Abstract
This chapter addresses Bradley and Cooper’s first work published as Michael Field, the verse drama Callirrhoë (1884). This play, set in an ancient Greek city grappling with the new religion of Dionysus, serves as an artistic manifesto that guides the rest of Michael Field’s writing lives. With a plot that hinges on a complex rendering of sacrifice and devotion, Callirrhoë implements a hybrid form combining closet drama and verse tragedy to express the complexities of living a passionate aesthetic life. This chapter takes special notice of the six lyric poems that are embedded within and contrasted to the blank verse drama to show how characters sing lyrically to express emotions that blank verse cannot body forth. I ultimately argue that Bradley and Cooper identify more strongly with the Dionysian priest than the maenad, because the priest interprets the god’s messages for the people and speaks with authority. Whatever else he represents in Callirrhoë, Dionysus’s primarily role for Michel Field is as the God who inspires them to create verse drama.
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Notes
- 1.
T. D. Olverson, Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 127.
- 2.
Yopie Prins, “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 46, 57.
- 3.
Sharon Bickle, “Victorian Maenads: On Michael Field’s Callirrhoë and Being Driven Mad,” The Michaelian, iss. 2 (December 2010), 2.
- 4.
Linda M. Shires, “Of Maenads, Mothers, and Feminized Males: Victorian Readings of the French Revolution,” in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory History and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (New York: Routledge, 1992), 147–65; Yopie Prins, Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 202–218.
- 5.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund (London: George Bell, 1884), iv, HathiTrust. Further citations of this work are given in the text.
- 6.
Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 122. Although Evangelista focuses more on their lyric volume Underneath the Bough than the drama Callirrhoë, his conclusion that “Bradley and Cooper sought to understand antiquity by performing it” applies particularly well to this play.
- 7.
A. Mary F. Robinson, Rev. of Callirrhoe, Fair Rosamund, by Michael Field, Academy 25, no. 631 (June 7, 1884): 395.
- 8.
Michael Field names only two in the band of maenads: Anaitis, the head maenad who does Coresus’s bidding, and Dione, whose function in the play is to demonstrate broken family ties.
- 9.
Prins, “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” 56–7; Andrew Eastham, “Bacchic Transference and Ecstatic Faith: Michael Field’s Callirrhoë and the Origins of Drama,” Women’s Studies 40 (2011): 498.
- 10.
Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 3.
- 11.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund, rebound and annotated, Oxford University, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.4v.
- 12.
In Fair Rosamund , Bradley underlines in red all parts written by Cooper—as she had done for Callirrhoë—but adds no explanations.
- 13.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.2.
- 14.
Michael Field, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.2.
- 15.
Michael Field, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.2.
- 16.
Coresus knows that hurting the town hurts her more than personal bodily harm: in wreaking his revenge, he refuses Anaitis’s offer to curse Callirrhoë with madness, answering, “Nay. / On her no curse; but on her city set / Long-famished plague” because the death of her loved ones “will evoke / Worse agonies than the sharp pangs of death” (29).
- 17.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.2. In a November 27, 1884, letter to Robert Browning, Bradley explains that “[w]e hold ourselves bound in life and in literature to reveal—as far as may be—the beauty of the high feminine standard of the ought to be.” Nonetheless, she avers, “we could not be scared away, as ladies, from the tragic elements of life.” Michael Field, Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), 8.
- 18.
The other was F. W. H. Myers’s essay on “Greek Oracles” from Hellenica. She quotes the relevant passage about Coresus and Callirrhoë verbatim in her notes on the text, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.9.
- 19.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.11.
- 20.
Among the “facts in the life of Dionysus [that] must be brought prominently forward, as telling powerfully upon even forming the character of Coresus,” Bradley highlights “[t]he period of his madness, when he wandered through the Earth, persecuted + avenging, the victim of Hera’s wrath.” MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.5.
- 21.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.3.
- 22.
Michael Field, Eng.poet.e.70, f.1. This use of “quicken”—suggesting fetal movement that is proof of life—again analogizes literary creation with procreation, and emphasizes the life-affirming element of artistic inspiration. See chapter 2, note 99.
- 23.
Catherine Burroughs, “The Persistence of Closet Drama: Theory, History, Form,” in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 216-7; Catherine Burroughs, “Closet Drama Studies,” introduction to Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form, ed. Catherine Burroughs (New York: Routledge, 2019), 3.
- 24.
Joseph Bristow details Michael Field’s interest in staged plays throughout the 1890s, as well as their determination to stage Attila, My Attila! (1896) even after the failure of A Question of Memory (1893), noting that they wished for a place “among a rising generation of playwrights whose daring dramas were transforming the London stage.” Joseph Bristow, “‘Unwomanly Audacities’: Attila, My Attila!” in Michael Field, Decadent Moderns, ed. Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), 124. It is not known whether this ambition extended back into the 1880s.
- 25.
Denise A. Walen, “Sappho in the Closet,” in Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 234.
- 26.
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993), 13.
- 27.
Burroughs, “Persistence,” 219.
- 28.
Burroughs, 219.
- 29.
Burroughs, 218.
- 30.
Burroughs, 227.
- 31.
Burroughs, “Closet Drama Studies,” 6.
- 32.
Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespere [sic] Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811), in English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay, vol. XXVII, The Harvard Classics, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier, 1937), 300, 301.
- 33.
Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” 301.
- 34.
Lamb, 314.
- 35.
Hence, reviews of Callirrhoë compare Michael Field to ancient Greeks and Renaissance tragedians, noting their “spiritual kinship with the playwrights of Periclean Athens and Elizabethan London.” [William Watson], “A New Poet,” rev. of Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund by Michael Field, Liverpool Mercury, Oct. 29, 1884, 7.
- 36.
Susan Brown, “Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women,” Victorian Poetry 33, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 89–109.
- 37.
Carol T. Christ, “Introduction: Victorian Poetics.” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 10.
- 38.
Joan Evelyn Biederstedt, “The Poetic Plays of Michael Field,” Ph.D diss., Loyola University Chicago, 1963, 66, eCommons, http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/638.
- 39.
Annie Finch’s analysis of metrical code in The Ghost of Meter notes how “metrical associations create their own layer of literary meaning as they develop throughout a poem.” While cautioning against assigning blanket meaning to a specific meter, she notes that it is “generally accepted that the choice of a particular metre constitutes a relation with tradition, which can carry different implications in different poems.” Using the example of Emily Dickinson, Finch argues that iambic pentameter verse suggests a “patriarchal poetic tradition” as well as the “power of religion and public opinion … formality … stasis.” Because of the tradition of blank verse in dramatic verse tragedy as practiced by male playwrights, I argue that blank verse carries a similar weight for Michael Field. Annie Finch, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 12, 14, 13.
- 40.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, 3rd series, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson, 1998), p. 787, IV.i.10, 35.
- 41.
[Richard H. Hutton], “A New Poet,” review of Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund, by Michael Field, Spectator 57 (May 24, 1884), 682.
- 42.
Marion Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 5.
- 43.
Ana Parejo Vadillo, “This Hot-house of Decadent Chronicle: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” Women’s Writing 26, no. 3 (2015): 217, Tandfonline.
- 44.
Vadillo, “This Hot-house of Decadent Chronicle,” 205.
- 45.
“Some Minor Poets,” including review of Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund, by Michael Field, Saturday Review (Aug. 9, 1884): 192.
- 46.
“Recent British Verse,” including review of Attila, My Attila! by Michael Field, Poet-Lore: A Quarterly Magazine of Letters 9, vol. 1, n.s. (1897), 441; 441–42.
- 47.
Olverson, Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism, 19.
- 48.
Julie Casanova, “Gender and Chronotopes of Revolution in the Border Ballads of Swinburne and Marriott Watson,” Victorian Poetry 57, no. 2 (summer 2019), 194–5.
- 49.
Dionysus is the only one of the Olympian gods born of a mortal mother, and his worship is centered in the material world.
- 50.
Of these, only the Faun would be likely to sing in a drama by Shakespeare, although the Faun would be more likely to appear in a comedy than a tragedy. A delightful and an otherworldly being, he is like Puck or Ariel. But Michael Field’s Faun belongs to the realm of tragedy: despite his comic songs and scenes, he himself dies after Machaon teaches him the truth of death.
- 51.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.3.
- 52.
Michael Field, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.2v.
- 53.
Michael Field, Ms.Eng.poet.e.70, f.5r.
- 54.
Thus, Callirrhoë’s spinning lyric could be sung to the tune of a song like Robert Burns’s “O, Let Me in This ae Night” (1795), where the first unstressed syllable of every line is, in the written music, either a pick-up note to the downbeat of the first measure or the unstressed final beat of the previous measure:
O lassie, are ye sleepin yet, /
Or are ye waukin, I wad wit? /
For love has bound me hand an’ fit, /
And I would fain be in, jo.
- 55.
In the dialogue that follows, Nephele says she “found myself / Whirling the thyrsus” (13), providing a rhyming echo of Callirrhoë’s “Twirl the spindle.”
- 56.
The duality of the song—both ballad and hymn—also shows that the line between the types of love is not so easily drawn. It both explains Coresus’s behavior (Corsus, smited by Eros’s arrow, is unable to evade or undo its effects, and he is therefore under the command of Eros when he pursues Callirrhoë) and the gentle wooing of the young lovers of Calydon. Michael Field includes a short scene (I.iv) whose sole purpose seems to be to demonstrate Eros that is neither mere friendship nor pained, tortured, and heart-rending.
- 57.
That Michael Field does not fully endorse Coresus’s feelings—despite his worship of Dionysus—is apparent in this echo of the Duke’s words in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” when he complains that the attention his duchess gave him was no different from that won by “The bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for her.”
- 58.
The seven-line song recalls several Renaissance song forms, like rondelet and saraband, without quite conforming to those rhyme schemes.
- 59.
Derek Attridge, writing about irregular rhythms with steady beats, notes: “Historically, these popular forms are all associated with song, and it may well be that the tendency to vary unstressed syllables with some freedom while observing the count of the stresses was encouraged by the musical rhythm, which took care of any potential irregularities or ambiguities; nevertheless, it is clear that verse of this type doesn’t need a musical setting in order to be perceived as having a salient and consistent rhythm. It is equally clear that it doesn’t lend itself to prosodic analysis in terms of traditional (which is to say Greek and Latin) ‘feet.’” Derek Attridge, “Beat,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38.
- 60.
This is the best-loved part of this play. The reviews mention this scene more than any other; the Athenæum, for instance, reprints the entire scene. It is also included as representative Michael Field poetry in Alfred H. Miles’s edition of Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1907). And Michael Field reprints both faun songs in every iteration of their song-book Underneath the Bough (1893, 1898).
- 61.
Although Machaon and Coresus both use “he” to refer to the faun, I have chosen “it” to be true to the faun’s own declaration that “’tis a faun” and not a boy.
- 62.
Using prose in the market-place seems to be a nod to traditional verse drama, where the use of prose differentiated the common folk from the noble and heroic. Emathion’s prose speech similarly serves to differentiate his guilt-induced madness from maenadic frenzy or from holy madness. Emathion does not break into lyric because he is insane but not “enthusiastic”; mad but not “audacious.” Self-loathing and fearful, he is not fit for song.
- 63.
Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.7.
- 64.
Michel Field, “Callirrhoë,” Bodleian bound conflation of drafts from approximately 1880, Oxford University, Bodleian Libraries, MS.Eng.Poet.d.74.
- 65.
Ivor C. Treby, Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists (London, De Blackland Press, 1998), 29.
- 66.
Michael Field, “Callirrhoë,” partial draft, beginning III.v, 1882, Oxford University, Bodleian Libraries, MS.Eng.Poet.d.75, f.45.
- 67.
This volume contains a verse drama, “Bellerophôn,” and eleven other poems on Greek themes. Bradley wrote, “Coresus must not be another Bellerophôn.” Michael Field, Callirrhoë rebound, MS.Eng.poet.e.70, f.4v. Because Bradley uses character names here, the obvious meaning is that she wants to be sure to distinguish between the two men’s motivations, actions, and modes of speech. Stefano Evangelista’s discussion of “Bellerophôn,” however, suggests that Bradley also would not have wanted Callirrhoë to be received like “Bellerophôn”: “they were badly faulted for their use of material from Euripides … and their inconsistent transliteration of Greek names.” Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece, 97.
- 68.
Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece, 115.
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Richardson, L.M. (2021). Verse Tragedy/Closet Drama: Callirrhoë (1884). In: The Forms of Michael Field. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86126-1_3
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