A draft Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them.

Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong.

Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Nicholas Udall

Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553), authorship much disputed – start with two influential pre-Elizabethan comedies written for academic settings.

Gorbuduc (1561), Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville – the first English tragedy in blank verse, performed before young Queen Elizabeth.

Somewhere in the mid-1570s permanent theaters begin to succeed, and it is tempting to see what might have been on those early stages, but let’s jump to Marlowe, the great young innovator.

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587), Christopher Marlowe – not that you would know from this one, not that I remember.

Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587), Christopher Marlowe – cheating a bit, putting the two plays together.  Now things are starting to get good.

The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd – the first revenge tragedy, very exciting.

The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe

Arden of Faversham (1591), ??? – more cheating, since this may actually be Shakespeare, not Not Shakespeare.  Or it’s Marlowe.  Or anyone.

Doctor Faustus (1592), Christopher Marlowe

Edward the Second (1592), Christopher Marlowe

Selimus (1592), Robert Greene – one of many, many Tamburlaine knockoffs.  Static and dull, I assume.

The Massacre at Paris (1593), Christopher Marlowe – Oddly, this is the only play I will mention of which I have seen a performance, an almost hilariously gory French adaptation.  It is not a good play, but it is sure an interesting one.

The Old Wife's Tale (1593), George Peele – A parody of a genre of fairy tale romance plays none of which are extant, meaning this might be gibberish.

Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson – I do not remember this as a great play, but young Jonson is inventing a new kind of comedy that will pay off in his later masterpieces.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – An early “city comedy.” 

Antonio's Revenge (1600), John Marston – revenge!

The Tragedy of Hoffmann (1602), Henry Chettle – revenge!

Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Ambitious Jonson wrote a couple of serious Roman tragedies.  I remember them as weak, but I’ll give this one another chance.

A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – A domestic melodrama, in case you were wondering why those were not popular in the old days.  Oh, they were.

The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – Really very early Jacobean, but it let’s me end the list on an unusual masterpiece, featuring one of the period’s great characters.

What was going on in that five-year gap after Marlowe’s death in 1593?  I will have to investigate more.  I know one thing.  If Shakespeare, like Marlowe, had died at age 29, perhaps knifed in the same tavern fight, he would be remembered as the promising young author of Richard III.  Over the next five years he became the greatest playwright in British history.  The greatest writer?  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Falstaff, his sonnets.  He became the center of gravity that turns everyone else into Not Shakespeare, into Shakespeare’s great predecessor or disciple or rival, something defined against Shakespeare.

I am still tempted, I don’t know, by a Greatest Hits approach, which would drop a dozen of the above and continue on into the 17th century with Jonson’s great comedies, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Atheist’s Tragedy, some selection of Thomas Middleton, those two magnificent John Webster plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ending with the collapse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a decade before the Puritans put the exhausted, decadent London theaters out of their misery.

Poetry, theater: French literature Petrarchizes - However well one may be educated / In Greek and Latin subtleties

More from the difficult French 16th century. I won’t get to Montaigne.

3.  French classical theater, this is just what I mean when I say that 16th century French literature is in some sense too hard.  French writers were absorbing and transforming a flood of new classical texts coming to France from Italy, plus what had already been a century or two of Italian responses to those discoveries.  With the plays of Seneca as the crucial example, a new kind of French theater came into being.

The English history is a little bit later, but parallel.  In England, though, the academic theater quickly turned into a chaotic popular theater, while in France it became more of a purely courtly form.  More intellectual, specialized, and boring.

Shakespeare, or Kyd, or whoever, read Seneca and thought “Ghosts and murders!”; French writers apparently thought “Sententiae!”  The two plays I have read (in English) are not dramatic.  They are both by Robert Garnier, the most important French playwright of the century, although by no means the earliest.  I wrote about Les Juifves (The Hebrew Women, 1583) a few years ago, and have also read Marc-Antoine (1578), a tragedy about Anthony and Cleopatra, in Mary Sidney’s 1592 version.  These are plays where characters barely interact.  Anthony declaims a monologue and leaves the stage; Cleopatra ditto and ditto; Anthony returns etc.  The two characters do get to talk to each other at the very end of the play.

Sidney’s poetry is exquisite, and I assume Garnier’s is comparable, but you can’t give this stuff to high school kids, even French ones.  They are punished enough with Corneille and Racine.  The 16th century French theater is for graduate students.  I guess English is not so different – who outside of graduate school reads Gorbuduc (1561)?  Still, Garnier is contemporary with Marlowe and The Spanish Tragedy – dramatic plays.

4.  French poets are working on the same project, pulling the Italian Renaissance into French.  The parallel with English poetry is close.  The equivalent of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the first poet to bring Petrarch into the language, is Clément Marot, who I have not read.  The most important is Pierre de Ronsard, who is lying when he writes that his suffering is so powerful that he does not know how to express it, either “Tant lamenter, ne tant Petrarquiser” (Des Amours, sonnet 129) – “as lamenting, nor as Petrarchizing.”  This man knew how to Petrarchize.  He was the greatest of Petrarchizers.

One result, just like in English, was ingenious but esoteric demonstrations of poetic learning like the Délie of Maurice Scève, which I read some portion of in Richard Sieburth’s translation.  The reader is assumed to know his Petrarch, his Horace, and his Horace-via-Petrarch inside out, while also interpreting riddle-like emblems and so on.  Advanced intellectual pleasure.

By contrast there are The Regrets (1558) of Joachim du Bellay, expat poetry.  Du Bellay worked in Rome and missed France.  He wrote a 191-poem sonnet sequence on that subject, mostly in some way about life in Rome, although he makes it home at the end.  The poems are full of personality, and are almost conversational, a good trick in a sonnet.  Ronsard is a genius, but is always performing, however beautifully.  Du Bellay – well, he is performing, too, but he tricks me into intimacy.

However well one may be educated
In Greek and Latin subtleties, I think
The effect of this place is to teach something
One didn’t know before one came this way.
Not that one finds here better libraries
Than any that the French have put together,
But that the atmosphere, perhaps the weather,
Spirit away our less ethereal faculties.
Some demon or other, with his sacred fire,
Purifies even the worst of us, tempers and refines
Till our judgment is too wary to be misled.
But if one stays here too long, all one’s strength of mind
Goes up in smoke, and leaves nothing behind,
Or so little that one loses the thread.  (Sonnet 72 in C. H. Sisson)

It’s complex, but not because it is learned.  We are lucky to have C. H. Sisson’s 1984 translation of (most of) Les Regrets.  An all-time great translation, partly accomplished by a subtle mastery of slant rhymes.

Someday I should read the entire sequence in French.  I should read an entire book by Ronsard, too, Les Amours (1552) or something.  Long ago, I scoured the versions of Ronsard in English; they range from functional (the Penguin Classics edition, clearly meant for French students) to hilariously bad (there is one from the 1960s in free verse with “erotic” drawings by the author).  So without French, du Bellay yes, Ronsard no.

The great feminist rediscovery of the period is Louise Labé.  French critics spent the 1990s debating whether she existed, or was really a persona of Scève.  That’s some feminism!  Anyway, the consensus, now, is that she existed.  I should read her, too.  When you go to see Rabelais’s hospital in Lyon, look for the plaque identifying Labé’s childhood home, which is just across a little restaurant-packed plaza.

I dream of flying to the moon but give no thought to fame or fortune - enjoying Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac

Some works of art turn out to be beginnings; some are more like ends.  In the 1890s, The Master Builder (1892), Spring Awakening (1891), The Seagull (1896), and, heaven help us, Ubu Roi (1896) look like the future.

Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) is like a culmination of the French theatrical tradition before the madmen blow it up.  Corneille, Molière, Marivaux, the Romantics – they all lead to this “heroic comedy.”  Meaning, I sure enjoyed it.  And it is not really even the end of a tradition, not at all, but its descendant is Schönberg and Boublil’s Les Misérables, not Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.  Eh, like I know anything about 20th century French theater.

A big cast, a huge lead part, an onstage battle scene, an onstage theater scene, duels, an entire act set in a pastry kitchen (and, thus, to a gluttonous critic, among the greatest acts in theatrical history).  I wondered if Roxanne, the female lead, was a little thin, but she roars to life in Act IV.

I own a strange edition of the play, a Signet Classics paperback translated by Lowell Bair that includes a DVD of the 1950 Michael Gordon film, or should I say José Ferrer film, since all anyone cares about is his performance.  I haven’t watched it; I should.  My understanding is that it is, like the original, in verse.  The translation I read was all prose, except when Cyrano is dueling – he composes impromptu verse when dueling – or the poetically ambitious pastry chef is reciting a versified recipe.

RAGUENEAU.   There’s something lacking in this sauce.

THE COOK.  What shall I do to it?

RAGUENEAU.  Make it more lyrical.

I suppose I should read a version – Anthony Burgess’s? – that makes Cyrano more lyrical, but I was happy with this one.

Cyrano is an ideal man of the 17th century, brilliant, brave, adept in all useful skills – poetry and swordsmanship – and also, to use an anachronism, the epitome of cool, limited only by his ugliness, meaning his enormous nose.  His love for his cousin Roxanne is channeled into a successful attempt to win her for another man, a handsome idiot.  The jealousies of another character adds some complications to the plot.  Most of the play is done for laughs, but the pathos of the short final act, a kind of coda, is earned.

Cyrano is worth knowing for his own sake.  He declaims a long statement of purpose in Act II, Scene 7, (a response to the suggestion that he “temper [his] haughty spirit a little”) much of which applies as well to Rostand’s time as to his.

But what would I have to do?...  Dedicate poems to financiers, as many others do?  Change myself into a buffoon in the hope of seeing a minister give me a condescending smile?  No, thank you…  Attend councils held in taverns by imbeciles, trying to win the honor of being chosen as their pope?  No, thank you.  See talent only in nonentities?  Be terrified of gazettes, and constantly be thinking, “Oh, if only the Mercure François will say a kind word about me?”  No, thank you…  I dream of flying to the moon but give no thought to fame or fortune.  I write only what comes out of myself, and I make it my modest rule to be satisfied with whatever flowers, fruit, or even leaves I gather, as long as they’re from my own garden.

Is this the great hero of the 17th century or the 19th?

Beerbohm's theater writing - I think I see some of my readers raising their eyebrows

The last fifth or sixth of The Prince of Minor Writers is Beerbohm on the theater.  He was a newspaper drama critics for over a decade.  What writing is more ephemeral than reviews of forgotten plays?  So here we have pieces on Ibsen, Shaw, and Sarah Bernhardt, of interest to this day.  And the pieces about forgotten performers – there are no pieces about forgotten plays or playwrights – are just as interesting.

Beerbohm is in his nostalgic mode in “Dan Leno,” a tribute to an actor of Beerbohm’s youth who specialized in patter, like Danny Kaye.  A long description of a Leno sketch, a shoe salesman bit, is about as funny as you would expect, if you have ever had anyone describe a comic sketch to you, minus the jokes:

I think I see some of my readers – such of them as never saw Dan Leno in this part – raising their eyebrows.  Nor do I blame them.  Nor do I blame myself for failing to recreate that which no howsoever ingenious literary artist could recreate for you.  (335)

Beerbohm foresees that recordings, film and audio, will someday solve this problem, but too late for Dan Leno.  “No actor of our time deserved immortality so well as he.”  There is also a lovely tribute to his much older “radiant” brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a famous actor and theater manager, which includes Max’s own beginnings with the theater as a brother-worshipping schoolboy.

A couple of essays are, unsurprisingly, humor pieces disguised as theater criticism, or vice versa, one of them mocking Londoners who saw Hedda Gabler in Italian just because the lead was Eleonora Duse, who was not even, according to Beerbohm, any good in Italian.

… it was not the only performance of Hedda Gabler.  There was another, and, in some ways, a better.  While Signora Duse walked through her part, the prompter threw himself into it with a will.  A more raucous whisper I never heard than that which preceded the Signora’s every sentence.  It was like the continuous tearing of very thick silk.  (“An Hypocrisy in Playgoing,” 330)

The other, even funnier, has Beerbohm seeing a play in the pit rather than in his usual box; I am skipping the jokes on the impossibility of seeing the play or hearing the actors for the concluding bit of genuine criticism:

What matter, then, how great be the degree of remoteness from reality?  The marvel to me, since my visit to the pit of the Garrick, is not that the public cares so little for dramatic truth, but that it can sometimes tolerate a play which is not either the wildest melodrama or the wildest farce.  Where low tones and fine shades are practically invisible, one would expect an exclusive insistence in splodges of garish colour…  I shall in future be less hard on the public than has been my wont.  (“In the Pit,” 339, ellipses in original)

The Prince of Minor Writers end with three radio addresses from the 1930s and 1940s, all purely nostalgic, on the theater of Beerbohm’s youth.  He even sings.  With no mention of the war, the talks are in the genre of “Why We Fight,” a defense of English culture.  Nostalgia becomes patriotism, a form of civil defense.

Goldoni's smash hit play - I'm only one man but I got two guvnors

Some of you out there, who understand your commedia dell’arte, those with a liberal education, your hummus eaters, will know that this play is based on Carol Goldoni’s two hundred-year-old Italian comedy A Servant of Two Masters and you will now be saying to yourselves “if the Harlequin, that’s me, has now eaten, what will be his motivation in the second act”.  Has anyone here said that?  Perhaps in an attempt to impress a date.  No.  Good.  Nice to know we don’t have any dicks in tonight.  My character, Francis, has to find a new base motivation to drive his actions in the second half.  Your job is to try and work out what that might be.

This is said by a relaxed, well-fed Francis in Act II, Scene 2 of One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s hit 2011 adaptation of – see above for details.  Bean moves the setting to 1960s Brighton and makes the characters idiot British gangsters, giving him a port, slang, and violence, everything he needs to keep his farce cooking.

Bean pins Goldoni down pretty well here.  His is the literature of base motivations.  This one, by the way, appears instantly:  Enter DOLLY, miniskirt, boobs etc.

The story of The Servant of Two Masters is that a clownish, hungry servant finds himself in the service of two masters.  He has to run around doing errands for both without letting the other know, which is comic.  There’s also some nonsense with disguises and who’ll marry whom.  In the center of the play is a long, crazy scene where Francis / Truffaldino / Harlequin is simultaneously serving lunch to both of his guvnors, again, unknown to each other, while he steals scraps, or entire dishes.  Lots of racing around and slamming doors.

Not too long ago I saw a college production of Servant that put a lot of obstacles in front of its actors, but as they moved into that waiter scene, the awkwardness vanished.  The whole thing just took off.  What a scene.  Bean is obligated to escalate the action, and does he ever.  This must be almost painful to watch in the theater.  Laughter, the pain would be from laughter.  When it is over:

What I suggest we do is take a fifteen minute interval here.  You can have a drink.  We’re going to fill out some Health and Safety forms.  (Act I, Sc. 4)

I am tempted to just quote more jokes, but I suppose they lose something without the surrounding patter.  It’s a funny play.  I’m laughing now; too bad you can’t see me.  As I leaf through the actual Goldoni play, the Edward J. Dent translation found in The Servant of Two Masters and Other Italian Classics (ed. Eric Bentley), I cannot help but find it a little thin read right up against the super-charged One Man, Two Guvnors.  So don’t read them in that order is my advice.

It’s the poetical history of mankind - Jean-Claude Carriére's Mahabharata - it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted

The third India-related book I read was The Mahabharata, not the ancient Indian epic itself, of course, since it is endlessly long and also bears a curse, but the superb French theatrical adaptation by Jean-Claude Carriére (1985) written for and with Peter Brook (who is also the translator).  I was a bit too young to remember the excitement when Brook brought the play to New York in 1987, but I do remember reading about, in The New Republic (RIP), and never finding, the 1989 film (Carriére is best known as a screenwriter).  The film is three hours long, cut down from a six hour television version, itself reduced from the play’s nine hours.

So of course this is really A Mahabharata, maybe even Several Mahabharatas.  The scale is reduced, although I can fill in what Carriére and Brook cannot.  He can say that an army of millions is fighting and dying, but onstage he has a dozen or two.  I have millions, and dozens, too.  I imagine what is in the theater; I imagine what I want.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What’s this flame that’s devouring the world?  Elephants are howling in terror, snakes are hurling themselves into the sky.

BHIMA:  Aswatthaman has just released his father’s sacred weapon.

YUDHISHTHIRA:  What can we do?  Men, animals, the earth itself – all are shriveling to ashes.

GANDHARI:  I see a white heat.  (199)

The detonation of a mystical nuclear weapon by the desperate Kauravas is just one of the visual opportunities for a theater director, and one of the many surprises for the reader.  I have read versions of the epic before, yet it is so rich that I am always surprised.

The war that ends the play – by ends, I mean fills the last third – including the difficult argument of the Bhagavad-Gita is outstanding, and the myths, origin stories, and heroic deeds that occupy the early two-thirds are just as exciting, but what is really makes the play effective, and is an innovation of Carriére’s, is the narrator figure Vyasa, by tradition author of The Mahabharata, who wanders in and out of the action.  Here is how the play begins:

A boy of about twelve enters.  He goes toward a little pool.  Then a man appears.  He is thin, wearing a muddy loincloth, his feet bare and dirty.  He sits thoughtfully on the ground and, noticing the boy, he signals him to come closer.  The boy approaches, slightly fearful.  The man asks him:VYASA:  Do you know how to write?

BOY:  No, why?  The man is silent for a moment before saying:

VYASA:  I’ve composed a great poem.  I’ve composed it all, but nothing is written.  I need someone to write down what I know.

BOY:  What’s your name?

VYASA:  Vyasa.

BOY:  What’s your poem about?

VYASA:  It’s about you.
[skip a bit]
It’s the poetical history of mankind.  If you listen carefully, at the end you’ll be someone else.  For it’s pure as glass, yet nothing is omitted.  It washes away faults, it sharpens the brain and it gives long life.  (3)

I was pretty much captured several lines earlier, even before I learned about all the prize I would win.  And at this point, Ganesha appears, offering his services as a scribe.  These three wander through the rest of the play which it turns out has not only not been written but not performed, or the history has been imagined but has not happened.  We watch it happen along with its author.

There are other good ways to read The Mahabharata.  R. K. Narayan’s prose retelling, for example, or William Buck’s.  Maybe not better ways, though.

The Stray Dog Cabaret - When fearful friends abandoned me music stayed

The Stray Dog Cabaret (2007) masquerades as an anthology of Silver Age Russian poets – Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, and six others, all of whom knew each other and were patrons to a greater or lesser extent of the bar in the book’s title.  It was a scene, as we might say now.

Paul Schmidt, the translator and anthologist, organizes the book so that the poets and poems comment on, respond to, and even directly address each other.  History progresses – the war, the revolution, the terror.  A series of biographical notes, presumably written by Catherine Ciepiela, with Honor Moore the book’s editor, are almost too depressing to read.  The headers are by themselves too depressing:  Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).  Let’s move back to 1913:

The Stray Dog Cabaret

All of us here are hookers and hustlers
We drink too much, and don’t care.
The walls are covered with birds and flowers
that have never seen sunshine or air.

You smoke too much.  There’s always a cloud
of nicotine over your head.
Do you like this skirt?  I wore it on purpose.
I wanted to show lots of leg.  (Anna Akhmatova)

Osip Mandelstam is not so sure:

This life of constant thrills will drive us crazy:
wine in the morning, hangover every night.
How can we get away from this sick excitement,
the awful flush of feverish delight?

But Blok sends her a drink:

I sent you a rose in a glass of champagne
while the gypsies played as the gypsies do.
Then you turned to the man you were with and said:
“You see his eyes? He’s in love with me too.”

Akhmatova rejects the offer – “You’re a very bad boy.”  And you’re crazy.”

Translation purists, a sad lot, will be horrified when they turn to the notes and discover that with the Blok poem the translator “has created a new poem from three stanzas of ‘In the Restaurant’” and that “[t]he poem actually was dedicated to Maria Nelidova.  “The original poem has no title.”  “The phrase ‘And it makes me cry’ does not appear in the original poem.”

As fine a translator as Schmidt was (his Rimbaud is sure good), to the bone he was a man of the theater.  The Stray Dog Cabaret is a theater piece in disguise.  The actors playing the poets step forward and read their poems to each other before returning to their drinks and dancing.  Before slipping off of the stage, one by one, until only Akhmatova is left, now old, the survivor:

Music
(for Dmitri Shostakovich)

Something miraculous burns in music;
as you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
when others turn away their eyes.

When fearful friends abandoned me
music stayed, even at my grave,
and sang like earth’s first shower of rain
or flowers suddenly everywhere alive.

A burst of Silver Age Russian reading would be enormous fun, I am now convinced of that.  Chekhov’s plays, Bely, Babel, and all of these amazingly alive doomed musical poets.

The Blue Lantern has improved The Stray Dog Cabaret by introducing two painters to the show.  

The marionettes grow uneasy - clever Schnitzler plays

Schnitzler is a clever writer, interested in cleverness.  He has a conceptual streak in his creativity.  I am still plenty ignorant, but I have read enough Schnitzler to piece together a timeline, and I can even make out a Clever Period, much of it documented in Paracelsus & Other One-Act Plays (tr. G. J. Weinberger, Ariadne Press, 1995), but also covering “Lieutenant Gustl” and of course La Ronde (written in 1897), which is the best example.

La Ronde is about sex but the structure could be used for almost anything.  The ten interlocking, circular scenes each have a pair of characters who are sexual partners, with one character moving on to the next scene and partner, but the structure could be used for doctors and patients, or salesmen and customers, or any situation where people are likely to be found in pairs.  The number of scenes could be reduced or increased as inspiration or resources require, and even the sexual story can easily be updated and rearranged.  Presumably some recent playwright has, for example, made some of the encounters homosexual.

La Ronde as written is good, but the genuine cleverness of the flexible gimmick is more noticeable, and perhaps even more important.

The series of one-act plays Schnitzler wrote between 1898 and 1910 are mostly what would now be called “high concept.”  The Green Cockatoo (1899) is set in a French dive where slumming nobility come to eavesdrop on criminals and lowlifes, except that the criminals are actors and it is all just a performance, and the nobles know it is a performance, so this is really a play-within-a-play with the fictional audience sitting onstage.  The play takes place on July 14, 1789, so we know that something “real” will intrude on the show.

A couple of plays are stylized commedia dell’arte mime plays.  A trio are not puppet plays, as I had guessed from their titles, but rather riffs on puppet plays.  In The Puppeteer (1903) a man who thinks that he is the puppeteer discovers that he is the puppet.  The Gallant Cassian (1904) reprises the idea but as farce and nonsense, with a lot of instantaneous changes in luck and love, a pointless duel, and a woman who hurls herself from a window but is saved when the title character leaps after her and catches her in the air.  Why not, they are all just puppets.  This is the end (Martin lost the duel):

MARTIN plays the flute  It is bitter to die alone when one was still loved, well-to-do, and full of the most splendid hopes a quarter hour before.  Truly, it is a bad joke, and I’m actually not at all in the mood to play the flute.  Lets it fall and dies.

Most amazing is The Great Puppet Show (1906) which features an onstage carnival and another play-within-etc., an entire puppet theater and its audience, who constantly comment on the action.  I assume that the marionettes are meant to be played by humans, with paint on their faces and strings tied to their arms.  Or maybe not.  In the comic high point, a member of the “real” audience, perhaps sitting right next to me

Stands up and yells out loud  This is a fraud!  The people on stage all look over, the marionettes grow uneasy, and some of them look out from the sides of the marionette theater.

THE GENTLEMAN IN THE AUDIENCE  A fraud!  I won’t fall for that!...  that’s not worthy of a serious theater!...

DIRECTOR  on the apron My dear sir!

AUTHOR  also near the front, wringing his hands

THE GENTLEMAN  going further forward  I won’t let myself be cheated out of the ending!...  To the orchestra section  it’s obvious that the author couldn’t think of an ending… (ellipses in original, except for that last set)

The “real” audience member is invited to join the onstage audience, but he retreats in confusion.

I am not saying these Schnitzler plays are as complex as the best Pirandello, but anyone interested in clever meta-theater would enjoy these plays and should give Schnitzler some credit.

The possibilities of an absolutely unemphasized art - Modernism meets Noh drama

Tony’s Reading List has nothing but Japanese literature all month.  I am joining in by reading the little anthology The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (1916) by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa.  Fenollosa was one of the great early American experts on Japanese art (see Christopher Benfey’s The Great Wave (2003) for more of that story).  He died in 1908.  Pound came across his papers and became fascinated by Fenollosa’s translations of Noh plays and his extensive but fragmentary notes on the subject.  So Classic Noh Theatre includes fifteen complete plays translated by Fenollosa, notes by both Fenollosa and Pound and, as a bonus, a separate essay by William Butler Yeats.

Yeats had been trying to bring Celtic legends to the stage but in an “indirect and symbolic,” even “aristocratic” fashion (p. 151).  He was part of an extended group of poets and playwrights like H. D. and Hugo von Hofmannsthal who were interested in finding alternatives to so-called realism, to Ibsenism.   They turned to classical models like Greek drama.  How startling it must have been to discover this preserved Japanese tradition that like Greek plays featured masks, a chorus, ritual music and dance, and compressed retellings of foundational stories, in the case of Noh from, for example, The Tale of Genji and The Tale of Heike.

And how pleasing it must have been, for Pound at least, to find that Noh drama is so compressed, intense, and laden with tradition that it can seem completely impenetrable.  In a typical play – I will look at “Kakitsubata” by Motokiyo – a wandering priest encounters a spirit which appears first in ordinary form (a young girl) but after an act of devotion returns as a legendary figure, in this case a character from the 9th century Tales of Ise who is associated with the iris.  She displays her fine robes and then, with the assistance of the chorus, dances and sings an iris dance:

SPIRIT:  The flitting snow before the flowers:
              The butterfly flying.

CHORUS:  The nightingales fly in the willow tree:
                  The pieces of gold flying.

SPIRIT:  The iris Kakitsubata of the old days
               Is planted anew.

CHORUS:  With the old bright colour renewed.  (130)

The spirit fades as it “flower soul melts into Buddha.”  Is this much of anything?  Pound recognizes the difficulty; it is exactly his point of interest:

Our own art is so much an art of emphasis, and even of over-emphasis, that it is difficult to consider the possibilities of an absolutely unemphasized art, an art where the author trusts so implicitly that his auditor will know what things are profound and important.  (130)

Noh does have other moods, though, even (profound, unemphasized) humor.  See the epistemological confusion when the priest meets the ghost in “Tsunemasa”:

SPIRIT:  I am the ghost of Tsunemasa.  Your service has brought me.

PRIEST:  Is it the ghost of Tsunemasa?  I perceive no form, but a voice.

SPIRIT:  It is the faint sound alone that remains.

PRIEST:  O! But I saw the form, really.

SPIRIT:  It is there if you see it.

PRIEST:  I can see.

SPIRIT:  Are you sure that you see it, really?

PRIEST:  O, do I, or do I not see you?  (55)

I have no doubt that other, later anthologies would serve as better introductions to Noh drama.  But Pound’s hodgepodge is the moment English-language Modernism was introduced to Noh.

It shakes accepted values–disperses former glory–dismays age-long courage - Georg Kaiser's The Burghers of Calais

One last German-language play.  Last for now.  Georg Kaiser’s The Burghers of Calais (pub. 1914, perf. 1917) is, I am told, the signature Expressionist drama.  I do not know what Expressionism is, exactly, or to the extent that I do know, I cannot see the relationship between Kaiser’s play and Expressionist artists like Franz Marc and George Grosz.  Let’s not make this post about my ignorance, though.

The Burghers of Calais is inspired by one of Rodin’s most famous sculpture groups (here’s the plaster version at the Musée Rodin), itself inspired by an episode in Froissart’s Chronicles.  During the Hundred Years War the English besieged the port city of Calais.  Rather than sack the town, they demanded that six leading citizens surrender themselves while dressed in sack cloth and a noose.  The humiliation and presumably execution of the six, in exchange for safety.  Six leaders, including the city’s wealthiest merchant, volunteered for the sacrifice.  Rodin’s sculpture enacts their most pathetic moment, as they leave the city to their deaths.  Presumed, as I said, since the men were spared by the intervention of the Queen of England.

Kaiser takes advantage of the men’s humiliation in the play’s final act, where the public removal of their ornate garments and donning of the sack cloth and noose gains, as it is repeated, a ritual power that a much worse playwright could hardly damage.  But Kaiser has a stranger, ahistorical purpose.  He adds a number of ludicrous complications to the story – mainly that seven men volunteer when only six are needed – in order to test the meaning of the sacrifice.  Ordinary concepts of glory, honor, or duty are somehow insufficient, not meaningful enough.  The volunteers go through a scourging or purging process before their sacrifice, overcoming their fear of death and attachment to the world.  I think.

Thick smoke swirls about your heads and feet and shrouds the way before you.  Are you worthy to tread it?  To proceed to the final goal?  To do this deed–which becomes a crime–unless its doers are transformed?  Are you prepared–for this your new deed? –It shakes accepted values–disperses former glory–dismays age-long courage–muffles that which rang clear–blackens that which shone brightly–rejects that which was valid! –Are you the new men? (114-5)

That passage is just a scrap of a characteristic two-page monologue.  I picked it because the Nietzschean or visionary overtones are unusually clear.  New men, huh?

I do not know if the odd use of the dashes in the translation is straight from Kaiser or if the translators are attempting to recreate one of the many peculiar features of Kaiser’s anti-naturalistic text.  The play begins in crisis, at a high rhetorical pitch, and maintains the tone almost to the end – once the men have reached their apotheosis, the tension is allowed to relax.  I was reminded of the unrelenting intensity of a contemporary drama, Charles Péguy’s The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, with which Kaiser's play shares the theme of transcendent sacrifice.

I read the translation of J. M. Ritchie and Rex Last found in Kaiser’s Plays Volume One, 1985, John Calder.  An admirably modest blurb on the back cover says “This book was worth publishing”; I agree.  Kind of a low standard.

Oh yes, thanks to the Caroline and Lizzy for the poke in the ribs that was German Literature Month.

Are you happy? No. - acting in Uncle Vanya

Does this look like much?  It’s from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1897), and is part of a reconciliation scene between Sonya and her young step-mother Elena:

SONYA:  Come, peace, peace!  Let’s forget it.

ELENA:  You mustn’t look like that – it’s not becoming.  You must believe in everyone, otherwise it’s impossible to live. (Pause)

SONYA:  Tell me honestly, as a friend – are you happy?

ELENA:  No.

SONYA:  I knew that.

The question is: what to do with that “No”?  Is Elena earnest, sad, defeated, defensive?  How about Sonya, in her answer?

I have seen two stage productions of Uncle Vanya,  a flawless actor’s holiday at the Steppenwolf Theatre (2001), the other a cluttered and mis-paced 2007 Court Theatre version (no complaints about the acting, though).  In both productions, the actresses played this scene in exactly the same way.  They replicated what Julianne Moore and Brooke Smith did in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which can be seen here at about 2:40, although the whole seven minutes is choice.  Excuse me – I am going to watch it again.

For most of the above dialogue the camera is over Sonya’s shoulder, so we only see Elena’s face, and her reaction to Sonya’s fumbling question, her genuine curiosity.  “Are you happy?” – and Moore breaks into an enormous smile.  She might even be about to laugh, but exercises restraint.  Sonya – now the camera moves to her face – also smiles, broadly, happily.  “I knew you weren’t,” matter of fact.  Both actresses laugh, shaking their shoulders.

Sonya was genuinely anxious that her step-mother was happy, and is genuinely relieved that she is not.  Elena has already moved beyond happiness.  Her admission is old news, perhaps upsetting at some point in the past, but now something that can be treated ironically.  Now the two women can be unhappy together, which makes them happy.  Happier.

Vanya on 42nd Street is a showcase of interpretation via acting, full of actorly surprises, but for some reason this one stands out as a favorite, perhaps just because I have now seen live actors duplicate it twice, as if it is the standard interpretation of the lines, as if there is no other real choice.  Or perhaps I am just enjoyably amazed at seeing how much an actress can do with the word "No."

Sometime I would like to write about Sonya’s monologue at the end of Uncle Vanya, the “We shall rest” speech, with its “life that is bright, beautiful, and fine.”  It looks like it should ruin the play, just upend everything.  I think of it as an Alpine challenge for the actress, but every time I have seen the play it turns out to be a triumph.  Brooke Smith’s version is on Youtube here.

When reading a play, I have the book and my imagination, but I also have a lot of other people helping me out.

The translation is by Ann Dunnigan, found in an old Signet Classics paperback titled Chekhov: The Major Plays.  The Vanya on 42nd Street version is by David Mamet.

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches.  At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month.  My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature.  Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther.  German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird.  Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition.  The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage.  That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913.  Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet.  I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind.  (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank.  Let me look that up.  Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.  Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays.  Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde.  Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up.  Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II.  The titles alone attract my interest.  I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations.  Speculative might be a kinder word.  Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?

I only discussed Ubu Roi with you because it has the advantage of being the sort of play that most of the public will appreciate.

“Plays are meant to be seen!”  How often have I come across some variant of this sentiment, on book blogs or elsewhere, a bromide I uncharitably interpret as “I do not know how to read plays.”  But of course, I do see the plays I read, while I read them.  I use my imagination.

For the reader who wants the assistance, Jarry and others left behind a substantial amount of documentation about the performance of Ubu Roi – the other Ubu plays were not performed during or anywhere near Jarry’s lifetime.  The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (1965), ed. Roger Shattuck, tr. by many hands,  is packed with all sorts of wonderful nonsense on the theater.  Pa Ubu, for example, really should look like Jarry’s drawing on the left, with the spiral on his enormous belly and the strange, long-nosed mask destroying any ordinary notion of acting.  Through much of the play, he should be carrying a toilet brush, and when mounted, he wears a cardboard horse head.

Jarry stands at the head of what is now a long French tradition of anti-acting.  If I remember correctly, the director Robert Bresson even avoided the word, calling the people appearing in his films “models.”  Jarry not only wanted to obscure the face of the actors, but to destroy their voices and form:

And it is better for them not to move, and that the whole play should be spoken in a monotone.

And we have also said that the actor must take on the body appropriate to the part. (Selected Works, 74)

The imagined voice is crucial, and the delivery.  Ubu Roi is a comedy, I guess.  Some readings are funnier than others.  So I read lines aloud, try out different registers.  I have convinced myself that Jarry’s advice is not quite right – the nightmarish Pa and Ma Ubu should certainly bellow their idiotic lines, like George Costanza’s parents on Seinfeld, the couple that knows each other so well they simply skip to the screaming at the first hint of conflict – more efficient, don’t you know.  But the effect is funnier if other characters  act as if they are in a Shakespeare or Racine play or, I don’t know, Long Day’s Journey into Night, as if they are method actors squeezing every drop of meaning out of their lines.

But then none of this works if the actors are replaced by puppets.  Kenneth McLeish’s version of The Ubu Plays (1997) includes “Ubu sur la butte,” or “Up Ubu,” Jarry’s compressed adaptation of Ubu Roi for marionettes.  Frankly, when I was imagining my way through Ubu, I was mostly thinking of marionettes.   Screeching, flailing, insane puppets, tearing each other to shreds.  Somehow the appearance of bears and crocodiles, and the impalings and ghosts and characters falling in the toilet all made more sense.*

The backdrop at the premiere was painted by Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, and included “a bed, and at the foot of the bed a bare tree and snow falling,” as well as palm trees and a dangling skeleton.  Scene changes were signified by a sign hung from a nail, the responsibility of “[a] venerable gentleman in evening dress.”  All of this from Arthur Symons's description of the first night, pp. 256-7 of Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961).

None of this is remotely necessary to read Jarry.  Let fly.  After all, if you “simplify it somewhat… we would have something which could not fail to be funny,” since, Jarry writes, Ubu Roi is “the sort of play that most of the public will appreciate” (Selected Works, 67-8).

* Not that Jarry’s special effects are that special.  Nothing that, for example, the 18^th century Italian stage could not handle.  See Carlo Gozzi’s The King Stag (1762), as found in Eric Bentley’s The Servant of Two Masters and Other Italian Classics (1986).

A vacation, and a book blogging question

I will be wandering the prairie for a few days.  Back, let's say, Tuesday.

Do not forget to contemplate the possibility of reading Anything Ubu.  If you are wondering what goes on in Ubu Roi, Jarry's cover from the program for the first performance should help.

Let's see, that's Papa Ubu on the right, and I think the little fellows on the left are Polish princes.  And then there's a box on wheels, and a burning building, and the moon, and, yes, I have no idea.  No idea at all.

My question:  Has anyone come across theater blogs that are like book blogs, or book blogs that concentrate on plays - meaning, that are not just responding to current performances but are also reading plays, really writing about plays?  Anyone reading through Ionesco or Pinter or Calderón de la Barca or whomever?  If so, please direct me thither.  Thanks.

Yes, you are a Jewish King Lear!

"Reb Dovidl, I do not know if you have heard of the world-famous writer Shakespeare. Among his works is a drama with the title King Lear. The old king, like you, divided his kingdom and also like you sent away the loving daughter who told him the truth. Oh! How dearly he paid for that! Yes, you are a Jewish King Lear! May God protect you from such an end as that to which King Lear came." (Act I)

That's from The Jewish King Lear, a Yiddish play by Jacob Gordin, written and first performed in New York City in 1892. As a repertory vehicle for the legendary actor Jacob Adler (see left), it was performed, off and on, for over thirty years.

The Yale University Press translation (2007) is actually called The Jewish King Lear: A Comedy in America, but the play is, Fool aside, really a melodrama. Cordelia marries Edgar and is reconciled with Lear. Goneril and Regan are more weak and pitiful than evil. The Gloucester plot is merged with Lear's story - it's Lear who goes blind, from glaucoma, which is cured by his surgeon daughter!

I'm keeping Shakespeare's names, since they fit, but the characters' names, the settings, the Purim play, are all Jewish. When a rich merchant divides his property among his three daughters, and rejects the beloved daughter who refuses to thank him for his gift, it is the educated, secularized Edgar who recognizes that the situation is exactly like Shakespeare and says the lines I started with. The climax of the play comes when the battered, pathetic, blind Lear acknowledges the literary analogy:

"What was it [Cordelia's] teacher once said to me? I am the Jewish King Lear... well! I will stretch out my trembling hand and will say: 'Give a little kopeck to the Jewish King Lear!'" (Act III)

Then Lear and his loyal Fool, I mean servant, go into the world to beg. A great scene; easy to imagine how effective it was. Unlike the blunt ending, post-glaucoma:

"I was against Science! But look what a wonder science has performed. I thought a woman had to be dependent on her husband. But look at what a useful person my [Cordelia] is," etc. (Act IV)

I wrote about a later Jacob Gordin play last month, God, Man, and Devil. That one is a Jewish Faust. Perhaps it is possible to detect a pattern already. Among Gordin's eighty plays are adaptations of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, and Tennyson's poem Enoch Arden. There's also a Jewish Queen Lear, and why not. Gordin was an improver - educate and uplift. Some other titles: The Pogrom in Russia; Siberia; Hasia the Orphan. You can see where he got his nickname, "Big Barrel of Laughs" Gordin.*

Actually, The Jewish King Lear is not quite humorless, because of one character, the servant, the Fool, who just flew in from the Catskills:

ALBANY: Do you think that we only think of eating?
FOOL: I have heard it said: study like a Jew and eat like a Gentile. And that is after all the law in the Torah.
ALBANY: With your peasant's head, what do you know of what is written in the Gemara?
FOOL: Even if it's not written in the Gemara, it's still a very fine law.

The Jewish King Lear is a step or two away from a masterpiece - I think God, Man, and Devil was better, anyway - but I would love to read more of these fascinating Jacob Gordin plays.

* Nickname made up by me.

The musical-dramatic-national-patriotic tragic-comedy Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem

Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, originally published in 1909 and newly re-Englished by the expert Aliza Shevrin, is a Yiddish theater novel. Some luck that the same "star" metaphor is used in Yiddish and English. Two shtetl kids, a fourteen year old boy and a fifteen year old girl, fall in love and run off with a theater troupe. They wander around Europe and America - Budapest, Vienna, London, New York - and become stars, one an actor and the other a singer.

The novel begins with the discovery that the youngsters have disappeared, on the same night that the theater troupe skipped town. Could there be a connection? Then Sholem Aleichem takes us back to the arrival of the theater company, to give us the details of what happened, to let us get to know Leibel and Rosa. On the one hand, there's not a lot of tension here, since we know what's going to happen. On the other hand, we actually don't, since there's a pretty good twist that finishes the episode and pushes the story forward, that keeps the stars wandering. A couple more twists follow. This isn't a thriller, but the story is more than an afterthought.

Wandering Stars is not short - it's a little over 400 pages - and is padded. It takes Sholem Aleichem about a quarter of the novel, for example, to get Leibel and Rosa out of town. He's in no hurry. The novel was serialized in a newspaper* on a daily basis. Yes, daily. So each chapter is two or three pages long. Many are separate skits or essays or character sketches. All to the good, since these are among the best, the funniest, things in the book.

The main story, in general, is not the most interesting part of the book. But as the novel progresses, a huge case of actors, moneymen, and other hangers-on accumulates. The momentum increases, and the gags get funnier. Like this newspaper review:

"'Among all the pieces in all the Jewish theaters, this holiday Menorah shines so brightly that it has cast into the shadows every other piece,' modestly wrote another manager of his own production. The Menorah, he added with rare reserve, 'stands out among the others like a giant among dwarfs. At no other production will you witness so many tears shed on the stage over the plight of desolate widows and miserable orphans, over lost children and butchered babies, over Jewish daughters murdered and Jewish wives dishonored in bestial pogroms. And the rib-tickling humor, laughter, and Jewish wit heard on our stage cannot be beat. At no other production will you hear such sweet melodies sung by famous leading ladies and see such exciting dances by the loveliest dancers in the world." (p. 280)

Wow, The Menorah has everything. And then there's The Alrightniks; Four Sticks Make a Canopy; Dora, the Rich Beggar, by Shakespeare, Improved and Staged by the only Albert Schupak; and of course the musical-dramatic-national-patriotic tragic-comedy Moishe, featuring the smash hit song "Moishe."

How I long to see The Alrightniks.

Adam Kirsch seems sort of irritated that Wandering Stars is - what? Not crisp and efficient? Not as good as Tevye the Dairyman? He's right, it isn't. I have read enough Sholem Aleichem now that I am beginning to think of him as a literary giant, comparable to Mark Twain, say. His writing covers a lot of ground, and his inventiveness seems unbounded. But Tevye the Dairyman is a world-class masterpiece, hugely likable, and also complex, deep. I'm not disappointed that Sholem Aleichem didn't produce too many of those. Wandering Stars is, as is, a treat.

I still don't think I'm really writing book reviews. For a more review-like review, see the enthusiatic Reb Jew Wishes.

* What newspaper, published where? No idea. No one wants to tell me. Certainly not Tony Kushner, in his gushy, useless introduction. It's all just so wonderful! Thanks, Tony. I only know (or have guessed) that the original publication was in 1909 because of references to the novel's centennial.

The Dybbuk as Greatest Yiddish Play

Somewhere or another I called The Dybbuk the Greatest Yiddish Play. That's not really my judgment - what do I know, I've read a few and seen none. It seems like a first-rate modernist play, psychologically complex, culturally rich, with an original subject. I enjoyed reading it; I'd love to see it performed.

The Dybbuk has acquired a symbolic status that I wouldn't wish on any single work of art. Because of its history, and setting, and use of folklore, it has become The Representative Yiddish Play.

Ansky never saw it performed. It's 1920 debut, in fact, was as a memorial to Ansky himself, performed thirty days after he died. The superb poster is from that Warsaw production. So from the beginning, it had extra-aesthetic weight. The play became a stand-in for the lost world of Eastern European Judaism, destroyed by emigration, destroyed by World War I. And this was all before the Holocaust.

Habimah, a Moscow Yiddish theater company, now the National Theatre of Israel, put The Dybbuk at the heart of its repertoire. They still own, and often use, the original sets. How can a performance of the play not also be a memorial service? How does one judge such a thing?

There's another irony, come to think of it. The curators of The Dybbuk perform it, mostly, in Hebrew, in H. Bialik's 1918 translation. It's surely now performed more often in English and German than in Yiddish. One more irony: the Yiddish Dybbuk is a translation from the Hebrew! Ansky lost his Yiddish version when he fled the Bolsheviks, and created a new Yiddish text from Bialik's Hebrew.

Well, it's still a great play. But what complications. Typical, though, of the life and works of S. Ansky.

The machines make noise; they make noise - some Yiddish socialist agitprop

So greed is bad, I think we all more or less agree about that. What's a fellow to do about it? Be less greedy, I suppose.

Or reform society from the ground up. Every Yiddish writer I have considered here - to my knowledge, actually, every one I have read - was a socialist of some sort, and many were some variety of Communist. The degree of radicalism varied a lot, but in the face of brutal poverty, an oppressive Russian state, a materialistic America, and so on, all of the writers ended up on one side. Or, to be more precise, all of the literary writers.* There seems to have been a lot more disagreement about Zionism than about the redistribution of property.

H. Leivick's play Shop (1926) is first-rate agitprop by one of the Communist writers. Jewish garment workers in a Lower East Side factory go on strike, and win. The good people more or less get their way, the bad people do not. At the end of Act II, the workers sing the "Internationale."

What keeps the propaganda interesting is exemplified in the songs in Act I: two flighty young things come to work singing "Yes, sir, that's my baby \ No, sir, don't mean maybe," while an older woman sings a traditional Yiddish sewing song. The play's politics are idealized, but the characters and setting have some reality of their own, and are allowed to argue back a little.

Shop works in a lot of dancing, too; it would probably be a lot more enjoyable to see than to read. At first, it's all social dance - workers on break play music and form couples. The play ends, though, this way:

"The pattern of the dance is transformed into something which welds the people with the machines. Severe and inhuman from the start, it changes increasingly into a storm. Hands outstretched and faces like fire. At its greatest heat, as the dance reaches ecstasy, screams and whistles are suddenly heard from the street."

Purely modernist, there. This is after the workers have won the strike, too; a joyous moment turns into something more complicated, or skeptical. Here's the very end:

"The shop is alone. The machines make noise; they make noise."

* This is vaguely related, apparently, to why I haven't come across any early female Yiddish writers. The few women who were fortunate enough to be educated and had the temperament to write did not want to waste their time with literature. Rosa Luxemburg and her kindred spirits were going to change the world.

Yiddish playwrights are against greed. Me, too, no evil eye.

All of the plays in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation are American (written in the U.S., performed in New York theaters), but most of them are set in the old country, not so old for most of the audience.

The best play, I think, it the one Nahma Sandrow puts in the title: Jacob Gordin's God, Man, and Devil (1900). Gordin was a giant in the Yiddish theater, it's first serious playwright. He was right in the mainstream of modern theater, and reminded me at times of Ibsen or Ostrovsky. Gordin was a Tolstoyan who wanted to use the theater to educate the masses about high culture; as a result, he wrote a stage version of The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Jewish King Lear, which I must, must read.

God, Man, and Devil has a literary predecessor, too, as one might guess from the title. This is a Faust story. In a simplified version of Goethe's prologue, Satan, not to be mentioned on anyone's blog, convinces a distant, preoccupied God to let him test the virtue of a pious man with riches. Satan, no evil eye, actually tells us that this has be more like the story of Faust than Job, because "Nowadays a Jew is used to sorrows."

The dapper Mephistopheles, not to be thought of, calling himself Uriel Mischief, inveigles the poor, virtuous scribe Hereshele into buying a lottery ticket, a winner. Hershele is a genuinely religoius man, but the money, and Mischief's influence, ruin his and his family's lives, no evil eye, in more or less predictable ways. We get divorce, industrial accidents, attempted murder, all sorts of dramatic things.

The ingenious thing about the play is how Hershele's worst traits turn out to have been present all along, and how they are brought out through his interactions with his wife and father and other characters. The story of a man destroyed by his greed, good stay, evil away, is not exactly subtle, but the dramatic revelation of his character is expertly done. Hershele really is a good man, but not just that, like all of us.

It was asking for trouble to mention the devil, not to be mentioned, or good luck, no evil eye, and Hershele has a superstitious neighbor who has all of the formulas necessary to ward off all the bad effects. I have interlarded my text with some of them. She, of course, mentions luck and the devil more than anyone. A good gag for a play where the devil is an onstage character.

David Pinski's play The Treasure (1906) is also a greed play. An undertaker's son finds some gold coins in the cemetery while burying his dog. The vain teenage daughter, who is, frankly, a scream, gets to be a rich girl for a day, perhaps a bit too publicly. Next thing you know, the whole town is digging up the cemetery. Finally, logically, the disturbed dead take the stage.

This one's not exactly subtle, either, but it's funny, it builds to a meaningful climax, and I'll bet it works well live. Sandrow includes a scene from another from another Pinski play, Yankl the Blacksmith, just to show that Jewish playwrights did actually write about lust and adultery and other typical dramatic subjects (and the scene is well-chosen - it's like Jewish Tennessee Williams). But four out of the five plays in her excellent book are primarily attacks on greed.

I can't be expected to work for the sake of ideals alone - in America, thank God, people know the value of a pious Jew.

More samples from Nahma Sandrow's God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation. I had not planned to write about this for more than a couple of days, but My Life in Book's perspicacious question has inspired me, although to what, who can say.

Two major themes dominate early Yiddish literature: one is ignorance and superstition, and the other is greed. Both are threats to culture. Outside oppression - anti-Semitism and pogroms - is a distant third, although it comes to the forefront as conditions in Russia worsen. For the Yiddish writers who emigrated to America, to New York - and all of the plays in this book are American - superstition has receded, and the pogroms have been left behind. That leaves greed, mostly. I can be this reductive in part because there isn't that much Yiddish literature and these themes really are very common, and in part through pure ignorance (but not superstition).

An example of greed and ignorance, hand in hand, the beginning of Messiah in America (1919) by Isaac Moishe Nadir:

Shabby theatrical office, Broadway area, 1920s. MENAKHEM-YOSEF is a producer; JACK is his assistant.

JACK. I've got it!

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. What?

JACK. A spitter.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. A spitter. What do you mean, a spitter?

JACK. A novelty. I know this kid who can spit further than anyone in the world. His record is nineteen feet.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. Nineteen feet is no novelty. It seems to me that somebody has already spit further. He's already been outspat.

JACK. What are you talking about, Mr. Menakhem-Yosef? Nobody has spit nineteen feet yet, except for the Philadelphia spitter, and he's dead.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. See that? It's the nation's best men that die the youngest. How much will he take?

JACK. The spitter? Four hundred fifty a show. But I think he's good value.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. Certainly he's good value, who's talking value? But that's too high for me. I can't be expected to work for the sake of ideals alone. I can't bring on the Messiah single-handed.

JACK. What did you just say? Messiah. Messiah? Quiet. Why not bring on the Messiah? How is the Messiah any worse than a spitter?

I don't want to, but I'll stop there. They're going to put on a Broadway show in which the Jewish Messiah comes to earth. They plan to sell shares in the First Messiah Redemption Corporation. "Redeemed from what?" "How the hell should I know? What difference does it make? Jews want to be redeemed." They get Jack's uncomprehending uncle to play the Messiah, and pay h im thirty-five dollars a week, because "In America, thank God, people know the value of a pious Jew."

This is all completely outrageous, an affront to decency and good taste. Sandrow compares the playwright's humor to a sock to the jaw. That's about right.

What happens next? Don't know, exactly. Sandrow only includes this one scene! More than what I wrote, but only about four pages, all just as good. "It culminates in a boxing match between two competing Messiahs: the one who appears in this scene and a young motorcycle tough." Oy, you're killing me, I want the rest!

Tomorrow, more greed.