Life and Love and Serjeant Musgrave: An Approach to Arden's Play

Life and Love and Serjeant Musgrave: An Approach to Arden's Play HELENA FORSAs-sCOTT Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is probably John Arden's best-known play. It is also a play which has generated much critical argument, the focal point tending to be Black Jack Musgrave himself. Frequently, however, the SeIjeant has been interpreted in conventional naturalistic tenns, the reasons for his failure being traced to his outlook, his personality, and his mind. When John Russell Taylor asserted, in Anger and After, that "this is a play about individual, complicated human beings, ....., he defined a view of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance which has continued to play an important part in the critical discussion.:1 The most notable divergent approach to the play - and indeed to Arden's play-writing as a whole - is that which has been advocated by Albert Hunt. Hunt sees Arden's work as belonging, not to the naturalistic theatre of illusion, but to a broader and more ancient tradition which he exemplifies with theatre as different as British pantomime and the dramas ofShakespeare and Brecht.3 The theatre of illusion, Hunt argues, is ':a theatre of persuasion"; the tradition to which Arden's plays belong, in contrast, "has precisely the opposite aim: to question appearances."4 Consequently, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, if"Played for identification with the audience, ... becomes incomprehensible. For the true statement of the play lies in the way Musgrave's pacifist message is judged against the action of the play and found inadequate. If you're too close to Musgrave, this judgement is never seen.'" Hunt's view ofArden's drama is, I believe, essentially correct. In this essay, I want to investigate more closely what Hunt calls "the action of the play" and demonstrate how Arden uses a given plot structure as a means of making a statement in artistic terms. As Hunt indicates, the central conflict is between this plot structure and Musgrave's message, but Musgrave's particular brand of pacifism is compounded of elements which have a special historical significance with regard to drama as well as politics. It seems to me that only when 2 HELENA FORSAS-SCOTT these dimensions become clear to us, can the full implications of the play's confrontation begin to emerge. In an illuminating essay on Macbeth, Glynne Wickham has shown that the structure of Shakespeare's tragedy can be seen as a combination of two famous sequences from the medieval Cycle Plays: the story of Herod the Great and the Harrowing ofHell. According to Wickham, "The essentials that [Shakespeare] ... drew from the [Herod] play are the poisoning of a tyrant's peace of mind by the prophecy of a rival destined to eclipse him, the attempt to forestall that prophecy by the hiring of assassins to murder all potential rivals and the final overthrow and damnation of the tyrant.,,6 With Macbeth as a Scottish Herod, his eventual damnation foreshadowed by frequent references to him as the Devil, Macduff, his chief protagonist, plays the role of Christ. "As Christ harrowed Hell and released Adam from Satan's dominion," Wickham explains , "so afflicted subjects of mortal tyranny will find a champion who will release them from fear and bondage. This Macduff does for Scotland...."7 Wickham begins his analysis with a detailed examination of the familiar Porter scene, often so strangely out of place to a modem audience, but to the Elizabethan theatre-goer, a well-nigh unmistakable reference to the Harrowing of Hell. Like Shakespeare, Arden draws on a popular dramatic tradition for the plot of Serjealll Musgrave's Dance and brings this tradition sharply into focus at a crucial point in the dramatic action. The type ofpopular drama which Arden uses has survived into the present time, and in Act lll, Scene I of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance it surfaces with full force and all of its customary paraphernalia , the significant details being underlined by the Bargee who sets the scene in the market-place: Here they are on a winter's morning, you've got six kids at home crying out for bread, you've got a sour cold wife and no fire and no breakfast: and you're...