As promised last time, I will drag myself away from the Greek Legendarium and any sort of comparative literature speculation in this final blog about our Iphigenia, closing this Saturday. Instead I want to discuss the Chorus, a foundational element of the Greek Tragedy, and the role our interpretation of it serves in grounding our play in reality.
This is not the first show we have done featuring a Chorus; Henry V has a Chorus introducing each act, a role that is often played by one person but is specifically named as Chorus in the script (Shakespeare would play with this idea again during his Greatest Hits Era with Pericles, in which the Chorus is represented by the story’s author Gower). And our Tempest from Jesus Christ a decade ago 2013 turned Ariel into a truly omnipresent force on the island by making every actor but Prospero, whenever they were not playing someone else, function as a choral interpretation of the spirit. But the Greek relationship with the Chorus was…shall we say, Original, and this production afforded us another opportunity to play around with this ancient and tricky stagecraft.
L-R: Josh Adams, Andrew Keller, Scott Gaines, Britt Duff. From We Happy Few’s 2013 The Tempest. Photo by Jon Harvey.
The Chorus was a feature of 100% of Greek tragedies. The very idea of staged theatrical production at all grew out of choral recitations; when, apocryphally, Thespis stepped out from the Chorus at a Festival Dionysia and spoke as an individual character in a story. The concept of ‘actors’ or ‘a play’ were new technologies for the Tragedians; it is claimed that Sophocles came up with the idea that there could be three actors in a scene at a time, and before his innovation there were only two, which holds up in what little Aeschylus we have. And it is further claimed that Aeschylus innovated having TWO actors on stage, and that before him one character at a time spoke with the Chorus, which does not to me sound like the most riveting entertainment [no offense to the one-man and one-woman shows out there, you are free to change my mind when I decide to watch one of you. But don’t hold your breath -KH]
The Greek Chorus represents a crowd of people observing the action of the protagonists: often soldiers or sailors, women, slaves, or elders of the city. They are on stage for the entirety of the show and generally have little to no power over the situation at hand. Characters may speak with them, and they will express their approval or, more likely, condemnation of what is happening on stage, but with very few exceptions they are powerless to do anything other than observe with dread and dismay the protagonist’s downfall [find a ‘D’ word for “protagonist” here -ed.] And a key element of the Greek Chorus is that they speak with one, or occasionally two, voices. When they speak to another character they are as one, expressing the impotent thoughts or desires of the crowd of people they represent. But in their choral interludes they will occasionally split in two, the strophe and antistrophe, and speak to each other, indicated in the original and in verse translations with different lyrical meters that I could not with a gun to my head explain, much to the dismay of every Literature teacher I’ve ever had as well as, I’m sure, Benji Djain, John McGowan, and all the other Literature Professor Friends of the Company that are shaking their heads as they read this. The only metrical form I could ever really wrap my head around was the caesura-heavy alliterative poetry of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. But I digress. The Chorus’ primary function is to exposit, explain, and contextualize the story, much like myself, though I think they were a little less pedantic about it than I.
Our Chorus, composed, like in our Tempest, of everybody in the cast who isn’t playing a named character in a scene, functions as both actors and audience. A combination of bored Greek soldiers and the Players of Pippin or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they step in and out of roles as the circumstances call for, and otherwise observe the action as it unfolds around them. Our choral interludes are also both the same and different from the Classical mode; instead of singing in unison about Many-Towered Ilium or splitting in half for a back-and-forth discussion about which god Ajax had angered, our Chorus debates and analyzes the story as it is being told, with at least as many viewpoints as there are actors to express them. In this way they allow us to fill out that essential contextualization that the Chorus traditionally handles and that Greek Tragedies really require for a modern audience, without becoming overly florid or didactic by expounding 20-30 lines of poetry, as their ancient predecessors would have.
L-R: Debora Crabbe, Robert Pike, Matt Sparacino, Mary Myers, Bri Houtman. From We Happy Few’s 2023 Iphigenia. Photo by Mark Williams Hoelscher.
Another major advantage of this structure is that we keep many of our actors on the stage for most of the time, which forces us to reckon with, account for, and recognize costuming quick changes, often happening on stage and in view of the audience. If you’ve been a regular reader you will know how much significance I place on quick changes and multi casting [if you’re new to the blog or the company, it’s a lot -KH] Many of We Happy Few’s plays are on some level about artifice and staging, but this one is explicitly and textually about the creation of stories, how and why stories come into being. The actors know they’re in a play; they talk with regularity about what did happen, or should happen, or will happen next on the stage. The audience knows they’re watching a play; you’re the ones who gave me their hard-earned money for a ticket, stepped into a small square room with black walls and lights hanging from the ceiling, and sat in a chair to watch us pretend to be Greek. And we as a company have neither the budget nor the inclination to attempt to create true verisimilitude of a three millennia old story, especially when the core conceit of our retelling is that stories are changed by the context in which they are told and by the people doing the telling. There is little advantage to us breaking our necks attempting to maintain the illusion that we are standing on a becalmed beach in Greece when we are openly discussing the craft of storytelling in this piece. By contrast, there are MAJOR advantages to keeping fresh in the audience’s mind that it is ordinary people telling this story now, just as it was ordinary people telling this story hundreds or thousands of years ago. Euripides and Racine had the same discussions with their actors and directors and whatever designers and technical artists they had at the Festival Dionysia or the stages of Versailles and Paris as we did through our rehearsal process. The only differences were what language the discussions were in, and what the play looked like at the end of them.
I hope you were able to follow the meander of this blog from the historical function of the Chorus to the significance of knowing that human beings create the art that you enjoy. If you want to see what in the world I am talking about, we still have a handful of performances so you can come and see for yourself! Tickets are available here for tonight through Saturday June 17th!
I’ve hinted at this topic a couple times already in the leadup to this show, so now that we are up and running I think it is probably time to address the elephant in the room: the Curse of the Atreides. This curse, the REAL, if hidden, reason that Iphigenia is doomed, is one of two significant bloodline curses in Greek mythology and particularly in Greek tragedy. Maybe someday in another eight years I’ll win another pitch meeting and we will stage Seven Against Thebes or Oedipus Tyrannos and I’ll tell you all about the Curse of Labdacus, remarkably an even more troubling curse than this one. But until then, I have some theories about Greek bloodlines that I am eager to share with you.
Agamemnon comes by the blood on his hands honestly. He is following in a rich familial tradition of kinslaughter dating back to his great-grandfather Tantalus, a king on the West coast of what is now Turkey. Tantalus, for reasons passing understanding, took it into his head to test the gods’ infallibility. When the Olympians attended a banquet hosted by Tantalus, he butchered his own son Pelops, cooked him, and fed him to the gods to see if they would notice. What he would get out of this, other than a dead son and, I suppose, the satisfaction of being right, is unclear. In any case, he was wrong. The gods DID notice that the kid they were eating was human and not goat as they were promised (with the exception of Demeter, who was still in mourning for her daughter Persephone and inadvertently ate some of Pelops’ shoulder) The gods were understandably aggrieved at Tantalus, both for attempting to force them into anthropophagy and for thinking he could trick them. He was sent to Tartarus, where he stands in a pool of water up to his neck with a bunch of grapes above his head. If he bends his neck down to take a drink the water recedes, and if he cranes his neck up to eat a grape the branch lifts out of his reach. His eternal torment is where the word “tantalizing” comes from.
The Torment of Tantalus, by Bernard Picart, 1731.
Pelops, in the meantime, was restored by the gods and fostered for a time on Mount Olympus, where Hephaestus even built him a new shoulder out of ivory to replace the portion that Demeter ate. He sought the hand of Hippodamia in marriage, but her father King Oenomaus of Elis, fearful of a prophecy that he would be killed by his son-in-law, challenged him to a chariot race for consent to wed her, with his life as the hazard. Oenomaus had been running this con for a while, having claimed nearly 20 past suitors’ heads after defeating them in chariot races. But the other suitors weren’t the favorites of Poseidon, god of the sea and of horses. Nor were they trapped in a polluted bloodline whose every generation would pass more atrocities on to their offspring, turning them more vile and depraved and pathetic with each passing year. Pelops was both. He conspired with Oenomaus’ chariot driver Myrtilus, offering him half of the kingdom and the first night in bed with Hippodamia, if he would betray his master. Myrtilus leapt at the opportunity and sabotaged the chariot before the race, killing Oenomaus (and fulfilling his prophecy). When he approached Pelops to demand his cut, Pelops accused him of trying to rape Hippodamia and threw him off a cliff. His, shall we say, eventful life gave us the name for the Peloponnesian Peninsula, the large southern landmass of Greece separated from the rest of Europe by the Isthmus of Corinth.
The regions of the Peloponnesian Peninsula
Pelops’ sons Atreus and Thyestes are where it starts to get really complicated. First of all, the two of them conspired to kill their half-brother and Pelops’ favored son Chrysippus [for reasons I don’t want to get into now but I swear I can talk about if we ever do that Oedipus stuff and the Curse of Labdacus like I threatened earlier -KH] and they were exiled. While in exile they were jointly named as the stewards of Mycenae (or Argos, depending on who you ask) while its king Eurystheus warred with the sons of Heracles; when he was killed in battle Atreus and Thyestes ascended to the throne. But two men may not sit on one throne, and soon Atreus and Thyestes were at one another’s throats. Atreus found a golden lamb in his flock while looking for a sacrifice for Artemis, and gave it to his wife Aerope to hide it from the goddess [insulting Artemis is a family failing, it would seem -KH]. Aerope promptly turned it over to her lover Thyestes, who proposed to Atreus that the crown of Mycenae should go to whoever had a golden lamb. His brother somehow didn’t sense the obvious trick here and agreed, at which point Thyestes produced the lamb and won their contest. Atreus got him back by wagering that the crown should go to whoever could make the sun rise in the West and set in the East, after Zeus told him that Helios had been offended by Thyestes’ duplicity and would drive the chariot of the sun across the sky backwards to help him win back the throne.
After this their prank war took a turn. Atreus found out about the affair between his wife and Thyestes, and to get revenge he took a page from his grandfather’s cookbook, killing his nephews Aglaus, Orchomenus, and Calaeus and cooking them into a pie, Titus Andronicus-style, that he fed to their father. Thyestes’ inadvertent cannibalism left him polluted, unfit for human company, and he was exiled. While in exile an oracle informed him that, if he had a son by his daughter, that son/grandson would kill Atreus. Seeming to believe that if he was polluted anyway there was no harm in incurring more, he did so, raping his daughter Pelopia and fathering Aegisthus. When Aegisthus came of age he, true to prophecy, seized the throne, killed his uncle Atreus, and banished Atreus’ two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, who found refuge in the court of King Tyndareus of Sparta.
L-R: Matthew Rhys as Demetrius, Laura Fraser as Lavinia, Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chiron. From Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus, produced by Fox Searchlight.
While in Sparta Agamemnon and Menelaus married Tyndareus’ daughters, the clever Clytemnestra and the beautiful Helen, and with the support of the Spartans Agamemnon took his throne back from Aegisthus. When Tyndareus abdicated Menelaus became king of Sparta, and the scene was set for the beginning of the Trojan War, which I do not have time to explain here. While awaiting the muster of Greece to sail for Troy, Agamemnon continued the cycle of violence by killing his daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis as repayment for his boast of being a better hunter. Clytemnestra took her revenge during his long absence fighting the Trojan War by taking his father’s killer, the exiled Aegisthus, as her lover. When Agamemnon returned to Mycenae with his captive seer Cassandra in tow, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus caught them both in a net while they bathed and killed them, and Aegisthus, like Grover Cleveland, took power once again. Agamemnon’s son Orestes, having been away in Athens, returned some years later in secret on orders from Apollo and met his long-lost sister Electra. The two of them killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, as well as their son and Electra and Orestes’ half-brother/uncle/cousin Aletes. For the crime of matricide Orestes was tormented by the Furies and fled back to Athens, where Athena and Apollo interceded and the citizens gave him a trial. They found in his favor and the curse of House Atreus is finally broken.
What I find particularly interesting in the Atreides bloodline curse is the cannibalism. The kinslaughter is bad, certainly, but it is relatively common in these sorts of stories. But cannibalism is an entirely different kettle of…fish. Very uncommon in Greek mythology otherwise, it makes a surprising TWO appearances in the five generations of this curse. Even more interesting is that, in both cases, the victims of the cannibalism are the offspring of the perpetrator. I am aware of only a handful of other examples of fathers eating their sons in the canon of Greek myth: Tereus tricked into eating his son Itys by his wife Procne after he raped her sister Philomela and pulled her tongue out and the whole sorry trio being turned into birds by Apollo out of pity, Lycaon eating his son Nyctimus at another banquet for the gods and being turned into a wolf by Zeus out of disgust, giving us the name Lycanthrope for werewolves and apocryphally originating a werewolf cult on Mount Lykaion, and Kronos King of the Titans eating each of his children as they were born, out of fear of the one who would eventually usurp him. Cannibalism, as I have addressed before, is heavily associated with abandoning your humanity and identifying with another class of being, so I am not surprised to see animal transformations featured in these other stories. But why does it not feature in the Atreides myth?
Greater Werewolf, 5th Edition, Magic: The Gathering. Art by Dennis Detwiller. Never thought I’d get to use this picture again.
I believe the answer lies on Mount Lykaion and Mount Olympus. King Pelasgus, the father of Lycaon, was the namer and progenitor of the Pelasgians, the legendary inhabitants of prehistoric Greece from whom the “modern” Athenians and Thebans and Telamonians and Argives, etc. of Agamemnon’s time were descended. Agamemnon’s own ancestor Pelops, a victim of cannibalism, was similarly revered as the father of the Peloponnese, the people of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, in the times of Homer and Euripides. Kronos ate all of his children but for Zeus, who overthrew Kronos and became King of the Gods. And Zeus himself was always on guard for the next hero to usurp and replace HIM; Achilles, notably, was sometimes considered a threat to the throne of the Great Thunderer. It is my contention that cannibalism, particularly when you keep it in the family, was strongly associated in Ancient Greece with founding new tribes and dynasties. I think that Orestes had the opportunity to be either the progenitor of a new tribe, perhaps unifying all of Greece as his father did, but permanently, or the king of a new generation of gods, overthrowing the capricious Olympians and ushering in a wave of justice and rationality, as befits the first man ever acquitted by a jury. What happened in my little pet theory to turn him off the Golden Path is unclear, but from where I’m sitting he had as good a shot at the throne as anybody.
This theory has major implications for Frank and Brian Herbert’s Dune series as well. Timothee Chalamet as Duke Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, in Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 DUNE, produced by Legendary Entertainment.
Iphigenia is, unfortunately, little more than a footnote in this broader view of her family tree. For the Ancient Greeks her main job was to die, first to loose the winds for Troy and second to seal Agamemnon’s doom as a filicide. That may have been fine for them, but here at We Happy Few we like our female characters with a little more to do. Come see what agency we found for her! Tickets are still available here!
The lesson of the impossible choices offered up by the gods in Greek tragedies is not how to find a clever solution. It is not how to weasel your way out of a contract. You can’t outsmart the gods. Thinking you can will truly only make it worse for you, and that you would even consider that in the first place is probably why you are in this unenviable position at all. You cannot alter your fate. But you CAN dictate the manner in which you meet it. In Seven Against Thebes, Eteocles knows that his brother Polyneices is going to lead the assault on one of the seven gates of Thebes, and he knows that he and his brother are fated to die at each other’s hands, so he deliberately takes over the defense of the gate his brother is attacking. Instead of trying to escape his destiny he sets the terms under which it will be fulfilled.
In the basis for our story, Agamemnon’s impossible choice on Aulis at the onset of the Trojan War is: Kill his daughter, fulfilling his familial curse, incurring the pollution of kin-slaughter, and infuriating his wife, but sail to Troy at the head of the greatest army in history. Or spare her, and by so doing, betray his brother Menelaus and break his oath to Tyndareus and all of Helen’s suitors, earn a reputation for faithlessness, and then be forced to watch Odysseus assume command of the expedition and sacrifice his daughter anyway. And possibly be killed himself for violating a sacred pact. Similarly, Iphigenia’s choices, such as they are, are: beg and plead and resist the sacrificial knife, forcing her father to drag her to the altar, or accept her fate and try to find meaning or significance in it. There are no ‘good’ options in this position. There isn’t even a ‘less bad’ option. All that can be done is find a way to come to terms with the inevitable.
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, a fresco found in Pompeii
I was pondering this fatalistic worldview while I was at the gym the other day, watching my Stories. I watch Star Trek while I get my #steps in on the elliptical, it is the carrot I use to force myself to go to the gym. It works…sometimes. The point is, I was watching Star Trek and Data was singing Gilbert and Sullivan and it occurred to me that, while Star Trek is both highly literate and famously concerned with no-win scenarios, I could not recall any mention of the Greek tragedians or the canon of Greek tragedy.* As a man who is obsessed a little too concerned with demonstrating how well-read I am, this struck me as a real missed opportunity for the writers to score some deep cuts. My only conclusion is that Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus must not appear on the curriculum at Starfleet Academy.
There is, unfortunately, what I believe to be strong evidence to support my pet theory that the Commandant of the Academy has struck the Tragedians from the reading list. In the episode “Peak Performance”, Data is soundly beaten at some sort of milking udder-based strategy game by a Third-level Grandmaster and descends into a deep funk, only able to be roused by Captain Picard telling him that to do everything right and still lose is not failure, but the human condition life. Data, a voracious student of human culture with perfect recall, would certainly have recognized this lesson from the humbling of Heracles, were he familiar with it. In Euripides’ Heracles the title character, in his moment of greatest triumph after completing his final Labor, is driven mad by Hera and kills his own family. As he sits in despair amidst the wreckage he is comforted by his friend Theseus, who tells him that the gods are not wiser or better than humanity, merely stronger. Data should also have learned this lesson from Marvel Studios’ The Avengers: Infinity War, in which Thanos the Mad Titan, having experienced this sort of dismaying defeat in the past, comprehensively but empathetically metes it out to the defenders of the Infinity Stones.** I suppose the Infinity Saga has been struck from the curriculum as well. What’s more troubling is that Data didn’t even recall this lesson from the time he sat for the Kobayashi Maru, a test that is supposed to explicitly teach how to cope with failure and defeat. [It is possible that by the 24th century, the Kobayashi Maru test has also been removed from the curriculum. Like all tests, it only works if the contents are a surprise, and it having become a well-known shorthand for a no-win scenario negates its effectiveness. Its function may now be served by the Psych Test portion of the Academy Entrance Exam, which is instead personalized to the applicant but similarly has no right answer and gauges the testee’s response to a dangerous scenario -KH]
Foreground L-R: Brent Spiner as Commander Data, Glenn Morshower as Ensign Burke, Roy Brocksmith as Kolrami. Background center: Diana Muldaur as Doctor Pulaski, Marina Sirtis as Counselor Troi. From Paramount Pictures’ Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 2 Episode 21, “Peak Performance”, 1989.
Star Trek is not shy about wearing its references on its sleeves. A dozen or more episodes have Shakespeare quotes as their title. More importantly, it is abundantly clear that it is the characters themselves, not merely the writers, who are so aggressively erudite. One presumably quite well-worn Complete Annotated Shakespeare serves as set-dressing in Picard’s ready room, Data’s quarters, and Khan’s shelter on Ceti Alpha V. There are multiple episodes in which characters are rehearsing or directly quoting Shakespeare to each other, because if you have access to Sir Patrick Stewart for your science fiction television program you should cram as much Shakespeare into his mouth as you can. The Enterprise, flagship of the Federation, hosts art classes, chamber concerts, and poetry readings, the Cerritos entertains salons and transcendental meditation, and the Discovery and NX-01 screen classic films. In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk, Spock, and Khan bandy back and forth quotes from A Tale of Two Cities and Moby-Dick, while in Deep SpaceNine Sisko and Eddington trade barbs from Les Miserables. Captain Picard uses the epic of Gilgamesh to find common ground with the Children of Tama in one of the best episodes in the series’ history. Data and Geordi’s preferred holodeck recreation activity is Sherlock Holmes detective stories, while Picard unaccountably favors a deeply lame generic hardboiled detective series called Dixon Hill [presumably because Dashiell Hammett’s far superior Continental Op stories were still under copyright -KH] Riker is an amateur trombonist and jazz aficionado, a genre that his successor Captain Shaw scorns as overly loose and improvisational, favoring the structure and fidelity to form and meter of the Romantics. In one of my company-mates Jon Reynolds’ favorite episodes, noted schlemiel Lieutenant Junior Grade Reginald Endicott Barclay III has been cast as the title role in a production of Cyrano de Bergerac, a spectacularly incisive bit of casting by the Enterprise’s Chief Medical Officer and Performing Arts Chair Dr. Beverly Crusher. The nerds who comprise the officer corps of Starfleet are open about their interests and are not shy about indulging them. If they had been exposed to the Greeks, I strongly believe they would have mentioned it.
L-R: Tracee Cocco as Ensign Jae, Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, Michael Dorn as Worf, Jonathan Frakes as William Riker, Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi, Brent Spiner as Data. From Paramount Pictures’ Star Trek Generations, 1994.
Starfleet talks a big game about coping with failure and rising to meet it, but in reality their philosophy doesn’t mesh with Greek fatalism. You can’t change the conditions of the test in a Greek tragedy. Don’t get me wrong, Starfleet officers have grit in spades. They don’t back down and they honor their promises or die in the attempt. But the Greeks are too dour for the bright and optimistic fully automated luxury Communist future that Star Trek envisions for the Federation. To open another whole entire kettle of worms so close to the end of this blog post, Starfleet are more like hobbits; cheerful peaceful lovers of luxury, but doughty at bay, to quote the Professor. They love their comfort so well because they can go without it, and can bear terrible privations, secure in the knowledge that their warm cozy home is waiting for them if they can just get through it.
Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee. From New Line Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003.
The Klingons, on the other hand, live their lives in exactly the sort of loud, bold, expressive, emotionally charged manner that Euripides and his fellows describe. Shakespeare has fared very well in translation to the Klingon (so well that some overly-enthusiastic Klingon patriots even claim The Bard as one of their own!) and I imagine that the theatregoers of Qo’noS would find even more to appreciate from The Oresteia or Ajax. Or, just maybe, from OUR upcoming performance of Iphigenia, an adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Jean Racine’s Iphigenie, that we are excited to open next week! Tickets are available HERE.
*I was eventually able to find a single mention of Euripides in Star Trek, a throwaway line in the episode “Pen Pals”. Data posits that Commander Riker, after making an unusual ‘grand design of the Cosmos’ suggestion in support of the Prime Directive, could perhaps quote from the Greek tragedian in support of his argument, before dismissing the entire discussion as rhetorical and irrelevant to the life-and-death stakes of the situation. This suggests that Data’s [shallow -KH] interpretation of the Greek tragedies dismisses them as little more than parables about predestination and the will of the divine, lacking deeper emotional substance or thematic resonance. If this is the sad state of dramaturgical rigor in the Classics Department of Starfleet Academy I am not surprised they no longer teach the Tragedians.
**I owe a credit to John Hodgman for this point about the theme of failure in Infinity War, in a guest spot on this episode of Blank Check.
Happy May Day, everyone! I hope everyone is having a good day wrapping their Maypoles and Morris dancing and picking flowers and lighting bonfires and practicing class solidarity and seizing the means of production and protesting the abuses of Capital, however you choose to celebrate. In honor of the holiday *I* want to spend a lighthearted thirteen hundred or so words breaking down the implications of the human sacrifice at the heart of the story of Iphigenia, please join me!
The driving action in Iphigenia is Artemis’ demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter, the titular Iphigenia, to make obeisance for his crime of hunting in Artemis’ sacred grove and the killing of a sacred deer, and his monumental arrogance to brag that he was a superior hunter that the Great Huntress herself. Her demand of a human sacrifice, a virginal sacrifice no less, is unusual, almost unheard-of, in the Greek legendarium. Indeed, one of the only other times that it comes up in the extant tragedies, ironically in Iphigenia At Tauris, it is explicitly a watchword for the backwards barbarism of the Taurians who practice it, in contrast to the civilized Greeks who eschew it. In Euripides’ The Bacchae (produced in the same tetralogy as Iphigenia at Aulis), Pentheus’ death at the hands of the frenzied worshippers of Dionysus, including his own mother Agave, isn’t exactly a formal sacrifice but is explicitly the act of women in the throes of religious ecstasy acting on direct orders from a god. The annual Athenian tribute of 7 boys and 7 girls to Knossos was a marker of King Minos’ cruelty and inhumanity, not an endorsement of his methods; don’t forget that the offering was to feed the Minotaur, a living and monstrous reminder of Minos’ cuckoldry and his wife’s perverse and bestial desires. The stories of human sacrifice on Mount Lykaion refer to a dark past ancient and shrouded in mystery even to the Greek chroniclers of 2500 years ago. We will return to it another time, but for now suffice it to say it is the origin of the word ‘lycanthrope’. To the cultured Athenian, human sacrifice was at best a relic of a shameful past and at worst an inhuman, animalistic urge practiced by savages and beast-men. It is an inversion of the normal order of things, man sacrificed by beast instead of the other way around; not dissimilar to Artemis’ turning Actaeon into a stag and having his hunting dogs tear him apart.
As a quick aside before I get to the meat of this blog, it is no accident that Agamemnon son of Atreus of the line of Tantalus is the figure in Greek mythology who is FORCED to kill his own daughter. The fruit of kinslaughter grows heavy on the Atreides family tree, or as my family says, plant corn, get corn. The nature of bloodline curses in the Greek tradition is that they are cyclical and self-fulfilling. I don’t have time to totally break down the Curse of the Atreides right now [but don’t touch that dial! -KH] but Agamemnon killing his daughter both confirms his own destiny as an Atreides and renews his familial pollution for the next generation.
Dunnnn, dun-dun-dunn, dun-dun-dunnnn!
The Iphigenia story, both the familial connection and the last-minute reprieve, shares more than a few conceptual bones with the story of Abraham and Isaac. God tests the faith of his number one fan Abraham by demanding he sacrifice his son, but then stops him at the last second and has him switch Isaac out with a ram trapped in a nearby thicket, and rewards him for his loyalty by promising to “make [his] descendents as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore” [GEN 22:17]. Abraham is not troubled with the same moral dilemma as Agamemnon is at God’s decree; he hears the command and immediately chops the wood he will need for the sacrifice, grabs his rope and throat-slitting knife, and totters off to Mount Moriah with his son in tow. Isaac, similarly, has little compunction about obeying his father without question or explanation, even as he is bound and placed on the altar, Faramir-style. “God will provide,” his dad tells him, and that’s all he needs to hear. It takes Iphigenia a lot of hemming and hawing before she comes to her own utilitarian peace with her death, reasoning that it will protect Greek womanhood in the abstract by leading to the defeat of Troy. The will of the Greek gods are similarly irresistible to the God of Abraham, but unlike Him, Artemis has never claimed to be all-seeing or merciful. His demand may be inscrutable to His followers but His purpose is always to serve the Chosen People, so their trust in Him is implicit. Artemis has her own interests and agenda, she is largely disconnected from humanity except when their actions intersect with hers in some way, and it is clear that her demand of Iphigenia’s life is meant as a punishment for Agamemnon, not part of some divine Plan, so it is a little harder for Iphigenia to climb gracefully onto the altar than Isaac.
The producers of VeggieTales are seemingly too cowardly to produce a children’s vegetable version of the Binding of Isaac, so here is Big Idea Entertainment’s 2009 Abe and the Amazing Promise, the story of Isaac’s birth.
And of course, the reason for the season and the namer of this blog post, one of my favorite movies, The Wicker Man, has another bait and switch sacrifice at its core. Rowan, the young girl who has disappeared and who Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Constabulary is assiduously searching for, was never the intended sacrifice for Summerisle’s May Day celebration. Her replacement at the last minute with crusty, grouchy Sergeant Howie mirrors the miraculous replacement of Iphigenia with a stag and Isaac with a ram. That he is himself also virginal, the traditional measure of youth for sacrifices, along with being pious, a fool, and a servant of the crown, is just icing on the cake. The only difference is that the swap is not miraculous in nature, but a mundane and metaphorical replacement that had been in the works the entire time. And, of course, that Howie doesn’t come to terms with his demise nearly as well as his fellows.
Edward Woodward as Sergeant Neil Howie. From British Lion Film’s The Wicker Man, 1973.
Christ’s crucifixion also fits into this category, although His case is muddled because the Romans were merely executing Him; He and His followers were the ones who interpreted it as a sacrifice. The Abrahamic religions continue to muck things up vis a vis sacrifice by removing angst from the equation. Because their God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-merciful, there is little room for ambiguity about obedience. Jesus may have a momentary crisis of confidence in Gethsemane but there is never any doubt of the necessity or inevitability of his sacrifice. He, too, is not replaced at the last minute, though his resurrection and subsequent translation to heaven three days later does also mirror one of Iphigenia’s apocryphal fates as Artemis’ handmaiden and goddess of magic Hecate.
Sacrifice is a Rite of Spring. The crucifixion and Easter Sunday, the Festival Dionysia, and Beltane all happen in late spring for a reason. It is a thank you to the gods for surviving another winter, a celebration of the approaching warmth and sunlight, and an invocation for a fruitful harvest and another successful year. And it is significant that the humans being sacrificed in these stories are always young; you have to give up something with potential, the loss has to be meaningful and significant, or it doesn’t mean anything. In exchange, the miraculous replacement of the victim with an animal (or in the case of The Wicker Man, an outsider) demonstrates recognition of the value of the sacrifice and divine mercy. The cosmopolitan Greeks of Euripides’ time may have scorned the practice of human sacrifice as barbaric, but they certainly understood its thematic resonance. A resonance that we will hopefully capture on stage late THIS spring. We will be performing Iphigenia from May 24th to June 17th, just a week before midsummer, and I hope you can join us! Tickets are available now!
Hi there, everybody! It’s been a long time, I know, I’ve been busy with some of my myriad other responsibilities around the We Happy Compound. But the clarion call of our upcoming Shakespeare-adjacent reading caught my eye, and I followed the scent like a cartoon hobo being inexorably drawn to a pie cooling on a windowsill right here to another blog post [for those keeping track at home, the only reason I didn’t fully mix that synesthetic metaphor with all five senses was a failure on my part to think of appropriate touch or taste idioms -KH]. So here I am to write for you about the setting of the play Peerless by Jiehae Park, why it works, and how it fits into the larger canon of Shakespeare adaptations.
That setting, of course, is a high school. This setting is uncommonly popular with film adaptations of Shakespeare, in my experience. Particularly in the late 90s and early 00s. Before we go too much further I should pick a nit: I am referring to adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, by which I mean retellings in modern language of stories made famous by the Bard. Adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story, She’s The Man, O, and Get Over It [I am cheating a little with West Side Story, in which the characters never attend any classes, but since they are so clearly teenagers I have decided to give myself a pass. You are powerless to stop me. I am the author, I decide what is and isn’t fair. You’re just a hypothetical audience member, and based on my readership metrics you barely exist at all -KH] I am decidedly NOT talking about films set in the modern day using Shakespeare’s text, an entirely different kettle of fish that I would love to one day write a blog post about. But today is not that day. Today is the day I write about high school adaptations of Shakespeare and why they work so well.
She’s The Man, Dreamworks Pictures 2006. L-R: Robert Hoffman, Laura Ramsey, Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum, Alexandra Breckenridge
There are a couple reasons, by my count. First of all: high school is an emotionally fraught place, filled with emotionally fraught people. The sort of people whose feelings are right on the surface, who experience in their minds if not in actuality the strange highs and strange lows of the characters in a play. People, moreover, who are actively being taught Shakespeare. The temptation to have the actors discussing the very stories they are living through is very tempting, and as a fan of maximalism and an enemy of subtlety I see no reason for directors to not indulge that temptation.
10 Things I Hate About You, Touchstone Pictures 1999. L-R: Gabby Union, Andrew Keegan, Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Larisa Oleynik, Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Another telling feature is what stories are being adapted. In my brief survey of these adaptations I found 12th Night, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and Romeo & Juliet. Comedies about jilted lovers, longing, and competition, a tragedy about love and infidelity [and racism -ed.], and a tragedy about love and hate whose main characters are all teenagers themselves. Add in Macbeth, the source material for Peerless, and we find a tragedy about ambition, competition, and entitlement. These themes are all right on the money for high schoolers, a tightly wound group of people if ever there was one. No one has ever “loved not wisely, but too well” more than high schoolers, who have all these emotions coursing very strongly through their minds without a good idea of what they mean or how to appropriately act upon them. The stakes for everything feel so very high in high school, a time when competition is encouraged in the classroom and on the sports field and where relative worth can be objectively measured by scores and grades, and it feels natural to carry that competition onward to romantic pursuits. With this in mind it is a little surprising there aren’t more of these adaptations; surely there is space in the cinematic world for a high school Hamlet, riddled with parent issues and indecision about what the future holds, or a Much Ado About Nothing centered around the Homecoming dance. Our own colleagues at Woolly Mammoth put on Teenage Dick, Mike Lew’s high school Richard III play, just two years ago. The ground is fertile. Get on it, filmmakers of 1995-2007!
“O”, Lions Gate Entertainment 2001. L-R Julia Stiles, Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett
Consider also what stories AREN’T being adapted. Shakespeare was a man for all seasons, he had somber reflections about aging and legacy and statesmanship, about responsibility and fatherhood, that have little to no bearing on the lives of high schoolers. It would be difficult at best and offensive at worst to attempt to place King Lear’s struggle with parenthood and his own deteriorating mind in a sophomore biology class, or to have Shylock’s complicated battle with the legal system, anti-Semitism, and his daughter’s betrayal play out under the bleachers. The Romances are, ironically, completely inconsistent with a teenage setting, riddled as they are with tremendous leaps in time, overt mysticism and magic, and lessons about loving your children, living a good life, and being comfortable with your legacy and the approaching spectre of your death. Not a lesson that would resonate with, or make sense coming from, the captain of your all-state lacrosse team or the student body vice president.
From 10 Things I Hate About You, Touchstone Pictures 1999. L-R foreground: Susan May Pratt, David Krumholtz
And there is, of course, also the reason that WE and so many other theatre companies enjoy telling Shakespeare stories so much, regardless of their setting: they’re good stories. Immediately recognizable, drowning in thematic resonance and depth, populated by some of the most fleshed out and human characters in the history of literature, infinitely retellable, flexible to multiple interpretations and open for discussion and debate until the cows come home. And they’re also free, a not-to-be-sneezed-at advantage for the producer on a budget.
But Peerless wasn’t free, to gracelessly pivot back to the matter at hand in order to wrap up this blog post. We paid Concord Theatricals for the privilege of producing this reading for you all, and we were happy to do it. We are extremely excited for the chance to share this play with you, and I, personally, look forward to seeing you all there at the show tonight. Tickets are still available HERE or at the door. Prepare to relive your glory days or the living nightmare of high school, depending on your level of popularity between the ages of 15 and 18, and here’s hoping it was a little less…intense than our play tonight.
Hello again! Sales have begun for the second episodes in our highly popular and well-regarded Detective Audio series, featuring the cunning Sherlock Holmes and the irrepressible Loveday Brooke, and you all know what that means! It means I’m back to talk some more about whatever fool idea comes into my head, to pique your interest in those same audio plays and to hopefully encourage you to purchase them [they make great holiday presents! Just ask my entire family at the end of the month -KH] [But don’t tell them -KH] This time that topic will be a continuation of my series on detective stories. Last time we talked about their pedigree, where they came from and who begat whom, as well as a quick gloss on the variant forms they can come in. Today we will discuss what makes a detective story tick; the rules, both unwritten and thoroughly codified, that people have imposed on the genre. What’s more, last time we spoke I made you all a promise, if you’ll recall. Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, as I learned from my grandfather from his recitations of The Cremation of Sam McGee at family reunions, and I promised last time I would more thoroughly unpack the wide variety of subgenres and offshoots that can trace their origins back to the Detective story.
As I mentioned last time we spoke, our heroes, Sherlock Holmes and Loveday Brooke, are early figures in the history of the genre. Though not the first, Holmes is unquestionably the most famous detective in literature and laid much of the groundwork for future stories. Loveday Brooke is a contemporary of his, and while being both a woman and a working-class detective are noticeable departures from the norm, neither of those facets noticeably impact her sleuthing or the kinds of mysteries she is called upon to solve. Neither of our characters deviate from the classic Detective in the classic Detective story, in any of the myriad ways we will soon explore that a story can. In fact they are in many ways what their descendants are reacting to and turning away from, in their feverish propagation of new kinds of mysteries and new ways to solve them.
But before we delve into THAT topic we have to determine what makes a Detective story. Unlike pornography, which can only be identified on a case-by-case basis, there are rules that a story must follow to fit into the genre. Obviously there must be a detective character of some sort. Equally obviously there must be a crime or mystery for them to solve, otherwise it is just a boring naturalist story about a detective buying groceries or whatever. The detective must have some sort of assistant or sidekick audience-surrogate figure to bounce ideas off of [N.B. this character can but does not HAVE to be the same person each time; Holmes has Dr. Watson but Hercule Poirot gets dealt a random police lieutenant or family friend or former associate for every mystery -ed.] And not strictly mandatory but ubiquitous enough to bear mention is an upper/upper-middle class backdrop to the story, an environment of money and Society which explains not only why all of the suspects have time to answer questions from a nosy detective for several days, but also how they can afford to retain a consulting detective and why they would like to keep the incipient scandal under wraps, and the pots of money floating around keeps the “stands to inherit/debts to cover” motive in play. There is a reason that the traditional setting for a murder mystery is a party at a manor house.
From Paramount Picture’s 1985 Clue. Left-Right: Tim Curry as Mr. Boddy, Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlett, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, Michael McKeen as Mr. Green, and Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock
As the years passed, and the detective story became more and more popular, this bare set of rules was deemed insufficient and more stringent qualifications were proposed, ostensibly to maintain the high quality of story that the reading public demanded but serving mainly (in the nature of gatekeeping requirements everywhere) to limit the playing field to the “appropriate” kinds of stories and writers. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, a number of authors wrote guides attempting to codify the tenets of a proper Detective story. Two of those authors, S.S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox, went so far as to create enumerated lists to be followed, Van Dine’s Credo of 20 rules and Knox’s Decalogue (or the Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction). Some of these rules seem reasonable for making the stories “fair” (that is, solvable) for the audience; rules like No Twins, No Hunches, Only One Secret Passage, The Killer Has To Be Introduced Early, and The Killer Can’t Be The Detective. Others were more of a stylistic preference, like No Romance, The Crime Must Be Murder, No Supernatural Elements, No Conspiracies, The Sidekick Has To Be A Little Dumber Than The Audience, and No Literary Pretensions Distracting From The Mystery. And then some were just downright offensive: The Killer Must Be A Person Of Quality, Not A Servant or No Chinamen [in fairness to Ronald Knox, his complaint was a reaction to the use of Yellow Peril stereotypes in the stories of his contemporaries, not a personal antipathy. But still, not the most sensitive of rules -KH] Regardless of their intentions these rules, if assiduously followed, would have an enormously chilling effect on the form; a seasoned reader may note that many of these requirements would disqualify a number of Sherlock Holmes stories and, if practiced in toto, would reduce the burgeoning detective genre to little more than a category of especially prolix logic puzzles.
Moses Comes Down From Mt. Sinai, by Gustave Dore, 1866.
But more germane to my current thesis: you don’t ban something unless there is a reason to do so. These rules came into being as a reaction to the sorts of stories being written. And the writers of those stories, unsurprisingly, felt no particular need to obey these commandments, but rather continued to tell the stories THEY were interested in telling. Many of these stories have, justly or wrongly, disappeared from the public consciousness [or at least from MY sphere of awareness and light research for the purposes of writing this post -KH] but the influence they must have had is as clear as day in the existence of their descendants, clearly utilizing some of the structure of the detective genre while embellishing in some way to create their own form.
One of the earlier offshoots, occupying a unique position, is the rise of child and Young Adult detectives. If you’ll remember from my discussion of Treasure Island, YA fiction (in my calculus) is not quite its own form but a subgenre of the corresponding adult fiction genre, with some changes meant to aim the stories at children. Take for example Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown, the power behind the throne of the Idaville police department. Encyclopedia Brown doesn’t follow hunches that happen to be correct. He doesn’t conceal his thinking from the audience or his Watson, bodyguard Sally Kimball. His nemesis Bugs Meany may be the leader of a gang, the Tigers, but it isn’t a hidden secret society, and never do his solutions hinge on hidden doors or body doubles. No doubt S. S. Van Dine would approve, if only Idaville had been filled with the tiny broken bodies of murdered children for Brown to investigate, instead of missing baseball cards or rotting pumpkins.
Brown was just one of a host of child detectives, all solving age-appropriate mysteries with more or less of the appropriate rigor for our Arbiters of Quality Messrs Knox and Van Dine in their investigations. Some of the older children, such as the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, experience rather more adventure in their adventures; seldom does a Nancy Drew book go by without a chapter titled “Kidnapped!”, and Frank and Joe brawled with more than their share of smugglers while unravelling the mystery of Pirate’s Cove. But one set of detectives stands out in the catalogue of child detectives for more than just toeing the line between mystery and adventure story.
The Mystery Machine, from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! 1969-1970
Setting aside their talking dog for a moment, Fred Jones, Jr., Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers almost exclusively solved mysteries of a supernatural nature; ghosts and Bigfoots and haunted robots who were trying to steal from museums or defraud amusement parks or smuggle gold. While the true culprit was always some elderly malcontent in a rubber fright store mask, the story was always oriented around unravelling the meaning of the supernatural doings plaguing the town. Nor were they the only child sleuths with a mystical facet to their stories. Ghost Writer, of the eponymous show, was a ghost under a curious curse that only allowed them to interact with the material plane to highlight and interact with words and letters, and who (naturally) used these powers to aid a multicultural group of Brooklyn teens in solving mysteries, perhaps in hope of accruing enough good deeds to be freed from their eternal torment and allowed to rest.
While our Mystery Authorities, Knox and Van Dine, would surely choke on their pipe smoke at the spooky silliness and lack of solvability of all these stories, they certainly hold to at least the spirit of a detective story, which cannot truly be said for my next topic: NON-child-oriented supernatural mysteries. Or perhaps I should just directly say Adult Supernatural Mysteries, because these stories seem, for whatever reason, to veer quickly and heavily into Supernatural Romance. Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, the basis of True Blood, are officially titled the Southern Vampire Mysteries, but a more accurate description for them would be Vampire Action Erotica. Also fitting into this category would be the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton, about the Federal Vampire Executioner of Saint Louis and her dangerously inaccurate experiences with the Monster BDSM community. Lip service is paid to the idea of a mystery to solve, but the main focus of these stories is less meticulously investigating, collecting, and evaluating clues, and more putting the main characters in mystical peril and finding them ever-more-beautiful men to sleep with. Though in fairness, any story involving vampires has to work pretty hard to not become a SEXY story involving vampires, as I have addressed in the past.
David Boreanaz as Angel, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still the sexiest of all vampires.
Anita Blake at least does have SOME structural bones in common with yet another subgenre of detective fiction that has blossomed into its own form; the Police Procedural. The Police Procedural, which you will probably most recognize from your sick days when you’re bored at home and turn on TNT and watch ten straight hours of NCIS, asks a novel question of the audience: What if there WASN’T a preternaturally clever Consulting Detective available to leisurely crack the case, and instead it was just Lestrade and his companions on the police force, doing their level best to solve it with their regular human brains, collaboration, and a lot of legwork. The focus, as you may have guessed from the name of the genre, is on observing the day-to-day procedures of a police department as they go about their investigation, conducting forensic studies on the crime scene, following up on leads, conducting interviews and interrogations, sometimes all the way up to testifying in the trial. These stories are not generally about proving the cleverness of the detectives and by extension the audience for cracking a difficult case, but rather showing a still heightened but more realistic depiction of the process by which actual criminal investigations take place. Knox and Van Dine would surely have barely considered these stories as worthy of the name detective fiction, being so concerned with the crass and contemptible world of the lower and middle classes.
DUN DUN
Harry Dresden of the Dresden Files, despite being Chicago’s Only Wizard P.I., also managed to dodge being tarred with the same Vampire Action Erotica brush as Ms. Stackhouse and Ms. Blake. His series is, first of all, less sexy than those books, which is pretty remarkable for a series in which a prominent recurring character is an incubus. And second, Dresden may be a wizard, but he is also a hard-boiled detective, and hard-boiled detectives are SUPPOSED to get into fistfights and have guns pulled on them. Hard-boiled detective stories approach their mysteries the same way that police procedurals do, with legwork. The only difference is that hard-boiled detectives don’t have the institutional resources of a police department. Hard-boiled detectives solve crimes with brute force, both the mathematical concept and the literal use of physical strength. Philip Marlowe, Jack Reacher, Jake Gittes, and the nameless Continental Op aren’t smarter than the reader, as many literary detectives are. They’re just more cynical, having earned their mistrust the hard way with years of witnessing the worst humanity has to offer in their dogged pursuit of the truth, both on the dusty streets of Poisonville and in the seamy underbelly of high society. Their (oft-broken) nose for clues and savviness about the hunt would surely entertain our pals Knox and Van Dine; Philip Marlowe carries around exotic grass seeds, foreign cigarette butts, and matchbooks from bars he’s never been to, to sprinkle around crime scenes and baffle forensic examiners. But the detectives’ insistence upon falling in love with every pair of legs that walked through their glass door is a clear violation of their No Romance rule.
From Focus Features’ 2005 Brick. Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan Frye. My favorite movie of all time.
And finally here we come to the final mystery subgenre with which I am enough acquainted to discuss, the Cozy Mystery. If we were to recategorize the stories from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, this is where they would most closely fit. Cozy Mysteries are stories about isolated, unexpected crimes visited upon small, quiet communities, either where the detective lives or happens to be visiting. The detectives may be a retired or independent sleuth themselves, like Poirot and Ms. Marple, who conveniently happens to be in the neighborhood, or they may be simply talented amateurs, such as novelist Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote or Father Brown. While the crimes in question are often murder [meeting with the approval of our Review Board –KH], they are only ever discovered, never witnessed by the audience, and are none too gory, gruesome, or shocking. There is seldom any romance to speak of, and any that occurs is typically on the chaste-r side. The world and characters tend to be soft and a little quirky, without being out-and-out wacky or bizarre. The stories engender a calm, safe, warm, comforting…frankly, Cozy feeling when read or watched. They play fairly closely to the rules of the Game as set out in the Golden Age, with the exception that the aim is less to challenge the reader to compete with the detective (and through them the author) and instead to relaxingly follow along with the detective as they piece the puzzle together.
But our detective stories don’t fit into any of these categories. Sherlock Holmes and Loveday Brooke predate even the Golden Age writers, and are not bound by their rules. Certainly they, like many of their colleagues and descendants in the pure detective line, fall closest to the Cozy Mystery as well, but their world is too broad and their dangers too real to exactly fit the bill. Their adventures transcend subcategorization, and must be experienced to be truly appreciated and understood. Fortunately for you there is still time for you (and your loved ones!) to appreciate these before the holidays! All four of our packages, both current and previous adventures for Sherlock and Loveday, are available now! The sooner you order them the sooner we send them, and the better your chances are of them arriving for Christmas!
Hello again everybody! Long time no see! It is I, your dutiful, loyal, and long-suffering Literary Director, Box Office Manager, and Blogslave, returning from my interminable absence to enlighten my adoring audience about our recently-announced and highly-anticipated follow-ups to our Audio-Mysteries [oops. Strike this hyphen. Got a little dash-happy there -ed.]
Ordinarily I write these blogs in conjunction with the release of our shows, nominally as a part of our marketing campaign but mostly because I, along with the rest of the company, am hip-deep in the text we are working on and have many thoughts and interpretations, which everybody else gets to share viscerally on stage or in audio, but which I am forced by my lack of acting ability or design sensibilities to express via the hallowed medium of the Blog Post. But for our initial Mystery run, thanks to an extremely positive article in the Washington Post, we had no need for my far inferior writing to advertise the show. Moreover, a myriad of real-life personal issues, including but not limited to a literal broken leg (irony of ironies), prevented me from composing one at a reasonable time. So instead I am sharing with you some thoughts about mysteries, their origins, and our intrepid detectives now, to correspond with some details about our upcoming Episodes 2! A plus of this weird, late blog entry is that I don’t have to be cagey or cryptic about our previous stories, always a tricky line to walk when discussing mysteries and detective fiction. Instead I will be cagey and cryptic about our UPCOMING stories, to build suspense.
From Fox Picture’s 1975 Rocky Horror Picture Show. Tim Curry as Frank N. Furter, Susan Sarandon as Janet
But I am putting Descartes before the whores, as the madam said when she took up philosophy. First we need to talk about mysteries. But really, what we need to talk about is detectives. You can’t solve a mystery without a detective! And if you know me at all, you know that I’m going to start at the very beginning. It is, after all, a very good place to start. [I learned that from a disgraced former nun who fled Austria in the early days of the Second World War -KH]
Edgar Allan Poe, unlike the horror genre with which he is mainly associated, and the science fiction genre which only officious pedants associate him with, does have a legitimate and widely-recognized claim to the invention of the detective story. His creation C. Auguste Dupin, the protagonist of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, and “The Purloined Letter”, is commonly seen as the first Literary Detective. The Mystery Writers of America’s annual award, the Edgar, is named in honor of We Happy Few’s second-favorite depressive alcoholic. [behind yours truly -KH] This is not to say that Poe single-handedly invented the idea of solving a mystery out of whole cloth. There are examples of mysteries to be solved, and characters solving them, in the German Gothic and French Enlightenment traditions, as well as stories with what we would recognize as mystery elements in 1001 Arabian Nights and Shakespeare, to say nothing of the Chinese gong’an, or Crime Case, genre (of which the Circle of Chalk is a well-known example). Poe’s innovation was to make the story center around the detective, hide the resolution from the reader until the end, and have the detective character explain the solution for the benefit of the audience.
In any case Mssr. Dupin, Chevalier de la Legion D’honneur, opened the floodgates for all sorts of cunning, clever detectives to follow in his footsteps. Obviously the most famous was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but there also followed Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg, Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret, and scores of their peers, all private detectives solving cases the police could not, often making them look like fools in the process. From the ever flowing stream of the detective genre branched subgenres of all stripes, including (but not limited to!) the gentler Cozy Mysteries such as Christie’s Miss Marple or my mother’s favorite, Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown’s Mrs. Murphy, plucky and precocious Child detectives like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, and the Scooby Gang, and the gin-swilling, gun-toting, cigarette-chomping Hardboiled detectives favored in America, such as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and (my personal favorite) Dashiell Hammett’s nameless Continental Op. To say nothing of supernatural mysteries or police procedurals, both in their turn spawning, hydra-like, a host of related sub-subgenres.
The hotly-anticipated 30th adventure of Mrs. Murphy and her menagerie of helpful animals. Expected out October 12th, 2021.
I will come back to these in another blog. I don’t have time to explore in depth the innumerable subdivisions of detective stories, nor the rules, both unofficial and codified, for what makes a story both True Detective Fiction and fair to the audience. Not when I have our two detectives to, at long last, introduce! And especially not when they are both orthodox detectives, having arrived on the scene long before the genre began to Balkanize. I am speaking, of course, of Mister Sherlock Holmes and Miss Loveday Brooke, two private detectives working in the greater London area in the waning years of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Holmes, of course, needs no introduction, being one of the most iconic characters in literary history. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1880s, he has the honor of being the second most-portrayed literary character in the history of film, behind only fellow We Happy Few alumnus Dracula, and that is without counting his knockoffs like Basil of Baker Street, the Great Mouse Detective. Sherlock Holmes, with his deerstalker cap and faithful companion Dr. Watson in tow, is almost certainly the first image conjured to mind when the subject of detectives comes up. His idiosyncrasies, his aloof, even cold manner to his clients, his craving for intellectual stimulation, his fondness for disguise, and especially his habit of making tremendously accurate logical leaps from scant evidence, all make him the Very Model of a Modern Consulting Detective, the gold standard by which all others are judged. Small wonder that when we conceived of the Detective Audio Play series, we knew that Sherlock Holmes would make an appearance.
Basil of Baker Street. From Disney’s 1986 The Great Mouse Detective
And yet you will observe that we did NOT begin the project with the Detective of Baker Street. Our first (and much more successful) story in the series featured the talents of Miss Loveday Brooke, of the Lynch Court Detective Agency, created by Catherine Louisa Pirkis in the 1890s. By contrast to Mr. Holmes and many other literary detectives she is NOT of nebulous but independent means, and must use her remarkable talents of deduction and observation for a paycheck, instead of merely for her own amusement. She is also, notably, a Lady Detective, another rarity in this era. But unlike many of her female colleagues she does not solve Cozy Mysteries at manor house garden parties or in sleepy seaside villages with the help of her cat. Brooke is in a class all by herself, twice over: a working-class detective in an era dominated by gentlemen of leisure taking jobs to while away the hours, and a tough and smart woman proving herself more than a match for the bumbling police or her well-meaning but blustering employers. She is exactly We Happy Few’s favorite kind of character, and we are thrilled beyond measure to be able to resurrect her for a new audience.
We are delighted to bring both of these detectives back to you in our second installment of our Detective Audio Plays. Mr. Holmes plays with fire while solving the Adventure of the Norwood Builder, while Ms. Brooke puts her life on the line to uncover the Murder at Troyte’s Hill. In just a few short months, you will have the opportunity to solve the mysteries right alongside our detectives, even down to looking at the same clues, when you receive our Audience Experience package. Keep your eyes peeled in November, when both of these packages will go on sale. And if you missed out on the first mysteries, they are still available HERE as well!
When you work with a classical theatre company you don’t often expect the theme of your productions to speak precisely to the world you’re currently living in. “Classic” stories become classics because they are timeless and perpetually relevant, but the trade-off with timelessness is that they are often at at least a bit of a remove from current events. Certainly when we first adapted Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in our Midnight Dreary performances a few years ago we could not have anticipated the advent of a deadly and contagious plague sweeping the globe, nor the ineffectual and uncaring response that our lords and masters would offer to the Chief Calamity of the Age. Yet here we are, and I would be remiss in my duties if I did not address the awful parallels and what lessons we may learn, directly instead of allegorically for a change, from the literature of our forebears.
[THIS IS ONE OF THOSE BLOGS WHERE I DISCUSS IN DETAIL WHAT HAPPENS IN THE STORY IN THE SERVICE OF EDITORIALIZING IT, SO IF YOU WANT TO GO BLIND INTO OUR UPCOMING “MIDNIGHT DREARY” AUDIO PLAY YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP THIS BLOG FOR NOW. AS LONG AS YOU COME BACK AFTER YOU’VE LISTENED. YOU HAVE TO PROMISE. -KH]
I suppose it is not precisely a one-to-one relationship between our current pandemic and the one in our story, for which we may be grateful. The Red Death kills brutally and fast, wracking its victims with stabbing pains and disorientation before “profuse bleeding at the pores”, especially from the face (hence the name), and a blessedly quick death. Our own plague here on Earth Prime, by contrast, works much more slowly and insidiously, presenting mainly as the notoriously vague “flu-like symptoms”, if it presents symptoms at all, before attacking the lungs and the body’s ability to supply oxygen to its organs; either suffocating its victims directly or blocking oxygen receptors in the heart, kidneys, liver, or brain and shutting down those organs. COVID-19 also doesn’t manifest grisly symbolic markers of its passage on our bodies, as the Red Death or Stephen King’s Captain Trips or Tamora Pierce’s Blue Pox or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s insomnia plague or Prince Ashitaka’s curse in Princess Mononoke. [Perhaps because instead of being a fictional malady meant as a metaphor about the evil of the world or overreaching technology or our own mortality or the inherently self-destructive nature of violence, it is an actual deadly disease. Just a thought. -KH]
Prince Ashitaka, from Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke, 1997.
But enough about the disease currently wracking our world and driving into fearful isolation the members of our society it has not managed to kill. Let’s talk about Prince Prospero and his “dauntless and sagacious” solution to the horrible disease ravaging the countryside.
Prospero wields his vast power and wealth to utterly ignore the plague sweeping the nation. He abrogates his responsibility to his subjects in favor of serving his whims, sequestering himself and one thousand of his closest friends and relations from the outside world. Locking themselves in and literally welding the doors shut behind them. His Xanadu he stocks with performers and wine, the better to “bid defiance to contagion” and while away this plague in comfort and distraction. [If I’m being honest I can’t fully fault Prospero for this. I would not have made it this far into COVID lockdown without wine. -KH] The prince and his companions choose not to see the world outside the walls, as though they had hidden their heads in the sand, or stuffed their fingers in their ears and squeezed their eyes shut, or hidden under their blanket and whispered “There’s no such thing as monsters” over and over. Out of sight, out of mind.
Therapist: shadowbull isn't real, he can't hurt you.
If all Prince Prospero had done was shut his eyes to the Red Death, it would have been cowardly and selfish enough. But instead of simply quarantining from the plague Prospero capitalizes on it, treating it as a holiday. After about half a year spent in idle distraction Prospero throws a massive party for himself, a progressive dinner of seven color-coded rooms, culminating in a massively tasteless final room appointed all in black, illuminated with red light and dominated by a massive clock marking the hours.
At the stroke of midnight Prospero is confronted by…something, attired as a victim of the Red Death, seemingly summoned to fete along with the other elites of the principality. The prince is outraged by the appearance of the spectre, not because of the distastefulness of the costume, but by the REMINDER it represents of the terror raging outside his crenellated abbey walls. In his sanctuary Prospero was afforded the luxury of flouting the hellish disease and the massacre it wreaked upon the countryside, but he and his fellows cannot ignore the reality of this figure as it intrudes on their refuge. As they defied the contagion in their willful ignorance, so the contagion defies them with its presence, forcing them to come to terms, in the only way possible, with the reality they had pretended for months they could ignore.
“The Masque of the Red Death”, by Harry Clarke, for Tales of Mystery and Imagination, 1919.
If you, too, would like to come to terrible grips with your mortality through the medium of Edgar Allan Poe audio dramas, I have some excellent news for you: preorders for both of our Midnight Dreary audio plays are available now! Episode 1, featuring “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, will be released this Friday, October 16th. Episode 2, featuring “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Premature Burial”, will be released on Wednesday, October 28th. You can purchase them HERE! And don’t forget to pick up the extras packages, to add context and ambience to your listening experience. Operators are standing by!
NOTE: I began writing this blog before we knew that the run of Count of Monte Cristo would be cancelled, but I had too much fun writing about sandwiches for a thousand+ words to not share it with you all, and I figured that now was as good a time as any for some levity. So I’m sorry that this isn’t like a history of infectious disease and its relation to the theatre or something, sorry I couldn’t write up an essay about London theatres being closed during epidemic outbreaks or how the action of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is predicated on the city being emptied of its wealthiest inhabitants out of fear of the Plague. Hopefully in the future I’ll have more lead time and can put something like that together. -KH, Blogslave
Last week I shared with you all the historical context essential to the understanding of The Count of Monte Cristo, not only because it is my job to give you the audience the information that you will need to appreciate the show that my friends and I worked so hard to create for you, but also because history is one of my great passions. History is something I care about and trouble myself to understand deeply, because knowing and understanding history makes me feel connected to humanity at large. I’m a traditionalist sort of guy [sneak in to a pitch meeting some time to see just how boring, backwards and basic old-fashioned my show suggestions tend to be -KH] and the study of history gives me a comforting sense of continuity and fellowship with mankind.
This week, in an incredibly inadequate replacement for the Opening Night we were supposed to have tonight, I want to share with you another of my great passions, one about which I feel at least as strongly, and which comforts me at least as deeply, as the study of history. I am talking, of course, about sandwiches. And specifically, the Monte Cristo sandwich; what it is, how to make it, and arguably most importantly for the blog of a theatre company, what in the Sam Hill it could possibly have in common with our new show other than the name. Of all our shows in the past 9 years, this is the first time I have been able to shoehorn in a sandwich discussion [and I’ve been trying, believe-you-me -KH], and I’m certainly not going to let an opportunity like this go to waste. Please indulge me.
First things first: What is it? The Monte Cristo is one of a handful of sandwiches whose name is not self-explanatory, like Egg Salad or Beef on Weck or BLT or Turkey-Swiss Panini or Sausage Egg & Cheese McMuffin. It instead shares the cryptic naming convention of the Reuben, the Elvis, the Club, or that lovely French couple, Mr. and Mrs. Crunch themselves, the croque monsieur and croque madame. The Monte Cristo also defies simple description; it is one of the more…complicated sandwiches that I can think of, and as you might imagine from what you’ve read already I spend a lot of time thinking about sandwiches. It has three slices of bread, two kinds of meat, mandatory compression (an element shared only by the panini and archaic internet darling the Shooter’s Sandwich), egg batter, and is pan-fried [if you’re a Food Sinner it also has powdered sugar and raspberry jam -ed.] The best comparison I can make is a grilled cheese combined with a club sandwich, made with French toast.
So, second things second: how do you make it? [In case this wasn’t clear, this will indeed be one of those “three paragraphs of nonsense before the recipe” recipe. You know, those things everybody hates? But instead of being supposed to be a recipe, this is supposed to be an essay about what Monte Cristo sandwiches have to do with the Alexandre Dumas novel The Count of Monte Cristo, and We Happy Few’s adaptation thereof, so really this is the meaningless paragraph, not the previous ones -ed.] You start with the bread. Three slices, ideally brioche or something else rich and/or spongy. Like with French toast a little stale is fine, perhaps even ideal; my girlfriend taught me that in France French toast is called pain perdu, ‘lost bread’, because it is a way to use bread that you wouldn’t ordinarily eat, so dont fret about the freshness. Spread one slice with dijon mustard, then top with a slice of swiss cheese and two slices of deli turkey. If you like to mix sweet and savory, spread the next slice of bread with raspberry jam, then top with another slice of swiss cheese and two slices of ham. If you’re a good person use more dijon instead of jam. Put on the final slice of bread and smoosh it down real good. Cut off the crusts and press the edges together to seal everything in. Leave the sandwich weighted down while you prepare the batter; whisk together an egg and a splash of milk, maybe an ounce or two, and add in salt, pepper, nutmeg, and garlic. Dredge your sandwich in the batter (coat in breadcrumbs and re-dredge if you’re feeling fancy), place in a buttered frying pan over medium-low heat, cover and cook for 5 minutes. Flip and cook for 4 more, then remove and slice on the bias. If you’re anything like me both sides of the sandwich will be dark brown tending towards black but somehow the cheese won’t have melted yet; if you’re a good cook it will be golden brown and perfectly cooked through. If you used jam dust the sandwich with powdered sugar. Eat and enjoy!
Now, the real question. What does this have to do with our (cancelled) play? The name seems to be a misnomer, not used until the middle of the 20th century. It was apparently chosen because it sounded mysterious, fancy, and French-like. It did not seem to be intentionally chosen in reference to Dumas’ book, but it nevertheless has a number of similarities. The first I have already mentioned; the secret hidden by the name Monte Cristo. Just as Edmond Dantes hides his true name in order to seek his revenge, so does the sandwich conceal its ingredients behind a name. The second I have referred to as well; Monte Cristo, both for the sandwich and for Dantes himself, is a name that suggests fanciness. Dantes started as a simple sailor, and the sandwich begins with basic deli meats and old bread, but it sounds much more exotic and exciting to say “Monte Cristo” than to say “Edmond Dantes” or “Pan-fried Turkey, Ham, and Swiss Egg-Battered Sandwich with Raspberry Jam”, which we can all agree is a mouthful [but the bad kind, not the good kind, like the sandwich. -KH] The third is closely tied to the second; wealth and richness. Just as the Abbe Faria passes on the lost wealth of the Spadas to Dantes and gives him untold riches, so does the sandwich become much richer when you add the batter and fry it in butter.
There, unfortunately, we have it. Usually I would just now be swapping my Dramaturgy Chains for my Box Office Hat [MUCH prettier but, unfortunately, just as heavy. -KH] However, due to the unfortunate global outbreak of the Coronavirus we have cancelled our upcoming run of The Count of Monte Cristo. In lieu of my normal request that you purchase tickets to our upcoming show, I would instead ask that you keep yourselves safe and healthy in this uncertain time. And that, should you find yourself with excess coin after ensuring your own stability, you send a little of it our way as well. Times will be tight for us, as you might imagine, and every little bit helps us to pay our actors, designers, and technicians so we can keep making art for you.
Stay healthy, everyone. I hope to see you soon,
Keith and the team at We Happy Few
Hello again everybody! I am tremendously pleased to announce that we have finally made it through February, the worst month of the year, and it is now March, when good things start happening again. Good things like March Madness, the High Holy Days of the basketball calendar. Good things like DC’s cherry blossoms starting to bloom. Good things like the Landmark Theaters’ Studio Ghibli Festival (though I haven’t seen any announcements about that yet, which is bumming me out a little). Good things like spring, and sun, and warm weather. And, of course, the goodest thing of all; shows from everyone’s favorite independent theatre company We Happy Few! Our first show of 2020 will be another of our fan favorite Classics-in-Action, an in-house adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ revenge adventure The Count of Monte Cristo.
As is my wont, I…will not be telling you much about the show itself or the particulars of our adaptation yet, to not spoil anything about the story or bias you with my own interpretation (and also I haven’t been to any rehearsals yet so I don’t have any valuable insights on this production). Instead I am pleased to offeryouanotherentryinmyHistoryLessonseries, the only time in my life I get to make use of my Bachelor’s Degree in History. Fortunately for you all, my specialization was the 1800s, because I was so interested in the massive social, political, economic, cultural, technological, and demographic changes that occurred in the century. And one of the first things I learned about it was that you couldn’t discuss any of those changes without addressing the French Revolution, which began a little over a decade before the 19th century, in 1789. Historians also couldn’t wrap up the themes of the century neatly at 1900; the logical endpoint, and beginning of a new era in world history, was the First World War in 1914. This period, from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I, is referred to historiographically as the Long 19th Century. And I think it is important for us to discuss the first third of it, specifically in France, to get some context for our story. Let’s get learning!
It is difficult to imagine a nation that underwent more changes of government, in less time, than France did between 1789 and 1815. In that 26 years France was an Absolute Monarchy, a Republic, a Dictatorship, an Empire, briefly a Constitutional Monarchy, even more briefly an Empire again, and then stabilized as a Constitutional Monarchy. This arrangement wobbled in 1830 during a second revolution (you may have heard about it in Les Miserables), which maintained a Constitutional Monarchy of the Bourbons but moved the crown to another branch of the family, but then stabilized for about 30 years, until the revolution of 1848 established another Republic, which would be suborned into another Empire three years later. But since The Count of Monte Cristo was finished in 1846 we don’t have to worry about that part.
…yet.
France Pre-Revolution.
Briefly: At the end of the 18th century the Kingdom of France was ruled by the Bourbon family, who held the throne and maintained their authority by Divine Right. However, due to, among other things, an inability to effectively levy taxes, particularly on the nobility, the cost of maintaining rivalries with Great Britain, Spain, and Austria, a handful of poor harvests, and the cartoonish extravagance of the Sun King Louis XIV a few generations before [cf. The end of the Spanish Golden Age -ed.], the kingdom was all but bankrupt. So in 1789, the first time in almost 200 years, the Estates General were invoked to find a way to make France solvent. The Estates General was an advisory body to the monarchy composed of three groups: the First Estate, the clergy, the Second Estate, the nobility, and the Third Estate, the “commoners”, although part of the requirement to participate in the Estate was a minimum tax payment. The vast majority of the Third Estate’s representation was actually drawn from the bourgeoisie, what we would call the upper middle class; lawyers, merchants, and non-noble landlords. With the aid of much of the First Estate and a few of the more liberal-minded of the Second, [most notably to my biased mind Hero of the American War of Independence and professional Revolutionary Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de La Fayette -KH] the Third voted to rename the convocation the General Assembly and established its intention to create a Constitution for the nation which eliminated the feudal privileges of the nobility, dispossessed the Church of its holdings and wealth, and established a meritocratic and above all equal society. When the King attempted to dissolve the Assembly by dismissing its head, the Swiss financial expert Necker, and locking the representatives of the Third Estate out of their meeting hall, the people reacted…poorly. On July 14th partisan street fighters stormed prison/armory/Bourbon stronghold the Bastille, and we were off to the races. King Louis XVI lost his head to Madame La Guillotine a few years later and after some uncertainty France was officially a Republic in 1792.
“Une Exécution capitale, place de la Révolution”, by Pierre-Anton Demachy, 1793.
This Republic didn’t last long. Internal factionalism, paranoia, and radicalism from the sans-culottes [literally ‘without pants’, confusingly referring to the fact that laborers wore trousers instead of the knee-length breeches of the nobles -ed.], lower class laborers and peasantry, led to a series of massacres, show trials, and public executions initially targeting the nobility and clergy, and then spreading to moderates and critics of the sans-culottes in what is alarmingly but accurately referred to as the Terror. Under the influence of Maximilien Robespierre the radically leftist (even for revolutionaries) Committee of Public Safety oversaw the execution of almost twenty thousand and the arrest of over a quarter million more; the victims ranging from dispossessed nobles and noble sympathizers to political and personal enemies of the Committee. The Terror ended in 1794 in what is known as the Thermidorian Reaction; so named for the Revolutionary Month of Thermidor, mid-July to mid-August, when it took place. A coup by more moderate elements of the Revolution captured and executed Robespierre and a score of his allies, establishing in its place the Directory, a less radical but equally unpopular ruling council that was in its turn overthrown by Napoleon in 1799.
While this was happening in Paris the armies of the Revolution were fighting wars on just about all their borders. Austria, concerned by the precedent set by commoners guillotining their king and outraged by the execution of French queen and Austrian princess Marie Antoinette, declares war on Revolutionary France in 1792 and is joined by Prussia. [France actually preemptively declared war on THEM, presumably in order to have the initiative in the upcoming conflict, but since Austria was obviously preparing for war I am comfortable muddying the waters a little. This is why I don’t use my history degree that much; because I’m bad at it -KH] Spain, Portugal and Great Britain join the coalition the following year, and France suffers serious defeats in the Netherlands and the south of France. In 1794 the French armies, having instituted a universal draft and employing the unheard-of policy of promoting by merit instead of selling commissions, turned it around. By 1798 the French have established puppet client republics in the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern Italy, reached the gates of the Austrian capital of Vienna, and beaten the British so thoroughly at sea that Napoleon was free to invade British holdings in Egypt.
“Napoleon Crossing the Alps”, by Jacques-Louis David, 1801. I have a copy of this painting above my couch.
Since I’ve now mentioned him twice and he’s a fairly important figure in both the history of France and specifically in our story I should probably discuss him. Napoleon Bonaparte, a young Corsican artillerist who capitalized on the army’s new willingness to promote for merit, risen rapidly through the ranks, and been tremendously successful leading the Republican Army in Italy, seized the position of Consul in 1799 from the unpopular Directory. A few years later, like Caesar before him, he believed he should be Emperor instead. Unlike poor Caesar, however, the Senate of France agreed, and Napoleon was crowned Emperor of France in 1804. He promptly went back to war, that being what he was best at. He changed the policy of Revolutionary France’s warmaking from securing borders and supporting the causes of/establishing republics to the more Imperial goal of conquest. He conquered most of Western, Southern, and Central Europe until he found himself stymied in Spain by Arthur Wellesley and humiliated in Russia by General Winter. Napoleon was driven into exile on the Isle of Elba when the Allies (Great Britain, Spain, Russia…the rest of Europe) captured Paris in 1814, and Louis XVIII, the younger brother of the executed Louis XVI, was placed on the throne. But Napoleon, who had been tremendously popular as Emperor, not least for maintaining the Republican ideals of equality and meritocracy, escaped from exile less than a year later. He rallied his army for another try at conquering the world in the Hundred Days, only to be defeated again by Wellesley, now Duke Wellington, at Waterloo. With his defeat and second exile, this time to St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Bourbon Restoration finally took and France was left to the (relative) stability of a constitutional monarchy under Louis XVIII. In 1815 the old order has been re-established, the nobility and the Church are returned to their previous positions of power, and all traces of Napoleonic or Revolutionary sentiment are ordered purged. A brief interruption in 1830 shifted the crown from one branch of the Bourbon family to another, but after that the body politic remained stable for almost twenty years.
This period of upheaval is the immediate backdrop to The Count of Monte Cristo, which begins literally days before Napoleon returns from Elba in 1815 and ends in 1839. France’s entire power structure has been inverted, twice, and it has conquered and subsequently lost most of Europe. It has shown the common people of France (and, indeed, the rest of Europe) that power is available for seizure, and that it could be maintained, even if all the world stood against them. It has taught the nobility that THEIR power is not as unassailable as they may have imagined. It has expelled religion entirely from the public sphere. And it has put the theories of the previous century’s Enlightenment into practice, radically leveling the field and explicitly enforcing the notion that all men are equal. That many of these changes were reversed by the Bourbon Restoration doesn’t mean they hadn’t happened, however much the King and his courtiers may wish it was so. Also worth noting is that the experience turned France into a Nation, with a coherent national identity beyond “the holdings of nobles owing allegiance to a king”. It maintains this identity even after the monarchy has been restored, with the new Bourbons referring to themselves as “King of the French” instead of “King of France”. This nascent proto-nationalism is the first whisper of the political movement that would define the Long 19th Century, and while it isn’t ESPECIALLY relevant to Monte Cristo it is still worth knowing.
I hope this helps to give you all some context for what is happening in and to France in the period immediately before our story starts. If this laughably incomplete history of France isn’t enough foreknowledge for you and you think it would help you understand the story if you’ve read it first, I would strongly encourage you to start right now, as the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo is about 1300 pages long. If you don’t want to read half a million words and you’re comfortable with trusting us to tell you the story, and you should be, the tickets are available now!
We Happy Few DC 