PLAY GUIDE
2015
2016
About ATC .................................................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction to the Play ............................................................................................................................. 2 Meet the Playwright ................................................................................................................................... 2 Meet the Characters .................................................................................................................................. 6 Historical Context ...................................................................................................................................... 19 Reason, Rationality, and the Age of Enlightenment ................................................................................... 28 Theology of the Play ................................................................................................................................... 30 The Gospels ............................................................................................................................................... 35 Common Biblical Misconceptions .............................................................................................................. 39 The Psychology of Introspection ................................................................................................................. 42 Epistemology: Knowledge, Ethics, and Truth .............................................................................................. 43 Glossary ..................................................................................................................................................... 47 Crossword Puzzle ....................................................................................................................................... 51 …Discord Play Guide edited and designed by Katherine Monberg, ATC Literary Manager, with assistance from Luke Young,
Learning & Education Manager; Shelby Athouguia and Bryanna Patrick, Learning & Education Associates. Contributing writers: Kacie Claudel, Chloe Loos, Gabriel Oladipo, and Angelina Valencia.
SUPPORT FOR ATC’S LEARNING & EDUCATION PROGRAMMING HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY: APS
Rosemont Copper
Arizona Commission on the Arts
Stonewall Foundation
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Target
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona
The Boeing Company
City of Glendale
The Donald Pitt Family Foundation
Community Foundation for Southern Arizona
The Johnson Family Foundation, Inc.
Cox Charities
The Lovell Foundation
Downtown Tucson Partnership
The Marshall Foundation
Enterprise Holdings Foundation
The Maurice and Meta Gross Foundation
Ford Motor Company Fund
The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation
The Stocker Foundation
JPMorgan Chase
The WIlliam L. and Ruth T. Pendleton Memorial Fund
John and Helen Murphy Foundation
Tucson Medical Center
National Endowment for the Arts
Tucson Pima Arts Council
Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture
Wells Fargo
PICOR Charitable Foundation
ABOUT ATC Arizona Theatre Company is a professional, not-for-profit theatre company. This means that all of our artists, administrators and production staff are paid professionals, and the income we receive from ticket sales and contributions goes right back into our budget to create our work, rather than to any particular person as a profit. Eash season, ATC employs hundreds of actors, directors and designers from all over the country to create the work you see on stage. In addition, ATC currently employs approximately 50 staff members in our production shops and administrative offices in Tucson and Phoenix during our season. Among these people are carpenters, painters, marketing professionals, fundraisers, stage directors, sound and light board operators, tailors, costume designers, box office agents, stage crew - the list is endless - representing am amazing range of talents and skills. We are also supported by a Board of Trustees, a group of business and community leaders who volunteer their time and expertise to assist the theatre in financial and legal matters, advise in marketing and fundraising, and help represent the theatre in our community. Roughly 150,000 people attend our shows every year, and several thousand of those people support us with charitable contributions in addition to purchasing their tickets. Businesses large and small, private foundations and the city and state governments also support our work financially. All of this is in support of our vision and mission:
The mission of Arizona Theatre Company is to inspire, engage and entertain - one moment, one production and one audience at a time. Our mission is to create professional theatre that continually strives to reach new levels of artistic excellence that resonates locally, in the state of Arizona and throughout the nation. In order to fulfill our mission, the theatre produces a broad repertoire ranging from classics to new works, engages artists of the highest caliber, and is committed to assuring access to the broadest spectrum of citizens.
The Herberger Theater Center, ATC’s performance venue in downtown Phoenix.
The Temple of Music and Art, the home of ATC shows in downtown Tucson.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord By Scott Carter Directed by Matt August A Founding Father, a Victorian novelist and a Russian revolutionary walk into a…stop me if you’ve heard this one. Join us for a laugh-out-loud, whip-smart new comedy from Scott Carter, Executive Producer of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. … Discord takes the third U.S. President, the author of War and Peace, and the writer of A Christmas Carol, locks them in a room with “no exit,” and has them hash out Show art by Esser Design.
their views of scripture and the true meaning of existence in a cage match for the ages.
MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT Scott Carter (Playwright) has been the Executive Producer for Real time with Bill Maher since the show’s HBO debut in 2003, and served as producer for the first 1,100 episodes of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher on Comedy Central from 1993 until its move to ABC in 1997. While at P.I., Carter received eight Emmy Award nominations and three consecutive CableAce Awards for Best Talk Series. He has served as creator, producer and/or writer for Curb the Discussion with Susie Essman (TV Guide, 2010), Root of All Evil with Lewis Black (Comedy Central, 2008), Earth to America (TBS, 2005), The Conspiracy Zone with Kevin Nealon (Spike, 2002-3), and Exhale with Candice Bergen (Oxygen, 2000-1), among others. In 1997, Variety named him one of the “50 Creatives to Watch”, Playwright Scott Carter.
and he was named a 2007 co-recipient of the Producer’s Guild of America’s Johnny Carson Award for Real Time. A former standup comedian, Carter has written and performed two full-length monologues at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Aspen Community Arts Festival, the Cleveland Performance Festival,
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…Discord is the work of 21 years of research and writing, honoring three historical giants of different eras and their conceptions about the life and impact of Jesus Christ. Mr. Carter is the former Producing Director and a founding member of The Invisible Theatre in Tucson, Arizona. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, interior designer Bebe Johnson, and their two daughters, Calla and Colette. Discordant & Harmonious Notes By Scott Carter The writing of this play began, really, in June 1986 as I awoke choking on a Sunday morning. As a lifelong asthmatic, this was not unexpected, but the attack was to be the most severe of my life and I spent nearly a week in the hospital. At that time, I was a struggling standup comic and, like many colleagues, I was either indifferent or hostile to God; Jesus was the ghost who came into my bedroom when I was a child and tried to choke me to death on a nightly basis. I was released from Bellevue that Saturday afternoon. At the intersection of 26th and First Avenue, I had an epiphany like Saul on the road to Damascus when a thunderbolt knocked him to the ground, scales fell from his eyes and he knew that Jesus Christ was his Lord and Savior. My metanoia was less specific and more non-denominational; I went from cynical comic to non-affiliated deist. I received the unshakable realization of God’s existence and that of grace – for which I thought myself unworthy but grateful. I guess that’s why it’s called grace. I entered into a bliss state – loving all whom I met and forgiving previous transgressions done to me. It lasted about a week. Then it faded and I felt a return to the petty life I’d always led. I didn’t want this to happen. I wanted to make this event into the B.C./A.D. of my existence. But I had no strong religious affiliation to which to turn. My parents were devout believers in whatever Protestant community was closest and nicest. I grew up Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian and Lutheran. Post-service coffee and donuts were sacraments as sacred as any wafers or wine. So I made a pact with the universe in the summer of 1986: I would remain open to signs and direction from anyone offering religious literature, conversation or ritual. On October 5, 1988, I watched an episode of A World of Ideas on PBS. Host Bill Moyers was interviewing Reverend Forrester Church of All Souls Unitarian in New York. And it was here that I learned about the Jefferson Bible. In 1804 President Jefferson bought two identical copies of the King James Bible. Needing both sides of each page for his project, he then, over three consecutive nights, used a razor to cut out only the verses he liked from all four gospels. 3
Jefferson then pasted his chosen scraps of scripture into the pages of a blank book. He named his volume The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. I became fascinated with the details of this history. What modern president would hatch such an idea and then spend his White House evenings executing it? For the next eight years, my fascination stopped short of creativity. I was getting jobs writing and later producing television. In 1993, HBO teamed me with Bill Maher to develop Politically Incorrect for Comedy Central. As that show took off, Jefferson gathered dust. In 1996 my wife and I moved from New York to Los Angeles. We rented a house near Larchmont Village where, one Saturday at the independent bookstore, Chevalier’s, I discovered The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens. I subsequently learned that Dickens, between 1846 and 1849, condensed the gospels for the first five of his ten children. He read it to them so often that they had it memorized before they learned to read. Dickens’ favorite word in the English language was “fancy.” And, as you will soon hear, Dickens embraced most of the gospel verses that Jefferson jettisoned. I now had a play to write: two great men debating whose version of the gospels is better. The first pages of these men’s fictive theological spat multiplied madly during the ensuing months. One day, while allegedly doing more research (procrastinating), I happened on this note in Stephen Mitchell’s superb The Gospel According to Jesus: “…Tolstoy, took, compiled a gospel harmony, which he called The Gospel in Brief.” My excited first thought – adding Tolstoy to this debate – instantly gave way to an easily imaginable five more years of research to turn this duet into a trio. After the global success of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy suffered a Russian epic of a depression so severe that his family hid his hunting guns to avoid his suicide. He embarked on a 30-year spiritual quest, learning Greek and Hebrew to freshly translate scripture. The Gospels in Brief, unlike the work of Jefferson and Dickens, was published during Tolstoy’s lifetime – though not in Russia. His increasingly controversial works were smuggled into Switzerland and would later result in Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Harmonizing this latest Tolstoy research with the other two was proving unwieldy and was going to require much more work. The Jesus narrative is hardly, “the greatest story ever told.” Yes, there’s a beginning and end but the middle is a structural mess. At the end of 1999, after producing the first 1,100 episodes of Politically Incorrect, I left to develop my play and knew I needed help.
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Michael Bruner, a graduate of Princeton Seminary and the University of Hamburg began to meet with me regularly over the next three years. We organized the messy muddle of Christ’s ministry into a 315-page multi-colored volume. My literary agent shopped it around; no publisher was interested (at least not yet). Still, in 2005, this source material gave rise to the first draft of the play! It was universally hated. My wife hated it. My agent hated it. My lawyer hated it. And I felt guilty for wasting their time reading and so much of my time writing. I shelved it. But, please, no pity: I’ve had a long and lucrative career in television. By then, Real Time with Bill Maher was on HBO and scheduled in a way that allowed me to develop other projects. In December 2008, I found myself with three open months and re-read my play’s 151-page first draft. Every bit of Jefferson, dickens, and Tolstoy trivia had been thrown in; using the passage of time as perspective for this editing, I promptly removed most of it, focused on the Christ narrative, and distilled the page count from 151 down to 47 and increased the font size. But did I really have anything? I wanted someone to hear it who both had killer story chops and a spiritual simpatico. I called my friend, the brilliant writer, actor and comedian Garry Shandling. We were fellow Tucsonans who went to the same high school. He’d enjoyed my monologues and appeared on Politically Incorrect. We made dinner and reading plans for his house and I brought three little sticks with the heads of Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy to keep clear which character was talking. Garry interrupted me halfway through the stick puppet reading and gave me 23 pages of notes. We finished the play the following night with another round. I hosted reading after reading with friends and rewrote time and time again. Notes came from annotated scripts and postreading discussions. Norman Lear, Stephen Mitchell (the translator who’d introduced me to Tolstoy’s gospel), Byron Katie (the author and Stephen’s wife), my wife, Bebe, Elaine Pagels, the Princeton Religious Studies professor who wrote The Gnostic Gospels (which you might know under its alternate title, Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code) and many others participated and I am grateful for it. After one reading, Arianna Huffington said: “We must have a performance at my house.” That December, the play was read in front of a 20-foot-high Christmas tree and 60 guests including Shirley MacLaine who, afterwards, gave me her phone number to discuss the play. We met in a dark corner of a Malibu restaurant. She ordered a bottle of red wine and, after a sip, asked, “Do you know why the star of Bethlehem hovered over the manger?” I responded that I did not. “It’s because,” she continued, “it was not a star. It was a spaceship. Let’s start there.” Then, with the world weariness of a Cassandra used to having her truth doubted, she told me that she had slept in Jefferson’s bed (in this lifetime, through a connection at Monticello). She said workers 5
there report that his ghost roams the halls, whistling. Then she got to the purpose of our meeting: “You need a fourth character in your play … My friend Stephen Hawking believes that he is Sir Isaac Newton reincarnated. I really feel that Newton would have a lot to add to what those other three are saying.” I said, “Shirley, I appreciate you caring so much. But I’ve been working on this for 21 years. And I have to stop adding people or it will never get done.” My Cassandra looked at me, as through eyes of Fran Kubelick, of Irma La Douce, with an expression that said: Brother, you are making a big mistake. And maybe I am. But you’ll have to be the judge of that. Enjoy.
MEET THE CHARACTERS
Actor Larry Cedar, who plays Thomas Jefferson in ATC’s …Discord.
Actor Mark Gagliardi, who plays Charles Dickens in ATC’s …Discord.
Actor Armin Shimerman, who plays Count Leo Tolstoy in ATC’s …Discord.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743 on a tobacco plantation in Shadwell, Virginia, just outside of Charlottesville, as the third of ten siblings. His mother, Jane Randolph, was descended from a prestigious family who claimed to be of British royal blood, and his father, Peter, was a farmer, surveyor, and cartographer who died when Jefferson was just 14 years old. In his youth, Jefferson played the violin, read, and enjoyed playing in the woods of the Western frontier, which at the time stretched only as far as current-day Georgia. Jefferson began attending private school at the age of nine where he studied Latin and Greek, which he continued to study into his later teens. Private education was rather common at the time, as public schools did not exist and education was instead found at home, school, church, in volunteer positions, apprenticeships, and through private tutors. At the age of 17,
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Jefferson attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, but was disappointed in the academic rigor, which he considered lacking. To supplement his education, he began working more deeply with a circle of older scholars, including William Small, who later introduced him to the philosophies of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. Although Jefferson was baptized Episcopalian, he would later abandon Orthodox Christianity due to the influence of the Deist authors he encountered in his extensive academic study.
At the age of 20, Jefferson decided to pursue a career as a lawyer. At The Wren Building, where Jefferson studied at the College of William and Mary.
the time, there were no law schools; prospective lawyers would “read law” under the supervision of a “real” lawyer before taking the bar
exam. Established in Delaware in 1738, the bar exams were administered similarly as they are today, that is, by an exam consisting of essay questions designed to test the applicant’s knowledge of the law. Proof of competence, usually achieved by proof of education, was also required to pass.
After passing the Virginia bar in 1767, Jefferson practiced quite successfully as a Virginia lawyer. He married Martha Wayles Skelton in on the first day of 1772; the two had six children, but only two – Martha and Mary – would live to adulthood. Jefferson, now a family man, retired in 1774 to focus on politics and the maintenance of his land and slaves at Monticello, newly inherited after the death of his father-in-law, John Wayles, in 1773.
Although still heavily invested in the law, Jefferson made the move to politics as one of the first ardent supporters of American independence due to his belief that citizens should possess certain inalienable rights, with liberty chief among them. In 1768, he was elected to the House of Burgesses – the first elected legislative body in the American colonies – and joined its radical bloc consisting of those who opposed the royal governor, led by fellow revolutionaries Patrick Henry and George Washington. The House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, Virginia.
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Jefferson quickly made his presence and convictions known through his prolific writing, including A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), an eloquent essay which led to his reputation as a man of articulacy. America began its War of Independence in 1765 as a result of colonial unhappiness exacerbated by the Stamp Act and other imposed tariffs which offered few benefits but significant restrictions to the people of the colonies. As Patrick Henry cried “no taxation with representation”, the First Continental Congress (of which Jefferson was not a part) met to consider resistance to the British. Six months later, on April 19, 1775, the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Jefferson was appointed by the Second Continental Congress to a five-man committee tasked with producing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, along with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; Jefferson was selected to write the first draft. He completed it in only 17 days, and the Declaration of Independence was ratified after only minor revisions. An 1823 facsimile of the Declaration of Independence.
Afterward, Jefferson served in the Virginia House of Delegates in which he tried to adapt the laws to fit his American ideal; he wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777 and authored a total of 126 bills in three years. The second phase of the Revolutionary War stretched from 1778 to 1781 and ended with the capture and surrender of British soldiers by a joint Franco-American army led by Generals Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown.
On the first of June, 1779, Jefferson was elected Governor of Virginia, but was unable to please his constituents due to uncertainty as to who should be allocated resources – the Army or his Virginians. Jefferson Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia.
narrowly avoided being captured by the British and Benedict Arnold, an
American defector to the British Army during the last legs of the Revolution, after which he stepped down after two terms in office, choosing not to run for re-election. He returned to his home at Monticello, intending to live out the rest of his days outside of the political sphere, although this may have been exacerbated by the mockery made of him by political enemies and the third loss of a child.
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During his self-imposed retirement, Jefferson began working on Notes on the State of Virginia which examined the history, culture, and geography of the state. It also expressed his vision of a future America – “a virtuous agricultural republic based on the values of liberty, honesty and simplicity and centered on the self-sufficient yeoman farmer”. It discussed his racial views in which he expressed his firm belief that blacks were mentally and physically inferior to whites, though he claimed to abhor slavery as a violation of human rights and asserted that the only possible solution was the abolishment of slavery and the subsequent deportation of former slaves to Africa or Haiti. Despite this view, Jefferson owned approximately 600 slaves throughout his life and while he, allegedly, treated them with kindness, many scholars have questioned his benevolence and potential hypocrisy. Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died on September 6, 1782 at the young age of 34 due to a history of poor health aggravated by her final childbirth. The 1783 Treaty of Paris chronicling Britain’s defeat in the American Revolution led to the necessary development of an American governing body; the Congress of the Confederation was established and Jefferson was elected to lead the Virginia delegation. Jefferson then went abroad at the request of Congress to join and subsequently replace Benjamin Franklin as minister to France, during which his duties included negotiating loans and trade agreements. The position was not agreeable to him, as he felt the class gap was far too wide and appalling. While he was out of the country, the American Constitution was ratified in 1789 and George Washington was elected as the first President of the United States. Jefferson then went abroad at the request of Congress to join and subsequently replace Benjamin Franklin as minister to France, during which his duties included negotiating loans and trade agreements. The position was not agreeable to him, as he felt the class gap was far too wide and appalling. While he was out of the country, the American Constitution was ratified in 1789 and George Washington was elected as the first
Thomas Jefferson in 1791. Portrait by Charles Willson Peale.
President of the United States. Upon returning to Virginia in late 1789, Jefferson was appointed Secretary of State by the new president, with whom he had worked before. Jefferson advocated for state governments, strict dedication to the Constitution, and support for the French in ardent opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who supported strong national government, broad 9
Constitutional interpretation, and European neutrality. Jefferson agreed with the British Empiricists and was influenced by philosophers such as Gibbon and Voltaire. He distrusted cities and banks, desired decentralized governmental power, and believed that the tyranny of Europe stemmed from monarchical influence. Due to dissatisfaction with the Federalist – an early political group developed from Hamilton’s fiscal politics – powers and laws, Jefferson collaborated with James Madison to write the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which declared that the federal government has no right to exercise powers not specifically granted by the states. Jefferson resigned in 1794 due to extreme frustration and returned again to Monticello. In this second exile, his relationship with Sally Hemings (a slave and Martha’s half-sister) began. Historical evidence suggests that Jefferson was the father of all six of her children. Jefferson’s next return to the public eye came in 1797, when he was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate in direct opposition to the Federalists; this was the rise of the two-party system. At the time, candidates did not Jon Adams, second President of the United States.
openly campaign, and the winner was decided strictly by popular vote, with the top candidate winning the presidency and the runner-up becoming vice president, regardless of party affiliations. Jefferson was elected vice president to John Adams; however, their friendship waned as a result of political differences, and Jefferson was largely excluded from important presidential decisions. To fill his time and make use of his considerable intellect, Jefferson used his four years in the vice presidential office to author A Manual of Parliamentary Practice while concurrently serving as president of the American Philosophical Society, where he lauded the ideals of the Enlightenment and scientific advancement. With the upcoming presidential election of 1800, Jefferson and Madison requested the help of Aaron Burr in order to defeat the Federalist candidate, John Adams. Ballots did not differentiate between president and vice
Aaron Burr, third Vice President of the United Staates
president, so Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr both tied for the presidency. The still largely Federalist House of Representatives were led by Alexander Hamilton’s endorsement of Thomas Jefferson, thereby electing him to the presidency and Aaron Burr, whom Hamilton hated, to the vice presidency. 10
In power as President of the United States, Jefferson was much more productive and successful than he had been as governor. He acted with modesty to further differentiate the presidency from that of the European monarchy, reduced the size of the armed forces, lowered the national debt, and doubled the geographical size of the country by negotiating the Louisiana Purchase for $15 million in 1803. During his presidency, Jefferson also organized the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition in order to map out the newly-obtained country and establish an American presence in the west. Jefferson regarded Native Americans as equal to Europeans and
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 totaled 827,987 miles, doubling the size of the U.S.
yet maintained an assimilationist policy to “civilize” the indigenous peoples, as dictated by his Enlightenment philosophies. After his election to the presidency for a second term, Jefferson’s politics and policies were far less victorious, as the American economy experienced the effects of the ongoing war between France and Great Britain. In response, Jefferson passed the Embargo Act of 1807 which suspended trade with Europe, plummeted the export economy from $108 million to $22 million, and implemented the first steps toward the War of 1812, sometimes considered a second war of independence initiated by problems with British trade restrictions and
Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800.
British support of “hostile” native populations.
In 1809, Jefferson returned home to Monticello for the third time and began to remodel and improve his estate. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Surgeon General of the Continental Army, expressed a desire that Jefferson reconcile with John Adams – with whom he had ceased contact with due to political decisions and last-minute political appointments made by him prior to the election of 1800. In 1812, Adams sent a New Year’s message to Jefferson, which was followed by the exchange of 158 letters over 14 years in which the two discussed politics, the revolution’s place 11
in the world at large, and their roles in history. Unknown to Adams, his wife, Abigail, had attempted to reconcile their differences eight years earlier by reaching out to Jefferson after his daughter, Polly died in 1804. Near the end of his life, Jefferson was in substantial debt ($107,000, equivalent to more than $1 million dollars today) as a result of inheriting his father-in-law’s debt, the unpredictability of farming, and his constant renovations at Monticello. In order to pay his debt, Jefferson sold over 6,000 volumes from his personal library to the government in order to restore the Library of Congress, which had been burned by the British Army near the end of the War of 1812. Education was very important to Jefferson, as evidenced by his emphasis on books; he also believed fervently in the separation of church and state. Both of these ideals coalesced in the founding of the University of Virginia, the first secular college in America. Jefferson considered himself a Christian, one who followed the teaching of Jesus, and he demonstrated an extreme dislike of the clergy. In the later years of his life, he took specific passages out of the bible and compiled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, now known as the Jefferson Bible. He died on July 4, 1826 at the age of 83. Even though he was a man with many faults and contradictions, his effect on American politics and the structure of the government are undeniable, with lasting effects on the contemporary, social, economic, and political systems of the United States.
By Chloe Loos, Dramaturgy Intern
Charles Dickens Charles Dickens was born Charles John Huffam Dickens on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children of John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father was a minor government clerk in the Navy Pay Office on Portsea Island, where the family lived until 1815, when John was called back to London. After Charles’s fourth birthday, the family moved twice more: first to Sheerness, then to Chatham, Kent, where they lived until he was eleven. Charles enjoyed the outdoors and was an avid reader of books, Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights among his favorites. Though his father struggled with debt, John’s employment as a clerk allowed
The home in which Dickens was born at 393 Commercial Road in Portsmouth.
Charles to attend a private school for a few years during his childhood. 12
In June 1822, John Dickens was recalled by the Navy Pay Office and his family returned again to London, except for Charles, who remained in Kent to complete his final school term. John’s debt continued to mount, and in 1824 he was forced into debtor’s prison, as was a common penance for debt in England at the time. As John’s debts mounted, his wife and youngest children joined him there, while Charles stayed with a family friend, Elizabeth Roylance. Later, Charles moved in with another friend, Archibald Russell, an agent for the Insolvent Court, which specialized in bankruptcy. To pay for his housing and help support his family, Dickens left school to work ten-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse, where he pasted labels on pots of boot blacking for six shillings per week. The harsh nature of the work influenced his fiction and essays as well as his politics; he became interested in reforming socio-economic and labor conditions, which were well-matched to his detailed memory of people and events. A few months after John Dickens’s imprisonment, Charles’s greatgrandmother Elizabeth Dickens died and bequeathed his father £450, which allowed him to arrange payment for his creditors and leave debtor’s prison. Charles left his job at the boot-blacking warehouse, a decision with which his mother did not immediately agree and whose lack of support he would always resent. He left to attend the Wellington Illustration of Dickens working at blacking boots by Fred Bernard, published in the 1892 edition of Forster’s Life of Dickens.
House Academy, a private school, where he remained until March 1827, though he was unimpressed by the quality and rigor of the school. In May 1827 he started work as a junior clerk at a law office, where he would remain employed until November 1928.
In 1832, at the age of 20, Charles knew that he wanted fame and fortune beyond his upbringing, but was unsure of the specific vocation with which to achieve it. Though he explored his initial interest in theatre, he settled on a career in writing. In 1832, he got a job with The Mirror of Parliament to write journalism about parliamentary debates in the House of Commons, in addition to covering election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. Most of his journalistic output, though, was in the form of sketches - short, slice-of-life pieces - published in periodicals; these sketches, which mainly concerned London scenes and people, went on to form his first collection, Sketches by Boz, published in 1836.
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Dickens continued to make great progress both professionally and socially, arguably becoming the most successful popular novelist in the history of the English language and forming friendships with various novelists and publishers. Due to the success of Sketches by Boz, publishers approached him about writing another story to accompany illustrations by Robert Seymour. Dickens agreed, and began work on The Pickwick Papers, which was published serially in monthly installments. Though its first few episodes struggled, The Pickwick Papers would grow into a great success. In November 1836, Dickens became the editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a job he held for three years until he fell out with the owners. He then began writing Oliver Twist while simultaneously completing the final installment of The Pickwick Papers, writing as many as 90 pages per month while continuing to edit Bentley’s and work on four plays (which he also produced). Oliver Twist was published in 1838, and remains one of
Young Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise, 1839.
Dickens’s best-known works, as the first popular Victorian novel with a child protagonist.
On April 2nd, 1836, Dickens married Catherine Thompson Hogarth, with whom he would have ten children. His professional success continued to grow: a young Queen Victoria read both Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and was noted to have stayed up late into the night discussing the stories. He also published more works, including Nicholas Nickelby (1938-39) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1940-41). Despite his literary success, Dickens was still restless, sometimes behaving erratically. For instance, in Broadstairs, a coastal town in Kent, having flirted with the fiancée of his solicitor’s best friend, Dickens grabbed her one night and ran with her to the sea, where he said that they should both drown in the “sad sea waves.” She managed to escape and, afterwards, kept her distance.
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Catherine Hogarth Dickens. Portrait by Samuel Lawrence, 1838.
Dickens left for America in 1842, where he toured, presenting lectures and speaking on the necessity of international copyright laws (his work was frequently pirated in America), and grew even more popular among a new audience. He returned to England later that year and began work on A Christmas Carol (1843), the first and most popular of his Christmas stories, followed soon after by The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845).
After brief residencies in Italy and Switzerland, during which time Dickens worked on Dombey and Sons (1846-48) and David Copperfield (1849-50), he moved to Tavistock House, his London home, in 1851, where he wrote Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1856). He also continued his work within the theatre and became involved with the Great Ormund Street Hospital, using his considerable acting skills to give public readings of his own
Sketch of Charles Dickens drawn during his American tour in 1842. The woman in the bottom left is a likeness of his sister, Fanny.
work to secure funds for the hospital and return it to secure financial footing. Charles separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858 (a controversial decision at the time) and afterwards began to take on more public readings for his own profit; this, along with his journalism, consumed most of his energy. He also produced two highly successful novels after his separation: A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861). In later years, Dickens’s health began to deteriorate -- he struggled to eat solid foods, instead living on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry, leading him to begin a series of farewell readings in 1868 and 1869. The tour was cancelled at the advice of his doctors after he collapsed on April 22, 1869, and he began working on his final novel, a mystery entitled The Mystery of Edwin Drood. On June 8, 1870,
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Dickens at his desk in 1858. Portrait by George Herbert Watkins.
spending the day working on his novel, Dickens suffered a stroke and collapsed, never regaining consciousness before his death five days later. Having explicitly communicated his wishes to be interred at Rochester Castle, he was instead laid to rest at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, as arguably one of the best-loved English authors of all time. By Gabriel Oladipo, Literary Intern
Count Leo Tolstoy
The Empty Chair, 1870, by Samuel Luke Fildes, depicting Dickens’s empty chair in his study at Gads Hill Place after his death. Fildes was illustrating Dickens’s Drood during the last days of the author’s life.
Leo Tolstoy was born the youngest of four boys to an aristocratic family in Tula Province, Russia on September 9, 1828. His father, Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, was a veteran of the Russian Army. After the death of Leo’s mother in 1830, which would forever affect his feelings about motherhood and women, his cousin took over caring for the young Tolstoy children; seven years later, Tolstoy’s aunt would be named their legal guardian after the death of their father, and move the small family to her home in Kazan, Russia. Although Tolstoy experienced significant death and loss early in his youth, romanticized childhood memories would appear to influence his later writing.
Tolstoy received the majority of his education at home from French and German tutors. In 1843, he attempted an Oriental languages program at the University of Kazan, where he failed to excel as a result of his extensive and perhaps irresponsible social activities. After leaving the University of Kazan without a degree, he returned to his parents’ estate in Tula Province, Russia and attempted to become a farmer, which failed as a result of his agricultural inattention induced by frequent travels to Tula and Moscow. He did, however, succeed in keeping a journal, the beginning of a lifelong habit that would inspire his fiction writings later in life. During his attempt at farm life, Leo was visited by his older brother Tolstoy in 1848, at age 20.
Nikolay, during his service in the Army. After running up significant gambling debts during his visit, Nikolay persuaded Leo to join the 16
as a Junker and join him at his station in the Caucasus Mountains. When he arrived in Crimea in 1854, Leo was immersed into a war without a name. Tensions had been building between Russian and Ottoman empires for years, but luckily most of the great battles had already been fought by the time Leo entered the scene. Leo fought in the Crimean War through August of 1855. He was able to write realistic accounts of everything he witnessed that would eventually contribute to his fame. In quiet moments during his time in the Army, Tolstoy worked on the autobiographical story Childhood, which detailed his fondest memories from his early life. In 1852, he submitted the sketch to The Contemporary, the most popular literary, social, and political journal of the time; Childhood was accepted and became the first example of his published work. Tolstoy then began to write about his day-to-day experiences in the army, maintaining his personal account as the war continued while simultaneously penning Boyhood, the sequel to Childhood; the duo would eventually expand into a trilogy with the completion of Youth in 1856. He also authored a three part series in which he expressed his feelings about war, experimenting with a new technique that allowed audiences to read the stream of consciousness of the soldier protagonist. By the time the Crimean War concluded in 1856, Tolstoy was in high demand in the Russian literary scene. Known to be particularly tenacious and conceited, he refused to align himself with any particular intellectual school of thought, instead declaring himself an anarchist and fleeing to Paris in 1857, where he became heavily involved in gambling. His subsequent poverty would force him to return to Russia in 1862. Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs in September of 1862. They had thirteen children, only eight of whom would survive to adulthood. During this time, Tolstoy focused the majority of the 1860s on his first great novel, War and Peace, a historical account of the Napoleonic Wars paired with realistic, fictional characters that grew to immense popularity among Russian readers, eventually extending into a timeless work of literature. After the success of War and Peace, Tolstoy began work on his second great novel, Anna Karenina. The novel was based on current events of the Napoleonic Wars, combined with fictionalized events from his life. Anna Karenina was published in various journals and magazines from 1873 to 1877, to both public and critical acclaim. The royalties earned from the novel contributed to his quickly expanding wealth and prestige. 17
Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, with their daughter, Alexandra, in 1885.
Despite the global success of his two most famous novels, Tolstoy suffered a spiritual crisis in the 1870s due to his disillusionment with a state-run church, rejection of ritual and blind acceptance. Tolstoy broke ties with the Orthodox Church in 1901. His excommunication was a reflection of his own decisions, but this discovery of individuality lead to a depression so severe that his family hid his hunting guns to deter his anticipated suicide. Cynical of modernity and his Orthodox religious tradition, Tolstoy struggled to discover the meaning of life, inspiring him to embark on a 30-year spiritual quest during which he learned Greek and Hebrew in order to directly translate scripture. His description of the life of Jesus entitled The Gospel in Brief was published during his lifetime, and seeks to describe how one can live in accordance with the example set by Jesus in the Gospels of the Christian Bible. A drastic departure from his Russian Orthodox upbringing, Tolstoy embraced a Christian Anarchist perspective, believing that the existence of God could neither be proved nor disproved and that the meaning of life extends beyond the limits of the human mind. In addition to publishing his religious ideologies, Tolstoy continued to write fiction throughout the 1880s and 1890s. One of his most successful later works was the novella entitled The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), in which the main character struggles with the idea of death and fears that his life has been wasted on trivial matters. In 1899, Tolstoy wrote his third lengthy novel, Resurrection; the work received some critical praise, but did not match the success of his previous novels. During the final 30 years of his life, Leo Tolstoy worked primarily on developing essays about his anarchist critique of the state, with a focus on nonviolence, which established himself as a moral and religious leader. His support of nonviolent resistance to injustice influenced numerous future world leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Despite this social acclaim, he continued to struggle with reconciliation of his spiritual beliefs and the tensions they created in his personal life. His wife disagreed with his new philosophies, leading him to escape from her disapproval with his daughter and physician to Astapovo, Russia in October of 1910. Unfortunately, the pilgrimage proved too arduous for Tolstoy’s advanced age and developing pneumonia, and he died shortly afterward, on November 20, 1910.
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Tolstoy in his study in 1908. Â Photo by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.
To this day, Tolstoy’s novels are considered some of the finest literary achievements of early Russian history. War and Peace is frequently regarded as the greatest novel ever written, often analyzed in contemporary academia for its detailed portrayal of unconscious motives, and his work has extended far beyond his time, keeping his philosophies and knowledge very much alive today. By Kacie Claudel, Literary Intern
HISTORICAL CONTEXT Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary America Thomas Jefferson grew up in North America, after Great Britain established its first colony there in 1585: the lost colony of Roanoke. Although there has been no conclusive evidence as to what happened to the colony, the most popular theories include a mass slaughter instigated by the local Powhatan tribes, or possible integration into indigenous tribes of the area. The first successfully-established British colony was Jamestown, established by the Virginia Company of London in 1607, which would pave the way for the other British colonies in North America. Many of the colonies were established with the grant of commercial charters by the British monarch and Parliament to found and run settlements. There were three types of colonies: royal (owned by the king), propriety (formed with land grants awarded by the British government), and selfgoverning (formed with charters and awarded to joint-stock companies, which could be transformed into royal colonies if the king so desired). The thirteen colonies of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island, shared similar politics and values dominated by the Protestant traditions, which emphasized individual faith, frugality, and strong work ethics. The Great Awakening was a spiritual revitalization movement of the 1730s and 1740s which permeated the colonies and lauded the practice of Christianity as a personal feeling of the individual as opposed to a ritualistic affair, and increased general engagement with religion. While there was religious diversity in the colonies, practiced religion consisted exclusively of Christian variants, with ongoing debate about proper The thirteen American colonies in 1775. Image courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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Slavery was legal and practiced in each of the colonies, usually involving house service or farm workers. The British government was particularly interested in the colonies due to their rapid increase in wealth and population at a time when the Empire was just beginning to engage in far-reaching colonization. Economically, the colonies operated under the mercantile system in which all trade was concentrated in the British Empire while trade with other empires, such as the French, was forbidden. While the British government had ultimate authority, the colonies developed advanced systems of self-government including local elections. They began to collaborate with one another rather than using Britain as an emissary, which led to a deep-rooted sense of American identity in the early-18th century. A decade of increasing unhappiness with Britain exploded after the government attempted numerous tax increases in the colonies including the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Tariffs of 1767, and the Tea Act of 1773. Resistance led to the Boston Massacre in 1770 in which British soldiers fired on a mob of citizens, killing five men. In December of 1773, a group of Boston residents dressed as Native Americans threw 342 chests of tea into the New York Harbor to protest the increased tax on tea, an event which came to be known as the Boston Tea Party. Parliament responded by passing the four Intolerable Acts, which restricted town meetings in Massachusetts, ordered that British soldiers awaiting trial would be extradited to Britain, closed the port of Boston until Britain was reimbursed for the ruined tea, and allowed the governors, who were loyal to the king, to house troops in the homes of citizens without permission.
Famous depiction of the Boston Massacre, engraved by Paul Revere.
In response, Massachusetts formed a “provincial congress” to speak for and address the needs of the colonies. In the fall of 1774, a group of 55 delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies – Georgia neglected to send representatives, as they were hoping for British aid against local Native American tribes – met to express grievances at the First Continental Congress; while the delegates did not choose to declare complete independence, they did collectively disagree with the notion of taxation without representation. An organization of American citizens formed in protest of these taxes and in order to promote the rights of the colonialists, known as the Sons of Liberty. The Continental Congress intended to meet again in May 1775 to discuss further action, but before the Congress could reconvene, violence broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
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British General Thomas Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts but also a self-declared friend of liberty, received orders from the English Secretary of State to disarm the American rebels (including the Sons of Liberty) and imprison the rebel leaders. Colonial leaders, Paul Revere and Joseph Warren, intercepted Gage’s orders and rode to Concord at midnight on April 18th to alert their fellow patriots that that British were coming to raid their weapons cache. A shot was fired at dawn – historians are unsure which force fired the first show – thus beginning the American Revolution. Shortly afterward, the Second Continental Congress met in July 1776 and ratified Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The new Americans and their French, Spanish, and Dutch allies fought the British Loyalists on American soil by professing liberalism and republicanism in order to overthrow the monarchy. The war was long and bloody, with both sides often ignoring “polite” battle conduct and utilizing guerrilla warfare. King George III was livid about the colonial upset and ignored the request for independence, choosing to continue fighting until the patriots surrendered. He sent the British Army to America to side with the Loyalist troops and enlisted German Hessians and Native allies to opposite the colonial forces. America also acquired allies, notably France and Spain. After a second wave of attack, Britain surrendered at Yorktown. During peace negotiations, the American delegates went directly to the British, over the heads of their French allies in order to gain more land in the settlement. Britain obliged in the hopes that the new country would become a valuable trading partner, now that their prosperous mercantile system had been eliminated. After the official end of the American Revolution in 1783 with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, America
Coronation portrait of King George III of the United Kingdom by Allan Ramsay, 1765.
increased in prosperity and westward expansion on the North American continent began as people moved to the new territories out west. A similar political upheaval would follow soon afterward with the imitation of the French Revolution in 1789, due in part to the instability of the country thanks to heavy spending when lending assistance to the American Revolution. As in America, the French rebels also hoped to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic. Prominent Enlightenment philosophies of liberalism, republicanism, and fear of corruption spurred passionate politics and hastened the international spread of revolutionary ideals. John Locke’s thoughts on liberty also influenced political reasoning, especially regarding the inalienable rights of citizens and the social contract in which governments require the consent of the governed. 21
Following the American Revolution, America was incredibly unstable and fragmented. Although the states had united under the Articles of Confederation, which had served as the first Constitution after its drafting at the Second Continental Congress and ratification in 1777, the inefficiency of the new nation quickly became evident, leading to the ratification of the new and improved Constitution in 1788 which helped to stabilize the economy and unite the states. The first presidential election was held in 1789, with George Washington unanimously winning all 69 electoral votes and thus the American democratic experiment began. Jefferson returned from a stint as minister to France at the end of the year to serve as the Washington Administration’s Secretary of State. The Bill of Rights, written by James Madison, was added to the Constitution on December 15, 1791 to assuage fears of a too-centralized
Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, 1797.
government. The new Constitution’s emphasis on individuality broke down British traditions, such as the idea of gentlemen; laborers became the new respected class. Of course, serious issues remained, such as the lack of racial inclusion and the rights of women, but the new concept of freedom offered a significant improvement over the dissatisfaction inspired by life under the British Crown. However, conflicts of religion persisted, despite the First Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and the press. After a brief period of adjustment, a set of distinctly American attitudes and values gradually appeared, stabilizing the nation and easing differences of opinion among citizens. As the decades rolled by, citizens continued to move west. Despite the growing depth of an American identity and independence of government and economy, conflicts of interest remained and increased with industrial growth, clashes with Native Americans, and the debate surrounding slavery. The peace inspired by George Washington’s term as president was interrupted by the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which allowed Missouri to be admitted as a slave state in conjunction with the free state of Maine, while banning slavery from all new states north of Missouri), and the rise of multiple political parties. Unrest continued to develop until the nation would once more fall into conflict with the initiation of the American Civil War in 1861. By Chloe Loos, Dramaturgy Intern 22
Charles Dickens’s Victorian England The 19th century of Charles Dickens’s lifetime was a time of great change: many major empires fell, leading to a heavily altered political landscape, and unprecedented technological advancements changed life for many people. This change was most directly felt in Britain, where Dickens grew up and spent much of his life. As such, the worldview of Dickens’s time had a significant impact on his beliefs and output. In order to best understand Dickens’s work, one must first know the historical context he lived in. Economy Though the Industrial Revolution began sometime around 1760, it was still well underway through the early 19th-century, at which time it began to spread from Britain throughout Europe. During this time, there were radical transformations in society; technological advancements such as the increased use of steam power, new methods of iron processing, mechanized cotton spinning, and the rise of factories affected nearly every aspect of daily life. The rise of railroads also made it easier to move all of these newly manufactured goods, further expanding trade networks. The most notable change was that population and wealth increased at unprecedented rates, newly freed from previous technological constraints. However, there were also some notable flaws to the new technological developments. Some people, namely the Luddites, were opposed to the mechanization of industry as it displaced craft workers in industries such as textiles, who could no longer compete with the efficiency new machines. While people could find work in the new factories, they worked hard jobs with long hours, often under grueling conditions. Also, while most factory workers were adults, a significant number of children were also employed, who were often made to work for little or no pay. Dickens himself worked in such a factory, and as a result protested child labor for the rest of
Victorian B class mainline passenger locomotive.
his life. Religion Protestantism, originally established by Martin Luther with the Protestant Reformation, began to come under threat during the early 19th century. Due to shifting intellectual philosophies as a result of the Enlightenment and the rise of rationalism, fewer people were in favor of the traditional automatic acceptance of church doctrine. Advances in historical and scientific study also prompted more people to question Biblical events. The mass movement to cities as a result of the Industrial Revolution further threatened religious acceptance, as many members of the new urban population tended to forego church attendance.
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To address these changes, Protestantism shifted away from the emphasis of rituals and formalities and moved towards emphasizing a more personal connection with Jesus Christ. The church also began to address relevant social issues, advocating for increased education and social services and opposing things such as alcoholism and the slave trade (slavery was abolished in England in 1834). With these changes, Protestantism was able to continue with surprising vigor into the 20th century. Literature An important change in the British literary landscape that occurred
Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1529.
during Dickens’s lifetime was the shift from the Romantic Era of literature into the Victorian Era. During the Romantic Era, poetry remained the primary literary genre, featuring writers such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. However, during the Victorian Era, the novel became the most prominent genre in Britain. Due to technological advancements in printing, improved means of distribution, and increasing literacy, increasingly more novels were released, primarily in a serialized format.
Dickens also emerged as Britain’s most famous popular writer during this period. Like the Romantics and his fellow Victorian writers,
Romantic poet Lord Byron. Portrait by Richard Westall, 1836.
Dickens’s work was in part a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and often satirized the changes ongoing at the time, such as workhouse conditions presented in Oliver Twist. Other major novelists of his era included Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, George Eliot, and Victor Hugo. The short story was also emerging as a new literary structure during this time, with some of the first short story collections released between 1810 and 1830. Additionally, as printing became easier and more books, magazines, and scholarly journals were released, the number of literary magazines in circulation rose dramatically. 24
English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as painted by Amelia Curran, 1819.
Politics The 19th century saw the collapse of numerous major world empires, including the Spanish, Mughal, Holy Roman, and Chinese empires. This paved the way for the growth of the British Empire, which became a leading global power with rapid expansion into India, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. By the end of the 19th century, Britain controlled one-fifth of the world’s land and one-quarter of the world’s population. Other governments whose power expanded during this time include the Russian Empire, the German Empire, the Empire of Japan, and the United States. Liberalism, a political philosophy based on the support of equality and freedom, began to spread throughout Europe during this period. Particularly, as declining economic growth became more frequent and more people witnessed the harm of poverty and unemployment, advocacy for social liberalism increased, which emphasized the responsibility of the government to address economic and social issues. Victorian writers such as Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold were early advocates of social liberalism, and critics of
Map depicting the span of the British Empire in 1899.
social injustice. Slavery worldwide decreased dramatically during the 19th century. The UK passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 which empowered the British Royal Navy to stop the global slave trade, preceding Britain’s establishment as the first colonial power to abolish slavery in 1834. The French colonies followed suit by abolishing slavery in 1848, followed by America in 1865 and Brazil in 1888. By Gabriel Oladipo, Literary Intern
Tolstoy’s Imperial Russia The Russian Empire of Tolstoy’s lifetime included war, international crisis, extensive reform, and development into an international superpower. The social and financial crises in Russia, leading to the development of a representative government, certainly impacted Tolstoy’s life and the ways in which his literature touched his readers. Leo Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 in Tula Province, Russia, in the midst of the Russo-Turkish War, which had been sparked by the advancement of Russian forces into Bulgaria, the Caucasus, and northeastern Anatolia in June of 1829, which initiated the struggle for Greek independence. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Edirne later that year, 25
which awarded Russia most of the eastern shore of the Black Sea, and Turkish acquiescence to Russian authority. This constant state of war had great influence on Tolstoy’s writing throughout his life. Despite the careful appearance of power, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were actually times of social and financial crisis for Russia. Technology and industry continued to develop after the end of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s. At the time, Russia was unable to produce the funding necessary to support such rapid industrial advancement, and thus lacked the ability to compete with other countries on an industrial level. Political uproar accompanied the renovation of Russia’s economic and social structure, as did magnificent developments in music, fine arts, science, and of course, literature. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution, Russia’s economy developed more slowly than those of other European nations, perhaps as a result of Russia’s significantly larger population. Despite Russia’s rise in status to become a global superpower, many lived in rural communities and relatively primitive agrarian societies. Between 1850 and 1900, Russia’s population doubled due to advances in industrial development, demonstrating the fastest population growth of all major international powers, excluding the United States. The industry and population growth due to Russia’s international power unfortunately led to serious issues in Russia’s foreign relations. The Crimean War arose in 1853 from a conflict between several world powers surrounding the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Land (present-day Palestine), combined with instability induced by the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the land in question. Britain attempted to negotiate peace between the Catholic French and the Eastern Orthodox Russians; when the Ottoman Empire demanded alterations to the peace agreement, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia refused to cooperate, leading the Ottoman Empire (supported by France and Britain) to declare war on Russia. A year-long siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula ended with Russia’s plea for peace, which
Franz Roubaud’s The Siege of Sevastopol, during the Crimean War (1904).
was solidified by the Treaty of Paris in March of 1856. The Crimean War was one of the first major conflicts to utilize modern military technology and to be extensively documented by photographic and written evidence, and is often regarded as a prime example of tactical, medical and logistical mismanagement. 26
Nicholas I, known for his conservative policies and classic autocracy, was succeeded by Tsar Alexander II in 1855, who initiated large-scale educational, governmental and military reform. By 1864, most of the Russian government was comprised of districts, each of which supplied governmental representatives. Russia also established the State Bank in 1866, to help with the ongoing financial depression by supporting railroad development. After the Crimean War, Russia pursued cautious and calculated foreign policies. Russia followed the United States, France, and Britain by establishing relations with Japan and obtained extensive trading concessions from China following the Second Opium War (dates).
The 1890s in Russia saw a dramatic increase in the size of the working class, paving the way for a more dynamic political atmosphere in the state.
Emperor Nicholas I, who ruled Russia 1825-1855.
Despite such advancements, much of the Western Europe still viewed Russia as hopelessly backward, and considered the nation to be a portion of Asia rather than an outpost of European thought. Tolstoy emerged as an example of the great potential of Russia, and its significance to both international history and the future of the world.
Leo Tolstoy’s work in the 1870s significantly enhanced Russia’s international presence, capturing his readers’ attention with his creativity and passion, and the perhaps unprecedented complexity of his characters. His characters arguably represented the most complex of his time. War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) asked some of life’s most profound questions. He wanted to do more than entertain his readers. The rising prominence of Russian thought, ironically heralded by Tolstoy who would later be excommunicated, was historically enabled by the changing socioeconomics
Emperor Alexander II, who ruled Russia 1855-1881.
and philosophies of the growing middle class. By Kacie Claudel, Literary Intern
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REASON, RATIONALITY, AND THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT The Age of Enlightenment, sometimes also referred to as the Age of Reason, refers to a movement of intellectual awakening in Europe generally considered to have begun at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War (1648) and which stretched until the onset of the French Revolution (1789). The United States of America’s freedom from Britain could have inspired this movement across the sea, but the developing philosophies of the Enlightenment were somewhat curtailed by the violence of the French Revolution, which disillusioned many and inspired the re-incorporation of more pragmatic or realistic aspects of philosophy. French philosopher René Descartes by Frans Hals, late 1600s.
The Enlightenment heralded reason as a means of founding an influential system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and religion, which could allow human beings to derive objective truth about reality. Leading Enlightenment thinkers argued that reason could free humankind from the superstition and religious authoritarianism that brought suffering and death to millions in the religious wars of the preceding eras. This distribution and availability of knowledge was also greatly supported by the distribution of encyclopedias, which have existed for over 2,000 years as a way for organizing factual information.
Enlightenment philosophers revolutionized conceptions of ethics, logic,
Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, 1665.
epistemology, and metaphysics, with great repercussions on the political and religious fabric of Europe. The majority of philosophers could be generally categorized as either rationalists or empiricists.
The three most recognized rationalists, who advocated that all knowledge could be gained by the power of reason alone, using physical sciences, were René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. The three most highly-regarded empiricists (John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume) rejected rationalist ideology, advocating the belief that knowledge must emerge from experience and mathematics.
German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by Christoph Bernhard Francke, 1700.
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In response, the Romantic Movement emerged. Immanuel Kant criticized widespread confidence in the power of reason. He advocated Romanticism, with an emphasis on imagination, spontaneity, and passion as a reaction against the dry intellectualism of rationalists. Criticism of the Enlightenment expressed itself in a variety of forms, such as religious conservatism, postmodernism, and feminism.
The Age of Reason also initiated lasting impact on the religious landscape of Europe, particularly the continent’s relationship to Christianity. John Locke argued
Enlightenment thinker John Locke by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1697.
that while the miracles recorded in the Bible may indicate their divine origin, reason is integral to their explanation and eventual acceptance. Alternatively, the Deist persuasion of many French philosophers denied the necessity of revelation by arguing that God need not interfere in daily life past the creation of the universe. German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder further asserted the idea that language has a decisive influence on thought, and that the meaning of a book such as the Bible is therefore open to deeper exploration and interpretation.
Politics represented another aspect of society that was largely transformed by the Enlightenment. Enlightenment principles such as its emphasis on reason, rationality, and humanism challenged long-held political traditions, including
Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley by John Smybert, 1727.
belief in the divine rule of monarchs. The overturning of such established ways of life was central to the development of the modernism movement, which held that leaders should be representatives of the people. The Enlightenment is often regarded as the source of many critical social ideas, such as centrality in freedom, democracy, and the role of reason within society. The establishment of a predetermined basis of rights had widespread impact on Europe and the world, establishing the framework for capitalism, the development of the scientific method, increased religious and racial tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics. From this point onward, the pursuit of knowledge and truth became more achievable without fear of violating established and exclusive ideas. 29
Scottish philosopher David Hume, 1753.
The Enlightenment left a lasting impact on the modern world; its rapid development of science and social progress led to the general decline of the church coupled with political and economic growth, and laid the intellectual framework which would later influence the American and French Revolutions in the late-eighteenth century. By Kacie Claudel, Literary Intern
THEOLOGY OF THE PLAY Discord portrays a meeting of three veritable geniuses of different times and places, during which each member of the trio attempts to prove that their personal religious convictions represents the “correct” interpretation of the gospel. All three presented religions are variants of Christianity, that is, a monotheistic (belief in a single God) religion which accepts Jesus Christ as the son of God and the savior of the human race. These beliefs are expressed in creeds – beliefs, derived from the Latin “creedo” – which
Stories of life and passion of Christ by Gaudenzio Ferrari, 1513.
assert acceptance of Jesus’s suffering and death on the cross to cleanse humanity of sin before His resurrection and ascension into heaven, and the assumption that he will return to judge the earth and take believers with him to the Kingdom of God. However, the basic religious doctrine is not without conflict and dispute, and this general belief has splintered off into hundreds of related denominations. Dickens was a practitioner of Anglicanism, Jefferson followed Deist teachings, and Tolstoy began as a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, though he was later excommunicated as an outspoken advocate of Christian Anarchy. Their beliefs are expressed throughout the play in their unique yet related perspectives regarding the others’ theologies and their individual convictions and authorship of biblical texts.
Anglicanism Anglicanism, the Christian doctrine embraced by Charles Dickens, is a denomination derived from the Church of England. During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, many churches broke away from the papal authority of Catholicism to seek respite from what they believed to be corrupt teaching. The Church of England emerged from such doctrinal shift, with the decision to become independent largely driven by Henry VIII’s desire to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon – a practice forbidden by the Catholic Church. Henry VIII’s successor, Mary I, brought the English Church back to the Pope and Roman Catholicism, but Elizabeth I returned it again to a national authority in 1558.
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Anglicanism expanded beyond England in the 17th and 18th centuries, largely as a result of the activities of missionary groups, such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Church Missionary Society, who were sent to British colonies, such as India, the West Indies, and Canada, in order to convert believers to Christianity and save their souls from eternal damnation. After the American Revolution ended in 1783 with Britain’s defeat, the lack of British power in America led to a loss of power for the Church of England; bishops could no longer be ordained in America, a result of the close ties between the Church and British monarchy, leading to the increasing
King Henry VIII of England.
independence of national churches in North America. Today, the Anglican Communion, who follow the spiritual leadership of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury, consists of 38 national and regional churches as well as six extra provincial churches, comprising some 85 million members. Anglicanism does not embrace a central authority, such as the Pope represents for Roman Catholicism; instead, Anglican churches make their own governing decisions with some influential precedents set by the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates’ Meeting, and the aforementioned Archbishop, all of which are meant to be consultative and collaborative meetings in which religious authorities can discuss and debate the practices of
Queen Mary I of England.
their respective churches. The central belief of Anglicanism asserts that there is one God, consisting of three elements: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Anglican doctrine also posits that the decision embraced by humanity to live according to sin causes a breakdown among these three elements, which necessitated the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Son, in order to help humanity reconcile with God. To be considered a member of the Anglican Church, one must be baptized and partake in the Eucharist, which is the consuming of consecrated bread and wine to represent Christ’s body and blood as was performed at the Last Supper, the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples before his crucifixion.
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Queen Elizabeth I of England.
Members emphasize public and private prayer as expressions of faith, as well as the acceptance of the major creeds known as the Apostles and the Nicene, both of which confirm the story of Christ and belief in the three elements, as well as the Athanasian, which confirms the equal standing of each element. Anglican beliefs are largely derived from scripture (the sacred writings of a religion), reason, and tradition. The religion is often considered “via media”, meaning it represents the moderate position between radical Protestantism and strict Roman Catholicism. Anglicanism is strongly related to Catholicism, as it is identified as a part of God’s one true church and falls under the leadership of bishops, but includes many of the reformed tenants introduced during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century with Martin Luther’s The Ninety-Five Theses, which condemned the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. Though Anglicanism is generally diverse and not all churches agree on all specifics of doctrine and ritual, Anglicans generally consider the Bible to be a guide to everything necessary to salvation. Catechisms are also used to help children or adult converts understand key beliefs of the church. The Anglican Church also uses the Book of Common Prayer, a collection of traditional prayers compiled in 1549 and thoroughly revised throughout later centuries. Other important documents include The Thirty-Nine Articles, The Books of Homilies, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and the ChicagoLambeth Quadrilateral, all of which are consistently used as part of doctrinal study. By Chloe Loos, Dramaturgy Intern
Christian Deism Christian Deism, as passionately argued by Thomas Jefferson, first appeared in England during the 17th century as a result of the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, both movements which began to question aspects of doctrine and argue the importance of thought. Charles Blount was the first recognized deist of England; he wrote Religio Laici in 1683 and Oracles of Reason in 1693 in which he claimed that much of traditional Christianity had been invented by leaders of the church to maintain their power.
Deism resulted from individual oppositions to doctrine considered to be unreasonable or illogical, such as original sin, which derived from the partaking of the fruit from the tree of knowledge and which led to humanity’s fall from grace. Deists believed it unfair of God to automatically condemn all of humanity for acts committed by their predecessors. That, as well as the fact that over the course of all of human history, Jesus Christ was a relatively new and a rather Western divine figure, led Deists to believe that a loving God would not treat people so unfairly; why would all people be condemned to hell for not accepting the teachings of a man they had never heard of? What happened to everyone who lived before the time of Christ?
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These questions led to the rejection of certain scripture or doctrines which conflicted with the teachings of Jesus and prompted further reform of Christian theology, primarily by writers and intellectuals, resulting in the less-organized and centralized structure of Christian Deism. Many noted thinkers of the time who identified themselves as Anglican – such as John Locke, Thomas Woolston, and Matthew Tindal – felt that Christianity served as a means by which to confirm human truths. Others who expressed Deist ideas include leaders of the American Revolution including Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Due to the emphasis on logic and morality, it is interesting to note that there was an attempt during the French Revolution to
Thomas Paine, 1791.
replace the Catholic Church with non-Christian Deism; the attempt was unsuccessful, but the theoretical doctrine continued to spread to the United States. Although it appeared after Deism made its way to America, Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature (1801) is sometimes considered the Bible of American Deism. The tenets of Christian Deism also reject anything supernatural, such as the revelation of truth or miracles which contradict nature, and oppose the concepts of original sin, the divinity of Jesus Christ and atonement achieved by his death (also known as the Trinitarian doctrines, or belief in the Holy Trinity), and predestination, or the idea that individuals are born already saved or condemned, as it made God seem unnecessarily cruel. Deists believe in the existence of God as expressed by nature and reasoning, and choose to honor God through virtuous behavior and love.
Benjamin Franklin, 1785.
Likewise, they believe that individuals are accountable for their own actions, and that forgiveness can be obtained through genuine repentance. Today, contemporary Deism attempts to update Classical Deism by merging it with modern philosophy and new scientific knowledge, which has splintered beliefs even further than those deviations which appeared in the 18th century. Central agreements include the emphasis on reason, personal experience, and the natural world to inform decisions. Still, the acceptance of God without divinity lends Deism a very wide appeal, as evidenced by the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which indicated that those who identify themselves as deist increased by 717% percent from 1990 to 2001.
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Russian Orthodoxy Russian Orthodoxy is part of the larger Orthodox Christian movement, which attempts to follow the original and traditional religion as taught by Jesus to the apostles. The church is organized hierarchically with low-level parishes that feed into an eparchy, which are governed by bishops; larger eparchies are controlled by a Metropolitan archbishop. The highest powers are invested in the Holy Synod, a gathering of seven bishops chaired by the Patriarch, who does not have direct canonical power outside of Moscow,
The Holy Synod, the highest authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 1917.
unlike the Catholic Pope. Traditionally, the church is believed to have been founded by the Apostle Andrew, but it much more likely resulted directly from the  baptism of Prince Vladimir, the ruler of a group of East Slavic tribes, known as the Kievan Rus, in 988 A.D. Due to the imperial expansion of the Byzantine Empire and the resultant spread of their culture and beliefs, the Greek monks Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius translated parts of the Bible into Slavic in 863, aiding Vladimir’s expansion of Christianization to his citizens. Changes in doctrinal practice were introduced throughout the following centuries by The Hundred Chapter Council in 1551,
Vladimir I, ruler of the Kievan Rus 980-1015.
which focused on the reformation of internal life and regulation with the state and thereby unifying church ceremonies, as well as by Patriarch Nikon’s 1652 policy changes which included rewriting church-service books to be in greater agreement with scholars and Greek practitioners, and by the massive control of Peter the Great (1682-1725) who sought to modernize all church practices. A second expansion of Russian Orthodoxy took place in the late-17th and early-18th centuries as a result of missionary agendas as well as financial and political incentives granted by the church to political leaders and their constituents if they would convert. 34
The late-18th century saw a spiritual revival in the final decades of the imperial order, although some individuals took a more esoteric path in which they placed greater emphasis on spiritualism, private prayer, mysticism, belief in the supernatural, and Eastern religions, as Tolstoy would have witnessed. He was excommunicated from the church in 1901 after writing works praising Christian Anarchy, a belief which dictates the innate anarchy of the Bible as a construct, as the only important authority should be that of God. This focus on mysticism, ideology, and philosophy represents a major difference between Eastern and Western Orthodoxy, which emphasizes practicality and humanity (rather than mysticism). After the Russian Revolution of 1917 in which the Bolsheviks dismantled the Tsarist autocracy, a separation of church and state was enforced which led to a major decline in the power of the church and an increase in repression and secularization. Orthodox means “right believing� and implies that one follows the beliefs and practices of the first seven ecumenical councils of the 4th to 8th centuries which attempted to arrive at an agreement of a unified Christendom as dictated by Jesus. Orthodox members desire to follow the exact religion as established by the apostles. Two major beliefs of the Russian Orthodox Church are the acceptance of the Holy Trinity, representing three distinct divine persons that are bound together by an eternal divine essence, and the doctrine of resurrection which regards the crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation of Jesus Christ as literal events. Members also believe that the sinful individual can be saved by Jesus and that humans undergo deification in which they join the divine nature by uniting with the savior. During services, churchgoers often remain standing as the priest and deacon recite and lay out the Eucharist during the Liturgy of Preparation, as the congregation recites the Liturgy of the Carachumens and the Liturgy of the Faithful. Iconography of the Russian Orthodox Church is also very important and distinctly represents a strong Eastern influence with images of biblical stories or portraits of divine beings. Orthodoxy places extreme importance on tradition along with scripture and believes that both are equally important. There are over 300 million adherents today, making Russian Orthodoxy the third most populous Christian Church in the world, trailing behind Catholicism and Protestantism. By Chloe Loos, Dramaturgy Intern
THE GOSPELS The Holy Bible has four individual gospels which serve as a record of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy expressed conflicting personal ideologies, as well as suspicions about the Christian Church and the compilation of the Holy Bible. This lead each man to rewrite the gospels of the New Testament by using the Holy Bible as a source text to develop their own respective interpretations of the life and teachings of Jesus. Their respective gospels reveal their differing perspectives on ethics, government, tradition, the clergy, and the purpose of life. 35
The traditions of the Christian Church originally evolved out of Judaism. The Holy Bible, the authoritative literature for the Christian Church, is a compilation of ancient Jewish texts and newer writings, the oldest of which date back to the first century AD. The text of the Bible distinguishes the original Jewish writings as the Old Testament, while the newer texts are delineated as the New Testament. Through the entirety of the Bible, the central belief is that God cerated the world. The Old Testament details the history of God’s relationship to man beginning with creation and including the fall of humanity into sin, and God’s promise to absolve man from the consequences of sin by reconciliation through a savior-king. Christianity was born
Mosaic depiction of Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, on display at the Cefalú Cathedral, Sicily.
out of the belief that God’s promise of salvation is achieved through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The New Testament is comprised of 27 books, which include letters from early church fathers to believers, a revelation about the end of time, detailed events of the early church, and the four gospels. The four gospels are represented by the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and each tells the story of the life, death, resurrection, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth from the perspective of each book’s respective writer. Early church fathers were motivated to create a canon to describe the general law of the Christian faith, in order to form a consistent basis of belief and combat the constant threat of heresy. There is evidence of a standardized list of Christian canonical writings dating back to the third century AD, indicating that the Christian canon developed over the course of approximately 300 years. While the Old Testament was readily accepted as a result of Jewish influence on the early church, the compilation of the New Testament was highly scrutinized. The process of canonizing the books of the New Testament involved analysis of which books could be used for spiritual edification, in comparison to the books that were already considered to be the result of divine inspiration. Numerous other books and letters were considered for inclusion in the New Testament, but many were eventually rejected as unreliable, unnecessary, or heretical. The Apocryphal writings are a set of books dating from 400 BC-100 AD that were accepted for a time, but eventually rejected for inclusion in the New Testament. Scholars disagree as to whether these writings were considered divine at the beginning of the Christian Church due to their lack of references in other canonical books and writings by early church fathers. The Apocrypha was included in the original Holy Bible compiled by King James in 1611, but was eventually removed in 1885 AD. The Roman Catholic Church has accepted the Apocrypha as divinely inspired (as are the Old and New 36
Testaments), while the Protestant Church considers the Apocrypha to be less important as a source information. The Apocrypha represents a compilation of 14-15 books which focus on the social, political and religious history of Judea while it was governed by Alexander the Great (c. 356-323 BC), Ptolemy (c. 360-284 BC) and subsequent leaders. Separate from the Apocrypha, books that were completely rejected from the New Testament also include 15 non-canonical gospels, because they were believed to represent heretical accounts which conflicted with other canonical writings. While the exact objections to each book vary, reported heresy in the non-canonical books include discrepancies related to the nature of God’s salvation as achieved by faith and the divinity (or humanity) of Jesus Christ. The gospels are books written by the early followers of Jesus Christ (c. 4BC – 30~33AD) to describe his life and teachings. There is evidence to suggest these writings were considered canonical by the early church as early as the late first century and early second century AD. The gospels share similar stories, with minor details varying, and unique stories about Jesus performing miracles and teaching. The church has traditionally believed them to be consistent with each other, though scholars continue to debate their similarities. Each of the gospel writers describes the life, ministry, death and, at times, resurrection story of Jesus (copies of the gospel of Mark show an added chapter detailing the resurrection) while emphasizing slightly different perspectives.
The Gospel of Matthew has themes that include Jesus being the messiah of
First page of the Gospel of Mark in Armenian, by Sargis Pitsak, 14th century.
the OT by describing the prophecies and showing how Jesus fulfilled them. The themes found in the Gospel of Mark include Jesus as a servant and prophet, God humbled, to restore humanity. The Gospel of Luke shows detailed historical context by referencing events and people in power at the time, and he stresses the idea that Jesus came to save the world, not just the Jewish people, therefore all need to hear of him. The Gospel of John emphasizes those saved by grace as being God’s family. The gospels as respectively adapted by Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy were all heavily influenced by the life and teachings of Jesus, while their writings interpret of his ethical teachings. Key beliefs in Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief involve the necessary separation of church and state, simplicity versus excess, and pacifism.
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Tolstoy believed that Christianity is fundamentally in opposition to the state, in that faith cannot be commanded or demanded; thus, Christ was crucified to save Christians from the imposed will of the state. Tolstoy further posited that if all individuals could speak to God through prayer, then the need for the clergy and the church as a public institution is eliminated, and becomes only a channel of power for mankind. This philosophy led him to contribute to the theory of Christian Anarchism, which asserts that the relationship between church and state must be dissolved, as heavily influenced by his personal observations regarding the invasive role the Russian Orthodox Church played in the government and in the lives of Russian citizens. This led to his distrust of religious and political leaders, strong advocacy for the separation of the concepts of religious practice and morality, and the observation that at times, those most closelyaffiliated with religion and authority were the most corrupt. Tolstoy’s religious philosophies were also influenced by his sense of meaninglessness derived from monetary pleasure, as he continually sought happiness despite financial stability, leading him to appreciate what he saw as the “simpler” and deeper joys of the working class. Tolstoy’s version of the gospel thus accepted little that was present in the canonical gospels; he narrowed Jesus’s teachings to the Sermon on the Mount described in the Gospel of Matthew, and focused specifically on one passage which emphasizes the practice of pacifism in the face of oppression. Tolstoy believed that violence in all forms was morally wrong; in resisting violence, oppressors would experience love, grace and forgiveness, as ultimately exemplified by Jesus’s death on the cross. Tolstoy’s gospel also rejects tradition and the supernatural in favor of rationality, and thus does not include the resurrection as the canonical gospels do; his interpretations ends with the death and burial of Jesus.
Lev Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in 1908. This is the first color photograph taken in Russia.
Alternatively, the gospel of Charles Dickens’s interpretation is somewhat difficult to classify, as biographers have identified both Anglican and Unitarian inclinations within his writings, based on his commitment to Anglican churches in his lifetime and his dislike of the theology surrounding the concept of Hell. Dickens’s purpose in writing The Life of our Lord was to communicate the general story and teachings of Jesus to his children as important, but not specific, ethical lessons which encouraged love, forgiveness and compassion. His gospel was not intended for publication, and wasn’t published until 1934, a year after the death of his last surviving child. Dickens’s proclamations of Christianity were very broad, and largely in accordance with the 38
Charles Dickens, 1867-68. Portrait by Jeremiah Gurney.
Anglican Church of England which emphasizes both public and private prayer, as well as the maintenance of tradition including some adaptations from the traditional Christian (Catholic) Church, such as the elimination of a central authority.
Thomas Jefferson constructed his version of the gospel, now known as the Jefferson Bible, by extracting only the words and practical ethics of Jesus and leaving behind the sections of scripture he believed were added by the church to legitimize its power. Jefferson was greatly impacted by the Enlightenment, which stressed the attainment of truth through reason and logic, which subsequently affected theories of philosophy, science, politics and religion. Thus, Jefferson was suspicious of the clergy system and the presence of miracles within the gospels, which The Jefferson Bible, at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
he believed to be unscientific and the attempt of church leaders
to intimidate and control church membership. He advocated the moral journey of the individual and the separation of church and state, and despised the clergy, whom he believed regulated truth for others rather than allowing individuals to discover truth for themselves. His bible was not meant for publication; rather it was intended to serve as a guide for how a reasonable citizen should behave in society. The interaction between each philosopher and his interpretation of the gospel varied according to their individual beliefs and observations of the world. The Jefferson Bible was created to support Jefferson’s ideal system of American government and the implementation of free speech, as well as freedom of thought and religion, to create a harmonious society. Tolstoy’s interpretation of the gospel greatly reflected his own personal experience, called for the elimination of the institutions of church and state and challenged Russian authority, while Dickens’s gospel reflected traditional Christian teachings that he largely kept to himself and his family during his lifetime. Each individual interpretation, and the comparisons between them, provide a window into their ways of thinking, their personal and political environments, and their respective methods of discovering truth, both in the world and beyond. By Angelina Valencia, Dramaturgy Intern
COMMON BIBLICAL MISCONCEPTIONS As frequently discussed within ...Discord, many people differ in their understanding and interpretation of the Bible. Many of these differences are based in doctrine and rooted in important spiritual distinctions, some of which have led to the formation of new denominations. However, as the Bible became a more familiar part of society throughout history, some 39
ideas and portrayals have become common knowledge, despite lack of verification in the actual text of the Bible (much as the famous “balcony scene” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet never actually mentions a balcony). For believers and non-believers, knowing some of these misconceptions can increase one’s understanding of the text and help them better navigate a society in which Biblical images are quite common.
The Date of Christmas
Depiction of an infant Jesus with Mary and Joseph.
Though we now celebrate Christmas on December 25th, the Bible doesn’t actually reference that as the date of Jesus’s birth. Pope Julius the First decreed the 25th of December as the official date of celebration in 350 CE. Potential reasons for the date’s selection include being nine months after Jesus was thought to have been conceived, it coincided with the date of the Winter Solstice, or that it corresponded to one of many pagan festivals.
The Apple It is widely believed that the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is an apple, but the Bible doesn’t actually specify the type of fruit. Early Latin translations use the word mali,
Adam and Eve by Titian, 1550.
meaning both “evil” and “apple”. Since that time, the fruit in question has commonly been depicted as an apple in popular art.
The Three Kings The Bible doesn’t actually specify the arrival of the three kings, commonly referred to as magi, or wise men, who came bearing gifts for the baby Jesus. It is widely assumed that there were three because Jesus received three gifts, but the actual number of giftbearers is never identified.
Mosaic depiction of the three kings magi (kings) bringing gifts to baby Jesus, on display at the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy.
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Evolution of the Bible The Bible found in most homes and commonly read today is not the same Bible that has always existed. Over the millennia the Bible has been translated and recopied, leading to altered meanings or passages which differ from those in earlier versions of the text, particularly as those transcribing it changed or added to the text based on their own spiritual conceptions and beliefs. This has been proven through an examination of the historical periods of each book, as well as through the discovery of earlier written documents, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, being among the oldest known surviving Biblical manuscripts, provided important information about how the text had changed over time. For example, many biblical scholars believe that based on its writing style and content, 1 Timothy may not have been written by Paul as is often asserted, but may actually date to a later time.
Construction of the Bible The word Bible comes from the plural Greek form ta biblia, meaning "the books". The Bible is not a single book, as is often assumed, but actually consists of a collection of books and writings by various authors, and as such contains various writing styles and messages.
Definition of God “Yahweh” as depicted in the Hebrew Bible is different from “God” as depicted in modern Christianity in that the Christian God is attributed with omnipotence and omniscience, while the Hebrew “Yahweh” is observed to change his mind, among other things. Examples of this include Yahweh regretting the creation of humankind because their actions tended toward evil, and Yahweh controlling his anger towards the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf, opting not to destroy them.
Mary Magdalene In the book of Luke, there is an account of a prostitute anointing the feet of Jesus with tears and ointment and wiping them with her hair. It is often thought that this person is Mary Magdalene, who is mentioned later in the
The Penitent Magdalene by Domenico Tintoretto, c. 1598.
book; because of this, many think that Mary was a prostitute. However, the identity of the woman is not specified, nor is it explicitly stated that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. By Gabriel Oladipo, Literary Intern 41
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INTROSPECTION In the play, Jefferson, Dickens, and Tolstoy each promote what they perceive as the “path of righteousness” while challenging one another’s conceptions. In life, their interaction with the Christian gospel mixed with their experiences and beliefs to lead each man to create their own, personal gospel. In the world of the play, they are then prompted by their interactions with one another in death to look inward as they face the many contradictions between their lived beliefs and practice. The process of introspection is apparent in the thoughtful and individualized reinterpretations of scripture provided by all three men. Introspection is a philosophical and psychological concept, first developed by Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century. Wundt was the first to establish a lab specifically for the study of the mind, and is credited with the official separation of the science of psychology from
Larry Cedar as Thomas Jefferson in ATC’s ...Discord.
philosophy and physiology. Wundt first introduced introspection in an experiment in which subjects were taught to carefully and objectively observe and analyze their own thoughts. Different subjects demonstrated different introspective results to the same stimulus; an individual subject’s response to the same stimulus could even change between trials. Though the experimental results were inconclusive and a common process of the mind was not identified, the individuality of introspection was officially proposed. Philosophical introspection refers to the informal process of personally analyzing what is true about one’s emotional and mental state at a given moment or in the recent past; thus, it is the conscious effort of paying attention to one’s own mind. Introspection is considered a type of knowledge in the field of epistemology and is aimed at gaining knowledge, judgements and beliefs about mental events. While some believe there are substantial benefits to the consistent practice 42
Mark Gagliardi as Charles Dickens in ATC’s ...Discord.
of introspection such as increased personal awareness, better emotional and mental health and personal betterment, many philosophers agree that it is difficult to practice because an individual is limited to the amount of personal knowledge that they already possess. New discoveries can be made, but the presence of subconscious feelings and beliefs make it impossible for a person to exercise pure objectivity in viewing themselves and others. Informal introspection poses journalistic questions (who, what, where, when, why, and how) that deal with present circumstances, such as present hopes for the future, emotional reactions, mental processes, current goals and recent choices. Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy each deviated from traditional Christian beliefs through a process of sorting through their traditional practices, personal belief systems and the discovery of apparent discrepancies.
Armin Shimerman as Count Leo Tolstoy in ATC’s ...Discord.
Thomas Jefferson’s emphasis on knowable data and logical thinking suggests that he may have been the most likely candidate to practice philosophical introspection while Tolstoy, on the other hand, would likely have been wary of the credibility of introspection as an extension of the influence that the church and state exerted on the minds of its members, making the reliability of such knowledge questionable. Alternatively, while Dickens was unlikely to meet the idea of introspection with hostility, it could be argued that introspection was in competition with other types of knowledge such as sensory information, experience, and intuition, as indicated by the accounts of his personal friends describing his occasional irrational and erratic behavior. By Angelina Valencia, Dramaturgy Intern
EPISTEMOLOGY: KNOWLEDGE, ETHICS, AND TRUTH The systems of reality embraced by Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy were greatly influenced by their social, economic, political and personal environments. While all three men focused on Jesus of Nazareth as a source of truth, their ideologies differ from one another as greatly as their various interpretations of the gospel. In the field of philosophy, the process of accepting knowledge and creating morality, undertaken differently be each man, is known as epistemology.
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Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the questions, “How do we know?” and “What is the nature of knowledge?” Epistemology delves into the ways in which a person gathers information, whether by logic, experience, intuition, external influences, or other means of acquisition, as well as how people relate to reality and the ways in which they think and process information. Epistemologists claim that knowledge is a state of mind: unconscious things cannot “know” anything. The goal of thinking or gathering knowledge is to try and maximize the amount of "truth" while minimizing the level of what is "false". How do we do this, and what makes a person come to believe that something is true? What identifies something as knowledge, as opposed to a random idea, wishful thinking, or an act of faith? Epistemologists posit that knowledge is derived from the interaction between three things: belief, truth and justification. Belief with regard to knowledge is a willingness to accept that something is accurate, and to act accordingly. Thus, a person can only know something if they are inclined to believe the thought or idea behind the concept. However, truth is also a condition of knowledge: belief cannot constitute knowledge alone, because not every belief is true. At times, people adopt beliefs to avoid reality or to enhance positivity. Epistemologists would argue that if a belief is not true, it cannot constitute knowledge, nor can an unjustified or random belief be true, because no foundation exists upon which to base its validity. For this reason, objective truths must exist in order for knowledge to exist; otherwise no order or basis would exist upon Armin Shimerman, Mark Gagliardi, and Larry Cedar in ATC’s ...Discord.
which one belief may be chosen over another.
Furthermore, an idea is justifiable when proper logic cannot dictate why the idea absolutely cannot be true; therefore, many ideas are justifiable, though not necessarily accurate. The concept of justification can be thought of according to the following scenario: imagine that a man is walking down a street and sees houses. However, these are not really houses, but are facades painted to look like houses. He doesn’t know that they aren’t real, but he sees one and says, “That is a house.” His belief is justified because his senses lead him to believe that the houses are real. However, if he were to look behind the façade and realize the lack of a house, he could not be justified in his assertion, “That is a house,” because he has proof that the assertion is absolutely untrue.
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Justification, belief, and truth intertwine to create a unique belief system for each person. Additionally, there are four main categories from which people tend to draw knowledge and develop their morality: experience, logic, intuition and testimony. Experience is the process of learning by trial and error, while logic is the process of reasoning based on strict principles of validity. Instinct refers to “gut feelings”, moments of intuition, or immediate knowledge without conscious reasoning. Finally, testimony is information gathered from a reliable outside source. The three historical figures in ...Discord employ different methods of interacting with reality, which affects their methods by which they each gather knowledge and develop their personal moralities. Thomas Jefferson was considered a “child of the Enlightenment” due to the emphasis he placed on logic, reasoning, and freedom of thought in order to discover truth. Enlightenment philosophers believed that a person’s life and character could be improved through education, reason, and observation of the natural world. Jefferson adopted many of Mark Gagliardi, Larry Cedar, and Armin Shimerman in ATC’s ...Discord.
these beliefs, which guided his construction of his personal
gospel, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as the Declaration of Independence. Reason was Jefferson’s primary method of processing reality, which he held as the most important aspect because it was the most tangible for him. Reasoning is the most active way of interacting with reality, which suited Jefferson’s passion and need for certainty and order. Jefferson was heavily intellectual and relied on experience and intuition to gather information; he loved to experiment and glean truths from observation. His use of testimony as a source of knowledge is also arguable, because although he gathered knowledge from reliable sources, he seems to have often used it only as a starting point for his own individual reasoning. Dickens, on the other hand, experienced multiple levels of economic stability during his lifetime, greatly preferring a more lavish lifestyle. He was raised and baptized his children as Anglican, and although he believed that Jesus provided valuable ethical teachings, he was deeply suspicious of those who publicly proclaimed their faith and was discreet about which branch of the Christian church he most closely associated with, demonstrating both Unitarian sympathies and connections to the Anglican Church of England. Of the three men, Dickens leaned most heavily toward religious tradition, though with certain modern adaptations. Dickens’s summation of the gospel suggests that he was less suspicious of the Church and its compilation of holy scripture than Tolstoy and Jefferson; he retained most of the general ideas found in the gospel while seeking to develop it into a more fluid story. His acceptance of traditional Christian beliefs and commitment to transmit them to his family also suggest a deeper dependence on testimony than Tolstoy and Jefferson. He did differ from the Church 45
in certain areas, such as the theology surrounding Hell. The Christ depicted in his story of the gospel was a charitable, compassionate, and tolerant man; his objection to Hell was a moral one, which also suggests the use of intuition and reason as a means to discover truth. Dickens was described as a social crusader, who used his pen to write about people that society overlooked, such as the poor and orphaned; it is arguable that this belief came either from the teachings of Jesus or his personal experience of witnessing society’s attitude towards social outcasts. Dickens was described by his friends as hospitable and friendly but erratic, which might imply a tendency to rely on experience and intuition rather than reason. In slight contrast to the other two theologians, Count Leo Tolstoy’s experience with wealth left him morally unsatisfied, leading him to deeply question the meaning of life. He witnessed corruption within the government and the Church, particularly where the two institutions intersected, and which left him suspicious of the authority figures who managed society. His antiauthoritarian beliefs provided an inspiration for his interpretation of the gospel, and a foundation for his
Mark Gagliardi, Larry Cedar, and Armin Shimerman in ATC’s ...Discord.
theory of Christian Anarchy. He greatly valued knowledge, going so far as to learn the original written languages of the Bible in order to directly translate and more thoroughly understand the text without the impositions of other interpreters. However, while he valued reason, his belief that some truths were unknowable as the result of lacking or corrupted information or evidence suggest that experience and intuition also heavily influence his acquisition of knowledge and truth, and his interaction with his environment. He was also highly suspicious of testimony, a result of his distrust of the organized institutions of church and state. Epistemologists credit multiple environments and influences with shaping our process of discovering and accepting truth, including our personal experiences, the belief systems of those around us, our senses, and political and economic environments, just to name a few. They believe that our multiple sources of influence, subconscious or not, have helped to mold the way we interact with reality, as did the environments in which Jefferson, Dickens and Tolstoy lived. What are your sources of influence? How do you decide what is true? By Angelina Valencia, Dramaturgy Intern
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GLOSSARY Abhor: to regard with disgust and hatred. Abysmal: extremely bad; appalling. Adrift: without purpose or guidance. Amulet: an ornament or small piece of jewelry thought to give protection against evil, danger or disease. Example of an amulet.
Atheism: a belief that there is no God. Benevolent: well-meaning and kindly. Bilious: spiteful; bad-tempered. Botch: to carry out (a task) badly or carelessly. Bungle: to make or be prone to the making of mistakes. Artistic depiction of a cherub.
Celestial: supremely good. Cherub: a winged angelic being. Crucifixion: a method of slow and painful execution in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross and left to hang for several days until eventual death. Dejected: sad and depressed; dispirited. Depiction of the crucifixion of Christ.
Depravity: moral corruption; wickedness. 47
Distillation: the extraction of the essential meaning or most important aspects of something. Dogma: a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Emancipate: to set free, especially from legal, social, or political restrictions. Eminent: used to emphasize the presence of a positive quality. Emissary: a person sent on a special mission, usually as a diplomatic representative. Expectorate: to cough or spit out phlegm from the throat or lungs. Futility: pointlessness or uselessness. Gonorrhea: a sexually transmitted infection. Hypothesis: a proposition made as a basis for reasoning, without any assumption of its truth. Impeach: to call into question the integrity or validity of a person or practice. Implore: to beg someone earnestly or desperately to do something. Inoculate:to treat (a person) with a vaccine to produce immunity against a disease. Leprosy: a chronic bacterial infection which manifests in granulomas (inflammation) of the skin, respiratory tract, eyes and nerves. While treatment is available, leprosy carries a vicious social stigma; some countries still retain isolated leper colonies in which to quarantine those with the disease. Magistrate: a civil officer or lay judge who administers the law. Martyr: a person who is killed because of religious or other beliefs.
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Marzipan: a confection consisting primarily of sugar or honey and almond meal. Migraine: a primary headache disorder characterized by recurrent headaches that are moderate to severe, and often extremely sensitive to light and/or sound. Monograph: a detailed written study of a single specialized subject or an aspect of it. Muse: a force often personified as a woman, who serves as the source of inspiration for a creative artist. A marzipan pig.
Mutilate: to inflict serious damage upon a person or thing. Numskull: a stupid or foolish person. Obelisk: a stone pillar set up as a monument or landmark. Onerous: involving an amount of effort and difficulty that is oppressively burdensome. Pagan: a person holding religious beliefs other than those of the main world religions. Pickpocket: someone who steals money or other valuables from a victim without them noticing the theft at the time. Plausible: (of an argument or statement) seeming reasonable or probable. Pneumonia: an infection that inflames the air sacs in one or both lungs. Posterity: all future generations of people. Preposterous: contrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous. An obelisk.
Profligate: recklessly extravagant or wasteful in the use of resources.
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Repository: a place, building, or receptacle where things are or may be stored. Serene: calm, peaceful, and untroubled; tranquil. SoufflĂŠ: a baked egg-based dish which originated in early eighteenth-century France. State of the Union: a speech presented by the President of the United States to a joint A soufflĂŠ.
session of the United States Congress, typically delivered annually. Swineherd: a person who tends pigs. Tribunal: any person or institution with the authority to judge, or determine claims or disputes. Unanimous: an opinion, decision, or vote upheld, supported or carried by everyone involved.
Artistic depiction of a swineherd.
Venial: a slight and pardonable offense or occurrence.
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CROSSWORD PUZZLE
Intersecting Lives ACROSS 1 “Let the heart swell into what ___ it will” (Dickens, “Little Dorrit”) 5 Guitar’s five-string cousin 7 Add to one’s territory, as Russia did to Crimea in the 1700s 9 Jefferson used one to edit the gospels 14 Acquaintance of Dickens and literary rival of Tolstoy, Fyodor ___ 16 Having an unexpected twist 18 Adams and Jefferson declared one late in their lives after years of bickering 19 More greasy 20 Nonviolent Indian to whom Tolstoy wrote his last letter 21 Character that Tolstoy threw under a train, Anna ___ 23 Jefferson once received a 1,234-pound wheel of this as a gift 26 Jefferson political foe who was shot by his former vice-president, Aaron Burr 28 Dickens’ pen name 29 Jefferson purchase that doubled the size of the U.S. 30 Mountains that Dickens and Tolstoy once visited in the mid-1800s 32 Figure out, as a mystery 33 The Declaration of ___ 35 Crucifixion site, “the place of the skull” 38 While writing “Bleak House,” Dickens would often plunge his head into a ___ of cold water 39 Subject of a “head on a platter” painting owned by Jefferson, John the ___ 40 Name of Jefferson’s pet mockingbird, which was often on his shoulder when he answered the door (also, the nickname of a future president) 41 Jefferson’s wise nickname, “the ___ of (11 Down)” 42 “No nation is ___ where wine is cheap” (Jefferson)
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For answers visit arizonatheatre.org/discord.
By Merl Reagle
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DOWN 1 “There is something ... burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how ___ the world becomes” (Tolstoy) 2 Dickens’ last completed novel, “___ Mutual Friend” 3 Tolstoy’s “___ and Peace” 4 Dickens novel, “Great ___” 6 Day of Jefferson’s Declaration and death (2 words) 8 French leader from whom Jefferson bought 29 Across 10 The Promised Land (also, a national park in Utah) 11 Jefferson’s house, which means “little mountain” in Italian 12 Tolstoy’s last novel, about the Christlike redemption of a nobleman 13 String instrument played by Jefferson 15 Jefferson didn’t like to do it in public 17 Jefferson often powdered his hair to avoid wearing them 22 “Art ___ life”
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23 Least popular Dickens novel, “Martin ___” 24 Tolstoy’s early “___ Sketches,” about military life in Crimea’s capital during a siege in the 1850s 25 Jefferson was the first president to live in it full time (2 words) 27 One more time 29 “Anything is better than ___ and deceit!” (Tolstoy) 31 Dickens novel, “The ___ Papers” 34 Evil One who tempted Jesus thrice 35 Name of Dickens’ pet raven 36 ___ Lucerne (Dickens visited it in 1844) 37 “No crib for ___” (line from “Away in a Manger”) MERL REAGLE is the Sunday crossword creator for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and 50 other major papers. His “100th Anniversary Crossword Book,” the 17th in a series, was published in November 2013.