character Gollum cannot be definitively established, although it is true that Gollum – so named after a coughing sound he occasionally makes – is a creature of subterranean darkness. 29 Landis, 237. 30 Ibid., 279. 31 Ibid., 3. 32 Ibid., 295. 33 Ibid., 288. 34 Ibid., 301. 35 Ibid., 307. 36 Ibid., 350. 37 See Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,DISTRIBUTION 2000), 24. 38 Ibid., 26–7. 39 Ben-Ari, 129, recalls the battle with the censors over the general spiritual content of the piece, writing: “We argued with the committee, trying to make them understand that these were not ghosts or phantoms, but symbols, masks. Nothing helped. We had to throw out the entire scene.” 40 Mendel Kohansky, The Hebrew TheatreFOR(New York: Ktav, 1969), 50–1. Kohansky asserts that The Golem contains implicit criticism of the brutality of the Soviet regime against Jews post-revolution that the political censors missed. Emanuel Levy repeats this assertion in The Habima – Israel’s National Theatre 1917–1977: A Study of Cultural Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 40. For Kohansky, the spontaneous singing represented a sarcastic response by the Jewish Communists in the audience rather than a note of approval. Ben-Ari, if he wasNOT aware of such criticism, does not mention it; nor does he mention the audience reaction to The Golem, except to say it was “a great hit” (Ben-Ari, 130). 41 Levy, 292. 42 Veidlinger, 54, 60; Ben-Ari, 71; Levy, 81–3. 43 Ben-Ari, 191; see also ibid., 163 and 183. To underscore this point, David S. Lifson’s excellent The Yiddish Theatre in America (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965), 121 gives the New York Habima production of The Golem very short shrift. See also Levy, 85–8. 44 Veidlinger, 98; Levy, 104–11. 45 Quoted in Kohansky, 115. 46 See Levy, 184. 47 Quoted inPROOFS Goldsmith, 219. 48 Ibid., 220. 49 David Fishelson, “The Golem – Essay,” Manhattan Ensemble Theater, April 2002. www.manhattanensemble.com/golem/index.html (accessed March 11, 2017). T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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50 Alisa Solomon, “Theatre: A Jewish Avenger, a Timely Legend,” New York Times, April 7, 2002. www.nytimes.com/2002/04/07/theater/theater-a-jewish- avenger-a-timely-legend.html. (accessed December 16, 2016). 51 See Goldsmith, 15. 52 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Golem is a Myth for our Time.” New York Times. August 12, 1984. www.nytimes.com/1984/08/12/theater/the-golem-is-a-myth- for-our-time.html (accessed January 2, 2017). 53 Arthur Miller, “Foreword.” In Peter Kussi, Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Cˇ apek Reader (North Haven, CT: Catbird, 1990), 5.

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Shakespeare’s facility with theatrical ghosts is one of his most celebrated qualities as a playwright. The Ghost of King Hamlet is particularly invoked as an example ofShakespeare’s commandFOR of the spirit world. In the eighteenth century, this ghost was central to a volatile and very high-stakes debate about the nature and social role of dramatic literature between Voltaire, the great “outlaw intellectual” of France, and the eminent German critic G. E. Lessing, called the “father of modern dramaturgy.” Tracking the contours of this ghostly debateNOT is revelatory of the constant revisions of our collective cultural memory surrounding Shakespeare, because this ghost story is not limited to theatrical spectres, but also to the ghosts of ancient philosophers, kings, popes, and the countless shades of the religious battle- ﬁelds of Europe. This is by no means an exorcism; when I am through telling this story, I hope to convey a sense of what unﬁnished business of history is present in Shakespeare, and perhaps why we remain so eager to put the living into the service of his ghost.

Phantom history PROOFS As a monster that appears in ﬁction and mythology, the ghost is common to all cultures. This is unsurprising, considering the importance of memory, for that is the nature of a ghost; monstrously it straddles the present and the past, a memory given shape. Transparent, incorporeal, a ghost, like all T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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memories, is both here and not here. Like so many things in our lives, like race and gender and the past, memory is not real, yet it still exists, insofar as it has real effects on real people in the real present. A ghost is memories given shape for a compelling reason – to change the present. A ghost carries information from the past into the present, a warning that the past has been misremembered, at least from the ghost’s perspective. Unfinished business, a ghost is a memory with an agenda. Historians live with ghosts all the time – the past is, after all, lost, and it is left to the historian to cobble together a vision of the past based on evidence that exists in the present; but this evidence is fragmentary, translucent, ethereal, corruptible. So the picture it renders is, at best, spectral; the breath, blood and bone, the nerve and sinew, all that made it real and vital is long gone. Like all dead things, the past continues to change: bits and pieces of it are constantly coming in and out of focus;, new parts are unearthed while others stay buried. Its remnants decay at differentDISTRIBUTION and unpredictable rates and appear in different forms to each onlooker. Historians live haunted lives, surrounded by semi-visible people. All history is phantom history. No historian understands phantom history as deeply as a theatre historian, for whom the only important thing – the performance – died the instant it was born, decades or centuries or millenniaFOR ago. All that a performance leaves is fragments: reviews, playbills, receipts, scripts, impressions recorded in memoirs, ruins, gaps, holes, shadows. Many critics2 have noted that theatrical activity itself is somehow innately ghostly. It is, after all, an intervention into the present by the past, imperfectly and unstably remembered as it might be. Like all ghostlyNOT things, theatrical performance straddles the present and the past, fantasy and reality, emerging as a fairly uncanny collaboration between these opposites. Everything that appears on a theatrical stage has a ghostly quality: the prop that we see as a sword; the invocation of an ancient hall in the scenery; the actor who submerges his personality into a role and yet in so doing creates a third phantasmal thing – a hybrid of a living human and a character made only of text. Scripts seem static when we read them, but each performance is a resurrection and each resurrection is unique, unpredictable, and tragically lost the instant it appears. Theatre betrays that all memory is in a constant state of revision. In The Haunted Stage, MarvinPROOFS Carlson writes: Theatre, as a simulacrum of the cultural and historical process itself, seeking to depict the full range of human actions within their physical context, has always provided society with the most tangible records of T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:11

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its attempts to understand its own operations. It is the repository of cultural memory, but, like the memory of each individual, it is also subject to continual adjustment and modiﬁcation as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts. The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modiﬁed by the processes of recycling and recollection.3

It is uncomfortable to be reminded of this instability of memory. After all, what is an individual apart from a series of memories, eﬀectively stories one tells oneself about one’s histories – personal, tribal, religious, national, or what have you? Change the stories, and change the way an individual understands him- or herself. This, perhaps, is why ghosts are so horriﬁc – they carry occult information that, when known, will change our sense of ourselves in, possibly, the most profound ways. DISTRIBUTION

Who’s there? The first sign of the ghost in Hamlet is in the first line of the play – Bernardo’s “Who’s there?” This is not the typicalFOR interrogative of a tower sentry. For one thing, although the convention is to place this scene “On a Platform of the Castle” (because Hamlet later says he will meet the guards on a platform, I.ii.273),4 none of the original sources has any such stage direction; and Horatio explains in Scene II (l. 207) that the guards encountered the ghost “in the dead waste,” suggesting a more far-off appointment. In addition, Bernardo is not the active, on-dutyNOT guard, but his relief – it should be Marcellus who challenges Bernardo. But the border guards of Elsinore have plenty of reason to be on edge. The old king died under mysterious circumstances; the new king isn’t exactly who the laws of succession say he ought to be; the Norwegian Army might be out there with unfinished business of its own (which is why the sentries are positioned in the first place); and this desolate borderland is almost certainly haunted by a mysterious ghost. Bernardo and Marcellus are already frightened – in the next scene, Horatio describes them as “distill’d/Almost to jelly with the act of fear” (ll. 213–14) – and they have the sense to understand that the invasion of thePROOFS mortal plane by a spirit has something to do with the more prosaic, but no less horrific, impending invasion of the nation: “Well may it sort,” says Bernardo, “that this portentous figure/Comes armed through our watch, so like the king/That was and is the question of these wars” T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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(ll. 122–4). Sure enough, the ghost appears, and Horatio, the learned scholar, is smart enough to realize it has secrets to divulge, and requests that it speak its mind. The ghost is fragile, or at least shy; driven oﬀ by the cock’s crow, or by Horatio’s invocation of God, it needs the unwholesome night to do its unholy business and needs Hamlet to venture out to the borderlands. Hamlet, for his part, reveals that he also knows the ghost is carrying information, which he will attempt to gain at any cost:

If it assume my noble father’s person I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all If you have hitherto conceal’d this sight Let it be tenable in your silence still; And whatever else shall hap to-night, Give it an understanding, but no tongue. DISTRIBUTION (ll. 265–71)

Why all the secrecy? Because Hamlet’s “prophetic soul” has already determined that regicide is afoot, and he is pretty confident of his suspect, Claudius. Accusing a sitting king of murderFOR is a dangerous pastime, so he wants to play his cards close to his chest until such time as his “foul deeds will rise …to men’s eyes” (l. 280). He goes to meet the ghost, then, with no lack of preconceived notions. In Act I, Scene V, the ghost reveals that its purpose is indeed to rewrite the recent history of Denmark.NOT The offi cial story that the King was stung by a serpent while sleeping outside in his garden is, the ghost says, partially untrue, as the serpent that stung him is now wearing his crown. The ghost commands Hamlet to revenge his murder, to leave his mother alone, and to “remember me.” Hamlet promises to “sweep to my revenge” as fast as thought, but does not quite do so. When he has a moment, he reflects more soberly:

The spirit that I have seen May be a de’il, and the de’il hath power T’assumePROOFS a pleasing shape; – yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me. (ll. 587–91) T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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Hamlet is reined in by his own reason. The certainty he experienced in the presence of the ghost is now ﬁltered through his logic, his intelligence, and his understanding of how the cosmos works. Of this doubt, George Walton Williams has written:

The consequence of this understanding should be a questioning of the nature of the Ghost, but though he raises here the question of whether the spectre is a spirit of health or a devil, a goblin damned, Hamlet never seriously poses that question so as to have an answer to it. Instead, he posses the question as to whether or not the visitant is telling the truth … A question about the origin of a ghost is appropriate to salvation and damnation; the failure to ask that speciﬁc question – or force an answer to that question – could have cost Hamlet his soul.5

Williams is troubled by this ambiguity, to theDISTRIBUTION point that he remains unsatisfied that Hamlet ever really obeys his father’s injunction, and thus never really answers the play’s initial question –“Who’s there?”–even though he attempts an answer in Act III: “Is it the king?” (III.iv.30). But from Hamlet’s perspective, the cosmic nature of the ghost is far less important than the more central question, whichFOR is whether he should kill his uncle. So he engages in a test of the information, not of the ghost, that will reveal far more conclusive results. Admittedly, these tests are elaborate, seem to lack an appropriate sense of urgency, and eventually result in the deaths of almost all of the major characters, but compare his actions to that of his foil, Laertes. The latter hears onNOT the wind that his father, whom he seems to have treasured far less than Hamlet did his own, has been murdered, and flies off to his revenge never questioning his own actions: “That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard” (IV.i.122). That certainty renders him into a pawn of the play’s most diabolical character, and he becomes a murderer. Perhaps, however, Williams and those others who seek to investigate the nature of the ghost do not take into account that it is a theatrical ghost; after all, Hamlet is a play, not a demonology. Until and unless it is performed, a play is inert, a corpse, if you will. Good playwrights, even those uncon- cerned withPROOFS psychological realism, intentionally build ambiguities into their works to raise conflict – the most critical element of theatricality – to be resolved in different manners by different productions. Hamlet’s doubt, which prevents him from taking the ghost at its word, is a sign of his humility, his intelligence, and his caution. It is one of his greatest personal T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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virtues, but it is also one of his most theatrical characteristics. Torn by warring forces within himself – grief, guilt, rage, fear, and his desire to kill his uncle all battle with his reluctance to commit an unjustified murder – Hamlet’s inner conflict is the most compelling and dramatic element of the play. What, then, is the nature of a theatrical ghost? Students of the period know that Hamlet was just one of dozens of “revenge tragedies”–inspired by Seneca’s Thyestes and numerous enough to qualify as a genre – including Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587), and The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) by Cyril Tourneur. In almost all of these plays, there is some combination of the murder of a good ruler, the cover-up followed by a complicated intrigue, the suicide of the love interest, the battle with madness, the man talking to a skull, the explosion of violence that results in a huge pile of bodies (often set against a revel or festival of some kind), and,DISTRIBUTION of course, the ghost. The ghosts vary in their characters – from The Spanish Tragedy’s Ghost of Andre, who has to wake up the demon Revenge from a nap to get him on task, to the Ghost of Montferrers in The Atheist’s Tragedy, who commands his son to leave revenge to God.6 Ghosts on Elizabethan and Jacobean stagesFOR are themselves the descendants of a rich menagerie of spirits, demons, and other monsters that merrily populated European theatre prior to the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages, much of Europe’s “official” theatre culture comprised Church-sanctioned religious dramas: plays of the lives of saints, recounting of miracles, guild- sponsored adaptations of BibleNOT stories, and old pagan festivals warmed over with a Christian veneer. By their nature metaphysical, such fare swarmed with allegorical spooks of all kinds; meant not to be realistic representations of the metaphysical world, these creeps were understood as metaphorical presentations, a theatrical analogue to an abstract concept. Allegory is, in the words of Jane K. Brown, “a mode of representation which renders the supernatural visible,”7 but it is also a tradition unto itself – a system of reference that became, in effect, a theatrical language known and treasured by its audience over generations as it tried to keep up with changing political and religious discourses. In Brown’s description, the allegorical mode is layeredPROOFS over, very gradually, by the classical in Shakespeare’s work.8 Shakespeare is not writing in a vacuum: his audience is already well prepared to see and understand a stage ghost in this multifaceted context. Unlike Hamlet, the audience knows that the ghost’s information is valid, because allegorical ghosts are invariably truthful. Apart from being a horrific T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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and wonderful character, the ghost is a theatrical device that is used to bring Hamlet secret information, and the audience knows it; they do not share Hamlet’s doubts. Tradition has it that Shakespeare considered this role of suﬃcient importance that he undertook to play it himself, or perhaps he was merely looking forward to an opportunity to boo his audience for a change. None of this renders the ghost entirely innocent, however.

The spectre of war From the early sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Europe was ravaged by bloody and extended sectarian violence. The preaching of Martin Luther, beginning around 1519, gave a focus for simmering resent- ments against the Catholic hegemony. Religious matters were practically indistinguishable from political ones, and radical elements among the Lutherans in Germany seized the opportunity toDISTRIBUTION incite revolutions against not only priests but princes and other authority figures. By the 1600s, these divisions had metastasized into insurgencies that devastated Europe, destroying countless artifacts and artworks and depopulating entire regions. Theatre also suffered during this period; traditional religious drama was strongly associated with the Catholic Church,FOR and such performances were filled with sectarian significance. Performance venues of various kinds became cultural spaces wherein religious tensions could be manifested and played out – sites for new insurgencies. Across Europe religious drama was, sometimes violently, purged. Theatre culture would have to wait until things calmed down. NOT In Britain, King Henry VIII, who broke with Rome more for personal than theological reasons, led the Reformation. Some of his subjects balked, inciting violent reprisals and draconian new laws that made certain Catholic religious practices punishable by death. When Mary I came to power in 1553, Catholicism was reasserted with martyrdoms and widespread violence. her successor, Elizabeth, formally banned religious (and political) drama as one of her first official acts, on May 16, 1559, with a proclamation prohi- biting any plays “wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the realm shall be handled or treated, being no meet matters to be written or treated upon.PROOFS”9 This was part of a campaign to sterilize England of religious rallying sites and, hopefully, keep the country from descending into civil war. However, Elizabeth also famously fostered a new professional theatrical culture, with herself (through the office of the Lord Chamberlain), naturally, as the final arbiter of what was acceptable. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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Heavily censored and monitored, but also ﬁnancially supported and culti- vated, the London theatre scene was an explosively vibrant cultural market place when Shakespeare wandered into it in the 1580s. Writing was taken up not by monks but by men (and a few women) who had either had a formal education or could approximate one, and who were familiar with the style of the classical writers of Rome, who held tragedy to be the highest dramatic form. Elizabeth would not brook open criticism of her reign, but her censors allowed oblique political commentaries, so long as they were not too sedi- tious. Shakespeare had only to glance at the heads of traitors lining London Bridge to be reminded of the perils of venturing too far into matters of state. But apart from this rather chilly political discourse, London’s playwrights were remarkably free handed, and this environment rewarded creativity. King Hamlet’s Ghost is one example of such freedom. When it arrives in Denmark, it appears to be on temporary leave from Purgatory, where the sins of its life are “burnt and purg’d away” (II.ii.17).DISTRIBUTION It complains that it has to spend this time in the ﬁre because it was murdered “even in the blossoms of my sin” (l. 82), unconfessed, and unshriven by a priest’s Last Rites. Hamlet later stays his hand against Claudius because he believes him to be fully confessed (III.iii.76–90), and therefore likely to head straight to Heaven. The existence of Purgatory and the necessityFOR of confession were issues much debated by the elite theologians of the Anglican Church. Some writers were put to death for their inability to agree with the Anglican Church on these matters, and plenty of dissenters still roamed in England and abroad. Some modern authors have cited these passages and others in Shakespeare’s oeuvre as evidence that he harboredNOT Catholic sympathies. But G. K. Hunter has argued10 that Shakespeare actually took the state’s ambiguity with respect to religion as an opportunity rather than a restriction:

Shakespeare’s Catholic vocabulary and his sensitivity to its historical resonance is part of his freedom as a writer and does not allow us to decide that he was either a Protestant or a Catholic in doctrine or sympathy. One might also make the point that the state’s prohibitions as well as its calculated vagueness about doctrine allowed the skillful writer to enter into a greater range of psychologies and experiences, applyingPROOFS doctrinal words, with their powerful traditional charge, to humanly various situations.11

Hunter sees Shakespeare navigating the censorship of his era to make a strong move towards psychological realism, but whether Shakespeare was T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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self-consciously writing in such a way is unknowable. It is likely that he was writing what would get past the censors and play well to his audiences. But ambiguity, handled well, can translate into the kind of conﬂict that plays need to keep the action going.

Aristotle, revenant France had abolished religious drama in 1548, but as the next decades would prove to be dominated by devastating civil wars, serious theatrical matters would not be a government priority any time soon. Official Church opposition to theatrical entertainments of any sort overshadowed the rich tapestry of pre-Renaissance performance culture elsewhere in Europe. In the peacetime of the 1620s, Cardinal Richelieu founded his learned body, the Académie française, to pronounce judgement on all aspects of French culture. Richelieu, like Elizabeth inDISTRIBUTION England, understood the potential impact of the theatre on the social and political discourses of the era; as a staunch supporter of the absolute power of the French monarch, he did what he could to control the free expression of French artists of all kinds. What the Académie strived to generate was a literary dramatic tradition in France; that is to say, a traditionFOR of playwriting that was responsible to itself, as opposed to market demands, and an attendant body of criticism that strove to improve the quality of the writing and the public taste. As its defining text, the Académie took Aristotle’s Poetics. The Académie’sinterpretationofAristotlewasextremelyrigid,read in order to expel mixed genres like farce and tragicomedy, to insist upon strict adherence to “the unitiesNOT” of time, place, and plot and upon an elevated “decorum,” to limit the themes, sentiments, and aesthetic devices available to writers, and to reject any elements that were not in accord with a narrowly defined “reasonableness.” These restrictions were not limited to writers: actors were forced to select their gestures, vocal cadences, and postures from a pre-approved menu. Scenic art and music were similarly curtailed. Aristocratic, the Académie was charged with the responsibility of not only elevating French drama but also ensuring that it was incapable of fomenting any sort of dissent against the French Crown. Tasked with, in effect, exorcising the ghosts of popular theatre culture, the Académie wasPROOFS brutal in its condemnation of writers who did not match its standards, and even sometimes those who did. The stage ghost, for these French neoclassicists, was off the table – far too bombastic, cheap, and silly to be taken seriously. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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Theatre in London, meanwhile, was outlawed after the arrest and execution of Charles I in the 1640s. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, he brought a taste for neoclassicism with him from Paris, which quickly became all the rage among the reopened London theatres. John Dryden, a leading playwright of the age, would famously condemn Shakespeare for his lack of neoclassical decorum:

All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them laboriously: but luckily, when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there … He is many times ﬂat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great.12 DISTRIBUTION

Calling Shakespeare “natural” and “lucky” is a polite way of calling him a mad genius, a sort of idiot savant who stumbled upon a formula for great playwriting that he himself did not fully understand. English adaptors of Shakespeare hacked and slashed at theFOR scripts, and the Bard’s popularity remained equivocal in London as the eighteenth century commenced. François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a Parisian writer whose wit, prolificacy, and problems with authority figures would make him one of the most celebrated figures of the eighteenth century and beyond. WhileNOT in exile in England, the young Voltaire became enamored with English social and cultural freedoms, and with the work of Shakespeare in particular,buthemaintainedaneoclassical distaste for the lack of decorum on the English stage. In his criticism, he puts special emphasis on the subject of ghosts. In 1733, in his “Discourse on Tragedy”–which was both the preface to his Brutus (inspired by Julius Caesar) and a letter to his friend Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke – he wrote:

How, could we dare, on our theatre, to make appear, for example, the ghost ofPROOFS Pompey, or the genius of Brutus, among all those young men fellows who never look upon the most serious things except on the occasion to speak a bon mot? … If we were to hazard such a spectacle at Paris, would you not hear the parterre crying out? And would you not see the women turning their heads away?13 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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Voltaire here demonstrates his conflicted but adamant support for the very narrow reading of Aristotle proffered by the Académie, which itself is conflicted: neoclassicists idolize their Greek forebears for their literary theatrical culture but condemn their theatrical extravagance in bringing gods, murders, mutilations, poisonings, and ghosts. These failures of decorum, Voltaire argues to Bolingbroke, confuse titillation and horror for the more profound existential terror (phobos) that Aristotle says is so necessary to katharsis (see the Introduction to this book). This, he worries, would confuse and confound the parterre, those who occupied the cheap standing area near the stage, and offend the delicate sensibilities of French women in the audience. Yet, Voltaire seems almost wistful when he remarks: “we [French], on the other hand, as over scrupulous as you [English] have been rash, for fear of going too far, stop too short, and very often fail of reaching the tragic, for fear of going beyond it.”14 Voltaire seeks some kind of middle ground in which the potential of the theatreDISTRIBUTION to invoke powerful emotions is tempered by the sophistication of (French) good manners and high intellect, but could cite only one example:

Such terrible blows should not be provided, and not everyone should dare to strike them. Such developmentsFOR require great circumspection, and a masterful execution. The English themselves admit that Shakespeare, for example, was the only one among them who could evoke and speak to shadows with success: Within that circle none durst move but he.15 NOT That last line is a quote from John Dryden’s prologue to his 1670 adaptation of The Tempest. High praise indeed for Shakespeare, and a clear alliance between Voltaire and England’s most respected dramatic critic. But as the letter progresses, Voltaire makes his case for keeping to the styles vetted and approved by the authorities in Paris, rather snarkily remarking that “it is more diﬃcult to write well than to put on the stage murders, wheels, gallows, sorcerers, and ghosts.”16 This critique is more or less in line with Dryden’s, but Voltaire remained tantalized by the freedoms of the English stage, and his relationship with Shakespeare grew more complicated. In 1748,PROOFS Voltaire wrote Sémiramis , which appeared in Paris as a court spectacle, and caused tremendous upset among the staunch neoclassicists due to the presence of a ghost. In the play, Sémiramis is the Queen of Assyria. Years before the play’s action begins, she murdered her husband Ninus and usurped his throne; their infant son Ninias disappeared. Now, T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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nearly two decades later, her co-conspirator General Assur is fomenting a popular rebellion against her, citing a law that the land must have a male king. Sémiramis concedes and names not Assur, but a younger general she has got her eye on. This fellow is Arzace, who, unknown to the Queen, is actually her son Ninias. In Act III, Scene VI, in a “magniﬁcent, richly ornamented, salon” in front of the tomb of her husband, with Assur, Arzace, and her entire court, Sémiramis prepares to seal the deal, but she is confronted by her Ninus’s unquiet spirit as his ghost emerges from the tomb:

ARZACE: Very well! What do you command? Speak to us, you terrible god! ASSUR: Speak! SÉMIRAMIS: Do you come to destroy me, or pardon me? It is your scepter and your bed that I will give; judge if this hero is worthy of your place. Decree. I obey. DISTRIBUTION THE SHADOW: (to Arzace) You will reign, Arzace, but there are crimes you must expiate. In my tomb, at my ashes, you must sacriﬁce. Serve my son and I; remember your father: listen to the priest.17

Assur and Arzace know the functionFOR of a theatrical ghost, and they beg the spirit to oﬀer up its secrets. Assur and Sémiramis seem determined to brazen their way through this; after all, they killed the man and, as far as they know, his son. The ghost, for its part, is as oblique and unhelpful as a Greek oracle, but its most important command –“Remember your father”–echoes from Hamlet,NOT if not exactly in homage, then at least as an unmistakable invitation for comparison. Voltaire durst move in that circle that was formerly too frightening for anyone but Shakespeare! As Voltaire predicted, this ghost certainly spooked the French parterre: its appearance was suﬃciently bombastic to drive the noble petit-maîtres, who had long been accustomed to occupying seats on the stage during performances – the better to display themselves – back into the house. Boo indeed! And the parterre booed Voltaire right back with a merciless tirade for the inclusion of this unwelcome visitor from the Beyond in violation of neoclassical tradition and rationalism. Voltaire issued a response in his “Dissertation on Ancient and ModernPROOFS Tragedy,” which formed the preface to the published script of Sémiramis. He notes of his critics:

They spoke and wrote on all sides that we no longer believe in ghosts, and that the apparitions of the dead cannot be anything but childish to T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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the eyes of an enlightened nation. What? All antiquity believed in such miracles, and yet it will not be permitted to conform to antiquity? What? Our religion consecrated these acts of Providence, and yet it would be ridiculous to renew them?18

Such an argument has dangerous undertones: Voltaire is backtracking on his own condemnation of classical aesthetics, with its lack of decorum, by appealing to the authority of the ancients. But he takes an important, and to him perilous, step further when he invokes his own Catholic religion, with its faith in miracles and other supernatural phenomena. A contradiction is exposed: if an enlightened nation cannot admit even the allegorical existence of the supernatural, how can it support a religion whose very authority is predicated on miracles? He goes on to call up the Ghost of King Hamlet in defense of his own. Voltaire’s defense of the stage ghost in his “DissertationDISTRIBUTION” failed to persuade other French playwrights to imitate the ghost from Sémiramis, even as Shake- speare grew in popularity among the French. In 1769, Jean-François Ducis’s adaptation of Hamlet was staged at the Comédie Française. Ducis altered the play’s action to ﬁt the unities of time, place, and action, and eliminated the ghost completely. Richard Flatter writes:FOR

Hamlet’s father never appears. We learn all about his fate while listening to conversations on the one hand between Claudius and his trusted friend and accomplice Polonius, and on the other between Hamlet and his friend Norcestes. OnlyNOT once, in the third act, Hamlet, in sudden excitement, declares that he sees his father; but neither Gertrude nor Ophélie, who are with him, nor the audience are allowed to catch a glimpse of the apparition: it exists merely in Hamlet’s imagination or hallucination.19

In Ducis’s version, Gertrude – complicit in the murder of King Hamlet – eventually kills herself. Hamlet goes on to marry the perfectly sane Ophelia and live, presumably, as happily ever after as their circumstances permit. Voltaire did not protest this treatment of Shakespeare. On the contrary, years after hisPROOFS own stage ghost was rejected by its first audience, various factors had led him to feel ever more horrified at Shakespeare’s growing influence on French drama. One of those factors was personal: in September 1769, the English critical condemnation of Shakespeare had loosened up enough for the actor and entrepreneur David Garrick to host an elaborate T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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and expensive “Shakespeare Jubilee,” which included an actor representing Voltaire in a costume decorated with frogs wandering around the festival muttering criticisms.20 This fellow was brought in by Garrick as a straw man for the hated French, solidifying Shakespeare’s role as an emblem of British national pride. Voltaire, never one to shrug oﬀ a personal slight, was furious, but not merely because of the insults. He grew increasingly fearful that Shakespeare’s mythic persona, this ghost of the real man and his works, would cloud French aesthetic judgement irretrievably. Seductive as it was, it would hopelessly corrupt French theatrical taste. Furthermore, as Haydn Mason has observed, Voltaire began to see the struggle to assert French cultural superiority as part of France’s political struggle against England in the context of the French losses in the Seven Years War. In 1760, Voltaire wrote his Parallèle entre Shakespeare et Corneille, which, Mason writes, “set up the former as in a superior class to one of France’s greatest tragedians. Voltaire went to war on England.”21 DISTRIBUTION Voltaire seemed committed to ﬁghting the cultural wing of this war for decades to come. In 1776, he allied himself with the American revolutionaries in their war against Britain by publishing his Lettre à l’Académie Française,a document of aesthetics judged by the King’s advisors as likely to stir up new sectarian quarrels and be “injuriousFOR to religion. ”22 Voltaire’s crusade against Shakespeare also included broadsides, pamphlets, and his opus Commentaires sur Corneille – all designed to poke holes in the increasing bardolatry he saw all around him. These later writings merely bolstered Voltaire’s lifelong image as an anti-Shakespearean critic. DespiteNOT his scattered praise for Shakespeare, his earlier criticism had already set him up as a target for attacks by Shakespeare’s champions – not only in England, but also from the unexpected quarter of Germany, home to the upstart anti-neoclassicist G. W. Lessing.

The Romantic geist The first major popular German translation of Hamlet appeared sometime between the 1660s and 1680s as Der Bestrafte Brudermord, oder Prinz Hamlet aus Dänemarck (The Tragedy of Fratricide Punished, or, Prince Hamlet of Denmark). In this version,PROOFS which is mightily cut and shot through with low comedy, the ghost risks some of his gravitas by boxing a sentry’s ears and making him drop his musket (I.ii.7–8).23 Perhaps because of such undignified tendencies, German theatre culture in the early eighteenth century suffered from what F. J. Lamport has called a T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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“cultural inferiority complex.”24 Theatre, dominated by low comedy, bawdy Italianate improvisation, and other downmarket fare, was seen as a disgraceful pastime; as late as 1751 German actors could still be forbidden from taking Holy Communion.25 The French and English authorities all agreed that a respectable literary dramatic tradition meant tragedy, and tragedy was lacking in German. Lessing agreed with the French and English neoclassicists on the superior reﬁnement of tragedy. The son of a Lutheran pastor, a deﬁer of tyrants and a champion of Enlightenment philosophy, he advocated the free exchange of ideas and the general improvement of the human condition. He believed companionable friendship to be the most conducive state of mind for promoting these enlightened ends. The young Lessing saw tragic drama as the best tool for generating the feelings of compassion (Mitleid)thatwouldleadtothiscompanion- able, enlightened state. In 1756, in his lateDISTRIBUTION twenties, he wrote to a friend:

the power of tragedy is this: it should broaden our capacity to feel compassion. It should not merely instruct us to feel compassion towards this or that particular unfortunate person,FOR rather it should make us so sensible that an unfortunate person from any time, and in any guise, would move us and make us take their side … The most compassionate person is the best person, he is the one most disposed to all of the social virtues and to all manner of great-spiritedness. Anyone who makes us compassionate makes us betterNOT and more virtuous, and the tragedy that achieves the former also achieves the latter, or – it does the latter in order to do the former.26

Lessing possessed an unshakeable conviction that the theatre, with its emphasis on dialectics and its ability to create genuinely moving emotional worlds, was an unmatchable tool for generating compassion. But who would bring this sophisticated engine of empathy to the benighted German stage? Before Lessing, another German writer had called for a massive reform of the theatre alongPROOFS strict neoclassical lines. This was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66), a professor at Leipzig. During his ascendancy, the German theatre had indeed begun to idolize and largely copy the French, in a pedantic manner that superbly reﬂected that of its dictator. Lessing, however, would have none of this pedantry. In 1759, he wrote: T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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[Gottsched] did not want to improve our old theater so much as be the creator of an entirely new one. And of what kind? A Frenchifying one; without investigating whether this French theater was appropriate for the German way of thinking or not. He might have seen, on the basis of our old dramatic pieces, which he drove oﬀ, that we have more the taste of the English than the French; that, in our tragedies, we want to see and think more than the fearful French tragedy gives us to see and think; that the Great, the Terrifying, the Melancholy has a better eﬀect on us than the Quaint, the Delicate, the Enamored; that excessive simplicity tires us more than excessive plot, etc. He should have stayed on this path, and it would have led him directly to the English theater.27

Lessing’s assertion of a close kinship between the German “way of thinking” and the English was unusual as the English theatreDISTRIBUTION was not well known in Germany at the time. Scholars even disagree on how familiar Lessing could have been with Shakespeare’s plays. It may be that his acquaintance with Shakespeare in 1759 came largely through Voltaire, whose writings he read voraciously. Later in his 1759 essay, Lessing seems to echo Voltaire’s critique of French restraint: FOR

If one had translated Shakespeare’s masterworks, with a few modest changes, for our German audiences – I know for certain – it would have had better consequences than making them so familiar with Corneille and Racine … NOTEven making a decision by the models of the ancients, Shakespeare is a far greater tragic poet than Corneille – even though the latter knew the ancients well, and the former hardly at all … But with little eﬀort, I could prove to you at length how our old pieces really have very much that is English. To take only the best known of them: Doctor Faust has a number of scenes that only a Shakespearean genius might have conceived. And how enamored was Germany – as it still is, in part – of its Doctor Faust!28

Faust was a German folk favorite, featuring devils and phantoms. Lessing, who apparentlyPROOFS did not know Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at this time, tried his hand at a version. It was never completed, but it appears to have inﬂuenced Goethe’s masterpiece.29 But for Lessing to compare Corneille – the uncontested luminary of French tragedy and the idol of Voltaire – unfavorably to Shakespeare was tantamount to a declaration of T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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war against French tastes, and a personal broadside against Voltaire, who was still very much alive. By 1767, when Voltaire’s Sémiramis was staged in Hamburg, Shakespeare was becoming far more popular in Germany and translations of his plays were widely available. Lessing was now far better acquainted with English drama and dramatic criticism – and therefore with Shakespeare’s ghosts and their treatment by commentators – than he had been in 1759, and his stance towards Voltaire had become that of a mature critic. It was in 1767 that Lessing joined the newly founded Hamburg National Theatre as its in- house playwright. The lofty mission of the National Theatre was to foster native German drama, and prove that German authors could be as great as their French counterparts. It was for this reason that they hired Lessing, who was not only a leading critic but also a prominent playwright. But during the National Theatre’s brief existence (before poor management, infighting, and greed undermined its idealism), it staged moreDISTRIBUTION neoclassical French plays than new German productions. And no single author was more produced at Hamburg than Voltaire himself. Lessing quickly exceeded his remit by publishing a gazette, the Hamburg Dramaturgy, in which he could comment on the National Theatre’s productions for the edification of the actorsFOR and the public, with his aim being to nurture a morally uplifting, refined German dramatic tradition. In the eleventh essay, he turns on Voltaire and his “Dissertation on Ancient and Modern Tragedy,” with the ghost the sole topic of discussion. Picking up where Voltaire had left off in his defense of stage ghosts, Lessing underscores the need for dramatistsNOT to move the audience through “deception,” which must be grounded in the audience’s present beliefs. The conclusion is not that ghosts should be either used or avoided, but that their usefulness to the tragedian depends on the audience’s willingness to understand them as stage devices:

Very well, all of antiquity believed in ghosts. The dramatic poets in the ancient world were justiﬁed in exploiting this belief, and if we ﬁnd one of them bringing the dead back to life on stage, it would be unchari- table of us to condemn him according to our superior understanding. But thenPROOFS does the modern poet, who partakes in our superior understanding, have the same authority? Certainly not … Historical truth is not his goal, but merely the means to his end. He wants to deceive us, and, through deception, move us. If it is then true that we do not believe in ghosts anymore, if this lack of belief would necessarily hinder T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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deception, if without deception we cannot possibly sympathize, then the dramatic poet of today would be working against himself if, notwithstanding all this, he furnished forth such unbelievable fairy tales; all of the art that he might employ would be in vain. And in consequence? In consequence, should it be wholly impermissible to put ghosts and apparitions on stage? In consequence, must this wellspring of terror and pathos run dry for us? And does not poetry provide many examples in which a genius deﬁes all our philosophies, and things that we sneer at in cold reason manage to appear frightening to our imagination?30

What is remarkable here is how Lessing makes “deception” an agent in the generation of the all-important Mitleid (compassion). His opposition of “our philosophies” and “cold reason” to “poetry” and “the imagination” recalls passages in both Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream that alternately aﬃrm and discount the possibility that ghosts andDISTRIBUTION fairies are real, while the reference to “genius” implicitly seems to recall Dryden’s and Voltaire’s treatment of Shakespeare. Lessing is not in the least concerned with some academician’s deﬁnition of “decorum,” but entirely with the emotional response of the audience. Since the audience’s response to ghostsFOR remains highly emotionally charged, even if it understands them as deceptions, Lessing concludes that a clean rejection of the supernatural is far from obvious:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says this? Even more, what does this mean? Does it meanNOT that we have come so far in our understanding that we can prove their impossibility? Does it mean that certain irrefutable truths that contradict the belief in ghosts are so generally known and universally accepted, even to the most common man, that everything that contests those truths must seem ridiculous and absurd to him? It cannot mean that. The statement that we do not believe in ghosts in the present day can mean only this much: that in this matter, on which as much can be said in favor as against, and which has not and cannot be resolved, the current dominant mode of thinking has given greater weight to the reasons against. A few people think this way, andPROOFS many more want to seem as if they do; these people make a lot of noise and set the tone. The greater masses remain silent and behave indiﬀerently, thinking now this, now that, hearing with pleasure as ghosts are derided in the light of day and telling horror stories of them in the dark of night.31 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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Indeed, at the time this essay was written, all of France was in the grip of panic over a man-eating werewolf (or some other unholy thing) rampaging through the province of Gévaudon.32 Lessing recognized – while the neoclassicists of the Académie did not – that a belief in something as amorphous as ghosts might mean something different for different people, or indeed something different to the same person over the course of a single day. It is not eradicated by a declaration from pulpit or podium. Against the “few” who truly do not believe, “many more” merely pretend to disbelieve; and, as it is said, there are no atheists in foxholes. Even the staunchest rationalist might favor a doubt or two in the wee hours of the night, when an unexplained noise jolts him from the comfortable oblivion of sleep. Which of the modern tragedians, Lessing wanted to know, had mastered the effective use of the stage ghost? Was it possible, perhaps, that even “incredulous” audiences could fear such a ghost whenDISTRIBUTION its creator was a great artist? Lessing agreed with Voltaire about who had mastered the stage ghost, and who still feared it: “Shakespeare is this kind of writer, and perhaps only Shakespeare. Faced with his ghost in Hamlet, one’s hair stands on end, regardless of whether it covers a credulous or incredulous skull.”33 But for all his vaunted propriety andFOR sophistication, Voltaire, Lessing argues, is no Shakespeare. Comparing the ghost of Ninus to that of King Hamlet reveals something important about true horror and its aesthetic efficacy in performance: Shakespeare’s ghost appearsNOT truly to come from that other world; so it seems to us. For it appears at the sacred hour, in the harrowing stillness of the night, fully accompanied by all the sepulchral, mysterious indi- cators that, from the nursemaid onward, lead us to expect ghosts and with which we are accustomed to thinking of them. But Voltaire’s ghost is not even as good as a bogeyman designed to scare children; he is simply a disguised comedian, who has nothing, says nothing, does nothing that he could actually do, if he were what he claimed to be. Moreover, all of the circumstances in which he appears destroy the illusion and reveal him as the creation of a cold playwright who hopes to trickPROOFS and scare us, without knowing how he should go about it … Where did Voltaire hear that ghosts are so brazen? Is there an old woman alive who could not have told him that ghosts avoid sunlight and certainly do not tend to visit large gatherings? Of course Voltaire surely knew this, but he was too fearful, too fastidious, to make use of T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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common situations. He wanted to show us a ghost, but it had to be a ghost of a nobler sort, and through this nobler sort he ruined everything. The ghost that presumes to do things contrary to all tradition, contrary to all good manners among ghosts, strikes me as no proper ghost, and everything here that does not support the illusion destroys the illusion.34

The orthodoxy of ghosts here really refers to theatrical ghosts, whose behavior is dictated not by the tales of old women, but by the conventions of theatre practice. Frightened of this kind of stage ghost, Voltaire crafted one that he hoped would be more acceptable to the parterre, but it was not. As he himself had predicted, the mob came after him and his monster with their critical pitchforks, wailing, “This time you’ve gone too far!” Yet Lessing condemns Voltaire for not going far enough: DISTRIBUTION If Voltaire had stopped to consider the physical staging, he would have sensed, from yet another perspective, the impropriety of having a ghost appear before a large gathering … With Shakespeare it is solely Hamlet to whom the ghost appears. In the scene where the mother is present, she neither sees nor hears it. All of ourFOR attention therefore focuses upon Hamlet, and the more we see symptoms of a temperament shattered by horror and terror, the more willing we are to accept the apparition – that which caused this shattering in him – for what he takes it to be. The ghost aﬀects us more through him than it does in itself. The impression that it makes uponNOT him is transferred to us, and the eﬀect is too apparent and too strong for us to doubt the extraordinary cause. How little Voltaire understood this artistic device!35

Perhaps Voltaire did not fully understand his own ghost, but a more charitable approach would be to attribute his failure to the impossibility of his project – that of reconciling Shakespeare’s successful example in Hamlet with the precepts of French neoclassicism. Critics after Lessing would take the sensible next step of rejecting the tree along with its fruit: they condemned Aristotle’s Poetics as hopelessly out of touch with modern theatrical culture. LessingPROOFS alone was prepared to tilt against centuries of criticism and liberate Aristotle, too, from this dogmatic trap. In the eighty-ﬁrst through eighty-third essays of his Dramaturgy, Lessing methodically argues that the French neoclassical reading of Aristotle is deeply ﬂawed. He accuses the French of either maliciously or ignorantly T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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misinterpreting Aristotle to support their artistic arrogance and complacency. Lessing’s approach is more progressive and empirical. Any aesthetic law, he argues, should support rather than curtail artistic expression, and great artists should shape this law rather than be enslaved to it. He argues emphatically that the emotional impact of the performance on the audience must be of greater importance than questions of form alone, and that French restraint fails to achieve the correct balance of pity and fear that is necessary to move an audience to a higher emotional state – katharsis – which in Lessing’s view is an experience that both reﬁnes the intellect and expands the compassionate heart:

I know several French plays which distinctly represent the ill consequences of some passion from which we may draw many good lessons regarding this passion. But I know none that excite my pity in the degree in which tragedy should excite it,DISTRIBUTION while I certainly know various Greek and English plays which can excite it. Various French plays are very clever, instructive works, which I think worthy of all praise, only they are not tragedies … Their Corneille and Racine, their Crebillion and Voltaire have little or nothing of that which makes Sophocles Sophocles, Euripides Euripides,FOR Shakespeare Shakespeare.36

For the scholar J. G. Robertson, Lessing’s polemic against Voltaire and French tragedy “was the greatest argument for the much debated validity of Shakespeare which the eighteenth century had to oﬀer.” At the same time, from the perspective of LessingNOT’s contemporaries (if not those of later generations), “it enthroned Aristotle as a law-giver for all time, and not for Greek drama alone.”37 Lessing did not expect the world of the stage to conform to a stultifying structure imposed by elites. Instead, like the speaker of the prologue to Henry V invoking his “Muse of Fire,” he asked the audience to accept the performance as Aristotle intended: as a dialectical laboratory for the mind. In this laboratory, a great artist – a truly classical artist, in Lessing’s view – would capture the audience’s imagination in order to trigger compassion and the more reﬁned thought of which a only compassionate mind is capable. PROOFS Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy thus wrote a new code for understanding the social role of the theatre. It made plays (perhaps unmatched) tools for dialectical engagement on the most serious subjects, such as the nature of experience and the individual’s role in society. To reveal how human T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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relationships are formed and maintained, the drama builds new worlds, and it reflects us insofar as we can identify with the characters that live in them. The realism for which Lessing prepared the way, despite its name, seems to embrace a Shakespearean taste for phantoms. Not for nothing is it said, “Every Ibsen play might be called Ghosts.” Indeed, says Marvin Carlson, every play might justifiably be called Ghosts.38 That this important debate hinges on theatrical ghosts speaks not only to the necessity of balancing artistic freedoms with aesthetic standards, but also to the prevailing importance of a sense of wonder, awe, and indeed horror, at least in the phantasmal space of the theatre, where the unfinished business of memory is conjured up every night, before cock-crow, to change the present. In so doing it invokes the ghosts of Lessing, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, who, like us today, were unwilling to give up the ghost. Boo, indeed. DISTRIBUTION Notes 1 Portions of this chapter originally appeared as “Later Classicism in the Drama: How Shakespeare’s Ghosts Came to Haunt the Eighteenth Century” in The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature, Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis, eds. (Oxford: Routledge,FOR 2017), reprinted with permission. Thanks to Nick Moschovakis for providing editorial support. 2 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1–15, collects them, but it is worth repeating his list here: Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Perfor- mance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Richard Shechner, Between Theatre and AnthropologyNOT(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). I would like to add James Martin Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant Garde(s): Excorsising Experimental Theatre and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 3 Carlson, 2. 4 All quotes from the play are taken from The Yale Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Wilbur L. Cross and Tucker Brooke, eds. (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993). 5 George Walton Williams, “Hamlet and the Dread Commandment.” In Shake- speare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, John M. Mucciolo, ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 60–70 (64). 6 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2013); Cyril Tourneur,PROOFSThe Atheist’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 7 Jane K. Brown, The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 5 8 Ibid., 105. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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9 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), Vol. 4, 263. 10 G. K. Hunter, “Shakespeare and the Church.” In Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, John M. Mucciolo, ed. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 21–8. 11 Ibid., 27. 12 John Dryden, “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.” In The Critical Tradition, David A. Richter, ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 173–88 (184). 13 Voltaire, “Discours sur la Tragédie.” In The Complete Works of Voltaire (Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire), Nicholas Cronk et al., eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968–2013), Vol. 5, 165–6; my translation. 14 Ibid., 171. 15 Ibid., 174. 16 Ibid., 177. 17 Ibid., Vol. 30A, 219–20; my translation. 18 Ibid., 159–60; my ranslation. 19 Richard Flatter, Hamlet’s Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 5. 20 Haydn Mason (“Voltaire versus Shakespeare: The Lettre à L’Académie Française (1776),” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 18:2 (1995): 173–84 (174)) notes that the jubilee celebrated an idealized image of Shakespeare rather than the canon of his work: “literary London kept its distanceDISTRIBUTION from an occasion [the jubilee] that never staged or discussed a single play by Shakespeare but devoted itself to celebrating the myth of the playwright … Shakespeare was no longer just a dramatist but also the crowning glory of English letters.” This phantom playwright would become the center of what Mason calls the “cult of Shakespeare.” 21 Ibid., 174–5. FOR 22 Ibid., 177. 23 See Ernest Brenneke, Shakespeare in Germany 1500–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 257. 24 F. J. Lamport, Lessing and the Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 59. 25 Ibid., 123. 26 G. E. Lessing, “Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel zwischen Lessing, Mendelssohn, und Nicolai.” In Werke und BriefeNOT in zwölf Bänden, Vol. 3, Wilfried Barner, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), 671. Translation by Wendy Arons, used with permission. 27 G. E. Lessing, “Siebzehnter Brief. Von den Verdiensten des Herrn Gottscheds um das deutsche Theater. Auftritt aus dem Doctor Faust.” Briefe, die Neueste Literatur betreffend, No. 17 (Berlin: F. Nicolai, 1759), 97–107 (67 ff). Translation by Erik Butler, used with permission. 28 Ibid. 29 For more on Lessing’s unfinished Faust, see Lamport, 112–18. 30 G. E. Lessing, “Essay 11.” In Hamburg Dramaturgy, Natalya Baldyga, ed.; Wendy Arons and Sara Figal trans. (Oxford: Routledge, 2012). http://mcpress.media -commons.org/hamburg/essay-76/ (accessed January 31, 2014). 31 Ibid. PROOFS 32 For an excellent study of the Beast of the Gévaudon and its effect on the French public, see Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 33 Lessing, “Essay 11.” T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Helen Zimmern, The Hamburg Dramaturgy (New York: Dover, 1980; reprint of 1893 original text), 196, 204–5. 37 J. G. Robertson, Lessing’s Dramatic Theory (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), 245. 38 Carlson, 1.

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7 HAIREY BETWIXT

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There was … a Countri-man unto Pavia, in the yeare 1541, who thought himselfe to bee a Wolfe, setting vpon diuers men in the fields, and slew some. In the end being with great difficultieFOR taken, hee did constantlye affirme that hee was a Wolfe, and that there was no other difference, but that Wolues were commonlie hayrie without, and hee was betwixt the skinne and the flesh. Some (too barbarous and cruell Wolues in effect) desiring to trie the truth thereof, gaue him manie wounds vpon the armes and legges: but knowing their owne error, and the innocencie of the poore melancholic man, they committed him to the Surgions to cure, in whose hands hee dyed within fewe days after. NOT 1 (Simon Goulart, 1607)

The werewolf shares a problem with witches that other monsters do not have – its existence was at one time legal. That is to say, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (and arguably to this day: see below), it was possible to represent oneself as a werewolf during a criminal trial, and be prosecuted under special laws written for such a case. Whatever existence the werewolf might or might not have as an object of terror or spiritual admonition, it has an official, definable, and traceable existence in the criminalPROOFS courts of Europe. We may be prepared to admit, then, that the werewolf’s existence is a performed one, and therefore may be legitimate prey for scholars of the theatre. This chapter diverts from an examination of conventional theatrical performances and instead considers the phenomenon of werewolf trials to T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:12

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examine the special place that the werewolf holds in the psychology of the Renaissance, and in our own. My goal here is that of the historian who fears that plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose – periodization of the past becomes rather complex when we suspect, as Faulkner wrote in 1951, that it is not yet completely behind us.2

The werewolf problem Werewolves are common figures in mythology, superstition, and fiction dating back to Homer, while a belief that living humans can literally change into wolves and back again has been present in Western culture at least since the classical period: Pausanaias in his second-century CE travelogue Description of Greece records a widespread belief that an Olympic boxing champion, Damarchus, spent ten years as a wolf.3 Damarchus was a worshipper of the Lycaean Zeus, one of the descendants ofDISTRIBUTION King Lycaon who were thought to spend a certain time living as wolves as punishment for their ancestor’s sin (hence the term “lycanthrope”).4 Werewolf clans existed among the ancient Thracians, Greeks, Dacians, Romans, Iranians, Scythians, and Mongolians, all of whom used rituals or sacred intoxicants of various kinds (soma in Sanskrit; hauma in Avestan) toFOR induce transformations (hence the Iranian term for werewolf: haumavarka).5 Among Germanic peoples, a fascination with the werewolf persisted all the way to the regiments of the Nazis,6 while the ulfedhnar of the Scandinavian Ynglingsaga were known to don wolfskins to achieve a ferocious hybridity in battle. All of the werewolf cults shared a certain predilectionNOT for ceremonial violence – including cannibalism, berserk rage, sacred intoxication, and rape.7 Werewolves have also been associated with legal procedures since ancient times. The English word wolf grows from the Sanskrit vricas (“thief”), and from Hittite times through Germanic, wolf is used synonymously with “outlaw” in legal documents. “Wargus sit hoc expulsus” (“He is a wolf, and so expelled”), wrote the Franks; “Wargus esto” (“Be a wolf henceforth”), sentenced the Normans.8 The term “werewolf” first appears in a legal document: the eleventh-century Ecclesiastical Ordinances of King Cnut of Denmark, which warns that bishops must defend their spiritual flocks against the “PROOFSwodfreca [madly audacious] werewolf” (“wer” or “ver” is an old Germanic word meaning “man”).9 No doubt Cnut employed a mutation of the language of the Sermon on the Mount –“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15) – and the emphasis in this rhetoric seems to reflect T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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a notion that the danger comes from transformation, the sudden betrayal of a predator that had appeared to be one of the flock. From that moment on, Otten notes, the werewolf (usually but not always maleficent) appears all over European histories (e.g., the Topographica Hibernica (1187) of Giraldus Cambrensis), allegories (e.g., Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede (1394), ll. 458–9), fairy tales (e.g., the Grimms’ Little Red Riding Hood), and fictions (e.g., the late fourteenth-century Arthur and Gorlagon; the Roman de Guillaume de Palern (1350); Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1470)) as well as many sermons on the order of Gobin’s Les Loups ravissans ou doctrinal moral (1520). So, by way of a rhizomatic Deleuzian/Guattarian information super-highway, the man–wolf settles into the cultural consciousness of Renaissance Europe and will not be displaced. Thousands of real people would suffer terribly at the hands of this monstrous notion. The problem with werewolves emerges in the courts. Real, living individuals were accused, tried, and convicted of transformingDISTRIBUTION into wolves. Records exist of such cases as early as 1428, when a series of witch trials in Valais included testimonies of werewolfism, and as late as 1765, when a series of vicious attacks on peasants in Gévaudan prompted a national werewolf hunt (possibly problematizing, once again, our notion of which years constitute the “Renaissance”). AsFOR we shall see, the trials posed a very serious problem that struck at the heart of ecclesiastical authority, arising from a system of belief in the supernatural that the Church desperately needed but could not control; a problem to do with the horrifying inevitability of change. NOT Horrifying transformations Thomas Cahill famously calls St. Augustine the last classical – and the first medieval – thinker.10 Augustine’s strangely dual (or hybrid?) nature here is an important part of the serious question of the werewolf. The fourth- century Bishop of Hippo entertains sophisticated doubt on many theological issues, but he is perfectly clear on the subject of werewolves. In Book 18, chapter 17 of his De Civitate Dei (City of God), he writes: It is veryPROOFS generally believed that by certain witches’ spells and the power of the Devil men may be changed into wolves … but they do not lose their human reason and understanding, nor are their minds made the intelligence of a mere beast. Now this must be understood in this way: namely that the Devil creates no new nature, but that he is T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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able to make something appear to be which in reality is not. For by no spell nor evil power can the mind, nay, not even the body corporeally, be changed into the material limbs and features of any animal … but a man is fantastically and by illusion metamorphosed into an animal, albeit he to himself seems to be a quadruped.11

In Augustine’s view, animals do not possess souls. They are therefore doli incapax – incapable of sin – but nor can they hope to ascend to Heaven. Hence, if a man could become an animal, he would be not only absolved from sin but denied the possibility of salvation. The notion that God would permit such frivolity strikes at the very heart of Augustinian theology. Augustine’s influence on the development of both the Church and Western philosophy was so profound that he was quoted as the central authority on werewolves for as long as demonologists wrote about them. Augustinian skepticism about werewolves is reinscribedDISTRIBUTION by another highly influential text – the sixth and last paragraph of chapter 364 of Regino of Prüm’s ninth-century de Ecclesiasticis disciplinis. This single-page chapter, which became known as the Canon Episcopi (“Instructions to Bishops”), sternly admonishes the reader for believing in witchcraft, and hence for behaving as if influenced by witches, andFOR for punishing people for being witches. The final paragraph reads:

Therefore, publicly announce to all: any who believe such and similar things destroys the faith, and whoever has not the straight faith in God, is not his, but is of whomNOT he believes, that is, the devil. For about our Lord is written: “All things are made by him, and without him nothing is made.” Whoever, then, believes anything can be made, or any creature can be changed to better or worse, or transformed into another species or resemblance – except by the Creator himself who made all things, and through whom all things are made – is an unbeliever beyond doubt.12

The Canon and the Civitate were the unquestioned authorities for most demonologists writing between 1400 and 1800, and most of these writers agree (albeitPROOFS grudgingly, in many cases) that it is impossible for a man actually to become a wolf.13 There are many reasons why ecclesiastical and political authorities during the Renaissance permitted and encouraged witch trials, when it is clear from contemporary writings that there was great debate over both their T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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validity and their morality. Fiscal motives were certainly present: property confiscated from condemned witches filled the coffers of judges and paid the fees of witch-finders and the salaries of jailers, torturers, and physicians. Indeed, Johan Linden of Trier noted that the witch craze of the late 1500s in his city died down only when the populace had been completely stripped of cash.14 However, Sidky has convincingly historicized the era of the worst witch trials in Europe (1550–1630) in conjunction with the profound social upheavals of that period, including the Wars of Religion, widespread economic difficulties, and devastating outbreaks of plague.15 The Valais werewolf trials of the early fifteenth century, perhaps the first huge outbreak, followed shortly after a civil war in Savoy. The 1692 trial of a Livonian werewolf – an old man called Theiss – was somewhat stymied by his insistence that his function as a werewolf was to fight witches in Hell and restore stolen seed grain.16 The Beast of the Gévaudon appeared immediately after the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1764.17DISTRIBUTION Witch and werewolf persecution was a multifariously useful tool for social control. It provided a focus for the rage and fear of the populace, an antidote to the feeling of helplessness such times engender, easy, self-affirming answers for complex questions, and a way to eradicate certain undesirable people and resolve personal disputes.FOR Meanwhile, for the authorities, it meant good publicity, a display of strength, an increased sense of social cohesion, a reminder of what happens to members of the community who neglect to follow the rules, and all of the other benefits of state terrorism, including, perhaps most importantly, misdirection away from the real sources of strife, which in all likelihoodNOT were the ineptitude and corruption of the authorities themselves.18 Whatever else it may signify, the prosecution of werewolves across Europe and over several centuries demonstrates the persistence of many people’s belief in them despite the admonitions of the clergy. For enthusiastic demonologists, this presents a problem: how to capitalize on the belief and legitimize the profitable persecution without appearing to be in open revolt against ecclesiastical orthodoxy? The strange transformations these scholars undergo in their attempts to squeeze past Augustinian theology are quite astonishing. As a prime example, the Malleus Maleficarium of Kramer and Sprenger, possiblyPROOFS published around 1486, declares: In terms of what [the Church] says about the changing of a form into another variety or appearance, an explanation has been given for how this can happen through the art of conjuring, but as for its saying that T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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some creature cannot be made by the power of a demon, if “be made” is understood as “be created,” it is obvious that it cannot. If, on the other hand, “be made” is understood as “be made through a natural process of bringing forth,” it is certain that they can make certain imperfect creatures in this way.19

Later, the authors quibble about the subtle diﬀerence in meaning between the synonyms immutatio and transmutatio (the Devil cannot “change” things but he can “alter” things). They also write: “that which seems true to many cannot be altogether false, according to Aristotle … And now also in modern times we have the well-attested deeds and words of witches who truly and actually perform such things.”20 Another prominent judge from Burgundy, Henri Boguet, would list several accounts of werewolves in his Discours des Sorciers (1590), follow them up with accounts of transformations both biblical and natural,DISTRIBUTION but then write that lycanthropy must be an illusion, for it necessitates that “either a man who is changed into a beast must keep his soul and power of reasons, or he must lose this at the moment of metamorphosis.”21 Augustine had, after all, refuted such things. Instead, Boguet argues, Satan puts the witch to sleep, does the wicked work for him, and makesFOR him believe that he did it himself, to the point of replicating any wounds received on the witch’s body. “Notwithstanding,” he goes on, ignotum per ignotius, “I maintain that for the most part it is the witch himself that runs about slaying.”22 He concludes the chapter by moving the goalposts: “Even if they were guilty in nothing but damnable intention, theyNOT should still be thought worthy of death.”23 In his Daemonolatria (1595), the judge Nicolas Rémy (who claimed to have presided at the deaths of some 300 witches) writes of werewolves:

It is not only the external physical shape that appears to be changed; the witch is also endowed with the natural qualities and power of the animal into which she is seemingly changed … now this cannot be explained away as mere glamour or prestige by which our senses are deceived … for they leave behind them concrete traces of their activities.24 PROOFS Francesco Maria Guazzo writes in his Compendium Maleﬁcarium (1608):

[The Devil] surrounds a witch with an aerial eﬃgy of a beast, each part of which ﬁts on to the correspondent part of the witch’s body, head to T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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head, mouth to mouth, belly to belly, foot to foot, and arm to arm … and then they leave the footprints of a wolf upon the ground. But in this last case it is no matter for wonder if they are afterwards found with an actual wound in those parts of their human body where they were wounded when in the appearance of a beast; for the enveloping air easily yields, and the true body receives the wound.25

All of this solemn absurdity is meant to convince the reader that, while the Devil does not have any powers that the Church fathers have denied him, he can nevertheless eﬀect such profound changes in our perception that it makes no diﬀerence. It is as if the non-existence of the werewolf as a physical being constitutes just as grave a violation of the inviolable natural order as an actual contravention of that order. No less ironically, these theories deny the “diminished capacity” defense that is implicit in this understanding of lycanthropy: since animals are doli incapax, werewolvesDISTRIBUTION might claim to be innocent of any crimes they commit while in lupine form, but since werewolves do not exist, no werewolf can hide behind such a claim if he or she is prosecuted for being a werewolf. These authors were forced to subject themselves to their own horrifying, painful transformations in order to proveFOR their cases. They had to meta- morphose from thoughtful judges and compassionate theologians into ravening predators, disdaining law, logic, and human mercy. These bestial shifts did not go unnoticed: several voices of sanity and reason risked accusations of heresy and sympathy for witchcraft by condemning the Inquisition and the witch-hunting industry,NOT while the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne felt compelled to write some very back-handed “endorsements” condemning the Malleus for its abandonment of legal ethics and for running contrary to Catholic orthodoxy and, indeed, human decency. So controversial was the text that many ecclesiastical authorities, including even the Inquisition, refused to use it. But the book was endorsed by a papal bull from Innocent VIII,26 made extensive use of the recently invented printing press, and was adopted by local criminal courts and witch- hunters all over Europe. The Malleus proved so popular that it sparked an explosion of persecution across the continent over the next few centuries. In terms ofPROOFS performance, the werewolf’s existence at trial comes into being when the accused shapeshifter confesses. Trial records reveal that accused werewolves almost always confessed, sooner or later. This is unsurprising. As a subset of witchcraft, lycanthropy was a crimen exceptum, which stripped all due process from the accused, opening the door for the submission of T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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evidence from known liars, felons, little children, and even defense attorneys (who could be compelled to testify). Ugliness could be considered sufficient evidence to begin the prosecution of a witch, while for werewolves belli- gerence could be enough. Anyone who spoke out in a witch’s defense was immediately investigated. Prosecution included torture,27 a procedure officially governed by certain quasi-humanitarian rules that clever witch-finders excelled in side-stepping. Deleterious effects resulting from torture were legally considered the victim’s fault for failing to confess. Confessions obtained under torture contain details that bear a striking uniformity to the theological predilections of whichever member of the clergy supervised the procedure. As with witch trials, these confessions usually included communion with a demon, lurid sexual details, and malicious, destructive acts. Also, being named as a witch by a confessed witch was considered sufficient evidence for investigation (as stipulated in a papal bull), so werewolf trials tended to break out in clusters. It therefore seems reasonableDISTRIBUTION to conclude that the role of the werewolf was scripted by the civil authorities and rehearsed with the torturer, to stay in rhythm with the Church, and the unlucky werewolf himself was the most important performer in this ghastly troupe.28 But in some ways werewolf trials were significantly distinct from those of other witches. Crimes associated withFOR werewolves had to be lupine in nature – assaults on humans and livestock, murder, cannibalism, rape, or grave-robbing. Sidky notes that belief in werewolves (based on the number of trials and convictions) was far stronger where actual wolves were a problem, and especially in areas where depopulation resulting from the Black Death permitted reforestation and theNOT reemergence of Europe’s top carnivore.29 Wolf predations were high in all of the centers for werewolf trials in France, Italy, Switzerland, the Pyrenees, Germany, and Eastern Europe. By contrast, although werewolves feature in English myth and literature, there are no records of any werewolf trials in England. Brett Hirsch suggests that this might be due to the fact that real wolves were hunted to extinction in England by the end of the 1400s, before the witch craze really began.30 In fact, some actual wolves were prosecuted as werewolves, including a celebrated case in Anspach, Germany, in 1685, when a wolf was accused of being a deceased, hated Burgomeister, killed, dressed as the Burgomeister, and hung fromPROOFS a gibbet before being placed in a museum as evidence of lycanthropy. Between 1764 and 1767, the Beast of the Gévaudon (likely a pack of real wolves), which was held responsible for the grisly deaths of more than a hundred peasants, was hunted as a werewolf by senior military figures with Louis XV’s imprimatur.31 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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Although, according to the jurisprudence of witch trials, the flimsiest evidence might have been accepted, a werewolf trial had to include the testimonial presence of a wolf, and in the absence of actual wolves, it seems this kind of evidence was harder to swallow. To add credence to this notion, werewolf trials started to disappear much earlier than those of other witches, and this decline in cases appears more closely related to the elim- ination of forests and the hunting to extinction of red and gray wolves in Western Europe than to the much later dwindling of general belief in witches. Another cause, or perhaps symptom, of the dwindling presence of legal werewolves is the strong ascendancy of a psychiatric discourse of lycanthropy as a melancholia (clinical depression) that causes transformation delusions. This ancient diagnosis appeared intermittently in learned discussions of werewolves, but more or less separate from the criminal werewolf problem, until 1563, when the renowned Dutch demonologist and debunker Johan Weyer, in his De Praestigiiis Daemonum, ascribed werewolDISTRIBUTIONfism and witchcraft in general to delusional psychosis brought on by depression and substance abuse. Weyer’s writing may have been either influential or prescient of changes in the discourse. Nine years later, in Dôle, the convicted werewolf, cannibal, and murderer Gilles Garnier was sentenced not to be executed, but to spend the rest of his life in a monastery.FOR In Angers in 1598, Jacques Roulet confessed to being a werewolf and was convicted of murder and cannibalism, but an appeal to the Parlement de Paris commuted his sentence to just two years in an asylum for the mentally ill in Saint-Germain des Prés.32 Others were not so gently treated, but the scientific discourse continued to gain prominence. InNOT his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Reginald Scot attacks the “Lewde dealing of Witches and Witchmongers” as “verie absurdities” and inexcusable predations on the poor and innocent, and builds on Weyer’s scientific discourse regarding werewolves and witches. Scot, in no uncertain terms, identifies witch-mongering as a performance, and an indecent one at that, scripted with immense cynicism to cultivate and capitalize – literally – on fear and ignorance in order to line the witch-finders’ pockets. As to the authenticity of werewolves:

I saie that the transformations, which these witch-mongers doo so rage and ravePROOFS upon, is (as all the learned sort of physicians aﬃrme) a disease proceeding partlie from melancholie, wherebie manie suppose themselves to be woolves, or such ravening beasts. For Lycanthropia is of the ancient physicians called Lupina melancholia, or Lupina insania. J. Wierus [Weyer] declareth verie lernedlie, the cause, the circumstance, and the T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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cure of this disease. I have written the more herein; bicause hereby great princes and potentates, as well as poore women and innocents, have been defamed and accounted among the number of witches.33

Scot’s book was widely read and much translated, and it significantly influenced depictions of witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Middleton’s The Witch, and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton. The debunking of werewolfism reached an early crescendo in James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie (1597). The future James I of England writes:

There hath indeede bene an old opinion of such like thinges; For by the Greekes they were called λυκανθρωποι [lycanthropoi] which signifieth men-woolfes. But to tell you simplie my opinion in this, if anie such thing hath bene, I take it to haue proceeded but of a naturall super-abundance of Melancholie, which as wee reade, that it hathDISTRIBUTION made some thinke themselues Pitchers, and some horses, and some one kinde of beast or other: So suppose I that it hath so viciat the imagination and memorie of some, as per lucida interualla, it hath so highlie occupyed them, that they haue thought themselues verrie Woolfes indeede at these times: and so haue counter- feited their actiones in goeing onFOR their handes and feete, preassing to deuoure women and barnes, fighting and snatching with all the towne dogges, and in vsing such like other bruitish actiones, and so to become beastes by a strong apprehension, as Nebucad-netzar was seuen yeares: but as to their hauing and hyding of their hard & schellie sloughes, I take that to be but eiked, by vncertaineNOT report, the author of all lyes.34 For James, lycanthopy is a mental illness only, and the notion that people who suffer from it might possess hard and scaly shells that effect their transformation is merely a wicked (“eiked”) lie. Indeed, poor Ferdinand, in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, exhibits exactly these pathological symptoms, and his doctor laments:

In those that are possess’d with’t there o’erﬂows Such melancholy humour, they imagine ThemselvesPROOFS to be transformed into wolves; Steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night, And dig dead bodies up, as two nights since One met the Duke ’bout midnight in a lane Behind St. Mark’s Church, with the leg of a man T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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Upon his shoulder, and he howl’d fearfully, Said he was a wolf, only the diﬀerence Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, His on the inside; bade them take their swords, Rip up his ﬂesh, and try. (V.ii)35

Obviously, there is a strong reliance here on the 1607 account of Simon Goulart, a quote from which opens this chapter. On so much Scot and James agree, but no more. In the preface to his Daemonologie (1597), James excoriated Scot specifically for not believing in conventional kinds of witches, and when he ascended to the English throne in 1603 he issued an order for Scot’s books to be collected and burned.36 As the century progressed, the discourse on werewolves would become increasingly psychiatric, particularly in England.DISTRIBUTION The understanding of lycanthropy as a clinical malady would be supported by two influential physicians: Robert Burton in his Anatomie of Melancholy (1621) and Robert Bayfield in his A treatise De Morborum Capitis Essentiis & Prognostics (1663). As we have seen, though, irrespective of such advances in psychotherapy, Louis XV of France was still sending “FORwerewolf hunters” into Gévaudon more than a century later. The United States has its own deplorable history of witch trials, as well as numerous reported werewolf sightings and legends dating from the colonial era to the present day, yet there are no records of a werewolf trial ever taking place in North America.NOT This may be explained by the fact that, although wolves were certainly plentiful on the continent, colonization of the New World began after the general belief in werewolves had started to wane. Some four centuries later, however, that trend seems to be in reverse. Werewolves were mentioned in six criminal cases in the United States in 2010–11 alone.37 Most of these were rather silly, but one was truly horrifying. In Florida, a teenager, Stephanie Pistey, allegedly told three adult male friends that another teenager, Jacob Hendershot, had raped her. (The accusation turned out to be a lie.) She then lured Hendershot to a house where she was babysitting some very small children. Once there, he was set upon by herPROOFS friends and severely beaten with chains and clubs. He tried to run away, but they continued to beat him until he died. They then hid the remains in a storm drain, where they were discovered a month later. Pistey lied to the police about the murder, taunted Hendershot’s distraught mother on the street whenever she saw her, bragged on her Facebook page T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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about how sanguine (literally – she claimed to have drunk his blood) she was about Hendershot’s death, then gave a smirking prison interview during which she claimed that she was “part vampire and part werewolf,” all coy smiles, as if Jacob Hendershot’s violent death were part of a huge joke to which only Pistey herself knew the punchline. She was declared unﬁt to stand trial and sent to a hospital. (The same tactic did not work for her accomplices.) In March 2012 she emerged from the hospital, pleaded no contest to an accessory to murder charge, made a sincere apology to Mrs. Hendershot, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison.38

Lupus est homo Hybrid, composite, and transforming bodies fascinated medieval people just as they fascinate us. Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His World,39 writes extensively about monsters and grotesque bodies as symbolsDISTRIBUTION of celebration and transgression, but Jeﬀrey Jerome Cohen takes the notion further in Medieval Identity Machines. He observes that in addition to the wild proliferation of imagery of werewolves, centaurs, snake-women, and other monsters, there is a medieval predilection to consider bodies as indiscrete, capable of ﬂowing into one another in astonishing ways. CohenFOR also asks us to consider Opicinus’ “Zodiac Man” (see Figure 7.1), whose body becomes rendered into pieces and reconstituted into a living map of the earth’s continents and the sky’s constellations – his body congealed with the forms of animals, angels, humans, tools and weapons, distances, and times. Cohen argues: “There is something not quite human aboutNOT these bodies, with their refusal to respect the boundaries that are supposed to limit their form and to emplace agency within a controlling and singular subjectivity, a soul.”40 An open, dynamic universe is Augustine’s profoundest fear writ large. The transforming body breaks the biggest rules in the biggest ways. What unites them all, Cohen writes,

is an insistence that subjectivity is always enfleshed; that human identity is – despite the best efforts of those who possess it to assert otherwise – unstable, contingent, hybrid, discontinuous; that the work of creating a humanPROOFS body is never finished; that gender, race, sexuality, and nation are essential but not sufficiently definitive components of this production; that sometimes the most fruitful approach to a body or text is to stop asking “What is it?” and to start following Deleuze and Guattari’s injunction to map what a body does.41 T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:13

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DISTRIBUTION

FOR

NOT

FIGURE 7.1 Zodiac Man Source: MS. Ashmole 391, part V. fol. 9r, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Is this not a rather theatrical notion? Some Christian metaphysics ﬁts quite well with such notions of the universe as unﬁxed; consider how the non- linear dynamics of cosmic time operate with the spiritual indiscretion of the physical bodyPROOFS to enable the process of communion and the creation of the corpus mysticum – the single most important Catholic ceremony, in which all Christian bodies that ever were, are, or will be from anywhere are literally united in the body of Christ. Werewolves and their ilk, I would argue, are T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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the unwanted but unavoidable by-products of this notion. A holy supernatural fusion of bodies is merely monstrously mirrored in transformations that are manifestly un-Christian. Today, of course, we dismiss such notions as fantasies, even while holding as truth some scientific conclusions that would seem – to a medieval thinker – far more bizarre. Augustine’s stable universe is, at the time of writing, utterly exploded. Scientists have demonstrated that the universe is always in transition from one form to another. Life itself is permanently changing: follow the genetic ancestries of both wolf and man far enough back – to the Cretaceous Period – and they do in fact become one.42 This transformation happens quite noticeably in bacteria, fruit flies, and the fossil record. We call it “evolution” and we know how it happens, why it happens, when it began, and that it still happens. Each individual human represents just one rung on a multi-pronged, four-dimensional evolutionary ladder that maps like a hydra’s heads. But, as Lessing observed (see ChapterDISTRIBUTION 6), knowing is not the same thing as contemplating the cosmic, tribal, and personal implications of the knowledge that every human being is the result of a process of mutogenic deviance and shape-shifting. For all that we know these truths, we neurotically struggle to deny them in our daily lives through legislation, sermonizing, and many other kinds of social controlFOR that rely heavily on the notion that human flesh is solid, discrete, and classifiable, and unquestionably different than the flesh of animals. Although our modern hegemonies generally claim to be scientific rather than ecclesiastical in nature, they share with all forms of authority a dangerous reliance on a knowable, stableNOT body. Unstable, unclassifiable flesh threatens hierarchies in unpredictable ways. It offers the thrilling possibility that our deeply felt humanity, with its constant urges to fear and hate and lust and violence, has its own honest truth, which may be expressed through an uncanny hybridity. Like our Renaissance forebears, we feel these transformations to be possible even though we know, via our authorities, that they could not possibly be real, and in that gap real tragedies continue to occur. The werewolf is seductive partially because it provides an antidote, or at least an imaginary alternative, to our hegemonies. “Lupus est homo homini,” wrote Plautus in his play Asinaria: man is a wolf to other men.PROOFS43 But did he mean it literally? Scientific thought might deny the existence of a werewolf just as theology does, but the pagan struggle for freedom, the medieval Church’s irrational hegemony, and modern science all insist equally upon the werewolf’s dangerous message: there are other realities than the ones described by orthodox religious cosmography. And in T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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those realities, some of which are as rational, provable, and quotidian as a cheese sandwich, radical, astonishing transformation is the order of the day, and the human world is not separate, not even a little bit, from the animal one. Nudge either one a fraction and … well, as the haumavarka might say, a change is as good as a rest. Sweet dreams.

Notes 1 Simon Goulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories, Edward Grimstone, trans. (London: G. Eld, 1607), 387 2 The werewolf of the Renaissance has few features in common with the creature in modern popular films and television shows. Lycanthropy, for the Renaissance, is not a contagious disease; these werewolves achieve their transformation through the use of black magic of one kind or another (spells, special clothing, drugs, and ointments are the usual methods), whichDISTRIBUTION they procure from a supernatural patron. The moon, disease, and wolfsbane are all twentieth-century additions to the mythology; silver dates from the late eighteenth. Dealing with werewolves is the bailiwick of a witch-hunter or Inquisitor. Finally, the werewolf is transformed more or less wholly into a wolf, although in certain cases witnesses merely claimed to have “recognized” a wolf by its hands or face. Like modern werewolves, Renaissance werewolves kept wounds received in wolf form when they reverted back to human, and usuallyFOR transformed back into humans after death or injury. Finally, I restrict my investigations here to werewolves, as there is no space to discuss the Japanese tanuki, the Balkan varcolac, the Boudas of Abyssinia, the were-jackals, leopards, and lions of West Africa, the jaguar kanaima of South America, the skinwalkers of North America, or the werebears of Norway (more’s the pity). 3 Pausanias, Description of Greece, Arthur Richard Shilleto, trans. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1886), Vol. 1, 375NOT (6.8.2). Pausanias himself is skeptical: “I cannot credit,” he writes, “except the victory at Olympia, all the fictions about him made by boastful people, such as that he changed from a man into a wolf at the sacrifice of Zeus Lycaeus, and that 10 years afterwards he changed into a man again.” 4 Werewolves are also described in Vol. 1 of Diodorus of Sicily’s Historical Library, Vol. 7 of Pliny’s Natural History, and Book 8 of Plato’s Republic. I should point out that the ancient diagnosis of lycanthropy as a mental illness (that is, one in which a sufferer believes him- or herself to have been transformed into a wolf) was widely republished in medical texts in the ancient world and also present in many standard medieval medical texts, with wide agreement across cultures and eras of its symptoms and effective treatments into the seventeenth century. Clinical LycanthropyPROOFS Disorder is acknowledged in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(4th edn) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000) as a rare psychological disorder associated with schizophrenia, psychotic mood disorders, or substance-induced psychosis. Sufferers describe transforming whole or in part into some kind of animal, but it is not typically T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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associated with violent behavior. The psychological literature is full of case studies as well as wide-ranging speculation on the relationship of this disorder to werewolf myths (F. Surawicz and R. Banta, “Lycanthropy Revisited,” Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 20:7 (1975): 537–42; H. Rosenstock and K. Vincent, “A Case of Lycanthropy,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134:10 (1977): 1147–9; T. Faby, “Lycanthropy: A Review,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 82 (1989): 37–9; W. M. S. Russell and C. Russell, “The Social Biology of the Werewolf Trials,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 82:6 (1982): 379). 5 Mircea Eleade, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 1–11. 6 It appears the Nazis were inspired by Hermann Löns’s novel Der Wehrwolf (1910) and werewolf imagery became very common after Hitler came to power. Operation Werwolf was a propaganda campaign dreamed up by Goebbels and broadcast on German radio that described a guerrilla brigade that would resist the Allies’ advance into Germany; a regiment bearing the name was actually formed in 1944, but it had little impact. Hitler called his Ukraine HQ “Werwulf” and often referred to himself as a wolf (Adolf is a contraction of adel wolf – “noble wolf”). His Eastern Front HQ was called the Wolfsschanze (“wolf’s lair”). See P. Biddiscombe, Werwolf! The History ofDISTRIBUTION the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); see also Florian Evers, Vexierbilder Des Holocaust: Ein Versuch sum historischen Trauma in der Populärkultur (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011). 7 See H. Senn, Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 6–19. 8 Ibid., 6–9. FOR 9 Charlotte Otten, “Introduction.” In A Lycanthropy Reader, Charlotte Otten, ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 5. 10 Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor, 1996), 42. 11 Quoted in Otten, 6. 12 D. Patterson, “An Introduction to the Canon Episcopi” (2004). http://bichaunt. org/canon.html. (accessed August 10, 2012). 13 One notable exception is JeanNOT Bodin of Angers (1530–96), a prominent lawyer, member of the Parlement de Paris, and author of some deeply thoughtful and conscientious treatises on jurisprudence, ethics, and a theology of tolerance. In his De la demonomanie desSorciers (1580), he writes that he is convinced that werewolves exist: “[Werewolfism] is a very strange thing. But I find it even stran- ger that many cannot believe it, since all the peoples of the earth and all antiquity agree about it.” When it came to witches, Bodin was eager to suspend all processes that might ensure the rights of the accused, for he wrote that evidence had shown that almost all those accused of witchcraft were guilty. I find this a strangely lycanthropic approach to justice. See R. Scott, On the Demon-Mania of Witches (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995), 126. 14 Homayun Sidky, Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease (New York: Peter Lang, 1990),PROOFS 150. 15 Ibid., 21–47. 16 Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 26–8. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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17 See Jay A. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 18 For more information, see Sidky, 149–51, 256–65. 19 Quoted in and translated by C. MacKay in The Hammer of Witches (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 206–7. 20 I have been unable to find such a commentary from Aristotle in either of the places the authors cite: On Sleep and Sleeplessness or Ethics, Book 7. Nor have I ever come across Aristotle making such a note anywhere else in his writings. Nevertheless, Kramer and many of the witchcraft theorists who followed him were happy to repeat the lie in defense of their work. For a more complete discussion on how the Malleus wrestles with the problem of Aristotle, see chapter 3 of Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 21 Quoted in Otten, 83. 22 Ibid. Boguet tips his hat at this point by relating a story of being angrily befud- dled by the sleight-of-hand card tricks of an Italian count, whereupon his resentment caused him to make a rather cowardly ex tempore accusation of witchcraft (ibid., 86). 23 Ibid., 90. DISTRIBUTION 24 Quoted in Sidky, 200. 25 Francisco Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarium: The Montague Summers Edition, E. A. Ashwin, trans. (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1988), 50. 26 The Summis desiderantes affectibus of December 5, 1484, written at Kramer’s request. For an analysis of the impact of this document, see J. Baroja, “Witchcraft and Catholic Theology.” In Early ModernFOR European Witchcraft, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 19–44 (particularly 30–1). Whether the bull is a sincere expression of fear of witches or a political gambit by Innocent to increase the power of the Inquisition is a matter of some debate. 27 Accounts of such incidents include reports of intimidation, false promises, stripping, shaving, rape, isolation (in unpleasant spaces), starvation, probing of orifices, displaying of torture implements, exposure, strapping down, sleep deprivation, extraction of fingernails and toenailsNOT (or insertion of needles underneath them), scourging, thumbscrews, the rack, the “boots,” boiling water or oil on maimed flesh, waterboarding, strappado, shin-vice, heated metal seats, tourniquets, the wheel, impalement, ripping of flesh with red-hot pincers, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs. 28 See J. Tedeschi, “Inquisitorial Law and the Witch.” In Early Modern European Witchcraft, Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 83–118. The description I have given is very broad, and risks misleading reductiveness. The trials were polymorphous. Tedeschi notes that in Spain and Italy, where Inquisitorial power was strong, trials proceeded (at least initially) with a higher level of jurisprudence and concern for the rights of the accused. This seems to decline somewhat over time, particularly after 1580, when the majority ofPROOFS the Inquisition’s time and resources (Tedeschi reports some 40 percent) was transferred from persecution of Protestants to ferreting out sortilege. 29 Sidky, 220. 30 Brett Hirsch, “An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi,” Early Modern Literary Studies 11:2 (2005): 21–43. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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31 An excellent source regarding the Beast is Jay A. Smith’s Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 32 See Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865). 33 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, being a reprint of the first edition published in 1584, Brinsley Nicholson, ed. (London: Eliot Stock, 1886), 58. 34 James VI of Scotland (James I of England), Daemonologie: in forme of a dialogue (Edinburgh: Robert Walde-graue, 1597), 62–3. 35 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, C. Vaughn, ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1900), 113–14. 36 B. Nicholson, “Introduction.” In Scot, xi. 37 On March 24, 2010, an officer approached a shirtless man in Washington who was attacking dumpsters and cars with a sword. The man explained he was hunting a werewolf (“Bainbridge Island Police Arrest ‘Werewolf Hunter,’” MyNorthwest.com, March 24, 2010. www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/ 2480656/posts (accessed December 31, 2012)). On May 31, 2011, a fellow from Ohio was arrested after behaving violently at a campground. He told the arresting officers he was scratched by a wolf in Germany (wolves have been all but extinct in Germany since the nineteenth century),DISTRIBUTION and ever since has “gone on the attack” when the full moon is out. He was charged with underage intoxication (Adam Mawson, “Man ‘Goes on the Attack when the Moon’s out,’” MorningJournal.com, June 8, 2011. www.morningjournal.com/article/ MJ/20110608/NEWS/306089964 (accessed December 31, 2012)). On July 11, 2011, a man was arrested in a California park for barking, growling, and accosting passers-by while hiding in a publicFOR toilet (“Daylight Doesn’t Dissuade Werewolf of Larson Park,” SonomaNews.com, July 18, 2011. www.sonoma news.com/News-2011/Daylight-doesnt-dissuade-Werewolf-of-Larson-Park/ (accessed December 31, 2012)). In November 2011, a man reported to Milwaukee police that he had been tied up and sexually tortured by two women for two days; he had in excess of three hundred stab wounds, punctures, lacerations, and slashes. When arrested, the two women, who shared an apartment full of occult and lycanthropic literature,NOT claimed to be experimenting with con- tacting werewolf spirits (Gitte Laasby, “Woman Jailed in Bizarre Sex-Related Stabbing,” Journal Sentinel, November 9 , 2011). 38 C. Olwell, “Chase Sentenced to 25 Years in Slaying,” News Herald, August 28, 2012. 39 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Heléne Iswolsky, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 40 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xvii. 41 Ibid., xxiii. 42 Our common ancestor was a beast much like a modern aardvark. See M. Svartman and R. Stanyon, “The Chromosomes of Afrotheria and Their Bearing on Mammalian Genome Evolution,” Cytogenet Genome Research 137:2–4 (2012): 144PROOFS–53. 43 T. Maccius Plautus, Asinaria; or The Ass-Dealer. In The Comedies of Plautus, Henry Thomas Riley, ed. and trans. (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912), II.iv.

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Defense against the dark art With apologies to J. K. Rowling, I take the title of this section from a course offered at the fictional school ofFOR Hogwarts, wherein wizard children learn how to protect themselves against the horrifying creatures that populate their world. When I was a little boy, growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1970s, I had the opportunity to witness first-hand a process I have come to think of as “monsterization,” which is as dark an art as I can imagine. Jewish, olive-complexioned, dark,NOT and pudgy in a universe of slim, athletic, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mormons, I might have felt alienated anyway, but the long history of anti-Semitism loomed, it seemed, over everything I wished to do. Bullied, ostracized, made to suffer a seemingly endless series of humiliations (some of them violent), I was repeatedly asked by other students whether it was true that I had black blood or a tail. They speculated amongst one another in my hearing what had happened to my horns – whether I had filed them down or if they just hadn’t come in yet – and whether it was true that Passover matzoh was made with the blood of Christian children. I dreaded recess: on a good day, I would be left alone to lurk in somePROOFS untenanted corner of the soccer field, but more common were the days when the whim of the schoolyard turned ugly, and I would be surrounded, first buffeted with cries of “Dirty Jew” and “Kike,” then with fists, feet, or even rocks, while the teachers and playground monitors looked T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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on with bovine expressions. I have a vivid memory of presenting myself to my third-grade teacher, face smeared with dirt, blood, and tears, to hear her say, “You’re just super-sensitive.” As a child, of course, I had no idea that these attacks had a component that was not personal. Anti-Semitism is inscribed in the Latter-Day Saints’ holy text, the Book of Mormon, which singles out Jews as a people whose “works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abomina- tions” (2 Nephi 25:2 and 25:10), “a stiffnecked people” who “killed the prophets” (Jacob 4:14). 2 Nephi 10:3 reads: “the Jews, among those who are the more wicked part of the world; and they shall crucify him – for thus it behooveth our God, and there is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God.”1 Children pay attention. They hear these holy words in church and they listen to their elders talk about race, ethnicity, and religion. They find the old libels – the horns, the blood, the tail, and theDISTRIBUTION slaughter of innocents – from the uglier neighborhoods of the collective unconscious, and they put it all together. In their ignorance, children are frightened, and they discover that fear is transmutable into rage, which is much more pleasant to experience. All that remains is to seek an outlet for that rage, and the circuit of Roachian surrogation is complete. HumanFOR decency forbids atrocity, even an atrocity as minuscule as playground bullying, but the horns and the blood and the tail patently demonstrate that the target is not human. The fact that these monstrous traits cannot be publicly verified is merely further evidence of the perfidy of the intended victim. This is monsterization, which I have come to think of as “the darkNOT art.” It occurs when humans are reconfigured as sub-, un-, or non-, opening the door for horrific actions to be perpetrated against them. My little story – that of the lone alien isolated and unable to fight back against an ancient tide of hatred – has been repeated in communities all over the world from ancient times to the moment of this writing. When I entered my teen years I felt it in other ways – rejected for jobs for which I was qualified with no explanation; barred from joining certain social groups; stopped and frisked (once, with the barrel of a pistol pressed to my neck) by police for no crime other than walking or driving in my own neighborhood. In recentPROOFS years, publicized instances of “profiling” have become too common to ignore in the United States and elsewhere, revealing the Roachian erasure that has concealed them from public view for many decades. As a child, of course, I had no access to this broad view, so I suffered in a very personal, individual way. But I also paid attention. I knew that Jews T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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were widely hated, and I distinctly remember at the age of eight thinking there must be some reason for it. If they were looking for horns, there must be horns somewhere. Perhaps they were right, and mine hadn’t come in yet. Maybe I did have choices. When my horns came in, I could wear them proudly, defiantly. I found no small amount of personal joy, and relief from fear, in the idea of embracing the identity that was being forced upon me. Since I could not resist or reply to the process, what other options were available? My choice seemed justified in fourth grade when I auditioned for and was cast in my first theatrical role, as Caliban.2 I would play the monster. The comparison to Richard III, who as a social pariah was “determined to prove a villain” (Richard III, I.i) is tempting, but it was not until years later, when I first read W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, that I found an adequate description of my experience in his “double consciousness.” Du Bois famously writes: DISTRIBUTION It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;FOR two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.3

Bodies are, at core, the issue; not so much how they look as how they are seen. Du Bois recognized that the nonwhite body enters into Western society already monsterized. MyNOT story of playground beatings and occasional friskings should be read as a moment in time when my own whiteness failed to protect me against this – when my body was read as not white enough and therefore monstrous. At the time and place of writing, in the United States of 2016, hundreds of unarmed black people are being beaten and shot by police officers, and during an upwelling of fear innocent Muslims and Sikhs are suffering violence and legal discrimination for the crimes of a handful of maniacs who happen to resemble them in a superficial way. I recognize this action as a reflection of my own experience in nature, if not in scale. This is the dark art, and how we as theatre scholars, practitioners of art, and activistPROOFS thinkers might defend against it is the topic of this book. What I recognize in today’s violent persecution of minorities in the United States from my own childhood experiences as a monster is a sense of “two-ness,” as Du Bois calls it: that how others see me is predetermined, while how I see myself is yet to be determined. The glyph of the monster T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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as inﬂicted upon me, despite its origin outside of myself, was not fully extricable from my sense of myself as a full and complete human being with every right to the acceptance and happiness I did not experience; nor were these incompatible selves integrable. When I look into a mirror I see not only my physical face but other visages, some cadaverous or bestial, which represent and re-present as my bodies: commingled, inseparable, irreconcilable. I therefore know myself as multiple – a monster or, more accurately, a confabulation of monsters coterminous with my human self, whose status in human society is always and was always under constant and hostile review, revocable, yet to be determined. Cohen observes that the word creature means a thing that is not created but is perpetually being created, perpetually under revision at the behest of its creator. This is literally and literarily true of monsters – they exist in the stories that we tell about them, stories that undergo constant revision. When those stories are centered on a living person,DISTRIBUTION the process is the same. What’s more, Cohen says, the relationship between the monster and the one who dreams it is not ﬁxed, not even a little bit:

The space of transformation, becoming, passion, alterity, the uncanny, the utopian is in fact an interspace …FORThe monster and its dreamer are not two entities inhabiting a divided world, but two participants in an open process, two components of a circuit that intermixes and disperse both within an open, vibrant, unstable expanse.4 This expanse is one in whichNOT we may occupy multiple positions in relation to our monsters. I observe that Cohen’s “dreamer” here is not limited to the author of the monster – the reader is also the dreamer, as is the actor who puts on the greasepaint and jumps through the trap, and the members of the audience, who occupy multiple positions also. Whenever we encounter a monster in the theatre, we enter what Deleuze and Guattari would call an “assemblage”–a complex, fecund, and messy machine of subjectivity in which all of these positions – author, audience, and monster – are available to us. From Du Bois’s perspective, the dreamer is both the self and the other who imposes the monstrous identity – both perpetually create the monster. The act ofPROOFS identifying with the monster becomes a tactic of survival, via which the monsterized subject becomes one of the creators of the monster and thereby gains some control over its shape and behavior.5 Throughout this book, I have struggled to demonstrate how this assemblage functions in a few case studies in theatre history. The theatre has not T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:30

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always been granted the same level of scholarly gravitas that literature and cinema enjoy, in part because it is unashamedly an assemblage. Collaborative, it sometimes resists identiﬁcation of discrete roles, such as “playwright,” to whom a singular vision can always be ineluctably attributed. Grounded in its historical moment as a thing of substance and time, it sometimes resists claims to any kind of transhistorical universalism. Mercenary by necessity, it sometimes resists originality as an unaﬀordable luxury or dangerous experi- mentation. But a study of monster theatre demonstrates what a terrible mistake it is to dismiss the theatre for these reasons.6 Unliterary it may be, but perhaps that is as much its strength as its weakness. Marvin Carlson writes:

Any theatrical production weaves a ghostly tapestry for its audience, playing in various degrees and combinations with that audience’s collective and individual memories of previousDISTRIBUTION experience with this play, this director, these actors, this story, this theatrical space, even, on occasion, with this scenery, these costumes, these properties. In certain theatrical cultures, especially those with a strong commitment to con- tinuity of the production apparatus, this recycling is particularly noticeable; in others, especially thoseFOR with a strong commitment to artistic originality and innovation, it may be less so but has always been central to the functioning of theatre as a repository and living museum of cultural memory.7 We may add “this monster”NOTto Carlson ’s list without undue struggle. Compiling monstrogenealogies reveals these “ghostly tapestries” as layered experiences, assemblages in which the individual audience members see and hear not only this monster in this performance, but each incarnation of the monster they have ever known – literary, theatrical, folkloric, scientific, critical, and under their childhood bed – in polyphonous and productive dialogue with one another. Recycling is not the problem. It is, rather, the glory of the experience of the theatre and, if we are being perfectly honest, literature and filmmaking as well, despite their debatable claims to originality, transhistoricity, and single authorship. What a sterile culture we should have if thisPROOFS were not the case, with each cultural product contained like a butterfly under glass, unchanging and isolated and unable to communicate in the messy but wonderful system that generated it. On the contrary, it is the very familiarity of the elements of theatrical representation that account for its ability to function as an amplifier of T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:31

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empathy. Following the eighteenth-century dramaturg G. E. Lessing, I have tried with this book to make explicit what dramaturgs understand as an important connection between the artistic practice of the theatre and the loftiest ideals of humanist thought. When the theatre generates an appropriate aﬀect, Lessing argued, the audience can be inspired to feelings and values that comprise the best aspects of the human experience. In Lessing’s view, to be truly human is to be free to move intellectually as well as physically through the world in the pursuit of truth, and this perpetual quest (which can never be completed) generates deep empathy for fellow humans. Theatre, he demonstrates, is one of the greatest potential engines for this kind of exploration precisely because of its facility, as Aristotle had observed millennia before, for inciting empathy:

Precisely this love, I say, which we can under no circumstances lose towards other human beings, which smoldersDISTRIBUTION inextinguishably under the ashes with which other, stronger emotions cover it, as if it only awaits a favorable gust of wind from misfortune and pain and ruin to burst out into the ﬂame of pity; it is just this love which Aristotle understands under the name of philanthropy. We are correct when we comprehend it under the name of compassion.FOR [Eben diese Liebe, sage ich, die wir gegen unsern Nebenmenschen unter keinerlei Umständen ganz verlieren können, die unter der Asche, mit welcher sie andere stärkere Empﬁndungen überdecken, unverlös- chlich fortglimmet, und gleichsam nur einen günstigen Windstoß von Unglück und Schmerz undNOT Verderben erwartet, um in die Flamme des Mitleids auszubrechen; ebendiese Liebe ist es, welche Aristoteles unter dem Namen der Philanthropie verstehet. Wir haben recht, wenn wir sie mit unter dem Namen des Mitleids begreifen.]8

In this passage, Lessing is echoing the salient trends in Enlightenment philosophy in asserting faith that reason, empathy, and “the flame of pity” are capacities shared by all humans, regardless of their level of education, refinement, or any other factor. All that is required for this flame to become an inferno is exposure to the correct environment, one which the theatre, because of itsPROOFS live-ness, familiarity, and reliance on dialectics, has a particular aptitude to provide. As Lessing also argued, monsters in the theatre can, if used judiciously, amplify this capacity to draw empathy from the audience (see Chapter 6). “Monsters,” Cohen writes, “are never as idiosyncratic as they seem,”9 and T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:31

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indeed it is because monsters embody qualities with which we can empathize that we are able first to understand our reactions to our own traumas, to identify our own monstrous tendencies, and then to expand our ability to feel compassion for the traumas of others. In this way, we are not only made into more compassionate (and therefore, in Lessing’s view, better) human beings, but are also able to reclaim power over the very cultural weapons designed to render us powerless. Lessing’s theory, it turns out, has since been validated by modern neuroscience. Rapid assessment of strangers to see if they present a threat occurs in the brain’s amygdala, and relies on information from our cultural environment to identify dangerous people. If the culture provides negative racial stereotypes, the amygdala will rapidly employ those to classify racial difference as threatening. However, the brain also provides opportunities for control and retraining of those impulses. Beginning with awareness of the impulse, the brain can be conditioned with the collectionDISTRIBUTION of information – that Jews do not kill babies for matzah, for instance – to a more thoughtful response based on reason and evidence. This process, however, is slow and faces enormous obstacles. Stephen T. Asma writes: FOR We know, cognitively speaking, that this or that racial member is not a baby eater, a monster, a horror, but such knowledge is relatively effete when compared with subconscious amygdala motivation – which is so robust that it appears instinctual. If the epistemology that I have been sketching is correct, then theNOT solution to xenophobia and the demonization of the Other is affect replacement, not information enrichment.10

Affect management, Asma argues, like Lessing and many others before him, is the special province of art, adept at fostering feelings, thoughts, and actions which may be put into the service of “cultural therapy” by reconfiguring the markers the amygdala seeks in a positive light, and thereby transforming xenophobia into empathy. In fact, Asma demonstrates, recent psychological research indicates that the amygdala’s own preference for in-group identification can be utilized to discourage race-based exclusion in favor of inclusion based on somePROOFS other shared category – a phenomenon that is demonstrated by sports fans who discard their habitual prejudices to come together over a championship victory, for instance.11 The process is ongoing, of course, because such alliances are always shifting, but the best defense against the dark art is, like monsterization itself, primarily affective. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:31

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Each person who dreams a monster ought to recognize both the other and the self within it, and thereby witness the self in the other, and the other in the self. The monster escapes, ultimately, because the search for an empathic connection with other humans is a process that never ends. The assemblage of monster and theatre cultures provides a medium in which we can ﬁnd our most profound humanity in our capacity to feel this empathy, so necessary for the development of social policy that is just and kind, so that tomorrow’s children have less need for recourse to monstrous survival tactics. Teratologists, as Cohen observes in On Giants,

feel compelled to seek …“the fall or death, the stopping” of the monster. They seek to control its signiﬁcation by caging its strange body in a freak show, ﬁling its features away in an encyclopedia, reproducing its form in woodcuts so that it will not itself reproduce.12 DISTRIBUTION But the monster lives. The creators and critics of monsters in the end have little power over their growth and transformations. Teratologists will therefore never conquer their monsters, but instead are doomed uncannily or even neurotically to follow them into their nightmare lands and back in an endless cycle of fear and desire, alwaysFOR creating and recreating the con- ditions that, we hope, lead us onward towards the dynamic state of empathy required for our survival as a species. How could it be otherwise? Would we wish it to be otherwise?

Notes NOT 1 This quote and those above were taken directly from The Book of Mormon (www.LDS.org) on December 19, 2015. In telling this very personal story I do not mean to suggest that all Mormons are anti-Semites. That would be ridiculous. I am privileged to call some dear friends and have had the pleasure of working with Mormons and sharing communities with them, watching our children play together with no indication of the troubles of my own youth. I have been happy to welcome Mormon students in my classrooms. I do not confuse my neighbors, colleagues, and students with my own persecutors, children who probably saw themselves as courageous Jekylls trying to prevent evil, not as Hydes who were perpetrating it. I believe that it was fear, born of ignorance, which turned those particular children from Jekylls into Hydes. Nor will I advocatePROOFS that the monsterized have any right to turn the tables on those whom they perceive have hated them to deliver hatred in return, to make new monsters in order to legitimize some new atrocity. The lesson is not a Jewish one but a human one – for all humans – and it has fueled my research into monsters. T&F The Monster in Theatre History; by Michael Chemers Format: Demy (138 ×216 mm); Style: Supp; Font: Bembo; Dir: Y:/2-Pagination/TandF/MTH_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/ 9781138210899_text.3d; Created: 25/04/2017 @ 15:04:31

Conclusion 171

2 My second role, in fifth grade, was Marley’s Ghost in an adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 3. www.bartleby.com/114/ (accessed December 19, 2015). 4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “The Promise of Monsters.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, Asa Simon Mittman and Peter S. Dendle, eds. (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 449–64 (463). 5 Consider, for instance, how marginalized groups in American history have seized the slurs and epithets of their enemies (“nigger,”“queer,” and so on) and reappropriated them as powerful assertions of identity. 6 Particularly since all other art forms are, to a greater or lesser extent, also vulnerable to the same observations. 7 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 165. 8 G. E. Lessing, “Hamburg Dramaturgy.” In Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, Vol. 6, Wilfried Barner, ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), 565. Translation by Wendy Arons. 9 Cohen, “The Promise of Monsters,” 451. 10 Stephen T. Asma, “Monsters on the Braid: An EvolutionaryDISTRIBUTION Epistemology of Horror,” Journal of Social Research 81:4 (2014): 941–68 (960–1). 11 Ibid., 962. 12 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, On Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xiv. FOR

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