Notes on Recent Reading 39 (Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon)

Plutus (Aristophanes)

     An excerpt from this play was included in a 1916 anthology of socialist literature edited by Upton Sinclair, but Aristophanes, like many comic writers, was more a reactionary than a revolutionary. The play does make a strong case for the inequity of the distribution of wealth, but its plot is more a satire of human nature than of any political or economic system.
     Though Chremylos, the poor but honest farmer, complains bitterly that the virtuous tend to have little while scoundrels flourish, the solution he seeks is not that workers receive the fruit as of their labor but rather that they enjoy unearned income just as the upper crust has been doing for years. This casts Chremylos’ reform into the realm of fantasy. Thus the play ends with the unlikely displacement of the Olympians (and Hermes’ acceptance of a menial position in the main character’s household).


Mandragora (Machiavelli)

     This little play owes its energy to the high spirits of commedia dell’arte which like farce has a simple base in the absurd things which humans do when motivated by sex. The fact that such things are as funny today as four hundred years ago is suggested by the play’s frequent revivals. Tom Hanks has played Callimaco and Wallace Shawn did an excellent translation.
     In keeping with convention, the characters are reductive caricatures. I can enjoy Nicia, the elder husband; Lucrezia, the lusty wife mismatched with him; Callimaco, the man on the make, with his trusty sidekick and servant Siro; Ligurio, the sponger; and Fra Timoteo, the unprincipled churchman as much as anyone. Nonetheless, I felt just a bit disappointed when Callimaco’s fancifully elaborate seduction strategy succeeds and the new lovers look forward to further trysts, that is it. The play ends. Sketching the crazy unlikely structure of deception was the dramatic center.
     The cynical portrayal of the avaricious monk has often been considered satire of the Medici regime, and some have even seen Callimaco as a comic form of a Machiavellian Prince who, with his opportunistic use of strength overcomes Lucrezia who is associated with fortune. Such speculation may be left to those to whom politics are more interesting than the bedroom.


Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon)

     Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a super-productive professional Victorian writer like Trollope, produced “sensation” fiction which brought plot to the fore and themes of tabloid scandal to bourgeois readers, and the narrative turns make this book a page-turner to this day. If description rarely rises above the level of competence and character development is stalled at rudimentary, her work is still entertaining and “popular,” pleasantly digestible on a beach or in an airport terminal. One should not look too closely at such flaws as lapses in continuity – the author sometimes worked on several serials at once – or the acceptance of received ideas typical of literature with mass appeal. If Robert Audley’s pursuit of the truth is portrayed as motivated by Providence and “my lady’s” crimes in the end half-excused due to the revelation of her inherited insanity, this is wholly appropriate considering the author’s intentional focus on action. Real analysis of religion, gender roles, and psychiatric issues need have little place here. Even plausibility is sacrificed: what are the odds that the future Lady Audley would happen into the village of the uncle of her husband’s best friend? Or that Tallboys would have been such a successful prospector? Or that he would have been tossed into the well and then survived? Such questions are not likely to trouble Braddon’s readers.
     Likewise the story suggests a number of potentially significant themes relating to gender (Clara Talboys is a sort of double for her brother George), social class (the servant Phoebe resembles her mistress Lady Audley), madness (is Lady Audley really insane as the doctor concludes after a few moments conversation?), gentility (Lady Audley is so charming, she is not thought to be capable of crime), and bigamy (the author was living with her publisher whose wife was confined to a mental hospital), yet these are all in the end at the service of the plot. Judging from Wilkie’s earlier “sensation” novels and his later tendentious one, this is doubtless fortunate.