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The Polarized Universe of ‘The Island of the Mighty’: the Dramaturgy of Arden and D'Arcy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
New Theatre Quarterly does not normally include purely text-based studies of plays. since it is our feeling that journals of literary criticism offer a more appropriate home for such work. However, there are certain important plays which are in danger of becoming virtually lost to the world repertoire, when non-performance or flawed first productions have seemingly closed them off from further critical attention. One such play – or, to be precise, sequence of three plays – is The Island of the Mighty, which in a condensed form was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972, but in a production from which the authors dissociated themselves, in a dispute they described in an article in Performance (Fall 1973). Javed Malick, who has recently been awarded his doctorate from McGill University for a study of Arden's plays, here argues that The Island of the Mighty forms an important part of the Arden canon, expressing in its fullest and most coherent form themes and attitudes discernible in the earliest plays – and that its characteristic refusal to ‘do things properly’ is essential both to the authors' view of a polarized world, and to the dramaturgy they have evolved to give expression to that view, which made The Island one of their last works for the conventional theatre. Javed Malick now teaches English at Khalsa College in Delhi University.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986
References
Notes and References
1. See Taylor, John Russell, Anger and After (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 84.Google Scholar
2. Malick, Shah Jaweedul, The Dramaturgy of John Arden: Dialectical Vision and Popular Tradition, Ph.D. Dissertation, McGill University, 1985.Google Scholar
3. About Nelson in The Hero Rises Up the playwrights say: ‘This play is about a man who was, by accident of birth and rearing, committed to a career governed by the old Roman “rectilinear” principles. He himself was one of asymmetrical “curvilinear” temperament to an unusually passionate degree. But the English (who have inheritied the Roman mantle) soon discovered how to handle him. He was done properly: wasted his extraordinary energy, courage, and humanity upon having men killed (in the end himself killed).‖’
4. See Arden, John, To Present the Pretence: Essays on the Theatre and Its Public (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 155.Google Scholar
5. See Jones, Geraint, The Art and Truth of the Parables (London: SPCK Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Via, Dan O., The Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967)Google Scholar; and Darko Suvin, ‘On Metaphoricity and Narrativity in Fiction: the Chronotype as the Differentia Generica’, as yet unpublished.
6. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968).Google Scholar
7. The ages mentioned in the list of dramatis personae as well as various references within the text show that Arthur and most of his companions are to be presented as ‘old’. Arthur is himself the oldest of them all and near his death. ‘Why you poorold man – I never guessed you were so near death’, says Balin, when he first sees Arthur's face (I, iii). ‘Old men, old men, on their horses so huge’, sings the Pictish poet (I, x). In contrast, most of the active plebeians are young.
8. See Gurvitch, Georges, The Spectrum of Social Time, trans. Korenbaum, Myrtle (Dordrecht, Holland: Riedel, 1964).Google Scholar
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10. Cf. Suvin, Darko, ‘“Utopian” and “Scientific”: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels’, Minnesota Review, VI (1976), p. 59–70.Google Scholar
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