ALL THE PLAYS we have considered so far are written in verse. This has its reasons. For more than two thousand years the notion of verse was nearly inseparable from that of tragic drama. The idea of “prose tragedy” is singularly modern, and to many poets and critics it remains paradoxical. There are historical reasons for this and reasons of literary technique. But there are also causes deeply rooted in our common understanding of the quality of language. I say verse and not poetry, for poetry can be a virtue of prose, of mathematics, or any action of the mind that tends toward shape. The poetic is an attribute; verse is a technical form.
In literature, verse precedes prose. Literature is a setting apart of language from the requirements of immediate utility and communication. It raises discourse above common speech for purposes of invocation, adornment, or remembrance. The natural means of such elevation are rhythm and explicit prosody. By not being prose, by having metre or rhyme or a pattern of formal recurrence, language imposes on the mind a sense of special occasion and preserves its shape in the memory. It becomes verse. The notion of literary prose is highly sophisticated. I wonder whether it has any relevance before the orations recorded or contrived by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian Wars and before the Dialogues of Plato. It is in these works that we first encounter the feeling that prose could aspire to the dignity and “apartness” of literature. But Thucydides and Plato come late in the evolution of Greek letters, and neither was concerned with drama.
It is certain that Greek tragedy was, from the outset, written in verse. It sprang from archaic rituals of celebration or lament and was inseparable from the use of language in a heightened lyric mode. Attic drama represents a convergence of speech, music, and dance. In all three, rhythm is the vital centre, and when language is in a state of rhythm (words in the condition of ordered motion), it is verse. In the Oresteia no less than in the Bacchae, perhaps the last of the great feats of the Greek tragic imagination, the action of the drama and the moral experience of the characters are wholly united to the metric form. Greek tragedy is sung, danced, and declaimed. Prose has no place in it.
Very early, moreover, the mind perceived a relation between poetic forms and those categories of truth which are not directly verifiable. We speak still of “poetic truth” when signifying that a statement may be false or meaningless by the test of empiric proof, yet possesses at the same time an important, undeniable verity in a moral, psychological, or formal domain. Now the truths of mythology and religious experience are largely of this order. Prose submits its own statements to criteria of verification which are, in fact, irrelevant or inapplicable to the realities of myth. And it is on these that Greek tragedy is founded. The matter of tragic legend, whether it invokes Agamemnon, Oedipus, or Alcestis torn from the dead, cannot be held liable to prosaic inquisition. As Robert Graves says, the imagination has extra-territorial rights, and these are guarded by poetry.
Poetry also has its criteria of truth. Indeed, they are more severe than those of prose, but they are different. The criterion of poetic truth is one of internal consistency and psychological conviction. Where the pressure of imagination is sufficiently sustained, we allow poetry the most ample liberties. In that sense, we may say that verse is the pure mathematics of language. It is more exact than prose, more self-contained, and more capable of constructing theoretic forms independent of material basis. It can “lie” creatively. The worlds of poetic myth, like those of non-Euclidean geometry, are persuasive of truth so long as they adhere to their own imaginative premises. Prose, on the contrary, is applied mathematics. Somewhere along the line the assertions it makes must correspond to our sensual perceptions. The houses described in prose must stand on solid foundations. Prose measures, records, and anticipates the realities of practical life. It is the garb of the mind doing its daily job of work.
This is no longer entirely the case. Modern literature has developed the concept of “poetic prose,” of a prose liberated from verifiability and the jurisdiction of logic as it is embodied in common syntax. There are prophetic traces of this idea in Rabelais and Sterne. But it does not really assume importance before Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Joyce. Until their time the distinctions between the role of verse and that of prose were firm.
Verse is not only the special guardian of poetic truth against the critique of empiricism. It is the prime divider between the world of high tragedy and that of ordinary existence. Kings, prophets, and heroes speak in verse, thus showing that the exemplary personages in the commonwealth communicate in a manner nobler and more ancient than that reserved to common men. There is nothing democratic in the vision of tragedy. The royal and heroic characters whom the gods honour with their vengeance are set higher than we are in the chain of being, and their style of utterance must reflect this elevation. Common men are prosaic, and revolutionaries write their manifestoes in prose. Kings answer in verse. Shakespeare knew this well. Richard II is a drama of languages which fail to communicate with each other. Richard goes to ruin because he seeks to enforce the criteria of poetic truth on the gross, mutinous claims of political reality. He is a royal poet defeated by a rebellion of prose.
Like music, moreover, verse sets a barrier between the tragic action and the audience. Even where there is no longer a chorus it creates that necessary sense of distance and strangeness to which Schiller referred. The difference of languages between the stage and the pit alters the perspective and gives to the characters and their actions a special magnitude. And by compelling the mind to surmount a momentary barrier of formality, verse arrests and ripens our emotions. We can identify ourselves with Agamemnon, Macbeth, or Phèdre, but only partially, and after preliminary effort. Their use of a language shaped more nobly and intricately than our own imposes on us a respectful distance. We cannot leap into their skins as we are invited to do in naturalistic drama. Thus verse prevents our sympathies from growing too familiar. At the courts of great monarchs, lesser nobility and the third estate were not allowed too near the royal person. But prose is a leveller and gets very close to its object.
Verse at once simplifies and complicates the portrayal of human conduct. That is the crucial point. It simplifies because it strips away from life the encumbrances of material contingency. Where men speak verse, they are not prone to catching colds or suffering from indigestion. They do not concern themselves with the next meal or train time-tables. I have cited earlier the opening line of Victor Hugo’s Cromwell. It infuriated contemporary critics because it used an alexandrin, the very mark of high and timeless life, for a precise temporal statement. It drew tragic verse down to the gross world of clocks and calendars. Like wealth, in the poetics of Henry James and Proust, verse relieves the personages of tragic drama from the complications of material and physical need. It is because all material exactions are met by the assumption of financial ease that Jamesian and Proustian characters are at liberty to live in full the life of feeling and intelligence. So it is in tragedy. In a very real sense, the tragic hero lets his servants live for him. It is they who assume the corrupting burdens of hunger, sleep, and ailment. This is one of the decisive differences between the world of the novel, which is that of prose, and the world of the tragic theatre, which is that of verse. In prose fiction, as D. H. Lawrence remarked, “you know there is a watercloset on the premises.” We are not called upon to envisage such facilities at Mycenae and Elsinore. If there are bathrooms in the houses of tragedy, they are for Agamemnon to be murdered in.
It is this distinction which lies behind the neo-classic belief that verse should not be made to express menial facts. Since Wordsworth and the romantics, we no longer accept this convention. From the time of the Lyrical Ballads to that of Prufrock, poetry has appropriated to itself all domains, however sordid or familiar. It is held that all manner of reality can be given suitable poetic form. I wonder whether this is really so. Dryden conceded that verse might be made to say “close the door,” but was dubious whether it should. For in performing such tasks it descends into the chaos of material objects and bodily functions where prose is master. Certain styles of action are more appropriate to poetic incarnation than others. Because we have denied the fact, so much of what passes for modern poetry is merely inflated or bewildered prose. In contemporary verse drama, we see repeated failures to distinguish between proper and improper uses of poetic form. The recent plays of T. S. Eliot give clear proof of what happens when blank verse is asked to carry out domestic functions. It rebels.
But if verse simplifies our account of reality by eliminating life below the stairs, it also immensely complicates the range and values of the behaviour of the mind. By virtue of elision, concentration, obliqueness, and its capacity to sustain a plurality of meanings, poetry gives an image of life which is far denser and more complex than that of prose. The natural shape of prose is linear; it proceeds by consequent statement. It qualifies or contradicts by what comes after. Poetry can advance discordant persuasions simultaneously. Metaphors, imagery, and the tropes of verse rhetoric can be charged with simultaneous yet disparate meanings, even as music can convey at the same moment contrasting energies of motion. The syntax of prose embodies the central role which causal relations and temporal logic play in the proceedings of ordinary thought. The syntax of verse is, in part, liberated from causality and time. It can put cause before effect and allow to argument a progress more adventurous than the marching order of traditional logic. That is why good verse is untranslatable into prose. Consider an example from Coriolanus (a play in which Shakespeare’s purpose depends heavily on the prerogatives of poetic form):
No take more!
What may be sworn by, both divine and human,
Seal what I end withal! This double worship—
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other
Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance—it must omit
Real necessities, and give way the while
To unstable slightness. Purpose so barr’d, it follows
Nothing is done to purpose. Therefore, beseech you—
You that will be less fearful than discreet;
That love the fundamental part of state
More than you doubt the change on’t; that prefer
A noble life before a long, and wish
To jump a body with a dangerous physic
That’s sure of death without it—at once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison.
No prose paraphrase can give a fair equivalent. Nor can we “translate” downward Hamlet’s soliloquies, Macbeth’s meditation on death, or Cleopatra’s lament over her fallen lover.
As mathematics recedes from the obvious, it becomes less translatable into anything but itself. As poetry moves further from the prosaic, as it gains in subtlety and concentration, it becomes irreducible to any other medium. Bad verse, verse which is not strictly necessary to the purpose, profits from good paraphrase or even from translation into another language. Witness how much finer Poe sounds in French. But good verse, that is to say poetry, is all but lost.
So far, therefore, as tragic drama is an exaltation of action above the flux of disorder and compromise prevalent in habitual life, it requires the shape of verse. The stylization and simplification which that shape imposes on the outward aspects of conduct make possible the moral, intellectual, and emotional complications of high drama. Poetic conventions clear the ground for the free play of moral forces. The tragic actors in the Greek theatre stood on lofty wooden shoes and spoke through great masks, thus living higher and louder than life. Verse provides a similar altitude and resonance.
This is not to deny that prose has its own tragic register. One would not wish Tacitus to have written in verse, and Keats’s letters attain depths of feeling even greater than those of his poetry. But the two spheres are different, and the decision of certain playwrights to carry tragedy from the realm of verse into that of prose is one of the decisive occurrences in the history of western drama.
Traditionally the frontier between verse and prose corresponds to that which separates the tragic from the comic. What has come down to us of Greek and Latin comedy is in verse. Many of the same metres are used both by the tragedians and by Aristophanes, and this is true also of Plautus and Terence. But most probably there flourished below the level of literary drama traditions of folk comedy and farce presented in prose. That no texts have survived points to the larger fact that prose had not yet been accorded the dignity of belles-lettres. It was improvised and transmitted by word of mouth, if at all. But there can be no doubt that the association between comedy and prose is a very ancient and natural one. Verse and tragedy belong together in the domain of aristocratic life. Comedy is the art of the lesser orders of men. It tends to dramatize those material circumstances and bodily functions which are banished from the tragic stage. The comic personage does not transcend the flesh; he is engrossed in it. There are no lavatories in tragic palaces, but from its very dawn, comedy has had use for chamber pots. In tragedy, we do not observe men eating, nor do we hear them snore. But the nightcap and the cooking ladle flourish in the art of Aristophanes and Menander. And they thrust us downward, to the world of prose.
Medieval literature had its rich comic undergrowth. Nonliterary forms of dramatic entertainment, compounded of mime, jugglery, and broad horseplay, were widely popular. They enter the mystery cycles in the guise of comic interludes. The substitution of a sheep for the Child Jesus in the Shepherd’s Play is a notorious instance. No doubt there lies behind it a long tradition of dramatic farce. Vernacular prose, moreover, was gaining in strength and resource. With the renaissance, it was ready to assume the full rights of literature. It did so in Rojas’s Celestina (1499), a work part novel and part drama, and in Machiavelli’s Mandragola (1522), the first great modern comedy. From the Mandragola the way lies open to the comic prose of Molière and Congreve.
The traditional association between the comic genre and the prose form is implicit throughout Elizabethan drama. Often the double plot of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play is divided between prose comedy and verse tragedy. Clowns, fools, menials, and rustics speak prose in the very same scenes in which their masters speak in iambic verse. Such separation according to social rank and dramatic mood is frequent in Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and his courtiers use verse. So do the fairies in whom all language bursts into the flame of poetry. Peter Quince and his crew, on the other hand, express themselves in gnarled, clotted prose. Much of our pleasure springs from the counterpoint. When the rustics act their play before him, Theseus does them the courtesy of descending into prose (how else should they understand his thanks?). But it is a prose shot through with the cadence of his natural poetic style: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” The fun of Love’s Labour’s Lost arises in part from Armado’s fantastical prose. He speaks “not like a man of God’s making” because he torments prose into the florid shapes of the poetical. In the late Shakespeare, distinctions between verse and prose are attenuated by the search for an inclusive form, instantaneously responsive to the conditions of dramatic action and feeling. Yet even here we perceive the old usage. The comedy and the prose belong to low life, the grief and the poetry to high. In the last Act of Cymbeline, the caustic, sententious prose of the jailer falls across the way of some of the most melodious verse Shakespeare ever wrote. In The Winter’s Tale the use of prose precisely marks the limits of the pastoral. The clown, the servant, and the shepherds speak in prose though poetry knocks at every door. In The Tempest this ancient division is most clear. The isle is full of rarest music, but the low creatures on it—Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano—riot and conspire in rank prose. Caliban, who has in him a kind of angry poetry, turns prosaic under the influence of Stephano’s bottle. Yet none of these instances is conclusive. Cloten, in Cymbeline, nearly always uses prose as if to show that, although a royal personage, he is base and misshapen. The Winter’s Tale opens with a scene in which two courtiers converse in prose. And the castaway lords in The Tempest sometimes fall out of verse.
The subject of Shakespeare’s alternate use of verse and prose is complex and fascinating. Despite the great mass of Shakespearean criticism, it has received no thorough treatment. There is a technical difficulty. The distribution between blank verse and prose sometimes depends on the vagaries of the printer and the loose habits of Elizabethan punctuation rather than on the intentions of the poet. In certain plays such as As You Like It and Coriolanus, the printer seems to have gone particularly astray, making prose paragraphs of iambic pentameter or hypermetric lines of what was meant to be prose. Moreover, there is the fact that Elizabethan and Jacobean prose has a tendency to fall into the gait of blank verse.
But these accidents have been overstressed. In most cases, Shakespeare knew precisely what he was about when he changed from verse to prose or back again. He modulated the expressive form according to the requirements of character, mood, and dramatic circumstance. It is a matter of poetic tact, of an instrument played incomparably by ear. Both modes were equally pliant to his touch. Shakespeare was fully aware of the dramatic possibilities inherent in the shift from one to the other. He knew what effects of irony or contrast could be derived from a sudden confrontation of the poetic and the prosaic voice. And he was beginning to explore, in such plays as Lear and Coriolanus, those special resources of prose which are not available to poetry even where it is most complex.
The function of contrast is beautifully shown in Much Ado About Nothing. Nearly the entire play is written in prose. The few passages of verse are only a kind of shorthand to quicken matters. Indeed, with this play English prose established a firm claim to the comedy of intellect. Congreve, Oscar Wilde, and Shaw are direct heirs to Shakespeare’s presentation of Beatrice and Benedick. Verse would mar the stringent, bracing quality of their love. They are lovers in the middle range of passion, enamoured neither of the flesh nor altogether of the heart, but caught in the enchantment of each other’s wit. Their bright encounters show how intelligence gives to prose its real music. But in the last Act, poetry makes a memorable entrance. The setting is Hero’s false tomb. Claudio, Don Pedro, and their musicians come to do it sorrowful honour. They sing a mournful lyric: “Pardon, goddess of the night.” Then the prince turns to the players:
Good morrow, masters, put your torches out.
The wolves have prey’d, and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey.
The lines cast a healing spell. They brush away the squalid machinations of the plot. At the touch of poetry, the entire play moves into a more luminous key. We know that disclosure is imminent and that the affair will end happily. This salutation to the morning, moreover, delivers a gentle rebuke to Beatrice and Benedick. Don Pedro invokes the pastoral and mythological order of the world. It has none of the sophistication of the lovers’ prose. But it is more enduring.
Another example of intended contrast is that of the rival funeral orations in Julius Caesar. Brutus speaks in prose:
Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen? As Caesar love’d me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but—as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition.
A moment later, Mark Anthony launches into verse rhetoric of matchless cunning. We are meant to observe the full force of the contrast. Brutus’ style is dry and noble, as from a book of law. It proceeds in the vein of reason and solicits the mind. Anthony throws fire into the blood. He uses every licence of poetic form to lash the mob into a frenzy. He tells us: “I am no orator, as Brutus is.” True; he is a word-conjurer and poet. Like all men to whom prose is the natural voice of public affairs, Brutus fails to realize how much there is in politics of eloquent unreason. Even before Anthony has ceased, Brutus and Cassius have to “ride like madmen through the gates of Rome.” A fierce poetry is at their heels.
Sometimes Shakespeare uses the collision between verse and prose to articulate the principal meaning of a play. In Henry IV there is a manifold dialectic: nobility against crown; north against south; the life of the court against that of the tavern. Embracing all, is the clash between the chivalric ideal of conduct, already tainted with decay, and the new mercantile empiricism foreshadowed in Falstaff. Hotspur, Northumberland, and the King use high-flown verse, rich with the allegoric devices of feudal rhetoric. Falstaff speaks shrewd, carnal prose. We hear in it the voice of Elizabethan London. The two languages are constantly set against each other. Hotspur invariably strikes the medieval chord:
Now, Esperance! Percy! and set on.
Sound all the lofty instruments of war,
And by that music let us all embrace;
For, heaven to earth, some of us never shall
A second time do such a courtesy.
The Gallic battle cry and the archaic sense of “courtesy” (courtoisie) make the style as medieval as full armour. Falstaff gives the answer of the modern common man:
Can honour set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning!
The counting-house note in “reckoning” is deliberate. This is already the voice of Sancho Panza and the Good Soldier Schweik. It gives the lie to the heroic ideal. It is right that it should be Falstaff who claims victory over Hotspur and carries his body off the field. The Hotspurs are out of date.
Prince Hal moves between verse and prose with a cool sense of occasion. That is his special strength. He can use both the courtly and the tavern worlds toward his own ambitions. He has seen through their rival pretensions and is servant to neither. In the early part of the drama, the Prince allows Falstaff to set the tone. When they meet during the battle of Shrewsbury, Hal enters in the style of Hotspur:
Many a nobleman lies stark and stiff
Under the hoofs of vaunting enemies,
Whose deaths are yet unreveng’d. I prithee
Lend me thy sword.
But Falstaff is immune to chivalry. He answers in prose: “take my pistol, if thou wilt.” Prose and firearms go together. They are distinctly of the modern world. In Part II, on the contrary, the encounter between verse and prose ends with the necessary triumph of the poetic:
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
The verse beats like a stick across the old carouser’s back. But with his superb sense of controlled complication, Shakespeare allows Falstaff a parting word: “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.” The line is prose and the matter is money. It speaks of modern life, whereas there shines on Henry V, as he sets off to France and the last of medieval wars, the glory of a passing age.
In Troilus and Cressida the clash between the heroic ideal and prosaic realism occurs on more narrow and acrimonious ground. The mirror which Thersites holds up to the chivalric action is clouded and distorting. But there is a certain base truth in the image. Thersites is, perhaps, the first of those whom Dostoevsky calls “the men from the underground”; he reviles society for being hypocritical in its professed ideals and pours over others the dregs of his self-contempt. Thersites does more than speak prose; he is the incarnation of the antipoetic. His prose flourishes on the refuse of language. It is rank with gall and seeks to strip away the ornamental and discretionary conventions of the courtly style. In Act V, the two visions of life are confronted. The scene is a marvel of precise intonation. Troilus has observed Cressida’s falsehood and is about to be escorted from the Greek camp (this interlude in the midst of war is itself a convention of chivalry). He speaks in the elaborate style of courtly love and bids Diomed defiance in terms which bring vividly to mind feudal warfare and heraldic usage. But Thersites has been listening in the dark. As the noble lords withdraw, he pronounces a gross epitaph on the entire tradition of heroic romance. In a single moment, the wheel of language is brought full circle:
| TROILUS: | Have with you, Prince. My courteous lord, adieu. |
Farewell, revolted fair! and, Diomed, Stand fast and wear a castle on thy head! | |
| ULYSSES: | I’ll bring you to the gates. |
| TROILUS: | Accept distracted thanks. |
| THERSITES: | Would I could meet that rogue Diomed! I would croak like a raven; I would bode, I would bode. Patroclus will give me anything for the intelligence of this whore. The parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab. Lechery, lechery! still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds fashion. A burning devil take them! |
To the prose in King Lear, the rest of Shakespearean prose, and the style of Thersites in particular, seem preliminary. The functions of ironic contrast and social distinction are now surpassed and we find, for the first time in drama, a dissociation of tragedy from poetic form. The prose in Lear is a complete tragic medium and lies at the centre of the play. It shows virtues which differ from those of dramatic blank verse not in degree but in essence. This was Shakespeare’s radical insight. It made accessible a notion which the tragic theatre since Aeschylus had left unexamined: that of prose tragedy. And being the most comprehensive image of man’s estate in Shakespeare’s entire work, King Lear seems to marshal all the resources of language. The two voices of poetry and prose are heard in their full range.
The prose of Lear is charged with many tasks. It serves the considered malice of Edmund, the inspired gibberish of the Fool, the feigned distraction of Edgar, and Lear’s true madness. There is superb poetry in the play. The little that Cordelia says is marked by the concise music of Shakespeare’s late poetic manner. But the weight of suffering lies with the prose. This is true particularly of the scenes on the heath and during the storm. There nature herself has broken the mould of order, and so far as verse is order, it would do the occasion and the setting unmerited grace. Robbed of the honours, comforts, and powers of kingship, Lear discards the dignities of verse. His maddened spirit cries out in a prose which strains at the bonds of reason and syntax:
Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on’s are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come, unbutton here.
He has learnt that in the mouths of a Regan and a Goneril words can be made the mask of pure falsehood. In his agony, therefore, he uses them with a kind of lavish hatred. Having been unutterably wronged by fair but treacherous speech, Lear seeks to degrade language by steeping it in grossness and cruelty:
Behold yond simp’ring dame, whose face between her forks presages snow; that minces virtue, and do’s shake the head to hear of pleasure’s name. The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, though women all above; but to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption.
This passage is often printed in irregular verse. But one’s ear supports the reading of the First Quarto. The horror of the play has been gathering toward some expression of ultimate loathing and the comeliness of poetic form, however momentary, would diminish the monstrous sense of Lear’s assertion. These scenes on the heath draw the imagination to what Coleridge termed a “world’s convention of agonies.” In that last blackness, Shakespeare found prose to be the more just conveyor.
But this enrichment of the formal resources of tragic drama went largely unobserved. Neither during the eighteenth century, nor in the romantic period, did criticism concern itself with Shakespearean prose. Editors took it for granted or sought to rearrange it into blank verse. In his commentary on Lear, Coleridge never stops to note the special character of the expressive means. He points out that Lear’s madness is like “an eddy without progression,” yet fails to remark how closely the effect of static frenzy depends on the quality of the prose. This omission is characteristic. Shakespeare anchored in the minds of later English poets a firm association between tragedy and verse. His own blank verse seemed to control the shape of the language. To write tragedy at all, was to write verse drama. The neglect of Shakespearean prose is understandable, but it proved costly to the future of the English theatre.
The conception of prose tragedy was first argued in France. During the quarrel between ancients and moderns, Fontenelle and La Motte protested against the tyranny of verse. In 1722 La Motte began writing prose tragedies on Biblical and classical themes; his prose Oedipus appeared in 1730. He lacked the talent necessary to show the strength of his idea. But although verse tragedy continued to be the dominant genre, opposition to it never ceased. In the 1820s Stendhal declared repeatedly that tragedy would survive in modern literature only if it were written in prose. He could have argued from historical precedent, for the French language had already crossed the psychological and conventional barriers between prose and tragic drama in the late seventeenth century.
The decisive advance occurs in Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The play is a tragedy neither according to the canons of Molière’s own time nor, I suppose, by any larger definition. It presumes that damnation is real, but the action is viewed from an angle which is not wholly serious. The mastery of the play, its capacity to delight and disquiet at the same time, lies precisely in this slight distortion of perspective. The plot is grim, yet the actual events provoke a persistent drollery. And the reason is that we do not see them in the round. They are shown to us with a deliberate flatness. Don Juan is not a complete dramatic character. He can neither change nor mature. His responses are utterly predictable, and there is about him something of an eloquent, vivacious marionette. Few dramatic personages of comparable fascination show so little trace of any life outside their stage presence. He lives only in the theatrical moment, as does even the most brilliant of puppets. Don Juan represents a final heightening of that element of farce which is always latent in Molière. It translates into rhetorical and psychological terms the strong but somewhat shallow vitality of slapstick.
But even if it is something less than tragedy, Don Juan has an undeniable, grim force. And the nature of that force depends closely on Molière’s handling of dramatic prose. Some of the most striking effects are of a kind which verse might render in its own way, but it would, I think, be less natural and direct. Consider the famous scene (long suppressed for its libertine cruelty) in which Don Juan seeks to tempt a starving hermit into committing blasphemy:
| DON JUAN: | Tu n’as qu’à voir si tu veux gagner un louis d’or, ou non; en voici un que je te donne, si tu jures. Tiens, il faut jurer. |
| LE PAUVRE: | Monsieur … |
| DON JUAN: | A moins de cela, tu ne l’auras pas. |
| SGANARELLE: | Va, va, jure un peu; il n’y a pas de mal. |
| DON JUAN: | Prends, le voilà, prends, te dis-je; mais jure done. |
| LE PAUVRE: | Non monsieur, j’aime mieux mourir de faim. |
| DON JUAN: | Va, va, je te le donne pour l’amour de l’humanité.1 |
The tone is one of delicate balance between the savage and the frivolous; verse would bend it to either side. In the last moments of the play, the advantages of prose are again apparent. Don Juan is dragged to the flames of hell. His servant crawls out of the smoke and débris shouting for his wages:
| SGANARELLE: | Ah! mes gages! mes gages! Voilà, par sa mort, un chacun satisfait. Ciel offensé, lois violées, filles séduites, families déshonorées, parents outragés, femmes mises à mal, maris poussés à bout, tout le monde est content; il n’y a que moi seul de malheureux. Mes gages, mes gages, mes gages!2 |
Two of the most delightful traits in this passage derive from the tactics of rhetoric: the diminuendo of outrage which begins in heaven and ends with the cuckolds, and the double reference of the terms with which Sganarelle enumerates Don Juan’s victims. Each applies to its particular domain but carries at the same time a sexual connotation (violées, séduites, déshonorées, outragés). Thus the “violation” of the law at once evokes that of women, and the entire conceit is wound up in the double-entendre of poussés à bout.
But the dramatic value of Sganarelle’s outburst does not lie primarily in these rhetorical devices. What matters is the inappropriateness of Sganarelle’s feelings, his gross insensibility to the surrounding circumstance. This can best be rendered in prose. It is the indifference of the servant which makes explicit the damnation of the master. Having expended his vitality on empty lust, Don Juan has come to signify nothing even to his closest companion. He is a wildly animate shadow, snuffed out on the instant. His perdition and the eternity of his future torment leave Sganarelle unmoved. All he cares about are his unpaid wages, and his outcry for them is Don Juan’s sole epitaph.
It is no accident that both the scenes I have quoted from should involve money. The world of prose is that in which money counts, and the ascendancy of prose in western literature coincides with the development during the sixteenth century of modern economic relations. Like British reigning monarchs, the noble characters of tragedy carry no purse. We do not see Hamlet worrying about how to pay the players or Phèdre pondering her household accounts. It is only base creatures, such as Roderigo, who are shown putting money in their purse. But once economic factors have become dominant in society, the notion of the tragic will broaden to include financial ruin and the money-hatreds of the middle class. Molière was among the first to grasp the immense role which monetary relations assume in modern life. In Shakespeare, these relations retain an archaic innocence. One must possess money, as in The Merchant of Venice, for the stylish pursuit of love or to content one’s friends. But it comes from far places on sudden argosies. In Shakespearean drama, money is not an abstract counter of exchange whose only value derives from a fiction of reason; it is the daemon gold. Timon scatters it in compulsive waste and then finds it again, buried mysteriously on the edge of the sea. Of the Elizabethans, Ben Jonson had the truest insight into the mercantile temper. But even in Volpone, that great comedy of low finance, money has an irrational aura. It is a golden, sensuous god entering like fire into men’s veins. We are not shown how it is really earned, and the use of it is magic rather than economic.
Here again, the late seventeenth century marks the great division of sensibility, separating the world of Shakespeare from that of Voltaire and Adam Smith. It is in the late seventeenth century that literature begins taking a realistic view of money. Molière and Defoe realize that most of it comes neither from the fabled east nor out of the alchemist’s crucible. In Moll Flanders we glimpse the nervous and cerebral excitement of financial dealings. Swift went further. He had a sardonic insight into the unconscious roots of economic desire and played knowingly on the scatological aspects of avarice. The novels of Smollett show money being made and lost in rational and technical ways, and in the gambling scenes of Manon Lescaut there are intimations of that poetry of money which plays so large a part in Balzac, Ibsen, and Zola. But the poetry of money is prose.
The modern novel is a direct response to this turn of consciousness toward economic and bourgeois life. But this turn, which is one of the foremost occurrences in the entire history of the imagination, also affected drama. We can trace it back to George Lillo and the grimly prosaic plays that he wrote during the 1730s. His influence outside England was immense, and drama went middle-class with a vengeance. These “sentimental comedies” or, more aptly, comédies larmoyantes of the eighteenth century have not worn well. Their moralizing and pathos are so insistent as to become intolerable. We would have our feelings acted upon, not taken by the throat. Nevertheless, such plays as Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Diderot’s Le Fils naturel are of great historical interest. They lowered the range of drama so as to bring it into focus with the new realities of middle-class feeling. They are distant outriders to Ibsen. These parables of bourgeois life and suffering were written in prose. Lessing and Diderot sought to restore to the theatre the efficacy of current speech. For it was this that was entirely lacking in eighteenth-century tragedy. Yet the tragic poets, still in the grip of neo-classic conventions, would countenance no descent to the prosaic. Hence even their noblest efforts, Addison’s Cato and Samuel Johnson’s Irene, are cold, lifeless stuff. By refusing to avail itself of the reach of prose, tragedy veered away from the possibilities opened to it in Don Juan. The gap between tragic drama and the vital centres of imaginative concern widened and was never again completely bridged. And the formation of a dramatic prose appropriate to the conveyance of complex tragic emotions was delayed for perhaps a century.
The next step toward such a prose was taken by Goethe. In the initial, fragmentary version of Faust, the Urfaust, two scenes are in prose. One of these, Margarete in prison, Goethe changed to verse. But the encounter between Faust and Mephistopheles, which immediately precedes it, remained essentially intact throughout the sixty years during which Goethe worked on the Faust saga. It stands like an erratic bloc in the midst of poetry. But this scene, marked Trüber Tag. Feld., is notable not only for the singularity of its form, but also because it is probably the earliest in date of composition. It may go back as far as 1772, when the poet was under the impact of the trial and execution of a young woman who had murdered her illegitimate child. The dialogue seems to have been given to Goethe’s imagination whole and at white heat. The fact that he left it unaltered during the long years of revision affirms its inspired quality. The virtues of the prose are sparseness and accumulated stress. To show this, I must quote at some length:
FAUST: Im Elend! Verzweifelnd! Erbärmlich auf der Erde lange verirrt und nun gefangen! Als Missetäterin im Kerker zu entsetzlichen Qualen eingesperrt, das holde, unselige Geschöpf! Bis dahin! dahin!—Verräterischer, nichtswürdiger Geist, und das hast du mir verheimlicht! Steh nur, steh! Wälze die teuflischen Augen ingrimmend im Kopf herum! Steh und trutze mir durch deine unerträgliche Gegenwart!—Gefangen! Im unwiederbringlichen Elend! Bösen Geistern übergeben und der richtenden, gefühllosen Menschheit! Und mich wiegst du indes in abgeschmackten Zerstreuungen, verbirgst mir ihren wachsenden Jammer und lässest sie hilflos verderben!
MEPHISTOPHELES: Sie ist die erste nicht!
FAUST: Hund! abscheuliches Untier!—Wandle ihn, du unendlicher Geist! wandle den Wurm wieder in seine Hundsgestalt, wie er sich oft nächtlicherweile gefiel, vor mir herzutrotten, dem harmlosen Wandrer vor die Füsse zu kollem und sich dem niederstürzenden auf die Schultern zu hängen. Wandl’ ihn wieder in seine Lieblingsbildung, dass er vor mir im Sand auf dem Bauch krieche, ich ihn mit Füssen trete, den Verworfnen!—Die erste nicht! Jammer! Jammer!3
In part, the fierceness of the scene derives from the contrast between the prose and the surrounding poetry. Just before Faust breaks out in rage and grief, the vision of the Walpurgisnacht has faded away on a note of pure enchantment. The last quatrain sung by the receding spirits is marked pianissimo. The descent into prose is as sudden and violent as the change of setting from Oberon’s palace to the dreary day on the open field. But the tragic weight lies mainly in the occasion. Faust now recognizes the absolute vileness of Mephisto, the sheer nastiness of evil. His pact with the night has lost its grandeur. Faust is aware that his own consciousness is being drawn into the mire. He is no longer a Promethean rebel, but an adventurer engaged in a vile, petty piece of seduction. Evil can diminish the boundaries of the soul. Mephisto, who perceives in Faust’s outrage the glimmerings of his future subjection, rubs in the sense of nastiness and banality: Margarete is not the first girl thus seduced. Faust cries back at his tormentor: “Dog! loathsome beast!” His reference is exact: it is in the shape of a fawning poodle that evil first approached him. The poodle fawns, and the hounds of hell follow.
The scene closes on a rush of action:
MEPHISTOPHELES: Ich führe dich, und was ich tun kann, höre! Habe ich alle Macht im Himmel und auf Erden? Des Türners Sinne will ich umnebeln; bemächtige dich der Schlüssel und führe sie heraus mit Menschenhand! Ich wache! die Zauberpferde sind bereit, ich entführe euch. Das vermag ich.
FAUST: Auf und davon!4
Prose is performing certain tasks here which verse would, I think, perform with less stringency. Metrically, the staccato of the successive statements, the rapid fire of assertions, would yield a halting and unnatural line. It is the jaggedness of the prose and the disruption of natural cadence, which account for its unrelenting pressure. The ironies, moreover, are of a kind which is nearly too drastic for verse. I mean that verse, being necessarily adornment, would round the edges of savagery. Margarete is to be led from her dungeon “by a human hand,” but it is, in fact, the Devil’s claw that shall open the gates. Ich entführe euch, promises Mephisto: “I shall lead you away.” The phrase is apposite, for it signifies also “to elope” and “to abduct.”
This grim debate calls to mind the thought of what Faust might have been had Goethe written all of it, or a major part, in such prose. The actual language would, in that case, have conspired against the evasion of tragedy. As it stands, this scene invokes tragic emotions more naked than any we find elsewhere in the play. Once Goethe had written it, there was no further need in German literature for a dissociation between prose and tragedy. Nearly at one stroke, German prose had ripened to the highest dramatic purpose.
That purpose was, in part, fulfilled by Georg Büchner. In part only, because Büchner died at twenty-three. Throughout this book, I have to consider dramatists who failed because they lacked talent, because their natural bent lay in poetry or fiction rather than in drama, or because they could not reconcile their ideal vision of the theatre with the requirements of the actual stage. To Büchner these causes of defeat are not applicable. Had he lived, the history of European drama would probably have been different. His absurdly premature death is a symbol of waste more absolute than that of either of the two instances so often quoted in indictment of mortality, the deaths of Mozart and Keats. Not that one can usefully set Büchner’s work beside theirs; but because the promise of genius in his writings is so large and explicit that what we have is like a mockery of that which was to come. There is some flagging in Keats’s late poetry. Büchner was cut down in full and mounting career. One can scarcely foresee the directions in which might have matured a young boy who had already written Dantons Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, and that massive torso of prose narrative, Lenz. At a comparable age, Shakespeare may have been the author of a few amorous lyrics.
Büchner’s instantaneous ripeness staggers belief. The mastery is there from the outset. There is hardly an early letter or piece of political pamphleteering which does not bear the mark of originality and stylistic control. If we make exception of Rimbaud, there is no other writer who was so completely himself at so early an age. Usually passion or eloquence come long before style; in Büchner they were at once united. One marvels also at Büchner’s range. In Marlowe, for example, there is a voice prematurely silenced, but already having defined its particular timbre. Büchner commits his powers to many different directions; all in his work is both accomplishment and experiment. Dantons Tod renews the possibilities of political drama. Leonce und Lena is a dream-play, a fusion of irony and heart’s abandon that is still in advance of the modern theatre. Woyzeck is not only the historical source of “expressionism”; it poses in a new way the entire problem of modern tragedy. Lenz carries the devices of narrative to the verge of surrealism. I am mainly concerned with Büchner’s dramatic prose and with his radical extension of the compass of tragedy. But every aspect of his genius reminds one that the progress of moral and aesthetic awareness often turns on the precarious pivot of a single life.
It turns also on trivial accidents. The manuscript of Woyzeck vanished from sight immediately after the death of Büchner in 1837. The faded, nearly illegible text was rediscovered and published in 1879, and it was not until the first World War and the 1920s that Büchner’s dramas became widely known. They then exercised a tremendous influence on expressionist art and literature. Without Büchner there might have been no Brecht. But the long, fortuitous gap between the work and its recognition poses one of the most tantalizing questions in the history of drama. What would have happened in the theatre if Woyzeck had been recognized earlier for the revolutionary masterpiece it is? Would Ibsen and Strindberg have laboured over their unwieldy historical dramas if they had known Dantons Tod? In the late nineteenth century only Wedekind, that erratic, wildly gifted figure from the underworld of the legitimate theatre, knew and profited from Büchner’s example. And had it not been for a minor Austrian novelist, Karl Emil Franzos, who rescued the manuscript, the very existence of Woyzeck might now be a disputed footnote to literary history.
Büchner knew the prose scene in Faust and cites one of Mephisto’s derisive retorts in Leonce und Lena. He was familiar, also, with the energetic, though rather crude, uses of prose in Schiller’s Die Räuber. But the style of Woyzeck is nearly autonomous; it is one of those rare feats whereby a writer adds a new voice to the means of language. Van Gogh has taught the eye to see the flame within the tree, and Schoenberg has brought to the ear new areas of possible delight. Büchner’s work is of this order of enrichment. He revolutionized the language of the theatre and challenged definitions of tragedy which had been in force since Aeschylus. By one of those fortunate hazards which sometimes occur in the history of art, Büchner came at the right moment. There was crucial need of a new conception of tragic form, as neither the antique nor the Shakespearean seemed to accord with the great changes in modern outlook and social circumstance. Woyzeck filled that need. But it surpassed the historical occasion, and much of what it revealed is as yet unexplored. The most exact parallel is that of a contemporary of Büchner, the mathematician Galois. On the eve of his death in a ridiculous duel at the age of twenty, Galois laid down the foundations of topology. His fragmentary statements and proofs, great leaps beyond the bounds of classic theory, are still to be reckoned with in the vanguard of modern mathematics. Galois’s notations, moreover, were preserved nearly by accident. So it is with Woyzeck; the play is incomplete and was nearly lost. Yet we know now that it is one of the hinges on which drama turned toward the future.
Woyzeck is the first real tragedy of low life. It repudiates an assumption implicit in Greek, Elizabethan, and neo-classic drama: the assumption that tragic suffering is the sombre privilege of those who are in high places. Ancient tragedy had touched the lower orders, but only in passing, as if a spark had been thrown off from the great conflagrations inside the royal palace. Into the dependent griefs of the menial classes, moreover, the tragic poets introduced a grotesque or comic note. The watchman in Agamemnon and the messenger in Antigone are lit by the fire of the tragic action, but they are meant to be laughed at. Indeed, the touch of comedy derives from the fact that they are inadequate, by virtue of social rank or understanding, to the great occasions on which they briefly performs. Shakespeare surrounds his principals with a rich following of lesser men. But their own griefs are merely a loyal echo to those of kings, as with the gardeners in Richard II, or a pause for humour, as in the Porter’s scene in Macbeth. Only in Lear is the sense of tragic desolation so universal as to encompass all social conditions (and it is to Lear that Woyzeck is, in certain respects, indebted). Lillo, Lessing, and Diderot widened the notion of dramatic seriousness to include the fortunes of the middle class. But their plays are sentimental homilies in which there lurks the ancient aristocratic presumption that the miseries of servants are, at bottom, comical. Diderot, in particular, was that characteristic figure, the radical snob.
Büchner was the first who brought to bear on the lowest order of men the solemnity and compassion of tragedy. He has had successors: Tolstoy, Gorky, Synge, and Brecht. But none has equalled the nightmarish force of Woyzeck. Drama is language under such high pressure of feeling that the words carry a necessary and immediate connotation of gesture. It is in mounting this pressure that Büchner excels. He shaped a style more graphic than any since Lear and saw, as had Shakespeare, that in the extremity of suffering, the mind seeks to loosen the bonds of rational syntax. Woyzeck’s powers of speech fall drastically short of the depth of his anguish. That is the crux of the play. Whereas so many personages in classic and Shakespearean tragedy seem to speak far better than they know, borne aloft by verse and rhetoric, Woyzeck’s agonized spirit hammers in vain on the doors of language. The fluency of his tormentors, the Doctor and the Captain, is the more horrible because what they have to say should not be dignified with literate speech. Alban Berg’s operatic version of Woyzeck is superb, both as music and drama. But it distorts Büchner’s principal device. The music makes Woyzeck eloquent; a cunning orchestration gives speech to his soul. In the play, that soul is nearly mute and it is the lameness of Woyzeck’s words which conveys his suffering. Yet the style has a fierce clarity. How is this achieved? By uses of prose which are undeniably related to King Lear. Set side by side, the two tragedies illuminate each other:
| GLOUCESTER: | These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourg’d by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there’s son against father; the King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. |
(I, ii) | |
| WOYZECK: | Aber mit der Natur ist’s was anders, sehn Sie; mit der Natur das is so was, wie soll ich doch sagen, zum Beispiel.… |
| |
Herr Doktor, haben Sie schon was von der doppelten Natur gesehn? Wenn die Sonn in Mittag steht und es ist, als ging’ die Welt in Feuer auf, hat schon eine fürchterliche Stimme zu mir geredt! | |
| |
Die Schwämme, Herr Doktor, da, da steckt’s. Haben Sie schon gesehn, in was für Figuren die Schwämme auf dem Boden wachsen? Wer das lesen könnt! | |
(“Beim Doktor”) | |
| LEAR: | Down from the waist they are Centaurs, though women all above; but to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath in all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! |
(IV, v) | |
| WOYZECK: | Immer zu—immer zu! Immer zu, immer zu! Dreht euch, wälzt euch! Warum bläst Gott nicht die Sonn aus, dass alles in Unzucht sich übereinander wälzt, Mann und Weib, Mensch und Vieh?! Tut’s am hellen Tag, tut’s einem auf den Händen wie die Mücken!—Weib! Das Weib is heiss, heiss! Immer zu, immer zu! |
(“Wirtshaus”) | |
| LEAR: | And when I have stolne upon these son in lawes, |
Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! | |
(IV, v) | |
| WOYZECK: | Hör ich’s da auch?—Sagt’s der Wind auch?—Hör ich’s immer, immer zu: stich tot, tot! |
(“Freies Feld”)5 |
There are direct echoes. Lear calls upon the elements to “crack nature’s mould” at the sight of man’s ingratitude; Woyzeck wonders why God does not snuff out the sun. Both Lear and Woyzeck are maddened with sexual loathing. Before their very eyes, men assume the shapes of lecherous beasts: the polecat and the rutting horse in Lear; the gnats coupling in broad daylight in Woyzeck. The mere thought of woman touches their nerves like a hot iron: “there’s the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding”; “Das Weib is heiss, heiss!” A sense of all-pervading sexual corruption goads the old mad king and the illiterate soldier to, the same murderous frenzy: “kill, kill”; “stich tot, tot!”
But it is in their use of prose that the two plays stand nearest to each other. Büchner is plainly in Shakespeare’s debt. Prose style is notoriously difficult to analyse, and there is a great and obvious distance between post-romantic German and Elizabethan English. Yet when we place the passages side by side, the ear seizes on undeniable similarities. Words are organized in the same abrupt manner, and the underlying beat works toward a comparable stress and release of feeling. Read aloud, the prose in Lear and in Woyzeck carries with it the same shortness of breath and unflagging drive. The “shape” of the sentences is remarkably similar. In the rhymed couplets of Racine there is a quality of poise and roundedness nearly visible to the eye. But in the prose of Lear as in Woyzeck, the impression is one of broken lines and rough-edged groupings. Or, to paraphrase a conceit in Timon of Athens, the words “ache at us.”
Yet the psychological facts with which Shakespeare and Büchner deal are diametrically opposed. The style of Lear’s agony marks a ruinous fall; that of Woyzeck, a desperate upward surge. Lear crumbles into prose, and fearing a total eclipse of reason, he seeks to preserve within reach of his anguish the fragments of his former understanding. His prose is made up of such fragments arrayed in some rough semblance of order. In place of rational connection, there is now a binding hatred of the world. Woyzeck, on the contrary, is driven by his torment toward an articulateness which is not native to him. He tries to break out of silence and is continually drawn back because the words at his command are inadequate to the pressure and savagery of his feeling. The result is a kind of terrible simplicity. Each word is used as if it had just been given to human speech. It is new and full of uncontrollable meaning. That is the way children use words, holding them at arm’s length because they have a natural apprehension of their power to build or destroy. And it is precisely this childishness in Woyzeck which is relevant to Lear, for in his decline of reason Lear returns to a child’s innocence and ferocity. In both texts, moreover, one important rhetorical device is that of a child—repetition: “kill, kill, kill”; “never, never, never”; “immer zu, immer zu!”; “stich tot, tot!” as if saying a thing over and over could make it come true.
Compulsive repetition and discontinuity belong not only to the language of children, but also to that of nightmares. It is the effect of nightmare which Büchner strives for. Woyzeck’s anguish crowds to the surface of speech, and there it is somehow arrested; only nervous, strident flashes break through. So in black dreams the shout is turned back in our throats. The words that would save us remain just beyond our grasp. That is Woyzeck’s tragedy, and it was an audacious thought to make a spoken drama of it. It is as if a man had composed a great opera on the theme of deafness.
One of the earliest and most enduring laments over the tragic condition of man is Cassandra’s outcry in the courtyard of the house of Atreus. In the final, fragmentary scene of Woyzeck there are implications of grief no less universal. Woyzeck has committed murder and staggers about in a trance. He meets an idiot and a child:
| WOYZECK: | Christianchen, du bekommst ein Reuter, sa, sa: da, kauf dem Bub ein Reuter! Hop, hop! Ross! |
| KARL: | Hop, hop! Ross! Ross!6 |
In both instances, language seems to revert to a communication of terror older than literate speech. Cassandra’s cry is like that of a sea bird, wild and without meaning. Woyzeck throws words away like broken toys; they have betrayed him.
Büchner’s was the most radical break with the linguistic and social conventions of poetic tragedy. But these conventions were losing their grip throughout the European theatre. Musset had neither the originality of Büchner nor his imaginative force. But he rebelled against the autocracy of verse in French serious drama. In his rebellion, unfortunately, as in much else in his life and art, Musset lacked conviction. He was reluctant to confide the responsibility for full-scale dramatic emotion even to a prose as resourceful as his own. Hence the deliberate slightness, the brittle charm, of the Comédies et proverbes. Musset stayed the distance only once, in Lorenzaccio.
In many respects, the play is typical of romantic historical melodrama. The evasive hero is compounded of Hamlet and autobiography. The republican conspirators are modelled on Schiller’s Fiesco, and there are touches derived from that arch-romantic, Jean Paul Richter. But the language is new. Lorenzaccio is written in a sinuous prose, full of darting motion, and able to make explicit those nuances of feeling which characterize the romantic view of man. The prose is all action. Musset took over into dramatic dialogue the sparseness and clarity achieved by the novelists and philosophes of the preceding age. The melodramas of Victor Hugo are written as if neither Voltaire nor Laclos had used the French language. The style of Lorenzaccio, on the contrary, stems directly from the sharpening of prose which occurred during the eighteenth century. Lorenzaccio’s extended dialogue with Philippe Strozzi in the third Act rivals Stendhal; it has the same outward economy and richness of interior life:
Il est trop tard—je me suis fait à mon métier. Le vice a été pour moi un vêtement, maintenant il est collé à ma peau. Je suis vraiment un ruffian, et quand je plaisante sur mes pareils, je me sens sérieux comme la Mort au milieu de ma gaieté. Brutus a fait le fou pour tuer Tarquin, et ce qui m’étonne en lui, c’est qu’il n’y ait pas laissé sa raison. Profite de moi, Philippe, voilà ce que j’ai à te dire—ne travaille pas pour ta patrie.7
But this intriguing play had little influence. It did not free French romantic tragedy from the rule of bombast and hollow verse. For all its virtues, Lorenzaccio lacks weight. The structure is too random for so delicate and swift-moving a style. The dramatic tension lies in the detail rather than in the general design. Like the rest of Musset’s plays, therefore, it is more alive on the page than in performance. Yet, in breaking with the precedent of heroic verse Musset took a large step toward modernity. Stendhal’s plea for a tragic drama written in the language of the living is as implicit in Lorenzaccio as it is in Woyzeck.
| 1 DON JUAN: | you have only to decide whether you want to earn a gold sovereign or not; here is one that I shall give you, if you will say an oath. Come, you must swear. |
| THE POOR MAN: | Sir … |
| DON JUAN: | Short of that, you shan’t have it. |
| SGANARELLE: | Go on, go on, swear a little; there’s no harm in it. |
| DON JUAN: | Take it, here it is, take it, I say; but swear. |
| THE POOR MAN: | No, sir, I had rather die of hunger. |
| DON JUAN: | Come, come, I give it to you for love of humanity. |
2 Ah! my wages! my wages! Here, at one stroke, his death has satisfied everyone. The offended heavens, the ravished laws, the seduced girls, the dishonoured families, the outraged parents, the women marred, the husbands thrust to the wall—all the world is content; I alone am wretched. My wages, my wages, my wages!
3 FAUST: In misery! Despairing! Long and piteously lost on earth, and now a prisoner! The comely, hapless creature, a criminal thrown in a dungeon for horrible torments! Driven to that! To that!—Traitorous, vile spirit—and this you have concealed from me! Stand fast, stand! Roll your devilish eyes in a rage! Stand and beard me with your unbearable presence!—A prisoner! In irreparable misery! Delivered up to evil spirits and to harsh judging, unfeeling men!—And in the meantime you lull me with stale pastimes, hide from me her growing wretchedness, and would let her go helpless to perdition!
MEPHISTOPHELES: She is not the first!
FAUST: Dog! loathsome beast!—Change him, thou boundless Spirit! Change the reptile back into his dog’s shape in which, at nighttime, he often delighted to frisk before me, rolling at the feet of the harmless wanderer, and having tripped him, fanging at his back! Change him back to his favourite shape so he may fawn on his belly in the sand in front of me, so I can tread on him with my feet, the damnable one!—“Not the first!” The pity of it! The pity!
4 MEPHISTOPHELES: I will lead you, and hear what I can do! Am I omnipotent in heaven and earth? I will fog the jailer’s senses; get hold of the keys and lead her out with human hands! I will keep a lookout! The magic steeds are ready; I carry you off. That much I can do.
FAUST: Up and away!
| 5WOYZECK: | But with Nature, you see, it’s something else again; with Nature it’s like this, how shall I say, like.… |
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Herr Doktor, have you ever seen anything of compound Nature? When the sun is at midday and it feels as though the world might go up in flame, then a terrible voice has spoken to me! | |
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In toadstools, Herr Doktor, there, there’s where it lurks. Have you already observed in what configurations toadstools grow along the ground? He that could riddle that! | |
| |
Ever and ever and ever and ever! Whirl around, wind around! Why does God not blow out the sun so that all may pile on top of one another in lechery, man upon woman, human upon beast?! They do it in broad daylight, they do it on your hands like gnats! Woman! Woman’s hot, hot! Ever and ever! | |
| |
Do I hear it here also?—Does the wind say it also?—Shall I hear it ever and ever: stick her dead, dead! |
| 6 WOYZECK: | Christianchen, you’ll get a gee-gee, ho, ho: there, buy the lad a gee-gee! Giddy-up, giddy-up, horsey! |
| KARL: | Giddy-up, giddy-up! Horsey! Horsey! |
7 It is too late—I have cast myself into the mould. I wore vice like a garment, now it is stuck to my skin. I am truly a ruffian, and when I joke about my own kind, I feel serious as Death amidst my gaiety. To kill Tarquin, Brutus played the madman, and what surprises me about him is that he did not lose his reason at that game. Profit by my example, Philip, here is what I have to say to you—don’t work for your country.
