—Aristophanes, The Frogs ll.389-393
Allow me to say many things in jest and many things in seriousness, and, having sported and lampooned in a manner worthy of your feast, let me, victorious, win the victor’s wreath.
Sometimes misleading etymologies are the most instructive. Take, for instance, the word ‘obscene,’ the subject of which the normal human being recognizes intuitively. So also the average American city council or school board which forbids the reading of pornographic young adult novels in their meetings, while nonetheless countenancing their assignment to young children. A facially false etymology reveals something true about the obscene: that it should not take place on stage, but off stage (from the parts ob-, ‘against,’ and –skene, ‘stage’). This is a notable feature of classical Greek tragedy such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: the horrors which hide in the tragic abyss do not themselves appear on stage but are only manifest through speech. We hear of Oedipus’ parricide and incest, but we do not see these abominations. Perhaps this is why theatre critic Francis Fergusson, in his introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics, describes the Stagirite’s term praxis (action) as a “movement of spirit”: the action of a play is not always what a character does physically so much as what happens within them.
Such an understanding of action is necessary to discuss the psychomachia of Western Civilization that is Jane Clark Scharl’s Sonnez Les Matines, a verse play starring three university students in Paris who would come to be known as St. Ignatius of Loyola, John Calvin, and Francois Rabelais: the first Jesuit, the Protestant reformer, and the bawdy humanist. Although Scharl’s play has a murder mystery element to it, it’s no typical whodunnit à la Agatha Christie or other members of the detection club. Rather, what the three colleagues discover is their varying complicity in a murder that happens just outside a familiar tavern. The region of the abyss that these characters explore is somewhere beyond Oedipus’ Thebes, past even the more receptive recesses of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens, The Persians, or Prometheus Bound. What classicist and translator David Grene said in his short preface to Prometheus Bound can stand for Sonnez Les Matines as well: that it does not “measure up to Aristotelian standards,” but rather illustrates “a great permanent truth … at the heart of man’s activity,” namely the reality of man’s guilt and grace in the flesh polyphonically voiced in different meters by Calvin, Ignatius, and Rabelais.
Scharl’s play, taking place on Mardi Gras, that last night of the season of Carnival before the great fast of Lent, does not truly dwell in tragedy but rather in the borderland that professor of literature Louise Cowan called, following a Dantean paradigm, “infernal comedy.” Stepping out of the tavern, Rabelais shivers and says, “The streets themselves are hell tonight.” How? As Cowan notes, within the infernally comic realm, the pretty girl is victimized, the body is debased, and feasting is diseased and distorted. Calvin’s implication in the murder lies in his drunkenness; being some six cups deep in wine, he is “not easy / in his soul” on account of his struggle with despair. In such a state, he finds himself unable to intervene upon hearing the girl’s cry.
The play does not end in the abyss, with the trap sprung for the protagonist: not with the rotten red of the Danish court where Hamlet and the nobility lie dead, but with the matins bells ringing in the beginning of a season designed to turn the world upside down; not in the infernal way General Roberto Vannacci sees contemporary Italy, but in the celestial way another Italian once saw his home town of Assisi. Nonetheless, one senses the gloom of the tragic, the inexorable pacing of Greek tragedy’s Fate, hovering around and stalking about with Calvin. Scharl’s characterization reveals the later reformer’s doctrine of predestination as rooted in contempt for the weakness of the flesh and its at times apparent impenetrability to grace; the young philosophy student reminds us of the Danish prince, uttering a speech redolent of Hamlet’s “too too solid flesh” soliloquy.
Calvin has all of Hamlet’s indecision, resting on a lack of belief in his own freedom: as he says early on, “There is no choice—there’s only a restless flinching from pain to pain.” One senses within Calvin the typical modern error that undoes theology and philosophy both, a restless grasping for certainty which cannot abide faithfully confident in God. He sees in Ignatius and Rabelais one who “makes action seem so simple, the other guilt so trivial,” but he is himself consumed with fear of danger. Calvin’s anxiety recalls that of many young people in our own time, who are consumed with fear—fear that they could never do enough in a world that is falling apart, fear that they could never be enough to satisfy their deepest longings. They, like Calvin, hope that by shedding what feels like the “ruin[s] / of a man,” they might “find / within not one thing that [they] recognize” of their past selves, but rather a wholly remade identity.
When St. Paul urges his flock, in his letter to the Ephesians, to “Put on the new man” (Eph 4:23-24), he does so not with repugnance for those he shepherds, but with a sense that Christ perfects those who trust in him. Ignatius likewise does not cease in his converted life to possess a thumotic temperament; as Calvin rightly accuses him, “Battle’s entered deep into your soul, / and though you left behind the fields of Spain, / you will never leave the fight.” His love of the honor of his house was what caused him to begin a brawl with Rabelais in the courtyard, and the play’s gradual unveiling sequence shows that his excessive love of honor to the point of pride implicates him in the murder.
Ignatius shows the most signs of conversion through the play’s five scenes, as his overzealous love for family and homeland is chastened. By his concluding speech, he is able to call Rabelais both “brother” and “friend,” even though Rabelais began the play by joking about the Spaniard’s heritage. As Ignatius leaves the stage, and despite being uncertain of his fate before the law, Ignatius is able confidently to proclaim that, “Whatever comes, I know / where my first loyalty is owed: / to God’s Church, who bids me now / make haste to be well shrived.”
While Scharl works hard to craft the personae of Calvin and Ignatius, those characters with whom her audience is likely most familiar, it seems that the character of Francois Rabelais, on the other hand, came almost naturally. In the play’s preface, her explanation of Carnival and its fleshly excesses that call out for the penances of Lent, echoes the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim, in Rabelais and His World, that in the medieval carnival, distortion pointed toward rather than obscured reality. Hierarchies were inverted to temper pride, the flesh was indulged to show the emptiness of the passions, and the body was degraded to prepare the celebrant for newness of life.
This degradation must not be confused with the life-denying attitude of Calvin—we must remember that carnival has its telos in the injunction of the liturgy of Ash Wednesday: Memento homo quia pulvis est, et in pulverem reverteris. Or, as Rabelais comically phrases it in his concluding soliloquy, “That muck / to muck, muck we are, to muckiest muck / we shall return.” While Rabelais’ bawdiness leads his colleagues and the play’s audience to assume at first that he is guilty—of gluttony, fornication, possibly even murder—the deep humility and humor of the one-time Franciscan leave him with a greater innocence than anyone expects.
The sheer beauty and amusement provided by Rabelais’ one-liners and soliloquies testifies to Scharl’s comic wit and shows her ability to meld the comic and the serious characteristics of the one the Greeks called spoudogeloios, the ‘serious-funny man,’ whose humor most truly speaks of weighty matters.
