just as the bloodshed of Elizabethan tragedy is both harrowing and entertaining.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth (V.5.26–8) contains the titular speaker’s lament that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /Signifying nothing.” Elizabethan tragedy, filled with sound and fury, signifies that idiocy is a form of self-centered orientation alien to altruism (Greek idios means “one’s own self”; Latin alter means “other”).To this effect, Beatrice’s long pre-suicidal lament, brilliantly wrought in Valentio, is inescapably Elizabethan, including the following: “. . . Love, Lord of the Soul, before / Whose sovereignty Friendship should bend the knee / Of homage meek, hath risen in rash rebellion, / His throne usurping, claiming obedience low / Of him who knows how to receive, but not / To give. . . .” Idiocy, self-induced blindness to the Other, is, in fact, the gene of obsession.
Virginia Woolf, to whom this idiocy is manifest in her phrase (from A Room of One’s Own) “Milton’s bogey,” catches this note of human antithesis in Orlando. The comic novel opens with young Orlando entertaining himself by “slicing at the head of a [slain] Moor which hung from the rafters.” The cultural setting of the first part of the novel is Elizabethan England, in which Shakespeare’s plays (especially Othello) are very popular. Orlando, engaged to marry Lady Margaret, deserts her and falls wholly in love with Marousha (“Sasha”), a Russian princess, in much the same way that Valentio falls in love with Livia. “Sasha” requites his love but arbitrarily deserts him. The force of Orlando’s love-at-first-sight is a kind of violence; it is, indeed, quite similar to Valentio’s obsessive love of Livia at first sight and to his consequent desertion of Beatrice. Obsession is a violent emotion, a willful blocking of one’s vision from all but the immediate object of one’s desire; and it is akin to hostility. Woolf seems to see a resolution of love and war only in fantasy, the pursuit of which can lead to the essence of reality in the exercise of the imagination. For her, Elizabethan tragedy records a failure of imagination, a failure from which, significantly, we can learn.
Obsession in Elizabethan tragedy ranges from culturally conflicted emotions (the wars of houses) to individually self-centered emotions, including those “che sono vili” (“that are villainous”), as Professor Khatchadourian observes in Il tragico e l’irrazionale [Rivista di Estetica, XII.1, Jan.–Apr. 1967, p. 73], like the ambition of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Obsession is never benign; and in Elizabethan tragedy love is measured on the scales of obsession.
It is important to learn that to be obsessed is to be possessed by the notion of what one wants to possess. The lover, requited or unrequited in desire, wants to possess the wherewithal to secure her or his beloved. Star-crossed lovers want to possess the freedom to consummate their love. Families want to possess their integrity securely by keeping their integers within the strictly defined familial unit. Lovers and families provide the context for the sound and fury of Elizabethan tragedy. With individuals, it is love (or what is taken to be love: a receipt of satisfaction more than a giving of it). With families, it is feuds. With nations, it is wars. From the star-crossed lovers (Valentio and Livia; Uberto and Beatrice) in Professor Khatchadourian’s tragedy we proceed to the feud between the Ameidei and the Buondelmonti. And then, as we learn from his introduction, there would be the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, “and long after the original cause of enmity had ceased, they continued to steep all Italy in blood.”
As Virginia Woolf and Haig Khatchadourian intimate effectively, the trail from love to war is blazed by obsession. Love is, not a unilateral donation of the self to the other, but an uncompromising need to be satisfied by possession of the other. That Aphrodite and Ares should embrace and produce Harmonia is a product of the imagination. According to Woolf, the essence of reality is to be found in the imagination. Khatchadourian thus fires his imagination by shaping historical shadows into Elizabethan tragic poetry. He restates and adumbrates an answer to the question that Woolf has promulgated in Orlando. Woolf has playfully parodied Elizabethan culture and imaginatively equated the sexes by changing her male Orlando into a female Orlando in mid-story. Khatchadourian evokes Elizabethan culture by recapturing its music and force and tracing the genesis of its dramatic creativity to ancient Greece. Both enable us inspiritedly to exercise the imagination in coping with the phenomenon of idiocy. That, one may conclude, is in accordance with what is exemplary.
Roy Arthur Swanson
Emeritus Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Introduction
The original play, consisting of Part One of this book, inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedies, was written in blank verse in Elizabethan English, many decades ago, during the author’s Junior Year at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. It follows, like Shakespeare’s tragedies, the Classical Greek Tragedies in its thematic and structural elements, including ignorance and discovery, the climax and the denouement, as well as the tragic character’s Achilles’ heel—error of judgment (hamartia)—formalized by Aristotle in the Poetics, In 2012 a new version, in free verse, in modern English, was added for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Elizabethan English.
The source of the Tragedy consists in a series of historical events in 1215 Florence that resulted in protracted internecine conflict involving a number of leading families. The following passages, culled from a long-lost history book, provided the works’ inspiration.
“In Florence, the city that prided itself on being founded under the protection and ascendant of Mars, and therefore doomed by fate to everlasting troubles. Hence Roccuzzo de Mozzi is made by Dante to say:
Io fui della citta, che nel Batista
Cangio iL primo Padrone, onde ei per questo
Sempre con L’arte sua la fara trista.
In the year 1215, Messer Mazzingo Tegrini invited many Florentines of high rank to dine at his villa near Campi about six miles from the capital; while at able the family jester snatched a trencher of meat from Messer Uberto degli Infangati who, nettled at this impertinence, expressed his displeasure in terms so offensive that Messer Oddo Arrighi as sharply and unceremoniously rebuked him; upon this Uberto gave him the lie and Oddo in return dashed a trencher of meat in his face.
Everything was immediately in confusion; weapons were soon out, and while the guests started up in disorder young Buondelmonte de’Buondelmonti, the friend and companion to Uberto, severely wounded Oddo Arrighi.
The party then separated and Oddo called a meeting of his friends to consider the offence; amongst them were the counts Gangalandi, the Ubverti, Amedidei, etc. who unanimously decided that the quarrel shoud be quietly settled by a marriage between Buondelmonte and Oddo’s niece, the daughter of Messer Lambertuccio di Capo di Ponte, of the Ameidei family. This proposition appears to have been unhesitatingly accepted by the offender’s family as a day was immediately nominated for the ceremony of plighting his troth to the destined bride.
During the interim, Madonna Aldruda Donati, sent privately for Buondelmonte and thus addressed him: “Unworthy knight! What! Hast thou accepted a wife through fear of the Fifanti and Uberti? Leave her that thou hast taken, choose this damsel in her place and be henceforth a brave and honoured gentleman.” In so saying she threw open the chamber door, and exposed her daughter to his view; the unexpected apparition of so much beauty, as it were soliciting his love, had its usual consequence; Buondelmonte’s better reason was overcome, yet he had resolution to answer, “Alas! it is now too late!” “No,” replied Aldruda; “thou canst even yet have her; dare but to take the step and let the consequences rest on my head.” “I do dare,” returned the fascinated youth, and stepping forward again plighted a faith no longer his to give.
Early on the 10th of February, the very day appointed for his original nuptials, Buondelmonte passed by the Porta Santa Maria amidst all the kinsfolk of his first betrothed, who had assembled near the dwellings of the Ameidei to assist at the expected marriage, yet not without certain misgivings of his faithlessness. With a haughty demeanour he rode forward through them all, bearing the marriage ring to the lady of his choice and leaving her of the Ameidei with the shame of an aggravated insult by choosing the same moment for the violation