a given play, each cultural alternative usually exposes a deficit in thestatus quo or brings a valuable influence to compensate for some perceived lack. The Greek private detective, Christoforou, is able to explain to the older, middle-class accountant that the young wife he suspects of infidelity really only needs some excitement in her life with her mate. Martin Dysart, the controlled, rational psychiatrist, tells of traveling each summer through Greece, yearning for the wild passion of the ancient festivals of Dionysus. Mozart, bored with writing opera according to the dominant Italian conventions, is glad for a commission from the Austrian King Joseph to write opera in German.

Despite the cosmopolitan flavor of Shaffer’s work, his plays are consistently male-dominated. Significant conflicts tend to be between males. In The Private Ear, Tchaik loses Doreen to Ted. In The Public Eye, while following the wife is a major factor in the action, it is reported in dialogue between the two men. The wife does appear and interact with her husband and the detective, but she does not have equivalent exposure onstage. The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus all feature conflicts between males. Only in White Lies, one of Shaffer’s less notable efforts, is there a female protagonist. While she achieves a moral victory in that she sees and tells the truth in the end, she is forced to return her fortune-telling fee to the belligerent male antagonist and thereby faces an ethical defeat. In rewriting Shrivings, Shaffer strengthened the conflict by removing Sir Gideon Petrie’s wife altogether, leaving the American secretary, Lois Neal, as the sole female party in a struggle primarily among men.

Significantly, Shaffer’s strongest plays have usually included either more female characters or more active female characters than have the less successful plays. Even in their activity, however, the women may not be wholly ideal types. Louise in Five Finger Exercise is a domineering mother. Her daughter Pamela is aware of the family politics but is never permitted significant access to the actual struggles played out among the older members of the family, since she is only fourteen. Black Comedy features young Brindsley contending with Carol, his current and very superficial fiancée, on the night his former lover, Clea, returns. His upstairs neighbor, Miss Furnival, helps build the farce as a typical middle-aged spinster getting tipsy during the action, but she remains a convenient comic stereotype. All three women are actively involved in the plot, and all three have considerable dialogue. The protagonist, though, is a male.

Equus and Amadeus, Shaffer’s strongest works, include women as supporting characters. Dysart turns several times to Hester Salomon for emotional support during the course of Equus. Wise and compassionate, she is the most wholesome of Shaffer’s female characters. Constanze Mozart, too, is a support for her husband in Amadeus and is the only woman in the play who has a speaking role. The few others onstage are seen but not heard.

Because Shaffer is a twin, Jules Glenn suggests that his various pairs of male characters embody the conflicts and complementary satisfactions typical of twins. Although none of the character-pairs is portrayed as biological twins in the plays, their roles often have parallel aspects. Two men are involved with a single woman in The Private Ear, The Public Eye, and White Lies; two men in Equus, Martin Dysart and his patient Alan Strang, are inadequate in their sexual relationships with women. In Amadeus, both Mozart and Salieri have affairs with Katherina Cavalieri. The Royal Hunt of the Sun features two men who claim the role of a god.

Role of Self-disclosure

The key to an overview of Shaffer’s work is his talent for revelation of character through self-disclosure. Five Finger Exercise, conventional in many respects, is outstanding for its characters’ multiple levels of self-disclosure, from Stanley, who rants without understanding, to Walter, who understands both the Harringtons’ needs and his own and attempts suicide when fulfillment of his needs seems impossible. Shaffer’s other plays take their depth and texture from this technique, if not their basic purpose. Self-disclosure is the major structural pattern for The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus, each of which is presented by a narrator recalling past events. Similarly, Shaffer’s choice of themes as his craft matures leads to a progressive revelation of the human condition. Clive, Shaffer’s first stage protagonist, searches for individual identity and independence. Protagonists in the one-act plays, both the serious and the comic, are generally reaching for satisfactory relationships with other individuals. Leading characters in the major serious plays probe the ambitions, ideals, and institutions of humankind in the world at large.

Shaffer’s comments on The Royal Hunt of the Sun reveal a salient concern obvious in that play and others overtly dealing with worship: He is disturbed that “man constantly trivializes the immensity of his experience” and “settles for a Church or Shrine or Synagogue . . . and over and over again puts into the hands of other men the reins of oppression. . . .” Even his earliest play, though portraying domestic rather than political or religious struggles, shows that revelation of character, the self-disclosure essential to informed, mature relationships, makes the individual human being vulnerable to another’s control.

Five Finger Exercise

Dennis A. Klein observes that “there is not one happy marriage in all of Shaffer’s plays . . . and the prototype is the marriage between Louise and Stanley Harrington.” Clive Harrington, the protagonist of Five Finger Exercise, is his mother’s pet; he is also the target of his father’s criticism because he lacks “practical” or “useful” interests. Struggling for identity and independence, Clive is never safe in the family bickering. Agreeing with Stanley that the new tutor is a needless expense draws reproach from Louise. Admitting that he is writing a review of a performance of the Greek play Electra triggers one more paternal lecture on the really useful pursuits in life. Clive shows contradictory responses to Walter Langer, the young German whom his mother has hired as the family tutor. Clive needs and wants the contact with an understanding, mature role model. At the same time, he is jealous of his mother’s attraction to Walter, and therefore opposes Walter’s efforts to become part of the Harrington family.

Home from Cambridge, Clive drinks to avoid parental control. Walter advises him to get out on his own but declines to travel with him during the coming holidays. Seeing Louise cradle Walter’s head in her arms during a tender moment, Clive reports to Stanley that the two were engaged in lovemaking. Warmed by Walter’s Continental graces—he is fluent in French, plays classical music on the piano and on his phonograph, and brings her wildflowers—Louise enjoys toying with the young man in somewhat the same fashion as she toys with Clive. When Walter makes it clear that he esteems her as a mother, though, Louise urges Stanley to fire Walter for being “a bad influence on Pamela.”

Stanley, although he doubts that Clive’s accusation is true, resents Walter’s advice to Clive and uses the claim of an illicit relationship as a reason for dismissal. The lie is a very versatile weapon. It can help rid Stanley of the unwanted cost of the tutor and simultaneously serve vengeance on the young German for counseling Clive to leave home. It will punish Louise for her affectations. It will embarrass Clive—due vengeance for the boy’s lack of filial piety—and weaken Clive’s relationship with his mother, a bond Stanley could never match in his attempts at fathering and could never before attack so severely. Though he still understands his family no better than before, Stanley can dominate them all in one stroke.

Clive is shocked that the lie he told in private becomes his father’s bludgeon in public. He realizes that his capacity to injure others is as great as that of his parents. Walter, who has opened himself to Clive and Louise in his bid for acceptance as a family member, cannot tolerate the betrayal, the victimization, resulting from his vulnerability. Walter’s suicide attempt shows Clive the need for all the Harringtons to change: “The courage. For all of us. Oh God—give it.”

The Royal Hunt of the Sun

Pairs of one-act plays bracket Shaffer’s epic drama The Royal Hunt of the Sun, which turns squarely to the issue of worship in both institutional and individual dimensions. Old Martin, the narrator, tells of his youthful adventure as page boy to Pizarro, conqueror of Peru. To Young Martin, Pizarro is a hero to worship. To the priests Valverde and De Nizza, military conquest is a necessary evil that will bring the Incas the good of institutional Christianity. To Estete, the Royal Overseer, Pizarro’s personal ambition and the blessings of the Church are the necessary tools for advancing the dominion of King Carlos and thus for increasing his personal status within the king’s domain. Pizarro takes the noble justifications of Church and State and the outright greed of his soldiers as the means for attaining personal glory. A hard man, he warns Young Martin never to trust him: He will surely betray anyone and anything in his drive for fame.

Atahuallpa, god-king of the Incas, believes the approaching Pizarro must be the White God of ancient legend returning as foretold. Estete declares to the Inca general, Challcuchima, that the Spanish come in the names of King Carlos of Spain and of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Challcuchima insists that it is he who comes to them in the name of the Son of God—Atahuallpa, Son of the Sun. The two leaders are fascinated with each other. When cautioned against blasphemy in this duel of rank, Pizarro exclaims, “He is a God: I am a God.”

Young Martin’s faith in his hero and their cause is challenged when the Spanish massacre three thousand unarmed Inca warriors and capture Atahuallpa. Hernando de Soto gives the boy the stock rationale for the “huntsmen of God”: “There must always be dying to make new life.” Young Martin replaces a treacherous native translator for Pizarro and Atahuallpa and witnesses their growing kinship. The thirty-three-year-old Inca ruler learns Spanish and swordsmanship from his sixty-year-old captor. In return, Atahuallpa teaches Pizarro Inca songs and dances as the subdued empire collects gold to ransom its god-king.

Once the ransom is paid, Pizarro demands that Atahuallpa pledge that the Spanish will have safe passage out of Peru. He refuses, and Pizarro’s officers insist that Atahuallpa must die. Though he himself has found no special meaning in his mother Church, Pizarro persuades the Inca to accept Christian baptism. Without it, he would be burned to ashes. The god-king does not fear death; he believes his Father Sun will resurrect him. By accepting the rites of the Spanish Church, he earns death by strangulation and will leave a body to be restored.

There is no resurrection. Pizarro, however, weeps for his personal loss for the first time in his life and takes solace in the humanistic observation that at least Atahuallpa and he will be buried in the same earth under the same sun.

For Young Martin, Pizarro’s betrayal of Atahuallpa is the end of faith: “Devotion never came again.” Thus, Shaffer poses the high personal cost of trusting individuals and institutions further than they merit. The conquest was possible because Church and State accepted each other as justifications for destroying competing systems—and both fed on human greed and ambition. The Inca empire fell because its supreme ruler was convinced of his own divinity and was fascinated by the invader’s claim of equal status. He never ordered a significant counterattack.

Equus

Shaffer gives a macrocosmic study of worship through the conflict of whole systems in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, with glimpses of the personal cost of faith in such systems in the lives of Atahuallpa, Pizarro, and Young Martin. Equus, by contrast, provides a detailed microcosmic study of the elements of worship. Seventeen-year-old Alan Strang has blinded six horses in the stable where he works. Hester Salomon, a magistrate and friend of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, brings the boy to Dysart for treatment. The psychoanalyst uncovers, little by little, the attitudes and symbols Alan has fashioned into a mysterious personal religion—worship of Equus, the horse-god.

Alan Strang is more than the average troubled adolescent of the usual domestic drama. He is the most isolated, most disturbed of all Shaffer’s characters. The son of a printer and former schoolteacher, Alan is practically illiterate. His father forbids television in the home, so Alan sneaks off to watch Westerns at the neighbors’ house. An avowed atheist, Frank Strang considers the religious instruction Dora gives to Alan just so much “bad sex.” Dora, for her part, assures Alan that God sees him everywhere; she has read the Bible to him often. Alan especially enjoyed passages from Job and Revelation that refer to the strength and power of horses. Not wanting to interfere with her son, Dora allowed him to have a graphic poster of Christ being flogged by Roman centurions even though she believed it was a little “extreme.” After an argument over religion, Frank once stormed into Alan’s room and ripped the poster off the wall. Alan was devastated. A few weeks later, Frank gave Alan a picture of a horse, which Alan hung in the same spot at the foot of his bed. Frank once observed Alan chanting a genealogy, haltering himself with string, and beating himself with a coathanger before the horse picture. Frank never discussed sex with his son; Dora did so only in generalities that linked it with the love of God.

Shaffer opens both the first and second acts of Equus with Dysart pondering what the horse might want of Alan, and why, of all the things in the world “equal in their power to enslave . . . one suddenly strikes.” When Dysart questions the propriety of “curing” Alan, whose exotic worship is “the core of his life,” Hester Salomon assures the doctor that the boy must be relieved of his pain and helped to normal living. Expert in his profession, Dysart knows what he must do in order to lead the minds of troubled children into normal patterns, but he is himself led back to the borders of the rational, sensing something vital beyond: “that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. . . . I envy it.”

The self-disclosure integral to Shaffer’s drama, which built the dialogue and plot of Five Finger Exercise and which became a structural device as well via the narrator in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, rises to full force in Equus. Dysart is both narrator and protagonist. He relates the numerous episodes that present and then unravel the mystery of Alan’s attack on the horses. Through his speeches to the audience about the plot and through his confidences shared with Hester Salomon as the protagonist within the action, Dysart exposes his own character, just as he exposes Alan’s. Shaffer’s use of games—which appears in the follow-the-leader ploy of The Public Eye, the pretended shock-treatment scene of Shrivings, and so on—is important in Equus as well. As Dysart elicits one disclosure after another from Alan, the boy extracts significant answers from Dysart in return. The methods of revelation become more intimate as the plot advances. Alan at first sings commercials when Dysart asks questions. He later divulges information via tape recordings. He finally responds in direct encounters, first with resistance, then relying on supposed hypnosis, and finally under the pretended use of a truth drug that allows him to reenact the events of the night he attacked the horses.

Alan had been out with Jill Mason, who suggested a tryst in the stable—the Holy of Holies for Equus. Alan’s worship was so exclusive that his god blocked intimacy with any other. Caught between passion for another human being and passion for his horse-god—which, like his mother’s God, could see him everywhere—Alan struck out to blind the god who thwarted his relationship with Jill Mason.

Martin Dysart concludes that he can lead Alan into a normal existence, but it will probably be a drab, routine life. He himself remains drawn to the nonrational source of human passion: “I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark.” His need is marked with a remnant of the worship he is taking away from Alan; “There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.”

For Pizarro, the late attraction of a meaningful, dominating force appeared and died with Atahuallpa, a confident believer in an alien faith, but a faith with numerous parallels to the Christian tradition familiar to the conquistador. Pizarro had used his own religious heritage as a weapon for so long that he could only hope for meaning among a new set of symbols enlivened by a personal contact with the god-king the symbols supported. Martin Dysart’s relationship with his patient also draws him into confrontation with passionate worship. The motion from Pizarro to Dysart, however, is an ideological step from a protagonist who concludes that human beings make their own gods to one who can destroy a god and still sense some force beyond human reason that endures regardless of whether the belief-system of a given worshiper is destroyed. Shaffer’s next protagonist steps further into premises consistent with those of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Amadeus

Antonio Salieri continues Shaffer’s trend of self-disclosing characters by serving as both narrator and protagonist of Amadeus. Old Martin and Young Martin in The Royal Hunt of the Sun give the narrator’s view and the more passionate view of Pizarro’s page, respectively, and are cast as separate characters who both may be onstage at once. Dysart serves as narrator and protagonist in turn for Equus, not needing a distinction in age for the separate facets of the character, because the story Dysart tells took place in the recent past. His explanations and deliberations unify the flow of cinematic scenes, which include recent events retold from Dysart’s viewpoint and flashbacks to some more distant events in Alan’s past. Salieri, too, serves as both narrator and protagonist, but he must bridge a temporal gap of decades, as must Old Martin. Shaffer keeps Salieri a single character, similar to Dysart, but has Salieri change costume onstage and specify the shifts in time—covering two different eras in his life through changes in the character before the eyes of the audience. The transitions are yet one more method for effecting character revelation without simply repeating a narrative technique.

Salieri is Shaffer’s first protagonist to operate so nearly within traditional premises of religious devotion. Salieri interacts with a God anthropomorphic enough to respond to his prayers—but a deity shaped by the Salieri family’s mercantile values. In his youth, Salieri knelt “before the God of Bargains” and prayed to be a composer. In return, he would live virtuously, help other musicians, and “honor God with much music.” Mozart’s appearance in Vienna threatens the established Salieri’s self-esteem. Mozart the man is rash, vulgar, and obnoxious. For all the faults of the man, however, Salieri hears the voice of God in some of Mozart’s music. He prays for such inspiration in his own work, since “music is God’s art,” but to no avail.

Salieri’s star voice pupil, Katherina Cavalieri, sings the lead in Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio and has an affair with him as well. A jealous Salieri considers seducing Mozart’s fiancée, Constanze, in revenge. Mozart marries Constanze, despite his father’s objections, and struggles to support himself and his wife. Constanze Mozart approaches Salieri for help in securing an appointment for her husband. Salieri nearly exacts her virtue as the price for any assistance, but in the musical scores she has brought to further her husband’s cause, Salieri has seen Absolute Beauty. He recognizes his own mediocrity and rages at his God, “To my last breath, I shall block You on earth as far as I am able!”

Narrator Salieri introduces act 2 as his “battle with God” in which “Mozart was the battleground.” Salieri soon breaks his vow of virtue. Although he turns away a resentful offer of an interlude with Constanze, he takes Katherina Cavalieri as his mistress. Breaking his vow to help fellow musicians, he hinders Mozart’s career whenever possible. He recommends that Mozart not be appointed to tutor the Princess Elizabeth. He does suggest that Mozart be appointed chamber composer after the death of Christoph Gluck—but at one tenth the former salary. Salieri is determined to “starve out the God.” As Mozart thinks through the plot of The Magic Flute, Salieri raises the notion of using the rites and ideals of the Masonic order in the opera. The two composers were among many notables in Vienna who belonged to the lodge. As all the rituals and doctrines are to be kept secret, Mozart’s stage parallels of Masonic practices alienate the very lodge brothers who have helped him to find what work he can get.

Alone and ailing, Mozart begs God for time to complete his Requiem Mass. He asks Salieri to speak for God and to explain the continual suffering of his adult years. Salieri declares, “God does not love! He can only use!”

Salieri lives to see Mozart’s music come into vogue after the composer’s death. His own music dies before he does. He takes this as his punishment; “I must survive to see myself become extinct.” His claim to be Mozart’s murderer is his last attack on God. If his fame cannot last, perhaps his infamy can. Even so negative a grasping for glory proves vain: No one really believes him.

Salieri’s actions are reminiscent of those of the ancient Hebrew heroes who were held to covenants with their God. Salieri’s assertion that his virtue merits blessing while Mozart’s vices deserve punishment echoes a plaint recurrent in the Psalms. The pattern of Israel’s God favoring the unworthy or the unlikely candidate for leadership—the naïve Gideon, the young shepherd David, and so on—also has its reflex in Amadeus as the esteemed court composer finds the voice of God in the music of an immature, foulmouthed upstart. In a sense, Salieri also is a failed Cain. Jealous of God’s favor to Mozart regardless of all of Salieri’s musical and moral efforts, the aging narrator cannot even secure for himself the name of murderer. The biblical Cain bore a mark to signify his archetypal fratricide. Salieri cannot even invent the curse for himself. His God of Bargains wins the battle. Salieri gets no more and no less than he asked for when the bargain was struck, and he is punished for failing to keep his part of the covenant.

Thus, the trend of character revelation begun in the Harrington household persists. The issues of self-control versus domination by authority are broached from varying perspectives, institutional and individual, as Shaffer moves from a protagonist searching for self, through others searching for meaningful relationships with individuals, to characters exploring the human being’s relationship to the structures and forces of the world at large. From The Royal Hunt of the Sun to Shrivings (which probes the limits of secular humanism as thoroughly as other plays challenge aspects of traditional religion) and on through Equus and Amadeus, Shaffer’s protagonists become more overtly self-revealing and steadily more concerned with a focused search for meaning. Shaffer’s mature use of a character’s personal disclosures culminates in the award-winning cinematic narratives of Equus and Amadeus, in which there is a great passion to pursue, and in which the revelation of character shapes form, theme, and technique all at once.

The Gift of the Gorgon

The Gift of the Gorgon combines naturalism of plot and dialogue with highly imaginative staging. Through the use of lighting, screens, and a wall that can part centrally into halves, one set becomes half a dozen or so locales. The action takes place during the years 1975 to 1993. The role of the playwright and the plays he or she writes is combined with elements of Greek mythology and the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism. The Gift of the Gorgon opened to mixed reviews in December 1992. Peter Hall, who directed the play, praised Shaffer for undertaking such a bold, ambitious task at his age (Shaffer was sixty-six years of age at the time). Hall asserts that most dramatists in their sixties are content to sit and collect their royalties.

The setting is a villa on the Greek island of Thera but often becomes England during scenes of recollection. The protagonist is Edward Damson, a once successful but now reclusive English playwright. He has Anglicized his name from Damsinski, that of his father, a whining, bigoted Russian émigré. Edward’s wife is the former Helen Jarvis, whose father is a liberal Cambridge professor, a prominent member of the Peace League. Helen was a promising classical scholar until she gave up her own pursuits to devote herself totally to her husband and his career. Edward despises academic critics. Ironically, that is what his illegitimate son, Philip—never acknowledged by him—has become. As the play opens, Edward has recently died, and Philip has traveled to Thera to learn more about the father he never met. Helen is at first unwilling but does eventually review the Damson’s eighteen-year relationship in a series of flashbacks. One of Edward’s curious practices over those years was communicating with his wife through unpublished dramatic scenes he would leave on her pillow or in his desk where she would find them. In these scenes, Perseus, the Greek hero, represents Edward, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, represents Helen. Early in their relationship, Athena-Helen empowers Perseus-Edward to slay the Gorgon, a monster so horrible that the beholder is turned to stone. The Gorgon represents Edward’s initial inability to complete a play without his wife’s inspiration.

Edward is a man of extremes, violent in language if not in behavior. The rational Helen persuades him to tone down violent scenes in his plays Icons and Prerogative, which become great successes. Later, after Edward has come to believe that Helen is more stultifying than inspiring, he writes a play, I.R.E., about an Irish terrorist and a mother whose child he has killed. In the climactic scene (against which Helen has strongly recommended), the mother ritually murders the terrorist, then dances around his bloody corpse. The audience is repulsed, the play fails, and Edward exiles himself to Thera for the last five years of his life. There, he drinks, hangs about bars with pretty young tourists, and abuses Helen through total neglect. Eventually, the couple experiences something of a role reversal. The once pacific Helen writes a scene and leaves it in her husband’s desk. In the scene, Athena tongue-lashes a cowering Perseus, concluding with the accusation that Perseus himself has become the Gorgon. Edward appears contrite but plots to have his wife deal him a mortal blow. The scene mimics Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband, Agamemnon, in his bath in the classical tragedy, an act that Edward has earlier characterized as totally justified. He persuades Helen to give him a ritually cleansing shower, but he secretes a razor blade in the soap with which she will scrub his body. Philip, who has worshiped his father from afar, is forced to face the reality of his life and death.

As usual, Shaffer explores a moral subject, in this case vengeance in conflict with an all-encompassing forgiveness. He skillfully merges the classical and the contemporary. The choice of Helen’s name is, of course, suggestive of classical restraint. Edward’s surname (which he has consciously chosen, changing it from Damsinski) is evocative of his fate. The same is true for Philip, who has taken his father’s name, as Edward complains, without permission. The play is almost fiendishly clever and ambiguous, so that at the final curtain the audience may ask: Just what is the gift of the Gorgon, and just who is the Gorgon?