FYODOR SOLOGUB

Fyodor Sologub (1863-1927), poet, novelist, dramatist and translator, was born in St. Petersburg of humble parentage. The aristocratic “Sologub” (Count Sollogub—with an extra “l”—was a popular writer of the mid-nineteenth century) was a pen name assumed on the advice of literary associates who found his real name, Teternikov, lacking in grace. In 1882 Sologub completed his studies at a teachers training college, after which he taught in the provinces until his removal to St. Petersburg in 1892. In 1899 he became a school inspector, and in 1907 growing literary success and a pension enabled him to devote himself exclusively to writing. Sologub’s early years of struggle as a provincial schoolmaster in the gray, repressive 1880s are reflected in his novels Bad Dreams (1896) and The Petty Demon (1907); the second of these (which he successfully dramatized in 1909) was perhaps the last novel written in Russia to contribute a proverbial type to the national imagination in the figure of the odious Peredonov, who seems to concentrate in his person all the ignorance, malice, servility and paranoia of Russian minor officialdom.

With such a background, Sologub might have been expected to go the way of social protest, as the “plebeian” writers of the 1860s had done before him. Sologub’s protest, however, was of a different kind: he became the most thoroughgoingly decadent of the Decadents (at least in his works), tirelessly reiterating the supremacy of art and the artist’s creative will. A private mythology, strongly tinged with ninetyish diabolism and Schopenhauerian pessimism, is pervasive in Sologub’s work. His central myth is of the sun as a malevolent dragon who rules the world; thus life itself and all that draws us toward life are seen as an evil, darkness and death as a longed-for good. The potency of art is embodied in another favorite myth, drawn from Don Quixote: the figure of the simple peasant wench Aldonza metamorphosed by the Don’s creative will into Dulcinea del Toboso, a vision of transcendental beauty. It may be objected that these “myths” of Sologub’s are too deliberately invented, insufficiently steeped in the profoundest depths of the imagination; perhaps they are best regarded as something between a useful literary device and a strategy for survival.

Sologub’s last years were tragic. Although he welcomed the end of tsarist rule, he was unsympathetic to the Bolsheviks. Plans to emigrate were abandoned after the suicide of his wife and literary collaborator Anastasia Chebotariovskaya in 1921. Sologub published nothing after 1923, making a living by translation and occupying various posts in the Leningrad Writers’ Union.

While Sologub’s dramatic work does not quite reach the level of his best fiction and poetry (which Mirsky has called “the most refined and most delicate of all modern Russian poetry”), it exhibits at its best an impressive mastery of the theatre and a hard, ironic brilliance. The “Mystery” A Liturgy for Myself (1907), a hieratic ceremony of sacrifice and mystic communion that owes something to Viacheslav Ivanov, was Sologub’s first attempt at dramatic form. His practical involvement with the theatre dates from his friendship with Meyerhold, “to whom,” in his wife’s words, “he more than once entrusted the production of his plays on the basis of their identity of outlook.”

The Triumph of Death was Meyerhold’s last production at Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre (November, 1907). The play was interpreted by some as a parable of the failure of the 1905 Revolution: Algista, the beautiful daughter of the people, is broken by a petrified autocracy. The prologue, the most “Meyerholdian” part of the play, was in fact written after Meyerhold’s production; its abrupt dislocation of planes bears unmistakable witness to the influence of Blok’s Puppet Show. The decor demanded by the play, with its great sweeping staircases, offered considerable scenic possibilities; had Meyerhold been allowed to have his way and to bring the staircases down into the auditorium itself, The Triumph of Death would have formally broken the barrier between performers and audience, thus realizing a cherished dream of the Symbolist theatre.

The lyrical tragedy The Gift of the Wise Bees (1907) was the second of three dramas by Russian Symbolists to take as its subject the myth of Laodamia. Clearly, this parable of the supremacy of the creative imagination over death itself had a special fascination for the Symbolists. The play—one of the author’s finest—was banned by the censor, possibly because Sologub had added some spice to his myth by providing the hero, Protesilaus, with a handsome young lover, the sculptor Lysippus, who is constrained to yield to Laodamia his wax figure of Protesilaus only by the intervention of Aphrodite. In general, the Symbolists were pioneers in treating sexually unorthodox themes; it was a natural consequence of their cult of individualism and self-fulfillment at all costs. In the original version of a short play written by Sologub at this time, In the Name of Love, a father and daughter confess their mutual passion and decide to confront the world; in the revised version, the daughter is revealed, at the last possible moment, to be adopted, but this coup de théâtre in no way alters the essence of the situation, since she has already declared: “It makes no difference to my heart whether you are my father or not.”

Sologub’s next play, Vanka the Steward and the Page Jehan, was given its first performance at Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre in January 1909, under the direction of Evreinov, another kindred spirit, according to the author’s wife. More rigorously than any other drama of the period, Vanka formalizes the duality of vision central to the Symbolist theatre by means of an ingenious constructive device: a simple tale of adultery is subjected to contrasting treatment in a series of alternating scenes; those set in ancient Russia strike a note of coarse lechery, while those set in medieval France breath an air of refined chivalry. Thus the spectator is constantly thrust from one plane to another, exactly in the manner prescribed by Meyerhold’s “grotesque theatre.” Curiously enough, only the play’s “Russian” scenes were well received by contemporary audiences. For a later (1915) production, Sologub added a third, modern, variant of the adultery theme and gave the play a new title that might be rendered in English as Hanky-Panky through the Ages (this version has remained unpublished).

A kind of pendant to Vanka, and another playful excursion into style russe, was the parodistic fairytale play Night Dances, which bristles with facetious anachronisms and literary “in” jokes. Evreinov’s 1909 production of this play was a lighthearted amateur affair that seems to have included in its cast half of literary and artistic St. Petersburg—among the writers, Voloshin, A. Tolstoi, Remizov and Gorodetsky, and among the painters, Bakst and Somov; the dances of the title were choreographed by Fokine.

Sologub’s greatest theatrical success, if hardly his best play, was Hostages of Life, which Meyerhold staged at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1912 with elaborate art nouveau sets by Golovin and—a modish touch—some barefoot dancing à la Isadora Duncan (whom the author much admired). In Hostages, Sologub attempted, not altogether satisfactorily, to reconcile traditional realistic drama and the theatre of Symbolism by combining contemporary setting and types—some Chekhovian decaying gentry, a strong-willed “man of the future”—with characters whose function is almost purely symbolic, notably Lilith, “the first wife of Adam,” who leaves the architect hero in order that her place may be taken by the more prosaic Katia. Lilith, we are given to understand, represents “The Dream” and Katia “Life,” and the play concludes with the apotheosis of Lilith, “crowned with a golden diadem and her face lit by a solemn light,” in which we recognize not only the tone, but also the familiar Don Quixote imagery of The Triumph of Death: “I am weary, mortally weary. Many centuries have passed over me—I summon man to me and, my noble task accomplished, I go my way. And still Dulcinea remains uncrowned.” In his article “Aldonza Ascending,” written at about this time for inclusion in a volume dedicated to the memory of Komissarzhevskaya, Sologub interpreted the great actress’s career as the gradual transformation of Aldonza into Dulcinea.

Sologub’s later plays reveal a catastrophic decline in his powers as a dramatist. Love over the Abysses (1914) is another attempt to write a symbolical drama of contemporary life, but this time it is entirely abstract, in the manner of Andreyev. The plot strongly recalls Andreyev’s To the Stars, with its conflict between the contemplative and the active man—“He,” who lives on a mountaintop and observes the stars, and “The Man of Earth,” a Nietzschean entrepreneur of a type much in vogue during this period of industrial expansion. Even a final Liebestod fails to relieve the play’s solemn banality.

“The Theatre of the Single Will” (1908), for all its perverse extremism and the arrogant solipsism of its tone, is perhaps Russian Symbolism’s most ambitious attempt to formulate a coherent theatrical aesthetic—one which has much in common with Meyerhold’s early “static” theatre. The term “single will” is borrowed from Sologub’s favorite philosopher, Schopenhauer, whose method of argument—from subjective intuitions to sweeping generalizations—the Russian writer may also be said to have borrowed.

FYODOR SOLOGUB
THE THEATRE OF THE SINGLE WILL²³

“Upon the vessel is a seal, upon the seal a name; what is concealed in the vessel is known only to him who affixed the seal and to the initiate.”

E. K. Vizener. The Silence of the First Bride. A Novel.²⁴

“You philosophize like a poet.”

Dostoevsky. Letters.

Of all things created by the genius of man, perhaps the most joyous on its visible surface and the most terrible in its depths, when fathomed, is the theatre. The fatal progression—play; spectacle; mystery … This is as true of light comedy and knockabout farce as it is of high tragedy.

Tragic horror and the laughter of the buffoon stir the fraying but still seductive veils of our world with equally irresistible force—the world that seemed so familiar to us, all at once, in the fluidity of play, becomes astonishing, dreadful, overwhelming or repulsive. Neither the tragic nor the comic mask will deceive the attentive spectator any more than, in enchanting him, they have deceived the participant in play, or will deceive, in admitting him to the sacrament, the participant in mystery.

Behind the mouldering vizards, behind the berouged mug of the fairground buffoon, behind the pale mask of the tragic actor, there glimmers a single Countenance. Terrible, summoning irresistibly .…

The fatal progression. We played when we were children—but now our hearts have become dead to carefree play, and, filled with curiosity, we have come to gaze at a spectacle; and the hour will strike when, transfigured in body and spirit, we shall find true union in liturgical drama, in sacramental rite .…

When we were children, when we were alive—

“Children, only children live,

We are dead, long dead”—²⁵

we used to play. We allotted roles among ourselves and played them—until we were summoned to bed. Our theatre was partly that of everyday life—we were very observant and given to mimicry—partly symbolical, with strong leanings toward decadence, such was our fondness for fairytale, for the words of strange and ancient incantations, for the whole diverting and useless—from the practical point of view—ceremony of play. How delightful were the conventions, naiveties and absurdities of play. We knew very well that it wasn’t real, that it was all make-believe. We made no great demands on the stage designer or the props man. We would harness a chair and agree among ourselves:

— Let that be a horse.

Or if we felt like running about more ourselves, then we would say:

— I’ll be a horse.

Our play was not exclusive or one-sided in nature. There was the play meant for a big audience, for passages and halls, for gardens and fields, with crowds and hubbub and boisterousness—“half play, half brawl”—and there were intimate games played in secluded corners where grown-ups and strangers would never look. There we had been merry to the point of exhaustion, here it was creepy, but merry too, and our cheeks grew redder from this play than from boisterous chasing about, and in our eyes dim fires were kindled.

We played—and we did not know that our games were only cast-offs from the lives of the grown-ups. We played again what had been played before, as if it were new. And in this replaying of the games of others, we became infected with the potent poison of the dead.

However, it was not in the actual content of our play that its significance lay. The drops of burning poison dissolved in the external nectar of youth. The exuberance of life’s novelty went to our heads like a light, sweet wine, swift running lent wings to our feet—in the bliss of bright self-forgetfulness, the oppressive burden of terrestrial time was consumed. And the sharp, swift moments were consumed, and from the ashes was fashioned a new world—our world. A world aflame with the ecstasy of youth .…

And even later did we desire anything more from play—from tragedy or comedy—which had now become no more than a spectacle to us? We love to go to the theatre—especially to first nights of famous plays—but what is it we want of the theatre? Is it that we wish to learn the art of life, to purge ourselves of dark emotions? To solve some moral, social, aesthetic or perhaps some other kind of problem? To gaze upon the “reed shaken by the wind? Upon a man arrayed in soft garments? Upon a prophet?”

Of course, all this and much else besides can be dragged into the theatre, not without reason and even not without profit—but in the true theatre all this must be consumed to ashes, as old clothes are burned on a bonfire. And however varied the external content of the drama, we always want of it—if any life from the carefree days of our childhood remains in us—the same thing that we wanted of our childish play: ardent delight to ravish the spirit from the constraining fetters of tedious and barren life. Enchantment and delight—these are what draw each of us to the theatre, these are the means by which the genius of tragedy involves us in its mysterious design. But of what does this design consist?

Either I have no idea why man needs the drama, or it exists in order to lead man unto Me; to transport him from the realm of the capricious Aisa,²⁶ from the strange and ridiculous world of chance, from the region of comedy, to the realm of the strict and consoling Ananka, the world of necessity and freedom, the region of high tragedy; to abolish life’s temptations and to crown the eternal consolatrix—not the false one, but the one who will not deceive.

A theatrical spectacle to which we come to be amused and diverted will not remain simply a spectacle for long. Soon the spectator, wearied with a succession of scenes alien to him, will want to become a participant in mystery as he was once a participant in play. He who has been expelled from Eden will soon be knocking with a bold hand at the door behind which the bridegroom feasts with the wise virgins. He was a participant in innocent play when he was still alive, when he was still a dweller in paradise, in My beautiful garden between the two great rivers. And now his only path to resurrection is to become a participant in mystery, in liturgical rite to join his hand with the hand of his brother, with the hand of his sister, and to touch with lips ever parched the cup, the fullness whereof is a mystery, in which I “mingle blood with water”; to perform in a temple flooded with light and thronged with people that which is now performed only in the catacombs.

But the theatre of spectacle is an unavoidable transitional stage, and in our time, unfortunately, the theatre cannot yet be other than a mere spectacle, and frequently an empty one at that. Mere spectacle—that is, unless we are speaking of the intimate theatre that must be brought into being, but to speak of which—indeed, how can one speak of it? Would that not be a temptation for the uninitiate? … How can one speak of it but in hints and images?

It is spectacle that the modern theatre wishes above all to be. Everything is geared toward spectacle alone. Professional actors, footlights and curtain, skillfully painted sets aiming to give an illusion of reality, the ingenious contrivances of the realistic theatre, the profundities of the stylized theatre—all these exist for the sake of spectacle.

However, if the path along which the theatre must develop if it is to attain its high destiny has already become clear in our mind, then the task that confronts the man of the theatre—the dramatist, the director and the actor—is, in raising the theatrical spectacle to those heights that only spectacle can attain, to bring it closer to communal drama, to the mystery play, to liturgy.

It seems to me that the first obstacle to be overcome on this path is the performing actor. The actor claims too much of the spectator’s attention, thus overshadowing both drama and author. The more talented the actor, the more intolerable to the author his tyranny, the more harmful to the tragedy. There are two ways of overthrowing this seductive but nevertheless harmful tyranny: either to move the center of the performance out to the spectator in the auditorium or to move it behind the scenes to the author.

The first thought that might logically follow upon the recognition of the theatre as an appropriate forum for the communal drama might be that it is necessary to abolish the footlights, to take away the curtain perhaps and to make the spectator a participant in, or even the creator of the performance. Instead of flat drops, to have four gaily painted walls or the open-air expanse of street or square or field; to transform spectacle into masquerade, which is in fact a combination of play and spectacle. But in that case what would be the point of gathering together? Simply in order than “the peoples should congregate,” as a certain popular refrain has it? A harmless enough pastime, certainly—but where does it lead?

It is true that an element of the mysterious is admixed with play and spectacle in the masquerade—hints of it, secrets. But this is not the mystery itself. Just as the most terrible fears come at noontide, when, risen to his zenith and hidden behind his violet shields, the evil Dragon weaves his spells, so the deepest mystery is revealed only when the masks are removed.

All meridians meet at a single pole (or, if you like, two—but by the law of the identity of opposite poles, it is always sufficient to talk of a single pole), all earthly paths lead to a single eternal Rome—“always and in all things there is only I and no Other, there was not and shall not be”—every coming together of people is meaningful only insofar as it brings man to Me, from vain and delusive division to genuine union. The pathos of the mystery play is nourished by the transformation of the fortuitous many into a necessary unity. This pathos is a reminder that every individual earthly existence is only an instrument to serve Me, an instrument for exhausting in the infinity of earthly experiences the multitude of My potential existences, the totality of which creates laws while itself moving freely.

For this reason, then, there is in tragedy only one who acts and wills, which adds to the unities of action, place and time another unity—that of volitional impulse in the drama.

(Perhaps the thought transitions here will seem somewhat unexpected to some, but I am not conducting an argument, being incapable of doing so, but simply expounding my own thought. “I philosophize like a poet.”).

There can never in tragedy be more than one who acts and wills, not in the sense that he is the leader of the choric action, but in that he expresses the inevitable, not in the person of the tragic hero, but by his fate.

The modern theatre presents a sad spectacle of divided will and, in consequence, fragmented action. “People are different from each other,” thinks the simple-minded dramatist, “it takes all sorts to make a world.” He goes all over the place, noting manners, customs, details of everyday living, he observes various people and depicts all of this in a very lifelike manner. Kozmodemiansky, Nalimov and Vaksel are able to recognize themselves and their neckties, and are delighted if the author, for friendship’s sake, has flattered them, or they get angry if the author makes it clear that their appearance and behavior are not to his liking. The director is delighted to have the material to mount an entertaining production. The actor too is delighted to have the chance to demonstrate his skill in applying make-up, and proceeds to ape the quirks and appearance of the painter K, the poet U, the engineer A, the lawyer V .… The public is in raptures—it recognizes both those with whom it is acquainted and those with whom it is not—and is conscious of having one indisputable advantage: whatever commonplace peccadilloes are dragged onto the stage, every spectator, apart from a small number portrayed in the play, sees quite clearly that not he, but someone else, is under attack.

And none of this is needed. There is no everyday living, there are no customs—an eternal mystery is being played out, and that is all. There are no stories, no plots; all the expositions have long been exposed, all the revelations have long been revealed—there is only the eternal liturgy that is being accomplished. What are words and dialogues? There is only one eternal dialogue, and he who asks the question answers it himself and longs for an answer. And what are the themes? Only Love, only Death.

Different people do not exist—there is in the entire universe only a single being, a single I that wills, acts, suffers, burns with unquenchable fire and seeks refuge from the rage of life, with its horror and ugliness, in the comforting embraces of the eternal consoler—Death.

Many are the masks I don at will, but always and in all things I remain Myself—as a Chaliapine remains the same in all his roles. And beneath the terrible mask of the tragic hero, and beneath the ridiculous disguise of the jester, whom the comedy makes a jest of, and in the motley sewn together from rags of many colors worn by the clown whose grimaces amuse the gallery—beneath each of these camouflages the spectator must discover Me. The theatrical spectacle must present itself to his gaze like a problem containing a single unknown quantity.

It may be that the spectator has come to the theatre as the simple-minded come into the world, “to see the sun,” but I, a poet, create drama in order to re-create the world according to my new conception. As My will alone is supreme in the great world, so in the smaller circle of the theatrical spectacle a single will—the poet’s—must reign supreme.

The drama is the product of a single conception in the same way that the universe is the product of a single creative thought. The author alone is fate in tragedy, chance in comedy. Is his then the dominant will in everything? As he wills, so shall it be. At whim he can unite the lovers or bring about their sorrowful parting, raise up his protagonist or cast him down into the grim abyss of ruin and despair. He can, if he wishes, award the garland to beauty, youth, fidelity, courage, mad audacity, selflessness—but there is nothing to prevent him from exalting deformity and depravity and placing Judas the betrayer above all the apostles.

“In reproach to the unjust day²⁸

I shall raise up detraction to rule the world,

And tempting, shall not tempt in vain.”

The actor is full of conceit. He has overshadowed the author by the irrelevancies of his interpretation, by his unsuitable and disjointed social and psychological observations; he has transformed the drama itself into a collection of roles for various emplois. Then the director comes along and appropriates the author’s stage directions. At the director’s command, the drama’s nemesis, the hollow voice of imperious Moira, is pent up in a prompter’s box, and when rehearsals have been too few all the players stare at that single point, whence, to the vexation of the front rows, issues a voice. To make matters worse, the poet’s words are mercilessly garbled.

But does anyone imagine that it is my wish that my voice should issue from a narrow subterranean cell? That the windows of my imagining should be transformed at the director’s caprice into perfectly pointless pillars? That the words of my stage directions should be embodied in painted sets alone?

No, my word must ring out loud and clear. The theatre-goer must hear the poet rather than the actor.

This is how I envisage a theatrical performance: the author, or a reader standing in for him—and perhaps a reader would be better, not being agitated by authorial nervousness before an audience that will shout at him either in praise or blame (the one as unpleasant as the other), and who may even have brought keys with them to facilitate cheery whistling—the reader, then, will be seated close to the stage, somewhat to one side. In front of him will a desk, and on the desk the play that is to be presented. The reader will begin in due order, from the beginning:

He will read the title of the drama. The name of the author.

The epigraph, if there is one. Some interesting and instructive epigraphs are to be met with. For example, the epigraph to The Inspector General: “No use complaining about the mirror if your mug’s crooked. Popular saying.” A crude epigraph—such was this writer—but just, and an effective means of establishing the appropriate link between the audience and the stage action.

Then an enumeration of the dramatis personae.

The preface or author’s remarks, if there are any.

The first act. The setting. The names of the characters on stage.

The entrances and exits of the actors, if they are indicated in the text of the drama.

All stage directions, not excluding the shortest, if only a single word.

As the reader proceeds, the curtain goes up, the setting indicated by the author is revealed and illuminated, the actors come on stage and do whatever they are prompted to by the author’s stage directions and speak as directed by the text. If an actor forgets his lines—and when does he not forget them!—the reader reads them for him, as calmly and clearly as everything else.

The action unfolds before the audience as it unfolds before us in life itself: we walk about and talk, so it seems to us, by our own will; we do what we need to, or what comes into our head, and we try to realize what we suppose to be our own desires, insofar as the laws of nature or the desires of others do not hinder us; we see, hear, smell, touch, taste; we use all our senses and all our powers of intelligence to ascertain what exists in the world of reality, what has its own existence and its own laws, partly comprehensible to us, partly miraculous; we feel love toward one and hatred toward another, and we are moved by yet other passions, determining in accordance with them our relationship to people and to the world. Usually we are unaware that we have no independent will, that our every movement and every word are dictated to us and long ago anticipated, once and for all, in the daemonic creative plan of universal play. For us there can be neither choice nor freedom; even the charming interpolations of the actor are denied us, since they too are included in the text of the universal mystery play by some censor unknown; and the world we apprehend is nothing but a stage set, marvelous to the eye but hiding all the dirt and slovenliness of backstage. We play as best we can the role allotted to us, actors and spectators at once, alternately applauding and whistling each other, at once sacrificing and brought to the sacrifice.

Is the theatre able to offer us any spectacle except that of a world too wide for our powers and too narrow for our will? And indeed, should it? Act as you live, put life upon the stage—is this not exactly what the realistic theatre wants?

But what then will remain of the actor’s art? The actor, it would seem, is to be transformed into a talking puppet, and this cannot but be displeasing to the actor, who loves “strong” roles, the undivided attention of the orchestra seats, the shrieks of the simple-minded gallery and the journalistic hubbub about his name. Such a theatre is unacceptable to the modern actor. He will say contemptuously:

That won’t be a theatrical performance, but simply a literary reading with accompanying dialogue and movement. If that’s what you want, you’d do better to go ahead and build a puppet theatre to amuse the children. Let painted dolls move, let one man behind the scenes speak in seven different voices—let him speak and pull the strings.

But why, after all, should the actor not be like a puppet? For a human being there is no insult in that. Such is the immutable law of universal play—that man should resemble a marvelously constructed puppet. And he cannot escape that; he cannot even forget it.

The hour appointed for all will strike; each of us, in the sight of his fellows, will turn into an inert, lifeless doll, no longer capable of performing any role .…

There on the sackcloth it lies, this discarded and useless doll, for the final ablution, its hands folded, its legs stretched out, its eyes closed—a pitiful puppet fit for tragic play alone! Back there, behind the scenes, someone used to jerk indifferently at your invisible string, some cruel being put you to the slow fire of suffering, some evil being terrified you with the pale horrors of loathsome existence, and in your death agony you turned your yearning gaze toward some being without pity. And here, in the orchestra seats, someone has been amused by your awkward movements as you responded to the jerking of the terrible string, by your incoherent words (so quietly did the hidden prompter whisper them), your useless tears and your laughter, no less pitiful than your tears. Enough; your lines have all been delivered after a fashion, all the stage directions have been followed faithfully enough; the string is wound up and in vain your parched lips attempt to utter a new word; they open, they shut mechanically—and are silent forever. They put a sheet over you, bury you, forget you .…

An actor, even the most gifted, is no more than a man. The role he plays, however powerful, is less than life and easier than life. Clearly it is better for him to be a talking puppet moving in obedience to the clear and unimpassioned voice of the reader than to make a desperate muddle of his part to the accompaniment of the hoarse whispering of the prompter hidden in his box.

The level and unimpassioned voice of the “man in black” alone directs the entire theatrical performance, and in conformity with this, everything on the stage must strive toward the unity essential if the spectator’s precarious attention is to be held and not distracted in any way from the one important thing—the revelation through dramatic action of My countenance, ever one and unchanging beneath its manifold masks.

The performer is never alone on stage. Even when no other actors are visible, he who remains before the eyes of the audience is conducting an uninterrupted dialogue. The striving toward the one, toward Me, can proceed only from my polar opposite—from the many, the not-I. But all streams must mingle at last in a single sea and not be lost in the quicksands of the divided many. The one Countenance hidden beneath the masks must be revealed to the audience as the action proceeds; consequently there should be a single protagonist, a single personage upon whom the action rests, a single spot upon which the audience’s attention should be fixed. All the rays of the stage action must meet in a single focal point; only then will the bright flame of rapture suddenly flare…

The other characters in the drama should be no more than necessary steps in the progression toward the one Countenance. Their dramatic significance will depend entirely on their closeness to the center of the drama’s volitional impulse, as revealed in the protagonist. In their ordering on the descending steps of a single ladder of dramatic action lies the basis for their differentiation as individuals, for their distinctness as characters, which would not otherwise be of the slightest use to the drama. Desdemona is important in the tragic situation not because her role is a large and touching one, not because Othello loved her and destroyed her, but because she was the fatal one whose hand stripped him of his mask and at the same time revealed to him the fatally false and ambiguous nature of the world.

Given that the tragedy should have, in essence, a single actor, it follows that the theatre should free itself of acting as such. Acting, with all its variety of accurately observed and faithfully transmitted gestures and intonations, with everything that has passed into theatrical tradition, is acquired by assiduous study or invented anew by the imagination and intuition of the gifted actor—this familiar kind of acting, whether the product of inspiration or calculation, depicts the collision and the struggle between individuals who are quite separate from each other, who are sufficient unto themselves. But there are no such autonomous personalities on the face of the earth, and consequently there can be no struggles among them; there is only the appearance of struggle, a fatal dialectic expressed by the characters. Nor is it possible to conceive of a struggle with fate—there is only daemonic play, fate amusing itself with its puppets.

The better an actor plays the role of Man, the more pathetic his cry:

Let our shields ring, let our swords clash—the more ridiculously inappropriate his acting, the clearer his failure to understand his role. “Someone in Gray” has yet to accept a challenge to a duel. A little girl doesn’t fight with her dolls—she rips them apart and breaks them, laughing or crying as the mood takes her.

We find acting that is too much in earnest ridiculous; splendid declamation, noble gesture, excessively painstaking reproduction of the particulars of everyday life—we feel a little uncomfortable in the presence of such wonders, much as we feel uncomfortable in polite society when someone suddenly begins talking loudly and agitatedly, waving his arms about. It isn’t worth acting too much in earnest. Only the gallery is made to laugh and weep by what is being performed on the stage—the orchestra seats smile faintly, sometimes with a touch of sadness, sometimes almost gleefully, but always ironically. It’s not worth acting for them.

Tragedy strips from the world its mask of enchantment, and where we thought we saw harmony, pre-established or created, it opens before us the eternal contradictoriness of the world, the eternal identity of good and evil and of other polar opposites. It confirms all contradictions, and to every one of life’s pretensions, justified or otherwise, it returns an ironic Yes! Neither to good nor to evil will it return a lyrical No! Tragedy is always ironic, never lyric. And that is how it ought to be staged.

For this reason there must be no acting. Only a level word-by-word delivery. The calm enactment of situations, scene by scene. And the fewer there are of these scenes, the more slowly they succeed each other, the more clearly will the tragic idea emerge before the charmed spectator. Let not the tragic actor strain and strut—exaggerated gesture and pompous declamation should be left to buffoons and clowns. The actor must be cold and calm; his every word must be measured and grave, his every gesture deliberate and beautiful. A tragic presentation should not bring to mind the flickering scenes of a cinematograph. Without this flickering, which is both irritating and unnecessary, the attentive spectator must travel the long road to the understanding of tragedy.

Furthest of all from the spectator stands the tragic protagonist, the chief manifestation of My will—and the road to the understanding of him is the longest of all; to approach him, the spectator must climb steep steps, must surmount and vanquish many things both within him and without. The further from the protagonist, the closer to the spectator, the more comprehensible to him, until at last the personages of the drama become so close to the spectator that they emerge with him more or less completely. They become similar to the chorus in ancient tragedy, saying the things that any of those seated on the steps of the amphitheatre would say.

And so the peaceable, self-satisfied bourgeois comes to the theatre. How will he be able to accept exposition and denouement, what will he understand of the drama if all the speeches that resound from the stage are alien to his way of thought? As the tragedies of Shakespeare could not dispense with the clown, the modern drama cannot dispense with these banal tailor’s dummies with their blank faces, their creaking mechanism somewhat in need of repair, their dim, commonplace words. And if the bourgeois himself should shudder at their intolerable banality, so much the better—it will be a comforting sign that he too is approaching an understanding of the one Countenance concealed beneath the various masks, profaned but not destroyed by the banality of terrestrial utterance. Therein lies the true justification of light comedy, of farce—even of the buffoonery of the Punch and Judy show. And even of pornography.

There is yet another significance to this, since it is as yet the sole means available to the popular theatre—again I refrain from speaking of the intimate theatre, so close to our hearts but so difficult to speak of—the sole means of bringing the spectator into the action. The sole means—and in many cases perhaps an adequate one.

Even the mystery play itself, although a form of drama in the highest degree communal, nevertheless demands a single performer—both priest and sacrifice—for the sacrament of self-immolation. Not only the highest type of social activity, the mystery, but social achievement in general is at the same time utterly individual. Any common cause is carried through by the thought and planning of a single individual—any parliament will listen to an orator rather than sink into a cheerful hubbub of communion. “Upon the vessel is a seal, upon the seal a name; what is concealed in the vessel is known only to him who affixed the seal and to the initiate.” The temple is open to all, but the name of the builder is incised upon the stone. He who approaches the altar must leave his anger at the threshold. Therefore the crowd—the audience—cannot participate in the tragedy unless their outworn and banal words be consumed by fire within them. Only in passivity. The dramatic performer is always alone.

How can it be in the interest of the stage to flood it with a multitude of players, each one of whom lays claim to a character of his own and an individual role in the drama? Their fleeting appearances can only be irritating to anyone with an understanding of the drama; it is hard to remember who they are supposed to be, and of little point to do so. For this reason drama is difficult to read—you have to keep glancing at the list of dramatis personae. No wonder drama is little favored by the bookseller.

Is it not a matter of indifference to me whether Shuisky or Vorotynsky²⁹ is bustling about on the stage if I know that the tragedy of imposture, so brilliantly conceived by the genius of Russian history (and so palely outlined by the genius of Russian literature), is being enacted before me? One man speaks, and after him another—but are these not your own words, simple-minded spectator? Mingled with the pure gold of poetry, are not these your own pennies—dull, worn, but nonetheless dear to your heart—rolling on the boards?

It is a naive calculation—but a wise and true one—that as the theatregoer greedily picks up his pennies, he will pick up My heavy gold with them and sell me in exchange his soul, which, though it be of little weight, is dear to me. All the same, the less of this small change rolling about the boards the better: a plea addressed to dramatists.

As there is in the drama but a single will, the author’s, and a single performer, the actor, so there should also be a single spectator. The insane monarch who would attend a performance alone in his magnificent theatre, hidden behind a heavy curtain in the darkness and silence of the royal box, was right in this respect. In the tragic theatre, every spectator must feel himself to be this insane king, hidden from everybody. No one must see his face, and no one must be surprised if

“With mystery he veiled³⁰

The play of his passions,

Sometimes at graveside gay

And gloomy at the feast.”

And if he should lightly doze or even fall into a profound slumber, what is art but a golden sleep, and why should not the drama be a rhythmic dream? There will be no one to laugh at him, no one to be disturbed or shocked by an unexpected snore at the most pathetic moment.

The spectator himself should neither see nor hear anyone—neither those whose faces artlessly reflect all their feelings, moods, chagrins and sympathies, nor those who pretend to understanding and intelligence; neither the handkerchief raised to the reddened eye nor the glove nervously crumpled in the restless hand. He should remain impervious to those who blow their noses and snivel and to those who laugh, even if they laugh and weep in the right places. He who views the tragic show should sit in silence and darkness and solitude. Like the prompter in his narrow box. Like a theatre mouse.

With nothing extraneous to distract him, neither should the spectator be distracted by anything on stage that is not strictly necessary to the drama. Whether the decor consists of beautifully painted sets or simply drapes, the stage must be arranged in a single plane. The stage picture should be like a painting, and the spectator’s gaze should not be drawn beyond the actor into the depths of a multidimensional stage, into the region of the hidden, when his attention should be concentrated on him who acts and wills and contemplates.

It is pleasant to have scenery—it immediately creates an appropriate mood, giving the spectator all the visual hints—what then should we have against it? In the great world outside also:

“At once all seemed to me

A flat backcloth—

The dawn stretched like painted paper,

A star sparkled like tinsel.”

But he who is absorbed in the world of external decor has come to the theatre in order to find himself—in order to come unto Me.

His gaze should not be distracted by an oversumptuous diversity of scenery. For this reason, incidentally, it is better that one set should serve for the entire drama. At all events, at any given moment the spectator should know what he ought to be looking at, what it is that he should see and hear on stage. In this he will be assisted by the author’s stage directions as clearly enunciated by the reader, and of course he will also be helped by all available mechanical devices. Everything in the stage picture must be significant, every detail of the setting must be carefully pondered, so that nothing superfluous, nothing apart from what is absolutely essential is presented to the spectator.

Toward the same end, care should be taken with lighting; perhaps the spectator should be shown only what he is supposed to be seeing at a given moment, while everything else should be swallowed in darkness—just as everything on which our present attention is not fixed slips beneath the threshold of consciousness. It exists, but at the same time it is as if it did not exist. Because there exists for me only that which is within Me and for Me—everything else, though it may possibly possess reality for someone, lies dormant in the world of the possible, no more than awaiting its turn to be.

Such, in outline, is the form the theatrical spectacle should take. And the content to be invested in this form—the tragic game Fate plays with its puppets, the spectacle of the fatal dissolution of all terrestrial masks—is the mystery of perfect self-affirmation. I play, my playthings being dolls and masks, and, as the world looks on, masks and veils fall away and My unique will rejoices in its triumph. It is my own fatal error that ties all the strands of the plot, and I must struggle in the ever-tightening toils of irresolvable earthly contradictions until the fatal knots are sundered by a sharp stiletto that pierces Me to the heart. My lighthearted play has brought worlds into being—I am sacrifice and I am priest. Burning love consoles and, burning, is consumed; the ultimate consoler is Death.

The theatre, it is clear, gravitates toward tragedy. It must become tragic.

In our time, any farce will become tragedy; to a sensitive ear, our laughter is more terrible than our weeping and our rapture follows on hysteria. In the old days it was the lighthearted and healthy who laughed. The victors laughed. The conquered wept. With us it is the sorrowful and the mad who laugh. Gogol laughs … The eyes of My madness are full of merriment.

Our comedy, to put it simply, is nothing but tragedy that makes us laugh. But then we find tragedy itself laughable.

The sufferings of young Werther? No—the sufferings of a self-aware schoolboy.³¹ All very funny, but very serious too. He might have escaped with a birching, but he puts a bullet through his head. Young girls crowd about his freshly dug grave, roses are showered on his coffin—his parents weep and blow their noses. They wanted to give him a whipping, but they were too late. It wasn’t their fault.

Fragile laughter hangs like music in the air about us. There is perhaps a rhythm to it. It calls for dancing. Who can say that only Death dances on fresh graves? We too can dance. We are a merry crowd indeed; we dance like a family of undertakers during a cholera epidemic …

Whatever may be the content of the tragedy of the future, it will not be able to dispense with the dance. Not for nothing do shrewd dramatists even now insert the cakewalk, the maxixe or similar tomfoolery into their plays.

I hope, though, that the dance will be choric in nature. It is to accommodate such dancing that footlights should be removed from theatres.

The modern theatregoer is able to participate in the theatrical spectacle only to the extent that he is able to recognize himself in the more or less crooked mirrors that the theatre places before him; the next stage in his participation in the tragic drama must be his participation in the tragic dance.

It is fortunate that we have Isadora Duncan to wing the dance with her naked feet …

“How sweet to know another life is with us!”³²

(Valery Briusov)

Soon we shall all become infected with this “other life,” and we shall stream onto the stage like Khlysts to whirl about in frenzied ritual.

The action of the tragedy will be accompanied by and interspersed with dance. Will the dance be merry? Perhaps. At all events, it will be frenzied to a greater or lesser degree. For the dance is nothing but the rhythmic frenzy of soul and body as they surrender themselves to the tragic element of music.

You are mistaken if you look at a dancer and think to yourself that he must be drenched with sweat as he whirls about, and that’s the reason he loves to drench himself with the delicate fragrance of perfume. It is not he who whirls before your eyes, but the world that revolves about him ever faster, shimmering, dissolving, melting away in swift, untrammelled, airy motion. You have failed to perceive this universal gyration because you are timid and sensible, because you do not dare to surrender to the frenzied rhythm of the dance that will shatter the fetters of everyday existence. You see only the ridiculous—the red faces, the arm awkwardly obtrusive or ungracefully bent, the damp locks of hair, the droplets so repellent on a youthful skin. You do not know that it is the world’s spinning that breathes sweet fire upon the frenzied body given up to the universal dance; that the dews of Eden mingled delicious coolness with delicious heat.

The black ringlet whips the white neck, the toe of a white shoe flashes beneath a white dress, a smile of delight gleams and is born away on scarlet lips, the train of a dress streams out, brushing against you. Draw on your gloves, invite any lady you like; don’t be afraid—this is only a ball, you’re not on the Brocken but in a ballroom at the mansion of Baroness Jour-fixe. The floor is polished with wax—“the gift of the wise bees”—but not at all dangerous. “Miss Snandulia dances only with those who would be a suitable match” (Wedekind: Spring’s Awakening); she is a well-brought-up young lady, although “her dress is low-cut—to the waist at the back and in front to drive a man insane. She can’t possibly be wearing a petticoat.”

The ballroom dance is only a hint of what the tragic dance ought to be. True, the lady’s corset, gloves and shoes correspond—to a very limited extent—to the mask of the tragic player of old. We know now, however, that we have no need of masks, however beautiful, made by the theatre property man. We always wear our own masks, and they fulfill their function so well that we often deceive not only others but even ourselves with their play of expression.

The whole world is nothing but a stage set behind which the creative spirit—My spirit—conceals itself. All earthly faces, all earthly bodies are only masks, only puppets for a single performance of the earthly tragicomedy—puppets wound up to speak, gesture, laugh and weep. And then comes tragedy, attenuating mask and decor until we glimpse through them the world transfigured by Me, the world of My spirit, the consummation of My unique will; through the masks and disguises we glimpse My unique face, My transfigured flesh. Flesh that is beautiful and liberated.

The rhythm of liberation is the rhythm of the dance. The pathos of liberation is the joy of the beautiful naked body.

The dancing spectators, male and female, will come to the theatre, leaving their ugly philistine clothes at the threshold. They will be caught up in the airy dance.

In this way the crowd that came to gaze will be transformed into a circle of dancers who have come to take part in the tragic drama.

1908

FYODOR SOLOGUB³³

THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH

Tragedy in three acts, with a prologue

To my sister

FOREWORD

The author of this tragedy has exchanged his mask for a half-mask, but still does not reveal his face. He wishes to be recognized by the smile that coils at the corners of his lips.

But if he should not be recognized …

With all the words at his command, he speaks of one, unchanging thing. Untiringly he summons to one, unchanging thing.

But if he should not be heard …

Is his verse not beautiful? Is his prose not fragrant? Is he not a lord of language?

He smiles and passes on, drawing his cloak about him.

And she is with him, the serpent-eyed one.

THE SERPENT-EYED ONE
IN THE PROUD CASTLE

PROLOGUE TO THE TRAGEDY
THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

KING

ALDONZA, called Queen Ortruda

DULCINEA, called Aldonza

DAGOBERT, a page

THE POET, in a frock coat

THE LADY, in a silk dress

An antechamber of the royal castle. The walls are of immense, rough-hewn stones. In the front of the wall is the great arch of the entrance, through which the hall is visible to the audience. In the foreground is a wide, gently slanting staircase leading down to the auditorium, which corresponds to the inner courtyard of the castle. Halfway up the staircase is a shallow landing from which two somewhat narrower staircases branch off left and right: they lead through the side-walls to the castle’s outer courtyards. The antechamber is lined along sides and back with massive columns. Three short stairways ascend from the antechamber: the wide central one leads to the hall of banquets and ceremonial receptions; the two side stairways are narrow; the one on the right leads to the King’s bedchamber. This last stairway is partly lit by the moon. The King is sitting on the steps. He gazes into the darkness of the unlit courtyard and speaks softly, as if to some unseen companion.

KING. Who summons me I do not know, and what I am summoned to I do not understand. Dark phantom, what do you want of me? Your voice is indistinct and your face is dark, as if masked in mist. I do not know why I have come here, to this gaping darkness filled with midnight terrors. The great-winged prophetic bird awakened me, and I stole from my bedchamber, leaving my dear wife sweetly slumbering. And now I am here and a multitude of unknown faces seem to float before me, as if all the courtyard of my ancestral castle were thronged and the pale shades of the long-dead were peering at me from all the windows, from the galleries, from the balconies—silently. They gaze at me—but they won’t speak to me. O the wearisome apathy, the terrible indifference of these visitors!

Dulcinea ascends the side stairway. She appears in the guise of a poor peasant girl, known to everyone as Aldonza. Her clothes are ragged, poverty-stricken; her hair is falling out of curl; her arms and feet are bare. Over her shoulders she carries a yoke with two buckets.

DULCINEA. I’m tired, O God I’m tired. They make me go to the springs of living and dead water, and when I bring back my buckets filled, they tell me the water is undrinkable. They make me wash the floors with it and they beat me for bringing them water that’s harsh and bitter. They don’t know that the water I bring them in my buckets is sweet. I’m tired.

She sets down the buckets on the bottom step. She sits down on the stairs near the King, looks at him for a long time in silence, and at last says to him softly:

DULCINEA. Are you the king who lives in this proud castle and rules this land of darkness?

KING. Yes, serpent-eyed one, I am the king of this land—but mine is a land of light.

He looks closely at her and speaks.

KING. I recognize you. You are the peasant girl Aldonza, the one the urchins laugh at because a madman has called you by the sweet name of Dulcinea, the adorable enchantress, the loveliest of earthly maidens. You have learned to cast spells and to work enchantment, serpent-eyed one, but you have not found yourself a bridegroom.

DULCINEA. I am waiting for a king and for a poet who will crown me. They will crown beauty and overthrow ugliness. They will spurn the ordinary and strive after the impossible.

KING. Your buckets stand empty, those who sent you are waiting for their water and will beat you if you tarry along the way. Put your tawny young shoulder under the yoke, take up your buckets, fetch your water, serve him who has hired you for little pay.

DULCINEA. For little pay!

KING. Your lowly labor is not worthy of heavy, ringing gold. The rough embraces of the master’s son in a dark hallway smelling of goat and dog—that’s your proper reward. You have learned to work enchantment—but of what use are your conjurations?

DULCINEA. A poet is coming here—and you and he together must crown me, Dulcinea.

KING. Fetch your water.

DULCINEA. So that’s your mercy, King! Weary though I am, you send me forth again. I shall do your will, I shall bring living water and I shall bring dead water. And now, King, accept from me this little gift.

She gives him an amulet and leaves with her yoke and buckets.

KING. What has she given me, the sorceress? Is there an evil charm in this amulet? Or does it portend well? I’ll put it around my neck, anyway.

He puts on the amulet.

KING. How easy and relaxed everything about me is becoming. Life is easy, so easy! Death is easy, so easy! And all that lies ahead is becoming a sweet dream. A golden dream.

He sinks down on the steps. Dagobert the page enters.

DAGOBERT. The King is asleep on the steps, bewitched by the serpent-eyed gaze of Aldonza. Queen Ortruda is alone. Fate smiles upon me.

He makes his way stealthily to the King’s chamber. The Poet and the Lady enter.

POET. We certainly found a good cabbie.

LADY. Yes, he drove very fast. The wind whistled in my ears and my heart almost stopped beating. But he was strange. He sat there like a dead man. Where has he brought us, Mr. Poet? Everything here is quiet and dark and still.

POET. It’s an inn. All the same, I liked the coachman. In the poem I shall write about this journey, I shall call him Troika.

LADY. If I were you, Mr. Poet, I’d call him Automobile.

POET. No, dear lady, Troika is better. And I’ve found some wonderful rhymes for it too.

LADY. And what are they, Mr. Poet?

POET. “Charodeika”³⁴ and “vodka.”

LADY. Those are good rhymes, Mr. Poet. But I only like the first one.

POET. But there aren’t any good rhymes for the word “automobile.”

LADY. Perhaps there are, all the same.

POET. For example?

A dispassionate voice is heard.

—Death.³⁵

LADY. Did you hear that?

POET. Yes, I did. Someone is hiding and playing a joke on us.

LADY. There’s someone sitting on the stairs.

POET. It’s the porter.

LADY. You’re nearsighted, Mr. Poet. Take a good look—it’s the King.

POET. You’re mistaken, dear lady: kings don’t sit on stairs.

LADY. Perhaps you’re right, Mr. Poet. But it’s frightening here—and boring too.

POET. We’ll have some wine and a bite to eat.

Turning to empty space—the auditorium—he calls.

POET. Waiter!

They wait, peering into the darkness.

LADY. How dark it is here!

POET. That’s unavoidable. They’ll switch on the electric light in a moment … Waiter!

Dulcinea emerges, bent beneath the burden of her yoke.

POET. My dear girl, are you the waitress here? Let’s have the menu.

DULCINEA. I bring buckets filled with living water and dead water.³⁶

POET. This inn has a language all its own. What we have here is red and white wine. Which will you have, dear lady?

LADY. I’ll have the white.

POET. That’s apparently called “dead water” here. Pour us some dead water, my dear girl.

Dulcinea approaches. She dips her ladle and serves the Poet, who draws back slightly.

POET. Do you mean to say the wine here is served in buckets? That it can only be drunk from a ladle?

LADY. I think that’s original.

POET. I think it’s repulsive.

LADY. You’re right, Mr. Poet. Original, but repulsive. We won’t drink this dirty water from these filthy buckets, out of this rusty ladle.

DULCINEA. You’re mistaken, my dear. This is living and dead water, and you ought to drink some of it. You would see yourself in a magic mirror.

LADY. (capriciously) I don’t want to.

DULCINEA. I have waited for you a long time, Mr. Poet. You have come here, to the depths of time …

POET. (to the lady) This inn is called “The Depths of Time.”

DULCINEA. (continuing) … to sing in praise of me, the loveliest of earthly maidens, the enchantress Dulcinea, who here, in this dark land, is wrongly called Aldonza.

POET. That’s not why I came here.

DULCINEA. Sing my praises, Mr. Poet, and then the King will crown me. Sing my praises, dear Poet, and then a handsome youth will fall in love with me. Sing my praises, dear and wonderful Poet, and then my real name will be revealed to all.

POET. You’re an impostor. The real Dulcinea lives in a proud castle. She doesn’t have to carry heavy buckets. On her feet are satin slippers embroidered with pearls.

DULCINEA. Look into my eyes, Mr. Poet, and write poetry for me.

POET. I’m afraid of your eyes, serpent-eyed one. I’ve published all my poems—I don’t have any new ones.

DULCINEA. You shall not escape my enchantments, Mr. Poet, come what may. And this woman, who is a stranger to you, shall not help you. Sit down on these steps and watch what will be enacted here.

POET. I feel a strange weariness. Let’s sit down here, dear lady; this odd girl has promised us a show.

DULCINEA. Whether it remains merely a show or becomes a mystery depends on you.

POET. She’s talking about the intimate theatre. Let’s watch.

The King continues to doze in the middle of the staircase. The Poet and his Lady sit down by a column to the right, snuggling up to each other, and gaze at the spectacle as if it were a golden dream.

DULCINEA. The King is fast asleep—and does not wish to crown me. The weary poet has sunk down on the castle steps, his shoulder pressed to that of his chance companion—he does not wish to sing my praises, he refuses to recognize Dulcinea. I shall summon the young and the beautiful, I shall exalt love’s mysteries to the heights of bliss!

Turning toward the King’s bedchamber, Dulcinea calls out her summons.

DULCINEA. Aldonza—she who is here called Queen Ortruda! And you, young page Dagobert! Come to me.

Queen Ortruda and the page Dagobert appear at the top of the stairs.

DAGOBERT. My dear lady Ortruda, why have you come out here? The King, bewitched by the serpent eyes of crazy Aldonza, would have dozed for a long time, and we would have been free to taste the sweet delights of our love.

ORTRUDA. Someone summoned me, and there was such authority in the summons.

DAGOBERT. She’s here too, the serpent-eyed one!

DULCINEA. Dear Dagobert, surely you know who it is you love?

DAGOBERT. I love Queen Ortruda. And she loves me.

DULCINEA. Can’t you see that it’s Aldonza? Her eyes are lustreless, her voice too piercing. Love me, sweet stripling, love me—the beautiful Dulcinea. Reject the Queen, give her back to her husband.

ORTRUDA. She’s mad. Don’t listen to her, Dagobert.

DULCINEA. Be silent!

Without a word, the Queen sinks down on the steps next to the King and watches the spectacle with spellbound gaze.

DULCINEA. Love me, sweet Dagobert.

DAGOBERT. You’re a beauty, darling Aldonza. And you know how to weave spells. There they sit on the steps, the ones you’ve bewitched. Will you bewitch me too, cunning Aldonza?

DULCINEA. Don’t call me Aldonza. I am Dulcinea.

DAGOBERT. Everyone knows you’re Aldonza. But it’s all the same to me. I’ll call you whatever you like. I’ll be none the worse for it.

He embraces Dulcinea and tries to kiss her. Dulcinea frees herself. She speaks softly.

DULCINEA. Even you don’t believe me. And the most terrible mockery of all is that you call me by the name that belongs to me without believing in it. I have no need of that kind of love. Return to your lady.

Dagobert sits down next to Ortruda, puts his arm round her and dozes off with his head on her shoulder.

DULCINEA. Again spectacle remains spectacle and does not become mystery. Again I remain uncrowned, again my praises are unsung, again love is denied the real beauty of this world—the enchantress Dulcinea in the guise of the serpent-eyed Aldonza. But I will not abandon my design. Undaunted, I shall strive for the crowning of beauty and the overthrow of ugliness. Never tiring, I shall appear to the poet, the lover and the king in many guises. Sing my praise—I shall say—love me, crown me. Come to me, follow me. Only I am alive in life and in death, only in me is there life, mine alone is the ultimate triumph. Now I shall assume the form of the bondwoman Malgista and I shall send forth my daughter Algista to accomplish a great deed, to fulfill my eternal design. With her virginal freshness I shall mingle my eternal enchantments. Whether life triumph, or death—the triumph shall be mine.

THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH

Tragedy
in three acts

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

KING CLODOVEG

BERTHA, his wife

ALGISTA, her servant

MALGISTA, mother of Algista

ETHELBERT, brother of Bertha

LINGARD, a page

KNIGHTS, LADIES, PAGES, SERVANTS AND SERVING-WOMEN

ACT ONE

The antechamber is dimly lit by torches inserted in the iron rings of the columns. From the doors of the banqueting hall come the loud voices of revellers, songs, laughter and the clink of goblets.

Song (from the hall).

The cup is filled with heady wine —

Bridegroom, kiss your bride!

Beneath her veil the queen sits calm,

Behind that mist keen-eyed.

To lift a corner of that veil

None but a king may dare.

To press your lips upon your bride’s

Is sweet beyond compare!

Algista and Malgista stand near the entrance to the banqueting hall, hidden behind a column. Algista’s face is covered by a gray veil. They speak softly.

MALGISTA. Algista, dearest daughter, you’re not afraid?

ALGISTA. I’m not afraid.

MALGISTA. The time has come to carry out our great design—to crown beauty and to overthrow ugliness.

ALGISTA. Ugly and wicked, stupid and greedy, worthy daughter of generations of cruel and perfidious men, she rejoices, triumphant. She wishes to be queen—why?

MALGISTA. No, not Bertha the cripple, the daughter of the bloodthirsty king Coloman, but you, my beautiful Algista, deserve to be queen.

ALGISTA. I will be queen. And Algista shall be no more—the very name of Algista shall be forgotten. And I will be queen.

MALGISTA. Perhaps this is the last time I shall call you my daughter. Let me kiss once more the face of my Algista, the blooming roses of my dear daughter’s lips. Tomorrow I shall bow down before you, like a slave before her mistress.

Algista quickly throws back her veil. Her mother gazes at her adoringly and kisses her lovely face. Algista covers her face again.

ALGISTA. For a long time I stood here alone, hidden in a dark corner behind the pillars. After the wedding ceremony, here, before my eyes, the knights who had escorted our Queen Bertha took their leave of the King. They left the castle and rode away, and now only the two of us are left to serve her. Then I watched while the King of this land entered the hall with Bertha and the wedding guests and they took their places at table. They sit and feast while I stand alone and watch. From where I stand I can see the King’s face and Bertha next to him.

MALGISTA. Our lady Bertha, in accordance with ancient custom, sits covered with gold-embroidered Levantine cloth.

ALGISTA. What if Bertha be hidden by her veil of woven gold—I know and remember her face, pitted with smallpox; I know that one of my lady’s legs is shorter than the other, and that she conceals it by means of cunningly fashioned golden heels.

MALGISTA. (laughs softly and speaks in a whisper) Our rulers have invented many splendid ceremonies in order to elevate themselves above us. Sometimes we can even turn their vanity to our advantage. King Clodoveg has not yet seen our lady’s face.

ALGISTA. I know. They wanted to deceive the king of this land. He would have seen her for the first time tomorrow morning, but then it would have been too late. You can’t drive out a woman who’s shared you bed, no matter how repulsive she may be.

MALGISTA. No, we shall give him a wife who is beautiful and wise. He’s fuddled with wine. He won’t be able to see her face in the darkness of the bedchamber, and afterwards he won’t understand who’s deceived him and how.

ALGISTA. Deceit and perfidy are not our invention. The rulers of this world, the crowned and the mighty, have opened the way to perfidy and evil.

MALGISTA. The feast is drawing to an end. I’ll go now. We mustn’t be seen together.

Quickly she kisses Algista and goes out. The page Lingard appears from the banqueting hall.

LINGARD. I’m tired. I’m ready to sit down on the floor. It’s no joke to be on your feet from morning to night.

He goes to the corner where Algista is hiding.

LINGARD. Why, there’s someone here. Who are you?

ALGISTA. (in a feigned hoarse voice) I am Algista, a servant of Queen Bertha.

LINGARD. What are you doing here in the dark? You should be feasting with the other girls. They’re all drunk. Or are you tired too? Let’s sit together and rest awhile.

He embraces Algista and tries to kiss her.

ALGISTA. Get away from me or I’ll scream.

LINGARD. Touch-me-not! Don’t you find me attractive?

ALGISTA. You’re handsome, but we have no time for kissing today. And besides, we mustn’t. They’ll be getting up from the feast any moment, and I’ll have to undress our lady Bertha and put out the lights in the bedchamber so that the King won’t get a look at what he shouldn’t before the proper time.

LINGARD. And what shouldn’t he look at?

ALGISTA. What shouldn’t he look at? Things will go ill if the bridegroom sees the pockmarked face of his queen too soon. He’ll probably drive her out, saying ‘Go, while you’re still a maid.’

She feigns laughter.

LINGARD. So Bertha, you say, is pockmarked.

ALGISTA. Like a cuckoo. And lame too.

LINGARD. (laughs) And so the King has been deceived.

ALGISTA. Yes. But keep quiet for the time being.

She moves away, pretending to limp.

LINGARD. And why do you keep your face hidden? And it looks like you’ve got a limp too. Like mistress, like maid!

ALGISTA. What are you talking about? I’ve never limped in my life!

She leans against the wall.

LINGARD. Let me take a look for myself. You’ re not pockmarked too, by any chance?

He catches hold of her cloak. Algista lets out a piercing scream.

LINGARD. Stupid girl—the likes of you can put a noose around a man’s neck.

He runs off. The King, knights, ladies, pages, menservants and serving-women enter from the banqueting hall.

KING. Someone here was calling for help. Who dares disturb our carefree and joyous feast? Find the insolent fellow and bring him before us.

Algista mingles with the King’s serving-women. Pages and servants rush about the antechamber, making a fearful din. The knights stand in bellicose and slightly ludicrous attitudes, rolling their eyes threateningly; their faces are red with the wine they have drunk in abundance.

KING. Are you frightened, my dear wife Bertha? Are you trembling?

BERTHA. No, my lord, with you at my side I’m afraid of nothing.

KING. Someone raised a drunken outcry and then made off—frightened at his own impudence. We forgive the insolent one for our joy’s sake. Leave your searching, our trusted servants. Women, conduct the queen to our bedchamber.

Bertha, ladies and serving-women disappear into the bedchamber; Algista goes with them.

KING. As for us, my friends—we’ll go back to the board and drink a last cup.

The King, knights, pages and servants go into the banqueting hall. The ladies who conducted the Queen to the bedchamber return and then leave by the stairs on the left. The antechamber empties. From the banqueting hall come shouts, bawdy songs and drunken laughter. Malgista cautiously mounts the side staircase. She looks about her. She steals to the door of the bedchamber. She listens, then quickly conceals herself behind the columns. The serving-women emerge from the bedchamber. They are laughing. They speak in drunken voices.

SERVING-WOMEN. She’s a modest one! Didn’t want to undress in front of us. Wouldn’t even uncover her face.

— She only kept her young maidservant with her.

— She’s a strange one too — all wrapped up in her shawl and doesn’t say a word.

— Old Malgista whispered to me on the sly that her daughter is pockmarked.

— And she’s supposed to be lame too: they say she wears shoes with different heels — one high, one low.

— Anyway, we’ll soon see — they can’t hide beneath their long veils forever.

They descend the staircase. The stage is empty. Algista appears from the bedchamber; barefoot, she wears a shift and is wrapped in a big dark shawl. She draws a dagger across her breast, drawing blood. Then she moves into the shadows and, half-covering herself with her cloak, lies down.

The King comes out of the banqueting hall, accompanied by a noisy crowd. They escort him to his bedchamber.

KING. My friends! I thank you for sharing with me this feast of celebration, and for diverting the Queen and myself with merry songs and seemly jokes. Now you may go to your beds, except for those who are to stand guard here—and may God bless you all.

Knights, pages and servants respond with raucous shouts: God grant our King and Queen long life. May He send good fortune to our King, our Queen and our crown prince! And may he send us a crown prince! We wish Your Majesty a good night—and a successful one!

The King goes out. The knights quiet the noisy, giggling pages. They all go out. Two armed knights remain at the doors of the bedchamber. They talk in whispers, then fall into a doze, leaning upon their spears, their backs against the columns. Two or three of the torches go out. Rustlings and stirrings are heard in the darkness. Algista moans. The knights give a start.

FIRST. There’s someone here.

SECOND. You remember how someone cried out when we were still at the feast?

FIRST. There’s a woman lying here.

They both bend toward Algista.

ALGISTA. (with a moan) Help!

The knights hold their torches over her.

FIRST. A real beauty!

SECOND. Someone has slashed her breast with a knife.

FIRST. A feeble blow. Our beauty’s frightened, but not seriously wounded. A poorly aimed blow—a child or a woman might have done it.

SECOND. Who are you, my beauty?

ALGISTA. Bertha.

SECOND. She’s calling for Bertha.

ALGISTA. I am Bertha.

FIRST. The Queen?

ALGISTA. Yes.

FIRST. But the Queen is in the bedchamber with the King. You’re delirious, my beauty.

SECOND. She’s closed her eyes again.

FIRST. What shall we do with her?

SECOND. Let’s call the seneschal.

FIRST. Will it be a good thing if everyone gets to know of this strange, dark tale?

SECOND. What should we do?

FIRST. Let’s knock at the King’s door. He’ll praise us for our discretion. Who knows, perhaps this beauty—or maybe someone else—will have to be dispatched quietly so that no one finds out what happened here.

SECOND. You may well be right.

They leave Algista. She moans loudly. Malgista runs across the stage wailing.

MALGISTA. Where is my daughter Algista? Algista, Algista, where are you?

She runs off. Her wails can be heard backstage. Knights, women and pages come running in. The noise brings on the King. Exclamations, noise.

ALGISTA. Clodoveg, my lord—save me!

KING. Who is this woman?

FIRST KNIGHT. She was lying here, wounded, in a dark corner. We asked her who she was, and she said, Queen Bertha.

KING. What is she saying? The Queen lies in bed in my chamber.

ALGISTA. (in a weak voice) They undressed me and left. I was alone. Her face was covered. But I recognized her. She struck me with a dagger. Then she dragged me out here. My slave Algista plotted evil against me.

KING. What are you saying, unhappy woman! Can it be that I have been sharing my bed with a slave?

ALGISTA. Woe is me! I am dying, I, the daughter of a king, I, a king’s bride, I, in the flower of my youth and beauty—and she, my slave, lame, pockmarked Algista, is to be queen! I lie here on stones while my slave lies in my bed!

KING. Go, women, to my chamber, dress the Queen and bring her here. In my presence the Queen shall unmask the impostor and truth shall shine brighter than the sun.

MALGISTA (running in) Good people, tell me, where is my daughter Algista?

KING. Look, is this not your daughter lying wounded here?

MALGISTA. Algista, my child, who has done you harm?

She rushes over to Algista. She looks at her closely. She leaps up with a loud cry. She backs away. She throws herself on her knees before Algista.

MALGISTA. My dear lady Bertha, what’s the matter? Why are you lying here on the cold stones, half-naked? Why has your husband driven you from his bed?

ALGISTA. My faithful Malgista, what grief! What shame! While your daughter was undressing me, she struck me with a dagger. I fell at her feet as if dead. She dragged me out here, threw me into a dark corner and went herself to my bed.

MALGISTA. O woe is me! Algista, you madwoman, what have you done?

Bertha comes out of the bedchamber, the women with her.

MALGISTA. My wretched daughter, my mad Algista! What made you raise your hand against your mistress?

LINGARD. So that’s why she was trying to make me believe the Queen was pockmarked and lame!

FIRST KNIGHT. When was that? What are you saying?

LINGARD. Wait, I’ll tell the King everything.

BERTHA. Malgista, what are you saying? Or has grief darkened your reason? This is your daughter Algista lying here wounded.

MALGISTA. Falsehearted creature! You are Algista, you are my daughter, and our lady Bertha is lying here. You plotted to kill her, but she lives to unmask you, traitress!

KING. Who am I to believe?

BERTHA. I am Bertha, daughter of King Coloman.

ALGISTA. I am Queen Bertha.

BERTHA. I am your bride, King.

ALGISTA. I am your bride, Clodoveg.

BERTHA. I sat next to you at the feast.

ALGISTA. When we were sitting at the feast, I said to you: “My lord, kiss me on the shoulder.”

BERTHA. I said those words.

ALGISTA. Aloud?

BERTHA. I whispered them in my lord’s ear.

ALGISTA. Then how would I have heard them?

BERTHA. Malgista told you.

ALGISTA. No one told me anything—I wished my lord to caress me.

BERTHA. Bring back the knights who escorted me here—they’ll tell you …

ALGISTA. King, naturally my father’s emissaries told you that I was beautiful?

KING. Yes. Would I have married an ugly woman?

ALGISTA. See, King, how beautiful I am and how pockmarked she is.

BERTHA. Yes, but I am Queen, and you, my beautiful Algista, are my serving maid.

ALGISTA. Look, King—one of her legs is shorter than the other.

BERTHA. I am lame, but I am Queen.

ALGISTA. Surely, King, my father’s emissaries did not tell you that Bertha was pockmarked and lame?

KING. No. I would not have taken a lame and pockmarked woman to wife, and I don’t think that King Coloman would have deceived me.

Algista pretends to lose consciousness.

MALGISTA. (bending over her) My dear lady!

BERTHA. A web of deceit, a great web of deceit has been spun about me. Who will help me break the clinging threads of treachery? To whom shall I cry for help? I stand here defenseless, the victim of deceit.

KING. I can see which of these two is the deceiver. But tell me, barons and knights, what do you think—which one is the Queen?

KNIGHTS. This beautiful wounded lady.

KING. And the impostor?

KNIGHTS. That lame, pockmarked woman.

KING. What shall I do with her?

MALGISTA. King, pardon my daughter. The evil one clouded her reason. For my loyalty to the Queen, pardon my daughter.

KING. Take her deep into the forest and let it be as God wills. As for her mother …

ALGISTA. King, let this faithful woman remain with me. You saw how she unmasked her own daughter, the dear, devoted soul!

KING. It shall be as you wish, sweet Queen.

BERTHA. Poor King, you have been deceived.

Bertha is led away. Algista is raised up and carried to the bedchamber. The people leave. A dispassionate voice is heard:

— A night passes. A day. A night. A day. Nights and days. Years. In the murk of time the years slip quickly by. Ten years.

ACT TWO

The same antechamber. Algista enters precipitately through the center doors. She is splendidly arrayed, as befits a queen. She rushes distractedly about the antechamber. She is followed by Malgista. The last words of a song are heard.

So to a white-haired wizard

The trusting king gave ear,

And drove from throne and threshold

The wife who loved him dear.

The people, sore deluded,

To a witch swear fealty—

Together they rule the kingdom,

The sorcerer and she.

The queen—where is she now then?

The forest hides her wrong.

The queen-will she return then?

I’ll sing of that ere long.

ALGISTA. Has the King noticed anything?

MALGISTA. No, my lady—everyone was listening spellbound to the wandering minstrel’s songs.

ALGISTA. Did you recognize him?

Malgista makes no reply.

ALGISTA. What are we to do?

MALGISTA. He won’t dare to say anything. He’s not going to admit that King Coloman—Bertha’s father and his—is a cheat.

ALGISTA. I’m terrified!

MALGISTA. Don’t be afraid, my darling daughter.

ALGISTA. No, not terrified—tired. I was wrong. I believed that people wanted freedom and light. O with what persistence, what ingenuity—night after night, day after day—I kept drumming the same thing into the King’s ears, always finding new ways to say it! He trusted me, and eventually he learned to think as I do. But he can do nothing except what his ancestors did before him: make war, pass judgment, reward. Nothing audacious. Rulers want to rule—that I understand. But the people—all these simple people, artisans and tillers of the soil—O how they want to be slaves! Slaves, and nothing more!

MALGISTA. Everyone says that under your influence the King has become merciful to the people, generous to his servants, just to all those who seek justice from him. The people bless your name, Bertha, our beloved queen.

ALGISTA. They glorify the name of Bertha! But if the truth is revealed, if the King finds out my true name, will he glorify the sweet name of Algista?

MALGISTA. The King won’t find out.

ALGISTA. He will.

MALGISTA. Even if he does, he won’t believe it.

ALGISTA. They’re coming.

Malgista moves away from her and stands behind a column. Algista stands to the front of the antechamber, half turned away from the center doors so that her face is in shadow. The King, Prince Ethelbert in the garb of a wandering minstrel, knights, ladies and pages enter from the banqueting hall.

KING. Dearest Bertha, light of my eyes, why did you leave us? He sang two more songs, each better than the last.

ALGISTA. Great is the art of this wandering minstrel. What mere mortal could sing so sweetly and so insidiously. Is it not some evil demon that inspires his cunning melodies?

KING. To all appearances he is a godfearing man.

ALGISTA. The Evil One can wear a priest’s robe. His devilish songs made my head spin.

KING. Forgive me, dear Bertha—I thought he would give you pleasure. Minstrel, take this gold and rest yourself. Your songs are beautiful, your art is great—but I fear that there may be the power of magic in it.

ETHELBERT. My sister sings better, and if my songs drove your gracious lady Bertha from the King’s merry feast, perhaps my sister’s singing will bring comfort to Her Majesty.

KING. Where is your sister?

ETHELBERT. Here, waiting in the courtyard. If you will permit me, King, I shall bring her to you.

KING. Do so.

ETHELBERT. (passing Algista) The serving wench Algista makes a fine queen.

ALGISTA. The deceiver’s son comes with deceit against deceit.

ETHELBERT. Your lovely body shall be given to the scourge and the birch, and to a shameful death.

He goes out.

KING. What was that the wandering minstrel muttered?

ALGISTA. Incomprehensible words. He is possessed by an evil spirit; his mind is prey to cruel and monstrous visions. He is haunted by treachery, deceit, blood, torture and death. You should not have commanded him to bring his sister here. If she is like her brother, they will cast evil spells on you, dear my lord, and on me, your wretched queen.

KING. Very well, let them be forbidden to enter.

But hardly has the King begun to speak when Bertha and a little boy are seen mounting the central staircase; they are followed by Ethelbert.

KING. My good minstrel, your songs have been sweet to our ears. I don’t doubt that your sister’s singing would be still more skilled and delightful—but the Queen is weary and cannot listen to songs. And you, my songstress, do not be vexed that you waited your turn to sing in vain. Take this gold and go your way. Perhaps the Queen and I will send for you tomorrow.

BERTHA. I—Bertha, the Queen—am also weary. Driven out by you, my dear husband, because you trusted the deceitful Algista and not me, long have I roamed dense forests, steep mountains and broad valleys. The wild winds blew about me, the pouring rain drenched me, the fair sun scorched me, thorns rent my garments and tore my flesh, my feet bled from sand and stone. Under a haystack in a field, King, I gave birth to your son. An old beggar woman served me as midwife; I had him christened in a humble village church; I called him Charles; he will be a great king. Take him, dear King, and do not drive me from your bed.

ALGISTA. No one wanted to listen to you, my songbird, but you’ve sung your song all the same. Well then, let’s hear you sing some more; you’ve sung about yourself—now sing about me.

BERTHA. You are my serving maid Algista. Your mother, Malgista, is hiding behind that column, pale with rage and fear.

EHTELBERT. Dear Bertha, don’t lower yourself by arguing with a slave. Know, King, that I am Ethelbert, son of King Coloman, brother of your unfortunate wife Bertha, whom you drove out, deceived by the evil Algista.

ALGISTA. He is mad, and his sister no less so.

ETHELBERT. The knights who brought Bertha to you ten years ago are with me. You will recognize them and they will tell you the truth.

He blows a golden horn. Twelve knights mount the central staircase.

ETHELBERT. And here, King, is a letter from King Coloman.

He gives the King the letter. The King takes it.

KING. Chancellor, unseal this letter, and we shall read it, as it is fitting that royal missives should be read, standing in royal state. And now, wandering minstrel calling yourself by the name of Prince Ethelbert, will you assert once more that this woman, brought here by you, is indeed the beautiful Bertha, daughter of King Coloman?

ETHELBERT. Yes, this is Queen Bertha, your wife and the daughter of King Coloman.

ALGISTA. (laughing) Beautiful Bertha! A fine beauty! See, King, what a big mouth she has! How pockmarked she is! And one of her legs is longer than the other.

BERTHA. You remember all this very well, Algista—but then, how could you forget it? You it was who dressed and shod me.

ETHELBERT. My sister was beautiful, but as we were journeying here Algista marred her beauty with evil spells. See, King, how much my sister resembles me.

ALGISTA. Yes, another redheaded monstrosity.

ETHELBERT. Be that as it may, the girls of my homeland, and of other countries too, have found it hard to take their eyes off me, and any one of them …

ALGISTA. Jingle your gold and some strumpet will hang around your neck.

ETHELBERT. Question my companions, King. Perhaps their faces will be familiar to you.

KING. We shall return to our royal castle, read this letter, ponder the matter and resolve it according to our conscience. And terrible shall be our judgment on those who plotted treachery.

He goes out through the center door. All follow him, except for Algista and Malgista.

MALGISTA. (approaching her daughter) Dear lady, take your place beside the King. Fear nothing. Confess nothing. The King loves you and will believe none but you.

ALGISTA. I shall remain here. I am tired. And I have no wish to be Bertha.

MALGISTA. What are you saying, you insane creature? You ruin yourself—and me with you.

ALGISTA. Am I not beautiful? Have I not been true to him? Have I not born him a son? Did you see? They dragged in some sickly little runt with them, while my son, my son is strong and beautiful—O my son Chilperic!

MALGISTA. You see, everything is in your favor, my darling daughter. So have no fear: go in boldly and take your place—the King will believe none but you.

ALGISTA. The hour of my final ordeal has come. If he loves me, if long days and sweet nights have bound us forever, he will not reject me: he will crown Algista. I shall go, I shall reveal my name.

MALGISTA. You’re mad! What you wish cannot be.

ALGISTA. I must go!

She walks toward the door leading to the hall. Malgista tries to hold her back. A brief struggle.

ALGISTA. (crying out) King, I am Algista!

Quickly she enters the hall. Malgista runs after her.

(offstage)

KING. Algista?

Uproar. Cries of amazement.

ALGISTA. I am Algista. I stand here before you, Clodoveg, judge me as you will; put me to death or pardon me, but remember, King, how I …

KING. Silence! An impostor, a slave has brought shame to my bed!

KNIGHTS AND LADIES. Impostor! Slave! Let her die!

ALGISTA. Clodoveg, my sweet King, I was a faithful wife to you.

KING. Silence. A shameful death …

ALGISTA. Clodoveg, my sweet husband Clodoveg …

KING. Silence her, women!

Algista gives a suppressed cry. Uproar, exclamations, above which a single voice is heard.

CHANCELLOR. Be silent! The King will pronounce his dread sentence.

KING. Divest the impostor of her queenly crown, her necklet and her robes. And you, dear Queen Bertha, assume your rightful place. The impostor shall die a terrible and shameful death before the people. Her naked body shall be given to the scourge and the birch; she shall be beaten to death and her body shall be cast into the moat for dogs to eat. The boy too shall be beaten and hanged. Let us go, my Queen: together we shall watch her torments and listen to her cries from a high balcony. Let the impostor be whipped!

Algista’s muffled screams. The wailing of Malgista. Laughter. Uproar. Shouts. The noise grows gradually louder. Coarse guffaws are heard. Knights, ladies, pages, menservants and serving-women begin to emerge from the hall. Shouts come from the milling throng.

KNIGHTS, LADIES, MENSERVANTS, SERVING-WOMEN.

— The impostor has been unmasked!

— It’s Algista, just a common wench.

— They ripped all her finery off and put it on the real Queen.

— Where’s the sentence going to be carried out?

— Here in the courtyard, in front of this mob who have come to gaze at the spectacle.

— Look, they’re undressing her.

— The impostor will be put to death this very day.

— A terrible and shameful death.

— They are going to flog her to death with birch switches and scourges of rawhide.

— And they’re going to hang her brat.

— I spat right in her eye!

— She got a slap or two from me!

— She only has her shift on, but we’ll soon rip that off her.

— They’re bringing her out, they’re bringing her out!

Algista is led through the door of the hall. Everyone crowds about her, laughing, mocking, shouting. She is led down the wide stairway into the pit, where the great door of the castle is. The antechamber is wrapped in darkness. Malgista is heard wailing.

MALGISTA. Good people, good people, save my daughter Algista!

ACT THREE

The same antechamber. The howling of dogs is heard. The full moon casts a bright strip of light on the upper stairs and the edge of the landing, leaving the rest in shadow. At first the antechamber is empty. Then Malgista slowly climbs the side stairway. On her shoulders she carries the body of Algista, half-naked, barely covered by its torn and bloody clothing. She lays Algista’s body in the moonlight, kneels over her and weeps, keening softly.

MALGISTA. My daughter, my daughter! They beat you, they tortured you to death. Long did the blows of their merciless scourges rain upon you while boys and servants laughed. And my Algista died. They threw her in the castle moat for dogs to eat—but the dogs wouldn’t touch her, howling mournfully over the body of their gentle mistress. The moon rose, the dogs howled, and my sorrow mounted to the heavens.

Her weeping rises to a howl. The howling of dogs is heard. Malgista gets up quietly and goes out keening.

MALGISTA. My sorrow mounts to the cold moon, to the bright heavens. The dogs howl, scenting the blood of their gentle mistress, and I too shall go and howl on the spot where the earth drank her blood as it gushed forth.

She goes out. Algista lifts herself up and cries out.

ALGISTA. Sleepers, arise!

All is quiet. Algista falls back. Malgista returns. She is carrying the child in her arms. She lays him at Algista’s side. She kneels over them, weeping and keening.

MALGISTA. Even the innocent boy they did not spare. They beat him, they tortured him, they murdered him and threw his body by his mother’s. O Algista, Algista, my daughter!

Algista lifts herself up and cries out.

ALGISTA. Sleepers, arise!

Malgista bends over her and asks softly.

MALGISTA. Daughter, dear one, are you alive?

ALGISTA. At this fearful hour only the dead are alive.

The shouted challenges and responses of the sentries can be heard outside. Someone comes up the side staircase and peers into the antechamber. Little by little the castle becomes filled with soft rustlings and noises, which grow ever louder.

MALGISTA. Tell me, my daughter—you didn’t die? You’re alive?

ALGISTA. The hour of the final ordeal is at hand.

MALGISTA. Or have you risen from the dead, awakened by the power of her who weaves her spells in the quiet heavens or by the secret whisper of her who wanders at night at the crossroads?

ALGISTA. See, there are two paths. He will choose one of them. Whether I be living or dead …

She gets up slowly and cries out.

ALGISTA. Whether you be living or dead, my son Chilperic, arise.

The boy gets up. The moonlight falls on the pale faces of Algista and the boy, and on their bloody garments. Algista turns toward the King’s bedchamber and cries out in a loud and terrible voice that echoes through the building’s immensity.

ALGISTA. Sleepers, arise!

Commotion, shouting, the clangor of arms are heard from the castle interior. Servants, pages, knights and women run across the antechamber, into which the common people now crowd. Exclamations are heard.

MENSERVANTS, SERVING-WOMEN, PAGES, KNIGHTS, LADIES.

— Who was shouting so loudly here?

— What has happened?

— Has there been an enemy attack?

— Or have the dead risen from their graves?

— Was it the archangel’s trumpet we heard summoning us to the Last Judgement?

— I’m frightened!

— The blood that has been shed cries out to the heavens.

— It’s dark.

— Where are the torches?

Someone brings in a torch, then another, then more and more. Torch-bearers rush about the antechamber in disarray. Some of the torches are inserted in the pillar rings. People are shouting.

— Look, Algista is here!

— The tortured Queen is risen!

— And her son too.

— Woe is us. Was it not an evil thing that we did?

MALGISTA. Yes, woe. You have done an evil thing—you have broken the beautiful vessel and spilled the precious wine.

The antechamber grows brighter and brighter from the light of the torches. Algista and her son stand at the bottom of the staircase, the rest cluster about the walls and pillars. The King, Bertha and Ethelbert appear. Clodoveg and Bertha have dressed hurriedly, but their crowns are on their heads. The King carries a naked sword. The noise subsides. Everyone except the King stands motionless and silent, eyes fixed on Algista.

MALGISTA. Algista, dearest daughter, speak to him sweet words of love.

ALGISTA. King, it is an evil thing you have done, but my love forgives you. Leave this stranger and follow me, follow me to a life of freedom and joy.

KING. Who are you? Why have you come here? If you are alive, hide yourself from our just anger. If you have risen from the dead, return to your slumber and do not trouble the living with your nocturnal visitations.

MALGISTA. Algista, dearest daughter, summon him to follow you.

ALGISTA. Clodoveg, dear lord and husband, I am your Algista. I love you. I have come to summon you to me. Come to me, follow me.

KING. You deceived me.

ALGISTA. I was true to you, I shall remain true to the end.

BERTHA. King, kill the sorceress.

ALGISTA. Clodoveg, tell me, did you love me?

KING. I did.

ALGISTA. Tell me, do you love me?

KING. I do.

ALGISTA. Then follow me.

KING. Have the torments of your just punishment darkened your reason? Or have you come to us raised from the dead by evil charms? Who are you?—tell us. A night-wandering ghost or the living Algista?

BERTHA. Why is your sword in your hand, King? Thrust its iron into the evil heart of the impostor.

MALGISTA. Algista, dearest daughter, enchant him with sweet words of love, whisper secret incantations in his ear.

ALGISTA. My lord, I have come to you—take me as you will, living or dead. By the might of my infinite love, by the power of my unbearable suffering, by my will, triumphant over life and death, I have bought from heaven and earth and the dark subterranean world your body and your soul and your night-wandering shade. Here I stand before you, neither living nor dead, the breath all but gone from my body, yet still untouched by corruption; I hesitate at the terrible crossroads, my blood in the damp earth and my voice rising to the witching moon—and I summon you: come to me, of your own will choose for us a path to life or death. Come with me living, love me; or remain here—but here too you shall be with me, dead. Love me, lord and husband, mine forever, love me.

KING. You cheated your way into my bed, you stole the Queen’s name and honor.

BERTHA. She is a sorceress. Quick—run her through with your sword.

ALGISTA. When you loved me, when you showered me with caresses, when you whispered tender words to me, what did we care about the glitter of your crown or your sovereign might? Did I not make you drunk with all of love’s delights? Did I not sweeten your every joy with carefree mirth? Did I not dissolve your every sorrow in my tears? Was I not the bright sky to you and the cool shade, and twittering of birds and the stream’s bright babble? White and naked, my arms rested on your weary shoulders more lightly than the necklet of royalty. Sweeter than Falernian wine were the sultry kisses of my scarlet lips. My eyes shone upon you more brightly than the rich-hued diamonds and rubies of your crown. Was I not more beautiful than any queen? Was it not you who said that I was the wisest of women, that my words fell like gold on the worthless ashes of the speeches of your most venerable nobles?

KING. You were beautiful and wise, and I loved you. But what is past is past. Go.

BERTHA. Run her through with your sword.

ALGISTA. I will not leave you. We are united forever by the mysterious power of my love.

KING. Here is my wife, Queen Bertha—our son and heir, Charles, sleeps in his chamber, guarded by faithful servants. You and your son have no place among us.

ALGISTA. But do you love me?

KING. I do.

ALGISTA. Then let Queen Bertha and young Charles remain here. Yield your crown to him and follow me. I shall reveal to you a free and happy world, I shall lead you to a valley amid distant mountains where there are no rulers and no slaves, where the air of freedom is light and sweet.

KING. You speak madness. I am the King.

BERTHA. Kill her.

ALGISTA. Clodoveg, your fate is in your hands. Look—the torches are going out. Listen—the quick-eared dogs are howling outside, scenting mysterious traces in the fine dust of the roadway. See, King: everything around you is quiet and dark and still. Listen: no one speaks and my words fall into the darkness before you.

KING. Go, madwoman. Pages, take her away.

All those around the King stand motionless, their eyes fixed on Algista.

ALGISTA. Here I stand alone, all life and death within me. Yours is the choice, Clodoveg, dearest lord and husband. The final moment draws near. Destiny will not wait. For the last time I say to you: follow me, go forward with me into life—for only with me is there life; and there, where you grow rigid, King, beneath the madness of your crown, beneath your robes of blood, is death. Take off your crown, follow me.

KING. I shall not follow you. I am the King. Begone, mad-woman.

The ringing of churchbells is heard outside.

ALGISTA. The hour has come. Clodoveg, your choice is made. You will not come with me? You will not?

KING. No.

MALGISTA. He stands before you, a cold stone among stones, Algista. Algista, my serpent-eyed daughter, with terrible words cast a spell upon him, condemn him to eternal stillness.

ALGISTA. You stand before me, a cold stone among stones. Become a stone then, King; stand, a cold stone, until time devours you too.

Algista falls at the King’s feet. Her son falls across her corpse. The King and the others stand motionless. A dispassionate voice is heard:

— See, Algista is dead, Chilperic is dead. Her mother kneels over them, eternally inconsolable. See, Clodoveg and those about him have turned to stone. See, they stand like the carved figures in a stone frieze. See, before your eyes life petrifies to a flat tableau; the moon grows dim, and all light flees this place, and the proud castle’s immensity is hidden by the black cloud of death. Believe, then: by Death Love conquers—Love and Death are one.

NOTE

The substance of this tragedy is taken, in its general outline, from the legend of Queen Bertha of the Big Foot, the mother of Charlemagne. The name of the king has been changed deliberately in order to remove the tragedy from the realm of history, and even from the legend, which ends somewhat differently from my play. This is how the legend is summarized in G. N. Potanin’s book Eastern Motifs, pp. 5-7:

The Frankish King Pepin wishes to marry; his nobles journey to Hungary, to the city of Buda, and ask the Hungarian king for his daughter’s hand. The king is very flattered by the proposal, but fears that Pepin will reject his bride because she is deformed: one of her legs is longer than the other. However, the nobles, though aware of this, stand by their original decision. The parents send their daughter on her way in the company of two serving-women, one old and one young; the old one is Margista and the young one is her daughter Algista. The bride is received with due ceremony in Paris. Night falls; Bertha must go to the marriage bed. Margista expresses the fear that Pepin may kill her mistress; Bertha is troubled; Margista agrees to let Algista go in her place in order to save the princess. Bertha passes the night in Margista’s room and in the morning steals into the royal bedchamber, intending to change places with Algista, unbeknown to the king. When she enters, Algista wounds herself with a knife and accuses Bertha of attempting to kill her. The king, taking Algista for Bertha, is outraged and orders the supposed Algista to be put to death. Bertha is taken into a forest, where she loses her way. She wanders about in the forest for a long time, until at last she comes upon the house of a miller, who gives her protection. Suspecting no deceit, the king lives with Algista, by whom he has two sons. Bertha’s parents decide to visit their daughter; they arrive in Paris and see Algista in the queen’s place. The Hungarian king suspects that Pepin himself is responsible for the substitution. He prepares to return to Hungary and gather an armed force to punish Pepin. Before his departure, however, Pepin persuades his father-in-law to go hunting with him. During the hunt Pepin loses his way and comes upon the house of the miller in whose care Bertha has been living. The miller has two daughters, and that evening Pepin asks the miller to send one of his three girls to spend the night with him. The miller sends Bertha, having prepared for the king a bed of leaves in a cart … Bertha tells the king who she is and how she came to be living with the miller. The fact that one of her legs is longer than the other convinces Pepin that she is the true Bertha and that the woman he took for Bertha is an impostor. He takes Bertha to Paris and makes her his queen, puts the false Bertha to death and is reconciled with the parents of the true Bertha. Bertha gives birth to a son, who, either because he was conceived or born in a cart, is given the name Charro mano—Charlemagne.