Theatre remains one of the great human acts of conjuration. On a stage we can collectively summon spirits that envision all of human condition and imagination. Stages, or screens, are places where our world becomes malleable to us. Enacted fiction is where reality and imagination are intimate and promiscuous.
We can evoke worlds:
Chorus: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! (Henry V1.1.1-4)
And we can just as readily set up a scene only to uncreate it:
Prologue: From all that’s near the court, from all that’s great
Within the compass of the city walls,
We now have brought our scene —
(Enter Citizen [climbing onto the stage])
Citizen: Hold your peace, goodman boy.
Prologue: What do you mean, sir?
Citizen: That you have no good meaning. This seven years there hath been plays at this house, I have observed it, you have still girds at citizens. And now you call your play The London Merchant. Down with your title,boy; down with your title!
Prologue: Are you a member of the noble city?
Citizen: I am.
Prologue: And a freeman?
Citizen: Yea, and a grocer. (Knight of the Burning Pestle 1.1.1-14)*
In Shakespeare’s prologue above, the prologue itself enters as a character, a “Chorus” in the sense of the explicatory choruses so often present in drama of the classical age. The Chorus in classical Greek plays would usually be a group of figures that might dance, sing, and otherwise comment on the action of the play, and they also had a ritual significance. Scholars tell us of the choric “dithyrambs” (often described almost as a kind of hymn, or poem, or incantation, or perhaps all of these) to the god Dionysus, and that these elements of praise evolved into commentary on the plays. Think of explication or exposition as a sacred act–an act praising creation.
Comedy often carries a different kind of message, informed by a different kind of world. True to its creative form, Knight of the Burning Pestle seems to have a variously aspected chorus. The play begins with a typical dramatic prologue, spoken by a character who is part of the playacting troop and who is ready, with his company, to present a more typical kind of dramatic production for the audience. However, he is interrupted by the Citizen, a grocer who demands something different from his drama. The play then begins to be rewritten before our eyes, and we watch simultaneous creation and uncreation unfold as the original plot seems almost to dance with the new plot being written into the script.
Folkloric research additionally suggests that dance (with which the original Greek choruses are also associated, their commentary being a mixture of spoken, sung, and danced elements) may have served as an ontological foundation of the universe. In other words, groups of divine entities (or even a single divine entity with different potential aspects) may have “danced” creation into existence. ** In this sense, the dance continues even as the cosmos does, and dance may contain all the elements of creation that readily come to mind, and others as well.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries often ended comedies with a dance–and this is in keeping with the idea of marriage and creation. The “issue” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that are blessed by Oberon’s fairies at the end of the play resonate with the changeling child over whose custody Oberon and Titania struggle in weather changing disagreement at the beginning of the play. This issue, the children produced from the wedding union, stems from the dancing–the pure celebration of human union and ongoing creativity.
Of course, there are dances in other plays as well, even tragic ones. Romeo and Juliet meet at a feast, for example, where dancing would have been part of the celebrations, but that play moves backwards, with the dance opening the relationship between the doomed couple, who seem to move ever more steadily away from the festivities as the play continues. The grim intercession of acrimony seems to poison the well increasingly, until the marriage bed becomes the grave.
Perhaps the most famous form of dance as praise today is that of the whirling dervishes, the Mawlaw’īyya / Mevlevi Order (Sufi) devoted to the ideas of the 13th century poet and mystic, Rumi, who has been mentioned previously in this blog. You can see an example here:
Like undifferentiated whirling praise of the Dervishes, the empty stage remains open to all interpretations. It is Plotinus’ “One”, or the “uncarved block” of Taoist cosmology–the absence of the mirror in Buddhism that allows the dust to settle nowhere. That place where the sea and the sky become one thing, where all creation breathes and heaves excitedly, waiting to be born into some or other form.
When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi came to the house to join in the rites of mourning. To his surprise he found Zhuangzi sitting with an inverted bowl on his knees, drumming upon it and singing a song.
“After all,” said Huizi, “she lived with you, brought up your children, grew old with you. That you should not mourn for her is bad enough, but to let your friends find you drumming and singing–that is going too far!”
“You misjudge me,” said Zhuangzi. “When she died, I was in despair, as any man well might be. But soon, pondering on what had happened, I told myself that in death no strange new fate befalls us. In the beginning, we lack not life only, but form. Not form only, but spirit. We are blended in one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then a time came when the mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form, form evolved life. And now life in its turn has evolved death. For not nature only but man’s being has its seasons, its sequence of spring and autumn, summer and winter. If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature’s Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn.” (Zhuangzi, trans. Arthur Waley)
We cannot know, but in our dramatic craft, we have wings we never have in our mundane lives, creating not only kingdoms, but also moments:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did. (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.202-16)
Enobarbus’ description is one of the most famously evocative passages in Shakespeare’s works, and the sheer grandeur makes it seem all the more tragic because we know the end, even if we haven’t read or seen the play. The goddess on earth with so far to fall.
Comedy tends to be different, but not always so different. Mel Brooks is often quoted as saying, “Comedy is when I cut my finger. Tragedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Still, both the drama and the comedy can have a chorus, an attendant commentary that may be narrative or tonal, but that by its very interwoven nature seems to praise the creative act unfolding.
In Knight of the Burning Pestle, the chorus seems to have several aspects, with commentary shifting as readily as the plotline. One of the characters who performs a notable choric function (in fact singing all his lines, so performing a kind of choral function as well) is Old Merrythought. A proverbial jolly old soul indeed, he steadfastly refuses to lose his cheer even in the face of imminent disaster. He doesn’t have the very last lines in the play (the epilogue belongs to the Citizen and his Wife), but Merrythought does conclude the action of the comedy with a song:
Old Merrythought:
Strike up, then:
(Song)
Better music ne’er was known
Then a choir of hearts in one.
Let each other that hath been
Troubled with the gall or spleen,
Learn of us to keep his brow
Smooth and plain as ours are now.
Sing, though before the hour of dying;
He shall rise, and then be crying,
“Hey, ho, ‘tis nought but mirth
That keeps the body from the earth.”
(Exeunt omnes) (Knight of the Burning Pestle, V, 341-51)
The truth remains inscrutable. Yet, Shakespeare evidently appreciated that on the stage we may create or become anything. Of course, many dramatists of the early modern time knew this too, just as dramatists (and creators of all kinds) have always known it. Beaumont clearly knew it too, but the wild satire presented by his Knight of the Burning Pestle also seemed to be truly ahead of its time. Performed in 1607 (when the playwright was in his early twenties) the play was poorly received and the remainder of his major dramatic writings were collaborations, mostly with John Fletcher, some of which were later revised by Philip Massinger.
Beaumont went on to have successes in his collaborations but he didn’t write much if anything more on his own. He wrote no drama at all after his marriage in 1613, and he died in London in March of 1616. Shakespeare died the same year in Stratford upon Avon in April. Yet, for a single work, Knight of the Burning Pestle remains an astonishing presentation of creation and uncreation rolled into a single play. Dancing, singing, fighting, and a play deconstructing itself even while in the process of restructuring like a piece of stage magic in front of its audience.
Life is like that too, of course. And politics–especially in the present day, but also always. Sometimes a thousand times a day, a hundred times an hour, our worlds collapse and fold in upon themselves, only then to stand again in some new fashion. Terrible violence may descend upon us, and only our vision, our uncreating that in order to create something else anew, can save us. The conjuration that is theatre. Owl hooting. Hummingbird whirring. Branches in the wind. The Dervish always turning, supplicant to all creation even as that creation continues to unfold.
*If you would like to read Francis Beaumont’s play (better to see a production if you can find one), I recommend the edition edited by Michael Hattaway: Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Edited by Michael Hattaway. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 2009.
**Much more on this may be found in Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York: Norton, 2013.