1000 WORDS ABOUT

In twelve words: Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters rock America with drugs and madness.

This counter-cultural, irreverent weirdness, brimming with neon hippies adventuring across the astonished United States armed with LSD and exuberance, turned fifty years old recently. As something that only 1960s America could have produced, it is nevertheless not mired in its very peculiar sociohistorical moment, reaching its bright green tentacles right into the twenty-first century, poking and rearranging and pointing out.

Essentially, this book is a trip, literally and figuratively, and the trip is Ken Kesey’s. While One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is undeniably a (minor) triumph, Kesey is no visionary. He has no solutions, no explanations, no strategies, no great plan for a juster and more beautiful world. He just wants to, like, hang out.

Oh, but that’s the point, a bedraggled hipster would insist indignantly, with a righteous and sensitive mouth.

Yes yes yes, of course, but the point as pointlessness, this eternal tautology, is neither mysterious nor profound.

It is, however, an opportunity.

We clamber aboard the spray-painted bus with the rollicking, singing, perpetually high Merry Pranksters to criss-cross the deep South and mock the stars and the stripes and the cities and the ordinary people in traffic who just can’t jive to this great refusal of ours.

We drink orange juice laced with acid and perform experimental music with the just-formed Grateful Dead at Acid Tests, which are psychedelic parties replete with LSD, black lights, and projections of spinning melting colors. This exhilaration, flung wide open to new experience, burns at the enviable outside of commercialization.

The Merry Pranksters were doing something new.

Not innovative <— this word, so frequently invoked in tech articles to laud the launch of some mobile app or other, is really an unconscious euphemism for the entrepreneurial spirit which seeks not revolution but a quicker, more efficient, more streamlined way to reproduce the status quo in a way that makes more people more money more quickly.

Kesey and his farcical followers may not have exploded the status quo, but they certainly learned how to thrive on its margins.

Now, when we stand around enormous music venues, gazing up at the blinking Coca-Cola sign, and mosh pits are shoved up against gruff men with flashlights who are paid to ensure nobody has too much irresponsible or unsupervised fun, and marijuana edibles are arranged along glass cases rising impressively in air-conditioned, state-tax-paying dispensaries, and fifty-dollar, handwashed, organic T-Shirts proclaim Rule-Breaker and Che and Rebel, and we can order our own Banksy prints from Amazon for just $7.99, and micro-dosing is an Instagrammable method of getting more work done – when, in short, our dissent has been thoroughly co-opted and commodified and counter-culture is something to consume – the colorful bus called Furthur (sic) careening across a great vastness begins to look a lot like freedom.

In twelve words: goddess loves her, goddess loves her not, goddess loves her, goddess loves… 

Are you surprised that the first known author in human history was a woman?

 Daughter of the legendary rockstar conqueror and dynastic founder Sargon of Akkad, Enheduanna served as high priestess of the moon god’s cult in Ur, a super important religious center in Sumer.

Religion and government were essentially the same thing in those days, and as high priestess, Enheduanna would’ve called the shots in Ur’s temple complex. This was somewhere around 2300 BCE. 

Just think: this princess, priestess, and poet was writing two thousand years before the Greek classical period.  Her poetry influenced centuries of petitionary writing, from Homeric hymns to Biblical psalms.  Looming imperiously at the very beginning of human literacy, Enheduanna’s most astonishing work is The Exaltation of Inanna, an autobiographical hymn to the Mesopotamian goddess of battle. 

It describes how some jerk named Lugal-Ane staged a coup and exiled Enheduanna; after the furious goddess intervened on her behalf, Enheduanna was restored to her authoritative position. 

She also wrote about religion, war, and perhaps most tantalizingly, about herself.  Her poems are intimate, personal, and straightforward in their evocation of inner experience. 

We’re totally used to hearing modern poets complain about their lives, but more than 4,000 years separate us from Enheduanna. 

I’ve encountered a few different translations of her writing – there aren’t many – and it’s always tempting to read her poems and say, “Oh my god, she’s just like me!” But she’s not.  We don’t know her real name.  We don’t even know the origin of the language she spoke and wrote.  Moreover, we don’t know where the Sumerians themselves came from, what they looked like, or who their descendants are.  Ancient Sumer is, in a profound sense, a lost world.  We guess and infer, but the world’s first civilization is mostly an enigmatic, well-guarded secret.

For me, Enheduanna is associated with Nietzsche’s provocative question:

“Supposing that Truth is a woman – what then?” 

Nietzsche thinks we’ve been approaching truth all wrong.  Instead of doggedly pursuing her, philosophers should be charming and wooing her.  Academic articles invariably begin with “This study aims to establish X, Y, and Z.”  Timid, conscientious creatures, scholars are forever “aiming” to “establish” or “prove.” But maybe truth isn’t something to be established, discovered, or proven.  Maybe truth is something to be seduced.  Nothing destroys romance like the methodical argument, and no woman was ever driven mad with desire by a carefully drawn academic conclusion.  Maybe we should swap our syllogisms and deductions for masks, perfumes, poems. 

It’s not a coincidence that Enheduanna didn’t display her vast theological knowledge in tracts, lists, and summaries, like her contemporaries.  She communicated with poetry.  

Poets are always, always illusionists.  Enheduanna was the very first, uniting the political and the religious, the sacred and the worldly, in art.

Ultimately, our image of Enheduanna and her lost kingdom is not only a matter of history, but also of aesthetics – we create the past just as much as we recover it.  So let’s take our responsibility as artists more seriously by approaching scholarship more playfully.  I’m convinced that Keats couldn’t have meant anything else when he wrote that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” 

In twelve words: Henry wants a divorce, the Pope refuses, Cromwell makes it happen anyway.

While I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, everything else was uninteresting.  After all, here was heresy, plague, intrigue, murder, lust, betrayal – in short, England in the 1530s – all between two crumbling covers (by the time I’m finished with books, they’ve fallen to pieces, since I bring them everywhere, fold pages, and shamelessly write all over the margins).

However, it wasn’t only the dramadramadrama which gripped me.  It was also Mantel’s masterful portrait of Thomas Cromwell.

In his forties, rings on his fingers, wary, articulate, erudite, having been a mercenary, a lawyer, and a merchant, having seen too much to be trusting yet too wise to be cynical, able to recite the New Testament in Latin, Cromwell as chief advisor to Henry VIII contains multitudes and is one of the most nuanced characters in contemporary fiction:

“His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.”

In short, if you’re a man, you want to be him.  If you’re a woman, you’ve fallen desperately in love.  Even though the novel is set in the turbulent and brutal time of England’s break with Rome, replete with public executions and sweating sickness, it remains deeply human and, what’s more significant and difficult to pull off, humane.

Cromwell, whom history came to criticize as a despotic boor, isn’t all coolness and toughness.  Despite his morally ambivalent, if not downright amoral, context, he’s tender and his self-respect extends to others.  Whether the historical Cromwell matched this description or not is really beside the point.  This isn’t history, and if it is, Mantel is re-writing it.  For the purposes of reading and appreciating good books, things like facts, dates, and the looming shadow of What Really Happened, are simply the raw material from which the writer makes meaning.  The point isn’t to re-create the perspective of a king’s minister in the 16^th century so we can live through him.  What’s important is how the writer appropriates history and establishes it into contemporary culture.  What’s crucial is what it can, and does, mean to us now.

Anyway, Mantel doesn’t simply write about a time period, or even about Thomas Cromwell; both worthy, but narrowly defined, subjects.  For me, the novel is about a large and roaming consciousness which self-reflexively filters and re-interprets some of Western history’s defining moments with great moral sensitivity and depth, and which begins in Mantel, moves through Cromwell, and ends in us.

In twelve words: Phedre wants her stepson, who wants his father’s enemy.  Then everyone dies.

Let’s smoke cigarettes and talk about Racine, agency, and fate.  Let’s.  Say yes.

Que sera, sera.  While science contests the feasibility of free will more vehemently (do you read these things?), it seems that the Enlightenment ideal of unconstrained individual thought is troubled by the public’s favoring more archaic models of consciousness.  Ancient Indian philosophers insisted on an unavoidable karma, early Hebrews discussed “God’s will,” and the ancient Greeks deliberated upon moira.  That’s fate, gentlemen.

So, let’s talk about Racine’s tragedy Phedre as a dark meditation upon the possibility of choice in the midst of fatalistic forces roaming far beyond the scope of individual control or even awareness.  Fun!

The play, written and produced in 1677, sort of plagiarizes the tragedy of Euripides.  Theseus, king of Athens, husband to the doomed Phedre and father to the unlucky Hippolytus, is away from his city.  And good for him, because back home, there’s, like, drama drama drama.

While anxiously awaiting news of her husband, Phedre explains to her nurse, Oenone, why she’s been so mopey and whiny lately.   Turns out she’s in love!  Years ago, when she arrived at the court of Theseus a young, beautiful bride, she happened to turn around… and there he was.

Who was he?  Well, here’s where it gets good.  It was Hippolytus, her husband’s son.  She fell in love with her stepson!  Weird.  Hippolytus, meanwhile, has problems of his own.  He has an enormous crush on Aricia, the only survivor of a royal house which once warred against his father.  He’s pretty upset about it because having romantic feelings for people who tried to kill your family is totally inappropriate.

Phedre and Hippolytus are both frightened that their respective emotions will make Theseus really, really mad.  Because, you know, obviously. When the mistaken news of Theseus’ death unsettles the kingdom, Oenone urges Phedre to reveal her feelings to her stepson.  After all, you aren’t related, and with Theseus gone, who knows what can happen?  Go for it, girl.  YOLO.  Stupidly, Phedre tells Hippolytus the truth: “Your dad’s dead, so let’s get married.”  Predictably, Hippolytus declines: “Um, no, let’s not.”

Soon after, Theseus arrives.  He’s not dead after all!  Great!  It’s great, right?  Wrong.  Realizing that her husband is likely to find out about her incestuous betrayal, Phedre contemplates suicide.  Oenone, who adores her mistress and is willing to sacrifice anyone to avert her punishment, suggests that Phedre accuse Hippolytus of attempting to rape her.  Delirious with panic and becoming more and more incoherent, Phedre decides that this is a good idea.  (Note: accusing people who have not assaulted you of assaulting you is never, ever, ever a good idea.  Because of karma and stuff).

When Theseus confronts his son, Hippolytus is all, “Why would I want to sleep with that old hag?  I’m in love with Aricia.  You know, your nemesis, the one who tried to kill you.”

Then Phedre begins to feel bad for being such a jerk to Hippolytus.  She decides to tell her husband that they should just, like, get past the whole rape thing and be friends.  Before she has the chance, Theseus tells her, “Hey, Hippolytus in love with Aricia.  You know, my nemesis, the one who tried to kill me.”

Blind with jealousy, Phedre decides against absolving the innocent Hippolytus.  He’s in love with someone else?  He can go straight to hell.

So Theseus banishes his son from the kingdom, and soon after, Hippolytus is killed by a sea monster.  Seriously.

Phedre, in mounting panic, accuses Oenone of manipulation and disloyalty because the sea monster incident is totally her fault.  Oenone thinks, gosh, I’m horrible.  So she drowns herself.  Then Phedre appears before Theseus to defend his son’s innocence and repent of her illicit passion.  Sooo sorry, things just go a little out of control, you know how it is.  Then she drinks poison and dies.  That’s all.

The ways human beings use stories to structure experience and create meaning is the focus of narrative criticism, whose practitioners seek to understand how the deployment of symbols in narratives reveals or conceals aspects of the world.  Utilizing the method of narrative criticism, let’s talk about how narrative can convey tension between agency and fate.  Phedre’s setting and characters reveal how Racine succeeds in achieving this objective.

Setting

While the physical features of the play’s setting are negligible, the kingdom of Athens as situated within the overall sociohistorical context of ancient Greece is of supreme significance.  Particularly since almost the entirety of the plot is borrowed from Euripides,

Phedre features the motifs and commitments of ancient Greek tragedy.  Racine’s Phedre is set within the confines of a superstitious, paganist, fatalistic culture.

From Hercules, who murdered his own children at the will of ruthless Hera, to Oedipus, who was destined to kill his father and seduce his mother, the notion that fate determines human behavior is a guiding principle of ancient Greek thought.  Phedre and Hippolytus, ensnared within such a culture, cannot help but reflect its beliefs and values, particularly in their relations to ancient Greek deities.  The events which befall Racine’s heroes can only occur in a context wherein gods capriciously and even arbitrarily toy with human lives.  Phedre consistenly summons the gods to witness her suffering at their hands.

Addressing her grandfather Helios at the opening of the play, she cries, “Noble and blazing Author of a race/ Of sad, unhappy mortals!” (Phedre 1.3).  Soon after, she wonders: “Where, where have I let stray/ My longings and my self-control?  Oenone!/  The Gods deprive me of the use of it” (Phedre 1.3).  Prior to explaining her forbidden love for Hippolytus to her nurse, Phedre laments: “Your fatal hatred Venus!  Oh, your wrath! … Since Venus wills it so, I perish now” (Phedre 1.3).

Similarly, when Hippolytus admits himself in love with Aricia, he asks, “Am I, in turn, to find myself enslaved?/  Can the Gods wish to humble me so far?” (Phedre 1.1).  When grieving the death of his father, Hippolytus says, “The Gods at last have doomed him, even him/ Alcides’ friend, companion, and successor,/ To the homicidal shears of Fate”  (Phedre 2.2).

Hippolytus and his father, the great Theseus, are both admitted to be the pawns of overwhelming forces.  It is important to note that Theseus is a hero who is famed for slaying the Minotaur.  He is not a cowering and frightened creature, imploring the decisions of the gods.  He acts within the world with considerable freedom and power.  Nevertheless, the gods can overpower “even him.”  The “homicidal shears of Fate” do not distinguish between coward and hero.  Theseus and Hippolytus are indeed strong decision makers, but only inasmuch as they are divinely ordained to be so.  Such heroic greatness pursued within, rather than beyond, divinity’s constraints, is possible only to a citizen of an early civilization.  The historical setting of Phedre, which juxtaposes individual will with fatalistic power, is chronologically ancient and hierarchically supernatural.  The characters literally walk within a world of gods, demigods, and monsters.  The active presence of gods which can condemn a Phedre and monsters which can murder a Hippolytus is a vivid demonstration of human choices conflicting with external forces.

Phedre is also ideologically situated within a seventeenth century, religious, Western culture.  Much has been made of the Jansenism of Racine.  Educated in the Jansenist community of Port-Royal, Racine was invariably exposed to Jansenist thought, which insisted upon humanity’s depraved nature caused by original sin.  This inescapably fallen state reappears in Phedre’s dramatic inability to overcome the perversity of her own desires.  Much like the Jansenist followers who could not overcome the stain of original sin and would be redeemed only by communion with God, Phedre seeks the resolution of her suffering beyond the horizons of ordinary possibility.

For the Jansenists, salvation was achieved through God’s grace.  For the pagan Greeks, human transcendence led to death.  In either case, Phedre reminds us that redemption cannot be found within the everyday round of human life.  Furthermore, the setting involves a moralistic stance ushered in by the play’s reliance upon the incest taboo.  Such love is presented as so monstrous that Phedre must die rather than endure it, and when the innocent Hippolytus stands accused of it, his horrified father banishes him from the kingdom.

The incest taboo emerges from the guarded parameters of sexual activity within society, undertaken as protection of familial and social organization.  Sociologist Talcott Parsons writes: “It is essential to the family that more than in any other grouping in societies, overt erotic attraction and gratification should be given an institutionalized place in its structure … eroticism is not only permitted but carefully regulated; and the incest taboo is merely a very prominent negative aspect of this more general regulation.”  The defining feature of the incest taboo is that it’s a prohibition.  Its prohibitive nature means that incestuous behavior is always necessarily a violation of societal values and trust.  Thus, what Phedre feels and what Hippolytus is accused of feeling are tantamount to rebellion, lawlessness, and destruction of the sociocultural fabric.

It is significant that Racine does not explain any of this.  Phedre does not elucidate to the audience exactly why her passion for Hippolytus is an ethical failure, and Theseus does not elaborate upon why he is justified in banishing his son from Athens.  For Racine, such values are implicit within the work and automatically assumed.  Racine does not tell us how to judge his characters, and he expected his audience to arrive at the theater with a tacit moral understanding which they then applied to the events they witnessed.  The modern reader still approaches the play with the unspoken awareness that a woman’s desiring her stepson is perverse, immoral, and unjustifiable.  Thus, the play relies upon a wider sociohistorical context in order to communicate its message.  Without this implicit moral awareness, the events of the play would be incomprehensible.

In a profound sense, then, the reader participates in structuring the setting of the play.  Phedre’s setting is not simply prepared by Racine for the reader to step into – the reader also brings a set of ideological commitments which enable the play to function as a tragedy.  It is precisely because of this ideological setting, which is simultaneously presumed by the audience and represented by Racine, that the characters and interactions become substantial and meaningful as manifestations of the struggle between human agency and inhuman forces.  Phedre’s setting does not merely structure the play for the reader, but also delimits the possibilities for its characters in a way that illuminates the struggle for individual freedom. 

The fatalism of Greek myth, the irredeemable human nature of Jansenism, and the ideology of the incest taboo, all implicitly conspire to make explicit an unassailable wall of abstract obstacles against which Phedre’s characters find themselves crashing.

Characters

The personalities and interactions of Phedre’s characters help facilitate Racine’s objective of presenting agency conflicting with fate.  Phedre, Hippolytus, and Oenone are the principal actors whose critical choices determine and delimit events.

Phedre is remarkably single-minded and uncompromising.  Her illicit love has consumed her utterly.  As a consequence of her alleged impurity, she seeks death.  Not, however, as a desired end, but as the unavoidable outcome of her true desire’s incompatibility with what is possible.  Vera Orgel writes about Racine’s tragedy: “The greatest catastrophe is not the failure but the breaking of the mainspring of life, renunciation of the unattainable goal and the end of endeavor.”  For Phedre, fulfillment is impossible: the very nature of her passion forbids its realization.  Phedre’s very being is at odds with life, and her tragedy is that she cannot change.  She cannot simply “get over” her feelings, despite her recognition that they are a “crime,” a “malady,” and her “love is horrible,” and she would rather die than confess to “a love so black” (Phedre 1. 3).

Her reason is intact, but her will is disobedient.  What binds her so hopelessly, she is convinced, is the tyranny of a petulant Venus.  Of course, whether there is actually a scheming Venus or not is beside the point.  Venus or no Venus, the cruel conflict is clear: something beyond the limits of human possibility urges Phedre to seek that which is beyond the limits of feasibility.  In this struggle, Racine casts the opposition of human agency and fate.  What Phedre longs for is forbidden, and rather than overcome her weakness, she dies.  To challenge the edicts of fate, Racine tells us, is suicidal.  The Racinian hero is tragic inasmuch as his life remains eternally uncompleted.

When, deceived by the supposed death of Theseus, Oenone persuades Phedre to hope to marry Hippolytus, a veritable social disintegration threatens.  For Phedre to achieve what she longs for, not only in the sense of possessing Hippolytus but in the wider sense of living publicly as his wife in a world wherein her violation of the incest taboo is acceptable, her entire social order must be undermined.  After all, the incest taboo is the foundational law of the original social unit – the family – from which the wider sociocultural context emerges: the prohibition of incest is the original law which begets all other rules of civilization.  Phedre’s nature, quite literally, exists against the world.

To dispel any possibility of self-realization even further, Racine reminds us that Phedre is the daughter of Pasiphae, who was cursed to procreate with a bull in the madness of her inhuman ardor.  Even this horror, however, is presented as ordained by the gods.  Phedre cries, “Venus! …/ Into what aberrations did love cast my mother!” (Phedre 1.3).  Phedre’s monstrous fall is determined not only by the gods and the social edicts governing proper sexuality, but also by her parentage.  Her mother’s “aberrations,” it seems, predict and perhaps even prefigure her own.  In these myriad ways, then, Phedre is bound.  She seems hopelessly doomed, which is precisely what Racine wants his audience to recognize.

Such fatalism, however, is not Racine’s only objective.  He also wants to present the defiant blazing of human will in spite of fate’s closed doors.  Irrational, hopeless, and pathetic as it may be, the tension between pre-determination and will emerges most poignantly in the very fact that Phedre dares to love Hippolytus in spite of every possible reason why she should not.  In the simplest terms, she loves him “anyway.”  After all, if human beings were mindless automatons able only to parrot their own boundaries, Phedre wouldn’t be capable of even conceiving of such a love.  Her passion is proof of her freedom, however limited it may be.

Hippolytus, too, is fated to desire what is forbidden.  In loving Aricia, he finds himself loving that which represents the violent destruction of his family: “That young sole survivor of a tribe/ Which fatally has long conspired against/ My family: Aricia” (Phedre 1.1).  Furthermore, he knows his father will resent the match: “Did I forget/ The eternal barriers between us two?/ … Against the wrath/ Of an infuriated father, launch/ My youth upon a course of love so mad?” (Phedre 1.1).

Much like Phedre, however, Hippolytus protests that he is not to blame.  Known as prideful and solitary, Hippolytus has scorned the snares of romance and women, preferring instead the less intimate arts of racing horses and hunting.  However, something beyond his own reason beckons him to Aricia.  He asks, “And even if my pride could ever melt/ Should I have been insane enough to choose/ Aricia for my conqueror?” (Phedre 1.1).  The guilty love, Hippolytus explains, is not his choice.  Now that he is captured, however, he regards Aricia as his “conqueror,” once more underscoring his helplessness in the romantic matter.

In great contrast to Phedre, however, Hippolytus is virtuous.  The play’s characters know him for his chaste, monastic nature.  He remains virginal and aloof, casting cool and superior glances at the warm entanglements of eroticism.  His tutor, Theramenes, describes Hippolytus thus: “So proud and wild,/ Making a chariot fly along the shore;/ Or, practiced in the art that Neptune taught,/ Taming unbroken horses to the rein” (Phedre 1.1).  Hippolytus spends his days playing with horses and chariots — his interests, like those of a young boy, are childlike, innocent, and free from intrigue.

Furthermore, Hippolytus knows he is virtuous: “When I grew to riper years and knew myself,/ I praised, myself, the self I came to know” (Phedre 1.1).  What is Hippolytus praising himself for?  His “Amazonian pride,” (Phedre 1.1) which keeps him sexually pure.

When discoursing on the myriad accomplishments of Theseus, Hippolytus critiques his father’s wayward eroticism.  He and Theramenes discuss how Theseus slew the Minotaur, displayed the strength of Hercules, and punished pirates.  However, Theseus is not romantically consistent or honest, and Hippolytus laments his father’s “less glorious deeds/ His promise made and broken everywhere… Too credulous creatures by his love deceived… How happily I would have then wiped out/ The base half of so fine a history” (Phedre 1.1).  His father’s past, Hippolytus complains, is “base.”  He regards himself as enough removed from such impurity to be able to judge it accurately.  Fifty years ago, Hippolytus may have been described as a prig.  Precisely because of such self-conscious goodness, Hippolytus does not garner the audience’s compassion as the self-deprecating Phedre does.  We admire his scruples, of course, but we can’t quite grasp why Phedre loves him.  We certainly can’t.

Given Hippolytus’ aggressive goodness, it’s all the more remarkable that someone as rigid as he is could possibly fall into the snares of erotic love.  Theremanes, guessing at his charge’s passion for Aricia, asks, “What heart has ever been too brave to be/ Vanquished by Venus?” (Phedre 1.1) and later cries, “What is your pretended pride of speech?/ Confess it, all has changed!” (Phedre 1.1).  Hippolytus cannot maintain his own scornful nature, because the gods do not will it so.  If it were up to him, he would continue to race and play along the shore, contemptuously frowning at the impious desires of others.  Instead, “all has changed,” and he finds himself bound to love his enemy.

Just as with Phedre’s powerful emotion, the guilty love of Hippolytus for Aricia displays not only his helplessness, but also his paradoxical freedom.  Love changes him.  Only emotionally flexible beings are capable of change, of response to the bursting and raving of circumstance.  He does not remain static and stubborn, like a fixed sculpture or a puppet, but exists in subjective relation to other subjects.  Even he, the audience is led to think, the proud and solitary monk, can suddenly begin to burn with a very human feeling.  Significantly, his humbling transformation softens him in the audience’s eyes, as well.  Suddenly, Hippolytus ceases to be a self-aggrandizing demigod who pushes us away with his self-righteous bragging, and becomes a sympathetic character, whose dreams we support.  From one perspective, the alteration Hippolytus undergoes is proof of how buffeted and controlled by fate he must be.  However, it is also evidence of his great capacity for daring, for defying, for transgressing authority’s boundaries and his own stubborn nature.  After all, he didn’t simply fall in love with a nice, acceptable girl his father might have liked.  He fell in love with his family’s nemesis, a love he must denounce and yet cannot.  In these paradoxical, seemingly contradictory ways, Hippolytus, too, is a study in the tense hues of agency’s struggle against fate.

Perhaps the freest character in the tragedy is Phedre’s nurse, Oenone.  It’s important to mention Racine’s own preface to the 1677 publication of Phedre.  He explains that although the original Euripides play featured Phedre coming to the decision to accuse Hippolytus of rape on her own, he decided against casting his heroine in such a merciless light.  Racine explains his decision: “I have taken the trouble to make her a little less hateful than she is in the ancient versions of this tragedy, in which she herself resolves to accuse Hippolytus.  I judged that calumny had about it something too base and too black to be put into the mouth of a Princess who for most of the time is only noble and virtuous.”  But is this convincing?

Also, whereas the Euripidean Theseus learns of his son’s innocence after conversing with a goddess long after Phedre’s suicide, Racine generously insists that his noble heroine herself inform her husband of the truth.  If Phedre is absolved of too much cruelty, then who will be to blame?  Well, Racine clarifies, “This depravity seemed to me more appropriate to the character of a nurse, whose inclinations might be supposed to be more servile.”

Thus, the ultimate dichotomy between Phedre and Oenone is established, as between master and servant, elite and common, noble and depraved.  In some sense, Oenone is trapped by her lowly circumstance.  She is destined to remain socially inferior by virtue of her rank and occupation.  In a different sense, however, Oenone’s lack of courtliness prefigures her greater freedom.  While Phedre accepts insurmountable obstacles, bemoaning the wickedness and unfairness of divine inevitability, Oenone fights against the tide of circumstance.  Less bound to royal duty, Oenone’s life instincts can burn more surely. Contrasting the two characters, Thomas Braga writes: “Oenone’s ‘oeil vivant,’ basically pagan, existential, energetic, pragmatic, a life-oriented point of view, contrasts vividly with Phedre’s ‘oeil mourant,’ essentially Jansenist, pessimistic, guilt-ridden, lethargic, and moribund.”  There is dignity in suffering, Racine seems to tell us, and even more dignity in accepting it.  Oenone’s alleged servility is correlated directly with her unwillingness to suffer.  Or, to put it more boldly, it is correlated directly with her unwillingness to submit to fate.

Despite Phedre’s adulterous and incestuous desires, it is Oenone who is accused of ushering in the kingdom’s doom, which kills Phedre, Hippolytus, and Oenone herself.  Why?  Precisely because Oenone is the prime mover of the action – indeed, she is the one who chooses, and urges Phedre, to act.  After hearing of Theseus’ rumored death, Oenone argues, “By Theseus’ death all knots have been untied/ Which made your love a horror and a crime./ You need no longer fear Hippolytus” (Phedre 1.5).  From whence comes this radical meddling?  Is it truly from Oenone’s “servile” rank?

The play’s events belie Racine’s own judgment in his preface.

At the opening of the play, Phedre is overcome with grief and guilt, longing only for death.  Oenone will not hear of it: “Although only a feeble ray of life/ Remains with you, yet sure I will forestall/ Your voyage to the dead, and get there first” (Phedre 1.3).  After the failure of her various attempts to boost Phedre’s spirits and alter her decision to die, the desperate nurse scrambles to think of some other plan to keep the queen alive.  Seizing upon the news of the king’s death, Oenone explains: “Madame, I ceased to urge that you should live;/ I thought to follow you into the grave/ From which I had no more the heart to turn you;/ But this new blow prescribes for you new laws” (Phedre 1.5).  In begging her to approach Hippolytus and consider marrying him, Oenone is acting to prevent the death of Phedre.  If marrying Hippolytus will make her queen content, Oenone will enthusiastically urge the possibility.  When the kingdom learns that Theseus is alive and Phedre once more returns to her melancholy refrain of suicide, Oenone begs her to live for her son: “Think of a son whose only hope you are” (Phedre 2.5).  When that calculation fails, Oenone grasps at what seems like an avenue to Phedre’s liberty: “Be bold, accuse him first!/ Charge him with the same crime of which today/ He can accuse you!” (Phedre 3.3).  With this temptation, Oenone buries herself in dishonor and is rightly regarded as bringing about Phedre’s suicide and Hippolytus’ murder.

The question, nevertheless, remains: is Oenone’s motivation base and unworthy of a “noble Princess?”  The activities of the nurse reveal that her motive is far from depraved and, in fact, functions at the highest level of compassion and loyalty.  She cries, “Alas! Whether I be to blame or not/ For your misfortunes, what is there on earth/ Of which I am not capable to save you?” (Phedre 3.1).  It is not from inferiority of rank that Oenone acts so magnanimously, but from her greater sense of agency.  Despite the edicts of the gods which doomed Phedre, Oenone struggles to transcend them and bring about a state of satisfaction and happiness.  Indeed, Oenone’s is the most active, striving, willing role in the play.  Phedre only languishes and laments, while Oenone fights to grasp the reins of fate and alter its direction.  Of course, the nature of Racinian drama must frustrate her work.  The profound compassion motivating her struggle must become a tacit accomplice in a predetermined mercilessness. It is not Oenone’s inherent inability to be ethical, but rather the inhumane brutality of the gods, which is the source of Phedre’s downfall.

This is how Racine reminds us that human will counts for very little in the powerful surge of uncontrollable circumstance.  Nevertheless, while Phedre and Hippolytus dare to live against fortune only in their inward, guilty, erotic worlds, Oenone defies laws and events in the sphere of the everyday.  In seeking to marry Phedre and accuse Hippolytus, thereby privileging sensual happiness above social duty, Oenone subverts the incest taboo, the fatalistic Greek value system, and the guilty Jansenist conscience.  She contests the rules of what is acceptable, good, and just.  Oenone is the only character who truly acts and whose decisions provide most of the impetus for the play’s events.

Phedre’s ancient, pagan, ideologically rife setting, influenced as it is by Racine’s strict Jansenism, becomes a powerful symbol for the intractable trappings of fate.  The three most significant characters – Phedre, Hippolytus, and Oenone – are enmeshed in a world largely not of their choosing.  With their futile struggles and profound melancholy, Racine paints a world wherein human will has little influence.  Oenone, the most daring and free character in the play, may be justly regarded as subverting this bleak picture.  Of course, in a more profound sense, it is Oenone’s seeming agency that brings about Phedre’s death, thus linking her into a fateful chain which she cannot tear asunder, either.  Even the character with the greatest freedom can only contribute to a fated end.  Nevertheless, the struggle for love and happiness, simultaneously foolish and great, permeates Phedre’s theater.  Even as the wills of the characters are frustrated again and again, a perhaps irrational defiance underwrites their tragedies.  Human freedom, it seems, is sometimes simply a matter of stubborn faith.  By aesthetically intermingling the play’s setting and characters, Racine’s narrative is able to convey the fragility of freedom.

In twelve words: Prince Hal wants to party, but political rebellion ruins all his fun.

I think: When Alexander III visited Troy, someone offered to show him the lyre that once belonged to Paris.  He refused.  He pointed out that Paris played it for the sake of women, love, and seduction.  Alex the Great said he’d much rather see the lyre of Achilles, upon which that great hero once sang of the “heroic deeds of men,” presumably when he was sulking and avoiding combat.  Ironic?  Oh, sure.

Setting aside the sexism (because where can it go, if not to the side?), I share Alexander’s tastes.  I’ve read, and loved, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and The Scottish Play (I can’t call it by its real name – you know, the one that begins with an ‘M’ and sounds a little bit like McBurger – because I’m superstitious and afraid of its curse). Although I’m convinced that Hamlet is one of the most perfect creations in history, and Othello’s credulity is marvelously wrought, yet… yet… I cannot help noting their mood of pettiness.  The plays are about vain and vainglorious desires.  They’re about people doing the things that people do.

There’s Othello, who with the self-absorption of any proper lover, is like the guy at the bar who just wants to complain about his girlfriend.  There’s Hamlet, who sees only himself.  He’s eternally ferreting around his psyche, fascinated with his inclinations and fears, luxuriating in his great, tragic darkness.  It’s all about him, like, all the time.  In short, these tragedies are the lyre of Paris: personal, seductive, and vain.

But Shakespeare’s historical plays are about the ascension of civilizations, the struggles of nations, and the power dynamics concealed behind what we cheerfully call “progress.” Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Henry IV burst forth, like the songs of Achilles, with the “heroic deeds of men.”  It is Shakespeare’s expansive range to play upon both lyres.  He summons the microcosmic dramas of individuals.  Then he waves the wand of his imagination to stage the vastness, glory, and decline of centuries.  We, too, can shift from moment to universe, from the mundane to the eternal, because we’re inescapably both.  Today, I’m not myself.  Today, I’m universal.  So, let’s talk about royalty.

King Henry IV is really stressed out.  First of all, it’s time to show those Muslims and go on a Crusade.  Second, the nobility of England don’t like the king’s policies.  Third, Wales and Scotland are rebelling.  And finally, his son is utterly useless.  The young Prince Henry (who, for reasons surpassing understanding, calls himself Hal) doesn’t care about Crusades or rebellions.  He hangs out in taverns with his sidekick Ned Poins, fat Sir John Falstaff, prostitutes, and other degenerates.  The prince drinks and swears and gambles and steals and plays tricks and is, in other words, simply no good.

He tells the audience, however, that he’s the worst prince in history only temporarily.  He plans to reform himself.  Besides, the more he disappoints his father now, the greater will everyone’s shock be when he transforms into a proper son.  Sometimes, your friends pretend to forget your birthday so that when they lunge at you from behind a couch with balloons and cake, you’re extra surprised.  Same logic.

The grumpy nobility unites with the rebels in Scotland and Wales to overthrow the king.

While King Henry frets and wrings his hands, Prince Hal and Poins prance in disguise, robbing their friend Falstaff.  Why?  Because Hal knows Falstaff will turn the robbery into an absurd story to present himself as a hero.  Hal thinks this is funny.  He has a wicked, wicked sense of humor 😉 After his dad tells him he’s stupid, Hal decides that maybe now is the time to show everyone what a great guy he really is.  So, he helps fight the rebels.  Falstaff is also forced to defend the king.  Instead, he falls down and plays dead because he thinks honor is a dumb thing to get killed over.

Meanwhile, Prince Hal saves the king’s life.  He even gets wounded.  But he continues fighting, because, look, he’s actually been noble all along.  There, you see?  He told you so.  Are you surprised???????

Wait a minute, you think.  Are these the heroic deeds Achilles sings of?  Why, there’s lust and vulgarity and personal preference all over the place!  And Shakespeare smiles wryly and turns to his glass of ale.

With jarring brightness, Shakespeare illuminates the shadows between what we are and what we think we are.  Prince Henry lives idly, wastefully, and corruptly, but assures us that such dissoluteness is not his true character.  He explains:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
If the “base contagious clouds” are not part of the prince’s true nature, then they are probably Falstaff, Poins, and the other street criminals he drinks with.  It’s their vulgarity, not his own, which “smothers up his beauty from the world.”  The prince will “please again to be himself” later, to the delighted surprise of his court.  But the analogy flails a little.  The sun, of course, does not “permit” the clouds to conceal its radiance.  The clouds’ movement is a matter of indifference to the sun, which persists in its brightness regardless of them.  It is difficult to make the claim, however, that the prince persists in his goodness in taverns and brothels.  And if he is not himself in such places, then who is he?

I think, perhaps ungenerously, that the prince is deceiving himself.  We condemn the vices of others which we render justifiable or even charming in ourselves.  The prince seems to think that Falstaff and Poins are cheap by nature.  His own nature, however, is sunnily royal, and cheapness is merely a mask.  But this is strange.  Goodness is not an object one can lightly toss off or throw on.  Again: if he is not himself, who is he?  Donning a cloak of artificial corruption is, at best, a naïve and self-indulgent way to inspire higher praise later.  At worst, it’s an insincere motive which justifies frivolity and idle pleasure, summarized with the Machiavellian formula: the ends justify the means.  Well, perhaps.  If the ends are valuable and important, lenience is acceptable.  But let’s examine the prince’s proposed ends.  He wishes to shock, amaze, and be “wond’red at” when he will finally “please again to be himself.”  Is it acceptable to deceive an aging, worried father for the sake of incurring wonder and praise?  I’m not so sure.  If Prince Henry is conscious of the implications of his self-justification, then he is a deliberate charlatan.  He is aware that he must inherit the throne as King Henry V.  He knows he must eventually abandon Falstaff and Poins, and is therefore simply using them for very skewed purposes.

But let’s say it isn’t the prince speaking, but the narrator.  Through Hal’s mouth, the narrator informs the audience of the prince’s destiny.  Then we can assume that Hal is not acting, not pretending to be a corrupt fool, but rather struggling with the promise of kingship by drinking it out of consciousness.  When King Henry needs him, however, he awakens to his royal nature and defends it honorably.  In this case, the prince undergoes a psychological transformation, wherein, again, he is not what he thinks he is.  He experienced himself as a petty drunkard and a thief, but revealed himself to be an able descendent of an able time.  The latter approach is ethically much more satisfying.  But it’s less credible.  Can one reinvent himself to conform to the needs of a moment?  Perhaps.  After all, “some have greatness thrust upon them.”