Unreal Mockery

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 11

Unreal Mockery

"ENTER Brachiano’s Ghost, in his leather cassock and breeches, boots and cowl; in his hand a pot of lilyflowers with a skull in it... . throws earth upon him and shows him _ the skull." This superb stage direction, from the post-Shakespearian dramatist. Tohn

Webster, not only gives the quintessence of that extraordinary generation, it expresses. with some vividness a strain of imagery recurrent in European thought — the macabre, that chilling mixture of the uncanny, the hortible and, perhaps most essential, the

grotesque. ‘Po trace its history would be a vast task, but the main line of descent seems to have begun when the fancies of medieval civilisation in decay turned to images of death and putrefaction. Morbidity and necrophily have been distinguishing signs of the macabre tradition ever since, but curiously enough it occurs not in periods of decadence and decline, but of vigour and expansion. It was the dark side of the boundless zest for sensual living which the Renaissance introduced-in Shakespeare’s lightest comedies Armado, Rosalind, and Falstaff abound in images of the grave-and this phase reached a climax of grisly efflorescence in Brachiano’s pot of lilies. Then it lay in quiescence till the coming of romanticism, whose vehement and unbridled spiritual ardour overflowed in the familiar images -the skull, cerements, tombstone and worm, and many new ones; the, figure of the ghost went beyond its Elizabethan role of moral accuser and became an emanation of the evil, the malignantirrational, the uncanny. Dickens, Melville, and Scott were great authors who turned to the macabre, but there was a line of writers who made a cult of itPoe, Le Fanu, Beddoes-and, as an interesting 3YA broadcast showed us, "The Influence of the Macabre" was strong in 19th Century music: Liszt, Moussorgsky, and Kilpinen were examples.