Dramatic Irony
Much of the emotional impact of both the novel and the play comes from the dramatic irony built into the perspective, where we know or understand more about what is happening than Christopher does.  We either intuit the truth, or in the case of the play we often actually see more by how the other characters react, and we recognise when Christopher is misreading a situation. When his mother is in hospital, for example, and Christopher wants to write to her or visit, we appreciate that his hope is futile. The pathos we feel for Christopher comes from this dramatic irony.

As does the humour. Our understanding precedes moments when Christopher gets it and calls out the truth in unexpectedly plain terms. We’re set up for his punch line. For example when Mrs Alexander tells him that his mother and Mr Shears were “very, very good friends” –  “Do you mean they were doing sex?” And of course throughout the play Christopher often responds inappropriately because he is not reading the situation as we conventionally are: “Did you mean to hit the policeman?” – “Yes”. Or when he asks Mrs Alexander to look after his rat Toby while he is in London, and she asks how long he is going for: “Until I go to university.”

Finally it is Christopher’s unique view of the world, his response to the usual flow of things that is so funny, engaging, and even challenging to our understanding. That’s also dramatic irony – where we think we know everything and in fact he shows us otherwise.

“…’Twere well it were done quickly.”
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Macbeth Shakespeare’s “most rapid” play, and as Emma and I discussed in the podcast, the action certainly flies along. There is a very deliberate sense that events are running out of control, for at each stage in the plot the Macbeths act precipitously. The idea of time running ahead of them is established from the start – the announcement that the King and his company will stay with them catches them by surprise – Macbeth barely has time to get home before they are due to arrive and they can’t but be hastily prepared to host the court. Duncan staying with them immediately after they’ve learned of the witches prophesy also presents them with an unexpected opportunity; one that they’ve not had time to consider and which they must act on that very night.

In their acting to kill Duncan they obviously disrupt the normal sequence and pace of succession. When Duncan bestows his favour on Macbeth in making him the Thane of Cawdor, he tells him “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour/To make thee full of growing”. This would be the natural time scale, where Macbeth’s progress would be nurtured over time

Macbeth’s need to act fast is not only a practical one, it is also psychological. When he steels himself to do the deed quickly, he expresses the reflexive instinct not to want to look too closely at the fact of what he is doing. Indeed this urge to avoid thinking about his actions only accelerates: “From this moment/The very firstlings of my heart shall be/The firstlings of my hand. And even now,/To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.” His evil thoughts do not bear examining or arresting: “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand/Which must be acted, ere they be scanned.” 

Macbeth recognises the moral failure of his actions from the start – he cannot look clearly at himself for this would be to take responsibility: “To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself.” His disavowals suggest that he is trapped in a form of self-created trance. In one of her lectures on the play, Emma cited a mock modern court case that put the Macbeths on trial for murder in which they pleaded ‘diminished responsibility’ in their defense. Was Macbeth in the grip of a temporary madness? Or perhaps even of the controlling power of the witches?

After the relentless frenzy of Macbeth’s actions, Shakespeare suggests at the end of the play that the natural pace of time will be restored, when Malcolm proclaims that he will act judiciously “in measure, time and place.”

The Title 
We talked during the podcast about the significance of the title, particularly of the superficially awkward back slash. The back slash implies something that is both blue and/or orange simultaneously, which of course the oranges are perceived as in the play. Likewise, the labelling of Christopher’s condition is ambiguous. At its simplest, the identity of an orange is defined by the colour of its skin, as Christopher is called black because of the colour of his skin. The analogy is signalled more explicitly when Robert refers in his report to the “blue-skinned orange” as being in the “minority given that other citruses are ordinarily orange”.

The semantics of our labelling people and medical diagnoses is cleverly conveyed in the artwork for the title of the play used for the recent production we discussed in the episode. The design shows a single capsule of medication, one half of which is orange and the other blue, but the words Blue and Orange are fixed to the reverse colours, so we experience that mind trick of not noticing that the orange half of the pill is actually labelled blue and vice versa. It reinforces the doubt that we should be acknowledging in the difficulty about labelling people and particularly of course in labelling mental health conditions.

More on madness
The question of how voluntary or “feigned” Hamlet’s madness is has challenged academics, actors and audiences for centuries. As we cited in our conversation, Hamlet gives us explicit notice that he is putting “an antic disposition on” and is “mad but north-north-west”; however there also seems little doubt that his connection with the external world is destabilised by the death of his father, his mother’s hasty remarriage to his uncle, and then by the visitation of a ghost and the burden of his charge to exact revenge. These things together would unsettle even the most stable of minds.

Hamlet’s soliloquies reflect his increasing disconnect from the external world. His mental stress engenders spiralling internal debate and indecision, a self-fulfilling descent into a form of madness. The strain is exacerbated by the fact that he largely has to carry his revenge mission secretly. He cannot confide in his lover, Ophelia, partly because he may not trust her not to betray his intentions to her father, but also because he may wish to protect her from the darkness of the world he has seen. Hence, although he delivers his counsel too sharply, perhaps his advice that she should hide herself away in a nunnery is an emotional plea that she may be spared the evil and dangers he must confront. For Hamlet a distance has opened up between them, or between now and the past, before the extreme events he has witnessed and is unable to share. Any romantic innocence in their relationship is lost for him.

He also seems unable to fully confide in Horatio, possibly because he intuits that it is not clear that Horatio grants that the ghost is as genuine as Hamlet warrants, and in time the instability of his own mind has gone too far to be able to relate to Horatio in the straightforward way he used to. So he is alone with his raging thoughts and despair.

The genius of the portrayal of Hamlet’s madness is that it rings true wherever on the spectrum between “put on” and involuntary it is played. His intelligence clearly enables him to effect the antic disposition, and at the same time his emotional volatility and mental desuetude could also be a natural  extension of his introspection and the stress that the situation imposes on him.

The Recruiting Officer
There is an additional richness in Our Country’s Good that comes from the parallels between its story and themes, and those in the play-within-the-play, The Recruiting Officer. The Recruiting Officer presents a satirical portrait of society in the country town of Shrewsbury, focussing particularly on the activities of several army officers whose mission is to recruit local men to serve in the army. Along the way officers don’t mind enjoying the hospitality of the local ladies, who in turn are seeking to recruit partners of their own. Although the play is a comedy of love and deception, like Our Country’s Good it also has serious things to say about social class, women’s position and prospects, and the realities of military service.

The many specific parallels between the plays begin with the simple fact that the Royal Marines sent to establish the colony in Our Country’s Good are of course recruits themselves. In fact a number of them do not appear to be happy that they have been selected for this challenging mission. By contrast to The Recruiting Officer, which is set in 1706 when the army were buoyed by a recent victory over the French, these officers have just suffered an historic defeat in America. It’s safe to say that morale is not high in the camp here. The fate of the convicts is also not dissimilar to the way that petty criminals were often impressed into the army – many are victims of trumped up charges or excessive sentencing.

Somewhat ironically the marines in Our Country’s Good express concerns about the specific choice of the play that the convicts are to perform. Ross and Tench, for example, are fear that the immorality of the officers on display in The Recruiting Officer could encourage insubordination or worse  in the company. The officers’ objections may partly be based on their understanding that The Recruiting Officer was notoriously candid in its references to sexual relationships, including overtones of homosexuality in the army, which may of course been too close to the bone for the service men.

Their assumptions about the immorality of the theatre may also stem from the historic view that actresses were commonly associated with being prostitutes – a connection which Major Ross makes about the prospect of the convict women being in the play: ‘Filthy, thieving, lying whores and now we have to watch them flout their flitty ways on the stage.”  Reverend Johnson underlines the point when he observes that his wife would certainly not entertain the idea of acting in a play: “My wife abhors anything of that nature. After all, actresses are not famed for their morals.” When the Reverend seeks reassurance from Captain Clark that The Recruiting Officer is a play that promotes marriage, there is further irony in the captain’s partial answer: “They marry for love and to secure wealth”, his failing to mention the other less salubrious behaviour of the officers.

The two plays literally overlap when characters in Our Country’s Good quote lines directly from The Recruiting Officer, and we cannot but draw parallels between the characters and the roles that they are playing. When Ralph and Wisehammer rehearse Plume and Brazen’s contest over Jack Wilful, for example, they are also enacting their own rivalry over Mary. When Arscott quotes Kite’s great speech about his being born a gypsy where he learned “canting and lying”, Dabby exclaims “That’s about me!”. The overlap is most strikingly felt in the magical scene on the beach where Ralph and Mary act out the exchange between Plume and Silvia dressed as Jack Wilful, when the force of their attraction all but overwhelms them and Silvia asks him to say “what usage she must expect under his command”. Ralph and Mary yield to the power inherent in the speech and consummate their love.

Our Country’s Good finishes with the opening speech of The Recruiting Officer. It’s a rousing, theatrical speech which promises a triumphant performance, triumphant simply because of the collective energy and purpose that have made it happen against the odds.

The Recruiting Game
There is at the very least a twin meaning in the title of The Recruiting Officer. We first assume that it refers literally to Captain Plume, or perhaps also collectively to Kite and Brazen, as the officers who have arrived in town to recruit local men for the army. Of course the officers are also open to recruiting women for their pleasure, if not to marry. In fact as Plume confesses, he often achieves both goals by targeting the women to get through them to their male acquaintances, as he does with Rose in pursuit of Bulloch and Cartwright.

It is also true that the women in the play are out to recruit, in their case long-term romantic or economic partners. Silvia’s mission is to recruit Plume; Lucy seeks to enlist Brazen; Rose will be happy to snare either Plume or Jack Wilful. The parallels between the recruitment games of the sexes come together of course in the figure of Jack Wilful himself, or herself. Plume believes that he is recruiting another man for his army, while also inadvertently advancing his and Silvia’s matrimonial negotiations.

And the twin meanings of the recruitment game are further articulated in the use of military language to describe the campaigns of love: Melinda is likened to Helen of Troy, requiring a ten-year siege to win, and when Worthy laments that he was “forced to blockade” when his “general advance” on her was repulsed, Plume urges him to “redouble his advance”.  The reciprocal metaphors are also used:  Plume is “married” to the regiment, and finally of course Plume settles down to marry Sylvia and to “raise recruits” of his own – their children –  who will perhaps become another generation of ‘recruiting officers’ as the cycle continues.