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Structure, Characterization, And Language In The Drama Of Christopher Fry

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Structure, Characterization, And Language In The Drama Of Christopher Fry

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Content T h is d iss e r ta tio n has boon Gl— 3G0G
m ic r o film e d e x a c tly a s r e c e iv e d
ROY, Fm il L a w ren ce, 1933 —
STltU C Tl'K K , CHARACTKRIZATION, AN1>
FA N G LA G F IN THK D F t AM A O F CHRISTOPH KR
FRY.
U n iv e r sity of Southern C alifornia
P h .D ., 19G1
la n g u a g e and l i t e r a t u r e , m odern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
Copyright by
EMIL LAWRENCE ROY
1 9 M
STRUCTURE, CHARACTERIZATION, AND LANGUAGE
IN THE DRAMA OF CHRISTOPHER FRY
by
Emil Lawrence Roy
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1961
UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PARK
L O S A N G E L E S 7. C A L IF O R N IA
This dissertation, written by
under the direction of /ii_, .Dissertation C o m
mittee, and a p p r o v e d by all its m em bers, has
been presented to and accepted by the Dean of
the (Graduate Sthool, m partial fulfillment of
requirements for the decree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Demm
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction I- 10
I. The Boy With a Cart........................ II- 38
II. A Phoenix Too Frequent 39- 72
III. The Firstborn............................... 73-110
IV. The Lady’s Not For Burning............... 111-148
V. Thor, with Angels.......................... 149-184
VI. Venus Observed ............................. 185-221
VII. A Sleep of Prisoners ..................... 222-253
VIII. The Dark is Light Enough................ . 254-285
Conclusion................... . . 286-303
Bibliography......................................... 304-305
ii
INTRODUCTION
Christopher Fry's dramatic work includes three
religious plays, a tragedy, and four comedies. With the
exception of The Boy with a Cart (1939), his plays have
appeared within the post-war decade. Comment in the
popular press has leveled off since November of 1950,
when lour oi Fry’s plays were appearing concurrently in
London and New York, but the critics still disagree sharply
on the stature of the playwright. It should be noted that
nearly all of them, from debunker to apologist, believe
(1) that writers in the tradition of drama have a rank
and hierarchy, (2) that plot, character, and language
can be abstracted from the work and compared with the same
elements in other works, and (3) that the nature of the
audience influences the quality of the play.
In their attempts to rank Fry, critics have inevitably
associated him with another contemporary or a predecessor,
and then established likenesses or differences. The London
Times Literary Supplement, for example, speaks of Williams
and Miller in America
as in Britain seven or eight years ago the theatre
talked of Eliot and Fry, or as, much farther back,
it would couple Pinero and Jones.i
^-"By the Lights of Times Square,” November 6, 1959,
1
Depending on the bias of the critic, Fry has been found
superior or inferior to most of the following: Synge,
Anouilh, Sartre, Oiraudoux, Pirandello, Claudel, Sayers,
Cummings, and Auden. His detractors, in denying his
"greatness," have resisted any important shift in the
existing hierarchy of established dramatists. Robert
Brustein recently classed Fry as "minor," along with
Barrie, Galsworthy, and Bridie, in contrast to major
English dramatists like Wilde, Shaw, Eliot, and Osborne.^
To Marius Bewley, Fry is an inferior poet applying a
grand style to trivial themes, "what one might expect of
Paradise Lost if it were re-written by Ogden Nash.
Irritated by the continuing flux of Fry’s reputation,
Denis Donaghue in The Third Voice objects to what John
Alexander calls the "cult of the new-born view"^ and agrees
with Gassner, Clurman, and Spender that Fry’s verse
"faces toward the literature of the past."^
On the other hand, John Mason Brown sees in him a
p. xxii.
^Harper1s, October, 1959, pp. 167-68.
3"The Verse of Christopher Fry," Scrutiny, June, 1951,
p. 80.
^John Alexander, "Christopher Fry and Religious
Comedy," Meanjin, Autumn, 1956, p. 78.
5
John Gassner, "Prospectus on Playwrights," Theater
Arts, November, 1954, p. 95.
3
revival of Elizabethan vigor, and Scott-James thinks him
the one post-war poet who can be acclaimed with confidence.
In the selection of particular plays or characteristics,
Derek Stanford compares Fry's "symphonic development" of
structure with Pinero's logical plots; Kerr thinks
A Phoenix Too Frequent the most perfect thing of its kind
since The Importance of Being Earnest; and Gillett believes
that the economy of his characterization is Shakespearean.
But the uncertainty remains. In 1950, at the height of
the controversy, Time reported with characteristic suc
cinctness :
London intellectuals are carrying on a running debate
as to whether they have a new Shakespeare in their
midst or just a particularly brilliant writer to be
rated somewhere between Noel Coward and T. S. Eliot.6
The statement by Stephen Spender that by his "idiom"
Fry's "work stands or falls''^ still holds true: Chris
topher Fry's language has formed the beachhead of his
reputation. Martin Arrowsmith has compared Fry’s verse
with Marlowe’s, seeing in it,
the same verbal impatience, the [same] laddering of
effects toward an over-all tonal roof, and the exub
erance and extravagance of the autonomous language.®
6April 3, 1950, p. 51.
7"Christopher Fry," Spectator, March 24, 1950,
p. 364.
Q
"Notes on English Verse Drama," Hudson Review,
Summer, 1950, p. 208.
Bewley, however, likens Fry's language to that of the
lesser Elizabethans, Drayton and the early Shakespeare,
and emphasizes the derivative, Georgian character of the
verse. Donaghue deplores the lack of Flaubertian "bone"
in his speeches, and to Spender, the easily-parodied effect
of his rhythm is "far less dynamic than (say) Archer's
translations of Ibsen's poetic plays." Kerr, however,
believes that Fry has discovered a twentieth-century verse
form for comedy.
Because of Fry's poetic language, the poet-dramatist
with whom Fry is most often compared is T. S. Eliot. The
popular press— John Mason Brown, Time, e t al.--has
attempted, in the words of a Saturday Review critic, to
"boost Fry by beating Eliot with him,"9 and the academics
have replied in kind. The two dramatists admittedly form
no school with other poetic dramatists like Auden, and
have only tenuous links with Maxwell Anderson and W. B.
Yeats. They can be grouped, however, by their renova
tion of poetry as a dramatic medium, their "religious"
themes, and, probably most important, their rise to popu
lar notice at the same time and place. Appealing to what
is ultimately a cyclical theory of art, Clurman comments,
I cannot say why the English have produced no group
to take the place of Galsworthy, Maugham, Barrie,
9W. T. Scott, "The Literary Summing Up," December 30,
1950, p. 8.
Pinero, Shaw, or even a new Lonsdale, Noel Coward
group. . . . This explains, in part, why The Cocktail
Party and the plays of Christopher Fry occupy their
extraordinary position.
When Charles Horgenstern attacks Fry for a suffusion of
bad witticisms, distracting puns, and the inorganic use
of his "sources," Redman, Brown, and Scott-James admit
Fry's, like Eliot's, indebtedness to his predecessors, but
agree that in comparison with Eliot, he "knows much more
about the practical business of the theatre. " H
But, behind praise and attack alike--most agree that
Fry and Eliot are the "undisputed leaders" in the field
of poetic drama— rests a sense of identity, for better or
worse, between the kind of drama Fry writes and the kind
of audience that watches his plays. Most of Fry's
commentators visualize an audience hopelessly fragmented
into warring segments: there are the dull and the
imaginative, the feeling and the thinking, the groundlings
and the "better sort." At the same time, the closeness
of the relationship between kinds of viewers and levels
of dramatic appeal is an inescapable legacy of the New
Criticism. Hardly anyone doubts the validity of William
Empson's dictum that a really good play "is likely to be
l°"Theatre: In Contrast to Fry," The New Republic,
August 20, 1950, p. 21.
11-Be n Ray Redman, "Christopher Fry: Poet-Drama-
tist," College English, January, 1955, p. 191.
a play that can satisfy different individuals,"1^ although
the question of how to create or sustain such an audience
gets a variety of cursory answers.
John Mason Brown observes that,
Under Atlee's prosaic government, in a theatre made
brackish by its realism, and during times aggressively
unlyrical, rFry] has triumphed as a poetic drama
tist.15
Another critic finds that both Fry and Eliot stimulate
"clear thinking and sharp intelligence . . . by no means
a bad thing, ,t1^ and Time contrasts the guilt-ridden, money-
grubbing prayerfulness induced by Eliot with the gregarious
lustiness which Fry effects. Even Bewley grants that Fry
"may even be as good as anything we can expect in modern
poetic drama," though he adds, "But in saying this I am
aware that the praise is rather slight" (p. 84).
Gassner, however, has correlated tradition, theater,
and writer in a highly useful, if controversial, judgment.
He finds two playwrights in Fry, the author of morality
dramas and the public entertainer, playwrights which
correspond with the amateur or religious theater and the
commercial theater, respectively. To support his view
12
Some Versions of Pastoral, Norfolk (n.d.), p. 66.
15,,Yes and No," As They Appear (New York, 1952 ),
p. 115.
^Harold Hobson, "Poetic Drama Ascendant," Christian
Science Monitor Magazine, March 25, 1950, p. 4.
7
that Fry’s career as a commercial dramatist is of little
future importance he makes two points:
Neither here nor in England has his example been
followed with any particular success, and . . . even
the farthest reaches of success attributable to Fry
himself do not signify any radical departures from
the kind of theatre to which the English public has
been accustomed. ("Prospectus on Playwrights," p. 93)
Although Marius Bewley attacks the "rather soggy contem
porary audience" ("Verse of Christopher Fry," p. 82), the
admiring Derek Stanford decries the insensitivity of "the
average highbrow critic. "1-5 On the other hand, Stephen
Spender finds that the "surprising revival of English
gifts in arts which had deemed dead since Elizabethan
times” is accompanied by the revival of "an audience
ready to welcome almost any development of the imagination.
The stage is certainly set for the poetic drama" (p. 364).
In summary, although Christopher Fry’s "greatness"
remains in question, his "significance"— a place among
the eight or ten leading twentieth-century English drama
tists— seems assured. Although his audience has been
energetically praised or maligned from varying points of
view, it has not been studied with any pretensions to
statistical accuracy. And even if it were, the results
would probably only confirm Francis Fergusson’s belief
that "since the destruction of the great 'mirror* of the
^Christopher Fry: An Appreciation (London, 1951),
p. 207.
8
Elizabethan theater, it has been necessary to restore or
invent the theater.In the absence of such a study
and an adequate method for its interpretation, we probably
know less about Fry’s audience than we do about the
ancient Greek or Elizabethan playgoers. Hence, judgments
on the effect of Fry's auditors upon his dramaturgy, and
consequently on his stature, remain personal and subjec
tive.
Moreover, the critical analyses of his work have been
few in number. The somewhat ephemeral reviews have been
largely vitiated by either the incompleteness of Fry's
work at the time, the isolation of one or more plays or
critical factors to the detriment of others possibly more
important, or emphasis on what the reviewer "so beauti
fully thinks about it all.”17
Therefore, the present study will concentrate on the
organizing forms which Fry uses aesthetically to organize
the "matter” of his plays: specifically, structure,
characterization, and language. Within the limits of
their interaction, some judgments will be made on the
effectiveness of their use. Consequently, the few terms
and their implications for this study need brief defi-
nit ions.
^ Idea of a Theater (Princeton, 1949), pp. 109-110.
17H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (New York, 1950), p. v.
9
Structure in a play is the selection and arrangement
of incidents made with the intention of demonstrating an
idea in detail and in depth. The plot of any play, as
distinguished from its action, is the whole story of the
play. The single large action is the complex of physical
movements performed by actors on the stage. The narrative
structure includes the beginning, middle, and end of the
play. within the smaller unit of the scene, structure
involves the arrangement of three elements: exposition,
action, and preparation. Exposition is the recounting of
the past, action the forward movement of the scene,
preparation is the hint of things to come, the unanswered
questions.
As each character performs a complex of physical
movements on the stage, he develops what may be called
a single dominant essence, vice, passion, emotion,
humour or "psychological drive." The structure of drama
inherently places active essences in conflict. Characteri-
zation therefore works out "active essences" through
movement, becoming, and revealing, processes in which
conflict is the essential factor.
Language is here limited to the use of metaphor and
versification to forward and develop structure and
character. It Is assumed that imagery is ambiguous and
ambivalent, and will tend to be grouped in "clusters"
which reflect sound-correspondences and personal and
10
traditional symbolism; in such cases, each element in
the cluster tends to call up one or more of the other
elements.
If "verse'1 is defined as segments grouped around
stressed syllables, the fundamental unit becomes not the
"foot" but the whole line; verse must then be conceived
as an elaborate contrapuntal pattern between the superim
posed metre and the ordinary rhythm of speech. Whereas
the pattern may be static and graphic, the rhythmical
impulse is dynamic and progressive: the patterns to
follow are anticipated. By indicating the counterpoint
between pattern and actual fulfilment, 1 will attempt to
reveal the tendencies for the whole play generally, and
for individual characters, specifically.
After analyzing the use by Christopher Fry of the
techniques of structure, characterization, and language,
I shall reach some judgment as to the unity achieved
among these techniques.
CHAPTER ONE: THE BOY WITH A CART
Structure
In Christopher Fry *s The Boy with a Cart,l Cuthman,
a young shepherd, takes his mother into the English
hinterland after his father dies. When a group of mowers
ridicule the fall of his mother from the cart, a rain
storm ruins their crop. In the village of Steynman,
Cuthman starts to build his church, but is temporarily
delayed when two village ruffians, Alfred and Demiwulf
Fipps, steal his oxen. He yokes the brothers in place
of the oxen and their protesting mother is carried away
by a marvelous wind. After the king post of the church
slips, Christ intervenes to replace it.
In the first scene, The People of South England
anticipate the movement of the play:
And you shall see
Now in this place, the story of his going
And his building.--A thousand years in the past
There was a shepherd, and his son had three
Sorrows come together on him. (p. 2)
Alongside the two-part action, which consists of the
search for the site and the construction of the church,
moves the three-part plot, the "sorrows." Although both
^-New York, 1950,
11
12
action and plot are shaped by the logical concatenation
of events, these parts never coincide symmetrically.
Almost half of the play, including the "beginning’1 and
first sorrow, is presented through exposition; only after
Cuthman's "first trouble" (p. 10) is described does "the
story of his going,” the first part of the action, begin.
The second and third sorrows, summarized by The
People as "rain that spoils the mowers' crop" and "wind
sweeping old women off their feet" Cp. 36), fall within
the two parts of the action— Cuthman's "going" and his
"building," the middle and end, respectively, of the play.
But in their summary. The People fail to mention two
other "sorrows," Cuthman's direct conflict with the Fipps
brothers and his attempt to replace the king-post.
Although both are only reported, not dramatized, the same
is true of the first sorrow--and Cuthman "suffers" in all
five instances. Therefore, the term "three / Sorrows"
must refer to a symbolic interpretation of the plot, rather
than to an accurate summation of the shape of the plot
or action itself. As plot and action proceed, the waste
land trek and all the ensuing episodes parody--in satanic,
comic, or idealized form--Cuthman*s first sorrow.
In the story of Cuthman, as in the concurrent
succession of day and night, life and death, and the
seasons, The People of South England see a single motif:
the movement from conception to culmination, the "working
13
together of man and god like root and aky" (p. 2). But
Cuthman's self-assertion in the next scene and his conse
quent isolation from nature ironically foreshadow not
unity, but desolation. When the report of his father's
death comes, he immediately recalls his father's vision
of Gethsemane and the Ascension, which symbolically fore
shadows Cuthman's pangs of guilt and as-yet-unformed
desire "to grow to my father / As he grew to Thy Son"
(p. 8) and also links his Gethsemanic trek "over five
counties" (p. 2) with the Pentecostal appearance of
Christ (a double extension of a pentad) in his re-united
"church" at the very end.
Once Cuthman accepts the blame for his father's
death, The People of South England close the gap of time
separating them from Cuthman. The regular alternation
of their chants with Cuthman's complaints reflects the
dependence of natural and social unity on the stability
of their most typical representative, Cuthman:
Is God still in the air
Now that the sun is down?
They are afraid in the city,
Sleepless in the town (p. 7).
Although the death of Cuthman's father is purely circum
stantial, its coincidence with the new year, Cuthman's
self-assertion, and his accession to divine powers
(magically enclosing his sheep) lead Cuthman toward
greater self-realization. At his departure from the
14
village, Cuthman’s first sorrow takes on ritual signifi
cance :
We shall never look again on the white walls f my
swaddling clothes put out to dry. I am out of
them once and for all (p. 12).
From an imitation of the ritual of the Enniautos-Daimon,
the seasonal combat between old king or god and new,
Cuthman has passed through the rite de passage from
adolescence to maturity, implying that the sorrows to come
will also be initiations.
Cuthman's spiritual search for his "church”--the first
sector of the two-part action— is objectified by his
wanderings in the wilderness, a sort of Mosaic quest for
the promised land. The contrast of the sterility to the
fertility which lay behind and lies ahead, the nameless
ness of the desert and the direction they take emphasize
not only the irrevocability of Cuthman’s pre-ordained
mission, but the healing, through "trial by ordeal,” of
the broken family.
In a field the next morning, the mowers’ garrulous
celebration of the harvest contrasts the early freshness,
succulent crops, and unity of "the muscle and the meadow”
(p. 16), with the foregoing night, dryness, and choked
isolation of Cuthman and his mother from the mainsprings
of life. When the cart-rope breaks, dropping Cuthman’s
mother to the ground, the combined exposition and action
contrast the present helplessness of Cuthman's mother
15
with the mowers1 over-confidence, and her past familial
integration with her present social isolation. Moreover,
the mowers* taunt, ’’baby boy" (p. 18), foreshadows a
repetition of the initiation of Cuthman from adolescence
to manhood, his second sorrow.
At the onset of the crop-destroying rain, the feverish
activity, despair, and forced retreat by the mowers are
exactly duplicated by the "fluster of the vegetation,"
the singing of "the n^zed valley," and the flow of water
beneath the "crying hedge" (pp. 19-20). In retrospect,
the mowers’ thoughtless parody of death, their rejection
and ridicule of the intruders, and their own rout by
seemingly capricious nature is a comic version of Cuth
man’s death-wish, his arrogant dismissal of the villagers,
and his belated recognition that his acts contain their
own nemesis, in the first sorrow.
Cuthman's mother, Cuthman, and The People all see
that the rain rights a balance which the mowers disturbed.
Cuthman’s mother reacts superficially: the mowers got
what they deserved. Cuthman's response is deeper:
"Timber / And flesh" are not different as he had once
believed, but "of equal and old significance" (p. 21).
If the past means little to Cuthman, only the future
matters to The People of South England: as Cuthman's
body manifests his soul, thus will the church at Steynman
embody Cuthman’s raison d’etre: "The bell climbs in the
16
steeple, / The belfry of his shaggy head” (p. 23). The
audience is thereby prepared not only for the immediately
ensuing events, but for the withdrawal of Cuthman from
the play as well, after the completion of the church.
In the next scene, Tawm's death-seeking desertion of
society parodies Cuthman’s first entrance. his failure to
escape his relatives, like Cuthman’s earlier flight,
foreshadows Cuthman's replacement of Tawm’s son (whose
desertion to the city brought on Tawm's despair).
The random, then favorable, welcome of the villagers
resembles, as Cuthman's mother sees it, her one-time
arrival at her Cornish home with Cuthman’s father. The
discovery by Tawm and Cuthman's mother of their children's
"mistreatment” leads to Tawm’s comparison of Cuthman and
his own lost son, a prelude to "adoption.” Cuthman's
subsequent employment by the "surrogate-father" farmer
prepares for his successful transformation of the Fipps
brothers into oxen: he is a "great lover of animals. . .
He can do anything he wants with them" (p. 27).
When Cuthman is left in god-like isolation by his
mother and the now-festive villagers, he begins the second
and final phase of the action by invoking, even parodying,
the primal creation: "Let there be a church" (p. 29).
The fulfilment by nature, time, and society of God's
purpose in turn prepares for divine intervention at the
end: "God guide the hammer and the plane / As the root
17
is guided" (p. 29).
Alfred and Demiwulf Fipps enter, parodying the
wilderness journey of Cuthman and his mother. Like their
predecessors they have a social program but are isolated
from the very society they wish to direct. However, the
situations are now ironically reversed: in only a week,
Cuthman has replaced the Fipps brothers; he is now com
munity leader. For Cuthman has diverted the community's
energies from athletic contests to church-building.
The People of South England interrupt. They, not
the brothers, control the future: "We make a country
dance of Cuthman's labours" (p. 30). While they speak,
six months pass.
When the Fipps brothers refuse to return his "tres
passing" oxen, Cuthman yokes the brothers instead. The
observing villagers compare his action with "wrestl^ing]
with timber in the framework of the church," (p. 33)
preparing for Cuthman's struggle with the misplaced king
post. When Mrs. Fipps tries to interfere, she is blown
out of sight by a wind as Cuthman undergoes his third
sorrow. Mr. Fipps' "comic baptism of the unbeliever" is
a parody both of the consecutive alienation and wasteland
trek of Cuthman and his mother, and the defeat of the
mowers by another natural disturbance; in each case,
nature reacts to correct social imbalance.
After Cuthman's mother announces her marriage to
18
Tawm--a partial fulfilment of Cuthman’s search for a
father— news comes that the king-post of the church has
slipped. But Cuthman then enters to report that the
catastrophe has been ameliorated by a man who entered,
lifted the king-post into position with a motion, and
said, "I was a carpenter. . . ." (p. 39). Cuthman has
seen that,
There under the bare walla of our labour
Death and life were knotted in one strength
Indivisible as root and sky (p. 39).
The report by the People of South England that life goes
on although Cuthman Is long dead forms, with the intro
duction, an envelope for the play as a whole.
Structural analysis o f The Boy With a Cart shows that
the plot moves forward not by action, but by preparation
for the future, and then announcement by messengers that
the forecast events have indeed occurred as anticipated—
off stage. This lack of action is due partly to the
difficulty of presenting internal conflict or "sorrow"
directly, partly to the repeated incursion of implausible
supernatural elements (implausible if presented as deus
ex machine), and partly to the repetitive quality of
the plot Itself. In the absence of action on the stage,
events which the audience should gather intuitively from
participation in the action must be described and
explained.
19
Characterization
Each of the characters in The Boy With a Cart
develops a basic drive in conflict with those of the other
characters. Stated simply, these drives are: the attempt
by The People of South England to relate every earthly
phenomenon to God's active plan; Cuthman's attempt to
build a church; his mother's attempt to achieve res
pectability; the attempts by Cuthman’s father and Tawm to
regain their authority; the attempts by the Mowers and
the Villagers (in both hamlets) to preserve social unity;
the Fipps brothers' attempts to supplant Cuthman; Mrs.
Fipps*s attempt to expel the interlopers. These strangely
assorted characters are brought together and their con
flicting desires united or suppressed by Cuthman's search
for the ordained site and then his construction of the
church upon it.
The People of South England are characterized by
their name, their mode of existence, and their ambivalent
role-playing--impassive chronicler, fellow-sufferer, and
skeptical commentator. They embody the conscience, or
emergence of feeling into consciousness, underlying both
the race ("People”) and nature, largely seasonal and
vegetative ("South England"). In terms of their superior
substance, mobility, and perspective--they are separated
from the "present" by a milennium--the action seems puny,
inconsequential and at times almost irrelevant. What
20
interests them is not the historicity but the pattern
of Cuthman's life, the recurrence which gives it signi
ficance .
As narrators, they open and close the play, interrupt
the action to comment, and forward a deeply symbolic
transitional movement--the wasteland journey. As co
protagonist with Cuthman, they predict his course of
action and then reflect, concentrate, and intensify his
passion and perception. When his sorrow results from
personal, natural, or social disruption, the People
extend its significance by "pathetic fallacy," embodying
the spirit of pathos in natural and social entities. When
Cuthman meets recognizably human antagonists, the People
become sceptical and rationalist; this pose, however,
diminishes the action to the status of a homily for their
sermon at the end.
The characterization of the maturing Cuthman is best
understood in terms of archetypal roles. He moves from
the role of "sorcerer’s apprentice," when his assumption
of misunderstood divine functions triggers social and
natural catastrophe; to the role of poet as vates, the
inspired Shelleyan hero who seeks to embody in action
the purpose which in rare moments is revealed to him;
to poet as warrior, who cleanses the community; to poet
as priest, who embodies the highest religious aspirations
of the community. The last three roles "actualize" or
21
give content to his first unsuccessful attempts at
rebirth. His characterization is further extended by
his illuminating glimpses into the future made possible
by momentary correlations of past and present, by his
conflicts with and triumphs over false embodiments of his
ideal, and by the sympathetic reflection of his inner
struggles through social and natural dislocations.
In the first sector of the three-part plot, Cuthman
is characterized as an immature, irresponsible adolescent.
In his rebellion against his father's authority, he has
somehow invoked the spiritual powers of God for his
own aggrandizement. Like his father, Cuthman wishes for
and obtains transformation. But he learns that in seeking
to attain personal power, supplant his father, and renew
his environment, he must suffer the imbalance entailed
by any program of reform. The only corrective for
immaturity is over-stimulation of the sensibilities,
pain :
Out of this, out of the first incision
Of mortality on mortality, there comes
The genuflexion, the partition of pain
Between man and God; there grows the mutual action,
The perspective to the vision (p. 10).
Cuthman*s hubris, then, had consisted of a paralysis of
vision, a spiritual myopia. Once he channels his over
confidence into the quest-motif, the Telemacheia, he is
able to sublimate his inner conflict from father-rejection
to acceptance:
22
Let me at last be faithful
In perception, and in action that is born
Of perception, . . . that I may grow to my father
As he grew to Thy Son (p. 8).
In the conflict with the mowers, a series of charac
terization devices indicates Cuthman's new maturity: he
avoids conflict to make a new rope for the cart and com
pletely ignores the flytting match between the mowers and
his mother. Cuthman then undergoes a spiritual trans
figuration: his mind is awakened like "a fading coal,
which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness.” During the rain which
destroys the mowers1 crops, Cuthman "felt the mood / Of
the meadow change" (p. 21). Contrasting his present
spiritual stature with his incompetence as a craftsman—
"I have no craft or knowledge of joint / or strain"
(p. 2 2)— Cuthman sees his quest and its culmination in
terms of his own past childhood and destiny. Thereafter,
Cuthman's "quiet desperation," which so repels his
antagonists, appears as the psychological counterpart to
his active introspection, sense of relationships, and
a single-minded conservation of energy.
At the arrival of Cuthman and his mother at Steyning,
Cuthman begins to assume the role of warrior-hero. Looking
back on the transformation of Cuthman's purpose to action,
Cuthmanfs mother characterizes his initiative in exag
gerated terms of force and brutality:
23
My sou pushes me into a cart and bumps and bangs me a
million miles until I am the colour of midnight (p. 27).
His authority, moral stature, and competence, however, are
now unquestioned.
In the yoking of the Fipps brothers to replace the
oxen they have removed, Cuthman's role as logios aner,
MSpielman,lf or magician-king is amplified into the role
of Carlylean warrior-hero, the member of the true elite
who rises through sheer merit:
to-day
I drew a circle to guard the church, . . .
And all your power to stir and strength to speak has fallen
round your ankles (p. 32).
The People of South England associate Cuthman's endeavors
with the mythical rites de passage, with emphasis on the
test, the movement from youth to maturity exemplified
in a myth like the victory of Christ over Satan:
He has slammed back the ocean's stable-doors
And slapped the sturdy bases of the earth,
Wrenched and worried into the heart of heaven
And dragged a bellowing Lucifer to ground (p. 35).
The characterization that emerges is that of a reverse
Prometheus: his vindication follows rejection by man for
befriending God.
In the shifting of the king-post, Cuthman is charac
terized as ritual victim who undergoes first the sparagmos
or sacrificial rending, then the peripetia or reversal,
and finally the epiphany or recognition. First a messen
ger reports his ritual death ("And now he has gone into
24
a ghost," p. 38) which, in Cuthman's account, resembles
the crucifixion:
I was alone by the unattended pillar,
Mourning the bereaved air that lay so quiet
Between walls; hungry for hammer blows (p. 38).
The reversal and epiphany, revealed to Cuthman alone,
re-establish his divine mission by divinely rendering
him impotent in order that the glory be reserved for God:
But gradually I was aware of someone in
The doorway. . . . At his touch
[The king-post[ lifted to its place. .
I heard him say *1 was a carpenter' . . . (pp. 38-39).
It is consistent with his saintly roles that Cuthman's
life, "puffed like a dandelion / Into uncertain places"
(p. 39), should end with a suggestion of direct heavenly
assumption.
Cuthman's mother is characterized, successively, as
helpless suppliant, confidante, buffoon, bourgeois matron,
and authoritarian matriarch. When she participates in
Cuthman's purposive acts, she is presented as buffoon,
or bomolochos, whose function is to increase or focus the
comic mood. When Cuthman undergoes sorrow, she is charac
terized— always by messengers— as the tragic antithesis
of the buffoon, the suppliant who presents a picture of
unmitigated sickness and grief. When Cuthman's sorrows
have been resolved by renewed perception, his mother
shares his insights, thus filling the role of confidante,
a Jamesian reflector. When the action stops and only
25
time changes, her role is that of bourgeois matron, a
role which gains a strong admixture of matriarchal wilful
ness in the church-building sequence; there she fills
the vacuum of authority which Cuthman's father is unable,
and Tawm is not allowed, to fill.
Cuthman's father and Tawm, his father-surrogate, are
complementary facets of the same character, an eiron type
of old man who begins the play by withdrawing from it,
and ends the play by returning. Cuthman's father is first
characterized as a senex iratus, or heavy parent, obsessed
with routine, materialism, and death; his counterpart,
Tawm, is a parasite characterized by the same attributes
in diminished, centrifugal form: irritation, helpless
ness, and escape. However, the symbolic burden placed
on Tawm by his marriage to Cuthman's mother is dispropor
tionate to his part in forwarding the action or plot.
The mowers are embodiments of the seasonal rhythm,
a chorus of satyrs gone wild, with the very human charac
teristics of sensuality, a keen sense of the incongruous
and, finally, fear. Life, existing to be enjoyed, is an
endless cycle of the stimulation of the senses :
Grass, the year, and a merry friend.
All at last come to an end (p. 16).
Conceiving existence in terms of climactic moments regard
less of development or continuity, they reduce Cuthman's
quest to material terms and misconstrue Cuthman's new-found
26
purpose as childishness. By extending their rudimentary
social 8cheme--the present as a repetition of the change
less past--into nature, they indicate their own vul
nerability to the catastrophic forces they ridicule.
The given names of the Fipps brothers, Alfred and
Demiwulf , suggest aniinality, primitiveness, and com
bativeness. As frustrated exponents of status-seeking
through sublimated combat, the contest, they are imme
diately isolated when the community accepts cooperativeness.
When they attempt to restore competition by opposing
Cuthman, they are themselves yoked and their animality
purged. An ironic reversal emphasizes the aggressive
ness of their mother, Mrs. Fipps. After she directs a
stream of spitting epithets (acting as her name sounds)
at Cuthman, the violence of her attempted expulsion is
reflected by a divine wind which carries her away.
In the movement of the play, each event exists not
for itself, but for its relationship to the central idea:
the awakening of all the characters to the vital link
between temporal progression and the divine plan. The
People of South England fill the vacuum left in the play's
structure by the lack of action. By directing all atten
tion to the past or future and by focussing upon the
multiplicity of vertical links between earth and God,
they reduce problematical abstractions to concreteness
and immediacy. Once the powerful influence of Cuthman’s
27
father is accepted as an objective correlative for divine
predestination, Cuthman's increasing maturity and community
responsibilities grow organically out of the quest motif.
In the absence of any real conflict within Cuthman's mind
or between him and his society, tension develops between
the homely, realistic pragmatism of Cuthman's mother and
the lofty idealism of The People of South England; the
choral disbelief in the "reality" of dramatic events
strikes at the base of their own existence and weakens the
rationale of the play's whole mode of existence. This
weakness is magnified in the epilogue when the author
himself loses interest in the play, and drops his guise
as "The People of South England" to exhort the audience
directly.
Language
Imagery.--Imagery in The Boy With a Cart is primarily
a device of structure, emphasizing the sameness of events
and confirming the repetitive nature of the sorrows
implied by their symbolic three-ness. An image which
appears in one sorrow might be expected to reappear in
one or more of the others, as well as In the parodies.
In most instances, the form and effect of the individual
image is more responsive to changes in emotion, maturity,
or moral sanction within the particular sector, or
between sorrow and parody, than to differences between
28
the various sorrows, among which whole blocks of imagery
sometimes appear readily interchangeable.
The first two sorrows, the beginning and middle of
the play (including the quest-motif) are united by several
image clusters, among which the most important are grass-
water-eye (foresight, insight), and sun-clothing-water
(initiation). Although his mother, the villagers, and
the mowers fear water--change means death, not renewal--
Cuthman wants to look for '’longer grass" (p. 14) and sees
the same air which was filled with rain, routing the
mowers, "sprung with green" (p. 21). The eye-grass
cluster also coincides with Cuthman’s initial death-wish
(p. 3), his mother’s wasteland fears of isolation and
bad dreams (p. 16), and the mowers’ thoughtless invocation
of death (p. 16 ) .
In the same movement, the sun-clothing-(childhood)-
water cluster objectifies Cuthman’s maturity, a mani
festation of the rite of passage of birth. The whole
series occurs in Cuthman’s parting remark that "We shall
never look again at the sun on the white walls, my
swaddling clothes put out to dry" (p. 12) and again,
after he defeats the mowers who had taunted him with
"baby boy."
Analysis thus far has tended to indicate that the
tone-giver of the play, the symbol which determines the
structure and meaning of the imagery, is the sun (God).
29
The appearance of the carpenter at the end, seemingly
"carved out of sunlight" (p. 29), provides a useful key:
His voic e
Hovered on memory with open wings
And drew itself up from a chine of silence
As though it had longtime lain in a vein of gold (p. 39).
In this passage, the ambiguous "vein of gold" puns on
both blood vessel "vein" and ore deposit "vein," while
"gold" is linked with "god" by umlaut. "Carved out of
sunlight" indicates another umlaut linkage— "son" and
"sun"; the communion ritual implied by the blood vessel
"vein" symbolizes consubstantiation of Father and Son
(fulfilling Cuthman's initial wish). The appearance of
a sun metaphor in the first sorrow unites Cuthman’s
saintliness and divine promise with the culmination of
the quest. When Cuthman received his supernatural powers,
the sun laid his "face on gold" (p. 3); he then remembers
that when his father told of Jesus, "his face was like a
live coal" (p. 5). After the evening turns "a friendly
face" (p. 24), Cuthman arrives at the church-site, the
hill where "the sun will beat on the bell" (p. 29),
recalling the metaphysical "belfry of his shaggy head"
(p. 23).
These image clusters, uniting the first two sorrows,
the quest, and the beginning and middle, have no counter
part in the last sorrow, church-building, when the welter
of parodies, conflicts, and minor characters dissipates
30
the earlier focussed unity. Instead, animal imagery,
particularly horse-, dog-, and bird-metaphors, appears
in all the sorrows, linking them with each other and with
most of the parodies. At the same time, the relative
economy or extension of the imagery reflects emotional
conflict, levels of maturity, and religious symbolism.
The dog image, sometimes occurring with fire (passion)
and eye (God), is another extension of the sun symbol;
it appears not only in the three significant sorrows, but
in the two others and in all the parodies as well. In
each case, the tendency of a watch dog to bite and bark,
to hang on tenaciously, objectifies strong human desire
and usually coincides with the beginning of a journey.
When Cuthman leaves his Cornish village, his troubles
"only dog at his heels" (p. 10), recalling a similar image
in The People's introduction. After the defeat of the
mowers, Cuthman is called'la dogged pinhead of dust." The
whole cluster occurs when Cuthman tells the Fipps brothers:
There’s one fire in me that no man shall put
out. . . . I have the unsleeping eyes of a watch dog.
(p. 32)
Before Mrs. Fipps is blown away, she objects to Cuthman’s
mother as "skulking around" (p. 33). Then, by way of
contrast, at the appearance of the carpenter, the air
seemed to leap dog-like at his side (p. 39), an image
linking human purpose with divine predestination.
The parodies, too, may be identified not only by
31
structural analogies, but by the presence of one or more
elements of the dog-eye-fire cluster. During the wilder
ness trek, household fires shrink ''across the fields to
a dog's bark" (p. 15). The same cluster is found when
the Fipps brothers first appear, also on a journey.
Like the dog image, the horse metaphor connects the
sorrows with each other, and with their parodies. While
the first sorrow begins,
We rThe People] have felt
Heaven ride with Spring into the meadows (p. 1).
it ends with Cuthman's mother's dislike of change, seasonal
or otherwise: "She doesn't walk up to misfortune like a
horse to sugar" (p. 10). Behind the horse image can be
perceived the archetypal death of the vegetation god in
autumn and revival in spring. After the People hear the
"rain riding suddenly out" (p. 19), to destroy the
mowers' crops, Cuthman recalls that "God rode up my
spirit and drew in" (p. 21) beside him. However, Cuthman,
as vehicle for God's purpose, still must "plug” and "plod
out his vision" (p. 23). To defeat the Fipps family,
Cuthman "stampeded into his manhood" (p. 34). After the
king-post slips, the frustrated Cuthman pats the useless
building stone "as though it were a horse that had brought
him safely through battle" (p. 38). After Cuthman's
death, the People re-direct attention to God, the con
tinuing force in human existence, with the horse metaphor.
32
Still another animal image, the bird, helps connect
the sorrows and parodies. Like horse and dog, it is
associated with the sun and its synecdoches— "the Lark
dissolve in sun" (p. 1), with mouth like biting dog and
reined, drinking horse (p. 19), and the seasons.
Other images, with a more limited structural func
tion, tie together a limited number of sorrows and paro
dies. A sun (youth )-cloud (age) antithesis connects
Cuthman's resentment of his father (p. 4) with Tawm's
rejection of his relatives (p. 24). A vagrancy image
not only associates the wasteland trek of Cuthman and
his mother (p. 11) with the windy journey of Mrs. Fipps
(p. 34), but characterizes both women as unwilling
travelers. Imagery of war, torture, and punishment con
nects the choral introduction (p. 2), the wasteland trek
(pp. 15, 26), the rained-out mowers (pp. 19-20), and the
vengeful Fipps brothers (p. 29), with the king-post
struggle (p. 38). The stone metaphor appears in the
first sorrow (pp. 3, 6), the wasteland trek (p. 15), and
the king-post episode (p. 38). At times a single image
serves the same purpose within a sorrow that others do
between sorrows. In the first sorrow— and nowhere else--
an ice-skating image adds another level to the action.
Cuthman's complaint that the villagers, in bringing news
of his father's death, are "breaking the sun" (p. 5)
over their knees, is followed by introspection,
33
How can I keep
Pace with a pain that cornea in my head so fast?
How did I make the day brittle to break? (p. 6)
Later, he calls himself "a boy sliding / On the easy
ice" (p. 8). The ice then "cracks": completely over
whelmed, Cuthman complains, "No longer dryshod can I
keep my will" (p. 8). The association of contest, jour
ney, foot-work, and the deeper reality-delusion implica
tions amount to a dramatic adaptation of the metaphysical
conceit.
Versification.--The prevailing metrical pattern of
The Boy With a Cart is blank verse. An early speech by
Cuthman is typical:
How did I make the day brittle to break?
What sin brought in the strain, the ominous knock,
The gaping seam? Was it a boast on the rock? (p. 6)
Deviations like the inverted first foot, the dropping
of the first slack syllable, and the extra slack syllable
only confirm the traditional basis of Fry’s blank verse
technique.
When Cuthman nears the end of his quest. The People
adopt briefly a strong-stress meter:
Weariness runs off his brow
Already the bell climbs in the steeple,
The belfry of his shaggy head (p. 23).
Coming after more than half of a play written in blank
verse and prose, these lines must be read with three
stresses to the first and third, four to the second line
(though perfect pentameter). The speech speeds the tempo
34
and effectively bridges the two-part action.
Although the characters cannot be told apart by their
use of imagery, they can be distinguished by the metrical
pattern of their speeches. Minor characters use prose,
major ones verse; however, characters like Cuthman’s
mother, Mrs. Fipps, and the choruses of villagers shift
to blank verse when Cuthman enters using it.
Other metrical factors divide the characters. The
People of South England and the mowers both use stanzaic
forms; the former depart from blank verse, and the latter
"sing," in contrast to the prose of their speeches. The
People’s introduction and conclusion to the play are
divided into verse paragraphs, blank verse in one and
irregularly rhymed iambic pentameter in the last. They
use four-line stanzas with a steadily diminishing number
of strong-stresses to comment on Cuthman’s first sorrow;
later they utilize five stanzas of five lines each, of
which eighteen lines are broken by a caesura: word repe
tition, internal rhyme, and alliteration draw the balanced
phrases and clauses together. Exposition tends to be
hypermetric, the iambic beat slowed by the addition of
extra syllables. Action, on the other hand, is usually
expressed in regular iambic pentameter, and may break
into galloping anapests. In prose, as in verse, anapests
often indicate a journey, the quest-motif: ’’ You needn’t
go farther than the end of the earth to find a fortune”
35
(p. 18 ) .
To repeat, imagery is a device primarily of struc
tural unification, versification a device of character
differentiation. Similes predominate; symbolism is
fairly obvious and derivative; irony sometimes hinders
clear expression as in "laid my face on gold" (p. 13),
for example. Imagery, at times, verges perilously on
the ludicrous: "Already the tell climbs in the .
belfry of his shaggy head" (p. 23). It is also sometimes
trite as in "sick dog," "water through a sieve." Versi
fication shows more variation from character to character,
but speeches are uniformly long. Dialogue almost never
includes more than two characters and/or a chorus. The
meter is predominately blank verse, with the occasional
use of strong-stress lines and a number of stanzaic
innovations.
In summary, the structure of The Boy With a Cart,
Fry's primary act of representation, is organized by
multiple journeys at cross-purposes, an atomistic concept
of social organization, and all kinds of doubleness,
implied by the thematic urge to form a "perspective to
the vision" (p. 10). Thus, the action is shaped by
rhythmic journeys: back and forth (from village to
village, desert to meadow, farm to town) and up and down
(stairs, hills and valleys, earth and sky). As church
36
succeeds cart, present follows past, and Son redeems
saint, the audience is "lifted out of time and space on
to the plane of the universal."2 it is the centrifugal
quest and the opposite but equal centripetal church-
building which sustains the structural tension and
impetus.
Within the second act of representation, that of
characterization, the same sort of duality emerges. The
links between Cuthman's physical quest for self, family,
and community, and his efforts to mingle his essence with
God's, impose upon the universe the same vertical effort
seen in structure. The characters imitate Cuthman as he
imitates Christ: the human drama parallels the divine
drama whose form is vaguely discerned in the "pathetic
fallacy," the sympathetic reaction of nature to Cuthman's
sorrows.
The attempts by Cuthman to rebuild his fortune by
sheepherding, reunite his family through his mother's
remarriage, and reunify a community which accepts and
carries out his ^oal of building a church are easily
assimilated by the bourgeois conventions of thrift, family
solidarity, and progress. But the quarrel between the
People of South England and Cuthman's mother reveals the
^F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Hythistoricus. Arnold,
1907. p. 144.
37
shrunken rigidity of the plot, a weakness evident from
the beginning. What possible force could be powerful
enough to strip Cuthman, in one blow, of material goods
and family and community ties? Only God, of course. But
any attempt to make a character Christ-like, a guiltless
scapegoat, inevitably transfers the guilt to the com
munity. This tendency is alleviated, in part, by Cuthman's
initial hubris; he is at first immature and irrespon
sible. He had used God's power for his own ends and must
suffer the consequences. Therefore, to properly deify
Cuthman, Fry finds it necessary to interpose a neutral,
will-less society between his hero and the People of
South England, with the loss, primarily, of plausibility.
The third act of representation, that of constructing
the language, is made to do what the structure and
characterization cannot do. The intermediate vertical
links between the real and ideal, such as the chorus,
father and father-surrogates, mother, and wasteland
journey, are extended dramatic metaphors which duplicate
the unreality of a key introductory phrase, "joint action
of root and sky." Here the word joint ambiguously denotes
both hand (with its flexing joints between bones) and link
(or invisible connection). The lack of action and the
flatness of the subordinate characters is reflected in
the presence of associative links between the dramatic
incidents. The attention bestowed on contemplation is
disproportionate to the dramatic adequacy of the events
to be contemplated: reality and ideality remain in paral
lel juxtaposition.
CHAPTER TWO: A PHOENIX TOO FREQUENT
Structure
Christopher Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent^- is struc
tured like Greek New Comedy, as transmitted by Plautus
and Terence. The desire of a young Ephesian widow,
Dynamene, to follow her husband, Virilius, in death, is
complicated by an erotic intrigue with a young Roman
corporal, Tegeus. When the young soldier "loses" one of
the corpses he is guarding, the crisis of his threatened
suicide is resolved by a rationalization, a comic version
of Aristotle's "discovery." Dynamene clears the way for
her union with Tegeus by urging her young lover to
replace the stolen corpse with her husband.
By starting nearly at the end of Pctronius' brief
plot (the source), never moving from the scene of the
tomb, and making elapsed time correspond with theater
time, Fry achieves the maximum concentration of "focussed
theater." At the same time, the analogous rhythms of
the phoenix legend, of the Sleeping Beauty-Cinderella
marchen which resemble the Petronius story, and of the
ritual awakening of the slumbering nature-god are all
^London, 19 55.
59
40
assimilated by the double theme: "Death is a kind of
love" (p. 8). All the centripetal attempts to draw upon
Greek and Christian myth, nature ritual, and the rising
comic rhythm of the transformation motif are precisely
balanced by the complicated interplay between heroic and
pastoral which gives the impression of dealing with life
completely.
The introductory scene effectively contrasts the
maid Doto’s comic distaste for the two-day-long hunger,
thirst, darkness, and loneliness with the gregariousness
she obviously prefers. Awakened by lamp-light, Dynamene,
her mistress, repeats Doto's association of mourning with
an unpleasant sexual experience. As Doto found, "life
and death / Is cat and dog in this double bed of a world"
(p. 1), Dynamene is a "cat in the ruins of a house" (p. 3)
whom her husband Virilius had "insulted" by dying.
Both women’s sense of bereavement, summed up by Dynamene’8
dream of fruitlessly pursuing a Virilius-ship, indicate
a basic donnee of plot: the quest-motif. Dynamene’s
mention of Arcite Street (recalling one of the two noble
competitors in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale"), where she met
Virilius, with Doto's earlier mention of a quoit-collecting
lover, foreshadow the sublimation of the life-death
struggle into a game of passion. Moreover, Dynamene’s
exposition of Virilius' rationalization of the gods
"in seventy columns," looks forward to Tegeus’ string
41
of oaths, also recited, with no more belief in divine
efficacy than had Virilius, for the same purpose: to
demonstrate convincing interest and sincerity. The
departure of Virilius in dream as in reality, moreover,
prepares for another departure near the end, that of
Tegeus.
Attracted by the light, Tegeus enters. His dis
cussion with Doto prepares for a concluding scene when
Tegeus again breaks in: just as he will force Dynamene
to choose life, he persuades Doto to eat and drink. His
reference to the hanging corpses--"The holly "holyj-
berries are just reddening” (p. 11)--foreshadows his own
ritual death at the end, while his former intention of
"volunteering for overseas service” (p. 12), not only
links him with the Virilius-ship of Dynamene's dream,
but prepares for Dynamene*s mistaken identification of
him as Charon, embodying in the action the paradox implied
by Doto’s comic summary of the motivation for their death-
watch :
It all started with madam saying a man
Was two men really, and I’d only noticed one,
One each, I mean. It seems he has a soul
As well as his other troubles, (p. 8)
Although past and present had been kept at their
proper distances before, all time is now united in the
present. Disturbed by the conversation, Dynamene mis
takes Tegeus for Charon, is played a second trick (when
Tegeus ’’guesses" her name by reading it on her brooch),
and then is self-deceived, mistaking the moon for morning
daylight. Structurally, the three tricks initiate con
flict, then shift the initiative to Tegeus, and finally
prepare for the replacement of Dynamenefs delusions by
rationality.
With Doto now asleep, the conflict shifts from
irritable bickering--"drinking is harmful to our tempers"
(p. 22)--to dialectics:
Here in a grave, separate from any life,
. . . My body ventured
A step towards interrupting your perfection
of purpose. . . .
It has been a place of blessing to me. (p. 24)
Tegeus now sees that Dynamene1s purposes, if his
own wishes are to be fulfilled, must be re-directed from
death to life. When the vital moment, the present, is
arrested, dramatic action stops and the intrigue moves
forward by linguistic gesturing and rational manipulation
the Perilous Cemetery becomes the Perilous Chapel. Like
his archetypal predecessor, the quester who seeks to
remove the curse from the Waste Land by asking the proper
questions, Tegeus introduces ambiguity into Dynamene*s
death-wish. Moreover, his offer to take Dynamene to her
dead husband in Hades, and then return, manifests the
archetypal three-day journey of a god through sacrificial
death, disappearance, and rebirth.
During the highly charged central debate, three
43
implicitly analogous situations develop simultaneously:
the game of passion, the lawsuit, and the sacramental
meal. The cortezia, or game of the passions, is primarily
a test of self-control carried on with affability, sophis
tication, and patience; when one gives in, the game is
over (Doto lays down the rules in her first speech).
Moreover, Dynamene as defendant and Tegeus as plaintiff
each construct differing versions of the same situation,
the fated, impersonal crisis to bring the recognition
that one version is realistic, the other illusory (when
the situations are ironically reversed). And within
the context of the sacramental meal, the two co-partici
pants will resolve Dynamene*s inner conflict (body vs.
soul) and Tegeus' outer conflict (man vs. state) by
spiritually assimilating the MuniverseM--symbolized by
wine (life-blood) and bread (body) within themselves.
The discussion, which Tegeus initiates and controls,
begins by showing that every possible viewpoint is
incomplete,
If we persuade ourselves
To one particular persuasion . . .
. . . there must be areas of soul
Lying unproductive therefore (p. 25),
confirming the tragedy of existence. That is, the closed
circular rhythm of the remote planetary universe, by its
exclusion of man, is a vast, impersonal engine of torture
which commits man to an unending sparagmos, a meaningless,
44
repeated tearing apart of the sacrificial human body:
We go round and round . .
. There'll come a time
When it will be unbearable to continue (p. 26).
When the deeply engrossed lovers recall a chance
childhood meeting, the very association of their second
meeting with the three fates, "Klotho, Lachesis, and
Atropos!" (p. 27), and the demonic cycle of life and death
they symbolize, breaks the circle. The scenic expansion
resulting from renewed perspective into the past in turn
imposes order on the hitherto chaotic universe with its
remote, unfathomable gods, who "forget us or tease us /
Or helplessly look on" (p. 28). The closed cycle must be
transcended by an act of faith, a recognition that they
were destined to love each other. Tegeus,
was born to fill a gap
In the world's experience, which had never known
Chromis loving Dynamene (p. 28),
ironically foreshadowing the resolution, the gap in the
row of hanged traitors which the body of Virilius will
fill. Then, while Dynamene inverts the transcendence,
logically associating desire with the dead Virilius—
"Love's in Hades" (p. 30)--Tegeus willingly undergoes
ritual death, "Call me / Death instead of Chromis" (p. 30),
a symbolic anticipation of his pretended, then actual
substitution for Virilius.
In a brilliant metaphysical speech, Tegeus imagi
natively transcends Dynamene* a rigid love-death polarity
45
by equating earth with hell and assuming Virilius's
persona:
If I had been your husband, . . .
. . . I should say 'I have left
My wealth warm on the earth, and, hell, earth
needs it * (p. 31).
That is, as Tegeus repeats Virilius In love, in life,
Dynamene should accept his ritual death as a substitute
for her real death and his life for the moment--which is
really all that counts--as a ritual resurrection of
Virilius.
However, Dynamene is momentarily unable to transcend
the gap between the Many and the One and as a result
herself undergoes spiritual rending: "Stop, stop, I shall
be dragged apart" (p. 31). But her passion, her pre
occupation with honor, and her love of Tegeus resolve her
inner conflict; they kiss and both attain spiritual
transport:
I feel as the gods feel:
This is their sensation of life, not a man’s:
Their suspension of immortality, to enrich
Themselves with time (p. 32).
As soon as Dynamene is identified with the cyclical pro
cess of life and death, fate enters: Dynamene learns
that "Zeus" brought Tegeus to the tomb. When Tegeus
leaves to check his "boys," his parting apostrophe to
Dynamene, "Darling loom of magic" (p. 33) prepares for
a crisis which Dynamene--like the three fates— alone
brings on, and alone can resolve.
46
Doto then awakens to restore through parody the
perspective of "real life," for the scene imitates Dyna-
me.ie's dream-recapitulation with which the play began.
While Doto slept, Tegeus "came and went, came and went,"
a phrase which not only identifies Tegeus with Virilius,
"a coming man / Already gone" (p. 3) to the grave; it
also connects Dynamene's fortunes in love with those
of Doto: both are twice deserted. Moreover, by fore
shadowing Tegeus1 death by court-martial or suicide, the
scene prepares for a demonic reversal of the theme, "Death
is a kind of love." But as Dynamene's love leads toward
Tegeus* death, so will Virilius's mock-death fulfil
Dynamene's love for Tegeus.
Tegeus then returns to turn both Dynamene1s dream
of love and Doto's dream of death to nightmare. Like
Doto, who hadn't "a bone left" (p. 35), Tegeus is "dis
embodied": one of the criminals had been cut down by
relatives for burial, a possibility Tegeus had been
posted to prevent. Unlike Dynamene, who lost love and
awakened to find a corpse, Tegeus lost a corpse and
returned to love. But for Tegeus, like Dynamene before
him, love and death have alike become trivial and inexor
able, dialectically involved in the same closed fatal
cycle.
But a guilty scapegoat is found for Tegeus--Virilius;
his death has invoked the love affair and the consequent
47
disembodiment all around. By discovering that "love is
the only discipline / And we’re disciples of love”
(pp. 41-42), Dynamene fulfills Tegeus’ desire to "put
a moat of tears / Round her [ Dynamene's] bastion of
love, and save The World” (p. 12). As love is a kind of
death, religion is a kind of war. When Dynamene1s body,
metonymically representing the world, is suffused by
Tegeus’ love, which forms a blood-tie between them both,
so like a substitute Christ, Virilius "moves again in
the world, accomplishing / Our welfare" (p. 43).
An analysis of the structure of A Phoenix Too Fre
quent indicates two significant deviations from Greek
New Comedy. The claims of Virilius upon Dynamene’s
loyalty, forming the main obstacle to the lovers' union,
is more symbolic than real, though no less compelling.
At the same time, Virilius’ power to condemn Dynamene is
all the more effective and dramatic for being inter
nalized in her will; his dead body not only exercises a
power over her he never had in life, but the corpse may
be discarded once the values which survive him are seen
to be as lifeless as his dead body. Another deviation is
striking: the comic resolution of the crisis results
not from plot manipulation alone, but also from a long
chain of persuasive rationalizations. "Language as
symbolic gesture" imitates the rebirth ritual: the play
becomes a dramatic representation of thought, a rationale
48
of human progress toward emotional maturity.
Characterization
Despite the first-century Roman setting, classical
mythology, and their pseudo-Latin names, Dynamene, Tegeus,
and Doto are Londoner members of an intellectual elite.
They work out their mid-twentieth century anti-rationalism
against the backdrop of an ambiguously decadent and
totalitarian political order. The succession of one
triangle (Doto-Tegeus-Dynamene) by another (Tegeus-
Dynamene-Virilius) shapes the action within the sphere
of comedy. The complicated interplay between the two
successive intrigues is another expression of Wylie
Sypher's observation that
comic action is double, since it is both a rational
debate and a phallic orgy. Logic and passion appear
together [to preserve] the dual and wholly incom
patible meanings of sacrifice and feast, cruelty and
festival, logic and license.^
Doto is characterized by her name, her ambivalent
roles as mock antagonist and intermediary, and her
clowning parodying of artificial social conventions. Her
active essence is indulgence of the senses; she acts
as her name sounds:
But men are in before I wish they wasn’t.
I think quickly enough, but I go behindhand
2
"Introduction and Appendix," Comedy (Garden City,
1956), p. 218.
49
With what I ought to be saying. It's a kind
of stammer [Do-to]
In my way of life (p. 36).
Moreover, her name recalls the phrase "dumb as a dodo,"
labelling her a foolish character in a "wise" situation.
Her attempted seduction of Tegeus not only provides the
necessary "parallel in low life to the serious part"-*
which exposes her mistress's pretentious chastity to the
perspective of "real life," but it forms a second triangle
which effectively initiates conflict through passion.
For she has deep roots in the fabliau tradition: in the
simplest terms, her function is to bring Dynamene and
Tegeus together, initiate their love-making, and then
withdraw. These dual roles, seductress and intermediary,
are effectively combined by her social status. She can
speak the truth because she has nothing to lose. She
easily becomes Dynamene1s extension (through parody), as
well as her counterpart (through association). When
Tegeus lists the virtues he has found in the grave, Doto
speaks more wisely than she knows: "He means you, or
you and me, or me" (p. 17). For Doto not only objecti
fies the sensual half of Dynamene1s body-soul polarity;
she restores a sense of epiphany to her mistress’s closed,
tragic circle of experience: "Death's a new interest
^William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk,
n. d. ) , p. 29.
50
in life" (p. 4 ) .
Virilius appears almost as a god-figure, represen
ting the Roman empire as the state embodies the sanction
of the shadowy gods, and behind them, the fatal revolutions
of the spheres: "You could regulate the sun by him"
(p. 3). This phrase not only parodies the now-ironic
cliche about the British Empire, but implies that Virilius
was (too) punctual and methodical. Alive, he resembled
Zeus on Olympus, stodgily correct, glib, and unimagina
tive, with the "cautious voice which made / Balance-sheets
sound like Homer and Homer sound / Like balance sheets"
(p. 5). But both he and Rome, whose essences are repre
sented by simulacra, the corpses above and below, have
paradoxically assumed heightened powers over life--to
which they have no just claim-~through deathliness. That
is, the scene embodies the quality of the dilemma which
is imposed upon Dynamene. From the time of his entrance,
Tegeus correctly senses that he must change the scene—
revise Dynamene's world-view by dialectic, parody, and
dramatic posturing--if he is to replace Virilius. The
ignominious fate of Viriliusfs corpse is ironic and
fitting: his hanging suggests that he is getting a taste
of his own medicine (in being kept out of Hades for
trying to send Dynamene there), that he has met the
deserved fate of all politicians, and that a society
which can be deceived by the substitution of a politician
51
for a real man deserves to be misgoverned.
Throughout the play, the repeated references to
doubleness, mysterious transformations, and inverted
value symbols all rationalize the idea of a return which
Tegeus embodies. For example, Doto's early reflection
on body and soul making two men of one, together with
her concluding comment on Tegeus, "The master. Both
the masters" (p. 43), confirms the idea of ineluctable
fate implicit in the phoenix legend, and ties beginning
and end together. Moreover, as fertility (symbolized
by Virilius's "virility") is the soul of time (indicated
by the pun of "tedious" on Tegeus), so is Tegeus the
incarnation of Virilius.
Although Tegeus enters with a great deal of authority
and bluster, Doto quickly discovers his lack of courage,
"For a member / of the forces, you're peculiarly queasy"
(p. 10), maliciously attributes his concern to salacious
ness, and degrades him--only a corporal, anyway— to a
mere uniform. To the disappointed Dynamene, Tegeus is
a stock miles gloriosus, a "Quack, charlatan" who, in
spite of his ostentatious swearing, has "never known the
gods. . . . He's completely spurious" (p. 14).
At the same time, Tegeus's deeper impulses include
a meditative bent, and a naively enthusiastic conserva
tism. He is depicted as curious, generous, clever, and,
most important, a sensitive judge of the social
52
proprieties: "rendering to the living its rightful poise
is not unimportant" (p. 19).
Tegeus' new name, "Chromis," with its "breadlike
sound" (p. 22), together with his refusal to call Dyna-
meme by name— "it makes you real" (p. 22)--masks his
shift from buffoon to eiron character. He now employs a
socratic technique, asking questions whose answers are
implied by yet more questions; along with his new role
goes his already established pose of being less than he
is, even nothing. At the same time he plays with Dyna
mene his sacramental, legalistic game: archetypal asso
ciations from the pagan and Christian traditions coalesce
both to complicate his character and to clarify his
active essence. He more and more resembles a persona
which simultaneously fulfills the archetypes of Adam,
Prometheus, and Christ. Allusions to apples and dust,
fire and chains, and Tegeus' fear of crucifixion appear
often enough to link Tegeus with these mythic characters.
When Dynamene identifies the rebirth of love, the renewal
of the flow of the life-blood through the universe, and
hence the seasonal fertility of the crops, Tegeus-Chromis
closely resembles the Piers Plowman archetype:
A humourous ploughman goes whistling to a team
Of sad sorrow, to and fro in your brow
And over your arable cheek (p. 29).
However, Tegeus is not a god; the mythic parallels
only suggest his function and purpose: as a quester who
53
restores fertility to a Waste Land laid sterile by the
impotence of its King. Tegeus restores a spiritual
"fountain of confidence / When the world is arid" (p. 24).
The crisis of the missing body, resolved by "elevating"
Virilius--symbol of an easily-fooled, obfuscating Empire--
from scoundrel to scapegoat, grants Dynamene life with
love and honor and transforms the miles gloriosus cor
poral, by his rhetorical contempt of death, into a true
hero .
Dynamene is characterized by her name, her passive
mythic function, and an obsession which is a fundamental
donnee of the drama: the comic life of the psyche as
rationalizing The implicit paradox in Dynamene*s name
(dying + meaning) is clarified by Tegeus’ remark that
"death . . . may be life's reason" (p. 25) and her efforts
to pass, like the princess in the Sleeping Beauty marchen,
from innocence to experience.
Dynamene's extended, slighting characterization of
Virilius emphasizes her loneliness, her latent sensuality,
and loss of purpose: "I taught [Virilius] to appreciate
me" (p. 5). She is left sterile, spiritually dry: "Now
I keep no flower, except in the vase / of the tomb"
(p. 3). Moreover, her anger at Doto's continuing concern
with life's routines, her own self-contradictory denial
of social pleasures, and above all, pain at mention of
"the beautiful world" (p. 5) indicate her closeness to an
54
ancient character-type, the churlish lady, the refuser
of festivity. Although she condemns the desire for
reputation and dignity, she has carefully obtained
official approval of her fast and views her act as a
public "sacrifice / Of self, solus" (p. 5), snobbishly
telling Doto "our tears are very different" (p. 5).
Her comic confusion as she awakens, first thinking
she is home in bed, then believing Tegeus to be Charon,
is a functional demonstration of her "humourous" repe
tition of a single vice or preoccupation. Until Tegeus
enters, this dominant desire is manifested chiefly as an
eagerness to accept myth for reality, to become confused
by facts.
Tegeus' juxtaposition of grave and vegetative nature,
the scenic equivalents of Dynamene's "perfection of
purpose" and Tegeus' "renewed faith in human nature"
(p. 24) introduces ambivalence into Dynamene'a hitherto
fixed intent. When she admits, "Perhaps I jumped to a
wrong conclusion" (p. 16), it becomes evident that
Dynamene*s stoicism is largely a repressed hedonism, and
alternatives with clear moral associations begin to
emerge. When she later complains, "It's death / I desire,
not you," Tegeus replies "Where's the difference?" (p. 30).
He has won, for as Denis de Rougemont has acutely observed,
"The approach of death acts as a goad to sensuality. In
55
the full sense of the verb, it aggravates desire.
The subtle, psychoanalytic penetration into Dynamene1s
unconscious by Tegeus not only weakens her dependence upon
the approval of the now-remote Virilius— "My husband and
all he stood for" (p. l9)--but brings the discovery that
the fates had parted them as children, only to bring them
back together again. Moreover, when Tegeus idealizes the
innocence of the Dynamene he knew as a child, Dynamene
replies astringently, "I was quite plain and fat and I
was usually / Hitting someone" (p. 28). If it is remembered
that the Freudian school of psychologists holds that the
representation of the wrath of God is directly related to
the infantile fear of a parent, the shift of Dynamene's
allegiance from the deified Virilius (the projected
father-image) to the sympathetically human Tegeus is
entirely consistent with her belief that "love is the
only discipline" (p. 49), and that she and Tegeus are
the "disciples of love" (p. 42). Once Dynamene joins
Tegeus-Chromis in a religious love-feast--"Let me unload
something of my lips’ longing / On to yours receiving"
(p. 30)--making of their passion a means of spiritual
transubstantiation, she undergoes the predicted "regenera
tion" (p. 12 ).
From this point of view, Tegeus' childish death-threat
^Love in the Western World (New York, 1956), p. 53.
56
is a brilliant tactical maneuver, a rebirth pattern which
actualizes the transmutation of Dynamene from naughty
child to Magna Mater--'fThen I shall be / Creation" (p. 52).
The link of past and present, One and Many, brings with
it the discovery that the living forces that make natural
events follow reasonable laws are identified with the
blood that unites the members of the tribe:
Maybe I [Tegeus] blundered past you, taking your look,
And scarcely acknowledge how a star
Ran through me to live in the brooks of my
blood forever (p. 28).
She becomes the life principle which "restores" Tegeus
later, the elan vital of the universe: "You have the
skies already" (p. 32). When Tegeus leaves, calling
Dynamene the "Darling loom of magic" (p. 33), she becomes
identified with the three weavers, the Fates whom both
God and men obey. Paradoxically, as Dynamene1s love
brings on Tegeus' mock-death, so does Virilius' death
finally result in Dynamene1s true love, a revolutionary
transformation.
Characterization in The Phoenix Too Frequent unites
the refined, the universal, and the low, positions roughly
approximating the functions of Dynamene, Tegeus, and Doto
at their entrance, maintaining Fry's insistence on meaning
at various levels of the action. However, the characters
exchange and parody roles as the situation changes, as
each adopts a characteristic mode to find, as death
57
ironically joins and separates them, Ma reason for
living" (p. 25). Changes in the relationships between
the characters coincide with modifications of their
attitudes; for example, Dynamene becomes less class
conscious after the arrival of Tegeus, as Doto becomes
more so, in mock-resentment at losing the corporal: "I
was born nether, madam, though not / As nether as some"
(p. 36). The emphasis shifts between earlier stress
on the obstructing Virilius and later accentuation on
the reconciling Tegeus, Doto's characterization preparing
mainly for the love-game.
In the presence of the catalytic Virilius, Tegeus
is transformed, but largely because Dynamene wants it
that way. When Tegeus enters to oppose her love-death
wish and is not repulsed, it becomes evident that he
is in fact not the custodian of a dead society, but its
rebellious prisoner; he thus becomes a worthy representa
tive of the new society to which both aspire. Fate and
free will coincide in the cognitio, with its characteris
tically curious Fry inversion: Dynamene has been looking
for the one who has been looking for her all along.
Language
Imagery.— The imagery in A Phoenix Too Frequent forms
a total structure corresponding to the basic rhythms of
the phoenix myth: a phase of painful oppression, a
58
binding or paralysis of the life-force, is followed by
a release of that force. In terms of characterization,
the progression consists of movement from hallucination,
short-sightedness, and dizziness to clarity, stability,
and a confident sense of perspective. The forward urge
and backward swing of the journey and upward thrust
and downward plunge of the natural cycles are identified
with the rotating polarities of the universe. That is,
the emotional rhythms of Hades arid Paradise, the sexual
rhythms of maleness and femaleness, and the cosmic rhythms
of day and night are drawn together by an underlying sense
of recurrences— of going round and round, out and in,
r'gressM-ing.
The sense that life is a closed, tragic progression
is conveyed by circular images of chaos, chains of meta
phors of disease, pain, and sickness, and natural images
of winter, sterility, and deathly quiescence. Images of
circles, spirals, and funnels like the spinning tomb,
spider's web, whirlpool, and gales of dust all suggest
a basic human lawlessness underlying an artificial social
order. Dynamene's reference to Virilius* "curling calli
graphy," and Tegeus* later comment on the "ribbon to bind
the unruly curls of living" (p. 12), repeat in a purely
domestic setting an important symbol of the play, the
wheeling motion of the cosmos which by its supreme self-
sufficiency reduces man to a futile, tortured vegetable.
59
That the sex-drive and death-urge alike resemble
the spinning tortures of Paola and Francesca, with the
accompanying sensations of heat, sickness, and total
isolation is indicated by Doto’s early prayer to Aphro
dite, ’’Don't keep turning men over in my mind," (p. 1),
followed by an allusion to Prometheus, the heretical
fire-bringer. Tegeus' reference to the sky as an "oval
twirling blasphemy" (p. 12) recalls Dynamene's picture
of the spitting cyclops, the one-eyed blacksmith whose
symbolical associations are telescoped into, the conceit
of a frenzied, hectic universe consumed by the burning
desire to bring forth unnatural, grotesque monsters:
. roots sizzle into hyacinth
And orchis, and the sand puts out the lion,
Roaring yellow, and oceans bud with porpoises,
Blenny, tunny, and the almost unexisting
Blindfish; throats are cut, the masterpiece
Looms out of labour (p. 6).
Once passion overwhelms Tegeus1 Promethean sense
of idealism and human service— "I love all men" (p. 12)--
his own body becomes the tortured battleground of strug
gle and endurance against hopeless odds: he at first
feels sick, then is tortured by Dynamene1s "flame of
sorrow" (p. 16). At the same time, Dynamene's preoc
cupation with symbols of mortality and Tegeus' with
symbols of ideality are assimilated by the ageless battle
of the sexes; the fated rivalry of the spider and the
bee provides a potent conceit for the opposition of
60
narcissism and self-forgetfulness, on the one hand, and
the dimly shadowed acts of the three Fates, on the other.
Dynamene*s associations with the spider are countered by
Tegeus* ’’honeysuckle . . . because of the bees” (p. 13);
his painting of the corded god and Proteus braiding the
wind, like Dynamene's hawser-like tie to Virilius, are
"threads of slaughter” (p. 16), carrying overtones of
compulsive bondage to the death-urge, with its pain and
deprivation; before saying good-bye to his "loom of
magic" Cp. 33) who had felt imprisoned in an armory,
Tegeus is stung by a thread of Dynamene*s hair (p. 32).
If Tegeus sees his own situation in terms of the
rigors of soldierly discipline, Dynamene’s inner conflicts
are expressed by religious symbols: her mortification of
the flesh is nun-like. She is,
cloistered
In a colourless landscape of winter thought
Where the approaching Spring is desired oblivion
(p. 14),
a telescoped conceit identifying a deep psychological
need for release from conflict and tension with the
wintry quiescence of nature. Her images of pent-up
chastity occur again and again as the glassy sea, "a
terrible black crystal of grief” (p. 15); her sense of
sterility isolates her not only from life and society—
the "squalid suburbs" (p. 13)— but from Tegeus, who must
cross the "wrenching ice" (p. 30) between them.
61
The growing passion between Tegeus and Dynamene
heavily utilizes sacramental symbolism, carrying as it
does the mystical ritual of transubstantiation--another
manifestation of the phoenix myth. By partaking of the
wine and bread which signify the blood and body of man
kind, the lovers become the universe; their consubstan-
tial love unites water and earth, river and vegetative
nature, the seas of cosmic space with the waters of the
earthly ocean. Accordingly, Dynamene resembles a spiri
tual Waste Land whose dryness is prolonged by the impotence
in death of the once-virile Virilius; the birth of love
at the arrival of the quester, Tegeus, resembles the
ritual "freeing of the waters."
The spiritual, natural, and sexual culminations are
all as similated by the quest-motif, which emerges through
the imagery of a sea-journey, a purgation on a massive
scale of all the "mildew, verdigris / rust, woodrot"
that lead to degeneration of the elan vital. References
to Tegeus as Charon, to the third day in the tomb, and
then to Tegeus as a gorgon swimming upward through tears
contrast with the winged Virilius-ship; Tegeus’ voluntary
offer to take Dynamene "to Hades, leave you with your
husband / And come back to the world" (p. 2 5) is a similar
tour d’abolie but he embodies rescue, not desertion. His
mock-journey would be the first "step towards . . . renewed
faith in human nature" (p. 24). The archetype underlying
62
the mutual drive towards "regeneration” is that of the
death, disappearance, and rebirth of the harvest god,
whose descent into darkness and depths followed by an
ascent into the light corresponds with the rhythmic
polarities of grief and hope, life urge and death instinct,
and the male-female sexual rhythms. Symbols of female
ness embody the slow downward plunge from light to dark
such as the sun trailing a hand in the Styx, drowning in
grief, or Tegeus’ admiring visualization of Dynamene's
"body / Descending stairs in floating light" (p. 31).
The light-dark contrast, hugely magnified by recurring
associations of Dynamene with stellar symbols, embodies
overtones of unfulfilled potency; although earlier
"sighing down the air like a slow comet" (p. 8), Dynamene
is awakened by Tegeus’ love like "bright grain whirling /
Over the black threshing floor of space" (p. 29), a
striking combination of cosmic, circular, and light-dark
imagery.
In contrast to symbols embodying the passive, iner
tial sinking of the female sensibilities are symbols of
maleness, expressing a rapid, aggressive, upward thrust
of vegetation toward the light, of a river toward the
sea, and of daybreak. The "little Phoebuses rising and
setting” (p. 22) in Tegeus’ eyes are Dynamene's fanciful
projection of his rise "on a wave of life" (p. 40),
the flood of idealism which sublimates both personal and
63
community life-urges. Moreover, the interplay which is
fused by the juxtaposition of Dynamene’s symbols of mor
tality and Tegeus’ symbols of ideality indicates a
metaphorical equation of daylight with the darkness of
desire and the sleep of the sun with the awakening of
the passions, light with quiescent femaleness, darkness
with active maleness. Realized love, as in symbols of
heated baths and falls of tears, is warm, cleansing,
and pulsating; ideal love, as in the cheek "pale as a
pool' (p. 12), is cool and still. Moreover, if the sea-
journey is a metaphor for life, the flying ship forms a
dynamic counterpart for bastion and moat, cloister and
frozen landscape, symbols of defensive sterility and stag
nation. The symbolism of the drowning sailor, held by
others’ hands, not only connects the renewing force of
the "vegetable tides" (p. 5) with Dynamene's withering
flower, but prepares for the symbolic "raising up" of
Dynamene1s intelligence by Tegeus’ mind, a dynamic symbol
of maleness which re-emerges in Tegeus1 passionate invo
cation of the "fatal love":
Since I have to die, let me die here, in love
Promoted by your kiss to tower, in dying
High above my birth (p. 40).
The barrier of chastity between childhood and
maturity, man and woman calls forth ritual and release,
both hinders and confirms passage, and forms the psycholo
gical basis for the imaginative linking of love and death.
64
The rites of passage through birth, puberty, and death,
as well as the transmutation of chastity to consummation
between lovers are represented as a zone of miracle (p. 30),
the crossing of two troublesome roads (p. 27), a gap in
the world’s experience, and "the dark high seas / of our
separation" (p. 28). The "sudden melodious escape" of the
young river represents the "freeing of the waters" motif,
and symbolically clusters music, love, the male sex drive,
and the seasonal return of fertility. In his efforts to
transmute the horns of Dynamene*s dilemma, "the opposite
corruptions, / The world and the grave" (p. 19), to a
verbal paradox, Tegeus projects the body’s life blood,
which contains like the wine "a twin nature, winter and
warmth in one, / Moon and meadow" (p. 19), onto the
world's rivers. Continence, by damming up the desires,
increases their force; desire wells up from within like
underground streams: "Nature . . . winds her furtive
stream all through our reason" (p. 24;. Tegeus’ love,
therefore, becomes "a fountain of confidence / When the
world is arid" (p. 24), a metaphor likewise found in
imagery of rain, tears, and a spring thaw.
At the same time, to signify her sense of growing
identity with Tegeus, Dynamene links music, love, and the
harvest festival together, the wine acting to
flute our senses
As though a music played in harvest hollows
65
And a movement was in the swathes of our memory
(p. 20),
the converse of Tegeus1 complaint that the "poor musician,
existence" (p. 18) tortured him with love. Music imagery
is used to represent the conjunction of love and death,
fancifully by Doto, and with pathos by the others. Dyna-
meme, anticipating Tegeus' crucial intuition, "Death is
a kind of love" (p. 8), not only recalls Virilius* summary
epithet for her, "harmonious" (p. 5), but looks ahead to
Tegeus* desire to "sing in 'her] blood for ever" (p. 31).
Moreover, bird symbolism, with its song, flight, and
euphemistic association with the bees, is linked organi
cally with the fated perpetuation of the species through
sexual fulfillment. The wings of the Virilius-ship,
like the alabaster bird-statue, prepare for the phoenix
like appearance of Tegeus, at first accused of lacking
a "feather of the supernatural" (p. 14). Moreover, the
"jabbing, funeral, sleek- / With-omen raven" (p. 16),
a symbol of the prediction and malignity, is transmuted
by desire-fulfillment to Dynamene's inebriated visualiza
tion of a "nightingale / Sobbing among the pears" (p. 19),
a startling conjunction of love, existence, and death
like that of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale." Informed by
an imaginative assimilation of disparaties implicit in
the telescoping of the Many and the One, chains of basi
cally simple metaphors— food and drink, quest or journey,
66
light and darkness, and sexual fulfillment— can be organi
cally fused.
The characters in Phoenix are afflicted with ’’double
vision," a state which differs from the interplay of
myopia and hyperopia between saint and community, chorus
and hero in The Boy With a Cart. For everyone in Phoenix
is seeking a "new perspective," (p. 23), a "climax to the
vision" (p. 19), an epiphany which flashes behind reality
to illuminate "the apparition of the world within one
body" (p. 32). Doto's naive wonder at Dynamene1s body-
soul dichotomy, Tegeus1 complaint of a "stigmatism in
his stars" (p. 15), and Dynamene's symbolic susceptibility
to "two conflicting norths" (p. 31) are all symptomatic
of the unending internal struggle of conscious and uncon
scious feeling and the understanding. Dynamene feels
this inner rending more keenly than the others:
When the thoughts would die, the instincts will
set sail
For life, and when the thoughts are alert for life
The instincts will rage to be destroyed on the
rocks (p. 18).
From a sense of personal sparagmos and a search for
its cause emerges the Creation motif, the archetypal act
which identifies the emergence of the soul from sickness
to health, the universe from chaos to unity, and phoenix
from ashes to rebirth. The cohesive force which imposes
meaning upon movement, purposive force upon random motion,
is the formation of a centripetal counterbalance to the
67
centrifugal energetic procreation: the transferred
meanings of the symbolic idioms of love, war, and religion.
The sense of correspondences between antitheses,
"Love's in Hades" (p. 50), leads inevitably to the mul
tiple inversions manifested in Tegeus’ replacement of
Virilius, Virilius' "hanging" to save Tegeus, Doto's
clownish imitation of her mistress, and many other such.
The succession of innocence by experience.
What is madness
To those who only observe, is often wisdom
To those to whom it happens (p. 31),
represents psychologically Tegeus' polarities of "untrust
worthy, / Unpredictable, unenlightened night" and "a
vision, a hope, a promise" (p. 18). The transcendent
unity of the two, "dust with dust releasing such a light"
(p. 52), is a re-embodiment of the primal union, in turn
telescoped on a universal scale: Dynamene "shall be
creation" (p. 33). With affirmation comes clear vision,
clean skies, spiritual health: "No cloud can rise on
love, no hovering thought / fidget" (p. 34). The world
is no longer a fiery, throbbing, hellish conglomeration of
disease spoor, whirling dust, and hellish apparitions:
"Time runs again; the void is space again; / Space has
life again" (p. 38).
Vers if icat ion.--The meter is predominantly blank
verse, however, without the stasis of interspersed lyric
which coincided with the moments of extended contemplation
68
in The Boy With a Cart. Regular iambic pentameter is
extremely rare: "It seemed quite lively then. And now
I know . . (p. 4). More frequently, the accepted
complication of the norm--the inverted first foot, the
dropping of the first slack syllable, the extra slack
syllable internal to the line—lends flexibility to dia
logue. In the following lines,
But our tears are very different. For me
The world is all with Charon, all, all .
(p. 5),
the first line includes all the conventional deviations;
the second, except for being one syllable short, is per
fect iambic pentameter. As in The Boy With a Cart,
anapests indicate a journey:
I could see you to Hades, leave you with your husband
And come back to the world (p. 25).
The doubleness previously indicated in structure,
characterization, and imagery emerges in meter as punning
sound-sense correspondences, the parallel sequence of
like syntactical entities, and tricks of repetition and
inversion. Puns occur in lines like "Such a stern
prow, / Such a proud stern" (p. 2), "Mourning has made
a warren / In her spirit" (p. 9), and "Oblit--oh, what
a pity / To oblit" (p. 14). A series of phrases explaining
Dynamene’s willingness to drink.
Because I have been curt, because you are kind,
And because I’m extremely thirsty (p. 19),
builds parallel clauses, the first two ending with umlauted
69
antitheses, to a comic anti-climax. The same process can
be observed in triple epithets, "untrustworthy, / Unpre
dictable, unenlightened" (p. 18), a trick of nervous
repetition, indicative of moody contemplation, "always,
always" (p. 17), or excited confusion, "And why should
insolence matter. . . . I don't know why it should matter"
(pp. 14-15); sometimes, the term is repeated by several
of the characters with a subtle shift in tense or argument.
Dynamene drinks to her
husband and all he stood for.
TEGEUS: Stands for.
DYNAMENE: Stands for.
Within the lines alliteration and assonance are
woven together, as in "sleep / With a bald bee-keeper who
was wearing his boots" (p. 1), the "b's," "ee's," and
"oo's" producing a comic pattern of incongruity. Fry
theorizes on sound and sense when Dynamene criticizes
the sound of Tegeus' name as "very thin," and thinks of
a name with,
darker vowels.
And your consonants should have a slight angle,
And a certain temperature, (p. 20)
In summary, Fry's primary act of representing the
structure utilizes two social planes, one superimposed
upon the other, each a parody of its opposite, which
imply the quality of "doubleness" which draws structure,
characterization, and language together. Both planes
are represented schematically by the stage setting; the
70
world above represents group achievement, empirical
pure-action, and common sense. Dynamene's society hangs
criminals impartially en masse and fits her actions into
their scene, a pleasure-pain world of zoning laws and
sanitation regulations. The world below, however, rep
resents dark individual desire: lonely man in a hostile
universe.
But it is characteristic of Fry's method that neither
plane exists in isolation. Characterization, his second
act of representation, reveals that the truly lonely man
is not Virilius, the insensitive social animal below, but
Tegeus above, who is isolated by the very society he
defends. When Tegeus enters the tomb, his personal ritual
death makes clear the actual death of his society. Thus
the simple contrast of life and death, actus and status
in the widest sense, imposes'on the action the movement
from a society controlled by the freedom of youth.
Fry’s third act of representation, the making of the
language, exhibits a contrast between leitmotifs, the
dynamic and the static, fancy and imagination. In the
image clusters, each element is extended centrifugally by
a sense of correspondence between the Many and the One,
the basic formal principle of the metaphysical poets, and
centripetally by wit. The imagery assimilates the for
ward urge and backward swing of the journey (including
dream vs. reality, heaven and hell, Charon and Prometheus,
71
the progression of the seasons), the cyclical recurrences
of daily probability (light and dark, fire and water,
heat and cold, maleness and femaleness), to the cosmic
pattern of fixed, cosmic polarities (height and depth
imagery, air and ocean, stellar Images). The closest
that symbolism approaches to allegory is in the extended
conceits and personifications. Similes and the "pathetic
fallacy," both constricting techniques which impose logi
cal links on disparate activities, are rare; rather the
linking of idea and image which dominates the poetic
technique, as in "Would you consider we go round and
round? . . . We concertina" (p. 26), should be classed as
wit, the use of analogies which are based on two or three
sensory similarities, but fit ambiguously into any of the
multiplicities of leitmotifs. Structurally, the move
ment of the play assimilates spheres usually not considered
analogous within all-pervading archetypes, notably the
creation, quest, rites de passage, and sacramental motifs.
The consequent violation of standards of decorum is here
particularly appropriate to rapid changes of mood during
a brief time span, the striking differentiation between
the character of Doto (who uses obvious, dyslogistic
imagery to dislocate the interwoven network of association
found in the speeches of Tegeus and Dynamene) and the
bathetic degrading of stereotyped imagery which permits
more fundamental identifications to emerge. Within the
progression of structure, characterization, and language,
the myth of transformation, reversals in characterization,
the basic comic technique of repetition, and suggestions
of universality in each particular object are perfectly
unified.
CHAPTER THREE: THE FIRSTBORN
Structure
The Firstborn^- is structured like a conventional
revenge tragedy. The play begins with the return of
Noses, after a decade of self-exile for murder, to free
his people. The Pharaoh Seti agrees upon one condition:
Moses must again lead the Egyptian armies to meet the
threats of civil war and a Libyan invasion. Although
Moses refuses, his nephew Shendi is easily corrupted by
an officership in the Egyptian army.
The tragedy then completes the counterbalancing
movement begun by Moses' return. The arrival of the
worsening plagues brings concessions but not total victory.
Although Moses tries to avert the final catastrophic
destruction of the "firstborn," both Shendi and Rameses
die, and the Hebrews are freed. The structure therefore
resembles an 'X': the upward stroke represents Moses*
career, the downward stroke Seti's, while the interstice
occurs with the confrontation of Seti by Moses with
irresistible moral superiority: a crucified victim of
the Pharaoh’s taskmasters.
1-New York, 1958.
73
74
The first edition of The Firstborn was published in
1946. Then Fry altered the play "immediately after the
Edinburgh Festival production in 1948" (p. vii), as he
reveals in the Foreword, and for the 1952 edition,
"revised those alterations, refashioned the last scene,
and cut further" (p. vii). In his second edition, the
author eliminates passages of philosophizing and inconsis
tencies of character; he also cuts sections which slow the
action with ornamental imagery, cliches, or syntactic
over-cleverness. The third edition, published in 1958,
"incorporates alterations . . . made for the New York
production (April 1958)" (p. viii). This version, pre
sumably the one the author prefers, is the basis of the
present study. Fry has again cut the play, mostly in
the last scene, in ways that modify Moses’ character
rather ambiguously.
The stage setting at the beginning of the play
symbolizes the ambivalence which develops within the
action. A palatial terrace overlooks an uncompleted
pyramid, and beyond it lie the disregarded Hebrew dead,
buried in the drouth-stricken sand. Although the "rep
resentative" Egyptian and Hebrew families meet on equal
terms, the political chasm between the deified rulers
and dehumanized slaves appears in the expressionistic
alternation of the scenes between the palace and Miriam's
tent, in the piercing off-stage noises, and in the
75
difficult problem of identity. Moreover, those characters
who cross the racial barriers--Moses, Raineses, and Anath--
are uninvited intruders tolerated by political necessity.
As the characters search desperately for abiding
personal intimacies, their efforts are frustrated in ways
that suggest fate and retribution on a parallel, but
unseen and eternal plane. The same "doubleness" appears
in a series of rituals in the guise of social occasions:
the arrivals, departures, celebrations, and reunions
which usually signify rites of passage, mock-deifications,
exorcisms, atonements, and sacrifices. Despite these
ambiguities, the play possesses the rational unity of a
single abstract idea, the attempt by all the characters
"to find / Their god and so become living men at last”
(p. 41 ) .
The three scenes in Act I are subtle versions of
one another, each beginning with a frustrating mock-reunion
which breaks up in open conflict. This first scene intro
duces the Egyptian royal family, one member after another
wishfully anticipating Moses1 return. Although it is
’’impolitic / To mention Moses" (p. 5), Anath tells her
niece Teusret how she had once discovered ”A tiny weeping
Israel who had failed / To be exterminated” (p. 4) in
her father’s pogrom. She tells also of Moses’ growth
into a soldier of genius, and how, at the height of his
career, he recognized
76
his mother’s face in the battered body
Of a bricklayer. . . . And he killed
His Egyptian self in the self of that Egyptian
[overseer 1
And buried that self in the sand. (p. 6)
Anath's exposition is justified by Teusret's "official"
ignorance of Moses1 existence, and stresses the dead
weight of the past on the present. It also prepared for
Seti's search: "I need Moses.— We have discarded in
him / A general of excellent perception" (p. 7). When
the popular Rameses reports his holiday hunting (another
quest), and the arrival of "a man of authority . . . Who
is somehow in my memory" (p. 10), the stage is set for
Moses' imminent return and his agon with Seti.
Moses’ entrance into the palace is thus justified
by his one-time rank, abilities, and forcefulness. Also,
Seti is ready to forget the past: "Isn't it time we laid
the crippling ghost / That haunts us?" (p. 12). But
instead, Moses demands a hearing for Aaron's listing of
the Hebrew dead with orderly statistics parodying the
imposition of tyranny on "the unripe world" (p. 15).
Moses and Seti then quarrel, as Moses condemns the
Pharaoh's vain lack of insight:
A man has more to be than a Pharaoh
He must dare to outgrow the security
Of partial blindness, (p. 4)
Whereas Seti has "put men to a purpose" (p. 15) en masse,
Moses lauds the individual man. Though outwardly calm,
Seti is temporarily defeated: "Now he will not sleep
77
again tonight" (p. 16).
During the struggle between Hoses and Seti, our
attention is fixed upon their clash. The scene is literal,
close, and immediate: a room in the palace. The scene
then shifts to a second "reunion" in Miriam’s stifling
tent, which is surrounded by the "withering city" (p. 19)
and beyond it, the parched mountains. All are symbols
externalizing Miriam’s, and the Hebrews', despair: "I
repeat myself unendurably, like the Creation" (p. 18).
Her exposition of futile rebellion "in a night of loud
hyenas" (p. 20) brings in reply Moses' affirmation of
transcendent purpose:
Death was their question to us, and our lives
Become their understanding or perplexity.
And by living to answer them, we also answer
Our own impermanence, (p. 21)
When Rameses enters to find "the immense and affable
god in general's uniform" (p. 23), he, like Teusret in
the next scene, is abruptly disillusioned. His repeated
offer of a generalship is insultingly rejected:
What armour shall I wear? What ancestral metal
Above my heart? Rib, thighbone and skull:
Bones from the mines of Egypt. . . . Idiot, idiot!
I should have lost them, Aaron, and be lost. (p. 25)
When Miriam and Aaron suddenly leave to help Miriam's
son Shendi, who "is being prevented" (p. 26), Rameses is
torn between father and "uncle," youth and maturity, and
pleads for Moses* "magic": "You have the formula. I
need it" (p. 27).
78
But the entrance of the beaten, heat-maddened Shendi
casta doubt on both Moses' and Rameses' version of the
spiritual disorder which pervades the land. The Hebrew
brickmakers had struck:
But suddenly they're running--no, not they,
It's only their bodies that are running: the madmen
Are still standing in the sun, watching their bodies
Run away. (p. 29)
Shendi's grotesque parody of dehumanization not only
restores perspective of a kind, but applies both to Moses
and Rameses, one of Moses' "crop of relations . . . in
the land you dunged for us" (p. 30). The guilt is col
lective. Rameses sends away the pursuing overseers--
"We'll teach you striking. / Striking’s our specialty"
(p. 30)--and then leaves, deeply humiliated. Although
Aaron sees Rameses as their hope "in the belly of our
misfortune" (p. 31), Moses rejects the use of "palace
manoeuvering and compromise" (p. 31) in which Rameses
will presently engage so tragically.
In the third scene back at the palace, both Rameses
and Teuaret (like Shendi) have awakened to a nightmare.
To Rameses, the arrival of Moses and his father's sub
sequent arrangement of Rameses* marriage to a Syrian
princess seem unreal and dream-like:
In these twelve hours the future
Has suddenly come up, two-legged, huge, as though to say
'See nothing but me.' (p. 32)
At the same time Teusret tries to find Rameses, but "The
79
rooms were all deserted. / Just as it happens in my sleep
sometimes'' (p. 33). But Anath's fatalism restores pers
pective: "If the dynasty is safe / We can at least be
partly ourselves" (p. 34).
Rameses1 efforts to commission Shendi (as a bribe to
Moses) conflict ironically with Teusret’s attempts to make
Rameses "into / A nice little afternoon god" (p. 35).
Moses then enters carrying a lifeless, young Hebrew scape
goat to maim her deification ceremony and resume the
struggle with Seti; but the moral advantage is now his.
When the Pharaoh vainly imitates a "god" whose "creative
plan . . . is / Not to count the cost but enormously /
To bring about" (p. 41), Moses angrily objects that
political and natural chaos have overtaken the "maturity
of the world" (p. 41) which Seti supposedly embodies. At
the end of the first Act, Moses1 raging self-vindication
is confirmed by the theophanic thundering of the "infinite
eavesdropper" (p. 42).
Act II presents the Peripety and Recognition which
result from struggle; it is the "middle" which succeeds
the first Act by the laws of probability. The first
plague of blood arrives and is followed by all the others
when Seti refuses to give in. Anath is to tell him, "You
tricked Moses after I had gone myself / To bring him to
you, and what followed followed" (p. 56). In the first
scene the plague of blood and Shendi^ promotion ironically
80
coincide to divide the Hebrews, casting the genuineness
of Moses' leadership in doubt. Aaron rejects the
miracles: "Is it not possible still to be plain men /
Dealing with a plain situation? Must we see / Visions?"
(p. 46). In turn, Miriam's desperate flight from "this
intolerable night" (p. 46) anticipates Shendi's entrance
to announce, "We've stepped across to a new life" (p. 47).
As Seti had anticipated, Shendi's unexpected commission
sets Hebrew against Hebrew just as Moses' return had
done, but his envious attacks on Moses,
The rest of us can keep
Against the ground, and lose the whole damned world
Because Moses prefers it, (p. 49)
restore perspective to Aaron. Even Miriam glimpses a kind
of ironic wisdom: "As the Nile / Happens into blood.
Shendi an officer" (p. 49), preparing for Shendi's death
in the catastrophe which is to free the Hebrews.
Anath interrupts to bring false hopes of victory to
Moses, and to restore the Hebrew-Egyptian conflict to the
context of natural disorder:
See the men and women
Bewildered in the doorways, for the name of their world
Has changed from home to horror, (p. 51)
When she and Moses leave, Miriam's fears prepare for the
disasters of the next scene: "Many thirds / I must be
sure to keep my thoughts quite away from" (p. 52).
The second scene of Act II begins with Anath*s
description of the plagues, a massive purgation of Egyptian
The hail was hard, metallic, cold
And clean, beating on us with the ferocity
Of brainbright anger. . . .
It bruised away the memory of vermin
And struck our faces fairly, (p. 55)
But Seti's obstinate refusal to be panicked by "this chain
of black coincidence" (p. 56) ironically accompanies his
failure to recognize his loss of control over the course
of events: "Moses / has taken policy out of your hands"
(p. 57), and prepares for his desperate abdication at
the end. Moreover, Shendi*s deluded announcement in the
previous scene that "hell is done" (p. 47) is now parodied
by Rameses' mock tour d'abolie:
Dark rumour has been rising off the pavement chilling
Into the heart of the people. . . . I've been out
walking
Under the burning windows of the people's eyes. (p. 58)
As in the first Act, screams off-stage foreshadow the
entrance of Moses following Rameses* recognition that this
time, Shendi is doing the beating, that "the things we do
take their own life after / They are done" (p. 60).
Ironically, Seti has not learned, nor Moses, that
"No birth is worth this labour" (p. 63). But Moses
obstinately reaffirms the inalterable course of nemesis:
the return of the avenging God to correct a situation of
enmity. He had "Released the cataract of birth and death /
To storm across time and the world" (p. 64). As if on
demand, the theophanic clouds darken the sky, a sequel
82
to the previous thundering; the clouds ironically appear
in order that MSeti / May see better without the light
of day” (p. 65).
Both scenes of the catastrophic third Act focus
attention on the moments when the characters are most
open to disinterested insights: the family gatherings
and arbitrary meetings. The first: scene begins with the
rite of the Passover in Miriam's tent, Moses' "charac
teristic way of achieving / Unity among us” (p. 69).
Ironically, the eleventh hour setting, "this midnight of
Moses” (p. 68), foreshadows the union-in-death of Miriam
and Shendi. For Miriam has deserted her son and returned
to her tent, blaming herself for even bearing him at all.
Her recall of Moses' return as if he were ”a madman”
(p. 69) prepares for Shendi's desperate pleas that Miriam
return to him:
And how can we be scrupulous
In a life which from birth onwards, is so determined
To wring us dry of any serenity at all? (p. 70)
He blames Moses' "stupendous mischief” (p. 71), just as
Moses had once attacked Seti, an indication of Moses'
partial blindness to the magnitude of the impending
destruction. Moses' prediction of death for "All the
firstborn, cattle, flocks, and men" (p. 73), his belated
recognition that God therefore "pointed at Rameses" (p. 74),
and Moses* desperate departure parallel Miriam's rejection
of Shendi, her son’s recognition that "It was death from
83
the beginning," (p. 77) and Shendi1s flight which is
followed by Miriam's. Aaron realizes that they share in
Israel's transformation:
The night
Of deliverance. Tonight we all go free.
And Miriam too. He said she would go free. (p. 77)
The second scene of Act II, which part ly coi nc ides
in point of time with the first, shifts back to the palace.
Like the Israelites, the Egyptian royalty await a ritual
exorcism, the approach of ’'solid and gay Syria / To chase
away the fiends" (p. 78). With his bride, Seti offers
Rameses "a throne and an empire" (p. 79), although his
son quickly recognizes the maneuver as another trick. Just
as Moses had earlier rejected the proferred generalship
as "adultery" (p. 25), Rameses objects to being sacri
ficed to the "factions, / The whorers and devourers,
roaring over / The rocks of the dynasty" (p. 80). However,
Seti forces Rameses to ascend the throne.
Instead of the "wealth of life" (p. 80) which Seti
promises Rameses comes the sparagmos, the "noise of
breaking lives" (p. 81), signaling Moses* entrance to
oppose the very force he had unleashed: "In life's name,
what are we? / Five worlds of separation?" (p. 83). But
as death "pushes through the gate / Shoulder to shoulder
with the bride” (p. 84), Rameses dies; Moses* own momen
tary spiritual death brings the recognition that Rameses*
death both indicts and purges his society:
84
1 do not know why the necessity of God
Should feed on grief; but it seems so. And to know it
Is not to grieve less, but to see grief grow big
With what has died, and in some spirit differently
Bear it back to life. (p. 86)
As the epiphanic "early light reaches Rameses" (p. 87),
the survivors are drawn together with the promise of new
un ity:
We must each find our separate meaning
In the persuasion of our days
Until we meet in the meaning of the world, (p. 87)
But the promise has meaning only for Moses. The others
remain outside the pale of hope for this world or the
next. The climactic assurances, like those in The Boy
With a Cart, are too mystic and wistful to apply to any
but Moses, who voices them, and the audience.
Elsewhere in the play, what Fry loses in scope and
magnitude, he gains in concentration. His two opposed
families are not "average" in status, freedom of movement,
or intelligence. Yet, their reunions, conflicts, and
meditations take place in typical situations which provide
an intense focus for their attempts to justify their
lives in terms of their "delicate consciousness of worlds
beyond the world" (p. 54). Only the last scene remains
unsatisfactory. Fry’s frequent efforts to revise it indi
cate more than a lack of skill. He is unable to choose
between the opposing claims of retribution and fatality,
the view which holds tragedy to represent punishment
for sin, and the view which believes it to be simply an
85
unfathomable event, with its explanation secondary and
variable. This problem, as we shall see, is deeply rooted
in the character of Moses.
Characterization.--In spite of the Biblical names,
antique setting (1200 B. C.), and explicit references to
the slave-state chasm between ruler and ruled, the basic
social unit is a pre-Munich, upper-middle-class British
family. Fry continues the panoramic conventions of A Boy
With a Cart; The Firstborn was begun in 1938 , a year
before Boy was first produced. However, the structure and
characterization indicate a trend toward the focussed
form of drama with its compressed scene, intimate drawing
room, and sophisticated sparring partners which he had
utilized so effectively in A Phoenix Too Frequent.
As the intrigues within intrigues, maimed rites, and
misalliances indicate, the plot of The Firstborn is the
complex working-out of a series of desires, all in con
flict. Stated simply, they are: Seti’s attempts to get
Moses as his general; Rameses' attempts to mature; Anath’s
attempts to regain Moses as her son; Teuaret's attempts to
hold on to Rameses; Aaron’s attempts to rationalize Moses*
goals; Miriam's attempts to avoid reality; and Shendi*s
attempts to rise in the world. These strangely assorted
and isolated people are brought together and their con
flicting desires united into a single action by Moses*
attempts to free the Israelites, by the mysterious sickness
86
which afflicts the land and its people as well, and by
the dominating Resurrection archetype.
God is variously characterized as "Ra, raising / an
eyebrow stiff with the concentration of creation" (p. 8),
"eternity's birdsmith" (p. 27), "frantic compulsion"
(p. 35), "ultimate fire" (p. 41), "inimitable patience"
(p. 41), "infinite eavesdropper" (p. 42), "creation's
mutehead" (p. 45), or simply, "Fate" (p. 47). In most
of these cases, a human capability or emotion is ampli
fied by some kind of immeasurability. God is usually
visualized anthropomorphically, a power of vengeance that
dwarfs the universe,
a vigour moving
In a great shadow, who draws the bow
Of his mystery, to loose this punishing arrow. . . .
He who in his morning
Drew open the furious petals of the sun; (p. 64)
Whatever else He is, God is not nature, although he is
defined by it. Yet, these limited views and others are
presented as baffled, angry, or egoistic attempts to
penetrate through the "bewildering mesh of God" (p. 84).
More concretely, the theophanies which climax each Act,
the series of mounting plagues which reverse the action,
and the augured arrivals and returns, particularly of
Moses--"Sometimes the unaccountable stalks in" (p. 11)—
dramatically actualize God as a withdrawing and returning
figure.
Moses, like Cuthman in The Boy With a Cart, is an
87
atoning, Carlylean "great man.’1 He becomes less and less
self-assured as it gradually becomes evident that the old
community must be destroyed before the "new Jerusalem"
can rise. He enters in Act I somehow metonymic of God,
the Hebrew dead whose "names I am" (p. 19), and nemesis:
My blood heard my blood weeping
Far off like the swimming of fear under the sea,
The sobbing at night below the garden, (p. 13)
He is princely murderer, deserted general, and dirty,
heat-deluded "stranger" known to all. He yet attempts
to reveal a truth which all the others find it uncomfor
table to see: "Egypt should come to see her own shame /
And discover justice for my people" (p. 15). Although his
pride is muted by Fry's omission of Moses' self-righteous
ness, prosperity, and ambition, "I could be Pharaoh in
Midian,"2 in the first edition, Moses still reveals hubris
in his dogmatic sense of mission:
We have a God who will support the spirit,
And both shall be found. . . . I am there, beyond
myself,
If I could reach to where I am.
He parodies God to mock Rameses: "Yes, we’re precipi
tous, / We gods" (p. 23); and he even jokes with God. At
the beginning Moses still believes that if he accepted
Rameses' repeated offer of a generalship, he could make
2(London, 1946), p. 14.
-*1958 edition, p. 23.
88
his "future, put glory into Egypt, enjoy myself / Into
your father's confidence" (p. 25), and dismisses incon
sistencies in his own conduct as "a quarrel in God's
nature" (p. 27).
Yet his confusion at the first plague, "Are we on
sea / Or land" (p. 46), not only foretells his predestined
role in the Red Sea crossing, but emphasizes his very
human misconceptions of the vision he conveys. In Act II
he no longer assaults Seti directly but organizes the
Israelites, cajoles, and waits, while for Seti, "Fate
takes a hammer / To chip and chip at our confidence"
(p. 57). As he had once been gadfly to Seti, he becomes
midwife to the Hebrew nation, a personification of God's
instrumentality, "this punishing arrow / Feathered with
my fate" (p. 64).
Hoses' attempts to embody justice for both races,
with his life wept "like a tear of passion / On to the
iniquity of Egypt" (p. 65), and the attention by Fry to
symmetry rather than progression lead to a spectacular
but relatively unmotivated climax. Hoses had been gone
a decade; his treatment of Rameses at his return had
been patronizing and sometimes insulting; thus personal
attachment does not adequately motivate his return to
save Rameses at the end. In his first two versions of
the play, Fry emphasizes the inexorable power of fate:
89
''This is how it is / to make time your friend,"4 a comment
by Moses which blames God without reconciling the problem
of Moses' hubris with retribution against Seti. In the
third edition, Moses1 oblique attack on fate is muted,
with references to the necessity to "force the arduous,
damnable pass of time" (p. 89) dropped from the play.
Instead, Moses' guilt is emphasized: "The blame could
impale me / For ever."^ The concluding paradox, "Death
and life are moving to a call" (p. 87), is more a puzzle
than another one of "life’s little ironies." The author
again faces--and fails to solve through action--the prob
lem that the bereaved Cuthman began with in The Boy With
a Cart: to what extent is the wish the parent to the
deed?
Aaron is Moses' foil, an essentially conservative
"plain dealer." He is at first satisfied with "Reality
of a kind" (p. 25). Until he learns to accept the extreme
situation as the norm, he tries to "outmove motives to
our advantage" (p. 49). Moses' successful mysticism
carries him into a Platonic orientation of values on the
eve of the Israelites' departure: "His [Moses'] mind will
be our history / Before the morning" (p. 67); but he still
retains an earthy sense of realistic canniness. It is
^(London, 1952), p. 87.
^1958 edition, p. 86.
90
Aaron who predicts the all-important event which Moses'
over-view failed to single out: "And does nothing, no
presentiment, / Creep on the heart of Pharaoh at this
moment? , . . does nothing make him fetch his firstborn /
Beside him-" (p, 75), And it is Aaron who gently draws
Moses away from his futile struggle with death:
All ears wait for your command to march.
Egypt is throwing away its gold to have us gone,
Is it now? (p, 85)
In all Seti'fl conflicts with Moses, the Hebrews, and
his ovm family, he never deviates from a set of simple
principles, which are,
care,
Effort, devotion, sacrifice of all inclination,
Even to the sacrifice of my own person, (p. 85)
Seti's name is an acrostic of "let the sun ;son) free"
(p, 66); it is his fate to preside over the dissolution
of empire and family alike, Although he prides himself
on a rational scepticism, his agnosticism slowly emerges
as a negative characteristic of a supreme egotism. He
imitates the gods'
creative plan which is
Not to count the cost but enormously
To bring about, (p. 41)
When Moses mentions God's "inimitable patience," Seti
replies, "He and I have something in common" (p. 41); and
even Moses speaks of the degradation of the Hebrews in
terms that suggest Seti is the prototype of his God:
"they are your likeness, these men, even to nightmares"
91
(p. 15). In Fry's revision of the first edition, he
omits most references to Seti's realistic foresight or
pious awe, e.g., "Our lives at the most coincidental
bring the gods / Very near,"*' at Moses' first entrance.
Seti's political maneuvers succeed brilliantly for a
time; he "made certain concessions to Moses / And recon
sidered them" (p. 56). As a result, Moses is partially
alienated from his own family, and becomes confused by
the appeals of Anath and Rameses: "Egypt and Israel both
in me together" (p. 24), But each of Seti's entrances
brings him face-to-face with opponents he can neither
avoid, expel, nor defeat, scenes skillfully contrived to
"send the god to vanish finally / Into the lie that he
always was" (p. 23). He both denies responsibility for
the "furious / God-epilepsy of earthquake and eruption"
(p. 54) and seeks to survive the destruction of the
state: "I am not, / But I am always" (p. 80), At the
end even Rameses recognizes him as an imposter: Seti's
abdication will make him "not a self / But a glove dis
guising your hand" (p. 80). Final perception comes too
late: when Rameses dies, Seti learns that he has lost
everything because he knew nothing: Rameses' bride
"need bring nothing, except the hour that has gone"
(p. 87).
* * 1 9 4 6 edition, p. 13 ,
92
In an illuminating comment Fry suggests that "Rameses
lives a boyhood almost identical with Moses' own" (p. vii).
Each of the occasions in which he participates suspends
him between childhood and manhood, dependency and self-
assertion :
I should burn
Throne and lotus gladly if I could break
Myself of boyhood, if burning would do it. (p. 27)
The vulgar brawl between the two brutal overseers and the
maddened Shendi is a dramatic metaphor of the dilemma
Rameses faces in choosing between two ways of life. He
at first resists the tragic movement of the action,
"Weren't you told I sent for him?" (p. 30), but Miriam's
unanswerable question, "Why is the palace here?" (p. 20)
intensifies his feelings of guilt. Rameses reacts by
anonymously promoting Shendi'a commission with the best
of intentions, but when the plagues arrive, he finds that
"The sweet part of the world’s / All over" (p. 63).
Rameses meets death with resignation and fortitude; he
is set free "To wander the winding and coitous passages /
Of the heart" (p. 81).
Shendi appears only three times. He is characterized
by the contrast of his tepid aspirations, "We hope to live
a little" (p. 49), and the violence of his envious attacks
on Moses' supposed cowardice and brutality:
The tradition is that, once upon a time,
You didn’t know the meaning of apprehension
93
Or fear— back in those days when it was you
They treated well. (p. 50)
The revisions eliminate most of his attempts at reasoned
judgment, e.g., weighing the loss of Egyptian greatness
against the gain of Hebrew freedom. With his concept of
servitude as rape is associated the taint of illegitimacy
which he attaches to Moses: MThe spermy bastards! /
They make us hit the earth like spit’' (p. 29). His own
assault on his kinsmen, once he is an overseer, is a
demonic parody of Rameses* attempts at god-like creation,
his meddlings twisting "themselves / Into foul shapes"
(p. 60). When the angel of death comes to take the
"firstborn," Shendi pre-enacts the tearing of Egypt by
divine vengeance. Ripping off the Egyptian uniform
becomes a dramatic metaphor of Anath*s vision of a land,
naked
To the bone and we are naked beyond the bone,
Down to the barest nakedness which, until now,
Hope kept covered up. (pp. 55-56)
While Moses and Seti struggle, the terror and pity
are channeled through the impassioned young men and the
suppliant women on either side. In the beginning, only
Teusret retains the full bloom of innocence; Miriam sus
tains the worst effects of dehumanization, while Anath*s
morale deteriorates under the unremitting pressure of
catastrophe.
Anath is characterized by her search for spiritual
solace, her legalistic view of truth, and her compassion.
94
While associating Moses with justice, she attaches to him
her own desolation. She tells him when she brings Seti's
summons,
I shall be glad
Not to be alone this time, with the earth
Wavering to a hint of doom. I suppose
There have to be powers of darkness, but
they should keep
To the rules, (p. 52)
She thus is the consciousness of the race, both Egyptian
and Hebrew, who is forced helplessly to suffer and per
ceive :
I’ve no more efficacy
Than a fishwife who has been to breed against
Her will; and so I’m shrill and desperate, (p. 54)
Although until the reversal of fortunes she had parried
Seti's references to her prescience with wry irony, "Am
I a planet / To be so influential?" (p. 56), disaster
becomes no joking matter. Her healthy optimism degenerates
into a desperate relativism like Miriam’s. When it is
Rameses who needs life, Moses finds that all of Anath's
has been directed towards himself: "It [Anath*s life]
went to be your shadow" (p. 82). She can only reply
with an unanswerable question: "What is left / To call
to me?" (p. 87).
When Moses tells the suffering Anath that "Hell / Is
old, but until now / It fed on other women" (p. 64), he
refers to Miriam. Anath's Hebrew counterpart, she is
characterized by her death-wish, her futile rejection
95
of "what goea on outside" (p. 19), and her attachment to
Shendi, who la "all ahe rests on" (p. 20). She associates
sin with the sex act, blaming herself for "The wrong to
have borne him / To that childhood" (p. 68). Despite the
load of guilt and pathos she is forced to bear, she remains
in the Eve-like position of a child baffled by her first
contact with an adult situation.
Teusret is characterized by her name ("truth of it"),
her charmed innocence, and her symbolism of redemption.
Her character is changed more than the others by Fry’s
revision. An extended appearance in Act II, scene ii,
in the 1946 edition, for example, is entirely eliminated.
In it, her cynical rejection of Seti's use of Rameses
"for Egypt’s purpose, and whether he's happy or unhappy /
To you it's equally good"7 blights her simplicity and
deserves omission. Although Rameses' impending marriage
nauseates her, "Phipa! Phipa! Phipa! The noise a flute
makes / When the mouth's too full of saliva" (p. 54),
she passes through more horrible scenes of degradation
virtually untouched. Like Marina of Pericles she is
estranged from her father: "Has no one / Told him he has
a daughter?" (p. 57). Yet at the moment of defeat she
symbolizes to Seti the enduring health of the whole
body-politic: "How many thousand thousand years / Are
71946 edition, p. 65.
96
being nursed in your body, my young daughter?" (p. 79).
Teusret alone perceives Phipa’s true significance, "Isn’t
it .in love that life is strongest?" (p. 84), and becomes,
like Phipa, a harbinger of new life.
In summary, the structure of The Firstborn is devised
to present, by comparison and contrast, the response of
each of the characters to an immediate situation. It is
because of the exactness with which Fry presents the
dramatic symbolism, the nuances of rationalization, and
the flashes of perce pti on in moments of crisis that he
can make them convey together a single action with the
scope of poetry.
Language
Imagery.— The organization of the imagery of The
Firstbom clearly indicates the transitional nature of
the play. On one hand, a significant proportion of the
figurative language follows the cyclical patterns of
departure and return, rise and fall, dark and light which
organically confirm the passages between palace and tent,
the "Interchange of earth with everlasting" (p. 72), and
the multivalent birth-death cycle. Yet Fry still uses
static imagery as in The Boy With a Cart which extends
by association from a spatial hand-music-dust cluster.
Rather than receiving its "tone" from the sun as In Boy,
however, the dynamic imagery reflects the cosmic rhythms
97
of the "round of light / Which will not wheel in vain"
(p. 87). At the same time, the all-pervading presence
of God as Mosaic eponym and of the Creation motif as
archetypal pattern leads to imagery which generalizes
rather than particularizes, yet provides an interlocked
texture of metaphor.
In The Firstborn blood is metonymic with virulence,
the rising motion, and masculinity. For example, it is
cynically dishonored by Seti until "pity came out of
[him] like blood" (p. 55). In turn, Moses projects
blood-vengeance upon the universe as "the swimming of
fear under the sea" (p. 15), thus identifying the disease
of the bloody wells with retribution, "The spilt blood /
Of Israelites that is flowing back on Egypt" (p. 51).
Through sacrifice the mana is renewed in a tide of new
life:
Only we who have the darkness
Here in our blood, . . . only we of Israel
Standing ready for the morning will be unvisited.
(p. 73)
That Seti and Shendi, otherwise poles apart, are
threatened in similar ways by Moses' return is indicated
by their use of ship-imagery, an oblique symbol for their
own perverted quests. Rebuffed by a vindictive Moses,
Seti finds "something shipwreck" (p. 13) about him,
wtiereas Shendi, just before his death, screams, "I know
you’d founder me / If you had the chance--" (p. 71).
98
Phipa is the antidote: Seti associates her with the
sexual magnetism of nature:
Homegoing sailors,
When there are no stars, steer perfectly for Syria
Merely by thinking of her. (p. 35)
Ironically, her arrival destroys both Seti and Shendi,
for renewal means the death of corruption. It is left
to Anath, in two Scylla and Charybdis metaphors, to
locate the sickness in Seti's paralyzed moral fiber: he
is "wedged inactive / In between his decision and pride"
(p. 52).
Imagery from the fire-world of heavenly bodies is
used to mark the movement from one world to another, the
perception of change by one of the characters. When the
plague of blood arrives, Moses notices "The sun this last
hour / Has been that colour" (p. 45). After the first
plague, Anath notices that "The sky is brighter: The
worst may be over" (p. 52), but the worst has just begun.
When Seti's last hope Rameses dies, he tells Moses,
You found us in the morning.
Leave us with what remains of the night.
The day you found us in is over. (p. 86)
The imaginative cycle of waking and dreaming life
is opposite to the solar one: the titanic libido wakens
when the sun sleeps, and the light of day is often the
darkness of desire, except for "benighted" beings. The
"inquisition of stars" (p. 74) finds Shendi and Rameses
guilty, thus confirming the verdict of Greation/Chaos
99
which Moses and Miriam earlier disputed; in a dramatic
reflection of natural by moral law, Aaron notices that
"the stars are fading in silence" (p. 85). Phipa, the
"magnitude out of Syria" (p. 77), then arrives. The
symbolic shift from starriness to star of the East not
only confirms Moses' creed of individualism, but pre
enacts the Christ-heralding succession of old by new
dispensation.
Both Moses and Rameses are characterized by asso
ciations with the rising sun, a cosmic metonym of the
"flying spark / Attempting the ultimate fire" (p. 41).
As Rameses views Moses "clear and risen roundly over the
hazes" (p. 27), thus Seti visualizes Rameses ("I over
branch the light," p. 79), but Moses* success is the
measure of Rameses* failure. Rameses merely smoulders
in the constricting, burning coffin (in which Dante
places atheists) of Seti's malevolent restraints on his
manhood:
The flowers were schooled
With salamanders to be so enduring
In this furnace, (p. 57)
Thus Rameses tries to sacrifice his youth in a blazing
rite of passage, as when he first enters, and when he
confronts Moses in a disastrous test of wills; after the
Peripety, when the plagues arrive, Rameses is forced to
walk under the satanic "burning windows of people's
eyes" (p. 58).
100
Conversely, by keeping out the health-giving light,
Seti becomes identified with metaphors of darkness. As
he had once "blotted” Moses out of the records, he keeps
Rameses away from the sun. With his darkness is associated
decayed, corrupted nourishment. Rameses condemns his
"black bread of policy” (p. 59), an image recalling the
"uninterrupted darkness of an addled egg” (p. 9) to which
he had compared the approaching death of a game bird, a
symbolic anticipation of the stifling of his own spirit
by Seti.
As in five other of Fry's plays, bird imagery appears
in the first scene as symbol of the wheeling motion of
nemesis, divine interchange between earth and heaven, and
boding. Birds rise and return at the Hebrew's screaming
fall, preparing for the birds' wheeling flight from
Rameses, and the rise and fall of owls at Phipa's approach.
Moreover, the "glittering charcoal of the eyes” (p. 27)
of God's vengeance-hawk links the bird with Seti’s partial
blindness, the Hebrews' "wildfowl quality of blood” (p. 22),
the despair of Teusret in "beating her wings” (p. 33),
the malevolent buzzing of the court against Anath's child-
discovery, and the feathering of God's punishing arrow
with Moses' fate. Thus bird imagery is used to meld two
extreme, contradictory views of tragedy: the omnipotence
of an external fate, and vengeance for a violation of
divine law.
101
One indication of the mystic direction of the action
and characterization is the use of name-imagery; the
Creation motif emerges as the search for identity. A key
passage is an analogue of Genesis 2, and is associated
with the desperate quest for a lost paradise: "We . . .
shuffle our fingers in the dust to find the name we once
were known by" (p. 55). Name-imagery reflects the double
perspective of the action: as the names of the dead are
what Moses is, the name of the Egyptian world changes
"from home to horror" (p. 51).
The worst effects of a living death are disembodiment,
"Here's my name without a man to it" Cp. 77), which is
accompanied by hallucination and nightmare. Teusret asks
if they are to meet Phipa "in the jumping shadows, /
Aunts, owls, flame, sisters and all" (p. 78). Earth is
animated as the "sound of god . . . Found and parted the
stone lips of this / Egyptian twilight in the speech of
souls" (p. 71); words are perceived as things, and the
animal imagery which carries benign associations for the
Hebrews appears as demonic spirits to the Egyptians.
Anath fears "the howling dog" (p. 51), Rameses listens
for "the future's loping footfall," (p. 59) and Shendi
threatens Moses: "That fox has his tail on fire / And
someone should know about it" (p. 73). The inner conflict
which emerges in metaphors of death, delusion, and
disease, "the pangs of this coming deliverance" (p. 64),
102
has its social counterpart in imagery of miscarriage,
prostitution, and incest perceived by Egyptian and Hebrew
alike. Anath tells Seti that he,
had stirred up the muck
Which the sweet gods thought fit to make us of
When they first formed man, the primal putrescence
We keep hidden under our thin dress of health.
What a pretty world, this world of filthmade kings!
(p. 55)
The dynamic imagery of The Firstborn is organized
about the ritual of sacrifice, and is constructed largely
by metaphysical, spatial, incremental techniques. It
shows the Many to be One, the microcosm a diminution of
the macrocosm, and each contributing image a metonymic
extension by association from a metaphoric center. After
killing the Egyptian overseer, Moses had undergone a
spiritual death symbolizing the actual murder en masse
of his kinsmen. From the womb-like darkness of Moses’
mind, the Hebrew blood rises to renew the land in a tide
of new life. From the tomb which Seti’s inhumanity has
created for the Hebrews come fungoid mists, demons, and
broken voices; the tide of vengeance wrecks the ship of
state.
Interwoven with the dynamic imagery which is dis
tinguished by rhythmic, ritual, and scenic analogies
confirming situations already present in the overt action,
are the relatively static metaphors serving largely to
convey the isolation of the characters and, at the same
103
time, to telescope this desolation into images of universal
chaos. The latter may be visualized as a spider web with
a simple hand-music-dust cluster at the center surrounded
by myriads of synecdoches. From ’’music" extends imagery
of song, keys, lute, loom, torture rack, voices and words;
from "hand” extends imagery of fingers, fists, arms,
bones, fighting, percussion, sculpting, striking; from
"dust" is derived imagery of sand, storms, cracks,
draughts. The process of composition illustrated by this
spatial pattern of clusters is best described in terms
of "fancy, a creative faculty which, according to Cole
ridge,
has no other counters to play with but fixities and
definites [and] must receive all its materials ready
made from the law of association.®
Most of the fanciful imagery stresses the essential
identity of dramatic events, shared emotional involvements,
and the double perspective. The analogy of clouds and
tide, "a sea of cloud . . . pouring onto the beaches of
the sun," (p. 65), dust and mud not only amplifies Moses’
search for clarity in "this droughy / Overwatered world"
(p. 27), but simultaneously pre-figures the guiding
pillar of smoke and fulfills Moses' role as a new Adam;
Anath thought Moses "was a dust-storm we had shut outside"
Q
"The Imagination,” Criticism: The Major Texts, ed.
W. J. Bate (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p^ 387.
104
(p. 7). Teusret's angelic lute has for its demonic
synecdoches the vengeful bow of God, the loom of fate
which pulls the characters together, and the rack of
torture which tears apart: "Our lives go on the loom /
And our land weaves" (p. 34). And in one of the most
effective extensions of the entire hand-music-(dust)
cluster. Fry connects first and last plague, the creation
motif, Moses' latent hubris, and the doctrine of recurrent
historical cycles. When the water turns to blood, Moses
exclaims:
I was waiting
Without expectation. But surely, I already knew?
We with our five bare fingers
Have caused the strings of God to sound.
Creation's mutehead is dissolving, Aaron.
Our lives are being lived into our lives, (p. 45)
At the end Moses attempts to save Rameses by drawing the
five survivors together as "five fingers to close into a
hand / To strike the death clean away" (p. 83). In
another cluster, the music of the spheres revealed only
to Teusret and Moses occurs to the others in terms of
inharmonious noise, cracked voices, and an "intolerable
singsong" (p. 15), all of which actualize the implications
of disease for the "language [which] is life" (p. 27).
Most of the cuts in the 1952 and 1958 editions
affect superfluous ornamental language. A hint of Fry’s
attitude appears in Rameses' embarrassment when he calls
Moses "A gate without a key [which] must lead somewhere,
105
so I believe, / Though perhaps that sounds fanciful
[italics mine]."9 Much of the excised imagery is stock,
repetitive, and trite, with few associations with the
dramatic context.
Versification.--The meter of The Firstborn, like that
in The Boy With a Cart and A Phoenix Too Frequent, is
blank verse varied conventionally by the inverted first
foot, the dropping of the first slack syllable, and the
extra slack syllable internal to the line. Usually,
exact iambics occur in six-stress lines dealing with
death: ”1 thought he was a dust-storm we had shut out
side" (p. 7). On the other hand, Teusret's two-stanza
lyric, like that of the Mowers in The Boy With a Cart,
is heavily alliterated, strongly-stressed, irregularly
rhymed verse. Moreover, characters often divide a line
between them, an indication of increased flexibility.
A substantial portion of the sentences are inter
rogative, for the world of The Firstborn is a world of
riddles, mystery. Characters repeat questions, fragments,
and phrases to reflect their hopelessness of ever pene
trating to reality.
RAMESES: My plana are different.
SETI: Your plans are different! . . .
. . . And so your plans are different?
You've already made your plans! (p. 59)
^1946 edition, p. 26.
106
Those who most fear change, either renewal or death,
stutter like "the wintered cuckoo" in The Boy With a Cart
at the approach of spring. The speech of Miriam parti
cularly is filled with fragments, broken thoughts, and
apparent interruptions; all are mannerisms symptomatic of
inner disturbances. Those with more self-control play
with words, shifting syntax to explore personal motiva
tions :
ANATH: What are you doing to Egypt, Moses?
MOSES: What
Is Egypt doing to Egypt?
ANATH: Or Egypt to you. (p. 51)
The use of intellectual images of contradiction such
as "sweet made foul" (p. 54) and cliches reworded in the
direction of calculated ambiguity confirms the movement
of the action: "Creation's mutehead is dissolving"
(p. 45). Fry also uses sound correspondences paradoxically
and analytically, as in "outmove motives" (p. 49) and
"approached the unapproachable" (p. 54). However, effec
tive reversals in syntax in the 1958 version are sympto
matic of a plethora of imprecise attempts at freshness
which have been excised in Fry's revision of the 1946
first edition. For example, a phrase like "not this,
not even this, but this destroyed. / This refused to
itself” (p. 42, 1946 edition) indicates Fry’s confusion
as much as Moses1. Language not only confirms, but
contradicts the course of the action. When Shendi says,
107
"Hell Is done, done / Done with, over!" (p. 47), he
thinks that the future has just opened up, but the auditory
imagery produced by the repeated word "done" conveys an
opposite and ominous impression.
The form of The Firstborn— its structure, characteri
zation, and language— may be understood as the imitation
of a certain action. This action is the quest for God,
the pattern behind the mystery, "the appearance of Hell"
(p. 47). That is the over-all aim which embodies the
essentially religious theme: "to find God in order to
give meaning to men's lives." Fry has seen this quest as
the real life of the Israelite exodus, discerning it
through the personages and events as one discerns "life
in a plant through the green leaves." Moreover, he
must have seen this particular action as a type, or
crucial instance, of human action in general; therefore,
he is able to present it in the form of the ancient ritual
which celebrates the perennial mystery of human life and
action.
The first act of representation consists in making
the plot or arrangement of incidents. The arrangement
which Fry makes of the events of the story--alternating
between tent and palace to present personal, social,
and theological conflict, rehearsing the past in relation
to what is happening now and what will come as a result—
already to some degree actualizes the double issue of the
108
tragic quest he wishes to show, even before we sense the
characters as individuals or hear them speak.
The characters or agents are the second actualization
of the action. The soul of the tragedy is there already
in the order of events, the contrasting movements of Seti
and Moses. That Fry's art of characterization is extremely
conscious and deliberate is clear the moment one considers
the differences between the stories of his characters as
they appear in Exodus and the moments of their lives which
he chooses to show directly on stage. Exodus chronicles
a century and a half of private rituals and public spec
tacles, a series of "ugly and impossible / Mistakes in
nature” (p. 46). Fry could have shown us an exciting
exercise of Seti's power if he had not chosen to see him
only when he is forced to pause and analyze his own
motives in a wider context which qualifies their impor
tance. In Exodus Moses engages in a series of fabulous
adventures, but Fry has rejected the standard movie fare
of spectacle and artificial crisis as trite and false.
When the first plague turns water to blood, Aaron wonders
what has happened to "plain men / dealing with a plain
situation” (p. 46). At this moment, Aaron reveals far
more effectively than either theology or magic, reason
or ritual, the force behind history against which man's
efforts appear ineffectual and puny. While the men on
either side serve to move the action ahead, developing
109
it in time through their internecine conflicts, the women
represent the interests of that resolution, in which the
end of the analogous actions will be realized.
The third actualization of the action is in the
language of the play, the imagery and rhythms wherein the
characters develop their internal essences in response to
the ever-changing action of the play. The imagery employs
not only syllogistic progression, but progression by asso
ciation and contrast. Thus imagery which reflects the
cosmic, natural, and human rhythms is used not only to
indicate the double issue of the play, up or down, but
to reveal each character’s perception of, or blindness
to, his individual situation. Hence the ideas of right
and wrong, historical flux, blame and absolution are sym
bolized by the rhythmic rise and fall of blood and the
seas, the cosmic bodies, and natural imagery, all of which
differentiate the characters and provide an effective
texture of realism for the structure. On the other hand,
the passions of the characters grow out of the creation
motif which informs the action and is represented by sen
suous images which reveal the universals underlying
transitory emotional involvements.
Because the analogous actions, character representa
tions, and symbolic rhythms coalesce in so many ways, and
because Fry so effectively utilizes progression, feeling,
and reflection, except in the poorly-motivated attempt
110
by Moses to save Rameses, the play closely approaches
the completeness of Integration "by analogy.”
CHAPTER FOUR: THE LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING
Structure
The Lady's not for Burning, ^ like its shorter pre
decessor, A Phoenix Too Frequent, follows the structural
conventions of Greek New Comedy. In order to save a
suspected witch. Jennet Jourdemayne, from burning, a
discharged soldier, Thomas Mendip, himself confesses to
a number of crimes; but he is disbelieved and she is con
demned. At the same time, Alizon Eliot arrives to marry
Humphrey Devize, whose younger brother, Nicholas, also
wants her. After Alizon elopes with a servant, Richard,
Thomas rescues Jennet from Humphrey's attempts to seduce
her. Old Skipps, the assumed "victim" of both Jennet and
Thomas, is brought back, a comic version of Aristotle's
discovery, and the couple is released.
By beginning at the end of his analogous stories,
making the beginning and end coincide paradoxically with
evening and dawn, and making the "confessions," a social
occasion, and family prayers coincide with the first Act,
Fry achieves remarkable but economical progression. By
breaking the established routine of a staid drawing room
^*New York, 1949.
Ill
112
(reflecting the thirties in England) with a series of
quests by confused seekers, Fry is able to present a logi
cal complexity of conflicts on several levels. There is
a series of love triangles, in which the Devize brothers
compete unsuccessfully with Thomas and Richard for the
two young women. There is the more fundamental conflict
between two views of society, between one group which
favors the way of form and convention, and another which
denies the validity of anything which is fixed and arbi
trary. It should be added that the groupings continually
shift, that no one character holds either view unquali
fiedly, and that the range of interests is quite diverse.
And finally, there is the disagreement among all the
characters about the shape or meaning of the events they
observe.
All the conflicts raise the ultimately personal ques
tions of conviction, judgment, and loyalty which merge into
a single action. This is the creation of situations
designed, in Jennet’s words, "to give me a choice" (p. 85).
It is fitting that the main emphasis should be cast for
ward to the scenes of discovery and reconciliation, to a
social occasion which can stand for the ceremonial rite
of passage to maturity.
The main structure of Act I is clear: Fry arranges
all the action around three major points of interest,
the whole Act moving in a recognizable rhythm of
113
heightening and decreasing tension. It is also written
so as to present a logical progression from one high
point to another: both the crime and criminals have to
be identified before Mayor Tyson can detain Thomas and
Jennet, while the contradicting variety of events must
cast enough doubt on the rightness of Tyson’s decision
to allow further development and conflict in the rest of
the play. Therefore the first Act seems as tight and
orderly in its construction as the beginning of a good
detective story.
The beginning of the play, Thomas’ entrance to
startle the humdrum Richard with his wish to hang, builds
logically and with dramatic tension toward the first
climax, Nicholas’ announcement that he too is a murderer.
The first dialogue hints at ’’gossip of murder and witch
craft” (p. 3), and prepares ambiguously for the arrival
of "company--we11, a girl” (p. 5), which could be Jennet,
but is actually Alizon Eliot, betrothed to Humphrey
Devize.
Richard’s immediate infatuation with Alizon not only
produces the first triangle, but prepares for the first of
a series of rebellions against convention--Nicholas*
assault on Humphrey. Richard's exposition of his foundling
status and discovery by a priest after being "crammed into
the poor-box" (p. 7), prepares not only for the chaplain's
effective intervention in Act II, but provides a
114
"aanctuaryM for him to take Alizon to in Act III.
Alizon's exposition of her own father’s plan "to simplify
matters and let [her] marry God" (p. 7) suggests the
mock Enniautos-Daimon struggle over her between Humphrey
and Nicholas Devize.
Finally Nicholas enters climactically to announce his
"murder" of Humphrey, but when he attempts to take Alizon
"out into the air" (p. 10) his mother enters to stop him:
"She's in the air already. This room is full of it"
(p. 10). Thomas then sees Humphrey alive, a discovery
which relaxes tension. Margaret Devize's memory of once
losing her "heart to clean linen" (p. 15) rationalizes
the sexual basis of the twins' quarrel, and lays the
basis for future sexual competition. The resulting delay
in Thomas' confession and the expansion of the scene by
reference to a witchhunt by "those bib-and tuckered blood
hounds out in the street" (p. 15) prepare for the entrance
of Mayor Tyson "afflicted with office" (p. 17), an ironic
imitation of Thomas' initial entrance: "Flesh weighs
like a hundred years" (p. 4).
Again tension rises with the attempts by the mayor,
like Richard and Margaret, to put Thomas off, a dramatic
metaphor of the tendency to hide reality with deadening
convention:
What is official
Is incontestable. It undercuts
L15
The problematical world and sells us
Life at a discount, (p. 16)
The coincidence of Thomas’ search for a crime with
society’s search for a criminal then suggests that the
quests are analogous: both society and Thomas attempt,
as the dramatic metaphor of the brothers’ fight reveals,
to be "transfigured with dirt" (p. 16).
When Tyson ignores Thomas’ confession, tension
relaxes, only to rise for the third, most sustained
climax; the suspected witch, Jennet Jourdemayne enters,
her search for "the protection of your laughter" (p. 25)
so disturbing the humorless Tyson that he immediately
arrests her. Jennet’s fantastic fables prepare for her
similar seIf-incrimination in Act II, and bring support
from Thomas which builds pressure on Tyson for some form
of action, anything to restore perspective: "Am I
invisible? / Am I inaudible?" (p. 29). His outraged
reaction to the couple’s "awful unorthodoxy" (p. 26)
interrupts Jennet’s discovery that Thomas’ and her victim
is one and the same, alerting Thomas in time to interrupt
the same realization on Humphrey's part, in case the
audience missed it. Thomas predicts, ’The Last Trump /
Is timed for twenty-two forty hours precisely" (p. 33),
bringing various reactions from his hearers. Margaret
leaves to change her dress, with a parody on Thomas’
prediction and a reminder to the audience of the third
116
Act betrothal party; Jennet attacks the "storm of super
stition" (p. 34) and asks to live; Tyson arrests both
interlopers; and Thomas pleads fatal passion: "hang me,
before I love that woman!" (p. 35). Thomas' announcement
seems rather unmotivated, in view of his misanthropy and
later profession of love only under extreme duress, but
this surprise is somewhat mitigated by his disturbed
emotions. Moreover, only Tyson hears him, a hint of the
older man's veiled rivalry in Act II: "Blow your nose /
And avoid lechery," (p. 37) Tappercoom is to tell him.
The crises mount in the second Act as Tyson and his
confused hangers-on attempt to settle the problems raised
by the disturbed martyrs, Jennet and Thomas:
We really must
Feel our way. We don't want to put ourselves wrong
With anything as positive as evil. (p. 36)
The alternation of tension and relaxation evident in the
first Act continues into the second. Moreover, all the
lines of action established in Act I— the triangles,
social conflict, and contradictory perceptions of reality
are followed up. However, Fry must not only present the
inevitable outcome of what happened in Act I, but must
arrange a complex set of materials in such a way that
the interest will be continuous, the action progressive,
and the effect climactic. Thus, the once-victorious
Nicholas is defeated, preparing for Humphrey's aggressive
seduction attempt in Act III; Richard is humiliated in
117
a comic version of Thomas' tortures, foreshadowing his
rebellious elopement; and Tyson's tendency to be easily
influenced not only justifies the eavesdropping scene,
but allows the initiative to shift to the intruders once
conflict eases into detente in Act III.
Act II begins by reducing the moral content of con
ventions to alsurdity, and prepared for the comic defeat
of Tyson's futile quest for "proof / Positive of guilt"
(p. 47). The first high point is reached when Tyson
and Tappercoom fail to react to Margaret's calls for
help: "The tongs. Hebble, the tongs dear! Sweet /
Elijah, we shall all go up in flames!" (p. 37). No
sooner has one crisis passed with the Chaplain's sugges
tion that Thomas "might be wooed / From his aptitude for
death by being happier" (p. 42), preparing for the rever
sal at the end of the Act, than another arises. Richard
drunkenly ridicules the illusions of the controlling
characters and is forced to scrub the floor. Tyson's
long-awaited plan is then delayed by another emergency:
a brick has struck Nicholas on the head, an incident
greeted, as were the falling log and shooting star, as
"an excess of phlegm / In the solar system" (p. 40). Fry
here and elsewhere depends on the common heritage of
ritual and myth, but without any belief in their literal
meaning; he responds to their theatrical effectiveness
but cannot equate them with permanent moral values.
118
Rather, they are convenient containers for deeply-rooted
human drives which would take other forms in other cir
cumstances. For example, the confused, interrupted
drawing-room deliberations parody, and are broadened by,
the analogous acts of the religion-struck mob, although
neither of the actions thereby receives divine sanction:
And some
Went down on their knees and others fell over them
And they've started to fight again, (p. 39)
As in Phoenix, the most concentrated scene in the
play brings the two principals together in a socratic
discussion which resembles a legal trial, a love-game,
and a ritual act of communion. But the eavesdropping
scene appears more contrived than its comparable predeces
sor in Phoenix, and the viewer may rightly feel that the
single aim of the arrangers, "to slake / The dryness of
. . . disbelief" (p. 47) is fulfilled too much later to
have any clear connection with this scene; moreover, the
seduction scene in Act III dramatizes psychological
development for both participant and eavesdropper far
more effectively.
Thomas' attempts to show Jennet that laughter "is an
irrelevancy / Which almost amounts to revelation" (p. 49)
contrast with his own past tortures, and with Jennet's
sentence to burn at the stake. To defend her own views
Jennet recalls her father's futile alchemy and her own
accidental success in turning copper to gold. Thomas
then condemns her credibility and, ironically, that of
the eavesdroppers as well: "We have wasted paradox and
mystery on you / When all you ask us for is cause and
effect!" (p. 53). Her tears lead in turn to Thomas’
reverse-proposal, and to the later tearful recognitions
in Act III.
When the eavesdroppers suddenly interrupt, the Act
ends in the purest traditions of melodrama, slapstick,
and sentimentality. Thomas naturally knocks down Humphrey
when he threatens the Chaplain, Jennet naturally faints.
With tension relieved, Thomas accepts his sentence to
sociability only if Jennet too "shall take her share
tonight / Of awful festivity" (p. 61), a device patently
conceived to keep the principals on stage for the next
Act. Tyson is compelled to acquiesce in Thomas' sugges
tion, preparing for the development of real conflict
within the love-triangles in Act III. However, the social
conflict has ended with Thomas' demand of "fair play /
For the criminal classes!" (p. 59), and the problem of
perspective is all but resolved for the principals.
Act III is directed mainly toward the rescue,
managed--or mismanaged--largely by forces outside the
persons being rescued, although the beleaguered couples
help to save themselves. The Act begins with argument
like the first two Acts, an unsuccessful attempt to
expel the intruder, Thomas, but the ironic shifts in
L2 0
attitude indicate a deeper symbolic shift in society.
For now it is rebellious youth who complains about the
"ceremonial drumming of the humdrum" (p. 63). It is a
one-time conservative, Margaret Devize, who anticipates
an exhilarating change. Her announcement that "The
course of events is incredible" (p. 65) prepares for
Jennet's grand entrance. The reaction of the bored young
men to Jennet’s "sense of daylight" (p. 67) in turn fore
shadows the tearful cognitlo whose "days gone by" Jennet
wears as "The all unhallows Eve to his poor Adam" (p. 69).
Both Tyson’s and the Chaplain’s sentimental tears, like
those of Catherine of Aix, wash away outworn conventions;
Tyson, then the Chaplain, withdraw to "be alone with
'their] own convictions" (p. 73).
Tension again rises when Alizon returns to propose
an elopement to Richard, creating "a good world" (p. 77)
from the social indifference which had driven them
together. At the same time, their attempts to "make the
future . . . Lie down with our happiness" (p. 77) are
comically complicated by Margaret's attempts to promote
the corresponding attachment between Thomas and Jennet
while Humphrey and Nicholas try to disrupt it.
While Thomas accidentally eavesdrops, Humphrey tries
to seduce Jennet. She is given a false set of alter
natives: "To sleep with you, or to-morrow to sleep with
my fathers" (p. 81). The temptation rises to a climax
121
built by Humphrey's eagerness and apprehension, and
Jennet's hesitancy, which ends with her refusal: "I no
more run to your arms than 1 wish to run / To death. I
ask myself why" (p. 82). In a comic actualization of her
"wish the ground would open" (p. 84), the cellar thunders
(with the trapped Nicholas' pounding) and Thomas enters
as deus ex machine. Thomas' recognition of "the disas
trous truth. I love you" (p. 85), and Nicholas' release
from the cellar and dependence on Humphrey alike coin
cide, preparing for the climactic "resurrection" of both
Thomas' and Jennet's supposed "victim" by the reborn
Richard and Alizon. Although their discovery of Skipps
who "had been to see his daughter" (p. 89) is highly
accidental, the rush of coincidence and surprise at the
end of Act III is a lively parody of the official and
public irrationality, and paves the way for the denoue
ment. Released by the fatherly Tappercoom, who notes
"a kind of somnolent inattention" (p. 93) in the night,
Jennet and Thomas see their past actions with an equani
mity which clearly points the way toward a definition of
comedy:
THOMAS: Do you see those roofs and spires?
There sleep hypocrisy, porcous pomposity, greed,
Lust, vulgarity, cruelty, trickery, sham
and all possible nitwittery. . . .
JENNET: And do you think
Your gesture of death is going to change it? (p. 94)
It is because of these incompatibles in reality that
122
the viewpoints chiefly of Thomas and Jennet — and of the
other characters ultimately--are able to transcend them.
Even though legal, religious, and scientific "ideas” are
used chiefly to highlight the irrationality of social
conventions, they also suggest the shadowy forces of fate
and retribution, and at the same time reveal the differing
attitudes of the characters toward change. Yet to be able
to laugh at sin and error means not only that one has
surmounted them, but there are no profound issues to be
decided, no vital choices to be made. It should be noted
that Jennet does not have a real choice to make between
Humphrey and Thomas because what she wants is identical
with what she feels to be right; besides, the crucial
decision is Thomas1 alone. The revelations in the last
Act make it clear that the finer gradations of feelings
aroused by contradictory pulls and drags are only inci
dentally related to the sexual intrigues, and are funda
mentally associated with the attempt to reconcile morality
with social conventions. The problems are those of an
external, pragmatic world, the world of moral relativism,
the world of comedy. Therefore, in spite of a large cast
of eleven characters, the sometimes hackneyed use of
dramatic conventions such as the eavesdropping scene
and the "aside,” and a certain amount of coincidence and
sentimentality, Fry achieves economical progression
without too great a sacrifice of plausibility.
12 3
Characterization
Although the large cast are differentiated princi
pally by age, their attitudes toward change, and varying
degrees of involvement, they are all brought together
and their conflicts resolved by three occasions: a witch
hunt, prayers, and the celebration of impending nuptials.
By choosing a sufficiently remote time, "1400 either more
or less or exactly” and place, ”the small market-town
of Cool Clary,” Fry is able to utilize the force of
Medieval tradition to isolate emotional issues from
irrelevant, contemporary detail. At the same time, the
genre requirements of the high "comedy of manners” implies
the adherence of all the characters, celebrant and
intruder alike, to the social norms accepted by every
modern, upper-middle-class, British sophisticate. Each
of the characters, like Humphrey Devize, "knows his way
about" (p. 8). Yet the quests of all of them for a lost
paradise of innocence "as it was in the beginning" (p. 92)
are subtly shaded and contrasted by the complicated
triangles, the refined war between the "ins" and the "outs,"
and the varied problems of perspective.
The series of desires, which must be worked out in
conflict without losing the complexity of human motiva
tion, are: Richard's attempts to break free of his "own
apron strings" (p. 76); Alizon Eliot's attempts to escape
with Richard; Thomas Mendip's attempts "to make an
124
example of himself to all / Erring manking" (p. 89); the
attempts by the accused witch, Jennet Jourdemayne, "to
have the protection of your laughter" (p. 25); Nicholas
Devize*s attempts to imitate his older brother, Humphrey,
who is pursuing Jennet; and the attempts by the otherwise
disunited blocking characters, Mayor Hebble Tyson, his
sister Margaret Devize, Justice Edward Tappercoom, and
the Chaplain, to enforce "a general acquiescence to the
mean" (p. 70), The inability or unwillingness of all
of them to withdraw from the confusion of the incongruous,
juxtaposed social situations forces each one to continually
reassess his own motives in terms of the changing dramatic
aituation.
In contrast to her wintry thoughts of the deserting
Humphrey, Alizon Eliot finds "poor" Richard’s name "As
golden as a humblebee" (p. 75). For it is wholly in terms
of his infatuation for her that the rootless and indecisive,
but sensitive, adolescent is metamorphosed from the "cal
culating piece of clay" (p. 3) Thomas discovers at the
beginning of the play. Alizon then sets in motion within
Richard "machinations of nature; / As April does to the
earth" (p. 9). His sceptical hesitation in bringing
Tappercoom is followed by his attack on Tyson's "tortures"
of Thomas and Jennet:
If only inflicted pain could be as contagious
As a plague, you might use it more sparingly, (p. 43)
12 5
As a result Tyson forces him into servile "fetching and
carrying. / If you wish to be a mule you shall be a mule"
(p. 44). He then sees his later hurried entrances and
exits as a dramatic symbol of a deeper uncertainty: "I'm
the to-and-fro fellow" (p. 74). As his love for Alizon
is aggravated by rejection of the others, and Alizon’s
argument that "laws can't live in the heart" (p. 75),
he agrees to search with her for "safety, peace, / And a
good world" (p. 77). Thus his real life begins after the
play ends.
Alizon Eliot is characterized as a naive, devout
"little blonde religious" (p. 64) who appears only three
times; her entrance in the first act emphasizes both her
desire "to be altogether different" (p. 5) and her con
cealed resentment at the "misunderstanding" which led
first to her birth, and then to her planned marriage to
Humphrey after her father "stopped thinking of God as
eligible-- / No prospects" (p. 7). Her abrupt rejection
by both Humphrey and Nicholas— "T'm not very used to
things happening rapidly" (p. 16)— explains her off-stage
brooding during Act II, "pale, tearful, and nibbling a
walnut" (p. 64). Thus she accomplishes her rite of
passage into maturity through passion:
I have become
A woman, Richard, because I love you. I know
I was a child three hours ago, and yet
I love you as deeply as many years could make me.
(p. 76)
126
Thomas Mendip is characterized by the reactions of
the other characters to his "magnetism of mystery / And
[his] curious passion for death" (p. 56), his assumption
of the role of advocatus diaboli, and his maturing shift
in perception as he recognizes the identity of his and
Jennet’s destiny. He is at first viewed by the blocking
characters as a "half-pay half-wit" (p. 29) miles glorio-
sus, who at the same time has a "well-born father" (p. 4),
is oddly likable, and "quite understand[s] the rules"
(p. 20).
The Chaplain quite rightly understands his role as
another variant of the comic "refuser of festivity." The
ridicule which Jennet fails to obtain is all piled on
Thomas when he is,
found guilty
Of jaundice, misanthropy, suicidal tendencies
And spreading gloom and despondency, (p. 60)
However, his shocking obsession with man's "obscene /
Decaying figure of vegetable fun" (p. 58) which leads
to his attacks on the world of "humbug and curious pas
sions" (p. 34) emerges as an overdeveloped idealism. This
itself is a reaction to the horror of "prising open riba
to let men go / On the indefinite leave which needs no
pass" (p. 21), as he reveals in his early, slightly drunk,
and loquacious exposition. For Thomas enters at the
beginning of the play and remains to participate largely
as commentator. He exits only to "come moralising in"
127
(p. 84) again.
His furious attacks on Mthe entire fallacy of human
emotions" (p. 67) appear at the beginning to be the result
of a cynical rationalism, as indicated by his parody of
a Cartesian axiom: "I breathe, / I spit, I am" (p. 6).
His imaginative pose as the devil's advocate, "The Great
Unspurious" (p. 50), which helped condemn Jennet, and
brought the pair together, however, is partly a pose, an
attempt to release inner tensions,
Like the heart going out of me,
By which it avoids
Having to break, (p. 69)
At the same time his Devil-mask startles the others from
their complacency, and conceals his role as a new Adam
driven to treading the "garden threadbare / Completing a
way to save" (p. 87) Jennet.
Jennet's dilemma in choosing between Humphrey and
the stake unmasks Thomas, revealing his insecurity and
innate dislike for disorder: "I was nicely tucked up for
the night / Of eternity" (p. 85). The significance of
his name, "mend-up," emerges from Jennet's explicit
reference to the congruence of their destinies from the
beginning: "You have cut yourself a shape on the air,
which may be / My scar" (p. 56). Consequently, he
realizes that something outside his constricting system
of thought "condones the world incorrigibly" (p. 73).
Near the end, Thomas' motives are greatly
128
over-simplified; all his cynicism, self-confessions, and
his attacks on convention are rather sentimentally reduced
to ’’the opportunity of providing a diversion" (p. 89)
from attacks on Jennet. Consequently, he leaves with
Jennet thoroughly domesticated:
You gamble on the possibility
That I was well-brought-up, and, of course, you're
right, (p. 94)
Jennet Jourdemayne is characterized by her quest for
an objective orderliness to fend off "the clutch of chaos"
(pp. 53-54), by her growing perception through passion
that feelings outweigh the dictates of reason, and by the
possibilities of renewal which all the characters see in
her, as the name, "great day," implies. After being
announced as a beautiful witch who "most of all disturbs
Hell's heart" (p. 21), she enters as a comic variant on
the suppliant woman of tragedy; she appeals to the
assembled representatives of the "reasonable world"
(p. 24) for "compassion / To lift suspicion off me"
(p. 35). But the fears of the credulous conservatives
lead to her condemnation for the "rigmarole of her
dreams" (p. 26). She denies that she had "changed a
man / Into a dog" (p. 23), although passion makes the
Devize brothers quarrel like animals; and that "I bring
back the past" (p. 25), although she is to realize when
she confronts Tyson in Margaret's dress, "I rustle with
his memories" (p. 69).
129
When her ’’wish in all good faith to continue living"
(p. 34), characteriatic of the martyr, is denied by Tyaon,
she is abruptly disillusioned:
But horror is walking round me here
Because nothing is as it appears to be. (p. 50)
Her anxiety-fulfillment nightmares of "shadows sharp as
rocks" (p. 49) drive her to a naturalistic relativism,
dehumanizing her to "an unhappy fact / Fearing death"
(p. 55). Because of the imminence of death, she rejects
her father’s idealistic alchemic attempts to "change the
matter of the world" (p. 51), indicating a nascent cyni
cism: "for me, the actual! / What I touch, what I see,
what I know; the essential fact" (p. 52). Paradoxically,
Thomas' relentless attacks on her realism drive her to
an apparently diametrical position: "You [Thomas] may
be as corrupt as ancient apples, well then / Corruption
is what I most willingly harvest" (p. 58).
After Thomas’ intervention has forced her to take
part in the last Act celebration, she enters exhausted,
clear-eyed, and resigned, tom between Nicholas’ sincere
devotion, the appeal of the "open-hearted night" (p. 79),
and dread of the future: "I am tired of keeping my
thoughts clear of that verge" (p. 80). But when Humphrey
offers hope "actual / As my body is" (p. 81), she makes
the transcendent leap from a naturalistic fatalism to
a sense of renewal:
130
What Is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What la good, as love is good.
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it. (p. 83)
Her reaction to Thomas’ declaration of love preserves
her independence without willfulness, draws her inner
conflicts into harmony with the ’’facts" of existence,
and provides her with a rational context for sensibility,
the presence of volition as evidence of individual soul:
My heart, my mind
Would rather burn. But may not the casting vote
Be with my body? (p. 86)
When she and Thomas are freed, her "gentleness, considera
tion and gaiety" (p. 78), which had "charmed" her captors,
likewise captivate Thomas, even though she is an "incon
venience" as "inevitably as original sin" (p. 95).
Margaret Devize and her two sons, Humphrey and
Nicholas, all "devise" varying means of using Jennet to
circumvent social repressions. Like Anath in The Firstborn,
Margaret passionately regrets her lost youth:
0 Heavens, we have all been young.
Perfectly young, obstreperously golden.
What a martyrdom it was--(p. 11).
Her attempts to "seem composed, sufficiently placid and
unmotherly" (p. 15) conceal a distrust of emotion and an
unsympathetic obliviousness, as Thomas observes:
What better use can we put
Our faces to than to have them express kindness
While we’re thinking of something else? (p. 14)
Each of her appearances emphasizes her attention to
131
propriety, custom, and tradition, conventions which have
assumed the proportions of divine ordinance; she threatens
under increasing pressure to "lose my faith in the good-
breeding of providence" (p. 29). However, her belief in
common with Jennet in the "reasonable world" (p. 24),
and her own hidden desire for rebirth--"I could do with
a splendid holiday / In a complete vacuum" (p. 78)--lead
to a plausible and well-motivated liaison between the
two women. By providing Jennet with a mate other than one
of her sons, Margaret preserves the stability and moral
correctness of her own family.
Humphrey and Nicholas Devize quarrel like "Romulus
[and] Remus" (p. 67), but are "inseparable, really twin
nature, utterly / Brothers, like the two ends of the same
thought" (p. 11); they differ chiefly in relative degrees
of innocence. Humphrey is older, unscrupulous but clever,
and is driven by two simple urges. Threatened by Thomas
for trying to seduce Jennet, he places his feelings in
a pleasure-pain context:
Whatever happens I shall have one bash at him
Which next to this other thing is the most desirable
Act in the world, (p. 84)
Yet he is persistent between fits of fickleness. He Is
argumentative and persuasive even if Jennet does recognize
his pleas as "a pretty fiction / To distract the cherubim
and seraphim" (p. 83). And unlike Thomas who seemed to
have "only said / 'Die, woman, and look as though you
132
liked it" (p. 85), he does flatter Jennet by giving her
a choice concealing a "multiplication of double-crossing"
(p. 16).
Nicholas clearly sympathizes with his brother's
aims: "I'm always deeply / Devoted to your affairs"
(p. 64). But he too manages to function as a "plain
dealer," a kind of conscience: "It comes through, however
much of our whiteness / We paint over it" (p. 22). His
attempts to abduct Alizon, harangue the rabble, and cor
rupt Jennet simply translate Humphrey's seductive efforts
into their sentimental equivalents: "What does love
understand about hereinafter-called-the-mortgagee?"
(p. 17). Like all the other characters, he wants renewal
and thinks he has "just been reborn" (p. 11) after
,rkilling" Humphrey; his wound on the head after haranguing
the crowd is a red badge of virility and manhood. But
his attempt, like Thomas', to gain notoriety through crime
falls short through "abysmal poverty of mind" (p. 64).
His descent down "the pitshaft of love" (p. 79) becomes
an absurd parody of both love and death when the escaping
Richard locks him in the cellar "yelling like a slaughter
house" (p. 86). Considerably chastened, he accepts defeat
and the maturity which victory would have withheld: "I
shall go and lie with my own thoughts / And conceive
reciprocity" (p. 87).
Mayor Hebble Tyson is characterized by his humorless
133
Mdream of the fear of having nightmares" (p. 38), his
ineffective defense of "The ordinary decencies of life"
(p. 18), and the inexorable unveiling of his lonely
guilt, his "fear of [his] single self" (p. 38). Although
he appears to the hopeful Jennet as "a gentleman / Full
of ripe, friendly wisdom" (p. 23), the darling of the
television situation comedy, his refusal to recognize
the existence of Thomas "coming her without identity"
(p. 20), and his interruption first of Jennet’s and then
of Humphrey’s revelation of the obvious discrepancies in
reports of Skipps’ "death" are more than melodramatic
suspense devices. His intrusion demonstrates Tyson’s
active essence: his function is to keep the truth from
being known. But Thomas is quick to recognize the value
of Jennet to Tyson as scapegoat: "What bliss to sin by
proxy / And do penance by way of someone else.'" (p. 28).
Ironically, his postponement of decision until he
is forced to "let the fairies fox you while the devil /
Does you" (p. 28) brings about his cognitio. For Tapper
coom acutely perceives in Tyson’s desperate order to burn
her not a return to common sense, but a "belated visit
of the wanton flesh / After all these years" (p. 71).
His tearful childishness, "I’m no longer / Young, and I
should be given protection" (p. 71), and his withdrawal
"to be alone with my convictions" (p. 73) signify a
rebirth into maturity through self-knowledge.
134
The Justice Edward Tappercoom is "an overworked and
elderly man" (p. 93) with almost nothing to do, a good
humored advocate of political conniving: "Good is as
good results" (p. 47); though witty, he is unimaginative,
and constitutionally attached to the blocking characters
by his conservatism: "I am not a nervous man / But I
like to be predisposed to an order of events" (p. 38).
Realistic about his own shortcomings, he can afford to
chide Tyson with a post of mock-superiority: "You’ve
got to be dispassionate. / Calm and civilized. I am
civilized" (p. 71).
The Chaplain is a variant of the comic pedant whose
frankness and naivete stand in sharp comic contrast to
the inability of the blocking characters to break through
their ordinary habits:
I wish I were a thinking man, very much.
Of course I feel a great deal, but that’s no
help to you. (p. 40)
Without actually engaging in dialectics, he reveals the
ironic basis of Thomas' rebellion while clarifying his
own highly sublimated role in opposing the "devil":
All my friends tell me I actually exist
And by an act of faith I have come to believe them.
But this fellow . . . is so convinced
He Ls that he wishes he was NOT. (p. 41)
Although "subdued / To the cloth he works in" (p. 49),
he extorts "lightness of heart / From the guts of his
viol" (p. 69), and is overcome with remorse. But he too
135
ia reconciled to the paradox of existence, taking "so many
glaaseaful of repentance heTa almost unconscious of the
existence of sin" (p. 91).
Although speaking only a few lines, the last-intro
duced Skipps ia lthomme moyen senauel par excellence who
returns in a Lazarus-like mock resurrection: "Dead, am
I?" (p. 91). He parodies the Chaplain by drunkenly con
ducting a mock baptismal service to place the "coabbera-
tion[s]" of all the other rebirths in a wider perspective:
"immersion upon us miserable offenders" (p. 90). At the
same time he mocks the latent sadism of repressive
authority, "give us our trespassers as trespassers will
be prosecuted for us" (p. 91) to appease the rebels, to
covertly support the necessity for a sacrificial purga
tion of sins, and to show that belief is too strong to
be hurt by mockery.
The kaleidoscopic multiplication of doubleness in
the confused love affairs, imitative brothers, "plain
dealers," fake chaplains, and respectable drunks increases
the comic mood; complications are inherently funny. At
the same time, Fry ably avoids any suspicions of arbitrary
manipulations, over-simplifications, or--except in the
exaggerated and somewhat false effect of the recogni
tions— poor motivation. By moving his time back to the
most static of eras— in the popular mind, at least—
Fry is able to isolate ideas, emotions, and reactions
136
from their contemporary setting; thus he forces his
characters to view their motives in terms of the immediate
effects their actions have on others.
Language
Imagery.--The whole of the imagery in The Lady's
not for Burning forms three dominant clusters, all taking
their sources from metonyms of the sun-attributes: light-
dark, heat-cold, and wet-dry. The interaction between
polarities, Fry's habit of inverting traditional value
symbolism, and the presence of the love-death paradox
all reinforce the imaginative complexity of the imagery
as a whole.
Light-dark imagery primarily characterizes, grouping
and distinguishing between "good" and "bad" characters.
The succession of day and night in a Ptolemaic universe
is identified with the mythical positions of Heaven and
Hell. Thomas, Alizon, and Jennet "shine" like "the utter
white of heaven" (p. 8). Alizon is "pale" (p. 64) like
St. Peter, and Jennet, who is associated with jewels, the
rising sun, and the fire of martyrdom, is herself called
"five-feet-six of wavering light" (p. 87). Thomas Mendip,
too, gleams figuratively like a limewashed wall. In
contrast, Humphrey is "swart" (p. 8), and Nicholas uses a
light-dark antithesis to ridicule the immorality of the
blocking characters: "[Evil] comes through, however much
137
of our whiteness / We paint over it" (p. 22). Signifi
cantly, Richard is "purgatory-color" (p. 8), an analogy
which signifies his immaturity and the ambiguity of his
social status.
Although light-dark imagery usually symbolizes the
conflict of good and evil, its synecdoches are often
paradoxically inverted and clustered. A metaphorical
descent into hollow darkness symbolizes the search for
rebirth through love. Erotic desire appears in metaphors
like baths of brimstone, clashing cymbals, the "mountain
belly of time" (p. 33), the chaplain's viol as his mis
tress, a kettle set over Jennet's flame, the Sheban
fountains, or a "bell of longing" (p. 82). Thomas' fear
of the "unholy mantrap of love" (p. 94), and Nicholas'
image of Jennet as a "sense of that cavernous / Night
folded in night" (p. 79) symbolically identify the birth
of love with re-entrance into the womb: going into the
"pitshaft of love" (p. 79) is like opening "Pandora’s
box with all the ills" (p. 34), preparing for Margaret's
invitation to Jennet to "Make free / With my jewel box"
(p. 65).
Just as the associations with religious love make
darkness a "goodness" metaphor, the debasement of love
to sensuality identifies light-symbols with sin and
conflict: "altercation thrums / In every granule of the
milky way" (p. 53). Ironically, the value-inversion of
138
light-dark symbolism is only an extension of the problem
of vision signified by death-symbols like "night of
eternity” (p. 85) and the "calculating twilight” (p. 51)
in which Jennet's father wandered. While diminishing the
macrocosm, light-dark Imagery magnifies human perception
of the cosmic, Manichean struggle of the forces of light
and darkness. For example, Alexander is supposedly invoked
with a "breastplate of shining worms” (p. 25), while the
fearful Jennet's last "silver night” is watched by a
death's head moon with its "white unmolared gums" (p. 68);
the moon itself reflects the "spatial light / Of Garbage
Indestructible" (p. 32) of a dead universe. Thus Fry
inverts the customary associations of day and night
with light and dark, life and death, to suggest the
dream-world of anxiety-fulfillment.
The daily rhythms of light and dark are extended by
analogy into the seasonal antithesis of heat and cold,
which is combined paradoxically with heaven-hell, winter-
spring, wind, and bird imagery. The transmutation of
flesh to soul by alchemic, sexual, and religious fire
confirms the literal theme while linking its motifs.
Jennet's question why her persecutors must brand them
selves with her, Tappercoom's reference to being singed
by a candle, and Nicholas' suggestion that Jennet reverse
the direction of the flames are assimilated by Nicholas*
self-characterization:
139
compounded of all combustibles.
The world's Inside. I'm the receipt God followed
In the creation. It took the roof off his oven.
(p. 10)
Bird-fire imagery not only confirms the seasonal
motif; it establishes a parallel between the Richard-
Alizon affair in The Lady's not for Burning and the
Dynamene-Tegeus intrigue in A Phoenix Too Frequent.
Richard's fear of "life sending a flame to nest in my
flax" (p. 6) and Thomas' later analogy of Alizon to
"Tinder, easy tinder" (p. 31) unite the sacrificial,
erotic, and spiritual implications of Jennet's phoenix
like "freedom in the fire" (p. 66): her first entrance
resembles the "approach of naked morning / [which] flies
into the fire like a shadow of goldfinches" (p. 24).
Therefore, birds of spring, femaleness, and morning like
the dove, sparrow, and lark are contrasted with images
of winter, darkness, and sterility like the cuckoo "unable
to die" (p. 13) and "raven-quills of the shadows" (p. 95).
The wet-dry antithesis, a third major cluster of
images, groups the transmutation of wasteland to garden
by spiritual rain, the tour d'abolie motif, and the
dilemma of choice which dominates both structure and
action. All the characters are at some stage of the action
capsized, abandoned, and dried up by the wind off the
moors of mortality, from "the mouth / Of that same planet
of almighty blemish" (p. 85) each wants to leave. Nicholas
140
tries to carry Alizon out into the air Tyson is victim
to; Humphrey's "castles in foul air" (p. 81) and "scents
of new-mown hell" (p. 80) recall Thomas' "uproariously /
Comical dreams which smell of henbane" (p. 4). Therefore,
imagery of plague-pit stench externalizes the rise of
deep-seated guilt into consciousness: "I'm overblown /
With the knowledge of my villainy" (p. 93). Moreover,
the flymarks of black magic, centuries piled like "clods
of dung" (p. 26), and Thomas' prediction of a time for
"tombs to tip / Their refuse" (p. 33) all project a
despairing death-urge upon the universe.
In a "winter" context, the stench becomes a wind,
the snow dusty, symbolizing a violent internal or external
reaction to despair: Nicholas' belief that the stars
blew his way, the rioting Jobby Pinnock "Roaring like the
north wind" (p. 39), and Jennet's "flakes of drifting
fear" (p. 55) all project guilt on nature in a winter
dramatic context.
Whereas the dry, wintry wind symbolizes the sterility
and futility which are inflicted by society upon its most
sensitive members, with a warm spring wind comes the fall
of rain or dew, a flood to end social and personal
drought. Spiritual transformation emerges in a starry
"rainfall of diamonds" (p. 66), the repentant "Dripping
like newly-weighed anchors" (p. 71) of the chaplain and
mayor, and the "dewdrops of one syllable" (p. 48) of
141
Richard's prayers for Jennet. Tappercoom*s hopes to
"slake the dryness of my disbelief" (p. 47) and Tyson's
wandering Jews of tears externalize inner change, a
rebirth commemorated by the baptism of the "heathen rain
fall" (p. 48) which lingers after the "storm of super
stition" (p. 34), as Jennet perceives:
like the angels,
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips. (p. 83)
Paradoxically, the wet-dry antithesis represents the
dilemma of existence implicit in the life-as-quest motif.
In their search for the "sombre sultry waters / Where
beauty haunts" (p. 77), all of the lovers identify the
problems of physical maturing, belief, and individual
freedom with sea imagery. Moreover, the journey across
"the heart, the inland sea" (p. 68) is identified with
the quest on "the planks of time" (p. 67) across the
"swamp of space" (p. 83). Yet between embarkation and
consummation (in its broadest sense), lie the opposite
but equal symbolic dangers of drowning (moral annihila
tion) and of isolation as a castaway (ostracism). Ship
wreck symbolizes the disorientation and confusion
accompanying the failures of all the young men to establish
intimacies: Thomas asks that Jennet not be his Helles
pont, whereas Jennet fears Humphrey will drown the singing
142
milkmaid in her blood, and the frustrated Humphrey tells
Nicholas to drown himself. Conversely, all of the
suitors are at one time or another "cast adrift on a raft
of melancholy" (p. 73). Thomas chokes with "the seven /
Sobs I managed to bring with me from the wreck" (p. 74),
Jennet is landed by Thomas' "seine of insanity" on his
"strange beach" (p. 55), and the confused Nicholas
figuratively flies his shirt at a masthead.
By seeing his own life as a tour d'abolie, his body
as the world, and the basic bodily functions as vegeta
tive, Thomas Mendip relates his personal ambiguities to
the quest-motif which recurs in the motivations of all the
characters, and to the larger Ptolemaic mythic scheme.
Moreover, to escape the futile self-consciousness of life
like "the possibility of water on a desert" (p. 63),
Thomas wanders through "the arterial labyrinth, the
body's hell" (p. 4). By unconsciously willing the death
of their elders, the young people sacrificially "scour
themselves in the blood of a grandmother" (p. 14). Thomas
returns from "floundering in Flanders" (p. 21); the
bloody "sunset in a puddle" (p. 34) is actually a "splash
from the cherry-red river that drives [Nicholas'] mill"
(p. 45); and Thomas asks if Tyson's blood runs "deep
enough to run cold" (p. 71). Thus, the sexual connotations
of death, like the deathly connotations of sex, are
assimilated to the moral polarities of heaven and hell,
143
the alternations of light and darkness, and the rhythms
of birth and death.
Versification.--The meter in The Lady's not for
Burning is predominately blank verse with the traditional
variations; occasionally a perfect iambic pentameter line
appears: "And brought forth man, the mouse. The spheres
churned on" (p. 33). But to a much greater extent than
in any of the previous plays, the meter emphasizes speed,
a sense of movement, and urgency; alliteration in phrases
like "heckling itself hoarse in that hot-head / The sun"
(p. 53) and "fishing net / Of eccentricity, your seine of
insanity" (p. 55) emphasizes the harsh, barking accents
which emerge most clearly in crabbed, obscure abuse:
You bubble-mouthing, fog-blathering,
Chin chuntering, chap-flapping, liturgical,
Turgidical, base old man! (p. 28)
Thomas' attack on Tyson releases a rapid stream of expec
torated syllables. On closer examination, the epithets
group themselves in pairs by rearranged, consonantal
rhythm-pattems, the whole series ending climactically
in a contrasting triplet of monosyllables.
At another extreme, Fry is able to suggest an oracular,
meditative, essentially discontinuous rhythm which, with
the repetition of long vowels, suggests painful suspira-
t ion:
Then sad was my mother's pain, sad my breath,
Sad the articulations of my bones,
Sad, sad my alacritous web of nerves,
144
Woefully, woefully sad my wandering brain.
(p. 83)
The frequent appearance of mouthfuls of consonants
and long, lumbering polysyllables ia characteristic of
the play. The sharp discords of ’’omnipotent bombinations”
(p. 33), "abaction, peculation, and incendiarism" (p. 36),
and "porcous pomposity" (p. 94) appear to be a marked
deviation from harmony and decorum, but in this respect,
the play is in the honorable tradition of Butler's
Hudibras. Fry himself has Tappercoom use — and parody--
the excessive intellectualism connoted by obscure and
technical terms: "The whole thing's a lot of amphigourious
/ Stultiloquential fiddle-faddle" (p. 38). The use of
"bibulate" for "drink," "palingenesis" for "repeated
rebirths," and "cachinnation" for "laughter" may also be
interpreted as imitative decorum or intentional caco
phony to deflate bathos or sentimentality.
Yet the highly styled, manneristic use of ambiguous
sound-sense links suggests the weakness of the pun and
similar devides to organically further the action or
develop character. For a plethora of phrases which
exhibit internal rhyme, multiple puns, and arbitrary
repetition like "jaws and maw" (p. 17), "mumping [pumping]
pub" (p. 19), and "How she must make Torment be tormented /
To have her to add to its torment" (p. 21), like meta
phorical allusions and an associationalistic structure
145
of imagery, turn their back, on the sense of the dialogue
and set up self-contained patterns in their place.
These associations are witty, addressed to the awakened
intelligence, and project the meaning of the drama upon
another dimension. Yet, at the same time, the action
sometimes stops or even fails to bring about the revela
tions being analyzed.
In conclusion, the form of The Lady *s not for Burning,
its structure, characterization, and language, may be
understood as the imitation of a certain action. This
action is the quest for volition, the rational stability
behind the emotional imbalance, the "paradox and mystery"
(p. 53). This is the over-all aim which informs the
essentially comic theme: "to find an open society which
tolerates all possible variations of behavior in order
to be oneself." Fry has seen this quest as the real life
of the confused searches; moreover, he must have seen
this particular action as a type, or crucial instance,
of human action in general. Therefore he is able to
present it in the form of comedy, which reconciles all
the characters to a new order which is at last seen to
represent the wish-fulfillment dreams of all of them.
The first act of representation, which consists in
making the plot or arrangement of incidents, attains
maximum concentration and economy by introducing three
coincident "rituals" of exorcism (witchhunt), invocation
146
(prayers), and fertility (nuptials), each of which is
celebrated to improve the well-being of the community. At
the same time the carefully balanced exposition and
action, the logical succession of events, and the action
rising toward logical climaxes involves all of the charac
ters in a comic interpretation of human nature, comic
because the refusal of each of the participants to see
the meaning of rituals involving others will not prevent
his own involvement in the problems of others. At the
same time, the use of the erotic intrigues to give pers
pective to the desire for prayer, and the use of the
village witchhunt to universalize the emotional "conquest
of evil" (p. 45) In the house broaden the relevancy of the
issues at the same time that the compact scene focuses
clearly upon the immediacy of the action.
The characters or agents are the second actualization
of the action. The soul of the comedy is there already
in the order of the events, the kaleidoscopic shifts
between stability and chaos as one after another of the
characters arrives to demand acceptance of his own terms.
That Fry's art of characterization is extremely conscious
and deliberate is evident the moment one considers the
differences between the stories of his characters as they
might appear in saints' legends and the details of their
lives which he chooses to show directly on stage. A
legend of martyrdom would begin with a mob reaction to a
147
guiltless individual, shift to a trial, and end with the
spectacular confrontation of stiff-necked heretic by
equally stiff-necked persecutor. Pry could have shown us
an impressive display of legal acumen and wit by a crown
jurist had he not selected a village nobody at the single
moment in his life when he is forced to pause and analyze
his own motives in a larger context. In a standard
romance an idealized Ben Hur would arrive--or not arrive--
in time to free the martyr with a stirring programmatic
enunciation of mercy proclaimed over the bodies of his
victims. But Fry has not idealized the moral views held
by a mass audience: he has postponed Jennet’s recognition
until after all the characters have been forced to make
critical decisions. When Jennet tells Humphrey in Thomas'
hearing that,
I am interested
In my feelings. I seem to wish to have some
importance
In the play of time. (p. 83)
she reveals the dramatic significance of romantic love;
the conflict between the fearful superstition of the
conservatives and the scepticism of the radicals is not
the central concern of the play but a way of revealing
its theme; they are symbolic of the universal conflict.
Although the ostensible scene is the stodgy, conventional
suburban parlor, it is not felt as all reality; we per
ceive around it and behind it the forces of the changing
148
modern world.
The third actualization of the action is in the
language of the play, the imagery and rhythms wherein
the characters develop their internal essences in response
to the ever-changing action of the play. The Imagery
not only groups and contrasts characters, but reveals a
larger symbolic context for the actions taking place on
the stage. While effectively reviving the past without
a veneer of idealism, the language diminishes or bur
lesques the past as well as instilling Immediacy in the
action.
CHAPTER FIVE: THOR, WITH ANGELS
Structure
Like Fry18 two previous religious plays, Thor, with
Angels1 is constructed in three movements, each one
building up to and receding from a crisis. After the
Jutish Cymen and his relatives return from a defeat by
the Saxons, tension rises with a quarrel over sacrificing
their Briton prisoner, Hoel. The dissenting Cymen is
goaded into a rage and unaccountably tries to kill his
own son instead of the prisoner. After Cymen and Hoel
are led away, the appearance of the "resurrected" Merlin
complicates the second movement. A surprise attack of
sheep-killing wolves is driven off with Hoel's help,
only to be followed by the second major crisis of the
play, Cymen*s rebellious destruction of Woden's altar.
After Cymen is summoned to a religious assembly, beginning
the culminating movement of the play, the growing affec
tion between Martina and Hoel leads to the final major
crisis: Hoel is sacrificed in Cymen1s absence, the clan-
leader returning after the fact to announce a new dispen
sation.
1London, 1948.
149
150
As this brief summary indicates, the rhythm of
Thor, with Angels rises and falls in a dramatic represen
tation of Merlin's "quest and conquest and quest again"
(p. 27). Moreover, in his socratic dialogue with Cymen,
Merlin juxtaposes the love, war, and religion motifs which
in previous plays dominated the organization of the
imagery:
And men broke their swords in the love of battle,
And broke their hearts in the love of women,
And broke the holy bread in the love of God. (p. 28)
This ironic interplay implies a second structural device:
temporal events as a mirror of divine activity. Thus each
crisis in the action is preceded by a fabulous offstage
event involving divine participation; its exposition not
only reinforces the mystic significance of the dramatic
crisis, but in turn derives immediacy from its analogue:
"The same with gods as with men" (p. 42). Furthermore,
the associations of war and perverted sacrifice with the
old gods and of love and transcendent atonement with the
new gods suggests the succession of the old by the new
and behind this change, the theme of a "return to para
dise ."
Like Fry's first four plays, Thor, with Angels
begins with the end of an old quest and ends as a new
one begins. The first few scenes present the ironic
spectacle of a defeated band of Jutes returning to an
impotent religion and, in Cymen's case, to a cold wife:
151
"Have I come home? Or is this a place / Of graven images?"
(p. 5). Just before Cymenfs arrival, however, a series
of events forebodes deepening conflict between Cymen and
his disgruntled family. The steward Colgrin comically
attempts to kill Quichelm, the same son the deluded Cymen
will later attack. Then follows exposition of Cymen*s
unaccountable protection of a British slave on the winning
Saxon side after his sword "broke / Against a staggering
light" (p. A). The unwelcome implication of madness
rationalizes Cymen's growing estrangement from his
family, which is to rise from "subterranean muttering"
(p. 7) to open rebellion in his absence. Moreover,
reports of his "blaspheming against Woden" (p. 4) build
tension and prepare for Cymen's seIf-defensive attacks
on the "golden future our fathers died for!" (p. 9).
Cymen*s condemnation of "some ancient / Damp god of
this dooming island" (p. 9) is perverted by the demand of
Osmer, his brother-in-law, that the Briton captive, Hoel,
be sacrificed: "Here's the land you loathe, / In bone
and blood. Break its back** (p. 10). Although exposition
is heavy in the first movement, it is integral to the
development of conflict. For the attack of Cymen's family
on his "fears [of] more gods than he knows what to do
with" (p. 10) is met in turn by Cymen's blasphemy against
his ancestral "island god, the down-and-out divinities"
(p. 10). The struggle temporarily Immobilizes Cymen
152
as both he and Hoel attempt to understand the divine
eponyms of human chaos:
every
Moment shall have spears addressed to that dark
Which lies in wait for my will. Alive,
[Hoel is] ours; dead who knows to what
Unfriendly power he will have given himself? (p. 13)
But the emergence of the sun from the mist, recalling
the moment of defeat in battle when Cymen rescued Hoel
and ’’ The sky turned round” (p. 8), infects Cymen with his
family'8 "stampede of defeat" (p. 13). He throws Hoel
to the ground and shouts hysterically, "Let us love one
another" (p. 14). In a dramatic metaphor which demoni
cally parodies the archetypal sacrifice of Christ by
the Father, he tries to kill his own son Quichelm. His
wife Clodesuida quickly intervenes, ordering the others
to "Dip him in sleep . . . and he’ll be washed into
reason" (p. 15), lowering the dramatic tension. The
entire scene, ending with the metaphoric allusion to
baptism, foreshadows Merlin’s later prediction of Hoel’s
predestined martyrdom, Hoel "having a death in him too; /
That death by drowning in the river of his baptism"
(p. 29 ).
Hoel is taken away by Colgrin, his homelessness and
"Damned ambition for life " (p. 17) preparing both for
the suddenness of his attachment to Martina, Cymen's
daughter, and the pathos of his violent death. First
Anna, then Martina, come to Hoel’s guard room. Anna's
153
attack on Colgrin parodies his half-serious praise of
death, ,TThe best life is led horizontal / And absolutely
unconscious" (p. 16), and their quarrel over the lost
sword not only precipitates a domestic war, but prepares
for the appearance of Merlin.
Martina's argument with Hoel continues the quarrel
between Anna and Colgrin, her separation from Hoel by
religious enmity foreshadowing the growth of their affec
tion with the imminence of Christianity. Hoel's exposi
tion of his attempts to read the altars of the One God
in which "there were three" (p. 19) not only contrasts
with Cymen*s hate of the Jutish gods "Cross-boned on
weedy altars" (p. 19), but prepares for Cvmen's destruc
tion of the family altar. At the same time Hoel’s
reference to his father’s memory of "earlier gods who
still harped on the hills" (p. 19) prepares for Merlin's
entrance and, in turn, the return of the Romans.
Clodesuida interrupts in "horrible suspense" (p. 20):
while Clodesuida has been "securing us to the gods / With
every device that's orthodox" (p. 21), her daughter Martina
has been feeding the arisen Merlin. Like her father,
Martina is in revolt against the gods, though covertly:
He screws up his eyes and looks
At my hand and tells my future. It's better
Than having always to placate the gods
For fear something should happen, (p. 22)
A series of messengers then arrives to build tension
154
by announcing increasingly urgent crises. Disagreement
on the significance of their messages initiates conflict
among their listeners; moreover, the rapidity of their
arrivals allows no time for differences to be resolved
by rational deliberation.
First, Merlin enters and guardedly speaks of the
need to "be lost / And then be found. It’s an old custom
of the earth / From year to year” (p. 24), only to be
interrupted by Cymen, whose sleeplessness forms an ironic
parallel to Merlin's inability to die. As in the previous
scenes, past conflicts with future, this time in a version
of the Enniautos-Daimon ritual, the struggle of "superan
nuated god" with "mere entangled man" (p. 25) which
prepares for Cymen's Promethean destruction of the altar.
In a veiled prediction of a new community to be invoked
by Hoel's sacrificial atonement for the sins of the old
i
one, Merlin assimilates the motifs of love, war, and
religion to a seasonal context: Cymen's indifferent
gods ,
never feel
As the world feels in springtime the stab of the spear
And the spurt of the golden blood,
Winter’s wound-in-the-side, the place where life
begins, (p. 27)
The Jutes, and their conquerors, are to bear the British
culture "as though you were our widow / Not our con
queror" (p. 27). Attacking in return, Cymen condemns
the weakness of Merlin's Christian land:
It shook
Down, it burned, its ash was blown
Into our food and drink, (p. 28)
He intuits a "violence of humility" which "clangs alarm
with a steady beat in the wild / Night of history" (p. 28).
Clodesuida's rejoinder that Cymen churns up the air is
refuted by Anna's desperate warning that wolves are "into
the sheep" (p. 20), her message itself contrasting with
the quieter deliberations.
As the Jutes rush out to combat the wolves that are
a natural manifestation of social and psychological chaos,
Merlin remains to correlate the unity of temporal and
eternal events with revelation of divine predestination
through the repetition of like historical cycles:
I'm too near-sighted now
To be able to distinguish one thing from another.
The storm-swollen river from the tear-swollen
eyes, .
What is in one is in the other, (p. 32)
Moreover, just as the Jutes had conquered the Britons,
so Merlin hears "the men of Rome / Returning, bringing
God, winter over" (p. 33), signaling the return of the
victorious harbinger, Hoel: "The Briton killed the
grimmest, / The greatest [wolf] with his hands" (p. 34).
As the wolves had attacked the sheep, Cymen's family
turns against Cymen and Hoel: "Make retribution / Before
we're godsmitten again" (p. 35). The sight of Hoel's
wolf-clawed shoulders, a dramatic metaphor of Cymen's
weariness "Of being ground between the staring stones /
156
Of air and earth" (p. 37), drives Cymen to temporary
acquiescence, but he rejects the Briton in favor of a
substitute sacrifice, then revolts:
What do I do by sacrifice?
The blood flows, the ground soaks it up,
The poisoned nightshade grows, the fears go on, . . .
The sacrifice is despair and destruction, (p. 37)
And he tears down the altar. Thus, the second crisis,
like the first, is a maimed rite of sacrifice which
irreparably widens the gulf between Cymen and his family.
Cymen's Promethean challenge to the gods to "Come
down and silence me!" (p. 38) is ironically answered
instead by a royal messenger who announces a religious
assembly to confirm King Ethelbert’s conversion to
Christianity. The Jutes’ rejection, except for Cymen,
of the King's divine "fatherliness" indicates another
love-religion parallel: "Let the king indulge the queen /
If it keeps her wife-minded" (p. 40). Thus, exposition
of the theophany of "Gregory of Rome who on a market-
day / Saw angels where we see our enemies" (p. 39)
prepares not only for the symbolic healing of the racial
schism by the love of Hoel and Martina, but foreshadows
Cymen's own vision, at the end of the play, of Hoel as
Christ crucified. At the same time, Cymen's submissive
departure, "We're in the path / Of change" (pp. 40-41),
is contrasted with the rebuilding of the altar by Tadfrid
and Osmer, a dramatic metaphor ironically foreshadowing
157
the destruction of old by new ways.
After Cymen leaves, Osmer plots "to elude the alle
giance to Cymen" (p. 43); his treachery contrasts sharply
both with Hoel's willing aid against the sheep-killing
wolves, and with Cymen's unquestioning compliance with
the royal summons. The rest of Cymen's family rationalize
their fears in terms that pervert the continuing parallel
of love, war, and religion:
the gods were formed
Out of the old hurt pride of rejected chaos
Which is still lusting for the body of the world we
walk on. (p. 4 3)
For the rejected Hoel, whom Martina feeds as she
had Merlin, the girl places her relatives' cynical
departure to "pray, with a certain purpose" (p. 44) in a
social context to restore perspective: "They hate you;
and that's easy to understand. / We have existence on such
hard terms" (p. 44). Martina's dislike of the universe
as "too ill-fitting / And large" (p. 44) is only another
manifestation of fear of the outsider: "It isn't one of
my easiest duties. But how else / Can we keep our footing
or our self-esteem?" (p. 45). At the same time, her com
passionate interest in Hoel's comfort contrasts ironically
with Clodesuida's earlier apathy toward Cymen's demands.
Merlin's excessively long (59 11.) speech during Hoel's
sleep, in Martina's absence, does nothing to aid dramatic
progression; its sole purpose is to form a sermon within
158
an exemplum as time supposedly passes.
Martina's return with food initiates a romantic
analogue to Cymen's previous pacifistic "madness."
Hoel's playful willingness to become a "girl’s shadow"
(p. 48) draws an admission from Martina that a "Briton
. . . , if he were a Jute, / Would be brave and agreeable"
(p. 48); in turn, Hoel half-mocks the simple-witted
affections that can't tell the difference between friends
or enemies. But Martina's innocent kiss is perverted,
by the diseased minds of the watching relatives, to a kiss
of death. Their attack on Hoel as "a god's meal" (p. 49)
not only recalls Cymen's vision of the false gods who
consume our days
Like food, and crunch us, good and bad.
Like bones (p. 34),
but leads to the crisis of the demonic crucifixion which
Martina is helpless to prevent. Her ambiguous cries,
"Father! Father!" recall Christ's words on the cross
and prepare for the concluding, somewhat sentimental,
approach of the happy theocracy.
The end is linked to the beginning by Cymen's entrance
when the sacrifice is accomplished, an ironic echo of
his own earlier attempts to sacrifice. Hoel's crucifixion
confirms the "vision" he had seen during the sermon:
And while we listened, with our eyes half-shut
Facing the late sun, above the shoulder
Of the speaking man I saw the cross-road tree,
The love of the God hung on the motes and beams
Of light. . . . (p. 52).
159
Cymen's summation conveys the paradox of the fortunate
fall implicit in all Christian tragedy:
The sacrifice of God was brought about
By the blind anger of men, and yet God made
Their own blindness their own saving and lonely flesh
Welcome to creation, (p. 53)
In summary, the action of the play is advanced by
dissolving and recombining the analogous love, war, and
religion motifs; by a demonstration of the logical and
ironic concatenations of events on the temporal and eternal
planes; and by the linear arrangement of varieties of
conflict between the old and new orders.
Characterization
The ambiguity of the values which separate and group
the characters, the parallels between the eternal and
temporal planes, and the purely historical transition
between old and new systems of social mores are implied
by the title, Thor, with Angels, and confirmed by the
Gregorian "vision" of "angels where we see our enemies"
(p. 39). By choosing a period from the English past
(A.D. 596) when a cultural invasion not only consolidated
an earlier political upheaval but promised to integrate
church, state, and ethnic groups, Fry is able to embody
in the dramatic conflict a multiplicity of implications.
Moreover, the mythic parallels between the fatherhood,
priesthood, and political supremacy of the king are
exactly balanced by the contrasting symbolic conflict
160
of Jute and Saxon, father and child, paganism and Chris
tianity .
Within a context of contrasts and analogies, each
of the characters develops an inner essence in conflict
with that of each of the other characters. Strictly
speaking, they are: Cymen's attempts to "rid the brain
of uncertainty, rid the heart of its fear" (p. 25); Hoel's
attempts "to see into the light" (p. 50); Merlin's
attempts "To bring to her [the world] the devotion of my
dust" (p. 25); Clodesuida's attempts to "Trust our gods /
And put these heathen to work" (p. 30); Martina's attempts
to conciliate differences; and the reactionary attempts
of Quichelm and Cheldric, Cymen's sons, and Tadfrid and
Osmer, his brothers-in-law, to "swing back on time, and
hope the gods / Forget the indecision" (p. 11).
Cymen is characterized by his imitation of Simon
Peter's apostolic denials, the analogous conflicts which
externalize his inner struggles, and the juxtaposition of
the god-like falling and rising motion of his participa
tion with the equal but opposite rising and falling
motion of Hoel's fate. Just as in The Firstborn where
Moses' victory spells Seti’s defeat, the resolution of
Cymen's inner struggle dooms Hoel; in both plays, the
peripeteia is largely accomplished by forces outside
the dramatic progression of the play.
Before and immediately after Cymen's entrance, the
161
pejorative attacks by his family on "our chief, our lord,
your [Clodesuida*s] maleficent male" (p. 7) foreshadow
Cymen’s continuing role of Alazon or impostor in their
eyes, a "man, spilling sawdust / Like an old puppet"
(p. 8). Although his search for a scapegoat, "Some fiend
of this land [which] came at my back" (p. 8) is directed
at the past, then at Hoel, at his family, and finally at
Merlin, his opponents can be considered as objectifica
tions both of the conflicting elements in Cymen and of
the principles of good and evil in the world. Throughout
the first movement of the play, he struggles; when he is
taken away to be "washed into reason" (p. 15), the momen
tary lowering of his defenses permits the "third strange
eye," which the struggle between "myself" and "That not-
myself which took my will" Cp. 11) forced into his head,
to bring perception. Through a childish anxiety-fulfi11-
ment nightmare, he understands that he has become the
battleground for the moral forces of the universe:
I lay on my bed and felt it stand with its feet
Planted on either side of my heart, and I looked
Up the tower of its body to find the face
To know if it meant to help or hinder,
But it was blotted out by a shield of thunder, (p. 26)
It is in terms of Cymen’s characterization that Fry
has taken at least two steps to relate the middle of the
action to the beginning and end. First, there is an
obvious effort to continue and even extend the conflict,
rather than present a mere record of events, as in The
162
Boy with a Cart. Secondly, the clash within Cymen grows
stronger after he has decided to preserve Hoel. His
blasphemy against Woden in battle, confirmed by his incon
gruous invocation, "Let us love one another" (p. 14), and
then his deluded attempts to kill Quichelm can be--and
are--rationalized as madness, fever, "The burning of his
body" (p. 15). But his Promethean attack on Woden’s
altar is a fully self-conscious attempt to regain the
initiative from indifferent gods who intervene in human
affairs only to protect their own prerogatives. He has
asked Merlin,
If, as you imagine, our gods have no care
Whether we win or lose, what cuckoo power
Is it that usurps the rest of my soul? (p. 27).
Until his imperious summons to the gods, "Can’t you even
bring me to silence?" (p. 38), is incongruously answered
by a royal messenger, Cymen's irresponsible attacks on
civilization magnify his own personality into pseudo
divinity: "I curse this land that curses me" (p. 10).
Cymen's contest with Merlin separates divine pretense
from human actuality; like Orestes pursued by the Furies,
Cymen bears the sins of his race: "What powers pursue
us here?" (p. 25). His desperate attempts to "face it
like a man" (p. 29) are demoniacally perverted by his own
recognition that "The skirts of the gods / Drag in our
mud" (p. 26). He has become a new Adam, a "mere entangled
man" (p. 25). Moreover, Merlin's very presence mocks
163
his threat, "Both you or this boy / I can destroy now"
(p. 27).
The messenger's arrival places the familial, sexual,
and racial conflict in the broader perspective of time:
We’re in the path
Of change, and I must go to meet the change,
Being unable to live unaltered, (p. 23)
The restoration to Cymen of volition by the messenger,
"I’ll leave you to make your way" (p. 40), reinforces
Cymen's continuing sense of responsibility, affirmed
earlier: "This house / Is on my back; it goes my way"
(p. 15). His power even in his absence is acknowledged
by the rebellious Osmer, who justifies the sacrifice
"in his name" (p. 43).
Cymen's departure, like an archetypal Piers Plough
man, stresses a new submissiveness and dedication: "He
walks steadily enough now. / Very much as he does behind
a plough" (p. 41). His new willingness to shoulder the
"huge debt of pain [which] mounts over all the earth"
(p. 53) when he returns, his fatalistic acceptance of
non-resistance "without thought / Of what will come"
(p. 63), and his unquestioning acceptance of Hoel’s death
effectively represent, in dramatic form, the conversion
of an entire nation. However, these qualities of charac
ter emerge from divine intervention rather than as an
organic development from his earlier demonstrations of
impuslive virility, sardonic foresight, scepticism,
164
and reaponsibility.
Hoel i9 a likable, innocent "sad and savage Briton11
(p. 18) whose predestined role as martyr is developed by
the paradoxes arising from the inevitable succession of
past by future. He helps the Saxons defeat the Jutes,
but is himself captured. MWild as an animal in his heart'1
(p. 33), he saves the Jutes* sheep from the wolves but is
himself sacrificed. The significance of Hoel's name, a
cognate of the Germanic houwa (to cut or hew) and a pun
on "hoe-well11 emerges from his desperate request that
Colgrin "hack me off" (p. 16) his dead mother, the earth,
and his wish for a "steady job in the grave" (p. 17).
The ironic interplay of the attempts to both dehuman
ize Hoel to a "flint that is going to skag us" (p. 36),
a louse, a blackened skull, and a "limpet on a sour rock"
(p. 17), and to deify him as "a shepherd.with a lion"
(p. 34), signifying the David-Christ archetypes, converges
in his embodiment of "the eternal alien / In our own world"
(p. 38), the Wandering Jew, the spectre of total isola
tion from society which haunts the denizens of Dante's
Inferno.
As Hoel's characterization proceeds, the Briton comes
to embody a diverse set of life symbols. At different
times, he is thought to represent "the land you [Cymen]
loathe / In bone and blood" (p. 10); the water in which
he has been given to god; the "fiend that twists [Cymen’s]
165
tongue" (p. 14); mankind, as Congrin tells him: "Lowest
form of life; that’s you" (p. 16); and the life force
implicit in "quivering black-haired flesh" (p. 10).
Significantly, Hoel acknowledges Cymen's protection with
a simile of the first act of divine creation: "I’ve
known nothing except / Your mercy; that indeed was a kind
of light to me" (p. 29). After Merlin "returns," his
subconscious memories of Christianity and his growing
attachment to Martina stimulate an increasing independence
of judgment. He functions as a neglected conscience by
accusing the Jutes of having deified their passions to
justify their own excesses. Moreover, the "third strange
eye" (p. 11), which enlightened Cymen, clarifies Hoel's
sense of his and Cymen's divine instrumentality:
I wonder
What it was that came and wielded your father
and left me
Alive? (p. 44)
At the conclusion of the play, Hoel's own quest for
enlightenment is fulfilled: the Jutes, despite Martina's
opposition, celebrate a black mass by making "a god's
meal of you, / And mak[ing] our peace with you, with you
as peacemaker" (p. 49). At the same time, the innocence
which totally indicts Hoel's society confirms the fitness
of the scapegoat to "set this house / Free from fear and
guilt and the working of darkness" (p. 50).
Merlin appears in this play as a magician, Spielman,
166
or logios aner; he is a benevolent withdrawing and
returning eiron character, as Cymen points out: "You nod
and look beyond me, / And pretend to know nothing" (p. 30).
His eulogy to the "shape / Which was in a dream before
the shapes were shapen" (p. 45), his infallible, prescient
mediation between past and present, and his claim that
"whatever man may be / I am that thing" (p. 25) which
associates him with the collective unconscious, clearly
identify him with the People of South England in The Boy
With a Cart. Yet through his debates with Cymen, he
comes to embody the spirit of Eccha, the dead Jute leader
for whom Merlin’s racial descendant, Hoel, will atone by
"echo[ing] Eccha / Into death" (p. 12). Whereas the
Arthurian Merlin had urged characters on to violent deeds,
Fry's prophet urges pacific endurance. Ironica lly, it
is the absence of the chastened Cymen which permits the
violence of Hoel's death, a signal of Merlin's renewed
theocracy. Yet the final sacrifice- is necessary to place
the action in a perspective of peaceful Christian redemp
tion .
Colgrin, Cymen's steward, is Merlin's comic double.
As Merlin rejects impossible dreams by "looking ahead,
having made my peace with Time" (p. 27), Colgrin measures
superficial ideals against the standard of "real life."
Both restore perspective. Colgrin's repeated failures
to find his sword parody impulsive violence, and his
167
cynicism ridicules war as a realistic means to com-unity:
"It adds an air / Of glory, and we shake hands in Val
halla" (p. 20). By making him Hoel's guard, establishing
his laziness as a butt for the others' ridicule, and
giving him a shrewish wife, Fry maintains continuity
through the episodic portions of the play. Moreover, he
presents a low point against which to estimate the heights
of Hoel's transcendence.
Clodesuida, her daughter Martina, and her servant as
well as Colgrin's wife, Anna, though not without humor
at times, are mainly suffering suppliants: Clodesuida
is forced to absorb the tension from Cymen's "brainstorm
of wrong" (p. 40); Martina's growing compassion for Hoel
is wrenched by his violent death which she is powerless
to prevent; and Anna has "Sharp pains in the back just
to have seen [the wolves] gnashing in the light" (p. 31).
Clodesuida supports her brothers and sons against
Cymen and Hoel, rejects Cymen's brusque affection with
frigidity, and has devoted her life to ritual purgation.
At the beginning, when the men return for food and hos
pitality, she is "gone to early rite" (p. 2). Moreover,
Clodesuida consistently finds religious sanction for her
repeated attacks on "these things which aren't ourselves"
(p. 24) and wears herself out "securing us to the gods"
(p. 21). Yet in a deeper, more vital sense, her compe
tent realism, "My hands / Can only draw their everyday
168
conclusions" (p. 42), and her belief that "we succeed
or suffer / According to our men" (p. 42) reveal a close
harmony with Cymen, who when he returns at the end of the
play greets her first:
Clodesuida, a peaceful heart to you now, . . .
This evening you and I
Can walk under the trees and be ourselves
Together, (p. 51)
Her lingering doubts, "We have to live" (p. 52), the
inner conflict which had muted her sympathy, and her
frustrated efforts at unity and conciliation all lend
credence to her final acceptance of the promise of life
"by rule of God" brought by Cymen.
Martina echoes her mother's xenophobia, supersti
tions, and dependence on her men, first Merlin and then
Hoel, but her complaint of "being old with being young
in a long winter" (p. 18) indicates her sparagmos between
youth and maturity. From the beginning she attempts to
avert conflict. When Quichelm threatens Colgrin, she
pleads, "Beat him tomorrow. Let's be affable" (p. 3).
Later she feeds Merlin, calming Clodesuida's fears with
an earthy realism: "You shall see him for yourself"
(p. 22). Her final, fruitless struggle against the
violent attempts to kill Hoel is a dramatic metaphor of
her efforts to break free of the trammels of the past, a
conflict to be resolved only by Cymen's revelations.
Anna, Colgrin's wife, functions both as a sympathetic
169
foolish character in a wise ■ituation--"lt's good to see—
we anticipate little enough" (p. 33)--and as a comic
version of the shrewish wife: "a devout woman, but dismal
in some respects" (p. 2). Her repeated attacks on Col
grin’s laziness, "Nobody's at it / Except old Anna"
(p. 17), parody Clodesuida's reliance on her brothers.
At the same time, Anna's helplessness at the wolves,
her wry humor, and her belief in free will are a realis
tic commentary on human nature:
Men
Make enough misfortunes for themselves, without
Natural calamities happening as well. (p. 32)
Quichelm and Cheldric, Cymen's older and younger
sons, and Tadfrid and Osmer, his brothers-in-law, are all
churlish, superstitious, fanatic zealots. They are types
of the agroikos, refusers of festivity, which appeared
in The Boy With a Cart as the Phipps brothers and in
The Firstborn as Shendi and the Egyptian overseers.
Except for the threats to Quichelm's life which anticipate
Hoel's martyrdom, and Osmer's instigations to rebellion,
they are scarcely differentiated. Despite their savage
and bloodthirsty viciousness, the new dispensation is
somehow to convert them too. Supposedly, Cymen's return
will make "Their blindness their own saving and lonely
flesh / Welcome to creation" (p. 53).
The successions of divisions and regroupings among
the characters which result from the unexpected and
170
even fabulous arrivals of outsiders into an outwardly
calm domestic situation resembles the characterization
in The Lady's not for Burning. In Thor, with Angels
as well, the double plane of the action, the religious
overtones of racial and sexual conflict, and the opposing
tugs of love and duty justify a large and varied cast of
characters. Moreover, the varying versions of divine
influence on human destinies suggest the pervasiveness,
the basic and inevitable nature of the conflict.
Language
Imagery.--The whole of the imagery in Thor, with
Angels, as in the previous plays, consists of metonyms
for an attribute of the sun. In turn, each of the con
crete metonyms is paired with an equally concrete
contrariety; the interaction between their polarities,
the tendency of metonyms to "cluster," and the interplay
between metonym and source spawn an endless chain of
interrelated synecdoches which link each image, obviously
or deviously, with the imaginative focal center in the
sun.
That the rhythmic succession of day and night by
each other is the basis of the moral and psychological
motivations of the action is indicated by Osmer’s ques
tion, "Shall we let the light of our lives / Be choked
by darkness?" (p. 53). For light is associated with
171
reason, virility, and health; dark with fear, impotence
and disease. Just as in Cymen's mind, the shadows of
weariness struggle with the "glare of the brain" (p. 24),
Merlin's "reflective" insight, exemplifying his function
as conscience of the race, is symbolized by the image of
his eyes as "two pale stones / Dropping in a dark well"
(p. 21).
The juxtaposition of the voyaging sun, a human
lifetime, and the quest-motif emerges in an analogy
between the journeys of the individual human and of the
body-politic over "the surface of life" (p. 24), one
granting immortality to the other. As the "ship [of state]
in full foliage rides in / Over the February foam"
(p. 33), so does "the doting bubble" (p. 24), which is
man, float on "the golden bed of the troubled river"
(p. 24); both take their source from the seasonal,
sacrificial "spurt of golden blood, / Winter's wound-in-
the-side" (p. 27). The metonymic extension of the life-
quest into the seasonal grey winter and gold summer,
the grassy green and icy white of living and dead vege
tation god, and stormy sea and muddy earth, demonstrates
the consecutive but conflicting manifestations of nemesis:
every new life, by the fact of its existence, provokes
the return of avenging death. Cymen contrasts false
golden promises with the chalk cliffs of Dover, hears
ghostly voices from "yellow sodden hills" (p. 9), and
172
sees the rise of the sun as "the burning sea of honey /
Over the grey sand of our defeat" (p. 13). That the
actions of the characters in the play are meant to rep
resent in little the motivations of mankind, in turn
derived from the workings of natural law, is confirmed
by the imagery itself. In his long soliloquy, Merlin
Juxtaposes the "maze and cellarage of honey" with the
"charts and maps of men" (p. 46). When we recall the
fanciful associations of flowing honey and tides and of
the problems of navigating the golden river of life, the
imaginative congruence of microcosm and macrocosm clearly
emerges.
To the unenlightened Jutes, by way of contrast, Mer
lin and Hoel are members of a suppressed heathen race
who had "lain furtively in the setting sun" (p. 19);
their "darkness" carries connotations of superstition,
willfulness, and disaster for viewer and persons viewed.
Not only does Merlin recall the darkness of his birth,
attack the predatory Jutes as crow-like, and condemn
them for having "waged winter upon us, till . . . you
blackened / The veins of the valleys with our dried
blood" (p. 32); Hoel is repeatedly singled out as being
black-haired and benighted. Throwing him to the ground,
Cymen threatens with his foot on "the neck of the dark"
(p. 13) to kill him.
The extension of the daily rhythms of light and
173
dark by analogy into the seasonal antitheses of heat and
cold amplifies the winter-summer struggle between Cymen
and his family; their conflict over Hoel is a ’’ natural"
illustration of nemesis. Returning to a cold wife who
sacrifices "so the gods will warm towards us" (p. 51),
the defeated Cymen drinks defensively: "Down the throat
sunshine" (p. 6). His relatives, "the dumb icebergs"
(p. 8) want to kill Hoel in cold blood (p. 11) "even
though our blood freezes" (p. 36). But Cymen figuratively
spews "the hot spout / Of indignation" (p. 13) and fears
the vengeful "misshapen fire" (p. 13) even from a clear
sky.
In "winter" contexts, the value connotations of the
light-dark polarities are reversed. Whereas a deathly
whiteness is characteristic of ice, bone, and silver, a
fertile darkness identifies the contemplative, womb-like
wells of thought peopled by benevolent shades. Cymen tries
futilely to sacrifice a white goat, Osmer believes their
"luck's neck rwill be] fractured" (p. 35), and the teeth
of the attacking wolves are seen "gnashing in the light"
(p. 31). To universalize the cyclical, repetitive return
of death, Merlin recalls how Arthur’s knights had ridden,
Into a circle of snow-white wind
And so into my head's old yellow world
Of bone. (p. 28)
The inverted, paradoxical blackness of whiteness,
or vice versa, is a result of the increment of Hell in
174
the ’’winter" cluster of death and derives from the image
of bones in the infernal pit. Behind the paradox is
implied the cosmic, Manichean struggle of the forces of
light and darkness. After Merlin associates darkness
with "a strain of hell in his blood" (p. 25), Clodesuida
reveals her fear of Hoel's "brain’s blackened teeth"
(p. 36). Near the end, Quichelm identifies the black
haired Hoel with the concealed whiteness of "Leper-flesh"
and condemns the "flicker of your rutting eyes" (p. 49).
By being contaminated, Martina has become the "black pawn
of the devil's game" (p. 49). In the same vein, the
benevolent penetration of sunlight into darkness is per
verted by anxiety into its reverse, the penetration of
darkness into whiteness: the despairing Hoel sees himself
as a louse "skewering / Into the wool away from the beaks
of crows" (p. 17).
In contrast to the deathly whiteness of bones is the
restorative darkness of sleep, contemplation, and— to
those desperate for total transformation--death. These
clusters combine hollow symbols of rebirth, death as a
baptismal re-entry to the womb, and the extension of
vision through analogy to the scattering of darkness by
the sun. The dark wound in winter's side, Merlin's
"budding grave" (p. 23), Merlin’s name as an "echo that
booms in the deepest cave of [Hoel's] race" (p. 22),
and Clodesuida'8 request that Cymen be dipped in sleep
175
all resemble the baptism of Hoel "In a land which had
become a grave to us all" (p. 29). In his last moments
of life, Hoel asks that Death be,
like a hand that shades
My eyes, helping me to see
Into the light, (p. 50)
In an economical device of characterization, the bene
volence of the personified '•wandering shadows" (p. 46)
and of Martina'8 belief Hoel would make a good shadow
contrasts with the malevolence of the darkness-associa-
tions applied to the couple by the apprehensive Jutes.
The analogy of the return of the church to "the
wall of sky / Breached by birdsong" (p. 33), the Emer
sonian image of forcing "a third strange eye into [Cymen*s]
head" (p. 11), and Merlin's reference to grass sprouting
from a skull link the emergence of a neophyte from the
womb, the seasonal context of the death-rebirth continuum,
and the "enlightened" revival of spring. Moreover,
Merlin's feigned inability to distinguish "the storm-
swollen river from the tear-swollen eyes" (p. 32) links
mankind's sorrows with the quest, giving, at the same
time, man's struggles an inevitability in common with
natural change. The Jutes want to "douse" Hoel (p. 12),
Colgrin's sword is swathed in wet linen, the earlier
British gods "wept runnels" (p. 19) at their defeat, all
fear the "brainstorm of wrong" (p. 40), and Hoel complains
ambiguously of Cymen’s intervention:
176
I might by now
Have been wading about in the sway of death,
But I'm blinking at the light; my head swims
with it. (p. 16)
Just as water identifies rites of passage through
birth, maturity, and death, it is synecdochic with the
negative element in the Manichean struggle of light and
dark, as indicated by Colgrin’s reference to "This dizzy-
dazzy / World made of morning sun and fog-spittle"
(p. 16). For all the characters associate fog, sweat,
and mist rising from the earth with divine malevolence.
At the beginning the Jutes emerge, cursing and confused,
from the mist, talking "in a kind of cloud" (p. 3).
Moreover, Cymen's curse of sodden hills, gravel and muck,
and every soaking blade of grass demoniacally invokes
Merlin from the tower, "A spitting-place / For all benighted
life" (p. 21), and is echoed by Osmer's reference to
Hoel's "damned contagion" (p. 48); Osmer adds, with an
oblique glance at the inscrutability of good and evil:
Uncertainty
Has dandled us enough to make us sick
For life. (p. 49)
Another manifestation of the balanced conflict of
good and evil appears in the sexual attraction-repulsion
relationships of the sun and earth. Whereas the maleness
of the sun is linked with its rising motion, its bloody
fire, and the phallic ism of responding vegetation, the
femaleness of the earth is linked with its enveloping
177
darkness, the compulsive attraction of its muddy filth,
and the deathly passage through its dark underworld.
Cymen's dedication to the "unwearying, turbulent, blazing
loins of Woden" (p. 14) is opposed to the spark of the
Christian god whose land burnt: "its ash was blown /
Into our food and drink" (p. 28); but at the end, Cymen
sees "the love of the God hung on the motes and beams /
Of light" (p. 52), all of which identify fire and sun as
god-synecdoches, as in Boy. At the same time the sun's
upward motion across the sky reappears as Merlin's tower,
"pinnaele-ears the hare," (p. 45), the thrust of a sword
into snow, the breach of the sky by bird song, the indig
nation of the gods "mounting under the self-control / Of
the horizon" (p. 40), and the miracle of "old Joseph’s
[of Arimithea] faithful staff / Breaking into scarlet
bud in the falling snow" (p. 28). That Merlin’s image,
and the others, refer to a spring fertility dance and its
symbolism, is made clear by Merlin's accompanying comment,
"maywood and the like perform it every year" (p. 28).
On the other hand, the death-urge, divine vindic
tiveness, and impotence are associated with the ambivalent
earth-goddess whose love for mankind, her children, is so
powerful that it brings them forth only to destroy them.
Merlin believes that the earth winds delicious arms and
hopes to bring her "the devotion of my dust" (p. 25)
and Martina thinks Hoel's offer to be her shadow will make
178
him Mbite the dust” (p. 47), an oblique indication of the
fatality of her unsuspected Magna Mater attractiveness.
Although the Jutes believe the gods lust for the body of
the world and Merlin calls himself "an eternal suckling
who cannot drag his lips / Away from the breast of the
earth’* (p. 28), Cymen complains bitterly:
The skirts of the gods
Drag in our mud. We feel the touch
And take it to be a kiss. But they see we soil them
And twitch themselves away. (p. 26)
While Hoel hopes for a steady job in the grave, Cymen
ironically calls Hope the worker set to dig "the pit
which swallows us at last” (p. 37).
The "earthiness” of the grave identifies Colgrin
and Merlin as components of the same character: whereas
Colgrin is thick with rust like his impotent sword (p. 17),
Merlin appears later with "the red earth still on him”
(p. 22). The earthiness associated with Hoel links his
role as a new Adam, the movement of Christianity from the
"depths," and the god-like passage from life through death
to rebirth. The spiritual descendent of Merlin, "the
louse / In the filthy shirt of a corpse in the bottom of
a ditch" (p. 26) whose father was "Pure man" (p. 25),
he is called a "flick of mud" (p. 16) by Colgrin. His
"descent" both from life and from Merlin is indicated in
Colgrinfs fanciful status-rankings: "Lowest form of life;
that's you. Next to lowest, me" (p. 16). Moreover, that
179
Cymen'a attempt to be freed of Hoel, the "speck of the
dust which three of our generations / Have marched over"
(p. 29), will be unsuccessful is indicated by his rela
tives’ desire to clean their hearts (p. 50) with Hoel's
death. Their intention to send him on "a damned journey
into dust" (p. 7) where the moles can teach him to dig
parodies the rebirth motif implied by Merlin's blessing
from his womb-like budding grave.
Vers if ication.— The verse form of the language in
Thor is blank verse as in the other four plays, continuing
the easily imitated, loose, conversational style. Strong
emotion tends to emerge in a rigid and exact, but rare,
pentameter line: "I curse this kingdom, water, rock and
soil.'" (p. 9). Another characteristic of the language
is a trick of repetition of like words or phrases:
Who at it? Not you at it. Don't you
Think he's ever at it; Nobody's at it. . . .
(p. 17)
At other times, the like phrases are separated by dialogue
in such a way as to emphasize a return, as in Hoel’s
repeated "I want to live!" (p. 17), or Merlin's "truest
and conquest and quest again" (p. 27). More subtle is
the use of "all dreams out of a slumbering rock" (p. 45)
and variations on this phrase as a refrain in Merlin's
long, lyrical elegy on sleep. In the same lyric, Fry
intensifies his use of internal rhyme and sound corres
pondence :
180
Lambs in a skittle prance, the hobbling rook
Like a witch picking sticks, (p. 45)
Characteristically, the longest speeches are invocations,
such as those of Cymen before the altar, and the exposi
tion of miracles by messengers.
The repetitions, acrostic recombinations, and word
plays are so prevalent in the play as to confirm allitera
tion, assonance, and consonance as Fry-mannerisms.
Phrases like "White as a water-spout spinning1' (p. 8),
"sun in the sky suffers" (p. 39), and "The fearful
silence / Became the silence of great sympathy" (p. 52)
would tax the dexterity of most actors accustomed to the
use of more prosaic terminology. Yet a phrase reminiscent
of Shendi's despair in The Firstborn occurs in Cymen1s
plea, "The deed of death is done and done and always / To
do, death and death and death" (p. 38). The auditory
imagery produced by the repeated words "done" and "death"
conveys Cymen's belief that the knell of fate has sounded
and that he has lost the exercise of free will; yet he is
given a choice at the same moment, ironically, that the
act he resisted is accomplished.
Within the dominant pattern of blank verse occur
phrases like "the wind hushing the world to hear / The
wind hushing the world" (p. 35) and "unuttering vapor,
unutterable void." Not only do lines like these illus
trate the tendency of alliterative language toward a
181
strongly-stressed, four-beat line, but exemplify the
connection between the written and the spoken line, one
of the clearest indications of "poetic" language regard
less of its quality.
Summary
In accomplishing the primary act of crea
of making the plot, Fry has begun the play ef
(with Cymen's thwarted attempts to sacrifice)
it effectively (with the love-death sacrifice
in Cymen's absence), but between the two the
rather irregularly and disconnectedly. Durin
movement, the coincidental arrival of the mes
without any linear connection, Merlin's presc
a continuing series of miracles coerce the ac
cost of plausibility and without adequate pro
The ending seems rather to spring from the early part of
the play: Hoel is killed by the Jutes in revenge for
killing their leader, Eccha, in battle. To present
Cymen's inner conflict, Fry invents not one new action
but several different ones, thus increasing our sense
of discontinuity in the middle. Also, his overstress on
the farcical in the presentation of very serious matter
suggests a partial inability to present transcendence
effectively through action; the disproportion between
the shrunken magnitude of the scene and the significance
tion, that
fectively
and ended
of Hoel
action moves
g the second
sengers
ience, and
tion at the
gres sion.
182
it is supposed to convey is another manifestation of the
same difficulty, and is only partly alleviated by the
amplifications of imagery- Moreover, the use of miracle
as spectacle, for parody or satirical exposition while
the action stops, implies that Fry fails to understand
the meaning of his story at a level deeper than the
literal; he does not find the myth, as a whole, signifi
cant as such.
The second act of imitation, that of establishing
the reality of his characters by creating a variety of
perspectives, is accomplished by a series of analogous
conflicts which nearly exhaust the potentialities of the
situation. The complex politico-mythico-geneological
links between Merlin and Hoel, the plausible interaction
between Cymen's and Hoel's functions as lovers, warriors,
and priests, and the range of emotion displayed by the
subordinate characters display a conscious use of artistry
by the author. Cymen's symbolic role far outweighs his
actual contribution to the dramatic progression, and
Hoel's confused gropings, while giving probability to the
ending and contrasting his sensibility with the sensate
violence of his killers, hardly accord with his own
reported herculean feats of valor first against the Jutes
and then against the wolves. However, Fry presents both
Cymen and Hoel undergoing an improvement of character
which accounts in moral terms for the ending; the middle
18 3
shows them drawing together and making good use of the
understanding their congruence brings them, and the
spectacle of their analogous moral evolution gives a
degree of probability and dramatic acceptability to the
ending.
The third act of imitation, that of augmenting the
action and characterization with language, both confirms
and amplifies the rhythms discernible in the structure.
By assimilating moral, fatal, and social change to the
natural cycles. Fry universalizes the action. At the
same time, he attempts to show how the movements he has
selected from the diversity of human life are representa
tive not only of all other movements, but of the unseen
forces interacting upon the eternal plane. That the
result is not ambivalence but a diminutization of the
eternal is a consequence partly of the dramatic action,
focussing as it does upon human action, and partly of
Fry's sceptical attitude toward the divinity.
A more serious deficiency of the play as poetic
drama is the strong tendency for the miracles revealed
by exposition to spring from the imagery, rather than
otherwise. The wolf-attack, for example, has no linear
or causal connection with the rest of the play; rather,
it objectifies the retributive forces of the divinity,
as references to the Mwhite-hot lion of the air" (p. 13),
ghostly teeth, and fear causing "Sharp pains in the back"
184
(p. 31) abundantly testify. Likewise, the light which
both broke Cymen’s sword and confused his ability to tell
his son Quichelm from Hoel, and the sun which represented
a crucified god to him, do not develop logically from the
action, but extend from an imaginative analogy between
the descent of divine inspiration and the earthly approach
of sunlight which has its source in the play’s imagery,
not in its action.
CHAPTER SIX: VENUS OBSERVED
Structure
In Venus Observed,^- Fry presents three lines of
action in a rising, falling, and rising rhythm of three
Acts. In Act I, while the Duke of Altair brings his
three one-time mistresses together for his son Edgar to
choose a "mother/' Dominic accuses Reedbeck, who is
both his father and the Duke's bailiff, of embezzlement.
When Reedbeck's daughter, Perpetua, enters, both the
Duke and his son Edgar are infatuated. In Act II Dominic
persuades Perpetua to protect her father from the con
sequences of his indiscretions by marrying the Duke.
But Edgar and Perpetua rebel against repressive authority;
the Act ends as one of the Duke's former mistresses,
Rosabel, burns down the Duke's observatory and ends his
seduction of Perpetua. In Act III the Duke absolves
Reedbeck of any wrongdoing and chooses Rosabel as his
wife, freeing Edgar and Perpetua to marry.
At the heart of the plot are two triangles: the
Duke, Perpetua, and Edgar; the Duke, Perpetua, and
Rosabel. Yet which boy gets which girl is not Fry's only
^■New York, 1949.
185
186
concern, even though the complicating conspiracy unduly
emphasizes this problem. More important, the parent-
child, boy-girl conflicts all reveal fatal passion: love
is like death in literal, comic, or sublimated terms.
Moreover, the social battle between the "ins" and "outs"
is reflected by the contrapuntal alternation of the scenes
between the decrepit, aging observatory filled with the
newest scientific equipment and the verdant Temple of
the Ancient Virtues from which so many duchesses had
announced their pregnancies. Fry carefully avoids over
simplification by the use of paradox; for example, the
destruction of the conservatory by a woman and the panic-
stricken collision of two mistresses in man-made cars
not only parody the usurpation of sexual prerogatives
exemplified by the Duke's arbitrary manipulation of the
situation of choice at the beginning; they also symbolize
the liberalizing forces of the future which each of the
characters chooses to ignore.
Moreover, Fry has chosen a highly conventionalized,
artificial occasion which compresses a great many improb
able events— an eclipse, a seduction, a homecoming, a
conspiracy, and many others--into less than twelve hours;
it begins with day and ends with night, or the approach
of dawn, as do all the other plays. The analogous plots,
the cyclical rhythm, and the ironies all reflect the
characteristic double plane and, within the mythic setting,
187
a single action. The metaphysical identity of the Many
and the One is beat stated by the Duke:
If we can move and talk
Under the sun at all, we must have accepted
The incredible as commonplace, long ago. (p. 32)
It is this mysterious succession, without repudiation, of
past by future, conventional by Bergsonian open society,
and age by youth which merges into a single, unifying
action: the restoration of free will to each of the
characters.
In Act I the parent-child conflicts are polarized by
the analogous struggles of the Duke and his agent, Reed
beck, with their sons: the attempts by the Duke to force
Edgar to choose among "three handsome women, / All of
them at some time implicated / In the joyous routine of
my life" (p. 1), and Dominic's attempts to force Reedbeck
to admit his "unrelieved, wicked cupidity" (p. 8) are
analogous. As Dominic unconsciously indicates in his
reference to the burgling Bates' "lust for climbing
ladders" (p. 8), seduction is like theft and conversely,
beauty like virtue. That the plots occur on a double
plane is further suggested by the entrance of a deus ex
machine to resolve the crises in each Act, and in both
scenes of Act II. Thus Perpetua enters like "Venus from
the sea" (p. 28) near the end of Act I; Edgar hits his
conniving father with an arrow as Cupid, "the little
god [who] makes a special effort, shoots / Most generously"
188
(p. 64) to conclude scene one in Act II; Reddleman and
Bates rescue the Duke and Perpetua from the burning
tower like "The guardian angels" (p. 74) to end Act II,
In Act III Dominic ponders,
the whole of life is so unconsidering,
Bird, beast, and fish, and everything.
I wonder how the Creator came to be
Mixed up in such company, (p. 94)
In Act I, just as the Duke's plans to "close his
eyes / In a resignation of monogamy" (p. 2) are compli
cated by a mistress’ recalcitrance and a son’s embarrass
ment, Reedbeck’s happiness at his daughter’s return is
tempered by his son’s "paradoxes of virtue" (p. 9) and
Perpetua's admission that she has been imprisoned as
"unsafe / For democracy” (p. 30). The entire first Act
then, is constructed around the arrivals of the Duke's
mistresses, ostensibly to view an eclipse, actually for
Edgar to "perform the judgement of Paris" (p. 2), and
dramatically to serve as a series of reflectors to build
up the Duke on stage.
The preparation of the mistresses' closely-timed
arrivals for Perpetua's entrance, the girl symbolically
replacing Rosabel at the exact moment when the sun is
"annulled and renewed" (p. 13), coincides logically with
the three dramatic crises, each more sustained and tense
than its predecessor. Edgar's reluctance to make "an
impossibly hasty / Judgement" (p. 2) and the Duke's
189
ominous warning to Reedbeck to "Expect the worst" (p. 5)
build tension toward Dominic’s accusations of Reedbeck,
preparing logically for the Duke-Edgar-Perpetua triangle:
We're both in
For misery now, and Perpetua comes home
Just in time to share it. (p. 9)
Bates interrupts to introduce the first mistress,
Rosabel Fleming, showing in a "trace of rough handling"
(p. 9) by Reddleman a dramatic metaphor of the argument
just ended. Rosabel's humiliation at her entrance is
sharply contrasted with the insincerity of the second
arrival, Jessie Dill, who tells the Duke, "Here he is
himself. / He's the same boy, God bless him, not a day
older" (p. 11). The entrance of Hilda Taylor-Snel1, the
third mistress, not only disappoints the expectant Reed
beck but brings from Edgar a muted protest against the
Duke: "But until he’s dead I’m really a redundancy. /
I make him feel bifurcated" (p. 14). Edgar's rebellion
prepares for Reedbeck's revelation of his competition
with the Duke; Reedbeck's desire to be reunited with
Perpetua prepares, in an equally paradoxical way, for
Edgar's infatuation with Reedbeck's daughter, another
manifestation of the double plot-links. At the same
time, exposition seems natural because of the mistresses’
inevitable comparisons of past with present and implicit
analogies between the apparent casualness of the occasion
and similar preludes to past seductions. Reedbeck
190
explains comically,
This was one of his Grace's
Bedrooms, as perhaps [you already know] . . .
He also uses
The room for experiments, (p. 11)
Jessie and the audience understand: "He always did"
(p. 11).
Tension again builds as "A silence broods on Rosa
bel” (p. 12), Reedbeck1s impatience grows, the eclipse
nears, and Edgar attempts to choose: "I've such a
feeling of prenatal / Tension, it's more than a boy can
bear" (p. 17). When he gives Rosabel the apple, fore
shadowing the Duke's final choice, his father's disin
terested objectivity,
To take us separately Is to stare
At mud; only together, at long range.
We coalesce in light, (p. 20)
goads Rosabel into open rejection. Her outburst forces
the Duke to rationalize his motivations and then abandon
his scheme for choosing a wife: "I shall plough up the
orchard, Edgar; it was never a great success" (p. 24),
when Perpetua enters.
Tension again rises toward the third and culminating
crisis of the Act: when Edgar refuses the Duke's demand
that he give Perpetua the apple, Perpetua impulsively shoots
It from the Duke's hand. The effect of following the
stories of unfaithful children and stubborn mistresses
with Perpetua's revolt against a "threat to my new-come
191
freedom" (p. 31) makes us feel that all society is breaking
up. Moreover, the defeat of first Rosabel, and then of
Perpetua by the Duke conveys the further impression that
society is firmly in the control of a usurper who deserves
to be defeated. The release of tension by her shot allows
Perpetua to explain her membership in "The Society for the
Desecration / Of Ancient and Modern Monumental Errors,"
an ironic comment on the Duke's institutionalized mani
pulation of his mistresses by the Edenic apple temptations,
and a preparation for Rosabel's emulation of Perpetua’s
revolt with another "fire-arm."
Act II, like Act I, begins with a parent-child
conflict. Like the Duke, Dominic mistakenly equates
youth with impartiality and successfully transfers the
power of choice from mature to youthful hands while with
holding full knowledge of the real alternatives. Just as
the Duke’s assurance that "Equality is a mortuary word"
(p. 3) is contradicted by his preference for Perpetua,
so is Dominic’s assuagement of Perpetua, "a coronet's
no martyrdom" (p. 34), ironically belied. For just as
Dominic’s attacks had previously "let all the life out
of" (p. 10) Reedbeck, so will his manipulations nearly
kill Perpetua.
Reedbeck’s thievery from the Duke is a covert,
parodic version of the parent-child struggles:
192
1 care so much for civilization,
Its patrician charm, its grave nobility;
He cares so little, (p. 37)
At the same time, he has ridiculed Dominic’s selfish
concern for the sanctity of reputation by calling ’’this
process Reedbequity" (p. 37).
The entrance of the Duke with bow and quiver places
the seduction motif in its mythic, combatative, and
legalistic contexts, as Perpetua perceives: "Let the
trial begin" (p. 40). Her flippant beginning of the
hunting of the hunter, "What a rival for Artemis, and what
chance Actaeon / Would have if I pursued him" (p. 41), is
not only intensified by the dramatic metaphor of Reed
beck' s assault on Dominic, but prepares for Edgar’s shot
at his father: both acts logically reverse the direction
of the manipulations by the Duke and Dominic in the first
Act, while the Duke’s perception that his contest with
Perpetua is really a struggle with Edgar suggests a con
cealed Oedipus situation in which the hero replaces his
father as lover.
The Duke then realizes that "the generations join /
In a life-and-death struggle" (p. 51). The letter-writing
Jessie's question about how to spell "epidemic" links
the choice and temptation plots ("love is a contagious
disease, flying like arrows"). On either side, illusions
are replaced by recognitions of reality which recall
the trial analogy earlier suggested by Perpetua. While
193
Edgar discovers his father has ’’lost the autumnal look"
(p. 51), the Duke no longer finds Edgar "so unassuming
and easy" (p. 50). While each warns the other to "hang
in abeyance" (p. 53), Rosabel acta:
I shall send his Observatory
Where Nero's Rome has gone; I'll blaze a trail
That he can follow towards humanity! (p. 58)
In the longest uninterrupted scene in the play, the
Duke and Perpetua "as one / Hallucination to another"
Cp. 59) joust verbally, their dialogue revealing an inter
twined trial, contest, and love-game which the "magic"
mirror symbolism makes concrete. Although the mirror
of the sky reflects "Saturn, who once glinted in the
glass / Of Ariadne's mirror" (p. 60) from the telescope,
the Duke’s mirror, so does Perpetua, the mirror-like
embodiment of "eight duchesses / And the three housekeepers
and the chambermaid / Combing their hair" (p. 65) see not
the Duke but his "extension in time" (p. 14), Edgar.
Seizing the initiative from the now supplicating Duke,
Perpetua refuses to follow the Duke into love as she
will later refuse to follow him down the burning stairway:
When I lose my way I shall lose it
In my own time, and by my own misguided
Sense of direction, (p. 68)
In an explicit return to the legal overtones of the
contest, Perpetua asks, "How happy do you feel to know
you tried / For a bride by this conspiracy of silence?"
(p. 69). But her desperate confusion by the fire contrasts
194
with both her own previous and the Duke’s restored
presence of mind. When he suggests a trial by ordeal,
a Mriproaring gauntlet to be run / By a couple of God's
children” (p. 70), she protests impulsively, "Between
the giddiness I love you” (p. 72).
The quarrel between the would-be rescuers, Reddleman
and Bates, who comically use their old skills in fighting
"all the golden lads of lions” (p. 73) and climbing a
ladder, establishes another double plot-link ("rescuing
victims from a fire is like saving free will from pas
sion”), universalizes the rescue, and rationalizes the
melodramatic situation. Moreover, the Duke, like Reddle
man, loses the stigma of the past along with his obser
vatory. He too could say, ”B'Jason, I’ve a better opinion
of meself” (p. 76).
In Act III the scene shifts symbolically to the
Temple of the Ancient Virtues where the two penitent
malefactors, Dominic and Rosabel, meet for the first
time. Although Rosabel tells Dominic, "I want harshness.
I want hatred” (p. 78), his own guilt and their own
strangeness to each other comically provoke and make
plausible the completeness of their expository confes
sions. Her disclosures to the Duke, turned aside by his
own lament that "So much I delighted in / Is all of
ash" (p. 81), brings from Rosabel another plot-association
link:
195
Time and I both know how to bring
Good things to a bad end, all
In the course of love. (p. 81)
Her replacement by Perpetua in the dark actualizes her
perception, preparing in turn for the Duke's disillusion
ment. Just as Rosabel shattered "conservatories into a
deluge of crystal" (p. 82), Perpetua is to disclaim her
love for the Duke but only after her confession is comi
cally delayed by Reddleman's and Bates' resumed argument,
then Reedbeck's blurted confession.
With Reedbeck's arrival, the Duke formally recognizes
the situation as a Saturnalia of confession, the falling
rain a sympathetic natural manifestation of his own
smoke-singed tears. Even Dominic is included in his
magnanimous offer of "grace": "Take a drink to wash /
Your conscience down" (pp. 87-88). Following his forgive
ness first of Reedbeck and then of Perpetua "for being
born of the flesh" (p. 89), the return of Edgar and two
erstwhile mistresses, Jessie and Hilda, from a dance
continues "the unrevealing revelation of love" (p. 89).
Hilda has rediscovered her love for her injured "Roderic-
phenomenon" (p. 92). Rosabel has surrendered to the law,
Jessie is "willing to get / Into anybody's bed tonight"
(p. 94), and Edgar admits his love for Perpetua. The
three lines of action, their double eternal-temporal
planes, and the paradox of existential motivation are
identified by her final wondering perception:
196
No one is separate from another; how difficult
That is. . . . And yet I have to be
Myself. And what if my freedom becomes
Another person's compulsion. What are we to make
Of this dilemma? (p. 96)
The Duke *s love for Rosabel, like that of Perpetua and
Edgar for each other, identifies the "grace" the Duke
symbolizes with love, the final transcendence embodied
by the analogous lines of action.
As in The Lady's not for Burning and The Firstborn,
the action in Venus Observed is largely over by the end
of the second Act. All that remains in Act III is to
bring the erotic intrigue and its inherent parent-child
conflict, delayed artificially as in Thor, with Angels,
to a satisfactory conclusion. The tendency of Fry to
root Rosabel's pyromania and Reedbeck's thievery in charac
ter rather than conflict, and for the sensational effects
of these actions to affect others more than their projec
tors reveals a weakness in motivation which also appears
in the disproportionate effect of the various "well-made"
concrete devices. The apple and pistol, bow and quiver,
mirror and lamp, false ledgers and secret document of
absolution are only a few of these. Yet Rosabel and Reed
beck do evolve, their penitence accounting in moral terms
for the ending. And the mythic significance of concrete
devices, their association with situation, and their
usefulness in revealing feelings difficult to present in
a dialogue partly counteract their sensationalism.
197
Characterization
Characterization grows out of the paradoxes of
reconciling new and old societies. First, there is the
uneasy alliance between a traditional, almost feudal
aristocracy (embodied by the Duke) and a sophisticated,
bored squirearchy (represented by the mistresses). Also,
the entrance of Perpetua, the Americanized daughter of a
deserting mother, sharpens the dilemma of reconciling
individual volition with the subtle but pervasive demands
of a patriarchal family order. Finally, the arguments,
fisticuffs, and fire indicate the violence of the attempts
to bring together personal desires and morality within
the framework of a stable, conventional society. There
fore, the complexities and inconsistencies of character
motivation arise from "Estrangement in a world / Where
everything else conforms" (p. 53).
At the root of these dialectics are two parallel
Oedipus situations which arise in turn from a third:
Just as Edgar and Rosabel expose the Duke's claims to
possess Perpetua as fraudulent, so Dominic reveals Reed-
beck's thievery. Moreover, both intrigues resemble the
conditions and premises of Reedbeck's attack on the Duke,
which is rooted ultimately in sexual motives. The Duke
himself figuratively acknowledges:
I know he wishes to make honey.
Any bee would tell you, that's impossible
If clover objects to rape. (p. 68)
198
The status of the blocking characters depends on
concealment of their motives. At the same time, their
opponents are denied a full awareness of alternatives.
Thus, the fathers sow the seeds of their own destruction:
the Duke must permit Perpetua the same conditions of
impartiality he grants Edgar; Reedbeck’s deviousness
requires the same degree of deception in the Duke, Perpetua,
and Dominic. By accepting these conditions as valid, all
the characters manifest a degree of self-deception whose
removal demonstrates the characteristic comic reconcilia
tion of past with present, habit with aspiration, and
delusion with perspective.
In terms of the strategy of the play, all the charac
ters embody basic internal essences which are worked out
in conflict. Stated simply, they are: the Duke’s efforts
to recapture his youth with a new wife; Edgar’s ’’ wish to
remove” (p. 53) his father; Reedbeck's efforts to hold
his family together; Perpetua's efforts "to be free to
make my own way" (p. 95); Dominic's efforts to conceal
the truth; Rosabel's efforts to force the Duke to love
her; and the efforts of Jessie and Hilda "to give my
spirits a holiday" (p. 45).
The characterization of the Duke of Altair responds
sensitively to the cyclical movement of the play. Like
the mysterious alchemist in The Lady's not for Burning,
the Duke is a benevolent withdrawing and returning
199
figure: "Our stability is a matter for surprise" (p. 27).
In his ambivalent quest for the "complete, unsolitary life"
(p. 53) he builds up the action on stage, literally and
symbolically has the first and last words in the play,
and frankly resembles, in his machinations, the "Duke
of dark corners" in Measure for Measure:
My original
Syntax, like original sin, grows vastier
In the dark. (p. 59)
At the cost of "a little tension today" (p. 50),
the Duke succeeds in imposing the conditions deciding
,fWhich were my vintage years of love" (p. 1) upon his
son, Reedbeck and family, and his mistresses. The neat
ness of his successes and his ability to turn "almost
any disaster" (p. 27) to his own advantage evokes sharp
but futile protest from the others. Edgar's mock-prayer
"For all small birds under the eye of the hawk" (p. 16),
Hilda's ominous reference to "the old magician in his
blood" (p. 45), and above all, Rosabel’s condemnation
voice a veiled suspicion of the god-like malignity implied
by his name-symbolism (altitude + air):
You sit up here all night
Looking up at the stars, travelling farther and farther
Away from living people, (p. 21)
At the same time, the Duke paradoxically enhances his own
invulnerability to attack with a self-denigrating eiron
pose; he admits to aging, claims a "borrowed brilliance"
(p. 19), and turns aside Rosabel's charge of devilish
200
self-satisfaction with an ambiguous catholicity:
I'm a Roman in a world
Of Romans, and all creation can recognize me
As genus Man. (p. 23)
But when he arranges a tryst with Perpetua, an arrow
from Edgar's bow almost emasculates him. Edgar's open
attack on his father's hypocritical practice of hiding
his ’'autumnal look” with ”the appearance of a very mild
March day” (p. 51) uncovers the very human complexities
of an inner struggle between the Duke's sexual drives and
his parental responsibilities: ”A good father must be
a man" (p. 52). He denies his similarity to "the self
assimilated cat, / The adaptable chameleon” Cp. 53),
although Perpetua's far more effective rejection of his
benevolence unmasks the basic infantilism of his hopes
for total transformation. When Perpetua abruptly rejects
his "conspiracy of silence” (p. 69), the Duke pleads,
in imagery thinly concealing the ritual rebirth of the New
Year,
So there's to be
No climax and adorable close
With ego agonistes crowned and smiling? (p. 69)
Ironically, his willingness to accept the illusion
of Perpetua'a panic-stricken passion as genuine rationa
lizes his third Act demonstration of magnanimity and
objectivity, implied from the beginning by his then-empty
title, "Your Grace.” His "mercy" a sharp contrast to
Dominic's "justice,” he forgives both Perpetua and
201
Reedbeck,
Which means I forgive all tossing and turning,
All foundering, all not finding,
All irreconcilability, (p. 89)
His final transcendent choice of Rosabel,
She and I, sharing two solitudes,
Will bear our spirits up to where not even
The nightingale can know (p. 93),
completes the definition of his high comic role: crici-
cism is modulated by a sympathy that comes only from
wisdom.
The Duke's son, Edgar, as his commonplace name indi
cates, is deliberately associated with the conventional
and typical; he is his father's "extension in time"
(p. 14), his first youth, and embodies his mystic hopes
for immortality: "If I should die, with the great ques
tion unanswered, / I leave myself in you to ask it still"
(p. 53). From the time of Edgar's muted complaint, "Until
he's dead I'm really a redundancy" (p. 14) up to his
pointed warning to his father not to move "between me
and where I aim" (p. 50), he acts at the volition of
others. Thus he is controlled by his father at the
beginning, by the mistresses in Act II, and by Perpetua
at the end, an indication both of his colorless personality
and of the real wish-fulfillment beginning of his life
after the end of the play: "Dreams know where to look
for deeper and stranger / Shadows than I do" (p. 55).
Reedbeck is a comically pedantic lover of "the
2 02
groves and grooves of Academe" (p. 10) who is charac
terized by the impact of reality upon his rationalizations,
his spurious agreement that "certain eccentric / Means
have had to be taken for splendid ends" (p. 37), and a
fear of the future which belies his pose of self-suffi
ciency in Act I. Like the Chaplain in Lady, he is "a
broken reed"^ at the "beck" of the Duke. The deception
involved in his apparent acquiescence to the Duke's will,
as at the beginning, while he continues to overlay "the
Law with a certain transposition" (p. 37) emerges in
name-symbolism. The paradoxes of Perpetua's "poppa-
dillo" (ridiculing his peccadillos) and his own coinage
"Reedbequity" (a take-off on social theorizing) indicate
symbolically the histrionic contrast between his professed
love of civilization and his highly undignified entrances
in the second and third Acts, his "sudden accession of
rage" (p. A3) toward Dominic, and his abject confession
to the Duke. Thus his fanciful justification of "A kind
of casual taxation" (p. 37) and his rejection of the
reality of the burning conservatory as "Imagination--
disconcerting--too vivid" (p. 86) are both facets of a
"myopia in my moral vision" (p. 86); not until Perpetua
nearly dies to save him does he achieve a realistic
perspective and confess his misdeeds.
^The Lady's not for Burning (New York, 1949) , p. 31.
203
Perpetua*s symbolic replacements of Rosabel in the
first and last Acts, her alternating affirmations and
surrenders, and her pursuit of her pursuer are all rhyth
mic amplifications of the dilemma she is left with at the
end:
I move and the movement goes from life
To life all round me, and yet I have to be
Myself, (p. 96)
Thus in shooting the apple from the Duke’s hand, she not
only identifies his Edenic temptation as another of the
"Ancient and Modern Monumental Errors” (p. 31) for whose
destruction she was imprisoned; her own mature judgment
that "you must make good, before you break the bad"
(p. 31) prepares for her sacrificial effort to save her
father by marrying the Duke. Moreover, her "courage that
makes a person come true" (p. 47), stimulating as it does
the frustrated Rosabel, is qualified and humanized by her
impulsive rejection of the Duke as "almost too young to
be lived with" (p. 67) and then by her acquiescence to
her fate in the flames, "We go together into pain" (p. 72),
the "martyrdom" with the Duke which Dominic had ridiculed.
Therefore, her rejection of the Duke, both in the Conser
vatory and after the fire "without respect of persons"
Cp. 68) confirms her self-respecting, intuitive love for
Edgar. Unlike Dominic, who justifies a greater to absolve
a lesser wrong, she refuses to go with Edgar to "see how
the last of the flames dance down / To sleep among the
204
ruins’' (p. 97), emphasizing a new conservatism resulting
from her "peaceful conversation" (p. 97) with the Duke,
Perpetua*s brother Dominic is "strict, correct, but
undelighting / Like a cleric jigging in the saturnalia"
(p. 63). From the moment he dampens Reedbeck's joy at
Perpetua's return with one of his "knock-the-bottom-out-
of-everything mornings" (p. 6), the young scholar is a
comic "refuser of festivity." That his puritanism is
fundamentally sadistic is indicated by his exaggerated
relief at Perpetua's self-sacrifice, and his pleasure,
in contrast to Perpetua*s compassion, in tormenting his
father: "Don't pamper him. We have to make him realize /
He’s been sinning all this while" (p. 35).
Dominic is singularly humorless, reveals his immature
intolerance of ambiguity by attempts to adjust all human
problems immediately, and becomes the target for most of
the play's dyslogistic epithets. The Duke reserves his
few exclusively moral judgments for Dominic: "You think
more of the sin than of the sinner" (p. 93). Saved from
total expulsion by the magnanimity of Perpetua and the
Duke, he finally achieves an understated recognition of
human frailty: "Ethics are very difficult" (p. 94).
Rosabel Fleming, the Duke's one-time mistress and
predestined mate, is characterized by the nuances of her
single-minded desire to "blaze a trail that [the Duke]
can follow towards humanity" (p. 58). Her first entrance,
205
which reminds Jessie of Rosabel's once ’’being very sweet
in a play about Ophelia" (p. 11), foreshadows her fear of
"groping along the corridors / Of someone else's mind"
(p. 13). Her suspicion of the Duke’s motives momentarily
shakes her. In a submerged reference to name-symbolism,
she pleads, "I was wondering / What note [Rosa-"bell"]
to sound" (p. 12).
After her abrupt, passionate attack on the Duke
results in her crushing humiliation, she lapses into an
ominous brooding: "1 am only the meaning of what comes
after dark" (p. 47). In a disregarded warning, Bates
puns on her last name: "Fleming she says she's called: /
Flaming nuisance, I reply" (p. 48).
In the last Act, after she burns down the conservatory
in the mistaken belief that no one was inside, she admits
her crime and its psychological motivation, a desire for
purgation: "I want harshness. I want hatred" (p. 78).
Just before her surrender, the Duke unconsciously recog
nizes her love, identifying his smouldering observatory
with another "Ros-a-bel" (p. 93) name-pun, "The foment
of wild flamboyant rose" (p. 80).
Jessie Dill, the second mistress, is unhappily married,
promiscuous, and somewhat thoughtless: "I like being
here so much I never even wondered [about the Duke’s
motives]" (p. 44). Yet she quickly commiserates with
Hilda's apprehension for her husband's life, has a sense
206
of humor, and realistically accepts the Duke-Perpetua
intrigue: "I should let them be, because be they will"
(p. 45). Moreover, her concealed passion, sensitivity,
and compassion add a satisfying complexity to her magna
mater role which the Duke1 s capsule sketch reveals: '*More
universe than empire, less conquered but more embracing"
(p. 26) .
Hilda Taylor-Snell, the third mistress, is charac
terized by the effectiveness of her sardonic jabs at the
Duke *s composure, the acuteness of her character analysis,
and her maternal sensibility. Her admission of "no parti
cular heights or depths myself" (p. 45) is a shield against
malice, and conceals a deeper sense of responsible con
sideration :
I've always hidden more
Than was good for me, hoping in that way
To make my life seem pleasant to everyone, (p. 44)
Not until her husband, Roderic, is injured in a hunting
accident is she finally permitted a free exercise of
choice:
1 sat
Beside him and marvelled, and wondered how
So much could lie there in a human shell, (p. 92)
Reddleman and Bates, the miles gloriosus lion-tamer
and ex-burglar, respectively, are a "pair of immortals"
(p. 84) whose continuing warfare actualizes the conflict
of naturalism and mysticism within the Duke:
207
To take us separately is to stare
At mud; only together, at long range,
We coalesce in light, (p. 20)
Bates, forever "baited" by Reddleman, refers scornfully
to his bullying opponent as "his incandescent majesty"
(p. 84) and, in return, is taunted as "the diminuendo of
all small souls" (p. 84). The return of Reddleman's
courage by the fire as well as Bates' honorable use of
his old trade parody the moral implications of the seduc
tion :
Didn't God make sinners of you and trap you here
For the decent purpose of putting me back
In the way of salvation? (p. 74)
In summary, Fry effectively presents a representative
cross-section of upper-middle-class society, differentiates
even minor characters, and broadens the significance of
the various actions by embedding similar and contrasting
enactments in parallel plots. However, of the three
mistresses, Hilda and Jessie have little to do but talk
to each other, although they do serve as "reflectors" for
the Duke and crystallize Edgar's vague feelings of rebel
lion into action. Jessie is unchanged at the end (probably
realistically) and Hilda's cognitio is imposed from out
side the action. It is Rosabel's role, so important to
the peripety, which appears artificial and contrived,
despite the clear but unobtrusive hints of her compulsive
fire-setting. For it is "Life," not any conflict arising
directly from the action, which "has been tilting and
208
driving [her] towards to-night" (p. 47). Rather than
specifying what particular acts of scorn, indifference,
or cynicism cause her to react differently than the other
mistresses, Fry chooses to leave the Duke's character
unsullied. As a result the climax, as in The First
born , is insufficiently motivated.
Language
Versification.--The structure of the imagery in
Venus Observed, as in all the previous plays, is organized
by the similarities between the rhythms, phases, and
movements of the sun and other heavenly bodies. That is,
the rise of the male sun toward the cavernous female moon
is exactly countered by the fall of the male stars toward
the enveloping female earth; the divine flight of fiery
birds toward the light is balanced by man's mortal fall
into a dark grave; and the struggle of chill enlightenment
with heated purpose assimilates the patterns of light and
dark, freezing and combustion, and the circling seasons.
Thus the tone-giving sun "radiates” metonyms: "Now le
Roi Soleil, / How many children did he have?" (p. 98).
Each of these reductions, moreover, is coupled with an
opposite in ways that suggest the sexual act. For
example, the eclipse of the sun by the moon is called
"The copulation of Jove, magnificent in / Mid air" (p. 17).
The pairs in turn "beget” myriads of other metonyms by
209
association, tend to cluster, and form paradoxical com
binations which confirm and amplify the growth of
character within the progression of structure.
As the astronomical/astrological themes suggest,
imagery of light and dark, of the fire-world of heavenly
bodies, and of angelic birds is heavily predominant.
Moreover, once the imagery is broken down by analytic
dissociation, Mstar-gazing*1 becomes a symbol of the pro
tagonist, the Duke, while "fire-setting" is symbolic of
his antagonist[s] Rosabel/Perpetua. Stars stand for
high-minded solitude, vanity, and rationalism; fire means
passion and humanity. While Reedbeck stole from him, the
Duke sat above, his "eye glittering with starlight"
(p. 68); his search for an ideal mate was "ordeal by
star" (p. 61). Once Perpetua discovers and reveals his
"black"-mail, he explains that swarming stars and solitary
Duke would not otherwise have been visited. Ironically,
after the fire Reedbeck comments, "no amount of stars
[were] any use" (p. 86) in saving them: in disaster,
craftiness is futile.
In contrast, insecurity, sexual passion, and emo
tional transport emerge in fire-images. Rosabel believes
the Duke can understand human passions only if he is
touched by fire, the infatuated Edgar offers to show
Perpetua how "the last of the flames dance down / To
sleep among the ruins" (p. 97), and the penitent Duke
210
suggests "we . . . sit by the cinders / And toast our
hearts" (p. 82). Indeed, the traditional mind-heart
opposition is metaphorically embodied in the stars-fire
antithesis.
The contest between the Duke and Perpetua is con
firmed by the opposite but equal movements of the hot,
rising, lighted sun toward the cool (hence chaste),
falling, dark moon. The Duke is a sun-symbol; he "de
cline's] with the sun" (p. 12), his aging resembling a
sun-set, and Rosabel clarifies the competitive basis
of her attacks on the Duke. She has actually rejected
Perpetua: "Why do we all have to get between someone
else / And the sun?" (p. 89). By the same token, Per
petua is a moon-symbol, who emerges at the beginning
like Venus from the sea. As the eclipse approaches, the
symbolic moment of her entrance, the Duke notices that
"the mouth of the moon has already begun to munch" (p. 3),
preparing for the apple-temptations in both Acts I and II.
At the end she wishes in contrite embarrassment "she
could sink away with the night" (p. 88) and is lit to her
bed by Edgar.
The sexual contest between the Duke and Rosabel/Per-
petua takes its "tone" from the climbing and falling
movements of "the brandishing sun inciting the earth /
To revolution" (p. 10), opposing cycles which are brought
into conjunction by fate and Fry’s artistry. Although
211
the Duke*s mature experience contrasts sharply witii
Perpetua*s youthful innocence, both characters are
engaged in identical quests for "the one twin-hearted
permanence" (p. 61), as the imagery makes clear. When
the fire starts, the Duke wonders if the smoke is caused
by "the upward sparks and downward stars together" (p. 70),
and in an amplification of their dualist goals, resigns
himself and Perpetua to inevitable death:
In the long world we’re being shaken from
The star which, when it's rising, is called Venus,
Setting is Lucifer, the goddess
Graduating into demon, (p. 73)
He thus projects inner conflict and his contest with
Perpetua upon a Manichean universe. Once they are saved,
however, the Duke compares his illusory union with Per
petua to the eclipse, "a day when the sun is drowned by
the moon" (p. 32), and sips ritually from the "west" of
a glass of champagne, leaving the "east" for Perpetua.
Incidentally, since champagne is a tear-equivalent, and
comes from "the weeping stars" (p. 10), it is natural that
the repentant Duke should toast Perpetua after the fire
had "smoke[d] tears into eyes unaccustomed to them"
(p. 81).
The tendency of sparks, birds, and thoughts to "rise"
and stars, angels, and heavy emotions to "fall" extends
the element of paradox so characteristic of Fry’s meta
physical approach. For example, the animal-hollow
212
image-fire cluster, associated with heroic purpose as
early as The Boy with a Cart, appears throughout Venus.
It is particularly evident at the peripety when the
deus ex machina Reddleman thumbs a ride on the rising
heat and snatches his lost courage from ’’all the golden
lads of lions / I ever put me hand into the fire of!"
(p. 73). Moreover, the association of golden fire,
lion-taming, and Reddleman's favorite oath, "B1 Jason,”
assimilates the petty search of a manservant for courage
to the heroic myth of Jason's quest for the golden fleece,
a sort of reverse-parody.
Strangely enough, birds, animals, and even insects
are fire-synecdoches, while trees are darkness-metonyms.
Edgar's fire-breathing horses, the glow-worm rose of
fire, Reddleman's "sainted salamanders" (p. 73), and the
"lyric lark / Flaking its limit of heaven from a cloud"
(p. 53) are but a few examples of the imagistic, fiery,
primitive will to prevail. In paradoxes like "crow-footed
woods" (p. 97) and the dark tree with a nightingale at
heart, the evil power of fertile darkness is "animated."
That moat of Fry's polarities are dialectical, that
is, require the actual or implied presence of an opposite
to be defined, not only Is characteristic of all image
clusters, but explains the plethora of similar interlinked,
subordinate polarities. For example, the Duke's
reference to the symbolic union of the phoenix and the
213
dove is derived in turn from the basic opposition of
stars and fire (one falling, the other rising) and joins
with images of the seasons, kinds of light, and constel
lations to characterize the female characters.
In this context, wintry "whiteness" symbolizes
purity, innocence, and youth, while fiery-ness indicates
sexuality and consummation. Thus, Perpetua is a White
Queen (p. 71), one of the girls emerging from a "blinding
snowstorm of virginity" (p. 2). That Rosabel and Per
petua are ironical manifestations of one personality
appears in a development of the Duke's phoenix-dove
paradox: for the Duke, mistaking Perpetua for Rosabel,
refers to her as "little firebird" (p. 82) and mourns
his Rosabel-burnt tower, "all of ash, like a dove's
breast feathers" (p. 81). Jessie is a third manifestation
of the two other women; after the Duke tells her she
shines, she admits her dream of being a constellation
casting "a ray of light to some nice couple" (p. 2 0),
combining a sort of fiery starriness. Moreover, the
division of "decomposition" of Rosabel into two charac
ters, as when Perpetua replaces her in the first and
last Acts, and the dual threat to stability and innocence
are concretized by "broken" light, as if it were passed
through a spectroscope. Just before Rosabel attacks the
Duke in Act I Jessie remembers her childhood view of
the Crystal Palace; in Act III, before the departing
214
Rosabel is displaced by Perpetua, the Duke forgives the
pyroraaniac for breaking "Conservatories into a deluge of
crystal" (p. 82). Ironically, sun(-fire) light reinforces
the work-sex paradox associating the apparently divergent
purposes of the Duke and Reedbeck. Whereas the Duke's
initial illicit sexual affair was "a first bright blow"
(p. 2), Reedbeck thinks back to "old Lady Bright, my
first / Employer" (p. 7).
The quest-motif, as represented metaphorically by
the hazards of a sea-voyage, suggests a rite of passage
from one stage of life to another, "a sudden hoarseness,
enough to choke the sense" (p. 62). Moreover, the identi
fication of the womb, the earthly bodies of water, and the
seas of space amplify the paradoxical identities of birth,
the inception of a mature love, and death to project the
transcendental development of the theme: T,We shall all
feel ourselves making a north-west passage / Through the
sea of heaven" (p. 3). Therefore, at the same time he
makes his own "Deft and reckless plunge into ancient
history" (p. 16), the Duke warns Reedbeck against cap
sizing in disappointment. Although he believes he can
"prink across every puddle and laugh / To think that men
can drown" (p. 21), it is ominous that Perpetua enters
feeling "the Atlantic foam still racing / Under my eye
lids" (p. 28), a preparation for the literal and symbolic
drowning of the sun-Duke by the moon-Perpetua.
215
Moreover, the fear of death, violation, or insecurity
is confirmed by hollow sea imagery of darkness, arising
basically from the creation archetype: ’’ This is the most
pregnant pause / Since darkness was on the face of the
deep" (p. 33). Rosabel is fearful of groping along the
corridors of someone else's mind, and transfers her
anxieties of the "darkest bruise on the human mind"
(p. 21) to the Duke. In panic, Perpetua shoots at the
proferred apple "Still half at sea" (p. 31) and admits
that her return to the "druid circle of stony sea"
(p. 28), which is England, is like being in prison.
Finally, Reedbeck after the fire comments pensively,
"here we are / Looking such weak vessels and so temporary"
(p. 87).
Thus the oceans of the earth and dark seas of space
both represent the inescapable fact of existence, "muddy /
With the hard wading of humanity" (p. 58), whose "boring
overplus” (p. 20) signifies the ever present danger of
extinction, boring because of its probability. Its mists
blind the characters to reality and disrupt their sense
of orientation (though often granting dazzling insights);
but its rains bring fertility, penitence, and an impli
cation of divine sympathy. Thus the Duke’a sense of
rebirth at the end is expressed by his thoughts of "a
field of milk-white haze [where] the lost / Apollo glows
and wanders towards noon" (p. 98).
216
In another paradoxical transference of the creation
archetype, dust and darkness are related to the chaos from
which order was initially created; they signify sleep,
a limitless fertility, and infinite space which diminish
mankind. In contrast, air and light, which complete the
unity of "the four terrible elements" (p. 87), are life
symbols which shape the lifeless dust and darkness into
form. Thus Reedbeck equates "the east wind" and "smoking
fires" (p. 7), and the Duke describes the way the breath
of the mythical, immensely fertile, sleeping Endymion
"played all day with the motes of the dust" (p. 58). A
wind is nearly always associated with a movement of
"spirit," unpredictability, or sudden crisis. Thus it is
that Rosabel’s compulsion struck her like a tornado
(p. 79), for Edgar the air seemed to form Perpetua "out
of a sudden thought" (p. 95), and the Duke at last dis
covers that "an ancient love can blow again" (p. 99).
Moreover, new life is always generated by the fall of
light into an image of hollow darkness. The magician in
the Duke’s blood which drew his mistresses into a
revealing circle, the "slants of sun" between the "slats"
(p. 59) of Endymion’s sleep, and the comment that "every
circle of grass can show a dragon" (p. 63) are all derived
ultimately from the mythic association of life, light,
and enlightenment with sexual consummation: "an access
of starlight / And the fish began to swim" (p. 59).
217
Veraification.--Aa in the preceding plays, the
prevailing blank verse pattern shows a high capacity for
the interplay of syllable-stress meter with various other
rhythmic patterns. Aside from Reedbeck'a whimsical lyric
of rebirth ("I am still / A chippy young chap"), which is
a variation on similar lyrics in all the other plays, the
major patterns of sound-organization are alliteration,
assonance, consonance, and parallelism as auxiliary
"configurational" and metric features. The most obvious
alterations are the use of parallel phrases, as in Per
petua's antitheses and juxtapositions, separated by
caesuras:
The more we destroyed, the worse the bad sprung up,
And I thought and thought, What can I do for the world?
I was wearing the prison drab. My name was a number.
(p. 31)
Closely related is a curious trick of repetition which
emerges in situations of stress and panic. Reedbeck pro
tests, "I don't at all feel like apologizing, / I don't
feel at all like apologizing. Would you apologize?"
(p. 43), and Perpetua pleads, "I'm afraid, I am so /
Afraid of the fire" (p. 73).
Moreover, the use of catalog-lists reflects either
pensiveness or anger, and might be characterized as an
itemized unpacking of parts as parts of a whole. Edgar's
series of fruits he will offer Perpetua instead of the
apple, the Duke's list of things tricked by the eclipse,
218
and Reedbeck*s string of epithets for Dominic are examples
of a tendency revealed in Perpetua*s list of the colors
of fall as she stands "perplexed and plagued'* in the
White Temple:
Lemon, amber.
Umber, bronze and brass, oxblood, damson,
Crimson, scalding scarlet, black cedar.
And the willow's yellow fall to grace, (p. 34)
However, the total effect of these catalogues is not com
plexity but simplicity; categories are set up and then
copiously illustrated. In contrast, repeated alliteration
is incurably comic, as witness Reddleman*s series of
"s's" to represent the hissing of a fire:
And, by the blistering,
Of the blessed St. Laurence, and the blessed
St. Vincent,
Shadrac, Meshac, Abednego, and all
The sainted salamanders . . . (p. 73)
Syntactic shifts like "a fine rain raining still”
(p. 94) are rare but subtly chiming. Sound-sense puns
like "coruscating on thin ice" (p. 22), "equine equa
bility" (p. 51), and "sea-saw sea" (p. 54) are more
obvious and plentiful manifestations of the same Impulse.
Another subtle use of rhythmic variation is the umlaut
shift of vowels within similar arrangements of consonants.
For example, "lyric^ lark" (p. 53), "black with broom
sticks" (p. 54), and "raised rents" (p. 8) all Indicate
tendencies which occur in the Duke's comparison of
"foment of wild flamboyant rose" to "Glow-worm light of
219
a primrose” (p. 80). The complex interweaving of asso
nance, alliteration, and sense; the recombinations of the
consonants 'F' and *1' and of the 'o' and 'i' vowels; and
the duplication of light, redness, and flower imagery,
are highly intricate.
Any discussion of Fry's first act of imitation, that
of making the plot, must begin with the observation that
Venus Observed is founded on several basic improbabilities.
One is the Duke’s device of forcing his son to choose a
"mother”; another is the assumption that the Duke would
permit his bailiff to steal for years without the slightest
hint of displeasure. These problems are complicated by
the coincidences of Perpetua's arrival, Dominic's confron
tation of his father with evidence of larceny, and the
love-contest between father and son for the same girl.
None of these incidents is surprising or uncharacteristic
of comedy, but presenting their interrelationships in
terms of plausible conflict is an almost insuperable
problem for Fry and becomes unmanageable at the peripety
of the play, the strategic moment of reversal. It might
be noted that Lady was far more successful in its initial
stages because of the logical, mythic, and psychological
probability of a marriage, a witchhunt, and a murder
coinciding.
A similar difficulty arises in the above-mentioned
peripety which of necessity resolves the drama, a problem
220
at the center of Fry's second act of imitation, charac
terization. For in each of Fry's plays, the intrigues
are untangled by the intrusion of the eternal upon the
temporal plane through the agency of a deua ex machina.
This divine problem-solver may be a human alazon with an
overdeveloped egotism like Tyson in Lady, Virilius in
Phoenix, and Rosabel in Venus, or may be a god as in all
the religious plays. In an attempt to resolve this dif
ficulty, Fry increasingly centers his plays around a
single individual superior in degree, if not in kind, to
the other characters. This trend becomes very apparent
in Thor, with Angela, although each of four previous
plays had easily-identified central characters, and is
still further developed by the attributions of pseudo
divinity to the Duke in Venus.
The love-game in the middle of the play develops the
choice-motif, just as the two father-son conflicts dupli
cate each other with subtle differentiations and amplify
a third intrigue, the Duke-Reedbeck struggle. Yet these
intricacies cannot displace the disproportion between
Rosabel's meager motivation and the tremendous effect she
has upon the plot. Moreover, the contrived nature of her
presence is increased, not lessened, by the wanderings of
the other two mistresses.
The third act of imitation, that of making the
language of the play, organizes the imagery into a vast,
221
inter-locking directorate of metonymic polarities which
confirms the dual level of the action and amplifies the
texture and complexities of the choices which all the
characters make, Moreover, it assimilates the petty (if
viewed naturalistically) quests and struggles of the
characters to a mythic context which universalizes the
action, At the same time, however, it coerces functions
belonging properly to the action and characterization by
them with an equally improbable cosmology,
the very sort of comparison which is most des-
to both, The rash of coincidences must be
to fate or nature, as exemplified in the sym-
world-view, not to the progression of the action
endowing
erecting
tructive
ascribed
holistic
CHAPTER SEVEN: A SLEEP OF PRISONERS
Structure
A Sleep of Prisoners^ is a modern morality in four
movements, It is set and performed in a church which has
been turned into a prison camp because ominously, in the
broken English of the German commandant, "All more buil
dings blow up into sky" (p, 5), In the prologue which
pre-enacts the episodes that follow, one of the four
military prisoners, Peter Able, angers another, David
King, with an irritating repetition of previous defences
of pacifism; he is almost killed before another prisoner,
Tim Meadows, pulls King away, The first movement, which
begins after they all fall asleep, is Tim Meadows' dream
of Joe Adams'/Adam's failure to prevent the murder of
Peter/Abel by David/Cain. In the second movement, David
dreams that Adams/Joab kills Peter/Absalom at his command
as "King of Israel" (p. 11). The third movement is
Peter's dream that he, as Isaac, is saved from sacrifice
by David/Abraham only through the intervention of Adams/
Angel, In the fourth movement, "a state of thought
entered into by all the sleeping men" ("Preface"), three
^New York, 1951,
222
223
of the soldiers as Shadracf Meshac, and Abednego enter
the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, and are released by
Meadows/Man to continue their "exploration into God"
(p. 48).
The structure of A Sleep of Prisoners exhibits pro
gression through variation in the place of strictly linear
development of the plot. That is, the play represents
dramatically a series of Biblical moments which play over
and over again the crucial episode in the characters'
lives which appears in the prologue. In spite of the
sensational nature of the acts of murder, conspiracy,
and bloody sacrifice, each of the characters in turn
is forced to question the form and meaning of the primal
conflict:
0 God, are we
To be shut up here in what other men do
And watch ourselves be ground and battered
Into their sins? (p. 41)
Therefore, Fryfs use of an evening-dawn time scheme
is symbolic: the night actually represents the "shadows
of our history" (p. 31) in which the separate mythico-
historical incidents are personal and societal "days."
To heighten the purely dramatic effect of his archetypal
conflicts, Fry makes the same characters play successive
roles, compresses the historical passage of centuries
into a dream sequence,a nd uses a church-prison setting
which signifies the grave. For as the "towzer commandant"
224
had said, the "church" would "Keep off sun, keep off
rain" (p. 5). Thus, in this archetypal masque which con
stantly undermines the distinction between illusion and
reality, all the analogous episodes are united into a
single action: "to be strong beyond all action" (p. 46).
For the sake of the theme, Fry must show Peter
affirming non-violence and converting his opponents. Bur
to avoid over-simplification, he must also present his
protagonist's susceptibility to false values, adjust and
transpose the characters' relationships to each other,
and finally relate his theme to the problem of existence.
It is the order of these experiences which determines
the meaning of the structure of the play.
The realistic beginning or prologue of the play,
which represents an all-important "slice of life," has
two crises, one in anticipation of the other. While
Tim Meadows and Joe Adams rather prosaically make the
church-prison livable, Peter taunts David for his Ignorance
of Latin; in return David threatens Peter and then tears
apart a hymn book. Later, just when David's resentment
at being "locked in like lunatics" (p. 7) rises to a
pitch, he is again ridiculed by Peter as an "example of
the bestial passions that beset mankind" (p. 7). David
attacks his mocker and almost kills him before Meadows
successfully parts the fighters.
The exposition by Peter, "We've had all this before"
22 5
(p. 7) not only rationalizes the sudden penitence after
the struggle: Peter admits "I suppose I'd better / Hit
him back some time" (p. 8) and David helps him into bed.
The ensuing conflicts are foreshadowed; they therefore
seem to be more plausible. Adams' efforts to maintain
stability by first ordering Peter to "Have some common
sense" (p. 6), then demanding that David "damp down that
filthy volcano" (p. 8), and finally admitting, "I some
times feel a bit like Dave / Myself, about Pete" (p. 9)
prepare for his Adamic equivocation in the Abel-Cain
altercation. At the same time, the necessity "to think
twice every time you think" (p. 5) establishes the
presence of an allegorical meaning beneath the interplay
of real life and concrete events.
Although A Sleep of Prisoners has no internal divi
sions such as acts or scenes, the four Biblical incidents
clearly repeat with variations the initial situation of
conflict. The Abel-Cain episode begins concretely like
the prologue with Peter's organ-fingering, David's demand
he come down from the loft, and the argument between the
two. Thus it bears a close circumstantial resemblance
to the previous rise of tension toward an internecine,
personal, rabidly vindictive battle, a battle which ended
anticlimactically. Although the conclusion is known in
advance, Fry maintains suspense by the firmness of con
tinuity, a deeper penetration into the motivations of the
226
struggle, and by the innovation of the dice game. When
David loses and blames "the smiles that went between
[Peter] and the top air" (p. 17), he reveals the double
plane of action which explains the greater prominence
of Meadows and Adams in this movement. As Adam(s) is
the "father" of David/Cain and Peter/Abel, so all are
"children" of Meadows, the somnolent god-figure. When
Adams tries to part the battlers, he is "wheeled by an
unknown force back against his bunk" (p. 18). The irrevo
cability of Peter’s death plunges both Adam(s) and
David/Cain into deep remorse, bringing with it Adam’s
perception that "I am a father unequipped to save"
(p. 19) and Cain's lament that now "God the gun / Watches
me exercise in the yard" (p. 20). Meadows (God) then
protects but brands Cain, fulfilling Peter’s prediction
that they would become "all pain-fellows" (p. 15). After
David goes back to bed, Meadows awakens to remark, "1
can't rest easy for the night of me" (p. 21), an oblique,
ironic judgment on the shared guilt of God and man.
The second movement, re-enacting Absalom's ill-fated
rebellion against David, reverses the David-Adams situa
tions, while repeating the nemetic swing and counterswing
of the previous movements. When "King" David voices his
fear of a "shadow" who "lurks against my evening temper"
(p. 22), his enemy materializes as Peter/Absalom. David
attacks the "Hell . . . in my father's head" (p. 22),
227
which Adams (as Joab) has nurtured, and David defends his
view that "The indecisions / Have to be decided" (p. 23).
The first crisis arises from David’s command that Joab/
Adams instruct Absalom/Peter in unarmed combat, "How
your bare body makes them die" (p. 24). The second is
the murder of Peter/Absalom by Joab at David’s command,
"We attack at noon" (p. 25). Adams/Joab's watch-peering,
shrill whistle, and miming machine-gunning of the help
less Peter/Absalom not only update the ancient legend,
but strip the viciousness of an army attack to its most
personal, brutal terms. At the same time, terror and
pity are increased by the poignancy of Absalom’s futile
flight to "the other side of the river" (p. 25), a sym
bolic acceptance of a martyr’s death rather than direct
involvement in power politics. When Joab returns, David
asks doubtfully,
Are we ever sure it's the victory?
So many times you've come back, Joab,
With something else. (p. 27)
That Joab’s murder of Absalom is only the latest in a
series of failures is made clear by the episodes which
have already occurred in the course of the play. For
Adams/joab, once the murder has been Irrevocably accom
plished, says, "I can't be held responsible for everything"
(p. 27), recalling his own helplessness and guilt as arche
typal sinner in the previous movement.
The third movement, Peter's dream of Isaac's
228
near-death at Abraham's hands, reduces direct conflict
to its simplest archetypal terms, the ritual sacrifice
ended by an angelic visitation. As Meadows/God had
appeared to David/Cain in the first movement, so David,
as Abraham, is conceived by Peter/lsaac. The desire to
"inoculate our lives / Against infectious evil" (p. 31),
the search for freedom, and David's sudden widening of
the scene, 'The cities are pitifully concerned" (p. 29),
clearly indicate that this movement, like those preceding
it, is another Enniautos-Daimon rite. Like "a flinching
snail, a few unhopeful harebells" (p. 31), Peter has
"come only a short way into life" (p. 32), and is "bound
for a better world" (p. 32). The binding of Peter/lsaac
by ropes , of "men with men . . . like the knotted sea"
(p. 33), and of the ram "In the barbed wire of the briar
bush" (p. 33) symbolically juxtaposes existence, war,
and guilt-purgation through sacrifice. Adams then appears
as a deua ex machina to halt David/Abraham's upraised
knife. His substitution of the ram for Isaac is "a
curious changing" (p. 33) like that of the body for the
soul through death. The movement concludes with a
dialogue between Peter and the Meadows/donkey man, "you
old milennivm" (p. 34), whose climb up and down the hill,
in and out of the stable, "Across the sands and into the
sea" (p. 34) is a dramatic metaphor of the deathly
rhythms of purgatorial lives.
229
In Adams* dream, shared by all the others, the
nightmarish trudge over logs which "are slimy and keep
moving apart" (p. 38) is a demonic parody of Simon Peter*s
walking on the waters, the soldiers' previous march to
the church, the Hebrew Exile, and man's existential
journey to the grave:
How can a man learn navigation
When there's no rudder? You can seem to walk, . . .
But presently you drown, (p. 37)
At the same time, the three-cornered conflict between
David, Peter, and Adams has modulated into a camaraderie,
Adams telling Peter,
Dave and I will be
Your anchor, boy; keep you from drifting
Away where you're not wanted yet. (p. 38)
Peter's nonsense rhymes about sadistic, then penitent
Nebuchadnezzar, and "Three blind mice of Gotham, / Shadrac,
Meahac, and Abednego" (p. 39) not only recall his organ-
fingering and Bible-reading in the prologue, but prepare
for their "disembodied service" (p. 39) before the furnace-
like "round of blaze" (p. 43). They are then paradoxically
bound only to be separated, dehumanized: "Tied hand and
foot: not men at all!" (p. 42). As the smoke parts them,
the cords
That were tying us are burnt drop off
Like snakes of soot. (p. 44)
At this point, Meadows is seen nearby. After crowing
like a cock, he identifies himself as "Man" under God's
command and permits the others to emerge "If you have the
230
patience and the love” (p. 44). As the play approaches
the end, the sermon takes precedence of the drama: Fry
is here drawing a moral before restoring the perspective
of real life. His mouthpiece, Meadows, reiterates the
lesson which the last movement, by bringing them all
together, represents dramatically:
Figures of wisdom back in the old sorrows
Hold and wait forever. We see, admire
But never suffer them: suffer instead
A stubborn aberration, (p. 46)
The moralising continues as a socratic dialogue between
Peter, David, and Meadows, David's questions implying
Meadows' answers. Peter then returns to the pulpit, where
he has stood for a time in each of the previous movements,
to proclaim the epiphanic insight:
The blaze of this fire
Is wider than any man's imagination.
It goes beyond any stretch of the heart, (p. 47)
At the end the prisoners awaken one by one "Out of a well.
Where Truth was" (p. 48). Peter asks, as a spokesman for
all of them, "What gives us a sense of direction in a
dream?" (p. 49), and restores perspective to give plausi
bility to their visions,
And what would have happened
If we'd walked into the guard? Would he have shot us,
Thinking we were trying to get out? (p. 49)
In spite of their "return" to life from their ana
logous journeys to underworlds of the unconscious, the
ending both completes and contrasts sharply with the
231
beginning. Because of the actions which have transpired,
the still-evident, concrete articles have taken on sym
bolic meaning. Peter's song, "Now the day is over," at
the beginning and the bugle sounding "reveille" at the
end not only signify the literal passage of a night;
together with Meadows' mention of "all your bunks giving
up their dead" (p. 49), they indicate the symbolic lapse
of time between death and the apocalyptic resurrection of
souls.
In summary, the structure of Sleep reveals a "figural
interpretation" of history, a means of establishing,
a connection between two events or persons in such
a way that the first signifies not only itself but
also the second, while the second involves or fulfills
the first. The two poles of a figure are separated
in time, but both, being real events or persons, are
within temporality.^
By beginning his play realistically in time, Fry provides
perspective, while eliminating all suspense, to free his
message from irrelevancies. His method universalizes the
horror by revealing the characters as types; it emphasizes
pity by keeping sight of the reality behind the role-
playing. Also, the fourth movement places the familial
variations of the theme on a broader eternal plane: "Each
man is the world" (p. 45) and, Meadows might have added,
is as certainly the child of God as children are subject
^Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Garden City, 1957), p. 64.
232
to earthly fathers. However, the episodic structure of
the play, despite the ascending order of the experiences,
stresses the links between man and God rather than the
probability of linear progression. This structural weak-
ness Implies, and is another manifestation of, the
moralising at the end.
Characterizat ion
Exactly corresponding to the structural mode of
pre-figuration and fulfillment in A Sleep of Prisoners is
the characterization device of "decomposition,'1 a techni
cal term introduced by Ernest Jones and explained further
by William Empson:
'One person of complex character is dissolved and
replaced by several, each of whom possesses a dif
ferent aspect of the character which in the simpler
form of the myth is combined in one being.’ This is
supposed always due to a regular repression, as by
an Oedipus complex producing a tyrant and a loved
father, but it obviously has a wider use— wherever
a situation, conceived as a myth and repeated with
variations, is the root material of the play.5
The inevitable dissolution and reconstitution of simpler
aspects of personality as the play moves from dreamer to
dreamer, variation to variation, is implied by the scene.
The church-as-prison represents simultaneously the "cage
of the world" (p. 19) which imprisons man's spirit in
his body, the racial unconscious which inhibits man's
^Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn., n.d.),
p. 66.
233
attempts to transcend Irrationality, and a state of
’'disembodied service" (p. 39) which is "entered into by
all the sleeping men" ("Preface") in the last episode.
As a logical outgrowth of these ambivalences, the charac
terization logically grows out of Meadows' perception
"But there's strange divisions in us, / And in every man,
one side or the other" (p. 10).
Despite the complexities of personality evident from
the very beginning, each of the characters can be said to
have an inner essence. Stated simply, these essences
are: Private David King's desire to "be active / And seem
to do right, whatever damned result" (p. 41); Private
Peter Abie's desire to perceive through suffering; Cor
poral Joseph Adams' efforts to force the others to conform;
and Private Tim Meadows' efforts "to see / Where evil is"
(p. 45). The inner essences of all the characters are
analogous: each one is forced to make a tour d'abolie
of his hidden desires and anxieties.
In the prologue, characterization is defined by the
conflict between alazon David King and eiron Peter Able,
while the tragic mood is polarized by the buffoon Tim
Meadows and the churlish Joseph Adams. Peter is pictured
by David as "no-complaints Pete" (p. 5). He is a super
cilious intellectual whose stance in the organ loft
implies his proud rationalism, "the smell of cooped-up
angels" (p. 5). Under attack Peter re-affirms the
234
"mystery" of existence, and rationalizes the dream-fulfill-
ment of Biblical ritual by his sceptical resignation to
fate: "We've had all this before" (p. 7). His apparent
acceptance of personal martyrdom, "Sort of absent-fisted"
(p. 8), contradicts a concealed desire for both spiritual
transformation and worldly status: "Perhaps I was meant /
To be a bishop" (p. 7).
In taking Peter’s side against David, Meadows affirms
the power of his own insight while dehumanizing David to
an instrument of brute, blind force: "I see the world
in you very well. 'Tisn’t / Your meaning but you're a
clumsy, wall-eyed bulldozer" (p. 7). Yet David admits
that of "’All creatures great and small--’ / Well, one
of those is me" (p. 4) and reacts violently only after
intolerable baiting. Moreover, his intense solicitousness
for the bone-weary Peter, "I'm a pal of his" (p. 9), is
an indication of their acceptance of common values: deep
feeling confirms humanity.
In his refusal and inability to reach any stable
moral judgment on the conflict between David and Peter,
Adams reveals an innate conservatism and an equivocation
which foreshadows serious moral weakness. In uncommon
situations, his "common sense" (p. 6) is to prove
singularly deficient.
The first movement is Tim Meadows' dream of Adam(s)'
failure to protect Abel (Peter) from Cain (King). It
235
is an acute theological commentary on the character
relationships previously exhibited, for it imposes upon
them polarizations which are to be inverted and paralleled
in succeeding episodes.
Fry had characterized Tim Meadows in the prologue as
a benevolent withdrawing and returning figure who murmurs,
as he falls asleep, "I didn't ask to be God" (p. 11).
In his dream, he and Joe Adams between them manifest two
contrary facets of the father-figure: vindictive malice
and apprehensive concern, respectively. Thus in his
dream the limping, over-age, widowed soldier "speaks as
at heart he is" ("Preface"), assuming all the powers
associated with Adams' superior military rank, while pro
jecting his own ineffectiveness upon Adam(s). The futility
of Adam(s)' attempts as "a father unequipped to save"
(p. 19) either Abel’s (Peter's) life or Cain’s (David's)
soul is a subtle inversion of Meadows’ motivations for
soldiering and his consequent leg-wound: "Cursing never
made anything for a man yet" (p. 10). In a demonic parody
of Genesis I, Meadows, "old enough to be your [Adams']
father" (p. 10), first puts the fallen Adam(s) on trial:
"I said Let there be love, / And there wasn't enough
light, you say?" (p. 12). He then pursues Eriny-like the
guilty Cain, condemns, and then sadistically brands him:
"My word is Bring him in alive. / Can you feel it carved
on your body?" (p. 20).
236
Adam(s)' inability to intervene between his "sons,”
his guilty consciousness that he "made them both” (p. 18),
and his fearful sense that the future is meaningless all
impose an overwhelming burden upon him:
When 1 was young the trees of love forgave me: . . .
The days of such simple forgiveness are done,
Old Joe Adam all sin and bone. (p. 19)
The personalities of Peter Able and David King embody
"the fury and the suffering" (p. 18) made out of Adam's
body, the "strange divisions” which occur in all the
characters as a manifestation of their alienation from a
malevolent divinity. While Meadows and Adams exchange
key attributes, David and Peter intensify attitudes
revealed earlier. Not only do their surnames imply the
incident, "Able" punning on both "ability" and "Abel,"
and "King" an umlaut transference from "Cain," while
implying a desire for superiority. David enforces con
formity against Adam(s) as had Meadows-God, accusing him
of behavior "pretty much like mutiny" (p. 13). But para
doxically, he defends his murder of Abel as less serious
than Abel's crime in setting "up his heart / Against
[God's] government of flesh" (p. 21). Although he hopes
for "no more half-and-half" (p. 19), a term of derision
for the dead Abel which reflects his own duplicity, his
own personality is fragmented as God's (Meadows') ironic
command to him reveals: "Run, run, run. Cain / Is after
you" (p. 19).
237
The father-son roles assumed by David King and
Peter Able in the second and third movements not only
shift the alignments among themselves and the other
characters, but indicate the parent-child basis of the
Meadows-Adams, God-man association. The second movement,
David’s dream, represents Absalom's rebellion against
"King" David and his consequent death at Joab's (Adams’)
hands. David "King of Israel” (p. 11) is characterized
as an opportunist who conceals his vindictiveness by
assigning to Joab (Adams) the responsibility for Absalom's
(Peter's) death: ”We have to show him / This terse world
means business, don't we, Corporal?” (p. 24). As David
takes on Adams' ingrained equivocating to emphasize his
own previously-indicated divisiveness, "Loved and alone /
David keeps the earth" (p. 21), Joab (Adams) gains a
measure of David's (Cain's) tough vengefulness: "You've
got to know how to get rid of the rats of the world"
(p. 25).
At the same time, Peter's characterization is
influenced by David’s need, as in the previous episode,
to justify his own immoralities by transference of guilt:
Absalom (Peter), like his apostolic successor Simon Peter,
denies his fatherly, temporal predecessor of the spiritual
King of Judah three times: "Do you think I care?"
(p. 22). Moreover, David has Peter carry pacifist ten
dencies to the extreme of sceptical nihilism, saying as
238
Absalom: "Your enemies are friends of mine" (p. 22).
Joab's dispassionate murder of Absalom contrasts with
David's lingering indecisiveness, his desire for tangible
reality: "I want to be sure at last" (p. 27). But like
Adam(s) in the preceding movement, David is subject to
the law he embodies. By the moral slovenliness of his
capitulation to the hobgoblins of consistency, he is
again forced to bear the responsibility for the death of
Peter/Absalom.
The third movement is Peter's dream of his approach
to death as Isaac, before Abraham (David) is restrained
by an angel (Adams). While Peter accepts the father-son
relationship earlier erected in David's unconscious, the
age differential has dramatically widened. At the same
time, Peter inverts his own and David's attitudes toward
change. The symbolically aged, chastened acceptor of
"bitter events" (p. 32) that David as Abraham has become
is made to voice a fatalism Peter himself espoused in the
prologue: "Time gives the promise of time in every
death, / Not of any ceasing" (p. 29). On the other hand,
Peter feels a lust for life which Meadows had attributed
to David as Cain: "I loved life / With the good rage
[God] gave me" (p. 20). He now can share of the poignancy
of Adam(s)' loss of Paradise, the once-etemal moment
when "the relief of daylight / Flows over me, as though
beginning is / Beginning" (p. 29).
239
At the moment the knife is upraised, Adams enters
as a deus ex machina. An intermediary as in the David-
Absalom episode, he still retains the vast self-confidence
of his instrumentality. However, his malevolent vindic
tiveness has been replaced by a humanized -oncem mani
fested by Meadows in the prologue: "There are new
instructions" (p. 32). He now carries out God’s commands
as efficiently as he had obeyed David in the role of Joab,
but with a new tone of enlightenment and emotional
stability: "Between the day and the night / The stars
tremble in balance" (p. 33).
Meadows appears near the end of the movement as a
donkey man whose "jog, jog, jog, jog, jog" (p. 34) brings
on the unremembered future. His rhythmic travels as well
as his accompanying donkey, "Mi 1li-edwinium” (p. 35),
signify the restoration of natural balance by nemesis,
the cleansing of guilt from man by the coming of a savior
to a "Stable for mangy mokes" (p. 35), and the collective
salvation of the body of the church through their sharing
in the mystic, sacrificial communion "as patient as two
stale loaves" (p. 34).
Adams’ dream, the fourth movement, recapitulates
the entrance of Shadrac, Meshac, and Abednego into
Nebuchadnezzar's furnace; Meadows is significantly absent.
Adams is again torn between two poles: between his keenly
growing perception that "we are your three blind mice"
240
(p. 40) and the demands of the one-eyed Nebuchadnezzar,
between his urge toward a friendly death and his automatic
compliance with unheard orders delivered In a "bastard
language" (p. 42). Ironically, David’s (as "King") and
Adams' (as Joab) earlier characterization of "enemies"
as vermin, rats, is now transferred to the sacrificial
trio. Peter again manifests his love of reasonableness,
his fear of chaos, and his characteristic attempts to
find a pattern in the movement of time:
0 how
Shall we think these moments out
Before thinking splits to fear. (p. 42)
As he, in his Absalom-role, has resisted being drawn into
humanity's "nightmare," so he again pleads: "Wake, wake,
wake: / This is not my world!" (p. 40).
David, facing like the others his moment of death,
manifests the pristine essence of his character: he
becomes pure will, a personification of the urge to power
without losing a sense of uselessness which humanizes him:
"Let me have some part in what goes on / Or I shall go
mad!" (p. 41). As they are all bound and forced to kneel
to the flames, David still lives only for the present:
"I've been strong" (p. 43).
When they b um and are not destroyed, Meadows appears
as he had in the first and third movements, a "cockeyed
son / Of heaven" (p. 45). He is now a harbinger of new
life, return, and nemesis: "Single moments / Gather toward
241
the striking clock" (p. 45). By announcing himself as
"Man" under "God's" (p. 44) command, he symbolizes all
the other characters. Moreover, he alone is qualified to
draw the moral from all the preceding movements, the
necessity for honesty,
Not to say we do
A thing for all men's sakes when we do it only
For our own. (p. 45)
The cognitios which arise in the fourth movement are
a logical and linear development of progression in charac
terization. Peter, who had formerly questioned the
reality of conflict, is now forced to recognize a positive
factor in evil:
The flames are men: all human. There's no fire!
Breath and blood chokes and burns us. This
Surely is unquenchable? It can only transform.
(p. 96)
Possibly recalling the unarmed combat between Adams and
Peter in the Joab-Absalom sequence, David now recognizes
that God is "Stronger than anger, wiser than strategy"
(p. 47). And Adams, from his roles as primal man, vicious
servant of an indecisive king, and finally as divine
emissary, recognizes the illusory nature of false commit
ments: "Strange how we trust the powers that ruin / And
not the powers that bless" (p. 47). So David, who had
found only one answer to every question, and Adams, who
had found his questions unanswerable, are both forced to
see, as Meadows puts it, that:
242
No man's in vain. Each man who dies,
Dies the world with him. (p. 46)
The awakening brings from Meadows the understated sense
of identity which all have come to feel: "It's the same
for all of us” (p. 48), and from Adams an acceptance of
ambiguity which all the characters now share: "Dave,
we’re mad boys. Sleep gone to our heads” (p. 49).
In summary, the unity of A Sleep of Prisoners derives
from the recapitulation of mythically similar experiences
by a representative group of imprisoned soldiers. Although
no structural or historical sequence connects the episodes,
the expressionistic distortion of reality rationalizes
the "sense of direction in a dream” (p. 49) while power
fully compressing the emotional significance and univer
sality of cumulative incidents. Although the ritual
experiences cannot be said to point causally toward the
ending, they do account morally for the cognitlos. More
over, the realistic puzzlement which characterizes the
awakened dreamers at the end not only restores the pers
pective of "real life,” but points to a future transfor
mation on the audience's side of the stage.
Language
Imagery.--As in A Phoenix too Frequent, the imagery
in A Sleep of Prisoners is organized by the night journey
of the sun through the dark under-world. The stellar,
air, and fire imagery, so essential to the astronomical/
243
astrological theme in Venus Observed, is insignificant
in A Sleep of Prisoners. Rather, water, earth, and hol
low imagery confirms the tour d'abolie variant of the
quest-motif. The dominant underwater-passage cycle is
comprised of three phases: a death-plunge, a dark jour
ney, and a re-emergence. It resembles the movement from
sleep, to dream, to awakening. The analogical identity
of the death and rebirth of a vegetation god with the
magical human genesis through the divine muddying of
mortal dust is imaginatively contained in Meadows' phrase:
"Each man is the world" (p. 45). Moreover, the spilling
of blood by sacrifice, of earthly waters by cataclysm, and
of divine fire by apocalypse are all implied by the mythic
resemblances of human, earthly, and universal bodies.
By accepting the anagogic identity of everything with
everything else, and associating the cyclical process
of development with shifts among polarities, Fry embodies
progression within a richly associative, metaphysical
series.
As in the conclusion of Pilgrim's Progress, water
separates souls from the body, saints from sinners. Sym
bolically, and technically in the structure of the play,
the yawning mouth of the womb/tomb stands ahead: "The
future is like a great pit" (p. 19). All of the charac
ters, in an obvious glance at the title, are "prisoners
of the dark" (p. 32). Hollow imagery of darkness like
244
"dunging a marrow bed" (p. 10), death being a "rabbit out
of the hat" Cp. 25), sleeping at a window marked with a
cross, and human(e) gentleness being a "thin veil over /
The long scars from the nails of the warring hearts"
(p. 51) constantly re-emerges to intensify the eternal
implications of sleep "in a looming great church" (p. 21).
The very real, though untheological, sensations of impa
tience felt by a dead Christian awaiting resurrection are
unmistakable.
Therefore the "entrance," or first phase of the
water cycle, clusters the falling movement, water, and
hollow imagery of darkness; the increment of other
metaphors subtly modifies the symbolic world-view, the
dramatic situation, and characterization. "Death by
drowning" sometimes differentiates those granted total
transformation from those condemned to a fatal existence.
Thus Meadows sees David go off to sleep "back into the
sea, like a slippery seal. / And here am I, high and dry"
(p. 26). Just before, ironically, Absalom (Peter) had
escaped from Joab (Adams), he believed, to the other
side of the river, "Showery still, but I manage to get
out" (p. 2 5). Then Meadows goes under for the third time.
When the hollow image of darkness is a tree or bush,
and is associated with an animal and the falling motion,
the animal, vegetable, human, and divine worlds are
metaphorically identified. For example, Peter*s empathy
245
with the "ram caught here by the white wool / In the
barbed wire of the briar buah" (p. 33) not only suggests
the crucifixion of the thorn-crowned "lamb of God" on the
tree of life, but characterizes Peter’s self-sacrificial
role. A further extension, the identification of the
human soul with a bird sitting in the branches of the
tree of life, occurs in a reference to "The singing
birds [which] drop down and down to the bed of the skies"
(p. 20). Consequently, images of cooped-up angels, the
fateful dice as a nest of singing birds, and David’s
sense of helplessness "like a half-wit angel strapped to
the back of a mule" (p. 17) imply the moral immobility
of man caught between reason and passion, waking and
dreaming, divine good and satanic evil. Hence, man’s
ability to transcend his limitations is symbolized by
his "Fabulous wings unused, / Folded in the heart" (p. 46),
a confirmation of the bird-tree of life theme.
Conversely, the combination of the eye-animal (insight
into irrationality)-light cluster with a fall into hollow
darkness suggests the tragic process of life cut off by
sacrifice, ferocity, or some overriding need. After
Peter sees his heart thudding in the eyes of the sacri
ficial ram, he dreams of the donkey Milli-edwinium as
"nothing herself but two swimming eyes / And a cask of
ribs" (p. 34). His vision is hugely magnified by Adams:
"The world shin.ee wet. I think it's men’s eyes everywhere.
246
/ Reflecting Light" (p. 37).
In the second phase of water imagery, the "passage"
or quest, those who fear the irrationality of the unconsci
ous, experienced as nightmare and projected on Hell,
actualize their sense of isolation from deity with imagery
of fearful voyaging. Adams wonders how long God can
"drift over our sea, and not give up / The ghost of hope"
(p. 37) while he himself is salt and sick on a raft,
"soaked to the skin" (p. 37). Asking "mercy / On our sick
shoals" (p. 37), he warns David against his egoistic
imitation of (Simon-)Peter: "These logs we're on / Are
slimy and keep moving apart" (p. 38). Earlier, Adams
(as Joab) had cautioned "King" David that Absalom's
(Peter's) rejection "riddles your world until it sinks"
(p. 22). And near the end, Peter uses a voyaging image
to express his traumatic recreations of the scapegoat
role, being shut in what other men are to be "ground and
battered / Into their sins" (p. 41).
The inclusion of heat in the water and fall into
hollow darkness imaginatively recreates the effects of
the drowning of the sun by the sea. In the fourth move
ment, three of the characters are plunged into "Scalding
God" (p. 43), a demonic inversion of final unction. After
their "bodies drop off / Like snakes of soot" (p. 44),
the soldiers find themselves menaced by a sniper of the
fire "In this narrow shaking street / Under the eaves of
247
seven-storeyed flames" (p. 44). The associations of fire
with a labyrinth, the deserted wasteland which the lost
Eden has become, confirm the pointlessness of wandering
through an unexamined life. Although Peter has once
asserted that Hell was in his father's (God-David1s)
head, he now realizes, ’’There's no fire! / Breath and
blood choices and burns us!” (p. 46). Fire corresponds
to blood, and both in turn to an existential hell which
life in the body prolongs: "He sees the scarlet shoots
of spring / And thinks of blood" (p. 23), as Peter says
of "King" David.
Earth is added to the water-hollow image-heat cluster
to imply rejection of a diseased, decadent civilization.
After David ridicules "Pete down there in the festering /
Bomb-hole making cups of tea" (p. 6), he attacks his
adversary and is ordered to damp down his volcano. A
foot image, when added to the cluster, emphasizes the
sense of perverted questing and undergoes a series of
interesting modifications. Immediately after David
threatens to put his foot through Peter, Meadows recalls
how, after his Uncle George died, his wooden leg "got
out in the wash house" (p. 4). Then Adams is reminded
of "the size of that blister" (p. 9) on his foot.
Finally, David takes off Peter's socks and returns to
the basic image of earthly corruption to stress his
belief that, "We've got to finish the dirty towzers.
248
It's been / A festering day, and I'm stinking tired"
(p. 9).
When the purgatorial cluster is exactly reversed,
the rising motion, a hollow image of light, and an eye-
metaphor cluster together. The benevolent, Emersonian
"transparent eyeball" becomes an alien imposition upon
humiliated mankind; he is constantly oppressed by "Sky's
hollow filled as far as for ever / With rolling light"
(p. 15). This degradation thus identifies the tyrannous
David of the prologue, who strikes out at Peter like a
"wall-eyed bulldozer" (p. 7), with the devilish Nebuchad
nezzar of the fourth movement, "him with one eye" (p. 41).
It is natural that in the third movement, which
emphasizes moral change, water imagery (of the quest-motif)
should predominate, as earth does in the second movement,
fire in the fourth. Therefore, unlike the transformation
implications of a darkness-earth-water cluster, derived
from the archetype of fertile chaos from which creation
arose, the light-air-earth cluster indicates a sterile
isolation of man from man, man from God. David is cor
rupted by a "mould of passion" (p. 16), the ignis fatuus
spiritual impotence which causes Abraham's knife to drop
"Harmless and shining" (p. 32). In an echo of Adam(s)'
loss of "the ivory light of Eden" (p. 16), Cain's life is
endangered by the "bursts of open day between the nights"
(p. 20). Just as the scheming Absalom had stood "In the
249
dark alley-way making mischief" (p. 22), so Adams com
plains that "The air is bright between" (p. 37) man and
God. Finally, David complains that their demonic tor
turers, like Absalom in the second movement, "played
their game in the dark" (p. 42). Thus, light sandwiched
between darkness, like day between dawn and dusk and
life between womb and tomb, is seen in these contexts to
be purely infernal.
The third and final phase of the water-cycle has been
reached when the characters awaken and emerge "Out of a
well. Where Truth was" (p. 48). The cooling waters of
the infant baptismal found here contrast with scalding
God. Just before "Go* dips his hand in death to wash
the wound" (p. 31), Peter sees the houses come to light
and, in his Isaac-incamat ion , realizes,
The relief of daylight
Flows over me. . . . Breath
And light are cool together now,
The earth is all transparent, but too deep
To see down to the bed. (p. 29)
At this symbolic point in the cycle, a water-earth-
whiteness-in-darkness cluster, derived from the creation
archetype, actualizes the contrary associations of
birth-as-transformation, and birth-as-repetitive-death.
While the others are sleeping like great roots, David
"tremble[s] like an earthquake" (p. 23) with rage. He
fears a man in the dark way, a shadow with "a belly and
ribs" (p. 22). Just before going to his tomb-like bed,
250
"Bathed in sweat t white with dust" (p. 27), ,rKing" David
sees what must be the resurrected Christ-Peter-Absalom
coming "Along the road, starting the dust" (p. 27).
In summary, the imagery extends associatively from
the mythic and dramatic connotations of a single, simple
element throughout three interlocked phases, eventually
bringing a whole imaginative universe into view. Besides
providing a satisfying physical texture for the action,
it differentiates character.
Versification.--The blank verse pattern of the play
is hospitable alike to colloquialisms, shifts in situa
tion and mood, and to repetitive sound patterns. In
fact, it is more effective as container than as unit of
sense organization. The manneristic repetitiveness pro
duces frequent umlaut series , such as "locked in l_ike
j.unatics" (p. 7), and "into the sea, l_ike a slippery seaJL"
(p. 26). Assonance and alliteration are combined in
the nursery-like "barbed wire of the briar bush" (p. 33).
And end rhyme is rare but striking: "open air" rhymes
with "barrack square" (p. 41), for example.
The frequent analogous crises which result in a
rapid-fire succession of tense moments account, at least
partly, for the phrasal repetitiveness. The trait is
almost a nervous stylistic stutter, for examples sprinkle
the dialogue on nearly every page. David repeats phrases
more than the others, pleading, for example, "Let me
2 51
sleep, let me, let me, let me sleep. / God let me sleep,
God, let me sleep" (p. 21). By the same token, repeti
tion of similar phrases by two or more characters indi
cates a tense situation, alienation, and tightly controlled
emotion:
PETER: So drill my spirit, Corporal, till it weeps
For mercy everywhere.
DAVID: It had better weep,
It had better weep. (p. 39)
As in earlier plays, lyrics parodying spiritual
rebirth are used to signal the beginning of new movements.
Whereas David's quotation from a tom hymn-book in the
prologue subtly but ironically differentiates him from
Peter, the Bible-parodying jingles in the fourth move
ment seem jarringly inappropriate. Yet the tone of
jocular irreverence expresses, in a striking way, the
double meaning conveyed throughout by the dream-conscious-
ness chain of contrarieties. For puns on "sole" and
"soul," and "tales" (of Shadrac, Meshac, and Abednego)
and "tails" (of the three blind mice of Gotham) emphasize
the fragmentation of all prior orientations by the social
and psychological disruption which is war. A further
extension of the jingle-puns occurs in the Orwellian
inversions of a series of slogans:
Police on earth. Aggression is the better
Part of Allah. Liberating very high
The dying and the dead. Freedoom, freedoom.
(p. 42)
The first act of imitation in A Sleep of Prisoners,
2 52
that of making the plot, is both restricted and compressed
by the necessities of instilling contemporaneity into
ancient rites, of varying similar experiences without
losing sight of simple truths, and of ''displacing” or
making plausible the texture and realism of a dream-world.
For example, the dice game in the first movement not only
represents a common soldiers* escape from boredom, but
stops the action in order to force each character to
examine his own motivations. Moreover, by its parallels
with the dicing for Christ's cloak, the scene dramatically
actualizes the double-plane of reality: the perspective
achieved by the juxtaposition of trivial pursuits with
decisions of great moment.
The second act of imitation, that of characterization,
corresponds exactly to the series of variations through
which each character passes. Although Adams as a soldier
with minutely superior rank would be expected to function
as an automaton, his widely varied roles force him to
pause and ponder the moral fitness of the agencies he
obeys. Peter’s over-intellectualized desire for self-
sacrifice could be trite and sentimental, as his roles
are made to seem to every Sunday school pupil. By
repeatedly subjecting him to the irrationalities of
reality, Fry demonstrates effectively how "We sound fine
words unsoundly" (p. 45). Moreover, the passion-compassion
contrarieties which pull David apart are dramatically
2 53
demonstrated by the series of father-son struggles which
tremendously concentrate his drives without oversimplifi
cation. However, the dominance of structure by characteri
zation, and the failure of both to convey the theme
adequately, weakens the characterization of the deus ex
machina Meadows, who, apart from all possible talents
or gifts, intrudes upon the stage to deliver a sermon at
the end.
The language, the third act of imitation, is accurately
utilized as an amplification of the quest-for-transforma
tion motif. As in previous plays, Fry imaginatively
throws skeins of associations out from his fibrous
nucleii of basic elements. While the source of his
imagery lies in hollow, dark images of water, the shifts
among contrarieties inobtrusively convey the metaphysical
ties between the Many and the One.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DARK IS LIGHT ENOUGH
Structure
The action of The Dark is Light Enough^ - begins in a
normal world of social convention, shifts to a celebra
tion of toleration, and finally transcends both. In
Act I, the Countess Rosmarin Ostenburg harbors her one
time son-in-law, the army deserter, Richard Gettner.
She refuses to surrender him to a group of Hungarian
revolutionaries even when the life of her present son-in-
law, Count Peter Zichy, is endangered as a consequence.
In Act II, Richard attempts to reclaim Gelda (his one
time wife), Count Peter affirms his patriotism, and
Stefan forces Gettner into a duel, with near-fatal results
to himself. Act III dramatizes a series of conversions:
Gelda returns to Peter, the Countess accepts her death,
and Gettner intercedes for the defeated Janik, his one
time enemy.
The beginning and end of The Dark ia Light Enough
reverses the enveloping situations utilized in Fry's
first comedy, A Phoenix Too Frequent. That is, Fry
begins his last original comedy with the rescue and ends
1-New York, 1954.
2 54
255
it with a rather abstracted, inverted version of suttee.
However, both plays begin with an absurd, irrational
law: in Dark, that an army deserter must be caught and
killed, regardless of his motives. The similar series
of crises through which a woman builds a new society by
reforming a man not only verges on an eternal plane of
action, but culminates in the transcendence of an unsatis
factory, irremediable, temporal present. The complexities
of action, the rigorously circumscribed scene, and the
presence of the Actaeon and Ulysses-Penelope archetypes
are all focussed on the development of a single action:
the demonstration of ways by which '’Lives make and
unmake themselves in her [the Countess’] neighborhood /
As nowhere else" (p. 5).
Act I begins with a series of incongruous, contra
dictory social rituals: the Countess’ son Stefan’s twen
tieth birthday, the engulfing 1848-49 Hungarian revolution
against Austria, and a number of surprising family reunions.
That all of these events comically represent rites of
rebirth is indicated by Kassel’s recollection of the
Countess’ acceptance of a new child: "We must freely
admit the future" (p. 2).
Through dialogue heavy in exposition. Fry hints at
the two antecedent events whose consequences form the
double plot. The first is the Countess’ decision "to
find, in a little farm . . . Poor hunted Richard" (p. 17).
2 56
By taking the responsibility for Gettner!s life upon
herself, the Countess fatally over-exerted her heart,
and by having withheld essential information from her
son Stefan (partly a device by the author to build sus
pense), she had so upset him that he had Irrationally
summoned his idolized brother-in-law and sister, Count
Peter Zichy and Gelda, from Peter's post in Vienna,
the second important antecedent event.
Therefore, the first Act rises to two carefully
motivated, consecutive crises. The first occurs when
the Countess confronts a representative section of con
ventional society with a fait accompli. Richard Gettner*s
dramatic entrance, when the Countess was expected, bur
dens them all with his cumulative failures:
I'm bound to give you
Great uneasiness. This disease I am
You're all of you guilty of harbouring, (p. 20)
The second crisis, ending the Act, is a logical culmination
of the sub-plot which is connected logically and para
doxically with the first. That Stefan in his panic has
summoned Peter and Gelda is rationalized by his naive
belief that "Peter's the great protector of the family"
(p. 5), by the magnitude of his mother's "desertion,"
and by the impending crisis: "We*re in the direct road
of revolution" (p. 5). Therefore, the play begins with
a number of analogous, intersticed quests: while an army
of Hungarians has been attempting to transform the
257
political order, a son (Stefan) has been searching for a
mother (Counteas Roamarin) who, in turn, haa been que8ting
for a "aon,f (Richard Gettner).
Stefan's action prepares for Janik*s strategic intro
duction of Peter, near the end of the Act, as "someone
. . . who may help us to a peaceful understanding" (p. 31);
moreover, Peter is placed on the same symbolic footing
with Gettner (another "deserter" of wife and country).
The arrival of Peter just after the Countess returns is
a coincidence which convinces Janik of their complic ity
in the plot to hide Gettner. The Countess' dilemma in
choosing between the lives of Richard Gettner and Count
Peter Zichy, and, behind it, the more profound balance
between fatality and volition which has made the Countess
herself "hotly debatable ground" (p. 31) modulates into
a diplomatic detente. In order to lose no status while
accepting partial defeat, each of the principals creates
a mutually accomodating fiction, part of Peter's conven
tional "world of paper" (p. 33). If Janik will pretend
that Gettner is "a fantasy" (p. 27), the Countess, in
turn, will agree that Janik ia commandeering her home
"Under cover of peaceful maneuver" (p. 27). The Act
ends with a veneer of convention precariously concealing
Janik*s "dangerous, partial love" (p. 37), Stefan's
guilt--"Peter, I brought this on you" (p. 31)--Gettner*s
compulsive honesty, and an all-pervading sense that
2 58
’’ Time and place have conspired against us" (p. 31).
By beginning the second Act with exposition of a
Hungarian defeat and forced bivouac in the Countess'
house, Pry not only gains great freedom in bringing
together characters who are in opposition and who would
normally avoid or attack each other; he also achieves
concentration in his extension of the Richard-Gelda-Peter
and Countess-Richard-Stefan plot lines by having all the
action take place at a spontaneous party.
Although Act II complicates the relations among the
characters by "almost undoing / The events of yesterday"
(p. 54), it is a logical extension of the lines of action
set in motion previously. To purge his guilt for
summoning Count Peter to a trap, Stefan challenges Richard
to a duel whose consequences Gettner attempts to escape
in Act III; moreover, Stefan's question to Richard,
"Would you be ready / To risk your life if I give you the
opportunity?" (p. 40), foreshadows the final denouement.
Just as the Countess had idealistically transmuted pacifism
into a "spiritual democracy" (p. 35), Gelda rejects her
"good husband" (p. 12) for Gettner, an act which Stefan's
near-death reverses in Act III.
The second Act is constructed rhythmically with
contrasting panels of alienation and reconciliation, a
paradoxical succession of events which quixotically
vindicate the Countess: "Desertion . . . has now changed
2 59
into benefit” (p. 53). After Gettner refuses Stefan's
challenge to a duel and, with it, the code of conduct
which exalts honor above all else, choosing to remain
"dishonoured without indignation" (p. 41), Gelda inter
prets the Countess' respect for Gettner*s "Wandering and
uncertain will" (p. 30) as a "faith in faith" (p. 47).
Their reconciliation is succeeded by another series
of ironies: defeated in war, Janik is forced to find
"a slight flavour of victory” (p. 53) in the capture of
the Countess' house. Bereft of possessions, the Coun
tess in turn succeeds in imposing her conventions upon
Janik*s ways of war: "1 suppose them / Reasonable,
sensible, and civilized" (p. 54), and hopes not to be
"a distraction to providence" (p. 54). Peter then enters
to reveal through exposition how, stripped of status,
freedom and (still unknown to himself) wife, he picked
up a sword in battle and "became the very passion I
opposed, and was glad to be" (p. 59). His courage in
battle, followed by his honest avowal of conservatism and
compromise contrasts ironically with his rival Gettner*s
"boredom and melancholy" at "High thoughts and righteous
judgements" (p. 18). Moreover, Belmann's wager against
the Countess' chances of changing Gettner is ironically
confirmed by Richard's drunken descent from the loft,
his defense of a rejected ego, and his maudlin self-pity:
"My wife has married another man" (p. 63). Gettner then
260
uses Gelda’s wordless rejection of Peter, a deeply ironic
contrast to Peter’s refusal "to see / A dead man cross
our love" (p. 36), to justify exactly the reverse of the
high-minded decision Peter made in Act I:
Gelda remembers she once married me,
And has an idea to love me. That seems reason
Enough to kiss her in the sight of this congregation
Without disrespect to anybody, (p. 66)
In a horribly ironic, but completely natve and
un-self-conscious parody of the wedding celebration, the
soldiers accept the fiction of Gettner's "being only
apparently among us" (p. 64), and are persuaded to dance
by the Countess. When they lay down their pistols, the
weapons are picked up by Stefan, who provokes Gettner into
a near-fatal duel. The dramatic incident is carefully
motivated by the earlier mock-challenge of Belmann by
Jakob, who is "only / Concerned with this moment of
loyalty" (p. 8), and its pathetic counterpart at the
beginning of Act II, which, in turn, was implied by the
maimed birthday rite in Act I.
Kassel's comment after Gettner shoots Stefan, that
"New life will graft on a threat" (p. 73), lowers tension
only to prepare for the concluding crisis of the Act,
the Countess' atoning collapse: "Perhaps for a moment /
He [Stefan] drew-in a draught of my strength" (p. 75).
Moreover, the concluding scene prepares for increasingly
numerous indications of the Countess' impending death,
261
her necessary denial to Richard of his right 'To be the
one to say to dying things / 1 Be a beginning'" (p. 98),
and for Richard's final intermediation for Janik at the
conclusion of the play.
As in all of Fry's previous full-length plays, the
peripety occurs between the second and third Acts. A
week has passed, and the desolate and disorganized scene
implies the isolation which is to accompany the return of
clear-eyed volition to each of the characters in the
course of the concluding Act. The report of a birth (as
in Act I) in the presence of death emphasizes the
inexorable counterswing of fate, the logic of events,
nemesis. At the same time. Belmann1s observation that
"the world does take on / A slightly more encouraging
appearance" (p. 83) appears hollow and flaccid in contrast
with a series of reports of Gettner's desertion, the
sickness of Stefan and of the Countess Rosmarin, and the
reign of terror following the collapse of the Hungarian
revolution.
Stefan's wounding, Gettner's desertion of the Coun
tess (as of art, love, and war), and then Peter's re
affirmation of love bring from Gelda a cognitio:
my curiosity,
My pride, my ambition to succeed
Where I failed before, my longing to discover
What conversions could be made by love, . . .
We all began to sink. . . .
You [Peter] and I are the truth, (p. 81)
262
Then Count Peter's self-flagellation lends urgency to
their departure, forcing him to self-recognition and
emphasizes the dramatic logic of events which the play
has represented:
What torments me
Is . . . whether that ride here,
Whether Stefan's message of alarm for Rosmarin,
Wasn't one cause of these deaths and the endless
consequences, (p. 80)
The couple's resignation to fate, the Countess' descent,
bringing "gifts / Out of the air" (p. 85), and Gettner's
frenzied return all dramatize Jakob's prophetic remarks:
We merely change anxieties . . .
I hardly
Know what to do. No road ia clear
Until the Countess is out of danger, (p. 84)
But before Gettner returns with rumors of her death,
the Countess appears to be present "when the last Thurs
day comes" (p. 87). Although the Countess' approach to
death has been well motivated, and her attitude seems
dignified and objective, the long scene is saved from
sentimentality largely by the somewhat contrived entrance
of Janik. Through his cosmopolitan forbearance, his
tolerance, and his mature responsibility, "There's little
chance / It will turn out well" (p. 92), he deserves
salvation: his apology, "three times I've used your
house / Without civility. I won't again" (p. 90), con
trasts sharply with Gettner's previous arrogant self-pity,
and prepares for Gettner's cognitio at his return.
263
After the Countess has persuaded Jariik to accept
sanctuary, Gettner enters:
And sick of seeing faces
Plastered with tears and rain, the road became
A nightmare and impassable, (p. 94)
In their final discussion, the Countess' joking references
to palingenesis, to the hiding Janik, and again to the
often-mentioned "needs of a more true and living world"
(p. 29), lead inevitably to Gettner’s ironic intercession
(and probable atoning death) for his one-time enemy,
Janik. The Countess says at last:
I am very much in love with something;
What it may be I can’t remember;
It will come to me.
That was a roundabout drive in the snow.
Owing to my eccentric sense of direction! (p. 101)
Gettner’s decision to give himself up to the Austrians
and probable death is motivated by a series of preceding
events. He had irretrievably lost Gelda, his last hope
of recapturing the illusive innocence of youth. Also,
the innocent, naive, fun-loving Hungarians have been
superseded by the sadistic Austrians who, as Janik has
warned, "are more determined" (p. 92). Finally, the
Countess’ ambiguous promise to "not / Leave you until I
can love you, Richard" (p. 101) posits a transcendental,
romantic union of souls after death which Gettner may
pass into through the corridor of martyrdom.
In summary, the logical and paradoxical concatenation
of plots, the symbolic shifts in scene, and the careful
264
utilization of contrast and variation induce a kaleido
scopic variety of incident without loss of unity. The
swing and counterswing of the plot is made apparent and
strikingly ironic, while, at the same time, the central
theme of conversion through love ia maintained. However,
the heroic surrender of Gettner to the Austrians ia a
rejection of the soul-body unity valued by the Countess,
makes a virtue of his absurd proposal of marriage, and
masks the author's need to dispose of both Janik and
Gettner with a sentimental gesture.
Characterization
A large cast appears in The Dark is Light Enough.
There are eleven characters with names, including two
servants, plus five unarmed soldiers. The divisiveness
of the time-place setting, "An Austrian country-house near
the Hungarian border” at mid-nineteenth century (1848-49),
subtly implies the motifs of conversion, transformation,
and moral change which shape the characterization. As
in five of Fry's previous plays (excepting Boy and Venus)
the protagonist is a soldier charged with the defense of
the order with which the female lead (as in Phoenix, Lady,
and Thor) is unwillingly identified.
Within the progression of the dramatic action, each
of the characters develops a single, vital essence. Sum
marized briefly, these essences are: the Countess' desire
265
to remove all obstacles "to the needs of a more true and
living world" (p. 29); Gelda's desire "to discover / What
conversions could be made by love" (p. 81); Richard
Gettner's desire to save his soul; Count Peter Zichy's
desire to make rational choices possible; Stefan's desire
to expiate the wrongs to his family; and Colonel's desire
"to cherish all hearts that are oppressed" (p. 15). All
these diverse inner drives are united by the drive to
achieve transformation. Therefore, the contrast between
liberalized matriarchy and the chaos of total war, between
past and future, between confused national and obsessive
personal allegiances emerges in the paradoxical equivo
cations which none of the characters can escape. For
example, a highly significant symptom of the collapse of
traditional orientations is the characteristic sense of
personal disunity: most of the characters feel split
away from the reality of their bodies and even speak of
personality traits as separate beings.
The Countess Rosmarin Ostenberg is characterized by
her mystic benevolence, her scenic embodiment of thought
ful neutrality, and by her Madonna-like welding of
sexual and spiritual love. In the first Act, exposition
of the Countess' unexplained absence is followed by her
entrance to announce her part in rescuing Richard Gettner;
she thus appears as a well-meaning, withdrawing and
returning maternal eiron figure. Kassel's exposition of
266
her nonchalant birth-giving and her "divine non-inter
ference” (p. 5), and then hia explanation of her ambiguous
message as "her way, not / Of giving but of withholding
information” (p. 3) imply her transcendence of the society
she dominates. Moreover, once she has entered to defend
her actions before her admirers, the contrast between
her "qualities of true divinity” (p. 4) which they attri
bute to her and her very human emotionalism--”I had
begun to be eternally dispassionate, / And life and death
at once became the argument" (p. 24)--at once parodies
the quarrel between Gettner and the others and establishes
the source of her elan vital. That is, satisfactory
judgment can't be made in simple terms: "in this world
a mystery / Is only so out of extreme simplicity" (p. 3).
In her mediation between Richard and his social
critics, between the single-minded Colonel and her frag
mented family, the Countess becomes "hotly debatable
ground" (p. 31), an oblique reinforcement both of the
magna mater symbolism and of the purgatorial conditioning
which she, in her symbolic ascents and descents of the
stairway, undergoes in place of the others. At the same
time, the Countess is humanized by the contrasts of her
whimsicality and "strange prescience" (p. 16), and her
claim to represent all mankind: "In our plain defects /
We already know the brotherhood of man" (p. 21). While
Richard is symbolically "Kept standing in the pillory"
267
(p. 21), the Countess assumes the role of public defender
and asserts, with terminology heavily charged with legal
overtones: "There can be love without evidence" (p. 35).
In the second Act, the Countess herself undergoes
trial by ordeal. Her departure for the stables emphasizes
both her innocence and her queenliness, as epithets like
"queen bee" and a "little girl at a circus" (p. 53) indi
cate. Despite her eviction, she retains her belief that
her house, like herself, "was perpetual; it was the
stars / Which turned and fled" (p. 52). Her powers of
conciliation are brought dramatically to bear in the
protection of a surly Gettner from the Hungarian soldiers,
in the creation of an Open Society around herself in the
stable, and in the success of her plea, after the duel
between Stefan and Gettner, "not to make [Stefan] the
cause of punishment, / Not to make his wound a death"
(p. 74). She then accepts martyrdom for her ideals:
though "My body sometimes tells me / I'm not here for
ever" (p. 74), her son, like Gettner, lives because "for
a moment / He drew-in a draught of my strength" (p. 7 5).
In the third Act, the descent of the Countess is
greeted as "our world revived" (p. 85) with the split
between body and soul carrying ever-heavier overtones of
the bodily assumption attributed to the Christ-mother:
Her tody won't save her; there's no harm in seeing
What comes of a still-willing spirit, (p. 85)
268
With the return of Richard Gettner "to say to dying
things / ' Be a beginning,fM (p. 98), the juxtaposition of
Richard’s reports of already-mourning peasants, his ironic
epithet for her of "Great hypocrite" (p. 94), and her own
self-characterization as "a small, shameful bundle of
prejudice" (p. 100), climaxes the death-as-rebirth motif.
Her half-joking request for "a life all over again to
deserve" (p. 94) the world's good opinion, her musing
about the "roundabout drive in the snow" (p. 101), and
her promise to Richard not to leave him until she can
love him all emphasize her mystic belief in spiritual
renewal:
Protect me
From a body without death. . . .
With death it can hold
More than time gives it, or the earth shows it.
(p. 89)
Gelda is characterized by her dependence on her men
and the implications of her cognitios in Acts II and III.
Her indecisive waverings between Gettner and Count Peter,
her unformed idealism, and emotionalism are ridiculed
in Richard's self-assertions in Act II:
I have a very interesting wife
Who, for the turn of a leaf, would love me.
Dear slug, she said, I'll be your faith. And so
She is, and here she is. Penelope's
Her name. (p. 65)
At the moment, her stance between Gettner and Zichy Is a
dramatic metaphor of her suspension between the past and
present, conversion and consummation, volition and
269
surrender. Yet when Gettner again deserts her, her fear
that if she never again sees Peter, "I've made myself
into an enemy / I shall never defeat" (p. 78), brings
about her reconciliation with Peter. Because of her
unworthy motives in choosing Richard, she has brought all
the others to disaster. In recanting, she tells Peter:
"You and I are the truth" (p. 81).
For diverse reasons, Richard Gettner, Count Peter
Zichy, and Colonel Janik are "all confused, incomprehen
sible, / Dangerous, contemptible, corrupt" (p. 21); each
has become divided, self-mistrustful, and disoriented.
Richard Gettner, like Thomas Mendip of Lady, Moses of
Firstborn, Tegeus of Phoenix, and Hoel of Thor, is a
self-discredited soldier whose hypersensitive idealism
drives him to self-sacrifice as a last desperate attempt
at total transformation. The divisions in his personality
are foreshadowed by disagreements on his intrinsic merit,
Jakob recalling his attempt to "give literature / A new
fire" (p. 7), and Belmann applying to him all the moral
disparagements an established society feels towards its
untouchables:
that rag of hell
Richard Gettner: that invertebrate,
That self-drunk, drunken, shiftless, heartless
Lying malingerer, Richard Gettner. (p. 6)
Although Gettner enters with a well-reasoned attack on
the "fearful excitements" of the revolution through which
270
"any side can accuse the other / And feel virtuous without
the hardships of virtue" (p. 15), his demeanor, as the
pursuing Hungarians approach, degenerates perceptibly into
obsequious pleading:
1*11 not die to oblige anybody; . . .
Before 1 do
I’ll get down on all fours, foot-kissing,
Dust-licking, belly-crawling, (p. 22)
In the second Act, he argues with Stefan, engages in a
successful game of passion with Gelda, publicly humiliates
Count Peter, nearly kills Stefan in a duel, and deserts
again. After telling Stefan of the Countess, "There's
no one on earth / I would put to more trouble" (p. 39),
he correlates the contrarieties of "the sound of great
spirits" and "a wretched human capacity" (p. 45), the
Countess* stability and his own despair, Gelda's innocence
and his own role as "the disappointer of expectations"
(p. 45). His own equivocal position as an army deserter
who was once an officer symbolizes his spiritual predi
cament: "My simple nature asks better of men / Than I
should ever presume to provide" (p. 42). In his hearing,
the Countess then tells Gelda that
Richard was no brute, and no
Pursuer of evil, but more like one enraged
Because he thought that good rejected him. (p. 56)
Richard's foolhardy descent from the loft to claim
Gelda*s love and reject Count Peter's moral and social
superiority contrasts with his initial obsequiousness,
271
while exaggerating his egotism; his self-characterization,
with overtones of desertion, self-condemnation, and inner
instability, prepares for his duel with Stefan, his
second desertion, his return, and then his final self-
sacrif ice:
Three incorrigible traitors, can’t help it;
The heart, that's one, the brain, that's the second.
And the will, old will power, deserters to the death.
Shoot me now and tomorrow you can join me. (p. 63).
His desire to kiss Gelda "in the sight of this congrega
tion, / Without disrespect to anybody" (p. 66) is a
demonic parody of GeIda's influence in having "me wooing
my way backwards / To the chancel of All Angels 1838"
(p. 47). Moreover, his reaffirmation of love for Gelda
rationalizes his return to the Countess late in the
third Act, and confirms GeIda's clear-sighted charge:
"You [Richard] rode out / Of the indecision; and so did
I" (p. 90). Although the Countess' disclaimer of love
humiliates Richard— "I see myself reduced to one dimen
sion" (p. 101)--he attempts, with his gesture of self-
sacrifice, to embody "a tale . . . certain, unswayable, /
Abundant, and long-suffering, . . . this / Of you [the
Countess] with me" (p. 99). Yet his surrender and likely
death negate the Countess' most cherished principles,
extend to an illogical extreme "the journey I was making /
In no direction in particular" (p. 101), and culminate
a fatal passion in which the feeling becomes everything
272
and the object of affection nothing.
Count Peter Zichy, Richard Gettner’s successor in
marriage and present rival for Gelda's affections,
develops through a series of cognitios the characteristics
implied in a series of eulogistic epithets voiced before
his entrance: he is "the great protector of the family"
(p. 5), "Count Peter the sturdy" (p. 8), Gelda’s good
husband, and "Peter blessed" (p. 31), with its apostolic
overtones. Like Virilius in Phoenix, the Duke of Altair
in Venus, and Cymen(-Peter) in Thor, he epitomizes the
tolerant, conservative aristocrat. Stefan, in his deific
idealizations of Peter, believes,
If you call to him, he puts his own world down
And takes you up [Hercules-like], almost before
you realize
What made you need him. (p. 5)
In the first act, he refuses to be exchanged for Gettner,
thus preserving complete free will for both the Countess
and Gelda; in the second Act, he participates impulsively
in a battle with the Austrians and "can taste it / Like
a fault of my own" (p. 60); and in Act III, considerably
chastened and penitent, he wonders, at news of the
Hungarian defeat and ensuing reign of terror, whether or
not he bears the responsibility for the inhuman chaos.
Thus he regains a wife, but "other worlds / Come to an
end tonight, Gelda, / More irreparably than ours" (p. 82).
Colonel Janik is "a poor sort of divided man"
273
(p. 52) whose apologies in the course of action, succes
sion to Gettner as suppliant, and uneasy embodiment of
cultured geologist and ruthless soldier manifest a
fatalistic, jaded, good-natured resignation to the fate
he first opposes, then succumbs to. He is characterized
by the contrast of his "sheer purpose" with Gettner's
"wandering and uncertain will" (p. 30), by the disparity
between his "dangerous, partial love" (p. 37) for country
and Peter*s ability to "see / Hungary's best future in
Austria's friendship" (p. 33), and by the contrast of the
Countess' and Peter's idealism with his own pessimistic
naturalism:
We're not ungrateful for your interest,
Count Zichy; it's only a pity
There's no better world fit to receive it. (p. 33)
Stefan, the Countess' son, is characterized by his
guilt (for having summoned Peter), his compulsive death-
urge, and an overwhelming sense of self-insufficiency:
"I've never had a reason to be / Anything but harmless"
(p. 38). He is largely a nonentity whose emotionalism
lends credence both to the donnee and denouement of the
play.
As in all of Fry's previous comedies, characterization
emerges basically from the triangular sexual contests
among an older man (Count Peter) and woman (Countess Ros-
marin), and a younger man (Richard Gettner) and woman
(Gelda). That the alliances at the end remain the same
274
as those established at the beginning not only suggests
that a doubleness exists, that sexual drives carry strong
overtones of spirituality, but confirms a paradox unique
in Fry's last play. Richard's rejection of Gelda for her
mother, like Gelda's rejection of Richard for the older
Peter, reverses the traditional comic formula and con
ceals a heavily nostalgic drive toward old, established
values. Moreover, the youth-age antitheses (and the
victory of age), the oddly doubled triangles, and the
multiplication of father- and mother-surrogates suggest
a need--not realized draraatically--to achieve a serene,
peaceful, halcyon existence which places paradoxes within
the perspective of an idealized, future golden age.
Language
Imagery.--Imagery in The Dark is Light Enough confirms
the existence of a double plane which informs the Countess'
transforming, divine non-interference: "there is nothing
on the earth / Which doesn't happen in your own hearts"
(p. 74). That the tone-giver of the imagery is the quest-
raotif, assimilating the rhythms of analogous journeyings,
is apparent from the prominence of water-imagery; at the
same time, the light-dark imagery which forms a crucial
set of sun-metonyms in the title and its source, and
imagery of heat and cold suggest the daily, seasonal,
and lifetime rhythms. However, imagery of fire and air.
275
of vegetation, of animals (except for the dogs and horses
which Fry equates with animality and divinity throughout
his plays), and locales of the after-life is rare.
Water-imagery is subtly modulated by the increment
of symbolic stages in a sea voyage, the seasons, and the
human spirit. The sea-voyage, with its beginning,
crossing, and ending, suggests the initiation, survival,
and extinction which characterize the life process, and
which extends by analogy to spiritual immortality. In
contrast to the Countess, who goes "floating out / Of
this interesting present / To some remote evening" (p. 22),
and Peter, "a man of decision [who can] take the cold sea
in a courageous plunge" (p. 65), Gettner is,
an unhappy
Gentleman, who comes to the shore
Of a January sea, heroica lly
Strips to swim, and then seems powerless
To advance or retire, either to take the shock
Of the water or to immerse himself again
In his warm clothes, (p. 56)
The symbolic context of the sea-joumey itself
emerges in imagery of grounding, drifting, and shipwreck;
the quality of dilemma expressed by the scene appears in
the Countess' reference to a flight to the Antipodes, her
metaphor of life without death as "outcast, like a rock
in the sea" (p. 89), and her condemnation of "souls who
will not budge / Out of their barren islands" (p. 93).
Gelda regrets her instinct to put out with a "lifeboat"
for Richard because of the "sinking" which all of the
276
characters consequently experienced. Ironically, Gettner*a
bitter contrast of the Countess' serene non-conformity
with the isolation rendering meaningless all the rest of
their lives utilizes a metaphysical unity of microcosm and
macrocosm, the Many and the One, individual and communal
destiny, reality and ideality, in the implicit mythical
context of the Babylonian Exile:
You can stoop your eyelids down, and make them
Close on a calm of mind.
But we don't live under your eyelids. There, perhaps,
By a serene elimination of
Three-quarters of the earth, you can exist
Beside the still waters. But out here
The drowning still goes on. (p. 97)
His insights implicitly identify the fates of the Hebrew
and Hungarian nations, as well.
The third and last stage of a sea-journey, the home
coming, implies a victory by acceptance of human weakness,
and clusters water, the harbor, and disease. Just as
the Countess "harbours" both Janlk and Gettner, the latter
linking a harbor reference with "This disease I am"
(p. 20), Belmann compares his sight of the Countess' last
entrance— despite disease--with watching
A fishing boat outwit the rocks and a very
Unbenevolent sea. It did at last
Gain the shore, (p. 86)
The same cluster appears in Peter's "taste" of human
"fault" after the battle, and of "failure" when Gelda
seemingly rejects him for Richard; here the imagery charac
terizes .
277
The ominous events, uneasy political and social
detente, and the mood of uncertainty all impart a plas
ticity, a heaviness, a thick-ness to ordinarily fluid
time: "no heart is served, caught in a moment / Which
has frozen" (p. 67). Therefore, imagery of heat and
cold, the seasons, and the water-cycles combine to con
firm the theme of moral change. With snow is associated
the attributes of sterility and purity, identical except
for their symbolic associations with the growth process:
purity initiates innocence, sterility extinguishes it.
Thus, Gettner falls out of the world in a drift of snow,
the soldiers kick the snow off their heels and "move on
as light as boys" (p. 25), and snow itself "comes down
as white and soft as a bishop's hand" (p. 13).
Usually however, snow, frost, and cold imply the
presence of human guilt, sin, and error:
The hardest frost of a year
Will not arrest the growing world
As blame and the memory of wrong will do. (p. 51)
The spiritual renewal suggested by the effect of spring
warmth on winter snow typifies Gettner's creative attempts
to "give literature a new fire" (p. 7), the annulment of
his unconsummated marriage "as though / Mortal mistakes
were snow" (p. 8), and Belmann’s reply, when Jakob sug
gests thinking of the Countess: "I do, and the snow
immediately melts / And all the Hungarians are dead"
(p. 2). The thematic ambivalence is confirmed by earthly
278
transmutation of compassion to passion; both are typi
fied by heat-images. Gettner condemns God and woman as
"a confederation of longing, / With the whispers hot in
your ear" (p. 65), and later refers to jealousy at the top
of its fever; forced tc choose between Gettner and Count
Peter, the Countess thinks of herself as "hotly debatable
ground" (p. 31).
A third water cycle, besides the journey and sea
sonal motifs, is a religio-natural succession of renewal
of the waters, their flow, and pollution of the source.
The Countess at the end wants Gettner's profession of love
to "wash over me," Gelda wishes the rain "would wash the
last few days away" (p. 79), and the Hungarian war song
visualizes the way "rivers of their [foes'] blood"
would drench their swords.
The sense of lost purpose emerges in imagery of
meandering, shallow rivers. After he is shot in a duel,
the stream of Stefan's life runs shallow and slowly, and
Gelda thinks of the road to Vienna, after the Hungarian
defeat, as "A river of drifting, hopeless, / Dangerous
men" (p. 81). That the life-springs of the individual
and social spirit are diseased is obliquely revealed
by Gettner*a fanciful description of his own entrance
to the Countess' entourage:
The intellectual soul
Of Europe comes down to the stream to drink.
What’s this
279
Floating belly-upwards? A dead fish. (p. 12)
Corresponding to the season-synecdoches of heat and
cold, fertility and sterility, are the day-synecdoches of
light and dark, which paradoxically carry over the life-
light-enlightenment associations. After Gettner recalls
his attempt "to root myself in her [the Countess']
radiance" (p. 45), Jakob speaks of him as having a "glow
still about him" (p. 55) because of his brief literary
success; when he emerges drunk to reclaim Gelda and
describes himself as "a man / Who will do anything for a
ha'penny night light" (p. 62), he claims he can see a
soldier's soul shining out in his buttons and complains
of his inability to fulfill the expectations of others:
"The frank daylight's turned full on you" (p. 65). Thus,
light-imagery clusters closely around GettnerTs spiritual
attributes.
In contrast to the overtones of idealism, inspira
tion, and salvation of light-imagery are the darkness-
asaociations of stultifying reality, sin, and rejection.
Although the Countess' initiation of Gelda's marriage
to Richard is described as "an act of dark night" (p. 8),
he had refused consummation "so I should not see / The
shadow go across you" (p. 45). Darkness, like time and
emotional sensation, gains solidity and force, even
instrumentality; its appearance confirms the powerful
parallel between national and personal fidelity, at least
280
in negative terms. Knowing that the Hungarian "arras /
Are moving through the night against Vienna” (p. 14),
Stefan urges the Countess to send Gettner out into the
night and let it beat on his head alone. However, Gelda
elects to harbor Gettner and consequently undergoes "a
shade of suffering" (p. 43). At the end, when the
Countess decides to go out like a night-light, Richard
returns to his directionless journey "Where the dark
makes no false promises" (p. 101).
Hollow imagery of darkness links the Countess'
rescue of Gettner at the beginning with Janik's narrow
escape at the end. Just as Kassel anticipates the
imminent arrival of pursuing Hungarians in the first Act
because Gettner's "name has the ring of reputation"
(p. 19), the fatalistic Janik, at the end of the play,
knows it "won't be long before they're round me in a
ring" (p. 90). The word ring (punning on sound and
circle) identifies the Countess with the fugitives.
Whereas the peasants "caught the sound of bells in the
dark" (p. 3) as she passed seeking Gettner, she recalls
on her deathbed: "That was a roundabout drive in the
snow" (p. 101).
Earth- and world-imagery amplifies the fragmentation
of personality so noticeable in characterization. Just
after Jakob characterizes the dying Countess as "our
world revived" (p. 85), the Countess extends the image
281
to gently ridicule a faith in social forms: dying without
ceremony "would be surely / Ungracious to an earth which
has entertained me" (p. 87). Ironically, while the Coun
tess and Hungary die, Count Peter tells Gelda:
But other worlds
Come to an end tonight, Gelda
More irreparably than ours. (p. 82)
Earth-imagery confirms paradoxical identities of micro
cosm with macrocosm, individual with society, and realism
with idealism.
Versification.--As in all the previous plays, the
lyrics are informal hymns to rebirth, one through vio
lence, one through sexual love. Both ridicule trammels
on individual freedom: the war-song by its hyperbolic
celebration of a bloody bacchanalia, the other by its
innocuous replacement of a supposedly bawdy line. Fry
is interested in the sound-sense paradoxes such as
Gelda's "faith in faith" (p. 47), "the goddess of it, in
her Godlike way, / Is God knows where" (p. 4), and Gelda*s
hope to "have progressed / Beyond ourselves to ourselves
made wiser" (p. 36). As before, phrase-repetitions
convey a strong sense of agitation, fear, and inner con
flict. Gettner pleads to the others to "Lie, lie! 0
Christ, lie for me!" (p. 26), and later poses as God:
"Immortal man, / Immortal man achieve me" (p. 64). When
the choice between Gettner and Count Peter is set before
the Countess, a series of characters shout their
282
incantatory support of her argument:
STEFAN: Wrong!
COUNTESS: You are wrong.
GELDA: No such thing could
happen.
STEFAN: Wrong, wrong, Colonel! (p. 32)
All the characters exhibit a fondness for playing
on each other*s words. When Janik asks the Countess if
she has no thought for the downtrodden, she replies with
a series of balanced clauses, analogies, and antitheses:
Not
As they are downtrodden, but as they are men
I think of them, as they should think of those
Who oppress them. We gain so little by the change
When the downtrodden in their turn tread down. (p. 51)
Of the Countess' departure, Belmann reports that one of
the servants "woke, / Or dreamt he woke, and heard, or
thought he heard” (p. 1) her sleigh. When Belmann asks
the Countess if he may ”doubt your wisdom and care for
us?” Jakob replies, "No X never wish to doubt you, Coun
tess, / Nor to hear you doubted!” (p. 20).
To summarize, in The Dark is Light Enough, Fry has
clearly subordinated plot-making to characterization.
The dominant role of the Countess, the presence of a
thesis (for the first time so prominently in a comedy),
and the marked dependence of all of the conflicts upon
the struggle between Gettner's rationalism and the
Countess' mysticism are indications of the importance
of characterization. Moreover, the unsatisfactory ending
is a symptom of the tension between structure,
283
characterization, and language.
The making of the plot proceeds on several levels.
There is the melodramatic struggle between the peaceful
Countess and the warlike Janik over the worthless Gettner,
in which both antagonists deny the ’’reality" of the
fugitive. There is also the more savage struggle between
the various characters, who cannot agree about the shape,
meaning, or even the facts of the Countess' action, for
each has rationalized it in his own way. And finally,
the rhythmic tension between the various plots (making
love is like making war), house and stable, main floor
and loft, parlor and snowy landscape, and many others,
implies and supports the levels of conflict which ensue.
Significantly, each act rises to a thundering--of marching
men, fists against doors, pistol shots--which places the
rigidly constricted scene in the perspective of tremendous
change.
It is in terms of characterization, traditionally of
secondary importance in the hierarchy of acts of represen
tation, that the primary issues are developed. The main
issue of the play is between the Countess and Richard
Gettner: the relative merits of tolerance and of idealis
tic rejection of human error as ways to be saved. The
time-place setting, the Countess' immense spiritual and
social stature, and the pervasive effects of an emanci
pated parlor upon a heterogeneous group of characters
284
sharply focus the dramatic adequacy of this situation.
By being forced to assume and re-enact the customary
roles of other characters, each character must pause and
pathetically sense his own motives in a wider context
which qualifies their importance. Gettner is a frus
trated intellectual who alternately condemns, threatens,
and grovels before representatives of his society as he
has many times before. Yet he is forced to play the lover
and the fighter, and consequently to observe and ponder
the fidelity of the rejected Peter, the forgiveness of a
wronged Countess, and the disillusionment of a saddened
Gelda. The momentarily victorious Gettner sees in Janik
the full-scale representation of the patriot he had
impersonated; the defeated Janik ultimately finds Gettner
a scapegoat of an unjust society. Stefan acts decisively
and passionately as he imagines Peter would do, while
Peter is forced to imitate first the Countess1 tolerance,
and then Janik's selfless rebellion against authority.
Gelda sees in Gettner the fulfillment of her mother's own
Idealism which had initiated her first marriage, while
the Countess comes to see in Gelda the culmination of
her own one-time ignorance and impulsiveness. Only the
final catastrophe, Gettner*s imitation of the previous,
analogous acts of self-sacrifice by the Countess, Peter,
Janik, Gelda, and Stefan remains undigested, sensational,
and literal. And it is this final scene that calls so
285
clearly in doubt Fry *s capability of transcending the
limits of realism.
The third act of imitation, Fry’s making of the
language, is firmly subordinated to the requirements of
plot and characterization. It not only crystallizes
and re-works elements already present in the scene— snow,
light and dark, heat and cold--but it amplifies the mood
of fragmentation which so strongly suggests an unseen but
strongly pervasive '’spiritual democracy." Its symbolic
re-combination of paradoxical images, its thematic organi
zation around the journey-motif, and its specificity all
work together to form a careful, highly self-conscious
mode of suggestion.
CONCLUSION
My purpose in criticizing the plays of Christopher
Fry has been to attempt to see in the completed works a
"hierarchy of actualizations." The first act of repre
sentation consists in making the structure or arrangement
of incidents. Although the primary place of structure
in the hierarchy has nothing to do with the order in which
Fry composed his drama, nor with the order we follow in
criticizing the play, we have assumed that the arrangement
of events of the story-~the beginning, middle, and end—
to a great extent actualizes the movements on the stage
even before the characters appear or before they speak.
The characterization is the second act of represen
tation in the hierarchy of techniques. It has been
assumed that the development of dramatic characters provides
individual variations upon the action which is represented
by the structure. Characterization thus works out "active
essences," the single vice, humor, or psychological drive
which dominates each character, within a structure of which
conflict is the essential factor.
The third act of representation consists in making
the language, limited in this study to imagery and
versification. It is assumed that the theme which is
286
287
the substance of the play is represented first in the
structure, second in the characterization, and third in
the imagery and versification through which the characters
develop their ’’active essences" in response to the shifting
situations of the play. If one thinks of structure Cor
"plotting"), characterization, and language as successive
"acts of representation" by the author, one may also say
that they constitute in the completed work a hierarchy
of forms, and that the language of the play is its highest
individuation. It is assumed in this study that effective
dramatization of a theme involves unity, in the completed
work, within the hierarchy of forms.
In Christopher Fry's first published play, The Boy
With a Cart (1939), the structural tension and impetus
are sustained by the two-part action: the centrifugal
quest and the opposite but equal, centripetal church-
building. However, the plot moves forward less by
dramatized conflict than by preparation for the future,
which is followed by the announcement by messengers that
the forecast events have indeed occurred, but off stage.
The lack of action is due partly to the difficulty of
presenting inner turmoil or "sorrow" directly, partly
to the intervention of supernatural forces, and partly
to the episodic nature of the plot itself. In the
absence of a direct representation of conflict, events
to which the audience should respond intuitively must be
288
described and explained.
Within the confused multiple quests which the struc
ture represents, characterization is furthered by the
awakening of all the characters to the vital link between
the action and the divine plan which informs it. While
Cuthman's increasing maturity grows from a realization
of the true force behind his motivations, an irrelevant
contradiction arises between the realism best represented
by Cuthman's mother and the lofty idealism of the People
of South England.
Imagery is primarily a device of structure, empha
sizing the sameness of events and confirming the repeti
tive nature of the sorrows. Image clusters formed and
dominated by an attribute of the sun recur to link epi
sodes, crises, and parodies. On the other hand, versi
fication is primarily a device of character differentiation,
although the metrics are also sensitive to changes in the
movement of the action.
The immediate vertical links between the real and
the ideal, such as the chorus, the father and father-
surrogates, mother, and wasteland journey, are extended
dramatic metaphors which tend to develop action and
character undramatically, through description. Conse
quently, the attention bestowed on contemplation is
disproportionate to the dramatic adequacy of the events
to be contemplated; the acts of representation never
289
achieve adequate unification.
In A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), Fry's first one-
act comedy, the structure represents two social planes,
each one a parody of its opposite. The scene thus implies
the quality of doubleness which draws structure, charac
terization, and language together. Within the limitations
of a highly focused, economical one-act play, Fry assi
milates the analogous rhythms of the phoenix legend, of
the Sleeping Beauty-Cindere11a marchen, and of the ritual
awakening of a slumbering nature-god to the paradoxical
love-death theme. The inevitable game of passion, more
over, resolves both inner and external conflict by its
sacramental symbolism and by its use of an intricate
chain of rationalizations to overcome illusion.
Characterization unites the refined, the inter
mediate, and the low, positions roughly approximating
the functions of Dynamene, Tegeus, and Doto at their
entrance: characterization thus maintains Fry's insis
tence on meaning at various levels of the action. More
over, as the stress shifts from the obstructing Virilius
to the reconciling Tegeus, motivation is correspondingly
complicated by the logical succession of one triangular
sexual competition by another. At the same time, the
delicate balance of symbolism and naturalism complements
and supports the inner conflicts which add complexity
to character.
290
The imagery in A Phoenix Too Frequent forms a total
structure corresponding to the basic rhythms of the phoenix
myth: a phase of painful oppression is followed by a
metaphorical release of the paralyzed life-force. More
over, the "double vision" which appears so predominantly
in characterization is confirmed by an imagistic progres
sion from hallucination, short-sightedness, and dizziness
to clarity, stability, and a confident sense of perspec
tive. The "doubleness" which exists in structure, charac
terization, and imagery emerges in the versification as
punning sound-sense linkages and tricks of repetition
and inversion. Thus, the confirmation, amplification,
and paradoxical recombinations of the themes implicit
in the transformation motif perfectly unify the levels
of representation.
The Firstborn (1946) is a religious play, Fry's
only tragedy. In it Fry continues the panoramic conven
tions of A Boy with a Cart although his method includes
the focused scene, intimate drawing room, and sophisticated
sparring partners which he had utilized so effectively
in A Phoenix Too Frequent.
The arrangement which Fry makes of this revenge
tragedy--alternating between palace and tent to present
personal, social, and theological conflict and rehearsing
the past in relation to what is currently happening and
what will come as a reault--actualizes the double issue
291
of the tragic quest long before it occurs. As the charac
ters search desperately for abiding personal intimacies,
their efforts are frustrated in ways that suggest fate
and retribution on a parallel, but unseen and eternal
plane. The succession of increasingly devastating plagues
climaxes in the poorly-motivated death of Raineses. The
lack of motivation stems directly from Fry's inability
to choose between the opposing claims of retribution and
fatality, t ie view which holds tragedy to represent punish
ment for sin, and the view which believes it to be simply
an unfathomable event, with its explanation secondary and
variable.
Characterization is devised to present, by comparison
and contrast, the response of each of the characters to
an immediate situation. Although Fry's two opposed
families are not "average," their reunions, conflicts,
and meditations take place in typical situations which
provide an intense focus for their attempts at self
justification. While Moses and Seti struggle, the terror
and pity are channeled through the impassioned young men
and the suppliant women on either side. The faulty moti
vation evident in the structure recurs in the characteri
zation of Moses: although no personal attachment justifies
his return to save Rameses, the resolution of the play
demands a Hebrew victory through Egyptian catastrophe.
As in A Boy with a Cart, Fry fails to embody in the
2 92
action an adequate motive for the hero’s presence at the
end, a motive which would be causally related to Raineses'
death but yet would leave Moses sinless.
The language indicates the transitional nature of
the play. On the one hand, a significant proportion of
the imagery follows the cyclical patterns of departure
and return, rise and fall, and dark and light which
organically confirm the passages between palace and tent,
earth and heaven, and birth and death. Interwoven with
the dynamic imagery which confirms the structure is static
imagery which extends by association from a spatial
hand-music-dust cluster; static metaphors convey the
isolation of the characters and, at the same time, mag
nify personal meaninglessness with images of universal
chaos. The paradoxical sound-sense correspondences; the
predominant appearance of fragments, questions, and rever
sals of syntax; and the intellectual contradictions within
the versification all confirm the movement of the action
in a world of riddles and mystery.
Because the analogous actions, character represen
tations, and symbolic rhythms coalesce in so many ways,
and because Fry so effectively utilizes progression,
feeling, and reflection--except in the poorly-motivated
attempt by Moses to save Rameses--the play closely
approaches the completeness of integration Mby analogy.”
The Lady’s not for Burning (1949), like its shorter
293
predecessor, A Phoenix Too Frequent, follows the struc
tural conventions of Greek New Comedy. Fry achieves
economical progression in his representation of structure
by beginning near the climax of the already-brief Petronius
story, making the beginning and end of the play coincide
paradoxically with evening and dawn, and making the "con
fessions," a social occasion (nuptials), and family
prayers coincide with the first Act. By breaking the
established routine of what is actually a staid, prewar
drawing room with a series of quests by confused seekers,
Fry is able to present a logical complexity of conflicts
on several levels. There is a series of love triangles,
the more fundamental conflict between radicals and con
servatives, and finally, the disagreement among all the
characters about the meaning of the events they observe.
Yet all the conflicts are designed to open a situation
of choice before all the characters. In spite of a large
cast, the somewhat hackneyed "asides" and eavesdropping
scenes, and a certain amount of coincidence and senti
mentality, Fry achieves economical progression without
too great a sacrifice in plausibility.
Characterization differentiates the characters
chiefly by age, their attitudes toward change, and
varying degrees of involvement. Yet at the same time,
the quests of all of them for lost innocence are subtly
shaded and contrasted by the varied problems of
294
perspective which arise from the structure. The kaleido
scopic multiplication of doubleness in the confused love
affairs, imitative brothers, ’’plain dealers," fake
chaplains, and respectable drunks increases the comic
mood. At the same time, Fry ably avoids the appearance
of arbitrary manipulations, over-simplifications, or—
except in the exaggerated effect of the recognitions--
poor motivation. By choosing for his setting a typically
Medieval time and place, Fry is able to isolate an
essentially modern conflict from its twentieth-century
milieu. By slowing the passage of time and constricting
the social group ihvolved, he forces his characters to
view their motives in terms of the immediate effects
their actions have on others and themselves.
In the language, the symbolic quests for meaning in
society are analogous to the alternations of the flight
of the sun across the daytime sky with its nighttime
journey through the dark underworld. The passages of
individual from womb to life, of the sun from darkness
to light, and of the soul from dream to rational conscious
ness are linked metaphorically to the mythic resemblances
of the human, earthly, and universal bodies. The whole
of the imagery thus forms three dominant clusters, all
taking their sources from antithetical metonyms of the
sun-attributes: light-dark, heat-cold, and wet-dry.
Within the versification, however, overabundant phrases
295
which exhibit internal rhyme, multiple puna, and arbitrary
repetition tend to turn their backs on the sense of the
dialogue and set up self-contained patterns in its place.
The interaction between polarities, Fry's habit of
inverting traditional value-symbolism, and the presence
of the love-death paradox all confirm the organization
of structure and characterization, although Fry's unwilling
ness to recognize the full implications of this theme,
the desire for free choice, results in less than complete
unification of his acts of representation.
Like Fry's two previous religious plays, Thor with
Angels (1948) is constructed in three movements, each one
building up to and receding from a crisis. Moreover, the
juxtaposition of the love, war, and religion motifs
implies a complementary structural device: temporal
events as a mirror of divine activity. Furthermore, the
association of war and perverted sacrifice with the old
gods and of love and transcendent atonement with the new
gods suggests the succession of the past by the future
and behind this change, the theme of a return to paradise.
In accomplishing his representation of the structure,
Fry has begun and ended the play effectively: Cymen's
thwarted attempts to sacrifice Hoel are fulfilled in his
absence. But between the cause and result, the beginning
and end of the play, the coincidental arrival of messen
gers without any linear connection, Merlin's prescience,
296
and a continuing aeries of miracles coerce the action at
the coat of plausibility.
Characterization is constructed by the creation of a
variety of perspectives which arise from a series of
analogous conflicts. The complex political, mythic, and
genealogical links between Merlin and Hoel; the plausible
interaction between Cymen's and Hoel's functions as lovers,
warriors, and priests; and the range of emotion displayed
by the subordinate characters display a conscious
artistry by the author. As the play progresses, however,
both Cymen and Hoel act in ways inconsistent with traits
of character firmly established at the outset. Yet, Fry
presents both Cymen and Hoel undergoing an improvement of
character which accounts in moral terms for the ending.
Language both confirms and amplifies the rhythms
\
discernible in the structure. The imagery is organized
by the equal but opposite daily journeys of the sun(-god).
The tendencies of the male sun to rise toward the light
in the morning and plunge toward the dark female earth
at evening, of the neophyte to leave the dark womb for a
light sea of social humanity and re-enter the dark tomb
at death, and the struggle of the enlightened reason with
the dark will are assimilated to the myth of a vegetation
god who dies in the autumn dusk and revives on a spring
morning. Thus, by assimilating moral and social change
to the natural cycles, Fry universalizes the action.
297
Yet, the strong tendency of the miracles revealed by
exposition to spring from the total image-structure,
rather than the reverse, reveals a serious deficiency of
the play as poetic drama. The disruption of the proper
hierarchy of the representative acts is symptomatic of
the lack of adequate, causal unity in the progression
of the play. Thus, Thor with Angels appears to possess
far less than adequate unity of structure, characteriza
tion, and language.
Venus Observed (1949) is Fry’s second full-length
comedy. Structure compresses a great many improbable
events into less than twelve hours; the analogous plots,
the cyclical rhythm of the alternating scenes, and the
love-death paradox all reflect the characteristic double
plane and, within the mythic setting, a single action.
The mysterious succession of past by future, of conven
tional by open society, and of age by youth restores free
will to each of the characters. As in The Lady’s not for
Buming and The Firstborn, the action is largely over by
the end of the second Act. All that remains in Act III
is to resolve the erotic intrigue and the Duke-Edgar
competition, a resolution which would become unmanageable
without the intervention of a deus ex machina at the
close of each of the play’s four scenes. The numerous
"well-made1' concrete devices also disproportionately
affect the progression, although their mythic significance,
2 98
their association with situation, and their usefulness in
revealing submerged feeling are appropriate and effective.
Characterization grows out of the paradoxes of
reconciling new and old societies. As in Thor with
Angels. Fry centers his play around a single superior
individual; at the same time, he effectively presents a
representative cross-section of upper-middle-class
society, differentiates even minor characters, and broadens
the significance of the various actions by embedding
similar and contrasting enactments in parallel plots. Of
the three mistresses, Hilda and Jessie have little to do
and Rosabel1s role, which is so important to the peripety,
appears artificial and contrived. Yet Rosabel and Reed-
beck evolve, their penitence for their respective crimes
accounting in moral terms for the ending.
The representation of the language in Venus Observed,
as in all the previous plays, organizes the imagery by
the similarities between the rhythms, phases, and move
ments of the sun and other heavenly bodies. As the
astronomical/astrological themes suggest, imagery of light
and dark, of the fire-world of heavenly bodies, and of
angelic birds is heavily predominant. Moreover, once
the imagery is broken down by analytic association,
thematic polarities emerge which dissolve and recombine
with their metonyms. That is, "star-gazing" becomes a
symbol of the protagonist, the Duke, while "fire-setting"
299
stands for his antagonist[s] Rosabel/Perpetua. Thus
the imagery confirms the dual Level of the action and
amplifies the texture and complexity of the choices which
all the characters make. Moreover, it assimilates the
quests of the characters to a mythic context. However,
the rash of coincidences which must be ascribed to the
fate or nature represented in the metaphorical cosmology
indicates the tendency of metaphor to coerce action.
The play, as a result, falls short of the desirable unity
of the structure, characterization, and language.
The structure of A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) exhibits
progression through variation in the place of strictly
linear development of the plot. That is, the play repre
sents dramatically a series of Biblical moments which
play over and over again the crucial episode in the
characters' lives which appears in the prologue. To
heighten the purely dramatic effect of his archetypal
conflicts, Fry makes the same characters play successive
roles, compresses the historical passage of centuries
into a dream sequence, and uses a church-prison setting
which signifies the grave. Thus, in this archetypal
masque which constantly undermines the distinction between
illusion and reality, all the analogous episodes are
united into a single action: to be strong beyond action.
By beginning his play in a realistic time-place setting,
Fry provides perspective; he also frees his message from
300
irrelevancies by eliminating all suspense. However,
the episodic structure of the play, despite the ascending
order of the experiences, stresses the links between
human and divine activity, rather than linear, causal
progression of the plot. The moralising at the end is
another manifestation of this structural weakness.
Although no structural or historical sequence con
nects the episodes, the unity of the play can be said
to derive from a device of characterization: a typical
group of imprisoned soldiers recapitulate a series of
mythically similar experiences. At the same time, the
expressionistic distortion of reality powerfully inten
sifies the emotional significance of cumulative incidents.
Although the ritual experiences cannot be said to point
causally toward the ending, they do account morally for
the cognitios. Moreover, the realistic puzzlement which
characterizes the awakened dreamers at the end not only
restores the perspective of "real life" which began the
play, but points to a future transformation on the
audience's side of the stage.
The imagery of A Sleep of Prisoners is organized
by the night journey of the sun through the dark under
world. The stellar, air, and fire imagery, so prominent
in Venus Observed, is insignificant in A Sleep of
Prisoners. Rather, water, earth, and hollow imagery
confirms the tour d'abolie variant of the quest-motif.
301
Moreover, the spilling of blood by sacrifice, of earthly
waters by cataclysm, and of divine fire by apocalypse
are all implied by the mythic resemblances of human,
earthly, and universal bodies. By accepting the anagogic
identity of everything with everything else, and asso
ciating the cyclical process of development with shifts
among polarities. Fry embodies progression within a
richly associative, metaphysical series. The versifica
tion makes heavy use of phrasal repetitiveness; at the
same time, the tone of jocular irreverence which dominates
so much of the dialogue expresses the doubleness of
meaning conveyed by the dream-consciousness chain of
contrarieties. Although the structure of the play, then,
is dominated by the demands of characterization, both are
confirmed by language; the resulting unity approaches a
high level of effectiveness.
In Fry’s last play which is also a comedy. The Dark
is Light Enough (1954), the complexities of the double
plot, the rigorously circumscribed scene, and the presence
of the Actaeon and Ulysses-Penelope archetypes are all
focused on the development of a single action: the demons
tration of personality-transformation through the Influence
of Countess Rosmarin. With the representation of struc
ture, the logical and paradoxical concatenation of plots,
the symbolic shifts in scene, and the careful use of
contrast and variation induce a kaleidoscopic variety of
302
incident without loss of unity. The swing and counter
swing of the plot are made apparent and strikingly ironic
while, at the same time, the central theme of conversion
through love is maintained. The heroic surrender of
Gettner to the Austrians, however, is a rejection of the
soul-body unity valued by the Countess, makes a virtue
of his absurd proposal of marriage to the Countess, and,
with a sentimental gesture, masks the author's need to
dispose of both Janik and Gettner.
It is in terms of characterization, traditionally of
secondary importance in the hierarchy of acts of represen
tation, that the primary issues of the play are developed.
The main conflict of the play is between the Countess and
Richard Gettner: the relative merits of tolerance and
of idealistic rejection of human error as ways to be
saved. The time-place setting, the Countess' immense
spiritual and social stature, and the pervasive effects
of an emancipated parlor upon a heterogeneous group of
characters sharply focus the dramatic adequacy of the
situation. By being forced to assume and re-enact the
customary roles of other characters, each character must
pause and pathetically sense his own motives in a wider
context which qualifies their importance. Only the final
catastrophe, Gettner1s imitation of the previous, analo
gous acts of self-sacrifice by the Countess, Peter,
Janik, Gelda, and Stefan remains undigested, sensational,
303
and literal.
Language is firmly subordinated to the requirements
of structure and characterization. It not only crystal
lizes and re-works elements already present in the
scene--snow, light and dark, heat and cold--but it ampli
fies the mood of fragmentation which so strongly suggests
an unseen but strongly pervasive "spiritual democracy."
Its symbolic recombination of paradoxical images, its
thematic organization around the journey-motif, and
its specificity all work together to form a careful,
highly self-conscious means of suggestion. Therefore,
despite a seriously-flawed denouement, the representations
of structure, characterization, and language attain a
high degree of unity.
PLAYS BY CHRISTOPHER FRY
The Boy with a Cart. New York, 1950.
The Dark Is Light Enough. New York and London, 1954.
The Firstborn. London, 1946.
________ . New York, 1952.
________ . New York, 1958.
The Lady's not for Burning. New York, 1950.
A Phoenix Too Frequent. London, 1946.
A Sleep of Prisoners. New York, 1951.
Thor, with Angels. London, 1948.
Venus Observed. London, 1949.
SOURCES CITED
Alexander, John. "Christopher Fry and Religious Comedy,"
Meanjin, 15:77-81, Autumn 1956.
Arrowsmith, Martin. "Notes on English Verse Drama,"
Hudson Review, 5:208, Summer 1950.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Garden City, N. Y., 1957.
Bewley, Marius. "The Verse of Christopher Fry," Scrutiny,
18:78-84, June 1951.
Brown, John Mason. As They Appear. New York, 1952.
Brustein, Robert. ,fWhy American Plays Are Not Literature,"
Harper * s, October, 1959, pp. 167-72.
"By the Lights of Times Square," The London Times Literary
Supplement, November 6, 1959~ jk xxii.
Clurman, Harold. "Theatre: In Contrast to Fry," The New
304
305
Republic t August 20, 1951, pp. 21-22.
Coleridge, S. T. "The Imagination." In W. J. Bate, ed. ,
Criticism: The Major Texts. Cambridge, Mass., 1952.
Comedy, ed. with Introduction and Appendix by Wylie
Sypher. Garden City, N. Y., 1956.
Cornford, F. M. Thucydides Mythistoricus. Arnold, 1907.
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Norfolk,
(n.d. ) .
Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Princeton,
1949.
Gassner, John. "Prospectus on Playwrights," Theater Arts,
35:26-30, January 1951.
Hobson, Harold. "Poetic Drama Ascendant," Christian
Science Monitor Magazine, March 25, 1950, pT 5T
Kitto, H. D. F. Greek Tragedy. New York, 1950.
,fMuse at the Box Office," Time , April 3, 1950, pp. 50-51.
Redman, Ben Ray. "Christopher Fry: Poet-Dramatist,"
College English, 14:191-97, January 1953.
de Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. New York,
1956.
Scott, W. T. "The Literary Summing Up," The Saturday
Review, December 30, 1950, p. 8.
Spender, Stephen. "Christopher Fry," Spectator, March 24,
1950, p. 364.
Stanford, Derek. Christopher Fry: An Appreciation.
London, 1951.

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Creator Roy, Emil Lawrence (author)

Core Title Structure, Characterization, And Language In The Drama Of Christopher Fry

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest,Theater

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Lecky, Eleazer (committee chair), Hadley, Paul E. (committee member), Pallette, Drew (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-242313

Unique identifier UC11358140

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Legacy Identifier 6103806.pdf

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