Repression and self-denial have fatal consequences in John Ford’s The Broken Heart.
Martin Wiggins explains.
Title page of The Broken Heart, first published in 1633.
Our scene is Sparta; he whose best of art
Hath drawn this piece calls it The Broken Heart.
In the first couplet of his prologue, John Ford establishes a continuum between the private world of the self and the public world of the community, between ancient Sparta and the human heart which we can never literally see in the theatre. (He had not yet written ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.) Sparta, a unique choice of setting for a play of the English Renaissance, was a city known for valuing self-discipline over self-expression. The pressures and difficulties created by its code of behaviour are evident in the way Orgilus responds to the difficult situation at the root of the narrative, the forced marriage of his fiancée Penthea to jealous old Bassanes: he takes himself off to Athens not to indulge an impulse to withdraw into the academic and the contemplative but as a considerate act of altruism. He himself has nothing to gain from it: after all, as he says himself, ‘Souls sunk in sorrows never are without ’em; | They change fresh airs, but bear their griefs about ’em.’ The ones to benefit will be Penthea and Bassanes, losing the constant reminder of the husband she might and should have had, and therefore losing also an unwilling provocative agent for jealousy and pain. Yet it is also important that there are powerful feelings of sorrow under his austere, self-abnegating Spartan carapace. Orgilus’ very name, suggestive of anger, implies a nature given to titanic passion, and in soliloquy he confirms the presence of normal human emotions, ‘those flames which hidden waste | A breast made tributary to the laws | Of beauty’. But the key word is ‘hidden’: like a baked Alaska in reverse, Orgilus is cold on the outside, but passionately hot within.
Like Orgilus, most of the Spartans repress their feelings and their pain in order to show the cool, dignified, laconic outside which so typifies the play down to its very style. Of them all, Penthea is the one who submits herself most absolutely to the necessity of her situation, always acting against her own emotional self-interest from her unwanted marriage to Bassanes onwards, and always determined to live by the terms of the role that has been thrust upon her. In effect, she internalizes the culture’s self-denial and accepts guilt for the wrongs of which she is in fact a victim: when in madness she finally gives explicit utterance to her feelings, she declares herself not violated but ‘strumpeted’ by the marriage. The upshot is the terrible masochism with which, on meeting Orgilus in the palace garden, she refuses him neither for honour nor for loyalty to her unwanted husband, but for his own good: he is too good for her, whored as she is, and ‘My true love | Abhors to think that Orgilus deserved | No better favour than a second bed’; so she declares that she will save him from that fate by marrying again to make herself even more unhappy with a second husband ‘worse than this and less desired’. This is the trigger for Orgilus to plot revenge, and for her to collapse into madness and death. Her husband makes an instructive contrast. It is a measure of Bassanes’ pain that he is so seriously out of step with the expected norms of his society. At one point it is rumoured that unreasonable, unfounded jealousy is to be made legal grounds for divorce. Here is the usual Spartan devotion to face value which he cannot share, haunted as he is by the possibility that things may not really be as they seem, and that Penthea may be cuckolding him: ‘No woman but can fall, and doth, or would’. It’s a mere anxious fantasy – there is never any reason to suspect that Penthea would so much as consider adultery, let alone commit it – and it is expressed in terms of bouts of manic behaviour and barely suppressed violence: he proposes to block up a street-window to forestall temptation, and threatens to tear one servant’s throat out and cut another into collops should they try to corrupt their mistress. Here is one Spartan who cannot keep his turbulent feelings under control. Yet if this bad behaviour is principally presented in broad terms as something like humours-comedy folly, there is also a kind of peculiar, pragmatic wisdom to it. Whereas Penthea, the ultimate repressed Spartan, is the first character to die, Bassanes is the only one who experiences violent emotions in the course of the play, yet who remains alive at the end.
It is usually a mistake to take violent death, often of an extreme and sensational kind, as the defining signature of early 17th-century tragedy. In’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the murders, all associated with social gatherings, are extreme and disturbing intrusions into a world which, if it is not necessarily the same as our own, nevertheless has some recognizable standard of everyday life which is violated by the tragic events. However, the four premature deaths in The Broken Heart are characterized more by their peculiar quietness and apparent serenity: whereas ’Tis Pity climaxes with the slash of Giovanni’s eviscerating dagger, here we have the slow, almost silent drip, drip, drip as Orgilus’ life-blood drains away. Ithocles meets his end unspectacularly immobilized in a trick-chair, not begging for life but stoically commanding Orgilus to murder him. Penthea dies off-stage by a slow process of internal collapse which is explicitly construed as an act of self-destruction: ‘Her blood … be henceforth never heightened | With taste of sustenance. Starve.’ Calantha goes by quicker but equally invisible means, containing her grief long enough to discharge her necessary public responsibilities and then inducing her heart to break with a terrible cry of ‘Crack, crack’. And, rather than dishonour himself with what he calls ‘vagabond pursuit of dreadful safety’, Orgilus actively puts himself in the way of justice for the murder, and chooses a self-inflicted execution which will give him his own triumph in the dignity and fortitude with which he can bear to die slowly. These are all characteristically Spartan deaths, requiring extremes of stoical endurance and self-control.
‘Break, my heart,’ says Hamlet, ‘for I must hold my tongue.’ In the final movement of the play, self-discipline and repression seem always to be associated with the aggravation of pain: ‘Could my tears speak,’ says Orgilus’ sister when he is sentenced to death, ‘My griefs were slight.’ Calantha’s behaviour, dancing on ‘When one news straight came huddling on another | Of death, and death, and death’, is the play’s crowning act of self-control, but it is also profoundly self-destructive:
Be such mere women who with shrieks and outcries
Can vow a present end to all their sorrows,
Yet live to vow new-pleasures and outlive them.
They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings.
Shrieks and outcries, such as we have heard from jealous Bassanes, prove ultimately therapeutic; it is Spartan self-restraint, the turning inward of grief and pain, which is fatal. So Calantha’s heart breaks, for she has held her tongue.
Martin Wiggins is Senior Lecturer and Fellow, and Tutor for Research, at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
The Broken Heart opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from 12 March 2015.
Directed by Caroline Steinbeis
Designed by Max Jones
Composed by Simon Slater