“Body’s Image”: Yerma, The Player Queen, and the Upright Posture

Abstract

“Body’s Image”: Yerma, The Player Queen, and the Upright Posture Murray Baumgarten Francis Fergusson has reminded us of the ways in which Lorca’s theatre, of a piece with his poetry, brings the latent memory of the rich Andalusian folk-tradition to dramatic vivid life. Writing out of the revival of a national culture, which he in part helped to bring about, Lorca creates “significant art forms, filled with immediately relevant moral and spiritual content”; his poetic theatre responds to rather than evades “the crucial labor of the dramatic poet, faced with the modem stage and the mod­ em crowd,” by discovering and articulating his poetic vision as myth, ritual, and ceremony.1 Like Yeats, Lorca “felt the need of a story and form which should make the play itself (as distinguished from the language) poetic,” seeking these “elements in myth and ritual. Yeats pro­ ceeded from Irish myths, to an English version of Oedipus, to forms based on the No play”; Lorca found the possibilities he sought among the gypsies and the (mythic) landscape of his native Andalusia. Yeats labored “to reincarnate a myth in our time,” struggling to release “the suggestion of deep poetic in­ sight” that tempted him in his reading into the dramatic life of his plays. Just as self-conscious a poet, Lorca found his own way into myth. Lorca persuades us to suspend our modem disbelief in cere­ mony; making believe with him, we participate in the evocation of ancient stories, exploring and articulating their nonrealistic meanings. His magic lifts us out of our everyday world; his ritual becomes ours. If the story of Don Perlimplin is “not strictly a myth, it has the qualities our poets seek in myth: It seems much older and much more generally significant than any history which is literally true,” Ferguson points out, “yet Lorca does not seem 290 Murray Baumgarten 291 to have thought it up, but rather to have perceived it, or heard it, in the most intimate chamber of his sensibility. In embodying it on the stage he is careful to preserve this oft-told feeling, like a song, or a tale told by a grandmother. This he does with the utmost confidence and simplicity,” in a manner Yeats came to understand through his theoretical study of the theatre and struggled to embody in his own plays and theatrical company.2 Both men discover or invent versions of traditional tales which, rooted in their respective locales, come to form the struc­ ture of their theatrical practice. Like the stories of folklore, legend, and ballad, they are quick with a tragic intensity. These simple plots of desperation and love’s loss are the vehicles by whose means Yeats and Lorca explore fundamental human questions. In examining an issue like the body’s image—the center of The Player Queen and Yerma—both artists create works that in their dramatic fullness articulate a philosophical anthropology. As the protagonists of these plays encounter each other in theatrical dialectic, they realize their human destiny as beings determined by their upright posture, and work through a perspective similar to the one Erwin Straus has outlined in his famous essay.3 “I have long wanted to go there to lose my name and disap­ pear,’^ the real, but anonymous, Queen says at the crisis of The Player Queen as she dresses Decima for the royal part and makes her exit. Mild and meek, living a fantasy life, the Queen has visions of martyrdom. At the beck and call of the Prime Minister, she has closeted herself with her mystic visions for the seven years of her rule, striving to deny her body’s call to love in order to be martyred like her patroness, Saint Octema. Her encounter with Decima makes it possible for this real Queen to slip away to the convent and disappear. She fulfills her deepest wish just as Decima, the player queen, now has granted the fulfillment of Septimus’ poetic prophecy. As her body ac­ cedes to the image of royalty and as she plays the royal part, Decima becomes in fact the queen her changeling was in name alone. “Man is nothing till he is...