The plays of Sheridan

I wonder if Sheridan’s literary reputation is on the wane these days. Revivals of his plays are not, I think, so common now as they used to be. We still hear of Edith Evans’ splendid Mrs Malaprop, for instance, or of Laurence Olivier’s exuberant performance as Mr Puff (a role which he seemingly alternated with Sophocles’ Oedipus!), but contemporary luminaries of the stage rarely if ever list Sheridan roles in their credits. And in all the years I have spent here in London, I cannot recall a single performance of a Sheridan play. No doubt I have missed a few, but it’s hard to escape the impression that these plays simply aren’t performed that much these days as they not so long ago used to be. Or read either, for that matter. This is in great part due, no doubt, to that questionable dictum that has gained ground that plays are meant “to be seen, not read” – a dictum that has resulted in the undervaluing of a great many dramatists in preference to authors of prose fiction – but it could also be, I think, that our age is out of sympathy with Sheridan’s dramatic ethos.

I was contemplating this matter only quite recently, when it occurred to me that I had never read Sheridan’s plays either. 18^th century writers of prose fiction, yes: the novels of Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and even the intimidatingly long Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, have all been duly ticked off the list, and, in many cases, greatly admired and loved; but Sheridan I knew only by reputation. Well, there was only one way to put that right: Penguin Classics do a very useful volume containing his three greatest hits – The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and The Critic – and, while Sheridan is not these days a big enough name for this volume to be readily available in the local bookshop, it is still in print and is easily ordered.

However, on reading these plays, I did, I confess, have a sneaking sympathy with the “meant to be seen, not read” crowd. Imagine never having seen your favourite sitcom, and knowing it only through the script: how much of it would we laugh at? If I had never seen, say, Andrew Sachs’ performance as Manuel in Fawlty Towers, would I have laughed at seeing a mere “ ¿Qué? ” in cold print? The impact of comedy undoubtedly depends to a very great extent on the comic skills and timing of the actors. However, as I was unlikely to see any of Sheridan’s plays any time soon; and, further, as I have gained much merely from reading comic plays (I am an aficionado of Molière, after all); I wasn’t going to let this stop me. After all, reading the lines and trying to imagine how good comic actors would deliver them is in itself great fun.

All this resulted in a very entertaining week’s worth of reading. (Yes, I know … but I’m a slow reader.) In The Rivals, we have all the appurtenances of romantic comedy – young lovers, impossibly eccentric elders, lovers’ tiffs that are lunatic storms in tiny teacups, disguises, misunderstandings, and all the rest of it. It’s the sort of thing that Oscar Wilde wrought to a pitch of perfection in The Importance of Being Earnest, and which Wodehouse later seized upon (albeit as prose fiction rather than as stage drama). If I am to be entirely honest, both Wilde and Wodehouse improved upon Sheridan here: but it is hardly Sheridan’s fault that those who later took up the genre developed it to such an extent. The Rivals still stands up as a fine comedy even on reading: I’d love to see a good comic cast let loose on this.

The tone in The School for Scandal is somewhat darker. Here, Sheridan presents us with a society where gossip, scandalmongering, hypocrisy, gratuitous and mendacious denigration of one’s fellow humans, are virtually social graces: it is almost impossible to be part of society without being part of all this. The world Sheridan presents here is not too dissimilar to the world presented by Molière in possibly his greatest work, Le Misanthrope. There, Molière puts at the centre of his play a man of integrity, Alceste, who deplores all he sees about him, but who is nonetheless hopelessly in love with Célimène, an attractive young lady very much at home in this world that Alceste so deplores.  But ultimately, Alceste refuses to compromise his integrity, leaving himself lonely and isolated, and, in the midst of all the comedy, almost a tragic figure. But this is not the direction Sheridan wants to go in. He gives us delicious characters, a fine farcical plot (involving that famous scene in Act 4 with various people hidden behind screens on various parts of the stage), and a happy ending where all is resolved, although, given the nature of the dramatic world he presents, a completely happy resolution should be well nigh impossible: even if individuals do reform, the nature of the society they inhabit is too inherently corrupt to change even in the slightest: any man of genuine integrity in such a society must, at best, compromise, as Alceste’s friend Philinte does, or, at worst, end up lonely and isolated, like Alceste himself. But this is not Sheridan’s concern. The corruption of society is not here a representation of the fallen nature of Man: it is, rather, a backdrop with great comic potential. And Sheridan exploits this potential brilliantly, squeezing as many laughs out of it as he can with considerable ingenuity.

The Critic seemed to me the funniest of the lot. After all, which other play features as a character an author named Sir Fretful Plagiary? In this play, Sheridan dispenses almost entirely with plot. Most of the play consists of a rehearsal of another play, an absurd “tragic drama” about the Spanish Armada, with comments by the exuberant Mr Puff, author of this play, an enthusiast of the theatre, Mr Dangle, and a dramatic critic, Mr Sneer. That’s it. No young lovers, no-one hiding behind screens, no disguises and misunderstandings to be smoothed out at the denouement. Indeed, no denouement at all, for that matter.

Without anything resembling plot, everything stands or falls by the quality of the gags, and, even seen only in print, they are hilarious. The play within the play is extraordinarily bad, but Puff is nonetheless delighted by his own invention, and is not in the slightest bit put out by any criticism. When it is pointed out, for instance, that one of his lines is straight out of Othello, he blithely responds:

Gad! now you put me in mind on’t, I believe there is, but that’s of no consequence: all that can be said is, that two people happened to hit on the same thought, and Shakespeare made use of it first, that’s all.

Puff is particularly proud of the “mad scene”, and proudly reads out his stage direction:

‘Enter Tilburina stark mad in white satin, and her confidant stark mad in white linen.’

Puff patiently explains to the various objectors that, yes, the confidant as well as the heroine must become mad. Stark mad. And once the scene ends, Puff turns to his audience in triumph:

There, do you ever desire to see any body madder than that?

(I must confess this is a line that has run through my mind after reading many a chapter by Dostoyevsky…)

Now that I have read these plays, I don’t know that I’ll be returning to The Rivals, or even to The School for Scandal: it’s not that I didn’t enjoy them – I did – but I’m not sure there’s enough substance in either play to warrant revisiting (although I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing them performed on stage). The Critic I shall most certainly be returning to: it’s one of those instances we sometimes encounter (Don Quixote is another) of a parody that remains funny even when that which it is parodying has vanished from sight. This play alone should be enough to cement Sheridan’s reputation as one of the great comic authors.

“A Month in the Country” by Ivan Turgenev

I’ve long had a theory – which will, I am sure, be quite exploded in the comments section of this post by people better read than myself – that while the novel was establishing itself in the nineteenth century as perhaps the most important literary form of the age, drama lagged significantly behind. While prose drama was seen primarily as suitable for comedy ( Sheridan, Gogol, the prose plays of Molière, etc.), tragic works were still seen to require a dignity and nobility that only verse could provide. Further, drama, unlike prose fiction, had either to be tragic or comic: there was nothing between Racine on the one hand, and Molière on the other. And while the comic could (and indeed did) accommodate figures from all walks of life, the tragic had to deal with kings and queens, nobles and bishops, princes and princesses; and, with people now reading about Emma Woodhouse or Emma Bovary, kings and queens and nobles and bishops delivering high-flown blank verse were, perhaps, starting to seem a bit old hat. So, while the novel flowered as a literary form (Austen, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, and so on), drama, in contrast, remained relatively static, and, indeed, stultified, until some time in the late nineteenth century when Ibsen and Chekhov (and I guess I should add Strindberg, although, personally, I have never really understood his work) rescued the form by raising it to the heights that the novel, at its best, had already attained.

I suppose it would be easy enough to find exceptions to this (Büchner, for instance, although his remarkable plays weren’t know about till much later); but, whatever the reason, as a vehicle of literary expression, the drama did indeed, I think, lag behind the novel for much of the nineteenth century. But one very notable exception is a play Ivan Turgenev wrote in 1850, A Month in the Country.

At this stage in his career, Turgenev had written some wonderful short stories and sketches, but had not yet embarked on the novels on which his fame now primarily rests. A Month in the Country is not too often performed these days (at least, I cannot remember a single performance of it in London in the last few decades), but, reading it, it seems a remarkably assured work, and leaves one wondering what Turgenev might have gone on to achieve in the field of drama had he not decided to turn instead to the novel. Not that A Month in the Country is not a fine work in itself. But it also seems, in the context especially of the times, a sort of harbinger, indicating directions of development in the drama that were only really taken up by Chekhov some fifty years afterwards.

The scene should be familiar to anyone who knows Chekhov’s plays: a country estate populated by its owners (landed gentry naturally), and various hangers on (wards, ageing parents, “companions” – i.e. those who would have been destitute were it not for the landowners’ charity); tutors and governors, maids and servants; and the occasional country doctor or neighbouring landowner stopping off. It is, in short, an ensemble piece, as are all of Chekhov’s dramas. And the mode is neither comic (although there are a few jokes in it), nor explicitly tragic: it is pitched – once again, as Chekhov’s plays are – between the two extreme poles, depicting with the utmost seriousness and sensitivity the unfulfilled longings and the pains of disillusion of its principal characters, while yet placing them in a wider context in which we may see such things as, perhaps, less than cataclysmic. The register, as in Turgenev’s novels, is of a gentle sadness.

At the centre of this group is Natalya Petrovna, the lady of the house. Although she is married, she is loved by Rakitin, described in the list of characters as a “friend of the family”. The love is not returned: Natalya Petrovna is not an adulterous wife. Nonetheless, and despite knowing what Rakitin feels for her, she is on friendly terms with him, and often confides in him. This scenario would recur in Turgenev’s later novel, Smoke, with Irina and Potugin; and, as was well-known even at the time, Turgenev himself was in just such a position, in love with the famed opera singer Pauline Viardot, and hanging around hopelessly with the Viardot household. It does seem a somewhat humiliating situation to be in, and it seems surprising that Turgenev, knowing this to be his own situation, and knowing, further, that this situation was no secret, should so draw attention to it by depicting it in his own work.

In Smoke, the husband had been a pretty nondescript character. Here, the husband is off-stage for most of the play, but when he does emerge in the final acts, the way Turgenev presents his is arresting: he knows full well how his friend Rakitin feels about his wife, but has such confidence both in his wife and in his friend, he firmly believes that neither would betray him. This is quite remarkable, especially in a drama, in which an Othello-like jealousy would have created a far greater theatrical impact; and that Turgenev was prepared to forgo such a immediate theatrical impact for the sake of greater subtlety of characterisation is an indication of how seriously he took the artistic potential of what he must have known was a new kind of drama – neither broadly comic, nor yet aiming for the intensity of high tragedy.

But arresting though this situation is, Turgenev keeps it mainly in the background till the final two acts. Of greater impact in the earlier part of the play is the passion Natalya Petrovna feels for her son’s tutor, a young man barely out of childhood himself, and who is utterly taken aback when he discovers the intensity of the passion he has unwittingly unleashed. And here, although Turgenev is not aiming to write high tragedy, he is surely harking back to Racine’s Phèdre, or even to Euripides’ Hippolytus. Racine’s focus had been the older woman, and Euripides’ the younger man, but since Turgenev’s play is an ensemble piece, he can focus equally on both. The young tutor, Belyaev, finds himself having to grow up quickly, and come to some kind of understanding of the endless complexities of adult human emotions; and Natalya Petrovna, having regarded lightly Rakitin’s passion for herself, has now to understand, and, if she can, come to terms with her own unfulfilled passion, and its destructive power. And this proud lady has to cope also with the humiliation of becoming a rival to her own teenage ward.

One may, of course, read this as Turgenev “getting his own back” on Pauline Viardot, but that would seem to me a shallow reading. Quite apart from the inadvisability of interpreting a work based on what we know of the author’s own life, advancing such an interpretation is to overlook the gentle compassion with which Natalya Petrovna is depicted. If there is any sense of triumph on the author’s part, I, for one, could not detect it. The theme here is unfulfilled desire, and, however humilating it may be, either in Rakitin or in Natalya Petrovna, or, for that matter, in the teenage ward Vera, Turgenev’s treatment of this theme evinces a gentle sadness. There is no catharsis at the end. Turgenev was not writing high tragedy: people here do not die of unhappiness, but have to go on living, bearing their burdens as best they can.

The play is not, perhaps, flawless. Ibsen had once said of one of Tolstoy’s plays that there were “too many conversations and not enough scenes”: sadly, he did not go on to explain what he regarded as the distinction between the two, but we may, perhaps, guess at it: in a “conversation”, only what is explicitly said is important, whereas in a “scene”, what is said is invested with various overtones and resonances in such a way as to communicate more than what is explicitly said. That, at least, is my understanding. And here, too, I think Ibsen might have made the same criticism as he had made of Tolstoy’s plays – “too many conversations, not enough scenes”. But Ibsen himself had worked for decades to master the art of creating scenes rather than mere conversations; and while it is true that much of this play consists merely of conversations (at least by the definition I have proposed above), these conversations are never less than interesting, and are often compelling; and the “scenes”, when they come, are magnificent.

There are cases, admittedly, when characters express their thoughts through long monologues. I suppose that in a modern production, realism can be dispensed with altogether at such points, and stage time frozen as the character steps up to the footlights to deliver what we would now describe as “stream of consciousness”. Or better still, such monologues may be cut altogether: audiences are more used now to picking up subtleties of internal thought purely from what the characters say on stage.

And little passages such as this may also be cut:

ISLAEV: I’m not used to altercations of this sort. I hope they won’t often be repeated. I’ve a strong constitution, God knows, but I can’t bear this.

To our modern ears, this sounds very much like a novelist writing a play. We can easily imagine a passage such as this in a novel – for instance:

Physically, Islaev had a strong constitution, but he had been throughout his life so free of all worry, and so unused to conflict, that confrontations of all kinds upset his natural equilibrium.

But in a play, such lines seem out of place. We are asked to believe that Islaev, in a state of mental perturbation, could nonetheless analyse himself accurately, and articulate clearly the fruits of his analysis for the audience’s benefit. But these were early days for realistic drama: one can easily find such passages also in early Ibsen or in early Chekhov.

A Month in the Country was Turgenev’s last play: he had written a few earlier – mainly in a comic, Gogolian mode – but none of them are anywhere near the class of this. After this, he turned to the novel. But it’s hard not to speculate how the drama might have developed had he decided otherwise. A Month in the Country very clearly points forward to Chekhov, but even when seen purely in its own light, it seems to me a remarkable achievement.

(The translation I read and quoted from above is by Stephen Mulrine, published by Oberon Books)

“The Stone Guest” by Alexander Pushkin

[All excerpts below taken from the translation by Nancy K. Anderson, published by Yale University Press, 2000.]

Pushkin seemed to have had Mozart on his mind around 1830, when he wrote those four miniature plays, usually known in English as the “Little Tragedies”. In one of these plays, Mozart and Salieri – a dramatic treatment of the myth that Salieri had poisoned Mozart, and written long before Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus –  Mozart himself is one of the protagonists. Another deals with a myth that, by then, was very much associated with Mozart – the myth of Don Juan. But, as with everyone else who had tackled this myth (including its originator, Tirso de Molina), Pushkin had his own individual view of the myth. And, partly because the form of Pushkin’s work – a miniature play in which, given its brevity, much is necessarily left unsaid – it is Pushkin’s view that I find the most enigmatic and elusive of those I have so far encountered.

Tirso de Molina had not made too much of the master-servant relationship. Molière, and, following him, Mozart and da Ponte, had, bringing this relationship to the front of the stage. Pushkin also brings the master and the servant (the servant here called Leporello, as in Mozart’s opera) to the forefront: the drama begins with the two of them entering Madrid, even though Don Juan has previously been banished from the city. The conversation between the two is partly expository – telling us what we need to know for the drama to make sense; but it is not entirely expository. Just minutes into the play, for instance, we get this:

DON JUAN (pensively): …    Poor Inez!
She’s gone now! How I loved her!

LEPORELLO: Inez! The black-eyed one … Now I remember,
For three months you were paying court
To her; it was all the devil could do to help.

DON JUAN: July it was … at night. I found strange pleasure
In gazing at her sorrowful eyes
And death-pale lips. It’s strange,
You apparently didn’t think she was
A beauty. And in fact, there wasn’t
Much beautiful about her. Her eyes,
Just her eyes. And her glance … I’ve never seen
Another glance like that. And her voice
Was quiet, feeble – like a sick woman’s –
Her husband was a worthless wretch, and stern –
I found that out too late – Poor Inez!…

With all its various ellipses and aposiopeses, the effect of this passage is sketchy – an adumbration rather than a depiction. Inez was no beauty in any conventional sense, and her “sorrowful eyes and death-pale lips”, and her voice that was “quiet, feeble”, suggest something sickly, other-worldly, and haunted by death. She is not, in short, the type of woman we would expect Don Juan to be attracted to; and, indeed, Don Juan himself is not sure why he had been attracted to her. In Mozart’s opera, Don Juan (or Don Giovanni) would seduce (or rape, if needs be) all kinds of women, simply to add them to his list, but what we see here is something new, something very alien to the incarnations of Don Juan as imagined by either de Molina, or by Molière, or by Mozart: we see here a Don Juan capable of genuine tenderness and affection. True, the other Don Juans could express tenderness and affection for the woman they are wooing at the time, but never for a past conquest; and it is left to us to determine how sincere their protestations of tenderness and affections are, and, indeed, whether such feelings can be said to exist at all when they are, at best, merely transient. But Pushkin leaves us in no doubt: this Don Juan is indeed capable of feeling these emotions, even for a woman who is now, presumably, dead.

And neither was Don Juan attracted to Inez because of her beauty. Leporello did not think her beautiful, and Don Juan agrees. Whatever attracted him, it was not her physical charms. And what he chooses to remember about her are those death-haunted qualities – her “sorrowful eyes and death-pale lips”. All of this suggests a rich inner world that previous Don Juans did not have. But then, almost immediately, Pushkin pulls us up short: the last two lines of the passage quoted suggest – only suggest, as nothing is spelt out – that Inez was murdered by her husband for her affair with Don Juan. If this was indeed the case, Don Juan had played a significant part in her tragedy, and, especially given how he still feels about her, he should feel guilt, and remorse. And yet, he doesn’t. Immediately after this rather affecting minor key passage, without so much as pausing for breath, Pushkin turns the tonality to a major key, and the rhythm becomes jaunty, as Don Juan and Leporello move on to talk about further conquests. Yes, Pushkin had Mozart on the mind, right enough.

This passage about Inez cannot be described as “expository”, as Inez is not mentioned again in the play. The entire section could have been taken out without affecting our understanding of what happens. But that minor key tonality it imparts, if only for a few bars, colours everything that comes afterwards. And it leaves us with a strange impression of Don Juan: he is a man clearly capable of introspection and tenderness and depth of feeling, who can be drawn to qualities other than mere external charm, and yet who bears no responsibility for the past, no guilt for his actions. He had, in the past, before the curtain raises on this play, killed the Commander, for reasons and in circumstances both left unspecified. But, once again, there is not the slightest hint in him of remorse: rather than feel sorry for the man he had killed, it is his widow, Doña Ana, who now interests him. The past is buried, and not allowed to interfere with the joys of the present.

In the second of the four scenes that make up this play, we are introduced to, in effect, a female equivalent of Don Juan, the actress Laura, who, like her male counterpart, demands complete freedom to pursue her desires. If Don Juan feels no responsibility for the past, Laura, only eighteen, and, hence, without much of a past to speak of, feels none for the future. When reminded that some day she too will be old, her reaction is:

…  Then? Why should
I think of that? What talk is this?

But even in those eighteen years, she had been Don Juan’s lover, and, in this scene, Don Juan comes back to visit her once again. This is yet another departure from previous incarnations of Don Juans: previous Don Juans did not care for their past lovers, their past conquests – they were always moving onwards to new experiences. But Pushkin’s Don Juan is different: he may not take responsibility for the past, and may refuse to feel any guilt that may interfere with his enjoyment of the present, but that past, nonetheless, is never dead for him.

In Laura’s apartment, Don Juan is challenged to a duel by a Don Carlos, whose brother Don Juan had previously killed in duel. (Whether or not Don Carlos’ dead brother is the Commander, we are never told.) Don Juan does not want to fight in Laura’s room, but he is given no choice. Of course, he kills Don Carlos. As in Molière’s play, Pushkin had placed the killing of the Commander before the play opens, but while Molière had done this to make Don Juan a more likeable character, Pushkin has no such intention: the killing of Don Carlos takes place in full view on stage, and, while it can certainly be argued that Don Juan was given no choice in the matter, we cannot but note the utter lack of remorse, or even of regret, either on his part, or on Laura’s. It has happened, it is now in the past, and responsibility for past actions, or guilt for past crimes, must not be allowed to interfere with the demands of the present.

And yet the past cannot be forgotten. There, it seems to me, is the paradox at the heart of this strange and elusive work. To enjoy the present, to seize the moment, the past must be forgotten; and yet, the past cannot be forgotten: the death-like pallor of Inez continues to haunt.

This paradox forces itself into the forefront of the action in the final scene. Here, Don Juan, having declared his love for Doña Ana under the assumed name of Don Diego, has been invited into her chamber. And, on the very brink of attaining his desire, he does the very thing that is most likely to thwart it: he admits that Don Diego is but an assumed name, and that he is really Don Juan, the killer of her husband. It is a startling moment, and not something I can claim fully to understand. It seems an inexplicable thing to do, and certainly not something that the Don Juans of de Molina,  Molière, or Mozart would have done. But Pushkin’s Don Juan is different: however he may try  to bury the past, to expunge it from his mind so he does not have to bear its burden, it refuses to remain hidden: it must out. And, in this startling final scene, it erupts unexpectedly into the open.

And at this point, the statue of the Commander comes to drag Don Juan into Hell. It is impossible not to see the stone statue at this point in symbolic terms. What does he represent? For surely, he must represent something: he is not just an optional add-on, present merely because the story demands it. The title of Pushkin’s play is not, after all, Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, or The Trickster of Seville: it is The Stone Guest. It is the statue, the title reminds us, and not Don Juan, who is at the centre of things, and it is up to us to understand the significance of this statue.

The obvious response is that he is the past that Don Juan had tried to deny – the responsibility he had shirked, the guilt he had buried, but which refuses to remain buried. Seen in this respect, we can find significance in the fact that he is of stone, the very antithesis of the flesh and blood that lives for the moment; we may find significance also in the fact that it is Don Juan who had invited him; or in the fact that the statue of the Commander is considerably larger than the Commander had been when he had lived.

All of this makes for a coherent reading, no doubt, but it strikes me as unsatisfactory, as it reduces the poetic richness of the work to mere allegory, and symbols rich with meaning into impoverished ciphers. In these cases, it seems to me best to not interpret at all, but, rather, instead of trying to winkle out what these symbols and the poetic images may mean, to take them at face value, and allow them to resonate in one’s mind.

I can’t say this play has settled yet in my mind. But it does continue to resonate, and I do sense there is more substance here than can be conveyed by any interpretation I may have to offer. Pushkin seemed to see this myth in terms of the past, and of the burden of guilt for that past that we try to keep submerged, but which we cannot keep from irrupting into the present.

At least, that’s the way I see it right now: I’m sure that the longer I ponder on it, the more meanings it will continue to yield. It is, as I said, the most enigmatic and elusive of all the Don Juans I have encountered so far.

“Don Juan” by Molière

[All excerpts from the play are taken from the translation by John Wood, published by Penguin Classics, 1953]

 

Molière’s version of Don Juan appeared in 1665, only thirty-five years after Tirso de Molina’s, but it seems to inhabit a quite different world. It seems a more civilised world, more refined; and Don Juan is no demonic force of nature here, as he had been in the earlier play – no id stripped of its superego: rather, he seems, if anything, a thoughtful young man, a man who takes the trouble to think about, and to justify, his incessant womanising:

Let fools make a virtue of constancy! All beautiful women have a right to our love, and the accident of being the first comer shouldn’t rob others of a fair share in our hearts. As for me, beauty delights me wherever I find it and I freely surrender myself to its charms.

Not merely does he present his womanising as a virtue rather than as a vice, he sees the women as the victors, and himself as the vanquished – as the one who “surrenders”. Now, of course, this could be, and is, indeed, likely to be, mere self-delusion, but the fact remains that he actually believes it.

Come what may, I cannot refuse love to what I find lovable, and so, when a beautiful face is asking for love, if I had ten thousand hearts I would freely bestow every one of them.

What is generally seen as self-centredness, and lack of empathy for the feelings of others, Don Juan sees as generosity. And this leaves open the question: does Don Juan really not see the grief and the heartache that he causes? Seemingly not. When he encounters Elvira, the woman he had married and had subsequently deserted, he fobs her off with an absurd reason for having left her. It’s not so much that he is lying: not only does he not himself believe what he is saying, he does not expect Elvira to believe it either. Molière, like da Ponte and Mozart after him, endows Elvira with genuine tragic dignity and nobility of character, and Don Juan’s callous treatment of her cannot but leave a nasty taste in the mouth. But Don Juan is, nonetheless, being true to himself. “The whole pleasure lies in the fact that love isn’t lasting,” he says at one point. Love is transient. He accepts that as a fact; he takes pleasure in this fact; and he cannot hold himself responsible if others do not see this fact as clearly as he does. Love isn’t lasting; life isn’t lasting; so why not accept these truths, seek what pleasure these truths bring us, and not burden ourselves with arbitrary moral rules that make us so unhappy in our temporary existence?

For Molière’s Don Juan is a rationalist. His servant, Sganarelle, describes him in the opening scene as a man who believes in neither “Heaven, Hell, nor werewolf”. At one point, Sganarelle, tries to pin down what exactly Don Juan believes in:

Sganarelle:  Do you really not believe in Heaven at all?

Don Juan:  Suppose we leave that alone.

Sganarelle:  That means you don’t. And hell?

Don Juan:  Eh?

Sganarelle: No, again! And the Devil, may I ask?

Don Juan:  Yes, yes.

Sganarelle:  No more than the rest. And don’t you believe in a life after this?

Don Juan:  Ha! Ha! Ha!

Sganarelle [aside]: This chap will take some converting! [To Don Juan] Now tell me this – the Bogy Man – what do you think about him?

Don Juan:  Don’t be a fool!

Sganarelle:  Now, I can’t allow that. There’s nothing truer than the Bogy Man. I’d go to stake for that. A man must believe in something. What do you believe?

Don Juan:  What do I believe?

Sganarelle: Yes.

Don Juan:  I believe that two and two make four, Sganarelle, and that two fours make eight.

And suddenly, we find ourselves in the world of Turgenev’s Bazarov, who knew only that two plus two made four, and that all else is nonsense. This is the truth, this is how things are. Don Juan has happily embraced this truth, and delights in it; and if others cannot do so, then so much the worse for them: Don Juan cannot hold himself responsible for the follies of others.

But, in Molière’s version, Don Juan is by no means a man devoid of morals. When he sees a man set upon by robbers, he feels honour-bound to help protect the man from his assailant: one doubts whether de Molina’s Don Juan or Mozart’s Don Giovanni would have cared. This Don Juan is not amoral; but his morality cannot encompass the irrationality of desiring that which is not, and that which cannot be – of desiring Eternal Love, or Eternal Life.

But one cannot deal with human affairs without taking the irrational into account. Elvira’s continuing to love Don Juan, the man who had so heartlessly deserted her, is no doubt irrational, but we do not, as Don Juan does, scoff at her for doing so: rather, we find in her devotion, misdirected though it is, a nobility and a pathos, and even a tragic dignity. That may be irrational, but in all human affairs, irrationality exists, whether Don Juan chooses to accept it or not. And when irrationality does indeed irrupt into Don Juan’s life, he is troubled by it: when he invites the Commander’s statue to dinner, and the stone statue nods in response, Don Juan is momentarily speechless, and then, after a pause, can only say:

Come on. Let us get out of here.

Later, he claims it was but a trick of the light. His sense of the world cannot accommodate life inhabiting that which is not flesh and blood, any more than it can accommodate human desire for that which does not exist. As with Bazarov, when two and two stop making four, he is out of his depth.

But when the statue finally comes to drag him to a Hell in which he does not believe, Don Juan shows genuine courage. I doubt de Molina’s Don Juan or Mozart’s Don Giovanni show much courage here: since neither has the imagination to feel fear, neither has any fear to overcome. But with Molière’s Don Juan, it is different, for Molière presents Don Juan not as some phenomenon of nature, but as a human. And, being human, he is susceptible to fear, and also capable of courage. Indeed, I cannot help feeling that, despite all Don Juan’s manifold flaws and shortcomings, Molière couldn’t help liking him: he certainly humanises him in a way that neither de Molina nor Mozart does.

This is a feeling I often get with Molière, although, given how long it has been since I last read through his plays, I should really go through them again to check my impressions. But certainly, when I last read these plays, I distinctly got the impression that, despite showing us with a thoroughly unsentimental clarity all the various inadequacies of humans, he couldn’t help liking them. Of course, there are a few, such as Tartuffe, who are probably beyond the pale of human sympathy, but, from what I remember, Molière had no scorn or disdain for those who are duped by Tartuffe: he regarded them, as he did Alceste the misanthrope or Harpagon the miser, with no bitterness, but, rather, with a gentle and amused tolerance. The follies of mankind are things in which we all have a part, and that leaves little room for anger or for bile.

And I can’t help sensing a gentle humanity in Don Juan as well. This is not to say that Molière cannot see the sufferings brought about by Don Juan’s actions, but the features of the character of Don Juan are certainly softened. The killing of the commander, say, that both de Molina and Mozart present onstage, here takes place before the action starts: the exact details of that killing are not given, but, given Don  Juan’s impulsive generosity in running to the aid of a stranger assailed by robbers, we are happy to believe that he is far from a cold-blooded murderer.

Molière emphasises also the warm and easy relationship between Sganaralle and Don Juan – to such an extent, indeed, that I was more than once reminded of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Of course, Sganarelle says that he knows his master to be a scoundrel, but only stays on with him out of fear, but that is belied by the many scenes they have together: there is not the slightest hint of tyranny on the part of Don Juan, nor fear on the part of Sganarelle. In the opera, da Ponte and Mozart made more of the servant’s vicarious enjoyment of his master’s conquests, and of the co-existence of this vicarious pleasure with a certain sympathy for his master’s victims, but Molière stops short of venturing into those psychological depths: in this play, the warmth of the relationship between the two is clear, and is a striking departure from the somewhat harsher dramatic world presented in Tirso de Molina’s play.

But – inevitably, given the story – all the essential gentleness of Molière’s drama cannot camouflage that whiff of sulphur, of hellfire.  Don Juan, who believes in this world and this world only, a world of flesh and blood where two and two make four and twice four make eight, is finally overcome by an irrational force that, far from being flesh and blood, is animated stone. Once again, from what I remember from my previous readings, Molière was usually gentler to his other flawed protagonists, but this is one aspect of the story from which there is no getting away. Which makes this play, I think – despite all the laughs (and it is very funny, even in translation) – the closest Molière has come to tragedy.

“The Trickster of Seville” by Tirso de Molina – the first Don Juan

The myth of Don Juan is possibly unique in that we may pinpoint precisely its origins: it’s a Spanish play, first published in 1630 but written much earlier – possibly as early as 1616, Wikipedia tells me – written by Catholic monk Tirso de Molina. The full Spanish title of the play is El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra – which, roughly translated, reads The Joker of Seville and the Guest of Stone. The English title of this play varies by translation, but in the one I read – the verse translation by Roy Porter – the title is given as The Trickster of Seville. So let’s stick with that.

The story caught on almost immediately. In the decades following the first performance, there were – in those copyright-free days – any number of variants. Further variants continued to appear at a dizzying pace: Armand E. Singer,  Professor of Romance languages at University of West Virginia, has listed no less than 1,720 of them. And the myth has attracted the attention of some of the greatest creative minds of the Western world – Molière, Mozart, Pushkin. Indeed, Molière’s version appeared a mere 35 years after the publication of Tirso de Molina’s. Clearly, there is something in this story that resonated powerfully, and, given the undiminished popularity of various works based on this myth, continues to resonate still.

At the most basic level, it is, of course, is a male wish-fulfilment fantasy – a man addicted to sex whom no woman can resist is, I’d guess, the stuff of dreams for most heterosexual men, and the punishment at the end is no more than an obligatory piece of stuffy moralising we need to put up with. This, of course, is to interpret the myth at its most basic level, but perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss this basic interpretation: there is, it seems to me, a lot going for it: wish-fulfilment is, after all, a powerful draw. However, it seems fair to say that it is not this crude piece of wish-fulfilment that has drawn to it some of the greatest of creative imaginations: the myth clearly resonates on other levels also.

The last time I broached this subject on this blog, one correspondent very kindly directed me to this fascinating account of the myth by Paul Berman. In his essay, Berman argues that Tirso de Molina, who, despite his Catholic credentials, was a convert from Judaism, critiques in his play the Christian viewpoint that replaces the Principle of Law with the Principle of Grace, of Justice and Retributon with Repentance and Forgiveness. “The trouble,” Berman argues, “ … is that society that depends on conscience has no defense against a sociopath who has none”, and that “Christian reliance on the Attribute of Mercy at the expense of the Attribute of Justice … frees Juan to formulate a sociopath’s theory of salvation”. I shall not repeat Berman’s thesis here, since, firstly, I don’t think I have taken it all in fully; and, secondly, because it available online in its original form, and any paraphrase on my part can only distort. I do, however, recommend it to the interested reader.

However, there seems to me other angles as well that are worth exploring. The most striking, for me, is the means of Don Juan’s punishment. Of course, in a traditional morality play, the wrongdoer must be punished, and Don Juan is; however, perhaps rather surprisingly given the long list of earthly enemies he has accumulated, the punishment does not come from any earthly source: it comes from the other world. This makes for some dramatic untidiness – an untidiness that not even the stagecraft of Molière, of Mozart and da Ponte, or of Pushkin, could quite get around: throughout the action of the play, conflicts are created that are, by the end, left merely hanging in the air, since the resolution does not come from any of Don Juan’s worldly antagonists. As a consequence, the various characters whom Don Juan encounters are left, once Don Juan has finished with them, with no real dramatic purpose to fulfil. As Don Juan moves on from one set of characters to another, the sets of characters he leaves behind have little to do except to disappear from the action, or merely to crowd the stage for no discernible reason.

In Mozart’s opera, this seems to me the very point: the earthly antagonists are no match for Don Juan (or Don Giovanni), who emerges therefore as a character beyond the reach of earthly justice: the disorder he brings to the world can only be set right by a force from another world. The ineffectuality of mere mortals in the face of the phenomenon that is Don Juan is, it seems to me, is at the very centre of Mozart’s opera. But I am not sure this is the case in de Molina’s play: as in Mozart’s opera, there are several characters who, once their interaction with Don Juan is finished, mill about the action without contributing anything, but their inability to act effectively seems to me here more a dramatic encumbrance than anything else.

However, this other-worldly punisher is a remarkable figure. The idea of the other-worldly nemesis being a statue, a creature of stone, is, as far as I know, entirely Tirso de Molina’s creation, and while, it appears from various modern productions of Don Giovanni, many in our own times find rather risible and are embarrassed by the idea of a moving statue exacting retribution, it is precisely this feature that excited the imaginations of Molière, Mozart, and Pushkin. For Don Juan, who glories in being a creature of flesh and blood, who rejoices in pleasures of the flesh and is fired by desires of the blood, must be punished by one who has neither flesh nor blood about him – who is, indeed, quite literally, made of stone.

But of course, to speak of Don Juan’s punishment by the statue as the punishment of the human by the non-human is too crude a representation. For Don Juan is more than just human. Or, to be more accurate, he is less than fully human. He is a character entirely without conscience, and, as such, no human consideration can touch him. His utter lack of human conscience places him beyond the human pale. In Freudian terms, he is the id set free, with no superego to impose any form of control. It could be argued, I suppose that this man, seeking merely pleasure, without any form of control restricting his actions, is a form of wish-fulfilment, and a very potent one at that: he is certainly a very attractive figure, as was recognised from the very start. But while we may find such a figure attractive, we also recognise his dangers: no ordered society could accommodate such a figure, and his very presence of fills us with a sense of dread, even of terror. Don Juan fills us with both joy and with terror: he both attracts and repels in equal measure. It is easy to see why so many have been drawn to de Molina’s myth.

The Trickster of Seville is, despite some dramatic clumsiness, a remarkable play, and not merely because it originates so powerful a myth: de Molina seems fully aware of the resonances of his creation – although, of course, there is always a danger that we may be reading back into this work various elements that later dramatists have introduced. De Molina presents both the attractive nature and the charisma of Don Juan, and also the misery he leaves in his wake: the lamentations of Tisbea (called Thisbe in Roy Campbell’s translation), is particularly striking, especially given that, unlike Don Juan’s other conquests in this play, she is of a lower social order:

Fire, oh fire, and water, water!
Have pity, love, don’t scorch my spirits!
Oh, wicked cabin, scene of slaughter,
Where honour, vanquished in a fight,
Bled crimson! Vilest robber’s den
And shelter of the wrongs I mourn!
O traitor guest, most curst of men,
To leave a girl, betrayed, forlorn!

Even in Shakespeare, I cannot think of an instance of a woman from the lower social orders accorded such tragic stature.

But at the centre of the play is, of course, Don Juan, the man who is beyond the control of society because he is beyond the control of his own conscience, a fulfilment of our deepest desires and also of our most fearful nightmares, and who both attracts and appals in equal measure. He is a figure who has appeared in all sorts of guises since in Western literature, and, I guess, he will continue to appear: for while we may all secretly desire to be a person who is utterly unconstrained in the obtaining of desires, the very thought of such a person existing can but fill us with terror. We need to be our own Stone Guest to keep our flesh and blood in order.

The Don Juan Myth

I am not so much intrigued by the Don Juan myth as I am by its having intrigued so many others. On the face of it, I can see nothing particularly remarkable about the myth: Don Juan, an insatiable satyromaniac whom no woman can resist, strikes me as little more than a frankly rather crude male sexual fantasy. And yet, this seemingly uninteresting myth has exercised minds as distinguished as those of Molière, Mozart (and his librettist da Ponte), Pushkin, Byron, Richard Strauss, and, in a modern twist in which the mythical Don Juan Tenorio becomes the contemporary John Tanner, Bernard Shaw.  I am intrigued by what they all saw in this myth.

The only work based on this myth that I think I can claim to know to a greater depth than that merely of a nodding acquaintance is Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, and, as I indicated in a recent post, this opera, despite some forty or so years of listening, I find puzzling in many respects. For Don Giovanni himself, the central character around whom everyone else and everything else seems to revolve, seems, to me at any rate, a complete blank. Music which would strike us as deeply felt if sung by any other character becomes, when sung by the Don, insincere: we know that his ardent avowals to Donna Elvira of his repentance are false; in the serenade that follows, we know that the heart-achingly beautiful avowal of love he expresses is not deeply felt, nor even shallowly felt: it is not felt at all. This creates a peculiar tension: how can music so richly expressive not express anything? Through centuries of interpretations, all sorts of things have been written by commentators who refuse to accept that this can be possible: music of such emotional depth must, they assume, indicate emotional depth in the character who is singing it, and they have tried to see in the character of Don Giovanni all sorts of things that simply cannot be justified by the text. Many Romantics thought the Don Giovanni is searching for his ideal love: he isn’t. As Leporello’s “catalogue aria” makes clear, it is mere prosaic quantity rather than any poetic quality that counts for the Don. More recently, director Kaspar Holten, who directed the piece for Royal Opera, thought Don Giovanni was trying to escape his own mortality, but, once again, there is nothing whatever in the text to indicate this. Not an inkling.

So let us accept what Mozart and da Ponte gives us. Much of Don Giovanni’s music suggests that it should be deeply felt, but it isn’t, and the sense of unease this imparts to the listener is, I think, precisely the point. Mozart’s music endows Don Giovanni with a tremendous vitality, and an irresistible charisma, but there’s nothing behind all this vitality and charisma – no search for Ideal Womanhood, nor Fear of Death, nor any of the other things that the preoccupations of the interpreter’s own time may choose to saddle him with. This lack of substance where substance is to be expected makes this, I think, a very disturbing work – perhaps even more so than Mozart’s next opera, the deeply disquieting Cosi Fan Tutte.

But I remain uncertain. Mozart’s operas – especially the three he wrote to libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte – are endlessly complex works, and one should always be prepared to modify one’s views on them. But I am now intrigued by how others have interpreted this myth.

So I am planning a course of reading on the matter. Over the next few weeks, or however long it takes, I am planning to read Tirso de Molina’s play The Trickster of Seville (which, I believe, is where the myth began), Molière’s Don Juan, Pushkin’s The Stone Guest, and Bernard Shaw’s variation of the myth, Man and Superman. (I suppose I should really add Byron’s poem to that list, but let us restrict ourselves to drama for the moment.) And I am planning to record here, for what they’re worth, my thoughts on these works. And maybe, at the end of it all, I’ll have some inkling of why this myth has exerted to firm a grasp on the imaginations of so many.

And even if I don’t, a project such as this sounds fun.

I now therefore declare the Don Juan season officially open.