In at the Death

The first surviving work of dramatic criticism in English is also, as one might expect, an anti-theatrical diatribe. The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (c. 1380– 1420) condemns the mimetic spectacle of human bodies in pain. In its view those who torment Christ and the saints in jest (read, performance) are no different from the actual Jewish and pagan torturers of ecclesiastical lore. The treatise depreciates the alleged devotional value of performance, which is overwhelmed and eclipsed by the temporal and physical functions of playing. Unlike paintings of the Crucifixion that reveal the truth, the actor's physical presence “causes excessive bodily delight, distracting viewers from their proper eschatological hopes.” Impure flesh cannot properly incarnate sanctity. The audience, sharing the temporal dimension of the performance, never loses its awareness of the secular; its weeping at the torments depicted, complains the author, may be an emotional indulgence that detracts from actual contemplation.

The naivety of the Tretise in regard to theatrical aesthetics is typical of such polemics, which can be heard down to Dr. Johnson and beyond. This way of thinking denies the audience a double vision and the performer a twofold presence. When the actor was an amateur, a fellow townsman known to the spectators in a real-life context, a certain willing suspension of disbelief had to enter into play. The sacred narrative temporarily occludes mundane familiarity, while the familiarity levels the exalted spirituality of the sacred. A kind of double exposure occurs, with the devotional image laid over but not concealing the flesh-and-blood simulacrum. Intense faith in the former enables acceptance of the latter.

The Road Not Taken

Contrary to popular belief, performances went on in the British provinces and private homes during the Interregnum even after the official ban on theater. Nevertheless, many traditions were interrupted or fell in desuetude. When the court returned from its exile abroad, its theatrical tastes had been shaped by the French. Daggers continued to be drawn, hair-raising descriptions continued to be declaimed, but on-stage death fell out of fashion even after Shakespeare and his contemporaries began to be revived.

The French constraints were in place early. Jean de la Taille, a humanist playwright, in his De l’art de la tragédie (1572), proclaimed that tragedy “treats only piteous ruins of great lords, inconstancies of Fortune, banishments, wars, plagues, famines, captivities, execrable cruelties of tyrants and, in short, nothing but tears and extreme miseries.” Nevertheless, following the Horatian precept, the spectators must not be confronted with ultraviolence. In addition to preserving the unities of time and place, “one must be careful not to do anything on stage that cannot be done commodiously and decently (honnestement), so as not to carry out murders and other deaths, and not in pretense or otherwise, for each one will always see what it is, and that it is not always feigning (faintise).” These recommendations harden into the laws of French neoclassic drama over the next few years.

Indeed, had it not been for Cardinal Richelieu's eagerness to centralize his nation's cultural heritage, French drama might easily have gone the way of the Elizabethans. De la Taille's strictures were meant to rebuke the already burgeoning bloodshed of Renaissance tragedy that reflected the ever-present turbulence of civil and religious wars. Stage violence was but a pale reflection of the atrocities visited by French Catholics on Protestants and vice versa. A generation later, in his Art poëtique françois (1597), Pierre Laudin d’Aigaliers contradicted de la Taille, insisting that theater must cater to the taste of the audience, which prefers convulsive emotions, spectacular horrors, and terrifying deeds. If tragedy is indeed a representation of the lives of rulers and heroes, cruelty must be a constituent part of it.

The Realm of Shadows

For the Athenians, some things were worse than death. Ostracism, for instance. At first sight, the punishment, usually visited on members of the elite, might not seem severe: its term was for 10 years and the banished individual retained his property. The purpose of the exercise was to maintain political stability within the demos, so it was less punitive than preventative. Recall was always possible.

Nevertheless, exile from one's community was, for the citizen of a polis, a grievous affliction. Except in situations of military emergency, the aggregate known as Greeks (or Hellenes) saw themselves not as members of a nation but as constituents of individual city-states, with their idiosyncratic rites, customs, and dialects. To be condemned to live among strangers had traumatic psychological consequences, in addition to whatever feelings of guilt or shame the ostracized person might undergo. That decade away from home would be hard to bear.

Death, on the other hand, was a clean break with no possibility of return. It is frequently figured as ostracism from the light of day, a banishment to perpetual darkness. Hades (literally the “unseen”), the sunless realm, is literally an underworld; to enter it is always a katabasis or descent. Iphigenia's lament, “To look upon the world/Of light is for all men their greatest joy— /The shadow world below is nothing,” can be heard from the lips of many tragic protagonists. “The ancient Greeks tended to believe the ‘self ‘ of the person was contained in the body, not the insubstantial soul that peeled away from it in death.” To lose one's body with all its faculties and appetites, its potential for pain or pleasure is to be reduced to a shade, wandering aimlessly throughout the nether world, exiled from human society, from ties of affection, from strong emotions. It is not an “afterlife,” but an absence of life. It is the most extreme form of ostracism, a divorce not only from daylight but also from all human connection.

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This is not a book about death. It is a book about dying or, more specifically, about the representation of dying in the theater. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. This cannot be discussed without attention to the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes toward death in their communities and cultures. Nevertheless, my emphasis is on the practice of acting.

In 1995 a British scholar noted that “the subject of death has loomed increasingly large in much academic discourse and yet literary representations of death have only very recently begun to receive critical attention.” Twentyfive years later this no longer holds true, but the bulk of this discourse is content to explore “literary representations,” in other words, texts. Those studies that deal with the performance of death limit themselves to modern and contemporary theater. Generally neglected has been what a performer of the past actually did on stage. There exist more historical studies of audience reception than of what the audiences were receiving.

The obstacles to reconstructing bygone performances are obvious. As Richard Grant White wrote as far back as 1872, an actor can be judged “only by the effect which he produces […] a result, the elements of which are his power on the one hand and the impressibility of his audience on the other.” Lest this be considered a retrograde or Victorian attitude, we find it reiterated on the eve of the Great War by an apostle of the New Stagecraft. Huntly Carter, while proselytizing for Reinhardt, Meyerhold, and the cinema, suggested that modern innovations in stage directing and design were necessary and natural substitutes for the “maximum intensity of acting.”

Over Her Dead Body

Actresses had fewer opportunities to display virtuosity in their demise. They generally served as victims at the mercy of their male partners. A major obstacle to women vying with men in flamboyant stage deaths was social attitudes to female modesty. The ancient taboo on women appearing in public conspired with the equally hoary fear of women out of control to prescribe severe limits on their portrayals of madness, unruliness, and dying. There was something more than indecorous, almost indecent about the physical exertions required by a memorable display of death throes.

Animadverting on Eliza O’Neill's ear-curdling shrieks, eye-rolling, and guttural death-rattles, William Hazlitt offered the Regency-era consensus:

This might be applicable to a performer of either sex who challenges notions of the ideality of art. However, Hazlitt goes on, what's worse is the contradiction between O’Neill's “form and delicate complexion, and the violent conflict into which she was thrown.” He compares her with a little flower contending with a storm. By “pushing truth and nature to an excess,” she was marring her delicate beauty. The following age might add that she was offending modesty. When Clara Rousby in her signature role as Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, the critics concurred that it was a disgusting sight, despite her manager contending “she is burnt only a little.” The need for a dramatic actress to be ladylike confined her to conventional attitudes and actions.

Neoclassic drama offered few if any opportunities; the more grisly Jacobean dramas were seldom revived. Shakespeare was therefore the welcome exception. Some Juliets hoped to outdo or at least match the flamboyant finales of their Romeos.

The Last Act

Grand opera is notorious for its exotic and spectacular deaths, which customarily occur in the last act and allow for florid valedictories: breathing in the fumes of the deadly manzanilla tree (L’Africaine) or chewing leaves of the toxic stramonium tree (Lakmé), entombed in a temple (Aïda) or wasting away in the wilds of Louisiana (Manon Lescaut), leaping off a cliff (La Forza del Destino) or the ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo (Tosca) or into the erupting crater of Mount Vesuvius (La Muette de Portici), stabbed outside a bull-ring (Carmen) or a cave (Forza again) or by one's own hand (Lucia di Lammermoor; La Gioconda; Roméo et Juliette; I Gioielli della Madonna), impaled on a boar spear (Die Gōtterdämmerung) or shot in error (Les Huguenots), poisoned by lemonade (Luisa Miller) or toadstools (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) or one's own decoction (Lucrezia Borgia), strangled by hand (Otello) or by one's queue (L’Oracolo), disembowelled in hara-kiri (Madama Butterfly), burnt alive as a witch (La figlia di Iorio), consumed in the flames of a funeral pyre (Norma; Les Pêcheurs des perles) or tossed into a vat of boiling water (La Juive), crushed by a falling palace (Le Prophête; Samson et Dalila) or an avalanche (La Wally) or under the shields of guards (Salome), or flung from a cathedral tower (Notre-Dame).

I provide this inventory to show how rare and noteworthy in opera is a quiet death in bed. As Helen M. Greenwald points out, in opera the “dying fall” receives its explicit musical expression in Puccini's La Bohème. In her view, “the death of a character is reserved for the final curtain, in a familiar choreography where the heroine (less commonly, the hero) falls to the floor as a tonic chord pounds loudly enough to raise the audience to its feet (as in both La traviata and Madama Butterfly).”