Calderon: The Mayor of Zalamea

The Mayor of Zalamea
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Translated from the Spanish by Edward Fitzgerald
(Univ. Illinois, 2000) [c.1651]
60 p.

An army regiment marching past a small town decides to billet its soldiers for the night, and a beautiful young woman catches the eye of one of the soldiers. But this is no tender romance; lust and violence rule the night, and justice contends against might for supremacy.

This was one of Calderón’s last plays, written, I believe, shortly before he (mostly) gave up playwriting to enter the priesthood. It’s an engaging piece that effectively mixes sober drama with good-natured comedy, has several admirable protagonists, and a believable villain too. Thematically it explores the relative value of wealth and nobility, and also, in the conflict that arises between the regiment and the town, tensions between different sources of authority in the pursuit of justice.

I wondered if I was picking up references to other literary works. There is a pair of characters, for instance, Don Mendo and Nuna, who struck me very much as a Quixote and Panza partnership; they are largely peripheral to the main line of the story, but they might provide comic relief on stage. And I wondered, too, if the play contains a reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

MENZO: Go again, and tell her something about her window being another East, and she a second Sun dawning from it in the afternoon.

Or maybe this was just a common trope that both Calderón and Shakespeare drew upon.

On the whole, it strikes me as an excellent play that would work well dramatically, though I suppose it is doubtful that I’ll ever have an opportunity to see it on stage. The last few Calderón plays I’ve been reading have been in the 19th century translation of Edward Fitzgerald; I gather that he has his critics for the liberties he takes, but they are wonderful to read and I’m sticking with him.

Books briefly noted: plays

If You’re Glad I’ll be Frank
Tom Stoppard
(Faber & Faber, 1969)
31 p.

This is another radio drama Tom Stoppard did for the BBC in the year of the premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, although whether before or after I have not been able to discover. In the introductory notes Stoppard says it grew out of a conversation about imaginary jobs — such as, in this case, the job of answering the phone and announcing the exact time to those inquiring. There was, at that time, a service people could call to get the time (“On the third stroke, it will be three o’clock”), but of course the job was not done, in real time, by a real person. Anyway, the drama is a rather odd one, involving a man estranged from his wife who hears her voice when he calls the time number, and then rushes around frantically trying to find her. She, meanwhile, is prone to musing on the nature of time, its infinity, our inability to stop or otherwise control it, the illusion of our having domesticated it with clocks, and so forth. It’s an amusing mixture of humour and intellectual playfulness, though I will say that I found it less successful than the other radio dramas I’ve read thus far, mostly because the story is so very peculiar. Oh, and the two main characters are named Gladys and Frank, hey hey.

***

Where Are They Now?
Tom Stoppard
(Faber & Faber, 1984) [1970]

In the early days, Tom Stoppard did quite a lot of radio drama, and here is another instance: a half-hour drama that aired on the BBC early in 1970. The story, to the extent that there is one, centers on an “Old Boys” dinner for the alumni of a boarding school, and the discussion is intercut, or blends back and forth into, a similar dinner a few decades earlier, when the men were students in the school. There is a certain amount of “then and now” contrast, and some irony and poignancy arising therefrom, and, I suppose, some humour too, although on the whole I found the play pretty slight, and hard to follow too. This is the first thing I’ve encountered on this tour of Stoppard that has left me cold.

***

The Knights
Aristophanes
Translated from the Greek by A. Sommerstein
(Penguin, 2002) [424 BC]
130 p.

Without some background on the politics of Athens during the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, I think this play would be pretty hard to get into. It was my good fortune to come to it just after reading Thucydides, so I was girt about the loins. Even so, I found it a tough slog. It is basically a satire on Cleon, one of the principal figures in Athens at the time. In the play a sausage-seller and a character representing Cleon compete for the attention and loyalty of a third character, Demos, representing the Athenian people. It’s kind of an allegory, then. I didn’t find much to enjoy in it. I’m having a hard time imagining how these comedies of Aristophanes would have played on the stage.

Diodorus Siculus: Athens in the 5th century BC

The Persian Wars to the Fall of Athens
Bibliotheca historica, Books 11-14.34
Diodorus Siculus
Translated from the Greek by Peter Green
(University of Texas, 2010) [c.50 BC]
348 p.

The two great historians of the ancient Greek world are Herodotus and Thucydides. The former gave us a history that set the stage for and recounted the events of the Greco-Persian wars that ended in 480 BC, and the latter recounted (most of) the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, but between the two of them there lies a gap of fifty years — fifty years of great interest, being in numerous respects the golden age of Athens, in which the high repute in which she was held for her role in defeating the Persians brought her honour and wealth, much of which was undone by the decades-long struggle of the Peloponnesian War.

Into the breach steps Diodorus Siculus, a first-century BC writer whose massive historical project, the Biblioteca historica, covers events in and around the Mediterranean from the Trojan War down to the life of Julius Caesar. Of its 40 books, 15 have survived to our time, including those, Books 11-14, which treat of Greece in the 5th century BC.

It is perhaps unfortunate, given our wish to rely on him, that Diodorus comes to us with a distinctly malodorous reputation. He was admired, it is true, in the first few centuries after he wrote — both St. Jerome and St. Justin Martyr spoke well of him — but in the last couple of centuries, since the onset of historical criticism in German scholarship, his star has declined. The critics have been unsparing: he was a “miserable scribbler”, said Wilamowitz; “a flat and foolish pen-pusher”, said Soltau; Nock thought him “a small man with pretensions”, while Macaulay judged him “a stupid, credulous, prosing old ass”, and, piling on a bit, Niebuhr pronounced him “naive, unlearned, totally spiritless, without judgment, silly, incompetent…” and so forth. The point is clear enough: Diodorus Siculus was a bad historian.

So goes the consensus, but Peter Green, translator of this volume, and as eminent a classicist as you’re likely to find, does not agree, and he has produced this book in an attempt to set Diodorus’ project before us once again, sustained by a scaffolding of scholarly notes.

He grants that Diodorus makes errors — he tries to align Greek history and Roman history, for instance, but he’s off by a few years — but argues that at least some of these mistakes can be attributed to the manuscript being, here and there, still in draft when Diodorus died. Earlier critics accused Diodorus of being not much more than a bad copyist, but Green argues that in fact his work shows considerable evidence of original research and that his reliance on previous historians has been exaggerated. And he believes, finally, that, despite some flaws, given the paucity of evidence about this inter-war period in Greece we ought not to look a gift historian in the mouth.

That scholarly dispute is an interesting one, but more important for casual readers like us is whether we learn something from reading Diodorus, and whether we enjoy ourselves as we read. And I think we do, in many ways. For example, in the early parts of Book 11 he narrates the run-up to the Persian invasion and he gives this detail about inter-Greek politics:

The Argives sent ambassadors to the allied congress, announcing that they would join the alliance if offered a share of the command. To which the delegates responded in plain terms that if the Argives thought it worse to have a Greek general than a barbarian master, they were right to remain neutral; but if they aspired to take over the leadership of the Hellenes, they should (said the delegates) have performed deeds deserving of such an honor before applying for it.

A delightful reply! And I don’t remember seeing it in Herodotus.

At Thermopylae Xerxes offered, as was his custom, to make terms with King Leonidas and the Spartans before the battle began:

[Xerxes] ordered them to make the following proclamation: “King Xerxes orders everyone to surrender their arms, to go back under safe-conduct to their native country, and to be allies of the Persians; and if they do this,” the proclamation continued, “he will grant them more and better land than that they now possess.”

We know that his offer was refused, but I don’t recall it being refused in these gallant terms:

But when Leonidas and his companions heard what the messengers had to say, they replied that if they were to be the king’s allies, they would be of more use to him fully armed, and if they were compelled to wage war against him, they would do battle for freedom all the better through keeping their weapons; and as for the lands he promised to give them, it was a tradition with the Greeks to gain lands not by cowardice but by valor.

Much later, during the throes of the Peloponnesian War, Diodorus tells us of the great sea battle that took place between the Athenians and the Syracusans in the harbour of Syracuse, and it is told with particularly vivid attention to the human scale and human cost of the struggle:

The spectators upon the walls gave great shouts when they discerned any advantage gained by their friends; but when they were in danger of being overcome, they filled the air with doleful groans and lamentations, calling upon their gods for deliverance. Sometimes some of the galleys of the Syracusans were destroyed under the very walls, and their kindred and relations were the eye-witnesses of the death of their children, wives of the miserable ends of their husbands, and brothers of their brothers.

All this I would put on the positive side of the ledger. But there is a negative side too, easier to state: I often had a hard time understanding what was going on. Diodorus is an annalist, going year by year, and while this makes it relatively simple to keep the chronological order of the story straight, it’s less easy to follow a single story arc across multiple years, as it gets mixed up with other story arcs.  For instance, Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war cuts off in 411, six years before the war ended; Diodorus covers the whole thing, but, having read the book, even if you offered me a nice plate of taramasalata and souvlaki, I could not tell you how it ended. Individual historical figures did not often emerge from the fabric with distinctive character, and that’s fairly disappointing considering that his story involves a host of fascinating people, including Pericles, Sophocles, and Socrates. The whole affair left me with the impression of its being a bit of a ramble. That’s not a comment on his historical reliability, which I’m not qualified to adjudicate, but just on his style and manner.

These problems were severe enough that, in the end, I found Diodorus Siculus more disappointing than otherwise. My principal reason for reading him — for an account of the inter-war period — was left mostly unsatisfied, and, though I appreciated certain aspects of the book, I found it, on the whole, lacking character and art.

Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Tom Stoppard
(Faber, 1968)
95 p.

PLAYER: We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

I’d like to know how Top Stoppard felt when he, a young man with a couple of plays under his belt but no grand success, had the idea for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He must have sensed that it was one of the best ideas for a play that anyone ever had. To turn an idea into a play is, of course, a big job, fraught with perils, but even so the intrinsic value of the premise must have been like a warm coal burning in his heart as he worked. I hope so.

The premise, in the unlikely event that you don’t know, is that the play takes us off-stage, and behind-the-scenes, as it were, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as we follow the two minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and discover what they are doing when they are not in Hamlet. Their on-stage scenes in Hamlet are experienced here as interruptions, as Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude burst onto the stage. Stoppard achieves an amusing reversal of figure and ground.

The premise naturally suggests a set of ideas to explore: the artifice of the theatre, the difference between action on the stage and action in real life (an idea also native to Hamlet itself), imagination and reality. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are fictional characters; do they have any existence when they are not on-stage? In this play they seem to occupy a curious state of partial being, where logic is not always reliable and even the laws of probability break down. Their off-Hamlet language is modern, stripped down and sometimes barely intelligible, but it erupts into florid Elizabethan verse whenever Shakespeare’s other characters are present. Which persona is the real one?

GUIL: Well, aren’t you going to change into your costume?
PLAYER: I never change out of it, sir.

There are religious and philosophical overtones to their situation. Shakespeare’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have a creator, and their creator has given them something to do; they know what it is, as actors do. But in this play they have a kind of double-existence, both on- and off-stage, both in character and not, and this duplicity cultivates a skepticism about their nature and purpose:

PLAYER: You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.
GUIL: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act.
PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you’re here at least.
GUIL: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true.

They are recapitulating the modern skeptical predicament, stranded in a state of existential aimlessness.

The play also finds a fresh angle on the old theme of appearances and reality. What happens on a stage is, while it plays, a kind of reality, one that can absorb our attention and affect us. But it ends when it ends, and it is, as Plato told us, fundamentally not-real. We know, for instance, that our two protagonists are destined to die — this is written in Hamlet and cannot be avoided — but a death on-stage has not the same finality as an actual death. Shakespeare kept their deaths off-stage; does that make them, at least possibly, more real? The play spends a good deal of time ruminating on death and its reflections and shadows, sometimes with a particularly black humour:

GUIL: Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! (More quietly.) You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn’t bring home to anyone — it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says — “One day you are going to die.” (He straightens up.) You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?
PLAYER: On the contrary, it’s the only kind they do believe. They’re conditioned to it. I had an actor once who was condemned to hang for stealing a sheep — or a lamb, I forget which — so I got permission to have him hanged in the middle of a play — had to change the plot a bit but I thought it would be effective, you know — and you wouldn’t believe it, he just wasn’t convincing! It was impossible to suspend one’s disbelief — and what with the audience jeering and throwing peanuts, the whole thing was a disaster! — he did nothing but cry all the time — right out of character — just stood there and cried … Never again.

*

It’s not a perfect play. Personally I feel that it’s too long, a little too invested in existential musings, a little too prone to Godot-esque flights of nonsense:

PLAYER: Why?
GUIL: Ah. (To ROS:) Why?
ROS: Exactly.
GUIL: Exactly what?
ROS: Exactly why.
GUIL: Exactly why what?
ROS: What?
GUIL: Why?
ROS: Why what, exactly?
GUIL: Why is he mad?!
ROS: I don’t know! (beat)
PLAYER: The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.
ROS (appalled): Good God! We’re out of our depth here.
PLAYER: No, no, no — he hasn’t got a daughter — the old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.
ROS: The old man is?
PLAYER: Hamlet, in love with the old man’s daughter, the old man thinks.

But, at the worst, these still have spark, and are thematically apt. It is true that the play, like much of Stoppard’s work, suffers from a tendency to keep us “intrigued without ever quite being enlightened,” but, again, this is plausibly part of the point.

In any case, I’ve long admired the play (though I’ve never seen it staged). It introduced Tom Stoppard to the world, and to me. The hallmarks of his best work are all here: sparkling intelligence, ready wit, verbal hijinks, and, not far beneath the surface, a beating heart. It’s a very good play.

Murdoch: The Bell

The Bell
Iris Murdoch
(Vintage, 2004) [1973]
314 p.

I’ve had a simmering interest in the novels of Iris Murdoch for many years, since, I suppose, I read with appreciation The Sovereignty of Good, a philosophical work, and wondered, in the back of my mind, what she would do with a story. Most philosophers don’t write fiction.

The Bell was a good place to begin. She takes us inside a nascent lay religious community that has set up shop next door to an ancient, now Anglican, convent in the English countryside not far from London. One member of the community, Catherine, is preparing to enter the convent, and another, Paul, is just there to do some academic work related to the Abbey, but the rest are, for their various reasons, attracted to the idea of trying to live a life of prayer and work — ora et labora — in cooperation with each other.

Our entry into this community is through the eyes of Nora, the estranged young wife of the resident scholar. She’s not religious herself — she had given up her childhood practice, we learn, in one of the brilliant bits of characterization that pepper these pages, “when she discovered that she could say the Lord’s Prayer quickly but not slowly” — but she wants to try to patch things up with her husband, and so she joins the community, temporarily, as a somewhat awkward outsider. An early attempt to befriend another member of the community is met with unexpected reticence — “we never discuss our past lives here” — but, as the story shows, the past cannot be sealed off so easily.

It’s a book with an ensemble cast, but there are three characters in particular who come into clearest focus. Nora is one, and the others are Toby, an unostentatiously pious young man just setting out in the world, and Michael, the founder and de facto leader of the small community. All three are interesting people, but Michael is an especially complicated man, whose good will and sincerity cannot overcome a variety of inclinations and faults and secrets that cause harm to those around him and threaten the stability of the enterprise in which he is engaged.

The community, as I’ve said, is attached to a cloistered convent, and I, perhaps without good grounds, was surprised at how Murdoch not only granted but even fostered what I shall call “the mystique of the cloister”. I mean that not only does she grant that the religious life has aims and methods that are worthwhile and admirable, but that it may actually provide a privileged path to wisdom and human fulfillment. Her nuns, at any rate, are granted dignity and insight that others in the story lack.

And, more generally, Murdoch seems to be genuinely interested in what motivates people to consider a life dedicated to God, and in the goods in which such a life consists. Even when she is drawing our attention to mixed motives and to the many ways in which good intentions can be undermined by sin, we still get a sense that this community is trying to live up to a worthy ideal. There are several “homilies” in the book, delivered by particular members of the community to the others, that are, as far as I can tell, plump with genuine, completely unironic moral wisdom. Knowing that she wrote The Sovereignty of Good I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I was, a little.

The book is also noteworthy for the way it handles homosexuality. At the time of its publication it may (I don’t know for sure) have been criticized, in some quarters, for its positive portrayal of homosexual attraction (“this love was something so strong, so radiant, it came from so deep it seemed of the very nature of goodness itself”), but today would almost certainly be censured, in other quarters, for not being affirmative enough (“[because of it] his very love for his God seemed to be corrupted at the source”). Love is a good, but the book shows us, also, that even politically approved forms of passion are not always benign. I thought the matter was handled with the same clear-eyed evenhandedness that she brought to the other moral dimensions of the book.

I mentioned above that I had wondered, prior to picking up the book, how a philosopher’s novel would read. Stodgy? Prone to abstraction? I was delighted to find, though, that she commands a wonderfully precise and lucid style. Her characterizations are often deft, and her descriptions superbly nuanced. (I was reminded, again and again, when a complex thought was brought to a perfectly judged conclusion, of Thomas Mann’s writing, which is good company indeed.) That said, there were a few “philosophy professor” moments in which characters, instead of just thinking their thoughts, thought instead of how those thoughts compared to what Kant thought. I found these gaffes endearing.

I haven’t even mentioned the main plot, which involves the bell of the book’s title (and a medieval legend, and dramatic events that send affairs spinning into chaos). These things are, I think, better left as surprises for those who might be inclined to read the book. I found it all quite absorbing and delightful, and I certainly intend to explore another of her novels in the future.

***

[Temptation]
By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.

[Judgement]
“Those who hesitate to judge others are usually those who fear to put themselves under judgement.”

[Innocence and experience]
“How false it is to tell our young people to seek experience! They should rather be told to value and to retain their innocence; that is enough of a task, enough of an adventure!”

[Moral theory and practice]
Michael had always held the view that the good man is without power. He held to this view passionately although at times he scarcely knew what it meant, and could connect it with his daily actions only tenuously or not at all.

Machiavelli: The Mandrake

The Mandrake
Niccolo Machiavelli
Translated from the Italian by Frederick May and Eric Bentley
(Applause, 1958) [1518]
58 p.

I hadn’t known that Machiavelli wrote plays, and, to be honest, am not at all well-informed about the state of drama in Europe prior to the flourishing of English playwrights under Elizabeth, but my exploration of early-ish modern drama has turned up La Mandragola, and happily so, for it is quite delightful.

A young man lusts after a married woman, and, with the help of a cunning friend, concocts a plan to convince both her and her husband that she should sleep with him. The married couple has been unable to conceive, and so our lusty heroes invent a (fake) fertility potion, made from mandrake root, that will guarantee a child, but with one caveat: the first man to sleep with the woman after she takes the potion will surely die. The husband wants the child, but, naturally enough, doesn’t want to die, and so yields his place to the enterprising trickster.

That’s the story, more or less, though it’s a comedy of situation that has many complications that pull in a crowd of characters:

An evil parasite…
A scholar who is not too bright…
A lover who is full of fight…
A friar whose moral sense is slight…

It’s shrewd and witty, and reminded me of the hi-jinx of Shakespearean comedies like The Taming of the Shrew or A Comedy of Errors, though of course Machiavelli predates Shakespeare by a few generations. It has a strongly anti-clerical bent, especially by means of the aforementioned friar who, at one point, agrees to help procure an abortion. Scandalous then, scandalous now; Machiavelli knew how to push buttons. But the play as a whole is so farcical and unwholesome that it’s hard to be really upset about it. It is meant to be diverting, and not much more. Or, as the prologue puts it:

This comedy is not profound,
I’m not so sure it’s even sound.
Our author sends you his excuses.
He says life’s hard, the world obtuse is,
And he most gladly would display
His gifts in any other way.
The only question is: who’d pay?

**

The play has been adapted for the screen as The Mandrake Root, and it’s quite good. Available on YouTube.