How does our re-reading of favorite texts and images change over time, as the world changes around us? Like so many readers before me, I’ve always noticed how Virgil presents the queen of Carthage as a strong, intelligent ruler and civic planner who “plans her escape, collects her followers” and their treasures: “and a woman leads them all.” (1.440-448). By the time Virgil shows us Aeneas’s inspection of her achievements, the “ramparts” of the “new city of Carthage” are rising, along with the “gates,” “laws,” “harbor,” and “theatre” (1.510–519). After Aeneas, having inspired her passion and learned from her example, abandons her to found his own new city, I used to thrill to their passion, and think I could only mourn her self-destructive suicide.
But today, driving into work and listening tothe radio stories of women assaulted and raped, I thought about Dido differently. Where does the fire of her passion come from? I wondered if I could read it differently: Venus plopping Cupid into her lap, forcing love on her, telling him to “breathe [your] secret fire into her,/ poison the queen and she will never know.” (1.818-820). “She will never know–“ I thought of her listening to the tales of assault and Roofies. Giving sexual targets Rohypnol and other drugs if they’re not aware of it, I think, that’s rape. So do I think Venus has arranged for the rape of Dido so that Aeneas can gain power? I didn’t think of it this way before, but I did this morning. I wouldn’t quite say Rome was founded on rape, but the thought occurred to me. I rejected it, but I thought it.
And then I thought, parking the car and getting out: Where do the Romans find the other founders of Rome, the women who bear their children? That’s the Rape of the Sabine Women, isn’t it? The historian Livy (59 BCE–17CE) tells their abduction this way: “When the hour for the games had come, and their eyes and minds were alike riveted on the spectacle before them, the preconcerted signal was given and the Roman youth dashed in all directions to carry off the maidens who were present. The larger part were carried off indiscriminately, but some particularly beautiful girls who had been marked out for the leading patricians were carried to their houses by plebeians told off for the task.”
Still thinking about the women whose defeat built Rome, I looked “Sabines” up in the index to our edition of the Aeneid and I found that Virgil treats this incident as an important factor in Aeneas’s triumph, depicted on his shield by the god Vulcan: “the workmanship of the shield,/ no words can tell its power… […] and the Sabine women brutally/ dragged from the crowded bowl when the Circus games were played” (8.738–739, 748–749). Not a game for them, as the translator’s words “brutally” and “dragged” suggest. The end of the story is supposed to be a happy one: years later, the women prefer to remain with their abductors and the families they have established. Our edition’s introduction by scholar Bernard Knox is more upbeat than the translation by Robert Fagles that it precedes, pointing out that “the Romans carried off the Sabine women to marry them” (34). As classicist Mary Beard points out, Roman plots involving rape “are not now best known for their subtlety. The ‘happy ending’ to some of [Plautus and Terence’s comedies] can appal modern readers: ‘Good news — the rapist was her fiancé all along'” (202). There’s no happy ending here for Dido, of course, whatever the Sabines’ decision.
But the image of that “so-called rape” stayed in my mind from a picture by Nicolas Poussin, a painting I knew and was shocked by as a child, because it’s in my hometown of New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
Nicolas Poussin, The Abduction of the Sabine Women, oil on canvas (probably 1633-4)
These women are being taken to increase the power of Rome. Their twisted limbs, their signals to their husbands, their forced abandonment of their children and parents at the signal from the red-clad ruler on the pillar – that’s rape to me.
So how does this change my reading of Dido? I used to think the two ways I had of seeing her were in conflict – the leader and builder, the self-destructive victim. But now I think that if she went on the radio with her story, Dido would say: Look! Even capable, intelligent, strong women can be taken advantage of, in the power structure I know.
I’ll hope that message can make changes.
Works Cited
Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. Print.
Livy. History of Rome. Trans. Canon Roberts. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1912. Print.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
Vivian Folkenflikis an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program. She has blogged previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on the intersection of race and gender in past course texts.
Sebastiaen Vrancx, Aeneas and Achates Outside the Temple of Juno (ca. 1615). Louvre Collection. Image and further information available at the Frick Collection.
This post was originally published on October 14, 2016.
Writing your first essay in the Humanities Core Course, a literary analysis of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, you will have been reading and re-reading Virgil’s text in Robert Fagles’ translation in order to make claims about the text and find appropriate textual support.
It might be hard at this point to remember exactly what you knew about Virgil’s Aeneid before you started reading it in the context of the Humanities Core. Some of you may have never encountered Virgil or the Aeneid, while others may have read all of the Aeneid before they started the course. Most students, however, will fall somewhere in between these extremes, and soon after you started attending Professor Zissos’ lectures, you started to accumulate information about Roman culture and society and the structure of the Aeneid that turned your reading experience into an informed, guided reading experience.
You can think of this kind of reading experience as part of a discussion — literally so in your discussion sections, but also metaphorically as a conversation with anyone in the past who has read Virgil’s Aeneid and left us a record of his or her reading. A text as old as the Aeneid has produced many such records of past readings, testimonies of readers that can direct our attention in turn to specific aspects of the text that we would have otherwise missed. Reading such accounts allows us to enter into a virtual conversation with past readers that enriches our present understanding of the text. First, let us recall a scene from Book 1:
…, uidet Iliacas ex ordine pugnas bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem, Atridas Priamumque et saeuum ambobus Achillem. constitit et lacrimans ‘quis iam locus,’ inquit, ‘Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? en Priamus. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.’ sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine uultum. (Virgilius Maronis, I, 456 – 465)
Translated by Fagles, in our Penguin edition, as follows:
… — all at once he sees,
spread out from first to last, the battles fought at Troy,
the fame of the Trojan War now known throughout the world,
Atreus’ sons and Priam — Achilles, savage to both at once.
Aeneas came to a halt and wept, and “Oh, Achates,”
he cried, “is there anywhere, any place on earth
not filled with our ordeals? There’s Priam, look!
Even here, merit will have its true reward …
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.
Dismiss your fears. Trust me, this fame of ours
will offer us some haven.”
So Aeneas says,
feeding his spirit on empty, lifeless pictures,
groaning low, the tears rivering down his face … (Virgil 63)
In this blog post I want to focus on one such example of a past reader’s reaction to this specific passage, a remark by Denis Diderot, the editor of the most famous publication during the European Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, a friend of Rousseau, and one of the first to write evaluative essays about publicly exhibited paintings:
Un des plus beaux vers de Virgile et un des plus beaux principes de l’art imitatif, c’est celui-ci: Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. Il faudrait l’écrire sur la porte de son [i.e. a painter’s] atelier: Ici les malheureux trouvent des yeux qui les pleurent. (Diderot 392)
One of the most beautiful verses of Virgil, and one of the most beautiful principles of imitative art, is the following: sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
One ought to write it above the entrance to the painter’s studio: ‘Here the unfortunate ones will find eyes that shed tears for them.’ (my translation, O.B.)
The inscription Diderot proposes for a painter’s door as a reminder for the artist that his supreme aim should be to move the beholder is clearly less a translation of the Latin quotation than a metonymical summary of the whole scene.
What seems to be lost in Diderot’s version is the heart-rending conflict in which Aeneas finds himself caught, between grief (hence his own tears) at being confronted with a rendition of his own past, and hope, which he tries to impart to Achates even as he is crying. This hope is also founded on tears: the tears Aeneas assumes the inhabitants of this strange new land to have shed over his fate. It gives him reason to believe that he and his companions will finally meet with a friendly reception, quite unlike the series of encounters with monsters he has just survived, when he re-traced part of Odysseus’ itinerary on his voyage from Troy before landing in Carthage.
Diderot’s metonymy can be resolved in different ways: Diderot may be admonishing the painter to identify with his subject emotionally (the painter’s tears), or he may exhort him to paint so that someone visiting his atelier will be moved to cry. But what is missing from Diderot’s version are tears of recognition, the tears which Aeneas sheds upon recognizing his father and himself (‘se quoque‘, l.488), depicted in their most desperate moment.
Diderot then proposes that the ideal scene of reception for a painting adhering to this criterion would be for a criminal who carries his secret unrecognized in society to dread the steps leading to the public exhibition space for paintings in his contemporary Paris, the Salon, where a painting depicting his crime would have such a powerful effect on him that he would willingly sign his own sentence.
In quoting the line, as Diderot does, a reader re-contextualizes it. Part of this process is the interruption of the narrative sequence of the original, including its sequence of emotions.
In this particular scene, Aeneas’ conflicted emotions of grief and joy eventually are transferred onto Achates, his companion, who has accompanied him to Carthage from the ships and now stands with Aeneas magically hidden by Venus invisibly before the artwork in Juno’s temple. It is as if Aeneas has brought in the form of his companion Achates his own, representative audience and engages before our very eyes in narrating the temporal sequence of the scene, which most commentators assume to be a mural painting.
And Achates does indeed exhibit the precise mix of fear and hope characteristic of Aeneas’ first reaction: “simul percussus Achates / laetitiaque metuque” (513-4) — Achates was simultaneously shaken both by joy and by fear. But these emotions of Achates are emotions occasioned by Dido, whose appearance with her followers and some of Aeneas’ companions, whom he had left behind at the ships, interrupts Aeneas’ contemplation of the artwork on the wall.
Achates’ reaction might then be described as a delayed emotional reaction that re-enforces the hierarchy separating him from Aeneas — his emotions are slower, he feels only now what Aeneas has felt since he laid recognizing eyes on the representation of scenes from the Trojan War. They also might be described as testifying to the effect of Aeneas’ (and, by extension, Virgil’s) ekphrasis: Aeneas’ re-telling of the scenes that Achates sees in front of him gradually awakens in him the mix of fear and joy Aeneas has been feeling from the very start.
Yet, whatever hierarchical distance between Achates and Aeneas had separated them in their initial reaction is finally effectively closed again in the next line, when both are united in an emotional confusion related to the decision whether or not they should discover themselves to their companions. They both burn with a desire to re-join them, yet they still fear to give up their supernatural disguise for fear that Dido and her people might turn out to be hostile: “auidi coniungere dextras / ardebant, sed res animos incognita turbat” (514-5).
In his commentary on the scene, Lee Fratantuono suggests that Aeneas’ initial mix of fear and joy had to have given way to “increasing horror”:
The pictures follow the story of the fall of Troy to the very point where Aeneas’ story in Book 2 [of the Aeneid] will begin; Aeneas himself will paint the rest of these pictures, as it were, when he tells the story of what happened after the Ethiopian and Amazonian allies came to Priam’s aid. Aeneas knows that the pictures of Memnon and Penthesilea presage the final chain of events leading to the sacking of the city; the sum total of the pictures, especially in the situational context of Juno’s temple, should not be consolatory to a Trojan. These are images not set up as memorials of human compassion, but as triumphant records of the victories of Juno’s beloved Greeks over the enemies she so hates. In the first excitement of seeing the early scenes from the war that so changed his life … it is as if Aeneas momentarily forgot the dreadful context of the artwork … The scene is one of increasing horror as Aeneas surveys the paintings in their terrible order, before he finally cries out after seeing the desecration of his friend Hector’s body: tum vero ingentem gemitum dat pectore ab imo (1.485) Then indeed he gave a mighty groan from deep in his breast. The pictures might have been fitting to help rouse Carthaginian morale during the Punic Wars; they celebrate the worst degradation of the Trojans. Aeneas stares fixed and agape at these images as Dido finally enters the temple and interrupts the tour of her art gallery. (Fratantuono 19)
Fratantuono’s more detailed and more faithful reading of the scene allows us to see that in quoting and re-contextualizing Aeneas’ initial emotional reaction to the artwork in Juno’s temple Diderot seems to have effectively blinded us to the narrative sequence of pathos that leaves Aeneas much more troubled, and much less relieved, than we might initially assume.
That readers should be tempted to quote and re-contextualize the line like this has in part to do with the difficulty of translating it in a prosaic, straightforward way. In a literal, word-for-word translation we would read for ‘sunt lacrimae rerum / et mentem mortalia tangunt’: “there are tears of – or for – things (rerum) / and human things (mortalia) touch the mind”.
In translation, rerum and mortalia take on heightened affective qualities, as they are often generalized to stand in for the fate of being human. Thus, Ronald Austin in his 1971 Oxford edition translates: “even here tears fall for men’s lot, and mortality touches the heart” (Austin n.p.), while Allen Mandelbaum renders rerum in English with “passing things”, and mortalia with “things mortal” (Mandelbaum 17).
But beyond pathos there is also a second aspect that contributes to the temptation to quote and re-contextualize this line and in doing so to disturb its temporality, the temporality it has in the sequence of Virgil’s narrative — and this temptation has to do with the complex temporality of Virgil’s narrative itself, with a structure of prolepsis and analepsis that re-enforces the main themes of his epic, fuses together its parts and shackles those parts in turn to the Homeric tradition.
Inasmuch as Aeneas at first interprets the artwork in Juno’s temple as a sign that he will find refuge on these unknown shores he looks toward the future. Inasmuch as he draws hope from a representation of his own past, he looks toward that past. Both past and present are united in this moment.
His interpretation repeats an act of interpretation in which Dido herself engaged when she first arrived at the very same spot with her followers as refugees from the city of Tyre: “Now deep in the heart of Carthage stood a grove, / lavish with shade, where the Tyrians, making landfall, / still shaken by wind and breakers, first unearthed that sign: / Queen Juno had led their way to the fierce stallion’s head / that signaled power in war and ease in life for ages. / Here Dido of Tyre was building Juno a mighty temple, …” (Fagles 63).
For Aeneas, looking at his own representation in the battle scenes from Troy offers an anagnorisis, a literal, pictorial recognition of himself that is part of an emotional crisis: “Aeneas gives a groan, heaving up from his depths, / he sees the plundered armor, the car, the corpse / of his great friend, and Priam reaching out / with helpless hands … / He even sees himself / swept up in the melee, clashing with Greek captains, / sees the troops of the Dawn and swarthy Memnon’s arms.” (Fagles 64).
For Virgil’s Augustan reader, Dido’s interpretation of the stallion’s head as “… power in war and ease in life for ages …” is offered up as a fulfilled prediction, a proleptic description of the power and wealth of the Carthage that was to be Rome’s adversary in its two most desperate, formative wars, the first and second Punic War. Indeed, the Aeneid as a whole is structured proleptically by this conflict, and it has often been faulted for this constraint of imperial flattery, which projects existing history back in time to re-create a founding myth for the Augustan Roman empire, an analepsis that purports to be a prolepsis, a vaticinium ex eventu, a prophecy fulfilled that strains to pretend the outcome could be any different.
It’s now time to interrupt our close reading of this passage and take stock of what we have done.
(1) We have applied techniques of close reading to a sample passage from Virgil’s Aeneid.
(2) We have tried to account for the difference translation makes in our interpretation of this passage.
(3) We have applied technical terms from rhetoric, art and literary criticism (ekphrasis, analepsis, prolepsis, anagnorisis, vaticinium ex eventu).
(4) By taking a closer look at this passage, we have become aware of some important themes and structures of Virgil’s Aeneid that we encounter elsewhere in the poem (e.g., ekphrasis in book 8; vaticinium ex eventu; structures of repetition and imitation that inform the relationship of parts of the Aeneid to each other, and to epic poetry that preceded it).
Where could one go from here?
One could contextualize the passage, either in the context of a reading of Diderot or of reading Virgil, with the ultimate goal of contributing to an interpretation of the work of one of these two authors. One could also connect this sample reading to larger theoretical concerns. One such concern that has informed my own approach to literature is reader-response criticism and hermeneutics, another a conscious application of rhetoric to the study of literature. In order to do so, one would have to take into account more detailed readings of this passage by specialists like the classicist Michael Putnam, who dedicates a chapter to it in his 1998 book Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. One could also engage in an informed visual analysis (Essay #2!) of art work depicting this passage in Virgil, like the works by Sebastian Brant and Sebastiaen Vrancx featured here.
Virgil. The Aeneid of Virgil. Tr. Allen Mandelbaum. University of California Press, 1982.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Tr. Robert Fagles. Penguin, 2006.
Further Reading
Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. Yale University Press, 1998.
Oliver Berghof received his PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine in 1995. He taught in the Humanities Core program as a graduate student between 1992 and 1995, and has done so again as a lecturer since 1999. A native of Germany, he specializes in European Literature, Literary Theory and Humanities Computing. In teaching Humanities Core, he particularly enjoys the challenge of teaching students in UCI’s Honors Program.
The post originally appeared in Surfacing Memory: Seeking the Voices that Inform Me, a multimedia site where seminar leader Susan Morse explores artifacts and heirlooms in an effort to reconstruct her own family’s history. Our gratitude to Dr. Morse for sharing this personal story here in hopes that it will serve as a model for Humanities Core students’ own oral history and artifact-based research projects this quarter.
“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in your neighbor’s moccasins” (Cheyenne Proverb)
Just above illustrations pictured below was written the date
I’m not sure if this date refers to when the nine panel “funny” was originally published in the newspaper or to when it was pasted in the McNiven (my great great grandmother’s and then Jesse McNiven’s) Scrapbook. There are very few clues to indicate in which newspaper (or in which country) this illustration was even printed. Given my knowledge of the McNiven family time-line, there is a distinct possibility it appeared in a Canadian newspaper prior to the family exodus to the then American territories to the south. Then again, in 1879 they may still have been in Scotland.
What interests me about these possibilities is that the illustration clearly demonstrates a fascination with empire; in particular with the clear demarcation between the old inheritance-based British Empire and the newly expanding American empire making its presence known deep into the “Wild Western frontier.” What’s more, the panels characterize — or even satirize — a clear cultural dissonance between these positions that makes possible a third and more compelling ethnographic reading outside of empire altogether.
So let’s try walking through this illustration wearing different pairs of moccasins to see how each fits beginning with the caption at the end of the illustration which reads:
Given ethnolinguistic references from the 19th century, it is clear from the caption that an American Indian (pejoratively described as a “Red Shirt”) and a cowboy (also referenced negatively as an untamed or wild “Broncho Bill”) have been invited to a hunting event but one that will not align with their expectations. The superior “Master of Hounds” serves as the host for this occasion, and given this final revelation it seems clear that from a socio-cultural context this event would be both foreign and unknowable to the two American men, something that gives satire some legs. Spoiler aside, the caption confirms the medium’s rhetorical design as one that will draw on cultural dissonance to drive a particular narrative.
Our narrative begins with an American Indian traveling together with a fairly stereotypical characterization of an old “Wild West” cowboy. The two ride together in peace and in harmony with each other and in nature; the horses also moving in step. The teepee and war bonnet place the American Indian in a tribe, like the Cheyenne, that hunts and follows the seasons and the movement of big game; bison in particular. Other noteworthy markers — such as the feathers and long war bonnet — situate the American Indian riding in the front as both his tribe’s leader as well as a singularly courageous and prominent member of his tribe.
Traditionally, tribal members earn their first eagle feather to commemorate a rite of passage into adulthood. I witnessed this ritual annually while coaching and living on the Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Arlee, Montana while I was an undergraduate. Tribal elders presented High School seniors with an eagle feather along with their diplomas at the Graduation ceremony. After the presentations were completed, one of the Tribal Elders explained that the American Indians from the northwest and plains region consider the eagle to be the bravest and strongest of all birds. Not only does this spirit travel with the feather, but also anyone who possesses and wears a ceremonial eagle feather carries honor and pride at being one of the First Peoples (feathers were offered to all non-tribal seniors as well). As a final gesture, the Tribal Elder waved his feathers over the crowd as a means of wishing everyone in the community prosperity, peace and happiness.
Additional feathers are then awarded following actions recognized by the tribe as courageous or heroic. The feathered head dress pictured above, for example, conveys much more than this man’s role as the tribal chief. This war bonnet signals a lifetime’s worth of feathers earned through heroic action. Additionally, the warrior’s pole he carries and the horse he rides contain a number of overflow feathers earned. Finally, both the war bonnet and warrior’s pole are ceremonial, reserved for special occasions, and serve as a sign of respect for the coming event – say, for example, a ritualistic hunt or an invitation to meet with a “neighbor” in the Cheyenne sense of the word.
This ethnographic reading of the two Americans, however, may have been lost on the readers of the time who might have preferred instead to see these men as wild and weak or inferior in comparison to the imperial power whose newspaper they read. The chief, for example, carries his own teepee, a task usually reserved for women in the tribe. This, along with a hyperbolic abundance of ceremonial feathers offers those sympathetic to the British Empire a rhetorical reading of this so-called great and heroic leader as anything but formidable or worthy. The cowboy representative of the American Empire maintains an even weaker position, since he trails behind the chief and rides a paint horse. The paint horse — a mix of Barb, Andalusian and Arabian breeds — was originally brought to the frontier during the Spanish “conquest” of the Americas by Cortez and his Conquistadors. Nineteenth century associations of the paint horse by white colonizers and Europeans were pejorative given its mixed blood, connections with a defeated imperial intervention and its most common association as the “Big Dog” or “God Dog” of the American Indian, in particular with those tribes that hunt and wage war on the plains.
Additionally, although later panels of this illustration clearly name the cowboy as a man, the depiction above not only feminizes him, but it also places him in an even more inferior, weaker position in contrast to the already emasculated chief. His long, free flowing hair characterizes his identity as untamed, wild and therefore “savage” or uncivilized according to beliefs that were widely-held by Europeans (as well as by their descendants living in the established states of America) at this time. As a representative of the American imperial machine, the feminized American stands in sharp contrast to the masculinized British “Master of Hounds” (not yet pictured but named in the closing caption). This man — the “Master” — is a figure with distinction, a man fronting a clear title and legacy bound to a deep, long-standing aristocratic British tradition. Unlike the “Master,” the cowboy bears the name “Broncho Bill.” His identity characterizes him, in part, as a “broncho” (or the more common bronco) which in “Wild West” equestrian circles describes an untamed and untrained “frontier” horse. Interestingly, it is also a term used to denote a mustang, another mixed breed of range pony introduced to the American territories by the Spanish (and which continue to run feral in the hills to this day). Moreover, this man is identified by first name only and does not garner societal distinction enough to hold a family name; therefore this (Imperial agent) “broncho” represents an uncivilized, culturally mixed emasculated man, but this is not a reliable ethnographic reading. Let’s get back to that…
The second panel in the series reflects — on the one hand — a harmonious, symbiotic relationship between the American Indian and his cowboy companion. In this frame, the cowboy prepares what is mockingly described as “light refreshment” presumably for both men as the chief smokes a pipe, a ceremonial gesture signaling agreement with a covenant between parties or preparation for a planned ceremonial event. Perhaps he smokes in this case to acknowledge the invitation to join “the Hunt.” The horse adorning the teepee elevates this animal to a spirit or totem animal that symbolizes a balance between personal drive and untamed passions, between individual agency and a responsibility to others, quite suitable given the chief’s role in his community. Harmony extends also to the two horses standing behind the teepee that have been acculturated to two different traditions, and that live and rest comfortably together which parallels the two men who bear markers to clearly different yet compatible ways to exist and to live together.
On the other hand, the designation of this space as a “Wild West Camp” recalls earlier depictions of the American representative of empire as uncivilized and weak. What’s more, the cowboy performs a woman’s labor by preparing the refreshment and probably also by serving the chief who currently smokes alone. I’m partial to the symbiotic and harmonious reading, of course, but as someone who studies this history, I must acknowledge the generosity of such a narrative in hindsight given widespread and systematic atrocities perpetrated against the First Peoples by agents of American imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Negative attitudes about the First Peoples were perpetuated in part through cultural dissonance (through the notion of a “gender frontiers,” for example), the implications of which are clearly depicted in panel three. It appears that a well-dressed local (looks a little “dandy” to me) on an afternoon walk has just happened on the cowboy and the chief engaging in some afternoon teepee relations — so to speak — with the chief having taken a superior position. This interaction sharply mocks American colonizers (represented by our “broncho”) as having succumbed to or been seduced by the so-called “unnatural behaviors” of the “savage” American Indians.
Additionally, the depiction of the chief places him in an overtly sexually aggressive stance counter to the man passing by. This exchange facilitates what might have counted in 19th-century America as a threat to white culture; first, through a mixed race, same-sex relationship and second, through the aggressive encounter triggered by the exposure of, what looks like, a naked and virile “Indian” chief to the startled, unarmed white stranger shown as innocently passing by. The cultural reality, however, is that heteronormative ideals and constructs didn’t really exist among American Indian tribes until they were imposed on them by European colonizers. And — as an interesting aside that the illustrator may not have known — American Indian hunters traditionally abstained from intercourse for a few days prior to a hunt as part of a ceremonial practice (abstinence from sex to produce an abundant bounty during the hunt).
The threat of a blended culture to imperial civilization and legacy continues to figure prominently in panel four. Clearly, the sight of the American Indian chief and “Wild West” cowboy seems so strange and “savage” in contrast to the waiting members of the British hunting group, that neither the “civilized” men nor beasts among them including the dogs can control its feelings or “sensation[s]” of desperation. At the same time, and funnily, the two Americans calmly and quietly enter the scene to witness pure chaos as the well-dressed, British fox hunters struggle to sit or to control their mounts and hounds marking a clear dissonance between the cultural groups.
The cultural disconnect depicted in this frame and implied throughout the illustration extends primarily to the differences between what counts as a hunt for each group. The British riders with their hounds are waiting for a Fox Hunt, a sport of leisure (pffft) that goes back to the 16th Century that does not yield any food as bounty for a successful run. The primary objective of this kind of hunt is the performance of human superiority over animals, of wielding control over a pack of trained dogs to chase down and to kill the red fox. These unarmed riders (chasers more than hunters) work together with the “Master” of the hounds to control and to direct their hounds as they search for, chase down, and kill a fox victim. The Master may then choose to reward those hunters who perform most admirably during the event with some trophy from the dead fox — a paw, the mask, or the tail (the biggest honor). The remaining carcass is then tossed to the hounds. Very civilized indeed and then light refreshment follows.
However, one doesn’t have to look beyond the above panel to recognize that the chief and his partner had a much different hunt in mind. The chief who is positioned as standing and surveying the landscape in front of him, clearly, searches for big game — most likely bison — as the objective of the hunt. This hunt does not describe a mere sport for those in the American “frontier.” The hunt for bison (buffalo where I come from) which may last a single day or several, ideally yields tens of animals all of which are honored, eaten, worn and otherwise utilized by members of the tribe. No part of the animal goes to waste. In terms of a hunting bounty, the hunter responsible for bringing a buffalo down with his bow and arrow is entitled to claim the hide and some of the choicest meat cuts as his prize.
An even more special prize for American Indians — like the Cheyenne — is marked by a hunter’s first kill, where as his trophy and as an important rite of passage, he will drink some of the blood of his kill. While drinking the blood of a freshly killed animal may seem at first savage (and certainly would for the Fox Hunters), this is in reality a culturally short-sighted position. American Indians live in harmony with nature, belong to the land and see themselves as brothers to the animals they kill. Blood symbolizes the force that gives life to all beings. The blood, along with the animal that sacrifices it, is a gift that deserves and demands respect (a message my Navajo godfather Jimmy John relayed to me throughout my childhood). A hunter who drinks the warm blood of the animal he has killed demonstrates his deep respect for the animal’s sacrifice. It also symbolizes that the life of this animal will continue in the hunter. In death, the animal’s body (and blood) serves as a gift that will ultimately prolong the lives of many in the hunter’s tribe. Given this naturalist reading of the scene, the calm entry of the two men signifies their harmonious relationship with nature, with their horses and with each other.
The British hounds, however, are not in harmony with this nature but express such a discord at the sight of these two individuals and their horses that the American men must hide until the more “civilized” and trained hounds will no longer be negatively affected (or even influenced) by their presence (which really pushes the “othering” boundaries).
Throughout these panels, the harmony and symbiosis of the two American men persists, despite rhetorical efforts to depict them as weak, emasculated and inferior. This symbiosis and harmony between the men, their horses and their inner nature or “impulse” continues in frame six as the men are thrown from their mounts. It is unclear what particular impulse led to this unexpected ejection (perhaps it simply mocks them as irrational creatures), but the double stop of the horses and the double flight of the men further illustrates an equity between these two men even though they clearly come from different cultural backgrounds (and from different equestrian traditions). They remain in harmony with each other and with the natural world including with their inner “impulse.” And their horses aren’t getting ready to run away from the men (which you’ll notice on the next frame).
In panel seven the two Americans are back on their mounts and chasing after “information” about some “natives” depicted above that look quite like British citizens, don’t they? In fact, these “natives” resemble 19th-century bobbies, a police force first put in place in London in the early 19th century to maintain law and order on the British home-front. Perhaps the spoof here is on the American wanton disregard for the British imperial claim on the western territories. These two “wild” Americans lack the decorum to perform accordingly at the Fox Hunt. Their very presence disrupts the event precisely because they are “savage” outsiders or “others” in the context of European Imperialism. Further taking the above panel into account, they wildly chase these “natives” without control over their own trajectory (or their mounts) at the same time as they fail to recognize the so-called “native” claim to the land as conferred by the panel’s caption. There is a sharp irony that features one of the First Peoples in this fight against the “natives”: one, because he travels with a member of the American Imperial team and two, because the British bobbies claim “native” ownership, which, as we know, was but one of many attempted European interventions on territory already fully populated by a diverse, self-regulating, autonomous indigenous population.
Have you noticed a clear lack of narrative between some of these panels? So have I! Two consistent features, however, seem to be the persistence of satire and the two Americans. The above scene, for example, satirizes “frontier” scouting techniques, although it is quite unclear what these men are trying to find, and where the third guy came from. Maybe they are still scouting for the “information” they were seeking in the previous panel. The above depiction of “Broncho Bill” mocks his lack of scouting skills as he presumably uses his hand to reach for scat and other tangible clues about the particular “scent” they seek. The illustration pokes further fun by depicting the American Indian as literally utilizing a white man to accomplish this same task (which seems much more practical) and which degrades the white man’s and the cowboy’s ethos. In reality, however, American Indian scouts enjoy a long-standing reputation as quasi-diviners who can detect and read seemingly obscure natural signs, or pick up a trail by vibration and sound, or observe and gather vital knowledge about an enemy without detection.
And so we come to the final frame in the series, which appears to answer a few unanswered questions, offers a clear commentary about the two American riders, and throws an additional means for understanding the “hunt” into conversation. As it turns out, the hunt and the scouting excursion seem, in the last few frames, to have been to locate one of any available run-away horses for the British rider to carry him back home. Although many of these panels have promoted a claim of British superiority, when it comes to real riding, this Brit and his mount look spent. In this panel, the Brit trails behind both American riders who begin and end their journey on their own horses, illustrating that they are both good riders and possess “good riding knowledge,” perhaps a positive nod to having “impulse” that may be akin to sound horse sense. This stands in stark contrast to the Britisher who was dismounted and who lost control of three different horses. It doesn’t appear that he even travels home on his own horse. Also noteworthy is that while there were consistently negative characterizations of the two American men, they are referred to in these final lines as “our Wild West friends” who (you may have noticed) have been riding and working together for some panels now.
“Our Wild West friends” bring me to the final tidbit about this peculiar illustration. According to the caption that follows this final panel (the one we began our discussion with), the hunt was set to meet in Hertfordshire, but there is no Hertfordshire in America or in Canada. The closest is a county located in southern England. After all of this consideration and analysis, in the end, it is possible this illustration may not have been published or set on the North American continent at all but rather took place in the 19th-century British imagination.
Perhaps this illustration nods to early iterations of the “Wild West” spectacles, the most famous of which are the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows. If you do any digging, you’ll certainly notice a lot of Bills as headliners (Pawnee Bill, Buckskin Bill, Buffalo Bill…Broncho Bill). Smaller versions of these shows began in England in the early 1870s and featured an array of “frontier” types that fed consumer curiosity about “unnatural” oddities of the American “Wild West” including cowboys, American Indians, infamous outlaws, lady sharp shooters, etc. These curious figures were all put on public display and observed and marveled and consumed for their “strange” manners like any number of traveling “freak shows” and other marvels of nature that were popular in Europe in the 19th century. Is it possible that “Our Wild West Friends” depicted as living in symbiosis and harmony with each other and in nature were actually meant to stand in as marvels of nature in a kind of illustrated “Wild West Freak Show” published in a British newspaper way back on January 1, 1879? If that was the intention, then the joke is on them for having missed the deeper meaning. I think I prefer walking around in my neighbor’s moccasins for a few moons…
After Professor Sharon Block’s lecture on Thursday, April 13th, I decided to add a postscript:
The moccasins to the left above are mine and were made in the traditional way. Men perform the hunt and women perform the remaining labor. They dress the animal, prepare the meat, other animal parts, and hide: scrape, tan, chew (yes, you read that correctly) and smoke the leather. The bead work was done by Jeannie Peak whose mother is very famous in the region for traditional beaded crafts she made for famous people like the Queen of England and Roy Rogers (of old Western Film and Radio Spectaculars). Many members of the area tribes — including many of my Salish friends in Arlee, MT — are descended from American Indians converted in the late 1800s to Catholicism (see the Mission in St. Ignatius, MT). The flower on the two pieces above is the “Salish Rose,” symbolic of femininity, fertile bounty (reproduction), and the natural cycles of life. The Salish Rose also has a second meaning that most outside of the community might not know; it is a symbol of the Catholic Sacred Heart of Christ. The second piece — the necklace featured to the right above — is traditionally worn by Salish women who participate in tribal and intertribal dancing ceremonies and rituals called Pow Wows (during fourth of July weekend in Arlee). The Shawl Dance or the Traditional Dance are danced by the American Indian woman to celebrate her femininity, her role within the tribal community, and her direct connection to mother nature.
Susan Morse is a continuing lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she has enjoyed teaching for many years. She received her PhD in German Studies from the UCI Department of European Languages & Studies in 2006. She also studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology and English at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, which is another reason why she loves teaching in the Humanities. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and the limits of representation in the Holocaust. In addition to leading seminars in Core, she also enjoys teaching a Romantic Fairy Tales course for the Department of European Languages & Studies and Comparative Literature.
The following is a revised version of a talk given as part of a “Shakespeare on Film” panel at the 2013 Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., and, like Writing Assignment 4 for this cycle of Humcore, it performs a comparative analysis on an example of Shakespearean appropriation, identifying how certain themes originally appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and then reflecting on how these themes have changed in the process of adaptation. For students currently writing and revising their own essay drafts, it offers a model of how to a) select and incorporate relevant passages from Shakespeare, b) use secondary sources to develop a central argument, and c) describe and analyze film as a medium. While this post does not rely heavily on the technical vocabulary of film analysis (a good introduction to which can be found here), it does include detailed descriptions of the various scenes and cinematic elements being analyzed. Students may compare these descriptions with the actual excerpts of the film provided throughout to get a sense of how to translate the medium of cinema into written form.
The King’s Speech, however, is the film that most consciously and explicitly engages with its Shakespearean influence, embodied in the character of George VI’s Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. Screenwriter David Seidler cleverly exploits the biographical fact that Logue was an amateur Shakespearean actor to weave the Bard’s words and themes throughout the film. In fact, Logue’s very first appearance on screen is attended with a Shakespearean quote. In this scene, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, played by Helena Bonham Carter, having come to Logue’s office to enlist his services for her husband, discovers a rather drab and dilapidated space. Emerging from the bathroom with the sound of a flushing toilet receding into the background, Logue, aware of the impression his home can make, quips, “Poor and content is rich and rich enough” – a line from Othello. When Elizabeth responds with a bemused, “I’m sorry,” Logue promptly interjects, “Shakespeare. How are you?” and thrusts out his hand in a remarkable gesture that fuses citation and introduction – as if he were claiming to be the Immortal Bard himself.
Logue’s practice of speaking with a Shakespearean cadence reflects, at one level, his status as a product of empire. As an Australian transplanted to London, Logue is an outsider in love with an English cultural tradition that actual English men and women seem all too ready to deny him. To drive this marginalization home, the film presents a brief interlude where Logue auditions for an amateur Shakespeare troupe from Putney, the leader of which barely lets Logue get out the lines to Richard III’sopening soliloquy before cutting him off with a derisive, “I didn’t realize that Richard III was king of the colonies.”
But the allusion to Richard III in this scene serves as something more than just an opportunity to illustrate Logue’s experience of cultural rejection. Instead, I want to suggest that it represents Seidler’s winking acknowledgement of the film’s conscious appropriation, and often inversion, of a host of Shakespearean themes and tropes.
In fact, the overall arc of the film’s action is an ironic reversal of the plot to Richard III. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is presented as a man who, because he possesses a defect that keeps him from enjoying a private life, pursues instead a path of public ambition through cunning and strategizing. As the hunchback Richard tells the audience in his opening monologue, “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.28-31). In the King’s Speech, however, Bertie’s “defect” frustrates the demands and expectations of his public position, and where Shakespeare’s murderous “Machieval” claws his way to the crown by sheer force of will, Bertie practically has to be dragged there kicking and screaming. When Bertie’s wife tells Logue that her husband has to speak publicly and can’t switch jobs, Logue jokes, “indentured servitude?” She replies, half-grinning, “Something of that nature, yes.”
Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard III in PBS’s The Hollow Crown (2016)
Indeed, this sentiment of being overwhelmed by public duty and desiring the life of a private man is a common theme in Shakespeare’s histories. In Henry V, a play about one of England’s most celebrated medieval kings, the eponymous ruler delivers the following melancholy reflection, just before the fateful battle of Agincourt:
O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing! What infinite heart’s-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that private men have not too,
Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1997)
This “twin-born” nature of English monarchs – one of Shakespeare’s favorite history play tropes – was famously identified by the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz as the doctrine of “The King’s Two Bodies” – the first, a mortal, natural body that is the seat of the private individual, and the second, a political, deathless body that is the abstract embodiment of the English nation continuing in perpetuity.[1] According to Kantorowicz the concept of the “two bodies” developed in legal discourses of 16th century as a necessary bridge between the mystical, theological concepts of the medieval imagination and the modern secular notions of the state. In a seminal reading of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Kantorowicz asserts that “the legal concept of the King’s two bodies cannot…be separated from Shakespeare” because it was Shakespeare who “eternalized the metaphor” in a way that continues to shape the cultural imagination of Western civilization.[2]
As a modern historical drama about a modern sovereign, The King’s Speech certainly plays upon Shakespeare’s eternalized metaphor, but it does so with a keen awareness that the metaphor has undergone a fundamental re-imagination since the 16th century. Indeed, the modern conception of the English monarchy, starting with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, has been marked by a concerted effort to suppress the importance of the King’s natural body and to completely divorce the private will of the sovereign from the functioning of public authority.[3] “If I’m a king, where’s my power?” Bertie exclaims in the penultimate scene of the film, acknowledging this limited and circumscribed role the monarch now inhabits: “Can I form a government? Can I levy a tax? Declare a war? No.” But the mystical element that still peeps through, the one that almost embarrassingly attests to the fact that the king is still the clumsy persona mixta of a pre-modern constitutional tradition, is the importance of the voice. “And yet I’m the seat of all authority” Bertie continues, “Why? Because the nation believes that when I speak I speak for them.”
While acknowledging the dull reality of 20th century kingship, TheKing’s Speech nevertheless takes seriously this mystical kernel still alive and active in the operation of sovereignty. For even in the modern age, it is the sovereign’s voice that the nation is supposed to respond to, particularly in times of crisis, and this voice therefore continues to function as the symbol of a stable and secure order. But the film is not merely fascinated with the mystical authority of the king’s voice in the abstract; its interest also lies in the unique historical moment of the early 20th century, when the development of broadcast technology raised the stakes of the sovereign’s personality in new, and potentially disruptive, ways. “In the past, all a king had to do was look respectable in uniform and not fall off his horse,” George V, played by Michael Gambon, grumbles to his son Bertie, “Now, we must invade people’s homes and ingratiate ourselves with them. This family’s been reduced to those lowest, basest of all creatures. We’ve become actors.”
Extending and ironizing this analogy between royal authority and public performance, the visual vocabulary of the film draws remarkable parallels between the traditional iconographies of royalty and the material technology through which that royalty will be translated in the age of mass media. Thus, the very first images of the film are a series of lingering shots upon a single microphone, impressive in its bulk and resembling a kind of missile, as if to suggest that one false move will unleash its powerful, destructive force. This, as the film’s framing implies, is the new throne, the new crown.
Microphone as New Seat of Power in The King’s Speech (2010)
We are then shown the pre-broadcast ritual of a nameless BBC announcer, wherein the film offers a kind of visual parody of a coronation ceremony, inviting the audience to witness the anointing and blessing of the voice before it takes its place in this new seat of power.
The fact that it is a nameless BBC announcer undergoing this parodic coronation emphasizes the profound effect that this new technology will have upon the nature of power and authority. Later in the film, when Bertie and his family have finished watching a newsreel of his own coronation, the images and sounds that immediately follow are of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Bertie sits silently watching Hitler’s bombastic performance as a young Princess Elizabeth asks, “Papa, what’s he saying?” “I don’t know,” Bertie wryly replies, “but he seems to be saying it rather well.”
As the film suggests, for a consummate speaker like Hitler, the technology of the microphone magnifies his personality, and it is in this act of technological magnification, rather than the force of custom or tradition, that the authority of modern authoritarianism is created. Bertie, by contrast, with an authority based on a tradition much bigger than his individual self – the thousand year legacy of British royalty – finds himself dwarfed and overwhelmed by the prospect of personal magnification, a theme that the film’s director Tom Hooper signals brilliantly through camera angles and shot composition, wherein microphones are continually eclipsing and obscuring Bertie’s face.
Motif of Microphones Obscuring Bertie’s Face in The King’s Speech (2010)
Bertie’s stutter thus operates as a kind of return of the repressed, embarrassingly foregrounding the continued fact of the king’s physical presence, his natural body. The plot of the film, therefore, principally revolves around achieving some kind of harmonious re-alignment of the two bodies paradox.
Enter: Lionel Logue with his Shakespearean eloquence and radical approach to speech therapy. And while Bertie’s rise to the throne is a reversal of Shakespeare’s Richard III, his friendship with Logue recalls and inverts many of the tropes contained in the Prince Hal/ Falstaff relationship of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2.
Simon Russell Beale (left) as Falstaff and Tom Hiddleston (right) as Prince Hal in PBS’s The Hollow Crown (2012)
Like Bertie, Prince Hal, in Henry IV, Part 1, condescends to a state of familiarity and equality in order to learn how to “speak” the language of his subjects, proclaiming while in the riotous company of Eastcheap, “I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (2.4.18-20), a skill that will later serve him well when he must rally his troops before the battle of Agincourt – a feat he achieves through his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech, calling upon his “Band of brothers” to shed their blood with him (Henry V, 4.3.18-67).
Hal’s Rejection of Falstaff Upon Becoming King Henry V (from an 1830 Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays edited by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke)
However, Hal must ultimately renounce Falstaff and the friendship that taught him this speech because of the threat that such a private friendship poses for the public good. Shakespeare famously illustrates this threat in Falstaff’s reaction to hearing of Hal’s ascension to the throne, where the reprobate knight proclaims, “the laws of England are at my commandment” (2 Henry IV, 5.3.136-7), a sentiment which exemplifies the common Renaissance fear that corrupt personal advisors might turn the king’s power into a tool for private gain.
The filmmakers seem very cognizant of the threat Logue represents within the confines of these older tropes, and interestingly, there are many sinister associations with Logue’s character subtly sprinkled throughout the film. Consider for instance the visual sequence of Elizabeth’s initial visit to engage Logue’s services for her husband. First, we see her in a chauffeured car on her way to the office, but because of the thickness of the fog, a man walks out in front as a guide. Then, upon arriving, she must cage herself in a rather menacing-looking elevator and wait for its slow decent to a lower floor. Though very slight visual cues, the fog and the elevator give the unsettling impression of entering a kind ofGrecian underworld. The man guiding the Duchess’s car through the fog in particular conjures up images ofCharonleading a freshly arrived soul across the riverStyx.
Then we have Logue’s Shakespearean quotes themselves, all of which come from very sinister contexts. Besides Richard III, the “poor and content” line is spoken by Iago and is delivered during the very scene where he first plants the doubt about Desdemona’s virtue in Othello’s mind, a doubt that will eventually ripen into the murderous jealousy that causes Othello’s tragic downfall. Logue’s third instance of Shakespearean quotation comes in the form of Caliban’s famous “Be not afeared” speech describing the The Tempest’s enchanted Isle (3.2.135-43), a speech which Logue delivers, with an impromptu hunchback, for the entertainment of his sons.
While the lyricism of the speech is breathtaking, it’s important to remember that, in its original context, Caliban is trying to convince the newly shipwrecked commoners Trinculo and Stephano to kill Prospero for him – an instance of the colonized subject attempting to destroy the man who holds sovereign sway over him.
Russell Brand as Trinculo (left), Alfred Molina as Stephano (center), and Djimon Hounsou as Caliban (right) in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010)
Granted, the film never depicts Logue as harboring violent intentions toward Bertie, but it does position him as a subversive figure. The suspicion of Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang, played by Derek Jacobi, towards Logue, particularly in the run up to Bertie’s coronation, is construed by the film as mostly being motivated by class snobbery. However, the suspicion also arises from the aforementioned fear that personal advisors and favorites to the king can become threats to the constitutional order. Here we may again recall Falstaff’s hopes in Hal’s succession or the figure of Piers Gaveston as depicted in Christopher Marlowe’s EdwardII. Visually, the film registers this age-old suspicion of favorites in its shot composition and its staging. Consider, for example, the camera angle during Bertie and Logue’s conversation, prior to Edward’s abdication, about whether or not Bertie has the potential to be king. As if showing us Bertie’s own internal interpretation of how taboo such a consideration is, the film frames Logue as a kind of devil on Bertie’s shoulder, whispering treasonous temptations into his ear.
Or consider the image that we get during the rehearsal for Bertie’s coronation. Having dismissed everyone but Logue, Bertie falls into a fit of despair, asserting that he has only come to this point because of Logue’s ambition to have a star pupil in the future king. Getting up from the throne and looking off into the distance, Bertie morbidly imagines that his legacy will be that of “Mad King George the Stammerer, who let his people down so badly in their hour of need that…” Bertie does not complete the self-pitying prediction because as he turns, he sees Logue casually lounging in Saint Edward’s chair, as naturally as if he were king himself.
Finally, during the climactic wartime broadcast where Bertie announces Britain’s entry into World War II, the crucial moment towards which all of Bertie’s speech therapy (and thus the film as a whole) has been building, we are given the visual of Logue actually conducting Bertie as if he were some kind of orchestra (see edited clip below). However, the film only raises these symbolic fears of usurpation in order to demonstrate that they are unfounded. Logue’s sitting in Saint Edward’s chair merely serves to demonstrate that Bertie does not need to be intimidated by the materials of ceremony. (Here, Bertie’s self-affirming shout of “I have a voice!” is essentially the film’s feel-good climax). And well before the conclusion of the wartime broadcast, Logue has stopped conducting and stands transfixed, listening to his King’s voice as merely one subject among many. In this climactic moment, we, as an audience, are meant to see how much Logue has helped Bertie discover his own voice and become his own man, registered in the shot composition by a suspended microphone that now reflects Bertie’s face rather than obscuring it.
By inverting the old Shakespearean tropes, the film validates and indeed celebrates the king’s personal friendships as an essential means to fulfilling his royal duties – a touching twist for any Shakespearean critic who thought Hal’s rejection of Falstaff was an unkindness too difficult to stomach. In fact, Logue’s insistence upon intimacy while treating Bertie, and his psychological approaches to speech therapy (an historical inaccuracy on the part of the filmmakers), remind us that the King’s Speech not only updates its Shakespearean themes according to modern media, but also updates the problem of the King’s two bodies, and the king’s voice, in the context of post-Freudian psychology. As the Lacanian critic Mladen Dolar has written in his work, A Voice and Nothing More, “we are social beings by the voice and through the voice; it seems that the voice stands at the axis of our social bonds, and that voices are the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of subjectivity.”[4] Indeed, the film presents Bertie’s stuttering as originating in the formation of this “intimate kernel of subjectivity” and further exacerbated by the process through which it gets integrated into a larger social fabric. Significantly, Logue is able to convince Bertie to start therapy through a trick. In what has become the film’s iconic scene, Logue asks Bertie to read Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy while listening to classical music blasting through a set of headphones. Logue records Bertie’s performance on a record, which Bertie refuses to listen to until much later. When he finally does, however, hearing his voice reciting Shakespeare’s most famous speech without hesitation or mistake, he immediately begins treatment. This trick works, the film implies, for two reasons. First, it allows Bertie to efface himself, to not be crushingly self-conscious of his own voice while he is speaking. Second, the recording allows him to experience his own voice from the perspective of another, to be alienated enough from it to see it as an object in itself.
As the film suggests, at a deep psychological level Bertie lacks confidence in the world of social response that his voice is supposed to elicit. Here we might recall how, according to Kantorowicz’s concept of the King’s Two Bodies, the peripeteia of Shakespeare’s Richard II occurs when the besieged monarch loses confidence in the mystical power of his kingly capacity and at last becomes aware of his own limited creaturely existence: “I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?” (3.2.175-7). In Bertie’s case, however, the loss of faith is much more profound, for we learn that as a child he was subject to abuse by a nanny who wouldn’t feed him, and that it took his parents three years to notice. The scene in which this information is revealed becomes all the more poignant by the incorporation of one of Logue’s speech therapy techniques introduced earlier in the film. In that earlier scene, Logue explains to Bertie that singing his words using a familiar melody can help keep him from stuttering, at which suggestion Bertie tries the melody to “Swanee River.” So when Bertie later begins to talk about his childhood and the stress of his memories increases the severity of his stammering, Logue advises him to sing it, which results in Bertie confessing the awful neglect of his nanny – “then she wouldn’t feed me” – while finishing with the original lyrics to “Swanne River” – “far, far away.” It’s a brilliant bit of staging on the part of the filmmakers, as it serves to underscore how this traumatic experience instilled feelings of isolation and distance in Bertie, and ultimately caused him to lose faith in the power of his own voice to bridge that distance.
A big part of Logue’s therapy throughout the film, then, is to create a smaller version of this world of social response, a more intimate realm somewhere between the purely public and purely private, where Bertie only needs to worry about a single recipient and can be confident that this recipient is a friend. This theme is most directly illustrated in the final scene where Bertie delivers his inspiring wartime broadcast in a small room just to the side of the palace offices. Only Logue is there, instructing Bertie to “Say it to me, as a friend.” Coupling the intimate space of self-with-other with a palpable demonstration of mass media’s potential for self-amplification, the scene finally banishes the specter of totalitarianism and tyranny heretofore haunting the film’s meditation on modernity and sovereignty, opting instead for the emotionally satisfying resolution of melodrama, albeit (it must be admitted in this context) melodrama of the highest order.[5]
But it behooves us as attentive viewers to recognize the quaint nostalgia at the heart of this melodramatic resolution – a nostalgia which readily acknowledges the first half of the 20th century as a time of political and social upheaval, but nevertheless takes comfort in the assurance of a worthy future ahead. How else are we to understand the bizarre incongruity of the film’s final moments, where a declaration of war is greeted not with sadness or trepidation, but with relief and triumph, as family members and palace officials cheerfully applaud Bertie like a sports movie underdog who’s just won the big game?
By contrast, at the dawn of 21st century, though we feel a commensurate sense of social and technological upheaval, what we lack is that easy faith in the brighter tomorrow, the confidence that the bitter struggle ahead will inevitably lead to some grand, ennobling victory. We shouldn’t forget that, even though it won Best Picture in 2010, The King’s Speech wasn’t the only historical drama on that year’s list of Oscar contenders. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network garnered as much, if not more, critical and popular acclaim as the King’s Speech, but the tone and guiding metaphor of each film could not be further apart.
Even the title, TheSocial Network, evokes a de-centered, depersonalized world of distributed power and murky social obligations, while the film itself structurally refuses to empathize with or reject its central protagonist through the frame story of a legal deposition, leaving it unclear whose version of events is the truth. Through the course of the film, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is portrayed as a social maladroit, whose rise to the top is fueled by a combination of unimpeachable talent, unshakable resentment for the existing social hierarchy, and just a dash of Machiavellian ruthlessness – in other words, like a Richard III. Clearly, the more unsettling strains of Shakespeare’s tragic vision have not been rendered obsolete by the modern age, but indeed continue to resonate with contemporary doubts and anxieties about where our society might be headed.
We must ask ourselves, therefore, what it says about our own historical moment that, when it came time to choose between these two films, popular imagination and institutional recognition in America longingly bent toward the comforting paradigm of the past, indulging an atavistic impulse to listen to and follow the steady, singular voice of a sovereign.
[2] Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 26.
[3] The classic analysis of the sovereign’s circumscribed and symbolic role in England’s post-1688 constitutional government is Walter Bagehot’sThe English Constitution (1867).
[4] Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 23.
Robin S. Stewart received his Ph.D. in English from UC Irvine in 2013, specializing in early modern British literature and Shakespeare. He has written previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog onEmpire and the Nation-State Before the 18th Century.For interested students, he will be teaching a course on Shakespeare (E103) during the upcoming Summer Session that will be coordinated with the New Swan Theater’s productions of The Tempest and Taming of the Shrew. Students who enroll in the course will read three plays (The Tempest, Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear), analyze various film versions of each, and, as their final assignment, write their own creative adaptation of a chosen Shakespeare scene.
Vivian Folkenflik is an emeritus lecturer in the Humanities Core Program, where she taught for over three decades. She is the editor and translator of Anne Gédéon Lafitte, the Marquis de Pelleport’s novel The Bohemians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and An Extraordinary Woman: Selected Writings of Germaine de Staël (Columbia University Press, 1992). She is also the author and archivist of our program’s institutional history at UC Irvine. Her thought and teaching have been at the center of many cycles of Humanities Core, and she continues to act as a pedagogical mentor for seminar leaders in our program. She has blogged previously for the Humanities Core Research Blog on the intersection of race and gender in past course texts.
