“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging theAethiopicaacross the Channel

Abstract

Previous articleNext article Free“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the Aethiopica across the ChannelNoémie NdiayeNoémie NdiayeColumbia University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor a long time, the third-century romance Aethiopica by Heliodorus of Emesa fell exclusively within the critical purview of novel specialists. Over the last fifteen year, a rich body of scholarship has emerged and shifted attention from the important formal innovations that the discovery of Heliodorus’s romance facilitated to the significance of the Aethiopica’s racial themes for the early modern cultural moment.1 This recent scholarship has focused, on one hand, on the reception of the Aethiopica in early modern English literature and theater and, on the other hand, on the reception of Heliodoric materials in continental visual culture starting in 1610.2 The present article means to connect those two discrete lines of critical inquiry by foregrounding a topic that has, to this day, received virtually no attention: stage adaptations of the Aethiopica in early modern France and their transnational influence on English seventeenth-century theater.It is well known that, starting with Jacques Amyot’s 1547 translation, France was the epicenter of a Heliodoric phenomenon whose tremors were to be felt throughout western Europe. Yet the transnational dimension of Heliodorus’s early modern reception, with which art historians and novel specialists alike usually reckon, has been ignored so far by English theater scholars.3 By highlighting the strong discursive similarities that exist between early modern French Heliodoric plays and their English counterparts, I aim to show that the development of racial thinking in English theater during the first half of the seventeenth century can be productively explored in dialogue with contemporary theatrical reflections on racial heredity across the Channel. A comparative approach reveals that the histories of race proper to early modern England and France, while unique and distinct, are intertwined, for racial thinking developed transnationally in Europe, as racial tropes and paradigms morphed and circulated across borders.In this article, I argue that early seventeenth-century playwrights in France and in England often rework the plot of the Aethiopica in ways that question the chromatic fluidity of human skin at the core of the Greek romance, and that those changes are informed by ideas of black heredity—or, to quote George Best in 1578, black “lineal descent”—which were gaining traction in the context of an incipient racialization of blackness.4 Race, as it is understood in this article, is the power structure that allows a dominant social group to select a human group based on a variety of criteria (such as religion, class, ethnicity, physical appearance) and to imagine this group as endowed with a set of essential and hereditary traits that warrant its position in the social hierarchy.5 Understood as such, race depends on the premise that essential traits will be transmitted across generations. In other words, blackness has to be thought of as hereditary to solidify into a racial category, and early modern stage adaptations of the Aethiopica, pushing hereditary modes of thinking about skin tone to the foreground, helped integrate blackness as a category into the early modern racial matrix. Ultimately, I show how the Aethiopica, which was originally concerned with a relatively rare and narrow object (transracial births), becomes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a space for thinking through the much larger and urgent issues of blackness and race on stage across the Channel. To do so, I consider a large corpus of plays and give special attention to two early modern Heliodoric plays, French and English, which rework the plot of the Aethiopica most boldly and radically in favor of black lineal descent.I first give an overview of the French corpus of Heliodoric plays stretching over the whole century and contextualize the success of the Aethiopica by highlighting the relevance of its plot to the development of the racial matrix in early seventeenth-century France. In particular, I read closely Octave-César Genetay’s 1609 L’Ethiopique, ou les chastes amours de Théagène et de Chariclée, in order to unpack its confident dismissal of maternal imprinting as a viable explanation for the birth of transracial children in favor of atavism. After this, I place Genetay’s intervention in a larger current of theatrical and visual continental representations that use Heliodoric materials as a catalyst to implement a stricter vision of a black heredity. I then trace the influence of this intellectual trend onto contemporary English theatrical culture, giving credit to the queen consort Henrietta Maria, a transnational cultural agent who translated the French courtly fondness for and understanding of the Aethiopica into English performance culture. Finally, I examine some late 1630s Heliodoric plays within the context of early seventeenth-century English conversations on blackness and analyze at length Richard Brome’s corrosive city comedy The English Moor, or the Mock-Marriage (1637), whose relentless sabotage of the Aethiopica’s plot speaks to two key concerns in the play: the inescapability of lineal descent and the threat of degeneration that miscegenation of all sorts poses to the English nation.I. Blackness, Lineal Descent, and the Racial Matrix in French Heliodoric PlaysHeliodorus’s Aethiopica tells the story of Chariclea, a beautiful Ethiopian princess who was abandoned at birth with letters and tokens of royalty when her mother found out that the baby was white and grew afraid of being wrongfully accused of adultery. Heliodorus’s novel uses maternal imprinting, the medical theory according to which perceptions that struck the imagination of a woman at the beginning of her pregnancy would influence the formation of the fetus.6 Indeed, in the romance, the baby was born white from black parents—a transracial child—because, during conception, the mother, Persina, had her eyes set on a portrait of her ancestor Andromeda, another breathtakingly beautiful Ethiopian princess whom most early modern artists represented as white, although Ovid had explicitly depicted her as black.7 Chariclea survives: she is raised by a series of substitute father figures, grows into a virtuous young woman, who, together with her chaste Greek lover Theagenes, travels across the ancient world and eventually finds her way back to Ethiopia and to her biological parents. As she is about to be sacrificed to the Moon by king Hydaspes in order to celebrate the Ethiopians’ military victory over the Persians, she demands a full trial, during which she spectacularly reveals her lineage by exhibiting the explanatory letters and the precious tokens (a royal ring, in particular) with which she was abandoned. She also stands next to the portrait of Andromeda that allegedly caused her whiteness and, finally, produces an intriguing black spot on her arm, which her mother recognizes. Scholars have noted that, during that scene, Chariclea mobilizes several of the tragic recognition tropes identified by Aristotle in the Poetics, which recur in most Greek romances.8 Chariclea’s letter, jewels, and birthmark are all demands of the genre, but Heliodorus puts those established recognition tropes to the test by using them in the extreme case of a transracial recognition scene. The old tropes work, Chariclea is spared, inherits the kingdom, and marries Theagenes. Thus, the novel is both set into action and eventually resolved by misguided and insightful readings of its heroine’s body: Chariclea’s body requires nuanced hermeneutics, for it is simultaneously deceiving (her white skin obfuscates her lineage) and evidentiary (her black spot, whether it be a mole or a synechochic patch of black skin, reveals her lineage).More often than not, the gravitational center of French Heliodoric plays is the final trial and recognition scene, which suggests that the complex hermeneutics of Chariclea’s African body constituted the main appeal of this source material for early modern French theater makers and consumers. As the case study of Genetay’s play L’Ethiopique will show shortly, the hermeneutics of African bodies that moves Heliodorus’s novel forward provided early modern French theater with an experimental space to consolidate modes of thinking about blackness along the lines of lineal descent. Early modern playwrights adapted the Aethiopica according to new modes of thinking about blackness: modes that undermined the fluidity at the heart of Heliodorus’s romance.9 The idea of black lineal descent, which those Heliodoric plays foreground, partakes in the history of racial thinking, to the extent that heredity is one of the necessary foundation upon which racial thinking is built. Early modern Heliodoric plays do not make the common contemporary moves of associating blackness with sin, servitude, or inferiority—yet they do crucial ideological work, laying the ground for the racialization of blackness.The late sixteenth century social context of French aristocratic struggles explains, to some extent, the particularly strong interest that French theater producers and consumers developed for the question of lineal descent in the Aethiopica. Since the middle of the sixteenth century, the word “race,” originally used to refer to French royal dynasties, had been extended to refer to good aristocratic pedigree understood in essentialist and hereditary terms. The old military nobility, la noblesse d’épée, had developed a discourse that insisted heavily upon this idea during the crisis of the French aristocracy, when they felt threatened in their prerogatives by the rise of la noblesse de robe, an ambitious bourgeois class that either purchased their aristocratic status or earned it by serving an increasingly domineering Crown.10 According to this defensive racial discourse, true nobility was transmitted through blood, and its preservation required a policing of marriages and avoidance of miscegenation with the nouveaux riches—at a time when the impoverished old nobility often married into wealthy new noble families. In that sense, Guillaume Aubert writes, “the idea of race rapidly became an essential feature of the early modern French ethos.”11 This is what Jean E. Feerick describes as the “race-as-blood” system that was also dominant in late sixteenth-century England.12 Within that racial paradigm, which obtained across the Channel and beyond, “to belong to a race was to belong to a family with a valorous ancestry and a profession of public service and virtue.”13 The heightened cultural sensitivity to issues of “blood” that permeated early modern French society constituted a most fertile ground for stage adaptations of the Aethiopica, the story of a princess who struggles to reclaim her rightful yet invisible royal lineage. It is not surprising then that the vogue for the Aethiopica should have started in courtly aristocratic circles.The Aethiopica also resonated in early modern France because it spoke to the multifaceted nature of contemporary French racial thinking. Indeed, in late sixteenth-century France, a new racial paradigm emerges, slowly: the paradigm of race as skin tone (which had been in use in Southern Europe for over a century). Jean E. Feerick points out that, often, “the difference of skin color emerges in the context of a contestation of social hierarchies expressing a hereditary order.”14 Yet in the case of Heliodoric plays, the relation between the two racial paradigms of blood and skin tone is more analogical than dialectical. In Chariclea’s story, blood (royalty) and skin tone (black heritage) align with each other: the same evidence (tokens, letter, bodily sign) is used to prove or disprove both of them simultaneously. This analogical relation would later inform the rise of the race-as-skin-tone paradigm to dominance, for, as Guillaume Aubert has shown, the racial discourse, tools, and terminology developed in the sixteenth century to protect aristocratic privilege in metropolitan France would be extended to protect white privilege at large in the overseas colonies in the second half of the seventeenth century.15Already at the end of the sixteenth century, the French racial lexicon registers the emergence of the race-as-skin-tone paradigm. For instance, the term métis (mixed race) had existed since the thirteenth century to designate animals born from two different species, bastards, and people of low extraction; but in 1559, the term was used to define someone “whose mother and father belong to different people, among the Greek” by none other than Jacques Amyot, Heliodorus’s very own translator.16 Beyond its use in the realm of animal husbandry, the term métis could now designate ethnic mixing in addition to “blood” mixing, probably under the influence of the fast-growing Spanish racial lexicon (see mestizo) that actively sought to categorize the increasingly hybridized population of an empire replete with subjects of color. In Spain, since the promulgation of the statuses on the limpieza de sangre, blood had been used as a tool to racialize groups on the basis of religious difference (Jewishness, Moorishness, and Islam). With the phrase sangre azul, old Christians drew attention to the whiteness of their skin (translucent enough for their veins to show) in order to prove that there had been no intermarriage with Jews or Moors among their ancestors. This phrase suggests that, in Iberia, race as religion, the dominant racial paradigm, could sometimes lapse into race as skin tone.17 That the French correlative of the Spanish phrase sangre azul, le sang bleu (blue blood), should refer, up to this day, to aristocratic lineage, that is, to the race-as-blood paradigm, bears witness to the circulation of racial concepts across national borders and to the interconnectedness of the various paradigms within the racial matrix in early modern Europe. In short, race was already polysemic in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Aethiopica’s interest in heredity as it applies to both blood and skin tone was most welcome in this context.Numbers attest to the popularity of the Aethiopica on the French stage. In his seminal translation, Jacques Amyot repeatedly theatricalizes Heliodorus’s romance. To give but one example among many, the first account of Chariclea’s story, in book 2, is framed as pure theater, when Cnemon, urging Calasiris to reveal who the beautiful stranger is, declares: “it is time for you to put your comedy into words, as if you were to walk on a scaffold, or a theatre, and play it.”18 French playwrights were quick to pick up on Amyot’s hints at the theatrical potential of the Aethiopica and its final recognition scene: French Heliodoric plays constitute a large corpus spanning the whole stretch of the seventeenth century. This corpus starts with the eight-play cycle of Les Chastes et loyales amours de Théagène et Chariclée, by Alexandre Hardy (Paris: Jacques Quesnel, 1623), presumably performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1601.19 Hardy’s marathon theater sequence was followed by L’Ethiopique, Tragicomédie des chastes amours de Théagène et de Chariclée, by Octave-César Genetay (Rouen: Théodore de Reinsart, 1609), performed shortly before its publication in a private castle in La Flèche, as well as the lost Théagène, by Gabriel Gilbert, performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1662, the never completed and unfortunately lost manuscript of Théagène et Chariclée by Jean Racine, presumably started between 1662 and 1664, and, finally, Téagène et Cariclée, a “tragédie en musique” by Joseph-Francois Duché de Vancy (Amsterdam: Antoine Schelte, 1695), performed by the Académie royale de musique. To this corpus, one can add the stage adaptations of the myth of Andromeda, which is part and parcel of the Aethiopica, to the extent that Chariclea is Andromeda’s heiress and duplicate in whiteness. Those adaptations include the lost anonymous Ballet d’Andromède exposée au monstre marin, 1606 (of which virtually nothing is known), La Perséeene, ou la délivrance d’Andromède (Lyon: Simon Rigaud, 1618), by Jean Boissin de Gallardon, which may or may not have been performed, the anonymous intermède Andromède delivrée (Paris: Paul Mansan, 1624), which was performed in Paris, the much applauded Andromède (Rouen: Laurens Maurry, 1651), by Pierre Corneille, performed at the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon in 1650, and, finally, Persée et Andromède (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1682), an opera by Lully and Quinault performed at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in 1682–83. This is a substantial corpus, with a particularly strong segment in the first quarter of the century. Those twenty-five years also saw a boom of Heliodorus-inspired productions in French visual culture, including among other artifacts, illustrated editions, painting cycles, and tapestries, under the influence of royal patronage—in particular, the patronage of Queen Marie de Medici.20 As the genres and performance spaces of the plays listed above suggest, in theatrical culture just as much as in visual culture, Heliodoric adaptations never developed far from the royal court in France.II. Octave-César Genetay’s L’Ethiopique: A French Case StudyOctave-César de Genetay’s L’Ethiopique, Tragicomédie des chastes amours de Théagène et de Chariclée deserves particular attention as the most radical rewriting of the Aethiopica in favor of lineal descent to be found in early modern French theater.21 Genetay wrote L’Ethiopique in 1609 to celebrate the wedding of Catherine de la Varenne, the daughter and youngest child of Guillaume Fouquet de la Varenne, one of King Henri IV’s closest advisors—whom he had ennobled a decade earlier. The performance took place in La Varenne’s luxurious brand new castle in the city of La Flèche. A chef’s son, La Varenne had started his career as a cook in the service of Catherine de Bourbon and had been a portmanteau to the king before his military merits had propelled him to higher functions in the king’s house.22 In other words, La Varenne was a new aristocrat, of bad pedigree, or bad race: a 1607 portrait of the French royal family attributed to Frans Pourbus the Younger shows the grateful Fouquet de la Varenne at the king’s feet, holding a sign that reads “He made me earn nobility and gave me wealth.”23 The French king most probably attended the wedding of his protégé’s daughter. Indeed, the sonnet dedicated to the king “the great Henri, sun of the French kingdom” just between the prologue delivered by the goddess Diana and the beginning of the first act in the playtext was most probably delivered during the performance, addressing the king directly among the audience members in order to commend his generosity toward the city of la Flèche.The bride, Catherine, had been ennobled indirectly, through her father, just ten years before her marriage. Born as she was in a solidly bourgeois family, Catherine’s blood was hardly blue enough for her to marry Claude d’Avaugour, who, by contrast, belonged to one of the oldest baronial dynasties in Brittany. In 1609, this mixture of old aristocratic blood and new aristocratic blood would be read as an interracial marriage in accord with early modern French terminology and the children born from such a union, as métis. The Heliodoric material had a clear topical value in this context. In the prologue to the play, Genetay has the goddess Diana compare Theagenes and Chariclea to the virtuous newlyweds, creating an analogical structure in which the anxieties surrounding Chariclea’s lineage, which are so happily resolved in the novel, provide a safe space for addressing (and assuaging) anxieties surrounding Catherine de la Varenne’s own aristocratic lineage in the validating presence of the French king.Focusing, more than any other French Heliodoric play, on the recognition scene, Genetay’s play dramatizes only the last book of the romance, the trial book, and summarizes the rest of the plot in a couple of monologues. Zooming onto the trial scene and the final deciphering of Chariclea’s evidentiary body, the play paradoxically suppresses the moment when Chariclea produces physical evidence of her lineage. Indeed, in this adaptation, Persine dreams that the beautiful prisoner about to be sacrificed is her daughter, and narrates her dream to Sysimethres, the Ethiopian priest who received Chariclea as a baby from her mother’s arms. Because Sysimethres has just had an illuminating conversation with Chariclea, he is able to confirm the queen’s suspicions. Persine is overjoyed, embraces her long-lost daughter, and exits to impart the good news to her husband offstage at the end of act 4. Spectators are given indication, in the following act, that the king has seen the letters and tokens, but no one mentions Chariclea’s black patch of skin. The mysterious black mark is simply evacuated from Genetay’s play. This does not mean that the play renounces reading Chariclea’s body—on the contrary, the play advocates for a radical re-reading of Chariclea’s body. Indeed, the play inverts the bodily hermeneutics presented as correct by Heliodorus: while, in the romance, it is not Chariclea’s whiteness but her black spot that reveals her lineage, Genetay’s play boldly claims that whiteness actually is the true indicator. The chorus calls for this readjustment of bodily hermeneutics when they address the audience in-between the acts, while Persine is offstage, sharing the happy news with Hydaspes:24Les Dieux par raison profondeIt is the gods, who, for some deep reason,Ont fait l’homme blanc et noirHave made Man white and blackPour ornement du grand mondeTo adorn the vast worldLuy donnant divers manoirs:And have given him various mansions:Ce n’est point ni la semence,It is not semen,Ni l’imagination,Nor imagination,Ni la chaleur trop immense,Nor excessive heat,Ni la froide régionNor the cold climate of any region. Chacun forme en son semblableEveryone breeds in his own image,Selon qu’il a la couleur,Based on his own color,En quelque endroit habitableIn some habitable part of the worldQu’il juge à vivre meilleur:That he deems fittest to dwell;Et si quelqu’un vient à naistreAnd if perchance someone is bornDe teint qui soit différentWhose hue is different,Il le tient de quelque ancestreThey inherited it from some ancestorQui l’a eu tel apparent.Who had it of that color. C’est donc chose bien aiséeThus, it is easy to understandQue Chariclée l’ait blanc:Why Chariclea’s hue is white:De même l’avait Persée,White was the hue of Perseus,Premier de son royal sang.Who founded her royal blood.Et ne pensons qu’il procèdeAnd don’t think that her hueDe la vue d’un tableau,Comes from viewing a painting,Car noire était AndromèdeFor Andromeda was black,Bien qu’elle eust le corps très beau.Although her body was gorgeous. Ainsi par longues annéesIn a similar way, for many years,Les fondateurs des ThébainsThe Thebans’ ancestorsLaissèrent à leur lignéeLeft clear indications of their lineageDe leur sang signes certains:To their descendants:Chacun portait une flècheEach of them had a spearImprimée sur son corps,Imprinted on his body.Mais la nature qui pècheBut nature, which errs sometimes,Un temps ne la mist point hors.Stopped expressing it for a while. Cette marque fut perdueThat mark was lost to their heirsUn long âge en leurs neveux,For a long time;Enfin elle fut rendueEventually, it was restoredA Python descendant d’eux,To their descendant Python,D’une flèche la figureWho had the shape of a spearSur la cuisse empreinte estoitImprinted on his thigh,Par naturelle advantureAnd while this was only natural,Que pour miracle on contoit.People deemed it a miracle. Les blancs prétendent louangeWhite people mean to admireSur nous autres basanez,Our blackness,Mais à nous n’est pas moins estrangeBut we wonder no lessDe quoy ils ont ainsi nez:Why they were born white:Il est à croire facileIt is easy to believeQue nous leur donnons façon,That we fashion them—Comme un vers de sa bobilleLike a black worm emergesSort de noir, blanc papillon.From its cocoon as a white butterfly.After debunking in the first stanza the most common early modern explanations for blackness (climate theory, black semen, and the alleged stronger heat of black bodies), the chorus delivers a hard blow to the theory of maternal imprinting to articulate a strong vision of heredity: we will never know why the gods created man of different colors, but each man transmits his own color to his heirs through lineal descent.25 While some hereditary features remain unexpressed for a few generations, they can resurface anytime in the descendants: hereditary features are dormant, not lost. Thus, Chariclea was born white because she had a white ancestor, the Greek Perseus, whose whiteness resurfaced in her: through lineal descent, Perseus transmitted simultaneously his noble blood (son royall sang) and his skin tone (le teint).The chorus claims to read in terms of natural philosophy (naturelle advanture) what too many contemporaries read as “a miracle”—this embrace of the scientific paradigm informs the mesmerizing image of the worm’s biological metamorphoses into a butterfly at the end of the passage. Nine years after Genetay’s play was published, Jean de Riolan the Younger, the influential Parisian anatomist, would produce the first dissection-based account of black skin in Western Europe: the chorus seems to capture the historical moment when blackness became an object fit for modern scientific discourse.26 Based on such dissections, Riolan would note that “blackness does not go beyond the cuticula [skin outer layer] … below the black cuticula, the Ethiop’s skin was whiter than snow.”27 The image of the flayed corpse revealing snow-white flesh under black skin in the theater of anatomy of the Parisian schools of medicine eerily connects with the worm leaving its black envelope as a white butterfly that Genetay’s chorus evokes. The desire to tackle Chariclea’s case in “natural” terms informs the emphasis that Genetay’s play puts on lineal descent at the expense of maternal imprinting and geohumoralism regarding skin tone.In the chorus’ mouth, lineal descent is part of larger inchoate discourse on blackness that gives the reader a glimpse into what racialization in progress looks like. For instance, the last stanza of the chorus’ stasimon, adopting the Ethiopians’ viewpoint in a typically baroque perspectival shift, posits an equality between black and white people that resonates with other French plays informed by Montaignian cultural relativism such as Les Portugaiz Infortunez (which was published in 1608 by the same editor who published Genetay’s play a year later).28 At the same time, the idea that Andromeda was black “although” she had a gorgeous body mobilizes the motif of the queen of Sheba, “black but comely” in the Song of Songs, and the long-standing ingrained esthetic prejudice against dark skin that it betrays. Similarly, while the last stanza posits a shared black origin for all human beings (inverting the common idea that the first Man was white), the image of the black worm turning into a white butterfly by leaving its cocoon behind is highly ambiguous. Indeed, on the one hand, it could easily evoke the silkworm industry and thus depict black-skinned Africans as skilled producers of very desirable goods and black skin itself as desirable in virtue of the silk / skin comparison (Henri IV, present in the audience, had enthusiastically introduced sericiculture into the country roughly a decade earlier, before James I did the same in England). But at the same time, the image suggests that blackness, associated with the earthiness and materiality of the worm, is but a stage on the way to a greater form of perfection that is whiteness, associated with the spirituality that the butterfly traditionally represents. In short, the chorus emits an inchoate racial discourse as it places black skin at the intersection of scientific, ethical, esthetic, spiritual, and economic discourses informed by various hierarchies. That the playwright should have put this inchoate racial discourse into the mouth of the chorus—the character in charge of voicing the doubtful, conflicted, and light-searching worldview of the commons in late Renaissance French dramaturgy—only gives it more cultural weight.III. Black Andromedas, White Andromedas, and VerisimilitudeIn Genetay’s play, lineal descent informs the chorus’ account of Chariclea’s whiteness, but it also colors their confident assertion that Andromeda, Chariclea’s ancestor, was actually black. This assertion is not an isolated case in early seventeenth century French culture. For instance, in 1598, Jean Boissin de Gallardon had a black Andromeda in his La Perséenne ou la délivrance d’Andromède. When he first perceives Andromeda tied to the rock, Perseus wonders:Serait-ce une statue ou quelque prisonnière?Is it a statue or a prisoner?Ce n’est rien de ces deux, ains un demon noircy …Neither! ‘Tis a blackened devil …Cette esclave-cy me met en tel servage,But this slave enslaves me soQue mesme je ne puis ébranler mon pennageThat I can’t even shake my feathersContre le naturel des Ethiopiens …At the nature of Ethiopians …Contemplant seulement ses cheveux frisotez,I just take a look at her frizzy hair,Le Paphien me rend jusqu’auz extremitez.And Eros subjugates me entirely.29That Gallardon’s should be, to my knowledge, the only play in which Andromeda was meant to be black-skinned makes the lack of information surrounding the performance history of this play particularly frustrating. Elizabeth McGrath’s st