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Thersites in the Labyrinth of his Fury

The cynical Thersites is, in many ways, the most accurate observer in Shakespeare’s play.  Peter Hall’s production, from Thersites’ first entrance as The "Prologue" (an invention of this production and not in Shakespeare’s text, where Thersites does not appear until Act 2), he functions as a deflating commentator upon the action as it unfolds.  For him, the issues behind the great war are clear: "All the argument is a whore and cuckold" (2.3.69-70), and no ideals survive intact his withering judgments: all is seen as "wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion" (5.2.201-2).

But if he engages the audience with his running commentary on the action, he disgusts it with the running sores on his body.  The other Greeks look like they have been camping out for seven years, their rough dark togs worn and ragged; Thersites appears to have been sleeping in a ditch, exposed to all the elements.  His shirt has deteriorated to a loose vest that does not hide his scarred midriff, his knee-length pants are worn out in the seat and crotch, and both hang on him like gray-brown rags whose original color or form is past guessing.  Unlike his heavy-booted Greek comrades, Thersites has wrapped his feet in strips of filthy cloth.  He carries a weathered leather pouch large enough to tuck away anything of value he happens upon, like Achilles’ discarded wine goblet. The scabs that adorn his body are not the wounds of war but the evidence of disease.

Thersites plays only a minor role in Homer’s account of the Trojan war, though there he is memorably described:
 

                                                      A most disordered store
Of words he foolishly powrd out, of which his mind held more
Than it could manage - anything with which he could procure
Laughter he never could containe.  He should have yet bene sure
To touch no kings.  T'oppose their states becomes not jesters' parts.
But he the filthiest fellow was of all that had deserts
In Troy's brave siege:  he was squint-eyd and lame of either foot,
So crooke-backt that he had no breast, sharpe-headed, where did shoote
(Here and there sperst) thin mossie hair.  He most of all envide
Ulysses and Æacides, whom still his splene would chide,
Nor could the sacred king himselfe avoid his saucie vaine -
Against whom - since he knew the Greekes did vehement hates sustaine
(Being angrie for Achilles' wrong) - he cried out, railing thus: . . .
                          (The Iliad, Book Two, trans. Chapman, lines 181 - 193)

Certainly Shakespeare drew on this account for his own portrayal of the character, though the railing of Homer’s Thersites never threatens to become as convincing as it does in Shakespeare’s play.

 No one can say for certain who first played Thersites on stage, but, if the play was staged by Shakespeare's company when it was written about 1602, Robert Armin probably would have created the role.  In 1599, the veteran comic Will Kempe sold his share in the new-built Globe and quit The Chamberlain's Men.  The arrival of his successor, Armin, marked a dramatic change in the nature of the "clown" roles Shakespeare produced for the company.  Kempe had been admired both as a physical comic and a brilliant improvisational wit, whose witty ad libs may well have prompted Hamlet's advice to the players (in a play written soon after Kempe left the company):

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them -- for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered.  That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.    (Hamlet. 3.2.38-45)

Armin, as one of the gravediggers, presumably stuck to the script.  In Armin, Shakespeare found a player who, though neither the acrobat nor wit that Kempe was, could bring to life more verbally complex humor, and for this more subtle intelligence Shakespeare created his most sardonic commentators, As You Like It's Touchstone, Twelfth Night's Feste, All's Well's LaVache, and the fool in King Lear.  Thersites' crabbed and complex diatribes would be perfect material for Armin, though the cynical Greek is a darker, more aggressive critic than his predecessors in the comedies, and his bitter commentaries look toward the later rueful parables of Lear's Fool.

The first modern English staging, William Poel's in 1912, featured an actress, Elspeth Keith, dressed as an Elizabethan clown, in the role of Thersites "to highlight the tragic absurdity of a love affair and a war that had doomed it to failure," as David Bevington says in his introduction to the Arden edition (which served both as Peter Hall’s text for the production, and which appeared on stage carried by Andrew Weems’ Thersites as he enters to open the play). Later producers have been no less imaginative in their efforts to embody Thersites’ bitter wit.  The 1938 modern dress production at London's Westminster Theatre found Stephen Murray playing Thersites as "a Communist intellectual," as one critic noted, "a left-wing, railing journalist in a bright red tie."  Tyrone Guthrie also imagined Thersites as a cynical war correspondent, now armed with sketchbook and camera, when he staged the play at the Old Vic in 1956.  When John Barton directed the play in 1968 for the RSC, his emphasis on the play's corrosive sexuality was embodied also in his Thersites, who, played by Norman Rodway, "was made up to suggest tertiary syphilis and wore a codpiece representing a war mask, with a huge rope phallus for a tongue" with which the actor "could do some pretty indecent things."

Jonathan Miller, directing the BBC's 1981 television version, probably most radically imagined the role when he cast the blind cabaret performance artist "The Great Orlando," whose real name is Jack Birkett.  Derek Jarman employed Birkett's weird stage presence a few years earlier in his film of The Tempest when he cast him as Caliban.  The tall bald "Orlando" first appears in Miller’s Troilus in a tattered dress, literalizing Ajax' s derogatory epithet "Mistress Thersites." His diction was delivered in mannered "drag queen" style.  He is first discovered busily sewing for Ajax as he cattily bitches about his master.  Later appearances find him scrubbing clothes at a wash basin.

Howard Davies', in his 1985 Royal Shakespeare production, cast Thersites, played by Alun Armstrong, as a "Geordie waiter," whose pranks included a comically botched attempt to whip a tablecloth out from beneath an elaborate and spectacularly breakable table setting.  In the RSC's next production, in 1990, Simon Russell Beale was a skid row bum, sporting a Gay Lib button, a loose overcoat that suggested imminent indecent exposure and a leather skull cap. In 1998, the RSC’s production of Troilus received mixed reviews, but London's Financial Times singled out its Thersites: "The best work comes from Lloyd Hutchinson, who makes a truly revolting Thersites, the serviceable functionary who offers an obscene, debunking commentary on the action. Looking like some lost vaudevillian from a Samuel Beckett play, you can almost smell the stench of corruption coming off him, and his vile little stand-up routines with their disgusting sexual innuendo rightly suggest that he is the Bernard Manning of the Trojan war,"  But the reviewer wonders, "Why is Thersites the only Greek with an Irish accent?"

Peter Hall's first Troilus in 1960 featured the young Peter O'Toole in the role a few years before his discovery by Hollywood.  One critic noted that he seemed "to retch at the very thought of the human race." Hall's new Thersites in the TFANA production of 2001 is no less appalled by the war and the warriors he finds himself surrounded by.  Andrew Weems, opens the play, entering with a corpse, soon to join the skeletons that sit in the stage's sand pit forming the ghastly pre-show tableau.  His face bears a lit cigarette and a bitter scowl, establishing the sense of disillusion and disgust  that he carries through the rest of the play.

Though Agamemnon in the first act anticipates the moment "[w]hen rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws," (1.3.73) the scurrilous Greek does not appear in his own right until we find him exchanging insults with Ajax, who seems to be his master, at the beginning of Act II.  Thersites' place in Ajax’s tent is ambiguous.  He is referred to as "slave," but he insists "I serve here voluntary" (2.1.92). His next scene finds him entertaining Achilles, and when Nestor wonders at Ajax's anger with his fellow hero, Ulysses explains, "Achilles hath inveigled his fool from him" (2.3.89).

The major themes of Thersites' railing are the sheer absurdity of the war that is being fought, and he measures it in his characteristic language of disease and decay. "Nor could the sacred king himselfe avoid his saucie vaine," said Chapman’s Homer of the railer, and we first find Thersites in Shakespeare’s play impudently insulting the Greek general: "Agamemnon -- how if he had boils, full, all over, generally?", he contentedly imagines; "And those boils did run (say so), did not the general run then? Were not that a botchy core? (2.1.2-6)  Thersites' railings habitually combine insult with references to the most disgusting afflictions that Renaissance flesh was heir to.  He repeatedly calls up the symptoms of the age's second most fearsome ailment (after plague), syphilis.  The boils and scabs, the running sores he gleefully wishes on his commander and which, in Weems' make-up, he displays himself, are all symptoms of a disease known well to Renaissance England, and which is used symbolically to characterize the entire Greek enterprise:  "Vengeance on the whole camp," he wishes, or, "rather, the Neapolitan bone-ache: for that, methinks, is the curse dependent on those that war for a placket" (i.e., a petticoat; 2.3.15-19). Syphilis bore several geographical nick-names, most often linked to France or Spain, but the French claimed to have contracted it at their 1493 siege of Naples, hence Thersites' "Neapolitan" attribution. Thersites' preoccupation with these various symptoms is far from clinical, he calls them up in all their irritation as if they are familiar companions.  "I would thou didst itch from head to foot, and I had the scratching of thee," he tells Ajax; "I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece" (2.1.25-7).

Hall and Weems have taken all that the text provides and have produced a Thersites who not only convincingly expresses the disgust this bitter fool spews out from "the labyrinth of [his] fury” (2.3.2), but personifies it as vividly as any Thersites on record. Audience members in the nearest rows might be surprised that he does not give off the physical stench of the disease he, and the play, discover at the heart of the martial ideals they debunk.

 

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