One of the intellectual constructs that commentators turn to again and again in their assessments of Peter Shaffer's Equus is the Nietzschean distinction between Dionysian impulse and Apollonian order. Dennis Klein, for example, notes that the play portrays, among other things, "the classical struggle between Apollo, the Greek god of healing and medicine, of morality and ethics, and Dionysus, the god of fertility for whom the worship was ecstatic and orgiastic..." (123-24). Likewise, Ebner argues that "the play makes a striking comment upon society by viewing these longings of soul and body, of worship and sexuality, in opposition to corporation, parent, profession, and conventional religion which conspire subtly to thwart all mystery and ecstasy in modern life. It is Dionysus and Apollo all over again..." (29).[1] The play itself contains only one oblique reference to suggest this "debate"-Dysart's claim that, while Alan Strang has actually lived his mythic beliefs, Dysart himself can merely "touch [his] reproduction statue of Dionysus for luck" and then go off to work (83)--a subtle clue perhaps to Dysart's own Nietzschean leanings. That Dysart should regard the difference between himself and Alan in this way is not in the least surprising. After all, the play is concerned not only with Alan Strang's madness but also with Dysart's deep discontents, notably Ills longings to escape from the normal", to experience the kind of transcendence that Alan has known, to live his own passion for ancient Greece. Alan's bizarre behavior, his rituals and his crime, simply allow Dysart to realize by comparison his own unsatisfied desires and to articulate the reasons for his unhappiness. As Beckerman has suggested, Dysart's probing into Alan's psyche "only solidifies the way he [Dysart] thinks. His monologues celebrate... his own negativity" (Beckerman 208).
What is surprising, however, is the degree to which commentators have taken Dysart's allusion at face value and the extent to which the larger religious context of the play has been ignored. Far too much critical attention has been paid to Dysart's interpretation of events and not enough to the facts that lie before him (and us). Indeed, Dysart's preoccupations with self also serve to blind him to the exact nature of Alan's ritualistic worship and the reason for the atrocity the young man ultimately commits. The fact is that only a small part of Alan's worship can be characterized as "Dionysian" (orgiastic and ecstatic). Instead, the vast majority of Alan's "myth" is based upon Judeo-Christian theology and rite. For Alan, the horse-god Equus starts out as a Christ figure rather than a Dionysian one, more sacrificial than ecstatic and sexual.[2] His services to this "god" take the form first of direct physical emulation of the sacrificial victim's sufferings and later of a more elaborate ceremony in which he himself takes on something of a divine role. Then, in an abrupt shift, caused by the conflict between his devotion to his religious myth and what he regards as the temptation to sin, Alan comes to view Equus as another species of the divine--the 'jealous God" of the Old Testament who watches and judges the actions of his people. Excessively preoccupied with Greek religious models, Dysart ignores this JudeoChristian element almost entirely (as have many of the play's critics, by and large), and the view of Alan's disorder with which he provides his auditors is thus distorted, refracted as it passes through the prism of Dysart's peculiar consciousness. If, on the other hand, we take from Dysart's mouth the facts of Alan's life and then interpret them independently, we see a character who, except in a very limited sense, is far from Dionysian in both outlook and ritual practice.
Much of what Dysart comes to learn about Alan Strang derives from the youth's parents, who continually protest that they are not at fault for what has happened to Alan. "We gave him the best love we could," Dora Strang passionately asserts at one point. "If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing-because that's him; not just all of our things added up" (78). Dysart tends to agree with her, saying in one of his monologues that the reason a person succumbs to mental illness is ultimately a mystery. And yet he also claims that the ability to understand compulsive behavior lies within his power, and so he probes into Alan's past, discovering much that is related to Alan's bizarre equestrian myth, though remaining reticent for much of the play about the precise nature of those discoveries.
The first notable link in the chain of obsession is Alan's equation of Christ and the horse.[3] Hearing from Dora Strang about the picture of a horse that hung in Alan's room--a picture taken at an unusual angle, "absolutely head on," "all eyes" (45)--Dysart also learns that the picture, a gift from Alan's father, replaced the religious illustration which Alan himself had hung there and which Mr. Strang had torn from the wall in a fit of anger. The former picture, Dora goes on, was quite extreme: "The Christ was loaded down with chains, and the centurions were really laying on the stripes" (45). When Frank Strang subsequently visits Dysart, he provides more information about Alan's use of the picture. Kneeling before the horse in the photograph--the image that replaced that of Christ's crucifixion--Alan ritually recites the genealogy of his "god" ("Flankus begat Spankus..."), culminating in the familiar words of one of the god's predecessors, "Behold, I give you, my only begotten son!" He then places into his mouth a piece of string in the shape of a noose and beats himself with a wooden hanger (51). "Religion," Frank Strang says in disgust over what he, a socialist, sees as the main problem in modern society, "Religion's at the bottom of all this!" (51).
In some ways, Frank Strang is even more perceptive than the psychiatrist himself. Religion/s at the bottom of Alan's disturbance-the only religion that Alan knows, his mother's Christianity, which competes in his mind with his father's equally influential atheism. The maternal influence surfaces in the young man's descriptions of his own aberrant religious practices. In his account, Alan conflates material from a variety of recognizable sources--the delightful stories about horses that his mother once told him, the Bible, his loathing of the job he held in an appliance shop, and others--but the main portion of Alan's delusion, his belief in his god's suffering and triumph, are decidedly biblical, specifically Christian. Like Christ, Equus is in chains "for the sins of the world" (66). (Like Christ, too, Equuswas born in a stable [67]; and not incidentally, of the four evangelists in the New Testament, only Matthew and Luke include both nativity stories and genealogies of Jesus, both of which Alan uses in his "myth" of Equus.) Just prior to Alan's night rides, he says that he gave the horse a lump of sugar, which he called "His Last Supper" (71) and which contained Alan's sins (72). And, in yet another familiar leading reference, Alan says of Equus, "Into my hands he commends himself..." (72).
The allusions to Christ's birth and crucifixion are unmistakable here, but what are we to make of them? Put another way, how do these allusions help us to define Alan's attitude toward his "god" Equusand his relationship with him? The answer is, to say the least, complex. Taken together with what we learn of Alan's obsessive ritualistic activities before the picture in his room, the allusions reveal a tangled web of ill-formed associations and eccentric interpretations which Alan has spun to help him make sense of the world generally and his own conflicting feelings toward his parents specifically. While his parents cannot be said to have caused Alan's illness, their influence, particularly their sharp disagreements over matters of religion, is seen in each of the three manifestations of that illness.
Alan's secret rituals in his room, involving as they did his echoing the words of God at Christ's baptism ("Behold, I give you... my only begotten Son") and the subsequent self-flagellation, suggest that Alan regards himself as more than a mere disciple to his God. Rather, he himself becomes the Christ figure in this participatory mythic scheme as he reinterprets and plays out Christ's passion, replete with actual corporeal punishment. In his own mind, he becomes the protagonist in the sacrifice, incorporating into his act the sufferings of Christ as depicted in the brutal image that once hung on the wall and the image of the horse that now hangs there. Like Christ, presumably, Alan willingly undergoes this physical torment to atone for sins, but whose sins are they?
The most likely answer might be inferred from something he tells Dysart later on in the narrative. In his night rides on the horse, Alan asserts, he would feed a lump of sugar, which contained "my sins" (72), suggesting that the sufferings he endured earlier in his life were also meant to atone. Given the religious nature of those self-inflicted punishments and the image before which he carries them out, the sins are clearly linked to his parents' attitudes toward him. He regards himself as responsible for the rift between his parents, and his self-induced pain is the means to heal that conflict, at least in his own mind. As such, the two pictures, the horse and the suffering Christ, become one, united not only as mythic intellectual constructs but also through Alan's act, which symbolically represents Alan's attempt to reunite his parents. To his mind, the image of the Christ represents his mother's religion and the horse his father's atheism, and his body, begotten by both of them, thus becomes the place where these opposites meet. Hence, Dora and Frank Strang's "only begotten son" takes upon himself the "sins" of the household and, by his suffering, attempts to restore harmony.
Alan's mythic rituals undergo radical change, however, after he is employed at a stable, where he has the chance to be around real horses. If we attend carefully to what Alan does in his night rides with Nugget (Equus) and to what he says about the rides, we see a shift in both self-perception and in his attitude toward religion. Not Alan, but Equus, the incarnated god, takes upon himself the burden of Alan's sin, transmitted through the lump of sugar, his "Last Supper" (72). Moreover, when Alan declares, "Into my hands he commends himself" (72), he suggests further that he no longer regards himself as the sacrificial victim but as something akin to God, into whose hands Jesus commends his spirit in the gospels. And the fact that Alan's new ritual is, in large measure, sexual shows the merging of urges, worship, and desire.
Alan seems then to violate the principles of both parents: his deliberate flirting with blasphemy suggests a rejection of his mother's Christian principles, while his perverse sexuality is sure to disappoint his seemingly straight-laced father. If, as Frank Strang indicates, religion is "just bad sex" (34), and, as his mother might argue, "sex makes for bad religion," then Alan's violation of their principles suggests a movement away from symbolic reconciliation of his parents and toward something like the Dionysian ecstatic union that Dysart sees operating in Alan's mythic gestures. By the same token, however, we must recognize the fact that Alan has not abandoned Christian principles for pagan ones in his later rituals. Instead, Christian elements are powerfully represented there, and they will eventually give way to the third and final aspect of his perceived relationship with the divine. Before taking up that most important stage in the development of Alan's myth, one needs to consider Dysart's perceptions of what he has learned.
Despite the fact that Dysart claims to be able to understand and treat Alan's compulsive behavior, he remains curiously silent about the principal source of Alan's bizarre form of worship. Only once does he refer to Jesus--when he asks Alan whether Equus in chains is "like Jesus" (66)--but, in his frequent addresses to the audience, he never elaborates upon or interprets this important element. Why? One possibility is that he considers that nexus too obvious to belabor. Another, and the more likely one, is that he is simply not interested in that aspect of Alan's myth and ritual and thus ignores it, preferring to dwell upon the Dionysiac elements-the ecstatic rides, the communion with the divine, the sexuality-elements that he finds desirable and lacking in his own life. One speech in particular brings together all of these discontents:
"I tell everyone Margaret's the puritan. I'm the pagan. Some pagan! Such wild returns I make to the womb of civilization. Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for by vouchers, cautious jaunts in hired Fiats, suitcases crammed with KaoPectate! Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive. And I use that word endlessly: 'primitive'. 'Oh the primitive world,' I say. 'What instinctual truths were lost with it!' And while I sit there baiting a poor unimaginative woman with the word, that freaky boy tries to conjure the reality! I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos--and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field! ... I watch that woman knitting, night after night--a woman I haven't kissed in six years--and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his God's hairy cheek!" (82-83)
Several critics have commented sympathetically upon Dysart's discontents. Vandenbroucke, for instance, notes that Dysart is searching for meaning in life, "some basic congruence between his aspirations for intelligibility and the essential constitution of reality" (Vandenbroucke 132). Plunka argues that "almost all of Shaffer's plays present a dialectic between a threatened, often isolated, individual trapped in a world of roles and codified behavior and his alter ego, an independent person who is not controlled by the desires of others... primitives who create their own microcosm and answer to no one but themselves." Characters like Alan, according to Plunka, "teach Shaffer's misguided protagonists that they are living in a phony, artificial world (28).[4] To be sure, Dysart is a character with whom we sympathize, a troubled man who doubts the benefit of his work and the integrity of his life. And yet that sympathy does not necessitate our agreement with his assessment of Alan. Because of his own discontents, Dysart chooses to focus on what he sees as the most attractive aspects of Alan's behavior: the primitive and Dionysiac elements in Alan's worship; the limited vision that diminishes the torment that Alan ultimately endures; the tortured evolution of his religious observances.
The tension between these Dionysian and Christian influences is best given Nietzsche, for whom Christianity is directly opposed to Dionysian impulse:
From the very first, Christianity spelled life loathing itself, and that loathing was simply disguised, tricked out, with notions of an "other" and "better" life. A hatred of the "world," a curse on the affective urges, a fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendence rigged up to slander mortal existence, a yearning for extinction, cessation of all effort until the great "sabbath of sabbaths"--this whole cluster of distortions, together with the intransigent Christian assertion that nothing counts except moral values, had always struck me as being the most dangerous, most sinister form the will to destruction can take .... As for morality... could it be anything but a will to deny life, a secret instinct of destruction, a principle of calumny, a reductive agent--the beginning of the end?... [M]y vital instincts turned against ethics and founded a radical counterdoctrine, slanted esthetically, to oppose the Christian libel on life .... Being a philologist, that is to say a man of words, I christened it rather arbitrarily--for who can tell the real name of the Antichrist?--with the name of a Greek god, Dionysos. (The Birth of Tragedy 10-11)
Other commentators on myth have also suggested that Christianity falls outside the pale of mythic behavior. The most notable of these, Mircea Eliade, argues that mythic rituals as cultural phenomena allow participants to reenact the creative works of their gods and thereby to emerge from profane, linear, historical time and actually reenter sacred time, which is "at once primordial and indefinitely recoverable." By contrast, "Christianity, as faithful heir to Judaism, accepts the linear time of History: the world was created only once and will have only one end; the Incarnation took place only once, in historical Time, and there will be only one Judgment." As opposed to peoples who ritually reenacted events from their divine narratives, Eliade suggests, modern humanity is bound by the march forward of history, unrecoverable time, and he calls the world view that this chronological progression engenders "the terror of history" (Eliade 18, 169, 68).[5]
What Dysart regards as the Dionysian elements of Alan's ritual--emphasizing as he does the primitive, life-affirming qualities of Alan's myth, the ability of the practitioner to escape self-enclosure,[6] the sexual release involved in this form of worship-will become, to the contrary, life-denying and destructive, the opposite of the Dionysian urge as defined by Nietzsche and the temporally transcendent in Eliade's terms. The Strangs' attitudes toward sex and religion, which Alan has shaped into obsessive behaviors, will not permit him to engage fully in the ecstatic nature of Dionysian religion; nor can he fully escape time in his enactments, since he must perform them in absolute secrecy, away from the judgmental prying eyes of his parents and later the stable owner. Focusing enviously upon what he supposes is the liberating integrity of Alan's worship, Dysart ignores almost entirely the mental trap in which Alan is bound. Alan wants both to reconcile his parents and to reject their smug and constricting notions of how life should be lived. Caught in this double bind of conflicting emotions, he tries to spin a variety of self-protective myths but eventually succumbs to the pressure he has been made to feel, and, far from being his salvation, it is his "myth" itself that will damn him.[7]
Significantly, the events precipitating Alan's fall both concern sexuality, which, in turn, change Alan's relationship with his god. Meeting his father at the "skin flicks," to which Alan has gone with Jill Mason, Alan becomes agitated, first loathing the older man for his hypocrisy, for "all those airs he put on," and then sympathizing with Frank, seeing him as "just a poor old sod on his own," someone who "does his own secret thing which no one'll know about, just like me!" (95-97). Ignoring the inner conflict that Alan feels about his father, Dysart prompts the agitated youth to admit that the insight he derived into his father's nature somehow liberated the youth, thus enabling him to feel, without guilt, sexual desire for Jill. As always, Dysart emphasizes here only what he finds desirable, what he would like to experience vicariously through Alan. And so it is that, when Alan says of Jill, "she's the one with the eyes!" (97), Dysart leads him to agree that he actually wanted "to look at her breasts... like in the [pornographic] film" (97). As we know by now, however, eyes have a much more profound significance for Alan; they are the bulging eyes of the horse in his favorite picture, the horse that he has apotheosized.
Alan can no more feel sensuality in the place where Jill wants to engage in sexual activity--the stables--than he could if he were in a church, for the stables are for Alan a sacred place, the Temple ofEquus, the god's "Holy of Holies" (67). Although he will try nevertheless to "violate" this holy place, Alan will soon discover that his god is not like the liberating deity, Dionysus, but more like the moral, forbidding God of the Old Testament, the God of Job. The morally binding principles that Alan learned from his Christian mother contradict Dysart's interpretation of the freedom he derived from learning of his father's indiscretions. The god Equus waiting for Alan in the stable when he goes there with Jill is not Dionysus, nor is he any longer the Christlike victim whom Alan had once venerated, kneeling before the picture in his room and in his ritualistic night rides. Early in the narrative we learn that Alan's mother told him stories about horses, two among them being most notable with respect to Alan's illness. In one of them, she suggested that native Americans--"the pagans," as she calls them--regarded horse and rider as one entity, like a god (31). From this account, Alan would later derive the idea of being one with his god during their ritual rides: "Two shall be one" (67). The other story is ultimately more impressive. Alan and his mother used to enjoy their story of "Ha, ha," an allusion to part of the peremptory speech of God to Job, beginning "Hath thou given the horse strength?" What began as an amusing activity between mother and son now becomes a potent force in Alan's worship.
Although Dysart prompts Alan to say that Jill's eyes lead to thoughts of her breasts and therefore of sexuality, Alan later corrects that misconception. Trying vainly to perform sexually with Jill, he sees not her eyes but those of Equus: "Then I see his eyes. They are rolling!" (105). Even Dysart cannot ignore the evidence before him now. Realizing that Equus is not Dionysus but God, he intones for Alan the Old Testament formula: "The Lord thy God is a Jealous God. He sees you. He sees you forever and ever, Alan. He sees you!" (105). Alan then tries to transform Equus back into the Christian God, "the Merciful" (104), but it is no use. "Ha, ha," the God of Job, has come to torment him, the God who forces Job to admit finally, "I knew thee only by report but now I see with my own eyes. / Therefore I melt away; I repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42: 5-6). But Alan does not repent. Torn between his desire to live and the Nietzschean life-denying force of morality, he strikes out, blinding the horses so that the eyes that have tormented him for so long can no longer see.
Witham has argued that "Dysart finally accepts his part as healer because any other alternatives are simply unacceptable" (63). That is true, and, in the end, Dysart, recognizing at last the precise nature of Alan's obsession, sadly promises to cure Alan. "He'll be delivered from madness" (107), he avers in an ironic echo of the Lord's Prayer, "deliver us from evil." Unhappy about his intended work, Dysart still prefers Dionysian transcendence to the great god Normal, but he sees the change as necessary not only to society but also to Alan himself. While we may share to some extent Dysart's sadness about the need to cure Alan of his passionate worship, we must also feel some relief for the boy. After all, normal, however bland and unexciting, will not exact the same terrible costs demanded by Alan's "jealous God."
- In what is perhaps the best and most thorough treatment of the idea, Walls provides a corrective to the mainstream critical view on the Nietzschean influence on the play, maintaining that the central conflict in Equus actually involves Dionysian man (Alan Strang) and Socratic or theoretical man (Martin Dysart), rather than Apollonian order generally. Shaffer himself has lent some credence to this critical view by suggesting that the Nietzschean split is, in a very general way, at work in his life and work: "I just feel in myself that there is a constant debate going on between the violence of instinct on the one hand and the desire in my mind for order and restraint" (qtd. in Piunka 30).
- Critics have noted the ambiguous nature of Alan's relationship with the horse. Walls suggests that "Alan's sexual episodes with the horse appear more as religious rites than attempts to reach sexual satisfaction" (317). Ebner argues that Alan's home life and cultural background "render both worship and sexual expression problematic... and out of the archetypal depths of his own psyche [Alan] creates Equus, his horse-god, object of both religious worship and of sensual enjoyment. In modern fashion, he has constructed his own meanings where society has failed to supply them" (31).
- Lounsberry takes the influence back further. "The horse, which embodies powerful mythological and sexual richness in Alan's first ride at the age of six, subsequently accumulates, and is thus tainted by, associations with the other gods in the society," these "gods" including socialism, television, and movies (21).
- On the contrary, Beckerman goes so far as to call Dysart "less a complex human being than a nexus of contemporary states of mind and behavioral habits. His fascination with ancient Greece dramatizes a romantic longing for purified existence. His alienation from his wife represents a congenital revolt against domesticity. In the course of the play we learn nothing much about the source of or motivation for these attitudes .... The play is thus as abstract as its chief character" (208).
- Eliade further notes that it was actually the Greeks beginning with Xenophanes (ca. 565-470) who emptied mythos of religious value: "Contrasted both with logos, and, later, with historia, mythos came in the end to denote 'what cannot really exist.' On its side, Judeo-Christianity put the stamp of 'falsehood' and 'illusion' on whatever was not justified or validated by the two Testaments" (1-2).
- Nietzsche speaks in The Birth of Tragedy of the sober principium individuationis of ApolIonian culture as opposed to the intoxicating ecstasy of Dionysian stirrings. "So stirred," he goes on, "the individual forgets himself entirely" (22). This loss of self is certainly involved in Alan's rituals, and this aspect of worship is perhaps what Dysart most desires.
- Walls calls Alan's myth "an active abomination," one that "says yes to the present rather than placing its hope in a time to come, as his mother's Christianity and his father's socialism trust" (316). This is generally true, though that hope will not help to save Alan from his god's harsh judgments.
Beckerman, Bernard. "The Dynamics of Peter Shaffer's Drama." In The Play and Its Critics: Essays for Eric Bentley. Ed. Michael Bertin. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1986. 199-209.
Ebner, I. Dean. "The Double Crisis of Sexuality and Worship in Shaffer's Equus." Christianity and Literature 31 (1982): 29-47.
Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper Colophon, 1963.
Klein, Dennis A. Peter Shaffer. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Lounsberry, Barbara." 'God-Hunting': The Chaos of Worship in Peter Shaffer's Equus and Royal Hunt of the Sun." Modern Drama 21 (1978): 13-28.
The New English Bible: Oxford Study Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "The Birth of Tragedy" and "The Genealogy of Morals." Trans. Francis Golffing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956.
Plunka, Gene A. Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals in the Theater. Rutherford, N J: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1988. Shaffer, Peter. Equus. 1973. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Vandenbroucke, Russell. "Equus: Modern Myth in the Making." Drama and Theater 12 (1975): 129-33.
Walls, Doyle W. "Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche, and the Neuroses of Health." Modern Drama 27 (1984): 314-23.
Witham, Barry B. "The Anger of Equus." Modern Drama 22 (1979): 61-66.
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By LEONARD MUSTAZZA
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