The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles

THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE OF CRUELTY AND ITS DOUBLES ARTAUD AND INFLUENCE AMANDA DI PONIO

Avant-Gardes in Performance Series Editor Sarah Bay-Cheng Bowdoin College Brunswick, ME, USA

Despite the many acts of denial and resistance embodied in the phrase “death of the avant-garde,” interest in experimental, innovative, and politically radical performance continues to animate theatre and performance studies. For all their attacks upon tradition and critical institutions, the historical and subsequent avant-gardes remain critical touchstones for continued research in the disciplines of theatre, performance studies, film and cinema studies, media study, art history, visual studies, dance, music, and nearly every area of the performing arts. “Avant-Gardes in Performance” features exciting new scholarship on radical and avant-garde performance. By engaging with the charged term “avant-garde,” we ­consider performance practices and events that are formally avant-garde, as defined by experimentation and breaks with traditional structures, ­practices, and content; historically avant-garde, defined within the global aesthetic movements of the early twentieth c­ entury, including modernism and its many global aftermaths; and politically radical, defined by ­identification with extreme political movements on the right and left alike. The series brings together close attention to a wide range of innovative performances with critical analyses that challenge conventional academic practices. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14783

Amanda Di Ponio

The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles Artaud and Influence

Amanda Di Ponio Huron University College London, ON, Canada

Avant-Gardes in Performance ISBN 978-3-319-92248-5    ISBN 978-3-319-92249-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018944446 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Paul Fearn / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In loving memory of my father, Guglielmo Di Ponio (1938–2013) Sempre Avanti

Acknowledgements

I must first acknowledge Robert F. Barsky who introduced me to Antonin Artaud’s theatre in a course on carnivalesque literature at the University of Western Ontario. I wish to thank Neil Rhodes, without whom this project would not have been possible. I also thank Philip Parry for his guidance and Sandra Wallace for her unrelenting kindness. I am most indebted to the examiners of my doctoral thesis from which this project emerged, Peter Womack, and especially Alex Davis for providing me with invaluable feedback. The School of English at the University of St Andrews was a source of tremendous support and generosity during my tenure there as a doctoral candidate. I am most appreciative of the scholarship awarded to me on behalf of the university. I am equally grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a doctoral fellowship grant in support of this project. I also wish to thank my friends, colleagues, and students at Huron University College, especially in the English and Cultural Studies department, for their support, guidance, and encouragement. I’ve been fortunate to have countless loving family members, steadfast friends, and wise and selfless professors who have not only supported me, but who have made me a better friend, educator, and human being by setting the most wonderful examples. I am forever grateful to them.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Vicky Bates and my editor, Tomas René, at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience and expertise. Special thanks go to the Bingham family—Joe, Janette, and especially my husband, Allan, for his exceptional and most appreciated love, generosity, support, and sense of humour that I cannot do without. This book is for my family: Guglielmo, Anna, and Carlos Di Ponio.

Contents

1 Introduction   1 Section I  The Theatre and Its Double  11 2 Interpreting Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty  13 Section II Elizabethan Social History: Doubles of the Theatre  45 3 Theatre and Plague: The Doubly Potent Spectacles of Early Modern Culture  47 4 Bear-Baiting and the Theatre of Cruelty  87 Section III  The Sources of Dramatic Cruelty 119 5 Thyestean Savagery: Seneca, the Renaissance, and the Theatre of Cruelty 121 6 Artaud and the ‘Elizabethans’: Revenge Tragedy as Inspiration for a Theatre of Cruelty 155 ix

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CONTENTS

Section IV  The Theatre of Cruelty in Performance 191 7 Artaud’s Les Cenci 193 8 After Artaud: Peter Brook and The Theatre of Cruelty Season 213 9 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 237 Index 261

List of Abbreviations and Note on Translation

As the majority of the book is written in English, in order to remain consistent, titles of works in French only appear in that language in the body text when they are first introduced. They are accompanied by an English translation which is thereafter used when that title is later referred to. I offer the reader English translations—either from a translated edition or my own renderings—in the body text and the French original in the endnotes. When solely referring to and not directly quoting from Artaud’s original French text as found in Gallimard’s Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud, I reference the passage in the body or in the endnotes as applicable, and I include where to find a reliable and accessible English translation, if a translation is available. In quoting from source material, I have done my utmost to maintain the integrity of the printed page whenever possible. TD

OC Richards

Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son Double, in Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud, ed. by Paule Thévenin, 26 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1956–; rev. edn 1976–), IV (1964), 9–171 Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud, ed. by Paule Thévenin, 26 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1956–; rev. edn 1976–) Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958)

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List of Abbreviations and Note on Translation

Corti

Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud: Collected Works, trans. by Victor Corti, 4 vols (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968; repr. Calder Publishers, 1999) Sontag Susan Sontag, ed., Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, trans. by Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) PP Thomas Dekker, The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. by F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925) RSC Royal Shakespeare Company Marat/Sade Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade Whereas the reader may perhaps be more familiar with a politically active reading of Artaud via a Brechtian-Marxist model, as per Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, this is beyond the scope of this book; my own reading may be considered just as political, but it is not particularly Marxist. While Artaud believed that art could incite socio-political change, he did not consider party politics the means to do so, which is why he was ejected from the Surrealist Movement by André Breton. His theories identify the need for social change, but as radical as they may be, they lack the necessary follow-through demanded of those more politically motivated by a communist politics or otherwise.1 Nonetheless, Artaud’s ideas are no less potent today in their call for dramatic change in the theatre and beyond as they were when they were first written in the 1930s.

Note 1. Michael Scott, Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 9.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The connection between Antonin Artaud’s Théâtre de la Cruauté (Theatre of Cruelty) and the drama of the age of Shakespeare is a lot closer than we might think. This book considers the direct influence of early modern drama, and the wider cultural contexts in which these plays were written and performed, on Artaud’s theory and concept of cruelty within the theatre. What Artaud promoted in his theatre was rigorous, spectacle-driven performance that was true to culture. He detested the idea of culture as synonymous with sophistication and elegance, and divorced from the unsavoury elements of life—madness, sickness, and death. His theatre, therefore, was less concerned with fixed language, character development, or psychological exploration than it was with showing life authentically as it exists at any moment in time. By stripping the text accordingly, alongside the addition of a language of physicality and gesture, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty offers new insights into Classical, Renaissance, and Modern theatre. He maintains that the theatre must be experienced viscerally, honestly, and brutally. No one is to leave a performance intact. What I propose is that Artaud’s theory is based on the cultural phenomena present in the early modern period. The foundation of his theory aligns the theatre with the plague—an ever-present terror in the Renaissance consciousness—as both are sources of delirium and creativity, destruction and regeneration. The plague and its surrounding atmosphere contain both the grotesque and sublime elements of life Artaud wished to capture © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_1

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in his theatre. His theory of cruelty is part of a larger investigation into the connection between spectacle, violence, and sacrifice explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, René Girard, and Georges Bataille. Although Artaud was fascinated by what was referred to by critics as Elizabethan theatre, there is very little academic scholarship on the connection between the two, and what does exist tends to focus on Shakespeare.1 In ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté (Premier manifeste)’ [‘The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto)’], Artaud includes Shakespearean and Elizabethan drama in general as examples of ideal works to illustrate his new theatre. Aside from the studies written in French, most notably Jonathan Pollock’s essays ‘Shakespeare et le Théâtre de la Cruauté d’Antonin Artaud’ (2000) and ‘Le théâtre et la peste: les dramaturges élisabéthains revus par Antonin Artaud’ (2001), Pierre Brunel’s ‘Antonin Artaud et le répertoire élisabéthain’ (1989), and the works by Alain and Odette Virmaux,2 there are only a few works written in English wholly and constructively concerned with this subject. These studies in English tend to focus on specific plays and performances rather than textual or socio-­ historical analysis, as in Bryan Reynolds’s ‘Untimely Ripped: Meditating Witchcraft in Polanski and Shakespeare’ (2002), Eric S.  Mallin’s essay ‘Word and Plague in the Second Quarto Hamlet’ (1995), and in Stephen Phillips’s dissertation ‘History in Men’s Lives: A Study of Two Cycles of Shakespeare’s Histories Produced at Stratford in the Nineteen-Sixties and Nineteen-Seventies’ (1988). In addition to these works which focus on the influence of Artaud on productions of Shakespeare’s plays, there is Dominique Duvert’s dissertation which applies Artaud’s theories of the tension between language and drama to the reading of Coriolanus and other  plays in ‘The Tragedy of Language: An Application of Artaud’s Criticism of the Dramatic Text to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Molière’s Dom Juan and Calderón’s La Vida es sueño’ (1991). Further, Artaud’s theories concerning violence are applied to King Lear in Naomi Liebler’s ‘Pelican Daughters: The Violence of Filial Ingratitude in King Lear’ (2007), and more generally in Richard Fly’s ‘Shakespeare, Artaud, and the Representation of Violence’ (1989). Jonas A.  Barish’s conference paper ‘The New Theatre and the Old: Reversions and Rejuvenations’ (1969) provides a detailed overview of Artaudian principles in relation to the early modern theatre. There is also scholarship in Dutch which focuses on the Shakespeare-Artaud connection by Laurens De Vos.3 In Arabic and Italian, the focus is on one of the most famous productions of Shakespeare interpreted via Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty: Peter Brook’s

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King Lear (1962). Alongside Brook, Richard Schechner and Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99) are perhaps the most well-known, credible directors who accredit a connection to Artaud. Whereas there is a lack of recent work in establishing links between early modern and Artaudian drama, a vast body of scholarship examines the influence of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty on avant-garde theatre and film. This includes the work of Marvin Carlson, Helga Finter, Jane Goodall, David Graver, Naomi Greene, Christopher Innes, and Susan Sontag.4 The best-known, well-received investigation into both the final period of Artaud’s creative activity as well as his legacy upon contemporary theatre, dance, and performance art is Stephen Barber’s collection of books on Artaud: the critical biography Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993); Artaud: The Screaming Body (1999); Antonin Artaud: Terminal Curses: The Notebooks, 1945–1948 (2008); The Last Words of Antonin Artaud (2009); The Anatomy of Cruelty: Antonin Artaud: Life and Works (2013); and the recent article ‘Corporeal Disintegration as Last-Gasp Vocal Act: The Final Works of Murobushi, Artaud, and Chéreau’ (2017). Finally, Kimberly Jannarone’s book Artaud and His Doubles (2010) offers insights into his practices as a director aligned less so with his peers—the practitioners of the modern period and their idealism to forge a better world—and more so with contemporary ideas ‘of the rise of the director and the taming of the audience’, and explores Artaud in relation to Jannarone’s readings of crowd theory.5 The early modern source from which Artaud developed his Theatre of Cruelty is not treated in Barber’s or Jannarone’s books. This book is guided by the following thematic questions: What aspects of early modern culture best stimulated Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty? How are these cultural phenomena presented in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and how has Artaud interpreted them? How do his theories intersect with those surrounding spectacle, violence, sacrifice, and cruelty in his theatre? To what extent have Artaud’s followers addressed the early modern context which so inspired his theatre; to what end; and what is irreconcilable between Artaud and their theatres or productions? To answer these questions, this book is divided into four sections which work interdependently: Artaud’s notion of cruelty as presented in his Theatre of Cruelty; the importance of early modern social history in Artaud’s theatre; the sources for dramatic cruelty focusing on the influence of Seneca and the early modern dramatists who integrated cruelty into their work; and the Theatre of Cruelty in performance both in Artaud’s lifetime and beyond.

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But this is not just a singular study that considers the influence of the Elizabethan theatre on Artaud. More so, it examines what I view to be the doubles of the early modern theatre through an Artaudian perspective. The framework of the book is linked to the concept of the double as it takes the comparative action of moving between two different contexts and time frames, not only to show how they correspond to each other, a traditional application of the double, but also to offer some critical reflection on conventional and accepted understandings of theatrical history and practice. This second effect of ‘doubling’ aims to develop a new discourse of antiestablishment and counter-tradition based on an Artaudian reading of the synthesis between theatre and culture. As such, there are different points of view and interchanging perspectives in the study which reflect these different readings. This state of flux supports the shifting understanding of cruelty in the theatre, according to Artaud’s notion of the word, his desired presentation(s) of it, and others’ understanding and use of it. The double motivates the entire investigation and advances the twofold reading of the book’s contents in creating a poetics of the theatre. The opening section of this book, therefore, aims to explain what Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty proposes. Not simply a generalization of his ideas, Chapter  2 (Interpreting Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty) considers Artaud’s relationship with the traditional theatre he both condemns and reveres, wanting to destroy and renew it, and eventually reproduce it, albeit according to his specifications rather than those adhering to tradition. These conflicting desires regarding theatrical reproduction complement Artaud’s shifting views on cruelty—as figurative and actual—and its presentation on the stage. Artaud’s theatrical dissidence is identifiable from his early experiments in the theatre with the Théâtre Alfred Jarry (1926–31), which he began shortly after his ejection from the Surrealist movement. In this chapter, I reflect on this early attempt at theatrical production and its connection to the Theatre of Cruelty. I examine the content of the essays written on the Theatre of Cruelty and the notes and letters on cruelty and on language present in Le Théâtre et son Double (The Theatre and Its Double), first published as a complete book in 1938. The chapter offers the reader my interpretation of Artaud’s sometimes contradictory views surrounding the theatre. For example, although Artaud wants to achieve a standard of performance which does not have to rely on verbal or gestural repetition— which he believes is inimitable anyway, and is a view resembling Mikhail Bakhtin’s—instead of solely focusing on direct staging, as in his understanding of the Balinese, or what he terms, Oriental theatre, he nonetheless

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engages with the European, or Occidental theatrical tradition. For this reason,  I evaluate the  elements of this traditional theatre that inspired Artaud’s destruction and recreation of it for his Theatre of Cruelty.6 Sections 2 through 4 each contain two chapters. Section 2 of the book (Elizabethan Social History: Doubles of the Theatre) is directed towards early modern social history and its significance in the Theatre of Cruelty. The focus of Chapter 3 (Theatre and Plague: The Doubly Potent Spectacles of Early Modern Culture) is the various outbreaks of plague epidemics in England, specifically London, which coincided with the emerging English public theatre. Their presence in the Renaissance consciousness in examined through a reading of the series of plague pamphlets written by Thomas Dekker and edited by F.P. Wilson in order to understand how the actual plague and its effects were received and how the outbreaks helped shape Artaud’s theory. In his essay ‘Le Théâtre et la Peste’ (‘The Theatre and the Plague’), examined here at length, Artaud draws a metaphorical parallel—taken to its extremes—aligning the theatre with the plague. The connection between the two, according to Artaud, is visceral as well as physical and metaphysical; both have the power to transform through upheaval. It is Artaud’s belief that the theatre should take full advantage of its correlation with the plague. In this chapter, shifting perspectives converge in establishing this connection. Artaud’s essay considers the 1720 plague at Marseilles, the last severe outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe, as he examines the medical data made available during the epidemic in order to determine the nature of the delirium affecting plague sufferers and its communication amongst the populace through means other than purely physical. In Artaud’s essay, this delirium is equal to that which is experienced in the theatre. I support this Artaudian reading through an examination of prevailing medical observations of early modern outbreaks of plague in order to establish a connection between the effects of the Marseilles plague and of the London plagues afflicting Renaissance England. With this connection in stride, the focus shifts in order to consider the presence and effects of the plague by looking to Thomas Dekker in order to better understand the early modern view of plague as a result of God’s vengeance and the rules and regulations in place during these epidemics. I work to establish, with the support of Margaret Healy’s Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England, the connection between theatre and plague from within the thought worlds of sixteenth and seventeenth-century men and women. During outbreaks, the plague was able to supplant authority during times of

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potency, effectively spreading purgative disorder. The theatre, according to Artaud, harnesses this same power and ought to provoke these same effects. It is my argument that this double relationship, between the plague and the theatre, is exemplified during the early modern period. The English public theatre is the perfect double of the plague as Artaud understands it: its ability to cause social breakdown, to evoke frenzy in its participants, and its destructive and creative elements are all identifiable in the early modern theatre. An Artaudian reading of the plague alongside the theatre allows the reader to consider the plague as something more than a disease explained through modern medicine or through religion which reasoned that the plague was God’s harbinger of death. The chapter closes with a reading of a selection of Elizabethan drama which consciously reflects on the persistent presence of plague. Still in Section 2, Chapter 4 (Bear-baiting and the Theatre of Cruelty) looks at bear-baiting, the most disturbing of Elizabethan ‘entertainments’ for today’s reader who harbours the sensibilities of a postmodern era. Whereas the previous chapter looks at imposed physical and psychological cruelty within the natural environment as a by-product of the plague caused by the unleashing of vice alongside extreme action, this chapter works to establish a visual and spectacular early modern Theatre of Cruelty. This double of the Elizabethan theatre—non-linguistic and gestural—featured real blood and suffering, neither stylized nor representational. However, bear-baiting, as Artaud would have understood it—an existential crisis of confrontation where unseen forces inflict cruelty upon us, thereby challenging our freedom and agency—is also addressed in this chapter. The bear-baiting pit is an arena of ambiguity, of acceptance and abhorrence, of civility and barbarity. The shift between these viewpoints prompts a move from ‘doubling’ to triangular interplay between the early modern theatre, the bear-baiting pit, and Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in order to reveal the cultural ambivalence of this arena. Bataille’s Erotism is also relevant in this chapter and provides one possible explanation as to why audiences were drawn towards this existential entertainment of crisis. Following this examination of social history, Section 3 (The Sources of Dramatic Cruelty) looks at the sources of dramatic cruelty with a focus on theatre. As a result, whereas there is more historical interplay between periods in the previous chapter, this one is more fixed. Chapter 5 (Thyestean Savagery: Seneca, the Renaissance, and the Theatre of Cruelty) considers the double influence of Seneca, both on Artaud and early modern dramatists, to whom Artaud is equally indebted. A triangulated

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argument establishes the  role of the Elizabethan theatre in  progressing the Seneca-Artaud spectrum. An Artaudian perspective also helps to modify established perceptions of how to read the authority of Seneca in the Elizabethan context. Through reverse historicism, the future reveals a new way to view the past. In particular, Seneca’s Thyestes7 is considered alongside one of its doubles: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Although there is an obvious difference between the literary Seneca and the theatrical Artaud, they correspond through their deployment of insane furor, which also connects the theatre and the plague alongside a pattern of performance. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa’s 2004 production of Taitasu Andoronikasu (Titus Andronicus) which incorporates these elements in a production that portrays physical cruelty in a highly stylized manner. There is a further double link between Seneca and Artaud through the ritualistic elements in drama; a Girardian notion of ritual sacrifice as demonstrated in Violence and the Sacred directs the discussion of ritual and negative violence in Thyestes. An Artaudian perspective of this relationship connects the power of ritual in the theatre to the plague. This reading is considered by A.J.  Boyle in Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. He sees Seneca’s concept of theatre as Bacchic in nature, something he also identifies in Artaud’s plans for a purgative Theatre of Cruelty based on the simultaneous destructive and redemptive elements of the plague. In this chapter, I also examine Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 as a contemporary performance which supports this viable connection. Section 3, Chapter 6 (Artaud and the ‘Elizabethans’: Revenge Tragedy as Inspiration for a Theatre of Cruelty) is devoted to the appeal of Revenge Tragedy, with a focus on select works Artaud wanted to rework and reproduce—The Revenger’s Tragedy attributed first to Cyril Tourneur and now Thomas Middleton; John Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi; and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore—in order to explore how these plays are linked to the Theatre of Cruelty and how they would translate on its stage. Here, the positive side of Artaud’s paradoxical relationship with the traditional theatre—specifically Jacobean drama—is analysed through not only the texts themselves and their subject matters, namely the incest taboo in addition to revenge, but the dramatic conventions in use during the period. These texts, signifying taboo, corruption, rebellion, and disease, at their very foundations elicit the intentions of the Theatre of Cruelty. While Artaud did not necessarily take issue with the texts themselves and the language therein, he did find the manner in which they have

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been interpreted and staged, after their inspired inceptions that is, as problematic. An Artaudian realization of these dramas focuses not on their literary brilliance, but their physical, frenetic value which is evocative of the period, demonstrated through their connection with the plague, and realized through their dramatic and emblematized presentation. Implicit and explicit cruelty is present in the devastating actions of the plays. As such, their performance via the Theatre of Cruelty could legitimately be presented as bloody, although Artaud did not want his theatre to be systematically associated with bloodshed. In this regard, the explicit and physically violent early modern theatre is the double of the implicitly cruel and stylized Theatre of Cruelty. The Artaudian perspective allows for broad and varied interpretation of the plays of Middleton, Webster, and Ford, not necessarily as plays reliant upon their textuality, but on what is latent in the imagery therein. What is most important to discern is that the basis for cruelty, for life, is present in the works themselves. How to elucidate the cruel context and connections becomes a concern for the modern director, interpreter, or adapter. The goal is to shock the audience into honest, instinctual response. Employing cruelty if the means to do so successfully. Section 4 (The Theatre of Cruelty in Performance) looks to performance. Chapter 7 (Artaud’s Les Cenci) examines Artaud’s Les Cenci, his first and only Theatre of Cruelty production. Whereas one interpretation of the early modern theatre present in the Chapter 6 allowed for bloody performance, Les Cenci is the quintessence of a stylized production which effectively uses the stage language of the mise en scène to affect the viscera. Artaud’s rendering of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drama, an independent and inspired creation in its own right according to Artaud, incorporates the image of the plague as metaphor, a fundamental theme present throughout this book and in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The chapter also looks at incest as a psychosexual analogue of plague, with a focus on Bataille, and with reference to Richard McCabe’s study Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550–1700. The furor present in the play, most exceptionally through the character of Count Francesco Cenci, links this chapter to previous discussions involving madness and delirium. Les Cenci also functions as an ‘Elizabethan’ double through its connection with Shelley and his indebtedness to Revenge Tragedy. Although it is important to consider actual performance (as in Ninagawa’s Titus Andronicus) in addition to speculative performance (as  found in Chapter 6), it is equally vital to understand that Artaud’s Les Cenci did not fulfil his every requirement for the Theatre of Cruelty. Les Cenci was indeed

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a compromised production; however, Artaud’s achievement of demonstrating plague-like furor and cruelty upon the stage, assaulting his audience through their senses without having to rely on bloodshed, connecting with the audience through powerful imagery and sound, thus forcing an intuitive response, should not be undermined. The fact that Artaud never produced a Theatre of Cruelty play that adhered completely to his own demands has perpetuated the criticism that this kind of theatre exists in theory only. Chapter 8 (After Artaud: Peter Brook and The Theatre of Cruelty Season) focuses on the Theatre of Cruelty after Artaud. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)-funded, early experimentation with the Theatre of Cruelty is  the perfect double of Artaud’s theatre. The Theatre of Cruelty season (1964) provided the opportunity for unfettered investigation into Artaud’s theory of performance during the height of its popularity in the counter-culture era of the 1960s, nearly three decades after the publication of The Theatre and Its Double. Brook also had the early modern theatre in mind when he devised the season, and it was his search for a penetrative theatrical language which led him to Artaud. A series of productions over several years—from King Lear (1962) to Oedipus (1968)8—were produced with the Elizabethan theatre in mind, but Brook’s direction of Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade (1964) was the only direct product to come out of the 12-week Artaud experiment. This modern German play, therefore, functions as a double of the Elizabethan theatre through the Artaudian process and aesthetic Brook adopts. Weiss himself commented on the play’s natural connection to Artaud regarding performance. Marat/Sade doubles the early modern theatre as it reflects the volatility of its own time and uses a penetrative language—that of action and gesture, rather than poetry and prose—to connect  with and impact its audience. An Artaudian conception of theatrical performance links these two potentially opposing theatres, early modern and modern German, together. The structure of the book as set out by the above summary is intended to convey the thematic elements of this study as clearly as possible, but it will also become apparent that it does not take a linear approach, but often double-backs upon itself, considering previous arguments before moving forward. This is an inevitable, intended consequence of the subject of this book: the concept of the double itself. The series of doubles presented are

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connected via an Artaudian reading of the early modern theatre which opens up an arena of discovery into non-traditional analyses that challenge accepted and traditional theoretical views.

Notes 1. Artaud follows Anglophone critics of the time who used Elizabethan as a term to refer to the whole Renaissance or early modern period in England. 2. Alain Virmaux, Antonin Artaud et le théâtre (Paris: Seghers, 1970); Alain et Odette Virmaux, Antonin Artaud (Paris: Le Manufacture, 1991) and Antonin vivant (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Oswald, 1980). 3. De Vos also thoroughly considers the influence of Artaud and Samuel Beckett on the work of Sarah Kane in Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011). 4. David Graver and Christopher Innes consider Artaud and textuality within avant-garde performance. Their respective essays ‘Antonin Artaud and the Authority of Text, Spectacle, and Performance’ and ‘Text/Pre-text/Pretext: The Language of Avant-Garde Experiment’ appear in James M. Harding’s collection Contours of the Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), 43–57 and 58–75. 5. Kimberly Jannarone, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. x. 6. Oriental and Occidental are Artaud’s terms on how to distinguish between the established theatre and some fantasy of ‘the other’ which is potentially problematic as its understanding comes from an outside perspective which can be interpreted as further mystifying the gestural language of the dance rather than explaining it. 7. Artaud’s own rendering of the Senecan tragedy is unfortunately lost. 8. While the production of Seneca’s Oedipus, adapted by Ted Hughes, would appear the logical choice, as the play opens up to the city of Thebes devastated by plague, it focuses less on the effects of plague. The production was successful, however, in penetrating its audience through laughter, prompted mainly by the use of a giant inflatable phallus at a key moment in the play’s culmination.

SECTION I

The Theatre and Its Double

CHAPTER 2

Interpreting Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty

Antonin Artaud’s search for a new theatre did not necessarily lead him to madness, but the frustrations he suffered are clearly identified in his body of work. Various obstacles prevented him from articulating his ideas, among them his contemporary readers’ resistance to a theatre which hoped to destroy the modern French theatre of verisimilitude that his audience was accustomed to. Artaud, therefore, had to try and combat his readers’ fundamental urges to defiantly disregard what he was writing. Moreover, his concept of the Theatre of Cruelty proved difficult even for him to establish, not only because he had trouble expressing his ideas in writing but also because the ideal he was trying to impart was difficult to relate. In a letter to Jean Paulhan, friend and editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, Artaud writes of the inability to express his theory in conventional language: ‘In the matter of the spectacle it is not possible for me to give supplementary particulars. […] For once what I want to do is easier to do than to say.’1 Artaud’s theatre is understood in performance; words fail to capture his spectacle that is driven by action rather than language. He was unable to rely on words because he considered them  fixed and therefore open to misinterpretation. For Artaud, utterances, spoken or written, are unique and unrepeatable. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his own body of work, addresses the inimitability of utterance. He maintains that no two are alike because they are held to the context in which they are spoken and/or written. For Bakhtin, language is dialogic in nature, fluid, and transitory. His © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_2

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concept of heteroglossia insists that every word takes on new meaning whenever it is uttered because of variance in context.2 There are too many discrepancies affecting the nature of discourse, both written and spoken, for it to be considered fixed. Artaud is just as zealous in his discussion of language, spoken or gestural, especially in relation to the dramatic performance.3 In his essay ‘En finir avec les chefs-d’œuvre’ (‘No More Masterpieces’), he writes: What has been said is not still to be said; that an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another, and that the theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice. (Richards, p. 75)4

For Artaud, words are not just ideologically and culturally specific. He insists that they are in no way repetitive and applies this theory to gestures and forms which are equally inimitable from one performance to the next. In The Theatre and Its Double, his collection of essays on the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud argues that the theatre provides the perfect arena for the written and the spoken word, as well as gesture, to exercise their distinctiveness within the structure of a performance.5 The possibilities for each staging are indefinite according to Artaud, for although the dialogue and stage directions are usually fixed in a play, the physical movements change even in their supposed repetition. Each performance, therefore, opens a new space for discovery. The theatre is not a means to exercise repetition because the context, the interpretation, the delivery, and the reception always change. Concrete variations such as a director’s interpretation of the material, and his or her manifestation of that vision through the mise en scène, ensure a unique happening or event. Static art has no place in Artaud’s theatre. The relationship between Artaud’s revolutionary theatre and the dramatic tradition is therefore paradoxical, for in order to attack the masterpieces of the past, one must engage with them and the dramatic tradition from which they acquire their power and influence. Thus, Artaud’s conflicting desires to destroy, to renovate, to reproduce, and to repeat are contradictory, but not implausible, especially if one of his goals is to dissociate his audience’s understanding of culture from that of high culture. Artaud’s understanding of culture is elemental. It acknowledges the artificiality of high culture that is imposed upon humanity. The theatre

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provides Artaud with the forum for exposing these fixed forms for what they are: synthetic and insincere. Once they are destroyed, change is possible. However, Artaud also acknowledges the allure and the fascination with high culture. If he is to change our understanding of culture, he needs to do so from within the structure he plans to destabilize. His frustration and his obsession with being misunderstood is not altogether in the realm of paranoia. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provide a branded understanding of Artaud as schizophrenic: It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way.6

While this explanation may account for Artaud’s frenetic desire to be understood, especially in having to use a codified language which does not conform to his own, it also confronts the barriers contributing to his perceived unintelligibility, namely in applying the label of schizophrenic to Artaud, a term which is itself considered fixed and therefore open to misinterpretation or even misapplication. In Artaud’s collection of writings surrounding his Theatre of Cruelty, the ambiguity of the written word is particularly apparent because Artaud’s choice of terminology for describing his theatre has always been subject to misinterpretation. One word in particular—cruelty—is a major source of anxiety for Artaud because of his readers’ habitual interpretations of the word; however, the fault is not entirely theirs. The particulars of the Theatre of Cruelty change depending on context. Artaud remained consistent in his requirement for cruel and violent images in his theatre—not as a means to establish conventional, repeatable patterns, but as a means to purge related emotions—but their portrayal noticeably changes. In an attempt to add clarity, as well as infamy, to his first manifesto, he composed a second detailing how he will stage the proposed first production of the Theatre of Cruelty. A third development concerning the Theatre of Cruelty, this time poetic in nature, was composed in 1947 after his release from Rodez Asylum as part of his unaired 1948 broadcast Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God), and Artaud’s final thoughts on cruelty, expressed in a 1948 letter to Paule Thévenin, Artaud’s friend and the editor of his complete works published by Gallimard, were

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never realized in his lifetime. These changes in the interpretation of cruelty further exemplify the idea that language is not static and can change according to its use and the contextual variance surrounding utterance. The parameters of destabilizing language, especially in relation to performance, are crucial in discussing Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.

Foundations The ideas expressed in The Theatre and Its Double were not entirely new for Artaud at the time of its composition. The compilation of the diverse essays under one title was a means to add cohesion to his notions for what the theatre should and could be. While working as an actor under the tutelage of Charles Dullin, Artaud developed a somewhat unconventional attitude towards the theatre and the role of the actor. Instead of following Dullin’s teachings, which in the tradition of Jacques Copeau demanded subservience to the text, Artaud began to develop his own ideas about theatre production and sought to create an alternative to the stage spectacle that simply entertained rather than challenged audience comfort and complacency. For Artaud, traditional theatre was not engaging enough for either actor or spectator. He detested this fact, and therefore began his attack on conventional theatre with the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, named after the creator of Ubu roi (King Ubu), whose atavistic play featuring anti-­ realistic theatricality, including puppetry and linguistic crudities, opened with the word ‘merdre’, a hybrid of ‘merde’ (shit) and ‘meurtre’ (murder). This destructive blow to conventional French drama directed by Lugné-Poe began and ended on 10 December 1896 at the Théâtre de L’Œuvre after an infamous riot. The stereotypically passive bourgeois nineteenth-century spectators were effectively shocked and responded violently to the lowbrow comedy. Inspired by the Surrealist movement from which he was expelled in 1927 because of leader André Breton’s turn towards communism, Artaud, alongside fellow ex-Surrealists Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron, created a repertoire to counter popular French theatre comprised of innocuous plays, carefully designed within the constructs of the well-made play and made to entertain.7 The Théâtre Alfred Jarry featured original works, adaptations of classical and canonical drama, including August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, and stage scenarios to replace dialogue plays. The project ran from 1926 to 1931 but completed only two seasons from 1927 to 1929. A total of four spectacles were performed over eight evenings.8 The Théâtre Alfred Jarry advocated Artaud, Vitrac,

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and Aron’s collective rebellion against mainstream French theatre. No matter how limited its success, the Théâtre Alfred Jarry raised awareness of alternative staging and allowed Artaud, who wrote its manifestos, the opportunity to explore some of his theories about drama and spectacle to a somewhat receptive audience. After Vitrac’s departure in 1929, Artaud had difficulty maintaining the theatre project, and by 1931, he completely abandoned it. The performances of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry were non-linear and anti-­ realistic, and often evoked the dreamlike atmosphere associated with the art of the Surrealist movement. There was little rehearsal of these set-less skits and plays which were notoriously characterized by their stress on ‘hallucinations and rude confrontations’.9 Each production included specific elements: the introduction of puppets (something which the Theatre of Cruelty would inherit) to ‘induce the metaphysical fear produced by the inhuman representations of Oriental dance drama’; ‘dismemberment to depict an underlying state rather than bloodshed’; and ‘de-identification’, to prevent the audience from identifying with the characters which would in turn lull or mollify their senses.10 The actors rehearsed by practicing ‘ultra-stylised, often jerky movements’ in an attempt to both reject stage realism and to dissociate the audience in order to keep them alert to the physical effects of the spectacle (‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 8–9).11 This resulted in a great deal of incomprehension for the audience, rather than the Théâtre Alfred Jarry’s desired effect which was to appeal to the senses rather than psychology and jolt the audience into responding instinctually to the action. Current theatrical conventions did not allow for this sensual immediacy, and this prompted Artaud to develop ‘an absolutely pure theatre’ which would surely revive interest in the ‘total theatre formula’ (My translation).12 The foundations of the Theatre of Cruelty are identified in Artaud’s early attempt at theatrical composition and production. His ‘Manifeste pour un théâtre avorté’ (‘Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre’), along with the brochures he produced for the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, are precursors of his essays and manifestos on the Theatre of Cruelty. They articulate Artaud’s ideas on what theatre should be. When he wrote The Theatre and Its Double, those ideas changed, as did his stipulations about how to produce a theatrical production. Change in criteria aside, Artaud remained consistent in isolating the problem with contemporary theatre, maintaining that the way to necessarily revitalize the theatre was to provide the public with something vital rather than merely entertaining. In the

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brochure produced for the 1926–27 season, for example, Artaud stresses the importance of original, inspired drama to restore power to the theatre: We need to believe in what we see. We can no longer subscribe to theatre which repeats itself every night according to the same, ever the same, identical rites. The show we are watching must be unique and give us the impression of being as unexpected and as incapable of being repeated as any act in life, any occurrence whatsoever brought about by events. (‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 18)13

The theatre’s force lies in its ability to sustain contact with real life. The goal of any production, according to Artaud, is to actively stimulate the audience via the senses. The feeling elicited is not necessarily pleasurable, but momentous. Artaud likens the experience to participation in a ‘real operation’, involving not only the mind but also the senses and the flesh, where the spectators know they will survive the process, but they will not leave intact (‘Théâtre Alfred Jarry’, ii, 22; ‘Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 17). There is a gravity associated with the theatrical experience whose significance the audience needed to understand. This desire to profoundly engage the audience, to reach members to their instinctual core, was a ceaseless goal Artaud aspired to achieve throughout his entire career. The work in The Theatre and Its Double was born of Artaud’s insistence that the theatre should penetrate its audience. The collection of essays was initially written for contemporary artists, dramatists, and actors, and although it was the distillation of his theatrical vision, it was seemingly also intended as a sort of manual on how to avoid producing lifeless spectacles. No matter how inconceivable, his goal was to reach an even broader audience: his fellow victims of a life divorced from culture, or real life. In his preface to The Theatre and Its Double, ‘Le Théâtre et la Culture’ (‘The Theatre and Culture’), Artaud addresses the dire reality of a world no longer interested in culture because of a false idea of civilization that insists on elitist connotations. For Artaud, the civilized man ‘is a man instructed in systems, who thinks in forms, in signs, in representations’, a monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of acts from thoughts, is developed to absurdity (My translation).14 Artaud maintains that civilization and culture are instead synonymous: ‘it is artificial to distinguish between civilization and culture, as is using two words to signify one and the same action’ (My translation).15 The implications of such a division would

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assume that if we employ this false understanding of civilization as ‘civility’, life is, in effect, separate from culture. Any ambiguity surrounding their connection is in relation to the idea of an applied culture—the current use of civilization that is mediated by conventional, conformist behaviour—which Artaud considers a misappropriation. The refined concept of civilization rejects the link between life and all its baseness: raw and unrefined, savage and instinctual, and the theatre should capture this intense relationship. Artaud wishes to make clear to his readers that those whom society has termed ‘civilized’ are currently cut off from life. As a result, they are not truly in touch with the culture of the everyday. There is a definite lack of community between the public and the civilized. When culture is reserved for the falsely civilized, it is highbrow and elitist, and excludes the people. Artaud stresses that this is not the fault of the public, who lives and experiences the culture of the everyday, but of the learned, who have perpetuated and enforced a distinction between life and culture by elevating elements of the past, refusing to alter them to better reflect a present, thereby better engaging with it. In ‘No More Masterpieces’, Artaud proposes that the present cannot move forward and create anew unless the worship of masterpieces is abolished: We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for a self-styled elite and not understood by the general public; […] Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone. (Richards, p. 74)16

The very notion of a masterpiece sets parameters of exclusivity around it. Artaud wants us to create art now and make it accessible for everyone in a common language relevant to the present. This idea of admired art, placed on a pedestal and creating nothing, is so completely detached from life that it ceases to have any purpose. Artaud’s goal is to put the non-rational and the sublime back into the everyday rather than leave it in museums where it does no immediate good. However, the masterpieces themselves, and the language with which we understand them, can and should be adapted to better reflect the modern world.

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But what kind of life is Artaud trying to capture and portray in an attempt to demonstrate this artistic intensity? What language will he use to bring it into existence? His first manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty is the primary indicator of what this new theatre will be. With regards to his subject matter, the theatre should bring the life of the outside world into the realm of performance. In this respect, Artaud’s theatre resembles Bakhtin’s carnival: Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants.17

Both Bakhtin and Artaud examine life in action, spontaneous, and without social restriction. Creating an environment which exhibits this very amalgamation between carnival and its participants—the performance and its audience—is central in portraying a mass spectacle of release: The Theater of Cruelty proposes to resort to a mass spectacle; to seek in the agitation of tremendous masses, convulsed and hurled against each other, a little of that poetry of festivals and crowds when, all too rarely nowadays, the people pour out into the streets. (Richards, p. 85)18

Extreme action must dominate the movement of the spectacle if it is to have any impact upon the audience. This is not staid enjoyment. The image of masses convulsed and hurled together is one of confrontation and frenzy. Bakhtin has no use for footlights in the same way Artaud has no use for the proscenium arch which divides the performers from the spectators. But Artaud is still talking about a performance. Even though he incorporates footlights, components specific to pure theatricality, they are used to help create a spectacular mise en scène that will jolt the audience into participation. He plans to do away with any traditional sense of a stage to

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establish a more authentic communication with the audience, placing them in the middle of the action rather than on the periphery: We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it. This envelopment results, in part, from the very configuration of the room itself. (Richards, p. 96)19

In the Theatre of Cruelty, the physical constructs of the stage will complement the notion that theatre is life-acknowledging and inclusive. The spectators are as much a part of the action as the actors. The Theatre of Cruelty relies on the fact that the mass spectacle rouses the crowd from a static, perhaps even ‘civilized’ existence. But something important ­happens during these ‘carnivals’: although free from social restriction, of the regular rules and regulations in effect during non-carnival days, the practitioners are victims to the whim of the crowd and its actions. This is reality, complete with its liberty and restriction. Although free, constraints are still in operation, and Artaud wants his theatre to demonstrate this fact. Artaud could not help but appreciate the reality of unseen constraints. At the very basic level, for Artaud to even reach the public, his theatre must first exist, and only if appropriately funded can it exist on a massive scale. Stephen Barber does not want his reader to forget that Artaud was very much aware that his plans for a new theatre were directed towards potential financial backers in addition to the public: ‘The Theatre of Cruelty had to be launched as a business venture as well as a revolutionary dream about theatrical and physical transformation.’20 He designed his second manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty in the form of a marketable brochure in the hope that it would attract financial interest (Barber, Blows and Bombs, p. 58). In addition to his artistic peers and the common citizen, Artaud’s audience included the elite members of the society he openly reprimands in his manifesto. It is unsurprising, therefore, that his manifesto was not entirely well-received since the very people he was trying to entice as financiers were those most completely cut off from the true culture of everyday life. They were active participants in a world no longer concerned with culture as it is meant to be defined: ‘The world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient

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toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient’ (Richards, p.  7).21 Artaud needs to find a way to appeal to people who waste their life force on their concern with the immediate and highly irrelevant issues confronting them. To do this he must extricate the ideas which come from the same force that compels us to feed our hunger: instinct. This same immediacy is found in action; thus, creating a theatre of action becomes the means to engage with the force of culture within ourselves. The language of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is based around action as the motivating factor in the theatre, and any action in the performance is generated by the mise en scène instead of textual and/or verbal language. There is no corresponding term for the way Artaud uses mise en scène as it means so much more than just the designated area and adornment of a stage spectacle, including the important element of sound. Artaud stipulates that there will be no set; only the elements which fill the stage are necessary. The mise en scène is the epicentre of all life surrounding the drama, ‘the point of departure for all theatrical creation’ (My translation).22 Its components include gesture, musical instruments, lighting, costumes, objects, masks, and accessories resulting in a total theatre experience. Any object requiring a stereotyped physical representation will be disguised, and ‘manikins, enormous masks, objects of strange proportions will appear with the same sanction as verbal images, will enforce the concrete aspect of every image and every expression’ (Richards, p. 97).23 In the essay ‘La Mise en scène et la Métaphysique’ (‘Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène’), Artaud stipulates that the language of the stage need not be stimulated by a verbal language, but instead should use its vast space in speaking its own physical, concrete, and sensual language: I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. (Richards, p. 37)24

The stage, its surroundings, and its concrete elements all work together to stimulate the senses rather than the intellect of the audience members participating in the Theatre of Cruelty. This is how to reach the

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audience according to Artaud: ‘Dialogue—a thing written and spoken—does not belong specifically to the stage, it belongs to books’ (Richards, p. 37).25 The elements of the mise en scène, therefore, work together to form a stage-specific language that is not reliant upon the written word. According to Artaud in the essay ‘Théâtre Oriental et Théâtre Occidental’ (‘Oriental and Occidental Theatre’), words, dialogue, and verbal language have their place in the theatre, but they should not detract from the physical action on the stage or take precedence over any gestured language in the performance: ‘It is not a matter of suppressing speech in the theater but of changing its role, and especially of reducing its position, of considering it as something else than a means of conducting human characters to their external ends’ (Richards, p. 72).26 What is important to understand is that Artaud does not wish to abolish dialogue from the stage altogether. It is just one component of the greater whole of the production. And, similar to Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism in a world dominated by heteroglossia, the constant interaction between meanings potentially conditions the other elements affected by it (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 426); how they are affected is determined at the moment of utterance. For Bakhtin, this occurs in the novel; for Artaud, this happens in performance, in real time. This perhaps makes it more difficult to carry out accurate character analyses in the theatre, but Artaud deems that the theatre is not the place for character analysis. The mise en scène assumes an intellectual dignity in placing language below gesture, thus allowing the audience to respond emotionally. By incorporating the physical language of the stage, the director27—the metteur en scène—gets closer to the dynamics of pure theatre (TD, iv, 128; Richards, p. 107). Artaud’s underlying anxiety is that without any spoken language to accompany the language of the mise en scène, the Occidental or European audience would not be able to follow action accurately. The theatre Artaud is proposing is far removed from the theatre with which his audience is familiar: the conventional drama of stage realism which Alfred Jarry rebelled against in creating Ubu roi at the close of the nineteenth century. But it is not impossible to stage text-driven plays in this manner. It all depends upon the interpretation of the director, an idea which Artaud endorsed. Ultimately, the play and its characters are at the mercy of the director and his or her vision for the spectacle.

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Three Influential Events Artaud’s inspiration for a physically driven theatre which was to become the Theatre of Cruelty can be traced to three equally influential events Barber confirms took place over a four-month period in 1931.28 The first event was Artaud’s observation of a Barong performance of the vibrant Balinese theatre at a Colonial Exhibition in the Vincennes Forest in July 1931.29 Here, he saw all the potentialities of a theatre dominated by actions, of living hieroglyphs, able to evoke the spiritual through movement: In the Oriental theater of metaphysical tendencies, as opposed to the Occidental theater of psychological tendencies, this whole complex of gestures, signs, postures, and sonorities which constitute the language of stage performance, this language which develops all its physical and poetic effects on every level of consciousness and in all the senses, necessarily induces thought to adopt profound attitudes which could be called metaphysics-in-­ action. (Richards, p. 44)30

While this may appear as a reductionist fantasy of the Balinese theatre as a series of ‘hieratic gestures’, as Christopher Innes posits, perhaps even an ingenuous rendering of a ritual to facilitate mass consumption for an unfamiliar audience, Artaud did recognize in the performance a viable means by which to revitalize European theatre and destabilize the psychological dominance of a psychologically driven, Occidental theatre.31 The performance, which featured ‘a grotesque witch, a mythical beast, and trance states […] leading to mass hypnosis through contagious delirium’, was for Artaud the best way to reach the audience: through a theatre that evokes the metaphysical realm through action which in turn stimulates the mind through the senses (Innes, ‘Text’, p. 61). To make metaphysics out of a spoken language is to make that language express what it ordinarily does not: to make use of it in a new fashion; to reveal its possibilities for physical shock; to make it active in its spatial distribution; to manage intonations in a concrete manner, thus considering their power to shatter; to turn against the utilitarian view of language; and to consider it as Incantation (TD, iv, 56; Richards, p.  46). To create a metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression concentrating on the concrete power of physical action and expression is a vital concern of the Theatre of Cruelty (TD, iv, 107; Richards, p. 90).

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In ‘Sur le théâtre Balinais’ (‘On the Balinese Theatre’), Artaud articulated what he viewed to be the superior elements of this theatre. Upon observing the performance at the Colonial Exhibition, he concluded that the Balinese theatre—neither elitist nor exclusive, but popular in fact— seemed to spontaneously create spectacles during its staging, in the same way a true playwright creates upon the stage. The Balinese theatre does not act out a written play; rather, the play is composed on the stage through ritual-like gesture, equally precise, specific, and controlled.32 The gestural, non-linguistic features of this performance fascinated Artaud, and he wanted gestures performed on stage to convey the same kind of fascination to the public through the power of a non-textual language. The spectacle comes to life through this language of movement and voice where the actors, wearing their geometric robes, appear as animated ‘hieroglyphs’ (TD, iv, 65; Richards, p.  54). Most impressive is that the performance, which also features trance, is immediate without being specific to time or place, thus a double of reality. What exists in performance has no previous incarnation. Further, ‘the themes are vague, abstract, extremely general. They are given life only by the fertility and intricacy of all the artifices of the stage which impose upon our minds like the conception of a metaphysics derived from a new use of gesture and voice’ (Richards, p. 54).33 The performance exists in its onstage reality from the moment of creation, and its life-cycle is complete when the performance is over. It has no past or future life, but rather lives in the present moment on the stage. All creation happens directly on the stage instead of being something already finalized and then brought to the stage. This immediacy, for Artaud, was an ideal model of the total theatre he hoped to replicate. Artaud also wanted to make use of direct staging: ‘We shall not act a written play, but around themes, facts, or known works, we shall make attempts at direct staging’ (My translation).34 In this respect, the director becomes ‘a kind of manager of magic’ as he or she reveals the mysteries of the stage (My translation).35 In ‘Le Théâtre Alchimique’ (‘The Alchemical Theatre’), Artaud likens the role of the metteur en scène to that of an alchemist who must reorder the cosmos in order to create anew. The theatre, like alchemy, he argues, is laden with symbols which hide their deep-seated principles from sight, replacing them with an indirect reality. The metteur en scène must work through these symbols to communicate their true meaning. Because these symbols are physical, the theatre should reflect this and work through signs and images instead of words.

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The second event to inspire Artaud’s notions of physically driven theatre was his exposure to the painting Lot and his Daughters (ca. 1509) by Lucas van Leyden in September 1931. For Artaud, this work is not an example of static art for it inspires the viewer towards creation. It also demonstrates all the principles of Artaud’s mise en scène. He believed the painting was arranged on the canvas in the same way a spectacle is directed on the stage. In the Leyden painting, the multiplicity of perspectives and the spatial distortion in representing the themes of incest and apocalypse are jarring. Further, the painting communicates its themes of sexuality and disaster without uttering a single spoken word. For example, the impression of disaster is complete in the appearance of ships in pieces as fire rains down upon Sodom and Gomorrah from the luminous sky; this is in the background of the painting, for the foreground is reserved for the image of a drunken Lot, whose arm is draped around one of his daughters as he suggestively leans into her. The theatre should also produce striking images with minimal explanation to shock the audience, which, while in line with the activist avant-gardes who seek to stimulate creativity and/or cultural awareness in spectators, in Artaud, shock is the means to stimulate visceral response.36 Artaud’s identification of the physical-in-action in the Leyden painting and its incorporation into his theatre is representative of the importance he places upon the idea of physicality in the construction of spatial and concrete language. The third event relevant to Artaud’s emerging theatre was the impact of the Marx Brothers films Animal Crackers, released in Paris, December 1930, and Monkey Business, which opened in mid-October 1931. He wrote a review on both films for La Nouvelle Revue Française (issue 220, 1 January 1932). Evidence suggests that Artaud was completely disillusioned with film because of his commercial acting career.37 According to Barber, Artaud’s reactions to the Marx Brothers films were channelled from the medium of film to the medium of theatre (Barber, Blows and Bombs, p. 46). Artaud praises Animal Crackers’ participation in the distinct poetic state of mind of surrealism, its humour, and its liberation (TD, iv, 165; Richard, p. 142). Monkey Business proved more sinister a film, as Artaud regarded its conclusion, which features the master’s servants lecherously pawing at his daughter’s bare shoulders amidst the vigorous dancing of the Marx Brothers, as a hymn to anarchy and revolt (TD, iv, 167; Richards, p. 143). From the Marx Brothers films, ‘Artaud developed his insistence on the necessary danger of the chance, disruptive event in his theatre’ (Barber, Blows and Bombs, p.  47). The anarchic freedom of

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laughter in the films, in addition to their physicality, noise, and movement, is recognized in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (TD, iv, 51; Richards, p. 42). Artaud’s ambition, therefore, inspired by dance, painting, and film, was to create a theatre which would exemplify physical and concrete language. Artaud was also aware of his predicament, believing that a physically driven drama would be difficult for a European audience to receive, accept, or even to understand. Indeed, the supremacy of psychological drama communicated verbally was so ingrained in European theatre that a new theatre functioning independently of the text was a completely foreign innovation. Artaud’s vision defiantly requires that theatre move away from solely expressing psychological and moral conflict through words, and to instead ‘express objectively certain secret truths, to bring into the light of day by means of active gestures certain aspects of truth that have been buried under forms in their encounters with Becoming’ (Richards, p. 70).38 Artaud is insistent that the Theatre of Cruelty is best equipped to stage the plays of the past through its very insistence on a visceral experience of language ignited within the spectacle. He views his theatre as a return to the past in its ability to provoke a cathartic revelation and release. While this may appear to be a contradiction, for Artaud means to do away with masterpieces, he vies for a return to pure theatre of the past before it was compromised by a corrupted view of civilization. Pure theatre prompted visceral reaction to the events in performance, experienced through the senses, bombarded by action, and prompting intuitive, emotional reaction. The Theatre of Cruelty, therefore, is not trying to isolate its audience by creating spectacles completely strange and unfamiliar. The language used to express these ideas in performance may be new, but it is more effective than the familiar language of the European theatre: And it is not a question of whether the physical language of theater is capable of achieving the same psychological resolutions as the language of words, whether it is able to express feelings and passions as well as words, but whether there are not attitudes in the realm of thought and intelligence that words are incapable of grasping and that gestures and everything partaking of a spatial language attain with more precision than they. (Richards, p. 71)39

Artaud believes that the most powerful feelings cannot be understood through language; we are only able to glimpse their meaning fleetingly through action. If the language of gesture can bring us closer to them, then the Theatre of Cruelty will have achieved its goal.

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Elizabethan Dramatic Conventions We cannot be sure of how closely Artaud studied Elizabethan drama, but through an examination of the physicality of the acting space and the conventions in practice in the early modern theatre, it is possible to understand which aspects Artaud rejected and incorporated in his Theatre of Cruelty.40 Andrew Gurr’s extensive study of the Shakespearean stage looks at the concepts and constructs of the Elizabethan theatre: the companies, players, playhouses, stages and staging, and audiences.41 According to Gurr, almost all the action took place upon the platform, or stage, without the ‘separation of players from audience by a proscenium arch’, but with a ‘crowd of “understanders” jostling alongside the amphitheatre platforms’ (Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 179). The lack of a proscenium arch separating the audience and players would satisfy Artaud’s demand for an engaging, participatory theatre further exemplified by the presence of ‘understanders’ who would surround the platform and the players thereon. In Dekker’s pamphlet The Gull’s Hornbook, he refers to the ‘twelue-penny roome next the stage’ that would allow an audience member to sit on the stage.42 However, as discussed earlier, Artaud requires the action to surround the audience members, thus placing them amidst the action (TD, iv, 114–15; Richards, pp. 96–97). His ideal is not an auditorium, but a large space— ‘the theatre of the action’—based on the architecture of certain churches or holy places, without adornment, ‘and the public will be seated in the middle of the room, on the ground floor, on mobile chairs which will allow them to follow the spectacle which will take place all around them’ (Richards, p.  96).43 Thus, the audience is part of the action, making the need to appeal to its sense of believability unnecessary. Although the basic platform or stage of the early Elizabethan public theatre was not the space Artaud envisioned for his Theatre of Cruelty, he would have viewed the use of this space and the potential for audience interaction as very positive. In addition, the conventions employed would have satisfied Artaud’s aims. The use of dumb show to show frenzied action without the disturbance of dialogue was a particular practice Artaud employed in his Theatre of Cruelty. In his assessment, it is the perfect means to demonstrate non-­ verbal action. According to Dieter Mehl, in The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of Dramatic Convention, during the Renaissance, the dumb show developed from a device to show pageants and processions, that were purely visual, to ‘increasingly more like the other scenes of the play’.44 The dumb show allowed for visual elements to flourish and succeed where

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dialogue failed. In Mehl’s opinion, John Marston, author of revenge tragedy Antonio’s Revenge (ca. 1600), was most successful in ‘making dialogue and speech subservient to dramatic plot and action’, the importance of which Artaud emphasized in his own theatre (Mehl, p. 22). But dialogue and speech are not completely eliminated in the Theatre of Cruelty. In Artaud’s production of Les Cenci, examined later in this book, his moments of dumb show demonstrate the awesome power of action and gesture uninterrupted by dialogue. Elizabethan dramatic conventions of acting methodology and delivery also appealed to Artaud. In documents relating to the production of Les Cenci, Artaud’s own directorial method may be identified, but specifics on actor training are somewhat lacking.45 In Elizabethan Acting, B.L. Joseph suggests that a formal ‘Elizabethan “manual of oratory”’ is equally absent, or if there is one in existence, he was unable to find it.46 Instead, action accompanying acting or oration ‘was the result of allowing truly felt ­emotion to communicate itself through trained voice, facial expression, and movement’ (Joseph, p.  22). The art of acting is not a question of simply becoming, but of channelling one’s own self and behavioural nature in the art of performing. John Bulwer takes this approach in his discussion of the 120 emotion-­ appropriate hand gestures used for oratory that were presumably also used in the theatre.47 The Chirologia and Chironomia depict the language of gesture, focusing on the specific positioning of the hand. Whereas Joseph argues for the analogous relationship between orator and actor in his inclusion of Bulwer’s text, Peter Thomson’s research on actor training suggests that Bulwer’s work was not a necessary tool for all orators or actors (if they can comfortably be placed in the same category), for various acting styles were employed to accommodate the myriad of character roles in existence, and to suggest that a ‘single, uniform acting style on the Elizabethan stage’ existed is misleading.48 Perhaps Gurr can offer a compromise of both views in his opinion that the illustrations of the Chirologia and Chironomia ‘belong more properly with dumb-show than acting with words’ (Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 102). Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia detail the language of gesture for the Elizabethan stage. If, as Gurr suggests, it is best employed in dumb show, it is a viable replacement for the spoken word as well as a means to enhance the performance of gestural language. Bulwer’s gestures, still recognizable today, could form the basis for Artaud’s language of gesture he had hoped to develop for his Theatre of Cruelty. Therefore, a further substantial link between his Theatre of

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Cruelty and the Elizabethan theatre may yet be established by modern practitioners of Artaudian performance. This language of gesture could work in the same way as the living hieroglyphs featured in the Balinese dance Artaud witnessed and had hoped to emulate. The gestures Bulwer identifies may not be an alphabet proper, but are  examples of a viable ­performance semiotics.49 In Les Cenci, Bulwer’s gestures protego and impedio are identified in his directions for act one, scene three, but Artaud never refers to them by name.50 In Artaud, they are full-body movements and not dissimilar in appearance to their manifestation on the Elizabethan stage: ‘Chironomia and Chirologia reveal how an Elizabethan actor by means of gesture might validly communicate clearly and powerfully, in a poetry of movement, what he was thinking, feeling, and willing to achieve when presenting a character in an Elizabethan play’ (Joseph, p. 47); this is poetry Artaud would willingly incorporate into his Theatre of Cruelty.

Cruelty in the Theatre The most effective way to bring the audience in touch with instinctive emotions is to produce a physical language which shakes the theatre and its audience to the core. This is where the idea of a theatre based on cruelty comes from. But what exactly does Artaud mean by cruelty? In ‘Le Théâtre et la Cruauté’ (‘The Theatre and Cruelty’), Artaud writes the following: ‘Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be rebuilt’ (Richards, p. 85).51 The movements of his physical theatre are generated by this force Artaud calls cruelty, and it is necessary for the theatre to adopt cruelty if it is to evoke the spiritual through the metaphysical. Artaud imparts his physical theatre through direct and cruel images as they appear in life. In this respect, the Theatre of Cruelty is real and not representation. As Jacques Derrida’s reputable essay ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ suggests, this theatre is not representative or illusory, for nothing and creating nothing, but is life itself.52 Artaud’s express intention is to eliminate imitation, dictation, and recitation from the stage, but not representation, for its very closure perpetuates its beginning (Derrida, p. 302). The Theatre of Cruelty, therefore, is creation-in-action prompted by cruelty, concerned not with verisimilitude, but real life. Artaud writes the following on cruelty in a letter to Jean Paulhan wherein he explains why he chose cruelty for the title of his theatre:

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This Cruelty is a matter of neither sadism nor bloodshed, at least not in any exclusive way. I do not systematically cultivate horror. The word ‘cruelty’ must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. […] One can very well imagine a pure cruelty, without bodily laceration. And philosophically speaking what indeed is cruelty? From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination. (Richards, pp. 101)53

In explaining his theatre, Artaud frequently refers to cruelty as ‘rigor’: a harsh force of and for life. Invoking cruelty does not necessarily mean the display of vast quantities of blood upon the stage. He argues that a cruel, violent, but not necessarily bloody, image has the power to express this rigour. In this respect, Artaud claims he did not have to choose the word as it was already in existence. Not only is it a means to demonstrate an appetite for life, but it is a necessary force to create life. Cruelty is needed in the theatre, especially if theatre is seen as a medium for continuous creation. His theatre, therefore, is simply satisfying that need: ‘I employ the word “cruelty” in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, […] And theater in the sense of continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity’ (Richards, pp. 102–03).54 In effect, Artaud could have called his theatre ‘life’, or ‘instinct’, or ‘necessity’, perhaps because of the latter’s association with the ancient Greek Ananke (force, constraint, or necessity personified), but he chose cruelty because it implies powerful action; however, in choosing such a word, Artaud found himself continuously having to justify and explain it.55 Whether or not this contributed to the failure of his theatre is uncertain, but the Theatre of Cruelty only had one 17-performance run of Artaud’s own revision of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci which was ill-received.56 Artaud composed ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté (Second manifeste)’ [‘The Theatre of Cruelty (Second Manifesto)’] to clarify his original manifesto, and to name the ideal scenario for production: his La Conquetê du Mexique (The Conquest of Mexico). The second manifesto elucidates certain points of the original, and offers a description of what Artaud calls scenic space.57 A version of the second manifesto was also published in Le Nez in 1950, and provided details of the next planned production of the Theatre of Cruelty had Les Cenci been as successful as Artaud had anticipated.58 Whatever particulars Artaud was unable to write about his theatre—

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something he believed was easier to do than to say—he attempted to elaborate on them in the second manifesto. Also, the idea of cruelty had developed somewhat from the rigour of the first manifesto to something more brutal and corporeal in an effort to penetrate and shock his audience. Here, Artaud is not so eager to disassociate cruelty and violence from their enduring association with blood: The Theater of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theater a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigor and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. (Richards, p. 122)59

A bloody cruelty will be necessary from time to time if the theme portrayed requires it. The Conquest of Mexico, detailing the overthrow of Montezuma, for example, must show bloodshed without gratuitousness. Although Artaud never realized this particular production and its assigned vision, he nonetheless remained true to the idea that cruelty is essential to the theatre in order to revitalize it. He continued his search for the living Theatre of Cruelty in Mexico from 1936 to 1937, and in Dublin, Ireland, in mid-1937, before he was deported back to France and placed in a series of mental institutions for the next nine years where he underwent 51 separate electroshock treatments. Following Artaud’s release from confinement, the fundamental concepts of the Theatre of Cruelty resurfaced in 1947 in various forms. At the Vieux-Colombier on 13 January 1947, Artaud gave a tête-à-tête performance to 900 spectators that he titled l’Histoire vécu par Artaud le Mômo (The Story Lived by Artaud the Mômo).60 In his first public appearance after his release from Rodez Asylum, Artaud appeared a broken man, spitting and yelling pointedly at his audience whom he appeared to despise. His language was violent and biting, and he abruptly left the stage before the end of his spectacle after having referred to his audience as a carcass. Artaud gave them a theatrical performance at the cost of his own health and sanity. This was not theatre in the traditional sense of rehearsed psychology slowly unfolding through the representation of the text, but a spontaneous, active, and bodily response to deep-seated emotions of disgust aimed towards an audience who were a part of bourgeois society, one that would support the confinement of the mentally conflicted, and not the receptive audience he had hoped to address.

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This disgust appears again in what was to be his last communication with the public, this time through the medium of radio, thus accentuating the importance of sound as spectacle. To Have Done with the Judgement of God is a recording made up of five parts and serves as an outcry against all the institutionalisms of his day. The recording is an attack in which Artaud renounces everything and everyone, but it was also a forum for Artaud to showcase his new vocal, sonorous language of screams and delineated ­syllables that he had been developing since his release from Rodez in order to showcase the body in extremity.61 The first of the five parts of To Have Done with the Judgement of God was performed by Artaud himself and details the fictional practice of collecting sperm from schoolboys in order to provide the American government with future soldiers; part two, ‘Tutuguri: Le rite du soleil noir’ (‘Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun’) was read by Maria Casarès, a Spanish actress, and details Artaud’s experience with the Tarahumara in Mexico; Actor and friend, Roger Blin, performed part three, ‘La Recherche de la Fécalité’ (‘The Search for the Excremental’), and expresses Artaud’s opposition of ‘bone’—mere existence, to ‘excrement’—being; part four, ‘La Question se pose de…’ (‘To Raise the Question of…’), which attacks ideas of language, was read by Paule Thévenin; and the conclusion, a parodied interview, was performed by Artaud, who ironically cried out for his own silence. The entire recording was adorned with Artaud’s noise-effects. The broadcast itself was suppressed on the afternoon of 1 February 1948, the day before it was to be aired, by Wladimir Porché, the head of the radio station, who immediately banned it for its obscenity.62 During this final creative period from 1946 to 1948, Artaud tried to express his desire for a Theatre of Cruelty in poetry. At the time, Artaud was dying of intestinal cancer. Images of disease, therefore, are prominent in his descriptions of a world not understanding its own despair in the poem ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté’ (‘The Theatre of Cruelty’), which, although part of To Have Done with the Judgement of God, was never recorded because of time constraints.63 In Artaud’s view, our instinct to strive towards action has been supplanted by our instinct for immediate sustenance, thus distracting us from attacking the real problems of existence, and removing us further away from genuine experience. It is only by destroying notions of an untouchable reality existing beyond our grasp that we may focus on completing the construction of reality which will result in ‘the return of eternal health’ (My translation).64 In the poem, Artaud reiterates that the Theatre of Cruelty is necessary to reinstate the

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life-principle. The theatre has a dual power enabling it to cause both upheaval and to generate life. It has the power to destroy the black and macabre dances of death associated with what Artaud refers to as the occult in the poem. The origins of various diseases—‘eczemas, shingles, tuberculoses, epidemics, plagues’—originate in these dances (My translation).65 The recurring image of the infected body adds a highly personalized element to the poem. Artaud’s own body, sick beyond repair, should provide incentive for the reader to eliminate the source of disease by embracing Artaud’s restorative theatre. He even suggests that diseases exist because the theatre does not: There is plague, cholera, black smallpox only because the dance and consequently the theatre have not yet begun to exist.66

The dance Artaud refers to here is that of our healthy bodies, and it cannot take place until the true theatre replaces these fatal diseases. The theatre, therefore, cannot exist at the same time as these plagues. The theatre and the plague are doubles, and both forces are destructive and regenerative. This connection is vital to understanding Artaud’s theatre, and is discussed at length in the following chapters. Artaud had extraordinary belief in his theatre. He writes his Theatre of Cruelty poem as a man dying of a plague—cancer—for which there is no cure, whose existence he blames on the lack of a penetrative theatre, for it would have the power to make our bodies receptive. This is motivation enough for his wanting to focus his energies on initiating a theatre projecting physical violence. In a letter to Paule Thévenin dated 24 February 1948, after the ban on his radio performance of To Have Done with the Judgement of God, and just eight days before his death, he reveals his future plans for the Theatre of Cruelty: And from now on will devote myself exclusively to the theatre as I conceive it, a theatre of blood, a theatre which with each performance will have done

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something bodily to the one who performs as well as to the one who comes to see others perform, but actually the actors are not performing, they are doing. The theatre is in reality the genesis of creation. This will happen.67

A Theatre of Cruelty, bodily and brutal, depicting real blood and real creation, will follow Artaud, provided that people stop wasting their energy on remedial satisfaction. This image of a society far too concerned with irrelevant and wasteful consumption appears once again at the end of the letter. The need for spiritual fulfilment is replaced with the desire simply to feed, to sustain the body without worrying about the soul. Artaud is not one of these spiritually dead, for he can no longer eat without spitting.68 Perhaps a theatre based on real blood will appeal more to the ravenous, consumerist, and elitist public Artaud despised so entirely. Artaud’s requirement for real blood was never realized during his lifetime. His intention for this final theatre does not appear to be the staging of dramatic texts, altered or not, but rather for participation in a real event, or the presentation of reality as it happens. This is not staging, but, if taken literally, the very creation of life on the stage. Unfortunately, the parameters of this final physically real and cruel Theatre of Cruelty were never specified, but the result would have been a theatre very different from Artaud’s initial vision. He did provide the parameters for the Theatre of Cruelty as presented in The Theatre and Its Double, including the desire to create a remarkable new language for the modern theatre based on a concrete and physical language with a focus on action. What we can do is consider the inspiration for his cruel, rigorous, and bloody when necessary theatre, by an examination of the early modern theatre he admired as well as the surrounding social history of the period which would have factored into the plays themselves and the inception of the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud’s principles and his vision are realized through contemporary, avant-garde productions reinterpreted via the manifestos for the Theatre of Cruelty. This lends truth to Artaud’s belief that art is not static as his continues to inspire creation, supplying the theatre with new and unique utterances, and allowing for his sense of rigour to continue, necessarily so.

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Notes 1. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 117. Hereafter Richards. ‘Quant à la question du spectacle, il ne m’est pas possible de donner de précisions supplémentaires. […] Pour une fois ce que je veux faire est plus facile à faire qu’à dire.’ TD, iv, 140–41. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud, ed. by Paule Thévenin, 26 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1956–; rev. edn 1976–). Hereafter TD and OC respectively. 2. ‘Heteroglossia—The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions— social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.’ Mikhail M.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.  428. The above definition is found in the glossary of Michael Holquist’s and Caryl Emerson’s collaborative translations of Bakhtin’s major influential essays. The concept of heteroglossia is discussed at length in the last essay of the collection: ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1934–35). 3. Artaud does not acknowledge any debt to Bakhtin, but their views on language are comparable. Their works—Bakhtin’s on dialogue in the novel and Artaud’s on the language of performance—are both concerned with the malleability of utterance. 4. ‘Qui a été dit n’est plus à dire; qu’une expression ne vaut pas deux fois, ne vit pas deux fois; que toute parole prononcée est morte et n’agit qu’au moment où elle est prononcée, qu’une forme employée ne sert plus et n’invite qu’à en rechercher une autre, et que le théâtre est le seul endroit au monde où un geste fait ne se recommence pas deux fois.’ TD, iv, 91. 5. The essays in the 1938 publication of The Theatre and Its Double are as follows: the preface, titled ‘Le Théâtre et la Culture’ (‘The Theatre and Culture’); ‘Le Théâtre et la Peste’ (‘The Theatre and the Plague’); ‘La Mise en scène et la Métaphysique’ (‘Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène’); ‘Le Théâtre Alchimique’ (‘The Alchemical Theatre’); ‘Sur le théâtre Balinais’ (‘On the Balinese Theatre’); ‘Théâtre Oriental et Théâtre Occidental’ (‘Oriental and Occidental Theatre’); ‘En finir avec les chefs-

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d’œuvre’ (‘No More Masterpieces’); ‘Le Théâtre et la Cruauté’ (‘The Theatre and Cruelty’); ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté (Premier manifeste)’ [‘The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto)’]; ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté (Second manifeste)’ [‘The Theatre of Cruelty (Second Manifesto)’]; ‘Un Athlétisme Affectif’ (‘An Affective Athleticism’). There are two sections devoted to letters, one on cruelty and the other on language. All but two letters are written to Jean Paulhan; the other addressees are André Rolland de Renéville (the one letter to him is a response to Renéville’s original letter to Artaud), and critical writer Benjamin Crémieux, according to editor of the Gallimard Œuvres Complètes, Paule Thévenin. The final section of the collection is titled ‘Deux notes’ (‘Two Notes’). The first note is on the genius of two films by the Marx Brothers: Animal Crackers and Monkey Business, wherein Artaud applauds the humour and destruction of the films. The second is on the 1935 performance of Autour d’une mere by Jean-Louis Barrault, an adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In this review of the poetics of the drama, Artaud praises the expressiveness of gesture within the performance, and comments on its appeal. ‘Le Théâtre de Séraphin’ (‘Seraphim’s Theatre’) was sent to Paulhan from Mexico in a letter dated 5 April 1936, and although it was meant to be included in the 1938 Gallimard publication of The Theatre and Its Double, it was accidentally left out. It was added to the second edition published in 1944. Its contents are similar to those of ‘An Affective Athleticism’ as they demonstrate the importance of artistic preparation; for the actor, like an athlete, must learn how to prepare his or her body. Artaud argues that controlling breathing, as specified in the Kabbalah, is essential to the actor’s craft. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedpius: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.  Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p. 15. 7. By the mid-nineteenth century, this genre was already viewed as antiquated. However, la pièce bien faite’s dramatic structure of exposition, discussion/digression, and revelation is nonetheless still applied to dramatic texts. 8. The Théâtre Alfred Jarry opened on 1 June 1927 at the Théâtre de Grenelle. Three pieces were performed over two nights: Artaud’s Ventre brûlé; ou La Mère folle (Burnt Belly, or the Mad Mother), Aron’s Gigogne, and Vitrac’s Les Mystères de l’Amour (The Mysteries of Love). The next performance was of Paul Claudel’s Le Partage de midi on 14 January 1928 at Le Comédie des Champs-Elysées, and included a screening of Vserolod Pudovkin’s 1926 film Matь (as La Mère). 2 and 9 June 1928 saw performances of A Dream Play, and the final Théâtre Alfred Jarry venture was devoted to three performances of Vitrac’s Victor; ou, Le pouvoir aux les

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enfants (Victor, or The Children are in Power) on 24 and 29 December 1928 and 5 January 1929 at Le Comédie des Champs-Elysées. For an analysis on performance and direction see Kimberly Jannarone, ‘The Theatre Before Its Double: Artaud Directs in the Alfred JarryTheatre’, Theatre Survey, 46.2 (2005), 247–273. 9. ‘Introduction by Clayton Eshleman’, in Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period by Antonin Artaud, ed. and trans. by Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador (Boston: Exact Change, 1995), pp.  1–48 (p. 6). 10. ‘Introduction’, ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud: Collected Works, trans. by Victor Corti, 4 vols (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968; repr. Calder Publishers, 1999), ii, 13–69 (pp.  8–9). Hereafter Corti. 11. ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 8–9. 12. ‘d’un théâtre absolument pur’; ‘formule du spectacle total.’ ‘Théâtre Alfred Jarry’, in OC, ii (1961), 17–86 (pp. 19, 48). 13. ‘Nous avons besoin de croire à ce que nous voyons. Un spectacle qui se répète tous les soirs suivant des rites toujours les mêmes, toujours identiques à eux-même, ne peut plus emporter notre adhésion. Nous avons besoin que le spectacle auquel nous assistons soit unique, qu’il nous donne l’impression d’être aussi imprévu et aussi incapable de se répéter que n’importe quel acte de la vie, n’importe quel événement amené par les circonstances.’ ‘Théâtre Alfred Jarry’, ii, 23. 14. ‘est un homme renseigné sur des systèmes, et qui pense en systèmes, en formes, en signes, en représentations.’ TD, iv, 12–13. 15. ‘c’est artificiellement qu’on sépare la civilisation de la culture et qu’il y a deux mots pour signifier une seule et identique action.’ TD, iv, 12. 16. ‘On doit en finir avec cette idée des chefs-d’œuvre réservés à une soi-disant élite, et que la foule ne comprend pas; […] Les chefs-d’œuvre du passé sont bons pour le passé: ils ne sont pas bons pour nous. Nous avons le droit de dire ce qui a été dit et même ce qui n’a pas été dit d’une façon qui nous appartienne, qui soit immédiate, directe, réponde aux façons de sentir actuelles, et que tout le monde comprendra.’ TD, iv, 89. 17. Mikhail M.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968; repr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 7. 18. ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté se propose de recourir au spectacle de masses; de rechercher dans l’agitation de masses importantes, mais jetées l’une contre l’autre et convulsées, un peu de cette poésie qui est dans les fêtes et dans les foules, les jours, aujourd’hui trop rares, où le peuple descend dans la rue.’ TD, iv, 102.

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19. ‘Nous supprimons la scène et la salle qui sont remplacées par une sorte de lieu unique, sans cloisonnement, ni barrière d’aucune sorte, et qui deviendra le théâtre même de l’action. Une communication directe sera rétablie entre le spectateur et le spectacle, entre l’acteur et le spectateur, du fait que le spectateur placé au milieu de l’action est enveloppé et sillonné par elle. Cet enveloppement provient de la configuration même de la salle.’ TD, iv, 114–15. 20. Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 57. 21. ‘Le monde a faim, et qu’il ne se soucie pas de la culture; et que c’est artificiellement que l’on veut ramener vers la culture des pensées qui ne sont tournées que vers la faim.’ TD, iv, 11. 22. ‘le point de départ de toute création théâtrale.’ TD, iv, 112. 23. ‘des mannequins, des masques énormes, des objets aux proportions singulières apparaîtront au même titre que des images verbales, insisteront sur le côté concret de toute image et de toute expression.’ TD, iv, 116. 24. ‘Je dis que la scène est un lieu physique et concret qui demande qu’on le remplisse, et qu’on lui fasse parler son langage concret. Je dis que ce langage concret, destiné aux sens et indépendant de la parole, doit satisfaire d’abord les sens, qu’il y a une poésie pour les sens comme il y en a une pour le langage, et que ce langage physique et concret auquel je fais allusion n’est vraiment théâtral que dans la mesure où les pensées qu’il exprime échappent au langage articulé.’ TD, iv, 45. 25. ‘Le dialogue—chose écrite et parlée—n’appartient pas spécifiquement à la scène, il appartient au livre.’ TD, iv, 45. 26. ‘Il ne s’agit pas de supprimer la parole au théâtre mais de lui faire changer sa destination, et surtout de réduire sa place, de la considérer comme autre chose qu’un moyen de conduire des caractères humains à leurs fins extérieures.’ TD, iv, 86. 27. Not the best translation as Artaud sees the term metteur en scène not simply as a director, but as a producer, dramaturge, visionary, and creator. 28. Barber, Blows and Bombs, pp.  44–47. All three events are found in The Theatre and Its Double, appearing in the essays ‘Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène’, ‘On the Balinese Theatre’, and ‘Two Notes’ respectively. 29. Christopher Innes discusses the influence of this performance and other non-Western influences in Chapter 1 of his Avant Garde Theatre: 1892– 1992 (London: Routledge, 1993; repr. 2005). 30. ‘Dans le théâtre Oriental à tendances métaphysiques opposé au théâtre Occidental à tendances psychologiques, tout cet amas compact de gestes, de signes, d’attitudes, de sonorités, qui constitue le langage de la réalisation et de la scène, ce langage qui développe toutes ses conséquences physiques

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et poétiques sur tous les plans de la conscience et dans tous les sens, entraîne nécessairement la pensée à prendre des attitudes profondes qui sont ce que l’on pourrait appeler de la métaphysique en activité.’ TD, iv, 54. 31. Christopher Innes, ‘Text/Pre-Text/Pretext: The Language of AvantGarde Experiment’, in Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality, ed. by James M.  Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000), 58–75 (p. 61). 32. For a detailed  critical account of Artaud’s observation of the Balinese dance see Nicola Savarese, ‘1931: Antonin Artaud Sees Balinese Theatre at the Paris Colonial Exposition’, trans. by Richard Fowler, The Drama Review, 48.3 (1988), 55–71. 33. ‘Les thèmes sont vagues, abstraits, extrêmement généraux. Seul, leur donne vie, le foisonnement compliqué de tous les artifices scéniques qui imposent à notre esprit comme l’idée d’une métaphysique tirée d’une utilisation nouvelle du geste et de la voix.’ TD, iv, 65. 34. ‘Nous ne jouerons pas de pièce écrite, mais autour de thèmes, de faits ou d’œuvres connus, nous tenterons des essais de mise en scène directe.’ TD, iv, 117. 35. une sorte d’ordonnateur magique.’ TD, iv, 72. 36. With their concerted attacks on conventional linguistic constructions, the Dadists sought to provoke their audiences to continually question. The Surrealists, through the juxtaposition of traditional norms, sought to provoke artistic and intellectual creation, questioning logic and predictability, ultimately leading to socio-political change; the latter was less a concern for Artaud, hence his ejection from the movement. 37. Most notably, Artaud portrayed Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) and a young monk, Jean Massieu, in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). 38. ‘d’exprimer objectivement des vérités secrètes, de faire venir au jour par des gestes actifs cette part de vérité enfouie sous les formes dans leurs rencontres avec le Devenir.’ TD, iv, 84. 39. ‘Et il ne s’agit pas de savoir si le langage physique du théâtre est capable d’arriver aux mêmes résolutions psychologiques que le langage des mots, s’il peut exprimer des sentiments et des passions aussi bien que les mots, mais s’il n’y a pas dans le domaine de la pensée et de l’intelligence des attitudes que les mots sont incapables de prendre et que les gestes et tout ce qui participe du langage dans l’espace atteignent avec plus de précision qu’eux.’ TD, iv, 85. 40. According to A. Brulé, Araud’s contemporary, Elizabethan scholarship in France, excluding that which considered Shakespeare, was limited and only made an impact as late as the nineteenth century. A. Brulé, ‘Panorama du Théâtre Élizabéthain en France’, in Le Théâtre Élisabéthain, ed. by

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Georgette Camille and Pierre d’Exideuil (Marseilles: Les Cahiers du Sud, 1933), pp. 242–47. 41. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 42. Thomas Dekker, The Gull’s Hornbook, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets, ed. by George Saintsbury (London: Percival, 1892), pp. 209– 75 (p. 215). 43. ‘et le public assis au milieu de la salle, en bas, sur des chaises mobiles qui lui permettront de suivre le spectacle qui se passera tout autour de lui.’ TD, iv, 115. 44. Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of Dramatic Convention (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 25. 45. Artaud does devote two essays—‘An Affective Athleticism’ (in The Theatre and Its Double) and ‘Seraphim’s Theatre’—to the importance of breathing in actor preparation, but a manual on actor training for the Theatre of Cruelty intentionally does not exist. 46. B.L.  Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 17. 47. John Bulwer, Chirologia or The naturall language of the hand. Composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: or, the art of manuall rhetoricke (London: Printed by Tho. Harper, and are to be sold by R[ichard] Whitaker, at his shop in Pauls Church-yard, 1644), p. 143. 48. Peter Thomson, ‘Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 321–35 (p. 334). 49. For more on semiotics see Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 50. Bulwer, pp. 151, 155. 51. ‘Tout ce qui agit est une cruauté. C’est sur cette idée d’action poussée à bout, et extrême que le théâtre doit se renouveler.’ TD, iv, 102. 52. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967; repr. London: Routledge Classics, 2001; repr. 2005), pp. 292–316 (p. 294). 53. ‘Il ne s’agit dans cette Cruauté ni de sadisme ni de sang, du moins pas de façon exclusive. Je ne cultive pas systématiquement l’horreur. Ce mot de cruauté doit être pris dans un sens large, et non dans le sens matériel et rapace qui lui est prêté habituellement. […] On peut très bien imaginer une cruauté pure, sans déchirement charnel. Et philosophiquement parlant d’ailleurs qu’est-ce que la cruauté? Du point de vue de l’esprit cruauté signifie rigueur, application et décision implacable, détermination irréversible, absolue.’ TD, iv, 120–21.

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54. ‘J’emploie le mot de cruauté dans le sens d’appétit de vie, de rigueur cosmique et de nécessité implacable, […] Et le théâtre dans les sens de création continue, d’action magique entière obéit à cette nécessité.’ TD, iv, 122. 55. See in the ‘Lettres sur le langage’ (‘Letters on Language’) section of The Theatre and Its Double the letter written to Jean Paulhan on 9 November 1932. In it, Artaud expresses his anguish in his struggle to try and explain what he means by cruelty, and people’s misinterpretation of it. TD, iv, 136–140 (p. 137); Richards, pp. 113–16 (p. 114). 56. The Theatre and Its Double was published three years after the failure of Les Cenci. 57. See the letter written to Jean Paulhan 28 September 1932. TD, iv, 131– 135 (p. 135); Richards, pp. 109–13 (p. 113). 58. See ‘La Conquetê du Mexique’; ‘Autour de Théâtre et son Double’, in OC, v (1964), 21–29, as well as the letters ‘À Jean Paulhan, Dimanche 22 janvier 1933’ and ‘À André Rolland de Renéville, Dimanche 22 janvier 1933’. ‘Lettres’, in OC, v (1964), 197–200. 59. ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté a été créé pour ramener au théâtre la notion d’une vie passionnée et convulsive; et c’est dans ce sens de rigueur violente, de condensation extrême des éléments scéniques qu’il faut entendre la cruauté sur laquelle il veut s’appuyer. Cette cruauté, qui sera, quand il faut, sanglante, mais qui ne le sera pas systématiquement, se confond donc avec la notion d’une sorte d’aride pureté morale qui ne craint pas de payer la vie le prix qu’il faut la payer.’ TD, iv, 146. 60. Mômo is an idiom meaning ‘idiot’ or ‘simpleton’ in the Marseilles dialect Artaud was clearly familiar with as a native of the city. For a more complete rendering of the evening’s events, see Barber, Blows and Bombs, pp. 136–39. 61. Alfred Jarry purportedly spoke in a similar sonorous language of nasally, staccato tones similar to Pa Ubu, the protagonist of his play, Ubu roi. 62. Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. (Antonin Artaud: Radio Division Française, 1947). 63. ‘Open Letter to the Reverend Father Laval’, in Watchfiends & Rack Screams, pp. 325–30 (Notes, p. 342). 64. ‘le retour d’une éternalle santé.’ ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté’, in OC, xiii (1974), 105–118 (p. 110). 65. ‘éczemas, zonas, tuberculosis, épidémies, pestes.’ ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté’, xiii, 113. 66. ‘Il n’y a la peste, / le choléra, / la variole noire / que parce que la dance / et par conséquent le théâtre / n’ont pas encore commencé à exister.’ ‘Le Théâtre de la Cruauté’, xiii, 114; ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, in Watchfiends & Rack Screams, pp. 309–23 (pp. 318–19).

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67. ‘Et me consacrerai désormais / exclusivement / au théâtre / tel que je le conçois, / un théâtre de sang, / un théâtre qui à chaque représentation aura fait / gagner / corporellement / quelque chose / aussi bien à celui qui joue qu’à celui qui vient voir / jouer, / d’ailleurs / on ne joue pas, / on agit. / Le théâtre c’est en réalité la genèse de la création. / Cela se fare.’ ‘À Paule Thévenin, Mardi 24 février 1948’; ‘Lettres à propos de Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu’, in OC, xiii (1974), 146–47. ‘To Paule Thévenin’; ‘Last Letters’, in Susan Sontag, ed., Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, trans. by Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 584–85 (p. 585). Hereafter Sontag. 68. ‘À Paule Thévenin, Mardi 24 février 1948’, xiii, 147. ‘To Paule Thévenin’, Sontag, p. 585.

SECTION II

Elizabethan Social History: Doubles of the Theatre

CHAPTER 3

Theatre and Plague: The Doubly Potent Spectacles of Early Modern Culture

‘The Theatre and the Plague’, Artaud’s essay on the connection between plague and theatre, was presented at the Sorbonne on 6 April 1933 as part of Doctor René Allendy’s lecture series ‘Nouvelles Idées’.1 According to Brian Singleton, Artaud’s lecture was part of a larger research project under the direction of Allendy on the effects of the Black Death titled Chronicles of the Plague to which he was allegedly contributing (Singleton, p. 29). Anaïs Nin, studying psychoanalysis under Allendy at the time, was also looking at the social impact of plague for the series, specifically ‘the violent life which suddenly burst from terror of death’.2 Artaud’s lecture at the Sorbonne notably turned into a theatrical performance. Nin, who witnessed the event, detailed the following in her journal: He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous [sic] works of art and theatre came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying of the plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out his agony. “La Peste” in French is so much more terrible than “The Plague” in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors. © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_3

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His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion. At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. […] He was hurt, wounded, baffled by the jeering. He spat out his anger. ‘They always want to hear about; they want an objective conference on “The Theatre and the Plague,” and I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. I want to awaken them. They do not realize they are dead. Their death is total, like deafness, blindness. This is agony I portrayed. Mine, yes, and everyone who is alive.’ (Nin, i, 191–92)

As in his 1947 performance at the Vieux-Colombier mentioned in the previous chapter, Artaud gave himself completely to his audience. Unfortunately, in both cases, he misjudged his audience’s willingness to observe, let alone share in his performance, maintaining a safe, distance, preferring objective impartiality to subjective immersion. His desire to give the experience of plague, to show his own body breaking down, moves his idea of theatre as plague out of the metaphorical realm and into the literal. The theatre’s ability to disturb human composition, either physically or mentally through the experience of psychological turmoil, is akin to the plague’s own powers to destroy society on a ­massive scale. The ultimate goal of the theatre is to spiritually enlighten the audience. The way to do so effectively is to instigate a disruption of the status quo. This is the awakening Artaud speaks of in the lecture and in his radio broadcast years later, and both the theatre and the plague have the potential to rouse the anaesthetized soul. Great disruption, therefore, destroys but also cures. Artaud’s research on the phenomenon of the bubonic plague as a series of infectious outbreaks which occupied and influenced human interaction in Europe from 1347 to 1730 was fundamental to the development of his theory that the theatre, like the plague, has the power to transform through upheaval. Although just how extensive his research for Chronicles

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of the Plague is unknown, the evidence presented in the essay ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ alone support his thesis that the relationship between the plague and the theatre is not merely metaphorical. What is most pressing for Artaud to convey in his essay is that the communicative power of the plague is both visceral as well as mystical, affecting the body and mind of the contaminated. Likewise, the effects of the theatrical performance evoke a total response—physical, emotional, instinctual, and intellectual— in the participatory audience member. In this respect, theatre is plague, plague is theatre. And during the formative years of the early modern public theatre in England, either the plague or the theatre was a functioning entity complete with rules and regulations that varied depending on which phenomenon was dominant at any given time. When the plague prevailed, the theatres were closed; when the theatres were open, the plague was in remission. This does not mean that theatre and plague cannot co-exist, but that they are doubles of one another, so that when the one is absent, the other becomes its perfect substitute. Even though Artaud was living in France, it is impossible, given his status as a researcher on a project chronicling outbreaks of plague and their physical and psychological effects, that he overlooked the strong connection between the emerging public theatre and the plague years which intermittently infected England, most catastrophically affecting London, beginning in 1347 and ending with the Great Fire of London in 1666. I do not think it imprudent to assume that Artaud was at the very least aware of certain aspects of English social history pertinent to his research on the plague for both the never-completed chronicles and his work on the theatre’s connection to the plague for his Theatre of Cruelty. The focus of this chapter is the presence of plague in England—specifically London—as it pertains to the development of the English public theatre from the 1563 plague, which caused the first ban on public performance. Thomas Dekker’s plague pamphlets are important primary source chronicles which document and comment on the social effects of the 1603 and the 1625 plagues upon the entire English populace, and provide insight into the prohibitions in place during plague-time.3 Additionally, particular works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries reveal that the plague was indeed present in the consciousness of this emerging commercial enterprise.4 Ultimately, both Artaud and Dekker question the origin and the communicability of the disease in relation to the medical discourse of their respective periods, countering it with a mysticism which views science as a secondary method of understanding the disease and its effects.

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The plague is as creative as it is destructive, and vice versa, a crucial balance in Artaud’s thinking which appears in his discussions of cruelty and the metaphysics of performance. Like the theatre, the plague is accompanied by a mise en scène that includes a host of frenzied actors and spectators. The only ostensible ambiguity between the two is that the plague cannot be controlled; however, the audience’s reaction to theatrical performance is equally capricious. While specific social, political, and economic restraints act as the superficial means of controlling the reach of its contagion, the plague’s potency is not restricted by them. Suppressing the disease is based on a clinical discourse which underestimates its means of communicability. Rather than focus on the spread of the plague through physiology and person-to-person contact, Artaud posits a psychological communicability which is more in line with the world view of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century men and women who tried to understand the cause and impact of this terrifying societal crisis. The plague, not necessarily medical in origin, its spread, and its psycho-social impact upon the populace suggests a crisis of control, provoking disorder and resistance. This same anarchy is possible in the plague’s double: the theatre.

The Marseilles Plague Artaud begins his essay by acquainting the reader with the 1720 plague at Marseilles.5 He narrates an exemplum in which he details a dream had by Saint-Rémys, Viceroy of Sardinia, just 20 days before the arrival of the Grand-Saint-Antoine to the shores of Marseilles during the outbreak of plague in May 1720.6 In his dream, the Viceroy sees his entire city state, including himself, infected by the plague, and the consequences are dire: Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate. Order collapses. He observes every infringement of morality, every psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring within him; torn, failing in a dizzying collapse of tissue, his organs grow heavy and gradually turn to carbon. (Richards, p. 15)7

Saint-Rémys first witnesses and then experiences the effects of the plague in his dream. He sees the dark side of humanity in operation, without morality—either spiritual or societal—or political authority. He feels his own organs deteriorating, causing his body to break down, bringing him closer to his death. The failure of the body is both physical and psycho-

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logical: the mind cannot remain intact if the body is polluted, just as the body cannot achieve its full potential if the mind is not whole. Alongside the physical collapse of the contaminated, the plague infects the psyche of every individual, infected or not, as the contagion takes over, making it impossible for a sense of community to exist because its members no longer have any sense of ethical camaraderie. Saint-Rémys believes that Sardinia is in danger of infection and chooses to act accordingly. The plague is rumoured to be from the Orient, so he divorces interaction with this foreign ‘other’ in order to prevent the disaster of plague taking place on the island. Certain that the ship is already contaminated, he forbids the Grand-Saint-Antoine, sailing one month out of Beirut, to dock on the banks of Cagliari and orders the ship ‘to make full sail away from the town, under punishment of being sunk by cannon fire’ (My translation).8 Saint-Rémys acts irrationally and despotically, against the better judgement of his staff, and without respect for law or custom because he believes that he is sparing the population from the physical and mental distress which infects every citizen during plague-­ time. The actions of the healthy Viceroy are ironically similar to those of a person infected by the plague as he loses sight of his sense of hospitality and community and commits himself to devastating actions. The motivation behind his actions is unclear: was his goal to protect his political position, to save his people, or perhaps both? We now understand that the Viceroy’s actions helped spare Sardinia from this particularly vigorous strain of the infection in 1720. Marseilles, on the other hand, was already infected with plague by the time the Grand-Saint-Antoine docked there. Artaud suggests that the strain aboard the vessel was the original virus, the ‘Oriental’ plague, the ‘other’, which further mystifies the disease for Artaud, who appears to be susceptible to the exotic manifestations of a distorted cultural understanding and appropriation of Orientalism. Modern historians, however, do support Artaud’s claim that the first strain of plague indeed originated in Asia, and that it broke out of Mongolia and the Gobi Desert in the 1320s where it is still endemic today amongst the native rodents, a documented origin story posited by William Naphy and Andrew Spicer in Plague: Black Death and Pestilence in Europe.9 Whether or not the Grand-Saint-Antoine was directly responsible for bringing this original strain to Marseilles in 1720 is impossible to know for certain. What is plausible is that the crew and cargo of the Grand-Saint-Antoine were not immediately quarantined on Jarre Island before docking at Marseilles, even though the stipulation of

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immediate sequestering was in place at the time of infection. It may have been one of four ships—three docked on 31 May and a fourth on 12 June—which arrived at Marseilles from the Middle East where infection was spreading; these four ships were allowed to port in spite of the regulations in place (Naphy and Spicer, p. 135). The crew of these ships were initially examined on the shore of Marseilles at the lazaretto (plague ­quarantine hospital) where they were ordered a 40-day quarantine (quarantina—noun meaning ‘about 40’ in Italian), and thereafter removed to Jarre Island after ‘more sailors, some shore-porters, and even one of the health officials died’; their cargo was sealed off in the infirmary warehouses, as were the porters (Naphy and Spicer, p. 135). The Grand-Saint-­ Antoine could have been one of these four ships. Its presence in Marseilles would support Artaud’s claim that the plague worsened there when these ships from the Middle East appeared on its shores. Artaud sources the account of Saint-Rémys’s dream in the archives of the town of Cagliari, Sardinia. Whether or not this is historically accurate, it is certainly rhetorically effective. Its purpose is to draw attention to the mysticism surrounding the plague. This particular story offers one quixotic account to explain why an entire island was not affected by the plague even though other cities, towns, and villages across Europe were devastated by the epidemic. The Viceroy’s decision to disallow the Grand-­Saint-­Antoine privilege to dock saved Sardinia from this particular outbreak of plague. Most important for Artaud is the way in which Saint-­Rémys arrived at his decision to withhold docking privileges to the Grand-­Saint-­Antoine. He insists that the plague and the Viceroy were connected in some way: ‘for it cannot be denied that between the viceroy and the plague a palpable communication, however subtle, was established: and it is too easy and explains nothing to limit the communication of such a disease to contagion by simple contact’ (Richards, p. 17).10 Artaud may believe that the plague is able to communicate on a psychic level, but he admits that no matter how strong the extrasensory connection between the plague and the Viceroy, it was unable to infect him beyond the framework of his dream.

Physiological and Psychological Symptoms of Plague Research on the plague as a communicable disease is extensive but far from conclusive. The fact that it has afflicted humans on such a massive scale—Europe from approximately 1345 to 1730, and there are still numerous reported cases in Africa, specifically in Madagascar whose 2017

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statistics  suggest an epidemic,  and in  Asia—makes understanding the spread of the bubonic plague anything but simple. Depending on who is consulted, the perspective can vary dramatically. For example, Paul Slack is not so quick to dismiss the possibility that the human-flea-human sequence replaced the rat-flea-human sequence as a means of infection: ‘The human flea, Pulex irritans, can transmit infection directly from one man to another, provided that it is present in sufficient numbers and provided that the first human host has sufficient plague bacilli in his blood-stream’; both conditions were more than likely satisfied in early modern England.11 In modern North Africa, there have been multiple cases of plague per household which suggests that the human flea was able to infect human beings with the bubonic plague in at least a few isolated instances, as per the findings of Robert Pollizer in Plague and L. Fabian Hirst in The Conquest of Plague, the two standard, modern studies on plague.12 Generally, most physicians and historians can agree that the ‘human disease of plague is caused by the invasion of the body by a bacterium, Pasteurella pestis, which is primarily an internal parasite of rodents, particularly of the rat’.13 The virus is Asian in origin, as is one of the two breeds of rat, ‘Rattus rattus, the black, house, or ship-rat’, which is indigenous to India and Burma according to Martin Alister Campbell Hinton in Rats and Mice as Enemies of Mankind, but made its way to Europe (Shrewsbury, p. 7). The other species, ‘Rattus Norvegicus, the greyish-­brown, field, or sewer-rat’, native to the area between the Caspian Sea and Tobolsk, was not as threatening as the house-rat, for it neither lives nor breeds in close contact with humans (Shrewsbury, p. 7). When a rat is infected by P. pestis, it passes that disease onto its fleas, causing their digestive system to become ‘blocked’, propagating a voracious appetite their rat hosts cannot possibly nourish. When the rat dies and there are no other rats available to feed upon, only then will the blocked rat-flea turn to the closest neighbour of Rattus rattus: the human being.14 The black ­house-­rat makes its burrow in warm and dry places, and the thatched roofs of economical, low-income housing in early modern England would have been an ideal nesting spot. It was easy, therefore, for the blocked fleas to find alternative hosts once the rats died out. The disease itself thrives in both humid and temperate climates, prime breeding weather for the flea itself. P. pestis is highly toxic in the human being, and although epidemic mortality rates vary, normally between 60 and 80 per cent of those infected die (Slack, p. 7). There are three varieties of bubonic plague differentiated by the symptoms associated with each of them: bubonic plague, where ‘a blister forms

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at the site of the original flea-bite and develops into a gangrenous blackish carbuncle’ signifying that bubonic plague is present; septicaemic plague, ‘when the bacilli invade the blood stream quickly and cause death before buboes have had the time to develop’, and is often accompanied by necrosis; and pneumonic plague, ‘bubonic plague complicated by pneumonia, […] its dependence on lung involvement and not on fleas’ (Slack, pp. 8–9). The latter two types of plague are associated with winter, but all three are dependent upon the initial contact with an infected flea. Even if primary pneumonic plague was caught like a common cold or flu, and this is possible, for the bacilli invade the lungs and can be exhaled through the breath of an infected subject, there is no evidence that it was a separate epidemic and would not have been relevant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Slack, p.  9). Differentiating between the forms of bubonic plague in the twenty-first century may be straightforward, but as J. Leeds Barroll suggests, in Shakespeare’s time, ‘the lines of demarcation between the various forms would not have been particularly clear, especially when one variety of plague could develop in the course of another’.15 The quick mortality rate would have been a clear enough indication that an epidemic of plague was present. The symptoms of bubonic plague are highly visible and intense, and the incubation period is generally short. Nearly all cases are lethal, but death is a merciful release in comparison to the painful suffering the diseased endure: The victim’s temperature rises, to around 40°C, and he suffers headaches, vomiting, pain and delirium before sinking into a final coma. […] The lymph nodes, usually in the groin but sometimes in the armpit or the neck, swell and suppurate, forming the buboes which give bubonic plague its name. Finally fresh carbuncles appear, along with blisters and large subcutaneous spots which can change colour between orange and black, blue and purple. These spots were described by historical observers as the ‘tokens’ of plague, and they and the other clinical manifestations made cases of bubonic plague easily recognisable. (Slack, p. 8)

Although the symptomology appeared uniform enough to indicate bubonic plague, other diseases were often mistaken for it; the convenience of these implications will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. Some of the most detailed and accurate accounts of symptoms associated with the bubonic plague are coincidentally found in the literature

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produced during and after the Marseilles outbreak of 1720 that Artaud cites in his essay. The findings are based primarily on the work of Doctor Bertrand and his team of physicians and surgeons led by Chicoyneau and Souiller. Their names are found in the comprehensive and widespread literature on the plague at Marseilles which made its way to England where the fear of an outbreak was propagating.16 In 1721, there were several privately distributed pamphlets in England that both documented the plague at Marseilles and provided methods of prevention of infection; two of these documents were compiled by Richard Bradley and translated into English. They contain the findings of Chicoyneau, Souiller, and a third physician, Verney.17 Chicoyneau, Souiller, and Verney classified the sufferers into any one of five classes depending on the nature and gravity of their symptoms, while a sixth class was reserved for those victims who died before any sign of infection had a chance to manifest, likely cases of ­septicaemic plague. Class one had the highest mortality rate in the shortest span of time: sufferers usually perished within hours once all detectable symptoms revealed themselves, and they lived no longer than three days. These were observed in the first period of the outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseilles: These Symptoms were for the most part irregular Shiverings, the Pulse low, soft, slow, quick, unequal, concentrated; a Heaviness in the Head so considerable, that the sick Person could scarce support it, appearing to be seized with a Stupidity and Confusion, like that of a drunken Person; the Sight fixed, dull, wandering, expressing Fearfulness and Despair; the Voice slow, interrupted, complaining; the Tongue almost always white, towards the end dry, reddish, black, rough; the Face pale, Lead-coloured, languishing, cadaverous; a frequent Sickness at the Stomach; moral Inquietudes; a general sinking and Faintness; Distraction of the Mind; dosing, and Inclination to vomit, Vomiting, etc. (Chicoyneau and others, p. 7)

The psychological effects of plague appear just as noteworthy as the physical maladies in this description, suggesting that the bubonic plague is as much an affliction of the mind as it is of the body. Sufferers in the first class were mercifully unaware of the severity of their situation because of their psychological state of mind. Class two experienced ‘Ravings or phrenetick Deliria’, but gradually lost the security their ignorance afforded them as their symptoms grew in severity (Chicoyneau and others, p. 9). The more patients were cognizant of their situation, the more severe their infection

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and the worse their suffering, as was the case with class three sufferers, who appeared to be of ‘courageous Disposition of Mind, and resolute under all Events, yet as soon as they felt the first Strokes, it was easy to know by their Looks, and their Discourses, that they were convinced that their Sickness was Incurable’ (Chicoyneau and others, p. 13). The delirium associated with the plague, particularly with class one sufferers, therefore, is analgesic in nature as it prevents victims from understanding the gravity of their predicament, for their lack of consciousness dulls their pain. They have the freedom to act without decorum or restraint as they perform according to the stipulations of the plague. Patients with only the outward signs of plague—those in class five—‘went about the Streets and publick Places, only using themselves a simple Plaister, or asking of the Physicians and Surgeons such Rememdies as are necessary to These sorts of suppurating Tumours’ (Chicoyneau and others, p.  15). Their buboes were the only outward sign of infection, a feature which distinguished the disease from others, as mentioned earlier. Accordingly, each player in the plague-theatre is distinguished by these buboes. The audience members, therefore, may be free from the outward infection of plague, but not from the spectacle which surrounds them. The plague symptoms Artaud describes in ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ are similar to those mentioned in the Bradley pamphlets. We cannot know for certain if Artaud had access to the pamphlets or their French originals, but his remarks suggest that he did indeed consider certain clinical observations made during the plague at Marseilles. Artaud offers an interpretation of a patient’s physical breakdown from the point of infection: Before the onset of any very marked physical or psychological discomfort, the body is covered with red spots, which the victim suddenly notices only when they turn blackish. The victim scarcely hesitates to become alarmed before his head begins to boil and to grow overpoweringly heavy, and he collapses. Then he is seized by a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of a centralized magnetic suction, of his molecules divided and drawn toward their annihilation. His crazed body fluids, unsettled and commingled, seem to be flooding through his flesh. His gorge rises, the inside of his stomach seems as if it were trying to gush out between his teeth. His pulse, which at times slows down to a shadow of itself, a mere virtuality of a pulse, at others races after the boiling of the fever within, consonant with the streaming aberration of his mind, beating in hurried strokes like his heart, which grows intense, heavy, loud; his eyes, first inflamed, then glazed; his swollen gasping tongue, first white, then red, then black, as if charred and split—everything proclaims an unprecedented organic upheaval. (Richards, p. 19)18

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The white, red, and then black tongue Artaud describes matches the observations of Chicoyneau, but Artaud adds that ‘the most terrible plague is the one which does not divulge its traits’ (My translation).19 Although the body already shows the outward signs of infection via red spots, the mind does not yet react. Only when those same spots turn black is the victim conscious of the disease. Once the mind is aware of the symptoms and what they signify, the rest of the body reacts internally and externally. The mind responds negatively to these outward signs and to the pain associated with the disease; thus, the patients saw themselves ‘destined to certain Death’ as witnessed by Chicoyneau and the other physicians during the Marseilles outbreak (Chicoyneau and others, p. 9). Consciousness transforms the plague victim from a person acting according to the freedom delirium allows, to one preoccupied with the fear brought on by the knowledge of their approaching and certain death. The question of where the central point of infection lies still remains: is it in the body, at the points of contact where the blocked fleas have bitten their victims, or in the mind that reacts only when the signs of infection manifest themselves and not before? Does the mind try and protect itself by ignoring the subtle, early signs of the plague? Is it the nature of the disease to take over the mind, shrouding it in a false sense of security, able only to free itself when death is near, or not at all, as in the case of class one sufferers, so disoriented that their minds were unable to react accordingly? In cases of septicaemic plague, the mind does not have the opportunity to react to the outward symptoms because they never appear. In these cases, the plague victims die suddenly, maybe even blissfully. Artaud’s research on the autopsies performed on plague victims reveals that in a noted percentage, only two organs were dramatically injured by the presence of plague: In certain cases, however, the injured lungs and brain blacken and grow gangrenous. The softened and pitted lungs fall into chips of some unknown black substance—the brain melts, shrinks, granulates to a sort of coal-black dust. (Richards, p. 20)20

Artaud comments on these observations, emphasizing that these two organs need human control in order to function: ‘Thus the plague seems to manifest its presence in and have a preference for the very organs of the body, the particular physical sites, where human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to occur’ (Richards, p. 21).21 The central point of infection in both the lungs and the brain supports my own esti-

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mation that the disease mollifies and/or stupefies the brain’s functioning until death—or its acknowledgement—is imminent. While this may afford the sufferer some peace of mind, it also promotes an unconscious agitation, which stimulates the survival instinct that prompts irrational action. Artaud found too many discrepancies and unanswered questions regarding the nature and vehemence of various outbreaks of plague spanning several centuries to categorize them all as the same disease. The very heading ‘bubonic plague’ is both a convenient and ambiguous title for undisclosed ailments, as it was in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Even the French Doctor Yersin, although able to isolate and name the microbe associated with the virus in 1894, could not have adequately understood the entire nature and disposition of the plague (Slack, p.  7). Artaud’s objective in writing his essay is to establish that there is a lack in understanding of what he calls the ‘spiritual’ physiognomy of the disease, asking, for example, why all great outbreaks of plague last for five months and then abate (TD, iv, 26–27; Richards, p. 22). Science has proven that the rat-flea breeds and thrives in humid and temperate climates, which is why the plague’s virulence would cease during the harsh winter months of the English calendar, but Artaud is not totally convinced by the explanations science has to offer. His question as to why the plague was able to spread amongst nations without any direct contact with Asia is easily answered by looking at the increase in trade via transportation of goods by sea. The expansion of trade in Medieval Europe increased the opportunity of sharing more than requested and desired cargo with far-off neighbours. In Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England, Margaret Healy suggests that ‘textiles provided a congenial environment for flea and rat travel’.22 But what of other strange facts surrounding plague which go unexplained: ‘Why distance, chastity, and solitude are without effect against the attacks of the scourge’, and why are debauchees, such as those in Boccaccio’s Decameron, who wait out the plague by indulging in excess in the country, spared (My translation)?23 The plague moves through crowds variably. Morality does not appear to affect its toxicity. Another implication is that the plague inspires acts of immorality in individuals caught on its path of destruction. In Artaud’s opinion, it is difficult to trace the physiognomy of a disease that acts with such freedom and indifference, manifesting itself in various forms in order to adapt itself to any setting, disregarding both the structure and the laws governing infestation. The plague provokes people to an excess similar to carnival, which is both devastating and revitalizing, and harbours both the grotesque and sublime. According to Mikhail

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Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, carnival is ultimately liberating; it offers the public occasions for the inversion of political, legal, and ideological authority of both church and state. During plague-time, as well as in the time allotted for carnival, people purge their repressed energy. This release is regenerative and makes the return to order possible. But there is also something divine about the way the plague is able to transform, regenerate, and destroy without discrimination. This examination  does not suggest, however, that the rules governing behaviour during the outbreak crises were just as indiscriminate across classes.

Plague in Early Modern England It was believed in both Medieval and Renaissance Europe that God had sent the plague as punishment—as suggestive biblical precedents confirm24—for sinful behaviour: ‘the ultimate cause was the Wrath of God incited by the sinfulness of God’s people’ (Naphy and Spicer, p. 13). This attitude was prevalent throughout the outbreaks. As biblical imagery ­suggests, the plague is the scourge of God that rains down upon the earth like arrows from the heavens (Psalms 38.2). In Thomas Dekker’s plague pamphlet Newes from Graves-end, published shortly after the plague of 1603, the author attributes the visitation of plague on the nation as God’s direct response to the sins committed by England. Perceived in this way, God is justified in chastising England. He sends the plague, a deserving punishment, to eradicate his sinners: ‘God in anger fills his hand / With Vengeance, throwing it on the land.’25 The ‘arrowes of infection’ are thrown upon the earth without distinction, bringing undifferentiating death.26 The arrows that fly by day were said to rain various diseases upon the earth, but plague or pestilence was the most severe and was reserved for periods of great sin. This imagery was popular throughout early modern Europe during outbreaks of plague. The title page of Dekker’s 1625 plague pamphlets, A Rod for Run-awayes, for example, features God’s arrows in both hands of a skeleton, death personified: the right hand is focused on the poor who stay behind in the city and its surrounding liberties, and the left hand is pointed at the wealthy who flee the city and the disease, but do not make reparations for those less fortunate who cannot escape. Elsewhere in Dekker, personifications of the plague feature the popular image of a hunter stalking victims. Dekker’s title page of The Blacke Rod: and the White Rod (Justice and Mercie) Striking and Sparing LONDON (1630) features verses 3–6 from Psalm 91:

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Surely hee will deliver thee from the snare of the Hunter. And from the noisome Pestilence. Hee will couer thee vnder his wings, and thou shalt be sure vnder his Feathers. Thou shalt not bee afraid of the Pestilence, that walketh in the Darke, nor of the Plague that Destroyeth at Noone-day.27

The biblical quotation propagates both the image of the stalking hunter and of the visible destroyer who openly dispatches destruction by the light of day. These competing images thus perpetuate the terror of the plague as something sinister and unseen while at the same time presenting the horror it distributes as routine  and ultimately sanctioned punishment. Contradictorily, this somewhat trite imagery only intensifies the terror of the plague as it appears more imminent and commonplace. Dekker offers another possible explanation for the successful distribution of the plague, suggesting that it is not just Providential in nature, an arbitrary other, but is familiar. He suggests that the plague proliferates within the individual soul: ‘For euery man within him feedes / A worme which this contagion breedes’ (Dekker, Newes from Graves-end, p.  85). The implication is that the responsibility of the success or failure of the spread of contagion lies within the individual. The trajectory of contamination assumes that the plague matures in the foul soul, feeds on the body, and then outwardly spreads infection to others. Remaining virtuous, knowledgeable, and above all penitent is the only way to protect oneself from the plague. To commit sinful actions only perpetuates the epidemic, as does remaining ignorant of the fact that salvation lies within the human soul. For those already spotted, salvation is only available for the eternal soul, and that lies in embracing God: Fall on thy knees, Call for Mercy, to helpe thee, Cry out vpon thy sinnes, send for thy Heauenly Physitian, to minister good things to thy Soule, settle thy minde in peace, shake off the world, looke vp at Heauen, Thither is thy Iourney, prepare for no voyage else! Art thou all-spotted ouer! They are gods rich Ermines; to Inroabe thee like a King, and to set a Crowne of Glory on thy Head. (Dekker, The Blacke Rod: and the White Rod, p. 215)

The advice Dekker offers for those already infected and awaiting death is to beg for the mercy of God to ensure the preservation of the eternal soul. The body may dread dying, but the soul will be granted salvation through its penitence.

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The way to eradicate the plague is to eliminate sin and unhealthy behaviour, which was regarded as a logical approach to combating the plague. Healy catalogues these ‘fictions of disease’, treatises and manuals, such as William Bullein’s The Government of Healthe (1558), Thomas Cogan’s The Haven of Health (1584), and William Vaughan’s The Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health (1600), which detail how to keep the mind, body, and soul healthy against plague infection (pp. 28–37). In this respect, responsibility is placed on the individual, and thereby the collective, to control sin because the plague thrives upon it. Thus, state-­appropriated and/or Christian-sanctioned treatises promoting restrictions on certain, unsanctioned behaviour appear justified. Further, Healy argues that these non-medical texts, in particular Thomas Lodge’s A Treatise for the Plague (1603),28 illustrate ‘how essential non-“medical” texts were in the sociocultural understanding of a terrifying affliction which effectively rendered the physician impotent’, especially in interpreting the ‘“How?” and “Why?” questions associated with the disease’ (p. 55). This lack of understanding made it easy for those in positions of power and influence to appropriate the image of plague to support their own political agendas. In Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England, Jonathan Gil Harris examines the Elizabethan world view regarding the foreign ‘other’ ‘as a simultaneously pathological and economic phenomenon’ (p. 21). In merging both the medical and mercantile world of Elizabethan England, he establishes a link between commerce, disease, and national health from the presence of the mid-fifteenth-­century allegorical drama An Interlude of Wealth and Health (c. 1558) onward. In the drama, Welth and Helth are nationalistic figures, reflecting the well-measured Commonwealth; they become analogous with England’s prosperity, where economic and corporeal health are understood as ‘an endogenous phenomenon, resulting in internal balance’ (Harris, p. 22). The threat to this balance is characterized by the foreign, Spanish-speaking Illwill and Frenchspeaking Shrewdwit, in addition to the Flemish immigrant, Hans, who is linked to economic sabotage; Remedy successfully banishes Hans, the foreigner, from the drama (Harris, p. 22). Belief that inflection comes from the foreign ‘other’ results in a xenophobic reaction, similar to that of SaintRémys, whose response was to disassociate from and/or vilify the ‘other’ to avoid the Marseilles outbreak of plague. The scapegoating tactic was nothing new. Following the Black Death in the fourteenth century, the Jewish population, considered ‘both the moral and the physical polluters’ of the community, ‘were caught up in a holocaust of human sacrifice’ post-

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outbreak (Healy, p. 63). In early modern London, the poor, comprised of foreign and domestic residents, were the scapegoated ‘other’. Exponential increases in London’s population, particularly in the liberties, or surrounding suburban areas, pushed the poor to the margins of the city which could not support the influx of residents.29 Further, a rhetoric of uncleanliness became increasingly associated with these areas bordering the city and ‘the unprofitable and wasteful … idle and naughty … unruly, base sort of people’ inhabiting them.30 As Healy aptly suggests, this is where plague discourse acts as an indicator of the period’s social tensions (p. 94). Although it is unconvincing to our postmodern sensibilities that the outbreak of plague was indeed dependent upon the morality and socio-­ economic class of its victims, promoting this discourse helped to control the movements of the citizens of London—especially those considered undesirable—and their detested pastimes. During plague years, the Privy Council in England responded to the threat of infection by restricting the populace’s behaviour in times of crisis by prohibiting various activities they were keen to partake in. Decisions regarding behavioural restraint were based on either their own reports or suggestions made by the Court of Aldermen and the district Bishops. Generally, because the plague was believed to be communicable via straightforward contact between individuals, putting a halt to public gatherings was one of the only means available to help prevent the spread of the disease. But a universal restriction on all gatherings was not in place. For example, attending church was allowed, as ‘authorities for the most part held that it was impossible to take the infection during the act of worship’, but the infected themselves were forbidden to attend in 1563 and in other particularly devastating plague years.31 Public entertainments and assemblies frequented by the lower classes were generally held in poor regard even without the threat of bubonic plague, so restricting these types of morally dubious events as a means of trying to control the spread of the infection served the best interests of the council rather than the public. Ironically, keeping people in their own homes put them more at risk as the increase of infection was dependent upon the fleas of the house-rat and not of dogs, their deterrents, as was suspected. F.P. Wilson refers to both the journals recording the proceedings of the London Court of Common Council and the Domestic State Papers of the reigns of Elizabeth i, James i, and Charles i in tracking the prohibition of various social gatherings during plague years: ‘Bear-baitings, theatres, dancing and bowling (especially on Sundays), the going about with drums and proclamations, buckler-play

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and ballad-singing, were sternly put down by the authorities in plague-time.’32 The first prohibition against plays was on 12 February 1564, when the plague of 1563 was not yet extinct from the city, in the form of a mayoral proclamation forbidding any person to either attend performances or allow performances to take place on his or her premises without sanctioned permission: [No person may] ‘set forth or openly or privately play or to permit or suffer to be set forth or played within his or their mansion, house, yard, yard-inn, orchard or other whatsoever place or places within the said City or the Liberties thereof any manner of interlude or stage-play at any time hereafter without the especial licence of the said Lord Mayor’.33

It is worth mentioning that the prohibition preceded the establishment of any permanent playhouses by at least three years, for the dubious Red Lion was not established until 1567, and the Theatre—which was condemned by the preacher John Stockwood in a sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1578, who identified it as ‘a shew place of al beastly & filthie matters’— was not built until 1576.34 The clergy generally thought the theatre a place of sin, and did not have any trouble condemning playhouses or playing in general. Again at Paul’s Cross, in 1577, and preceding Stockwood’s sermon, T. Wilcocks used the following syllogism as a means of attacking playing in general: ‘“the cause of plagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes”’.35 This syllogism succinctly presents the plague as the double of the theatre. Here they are both seen as negative phenomena. Connecting them is their association with sin. The attitude expressed by T. Wilcocks is just one example of antitheatrical prejudice held primarily by the Puritans, as identified by Jonas A.  Barish in The Antitheatrical Prejudice.36 The major problem was that Puritans in prominent positions—such as the mentioned clergymen—were able to publicly admonish the theatre as well as recommend prohibitions against it and its spectators.37 The Puritans ranked playgoing high in the hierarchy of sins; for, though humans are born to sin, yielding from time to time to this natural urge in moments of passion, seeking out sin is another matter. In making this consensual choice, the sinner ceases to be one of what preacher William Tyndale termed ‘“God’s sinners”’, and becomes instead one of the ‘“devil’s sinners”’: ‘For the detractors of the stage, any traffic with the theatre, whether

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as participant or spectator, must enroll a man in the legions of the damned’ (Barish, Antitheatrical, p. 81). Add the fear of the plague to this hatred, and the result is the recommended closure of public places such as theatres and bear pits which drew in large, lower-class crowds. The Privy Council, aldermen, and bishops believed their actions were in the best interests of the population. Charles F. Mullett contends that ‘indeed on several occasions Puritan hostility sufficed to close the theatres, but even then the magistrates usually adduced the fear of spreading the infection as the basic reason’.38 Even if city officials did act objectively, certain liberties were nonetheless taken in the closure of the theatres. Ten days after the prohibition of 12 February 1564, Bishop Edmund Grindal wrote a letter to Sir William Cecil complaining of players and their influence on the public, thus marking ‘the first occasion upon record upon which plague was made the ground for an attack upon the London stage’.39 He writes: By searche I doo perceive, thatt ther is no one thinge off late is more lyke to have renewed this contagion, then the practise off an idle sorte off people, wch. have ben infamouse in all goode com[m]on weales: I meane these Histriones, com[m]on playors. Who now daylye, butt speciallye on holydayes, sett vp bylles, whervnto ye youthe resorteth excessively, & ther taketh infection: […] In my iugement ye shulde do verie well to be a meane, yt a proclamation wer sette furthe to inhibitte all playes for one whole yeare (and iff itt wer for ever, it wer nott amisse) wthin ye Cittie, or 3. myles compasse, vpon paynes aswell to ye playors., as to ye owners off ye howses, wher they playe theyr lewde enterludes. (Malone Society Collections, i, 149)

His recommendation to suspend acting within three miles of the city became law and remained in effect during any subsequent and serious threat of plague. The letters written by the Court of Aldermen to the Queen or King and the Council, preserved in the collection of books known as The Remembrancia, reveal that it was believed to be dangerous to attend public performances during plague-time.40 A selection from the letter of 3 May 1583, addressed to Sir Francis Walsingham, shows evidence of that fear: Among other we finde one very great and dangerous inconuenience the assemblie of people to playes beare bayting fencers and [pro]phane spectacles at the Theatre and Curtaine and other like places to wch doe resorte great multitudes of the basist sort of people; and many enfected with sores

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running on them being out of our iurisdiction and some whome we cannot discerne by any diligence; and wch be otherwise [per]ilous for contagion biside the withdrawing from Gods sr vice, the [per]il of ruines of so weake byldinges, and the auancement of incontinencie and most vngodly confederacies, the terrible occasion of gods wrathe and heauye striking wth plages. (Malone Society Collections, i, 63–64)

It is difficult to ascertain which marked danger is most feared in this passage: the fraternization of base people, the uncovered symptoms of the plague, or God’s wrath caused by the sinning of his people, whose suspected filth—of mind and body—supposedly caused the plague in the first place. Given the context in which these recommendations were made and the belief that the amassing of large numbers of people would perpetuate the spread of infection, the fears of the aldermen are not completely irrational. Their recommendations were important in establishing legislation against playing, even though we now understand that their fears of mass assembly were illogical. The modus operandi of the plague was still believed to be inexplicable. The ignorance surrounding the disease made it easy for authorities to pervert the situation to suit their own ends, in this instance, to control the movements of the societal poor and restrict them from attending their antithetical pastimes. As Peter Thomson elucidates, the formative years of the English public theatre in London were dependent on the remission of the plague: Major outbreaks in London, causing the banning of public performances, occurred in 1563, 1574, 1577, 1578, 1581, 1593, 1603, 1635, and 1636, and the stutter of a secondary outbreak often led to a restraint on plays in the years immediately following major epidemics, as in 1580, 1583, 1586 ‘in respect of the heat [the plague thrived in such conditions] of the year now drawing on’, 1587, 1594, 1604, and 1605.41

In this respect, theatre and plague are doubles because they were rarely allowed to co-exist. Artaud suggests that they do not necessarily need to. During the plague years associated with major outbreaks, the ability for private or court-sponsored theatre companies to perform within the city was restricted. The one advantage to this decree was that the prohibitions in the city allowed the players to tour the countryside, resulting in increased exposure of both the companies and their plays in repertoire in those rural areas. The prohibitions themselves came into effect when the

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weekly bills of mortality (compiled by each London parish district, and recording all the christenings, deaths, and burials) exceeded a certain number. This number fluctuated from 50 as early as 1584 or 1585, to 30 or 40 from 1604 onward until the closure of the theatres in 1642 (Wilson, pp. 53–54). Discrepancies in the data suggest that the regulations were not always strictly enforced: In May 1636, for example, the Privy Council ordered the suppression of plays on 10 May, two days before the publication of the bill returning 41 plague-deaths. Yet in the week ending 5 May only 4 deaths from the plague had been recorded. It is impossible therefore to tell from the bills of mortality alone for how many weeks in the year the theatres were closed.42

The reasons for unnecessary closure of the theatres can be attributed to the faulty recordings of the number of the dead, or the authorities satisfying their own agendas. To argue the one reason over the other would result in purely conjectural conclusions, but it is clear that the plague was not the only deterrent in the progress of the English public theatre. Another angle from which to examine the halting of playing and the closure of the theatres during plague years is to argue that the spectacle was already in place and the need for theatrical entertainment and enlightenment was not as pressing. The bubonic plague was the alternative to the public theatres that were closed 60–96 months from 1603 to 1610.43 I have substantiated this idea that plague itself is a theatre which is free from restraint (least of all parliamentary), evident in the way the plague victims, or players, act according to the symptomatic delirium associated with the disease. The Privy Council was able to exercise its control over the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline theatres by determining whether or not a gathering for performance was legal or not, but they could not control the plague by this same legislature. Also, the plague’s audience, unlike that of the theatre, is captive. Those infected by the plague cannot choose to ignore the physical and mental demands pressed upon them. The victims’ reactions to the plague infection are involuntary, but these are the desired effects the plague wishes to rouse as they are in direct opposition to what civilization enforces upon the populace. It can be argued that the theatrical performance also practises mind-control over its actors and audience through the director’s attempts to evoke particular emotions in its participants that they would not necessarily feel without the influence of his or her vision.

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The Plague-Theatre For Artaud, the theatre is as great a force as the plague. He demonstrates this by first drawing attention to the spectacle which takes place during an infestation of plague, a type of living theatre; thereafter, he makes connections between it and the elements involved in its production: Once the plague is established in a city, the regular forms collapse. There is no maintenance of roads and sewers, no army, no police, no municipal administration. Pyres are lit at random to burn the dead, with whatever means are available. Each family wants to have its own. Then wood, space, and flame itself growing rare, there are family feuds around the pyres, soon followed by a general flight, for the corpses are too numerous. The dead already clog the streets in ragged pyramids gnawed at by animals around the edges. The stench rises in the air like a flame. Entire streets are blocked by the piles of dead. Then the houses open and the delirious victims, their minds crowded with hideous visions, spread howling through the streets. The disease that ferments in their viscera and circulates throughout their entire organism discharges itself in tremendous cerebral explosions. Other victims, without bubos, delirium, pain, or rash, examine themselves proudly in the mirror, in splendid health, as they think, and then fall dead with their shaving mugs in their hands, full of scorn for other victims. (Richards, p. 23)44

The plague creates a living theatre, and although Artaud is not specific about the plague outbreak which he is visualizing—it may in fact be a generic description—what he describes is very similar to the brutal ­atmosphere of London during plague-time, overrun by the dead or the stricken. Dekker observes: But this black Curse Doing ill abroad, at home does worse, For in thy (now dispeopled) streetes, The dead with dead, so thickly meetes, As if some Prophets voice should say None shall be Citizens, but they. Whole households, and whole streets are stricken, The sick do die, the sound do sicken, And Lord haue mercy vpon vs, crying, Ere Mercy can come forth, th’are dying. (Dekker, Newes from Graves-end, p. 94)

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What took place during plague years in London was a production worthy of both the early modern theatre and Artaud’s idea of the ‘true’ theatre: In the true theater a play disturbs the senses’ repose, frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt (which moreover can have its full effect only if it remains virtual), and imposes on the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic. (Richards, p. 28)45

The plague, therefore, has the potential to affect every citizen at every echelon as all are collectively and inevitably exposed to its performance that assaults the senses through the witnessed devastation, while simultaneously freeing the unconscious. Artaud is correct in identifying that once the plague establishes itself in a city, the regular forms of authority and control collapse; a similar situation occurs during carnival, only it is regulated, or it exists purely because the figures of authority—whether mystic, deific, or parliamentary—permit its existence. The plague, on the other hand, runs free, and the designated period of release and purgation is replaced by a period of infestation during which those in authority, although powerless, try and assume different roles to counter its autonomy. During plague years, an elaborate system was in operation to control both the spread of the contagion, and the citizens of London, infected or not. The Plague Orders were the culmination of a series of regulations in place during outbreaks from the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Privy Council’s altered programme of 1578 became the standard orders across England held exclusively until May 1666, taking into account only minor alterations in 1592, 1593, 1603, and 1625 (Slack, p.  209). In 1583—erroneously dated 1593 in the Malone Society Collections46—the set of regulations, detailing the execution of the orders by official officers relating to sanitation and segregation, were printed and delivered to the aldermen of the city of London who distributed them accordingly. In the city, a hierarchy existed with the Queen or King at the top, followed by the Privy Council, the Lord Mayor (to whom the provost-marshal attended), the aldermen (whom the Lord Mayor appointed), the councillors, and finally the district marshal. The list of officials and their select duties read like a playbill of dramatis personae ranked according to the frequency of their appearance. The duties of the lower-ranking appointed officers are notably more important than those of the higher-ranking officials, which

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unfortunately meant they were in immediate danger of the plague because of their exposure to it. For example, four viewers—two of dead bodies and two of ‘sick suspected’—were to report to the Constable, ‘all vpon pain of imprisonement’ if they failed to uphold their post and disclose the dead or dying; their exposure to such persons, and particularly their dwellings, naturally made them susceptible to infection (Malone Society Collections, i, 209). In theory, this was a functioning body, communicating changes in legislature and controlling the flow of information from the Queen or King and Council to the common citizen; however, the plague was potentially able to render the Orders useless, for during severe attacks, meetings were out of the question. This system was also dependent upon everyone doing his or her job willingly; in truth, maintaining order during the plague was not a desired occupation as it did not pay well and there was much risk involved. Constables, for example, were responsible for keeping the peace and ensuring that the Plague Orders were observed, but their more perilous duties had them shutting up and marking infected houses—more often, the ‘shutting up’ of houses seemed to target ‘the poore sort’ (Slack, pp. 215, 213)—arresting wandering beggars and the idle, and ultimately placing their own lives at risk: ‘Constables were in great danger of taking the infection, or of being mauled by plague-stricken maniacs. […] Many constables ran away in plague-time, but flight only gave temporary relief’ (Wilson, pp. 17–18). Here, Wilson’s reading supports the mental affliction of the disease, which, in addition to the physical symptoms of the plague, would have had a shocking and profound effect on the orders’ enforcers. The constables who fled would eventually have to be held accountable for their betrayals to the oath they swore to by choice. The entire system was under threat of collapse if they failed to maintain their composure. The two examiners—listed as surveyors in the Plague Orders of 1583—on the other hand, did not choose their posts, but were appointed on a monthly basis by each district alderman, and their ‘refusal to take office or negligence in the performance of duty was punished by a committal to ward’.47 They were the watchdogs during plague-time and were responsible for the following: The examiner’s duties were to ensure that all orders were duly observed, to discover infected houses, to appoint and supervise wardens, searchers, and other plague-officials, and to render account of the due execution of his charge before the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and deputy-aldermen. He was required to keep to himself and to carry a red wand in his hand when he walked abroad. (Wilson, pp. 19–20)

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The examiner was a player in the plague-theatre, and his role of informant was signified by his red wand. Understandably, the position itself was not a coveted one, as the examiner was susceptible not only to infection but also to the ire of the plague victims themselves who did not want to be identified as such. From the early sixteenth century, once plague was discovered in a home, it was marked and the movements of its inhabitants were restricted. The infected too were easily identifiable characters in the plague-theatre as they carried white rods when they took to the streets; if they failed to do so, they were fined five pounds, an extraordinary amount, especially for the poor (Wilson, p. 57). But there were so many abuses of the rule that after the plague of 1563, regulations were more rigorous, and the entire population of an inflicted household was segregated for 40 days. The ‘deputy-alderman appointed one “honest, sad, and discreet” person to provide food, fuel, and other necessaries, the cost to be defrayed by the householder or if he were too poor, by “the charitable alms and devotion” of the parish rich’ (Wilson, pp. 57–58). Although in the 1570s, only those with plague-sores were confined to their homes, in 1583, the rules changed once more, and until the plague of 1665, it remained that an entire household would be shut up for 28 days; the household was allowed to move to the country provided they did not return to the city within the ban period (Wilson, p. 58). The house itself was marked in various ways until 1592/93 when the Privy Council decided on a wooden red cross bearing the inscription ‘Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’ (Wilson, p. 61). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare uses the slogan to imply that the king and his lords are victims of the plague of love: biron



Bear with me, I am sick. I’ll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see. Write ‘Lord have mercy on us’ on those three. They are infected, in their hearts it lies. They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes. These Lords are visited, you are not free; For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see. (v. 2. 417)48

The passage also features the images of the buboes as tokens, suggesting the inevitability of infection and of eventual death. Acts of vandalism to the crosses led to the Privy Council’s 1603 decision that houses bear a red

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cross painted in oil paint and a paper inscription detailing that plague was present in the household (Wilson, p. 64). Fleeing to the country was a fairly effective way to avoid the plague, provided the person in flight had the means to do so; however, the consequences of fleeing resulted in significant problems for those remaining within the city during plague-time, not only because the return of the deserters prompted a resurgence of the plague but also because their leaving left a burden on those who remained in the city. In A Rod for Run-­ awayes, Dekker’s plague pamphlet of 1625, he chastises the wealthy for having deserted the city without first providing for those less fortunate: ‘you flye to saue your selues, and in that flight vndoe others’.49 He proposes a way of deterring the rich from fleeing, or at least of ensuring that they make monetary provisions for the poor before doing so: In London, when Citizens (being chosen to be Aldermen) will not hold, they pay Fines; why are they not fined now, when such numbers will not hold, but giue them the slip euery day? It were a worthy act in the Lord Maior, and honourable Magistrates in this City, if, as in the Townes to which our Merchants, and rich Tradesmen flye, the Countrey-people stand there, with Halberds and Pitchforkes to keep thē out; so, our Constables & Officers, might stand with Bils to keepe the rich in their owne houses (when they offer to goe away) vntill they leaue such a charitable piece of Money behinde them, towards the maintenance of the poore, which else must perish in their absence. They that depart hence, would then (no doubt) prosper the better; they that stay, fare the better, and the generall City (nay the vniuersall Kingdome) prosper in blessings from Heauen, the better. (Dekker, A Rod for Run-awayes, pp. 149–50)

For Dekker, to abandon London and its inhabitants during its time of need was an offence worth punishing. To die from the plague, whereby the soul receives God’s mercy, was more commendable than surviving the plague if at the cost of others. The lack of immediate action taken against deserters shows just how little control authorities actually had during plague-time: ‘when the pestilence became virulent the populace got out of control, and the authorities were forced to sit with folded hands until the plague had spent itself’ (Wilson, p. 72). The focus of the orders appears to facilitate the collection of fines for desertion or dereliction of duty rather than to ensure the poor are adequately cared for. According to Bullein, in The Government of Healthe, shutting up, refusing to care for, and extorting the poor only

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infused God’s ire and spread the contagion (Healy, p. 101). Ultimately, the infected acted in accordance with the freedom associated with the plague, and the untainted, perhaps experiencing a sense of inevitability, acted either chastely and penitently—as Dekker would recommend them to do—or maliciously, but without fearing the consequences of their actions. For Artaud, the madness associated with the plague likens the epidemic to the theatre. This connection is examined in later chapters of this book, most notably in subsequent discussions of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Artaud’s Les Cenci, respectively. In the episodic flashes of possession which cause the victim to perform heinous actions for no apparent reason, the plague’s connection to the theatre is confirmed: The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit. The last of the living are in a frenzy: the obedient and virtuous son kills his father; the chaste man performs sodomy upon his neighbors. The lecher becomes pure. The miser throws his gold in handfuls out the window. The warrior hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save. The dandy decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades before the charnel houses. (Richards, p. 24)50

The images of plague Artaud describes are shocking, featuring murder, sexual deviation, rage, and desperation, but they are nothing that England’s early modern audiences were unfamiliar with. As Michael Neill attests, London’s theatres were believed by the more devoutly Christian section of the population to show all kinds of filth: In its blurring of moral distinctions, its counterfeitings, its violations of vestimentary order, its breaking of the accepted boundaries of hierarchy and gender—and even perhaps its promiscuous creation of a mass audience, heaped together in a pit—playing constituted, in fact, a kind of metamorphic plague for which actual disease was the proper and inevitable retributive substitute. […] Theatres were imagined as a source of miasmic infection, every bit as dangerous as the plague pits themselves.51

Again, the connection between the theatre and the plague is corroborated. The plague represents the ultimate social breakdown which is imag-

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ined to be enacted in the theatre. The theatre is a means to showcase life as it exists; therefore, if the playhouses of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries showed acts of frenzy upon the stage, it was because people were capable of committing them, whether they were under the influence of plague or not. The plague featured these gratuitous acts on a massive scale because many of the diseased were stricken with madness: From many houses might be heard the groaning of sick persons or the wailing of mourners, while above all was heard the continual tolling of the bells. Fever-maddened wretches ran from house to house infecting others. […] Some hurled themselves out of windows or drowned themselves in the Thames. Many blasphemed openly against God and sought to drown their fear of the terrible and invisible foe in drink and riotous living. (Wilson, p. 99)

Wilson’s description of the frenzied sick running out of their homes and committing atrocities of all sorts is almost identical to Artaud’s description in ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ mentioned above. Without doubt, the plague corrupted the mind while it destroyed the body, destroyed social and moral structures, a truth known since the Black Death as Boccaccio’s description in The Decameron attests: In the face of so much affliction and misery, all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and been extinguished in our city. […] This scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.52

The disease causes the breakdown of the social order which is turn threatens the relevance of authority, familial, societal, judicial, or political.

Filth and Infection Fundamentally, the theatre and the plague are products of the urban centre and both most certainly thrived in centrally populated areas: the city was seen as both the hub of civilization, but at the same time, ‘a place of dirt, corruption, and disease’ (Neill, p. 24). London was considered particularly dirty during outbreaks of plague and England in general was slow

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to adopt the regime of plague rules concerning hygiene to control the spread of infection: ‘it was a European commonplace that Italy was “the strictest place in the world, in the case of health” while England was considered one of the most backward states’ (Naphy and Spicer, p. 79). In Ben Jonson’s poem ‘On the Famous Voyage’, the narrator comments on the filthy Fleet ditch which had become a common sewer by the sixteenth century despite numerous attempts to try and clean the river banks. Jonson likens the city of London to Hell, and the River Thames as the indistinguishable collection of the four rivers of Hades—Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Phlegethon. The most horrid of its entrances was the Bridewell dock where the outlet of the flatulence-reeking Fleet Ditch was located: ‘Say thou stop thy nose: / ’Tis but light pains: indeed this dock’s no rose.’53 Here, the river is framed by ‘women and men / Laden with plague-sores’ (Jonson, lines 16–17). The allusion suggests that the river itself, which snakes through the city, breeds the contagion infecting its citizens. In Artaud’s description of the plague, he mentions the familial pyres in the streets used to burn the dead. In July 1563, London adopted the practice of burning fires three times a week at seven o’clock in the evening, and twice a week in 1603 between eight and nine o’clock, as a means of purifying the air.54 Although the burning of bodies would not have sanitized the air, it was a cleaner way to dispose of the dead and at the very least would have eradicated the fear of a resurgence of the infection; however, religious provisos forbade the living to perform such funeral rites. The poor were generally not given proper burial during plague-time but were thrown into plague-pits by the thousands, the unfortunate fate of many of its victims. Also, rich and poor often expired in the streets, and there they remained until the corpse bearers—crying ‘“Cast out your dead” or “Have you any dead bodies to bury?”’ (Wilson, p. 46)—came around to collect them. For those not fortunate enough to die suddenly in the streets, death awaited them at home or in the Pesthouse, a plague hospital which was first established in 1594  in the St Giles, Cripplegate area (Wilson, pp. 74–84). Conditions were appalling for the sick, but arguably not much worse than the conditions inside a shut-up house where the healthy sane were forced to remain with the infected mad. This increased the chances of infection spreading to other family members because once their host was dead, the blocked fleas would turn to the healthy humans of the household to try and satisfy their insatiable hunger. The practice of shutting up houses, therefore, was a means to perpetuate the disease rather

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than stop it. The psychological torment of being locked up with the dead or dying was undeniably horrifying. Dekker writes: What an vnmatchable torment were it for a man to be bard vp euery night in a vast silent Charnell-house? hung (to make it more hideous) with lamps dimly & slowly burning, in hollow and glimmering corners: where all the pauement should in stead of greene rushes, be strewde with blasted Rosemary, withered Hyacinthes, fatall Cipresse and Ewe, thickly mingled with heaps of dead mens bones: the bare ribbes of a father that begat him, lying there: here the Chaples hollow scull of a mother that bore him: round about him a thousand Coarses, some standing bolt vpright in their knotted winding sheetes: others halfe mouldred in rotten Coffins, that should suddenly yawne wide open, filling his nosthrills with noysome stench, and his eyes with the sight of nothing but crawling wormes. […] Were not this an infernall prison? would not the strongest-harted man (beset with such a ghastly horror) looke wilde? and runne madde? and die? (Dekker, The Wonderfull yeare, p. 27)

Dekker’s imagery likens the home where one is fated to die to the ancestral tomb. The atmosphere associated with the plague is alone enough to make the sane turn mad without actually being infected.

Theatre, Contagion, and Ritual Artaud thought it was worth investigating the spiritual forces associated with the plague. It was certainly able to unleash gratuitous behaviour in its victims, but the atmosphere of infection was also able to prompt those healthy and sound of mind to commit atrocious acts. The actor working in the theatre is similar to a person subjugated by the plague as he too is overcome by a force compelling him to perform actions contrary to his disposition: ‘The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him, is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition’ (Richards, p. 24).55 How this works in practice will be discussed in my examination of John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a play Artaud held as the exemplary model of ‘essential’ theatre. At present, it is important to understand that there is a fundamental connection between the physical, the physiological, and what Artaud refers to as the spiritual forces of the plague, and the impactful images of his proposed total theatre. The difference between the

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images of the plague and the images in the theatre is that the plague images occur in relation to a powerful state of physical disorganization, while the images in the theatre are products of a spiritual force beginning its trajectory in the senses and doing so without an intellectual understanding of external reality altogether (TD, iv, 31; Richards, p. 24). This is not to say that the images of the theatre are any less potent than those of the plague. Successful theatre penetrates the audience’s sensibilities with all the force of an epidemic: Extending this spiritual image of the plague, we can comprehend the troubled body fluids of the victim as the material aspect of a disorder which, in other contexts, is equivalent to the conflicts, struggles, cataclysms and debacles our lives afford us. And just as it is not impossible that the unavailing despair of the lunatic screaming in an asylum can cause the plague by a sort of reversibility of feelings and images, one can similarly admit that the external events, political conflicts, natural cataclysms, the order of revolution and the disorder of war, by occurring in the context of the theater, discharge themselves into the sensibility of an audience with all the force of an epidemic. (Richards, pp. 25–26)56

The theatre has the potential to produce images so awesome that they affect—and infect—every member of the audience. Artaud believed that the theatre had the potential to move people to ecstasy through contagion. The way to do this effectively was to evoke the power of ritual currently lost. At a dinner party hosted by Anaïs Nin in March 1933, Artaud spoke of his desire to incorporate this power in his own theatre: He talked about the ancient rituals of blood. The power of contagion. How we have lost the magic of contagion. Ancient religion knew how to enact rituals which made faith and ecstasy contagious. The power of ritual was gone. He wanted to give this to the theatre. […] He wanted to shout so people would be roused to fervor again, to ecstasy. No talking. No analysis. Contagion by acting ecstatic states. No objective stage, but a ritual in the centre of the audience. (Nin, i, 187)

By turning theatre into ritual, Artaud is able to reach his audience, inviting them to be part of the spectacle, thus inffecting them through the power of contagion.57 The effects of such images move people to a state of curative delirium, similar to the experience plague instigates, inducing a trance-­ like state.

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True theatre, therefore, is just as destructive as the plague, but both are equally revitalizing and regenerative. From destruction, the theatre—like the plague—creates new and extreme images. The plague has the ability, as does the theatre, to break through convention and reveal the truth about both inherent and socially constructed human nature. The plague in early modern England was successful in rendering two systems of psychological and social control useless: the social order in existence before plague-time and the rules and regulations in place to try and control it and the populace during outbreaks. Both proved ineffectual against the plague. The works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were written during outbreaks of the bubonic plague and in the intervals between them. It seems impossible, therefore, that these playwrights could have remained unaffected by their sick environment which featured images of horrific disarray. Whereas Dekker’s pamphlets comment on the socio-historical phenomena associated with the major outbreaks of 1603 and 1625, and address the collective consequences of the disease on society, early modern drama is both literally and metaphorically connected to the outbreaks of plague via the presence of a real or imagined epidemic and the social phenomena associated with them.58 According to René Girard, the social breakdown which accompanies the plague is a worse disease: ‘Anarchy is a plague; in a sense, it is even more of a plague than the disease itself. […] The medical plague has become a metaphor for the social plague; it belongs to what we call literature’ (Girard, double business, p. 138). He continues, insisting that the compelling vitality accompanying images of plague in literature would be unthinkable ‘if the social “plague” were not always with us, as fear or as reality, in some form or other’ (Girard, double business, p. 138). Girard’s reading of the plague in literature is similar to Artaud’s explanation of the plague in relation to theatre; the exception is that the potency of the actual plague is not reduced to metaphor alone. For Artaud, the anarchy of the plague is always potentially present in the theatre. Girard’s essay focuses on the entire ‘thematic cluster that includes various forms of undifferentiation and transgression, the mimetic doubles, and a sacrificial theme that may take the form of a scapegoat process which accompanies the mythical plague, for it is never present alone in literature (Girard, double business, p. 148). For Girard, Shakespeare realizes this entire thematic process. Romeo and Juliet provides the perfect example of how:

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The death of the lovers is the entire plague, in the sense that it represents the climax of the scourge, the plague finally made visible and, as a consequence, exorcised by its very excess; the plague is both the disease and the cure. A sacrificial death brings about the end of the crisis and the reconciliation of the doubles [the Montagues and the Capulets]. (Girard, double business, p. 152)

Girard’s major concern with the doubles is their relationship to the sacrificial crisis in literature: the role of the plague is a means to an end in the entire process of sacrifice. For Artaud, plague is the double of theatre, and both are crises which are resolved by either death or cure (TD, iv, 38; Richards, p.  31). The plague may be the superior disease in Artaud’s opinion because everything is annihilated after the crisis; while the theatre—similarly achieving a certain kind of equilibrium impossible without total destruction—is ultimately an invitation to share in delirium resulting in revelations of human truth (TD, iv, 39; Richards, p. 31). The works of William Shakespeare are exemplary models of the Artaudian theatre because the playwright has first-hand knowledge and experience of the plague and how it influences human nature. When Shakespeare, for example, comments on the cultural phenomena associated with plague, or incorporates the anarchical atmosphere of the plague in his own dramatic texts, he uses his actual observations of the disease’s impact on his socio-physical environment. Shakespeare preserves the potent images of plague he personally witnessed. An example of this is again found in Romeo and Juliet when Friar John reveals why he was unable to deliver Friar Lawrence’s letter to Romeo: friar john



Going to find a barefoot brother out— One of our order—to associate me. Here in this city visiting the sick, And finding him, the searchers of the town, Suspecting that we both were in a house Where the infectious pestilence did reign, Sealed up the doors, and would not let us forth, So that my speed to Mantua there was stayed. (v. 2. 5)

His contemporary knowledge of searchers complements the passage with a vivid accuracy that makes the image that much more truthful, potent, and impactful for his audience. He restores the latent images of the plague, thereby encouraging his contemporary audience to recall its a­ccompanying

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social and moral disorder. Elsewhere in his plays, contaminated Denmark in Hamlet, or diseased Scotland in Macbeth, which ‘cannot / Be called our mother, but our grave’, are examples of environments which metaphorically feature the imagery associated with the plague (Macbeth, iv. 3. 166). As we have seen, Dekker also comments extensively on the moral decay of England’s people, for sin was believed to be a legitimate cause of the plague. Thomas Nashe’s play Summers Last Will and Testament indicates the lack of morality associated with the plague. The song of lament sung to mark Summer’s approaching death reveals the doleful state of humankind: will summer



Adieu, farewell earths blisse, This world vncertaine is, Fond are lifes lustfull ioyes, Death proues them all but toyes, None from his darts can flye; I am sick, I must dye: Lord, haue mercy on vs.[…] All things to end are made, The plague full swift goes bye; I am sick, I must dye: Lord, haue mercy on vs.59

The plague may full swift go by, but it kills many ere it passes. Its underlying presence in the early modern subconscious is suggested in Nashe’s comedy, as well as in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the mirth of the previous four and a half acts collapses with the news of the King of France’s death; ‘the scene begins to cloud’ as the comedy takes a tragic turn (v. 2. 714). The end of the play, instead of featuring the couples uniting in marriage, has them separate for a 12-month period during which the males are charged with some service. Biron, no doubt committed to the plague hospital, is to ‘Visit the speechless sick and still converse / With groaning wretches’ to make them smile (Love’s Labour’s Lost, v. 2. 837). Dekker considered laughter to be powerful medicine against the plague, there being nothing else—sensible or not—able to combat it. Plague metaphor denotes the decay of human sociality. The parting of the couples in Love’s Labour’s Lost results in the collapse of the comedy and the community. The works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries which feature the barren and sullen imagery of plague-time further link the supported connection between the theatre and the plague as they both result in the

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upheaval of the status quo and a breakdown of social structure. In Troilus and Cressida, the plague takes the form of war: ‘Shakespeare presents the siege of Troy as an outbreak of moral sickness—the true “plague of Greece”’ (Troilus and Cressida, ii. 1. 12).60 The war itself is a sick enterprise because decree—the system by which society and war is designed— has been undermined, thus resulting in the breakdown of the entire system. In soliloquy, Ulysses reveals that ‘The specialty of rule hath been neglected’, for the Greeks have forgone custom (Troilus and Cressida, i. 3. 77). Nowhere is this more evident than in the final scenes of the play where Achilles and his Myrmidons kill an unarmed Hector who is then ‘In beastly sort dragged through the shameful field’ (Troilus and Cressida, v. 11. 5). He becomes one more dead body in the ever-increasing heap, without distinction, perhaps even temporarily thrown on a plague-like pit for Achilles does not immediately relinquish Hector’s body. The relevance of the plague on Artaud’s research for his Theatre of Cruelty is fundamental in understanding his concept of a free theatre that is not only independent of imposed ‘civilization’ but works to destroy it. In doing so, the theatre creates new methods for self-discovery and definition by unleashing vice alongside extreme action. The atmosphere this creates in the theatre is similar to the effects of a plague upon society which sees the social and psychological institutions of control struggle against anarchy. The cultural phenomenon of plague in early modern England had an impact on Artaud’s development of the plague as a double of the theatre. The rules and regulations in place to try and control behaviour during plague-time were ineffective, and not solely because of the medical unknown. Thomas Dekker’s plague pamphlets comment on a society trying to remain a collective during a time of indifferent and compromised mortality amongst the living. He also reveals the force of the plague and its impact on the human psyche. Shakespeare’s plays and those of his contemporary playwrights incorporate images of contagion, sickness, and death as a means of capturing extreme moments of disorder which bring to the surface hidden and dark characteristics of human behaviour. They also provide an insightful look at the impact of plague and its delirium-causing societal crisis by contagion. Interestingly, the English outbreaks of bubonic plague in 1603 and 1625 both coincided with the death of a monarch, and though perhaps a chance occurrence, it accommodates a perfect illustration of Artaud’s idea that the plague, just like the theatre, can cause all forms of control to collapse, and that no one is beyond the intense grasp of either.61

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Notes 1. Brian Singleton, Artaud: Le Théâtre et son double, Critical Guides to French Texts, 118 (London: Grant & Cutler, 1998), p. 29. 2. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–34, ed. by Günther Stühlmann, 7 vols (New York: Swallow Press, 1966–80), i (1966), 189. 3. Thomas Dekker, The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. by F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). 4. Jonathan Gil Harris examines images of plague in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in his book Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) in establishing the link between early modern drama and the healthy body politic; see Chapter 1: The Pathological Drama of National Economy. 5. France suffered from bubonic plague in 1668, but the Great Plague of Marseilles from 1720 to 1722 was by far the most severe. 6. Filippo-Guglielmo Pallavincini, Baron of Saint-Rémys, was Viceroy of Sardinia 1720 to 1724 and again from 1726 to 1728. 7. ‘Sous l’action du fléau, les cadres de la société se liquéfient. L’ordre tombe. Il assiste à toutes les déroutes de la morale, à toutes les débâcles de la psychologie, il entend en lui le murmure de ses humeurs, déchirées, en plein défaite, et qui, dans une vertigineuse déperdition de matière, deviennent lourdes et se métamorphosent peu à peu en charbon.’ TD, iv, 19. 8. ‘de faire force de voiles hors de la ville, sous peine d’être coulé à coups de canon.’ TD, iv, 20. 9. William Naphy and Andrew Spicer, Plague: Black Death and Pestilence in Europe (first published as The Black Death, 2000; Stroud: Tempus, 2004), p. 26. 10. ‘car on ne peut nier qu’entre la peste et lui ne se soit établie une communication pondérable, quoique subtile, et il est trop facile d’accuser dans la communication d’une maladie pareille, la contagion par simple contact.’ TD, iv, 21. 11. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 314. See also Leslie Bradley, ‘Some Medical Aspects of Plague’, in The Plague Reconsidered: A New Look at its Origins and Effects in 16th and 17th Century England (Matlock: Local Population Studies, 1977), pp. 13–15. 12. Slack, pp. 9–11; p. 345, note 17. 13. J.F.D.  Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 1. 14. A brief summary of the role of the rat and rat-flea in the spread of infection to human beings is in Chapter 1 of Shrewsbury: The rat and its relation to the history of the plague, pp. 7–16.

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15. J.  Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 81. 16. It is worth noting that during England’s multiple outbreaks of the disease from 1486 to 1604, there were less than two dozen books, treatises, or pamphlets written on the plague. From 1625 to 1627, in just two years, there were 36 books published on the plague (Naphy and Spicer, p. 97). 17. The three consulted for this book are the two pamphlets edited by Bradley, and a third by Richard Mead: Chicoyneau, Verney and Souiller, A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles, Its Symptoms, and the Methods and Medicines used for Curing it, ed. by Richard Bradley, translated from the French by a Physician (London: Printed for S. Buckley in Amen-Corner, and D. Midwinter at the Three Corners in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1721); Richard Bradley, ed., The Plague at Marseilles consider’d, 2nd edn (London: Printed for W.  Mears at the Lamb without Temple-Bar, 1721); Richard Mead, A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Methods to be Used to Prevent it (London: Printed for Sam. Buckley in Amen-Corner, and Ralph Smith at the Royal-Exchange, 1720). 18. ‘Avant tout malaise physique ou psychologique trop caractérisé, des taches rouges parsèment le corps, que le malade ne remarque soudainement que quand elles tournent vers le noir—. Il n’a pas le temps de s’en effrayer, que sa tête se met à bouillir, à devenir gigantesque par son poids, et il tombe. C’est alors qu’une fatigue atroce, la fatigue d’une aspiration magnétique centrale, de ses molécules scindées en deux et tirées vers leur anéantissement, s’empare de lui. Ses humeurs affolées, bousculées, en désordre, lui paraissent galoper à travers son corps. Son estomac se soulève, l’intérieur de son ventre lui semble vouloir jaillir par l’orifice des dents. Son pouls qui tantôt se ralentit jusqu’à devenir une ombre, une virtualité de pouls, et tantôt galope, suit les bouillonnements de sa fièvre interne, le ruisselant égarement de son esprit. Ce pouls qui bat à coups précipités comme son cœur, qui devient intense, plein, bruyant; cet œil rouge, incendié, puis vitreux; cette langue qui halète, énorme et grosse, d’abord blanche, puis rouge, puis noire, et comme charbonneuse et fendillée, tout annonce un orage organique sans précédent.’ TD, iv, 24. 19. ‘la peste la plus terrible est celle qui ne divulgue pas ses traits.’ TD, iv, 25. 20. ‘Dans certains cas pourtant, les poumons et le cerveau lésés noircissent et se gangrènent. Les poumons ramollis, coupaillés, tombant en copeaux d’on ne sait quelle matière noire, le cerveau fondu, limé, pulvérisé, réduit en poudre, désagrégé en une sorte de poussière de charbon noir.’ TD, iv, 26. 21. ‘La peste donc semble manifester sa présence dans les lieux, affectionner tous les lieux du corps, tous les emplacements de l’espace physique, où la volonté humaine, la conscience, la pensée sont proches et en passe de se manifester.’ TD, iv, 26–27.

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22. Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 52. She mentions Dekker’s observations of his fellow Londoners’ fears of purchasing new, imported clothing, especially wool, which houses the plague of leprosy; the origins for this view are found in Leviticus, which ‘dwells at some length on the management of the leper’s woollen and linen garments.’ 23. ‘Pourquoi l’éloignement, la chasteté, la solitude sont sans action contre les atteintes du fléau.’ TD, iv, 27–28. 24. Mary Douglas identifies that the most frequently referenced sermons alluding to plague in the early modern period are found in 2 Samuel 24, Deuteronomy 28—detailing the few blessings for obedience and the myriad curses for disobedience—and Psalm 106: 29–30. Punishment is delivered by way of disaster by the hand of God in the form of plague and/or disease. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 30–31. 25. Thomas Dekker, Newes from Graves-end, in PP, pp. 63–103 (pp. 85–86). 26. Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull yeare, in PP, pp. 1–61 (p. 30). 27. Thomas Dekker, The Blacke Rod: and the White Rod, in PP, pp. 197–217 (p. 197). 28. Lodge does offer some dangerous instruction for curing the disease, such as the burning of a ‘carbuncle’, bubo, or ‘pustule’ as soon as it appears on the body. More often than not, unfortunately, this painful treatment accelerated the disease and caused the patient to go into shock. Thomas Lodge, A treatise of the plague containing the nature, signes, and accidents of the same, with the certaine and absolute cure of the feuers, botches and carbuncles that raigne in these times: and aboue all things most singular experiments and preseruatiues in the same, gathered by the obseruation of diuers worthy trauailers, and selected out of the writing of the best learned phisitians in this age. By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke (London: Printed for Edward White and N. L., 1603), pp. 36–37. 29. Population of London in 1560: 110,000; in 1600: 185,000; in 1640: 355,000. Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, ‘Population Growth and Suburban Expansion’, in The Making of the Metropolis: London 1500–1700, ed. by A.L. Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), p. 43. 30. Slack, p. 305. 31. F.P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 50. 32. Wilson, p. 50. Domestic State Papers of the Reigns of Elizabeth i, vol. 98, Document 38; and The Journals Recording the Proceedings of the London Court of Common Council, xxiii, 131. 33. Wilson, p. 52. The Journals Recording the Proceedings of the London Court of Common Council, xviii, 184.

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34. John Stockwood, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse on Barthelmew day, being the 24. of August. 1578 (London: Imprinted by Henry Bynneman for George Byshop, 1578), pp. 134–35. 35. Wilson, p. 52. Sermon (1578), p. 47. 36. See Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80–96. 37. The Puritans themselves were later reproved by James i, in 1599, referring to them as the ‘verie pestes in the Church’. James i, Basilicon Doron, Political Writings, ed. by Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 26–27. 38. Charles F.  Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), p. 100. 39. Malone Society Collections, ed. by W.W.  Greg, 15 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911–93), i (1911), 148. 40. Volume one of the Malone Society Collections reprints those letters found in The Remembrancia which recommend the suspension of public performance from 1580 to 1634 (pp. 43–100). 41. Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 7–8. 42. Wilson, p. 55. Malone Society Collections, i, 391. 43. John Twyning, London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1998), p. 158. 44. ‘La peste établie dans une cité, les cadres réguliers s’effondrent, il n’y a plus de voirie, d’armée, de police, de municipalité; des bûchers s’allument pour brûler les morts, au hasard des bras disponibles. Chaque famille veut avoir le sien. Puis le bois, la place et la flamme se raréfiant, il y a des luttes de famille autour des bûchers, bientôt suivies d’une fuite générale, car les cadavres sont trop nombreux. Déjà les morts encombrent les rues, en pyramides croulantes que des bêtes rongent sur les bords. Leur puanteur monte en l’air comme une flamme. Des rues entières sont barrées par des entassements de morts. C’est alors que les maisons s’ouvrent, que des pestiférés délirants, l’esprit chargé d’imaginations affreuses, se répandent en hurlant par les rues. Le mal qui leur travaille les viscères, qui roule dans leur organisme entier, se libère en fusées par l’esprit. D’autres pestiférés qui, sans bubons, sans douleur, sans délire et sans pétéchies, se regardent orgueilleusement dans des glaces, se sentant crever de santé, tombent morts avec dans leurs mains leur plat à barbe, pleins de mépris pour les autres pestiférés.’ TD, iv, 28–29. 45. ‘Une vraie pièce de théâtre bouscule le repos des sens, libère l’inconscient comprimé, pousse à une sorte de révolte virtuelle et qui d’ailleurs ne peut

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avoir tout son prix que si elle demeure virtuelle, impose aux collectivités rassemblées une attitude héroïque et difficile.’ TD, iv, 34. 46. Malone Society Collections, i, 206–10 (p. 206). 47. Wilson, p.  19. The earliest reference to the appointment of surveyors is dated November 1578  in The Journals Recording the Proceedings of the London Court of Common Council, xx, part 2, 450b. 48. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). All further quotations from Shakespeare’s dramas are from this edition. 49. Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Run-awayes, in PP, pp. 135–71 (p. 148). 50. ‘Dans les maisons ouvertes, la lie de la population immunisée, semble-t-il, par sa frénésie cupide, entre et fait main basse sur des richesses dont elle sent bien qu’il est inutile de profiter. Et c’est alors que le théâtre s’installe. Le théâtre, c’est-à-dire la gratuité immédiate qui pousse à des actes inutiles et sans profit pour l’actualité. Les derniers vivants s’exaspèrent, le fils, jusque-là soumis et vertueux, tue son père; le continent sodomise ses proches. Le luxurieux devient pur. L’avare jette son or à poignées par les fenêtres. Le Héros guerrier incendie la ville qu’il s’est autrefois sacrifié pour sauver. L’élégant se pomponne et va se promener sur les charniers.’ TD, iv, 29–30. 51. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 26. 52. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. by G.H. McWilliam (London: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 52–53. 53. Ben Jonson, ‘On the Famous Voyage’, in Poems, ed. by Ian Donaldson (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 77–84 (lines 59–60). 54. Wilson, p. 31. The Journals Recording the Proceedings of the London Court of Common Council, xviii, 123b, and xxvi, 115b. 55. ‘L’état du pestiféré qui meurt sans destruction de matière, avec en lui tous les stigmates d’un mal absolu et presque abstrait, est identique à l’état de l’acteur que ses sentiments sondent intégralement et bouleversent sans profit pour la réalité.’ TD, iv, 30. 56. ‘Si l’on veut bien admettre maintenant cette image spirituelle de la peste, on considérera les humeurs troublées du pesteux comme la face solidifiée et matérielle d’un désordre qui, sur d’autres plans, équivaut aux conflits, aux luttes, aux cataclysmes et aux débâcles que nous apportent les événements. Et de même qu’il n’est pas impossible que le désespoir inutilisé et les cris d’un aliéné dans un asile, ne soient cause de peste, par une sorte de réversibilité de sentiments et d’images, de même on peut bien admettre que les événements extérieurs, les conflits politiques, les cataclysmes naturels, l’ordre de la révolution et le désordre de la guerre, en passant sur

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le plan du théâtre se déchargent dans la sensibilité de qui les regarde avec la force d’une épidemié.’ TD, iv, 31–32. 57. Avant-garde director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99), considered one of Artaud’s successors, but no less than an innovator of the Theatre of Cruelty, wished to turn entertainment into ritual through theatre with his work on Paratheatre (1969–78). Grotowski would invite a few spectators to engage with the actors, both during and after performances, thus becoming participants. The result was the innovation of the unmediated, participatory theatrical experience. See his Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. by Eugenio Barba (Denmark: Odin Teatret Forlag, 1968; repr. New York: Routledge, 2002). For a comprehensive critical overview of Grotowski’s various forays into theatrical revolution see The Grotowski Sourcebook, ed. by Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner (London: Routledge, 1997). 58. René Girard, ‘The Plague in Literature and Myth’, in “To double business bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1978), pp. 136–54 (p. 138). 59. Thomas Nashe, A Pleasant Comedie, called Summers Last Will and Testament, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. by Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904–08; repr. Sidgewick & Jackson, 1960), iii (1960), 231–95 (lines 1574–1615). 60. Neill, p. 27. 61. Artaud references the outbreak of plague in Mékao, Japan in 600 B.C. ‘on the occasion of a mere change of government’ (Richards, p.  18); ‘à l’occasion d’un simple changement de gouvernement.’ TD, iv, 23.

CHAPTER 4

Bear-Baiting and the Theatre of Cruelty

The baiting of animals is a loathsome activity that is well documented in European history. The complex cruelty associated with bear-baiting, in particular, which often features a human in the role of tormentor, would have logical appeal to Artaud. Although Artaud does not specifically mention the baiting of animals in The Theatre and Its Double, the dubious European pastime does draw parallels to his Theatre of Cruelty. Animal baiting is another double of the early modern theatre, and is just as potent as plague in its ability to elicit a crisis in consciousness. In recalling the reason behind Artaud’s inclusion of cruelty in his theatre, the relevance and appeal of bear-baiting is clear: That is why I propose a theater of cruelty.—With this mania we all have for depreciating everything, as soon as I have said “cruelty”, everybody will at once take it to mean “blood.” But “theater of cruelty” means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. (Richards, p. 79)1

© The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_4

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Artaud’s renderings of cruelty are not so much explored for the sake of displaying gross horror and brutality, of blood and guts, as they are to express his notion that no one is free from cruelty, that it can potentially be inflicted upon us at any given time. Much like the animals involved in bear-baiting in the early modern theatre, everyone and everything is subject to the mercy of the cruel intentions of others. Artaud believes that ‘things’ can exercise their cruelty against us, suggesting that any unseen force, perhaps even fate, he suggests, can act against us, causing the most innocent to fall victim to cruelty. The notion of the theatre created for the very purpose of demonstrating that we are not free or in control is ever present in the early modern theatre. Playwrights create and destroy characters at their whim, and the stories of those who survive unfold within the boundaries of the theatre where anything can happen to either the players or their audience, including the sky falling on any number of heads.2 The providential theatre of the early modern period comes to fruition in the baiting of animals. But the characters here are not individuals who can conceivably control their outcome, or speak out against it, but animals—bears, bulls, apes, horses, cocks, and dogs—at the mercy of one another and their human tormentors who either appear with the animals in the baiting pit or position the animals there for the purpose of entertainment. The cruelty presented in this early theatre is neither instinctive nor elemental, but imposed. Instead, these animals were the unpredictable players in the early public theatre whose very presence in this existential confrontation serves to remind us of our lack of freedom. What better arena through which to examine the early modern Theatre of Cruelty, therefore, than the bear pit? Here, innocents are pitted against one another in the name of entertainment where they actually bleed, suffer, and occasionally die. It is the ideal place where we may understand the explicit and implicit cruelty of the theatre through non-linguistic, non-textual, gestural theatre.

The Pit and The Theatre What went on at a baiting is extensively documented, as well as how the spectators, both domestic and foreign, viewed the proceedings. While this will assuredly be discussed in the chapter, more uncertain is where the games took place. Paris Garden and Bear Garden are used interchangeably in both primary material and secondary scholarship on the bear-baiting arena, although they were not always one and the same:

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Paris Garden was the generic name given to the successive places for bear-­ baiting which lay on the Surrey side of the river, not in the Southwark proper, which was in the jurisdiction of the City, but in the Liberty of the Clink, which stretched in a westerly direction along the Bankside, or still farther to the west, in the Manor of Paris Garden itself.3

Both the Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1572, and Radulph Agas, Civitas Londinum, ca. 1561–70, maps show both venues for bull and bear-baiting  side-by-side near the river bank.4 A detail of the Agas map, which features the gardens or pens where the animals were kept, appears to be an accurate view of the baiting area and nearby gardens, featuring the two separate arenas for performances. Their proximity to the London public theatres (which Bear Garden predates), including the Swan, the Rose, and the Hope, is one concrete connection between the theatre and the bear pit. The venues for baiting were not fixed from their inception. A change signified relocation, demolition, or conversion of the gaming space as Stephen Dickey reveals: In 1613 Philip Henslowe, who had long divided his entrepreneurial activities between tiring room and kennel, had the Bear Garden torn down and replaced by a structure modeled on the Swan playhouse. He stipulated, however, a removable stage so that, in the language of the building contract, it would be a ‘Plaiehouse fitt & convenient in all thinges, bothe for players to playe Jn, And for the game of Beares and Bulls to be bayted in the same’.5

It is not hard to imagine Bear Garden doubling as an early modern public theatre and vice versa. Henslowe’s Hope Theatre served this dual function of bear pit and playhouse. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a chaotic carnival comedy of excess, premiered at the Hope in 1614. The Induction scene acknowledges the arena’s twin focus by commenting on the persistent smell of the playhouse on account of the ‘beares within’ that would benefit from a poor performance as the ‘broken Apples’ thrown at the stage would be gathered for their repast.6 The design of a circular building with a three-tiered seating gallery is ideal for both a bear-baiting and an early modern play.7 In the case of Henslowe’s Hope Theatre, both stage and baiting arena suffered the same ill fate when Parliament closed the London theatres in 1642: The Hope, on the Banks side in Southwarke, commonly called the Beare Garden, a Play House for Stage Playes on Mundayes, Wedensdayes, Fridayes, and Saterdayes, and for the baiting of the Beares on Tuesdayes and

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Thursdayes, the stage being made to take vp and downe when they please. It was built in the year 1610 [1613 in actuality], and now pulled down to make tennementes, by Thomas Walker, a peticoate maker in Cannon Streete, on Tuesday the 25 day of March 1656. Seuen of Mr. Godfries beares, by the command of Thomas Pride, then hie Sheriefe of Surry, were then shot to death, on Saterday the 9 day of February 1655, by a company of souldiers. (Chambers, ii, 375)

Theatre and Bear Garden were ultimately at the mercy of public opinion, Puritans, and government legislation.

Elizabethan Receptivity But did the Elizabethan viewing-public consider the baiting of animals cruel? Whereas our modern sensibilities lead us to view the practice as such, an examination into the Elizabethan worldview proves otherwise. Indeed, Sir Sidney Lee comments on the appeal of the sport during Shakespeare’s time: The baiting of bulls and bears by dogs was recognized by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as a legitimate sport. The practice was of classical antiquity. As early as 1174 William Fitzstephen, in his Descriptio Londoniae, mentioned the baiting of bulls and bears among the established pastimes of Londoners in winter. The sport was long encouraged by English sovereigns and their Courts, and enjoyed the almost universal patronage of the middle and lower orders of society. Throughout the sixteenth century the recreation was, in fact, a leading national amusement.8

Sixteenth-century anthropocentrism maintained a clear divide between the human and the animal world: humans dominated, animals were subordinate, and for that reason they were at the behest of humankind. It was both the duty and the right of humankind to monitor animals and treat them accordingly. Animals were fatally reprimanded, as the Old Testament prescribed, for example, if involved ‘in homicide or bestiality, not as a punishment, but as a symbolic way of expressing abhorrence of the crime and respect for human life’ and divine law, according to Keith Thomas.9 Extreme malicious behaviour, outside the realm of symbolically expressing abhorrence or enacting divine punishment, was not promoted or encouraged. Using animals for sport, therefore, was undoubtedly neither a way for humankind to oversee animals nor to punish them justly, but instead to benefit from them.

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Unnecessary cruelty to animals was in bad taste not because of the anguish it caused the animal, but more importantly because of the danger to the person inflicting the suffering: ‘moralists normally condemned the ill-treatment of beasts because they thought it had a brutalizing effect on human character and made men cruel to each other’ (Thomas, p. 150). Puritans, in particular, wrote expressly against any and all kinds of animal cruelty, and ‘disliked animal sports because of their association with noise, gambling and disorder’, and also because such malicious cruelty gave the spectators pleasure (Thomas, p.  158).10 The degradation of humanity, civility, and sensibility, therefore, were the major anxieties in relation to cruel acts against animals. The fear was that if a person was allowed to indulge in this kind of depravity, he or she would indulge in depravity against humans. The condemnation of cruelty against animals was a means to protect humans from themselves and ultimately from one another. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias traces the process of civility (which ‘has no beginning’) from the Middle Ages because the period has left later observers with ‘an abundance of information on what was considered socially acceptable behaviour’.11 He ascribes the process itself to the restructuring of the classes—that eliminated, among other factions, the knightly society and their requisite and brutal aggressiveness—which resulted in the implementation of ‘socially instilled self-control’ (Elias, p. 166). This control restricts, among other arguably inherent emotions, the realization of the desire for pleasure. In a section on ‘the visual satisfaction of the urge to cruelty, the joy in watching pain inflicted’, Elias uses the example of the sixteenth-century Parisian practice of burning one or two dozen cats on Midsummer Day, a festive pleasure, to demonstrate cruelty enacted ‘without any rational justification and disguise as punishment or means of discipline’ (Elias, pp.  166–67). Spectators were not repulsed by the burning, but revelled with delight to the agonizing sound of the dying cats.12 This ‘social institution, like boxing or horse-racing in present-day society’, aroused pleasure in its contemporary society (Elias, p.  167). Modern sensibilities deem this and other practices abnormal, argues Elias, because ‘conditioning in our stage of civilization restrains the expression of pleasure in such actions through anxiety instilled in the form of self-control’; any undesirable ‘expressions of instinct and pleasure are threatened and punished with measures that generate and reinforce displeasure and anxiety’ (Elias, p. 167). People took pleasure in the suffering of the animals. Anxiety is the result of not being able to enjoy such pastimes.

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While the Midsummer Day celebrations were not considered particularly barbarous, it should be noted that a very gradual behavioural shift from barbarity to civility in social custom from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (though the eighteenth century experienced the most defined changes in this shift) saw its beginnings in the 1530 appearance of Erasmus’s text on manners, De civilitate morum puerilium (Elias, p. 43). The work was a remarkable success, inspiring several treatises on etiquette, the majority of which were produced in the French language, which could perhaps account for Artaud’s detestation for the word ‘civilize’ and its elitist connotations. This change in behaviour was reflected in the change in taste. Daniel Baraz notes the change in literature: ‘As interest in Seneca’s writings grew, so did the preoccupation with cruelty.’13 The influence of Seneca upon the Middle Ages is also noted in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s classically inspired Summa theologiae, which understands cruelty in the Senecan tradition: ‘For Seneca cruelty was physical, interpersonal, and in most instances had pleasure (for the person inflicting it) as an important ingredient’ (Baraz, p. 206). Seneca’s moral essays De clementia and De ira both refer to cruelty; in the former work, it is defined as the opposite of mercy, while in the latter, it is the result of violence stemming from repeated anger that goes unchecked (Baraz, p. 199). The Christian tradition, notably with Saint Augustine and Bernard de Clairvaux, marks a shift from the Senecan understanding of cruelty as a physical concern to a spiritual one. In the next chapter, I shall look at Seneca’s notion of cruelty—a physical force generating pleasure—in relation to his tragedies, specifically Thyestes. What one might call a long-after derivative of Senecan notions of cruelty, bear-baiting as a sport was a thriving pastime in England—probably introduced by the Italians14—until the games were officially abolished by law in 1835. Although its audiences were somewhat aristocratic in origin, spectatorship extended to include the public during the Elizabethan and Jacobean reigns when the sport reached the height of its popularity. The public was also granted access to particular contests ‘held in royal and private parks, to which [they] were admitted free, as well as in open spaces in town and country’ (Lee, ii, 428–29). The baiting of animals was a legitimate sport and a successful form of entertainment; Sir Sidney Lee even classifies it as a national amusement, further legitimating the exploitation of the animals as a service to the nation. Correspondingly, it drew a foreign crowd. The personal diary of an Italian merchant sailor, Alessandro Magno, contains a detailed account of his observations of an English bait-

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ing in 1562. His description provides some insight into the appeal of the sport, as well as the feelings of repulsion regarding certain aspects of the baiting: Across the river in a certain place they have perhaps two hundred dogs, each separated from the other in certain small boxes made of boards. The dogs are the kind we use in Venice for bull-baiting. They also have, in another pen [casa] many bears and in another some wild bulls. In the midst of these is an open circular space surrounded by stands with their awnings for the sun and the rain, where every Sunday in the training of these dogs people find great entertainment. To enter below one pays a penny (which is s.2) and two to go up into the stands. The amusement lasts from the vesper hour until evening, and they put on very fine baitings. First they lead into this space, which is closed about, and there is no way out unless they open certain doors, and they bring in, I say, a worthless horse with all its trappings, and a monkey in the saddle, then four to six of the younger dogs, with which they make an attack. Then these are replaced by leading in more experienced ones, in which baiting it is a fine sight to see the horse run, kicking and biting, and the monkey grip the saddle tightly and scream, many times being bitten, in which baiting, after the attendants [circostanti] have intervened a while, with frequently the death of the horse, and it is removed from the scene, they bring in some bears, either one by one or several together, but this baiting is not very fine to see. Finally they bring in a wild bull, and they tie it with a rope about two paces long to a stake that is fixed in the middle of the enclosure. This baiting is finer to see than the others and is more dangerous for the dogs than the others, many of which are wounded and die, and it lasts until evening.15

Magno witnesses the baiting of the ape on horseback, the bear, and finally the bull. All of the animals are attacked by dogs in a similar manner, but he prefers the baiting of the bull to the others perhaps because he is more familiar with the bull-baiting, having conceivably seen a variation of the same sport in Venice. The baiting appeals to Magno’s sense of taste and culture, and he is perhaps drawn to the spectacle in part because it is one entertainment that Magno can enjoy without having to be privy to the linguistic nuances of a foreign language. Its appeal lies in recognizing the variances—if any—between the Italian and English styles. He notably finds the baiting of the bear particularly unpleasant to watch. According to his description of the events, either each bear is baited in turn or a group of bears are baited simultaneously. For Magno, the bear-baiting lacks the

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precision and skill associated with the sport featured in the bull-baiting, which is altogether more perilous for the dogs than either the baiting of the ape on horseback or that of the bear. The merits of the baiting for Magno, therefore, are directly related to the performance of the dogs. Their instinct for survival, to both attack and defend accordingly, is where the fine features of the spectacle lie. The battle is one of stealth. For Magno, the torture of the animals, either tethered to the stake or running free, is not necessarily wherein the appeal lies; however, to ignore the fact that the scene of the ape on horseback, screaming as it grips the horse’s reigns, is entertaining for Magno and the other spectators is to misapprehend the viciousness of the sport. Baiting was indeed a blood-­ sport, and the attending audience expected to see carnage at the event. But as Magno’s account suggests, not everyone in the early modern period shared the same sensibilities. The sentiments of Michel de Montaigne in his essay ‘On Crueltie’ counter the popularity of animal baiting: After the ancient Romanes had  once enured themselves without horror to behold the slaughter of wild beasts in their shewes, they came to the murther of men and Gladiators. …  No man taketh delight to see wild beasts sport and wantonly to make much one of another: Yet all are pleased to see them tugge, mangle, and enterteare one an other. And lest any bodie should jeast at this simphathie, which I have with them, Divinitie it selfe willeth us to shew them some favour: And considering, that one selfe-same master (I meane that incomprehensible worlds-framer) hath placed all creatures in this his wondrous palace for his service, and that they, as well as we, are of his household: I say, it hath some reason to injoyne us, to shew some respect and affection towards them.16

Montaigne acknowledges the appeal of sports featuring ‘beasts’ pitted against one another for entertainment, but his own sense of empathy prevents him from viewing such savagery as entertainment. He speaks of showing animals respect and affection, a truly modern and, as later demonstrated, enlightened way of thinking. Magno, on the other hand, does not acknowledge the brutality of the entertainment, but writes that the baiting of the bears is not particularly nice to watch as it lacks the sporting qualities he associates with the bull-baiting, such as the dogs’ prowess in attacking the bull. The bull, however, is prevented from using its full force or range of motion as it is tied to a stake. This same method is used to restrain the bears, but they were often further restricted from using either their unmitigated strength or their complete sensory perception. Bears used for baiting have their teeth either pulled out or broken down, their

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claws clipped, and their eyes often blindfolded, and although the bears are frequently maimed, they are nevertheless used for sport. Negativity and opposition against both the sport itself and the people associated with baiting, including those in attendance, was present throughout the early modern period.17 In Puritan Robert Crowley’s ‘Of Bearbaytynge’, found in his epigrams of 1550, he considers the sport an appalling pastime, and condemns the people in attendance, especially those who place bets on the games: What follye is thys, to kepe with daunger, A greate mastyfe dogge and a foule ouglye beare? […] And yet me thynke those men be mooste foles of all, Whose store of money is but verye smale, And yet euerye Sondaye they will surelye spende One penye or two, the bearwardes lyuyng to mende.18

Crowley, a clergyman, finds the entire enterprise atrocious. Not only do people attend the bear pits on the recognized day of worship, but they waste their meagre wages on the events. He also comments on their willingness to expose themselves to the peril, both physical and moral, associated with the entertainment. Their enjoyment of the carnage and the pleasure they gain from watching is most worrying. Unlike Montaigne, Crowley does not openly express sympathy for the ‘foule ouglye beare’, but instead condemns the entirety of the sport and those who associated themselves with the enterprise. The baiting spectacle was a favourite of the nobility because it served the dual purpose of entertainment and display of England’s magnificence to visiting dignitaries. In John Nichols’s compilation of Queen Elizabeth’s progresses and public processions, he mentions three particular baiting entertainments attended by the Queen, who was clearly amused by what she saw. The first took place on 25 and 26 May 1559, where both she and her guests, the French Ambassadors, ‘were entertained with the baiting of bears and bulls with English dogs’, both after dinner and again on the

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following day: ‘The 26th, they took barge at Paul’s Wharf, and so to Paris Garden, where was to be another baiting of bulls and bears.’19 The French Ambassadors, conceivably impressed with the performances of the mastiffs, took many away with them as hunting dogs, an English gift from the Queen. The next recorded entertainment was 24 July 1575 at Kenilworth Castle, which featured ‘Bandogs’ and 13 bears.20 Robert Laneham’s letter of 1575 provides some stimulating insight into how the sport was viewed by the elite English audience: It waz a sport very pleazaunt of théez beastz: to sée the bear with hiz pink nyez léering after hiz enmiez approch, the nimblness & wayt of the dog too take hiz auauntage, and the fors & experiens of the bear agayn to auoyd the assauts: if he wear bitten in one place, hoow he woold pynch in an oother to get frée: that if he wear taken onez, then what shyft, with byting, with clawyng, with roring, tossing & tumbling, he woold woork too wynde hym self from them: and when he waz lose, to shake hiz earz twyse or thryse wyth the blud & the slauer about hiz fiznamy, waz a matter of a goodly reléef.21

Laneham’s lines of praise are not only in celebration of English strength and mastery by way of the mastiffs for they also comment on the skill and force of the bears. The bear-baiting was excellent entertainment according to Laneham; his description is far different from Magno’s. Whereas Magno found the bear-baiting unpleasant, Laneham on the other hand sees it as the height of animals in combat, which is indeed as skilful as it is entertaining. The bears—the ‘underdogs’—are lauded for their strength and resilience under attack. In this reading, the bears may resemble the chivalric aggressiveness of a lost knightly society. A variation of this same exciting description is found in the third recorded baiting attended by Queen Elizabeth, this time with the Danish Ambassador at Greenwich in May 1586, ‘whereat it cannot be spoken of what pleasure the people took’ (Nichols, ii, 459). Both royalty and peasantry appear to demonstrate the same sense of taste in entertainment, with the former stratum leading by way of example. Pleasure was not gleaned purely from the actual baiting of the bears or bulls. In a baiting proper, several entertainments kept spectators, either royal or plebeian, entertained. Magno does not readily comment on this detail. Lupold von Wedel, a Pomeranian noble as well as a traveller and writer, offers his account of the baiting of three bears, a horse, and finally a bull at Southwark on 23 August 1584. The following took place after that particular baiting:

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The next was that a number of men and women came forward from a separate compartment, dancing, conversing and fighting with each other: also a man who threw some white bread among the crowd, that scrambled for it. Right over the middle of the place a rose was fixed, this rose being set on fire by a rocket: suddenly lots of apples and pears fell out of it down upon the people standing below. Whilst the people were scrambling for the apples, some rockets were made to fall down upon them out of the rose, which caused a great fright but amused the spectators. After this, rockets and other fireworks came flying out of all corners, and that was the end of the play.22

There was plenty to keep the audience members—with their various preferences—entertained, and in playful peril, a necessity if the sport was also a means to display the pomp and pageantry of the Crown. This finale (similar to the jig), featuring dancing and stage fighting, signalled both the end of the baiting and the theatrical entertainment. In this respect, the bear-baiting and the subsequent events it featured were comparable to an early modern stage play. The baiting pit, like any other theatre, had to entice and compete for its audience members. By offering bread and apples, the baiting also serves a dual function of superficially appeasing the masses through panem et circenses. Bear-baiting was an entertaining sport and promoting it as such was beneficial to its success. As Dickey speculates, ‘baiting and theatre must have at times competed uneasily for the public’s pence. The later Elizabethan theatre apparently proved a powerful rival to the bears, bulls, dogs, horses, and apes of Paris Garden’ (p. 264). Sunday was recognized as the day set aside for bear-baiting, a travesty according to Puritan Philip Stubbes in his Anatomy of Abuses. But the dominance the sport held on weekdays, particularly Thursdays, was in jeopardy. This led the Privy Council to decree on 25 July 1591 that plays and such performances be scheduled for other days of the week because of its interference with her Majesty’s game of bears: The players doe use to recyte theire plaies to the greate hurte and destruction of the game of beare baytinge and lyke pastymes, which are maynteyned for her Majesty’s pleasure yf occacion require. These shalbe therefore to require you not onlie to take order hereafter that there maie no plaies, interludes or commodyes be used publicklie made and shewed either on the Sondaie or on the Thursdaies, because on the Thursdayes those other games usuallie have ben allwayes accustomed and practized.23

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In lieu of this court-sanctioned economic rivalry, Dickey asserts that playwrights used the order to their advantage by incorporating bear-baiting imagery into their plays. Audiences would have been familiar with the ‘heroic scenario of a lone defender who, though more powerful than any single antagonist, is both outnumbered by his assailants and hindered from using his full powers’ (Dickey, p. 264); however, sympathies could lie with either the bear or the attackers. The image is malleable, just as the outcome of bear-baiting is either in favour of or against the bear.24 More often than not, in spite of their being hindered, the bears won. In Arden of Faversham, sympathies are with Thomas Arden, an unfortunate ‘bear’ who does not win. His own wife, Alice, one of six murderers, feigns her regret in taking such action against her husband in her attempt to appear as innocent as the hapless dogs who attack the bear because their instinct for survival has been manipulated for entertainment purposes. But Alice’s instincts favour sexual fulfilment over compassion. She appears to resign herself to murdering her husband solely because afterward she will be in a position to enjoy her lover, Mosby, whom she only playfully accuses of bewitching her into plotting the murder of her husband: alice



Base peasant, get thee gone, And boast not of thy conquest over me, Gotten by witchcraft and mere sorcery.25

Her protests are ingenuine, and she resorts to them as a means to compel Mosby into reassuring her of his affection towards her, which in reality is equally false. Later, she protests her innocence to her accusers, but her maliciousness is nevertheless revealed. Arden has eight attempts on his life before his attackers—a pack of six, human mastiffs—are successful in killing him. Unsuspecting of any malice, he is taken while playing at tables. First he is blindfolded—as is the bear that is whipped, discussed further in this chapter—thus preventing him from fighting back with his full force, and then the room is locked from within, making him captive in the ‘pit’, thus impeding any attempt at escape. Mosby, Shakebag, and Alice (who gives Arden the final blow) strike at him in turn with daggers instead of teeth. Unable to fight back, Arden is murdered. The attack itself is not as interesting as it is in Macbeth, for example, because the attackers have an unfair advantage over the ‘bear’, but it is perhaps more similar to an actual bear-baiting, where the unwitting bear fights back in an attempt to hold off his assailants.26 The pack of human mastiffs, however, are ultimately held accountable for their collective crime and brought to justice.27

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Jacobean Popularity Bear-baiting grew in popularity during the reign of King James as it became more of a public spectacle. According to C.P. Cerasano in ‘The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise’, ‘the baiting was his favourite sport, and one—judging from the frequent performances—we would perceive as always at his beck and call’.28 There was a generous amount of prestige and authority associated with the involvement of bear-baiting. The development of a royally commissioned office is traceable from the fifteenth century: The Master of the Bears was commissioned by the monarch. A regular office is traceable back to 1484 when Richard iii appointed his personal bearward to the position of ‘Master, Guyder and Ruler of all our Bears’. By the time of Henry viii the office was well established within the Court heirarchy [sic]; and by 1573 the patent issued by the Queen to Ralph Bowes suggests that the officer had been invested with considerable authority, albeit authority over an alternative kingdom, one of animals: he was ‘Chief Master Overseer and Ruler of all and singular our game’ (italics [Cerasano’s]). Under James i the officer was referred to by several abbreviated titles, including ‘Master of the Bears and Mastiffs’, ‘Master of the Bears’, and ‘Master of the Royal Game’. (Cerasano, p. 195)29

The privilege unfortunately did not afford too much profit, unless the Master took it upon himself to lease out the bears. The real money made in bear-baiting was from the bets placed on the games. The bears were known by name and were effectively superstars. They were adorned with personable names: ‘George Stone, Harry Hunks, Tom of Lincoln,30 and, above all, Sackerson’ (immortalized in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor) were the ‘vulgar’ idols of the sixteenth century (Lee, ii, 432). These names could just as easily be mistaken for nicknames of bare-knuckle fighters or boxers, thus demonstrating that the humananimal divide may not be so broad a spectrum. While the vulgar may indeed be rooted in the popular, that popularity is perpetuated by the ruling classes. The acclaim of the sport was sustained for the best part of the seventeenth century. In Bull, Beare, and Horse  (1638), a poem dedicated to Thomas Godfrey, ‘Keeper of the Game for Beares, Bulls, and Dogges’, John Taylor lists the names of all the bears in Bear Garden. To name a few:

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1. Ned of Canterbury. 2. George of Cambridge. 3. Don Iohn. 4. Ben Hunt. 5. Nan Styles. 6. Beefe of Ipswich. […] 14. Mall Cut-purse. 15. Nell of Holland. 16. Mad Besse.} 17. Will Tookey.} two white Beares31

It was in the best interests of the spectators to follow the bouts and the advancements of the individual bears especially since betting on the games was a large part of the appeal. Major celebrity was assigned to these animals, which is natural given the popularity of the sport and the potential money to be gained from the contest: Upon his hind feet, Tipto stiffe to stand, And cuffe a Dog off with his foot-like hand; And afterwards (for recreations sake) Practise to run the Ring about the stake. Whilst showts, and Mastives mouthes do fill the sky That sure Acteon ne’re had such a cry. Thus Beares do please the hearing and the sight, And sure their sent will any man invite: For whosoer’e spends most, shall finde this favour, That by the Beares and Dogs, hee’s made a favour. (Taylor, Bull, Beare, and Horse, p. 56)

Similar to Robert Laneham’s sixteenth-century prose, John Taylor’s poetry equally captures the excitement of a bear-baiting while paying homage to the sport and praising the bear who risks its life for the spectators’ entertainment and profit. Taylor attests to the force of the bear by interpreting its being tied to the stake, running in circles, not an effect of frustration, fear, confusion, or even of an instinct for survival, but of recreation. The bear, however, clearly endures a heavy burden. The imagery Taylor chooses is both powerful and disturbing as it alludes to Ovid’s classical image of the metamorphosed Actaeon, who ‘groaned, uttering a sound which, though not human, was yet such as no stag could produce’ when his own hounds

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attacked and mutilated his changed body.32 Taylor’s choice of imagery suggests that the bear experiences an agony worse than that of Actaeon, and this pleases the spectators. Further, the passage speaks to humankind’s bestial nature in relation to both the human-animal inversion in Actaeon’s transformation, and of Diana’s reaction to his death, especially if we question the details of Actaeon’s crime: is he punished for accidentally seeing the goddess naked, or for lustfully gazing upon her? The major difference between the gleaned pleasure experienced by the spectators and by Diana is that the latter enjoys the sight because it satiates her desire for vengeance, and not because it is particularly entertaining. This graphic cruelty would be an infinitely pleasurable image to the spectator who opted to bet against rather than for the bear. In Worke for Armourours, Thomas Dekker condemns the brutality of the sport and the gambling custom surrounding it. He states that ‘Violence hath borne many great offices, and Money hath done much for him’.33 The yearning for financial gain allows violence to flourish for it thrives upon people craving monetary gain, generally as a means to escape, or at least divert, poverty. That people hope to turn a profit in the participation of brutality in the hell on earth that is the bear pit is loathsome to Dekker: No sooner was I entred but the very noyse of the place put me in mind of Hel: the beare (dragd to the stake) shewed like a black rugged soule, that was Damned, and newly committed to the infernall Churle, the Dogges like so many Diuels inflicting torments vpon it. (Worke for Armourours, iv, 97–98)

The torment continues with the whipping of the blind bear, which was also an event in the bear-baiting programme. The animal is dragged to the stake, like a martyr, but death may or may not ensue from the inflicted torment. This act of sadism features a maimed bear, described here as being at the mercy of its attackers, who encircle and strike from all directions: At length a blinde Beare was tyed to the stake, and instead of baiting him with dogges, a company of creatures that had the shapes of men, & faces of christians (being either Colliers, Carters, or watermen) tooke the office of Beadles vpon them, and whipt monsieur Hunkes, till the blood ran downe his old shoulders: It was some sport to see Innocence triumph ouer Tyranny, but beholding those vnnecessary tormentors go away w[ith] scratched hands, or torne legs from a poore Beast arm’d onely by nature to defend

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himselfe against Violence: yet methought this whipping of the blinde Beare, moued as much pittie in my breast towards him, as y[e] leading of poore starued wretches to the whipping posts in London (when they had more néede to be reléeued with foode) ought to moue the hearts of Cittizens, though it be the fashion now to laugh at the punishment. (Worke for Armourours, iv, 98–99)

The whipping of the blind bear disgusts Dekker. His sympathies are clearly with the bear that naturally defends itself against its tormentors. The inversion of animal and man is clear in Dekker’s use of language in referring to the men as dogs, and the bear, Harry Hunkes, as ‘mousieur’. However, during the baiting itself, Dekker has equal sympathy for the dogs as they are knocked back after every attack, and persist only because they are trained to do so. He reflects on this action, extending the image into a metaphor on society: But when I called to mind, that all their tugging together was but to make sport to the beholders, I held a better and not so damnable an opinion of their beastly doings: for the Beares, or the Buls fighting with the dogs was a liuely represẽtation (me thought) of poore men going to lawe with the rich and mightie. The dogs (in whom I figured the poore creatures; and fitly may I doe so, because when they stand at the dore of Diues, they have nothing, if they haue thẽ but bare bones throwne vnto them,) might now & then pinch the great ones, & perhaps vex them a little by drawing a few drops of blood from them: but in the end, they commonly were crushed. (Worke for Armourours, iv, 98)

The poor may contend with the rich, and from time to time, like the dogs, may get ahead. But the majority of the time the poor are defeated and are either beaten down in their bout for survival or are themselves tied to the stake. Ultimately, they are at the mercy of the rich. Dekker cannot understand the appeal of such a sport, for it effectively mirrors the reality of the plight of the poor, complete with an enforced brutality. We can extend this analysis to one of class: animals at the mercy of their tormentors mirror the relationship of the poor who are behest to the ruling classes. In Worke for Armourours, Dekker takes the opportunity to examine how ferocity in the bear pit mimics the ideologies of status in early modern England. Further, he exposes these injustices as masked in a sport which is surely not a fine sight to see.

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The Arena of Ambiguity Bear-baiting can indeed be read as a metaphor for social struggle. Erica Fudge suggests that ‘the cruelty of baiting becomes symbolic of oppressive power relations. […] Cruelty to animals is understood as the infliction of pain on those even lower than you as a response to the frustration caused by social inequalities.’34 The oppressed poor are therefore able to turn their aggression onto the animals in the baiting arena as a means of acting out their own frustrations: By destroying or tormenting the weak, such as a rabbit or a child, the oppressors become the master who has in turn tortured them. Their own victims’ helpless writhings echo what they have felt, and temporarily replace them in the role of victim. And so these new reactive tortures ascend, momentarily in their own mind, to the social—or physical—power position of their oppressor.35

The victims of oppression change their position from one of weakness to one of power as they displace their suffering onto a more vulnerable subject. Dekker does not regard the creatures whipping the blind bear as superior beings. Instead, they appear less than human because of their unnecessary torturing of the bear. The spectators too, similarly oppressed, are therefore more like the animals in the pit rather than the humans inflicting the torture on the animals. The inversion of animal and human has important ideological significance. There is identification with the animal not as other but as akin: If what happens to animals is a representation of what is happening to some humans then animal suffering must be staged to replicate human suffering, therefore there must be a belief that the animal can suffer in a way which is analogous to the human. (Fudge, Perceiving Animals, p. 17)

This reading of bear-baiting is justly complex. Entertainment is not the sole purpose of attending. To enter the bear pit is to enter an arena of ambiguity for it blurs the lines between the human and the animal, the oppressor and the sufferer. It is the place where humans come to understand, at least subconsciously, their similarities with the animals on display for human indulgence. And analogous to the plague pit, it is the forum where the living face the dead and come to recognize their impending doom.

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This idea which sees the animal of the baiting pit as the double of the human can be understood through psychoanalysis. The ever-present danger involved with just viewing the sport draws the audience towards watching a violent death in the first place. In Erotism, George Bataille’s work on death and sensuality, he claims that we are instinctually drawn towards violence, but society puts in place a series of taboos against acting upon our inherent, violent nature. Elias’s stance in The Civilizing Process is similar to Bataille’s comment which claims that ‘man must combat his natural impulses to violence’.36 According to Bataille, we are drawn towards a violent death because we long for the continuity we lose at birth. Death is the only means by which to achieve continuity once again, and eroticism—‘assenting to life up to the point of death’ (Bataille, p. 11)—is the closest means to achieve death without actually dying. We want death, but taboos are placed as obstacles against committing acts of murder and suicide. Attending a bear-baiting, therefore, would be a way in which to experience by proxy the violent death we crave. Our attraction towards violence and death is twofold: ‘Violence, and death signifying violence, have a double meaning. On the one hand the horror of death drives us off, for we prefer life; on the other an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us profoundly’ (Bataille, p. 45). In observing death, we assert our desire to live; therefore, we are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by death. Were the spectators, then, drawn to the potential life-threatening danger both they and the animals faced when the sport was in play as a means to assert their lives? I mentioned earlier that the people would have taken pleasure in the carnage involved with the baiting, and indeed attended in order to be entertained with blood. A Bataillean reading of a bear-baiting would deem it an example of a ritual sacrifice in this respect: The victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the sacramental element. This sacramental element is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity: what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. (Bataille, p. 82)

In ritual sacrifice, the tense onlookers achieve continuity through shared participation by observation. This is different to René Girard’s notion of

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sacrifice where the victim is an arbitrary and lone figure, a ‘scapegoat’, whose death will rid the community of negative violence.37 The victim in a ritual is an animal, considered sacred, and on the same level as the human: an anthropomorphic view. But in a baiting, there is no solemn silence to mark the rite of sacrifice. The crowd shows its enthusiasm by making noise and roaring with laughter and delight. In this respect, the atmosphere of a bear-baiting would in essence parody the proceedings of ritual sacrifice that Bataille details above. The crowd would be able to achieve continuity through witnessing the death of the animal, which is considered sacred, not profane, yet a complete lack of solemnity resides in the act. The pleasure the crowd feels in attending the mock-ritual proceedings cannot be denied or overlooked. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Artaud acknowledges the power of laughter and its anarchic abilities. He also stipulates the need for ritual in the theatre as a means to rouse people to fervour. The bear-baiting theatre has the ability to do this without dialogue, text, or analysis, just as Artaud specified. Artaud and Bataille intersect here as a Bataillean reading of bear-­ baiting confirms its power of contagion as the entire audience achieves continuity in viewing the event. Lacking an objective stage, it is a ­non-­linguistic ritual which happens in the centre of the audience. The spectators engage in the proceedings actively rather than passively, and are encouraged to shout, cheer, and jeer. The mayhem associated with the sport undercuts the solemnity of ritual, but reflects the disorder and rigour of Artaud’s theatre; still, it is not mandatory. The association that Dekker makes between the animals in the pit and the poor and oppressed who were avid spectators moves him towards compassionate reflection on the plight of the poor, ultimately causing his revulsion towards the spectacle itself. This results in Dekker’s ‘turning away’ from the spectacle via his condemnation of it and its damnable surroundings. The theatre should release conflict and revolutionary possibility through the physical, but witnessing the brutal image is necessary to understand the truths it reveals. The challenge is to create balance between cruelty and revulsion to prevent a turning away. Therefore, venue-sharing establishes a tangible link between the early modern theatre and the bear pit. Earlier, I contended that bear pit and playhouse were both battling for the same blood-thirsty audience. Henslowe seemed to rectify this problem by drawing the audience to one building, the Hope (fit for either a baiting or a theatrical production), rather than to any specific performance per se. The circular design of the

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theatre could suit either entertainment; the scaffolding could easily accommodate both audiences; and the pit area was ideal for both bears and players on account of the removable stage. The players, animal and human, shared the same area where they performed the same function: to entertain through conflict. The animals are pitted against their adversaries, and the characters in a play are pitted against theirs. Playwrights were well aware that they were writing plays for an audience familiar with bear-­baiting, and therefore used that imagery to their advantage. Alexander Leggatt documents the metaphors of bear-baiting and its analogous imagery appearing in a large number of Shakespeare’s plays.38 As Leggatt ­suggests, ‘the playhouse audience paid to see what the bearbaiting audience paid to see, cruelty, suffering, and courage displayed for its pleasure’ (Leggatt, ‘Shakespeare and Bearbaiting’, p.  52). The audience demanded to see the images of popular culture. Even after the option of attending a bear-baiting was no longer available, its theatrical and metaphorical counterparts remained. The major difference, of course, is that the violence present in baiting was real and not representational as it often is in a stage play. The challenge, therefore, is to somehow attain the same level of potency.

From Barbarity to Civility Although bear-baiting—and the theatre—was suppressed in 1642, Bear Garden was nonetheless resurrected after the Restoration period (Chambers, ii, 470). Its success and popularity were dependent on its appeal to an audience which would attend the sport. After its suppression (which coincided with the brutality of the Civil War), that audience was clearly not as large as it was at the height of its popularity, when baiting was deemed respectable and acceptable. In Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Peter Burke traces the withdrawal of the upper classes from popular culture. He observes this change occurring as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, when private theatres were being erected, as the common, filthy divertissements of the lower classes were no longer suitable.39 What is ironic is that baiting was a pastime of the nobility and the gentry before its assimilation into the public sphere. Although his chronology has been questioned, Burke’s work identifies that a definite change—that needs to be accounted for—was gradually taking place.40 People like Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both of whom were fond of the game at earlier dates, condemn it as an unfit pastime in

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later accounts. Pepys offers this description of a baiting he attended on 14 August 1666 which provides insight into his changed attitude: And after dinner with my wife and Mercer to the Beare=garden, where I have not been I think of many years, and saw some good sport of the bull’s tossing the dogs—one into the very boxes. But it is a very rude and nasty pleasure. We had a great many hectors in the same box with us (and one, very fine, went into the pit and played his dog for a wager, which was a strange sport for a gentleman), where they drank wine, and drank Mercer’s health first, which I pledged with my hat off.41

Although Pepys was clearly in attendance at this baiting, and alludes to the fact that he previously attended others, he now condemns it; however, he does comment on the ‘good sport’ of the baiting and refers to it as a ‘pleasure’, albeit a ‘nasty’ one that a gentleman should not admit indulging in. Perhaps this is why Pepys is somewhat shocked to see the very fine gentleman with whom he shares a box play his dog for a wager.42 Pepys, who was generally not fond of blood-thirsty sports, more than likely considered even being in attendance at a baiting unfit, but he admittedly was an audience member from time to time. The same change in acceptance of the sport is documented in the diary of John Evelyn, who writes the following on 16 June 1670: I went with some friends to the Bear Garden, where was cock-fighting, dog-­ fighting, bear and bull-baiting, it being a famous day for all these butcherly sports, or rather barbarous cruelties. The bulls did exceeding well, but the Irish wolf-dog exceeded, which was a tall greyhound, a stately creature indeed, who beat a cruel mastiff. One of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap as she sate in one of the boxes at a considerable height from the arena. Two poor dogs were killed, and so all ended with the ape on ­horseback, and I most heartily weary of the rude and dirty pastime, which I had not seen, I think, in twenty years before.43

As in Pepys’s diary entry, the reader is faced with an account of a tentative return to Bear Garden. The sense of danger is ever present, with dogs being inadvertently thrown into boxes, but even though it once appealed to Evelyn as it did to Pepys, both no longer regard the sport as appropriate. Evelyn does not refer to the baiting as a pleasure at all, but instead as ‘butcherly’, ‘barbarous’, and a ‘rude and dirty pastime’. By calling it dirty, he attaches a subtext of sinfulness to the sport. It becomes, therefore, a

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question of morality and concern for perhaps not only the animal, but the spectator watching the sport as well. This is what Keith Thomas would call an enlargement of ‘the boundary encircling the area of moral concern’.44 But why was it enlarged? Thomas attributes the emergence of a new campaign against banishing such recreations as ‘a combination of religious piety and bourgeois sensibility’ (Thomas, p. 159). Consideration for animals was strongly promoted as a religious obligation and was successful when viewed as such. A movement towards compassion over stewardship (depending on interpretation, ‘stewardship’ could condone a series of actions which could be seen as remaining within the bounds of exhibiting only minimal, necessary cruelty) in the treatment of animals began to develop, resolutely undoing the appeal to tradition which can account for the sport’s legitimacy and longevity. This piety and sensibility only escalated from the seventeenth century onward and resulted in increased protection for animals. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Animal Cruelty, established in London in 1824, promoted love and care for animals as part of Christian duty in a series of pamphlets published around this time, seemingly a different duty from administering punishment.45 William Harrison Drummond wrote one of many discourses in circulation at the time, detailing how the good Christian was meant ‘to be employed as a minister of mercy, not as an executioner of wrath. […] But though we may kill, we may not torture.’46 Perhaps it took the right religious angle for the people to embrace this idea that respect for animals needed observation. Actions motivated out of kindness and obligation appear to work against our natural fondness for cruelty. Perhaps the evolved treatment of animals conjures a deeper understanding of the effect of cruelty on the human condition. Cruelty operates at the very base of the human. The farther the movement away from the bodily level of mere existence, the more the human soul is elevated away from the baseness of the flesh. Imposed society and religion move us away from the elements of base necessity and desire into a realm where the psyche is subdued. Our desires and our natural impulses towards aggression and depravity are suppressed. In this respect, I agree with Fudge who claims that a bear-baiting is a means to replicate human suffering in order to replace our own suffering with that of a weaker victim. True, we are able to recognize our own frustration with our human oppressors, but more than this, we are able to identify our animal nature. Puritan Robert Bolton’s sermon Some Generall Directions For a Comfortable Walking with God (1625) presents other implications to consider:

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Bathe not thy recreations in blood: Refresh not thy tired minde with spectacles of crueltie: Consider, 1. How God himselfe out of tendernesse and pittie, would not haue his people feede vpon the flesh of Beasts with the blood, lest thereby they should be flesht to crueltie, and inured to behold rufull obiects without horrour. And doest thou thinke then, hee will allow thee to feede thine eye and fancy, with their bloody torturing and tearing one another in pieces? 2. With what brutish sauagenesse thou deiectest and debasest humanitie, below the immanitie of beasts. No beast, they say, takes contentment in the hurting of any other, except in the case of hunger or anger. They satisfie their appetites and rage sometimes with cruelty and blood; but their eyes and fancies neuer. 3. That men bloodily minded towards harmlesse beasts, discouer our naturall propension to crueltie.47

Fudge’s understanding of Bolton has her conclude the following: ‘To watch a baiting, to enact anthropocentrism, is to reveal, not the stability of species status, but the animal that lurks beneath the surface’ (Fudge, Perceiving Animals, p. 15). What I wish to conclude in reading Fudge’s interpretation is that it is not the animal lurking beneath the surface, but the unfettered human being. We do not have to necessarily identify our own inherent cruelty as animal. It is a part of the fundamental human composition. Artaud comments on the innate drive towards cruelty in a letter to Jean Paulhan dated 14 November 1932: ‘Cruelty was not tacked onto my thinking; it has always been at home there: but I had to become conscious of it’ (Richards, p. 102).48 Cruelty is always there, part of the human psyche, even though we may be compelled to ignore it, or blatantly choose against making a conscious connection with it. Artaud would argue that this is the concept of the human we are meant to know and understand: the base human, uninhibited and real, communicating desire through non-verbal gesture, beyond the codes of civility one is required to follow. Artaud’s theatre is reactionary against these codes. The stage, and the bear pit—its double—are the perfect arenas in which to behold human nature. In a letter dated 9 November 1932, again to Jean Paulhan, Artaud explains the problems with his contemporary theatre and outlines what the theatre needs to produce: The theater as we practice it can therefore be reproached with a terrible lack of imagination. The theater must make itself the equal of life—not an individual life, that individual aspect of life in which CHARACTERS triumph, but the sort of liberated life which sweeps away human individuality and in which man is only a reflection. The true purpose of the theater is to create

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Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspect, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves. (Richards, p. 116)49

The theatre is the perfect place to depict the universal concept of human existence, which consists of being stripped down to one’s essence. Ultimately, the theatre has the power to communicate this non-verbally, not through carefully articulated language and response, but through cruel, immediate, and instinctive bodily gesture. To appeal to the public either in our own contemporary setting or that of the early modern period is to appeal to both literate and non-literate individuals. In Shakespeare’s Talking Animals, Terence Hawkes reminds us that Shakespeare was not writing for elites, but for the public: Shakespeare’s plays originally grew and flourished in quite a different context. They were written for an audience that did not regard them primarily as ‘literature’, and whose standards of literacy were in any case hardly likely to have been those of a modern audience. Shakespeare wrote, in short, for an audience of ‘talking animals’.50

Appreciating this truth makes it easier to understand how images of bear-­ baiting, depicting fundamental cruelty by way of gesture, would find their way into the plays of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. The audience was able to relate to the very principles of their internal and external culture. But Shakespeare’s textual language is anything but base. In ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, Artaud stipulates in his first manifesto that ‘Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds’ (Richards, p. 99).51 The mise en scène of Artaud’s new theatre must physically show the human propensity for cruelty. It is a part of who we are, and if the theatre is meant to double life, it must include cruelty. The bear-baiting arena is the ideal point of departure to begin looking at Artaud’s connection to the Elizabethan theatre as it is one prototype for the early modern Theatre of Cruelty. The bear pit is a place where words give way to the violent gestures of thrashings, whippings, and the drawing of blood. It is the place that brings audiences, like charmed snakes, back to the subtlest ideas through their anatomies.52 The crowd responds to the actions with delight, and does not surrender in stoic silence as they watch the animals at the mercy of the

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spectacle. The spectators are compelled by the performance itself because they identify with their animal counterparts on the stage. In this respect, through this displacement, the audience is ‘in the centre’ with the action ‘surrounding’ them, bombarded with sounds and violent action (My translation).53 The bear pit fulfils Artaud’s requirement that the theatre directly affect the organism through gestures that force the audience to adopt certain attitudes. Some embrace the realization while others deny themselves the spectacle. They call out to put an end to the Theatre of Cruelty on the early modern stage, but the images of bear-baiting, so ingrained in the culture, surface once again, appearing on other stages. The desire for cruelty is represented in early modern drama. The theatre, therefore, is a means by which to transpose this cruelty to the audience members, who in turn find pleasure in discovering themselves in the images on the stage. Cruelty is ingrained in our thoughts, entrenched within our very essence, and translated through our gestures. We need to satisfy this desire for cruelty and the theatre goes so far as to do that.

Notes 1. ‘C’est pourquoi je propose un théâtre de la cruauté.—Avec cette maine de tout rabaisser qui nous appartient aujourd’hui à tous, « cruauté », quand j’ai prononcé ce mot, a tout de suite voulu dire, « sang » pour tout le monde. Mais « théâtre de cruauté » veut dire théâtre difficile et cruel d’abord pour moi-même. Et, sur le plan de la représentation, il ne s’agit pas de cette cruauté que nous pouvons exercer les uns contre les autres en nous dépeçant mutuellement les corps, en sciant nos anatomies personnelles, ou, tels des empereurs assyriens, en nous adressant par la poste des sacs d’oreilles humaines, de nez ou de narines bien découpés, mais de celle beaucoup plus terrible et nécessaire que les choses peuvent exercer contre nous. Nous ne sommes pas libres. Et le ciel peut encore nous tomber sur la tête. Et le théâtre est fait pour nous apprendre d’abord cela.’ TD, iv, 95. 2. This was indeed the case at a bear-baiting in Southwark, London at BearHouse in Paris Garden on 13 January 1583, where seven people were killed, and two or three hundred others were injured, some to the point of death, when the whole building collapsed. Philip Stubbes, ‘Beare-baiting and other Exercyses, vsed vunlawfully in Ailgna’, in Anatomy of Abuses in England in Shakspere’s Youth, A.D. 1583, Part i, ed. by Frederick J.  Furnivall, The New Shakspere Society (London: Trübner, 1877–79), pp. 177–80 (p. 179).

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3. E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), ii, 359. 4. The Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg and Agas maps are reproduced in The A to Z of Elizabethan London, compiled by Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor, London Topographical Society Publication, 122 (London: Margary, 1979), pp. 32; 23, 25. Please note that Prockter and Taylor suggest the start date for the Agas map to be sometime after 1561, and the completion date as 1570. They reason for the post-1561 start date because St. Paul’s Cathedral is missing its spire that was destroyed by fire in 1561. Dawson lists its approximate date of publication as ca. 1590. 5. Stephen Dickey, ‘Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 255–75 (p. 261). See also Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary, ed. by W.W.  Greg, Part 3 (London: Bullen, 1907), p. 20. 6. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in Ben Jonson, ed. by C.H. Hereford and Percy Simpson, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vi (1938), 1–141 (Indvction [sic], 52–53). 7. This is still the ideal shape for a high-capacity arena or stadium. 8. Sir Sidney Lee, ‘Bearbaiting, Bullbaiting, and Cockfighting’, in Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of his Age, ed. by Sir Sidney Lee, Walter Raleigh, and C.T. Onions, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917; repr. 1926), ii, 428–36 (p. 428). 9. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), p. 97. Exodus 22 calls attention to the punishment of animals, and their owners in the cases where negligence is involved, if and when they commit either homicide or bestiality. It is the duty of man, specifically, as overseer to punish animal malefactors accordingly. 10. See also Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England (1905 edn), i, 144. ‘Macaulay declared in a famous gibe that the Puritans disliked bearbaiting not because of the pain it gave the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the spectators. There is a fragment of truth in that remark, but not in the way it is usually understood. Puritans lamented the readiness of dogs to fight with bears because they saw it as the result of the Fall and therefore a reminder of Man’s sin.’ Thomas, p. 157. 11. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 48. 12. Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French History (New York: Basic Books, 1984) recollects the cat massacre of 1730s France, told by one Nicholas Contat: Ill-treated and sleep-deprived workers, Jerome (a version of Nicolas Contat) and Lévillé, along with

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several journeymen, gathered up the cats owned by print-shop owner Jaques Vincent and his wife, and as many alley cats as they could find, bludgeoned them to death, and then held a mock trial to determine their guilt. This was met with hilarity from witnesses. Lévillé reenacted the scene several times in the weeks that followed, and to the amusement of his fellow journeymen. The massacre was a response to the Vincents’s neglect of the workers whose animals were treated far better than the men (pp. 75–77). 13. Daniel Baraz, ‘Seneca, Ethics, and the Body: The Treatment of Cruelty in Medieval Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 59.2 (1998), 195–215 (p. 196). 14. Baiting was first introduced into England, ‘according to one story, by a band of Italians and first exhibited before King John at Ashby-de-laZouche, “for his Highness’ amusement, wherewith he and his court were highly delighted”’. Dix Harwood, Love for Animals And How it Developed in Great Britain (New York: the author, 1928), pp.  51–53. The sport thrives today in parts of Northern Pakistan. 15. ‘Hanno passato il fiume in un certo loco forse ducento cani richiusi una separato dall’altro in alcune piciole casele di tavole, e sono de quelli che usiamo a Venetia alla caccia de tori, Hanno anco in un’altra casa molti orsi, et in un’altra alquanti tori saluatici, e nel mezo un loco rittondo circondato de palchi cõ li suoi coperti per la pioggia, e per il sole, ove ogni domenica amaestrando li cani si prende un solazzo grãde pagando a star a basso uno denaro, che sono s.2 e doi ad ascẽder nelli palchi. El solazzo è che ad hora di uespro cominciando fino alla sera ui faño bellissime caccie, prima menano in esso loco che è richiuso attorno, e non se ui puo uscire se non aprono alcune porte menano dico uno caualo di poco pretio con tutti li suoi fornimenti, et una simia in sella, poi quattro, o sei cani delli piu giouani con li quali dãno uno assalto, e li cambiano, conducendone delli altri piu esprimentati, nella qual caccia e bellissimo uedere el cauallo fugir trando calci, e mordendo, e la simia teuersi forte alla sella, et cridare molte uolte essendo morduta, nella qual caccia poi che hãno intertenuto un pezzo li circostanti con morte spesso del cauallo, conduttoso fuori ui introducono alquanti orsi hora uno alla uolta, e quando piu insieme, ma questa caccia non è molto bella da uedere. Vltimamente poi ui mettono un toro saluatico, e lo ligano cõ una corda cerca dua passa longa ad un palo fitto nel mezo, e questa caccia piu bella da ueder dell’altre, e con piu pericolo de cani delle altre, delli quali molti ne sono feriti, e morti e dura fin sera.’ Giles E.  Dawson, ‘London’s Bull-Baiting and Bear-Baiting Arena in 1562’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 97–101 (pp. 98–99). Both the Italian account in the FOLGER MS. v.a.259 (de Ricci 1713.I) and the English translation provided by Charles S. Singleton are found in Dawson.

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16. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, ‘Of Crueltie’, in Essays & Belles-Lettres, trans. by John Florio, 3 vols (London: Dent & Sons, 1910; repr. 1946), ii, 122–23. 17. Oscar Brownstein’s article questions the assumed popularity of the sport prior to the reign of King James. Oscar Brownstein, ‘The Popularity of Baiting in England before 1600: A Study in Social and Theatrical History’, Educational Theatre Journal, 21.3 (1969), 237–50. 18. ‘Of Bearbaytynge’, in The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. by J.M.  Cowper (London: Trübner, 1922), pp.  16–17, lines 373–76, 381–88. 19. John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols, Burt Franklin: Resource and Source Works Series, 117 (London: Franklin, 1823), i, 67–68. 20. ‘Bewick describes the Ban-dog as being a variety of the mastiff, but lighter, smaller, and more vigilant; although at the same time not so powerful. The nose is also less, and possesses somewhat of the hound’s scent; the hair is rough, and of a yellowish grey colour, marked with shades of black. The bite of a Ban-dog is keen, and considered to be dangerous; and its attack is usually made upon the flank. Dogs of this kind are now rarely to be met with.’ Nichols, i, 438, note 1. 21. Robert Laneham’s Letter; Whearin, part of the entertainment unto the Queenz Maiesty at Killingworth Castl, in Warwik Sheer in this Soomerz Progress 1575 is signified, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall, The New Shakspere Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1890), p. 17. 22. Chambers, ii, 455. Passage translated by G. von Bülow (note 1). 23. Chambers, iv, 307. 24. Dickey uses examples from Shakespeare’s canon to illustrate this point of malleability, with the examples of Octavius and Macbeth, who both appear ‘at the stake’; however, Octavius is victorious, and Macbeth is not. Although in the latter example the bear is defeated, as an audience, we are still interested in the battle itself (pp. 264–65). 25. Anonymous, The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, ed. by M.L. Wine, The Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1973), i. 1. 198. All further quotations from Arden of Faversham are from this edition. 26. For a thorough discussion of Macbeth’s descent into bestial territory, see Chapter 1 of Andreas Höfele’s thorough investigation in Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): ‘“What beast was’t then”: Stretching the Boundaries in Macbeth’, pp. 41–67. 27. This same structure works equally well in comedy. Jonson’s Epicoene, or The Silent Woman contains several references to baiting—Tom Otter’s chief carousing cups are named bull, bear, and horse—and features the

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baiting of Morose (a lone ‘bear’ longing for silence) to non-violent ends. Ben Jonson, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, in Ben Jonson, ed. by C.H.  Hereford and Percy Simpson, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), v (1937), 139–272. 28. S.P. Cerasano, ‘The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise’, in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews (New York: AMS Press, 1984–), v, ed. by Leeds Barroll (1991), 195–209 (p. 197). I cite Cerasano, in particular, because she sources both the W.W. Greg edition of Henslowe Papers (1907), as well as George F.  Warner’s Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich (1881), which contain several documents in regard to both Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn’s joint position of Master of the Bears during the reign of King James. 29. See also E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, ii, 448–71 for a detailed account of the position of the ursarius, or bearward, in his discussion of The Hope Theatre and its early beginnings as Bear Garden. 30. Tom a Lincoln is also the title character in Richard Johnson’s late sixteenth-century Arthurian romance. 31. John Taylor, the Water Poet, Bull, Beare, and Horse, in The Works of John Taylor The Water Poet Not Included in the Folio Volume of 1630, Third Collection, The Spenser Society, 19 (Manchester: The Spenser Society, 1876; repr. New York: Franklin, 1967), pp. 1–69 (pp. 61–62). Either of the two white bears could have been used in productions of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, thus realizing the famous stage direction, ‘Exit, pursued by bear’. 32. Publius Ovidius Naso, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. by Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin, 1955; repr. 1978), p. 80. The story here is of Actaeon in Book iii of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who after losing his way, accidentally espied the goddess Diana bathing in her private bower. To punish the unknowing hunter, she turned him into a stag, but left his mind intact, so that when his hounds fatally attacked him, he was fully conscious. Only when Actaeon was mutilated beyond salvation was Diana ‘appeased’. 33. Thomas Dekker, Worke for Armourours, in The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. by Alexander B.  Grosart, 5 vols (London: Hazeli, Watson, and Viney, 1884–86), iv (1886), 87–166 (p. 131). 34. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (London: Macmillan; New  York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 16, 17. 35. Marjorie Speigel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (London: Heretic Books, 1988), pp. 82, 84. Cited in Fudge, Perceiving Animals, p. 17.

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36. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. by Mary Dalwood (first published as Death and Sensuality: a Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, New York: Walker, 1962; repr. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 69. 37. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (London: Athlone Press, 1988; repr. Continuum, 2005), p. 271. Girard’s notion of sacrifice and the ‘sacrificial crisis’ is discussed in Chapter 6 of this book. 38. Alexander Leggatt, ‘Shakespeare and Bearbaiting’, in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. by Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), pp. 43–53 (p. 52). Leggatt’s argument is similar to Dickey’s (albeit, the latter’s is a lengthy analysis of bear-baiting in Twelfth Night specifically) as it also focuses on the images of baiting in Shakespeare’s plays. Leggatt traces which aspects of the baiting Shakespeare found useful in his work. Although Leggatt’s is a brief discussion, there are numerous examples specified. He asserts that the following plays all contain images of a baiting, of attack and counter-attack, of pursuer and pursed: 1 Henry iv, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry v, Macbeth, 2 and 3 Henry vi, Timon of Athens, Richard iii, Henry viii, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That End’s Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, King Lear, and Coriolanus. 39. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Harper & Row, 1978), pp.  277–78. To some extent, Burke attributes this detachment to the increase in education. The upper classes and newly educated gentry were also no longer satisfied with lower forms of entertainment, such as the jig, which was considered a ‘“low” form of art’ (p.  277). Whether this was a new attitude towards the jig at the turn of the century, or simply a reaffirmation of the obvious, is not addressed in Burke. 40. See the introduction to Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, ed. by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), pp. 3–5. 41. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and others, 11 vols (London: Bell and Sons, 1970–76, vols i–ix; Bell & Hyman, 1983, vols x–xi), vii (1972), 245–246. See Z.C. von Uffenbach, London in 1710 (ed. by Quarrell and Mare), pp. 59–60, for an account of Samuel Pepys’s dislike of blood-thirsty sports. 42. The gentry owned and trained mastiffs for private and often public baiting. Points were awarded for the hits made on attack. Brownstein, p. 243. 43. The Diary of John Evelyn: With a Prefatory Note by George W.E. Russell, ed. by William Bray, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1907), ii, 49.

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44. Thomas, p. 150. As a historian, the concern for Thomas is the question as to why the boundary was ‘enlarged so as to embrace other species along with mankind’ (p. 150). 45. The society is known today as the RSPCA—The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 46. William Harrison Drummond, Humanity to Animals: The Christian’s Duty; A Discourse (London: Hunter, 1830), pp. 12, 16. 47. Robert Bolton, Some generall directions for a comfortable walking with God deliuered in the lecture at Kettering in Northhamptonshire (London: Felix Kyngston, 1626), pp. 155–56. 48. ‘La cruauté n’est pas surajoutée à ma pensée; elle y a toujours vécu: mais il me fallait en prendre conscience.’ TD, iv, 122. 49. ‘On peut donc reprocher au théâtre tel qu’il se pratique un terrible manque d’imagination. Le théâtre doit s’égaler à la vie, non pas à la vie individuelle, à cet aspect individuel de la vie où triomphent les CARACTÈRES, mais à une sorte de vie libérée, qui balaye l’individualité humaine et où l’homme n’est plus qu’un reflet. Créer des Mythes voilà le véritable objet du théâtre, traduire la vie sous son aspect universel, immense, et extraire de cette vie des images où nous aimerions à nous retrouver.’ TD, iv, 139–40. 50. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals: Language and drama in society (London: Arnold, 1973), p. 37. 51. ‘Sans un élément de cruauté à la base de tout spectacle, le théâtre n’est pas possible. Dans l’état de dégénérescence où nous sommes, c’est par la peau qu’on fera rentrer la métaphysique dans les esprits.’ TD, iv, 118. 52. TD, iv, 97–98; Richards, p. 81. 53. ‘le spectateur placé au milieu de l’action est enveloppée sillonné par elle.’ TD, iv, 115.

SECTION III

The Sources of Dramatic Cruelty

CHAPTER 5

Thyestean Savagery: Seneca, the Renaissance, and the Theatre of Cruelty

Seneca may not have written a manifesto for his philosophy on tragedy, but his dramas are indicative of what the theatre should do. His tragedies force the audience to acknowledge devastating truths about human nature. Of particular interest is the cruel context wherein savage imagery is employed in order to reach the audience viscerally, instinctively, and mentally. In adapting the famous myths of Greek and Latin folklore, Seneca is also commenting on a world where humankind is at the disposal of the gods. Their cruel governance is easily understood as a metaphor for Nero’s tyranny, and that of Caligula before him. Historically, the stage has been an important tool by which to expose, celebrate, or criticize the socio-­ political arena. Nevertheless, the metaphors of the early Roman stage support the idea that something sacred, divine, and mystical is connected to the human animal. Whether or not this is what drives us to extreme compassion or atrocity is yet unknown, but the theatre appears to be the place where we are able to examine these possibilities. Artaud formed an intense admiration for Seneca, especially his Thyestes (ca. 62), and wrote his own version of the play in the early 1930s called Le Supplice de Tantale (The Tortures of Tantalus).1 The play text itself is unfortunately lost, but its very creation reveals plenty. In the press release for his play, and in letters written to Jean Paulhan and Jean-Louis Barrault, Artaud reveals his admiration for Seneca and comments on his indebtedness to the Roman philosopher for writing L’Atrée et Thyeste2 which inspired © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_5

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his own play. Artaud felt the play held relevance to his Theatre of Cruelty and to his understanding of his own contemporary environment, which, also fraught with savagery, was too destined to repeat past sins and endure further hardship and even punishment.3 While he was not explicit on the specific details as to why the play was relevant, he is somewhat more lucid in his discourse on the adaptation of the Senecan theatrics he intended to incorporate in his tragedy. An examination of the conventions employed by Seneca and their metamorphoses in early modern England and in twentieth-century France, as intended for Artaud’s theatre, will be helpful in establishing how the imagery, delivery, and the mise en scène work to create the atmosphere necessary to evoke powerful emotional responses from audience members, the very goal of the Theatre of Cruelty. Early modern tragedy is undeniably indebted to Seneca. To what extent his dramatic works have influenced early modern drama has long been considered, the extent of which will not be repeated here, but I am indebted to the efforts of scholars who have worked hard to make common knowledge the many Senecan references found in the texts and dramas of the Renaissance.4 Examining the extent to which an Elizabethan or Jacobean play borrows style and lyrical verse from Seneca is not my immediate concern. Further, that Senecan subject matter and repertoire were influential and prominent in the Renaissance is important in this analysis only in its connection and relationship to the Theatre of Cruelty. Although establishing a viable connection with Seneca and early modern tragedians is of interest, examining the development of Senecan tragedy, marking the links between Seneca, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and Artaud, and their use of Thyestean imagery denoting violence, sacrifice, and contagious furor alongside savagery and cannibalism, is central. It is important to identify early on that although Seneca wrote dramatic tragedies, they were not necessarily performed as such. Emphasis was placed on rhetoric, not the mise en scène to create the subtext of the play; dramatics were primarily created by the language in the text, not the action; and performances were aural in nature, not visual, and rarely featured more than two speakers in any given scene. According to A.J. Boyle, the declamatory style of Roman dramatic performance comes from the appreciation and practice of recitatio (recitation), which Nero himself indulged in (Boyle, Tragic Seneca, p. 23). Contrast this idea of early Roman dramatics with Artaud’s general view of textual language as secondary to gestural language, and it is ostensibly difficult to reconcile the two viewpoints. In a

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letter to Jean Paulhan dated 16 December 1932, however, Artaud writes of his admiration for Seneca and how his theatre connects to the Theatre of Cruelty, something which he too sees as paradoxical: I am reading Seneca, who seems to me to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the moralist preceptor of I don’t know which tyrant of the Roman decadence—or else the Preceptor was this man, but he had grown old and lost his faith in magic. However this may be, he seems to me to be the greatest tragic writer in history, a man who was initiated into the Secrets and who surpassed Aeschylus in putting them into words. I weep as I read his inspired theatre, and beneath the sound of the syllables I hear sizzling hideously the transparent surge of the forces of chaos. And this reminds me of something: once I am cured I intend to organize some dramatic readings—for a man who does not believe in texts in the theatre this will be something—public readings at which I shall read the Tragedies of Seneca, and all potential patrons of the Theatre of Cruelty will be invited.5

For a man who prefers the language of gesture and action in the theatre to the written text, admitting appreciation for a Roman tragedian who conveyed powerful and savage dramatic action through language is alone significant, but the compliment connotes influence beyond mere respect. Seneca’s proclivity for concise language indeed influenced Artaud. Although he compromised his integrity for monetary assistance at various times during his career, Artaud’s proposal to perform dramatic readings of Seneca’s tragedies—an exercise in recitatio—was not solely for financial gain. His high opinion of Seneca as expressed in the letter to Paulhan is genuine. Artaud did eventually perform a text-based lecture nearly 15 years after he alluded to doing so in the letter.6 On 13 January 1947, at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris, Artaud delivered The Story Lived by Artaud the Mômo. This Theatre of Cruelty production was not a controlled reading, but a chaotic performance during which Artaud lost track of his text as it repeatedly fell to the floor. He appeared onstage as a living tragedy, but was received as a celebrity train wreck.7 A Seneca-Artaud spectrum exists, therefore, which begins with Seneca and tragedy in the oral tradition, including recitatio, but then appears to abandon textual language in the Theatre of Cruelty as detailed in the first and second manifestos. This too changes, expanding to include visual cruelty in Artaud’s sketches he began drawing during his confinement in the Rodez asylum from 1943 to 1946 and continued once released to the Saint Ivry rest home outside Paris from 1946 to 1948 where he died.

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Finally, Artaud integrates sound and recording with his dramatic lecture at the Vieux-Colombier, and in the banned broadcast of To Have Done with the Judgement of God, each marking the return to a tragic, but destabilized,  poetic language rich in both sound and symbolism, and perhaps demonstrating the most textual connection linking Artaud to Seneca. His later poetry, especially Artaud le Mômo, is latent with sexual and corporal imagery which makes it impossible to believe that Artaud, who started his wide-ranging career as a poet, was completely opposed to written language as an elevated form of expression that is sufficiently visceral. Interest in corporality is present in both Seneca and Artaud, as are the notions of magic, and the idea of the cosmic rigour of the gods who are compelled to create and destroy (TD, iv, 122; Richards, pp.  102–03). In spite of Artaud’s alleged disgust for written language in the theatre, I advance this Seneca-Artaud connection. The link between Seneca and the early modern playwrights who inspired Artaud is also a key point on the spectrum that addresses the metamorphosis of dramatic form from Seneca’s high oral style to the Renaissance public theatre which employed performance conventions not solely focused on developing rhetoric, thus staging and not simply reporting violence. This chapter culminates by examining the visualization of this spectrum by way of Yukio Ninagawa’s 2004 stage production of Taitasu Andoronikasu (Titus Andronicus), which is the perfect blend of Senecan tragedy, Renaissance dramatic style and rhetoric, and Artaudian theatrical presentation.

Beyond Recitatio Renaissance playwrights benefited from the several significant changes from Greek drama to Senecan drama. The shift from the limited stage drama of the Greek theatre to Senecan declamatory style initiated the progress towards a complete spectacle with attention paid to physicality and vivid action; the move from stage to podium enabled more flexibility in the variety of imagery employed. In Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, F.L. Lucas succinctly notes a key distinction between earlier Greek drama and Senecan tragedy: ‘in Greek tragedy horrors abounded, but they were kept off the stage’, while ‘in Senecan tragedy, as there is no real stage, the horrors are sometimes part of the action’.8 Seneca was not restricted in detailing whatever action he wished to convey to his audience—more than likely private audiences as there was no public theatre—because its action would not be staged. The images, therefore, were visualized in the mind. Lucas attributes the inclusion of horror in

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part to reflect the ‘greater natural brutality of the Roman mind’, as well as a means for Seneca to displace the unreality of the drama: ‘the author tries to be vivid by being lurid, to stimulate the jaded imagination of his public by screaming atrocity’ (Lucas, pp. 57, 58). Although a brutal convention, it is nonetheless effective in stimulating the audience, so much so that the Elizabethans not only maintained this Roman tradition of brutality, but exploited these atrocities by effectively and viciously staging their action: Not only did the cock-fighting, bear-baiting audiences of Southwark like plenty of blood and thunder, and therefore insist on representing actually on the stage, whatever Seneca had left to the imagination; but even the academic playwrights of the Universities, taking for granted that Seneca had been staged and acted in Rome, staged and acted even worse than Senecan horrors at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1592 Alabaster’s Roxana was performed at Trinity College, Cambridge, a typical Senecan imitation, which ends in a cannibal orgy of revenge so ghastly, that a gentlewoman in the audience ‘fell distracted and never recovered’. (Lucas, p. 58)

The audiences attending Roxana, a neo-Latin university drama, were not the same as those attending the popular stage performances in public theatres which doubled as bear pits, like the Hope, for example. However, as Lucas points out, blood and lust were abundant on both public and private stages during the early modern period. Seneca did not hesitate to include the oral—and, as Renaissance playwrights envisaged, physical—display of cruel action of his tragedies in the controlled environment of the stage. His Epistulae Morales condemn participation in any pastime which breeds cruelty in the individual. Epistle 7 comments on the potential danger the gathering of crowds, particularly those who watch Roman sport, can have on the individual: But nothing is so damaging to good character as the habit of lounging at the games; for then it is that vice steals subtly upon one through the avenue of pleasure. What do you think I mean? I mean that I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more voluptuous, and even more cruel and inhuman,— because I have been among human beings.9

The brutality witnessed by the crowds—the butchering of criminals by means of head-to-head combat—was by no means an enlightened form of entertainment. It was also both physically and morally dangerous for the crowd as it brought out the worst in the spectator. The breeding of vice

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via pleasure is Seneca’s main concern as he considers the viciousness of the crowd in perpetuating the murderous violence: ‘The spectators demand that the slayer shall face the man who is to slay him in his turn; and they always reserve the latest conqueror for another butchering’ (Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 7.4). He insists, therefore, that the young person who cannot hold fast to righteousness must be rescued from the mob (Seneca, Epistulae Morales, 7.7). In Seneca’s Rome, the dangers of herd mentality go far beyond insipidly following commercial trends, and instead warrant unethical conduct. What happened in the arena was uncontrollable, as were the consequences and the emotional responses to the events taking place in the bearbaiting pit. In writing the tragedies, Seneca assumed the role of the unseen governing force, and was able to control what a potential audience saw or heard. In doing so, he was able to evoke the necessary responses from his audience in a relatively safe, contained environment. The difference between real and representational violence is understood best in r­ elation to control. The actions that take place in the Roman games or the early modern bear pit, for example, are indeed a precursor to the Theatre of Cruelty; however, the lack of control can cause variance in what the audience observes. For Artaud, this is a good thing, because no two performances should be alike. But it also demonstrates his understanding of cruelty, that we are not free, that others may inflict their will, their rigour, their cruelty, upon us at any given moment. The danger associated with this volatility is part of the reason why people were drawn to Roman combat and/or early modern baitings. Individual audience members could only be affected by what they saw, which was dependent on both the performance that day and their limited or vast perspective in viewing it. This was one example of freedom from the text Artaud may very well have admired. The language used to describe Atreus’s revenge in Thyestes, however, by no means withholds the sheer brutality and horrible, physical cruelty of his actions. The Messenger recalls the proceedings of Atreus, who plays not only the role of murderer but also that of Priest in the sacrificing of Thyestes’s sons, Tantalus and Plisthenes, as he dissects the bodies both viciously and ritualistically: messenger

Torn from the living chests the organs are still trembling, the veins pulsing and the hearts throbbing in terror. But he handles the entrails and looks into destiny and takes note of the still-hot veins on the viscera. Once the victims prove satisfac-

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tory, he relaxes and takes time for his brother’s feast. With his own hands he cuts and separates the bodies limb by limb: working back to the trunk he crops away the resisting arms and broad shoulders; heartlessly he lays bare the joints and bones and chops them away; just the faces he keeps, and the hands given in trust. Some of the flesh is stuck on spits, and sits dripping over slow burners; other parts are tossed about by kindled water in a boiling cauldron. The fire leaps past the food placed on it; though forced back again and again onto the trembling hearth and commanded to stay in place, it burns grudgingly. The liver hisses on the spit; I could not easily say whether the bodies or flames groan more loudly.10 The faces and hands remain intact because they are later brought out and shown to Thyestes once Atreus reveals the horrid details of his revenge plot to his brother. They are the only parts that remain which distinguish the flesh as human, for once it is cooked by the flames, it becomes food, no matter how unpalatable. Dramatizing these events would have been a possibility in Senecan tragedy, as opposed to Greek tragedy, because of the difference in playing spaces, in addition to the methods regarding the representation of atrocity. In Seneca’s Thyestes, the Messenger’s lines could have conceivably been complemented by a dramatization of the action described taking place in the background of the performance area, and in a private reading or even staging of the play, might well have been a possibility. The aural reception would not have been compromised this way, though the audience’s sensitivity possibly would have been. Squeamish stomachs beware.

The Sacrificial Crisis Atreus’s motivations for the murders, which he masks as sacrifice, give rise to an examination of the validity of sacrifice. On the surface, the murder of Thyestes’s sons by Atreus is justified because they are indeed an offering to the gods in thanks for his apparent reconciliation with Thyestes: ‘For my part, I shall offer the designated victims to the gods above’ (Thyestes, iii. 545). Atreus’s choice of victims—which proves dreadfully ironic for Thyestes who celebrates his new union with Atreus by unknowingly feasting on the flesh of his children—allows him to take his revenge without severing ties with the gods, but instead honouring them. According to Girard, the choice of surrogate victim in a ritual sacrifice is arbitrary, for

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any of king, peasant, or animal (the usual substitute for a human, hence the term scapegoat) can fulfil the role of sacrificial victim in order to rid the community of an outbreak of violence; therefore, Atreus is theoretically able to perform his act of revenge without fear of divine retribution (Girard, Violence, p. 271). The death of the sacrificial victim is a means to bring about the end of a plague of violence, but the sacrificial act cannot be tainted in any way or a sacrificial crisis will ensue: The sacrificial crisis, that is, the disappearance of the sacrificial rites, coincides with the disappearance of the difference between impure violence and purifying violence. When this difference has been effaced, purification is no longer possible and impure, contagious, reciprocal violence spreads throughout the community. (Girard, Violence, p. 51)11

The rules surrounding sacrifice are determined by the social custom or religion of any given group or community. Although motivated by the passion of revenge, Atreus is extremely careful in committing the murders because he understands that a sacrificial crisis may result if he is not. The Messenger reveals that as high Priest and overseer of the sacrifice, Atreus may act with hastiness, but he is nonetheless precise in carrying out the ritual murders which equally satisfy his lust for vengeance: messenger

Once Atreus enters the place in a frenzy, dragging his brother’s children, the altar is fitted out. Who could express it properly? He pulls the youths’ princely hands behind their backs, and binds their sorrowful heads with a purple band of wool. The incense is not missing, nor Bacchus’ holy liquid nor the knife that touches the victims with salted meal. Every part of the ritual is kept, to ensure that such an outrage is performed by the rules. (Thyestes, iv. 682)

Atreus need not fear any retribution from the gods as his sacrifice is carried out in line with custom in spite of the frenzy with which he enters the sacred place. Presumably, he carries out his tasks with more controlled vigour. The whole purpose of sacrifice, iterated by Girard, is to rid the community of negative violence. In Thyestes, the victims are sacrificed for two reasons: to celebrate the reconciliation between the brothers and to unknowingly purge the negative violence brought upon the house by Fury

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via the ghost of Tantalus. Thyestes does not know that his sons have been appointed sacrificial victims; naturally, he would vehemently oppose the choice. Regardless of the fact that Atreus is insincere in making peace with his brother, and that Thyestes is unaware of the identities of the sacrificial victims, the sacrifice commemorating their union is an example of positive violence. As Girard explains, and as the tragedy perhaps attests, the concept of positive violence is never as straightforward as it could be. The following formula can be perverted: The surrogate victim is generally destroyed, and always expelled from the community. As the violence subsides it is thought to have departed with the victim, to have somehow been projected outside the community. The community itself is felt to be free of infection—so long, that is, as the cultural order within it is respected. (Girard, Violence, p. 281)

Sacrifice can indeed go wrong, even though it is an example of positive violence. Atreus appeases the gods, and the victims are properly expelled from the community through Thyestes’s digestive system thereby deeming the sacrifice as positive violence. Thyestes nonetheless waits for divine retribution at the end of the play, but his wait is in vain for he has disregarded the social order because he believes his sons were the victims of a fraudulent sacrifice as part of Atreus’s plot to fulfil his revenge. But even though the gods do not respond to Thyestes’s pleas in the final scene of the play, his story is not yet complete. Moreover, Atreus’s murder of Thyestes’s children begins another cycle of negative violence. Further, the issue of cannibalism complicates matters for Thyestes and the legitimacy of his appeal for retribution or revenge against his brother. It adds another dimension to the sacrifice. Note Bataille’s comments on ritualistic cannibalism: Man is never looked upon as butchers’ meat, but he is frequently eaten ritually. The man who eats human flesh knows full well that this is a forbidden act; knowing this taboo to be fundamental he will religiously violate it nevertheless. (Bataille, p. 71)

Thyestes does not eat of the flesh knowingly, which means that he is not legitimately taking part in a religious feast. His ignorance may absolve him of guilt, but he is nonetheless in violation of a taboo. This fact alone causes the gods to withdraw, thereby nullifying Thyestes’s appeal to them for justice.

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Contagious Furor and Insatiability Given the furor and desire with which Atreus acts, it is interesting that he refrains from feasting upon the flesh of his nephews. Bataille notes that the desire to feed upon flesh is manifest once cruelty is introduced into sacrifice (Bataille, p. 80). Human flesh is ‘“forbidden”, sacred, and the very prohibition attached to [eating] it is what arouses the desire’ (Bataille, p. 72). Yet, Atreus does not desire to eat the flesh himself, even though he is taking part in a religious sacrifice and can therefore violate the taboo against cannibalism. His only regret is that he did not tell Thyestes he was eating his own children during the act itself. In Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, a similar situation occurs when Georgina forces Albert to eat the cooked body of her lover, Michael; she even has the pleasure of calling Albert a ‘cannibal’ before murdering him with a single gunshot to the head. Georgina, in effect, fulfils Atreus’s desire, not to consume the flesh, but to reveal the identity of whom Albert is consuming; the variety of flesh is a non-issue in this case, for it is impossible to imagine Michael’s body, cooked whole and laid out in its entirety, as anything other than human. There is another possibility to consider in assessing the sacrifice, consumption of flesh, and the ensuing crisis in Thyestes as it can be argued that Fury herself instigates the run of negative violence by unleashing Tantalus as a plague, something which the spectre himself intuits: ‘Am I sent forth like some dread exhalation from a fissure in the earth, or as a plague to scatter foul contagion among the nations?’ (Thyestes, i. 87). Famous Renaissance parallels are the ghosts of Don Andrea in The Spanish Tragedy, who brings epidemic revenge upon the Spanish court, and King Hamlet, who inundates Denmark with an atmosphere of contagion because of his ‘Murder most foul’ (Hamlet, i. 5. 27). Although Fury may appear as just another mythical figure insinuating her presence in human affairs, her name reveals her intentions for the house of Tantalus. She unleashes his ghost to bring furor upon his descendants, which he does, albeit reluctantly. These ghosts, both the ancient Roman and Renaissance creations, work to establish the atmosphere and the nature of the action in their respective tragedies. They act as symbols of the contagious furor unleashed. The plague of Tantalus is not an actual plague, but metaphorical; however, the result of his being unleashed leads to the same kind of violence bursting forth from the terror of expectant death. In a Theatre of Cruelty staging, the ghost of Tantalus would be a prominent visual symbol to

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demonstrate the ever-present atmosphere of furor throughout the performance. The ghost, either human or mannequin, would have a permanent and prominent position upon the stage, a constant visual reminder thus visually enforcing the themes of the play. Tantalus also represents insatiable desire, his punishment from the gods for both stealing ambrosia and for murdering his own son, Pelops, whom Tantalus unsuccessfully tried to feed to the gods. The punishment itself is slightly different depending on the source consulted, but according to Ovid in Book iv of the Metamorphoses, he is a tormented shade in the underworld: ‘Here Tantalus reaches for the water he can never catch, and the overhanging tree for ever eludes his grasp’ (Ovid, p.  106). Unable to satiate his thirst or fill his stomach, he is ordered by Fury to inflict his crimes on his descendants: ‘bring havoc on the housegods, summon hatred, slaughter, death, fill the whole house with Tantalus’ (Thyestes, i. 52). The atmosphere of furor is accompanied by cannibalism, murder, and desire, translated to the audience primarily through the characters and action in the tragedy. Rhetorically, Tantalus is the metonym for the plague, which brings furious chaos and an ensuing cycle of negative violence. Aside from the revisions to dramatic structure, which enable Fury to establish the action of the play and the ghost of Tantalus to represent the atmosphere of contagion, Senecan tragedy also featured rich characters arguably more complex than those present in Greek drama. Contrast Sophocles’s Oedipus, who ‘is initially a benign ruler amidst his people, selfconfident and determined’ with Seneca’s Oedipus, who appears at the start of the play as ‘isolated and already obsessed with anxiety and guilt’, thus, according to John G. Fitch, ‘keeping with the inward turn of Seneca’s dramas and their concern with mental states’.12 Although using a type character can be an effective allegorical device, depending on the play and the playwright’s intentions, Seneca did not construct his characters strictly according to convention. His influence is seen in characters like Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy, for example, who is the allegorical figure of revenge, but even as a type, he betrays his dramatic composition and demonstrates complexity in expressing hesitation, fragility, remorse, and adoration (for his dead mistress). The Chorus as a whole—which in ­traditional Greek drama was a means of clarifying plot—also betrays its true disposition in Senecan tragedy and transcends classification. The Chorus’s move from ignorance to knowledge in Thyestes is a well-noted example of character development that is neither straightforward nor predictable. Generally, the Chorus reacts to

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the central action of the text without any foreknowledge of events. The Chorus does not know, for example, Atreus’s true intention in summoning his brother Thyestes back to court. But the Chorus does recognize that although Thyestes praises his new-­found solemnity, he is nevertheless drawn towards the crown: thyestes

While I stood on high, I never ceased to feel terror, or to fear the very sword at my side. Oh, what a blessing it is to stand in no one’s way, to take carefree meals lying on the ground! (Thyestes, iii. 447)

Thyestes appears sincere in his praise of the simple life, but his desire for power makes his brother’s request to rule together impossible for him to resist, with or without the added atmosphere of contagionious furor—in this instance, accompanied by desire—the figure Tantalus has brought to the house. Thyestes accepts the offer with wonderful phrasing that is suggestive of the irony he is likely unaware of: thyestes All that is yours, brother, I regard as mine. […] Then I accept. I shall bear the title of king imposed on me, but the laws and army will be subject to you, along with myself. (Thyestes, iii. 535, 542)

He aligns himself with his brother most readily, despite his love for the life of solitude. His acceptance of the offer proves fatal for Thyestes’s sons, who he previously warned of the allure of power. Thyestes truly becomes subject to Atreus and his revenge. In the second Ode, the Chorus comments on the private life as opposed to kingship, something that is all too familiarly tied to tyranny, and thereby bound to the sword: chorus



Who wishes may stand in power on a palace’s slippery peak: let sweet repose sate me. Set in an obscure place let me bask in gentle leisure; unknown to any Quirites let my life flow on through peace.

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So, when my days have passed without turmoil, let me die an old plebeian man. (Thyestes, ii. 391)

According to Fitch, the Chorus was a means for Seneca to give a voice to Stoicism within the text. The autocracy of Atreus is in direct contrast to the paradoxical stoic idea that ‘the wise man alone is king’, and Atreus is even further removed from Seneca’s own ideal of kingship, the ‘rex iustus, i.e. of one who holds temporal power but exercises it with justice and clemency’ as described in his De clementia.13 Instead, Seneca gives his audience one insatiable and tyrannical ruler and his double, his brother, who is just as despotic. Atreus is clearly not a rex iustus, as he is filled with a rage for revenge that his role as tyrant will enable him to act upon. If there are allusions within the text to imperial Rome—‘themes of megalomania, lust for power, violation of family relationships, and oppression of citizens’—it is not without a planned and deliberate irony (Fitch, ii, 224). Seneca survived Caligula, and would have outlived Nero, had the plot to assassinate him succeeded. He lived, therefore, in a time of furor. For his tragedies to reflect this is not surprising; Atreus is the perfect embodiment of a savage tyrant, whether or not based directly or indirectly on either Caligula or Nero. If the theatre is not the place for in-depth character analysis as Artaud writes in his essay ‘No More Masterpieces’—‘Leave textual criticism to students’ (My translation)14—Atreus is the ideal character because he is easy to understand and speaks openly about his motivations. He is so insatiable, so tyrannical, that it is as if he exists for no reason other than to obtain his revenge, the desire for which he cannot resist: atreus

Idle, inert, impotent, and (what I count the greatest reproach for a tyrant in high matters) unavenged: after so many crimes, after your brother’s treachery and the breaking of every principle, do you act with futile complaints—you, Atreus in anger? By now the whole world should be resounding to your weapons, fleets on each coast should be stirring up the twin seas; by now fields and cities should be alight with flames, and the drawn sword glinting everywhere. […] Let all who hide and protect that hated creature perish in a blood bath. (Thyestes, ii. 176, 188)

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Tantalus appears to have awoken the inactive tyrant into action.15 Not sure how his revenge will manifest itself in the beginning of the second act, he knows that mercy is by no means an option: ‘Slaying is for a lenient tyrant; in my kingdom death is something people beg for’ (Thyestes, ii. 247). Artaud would have admired the concise language of the Senecan aphorism, one of the most imitated features of Senecan style in the Renaissance. Atreus’s intentions are steadfast, and his speech direct. He is as exacting as the tyrant Count Cenci in Artaud’s Les Cenci, but arguably more lucid, for Count Cenci’s stability is exchanged for madness. Atreus is of sound mind, albeit of a mind focused on revenge. Atreus is a tyrant in control of furor whereas Count Cenci yields to it. The plague of Tantalus and the furor he unleashes seem to allow Atreus to concentrate on revenge. His madness is not accompanied by chaos, so that he, at the very least, appears sane. This exactness is an asset as he must first fool Thyestes into believing that he is indeed sincere in his request for peace and for a duumvirate. Atreus can also find association with Shakespeare’s characterization of Hamlet, who chastises himself for prolonging his revenge and appears mad in his intent, and of Richard iii, who is so completely bound to committing atrocity, stimulated by revenge and a desire for the crown, that he becomes almost inhuman in his desires, an allegorical figure of Vice, who denies himself all manner of understanding of custom and community, appearing as detached, subversive, and evil. Atreus’s very lack of mercy coupled with his insatiability and bloodlust liken him more to an animal than a human being. Atreus’s insatiability is bestial, for he is not satisfied once he achieves revenge, and only wishes that he had not been so hasty in its achievement: atreus

Even this is too little for me. Straight from the wound I should have poured the hot blood into your mouth, so you could drink their lifeblood while they lived. I have cheated my anger in my haste. […] My anger was to no avail. He tore his sons in his sacrilegious mouth, but he did not know it, they did not know it. (Thyestes, v. 1053, 1066) His insatiable desire, manifest in his wanting to injure his brother as much as possible, is inhumanely vicious. The series of images throughout the play promoting hunger and thirst alongside insatiable desire, work to ‘index man as appetite, his essential status as beast’ (Boyle, Tragic Seneca, p. 44).

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Bestial imagery is present in acts three and four, and is specifically connected to Atreus. Once he has Thyestes in his sights, like a predatory animal, he longs to strike hard and fast, but he must conceal his true intentions or, in sensing danger, his quarry—Thyestes—will flee: atreus

So with a keen-nosed Umbrian hound tracking beasts, held on a long leash, his snout bent down to probe the trails: while he scents the boar far off and faintly, he is obedient and silent in scouring the place; but when the prey is closer, he struggles with all the force of his neck and bays to hurry his slow master and fights free of restraint. When anger senses blood, it knows no concealment. (Thyestes, iii. 497)

It is impressive that Atreus is able to conceal his anger and his desire given the furor with which he acts. When he prepares Thyestes’s sons for sacrifice, the Messenger reveals that Atreus is completely galvanized: ‘As in the woods by the Ganges a hungry tigress wavers between two young bulls, craving each prey and uncertain where to sink her teeth first’ (Thyestes, iv. 708). He is also described as an Armenian lion that is still unsatisfied after indulging in flesh (Thyestes, iv. 732–43). Instead of a human being sacrificing animals, this particular beast brutalizes human beings. This human-animal inversion is very important to Artaud’s concept of theatre as it implies that the human being is more atavistic in nature than ‘civilized’. This lack of civilization and reigning primitivism by inversion is the type of atmosphere Artaud requires in his theatre.16 In Thyestes, the inversion begins with the sacrifice of Thyestes’s sons, and ends with his appeal to the gods for aid in the final moments of the play. By the end of the play, the gods withdraw. In their absence, Atreus replaces the gods (Boyle, Tragic Seneca, p.  54). This implies that he sacrifices Thyestes’s sons in praise of himself, which is a compelling notion. What is more probable is that Atreus is now on par with the gods. Perhaps this untouched ‘civilization’ in the play is what prompted Artaud to write so admiringly of Thyestes in his letter to Jean Paulhan: There is no better written example of what can be meant by cruelty in the theatre than all the Tragedies of Seneca, but especially Atreus and Thyestes. Visible in the Blood, the cruelty is even more present in the mind. These monsters are wicked as only blind forces can be, and theatre exists, I think, only on a level that is not yet human. […]

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In Seneca the primordial forces can be heard in the spasmodic vibration of the words. (‘Letter to Jean Paulhan, 16 December, 1932’; ‘Letters from 1932–33’, in Sontag, p. 307)17

Atreus, as a bestial character, unleashes all the power of a primordial force, able to penetrate the audience via the cruelty found in his control of events, in bloody action, and especially in the mind through the reverberation of spoken language. Artaud recognizes that the verbal presentation of the text is just as important as the potential dramatization of the action, the visual portrayal. Action and words work alongside the necessary rigour to connect to the listener’s or viewer’s awareness, penetrating the senses. This is noteworthy given that readings of Artaud tend to focus on his preference for dramatic spectacle over the language of the text. Although Artaud’s goal in creating his Theatre of Cruelty was to emphasize the importance of the language of gesture, alternatives exist, provided they are effective. His adaptation of Shelley’s The Cenci and his admiration for Seneca’s written works prove that spoken language can be equally effective in the Theatre of Cruelty and that its repetition does not have to parallel stability and predictability, but that the language of the text allows for variety and volatility.

Ritual and Bacchic Theatre For Artaud, the creative process, indeed creation itself, is never complete. There is always a necessity to create and the theatre obeys this desire with every new performance (TD, iv, 122; Richards, pp.  102–03). Artaud believed that the audience did not necessarily have to actively participate onstage in order to become part of this process and thereby become penetrated by it. His ideal was to place the audience in the centre of the theatre, with the action taking place all around them; this way, the audience is part of the ritual of theatre surrounding them. Metatheatrics help to break down the idea of theatre as illusion or as a masterpiece, invariably static and traditionally unadaptive, and make theatre more immediate and relevant. Similar to Bacchic theatre, where the themes of violence, transgression, madness, ecstasy, and challenge of authority are explored and eventually released through ritual and sacrifice, Artaud’s theatre is active. Avant-garde director Richard Schechner—inspired by Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre (1947), and Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre among others—led his Performance

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Group in an ‘attempt to rediscover the efficacy of performance as ritual experience’, just as he felt the theatre needs to do.18 His Dionysus in 69, staged in New  York from 1968 to 1969, saw the principles of his Environmental Theatre realized in an adaptation of Euripides’s Bacchae which was formally patterned but also improvised and participatory.19 Performances took place in the Performance Garage, a large but unadorned space—Artaud specified a large space, such as a hanger or barn—with various platforms and towers and plenty of space all around, which allowed the audience to interact with the actors and eventually participate in the onstage ritual if they chose. During an intense moment of creative regeneration, the actors onstage invited the audience to participate in the ‘Birth Ritual’ scene during which Dionysus is born. On Grotowski’s advice, in this scene, and during the ecstasy dance following it, the performers appeared naked, thus elucidating the importance of corporality and its discovery in the performance (Zeitlin, p. 68). This invitation was extended to the audience members who appeared in the scenes; the audience able to actively take part in the ritual taking place all around them was the principal motivation.20 Boyle sees Senecan tragedy as theatrical on the basis that Seneca’s concept of theatre is essentially Bacchic in nature. He makes the connection between Artaud’s idea of plague as a redemptive and regenerative process in ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ and in Seneca’s representation of the plague in Oedipus. Boyle is most concerned with the liberating forces of the plague at work throughout the play: But there is a suggestion too that the transformative process of plague itself, its grotesqueries, violence and carnage, its production of the ‘dreadful face of novel death, more grievous than death’ (dira noui facies leti, | grauior leto, Oedipus 180f.; cf. Andromache at Troades 783), its metamorphosis of human behaviour, are essentially Bacchic and belong to Seneca’s ideology of theatre. Not only to Seneca’s. (Tragic Seneca, p. 113)

They also belong to Artaud’s ideology of theatre. Here follows the comprehensive quotation from ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ to which Boyle refers: The action of the theater, like that of plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it shakes off the asphyxiat-

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ing inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony of the senses; and in revealing to the collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it. (Richards, pp. 31–32)21

The plague allows people to act in ways they would normally never consciously consider. The theatre, like the plague, drains the abscess of inertia that prevents heroic action and instead allows for intuitive sensory response. The action in Oedipus, which is not a revenge play, is different from the action in Thyestes. In Thyestes, Arteus benefits from the plague of Tantalus which results in a Bacchic release and a behavioural shift, thus allowing him to achieve his revenge. His acts may not be of a positive or heroic nature— dependent perhaps on one’s perspective regarding revenge—but he would not have had the courage to remain steadfast in his deception of Thyestes, nor perform the role as Priest in sacrificing his brother’s sons, without the aid of the plague of violence personified as the ghost of Tantalus. Boyle continues, maintaining that Seneca not only reveals this duality or two-facedness, but he ‘strips theatre itself’ in a series of metatheatric role-plays the characters perform in front of one another: the forgiving brother, the gracious king, and so on (Boyle, Tragic Seneca, p. 114). In Thyestes, Atreus’s revenge does not exist unless Thyestes is there to witness the devastating acts. Atreus needs his brother’s presence to acknowledge his deeds and cry out in heartache once Atreus reveals his crimes after the cannibalistic banquet (Thyestes, v. 1068–1096). Only then is Atreus successful in his revenge. The ‘true palm’ he wins is not from a sanctioned sporting competition, but rather a dramatic performance that convinces his brother that he wishes to make peace with him and that he offers him the crown as a sign of his earnestness (Thyestes, v. 1097). The other sign he offers is his sacrifice to the gods. Seneca’s Medea is most similar to Atreus in this manner. She feigns ignorance of her husband’s infidelity, appears genuine in her acceptance of his intended marriage, and even asks his forgiveness for her harsh words against him: medea

And now lastly I make this request, that any words poured out by my distracted pain should not stay in your mind. Let the memory of my better self remain with you, and let these words that yielded to anger be effaced.22

After he departs her company, her malevolence is revealed to the audience:

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He has left. Is it true? You go oblivious of me, and all my deeds? Am I forgotten for you? I shall never be forgotten. To work, summon all your strengths and skills. The benefit of your crimes is that you think nothing a crime. There is scant room to deceive them: I am feared. Attack at the point where no one can fear anything. Press on! Now is the time for daring, and for undertaking all that Medea can do, and all that she cannot do. (Medea, iii. 560–67)

She plays her part as dutiful wife so convincingly that Jason is truly shocked once her revenge plot is finalized with the murder of their own children. Furor-inspired cruelty—in both understandings of the word—often elucidates the mind of the criminal.23 The clarity with which the mad function makes their actions that much more penetrating, more immediate, more intuitively responded to, for any audience, intended or otherwise. The only other piece of evidence which remains of Artaud’s play exists in the letters to Jean Paulhan and Jean-Louis Barrault—the latter only briefly mentions in a postscript that Artaud had completed a tragedy in the fashion of Seneca: ‘And I also must read you my tragedy: The Torture of Tantalus’ (My translation)24—and a press release alongside a few notes written on Seneca’s Thyestes found in the Gallimard complete works under the title À propos d’une pièce perdue (About a Lost Play).Written by Artaud on 6 July 1934, it details his plans to perform his adaptation of Seneca’s L’Atrée et Thyeste in Marseille.25 Artaud intended to stage the play in either an exhibition hall or a factory in order to impart its immediacy in relation to its movement and relevance to his contemporary environment, an objective mirrored by Schechner in similarly staging Dionysus in 69 at the Performance Garage 25 years later. This is important, for although Artaud’s The Tortures of Tantalus is an adaptation of Seneca’s classic play, it is nonetheless an original piece of work. Artaud insists that because creation is never-ending, so too is a work of art, an attitude he held in promoting his Les Cenci, which was not simply an adaptation of Shelley and Stendhal. He wished to fill the theatre not only with the educated public familiar with the works of Seneca, but with the public en masse, and present the work in an impactful way, thus making it relevant. Artaud classifies Thyestes as one of the Great Myths, an essential category in his Theatre of Cruelty. In ‘The Theatre and the Plague’, Artaud reveals the following about the freedom with which the plague operates, and its connection to Great Myths:

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We can now say that all true freedom is dark, and infallibly identified with sexual freedom which is also dark, although we do not know precisely why. For it has been a long time since the Platonic Eros, the procreative sense, the freedom of life vanished beneath the somber veneer of the Libido which is identified with all that is dirty, abject, infamous in the process of living and of throwing oneself headlong with a natural and impure vigor, with a perpetually renewed strength, upon life. And that is why all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation. (Richards, pp. 30–31)26

The Bacchic origins Boyle identifies in Seneca’s theatre are explicitly present in Artaud’s. Whereas Seneca considers the events which cause the behavioural shift, Artaud has them already in existence. Artaud knew it was necessary, therefore, that his theatre, reliant on his new language of gesture, needed to incorporate this dark unknown as a way of penetrating his audience. The innovations ‘of sound, voice, movement, and gesture’ incorporated in his play would reflect this understanding of freedom as something otherworldly, unpleasant, mysterious, dark (My translation).27 For Artaud to reach his entire audience, it would also be necessary to feature instances of tangible, physical cruelty in order to provide his audience with the concrete clues as to what true freedom is: Where the masses may resist subtle dialogue whose intellectual rhythm escapes them, they will not resist the effects of physical surprise, the dynamism of cries and violent gestures, visual explosions, and a whole series of calculated tetanic effects intended to act directly upon the physical sensibility of the spectator.28

The Theatre of Cruelty, therefore, held that although cruelty was representative of the rigour of life, showing carnage was often necessary in demonstrating this rigour to its audience. Ten months after Artaud wrote these stipulations for The Tortures of Tantalus, Les Cenci opened in Paris. Arguably not as violent as Seneca’s Thyestes, Artaud nonetheless classified the story as a Great Myth and attempted to portray rigour through subtle dialogue in addition to his new language of gesture which included stylized, physical and psychological cruelty, but without bloodshed.29 Unfortunately, the elite audience was not amenable towards Artaud’s production.

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Determining why Thyestes was significant to Artaud’s conception of his Theatre of Cruelty can be uncovered by examining the notes that accompany the press release for the play. In ‘a portrait of the period’, Artaud asks two questions about the play: 1. What is the Tantalus Myth doing in the story of Atreus? 2. Why a story about Atreus and Tantalus, why Greek Drama? There are so many more urgent problems in life of the very greatest necessity and also so many kicks missed by execrated poets, aesthetes, archeologists [sic] and all useless people, since sensitivity about manners escapes them, as do notions of the most basic necessities. (‘About a lost play’, in Corti, ii, 153)30

We know from Seneca that the myth of Tantalus has its place in the story as a means of establishing the atmosphere of insatiable desire, thus giving Atreus the added drive to fulfil his revenge. The second question considers the relevance of Greek drama to the modern world. In the final draft of the press release, Artaud states that the sublime ideas present within Greek drama are impossible to overlook as is their relevance. Tantalus, the ancient or modern man, thinks he has everything, but in reality, possesses nothing: Man is Tantalus he thinks he has everything! power of the possessive word. Everything deceives him: delusions of the period, love, the love of a lifetime, riches; a lure, examine them closely—nothing there. (‘About a lost play’, in Corti, ii, 155)31

Tantalus does not even fully understand his own desires, for he is ordered to wreak havoc upon his family. The only true freedom in the text belongs to the gods and the underworld entity, Fury, who orchestrates the entire plot of revenge. Since Artaud felt his own society a constricting environment, it is easy to see why Tantalus and the tortures inflicted on his house would have appealed to Artaud as a metaphor for his own battles with his contemporary world. Tantalus, a figure in Hell, is defined by his deprivation, of his awareness that he has nothing. Artaud himself never ‘owned’ anything. He spent most of his life on the verge of poverty; he suffered

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from depression and opium addiction from a young age; and he was in and out of mental institutions his entire life, and continuously from 1937 to 1946. Artaud could hardly be described as a consistently functional member of his society. He lived on the fringe, so it is no wonder that he wanted his theatre to be inclusive.

William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus directed by Yukio Ninagawa Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is one of the Bard’s tributes to Seneca, and is easily identified in the long list of stage plays aligned with the Renaissance Senecan tradition largely due to its attention to exaggerated rhetoric that reinforces the brutal actions taking place upon the stage. Although some scholars have argued against the connection between Seneca and Shakespeare in the text, Robert S. Miola has worked hard to catalogue all the references to Seneca’s tragedies in the play.32 He has found the presence of Phaedra, Troades, Medea, Agamemnon, and Thyestes in Titus Andronicus either by way of allusion or by direct transposition of Senecan dialogue or phrasing. The play maintains the structure of Senecan tragedy—particularly that of Thyestes—but Shakespeare surpasses the Roman playwright because the stage play portrays a double revenge plot involving not simply one character’s major act of revenge, but a series of escalating atrocious crimes from the very first scene. Miola argues that ‘Seneca taught Renaissance writers including Shakespeare how to make scelus [crime, evil deeds] the central principle of tragic action and design, how to focus on the crime, the perpetrators, the victims, and on the moral framework violated’ (Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, p.  16). This pattern of iniquitous and inveterate revenge and retribution escalates, resulting in 14 bloody deaths to accommodate the double revenge plot which takes place over the course of the play. Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa’s 2004 production of Titus Andronicus, revived in 2006 at Stratford-Upon-Avon for the Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works festival, is the materialization of the Seneca-­ Artaud spectrum which acknowledges the Renaissance Senecan tradition. His interpretation and subsequent staging of the play links the early modern stage and the Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty via a performance which reflects the influence of Seneca upon Shakespeare’s text while fulfilling Artaud’s criteria for a Theatre of Cruelty. The Japanese language produc-

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tion imposes a different kind of restriction on language than what Artaud proposed, but is nonetheless effective in forcing the audience to comprehend the language of gesture. Ninagawa relies on the visual image to connect his audience with Shakespeare, using whatever means necessary to reflect life, including a pure white set which compels the eye to look upon the contrasted dark figures trafficking the stage. His unabridged production of Titus Andronicus, complete with its highly stylized Kabuki theatrical effects, a vivid mise en scène, and its use of metatheatrics, is a modern Shakespearean Theatre of Cruelty production. In Titus Andronicus, the audience is introduced to the three main revengers in the opening scene of the play: Titus Andronicus, the Roman war hero returned home from battle; Tamora, the Queen of Goths; and Aaron the Moor, her co-conspirator and lover. Like Thyestes, the entire action of Titus Andronicus is based upon one key moment of sacrifice; only in Shakespeare, it takes place at the start of the play. The entire atmosphere of negative violence within the play is arguably based on the death of Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus. It is the first instance of sacrifice in the play and it results in crisis. Titus is so steadfast in his belief that the sacrifice of Alarbus will appease the souls of the dead Andronici that Tamora’s pleading with Titus to spare her son is utterly futile: titus



Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me. These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain Religiously they ask a sacrifice. To this your son is marked, and die he must T’appease their groaning shadows that are gone. (Titus Andronicus, i. 121)

Lucius reveals the ritualistic way Alarbus will be sacrificed by the surviving Andronici: he will be burned to death upon a pyre, ‘And with our swords upon a pile of wood / Let’s hew his limbs till they be clean consumed’ (Titus Andronicus, i. 1. 128). By religious rights, the dead are justified in their demand (by proxy) of sacrifice over mercy. Tamora neither acknowledges these rights, nor approves the choice of victim, and so naturally she impedes the sacrifice. Girard reveals the consequences of such action:

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The hidden violence of the sacrificial crisis eventually succeeds in destroying distinctions, and this destruction in turn fuels the renewed violence. In short, it seems that anything that adversely affects the institution of sacrifice will ultimately pose a threat to the very basis of the community, to the principles on which its social harmony and equilibrium depend. (Girard, Violence, p. 52)

Although Tamora cannot prevent the sacrifice of her son, she ultimately poses a threat to social harmony by enacting her revenge upon Titus, thus fuelling the renewed violence. This sacrificial crisis leads towards the dissolution of the Roman community, predominantly affecting the Andronici. The vicious cycle of negative violence, resulting in rape and multiple murders, begins with the death of Alarbus. Although Tamora and Titus work towards revenge for the cruelty inflicted upon their offspring, Aaron’s motives are not as clear. A Marlovian character, rather than Senecan, he seems intent on villainy for no other reason than to entertain himself: ‘Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace: / Aaron will have his soul black like his face’ (Titus Andronicus, iii. 1. 203). He shows no remorse whatsoever when he reveals his part in the deaths of Bassianus, Quintus, and Martius, and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia. To Lucius’s horror, Aaron only laments the fact he cannot indulge in more crimes and satiate his appetite: lucius

Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds? Ay, that I had not done a thousand more. Even now I curse the day—and yet I think Few come within the compass of my curse— Wherein I did not some notorious ill […] But I have done a thousand dreadful things As willingly as one would kill a fly, And nothing grieves me heartily indeed But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (Titus Andronicus, v. 1. 123, 141) aaron

This same insatiability is present in Atreus, but his motivations are at least somewhat rationalized, for Thyestes committed adultery with Atreus’s wife. Aaron is a character based on type, and would be nothing more than Tamora’s lover had Shakespeare not enhanced his role. His physical appearance adds to

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his perceived status as a marginal character who insinuates himself into the plot as a means to direct others towards wickedness, thus satisfying his desire. In Ninagawa’s Titus Andronicus, distinguishing Aaron the Moor in an all-Japanese cast was achieved by casting a young, tanned, Japanese actor with blonde dreadlocks in the role. His costume helped to display his marginality: the perfect outsider, the bare-chested samurai appears in a floor-­ length red leather jacket, one of two pieces of his kamishimo. His direct addresses to the audience in act two, scenes one and three, also set him apart as he appears a striking contrast to the white set and its massive effigy to Romulus and Remus suckling beneath their she-wolf mother, an appropriate physical emblem to complement the image of Tamora as a corrupter of her young. Aaron, therefore, appears onstage with not only his own double, but Tamora’s double as well. Here, Tamora is visualized as the proverbial she-wolf instead of the tigress feeding her fury to her young as Lavinia claims her to have done: lavinia



O, do not learn her wrath! She taught it thee. The milk thou sucked’st from her did turn to marble, Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny. (Titus Andronicus, ii. 3. 143)

This image, part of the concrete language of the stage (TD, iv, 45; Richards, p. 37), reinforces the idea that Tamora and Aaron appear as the corrupters of youth, both savage and unmerciful. According to Miola, Shakespeare reformulated the revenger in Thyestes by distributing the sum of his parts, ‘transferring some of Atreus’ deplorable traits to Aaron (who, notwithstanding, has the redeeming characteristic of loving his son), and transferring the supernatural motivation of the Fury to Tamora in a serio-comic fiction’ (Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, p. 30); furthermore, Tamora also has Atreus’s desire for revenge. Her comicality is reinforced in act five, scene two when she appears as Revenge alongside her sons Chiron and Demitrius who are dressed as Rapine and Murder respectively. In Ninagawa’s production, Tamora and her sons appear on stilts wearing rich fabrics and ornate feather headdresses. All three are in constant motion for the duration of the scene, flapping their ‘wings’ and parading beneath Titus’s window in an effort to distract Titus and the audience, and for the actors to maintain their balance. They appear, then, as the living mannequins Artaud envisioned for his theatre (TD, iv, 116; Richards, p.  97), which, as in Ninagawa’s production, is

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inspired by the Noh and Kabuki theatre.33 Tamora’s usual costume of black leather promotes her marginality as both a Goth, and vicious dominatrix, who does not belong in Roman society. When costumed in a white, fur coat for the hunting scene in act two, scene three, hence exteriorizing her bestial interiority, Tamora’s knee-high black leather stiletto boots are nevertheless visible. Lavinia, always in white, purposely blends in with the pristine setting of Rome in its splendour. The contrasting costumes effectively project the characters as archetypes: Lavinia personifies purity and innocence, while Tamora and Aaron embody perversion. The delicate mise en scène of Ninagawa’s spectacle worked to welcome the gaze of the audience despite the urge to turn away from the moments of violent action in the play. Lucy Bailey’s bloody 2006 production of Titus Andronicus at the Globe, revived in 2014, is the aesthetic opposite to Ninagawa’s. Bailey sought to penetrate the audience through realism rather than stylization: instead of her dark production inducing a trace-like effect similar to Ninagawa’s spectacle, the audience members failed to focus on the action and responded by turning their heads away, and some even fainted, while others became either distracted and chose to deviate their attention from the stage to the dropping groundlings or turned away from the action so as to avoid the same fate.34 While Artaud would welcome this honest, intuitive response, and its contagiousness, once an audience ceases to focus on the action, turning away from it, the very opposite effect of what a Theatre of Cruelty production—or arguably any production—desires from its audience is realized. Ninagawa avoided ­ potentially nausiating the audience with massive amounts of blood by choosing to spill not a single drop on his immaculate set. Blood was replaced by red cords which fell freely from either a severed hand or tongue-less mouth, the same technique employed by Peter Brook in his 1955 production of Titus Andronicus.35 Further, severed body parts were glazed in a translucent plastic, thus enforcing the stylization and not the realism of the production. By portraying the physical horror of the action in this manner, Ninagawa encouraged his audience members to keep their eyes open and witness not only the crimes, but the emotional responses of the characters reacting to the horror on the stage. One of the most haunting images from the production featured a trance-induced Lavinia, bleeding red fabric cords from her wrists and mouth, slowly moving away from her naked (save for the same red cords flowing from their genitalia to the floor) captors who followed her around the stage, mocking her emotional grief and physical disfigurement. The captors imitated her moans, stifled screams, and slow movements of her broken body until, after enough

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laughing and howling at her misery, finally left her to ruin. The transformation of the once-smiling, perfectly groomed Lavinia, to the mess of a human being Chiron and Demetrius make of her, was completely devastating for the audience. The horror of her physical change was enhanced because she now appeared a stark contrast to the immaculate mise en scène. If actors have forgotten how to scream—‘No one in Europe knows how to scream any more, and particularly actors in trance no longer know how to scream’ (My translation)36—Ninagawa has reminded them how. Ninagawa did not alter a single line from Shakespeare’s text, yet throughout the play, the actors go so far as to scream while they speak and to sob in expressing their immediate emotional responses to the events taking place before reciting the scripted poetry or prose. Their screams were primeval, denoting honest releases of emotion. Words appear to be an inadequate means of expression; or, as in the final scene of the play featuring Young Lucius with Aaron’s baby in his arms, the scream is there when there are no words left to speak. He screamed directly at the audience for minutes on end, on his knees, with the baby in his arms before the scene mercifully faded to black. The use of screaming as a device is also readily available when Titus, buckling under the weight of so many deaths, loosens his grasp on his sanity. Just prior to the banquet scene, Titus is able to gather composure and ‘appears both as Procne, a revenging victim, and as Atreus, a revenging villain’ (Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, p.  30). His status as victim allows the audience to feel sympathy for him, but his role as revenger does not. And he is certainly insincere when he acts as Priest in sacrificing Chiron and Demetrius, an unsanctioned event as he kills them strictly for vengeance (the red cords appear once again as Titus slits their throats), and does not even pretend their murder is a sanctioned offering to the gods. The negative violence created by such action is immediately rectified, for shortly after he reveals the heads of Chiron and Demetrius baked in a pie to a stunned Tamora, Titus stabs her to death, and is in turn killed by Saturninus. The deaths of Lavinia, Tamora, Titus, and Saturninus follow one upon the other in close succession. Rhetoric gives way to bloodbath which is visually tolerable in Ninagawa’s production. Unlike Atreus in Thyestes, there is no time for Titus to enjoy his revenge. Prior to the opening scene of the play, the entire ensemble, including Ninagawa himself, appears on the stage in full dress engaging in casual conversation. This metatheatricality is a deliberate means to underscore the fact that the events which will traffic the stage in the coming moments are that of a played performance. Amongst the costume rails, the actors

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prepare for the event not by adopting their character roles, but by exorcizing their real selves from their bodies which will host these brutal, vengeful, and even innocent characters. The smiling actors dispersed along the stage prior to the beginning of the play contrast so entirely with the violence of the play that their presence in these opening moments reinforce its barbarism once the action begins, thus increasing the potency and severity of the performance. It is also very different from the sinister laughter of Tamora, Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius, and the desperate laughter of Titus marking his descent into madness, in the action of the play. As Artaud recognized, the anarchic freedom of laughter has its place in the theatre. Although it appears jovial at the outset of the performance, easing the audience’s mood, in the tragedy, it is directly related to the furor motivating the revengers. Seneca’s tragedies are as compelling today as when they were first written. Whether or not this was because they were adopted and reworked by the Renaissance playwrights is unknown. But Seneca’s combination of intense rhetoric with barbaric imagery, as demonstrated in this reading of Thyestes, has influenced the evolution of drama from oral to visual presentation in the theatre. The metamorphosis of dramatics from something exclusionary to inclusionary is a fascinating spectrum moving from Greek drama, to Seneca, to the Renaissance, and finally through to Artaud whose vision for his theatre was to create a flexible language of gesture able to penetrate an anaesthetized audience. His sense of mysticism surrounding creation is akin to the ancient Greek and Roman tradition, which sees man as the plaything of good and evil gods. Artaud believes it is necessary to acknowledge this evil side of creation, especially in the theatre, because an audience will respond to it. Perhaps this is also the reason why Titus Andronicus evokes such powerful emotional responses from its audience. The subtle combination of beauty and barbarism in Yukio Ninagawa’s production worked to draw the audience members in, without alienating them, thus allowing them to emotionally respond to the atrocities witnessed. This was especially true for the non-Japanese-speaking spectators who had to rely on the language of gesture and the mise en scène more than the spoken dialogue. The Senecan influences upon the play, and Artaudian influence upon the production, mark it as a performance firmly within the tradition of the Theatre of Cruelty, underlining Artaud’s legacy in inspiring the modern theatrical interpretation of early modern drama. On the larger whole, the production shows how Thyestean images of violence, sacrifice, cannibalism, and furor have worked to develop dramatics from Seneca to the present day.

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Notes 1. Artaud drafted a press release for the play, and referred to it in letters to both Jean Paulhan and Jean-Louis Barrault, all of which is documented in the Gallimard Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud: ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, in OC, ii (1961), 201–09; ‘À Jean Paulhan, 16 décembre 1932’; ‘Lettres’, in OC, iii (1970), 334–35; ‘À Jean-Louis Barrault, [Fin septembre 1935]’; ‘Lettres’, in OC, iii (1970), 340. 2. Seneca’s play is titled Thyestes; however, Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon wrote an adaptation of Seneca’s Thyestes titled L’Atrée et Thyeste (1707). Sontag concludes that this and Voltaire’s tragedy Les Pélopides ou Atrée et Thyeste are the adaptive texts Artaud was thinking of (622). However, both Laurens De Vos and Francesco Citti deduce that the original title of Le Supplice de Tantale was Atrée et Thyeste based on the press release written by Artaud on 6 July 1934. See Laurens De Vos, ‘Incest and Plague: Tragic Weapons Turned Against Tragedy in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty’, in The Locus of Tragedy, ed. by Arthur Cools, Thomas Crombez, Rosa Slegers, and Johan Taels, Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp.  263–75 (p.  264) and Francesco Citti, ‘Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Receptions of Seneca Tragicus’, in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy: Scholarly, Theatrical and Literary Receptions, ed. by Eric Dodson-Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 255–281 (pp. 272–73). 3. The Interwar period saw the turmoil of the armistice replaced by the decadence of the Roaring Twenties, only for this period of plenty to collapse during the Great Depression, which affected France in the early 1930s. Following this collapse was the Second World War. 4. See Jessica Winston, ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59.1 (2006), 29–58; Stuart Gillespie, ‘Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger’, in Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources, Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary Series (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), pp. 448–58; A.J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (London: Routledge), 1997; Robert S.  Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; rep. 2001); Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Frederick Kiefer, ‘Seneca’s Influence on Elizabethan Tragedy: An Annotated Bibliography’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 21a (1978), 17–34 for an annotated bibliography of scholarship on the SenecaRenaissance connection from the 1880s to 1978. 5. ‘Je suis en train de lire Sénèque, dont il me paraît fou qu’on puisse le confondre avec le moraliste précepteur de je ne sais quel tyran de la

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décadence—ou alors le Précepteur était celui-ci, mais vieilli, désespéré de la magie. Quoi qu’il en soit celui-ci me paraît le plus grand auteur tragique de l’histoire, un initié aux Secrets et qui mieux qu’Eschyle a su les faire passer dans les mots. Je pleure en lisant son théâtre d’inspiré, et j’y sens sous le verbe des syllabes crépiter de la plus atroce manière le bouillonnement transparent des forces du chaos. Et ceci me fait penser à quelque chose: une fois guéri j’ai l’intention d’organiser des lectures dramatiques—pour un homme qui nie le texte au théâtre ce ne sera pas mal—, lectures publiques où je lirai des Tragédies de Sénèque, et tous les commanditaires possibles du Théâtre de la Cruauté seront convoqués.’ ‘À Jean Paulhan, 16 décembre 1932’; ‘Lettres’, in OC, iii (1970), 334–35 (pp. 334–35); ‘To Jean Paulhan, December 16, 1932’; ‘Letters from 1932–33’, in Sontag, p. 307. In his letter, Artaud makes note of the two distinct elements of Senecan influence pertinent to the Renaissance: bloody revenge in his plays, and moral maxims in his letters and essays. 6. His lecture at the Sorbonne on 6 April 1933 for Doctor Allendy’s ‘Nouvelles Idées’ series became a performance in its own right, as Anaïs Nin’s description featured in Chapter 3 attests, and anticipated the Theatre of Cruelty. 7. For an in-depth account of the performance, see Barber, Blows and Bombs, pp. 135–38. 8. F.L.  Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 57. 9. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. by Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols, ed. by E. Capps, T.E. Page and W.H.D. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1917–25), i (1917), 7.2–7.3. 10. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Thyestes, in Seneca ix: Tragedies ii: ‘Oedipus’; ‘Agamemnon’; ‘Thyestes’; [Seneca]: ‘Hercules on Oeta’; ‘Octavia’, ed. and trans. by John G. Fitch, 2 vols, ed. by Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library, 78 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002–04), ii (2004), 215–323 (iv. 755). All further quotations and translations from Thyestes are from this edition. 11. A sacrificial crisis can also occur when something devastatingly wrong occurs in a community. Girard uses the example of Oedipus Rex, in which a plague is unleashed upon Thebes because of the wrongful murder of the King of Thebes by his only son. The Theban plague exists because of Oedipus’s patricide which is classed as negative violence. 12. Introduction to Oedipus, ed. and trans. by John G. Fitch, ii, 3–16 (pp. 5–6). 13. Introduction to Thyestes, ed. and trans. by John G.  Fitch, ii, 217–28 (p. 221). 14. ‘Laissons aux pions les critiques de textes.’ TD, iv, 90.

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15. At the end of act three in The Spanish Tragedy, the ghost of Don Andrea commands the sleeping Revenge to awake and infuse Hieronimo into action. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1592), ed. by David Bevington, Revels Student Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), iii. 15. 8–29. 16. Details of this are in the Preface to his essays in The Theatre and Its Double: ‘Le Théâtre et la Culture’, iv, 11–18; Richards, ‘The Theatre and Culture’, pp. 7–13. 17. ‘On ne peut mieux trouver d’exemple écrit de ce qu’on peut entendre par cruauté au théâtre que dans toutes les Tragédies de Sénèque, mais surtout dans Atrée et Thyeste. Visible dans le Sang, elle l’est encore plus dans l’esprit. Ces monstres sont méchants comme seules des forces aveugles peuvent l’être, et il n’y a théâtre, je pense, qu’au degré pas encore humain. […] Dans Sénèque les forces primordiales font entendre leur écho dans la vibration spasmodique des mots.’ ‘Lettres’, iii, 335. 18. William Hunter Shephard’s The Dionysus Group (1991) quoted in Froma I.  Zeitlin, ‘Dionysus in 69’, in Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, ed. by Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.  49–75 (p. 57). 19. The six axioms for Environmental Theatre are as follows: ‘1. The theatrical event is a set of related transactions; 2. All the space is used for the performance; 3. The theatrical event can take place either in a totally transformed space or in ‘found’ space; 4. Focus is flexible and variable; 5. All production elements speak their own language; 6. The text need be neither the starting point nor the goal of a production. There may be no verbal text at all.’ Schechner attributes the roots of point five to Artaud. His influence is also identified in point six. Richard Schechner, Environmental Theatre: An Expanded New Edition including ‘Six Axioms For Environmental Theatre’, rev. edn, The Applause Acting Series (New York: Applause Books, 1994), pp. xix–li. 20. The ‘Total Caress’ scene which invited audience interaction in the form of caresses of the female actors eventually had to be cut from the play as it grew out of control and dangerous for the performers. 21. ‘L’action du théâtre comme celle de la peste, est bienfaisante, car poussant les hommes à se voir tels qu’ils sont, elle fait tomber le masque, elle découvre le mensonge, la veulerie, la bassesse, la tartuferie; […] elle les invite à prendre en face du destin une attitude héroïque et supérieure qu’elles n’auraient jamais eue sans cela.’ TD, iv, 39. 22. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Medea, in Seneca viii: Tragedies ii: ‘Hercules’; ‘Trojan Women’; ‘Phoenician Women’; ‘Medea’; ‘Phaedra’, ed. and trans. by John G. Fitch, 2 vols, ed. by Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library, 62

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(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002–04), i (2002), 333–433 (iii. 553–57). All further quotations and translations from Medea are from this edition. 23. The mind of the criminal in completing acts of murder is further examined in Chapter 6. 24. ‘Et puis il faut que je te lise ma tragédie: Le supplice de Tantale.’ ‘À JeanLouis Barrault, [Fin septembre 1935]’; ‘Lettres’, in OC, iii (1970), 340. 25. ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, in OC, ii (1961), 201–09 (pp. 203–05); ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, ii, 205; ‘About a lost play’, in Corti, ii, 149– 55 (p. 151). 26. ‘On peut dire maintenant que toute vraie liberté est noire et se confond immanquablement avec la liberté du sexe qui est noire elle aussi sans que l’on sache très bien pourquoi. Car il y a longtemps que l’Eros platonicien, le sens génésique, la liberté de vie, a disparu sous le revêtement sombre de la Libido que l’on identifie avec tout ce qu’il y a de sale, d’abject, d’infamant dans le fait de vivre, de se précipiter avec une vigueur naturelle et impure, avec une force toujours renouvelée vers la vie. Et c’est ainsi que tous les grands Mythes sont noirs et qu’on ne peut imaginer hors d’une atmosphère de carnage, de torture, de sang versé, toutes les magnifiques Fables qui racontent aux foules le premier partage sexuel et le premier carnage d’essences qui apparissent dans la création.’ TD, iv, 37–38. 27. ‘du son, de la voix, des mouvements, du geste.’ ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, ii, 205. 28. ‘Là où le gros de la foule résiste à un discours subtil, dont la rotation intellectuelle lui échappe, elle ne résiste pas à des effets de surprise physique, au dynamisme de cris et de gestes violents, à des explosions visuelles, à tout un ensemble d’effets tétanisants venus à point nommé et utilisés pour agir de façon directe sur la sensibilité matérielle du spectateur.’ ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, ii, 205; ‘About a lost play’, in Corti, ii, 152. 29. One of these gestures in Les Cenci featured physical cruelty: the torture of Beatrice. This will be discussed in Chapter 7. 30. ‘1° Qu’est-ce que le Mythe de Tantale, qu’est-ce que ça vient faire dans l’histoire d’Atrée? 2° Pourquoi une histoire d’Atrée et de Tantale, un Théâtre Grec, il y a dans la vie tellement de problèmes plus pressants et de toute première nécessité et aussi tant de coups de pied qui se perdent pour les poètes, les esthètes, les archéologues maudits et tous les inutiles à qui échappent aussi bien le sentiment des convenances que la notion des plus élémentaires nécessités.’ ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, ii, 206. 31. ‘L’Homme c’est Tantale, / il croit tout tenir! / puissance du Verbe possessif. / Tout le trompe: / les illusions de l’âge, / l’amour, / l’unique amour, / la fortune: un leurre, / regardez-la de près—il n’y a rien.’ ‘À propos d’une pièce perdue’, ii, 208–09.

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32. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; repr. 2001). In the section on Titus Andronicus, Miola refers to Howard Baker as one critic in particular who has tried to dissociate Shakespeare from Seneca in his 1939 work, Induction to Tragedy. 33. The Noh theatre uses masks and often feature actors wearing traditional headdresses. Although today Noh theatre companies are all male, they were originally mixed gender, as is the modern Kabuki theatre. Actors tend to move slowly and ceremonially, emphasizing the ritual of the performance(s), around sparse sets. 34. Some audiences did, however, experience a truly visceral purgation in the 2014 revival, with some of its members vomiting in the theatre. Lyn Gardner, ‘Titus Andronicus review – Shakespeare’s bloodbath becomes a sadistic delight’, The Guardian, 11 May 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/may/11/titus-andronicus-globe-review. 35. Brook’s are described as red ribbons. In Ninagawa’s Titus, Howard Choy refers to them as tassels. I see them more as cords. ‘Toward a Poetic Minimalism of Violence: On Tang Shu-wing’s Titus Andronicus 2.0’, Asian Theatre Journal 28.1 (2011), 44–66 (p. 48). 36. ‘N’importe qui ne sait plus crier en Europe, et spécialement les acteurs en transe ne savent plus pousser le cri.’ TD, iv, 163.

CHAPTER 6

Artaud and the ‘Elizabethans’: Revenge Tragedy as Inspiration for a Theatre of Cruelty

The prospective programme presented in the first manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty reveals something positive about Artaud’s assessment of Elizabethan drama: 1. An adaptation of a work from the time of Shakespeare, a work entirely consistent with our present troubled state of mind, whether one of the apocryphal plays of Shakespeare, such as Arden of Feversham, or an entirely different play from the same period. […] 9. Works from the Elizabethan theater stripped of their text and retaining only the accouterments of period, situations, characters, and action. (Richards, pp. 99–100)1

His intention is  not only to restage Elizabethan drama according to the parameters stipulated in his manifesto, but to also offer new insights into how to interpret and portray these dramas which address the modern human condition, and in particular, the moral, physical, and psychological desolation of the body and mind. With a new language reliant on gesture, Artaud wants to strip the text accordingly, but leave its action—and ­accoutrements of period, situations, and characters—that appealed to the early modern audience and affected it viscerally. Elizabethan tragedy has the power to penetrate the body and the mind, modern or early modern, troubled or not, and Artaud acknowledges that. In effect, the early modern theatre provides the means to destroy and renovate static theatre and the tradition © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_6

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of verisimilitude associated with it. In addition to the works of Shakespeare, Artaud discusses other Elizabethan dramatists who relate to his ideal theatre.2 He writes that the Revenge Tragedy of Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and John Ford make a direct appeal to our senses through their action and subject matter.3 These dramas are driven by action rather than psychology; their subject matter, concerned with the physiology of the body, including its motivations and ultimately its demise, is a key component in production. Artaud’s major concern, therefore, is how to apply his concept of theatre to these works of early modern Revenge Tragedy in order to make them appeal to and hold relevance for a modern audience. Artaud’s supposed desire for a devoid-of-dialogue, spectacle-based performance has led critics and scholars alike to conclude that Shakespeare and his contemporaries are irrelevant to the development of the Theatre of Cruelty. Barber infers that Artaud detested the works of Shakespeare (Barber, Blows and Bombs, p.  67). The evidence he cites to support his claim is Artaud’s ‘compromised, textual spectacle’ of Richard ii, which he performed at the home of Lise Deharme in January 1934, along with his own scenario, The Conquest of Mexico, in an attempt to secure financial support for his Theatre of Cruelty (Barber, Blows and Bombs, p. 67). In truth, Artaud, like countless other artists, entrepreneurs, and politicians, detested making appeals for monetary assistance. What Artaud has written specifically about Shakespeare is found scattered throughout his body of work. In ‘No More Masterpieces’, Shakespeare is a subject of contention, and admittedly, what Artaud has to say is not positive. He is against what he terms narrative theatre, something that audiences have been exposed to since the Renaissance, and Artaud places responsibility for the genesis of this static theatre on Shakespeare: It is because we have been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater—storytelling psychology; it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on the one side, the public on the other—and because the public is no longer shown anything but the mirror of itself. Shakespeare himself is responsible for this aberration and decline, this disinterested idea of the theater which wishes a theatrical performance to leave the public intact, without setting off one image that will shake the organism to its foundations and leave an ineffaceable scar. (Richards, pp. 76–77)4

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Artaud’s criticism of Shakespeare is prompted by his condemnation of psychologically driven drama that is focused on the divulging of interiority rather than presenting action, and that action—in alluding to Hamlet act three, scene two, when addressing the players—is traditionally ‘to hold as ’twere and performance space, something his theatre will rectify. However the mirror to nature’ (21–22). Artaud also comments on the separation of audience and performance space, something his theatre will rectify. However, to suggest that the images an early modern audience would have been exposed to failed to have a lasting impact is misinterpretation. In fact, the very images of the mind and body in extremis which appealed to Artaud, and early modern dramatists, particularly  of Revenge Tragedy, are plentiful and necessitate interpretation of meaning. The goal for his theatre, then, is staging these moments in such a way as to make them relevant for his audience. His exposure to non-vital performances of Renaissance drama, and therefore not necessarily his understanding of it, led Artaud to his seemingly contradictory statement. Instead, a reinterpretation of the presentation of these dramas is in order. The modern French theatre opposes psychological drama, but Artaud insists ‘there is no need to descend to the repugnant level of the modern and French theater to condemn the theater of psychology’ (Richards, p. 77).5 To simply condemn one practice and then choose an equally insubstantial, uninspired option is deplorable. Considering that Artaud did not align himself with most of his contemporaries and always saw himself as an independent, his views on Elizabethan drama are not that surprising. Artaud views the progression of modern French theatre misdirected in its proclivity to distract the senses instead of penetrating them. Artaud is ultimately trying to make others understand that early modern drama does not necessarily have to be read or seen in this way. Further, he contends that the idea of l’art pour l’art—one he refers to as feeble and lazy—is only sustainable as long as life endures; however, he is quick to assert that ‘we are all mad, desperate, and sick’, and therefore must react (Richard, p. 77).6 Even if life does not change, the theatre has the power to influence the formation of new ideas. According to journalist and friend, Maurice Saillet, Artaud studied the Elizabethan theatre and its conventions, implying that he was undoubtedly inspired by its dramas: He studied the Elizabethan theater which spattered gold and blood upon the lofty clouds of his own aspirations as a poet. And he seems to have found his vocation when he writes: ‘Drama is the mind’s most perfect expression. It is in the nature of profound things to clash and combine, to evolve from one another. Action is the very principle of life.’7

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Elizabethan drama, pregnant with the imagery of corruption and decay, surely inspired the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud’s idea of a pure theatre of action is rooted in the plague, a phenomenon ever present in the Renaissance consciousness. Artaud took issue with the manner in which early modern drama was interpreted and presented. He also believed modern productions should reflect the endless possibilities of interpretation prompted through application of different staging techniques which elicit powerful, raw emotion. Artaud’s emphasis is not necessarily on realism— although he does require the production to be true in its relevance to life—but on audience absorption.

An Emblematic Approach to Stage-Specific Language Artaud would have understood the emblematic approach to staging early modern drama, which would have been familiar to audiences; specific examples of this tradition will follow in the coming pages. Artaud’s semiotic approach to staging, with emphasis on a stage language of symbols and hieroglyphs, is reminiscent of the ‘emblematic mode of thinking’ which enabled ‘early modern spectators to establish a symbolic or allegorical interpretation for scenes, events or characters’, as stated by Attilla Kiss in ‘The Anatomy of the Revenger: Violence and Dissection on the Early Modern English Stage’.8 Only for Artaud, the emblems are not simply part of a representational logic. In Early English Stages, Glynne Wickham maintains that it was not until the 1970s that this representational logic was revisited as a means of understanding and performing violence on stage.9 Artaud predates this revisitation. He vies for the move away from verisimilitude and stage realism and naturalism  in performance. Kiss deduces that the ‘semiotic endeavor was a reaction to the epistemological uncertainties of the age’, and in particular, those uncertainties primarily related to the body (p. 28). According to Artaud, these same uncertainties exist in his time too, only he associates them with a modern malaise resulting in the anaesthetizing of the esprit, a hybrid term meaning both mind and spirit for which there is no direct translation into English.10 The ever-­ present possibility of sudden death from plague, a real concern in the early modern period, is substituted by a spiritual inertia in the modern period.11 This not only compromises aesthetic appreciation, but the modern plague of ennui, which had gained momentum from the mid-nineteenth century onward, causes a lack of feeling or indifference to sensory experience. The turn to l’art pour l’art as a means of combating this malaise, according to

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Artaud, only led to ‘detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure’ (Richards, p. 77).12 The theatre has the power to do so much more than simply distract. Although Artaud calls for the reinvention of a stage-specific language to produce Elizabethan drama according to his criterion, it does not mean that every preceding production was flawed. The foundations of a good production are rooted in the plays themselves, but the way in which they are interpreted for performance is where the potential for success or failure lies. Artaud was definitely exposed to performances of Shakespeare’s works during his lifetime, and some adaptations were even satisfactory to him. Artaud wrote a review of As You Like It, adapted by Jules Supervielle and directed and produced by Victor Barnowski, which opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 12 October 1934. The film actress Annabella (Suzanne Georgette Charpentier) assumed the role of Rosalind in the production. Two similar reviews exist, and both appear in the Gallimard complete works; Thévenin suggests that the one is an earlier version of the other.13 That both productions featured music by Mozart and set and costumes designed by the artist Balthus—whom Artaud later employed for Les Cenci—supports Thévenin’s claim that both reviews are indeed of the same performance of Supervielle’s adaptation. In the reviews, Artaud praises the Supervielle production that the French press condemned: ‘Victor Barnowski’s production seemed too daring to the critics, even contrary to the spirit of Shakespeare.’14 Artaud, on the other hand, stresses that the production elements were indeed in line with Shakespearean vision and convention. His comment on Balthus’s design for the Forest of Arden heralds it as a complement to the mystic quality of Shakespeare’s Arden, a place of both refuge and enchantment: All Balthus’ forests in this show are deeply mysterious, full of sombre grandeur. Quite different from other theatre forests. They have shadows and a rhythm which addressed itself to one’s soul. Behind the trees and lights of nature, they evoke cries, words and sounds. They are all imaginary ideas inspired by the mind. (‘Reviews’, in Corti, ii, 147)15

Artaud sees the forest as a direct product of Shakespeare’s esprit. The ephemeral, dreamlike quality of Bathus’s set design is quite consistent with his surrealist, dreamlike art. Artaud, therefore, establishes a chain of creativity which begins with the works of Shakespeare: they effectively inspire the designer (Bathus) to create, and the product of his inspiration in turn enlightens the audience, evoking and inspiring poetry in them.

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Drama should induce creativity in the individual, and Shakespeare’s works have the power to do so if appropriated and adapted correctly for a relevant audience. As the review was in praise of Annabella and her successful stage debut, Artaud comments on the nature of her performance: ‘Yet there is Annabella, who he discovered for the theatre, in the role of Rosalind. Her acting was so perfect, so true to life, so charming and so natural as to be truly Shakespearean’ (‘Reviews’, in Corti, ii, 148).16 Artaud suggests that her acting is not only inspired, but that it is early modern in its origin. The Elizabethan actor was skilled in playing true to life with a natural and lively disposition, and although the circumstances themselves were imagined, the feelings expressed were real (Joseph, pp. 1, 3). According to B.L.  Joseph, in Elizabethan Acting, the external action of the actor, ‘the trained use of voice, countenance, and gesture to communicate what had already been expressed in words by the author, or was now being expressed by the speaker’, ought to develop ‘in accordance with the needs of his own personality’ (Joseph, pp. 5, 7). The natural actor, therefore, is he or she who makes use of that which already exists within the psyche, in addition to the inspiration the work itself provides.

Arden of Faversham Revisited Artaud specifies Arden of Faversham, an apocryphal play of Shakespeare’s, as one of the productions he will stage in the Theatre of Cruelty. The play is notable for its images of baiting which would have satisfied the early modern audience’s craving for visceral cruelty, already addressed in a previous chapter.17 Artaud admires the play for its action which amounts to several attempts on Arden’s life until his wife and lover are successful in murdering him. Artaud was equally impressed with the adaptation of the play written by Nobel Prize-winning author and playwright, André Gide.18 Although he considered the play similar to 50 other Elizabethan tragedies, he saw a certain purity in the exposition of characters and situations, thus making it a work of taste, timeless and non-literary, in which the action appears ‘naked’.19 Anything literary appears as humorous parody. Artaud had hoped to create the play, intensifying its madness, brusqueness, and spasmodic qualities that he believed were somewhat deficient in its present manifestation. Artaud promised not to change Gide’s text, but insisted on his freedom ‘to push the interpretation in whatever direction I find necessary, and to add any formal inventions

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inspired by the text, and thus not opposed to its spirit, but developed to the furthest degree, that I deem indispensable’.20 Artaud, as creator, has the autonomy, and as Kimberly Jannarone asserts in Artaud and His Doubles, the authority to adapt the play for his theatre as he so chooses, thus ‘creating a reality entirely from his own vision, superseding the authority of even the author he was soliciting’.21 This is entirely in line with not only Artaud’s own desires, but with his understanding of the power of the early modern text. The play becomes Artaud’s once it reaches the stage, unbound by either the anonymous Elizabethan playwright or Gide. The result is ‘a true theatrical adaptation of which I shall be sole author. A new play elaborated down to the smallest detail will show through beneath Gide’s text and beneath the thread of the action.’22 Had he realized his vision for Arden of Faversham, it would have been twice removed from the original work. The original, Gide’s adaptation, and Artaud’s intended staging of the play are to be considered as independent works of art. As the stipulations of the manifesto specify, the content, accoutrements of period, situations, characters, and action remain. Both text and action work together to form this united vision resulting in a total spectacle where no one component supersedes any other. When potent, the spoken language works to drive the action of the play. Artaud believed there was no question as to the virulence of Elizabethan language: ‘And I don’t think we have to worry about overdoing the virulence of the language, its crudity, its unclothed quality. Shakespeare and the Elizabethans went further in this direction than all of us together could possibly go.’23 The language of Elizabethan tragedy undeniably has the power to move the dramatic text towards action. In Artaud’s letter to Jean Paulhan on 3 August 1932, amidst detailing his desire to collaborate with Gide on Arden of Faversham, Artaud directs Paulhan’s attention towards a De Quincey essay he had given Artaud to read. Thévenin reveals this essay to be a translation of ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’.24 Within the essay, Artaud found parallels with his own  thinking: ‘I find the essay by Thomas De Quincey absolutely overwhelming, and the parallels with my own conceptions are uncanny.’25 Although he does not name any concepts directly, from reading De Quincey, a fellow opium addict, it is possible to identify the connections. The knocking at the gate to which the title refers is the moment in Macbeth following the murder of Duncan in act two, scene two. The knocking Macbeth hears fills him with the dread of discovery and remorse for the crime he

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committed. The knocking reflects back on the murderer ‘a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity’.26 Before the knocking at the gate, reality is suspended. De Quincey deduces that at the time of the crime, ‘the murderers and the murder must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess’ (De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, p. 154). The knocking at the gate breaks the silence of this isolated moment. The murderer is awoken from his stupor and the outside world enters again into his consciousness. In Macbeth, this suspension of reality resonates throughout the action. One of Artaud’s desires is to capture this moment and display it accurately and physically upon the stage in order to wake the unconscious spectator from anesthetization. De Quincey believes that the genius of Shakespeare lies in his ability to capture these moments. Remarkably, he understands the mind of the murderer and is therefore able to accurately portray that insulated moment of suspended human affairs and its aftermath for all to see and experience. In order to express just how awesome it is to capture this moment and why it affects us so intimately, De Quincey calls the reader’s attention to the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1812. De Quincey pays particular attention to the Marr family, the first four of John Williams’s eight victims.27 Mary, their servant, escaped the murderer by sheer circumstance as she had been asked to run an errand. When she returned, she knocked on the door of the Marr family shop and home, but heard nothing. Agitated by the silence, she continued knocking and several moments later, Mary heard footsteps approaching the front door. Mary’s knocking woke Williams from his stupefied state, this isolated, illusory, nightmarish world apart from reality wherein the murders took place. Had he not been in a stupor, Williams would have been able to act faster and perhaps draw Mary in under false pretence. Instead, she rather fortunately escaped the fate of the Marr family. With this horrible anecdote, De Quincey alerts the reader to the intensity of ‘transfiguration’, a force so powerful that the world, and its reality, ceases to exist for the murderer. Our sympathies should lie in trying to understand what goes on in the mind of criminals ensnared by this force, and our desire to comprehend should complement our wish to reform. De Quincey suggests we can at least learn something about this world of darkness from dramatists such as Shakespeare. Moments like the knocking at the gate undeniably have the power to shake us to our foundations; what we do with the experience afterwards is entirely up to us. The feeling it left

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on De Quincey propelled him to produce an essay on the ‘fine art’ of murder in an attempt to understand the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it. First, we must understand before we can enlighten through literature or drama.

The True Theatre The murder of Arden of Faversham and the Ratcliffe Highway murders were both actual, historical events. Because the audience knows the outcome, the tragic effect is intensified. The presence of the real world results in an increased potency, but that does not mean that it has any more or less imaginative power than the nightmare world of suspended reality. According to Artaud, real life may exhaust itself, but the theatre is sustainable: Once launched upon the fury of his task, an actor requires infinitely more power to keep from committing a crime than a murderer needs courage to complete his act, and it is here, in its very gratuitousness, that the action and effect of a feeling in the theater appears infinitely more valid than that of a feeling fulfilled in life. Compared with the murderer’s fury which exhausts itself, that of the tragic actor remains enclosed within a perfect circle. The murderer’s fury has accomplished an act, discharges itself, and loses contact with the force that inspired it but can no longer sustain it. That of the actor has taken a form that negates itself to just the degree it frees itself and dissolves into universality. (Richards, p. 25)28

The actor’s actions are more sustainable and transmutable than the one, accomplished task of the murdered. And while these images of poetry can do altogether without reality, the presence of factual events in the theatrical domain allows for an accepted and intimate immediacy, impactful for the audience to witness and absorb, and acquaints us with our corporeality. The best way to enlighten is through the theatre, where imagination and reality meet. In ‘L’Évolution du décor’ (‘The Evolution of Décor’), written in 1924, Artaud writes on the autonomy of the performance that is divorced from the text. The parameters for both the Théâtre Alfred Jarry and the Theatre of Cruelty are identifiable here: ‘Subservience to the author, dependence on the text, what a dismal tradition! Each text has infinite possibilities. The spirit of the text, not the letter! A text requires

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more than analysis and perception.’29 He continues by insisting that intercommunication between the esprit of the author and the esprit of the metteur en scène must be re-established. Moments from the text and from reality, therefore, come together in performance. The production is the result of such communication: it is the imaginative recreation of the esprit of the text. Viewed in this way, Artaud’s theatre is less totalitarian and more collaborative. But the modern world is ill-equipped to understand true theatre. Whereas in Chapter 3, I examined the socio-historical implications of the plague as a double of the theatre, especially that of the developing early modern public theatre, the next chapter looks at incest as a psychosexual analogue of plague, along with its symptom—madness—in Artaud’s ­production of Les Cenci. For present purposes, it is sufficient to reiterate that for Artaud, the plague is exactly like the theatre; they are one and the same. The power of the true theatre acknowledges the plague as a double of the theatre. If we understand that the plague causes the release of inherent gratuitous behaviour, and that such an outward force is necessary to cause people to act out, we can conclude that the paroxysms of madness caused by the plague are also found in the theatre. The theatre must take advantage of the unbridled freedom associated with the plague and use it accordingly. The effects of the plague are similar to the actions and motivations of the actor on stage, and they are also identified in the poet or playwright who, in reacting to the paroxysm, is moved to create: Everything in the physical aspect of the actor, as in that of the victim of the plague, shows that life has reacted to the paroxysm, and yet nothing has happened. Between the victim of the plague who runs in shrieking pursuit of his visions and the actor in pursuit of his feelings; between the man who invents for himself personages he could never have imagined without the plague, creating them in the midst of an audience of corpses and delirious lunatics and the poet who inopportunely invents characters, entrusting them to a public equally inert or delirious, there are other analogies which confirm the only truths that count and locate the action of the theater like that of the plague on the level of a veritable epidemic. (Richards, pp. 24–25)30

The early modern playwright who invents characters born out of the plague and then gives them over to a public equally subject to the same delirium is the perfect representation of how the action of the theatre

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functions as a veritable epidemic. The launch of poetry into the world is accompanied by this potentially disastrous delirium. The theatre does not permanently exhaust this, but instead continually builds it up and then releases it. Artaud writes that the plague unleashes dormant images and pushes them to their limit (TD, iv, 34; Richards, p. 27). The theatre also does this, extending the images as far as they will go. Their freedom allows for gratuitous and frenzied behaviour resulting in the hostile conditions surrounding an outbreak of plague. Society and its constructs work to stifle this energy in the time between the previous outbreak and the one yet to come. The dark sides of human nature are let loose with epidemic; the true theatre, therefore, should acknowledge and promote this release, and produce drama which is entirely free, provocative, and energized: In the true theater a play disturbs the senses’ repose, frees the repressed unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt (which moreover can have its full effect only if it remains virtual), and imposes on the assembled collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic. (Richards, p. 28)31

The unfolding drama intends to disturb and disrupt the very consciousness of the spectator, reminding him or her of the paroxysm, decay, and inevitable death of the mortal body. This is the desired end of a theatre that presents itself as both a spiritual and a visceral epidemic realized most aptly, according to Sir Philip Sidney, through ‘Tragedy that openth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue.’32

The Revenger’s Tragedy One of Artaud’s most admired dramas of the early modern period is The Revenger’s Tragedy. It is the most-mentioned ‘classic’ drama at the forefront of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry. The play was never actually performed— it was on the bill for both the 1927–28 and the 1928–29 seasons—but corresponds with what Artaud, Vitrac, and Aron were trying to achieve with their theatre, and what Artaud continued to develop with his Theatre of Cruelty after the dissolution of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry: We may no longer believe in theatre as entertainment, or a diversion, as swinishness or idiocy, but we do believe in that sort of catharsis, that heightened level on to which theatre carries life as much as thought. […] The

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Revenger’s Tragedy, besides being a recognised masterpiece, completely agrees with what we mean and want to be. Therefore we will put it on. All works are timeless. There are no specifically modern or classic plays, or else they are failures. The Revenger’s Tragedy is very close to our angst, our rebelliousness, our aspirations.33

Artaud mentions the notion of purgation through an Aristotelian idea of catharsis when he assesses the suitability of Revenge Tragedy for his theatre. Again, we are greeted with the same imagery associated with corporeality, with a cleansing of the esprit through theatre. The audience, therefore, is meant to undergo some change through participation in Artaud’s theatre, physically altering the body in some way. Spectators must be exposed to these corporeal transformations, to viscera, in order to facilitate that purging, of pity, fear, and any other necessary bodily fluid. In addition, the angst, rebelliousness, and aspirations of the play are in line with the intentions of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, but Artaud wanted to adapt the play in order to increase its appeal to a modern audience. Victor Corti suggests that Artaud’s vision of the adaptation was very controversial because the verse plays of the early modern period were adored by the French and were not usually altered to necessarily appeal to a modern sensibility (‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 10). Artaud’s concept of adaptation for the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, which included the stripping away of lines and the reorganization of plots, was controversial at the time. Years later, inspired by Artaud, Charles Marowitz adapted this process of stripping away the text in his adaptations of Shakespeare, as did Grotowski in his adaptations of the Polish classics The Ancestors, Kordian, and Akropolis, resulting in a combination of traditional theatre and modern expression (‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 10–11). In fact, today,  drama­ asterpiece texts turges in theatre companies the world over adapt classic, m thereby ensuring their survival. It is important to note that the Théâtre Alfred Jarry did experience success, no matter how nominal. The subject matter of The Revenger’s Tragedy is well suited to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty because the action takes place in a world of detestable morals where the characters change their principles according to each situation presented to them, all except for the aptly named Castiza—or Chastity—who just barely escapes contamination. The characters themselves represent allegorical types, as was customary with earlier Medieval or Elizabethan morality plays, a complementary element of the drama which adheres to Artaud’s theatrical regulations. The audience member does not

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have to analyse these characters’ psychology to determine their motivations in the play. Vindice—whose name is aptly based on the Italian reflexive verb ‘vindicarsi’ meaning to take revenge—is the most adaptable character in The Revenger’s Tragedy, playing several versions of himself as and when necessary: Vindice first appears as the lover, with skull in hand, lamenting the cruel death of his mistress, Gloriana, poisoned by the lecherous Duke. Next, he appears as Piato, a pander employed by Lussurioso to seduce Vindice’s own sister, Castiza. Lussurioso employs Vindice a second time—here he appears as the desperate version of himself—to murder Vindice’s own persona, Piato, after almost causing Lussurioso’s death. In his fourth iteration, Vindice appears as one of the masked men in the masque of the revengers in the final scene of the play. Therefore, he not only acts the part of his double, the sick, melancholic version of himself, but his treble and quadruple as well, thus playing himself into frenzy as he becomes overrun by the dire situations presented to him in the various worlds he simultaneously inhabits. The lack of moral integrity in The Revenger’s Tragedy contributes to the horrible vision of life in the play, a dire reality which the characters have come to accept as the norm: ‘’Tis no shame to be bad, because ’tis common.’34 Perhaps Artaud accepts this cynical atmosphere in the play because it is similar to his own world which he believed suffered from the same ethical distortions. Vindice’s own sense of integrity becomes flexible, therefore, to suit his desire for revenge and to adapt to the situational morality of the Italian court. In turn, the audience accepts his variable sanity. In this sense, the theatre infects the audience, and against its better judgement, suspends its understanding of reality and even supports his revenge plot. Attila Kiss argues that the metatheatrical framework enhances the emblematic tradition present in the early modern theatre, with the memento mori (Gloriana’s skull) accompanied by the presentation of the cadaverous dead. Through terror, he asserts, Vindice reminds the audience of its corporeality: vindice



Advance thee, O thou terror to fat folks, To have their costly three-pil’d flesh worn off As bare as this […] (The Revenger’s Tragedy, i. 1. 45)

These images, of what Kiss considers a ‘self-dissection’ of Vindice’s character, ‘implant in the spectator a continuous awareness of his or her own anatomical reality, the skull beneath our face’ (Kiss, p. 41). I would agree

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with this assessment not only because of the early modern consciousness and the emerging understanding of the physiology of the body but also because outside of the theatre, the audience was, at regular intervals, exposed to plague, a real and constant reminder of death. This onslaught of images—the recurring image of the skull, the cadaverous bodies35— would effectively jar the senses, forcing an intuitive rather than an intellectual response to the action. The result is a visual, impactful reminder of not just mortality but corruptibility, both physical and psychological. This vision is exemplified in Artaud’s own scenarios for the stage.36 Le Jet du Sang (The Spurt of Blood) is particularly gruesome, for it begins in an idyllic world that suddenly plummets into chaos just moments after the protagonists, a young couple, declare their love for one another. The stage directions to capture this moment in the play are as follows: Silence: Noise like a huge wheel spinning, blowing out wind. A hurricane comes between them. At that moment two stars collide, and a succession of limbs of flesh fall. Then feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticoes, temples and alembics, falling slower and slower as if through space, then three scorpions one after the other and finally a frog, and a scarab which lands with heart-breaking, nauseating slowness.37

Instead of a narrative, the play presents emblematic imagery to show the world in a state of disintegration—of the organic body, of family and society—divorced from logic and verisimilitude, depicted in the body parts, rather than characters, littered across the stage, and ultimately more dramatic than anything produced by Jarry or Artaud’s contemporary, Guillaume Apollinaire.38 In Artaud, the disintegration of morality, of all that is good, is depicted on the stage with the falling of the severed limbs (recall that dismemberment is used to depict an underlying state) and symbols of ‘civilization’. This same convention is used in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus in the final scene of the play when the scholars enter to find ‘Faustus’ limbs, / All torn asunder by the hand of death’.39 Both sequences, Artaud’s and Marlowe’s, could not have been represented on stage with the technical means available in 1930s France, let alone Elizabethan England. The concatenation of elements and events suspends any notion of verisimilitude. The world presented in The Spurt of Blood has been in operation since the fall of Rome to the present day. This fallen world, one of humanity in a constant state of fear, is the

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same one inspiring early modern playwrights; it is littered with corruption that trickles from the nobility downward. The fall is societal as much as it is personal, and is as psychological as it is physical. Plague as a recurring motif in The Revenger’s Tragedy signifies the immorality and corruption at the core of the play and of its characters. It spreads through poison—it should be noted that Vindice holds the skull in his hands in the first scene of the play, effectively poisoning himself and the audience members by association—the physical manifestation of this corruption, and it features directly in two of the several murders: that of Gloriana, Vindice’s mistress, which happens at the outset of the play, and that of the Duke; both die from the same poison. The epicentre of infection is the court where every character of supposed nobility is infected by a corruption that breeds the immorality which in turn spreads to the other characters. This is clearly identifiable in the lecherous Duke and his son, Lussurioso, who inherits the same lustful disposition as his father; the adulterous and vicious Duchess; the Duke’s spiteful, bastard son, Spurio; the Duchess’s sons, Ambitioso and the redundant Supervacuo, who are equally ambitious and devious; and the Youngest Son of the Duchess who rapes Lord Antonio’s wife, a virtuous woman who commits suicide because of the shame of being raped. The toxins in the play, therefore, have already spread amongst the populace from their entry into the body of Gloriana before the opening scene of the play. They infiltrate all subsequent action. Poison eventually infects all the characters, including Gratiana—Grace, which is meagre in the play—the mother of Vindice, Hippolito, and Castiza, who abandons all that is protective and maternal, willing to prostitute her own daughter in order to gain admittance into court. Poison lies so far beneath the skin that it penetrates the very bones of the infected: Vindice, for example, uses Gloriana’s same emblematic skull as the instrument to murder the Duke. Vindice, too, however, contracts its malady the moment he decides to avenge Gloriana’s murder. Self-motivated, individualistic, situational morality allows the poison to infect and then spread; thus, he is able to contaminate his own brother by recruiting him in his undertaking. Had Gloriana never been poisoned, Vindice would have remained healthy and virtuous, like his sister Castiza, who is spared the vileness of the court. The action of the play, which features a thorough sample of various ars morendi, lends itself easily to the staging required for the Theatre of Cruelty. The rigour with which Vindice and Hippolito work in enacting their revenge upon the Duke is accompanied by physical cruelty. Vindice

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intends to kill the Duke by exposure to the very same poison that killed Gloriana. He therefore creates a mannequin—which acts as a verbal image in the Theatre of Cruelty—and uses Gloriana’s skull as the head. The memento mori would be the physical representation of poison in a Theatre of Cruelty production, emblematic of its infliction upon the entire action of the tragedy and its characters. It would dominate the stage in monstrous proportions. The Duke kisses the skull, ‘like a slobbering Dutchman’ (The Revenger’s Tragedy, iii. 5. 163), and immediately, the poison takes effect as his teeth are eaten out. Hippolito thereafter stamps on his treacherous body, and then both he and Vindice hold the Duke down with daggers: one nails down his tongue while the other dagger is placed at his heart as the two revengers force the Duke to witness his bastard son, Spurio, in intimate company with his wife as he dies (The Revenger’s Tragedy, iii. 5. 201–215). The pseudo-incestuous relationship is too much for the Duke to bear. In addition to the importance of emblematic imagery, music is another feature that is used to profoundly impact upon the senses in the Theatre of Cruelty (TD, iv, 113; Richards, p.  95). While in Spurio’s company, the Duchess calls for loud music to accompany their pleasure as they go forth to celebrate their union by feasting. The music is delightful to the Duchess and Spurio, but adds to the Duke’s torture. The music, therefore, would have to reflect this double connotation: the passion of the Duchess and Spurio and the madness and humiliation of the Duke. The music of the revellers/murders in the final scene in the play would also feature frenzied, dissonant sounds as a way to stimulate the senses so as not to lull the spectator into stasis and to enhance the furor with which the characters perform.40 The scene following the bloody murder of the Duke features the three sons of the Duchess: Supervacuo, Ambitioso, and the head of Youngest Son, which the former two assume is that of Lussurioso. Having thought that they had sentenced their stepbrother, Spurio, to death, they are shocked to receive their youngest brother’s head instead. In a Theatre of Cruelty production of the play, the head of Youngest Son would appear bloody beyond recognition and disproportionately large, achieving its effect more through stylization rather than stage realism. Artaud permits the use of whatever is necessary to appeal to the audience’s sensibilities and elicit a genuinely and spontaneous reaction. The blood featured in the play, therefore, would be used to highlight the callousness with which this world of corruption functions, the severity of its retribution, and the inevitability of its corporeal repayment. The play itself, agrees William Stull,

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one of few scholars of Elizabethan drama to cite Artaud, already ‘fulfils Artaud’s definition of “true theatre”’.41 Artaud’s key focus then is how to portray the events in order to appeal to a modern audience. The potential to include flowing blood continues in the succession of stage directions surrounding the bloody banquet in the final scene of the play. The first is a dumb show which features the new Duke preparing to celebrate his appointment in office: ‘In a dumb show: the possessing of the young duke [lussurioso] with all his nobles; then sounding music, a furnished table is brought forth, then enters [lussurioso] and his nobles to the banquet. A blazing star appeareth’ (The Revenger’s Tragedy, v. 3). The blazing star, like the stars colliding in Artaud’s The Spurt of Blood, is an ominous omen. Lussurioso and the nobles are expecting revelry, but are instead diverted by the masque of the revengers led by Vindice and Hippolito: ‘The revengers dance. At the end, [they] steal out their swords and these four kill the four at the table, in their chairs. It thunders’ (The Revenger’s Tragedy, v. 3. 41). They murder Lussurioso and the three nobles, exiting moments before the masque of intended murderers enters, led by Ambitioso, Supervacuo, and Spurio. Ambitioso kills Supervacuo, Spurio kills Ambitioso, and the fourth noble, who is left to carry the blame, kills Spurio. Lussurioso had not expected his own murder for the evening’s entertainment. This scene could be staged in either a stylized manner, similar to Ninagawa’s Titus Andronicus, or feature unnaturally large quantities of blood, not to achieve realism, but surrealism. In either case, the cruelty of the violent images will be clear. These final actions happen within the silence of the dumb show accompanied by exaggerated gesture in order to facilitate spontaneous response. The action will appeal to the senses, particularly sight, thus keeping the audience visually enthralled and forcing them to react to the events. Ultimately, the potential for a Theatre of Cruelty production of The Revenger’s Tragedy is possible because the basis for Artaud’s theatre is already present in the action, ­characterizations, and stage directions of the play, thus confirming the tragedy’s fluidity, suitability, and its relevance. The final action of the play, Antonio’s condemnation of Vindice, who arrogantly confesses to the murders of Lussurioso and the three nobles, puts an end to the frenzied successive revenge plots and to the dubious moral code in operation in the Italian court. Their (pending) executions will purge treason and infectious, bad behaviour from the court and the surrounding kingdom, thus reinforcing the shame associated with immoral deeds. This purgation is only possible with death. Vindice and Hippolito are the double scapegoats whose deaths will rid the community, and the

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theatre, of negative violence, according to Girard (Violence and the Sacred, p. 271). However, this is not a mimetic reenactment with surrogate victims, such as animals, but actual human sacrifice, which begs the question if their blood will  indeed ‘wash away all treason’ or renew the cycle of violence (The Revenger’s Tragedy, v. 3. 160).

The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi John Webster is the second ‘Elizabethan’ playwright Artaud mentions by name.42 He had hoped to direct The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi in addition to The Revenger’s Tragedy and Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.43 Undoubtedly, Webster’s tragic vision of corrupt and dark worlds appealed to Artaud. In the opening scene of The White Devil, the audience learns that Lodovico, a man of ill repute, is banished from Rome for having committed murderers ‘bloody and full of horror’.44 In his defence, Lodovico suggests that there are far worse criminals in Rome’s high society who go unpunished, such as the Duke of Brachiano and Vittoria Corombona who are publicly conducting an extramarital affair. According to J.W.  Lever, Webster looks beyond individuals to the societies which have shaped them, suggesting that the White Devil is not Vittoria Corombona but Renaissance Europe.45 That both plays are based on real events that took place in Italy in ca. 1515 and 1585, respectively, supports both Lever’s assessment of and Artaud’s predilection for historically inspired tragedy. The corruption presented is based on a factual and exemplary microcosm of a diseased environment. Unlike The Revenger’s Tragedy, the characters in The White Devil are not based on type. Rather, they epitomize the dark atmosphere of the play. Although they have a multifaceted psychology worth examining, Artaud held that examining a character’s psychology should be left to students and not an audience. It is easier to understand the motivation of Lodovico, who like Vindice, seeks revenge, and less so the character of Flamineo, who appears to exist for no other reason than to engage in mischief. He seems to enjoy wreaking havoc on the characters in the play, and not only prostitutes his own sister to Duke Brachiano, but kills his own brother mercilessly (The White Devil, v.  2. 14). He initially blames his poverty for his predilection for cruelty, but declares that his exposure to the court, the pinnacle of corruption, perpetuated his lasciviousness:

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I visited the court, whence I return’d More courteous, more lecherous by far, But not a suit the richer. (The White Devil, i. 2. 317)

In the Duke’s service, Flamineo’s contempt for life comes to fruition. He scorns his position in life, but instead of improving his status by way of integrity, he chooses to seek benefit through malicious action. Vittoria’s motivations are even more ambiguous than her brother Flamineo’s. One motif in the play suggests that women are a plague upon men and the world in general.46 Brachiano, for example, rebukes his wife Isabella when she attempts to embrace him and charges that her very breath contains the plague (The White Devil, ii. 1. 165). Vittoria herself is proclaimed a plague—‘Domine judex converte oculos in hanc pestrem mulierum corruptissimam’—albeit by Monticelso, a corrupt man (The White Devil, iii. 2. 10).47 Her very presence has the power to spread corruption. The metaphor is exemplified in her retelling of the yew-tree dream, during which she cunningly induces Brachiano to kill both his wife and Vittoria’s husband, Camillo (The White Devil, i. 2. 220–44). Flamineo, listening, determines that she had devilishly intended her words to result in murder: ‘She hath taught him in a dream  /  To make away his duchess and her husband’ (The White Devil, i. 2. 246). If Flamineo exists only to amuse himself by dallying in corruption, Vittoria is the instrument for turning corruptive thought into action. The dream motif continues in the two dumb shows featuring the murders of Isabella and Camillo. These horrible and grotesque visions are unique as they reveal the central plot of action as it occurs in the play. They exemplify Webster’s practice of maintaining the importance of visual plot development, ‘so that the spectator does not feel the dumb shows to be independent additions contrasted with the character of the play proper’, as Dieter Mehl contends in The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (p. 139). As a total theatre practitioner, Webster not only amalgamates his use of varied performance techniques, but each element is valuable to the play in performance. The conjuror shows Brachiano the murders he puts into action, thus plot and action are revealed without dialogue in silent, powerful metatheatrical and emblematic gesture. In another powerful gesture, Isabella is killed in the act of solemn devotion when she kisses the poisoned painting of Brachiano:

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Enter Isabella in her nightgown as to bedward, with lights; […] She kneels down as to prayers, then draws the curtain of the picture, does three reverences to it, and kisses it thrice. She faints and will not suffer them to come near it; dies. (The White Devil, ii. 2. 23)

As in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the poison that kills the victim is the same used to punish the murderer, for Brachiano in turn dies a miserable, double death: first he is exposed to his poisoned helmet, and thereafter he is strangled by Lodovico and Gasparo. Camillo, on the other hand, is killed in violent action: ‘Flamineo pitcheth him upon his neck, and with the help of the rest writhes his neck about; seems to see if it be broke, and lays him folded double as ’twere under the horse’ (The White Devil, ii. 2. 37). These moments, in both private and public spheres, are important demonstrations of epidemic corruption leading towards inevitable unnatural death witnessed by the audience. As such, a Theatre of Cruelty ­production would elevate these moments to their emblematic status. For example, the yew-tree, the taxus baccata, is the very emblem of death, black and melancholic, feeding off corpses in the church-yard. Its depiction on stage would feature its red berries dripping blood (in stylized cords or liquid) upon the stage. The dream in its entirety would be visualized in a dumb show, in much the same way as the cataclysmic events involving stars colliding or shooting in The Spurt of Blood and in The Revenger’s Tragedy, signalling a turn in the action. Adding to this gravity are the words spoken by the conjuror. In the play, they are given the value of incantation, quite literally, which is one of Artaud’s demands for the Theatre of Cruelty (TD, iv, 56; Richards, p. 46). The same corrupt and diseased world of The White Devil is also present in The Duchess of Malfi. Once again, the origin of that corruption is the court, which has a strong influence on moral behaviour. As the opening image of the play suggests, ‘like a common fountain’ the court should pour forth ‘Pure silver drops’, but if it is corrupt at the pinnacle, ‘Death, and diseases through the whole land spread’.48 Here, Bosola, the malcontent, parallels the figure of Flamineo, and is a ‘familiar’ to Ferdinand in the same way as Flamineo is to Brachiano (The Duchess of Malfi, i. 1. 249). Unlike Flamineo, whose interiority is visualized instead of verbally disclosed to the audience, Bosola reveals his corruption via soliloquy throughout the play. In a Theatre of Cruelty production, soliloquy detracts from the action of the play; however, because Bosola complements his thoughts with

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actions, his inward revelations are applicable and acceptable. Also, they add clarification to the harsh world he lives in. In adapting the text for the Theatre of Cruelty stage, these asides would help to establish the atmosphere of the text. The words themselves would be given the same importance they have in dreams—‘It is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams’ (Richards, p.  94)49—thus stressing the sentiment and thought, subconscious or otherwise, influencing their utterance. Although Ferdinand introduces the impending bloodshed into the play, Bosola is the instrument of his revenge. He is also the one to end it as the reformed malcontent. His role is therefore similar to Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy, the person who must set things right by death, wherein lies the cure: ‘The theatre, like the plague, is a crisis resolved by either death or cure’ (My translation).50 Death appears to be the only option in The Duchess of Malfi, and only after the paroxysms of the disease are in full frenzy. Madness features most prominently in the text as it becomes the visualization and by-product of torment. Webster uses spectacle to demonstrate the tyranny the Duchess suffers by way of Bosola. During her incarceration, Bosola reveals to her the figures of her dead husband and children in a tableau of torment: ‘Here is discovered, behind a traverse, the figures of Antonio and his children, appearing as if they were dead’ (The Duchess of Malfi, iv. 1. 55). Ferdinand inflicts this cruelty upon her in order to drive her into melancholy. Thereafter, he sends bedlamites to her for ‘sport’, hoping that their affliction will spread to her (The Duchess of Malfi, iv. 2. 38). Bedlamites are featured in five Jacobean plays—Dekker and Middleton’s Honest Whore Part I; Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho; John Fletcher’s The Pilgrim; Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling; and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi—as a commentary on the seventeenth-century pastime of visiting Bethlehem Hospital for amusement. They are presented in metatheatric scenes which may suggest their marginality, but I maintain that their presence enhances their emblematic status signifying the plague, and even juxtaposes the madness in the presumed sane characters in the play. This is especially true in The Duchess of Malfi, except that it is not the Duchess who becomes afflicted with madness by association, but Ferdinand as he loses his sanity because of the guilt he feels in condemning his sister to death. He becomes ravenous, aggressive, and even lycanthropic (The Duchess of Malfi, v. 2. 1–21); he is not diagnosed with lycanthropy, however, until the fourth act.

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In the Theatre of Cruelty, the figures of Antonio and of the Duchess’s children would feature prominently in the play as they are emblematic of impending death and of the Duchess’s own anxiety. They would appear as wax dummies, larger than life, and mechanized. Symbolic of her turmoil, these figures would only be visible to her and the audience. Her madness would result, and she would move in the same frenzied motions as her brother, Ferdinand, whose madness is manifest in lycanthropy. His own madness is realized in his ferocious actions and movements, rather than in his seemingly nonsensical words and phrases. Acting more like an animal and less like a man, Ferdinand blurs the line between the human and animal divide, one cause of anxiety surrounding the body, mind, and soul during the early modern period. He becomes, therefore, a living symbol of disease and the specific fears associated with this particular unknown. Bloody vengeance is the means by which corruption is purged from Amalfi. The consecutive murders of the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola bring the play to a close and the reign of tyranny and madness to an end. After he receives his mortal wound from Bosola, Ferdinand ‘seems to come to himself’ just prior to his death (The Duchess of Malfi, v. 5. 68). Death effectively cures him, but whether or not it cures the corruption at the very root of the play is unknown. By killing the Duchess, revenge-­ seeking Bosola becomes repentant, cured of his indignation by the goodness she represents and, in effect, infects him with by way of her murder. The result is resolution by way of death which brings cure.

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Artaud names John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or Annabella, the title of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1894 French translation, as the play which best exemplifies his ideal of true theatre.51 Whereas the theatre is the double of an actual outbreak of plague, the plague is used metaphorically in Ford’s play. The epidemic Artaud identifies within the play achieves the same results as an actual plague. Siblings Giovanni and Annabella act in accordance with their own incestuous desires in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, concerned with neither the consequences nor the implications of their transgressive crimes. Giovanni, in particular, is motivated to the point of madness in justifying his desire, driven by the freedom of revolt in addition to his passion. Artaud particularly admires Giovanni’s rigorous justification of his lust: ‘From the moment the curtain rises, we see to our utter stupefaction a creature flung into an insolent vindication of incest, exerting

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all the vigor of his youthful consciousness to proclaim and justify it’ (Richards, p. 28).52 Even though he agrees to Friar Bonaventura’s petition to soothe his lust with prayer, Giovanni is still determined to act according to his will. When his chaste endeavour inevitably fails, Giovanni dedicates himself to ruin: giovanni



Lost, I am lost: my fates have doomed my death. The more I strive, I love; the more I love, The less I hope. I see my ruin, certain.53

He knows that he cannot deny the emotions he feels towards his sister. Most interesting is Giovanni’s claim that feeling this way about Annabella is natural. If Artaud is correct in concluding that ‘All true freedom is dark, and infallibly identified with sexual freedom which is also dark’, Giovanni acts in accordance to a dark sexual freedom which overrules societal discretion (Richards, p.  30).54 Annabella’s guardian, Putana—or whore in Italian—also endorses the union between brother and sister: putana  Your

brother’s a man I hope, and I say still, if a young wench feel the fit upon her, let her take anybody, father or brother, all is one. (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ii. 1. 43)

Putana argues for both freedom and familiarity in choosing any sexual partner, declaring that there is nothing particularly obscene about such a blood union. But if there is nothing wrong with a sexual relationship between siblings or family members, then why is there a taboo against it? Incest in relation to the structures of kinship is discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, but Bataille addresses this question by examining the eroticism involved in such unions (pp.  197–200).55 For Bataille, attraction is the fundamental basis for the regulations against incest: ‘Everything suggests that these regulations deal with the play of deep seated impulses among individuals. How otherwise can the unnatural renunciation of near relations be explained?’ (Bataille, p. 211). If ‘eroticism springs from an alternation of fascination and horror, of affirmation and denial’, having a taboo in place to prevent sexual relationships between siblings and relatives suggests that the repugnance we feel towards our siblings in present ‘civilized’ society was not necessarily always there (Bataille, p.  211). This theory works in accordance with Bataille’s belief that the

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very act of placing a taboo on an object emphasizes its sexual value. The fact that some act or some person is declared forbidden makes it or them that much more alluring, which in turn increases its or their value. Ultimately, the connection between incest and the obsessive value of sexuality is linked. The setting up of boundaries against the desired object gives ‘a fresh fillip to the irresistible animal impulse’ (Bataille, p. 212). According to Richard McCabe, ‘throughout the play [Giovanni’s] eroticism manifests a violent edge predictive of its final expression’.56 These impulses, associated with eroticism, motivate Giovanni, and he acts according to them with a sense of frenzied freedom that is similarly recognizable in a victim of plague. Giovanni is not actually suffering from an outbreak of viral plague, but the psychological symptoms of plague are present. His mad passions are able to play out in the theatre where they come to fruition. The theatre is where the impossible becomes the norm under intense action, where the playwright can challenge these concepts of ‘civility’ Artaud so vehemently opposed. Obscenity is not necessarily a factor, for the urges towards incest were once in the foreground of our impulses and desires: We cannot say that such and such a thing is obscene. Obscenity is relative. There is no ‘obscenity’ in the sense that there is ‘fire’ or ‘blood’, but only in the way that an ‘outrage to modesty’ exists. Such and such a thing is obscene if this or that person thinks it is and says so; it is not exactly an object, but a relationship between an object and the mind of a person. (Bataille, p. 215)

Obscenity is relative because of the external factors of time, place, and person involved in deeming an action or object as such. Reservations and regulations may also shift according to the same variables. It is all relative. This is why in a play like ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore there are various and shifting opinions regarding the incestuous union of Giovanni and Annabella. Annabella herself wavers in her once steadfast acceptance of her decision to enter into an incestuous relationship once she becomes pregnant with Giovanni’s child and concern for the unborn life takes precedence over her passions. When Giovanni stabs her to death, she asks for forgiveness and mercy for his act of murder, and also their mutual act of incest: ‘Forgive him, Heaven—and me my sins. Farewell, / Brother, unkind, unkind!— Mercy, great Heaven!—O!—O!’ (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, v. 5. 92). Her decision to pray for mercy is understandable given that her brother/lover has just mortally wounded her. She understands his intentions and thinks

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him justified, hence why she asks for Giovanni’s forgiveness as well as her own; yet, her final address to him is ‘unkind’. They are literally of kind—of kin—but his decision to slaughter her is completely contrary to an act of kinship. Giovanni reasons that in killing Annabella, he is saving both her and their unborn child from a far worse death. Artaud regards the incestuous passion driving Giovanni and Annabella as equivalent to the delirium which affects plague victims. The actions it unleashes are certainly considered obscene as they are contrary to the status quo, the attitudes of a healthy and ‘civilized’ society. These actions are the epitome of the freedom of revolt. But the revolt subsists beyond a mere psychological level as it propels the individual towards action: If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized. Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction. (Richards, p. 30)57

The exteriorization of this latent cruelty is expressed through rigorous action. When Artaud speaks of a Theatre of Cruelty, cruel and violent action is implied and necessary. In his letter to Jean Paulhan, Artaud refrains from detailing the particulars of his theatre, but he is adamant that the cruelty of his theatre is not exclusively based on blood.58 Cruelty ‘signifies rigor, implacable application and decision, absolute, irreversible determination’ (My translation).59 The actions of Giovanni—or Ferdinand and Bosola, Brachiano and Flamineo, and Vindice—are based in this implacability and determination. In the second manifesto, Artaud details that the cruelty of his theatre will be bloody, but not systematically so. Images based on blood and entrails are effective in demonstrating the possibilities of the theatre and its implicit cruelty, but the Theatre of Cruelty will not always either portray or rely on them (TD, iv, 146; Richards, p. 124). The metteur en scène can incorporate either the stylization of cruelty identified in the first manifesto or the use of bloody violence when necessary as the second manifesto clarifies. It is important to highlight that these manifestos do not exist exclusive of one another but are themselves doubles.

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In ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Giovanni is forced to commit blood-soaked actions in order to justify his lust. If incest was not a taboo, nor obscene in Giovanni’s society, he would not have to resort to such violence, nor would his frenzy give sway to such vicious action. But he is unequivocally driven: He does not waver an instant, does not hesitate a minute, and thereby shows of how little account are all the barriers that could be opposed to him. He is heroically criminal and audaciously, ostentatiously heroic. Everything drives him in this direction and inflames his enthusiasm; he recognizes neither earth nor heaven, only the force of his convulsive passion, to which the rebellious and equally heroic passion of Annabella does not fail to respond. (Richards, p. 28)60

Giovanni is completely incited towards action. Throughout the tragedy, action inspired by conflict is infectious. Other characters, therefore, become just as charged and motivated to act. Soranzo, for example, is wholeheartedly motivated to seek his revenge on the unknown man who made him a cuckold: ‘I carry hell about me: all my blood / Is fired in swift revenge’ (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, iv. 3. 149). He wastes no time in seeking revenge and employs Vasques, a man with a penchant for physical cruelty and who has already unabashedly killed Hippolita, to do his handiwork. Through him, Soranzo vicariously unleashes his fury. Vasques, with the aid of the bandetti, dispatches with Putana with pure malevolence: vasques  Come,

sirs, take me this old damnable hag, gag her instantly, and put out her eyes. Quickly, quickly! […] Sirs, carry her closely into the coal-house and put out her eyes instantly. If she roars, slit her nose. D’ee hear? Be speedy and sure. (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, iv. 3. 224, 230)

Vasques acts quickly and without impediment. In this play, bloodshed appears to be the most efficient way to deal with crisis, and so it flows. The plot itself unfolds by violently solving one crisis after another until no one is left to kill or cure. Carol C. Rosen argues that the cruel language present in the text moves the action along, or at the very least complements it.61 She claims that Artaud would have ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore reduced to mime, completely

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obliterating the language of the text (Rosen, p. 326). I disagree with this interpretation of the assertions Artaud makes in his first manifesto. Artaud would not want to completely supplant all textual language with action, but rather create a stage-specific language which includes both gestural and verbal language to complement the action of the play.62 Spoken language is important in the play because it both sets the parameters for staging and forces the action along through the passion expressed. R.J.  Kauffman comments on the atmosphere of Parma, the setting, in both the text and the action of the play: The carefully contrived world of the play is one in which marriage is debased, sacraments are violated, vows are disregarded, churchly and secular sanctions are loosed and enfeebled. Without being baroquely overdrawn, the world of the play is made to act (in its negations of beauty) as a foil to the desperate choices of Giovanni and his sister.63

This is the description of a society in turmoil due to an outbreak of plague. From the first scene of the play, the language is suffused with this kind of imagery; Friar Bonaventura even calls it a ‘leprosy of lust’ (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, i. 1. 74). That Ford’s play was written after the major plague years of 1624–25 gives good reason for the inclusion of plague metaphor in the play. Indeed, Hippolita’s curse in the fourth act ensures that the plague will run its course and not cease until all are dead: hippolita



Take here my curse amongst you: may thy bed Of marriage be a rack unto thy heart.— Burn, blood, and boil in vengeance!—O my heart, My flame’s intolerable!—May’st thou live To father bastards, may her womb bring forth Monsters, and die together in your sins, Hated, scorned, and unpitied!—O!—O! (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, iv. 1. 92)

Annabella’s unborn child is the result of the contagion caused by incest. The only way to cure is to kill Annabella and the profane monster she is carrying. In this respect, when Giovanni murders her, he is indeed saving Annabella, and especially their child, from a worse fate. The shock of the play’s corresponding action and language fortifies its connection to the Theatre of Cruelty. Clifford Leech asserts that ‘Ford

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goes out of his way to shock his audience’ with a ‘“desire” to make our flesh creep’.64 This is exemplified in the physical imagery of the play. What better way to make our flesh creep than to see Giovanni enter the banquet of the last scene with his sister’s heart upon his dagger? The physical cruelty inflicted is most certainly accompanied by bloodshed. A Theatre of Cruelty production, therefore, could illuminate the action by stylization. Giovanni could enter the stage, adorned with the presence of plague victims, physically disfigured and deteriorating on the stage, who expire once the action is completed in the final scene, with Annabella’s oversized, bloody, and still-beating heart upon his dagger—or, as in the 1971 film version directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi under the title Addio fratello crudele, upon a six-inch stiletto—and ‘trimmed in reeking blood’, saturated by his sister’s bodily fluids (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, v. 6. 10). The shock effect is punctuated as he bites into the heart, for he ‘came to feast too’ (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, v. 6. 24). And although Ford spares his audience the sight of Annabella’s body torn apart by Giovanni, whose ‘dagger’s point ploughed up / Her fruitful womb’, a Theatre of Cruelty production incorporating bloodshed would not. Soranzo’s direction to Vasques to ‘Bring the strumpet forth!’ will result in Annabella’s cleaved body dragged into the banquet hall for everyone on stage and in the audience to behold (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, v. 6. 32, 54). Such a scene brings to mind the Shakespearean image of the slain Macdonald: Macbeth ‘unseamed him from the nave to th’chops’ (Macbeth, i. 2. 22). Annabella’s body is the raw image of schism caused by a premature childbirth; the baby is ‘untimely ripped’ from her body by the unconventional caesarean Giovanni performs (Macbeth, v. 10. 113). The child, malformed because it is the product of incest, will be visible within the cavity of her womb. These images of corporeal disintegration and of schism will shake the audience to the core and leave an ineffaceable scar. The dark Elizabethans and Jacobeans envisioned the world in much the same way as Artaud saw it: a vile and corrupt place, devoid of humanity, whose sentient beings are obsessed with death. The performances that play out to represent these worlds do not exist in isolation or of one time, for their subject matter has the potential to penetrate a modern audience. The basis for the conventions Artaud created for his Theatre of Cruelty— the accoutrements of period, situations, characters, and action—is present in the plays themselves, and the stipulations for his theatre are therefore certainly applicable to The Revenger’s Tragedy, The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. His theatrical agenda involves

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the staging of action-driven texts via a new stage-specific language; the goal is to achieve maximum sensory appeal that delivers a penetrative and therefore participatory theatre experience for the audience. The staging of the diabolical and violent actions associated with the Theatre of Cruelty may be presented as stylized or bloody, or both. Either is applicable in the Theatre of Cruelty. The choice is ultimately left to the discretion of the director, an independent creator who can adapt as he or she sees fit. The motivation behind extreme action must always be to penetrate the audience and bring about an internal and external reaction, genuine, honest, spontaneous, and pure. But as much as the visual and bloody portrayal of the devastating action is sometimes necessary, its use must be balanced to ensure that the observer does not turn away. Performance does mirror life in this regard: for in the dark world of the early modern dramatists, so engrossed in death, decay, incest, mental and moral corruption, a contemporary audience would find parallels in the actions witnessed on stage to those which lurk in their present world. And in both settings, of the world and the stage, it is distressingly hard to turn away.

Notes 1. ‘1° Une adaptation d’une œuvre de l’époque de Shakespeare, entièrement conforme à l’état de trouble actuel des esprits, soit qu’il s’agisse d’une pièce apocryphe de Shakespeare, comme Arden of Feversham [sic], soit de toute autre pièce de la même époque. […] 9° Des œuvres du théâtre élisabéthain dépouillées de leur texte et dont on ne gardera que l’accoutrement d’époque, les situations, les personnages et l’action.’ TD, iv, 118–19. 2. To reiterate, Artaud refers to these playwrights and the theatre for which they write as Elizabethan in following Anglophone critics of the time who used ‘Elizabethan’ to refer to the whole Renaissance or early modern period in England. 3. The Revenger’s Tragedy is the play Artaud is primarily concerned with. Although modern scholarship attributes it to Thomas Middleton, and The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton certainly makes a convincing argument for his authorship of the play, Artaud would have known it as Tourneur’s. In his 2008 edition of the play, Brian Gibbons—among others—treats it as anonymous. 4. ‘C’est qu’on nous a habitués depuis quatre cents ans, c’est-à-dire depuis la Renaissance, à un théâtre purement descriptif et qui raconte, qui raconte de la psychologie. […] Shakespeare lui-même est responsable de cette aberration et de cette déchéance, de cette idée désintéressée du théâtre qui

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veut qu’une représentation théâtrale laisse le public intact, sans qu’une image lancée provoque son ébranlement dans l’organisme, pose sur lui une empreinte qui ne s’effacera plus.’ TD, iv, 92. 5. ‘qu’il n’est pas besoin de descendre jusqu’au répugnant théâtre moderne et français, pour condamner le théâtre psychologique.’ TD, iv, 92. 6. ‘nous sommes tous fous, désespéres et malades.’ TD, iv, 93. 7. Maurice Saillet, ‘In Memoriam: Antonin Artaud (1948)’, trans. by Richard Howard, in Richards, pp. 147–59 (pp. 147–48). 8. Attila Kiss, ‘The Anatomy of the Revenger: Violence and Dissection on the Early Modern English Stage’, Early Modern Culture Online, 2.1 (2011), 26–42 (p. 27). For further reading on the emblematic mode of thinking see György Endre Szőnyi, ‘The “Emblematic” as a Way of Thinking and Seeing in Renaissance Culture’, e-Colloquia, 1.1 (2003) http://ecolloquia. btk.ppke.hu/issues/200301/. 9. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300 to 1600: Volume Two 1576 to 1660, Part One (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 10. Artaud uses this term unequivocally to mean both mind and spirit. In her note on the translation of The Theatre and Its Double, Richards affirms there is no accurate English translation of the term (p. 6). 11. This is by no means to detract from the fear of death and of uncertainty in the modern period which saw not one, but two World Wars. 12. ‘d’art détaché, de poésie-charme et qui n’existe que pour charmer les loisirs.’ TD, iv, 93. 13. The two reviews appear in the second volume of the Gallimard Œuvres Complètes d’Antonin Artaud. The first review is titled, ‘Annabella au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées’ and is undoubtedly a review of the Barnowski production which opened on 12 October 1934 and starred the French film actress Annabella in her stage debut [‘Comptes rendus’, in OC, ii, 167–99 (pp.  198–99)]. The second review was sent to Gallimard by M. René Thomas, jazz guitarist and friend of Artaud, and is titled, ‘Comme il vous plaira de Shakespeare au Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées (Adaptation de Jules Supervielle)’ [‘Appendice’, in OC, ii (1961), 295–303 (pp. 302–03)]. 14. ‘La mise en scène de Victor Barnowski parut trop audacieuse aux critiques, voire même contraire à l’esprit de Shakespeare.’ ‘Comptes rendus’, ii, 198– 99; see note 1, p. 348; ‘Reviews’, in Corti, ii, 125–48 (p. 147); note 74, pp. 234–35. 15. ‘Toutes les forêts de Balthus dans ce spectacle sont profondes, mystérieuses, pleines d’une sombre grandeur. A la différence des autres forêts de théâtre, elles contiennent des ténèbres, et un rythme qui parle à l’âme: derrière les arbres et les lumières de la nature, elles évoquent des cris, des

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paroles, des sons; elles sont toutes des conceptions imaginaires où souffle l’esprit.’ ‘Comptes rendus’, ii, 198–99. 16. ‘Pourtant il y a Annabella qui est sa découverte au théâtre et qui a joué le rôle de Rosalinde, avec une justesse, une vérité, un charme et un naturel véritablement shakespeariens.’ ‘Comptes rendus’, ii, 302–03. 17. A discussion of Arden of Faversham as a baiting appears in Chapter 4. The title character, Thomas Arden, has eight attempts on his life before his attackers—a pack of six, human mastiffs—are successful in killing him. 18. André Gide, Arden de Feversham, in Le Théâtre Élisabéthain, ed. by Georgette Camille and Pierre d’Exideuil (Marseilles: Les Cahiers du Sud, 1933), pp. 107–17 (act one only). 19. ‘À Jean Paulhan, [Paris, le] 27 novembre 1932’; ‘Lettres’, in OC, v (1964), 186–90 (p. 187). 20. ‘d’en pousser l’interprétation dans le sens qui me paraîtra nécessaire et d’y ajouter telles inventions formelles inspirées par le texte, donc non opposées à son esprit, mais développées à l’extrême, que j’estimerai indispensable d’y ajouter.’ ‘Lettres’, v, 188–89. ‘To Jean Paulhan, [Paris] 27 November 1932’; ‘Letters from 1932–33’, in Sontag, pp. 304–06 (p. 306). 21. Kimberly Jannarone, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 174. 22. ‘une véritable adaptation scénique dont je [Artaud] serai le seul auteur. Une nouvelle pièce précisée jusque dans les moindres détails apparaîtra en transparence sous le texte d’André Gide, et sous le trame de l’action.’ ‘Lettres’, v, 189. ‘To Jean Paulhan, [Paris] 27 November 1932’; ‘Letters from 1932–33’, in Sontag, p. 306. 23. ‘Et je pense qu’il n’y a pas à craindre de forcer encore le virulence du langage, sa crudité, son déshabillé. Shakespeare et les Elisabéthains sont allés plus loin dans ce sens que nous ne serons tous capables d’aller.’ ‘Lettres’, v, 190. ‘To Jean Paulhan, [Paris] 27 November 1932’; ‘Letters from 1932–33’, in Sontag, p. 306. 24. ‘À Jean Paulhan, Mercredi 3 août 1932’; ‘Lettres’, in OC, v (1964), 116– 17 (p.  117); note p.  338. Pierre Leyris translated the De Quincey essay that Paulhan gave Artaud, which had either one of two titles: ‘Des coups frapées à la porte dans Macbeth’, or ‘Du heurt à la porte dans Macbeth’. According to Thévenin, Artaud read the former title. 25. ‘Je trouve l’essai de Thomas de Quincey absolument bouleversant, et d’un parallélisme inouï avec mes propres conceptions.’ ‘Lettres’, v, 117. ‘To Jean Paulhan, Wednesday, 3 August 1932’; ‘Letters from 1932–33’, in Sontag, pp. 297–98 (p. 298). 26. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by Frederick Burwick, 21 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000–03), iii (2000), 150–54 (p. 150).

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27. The four people murdered were Mr and Mrs Marr, their newborn child of 8 months, and a Devonshire boy, about 14, who was Mr Marr’s apprentice. A complete case study of these murders is found in De Quincey’s essay, ‘On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts’ (1827). 28. ‘Une fois lancé dans sa fureur, il faut infiniment plus de vertu à l’acteur pour s’empêcher de commettre un crime qu’il ne faut de courage à l’assassin pour parvenir à exécuter la sien, et c’est ici que, dans sa gratuité, l’action d’un sentiment au théâtre, apparaît comme quelque chose d’infiniment plus valable que celle d’un sentiment réalisé. En face de la fureur de l’assassin qui s’épuise, celle de l’acteur tragique demeure dans un cercle pur et fermé. La fureur de l’assassin a accompli un acte, elle se décharge et perd le contact d’avec la force qui l’inspire, mais ne l’alimentera plus désormais. Elle a pris une forme, celle de l’acteur, qui se nie à mesure qu’elle se dégage, se fond dans l’universalité.’ TD, iv, 31. 29. ‘L’asservissement à l’auteur, la soumission au texte, quel funèbre bateau! Mais chaque texte a des possibilités infinies. L’esprit et non la lettre du texte! Mais un texte demande plus que de l’analyse et de la pénétration.’ ‘L’Évolution du décor’, in OC, ii (1961), 9–15 (p. 11); ‘The Evolution of Décor’; ‘Two Essays from 1924’, in Sontag, pp. 53–55 (p. 53). 30. ‘Tout dans l’aspect physique de l’acteur comme dans celui du pestiféré, montre que la vie a réagi au paroxysme, et pourtant, il ne s’est rien passé. Entre le pestiféré qui court en criant à la poursuite de ses images et l’acteur à la poursuite de sa sensibilité; entre le vivant qui se compose des personnages qu’il n’aurait jamais pensé sans cela à imaginer, et qui les réalise au milieu d’un public de cadavres et d’aliénés délirants, et le poète qui invente intempestivement des personnages et les livre à un public éqalement inerte ou délirant, il y a d’autres analogies qui rendent raison des seules vérités qui comptent, et mettent l’action du théâtre comme celle de la peste sur le plan d’une véritable épidémie.’ TD, iv, 30–31. 31. ‘Une vraie pièce de théâtre bouscule le repos des sens, libère l’inconscient comprimé, pousse à une sorte de révolte virtuelle et qui d’ailleurs ne peut avoir tout son prix que si elle demeure virtuelle, impose aux collectivités rassemblées une attitude héroïque et difficile.’ TD, iv, 34. 32. Sir Philip Sidney, Selected Writings, ed. Richard Dutton (Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1987), p. 124. 33. ‘Si nous ne croyons plus au théâtre distraction, dérivation, porcherie, sottise, nous croyons à cette sorte d’exhaustion, de plan suréléve sur lequel le théâtre entraîne autant la vie que la pensée. […] La Tragédie de la vengeance, qui est d’ailleurs un chef-d’œuvre éprouvé, répond entièrement à notre sens, à notre volonté. Nous la monterons donc. Toutes les œuvres sont de tous les temps. Il n’y a pas de pièce spécifiquement ancienne ou moderne, ou c’est une œuvre ratée. La Tragédie de la vengeance est très

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près de nos affres.’ ‘Théâtre Alfred Jarry’, ii, 37. ‘The Alfred Jarry Theatre’, in Corti, ii, 28. 34. Anonymous, The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. by Brian Gibbons, New Mermaids, 3rd edn (London: A & C Black, 2008), ii. 1. 117. All further quotations from The Revenger’s Tragedy are from this edition. 35. We can add to these the recollection of family and friends covered with buboes, the images outside of the theatre. 36. See also La Pierre Philosophale (The Philosopher’s Stone), Il n’y a plus de firmament (There is no more firmament), and La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). The latter was made into a film directed by Germaine Dulac in 1928 and is considered one of three seminal Surrealist films. 37. ‘Un silence. On entend comme le bruit d’une immense roue qui tourne et dégage du vent. Un ouragan les sépare en deux. A ce moment, on voit deux astres qui s’entrechoquent et une série de jambes de chair vivante qui tombent avec des pieds, des mains, des chevelures, des masques, des colonnades, des portiques, des temples, des alambics, qui tombent, mais de plus en plus lentement, comme s’ils tombaient dans du vide, puis trois scorpions l’un après l’autre, et enfin une grenouille, et un scarabée qui se dépose avec une lenteur désespérante, une lenteur à vomir.’ ‘Le Jet du Sang’; ‘L’Ombilic des Limbes’, in OC, i (1970), 88–96 (p.  89).  The Spurt of Blood; ‘Umbilical Limbo’, in Corti, i, 62–65 (p. 63). This surrealist blueprint for the stage was first produced by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Theatre of Cruelty season in 1964. 38. Apollinaire’s  1917 play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) depicts the surreal dissembling of the physical and societal body held down by patriarchy, with Thérèse bursting her breasts—children’s balloons, one red and one blue—in the opening act of the play. 39. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (B-Text), in ‘Doctor Faustus’ and Other Plays, ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; repr. 1998), pp. 185–246 (v. 3. 6–7). 40. I don’t know if this necessarily translates into the 1970s glam-rock version of Fiona Buffini’s vision in her 2016 adaptation for the Nottingham Playhouse, but it surely has the potential means to jar the audience’s senses, for better or worse. It also has been adapted for a postmodern audience, prompting members to question the power of celebrity in the wake of a collective aghast response to the charges and convictions against Gary Glitter, a suspected paedophile and convicted rapist, who the Duke in this production of The Revenger’s Tragedy resembles. The world of Buffini’s version, therefore, is rife with its own account of moral corruption and disease.

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41. William L. Stull, ‘“This Metamorphosde Tragoedie”: Thomas Kyd, Cyril Tourneur, and the Jacobean Theatre of Cruelty’, ARIEL, 4.3 (1983), 35–49 (p. 41). 42. ‘Le Théâtre que je vais fonder’; ‘Articles à propos du théâtre de la N.R.F.’, in OC, v (1964), 35–37 (p. 36). 43. The other plays Artaud planned to stage for the Theatre of Cruelty are listed from 2 to 8 in the first manifesto. TD, iv, 119; Richards, pp. 99–100. 44. John Webster, The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi; The Devil’s Law-Case; A Cure for a Cuckold, ed. by René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; repr. 1998), pp. 1–101 (i. 1. 32). All further quotations from The White Devil are from this edition. 45. J.W.  Lever, The Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama (London: Methuen, 1971; repr. 1987), p. 86. 46. This connection is made by corrupt men. The play, in fact, has a Feminist slant. 47. ‘O lord judge, turn your eyes on this plague, the most corrupt of women.’ My translation. 48. John Webster, The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi; The Devil’s Law-Case; A Cure for a Cuckold, ed. by René Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; repr. 1998), pp. 103–211 (i. 1. 11–15). All further quotations from The Duchess of Malfi are from this edition. 49. ‘Il ne s’agit pas de supprimer la parole articulée, mais de donner aux mots à peu près l’importance qu’ils ont dans les rêves.’ TD’, iv, 112. 50. ‘Le théâtre comme la peste est une crise qui se dénoue par la mort ou la guérison.’ TD, iv, 38. 51. Artaud held Maeterlinck in the highest regard and even wrote the Preface to his Twelve Songs (1923). 52. ‘Nous voyons pour notre plus grande stupeur, et dès le lever du rideau, un être rué dans une revendication insolente d’inceste, et qui tend toute sa vigueur d’être conscient et jeune à proclamer et à la justifier.’ TD, iv, 34–35. 53. John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. by Martin Wiggins, New Mermaids, 2nd edn (London: A & C Black, 2003), i. 2. 140. All further quotations from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore are from this edition. 54. ‘toute vraie liberté est noire et se confond immanquablement avec la liberté du sexe qui est noire elle aussi.’ TD, iv, 37. 55. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote the quintessential work on incest in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, first published in French in 1949. His anthropological investigation was centred upon what he labels primitive society, where exogamy is carefully regulated because the distribution of women is of utmost importance within any given tribe for the simple reason that the number of available women in any given tribe is usually lim-

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ited. The females are considered both breeders and symbols of wealth, and exist as commodity for the males who acquire them. Maintaining the numbers of the tribe in regard to lineage is necessary, but owning a wife contributes to a male’s wealth. This is why marriages between blood relations are not considered taboo in these societies. The rules pertaining to marriages amongst blood relations are not regulated by the eroticism of modern incest taboos, but on whether the union is matrilinear or patrilinear. Within these abiding distinctions, further taboos may exist. Again, these distinctions operate in regard to wealth and commodity distribution, and are prohibited accordingly. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969; Rev. edn). 56. Richard McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 233. 57. ‘Si le théâtre essentiel est comme la peste, ce n’est pas parce qu’il est contagieux, mais parce que comme la peste il est la révélation, la mise en avant, la poussée vers l’exéterieur d’un fond de cruauté latente par lequel se localisent sur un individu ou sur un peuple toutes les possibilités perverses de l’esprit. Comme la peste il est le temps du mal, le triomphe des forces noires, qu’une force encore plus profonde alimente jusqu’à l’extinction.’ TD, iv, 37. 58. ‘À Jean Paulhan, 13 septembre 1932’; TD, iv (1964), 120–21; Richards, pp. 101–02. 59. ‘signifie rigueur, application et décision implacable, détermination irréversible, absolue.’ TD, iv, 121. 60. ‘Il ne balance pas un instant, il n’hésite pas une minute; et il montre par là combien peu comptent toutes les barrières qui pourraient lui être opposées. Il est criminel avec héroïsme et il est héroïque avec audace et ostentation. Tout le pousse dans ce sens et l’exalte, il n’y a pour lui ni terre ni ciel, mais la force de sa passion convulsive, à laquelle ne manque pas de répondre la passion rebelle, elle aussi, et tout aussi héroïque d’Annabella.’ TD, iv, 35. 61. Carol C.  Rosen, ‘The Language of Cruelty in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, in Drama in the Renaissance: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. by Clifford Davidson, C.J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1986), pp.  315–27. Peter Womack’s book on English Renaissance drama also looks at Artaud’s attraction towards ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore in his search for ‘the dangerous play that Artaud read’. Peter Womack, ‘John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, in English Renaissance Drama, Blackwell Guides to Literature (London: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 250–55 (p. 251).

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62. Artaud considered the language of the Maeterlinck translation of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore extremely potent and even included one of Annabella’s lines from the text in his essay ‘The Theatre and the Plague’ (TD, iv, 35; Richards, p. 28). 63. Ralph J. Kauffmann, ‘Ford’s Tragic Perspective in Elizabethan Drama’, in Elizabethan Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. by Ralph J. Kauffmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 356–72 (p. 366). 64. Clifford Leech, John Ford and the Drama of His Time (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), pp. 49, 50.

SECTION IV

The Theatre of Cruelty in Performance

CHAPTER 7

Artaud’s Les Cenci

This examination of the influence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on Artaud, and the reciprocal influence of Artaud on contemporary interpretations of early modern drama, has focused on textual analyses of the plays and cultural events which helped to formulate and visualize Artaud’s theatre. This final section considers attempts to stage the Theatre of Cruelty in applying Artaudian principles of avant-garde performance and begins with a discussion of his own production of Les Cenci, which opened 6 May 1935 at the Théâtre des Folies-Wagram and closed after a 17-­performance run. As the first production of the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud’s intention was to introduce his theatre and its accompanying new language of gesture to the French public. Stendhal had published the archives of the Cenci family in the 1830s, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci was already well known, having been translated into French in the early 1880s. Its first performance was directed by Lugné-Poe in 1890 at the Théâtre d’Art under the patronage of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.1 Artaud’s play is neither an adaptation of Shelley’s linear narrative nor a revision of Stendhal’s Les Cenci as found in his Chroniques italiennes, but an original work, a fact Artaud vehemently promoted. Both Artaud’s and Shelley’s plays are based on the real-life events which took place in Italy in the late 1590s, and are accounts of Count Francesco Cenci’s murder, orchestrated by his 15-year-old daughter Beatrice whom he had raped and tortured. She was executed on © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_7

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11 September 1599 after being charged, found guilty, and sentenced to die for parricide by corrupt authorities. Beatrice, her step-mother Lucretia—with whom she planned the murder—and the hired assassins were executed for their roles in carrying out this unnatural act.

From Innocence to Effluence The question of whether Beatrice was guilty of the murder of her father is a major preoccupation with Cenci aficionados. In the Shelley play, she is portrayed in such a manner that demands a sympathetic emotional response: a victim of his violation, Beatrice is therefore justified in murdering her father, Count Cenci. Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice before her execution—one of Shelley’s favourites—helped to influence the poet’s veneration of the teenager. From the portrait, he deduced and deliberately included the following suppositions in the preface to the play: Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world.2

Shelley professes Beatrice’s innocence at the outset of the text, claiming that circumstance alone forced her to play the role of murderess out of necessity. His comments thusly compromise an objective reading or viewing of the play. Shelley insists that Beatrice did not have an innate propensity for evil. Her nature was unlike her father’s, her antithesis, who spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, committing ‘capital crimes of the most enormous and unspeakable kind’ (Shelley, p. vii). Truly, she is the victim of her father’s corruption, but her delegation of his murder to assassins was unquestionably a criminal action which initiated her role as violent instigator. While Shelley proclaims he ‘endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were, and ha[s] sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by [his] own c­ onceptions of right or wrong, false or true’, the representation of Beatrice’s character as it appears in the preface persuades the reader of the play that she is innocent of murder, in spite of the fact that she is a co-conspirator, because the action was performed out of necessity and not predilection (Shelley, p. x). With regards to the incestuous relationship she engages in, Beatrice does not provoke her violation, but she is nonetheless a participant. In this respect, Shelley’s The Cenci is less like Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, where

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the act of incest is consensual, and more like Philip Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat, which presents ‘incest from a pathological perspective less as desire than disease’ (McCabe, p. 256). The inspiration for the play is rooted in the history of the Cenci family; however, unlike Shelley’s version, Massinger’s play is devoted to the exploration of the psychology of Malfort, the patriarch who doubles Francesco Cenci. Massinger’s focus on the tyrannical Malfort, rather than his innocent daughter, connects the play with Artaud’s Les Cenci. Ultimately, it is not natural affection that drives Count Cenci to rape and consequently torture his daughter, but furor, the same force driving Atreus in Seneca’s Thyestes. The impact of incest in Les Cenci is similar to that of a disease of epidemic proportions. According to Artaud in his essay ‘The Theatre and the Plague’, incest is indeed connected to plague by way of the abnormal intensity in which the impossible becomes the norm. Inevitably, this is linked to sexual freedom which is dark (TD, iv, 37; Richards, p. 30). Incest is, in effect, a psychosexual analogue of plague. Whether or not it is either a syndrome caused by a response to illness, as Freud suggests, or in accordance with or against Nature, it is against social custom, as Jane Goodall affirms.3 Artaud details the effects of incest through the story of the Cenci family, a microcosm of society itself. While Shelley does not specifically address the force of the plague in his play, he nonetheless evokes metaphors of contamination and pollution. The audience observes the spread of plague that stems from Count Cenci’s escalating tyranny as he unleashes devastation and madness on his family by way of incest. This contagion eventually results in the total destruction of the Cenci Empire. Guilt and innocence do not apply in this environment because they belong in the realm of rationality and taboo, the everyday world which does not function during an epidemic. The source of the plague is the cruelty within the soul of Count Cenci, where notions of morality, ethics, family, and religion have no place. In staging Les Cenci, Artaud’s main challenge was to make the spectacle appeal to his audience whilst demonstrating his theatrical language and highlighting the pure forces these characters represent. The Shelley play was never performed in the poet’s lifetime because he felt the subject matter too daunting. He wrote the following in the preface of the play: This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: any thing like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry

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which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. (Shelley, p. ix)

Shelley’s stipulations for the production were quite difficult to adhere to. How do the director and the actors ‘increase the ideal’ while at the same time minimize the subject matter and its horror? In Shelley, this is achieved by elevating the poetic language in myriad soliloquies. Whereas Artaud would wholeheartedly have agreed with Shelley’s demand that the exhibition should refrain from serving a moral purpose (a disservice to the play as it was written), the theatre is not a place for ideals where audiences are left unscathed from the actions upon the stage, and instead mollified by lyric poetry. Shelley chooses, therefore, to anesthetize the horror of the events by evoking a sense of the ideal. Nonetheless, the beginning of the third act communicates the monstrous horror in the play with Beatrice’s confirmation that she has indeed been raped by her father. In Shelley, the subtext of her lengthy exchange with Lucretia implies some kind of violation has taken place, but she never gives her step-mother a direct answer as to the nature of the abuse. Orsino, who enters mid-way through the scene, suspects the transgression, but Beatrice still does not specify the crime: beatrice



If I could find a word that might make known The crime of my destroyer; and that done, My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret Which cankers my heart’s core; aye, lay all bare So that my unpolluted fame should be With vilest gossips a stale mouthèd story; A mock, a bye-word, an astonishment:— (The Cenci, 154)

iii.

1.

She is unable to name the crime, in part because its very admission undermines its severity, reducing it to vile gossip, but we can deduce it was rape from her dialogue with Orsino which addresses the aftermath of her father’s violation upon her body and soul rather than the act itself. Her father has severed the bond of kin between parent and child; however, in doing so, he has enabled a stronger connection between them. After the

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rape, she is fully aware of the fact that his blood runs through her veins: ‘Oh blood, which art my father’s blood, / Circling thro-these contaminated veins’, which resounds like a perversion of the Lord’s prayer (The Cenci, iii. 1. 95). In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand similarly realizes this truth, but only after he commits sororicide. This same exchange between Beatrice and Lucretia takes place in Artaud’s Les Cenci. Rather than downplay the horror of the events, Artaud makes the rape, and its disclosure, the focus of the scene. Its effects drive Beatrice, aided by Lucretia and Orsino, towards parricide. Notably, Artaud’s language is not poetic, which is unsurprising given his guidelines for the Theatre of Cruelty. Likewise, the language of the plague is neither refined nor eloquent. It is fuelled by passion and frenzy, and both the spoken language and that of gesture must reflect this urgency and rigour. Whereas Shelley uses an idealized language to perhaps protect and ease the audience into accepting the tragic and horrible events taking place— primarily against Beatrice—Artaud offers no relief. Furthermore, he is far more direct and economical with his words: lucretia

What has he done? I am afraid to know. You must know. The worst has happened. lucretia The worst? What new misery has he invented? beatrice Cenci, my own father, has raped me.4 beatrice

By using the verb polluer, which translated literally means ‘to pollute’, Artaud denotes a subtext of filth, thus emphasizing the atmosphere of contagion and infection in the play, and at the same time evoking the imagery Shelley uses at the beginning of the scene when Beatrice speaks of the ‘clinging, black, contaminating mist’ dissolving her ‘flesh to a pollution’ (The Cenci, iii. 1. 17, 22). Count Cenci has physically polluted her by inflicting his will and his body upon her. This moment fortifies their connection, thereby turning Beatrice towards corruption. From the moment she acknowledges and confirms his crime, her propensity for good, rational thought changes to that of malevolence as she considers retribution over escape. She may be the innocent victim of her father’s debauchery, but her desire for justice propels her towards extreme action: ‘something must be done!’ (My translation).5 She fails in placing her trust in God to judge her father and decides on violent

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vengeance instead. According to Girard, this is the law of reciprocity: ‘One cannot exert violence without submitting to it’ (Girard, Violence, p. 257). Thus, everybody comes to resemble everybody else: the victim becomes instigator, and vice versa. No one is spared from the contagion and its ensuing violence. In Artaud’s play, Beatrice learns that there is no escape from her destiny. Her dire reality is realized through the retelling of a recurring childhood dream: beatrice

When I was little, I had the same dream every night. I was naked, alone in a vast bedroom with a wild animal such as only exists in dreams. I could hear it breathing. I could escape but I had to hide my glaring nudity. At that moment, a door opened. I felt hungry and thirsty. Suddenly, I found I was not alone. No! Not only was the animal breathing beside me, but it seemed there were other breathing things. Soon, I saw a horde of foul creatures swarming at my feet. And this horde was also thirsty. I set out stubbornly, to find the daylight. For I felt only daylight would satisfy me. Now the wild beast had followed me and was pursuing me from cave to cave. Feeling it near me, I realised my thirst was not only stubbornness. Each time I felt my strength was about to fail, I immediately awoke. (The Cenci, iii. 1. pp. 139–40)6

Beatrice’s narration of her dream is the longest passage given to any one speaker in Les Cenci. The importance and significance of dreams in Artaud’s theatre is not to be overlooked; this Websterian convention is one Artaud particularly admired. Dreams are exteriorized and often even visualized because they are seen as more truthful than our external reality; this is true of Beatrice’s dream in Les Cenci. Employing the logic of dreams, exploited foremost in dictée automatique (automatic writing), is Surrealist in origin. Her extended diatribe is therefore not a simple plot device, but a revelation of truth. After the rape, Beatrice’s innocence or inexperience is replaced by knowledge as she becomes consciously aware of her destiny. She distinguishes her perpetrator less as her father and more as Count Cenci, the pursuant beast from whom she will no longer be able to escape as he exists both within and without her psyche. Her dreams do not provide her with solace, but confirm the inevitability of Count Cenci’s violation and its effects. That other breathing beasts lurk in

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her dreams suggests that she may not be the only one to suffer, and may even be the source of others’ suffering, thus indicating her transformation from a pure and moral person into a polluted and dangerous villain. She has absorbed her father’s character and lives only to perform justice by way of murder. In raping Beatrice, Count Cenci infects her with the same furor afflicting him.

Les Destructeurs Again, the use of the dream to prompt revelation and exteriorize truth is employed as Count Cenci acknowledges himself as a destructive force in the play: cenci

I often dream that I am destiny itself. This is how my vices are best understood, and my natural bent for hatred and, above all, why I loathe most those who are closest to me in blood. I feel myself to be, I know I am one of the forces of nature. There is no life, no death, no God, no incest, no contrition, no crime in my existence. I obey my own law, of which I am my own master—and all the worse for those who are caught and sink without trace in my inferno. (The Cenci, i. 1. p. 123)7

Here, he sees himself an inescapable, abstract, elemental force: destiny itself. Within him is a force, unseen, propelling him towards violent action. In Artaud’s Le Figaro article published 5 May 1935, he refers to Count Cenci as a ‘destructeur’.8 Artaud’s play and his treatment of the subject matter is a revival of the Great Myths that bring truth to light, and it is for this reason that when adapted for the theatre, the story becomes a tragedy (‘Articles à propos des Cenci’, v, 48): So that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation. The theater, like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark, it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater, but of life. (Richards, p. 31)9

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Increasing the ideal and diminishing the horror of the events in the theatre, as Shelley would do, would detract from truth and result in an artificial audience response. The theatre and the plague have the power to collectively drain the abscesses that prevent exaltation put in place by societal hypocrisy; to do so effectively, the theatre must present truth without facade (TD, iv, 38; Richards, p. 31). However, Artaud exposes this Great Myth through language and monologue, something which he had hoped to eliminate from his theatre, and at least this production of Les Cenci. The Cencian model which seeks total annihilation of the social system in which it exists is similar to Artaud’s own sense of nihilism. Maurice Labelle suggests that the furor which drives Count Cenci is similar to Artaud’s own, concluding that both men were despised by their societies.10 Artaud’s belief was that if society became immoral, the solution, which he considers in his essay ‘Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène’, is simple: ‘I believe, however, that our present social state is iniquitous and should be destroyed. If this is a fact for the theater to be preoccupied with, it is even more a matter for machine guns’ (Richards, p. 42).11 According to Michael Scott  in Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist, although Artaud identifies the necessity for ‘a change in social order’, he lacks the necessary political motivation to do anything about it (p. 9). Change is prompted both organically, through plague and its theatrical double, or politically by way of militaristic upheaval. The theatre has the power to destroy iniquity, thereby cleansing the populace in the same way as an epidemic of plague. This is the Artaudian paradox: cure lies in contamination, often resulting in death. In Les Cenci, Count Cenci functions as a plague which destroys society. He rules as a tyrant who takes pleasure in atrocity causing mayhem. Artaud is so deeply against the convoluted definition of civilization, a blasphemy of creation, that its destruction is welcome, if not required. With Les Cenci, Artaud is able to perform the destruction he firmly believes is necessary. The problem is that Count Cenci is the centre of iniquity in his house and he causes it to breed. For this reason, Count Cenci himself must die with the rest of his offspring. Here, the prevalent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imagery of the plague as God’s vengeance indiscriminately raining down like arrows on his people is applicable. Count Cenci becomes the victim of his own destructive force, which in turn generates more victims. No one escapes the plague. The tyranny Count Cenci identifies in himself is similar to that of Shakespeare’s Richard iii who brings down his entire bloodline in his lust

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for power. His genetic composition has determined his position as destroyer, for he believes he is physically suited for nothing else: richard gloucester



And therefore since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determinèd to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (Richard iii, i. 1. 28)

For Richard, the only ‘“natural” behaviour is unnatural behaviour’ (McCabe, p. 157). A true villain, battling against all that is good, moral, and socially acceptable, he consciously decides to engage in every horrible indulgence without remorse, including the infliction of evil upon his kin. Both Count Cenci’s and Richard’s destroyer status is innate as much as it is self-fashioned. It is ironic, of course, that Count Cenci considers his family an affliction which poisons his existence. Although the inverse is true (Count Cenci himself is the poison), his family does eventually cut his life short (Les Cenci, ii. 1. p. 218). By infecting Beatrice, he ensures that he will destroy his entire family even after his death. The incestuous rape of Beatrice proves the most effective way for Count Cenci to pollute and thereby destroy his bloodline. The connection the father and daughter share after the rape strengthens their bond and secures her to him. Beatrice becomes trapped within the constructs of her mind and cannot look beyond its Cencian parameters: ‘Now I know what madmen suffer. / Madness is like death’ (The Cenci, iii. 1. p. 139).12 But the madness the rape has brought on is not only contained in Beatrice as it also infects Count Cenci. In effect, he re-contaminates himself by indulging in his daughter. Just as Beatrice cannot get her father out of her head, he cannot get Beatrice out of his: ‘Desire, furor, love… I don’t know which it is… but I am on fire. / I hunger for her’ (My translation).13 The incestuous relationship instigated by furor turns into passionate frenzy. Count Cenci infuses in Beatrice an otherworldly quality that enables her to draw those she loves towards her—Lucretia, Orsino (her would-be lover), and finally her brother, Bernardo—inevitably leading them into peril. The latter is particularly troubling because after Count Cenci dies, the bond between Beatrice and Bernardo mirrors the relationship she had with her late father. After she is arrested, Bernardo expresses the same desperation for Beatrice as Count Cenci did, something which Lucretia does not fail to recognize:

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bernardo (Hysterical)

No, no, no. I will follow her, wherever she goes. (Throws himself frenziedly at the soldiers, pounds at them) lucretia My God! It is old Cenci himself. Cenci, be still. bernardo For God’s sake kill me. But give me back my soul. (The soldiers hurl him back) They have sacrificed my soul… they have sacrificed my soul… they have sacrificed my soul… (The Cenci, iv. 2. p. 149)14 Bernardo may fail to adopt the vindictiveness of his father, but inherits Count Cenci’s obsession. Bernardo’s mad infatuation mercifully dies with Beatrice’s death. Artaud left the audience to decide what they were going to get out of Les Cenci. His play was not designed to fulfil some moral purpose; rather, Artaud wanted to perform and present his interpretation of a historical event. He published the following in La Bête Noire on 1 May 1935, just prior to the play’s premiere: I drew my play from Shelley and Stendhal, which does not mean that I either adapted Shelley or imitated Stendhal. From both I took the subject, which is, moreover, true and far more beautiful in reality than on stage or in manuscripts. Shelley embellished nature with his style and language, which is like a summer’s night that is bombarded by meteors, but I prefer the starkness of nature.15

Artaud’s intention was not to present reality without ornamentation as in Stendhal’s text, but to do so in such a way as to augment the importance of the story and its themes. Contrary to Shelley’s view, Artaud believes that poetic language is unnecessary as the action can take place without it; poetry does not help to clarify, and can inadvertently detract from, the story itself. This idea is repeated throughout Artaud’s body of work. In his translation of Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk, which shares the same rhetorical affinity with Shelley’s play, Artaud went so far as to remove long passages of poetry and song from the novel because he thought they were unnecessary to the action and therefore frivolous. For Artaud, anything which deviates from the action is eliminated. He maintained the structure of Shelley’s play—combining the last two acts into one—and much of the action of the plot, but did not translate the dialogue directly

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as his play was not a translation. No matter how avant-garde Lugné-Poe’s 1890 production of The Cenci was, it was not an original production, like Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty play claimed it was, but a translation of the Shelley text. Nevertheless, according to Stuart Curran, in its efforts to present in symbolic form human perversity and innocence in a world of excess, the play was the perfect ‘symbolist drama pitting elemental forces against one another’ (Curran, p. 200). As translator—or destructeur—of the text, Artaud saw the symbolist potential in the story of The Cenci. The Theatre of Cruelty’s plan to stage, without regard for text, however, did not manifest on the stage.

The Theatre of Cruelty Test Although Artaud achieved his goal of creating an original piece, Les Cenci was not an accurate representation of a complete Theatre of Cruelty production; to begin, the play was not even listed in the programme of the first manifesto as a possible ‘text’ to perform. Further, critical reception was mixed at best and tended to focus on the elite audience members— and not its creative elements—who were attracted to the play because the socialite, Lady Iya Abdy, who also financed the production, was cast as Beatrice Cenci. The use of the Folies-Wagram, Jannarone reminds, with its proscenium stage and gallery, and stationary instead of mobile seating, meant the venue offered the complete opposite of the staging requirements of the Theatre of Cruelty which specified that the action take place in the four corners of the room, thus surrounding the audience on all sides (Artaud and His Doubles, p. 162). But the entirety of the work and its performance should not be written off. The production itself, therefore, was a test or experiment to gauge the audience’s acceptance of Artaud’s vision. It was of utmost importance for Artaud to establish early on the significance of gesture and movement in the performance because Les Cenci was publicized as the introduction to his Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud was inspired by gravitational movement in composing Les Cenci, but he was trying to imitate nature even less than he was reproducing Shelley: While writing Les Cenci, I did not try to copy nature any more than I tried to imitate Shelley, but I imposed the movement of nature on my tragedy, that general gravitation that moves plants and beings like plants and which we also find in a static form in the volcanic eruptions of the earth. All the staging of the Cenci is based on this movement of gravitation.

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The gestures and movements are as important as the text; and the latter was established only to serve as a catalyst for the rest of the play. And I think this will be the first time, at least here in France, that we will be involved with a dramatic text written in terms of a production whose modalities left the author’s imagination concrete and alive. (Roger Blin and others, p. 103)16

Gravitational movement motivates the action of the play on the stage. In performance, the actors move first and speak later. They move in spirals, as if driven to do so by an unseen force, a motif representing Count Cenci, and these gestural movements adequately reflect the inevitable degeneration of the family as the dark forces in the play win over innocence. This understanding supports Artaud’s claim that destiny motivates all action within the play. Individual will is either subservient to destiny, personified in the character of Count Cenci, or is overpowered by it. The movement, therefore, would have nicely complemented this thematic idea. Colette, writing for Le Journal, saw the moments of movement and silence as little more than organized chaos orchestrated by Artaud, ‘who pulls his characters out of their rigidity only to throw them one on top of the other’.17 These movements spliced with silence were a means to visually establish, through gesture, the cruelty and control Count Cenci inflicts on his subservient household. Also, by identifying movement as natural and gravitational, Artaud establishes that gesture and movement are just as natural and important as the written text. The material Roger Blin, actor and assistant director of the production, published on act one, scene three from his rehearsal notebooks provides an accurate representation of what Artaud’s intentions were regarding movement; the staging featured more than 76 separate movements.18 The banquet scene, during which Count Cenci reveals he has effectively had his two sons murdered, features the Cenci family, Camillo, Andréa, Prince Colonna, unnamed guests, two female dwarves (who remain mute throughout the scene), and a large number of dummies who begin the scene in pantomime, moving in circles, crying, laughing, and sobbing, before the arrival of Count Cenci. They act freely and according to their own will until Count Cenci enters. To reiterate, the use of dummies—as either mannequins or silent actors—is extremely important for Artaud who explained their presence in the play:

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Dummies will intervene in Les Cenci. And in this way, too, I will return to the Theatre of Cruelty by circuitous and symbolic ways. […] The dummies in the Cenci will be there to make the heroes of the play say what is disturbing them and what is impossible in ordinary speech. The dummies will be there to formulate the reproaches, bitterness, regrets, anguish and demands, and from the beginning to the end of the play, one will perceive a language of gestures and signs that concentrates the anxieties of the time into a kind of violent expression. (Roger Blin and others, p. 104)19

These inert symbols express what cannot be said in spoken language. This is especially true in Les Cenci, for the tyrant suppresses any vocal objections against him. Silence doubly reflects both their refusal and their compliance. Their instincts may be to move away from Count Cenci, but as the gravitational force in the play, he inevitably draws them towards him: Confusion. guests surge back on all sides. They rush about, panic-stricken, advance as if into battle, but a ghostly battle. They are about to attack ghosts, their arms raised as if they were holding shields. (The Cenci, i. 3. p. 129)20

Roger Blin interpreted the stage action, of panic-stricken characters poised for attack, from the point of view of an actor participating in this organized chaos.21 Count Cenci appears to be the embodiment of Artaud’s notion of forces seen and unseen that exercise their cruelty against us, reminding us that we are indeed not free (TD, iv, 95; Richards, p. 79). Count Cenci restricts and redirects the movements of the other characters in the play. No matter how determined the guests appear to want to fight against tyranny, their movements become panicked and they instinctually move to shield themselves from Count Cenci who thwarts their intentions. Although this type of movement may have appeared chaotic to reviewers, such as Colette, Artaud’s intentions are purposeful, no matter the execution; unfortunately, he could not control the audience’s interpretation of the events witnessed. Later in the same scene, Count Cenci dismisses his guests in order to antagonize Beatrice. A silent exchange suggesting compliance takes place between Beatrice and Lucretia: ‘lucretia gestures as if to bar cenci’s way. beatrice shakes her head. lucretia understands, slowly exits after a last look at beatrice’ (The Cenci, i. 3. p.  130).22 Lucretia’s instinctive reaction, expressed through protego and impedio, is to stop her husband from

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gaining access to Beatrice. But Beatrice understands that it is useless to try and prevent what is inevitable. A shake of her head tells Lucretia that there is no use in trying to impede her father’s access to her. Beatrice, like the guests, is even drawn to Count Cenci, the centrifugal force in the play from which all movement generates from or gyrates towards. She is lulled into silent complacency by him: ‘cenci moves slowly towards her. His attitude has completely changed, his emotions are now very serene. beatrice looks at him. It seems her own distrust has suddenly vanished’ (The Cenci, i. 3. p. 130).23 She moves towards him, unthreatened and trusting. The diagram Blin provides shows Beatrice’s movement towards Count Cenci as she brings him the wine he requests. They move together in circular motion; however, once he advances towards her and moves to stroke her hair, she retreats away from his gravitational pull, jumping to the side as he touches her. She is suddenly conscious of the contagion that is her father.24 As if by instinct, Beatrice knows that although she moves away from him, neither she nor the rest of her family can escape the force of destiny that will eventually destroy them. This is wherein the cruelty lies. Her movement away from Count Cenci is temporary, but his hold upon her is permanent: ‘Leave her. The spell is working. From now on she cannot escape me’ (The Cenci, i. 3. p. 131).25 Movement, gesture, and sound work together to shape two actions showing physical cruelty in the final act of Les Cenci. Having decided to murder Count Cenci, Beatrice, with the aid of Orsino, hires two mute and inept assassins, whose inclusion is likely homage to Charlie Chaplin. By way of a dumb show, Beatrice prepares them for murder in a silent ceremony wherein she thrusts their arms out of their cloaks and ritually places daggers into their hands (Les Cenci, iv. 1. pp. 251–52). Her transformation from innocent to murderess is visualized in her preparing the hapless assassins. A Beatrice of action is presented to contrast the complacent victim of the earlier scenes. The assassins are successful in murdering Count Cenci by particularly horrible means: they drive two nails into him, one in his eye and the other in his throat. Artaud remains true to the cruelty of the murder, but chooses not to enact it. The audience only witnesses Count Cenci clutching his right eye as he stumbles around in the upstage area. The action itself is not accompanied by bloodshed, but a terrifying fanfare. Artaud relies on stylization rather than stage realism to create this potent image. The audience may be spared the gore of Count Cenci’s death, but they are still exposed to its physical and emotional aftermath.

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Once the murder is discovered, Beatrice and her accomplices are arrested. She is attached to a spinning wheel and tortured, the terror of which is accentuated by shrieks and noises characteristic of a medieval torture chamber (Les Cenci, v. 3. p.  263). The audience witnesses this moment of physical cruelty. Artaud had intended to suspend the wheel horizontally from above with Beatrice hanging from it by her hair, but he spared Lady Abdy, who was worried Artaud would actually torture her, from such suffering. Here, sound works with movement and gesture to assault the audience’s senses by way of recordings. The musical director for the production, Roger Désormière, used a recording of the bells of the Cathedral of Amiens—instead of Artaud’s request to install four bells at the four key points of the theatre—to put the spectator at the mercy of the play through a network of vibrations.26 The use of sound technique to express cruelty here complements the action and assaults both actors and audience members. This physical, visual, and sensual cruelty, although not bloody, is indeed visceral. It is used to attack the complacency of the audience without causing spectators to turn away from the physical horror Beatrice experiences. Therefore, although the images need not always show bloodshed, Artaud reinforced the power of the violent image: ‘violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of higher forces’ (Richards, pp. 82–83).27 Beatrice, like the audience, is subjected to the power of the theatre, through her father—doubling the power of the theatre—an external force hypnotizing her sensibilities. The cruelty of Les Cenci is found in the violent expressions which assault the audience via their senses. The force of this cruelty is primarily found in the actions of the central force that is Count Cenci. The story of the Cenci did not require gratuitous violence in order to scar the audience ineffaceably. As a precursor to his theatre, the subject of the Les Cenci and its portrayal on the stage by use of gravitational movement and gesture accompanied by silence and jarring sound was the most effective means to introduce Artaud’s contemporary audience to this idea of a penetrating and vivid stage production. It was also a means to investigate real catastrophe in the theatre. The plague that is Count Cenci, and the symptoms of madness and furor which arise from his being unleashed onto his family by way of incest, eradicates the entire social order. Artaud uses every visual and auditory facet of the stage and its contained environment to exhibit the effective destruction of the Cenci family physically and viscerally. The play serves as an artistic manifestation of the power of plague as Artaud is

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trying to make his audience realize that the theatre is just the same as reality. The effects the Cenci story produces are real, the emotion elicited from the audience is real, and what happens in the theatre occurs in real time. The plague and the cruelty it unleashes truly exist and no one is safe from it. Ultimately, the play was a commercial failure, but as a Theatre of Cruelty project, Les Cenci did indeed fulfil some of Artaud’s requirements for total theatre.

Notes 1. The translation was published in 1883 by Tola Dorian and featured a preface written by A.C. Swinburne. Lugné-Poe was also responsible for converting the Théâtre d’Art into the Théâtre de L’Œuvre. See Stuart Curran, Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 199. 2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Cenci’: 1819, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth, Revolution and Romanticism, 1789–1834 (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), p. xiii. All further quotations from The Cenci are from this edition. 3. Jane Goodall, ‘Artaud’s Revision of Shelley’s The Cenci: The Text and its Double’, Comparative Drama, 21.2 (1987), 115–26 (p. 123). 4. The Cenci, in Corti, iv, 119–152 (iii. 1. p. 138). All further translations of Les Cenci are from Corti, iv and the original French from OC, iv. Artaud did not provide his play with line numbers. I have therefore indicated which act and scene the passage is from and on which page(s) the text or stage direction is found. lucrétia Qu’a-t-il fait?… J’ai peur de comprendre! béatrice Il faut vous décider à comprendre que le pire est réalisé. lucrétia Le pire? Qu’a-t-il pu ajouter de pire à tout ce qu’il nous a fait supporter? béatrice  Cenci, mon père, m’a polluée. Les Cenci, in OC, iv (1964), 183–271 (Les Cenci, iii. 1. pp. 233–34). 5. ‘quelque chose doit être fait!’ Les Cenci, iii. 1. p. 239. 6. béatrice Quand j’étais petite, il y a un rêve qui toutes les nuits me revenait. Je suis nue dans une grande chambre et une bête, comme il y en a dans les rêves, n’arrête pas de respirer. Je me rends compte que mon corps brille.—Je veux fuir, mais il faut que je dissimule mon aveuglante nudité. C’est alors que s’ouvre une porte.

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J’ai faim et soif et, tout à coup, je découvre que je ne suis pas seule. Non! Avec la bête qui respire à côté, il semble que d’autres choses respirent; et bientôt, je vois grouiller à mes pieds tout un peuple de choses immondes. Et ce peuple est lui aussi affamé. J’entreprends une course obstinée pour essayer de retrouver la lumière; car je sens que seule la lumière va me permettre de me rassasier. Or, la bête qui se colle à moi me pourchasse de cave en cave. Et, la sentant sur moi, je constate que ma faim n’est pas seule obstinée. Et c’est quand je sens que mes forces sont sur le point de m’abandonner que, chaque fois, je m’éveille d’un trait. Les Cenci, iii. 1. pp. 236–37. 7. cenci Il m’arrive plus d’une fois en rêve de m’identifier avec le destin. C’est là l’explication de mes vices, et de cette pente naturelle de haine où mes proches sont ceux qui me gênent le plus. Je me crois et je suis une force de la nature. Pour moi, il n’y a ni vie, ni mort, ni dieu, ni inceste, ni repentir, ni crime. J’obéis à ma loi qui ne me donne pas le vertige; et tant pis pour qui est happé et qui sombre dans le gouffre que je sais devenu. Les Cenci, i. 1. p. 191. 8. Count Francesco Cenci as ‘destructor’. ‘Ce que sera la tragédie Les Cenci aux Folies-Wagram’; ‘Articles à propos des Cenci’, in OC, v (1964), 48–50 (p. 48). 9. ‘Qu’on ne peut pas imaginer hors d’une atmosphère de carnage, de torture, de sang versé, toutes les magnifiques Fables qui racontent aux foules le premier partage sexuel et le premier carnage d’essences qui apparaissent dans la création. Le théâtre, comme la peste, est à l’image de ce carnage, de cette essentielle séparation. Il dénoue des conflits, il dégage des forces, il déclenche des possibilités, et si ces possibilités et ces forces sont noire, c’est la faute non pas de la peste ou du théâtre, mais de la vie.’ TD, iv, 38. 10. Maurice Labelle, ‘Artaud’s use of Shelley’s The Cenci: the experiment in the “Théâtre de la cruauté”’, Revue de literature compareé, 46 (1972), 128–34 (p. 130). 11. ‘Or je dis que l’état social actuel est inique et bon à détruire. Si c’est le fait du théâtre de s’en préoccuper, c’est encore plus celui de la mitraille.’ TD, iv, 50. 12. ‘Je sais maintenant ce que souffrent les aliénés. / La folie, c’est comme la mort.’ Les Cenci, iii. 1. p. 235. 13. ‘Désir, fureur, amour, je ne sais pas… mais je brûle. / J’ai faim d’elle…’ Les Cenci, iv. 1. p. 249.

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14. bernardo (dans une véritable crise de nerfs.) Non, non, non! Où qu’elle aille, je la suivrai. Il se jette frénétiquement sur les soldats et les frappe. lucrétia Mon Dieu! mais c’est Cenci lui-même. Tais-toi, Cenci. bernardo Pour Dieu, tuez-moi. Mais rendez-moi mon âme. Les soldats le repoussent. C’est mon âme qui est sacrifiée. C’est mon âme qui est sacrifiée… C’est mon âme qui est sacrifiée… Les Cenci, iv. 2. pp. 261–62. 15. ‘J’ai tiré ma pièce de Shelley et de Stendhal, ce qui ne veut pas dire que j’ai adapté Shelley ou imité Stendhal. A l’un et à l’autre, j’ai pris le sujet, lequel d’ailleurs est historique et beaucoup plus beau en nature que sur la scène et dans les manuscrits. A la nature, Shelley ajoute son style, et ce langage, pareil à une nuit d’été que bombardent les météores, mais j’aime mieux la nature nue.’ ‘Les Cenci.’ ‘Articles à propos des Cenci’, in OC, v (1964), 43–47 (p. 45); Roger Blin and others, ‘Antonin Artaud in “Les Cenci”’, trans. by Victoria Nes Kirby, Nancy E.  Nes, and Aileen Robbins, The Drama Review, 16.2 (1972), 90–145 (p. 103). 16. ‘En écrivant les Cenci, tragédie, je n’ai pas cherché à imiter Shelley, pas plus que je n’ai copié la nature, mais j’ai imposé à ma tragédie le mouvement de la nature, cette espèce de gravitation qui meut les plantes, et les êtres commes des plantes, et qu’on retrouve fixée dans les bouleversements volcaniques du sol. Toutes la mise en scène des Cenci est basée sur ce mouvement de gravitation. Les gestes et les mouvements y ont autant d’importance que le texte; et celui-ci a été établi pour servir de réactif au reste. Et je crois que ce sera la première fois, tout au moins ici en France, que l’on aura affaire à un texte de théâtre écrit en fonction d’une mise en scène dont les modalités sont sorties toutes concrètes et toutes vives de l’imagination de l’auteur.’ ‘Articles à propos des Cenci’, v, 45–46. 17. A translation of Colette’s Le Journal review is found in Roger Blin and others, p. 135. 18. A complete translation of act one, scene three, including original blocking diagrams first featured in Cahiers Renaud-Barrault in 1965 appears in Roger Blin and others, pp. 111–27. 19. ‘Des mannequins interviendront dans les Cenci. Et c’est ainsi que je rejoins le Théâtre de la Cruauté par des voies détournées et symboliques. […] Les mannequins des Cenci seront là pour faire dire aux héros de la pièce ce qui les gêne et que la parole humaine est incapable d’exprimer. Tout ce qui est reproches, rancœurs, remords, angoisses, revendications, les mannequins seront là pour le formuler et on verra d’un bout à l’autre de la pièce tout un langage de gestes et de signes où les inquiétudes de l’époque se rassemblent dans une sorte de violente manifestation.’ ‘Articles à propos des Cenci’, v, 46–47.

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20. ‘Les convives refluent de tous côtés en désordre. Ils piétinent, affolés, et avancent comme s’ils allaient à la bataille, mais une bataille de fantômes. Ils partent à l’assaut de fantômes, bras levés comme s’ils avaient dans la main une lance ou un bouclier.’ Les Cenci, i. 3. p. 206. 21. Roger Blin and others, p. 121. 22. ‘Lucrétia fait mime de barrer la route à Cenci. Béatrice lui fait de la tête signe de n’en rien faire: Lucrétia a compris; elle se retire doucement après un dernier regard à Béatrice.’ Les Cenci, i. 3. p. 208. 23. ‘Cenci vient doucement vers elle. Son attitude s’est complètement transformée, elle respire maintenant une sorte de grande émotion sereine. Béatrice le regarde et il se semble que sa méfiance à elle aussi se soit tout d’un coup dissipée.’ Les Cenci, i. 3. pp. 208–09. 24. Roger Blin and others, p. 125. 25. ‘Laisse; le charme opère. Désormais elle ne peut m’échapper.’ Les Cenci, i. 3. p. 210. 26. Artaud had hoped to use direct sound to assault his audiences’ senses, but the implementation of 30-foot high bells in the Théâtre des Folies-­Wagram was not a viable option. Roger Blin and others, p. 97. 27. ‘des images physiques violentes broient et hypnotisent la sensibilité du spectateur pris dans le théâtre comme dans un tourbillon de forces supérieures.’ TD, iv, 99.

CHAPTER 8

After Artaud: Peter Brook and The Theatre of Cruelty Season

The 1938 publication of The Theatre and Its Double was already attracting attention before the second edition was published in 1944, and after Artaud’s death in 1948, interest in the poet, playwright, and theorist’s work only increased. By the 1960s, an Artaudian style of dramatic production became popular because of the Theatre of Cruelty’s global exposure by directors Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz in England, Richard Schechner and Julian Beck in America, Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, and Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Blin in France.1 These avant-garde directors of the counter-culture movement identified with Artaud. They connected with his theatre for its insistence to usurp status quo theatrical practice in order to evoke genuine emotional and physical responses in spectators accustomed to passive theatre. His was an alternative to Brechtian Epic Theatre which opted for the objective, critical distance of Verfremdungseffekt.2 The two theatres are essentially based on a similar goal which is to realize truths present within the microcosm of the play through performance and relate them to the macrocosm of the world. Yet both theatres seek to achieve this end through completely different means: one visceral and the other intellectual. Their success is largely dependent upon the approach taken by the metteur en scène, who is so much more than a director, to ensure the spectacle moves audiences to responsive reaction.

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In the Theatre of Cruelty, a potentially divergent vision can result depending on the techniques and the interpretation of cruelty employed. For instance, the decision of whether or not to portray bloodshed is of major concern. The potency of distressing images—of plague, of baiting animals for pleasure, of sacrifice, of incest, of murder—cannot be denied, but the rigour of an image is not dependent upon its gruesome characteristics. How best to exhibit this rigour without necessarily having to rely on the spilling of blood and still attaining potency is the challenge for any director devoted to the authentic response a Theatre of Cruelty production vies for. In Titus Andronicus, Yukio Ninagawa achieved this stylistically. Ninagawa presented the play exactly as it was scripted, albeit in Japanese translation, including the presentation upon the stage of several murders and mutilations, but he refrained from spilling a single drop of blood, opting instead for red cords to fall from the wounds of the numerous victims and perpetrators. The choice to stylize successfully overwhelmed audiences. As a result, spectators’ emotional responses to the action were honest, intuitive, and evocative of sympathetic devastation resulting in total emotional breakdown. The play itself, up until productions by Yukio Ninagawa, Lucy Bailey, and Julie Taymor’s 1999 film Titus, for example, so often regarded as outlandish parody rather than tragedy, was restored to its penetrating heights in Ninagawa’s production. Unfortunately, Artaud’s first manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty is vague in its details on how to achieve rigour in performance. In it, he stipulates the ideal environment for his theatre, including preferences concerning language, music, lighting, sound, costume, staging, and accessories, in addition to his partiality towards certain types of participants, spectators, and actors. He does not, however, delineate the specific means by which to achieve his vision. He knows what he does not want, and what he would like to see on the stage, but he is less successful in detailing any method for implementation. Whether or not Artaud was conscious of the lack of practicality in his composition of the first manifesto is a very intriguing question: if he was not, then he unconsciously protected his theories from becoming banal; if he was, then perhaps he foresaw both the failure of his dramatic vision, as well as its potential success, made possible by relying upon both its flexibility and that of the metteur en scène. Perhaps this is what prompted him to write a second manifesto. It provides a detailed outline of how his Conquest of Mexico scenario was to be staged, with its dependence upon the mise en scène and not the text to communicate the immediacy of Great Myths and stories chosen because of their

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familiarity and their content3: ‘these themes will be borne directly into the theater and materialized in movements, expressions, and gestures before trickling away in words’ (Richards, pp. 123–24).4 Details as to the nature of these movements, expressions, and gestures in achieving these ends in the production of The Conquest of Mexico are not specified, nor are they for any other planned spectacle. Artaud seems to have left the task to subsequent Theatre of Cruelty innovators and metteurs en scène to decide which artistic and technical aspects will be most effective in performance.5 It is important to mention that various productions, past and present, have been branded Artaudian simply because they employ any number or combination of Artaud’s concepts, ideas, or techniques. But if the directors of these same interpretations fail to devote themselves entirely to Artaud, the result is a trite performance. According to Brook in The Empty Space, this selective ‘adopt and discard’ policy only leads to a superficial version of Artaud’s theatre, which although theoretically easier to stage, ceases to penetrate either audience or actor in the way Artaud required: Artaud applied is Artaud betrayed: betrayed because it is always just a portion of his thought that is exploited, betrayed because it is easier to apply rules to the work of a handful of dedicated actors than to the lives of the unknown spectators who happen by chance to come through the theatre door.6

The director cannot control the spectators’ reactions, nor mediate their responsiveness to the director’s interpretation of events on stage. Seemingly, contemporary avant-garde performance attracts a particular audience, with the help of marketing, but there are no guarantees that the performance will be aesthetically or financially successful. A more obtainable goal the director can achieve is stimulating the actors and enhancing their understanding of the performance. This is a difficult task for many directors, especially those who have the best of intentions but lack knowledge of technique.7

Preparing for a Season of Cruelty The specific rules Artaud left behind for actor training were limited. Grotowski, for example, found it impossible to achieve Artaud’s goals for theatrical training and performance because of his lack of specifics regarding actor preparation. In the essays ‘An Affective Athleticism’ and

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‘Seraphim’s Theatre’, Artaud writes primarily on the importance of breath—as found in the Kabbalah—in relation to actor training. According to his stipulations, the actor, like an athlete, must be physically advanced, lacking nothing in mental and physical motivation. It is with this peak physicality of mind and of body that the actor will succeed in breathing properly in order to create the necessary sounds and movements demanded of him or her to penetrate the audience through his or her performance. The latter essay, ‘Seraphim’s Theatre’, deals, albeit poetically, with how to produce a scream that is both feminine in nature and supremely powerful when inspired by anguish and weakness. This is what inspired Grotowski to focus on actor training in his Laboratory Theatre, where his own theories of performance and actor training came to fruition. Focus was on psychophysical acting combining rigorous physical work with psychological-­ spiritual practices, including the release of the ‘body-­memory’. By the 1970s, Grotowski had all but abandoned working on productions proper to continue his paratheatrical research, inviting select spectators to engage with the actors after performances. Artaud’s vision was never outlined in an easy to follow, step-by-step methodology. Only his theory for a rigorous theatre remains and this is easily misinterpreted or manipulated. The only viable option for the director, therefore, is to work towards portraying an accurate vision of Artaud’s drama as far as it can be determined from his manifestos. But how is this done? One way this can be achieved is to work through the early modern context which inspired Artaud’s theatre in the first place, identifying the real or source elements in his theatre. Neither the playwright nor the director is detached from his or her surrounding environment, as demonstrated in my chapter on early modern plague, but is instead inspired by life. Although interpretation affords multiple possibilities, the contemporary director can choose to incorporate the socio-historical context latent in the setting of the play itself, or adapt the text to superimpose one’s own contemporary milieu on the production. It is my contention that an Artaudian production should potentially incorporate the same early modern socio-historical elements of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, such as the plague and its accompanying frenzy, and/or its symptoms, which inspired Artaud’s theories in order to destabilize the text and focus on action. Whether or not the director will acknowledge these details in the final production is ultimately a personal choice.8 The RSC’s 1964 production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, directed by Brook, is an excellent example of a Theatre of Cruelty production which is ‘very Elizabethan and very

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much of our time’.9 It is raw, frenetic, emotional, and reflects its environment. Alongside Artaudian techniques, Weiss added Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, and even managed to include a didactic thread running through this extraordinary combination of different theatrical styles, opting not to choose one over any other. Brook’s production, incorporating all these elements to achieve its desired reaction, is a working example of potent, total theatre: Everything about this play is designed to crack the spectator on the jaw, then douse him with ice-cold water, then force him to assess intelligently what has happened to him, then give him a kick in the balls, then bring him back to his senses again. (Brook, The Shifting Point, p. 47)

The play effectively assaults spectators out of their passivity through both the spoken dialogue and the visual mise en scène which Brook structures to work alongside the staging of the action. The spectacle acknowledges Artaud’s theory for a penetrative theatre, and incorporates his approach to staging, while considering the early modern context and its accompanying frenzy. The production of Marat/Sade was the culmination of the RSC’s Theatre of Cruelty season which began in autumn 1963 and featured the Royal Shakespeare Experimental Group under the guidance of Brook and Marowitz.10 The season itself was created in order ‘to explore certain problems of acting and stagecraft in laboratory conditions, without the commercial pressures of public performance’ (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 152). However, the group of 12 chosen actors and their directors had only 12 weeks of preliminary research before presenting their work to an audience. Public performances ran for a total of five weeks, with the first held on 12 January 1964. As the disclaimer of one programme indicates, no two of these work-in-progress performances were alike: ‘This programme will undergo a constant process of change, both in content and in casting.’11 The promptbook for The Theatre of Cruelty details what any audience would be expected to see in addition to the various improvisation exercises overseen by Brook and Marowitz: 1. Spurt of Blood cries 2. Artaud scene 3. Spurt of Blood 4. Typewriter 5. By Jove

Artaud Ableman

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6. Heathcliffe 7. Spine 8. Exercise 9. Public Bath Brook 10. The Screens sc. 17 Genet or Ars Longa Vita Brevis 11. Letter from the Lord Chamberlain 12. Guillotine Brook 13. Mime Scene 14. Hamlet Marowitz12

Brook and Marowitz envisioned that their cast of 12 young actors would live in an environment similar to Grotowski’s Laboratory or Beck’s Living Theatre, but ‘it became impossible to build a healthily incestuous groupfeeling’ in the time allotted for the experiment (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 167). In Marowitz’s opinion, the laboratory exercise became instead an opportunity to reveal who the better actors in the group were and in turn assimilate them into the mainstream group of RSC professionals. From the outset, the lack of appropriate exploration time due to deadlines (fuelled in part by the commercial concerns they had hoped to avoid), and the perceived non-existent camaraderie amongst the group, meant that the ideal working conditions in which to discover and apply Artaudian theory were not present. Cynicism aside, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) work was not entirely in vain, for when the actors were eventually subsumed into the 100-plus capacity of the RSC, the work done by the Experimental Group ‘was the pivotal factor in the Marat/Sade rehearsals, and the key by which the over-all company developed the style of the new production’ (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 172). In preparations for the production, Artaud’s theory was coupled with Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of actor training because, according to Marowitz, they are complementary: There is no fundamental disagreement between the Method actor and the Artaudian actor. Both rely on consciousness to release the unconscious, but whereas the Method actor is chained to rational motivation, the Artaudian actor realizes the highest artistic truth is unprovable. […] The Artaudian actor needs Stanislavski in order to verify the nature of the feelings he is releasing—otherwise he becomes merely a victim of feeling. Even Artaud’s celebrated actor-in-trance is responsible to the spirit that is speaking through him. (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 162)

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The two seem to share an ironic relationship, for Stanislavski’s method acting, which is controlled by set parameters for character determined primarily by the actor, is a means for the Artaudian actor to lose him or herself completely in performance. The unconscious is therefore monitored by consciousness. Marowitz mentions the actor-in-trance, a particular concept which fascinated Artaud after seeing the Balinese dancers perform at the colonial exposition in Paris in 1931. Schechner comments on the peculiarity of trance: ‘To be in trance is not to be out of control or unconscious. The Balinese say that if a trance dancer hurts himself the trance was not genuine.’13 The trance performance is not wild, unrestricted chaos, which happens to be periodically entertaining. It is motivated action with purpose. Here, we can see the connection to Bacchic frenzy, present in Seneca, Schechner, and Artaud (as discussed in Chapter 5), which is both tumultuous and regulated at the same time. Schechner qualifies Marowitz’s assertion that Stanislavski and trance share the same fundamentals: Balinese trance, shamanic possession, and the trickster are not examples of acting from the Stanislavsky tradition. But nor are they essentially different. Stanislavsky developed exercises—sense memory, emotional recall, playing the through-line of action, etc.—so that actors could ‘get inside of’ and act ‘as if’ they were other people. Stanislavsky’s approach is humanist and psychological, but still a version of the ancient technique of performing by becoming or being possessed by another. (Schechner, Performance Theory, p. 199)

The modern approach to acting finds its origins in the ‘becoming or being possessed by another’ of trance. The ancient technique is modified by Artaud who extends the possibilities of possession to include the double of the self as a potential occupier of the same body. The observations of Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, after having privately danced the first performance of his Ankoku Butoh, or ‘the dance of utter blackness’, are akin to Artaud’s notions, as the ‘other’ Hijikata was possessed by was a highly sensitized version of himself: ‘“The first time I danced my self-­ portrait, at a dance studio in Nakano, I started sobbing out loud. I shrieked and eventually foamed at the mouth. That was the first accompaniment to my dance. It turned out to be awesome.”’14 Hijikata is the dancer in trance. Artaud’s concept of the double is a foundational, prominent force in current actor processes of performance:

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A performer is either ‘subtracted,’ achieving transparency, eliminating ‘from the creative process the resistance and obstacles caused by one’s own organism’ (Grotowski 1968a: 178); or s/he is ‘added to,’ becoming more or other than s/he is when not performing. S/he is ‘doubled,’ to use Artaud’s word. The first technique, that of the shaman, is ecstasy; the second, that of the Balinese dancer, is trance. In the west we have terms for these two kinds of acting: the actor in ecstasy is Richard Cieslak in The Constant Prince, Grotowski’s ‘holy actor’; the actor in trance possessed by another, is Konstantin Stanislavsky as Vershinin, the ‘character actor’. (Schechner, Performance Theory, p. 197)

The elements of actor training surrounding the RSC’s Theatre of Cruelty season fall into the second process, of doubling, as the actor adds to him or herself to create a(nother) character. Brook and Marowitz provided the actors with Artaud’s theories and concepts which could be experimented with through the Theatre of Cruelty scenarios and thereafter be put to use in Marat/Sade. The goal of actor training for The Theatre of Cruelty season was to initiate the group of 12 actors into Artaudian theory. Although Marowitz was of the opinion that the initiates were ill-prepared, having been taught a diluted version of Stanislavski at English drama schools, because of time constraints, Brook and Marowitz were obliged to immerse the group into ‘the swirling waters of Artaudian theory’ as quickly as possible (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 154). As Brook states, the lack of available time was equally artistically restrictive and limited the possibility to maximize actor growth and development: ‘We did not start at the blazing centre, we began very simply on the fringes’ (Brook, The Empty Space, p. 55). Training began by experimenting with sounds, working with an array of various objects to discover new resonances. Thereafter, movement was added, and both worked together to release non-naturalistic emotions through sound, first by working with objects-turned-instruments, and then through the development of the actor’s own voice (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, pp.  155–56). In the first manifesto, Artaud asserts that musical instruments are as equally important to the mise en scène as the actors. He believed that familiar instruments already in existence were limited in producing penetrating sounds, and that research was needed to explore new ways of sound production: The need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through the organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into qualities and vibrations

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of absolutely new sounds, qualities which present-day musical instruments do not possess […] Research is also required, apart from music, into instruments and appliances which, based upon special combinations or new alloys of metal, can attain a new range and compass, producing sounds or noises that are unbearably piercing. (Richards, p. 95)15

Keeping in line with Artaud’s vision, the group banged on ‘boxes, bangers, scrapers, vessels, sticks, etc.’ to create new sounds (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 155). Most significantly, the group created new sounds with their bodies. The actors learned that ‘the voice could produce sounds other than grammatical combinations of the alphabet, and that the body, set free, could begin to enunciate a language which went beyond text’ (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p.  155). Actors may have forgotten how to scream (TD, iv, 163–64; Richards, p.  141), but under Brook and Marowitz, they were re-­learning how to do so in multiple ways. Once movement was added to the development of sound as a means to communicate emotion and thought, the actors worked on gestures and facial expressions in order to combine them to sound and movement in the creation of their new language. Thereafter, they learned how to establish a discontinuous style of acting, ‘which corresponded to the broken and fragmentary way in which most people experience contemporary reality’ (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 156). This relates to Artaud’s criterion of acting around themes instead of a specific, scripted text, reiterated here from Chapter 2: ‘We shall not act a written play, but around themes, facts, or known works, we shall make attempts at direct staging’ (My translation).16 Brook and Marowitz used improvisation ‘to break the progressive-logical-­ beginning-­middle-and-end syndrome’ ubiquitous in narrative (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p.  156). The themes in the workshops were based on various emotions and moods dependent on the evening’s demonstration, and improvisation as a whole was an important feature of any of the performance’s events. The intense efforts to create various scenarios to prompt natural emotion also produced the ‘Speak with Paints’ section of the preliminary exercises (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, pp. 164–65). The scenario featured a person leaving his or her flat, casually reading the newspaper while waiting for the lift to appear. When it did, the doors slid open, and discovered within is an ‘unexpected person towards whom you have a strong, specific attitude of one sort or another. (The actor decides background beforehand.) At that instant, you rush to the easel and immediately express that

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attitude in paints’ (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p.  164). These exercises were designed to remove the limits imposed on expression which does not begin and end with spoken language. It can be effectively conveyed through gesture which can, as the ‘Speak with Paints’ example attests, be immediate, responsive, and quite creative. The Experimental Group made use of the paints in the first ever performance of Artaud’s The Spurt of Blood as part of The Theatre of Cruelty season; in Jean Genet’s The Screens; and finally, in Marat/Sade where they were used to mark changes in emotion and action. In the scene marked ‘Death’s Triumph’, the pouring of red paint into a bucket by Polpoch (one of four clowns) follows the mock-execution of several chorus members, symbolic of the murder of hundreds of aristocrats under Marat’s Reign of Terror. Here, the pouring of the paint marks a change in the action. The chorus is brought back to life in time for the execution of the ‘King’—a dummy with a cabbage head and carrot nose—which occurs during the scene break prior to ‘Conversation Concerning Life and Death’. After the King dies, Polpoch pours blue paint into the bucket, which activates the chorus to act with rage as they frantically fight over the King’s freshly removed head. In the second act, black paint is poured into the bucket in ‘The Murder’ scene after Marat is killed. This action is halted by Polpoch who decides on pouring white paint instead. The paint prompts a visceral response. He pours it into the bucket, for the play does not end with the death of Marat, but with a mass rebirth for the inmates. Marat comes back to life for his final speech which prompts the chorus to begin its frenzied march towards the audience, and seemingly towards freedom, attacking the nuns and guards who attempt to bar the inmates’ way.

Marat/Sade: On Stage The experiments of The Theatre of Cruelty season, including the work on the creation of new sounds and their relation to movement and expression, the development of discontinuous action, and the ‘Speak with Paints’ exercises, all featured in the production of Marat/Sade, a logical pairing for the season given that Artaud had planned to stage for his Theatre of Cruelty, ‘6. A Tale by the Marquis de Sade, in which the eroticism will be transposed, allegorically mounted and figured, to create a violent exteriorization of cruelty, and a dissimulation of the remainder’ (Richards, p. 99).17 The first English-language performance of Weiss’s German play was on 20

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August 1964 at the Aldwych Theatre in London. The action of the play itself is set in 1808, 15 years after the play-within-a-play scenario based on the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat in 1793. The action of Weiss’s play leads up to this one event, which is ultimately anti-climactic once performed as there is an abundance of cruel and intense action taking place prior to the main event. Although it is Brecht who most inspired Weiss, he acknowledges the Artaudian nature of the play and its direct influence on the performance: But I didn’t think of Artaud when I wrote Marat/Sade, which grew out of its own material and had to be played a certain way in the atmosphere which the material created. However, Peter Brook was thinking of Artaud before he produced Marat/Sade, and he used Artaudian techniques. This is a director’s method, and for a writer it’s secondary. When I speak about the audience reaction I want, I mean that if there are very strong events on stage, they shouldn’t be acted in either a sadistic or a masochistic way, because either one makes it impossible to analyze the situation.18

Weiss’s comments align with a misappropriated view of Artaudian drama which sees cruelty as something altogether physical, brutal, and bloody. The staging of the drama, details Weiss, seems to grow out of its own material and would have to be performed accordingly. The result is a total theatre performance. The character of the Herald, for example, is as much the Harlequin of Commedia dell’arte as he is an element of distancing— Verfremdungseffekt—in the manner of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. He directs the sequence of action from within the play by introducing the scene names and commenting on the forthcoming proceedings, often interrupting them. He, like every other character in the play-within-a-play, is scripted by the Marquis de Sade who is responsible for the dialogue and content of the play. He is able to incite the patients of Charenton asylum to riot through his dialogue and its accompanying action. This is why Coulmier, the director of the asylum, asks Sade to curtail various scenes. Coulmier often stops the action of the play in order to chastise Sade, for although Sade had previously promised that he would make the necessary changes to the script, during the performance, he does not follow through on any of these assurances made. Thus, outbursts from the patient playing the character of Jacques Roux seem more chaotic than usual as he moves frantically around the stage, hollering at the top of his voice:

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We demand that everyone should do all they can to put an end to war This damned war which is run for the benefit of profiteers and leads only to more wars.19

His lines are meant to condemn the civil wars taking place within the French Revolution, but they also condemn the Napoleonic wars of 1808, the contemporary setting of Weiss’s play. Outbursts like these had dire consequences attached to them, no matter who uttered them. Coulmier is very conscious of the duplicitous nature of Sade’s script which is why he exercises cruelty and limits the freedom of the performers, and censors their script.20

Marat/Sade: On Screen Although the RSC currently records all productions for posterity and has done so since the early 1980s, this was an unforeseen method of preservation at the time of Marat/Sade’s first performance. Fortunately, United Artists offered Brook and producer Michael Birkett a low budget of $250,000 to direct the film version of the play, in any way they chose, provided it was completed in time (15 days): ‘This was an exciting challenge, but of course it meant conceiving the picture in a completely different way, keeping as close as possible to the stage version, which was rehearsed and ready’ (Brook, The Shifting Point, p.  189). While Brook tried to remain as close to the stage production as possible, he could not deny himself a foray into the immediacy the undiscovered angles and perspectives the film version could allow: At the same time, I wanted to see if a purely cinematic language could be found that would take us away from the deadliness of the filmed play and capture another, purely cinematic excitement. So, with three, sometimes four cameras working non-stop and burning up yards of celluloid, we covered the production like a boxing match. The cameras advanced and retreated, twisted and whirled, trying to behave like what goes on in a spectator’s head and simulate his experience; […] In the end, I think I managed to capture a highly subjective view of the action and only afterwards did I realize that it was in such subjectivity that the real difference between film and theatre lay. (Brook, The Shifting Point, pp. 189–90)

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The stage play is at the centre of the action in the Marat/Sade film. Although Brook captured one view of the action, the film nevertheless allows for thousands of subjective reactions in response to the on-screen presentation as no two viewings—or viewer responses—are alike. Also, different perspectives as a result of various angles used in the boxing match coverage approach helped to maintain focus on the central action of the play while enabling the audience to look at the simultaneous and peripheral action taking place amongst the secondary characters and chorus members without a major shift in perspective. Brook decided that shots should be taken not only of the stage but also from the stage, specifically the upstage area looking downstage on the central action, in order for the viewer to acquire the characters’ points of view. Brook achieves the desired cinematic effect while at the same time depicting a dynamic representation of the stage play. Ultimately, the spectator can only see what is recorded on celluloid and cannot look beyond what is available for presentation, but it was Brook’s intention to remain as inclusive as possible. The film allowed for a more elaborate set featuring a partition of bars between the actors and the spectators in Charenton. This added an interesting dynamic to the action, heightening the element of danger inherent in watching a production staged and acted by characters who are deemed mentally unstable.21 Had this type of framing been possible at the Aldwych Theatre, the sense of danger, along with the audience’s sensibilities, would have been amplified even more because the spectator of the stage play is not afforded the safety of the film-screen barrier that offers protection from the patients. Although directly removed from the action of the play, in watching the film version of Marat/Sade, the viewer is able to successfully transfer these emotions onto the spectators in the audience of the play at Charenton, and perhaps even onto the nuns and guards who are onstage with the inmates. Naturally, the advantage of actually being in the audience is unfortunately lost in watching the film.

Theatre as Cure Underlining the action of the play is the fact that these events took place; as bizarre as it may appear, it was nevertheless a reality. The inmates of Charenton did perform plays written by the Marquis de Sade for the aristocratic friends and colleagues of Coulmier, which makes the spectacle that much more absurd, while at the same time audaciously realistic: ‘In

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exclusive Paris circles it was considered a rare pleasure to attend Sade’s theatrical performances in the “hiding-place for the moral rejects of civilised society”’ (Weiss, p.  112). Outrageous as it may seem, these socially rejected, mentally ill captives were cast as actors at Charenton asylum under the direction of Sade—a sane, albeit eccentric, man who manipulated natural convention to suit his own desires—with the permission of Coulmier who supported the plays as exercises in rehabilitative psychotherapy.22 The inmates were therefore living in as many as three different worlds at Charenton: the world of their illness, or their own subjective realities; the world of the characters in Sade’s dramas, morally questionable and self-absorbed; and the outer world, or the objective and conventional reality they were deemed unable to function in, but was nonetheless made available to them for these performances. For the actors playing their roles as patients in a play-within-a-play, their immense task is to perceive or understand which world they are occupying at any given moment of the performance. Glenda Jackson, for example, assumed the difficult role of playing a young woman suffering from ‘sleeping sickness also melancholia’ who is entrusted with the part of Charlotte Corday in Sade’s play (Marat/ Sade, ‘Presentation’, p.  15). She is so absorbed by her own world, she moves like a somnambulist in a trance—similar to Artaud’s Beatrice once under Cenci’s spell—while the nuns, other patients, Sade, and the Herald control her movements and prompt her speeches. It is Sade, for example, who must stop ‘Corday’ from ending the play rather prematurely during the scene ‘Corday’s First Visit’, by reminding her she has ‘to come to his door three times’ before she is to kill Marat (Marat/Sade, ‘Corday’s First Visit’, p. 26). Taking the knife from her hand, Sade leads her back to her resting place on the stage. In the final scene of the play, Sade again disrupts the action—a technique to ensure the event is an anticlimax—and stops Corday from striking the death-blow to Marat in order to show a musical montage of the 15 years he has missed between his death in 1793 and the present date of 1808 to the audience and the nearly murdered Marat. After the montage, Sade releases his grasp on Corday and she finally delivers the death-blow, prompting the onstage crowd to react in gasps, groans, and cries. In addition to capturing the frenetic atmosphere of early modern England during plague-time that inspired Artaud’s theatre, Brook also identifies and makes use of elements of Elizabethan theatre to provoke a penetrative dramatic experience:

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Elizabethan theatre allows the dramatist space in which to move freely between the outer and the inner world. […] We can in turn feel identified or take our distance, abandon ourselves to the illusion or refuse it; a primitive situation can disturb us in our subconscious, while our intelligence watches, comments, meditates. We identify emotionally, subjectively, and at the same time we evaluate politically, objectively, in relation to society. (Brook, The Shifting Point, p. 57)

The ability of Elizabethan drama to penetrate our sensibilities through language, specifically poetry, while prose initiates the alternative effect of bringing us back to the ‘familiar world’, is an important feature of the genre (Brook, The Shifting Point, p. 58). It is integrated into a production such as Marat/Sade through Artaud: From one certain point of view, Artaud’s ‘cruelty’ can be seen as an attempt to recover the Shakespearean variety of expression by other means, and this Royal Shakespeare experiment, using Artaud’s work as a springboard rather than a model for slavish reconstruction, can also be viewed as a search for a theatre-language as agile and penetrating as the Elizabethans created.23

Artaud found the confirmation for his theories in the Elizabethan theatre and its historical context. His search for a new and powerful theatrical language is reflected in Brook and Marowitz’s experiments with the Theatre of Cruelty, specifically their choice to use ‘cruelty’ as a means to recapture the intensity of the early modern theatre. The penetrative language of gesture and movement acquired by the Experimental Group, and developed out of Artaudian theory, complements the textual language of Weiss’s Marat/Sade. The language of the play combines the intellectual poetry and prose written by the character of Sade with the primitive screams and instinctive movements and reactions the insane ‘actors’ communicate through. The force of this language was realized because of the experiment with Artaud. Much of the movement in Marat/Sade is initiated by the music and lyrics sung by the four singers who appear to be the most lucid of the patients. The music itself is played by five musicians, chained to their instruments, who communicate through sound. The Herald, also astoundingly aware of his surroundings, may separate the action by calling out the names of the scenes, but the singers are responsible for prompting the chorus of patients to act out their designated roles, sometimes even

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provoking the inmates to act out of control. In addition to their roles as singers, the group of four clowns also act in mime, in reversals, and in dance as a means of representing the various elements of Brook’s total theatre production. They respond to the action, events, and spoken text through a variety of means, including speaking without sounds, relying on gesture, and using those elements of sound expression experimented upon during the Theatre of Cruelty workshop. Appearing in elaborate costumes (in contrast to their patient comrades) of blue, white, and red, and wearing face-paint, which both accentuates their features but also likens their faces to masks, they are visually captivating. As such, they demand the attention of their audiences, onstage and in the theatre. Unlike the other patients, they rarely break character, and instead of appearing like the Artaudian trance-actors of the chorus, they are conscious entertainers. In prompting the chorus to act, they in turn provoke the audience to respond. They are living examples of the anarchic freedom of laughter. By the end of the play, there is no mistaking either the Herald or the four singers as anything other than patients. They lead the final march which is seemingly in praise of Napoleon: all



And though we’re locked up we’re no longer enslaved and the honour of France is eternally saved […] He’s the leader who ended the Revolution And everyone knows why we’re cheering for Napoleon our mighty Emperor (Marat/Sade, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 107–08)

In reality, the tyranny of Napoleon is presented as the double of the tyranny of the asylum: all

Charenton Charenton Napoleon Napoleon Nation Nation Revolution Revolution Copulation Copulation. (Marat/Sade, ‘Epilogue’, p. 108)

The patients work themselves into frenzy as they march towards the audience; the irony of the words they sing escapes them, but the rhythm nonetheless moves them to action. Whose values or ideals should they adopt? The suggestion by the end of the play is that they are all same: the

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asylum, Napoleon’s dictatorship, the voices of dissent, and of Sade are all reflective of some oppressive ideology. Trapped inside the bathhouse are Coulmier, his wife, and their daughter, who become prisoners to the gratuitous behaviour of the inmates, including the sexual deviancy of the inmate who plays Duperret. The play’s finale provides the necessary, bloody cruelty as the inmates achieve their own social upheaval. Like the trance-actor, they march to the music; however, as the momentum of the song increases, so too does their mania. The actors playing the inmates are not necessarily in a trance during the performance, but, as Ian Richardson (Marat) revealed during a midnight forum on 28 January 1965, they do allow themselves to revel in the freedom of the frenzy their characters’ experience: We very carefully improvised the ending. It’s rather curious and frightening that when we reach that part of the play something deep down does tend to take over. We have had actual physical violence of a very serious sort breaking out: there’s been real blood up there, fractured teeth, unconscious people. I found it necessary for me to completely withdraw to the safety of the proscenium arch because I was sensible of my obligations the rest of the week. There is at the end a fully-concentrated chemistry and if it convinces you, that certainly satisfies me on behalf of my colleagues.24

The characters, like victims of plague, go mad because they are free from the moral constraints of conventional society and intuitively react to their surroundings. The music, similar to the plague, triggers this frenzy. The actors play their roles so convincingly that they galvanize physical violence and become victims of one-another’s mania. Artaud demanded as much from his actors, and Brook supplied the required dedication: [Artaud] wanted a theatre that would be a hallowed place; he wanted that theatre served by a band of actors and directors who would create out of their own natures an unending succession of violent stage images, bringing about such powerful immediate explosions of human matter that no one would ever again revert to a theatre of anecdote and talk. (Brook, The Empty Space, pp. 59–60)

The images need not always be violent in their application of cruelty, but in Marat/Sade, the progression towards bloody violence is prompted by the prospect of freedom from everyday limitations.

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The inmates of Charenton found their freedom from social control in the theatre. The patients—like plague victims—achieve their moment of social upheaval by using the fantasy world of Sade’s play as their means. This moment of mass revolt of the patients in the world of the play should stir the same emotions within the spectators. In the film version of Marat/Sade, the audience in the film is also moved to frenzy as they approach the bars dividing the inmates’ space from their own. There is yelling and screaming on both sides as one side calls for liberation and the other side calls for the release of the new prisoners of the asylum: Coulmier and his family, along with the nuns and guards. Both are essentially crying out for the same thing: freedom from the asylum, a microcosm of social control on a small scale, and Napoleon’s France as the macrocosm of social control on a larger one. According to Marowitz, the goal of the Experimental Group was never to create the Theatre of Cruelty Artaud failed to achieve. Instead, The Theatre of Cruelty season was Artaudian in its ‘search for means, other than naturalistic-linguistic means, of communicating experience and insights’; its ‘attitude to the classics—not as peerless masterworks, but simply as material that could be reworked and rethought in very much the same way Shakespeare reworked and rethought Kyd, Holinshed, Boccaccio, and Marlowe’; and in ‘the shared distaste and impatience the group’s directors felt towards prevailing theatre-trends’ (Marowitz, ‘Notes’, p. 172). In the production of Marat/Sade, these elements come together to achieve the truth that Artaudian-inspired theatre has the ability to wake the senses of an anesthetized audience, therefore resuscitating the theatre and its power of contagion. That Brook and Marowitz were successful in their attempt reveals that the desire for penetrative theatre that infects the audience is indeed necessary, as is the evolving innovation of theatre practice if it is to be pertinent to our contemporary world.

Notes 1. By no means an exhaustive list of theatre artists and practitioners influenced or regarded as being influenced by Artaud’s Theatre and Its Double. 2. For a comprehensive and reliable analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, see Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work. Latest revised edition is published by Norton, 1974. 3. The Conquest of Mexico, for example, was chosen because it considers the question of colonization relevant to a developing world. 4. ‘ces thèmes seront transportés directement sur le théâtre et matérialisés en mouvements, en expressions et en gestes avant d’être coulés dans les mots.’ TD, iv, 148.

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5. The rise of the director—Regisseur in German—is recent and aristocratic, and Jannarone names Georg ii, arriving in Berlin in 1874 with his theatre troupe, as the first; his tour influenced Konstantin Stanislavski, André Antoine, and Max Reinhardt (Artaud and His Doubles, p. 136). Jannarone argues that the origins of one person taking artistic and technical control of a production are as early as the eighteenth century with J.W. von Goethe in Weimer and David Garrick in Drury Lane, but the latter’s management was nevertheless collaborative, comprising Garrick and James Lacy (Artaud and His Doubles, note 6, p. 222). 6. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968; repr. Penguin, 1990), pp. 60–61. 7. Even the best directors can fail in this regard, as was the case in Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty production of Oedipus starring John Gielgud. In his chronicle of the National Theater’s 50-year history, Daniel Rosenthal recites an anecdote detailing Brook’s plan to emulate a satyr-play which traditionally concluded the three tragedies. The company were told to improvise a joyous atmosphere, and gyrated and danced, all except for one Scottish actor, Frank Wylie, who shouted, ‘Bollocks!’ at the prospect. See ‘This is not going to be fun’, in The National Theatre Story (London: Oberon Books, 2014). 8. Although it is arguably more difficult to physically incorporate these elements in producing a contemporary play, one need only look to the success of Jonathan Larson’s mega-musical Rent which incorporates the terrifying frenzy associated with the post-modern plague: the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). 9. Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty years of theatrical exploration 1946– 1987 (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 47. 10. Charles Marowitz, ‘Notes on the Theatre of Cruelty’, The Tulane Drama Review, 11.2 (1966), 152–72. 11. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz, The Theatre of Cruelty (Stratford: Royal Shakespeare Company, 1964), [no page]. 12. The Theatre of Cruelty. Dir. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz. The LAMDA Theatre Club, 1964. The Shakespeare Centre Library, RSC/ SM/1/1964/THC1, [no page]. 13. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1988; repr. 2006), p. 197. 14. Stephen Barber, Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (London: Creation Books, 2006), pp. 5, 20. 15. ‘La nécessité d’agir directement et profondément sur la sensibilité par les organes invite, du point de vue sonore, à rechercher des qualités et des vibrations de sons absolument inaccoutumées, qualités que les instruments de musique actuels ne possèdent pas, […] Elles poussent aussi à rechercher, en

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dehors de la musique, des instruments et des appareils qui, basés sur des fusions spéciales ou des alliages renouvelés de métaux, puissent atteindre un diapason nouveau de l’octave, produire des sons ou des bruits insupportables, lancinants.’ TD, iv, 113–14. 16. ‘Nous ne jouerons pas de pièce écrite, mais autour de thèmes, de faits ou d’œuvres connus, nous tenterons des essais de mise en scène directe.’ TD, iv, 117. 17. ‘6° Un Conte du Marquis de Sade, où l’érotisme sera transposé, figuré allégoriquement et habillé, dans le sens d’une extériorisation violente de la cruauté, et d’une dissimulation du reste.’ TD, iv, 119. Marat/Sade may not have been penned by the Marquis de Sade, but Weiss’s play fulfils Artaud’s stipulations as set in his Theatre of Cruelty, first manifesto. 18. Paul Gray, ‘A Living World. An Interview with Peter Weiss’, ed. by Erika Munk, The Tulane Drama Review, 11.1 (1966), 106–14 (p. 111). 19. Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade, ‘First Rabble-Rousing of Jacques Roux’, pp. 52–53. 20. Anthony Neilson’s 2011 updated revival of Marat/Sade saw Coulmier control inmates via smartphones. As Michael Billington attests, the updates to the play are beneficial because they resonate with a contemporary audience familiar with apparatuses of control: ‘Marat’s belief in equality and freedom from oppression chimes with a world of street protests against dictatorship and popular demonstrations against the banker’s iniquities. Equally Sade’s advocacy of untrammelled individualism has its echo in an erotically obsessed, narcissistic society enthralled by technology, celebrity and material goods. And, just as Weiss’s play comes to no definite conclusion, so Neilson’s production leaves us to decide which set of values should prevail.’ Michael Billington, ‘Marat/Sade – review’, The Guardian, 21 October 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/oct/21/ marat-sade-review. 21. At the end of the film version, the asylum patients begin climbing over the bars in their hopes to enter the audience space and make their way towards freedom. 22. If the plays were similar to the Weiss play, the cure might be as dangerous as the disease. 23. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz, The Theatre of Cruelty (London: LAMDA, 1964), [no page]. 24. Peter Brook and others, ‘Marat/Sade Forum’, ed. by Richard Schechner, The Tulane Drama Review, 10.4 (1966), 214–37 (p. 222).

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

In England, the theatre as public enterprise, from its beginnings in 1576 through to the seventeenth century, was dependent upon the severity or leniency of the recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague that London suffered. The Elizabethan and Jacobean public theatres, continually at the mercy of infection, experienced the power of contagion. The plague is both destructive and regenerative, in Artaud’s deployment of it, wherein lies both death and cure. As the double of the plague, the theatre possesses these same transformative powers. Both the plague and the theatre invite its audiences, either captive or active, to share in images of delirium and frenzy, thus exalting their energies. The claim for regeneration as an outcome of the plague, a phenomenon causing intense destruction, is very specific to Artaud. The successful theatre or plague experience should shake the organism to its core. Artaud proposed that a Theatre of Cruelty would best capture the dual connection between the theatre and the plague. This theatre, which he could have easily called ‘life’ or ‘necessity’, was united with the plague through rigorous images communicated through a language of gesture. And whereas the violent image is most rigorous, it does not necessarily have to be bloody to be effective. Blood has its place in the Theatre of Cruelty, but not gratuitously so, as Artaud had no intention of exclusively associating his theatre with bloodshed. A delicate balance must therefore be struck to prevent the audience from potentially ‘turning away’ from the images presented. © The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2_9

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The physical manifestations of cruelty in the theatre—the stylization of the first manifesto, the ‘bloody when necessary but not systematically so’ provisos of the second manifesto, and Artaud’s final plans for the Theatre of Cruelty as a real and bloody experience for both actor and audience as his last letter to Paule Thévenin (24 February 1948) suggests—have the capacity for dramatization. Both Artaud’s Les Cenci (1935) and Yukio Ninagawa’s Titus Andronicus (2006) are excellent examples of this. Both productions feature stylized cruelty consisting of physically cruel imagery which complements the application of a sensual language of gesture. The violent and sometimes bloody images of the early modern theatre that inspired Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, along with its cultural context which includes the baiting of animals, were latent in the potential for bloodshed, but more so as images that provoke an honest, instinctual response in the audience. Accordingly, they find their complement in staging in the application of the first manifesto with clarification from the second. And Peter Brook’s very ‘Elizabethan’ production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964) saw frenzied actors spill their real blood onstage in a total theatre production that was not altogether devoid of stylization. The above interpretations of cruelty are neither exclusive to one production nor evolutionary, but are dual-natured. The presentation of cruelty in the theatre is not restricted to any one version or interpretation. It is the role of the metteur en scène to decide how exactly to realize cruelty in production. Cruelty in the theatre is most potent when infused with the images surrounding the plague and its accompanying delirium. It has been my intention to examine productions of the Theatre of Cruelty—those either planned or realized by Artaud himself and those of his innovators—that best demonstrate the Theatre of Cruelty’s connection to the early modern theatre alongside the important socio-historical context I believe significantly influenced the creation of his theatre. In addition to this early modern context, the source of dramatic cruelty is identified in Senecan tragedy which comprehends the connection between the theatre and plague through furor. Artaud’s concept of a Theatre of Cruelty intersects with the theories of Bakhtin, Girard, and Bataille in their investigations of spectacle, violence, and sacrifice. Bakhtin’s reading of carnival is comparable to Artaud’s notion of a participatory theatre which amalgamates life with the outside world. Equally, the very nature of a plague epidemic is carnivalesque in its composition: carnival and plague allow for the everyday world to necessarily purge itself, and, as the double of the plague, the true theatre—Artaud’s theatre—permits this same kind of release. Violence and sacrifice in Girard

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are also linked to the plague (he devotes particular attention to the plague of Thebes in literature and myth) and the succession of negative violence due to sacrificial crisis. Girard reads the medical plague as a metaphor for the social plague in literature. His explanation of the plague in relation to literature and the theatre is similar to Artaud’s, but the difference in Artaud is that the potency and contagion of the real, medical plague is actually present in the theatre. Bataille’s Erotism comments on, among other forces at work in the human animal, humankind’s propensity for violence. He also addresses the inherent and instinctual drive towards collectively observing death and/or ritual sacrifice. The transference of this desire to watching ‘sports’ such as bear-baiting is relevant both to Bataille’s investigation of the desire to achieve continuity and to the bloody version of the Theatre of Cruelty which we see on the early modern stage. The Theatre of Cruelty, the ideal of which was never achieved by Artaud during his lifetime, provides audiences with an alternative theatre where they are penetrated by the action taking place on stage. It challenges performances which exist only as a means to entertain, or worse, pacify. The goal, therefore, is to create and then operate a theatre of intensity that is neither trivial nor escapist. Desensitization has left us immune to the crises of contemporary society. A Theatre of Cruelty forces us to confront and combat the crises of culture, to confront the forces which habitually remind us that we are not free. Cruelty in the theatre reminds us of this. Artaud truly believed that the theatre, if its true potential were to be exploited, has all the life-altering force of an epidemic: I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to change in order for the theater to change; but I do believe that the theater, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things. (Richards, p. 79)1

For Artaud, the power of the theatre, when used properly, is dual-­ functioning: it has the power not only to influence and initiate destructive change but also to cure and restore, necessarily so.

Note 1. ‘Je ne suis pas de ceux qui croient que la civilisation doit changer pour que le théâtre change; mais je crois que le théâtre utilisé dans un sens supérieur et le plus difficile possible a la force d’influer sur l’aspect et sur la formation des choses.’ TD, iv, 95.

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Films and Radio Broadcasts Addio fratello crudele. Dir. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. Clesi Cinematografica. 1971 Animal Crackers. Dir. Victor Heerman. Paramount Pictures. 1930 La Coquille et le Clergyman. Dir. Germaine Dulac. Délia Film. 1928 La Grande Bouffe. Dir. Marco Ferreri. Nouveaux Pictures. 1973 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer. Independent. 1928. Marat/Sade. Dir. Peter Brook. Metro Goldwyn Mayer. 1966 Monkey Business. Dir. Norman Z. McLeod. Paramount Pictures. 1931 My Life and Times with Antonin Artaud. Dir. Gérard Mordillat. Archipel 33, Laura Productions, La Sept/Arte, and France 2. 1994 Napoléon. Dir. Abel Gance. Films Abel Gance. 1927 Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu. (Antonin Artaud: Radio Division Française, 1947) The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Universal. 1989 The True Story of Artaud the Momo. Dirs. Gérard Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur. Laura Productions, Les Films d’ici, La Sept, Arcanal, Centre Georges Pompidou. 1993

Programmes Bral, Gregorz, and Gabriel Gawin, Teatr Pieśń Kozła’s ‘Macbeth’: work-in-progress (Stratford: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2007) Brook, Peter, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade (Stratford: Royal Shakespeare Company, 1964) Brook, Peter, and Charles Marowitz, The Theatre of Cruelty (London: LAMDA, 1964) Brook, Peter, and Charles Marowitz, The Theatre of Cruelty (Stratford: Royal Shakespeare Company, 1964) Ninagawa, Yukio, Titus Andronicus (Stratford: Royal Shakespeare Company, 2006)

Promptbooks The Theatre of Cruelty. Dir. Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz. The LAMDA Theatre Club, 1964. The Shakespeare Centre Library, RSC/SM/1/1964/ THC1 Marat/Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade). Dir. Peter Brook. The Aldwych Theatre, 1964. The Shakespeare Centre Library, RSC/SM/1/1964/MAR1

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259

Reviews Bassett, Kate, ‘Anyone got a stain-remover?’, Independent on Sunday, 25 June 2006, p. 12 Billington, Michael, ‘Japanese master’s anti-imperial lament’, The Guardian, 22 June 2006, p. 36 Billington, Michael, ‘Marat/Sade  – review’, The Guardian, 21 October 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/oct/21/marat-sade-review Gardner, Lyn, ‘Titus Andronicus review – Shakespeare’s bloodbath becomes a sadistic delight’, The Guardian, 11 May 2014 https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/may/11/titus-andronicus-globe-review Nightingale, Benedict, ‘Titus Andronicus’, The Times, 22 June 2006, p. 21 Spenser, Charles, ‘The good-taste griefest’, Daily Telegraph, 22 June 2006, p. 28 Tyrell, Rebecca, ‘Tongueless in Stratford’, Sunday Telegraph, 25 June 2006, p. 22

Index1

A Abdy, Lady Iya, 203 Acting technique, 222 actor-in-trance, 218, 219 declamatory style, 124 method, 218 Speak with Paints, 221, 222 (see also Royal Shakespeare Company, The, Royal Shakespeare Experimental Group) Alchemy, 25 Aldermen, Court of, 62, 64 Alfred Jarry Theatre, 4, 16–18, 23, 37n8, 163, 165, 166 dismemberment, 17, 168 Allegorical drama, 61, 131, 134, 158, 166 Interlude of Wealth and Health, An, 61 Allendy, René, 47, 48, 150n6 Chronicles of the Plague, 47 Ananke, 31

Anarchic freedom of laughter, 26–27, 148, 228 Animal cruelty, 91 Animals, 6, 93 ape on horseback, 93, 94, 107 bear (see Bear-baiting) bull (see Bull-baiting) cat, 91 cock, 88, 107, 125 horse, 88, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 174 mastiff, 96, 98, 99, 107, 114n20, 116n42, 185n17 Anthropocentrism, 90, 109 Antitheatrical prejudice, 63 Anxiety, 15, 23, 91, 131, 176 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 168 mamelles de Tirésias, Les, 187n38 Arden of Faversham, 98, 155, 160, 161, 163, 185n17 Aron, Robert, 16, 17, 165 Gigogne, 37n8 Arrowes of infection, 59, 200

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2018 A. Di Ponio, The Early Modern Theatre of Cruelty and its Doubles, Avant-Gardes in Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92249-2

261

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INDEX

Ars morendi, 169 Artaud, Antonin acting career, 40n37 cruelty, 4, 15, 30–32, 87, 123, 207, 227, 235 electroshock treatments, 32 esprit, hybrid term meaning body and spirit, 158, 159, 164, 166, 184n10 journey to Ireland, 32 journey to Mexico, 32, 37n5 life in action, 20 mental state, 15 narrative theater, criticism of, 156 performance theory, 9, 14, 16, 17, 20, 31, 162, 166, 171, 216, 217 plague research, 50, 57, 86n61 Richard II, performance of, 156 Shakespeare, criticism of, 155–157 Shakespeare, praise of, 159 static theatre, criticism of, 14, 155, 156 traditional theatre, criticism of, 16, 109 understanding of the plague, 5, 6 violence, 15, 35, 158, 206, 207 Artaud, Antonin, works by, 33, 187n36 About a Lost Play, 139, 141, 149n1, 152n25, 152n28 Burnt Belly, or the Mad Mother, 37n8 Cenci, Les, 8, 29–31, 42n56, 72, 134, 136, 139, 140, 152n29, 159, 164, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200–203, 205–208, 208n4, 234 Chronicles of the Plague, 48–49 Conquest of Mexico, The, 31, 32, 156, 214, 215, 230n3 Evolution of Décor, The, 163 Manifesto for an Abortive Theatre, 17 Monk, The, 202 Philosopher’s Stone, The, 187n36 Seashell and the Clergyman, The (see Dulac, Germaine)

Spurt of Blood, The, 168, 171, 174, 187n37, 217, 222 Story Lived by Artaud the Mômo, The, 32, 123, 124 There is no more firmament, 187n36 To Have Done with the Judgement of God, 15, 33, 34, 124; Search for the Excremental, The, 33; To Raise the Question of…, 33; Tutuguri The Rite of the Black Sun, 33 Tortures of Tantalus, The, 121, 139–141 See also Theatre and Its Double, The Artaudian paradox, 7, 14, 123, 200 Audience active participant, 18, 20–22, 28, 49, 86n57, 105, 137, 166, 183, 234 bourgeois, 16, 21, 32, 92, 96, 108, 140, 203 response, 8, 17, 18, 23, 24, 32, 50, 121, 122, 147, 148, 170, 171, 200, 208, 213, 225, 234 seated in centre, 111, 136, 203 shock, 26, 27, 30, 32, 127, 136, 182, 207 understanders, 28 Avant-garde, 3, 10n4, 26, 35, 86n57, 136, 193, 203, 213, 215 B Bacchic, 7, 136–138, 140, 219 Bailey, Lucy, 153n34 Titus Andronicus, 146, 214 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 4, 20, 36n3, 234 Dialogic Imagination, 13, 23, 36n2 Rabelais and His World, 20, 59 Balinese, 4, 24, 36n5, 39n28, 40n32, 219, 220 hieroglyphs, 24, 25, 30, 158

 INDEX    

Balthus, 159, 184n15 Barbarity, 6, 92, 106–111, 148 Barber, Stephen, 3, 21, 24, 26, 39n28, 42n60, 150n7, 156 Barnowski, Victor, 159, 184n13, 184n14 Barong, 24 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 37n5, 121, 139, 149n1, 152n24, 210n18, 213 Bataille, Georges, 2, 8, 105, 234 Erotism, 6, 104, 129, 130, 177–179, 235 Bear-baiting ambiguity, 103–106, 108, 235 arena or pit, 6, 10, 88, 89, 112n7, 126 blind bear, 95, 98, 101–103 cruelty, 88, 92, 100, 110, 111, 126 gambling, 99, 101 Harry Hunkes, 102 location, 88, 89 Master of the Bears, 99, 115n28, 115n29 origins, 113n14 Paris Garden, 88 popularity, 95, 97, 99, 106, 111, 112n10 prohibition, 62 Tom a Lincoln, 115n30 Beck, Julian, 136, 213, 218 See also Living Theatre, The Bedlamite, 175 Bête Noire, La, 202 Billington, Michael, 232n20 Black Death, 47, 51, 61, 73 Blin, Roger, 33, 204–206, 210n17, 210n18, 213 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 230 Decameron, The, 58, 73 Bolton, Robert, 108 Some Generall Directions For a Comfortable Walking with God, 108 Brecht, Bertolt, 230n2

263

Epic Theatre, 213, 217, 223 Verfremdungseffekt, 213, 223 Breton, André, 16 Brook, Peter, 2, 9, 146, 153n35, 187n37, 213, 215–218, 220, 221, 223–230, 231n7, 231n9, 234 works by; Empty Space, The, 215, 220, 229; Shifting Point, The, 217, 224, 227, 231n9 Brutality, 88, 94, 101, 102, 106, 125, 126 Buffini, Fiona, 187n40 Bull-baiting, 93, 94, 107 Bulwer, John, 30, 41n47, 41n50, 205 Chirologia and Chironomia, 29; impedio, 30, 205; protego, 30, 205 C Caligula, 121, 133 Cannibalism, 122, 129–131, 148 Carlson, Marvin, 3, 41n49 Carnival, 20, 21, 58, 68, 89, 234 Cathedral of Amiens, 207 Cecil, Sir William, 64 Cenci, Count Francesco, 8 Chaplin, Charlie, 206 Charenton Asylum, 9, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230 Charles I, King, 62 Chicoyneau, François, 55–57, 82n17 Cieslak, Richard, 220 Civility, 6, 19, 91, 92, 106–111, 178 Clergy, 63 Colette, 204, 205, 210n17 Colonial Exhibition, 24, 25 Comédie des Champs-Elysées, Le, 37n8, 38n8 Commedia dell’arte, 223 Contagion, 50–52, 60, 64, 65, 68, 72, 74–80, 81n10, 105, 130–132, 181, 195, 197, 198, 206, 230, 233, 235

264  

INDEX

Copeau, Jacques, 16 Corombona, Vittoria, 172 Crime, 90, 98, 101, 139, 142, 161, 163, 196, 197, 199 Crowley, Robert, 95 Of Bearbaytynge, 95 Cruelty to animals, 91 Great Cat Massacre, 112n12 D de Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot, 149n2 de Montaigne. Michel, 94 On Crueltie, 94 De Quincey, Thomas, 161–163, 185n24, 186n27 transfiguration, 162 works by; On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts, 186n27; On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, 161–163, 185n24 de Sade, Marquis, 222, 223, 225, 232n17 De Vos, Laurens, 2, 10n3, 149n2 Deharme, Lise, 156 Dekker, Thomas, 5, 28, 49, 59, 60, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83n22, 101–103, 105, 175 works by; Blacke Rod: and the White Rod, The, 59, 60; Gull’s Hornbook, The, 28; Honest Whore Part I, 175; Newes from Graves-end, 59; Northward Ho, 175; Rod for Run-awayes, A, 59, 71; Wonderfull yeare, The, 75; Worke for Armourours, 101, 102 Deleuze, Gilles, 15 Delirium, 1, 8, 24, 76, 78, 164, 179, 233, 234 as symptom of plague, 5, 54, 56, 57, 66, 67, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 30 Désormière, Roger, 207 Destructeur, 199, 203, 209n8

Dialogism, 23 Doubles of the theatre Aaron and Tamora, 145 actor-in-trance and reality, 25 actor-in-trance and Tatsumi Hijikata, 219 Atreus and Thyestes, 133 bear-baiting and early modern drama, 87, 98, 105, 106, 109, 116n38, 125 Cenci, Les and Elizabethan drama, 8 double revenge plot, 142 Malfort and Count Francesco Cenci, 195 Marat/Sade and Elizabethan drama, 9 mimetic doubles, 77 plague and theatre, 6, 34, 49, 63, 65, 78, 80, 164, 176, 200, 233, 234 ritual and drama, 7 Vindice and Hippolito, 171 Dreyer, Carl Theodore Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La, 40n37 Drummond, William Harrison, 108 Dulac, Germaine, 187n36 Dullin, Charles, 16 Dumb show, 28, 29, 171, 174, 206 Dummies, 17, 176, 204, 205 E Early modern influence on Artaud, 3, 35, 80, 124, 142 period, 1, 10n1, 83n24, 183n2 popularity of bear-baiting, 96 population of London, 83n29 theatre, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8–10, 28, 81n4, 87, 88, 125, 155, 167, 227, 234 understanding of plague, 59–66, 68, 72, 77, 79 world view, 94, 102, 110, 155 Elias, Norbert, 91, 92 Civilizing Process, The, 104

 INDEX    

Elizabethan actor, 160 drama, 2, 6, 9, 28, 97, 155, 157–160, 166 dramatic conventions, 6, 28–30, 110, 226, 227 influence on Artaud, 2, 4, 7, 157, 171, 227 language, 161 popularity of bear-baiting, 90 world view, 61, 182, 216 Elizabeth I, Queen, 62, 83n32, 96 progresses, 95 English public theatre, 5, 6, 28, 49, 65, 66, 88, 89, 124, 125, 164, 233 Esslin, Martin, 230n2 Euripides Bacchae, 137 Evelyn, John, 106 F Fate, 74, 88, 89, 146, 162, 181 Figaro, Le, 199 Finter, Helga, 3 Fletcher, John Pilgrim, The, 175 Ford, John, 7, 8, 72, 75, 156, 172, 176, 181, 182, 194 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 7, 72, 75, 172, 176–182, 189n61, 190n62, 194 French Revolution, 224 Furor, 7–9, 122, 130–136, 148, 170, 195, 199–201, 207, 234 Fury, 128, 130, 131, 141, 145 G Gallimard, 15, 37n5, 139, 149n1, 159, 184n13 Gance, Abel, 40n37 Genet, Jean Screen, The, 218, 222 Gestural language, 234

265

Gide, André, 160, 161, 185n22 Girard, René, 2, 77, 104, 116n37, 150n11, 234, 235 To Double Business Bound, 77 Violence and the Sacred, 7, 128, 129, 144, 172, 198 Goodall, Jane, 3, 195 Grand-Saint-Antoine, 50–52 Graver, David, 3, 10n4 Great Fire of London, 49 Greek drama, 124, 131, 141, 148 Greek tragedy reported violence, 127 Greenaway, Peter Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The, 130 Greene, Naomi, 3 Grindal, Bishop Edmund, 64 Grotesque, 1, 24, 58, 173 Grotowski, Jerzy, 3, 136, 137, 166, 213, 220 Laboratory Theatre, 216, 218 Paratheatre, 86n57, 216 Poor Theatre, 86n57, 136 Guattari, Felix, 15 H Healy, Margaret, 5, 58, 61, 62, 72, 83n22 Heteroglossia, 14, 23, 36n2 Hijikata, Tatsumi Ankoku Butoh, 219 Hope Theatre, 89, 115n29, 125 Hughes, Ted Oedipus, 10n8 I Incest, 7, 8, 26, 164, 176–178, 180–183, 188n55, 195, 199, 207, 214 Innes, Christopher, 3, 10n4, 24, 39n29

266  

INDEX

J Jackson, Glenda, 226 Jacobean drama, 7, 175 popularity of bear-baiting, 92, 99–102 world view, 182, 216 James I, King, 62, 84n37, 99, 114n17, 115n28 Jannarone, Kimberly, 3, 38n8, 161, 203, 231n5 Japanese traditional theatre Kabuki, 143, 146, 153n33 Noh, 146, 153n33 Jarry, Alfred, 42n61 Ubu roi, 16, 23, 42n61 Jonson, Ben, 74, 89, 114n27 works by; Bartholomew Fair, 89; Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, 114n27; On the Famous Voyage, 74 Journal, Le, 204, 210n17 K Kabbalah, 37n5, 216 Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy, The, 151n15, 230 L Laneham, Robert, 96, 100 Larson, Jonathan Rent, 231n8 Lee, Sir Sidney, 90, 92 Lévi-Strauss, Claude Elementary Structures of Kinship, The, 177, 188n55 Lewis, Matthew, 202 Living Theatre, The, 136, 218 Performance Garage, 137 Lodge, Thomas Treatise for the Plague, A, 61

London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, 218 Lugné-Poe, Aurélien-Marie, 16, 193, 203, 208n1 Lycanthropy, 175, 176 M Maeterlinck, Maurice, 188n51, 190n62 Annabella, 176 Magno, Alessandro, 92–94, 96 Malina, Judith, 136 See also Living Theatre, The Mallarmé, Stéphane, 193 Malone Society Collections, 64, 65, 68 Mannequin, 22, 145, 170, 204 See also Dummies Maps of London, England Agas, 89, 112n4 Georg Braun and Frans Hohenberg, 89, 112n4 Marat/Sade, see Weiss, Peter, Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, The Marlowe, Christopher, 230 Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, The, 168 Marowitz, Charles, 9, 166, 187n37, 213, 217–222, 227, 230 Marseilles, 5, 42n60, 50, 51, 55–57, 61, 82n17 1720 plague, 5, 50–52, 55, 81n5 Marston, John Antonio’s Revenge, 29 Marx Brothers, 26, 37n5 films by; Animal Crackers, 26, 37n5; Monkey Business, 26, 37n5 Massinger, Philip Unnatural Combat, The, 195 Metteur en scène, 23, 25, 39n27, 164, 179, 213–215, 234

 INDEX    

Middle Ages, 91, 92 Middleton, Thomas, 7, 8, 175, 183n3 works by; Changeling, The, 175; Honest Whore Part I, 175 Mise en scène, 8, 14, 20, 22, 23, 26, 50, 110, 122, 143, 146, 148, 184n14, 214, 217, 220 N Nashe, Thomas Summers Last Will and Testament, 79 Negative violence, 7, 105, 128–131, 143, 144, 147, 150n11, 172, 235 Nero, 121, 122, 133 Nez, Le, 31 Nin, Anaïs, 47, 76, 150n6 Ninagawa, Yukio, 124, 142, 143, 145–148, 153n35, 171, 214, 234 Taitasu Andoronikasu, 7, 124, 142–148 Nouvelle Revue Française, La, 13, 26 O Obscenity, 178 Ovid Actaeon, myth, 101, 115n32 Metamorphoses, The, 131 P Patroni Griffi, Giuseppe Addio fratello crudele, 182 Paulhan, Jean, 13, 30, 37n5, 42n55, 42n57, 42n58, 109, 121, 123, 135, 139, 149n1, 161, 179, 185n24 Pepys, Samuel, 106, 116n41 Plague, 59 buboes, buboe, bubos, 54, 56, 67, 70, 187n35

267

bubonic plague, 5, 8, 48, 53–55, 58, 62, 66, 77, 80, 81n5, 233 major outbreaks in London, 65 Mékao, Japan, 86n61 outbreaks, 5, 49, 55, 58, 59, 73, 77 paroxysm, 164, 165 Pasteurella pestis, 53 Pesthouse, 74 plague hospital, 74, 79 plague literature, 82n16 Plague Orders, 68, 69 plague pamphlets, 5, 49, 59, 71, 80 (see also Dekker, Thomas) plague pit, 72, 103 plague-theatre, 56, 67–73 pneumonic plague, 54 rat-flea, 53, 58, 81n14 septicaemic plague, 54 symptoms of, 52–59, 178 treatment, 83n28 weekly bills of mortality, 66 Poison, 169, 170, 174, 201 Pollution, 83n24, 195, 197 Porché, Wladimir, 33 Privy Council, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 97 Puritans, 63, 84n37, 90, 91, 112n10 R Ratcliffe Highway murders, 162, 163 Red Lion, 63 Remembrancia, The, 64, 84n40 Renaissance, 10n1, 130, 134, 142, 150n5, 156, 183n2, 184n8 drama, 1, 157 Renaissance Senecan tradition, 6, 92, 122, 124, 125, 142, 148 understanding of plague, 58, 59, 158 world view, 1, 5, 92, 172 Reni, Guido, 194 Revenge Tragedy, 7, 8, 156, 157, 166

268  

INDEX

Revenger’s Tragedy, The, 131, 165–172, 174, 175, 183n3, 187n40 See also Middleton, Thomas; Tourneur, Cyril Richardson, Ian, 229 Ritual, 7, 24, 25, 75–80, 86n57, 104, 105, 127, 128, 136–142, 153n33, 235 Rodez Asylum, 15, 32 Roman, 121 combat, 126 community, 144, 146 decadence, 123 dramatics, 122 games, 126 sport, 125 tradition, 148 tradition of brutality, 125 Rowley, William Changeling, The, 175 Royal Shakespeare Company, The, 9, 187n37, 216, 218, 220, 224 Royal Shakespeare Experimental Group, 217 Theatre of Cruelty season, The, 9, 187n37, 217, 220, 222, 230 Royal Society for the Prevention of Animal Cruelty, 108 S Sacrifice, 2, 3, 7, 61, 78, 104, 116n37, 122, 127–130, 135, 136, 138, 143, 144, 148, 172, 214, 234 Sacrificial crisis, 78, 116n37, 127–129, 144, 150n11, 235 Saillet, Maurice, 157 Saint-Rémys, Viceroy of Sardinia, 50–52, 61, 81n6 Savagery, 94, 122 Scapegoat, 61, 62, 77, 105, 128, 171 Scelus, see Crime

Schechner, Richard, 3, 136, 213, 219, 220 Dionysus in 69, 7, 137, 139, 151n18, 151n20 Environmental Theatre, 137, 151n19 Seneca, 7, 92, 121, 125–135, 138–145, 147, 148, 149n2, 195 influence on Artaud, 121, 123, 124, 134, 136, 139, 140, 219 recitatio, 122–127 role of chorus, 133 Seneca-Artaud spectrum, 7, 123, 124, 142 Senecan tragedy, 10n7, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 135, 137, 139, 142, 148, 234 works by; De clementia, 92, 133; Epistulae Morales, 125, 126; Medea, 139; Oedipus, 131; Thyestes, 7, 92, 121, 126–135, 138–145, 147, 148, 149n2, 195 Shakespeare, William, 2, 7, 8, 70, 77–80, 98, 99, 114n24, 114n26, 115n31, 116n38, 124, 130, 134, 142–146, 148, 153n32, 153n34, 161, 162, 171, 182, 185n24, 200, 214, 218, 234 bear-baiting imagery, 106, 110, 116n38 influence on Artaud, 3, 78, 160, 161, 193, 200 plague imagery, 49, 77, 80, 81n4 scholarship in France, 40n40 works by; Coriolanus, 2, 116n38; Hamlet, 2, 79, 130, 218; King Lear, 116n38; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 70, 79, 116n38; Macbeth, 79, 98, 114n24, 114n26, 116n38, 161, 162, 182, 185n24; Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 99; Richard III, 116n38, 134, 200; Romeo and

 INDEX    

Juliet, 77, 78; Titus Andronicus, 7, 8, 116n38, 124, 142–146, 148, 153n32, 153n34, 171, 214, 234; Troilus and Cressida, 80; Winter’s Tale, The, 115n31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Cenci, The, 31, 136, 139, 193–197, 202 Sontag, Susan, 3, 149n2 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 218–220, 231n5 Stendhal Chroniques italiennes, 139, 193, 202 Stockwood, John, 63 Strindberg, August, 16 Stubbes, Philip Anatomy of Abuses, 97, 111n2 Supervielle, Jules, 159, 184n13 Surrealism, 4, 16, 17, 26, 40n36, 159, 187n36, 187n37, 198 dictée automatique, 198 Surrogate victim, 127, 129, 172 T Taboo, 7, 129, 130, 177, 180, 189n55, 195 Tantalus character in Thyestes, 126, 129, 134, 138, 141 myth, 131, 141 as plague, 130, 131, 134, 138 Tarahumara, 33 Taylor, John Bull, Beare, and Horse, 99 Taymor, Julie Titus Andronicus, 214 Theatre and Its Double, The, 4, 9, 14, 16–18, 35, 39n28, 42n56, 87, 213 Affective Athleticism, An, 37n5, 41n45, 215 Alchemical Theatre, The, 25, 36n5 Letters on Language, 42n55

269

Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène, 22, 36n5, 39n28, 200 No More Masterpieces, 14, 19, 37n5, 133, 156 On the Balinese Theatre, 25, 36n5, 39n28 Oriental and Occidental Theatre, 23, 36n5 Seraphim’s Theatre, 37n5, 41n45, 216 Theatre and Cruelty, The, 30, 37n5 Theatre and Culture, The, 18, 36n5, 151n16 Theatre and the Plague, The, 5, 36n5, 47–49, 56, 73, 137, 139, 190n62, 195 Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto), The, 2, 37n5 Theatre of Cruelty (Second Manifesto), The, 31, 37n5 Two Notes, 37n5, 39n28 Théâtre d’Art, 193, 208n1 Théâtre de L’Œuvre, 16 Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 159 Théâtre des Folies-Wagram, 193, 203, 211n26 Theatre of Cruelty actor training, 41n45 articulation of, 13, 15, 32, 42n55 audience penetration, 18, 32, 136, 146, 148, 155, 182, 183, 215, 216, 227 bloody when necessary, 8, 31, 32, 35, 109, 136, 142, 146, 150n5, 170–172, 179, 182, 183, 207, 223, 229, 233–235 catharsis, 27 concrete language, 22 direct staging, 4, 25, 221 dreams, 198 early modern influence, 28, 126, 158, 166

270  

INDEX

Theatre of Cruelty (cont.) gestural language, 6, 27–29, 122, 123, 136, 140, 142–143, 148, 193, 227, 233 gravitational movement, 203, 204, 206, 207 Great Myths, 139, 140, 199, 214 as influence, 136, 148, 213 manifestos, 17, 20, 110, 155, 179, 188n43, 214, 232n17 music, as feature of, 22, 170, 214, 220, 221, 229 in performance, 8, 170, 171, 174, 176, 182, 193, 216, 228, 231n7 performance space, 137 physical cruelty, 7, 30, 35, 126, 140, 152n29, 169, 182, 206, 207, 227 planned productions, 31, 160, 188n43 poem by Artaud, 33–35 rigor, 31, 32, 35, 105, 124, 126, 136, 140, 169, 179, 197, 214 Seneca, 123, 141 spectacle-based performance, 156 stage language, 22, 181 stylization, 7, 8, 140, 143, 146, 170, 171, 174, 179, 182, 183, 206, 234 three influential events, 24–28 true theatre, 34, 68, 77, 163–165, 171, 176, 234 Theatre of the Absurd, 217 Theatre practice emblematic approach to staging, 145, 158, 167–170, 174–176, 184n8 gesture, 29 metatheatric, 136, 138, 143, 147, 167, 173, 175 non-linguistic, 6, 25, 88, 105 verisimilitude, 13, 30, 156, 158, 168

Thévenin, Paule, 15, 33, 34, 37n5, 159, 161, 185n24, 234 Thomas Aquinas, Saint Summa theologiae, 92 Total theatre, 17, 22, 25, 75, 173, 208, 217, 223, 228, 234 Tourneur, Cyril, 7, 156, 183n3 Traditional theatre, 4, 7, 166 V van Leyden, Lucas Lot and his Daughters, 26 Verlaine, Paul, 193 Vieux-Colombier, 32, 48, 123, 124 Virmaux, Alain, 10n2 Vitrac, Roger, 16, 17, 37–38n8, 165 works by; Mysteries of Love, The, 37n8; Victor, or The Children are in Power, 38n8 W Walsingham, Sir Francis, 64 Webster, John, 7, 8, 156, 172–176, 182, 197 works by; Duchess of Malfi, The, 7, 172, 174–176, 182, 197; Northwood Ho, 175; White Devil, The, 7, 172–176, 182 Weiss, Peter, 217, 222–224, 226, 232n17, 232n20, 232n22 Persecution and Assassination of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, The, 9, 216–218, 220, 222–230, 232n17, 232n20, 234 William Tyndale, 63 Wilson, F.P., 5, 62, 66, 69–71, 73, 74 Wrath of God, 59