'There is Nothin’ like a Dame': Christopher Marlowe’s Helen of Troy at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Autor: Laura Grace Godwin
Rok vydání: 2009
Předmět:
Zdroj: Shakespeare Bulletin. 27:69-79
ISSN: 1931-1427
DOI: 10.1353/shb.0.0058
Popis: Although links between the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific and Christopher Marlowe's early modern play Doctor Faustus are admittedly few, there is certainly one issue upon which fictional twentieth-century sailors and sixteenth-century scholars can agree: to ease the passing hours before a distressing fate, "There is nothin' like a dame" (Rodgers and Hammerstein 37). Immediately after signing away his soul, Faustus dismisses--or retreats from--Mephistophilis's bleak conclusions about Hell with a request for a wife. The "woman Devil," or the A-Text's more spectacular "Devil dressed like a woman, with fireworks," apparently fails to satisfy and for twenty-four years Faustus engages in a variety of more celibate pleasures (Marlowe B 2.1.146 S.D., A 2.1.151 S.D.). But in his final days, as he prepares for his fate, Faustus turns again to carnal thoughts as he feasts with fellow scholars and confers about "fair ladies" (Marlowe A 5.1.10, B 5.1.11). In seeking diversion Marlowe's Faustus found, as Rodgers' and Hammerstein's sailors would, that "There are no books like a dame, /And nothin' looks like a dame" (Rodgers and Hammerstein 41). What Marlowe's "peerless dame" should look like, however, remains an open question (Marlowe A 5.1.14, B 5.1.15). In both the A- and B-Texts, the scholars who bear witness as the figure "passeth over the stage" seem duly impressed and Faustus, famously, is enraptured (Marlowe A 5.1.25 S.D., B 5.1.26 S.D.). Any irony that could be wrung from Faustus's initial question to Helen is almost certainly negated by the doctor's subsequent requests for kisses and his chivalric declarations. Given Helen's mute presence, what an audience sees is critical to the interpretation of the moment: whether spectators share Faustus's vision of transcendent beauty or are provided a divergent view of the famed armada propelling visage inevitably influences a spectator's perception of the tragic scholar and, I will argue, of Marlowe himself. Perceptions of the author are an especially potent issue when Marlowe's plays are produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). A certain level of comparison between authors is inherent in any production staged by the RSC, especially when that author is arguably best known under the explicitly comparative label "Shakespeare's contemporary." Of the many dramatists produced by the RSC in its nearly fifty-year history, Marlowe stands out as one of the few playwrights aside from the house dramatist to have a work revisited; the four revivals of Faustus elevate the play to a unique position as the non-Shakespearean drama that appears most often in the Company's repertoire. Variation is inevitable--the productions considered in this study were mounted by four different directors in three different decades--but what emerges from a survey of Helens at the RSC is a consistent association of the character with illicit or alternate sexualities. Given Helen's infernal origins such a conception may not be entirely surprising, but the persistent centralization of the silent and small role of Helen in publicity and in reviews ultimately displaces the aural pleasures of Marlowe's great versifier with a spectacle of taboo sexuality. The form of taboo sexuality has changed significantly in the twenty-year history of Faustus at the RSC and the variations provide an intriguing index of what is sexually--and politically--illicit. Responses to the RSC's Helens offer a glimpse of how period culture responds to taboo by approving or rejecting the specific theatrical choices that create a production's "face that launched a thousand ships" and the body to which it is attached (Marlowe A 5.1.91, B 5.1.94). The RSC first grappled with Helen in a 1968 Faustus directed by Clifford Williams, director of the Company's first Marlowe play, 1964's Jew of Malta starring Eric Porter. Williams and Porter approached Faustus at a time when the play had achieved a celebrity patina by virtue of a glamorous 1968 film version stemming from the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor Oxford University Dramatic Society revival of 1966. …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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