Moliere, Amphitryon

Moliere, Amphitryon, transl. & afterward by Richard Wilbur, Harcourt Brace & Company, San Deigo, 1995

What came of this retirement was Amphitryon (am-FIT-ree-un), a play very different from his other major comedies. Its characters were not seventeenth-century French people but ancient Greeks and Greek gods with Roman names; its comedy had not the consistent range and tone of, say, The School for Wives, but combined the flavors of vaudeville, of fantasy, of high comedy, and even of opera; its medium was not the conventional Alexandrine couplet, but a supple vers libre that could modulate easily between the several planes of Amphitryon’s comic action and unite them. (138)

The story of Amphitryon is an ancient one; both of Homer’s epics allude to it, and Hesiod recounts it. … Moliere’s chief source for Amphitryon was a Latin tragicomedy of the second century B.C., the Amphitruo of Plautus, and he was influenced as well by Jean Rotrou’s prior French adaptation, Les Sosies (1636). (138)

One such theme, that of entrapment in one’s role, … Sosia’s bitter wife, Cleanthis, who, as she twice complains, is the prisoner of her conventional virtue. The title character himself may perhaps be seen as a prisoner of his precious honor. / A second motif, which invites comparisons between Amphitryon and Moliere’s Don Juan, is the high-handed amorality of the powerful, and their indifference to truth. [139] … The warping effect of masters on servants is a third theme, and it is introduced at the outset by Mercury, who, despite his divinity, is Jove’s overworked and complaining lackey. … a fourth one—the problem of identity. Identity does indeed become a problem when one is confronted with a living, breathing double, [140] … discovers by interrogation that Mercury can remember, and claims to have done, a deed that Sosia [SO-see-uh] did “when no one was around.” It now seems to Sosia that he has no rational, evidential ground for denying Mercury’s claim to his identity. Having made that concession, yet bothered still by the feeling that he “must be someone,” Sosia struggles thereafter to maintain that there can be two Sosias in the world. Mercury, meanwhile, treats him as a nonperson who is “on standby,” as we say, for an identity which he may have when Mercury is through with it. … A final concern of Amphitryon, and its central one, is love and marriage. (139-141)

The one thing in Amphitryon that requires a bit of historical explanation is Jupiter’s insistence rigmarole about “the husband” and “the lover.” Many of the precieuses, or bluestockings, of Moliere’s day had a proto-feminist disdain for the slavery of marriage, and for its sensual aspect, and cultivated (instead of marriage, or in addition to it) Platonic love-relationship of the highest spirituality and refinement. Moliere’s The Learned Ladies (1672) was to mock this separation of marriage and love, husband and lover, in its portrayal of Armande. (142)

Vers libre in the French seventeenth century meant a form of poetry in which there was no prescribed rhyme scheme, and the poet could shift at will from one line length to another. This was the form employed by Moliere’s friend La Fontaine in his Fables, and, as Voltaire said, it is not as easy as it sounds. Why? Because it does not work unless there is good expressive reason for each change in line length, and unless the rhyme patterns—like the stanzas of more regular forms—embody the stages of thought. Moliere’s vers libre in Amphitryon is excellent, representing his poetry at its best and most lyric, and the reader will note the numerous ways in which this versatile form enforces one or another tone or comic effect. In many of the speeches of Jupiter and Alcmena, the baroque opulence of the rhyme combines with an artful redundancy of statement to give an impression of inexhaustible eloquence and gallantry. (The same speeches, in their leisured enlargement of a mood or idea, make one think of arias, though in 1668 the creation of French opera by Lully and Charpentier was still a few years in the future.) When virtuoso rhyme occurs in the speeches of Sosia, it has a different effect, and becomes the music of quick-witted talk or patter. / There are a variety of line lengths in Moliere’s text, but verse of twelve or eight syllables are the most common by far; I have tried faithfully to parallel his metrical movement in English measures. In all but one or two lines, I have been able to preserve his rhyme patterns exactly. The intended rhythms of my English lines will best be heard if the reader or actor will honor my occasional stress marks and will treat Sosia, diamond, and hellebore as three-syllable words. (145)

Mercury: And, given my unjust and dismal fate,
I owe the poets endless hate
For their unutterable gall
In having heartlessly decreed,
Ever since Homer sang of Troy,
That each god, for his use and need,
Should have a chariot to enjoy,
While I must go on foot, indeed,
Like some mere village errand boy— (Prologue, 6)

Night. Too bad, but there’s no help for it;
The poets treat us as they please.
There’s no end to the idiocies
That those fine gentlemen commit.
Still you are wrong to chide them so severely:
They gave you winged heels; that’s quite a gift. (Prologue, 7)

Night. Jove baffles me, and I have trouble seeing
Why these impostures give him such delight.
/
Mercury. He likes to sample every state of being,
And in so doing he’s divinely right.
However high the role that men assign him,
I’d not think much of him if he
Forever played the awesome deity
And let the jeweled bounds of Heaven confine him.
It is, I think, the height of silly pride
Always to be imprisoned in one’s splendor; (Prologue, 8)

Mercury. The tale you’ve told me is, in fact,
Save for the blows, entirely mine.
’Twas I who, as Amphitryon’s deputy,
Arrived this very minute from the coast;
I who shall greet Alcmena, and shall boast
Of how her brave lord brought us victory,
…
I have been flogged in Thebes full many a time
For deeds of which I shall not speak,
And branded on my backside for the crime
Of getting caught at…hide-and-seek. (1.2. pg. 34)

Sosia (aside). There’s not one lie in all of his discourse,
And I feel shaken. He has already made me
Admit that he is Sosia by brute force;
Now reason, too, seems likely to persuade me.
Yet when I pinch myself, or calmly ponder,
It seems to me that I am I. (1.2.35)

Sosia. After these proofs you’ve given, I can’t deny
That you are Sosia; to that I’ll say amen.
But if you’re he, tell me who I am, then—
Because I must be someone, musn’t I? [36]
/
Mercury. When I am Sosia no more,
You may be he; I think that’s fair.
But while I’m he, I’ll kill you if you dare
To pose as my competitor. (1.2.36-37)

Jupiter. There’s one small thing that troubles me a bit;
It would be even sweeter if I knew
That duty did not enter into it;
That the soft looks and favors that you show me
Stemmed from your passion and my self alone,
And were not tributes to a husband, shown
Because they’re something that you owe me. (1.3.39)

Jupiter. Alcmena dearest, in me you see
A husband, and a lover; and the latter’s
The only one, I think, who really matters.
The husband merely cramps and hinders me.
The lover, fiercely jealous of your heart,
Would be the only one for whom you care,
And will not settle for some part
Of what the husband deigns to share.
…
In this small matter which perturbs him so,
He asks that, in your thinking, you divide
Him from that other self he can’t abide; [40]
That the husband be for virtue and for show
Alone; and that your gracious heart bestow
All love, all passion, on the lover’s side. (1.3.40-41)

Alcmena. What the gods have joined, I shall not separate;
For husband and lover both, my love is great. (1.3.41)

Mercury. Heavens, Cleanthis, they’re at the amorous age;
After a time, all that will pass;
What now becomes them, at this early stage,
Would, in old married folk like us, seem crass; (1.4.44)

Sosia. No. I’m the servant and you’re the master, Sir;
The truth shall be exactly what you please. (2.1.49)

Sosia. Those are the facts, Sir, of the case.
That me was at the house ahead of me;
For I had got there, don’t you see,
Before I ever reached the place. (2.1.53)

Sosia. (aside) All speech is foolish if it’s framed
By someone of obscure estate:
But the same words, uttered by the great,
Would be applauded and acclaimed. (2.1.58)

Alcmena. The tale’s not long. I hastened forth to meet you,
Full of a pleasurable surprise,
Held out my longing arms to greet you,
And showed my joy by many happy cries. (2.2.69)

Sosia. When a man is drunk, the doctors hold,
Lovemaking ought to be eschewed,
Since children so conceived are always rude
And sickly, and the black sheep of the fold. (2.3.80)

Cleanthis. I wish all doctors were in Hell;
Their theories are lunatic.
Let them give orders to the sick,
And not prescribe for people who are well.
They meddle too much in our affairs,
Giving our chaste desires harsh rules to follow; (2.3.80)

Jupiter. Only the husband is at fault,
And he should be the culprit, in your view.
The lover had no part in that assault,
And his heart’s not capable of slandering you. (2.6.90)

Mercury, on the balcony of Amphitryon’s house, unseen and unheard by Amphitryon.
Since, here, I’ve no amours to give me pleasure,
I shall devise some other sport instead,
And put some life into my tedious leisure
By driving poor Amphitryon out of his head.
In a god, that sounds uncharitable and callous,
But it’s not my nature to behave benignly;
My planet’s attributes incline me
To deal in mischief and in malice. (3.2.103)

Sosia. Spare me, O brave and generous me;
Do practice more restraint and measure;
Good Sosia, let poor Sosia be,
And do not beat yourself with so much pleasure. (3.6.124)

Posicles. If the likeness is as great as you report,
Alcmena might not be to blame…
/
Amphitryon. Ah, in a matter of this sort,
Error, though pure, is guilty all that same, [129]
And innocence gets no mercy from the court.
Such errors, in whatever light one view them,
Are bound to touch us where we live,
And though our reason often may excuse them,
Our honor and our love will not forgive. (3.7.130)

Mercury. And as for me, I’m Mercury,
Who gave this rogue, for pastime, many a whack,
And borrowed his identity;
But now he need not think his fate so black,
For it’s an honor to have one’s back
Lambasted by a deity. (3.9.133)

Jupiter. For when the voice of Jove rings out,
His words are the decrees of Fate. (3.10.136)