NAPLES, 1562–1565
Bruno published his Candlemaker twenty years after he arrived in Naples and six years after he had left the city for good, but the play clearly returns to the time when he was a young student scrabbling for a place to live and a place at the university. In other words, he set his philosophical drama in the very time and the very place that had first brought him to philosophy. As he tells his audience, “You should imagine this as the royal city of Naples, somewhere near the Seggio di Nilo,” and like the young Bruno himself, his audience must make its way through the noise, crowds, chaos, and bad government to discover the point of it all. As he announces in the play’s “Proprologue”:
The comedy will have no prologue and it doesn’t matter: its material, its subject, its mode and order and circumstance, I tell you, will appear in proper order, and be put before your eyes in order, which is much better than having them explained to you in order; this is a kind of fabric that has both a warp and a woof; whoever can grasp it, let him grasp it; whoever wants to understand it, let him understand it … Note who comes and goes, what is said and what is done, how to understand it, how it can be understood; for certainly depending on how you take these words and actions … you will have occasion to laugh or weep mightily.
Precisely because of its hugeness and its confusion, Naples turned Giordano Bruno into a thinker. In its noisy, cruel, complicated heart, he learned to read, study, and train his memory with extraordinary discipline. His philosophy, in turn, would reflect its origins in Europe’s most crowded city: he would promise that it fitted citizens for living in the world, even when that world was only a tiny corner of an endless expanse of space.
First, however, Bruno had to find his own way, a slight, ambitious fourteen-year-old confronting the “fabric” of Naples with little more than his wits to help him. That “fabric,” in The Candlemaker, reflects all the caprice and contradiction of Spanish rule: crime is rife despite the oppressive presence of police attached to “the Court,” the dread Spanish tribunal situated in a fortress on the eastern margin of the city. Although it is illegal for a man to kiss a woman in public, the police let the streets swarm with prostitutes, from the streetwalkers who ply their trade alongside the port and the marketplace to the “women of honor,” courtesans who receive their wealthy clients so long, one of them muses, as their beauty lasts; the money they make in their teens and early twenties will have to sustain them for a lifetime. Blasphemy is severely punished by law, but every character in the play swears by a pantheon of saints and their relics, as well as the long-suffering Madonna. Greed for money is matched by the scramble for personal advantage; by robbing and tricking rich old men, the women, young men, and ruffians in this profane comedy get by in a harsh, uncompromising world. And yet, as Bruno stresses over and over again through the varying voices of his characters, this world, for all its corruption, is unfolding exactly as it should.
The most eloquent voices in the play, strikingly, are those of the women, who lay bare the cruelty of their society in forthright speeches. It is the courtesan Vittoria who best sums up the comedy’s overall meaning: “The world is fine as it is”—“Il mondo sta bene come sta.”
Consider that, like virgins, some of us are called foolish, and others wise; so that among those of us who taste the best fruits the world produces [that is, sex], the crazy ones are the ones who love only for passing pleasure, and don’t think about old age stealing up on them so fast that they neither see nor hear it, all the while it’s driving our gentlemen friends away. As old age wrinkles her face, he closes up his wallet; age saps her juices from the inside, his love wilts on the outside, age strikes her at close quarters, he waves goodbye from a distance. So it’s important to line things up in time. Whoever waits for time is wasting time. If I wait for time, time won’t wait for me. We need to take advantage of their situation when they still think they need us. Grab the prey when it’s chasing you, don’t wait until it runs away. If you don’t know how to keep a bird in a cage, you’ll never catch it on the wing. He may have a small brain and a bad back, but he has a fine wallet: as for the first circumstance, too bad for him; as for the second, it’s not my problem; as for the third—now, that’s something to reckon with. Wise men live for fools, and fools for the wise. If everyone were a lord, they’d be lords no longer: if everyone were wise, no one would be wise, and if they were all fools, none would be fools. The world is fine as it is.
The play’s prime mover, Gioan Bernardo, a young painter who ends up bedding both the heroines, is obviously Bruno as he would like to be, a genial, sexy swain, an artist whose greatest work is his own life. His pronouncements have often been read as quick doses of the Nolan philosophy, delivered by the play’s most attractive male character, but on the occasions when he appears, Gioan Bernardo is more of a trickster than a philosopher, as slippery as the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera. Like Don Giovanni, he is almost always playing a part rather than speaking frankly. His most straightforward speech involves the economy of nature:
It is common opinion that things are so ordered that nature never stints on the necessities, and never gives in excess. Oysters have no feet because, no matter where in the sea they find themselves, they have everything they need to sustain them, for they live on water and the heat of the sun (which penetrates into the deep). Moles have no eyes because they live underground, and live on nothing but earth, and can’t possibly lose track of it. If someone lacks art, they’re not granted tools.
Perhaps, as a creature of wishful thinking as much as out of dramatic necessity, Gioan Bernardo is a little too attractive for his own good. Bruno’s real presence in the world, especially when he first arrived in Naples, was surely more like that of a character who appears in only one scene of The Candlemaker, Ottaviano, a student of the tedious schoolmaster Manfurio, so much brighter than his teacher that he turns the pedant’s rhetoric against him and walks offstage in triumph. First, however, he butters up the silly old man with a torrent of sarcastic flattery:
OTTAVIANO: O gentle master, subtle, eloquent, gallant steward and cupbearer of the Muses.
MANFURIO: O lovely apposition.
OTT: Patriarch of the Apollonian choir …
MAN: “Apolline” were better.
OTT: Trumpet of Phoebus, let me kiss your left cheek, for I am unworthy to kiss that sweet mouth.
MAN: I envy not Jove his nectar and ambrosia—
Abruptly, Ottaviano switches from this abject flattery to insult; by the time Manfurio realizes that Ottaviano has been pulling his leg, the boy has skipped off, back into the streets where another student, Filippo Bruno, once scrabbled with the same ingenuity for survival in a harsh, beautiful, beleaguered city.
Bruno would eventually come to the same philosophical conclusion as Vittoria the courtesan: the world was fine as it was, with God vitally present in the chaos of everyday reality rather than off in some transcendent world of Ideas. But that revelation of the world’s essential rightness never kept him from acting to improve it. His alter ego in The Candlemaker is not a prostitute, after all, but an artist.
Furthermore, Bruno spent his years in Naples at San Domenico Maggiore, the very center of resistance to Spanish rule. Within its halls he learned how to link theology with political action.