The title for today’s post comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from the moment when Francis Flute, a young craftsman who mends bellows by trade, is called upon to play Thisbe in the play that the tradesmen hope to put on for the Duke’s wedding. Once Flute realises what is being asked of him, he becomes reluctant:
QUINCE: Francis Flute, the bellows-mender.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.2.37-46
FLUTE: Here, Peter Quince.
QUINCE: Flute, you must take Thisbe on you.
FLUTE: What is Thisbe—a wand’ring knight?
QUINCE: It is the lady that Pyramus must love.
FLUTE: Nay, faith, let not me play a woman. I have a
beard coming.
QUINCE: That’s all one. You shall play it in a mask, and
you may speak as small as you will.
Standing on what he perceives as the doorstep of his manhood, Flute has some confusion over gender roles. It seems almost as though he somehow fears that, by playing a woman in a play, he may miss whatever promise or potential he imagines might be offered by his coming beard. As a boy in world that seems (at least to him) to have strict gender delineations or definitions, the idea of playing another gender from the masculine ‘wand’ring knight’ he has in mind, confuses him and frightens him. (That it might actually excite him as well might be distinguished by choices in the actor’s process, and might depend on the breadth and scope of a given production.)
In this case, however, Quince’s mask remains a suggestion related to disguise. Flute can hide not only his gender, but also possibly his identity behind a mask as well, Quince implies that Flute’s mask can keep him safe from any public criticism or any potential ridicule about gender roles because, if he speaks ‘as small as [he] will’, no one will really know. who he is. No one will realise that it is actually Flute who is playing Thisbe.
Of course, this tends to fall by the wayside during the rest of the play, and I have never seen a production where Flute actually plays Thisbe in a mask. In fact, Thisbe’s lines are often some of Flute’s best moments in the play. A mask might not only squander such moments needlessly, but it might hamper the actor’s opportunities for some wonderful scenes.
Yet, Quince’s suggestion in Act I seems like an extension of safety, of anonymity. That, and Bottom’s subsequent suggestion that he play the role himself (as well as his role of Pyramus) manage to calm Flute’s momentary dissatisfaction.
Conversely, for the ultimate player, Bottom, any opportunity to perform brims with the promise to show off what he imagines to be his great talent and skill. After he agrees to play Pyramus, albeit after some disappointment at not being able to play the lion as well, Bottom immediately wonders “What beard were I best to play it in?” His face covering becomes an enhancement, an ornament, a display.
These two ways of masking, obscuring and displaying, are not really so far apart. In fact, traditionally, they are simultaneous. Pulcinella, pictured in the photo above, is often represented as wearing a mask, and the character embodies this confluence.* He hides while being obvious. He is at once deceptive and truthful. Like Bottom, who breaks character to blurt out upcoming plot details when he hears the audience questioning them, Pulcinella has been described by Antonio Fava as “the voice of the people, as the direct expression of a people as lively and spirited as the Neapolitans is never questioned.”**
Fava described Pulcinella as “a man without dignity, [who] is nevertheless indispensable to us all: without [him] … none of his countless ‘bosses’ could ever escape from the awkward tangle of troubles in which they find themselves. Pulcinella is everyone’s saviour, saved by no one.” In one sense, this sounds an awful lot like Bottom:
“Not only does love—Titania’s, his fellow players’, and his own love of playacting—redeem Bottom, but through his own redemption, Bottom also proves central to helping the greater love of Dream to conquer the grim specter of death and separation. In breaking character to rise comically from the stage after Pyramus’ death, Bottom asserts regeneration and renewal, infusing those qualities into the play at just the moment when the couples are on the verge of joining, of potentially creating new “issue”, new life. In dying as Pyramus and returning as himself, Bottom symbolically sacrifices himself to redeem us all.”***
Bottom needs no mask, in a sense. He plays the everyman that is himself, a modest braggart, like Pulcinella, he displays two faces to his audience, lover and tyrant.
Interestingly, there is a classic traditional recipe for a Neapoletan pizza known as “pizza Pulcinella”, which combines cottage cheese (or smooth ricotta, in modern versions) with pepper. With the spicy pepper serving as a natural contrast to the creamy cheese, the two faced character of the traditional dish is immediately evident. The recipe, including suggestions for modifications, may be found here: https://www.silviocicchi.com/pizzachef/pizza-pulcinella-ricetta-e-tradizioni/?lang=en
As Pulcinella and his mask suggest, the face we wear outwardly, the one we show to others, is not necessarily who we really are. Sometimes that is just one aspect, a caricature, an embellishment, or a simple lie.
“How’s it going?”
“Fine. Just fine.”
Musician Billy Joel’s 1977 hit song focused on our tendency to hide from each other.
In one sense, inside himself, Flute is the wandering knight he initially envisions. Fearless in his portrayal of Thisbe, he compels the audience to take his Thisbe at face value, as comic as the moment may unintentionally be. And Flute is the earnest lover too, springing into action as Thisbe with a noble sentiment to kill himself/herself over the body of his lost love Pyramus. In fact, one might argue that the lover in him wins out in the end.
After all, it is Flute who most laments the potential loss of Bottom when the weaver fails to make his expected appearance for their performance at the beginning of 4.2.
Oh sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a day during his life; he could not have ‘scaped sixpence a day. And the Duke had not given him sixpence a day for playing Pyramus, I’ll be hanged. He would have deserved it: sixpence a day in playing Pyramus or nothing.
AMND 4.2.19-24
It is a lovely moment. For Flute, the loss of their play means nothing compared with the loss of his Pyramus. Flute faces death, in the demise of the mechanicals’ performance, but that makes little difference in the face of the much more profound loss–the idea that Bottom might actually be gone. Bottom is, as Flute calls him a “paragon. A paramour is, God bless us, a thing of naught.” (4.2.13-4) Gone is Flute’s initial fear of playing another gender. Gone is any potential awkwardness about playing a paramour, gone is the worry that the play “goes not forward”. Only thoughts of Bottom the paragon remain, which fact speaks more deeply and truly to Flute’s love for his comrade than any other moment in the play.
This line of discussion might also lead us to consider social structures within the early modern playhouse itself. While the role of Flute was likely to have been played by a younger actor, perhaps a boy who didn’t look as though he might actually be able to grow a beard (which would make that line funnier). This ‘apprentice’ would most likely have played opposite a Bottom portrayed by a more mature and accomplished actor, perhaps someone like William Kempe, before he left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men company sometime after 1598. This idea lends the possibility of additional masks or roles within the Flute/Thisbe and Bottom/Pyramus roles–that of master and apprentice–which may or may not have been that much funnier to audience members who might have been familiar with the players themselves.
Of course, the masks we wear now are different, but even more essential. During the pandemic, human decency and concern for our fellow people everywhere dictates that everyone should be wearing a mask when they go out. Here’s a BBC news article about masks and the correct ways to select and wear them:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53395513
Where does this leave us? Long afternoons, mostly quarantined, wondering what might be next? Wondering where our saviour might be? Wondering how to become a saviour to ourselves and our loved ones?
Wondering who we are or who we might be, even under this rain or lack of rain. Used to be that we would sing and others would kill us for the lateness of the hour. Now, we sing and no one hears us at all. Crickets grow louder against that hushingness, growing against the evening like night jasmine almost at a bloom. Yet, it is not night jasmine coming. No.
We wear our masks and a dark sea laps around us. Closer, like a lost ocean where forgotten gods still sleep. Where we may sleep too, sooner than we think.
Man has lost the capacity to foresee
–Albert Schweitzer
and to forestall. He will end by
destroying the earth.
For our biggest masks now seem to be from ourselves. Looking in the mirror and seeing weirdly familiar strangers. Only they are falling into the ocean, the whistling sky, and mostly into themselves. The fruit has gone from the tree, and the ice cream truck from springs ago now sounds vaguely sour and wheezy. Out of tune. These are no longer the calls that we remember. These have transformed. They have become something else, slouching towards us with a mask dangling from outstretched fingers.
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.
Rachel Carson. Silent Spring.****
Oh, we recognize this world, even if we do not want to. A song we heard long ago, and now playing not so far away. We’ve seen other songs. Many other songs. Some of them swallowed our grandparents. Now, they are waiting to swallow us.
Like Pulcinella, we need to see both ways. Please wear a mask. Wear a fucking mask!
Please tend to the environment as well as you can. Then do better. Much better. Right fucking now!
Lie to ourselves. Wear the mask. But now we have to know what lies beneath it too. We’ve nearly arrived at the end of the play. Will Bottom break character to rise up and save us, eliciting sacred laughter to chase away the grim spectre of death?
There is an old Zen parable about a boy who captures a live bird, and he cups it in his hands to take it to the local wise man. He plans to ask the elder whether the bird is alive or dead. If the old man answers ‘alive’, the boy will crush the bird and show the dead bird to the elder. If the old man answers ‘dead’, the boy will open his hands and let the bird fly away. Either way, the old man will be wrong.
The boy takes the bird to the old man and asks his question, “Alive or dead?”
The old man looks at the boy gravely for a long moment. Then he answers, “The bird is in your hands.”
Everything is now in ours. In our hands.
Right now. This very moment. As you read these words.
Yes, you.
What will I do with this bird? Native of the so-called wild and free? Rider of the air? Tawny. Ungentle child of wilder currents than I will ever know? What shall I do with thee?
I am my own combination of desert, shore, and thunderstorm. How can I reconcile these to save anything when I cannot find any meaningful employment in my own land, and I am routinely cast out by other lands? I see that true ghost of Shakespeare (@realghostofshakespeare) behind the door. He holds a broom, and he is laughing. What my friends see variously as the irony of life, or the multifaceted nature of India, France, England, or where have you. Here. Here is where I am.
The great actor, Salim Ghouse said, “Sufism was once a reality without a name, today it is a name without a reality.”*****
Masks everywhere. So necessary now, because most of us don’t really want to die. But also other kinds of masks are also everywhere. As they have been. Hiding ourselves from ourselves.
I encourage you to be gentle to yourselves, but also even gentler to the world. It needs us now or else it really will cast us out. The end of shoes, beards, masks, and all the plays we’ve ever known.
*Pulcinella is the ancestor of the famous Mr. Punch–known across the world for his naughty antics in the variously scripted or unscripted puppet show, Punch and Judy.
**Chaffee, Judith, and Olly Crick. The Routledge Companion to Commedia Dell’arte. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2017.
***Langdon, John. “Death in Midsummer: the ritual death of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with reflections on ritual death in some of Shakespeare’s other plays”. The Shakespeare Institute Review. volume 1, Dave Paxton, ed., 2012. http://www.shakesreview.com/uploads/1/1/9/6/11968969/the_shakespeare_institute_review_issue_1_shakespeare_death_and_mortality_general_editor_dave_paxton.pdf
****Carson, Rachel L. Silent Spring. Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett, 1962.
What a delightful post to read.. I love the debate to wear or not to wear the mask, just shows what the human mind thinks continually! And the bird parable is perfect.
Thanks much for this, and for reading.