[In the essay below, Gianakaris traces Shaffer's artistic development throughout his plays, focusing on his "masterful merging of the literalism of realism with the provocative of the abstract pictorial."]

British playwright Peter Shaffer remains a puzzle today, particularly for critics and academic scholars. A "moving target" with respect to dramatic styles and thematic interests, he is difficult to categorize within tidy literary designations. Is he primarily a realist probing the psychological and social issues facing the modern age? Is he a somber metaphysician seeking answers to universal enigmas? Or is he a teasing farceur who targets mundane human follies? Regular theatergoers will recognize elements of all these types in Shaffer. Within the variety of styles evidenced in his many plays, however, stand key technical and conceptual loci which support his work as a whole, no matter what the veneer of the drama.

Those center points—essentially naturalistic in nature—will be taken up later in this discussion. But the puzzle of Peter Shaffer extends beyond mere technique or subject matter. In a larger frame of reference, there is difficulty in isolating the theoretical audience for whom he writes. Shaffer embodies that rare species of writer whose career straddles the worlds both of popular and "serious" drama. Impressive success on commercial stages has brought him enormous worldwide recognition, ready financial backing, and eagerness of top theater artists to work with him. The Battle of Shrivings (1970) alone of his dozen plays has failed to win an audience. Yonadab (1985), only a modest success, nonetheless ran for a year in repertory at the British National Theatre. All the rest of his works have received strong acclaim whenever they are performed. By most standards, Shaffer enjoys exceptional popularity on world stages and has earned his stature as one of our foremost writers.

Yet by no means does Shaffer pander to mass tastes to gain general audience following. Quite the contrary; his works involve intellectually demanding themes and innovative theatrical staging. Typically, at the center of his plays stands a questioning—or questing—protagonist, obsessed with discerning mankind's true metaphysical status. Shaffer's best known dramas—The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, Amadeus, and Yonadab—feature heroes such as Pizarro, Dysart, Salieri, and Yonadab who probe their respective universes for answers to philosophical and theological puzzles. Eventually, each protagonist moves toward knowledge of God. At the same time, the hero seeks to discover how far man might assume the powers of God and become God—if indeed He exists. More than a hint of Promethian and Faustian hungers exist in his protagonists. Shaffer's underlying thrust in his major dramas resembles that found in ancient classical drama: to define the relationship of mortal man to immortal deity. Simultaneously, Shaffer's dramatic universe infers values mirroring today's God-is-dead intellectual system, thereby allying Shaffer with the existential world view as well. Small wonder that academics find it dicey to pigeonhole Shaffer as a proponent of a single vision. In his wide-ranging and eclectic thinking, he has few peers today, most of whom focus on psychological or social problems.

Nothing in Shaffer's family background mandated a career in the arts. Born in Liverpool on 15 May 1926, Peter Levin Shaffer and his identical twin brother Anthony grew up in a middle-class Jewish household. Jack Shaffer, a property company director, moved his wife Reka and the family to London in 1936. But with the start of the second world war, they moved frequently to evade the German bombers. Despite the ongoing war, Peter and Anthony attended prestigious St. Paul's School beginning in 1942. Both twins were accepted by Trinity College at Cambridge University; but satisfying their service obligations came first. In their case, they served as Bevin Boys, youths who dug coal in the mines of Kent. In 1947 both Shaffers enrolled in Trinity College where they jointly edited the college paper.

Peter Shaffer came down from Cambridge in 1950 with a specialty in history but no definite career plans. Initially he tried his hand at various jobs until 1951 when he traveled to New York City. There, he worked for a book dealer, retail stores, and the New York Public Library. Shaffer later remarked that this period of his life was bleak and frustrating. But one positive outcome was his frequenting New York theaters. As a result of seeing so much theater, he felt encouraged to try writing plays, his first being The Salt Land. Work in the business world provided him little satisfaction, and he returned to London in 1954 to work at a large music publishing house. While holding that position, Shaffer found his initial success in the realm of drama, when The Salt Land was telecast over ITV. Paradoxically, during this same period he also was establishing a reputation as a writer of fiction. He published three mystery novels in London and in the United States: The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951), How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952), and Withered Murder (1955)—the latter two co-authored with his brother Anthony (the Tony-winning writer of Sleuth). In 1957, Shaffer had two more broadcast dramas aired—the unpublished radio play The Prodigal Father over BBC Radio and Balance of Terror (also unpublished) over BBC Television. Once his plays caught on, Shaffer never looked backward. Thereafter, he devoted his entire energies to the theater.

Shaffer's earliest full-length dramas, Five Finger Exercise (1958) and The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), immediately drew applause from critics who recognized a strong new voice in the theater. Awards came swiftly, initially in England and later in the United States, to confirm the importance of his writing to the modern stage. Later, Equus (1973) and Amadeus (1979) thoroughly won over audiences, earning both critical and popular applause. Both pieces became smash hits on Broadway, and each won a Tony Award as best drama. More recently, Lettice & Lovage (1987) received four Tony nominations, including one for best play. (Eventually the comedy won Tonys for Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack.) Thus, to this point Shaffer has established an enviable record of successes both commercially and critically.

Nor are Shaffer's plays solely popular on live stages. Movies have been made of nearly all his works to date. Here, the results are very mixed, however. Shaffer far prefers the stage medium to the screen, and readily admits the films of his works to be uneven. Interestingly, the factors that led to success or failure in transferring his plays to the screen—particularly the theatricality of his unique realism—also shed light on the nature of Shaffer's works themselves. Such a topic deserves separate consideration, and only a few points will be touched on here. But one unavoidable conclusion is that his plays, which are "exuberantly and unashamedly theatrical," have proven difficult to reconceive for the large screen. Not surprisingly, the film director's task is easier with those works built on more conventional realism. One example may suffice. An interesting yet ultimately disappointing film of Five Finger Exercise was made in 1962. Despite an impressive cast (including Rosalind Russell, Maximilian Schell, and Jack Hawkins) the movie version never attains the psychological richness of the original stage production. However, because of the play's original naturalistic premises, the characterizations of the five principals, along with their fully delineated motivations, translate readily to a movie format.

Just how well Five Finger Exercise made the transformation to film—relatively speaking—becomes evident when considering Shaffer's dramas that move beyond realism in their original conception. A disastrous film adaptation of Royal Hunt (starring Christopher Plummer and Robert Shaw) followed in 1969, for instance. After viewing the hugely distorted movie made of his noble quest drama, Shaffer knew he no longer could entrust his plays to screen writers. Thereafter, he wrote the film scripts himself for The Public Eye (1972), Equus (1977), and Amadeus (1984). Considering how theater-oriented his pieces are in format and spirit, it is surprising that the movie versions fared as well as they did. There is proof that outstanding results are possible when the play transferences are achieved with imagination and flexibility. An example is Milos Forman's film of Amadeus which accumulated eight Academy Awards including Best Film of 1984 and Best Film Adaptation for Shaffer's movie script. Previously, Shaffer received an Oscar nomination for his film script of Equus—a movie whose graphic simulations during the horse-blinding scenes fatally compromised it at the box office. As with Royal Hunt, the stage script for Equus prohibits its being re-shaped for film in a literal fashion—a fact the director of the movie, Sidney Lumet, learned at a high price, according to Shaffer. On the more recent front, plans for a movie version of Lettice & Lovage are in the works, suggesting that the playwright remains open-minded about filmic versions of his works despite disappointments in the past. Additionally, unlike earlier statements denigrating movies, in a recent interview Shaffer hinted that he might revise Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing? as a film. He even acknowledges that his most recent radio piece might also be an ideal candidate for a television play. The entire screen issue then remains open where Shaffer is concerned.

But to return to Shaffer's stage dramas, we need to delineate more closely the appeal of his ideas and techniques. Unlike the opaque conundrums underlying plays by certain other twentieth-century theater experimenters (Beckett and Pinter come to mind), Shaffer's dramas have remained accessible to the theater-going public. This fact tends to devalue his plays for politically oriented theorists who esteem a work according to its bewildering effect on audiences. For such detractors, to be "popular" with playgoers becomes an indictment of a play's worthiness. Only the puzzling, uncommercial, radical avantgarde retains merit for zealots like Brustein and Simon, accounting for their long and active distaste for Shaffer.

Just as his success bridging artistic and popular values elicits mixed reactions, Shaffer evokes ambiguous response and controversy on dramaturgical grounds. If pressed to describe Shaffer's primary writing tools, however, most critics acknowledge the centrality of psycho-logical naturalism. Conventional realism characterizes much of Shaffer's early work, including Five Finger Exercise, the one-act comedies, and the ill-fated Battle of Shrivings (1970, later rewritten as Shrivings, 1974). Although Shaffer temporarily returned to realism with Lettice & Lovage (1987) and the radio play Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing? (1989), naturalism never has been the playwright's favored dramatic approach. The initial draft for The Royal Hunt of the Sun already existed when the naturalistic Five Finger Exercise launched his career in 1958. His true inclinations lay in "big, sweeping theatre," as he explained to the interviewer D. Zerdin on BBC's "Profile" (11 September 1979). Shaffer elaborates in his Introduction to The Collected Plays of Peter Shaffer (New York: Harmony Books, 1982) that the times were not right for the unusual mannerisms of Royal Hunt. The tidal wave of realism during the 1950's, he declares, dictated that his early works follow standard conventions: "I became a playwright finally to be part of the grandiloquent and showy world of imaginative reality. It took me some time to acknowledge this to myself. The times, after all, scarcely favored such an ambition. The mid-1950s did not constitute a time when one could admit, with much chance of being sympathetically heard, a purpose to write about gods and grand aspirations, orators and ecstatics. It was a surging time for England, but the cry tended to be for social realism."

Shaffer recognizes the value of representationalism, however. With this first success, he established his ability to write masterfully in the realistic mode. Shaffer states, "On balance, I feel I did crafted work in my first piece. It said what I wanted it to say, and it possessed a shape which made it play easily and finally accumulated its power." Shaffer's next plays—Shrivings and the one-act comedies "The Private Ear," "The Public Eye," "White Lies," and "Black Comedy"—retained a realistic bias, thereby consolidating popularity with theater audiences. But careful observers of the stage understand that realism alone does not win audience support. His endeavors with realism permitted Shaffer to hone his talent for penetrating dialogue. The occasional intrusion of turgid prose and excessive sentimentality in Five Finger Exercise and in Royal Hunt largely was refined away in the crucible of this early period. Shaffer thus worked at and mastered dramatic realism with these works. Yet, good as these pieces played on stage, they did not satisfy what Peter Shaffer ultimately intended to achieve. Five Finger Exercise proved a valuable base from which he later could launch into more innovative theatrical enterprises.

Most crucial to Shaffer's dramatic style are the imaginative risks exhibited in his masterpieces. The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Equus (1973), Amadeus (1979), and even the revised Yonadab (1985) all exhibit the daring theatrical techniques that make up the playwright's imprimatur. What makes the techniques fresh is his brilliant fusion of presentational narrative modes with traditional realism. The four dramas noted convey their respective stories through a system of narrative frameworks. At the outermost perimeter stand the plays' chorus-like narrators serving as moderators or masters of ceremony. Old Martin, Doctor Dysart, Salieri, and Yonadab address the audience from their posts, first as outside observers of the respective story lines; later, they will blend into the inner plot line as active participants. Though not entirely objective, each moderator as watcher enjoys a unique perspective that instantly engages the attention, interest, and curiosity of playgoers, drawing them into the action.

Illustrations from the plays will help. Old Martin, Pizarro's young aide in Royal Hunt, quickly gains audience interest when addressing them directly with his opening lines to the play:

Save you all. My name is Martin. I'm a soldier of Spain and that's it. Most of my life I've spent fighting for land, treasure, and the cross. I'm worth millions. Soon I'll be dead, and they'll bury me out here in Peru, the land I helped ruin as a boy. This story is about ruin. Ruin and gold. … I'm going to tell you how one hundred and sixty-seven men conquered an empire of twenty-four million.

Following his tantalizing come-on, Martin conjures flash-back scenes through which Pizarro and other characters are introduced.

Parallel opening scenes mark all of Shaffer's finest dramas, whereby a narrator entices the audience into the world of the play. Dr. Dysart in the opening lines from Equus speaks directly to the audience while gesturing behind him at a youth, Alan Strang, nuzzling a horse standing next to him. The puzzling tableau is further heightened by the psychiatrist's cryptic words:

With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces. The animal digs its sweaty brow into his cheek, and they stand in the dark for an hour—like a necking couple. And of all the nonsensical things—I keep thinking about the horse!

Amadeus opens similarly with a non-realistic invocation. Following an "overture" comprised of stichomythic exposition whispered by two chorus figures, Salieri turns directly to the audience. He then entices his playgoers with an irresistible summons:

Vi Saluto! Ombri del Futuro! Antonio Salieri—a vostro servizio! … I can almost see you in your ranks—waiting for your turn to live. Ghosts of the Future! Be visible. I beg you. Be visible. Come to this dusty old room—this time, the smallest hours of dark November, eighteen hundred and twenty-three—and be my Confessors!

Shaffer seems satisfied with the general template laid out here, for he turns again to its use in his most recent serious work, Yonadab (1985, heavily revised in 1987). Once he greets the audience at the start of Yonadab, the title protagonist begins to spin his web of enticing intrigue:

This is a singularly unpleasant story. The Rabbis of the Middle Ages omitted it entirely, when they read out the scriptures, to spare the ears of their congregations—and they didn't know the half of it. I alone know it all—and, let me assure you, I don't intend to spare yours.

In the four major plays, once having introduced himself and the general subject of the play, the narrator moves into the play circuitry where he assumes an active role in the enacted scenes of the story. At irregular intervals, the narrator breaks the illusion to comment often to the spectators about the scenic actions. Such "breaks" in the story line allow for clarifying commentary on the plot, just as the omniscient observer in fiction uses stop-action to offer all-knowing remarks on the proceedings. But beyond that useful advantage, the narrator's "interruption" of the tale privileges him to fast-forward to later episodes in the story at will. The narrators—Martin, Dysart, Salieri, and Yonadab—become our guides as we traverse the actions of the plot, moving us faster or slower, directing our attention from one character to another, or from one detail to a second one.

Shaffer did not originate the narrator figure, of course. Witness Shakespeare's Richard the Second and Iago who also plot strategy for the audience before joining in the action. Similarly, tragic heroes in classical Greek drama often speak directly to the spectators. No one, however, develops the narrator character more effectively than Shaffer both as a story-telling device and as a fascinating figure unto himself. Use of the narrating "stage manager" also represents a hybrid version of presentational theater. For although the direct address to the audience cannot be considered realistic, the internal scenes introduced by the narrator are staged in what essentially is realism: characters communicate with each other through realistic dialogue, they move about the stage in conventional blocking, and the theatrical illusion is sustained for the duration of the scene being enacted. Shaffer thereby wrings important concessions from the realm of theatrical realism to gain flexibility in the narrative process.

Other non-representational modes emerge in the dramas of Peter Shaffer. Each of his four major works features striking iconographic sets and props to reinforce the substance of his themes. In Royal Hunt, the most stunning moments are evoked visually and through sound effects. Shaffer's stage directions to open scene 3 of the first act introduce the audience to the main visual emblem of the play:

The stage darkens and the huge medallion high on the back wall begins to glow. Great cries of "Inca!" are heard. Slowly the medallion opens outward to form a huge golden sun with twelve great inlaid rays. … In the center stands Atahuallpa.

Late in the play, that symbol of the sun is burned into the audience's memory during a scene called the Rape of the Sun; there, the greedy Spanish Conquistadors ravage the Incan emblem of gold to obtain its precious treasure. Again, the stage directions describe the non-verbal choreography involved:

Above, in the chamber, the treasure is piled up as before. Diego and the Chavez brothers are seen supervising. They begin to explore the sun itself leaning out of the chamber and prodding at the petals with their halberds. Suddenly Diego gives a cry of triumph, drives his halberd into a slot in one of the rays, and pulls out the gold inlay. The sun gives a deep groan, like the sound of a great animal being wounded. With greedy yelps, all the soldiers below rush at the sun and start pulling it to bits; they tear out the gold inlays and fling them on the ground, while terrible groans fill the air. In a moment only the great gold frame remains; a broken, blackened sun.

Other important moments in Royal Hunt form indelible imprints by innovatively combining sound with panoramic image. In The Mime of the Great Ascent (scene 8 of Act One), Shaffer conveys the sense of the Spaniards climbing the high, frigid Andes mountains on their way to meet Atahuallpa. Realistic depiction is abandoned for evocative symbols and strange sounds:

As Old Martin describes their ordeal, the men climb the Andes. It is a terrible progress: a stumbling, torturous climb into the clouds, over the ledges and giant chasms, performed to an eerie, cold music made from the thin whine of huge metal saws.

Soon, the bloody conjunction of the European and Incan worlds is commemorated in The Mime of the Great Massacre that closes Act One. With no spoken dialogue, Shaffer portrays the horror of the Spaniards' betrayal of the Indians:

To a savage music, wave after wave of Indians are slaughtered and rise again to protect their lord, who stands bewildered in their midst. It is all in vain. Relentlessly the Spanish soldiers hew their way through the ranks of feathered attendants toward their quarry. They surround him … All the Indians cry out in horror. … [D]ragged from the middle of the sun by howling Indians, a vast bloodstained cloth bellies out over the stage. All rush off; their screams fill the theater. The lights fade out slowly on the rippling cloth of blood.

These illustrative passages only suggest the power of Shaffer's presentational techniques. The Royal Hunt of the Sun most fully embodies Shaffer's use of Epic and Total Theaters—modes advanced by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud.

Analogous scenes of powerful non-verbal theater exist in the remaining serious dramas. Like its predecessor, Royal Hunt, Equus constructs its fable with a fusion of highly articulate dialogue in the mode of naturalism, embedded in mind-stretching visual scenes drawing on expressionism. Indeed, the central set utilized in the drama speaks metaphorically to the audience at all times. Shaffer's description of the set starts by calling it "A square of wood set on a circle of wood. " By requiring that the backdrop for the set consist of tiers of seats on risers with both audience members and cast scated there, Shaffer intends that those persons serve functions in the play as "Witnesses, assistants—and especially a Chorus." Shaffer's set instructions further suggest the square set resembles "A railed boxing ring" and a "dissecting theater" in an operating room. Such images are entirely appropriate for a plot that entails savage battle between the powers of orderly society and the chaotic impulse of instinctual religious worship.

Horses, of course, play a key part in Equus, and Shaffer's choice of how to represent them on stage fairly well determines his overall theatrical approach. Shaffer is explicit in his stage directions that the horses only be portrayed abstractly. His descriptions of how actors are to play horses prohibit even the least element of realism. Brown-colored velvet tracksuits are to be worn by the actors, with matching gloves. On their feet are will be four-inch light-weight metal-braced lifts fastened to actual horseshoes. On their heads are large symbolic horse masks constructed of alternating strips of silver wire and leather, with no effort to hide the human head beneath.

Most telling of Shaffer's instructions about the horses is his mandate that "Any literalism which could suggest the cozy familiarity of a domestic animal—or worse, a pantomime horse—should be avoided. … Animal effect must be created entirely mimetically … so that the masking has an exact and ceremonial effect. " The ritual base underlying Equus requires Alan Strang's orgiastic sessions of worship to be presentationally given. Only symbolic creatures and abstracted movements befit the play's theme. The result theatrically, however, is stunning. At the conclusion of the play's first act, Alan is hypnotized into reenacting his regular worship-rides on the horse Nugget. In Dysart's office, before the mesmerized psychiatrist, the boy activates the half dozen horse figures for his dream ride by calling out, "Equus—son of Fleckwus—son of Neckwus—Walk." The rites which follow are described through stage directions:

[A hum from the CHORUS. Very slowly the horses standing on the circle begin to turn the square by gently pushing the wooded rail. Alan and his mount start to revolve. The effect, immediately, is of a statue being slowly turned round on a plinth. During the ride, however, the speed increases, and the light decreases until it is only a fierce spotlight on horse and rider, with the overspill glinting on the other masks leaning in toward them.]

All the while, Alan first croons, then shouts, instructions to the horse, projecting the lad's combined religious and sexual ecstacy that culminates in obvious spiritual and physical orgasm.

Equus contains an equally spectacular finale which relies on symbolic actions using presentationalism. Alan's attempt to make love with Jill at the stables is interrupted by what the boy believes to be Equus' warning from the adjacent stall. His sexual desire totally squelched by religious guilt, Alan brutally dismisses the girl and prepares to answer Equus' demands for obeisance. During this abreacted scene inspired by Dysart's promises for his total recovery, Alan exhibits through his actions why he stabbed out the eyes of six horses: Alan's hopes for a normal sexual life was blocked by his self-designed religion making Equus his personal god. The lad knows of no other choice:

Alan [in terror]: Eyes! … White eyes—never closed! Eyes like flames—coming—coming! … God seest! God seest! … NO! … No more. No more, Equus. … Equus … Noble Equus … Faithful and True … God-slave … Thou—God—Seest—NOTHING!

[He stabs out Nugget's eyes. The horse stamps in agony. A great screaming begins to fill the theater, growing ever louder. ALAN dashes at the other two horses and blinds them too, stabbing over the rails. … The screams increase. The other horses follow into the square. The whole place is filled with cannoning, blinded horses. … ]

As in Royal Hunt, Shaffer turns to traditional realism, with its highly explicit and articulate dialogue, to promote plot and characterization for much of Equus. But for the climactic moments in the plot, the playwright provides emblematic scenes in which visual and aural effects move audience intellects—and emotions—beyond what is possible through stage literalism. Those remarkable stage images epitomize the glory of Shaffer's play-writing.

Of all that Shaffer has written to date, Amadeus elicits the most praise for its dramaturgical strengths. As in Royal Hunt and Equus, Shaffer punctuates his major scenes in Amadeus with haunting theatrical effects to create an unforgettable picture. And as in all his dramas, he consciously designs symbolic moments to conclude each act. Moreover, the epiphanous scenes represent far more than riveting moments appealing to the audience's visual and aural senses. Shaffer in those episodes succeeds brilliantly in embodying crucial truths in a single image. He does so by the imaginative melding of realistic speech with abstract image. The result is the coalescence of previous story understanding into a new, revelatory whole.

The most dazzling scene of enlightenment in Amadeus occurs at the close of Act One. By this point in the story, Antonio Salieri, principal musician in Emperor Joseph II's court in Vienna, has come to fear the musical genius of his younger rival Mozart. To measure the threat represented by the upstart newcomer, Salieri coerces Mozart's wife into bringing him Mozart's manuscripts of works-in-progress. Once Salieri begins to read the written musical scores, the sounds of actual music are heard in the theater to designate what he was reading. Shaffer not only has solved the logistics of allowing his audience to share the music Salieri hears in his head; the dramatist also mounts an electric experience on stage to suggest how transcendent the moment stands in musical history.

An analysis of this single scene reflects Shaffer's innovative mind at work. He first needs to have Salieri become aware of the immensity of Mozart's genius. Once that amazing fact has sunk in, Salieri must be made to revolt against God's ordained design. Using a two-part schema, the dramatist first stuns Salieri with Mozart's music itself. The stage directions interweave with Salieri's monologue to forge the climactic moment in his life:

[ … He contemplates the music lying there as if it were a great confection he is dying to eat, but dare not. Then suddenly he snatches at it—tears the ribbon—opens the case and stares greedily at the manuscripts within. Music sounds instantly, faintly, in the theater, as his eye falls on the first page. It is the opening of the Twenty-Ninth Symphony, in A Major. Over the music, reading it.]

Salieri: She had said that these were his original scores. First and only drafts of the music. Yet they looked like fair copies. They showed no corrections of any kind. … Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. [He resumes reading, and the music also resumes: a ravishing phrase from the slow movement of the Concerto for Flute and Harp.] … The truth was clear. That serenade had been no accident. … I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an Absolute Beauty!

To represent how devastating this new understanding is to Salieri, Shaffer instructs the composer to fall into a swoon. The question then arises, what will—or can—Salieri do about the situation with Mozart? With that unspoken query in the audience's collective mind, Shaffer shifts into the scene's second part: Salieri's new resolve. Upon regaining consciousness, lying amidst the fallen manuscripts of Mozart's compositions, Salieri "addresses his God":

Capisco! I know my fate. Now for the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his nakedness … Grazie, Signore! You gave me the desire to serve you—which most men do not have—then saw to it the service was shameful in the ears of the server. … Why? … What is my fault? … I have worked and worked the talent you allowed me. … Solely that in the end, in the practice of the art which alone makes the world comprehensible to me, I might hear Your Voice! And now I do hear it—and it says only one name: MOZART! … Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart! … [Savagely.] Grazie e grazie ancora!

[Pause] So be it! From this time we are enemies, You and I! I'll not accept it from You.

And with Salieri's audacious challenge to God, Shaffer closes the first half of his drama. The overall design now is apparent, and the remainder of the play will chronicle Salieri's failed attempt to defeat his deity.

Nothing from the second act achieves quite the equivalent excitement, although the bizarre death scene of Mozart is highly charged as he discovers Salieri's machinations. Salieri's attempted suicide near the end also provides striking visual pictures that reenforce the final frustrated acts of the deranged court composer. Ironically, the emblematic scene which best counterbalances the close of Act One does not appear in Shaffer's play text but rather in his movie script for Amadeus. There, a new, important episode is added to depict Mozart—on his deathbed—dictating to Salieri the unfinished score to his Requiem Mass. Though the added movie scene attains enormous dramatic power, the actions it proposes are wholly fictitious and incredible. In the stage script proper, the final graphic moment showing Salieri proves powerful enough: he stands before us—an aged, crazed, but still shrewd conniver—arms outspread to welcome us into his brotherhood of Mediocrities.

Shaffer's next drama was Yonadab (1985), his fable of human evil and aspirations drawn from Biblical accounts. Given the dark and foreboding tenor of the play, the initial emblematic scene seems entirely suitable. Again, the episode appears near the end of the opening act. Here, another complete scene (scene 8) follows before the act actually concludes. But for all practical purposes, little additional exposition or plot development can occur after the hair-raising events of scene 7.

The plot, in brief, concerns the devilry of King David's errant nephew Yonadab in Jerusalem long before the Christian era. Beginning with facts from Samuel 2 in the Old Testament, Shaffer fashions another god-seeking protagonist. In the case of Yonadab, though he aspires to godhead, he hungers first for finite proof of God's existence. One of his tactics to "flush out God" is to challenge Him on every front. Yonadab gradually convinces his cousin Amnon, heir apparent to David's throne, that Amnon can take whatever he desires and thereby define his godhead. Yonadab, meanwhile, stands on the sideline to watch as those he dupes attempt to become earthly deities through arrogant actions usually reserved for gods alone.

When he confesses to Yonadab that he wants more than anything to sexually possess his half-sister Tamar, Amnon is actively encouraged by Yonadab. Tamar is tricked into going to Amnon's palace and even to his bedroom, under the ruse of his being very ill. Once alone with her, Amnon reveals his true intentions to have her. She remains obdurate to his seduction, and Amnon quickly loses patience and rapes her. Yonadab is the voyeur par excellence, and he locates himself near the bed chamber to observe. Unexpectedly, Amnon drops the curtains surrounding the bed, leaving Yonadab the mere watcher of blurred shadows on the curtains. Shaffer ingeniously constructs a visual version of a momentous event in ancient history—all through a narrated account of shifting shadows. Yonadab is the audience's guide to a deed that ultimately leads to the demise of David's house and unrivalled empire:

(With increasing visibility the shadows of their bodies are thrown on to the curtain: immense black shapes enlarged and distorted by the lamps. During the following speech they make a series of abstract and strange shapes: a mysterious procession of glyphs.)

(To audience) All my life I remembered what I saw that night: the shadows!—more terrible than bodies. The limbs thrown up on the curtains like the letters of some grotesque language formed long, long before writing. There on the fall of a Jerusalem drape I saw, writ enormous … the archaic alphabet of the Book of Lust.

In Yonadab as in the other dramas considered here, the unique achievement of Shaffer's writing involves the surprising merger of realistic and presentational elements that usually remain antithetical to one another. Thus, even as Yonadab narrates the dreadful results of his plottings with Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom, Shaffer knows to insert a visual cameo to underscore the situation emblematically:

(Low music sounds. From high above descends the corpse of Absalom hanging by its long black hair.)

Yonadab: (To audience) Absalom died later—caught in a tree by his famous hair, fleeing the wrath of his father.

(King David appears, his head under a prayer shawl. The Helpers depart.)

The father mourned his eldest son, of course—but the mourning for Absalom far exceeded the mourning for Amnon. It was the hardest pain of his life. … I saw all their transports, this royal family, their lusts for transcendence—and I saw nothing. Always the curtain was between us.

Parallel to Shaffer's other dramas, the passage just noted appears at the conclusion of Yonadab, serving as a neat sum-up of the entire play, thanks to articulate, realistic narrative joined to an unforgettable visual emblem.

Finally, lest we think Shaffer's patented curtain closers occur only with his serious plays, consider for a moment his comedy Lettice & Lovage (1987). Several features are found in Lettice & Lovage that resemble those of the more serious drama; but for now we shall focus on the crucial curtain scenes, particularly those ending the first two acts. Act One closes with the tour guide Lettice Douffet fired by her superior at the Preservation Trust, Lotte Schoen. Their "exit interview" had been freewheeling, and the contrasting views of the two women openly aired. Although she had tried to explain her infelicities with facts concerning the provincial estate of which she was tour guide, Lettice realized in advance that her attempts would be futile. Therefore, when Lotte indeed dismissed her, Lettice was ready. With great august bearing, Lettice likens herself to Queen Mary just before her execution by Elizabeth. Lettice asks her executioner Lotte if she recalled what Queen Mary had worn on that auspicious day:

Lettice: Queen Mary appeared in a dress of deepest black. But when her ladies removed this from her—what do you imagine was revealed?

Lotte: I really can't guess.

Lettice: … A full-length shift was seen. A garment the color of the whoring of which she had been accused! The color of martyrdom—and defiance! Blood red!

[She steps out of her cloak to reveal a brilliant red ankle-length nightdress, embossed all over with little golden crowns … ]

Yes—all gasped with the shock of it! All watched with unwilling admiration—that good old word again—all watched with wonder as that frail captive, crippled from her long confinement, stepped out of the darkness of her nineteen years' humiliation and walked into eternity—a totally self-justified woman!

The graphic gesture of a doomed woman, metaphorically thumbing her nose at her captors, precisely matches Lettice's circumstances.

Lettice's black cloak figures in the emblem scene closing the play's second act, as well. By now in the plot, Lettice and Lotte are becoming good friends—with the help of "quaff," a strong brew Lettice alleges to be of Renaissance origin. Lotte even reveals that she wears a wig, showing how much a confidante Lettice has become. The women decide to eat out, and Lettice urges her colleague to leave her wig off when they leave to dine. After a hesitation, Lotte agrees:

Lotte: Very well … I will.

[They look at each other. Then Lettice laughs, a clear bright laugh of perception, and walks away across the room. She laughs again.]

What is it? What are you thinking?

[But instead of replying, Lettice takes off her black cloak and lays it ceremoniously at the base of the staircase, in the manner of Sir Walter Raleigh assisting Queen Elizabeth.]

Lettice: Come, madame. Your hedgehogs await!

Again, a picture is worth the proverbial thousand words. In both emblem scenes, the logical and literal factors of the moment are fused with an apt pictorial rendition to effect striking theatrical results.

Nowhere among his plays does Peter Shaffer venture far from his personal version of "realism." That fact perhaps should not surprise playgoers, because Shaffer's dialogue stands with the finest written in our times. And articulate language, after all, is "literal" in all senses of that term. But Shaffer is not content with a single dramaturgical strength; his imagination reaches outward to encompass visual displays of literal thought. Nor are the graphic equivalents to realistic details limited to mere symbols on stage. Shaffer, with the help of equally innovative directors such as John Dexter and Peter Hall, stretches to embody spectacular but always intelligent theatrical techniques, as we have seen.

If we seek to isolate one specific attribute that defines Peter Shaffer's genius, then, we could do worse than to choose the methods chronicled here: the masterful merging of the literalism of realism with the provocative of the abstract pictorial. Shaffer's power derives from a type of "trans-literalism" that invites the shorthand of stage emblems. No other playwright today can claim such an achievement.