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adaptation in theatre and performance

elizabethan and jacobean reappropriation in contemporary british drama ‘upstart crows’ GRAHAM SAUNDERS

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance Series editors Vicky Angelaki Department of Film, Theatre & Television University of Reading Reading, UK Kara Reilly Department of Drama University of Exeter Exeter, UK

The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical constitution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of reference at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between theatre and society.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14373

Graham Saunders

Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama ‘Upstart Crows’

Graham Saunders University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance ISBN 978-1-137-44452-3 ISBN 978-1-137-44453-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44453-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940197 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.

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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.

Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Nicholas Woodeson in Jubilee, 2001 © RSC 103616 Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Preface

A long and venerable tradition has existed in British theatre by which successive generations of playwrights have come to Shakespeare’s body of dramatic work with the intention of reclaiming it for their own purposes.

Even before the fiftieth anniversary of the playwright’s death William D’Avenant, perhaps bolstered by rumours pertaining to his direct blood lineage, put on early Restoration productions of Hamlet (1661), Macbeth (1664) and The Tempest (1667) that included alterations. Many of these involved the excision of politically sensitive language on the question of regicide and alterations, whereby depiction of kingship in Shakespeare’s time accorded more harmoniously to the changed realities of royal authority after the Restoration. The tradition carried on into the eighteenth century, most notably with Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear (1681), that even managed to usurp the Shakespearian original until well into the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw the practice continue with adaptations such as Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), that not only based itself around the Hollywood Gangster genre of the 1930s, but also drew extensively upon Richard III (1591). Later, Absurdist drama also drew upon Shakespeare in plays such as Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King (1962) and Macbett (1970), while the borrowings from Shakespeare in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957) have been well documented (Brown 1963; Kott 1967, 124; Scott 1982; Wilcher 1979).

This study continues by looking at how the development of this practice took a radical turn after the end of the 1960s. This began with v

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Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), a play that now sits quietly on exam board syllabi, but at the time irrevocably changed the way rewriting Shakespeare was understood as a practice.

Whereas formerly, these works had been considered adaptations, following Stoppard, these encounters with Shakespeare and his contemporaries took on autonomy as appropriations rather than the subsidiary status they held before as adaptations. The group of dramatists who took over the mantle from Stoppard included Edward Bond, Howard Brenton and David Edgar who wrote from an avowedly political position. Here, events such as the escalation of the Vietnam War and civil rights activism in America and Northern Ireland brought politics directly onto the streets in Europe, while in Britain legislation came into being to decriminalize homosexuality, abortion and the end theatre censorship. Taken together, all these factors helped to produce a very different breed of playwright after 1968. Their politics embraced the need to incorporate radical Socialism into mainstream British politics, and their drama offered ambitious and often chimerical treatments of a Britain coming to terms with itself as a declining world power in search of a new identity. This loose group gained the epithet of ‘The New Jacobeans’, which itself reflected a shared interest in the relationship they identified between their own work and the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Like Brecht before them, this interest came from similarities in approach to acting styles, staging conventions and an inherent sense of metatheatre.

In turn, attitudes and strategies of appropriation by British dramatists have changed, and the book seeks to both chart some of these changes and offer explanations as to why some of these changes might have occurred. As mentioned, during the 1970s and 1980s Shakespeare and his contemporaries became incorporated into a wider political project that have given rise to a confrontational approach being taken that deliberately set out to challenge aspects of Shakespeare’s cultural authority, including attitudes in the plays towards race, gender and even tragic suffering as a panacea for political stasis.

Such rewritings include Arnold Wesker’s objections to the depiction of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (c1598) that inform his play Shylock (1976); Elaine Feinstein (and the Women’s Theatre Group) Lear’s Daughter’s (1987) and Howard Barker’s Seven Lears (1989), plays that seek to fill the peculiar absence of the Queen in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Preface

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(c.1605): Barker also challenges Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c1621) for its pessimism and misogyny by writing an alternative ending in his 1986 version. Bond’s Lear (1971) is also an active rebuke to Shakespeare’s ending and its passive acceptance of ‘the gored state’ (V.iii, 296), that Bond interprets as a continuation of ‘the old order which would…certainly replicate the old errors’ (Roberts 1985, p.25).

Remnants of this attitude can still be discerned in recent work such as David Greig’s Dunsinane (2010), which amongst several aims, challenges the ideology of Macbeth (c1606), both as the exemplar of Scottish literature and the harmonious relationship it promotes between England and Scotland. However, the book identifies a shift in approach that takes place in the mid-1990s that changes the relationship between Shakespeare and the contemporary British dramatist from being one of confrontation to accommodation. The first major example of this accommodative process was Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), a play that incorporated dramatic motifs and ideas taken directly from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Yet, unlike appropriations of the 1970s and 1980s (where the direct relationship between Shakespeare was often announced from the title onwards) in Blasted, the relationship remains buried, but silently does much to produce the play’s deeply unsettling effect. By the time of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009), any Shakespearian traces become, if anything even harder to discern. Yet, I will argue that the play is itself a contemporary amalgamation and response to the festive comedies As You Like It (c.1599), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595) and Twelfth Night (c.1601) as well as borrowings from the Henriad cycle.

Another major approach taken by the dramatists and identified in this study has been their desire to speculate upon and investigate certain gaps and silences that they perceive within the classic text, gaps that are hinted at or inferred, but never made explicit. Many of the rewritings discussed fall into this category. Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters and Howard Barker’s Seven Lears both focus on the absent Queen in King Lear; Barker’s ‘new’ ending to his version of Women Beware Women (1986) arises out of speculation that Thomas Middleton might have appeased the authorities of his day by providing a conventional moral ending, and in Gertrude (2002), Barker takes the marginalized figure of the Queen in Hamlet (c.1601) in a speculative appropriation that like Seven Lears seeks to explain the reasons for this exclusion.

Above all else this study wants to make case for the importance of these appropriations of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as works

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that stand in their own right. For far too long they have unfairly been accorded a secondary place to the original sources, and often dismissed as parasitic for reasons that may possibly be motivated out of feelings of inferiority or jealously. This attitude has also been tacitly encouraged within the field of Adaptation Studies which has all but completely ignored this significant practice within British playwriting.

I also wish to argue that incorporating material from Shakespeare and his contemporaries into new work in British drama took an important new turn after 1966, breaking away definitively away from work that might be termed, and more significantly judged as adaptations, but can more accurately be described as appropriations. Here, I am indebted to the work of Julie Sanders, who in her book Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), not only set out for the first time to differentiate the two processes as separate, but makes a case for appropriation being a far more transformative and politically disruptive act of writing.

In essence this study contends that these plays become appropriative acts that break from the conservatism that exists in much adaptation of classical drama by virtue of it wanting to stay within the boundaries of the original text, whereas the appropriative text deliberately breaks from concerns over fidelity by ‘talking back’ and challenging the original text.

In this way, these ‘upstart crows’ become separate and valuable works in their own right.

Birmingham, UK

Graham Saunders

Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation period and parts of it were originally published in earlier forms and versions. Sections from parts of chapter three were originally published in the journal Modern Drama as ‘“Missing Mothers and Absent Fathers”: Howard Barker’s Seven Lears and Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters’, 43 (1999) and New Theatre Quarterly as ‘Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King Lear’, 20:1 (2004). This article has also been subsequently reprinted in Drama Criticism, 31.3 (2008). Chapter four contains material originally published as ‘“Monstrous Assaults’: Howard Barker, Erotics, Death and the Antique Text”, in Karolina Gritzner (ed.) Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010.

Parts of chapter six originally appeared in an article ‘Anyone for Venice?

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Arnold Wesker’s Shylock’, Coup de Théâtre: Variations Contemporaines Autor de Shylock, no. 28 (2014).

I would like to thank the department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading for providing sabbatical leave. I am also indebted to Dr. Robert Wilcher from the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, who was integral in shaping my original approach and thinking about the appropriation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by postwar British dramatists.

A note on the text: All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays come from Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds.) William Shakespeare, the Complete Works (Oxford: OUP, 1988). ix

Contents

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Introduction: Appropriating the Past 1

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Why Rewrite Shakespeare and His Contemporaries? 25

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A Host of Lears: Howard Barker’s Seven Lears, Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted 57

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‘Love in the Museum’: Howard Barker, the Erotic and the Elizabethan/Jacobean Text 85

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‘If Power Change Purpose’: Appropriation and the Shakespearian Despot 105

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Anyone for Venice? Wesker, Marowitz, and Pascal Appropriate The Merchant of Venice 127

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Festive Tragedy: Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) 151

Bibliography 177 Index 181

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Introduction: Appropriating the Past

London, 1948: in one of those curious moments of fate, two youths— one from north London, the other from the East End—attended a production of Macbeth at the Bedford Theatre in Camden, with the Shakespearian actor-manager Donald Wolfit in the title role. The two, young theatre-goers were Harold Pinter and Edward Bond. Each was profoundly affected by this early introduction to Shakespeare. For Pinter, who had previously been to see Wolfit Shakespeares at the People’s Palace in East London with his teacher Joseph Brearly, the experience helped persuade him to pursue a career in the theatre; later, as an actor he even joined Wolfit’s company (Billington 1996, p. 13). For Bond, four years younger than Pinter, the excursion to see Macbeth was equally significant: For the first time in my life- I remember this quite distinctly – I met somebody who was actually talking about my problems, about the life I’d been living, the political society around me…I knew all these people, they were in the street or in the newspapers – this in fact was my world. (Bond 1972a, b, p. 13)

This incident is worth recounting because it serves to illustrate the importance that Shakespeare and his contemporaries have played in the development of British playwriting since 1945. In his biography The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996), Michael Billington argues that encounters with the work of Jacobean dramatist John Webster produced an ‘influence of…chill compression on Pinter’s language and thought © The Author(s) 2017 G. Saunders, Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriation in Contemporary British Drama, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-44453-0_1

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(Billington 1996, p. 13), while a more detailed assessment of Pinter as a contemporary Jacobean has been made by Michael Scott in his book Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist (1989), one of the few single studies devoted to the subject. However, within the gamut of Pinter criticism it has been the influence of modernist writers such as Kafka, Joyce, Eliot, and Beckett who have been more frequently cited than Shakespeare.

The goal of this study is not so much concerned with mapping direct or indirect influences that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama have produced on British post-war dramatists; it seeks to look beyond work that contains discernible traces of those texts, and instead looks at those British dramatists who have actively sought to directly engage, challenge, and question the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Edward Bond is a case in point. While associated with original work such as Saved (1965), The Fool (1975), and Restoration (1981), Bond has also pursued a lifelong interrogation of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. This has ranged from adaptations such as Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1966) and John Webster’s The White Devil (1976), to work such as Lear (1971) which re-examines one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, and Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death (1973) that confronts myths regarding the figure of Shakespeare himself.

Bond’s critical writings on theatre as well as his published notebooks, letters, and more recently web-presence, have also been an on-going analysis of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and how our culture recreates his theatre today.

Bond’s position toward Shakespeare also informs the attitude held by many of the dramatists included in this study. While acknowledging the importance of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for the questions they asked of their own societies, Bond argues that todaywe would be naive to ‘accept their political answers although these were vital to their original audiences’ (Bond 1994, p. 12). Giving one example, Bond observes that one of the ways English Renaissance culture understood itself was through the dramatic convention of using ghosts to create meaning; however, for a modern audience ‘they become a confusion’ according to Bond. For us to readily accept the ghost in Hamlet as anything more than an Elizabethan stage convention becomes a false panacea for the problems of our own age that are haunted by a different set of concerns that for Bond include ‘the dead of Belsen… [the] hands of hungry people—with our fear of streets’ (Bond 1994, p. 37.) Therefore, when Bond

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uses ghosts in his own plays, as he does in Lear—he ensures they eventually die (Bond 1994, p. 43).

From Adaptation to Appropriation Albeit unwittingly, many of the dramatists in this study owe debts to French post-structuralism: since the 1960s, figures such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Gérard Genette have mapped out theoretical pathways that attempt to account for the processes that take place when material, taken from canonical texts of the past, became incorporated within contemporary work: from Barthes celebrated essay ‘The Death of the Author’ comes the idea of rejecting the unique primacy of the sequestered text to a relationship based on intertexts; Foucault’s formulation of the ‘author function’ in his ground breaking essay ‘What is an Author’ argues that ‘discourses are objects of appropriation’ (Rabinow 1984, p. 108), while Julia Kristeva has elaborated and refined this existing work into a practice she terms intertextuality, where every literary text can be seen as ‘a permutation of texts’ (Elam 1980, p. 9). Whereas in the past imaginative writing was assumed to be an unconscious and hermetic act of authorship, what the work of each of these theorists articulates and draws to our attention are the relationships that are initiated through the practice of rewriting other texts.

However, the theorist whose ideas come nearest to representing the relationship that the dramatists in this study enter into with the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is Gérard Genette and his book Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997). In his extensive work, Genette further developed Kristeva’s ideas based around intertextuality to propose a new term, transtextuality, to describe the relationship-conscious or tacit-that the texts shared with one another. Whereas Kristeva sees intertextuality as a process operating within another text, Genette sees it as a form of quotation or plagiarism of a work (Genette 1997, p. 2). In that way transtextuality becomes a more pervasive process based on ‘a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts [and] typically the actual presence of one text within another’ (Genette 1997, pp. 1–2). By this Genette means the relationship between a canonical work (the hypotext) and the text written in response to it (the hypertext). The title of Genette’s book Palimpsests, tellingly incorporates architectural imagery within its framework, where hypotexts have become partially, or even completely subsumed over time

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by new structures (hypertexts) created by subsequent acts of rewriting. In this instance, Genette uses the term architext/architextuality to describe what he calls ‘the entire set of general transcendent categories– types of discourse. Modes of enunciation, literary genres–from which emerges each singular text’ (Genette 1997, 4). Crucially for Genette, what takes place in the process of transtextuality is that the architectural structures of the originating hypotext, despite being obscured, can still always be partially discerned beneath the new textual edifice erected around them by the contemporary writer. Equally, these past textual structures can still be glimpsed and interpreted by readers and audiences cognizant with the relational hypotext. This prior familiarity to the hypotext in turn grants a keener awareness of where to locate and derive meaning from the interlinking connections that are produced between the originating hypotext and hypertext. By the same token, non-familiarity with these associations renders the hypotext invisible and gives the impression that the hypertext is an original and independent work. As we shall see, the dramatist Howard Barker utilizes the same analogy between the classical text as an architectural structure and seeing his function as being an archaeologist, exposing the text’s original structures, but in so doing, releasing its radical potential.

In a similar manner, Alison Forsythe, in what she terms the Dramatic Rewrite, analyzes and draws comparisons in The Merchant of Venice, between its architecture and the contemporary reception of classical texts. She argues that the original structure of Shakespeare’s play has become irrevocably altered by the Holocaust: ‘Shakespeare’s play has been transformed into a weather-beaten, battle stormed and desolate ruin over the centuries, but since the Holocaust it has become decidedly uninhabitable and uninviting’. Yet, in her book Gadamer, History and the Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison Rewrite the Theatre, Forsythe adds, ‘it is ruins and not palaces that bear testimony to the truth’ and that since the Holocaust The Merchant of Venice has become ‘a powerful literary ruin to explore and excavate (Forsythe 1998, pp. 112–113). As we shall see in a later chapter, Forsythe, in conjunction with others, explores two contemporary responses to the play–Charles Marowitz’s Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) and Arnold Wesker’s Shylock–that each create new texts from the ruins of the old in acts of reclamation.

The idea of exposing the classical text to such scrutiny has been alluring for critics working in this area. Alan Sinfield’s chapter “Making Space”:

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Appropriation and Confrontation in Recent British Plays’ in Graham Holderness’s influential collection The Shakespeare Myth (1988), sees the process going beyond one of exposure, to the creation of cultural space within the existing architecture of the Shakespearian text; for some, such as Edward Bond and Arnold Wesker this is done for political reasons, while for others such as Howard Barker, it comes more from an interest in the architecture of the classical text itself.

While the likes of Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, and Genette have come a considerable way in producing models that explain the processes of intertextuality, they have little or nothing to say about why a writer might consciously want to enter a relationship with canonical hypotexts such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, or the The Merchant of Venice. Such questions might be considered an irrelevance by the theorists themselves, yet for this study the various impulses that compel dramatists to engage in the task becomes a crucial concern. However, despite the widespread acceptance of intertextual relationships within the fields of literary and performance studies, contention remains over the correct terminology to denote the different forms the practice takes, as well as the question of cultural value ascribed to the new texts produced as an outcome.

Most commonly, the blanket term adaptation is given to any partial assimilation of an existing text within any given medium–from film and plays, to novels, beat music, and video games. The main area of dispute comes from this broadness of scope and although the field of adaptation studies has undergone major developments that have attempted to theorize and describe the many subtle differences operating within different media in recent years, there is still much more work to be done in the area. It should also be noted that intertextuality as a set of discrete theories has so far studiously avoided saying anything that either recognizes or takes account of the different creative impulses or strategies that have led contemporary writers to make use of canonical hypotexts in new ways.

The term adaptation now dominates as a default for the entire practice of rewriting itself, and enforced by acolytes who have sought to police and admonish the introduction of alternative vocabularies that attempt to identify differences in the practice of assimilating, altering, and transforming classic texts. However, in 2001 Julie Sanders’ book Adaptation and Appropriation marked an important change in altering this stasis. In it she confronted a lingering discontent held by those who saw adaptation as a limiting term, yet did not have access to any alternative critical

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vocabulary or theoretical approach. In relation to Shakespeare for example, Douglas Lanier has called into question adaptation being the default term for all forms of rewriting (Lanier 2002, pp. 4–5), while Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier have questioned (albeit rather unhelpfully) that ‘adaptation is not the right name…because there is no right name’ (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, p. 2).

Sanders offers an alternative term, appropriation, along with a substitute vocabulary that gives nuanced meanings to the complex and myriad practices that operate underneath the canopy of adaptation. That vocabulary takes account of the many subtle distinctions that take place within the act of rewriting-terms Sanders summarizes as, ‘variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation…conivation, reworking, refashioning, revision, re-evaluation’ (Sanders 2001, p. 3).

Crucially for Sanders, adaptation ‘signals a relationship with an informing source text or original’, and often does so in a clear and unambiguous way, whereas appropriation ‘frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product or domain’ (Sanders 2001, p. 26). Pascal Niklas and Oliver Linder criticize Sanders for keeping adaptation and appropriation ‘hygienically apart’, whereas they believe appropriation should always be considered as a form of adaptation (Nicklas and Oliver 2012, p. 6). However, it is directly out of this separation that Sanders is able to make crucial distinctions between the two forms.

This also has a significant impact on the dramatists who form the subject of this study; if plays such as Bond’s Lear and Barker’s Seven Lears are appropriations, then they take on an autonomy and higher status than simply being considered adaptations. Another way of thinking about the important implications Sanders suggests is to see the two as related, yet separate forms-projectiles whose ‘journey’ is determined by the gravitational pull exerted by their respective classical source texts. Adaptations are ultimately more earthbound creations, whereas appropriations have far greater capacity to escape the influence of their progenitor.

The distinction Sanders draws also has important implications for the work of the dramatists in this study in relation to the associations that appropriation makes to questions of ethics and politics (Sanders 2001, p. 2). The political dimension Sanders provides to appropriation originally came from its use within the field of post-colonial studies as a way of challenging dominant cultural norms maintained through literature.

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This featured most prominently in Homi K. Bhabba’s concept of mimicry as ‘a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model’ (Bhabba 1994, p.

122). For the most part, the appropriations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries within this study do not seek to use mockery to destabilize, but rather choose other means, often by interrogating significant gaps and absences within canonical texts. In short, appropriation challenges and subverts, whereas adaptation mostly confirms and confers an already assumed authority held by the source text.

However, Sanders was not the first to become aware of the inadequacies that adaptation presented as a blanket term. In 1976, Ruby Cohn’s Modern Shakespeare Offshoots became the first major study to look at the practice of Shakespearian adaptation by contemporary dramatists.

Yet, the title of the book uses a horticultural term that immediately assumes a subordinate relationship between the adapted text to its classical host. This same analogy is also later used by Genette in Palimpsests, who describes hypertexts as ‘grafts’, material that both ‘imitates and transforms’ its parent hypotext (Genette 1997, p. 21). Fortier and Fischlin also find Cohn’s use of the term ‘offshoot’ unhelpful, in that Shakespeare’s plays could also be considered the same due to their own extensive borrowings (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, p. 3). Genette’s use of the term ‘graft’ however, does provides a possible alternative as it implicitly assumes an autonomy, distinguishing the hypertext from its hypotext, while still acknowledging a mutual relationship.

Cohn also considers another phrase, ‘transformations’, to describe a textual practice involving Shakespeare, where new beginnings and endings may be added and non-Shakespearian characters introduced. In her 1994 book Talking Back to Shakespeare, Martha Rozzett Tuck uses the same terminology, although she distinguishes between ‘transformation’ and ‘offshoot’, seeing the latter as less directly connected to the Shakespearian text, and therefore ‘frequently makes no attempt to employ or rework the structure of events in the Shakespeare play’ (Tuck 1994, p. 9). In this instance she gives the example of Brecht’s Round Heads and Pointed Heads (1936) as an offshoot of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (c1604). By contrast, ‘transformations’ come under the wider ambit of appropriation which Tuck approvingly sees as a different process, one that involves ‘dismantling, rearranging, sometimes fracturing the text, sometimes adding to or updating, parodying or inverting

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it and then reassembling it into a recognizable re-imagining of the play as we know it’ (Tuck 1994, p. 8).

Elsewhere, critics have also argued for appropriation as a preferable term due to it being able to produce the same significant changes to the reception of classical texts that Tuck outlines. For example, Klaus Peter Müller argues that at its best, appropriation creates a form of drama in which ‘the world is looked at, and from a new angle; the vision has changed and a specific culture is transformed by the new perspective.

Another cultural text has been created’ (Müller 1997, p. 30).

Forsythe’s work in the area has already been mentioned. She is less interested in the terminology of appropriation, and concentrates instead on how such processes might operate. She draws upon the work of Hans Georg Gadamer in hermeneutics and history as a source of truth; for Gadamer, the classical text, (or Eminent Text as he terms it) is in possession of a potent ability to generate a strong interpretative value owing to the status it has accrued over the ages. Forsythe argues that paradoxically it is this very antiquity that far from removing them from the present gives such texts properties by which they become ‘more deeply enmeshed and complicit with the everyday world which we inhabit’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 5).

Consequently, when contemporary dramatists make use of such texts, they are able to exploit that power. Forsythe calls such works ‘the Dramatic Rewrite’, and sees them exhibiting a quality ‘which neither affirms or refutes the classic’s status, but rather harnesses its cultural cachet to provide the intratextual foundation between its production, “classic” status and current reception for its own dramaturgy’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 19). While this might sound similar to the process of appropriation, Forsythe considers the Dramatic Rewrite entirely ‘distinct from other artists’ negotiation with earlier works of art such as parody, appropriation, allegory, montage and pastiche’ (Forsythe 1998, p. xiii). For Forysthe, the crucial difference comes out of a new and reciprocal transhistorical dialogue between the classical text and the new work, one that moves back and forth simultaneously between the past and present, and one that ‘creatively mediates with the past and present, with knowledge gathered through the force of transition (Enfahrung) and the immediacy of transition (Enlebris), to perform new understandings (Forsythe 1998, p. xiii). This is achieved primarily through the status of the classical text’s canonicity, one that the Dramatic Rewrite exploits through ‘the classic’s imbrication with dominant ideology that contributes towards and

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facilitates a new and potentially radical aesthetic experience in the present’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 19).

Therefore, a play such as David Greig’s Dunsinane can incorporate elements from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and at the same time negotiate between medieval Scotland and recent military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. As we shall see in a later chapter, Greig also makes use of Macbeth for the political resonances it can create with the present, but for Forsythe this belongs to the realm of appropriation rather than the Dramatic Rewrite. Here she makes the distinction between, ‘The political determinism of…appropriation’, which in Forsythe’s view is ‘motivated by deterministically utilising the cultural cachet and kudos of Shakespeare for…political concerns’. By contrast, the Dramatic Rewrite ‘is neither politically determined, oppositional or decorative; rather it is the residue of an historically effected consciousness of our transition for the present’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 100).

As we shall see, Gadamer’s ideas share some notable similarities with Howard Barker’s response to classical texts. The negotiation between past and present that Forsythe identifies also chimes with Chantal Zabus’s critical position, who in the introduction to her edited volume of essays Tempests After Shakespeare (2002), which looks at the ways the play has been appropriated within a variety of media, concludes that appropriation is an ever developing and expansive practice that is continually relevant (Zabus 2002, p. 4). Writing elsewhere in the same volume on The Tempest and its relationship with Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day (1988), James Andreas also considers the act of appropriation to be one of continual expansion that beneficially ends up complicating its ur-text (Andreas 1999, p. 107). Martha Rozzett Tuck, who has already been mentioned in relation to calling such texts ‘transformations’ also sees these processes collectively belonging to the wider practice of appropriation in that they possess ‘the cultural and critical authority as the originating premise for a new imaginative construct’ (Tuck 1994, p.

5). What all these interpretations have in common are a shared consensus that irrevocable changes are created once a classical source text undergoes appropriation; a relationship that Rabey in his discussion of Howard Barker’s response toward Shakespeare’s work describes as ‘making a new argument from old matter’ (Rabey 2006, p. 23).

In addition to demonstrating a capability for expanding and transforming canonical texts, the plays within this study frequently seek to expose and fill intriguing gaps within the architecture of the classic

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text. Sanders acknowledges this to be another important functional tool of appropriation, one that operates in what she calls ‘a process of reading between the lines, offering analogies to the source text, drawing attention to its gaps and absences’ (Sanders 2001, p. 60). Yet, writing a decade earlier, these same missing and obscured elements had been identified in Susan Bennett’s Performing Nostalgia (1996), where she identifies the process of appropriation in phrases such as ‘symbiotic relationship’ (Bennett 1996, p. 2) and ‘citation of the past’ (Bennett 1996, p. 22). Yet, like Sanders, Bennett shares a recognition of its radical agenda by its ability to interrogate gaps and expose what she calls ‘hegemonic authenticity’ (Bennett 1999, p. 47) within classical textsproperties that not only stabilize and give cultural authority, but also paradoxically render those texts anodyne and neutered in the present.

Examples of such interrogative appropriation include Howard Barker’s Gertrude, a play that Sean Carney, in his important study of contemporary tragedy, believes comes from a recognition that in Hamlet ‘there is already a catastrophic tragedy within the play waiting to be excavated’ (Carney 2013, p. 109). For Bennett, such appropriations potentially become ways through which a ‘contestation of cultural power’ can come about, beyond ‘the containing processes of the apparatus’ (Bennett 1999, p. 48) that canon formation can endow, but also a conduit by which the contemporary dramatist can enter ‘a tense yet sometimes generative relation[ship] to their ur-text’ (Bennett 1999, p. 48).

Howard Barker, speaking through the voice of his pseudo-biographer Eduardo Houth in A Style and its Origins (2007) encapsulates his own methodology in a short poem, posing the question: ‘Have you an eye for the cracks? Some have’ (Barker and Houth 2007, p. 116).

Jonathan Dollimore, writing about Barker’s (1986) appropriation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women calls it ‘creative vandalism’ (Dollimore 1986). Alan Sinfield, in his book Faultlines (1992), while not making direct reference to Barker’s work, refers to Dollilmore’s term as a process of ‘blatantly reworking the authoritative text so that it is forced to yield, against the grain, explicitly oppositional kinds of understanding’ (Sinfield 1992, p. 22). In Barker’s case, those acts of ‘creative vandalism’ have included the rewriting of the final act of Women Beware Women, that assumes Middleton was forced to add a conventional moral ending following the deaths of characters driven by their sexual desires.

Elsewhere in Seven Lears, Barker gives us a prequel to King Lear, and,

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the aforementioned Gertrude speculates and reenvisages among other things, on the murder of Hamlet’s father.

Yet, as we shall see, it would be wrong to assume that anything like a consensus exists in regard to the value of Barker’s appropriations, or whether the term appropriation is fully recognized or acknowledged as a legitimate term. Barbara Hodgon is correct when she comments that adaptation and appropriation are ‘two extremely slippery labels’ (Massai 2005, p. 157), and as has already been discussed, Alison Forysthe sees appropriation as just another form of parody. Yet even here she recognizes that such ‘parodic and appropriative art can easily represent aesthetic means for concerted ideological ends’ (Forsythe 1998, p. 56).

The lack of consensus over terminology was brought into even sharper focus, when in the same year as Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation, Linda Hutcheon’s highly influential A Theory of Adaptation was also published. In it, Hutcheon rejects appropriation as being either a distinctive or independent practice (Hutcheon 2006, p. 8), and instead continues to embrace adaptation as a catch-all term for all forms of rewriting (Hutcheon 2006, p. 15). Such an approach is both a virtue and a limitation: applying a theoretical perspective that can account for all adaptive practice is both fresh and clear-sighted, and undeniably breaks new ground on the subject. However, for the purposes of this study the failure to recognize appropriation as being an associated but quite separate practice is highly problematic; moreover, Hutcheon’s insistence on the continuation of an already entrenched consensus on the subject is in the end, limiting. In this respect, Hutcheon’s understanding of adaptation has barely evolved since 2000 when Mark Fortier and Daniel Fischlin defined the term in their anthology of Shakespearian rewritings: Writ large, adaptation includes almost any act of alteration performed upon specific cultural works of the past and dovetails with a general process of cultural recreation…works which, through verbal and theatrical devices, radically alter the shape and significance of another work so as to invoke that work and yet be different from it – so that any adaptation is, and is not, Shakespeare. (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, p. 4)

Douglas Lanier, writing two years later, while recognizing that appropriation in relation to Shakespeare’s texts exists as a term in its own right, interprets it simply as ‘Shakespeare moved from one cultural

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realm or interpretative frame to another’, so designating the process at less than one remove from adaptation whereby ‘the context in which Shakespeare’s words appear [but] without changing the words themselves’ (Lanier 2002, p. 5).

While the impact of Hutcheon’s work is undeniable, it has strengthened the association of adaptation being synonymous with the act of rewriting; in so doing, this has inadvertently resulted in a closer policing of what belongs and what is excluded from an understanding of the practice. An example is work understood as prequels (Hutcheon 2006, p. 9) such as Barker’s Seven Lears and Gertrude or Steven Berkoff’s The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001), that concern themselves with characters from King Lear and Hamlet prior to their legitimation through textual inscription in Shakespeare. Hutcheon’s disapproval of what she considers unauthorized works is puzzling when one considers that those works not only readily subscribe to Genette’s terms metatextuality and transmotivaization, but he defends the prequel as a legitimate form of rewriting past texts. In the former, Genette argues that some hypertexts can provide a commentary on the other ‘without necessarily citing it’ (Genette 1997, p. 4), while transmotivization in hypertexts such as prequels is a given opportunity for a writer to ascribe motivation to characters that are missing or silent within the hypotext.

As mentioned previously, this study takes as its cue the emphasis that Sanders places on the political and the ethical through appropriation as the main point of entry for most of the dramatists included. Furthermore, Sanders’ observation about the embeddedness of appropriation (Sanders 2001, p. 2), of how the original text can be displaced by the new one, is also a crucial difference from previous understandings of adaptation.

Lanier, speaking in relation to Shakespeare defines adaptations (which he also calls transpositions), as works where ‘only minor particularities of setting, idiom, plot or character have been altered and that the essence of the original remains intact’ (Lanier 2002, p. 4). Sanders gives examples of pairings in drama where only a residual relationship between hypotext and hypertext exist. Those include Alan Ayckborn’s A Chorus of Disapproval (1984) with John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728); and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good (1988) with George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) (Sanders 2001, pp. 27–32).

The same degree of estrangement can be found in Howard Barker’s Gertrude, where despite the reference to Hamlet in its title, the naming of three of its central characters and the opening scene that includes

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a startling re-enactment of the murder of Old Hamlet, the play subsequently quickly distances itself from Hamlet.

This uncoupling also becomes a significant historical feature of appropriation itself. Whereas the 1970s and 1980s witnessed plays such Bond’s Lear and Brenton’s Measure for Measure as dramas that deliberately proclaimed their appropriated status to Shakespeare, a change took place from the mid 1990s onward, where plays such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted, David Greig’s Dunsinane, and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem become more clandestine, more assimilative and far less wedded to what Sanders calls the ‘posture of critique, even assault’(Sanders 2001, p. 4) that previous appropriations had set out to do. Work from the 1990s onward also tended to avoid mounting challenges to Shakespeare’s cultural authority, as opposed to their predecessors.

Against Appropriation Ever since the inception of the term appropriation, a countervailing resistance and scepticism has been mounted against it. Even a cultural materialist such as Alan Sinfield, who was among the first to seriously consider Shakespeare’s appropriation by post-war British dramatists takes on an uncharacteristically conservative tone in describing Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (R&GAD) and Bond’s Lear as adaptations to indicate their lesser status, and loftily dismisses any claims for them being autonomous works: rather, they become signposts that serve only to ‘point back to Shakespeare as the profound and inclusive originator in whose margins we can doodle only parasitic follies’ (Sinfield 1985, p. 179). It is not hard to imagine the same sentiments being expressed by A.C. Bradley or M.C. Bradbrook.

Howard Barker has provided a stinging reply to such views when he says, ‘Shakespeare never thought up a story in his life; in this I am vastly his superior’ (Brown 2011, p. 167), and which the critic David Kilpatrick, writing about Barker’s Gertrude—The Cry in relation to Hamlet considers to be ‘on a comparative and level par, bearing out a new relation to the myth’ (Kilpatrick 2003, p. 147). It is perhaps a tacit recognition of that power to subvert that lies at the nub of why appropriation is treated by some as a pejorative term. For example, Fischlin and Fortier associate it with constituting ‘a hostile takeover, a seizure of authority over the original in a way that appeals to contemporary sensibilities steeped in a politicized understanding of culture’ (Fischlin and

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Fortier 2000, p. 3). It is interesting to note that it is the taint of radical politics that Fischlin and Fortier find discomforting. Paul J.C.M. Frassen expresses those concerns more bluntly in his understanding of appropriation as ‘a kind of adaptation whose author has an ideological ax to grind with his predecessor’, in which ideological issues are foregrounded in the original text, so enabling the contemporary dramatist to ‘“talk back” to Shakespeare’ (Franssen 2010, p. 246). Desmet and Sawyer see the act of appropriation a bit differently, as an act that incorporates both a theft and a diversion of resources at the same time. They refer to this doubleedged relationship as, ‘something happens when Shakespeare is appropriated and both the subject (author) and object (Shakespeare) are changed in the process’ (Desmet and Sawyer 1999, p. 1).

As will be discussed in the next chapter, anxieties about appropriation eroding the cultural authority shored up in the body of Shakespeare’s work has often expressed itself in the form of mockery or outright hostility, with appropriation frequently dismissed as a presumptuous practice.

By contrast, the attitude taken to adaptation is a respectful one-it knows its place, and doing so is almost always apolitical in its stance, naturally subscribing to and often reflecting the same ideological position already taken in the source text. As such, it is no great surprise that adaptations are not only tolerated, but actively welcomed by the cultural guardians of Shakespeare as flattering confirmation of his continuity, authority, and permanence. By contrast appropriation, through its compulsion to ‘talk…back to Shakespeare’ (Desmet and Sawyer 1999, p. 11) presents a far more troubling and unstable relationship.

Despite breakthroughs in the recognition of appropriation as a separate process from adaptation, little attention has been drawn to how the practice has developed in post-war British drama. Major critical work on the subject (Marsden 1991; Desmet and Sawyer 1995; Novy 1999; Fischlin and Fortier 2000; Sanders 2001; Zabus 2002) all concentrate almost exclusively on the appropriation of Shakespeare within the medium of the novel and film. This exclusion within Adaptation Studies—such as the gaps and absences that Howard Barker interrogates in his excavations of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—are in themselves highly revealing. Considering the long-established relationship of appropriation between Shakespeare and British dramatists since 1966, it is surprising to find just two single studies on the subject—the aforementioned Modern Shakespeare Offshoots by Ruby Cohn, and Michael Scott’s Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist. Even within the three

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major existing works that seriously consider appropriation as a legitimate form-Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation, Desmet and Sawyer’s edited collection Shakespeare and Appropriation, and Marianne Novy’s two edited collections on the subject-with the exception of some cursory mentions of Stoppard’s R&GAD (Sanders 2001, pp. 55–57) (Desmet and Sawyer 1999, pp. 1–2), none of these studies acknowledge appropriations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by any other contemporary British dramatist.

The failure also extends beyond the critical arena and includes works such as John Gross’s anthology After Shakespeare: Writing Inspired by the World’s Greatest Author (2003). While it includes appropriations such as Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Ionesco’s Macbett, once again its treatment of post 1960s British dramatists–sparing a cursory extract from Edward Bond’s Bingo, Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet (1979), and the obligatory R&GAD–is again effectively ignored.

Allied to this critical neglect, many of the dramatists in this study have frequently been forced to defend themselves against attacks by hostile critics, who regard their plays as arrogant and insolent affronts, or at best parasitic and insipid forms of imitation. Even Stoppard’s R&GAD, generally regarded by many as a popular modern classic, has not been immune from criticism over the ethicacy of its relationship, not only to Shakespeare, but also to other modern canonical texts. For example, Arnold Hinchcliffe comments: It opened in 1967 to great acclaim not merely by the public but also by critics…what remains then, is, to what purpose and how well and the answer must be to little purpose and no more than competently…What we see is a clever author manipulating rather than exploring a parasitic feeding off Shakespeare, Pirandello and Beckett and however ingenious the idea, the over-long execution is relentlessly familiar. (Hinchcliffe 1974, pp.

141–142)

This analogy of the appropriated text feeding upon its host is a common criticism, but it is worth noting that Genette rejects the idea that hypertexts are somehow dependent on their hypotext. In fact, he concludes that, like a parent or child each, are simultaneously bonded yet independent from each other: ‘Every hypertext, even a pastiche, can be read for itself…it is invested in meaning that is autonomous and thus in some manner sufficient’ (Genette 1997, p. 397).

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While Genette’s assertion could be used as a counter-argument against such criticisms, ironically, many of the dramatists in this study aim also to deliberately establish what could be seen as a parasitic relationship to Shakespeare and his work. For example, when one considers Bond’s Lear, it is striking that, apart from its title, just how little material comes directly from Shakespeare. To Sean Carney’s description of Bond’s methodology being one of ‘refashioning, refining and purifying’ (Carney 2013, p. 219), could also be added extraction, for while the punishment of blinding (imposed in this case on Lear) and the retention of two (rather than three) daughters, together with the non-familial character of Cordelia means that there is very little that directly connects Lear to King Lear.

Powerful advocates against such criticisms also exist, who consider these appropriations as independent entities, albeit indirectly related to their source material. A measure of this independence can also be discerned by their standing within the contemporary theatrical canon.

Robert Wilcher for instance, believes that Arnold Wesker’s Shylock ‘is much more than an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. It is a wholly independent work of art’ (Wilcher 1991, p. 119). Wesker himself considered the play to be ‘a coming together of everything I’ve been trying to do up to now—the nearest I’ll get to writing a masterpiece’ (Leeming, 1977, p. 5). Similarly, Perry Nodelman considers Bond’s Lear to be ‘a tragedy that makes as much sense for our time as Shakespeare’s did for his’ (Nodelman 1980, 275), while Tony Coult believes it to be a work that ‘summons up Shakespeare’s play, yet exists entirely free of it as an autonomous piece of work’ (Coult 1977, p. 18).

Harold Bloom and the Anxiety of Influence Artistic reputation and the recognition of originality, within the boundaries of appropriation also haunt Harold Bloom’s 1973 The Anxiety of Influence. While contested today on several fronts, Bloom’s study became influential in critical thinking for many years, and the implications it throws up regarding the practice of appropriation are still useful. Bloom puts forward a theory that Romantic poetry was produced through a series of creative tensions between figures such as Keats, Shelly, and their literary predecessors. Couched in the language of Freudian psychoanalysis, Shakespeare functions as a kind of father poet, or as Bloom terms it, a precursor, with the contemporary writer cast in

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the role of an offspring, or ephebe. In some ways, this view of literary production is not new, and owes an unacknowledged debt to another famous work of criticism, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929): For masterpieces are not single and solitary births…Without…forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontë’s and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. (Woolf 1929, p. 98)

Bloom’s ideas were also influenced, at least in part, by T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’ (1919). Whereas Bloom uses a Freudian model as the motivation for poets to produce new works, Eliot believes that it is literary tradition alone, rather than Oedipal driven anxieties that motivate the process: ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists (Eliot 1975, p. 80).

Unlike Woolf however, Bloom does not see Shakespeare in thrall to any literary predecessor, having somehow miraculously achieved what he calls ‘the complete absorption of precursor (Bloom 1997, p. 31). For Bloom, great writers ‘wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’ (Bloom 1997, p. 5), and where regardless of gender, the ephebe poet is destined to play out this oedipal struggle in an attempt to free himself from the precursor’s influence. Few, if any, succeed and instead Bloom talks of ‘weaker talents [who] idealize’, including presumably many of the dramatists included in this study who are referred to as ‘figures of capable imagination [who] appropriate for themselves’ (Bloom 1997, p. 5). Whatever the true situation, a mixture of admiration and resentment prevails as the contemporary writer attempts to establish for themselves an individual voice in the literary pantheon.

Although now much discredited, not least for its entirely masculinist view of literary history, examples can be seen where that struggle is played out, and where the powerful influence of a precursor such as Shakespeare has made the act of appropriation difficult. For example, in an early diary entry during the writing of Shylock, Arnold Wesker confesses: What lunacy to take on Shakespeare…Ideally I want to make the first act ninety minutes and the second seventy-five minutes long. That’s not too

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long for a work that aspires to sit beside the Master’s. No, not sit beside, more as an appendage to. The fear remains, however, the panicky feeling lurks constantly. The play is too facile! The language can’t make up its mind whether to be fifteenth or twentieth century, prose or iambic pentameter. Shakespearean rhythms creep in. The imagery is impoverished, non-existent…so many fears. (Wesker 1997, pp. 4–5)

Fortunately, the diary entry for the following day is more optimistic: ‘I’m absolutely convinced that once the play is performed it will creep out from the shadow of WS [William Shakespeare], take on its own life, speak with its own voice.’ (Wesker 1997, pp. 6–7).

Bloom’s Freudian reading of poetic influence is still also apparent in the verdicts of several critics who discuss appropriation of classic texts. For example, Martha Tuck has likened the process to ‘an assertive adolescent, visibly and volubly talking back to the parent in iconoclastic, outrageous, yet intensely serious ways’ (Tuck 1994, p.

5). Myung-soo Hur’s comparison between Stoppard’s R&GAD and Shakespeare’s Hamlet also concludes that the former fails to ‘shed any new light on the original’s artistry nor honour the spirit or the language of the original. Instead, it was a product of Stoppard’s attempts to defend his creativity against his great literary Father figure’ (Hurr 1992, p. 785).

Postmodernism and the Parodic One other significant reason that negative criticism frequently bedevils the practice of appropriation comes, ironically, via another form of textual appropriation: namely critical theory. Despite the seriousness of the endeavour, much of the reason why the practice has not been taken wholly seriously by mainstream criticism is that individuals such as Genette have taken most of their literary examples from so-called minor genres. In Palimpsests, the case-studies that especially interest Genette are drawn from what he calls ‘certain canonical (although minor) genres such as pastiche, parody, travesty’ (Genette 1997, p. 8) rather than traditionally regarded serious forms such as tragedy, or political writing. In turn, this branch of critical theory has itself been appropriated or assimilated under the even broader discourse of postmodernism, where the term appropriation itself became synonymous with a mischievous sense of playfulness or ironic and detached quotation. The main culprit,

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eye. The entertainment proceeded, broke out afresh, developed and extended; old Martha controlled a shifting circle at one end of the room, Mr. Vickery displayed his roaring picturesqueness at the other, Father Holt glided and sparkled with watchful courtesy in the midst. Trays of cups appeared—and then more trays of jugs and glasses—and then of little crystal plates and dishes; there was always a tray of something delicate and charming at one’s elbow to fill the pause while Mrs. Clarkson waited for one’s next remark. She had to wait often and long, for she had the gift of exhausting a separate subject with each remark of her own; there was nothing to add when she had mentioned that she thought so too. She couldn’t be tempted with the jugs and glasses, but she waited calmly—she waited so mildly that I lost myself in watching a small drama, enacted in my view, and I only jumped back to her when at last she repeated that she had always thought so, rightly or wrongly. Mrs. Clarkson wasn’t easily remembered from one remark to another, and it happened that the drama in question was unusual and expressive. Not many people have ever seen Father Holt at a loss; it is a rare chance, and indeed one has to be quick to seize it. He is extremely sensitive to his surroundings, very adaptable, very deft; but once in a while he is over-confident, and he makes a slip.

I need hardly say that if there was any run of mankind with whom Father Holt felt sure of himself it was the run of the Anglican clergy on a tourists’ holiday in Rome. It didn’t, of course, come a great deal in his way, but he might reasonably feel that he had all its few varieties by heart. He well knew the breezy tact, or the burly independence, or the shining forbearance, or the envious—but enough, he knew them all, all the tones of their response to the courteous charm of a Jesuit. He thought he knew; and as he circulated in his distinction among Miss Gainsborough’s rabble he approached the broad back of Mr. Champerdown with all his ease. He rounded the back, he faced Mr. Champerdown (who was seated); he addressed him in that fine finished manner which he wore so lightly; and he didn’t even pause to verify its effect, it was just a polite word in passing for the clumsy big cleric—of the breezy kind, probably, prepared with a volley of manly tact and taste that Father Holt had no wish to confront. So he turned to pass on, having made his attentive sign, and in the next moment there happened the rare chance I speak of. A large hand, reaching out to a surprising distance, fell upon his shoulder—fell upon the whole of him, as it rather seemed, and gathered him up and drew him back and placed him

where Mr. Champerdown could survey him conveniently; the thing was done so deliberately, so gigantically, so gently, that it was as though you were to screw round in your chair and to pick up a mouse or a small bird from the ground—some little unsuspecting funny creature, taken unawares, whom you had the fancy to examine more closely. With perfect gentleness Mr. Champerdown held the bright-eyed bird and inspected it—and only for an instant or two, before he set it down again uninjured. That was all he wanted—just to take a singular opportunity, the first he had had, and to see for himself what a Jesuit in a Roman drawing-room looked like in the hand.

It was delightfully done, and it was over in a moment; but in that moment the expression of Father Holt was enough to make one forget a more vivid pre-occupation than Mrs. Clarkson. “Yes, always,” she said, “rightly or wrongly”—and her neighbour manifestly jumped to overtake her mild rumination.

When at length old Martha felt entitled to put us to flight I was careful to find myself descending the great staircase at the side of Mr. Champerdown.

We issued forth together into the silence of the Corso—Miss Gainsborough’s portal was at the silent end of the long straight highway— and he serenely accepted my company. He pointed the way towards the Place of the People, hard by, and we walked out into the middle of the broad empty square. A night of May, a night of Rome—and moreover a night of full moonshine: the beauty of the night was too great to be praised.

Two speechless men, alone in the emptiness, stared around them at a marvel of beauty that was close to them, all but touching their eyes and cheeks— that was infinitely remote and unattainable in the height of space. It was caressing and kind—and yet it drew away and away, impalpably melting, re-appearing, receding; and at last it had led our sight further and further, this way and that, creating a void in which not only a pair of speechlessly wondering men, but the great open square itself was absorbed and lost. And then again it lay empty before us, the glimmering Place of the People, snowy in the moonlight; and we passed over and stood before the triumphal archway of the city-gate, where it rose up to breast the splendour of the May-night and of Rome. We gazed for a while, still silent, and we turned again; and now, as though we had just entered by the northern gate, the city lay before us that was the goal of our patient pilgrimage. We had reached Italy at last, and the end of the journey and the threshold of the city. My companion stopped dead, his big forehead thrown back; and he lifted his

arms, he stood in an attitude of amazement, of salutation, of adoration—all that and more was in the gesture with which he acknowledged the presence of Rome. It reminded me—of what did it remind me?—of something in the Bible, in the book of the law; it was the “heave-offering,” and he raised it aloft and offered it here in the night upon the threshold. “Ave Roma!”—his voice trolled out soft and profound in the stillness.

I never again saw Mr. Champerdown, nor heard of him; but before we parted that night I had welcomed and enjoyed the possession that he restored to me. It was the thought of Rome—obliterated by the voices and the faces of the evening, and indeed of the last many days; it was the sight of the city, obscured unawares by the crowding heads of our pilgrim band.

The broad shoulders of Mr. Champerdown seemed to have ploughed an opening in the throng, and there was Rome; even the mere noise of his power and humour, and the notion of his power and humour for the first time fronting Rome—this had been enough to bring out the vision again in all its force. One inevitably forgets the look of it in the jumble of our pious company; only a very few of them here and there have the faculty of clearing the way. With one of these few I had stood before the Gate of the People; and I gladly accepted, I gratefully commemorate, the help of his remarkable gift. It came just in time; for my Roman days were now running out, I should soon have to depart with whatever I could save from them; two or three more fragments thrown upon the medley of my impressions will complete the pile. But the vision of Rome was safe, ensphered in that memory of the spring-night and the moonshine—safe and secure for me to carry away when I must go.

XIII. THE FORUM

J

ULIA OF ASSISI, fresh from the heart of things Franciscan, had been painfully struck by the heartlessness of Rome. In all the grandeur and the pride of the Seven Hills there is something which made her say to herself, as soon as she arrived, that it wasn’t the same as Assisi—a weak phrase, but she found the right expression before long. A want of heart!—for a time she wandered disconsolate, feeling that it was no place for her. What then was delight to discover in Rome her old friend and ally Professor Minchin—a man, as I believe, of European reputation, and a man for whom Julia has one of the frankest and most gurgling of passions. See her, hear her, on a perfect morning in the Forum, as she presents him with the party she has collected for the treat of a tour, under his guidance, among the excavated ruins. He knows them intimately, from the temple to the sewer; there is a heart of things Roman after all, and the Professor undertakes to reveal it.

Not in the great bleak galleries and the tawdry churches, but here among broken columns and crumbling masonry, still half buried in historic dust— here is that human and homely touch, or note, or message (for either word is used, if we follow Julia), which at first one took to be lacking altogether in Rome. The darling Professor had made all the difference to her enjoyment of the place; no wonder that she whinnied and panted in her enthusiasm, while she tried to keep us in a bunch and to marshal us properly for our treat.

The Professor seemed conscious of Julia as of some disturbance in the air, some unexplained flutter or flicker that confused him slightly; but he brushed it aside, he vaguely greeted the rest of us, and he flung himself immediately into the zeal of his task. Miss Turnbull, I know, was a young woman easily stirred to ideal raptures, but I soon acknowledged that the Professor was irresistible. He had the appearance partly of a moth and partly of a scarecrow; and the mixture, as I recall it, surprisingly gives him the likeness of a soft and ragged rain-cloud, swept by a kindly gust. He veered at high speed across the broken floor of the Forum, and Julia had much difficulty in holding the half-dozen of us in her embrace while she trundled us after him. The Professor had his view of the particular drain or paving-stone where the study of Rome begins; and there was nothing for it, said Julia, but to accept his rule and to squeeze as we might into the

awkward pit or cleft in which the fundamental object is to be found. “Mind the tail of your skirt, Mrs. Rollesby,” cried Julia, growing heated; “there’s room for Kathleen at this end, out of the puddle; wait, Professor, wait—I want Mr. Ram to hear this; really, Mr. Ram, if you crouch you can easily get in.” We were a handful, but Julia kept her head; the most trying member of the party was the Professor, who heeded nothing but the book which he had drawn from his pocket and from which he was gleefully reading aloud— translating as he went, for it was an ancient text.

It wasn’t the best situation for a classical lecture, and Mr. Ram, splashing in the puddle, sighed faintly in good Italian. “Per l’amor di Dio!” he murmured; he was very helpless, and the girl called Kathleen seized him with a manly arm and set him to rights on his perch. Crouching, scuffling, apologizing, we wedged ourselves about the lecturer—with sudden changes of pressure when Mrs. Rollesby leaned and peered over her capacious bosom (she may have been one of Emmeline’s heroines) to see what was happening to her skirt. Under the Professor’s elbow sat a bewildered maiden with a pulled-out neck like a hen’s, and she distracted the whole company by taking notes of the lecture on a little pad—scrawling down words like “republican (said to be)” and “(?) Etruscan,” which we all tried to read. Julia listened fervently, her lips moving in the effort to get the message of the paving-stone by heart; and the message ran on, ran on, now translated from the ancient book, now poured forth at an amazing rate in the exposition of the Professor. He was inspired; he stood upon the mouth of the sewer (if sewer it was—“masonry doubtful (perhaps),” obscurely noted the hen-necked girl)—he stood there and flourished his book and flaunted his interpretation and ransacked the ages, casting up the history of races, of immigrations, of the colour of men’s hair, of the obscenities of their religion, of the shapes of their water-pots; and he whipped open his book again and triumphantly quoted, he dashed it away to remind us of Pelasgic sources and Punic infusions and Iberian influences; and perhaps I rather recall the heads of his discourse as they reached the bewildered pad than as they fell from the Professor, but they were various and bristling and abundant; for it all came in, it all came round, it all came finally back to the stone on which Mr. Ram was trying to twist himself into a tolerable attitude without spoiling his trousers. “Ah,” exclaimed Julia uncontrollably, “how one feels it on the very spot!” Mr. Ram seemed to think so too; he raised

himself, ruefully inspecting the damp green traces it had left on the very spot. The Professor dived again into his book like a man possessed.

He kept us at last so long in our narrow pit that we must surely have laid the foundations of Rome and tunnelled its drains with all thoroughness; the notes on the pad were still dubious, but Mrs. Rollesby began to wonder if we hadn’t now reached the surface of the soil—she too had taken her share of the ooze of the ages. She signed to Julia with winks and nudges—and Mr. Ram appealed to Julia with a woeful smile, to which Kathleen added an imperative frown; everybody looked to Julia to take action—everybody except the maiden with the pad, intent upon the uncertainties of learning.

The Professor was Julia’s property, it was for her to deal with him; and he had clearly forgotten that we were still underground, he didn’t even notice that the reason why he couldn’t get at the pocket in his coat-tail (he made a sketchy motion towards it now and then) was that the hen’s-neck stretched in the way. We might just as well be sitting comfortably in the sun, and between her responsibility and her rapture poor Julia was flustered. “Soon, very soon—the blue-eyed infusion predominant—I’ll get him to move in a moment—their pots were shallower”: Julia tried to whisper encouragingly to Mrs. Rollesby without dropping the thread of the message. (I don’t answer for her version of it.) But the Professor swept over her head, beaming in the zest of his approach to the real inwardness, the ultimate significance, the true truth of the origin of Rome—it appeared that we were only there, even now, and the first damp stone, so homely and said to be so Etruscan, had still to be laid. We were to stick in our cleft indefinitely, I thought, for Julia’s tactful advances and coughs made no impression. The hen-necked girl scratched out “Etruscan” and wrote wildly “theory abandoned (if at all)”; and the Professor struck her forcibly on the jaw as he flung out upon the climax, the glad surprise to which he had been gradually leading us—his discovery of the solution, the answer to all the queries of the distracted student.

“But first,” he said, “I fear I must disturb you.” He explained with apologies that we should be better able to judge the weight of his argument if we followed him—and he was gone, leaping to the upper air with a sudden agility that brought on one of the tiresome attacks to which Mrs. Rollesby is subject on being startled. These attacks take the form of an extraordinary surging and quaking of the bosom, and she has to be seized and supported and propelled to a spot where she can sit on something less

painful than a heap of brickbats. So she says; but the girl Kathleen (who proved to be her niece) declared rather brutally that a little smart exercise would do her all the good in the world. “If she will gobble at breakfast she’ll palpitate before lunch—naturally,” said Kathleen, who was as taut and muscular as a young tree. With all this the Professor had given us the slip, our party was adrift and scattered, Mr. Ram saw a chance of escape— he feared and detested Kathleen. But Julia signalled so excitedly through a gap in some ruinous brickwork, not far off, that she drew us together again for the Professor’s revelation. Mrs. Rollesby, still surging, was somehow hoisted through the gap, and here we found a more convenient space and a less Etruscan boulder, on which she was deposited. There was more room; but it seemed that the secret of Rome still lurks in rather confined and dingy places. The Forum on a spring morning is a sweet spot, and Mr. Ram assured me that he loved every stone of it; the columns tower against the blue sky, roses scramble among the mouldering walls, the dark ilex-crown of the Palatine hangs nobly on its height. But the Professor dragged us away from the view and the roses, he thrust us into a dusty corner where there was nothing to be seen except the blank face of the brickwork to which he joyously pointed. Now, he said, we could perceive for ourselves the conclusion to which his argument had tended; and he shone so radiantly with his glee in the surprise prepared for us that Julia bravely gave a cry and a gasp of recognition on behalf of all. He was enchanted with his success. “I knew you would see it at once,” he said proudly; “that speaks for itself.” He patted and caressed it with the hand of a collector, a connoisseur; it appeared to be a little rim or ledge of greyish cement between the reddish bricks.

His triumph illuminated the shabby corner. Julia’s falsity, Mrs. Rollesby’s palpitation, Mr. Ram’s uneasy mistrust in the neighbourhood of Kathleen—he was rapt above all these in his blissful vision. I don’t know that any of us attained to a share in it; for even Julia, who perhaps came nearest, was so much disturbed by her own rashness and by the fear of being unmasked that she was altogether thrown out in her absorption of the message. She was soon in a fearful state of muddle between the homely touch and the human note, and if the Professor had had eyes for anything post-Iberian (but the pad must surely have got this word wrong) he couldn’t have failed to see that her attention wandered. I attribute my own confusion in the matter of the sewer and the grey cement in the first place to the hen-

necked girl (whom Julia addressed as “Hicksie dear”)—for the eye was fatally drawn by her pad; and secondly to Mrs. Rollesby’s alarming attack —which in spite of her niece’s treatment abated little on the boulder, some of the symptoms being so tumultuous that they even affected the Professor in his cloud. Mr. Ram, moreover, was inclined to attach himself to me, as the only member of the party who wasn’t rather rough with him; for the dry bones of learning, he said, left him cold, and he wanted to point out to somebody that the past only lives for us when it is touched by a poetic imagination. So he pointed it out to me, and in principle I agreed with him; but I couldn’t admit that the Professor was wanting in poetry. To me he seemed romantically poetic, and though his argument escaped me I appreciated the spirit of his dream.

It was the spirit of those old fine men, the scholars of the great revival, to whom the glory of antiquity was disclosed in the recovery of the lost books and the forgotten tongue; and even more, perhaps, it was the spirit of the artist, the lover of the marble and the bronze, who stood in breathless expectation while the spade unearthed the buried goddess and gave her back after long eclipse to a newly adoring world. As Poggio over a brown Greek manuscript, as Michael over the great smooth limbs that had lain for a thousand years of oblivion in the soil of the vineyard—so our Professor was hailing no less than a revelation in his turn. What is the mere fidget of the foreground, the present, the transient, compared with the huge unchanging past, where everything is secured and established under the appearance of eternity?—and how, when the obstruction is wonderfully pierced, the page restored, the earth of the present shovelled away, shall we refrain from dashing headlong into the world thrown open, serenely offering itself to our exploration? “There, there’s the appropriate country”—for no man can think rarely and intensely in the rattle of things proceeding, changing, palpitating, catching the eye momently with their ambiguous queries. A scholar shares the blest opportunity of the higher mathematician, and the two of them share it with the artist; all three, and doubtless the saint for a fourth, inhabit a region of completed things, of motionless truth. It is not to say that they are calm and motionless themselves—the Professor almost dances and leaps in the inspiration of his research, returning again and again to the wonder of the speaking brickwork. But the truth that he seeks is there before him, eternally disposed for the hand, the eye, the brain—and I am

not afraid of Mr. Ram’s own word, for the poetic imagination—that is able to discern and seize it.

To the Professor it was as lovely as a lyric of Sappho or a torso of the golden age. His fingers rested on the battered brick, the rubbish, the rubble —whichever it was that held the secret—with a touch that might have been laid on the exquisite curves of the perfect marble. His statue had come to the light, he chanted its beauty, he was ready to linger over its gracious lines for the benefit even of a few ignorant gapers like ourselves. Homely indeed!

—and human!—Julia was wide of the mark. It was divine, if the word means anything, in its immortal completeness; and as for homeliness, why it carries you off into the clouds, a soft tattered cloud yourself, so that the earth with its gapers and its great fat panting gobblers is forgotten—or would be if it weren’t for the singular moanings of the dying storm in Mrs. Rollesby’s breast. These, as I have said, did occasionally penetrate to the Professor; he glanced earthward with a puzzled look, as though he asked himself whether he had heard or only fancied the report of some commotion. Only fancy, he concluded; and he returned to the height of his discourse—which all this time you must imagine to have been ranging onward, sweeping backward, darting and circling as vivaciously as ever.

The wretched Hicksie tore leaf after leaf from her pad, scattering fresh interrogations as fast as the last were answered. Julia was still bright and eager, but her bad conscience was beginning to show in the flush of her dishevelment. The Professor alone didn’t flag; we had given up all thought of the roses and the view, and we gazed stonily at his vigour. Oh, the common earth of the present had little with which to retain such a man; he was caught into the past, into the loving celebration of his statue, his lyric— which is my figure for the secret revealed to his exploring and divining scholarship. I envy him as I envy an artist and a saint, or even a mathematician; there, there’s where I would be, where things stand still and are silent, and you roam among them, chanting the rapture of your research, till you drop. That is a life.

And what was the secret after all? I picture it vaguely as a brilliant divination and revival of the past, the result of the play of the Professor’s penetrating insight upon the vast amassment of his learning. I think of his jubilant glee as aroused, how naturally, by some great spectacle of the ancient world that he perceives in the light of his patient faithful studies.

Alas, it is vague to me; but he sees it as clearly, no doubt, beneath the dust

and rubbish of the Forum, as I see the green-veiled woman who strays drearily into our corner, murmuring over her red handbook “to our right lie the rude substructures of the peristyle.” And in point of fact I am quite as wide of the mark as Julia herself. The Professor was not the man to have spent good time and good thought over the visionary fancies I ascribed to him; not for him to be a mere “popularizer of the specious”—a phrase that he utters with hissing scorn, for it is one of his side-hits at the showier lore of a “sister university.” No, the Professor took a different view of the scholar’s privilege. It is for the scholar to find a loose stone or an insidious chink in the work of his predecessors and to leave it tightened and slopped; then as he dies he tells himself that he has done something which needed doing—not every man can say as much. Was it a small thing?—it may seem a small thing to you or me, but the Professor retorts that in these matters our clumsy measure is of no authority; if a fact has been inserted where no fact was, then truth is the better for it—and with what sort of scale, pray, will you undertake to estimate the betterment of truth? All this nonsense of torsos and secrets and lyrics may be well enough in a pretty book; but the Professor has been putting a great deal of energy into an explanation, which I seem to have totally misunderstood, of the point that had baffled—or worse, that had deceived and misled—all researchers before him. He has demonstrated his own theory, and when I mention that it has found complete acceptance even at the “sister university” (where to be sure they consider it a trifling matter—they would!) I think we may assume that a fanciful amateur, vacantly gaping, is not likely to find a flaw in it. Here is something accomplished for a man to rest upon with satisfaction—so much so that even now, after an hour of mercurial discourse, the Professor is still prepared to go springing off to the next dusty corner and rude substructure that speaks for itself in support of his view.

But what is it, what is it? At this distance of time I long to know, but I confess that at the moment, what with the wear and tear of the various distractions I have described, I could only agree with Mr. Ram that the day was indeed growing “sultry”—I never heard this word on the lips of anyone else—and that it would be pleasant to seek a little repose and refreshment.

Mr. Ram looked at his watch—“Time for a little vino, a little spaghetti,” he insinuated gently and playfully; and though he spoke aside to me, the suggestion was caught up with promptitude by Mrs. Rollesby. All eyes were again directed upon Julia, and poor harassed Julia had once more to begin

coughing and sniffing significantly at each of the Professor’s full slops.

Kathleen indeed told her aunt plainly that lunch on the top of “all that stodge” at breakfast would be disastrous for one so lately startled; and Mr. Ram drew a sharp breath between his teeth as she added, swinging round at him and pointing to his waist, “Yes, and for you too, Mr. Ram—you’d much better come for a tramp with me before you lay on any more of that deposit.” Hicksie also seemed to have no thought of food or rest; her scribbling was by this time almost delirious in the fever of its queries, but she stuck to it. And the Professor ran on, ran on, blind to Mrs. Rollesby, deaf to Julia—until it happened as before, he suddenly apologized for being compelled to disturb us again, and was gone. This time he was gone so imperceptibly that Mrs. Rollesby was unfluttered; she was consulting Mr. Ram with regard to the handiest place for her lunch. Might we decently take it that the lecture was finished? Not so—Julia, beckoning me to follow, had dashed in pursuit of the Professor; we saw her scrambling up a steep bank to a sort of platform among the ruins, elevated and exposed, where he was renewing his exposition to an audience of one—for the faithful Hicksie had kept pace with him and was sitting at his feet, bent already over a new page.

Julia gained the height and doubled his audience; and Mr. Ram and I, glancing at each other rather guiltily, suggested that they seemed very well as they were. The Professor was clearly quite unconscious of the dwindling of his audience; we seized our chance.

Over our sorso di vino, as Mr. Ram still called it, I was inclined to think that we had indeed been very near the heart of things Roman that morning —very near, if not completely in touch with it. The Professor’s singleminded certainty was contagious; he held his faith as a grain of mustardseed, and his passion almost convinced me that we waste our time in our random researches, away from his guidance, after the heart of Rome.

Suppose Julia was right, and it was the Professor who had really the clue— for indeed there was a quality in his faith, with its blankness to vulgar appeals, which hadn’t been noticeable on the whole among the rest of our band. Unfortunately I couldn’t put my question to Mr. Ram; he was preoccupied with his own more tender, more understanding and sensitive love of every stone of the Forum. It hurt him to see the Forum treated as a classroom, and he blamed himself for having suffered Miss Julia to include him, much against his rule, in the class. He didn’t wish to speak of the Professor, but rather of the impression that the Forum, familiar as it was, had made

upon himself last evening in a strangely “bistred” afterglow, whatever that may be. But with all his tenderness the faith of Mr. Ram was a languid thing beside that of the Professor, and I returned to the impression that the Forum had made upon myself in the iridescent halo (thus I capped Mr. Ram) of the Professor’s ardour. Where had I seen the like of it? Nowhere at all, I reflected, except perhaps in one place—and that was the great church, when the genius of Rome came riding and swaying over the heads of the multitude. Those eager votaries, yelling their homage—the Professor dancing in his zeal: they had come to Rome with something in common, their single mind.

XIV. VIA MARGUTTA

A

STUDIO!—I found myself at last in the studio of an artist. Deering had mocked my bookish and antiquated notions of Roman life and I had obediently dropped them; I had thrown over Hawthorne and Andersen, even the ingenuous romance of poor old Zola, and my pursuit of reality had carried me along the path that I have traced. But at last I arrived at a studio, and I hadn’t spent ten minutes there before I was back again in the dear familiar company of the Improviser and the Faun, the friends of my sentimental and pre-Deering past. I had had an inkling of them even as I approached the door; for the Via Margutta, tucked under the terrace of the Pincian Hill, is a corner of Rome where you might well expect to be brushed by their gentle ghosts. It is a street of studios, or it was a few days ago—perhaps it is a street of motor-works and cinema-houses by now; and a quiet bystreet not far from the Spanish Steps, full of shabby buildings with high northern lights, was still populous with Kenyon and Donatello and Roderick, for me at least it was, in that spring-time of the middle distance to which I now look back. Even as I turned into the Via Margutta, then, I had a hint that Deering had deceived me; and ten minutes later I knew he had, for I stood before the canvases that lined the studio of Mr. Vickery.

He was as loud and deaf and picturesque as I had seen and heard at Miss Gainsborough’s; he wore a great blue smock and a loose slouch-cap of black velvet, his white hair coiled upon his shoulders. There was a bewildering crowd of people in the big room, and there were several low tables spread out with fine old china and a lavish refection; and at first I was rather taken aback, for Mr. Vickery’s invitation to me had implied that I should find him lost to the world as usual and dabbling in his paints, but glad to welcome a friend to the casual cheer of an old Bohemian. He was casually welcoming such a crowd, and the strawberry-dishes were so many, and the room was so grand with tapestries and armour and cushioned divans, that I was struck shy and lonely at the start, forgetting my pleasant hint of Kenyon outside; but Mr. Vickery rolled jovially to greet me—he had a large rocking movement on his legs that was full of heartiness—and begged me to put up with the easy ways of an old Bohemian like himself.

He was very loud and clear upon the point, and I heard him reiterate it as he

rambled among his guests; I made out that we had all dropped in upon him casually, and must take him as we found him in the rude simplicity of his workshop. Presently he had picked up a palette daubed with colours and was wearing it on his thumb; and he clutched a sheaf of long-handled brushes that he threw down with splendid geniality to grasp the hand of somebody arriving or departing. We had surprised him, it appeared, at work on a gigantic canvas, a landscape, which was hoisted on an easel so tremendous that he had to climb by a step-ladder to reach the azure distances of the Alban hills. He climbed to them again from time to time, and he looked wonderfully striking, I must say, as he stood on the steps, his brush poised, glancing over his shoulder with a laughing boyish word to the crowd below.

The great picture represented a view of the Roman Campagna; the azure hills were seen through the straddling stilted arches of one of the ruined aqueducts; in the foreground was a party of goats, attended by a handsome old man, sheepskin-clad, who shaded his eyes and looked benignantly across at a boy blowing a pipe in the left-hand corner—and the boy, as I live, had matted curls and a pair of weather-stained velvet breeches. My mind flew to Deering—he should hear of this! Deering was too clever by half, with his derision of my innocent fancies; here was an artist, just as I had supposed, who duly studied the “picturesque models” of the English ghetto and introduced them into a picture as venerable and as romantic and as big almost as the Campagna itself. Is it into a picture, moreover? It is into fifty pictures, hung on the walls or tilted on easels all about the studio; and I wandered from one to another, very pleasantly, in the recovered company of my familiar old friends. Hawthorne murmured his prim harmonious phrases; another and a younger figure, very watchful under the careful correctness of his bearing, noticed everything and said little; and we passed from picture to picture, pausing before each with a smile of charmed recognition. The old man in his sheepskin, the boy in his curls, met us by many a crumbling arch of a sun-bathed aqueduct; and sometimes they met us in a street-scene, by a splashing fountain and a gay flower-stall, where they were joined by a girl with gleaming teeth and black provocative eyes; and again they met us in deep mountain-valleys, very verdurous and lonely, where there was a ruined temple on the height of a crag and a bandit at the mouth of a cavern; and everywhere the sheepskin and the curls and the fine dark glances had a charm for us, away from Deering’s sarcastic eye, to

which I for one surrendered in comfort and peace. This was a world I knew; it was quite a relief to cease from facing reality for a few minutes.

I was brought back to reality by encountering Miss Gadge, who said (as my shadowy companions vanished) that there was nothing she enjoyed more, as an old Roman, than a prowl round the studio of a true artist. She delighted in the temple and the bandit, but she seemed a little distraught in her reverence by her desire to talk about the people present. She had a great deal of information concerning all the company, and she hastened to impart it—for it would interest me, she said, to know something of the kind of types one met in a typically Roman studio. She went through them all, giving of each what is called a “thumbnail” sketch; she admitted that the phrase was Emmeline’s, and that in Emmeline’s society she had fallen into the habit of seeing people always in an intensely typical light—Emmeline says that a novelist does so quite instinctively. “Now that girl there with the blue beads—she’s a kind you only see in Rome: very charming, very ladylike and that—pretty I don’t say, and a bad complexion, but that’s neither here nor there; well, her name is Sandra Deeprose (an odd name, isn’t it?)

—” Miss Gadge’s sketches seemed to be wanting in crispness, and for an observer of type she was excessively occupied with the individual, but she wandered on over the company and presented me with a large number of facts and names. Mr. Vickery, she told me, was held to be the doyen of the “colony” in Rome; he had lived in Rome for ever, from far back in the ancient days of the Pope-King; he had known everybody, he had known the Brownings—and sharply on that word I looked round to devour the strange new wonderful sight of a man who had known the Brownings. He happened to be standing at the far end of the room with his back against a darkly figured hanging of tapestry; and his head in its florid grandeur, so carefully composed, was relieved upon its background like a daring portrait— brilliantly, slashingly painted, you might say, by some artist not afraid of an obvious effect. Of his own effect Mr. Vickery was very sure, and with reason; he offered himself as a finished achievement of art and nature, sufficient as he stood. But far from it, he was at that moment nothing in himself, he was everything for what he implied—to one pair of eyes at least, fixed on him with intensity. He had known the Brownings—how strange it seems and new!

It was true enough, no doubt; Miss Gadge was certain of the fact, she had heard him speak of “picnics in the Campagna” with the Brownings—

the throb of the thought was almost painful to me as she said it. But how delightful, she pursued, to know that I was a “Browning-lover” like herself; and she dropped the subject of the picnics in order to quote, to declaim some lines from “Rabbi ben Ezra” in a strangulated sing-song, quite unlike her ordinary voice, which expressed the power of her devotion to the poet.

“Grow old along with me—” she intoned the lines in a hoarse and quavering wail; and I broke out on her with a passionate cry, though it remained unheard, over the depth of her misunderstanding. If a wish could have struck her in the face she would have reeled on the spot; but though I had struck her I couldn’t have made her understand how completely she mistook my feeling. “It’s not that,” I might have burst out, “not in the least like that!”—and how should she have understood that my sudden interest in Mr. Vickery was larger and rarer and stranger than that of a “Browninglover,” even of one who could intone the chant of the Rabbi from end to end. I could any day have repeated the poems of Browning against Miss Gadge, though not on the pitch of her wail; but I was high above them, I felt, when I started at the sight of Mr. Vickery—at the gleam of the eaglefeather. I was with the Brownings in the Campagna, suddenly with them, stopping to speak to them: don’t you understand?—I wasn’t repeating their poems, which I have known by heart for years. It was useless to try explaining this to Miss Gadge, and I let her quaver on while I gazed my fill at the wonder. It was a strange excitement; and I don’t pretend to make light of it as I now look back, or to smile distantly at the thought of the thrill, the wild sweet breeze that ran through the imagination of the youthful onlooker.

A man who had known the Brownings—there he stood!

The company thinned at length, and I was able to approach him, though I knew full well that the demon of shyness would prevent my questioning him, as I longed to question, on the subject of the picnics. But first I was held awhile longer by Miss Gadge, who on discovering that I was a less worthy worshipper of the poet than she had imagined went on with her study of type; and this brought her to a shabby and crumpled little old woman who was slipping furtively about the room with a purposeful air, talking to nobody. Miss Gadge named her, and the name was indeed a surprise—Mrs. Vickery; she was actually the wife of our resplendent host, but Miss Gadge threw a world of meaning into her headshake and her delicate grimace as she referred to her. Poor Mr. Vickery, all through his long and sumptuous career that dowdy impediment had hung to him; and

Miss Gadge, like all his admirers, was impressed by his fidelity—though indeed you might equally call it his wife’s tenacity. But to do her justice she kept to the background when his brilliance was turned to the world; I could see this for myself, as she slunk among his visitors without attempting to pretend they were hers. Look, however—at that moment Mrs. Vickery did venture to accost one of them, a queer untidy bundle of a woman not unlike herself, though much more colourful and bold-eyed. “Ah yes, of course,” said Miss Gadge, nodding shrewdly, “she talks to the reporter”; for the bold bundle, it seemed, was a common type, a haunter of studios and public places and some drawing-rooms even, where she picked up what she could for the exceedingly vulgar and brazen newspaper that you know so well.

Mrs. Vickery fastened upon her with decision and drew her apart; and they stood together by one of the easels—not indeed looking at the picture, but evidently speaking of it, for Mrs. Vickery jerked her thumb at the bandit and proceeded to explain something very minutely to the journalist, emphasizing her points with a finger tapped on her palm. I caught a snatch of her explanation as I passed up the room. “He never asks less,” Mrs. Vickery was saying earnestly—“and he feels it should be known.”

The artist was now at work again; he was mounted on his step-ladder, that is to say, with brush poised and palette displayed, and at intervals he gave a masterly stroke to the Alban hills. He wanted to get “a little more nerve, more race, into the folds”: such was his odd expression. The crowd had cleared, but there was a small knot of people still clustered about him, and the braver occasionally sent a compliment or a question bawling up at him. “Don’t talk to me of ‘movements,’ ” he genially cried back; “the only movement a painter should think of is this”—and he twirled his brush in a narrowing spiral till it lighted on tiptoe in a fold of the hills. “The only movement I attend to is my own,” he exclaimed, swinging round, flashing on us superbly; “it extends from my house to my studio and back again.

‘Don’t talk about art—show me your work—here’s mine’: that’s what I say to the youngsters. My trade is paint, and I stick to it. An honest tradesman before the world—that’s what an artist should make and keep himself.

Before the world, mark you!—his dreams are his own affair. Ah, his dreams —!” Mr. Vickery paused, dropping his brush, and he smote his hand to his eyes and held it there in a long silence. “My God, his dreams!” he murmured. The little group of us stood in a row below him, hushed and intent. The grand old figure of the painter towered against the monument of

his toil, and the light of a spacious age seemed to beat on him in the hush.

An old master-craftsman of the Renaissance, in his flat velvet cap, his loose blue working-garb—a tradesman he called himself, sturdy in his pride, but we had a glimpse of what he hid from the world. More than a glimpse indeed; for it was a long minute, I should think, before he turned and caught up his brush and set boisterously to work again. As he did so I was sharply prodded from behind—by the lady-reporter, I discovered. “What was that about dreams?” she asked; “did he mean art-dreams?” She wanted to have it clear, but Mrs. Vickery stole swiftly forward and nudged her for another point. “You quite understand,” Mrs. Vickery distinctly whispered, “that it mustn’t appear to come from him—what I told you.”

Before long the painter stepped down from his ladder, inspected the nerve of the hills from the proper distance and declared himself satisfied.

He stretched his arms with a long happy sigh. “Well, well, well, it’s a great game—thank the gods for it! Where should I have been without it these fifty years? Can you imagine me without my poor old toys, Marchesa?

Colour-box and canvas—give me them and take the rest! ‘He was born, he painted, he died’—my biography; when you write it don’t add another word.” The Marchesa looked at him with kind timid eyes (she was a very tall and angular Englishwoman) and answered vaguely; she spoke vaguely because it was impossible for her to reach Mr. Vickery’s hearing with her gentle huskiness, so that it didn’t matter what she said. The artist motioned her to a big divan and threw himself beside her among the cushions. He talked on. “Ah, there has been some work done in this old room for fifty years! What’s been happening all that time in the world, Marchesa? You great ones of the earth have had your hour and your power, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it. A poor painter wishes well to the world, always, for so long as the world is happy and busy it will forget the poor painter—he counts on that.” Mr. Vickery’s glance roved for a moment, taking in the circle of his listeners; his wife was still engaged with the reporter at a distance, but she looked hastily round on the pause and gave the reporter a little push, directing her towards the divan. This lady hurried across and took a vacant chair by my side. Mr. Vickery had turned again to address the Marchesa, and he proceeded to speak with emotion of the long lonely laborious service to which a painter is dedicated; and insensibly he lifted the veil, musing to himself, and the light fell upon the hope, the faith, the ambition that an artist so jealously hugs and hides. “He hugs them like a

secret,” said Mr. Vickery, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, “a secret that he daren’t profane.” Once more there was a silence. My neighbour bent to me anxiously: “Did he say ‘profane’?” she enquired; “why profane, do you think?—do ask him.”

I don’t know in what form the “Roman studio-chat” appeared in the brazen journal, but if the good lady had as much difficulty in sorting her impressions as I had over mine she can’t have got them ready for the following Saturday. The Marble Faun, the Brownings, the goatherd and the bandit, and then the resplendence of Mr. Vickery—in all this there was far too much for an easy cosy column with plenty of “cross-headings,” even if one left out the array of the types. Mrs. Vickery by herself might be the substance of a leisurely chat; she didn’t attend the session of the divan—she was very busy at a writing-table in a far corner, where she seemed to be sorting papers, making entries in books, stowing things into drawers and locking them up with jingling keys. She at least was forgotten by the world and obviously knew she could count on it; but if one happened to notice her she appeared as the one small sign of lonely concentration in the decorative staging of an artist’s life. I watched her examining a slip of paper, biting her pen; and presently she left her place, edged round the wall to the divan, and unobtrusively offered the paper and the pen to one of our party, a well-fed middle-aged man with side-whiskers. “You’ve forgotten to fill in the date,” I heard her say softly. He filled it in, apologizing, and as she moved away she added that it would be sent without fail to his hotel next morning. Mrs. Vickery was attending to business, assured that the world was happy without her; she locked up the slip of paper and returned to the entries in her note-book. Yes, I think she would have made the best subject of all for one of the “jottings in Rome”; but the jotter missed it—she was preparing to ask Mr. Vickery about the profanity that she had also inadvertently missed.

He gave her no opportunity, however, so I suppose she had to supply it herself in the chat. I too had had my own question for Mr. Vickery, if I could have found the courage to bawl it—or rather if I could have framed it in any words. But I no longer desired to ask him about the Brownings, and indeed the air of the studio wasn’t favourable to questions, with its comfort so easy and public and its pictures so candid and explicit. If you want the answer to any question, look round you!—the room tells you all there is to be told. There was certainly nothing mysterious about the pictures; with one voice they declared themselves, repeating their frank formula with the

glibness of fifty voluble years. There was nothing questionable about the luxurious installation of their maker—nothing, at any rate, if one noticed the obscure corner of industry that attracted so little attention. And least of all did the painter himself provoke any doubts that he didn’t plainly satisfy, with his picturesque frontage turned so full to the light; the fumbling reporter was the only person who had missed a syllable of anything he intended to convey. And the upshot of it all was that Mr. Vickery had endured from a blander age, bringing a waft of its goodly confidence and ease, trailing a train of its illustrious memories—only not bringing, as it happened, the forgotten secret on which its glory and its confidence reposed. The blander world of romantic Rome didn’t greatly trouble itself with questions, didn’t object to a florid style, wasn’t afraid of the telling effect of a handsome old head against the bluest hills of Italy; but there had been something else, and Mr. Vickery didn’t chance to have brought it with him—it remained with the Brownings, they kept it. Let me ask Miss Gadge what it was. She thinks it must have been their depth, and she is ready to intone the whole of “Abt Vogler” to bear out her opinion.

Mr. Vickery, then, survived in our thin and acid air, to meet the assault of carping doubts from which his prime was protected; and he hadn’t the depth (if that is Miss Gadge’s word) to keep the faith of the romantic age as impressively as it was kept in his youth. I was glad that he had escaped the eye of Deering, to whom I should never betray him; Mr. Vickery, taken as he stood, too freely gave away the honour of Roman romance to be revealed to Deering. With me it was safe; but that sardonic observer, I am sure, wouldn’t consent to view the old survivor as I did, as I still can, when he placed himself before the dark tapestry with the golden light streaming full upon his patriarchal nobility. For me he was the man who remembered the great days, who had roamed in the Campagna with poets, and the man in whose studio the shadows of genius were still to be seen and talked with if one loved them. I loved them myself so dearly that I could easily give Mr. Vickery the benefit of their presence; and in their presence one didn’t take him as he stood, far from it, but with the lustre of his association upon him, strange and new. Deering wouldn’t have had this fond understanding; indeed he would have steeled himself against it with his modern doctrine that one mustn’t read books, at any rate in Rome. “Come out of your books,” he had exhorted me, and it wasn’t likely that he would relapse with me into Browning at this hour—into Browning, whose influence had been