Allegorical Characters Research Articles

Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape as Mirror Plays

The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1921-22), are Eugene O'Neill's most successful experiments in expressionism. Considering the similarities in their cyclical structures, mock-heroic protagonists and archetypal symbolism, they are mirror plays whose aspects parallel or complement one another's correspondences. In Emperor, Jones is forced to flee his erstwhile subjects in quest through nightmarish, menacing dark night of the soul (Walpurgisnacht). Once he has exhausted the mana or vital force attached to his silver bullet, he is forced to return to the sun-lit world of death. The Hairy Ape duplicates this order of events while inverting the symbolic content. Yank Smith, the protagonist, is almost immediately deprived of his persona through female duplicity. Emerging from his ship's womblike stokehold, he searches for rebirth through the labyrinthine bowels of the City. Repeatedly eluded by his lost identity, he finally enters the deathly embrace of his alter ego, the gorilla in the zoo. Both plays demonically parody the tragic ritual pattern which has been defined as transition by which through the processes of separation, regeneration, and the return on higher level both the individual and the community are assured their victory over the forces of chaos which are thereby kept under control.! Although Yank Smith has some claims to tragic stature, being described by O'Neill as a symbol in sort of modern Morality play,2 and both protagonists engage in conflicts which probe the mysteries of the corrupted human will, the of neither play is changed. Yank refuses to return at all, and the victory over chaos which society achieves through Jones's assassination re-establishes cabal of Calibans, mindless gang of Yahoos. Nor do Jones and Smith achieve significant recognitions. Moreover, the expressionistic devices take effect less through the access to the unconscious supposedly provided by allegorical characters, anti-realistic staging, and unexpected transformations than through esthetic distancing. As in tragicomedy, which both plays closely resemble, the audience remains at distance, yet within immediate call impersonal, yet strangely involved.3

Rodrigo Cota's "Dialogo entre el Amor y un Viejo": Debate or Drama?

poems stand out because they possess a spirit that is different from that of most cancionero poetry. Some of these poems are put into the mouths of allegorical characters and might be thought of as dramatic compositions. A famous example of such poetry is Rodrigo Cota's Didlogo entre el Amor y un Viejo which first appeared in Hernando del Castillo's Cancionero general de muchos y diuersos autores, Valencia, 1511.1 Leandro Fernaindez de Moratin, one of the first scholars to comment on the dramatic nature of this poem, suggested a probable date of composition as 1470. Moratin, who may have been influenced by the fact that he was actively searching for primitive dramatic texts, had no hesitation in declaring the Dialogo to be a drama. In the Origenes del teatro espahiol (1830) he has this to say about the work: Este dkilogo es una representaci6n dramaitica con acci6n, nudo y desenlace; entre dos interlocutores no es posible exigir mayor movimiento teatral.2 Moratin's impression has had an unthinking acceptance from the authors of all literary histories. Even the Spanish seminar of the Facolta di Magistero at the University of Florence-chiefly concerned, to be sure, with establishing a text-adopts uncritically the traditional view of the work.3 Yet it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the Dialogo is a drama. The time has come to review the evidence for and against this thesis. Although scholarship generally attributes to the work a dramatic element, there is some prima facie evidence that it is not a drama. The very fact that it appeared in a cancionero of lyric poems leaves room for doubt whether it was regarded as drama at the time that it was published. In addition, the work has only two characters. There is little action. We must also