Between the acts, p.24
Between the Acts, page 24
[81] I love till I die: From a lute song by Thomas Ford (ca. 1580–1648): “There is a lady sweet and kind, / Was never face so pleased my mind, / I did but see her passing by, / And yet I love her till I die.”
[83] Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken: In Robert Browning’s poem “Abt Vogler,” the speaker, an organist improvising at his instrument, conveys his idea of earthly music as an intuition of the heavenly through a similar image: “On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round” (73).
[84] what about the Jews: In early 1939, the British public generally knew less about Hitler’s persecution of Jews than the American public did, largely because Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy was to censor news of atrocities in his efforts to avert a European war. The British public was well aware, however, of the arrival of Jewish children as refugees: An item in the New Statesman and Nation on June 10, 1939, for example, drew attention to their plight, giving the name of the agency (in Bloomsbury) that people could contact if they were willing to serve as foster parents. The Woolfs, with their tour of Germany in 1935, their meeting with Sigmund Freud after his escape from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, and their political contacts, were well informed about Nazi atrocities. “Jews persecuted, only just over the Channel” Woolf wrote on May 15, 1940, and, as Hitler’s invasion of England threatened as an imminent possibility, she reflected increasingly on the implications for Leonard and herself (given his Jewishness and their Labour affiliations): “we in concentration camps, or taking sleeping draughts” (Diary 5: 186, 292).
[84] with a flea in his ear: An old saying, dating from medieval times, and used in various ways. In England, it would refer to something annoying or irritating, such as receiving a rebuke. See, for example, Love’s Cure: Or, the Martial Maid, an early seventeenth-century comedy, attributed to the combined authorship of John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, and Philip Massinger: “He went away with a Flea in’s Ear, / Like a poor Cur, clapping his trundle Tail / Betwixt his Legs” (III.iii). In French, the expression means to have a bee in the bonnet—that is, having an obsessive idea or a suspicion. In François Rabelais’ sixteenth-century satiric and—for Mikhail Bakhtin (see introduction xlvi)—carnivalesque novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, the inveterate trickster Panurge makes literal play with the image by having his ear pierced so that he can wear a dangling gold earring in which he has encased a flea, claiming then that he has a flea in his ear and a mind to marry (book 3, chapter 7). The saying also provides the title for Georges Feydeau’s highly popular bedroom farce, La Puce à Foreille (1907), in which the hilarious convoluted absurdist plot is instigated by a woman’s suspicions about her husband’s infidelity.
[85] reason holds sway: The period from the mid-seventeenth century up to the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the Romantic era used to be called, after Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the Age of Reason. The pageant is beginning to imply a historical pattern that imitates the cyclical process of seasonal change, like that proposed in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918). For Spengler, the eighteenth century was the high-autumn turning point, marking the shift from the Dionysian (or Faustian) to the Apollonian (or Euclidian)—a reorientation from creativity to rationalism that begins a culture’s inevitable decline. The play that follows, however, and the allusions to eighteenth-century poets of sentiment like Oliver Goldsmith and William Cowper, suggest that rationalism has not entirely “won.”
[85] Time, leaning on his sickle: This image combines Chronos or time, depicted in modern times with a scythe, with Cronus, the Titan god of the harvest who castrated his father with a sickle (a precursor of the scythe), thus heralding the destruction of the old crop to make room for the new crop in the spring. The blend is traditional: See Thomas Dekker, “For all Times sickle has gone ouer you, you are Orlando still” (The Honest Whore, 1604).
[85] While Commerce from her Cornucopia: The following passage is a pastiche or an echo chamber of allusions, all evoking a world beyond strife and warfare: The peaceful empire ushered in by commerce recalls “Thy cities shall with commerce shine” from James Thomson’s “Rule Britannia” (1740; line 20); the stranger fearful of the snake appears in Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770; line 354), a poem about the disappearing calm of rural life; violets and eglantines image an idyllic, longed-for imaginative realm in John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819; lines 46–47), later echoed in George Meredith’s “Love in the Valley” (1878; lines 101–2); and the image of the bees conflates “His helmet now shall make a hive for bees” from George Peele’s “A Farewell to Arms” (Polyhymnia, 1590; line 7) with “The yellow bees i’ the ivy bloom,” in a passage describing the poet’s visionary dream in P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820; I.745).
[85] while Zephyr sleeps: The Greek god of the west wind, and thus the harbinger of spring and, in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, of the call to pilgrimage: “When Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes” (lines 4–6).
[86] Damon: A poetic shepherd in Virgil’s eighth Eclogue, Damon occurs frequently as a name in the English pastoral tradition—in poems, for example, by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, and Alexander Pope. Pope’s “Spring: The First Pastoral or Damon” is notable for shifting the pastoral scene from Arcadia or Arcady (the mythical “green world” in Greek and Sicilian pastoral poetry) to the banks of the Thames: “Damon: First in these Fields I try the Sylvan Strains, / Nor blush to sport on Windsor’s blissful Plains: / Fair Thames flow gently from thy sacred Spring, / While on thy Banks Sicilian Muses sing” (lines 1–3). Line 3 echoes Spenser’s “Prothalamion,” which is later famously echoed in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (lines 183–84). For Cynthia, see the notes to page 25, “the lady was a picture,” and 77, “Old Man’s Beard.”
[87] Where there’s a Will there’s a Way: The eighteenth-century act of the pageant encapsulates the stock situations and characters in Restoration comedy, although it owes most to William Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700). In the latter, Millamant inherits her fortune only if she marries in a way that pleases her aunt Lady Wishfort; in the former, Angelica tricks her suitor Valentine’s father, Sir Sampson Legend, into proposing marriage, so that she can acquire and destroy a paper that would sign Valentine’s inheritance away. Money and love are Restoration comedy’s characteristic twin themes.
[87] Give me the pounce-box: Much fun was made in Restoration comedy of older women trying to recover youth through cosmetics and aromatics. A pounce or pouncet box held either powder for drying ink or perfume; small black patches on the face were used as beauty marks and also to hide blemishes or smallpox scars.
[87] A pox: A mild oath, referring to venereal disease.
[87] lighting his taper: A double entendre for a bit of bawdy wordplay.
[88] a pig in a poke: While the most common meaning of “a pig in a poke” is “a pig in a bag,” an expression that generally refers to buying something sight unseen, here “poke” refers to a yoke or halter placed around an animal’s neck with a pole inserted, pointing or poking forward, to prevent the animal from breaking through or jumping over a fence (OED, from Webster 1828). Deb’s speech is typical of the verbal dexterity valued in Restoration comedy, in which wit was often displayed in rapid and inventive strings of similes, frequently with sexual innuendo.
[88] Asphodilla: Asphodel is a plant belonging to the lily family, associated by poets with the narcissus and thought to be an immortal flower covering the Elysian fields: “Others in Elysian valleys dwell, / Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.” Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters” (line 170).
[88] jackanapes: A pet monkey, or a young man who acts like one. Much sexual flattery is implied in Sir Spaniel’s speech.
[89] Emperor of the Indies: The West Indies. Like Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Flavinda has a father whose fortune derives from South America, exposing the reliance of British wealth on colonial plunder.
[90] Where there’s a Will there’s a Way: The phrase returns with a punning humor characteristic of Restoration comedy.
[90] To match their ears: Implying ass’s ears, like those of King Midas, and making a stock joke about lawyers.
[92] The poor man to his cot returns: The tune returns us to the calm simplicities of ordinary life, evoked in images resembling those in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) and Robert Burns’s “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1785), and standing in marked contrast to the machinations of the aristocracy.
[93] with his tail between his legs: Flavinda’s observations upon high-society amours place her closer to the more worldly heroine of Restoration comedy than to the innocent heroine in the sentimental comedies that began to appear in the Augustan age of Queen Anne. See also the note to page 84, “with a flea in his ear.”
[94] a cit . . . a fop: Words for citizen and dandy, both implying decadent life in the city.
[94] What stung . . . the blue bag: The blue bag used in the laundry to prevent the yellowing of white linens was also, when wetted and applied to the wound, an old remedy for bee sting.
[95] Palaces tumble down: The destruction of Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, and Rome image the fall of civilizations, again suggesting the end of historical cycles. Compare T. S. Eliot’s lines, “Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal” in The Waste Land (V. 374–77).
[97] The Chinese, you know, put a dagger on the table: Mrs. Swithin is thinking of traditional Chinese theater, most likely Peking opera (jingu or jingxi), as opposed to the realistic spoken drama (huaju) that developed in the twentieth century. Combining acrobatics, mime, speech, song, and dance, Peking opera uses a bare stage and a minimum of props, relying on gesture and symbol to delineate setting and to convey emotion in a highly stylized and rigorously compressed way. Peking opera would have been known in England in the 1930s as a result of the widely publicized tours of the legendary Mei Lanfang and his troupe to the United States in 1930 and to the Soviet Union in 1935, where Mei’s performance greatly impressed Bertolt Brecht. A translation and adaptation, by Hsuing Shi-i, of Lady Precious Stream, a story taken from Peking opera, played for an extraordinarily successful long run in London from 1934–1936, although it only loosely represented the traditional style.
[97] And so Racine: Woolf’s close friend (Giles) Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), an authority on the French dramatist Jean Racine (1639–1699), wrote that unlike the English dramatist, Racine employed “the art of subtle suggestion,” with a daring that was “not the daring of adventure but of intensity.” Whereas the Elizabethan tragedians “traced, with elaborate and abounding detail, the rise, the growth, the decline, and the ruin of great causes,” Racine focused on the crisis alone, and thus seized “the very heart of his subject . . . in a single stroke” (Lytton Strachey, “Racine” [1908], Books and Characters: French and English, 5–27. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922).
[97] Pop Goes the Weasel: An old popular song with its basis in Victorian working-class poverty, using pop as slang for pawn. A friend of popular culture as opposed to the classics, Mrs. Manresa most likely took her nephew to a music hall show, or perhaps a film. The Three Stooges produced two shorts in the 1930s using the tune “Pop Goes the Weasel” as a theme: Punch Drunks (1934) and Pop Goes the Easel (1935). Surviving theater contracts from the famous music-hall theater the Argyle, in Birkenhead, show the Three Stooges booked for live performances there in August 1940, just before the theater’s destruction in a bombing raid in September of that year; they may have appeared there earlier, but most contracts from the 1930s are missing, possibly destroyed in the fire. Since the Argyle also broadcast its performances on radio, there are several possibilities for Woolf having the Stooges’ slapstick routines in mind. In any case, the song provides another opportunity for Mrs. Manresa to be linked to a popping cork.
[98] Gretna Green: A village just over the border in Scotland, where young couples, unable to marry in England, could be married under Scottish law.
[98] the Horn book: A child’s lesson book, generally a page mounted on a wooden paddle and covered with a protective laminate made from cow’s horn.
[99] my foot’s like a burning, burning horseshoe: Sir Spaniel’s gout links him to P. B. Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, an earthy, parodic comedy that satirically represents its characters as pigs. Suppressed in Shelley’s time, the play was inspired by the rowdy, carnivalesque behavior of a crowd in Italy on St Bartholomew’s Day. Bartholomew Fair, one of the most raucous of public festivals, was abolished in England in 1855. Oedipus means “swollen foot,” referring to his being maimed in the foot as an infant, and possibly connecting him to the Fisher King, whose sexual wound functions as a motif of sterility in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
[100] chalk stones: Common name for deposits formed in gouty joints; the practice of relieving the pain by keeping the hands warm links Lady Harpy with the audience’s “indigenous” old lady in the bath (wheel) chair, “crippled by arthritis,” with her “ungloved twisted hands.”
[101] O ingratitude, thy name is Deborah!: Lady Harpy appears to combine Hamlet’s “Frailty, thy name is woman!” (I.ii) and King Lear’s “Ingratitude! . . . More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster’ (I.iv).
[101] Sans niece, sans lover; and sans maid: Lady Harpy Harraden echoes two previous expressions of fatalistic resignation: Jacques’ famous speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, beginning “All the world’s a stage” and ending with a depiction of old age as “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (II.vii), and the similar sentiments expressed in Edward FitzGerald’s nineteenth-century translation of the great Persian poem, his “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam of Naishápúr”: “Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, / Before we too into the Dust descend; / Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie / Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!” (lines 93–96).
[102] what I call myself: The narrator’s voice, situated here in the audience, signals the difference between a person’s name, which implies a single entity, and the conflicting, multitudinous, conscious, and unconscious voices that make up a complex subjectivity. The notion of the discontinuous self, usually associated with postmodernism, is evident throughout Woolf’s work.
[103] worked like a nigger: An expression originating in the United States, meaning to work exceptionally hard. It was generally used to denote praise or at least grudging admiration, with little or no consciousness of its racist implications. A 1949 article in American Speech labeled nigger a “powder-keg word,” noting increasing public awareness of its derogatory connotations in the United States, yet claiming that racial tension, and hence awareness of racial prejudice, was significantly less in England. Dictionaries in the 1930s, including the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1933), were beginning to identify the word nigger as a word of contempt, but the American College Dictionary of 1947 was the first to label the word “offensive.” (See Rossell Hope Robbins, “Social Awareness and Semantic Change,” American Speech 24.2 [1949]: 156–58.) In a letter written in 1939, Woolf described her own hard work in these terms (Letters 6: 362), but in Between the Acts, these words seem to be reported by an observer at the scene. It is unclear whether Woolf herself slips into unconscious racial stereotyping or whether she is exposing such stereotyping in the supposedly “innocent” language of the time.
[103] No one wants it: No one in England wants a war.
[103] Gladstone: William Ewart Gladstone (four times British Liberal prime minister between 1868 and 1894) was not a pacifist and, in the 1880s, he used force, however reluctantly, to oppose uprisings in Egypt and Sudan; nevertheless, he was a notable opponent of imperialist expansion and warfare, denouncing the Turkish slaughter of the Bulgarians and later of the Armenians, the British war against the Zulu in South Africa, and the British invasion of Afghanistan. At the end of his career, he fought (although unsuccessfully) against the buildup of British naval power in competition with Germany, during his last term from 1892–1894.
[104] The glass is falling: The weather vane and the barometer (glass) indicate a coming storm.
[104] Cleopatra: For Woolf’s English readers, Cleopatra would most likely stir memories of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and Enobarbus’s famous tribute beginning, “The barge she sat on, like a burnish’d throne”—a line echoed in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (line 77). The choice of Cleopatra as one of Lucy’s buried selves makes an amusing but also profound statement about the multitudinous selves in our unconscious life, for Lucy’s personal self is clearly at an extreme remove from her “unacted part” as Queen of Egypt: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (II.ii).
[105] a twitcher of individual strings: The image suggests the handler of string puppets but is perhaps even closer to the sutradhar in classical Sanskrit theater, literally “the one who holds the threads.” Related to the strings (sutra) in early puppet theater (although scholars debate which came first), the sutradhar combines the roles of producer, director, narrator, and stage manager, and has the crucial function of linking together the performers, the performance, and the audience. Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury ends with the translation of sudtradhar as “puller of strings,” to which John Maynard Keynes replies, “I am already that!” (London: Wildwood House, 1981: 159). Images of threads and strings run throughout Between the Acts.
