Play with Fire

I remember twelve years ago, when I couldn’t wait to publish a post on everything I read. I really do. But this year, we’re almost to the end of January now, and I haven’t had any pressing urge to share my profound thoughts. Well, that’s the problem, actually: twelve years ago I felt I had more profound things to say. And by “profound” I don’t mean world-changing or even erudite; I just mean more than surfacy. But I feel now as if I’ve said on these pages all the profound things I have to say. I’ve reported my favorite thoughts on all the books I love and all the books I hate already. I’ve spewed forth all the contents of my brain on literary style and what makes for meaningful content. I’ve even shared what little I know about good poetry.

But I’ve had a good time reading this month, and there are at least three of you out there who read faithfully (which I know because you write to me from time to time). So I have a few slightly-more-than-surfacy things to say today about my recent adventures. Many of those adventures have braved the unknown perils of the Land of Drama, so here are a handful of comments about the plays I’ve read in the last four weeks.

A few years ago I read, mostly understood, and heartily enjoyed two plays by Ben Jonson: Volpone and Every Man His Humour. This year I decided to tackle the same author’s Sejanus and Batholomew Fayre. Sejanus is a tragedy about the rise and fall of a power-hungry advisor to Tiberius Caesar, just the kind of thing I would expect to enjoy. But I didn’t much. It didn’t have any of the rich poetry of Shakespeare, and yet despite its more straightforward language, I didn’t always understand the mere meaning of the sentences. I don’t usually have much trouble with seventeenth-century English, so I don’t know what was wrong; I was probably distracted or something. But I will say that if I get a hankerin’ to read an Elizabethan-Jacobean drama about Romans, I’ll go back for another helpin’ of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Batholomew Fayre worked much better for me. Four-hundred-year-old humor can be tough: it can depend on obscure topical references and on puns using slang no longer in use. There was a bit of that at the Fayre, but what I missed in understanding was made up for by the goofy but well recognized characters and the obligatory disguises and mistaken identities.

Better than either offering from Jonson was Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Here the creator of Figaro has some fun with a newly rich blockhead, M. Jourdain, who wants to surround himself with all the luxuries that gentlemen enjoy but doesn’t have the taste or understanding to know what it is he’s getting. On the other hand, his ignorance leaves him very easy to please; one of his teachers explains that all language is either poetry or prose, and M. Jourdain thinks an education a very fine thing indeed if it can teach a person that he’s been speaking prose his whole life without knowing it. Of course, there are more disguises and misunderstandings. Aristotle said that tragedy shows humans as better than they really are and comedy as worse than they really are. But comedy has always seemed much more realistic to me than tragedy: the ludicrous M. Jourdain is barely exaggerated. I grew up in the St. Louis suburbs, the land of 100,000 real-life Beverly Hillbillies families. So I know. (Sometimes the hillbilly still comes out in me: hence me hankerin’ for a helpin’ in the previous paragraph.)

Best of all were two plays by Aeschylus: Prometheus and The Eumenides. I don’t remember now why of all the Greek plays I could have reread, I chose these two, but I’m glad I did. (Or maybe they’re all just so good that any random pair would have scratched my itch.) Students of ancient Greece have to wonder often how intelligent people could have believed in such a petty, jealous, vengeful, unstable set of gods, let alone worship them. Well, Prometheus dares to pull back the curtain and show Zeus for what he is: an immoral, untrustworthy parricide. He also hints that Zeus will himself fall in the (near?) future. I wish we had more of this story!

The Eumenides provides an interesting and moving origin story for one part of the human psyche. Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon because he dared to come home from war when she didn’t stay faithful to him as Penelope did to Odysseus. Orestes kills his mother in revenge. The Furies are ready to wreak havoc on the land; they don’t like to see killing in return for killing, so they want to kill some more in order to stop the killing. Make war to make peace; that always works, right? Fortunately Athena convinces the divine avengers to leave the physical realm as it is and work on the heartstrings instead, creating senses of conscience and guilt as gifts to mankind. I’ve heard so many people talk about guilt being a bad thing, I’m always happy when I hear a wise one pointing out that guilt is a gift. 

By the way, one of the three of you who contact me from time to time recently reported to me that he can no longer post comments. I have discovered that you have to have a Google account (and presumably be signed into said account) in order to comment. So fire up your account, and make a comment. But don’t say anything too surfacy!