Brecht’s Edward
By
Martin Esslin
The
full title of Brecht’s play reads:
Here are enacted before the public the History of the unquiet reign of
Edward II, King of England, and his lamentable Death/As well as the good
Fortune and End of Gaveston his favorite/Furthermore the troubled Fate of Anne,
his Queen/Likewise the Rise and Downfall of the great Earl Roger Mortimer/All of
which occurred in England, principally at London, six hundred years before our
time.
If Marlowe’s play was the refined product of a university wit
displaying his literary skill, Brecht, it is clear, pursued a different end; he
wanted to make his play the equivalent of a ballad singer’s broadsheet, a
slice of history seen through the eyes of the common people, as performed by
fairground comedians in some barn or marketplace. In short:
a work of pop art. Or as one of the reviewers of an early performance
(Berlin 1924) put it: behind the
gauze curtain there stood, as it were, ‘Brecht the fairground barker with his
invisible pointer.’
This is the most important fact to be kept in mind in approaching
Brecht’s Edward II:
it is Brecht’s play, not Marlowe’s.
Brecht used Marlowe’s subject matter as Shakespeare used Plutarch or
Holinshed. But in style, language,
characters, motivation and incident the German play of 1923/24 is totally
different from the English classic of 1593.
As Brecht’s co-author, Lion Feuchtwanger, said in a poem published at
the time:
I, for example, sometimes write
Adaptations . . . in this manner:
I make out of old material
A new play, and put below the
title
The name of a dead poet, who is
Very famous but read by no-one, and I put
In front of the dead poet’s name the word: ‘after’
Then some critics write that I
Am full of piety, and others that I am totally devoid
Of it. And what the dead poet botched
Is attributed to me,
And what I’ve done well
To the dead poet, who is
Very famous and totally unread, and of whom
Nobody knows whether he in turn
Wrote original stuff or was merely
An adaptor
. . . drama, above all the plays of Schiller, had dealt with history and
the kings and queens who made it on a lofty plane.
Now the heroic images of nobility and tragic greatness lay shattered:
human weakness, meanness and pettiness could be seen as the motive forces
of history.
Hence the attraction of Marlowe’s story of a king who plunged his
country into years of bloody war for the love of a worthless catamite.
Here the movement of the destiny of nations could be shown to have been
no different from the gory crimes told in the broadsheets sold at public
hangings. Brecht deliberately
heightened the coarseness and squalor of the tale. Piers Gaveston, in
Marlowe’s version of a ‘sly inveigling Frenchman’ and ‘hardly a
gentleman by birth,’ but some sort of gentleman nevertheless, becomes in
Brecht’s version Danny, the son of a common butcher.
And while Marlowe’s Edward is kept captive in the dungeon ‘wherein
the filth of all the castle falls,’ Brecht’s imprisoned king actually has to
stand in the castle’s cesspool. The psychology of the principal characters
also is completely modern in Brecht’s version.
Mortimer, a rather shadowy figure in Marlowe’s play, has become a
protagonist whose weight is equal to that of the king himself:
the rationalist and scholar as opposed to the creature of blind impulse
and perverse emotion. Edward’s
queen, who is called Isabella in Marlowe’s version, and Anne in Brecht’s, is
also given a wholly modern motivation: she
loves her husband and only turns to Mortimer from hurt pride and despair.
Gaveston is seen by Brecht as a humble individual who cannot help the king’s
infatuation for him and, even in the hour of his downfall, prides himself on
having been the cause of so much bloodshed.
Brecht himself directed the first production of Edward
II on 19 March 1924. As though
to underline the message of the play about the bloody farce of history, the
rehearsals had been interrupted by the grotesque Hitler putsch, which rocked
Munich in November 1923. (And as so
often, Brecht’s brilliant intuition anticipated the history of his own time:
ten years after Edward II saw the light of day, Germany and the world
were rocked by Hitler’s savage execution of one of his main lieutenants, Roehm,
on the grounds that his homosexuality jeopardized the safety of the state:
in a scene worthy of Brecht he was dragged from the bed he shared with
his boyfriend and shot there and then.) Caspar
Neher, Brecht’s schoolmate at Augsburg and his lifelong friend, designed the
sets: they were in keeping with the
author’s intention—made of rough canvas as though for poverty-stricken
strolling players. Among the cast
was Oscar Homolka, who played Mortimer.
It was a highly stylized production:
in the battle scenes the soldiers appeared with white faces, like tragic
clowns. Brecht, it is reported, had
asked his friend and idol, Karl Valentin, the great Munich beerhall comedian,
for his advice on how to treat the battle.
Valentin replied: ‘What do
soldiers feel in battle? They are
afraid.’ Brecht translated this into white make-up.
Here already the practice of Brecht’s epic theatre—if not yet its
theory—was present. In a note
dated as early as February 1922 Brecht had expressed the hope that he might have
‘avoided one of the great faults of other art:
its effort to involve the public. Instinctively
I leave a distance and see to it that my effects (of a poetic and philosophical
nature) remain confined to the stage.’ The
“splendid isolation” of the spectator is not touched, he is not fobbed off
by being invited to feel empathy, to incarnate himself in the hero.
There is a higher order of interest:
the interest in the image, in the other,
which is incomprehensible, astonishing.’
In Edward II history is seen
through eyes of uncomprehending astonishment—as indeed the common people, who
pay for it with their blood, have immemorially observed the strange behavior of
the men who are the masters of their fate.
This is Brecht in his pre-Marxist phase, not yet in possession of the
dialectical interpretation of history which enabled him (so he felt) to
understand the reality behind the historical process and to point the moral to
his audience. Marxist critics—and
the later Brecht—would consider the moral neutrality of Edward
II a weakness. Others might
have their doubts about this, or even regard this objectivity as a strength.
For, as Brecht himself noted not long after he had written Edward
II: ‘The secret of the great protagonists in drama lies largely
in the fact that they can have almost any physical shape and that they leave
room for plenty of individual characteristics to be filled in . . .
Several different views about the subject-matter are allowed by the
playwright, and the characters remain quite unfixed.
Edward II, for example, can just as well be a strong, wicked man as a
weak, good one. For the kind of
weakness, the kind of wickedness he possesses is a profound and metaphysical
one, which can be found in people of all kinds.’
Remarks like these illustrate the subtlety of intention behind the
outward simplicity of a work like Edward II. Here too
Brecht was in advance of his time. The
bold strokes of his folk-ballad approach to history correspond very closely to
the deceptive primitivism of the comic-strip style of modern pop art and
avant-garde theatre. If anything,
history today has become even more like the workings of an incomprehensible
fatality compounded of the caprices and vanities and weaknesses of the little
men who have become the arbiters of the world’s destinies.
So Brecht’s play, forty-five years after it was written, may have
gained new relevance and topicality.
Bertoit Brecht’s One Tragedy? by
Eric Bentley
If Brecht’s early works have been neglected and underrated, Edward
II must surely be the most neglected and underrated of them all.
I was told by several persons that they assumed the play would not turn
up at all in an English-language edition of Brecht’s works ‘since it is a
translation from the English, and who wants to have Marlowe translated back from
the German?’ My reply is that the
same point was made earlier about The
Threepenny Opera, with as little justification.
Brecht was uninterested in translation and probably incapable of it.
Anything he touched became inalienably his own.
It is true that he was prepared to lift many lines from other authors,
not to mention incidents, but even lines and incidents reproduced by Brecht are
always utterly changed by the new context.
What was it that Marlowe’s play offered him?
The first thing that comes to mind is the subject—a Brechtian one—of
a homosexual relationship seen as a fatal infatuation, seen, moreover, as
masochistic in relation to the male principal and as sadistic in relation to
women. Secondly, the form.
Speaking on general lines, one would have to say, first, that the form of
an Elizabethan chronicle play offered Brecht that distance from immediate
experience which later he would bring under the heading of Verfremdung
or alienation. Thinking
specifically of Marlowe’s Edward II,
one would want to add that it has a remarkably expressive pattern of action
which can be taken over and perhaps in some respects improved on.
According to this pattern, the hero becomes a more sympathetic person as
his fortunes grow worse, while his chief antagonist becomes more and more
repellent as he has more and more success.
A reader of Marlowe who starts to read the Brecht is surprised and
perhaps disappointed very early on by Brecht’s omission of the most famous
purple patch in the play. Gaveston’s
speech about the fun which he and Edward will have together:
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please:
Music and poetry is his delight,
Therefore I’ll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows,
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay;
Sometime a lovely boy, in Dian’s shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring . . .
If the topic is homosexuality, would not such a passage seem highly
relevant? Reading on, one finds
that it is not relevant—is not
possible—to
the experience Brecht depicts, the world he creates.
A whole dimension of the poet Marlowe is not usable, and it may well be
the dimension which most of his English-language readers find the most
attractive: Renaissance
sensuousness finding expression in luxurious words and sinuous rhythms.
Brecht’s refusal of the Marlovian line is not motivated by modesty.
The Brechtian counter-play is always a sort of serious parody, converting
the sublime to the grotesque. In
Marlowe, the steady roll of the blank verse has an effect comparable in
solemnity to the rhymed Alexandrines of French classical tragedy.
The Brecht version intersperses iambic pentameter with shorter
lines—and sometimes with longer ones—that break the pattern and shatter, as
it were, the icon. As with the
form, so with the content. The
homosexuality in Marlowe is at once aesthetic and ambiguous.
Sometimes seeming conscious, physical, and even animal, it seems at other
times but the Elizabethan cult of poeticized friendship.
Marlowe’s Gaveston is seen not just as bedfellow but even more as royal
‘favorite,’ and a marriage we need not regard as phony is being arranged for
him with a princess. Brecht’s
Gaveston is a sexual partner first and last.
Actually, a reader who looked at the end of the play first, even though
there is no sex in it, would receive the same jolt from Brecht’s changes as
the reader who looks at the opening scenes.
When Marlowe’s Edward has to give up not only Gaveston but this world,
what he is left with is the Christian religion, i.e. the hope of a next
world.
Now, though Brecht’s Edward also ends up as a metaphysician, the
metaphysics are the opposite of Christian—precisely the opposite, indeed, a
very travesty of Christianity.
Therefore let the dark be dark, and the unclean unclean
Praise hunger, praise mistreatment, praise
The darkness
Marlowe’s eloquence has rightly been praised, yet there is
something
about his eloquent Edward II that is dramatically unsatisfying.
‘Edward sings too many arias,’ one tends to say.
Yet the fact that he does serves to conceal a dramatic weakness, which
derives from Edward’s passivity. Thinking
about the shortcomings of Marlowe’s play, one recalls W.B. Yeats’ rejection
of passive suffering as a dramatic subject.
Looking at this particular narrative, one finds two nodal points in it;
the point where Edward gives Gaveston up, and the point where he gives
the crown up. Both are actions
which are not actions. That’s
Edward, Marlowe might have said. It
is a proposition which is reversed by Brecht, whose Edward refuses to give up
either Gaveston or the crown. He
loses them anyway, of course, so, from a cynical point of view, there’s no
difference between the two Edwards. There
is all the difference in the world from a tragic point of view—and is not Edward II the one play of Brecht’s which can be called a tragedy
in any accepted sense?
However this may be, we are confronted here with opposite characters in
opposite stories. One play is about a weak man who, under pressure, gives up
his friend first and his crown later, and interests us only in his very human
weakness and by virtue of the faint halo that is cast around it by all the grace
and poeticizing. The other is a
play about an infatuated man, made palatable to us in the beginning by no poetry
or charm, but earning our admiration, gradually and with difficulty, by a
surprising loyalty both to his friend and to his idea of himself as king.
If one had to illustrate Marlowe’s gift of character creation from Edward
II, one could not say very much about any character save Edward himself.
In Marlowe, Edward has but one partner and foil:
Gaveston. In Brecht, he has
three: Gaveston, the queen, and
Mortimer. The contrast is a strong
one between the infatuated, stubborn king and the lost, embarrassed, not stupid,
but fundamentally rather innocent boyfriend.
The contrast is strong, too, between Edward and his queen.
Though this Edward has been able to become a father, everything else we
know if him seems homoerotic. And even the asexuality of his final phase is part
of the complex. The queen, on the other hand, is ‘all woman.’
She will be loyal to her man as long as she is allowed to be, but when
this loyalty is mocked and, as it were, forbidden, she will drift to another
man. There is a convincing
morbidity in this drift as Brecht shows it, since it is a drift to her former
man’s principal enemy and opposite.
Principal enemy and opposite: that
is why Mortimer is the principal partner among Edward’s three.
If all four characters are mostly Brecht’s own inventions, Mortimer is
ninety-nine percent so. Marlowe’s
Young Mortimer is in the beginning just a barbaric young man who is capable of
having at Gaveston with his sword to cap an argument.
We feel he takes over the queen only because that’s what barbarians do.
It is Brecht’s idea that Mortimer was a scholar, and has to be won from
his books before he enters the political arena at all.
More original still, his meditations have already led him to Solomon’s
conclusion: all is vanity.
The absolute ‘nullity of human things and deeds’—what premise for
political action! The conception
permits Brecht to create, in the first instance, an effectively tragicomic
scoundrel and, in the second, to define the perfect antithesis to Edward:
Edward is a man of feeling, Mortimer of reason.
Heroic courage is the tragic virtue, and Edward has it.
Mortimer’s courage, if we take it to exist at all, is unheroic because
it needs to be propped by hatred and cynicism:
it is easier to die if you are spitting hatred against others all the
while and if you truly find all living worthless anyway.
I have indicated that what makes a hero out of Edward in Brecht’s play
is, in the first instance, that, unlike Marlowe’s protagonist, he can
say No. His two refusals, spaced out in the way they are, do much to give the
play its grand and cogent structure. Edward
can say No because he possesses the primordial, Promethean tragic virtue of
sheer endurance. The effect and
meaning of this is much heightened by Brecht, because he gives Edward much more
to endure. Holinshed had spoken of
‘a chamber over a foul filthy dungeon full of dead carrion’ but Brecht
paints a picture which is not only more revolting than Marlowe and Holinshed but
belongs to a different pattern and intention.
Where his Edward stands is nothing more nor less than the cloaca, and we
see him there actually steeped in excrement.
There is dramatic appropriateness, and irony, in Edward’s final
condition. For one thing it is very
close to the primal condition, the situation of the human being born inter
urinas et faeces. And it is not
just that Edward finds himself there, but there he achieves strength and even
serenity.
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Brecht’s tragedy has a puritanic aspect.
His hero has been a heterosexual before the play opens, becomes a
homosexual later; and, later still, withdraws, through friendship, and, even
more, through friendship betrayed, into heroic solitude.
At the end he is almost a saint.
Edward’s heroism is more than new-found chastity.
The chastity is itself but an aspect of something else; independence.
Edward had not been able to do without Gaveston.
He had not been able to do without the queen even when he insulted and
rejected her: a contradiction she
spotted and taunted him with. He
could not do without his last loyal retainers until the chief one proved
disloyalty and betrayed him. It is
only when he is without all these people he ‘could not do without’ that
Edward finds he not only can do without them, but that he is now a man, he is
now himself, for the first time. He
is like a hypochondriac cripple who does not discover he can stand upright and
walk without assistance until his crutches have been brutally torn from him.
It has been remarked, it could hardly not be, that Brecht’s plays
present victimization, and many have got the impression that his early plays
show and represent a mere wallowing in it.
But this is to see what one might call the primary movement of the action
and not the counter-movement that ensues and for the sake of which the play was
written. Each
of these plays is actually a cry of Don’t fence me in!
The paradox of Edward’s final posture is that he is physically fenced
in but spiritually liberated. There
is nothing more they can do to him, and this in two senses, that he cannot
suffer worse humiliations and, secondly, that his fearlessness is an iron
barrier which they cannot cross: he
has fenced them in. In each case
Brecht shows a man giving way to pressure, and hence exhibiting human weakness,
but in each case there comes the counter-movement:
the worm turns, the weak man shows strength, and the ending is in some
sense a victory.
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