Jacobean Syndrome: Playwrites Look to the Past
Herb Greer
The glories of Elizabethan age theater succumbed to Jacobean
works ripe with torture, hatred, and revenge. Such human
flaws
are not lost on a new generation of playwrights. This article orginally appeared under the title "The Jacobean Syndrome".
It sometimes happens that an aesthetic pattern of one age in the arts is repeated, striking similar chords in a later age, sometimes centuries on. This is rare in the theater because writing style and conventions of performance can change radically from one century to the next. But the last half-century has seen the steady growth of such a parallel, most strongly highlighted in British theater but with unmistakable traces on the American side of the Atlantic.
A few summers ago, a relatively small theatrical event in the United Kingdom inadvertently cast light on this parallel, displaying and even stressing a peculiar set of qualities and tastes that contemporary British society (and, to some extent, America) shares with the England of the early seventeenth century. This occurred in a provincial British theater, the Salisbury Playhouse: a tight, exciting production of a Jacobean classic, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.
This play is typical of its age. The story is a morally chaotic alloy of cruel political and personal deceit, sadistic torture, sexual brutality, multiple murder, hatred, revenge, madness, and betrayal. It catered to an uncannily familiar set of audience tastes at a time in British history--the early seventeenth century--when the public's worldview shared many aspects and concerns of our own society and body politic. It was called, after King James I, the Jacobean period.
During the Elizabethan age that preceded it, the work of writers (above all, Shakespeare) rested on an accepted image of mankind as the noblest work of God, set at the center of the universe in a society whose written and, more important, unwritten rules turned on order, degree, hierarchy, and discipline. Those who, through a tragic flaw, violated the pervading scheme of things incurred disastrous consequences; those who survived the consequent disaster were left to carry on, shoring up and confirming the traditional scheme of things. As the literary historian Una Mary Ellis-Fermor put it, Elizabethan writers were in love with life.
The death of Elizabeth I and the accession of King James I altered this mood radically. The shock of a change in reign upset many old certainties; gradually, a pervasive spirit of disillusion set in. James, though popular at first as a strong king who forged the nations of the British Isles into a united kingdom, later became unpopular. The old respect for a certain order of society was no longer taken for granted, foreshadowing a sort of thrashing about for new values and ideals to replace those that were seen to have vanished. It was the time of the famous Gunpowder Plot, still recalled today in the British verse:
"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason, and plot.
We know no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot."
The anxious and sometimes violent groping for new certainties was not immediately successful. But it did foreshadow an attitude, uncomfortably familiar today, in which acceptance of the order of things was replaced by an emphasis on rights, individual conscience, and skeptical reason.
Jacobean tragedy embodied this new anxiety, along with a certain unreality. Plays of John Webster such as The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, seething with immorality, arbitrary violence, lethal enmities, underhand plotting, broken faith, and an almost total lack of moral framework, adumbrate a conviction that it does not matter what men do. In these scenarios, the consequences of human action are a matter of the artists' arbitrary choice and furthermore may or may not relate to the real world. An oddly positive spin on this is given in Irving Ribner's Jacobean Tragedy: The Quest for Moral Order: "John Webster creates a world which is incompatible with any system of religious belief. He bases this order on a celebration of the dignity of human life which renders man superior to his world, and the need to preserve this dignity for it is man's only weapon against the chaos of this world."
But in the patterns of cruelty and violence woven through the plays of Webster and his contemporaries, human dignity is not celebrated; on the contrary, it is entangled, choked, and then destroyed in a kind of horrible web of Machiavellian ruthlessness and blind chance. As with other writers of the time, notably George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford, humanity slips from a place at the center of the universe and into a moral chaos with nothing for guidance except the unpredictable impulses that govern the emotions. Social and personal pathologies are the order of the day.
Certain plays showed a morbid obsession with sexual violence that climaxed in Thomas Heywood's drama The Rape of Lucrece. It is not morality but power backed by force that triumphs over values that were formerly taken for granted. In Webster's works, plays like The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Torneur, and even late works by Shakespeare (notably King Lear, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth), such social sanctions as exist come from man and not from a scheme of eternal laws handed down by God. The mood was well expressed in Machiavelli's Discourses: "If our religion ever recommends strength, it demands rather that you should be strong in suffering than that you should achieve a valiant lead. This way of life seems to have weakened the world and given it over as a prey to evil men. They are secure in their control of it, knowing that the majority of mankind, having in mind their places in paradise, think more of supporting injuries than of avenging them."
This attitude strikes familiar chords in our own time, as described in Yeats' famous poem, "The Second Coming":
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
These lines foreshadow the political instability at the end of the twentieth century, especially a general arbitrariness in moral standards and often a blunt defiance or sophistic warping of them (who can forget the 1960s and '70s?) that has affected not just playwrights but audience sensibility, most notably in Britain and on the Continent, but with unmistakable traces in the United States. This, too, was anticipated among Jacobean writers and audiences: "[They] preferred to experience a succession of striking situations and to carry away a number of such separate images, rather than the memory of a unified and integrated artistic experience," says Una Mary Ellis Fermor in The Jacobean Drama (1965).
Put another way, the Jacobean audience, like our own media-shaped contemporaries, had a short attention span and a taste for lurid and violent images--a taste to which the writers catered with great success.
One must be careful with these parallels. The scope of our theater is much wider today; its audience is more socially diverse and much more varied in its tastes than in the time of James I. There is, however, a rough dichotomy: Where some, like those who frequent popular and undemanding Broadway plays and musicals, seek nothing more than entertainment, escape, and relaxation, others flock into the smaller, nominally elite theaters in search of what they regard as a deeper and more challenging experience.
Despite the metaphysical preoccupation ascribed by some writers to the plays of Webster and his contemporaries, such concerns were, so to speak, sub rosa and not as self-conscious as they are among our own serious playwrights. A Jacobean theater was not a quiet, semicontemplative place. It was noisy, chatty, the sort of place where a drunk's trousers might catch fire and be put out with a bottle of ale. Certainly the metaphysics that might underlie a play were not of great importance for a Jacobean audience, who relished and applauded the blood, gore, conspiracies, and violence for their own sake, much as an undemanding audience takes pleasure today in the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The self-consciously elite section of today's audience is quite another matter. There is a curious harking back to the medieval origins of our theater, in which certain plays--indeed, the original Quem Quaeritus drama that emerged from the Catholic Mass--confirmed the Christian faith and Holy Scripture. However, there is this difference: our self-consciously serious audiences fill theatrical temples in which, as in Jacobean times, normality and formerly valued rules of behavior and morality are set at naught, deliberately flouted, or outraged and mocked. Indeed, society's unwritten laws are aleatory, made and broken at will by men who defer to no higher authority.
This neo-Jacobean style has been a while in coming. The growing chaos and arbitrariness that had infected the visual and plastic arts since the turn of the nineteenth century made a belated entry into mainstream Western theater. About the middle of the last century, the theatrical tradition of a positive spin on accepted values still held good. When the shock of the Second World War subsided, not into peace but into the Cold War, and Britain's socialism failed to build the New Jerusalem that had been promised, a growing disillusionment with authority and tradition festered and finally, in the midfifties, burst onto the stage.
At first, this soi-disant revolt was a mild affair, centered mainly in the fashionable angry young man clique of British theater. This was touted as an aspect of an up-and-coming working class and given pride of place in the arts. But London's Royal Court Theatre, the nest of the new movement, was set not in a working-class area but in the posh southwest neighborhood of Sloane Square. Freshly fashionable playwrights such as the lower-middle-class John Osborne, Edward Bond, and John Arden began to push back the boundaries of what had been acceptable to prewar taste. With the abolition of official censorship by the lord chamberlain, the boundaries were thrown wide open.
In America, for different reasons, a similar mood was gathering, fueled by the new uncertainties of the developing Cold War and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. In the 1960s this burst like a boil into the anarchic behavior of students and the increasingly violent antiwar movement. The legitimate New York theater, ideologically bent since the 1930s, took up this sentiment with a vengeance. It had already spawned plays like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which implicitly lionized communists and fellow travelers, who were determined to negate and, hopefully, destroy everything that contemporary America stood for (while supporting a regime that had murdered some ten times the number that Hitler had killed).
In the sixties, the ferociously experimental work of Joseph Chaikin and his Open Theater mocked and rejected, more or less, the complete mainstream of American life, caricaturing middle America as mindless, ruthless, destructive, and instinctively cruel. Chaikin's work was welcomed at London's Royal Court. The fashionable antiestablishment mood was hardening with a rejection of everything and anything that represented order and authority in the United Kingdom. The critic Kenneth Tynan, chief cheerleader for the new playwrights, imported translations of the work of the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, including a play, Soldiers, suggesting that Churchill was a war criminal for bombing German cities and, further, that he had conspired to murder the Polish General Sikorsky during the war. The English playwright Charles Wood sneered at the Second World War itself as a bloody and pointless exercise. This dramatic sullenness eventually began to abate in America but intensified in the United Kingdom.
The outrage that greeted such productions at first was meat and drink to the new radical chic playwrights and their audience. At the end of the 1970s, when Britain scored its victory in the Falkland islands and the economy became richer and stronger than ever it had been in modern times, the mood of the theater did not abate. On the contrary, it hardened and intensified as the end of the century approached, becoming a kind of knee-jerk impulse to outrage and anger the establishment at any price. In a curious modern replay of the James I experience, Margaret Thatcher, initially popular because of her success in putting an exhausted Britain on its feet again, in time became an object of virulent hatred in the arts, especially the theater, in spite of (indeed, because of) her success.
Playwrights vaunted their flouting of social and sexual norms. The writer Howard Barker, whose plays tend to be afflicted by a theatrical version of Tourette's syndrome, had already caused an uproar with his National Theatre production of The Romans in Britain, which featured a scene of simulated homosexual rape and a foulmouthed cast of characters. But this was very mild stuff compared to the new In-Yer-Face style of theater that came up with the advent of New Labour in the nineties, maturing the neo-Jacobean school. (See my review of In-Yer-Face Contemporary Drama, by Aleks Sierz, in the Book World section, March 2002.) The playwright Mark Ravenshill was able to premiere a work with an openly obscene title on the fringe, and then have it moved into London's West End (the British equivalent of Broadway). Women playwrights achieved a particular prominence. Sarah Kane's play Blasted was a sort of compendium of every vile act of which human beings are capable, including cannibalism, infanticide, particularly revolting sexual pathology, and motiveless murder.
The behavior of the characters who wander through this thicket of depravity is as random and motiveless as the crimes they commit. As in work by Ravenshill and Kane, it offered up similar emetic recipes to be applauded and cheered by the elite audiences who go to the London theater in search of a notional substitute for salvation or enlightenment. Like the Jacobean audiences of four centuries ago, they delight in this stuff, but not in quite the same innocent and straightforward manner.
The twentieth- and twenty-first-century syndrome of Jacobean social pathology and gore in the arts is peculiar in that it offers a sort of hieratic justification for the deliberate nastiness it portrays. The radical chic clap and cheer the purveyors of this stuff on the grounds that it makes people think, or draws their attention to some atrocity in the world (in the case of Blasted, it was the horrors of the Bosnian war), usually an event that has been pounded into television viewers to the point of boredom or indifference.
This procedure is discussed both by astonishingly tame critics and the playwrights, themselves, in a pretentious, wooden jargon that purports to plumb the depths of human suffering and the raison d'etre of those who inflict it. In fact, what is expressed invariably amounts to a stunning banality, such as the fact that war is violent and hurts the innocent, or that it is not good for people to kill, rape, and murder each other. (When Blasted was premiered, at the Royal Court, of course, the London critics suggested that Kane was in dire need of psychiatric help. After she had proved them right by committing suicide, the play was revived. The same critics, perhaps feeling an unjustified contrition, suddenly discovered that Blasted was a species of eloquent and profound masterpiece.)
The original Jacobean drama vanished into a welter of Puritan suppression during the seventeenth-century English civil war. It is uncertain whether the neo-Jacobean writers will fade away with the Labour Party's engineering of Britain's decline into a province of the European Union. It is more likely that under Tony Blair's Roundhead government, they will succumb to the rapid changes of fashion and style that jar the contemporary theatrical scene from time to time. With an increasingly conservative mood among Britons, especially the young, there are signs that bad behavior and vile language on the stage are subject to the law of diminishing returns. Even the fashionable audiences in England are these days notoriously subject to a blend of fickleness and boredom that may see off the theater's neo-Jacobean symptoms of the age as quickly as Oliver Cromwell put paid to the original version.
Herb Greer is a contributing editor to the Arts section of
The
World & I.
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