By Hook or By Crook: Part Two

As I was writing the first part of this series, a question kept popping into my mind: “What am I judging these works against?” Am I just trying to immerse myself within Shakespeare’s world, such that I grow an adoration for him out of a sort of Stockholm’s Syndrome? And if so, would this make me any better than the Speare-heads I antagonize so relentlessly?

It occurred to me that I needed more context. Shakespeare is not the only English dramatist of the Elizabethan period, as much as anyone might try to make you think so. English drama in general was experiencing a sort of renaissance, inspired by that other, bigger Renaissance occurring all over Europe. The theatres were full of productions by Shakespeare’s predecessors, his contemporaries, and even those he inspired. Among these were hack playwrights, masterful dramatists, and even renowned poets. So I thought it may be worth our while to take a very brief detour in order to set the stage, as it were, for Shakespeare’s plays, and perhaps find out what makes them unique among their fellows.

The Spanish Tragedy - Thomas Kyd (~1580s/90s)

One of the most influential plays of the period, this play created the “revenge play” genre that would later become so popular. It begins with a frame story in which a soldier named Don Andrea, accompanied by the personification of Revenge, returns from Hell to watch the events that are going to play out at his court. Don Andrea was somewhat ignominiously killed by a Portuguese noble named Balthazar, in a manner akin to Hector in Troilus and Cressida, where instead of fighting one-on-one, Balthazar enlists the help of henchmen.

You would think, then, that Don Andrea would be the one getting avenged, but this turns out not to be the case. Balthazar is captured and held “prisoner” in Spain, but is essentially allowed to wander around and do whatever he likes. He tries to woo Andrea’s former love, Bel-imperia, but she’s already moved on to another man named Horatio, and it is his murder at the hand of Balthazar (et al) that becomes the locus of the revenge plot.

The revenger is Horatio’s dad, Hieronimo. In Hamlet-esque fashion, he vacillates between revenging and not-revenging, going a little kooky in the process, before finally using the Hamlet-esque mechanism of a play-within-a-play to enact his final revenge(s), creating a bloodbath that leaves only two characters left at the end of the day. After all this is said and done, Andrea, who has been dutifully watching along, has an epilogue wherein he decides which realm of Tartarus each character will be sent to.

An immediately noticeable structural element that sets this work (and a few others we will read) apart from Shakespeare is the short length of the scenes. Shakespeare will often seamlessly transition between multiple events or conversations within a single scene, where many other playwrights will resort to having everyone exit the stage for a reset.

We also see a few characteristic elements of “higher learning” seeping into the theatre. There’s a decent amount of Latin in here, some of it quoted from Ovid and Lucretius, and some of it seemingly composed by Kyd himself. On top of that, the Renaissance’s Greco-Roman obsession is fully present; not only is the “tragedy” itself a Greek form, but the play explicitly contains Tartarus, not Hell, as each murdered character is designated their own realm and deserts.

There are also random lines in Italian, which is funny because the play takes place in Spain. But Italy is the locus of the Renaissance, the centre from which all this Greco-Roman learning is spreading; and not only that, but Italian poetry was the basis for much of what we now consider fundamental to English poetry, especially that of this era, including blank verse meter (the meter in which all of these plays are primarily written), and the sonnet form. There’s a reason so many of Shakespeare’s plays take place there.

As for Kyd’s poetics, I’ll quote a short passage that I quite enjoyed:

I think Horatio be my destined plague.
First in his hand he brandished a sword,
And with that sword he fiercely waged war,
And in that war he gave me dangerous wounds,
And by those wounds he forced me to yield,
And by my yielding I became his slave.
Now in his mouth he carries pleasing words,
Which pleasing words do harbour sweet conceits,
Which sweet conceits are limed with sly deceits,
Which sly deceits smooth Bel-imperia’s ears,
And through her ears dive down into her heart,
And in her heart set him where I should stand.

I just love that repetition of the whiches and ands at the start of these lines. It’s something I haven’t seen from any of these other playwrights.

Overall, the play is well-composed, both in its poetry and its structure. The tropes of the revenge tragedy are used to place you in a world where passion rules all, and there is no problem that can not be solved with the right mixture of deceit and cruelty, which we will find to be the type of world many of these plays inhabit.

The White Devil - John Webster (1612)

We continue with another revenge play, but one that I think fails in all the ways Kyd succeeded. Webster’s play has little poetry; while it’s certainly written in verse, there is no charm or beauty to the language. The tropes are carried out in a haphazard fashion, as if we are just going through the motions.

The inciting offence is an adulterous relationship between Brachiano and Vittoria, which ends up bringing in their entire families, including an uncle who becomes the Pope midway through, leading to a convoluted mess of trials and murders that feel less like crimes of passion and more like structural necessities. One of the issues here is a lack of soliloquies or long speeches in general, meaning that we don’t get a solid idea of the worldviews of these characters. Long, poetic, philosophical speeches are the lifeblood of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and their absence here is conspicuous. It ends up making all the action feel incredibly mundane and meaningless.

On top of this, there’s no real hero nor any real villain to sink your teeth into. Everyone is just as bad as anyone else (with a few exceptions), which makes the whole play seem fairly monotonous. Even if someone isn’t a character you can root for, they can at least have interesting motivations, but I didn’t get that from any of the characters.

In the right hands, any stupid tragic story can be made enjoyable, as we will see with the next play, but this one never quite rose beyond the tropes for me. It made it clear all the ways in which this type of story can go wrong, which will be helpful to refer back to as we progress through this project.

Bussy D’Ambois - George Chapman (~1604)

The unfortunately named Bussy D’Ambois is the closest thing we will encounter to Shakespeare in this whole bunch. Chapman, like Shakespeare, was definitely a poet first and a playwright second, most well-known for his famous translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first to appear in English. The play is written entirely in blank verse, without prose interruptions, and consists primarily of long speeches punctuated occasionally by dramatic happenings. The poetry is right up there with Shakespeare’s, although occasionally a bit more confusing, playing with grammatical order in a way that reminded me at times of John Milton.

The plot is incredibly simple: Bussy D’Ambois is a French soldier of great renown, who is enlisted by a patron named Monsieur in the hopes of using him to overthrow King Charles. However, Bussy’s innate charisma immediately makes him a favourite pal of Charles, while also charming the wife of a jealous Count. Monsieur, disgruntled after losing control of Bussy, discovers and reveals the affair to the Count, who swears revenge…

The simplicity of the plot allows a lot of time for the characters to breathe, giving us some great scenes, including one in which the Count laments having to leave his wife alone in bed for even a single night (with dramatic irony abound, of course.) My favourite scene takes place as Monsieur and Bussy’s relationship is starting to sour, in which Monsieur asks Bussy whether their friendship is strong enough for them to share their true opinions about one another. What follows are a couple multi-page speeches in which the two cruelly dissect and criticize each other, after which Monsieur quips about how great it is that they’re such great friends.

The play is held together by the poetry; the plot is fairly bog-standard, and the characters, while entertaining, don’t have a lot of depth. I had a great time reading it, but when I reflected on the play later, I found that there just isn’t much to chew on. It doesn’t add anything new to the tropes it works with, nor combine them in particularly interesting ways. You could say it’s a fairly workmanlike play, in which a master of verse falls back on his mastery of language without exerting a great deal of creative effort.

Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe (~1594)

Based on a collection of German folk-legends, Doctor Faustus is the first known attempt to adapt the character to stage. The premise clearly holds a certain inherent appeal, as there have been myriad adaptations of the character since, most notably Goethe’s version, which this predates by about 200 years.

Unfortunately, after setting up the initial premise, in which Faustus grows weary of studying and decides instead to attain knowledge and power by conspiring with demons, the play accomplishes basically nothing, merely recounting a series of inexplicable antics perpetuated by Faust and others who end up with his demon-book of necromancy. Incredibly popular at the time, probably due to a general furvour toward demons, the scintillating nature of religious controversy, and some scenes that probably played quite well on the stage, the play fundamentally fails as a work of literature.

Faustus, after signing his deal with the devil, flip-flops back and forth between a desire to repent and a hedonistic desire to do… stuff. Initially, he seems to desire knowledge and power, but the extent of his activities are 1) learning a bit about astronomy; 2) having the Seven Deadly Sins paraded before him 3) annoying the Pope 4) entertaining the Emperor 5) tricking a horse-dealer (why?) and finally, 6) bringing Helen of Troy to life because a few of his buddies want to look at her. Immediately after 6), Faustus realizes that the 24-year term of his contract is up, and is dragged to Hell.

There is a comic scene in which Faustus’ servant acquires the services of a man known simply as CLOWN, but nothing comes of this. Another comic scene has a couple of nobodies somehow ending up with Faustus’ book of necromancy, which they use for their own nonsensical purposes. The purpose of the latter, one supposes, is to show that Faustus is not actually all that special in his necromantic abilities, but I feel that is already made clear enough by his total lack of ingenuity in utilizing his seemingly unlimited powers.

One interesting aspect of the play that separates it from all that we’ve covered thus far is a centring of Christian morality. We have explicit mention of not only God but also Christ, and Faustus’ major failing is his inability to repent, despite being told many times by an angel that, despite signing away his soul to the devil, genuine repentance will still allow him salvation. In the midst of plays that take on not only a Greco-Roman cosmology but even a Greco-Roman sense of morality, it was almost surprising to encounter such explicit Christian themes.

In the end, Doctor Faustus does not do anything interesting with the character, fails to produce anything resembling a coherent plot, and spends all its time meandering around waiting for the ending.

The Alchemist - Ben Jonson (~1610)

A satirical play about a servant left in charge of his master’s house who teams up with a conman and a prostitute in order to run an elaborate collection of schemes. These all revolve around convincing marks of the conman’s supernatural powers, which include alchemy, necromancy, and prophecy.

The play, interestingly enough, follows Aristotle’s “classical unities,” a theory that declares that great drama should have one principal action, take place over one day, and all happen in one location. Aristotle loved to come up with little rules like this, and 16th century Italians were enamoured with the guy, which is how it made its way to Jonson. Although English drama during the Renaissance was heavily influenced by the newly rediscovered Greek sources in myriad ways, Jonson seems to be one of few who decided to take this particular rule to heart.

I have to give Aristotle credit, though; these “classical unities” do gives this play a sense of momentum that is one of its greatest strengths. Since everybody is always coming to the same location, we end up with a constant intermixture between the schemes, thus forcing the schemers to think on their feet and come up with ever more ingenious twists to their plots. I would imagine it is this quality that caused Samuel Taylor Coleridge to say that this play has one of “the three most perfect plots ever planned,” although we must admit that Coleridge said a lot of things…

Alchemy was big business in the 16th century, if you could find the right mark. Similar to any pseudo-science nowadays, it is an off-shoot or sister-science to the actual scientific research which we today know as chemistry. And while there were legitimate esoteric alchemists, at least in their own eyes (Isaac Newton famously was one), there were obviously a lot of charlatans out there promising easy money, primarily through the means of transforming “lesser” metals into gold. The jargon of alchemy, designed to confuse the “uninitiated,” lends itself to satire quite easily, as shown in this play, where two characters rattling off perfectly genuine alchemical terms back and forth never ceases to be funny.

SUB: Are you sure you loosed them
In their own menstrue?

FACE: Yes, sir, and then married them,
And put them in a bolt's-head nipp'd to digestion,
According as you bade me, when I set
The liquor of Mars to circulation
In the same heat.

SUB: The process then was right.

FACE: Yes, by the token, sir, the retort brake,
And what was saved was put into the pellican,
And sign'd with Hermes' seal.

Remarkably, or perhaps unremarkably, the conman’s playbook employed here remains perfectly recognizable to the modern day reader, with the transformation of a few terms. What they would then call “projecters,” we might now term “entrepreneurs,” gathering capital from interested parties for the sake of grand schemes. Instead of alchemy, it’s tech; instead of necromancy, it’s new-age religion; instead of prophecy, it’s… well, I guess it’s still prophecy. By manipulating the desires of their marks, and convincing them of their keen-eyed aptitude in ignoring the skeptics, someone gifted with the right type of charisma can make a killing in any century.

All these qualities make The Alchemist feel remarkably modern, and I must say it was probably the most enjoyable I’ve read thus far. If I were to head out into a theatre and have this paraded in front of me, I’d probably go home in a pretty good mood.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

If we consider that the purpose of this project is to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare, then this particular exercise might end up being the most crucial part. Through this brief survey of Elizabethan drama — curated based on the plays/playwrights that came up most during my research (i.e. reading Wikipedia) — I have come to understand a bit about what separates Shakespeare from his contemporaries. Jonson can match Shakespeare when it comes to plotting, and Chapman is up there when it comes to poetry, but none of these plays were able to combine these elements with the sort of flair that Shakespeare does at his best.

They were, however, keen to match Shakespeare at his worst. A lot of the criticisms I have levelled against Shakespeare appear in these plays as well, meaning that they must have generally been considered acceptable during the period. These mostly have to do with abrupt changes of heart, inane comedic arguments, a reliance on hackneyed tropes (mostly to do with cuckoldry and murder), and a reckless inclination toward convenience when it comes to tying up the final act. Elizabethan drama, as a whole, is kind of silly, and I suppose that’s part of the appeal. In the same way that I still gasp during an episode of Gundam when two lovers find themselves on opposing sides of an outer space mech battle, even though it’s the tenth time it’s happened, some of the endlessly recurring plot devices here continue to entertain even when executed in a somewhat half-hearted manner.

An obvious omission from this list is any comedies. Yes, there was a satire in there, but it’s not really the same thing. This was not entirely intentional but also not entirely unintentional; to be honest, looking at the amount of Shakespeare comedies I’m going to have to get through during this project, I didn’t exactly feel like heaping a few more on my plate.

If I do feel the need to delve further into Elizabethan drama for whatever reason, I would probably explore some more of Chapman and Jonson, and perhaps give Marlowe another chance. Webster apparently belongs to a more cynical and sinister branch of Jacobean drama, which clearly does not appeal to me. Kyd seems mostly regarded for The Spanish Tragedy alone, but there do appear to be a couple more extant plays I could look into.

However, at this point, I’m just looking forward to getting back to Shakespeare, which I suppose is the greatest success of all.