At a pivotal moment in Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio strives to convince the Provost that they can substitute the head of an executed prisoner in order to defer the unjust execution of a good man. Because the corrupt Angelo (who has been deputised as the acting Duke) has already scheduled the execution, Vincentio contrives this kind of bed trick*–or head trick as the case may be–where they will show Angelo the other prisoner’s head (a pirate named Barnardine) in order to convince him that it is the good man’s head instead, and that the scheduled execution has been carried out.
The Provost explains that it might be challenging to convince Angelo that the pirate’s head was actually the head of the good man, Claudio, because Angelo had seen both men, and knew what they both looked like. Vincentio has an answer for this too:
O, death’s a great disguiser; and you may add to it.
Measure for Measure 4.2.180-3
Shave the head, and tie the beard; and say it was
the desire of the penitent to be so bared before his
death: you know the course is common.
It may be arguable that we all look roughly the same after we’re dead, but with some grooming and a haircut, one corpse’s head might be rendered similar to another. Usually, we think of professional grooming sessions as a way to look our best and to emphasise the best points of our individual traits. Conformity doesn’t usually spring to mind except in terms of general style.
Yet, Shakespeare suggests that we may be all the same in death. Are we, all like the same animal once we’ve been beheaded? Once we’re baked into a pie perhaps? This essential question seems to have been hinted at in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and answered to a greater degree in the more recent Sweeney Todd. In their plot to bake their murder victims into pies to serve to an unsuspecting public in their London pie shop, Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett sing a famous duet about the quality of meat that different types of individuals, coming from different professions, might lend to the pies. One of the lyrics notes that, in the end, it hardly matters, and that “everybody goes down well with beer”.
Barbers might feature more frequently in drama and stories than we might realise, and this may be a much an older plot device than we know. Certainly one of the trickster servant personae is frequently that of an independent tradesman. An old plot that comes to us from the Commedia dell’arte goes like this:
A young man and woman fall in love. However, the young lady’s guardian is a singularly lecherous, greedy, and unwholesome old man who lusts after his ward and secretly means to marry her as soon as she comes of age. In the meantime, this powerful old man (a person of relatively high social status) keeps the lovely young woman locked away from anyone who might see her or desire her. The old man also has a lieutenant or sidekick who has few scruples, and who will help him make certain that everything goes according to his plans.
Luckily for the young lovers, help is at hand in the form of a clever ally–perhaps a friend or a servant–someone who feels obliged, or who may be, or may have been, in the young man’s debt in some way. This clever friend/servant decides to help the young lovers to get the young lady out of her guardian’s clutches, so that they may flee, be married, and begin a new life together.
Sounds like the setup for Sweeney Todd, and it is. But the same basic plot appears in many guises elsewhere throughout the dramatic universe. In the opera The Barber of Seville, for example, the young count Amaviva falls in love with the lovely Rosina, who is the ward of the lecherous old Dr. Bartolo. Yet, the count’s former servant, Figaro, who is a little like everyone’s favourite uncle or cousin, has recently established himself as a popular barber in the town of Seville, and he agrees to help the lovers get Rosina away from Dr. Bartolo.
In terms of the commedia dell’arte that flourished on Italian stages from roughly the 16th to the 18th century, these figures are all stock types to a greater or lesser extent. The young lovers (innamorati, the ‘enamored’), the pompous old man (Il Dottore, or doctor) who stands as an impediment to their romance, the Harlequin (Arlechino, a form of Zanni, or clown, who is often a trickster servant), and the various other servants, sidekicks, officers, and so on all stem from the Italian commedia, and probably arose before that time, becoming more established as useful types for illustrative drama through the ages.
In Everyman, a play from the late 15th century, for example, many of the stock characters are actually embodiments of human qualities. There is a doctor, a cousin, a messenger, and an angel, but there are also the characters Good Deeds, Strength, Beauty, Discretion, and Knowledge among others. It seems hardly surprising that human personalities to which we can easily relate today began to appear as dramatic conventions: the overbearing father, the concerned friend, the braggart soldier, the wise woman, the cruel despot.
Like many of these characters, the young lady’s disapproving guardian has so many incarnations that they can’t begin to be mentioned here. From Hermia’s disapproving father, Egeus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the old merchant, Venturewell, whose daughter, Luce, is in love with Jasper Merrythought in the romantic satire The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Yet, in The Barber of Seville and Sweeney Todd, the servant or friend is a barber. Why? What might this character profession mean?
Of course, a barber potentially has access to many households. Most men, who theoretically must form at least half of the population of these households, usually need to shave periodically. But the barber also has another kind of access–a kind of intimacy which is innate to his profession. Bringing a razor so close to the human throat makes a nice metaphor for the kind of keen insight that barbers often gain into the lives and minds of those they shave. A barber hears things. Observes things. And a barber’s art takes time, in some cases, enough time to temporarily divert Il Dottore’s attention away from the innamorati, so that the young lovers can make plans. The fact that such diversions aren’t always successful doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t worth the effort expended in trying:
Figaro, the barber, here acts as a harlequin character type, the clever tradesman diverting the doctor’s attention from the lovers as they plan their escape.
Rossini’s well known operatic version of The Barber of Seville was based on a play (the first of a trio of plays) by French playwright, Pierre Beaumarchais.** We can see Figaro readily identified as a harlequin figure in this 19th century illustration of the shaving scene from Beaumarchais’ play:
In this illustration, the antecedent is clear (although perhaps the illustrator, or the director of the illustrated production had merely drawn the same kinds of conclusions). Masked like a zanni and dressed like a harlequin, Figaro prepares to shave a client with a terrifyingly enormous razor. Fear and humour are old friends, and often walk hand in hand, especially in drama.
An air of the mystical seems to hang about barbers in general. Here’s a scene from the 1972 film version of Man of La Mancha (where you’ll be familiar with the key players but you also might see a very young Brian Blessed in the background):
Of course, Peter O’Toole’s character, the genteel madman who believes himself to be the knight, Don Quixote de La Mancha, readily identifies the travelling barber’s shaving basin as a golden helmet with magical powers. And part of the point is that Don Quixote actually has a much more compelling perspective on life than those around him who subscribe to mundane ‘reality’.***
Passing the razor over’s skin also brings the sharp blade perilously close to the client’s lifeblood, putting the client’s life literally in the barber’s hands. If the barber in question should happen to be mad himself, or bent on revenge, or even both, the results could be much more shocking. This clip has been posted previously, with a trigger warning for those who might find it too violent or bloody, but it fits so well here, that here it is again. Sweeney Todd gives the truly evil Judge Turpin his final shave:
Even though he is perfectly poised to commit murder, the barber is everyman in a way. He is Harlequin, a tradesman or servant forever below the status of the households he serves, he also has access to them. He comes from the medical/bloodletting tradition of the Middle Ages, when his predecessors might have been the only doctors available to the populace. He may be, in many ways, the forerunner of the modern surgeon. Yet, he also lives firmly amongst the lower classes, a servant who must remain deferential to his masters.
Not only is Figaro what Royal Opera production manager Rachel Beaumont called “the universal personal handyman”, but he is also “smart, resourceful and will do any job that needs doing. Perhaps more than any other tradesman, he serves an essential purpose, but is despised for it – a pretty potent combination in [Beaumarchais’] pre-Revolutionary France.”****
Class is a real consideration here, and the power of tradesmen over the upper classes who seemed to hold almost all of the cards. For although the young lover Almaviva is a count, he enters the world of the The Barber of Seville disguised as a poor student (so that Rosina might opt for him independently of any potential influence of his social station or his wealth). This kind of entrance links the young count’s identity and sympathies with those of the middle and lower classes. Although the count pays Figaro well for his services, is it any wonder that Figaro readily sides with the young lovers against the aristocratic Dr. Bartolo? Is it any wonder that Sweeney Todd (derived from a popular penny dreadful) literally seeks to murder the class that continues to oppress him and others like him?
The Sweeney/Mrs. Lovett duet in Sweeney Todd ends with a vision that echoes that of the Duke above, a vision of death and consumption as the great human equaliser:
We’ll not discriminate great from small
“A Little Priest”, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
No, we’ll serve anyone
Meaning anyone
And to anyone at all!
However varied the above approaches may be, they all carry messages about class power. The Provost, who is guaranteed immunity by the Duke, will shave the pirate’s severed head to make it more like that of an innocent man, giving this officer a kind of power over Angelo’s perception of events. Figaro, who says he is “barber, surgeon, botanist, apothecary, veterinary”, is an enormously talented everyman, with a practical understanding of nearly every realm of human scientific development, is pitted against Dr. Bartolo, the pompously self professed “Doctor of Science”. The distinction between capability and vanity is pronounced. Sweeney Todd, an artist who understands both knives and human pain more deeply than anyone else, pursues his vengeance against a criminal judge, who presumably holds a regular power of life and death over those brought before him. Even Don Quixote’s travelling barber immediately sees through Don Quixote’s gentle madness, and estimates its harmlessness. Each of these characters, like the clever servant Harlequin before them, defies their masters on some level, precipitating various outcomes they desire in spite of the desires of those of higher social station.
When we look at the dates, Beaumarchais’ play in 1775 predates something like John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1728, and prefigures Brecht’s 1929 Threepenny Opera (based on the work of Gay and of French poet, François Villon) by more than a century. Of course, class struggle is nothing new. Even now, the financial papers continue to extol the virtues of low unemployment numbers in the United States. Unemployment has now dropped to 3.7 percent in the U.S., the lowest since 1969 we are told.
Still, it has said that “Of course unemployment figures are low. Everyone works three jobs just to make ends meet.” Underemployment remains the elephant in the room and there are no signs that this problem will go away anytime soon. People can’t really live on what they earn, even when working full time. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/15/629212924/the-call-in-underemployment
What might this mean, if anything? Well, look beyond your local, high priced ‘hair salon’ where they charge women £50 and more for a haircut. Look beyond adding highlights or a dye job for £ 80 and up. Look beyond the local ‘fast cuts’, where they charge (in the U.S.) $18 plus an expected tip for the stylist for a simple trim. No. Look for a barber. Look for a professional trained in classic hairstyles, and one who will cut anyone’s hair well, regardless of what they might want. Old school. Trained in the old ways of not just hairstyle, but how an individual style might look on a particular individual. Look hard though, because the basic, well-trained barber is a disappearing profession. Oh, people still need them, but barbers can’t survive on what they might make either, they have been forced to leave their shops in search of other work. You doubt that? Read this: http://theconversation.com/goodbye-to-the-barbershop-63168 High priced alternatives may be on the rise, but the corner barber? No. Clockmakers, tinkers, knife grinders, even the corner mechanic, all the tradesmen of the old days seem to be vanishing.
Overbearing, lecherous, pompous, powerful men? There seems to be no shortage of those. However, if you happen to be a young lover in need of help, don’t look for a servant, because most people really don’t have those anymore. Don’t look for a barber either. He or she probably won’t be around.
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*A bed trick is a dramatic convention (often appearing in early modern plays, but used elsewhere as well) where one lover substitutes for another, often in order to consummate a marriage or to link a wrongly spurned lover to a less than willing partner. In Measure for Measure, Mariana has been betrothed to Angelo, who had refused to fulfill his betrothal to her when her dowry was lost at sea. When Angelo later blackmails Isabella to sleep with him, Mariana goes to him in the darkness instead, and this ‘bed trick’ fulfills the betrothal between Mariana and Angelo after all.
**Pierre Beaumarchais’ title may have been a pun on the title of an earlier Spanish play by Tirso de Molina called El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (‘The seducer/trickster of Seville and the stone guest’), or the similarity may be coincidental. It is interesting to note that Beaumarchais originally conceived his play as an opéra comique, but it was rejected as such by the Comédie-Italienne. It was eventually performed at the Comédie-Française. Although several people have written scores for operatic versions of the work, the enduring version of The Barber of Seville that remains most famous today was scored by Giochinno Rossini with an Italian libretto by Cesare Sterbini.
***This is another case of a musical play that has been derived from another work. Dale Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha is based on Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which is one of the foundational works of western literature and says much about reality, perception, conceptions of honour, and the human condition.
****I urge you to read this great article by Rachel Beaumont for the Royal Opera House production of The Barber of Seville in 2016: https://www.roh.org.uk/news/who-was-the-barber-of-seville