SOURCE: Harben, Niloufer. “Three Plays of the 1960s.” In Twentieth-Century English History Plays: From Shaw to Bond, pp. 156-212. Houndmills, England: Macmillan Press, 1988.

[In the following excerpt, Harben identifies sources for Osborne's Luther and describes the critical reaction to the play.]

John Osborne's Luther presents another instance of a playwright being drawn to a historical subject for its religious interest. Yet Osborne's approach and achievement vary significantly from Bolt's and Shaffer's. His play, an arresting psychological study of a turbulent individual, at odds with himself and the social and religious institutions of his time, is one of considerably greater force and depth. Like Bolt, Osborne incorporates many of his central historical figure's recorded sayings into the dialogue of his play, but, unlike Bolt, he is able to match them with an urgent vital language of his own. This often results in impressive flights of rhetorical virtuosity or sequences of balanced arguments. Like Shaffer, he uses striking physical images, flamboyant spectacle and theatrical posture to create telling dramatic moments, but, where Shaffer indulges in these for their own sake, Osborne uses them with purpose, to reflect inner meaning or make a broad public point.

Luther is not the only time we find Osborne going to documentary sources for material and inspiration. His television play, A Subject of Scandal and Concern (1960) is based on events in the life of George Holyoake, who in 1842 was the last person in England to be imprisoned in England for blasphemy. Another play, A Patriot for Me (1964) is about Colonel Redl, the homosexual Austrian intelligence officer, who was blackmailed by Russian agents into betraying secrets to them in the period before the First World War. Luther has been selected for consideration because of its greater historical weight and dramatic impact, and because its concern with religious motivation links it with the other two plays dealt with in this chapter. It also illustrates the kind of history play, discussed in the introduction, which explores the relationship between the exceptional individual and his environment.

Luther at first was severely censored by the Lord Chamberlain's office—eighteen passages, including whole speeches, were blue-pencilled. Osborne refused to concede the excisions required, in an indignant letter to George Devine:

I don't write plays to have them rewritten by someone else. I intend to make a clear unequivocal stand on this because (a) it is high time that someone did so, and (b) … the suggested cuts or alternatives would result in such damage to the psychological structure, meaning and depth of the play that the result would be a travesty.¹

The Lord Chamberlain's office finally gave in, and apart from a few small verbal changes, Luther was presented intact.

The play was first produced by the English Stage Company on 26 June 1961 at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and it was published in the same year. It was acclaimed as an ‘excellent play which combined strength and clarity’,² ‘the most solid guarantee yet given of Mr John Osborne's dramatic stamina’.³ It transferred to London to the Royal Court Theatre in July 1961, and then to the Phoenix Theatre in September for a fairly long spell, continuing to run in London till the end of March 1962. Opening in Paris in 1961 at the Théâtre Des Nations, the play was described by Kenneth Tynan ‘as the most eloquent piece of dramatic writing to have dignified our theatre since Look Back in Anger’. The language of the play did cause a stir but, ironically ‘the lines by which a presumably sophisticated audience was most shocked were nearly all direct translations from the hero's own works’.⁴

The production was also a great success in New York, opening on 25 September 1963 at St James Theatre, where it ran for 211 performances. New York theatre critics hailed it as a ‘brilliantly acted historical drama’,⁵ ‘a work of power and integrity’,⁶ ‘an overpowering massive play of ringing authority—bold, insolent and challenging’.⁷ The play offered a splendid opportunity to Albert Finney, who gave an explosive performance in the title role, establishing himself as an actor of international repute. ‘He makes it clear by this one performance that he is an actor of extraordinary skill and endless potentialities.’⁸ The role of Luther is extremely exacting, stretching an actor both physically and emotionally. Finney proved himself equal to its demands, as Walter Kerr indicates:

We meet a spiritual epileptic. … Out of the sweetest plainsong, in a small forest of cowls, comes a strangled sound that can neither be released nor repressed. This swallowed howl rises as Mr Finney breaks towards us, severing the neat little pattern of religious life around him, until he has been hurled to the floor in a tongue-locked seizure, gasping to let the genius out of him. … Something beyond his own intelligence drives, shatters, and then pacifies this hero. Mr Finney elaborates it for us with magnetizing energy.⁹

John Osborne was drawn to the subject of Luther, not for its historical but for its religious interest:

I wanted to write a play about religious experience and various other things, and this happened to be the vehicle for it. Historical plays are usually anathema to me, but this isn't costume drama. I hope it won't make any difference if you don't know anything about Luther himself, and I suspect that most people don't. In fact the historical character is almost incidental. The method is Shakespeare's or almost anyone else's you can think of.¹⁰

It is ironical and oddly amusing that one of the plays that fits my definition of a history play is written by a dramatist who detests history plays! But in spite of what Osborne says, historical truth obviously does make a difference to him since he is careful to base his play on the facts and is quick to defend his play on historical grounds. John Russell Taylor recalls that ‘Osborne and his supporters rapidly pointed out to the tender-minded, who quailed at the dramatist's obsession with constipation and defecation’, that the playwright had used Luther's own words whenever possible.¹¹ This line of defence is one which Shakespeare would have felt no inward or outward pressure to assume, again revealing the much greater demand in our time for documentary evidence to support a view.

Critics were obviously unsettled by Osborne's portrayal of a Luther struggling with a private area of neurosis, and tended to attack the play as history. Simon Trussler calls it ‘an exercise in scatology’, and writes of its ‘failure to realize Martin's society—and more particularly the causes and effects of his impact upon it’.¹² Laurence Kitchin asserts that ‘the historical Luther became a public figure and Osborne's Luther doesn't’.¹³ Alan Carter's complaint is that ‘Luther's real problem—the nature of faith—is hardly even discussed, and surely the Reformation was essentially an intellectual movement.’¹⁴ Ronald Hayman goes so far as to say that compared with Brecht's Galileo or John Whiting's The Devil, Luther is not a history play at all because of Osborne's exclusion of this social aspect.¹⁵

But what if Osborne does extricate Luther from his social background. Osborne claims that Shakespeare adopted a similar approach and professes to write along Shakespearean rather than Brechtian lines. Critics have understandably considered the play in Brechtian terms; it was fashionable to make the comparison with Brecht, and Osborne was aware of Brechtian stage techniques and undoubtedly influenced by them. There are features in the play that reflect this such as the episodic structure, and the use of the medieval Knight figure to announce the time and place of the action. But these are superficial outward resemblances, and the play is not essentially Brechtian in character nor is there any reason why it should be. Osborne's focus is much narrower, more personal and concentrated than Brecht's. Unlike Brecht who works for a degree of critical detachment in his spectators, Osborne is interested primarily in engaging their feelings:

I want to make people feel, to give them lessons in feeling. They can think afterwards.¹⁶

As for the nature of the Luther he presents, the use of Luther's Christian name throughout suggests an emphasis on the personal inward dimension of the man rather than the social public figure.

Many names could be given to Luther—great religious leader, rebel, scholar, preacher, iconoclast, publicist, poet. In his play, Osborne draws attention to all these facets of the man, but, focuses mainly on an aspect many people might be inclined to resist—Luther as victim or patient. Osborne was obviously influenced by E. H. Erikson's book, Young Man Luther, a psychoanalytical study of Luther, first published in England in 1959, just two years before the play was staged. In it Erikson quotes a statement of Søren Kierkegaard's—‘Luther is a patient of exceeding import for Christendom’—and comments that Kierkegaard saw in Luther ‘a religious attitude (patienthood) exemplified in an archetypal and immensely influential way’.¹⁷ The full text of Kierkegaard's statement is that Luther:

confuses what it means to be the patient with what it means to be the doctor. He is an extremely important patient for Christianity, but he is not the doctor; he has the patient's passion for expressing and describing his suffering, and what he feels the need of as an alleviation. But he has not got the doctor's breadth of view.¹⁸

What Kierkegaard seems to mean by this is that Luther expressed in himself the symptoms or consequences of what was wrong in the Church. His was the subjective response to the problem, but, not possessing the doctor's objective overall view, he was not in a position to prescribe the cure.

Osborne might have come across the portion of Kierkegaard's statement quoted in Erikson, or even been familiar with the original passage itself, because he did read Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Sartre in the 1940s, when he says ‘existentialism was the macrobiotic food of the day’.¹⁹ At any rate in his play, Luther embodies this subjective, ‘patient’ side of life. The intellectual impact of Luther's achievement is not dealt with so much as the felt experience, the crisis of belief and identity.

Luther is presented equivocally, which is fitting, considering the continuing controversy over this complex towering figure, enigmatic to admirers and detractors alike. He can be seen as the hyperconscious individual, the artist, the prophet, the Christlike figure who takes on the tensions and torments of his age because he feels more acutely than others—‘Am I the only one to see all this and suffer?’ The sense of being singled out and hounded is prevalent:

Somewhere, in the body of a child, Satan foresaw in me what I'm suffering now. That's why he prepares open pits for me, and all kinds of tricks to bring me down, so that I keep wondering if I'm the only man living who's baited and surrounded by dreams, and afraid to move.

(Act 1, Sc. 2, p. 30)

His condition can thus be seen as an aberration from the norm, or indicative of ‘an overstimulated conscience’, as it is dismissed by some fellow monks. Luther is also accused of megalomania by Cajetan, the papal legate: ‘Why, some deluded creature might even come to you as leader of their revolution, but you don't want to break rules, you want to make them’ (Act 2, Sc. 4, p. 73). Even Staupitz, Vicar General of the Augustinian Order, who immediately recognizes a greatness of mind and spirit, discerns a definite leaning towards the theatrical: ‘One thing I promise you, Martin. You'll never be a spectator. You'll always take part’ (Act 2, Sc. 2, p. 56). Then again, Martin's predicament could reflect the inner tumult of the man of creative intensity who wrestles with experience, and sees in his own imaginative terms. The Knight, who bitterly confronts Luther at the end, regards him as out of touch with reality in his exaltation of “the Word”:

Word? What Word? Word? That word, whatever that means, is probably just another old relic or indulgence, and you know what you did to those! Why, none of it might be any more than poetry, have you thought of that, Martin. Poetry! Martin, you're a poet, there's no doubt about that in anybody's mind, you're a poet, but do you know what most men believe in their hearts—because they don't see in images like you do—they believe in their hearts that Christ was a man as we are, and that He was a prophet and a teacher, and they also believe in their hearts that His supper is a plain meal like their own—if they're lucky to get it—a plain meal of bread and wine! A plain meal with no garnish and no word. And you helped them to believe it.

(Act 3, Sc. 2, pp. 90-1)

Osborne presents all these alternate perspectives of the man and leaves the questions open-ended.

The play opens on a compelling note, with Martin being received into the Augustinian Order of the Eremites at Erfurt. In the original production the ‘setting is dominated by an agonized Christ hanging from a crucifix bent as if by the burden of humanity's crime’. An ‘atmosphere of reverence that amounts to awe’²⁰ is created by prayer, music, ritual, as Martin proceeds to take his vows. In the presence of the assembled convent, Martin is undressed to represent the divestment of the former man, and rerobed in the habit of the order, to signify investment of the new man in Christ. Martin kneels, and swears the oath of obedience. Then he prostrates himself, while the prior prays over him. A newly lighted taper is put in his hands, and he is led up the altar steps to be welcomed by the monks. Indistinguishable in their midst, he marches with them slowly in procession and is lost to sight (Act 1, Sc. 1, pp. 13-14). The powerful symbolism in the ceremony strongly conveys the idea of the absorption of the individual into the communal.

Martin's experience in the monastery is presented as a tremendous struggle for self-denial and subjugation. He is overscrupulous in his attempts to conform to the rigours of a highly disciplined life. Yet an exaggerated sense of being bound down and closed in gets the better of all his efforts at self-abnegation. This again is communicated in striking visual physical terms, in the form of a violent fit which suddenly grips Martin during mass. When at first the office commences he is lost to sight in the ranks of the monks. Presently there is a quiet moaning, just distinguishable among the voices. It becomes louder and wilder, until finally Martin appears staggering between the stalls. Outstretched hands fail to restrain him as he is seized in a raging fit. Two brothers go to him, but Martin jerks with such ferocity, that they can scarcely hold him down. He tries to speak, the effort is frantic, and eventually, is able to roar out a word at a time, ‘Not! Me! I am not!’ He finally collapses, and is dragged off. ‘The office continues as if nothing had taken place’ (Act 1, Sc. 1, pp. 22-3). The idea of the suppression of the individual by the institutional is put across vividly. The all-unifying world of the ‘participation mystique’ is set against the self-aware and self-imposing. The loss of uniqueness or identity takes on magnified proportions for Martin, who experiences it as abysmal self-loss.

The trammels of his environment—home, monastery, Church—all contribute to the sense of being fractured, dispersed and separated from himself. Hans Luther is an oppressive father-figure, affronting the dignity of the child, undermining his self-concept and presiding as a dominant factor in Martin's adult psyche. Hans who feels no less threatened than his son, is continually asserting himself to cover up his own feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. There is great strain and aggression in the relationship. In a Pinter-like situation, both can be found playing for the upper hand, manoeuvring to keep the advantage, shrinking from direct contact, yet striving to make connection. Here Osborne dramatizes the archetypal father and son conflict. Martin has to fight free of the identity of being Hans's son in order to discover his own personhood. At the very close of the play, we hear Martin telling his son, Hans:

You know, my father had a son, and he'd to learn a hard lesson, which is a human being is a helpless little animal, but he is not created by his father, but by God. … You should have seen me at Worms. I was almost like you that day, as if I'd learned to play again, to play, to play out in the world, like a naked child.

(Act 3, Sc. 3, p. 102)

Martin here recalls his experience at Worms as a rare moment of contact with his spontaneous untouched self.

The child is used as a powerful leitmotif in the play to suggest Martin's sense of wrested childhood, of having lost something that at root he is, underneath the demands and distortions of his environment. This feeling of self-loss is symbolized in the poetic image of the lost body of a child. Dredged out of Martin's tormented subconscious, this image haunts him continually. Martin's troubled interior state is forcefully realized in Act 2, Scene 1, partly by the expressionistic setting. A huge knife is suspended above the acting area of the stage with the torso of a naked man hanging over its cutting edge. Below this is ‘an enormous round cone, like the inside of a vast barrel, surrounded by darkness’ which suggests the deep corridors of the subconscious. ‘From the upstage entrance seemingly far, far away, a dark figure appears against the blinding light’ inside the cone, approaching slowly until it reaches the downstage entrance. ‘It is Martin, haggard and streaming with sweat.’ He cries out from some deep dimension of himself:

I lost the body of a child, a child's body, the eyes of a child; and at the first sound of my own childish voice. I lost the body of a child; and I was afraid, and I went back to find it … I'm afraid of the darkness, and the hole in it; and I see it sometime of every day! … The lost body of a child, hanging on a mother's tit, and close to the warm, big body of a man, and I can't find it.

(Act 1, Sc. 2, p. 24)

Osborne must have come across this image of ‘the lost body of a child, hanging on a mother's tit and close to the warm big body of a man’ in Erikson, who relates how the historical Luther once said that he did not know the Christchild any more; ‘in characterizing the sadness of his youth, he had lost his childhood.’ But later he could say that ‘Christ was defined by two images: one of an infant lying in a manger, “hanging on a virgin's tits”’ and ‘one of a man sitting at his Father's right hand.’²¹ Erikson talks of man as being bound in the loves and rages of childhood—the child is in the midst—and asserts that

man's adulthood contains a persistent childishness: that vistas of the future always reflect the mirages of a missed past, that apparent progression can harbour partial regression and firm accomplishment hidden childish fulfilment.²²

Osborne uses these ideas in his dramatization of Luther's interior state and thus can be found keeping close to history even in his depiction of the kind of image that could mentally possess Luther.

Martin's tortured self-consciousness brings home the idea that man is the centre of his own experience and subject to an inescapable narcissism of outlook. Man relates with others, but only from within a consciousness of which he is the focus. Society might present a picture of selves together, but essentially it is each alone in his own tragedy. This is brought out strikingly when the monks are shown at communal confession. The stage directions indicate that the scene throughout should be ‘urgent, muted, almost whispered, confidential, secret like a prayer’. They are all prostrated beneath flaming candles, and the formal confession of trifles by the other monks is punctuated by Martin's wrenched outcries: ‘I am alone. I am alone, and against myself.’ ‘I am a worm and no man, a byword and a laughing stock. Crush out the worminess in me, stamp on me’ (Act 1, Sc. 1, pp. 19-20). The close physical presence of the other monks going through the motions of the office, oblivious of Martin's anguish, emphasizes his essential isolation.

Martin suffers from an excessive emotional sensibility, and the fact that his condition is partly of his own making, contributes to his dilemma. He confesses to an oppressive dream:

I was fighting a bear in a garden without flowers, leading into a desert. His claws kept making my arms bleed as I tried to open a gate which would take me out. But the gate was no gate at all. It was simply an open frame, and I could have walked through it, but I was covered in my own blood, and I saw a naked woman riding on a goat, and the goat began to drink my blood, and I thought I should faint with the pain and I awoke in my cell, all soaking in the devil's bath.

(Act 1, Sc. 2, pp. 19-20)

The nightmare conveys the experience of being incarcerated in a self-imposed prison and assaulted by feelings of overwhelming fear and guilt, related to sex.

Luther's frightening sensation of being encased, closed in, dominates his personal sense of dilemma in the play. Osborne again probably derives this idea from Erikson, who describes Luther's traumatic experience of this sensation during a thunderstorm which occurred just before he became a monk:

In the thunderstorm, he had felt immense anxiety. Anxiety comes from angustus, meaning to feel hemmed in and choked up; Martin's use of circumvallatus—all walled in—to describe his experience in the thunderstorm indicates he felt a sudden constriction of his whole life space, and could see only one way out: the abandonment of all his previous life and of the earthly future it implied, for the sake of total dedication to a new life. This new life, however, was one which made an institution of the very configuration of being walled in.²³

Osborne seems to have taken up this idea and built on it. The whole play dramatizes the agonized thrust to break free. Luther is man making a bid for independent judgment, and experiencing a guilt which is very closely associated with freedom. It is the sense of being accused by some enclosing whole or order—family, Church, or more radically, the psychic womb—from which the independent self seeks to break out. This guilt grows with self-consciousness, and inheres in any free as opposed to ‘being part of’ action. Its gravamen is not merely non-conformity but independence, and it is inseparable from loneliness—‘Am I the only one to see all this and suffer?’ (Act 1, Sc. 2, p. 30).

Tormented by thoughts of judgement and hell, Luther finally breaks through to some sort of release, in the sudden revelation he receives of the profound implications of St Paul's affirmation that ‘The just shall live by faith.’ Throughout the play, Luther's sensation of being hemmed in by spiritual fear and tension is linked to his physical struggles with constipation—‘I am blocked up like an old crypt.’ (Act 1, Sc. 2, p. 29). Consistently, Luther's great moment of spiritual inspiration occurs at a time of relief from acute physical and emotional stress caused by this chronic disability:

It came to me while I was in my tower, what they call the monk's sweathouse, the jakes, the john or whatever you're pleased to call it. I was struggling with the text I've given you ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed, from faith to faith.” And seated there, my head down, on that privy just as when I was a little boy, I couldn't reach down to my breath for the sickness in my bowels, as I seemed to sense a large rat, a heavy, wet, plague rat, slashing at my privates with its death teeth. I thought of the righteousness of God, and wished his gospel had never been put to paper for men to read; who demanded my love and made it impossible to return it. And I sat in my heap of pain until the words emerged and opened up. “The just shall live by faith.” My pain vanished, my bowels flushed and I could get up. I could see the life I'd lost.

(Act 2, Sc. 3, p. 63)

Luther is driven to this spiritual discovery by his pervasive anguish at the unbearable destiny of being human and hence totally vulnerable and susceptible. Throughout the play there is great emphasis on the physical as well as the spiritual. The reek and weight of the body are continually registered. Martin often appears pouring with sweat, as if suffused with the sense of his own mortality. He continually feels betrayed by his body:

If my flesh would leak and dissolve, and I could live as bone, if I were forged bone, plucked bone, warm hair and a bony heart, if I were all bone, I could brandish myself without terror, without any terror at all—I could be indestructible.

(Act 1, Sc. 1, p. 21)

His father tells him:

You can't ever, however you try, you can't ever get away from your body because that's what you live in, and it's all you've got to die in, and you can't get away from the body of your father and your mother!

(Act 1, Sc. 2, p. 41)

It is as if Martin is terrified of his own animality, and this relates to his emerging conviction that all men fall inescapably short of God's law, because God requires assent from the heart and concupiscent man cannot give obedience with total spontaneity of mind and body.

The first Act of the play concentrates on the interior dimension and for this Osborne is heavily indebted to Erikson. Osborne's treatment of history has been criticized in relation to his use of this source. Trussler claims that Osborne ‘fails to assimilate all his available source material—mainly garnered from the psycho-analytical study Young Man Luther, by Erik H. Erikson’.²⁴ Hayman states that Osborne ‘seems to have done hardly any reading outside this one book’.²⁵ But this is not the case because he also appears to have drawn substantially upon another source which critics do not seem to have noticed—Roland Bainton's concise but authoritative biography, Here I Stand: the Life of Martin Luther (New York: Mentor, 1950). I shall be turning to this later to illustrate Osborne's interesting use of Bainton. But even if Erikson's study had been Osborne's only source, it is a well documented work, based on a sound reading of collated evidence and the most significant modern scholarship on the subject.

E. Gordon Rupp, a well-known modern Luther scholar, acknowledges this in an article, ‘John Osborne and the Historical Luther,’ first published in The Expository Times, volume 73 (February 1962).²⁶ This article is the substance of a lecture delivered at the University of Aberdeen on 31 October 1961, after the play had aroused much public discussion. Rupp cites Erikson's Young Man Luther as the book of the play and comments:

Erikson brings to his highly intelligent study not only his clinical experience but a wide reading which includes all the more notable modern books of Luther study. His work is a psycho-analytical commentary on Martin Luther's development. It is not the first such study, but is perhaps the most effective … in 1941 a Danish medical man and a Catholic, Paul J. Reiter, wrote two volumes on Luther's World, his character and psychosis. His picture of Luther as a tipsy manic-depressive is not very convincing, but his second volume puts together almost all the available evidence about Luther's physical and spiritual troubles and is very useful. On this and the valuable collection of historical documents by Otto Scheel, Erikson has drawn, so that this study of first-hand evidence has been to Mr Osborne's advantage.²⁷

Rupp points out the vastness of the material on Luther—the great spate of Luther's own writings, and the immense international field of Luther study, which has caused attention to be turned to ‘histories of the histories of Luther’—and admits that:

one of the refreshing and valuable points of Osborne's play is that he does pry Luther loose, so to speak, from his orthodox framework—from theology and piety as Protestants have conceived it, and gives us a kind of “existential” Luther who is really disturbingly and excitingly alive.

However he maintains that ‘we have very little really reliable evidence about Luther's home and childhood’, and ultimately sees the play as a ‘highly complicated psychological interpretation read into or out of chancy little bits of historical evidence which have haphazardly survived’.²⁸

But, as has been emphasized in the introduction, it is the historian's and not the playwright's function to weigh the evidence. What the historian sees as ‘evidence’ the dramatist sees more as ‘material’. Historical truth however is more than the available evidence. We cannot be sure we have the whole truth no matter how solid the evidence. Our knowledge of historical truth will always be fragmentary and the attempt to discover it will always involve the certain, the plausible and the purely speculative. The historian's contribution towards the recovery of the truth is specialized knowledge and systematic controlled inquiry. The dramatist's is imaginative sympathy and insight which must be given full play over his material, as long as no violence is done to history, and there are reasonable grounds for his portrayal. Of course Osborne did not set out to write a history play and might not even regard Luther as one. But I am calling it a history play because it fulfils the requirements of my definition for no matter how controversial a portrait of Luther Osborne presents, there is a firm historical basis for the vision presented.

Rupp finds the story that Luther had some kind of fit during Mass, ‘more than suspect’, asserting that it comes from four Catholic writers who were Luther's enemies. Erikson accepts the story, he says, because ‘it fits with his pre-fabricated psychological pattern—the interpretation of Luther's troubles as a persistent identity crisis.’ Rupp insists this is important ‘since it is in fact the only evidence that Luther had any attacks of this kind’, there is no trace of epilepsy before or after. But, as he amazingly goes on to admit, Luther had ‘psychosomatic attacks’ which first occurred in his forties and were ‘connected with his heart, dizziness, palpitations, and fainting fits. That as a monk he had desperate moments and occasional anxiety states is beyond doubt’.²⁹ Here we see a fine example of the historian's concern with accuracy of a precise narrow type which a playwright would not be bothered with. Osborne naturally pounced on the wonderful dramatic possibilities of the story of the fit during Mass, which vividly epitomizes the kind of intense psychological ordeal Luther was so prone to suffer. Luther's conflict with his father on entering the monastery, the emotional trauma of his first Mass, his prodigious imagination, his force of rhetoric and often bitter scatological invective, his physical maladies and the periods of intense religious doubt and anguish which hounded him all his life, are firmly attested facts. If Osborne includes incidents that are historically suspect—the fit in the choir, the nailing of the 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, the celebrated statement at the Diet of Worms: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise’—it is because the fascination of these is immense. This is so even for historians who deny their authenticity; irresistibly these stories have been repeated and are now an inextricable part of the legend surrounding the man.

Rupp however is impressed when Osborne keeps ‘marvellously close to the details’ of actual dialogue and incident, and dubious when he does not. His criticism of the play as history is on rather narrow, selective and inconsistent lines:

Now it is a valid point of Erikson that “nobody who has read Luther's private remarks can doubt that his whole being always included his bowels.” But since so much is made of this in the play, in the end to a comic and rather nauseating degree, and since it seems to me to damage the play as an historical chronicle, let it be firmly said that there is no evidence whatever that Luther had troubles like this as a monk, or indeed before the autumn of 1521 … To harp on this and show it as a constant factor in Luther's career from beginning to end, is quite unhistorical …

Yet he acknowledges nonetheless that:

Luther's illnesses are important and from 1521 onwards, there is a long list of them, deafness, noises in the head, dizziness, fainting, ophthalmia, hardening of the arteries, stone, bladder trouble, angina, so that when he died perhaps of a coronary thrombosis at the age of 63 he had been for some years a really old man.³⁰

Osborne has solid grounds for emphasizing Luther's physical disabilities and suggesting a correlation between his physical and spiritual condition since he did suffer acutely from such ailments and from states of neurotic anxiety. As another historian, Roland Bainton, asserts, the recurrence of Luther's severe depressions ‘raises for us again and again the question whether they had a physical basis and the question really cannot be answered’.³¹ Osborne's ‘harping’ on this surely is in keeping with the new psychological perspective of our age, which sees the mind and body as inseparable, and stresses the indivisibility of the human personality.

Osborne's view of Luther is by no means limited to the purely personal. The play portrays a state of spiritual crisis that reflects the climate of Luther's age as it does ours. In some periods of history, Erikson writes, ‘man needs a new ideological orientation as surely and sorely as he must have air and food’, and Luther, ‘a young man (by no means lovable all the time) faced the problems of human existence in the foremost terms of his era’.³² It is this fiery young Luther that not surprizingly caught the imagination of John Osborne.

As indicated earlier, although Osborne draws considerably on Erikson for his vision of Luther, this is not his only major historical source as critics have claimed. He also appears to have used Roland Bainton's biography of Luther, Here I Stand—the internal evidence is overwhelming. One of the strongest features that points to this is the inspiration Osborne derived from drawings and woodcuts of the period for there are numerous illustrations of these in Bainton's book. In the play Osborne states in a note on décor:

After the intense private interior of Act One, with its outer darkness and rich, personal objects, the physical effect from now on should be more intricate, general, less personal; sweeping, concerned with men in time rather than particular man in the unconscious; caricature not portraiture, like the popular woodcuts of the period, like DÜRER.

As a backdrop for Act 2, Scene 4, which dramatizes Luther's interview with Cajetan, Osborne specifies as a backcloth:

a satirical contemporary woodcut, showing for example, the Pope portrayed as an ass playing the bagpipes, or a cardinal dressed up as a court fool. Or perhaps Holbein's cartoon of Luther with the Pope suspended from his nose.

(Luther, pp. 46, 64)

Illustrations of all these woodcuts are reproduced in Bainton's biography, and it seems obvious that Osborne found a ready source in Bainton.

Bainton writes of Dürer's profound disquiet at the futility of all human endeavour, and provides a graphic description of his engraving, Melancholia:

There sits a winged woman of high intelligence in torpid idleness amid all the tools and symbols of man's highest skills. … The bell above is ready to toll. Yet in sable gloom she broods, because the issues of destiny strive in the celestial sphere. In the sky the rainbow arches, sign of the covenant sworn by Noah, never to bring again the waters upon the earth; but within the rainbow glimmers a comet, portent of impending disaster. Beside Melancholia, perched upon a millstone, sits a scribbling cherub alone active because insouciant of the forces at play. Is the point again, as with Erasmus, that wisdom lies with the simplicity of childhood, and man might better lay aside his skills until the gods have decided the issues of the day? What a parallel have we here in quite other terms to Luther's agonizing quest for the ultimate meaning of life!³³

Osborne must have been struck by the interesting parallel Bainton draws between Dürer's engraving and Martin's predicament for this passage brings inescapably to mind a similar idea and picture in the play. Martin encounters a child, dirty, half-naked, and playing intently by himself, on the steps of the Castle Church at Wittenberg. It is the year 1517 and Martin is just about to nail up his 95 theses on the Castle Church door, that legendary action that was to propel him into the vortex of international conflict and ultimately bring about overwhelming repercussions for the whole of the western world. Martin ‘puts out his hand to the child, who looks at it gravely and deliberately, then slowly, not rudely, but naturally, gets up and skips away sadly out of sight’ (Act 2, Sc. 3, p. 61).

Bainton also prints a reproduction of a drawing of Christ the Judge sitting upon a rainbow with a lily protruding from one ear and a sword piercing the other. Beneath him on one side there are figures being lifted up to heaven, and on the opposite side there are others being dragged down to hell. Bainton comments that the:

Christ upon the rainbow with the lily and the sword was a most familiar figure in illustrated books of the period. Luther had seen pictures such as these and testified that he was utterly terror-stricken at the sight of Christ the Judge.³⁴

In the play Luther is haunted by this particular image of Christ on a rainbow judging the world. Just before he is about to celebrate his first Mass, he falls to his knees crying out in desperation:

Oh Mary, dear Mary, all I can see of Christ is a flame and raging on a rainbow. Pray to your Son, and ask Him to still His anger for I can't raise my eyes to look at Him.

(Act 1, Sc. 2, p. 30)

This strongly suggests that Osborne used Bainton, since he picks on the very drawing that Bainton chooses to illustrate exactly the same point.

Then again, Osborne's representation of Pope Leo X relates directly to Bainton's delineation of him:

The pontiff at the moment was Leo X, of the house of the Medici, as elegant and as indolent as a Persian cat. His chief preeminence lay in his ability to squander the resources of the Holy See on carnivals, war, gambling and the chase. The duties of his Holy Office were seldom suffered to interfere with the sport. He wore hunting boots which impeded the kissing of his toe.³⁵

This figure springs to life in Osborne's play. He enters ‘with a HUNTSMAN, dogs and DOMINICANS’. He is indolent, cultured, intelligent, extremely restless, and well able to assimilate the essence of anything before anyone else. As Miltitz kneels to kiss his toe, he dismisses him impatiently, ‘I should forget it. I've got my boots on. Well? get on with it. We're missing the good weather.’ On receiving Martin's final appeal to the Church, he reads the young monk's plea for judgement and correction of his views as mere attitudinizing, and lets loose the full weight of his secular and ecclesiastical powers. His attitude is cold and unequivocal: ‘There's a wild pig in our vineyard, and it must be hunted down and shot’ (Act 2, Sc. 5, pp. 75-8).

The episodes in the play involving the Pope and Tetzel, the notorious seller of indulgences, come over as caricature with their broad but incisive lines of depiction. For these public figures, Osborne creates the effect of a caught attitude or impression, very much in the style of satirical cartoons of the period of which Bainton provides many examples.³⁶ It is intriguing to find Osborne making rich dramatic use of the source material supplied by this whole tradition of popular criticism in the form of polemical woodcuts, drawings, engravings and cartoons that flourished in the period.

There are other indications that Osborne drew inspiration from Bainton's account. In the early half of the play, Luther's conversations with Staupitz show the older man coping with the young man's importunate questionings, and gently reproving him for his obsession with various mortifications: ‘All these trials and temptations you go through, they're meat and drink to you’ (Act 2, Sc. 2, p. 53). There is a distinct parallel in Bainton who gives accounts of such theological discussions, with Luther beside himself when Staupitz failed to understand his torment:

Was then, Luther the only one in the world who had been so plagued? Had Staupitz himself never experienced such trials? ‘No,’ said he, ‘but I think they are your meat and drink.’ Evidently he suspected Luther of thriving on his disturbances. The only word of reassurance he could give was a reminder that the blood of Christ was shed for the remission of sins. But Luther was too obsessed with the picture of Christ the avenger to be consoled with the picture of Christ the redeemer.³⁷

Osborne similarly uses Staupitz as the voice of sanity and reason in the play. His balance and moderation serve as a foil to Martin's inordinacy and obsession.

Bainton emphasizes the fact that Luther was assailed by doubt all his life. ‘This man who so undergirded others with faith had for himself a perpetual battle for faith.’ The content of his ‘depressions was always the same, the loss of faith that God is good and that he is good to me. After the frightful Anfechtung of 1527 Luther wrote, “For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy of God.” His agony in the later years was all the more intense because he was a physician of souls, and if the medicine which he had prescribed for himself and for them was actually poison, how frightful was his responsibility.’

Luther held that the way of man with God cannot be tranquil: ‘David must have been plagued by a very fearful devil. He could not have had such profound insights if he had not experienced great assaults.’ Bainton comments that:

Luther verged on saying that an excessive emotional sensibility is a mode of revelation … Luther felt that his depressions were necessary. At the same time they were dreadful and by all means and in every way to be avoided and overcome. His whole life was a struggle against them, a fight for faith.³⁸

Osborne takes precisely this angle in the play, presenting Luther equivocally as a man of extraordinary spiritual vision yet a man who is also continually ‘struggling for certainty, struggling insanely like a man in a fit, an animal trapped to the bone with doubt’ (Act 2, Scene 4, p. 73).

In the second half of the play the accent is on the public figure rather than the private individual. The fast-moving episodic scenes provide sweeping cinematic flashes, a telescopic view of the personalities involved. John Tetzel cuts a flamboyant figure. The actor is required to have a commanding voice and presence for he has to hold the stage in a scene that is pure monologue. Tetzel's arrival is a spectacle in itself. To the accompaniment of loud music, bells, singing, and the smoke of incense from lighted tapers, a slow-moving procession makes its way to the centre of the market-place at Juterbög. Behind the Pontiff's bull of grace carried on a cushion and cloth of gold, and the arms of the Pope and the Medici, comes the focus of the procession, John Tetzel, Dominican, inquisitor and the most famous indulgence vendor of his day. With the rhetorical flourish and histrionic flair of the born salesman, he comes into his own as lord of the market-place:

… won't you for as little as one quarter of a florin, my friend; buy yourself one of these letters, so that in the hour of death, the gate through which sinners can enter the world of torment shall be closed against you, and the gate leading to the joy of paradise be flung open for you? And, remember this, these letters aren't just for the living but for the dead too. … It isn't even necessary to repent. So don't hold back, come forward, think of your dear ones, think of yourselves! … For remember: As soon as your money rattles in the box and the cash bell rings, the soul flies out of purgatory and sings!

The speech ends with Tetzel flinging a large coin into the open strong box, where it rattles furiously. There follows the sound of coins clattering like rain into a great coffer as the light fades (Act 2, Sc. 1, pp. 47-50). In production this was one of the most arresting scenes of the play. Tetzel was played by Peter Bull who turned this speech into ‘a juicy theatrical turn’.³⁹ ‘Corpulent under his mitre and hawking indulgences to a rattle of tambourine and drums’, he spoke with a ‘jolly, sleazy mission-week intimacy’ that was ‘lovely caricature’.⁴⁰ This meretricious display of pomp and rhetoric provoked a spontaneous round of applause. Gaudy spectacle and sensation are used with a serious purpose here to convey the prostitution of the Church—the corruption of the truth for cheap commercial ends. The vulgar bigotry of Tetzel is contrasted with the vision and sophistication of Cajetan, ‘Cardinal of San Sisto, General of the Dominican Order, as well as its most distinguished theologian, papal legate, Rome's highest representative in Germany.’ Urbane, subtle, the practised diplomat, Cajetan puts forward the strongest arguments for the Church. In an interview with Martin he makes an eloquent plea for its authority and unity. If these are destroyed he predicts a time of great social disquiet when there will be ‘frontiers, frontiers of all kinds—between men—and there'll be no end to them’. ‘How will men find God if they are left to themselves each man abandoned and only known to himself?’ (Act 2, Sc. 4, p. 74).

Cajetan's anticipation of what will ensue from the kicking away of traditional supports prefigures the state of things to come—the disintegration of the Church and the gradual dissolution of all real order and cohesion in Western society with the lack of an all-embracing structure to provide anchorage and direction. The Church and the world rent by schism is precisely the opposite of what the historical Luther intended, and Osborne's inclusion of a forward perspective here adds dramatic weight and edge to the discussion. As Katharine Worth points out, the trial scene in Shaw's Saint Joan ‘must surely have been in Osborne's mind when he constructed the argument between Luther and Cajetan’. ‘Like Cauchon, Cajetan argues with moderation, civilized wit and understanding’, warning Luther of the ‘far-reaching consequences of his “heresy,” consequences which Luther himself, like Saint Joan in her play, has not envisaged’.⁴¹

At the Diet of Worms, Martin finally takes an irrevocable stand which is also a personal expression of identity and freedom:

Unless I am shown by the testimony of the Scriptures—for I don't believe in popes or councils—unless I am refuted by Scripture and my conscience is captured by God's own word, I cannot and will not recant, since to act against one's conscience is neither safe nor honest. Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more.

(Act 3, Sc. 1, p. 85)

Like Bolt, Osborne places stress on the self as the ultimate point of reference. Thus Martin admits later, with reference to this critical moment: ‘I listened for God's voice but all I could hear was my own’ (Act 3, Sc. 3, p. 101). This harmonizes with the fact that the historical Luther made the subjective element overt and central in the question of faith, taking religion away from the monopoly of Church or institution.

From this bold heroic moment at Worms, there is a sudden dismaying shift of mood and perspective as we are confronted with the uprising of the peasants in 1525 and its ruthless suppression. The shock of this transition came through with ironic impact through its staging in the original production:

Mr Finney stands there in the foreground against a rich tapestry, proudly holding aloft one of the books he has refused to disown as a glowing light irradiates him. Then a light comes up in the background making the tapestry transparent and showing the peasants with their tattered banners marching to the fray. It is as if hero and anti-hero were revealed in a flash to be one, like Luther's strength and weakness.⁴²

A Knight steps out from among the carnage. He fiercely upbraids Luther for his failure to support the peasants he roused to rebellion by letting loose the floodwaters of change, that now threaten to sweep everything away, including what Luther upholds himself. He stands accused from all sides:

MARTIN:
The princes blame me, you blame me and the peasants blame me—
KNIGHT:
You put the water in the wine didn't you?

The Knight places his hand deliberately, ritually, on the lifeless body of a peasant and smears Martin with the blood. ‘You're all ready now,’ he says, ‘You even look like a butcher—’ Martin cries out in despair, ‘God is the butcher—’ (Act 3, Sc. 3, pp. 88-9).

Martin attempts to reconcile his faith with the reality of the catastrophic suffering around him. Preaching a sermon with enormous effort, he relates the story of Abraham's obedience in the face of God's command to sacrifice Isaac, his son, another spiritual dilemma which involves a morally dubious decision:

Never, save in Christ, was there such obedience as in that moment, and, if God had blinked, the boy would have died then, but the Angel intervened, and the boy was released, and Abraham took him up in his arms again. In the teeth of life we seem to die, but God says no—in the teeth of death we live. If He butchers us, He makes us live.

(Act 3, Sc. 2, p. 92)

Martin can only suggest blind faith in God's ultimate redeeming purpose, in the face of the horrific violence and suffering that follow as part of the consequence of his actions.

In depicting Luther as clinging to the Bible for strength and solace, Osborne was almost certainly influenced by Bainton who asserts that:

The Scriptures assumed for Luther an overwhelming importance, not primarily as a source book for antipapal polemic, but as the one ground of certainty. He had rejected the authority of popes and councils, and could not make a beginning from within as did the prophets of the inward word. The core of his quarrel with them was that in moments of despondency he could find nothing within but utter blackness. He was completely lost unless he could find something without on which to lay hold. And this he found in the Scriptures. He approached them uncritically, from our point of view, but not with credulity. Nothing so amazed him as the faith of the participants: that Mary credited the annunciation of the angel Gabriel; that Joseph gave credence to the dream which allays his misgivings … that the Wise Men were ready to go to Bethlehem at the word of the prophet.

To illustrate Luther's feelings of wonder at such faith, Bainton quotes from one of Luther's sermons in which he narrates the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham:

The father raised his knife. The boy bared his throat. If God had slept an instant, the lad would have been dead. I could not have watched. I am not able in my thoughts to follow. The lad was as a sheep for the slaughter. Never in history was there such obedience, save in Christ. But God was watching and all the angels. The father raised his knife; the boy did not wince. The angel cried, “Abraham, Abraham!” See how divine majesty is at hand in the hour of death. We say, “In the midst of life we die.” God answers, “Nay in the midst of death we live.”⁴³

Osborne uses precisely the portion of this particular sermon of Luther's which Bainton quotes. He modifies the language a little to blend in with his own modern prose style, but keeps close to the essential spirit and simple vigour of the original.

The final scene of the play again clearly derives its tone and shape from Bainton, who relates how Luther, grown famous and rather imperious in later years (having angered Henry VIII, infuriated Duke George and estranged Erasmus) was concerned that perhaps he had also hurt Staupitz who had not written for some time. Bainton quotes Staupitz's reply to Luther's letter of inquiry:

My love for you is unchanged, passing the love of women … but you seem to me to condemn many external things which do not affect justification. Why is the cowl a stench in your nostrils when many in it have lived holy lives? There is nothing without abuse. My dear friend, I beseech you to remember the weak. Do not denounce points of indifference which can be held in sincerity, though in matters of faith be never silent. We owe much to you, Martin. You have taken us from the pigsty to the pasture of life … I hope you will have good fruit at Wittenberg. My prayers are with you.

Shortly after he had received this letter news reached Luther that Staupitz was dead.⁴⁴ Staupitz's fatherly attachment to Luther, his wise advice, and the note of nostalgia, sadness and gentle reproach struck in this letter, characterizes his role in the final scene of the play. Osborne resurrects Staupitz (who actually had died many years before this time) and has him return in 1530 to the monastery which is now Martin's household. He is the same benevolent spirit, but grown tired and old. As Martin begins to dogmatize in his usual strident fashion, Staupitz gets up to retire:

STAUPITZ:
I'd better get off to bed.
MARTIN:
They're trying to turn me into a fixed star, Father, but I'm a shifting planet. You're leaving me.
STAUPITZ:
I'm not leaving you, Martin. I love you. I love you as much as any man has ever loved most women. But we're not two protected monks under a pear tree in a garden any longer. The world's changed. … You've taken Christ away from the low mumblings and soft voices and jewelled gowns and the tiaras and put Him back where He belongs. In each man's soul. We owe so much to you. All I beg of you is not to be too violent. In spite of everything you've said and shown us, there were men, some men who did live holy lives here once. Don't—don't believe you, only you are right.

(Act 3, Sc. 3, p. 100)

Staupitz does not deny Luther's crucial contribution to a vital reformulation of faith, but his warning is against Luther's setting himself up as an infallible authority, against the dangers of intransigence.

Staupitz in a way puts forward the Christian's only viable position in a new world perspective. His world deprived of firm lineaments, man walks uneasily with a sense of shifting footholds; thus God is groped for through a nightmare of uncertainty. The contemporary wisdom now lies in openness, toleration, flexibility. In the play, doubt and deep questioning are ultimately affirmed as a means to truth. The play ends quietly. Martin is shown speaking to his sleeping child: ‘A little while, and you shall see me. Christ said that, my son. I hope that'll be the way of it again. I hope so. Let's just hope so, eh?’ With the child asleep in his arms, Martin walks off slowly (Act 3, Sc. 3, p. 102). We are left on this pregnant note of mixed hope and doubt.

Thus, like Bolt and Shaffer, Osborne is drawn to a historical subject for its religious interest, but treats it with far greater depth and force of imagination. He firmly grounds his play on documentary evidence, but at the same time he is experimental in a vital individual way, combining his gift for rhetoric with vivid aural, visual and physical elements to convey both an inner state of tension and unrest, and an outer state of public conflict and debate. Music was richly employed to define the mood in the original production, becoming monastic or primitive by turn in the first half of the play, and public and strident in the second. The historical Luther's grand hymn, ‘A Mighty Fortress’, was movingly introduced at key points, at first ‘whispered to a lone drum beat’, then sung out triumphantly.⁴⁵

The bold use of dialogue, ritual, expressionistic settings, striking visual and physical effects, all point to a more poetic dynamic form of theatre. Running through the play is a chain of subconscious images drawn from memories, dreams, nightmares such as the lost body of a child, the monstrous rat assailant, the goat drinking blood, and the people reduced to their clothes all ‘neatly pressed and folded on the ground’. This is in keeping with the play's emphasis on a condition of spiritual anxiety, fracture and uncertainty. These images are rationally placed to fit in with a picture of a personal and collective neurosis.

From Luther, with its roots in psychoanalysis, Edward Bond's Early Morning seems an almost inevitable next step. It is a powerful surrealistic drama where rationality in artistic form is denied, and dreams intrude fantastically into waking life to depict a world of political madness.

Notes

1. See K. Tynan, Tynan Right and Left, pp. 180-1. Richard Findlater, Banned! a Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967) pp. 186-7.

2. Caryl Brahms, ‘Man Bites Dogma’, Plays and Players, 8, no. 12 (Sept. 1961) p. 11.

3. ‘Best Guarantee Yet of Mr Osborne's Stamina’, The Times, 28/7/61.

4. Tynan Right and Left, p. 78.

5. John McClain, ‘Brilliantly Acted Historical Drama’, Journal American, 26/9/63. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 24, no. 22 (1963) p. 277.

6. […]

7. Norman Nadel, ‘Osborne's Overpowering Luther’, New York World-Telegram and The Sun, 26/9/63. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 24, no. 22 (1963) p. 277.

8. Richard Watts Jr, ‘Luther in a Memorable Portrayal’, New York Post, 26/9/63. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 24, no. 22 (1963) p. 276.

9. ‘Kerr on Luther at the St James’, New York Herald Tribune 26/9/63. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 24, no. 22 (1963) p. 278.

10. ‘That Awful Museum’, Twentieth Century, 69 (Jan. - Mar. 1961) p. 216.

11. Anger and After: a Guide to the New British Drama (London: Methuen, 1962) p. 55.

12. The Plays of John Osborne: an Assessment (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969) p. 105. John Osborne (Essex: Longmans, Green, 1969) p. 18.

13. Drama in the Sixties: Form and Interpretation (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) p. 187.

14. John Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969) p. 87.

15. Contemporary Playwrights: John Osborne (London: Heinemann, 1968) p. 46.

16. ‘They call it Cricket’ in T. Maschler (ed.), Declaration (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957) p. 105.

17. Young Man Luther (London: Faber & Faber, 1959) p. 7.

18. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press, 1938) p. 508.

19. A Better Class of Person: an Autobiography 1929-1956 (London: Oxford University Press, 1981) p. 508.

20. ‘Osborne's Overpowering Luther’, New York World-Telegram and The Sun, 26/9/63.

21. Young Man Luther, p. 115.

22. Ibid., pp. 247, 95, 16.

23. Ibid., p. 37.

24. The Plays of John Osborne: an Assessment, p. 105.

25. Contemporary Playwrights: John Osborne, p. 51.

26. It was subsequently published under the title, ‘Luther and Mr Osborne’ in The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 1 (1965-66).

27. ‘Luther and Mr Osborne’ in The Cambridge Quarterly, 1 (Winter 1965-66) pp. 28-30.

28. Ibid., pp. 30, 42.

29. Ibid., pp. 32-3.

30. Ibid., pp. 34-7.

31. Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: The New American Library, 1950) p. 281.

32. Erikson, Young Man Luther, p. 20.

33. Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther, p. 100.

34. Ibid., pp. 22-3.

35. Ibid., p. 56.

36. See for example, Here I Stand, pp. 160, 240-1.

37. Ibid., p. 44.

38. Ibid., pp. 281-3.

39. Harold Taubman, ‘Luther stars Albert Finney’, The New York Times, 26/9/63. Reprinted in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, 24, no. 22 (1963) p. 280.

40. Walter Kerr, ‘Kerr on Luther at the St James,’ New York Herald Tribune, 26/9/63. See also John McClain, ‘Brilliantly Acted Historical Drama’, Journal American, 26/9/63.

41. ‘Shaw and John Osborne’, The Shavian, 2 (Oct. 1964) p. 31.

42. Harold Taubman, ‘Luther stars Albert Finney’, in The New York Times, 26/9/63.

43. Here I Stand, pp. 288-90.

44. Ibid., p. 198.

45. See John McClain, ‘Brilliantly Acted Historical Drama’, Journal American, 26/9/63. Norman Nadel, ‘Osborne's Luther’, New York World-Telegram and The Sun, 26/9/63.