Taste,
entitlement and power in Vernon Lee’s Comedy of Masks cum Puppet Show: The Prince of the Hundred Soups (1880)
By Sophie Geoffroy-Menoux (1)
Vernon Lee’s early, 1880 works (Tuscan
Fairy Tales, The Prince of the Hundred Soups, Studies of the Eighteenth Century
in Italy) all testify to her interest in Italian folk-lore, popular culture
and carnivalesque laughter. The Prince of
the Hundred Soups is a hybrid work based on several, popular or
genteel, genres: it is a cross between folk-tales, Commedia dell’ Arte (« Comedy of Masks »), puppet shows,
novella comedies, and fairy tales. Indeed, according to her preface, Vernon Lee
merely adapted her « puppet-show
in narrative », i.e. she rewrote and fleshed out the MS outline (2) of a
Comedy of Masks specially designed for puppets, dated 1838. (3) Its author, she
claimed, was an eccentric scholar she had known in Rome, one Theodor August
Amadeus Wesendonk, universally called « Mangia Zucchero » (« Eat
Sugar »), whose name brings to mind the figure of Wagner, (4) both admired
and abhorred by Lee, while his portrait reminds us of E.T.A. Hoffmann (one of
Lee’s masters). Wesendonk’s theoretical works and plays, she adds, helped her
in the preparation of her scholarly Studies
of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.
Yet, the Prince is a truly Leeian artefact : a
Victorian, utopian, feminist, fin de
siècle fantastical piece. The aesthetic and philosophical decision of using
puppets to perform a comedy of masks, i.e. of twice masked characters, and
twice fixed forms, endows her text with a peculiarly efficient kind of humour
(considering Bergson’s definition of laughter as provoked by “living creatures
made to look like clockwork dolls”) (5) and also disquieting,
fantastic overtones.
In order to try and unravel
the various threads of this work, two guidelines will be followed in this
article : the generic one (esp. the shifting relations between Commedia dell’Arte, puppet show, fairy
tale, comedy and fin de siècle fantasy),
supplemented by an analysis of the ideological significance of the structuring
of the play --plot, subplot and characterization-- upon the relations between
the three polysemic key-concepts of taste, power and entitlement. Indeed, The Prince of the Hundred Soups can be
considered as an ethnographer’s work, which, because of its ideological slant,
forestalls Mikhail Bakhtine’s, René Girard’s, or even Pierre Bourdieu’s
theories. (6)
The Prince of the Hundred Soups as a Comedy of Masks
« Taste », in its
literal sense, provides the backbone to the story of the haps and the mishaps
of the « Prince », or more exactly the « Doge of the Serene
Republic of Bobbio », whose entitlement and power are traditionally symbolized
by his ritual eating of 100 plates of soup « during his 100 days’ tenure
of office ». The literal association of taste, (7) entitlement
and power comes to a head on « the first day of the year one thousand six hundred and ninety
five » when Pantalone, a « new », self-made, and therefore
unentitled man, is elected, thus defeating the distinguished, supertitled,
over-entitled Scappino Scappini, Count Brighella (Generalissimo of the
Republic). Brighella immediately decides to overthrow his rival, and sets him
two tasks (as folklorists say) : eating his hundred soups (challenging
him: « we shall see whether thou wilt swallow thy hundredth soup »)
and having the great prima donna
Olimpia Fantastici sing for the citizens of Bobbio.
In the quest for titles and
public recognition, the inherited birth-right of the oligarchy of privileged
bluebloods is pitted against the acquired merits and worth of « lowborn
upstarts ». Pantalone, the embodiment of the Plebeians of Bobbio and of
their collective values (enthusiasm, dynamism and the gratification of the
senses) is thus opposed to Brighella, the lugubrious, heartless, cruel
« embroidering conspirator » whose efforts at removing Pantalone from
power betray his vision of democracy itself as a closed circuit and of
political representation as tautological. In the Serene Republic of Bobbio, the
election is but another word for the selection of the already distinguished,
the « elect », and the tautological mode of representation artfully
contributes to the strengthening of the self-serving, autistic powers that be.
But then, what or who does the Doge represent ? Who, then is the
usurper ?
The narrative is structured
like a comedy, complete with its exposition scene, peripetia, deus ex machina, denouement and its
romantic subplot: just like Romeo and Juliet, the children of the two rival families,
Giacinta and Leandro, are secretly in love with one other. They exchange
messages, manage to meet, and thanks to Olimpia’s help, finally save Pantalone
from the shame of being burnt (in effigy) at the stake, and marry.
But as a whole, the play is
based on a Commedia outline, as indeed the preface claims, and on Commedia
actors and masks (CLICK) with a carnival plot,
the key word of which is inversion. Everything is turned upside down or used in
a roundabout way. (8)
« Almost all of the rituals of the fool’s
festival consist in the grotesque debasing of the various religious rites and
symbols by transposing them onto the material and bodily level :
piggishness and drunkenness, obscene gestures, etc… » (Bakhtine 83, my
translation).
The ritual celebrations
(which I have analysed elsewhere) (9) punctuating the Doge’s fate fall into two
categories : priggishness vs piggishness… On the one hand, official
pageants meant to display social and political hierarchies and inequalities,
described by Lee like baroque performances ; and, on the other hand,
popular feasts based on carnivalesque inversion, subversive disruption and
universal merriment.
Carnivalesque inversion
also prevails as far as the Doge is concerned : a Jester turned into a
Prince by the people of Bobbio, Pantalone is then turned into a martyr by the
very same people. (10) His sudden triumph, then gradual downfall , is
effected through a series of reversals, resulting in his destitution, trial,
burning at the stake, all hinting at his real function : not the head of
the state, but indeed a scapegoat. A scapegoat which, according to René
Girard’s definition, exactly as in the system of the Roman Saturnalia, being
initially (and legally) made all powerful by the people, raised to an almost
sacred elevated position, is quickly ridiculed by everyone (Giacinta, Olimpia,
Senators, Brighella), and subjected to a process of marginalization : his
elevated position is indeed that of the victim on the altar of sacrifice.
Pantalone becomes the « public enemy of the State », is accused of
being a traitor, a thief… Driven to distraction (chapter 7), dressed like a
fool, (11) Pantalone loses his self-esteem, has nightmares in which even
Olimpia has the upper hand, in a word, grows mad.
To make things worse, Brighella
having frightened the ducal cook into accepting to make the ducal soup
unpalatable, Pantalone, the plump descendant of sausage makers, and powerful
head of the state, starves in his own palace, just like a beggar.
The child-like
« task » of eating his soup transforms the merry Italian tradition of
the banquet with its libertinage de table
into a rite of passage for Pantalone. A prisoner in his own palace, all his
meals being closely watched by peeping valets, Pantalone is paralysed by
etiquette and his eagerness to conform to it, since class distinction is based
on this. Instead of the triumphant, libertine and libertarian symposion he had
expected, what he gets is a sad though hilarious passion, a grotesque parody of
the Last Supper and of its liturgy.
« … the new Doge was thinking only of his soup
and of the way he ought to take it. He would have gulped it down all at once,
but restrained himself, and tried to eat it gravely, sedately, as if he had
eaten nothing else all his life long. But he felt the forty pairs of senatorial
eyes upon him, and his hand trembled; he took up too much soup in his spoon and
spilled some of it over his lace ruffle; then, all crimson with shame, he took
so little that he carried the spoon almost empty to his lips; his face more
deeply suffused, the veins of his forehead distended, he looked into his plate,
hoping to see its embossed bottom; but no bottom was visible as yet. He spooned
away convulsively at it; at last the long-desired embossed work became visible;
he sighed and regained courage. At last he had got to the last spoonful.
Victory! He had eaten the first of his hundred soups! He rose from table
radiant. He was now really the Doge!” (Prince, pp. 51-52)
The soup-eating being both
a strategic issue and status symbol, Pantalone’s inability to take–in the ducal soup is seen as a
metonymy of his lack of power --power defined as in-take : which is the basis of a dire indictement of
politicians’ ways: « One must be entitled, first, to eat the ducal
soups ; and in its turn the soup eating ceremony reinforces this
entitlement. » (A. Mussard) Class-conscious Pantalone, influenced by the
Victorian, indeed Calvinistic, equation of pleasure (defined as a vulgar,
meretricious gratification of the senses) and taste, distinction (defined as
decorous, refined, gloomy, indeed sacrificial), is acutely aware of the
discrepancy between his own nouveau riche
tastes and preferences --his bright, gilded, soft and comfortable home-- and
the gloomy sobriety of the corridors of power with their hard, oak furniture.
Convinced that his inability to swallow this soup betrays his coarse origins
and his plebeian palate, he is also convinced that this flaw must remain a
secret. In order not to starve, the Doge Pantalone is reduced to smuggling in
his food from the outside world, in violation of the sacred laws of Bobbio.
Food, and its taste, is
also the key element in the characterization of the cast of stock characters,
or types: the couple Pantalone vs
Brighella is here physically in keeping with a number of other similar couples
handed down by folklore which traditionally opposes lean people to plump people
(viz. Don Quixote - Sancho Pança). Tyrannical, deceitful Brighella is as skinny
as the Knight of the Sad Countenance, while pot-bellied, round-faced, jovial
Pantalone is a « direct descendant of the paunchy demons of
fertility », and owes as much to popular culture as Rabelais’s
«Gaster » (the god whose belly the Gastrolatres adore), (12) or Rabelais’s
own sources : the famous medieval « Quarrel of the Fat against the
Thin » (13) and « The Battle of Lent against Eat-Meat », (14)
whose soldiers are sausages…
Let us note here the savoury onomastic code in the names of
these folkloric figures : Pantalone Busdrago coming from Bos (beef)
Draconis, Hans Wurst (whom W. A. Mozart loved), Pikkelherring,
Mangia Zucchero, Maschecroûte-le-glouton (the Lyon Carnival), Jack Pudding
(UK), Jean Potage (France), Macaroni (Italy), some of them deriving from
Rabelais’s Gargantua, Engolevent, Happe Mousch, Maschefoin (Bakhtine
341) ; Bouillonsec, Potageanart, Souppimars, Soufflemboyau, Riflandouille,
Tailleboudin (some of the cooks in Rabelais’s Quart Livre).
The paramount importance of
culinary terms and of food is a typical Carnival trait : Carnival, which
« springs from fertility ritual » (Salingar 92) glorifies appetite,
or, indeed, appetites : food, drink, sex. Hence, « the insistent
jokes about food, sex, excrement and death » (Salingar 92), i.e. about matter,
and about the body as matter. Vernon Lee, though, is here tellingly torn apart
between her own passion for food, to which her letters home testify, a passion
that may have oriented her towards the adaptation of this particular
Rabelais-like outline by “Wesendonk”, and her own Victorian inhibitions, so that
sex is utterly absent. Unless we consider sausage-making as a covert albeit
gross allusion to it (just like Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy!). Bakhtine insists on the equation of « tripe
and guts” with “the belly, the entrails, the maternal breast, life »? (15)
And indeed, entrails/guts/bowels/womb/depths are linked, thus tieing together,
in a literally grotesque way, life (food, digestion, life) and death (the
slaughtering of the cattle, murder).
All
those are recurring elements in folklore and in Commedia dell’Arte, and were developped into codes and conventions.
Vernon Lee was aware of these conventions :
“in the old Italian comedy (and in the puppet-show
also), there exist a certain number of fixed types, comic and serious,
invariably dressing and feeling and speaking in the same way, and rendered
interesting only by being placed in continually new positions. Thus […] the
silly, duped, good-natured papa, the noodle of the piece, is always Pantalone,
dressed in red and black Venetian robes ; the plotting old villain is always
Brighella, sometimes called Scappino (whence Molière’s “Fourberies de Scapin”),
and invariably dressed in black ; the stupid and roguish servant, the sly
clown, is the acrobat Harlequin in his stripes ; the bully is the red-nosed
Scaramuccia ; the young lady is Giacinta, Rosaura, or Clelia ; the lover, in
full splendour of feathers and ribbons, Lelio, Valerio, or, as in “The Prince
of the Hundred Soups,” Leandro ; finally, the waiting-maid is Harlequin’s
sweetheart , Colombina. These types are almost invariable, and the whole
ingenuity of the play consists in bringing their various pecularities into new,
unexpected, and comical combinations.” (Vernon Lee, Preface to Prince, pp.
xxi-xxii)
She was also aware of Commedia’s
traditional reliance on typicality and on improvisation, and of its insistence
on gestures, voices, and the codes of pre-verbal or non-verbal communication.
“The Mask actors were […]
scarcely actors at all : they were fantastic realities [… ]; they
necessarily and from their essential nature felt, acted, and spoke in a
consistent and characteristic way. The consequence was evident : no parts
were written for them, they were placed opposite each other, and the meeting of
Pantaloon and Brighella, of Harlequin and the Doctor, of Pulcinella and
Scaramuccia, produced, by the automatic movement of the characters, an action
and a dialogue ever new and ever natural.” (Vernon Lee, Studies 237)
In the Prince, they all tend to expose the weakness and the passivity of
the male characters : alternately deprived of their powers of initiative,
they are staged like mere puppets in one another’s hands. The hero himself,
Leandro, is « an inanimate puppet only brought to life by other people’s
strength » (A. Mussard). In Chapter 7 (the climax), Vernon Lee goes as far
as having Pantalone order his servants « not to execute my
orders » : at that point, even he has become a pitiful puppet in
Brighella’s hands.
Yet, one often wonders who
manipulates whom, who pulls the strings : a question which is all the more
relevant since this play was meant to be a puppet
show… Do we have masks performing a puppet show or do we have puppets acting
out a Commedia dell’Arte ?
Masked actors imitating puppets ? Puppets imitating masked actors ?
Vernon Lee artfully capitalizes on the confusion; her puppet show reveals the
connections between real power and secrets, power and occult plots. Let us not
forget that the French technical word for the person who controls a puppet’s
strings is « l’ensecrètement »…
A « puppet-show in
narrative »
Puppets, manikins, models,
statues and dolls figure prominently in the Vernon Lee corpus. They have a
seminal role in her fantastical tales, (16) and in her theoretical works.
(17) In her Preface to The Prince of the
Hundred Soups, she defines herself as a follower of German pre Romantic and
Romantic authors of Fantasiesstücke
(texts in between the fantastical and the grotesque) like Schlegel, Jean-Paul
(Richter), Tieck, and of course E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose interest in puppets
--the epitome of passivity and alienation-- reflected their existentialist
concerns. (18) Vernon Lee’s preface also mentions famous predecessors or
contemporaneous writers like George Sand and her son, Maurice, who staged
puppet shows at Nohant. Other nineteenth century attempts at either analysing
or creating puppet shows should be mentioned here : L. Duranty, (19) Maeterlinck’s melodramas for puppets,(20) L’Eve
future by Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Büchner’s Leonce and Lena (1836), or, later on, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896).
But among the foreign travellers who were enthusiastic about the puppet shows they had attended in Milan, Turin, Genoa or Rome, like Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, William Wetmore Story, Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, Paul Valéry, very few, unlike Vernon Lee, were aware that puppet shows are an Italian tradition, dating from the late seventeenth century-early eighteenth century, and at its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century, when its high quality musical dramas entertained aristocratic and popular audiences. At that time, the number of puppets in Italy reached 40 000…
As Vernon Lee shows it, the repertoire of nineteenth century puppet shows derived from a long, twofold tradition : the first one, both ancient and popular, consisting in the adaptation of Commedia dell’Arte, farces, robbers’ stories, or saints’ lives, preferably performed by glove puppets, the « burattini », the most popular character being Pulcinella. The outlines are carnivalesque Commedia dell’Arte plots extolling material values (“le bas corporel”) such as food (taste in its first meaning). The other line is genteel, based on the « heroic model », consisting in the adaptation of heroic, pastoral or even classic plays, and usually performed by string puppets.
The « Pupi’s
opera » (« L’opéra des Pupi”) of Southern Italy (comical
improvisations based on epic outlines derived from episodes taken from the
legendary prose cycle of Charlemagne, L’Histoire
des Paladins de France by Giusto Lodico, published from 1858, 1860 onwards)
(21) may have been one source of inspiration for Wesendonk/ Lee : the
Doge’s soup eating is said to be « a habit dating from the time of
Charlemagne » (Prince 1). The
name of the inn where Olimpia takes refuge, the « Sword of Orlando »,
(22) is another example. The Chanson de
Roland was also part and parcel of the Sicilian folklore until the
nineteenth century.
Another source of
inspiration may have been the wealthy Venitian Abbato Labbia, who, in the
eighteenth century, staged melodramas specially written for puppets whose parts
were said and sung by famous singers : e.g. Metastasio adapted his Dido abbandonata for Labbia’s puppet
theatre.
The following extract from
the Prince shows Vernon Lee’s indebtedness
to those pastoral performances:
“After that the curtain of a little theatre erected in
the palace court was raised, and there came forward sundry nymphs in striped
satin petticoats and pink silk stockings, with crooks in their hands, and wreaths
on their heads, and sundry ancient heroes, in blonde wigs, plumed morions and
sandals, who performed a pastoral in music, singing the praises of a mysterious
shepherd, Glaucus, the richest and wisest shepherd of Arcadia, the beloved of
the Gods, whom every one understood to be Pantalone Busdrago ; the whole to the
accompaniment of excellent symphonies of harpsichords, viols, lutes, and
flutes.” (Prince,
pp. 19-20)
By the 1850’s, these puppet
shows rivalled with flesh and bone actors, their repertoire being by then
identical : (23) Goldoni, Shakespeare’s novella comedies (e.g. Romeo and Juliet) and Molière’s comedies
(the two lovers Leandro and Giacinta ; play within a play (chapters 9 and
12) ; Leandro’s tragic dilemma in chapter 12, which is not unlike Corneille’s
Rodrigue in Le Cid). The final coup
de théâtre and revelation follow the example set by Molière:
“Some critics go so far as to assert […] that wherever
in Molière there is complicated action and comic movement we may trace the
influence of the Italian comedy. Thus the Commedia
dell’Arte, which has perhaps afforded suggestions to Shakespeare and to
Lope de Vega […] produced the comedy of Molière by offering a definite artistic
mould in which to cast all the heterogeneous comic elements which had existed
chaotically in the old French fabliaux, nouvelles, and farces.” (Studies 240)
Mozart’s, Rossini’s,
Verdi’s or Wagner’s operas are likely models, too, just like vaudevilles,
Gothic Novels (The Bleeding Nun
adapted from Lewis’s The Monk), and
sensation novels (The Wandering Jew).
The influence of Carlo
Gozzi’s, Tieck’s, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantasy and of Charles Perrault’s fairy
tale archetypes is also extremely important in this play entitled, aptly
enough, the « prince » (why not the « Doge » ?). I contend
that in the Prince of the Hundred Soups,
Leandro’s evolution is a classic quest for identity or initiation, and
Pantalone’s struggle against Brighella as the envious witch casting a spell
(“we shall see whether thou wilt swallow thy hundredth soup”) in order to
compensate for the titles he lacks and to legitimate the initial displacement
of power, enacted as it is through unmistakeable rites of passage, all these
are fairy tale items.
The way in which the
victimized Jester-made-King finally turns into a trickster-hero is also
reminiscent of fairy tales. The trickster’s deceit and cunning bring about the
revenge of the weaker ones (tellingly, male characters like Leandro) over the
stronger ones (the inheritors) and the ultimate and unexpected triumph of
truth, freedom, art and love.
In the Prince of the Hundred Soups, although no precision is given, we
have a mixed cast of lowly, truculent, plebeian, Commedia characters (glove
puppets) and string puppets for the more genteel ones (goldonian, or
fairy tale characters). This distinction corresponds to the distinction between
the four masks and the two unmasked lovers, which is traditional in the Commedia dell’Arte. Such co-existence,
or co-presence, fits quite literally Meyerhold’s definition of the grotesque as a genre which refuses
to abide by any « either… or » distinction. The grotesque
unrelentingly exaggerates and thrives on contradictions, showing that life is
both vulgar and elevated, both
popular and genteel.
Vernon Lee’s fantastical,
feminist, utopian text : laughter in misery, food for thought, and lyrical
women
Writing as she does in the
nineteenth century, Vernon Lee transforms and alters the double tradition that
I have traced and which results in the dual aspect of her work: a fantasy, fairy
tale aspect on the one hand, and a weird, uncanny, fantastical, disquieting
aspect, on the other hand. The witches’ robes and pseudo sorcerer’s formulae
used by Brighella and Scaramuccia in order to frighten the page Truffaldino in
chapter 3 may be traditional devices in fairy tales. Yet, the occult satanic
rituals involving black magic, the Devil and even the famous wizard Master
Curtio (Curtius, Mme Tussaud’s mentor, is also present in « The
Doll »), are reminiscent of decadent Black Mass and secret brotherhoods’
rites.
“He [Truffaldino] was in the presence of that
mysterious council whose name might never be whispered, which all knew to
exist, but whose existence was too awful to be avowed. Truffaldino’s teeth
chattered at the recollection of the vague stories of men found drowned in the
river, or hanged to trees, or stabbed in their beds, with the terrible initials
of the council upon their corpses. » (Prince, p. 39)
Truffaldino accordingly
swoons away during the ritual, which is a topos
in fantastical literature. The repetitions, the mechanical gestures, the
artificial voices of those puppets-cum-masks offer a literally inhuman,
dehumanized, distorted vision of the world : aren’t these wooden dolls or
manikins, and those leather masks, caricatures ?
And as caricatures, they uncannily blur the limits between the real and the
artificial, truth and lies, life and its mimesis, and over-determine the
grotesque, occasionally endowing it with unbearable lucidity.
Such lucidity mostly serves
a feminist, nineteenth century vision. The unmistakeably Leeian, distinctly
utopian character of Olimpia Fantastici evidences this. Taking the place of the
traditional boring but sensible and influencial Dottore (absent from the cast),
Olimpia is a heroine in the best tradition --that of Boccacio, taken up by
Shakespeare in his novella comedies--
I mean the tradition considering woman neither as a despicable though virtuous
womb, nor as a despicable though enjoyable sinner, but as a puppet-master and an artist.
Olimpia is indeed a
capricious femme fatale (complete
with the whip in her hand), redolent of Circe (she confesses to changing men
into asses), of shrewd Fairy Morgana. This « eccentric siren »
nevertheless plays the role of the fairy god-mother, or benevolent dea-ex-machina, and brings about the
happy reunion of the star-crossed lovers, Leandro and Giacinta. She also
obtains Pantalone’s final lawful recognition by the people of Bobbio as
charismatic leader for life (!).
Indeed, in contrast to Lee’s likely model, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s automaton Olympia, the opera singer Olimpia Fantastici embodies the ultimate form of transcending, therefore unquestionable, legitimate power : more than the power of « taste » or « distinction », the power of beauty, the power of art… The final national reconciliation in Bobbio is reached through an epiphany of Art, after the people (and not solely the elect and the elite) have collectively expressed their vital appetite for art, for spiritual, emotional food (even though Olimpia’s song might be considered as yet another form of oral pleasure !). The people accordingly succeed in making Olimpia sing where the officials have failed.
This definitely betrays
Vernon Lee’s utopian bent. (24) The following vibrant passage
from her Studies testifies to her
awareness of the political dimension of the Italian Comedy of Masks :
“Laughter in misery, such was the origin of the
revived Comedy of Masks ; buffooneries to drown the recollection of
ignominy, merriment to hide seditious sorrow, local satire to hide national
satire, dialect to save Italian. […] crushed and mangled as a whole, the
country maintained its vitality in its fragments : fragments too
insignificant, too heterogeneous to create suspicion, living on separate and
unnoticed until at length permitted to reunite ; and the Comedy of Masks,
the jumble of Bergamascs and Sicilians, of Neapolitans and Bolognese, the Babel
of dialects the most dissimilar, is the product and the expression of this
provincial life ever tending towards forbidden national unity.” (Studies 235)
Last but not least, let us
not forget that Olimpia’s power is, typically, the power of the voice. This
strong, domineering woman with her magic, hypnotic voice is one of the earliest
prototypes in Vernon Lee’s series of androgynous singers. Even if she, like all
puppets, acts in playback, like, for
that matter, Hoffmann’s Olympia. Or Farinelli, Zaffirino or Rinaldi in Lee’s
own fantastical texts, in which their voice is merely imagined issuing from the
musici’s painted mouths !
We know that puppet masters
used a small instrument (called the « pratique » in French), which
they put in their mouths in order to alter their voice, so that the puppet did
have a voice --a specifically human feature-- which yet did not sound like any
particular human voice: (25) the voice, so traditional societies thought, of
the dead. (26)
Conclusion
The paradoxical generic
instability of this mixture of different heavily codified genres endows Vernon
Lee’s utopian play with a flamboyantly grotesque and subversive dimension. Her
nineteenth century feminist « parodic travestying » of the
conventions of fairy tale, Commedia
dell’Arte and puppet shows brings to light the --generally occult-- basis
of political life and social order: the trinity formed by the concepts of
taste, entitlement and power.
But, unlike those puppet
masters who were disliked and persecuted by Cromwell, Calvin and others, and
who protected themselves against charges of witchcraft and sacrilege by improvising, Lee could use the two Victorian
convenient labels « meant for children » and « fantasy » to
write and publish her Prince of the
Hundred Soups. This explains why, although the Studies leave us in no doubt as to her degree of awareness
concerning the political dimension of her play, she wryly dedicated it to a “grown up simpleton as desultory and
capricious as myself.”
NOTES
1.
This
paper was read at the June 2002 London Conference. It is partly based on a
seminar I then taught at the University of la Réunion, and for some of the
following remarks, is indebted to students’ clear-sighted analyses, esp. Miss
Alice Mussard’s.
2.
« Their [Beolco
(1540s) and his imitator Calmo’s]
successors were obliged to leave half of the dialogue to be extemporized, and
in a very few years the written part of the plays was reduced to a mere
skeleton plan of the action divided into scenes, which was hung-up in the
green-rooms for the instruction of the actors, who filled up the outlines
according to the whim of the moment. Thence it is that nothing has come down to
us of the Comedy of Masks of the late 16th and 17th centuries save a volume
published about 1610 by the actor Flamminio Scala, containing fifty outlines of
comedies in narrative form […] threadbare tales of scurrilous intrigue, which
are to the Comedy of Masks like the shapeless scaffoldings which remain after
some wonderful exhibition of fireworks…. » (Studies 238)
3.
“I have
translated (abridging here and there where the love of typicality produced a
certain monotony) and am now editing ‘The Prince of the Hundred Soups.’ ” (Lee, preface, Prince, p. xxiii)
4.
Mathilde von Wesendonk was Wagner’s
muse.
5.
My
translation from Bergson’s famous definition of laughter as triggered off by
« une mécanique plaquée sur du vivant ».
6.
Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction, critique sociale du jugement. Paris : Minuit,
« Le sens commun », 1979. See the chapter on « Titres et
quartiers de noblesse ».
7.
Taste: 1. the sense by which flavours are perceived. 2. the ability to
appreciate the beautiful and the refined, called “distinction” by Bourdieu.
8.
For
instance, the cavaliers/horsemen marching past the citizens of Bobbio with
their saddle on their shoulders…
9.
Sophie Geoffroy-Menoux, « Celebrations in the
texts of Vernon Lee : the Disruption of the Carnivalesque », in Alizés/Trade Winds, « Celebrations,
CAPES & Other Essays », N° 13, January 1997, pp. 157-175. Accessible
online at http://perso.orange.fr/oracle974/text/74c21e88-280.html
10. « Dans
ce système le roi est le bouffon, élu
par l’ensemble du peuple, tourné en
dérision par ce même peuple, injurié, battu lorsque son règne s’achève… Si
l’on avait commencé par donner au bouffon les parures du roi, à présent que son
règne est terminé, on le déguise, on le « travestit » en lui faisant
enfiler l’habit du bouffon… les injures le dépouillent de ses parures et de son
masque : les injures et les coups détrônent le souverain » (Bakhtine 199).
11.
With
colours in keeping with the nineteenth century system of correspondences
prevailing in puppet shows, a system based on Goethe’s Treatise on Colours.
12.
Gaster’s
belly is more than the actual, physical stomach of any living creature. It
symbolizes the material wants of the human community as a whole. See Bakhtine
299.
13.
See the Dispute des Gras et des Maigres and
Brueghel’s pictures, cited by Bakhtine 296.
14. See the
thirteenth century poem quoted by Bakhtine : « La Bataille de Carême
et de Mange-Viande ».
15.
« les tripes, les boyaux sont le ventre, les entrailles, le sein maternel,
la vie. » (my translation,
from Bakhtine 165).
16.
See
« The Doll », and « Sister Benvenuta and the Christ
Child »…
17.
See
« The Economic Parasitism of Women » in Gospels of Anarchy, for instance.
18. « C’est
un objet qui joue, animé par un ‘support’ humain. Et son jeu figure, symbolise,
raille, exorcise l’activité des hommes. Le fait que la marionnette soit passive
et manipulée, alors que l’acteur, étymologiquement, agit, est la clé des deux
aventures opposées qui l’ont affectée. Tantôt elle est dévalorisée, au point de
fournir une métaphore de l’impuissance, de « l’aliénation »
humaine : l’Europe baroque et romantique voit volontiers l’homme comme une
marionnette dont Dieu, le Destin ou d’autres forces « tirent les
ficelles ». […] A l’opposé, pourtant, le fait que la marionnette se trouve
passive entre les mains de son créateur donne toute la liberté créatrice à
celui-ci. » In « De la poupée aux formes animées », Les marionnettes 83.
19. « J’ai
donc osé composer un théâtre écrit de marionnettes, tentative sans précédent en
Europe, et je livre cette tentative à la méditation et à la critique des
esprits naïfs et savants. // En effet, jusqu’ici, toute la tradition des
marionnettes est orale. Quand une pièce est écrite c’est une exception. Elle
est jouée avec la plus grande liberté à l’égard du texte. » (L. Duranty, Théâtre des Marionnettes, Introduction,
Paris 1880, quoted in Les Marionnettes
108).
20.
Tintagiles’s
Death, Aleddin
and Palomides.
21.
According
to Bakhtine, those episodes were performed successively for months on end, and
scrupulously followed their source.
22.
« Dans Orlandino
de Folengo, […] on trouve une description parfaitement carnavalesque du tournoi
de Charlemagne : les chevaliers enfourchent des ânes, des mules et des
vaches, en guise de boucliers ils portent des corbeilles, en guise de casques
des ustensiles de cuisine : seaux, marmites, casseroles. » (Bakhtine 211).
23.
The
more able actors sometimes performed both in their own right then as puppet
masters in the second half of the show.
24. « Dans
le théâtre des marionnettes traditionnelles, les montreurs recouraient à la
‘pratique’, petit instrument qu’on se met dans la bouche et qui déforme les
sons de la voix, comme si la marionnette, animée et inanimée à la fois, pouvait
avoir une voix --signe de l’humain-- mais une voix altérée. La voix de
Polichinelle, déformée par la‘pratique’, constitue un caractère essentiel du
personnage et signifie aussi son appartenance au règne des morts. » R. de
Simone, A. Rossi, Carnevale si chiamava
Vincenzo, Rome, 1977 quoted in Les Marionnettes,
p. 108.
25. « La voix prêtée aux marionnettes
acquiert une signification presque rituelle, liée à la conjuration et à
l’évocation des morts. » R de Simone, A. Rossi, Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo, Rome, 1977 quoted in Les Marionnettes, p. 108.
Annex
The illustrations below are taken from Maurice Sand, Masques et bouffons (Comédie Italienne). Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1860.
About the masks themselves,
we recommend the following site : http://paularbear.free.fr/commedia-dell-arte/heritage/masques.html
1. Dramatis Personae
I. The
four masks
« Pantalone, Brighella, Harlequin, and
the Doctor, were called the four
masks ; they were the most popular, the most typical, the most
universally known and the longest of life. » (Vernon Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy,
p. 236).
1. Pantalone Busdrago I,
Doge of Bobbio
Pantalone (1550)
« Old men were
typified in Pantalone dei Bisognosi the Venetian merchant, wearing the obsolete
costume, --the scarlet stockings, black robe, and long-tailed hood, of the
burgher of a mediaeval commonwealth » (Studies
235)
He expresses himself in his
Venetian dialect. In The Prince of the
Hundred Soups, Pantalone, the descendent of a sausage maker, is close to
the German « Hanswurst » (« John Sausage »), derived from
Pulcinella/Punch.
2. Scappino Scappini, Count of Brighella, « Generalissimo Scappino Brighella ».
Brighella 1570
usually characterized as a
cunning, deceitful servant. Vernon Lee turns him into the most powerful man or
wizard of Bobbio ; confined within his ivory tower where he indulges in
his hobby (embroidery) from which he casts his spells (« we shall see
whether thou wilt swallow thy hundredth soup »).
3. Arlecchino, Brighella’s
bravo
Arlecchino, 1671
« By the middle of the
sixteenth century […] the two ideal classes of servants,
the hypocritical rogue and the gluttonous sly simpleton, were represented respectively
by Brighella, dressed in the loose-striped shirt and linen cap of the artisans
of the sixteenth century ; and by Arlecchino, wearing tight-fitting hose
and jerkin of motley stripes and patches, suggestive of the grotesque dress of
the youths in Signorelli and Carpaccio’s paintings. Both Brighella and
Arlecchino came to be associated with the town of Bergamo, the Lombard dialect
of which, wholly distinct from the Venetian of Pantalone, they continued to the
last to employ. These two servants, the arch buffoons of the play, were called
the two Zanni, perhaps in
reminiscence of the Sanniones of
Antiquity . … Harlequin in especial never lost his antique character of
mime, --dancing, playing tricks, and performing gymnastic feats in the midst of
his parts. » (Studies 235-6)
4. The Doctor
1653
« To these three were
added the Doctor, sometimes called Doctor Graziano or Doctor Balanzon, the
typical man of learning : dressed as a jurist, with an immense wine-stain
on one cheek : always a Bolognese, always blustering and pedantic,
oscillating between a knave and a fool, holding forth in maccaronian
Latin. » (Studies 236)
Olimpia Fantastici plays
The Doctor’s role.
II. « A quartet of Neapolitan
buffoons »
« Opposite this
quartet of North Italians arose another quartet of Neapolitan buffoons :
Pulcinella,… ; Scaramuccia,; Tartaglia,;Coviello;--these Southern masks
being more violent, more savage, more indecently antique, than the Northern,
and perhaps more restricted to their own
provinces »( Studies 236).
1. Pulcinella
1800
« Pulcinella, the
ancient Maccus, the modern Punch or Polichinelle, with immense nose and double
hump, dressed in white, a terrible sort of comic Bluebeard or Nero » (Studies 236): here, the role of
hunchback is held by Truffaldino, the « Gobbo » (Ottavio Zanni’s
cook).
2. Scaramuccia
17th-Century
Engraving of Scaramuccia Source Napoléon-Maurice Bernardin, La
comédie italienne en France et les théâtres de la foire et du boulevard
(1570-1791), Paris, Revue bleue, 1902 Date 17th-Century Author Unknown Permission This
image is in the public domain.
« The bully and
intriguer Scaramuccia, dressed in black, the archetype of the military
adventurer ». (Studies 236).
3. Tartaglia
« the simpleton and
stammerer Tartaglia » (Studies
236). Here absent
4. Coviello
« the long, dancing,
fiddling, singing vagabond Coviello » (Studies
236). Here absent, but Olimpia is undeniably endowed with some of his features.
III. « Regular
actors and actresses »
« To these masks—half
actors, half acrobats, half jesters—were added regular actors and actresses,
speaking Tuscan and probably improvising but little, the pair of lovers
borrowed with but slight alteration from the written comedy and retaining its
pseudo-antique names : Lelio, Leandro, Orazio, and Florindo ; Lavinia,
Flamminia, Ortensia, Giacinta or Rosaura, dapper figures with no comic work to
do, but necessary for the action of the play » (Studies 236).
1. Colombina (Olimpia’s maid)
1683
2. Lady Giacinta
(Busdrago) : a disdainful, charismatic, superior woman who belittles her
lover Leandro (another Leeian « New Woman »).
3. Isabella 1600
4. Leandro (Scappini Brighella) :
Giacinta’s lover ;
fragile, submissive, caught in the horns of a dilemma (ch 10); romantic and
sensitive. Giacinta and Leandro = Romeo and Juliet.
5.Ottavio, 1688
Bibliography
Henri Bergson, Le Rire, essai sur la signification du comique, Paris : Alcan, 1900.
Vernon
Lee, The Prince of the Hundred
Soups ; a Puppet Show in Narrative, 1880. London : T. Fisher
Unwin, 1883.
Vernon
Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in
Italy. 1880. New York : da Capo Press, 1978.
Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen-Age et sous la Renaissance. Paris : Gallimard, « Tel », 1970.
Michel Corvin, Lire la comédie, Paris : Dunod, 1994.
Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction, critique sociale du jugement. Paris : Minuit, « Le sens commun », 1979.
Leo
Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions
of Comedy. Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Bruna
Babuder, Eliana Treccani, Maschere :
la storia « segreta ». Verona : Demetra, 2000.
Sophie
Geoffroy-Menoux, « Celebrations in the Texts of Vernon Lee : the
Disruption of the Carnivalesque », Alizés/Trade
Winds n° 13, « Celebrations and Other Essays », Jan. 1997,
157-176.
René Girard, La violence et le sacré. Paris : Grasset, 1972.
Paul Fournel ed., Les Marionnettes. Préface d’Antoine Vitez. Paris : Bordas, 1982.
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