(A note: The ghost has it on good authority that the Malone Society will be meeting on the 6th of July at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford upon Avon in the United Kingdom. Anyone who can make it to this event should go because the meeting will feature a talk by the extremely knowledgeable Martin Wiggins on Philip Massinger’s play The Roman Actor, followed by a rare performance of that play, and then papers by scholars and questions with the actors. A real treat for anyone who can be there.)
For many people, one of the most terrible fears about dying isn’t actually the end of life itself. Instead, it is the fear that they, their achievements, or their lives, may be forgotten. Even those who have large families, many friends, colleagues, and connections may fear that their work, their efforts, and all the facets of their lives may eventually be completely erased from what Prospero calls “the dark backward and abysm of time”, and that they may vanish from individual or collective memory.
In this respect, there may be much to fear, for we all sense that someday, perhaps in a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand years, all our memories and connections will be so much sand–the dust to which the Bible tells us we must return. Ashes and dust. Dust in the wind. Diamonds and rust. Fading, dissolving, no remaining. Our once central (at least to us) existence consigned to wind across an empty field.
The last line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 in the title of this post represents one way that Shakespeare addressed this. Preserving not a treasured individual, but at least the memory of that individual’s youth or youthful vitality in verse–recorded in a poem that may outlast the individual long after they are bones, perhaps for even more than four hundred years. It is one way, albeit imperfect, of transcending mortality. In failing to make the subject endure, we may, at least, render the memory of that subject somehow more permanent.
In this sense, words become sorcery, capturing memory and etching it into standing stone. Of course, stone wears away too, eventually, a fact to which anyone who has spent time in ancient graveyards may attest. Ruthless time’s destructive umbrella eventually draws shade over all we know, or burns away in relentless sun.
Yet, some literary passages do survive for a time, many of these being poems and/or plays. Sometimes even short sections of documents take on a life of their own, subsequently achieving a longer kind of half life or quasi immortality. One such example comes from Philip Massinger (1583-1640), whose literary reputation seems to have perched somewhere between mortality and immortality.
According to Martin White, Massinger probably wrote around fifty five plays. Of these, twenty two are lost, eighteen were written with others, and fifteen were probably written by Massinger alone.* Perhaps the finest of these (as judged by Massinger himself and others) was his tragedy, The Roman Actor, first licensed for performance in October of 1626 and staged by the King’s Men at Blackfriars later that year. Afterwards, although the play was apparently occasionally performed, it seems to have gradually fallen out of favour with the general public along with Massinger’s reputation as a playwright, which may have declined for various reasons. Although the general fading may be due to Massinger’s less stirring poetry, or to his sometimes complicated fusion of elements from different genres.
In spite of this, and in spite of the possible retreat of The Roman Actor in general, one part of the play seems to have been retained and performed on its in later days. Gibson notes that John Philip Kemble edited The Roman Actor down to a shorter version, and also retained Paris’s ‘defence of acting’ speech from Act I as a “dramatic showpiece”.**
Because they can be both clever and moving, skillfully acknowledging the artistic medium even while moving through it, metatheatrical pieces tend to be popular anyway. Many of Shakespeare’s plays have smaller playlets or dramatic moments within them that highlight the theatrical nature of the larger play while creating effective micro theatrical moments of their own. The Pyramus and Thisbe scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the mousetrap Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet are two well known examples, but Puck’s closing monologue in Dream also underscores the playhouse as a creative structure while pointedly indicating the theatrical nature of much of human experience both within and outside of the theatre itself.
Still, Massinger’s play, The Roman Actor, features a moment where a famous Roman actor must defend the profession of acting itself against the old accusation of distortion. Brought before the lictors (charging officers), Paris is accused by Aretinus:
In thee, as being the chief of thy profession,
(The Roman Actor 1.3.32-4)
I do accuse the quality of treason,
As libellers against the state and Caesar.
When Paris presses him, Aretinus continues:
You are they
(1.3.36-43)
That search into the secrets of the time,
And under feigned names on the stage present
Actions not to be touched at, and traduce
Persons of rank and quality of both sexes,
And with satirical and bitter jests
Make even the senators ridiculous
To the plebeians.
The accusation of a particularly insidious kind of sedition also hints at Plato’s complaint that the arts are so far removed from the actual truth (because they only represent actual truths that lie outside of any fictional portrayal), that they must be excluded from the ideal state.
Here is a portion of Paris’s response:
But ’tis urged
(1.3.96-142)
That we corrupt youth and traduce superiors.
When do we bring a vice upon the stage
That does go off unpunished? Do we teach,
By the success of wicked undertakings,
Others to tread in their forbidden steps?
We show no arts of Lydian pandarism,
Corinthian poisons, Persian flatteries,
But mulcted so in the conclusions that
Even those spectators that were so inclined
Go home changed men. And for traducing such
That are above us, publishing to the world
Their secret crimes, we are as innocent
As such as are born dumb. When we present
An heir that does conspire against the life
Of his dear parent, numb’ring every hour
He lives as tedious to him, if there be
Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him
He is of the same mould, we cannot help it.
Or, bringing on the stage a loose adult’ress,
That does maintain the riotous expense
Of him that seeds her greedy lust, yet suffers
The lawful pledges of a former bed
To starve the while for hunger, if a matron,
However great in fortune, birth or titles,
Guilty of such a foul unnatural sin,
Cry out, ”Tis writ by me’, we cannot help it.
Or, when a covetous man’s expressed, whose wealth
Arithmetic cannot number and whose lordships
A falcon in one day cannot fly over,
Yt, he so sordid in his mind, so griping
As not to afford himself the necessaries
To maintain life, if a patrician
(Though honoured with a consulship) find himself
Touched to the quick in this, we cannot help it.
Or when we show a judge that is corrupt,
And will give up his sentence as he favours
The person, not the cause, saving the guilty
If of his faction, and as oft condemning
The innocent out of particular spleen,
If any in this reverend assembly –
Nay, e’en yourself, my lord, that are the image
Of absent Caesar – feel something in your bosom
That puts you in remembrance of things past
Or things intended, ’tis not in us to help it.
I have said, my lord; and now, as you find cause,
Or censure us or free us with applause.
Indeed, an actor might argue so today, that it isn’t the actor’s fault if his or her art affects individuals (especially guilty ones) in adverse ways.
Still, in the instance of this post, thinking back to the idea of immortality, the interesting thing remains how the above passage seems to have lived on beyond the popularity of the play in which it first appeared. In literature, and in drama, relative longevity may assume many forms. The spring of immortality may bubble forth in a grove of Florida woods .*** Or, a play itself may be immortal, or an idea or a passage within it may become relatively so.
Of course, these things only seem immortal as they may relate to us. Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote their works around four hundred years ago, but somewhere, if we listen carefully, we can hear echoes from much further back. Echoes of Neanderthal or Denisovan laughter that may sound strange but still familiar to our ears. Even nearer to us, perhaps the Etruscans would be joining such a feast, and maybe even some lost Banquo would this time make his appointed place at table.
*Massinger, Philip. The Roman Actor: A Tragedy. Edited by Martin White. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, 6.
**Gibson, Colin, ed. The Selected Plays of Philip Massinger. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1978, 98.
***Babbit, Natalie. Tuck Everlasting. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. The wood is later paved over to build a shopping mall, effectively eliminating the spring of immortality.