Burkman: The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter

The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter

Its Basis in Ritual

Katherine H. Burkman

The drama of Harold Pinter evolves in an atmosphere of mystery in which the surfaces of life are realistically detailed but the patterns that underlie them remain obscure. Despite the vivid naturalism of his dialogue, his characters often behave more like figures in a dream than like persons with whom one can easily identify. Pinter has on one occasion admitted that, if pressed, he would define his art as realistic but would not describe what he does as realism. Here he points to what his audience has often sensed is distinctive in his style: its mixture of the real and surreal, its exact portrayal of life on the surface, and its powerful evocation of that life that lies beneath the surface.

Katherine H. Burkman rejects the contention of some Pinter critics that the playwright seeks to mystify and puzzle his audience. To the contrary, she argues, he is exploring experience at levels that are mysterious, and is a poetic rather than a problem-solving playwright. The poetic images of the play, moreover, are based in ritual; and just as the ancient Greeks attempted to understand the mysteries of life by drawing upon the most primitive of religious rites, so Pinter employs ritual in his drama for his own tragicomic purposes.

The author explores two distinct kinds of ritual that Pinter develops in counterpoint. His plays abound in those daily habitual activities that have become formalized as ritual and have tended to become empty of meaning, but these automatic activities are set in contrast with sacrificial rites that are loaded with meaning, and force the characters to a painful awareness of life from which their daily routines have served to protect them.

Pinter’s ritual counterpoint is one that reveals the writer’s keen awareness of the rhythms of modern life as well as his awareness of those profound rhythms of sacrificial destruction and renewal that have always informed the best of drama. The playwright explores the celebration that accompanies the most cruel rituals of life, and his plays become an initiation for us from which we may emerge with a clearer insight and some feeling of renewal. It is in Pinter’s highly individual treatment of ancient ritual rhythms that Burkman finds the major import of his compelling art.

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Adams: Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes

Bernard Shaw and the Aesthetes

Elsie B. Adams

Though a genius of his stature defies any easy categorization, George Bernard Shaw was enough a man of his age not to have escaped the undeniably pervasive influence of the English aesthetic movement. The movement was at its height when he began writing and publishing in the 1870s and remained an active force in British artistic and literary circles during a substantial part of his long career.

The movement had two distinct branches, and Shaw found himself sympathetic to at least some of the tenets of both. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, he based his art on observed phenomena; and, with Ruskin and William Morris, he saw art as the product of a healthy milieu and a genuine religious impulse.

With the fin-de-siècle aesthetes, who often tended to languish in a haughty and fashionable despair that he rejected, the ever vigorous Shaw held in common the conviction that art does not uphold conventional morality and that art must be free from censorship. It is the artist’s business, he maintained, to create without restriction a meaningful form, appropriate and faithful to his inner vision—to depict a reshaped, motivated, and articulated reality that, as Oscar Wilde put it, serves as a model for life.

Though Shaw was often at pains to dissociate himself from the art-for-art’s-sake faction of the aesthetic movement, he was closer to it than he was ready to admit or realize. The genuine artists (as distinct from the dilettantes and artistic hangers-on) who appear in his plays are alienated, temperamental, and sensitive—often hypersensitive—individuals; they devote themselves to the perfection of their craft and are not afraid of being thought immoral.

Elsie B Adams’ examination of Shaw’s plays as the product of a unique artistic temperament at work in an intellectual climate that was shaped by the aesthetic movement reveals a wealth of new subtleties in them. With remarkable insight, she succeeds in placing Shaw more precisely within his own time, and in defining more exactly that aesthetic sensibility that served to shape his own.

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Fulgentius: The Mythographer

The Mythographer

Fulgentius
Translated from the Latin with Introductions by Leslie George Whitbread

Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, the writings of Fulgentius the mythographer, who lived in the late fifth or early sixth century, were extremely popular, much admired, and widely imitated. His influence on poetry, art, preaching, education, and the modes that were employed to adapt classical myth and literature to the requirements of more-or-less Christian patterns of thought was unquestionably profound.

Translations of the five Latin works ascribed to him have long been needed, simply to make a significant influence available to modern historians of medieval and Renaissance art, literature, and intellectual life. But the language of Fulgentius is appallingly difficult. Composed in the decadent Latin of his time, his writing is full of intricate rhetorical excesses of a particular extravagance and complexity that could only discourage the prospective translator, and that have caused some to describe his work as simply untranslatable.

The substance, too, of Fulgentius’s five treatises—on the content of Virgil according to moral philosophy, on classical mythology, on the Thebaid, on obsolete words, and on the ages of man and the world—has been found wanting. Charges have been made that both his purposes and his methods are confused and of dubious merit, and that the learning displayed in the convoluted syntax of his pompous and extravagant prose is merely secondhand when it is not just highly suspect.

It is an indisputable fact, however, that whenever such broad literary themes are under study as the development of allegory, the survival of classical mythology, medieval interpretations of Virgil, and the history of literary criticism, Fulgentius must be consulted and will be found instructive. For all his maddening imperfection, he has clear title to a secure place in literary and intellectual history—and not only for the central theses that inform his writing, but also for those peripheral concepts and commonplaces that he scatters about them.

Leslie George Whitbread has made a major contribution to scholarship in making these important pieces available for the first time in English, in translations that do full justice to the original texts but suffer none of their rhetorical shortcomings.

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Pierce: Shakespeare’s History Plays

Shakespeare’s History Plays

The Family and the State

Robert B. Pierce

The concept of the family as a microcosm of the state dates back to antiquity. It was revived in the Renaissance, when it became a common sentiment in the literature of Elizabethan England and provided William Shakespeare with a public basis for his art.

Robert B. Pierce systematically examines the nine history plays of the 1590s in the approximate sequence of their composition. He discovers in them a constant elaboration and rich development of the correspondence between the family and the state into an ever more subtle and effective dramatic technique.

Through a careful analysis of the language, characterization, and plots of the chronicles, Pierce demonstrates how the family served as an analogue of those grave events that marked the turbulent reign of King John and the subsequent terrible century of civil strife and wars with the French that haunted the imaginations of Englishmen more than a hundred years later. At times, he finds, Shakespeare depicts the family as a miniature of the kingdom, and the life of the family becomes a direct or ironic comment on the larger life of the commonwealth. At others, the family is inextricably bound up in a political situation by means of characters who are portrayed both in their public roles and as members of their families.

No dramatist treating of those persons and events that are the stuff of the chronicles could avoid depicting the family; for kings and princes are necessarily fathers and sons, husbands and brothers. But Shakespeare’s special contribution is to make the language and episodes of family life relate closely to the political themes that informed his drama—themes that, for his audience, were not mere abstractions but real issues involving the ever present danger of drastic disruption of the established order. Marriage and the relationship between father and son are the materials of a highly personal drama. By exploiting the correspondence between the family and the state recognized and accepted by his audience, Shakespeare, in plays shaped by Tudor political ideas, used these personal, familiar, and familial elements to bring a special immediacy to the rise and fall of kingdoms and kings.