Chapter 4 Metatheatre and the Baroque Machine with Unlimited Openness
4.2 The Multiplicity of Love
Indeed, the fact of foregrounding sexual violence by translating ancient texts is surely there in The Love of the Nightingale. However, this play expects a broader outcome. It aims to reconstruct the audience’s recognition of the theatre by its concern about language, theatre, and the culture, within all of which the concern about language plays a fundamental part in crushing the doctrine of the
representational theatre. By using parodic metatheatre as Deleuzian repetition of the old text, Wertenbaker revitalises and problemises the language in her
metatheatre so as to arouse the audience’s awareness of re-thinking their relationship to the performance and, moreover, the life itself.
4.2 The Multiplicity of Love
In Scene Five of The Love of The Nightingale, Wertenbaker explicitly shows her dexterity in incorporating metatheatre in her play. Timberlake
Wertenbaker’s revision of Euripides’ Hippolytus can be categorised as “inset”21 type of the play within the play, in which the characters of the outer are fully aware of the existence of Euripides’ Hippolytus. In addition, these characters watch the performance and even constantly comment on the inner play through
21 According to Hornby, the play within the play can be divided into two different types:
“in one, the ‘inset’ type, the inner play is secondary, a performance set apart from the main action, like The Mousetrap in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; in the other, the ‘frame’ type, the inner play is primary, with the outer play a framing device, like the Sly episodes in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew” (33). However, the contemporary use of the play within the play sometimes cannot be distinguished so clearly. Namely, it might be the matter of degree that varies from play to play and from different theatrical
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each one’s perspective which also interanimates one another’s attitude toward the play. To put it succinctly, Wertenbaker’s arrangement here achieves fully metatheatrical effect due to the fact that the character can “acknowledge” it as a performance. To take a case in point, the characters’ full consciousness of the inner play can be proved by the line “And now we must applaud the actors” near of the end of the play (307).
As Hornby points out, “[o]riginality in playwriting comes not from writing something completely new, but from putting old things together in new ways”
(24). In this sense, Wertenbaker’s delicate juxtaposition of two different ancient texts subtly exhibits a refreshing confrontation to the audience’s viewing
experience. This new manipulation, to some extent, elucidates the inscribed artificiality of the texts, and this radical approach, doubtlessly, is also a type of inscription as well. Yet, by no means does the playwright’s inscription intend to pretend to be natural. The difference lies in the openness—Wertenbaker’s
translation does not intend to settle down anything; instead, it operates every tiny part of the scene to reflect each one’s infinite possible meanings especially for the audience.
Such inscription entailing infinite openness is what Deleuze calls the transformation from “matter-form” to “matter-force” (The Fold 35).
Wertenbaker’s use of various materials does not follow the universal implication of the texts and representational form. On the contrary, the playwright
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emancipates the texts so as to diminish the closure of the texts and to relate the inner with the outer. This paradoxical way of inscription presents the Baroque trait: “an exterior always on the outside, and interior always on the inside” (The Fold 35). By this kind of exogenous inscription, we can understand that the folds
that the playwright makes become forces which embody in The Love of the Nightingale.
Another major theme in Scene Five can be clearly seen when Aphrodite enters the stage and plays in the inner play (301). This might help us to see the subtleness of the metonymic title of the play, The “Love” of the Nightingale.
Under this framework of metatheatre which engenders dialogues among the characters from different texts, one can find that “Love” is not the simple one which is socially constructed and naturally accepted by everyone, nor the common implication understood in the original version of Hippolytus. Here, I would like to take Aphrodite as an illustration of the refreshing confrontation where characters from different works sparkle new meanings. When Aphrodite enters the stage, the characters in Scene Five all have their own perspectives respectively. Here I want to firstly tackle the beginning of this scene specifically by focusing on King Pandion’s and Tereus’s reaction to Aphrodite’s lines:
APHRODITE. I am Aphrodite, goddess of love, resplendent and mighty, revered on earth, courted in heaven, all pay tribute to my fearful power.
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KING PANDION. Do you know this play Tereus?
TEREUS. No.
KING PANDION. I find plays help me think. You catch a phrase, recognize a character. Perhaps this play will help us come to a decision.
APHRODITE. I honour those who kneel before me, but that proud heart which dares defy me, that naughty heart I bring low.
TEREUS. That’s sound. (301)
Aphrodite’s appearance on the stage not only suggests the beginning of the inner play, but also shows the divergence of opinions of King Pandion and Tereus.
King Pandion regards the play as something with practical value that can help him deal with his daily issues. Therefore, he states his attitude toward the play in a very brief way which is to “catch a phrase” and “recognize a character.” For him, Aphrodite simply means the beginning of the play. However, Tereus is different from King Pandion. Although he has not had too much theatrical experience as he says “We prefer sports” later in the same scene, he does recognize the lines by Aphrodite immediately. The first line of Aphrodite shows her affirmation of the supreme power that she has. Then King Pandion generally talks about his way of seeing a play and suggests that they can “come to a
decision” after watching it. After King Pandion finishes his speech, Aphrodite once again states her view in terms of power. Tereus seems to respond to King
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Pandion’s suggestion; however, he responds after Aphrodite’s second line, which engenders a sense of subtle ambiguity that his response can also be the recognition of Aphrodite’s affirmation of power. From this moment, it is quite clear that Tereus’s own attitude towards love agrees with the idea of the
submission to a superior dominance.
After Aphrodite briefly foretells the tragic ending of Hippolytus, Queen and Philomele’s enterance to the stage shows us more different aspects of the
interpretation. When watching Phaedra’s lines with zealous affection, Philomele is greatly touched by that kind of “beautiful love” that Phaedra has for Hippolytus (302). Curious about her sister’s love life, Philomele asks Tereus if he has the same feeling for Procne. Queen condemns Philomele for her ethically
inappropriate speech. Unable to resonate with the character from the bottom of his heart, Tereus, of course, can only show his limited understanding of
Phaedra’s incestuous affection by saying “That’s wrong” and “Why should we pity her? These plays condone vice” (302-303). King Pandion then objectively reminds Tereus that the function of the theatre is to show “the uncomfortable folds of the human heart” (303). After that, once again Philomele is struck by Phaedra’s line by saying “You see, Tereus, love is a god and you cannot control him” (303). Philomele’s speech about the irresistible love literally coincides with Tereus’s recognition of the supreme power of love. However, these two totally different interpretations of love illustrate Wertenbaker’s artful play of language.
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Both of them agree that love is irresistible, yet they come to this literally same conclusion from different places. The way Philomele understands Phaedra’s love is to respond to things that have resonance inside the character. By contrast, Tereus’s love is from a place where one can dominate the other in the name of love. By doing so, the subtle contradiction produces a fold which engenders a new aspect in thinking, for the audience can start to think upon the real meaning of “love.”
To fortify the point presented above, here I will proceed to present further evidence in terms of the fold made by the playwright. After the discussion about whether or not Philomele is going to Thrace to reunite with her sister, Queen draws everyone’s attention back to the play by asking the others to “listen to the chorus” because “the playwright always speaks through the chorus” (304).
Queen’s implication somehow makes the lines by the chorus more influential to Tereus, for the will of the playwright can be expressed through the chorus, which is to say, the will of the authority lies in the speech of the chorus. We can still see Philomele’s and Tereus’s diverged attitudes toward the chorus’s speech:
FEMALE CHORUS. Love, stealing with grace into the heart you wish to destroy, love, turning us blind with the bitter poison of desire, love, come not my way. And when you whirl through the streets, wild steps to unchained rhythms, love, I pray you, brush not against me, love, I beg you, pass me by.
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Tereus. Ah!
PHILOMELE. I would never say that, would you, brother Tereus? I want to feel everything there is to feel. Don’t you?
Tereus. No! (304)
Tereus’s eccentric overreaction to the speech of the female chorus obviously explains that he is in fact struck by the speech. The speech echoes Tereus’s destructive and dominant mentality especially when he unconsciously places himself at the place of the dominator. Nonetheless, Philomele does not agree with the lines of the female chorus. On the contrary, she implies that love can
complicate, in King Pandion’s words, “the uncomfortable folds of the human heart,” which is the magnificence that love can bring about. These totally
different interpretations once again unleash the multiplicity of “love” in the play.
Interrogating the reason why Philomele would pity and justify Phaedra’s deed, Tereus contends his idea that Phaedra could “keep silent about it,” which helps the most to avoid the tragic outcome. Philomele responds to his
interrogation by saying “When you love you want to imprison the one in your words, in your tenderness” (305). On the surface, Tereus is convinced by
Philomele’s speech. As a matter of fact, another false understanding just happens once again. For Tereus, in the name of love, it is justified to “imprison the one you love,” and for him, the “word” means the power of order; as for
“tenderness,” it means one’s wishful desire disguised as what one thinks good
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for the other. If we refer to the later plot development in Scene Thirteen, one can easily find that these explanations are reasonable:
TEREUS. The power of the god is above the law. It began then, in the theatre, the chorus told me. I saw the god and I loved you.
[…]
TEREUS. Who can resist the gods? Those are your words. Philomele.
They convinced me, your words.
PHILOMELE. Oh, my careless tongue. Procne always said – my
wandering tongue. But Tereus, it was the theatre, it was hot, come back to Athens with me. (328-29)
It is obvious that Tereus recognises the authority of order and firmly believes in his own arbitrary interpretation. To put it more bluntly, what Tereus shows us is just his ideological mechanism. Although he can repeat exactly every word spoken by Philomele, he speaks these words on the basis of his institutionalised mentality. In Deleuze’s sense, the mechanism is “in fact organized into parts that are not in themselves machines” (The Fold 8). That is to say, different from the
“machine,” which consists of numberless parts as machines (The Fold 8), the mechanism is a closed system in which Tereus can only absorb specific ideas and act according to the doctrine from his closed mentality. As a consequence, Aphrodite’s and Philomele’s speeches about love coincidentally concur with Tereus’s need for constructing his inner mentality. These words are
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automatically received by Tereus and therefore transformed into the terrifying actions. As a character whose mentality embodies closed mechanism, Tereus is unable to think, reflect, and grow; instead, this only way of recognizing language is the way that he confirms his own subjectivity.
On the other hand, instead of judgmentally saying that Tereus is an awful and unskilled mind reader, I would also say that Philomele has too much confidence in language itself, which is also a kind of closed mechanism illustrated by
Deleuze. She believes the truth can only be expressed by language and is unable to imagine the situation where the distortion of the meanings might happen. In this sense, her confidence in language is too naïve and even unreasonable.
Here, I do not intend to blame the sexual victims for their victimisation in any sense but wish to foreground the ambiguity of language on an aesthetical level. Even though on the whole Wertenbaker defies the myth of language as what the realist theatre does, the characters in The Love of the Nightingale may not. On the contrary, Philomele, for instance, is deeply convinced by the language view of the realist theatre. Here I would like to quote from Terry Eagleton’s revelation of realist language from his Literary Theory to make Philomele’s language view more clarified:
Realist literature tends to conceal the socially relative or constructed nature of language: it helps to confirm the prejudice that there is a form of
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'ordinary' language which is somehow natural. This natural language gives us reality 'as it is.' (117)
Philomele’s excessive conviction of the language’s integrity can be proved if we take the quote above into consideration. To Philomele, language represents one’s thinking and one’s own free will, and if there is anything wrong with language, that is all because of the false intention of the speaker. In a nutshell, language is just a neutral tool which helps people to convey ideas. In this sense, Philomele’s mentality is also not “machined” enough to be exogenously open to the more possibilities of language.
Philomele’s and Tereus’s different interpretations of love not only activate the audience to think about the multiplicity of love, but also serve as two major forces that formulate the whole development of the play. Incidentally, their differences can prove that The Love of the Nightingale is a polyphonic22 text, which suggests that no centre can be found, nor can we pinpoint the location of the author’s stance. Each character centres oneself respectively so that the text
22 Here, I would like to borrow the term, “polyphony,” from Mikhail Bathtin. However, for Bathtin, theatre can hardly be polyphonic due to its limitation to materials and space:
“First, drama is by its very nature alien to genuine polyphony; drama may be multi-leveled, but it cannot contain multiple worlds; it permits only one, and not several, systems of measurement” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 34). In this way, Bathtin claims that drama is especially “monolithic” (17). Moreover, “Any weakening of this monolithic quality leads to a weakening of dramatic effect” (17). Admittedly, the length of a play may not be comparable to that of a novel. As a consequence, Bathtin considers that one stage can only represent one world and one voice (mostly the voice of the hero).
However, in my opinion, Bathtin may overlook the fact that not all the plays stick to the concept of “unity.” Neither do all the plays intend to achieve the “dramatic effect” in a traditional sense.
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represents a polyphonic situation.23 In this sense, the difference between Philomele and Tereus can be regarded as “centrifugal forces” which present various possible voices (Bathtin xxii). None of these characters are deliberately imposed by the author; instead, they are allowed to say the lines growing out of their own personalities. In this way, the centrifugal forces among these
characters happen to be the force of unfolding the following plot with openness.
In this sense, to put it under the framework of Deleuzian philosophy, the contradictory interpretations of love between Philomele and Tereus are the major fold of the play, for both illustrate specific views of the world and both of them are not machined enough. But one should notice that before the
juxtaposition of these two different views of world confront with each other, both of them are just closed mechanism. It is when the playwright facilitates the
dialogue between these two different “forms” of thinking that the real forces of fold begin to circulate in the text. Through the confrontation of these two forces in the manner of metatheatre, Wertenbaker succeeds in generating
undecidability and producing a fold by putting two ancient texts together, and more importantly, by making two ancient texts converse. The playwright’s fold is the most ideal fold in Deleuze’s sense: “a fold that differentiates and is
23 Aside from Philomele and Tereus, the other characters, King Pandion and Queen, in this scene also have their own perspectives which also serve as different aspects for the audience to contemplate. The analysis of four different contrasting responses to theatre can be found in Joe Winston’s “Recasting the Phaedra Syndrome: Myth and Morality in
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differentiated” (The Fold 30). The playwright not only makes Philomele’s and Tereus’s differences sparkle the force of unfolding the following plots, but also lets the original texts be changed. Wertenbaker’s new arrangement as a fold is just what Deleuze calls the “differentiator of difference,” which is the key to all the emergence of difference (The Fold 30).
Moreover, instead of forcing the audience to choose from the binary options that Philomele and Tereus present, the playwright provides a flight from the opposition. This gesture means more new possible choices in thinking. Along the same line, the audience’s reflection can be operated upon this play and further
“form a webbing of time embracing all possibilities” (The Fold 62).
This is the intention of The Love of the Nightingale and its metatheatre of so delicate a theatrical device. The play does not impose any will of the author on the characters and the audience, be it directly or indirectly. Rather, it exposes the polyphonic tunes of the text by fabricating different ancient texts to produce dialogues, which further make a fold not simply as a forward force to openness in the play, but also scale up the force of fold by having the audience think, behave, and decide for themselves. In this way, the audience are able to
formulate their unexpectable conclusions through the flux of dialogues arranged by the playwright. This multi-layered dramaturgy distinguishes Wertenbaker aside from the other dramatists. Wertenbaker’s metatheatre is at the heart of her
formulate their unexpectable conclusions through the flux of dialogues arranged by the playwright. This multi-layered dramaturgy distinguishes Wertenbaker aside from the other dramatists. Wertenbaker’s metatheatre is at the heart of her