SOURCE: Evans, Oliver H. “Shakespearean Prototypes and the Failure of Boker's Francesca da Rimini.” Educational Theatre Journal 30, no. 2 (May 1978): 211-19.

[In the following essay, Evans examines Francesca da Rimini, praising the treatment of Francesca and Paolo as well as the emphasis on the relationship between the brothers; however, he maintains that Boker's failure to develop the character of Lanciotto results in the failure of the play as a whole.]

In “Boker's Francesca da Rimini: The Brothers' Tragedy,” Jules Zanger argues that while at the start of the play the three principal characters “conform to the traditional characterizations” found in Dante, Boccaccio, and Leigh Hunt, Boker transforms the play from “the tale of Paolo and Francesca” into “the tragedy of Paolo and Lanciotto.”¹ Zanger further argues that just as Boker transforms the traditional story, he transforms the principal characters. At the play's start, the principal characters recall “Shakespearean prototypes;” by the play's end, Boker moves beyond his Shakespearean models and creates new, fresh, and valid characterizations.²

Zanger is correct in emphasizing the importance of the relationship between Paolo and Lanciotto both because much of the play's power arises from this relationship and because Boker's portrayal of the relationship demonstrates his ability to write a play that is complex and original. Similarly, Zanger is correct in claiming that Boker moves beyond merely echoing Shakespeare in his creation of the characters of Paolo and Francesca, and these characters provide further evidence of Boker's ability as a playwright. But Francesca da Rimini remains essentially a failure because Boker never manages to bring the same originality and complexity to his creation of Lanciotto. In Lanciotto, Boker does not move beyond merely echoing Shakespeare, and he is unable either to sustain the numerous Shakespearean prototypes and echoes found in Lanciotto's character or to reconcile those elements into a unified character. As a result, Lanciotto's actions in the play's final scene come as an anti-climax that is the play's major failure.

To speak of the play as a failure is not to deny that Francesca da Rimini is both fascinating and at times moving, and much of the play's success is owed to the skill and consistency with which Boker presents the characters of Francesca and Paolo. Francesca begins the play unaware of the deceit around her. Troubled by her father's having arranged her marriage, she nonetheless accepts her duty, for as she says, “I knew that it must be my destiny, / Someday, to give my hand without my heart.”³ But she is a victim of the deceit that permeates the world of this play; once aware of that deceit, she too becomes a dissembler and pretends to love Lanciotto. Yet at heart she is honest; she cannot bring herself to tell Lanciotto she loves him and when she falls in love with Paolo, to “endure” Lanciotto's “loathsome touch” is unthinkable (V.iii.23). Isolated from everyone, including her servant Ritta, Francesca commits herself fully to her love for Paolo and is at last willing to kill Lanciotto if that is the only means of insuring that love's survival. From her first appearance to her final actions, then, Francesca emerges as a powerful and consistently developed character.

Paolo's development is equally consistent, and he is a character of some complexity. He begins the play as a courtier deeply fond of, and loyal to, Lanciotto. But when he meets Francesca, Paolo is torn between his loyalty to Lanciotto and his love for Francesca, between what he calls “The homely path of duty” and “the ways / That bloom and glitter with seductive sin.” (II.iii.303-304). Unlike Francesca, Paolo is never able totally to commit himself to their love; he is never able to reconcile this conflict between “duty” and “sin” Too “craven,” he feels, to kill himself, he wishes “For some good cause to perish in” (V.iii.46-47). In the play's final moments, his inability to reconcile his internal conflict paralyzes him; unsuccessful in his attempt to defend Francesca from Lanciotto with words, Paolo at last is unable to do other than passively allow Lanciotto to kill him.

The characters of Francesca and Paolo reinforce a number of the play's themes: appearance versus reality, love versus loyalty, desire versus duty. Both are innocent as the play begins. Unaware of the world's duplicity, they are equally unaware of their own potential for being part of that duplicity. In the course of the play, they see into the nature not only of their society, but also of themselves.

In seeing beneath the surface of themselves, they find good and evil, noble emotions and base behavior, inextricably tied together. Thus Paul Voelker is mistaken in reading the play simply as a criticism of a sick social order from which Paolo and Francesca escape by “establishing a little island of truth in a sea of mendacity.”⁴ Neither Paolo nor Francesca seems to think that “a little island of truth” has been established, and their love has caused them first to deceive and then to betray Lanciotto. The tragedy of Paolo and Francesca does not lie in their being crushed by a corrupt society, but in their being torn between two noble emotions that cannot be reconciled: love for one another and loyalty to Lanciotto.

Had the play done no more than create these two characters and portray their tragedy, it would have been successful. But Boker goes beyond these characters; he places at the play's center Lanciotto, who is the play's major weakness. Lanciotto's character consists of elements borrowed from Shakespeare, but never unified. Elements of his character remain undeveloped or are forgotten entirely as the play proceeds until finally no consistent motivation informs his actions. Rather than transforming the Shakespearean echoes to his purposes, Boker relies upon Shakespeare without regard for whether the echoing creates a unified character. In fact, Lanciotto's character consists of so many Shakespearean echoes, is modelled upon so many Shakespearean prototypes, it is doubtful that any playwright could have melded the elements into a consistent character; certainly, Boker could not.

When he first appears, Lanciotto recalls the character of Richard III. Lanciotto's appearance is like that of Richard, and his soliloquy beginning “I, the great twisted monster of the wars” (I.ii.125ff.) echoes Richard's “I, that am rudely stamped.”⁵ But as he does in the characters of Paolo and Francesca, Boker seems at first to move beyond only echoing Shakespeare since while Lanciotto's appearance and speeches recall Richard, his character itself does not. Whereas Richard dislikes the newly established peace in England because it stands in the way of his ambitions and because he is “not shap'd for sportive tricks, / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass” (I.i.14-15), Lanciotto dislikes the peace with Ravenna because, rightly as it turns out, he distrusts Guido, the Lord of Ravenna. Moreover, whereas Richard is “subtle, false, and treacherous” (I.1.37), Lanciotto is not. Although Lanciotto vividly describes the revenge he wishes to visit upon Ravenna, that revenge is not motivated by treachery. Rather, Lanciotto says he wishes revenge because he pities the people of Rimini for the horrors they have suffered.

Furthermore, those portions of Lanciotto's early speeches that echo Richard's speeches on his deformity have a significance different from the Shakespearean models. Richard delights both in his evil and, as his subsequent courtship of Anne demonstrates, the revulsion his physical appearance causes in others; Lanciotto, faced with the prospect of having to marry, fears that his ugliness will incite “The sidelong shuddering glances of a wife” and “The degradation of a showy love” (I.ii.143-144) tempered only by pity, which Lanciotto calls “a sting / Thrust in by kindness” (I.ii.146-147). From his first words, Lanciotto reveals a concern for Rimini, a sympathy for its people, and a sensitivity to his deformity; and since such revelations serve to separate Lanciotto from Richard, Boker appears to be moving beyond the Shakespearean prototype.

As the play proceeds, Boker develops Lanciotto's character by adding more Shakespearean prototypes. Act I, scene iii opens with Lanciotto's soliloquy that leads to his offer to stab himself. He begins by wondering why he lacked the “power” to refuse the marriage his father insists upon, and he is troubled by the words of the fool who has arranged a funeral knell to celebrate the marriage announcement. Further, he wonders if fate is directing events, and he finds “a fascination” in the forthcoming marriage, “A morbid craving to pursue a thing / Whose issue may be fatal” (I.iii.16-17). Finally, however, he decides he would be foolish to enter the marriage since doing so will make him “A most conspicuous monster” (I.iii.26). Developing the theme of appearance and reality, Lanciotto recognizes that Caesar's robes, rather than hiding his appearance, will heighten his deformity. Hence at the moment Paolo enters, Lanciotto is ready to commit suicide.

Many echoes of Shakespeare may be discerned in this soliloquy. The wondering over portents and their meaning, as well as Lanciotto's mention of “ancient Rome,” recalls Julius Caesar, I.iii. Lanciotto's line “To sweat and toil under the world's broad eye” (I.iii.24) recalls Hamlet's “To grunt and sweat under a weary life” (III.i.77). Similarly, Lanciotto's meditation on suicide, his indecision, his feeling that “Thought preys on thought” (I.iii.20) and that he is the victim of “mental weeds” (I.iii.18) which sap his ability to act also recall Hamlet.

By Paolo's entrance, Boker has set in motion a complex character. In addition to his nobility of heart, Lanciotto possesses an ability to perceive the reality beneath appearance; he is moreover a character beset by superstition, yet open to the “morbid craving” of following experience wherever it may lead; he is undecided—torn between opposing the marriage, accepting the marriage, or committing suicide. In the subsequent speeches between Lanciotto and Paolo, Boker continues to draw upon Shakespeare for further elements of Lanciotto's character, but with these speeches that recall Macbeth and Lear, Lanciotto's character becomes incomprehensible and overburdened. Questions about, and expectations of, his character are raised that the play does not answer.

First, Lanciotto describes how his sword leapt from its scabbard and stuck in the floor surrounded by a pool of blood. Like Macbeth's dagger, Lanciotto's sword embodies the character's inner turmoil. Lanciotto claims the pool of blood “crawled to [his] feet, and lapped them, like the tongues / Of angry serpents” (I.iii.85-86). Paolo says the sword looks more “like a blessed cross” (I.iii.96). At this point, the contradictory perceptions of the sword, like the perceptions of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, fit the individual character's personality. But as events proceed, Lanciotto's fears and superstitions are well-founded. Like Macbeth, then, Lanciotto might be seen as a tragic victim of his inability to stem a course of events against which “All dumb things find tongues” (I.iii.70).⁶

Second, Lear as a prototype of Lanciotto emerges in the speeches that follow the discussion of the sword. Paolo invites Lanciotto to get dressed and in his speech beginning “Array this lump” (I.iii.102ff.), Lanciotto instructs Paolo that all people are “fouler” than they appear. “This life,” he says, “Is one unending struggle to conceal / Our baseness from our fellows” (I.iii.108-110), and he continues:

Here stands one
In vestal whiteness with a lecher's lust;—
There sits a judge, holding the law's scales in hands
That itch to take the bribe he dare not touch;—
Here goes a priest with heavenward eyes, whose soul
Is Satan's council chamber.

[I.iii.110-115]

In their perception of hypocrisy, these lines recall Lear's lines:

Thou rascal beedle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back;
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip'st her.

[IV.vi.164-167]

To assume that Lanciotto possesses a knowledge of the corruption hidden by appearance similar to the knowledge Lear gained through his suffering would be a mistake. To Lanciotto, all people must mask their true nature and thus become “Mere slaves and alms-men to a scornful world, / That takes us at our seeming” (I.iii.122-123). Paolo's subsequent question—“Say 'tis true; / What do you drive at?” (I.iii.123-124)—becomes the critic's question as well, for exactly what Lanciotto means by his speech is not clear, and the confusion is an indication of Boker's inability to control the echoes of Shakespeare.

Because Boker has taken pains to show that Lanciotto is nobler than his appearance suggests, it would seem logical for Lanciotto to complain that he is a “slave” to his deformity since that causes the world to miss the nobility lying beneath his appearance. But Lanciotto asserts that whereas the world thinks him “gentle, courteous, brave,” he is “harsh, rude, and a coward” (I.iii.126-127). While these words might make it seem that his valor in battle hides cowardliness, that he is like the soldier who “rivals Hector's bloody deeds / … With craven longings fluttering in [his] heart” (I.iii.118-120), Lanciotto's particular cowardliness is his inability “To cast [his] devils out upon the earth” (I.iii.128) and show “What a hell” the world “has forced back to canker in the heart / Of one poor cripple” (I.iii.129-132). Now it appears that at his deepest nature Lanciotto has a “hell / Of envy, malice, cruelty, and scorn” (I.iii.130), that his inner nature is as twisted as his physical appearance. Logically, then, one might assume that this core of malice would cause him to work evil against the world. But Lanciotto does not do this. At last, his sending of Paolo to Ravenna is motivated by his fear of being mocked. Thus we return once more to Lanciotto's being a “slave” to his deformity; his noble and sensitive nature is belied by his appearance.

By the end of I.iii, Lanciotto has been presented in the following, sometimes contradictory, ways: he is deformed, but that deformity hides a noble and sensitive nature; he is deformed, but that deformity hides a nature full of spite and malice; he is courageous, but his courage hides cowardliness; he is superstitious and attuned to the workings of fate; he is torn between thought and action; he is aware of the foulness in the world, aware even that such foulness lies beneath a “miracle of grace” (I.iii.134) like Paolo. To reconcile these elements at this point in the play is difficult. As the play proceeds, such reconciliation becomes unnecessary since most of these elements are forgotten as Lanciotto plays Othello to Pepe's mundane Iago during the latter part of the play.

In the latter part of the play the critic's temptation is to do the playwright's work and attribute motivations for, or explanations of, Lanciotto's murder of Paolo, and this forcing of explanations is the central weakness of the readings offered by Voelker and Zanger. Voelker—who concludes that since Pepe has “a thorough belief in some form of democracy,” he is therefore “a thorough-going democrat”—takes at face value Pepe's speech on democracy in III.i. As a democrat, Pepe speaks for “a natural system” of government, the reverse of the “fraudulent mode of government and social organization” found in the play. According to Voelker, Lanciotto recognizes Pepe as “his counterpart, even his double,” because Lanciotto has both a sympathy for the common people and an “antagonism toward the aristocracy and its methods.” In support, Voelker cites the following speech given by Lanciotto in I.ii: “How this shrewd fool / Makes the punctilio of honor show! / Change helmets into coxcombs, swords to baubles, / And what a figure is poor chivalry! (I.ii.200-203). Lanciotto's tragedy is that he fails to act on these “sentiments;” having seen beneath the surface of his society, “Lanciotto does not give into the truth of his heart which runs counter to the corrupt truth of his society.”⁷

But Lanciotto's speech “How this shrewd fool” need not indicate that he agrees with Pepe; his words might as easily mean that it is as ridiculous for Pepe to dress himself in the garb of chivalry as it would be for Lanciotto to dress in Caesar's robes. Nor is it clear that Pepe is an unambiguous representative of democracy or that he speaks for Boker.⁸ The scene in which Pepe mouths democratic sentiments is motivated by his desire to delude Lanciotto into trusting him, and the scene reads equally well as a satire on reformers as it does as a puff for democracy. As Lanciotto points out, the changes and reforms Pepe proposes would change everything except the human heart; it would remain as corrupt as always, and Lanciotto's remarks are especially ironic in light of the evil intent in Pepe's heart during this scene. The play, whatever its shortcomings, is not democratic propaganda. Moreover, Lanciotto's tragedy cannot be reduced to a failure to “give into the truth of his heart,” for as has been shown, the “truth” of Lanciotto's heart is so muddled and confused that to define it precisely is impossible.

While not as forced as Voelker's, Zanger's interpretation finally makes the play conform to a pattern it does not readily fit. By seeing the play as “the tragedy of Paolo and Lanciotto,” Zanger finds Lanciotto's love for his brother and his concern with his honor to be the play's central conflict. Thus in murdering his brother, Lanciotto places his honor above that love, only to realize too late that he loved Paolo “more than honor.”⁹

While Lanciotto's last speeches focus on his honor and his love for Paolo, the problem is that a concern with his honor deep enough to motivate the murder of his brother is new to the play. Earlier when Lanciotto suspected Paolo and Francesca were in love, it was Paolo's betrayal, not the affront to his honor, that upset Lanciotto; and although he has spoken of honor elsewhere in the play, Lanciotto has not been obsessed by it. As with so much else in Lanciotto's character, his concern with honor at the play's end provides a convenient motivation for the final dramatic action just as the elements of Lanciotto's character noted heretofore provided a means of drama earlier, and to read the play as Zanger does requires that those earlier elements be forgotten. At the end, Lanciotto, “generous, honorable, compassionate” while “at the same time, morbid, violent, and neurotically sensitive,” is stripped of his complexity and is once more the “monolithic villain of the legend” Zanger feels Boker escaped.¹⁰

As if aware of the problem of accounting for Lanciotto's final actions, Kent G. Gallagher has written of the play's conclusion: “Francesca da Rimini will not be bound by a single interpretation. It is primarily a mimetic tragedy. As such, the actions undertaken by all the major characters are so interlocked that the conclusion occurs inevitably; and those actions arise from a quantum of individualized and dramatic traits so extensive and so well-conceived and executed as to provide substance for the divergent themes perceived by various critics.”¹¹

Gallagher's argument, however, blurs an important distinction. Few would argue that a major literary work should be “bound by a single interpretation,” but to make various consistent interpretations of a work should be possible. While one mark of a major work may be its potential for giving rise to several interpretations, those interpretations have an internal consistency, are often consistent with one another, and are measured in part by the number of the work's elements for which they account.

Applied, for example, to the murder of Duncan, Gallagher's argument that “the actions undertaken by all the major characters are so interlocked that the conclusion occurs inevitably” is accurate. Duncan is at Inverness because having earlier placed “an absolute trust” on the former Thane of Cawdor, he now trusts Macbeth. Macbeth's role in the murder and his subsequent attitude toward it arise out of the conflict between his ambition, his subservience to his wife, and his conscience. Lady Macbeth's role and her attitude toward the murder arise from her character. Thus the murder of Duncan results from the interplay of these motivations and continues the play's several themes; therefore, it would be sensible to say that these events “arise from a quantum of individualized and dramatic traits so extensive … as to provide substance for the divergent themes.”

In the case of Paolo and Francesca, we can see at the play's end the interplay of the elements of their characters and, as earlier suggested, can trace their development from the play's opening to its final moments. Their behavior at the end culminates the “divergent themes” of which their characters have been a part from the beginning. Francesca shows both the final effects of her duplicity and her willingness to remain committed to Paolo in the face of death. Paolo is rendered passive by the conflict between his love for Francesca and his loyalty to Lanciotto.

But Lanciotto has been simplified. Themes his character earlier set in motion or contributed to are now forgotten. What is missing as the play ends is a speech, or series of speeches, that will organize and thereby clarify Lanciotto's character. Such speeches are given by both Paolo and Francesca, but similar speeches by the character at once the most complex of the play and at the center of the play's action are missing. Thus one is forced to reduce Lanciotto's final actions to illustrating a concern with his honor, a concern not nearly as important to Lanciotto early in the play as it becomes at the end. His earlier insights into fate and corruption, his earlier fascination with events that might prove fatal, his earlier statements of his own malice and cruelty, and his earlier conflict between thought and action are left unresolved.

Were Francesca da Rimini not a significant work and were the character of Lanciotto not initially interesting, the failure of the play pointed to here would matter little. But in the light of the present discussion, Francesca da Rimini, which is generally regarded as Boker's best play, may be seen as a measure of Boker's strengths and weaknesses. The play is a romantic tragedy. As Donald Clive Stuart points out, because romantic tragedy requires that each act have “at least one great coup de théâtre, … the action of romantic tragedy is a series of thrills.”¹² As such, romantic tragedies are generally poor vehicles for “the study of a theme or a character.”¹³ That Boker constructed a romantic tragedy with characters as well developed and as thematically consistent as are Paolo and Francesca is a tribute to his skill and shows the extent to which he overcame the limitations of his chosen genre.

In addition, the characters of Paolo and Francesca show the extent to which Boker escaped the influence of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, particularly the influence of Shakespeare. Richard Henry Stoddard early said of Boker's plays, “one feels in reading them that the writer had studied the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and that they harmed as well as helped him. If he could have forgotten them and remembered only his own genius, his work would have been more original.”¹⁴ While both Paolo and Francesca recall Shakespearean characters, Boker has moved beyond his models. He has created integrated and original characters that show his considerable skill at characterization and the extent to which he escaped his literary ancestors.

But at the play's center we find only the torso of a character. In Lanciotto, the play's most ambitious character, Boker escapes neither the limitations of his genre nor his literary models. The cause of Boker's failure to realize fully the character of Lanciotto, to the extent a single cause can be put forth, is his failure to escape the Shakespearean prototypes used in creating that character. Boker never moves beyond echoing such characters as Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and finally Othello; as a result, Lanciotto is, in his own words, a “bulk of wretched contraries” (I.iii.137). That phrase, with the possible exception of Richard, might be applied to any of Shakespeare's heroes. But in Shakespeare we see a character's actions emerge out of the conflict between those “contraries.” In Boker, we do not. Boker never makes the Shakespearean prototypes his own, is never able to put them to his purposes, and is never able therefore to make Lanciotto a sustained and integrated character.

Notes

1. ETJ [Educational Theatre Journal], 25 (1973), 411, 418.

2. Ibid., pp. 411-412.

3. George Henry Boker, Francesca da Rimini, II.i.130-131. All quotations from Francesca da Rimini, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, are from A. H. Quinn, Representative American Plays, 7th ed. (New York, 1953), pp. 319-368.

4. “George Henry Boker's Francesca da Rimini: An Interpretation and Evaluation,” ETJ, 24 (1972), 393.

5. William Shakespeare, Richard III, I.i.16. All quotations from Shakespeare, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, are from The Complete Plays and Poems, The New Cambridge Edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1942).

6. In his failure to heed omens and portents, Lanciotto may again, but slightly, recall the character of Julius Caesar, and the mark on Lanciotto's forehead, in addition to recalling Cain, recalls the “angry blot” on Caesar's brow. But because Lanciotto struggles with indecision and because he is troubled by the role of fate in these events, the echoes of Macbeth are more germane.

7. [Paul D.] Voelker, [ETJ 24 (December 1972)] pp. 390-391, 392, 393.

8. The reading of Pepe offered here differs from that offered by Paul C. Sherr in “George Henry Boker's Francesca da Rimini: A Justification for the Literary Historian,” Pennsylvania History, 34 (1967), 361-371. Sherr argues that Pepe speaks for Boker and that “as … artist,” Pepe is “Boker's counterpart” (p. 369). The objections that apply to Voelker's reading of Pepe apply as well to Sherr's.

9. [Jules] Zanger, [ETJ 25 (December 1973)] p. 418.

10. Ibid., p. 415.

11. “The Tragedies of George Henry Boker: The Measure of American Romantic Drama,” ESQ, [A Journal of the American Renaissance] 20 (1974), 415.

12. The Development of Dramatic Art (1928; rpt. New York, 1960), pp. 509-510.

13. Ibid., p. 509.

14. Recollections, Personal and Literary, ed. R. Hitchcock (New York, 1903), pp. 198-199.