Every evening, the sun set, just as it does now; the moon rose, stars peeked out, even comets occasionally spiced up the night sky or there was a meteor shower to draw you to a place of unimpeded observation, but you didn’t see gods step out of a cloud every day, nor, as Serlio points out, could you view a whole city in so small a space. Formerly, you would have had to imagine, as the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V hopes, that “this cockpit hold/The vasty fields of France,” and when he wonders whether we may “cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt,” his answer has to be as rhetorical as his question. He begged his audience to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts … think, when we talk of horses, that you see them printing their proud hoofs i’the receiving earth,” but the stagecraft that put on spectacles had horses, towns with their towers were rendered in realistic perspective, ponds were dug and boated, and gardens were planned in which outdoor extravaganzas could be organized. Barges, waterworks, fireworks, flames: Mountains erupted, Pompeii was destroyed time and time again, battles were enacted. Neither the audience for those Italian intermezzi, Jonson’s masques, nor for our modern cinema need exercise any such lofty faculty as Samuel Coleridge’s esemplastic power—the imagination. We have wide screen and surround sound. Warhorses run right at us, yet we hold our ground—well, we keep our seats and chew our corn before the stallions get it.
The moviemaker’s passion for accuracy is not misplaced. Realism does not require imagination. A single block of wood in a child’s hand can be the cornice of a building, a length of fortification, a truck, a train, a statue for the square. What can the replication of a fire truck in rubber, tin, or plastic be but a small big thing, whose ladders can fortunately be removed to scale castle walls or, laid at length, fence in cattle. The truck must be wished away. It goes only to fires. Beckett’s empty stage, his primitive props, like his terseness, his silences, are arguments.
Realism without remorse was what was wanted—the ideal real. The Italian architects of these great scenes and the monstrous engines that racked them into life, Vitruvius and Serlio, were moral dreamers, for their townscapes were visualizations so fetching in their appearance and promise that citizens longed to live in cities like them, full of parks, paths, and pleasing prospects. Ben Jonson, too, elevated his already-lofty aims to include moral edification once he had Queen Anne’s attention and could think of himself in earshot of the crown. Oxford and Cambridge subscribed to these spectacles with reluctance, judging them vulgar. Moreover, when the king paid one of his occasional visits, many adjustments had to be made to their theatrical spaces. Orgel notes that as the theater gradually became “a machine for controlling the visual experience of the spectator,” it was natural for designers like Jones to assume that the spectacle was the thing that would catch the conscience of the king, not a droning playlet, for the stage and its facilities remained after the play performed with their assistance retired behind its final curtain.
What was this theater like? It began as a room, a big room, a banquet hall often, at one end of which a stage was built above the previous floor by perhaps six feet or more, and fronted with a proscenium arch whose decoration was another concern of the architect. It must be grand, but it must also be temporary—as removable as so many of the exhibition halls erected for a world’s fair or a venue for the Olympic Games. The stage advanced a few feet forward of the arch and extended back through and beyond it, sometimes to another, smaller platform, elevated once more and against the building’s outer wall, where distant attractions could be placed. But matters did not end here. From the thrust-out stage, stairs of various sorts would be extended to the floor of the hall, and in this area, carpeted to mark it off, the dances were performed and the audience was invited to leave their seats and join the festivities. Certainly, the conclusion of the masque was marked by a mingling of players and an often equally costumed audience. This, Ben Jonson thought essential, because it represented the democracy of the aristocracy, the unity of the crown and its people that the poet so often strived to recommend.
The irony, of course, was heavy and cruel, for this was the period that immediately preceded England’s Civil War. After Cromwell’s triumph, there would be no more masques, no more Catholic artistic enterprises, and, if he could help it, no more Baroque prose. Milton would be no help to him there.
However, before that conflict, there would be lesser ones. From Ben Jonson and his followers, traditional complaints begin to emerge; traditional because their philosophical forebearers go back as far as our documented human history does. The spectator’s judgment should be appealed to, not just his emotions, the poets insisted. The leadership of the heart will imperil the state, they warned. From poets, this position may seem strange, since philosophers have accused poets of just this irrationality for centuries, with Plato at their head. But circumstances alter opinions with rapidity when self-interest defines the circumstances and approves the opinions. Was the theater to provide a visual or a verbal experience? And if you wanted to mugwump it (that is, have it both ways and sit on the fence with your mug on one side and your rump on the other), you would have your face punched and your ass kicked. I remember (in the eighties), when serving on the Literature Panel of our National Endowment for the Arts, how earnestly the playwrights endeavored to secede, asking for their own panel and, of course, their own funds. The theater is not literature, they argued, and, in sorrow, after a survey of the then-contemporary scene, we had to agree.
Irascible and combative by nature, Ben Jonson finally feels upstaged beyond endurance, and he attacks his collaborator by—what else?—putting him in a play, where he is called Lanthorn Leatherhead; and by—what more?—leaving Jones’s name off the title page of one of their just-published masques, and through—what further?—several epistolary poems that he circulates like bad news. I quote a few lines that clearly address our case:
And I have mett with those,
That doe cry up the Machine! & the Showes!
The majesty of Juno, in the Clouds!
And peering forth of Iris, in the Shrowdes!
O Showes! Showes! Mighty Showes!
The Eloquence of Masques! What need of prose,
Or Verse, or sense, t’express Immortall you?
You are the Spectacles of State! T’is true …
I chose this moment of what may seem an irrelevant past because all the players are at their best in this game, all are old pros, and they are consummately representative. With power and patronage the prize, art and politics, eye and mind, will fight round after round forever; since it is really a conflict between, at any moment, what is marginal and what is central; a war that’s always on, although its heat may be set sometimes at high, sometimes at simmer: between castoffs and nobility, serf and tsar, ruler and ruled, while among the king’s hopeful flatterers will be sophisticate and philistine—all of whom bow perfectly, but some offer brightly polished compliments, others dull and rudimentary ones. At its widest reach, the conflict is grimmest between advanced overweening nations and backward disgruntled ones, deepest between man and nature, most usual between thought and feeling, faith and reason, word and image, music and meaning; and, notoriously, between all that is thought to be sacred and all that is deemed to be secular. It is not the categories that change; it is the things categorized that do.
The Greek world, for example, though its culture was an oral one and only a few of its citizens were literate, was predominately verbal, and Greek plays were static by our standards. Men in masks spoke poetry while a chorus chanted wise and appropriately solemn lines. What mattered was what was said. Until Euripides, whose breaches of decorum caused riots, bloody acts were kept offstage so that great speeches could give an account of them. The medieval world, on the other hand, was visual, and for that it has been called “the Dark Ages.” The story of Jesus is so brief and fragmentary in its verbal origins as to be scarcely there at all, but in fresco it is full and glorious; Mary’s fig
ure draws the prayerful to her halo; Christ dies and Christ rises in front of pious eyes at all hours, on every sainted day of the holy year. Life is measured in ritual moments.
Masques may have been peculiar to the Stuart court, but spectacles were the rage throughout Europe during the seventeenth century, and were a social device the nobility employed to curry favor with their monarch. One instance may prove instructive, since a film was made of this spectacle, and, as so many films are, was a spectacle in itself. Gérard Depardieu stars as Vatel, the Prince de Condé’s master steward. He is depicted as an artist masterfully arranging fêtes, banquets, and other frolics for the amusement of his prince and his prince’s guests. This Condé is a retired general of the French army who was rewarded for his services with a province that he has managed to bankrupt. He needs Louis XIV’s assistance to pay his debts and save his estates. Louis, for his part, thinks the general may be usefully returned to duty for a campaign against the Dutch that he is contemplating. The year is 1671. The prince asks his king to pay (the operative word) … to pay him a visit; and when the king accepts, he turns the three-day festivities over to his steward, Vatel.
This movie prides itself on being true. It is a lavish production filmed in a grand château on a large estate with mazes of hedge, gracefully bridged moats, boating lagoons and reflecting pools, lawns and gardens, statuary, woods, lodges, stables, and hovels, too. Vatel’s banquets with their accompanying dances and recitals, as well as his engines of wonderment, are to be held and operated outdoors. The court will not have to suffer Twelfth Night’s raw English weather. Hundreds of extras cook and clean and carpenter while the camera dallies with equal deftness over décolletage and heaps of succulent melons, confections, and carcasses. The spectacles are elaborately re-created and executed, but only a few minutes of film time is allotted to each effect, and each will cost much in money, time, planning, design, and labor, just as the festival has. The movie is willing to waste much in order to record the wasteful at banquet, in the boudoir, or in their cups. It plays serious peekaboo, as its characters do, innocent of the irony in its condemnation of the lovely trifles it parades past our eyes. These unworthy, frivolous, callous, inherently vulgar people, on whom Vatel’s art is lavished, are no worse or better than those who drowsed through the speaking of Jonson’s lines, awakening only for the flying cupids. Where are these audiences now, in our more democratic days? They are eating popcorn in the darkened theater, a stranger not to be molested on one side, but a silken knee next door. And maybe, when the boat in the shape of a whale starts swimming between the banquet tables, jaws will cease chewing. “Marvelous photography,” I hear myself mutter. Oh yes, Vatel will suffer like Mr. Barnum. He will suffer annoyances galore and momentary setbacks like the uneven course of an illness: expensive glass mantels purchased to shield candles from the wind will be broken by poor packing and bouncing on bad roads; not enough beef has been ordered, and the fish has not yet arrived; the king suffers from kidney stones, and gout has hobbled Vatel’s patron, putting all of them in humors they would love to dump on someone else.
The true artist endures: Ben Jonson through his Jones, Inigo Jones through his Jonson. Roland Joffé, the director of Vatel, has his crowd of French, English, Italians, and Americans, too—Ennio Morricone leaves his spaghetti Westerns to put a little of Handel’s “Water Music” in his score, and Tom Stoppard has done the English version of the text. The Prince de Condé’s physician extracts the hearts from Vatel’s pet parrots in order to bleed them upon the general’s gouty foot; the prince loses (as he wisely must) his steward to Louis in a game of cards. Vatel’s spectaculars have pleased the king. Now he must perform his wonders at Versailles. Vatel is not a soccer player. He prefers the minor leagues. But now he knows he has been nothing but a lowly servant his whole life, a slave to be wagered at table like a Super Bowl ring. He runs a sword through himself—a chef’s death.
The spectacles kill a workman, but the soprano in the flying boat sails safely through the sky, false walls rise from the garden terraces as if asked for by a magician, tree trunks burst from the earth, and branches that have been folded like umbrellas in those hollow trunks unfold with a flourish; jets of water shoot suddenly heavenward, later rockets will stream, sparklers sparkle, pinwheels whirl, and the night will be lit with the momentary brightness of materiel and money. Spectacles make Romans of us.
All this, we must remember, in someone’s good cause. In 1644, the dramatist Richard Flecknoe observed:
Now for the difference between our Theatres and those of former times, they were but plain and simple, with no other Scenes nor Decorations of the Stage, but onely old Tapestry, and the Stage strew’d with Rushes, with their Habits accordingly, whereas ours now for cost and ornament are arriv’d to the height of Magnificence; but that which makes our Stage the better makes our Playes the worse perhaps, they striving now to make them more for sight than hearing. (Quoted by Orgel, p.61.)
To make money from the masses: That is the present formula. The movie, Vatel, has a social aim—to condemn the callous and profligate ways of ancient aristocracy and to comment on the artists’ eternal predicaments. A love affair is added to make a point about the treatment of women as well-coiffed courtesans or body servants. Moreover, it is a decent movie as movies go. Yet it is a victim of its own extravagance and its own success.
Professor Orgel defends the masque against Richard Flecknoe’s implication that it was the new visual emphasis which weakened the Elizabethan theater by pointing out that in masques later than Jonson’s the language of the texts is even more rhetorical than before. However, I think this observation works against him. Imagine trying to recite Thoreau while sandwiched between a pair of noisy, popular, loud-shout vocalists, each of whom is miked in front of an amplified band. When the poet finds himself competing with ostrich plumes, comets, and volcanic eruptions, he is inclined to ratchet up his rhetoric.
We marvel at expense. We marvel at amplitude. We marvel at ingenuity. Does it increase our sense of worth just to be there? Kings James and Louis certainly thought so. And we do, too; we save up our sense of wonder—for the World Cup, the Olympic Games, coronations, world’s fairs, the Super Bowl, the British Open, a concert by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones—whenever our team wins, we feel fortunate, a success, buoyed by the general euphoria, and to prove it, when we lose, we lose our tempers with other drinkers, other drivers, and our wives and kids.
But perhaps it is Easter Mass at St. Paul’s or St. Peter’s, or while attending the Passion play put on during Holy Week at Oberammergau, when we feel the awe that kings and flags have often endeavored to steal for themselves: perhaps at Red Square on May Day, when the workers paraded, and soldiers marched, tanks rumbled, and planes, rockets, massive cannon were pulled along on flatbed trucks past a stand where stood solemn-faced the secularly sainted leader and his company of thugs; or for a rally at Nuremburg, where searchlights lined the path the Führer took, and there were banners cracking like whips, bands made of brass that blew in unison, half a mile of polished boots that stomped upon command, a rhythm in a roaring crowd, as though its lungs were drums, and, to keep order, more teams of thugs, of whom there always seems to be a plentiful supply.
As a sign of the times, it was recently reported that in a village in the backlands of Brazil called Nova Jerusalem, a family of eleven, who ran the local hotel, decided (they had sufficient numbers) to put on, during Holy Week, a Passion play in the street in front of their establishment. Although the German original has been famous for a long time and is as commercial as Lourdes, it is doubtful that any member of the Mendonca family had ever heard of it. It was more than fifty years ago that their nine kids in white sheets gathered at the roadside and Epaminondas Mendonca roped together the first cross. The New York Times reports:
Now titled “The Passion of Christ in New Jerusalem,” it has become the best-known religious entertainment in Brazil, the largest Roman Catholic country. The play, being
performed nightly through Saturday, has grown into a lavish million-dollar spectacle that annually draws as many as 70,000 people to what is described as the biggest open-air theater in the world. It is so successful that it has even inspired a rival, dissident pageant. (April 13, 2003.)
It was not the founder who made this business prosper so, although he may have believed that the family reenactment might draw some useful attention; but, as is so often the case, it was a son-in-law, who saw the possibilities and was overcome by the requisite obsession. He wrote his own Passion play, dreamed of building a replica of Jerusalem for the show, and then supervised its construction over thirty years.
At first, family members assumed the roles, then townspeople, but eventually (in 1996) they were replaced by actors from the local television network. The play obtained other corporate sponsors, who paid $125,000 dollars for the privilege. There are nine stages at present, each huge, the sets nearly life-size, and those in the crowd, who pay a modest sum for their tickets, move with the pageant through the precincts of this theme park. The townspeople now supply the five hundred extras necessary, and, as if the spirit of Inigo Jones were being solicited instead of the church’s deity, a “hidden system of pulleys and ladders” lifts Jesus and the thieves into place. Yes, there are lasers and fireworks displays. The tormented face of the Savior is spotlit.
Rivals, who claim to be purists, complain of inaccuracies and commercialism, and there are always the squeamish, who believe suffering and sacrifice are better grieved for than watched. The performance has become less and less locally Brazilian in late years, and this has provoked criticism. From the actors, for example, regional accents are discouraged. One academic described the production, in terms certainly fashionable, as “domestic colonialism.” In the year 2000 (perhaps as a tribute to the new century), an orgy scene in front of Herod’s palace featured full frontal nudity. More recently, there were only a pair of topless Nubian maidens. Inigo Jones always supplied at least that.
A Temple of Texts: Essays Page 41
