Polymath

i
Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

https://ojcs.siue.edu/ojs/index.php/polymath/index
Editor
Douglas P.A. Simms
Editorial Board Fine Arts:

Steve Brown (Art & Design) Shelly Goebl-Parker (Art Therapy)
Humanities:
Isaac Blankson (Speech Communication) Matthew Johnson (English)
Physical Sciences:
David Kaplan (Physics) Urszula Ledzewicz (Mathematics and Statistics)
Social Sciences:
Denise Degarmo (Sociology) Jason Stacy (History)

Volume 1 Number 1 Summer 2011
Contents
Editors Introduction
Douglas Simms i
Articles
The Synthetic Bard: Dramatic Condensation from the Futurists to the Reduced Shakespeare Company Stefano Boselli Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies on College Campuses? RitaArras-Boyd and Roger Boyd Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency: The Collective Body and the Co-opted Individual in Spenser, Hobbes and Bunyan Nick Davis 1
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42
Copyright 2011 Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Editors Introduction
Douglas Simms SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY EDWARDSVILLE
It is with great pleasure that I write the introduction to the first issue of Polymath. Many journals have interdisciplinarity as a focus, though the vast majority treat interdisciplinarity within a field. Our hope with Polymath is to establish a forum for papers the topics of which are interdisciplinary in nature, or simply to bring papers from various disciplines together, the arts and sciences as the foundational elements of our institutes of higher learning. Each of the articles published within this issue exemplify this dual focus. Stefano Bosellis essay on rewritings of Shakespearean dramas and the Italian Futurists draws theater and literature together; Rita Arras-Boyd and Roger Boyds study of the importance of tobacco usage on university campuses brings a social-science approach to policy issues; finally, Nick Davis essay on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceptions of body, individualization of the person, political literature and graphic representation in frontispieces must needs use an interdisciplinary approach to the literary study of these works. Interdisciplinarity is not to be envisaged so much a hydra, whose multiple heads are there to be slain, but rather as the various fibers within a cord, possessing strength built upon the individual qualities working in unison. Such strength is the hope for our liberal education in the Arts and Sciences. Similarly many individual efforts were brought together to produce this volume (though any short-comings fall upon the editor alone). Thanks are to be extended first to the College of Arts and Sciences and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, whose support has enabled this project, particularly to Dean A. Romero of the College of Arts and Sciences who was the initial proponent and supporter for this endeavor. The editorial board members too were intrinsic in the formulation of what this journal would set out to do and have often given of themselves in meetings, feedback, and reviewing submissions. Consequently I am indebted to all of them: Steve Brown, Shelly Goebl-Parker, Isaac Blankson, Matthew S.S. Johnson, David Kaplan, Christopher Glosser, Urszula Ledzewicz, Denise Degarmo and Jason Stacy. Gratitude is also extended to the many nameless reviewers who have also selflessly given their time and learning to select among the various submissions.
The Synthetic Bard: Dramatic Condensation from the Futurists to the Reduced Shakespeare Company Stefano Boselli GETTYSBURG COLLEGE
Abstract: The Futurists criticized Shakespeare as the epitome of passist drama in several of their manifestos, and, at times, followed up on their own proposal to reshape his dramaturgy through their synthetic techniques. The Reduced Shakespeare Company abridged the entire Bards oeuvre to a single evening, but without reference to the Futurists. This article, going beyond the usual placement of the American troupe within the framework of popular Shakespeare, views their work as a contemporary embodiment of the Futurist Synthetic Theatre.
Although Shakespeare is frequently quoted as stating that brevity is the soul of wit, in reality it is one of his characters who pronounces these words in an ironic context. Polonius contradicts their literal sense by adding a plethora of longwinded expressions to the simple statement that Hamlet is mad. 1 In truth, despite employing brevity locally as a rhetorical device (Smith), the Bard never really took it to a global level: after all, even his shortest play, The Comedy of Errors, remains a fulllength work. But, due to its popularity, Shakespeares oeuvre has often inspired reactions and rewritings in a more or less parodic tone, many of which resorted to abbreviation. Among these, two artistic experiences in the last one hundred years stand out because they based their notion of theatre on extreme dramatic condensation: the Futurist Synthetic Theatre and the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Thus, what brings together early twentieth century Italian Futurism2 and a contemporary American troupe beyond their
1
POLONIUS. My liege, and madam, to expostulate / What majesty should be, what duty is, / Why day is day, night night, and time is time, / were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. / Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, / and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, / I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. / Mad call I it, for to define true madness, / What ist but to be nothing else but mad? (Ham. 2.2.8694). For the widespread appropriation of Shakespeare out of context in support of practically any agenda, see Drakakis. 2 The movement was officially born on 20 February 1909 with the publication of The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism on the French newspaper Le Figaro and was the first European avant-garde that aspired to embrace and penetrate reality in all its aspects (Antonucci, Storia 17). Led by the indefatigable Marinetti, Futurism gradually attracted an extremely diverse group of artists whose creativity was applied to everything, from
The Synthetic Bard
chronological distance is the exploration of the possibilities of the short play genre in its most diminutive form. 3 Throughout the numerous manifestos penned by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Italian Futurists in relation to the theatre from 1911 onwards, the ghost of Shakespeare emerged frequently as the epitome of passist drama. 4 In The Futurist Synthetic Theatre (Il teatro futurista sintetico, 1915) the value of the playwrights words was downplayed visvis the physical elements of the theatre building: Our futurist theater jeers at Shakespeare [. . .] but is inspired by red or green reflections from the stalls (Flint 127). Years later, the manifesto After the Synthetic Theatre and the Theatre of Surprise, We Invent the Antipsychological, Abstract Theatre of Pure Elements and Tactile Theatre (Dopo il teatro sintetico e il teatro a sorpresa, noi inventiamo il teatro antipsicologico astratto di puri elementi e il teatro tattile, 1924) lashed out at Italian psychologism by criticizing its decrepit hamletisms (Marinetti 174). If these mentions were rather general, the most practical advice had come from The Variety Theatre (Il teatro di variet, 1913): boil all of Shakespeare down to a single act (Flint 121). This is exactly the direction pursued by the Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC), with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).5 Since the shows beginnings in the 1980s and its canonization in the 90s, the RSC has made synthesis the cornerstone of its success, but crucial resonances with the Futurist Synthetic Theatre have so far passed unnoticed by scholars. The Futurists defined the sintesi, and the RSC followed in the same track with several shows based on intense abridgement. In this article I argue that, although there was no direct contact between the two groups, the Futurists should be
literature to painting, from music to culinary arts. For an excellent introduction to Futurist theatre, see Berghaus. 3 The concept of short play has so far received little attention. Most of the available theoretical studies are devoted to the one-act play alone (see, for instance, Kozlenko or Schnetz), but the short play genre also includes farces, scenes, sintesi, or ten-minute plays, different names that depend on poetics or historical circumstances. In general, if a full-length play tends to occupy the entire time of the performance, a short play calls for something else to occur in close chronotopic proximity, at least another play (Boselli 69). A full-length work becomes a particular case of short play once it is condensed and abbreviated. For a succinct encyclopedia entry, see Neumann. For the significant intertextual and dialogic implications of emphasizing the broader genre of the short play, see Boselli 4852. 4 DAmico noted how, in nineteenth-century Italy, Shakespeare came to represent the entire foreign dramaturgy outside contemporary French playwrights such as Sardou, Dumas fils, or Augier (35). Ibsen was another well-known playwright and he was also mentioned in the Futurist Synthetic Theatre manifesto. 5 An alternative, abbreviated title has often been used for productions: The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged).
regarded as the RSCs immediate generic antecedents since the results are strikingly similar on the level of their dramaturgical output. For our purposes, the role of Shakespeare is twofold. In the first place, it is metonymic, as it would be impossible to speak of the whole Synthetic Theatre or all of the RSC productions for reasons of space. It is therefore just the tip of the iceberg, but by no means exhausts the potential for analysis. At the same time, referring to the English playwright is also necessary, since the bulk of materials available from, or on, the RSC pertains to their first, Shakespearean, show. Thus, an investigation of the conflictual relation with Shakespeares lengthiness can function as a useful platform for comparison, a trait dunion between theory and practice across the Atlantic in search of the vitality of dramatic synthesis. Influences upon and from Futurist theatre THESEUS. Say, what abridgement have you for this evening? A Midsummer Nights Dream (5.1.39) The whole matter of reciprocal influences who inspired the Futurists and who was inspired by them is quite intricate, and this topic has already been explored in some depth.6 The general tendency to explore shorter dramatic forms since the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the limited reel length of a cinema in its infancy with its adaptations of classics including Shakespeare,7 different kinds of popular entertainment, or the contest for complete plays of maximum fifty lines by Comoedia in 1911, all could be considered general starting points for the Futurist imagination. According to Angelo Maria Ripellino, for instance, during Marinettis visit to Meyerholds Studio in Moscow at the beginning of 1914, the founder of Futurism was shown a pantomimic compendium of Antony and Cleopatras vicissitudes, followed by a three-minute excerpt from Othello improvised upon
See at least Antonuccis History of Futurist Theatre (Storia del teatro futurista 14369), which analyzes possible sources for the Futurist theatre and their relation to subsequent playwrights and avant-garde movements. For a more specific account of the myriad possible inspirations for the Synthetic Theatre, see Verdones La sintesi 14346 and Listas La scne 18590. 7 Holland indicates that from 1899, when a small part of Trees production of King John was filmed, to the end of the silent era, there were hundreds of Shakespeare films, ranging in length from two to over 100 minutes in length, all marked, of necessity, by a radical abbreviation of the language to what could be mouthed by the actors and read off the intertitles (39). The video Silent Shakespeare by the British Film Institute contains the pick of the bunch Italian productions of King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, which are brought to life with extraordinary hand-stenciled color (Bate). Bate finds that the simplification of structure offers the potential of taking the viewer to the core of each play, revealing the primal quality of Shakespeares stories.
The Synthetic Bard his request (168).8 Ripellino wondered if that experience might have influenced Marinettis conception of the Synthetic Theatre, but several scholars have noted that references to the notion of dramaturgical reduction already existed in Futurist manifestos as early as 1911. In fact, in the Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights (Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi), later renamed The Pleasure of Being Booed (La volutt dessere fischiati), the Futurists suggested that [t]he dramatic art ought not to concern itself with psychological photography, but rather to move toward a synthesis of life in its most typical and most significant lines. [. . .] Dramatic art without poetry cannot exist, that is, without intoxication and without synthesis (Flint 114). But it is not always so easy to establish if and how a particular concept or element has been employed as a basis for a specific artistic development. We can find another example of improbable connection in terms of brevity in the nineteenth century with Gian Pietro Lucini. Lucini has been counted as one of the possible sources for Futurist synthetism (Verdone, La sintesi 14344; Lista, La scne 186) because he wrote a section of his Book of Ideal Figurations (Il libro delle figurazioni ideali 1894) about the story of Romeo and Juliet. Lucini concentrated in a markedly symbolist mode on the single episode of the balcony, the perfect moment between the end of the night and daybreak. If we accept that Marinetti might have had the fragment in his mind and even counted Lucini among the Futurists in light of their common dislikes, 9 we would still be hard pressed to see how the passage could seriously contribute to the idea of the Synthetic Theatre. In the first place, the episode is not independent, but is part of a longer miscellany. It is, in fact, the second of five parts of the Intermezzo of Spring (Intermezzo della Primavera), and, in its section, is preceded by a brief narrative introduction from Matteo Bandellos Novelle. Thus, it is more a rewriting of a select particularly poetic episode according to a different sensibility than a critique to the lengthiness of classic dramaturgy. With ambiguity that only literature isolated from the real stage can afford, Lucini has the characters act and sing (Agunt et Cantant 31) without specifying when they do one or the other. He entrusts a considerable part of the action to a chorus of Night Souls who recount the few events, but leaves very little to dialogue. In truth, Lucini did not write the action for the stage at all. In the early 1910s, variety theatre was the first real starting point for the Futurists dramaturgical reflection, because, with its open format, it suggested a way of connecting the commercial circuit with the ideas explored in their irreverent serate.10 At the time of the early manifestos, Ettore Petrolini, a
8 9
If not otherwise indicated, translations are my own. Futurist Preface to Gunshots by Gian Piero Lucini (Prefazione futurista a Revolverate di Gian Piero Lucini Marinetti 29). 10 The serate were a way for the Futurists to spectacularize just about anything in a loose structure: readings of manifestos, poetry declamation, or exhibitions of paintings. For a
performer who had started his career in the variety halls of Rome, had already surpassed the stereotypes of standard macchiette11 thanks to an idiosyncratic, anti-naturalist style made of frequent use of nonsense, slittamento from his characters his term for what today would be called Brechtian alienation and even direct attacks on spectators annoyed by his unconventional attitude. Such unpleasantness (sgradevolezza) and the progression of his career assuredly had a lot in common with the Futurists readiness to despise the audience and be booed when proposing an absolute innovative originality (Pleasure, Flint 114). Despite his lack of a formal education, Petrolinis strength was rooted in a keen observation of society and absorption of current cultural trends. Although his Amleto was inspired by another work and written partly in regular verse practices stigmatized by the Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights12 the macchietta was certainly innovative in its approach as it cast off any subordination to the original with its corrosive attitude and, of course, extreme brevity. Written in collaboration with Libero Bovio and presented between 1912 and 1914, Amleto started with three rhyming quatrains in which Petrolini mocked, in sequence, the traditional portrayal of Hamlet, three of the most renowned Italian great actors, and even himself, the last resort for the banished character: I am the pale Danish prince Who speaks alone, who dresses in black. Who enjoys brawls, and goes, for fun, to the cemetery. If I play cards, its solitaire I can play the entire Yone by ear. If I want to do something fun I have breakfast with my dead dad. Gustavo Modena, Rossi, Salvini Tired of loving blond Ophelia Maybe in earnest, maybe as a joke
close reading of many newspaper reviews beyond Marinettis own advertizing falsifications, see Berghaus 85155. 11 Following the decline of the commedia dellarte, the Italian popular stage had been flooded with singer-comedians who developed the art of the macchietta, portraits of common people who usually had eccentric but none the less good-natured character traits (Berghaus 205). 12 All the dramatic works built on a clich or that borrow their conception, plot, or a part of their development from other works of art are wholly contemptible [. . .]. Regular prosodic forms should be excluded. The Futurist writer in the theater will therefore employ free verse (Flint 114).
The Synthetic Bard Told me Go away, with Petrolini, of the eenie meenie. 13 After a sarcastic reference to the ghost of Hamlets father The cock sings. My father has laid an egg. Hes there, he appears in the guise of a ghost (Il gallo canta. Il padre mio ha fatto luovo. l, mi si presenta sotto le spoglie di un fantasma) and an ostensibly serious promise to avenge him, Petrolini/Hamlet quickly overcomes the mourning for his incestuous mother and wonders why half of humanity has spent their entire life pondering on the to be or not to be dilemma. Could one be more distressed, more querulous, more melancholy than Hamlet? asks the performer ironically (Si pu essere pi afflitti, pi lagnosi, pi melanconici di Amleto?). With its caustic satire reduced to a few lines, a macchietta like this was definitely more likely to furnish inspiration for The Variety Theatre.14 This Futurist manifesto put forward many of the ideas that would be perfected in the later programmatical writings: the concepts of synthesis and subtlety, rhythm and speed, parody, or even destruction of dramatic themes and rules, and, most importantly, a crucial closeness between stage and audience. The revitalization of classic masterpieces could be achieved through genre mixture, simplification, and drastic length reduction within the frame of the music-hall: Systematically prostitute all of classic art on the stage, performing for example all of the Greek, French, and Italian tragedies, condensed and comically mixed up, in a single evening (Flint 121). Shakespeare, as we have seen, was to be abbreviated to a single act. The Futurist proposal to transform variety theatre into a theatre of amazement, record-setting, and body-madness was embodied by Petrolini, but a more solid collaboration with him and other performers like Luciano Molinari and Odoardo Spadaro did not start until the Futurists had honed their ideas and proposed actual dramatic works in conjunction with the next manifesto dedicated to the theatre.15 The Futurist Synthetic Theatre, written by Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra, spelled out the quintessence of Futurism applied to the performing
13
Io sono il pallido prence danese, / che parla solo, che veste a nero. / Che si diverte nelle contese, / che per diporto va al cimitero. / Se giuoco a carte fo il solitario / suono ad orecchio tutta la Jone. / Per far qualcosa di ameno e gaio / col babbo morto fo colazione. / Gustavo Modena, Rossi, Salvini / stanchi di amare la bionda Ofelia / forse sul serio o forse per celia / mi han detto vattene, con Petrolini, dei salamini (35). The Jone (v.6) was an opera by Enrico Pratella (1858). In the translation, I substituted a Y for the J, which, in Italian, indicates a semivowel and not a palatal consonant as in English. I salamini was a sketch first presented by Petrolini in Milan in 1908, here translated with a sound to rhyme with the performers name. 14 Because the macchietta predated the manifesto, it cannot be that Petrolini was here inspired by the Futurist theorizations as in Verdone, La sintesi 146. 15 For a detailed account of Petrolinis and other variety theatre performers contacts with the Futurists, see Listas Petrolini and, more briefly, Berghaus 20508.
arts and unleashed a scathing attack on realistic drama with its excessive concern for character psychology. In addition, the traditional structure made of minute subdivisions and predictable crescendos seemed insufficient to capture modern lifes chaotic fragmentation and exuberance. Convinced that mechanically, by force of brevity, we can achieve an entirely new theater, the three authors envisioned a type of drama whose fulcrum was synthesis: Synthetic. That is, very brief. [. . .] Our acts [atti] can also be moments only a few seconds long [attimi] (Flint 124). It ventured beyond linear logic, relying on the notions of speed, dynamism, and simultaneity. If the Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights had been a bold flight of imagination, given that there were no Futurist playwrights yet, and The Variety Theatre had sought to appropriate an existing type of entertainment, the two volumes of Futurist Synthetic Theatre published between 1915 and 1916 contained as many as seventy-nine sintesi, actual works that claimed an absolute originality and no reference outside themselves. The hundreds of sintesi subsequently produced responded to the most diverse directions of experimentation, depending on the interests of their many authors that ranged from extreme textual simplification to pure abstraction. Scholars have tried, with some success, to categorize them. 16 Suffice it to say that a significant group of sintesi directly attacked previous literary and dramatic models. Some of the most recognizable examples were (in parentheses their targets and edition): Sicilian Play (Dramma siciliano) by Bruno Aschieri (as parody of Vergas Rustic Chivalry [Cavalleria rusticana] and Verism; Aschieri 20), Last Tragedy of Adultery (Ultima tragedia delladulterio) by Ardengo Soffici (vs. the bourgeois triangle conventions; Verdone, Avanguardie 33); The Jesters Supper (La cena delle beffe) by Angelo Rognoni (vs. the homonymous play by Sem Benelli; Verdone 108); Melodrama (Dramma) by Cesare Cerati (vs. Madama Butterfly, and the excesses of opera in general; Verdone 115); Sacred Play (Dramma sacro) by Giorgio Carmelich (vs. sacra rappresentazione; Verdone 143); and Alfieris Saul (Il Saul di Alfieri) by Giuseppe Steiner (vs. Alfierian tragedy; Kirby 30708). On the topic of Shakespeare, apart from potential thematic consonances17 or language references such as why cant you be here and not be here (Paroxysm
16
Verdone, who observes that each sintesi is an exploratory expedition into a different continent (Teatro del tempo futurista 165), divides Futurist theatre in six categories: 1. grotesque and eccentric, 2. absurd, 3. occult and magickal, 4. abstract, 5. filmic and visionic, 6. ideological and polemical (99129); Gordon, who finds these labels misleading because the sintesi almost always fall in more than one group, analyzes them in terms of structure, character, space, language, and message (354). 17 See for instance Mario Dessys Madness (La pazzia, Verdone, Teatro italiano 72) for Hamlet, or My Wife Chee-Chee (Mia moglie Cic) by Pippo Juch (Verdone, Avanguardie 13738) and Jealousy (Jalousie) written in French by Carlo Bruno (Lista Thtre II, 10 11) for Othello.
The Synthetic Bard
[Parossismo], Chiti, La vita 92), it is somewhat surprising to discover that the English playwright is less visible than in the manifestos, although, in the Italian context, he was obviously more a symbol of theatre in general. 18 Only one author to my knowledge made a clear and direct reference. In 1916, Angelo Rognoni19 wrote Amleto, a synthetic devaluation (20) in which the frightening scene of Act I is reduced to the level of absolute normality. As a consequence, since Amleto could care less about his fathers ghostly appearance, the whole tragedy does not need to advance, and brevity is guaranteed: A remote location on the ramparts in front of Elsinore Castle. Hamlet is walking and meditating. The Ghost appears stage right. HAMLET (noticing him) Good evening, dad. GHOST (majestically) Shut up, son. This is not me. I am the ghost of myself. HAMLET (with indifference) Really? Pretty odd, isnt it? Curtain.20 For other strictly Shakespearean examples, one has to turn to playwright and humorist Achille Campanile, who was not part of the Futurist group, but, starting in 1924, employed the synthetic techniques in his pointed Two-Liner Tragedies (Tragedie in due battute). A Bardian reference, although not explicit in the title, is The Pensive Prince (Il principe pensieroso). This tragedy picks a typical trait of Hamlets character and makes it the reason for an answer based on a misunderstanding of the signified. After a long stage direction that describes the castle room and the characters poses, Il Gran Ciambellano says: Your Highness [= the same word for height in Italian] / THE PRINCE awakening from his meditations, sadly: Five feet, two and a half inches. / (Curtain) (72).21 Another kind of devaluation is Hamlet at the Trattoria (Amleto in trattoria), which puts the famous character in the low setting of a tavern, decreases the focus on him by adding other people, and reserves the
18
Such limited presence is, however, a general situation according to Lanier: for all his symbolic significance, Shakespeare is not a dominant component of popular culture. Even if we count generously, Shakespearian adaptations and allusions appear in a relatively small percentage of the mass medias overall output, and those appearances are often scattered unevenly throughout the range of cultural production (1819). 19 Rognoni was the founder, with Gino Soggetti, of the journal The Futurist Folgore (La Folgore futurista) in Pavia, which published sintesi and words-in-liberty (Bossaglia 15). 20 Un luogo remoto della piattaforma dinnanzi al Castello di Elsinore. / Amleto passeggia meditabondo. Da sinistra appare lo Spettro. / AMLETO (scorgendolo) Buona sera, babbo. / SPETTRO (maestoso) Taci, ragazzo. Io non sono io; sono lo spettro di me stesso. / AMLETO (con indifferenza) To, un bel caso anche questo. / Sipario. 21 Altezza... / IL PRINCIPE riscotendosi dalle sue meditazioni, tristemente: Un metro e sessanta. / (Sipario)
higher style for the waiter, who wittily excuses himself for the minuscule chicken he has served: Characters: HAMLET WAITER CUSTOMERS, WAITERS, CIGAR MAKER, ETC. In a Danish trattoria, at lunch time. HAMLET examining the microscopic chicken served to him: Waiter, what is this that you have served me? WAITER Oh, Sir, it was a chicken, but now its dead, peace be to its soul, and it is nothing now. (Curtain)22 The Synthetic Theatre perfectly cohered with the exaltation of the beauty of speed and modern life advocated in The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo, 1909) and with the love for abbreviation and summary in Destruction of Syntax Imagination without Strings Words-inFreedom (Distruzione della sintassi Immaginazione senza fili Parole in libert, 1913): Tell me everything, quick, in two words! (Marinetti 69). Beyond sheer textual reduction, one strength of the sintesi resided in their oppositional stance against the authority of tradition, dullness, and linear logic, all barricaded behind too many words. Nevertheless, once the micro-plays became available, implementation by professional practitioners remained a challenge. In the first place, a revolution still based on drama alone was unable to generate Futurist actors as quickly as needed. Some sintesi were incorporated in variety shows, but the experiment was confined to a handful of independent performers practically ignored by critics. When Marinetti and Co. tried to recruit regular professional companies, these could not afford to entirely abandon the passist plays that guaranteed their profits, nor to risk that their best artists be booed. Thus, they resorted to less experienced actors. In sum, the best performers of the sintesi remained their authors (Puppa 13). Furthermore, when the impresarios could be convinced to risk the integrity of their premises, the din made by the rowdy audience comprised by people too fond of the bellicose
22
Personaggi: / AMLETO / IL CAMERIERE / AVVENTORI, CAMERIERI, SIGARAIO, ecc. / In una trattoria di Danimarca, allora del pranzo. / AMLETO esaminando il microscopico pollo che gli stato servito: / Cameriere, che questo che mavete servito? / IL CAMERIERE / Oh, signore, era un pollo, ma ora morto, pace allanima sua, e non pi niente. / (Sipario)
The Synthetic Bard
atmosphere launched by the serate often prevented any real appreciation of the plays. Most importantly, the construction of a dedicated space, the great metal building (Flint 129) called for by the Futurist Synthetic Theatre remained an unfulfilled fantasy, because the Futurist scenographers were not yet ready for an active collaboration with the playwrights. A revolving stage, said Settimelli, could have been a solution, but the costs were outside the Futurists reach (qtd. in Verdone La sintesi... 158). Hence, the most striking paradox was that the scene changes between the sintesi thwarted much of their concept because the intervals lasted longer than the plays themselves: about thirty minutes of actual performance needed as long as two hours of intervals (Antonucci, Cronache 20 n.17). All in all, the revolution represented by the sintesi remained at the textual level, but, despite these drawbacks, the theoretical clarity achieved about brevity at the theatre was unparalleled. Even if the Futurists did not exclusively discover brevity but only pushed stylistic boundaries in that direction, their manifestos and the sheer number of their sintesi made the notion of extreme dramatic abbreviation into a solid dramaturgical tool that became available to subsequent playwrights and avant-garde movements.23 But this achievement did not necessarily imply a recognition for the creative importance of the Futurist Synthetic Theatre, the only and decisive revolution in the theatre of [the twentieth] century (Marinetti et al. 4). In a sense, the group had set the example by presenting themselves as absolute innovators, ready to be discarded after ten years.24 When the time came for a generational change, however, Marinetti could not resist and protested that other playwrights were plagiarizing Futurist ideas: in the case of Pirandello in 1924, the tone was softer,25 but, with Wilders Our Town in 1941, Marinetti roared like an old lion26
23
In 1973 Giovanni Lista wrote: Futurism claims the theatrical sintesi as its exclusive creation because of the position it occupied within the theatrical activity of the movement (at the current state of research, one can in fact count 56 authors and about 380 plays between the published ones and those that remained in manuscript form) (Le thtre... 40). 24 The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscriptswe want it to happen! (Founding Flint 43). De Maria points out how Marinetti was always reluctant to acknowledge the deep infuences of others upon his works, and inclined instead to acknowledge the superficial influences (LXIX). 25 the audience who now applaud Pirandellos new play, are also applauding his Futurist idea that consists in having the audience take part in the plays action. Let the audience remember that this idea comes from the Futurists (After the Synthetic Theatre Marinetti 170). 26 I deemed indispensable and urgent [. . .] to repeatedly and loudly take the floor during the performance of Our Town by the American playwright Wilder in order to denounce the shameless plagiarism of Futurist technical inventions (Rowdy Evening at Teatro
10
and forgot the positive impression he had formed about Americans and their openness to new artistic theories.27 In the meantime, through a series of eclipses and rediscoveries, Futurism has managed to become part of critical awareness, and Futurist suggestions have been implemented for the first time by others. In the case of all of Shakespeare in one act, the founding of the Reduced Shakespeare Company has been crucial for the idea to become a tangible reality. From the historical avant-garde to pop culture HAMLET. for look, where my abridgement comes Hamlet (2.2.438) Anyone reading the Synthetic Theatre Manifesto and familiar with the Futurist synthetic techniques could appreciate the stylistic and generic kinship with the RSC productions and I will try to bring some of the similarities to the fore in the next section. However, the connection is by no means straightforward, and, as a result, has been overlooked.28 Clearly, since Shakespeare has been so influential, it would take several volumes to identify in detail all consonances through different countries, cultures, and times. Therefore, this can only be a brief and simplified sketch of a few significant elements. In his introduction to a collection of Marinettis writings, Luciano De Maria summed up the Futurists impact on European movements: beyond nationalistic infatuations and stubborn and incompetent denigrations, it seems a reasonable argument that Futurism can be considered as a sort of propeller or general catalyst of European avantgardes (xxxviii). But the influence of Futurism crossed the Atlantic as well. In the United States, Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner reevaluated the Futurists contribution to the American neoavant-garde in the 1960s; more recently, Jeffrey Schnapp has been one of the most alert scholars of Futurism, while the University of California in general,
Argentina in Rome in Defense of the Primacy of Italian Theatre Tumultuosa serata al Teatro Argentina di Roma in difesa del primato teatrale italiano Marinetti et al. 3). 27 Less easily discouraged, less vile but subtler raisonneurs, Americans took part in the worldwide debate by resolutely applauding Futurism, and, despite lamenting as a weakness of theirs the lack of a classical and glorious tradition, they praised those children of old Europe who showed at last the need for making a clean sweep of an overly revered and overly imitated past (Futurist Preface Marinetti 27). The admiration for the American intellectual attitude was shared by Chiti, who spoke of the the healthy unrestrainable American curiosity, nothing else but a truthfully modern and profound artistic instinct (I creatori 10). 28 The Neo-Futurists are another contemporary American group, based in Chicago and New York City, who utilize synthetic techniques, but, in their case, they declare their source of inspiration in their name.
11
The Synthetic Bard
the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and other enlightened sections of academe have endeavored to keep the Futurist legacy alive. Yet this does not necessarily imply that Futurism has gained any strong presence among the general populace. During the summer of 2010, I interviewed Daniel Singer, the Californian founder of the RSC. He candidly admitted that, although he had formal training, his theatre history education was largely self-taught, and, somehow, he missed the Futurist movement entirely. My mention was the first he had heard of it. What is more striking, however, is that none of the reviews of the troupes shows, both American and British, ever mentioned the Synthetic Theatre. In fact, the RSC has rather been seen through the lens of popular culture within the strictly Anglo-Saxon tradition of Shakespearean abridgement. Peter Hollands chapter Shakespeare abbreviated begins as early as the first two decades of the seventeenth century, when the English Comedians playing across continental Europe regularly adapted Shakespearean plays (30). Evidently, the plots lent themselves to German and Dutch contexts where, due to the lack of purposely built playhouses, the troupes performed in town squares and inn yards, tennis-courts and palaces, on temporary structures created anywhere an audience might be found. The earliest plays have the quality of variety show, demonstrations of performance skills (acting, clowning, singing, dancing, and other musical numbers) [. . .]. They are also short with reductions of about 80 percent (31). An even more advanced shortening came in 1769 from David Garrick, actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London, who included in The Jubilee a celebratory afterpiece a procession representing as many as nineteen plays. The multilayered A Midsummer Nights Dream, for instance, consisted simply of Bottom with asss head and banner, sixteen fairies with banners, chariot drawn by butterflies, king and queen of the fairies in the chariot accompanied by a brief moment of wordless action (38). These two examples show one of the main reasons why drama was usually abbreviated: the necessity imposed by practical circumstances. The English Comedians needed shows for improvised stages, and Garrick arrived at the above minimal version of A Midsummer Nights Dream as a way to recoup money after a few desperate attempts to make other less extreme reductions work (38). Apparently, in Garricks time, Shakespeares comedies did not function commercially as full texts (37). It is through the practical necessities of production that Douglas Lanier noted parallels between the RSC and earlier approaches: The Reduced Shakespeare Company has its origins in pass-the-hat performances at Renaissance fairs in California in 1981. The fast-paced, participatory mode of performance demanded by this venue, not unlike innyard performances in Elizabethan England, has remained a hallmark of the companys style (102). Time was indeed a paramount limitation and Singer, in envisioning the original RSC show, was mindful of the way that event scheduled their entertainment in half-hour
12
blocks. Another influence directly bearing on brevity was [t]he advent of the rapidly-edited MTV music-video and the freedom afforded by film-editing techniques might as well be a logical continuation of Futurist synthetism. However, if one definite Italian influence was there, it was Commedia dellArte. Singer explained that: [t]hose heydays at the California Faires had a strict historical bent [. . .] so commedia dellarte was already a staple there. It was a natural leap for us to adopt the classic commedia characters, devise ridiculous plots with lots of jokes, and do the broadest imaginable slapstick complete with traditional masks and outrageously bad Italian accents. The form was ideal for our boundless energy and our commedias were exuberant. [. . .] When you perform extreme comedy like that, over and over, you learn an amazing repertory of movement and timing. Commedia is great training for comic performers. Commedias scenarios, the succinct lists of actions that served as bases for the fully-acted plays, are in themselves exemplary models of brevity, but the reference can also extend to the use of commedia techniques by anti-naturalistic movements including Futurism. Lia Lapini remarks that The Variety Theatre Manifesto fully belongs to the tradition of the European theatrical avant-garde, in which the popular forms of Commedia dellArte, circus, and carnival whose modes [. . .] converge in variety theatre and cabaret become the models of the new entertainment and of all avant-garde theatre practice from Meyerhold to Brecht (51). Thus, the rich texture of popular culture offers the most direct general connection between the Futurists and the RSC. In his booklet The Creators of Futurist Theatre (I Creatori del Teatro Futurista, 1915), Remo Chiti claimed a broad popular basis for the movement: Futurism, anti-traditional and antiacademic movement, [. . .] is a spontaneous product of our civilization, a great organism, the expression of many and not the weird apparel of an artistic clique (56). Indeed, a basic attitude underlies both the Futurists and the RSCs approach to Shakespeare, namely the opposition to high culture. Lanier remarked that [b]ecause [. . .] Shakespeare symbolizes high art in general, the distinction between Shakespeare and popular culture epitomizes one of the great divides in the culture of the last century, the division between highbrow and lowbrow (3). Yet, Shakespeare per se is not the object of critique. Rather, these appropriations target the sorts of social and interpretive decorum that govern how high art is treated, as well as those who enforce that decorum, authority figures like teachers, intellectuals, antiquarians, actors, and bluebloods (54). In this conflictual, modernist relationship with authority the Futurists and the RSC also share common ground. Even though Shakespeare was indeed part of
13
The Synthetic Bard popular culture in his own time,29 the playwrights de-popularization started in England during the Victorian period when the Globe edition, the first Shakespeare edition supervised by university scholars was published in 1864, and English was [. . .] institutionalized as a discipline with Shakespeare at its centre, at Cambridge in 1878 and Oxford in 1884 (40). In the meantime, following Garricks model, Shakespeare, the idea of theatrical stardom, [. . .] and the organization of theatrical companies become intertwined. Increasingly theatrical companies were organized around a star or stars who managed the troupe, took the lead roles, and established their eminence through skill in performing Shakespeare (33). When the Futurists targeted Shakespeare, they were referring to practically the same situation in Italy, where the mattatori felt entitled to tweak and twist the English playwright as a vehicle to enhance their personal success. With all the pompousness attached to Shakespeare, it is not surprising that the nineteenth century produced a host of parodies as mockery of authority and, at the same time, definitive sanction of the distinction between popular Shakespeare and Shakespeare proper (3839). These burlesques on American shores [. . .] quickly became wedded to the minstrel show form, with, predictably, Othello as a frequent object of ridicule and the contrast between Shakespearian verse and African-American dialect a source of racist humour (38). At the same time, parody clearly indicated an intimate familiarity with Shakespeares drama (Levine 59). Subsequently, the highbrow/lowbrow divide continued to present itself in waves. In her exploration of the many strands of Shakespop, Elizabeth Abele noticed how during the first part of the twentieth century American popular culture excluded the Bard, relegating him to distinct theatrical productions in select, major cities attended by well-behaved, passive, highbrow audiences, before this cultural hierarchy became more varied beginning in the 1960s with the production of Broadway musicals like West Side Story, [. . .]; and the rise of Shakespearean companies like the New York Shakespeare Festival (established by Joseph Papp) (3). As for the RSC, Lanier recalls that it was formed during the Reagan 1980s, the era of culture wars between traditionalists and progressives within which Shakespeare symbolized the literary canon embattled on the one side by radical interpretive innovation and on the other by encroaching popular culture. Compleat Works is of special interest for its negotiation of that battlefield (104).
29
Purcell points out that [m]any of the dialogic and carnivalesque performance modes associated with the puncturing irreverence of parody clowning, innuendo, politically subversive jokes, audience complicity, self-reflexivity were features of Shakespearean performance in the first place, and in some instances, Shakespeares own carnivalesque sequences have been performed with all the anarchic disrespect of a parody, while not actually being parodied in any literal sense at all (99).
14
If the attempt to pull the highbrow culture down from its pedestal is similar, one big difference between the Futurist avant-garde and the RSC is in the scope accorded to artistic action. The Futurists, taking the cue from DAnnunzios life as work of art, veered towards the art-action formula, with the aim of empowering the artist to interfere directly with reality, to the point of actually conceiving a complete identification between art and life in the political arena (Lapini 26). For the Futurists, synthesis was a consequence of an aesthetic revolution based on the admiration for the new technologies and the speed of the Machine. By contrast, the RSCs initial reason for abbreviation was utterly practical when they discovered a definite relationship between fast pacing, the laugh quotient, and the number of dollars that went into the hat at each performance (Londr 54). The Futurists theorized first, and then wrote the sintesi; the RSC were trying to make a living as full-time performers and discovered that maximum synthesis could allow them to be successful. For the Futurists, the attempt to reshape the entire world through aesthetic means implied a much stronger opposition to tradition, using theatre as the most powerful type of propaganda 30; the RSC found themselves in a world where such desire had proved utopian because theatre had been pushed to the margins. Thus, their agenda was much more limited, in a tension between reverence and resistance [that] is characteristic of Shakespops ambivalent use of Shakespeare (Lanier 55). Consequently, the theoretical impact of the two groups differs widely. As a result, the RSCs work has been placed solely within the frame of Shakespop and remains a mere subgenre that makes comedy of how much of the original text can be cut while still conveying its spirit (Lanier 99). But what should we make of the later, non-Shakespearean shows that adopted the same concept of extreme abbreviation? It seems fitting, at this point, to look more closely at the genesis of The Complete Works and analyze it in view of the kinships with the synthetic genre officially inaugurated by the Futurists. The Reduced Shakespeare Companys unwitting Futurist heritage By the way, we think its hysterically funny that our work is now considered to be culturally significant (Daniel Singer) Two official documents of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) are currently available: one is a DVD of the show in its 2003 version and the other is a book that contains the original 1994 script, literally surrounded by a huge number of paratextual materials (Borgeson, Long, and Singer). 31 The
30
Marinetti claimed that 90 percent of Italians went regularly to the theatre (Synthetic, Flint 123). 31 All subsequent page numbers refer to this volume unless noted. The authors start by asking a rhetorical question: there have been some 652 published editions of the Bards
15
The Synthetic Bard
first of these is an introduction that jokingly tells of the hardships the authors experienced in order to find an editor for their book. After they had purportedly asked, on ruled notebook paper, actor Kenneth Branagh, Queen Elizabeth, and the American actress Heather Locklear, they resorted to Professor J.M. Winfield. Despite officially appearing in the Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data (ii), Winfield is eventually revealed to be none other than Jess Borgeson himself behind a fraudulent pseudonym (136).32 This disclosure, in conjunction with the oddly numbered footnotes, 33 and their exceedingly bogus content, leaves no doubt as to the groups attitude towards academe, a point certainly in line with the Futurists desire to get rid of traditional scholarship. 34 The creation and development of the show began in 1981 when Daniel Singer, a California actor who had studied at the Guildford school near London, was inspired by a production of Tom Stoppards The (Fifteen-minute) Doggs Troupe Hamlet to write his own abbreviated version of Shakespeares masterpiece [. . .] and held auditions for his four-person, half hour Hamlet (11213).35 Initially, Singer hired Jeff Borgeson, a disgruntled Shakespearean scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (113), Michael Fleming, and Barbara Reinertson. On the day of the first performance in Novato, California, the actors selected the name of the troupe after discarding various other options, such as Condensed (Just Add Water) Shakespeare Company and Joseph Papps New York Shakespeare Festival. Instead of choosing plain concision or even opposition to the East Coast theatre mecca, the Reduced Shakespeare Company ended up with the same acronym as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the emblem of classic Shakespearean performance in England, thereby rendering
Complete Works. [note 1: A wild guess] What possible justification can there be, you ask, for this new volume? To which I reply: Its much, much shorter (xviii). At the same time, they also seem to have perfected Poloniuss habit of inflating a speech, and have added as many as six prefatory notes, one of which is the Publishers Preface to the Foreword to the Authors Notes which realizes that the whole thing has gone terribly, terribly wrong and suggests that the reader skip directly to the script (xix). At this time, the entire DVD is viewable at http://video.google.com (15 Sept. 2010). 32 In the meantime, Borgeson has officially adopted the nom de plume and is now known as Jess Winfield (Winfield). 33 In a spiraling progression from 1 to 99, then 180 to 199, 1180 to 1199, and finally 11180 to 11188. 34 we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni, and antiquarians. [. . .] set fire to the library shelves! (Founding... Flint 4243). 35 But see the other side of the same story: The origins of the fun might be traced back to a Department of Dramatic Art production of Tom Stoppards The (15-Minute) Dogg's Troupe Hamlet which gave Jess Borgeson his first role at the University of California, Berkeley. He used that material the following summer to audition for a half-hour Hamlet (same idea, different script) at a renaissance fair (Londr 53).
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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal their antagonism even more patent. 36 Adam Long joined the troupe as a crossdressing substitute when the only woman in the cast broke her ankle, and the number of actors later shrunk to three once it became clear that noone was really needed for the roles of Claudius and the Ghost. After another experiment in Shakespearean reduction (a two-man version of Romeo and Juliet a year later), in 1987 the RSC was invited to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, where a full-length work was required. Thus, the show was born as a fulfillment of its bold description for that event: all 37 plays by three actors in one hour (119). In March 1992, the RSC started an unlimited engagement at the Arts Theatre in Londons West End (121), and three months later, when Borgeson quit the show, not one person remained from the original cast. The ninety-minute performance on DVD is interpreted by Adam Long, Austin Tichenor, and Reed Martin, a performer with circus experience. The Complete Works continued with various casts, finally closing at Piccadillys Criterion Theatre in 2005 as the longest-running comedy in the West End (Winfield). The RSC officially thanked Tom Stoppard for bringing Bardian abridgment into the modern idiom (vii) and for furnishing the initial inspiration for the show.37 Originally, his The Doggs Troupe 15-Minute Hamlet (1976) was written (or rather edited) for performance on a double-decker bus (Stoppard 7) for Ed Berman and the Inter-Action troupe.38 Of its three abbreviated versions, 39
36
When the show premiered in London, The Evening Standard doubted that there would be room for two RSCs (qtd. in Borgeson 135). Lanier describes the Reduced Shakespeare Company as a carnivalesque inversion of the Royal Shakespeare Company, unabashedly pop American, willfully amateurish, physically rather than textually oriented, parodically high-concept in its adaptations (104). Notably, over time the Royal Shakespeare Company made various attempts to connect with popular culture, such as the Theatreground project (season 196970; Holland 27), or the acknowledgement of cinema as a reference for its marketing campaigns in its 1994 production of Coriolanus (Lanier 86). But it is in the interest of pop culture for highbrow and lowbrow to remain as distant as possible so as to maintain the potential for parody. 37 Singer so described his experience: Tom Stoppards cutting was a revelation: it conveyed the essence of the plot and consisted almost entirely of Shakespeares most famous and familiar dialogue. Despite the actors playing their roles sincerely, the audience was amused by the scripts extreme brevity, and I thought: the Editor is getting laughs! Brilliant! [. . .] Stoppards version gave me the confidence to create my own. 38 The very idea of Shakespeare on a bus seems a direct derivation from Futurist aesthetics inspired by the Machine. Holland explains that Ed Bermans Fun Art Bus, [was] a double-decker converted into a theatre and part of a belated countercultural attempt to move performance out of conventional high-cultural theatre spaces and towards the hypothesized popular culture that radical theatre yearned to engage with. Its eventual first performance, adjacent to the National Theatre, by it but not in it, permitted by that central institution of socially approved theatre, signals its uneasy status (40).
17
The Synthetic Bard
the first, and more avant-garde, is a prologue spoken by Shakespeare himself, which skips logical connections by condensing the play to a few highlights: For this relief, much thanks. Though I am native here, and to the manner born, It is a custom more honoured in the breach Than in the observance Well. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. To be, or not to be, that is the question. There are more things in heaven and earth Than are dreamt of in your philosophy Theres a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. I must be cruel only to be kind; Hold, as twere, the mirror up to nature. A countenance more in sorrow than in anger. (LADY in audience shouts Marmalade.) The lady doth protest too much. Cat will mew, and Dogg will have his day! (3132)
10
15
Interpreted from the point of view of synthesis, possibly the divinity in v.10, the verses so combined could acquire other meanings, such as a justification of the seeming madness of the abbreviation (v. 12), or the realization that nature has accelerated and would need a different mirror even if it seems cruel (vv. 13 14). The second part is a more narrative editing, whereas the third offers a spedup and comic encore of the same story. Stoppard definitely made the point that Shakespeare could skillfully be tailored to any desired length and the effect was in tune with how the Futurists saw the function of variety theatre: The Variety Theater destroys the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in Art with a capital A. It cooperates in the Futurist destruction of immortal masterworks, plagiarizing them, parodying, making them look commonplace by stripping them of their solemn apparatus as if they were mere attractions (Flint 119). Paradoxically, however, Stoppard behaved more conservatively as a playwright in terms of length when he endeavored to integrate his reduction into the more elaborate, full-length work Doggs Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth, first performed in 1979. Stoppard explains that [t]he comma that divides Doggs
39
The tripartite structure of the play has often gone unnoticed, as scholars perceived only a thirteen-minute first part capped by the two-minute encore (Gianakaris 227; Diamond 593).
18
Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth also serves to unite two plays which have common elements: the first is hardly a play at all without the second, which cannot be performed without the first (7). This sentence unambiguously states that Doggs Hamlet, itself a conflation of two pieces [. . .] Doggs Our Pet [. . .] and The Doggs Troupe 15-Minute Hamlet (7), is so incomplete that it needs another half-play to sustain it. Stoppard was quite innovative in how he devised the composition of his work, but he did not particularly deem brevity a value in itself.40 Conversely, expansion for the RSC was not meant as an exercise in sheer lengthening, but rather as one that developed techniques of brevity: the more plays they decided to squeeze into the shows duration, the more they were bound to reduce at all costs. The language adopted by the American troupe constantly just a step away from Marinetti and Co. draws attention to their striking connections to Futurism all the more. Some excerpts from the accounts of the beginnings of the show follow; the added italics highlight what sounds very much like the Futurist experience, imbued with speed and artistic ruthlessness: The creative interaction between the three of us was intense, fastpaced, absolutely electric. (Borgeson xxi) At first, the task of such a massive condensation seemed hopeless, and I approached the words of the Bard meekly, cautiously, even with a sense of reverence. [. . .] The next day we assaulted the Bard of Avon like cultural guerillas on steroids. We tore madly into volume after volume of the Bards work. Blindly. Insanely. Embarrassingly. Now the smoke has cleared. The deed is done. / May the Bard forgive us. (Long xxii) In 1981 I took a copy of Shakespeares Hamlet, tore out a few select pages, attacked them with a grease pencil, hired three total strangers and produced a sixteenth-century vaudeville show. [. . .] If the crowds had booed and thrown vegetables, as we had anticipated, this play (I use the term loosely) would never have been created. But audiences of the last quarter of the twentieth century apparently possessed an urgent need to see Shakespeare performed as if it were a Tex Avery cartoon, so the Reduced Shakespeare Company thrived. [. . .] there is excellent shock value in seeing a Great Shakespearean Scene reduced to two
40
Stoppards original pieces were inspired by Wittgensteins philosophy (Doggs Hamlet) and by the Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout and his abbreviated Macbeth, written for performance in private apartments at a time of political repression (Cahoots Macbeth) (Stoppard 78). Although the original works were not synthetic, the intertextual relationship between the two would still belong to a discussion of the short play genre.
19
The Synthetic Bard
lines. (Singer xxiii) The first quotation reminds one of the Futurists admiration for the beauty of speed (Founding Flint 41) combined with the new resources of electricity, 41 while the second and the third apart from Singer echoing The Pleasure of Being Booed, The Variety Theatre, and Campaniles two-liners sound as if they were taken straight from a Futurist statement about the necessity for an aggressive, shocking cleanse of old aesthetics, such as the following one from The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism: Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. [. . .] We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind [. . .]. Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly! (Flint 4143) We find similar consonances within the show. At the very beginning, Daniel 42 proclaims: we are going to attempt a feat which we believe to be unprecedented in the history of theatre. That is, to capture, in a single theatrical experience, the magic, the genius, the towering grandeur of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2). If this were not enough, just a few minutes later, embedded in a humorous fire-and-brimstone evangelist speech, there is a visionary sentence worthy of a Futurist manifesto: A glorious future! A future where this book (indicating the Complete Works) will be found in every hotel room in the world! (5). Although the preamble still sounds very reverential, the performance soon demonstrates to what extent synthesis can be employed as a means to eliminate the execrable effluvium of editorial excess from a playwright who used too many words (xviii). The structure of this Shakespearean variety show, especially in its first part, reproduces on the stage the distance covered by the RSC at the moment of editing the text, from moderate reverence to merciless guerrilla. Mel Gussow jokingly emphasized this violence of abbreviation: Though everything is goodnatured, the approach might be called one of Will-ful destruction, as the three R.S.C. clowns locate and then undermine the essence of each play. The pithierthan-Python parodies defolio Shakespeare. It is open to debate whether the abbreviation of Shakespeares masterworks has resulted in a puerile, shallow,
41
One example among many: The modern drama should reflect some part of the great Futurist dream that rises from our daily lives, stimulated by terrestrial, marine, and aerial velocities, dominated by steam and electricity (Pleasure Flint 114). 42 The script retains the original founders names, with the convention that Where Shakespearean characters appear [. . .], the character name is preceded by the actors initial: e.g. A/JULIET means Adam is playing Juliet (xxviii).
20
and absurd pie as in the apocryphal notes by Shakespeare/Borgeson (xxv), or if the greatest English dramatist has indeed been rendered more suitable and entertaining for contemporary audiences in our fast-paced world. The RSC astutely included an appendix with contrasting opinions by critics around the globe and let them battle among themselves, but favored the assessment of the Montreal Gazette, which cautiously posits that the show is Much more intelligent than it appears to be at first... (134). The beginning number of the show is a reduced version of Romeo and Juliet in which the actors pretend to be victims of circumstances outside their control. The necessity of adapting the play to just three actors automatically renders the scenes more essentially succinct, and the awareness of the reduction can be introduced lightly: And so much for Scenes One and Two (14). The following step, this time a more decisive cut, is attributed to an actors loss of memory: (JESS flips frantically through pages of the book. DANIEL is concerned.) DANIEL: Now what do we do? JESS: I dont know. He skipped all this stuff. (pointing to a place in the book) Go to here. (20) This mini-play also serves as a reminder of the shows mechanisms: D/NURSE: Men are all dissemblers, they take things apart and reassemble them (21). The next adaptation, Titus Andronicus, transforms the tragedy into a gruesome cooking show. Here, Titus Androgynous is preparing a pie with the meat of the rapist of his daughter, whose tongue has been cut. Far from despairing, the fathers attitude is quite lighthearted, similar to what we have seen in Rognonis Amleto: J/TITUS: And how are we feeling today? A/LAVINIA: Ot so ood, mubba. I ot my ongue tsopped off. J/TITUS: I know. Its a pisser, isnt it? But well get our revenge, wont we? (29) Lavinias tongueless speech (27 n.47) becomes a representation of the effects, at the same time cruel and comic, of the RSCs abridgement, which certainly disgregates all residual veneration for the original; the pie, in turn, could serve as an image of the way Shakespearean fragments have been combined here. The play ends quickly when the finished dish is offered to a couple in the audience, accompanied by a series of puns on the body parts therein contained (ladyfingers for dessert; finger-lickin good 30). Then, on the verge of skipping Othello altogether (how could any of them portray a black man?), the troupe finds a solution: a version put to rap music that ends in a
21
The Synthetic Bard
black power salute (36). Although acknowledged as not particularly original, the number is one of the most consistently crowd-pleasing sections of the show (33 n.55), perhaps owing to a good degree of self-parody, but possibly also because it gives the audience time to adapt by maintaining a certain textual length. Much more daring is the companys further step, a unique combination of all of Shakespeares comedies, which they justify with the claim that Shakespeare was a formula writer (37). Therefore they ask the playwright: ALL: Why did you write sixteen comedies when you could have written just one? JESS: In answer to this question, we have taken the liberty of condensing all sixteen of Shakespeares comedies into a single play, which we have entitled The Comedy of Two Well-Measured Gentlemen Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummers Twelfth Night in Winter. ADAM: Or ... DANIEL: Cymbeline Taming Pericles the Merchant in the Tempest of Love As Much As You Like It For Nothing. ADAM: Or ... ALL: The Love Boat Goes to Verona. (3738)43 The entire section that contains this dialogue is an ingenious synthesis of the two complementary archetypes of brevity and length. First, the RSC combines parts of several titles into a longer title; then, the result is reduced to its essence; finally, the section goes on to propose a rather convoluted summary in five brief acts, but covers the entire matter, so to speak, of all the comedies. For synthesis, this is an exceptional achievement. Naturally, the tragedies offer more material to anyone trying to ridicule the grandiloquence and wordiness of the plays, especially since they are not already funny. Therefore, the RSC embarks on an exaggeratedly Scottish version of Macbeth (J/MACBETH: Stay, ye imperrrfect macspeaker. Mactell me macmore 44); a Julius Caesar quickly transitioning into Antony and Cleopatra due to a characters ego (J/ANTONY: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, so bury him, and lets get on to my play, Antony... 47); an improvised version of Troilus and Cressida that is soon interrupted because it is too boring once approached from a hyper-intellectual viewpoint; and a condensation of all the historical plays into a football match
43
The last line becomes Four Weddings and a Transvestite in the later DVD version, a sign of the troupes constant spirit of improvisation and adaptation to specific circumstances.
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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal since sports are visceral, theyre exciting to watch (53).44 The latter is another masterpiece of synthesis, in which the announcer so describes the final moment: DANIEL (announcer): FUM-BLE!!! And Henry the Eighth comes up with it. Hes at the twenty, the fifteen, the ten... He stops at the five to chop off his wifes head... TOUCHDOWN for the Red Rose! Oh, my! You gotta believe this is the beginning of a Tudor Dynasty! (55) Indeed, one might look back at one of the hues of the meraviglioso futurista to find the exact antecedent: a cumulus of events unfolded at great speed, of stage characters pushed from right to left in two minutes (and now lets have a look at the Balkans: King Nicholas, Enver-Bey, Daneff, Venizelos, belly-blows and fistfights between Serbs and Bulgars, a couplet, and everything vanishes) (Variety Flint 117). To critics who may regret what was lost in the reduction, the RSC would unashamedly reply: We have expunged much of Shakespeares subtle psychological insight, his carefully spun subplots, his well-honed social satire, and skipped right to the sex and killing (xviii). And The Variety Theatre supported basically the same attitude: The conventional theater exalts the inner life, professorial meditation, libraries, museums, monotonous crises of conscience, stupid analyses of feelings, in other words (dirty thing and dirty word), psychology, whereas, on the other hand, the Variety Theater exalts action, heroism, life in the open air, dexterity, the authority of instinct and intuition. To psychology it opposes what I call body-madness (Flint 120). Thus, after rapidly mentioning Timon of Athens where the mention is the abbreviation and discarding Coriolanus completely due to a potential bad pun (Okay, so we skip the anus play 57), only Hamlet remains after the intermission, apparently the most targeted play of the Shakespearean corpus. 45
44
In a later manifesto, Theatre of Surprise (Il teatro della sorpresa 1921), an evolution of the Synthetic Theatre, Marinetti intended to [s]uggest a continuity of other very comical ideas [. . . thereby] training the Italian spirit to maximum elasticity with all its extralogical spiritual gymnastics (Marinetti 168). The manifesto included gymnasts and athletes among the expressions of body-madness. 45 Abele observed that of Shakespeares texts, Hamlet is the most frequently quoted, appropriated, rewritten and produced in popular culture. Though popularized Hamlets appear globally, this affinity seems especially strong in American popular culture (8). On the other side of the Atlantic, an account of short plays inspired by Shakespeare in the amateur British stage was given by Kosok: Hamlet, because it is so well known, lends itself more than the others to a special kind of burlesque: the reduction of a complex play
23
The Synthetic Bard
Here, the RSC makes one step backward an entire play lasting about twenty minutes of the show and several steps forward, exploiting more variations on the theme of abbreviation. The pressure of the to be or not to be monologue is relieved by abandoning it half way (you just cant take the pressure of this speech!!! 79), whereas another speech (I have of late [. . .] lost all my mirth) is instead thoroughly performed in a serious fashion and dismissed only at the end (So, well skip that speech 81). This technique not only allows a demonstration of how the performer can go beyond mockery and act it in the traditional serious way, but also experiments on the degree zero of abridgement. More complex is the get thee to a nunnery scene, the culmination of the RSCs consistent attempt to interact with the audience throughout the show. 46 In order to elicit a credible emotional response from the volunteer spectator chosen to play Ophelia, the audience is divided into three Freudian parts her Id, Ego, and Superego that are gradually trained to collaborate through simple movements or slogans. However emotional the result, all that Ophelia does in response is, she screams. Thats all she does (83). In reviewing this point during an Off-Broadway production in 2001, D.J.R. Bruckner reports a reaction that closely resembles the following gained by the Futurists over time in the transition from the serate to the Synthetic Theatre: The enthusiasm of the crowd I was part of makes me suspect that this play has developed a cult; the actors didnt really have to coach the audience in its lines. 47 At the end, what remains for the actors is to fulfill the claim that they know Hamlet backwards and forwards (66). Hence, they set out to surpass Stoppard with three acrobatic encores: the first one reviews highlights of the play, the second runs almost impossibly faster, and the third goes backwards and reverses actions (from end to beginning), word order (Nunnery a to thee get), and letter sequence (Sesir gnik eht 108). The idea reminds us of yet another Futurist proposal: play a Beethoven symphony backward, beginning with the last note
to a few minutes running-time, with an exaggerated emphasis on the banalities of the plot (168). 46 Of course, this also has a counterpart in a Futurist manifesto: Introduce surprise and the need to move among the spectators of the orchestra, boxes, and balcony (Variety Flint 121), or ELIMINATE THE PRECONCEPTION OF THE FOOTLIGHTS BY THROWING NETS OF SENSATION BETWEEN STAGE AND AUDIENCE; THE STAGE ACTION WILL INVADE THE ORCHESTRA SEATS, THE AUDIENCE (Synthetic Flint 128). The RSCs explicit reference is to more recent concepts: ADAM: I think we should WORKSHOP this. I think we could really make this a happening moment (84). Yet, without the Futurist notion of a conflictual relationship with the spectators, critics cannot comprehend moments of the show, such as the recurrent (so to speak) gag in which each of Adam Longs ditzy heroines mimes losing her lunch in the lap of an audience member (Peterson 24). 47 The Futurists exalted variety theatre for its emphasis on interaction: The Variety Theater is alone in seeking the audiences collaboration. It doesnt remain static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action, in the singing, accompanying the orchestra, communicating with the actors in surprising actions and bizarre dialogues (Flint 118).
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(Variety, Flint 121). Overall, noted Jean Peterson, [t]he actors change character, scene, gender, century, and stylistic approach with lightning speed [. . .] with an energetic fervor so manic that all six performing feet rarely touched the ground at the same time (2425). This is, indeed, Futurist body-madness. Still, beyond the velocity attainable at the textual level, there are at least two more aspects, those of costumes and props, that can reveal a connection with the Futurists and theatrical synthesis. The first appearance of Jess, in Shakespearean attire and Converse high-top canvas sneakers (7) produces the same effect as in Corra and Settimellis Dissonance (Dissonanza), a sintesi in which a man in modern clothes asks for a match halfway through a fourteenthcentury scene in verse between a lady and a page (Marinetti et al., 3941). Furthermore, when DANIEL wears goggles; ADAM wears floppy bug antennae and a clown nose; JESS wears a pair of Groucho Marx-funny-noseand-glasses (38), the RSC literally embodies the Futurists proposal to [i]n every way encourage the type of the [clowns and of the] eccentric American (Flint 121). In addition, Reed Martins training as clown becomes useful as entertainment during the intermission. 48 Finally, the speedy costume changes required by the Bardian condensation is clearly the synthesis of speed + transformations (Variety, Flint 119) admired by the Futurists in stage transformist Leopoldo Fregoli. Here, it cooperates to produce some comic problems for the RSC: (ADAM enters. He is ostensibly CLAUDIUS, but is not quite totally dressed in three different costumes.) [. . .] J/HAMLET: [. . .] uncle... father... mother... whatever you are (10001). A piece of costume and a prop is the sweat sock used as the Ghost (68), but the show is filled with more objects that act, such as an inflatable dinosaur and a small battery-operated Godzilla, an actual machine acting on stage for Troilus and Cressida.49 Moreover, apart from the traditional puppets already present in Stoppard for the play-within-the-play scene, the RSC actors repeatedly use a stunt dummy, for example as the corpse of Ophelia. All these props could be seen as embodiments of degrees of Futurist dehumanization of traditional
48
See also Boccioni who proclaimed: We extol clowns, acrobats and all the grotesque and unexpected of circuses and fairs (38). 49 This sequence spurred the only critical reference I could find to anything beyond Shakespearean parody. Bernard Levin in the London Times in 1992 said: To analyze humor is even worse than trying to define it, but I must try. These three men have tapped a wonderful spring; I think it is the element of inconsequentiality that separates them from ordinary funny-men. Let me give you an example: at one point, with no relevance at all to the structure (if it has one) of the show, a little clockwork Godzilla wanders out from the wings and lurches downstage, while the three seem helpless to do anything about it or even understand what is happening. Surrealism is an overworked term, but these three earn it. Their surrealism, though, is shaped into laughter (qtd. in Singer).
25
The Synthetic Bard
characters, with implications for the role of human performers in the crunch of the synthetic mechanism.50 Thus, in terms of Shakespearean abridgement, the two groups are complementary. The Futurists defined the Synthetic Theatre and proposed a reduction of Shakespeares dramaturgy to one act, even though they did not fully explore the possibility in concrete terms. In turn, the RSC started with Hamlet and then, because of the need to expand the show, actually fulfilled the Futurist project. Neither group limited themselves to the happy few and decidedly went in the direction of the audience against pomp and boredom. 51 Yet, where the Futurists were limited by their difficulties in finding suitable actors and performance spaces, the RSC gradually transformed Shakespearean condensation into a mainstream experience. If the RSC had stopped at Shakespeare, we could rest content in placing them solely within the long tradition of Shakespop parody. But there is more. Once Austin Tichenor a later addition to the troupe began to work on the companys second show, The Complete History of America (abridged) (1993), the RSC found its path and has since thrived, abridging practically everything and producing five more titles so far: The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged); Western Civilization: The Complete Musical (abridged); All the Great Books (abridged); Completely Hollywood (abridged); and The Complete World of Sports (abridged). Therefore, it seems productive to highlight, within the RSCs DNA, the specific strand of synthetism that was first clearly identified by the Futurists. One could say that through the Reduced Shakespeare Company, the Futurist Synthetic Theatre has successfully been resurrected.
50
Plassard notes the Futurists fury at systematically exploring every possibility of modifying the relations between man and the stage, from the performers transformation into pure mechanism to the substitution with the animated object (37). 51 Pressed for a statement of artistic philosophy, Martin posits: To put the shake back in Shakespeare. Were returning Shakespeare to the groundlings [] We dont make fun of Shakespeare, adds Martin, we make fun of the pompous, overblown productions of Shakespeare that sort of make people sick of him. We try to make him fun and accessible. Borgeson comments: When people have Shakespeare fear, it has nothing to do with the quality of the plays, but with the middleman-whether its a teacher or a theatre company. (Londr 56)
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Works cited Abele, Elizabeth. Introduction: Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular Culture. College Literature 31.4 (2004): 111. Antonucci, Giovanni. Cronache del teatro futurista. Roma: Abete, 1975. . Storia del teatro futurista. Roma: Studium, 2005. Aschieri, Bruno. Sintesi teatrali 19231937. Ed. Umberto Artioli. Roma: Arte viva, 1976. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare in Less Than 10 Minutes. New York Times 13 Feb. 2000. 15 Sept. 2010. Berghaus, Gnter. Italian Futurist Theatre 19091944. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Boccioni, Umberto. Estetica e arte futurista. Milano: Il balcone, 1946. Borgeson, Jess, Adam Long, and Daniel Singer. The Reduced Shakespeare Companys The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). Ed. J.M. Winfield. New York: Applause, 1994. . The Reduced Shakespeare Companys The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). Silver Spring: Acorn, 2003. Boselli, Stefano. The Intertextual Short Play: An Example Using Vergas Cavalleria rusticana and Capuanas Il piccolo archivio. Modern Language Notes 126.1 (2011): 4773. Bossaglia, Rossana, and Susanna Zatti, eds. Futurismo pavese. Pavia: Ticinum, 1984. British Film Institute. Silent Shakespeare: Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on. Harrington Park: Milestone, 1999. Bruckner, D.J.R. And You Still Thought Hamlet Was a Tragedy. New York Times 17 Oct. 2001. 15 Sept. 2010. Campanile, Achille. Tragedie in due battute. Milano: Rizzoli, 2000. Chiti, Remo. I Creatori del Teatro Futurista. Firenze: Quattrini, 1917. . La vita si fa da s: fantasie, teatro sintetico, scritti futuristi. Ed. Mario Verdone. Bologna: Cappelli, 1974. dAmico, Alessandro. Il teatro verista e il grande attore. Il teatro italiano dal naturalismo a Pirandello. Ed. Alessandro Tinterri. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. 2546. De Maria, Luciano. Introduzione. Teoria e invenzione futurista. Marinetti 1983. XXVIIC. Diamond, Elin. Stoppards Doggs Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth: The Uses of Shakespeare. Modern Drama XXIX.4 (1986): 593600. Drakakis, John. Shakespeare in Quotations. Studying British Cultures: An Introduction. Ed. Susan Bassnett. London: Routledge, 1997. 15272. Flint, R.W. and Arthur Coppotelli, trans. Marinetti, Selected Writings. By Filippo Tommaso Marinetti [et al.], New York: Farrar, 1972.
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Gianakaris, C.J. Stoppards Adaptations of Shakespeare: Doggs Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth. Comparative Drama 18.3 (1984): 22240. Gordon, Robert S. The Italian Futurist Theatre: A Reappraisal. The Modern Language Review 85.2 (1990): 34961. Gussow, Mel. Shakespeare Writ Small, As You Might Like It. New York Times 15 June 1991. 15 Sept. 2010. Holland, Peter. Shakespeare Abbreviated. Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Ed. Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 2645. Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. With manifestos and playscripts translated from the Italian by Victoria Nes Kirby. New York: Dutton, 1971. Kosok, Heinz. Making Short Work of the Bard: Shakespeares Character and Shakespearean Characters in the British Amateur Theatre. Historicizing/Contemporizing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Rudolf Bhm. Christoph Bode and Wolfgang Klooss, eds. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher, 2000. 15983.. Kozlenko, William. The One-Act Play Today: A Discussion of the Technique, Scope & History of the Contemporary Short Drama. New York: Harcourt, 1938. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Lapini, Lia. Il teatro futurista italiano. Milano: Mursia, 1977. Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy In America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. Lista, Giovanni. Le thtre futuriste. Travail thtral 11.2 (1973): 3482. . Thtre Futuriste Italien Anthologie critique. Vols. III. Lausanne: La cit, 1976. . Petrolini e i futuristi. Salerno: Taide, 1981. . La scne futuriste. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1989. Londr, Felicia Hardison. Reduced Shakespeare Company. Engle, Ron, Londr, and Daniel J. Watermeier, eds. Shakespeare Companies and Festivals: An International Guide. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. 5359. Print. Lucini, Gian Pietro. Il libro delle figurazioni ideali. Milano: Galli, 1894. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Teoria e invenzione futurista. Ed. Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1983. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso et al. Il Teatro Futurista Sintetico (dinamico alogico autonomo simultaneo visionico) A sorpresa Aeroradiotelevisivo Caff Concerto Radiofonico [senza critiche ma con Misurazioni]. Napoli: CLET, 1941. Neumann, Gerhard. Einakter. Moderne Literatur in Grundbegriffen. Tbingen: Niemeyer,1994. 10209.
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Peterson, Jean. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Shakespeare Bulletin 9.3 (1991): 2425. Petrolini Ettore. Amleto. Il teatro. Ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Roma: Newton Compton, 1993. 3536. . Venite a sentire. Il teatro. Ed. Giovanni Antonucci. Roma: Newton Compton, 1993. 4376. Plassard, Didier. Le tecniche di disumanizzazione nel teatro futurista. Teatro contemporaneo 2.4 (1983): 3564. Puppa, Paolo. Teatro dei testi. La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento. Torino: UTET, 2003. Purcell, Stephen. Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Reduced Shakespeare Company. 15 Sept. 2010. http://www.reducedshakespeare.com. Ripellino, Angelo Maria. Il trucco e lanima. I maestri della regia nel teatro russo del Novecento. Torino: Einaudi, 1965. Rognoni, Angelo. Amleto. 51 sintesi teatrali futuriste. Roma: CLET, 1943. 20. Schnetz, Diemut. Der moderne Einakter: Eine poetologische Untersuchung. Bern: Francke, 1967. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Pearson, 2004. Singer, Daniel. E-Mail Interview. 15 Aug. 2010. Smith, Warren. Artful Brevity in Shakespeares Monologs. Shakespeare Association Bulletin 24.1 (1949): 27579. Stoppard, Tom. Doggs Hamlet / Cahoots Macbeth. London: Faber, 1980. Verdone, Mario. La sintesi teatrale futurista. Teatro contemporaneo. Vol. I. Roma: Lucarini, 1981. 14373. Teatro del tempo futurista. Roma: Bulzoni, 1988. , ed. Teatro italiano davanguardia: Drammi e sintesi futuriste. Roma: Officina, 1970. , ed. Avanguardie teatrali da Marinetti a Joppolo Critica e antologia. Roma: Bulzoni, 1991. Winfield, Jess. FAQ. 15 Sept. 2010. http://www.jesswinfield.com/about.html.
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Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Rita Arras-Boyd and Roger Boyd
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY EDWARDSVILLE
Abstract: An interdisciplinary team of faculty and students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) examined policies and tobacco use patterns in 20042005. Nationally, overall tobacco use patterns have declined, although tobacco use patterns among college students have not followed the same trend (American College Health Association, 2010). SIUE policy prohibiting indoor tobacco use preceded adoption of the Smoke-free Illinois Act (2008) by more than a decade. However, there have been few changes in university tobacco policy since this act became law. As evidence mounts about the harmful effects of environmental tobacco smoke, more universities and colleges are banning tobacco use both indoors and outdoors. Results from the 20042005 study will be presented in the context of new evidence about the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke along with suggestions for future discourse, research, and policy directions for tobacco use on campus.
Literature Review Tobacco use is one of the leading causes of death, disease, and disability worldwide. Every year in the United States over 400,000 people die from tobacco-induced illness, and for every death, there are 20 people living with serious, tobacco-related conditions. One half of smokers will die prematurely (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2007). Tobacco use among adults has generally declined since the first Surgeon Generals warning about the risks of smoking was issued in 1964. Unfortunately trends in tobacco use among young adults, especially those from 1824 years old, began to climb in 1993 and have continued to climb until recently. The most recent data for this age cohort suggests some stabilization of tobacco use rates with the exception of white females (National Center for Health Statistics, 2010). Still, 4000 young people in the United States start smoking every day, adding to the escalating price tag for this complex issue. Direct costs of tobacco-related illness are estimated at $96 billion per annum with another $97 billion in loss of productivity (CDC, 2007). Educational attainment is generally considered a protective factor for tobacco use. Over the last 35 years, tobacco use rates among adults without a high school diploma have been 24 times higher than use rates among adults with Bachelors degrees or higher (NCHS, 2010). College students are a subset of the
1824 year old age cohort and are also much less likely to smoke on a daily basis than 1824 year olds overall. Yet, a substantial percentage (14%) of college students reported using tobacco within the last month (ACHA, 2010). However, these rates have declined considerably from a peak of 31% 10 years ago (Rigotti, Lee, & Weschler, 2000). People who experiment with tobacco before college often become regular smokers in college. Although teenagers are the main group that initiate smoking, it is during the period of young adulthood that more established and committed cigarette use begins to take place, (National Cancer Institute, 2008, p. 57). Given the well documented risks of smoking raises serious questions. Why do so many young adults, especially college students, initiate or commit to a behavior that is addictive and will likely decrease the quality and length of their life? College students use tobacco for many reasons. College often represents the first time that young people are living away from their family of origin and are confronted with a myriad of behavioral choices. During these years, young people refine their adult identity and face many new stressors. Tobacco use is one way of coping with these developmental and situational stressors: A young adult is leaving childhood on his way to adulthood. He is leaving the security and regiment of high school and his home. He is taking a new job; he is going to college; he is enlisting in the military. He is out on his own, with less support from his friends and family. These situations will be true for all generations of younger adults as they go through a period of transition from one world to another.... Dealing with these changes in his life will create increased levels of uncertainty, stress and anxiety.... During this stage in life, some younger adults will choose to smoke and will use smoking as a means of addressing some of these areas. (Harden, 1984, as cited in Ling & Glantz, 2002) Smoking symbolizes adulthood, independence, or an expected behavior. In the most recent ACHA survey, students over-estimated the percentage of peers who used tobacco by a factor of nearly six times (ACHA, 2010). Having a peer group of smokers increases the likelihood that a young person will use tobacco or will increase the amount of tobacco they use (Wetter, Kenford, Welsch, et al., 2004). Initiating, continuing, or increasing tobacco use, despite acknowledged risks is associated with expectations smoking helps regulate mood and control weight (DeBernardo, & Aldinger, 1999). These images of tobacco are largely attributable to successful, intensive, marketing efforts of the tobacco industry
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(NCI, 2008). Each day, the tobacco industry spends $36 million on marketing, a 200% increase over the last decade (CDC, 2007; Illinois Coalition Against Tobacco, 2005). College-age adults are the youngest, legal, target market for that industry. Marketing strategies for college students include distributing samples and sponsoring social events, both on and off campuses. These efforts have proven quite successful both in recruiting new college tobacco users, and promoting the transition from social use to daily use (Landman, et. al, 2002; Rigotti, et. al, 2003; Sepe, et al., 2002). College campuses can counter efforts of the tobacco industry through a number of measures including social marketing and education. However, universities and colleges are either not providing information on the dangers of tobacco to the general student population, students are not receiving these messages, or they are choosing to disregard the warnings on the dangers of tobacco use. The most recent ACHA survey (2010) revealed that only 35% of students recalled receiving information on the dangers of tobacco. Even fewer students (22%) expressed interest in this information. The American College Health Association Position Statement (2010) encourages colleges and universities to be diligent in their efforts to achieve a 100% indoor and outdoor campus-wide tobacco-free environment. Environmental tobacco smoke is a toxic contaminant, with no acceptable safe level. ACHA suggests policy specifics in guidelines published in September, 2009. Currently over 500 college campuses have varying degrees of policies limiting tobacco use (Institute of Medicine, 2010). The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is concerned with the well-being of student athletes. Tobacco is regarded as any other harmful drug. The NCAA prohibits tobacco use by student athletes and requires tobaccoprevention education every semester (NCAA, 2010). A systematic review reveals campus-based interventions are effective in reducing the number of students who use tobacco (Murphy-Hoefer, Griffith, Pederson, Crossett, Lyer, & Hiller, 2005). Public health efforts to control tobacco have also proven effective in reducing tobacco use, but only when coordinated evidence-based approaches are adopted and funding is adequate (CDC, 2007). Effective public health approaches include state and community-wide interventions in: promotion of tobacco-free social norms, smoke free policies, policies restricting and enforcing tobacco sales, substantial taxes on tobacco products, culturally appropriate and impactful counter-marketing and education, available and affordable cessation services, as well as collecting on-going surveillance data. However, very few states or communities have been able to devote sufficient, sustained funding to efforts such as these (CDC, 2007; CDC, 2004; Guide to Community Preventive Services, 2010). Results from the 20042005 Study
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Description of Population In 2004 there were 13,493 students enrolled at SIUE; approximately 22% who were living on campus. The undergraduate population comprised over 80% of the student body, with most students electing to pursue full-time course loads. At this time, the university employed approximately 2,300 faculty and staff (SIUE Factbook, 2005). Survey Sample A proportionate sample for each represented constituency (undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff) was sought with a desired sample of approximately 500, representing 3% of the campus population. Surveys were distributed in classes by members of the research team during the fall semester to both undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines including arts, sciences, and professional programs of social work, engineering, and nursing. Undergraduate surveys were distributed in general education courses to net responses from freshmen and sophomores and distributed in interdisciplinary study (IS) courses to net responses from juniors and seniors. Students were informed that if they did not wish to participate, they should hand in blank surveys with the rest of the class. Only nine blank student surveys (approximately 2.5% of the 403 students surveyed) were returned. Random numbers were used to draw a sample of faculty and staff. Surveys were distributed via campus mail. Two-hundred seven staff / faculty surveys were distributed, estimating that 30% would respond in an effort to maintain the proportionality of the sample. The 43% response rate from faculty and staff was slightly higher than expected. The total number of usable surveys for this study was 482. Instruments A 21-item questionnaire was designed to elicit tobacco use patterns, attitudes and awareness about campus tobacco policies. Participants were informed the study was voluntary, survey responses were anonymous, and the study had been approved by the SIUE Institutional Review Board. No incentives were offered to any participants. Eight key informants were interviewed to provide additional insight on existing tobacco policies and perceptions of tobacco use on campus. Key informants included representatives from athletics, health/wellness/counseling services, housing, student affairs, the provosts office, and campus security, with all solicited informants agreeing to participate. Data Analysis Survey responses were coded and manually entered into SPSS, for Windows (Version 12.0). Data was also randomly spot-checked for accuracy. Data
33
analysis included descriptive statistics, cross tabs, and Chi squares. Results were determined to be significant with probabilities (p values) less than .05. Handwritten notes were taken during key informant interviews. Gathered information and impressions were then further notated as field notes which were immediately typed by the interviewers. Interview data were later compared and contrasted for common themes (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Results Gender and race demographics of the sample, represented in Table 1, closely mirrored the general university population (SIUE Factbook, 2005). Table 1
Demographic Profile of Respondents Variable Gender Male Female Classification Freshman Sophomore Junior Senior Graduate Faculty Staff Other Race & Ethnicity Caucasian African American Asian Other Number 198 284 80 82 81 92 59 35 50 3 400 47 21 9 Percent 41.0 59.0 16.6 17.0 16.8 19.1 12.2 7.3 10.4 .6 83.0 9.8 4.4 1.8
Note: The race categories represent those that the University employed at the time of this study.
Tobacco Use Patterns Most of the respondents (67.1%) indicated they had never used tobacco, while 10.4% described themselves as former tobacco users (see Table 2). The 22.4% who reported current tobacco use varied in consumption patterns from daily to several times per month. Undergraduate students (25.9%) were more likely to report current tobacco use than any other groups, followed by staff (21.6%), graduate students (15.3%), and faculty (2.6%). These differences were significant (X2 =12.094, df=3, p=.05). More men (25.9%) than women (20.1%) reported current tobacco use, although these gender differences were not statistically significant (p =.135). Differences in tobacco use patterns by race were also non-significant. Those who reported using tobacco were more likely to be surrounded by a peer group of tobacco users. Most (77.6%) of those reported never using tobacco estimate half or less of their peers use tobacco, while 56.6% of current or former
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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal report that half or more of their peers using tobacco (X2 =54.27, df=1, p<.001). Similarly, former or current tobacco users were more likely to report parents using tobacco (X2 =6.624, df=1, p=.01). These results are illustrated in Table 2. Virtually all (97.8%) of the respondents who ever used tobacco began using tobacco by age 23. However, the greatest percentage (56.3%) reported initiating tobacco use during years associated with undergraduate education (ages 1723).
Table 2 Selected Demographic and Social Influences on Tobacco Use
Never Used (329) n Percent 118 61.4% 209 73.3% 219 65.6% 49 83.1% 26 74.3% 3 66.0% 3 100.0% 55 94.8% 211 14.8% 44 50.6% 19 36.5% 178 73.0% 170 66.1% Current User (105) n Percent 51 26.6% 54 18.9% 86 25.7% 9 15.3% 1 2.9% 10 20.0% 0 1 1.7% 41 14.5% 36 41.3% 27 51.9% 43 17.8% 63 24.5% Former User (45) n Percent 23 12.0% 22 7.7% 29 8.7% 7 1.7% 8 22.9% 7 14.0% 0 2 3.4% 30 10.6% 7 8.0% 6 11.6% 21 8.7% 24 9.3% 2 7.59 df 2 p .023
Gender Status
Peer Use
Parents
Male Female Undergrad. Graduate Faculty Staff Other None < > Dont Use Use
24.29
.002
77.55 6.31
6 2
<.001 .0
Beliefs and Attitudes Towards Tobacco Questions were posed about the effects of second hand smoke. The majority (91.2%) of respondents acknowledged that second hand smoke is harmful, although there were some differences in the strength of this belief associated with tobacco use patterns. Those who did not believe, or were unsure about the harmful effects of second hand smoke, were more likely to be current or former tobacco users (17.5%, vs. 4.5% among those never using tobacco X2 =22.758, df=2, p<.001). Current and former tobacco users were asked about the impact of tobacco use on their present health. There were no statistically significant differences noted between these groups, however, differences became apparent when these respondents were asked to speculate about potential future health consequences of their tobacco use. The majority of current and former tobacco users alike believed their future health would be adversely effected by tobacco, although current users were much more likely to believe tobacco use would cause future health problems (X2 =13.712, df=3, p=.003). While the majority of respondents (57.9%) were not particularly bothered by tobacco use around campus, there were significant differences in this perception, based on tobacco use status. Among tobacco users, (92%) reported not being bothered by tobacco, while the majority of non-users (53%) reported being bothered (p<.0001). There were also differences based on status. The most
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obvious way to cope with the bother of tobacco for non-tobacco users would be to completely ban tobacco use on campus. However, an overwhelming majority of respondents (73%) did not support a campus-wide ban, yet voiced support (63.9%) for the current ban on smoking in campus housing. These opinions were tied to smoking status. In 2004 there were no tobacco cessation services available on campus, although a majority (83.9%) of respondents, without regard to tobacco use status, indicated that tobacco cessation services should be offered on campus. Key Informant Interviews Common themes and concerns from the eight key informant interviews included aesthetics, cost of cleaning tobacco waste, comfort for non-smokers, enforcement of present policy, university safety, and health concerns. Aesthetics A couple of examples of remarks of the negative aesthetics of tobacco from key informants were: I see cigarette butts lying around certain areas, which is unsightly. Cigarette butts get thrown on the ground around entry ways look bad. Cost Controlling costs is an ongoing concern for most universities. Prohibiting smoking in campus housing definitely saves money on cleaning costs. However the additional trash created by cigarette butts and wrappers was seen as a problem and an expense. The physical effect of butts thrown on the ground is an ongoing cleaning problem. Cigarette butts are a huge problem around campus. Comfort Beyond appearance there were concerns of comfort for non-smokers: Making buildings smoke free changed the climate. There are people standing right outside the doors smoking. I believe they should create smoking huts away from the buildings. Health and Safety The main concern expressed by the police department informant was noncompliance with fire safety and policy enforcement in campus housing indicated by past disarmament of smoke detectors: Students are unhooking the smoke detectors. Health concerns were raised by the Intercollegiate Athletics Department; specifically, tobaccos addictive nature and the behavioral abuse.
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Policy Enforcement In 20042005 policy prohibited smoking in all campus buildings, including residence halls and all out door athletic events. Student conduct codes and employee discipline policies were applied for serious or persistent violations, although a common theme expressed by informants was that tobacco policy was difficult to enforce. The NCAA took a firmer anti-tobacco stand at that time, prohibiting athletes from using all forms of tobacco. Athletes violating this policy could be ejected by event officials or sanctioned by coaching staff (Halpin, 2006). Tobacco Policy Today In 2008 Illinois adopted a law prohibiting indoor smoking in public buildings and places of business. Smoking was and still is allowed outside of buildings. Illinois law specifies smokers gather no closer than 15 feet from building entrances. Building entrances continue to be popular places for smokers to gather. Because SIUE policy prohibiting smoking inside buildings preceded the law, few changes were needed after the law was enacted, save for moving smoking receptacles further from entrances and posting additional signage. Are Changes in Order? In the ensuing years since the survey and interviews, evidence is building suggesting tobacco policies should be reconsidered. More and more universities are banning tobacco use entirely on campuses. The U.S. Surgeon General 2006 report on the effects of second hand smoke concluded there is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke for non-smokers, and the only way to ensure workers (and presumably students) are not exposed to second-hand smoke is to establish smoke-free workplaces (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2006). A substantial percentage (42%) of respondents reported being bothered by environmental tobacco smoke on campus. The Surgeon Generals report details ways in which environmental tobacco smoke can be bothersome including nasal irritation, odor, cough, and wheezing (USDHHS, 2006). Nearly all respondents acknowledged the dangers of second-hand smoke, although the strength of this belief was tempered by smoking status. The severity of these health consequences is outlined in the Surgeon Generals Report (2006) including lung cancer, asthma, decreased lung function, heart disease, and low birth weight for pregnant women exposed to second hand smoke. Additional information is emerging about the dangers of third-hand smoke, or residue of smoke that clings to clothing and hair even when smoke from the air clears. This third-hand smoke is especially dangerous to children of smokers, but potential dangers exist for all children whose caregivers are around smokers (DOE Lawrence, Berkley Laboratories, 2010; Winnickoff, et al., 2009).
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In this study most of the tobacco users, or former users, indicated they started using tobacco in college. Undergraduate students were most likely to use tobacco and to be surrounded by peers who use tobacco. National data indicates students greatly over-estimate the percentage of people their age who use tobacco. Banning tobacco use on campus could, in theory, remove the social enterprise of smoking and modify students perceptions of the percentage of people who smoke. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2006) recommends workplaces implement complete smoking bans and suggest offering cessation assistance to help smokers quit. The health and economic benefits in the workplace can be substantial to both workers and the organization (Hopkins, et al., 2010). Factors contributing to cost savings include: increased employee productivity, increases in attempts and successful attempts to quit, decreased cleaning costs, increased safety, and decreased insurance costs. SIUE was ahead of many other universities in putting policies in place to curtail the use of tobacco products on campus. This study was conducted on behalf of the SIUE Tobacco Task Force to assess tobacco use patterns and policies and attitudes towards tobacco use. While acknowledging the dangers of second hand smoke, respondents did not support a complete ban on tobacco use. As increasing numbers of institutions, communities, and states adopt more aggressive measures to control tobacco exposure, attitudes among the population at SIUE may have shifted. Investigating current attitudes toward tobacco use on campus might provide greater support for more stringent tobacco use policies. An aggressive social marketing campaign to increase awareness of the dangers of tobacco would be advised before instituting a campus-wide ban. However, though support for incentives to quit tobacco use and increased availability of smoking cessation services were overwhelmingly supported by respondents in this study, these incentives and services have been underutilized in the past. There are questions as to whether increased awareness and more restrictive policies would translate into increased participation in tobacco cessation programs. Whether tougher tobacco policies would be even more difficult to enforce is also an issue that needs to be revisited. Last, though this study did not specifically address the issue of healthcare costs, either directly accrued by the university or by individuals, future analysis of data pertaining to this issue is of paramount importance in any tobacco policy discussion.
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References American College Health Association National College Health Assessment Reference Group Data Report 2009. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.achancha.org/docs/ACHANCHA_Reference_Group_Report_Fall2009.pdf. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention U.S.Department of Health and Human Services, and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health. (2007). Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs2007. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/stateandcommunity/best_practices/pdfs/2007/ BestPractices_Complete.pdf Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2006). Save lives, save money: make your business smoke-free. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/secondhand_smoke/guides/ business/pdfs/save_lives_save_money.pdf. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2004). Sustaining State Funding for Tobacco Control: The Facts. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/tobacco_control_programs/program_developm ent/sustainingstates/pdfs/factsFinal.pdf. Cigarette smoking among adults and trends in smoking cessationUnited States 2008. (2009). Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, 58(44). Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5844a2.htm#tab. DeBernardo, R. L. and Aldinger, C. E. (1999). An e-mail assessment of undergraduates attitudes toward smoking. Journal of American College Health, 48, 6167. DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (2010).Carcinogens form from third-hand smoke. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100208154651.htm. Guide to Community Preventive Services. (2010). Tobacco use. Retrieved from http://www.thecommunityguide.org/tobacco/index.html. Halpin, T. (2006). News: NCAA baseball rules panel addresses off-field issues. Amateur Baseball Umpires Association. Retrieved from http://www.umpire.org/modules.php?%20name=News&file=article&sid=3 2. Harden, R. J. A perspective on appealing to younger adult smokers. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. February 2, 1984. Bates No. 502034940 4943, as cited in Ling, P. & Glantz, S. (2002). Why and how the tobacco industry sells tobacco to young adults: Evidence from tobacco industry documents. American Journal of Public Health, 92(6), 908916. Hopkins, D. P., Razi, S., Leeks, K. D., Kalra, G. P, & Chattopadhyay, S.K. (2010). Smokefree policies to reduce tobacco use: a systematic review. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 38(2S), S275S289. Retrieved
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from http://www.thecommunityguide.org/tobacco/worksite/Worksite2010Smokef ree_Hopkins.pdf. Illinois Coalition Against Tobacco. (2005). Cigarette smoking-related mortality. Retrieved from http://www.ilcat.org/facts.htm. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. (2010). Ending the tobacco problem. Retrieved from http://sites.nationalacademies.org/Tobacco/smokescreen/Tobacco_051296 Landman, A., Ling, P. M., & Glantz, S. A. (2002). Tobacco industry youth smoking prevention programs: Protecting the industry and hurting tobacco control. American Journal of Public Health. TOBACCO AND THE MEDIA. 92, 917930. Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A.M. eds. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Murphy-Hoefer, R., Griffith, R., Pederson, L. L., Crossett, L., Lyer, S. R., & Hiller, M. D. (2005). A review of interventions to reduce tobacco use in colleges and universities. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 28(2), 188200. National Cancer Institute. (2008). The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use. Tobacco Control Monograph No. 19. Bethesda, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. NIH Pub. No. 076242. National Center for Health Statistics U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2010). Health, United States, 2009: With Special Feature on Medical Technology, Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus09.pdf National Collegiate Athletic Association. (2010). NCAA minimum guidelines for institutional alcohol, tobacco and other drug education programs. Retrieved from http://www.ncaa.org/wps/portal/ncaahome?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/ ncaa/ncaa/academics+and+athletes/personal+welfare/health+and+safety/dru g+education+programs/inst_guidelines Rigotti, N., Lee, J., & Wechsler, H. (2000). U.S. college students use of tobacco products results of a national survey. JAMA, 284(6), 699705. Rigotti, N., Regan, S., Moran, S., & Wechsler, H. (2003). Students opinion of tobacco control policies recommended for U.S. colleges: A national survey. Tobacco Control. 12, 251256. Sepe, E., Ling, P., & Glanz, S. (2002). Smooth moves: bar and nightclub tobacco promotions that target young adults. American Journal of Public Health. 92, 41419. Smoke-free Illinois Act, ILGA PA 095 0017. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/fulltext.asp?Name=095-0017
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Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Institutional Research and Studies. (2005). Factbook 20042005. Retrieved from http://www.siue.edu/factbook/pdf/Fb05.pdf U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2006). The health consequences of involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke: A report of the surgeon generalexecutive summary. Retrieved from http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/secondhandsmoke/report/executives ummary.pdf Wetter, D.W, Kenford, S. L., Welsch, S. K., et al. (2004). Prevalence and predictors of transitions in smoking behavior among college students. Health Psychology, 23(2), 168177. Winickoff, J. P., Friebely, J., Tanski, S. E., Sherrod, C., Matt, G. E., Hovell, M. F., McMillen, R. C., (2009). Beliefs about the health effects of "thirdhand" smoke and home smoking bans, Pediatrics, 123(1), 7479.
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Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency: The Collective Body and the Co-opted Individual in Spenser, Hobbes and Bunyan Nick Davis UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
Abstract:
This essay examines three texts, printed respectively in 1590, 1651 and 1682, which establish a relationship between the symbolic image of an anthropomorphic body and the readers understanding of individual life in its fundamental orientations. They are the Castle of Alma episode from The Faerie Queene, Hobbess Leviathan, and Bunyans The Holy War. Leviathan and The Holy War have as frontispieces highly significant visual representations of an anthropomorphic figure who dominates a landscape by virtue of scale and position; Spensers body-castle is described in detail as seen from outside, as internally explored, and in its envisaged physical setting. Emphasis on the constructedness of the symbolic body image forms a crucial part of the texts mediations between the presumptively collective and the prescriptively individual. Considered together, they offer a lens on the large-scale cultural transition, characteristic of early modernity, from predominantly collectivist to predominantly individualist conceptions of selfhood.
This essay examines three texts, printed respectively in 1590, 1651 and 1682, which establish a relationship between the symbolic image of an anthropomorphic body and the readers understanding of individual life's fundamental orientations. They are the Castle of Alma episode from The Faerie Queene, Hobbess Leviathan, and Bunyans The Holy War. Leviathan and The Holy War have as frontispieces highly significant visual representations of an anthropomorphic figure who dominates a landscape by virtue of scale and position; Spensers body-castle is described in detail as seen from outside, as internally explored, and in its envisaged physical setting. The three texts manifestly have different explanatory and persuasive purposes, but all establish a certain managed ambiguity in their symbolic representation of the body: the anthropomorphic image offered to the reader can be received, variously, as (a) an embodiment of collective knowledge which the reader/spectator already possesses, qua member of that collectivity, (b) a novel means of organizing collective knowledge, conceived on the model of anatomy, whose make-up and functioning therefore have to be explicated, and as a corollary of (b) (c) a novel means of self-understanding as an individual agent. I shall argue that emphasis on the constructedness of the symbolic body image forms a crucial
part of the texts mediations between the presumptively collective and the prescriptively individual. Considered together, they offer a lens on the largescale cultural transition, characteristic of early modernity, from predominantly collectivist to predominantly individualist conceptions of selfhood. The Castle of Alma sequence (The Faerie Queene, Book 2: canto 9, canto 11, canto 12, stanza 1)52 invites the reader to take stock of long-standing traditions of symbolic corporeal representation (see Barkan, Kemp). Here the presented anthropomorphic body is, in the first place, a mirror-like device (see Grabes) whose purpose is the recapturing for recognition of attributively collective knowledge or experience; such knowledge or experience is collective in the sense that the having of it obviates the drawing of a distinction between what might be registered by an individual and what might be registered by a group. Medieval to early modern texts metaphorically conceived as mirrors broadly accept a gnosiology in which apprehension of the world [is] not regarded as a creative function but as an assimilation and retracing of given facts (Curtius, 326). Creativeness here emerges, theoretically, not in the establishment of pertinent information but in the form of its retracing. Setting up an image of the body as a knowledge-mirror projects the principle more or less an anthropological universal, as Vico posits that bodily form and process possess a priori validity as a means of organizing cultural data. The collectivist mirrorbody also integrates knowledge: it is a medium for the simultaneous and somewhat co-ordinated presentation of different understandings of the human. Many passages from The Faerie Queene stand in continuity with medieval allegorical writing, most obviously the dream visions of Chaucer and Langland.53 Like its eras symbolic writing in general the episode centred on Almas castle creatively explores dissonances and correspondences between discrepant systems of understanding which are being simultaneously invoked; for example, this castle which is solidly constructed like a piece of architecture also shakes apprehensively so expressing its likeness to a sentient body when surprised by a sudden noise (see 9.11).
52
References are, by canto and stanza of Book Two unless otherwise stated, to Spenser (2001). The present discussion does not take in canto 10, an embedded narrative of mythic British and elfin history, the second of which pertains specifically to Guyon. 53 The Castle of Anima episode in Passus 9 of the B-Text of Piers Plowman is, as is generally recognised, a particularly important intertext for Spensers Alma episode. Alma is, as Walter R. Davis explains, both a poetical contraction of () Latin and Italian anima, whose meaning evolved from breath to the vital principle to the soul, and the feminine form of Latin almus [that which nourishes; fair, beautiful, gracious], as in the common phrase alma mater (24). A.C. Hamilton points out that Alma can also signify a maiden (from Hebrew almah), and that Langlands Anima is also named Life; see Spenser, 9.18n.
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Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency
For present purposes it will be sufficient to identify the predominant knowledge schemes, co-ordinated and integrated in some degree by bodily reference, which the episode qua mirror recalls. Lady Almas governance of the castle as chatelaine connotes the proper functioning of the human rational soul which, as in Plato and Aristotle, doth rule the earthly masse [i.e. the body, its inferior], / And all the service of the bodie frame (Book 4, 9.2); but the internal divisions of the castle, progressively explored by its visitors in the narrated action, also reference those of the soul itself, traditionally divided into vegetable (presiding over nourishment and growth), sensitive (the arena of feelings) and intellectual (inter-relating judgement, imagination and memory). The Alma narrative, linked in of course with the larger emergent design of the poems second book and of the poem as a whole, seeks to define a point of crossing between otherwise divergent strands of discourse. Very conspicuously, it sets in play conceptions of the moral life in a broadly classical understanding, where temperance is a finding of balance or the middle way between extremes, but also in a broadly Christian understanding as projected in metaphors of struggle and the search for salvation. It invokes a transcendent PythagoreanPlatonic mathematics which is taken to underlie the organization of the real, including that of the cosmos at every level, and which comes to the fore in the well-known conundra of the mathematical stanza (9.22); what is stated here has clear, iconic internal structure as a conjoining of the circle, the triangle and the square, but its bearing on bodily form as such and on its surrounding symbolic scene is indefinitely open to speculative enquiry. 54 The whole episodes metaphoric conception is partly sustained by the notion of the body politic. More will be said of this shortly, but we may note for the time being the episodes manifest concern with the hierarchical distribution of social functions, and with propriety of behaviour in ordinary social interaction and in warfare. The eras consideration of the polis as a body itself mediates tensions between classically derived enquiry into optimal structures of rule (see Archambault) and the Pauline account of the spontaneous integration of a Christian spiritual community. It has already been observed that the castle carries the double connotative weighting of a nervously responsive living organism and a construction that is robust and enduring (see also 9.21,45); in the second respect it is a piece of well-designed architecture, made following medieval practice and as Vitruvian theory recommends in bodily concordant proportions. The image of a properly constructed castle submitted to determined siege by malign forces sits well with the medieval narrative scheme of the psychomachia, or struggle within
54
It may be argued that the stanzas transcendent mathematics is, as presented, inherently incommensurable with surrounding statements in the poem and that, here as elsewhere, Spenser insists on the reciprocal irreducibility of significant symbolic systems; see especially Davis (1999) 79. No one is going to find this stanzas hidden truth: its truth is inscribed on its surface, making for speculative openness.
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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal and for the human soul.55 Finally the episode has contemporary national-cultural and geographic reference, somewhat unstable in character: in so far as the castle is under attack, it seems to be in Spensers Ireland (assailants rise against Arthur and his squire, who have not yet gained admittance to the castle, like a swarme of Gnats at euentide / Out of the fennes of Allan; 9.16); the castles fine porch (its chin) is on the other hand made of exceptionally valuable stone far from Ireland brought (9.24), and therefore self-locates in the England of the poems publication. Diversity and discrepancy of symbolic reference as commonly found in the more elaborate allegorical texts of the medieval to early modern period, is not a product of waywardness or carelessness, but a homage paid to the security of traditional collective representations, constructions of cultural knowledge shared on an assumed basis of common experience. Traditional collective representations both assume and avow conditions of intertextuality (see Ong 133). Textual commonplaces with a quotient of visual form, their authority has more than one attributed origin and they are open to multiple interpretation as figurings of truth. Familiar examples from medieval culture are the locus amoenus which, in a given instance, may or may not have Edenic significance, the image of the pre-eminent warrior bearing arms which may or may not contextually evoke the Christian armour of Ephesians 6, and the image of the sacral monarch who stands at the apex of social power. Symbolic narrative in the Alma sequence explores several receptions of the image of the body as portal to knowledge, in a spirit of inclusiveness and without disturbing the forms of reception themselves. But, having identified this marked tendency in Spensers symbolic account of the body, it is possible to identify another, making for the availability of quite a different kind of reading. As a matter of general critical recognition, the optics of The Faerie Queene produces several focal resolutions. We turn now to features of the body-castle episode which are explicitly disaligned from reference to what can already be established as collective knowledge. Reading on this other track requires the pursuit of disambiguation and the attempted construction of univocal meaning. Declaration that a working model for ethical temperance has been provided comes not after the description of Alma's castle in canto nine, but after the description of Arthur's struggle with Maleger and his followers in canto eleven, where the image of the castle loses its narrative significance. Canto twelve begins with the following narratorial declaration:
55
The psychomachia has its fullest known English realization in the gigantic morality play of c.1400 known as The Castle of Perseverance. The adventures of its central figure, Humanum Genus, span crucial battles fought within the soul, as virtues and vices lock in combat, and over the fate of the human soul, as for example when Humanum Genus leaves the safety of the plays symbolic castle under the persuasion of Covetousness. The basic motifs of the psychomachia are established in Prudentius later fourth-century poem of that name.
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Now gins this goodly frame of Temperance Fairly to rise, and her adorned hed To pricke [mark aimed at] of highest praise forth to aduaunce, Formerly grounded, and fast setteled, On firme foundation of true bountyhed [goodness, virtue] (12.1). Temperance's frame as characterised here is anthropomorphically conceived it has a head and is also firmly founded like an architectural construction, but correct apprehension of it requires us to take account of canto eleven, with its dispersed, relatively chaotic visual scene, and not only the architecturally centred scene of canto nine. It will be necessary to rethink our conception of what I have been terming the body-castle episode since, as Spenser's narrator explains at the start, the human body is symbolically represented here not once but twice. As kept in sober government it is the most fair and excellent of God's works; but as deprived of temperance though misrule and passions bace: / It growes a Monster, and incontinent [immediately, with a pun on moral incontinence] / Doth lose his dignity and natiue grace. In reading the passage we will [b]ehold (...) both one and other in this place (9.1). The episode's human body is the castle under Alma's governance with its demurely polite social etiquette: here the going amusements are restrained flirtation (9.3644) and reading (canto 10). But it is also and with equal insistence the throng of rabble-insurgents who have the castle under siege. I shall attempt to explain why the poem's instructive body needs to be shown in two entirely different forms. Book Two describes the moral education of its central figure Guyon, represented as young and approaching maturation, and is among other things a bid to civilize its reader along characteristic sixteenth-century lines. Individual attainment of civility here necessitates some withdrawal of emotional-cumintellectual attachment to the universal, collective human body. As Norbert Elias explains, the period's raising of the bar for standards of refinement went with the treatment of ever-growing areas of natural or commonplace behaviour as unmannerly and indelicate. Its implementation of self-distancing from one's own and others' bodily functions involved, for example, the innovatory use of such items as table-cutlery, commodes, handkerchiefs and nightwear. As well as evoking traditional symbolisms, the Alma episode offers an anatomy of newly conceived symbolic structures in a specific articulation. Here anatomy carries its up-to-date, somewhat Vesalian meaning of a precise, painstaking examination and exposition of bodily forms or processes in their functional interconnectedness; in respect of this procedure the body's most significant analogues are the thoroughly planned building and the machine. 56 A good deal
56
For the relation to architectural treatises, see Long 749, and for positive roles given to machine analogy in the eras moral thinking, see Wolfe.
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of canto 9 is given to systematic, anatomical description of this particular welldesigned and properly functional bodily system. 57 Conceived with topological accuracy as an apparatus which connects mouth and anus (its two gates; 9.23), it takes in guests much as it takes in food; its teeth, for example, are a welcoming corps of disciplined guards (see 9.26). We are informed in some detail about the efficient workings of its digestive tract, culminating in excretion (9.2733), of its emotional life, leading to thoughtful impasse (9.3344), and of its cognitive equipment, disposed as three persons who occupy adjoining chambers in the turret (9.4460). A.C. Hamilton comments, not unreasonably, that some of the body-castle's features seem to be modelled on Spenser's personal appearance (see 9.24n); this is an individually originated account of optimal bodily form and function. To view the passage in this other way, also sanctioned for reading, is to witness a foundering of the metaphorics of the body politic. In so far as it is a collective body, this is shown to exist partly as a formless horde of [v]ile caitiue wretches, ragged, rude, deformd, / All threatening death (9.13), connoting political misrule (popular insurgency in a government view) and disease as a form of bodily dissolution. The polar opposite of such disorder and its proposed remedy is the passages anatomical modelling of the disciplined, systemically interconnected and pragmatically functional body. This is introduced as a novel intellectual construction which is to play its part in the ethical forming of the reader. One of the poems declared purposes is, in the formulation of the Letter to Raleigh, to fashion (represent, mould, create) optimal human beings in motion whose compelling example will, like that of Cyrus and his army in the Anabasis, contribute towards the fashioning of readers who can live optimal lives (see 7146).58 Vesalius De Humanis Corporis Fabrica (1543) has as one of its objectives the dissemination of anatomical knowledge to all, including relatively unlearned practitioners of surgery and courtiers intrigued by the books design (see the works preface, xlixlii, and Long 76, 79). The Faerie Queenes exemplary anatomy of the living body is not, on the other hand, for all members of the polis: those given over to misrule have thereby demonstrated incapacity to comprehend it, and are discovered raging in its vicinity. 59 Its meaning as a matter of applicability to
57
Here it is useful to compare the passage with its closest contemporary intertext, the citadel-body of Du Bartas Divine Weeks (First Week, Sixth Day, ll. 401944; pp. 269 95). Du Bartas account, which more closely resembles the paintings of Arcimboldo, is an ingenious, multi-focussed description of organic form as artefact, whereas Spensers primary concern is with the working interconnectedness of the whole. 58 For wider discussion of the Spenserian narrative exemplar as an automated and automating life-form, see Davis (2011). 59 This is one of the poems several non-inclusive definitions of its understanding readership; the teachings of the egalitarian giant in Book Five, for example, are said to be
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individual life, not already assumed to be a given of group experience, is best acquired through a labour and pathos of individual understanding. This returns us to a question which was raised earlier: why is the frame of Temperance said to come into view after the spatially dispersed fighting of canto eleven, and not after the description of an architectural-cum-mechanical structure in canto 9? The answer, is, I would suggest, that the significance of the books modelling of an optimal body is best grasped through reflection on a form of individual experience, one which only an individual can undergo and suitably interpret. Here our vehicle for such reflection is Arthur, who attempts to fight Malegar as leader of the horde which has been besieging the castle. As this episode makes clear, while the collectivist symbolic body is supra-individual and unthreatened by mortality, the individually constructed symbolic body carries significance only in the context of individual life; or, to put it more concretely, we come to value it fully only by learning that we are going to die, and that what it models, however useful or prestigious, can falter in its personal application we all sometimes become tired or fall ill. The episode of Arthur and Malegar is largely untraditional as narrative allegory (one can source its individual components,60 but not its whole organisation), highly paradoxical as narrative action (see especially 11.3940) and, against the background of the larger poem, surprisingly unchivalric in styling since Arthur nearly dies during the combat not at Malegars hand but through the assault of two hag-like women. Named by the narrator Impotence and Impatience, these project individual, isolating forms of experience, ones which it would be emotionally preferable not to have: as well as being self-governing machine-like structures we are also beings possessed of limited and unreliable powers and, qua impatient, ones who struggle against acceptance of that condition. Health classical salus, with connotations of salvation and safety has by this point in the symbolic narrative morphed into a phenomenon which is to be scrutinized and monitored at the individual as distinct from the social level. The poems image of Temperance gains its fully instructive force as a consequence of the readers cathartic acceptance of vulnerability to personal suffering in the forms of weakness and illness, reminders of death as terminal dissolution. I have identified three moments in the reading of Spensers Alma passage: that of accepting the force of traditional symbolic representations centred on the body, shown in an image which is, however, divided and unintegrated because the body politic itself is divided and unintegrated; that of tracing the interconnections of a novel symbolic body, architectural and mechanical in construction; and that of integrating response to this imposing model body with awareness of individual frailty and mortality. I have also suggested that reading
of interest only to fooles, women, and boyes, who as represented in the passage turn into a lawless multitude (2.30,52) when Artegall and Talus destroy him. 60 The central combat, for example, directly recalls that of Hercules and Antaeus.
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of the passage encompasses these moments sequentially, in the order just set out. Comparable moments also have great importance in the readerly encounter with Hobbes Leviathan; but the argument is structured in such a way as to fold these moments on to one another, setting them before the attention simultaneously. * * *
Figure 1
Hobbes has no piety whatsoever towards traditional collective representations, and sees the mentality of ordinary people as a blank sheet apt to be imprinted with such commanding texts or images as the ruling authority chooses:61
61
For the vivid conjunction in Hobbes of sensationalist psychology and a strong interest in crowd control, see Springborg.
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Common-peoples minds, unless they be tainted by dependence on the Potent, or scribbled over with the opinions of their Doctors, are like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be imprinted in them (ch. 30, p. 379)62. In this spirit his monstrous anthropomorphic creature, Leviathan, forcefully displayed in the texts frontispiece (see fig. 1), is being put forward as a new, valid collective representation for the ruling authority to relay to its subjects. This symbolic figure has, I would suggest, a somewhat parodic and subversive relation to the collective symbolic representations of cultural tradition: those are accepted primarily through habit and custom and have of late, so runs the underlying thought, been much contested and, as part of this process, done a lot of damage; this impressive and threatening image, on the other hand, is well fitted to impose assent; moreover, the items displayed in boxes in the lower half of the image show how this symbolic figures power, secular and sacral, is put into practical effect; here a fired cannon, for example, is treated as being equivalent to the thunderbolt of excommunication (the forked objects immediately below symbolize weapons of argument). The image so viewed immediately establishes two focuses of political interest: how is sovereign power implemented, once it has been established, in that series of relays which conserves its triumphant force?; and, the texts more pressing concern, how does it compel the foundational and spontaneous collective acknowledgement which underpins such implementation? Answering the second question involves paying close attention to the books rhetorically charged opening statements. In making automata, we are told, human beings give to certain products of engineering an artificial life, simulating animals capable of motion in imitation of nature as the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World. But human art can also go beyond this in imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN, called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latin CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body (Introduction, p. 81). Aristotle speaks similarly, in the Poetics, of muthos (plot, story) as the soul which gives life to a tragedy, in so far as we can regard tragic plays as members
62
References are by chapter and page to Hobbes (1968). Hobbes goes on to state with unfathomable sarcasm that if ordinary people can learn to accept the officially promulgated doctrine of the Eucharist, which is against Reason (ch. 30, p. 379), they will certainly learn to accept his entirely rational doctrine of the sovereign state.
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of an artificial living species which human beings have created. A gigantic fabricated man who supplies protection for a human collectivity evokes ancient stories of Talos, the bronze man who guarded Crete. A figure called Leviathan recalls in name but not in form the Leviathan of Job 4041 and Isaiah 27.1, variously glossed as a crocodile, a whale, a fish, a snake, and a dragon (Tralau 62); Leviathan as modern monster and its scriptural counterpart can be taken to be alike only in the challenging sense supplied by the Vulgate citation: Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetus ei There is no power on earth which is to be compared with him. Later in Leviathan the formulations of the quoted passage are recalled when we are told, in the only other reference to the creature Leviathan, how this engineered construction comes to be or, as simulated man, is born. It has to be imagined that all the members of a collectivity at a certain point say to one another, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men [i.e. the sovereign power in whatever form], on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his actions in like manner. Once this is done, explains Hobbes, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which we owe under the Immortall God, our peace and defence (ch. 17, p. 227). As the text clearly acknowledges, this is not to be taken as a historical account of a sovereign states formation. The individuals who compose a given sovereign state, or their forbears, are not to be imagined as having gathered one day to make a verbal contract with one another: that story is provided in order to bring out the political meaning of the contractual principle. Which is to say to say that the problem concerning a collectivitys spontaneous assenting to the imposition on themselves of a sovereign power is repeated in the problem concerning a collectivitys spontaneous construction of a sovereign power which holds sway over them, as symbolized in both cases by an extremely powerful artificial man or Mortall God. To recapitulate, we have considered Leviathans putting forward of a new collective representation with political force in the space once occupied by traditional collective representations. And in order to explain what this new representation, Leviathan, might be, we have considered the texts account of that constructive act which has produced a mighty artificial man. But the account of the second has to be received as an explanatory fiction, and it has not yet proved possible to say anything revealing about Leviathans actual construction, its or his engineering, including the fabrication of Leviathans soul, the contractually transferred sovereign power which is said to give this creature life and motion. Here there is an obvious
51
contrast with Spensers complex anatomy of the symbolic temperate body. Aristotles Poetics, which is an important intertext for Leviathans, likewise offers useful information about the optimal form of a tragic muthos as well as metaphorically instating it as tragedys soul. The resolution of this issue is, however, provided in Leviathans frontispiece, probably more clearly and certainly more directly than in its written text. 63 Its symbolic anthropomorphic giant represents a human collectivity with a certain grotesque explicitness, since the visible portions of it excepting the head and fingers are composed of a multiplicity of human bodies. These are clothed and, mainly, hatted that is, wearing their public garb as if at or approaching some form of assembly. Given that Leviathan the creature faces towards us, confronting the reader as if in a mirroring relationship, why are its component bodies, who in some sense represent us, facing in the opposite direction? The effect is disconcerting, like that of the Magritte painting (Rproduction) which shows a man looking at the mirrored image of himself seen from behind, as the spectator already views him. The frontispieces positioning of the human forms composing Leviathan was evidently not the only possibility envisaged. In a manuscript version prepared by the same artist for the exiled Charles II, and no doubt designed to win his personal approval, the component forms are heads, unhatted, facing outwards from the image and wearing agitated facial expressions suggestive of excitement or fear. 64 This clearly conveys the awed subordination of the collectivitys individual members to the artificiall man whom they compose, a man who bears the trappings of a monarch and does indeed, as in the printed version, look somewhat like Charles. The logic of the bodies positioning in the printed frontispiece has, however, been convincingly identified by Horst Bredekamp: [t]he eyes of each one, regardless of position, is directed towards the giants head and returns through his eyes back to the viewer (40, my emphasis). In other words, a form of mirroring is indeed taking place: what the reader encounters in meeting the eyes of the gigantic artificiall man is his/her own gaze, which is now to be imagined as belonging to the gazing totality made up of the ensemble of readers and ensemble of political subjects, the assembled throng which the image presents. A place has thus been assigned to the individual as a bearer of volition in the same movement which locates him as part a collectivity living in subjection to the sovereign power, a being whose powers seem to resemble his own in a huge magnification. The artificial construction which makes this paradoxical act of (self-) seeing possible
63
I concur with Horst Bredkamps view that the frontispiece to the first edition constitutes one of the most profound visual renderings of political theory ever produced, and with his high estimation of its capacity to address elements of political thought [which are] bizarre or even offensive to the modern reader (30, 33). Among Bredekamps conclusions are that it was designed in Paris by the engraver Abraham Bosse with the collaboration of Hobbess (see 30). 64 The image is reproduced in Bredekamp (41).
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is the argument of the book, the force of which is established in this introductory tableau. At the centre of Leviathan as act of persuasion is a moment of uncanny encounter, ingeniously contrived in such a way as to provoke awe and fearful apprehension.65 In the texts necessary monster, Leviathan, we confront both the implacable character of sovereign power as it bears on the individual subject and the frightful nature of what it has been created to oppose and subdue, our own collective disposition towards anarchy. The sovereign state, considered to be the most impressive of human inventions and a virtual man in its own mode of being, is found to exist in the relay of looks that passes continuously between its component human entities considered as disparate individuals and these same human entities given collective embodiment in the sovereign power, a designated person or assembly. It is not necessary to appeal to a founding contract in order to establish this mans right to exist or principle of existence, much as it is not necessary to make an experimental entry to the state of nature (as in the brilliant evocation of chapter 13) in order to establish that life outside this constructed, non-natural legal-political framework is nasty, brutish and short. Such are Leviathans optical dealings with an issue of political foundation, making for simultaneous individual self-recognition as political agent and political subject. To behold the image of sovereign power in the texts mediation of it is to perceive, immediately, that there is no power on earth which is to be compared with him Leviathan considered as political artefact identifies as foundational constant a continuing subjective condition of fearful apprehension which also goes on discovering its own remedy. * * *
To turn to Bunyan from Hobbes is, at first sight, to return to the sphere of established collective representations. Here the trajectory of symbolic reading more closely resembles the one that has been defined for the Alma episode than the one that has been defined for Leviathan. Nevertheless, the design of The Holy War also resembles that of Leviathan in that one of its key purposes is to create and sustain a moment of recognition, and in that a semiotics of collective representation is brought firmly under authorial control in the interests of fixing a pattern of response. The frontispiece of the 1682 edition was probably composed like that of Hobbess text under authorial supervision. It represents what is in important respects an apocalyptic scene, whose focus is the climactic battle of Revelations 10 between the great dragon, identified with the Devil, and the host of Gods angels. The portion of the terrestrial globe shown beneath the warring parties makes it clear that the fate of the earth is at issue. But the image
65
See Landaus comments on the radical otherness and rational irreducibility of Leviathan as invented monster with strong mythic overtones.
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of a walled town-cum-body the obvious bodily features being Heart Castle, Eargate and Eyegate placed at the images centre cues a narrative of individually-located struggle in the psychomachias double sense of struggle both within and for the soul: the book will place eschatology within a personal perspective where, as in The Pilgrims Progress, the represented experience of an individual is offered as possessing universal significance. But while the texts Towne of Mansoul, gendered as female along traditional lines, is by analogy the unitary soul of an individual, its principal narrative concern is the life of the soul as compositely represented by the varied members of a civic corporation; the main actors are agencies of good and evil projected as rival military and occupying forces, and their helpers or enemies among the townsmen whose loyalties they contest. In the frontispiece the most conspicuous figure, larger indeed than the town, the Devil in dragon form, or Emanuel as leader of the opposing army, presents the recognisable image of Bunyan in the person of author.66 One of the inferences which may be drawn from this placing of weighty visual emphasis on Bunyan is that it will be the responsibility of the author to explain how a story of conflict and deceit with numerous narrative agents bears analogically on the spiritual life of the individual, since received frameworks of understanding will not necessarily do this with clarity and reliability. In the prefatory poem Bunyan states that reading must be guided by his continuously-provided marginal glosses on the action: Nor do thou go to work without my Key, / (In mysteries men soon do lose their way) ()/ It lies there in the window. The margent (5)67 here is the marginally supplied gloss for the window, without whose light the narrative allegory would resist interpretation or be interpreted falsely. Walter Ong has pointed to the role of the printed book in producing the strong impression that a given text is closed off and separated from other texts, and not locatable within a shared intertextual field; which, in forming the conception and reception of a book with this novel profile, affirms its originality and individuality while conferring the same attributes on its writer (1325). Bunyan aligns himself with the emergent figure of the book author, which is in conformity with a Protestant critique of the traditional, priestly conveyance of doctrine. The Holy Wars purpose is to establish, on an individual authors initiative, a novel basis on which certain doctrines can be assimilated at the level of experience by the reader who tracks a specific narrative development. The force of this conception depends partly on engagement of the readers awareness that the attribution to an individual, qua author, of distinctive authorizing
66
Cf. the image of the sleeping Bunyan, accompanied by one of the books scenes qua dream, which appears as frontispiece to the third edition of The Pilgrims Progress, a text which had already gained a considerable reputation. 67 References are to Bunyan (1980); italicization is normalized.
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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal powers is a cultural practice of recent invention. 68 The narrated action locally includes a critique of the embodiment of doctrine in customary forms: three proper men called Tradition, Human-wisdom and Mans Invention enlist as Emanuels soldiers, but following capture in a skirmish they join the diabolic army since, as they explain, they do not so much live by Religion, as by the fates of Fortune (512). The shape of whole narrative establishes convergent paths between a representation of scripturally charted world history, spanning Creation and the Last Days, and the representation of an individual life which spans the fall into sin via temptation, the experience of redemption, and the texts distinctive concern entry into a more fortunate though still imperfect condition of life where grace is operative; here, crucially, the traditional security of the body imaged as a defensive enclosure has to be relocated on a new conceptual and pragmatic basis. In the context of a broad awareness of the shape of collective human history the reader is offered a representative personal history for the truth of which Bunyan stands as guarantor: the prefatory poem includes authorial declaration that I myself was in the Town, / Both when twas set up, and when pulling down, and that what is here in view / Of mine own knowledge, I dare say is true (184).69 The role of the author, constructed between empirical writer, empirical reader and the text which mediates their activities, is to establish conditions of access to a human ethical-spiritual state which is to be shared as an affective condition. In the terms offered by a traditional mapping of mind onto body it is a condition of heart. The narrative of The Holy War has three phases and leads logically towards a newly inflected account of the contemporary Christian believers condition. As symbolic narrative it also offers a novel anatomy of the living soul, in that the corporate functioning of a town on a contemporary model, with its differentiated officials and volatile, rumour-led collective awareness, is treated as a vehicle for analysis of the souls individually assertive and interacting faculties. Among the marks of the allegorys distinctiveness is that it has relatively little use for the potential body symbolism of an architectural structure, or for representation of the soul as this structures unitary resident, both falling within the convention of mirroring: these commonplaces of collective knowledge are acknowledged
68
For an examination of relations between authority and authorship in Bunyan, see Spargo. The poem headed An Advertisement to the Reader, printed at the end of The Holy War, addresses the problematic authenticating or deauthenticating relationship between the empirical John Bunyan, John Bunyan the now celebrated author, and whoever might have written The Pilgrims Progress and/or The Holy War as texts to which the reader has access. The poem begins Some say the Pilgrims Progress is not mine (251). 69 See also the texts treatment of narrative time, one of whose periods of demarcation seems to correspond to a phase of Bunyans own spiritual development as described in Grace Abounding. See the comments of the editors, xxxii.
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Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency but also largely70 ignored in the interests of exploring new forms of insight. The main schemes of action are the following: (1) Diabolus seduces the inhabitants of Mansoul, a town originally established by King Shaddai and, subverting its institutions, gains unremitting control over the towns life. (2) On hearing of this the Kings son, Prince Emanuel, directs and finally leads a prolonged military assault on the town, overcoming the followers of Diabolus and freely bestowing mercy on its inhabitants, beginning with the civic leaders who have expected to be put to death; this moment of concord is marked by celebration. (3) There is a further lengthy period of grievous internecine struggle between Diabolonians, who remain lurking within and ready to emerge from the outsides, and walls (144) of the town, and those loyal to Emanuel; though the Princes followers often fail in vigilance or force, his leading soldiers never lose control of Heart Castle, which is the strong hold of the town (204). It is made clear, then, that in the third phase, even though it is emphatically one of uncertainty and confusion, the necessary understanding, power and responsibility for resisting Diabolus have been fully transferred to Mansoul, since the heart of the individual has now undergone experiences which enable it to resist deception and capture; this is what the individual is required continuously to recall as a condition of present spiritual wellbeing. In the frontispieces striking conception, this insight is figured as a condition of transparent correspondence between the castle-heart of Mansoul, the heart of Bunyan, a set of purposes projected in a book, and their counterpart in the texts fashioning of it, the suitably educated heart of the reader: to respond to the text appropriately is to perceive and experience their essential alignment. Collective representations which are well established in custom and tradition engage what Yeats called emotion of multitude: their being actively shared as well as their intersubjective availability is a matter of group significance, 71 they are embedded in familiar practices, they can be variously semiotized in a manner which connotes social breadth and historical depth. The symbolic image of the body as a defensible enclosure can, as an instance of such a representation, be received as a reminder of knowledge of the human state whose substance is a vast tissue of individual experiences. But, an anatomizing of the symbolic collective body, of the kind which occurs in Spenser, Bunyan and, more abruptly and prescriptively, in Hobbes, implies a re-examination of
70
The traditional, unitary image of the soul is most in evidence in the representation of the victorious Emanuels arrival in the town, his privileged treatment of it and the celebrations which ensue; 10616, 13550. A climactic passage characterizes Mansoul as very distinctly feminine: Now did Mansouls cup run over, now did her Conduits run sweet wine, now did she eat the finest of the wheat, and drink milk and hony of the rock! Now she said, how great is his goodness! For since I found favour in his eyes, how honourable have I been!; 149. 71 Cf. the distinction made by Charles Taylor between shared (Intersubjective) meanings and common meanings (affirmed by a group in active sharing); 39.
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received cultural knowledge and its bearing on individual action and choice. The Holy War, which is of the three most fully conceived as a communication between an individual text and an individual reader, offers a symbolic narrative whose purpose is to mould a style of reception such that it can be received in the proper manner with certain assured consequences. It is focally as a story of the heart that this symbolic narrative bids to avoid the hazards of intertextual connection and vagaries of collective use, with a view to conveying a univocal meaning with individual application which can also be reliably transmitted.
Works Cited Archambault, Paul. The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political Literature. Bibliothque dHumanisme et Renaissance 29(1967): 2153. Barkan, Leonard. Natures Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Bredekamp, Horst. Thomas Hobbess Visual Strategies. The Cambridge Companion to Hobbess Leviathan. Ed. Patricia Springborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 2960. Bunyan, John. The Holy War. Ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Davis, Nick. Stories of Chaos: Reason and its Displacement in Early Modern English Narrative. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. . Nature, Desire and Automata in the Bower of Bliss. The Automaton in Renaissance Literature. Ed. Wendy Hyman. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2011. Davis, Walter R. Alma, castle of. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. 245. Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste. La Sepmaine. Ed. Yvonne Bellenger. Paris: Nizet, 1981. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1. The History of Manners; Vol. 2. Power and Civility. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Grabes, Herbert. The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in titles and texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance. Trans. Gordon Collier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Hobbes, Thomas (1968). Leviathan or, The Matter, Forme and Power of A Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill. Ed. C.B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Kemp, Martin. Temples of the Body and Temples of the Cosmos. Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of
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Art in Science. Ed. Brian Baigrie. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 4085. Long, Pamela. Objects of Art/Objects of Nature. Merchants and Marvels; Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Routledge: New York and London, 2002. 6382. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen: London and New York, 1982. Spargo, Tamsin. The Writing of John Bunyan. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 2001. Springborg, Patricia. Hobbes and Historiography: why the future, he says, does not exist. Hobbes and History. Ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Tom Sorell. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Tralau, John. Leviathan, the Beast of Myth. The Cambridge Companion to Hobbess Leviathan. Ed. Patricia Springborg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 6181. Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body: Book I The Bones and Cartilages. Trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman. San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1998. Wolfe, Jessica. Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

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Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

The Synthetic Bard

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Is it Time to Revisit Tobacco Policies?

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal

Mirroring, Anatomy, Transparency

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