"God-Hunting": The Chaos of Worship in Peter Shaffer's Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun

"God-Hunting": The Chaos of Worship in Peter Shaffer's Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun BARBARA LOUNSBERRY Pizarro: I've gone God-hunting and caught one. EQUUS and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer's masterpieces to date, are mutually revealing. In fact, the historically removed and more elaborate Royal Hunt can help the reader penetrate the starker Equus, as well as the confusion which its modern psychoanalytic metaphor has unfortunately occasioned. For Equus is only peripherally related to the pitfalls of modern psychiatry, just as Royal Hunt is concerned only incidentally with the· rape and massacre of the Incan civilization by the Spanish conquistadores.I Despite these compelling settings, each play is really an exploration of man's search for gods, what he does when he seems to find them, and how they ultimately elude him. "God-hunting," indeed, is Shaffer's great subject. He is a writer steeped in knowledge of ancient myth and a playwright of poetic temperament. "My head has always been full of images," he confesses in his note to Equus, and in the following pages I shall attempt to untangle the complex associations suggested by the images and demonstrate : 1) that god-hunting supplies the dramatic structure for Shaffer 's two great plays; 2) that the multiplicity of gods is the source of dramatic conflict within this structure, and; 3) that the rich mythopoetic resonance of the central god images in each play, the sun in The Royal Hunt and the horse in Equus (as well as the image of the eye which links them) supplies the compelling intellectual and emo13 14 BARBARA LOUNSBERRY tional power of the plays. I hope to show by the end how each "pantheon" of gods and central god symbol is particularly suited to its historical context. The names Shaffer gives to the two acts of The Royal Hunt of the Sun disclose the essential structure of both dramas. Act I is called "The Hunt" and Act II, "The Kill." The simple formula, then, for a Celtic Candelabra, Plate 18 from J. E. Ciriot, A Dictionary ofSymbols, second ed., transl. Jack Sage (London, 1971). Courtesy of Routledge & Kegan Paul. "GOD-HUNTING": SHAFFER'S EQUUS AND ROYAL HUNT 15 Shaffer god-play is an extended search for a god, and, ironically, the god's murder, mutilation, or abandonment when the god is found. In The Royal Hunt of the Sun, the aging and spiritually depleted Pizarro embarks on a military and economic expedition which turns into a last-ditch spiritual quest for the Sun God Atahuallpa. Yet when Atahuallpa is found, he is destroyed. In Equus, the equally lost psychiatrist Dysart's journey into a horse-maimer's psyche becomes a search for the great god Equus. And just as the boy has mutilated the god before him (as Atahuallpa had killed his brother), Dysart's finding of Equus entails his own psychic mutilation of the boy-who-would-begod . Furthermore, it is not only the major characters who go a'hunting . By his nonrealistic intermingling of space and time in each play, Shaffer forces his audiences to embark on a god-hunt along with his characters. We are asked to put the pieces together, to search for a whole in a way analogous to the searches being conducted on stage. This technique perhaps explains· the devastating power of the plays, for once involved in the hunt we find ourselves inescapably accomplices in "the kill." "This is the law:" Pizarro says in the penultimate scene of Royal Hunt, "die in despair or be a God yourself."2 These seem to be the significant alternatives in Shaffer's god-hunting universe. Shaffer's characters indeed represent these alternatives. One might say that: Pizarro Atahuallpa DeSoto Dysart Alan Strang Hester Salomon (And that the remaining characters in each play represent conflicting forms of idolatry which complicate any purer effort at worship.) . Pizarro and Dysart are figures of despair. The plays dramatize. their quests and conclude with their bitter and poignant recognition of their success being their defeat and of the meaning of their loss. The links between Pizarro and Dysart are numerous. Pizarro and Dysart each dream of the...