The Adulterer, Part VIII: Blood and Gore, contd.

            At this stage, one might fairly question the nature of Warren’s sanguinary fixation. As a function of style, it certainly sets apart her literary efforts from those of her fellow Founders. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, used the word “blood” once in the course of his A Summary View of the Rights of British America, once in his Kentucky Resolutions, and three times – counting the use of the word “bloody” – in his First Inaugural Address.  The eighty-five essays that make up the Federalist Papers – penned by  Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – meanwhile contain the word “blood” or “bloody” a scant fifteen times. The Adulterer comparatively makes use of these same words a staggering thirty-two times over the course of five acts. The figurative image of blood was clearly of value to Warren, in a way that simply wasn’t the case for some of her more prominent compatriots among the Founding Generation. And while the various implications and symbolic significances utilized within the text of The Adulterer have been thus far discussed at length, it perhaps remains to be determined what, if anything specific, Warren was driving at. Why, in short, was blood such an important motif for her? Was it merely a matter of taste, or was there a point which she felt its rhetorical use helped her to make?

            To begin, it certainly bears repeating the obvious. As writers and artists have been aware of since time immemorial, audiences can be made to react very strongly to imagery that taps directly into their physical sensitivities. Show someone the image of a severed head, and they while almost certainly respond more instinctually or emotionally than they would if presented a picture of, say, a felled tree. Similarly, descriptions that play upon common feelings of vulnerability, fear, or repulsion often seem to resonate more powerfully with people than their more abstract or plainly descriptive equivalents. Warren’s use of blood, gore, carnage, and general physical suffering no doubt sprung in part from this idea. The subject of her first attempt at explicitly political theatre was of tremendous significance to the daily context of its intended audience, though not everyone who happened to read a copy of The Adulterer was likely to approach the topic with the same passion quite clearly nurtured by Warren herself. As is all too familiar here at the dawn of the 21^st century, there were doubtless people living in Massachusetts in the early 1770s who did not consider themselves to be politically engaged. Content to live their lives concerned only with the needs of the moment, they doubtless determined to leave matters of policy and political economy to those possessed of the training, interest, and inclination.

At the same time, it also bears remembering that no small portion of the population considered their loyalty to the Crown and to Parliament as holding greater personal sway than any fears they might have entertained as to the status of their rights and liberties. Thus confronted with indifference and hostility, Warren may simply have determined to deploy certain rhetorical devices within the text of The Adulterer in order to better reach her countrymen. Not everyone cared about the purported behavior of the Governor or his supporters, or about the edicts of Parliament upon the taxation of a relatively short list of goods. But most people could be made to feel insecure, or horrified, or disgusted. They could be shown a severed head, in short, and made to despise the party responsible. Granted, this sort of sensationalism is hardly foolproof. Sometimes people are cynical; sometimes they are detached. Sometimes they don’t like feeling as though their emotions are being manipulated. But, more often than not when shown something visceral, they simply react. While her exact intentions almost certainly ran deeper than that, it would nonetheless be short-sighted to hold Mercy Otis Warren as being entirely above the use of such a time-tested tool of artistic expression.

That being said, her aim was almost definitely more than to achieve a degree of “shock and awe.” As her later work strongly attests, Warren was both engaged with the political and social events unfolding around her and eager to affect the outcome of the same. She did not write simply to convey information – she was not a journalist, in short. Rather, she wrote in order to express a particular point of view, promote a particular course of action, and generally move the world she inhabited in what she believed to be a constructive direction. The Adulterer was surely in keeping with this attitude. The events represented therein – the killing of Christopher Seider or the Boston Massacre – were already well-known by the time of its publication in 1773. For that matter, so were the various transgressions of colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson. The purpose of the play, therefore, was assuredly not to inform – not to point to something that people might not have seen – but rather to offer a potential course of action. In so doing, Warren effectively wove together the events of recent years into a kind of object lesson in moral behavior. Blood was perhaps the most prominent figurative element therein, doubtless chosen for its ability to elicit an emotional response.

In the framework of The Adulterer, blood – in whatever context – arguably represents life itself. It is the most precious thing any individual can possess, and the most costly thing anyone stands to lose. Care must be taken, then, preciously how and when blood is shed. A person who bleeds willingly for the sake of principle thus demonstrates both the depth of their conviction and the value of the thing itself. Conversely, someone who extracts the blood of the innocent in the name of ego is guilty of destroying something of unparallelled value. Just so, the blood shed by a forebear in order to secure a legacy for their offspring represents a tremendous responsibility for all those that claim to enjoy the fruits thereof. And when faced with a such a tyrant as would callously snuff out human life, it may become just to bleed them dry – precious though even their life might be in essence, the loss of it could well save many more. What Warren was driving at, therefore, was arguably the characterization of the struggle then ongoing between British authority in Massachusetts – as represented by Governor Thomas Hutchinson – and the increasingly radical and organized political opposition as a matter, not of taxes and legislative prerogatives, but of life and death. To that end, The Adulterer seems designed to shift the debate away from notions of law, and precedent, and inherited rights – though rights do form a large part of the vocabulary of Patriots resistance to Rapatio’s machinations – and towards a far more fundamental moral quandary. People had died, Warren pointed out – and they were dying, and they would yet die. The only question that mattered, therefore – the only question worth answering – was what were the people of Massachusetts going to do about it?

In fact, The Adulterer seems to provide an answer. Upon the aforementioned massacre of Servian civilians, Brutus attempts to rouse an assembly of his countrymen in in Act III, Scene I by describing what stands before them in their quest for justice. “We’ll rescue freedom,” he says,

            Yes, thy wounds my country

            Shall soon be closed and from the precious gore,

            Which stains the streets shall spring a glorious harvest.

            Now is the crisis; if we lose this moment,

            All’s gone forever – Catch the happy period,

            And boldly hurl oppression from her basis.

Here, it seems, Warren’s bloody visions of self-sacrifice, suffering, obligation, and revenge cohere into a kind of moral imperative. While acknowledging the blood that has been shed already – a loss of life which cannot be undone – Brutus recasts the horror of, “The precious gore, / Which now stains the streets” as the possible prelude to something “glorious.” Just as he and Cassius feel the weight of the sacrifice rendered by their ancestors and endeavor to see it justified, Brutus here seems to be expressing a similar sense of obligation as concerns the innocents slain at the hands of Rapatio and his minions. Fulfilling that obligation, he asserts, will summon forth a “harvest” – i.e. the bountiful realization of much time, and effort, and suffering – which will serve to ensure that all who died in the course of its achievement will not have perished in vain.

            The period within which this harvest might be realized, however, is unfortunately a fleeting one. “Now is the crisis [,]” Brutus asserts, “If we lose this moment, / All’s gone forever [.]” The significance of this exhortation seems quite plain enough. Rather than simply chronicle the suffering and lamentations of her fellow citizens of Massachusetts, or draw attention to the iniquities and moral lapses of the ruling elite thereof, Warren sought to spur her countrymen to action. Much had been lost, she admitted – through the medium of Servia and her ill-starred Patriots – but that loss could be made good by those who yet drew breath. As of 1773, many people in Massachusetts had been harshly disabused of their former loyalty to the British Crown – by being taxed, garrisoned by soldiers, and shot down in the streets. And while the resulting anger would surely have lingered a good deal longer with those already inclined to doubt British intentions – Samuel Adams (1722-1803) for example, and his infamous Sons of Liberty – it was almost certainly bound to fade among the general population in the absence of further incidents. Notwithstanding that the so-called Boston Tea Party (December, 1773) and its disastrous aftermath were yet on the horizon, it surely appeared to Warren as though something needed to be done before her fellow countrymen no longer felt so keenly that their repeated injuries were in need of redress. Act, she therefore insisted, before the opportunity has passed – “Catch the happy period,” and make good the suffering that Massachusetts has been made to endure.

As to what the moment required, however, Warren’s hero was somewhat more equivocal. “Boldly hurl oppression from her basis [,]” he declares to his fellow Servians in a rather bloodless directive compared to his and his cohorts’ usual fare. And yet, context again supplies a deeper meaning. As Portius declared his intention to drench his sword in the blood of a tyrant, and as he, Cassius, Brutus, and Junius jointly pledged to pave the streets of Servia “with many a human skull” in quest of liberty for their homeland, there would seem to be no mistaking the intention behind the phrase “boldly hurl oppression.” If Rapatio was the seat of oppression in Servia, then Brutus was commanding his fellow citizens to seize the man and cast him from his lofty perch by whatever means they could. In consequence, the cited plea effectively joined together three of the moral implications Warren attached to the image of blood in the context of The Adulterer – i.e. it acknowledged the horror of innocent suffering, characterized that suffering as a form obligation, and located the fulfillment of that obligation in the justifiable infliction of additional suffering upon the party (or parties) ultimately responsible.

While it may be somewhat irregular – by the terms previously set for discussions herein undertaken – a brief glance past the publication of The Adulterer into the 1780s would seem to bear out the characterization presented above for Mercy Otis Warren’s particular interpretation of all things sanguinary. Specifically, the pamphlet entitled, Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions – written by Warren in response to the proposed constitution presented by the Philadelphia Convention in September, 1787 – exhibited a similar rhetorical fixation with blood, suffering, self-sacrifice, and obligation. In laying forth her position against the adoption of said constitution, for example, Warren described her countrymen as a people, “Who have braved the power of Britain, weathered the convulsions of war, and waded thro’ the blood of friends and foes to establish their independence and to support the freedom of the human mind [.]” These, “Brave Sons of America,” she continued,

Have purchased it with their blood, and have gloried in their independence with a dignity of spirit, which has made them the admiration of philosophy, the pride of America, and the wonder of Europe.

Capping off this paean to heroic self-destruction, Warren further declared that,

On these shores freedom has planted her standard, dipped in the purple tide that flowed from the veins of her martyred heroes; and here every uncorrupted American yet hopes to see it supported by the vigour, the justice, the wisdom and unanimity of the people [.]”

Whether weaving allegory or polemic, it seemed, Mercy Otis Warren conceived of the struggle between liberty and tyranny in terms of life, and death, and blood, and suffering.

In the cited passages of Observations, as from the lips of Brutus and his Servian brethren, blood is invoked alongside words like “brave,” “freedom,” “glory,” “dignity,” “pride,” “martyr,” and “justice.” Thus, like her creation Brutus, Warren seems inclined to characterize the suffering of her fellow Americans in the cause of liberty as a heroic, ennobling thing. The “standard of freedom,” she rhapsodized, was, “Diped in the purple tide that flowed from the veins of her martyred heroes [.]” There is in this a distinct echo of the Act V, Scene I lament of Brutus, who, “Waked and wept and would have fought for thee, / And emptied every vein, when threatened ruin.” But whereas Brutus offered to make this noble sacrifice, Warren reminds her readers in Observations that the defenders of America already have, and it thus fell to their countrymen to see that their suffering was justified. In this, and in her contention that the veterans of the late Revolutionary War had, “Purchased [independence] with their blood [,]” Warren also echoed the claims of characters like Cassius’ ghostly father that bodily sacrifices – i.e., bloodshed, suffering, and death – in the name of noble causes constituted a form of obligation. As the forebears of the Servian Patriots built a legacy for their offspring out of blood and toil – “Behold this fair possession [,]” the aforementioned spirit exhorts his son, “I struggled hard to purchase, fought and bled / To leave it your unsullied – Oh defend it – so too did Warren’s Observations portray the suffering and death endured by the “martyred heroes” of the Revolution as a form of moral debt that only, “The vigour, the justice, the wisdom and unanimity,” of their countrymen could pay off.

Further on in Observations, in the midst of a numbered list of specific objections to the proposed constitution, Warren again made use of the image of blood as a rhetorical device. In this case, in the seventeenth of eighteen resolves, she declared that the provision ensuring the adoption of the new system of government upon the ratification of only nine of thirteen states represented, “A subversion of the union of Confederated States,” and in fact, “May be a means of involving the whole country in blood.” The most obvious implication of this phrase is that Warren believed the imposition of the proposed constitution upon the whole of the United States after only a fraction of its citizens had approved of the same would likely result in some manner of civil unrest, further needless suffering, and death. Consider, by way of comparison, the cited assertion of Brutus that Rapatio, “Imbues his hands in blood” by prizing his own position above the lives and liberties of his fellow Servians, or the way that Junius describes soldiers responsible for killing innocent civilians as having their garments, “Stained with blood [.]” As the protagonists of The Adulterer used blood as a metonym for the unnatural cruelties that the Servian ruling elite were willing to indulge, their creator Warren appeared to use the same terminology to lay the responsibility for further suffering squarely at the feet of those who would support the ratification of the proposed constitution. The country would be “involved in blood,” she declared, and the most dedicated supporters of the proposed constitution would be the cause.  
    

            Granting that it may not represent conclusive validation for the assertions put forward herein as to the symbolic significance of blood in Mercy Otis Warren’s The Adulterer, the cited passages from her later Observations present a potentially intriguing coda to the call to arms evidently embodied by the former. Not only, it appears, was Warren inclined to characterize the mounting struggle between Crown authorities and the local political opposition in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts as a matter of life and death, but she seemed disposed to adopt the same basic moral framework when later discussing the post-Revolutionary contest between supporters and detractors of the proposed federal constitution. In both instances she was almost certainly endeavoring to utilize a particular rhetorical technique to move her countrymen to action, though this should not necessarily be taken to render moot the personal or cultural significance of the act. That in at least two instances fifteen years apart Warren was given to describe the crises she perceived facing her countrymen as a matter of the utmost importance – of blood, and suffering, and sacrifice – may well indicate that she tended to view what others characterized as political, economic, or philosophical questions through a distinctly moral lens. Furthermore, that she believed her countrymen would respond to what she wrote in the manner she intended would seem to suggest – unless she was wholly and completely out of touch with the people whose passions she confidently attempted to rouse – that a moral characterization of the events of the American Revolution and its aftermath could and did coexist with more abstract examinations of philosophy, or law, or history.

Bearing this in mind, The Adulterer would appear very much of a kind with Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Like Warren, Paine was given to expressing his disdain for the reigning political order in distinctly moral terms. And while Common Sense attacked the very concept of monarchical government rather than a particular manifestation thereof – i.e. the administration of Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts – and brought to bear a number of logistical arguments in attempted to make a case for American independence, its author was given to a form of expression not at all unlike that seen in the text of The Adulterer. On the subject of monarchy, for example, Paine declared that it was, “A form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it.” In a similar vein, avowing that America only stood to suffer by being dragged into conflicts between European powers, Paine asserted that, “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO PART [.]” And on the subject of reconciliation between Britain and America, Paine avowed that his heart had turned against it after the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19^th, 1775), whereupon,  

I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever; and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE, can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.

Warren might well have struggled to craft a more fitting pronouncement from the lips of her own Brutus or Junius. And while there is much more besides in Common Sense that unites it in tone and outlook with Warren’s The Adulterer – Paine’s description of Britain as a “Barbarous and hellish power,” for example – their shared use of blood as a signifier of life itself, and its loss, and the villainy of those who would discount its value, would seem more than adequate to make the case.

            The Adulterer, as its fixation upon blood, and gore, and sacrifice, and revenge arguably attest, was therefore likely intended to function as an instrument of moral persuasion – to act upon the sentiments of its audience, rather than their reason. And like Common Sense, it was written at a time of great turmoil – i.e. the aftermath of the Boston Massacre – which it sought to harness for the purpose of achieving redress for injuries sustained by the people of Massachusetts. As Brutus exhorted his fellows to, “Catch the happy period [,]” so Warren doubtless sought to rouse her own suffering countrymen by means of visceral imagery and emotive language. In this, The Adulterer stands distinctly apart from certain other publications of the period whose focus and tone were decidedly academic. By way of example, Jefferson’s aforementioned Summary View – published in 1774, in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party – or even the Declaration of Independence – published in 1776, after over a year of open conflict between Britain and the Colonies – appear somewhat more concerned with the nuances of English legal history and Enlightenment political theory than with attempting to provoke a moral reaction to decidedly immoral behavior.

And yet, though the authors of the Declaration seemed inclined to characterize the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain as resulting from the breach of a long-established contract while Warren compared Hutchinson and his supporters to cannibals and murderers, their respective efforts should not be seen to stand opposed to one another. Both approaches – the intellectual and the emotional – served to forward the cause of protecting and promoting the lives and liberty of the contemporary American people. Polemicists like Paine and Warren made use of language, and rhetoric, and the sensibilities of their audience to rally the people to a realization of the true stakes of the crisis then unfolding around them. They blasted complacency and unthinking loyalty, mourned the suffering and the losses that had callously been inflicted, and exhorted their fellow citizens to salvage what they knew to be their birthright. At this stage, a theorist like Jefferson – or John Dickinson or James Wilson, for that matter – steps forward and offers to an audience now much inflamed a potential plan of action. “Boldly hurl oppression from her basis [,]” Warren’s Brutus declared, and well that he might have done so. But such an appeal required structure and direction if ever it were to be acted upon. Jefferson’s Summary View, Wilson’s Considerations, or the Declaration itself thus provided the legal and philosophical framework for redress. By channelling the popular moral condemnation aroused by works like Warren’s The Adulterer, these explorations of theory and precedent helped give form to the exhortations raised by the former. In consequence, while The Adulterer ought indeed to be thought of as a thing apart from some of the more theoretical or academic works of the period – in which philosophers were quoted and grievances were itemized – it was also distinctly complimentary to the same.               

The Adulterer, Part VII: Blood and Gore, contd.

Besides functioning as a sort of badge of honor or a representation of destruction and cruelty, blood yet performed two further symbolic functions within the text of Mercy Otis Warren’s The Adulterer. The least common but perhaps most striking was the use of imagery based on blood and violence as a means of visualizing the cause and effect relationship Warren perceived between the defeat of tyranny and the triumph of liberty. A previous citation would seem to encapsulate this association quite effectively, as offered by Portius in Act II, Scene I. “I’ll cut my way through all,” he declared of the supporters of Rapatio, “And this my sword / Drench in the tyrant’s blood, then on the pile / Of bleeding freedom, pour the rich libation.” Brutal though the image conjured may seem, the emotion underpinning it was doubtless intended to be something on the order of self-righteousness. Portius speaks in anger, and so casts his thoughts in vibrant language, but his intention is self-consciously just. In order for his fellow Servians to enjoy the liberty that is theirs by birthright, he believes, their oppressor must be brought low. Thus, while blood unwillingly drawn from an innocent bystander is a symbol of horror, destruction, and cruelty, blood drawn unwillingly from a tyrant is figuratively nourishing to the cause of liberty.

Portius voiced much the same sentiment in Act II, Scene III following the aforementioned massacre of Servian civilians – an obvious analogue to the Boston Massacre of March, 1770. Having witnessed the event alongside his companion Junius, Portius cries out to his fellow Patriots,

While I can boast one short reprieve from death

I’ll breathe revenge. This unstained guiltless dagger

Shall sweat with blood, and rust with human gore.

While he makes no explicit mention of whose blood his dagger will sweat with, the context makes it plain enough that he intends his victims to be Rapatio and his clique. And though the moral significance of the purported act is left similarly unspoken, the prior statement made by Portius on the value of a tyrant’s blood likewise indicates the nature of his desire. Warren almost certainly did not intend her audience to interpret this vengeful declaration as a sign of personal barbarism on the part of Portius, though he speaks as freely of causing harm to his fellow man as Rapatio or Hazelrod. That the words came from the mouth of a Patriot – and one whose love of liberty and hatred of tyranny has been established – is therefore the key. Though Portius is somewhat hotheaded – he reacts quickly, sometimes thoughtlessly – his hatred is not indiscriminate. He sees Rapatio as the cause of Servia’s suffering, and believes that his removal will bring about an end to the same. Compared to characters like Rapatio and Hazelrod – who speak of inflicting suffering and death in general, almost haphazard terms – the bloodlust exhibited by Portius is therefore made to seem virtuous. He wishes to draw blood – seems prepared to dedicate his life to the accomplishment – but only from those whose actions have earned it, and only in service of a higher goal.

            Bearing this distinction in mind – between blood drawn with cause and blood drawn arbitrarily – the shared pledge taken by a quartet of Patriots at the end of Act I, Scene I would appear a prime example of Warren’s use of context as an indication of symbolic significance. Having poured forth their anger, bitterness, and self-righteous desire for revenge, Brutus, Cassius, Junius, and Portius together declare,

            No terms shall move us.

            These streets we’ll pave with many a human skull.

            Carnage, blood and death shall be familiar,

            Though Servia weep her desolated realms.

In truth, it’s hard to know precisely whose skulls the quartet intended to use for cobbles, or whose blood and death they intended to become inured to. Out of the mouths of Rapatio or his supporters, this same statement would doubtless take on an unmistakably sinister aspect. By their callousness and their cruelty – that is to say, by the kinds of lines Warren otherwise gave them – there would surely be no doubt that they intended the victims to be hapless innocents. With Brutus and company, however, the significance is not quite so clear. On one hand, they may well have been referring to Rapatio and his followers. Shocking though the image may be of the ostensible heroes of a story desiring to pave the streets with the skulls of their opponents, Warren made it clear – as cited above – that brutal violence was morally acceptable in the world of The Adulterer if it was narrowly directed at the vile, the cruel, and the unrepentant.

On the other hand, Warren’s depiction of Patriots like Brutus, Cassius, and Junius shows a strong instinct towards sell-sacrifice, with personal bloodshed as a symbol thereof.  The skulls they speak of, therefore – and the blood, and carnage, and death – may have been intended as a reference to themselves. So willing are these Patriots to die for the cause they have chosen for themselves – to the point of equating death with a kind of moral triumph –it hardly seems out of the question that they would be willingly to lay their bodily remains upon the streets of the land they so love, or become victim to unmitigated carnage in its name. Rather than chose between these connotations – between self-righteous revenge and self-abnegating sacrifice – as though they were mutually exclusive, however, it may be closer to Warren’s intention to see them as joined in a mutual pledge. The Patriots are willing to die for Servia. They say as much, and so often, that one is forced to admit it as the truth. And they are willing to kill for Servia. The cited passages from Portius make this clear enough. Thus, they revel in the blood that is drawn from their own veins in defence of the land they love, they react in horror to the blood that is extracted from the bodies of those innocent victims of the tyrannical cabal that rules them, and they lust after the blood of those same cruel and pitiless officers whose rule over Servia has become a parody of justice and integrity.

The final gloss that Warren’s The Adulterer applied to the symbolic significance of blood and death takes the form of a kind of incentive to action, aimed at Patriots like Brutus and Cassius. Specifically, it is the image of their fathers’ or forefathers’ blood, called to mind more than once over the course of the play’s five acts. In Act I, Scene I, for instance, among the first lives delivered by Brutus is a description of Servia as, “A clime matured with blood; from whose rich soil, / Has sprung a glorious harvest.” Cassius subsequently clarifies precisely whose blood it was that enriched the soil in question, speaking at length to Brutus of, “Our noble ancestors, / Who lived for freedom, and for freedom died [.]” “Should these heroes,” he goes on to say,

Start from their tombs and view their dear possessions

The price of so much labor, cost, and blood, 

Gods! What a pang it would cost them; yes, they’d weep,

Nor weep in vain.

Brutus registers his agreement with Cassius by affirming that he, “Sprang from men who fought, who bled for freedom [,]” and who, “Struggled like patriots, and through seas of blood / Waded to conquest.” He later invokes the same kind of imagery when he swears, in the name of his forefathers’ spirit and, “All that blood, that precious blood they spilt,” to stand and to act on behalf of suffering Servia.

            Here, blood is symbolically invoked as a cost paid – a sacrifice made by one generation that their descendants must live up to. By the way that it is characterized, Brutus and his fellow Patriots think it an unequivocally precious thing. Men suffered – their fathers, and their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers suffered – to create something of value that they could leave to their descendants. In part, that thing was Servia itself – the land, its boundaries, and all contained therein. But it was also something more ephemeral – and perhaps for it, dearer still. Those suffering patriots of old – as Warren would have it – left a legacy of freedom for their children. They fought for a liberty that doubtless many of them did not live to enjoy. And in bleeding for that goal, they made it all the more valuable. Thus, attached to the notion of inheritance and heritage, blood comes to symbolize a kind of covenant. Brutus and his compatriots feel compelled to fight and suffer for their homeland because – among other things – they believe that the liberties they have taken to be their birthright were purchased at as steep a cost as it is possible to accrue. To justify that cost – to keep true to that covenant – is to ensure that the ancestors of Brutus and his companions did not suffer or even die in vain. The Servian liberties that men like Brutus, Cassius, and Junius seek to protect, therefore, function as both a right and a responsibility, with blood – shed long ago, but no less vibrant for it – as a representation thereof.     

The Adulterer, Part VI: Blood and Gore

Literary references or allusions aside, there are in fact a number of thematic elements which seem to recur across the length of Mercy Otis Warren’s The Adulterer whose prevalence and significance ought to be marked. Perhaps the most striking – in the context of Warren’s larger body of work as well as in the immediate – is the frequent use of blood-based imagery. Indeed, Warren’s sanguinary fixation is in some ways a defining element of the tone and style of her freshman attempt at political theatre. To some degree, this was surely intended to achieve an immediate, visceral effect. Confronted by characters who spoke of drenching their sword, “In the tyrant’s blood, then on the pile / Of bleeding freedom, pour the rich libation [,]” a contemporary reader would surely have been struck by the vibrancy – if not also the ghoulish brutality – of the image. Taken as a whole, however, there would seem to be something more to Warren’s often gory style of verse than a simple desire to shock or unsettle. Variations upon the image of blood and bodily harm that occur within the text of The Adulterer appear to fall within a set of fairly cohesive moral themes. Employed to convey a sense of personal sacrifice, destruction and loss, or hard-won triumph, these motifs were arguably intended to help illustrate the dangers facing contemporary Massachusetts, those factors that urged action over extended deliberation, and the means by which innocent suffering could eventually be redeemed. 

Consider, by way of explanation, the first of the three motifs named above – i.e. blood as symbolic of willing personal sacrifice. Brutus and Cassius in particular speak often and freely of the glory and nobility of shedding blood for one’s country, generally in the context of personal frustration over Servia’s ongoing plight. Act I, Scene I contains but the first of many such instances. Therein, Brutus seeks to rouse his countrymen to overcome their fears by declaring,

‘Tis not a conquest, merely, leads to fame.

The attempt enobles. Yes, the suffering patriot

Towers while he bleeds and triumphs while he dies.

In his estimation, is seems, shedding blood in the act of rescuing a suffering people renders a person something more than merely human, even if the act itself fails. Indeed, failure – in the form of death – appears to Brutus an even surer claim to victory – or fame, or ennoblement – than success. In this, Brutus – and through him, Warren – appears to reveal something about the Patriot understanding of the relationship between morality and action. Brutus is willing to fight and to suffer – to bleed – whether or not he achieves his stated goal. What matters to him, therefore, more than the goal itself would seem to be the conviction behind it – the reason for the attempt rather than the outcome of the attempt. In the mind of Brutus and his contemporaries, then, to act rightly is to act with conviction, with blood as the most personal – most vital – symbol thereof. 

This conviction would seem to be confirmed by a later affirmation uttered by Brutus’ in Act II, Scene III. “That man dies well who sheds his blood for freedom,” he declares, roused to anger following the massacre of his fellow citizens at the hands of Bagshot’s soldiers. Again, the outcome appears less celebrated than the motivation that seeks it. Brutus does not declare to his fellow citizens that the man who “shed his blood for freedom” lives well, or that, having won freedom, the misery endured in the process will have been justified. “That man dies well,” he says, rather seeming to admit that an uncertain outcome should not deter one from acting, and suffering, in pursuit of said outcome. Fellow Patriot Junius voices his agreement with Brutus later in the same scene when he states that, “He, who bleeds in freedom’s cause, expires illustrious.” The cause, it seemed, matters more than its fulfilment to Warren’s benighted Servians, and blood – one’s own blood – is evidently the symbol they most closely associate with personal fealty to the same. Thus, The Adulterer finds Brutus in Act V, Scene I, alone, dejected, professing to his beloved Servia, “I’ve waked and wept and would have fought for thee, / And emptied every vein, when threatened ruin.” Though he does not speak the words, the implication of death – of willing suicide in defence of the motherland – is clear enough in this vow. Even when the loss of life in not in the offing, however, blood serves the same symbolic purpose – i.e. a sign of one’s dedication and loyalty. 

Act V, Scene III – the finale of The Adulterer – shows the young and optimistic Servian Marcus very much in this mode. Stirred by the selfless words of his countryman Brutus, Marcus declares that, “In such a cause, pleased could I bare my bosom, / And pour my choicest blood [.]” While one may debate the precise meaning of the phrase “choicest blood,” the willingness to suffer death declared by characters like Brutus and Junius is notably absent. Marcus, it seems, is entirely willing to bleed for his country, but not so willing to die. Perhaps this is meant to symbolize his optimism – willing to suffer for the land of his birth, he yet envisions a time when Servia and its inhabitants will not be subject to the will of a self-aggrandizing tyrant. Granted, death is not completely absent from the thoughts of young Marcus. When Brutus advises him that wealth and power could yet be his upon an embrace of Rapatio and his coterie of sycophants, Marcus scorns the very idea. “Better live a poor man [,]” he affirms, “And die so too [.]” And yet, a willingness to die in poverty and obscurity for having rejected temptation is a thing apart from embracing death in the cause of freeing one’s country. 

While his countrymen seem resigned to fight for the sake of fighting – to shed blood for a cause they know to be just without necessarily believing they will meet with success – Marcus joins his readiness to suffer bodily loss with an evident conviction that the years to come may hold some hope. Asserting to Brutus his aforementioned belief that dying unknown and honest is better than living celebrated and corrupt, Marcus accordingly declares that, “Though hate and malice / May shoot their shafts against me, better thus / To make my exit, while the soul with comfort / Reviews the past and smiles upon the future.” Granting once again that the difference between fading into obscurity and expiring illustriously for the cause of freedom is rather vast, it is nonetheless remarkable that Marcus seems capable of envisioning the future at all, let alone one that he might smile upon. His fellow Servians rarely appear capable of seeing past the end of their own machismo – a noble death is the most they are capable of imagining for themselves, and the bloodier the better. And yet, despite his optimism – perhaps Warren’s attempt to add a glimmer of hope to the proceedings – Marcus draws the same symbolic connection between personal conviction and personal suffering. He, too, would willingly shed blood for his country, as it seems would every one of Warren’s Servians who think themselves a Patriot.

As discussed above, however, blood did not only symbolize willing personal sacrifice within the text of The Adulterer. Indeed, it quite often seemed to represent something altogether unwilling and unwelcome – i.e. the loss and destruction of innocent life. In this mode, blood stands in for needless slaughter, the brutal impulses that cause it, and the injustice that attends. Consider, to that end, a passage from Act II, Scene I. Having witnessed the death of an innocent Servian youth at the hands of one of Rapatio’s supporters – a reference to the killing of one Christopher Seider (1758-1770) by a Boston Customs House official named Ebenezer Richardson – Cassius recounts the scene to an anguished Brutus, concluding that, “One youth, unhappy victim fell – he lies / Reeking in gore, and bites the hated ground.” As a stand-in for blood, the word “gore” is here used to indicate needless suffering rather than voluntary sacrifice. The youth in question was not a willing casualty – he did not offer his blood in service of a particular cause – but rather an “unhappy victim” whose sacrifice was inflicted from without. Thus, whereas the image of blood often seemed to connote fealty and integrity in the context of the struggle between Patriots like Brutus and Cassius and their oppressor Rapatio, at other times it seemed to represent the damage daily done to the people of Servia by unopposed tyranny. The response offered by Brutus to the cited passage would seem to confirm this characterization. “Oppression strews / Her earliest paths with blood [,]” he exclaims, “Gods! are we men? / And stand we still and bear it? Where’s our sense?” Far from symbolizing personal conviction, here blood appears to signify both the barbarism of Rapatio and his cohorts and the failure of men like Brutus himself to offer resistance.

Subsequent instances arguably sharpened the rhetorical distinction between Warren’s uses of blood as symbol of personal covenant and blood as marker of oppression and failure. Act II, Scene III, for instance, finds Brutus lamenting the willingness of men to draw the blood of their neighbors at only the slightest urging. Though unnamed, he points clearly enough to Rapatio as the cause of such behavior in suffering Servia. “Deaf to the call of nature pleading in him,” he declares, the villain,

Imbrues his hands in blood – ten thousand join him.

The soldier heated by the cursed example,

His poniard whets,

And swear to fill these streets with blood and slaughter.

In this instance, the blood being shed is connected to a specific individual or group – i.e. the Governor who imbrues (or stains) his hands with it or the soldiers who whet (or sharpen) their poniards (or daggers) to draw it. It is not, however, their own blood that these people seek to extract. While Patriots like Brutus, Cassius, and Marcus speak of emptying their veins and bleeding for their country, here the vital fluid is being drained as a consequence of the actions or moods of a separate party. This can be particularly inferred from context – as part of a reflection upon the thoughtlessness of man, the invocation of blood and slaughter by Brutus thus takes on an aspect of waste and pointlessness. Rapatio’s hands are stained with the blood of his subjects, not because they volunteered to suffer for their country but because he sought to impress his will upon them. The soldiers follow suit out of heated temper, visiting their rage upon a people who neither asked for nor deserved it.

            The difference between bleeding nobly and bleeding piteously, it seemed, was essentially a matter of choice. Those who elect to bleed – Brutus, Cassius, and their Servian compatriots – wear their blood with pride. To them – and evidently to Warren – it symbolized the willingness of the individual to bear up under the threat of death in pursuit of something sacred. Those whose hemorrhaging was forced upon them, however, gained no such exaltation by being so drained. Far from towering while they bled, these innocents reeked with the gore that was drawn from their bodies. Their suffering was not heroic, but rather synonymous with carnage – even cannibalism. Act II, Scene IV expressed the latter, wherein Brutus describes the wounds of his slain countrymen as speaking to, “The sport of every ruffian, / Who plays with death and thirsts for freemen’s blood.” So too did a passage in Act III, Scene I, which saw Cassius pronounce these same murdered Servians the, “Unhappy victims to inhuman ruffians; / Who wish to drink this country’s richest blood, / And crush expiring freedom [.]” Within the context of The Adulterer, it would appear that blood unwillingly extracted was tantamount to the most wretched crimes imaginable. And this appeared to be true whether it adorned the streets upon which those innocents formerly resided, or marked the person of the parties responsible. Thus did Junius express his outrage at the slaughter of his countrymen in Act II, Scene III by stating that, “The inhuman soldiers stamp the hostile ground, / His garments stained with blood, / The streets of Servia sweat with human gore.”      

            Even the villains of Warren’s The Adulterer conform to this symbolic association, and in so doing give it strength. Rather than characterize their efforts to maintain control over Servia, and the suffering inflicted as a result, as unfortunate and unintended, Rapatio and his minions speak quite frankly of – indeed, seem to revel in – the unwilling blood they have drawn. Thus, in asking his supporters to falsely affirm that they have been the victims of a foul conspiracy, the Governor of Servia demands they swear, “That long before that night, / In which we snuffed the blood of innocence, / The factious citizens, urged on by hell, / Had leagued together to attack the solider [.]” As depicted by Warren, Rapatio makes no effort to equivocate, obscure, or minimise what he and his clique have done – rather, he makes their crime viler yet by admitting it so freely. And while the phrase “the blood of innocence” is not spoken with anything like the reverence attributed to it by Brutus and his compatriots, the connotation for the audience remains the same. Indeed, it is reinforced.

Consider, in that vein, a passage from Act IV, Scene III. In the midst of an extended monologue, Hazelrod attempts to explain the regard he feels for his master Rapatio by declaring of him,

            When the ties of virtue and thy country,

            Unhappy checked thy lust for power – like Caesar,

            You nobly scorned them all and on the ruins,

            Of bleeding freedom, founded all thy greatness.

Not only were Warren’s villains characterized by their opponents as thirsting for blood – as might an animal who responds to the urgings of its nature – but they themselves believed that the suffering they inflicted formed a key part of their own prestige. Act V, Scene II saw Hazelrod again draw this connection, this time in the form of a reassurance to an imprisoned ally. Addressing the jailed E___r – a stand-in for the aforementioned Ebenezer Richardson – the Lord Chief Justice promises him that,

            You therefore

            Shall one day leave this dismal tenement,

            Again with pleasing scenes of blood and carnage,

            To glut our vengeance – yes – by heaven we swear [.]

Laying aside the implications of the cartoonishly evil persona Warren attributed to the character of Hazelrod – a matter for another time, rest assured – his symbolic usage of words like “blood,” “bleeding,” and “carnage” is very much in keeping with the motif established by more virtuous characters like Brutus and Cassius. Whether celebrated or mourned, therefore, blood that is unwillingly drawn within the context of Warren’s The Adulterer possesses the connotation of some of the vilest crimes imaginable. By lamenting the very thought of it, Patriots like Brutus, Junius, and Marcus affirm their status as men of compassion, integrity, and honor. And by revelling in the promise of it, Rapatio and his minions make known the extent of their depravity, cruelty, and viciousness.  

The Adulterer, Part V: Bardolatry, contd.

The aspect of The Adulterer evidently drawn from Hamlet, meanwhile, is not a character – or even a piece of dialogue famously uttered by a character – but rather a general scenario. In Act I, Scene IV of the latter, the titular Prince of Denmark encounters what appears to be the ghost of his departed father upon the ramparts of the royal castle, Elsinore. Uncertain at first, Hamlet eventually follows the ghost to a private conference, at which point he is informed of his father’s murder at the hands of his brother and successor Claudius. Hamlet is shocked to hear it, struck by the ghost’s plea to be revenged, and resolves to

Wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.

Among the most famous scenes in the play, Hamlet’s encounter with this paternal apparition sets in motion nearly everything that follows – from the accidental death of foolish Polonius, to the suicide of maddened Ophelia, to the final bloodbath that claims Hamlet himself. And yet, the unmitigated catastrophe that the appearance of the ghost ultimately portends begs certain questions as to the significance of its claims. 

The spirit appeared to speak the truth. By all indications, Claudius did kill his brother the king. And in point of fact, he did marry the slain monarch’s wife Gertrude, and did seize the vacated crown in place of his grieving nephew. Hamlet’s desire to seek revenge, therefore, was seemingly founded upon wholly justifiable outrage. That being said, the result was surely far from what either he or his murdered father desired. By the time the curtain closes upon the final scene of Hamlet, nearly every principle character is dead. Some are killed mistakenly, others driven to take their own lives, and the rest slain either because they were the targets of Hamlet’s single-minded desire for revenge or collateral victims of the same. However valid the ghost’s complaints, therefore, and however earnest Hamlet’s intention, the result could hardly be described as a restoration of the former status quo. In consequence, it seems fair to question the nature of that first spectral meeting. Was that truly the ghost of Hamlet’s father, or some sinister spirit that had merely assumed his form? And yet more intriguing, was it the ghost’s intention to lead Hamlet down the path of ruin, or was the destruction that followed wholly the result of the Danish Prince’s foolishness, singlemindedness, or general lack of prudence? Shakespeare offers no simple answer, though his consistent practice of probing the depths of the human spirit – and the flaws he perceived therein – may perhaps be taken as a signal of his intention.

Warren’s The Adulterer, while once again failing to attain – or perhaps even attempt – the summit of Shakespeare’s verse, his talent for characterization, or his dazzling imagery, nevertheless seemed to borrow from Hamlet the basic outline of the scene cited above. In Act II, Scene I of the former, Patriots Cassius and Brutus express to each other their mutual sorrow upon being informed of the death of an innocent Servian youth by a supporter of Rapatio. In response to Brutus claiming that he would gladly die, “Could but my life atone and save my country [,]” Cassius urges him to, “Live to rescue virtue [,]” by relating to him a spectral encounter of the previous night. His father’s ghost, it seemed, had visited him, and made such demands as a departed father was wont to do. “Cassius attend [,]” the apparition began,

Where is that noble spirit,

I once instilled – behold this fair possession

I struggled hard to purchase, fought and bled

To leave it yours unsullied – Oh defend it,

Nor lose it but in death.

Understandably startled by the vision, Cassius relates that he then swore to defend that which had been left to his care, “And e’er I’ll lose it, meet ten thousand deaths.” Granted, there is much that separates this mere recollection of an ethereal visitation from the far more visceral sight of Hamlet listening attentively to the hellish lament of his father’s ghost. Cassius, for one, is not the principle character in The Adulterer. The narrative does not pivot upon his actions or intentions, and nor does the scene described by him to Brutus function as much more than a particularly colorful exhortation. It doesn’t set in motion the undoing of the principle character or his cause, and it isn’t freighted with the same ambiguity as is Hamlet’s visitation with his spectral progenitor. It is, therefore and undeniably, a less significant scene.

That being said, it is hardly insignificant. The base circumstances, for instance, are generally quite similar. In both cases, the ghost of a father visit his son, bewails the state into which the world has fallen, and requests his progeny to make things right. In fairness, the outward nature of these requests would seem to vary considerably. The forebear of Cassius seems most concerned by the extent to which his native Servia – for which he “fought and bled” – has suffered since his death. Defend it, he commands his son, as might a father who seeks to protect in death what he had earned in life. Hamlet’s father, meanwhile, chiefly addresses himself to distinctly personal matters. What seems to trouble him, more than the depth to which Denmark might sink under the leadership of the usurper-king Claudius, is the fact that he was killed before he could account for the sins he had committed in life, and that his brother – “A wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine” – has taken his place in the marriage bed of Queen Gertrude. “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest [,]” he admonishes his son, lest his priorities be at all mistaken. In spite of the general exhortation delivered to Cassius and the specific grievances names to Hamlet, however, the connection between their respective spectral visitations is perhaps more than merely circumstantial.

Besides murder, over which the old king has every reason to be perturbed, the principle crimes that Hamlet’s father hurls at his brother Claudius have to do with the supposedly “unnatural” quality of the new king’s marriage to the aforementioned Gertrude. “Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,” the ghost declares of his brother, whom he further claims, “Won to his shameful lust / The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.” Again, it seems his anger is aroused more by the thought that his wife has been somehow soiled than that his throne has been usurped. Consider, however, the nature of the thing. Claudius captured his brother’s crown and his brother’s wife with a single act of fratricide – he married Gertrude, and thus took her slain husband’s place as King of Denmark. Far from a simple marriage partner, then, Queen Gertrude may be seen to represent the kingdom itself, to which Hamlet’s father pledged himself and lesser Claudius cannot fail to spoil. Claudius is thus an adulterer in both the literal and figurative senses – his place upon the throne and in the bed of Gertrude is unnatural, unholy, and doomed to ruin. Now consider Warren’s antagonist, Rapatio. Has he not stolen what the father of Cassius worked so hard to defend, Servia itself? By his “marriage” to the land – as its governor – does he not diminish its virtue? Is he not, then, the titular adulterer? Though Warren does not make clear how it is that Rapatio became governor – through merit, favoritism, or trickery – her depiction of the man would seem to indicate that usurpation is not beneath his dignity. And while it is Brutus, rather than Cassius, that leads the charge against the continued perversion of Servian rights, other scenes make clear that Brutus feels the same sense of fealty to his forebears, though he was spared a direct confrontation with the same.

Observe, to that end, a speech delivered by Brutus in Act I, Scene I of the Adulterer. While reflecting, alongside Cassius, upon the plight of Servia at the hands of cruel Rapatio, Brutus declares,
 

I sprang from men who fought, who bled for freedom:

From men who in the conflict laughed at danger;

Struggled like patriots, and through seas of blood 

Waded to conquest. I’ll not disgrace them.

Shortly thereafter, upon the arrival of fellow citizens Junius and Portius, Brutus offers another meditation on the sense of obligation he feels to those that preceded him in defending the liberties that Rapatio presently threatens. “By all that’s sacred!” he cries,

            By out father’s shades!

            Illustrious shades! who hover over this country,

            And watch like guardian angels over its rights:

            By all that blood, that precious blood they spilt,

            To gain for us the happiest boon of Heaven;

            By life – by death – or still to catch you more,

            By Liberty, by Bondage. I conjure you.

Evidently, though he managed to avoid a direct visitation by the ghost of one of his predecessors, Brutus is nonetheless conscious of exactly those things that the spirit of Cassius’ father made known to his son, and feels exactly the sense of obligation that Cassius determined to swear. In consequence, though his place in the parallel scene is filled by Cassius, Brutus otherwise seems to embody the Hamlet archetype, as adapted to the context of The Adulterer. He feels driven by a sense of filial duty to avenge – or at least remedy – the abuses done to his patrimony by the figurative usurper Rapatio, he is not infrequently melancholy and anxious, and he seems given to indecision. The key difference between the two – indeed, the difference between Hamlet as a piece of art and The Adulterer as a piece of political commentary disguised as art – is rather the object of their quests and their respective relationships to it.

Whereas Hamlet seeks to avenge the death of his father and rid his mother of her adulterous lover, Brutus’ aim is somewhat more abstract. Though it may fairly be argued that his forebears represent his departed father and Servia his benighted mother, his desire to restore to its proper place the rights that he and his fellow citizens regard as their collective birthright is of a different quality than Hamlet’s determination to seek personal revenge. The Prince of Denmark is motivated by filial duty – his father has been killed, his mother despoiled – and he thus allows his emotions to guide him to often unfortunate ends. Brutus conversely expresses his intentions by way of an abiding love of country. He wishes to redeem his suffering homeland – his “mother” – from a sense of duty and devotion, and aims to redeem the sacrifices of his forebears – his collective “father” – by rescuing the thing that they sacrificed for from the clutches of a cruel and covetous autocrat. Brutus – like Hamlet – does not always see matters clearly. He seems to vacillate between seeking bloody revenge and pursuing a course of forbearance and rectitude. He talks at length, and acts but rarely. And when success seems within his grasp, he accepts it thoughtlessly, more eager to claim victory than verify it. Nevertheless, he avoids Hamlet’s greatest follies by moderating his passion. It is not, after all, a parent’s life or their virtue he seeks to redeem, but the life and virtue of his country. In this he is not alone, and it is perhaps this sense of solidarity that keeps Brutus from allowing his fleeting impulses to make a bad situation worse.     

Granting the extent to which The Adulterer deviates from Hamlet ­– in large part embodied by the differing circumstances and responses of their respective protagonists – it doubtless bears asking why Warren evidently believed that the allusion served her. Why, in short, did she appear to refer to elements of the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark in her theatrical representation of the plight of contemporary Massachusetts? What purpose could it – or indeed, references to Julius Caesar or Macbeth – have served? The most likely answer to these questions is perhaps also the most intuitive – i.e. because that is what authors do. Indeed, it is what artists do. In attempting to communicate with their audience – whether in the 16^th, 18^th, or 21^st centuries – a novelist, playwright, painter, or musician often freely references, adapts, or replicates some element of a pre-existing work. They do this to pay homage, to celebrate the art that they themselves enjoy, or to connect with their readers, listeners, and viewers in ways that take advantage of their experiences and expectations. Sometimes they seek to short-circuit an emotional or atmospheric trigger by way of a kind of shorthand. Replicating a scene from a well-known piece of literature within their own work, for example, may effectively harness the connotations of the former to the advantage of the latter. In other cases, artists may seek to manipulate audience expectations by using familiar elements to establish a sense of comfort and equilibrium that may then be shattered for the purpose of narrative or emotional payoff. References and allusions, in short, form part of the essential language of creative expression, along with things like color, tempo, intonation, or diction. To allude, therefore, is to seek to connect with an audience upon a common plain of experience.

Warren’s use of Shakespeare as a frequent reference point in The Adulterer certainly falls within this realm. Not only was she familiar with the works of the Bard of Avon, but she doubtless understood that her prospective audience was similarly conversant. Shakespeare, therefore, represented a type of shorthand between author and reader – a means by which the two might communicate more efficiently and effectively than otherwise. Indeed, Shakespeare likely represented the most common shorthand available among citizens of late 18^th century Massachusetts, save perhaps for the Bible. By giving her antagonist the name of Brutus, therefore, Warren could reliably depend upon her readers to make the connection to the tragic hero of Julius Caesar and calibrate their expectations accordingly. By putting words in the mouth of her villain Rapatio that resembled those famously uttered by the vile and scheming Lady Macbeth, she could hope to harness the feelings her audience likely nurtured about the latter towards more effectively characterizing the former. And by drawing similar associations between filial duty, adultery, and revenge as were depicted in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Warren could endeavor to conjure audience impressions of the Danish Prince and his motivations in service of establishing the disposition and intentions of her own protagonist. In this sense, strange as it may seem, Warren’s use of Shakespeare is perhaps the most relatable element of her first foray into political drama.

However important Joseph Addison’s Cato may have been to the Founding Generation, and to Warren in particular, in its sober celebration of personal integrity, it is not at present a widely renowned – or even widely known – piece of theatre. Productions of Cato are not mounted yearly in cities around the world, it has not been widely adapted to television or the cinema, and its characters and expressions have not become part of the common lexicon of everyday vernacular English. It has hardly been lost to time, of course, though neither has posterity seemed to celebrate it much. In consequence, though Cato’s influence upon the form and substance of Warren’s The Adulterer is both pronounced and highly significant, the average 21^st century reader will likely pay it little heed. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is as vital in 2017 as it was in 1773. Festivals that celebrate the Bard of Avon and his work are a regular feature of the cultural life of most countries in the English-speaking world, and countless expressions coined by Shakespeare – from “all’s well that ends well” to “wild good chase” – have since become a integral components of spoken and written English. Far beyond the national poet of England itself, William Shakespeare has become the national poet of an entire linguistic culture.

While this hardly represents any kind of revelation, it should serve to give pause to those interested individuals who struggle to connect with the events and personalities of the American Founding. Though it may be something of an oddity that the most accessible point of reference between an 18^th and 21^st century reader of The Adulterer appears to be a set of plays originally written and performed in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, it is nonetheless the truth. And in that truth, there is something infinitely precious. Mercy Otis Warren, as the above examination has hopefully shown, wrote for an audience that was – like herself – literate in the works of Shakespeare. Her references to Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet were not indulgent flights of artistic fancy, but techniques by which she sought to more effectively communicate with her readers. Though over two hundred years have passed since then, this is hardly an unrecognizable gesture. She was doing in 1773 what artists working in a variety of mediums have since attempted across the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries – i.e. adapting, alluding to, or directly referencing characters, scenes, or plotlines from the works of Shakespeare. And in the process – though certainly without intending to – she has made it possible for someone born nearly two centuries after Warren died in 1814 to in some way grasp both her own frame of reference as well as that of her audience. She liked Shakespeare. They liked Shakespeare. So do countless people living in the English-speaking world today. That commonality – that shared reference point – presents a tremendous potential entry point into a deeper and more vital understanding of The Adulterer, the American Founding, and the personalities that shaped each of them.

The Adulterer, Part IV: Bardolatry, contd.

   As to content, The Adulterer appears to borrow from or allude to a number of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, though to a lesser degree than in relation to form or style. That being said, the few allusions that may be positively identified remain significant in the manner by which they attempted to connect narrative or personal tropes common to the Shakespearean canon to the events and personalities of 1770s Massachusetts.

Take, for instance, Warren’s highly sympathetic portrayal of the character Brutus. This erstwhile Servian Patriot is in effect the protagonist of The Adulterer. The anguish he feels over the state of his country is made abundantly clear - indeed, the lament he shares with Cassius for benighted Servia is what opens the play, effectively setting the tone for what follows – and his motivations are never presented as anything less than sincere and genuine. That being said, the historical figure after whom he is named was possessed of a rather complicated legacy. Marcus Junius Brutus, as cited previously, was one of the chief conspirators in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar and a co-commander against Caesar’s angered allies at the Battle of Philippi (42 BC). While his former friend Marc Antony (83 BC-30 BC) was quick to defend the nobility he perceived in Brutus and saw to the respectful disposal of his remains, subsequent observers were far less kind. As the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire under the authority of the slain Caesar’s adopted son Gaius Octavius (63 BC-14 BC), Brutus became an object of scorn and vilification. Not only was he considered a traitor to Caesar himself – since deified by the Roman Senate – but to the whole of Roman civilization. Later chroniclers – with the exception of essayist Plutarch (46-120) – were similarly unkind. Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), author of one of the most famous literary depictions of the historical Brutus, even went so far as to portray him in his Divina Commedia, published in 1321, as doomed to languish in the ninth circle of Hell alongside fellow assassin Cassius and Judas Iscariot.

Anyone reasonably conversant in the history of the ancient Roman civilization – i.e. those citizens of Massachusetts who had received the standard 18^th century classical education – would have been aware of these characterizations of Brutus. At best he presented in most historical accounts as noble but credulous, and at worst he was portrayed as vile and disloyal. Why, then, would Warren have named her tragic hero after such a figure? What connotations did she hope to summon by granting her protagonist the name of one of history’s most famous assassins? The answer, as hinted at above, has everything to do with the works of William Shakespeare. The historical Brutus, as it happened, was the also principle character in his neoclassical tragedy Julius Caesar. Though cajoled – some might say manipulated – by Cassius into joining the conspiracy against his friend and mentor, Shakespeare’s Brutus is an exceedingly complex character who constantly grapples with dueling loyalties to the Roman state and to his former benefactor. Once the deed is done, Brutus proceeds to be haunted by Caesar’s ghost; his attempt to save Rome from the tyranny of a demagogue is turned against him by the wily Marc Antony; he becomes an enemy of the state; he loses what few of his allies remain. In spite of what he believed to be the noblest of intentions, it appears as though his actions have doomed himself and his countrymen in equal measure. And yet, at the moment of his suicide, Brutus seems to take some degree of solace in the outcome he has witnessed. “I shall have glory by this losing day,” he avows, “More than Octavius and Mark Antony / By this vile conquest shall attain unto.”

This is the version of Brutus to which Warren’s protagonist most clearly hews. Neither traitor nor dupe, the protagonist of The Adulterer is a man of integrity and conviction who nonetheless grapples with the conflicting impulses of his conscience. At times he feels in his heart a powerful need for retribution upon those who have wronged him, though he resists its urgings in favor of patience, resolution, and a respect for the rule of law. At times he feels compelled to act, to defend Servia from its enemies, by a deep and abiding sense of patriotism, yet he rarely seems to know precisely what it is he ought to do. And upon finally taking action and being met with an outcome that has all the outward appearances of victory, he too easily fails to question the depth of what he and his allies have achieved. This abiding complexity, tendency towards internal conflict, and unquestionably noble intentions are eminently Shakespearean in their basic dimensions. As with the Bard’s tragic hero, Warren’s Brutus is a creature of emotion whose honor and integrity are rooted in the love he feels for his country. His failings are plain enough, but they never detract from the quality of his character or the purity of his intentions. Thus, as with the protagonist of Julius Caesar, the heroic lead in Warren’s The Adulterer is cast as an object of compassion, admiration, pity, and regret.

Clearly, knowledge of the historical Brutus alone would not have prepared audiences in Massachusetts to identify with or feel sympathy towards his Servian namesake. Doubtless many of them were aware of the former’s role in the history of ancient Rome, perhaps even to the point of identifying him as potential symbol of anti-monarchical or pro-republican sentiment. That being said, a people familiar with Shakespeare – which, as discussed, Warren’s intended audience almost certainly was – would doubtless feel a far greater affinity for the character that Shakespeare so skillfully rendered. The Brutus of history was more an icon than a man – emblematic of treachery, conspiracy, lost causes, or noble failures. There was little warmth in the many retellings of his deeds, and little attempt to attribute moral complexity to the decisions he made. Shakespeare’s Brutus was comparatively vital and human, and Julius Caesar a far more affecting chronicle of his last days than even Plutarch’s relatively generous biography. Desirous of eliciting a particular response from her audience – outrage, grief, reflection, etc. – Warren was therefore well-disposed to settle upon Brutus as the name and the inspiration for her brooding hero. Though history had ascribed to the designation all manner of symbolic importance, Shakespeare alone had made it fit for a man who struggles against the forces of history, human weakness, and his own impulses in search of a brighter day for the country he loves.      

In addition to this particularly weighty allusion to one of the great tragic figures of the Shakespearean canon, The Adulterer also contains what appear to be references to famous scenes from both Macbeth and Hamlet. As to the former, two scenes (Act I, Scene II and Act III, Scene IV) offer snatches of dialogue from Rapatio that bear a strong thematic resemblance to Lady Macbeth’s famous “Unsex Me Here” monologue from Act I, Scene V. By way of a refresher, said oration is delivered by the wife of the title character in the form of a sinister plea, by which she hopes to summon the ability to carry out whatever means are necessary to see her husband’s visions of royal succession come to pass. Even by the standards of the Bard of Avon – which are obviously quite high – it is a tremendously effective and visceral piece of writing, full of bodily imagery and hellish allusions. “Come, you spirits [,]” the lady first invokes,

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,

And take my milk for gall, your murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry, "Hold, hold!"

From within this passage, several things ought to be marked out for later comparison. First, the manner in which the character addresses herself to a vague group of “spirits,” combined with the ill deeds she seems intent on carrying out, leave a definite impression that Lady Macbeth is not seeking solace by communing with the angels. Rather, it appears that she seeks to invoke the embodied darkness to which the Christian God stands fundamentally opposed. Also worth noting is the exact nature of her plea. She does not ask for something to be done in her behalf – for an old man to die, some accident befall him, etc. Rather, she asks that her own sense of mercy and compassion be stripped away so that she can achieve the desired ends herself. Thus, by asking that some part of herself be extracted or destroyed so that she can serve a larger purpose, Lady Macbeth engages in what is essentially a very twisted act of self-abnegation. 

While Warren does not quite reach this pinnacle of lyric expression in the cited passages of The Adulterer, the general circumstances thereof are notably similar. Act I, Scene II sees Rapatio alone in his home, musing upon the ills that the Patriot cause has visited upon him and girding himself to seek revenge. Working up from bitterness to passionate hatred, the Governor of Servia soon enough resolves that,

            If there is any secret sympathy,

            Which born and bred together, they may claim,

            I give it to the winds -- out! out! vile passion,

            I’ll trample down the choicest of their rights

            And make them curse the hour that gave me birth;

            That hung me up a meteor in the sky,

            Which from its tail shook pestilence and death

Note in these verses Rapatio’s desire to be rid of that part of himself which he finds burdensome to his desired purpose. He seeks revenge for the humiliation that the Patriots have visited upon him – a reference to the real-life Governor Hutchinson’s encounters with mob violence in August, 1765 – and willingly casts “to the winds” whatever sympathy he may be made to feel for having been born and raised in the same country as his hated enemies. Look, too, at the comparison he makes between himself and a meteor, whose tail bring forth “pestilence and death.”  While it may be something of a stretch, a comparison to a passage from the Bible’s book of Revelations appears to speak to Rapatio’s infernal intention. Said passage, from chapter eight, verses ten and eleven, reads, “There fell from heaven a great star burning as a torch, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and many men died of the waters [.]” Reading a falling star as a meteor and the poison wrought by Wormwood as “pestilence and death,” it would seem that Rapatio – and thus, Warren – sought to characterize his birth as equivalent to the Biblical apocalypse.

The relevant dialogue from Act III, Scene IV, while somewhat less emphatic, nonetheless seems to spring from the same core sentiment. Referring to the Patriots, whose efforts at seeking recompense for their suffering has reached the peak of its success, as “Mistaken wretches [,]” Rapatio next declares, “Come cunning be my guide, / Beleagued with hell -- Come all those hateful passions / That rouse the mind to action [.]” While in this instance the Governor of Servia seems intent on summoning the will to visit cruelty upon his countrymen, rather than dispelling whatever virtues might prevent him from doing the same, the net result is essentially unchanged from Act I, Scene II – Rapatio seeks to act against his subjects without remorse, seems to doubt his ability to do so, and attempts to summon the will. Lady Macbeth’s plea – though expressed with greater art – is very much on this same order. As she sought to shut out her sense of remorse, so Rapatio flung his feelings of fellowship to the heedless gale. As she asked to be filled, “From the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty [,]” he bid welcome to, “All those hateful passions / That rouse the mind to action [.]” And as her invocation of nameless spirits and “Murdering Ministers,” and her plea for the cover of, “The dunnest smoke of hell [,]” evoked a decidedly demonic quality, the parallel he seemed to draw between his arrival on earth and its final ending lent a unequivocal, all-consuming darkness to the subject at hand.

Thus – with admirable subtly, if not admirable skill – Warren appeared to invoke one of the most notorious aspects of one of the notorious characters in the contemporary canon of Western literature. Rapatio did not repeat the lines first penned by Shakespeare for Lady Macbeth – which are likely too gendered to be successfully grafted onto a male character – but rather expressed the same basic sentiment in the same basic context. Lady Macbeth sought to deny the primacy of her kindness, mercy, and compassion – qualities doubtless thought to be womanly, hence the need to be “unsexed” – in order to act in a decisive manner upon the vision of her husband attaining the throne of Scotland. Duncan, King of Scotland and object of her murderous intent, was her countryman – nay, her sovereign lord – to whom she ostensibly owed love, fellowship, and fealty. Her intention to destroy him, therefore, and her consequent willingness to let the utmost darkness take possession of her body and her soul, is a truly monstrous thing. That her outsized ambition is the essence of sinfulness is made clear by her ultimate fate – driven mad by guilt, she ends her own life. Rapatio, meanwhile, endeavored to banish the sympathy he might have felt for his fellow Servians and call to himself the darkest impulses possible in order to quash the latent insurrection of the so-called “Patriots” and preserve his office thereby. As Governor of Servia, he has been bestowed a sacred trust – the fate of his countrymen is his to determine, and their rights his to protect or to deny. His declared intention to trample upon that which his fellow Servians hold dear, and his willingness to associate his existence with death and destruction, is thus cause for horror and revulsion. Granted, the audience is not shown what fate yet awaits cruel Rapatio – he goes unpunished as of the final scene. A familiarity with Shakespeare, of course, and with one of his most enduring characters in particular, would surely have furnished an answer. Only one manner of outcome could lie ahead for a character so self-consciously vile.