Posts Tagged ‘Drama’
“What matters to you defines your mattering”*…
Further in a fashion to yesterday’s post, and via the always illuminating Delanceyplace.com, an explication of one of the most fundamental of all human needs: an excerpt from Rebecca Goldstein‘s The Mattering Instinct, in which she draws on one of the fathers of both pragmatism and psychology, William James…
We speak both of what matters and of who matters. In fact, we speak a great deal about both.
Consider what matters. In recent decades, the phrase why X matters has become a template for dozens of book titles, including Why Beauty Matters, Why Emotions Matter, Why Family Matters, Why Genealogy Matters, Why Good Sex Matters, Why Jesus Matters, Why Knowledge Matters, Why Liberalism Matters, Why Money Matters, and Why Stories Matter. The profusion of titles, many of them mutually exclusive–after all, if Jesus matters, then how, too, can money?–testifies to our preoccupation with what matters.
And it’s not only the question of what matters but also of who matters that’s urgent. Consider: In 2013, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black American, was visiting, together with his father, his father’s fiance at her townhouse in a gated community in Florida. While the grownups were out, Trayvon went to a nearby convenience store to get himself some snacks and, on his way back, was shot by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, himself a member of a minority as a Hispanic American. Zimmerman found Trayvon suspicious looking–the boy’s hoodie was prominently mentioned in news stories–and called the police, while he continued to trail the teenager, a course of action ultimately ending in the boy’s death. Trayvon hadn’t been armed. All that was found on him was a bag of Skittles and an iced tea.
After the acquittal of the shooter, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter exploded onto social media. The three-word slogan soon went beyond mere hashtags and placards, following the deaths of two more unarmed Black Americans, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, to become a political movement. Those who opposed Black Lives Matter sometimes offered as rejoinders their own three-word slogans: ‘All Lives Matter,’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ this last referring to police officers. Of course, ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t inconsistent with either ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ since ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t synonymous with ‘Only Black Lives Matter.’ The power and the poignancy of the original slogan lay in its minimalism. But what the battle of the slogans made clear is the potency of the verb to matter, in this instance applied not to the question of what matters but rather who matters.
So what exactly does the verb to matter mean? Here is a quick working definition: To matter is to be deserving of attention. It’s the same whether we are speaking of what matters or who matters. The thing or the person that matters makes a claim on us; at the very least, a claim is made on our attention.
The claim of being deserving of attention may be based on consequences that would ensue from paying attention or not paying attention–as when we ask, say, does voting really matter? We’re asking whether voting makes a difference; and so whether it’s worth our while to pay the attention called for in voting. It’s still the question of being deserving of attention, but what decides the issue is the consequences. In other circumstances, claims of mattering–of being deserving of attention–are independent of considerations of consequences, as when we assert that Black lives matter or that all lives matter. Here it’s intrinsic mattering, having nothing to do with consequences. And what intrinsic mattering comes down to is being deserving of attention. To claim that Black lives matter, as all lives matter, is to make claims regarding the deservingness of attention.
This leaves us with two more terms to explicate: attention and deservingness.
Attention is a mental phenomenon studied by contemporary psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists–in other words, it is a subject for the empirical sciences.
The best definition I know of the phenomenon was given by the philosopher and psychologist William James. Attention, he wrote, is ‘the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts.’ Focalization, concentration of consciousness, are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James implies that attention is something we do. ‘It is the taking possession by the mind.’ The world’s languages agree. In English we pay attention, while in other languages we give, lend, gift, dedicate, sacrifice, prepare, turn, attach, apply, infuse, and arouse our attention. The linguistic formations all imply that there is activity and agency in attention. His definition also makes clear how attention, as an activity, is to be distinguished from the broader notion of consciousness. After all, that confused, dazed, scatterbrained state is a state of consciousness, though the ‘real opposite’ of paying attention.
His definition also entails that attention is limited and selective: withdrawal from some things. Every act of attention is an act of exclusion. In paying attention to something, we are forced to ignore a multitude of other things. And he ties this limitedness and selectivity with attention’s usefulness: in order to deal effectively. Contemporary psychology agrees. Attention’s limitedness and selectivity is crucial to its usefulness and linked to the reason why organisms evolved attention in the first place: to pay attention to changeable things in the organism’s immediate environment that can help or hinder it, nourish or annihilate it. That unpleasant smell, for example, may very well signal toxicity. Note the presence of the word changeable. The function of attention is tied to what is variable, not just to what is relevant to fitness. Oxygen, our heartbeat, gravity, and many other things are vital to our survival, and our unconscious mental processes must take them into account. But they tend to be constant, so there is no need to allocate our limited window of attention to them, unless circumstances alarmingly change.
The agency entailed in the act of paying attention means that we have some control over what we do and don’t pay attention to. You may be unable to remain oblivious to the bad music blasting in your gym or the rank smell seeping into your kitchen–stimuli that are intense or that pop out of your surroundings. But you can decide to pay no attention to, say, gossip or popular culture, social media or your weight. You can decide that they simply don’t matter, which is to say that they’re not deserving of your attention. And this brings us to the second component of the English verb to matter–namely deservingness.
Deservingness introduces an entirely different level of consideration into our preoccupations with mattering. It’s a level that goes beyond the psychological, beyond the empirical altogether. Deservingness draws us into the nonempirical sphere of values and justifications, of oughts and ought-nots. This is the sphere that philosophers call normative, because it invokes norms of justification. The mattering instinct means that we are normative creatures down to our core. We think and act and shape our lives within the sphere of justifications. Instead of calling ourselves Homo sapiens, we might better have christened ourselves Homo justificans.
It’s the presence of deservingness in the concept of mattering that raises us up into an entirely different order of both complexity and perplexedness. The mattering instinct has us straining beyond the empirical for the normative knowledge that eludes us. We are carried over into the sphere of values and justifications without being equipped to see our way through. Here is the epistemic elusiveness that injects the unsubdued doubt–and hence unease–into the heart of what it is to pursue a human life.
We speak both of what matters and of who matters. And behind our preoccupations with both is the most urgent of all our mattering questions, which is voiced in the first person: Do I matter? This is the mother of our mattering questions. Ultimately, we want to know what matters because we desperately want our own lives to be driven by what matters. We want to know who matters because we desperately want to be numbered among the ones who matter.
Self-mattering–feeling ourselves overwhelmingly deserving of our own attention–is baked into our identity. The usefulness of attention, to which William James alluded, is its usefulness to ourselves. So it’s no wonder that the greater part of our attention is given over to ourselves, whether overtly or tacitly. Throughout the enormous complexity of how the mind works, our self-mattering is presumed. And yet, astonishing creatures that we are, we are able, by way of the capacity for self-reflection with which our brains come equipped, to step outside of our self-mattering, which is to step outside ourselves, to pose the mother of all mattering questions…
It’s the deservingness component that separates the mattering for which we long from such empirical psychological states as having confidence or self-esteem. You can go online right now, or schedule a visit to a psychologist, and take a test that measures your confidence or self-esteem. There will be a series of statements to which you respond with the degree of your agreement, such as: I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others. I feel that I have a number of good qualities. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I’m a failure. The test may even provide a numerical score, similar to an IQ test. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, for example, which is one of the most widely used measures of self-esteem and from which I’ve taken the above statements, provides a numerical value from 1 to 30, with any score under 15 indicating low self-esteem. It was none other than William James who first formulated the concept of self-esteem, offering an equation as its definition.
But these assessments of how good you feel about yourself, often in relation to others, aren’t tests of whether you truly, objectively, existentially matter. To figure out that question, the mother of all mattering questions, you can’t take an empirical test. Your self-esteem score, whether high or low, may be grounded in self-delusion, and the mother question is a demand for the answer that lies on the other side of self-delusion. Do I truly and objectively matter? I know that I can’t help feeling that I do, but do I really?
When it comes to our own mattering, we are staunch realists. We don’t want feelings. We want the facts.”…
See also “Why We Need to Feel Like We Matter” (source of the image above)
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As we wonder about worth, we might spare a thought for a man who unquestionably mattered, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; he died on this date in 1832. A poet, playwright, artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and philosopher, he is probably best remembered these days for Faust. But by virtue of the breadth and depth of his work, he is considered “the master spirit of the German people,” and, after Napoleon, the leading figure of his age.
“Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
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As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
“I am not Cinna the conspirator”*…
As Philip Goldfarb Styrt explains, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a telling parable about the administration of justice—and rife mishandling thereof—in our day…
American politics has a long history of referencing William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, from Abigail Adams, who identified with Portia, the wife of Brutus, as Betsy Erkkila has noted, to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which “both was and was not reenacting” the play, in Cary M. Mazer’s words. These references are likely due to the intersection of American identification with Roman republicanism, which the play dramatizes, and the long history of American interest in Shakespeare specifically. More recently, a great deal of ink was spilled during Donald Trump’s first term comparing the president to Caesar. But while an excellent hook for contemporary stagings of the play, this kind of parallel has limitations. King George III and Abraham Lincoln weren’t Caesar, and neither is Donald Trump, even if a lead actor sports a distinctive red tie. This history does, however, raise the question of what Shakespeare’s play might have to tell us about our current historical moment.
One overlooked area of governance that has become increasingly important in the early days of the current administration is due process: what procedures does the government have to go through and what kinds of hearings must be held, particularly in immigration cases, in order to arrest someone? To remove or deport someone from the country? From the Mahmoud Khalil case at Columbia University to the Rümeysa Öztürk case at Tufts, the Secretary of State has been personally marking individual visas and green cards for revocation; in addition, in cases like the one that centers on the removal of alleged gang members to El Salvador, whole categories of people are being removed without a hearing or a trial and with at least some allegations that the individuals removed aren’t even part of the targeted class.
Julius Caesar treats these issues directly. The play focuses on the assassination of the title character by a conspiracy headed by Brutus and Cassius and the defeat of the conspirators in battle by Caesar’s successors, the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. Along the way, the play presents punishment as a major theme: First, the punishment of Caesar for the perceived sin of royal ambition, and second, the punishment of the conspirators for his murder. Because of this, a close look at the play and the scholarship surrounding it can help make clear the stakes of due process. While the term itself wouldn’t have been used in Shakespeare’s time, his era was one in which the procedures of law we now call due process were being formalized, and his plays show a consistent interest in whether that proper procedure is being followed.
A pair of crucial scenes related to this issue immediately follow the play’s most famous parts (Caesar’s assassination and the speeches delivered by Brutus and Antony over his body, in Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2, respectively) and may be sometimes overlooked. But when considered together, they give insight into why arbitrary executive action without due process is dangerous, whether it technically operates within the law or not.
The first of these two scenes—in Act 3, scene 3—features mob violence. Incited by Marc Antony to seek revenge, the citizens seek out conspirators to murder, and they mistake the poet Cinna for a conspirator of the same name. They tear him to pieces. Though this act is hardly the same as an official arrest, which might seem to distance it from discussions of due process, this moment isn’t just about the mob, as Martin Mueller points out; it’s about how power acts, whether through masses or through government. It’s a case of enacting punishment in a case of mistaken identity, particularly one where despite that mistake having been corrected in real time, the damage is done. “I am not Cinna the conspirator,” are the victim’s last words, but the play gives neither time nor opportunity for his insistence to convince anyone to keep him alive. Due process would allow for potential Cinnas to demonstrate innocence and remove themselves from the unwarranted threat; without it, everyone is imperiled.
There’s another element of the current concern regarding due process that relates to the fate of poor Cinna. His death isn’t merely the result of mistaken identity; as Jeffrey J. Yu writes, after he tries to identify himself the mob changes its tune, declaring that they’ll kill him for being a bad poet instead. Absent due process, there’s no pause to decide whether this person should be condemned or if the reason given for condemnation is legitimate. This episode serves as a reminder that due process doesn’t merely protect people from mistaken identification; it also requires those who would mete out punishment to specify, up front, the reason for it.
The Trump administration’s refusal to give key information to multiple judges in the removal cases recalls this danger. By refusing to specify details of the case, the government keeps the possibility alive of changing their reasoning or their claims to have the same effect for different reasons—just as the mob changes its reasoning for killing Cinna. This belies the question of whether those who are looking to deliver punishment are acting in good faith, a concern that became part of the appeals court decision in the El Salvador case and has subsequently been raised in other courtrooms as well. Just as Shakespeare’s mob finds new justifications for why Cinna the Poet should die, the government keeps open the possibility of producing a different reason for removing the people it currently claims are alien enemies—a process they have already begun with individual visa revocations. Due process requires a commitment to the reasons punishment is sought and thus allows those reasons to be addressed and countered.
As Nicholas Royle argues, the scene of Cinna’s death can easily be treated as a version of Julius Caesar in miniature. The play as a whole is about categorical error: killing someone because you think they are one thing only to find out you were wrong. This, in turn, centers the idea of due process, because only through it can deliberative decisions about identity, guilt, and punishment be properly engaged. The lynching of (the wrong) Cinna is the madness of a mob; the murder of (the right) Caesar is a conspiracy of nobles; the removal of hundreds of (alleged) Venezuelan gang members is the action of ICE. Each is a distinct entity, but they hold in common a lack of judicial process to determine what is to be done and to whom.
If the death of Cinna is a microcosm of the play, the other moment that reinforces the importance of due process in Julius Caesar is even more compressed, lasting a mere eight lines at the start of the fourth act. That’s all the time it takes for Marc Antony, Octavius (the future Augustus Caesar), and Lepidus to choose the Romans who will die by proscription in order to keep their triumvirate in power while they war against Caesar’s assassins. This is an arbitrary and impersonal form of execution: the triumvirs check off the names of those they want dead: “these many, then, shall die; their names are pricked.” As Robert Kalmey observes, this moment encapsulates what Roman historians thought of as the worst of all of Octavius’s crimes against the state before becoming emperor. This “tyrannical ruthlessness and cruelty,” in Robert Miola’s words, reveals that the triumvirate will be no better than Caesar’s assassins or the mob; they too will kill at whim to stay in power.
There’s something disturbing about these proscriptions, which is why both Kalmey and Miola identify them as critical. The triumvirate make a cold-blooded choice to kill many Romans; it has neither targeted motivation, as did the assassination of Caesar, nor does it possess the emotional if not legal justification embraced by the inflamed mob in its misdeeds. This isn’t to justify those prior murders. Rather, it’s to point out that the proscriptions somehow exceed even them in horror because of how they’re administered. There’s no due process here, either; the three triumvirs don’t get their hands dirty, their decisions can’t be appealed, and there’s no public process by which those to be killed will be identified before the decision is final.
In this there’s a distinct echo of the process currently in use for determining which visas (permanent or temporary) will be revoked under the current administration. The decision lies solely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to determine if a particular immigrant poses a threat to national security; if he makes that determination, then the immigrant in question can be picked up off the street without hearing or appeal. Thus far, there’s no venue for disputing such a determination nor is there a published list of those whose visas have been revoked, even though Rubio claims to have revoked as many as 300 (coincidentally, as Kalmey details, the number of senators proscribed by the triumvirate).
Of course, deportation or removal from the United States isn’t the same as death; Rubio’s unilateral visa revocation isn’t the same as the proscription. But the lack of transparency and due process are similar, and there are few to no guarantees of the safety of people whom ICE agents remove, often without identifying themselves, and move around without notifying the family or lawyers of the detained. In fact, the government has argued in court that it has no responsibility to return those who might be removed incorrectly or by accident.
In Julius Caesar Shakespeare demonstrates the extreme consequences of a lack of due process. Not every such deprivation becomes a literal matter of life and death as in the play, but making use of such scenarios enables Shakespeare to highlight more effectively the danger of arbitrary action. Whether we imagine ourselves, like Cinna the Poet, hunted for a crime of which we are innocent or, like the Roman dignitaries proscribed by the triumvirs, marked out for condemnation, the drama asserts that some kind of due process is a necessity for a free state. If, as Lloyd Matthews has argued, America’s founding ideals of liberty are intimately linked to Julius Caesar, that connection should remind us that such liberty requires due process to function properly…
“The Lessons of Due Process in Julius Caesar,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (“A Harvard Law class uses the Bard’s plays to explore legal themes and concepts past and present”)
* Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 3
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As we recognize rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that the Mercury Theater broadcast the Halloween episode of their weekly series on the WABC Radio Network, Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the show (which was uninterrupted by ads) was composed of simulated news bulletins… which suggested to many listeners (a huge number of whom joined in progress, after tuning over from the Edgar Bergen show on NBC) that a real Martian invasion was underway.
While headlines like the one below suggest that there was widespread panic, research reveals that the fright was more subdued. Still there was an out-cry against the “phony-news” format… and Welles was launched into the notoriety that would characterize his career ever after.
“What nourishes me, destroys me”*…
On the occasion of the publication of Stephen Greenblatt‘s new book, Dark Renaissance, Nina Pasquini profiles its subject, the remarkable Christopher Marlowe…
He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence.
At 14, young Marlowe—the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler—won a scholarship to the prestigious King’s School, becoming the first in his family to receive a formal education. He excelled, went on to the University of Cambridge, and there studied the great works of antiquity, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Where his classmates saw musty mandatory reading, Marlowe found something else: worlds of ecstatic violence and erotic excess, of vengeful outcasts and capricious gods, worlds that upended the Christian moral order in which he was raised.
After graduation, Marlowe faced an uncertain future—unlike his wealthy classmates, his education didn’t secure for him a place in society. So, he decided to take a risk, moving to London to try his hand at an unstable, disreputable profession: writing for the stage.
When Marlowe was born in 1564, says Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, England was still stuck in the Middle Ages, even as the Renaissance bloomed on the continent. Public entertainment revolved around bearbaiting and hangings; poetry was weighed down by moralizing and clumsy rhymes; brutal censorship stifled any art that challenged the crown’s authority.
By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.
“It was Marlowe who cracked something open,” Greenblatt says, “and enabled Shakespeare to walk through—how should we say?—over his dead body.”
Marlowe’s story, Greenblatt adds, is also relevant to many of academia’s current preoccupations. He was a “first-gen” student who glimpsed radical possibilities in the supposedly conservative texts of “great books courses.” He faced a “vocational crisis” familiar to many humanities students today—and pursued his passion despite the risk.
That career began with Marlowe’s debut play, Tamburlaine the Great, written in 1587 or 1588. “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater,” Greenblatt writes, “is pre- and post-Tamburlaine.”
Part of the play’s shock value lay in its plot. Loosely based on the rise of the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror Timur (also known as Tamerlane), Tamburlaine the Great tells the story of a Scythian shepherd who ascends from obscurity to become a dominating tyrant. The violence is unrelenting, and the ambition unchecked: Tamburlaine faces no moral comeuppance for his pride. This rags-to-riches arc may have mirrored Marlowe’s own desires, Greenblatt writes—and defined many of the other outsider characters Marlowe would go on to write.
But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says. Marlowe’s characters spoke in unrhymed iambic pentameter—“elegant, musical, and forward-thrusting,” Greenblatt writes—which gave English drama a new expressive register.
Before Tamburlaine, English playwrights were trapped in stiff structures such as Poulter’s measures—couplets in which 12-syllable iambic lines rhyme with 14-syllable iambic lines. Blank verse enabled Marlowe’s characters to sound like they were “actually speaking English,” Greenblatt says, dramatized by some structure, but still alive. Shakespeare would come to rely heavily on blank verse in his own work.
A few years later came Doctor Faustus, first performed in 1594. It was Marlowe’s most famous play and the first dramatization of the Faust legend, in which a scholar makes a deal with the devil, trading his soul for magical powers. This work, Greenblatt argues, marked the first time “a powerful, complex inner life” was represented on the stage.
Before Marlowe, English theater externalized psychology through allegory: morality plays populated by characters such as Pride and Shame. In Doctor Faustus, by contrast, Marlowe relies on soliloquy and dialogue about the characters’ internal states. “It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done,” Greenblatt writes.
Marlowe’s life ended as dramatically as one of his plays: he was stabbed to death in a tavern in Deptford. Officials claimed the death resulted from a quarrel over a dinner bill—but Greenblatt points to a more complicated story. While still a student at university, Greenblatt writes, Marlowe was likely recruited as a spy for Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, possibly to monitor Catholic dissidents or plots against the crown.
But over the years, Marlowe drew scrutiny for his radical ideas and was accused at times of atheism—a grave offense in Elizabethan England. Greenblatt believes that Marlowe was killed for his beliefs, possibly on orders carried out by an “overly zealous servant” of Queen Elizabeth herself.
To Greenblatt, Marlowe’s life serves as a reminder of how repressive Elizabethan England was: “It was basically wise to keep your head down, unless you wanted your head to be chopped off.” Marlowe didn’t and paid the price. Shakespeare was watching, Greenblatt argues, and learned he had to be more careful. But Shakespeare’s blend of conservatism and radicalism was only possible because Marlowe had first ventured too far. Shakespeare relied, Greenblatt writes, on Marlowe’s legacy of “reckless courage and genius.”
And Greenblatt believes Shakespeare was aware of his debt. Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance ends with a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a reference to Marlowe’s mysterious death in that small tavern room in Deptford: “When a man’s verses cannot be understood…it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”…
Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard: “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Why One of Shakespeare’s Rivals Is Still Making Trouble.”
* translation of the phrase– “Quod me alit, me extinguit”– found on the portrait of Marlowe above (at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
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As we ponder profundity, we might spare a thought for a more modern playwright, August Wilson; he died on this date in 2005. Often referred to as “theater’s poet of Black America,” Wilson is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. (Plays in the series include Fences and The Piano Lesson, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.) In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
“I’m Your Puppet”*…
Your correspondent is hitting the road again. (Roughly) Daily will be on hiatus until July1…
The first English language history of puppets…
Anybody who grew up with Shari Lewis’ Lamb Chop, Fred Rogers’ King Friday XIII, or Jim Henson’s Muppets will surely feel that they have entered a more expansive puppet realm at the outset of Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920). Late one evening in Cleveland, Ohio as she makes alterations to their costumes, a cast of stringed characters from Anglo-Irish dramatist Lord Dunsany’s otherworldly drama The Golden Doom — the Chief Prophet of the Stars, the Chamberlain, a pair of Spies, and a Priest — treat Joseph as rudely and defiantly as Pinocchio abused Geppetto. Beating her retreat from this imagined Lilliputian assault, the weary marionette seamstress overhears them vainly reciting their august, cosmopolitan ancestry, from the ancient Indian Ramayana, Japanese jōruri dramas, and medieval Passion plays to pugilistic stars like Pulcinella, Punch, Kasperle and Karaghöz, on down to the devotion of modern immortals spanning from Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Goethe to George Bernard Shaw and Maurice Maeterlinck.
The first comprehensive history of marionette artistry in the English language, A Book of Marionettes appeared at a watershed moment in both American and world puppetry, after a century of artistic and technical innovation, and before the cinema’s global supplanting of human attention and storytelling. Drawing on her field study of European puppetry, Helen Haiman Joseph magisterially surveys the millennia-long world history of string and silhouette marionettes. Born seemingly simultaneously with organized religion, the little creatures never leave their creators’ sides, fully capable of expressing the entire range of human emotion and experience in every corner of the globe, in every age. Enlisted as surrogate actors, marionettes perform with their necessarily circumscribed mechanical gestures deeds of immense gravity, all while barely touching the earth. As Joseph moves adeptly through the ever-dynamic world of marionette theaters, one gets the feeling that she is actually narrating a kind of alternate history of the world, one that is altogether more joyously humane than any epic recounted about mere human beings.
Granted the power to subvert any worldly authority, marionettes, as Joseph proves, perennially overthrow all social, political, religious, and even artistic conventions. When Martin Luther’s Calvinist confrères refused to administer the sacrament to actors, they became puppeteers. On more than a few occasions, both puppeteers and puppets found themselves behind bars, so effective was their satire against oppressive ecclesiastics and governments. Since the modern Western state arose at a time when marionette theaters were ubiquitous, the diminutive legion was always at hand to model courage and stoutheartedness for their momentarily cowed audiences. That Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre of Paris, and Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour were inspired by puppet plays, or that Lord Byron drew his model of Don Juan from a Punch & Judy piece titled The Libertine Destroyed, suggests the deep fraternity of modern drama with its little brother…
More history– and illustrations: “Strings Attached: Helen Haiman Joseph’s A Book of Marionettes (1920)” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Browse the book in full at the invaluable Internet Archive.
* a song written by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, best known in the version recorded by James & Bobby Purify (Hear here)
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As we untangle the strings, we might recall that it ws on this date in 1623 that a large codfish, split open at a Cambridge market, was found to contain a copy of a book of religious treatises by John Frith.
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