A Curious Girls' Night Out

18 Feb 2011

On Friday last week, Alexi, Sophie and I went out for the evening to see a production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress by the Cambridge University Opera Society. We had a very enjoyable evening, with some wonderful singing by the students involved. As none of us are musical specialists, however, that is as much as I will say on that score here.

However, Richard discussed in his very first post for this blog, how our project logo is based upon a plate from Hogarth's engraved series A Rake's Progress, on which Stravinsky's opera is based. As the resident 'iconographer' on the project, Hogarth's A Rake's Progress is of great interest to me, due to the 'longitude lunatic' in the final plate set in Bedlam (the insane asylum Bethlehem Hospital). I will blog in the future about the specific iconography of 'the longitude lunatic,' what I think this tells us about Hogarth's attitude to the longitude process in general, and in turn how this informed his overall presentation of eighteenth-century society.

What interested me in Stravinsky's opera and the libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, was the way in which they adapted Hogarth's story of  the moral and social degeneration of Tom Rakewell, and picked up on wider themes in Hogarthian, and more general eighteenth-century, satire. In Hogarth's version, Tom inherits a fortune from his miserly father and goes off to London to enjoy himself, paying off his pregnant girlfriend Sarah Young before he goes. In London, Tom gets drawn into fashionable society, hosting levees and attending brothels. He soon runs into debt and narrowly escapes from the bailiffs on his way to an audience at St James's because of the timely arrival of Sarah with her savings. Despite her continued devotion, Tom tries to redeem his fortunes by marriage to a rich, one-eyed widow, but soon loses this wealth in gambling houses. This lands him in Newgate prison for debt, and he descends into  madness and is admitted to Bedlam (where he is joined by the longitude lunatic).

Stravinsky, Auden and Kallman remained largely true to this story, changing the character of Sarah to 'Anne Truelove' and fleshing out the character of the rich widow into the comic figure 'Baba the Turk' who is a bearded rarity on the London stage, and was one of the most enjoyable characters in our production of the opera. The major change, however, is the introduction of the character 'Nick Shadow,' who, in the opera, arrives unbidden in Tom and Anne's country idyll telling Tom of a fortune inherited from an unknown uncle. He leads Tom to London and there forces him into the sorts of vice and misdemeanour outlined by Hogarth. Nick turns out to be the Devil, plays cards with Tom for his soul, and eventually sends him mad as a punishment for winning the game. The moral outlined by the characters' epilogue is that 'For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds a work to do.'

There are three themes of Hogarthian and wider eighteenth-century satire that particularly interested me in this adaptation. The first is 'Projecting,' the name given to inventors of improving schemes for which they sought investment by others. This ranged from scientific  and mechanical projecting, such as a new repeat-firing canon, or water pumps for irrigating land, to financial projecting of insurance companies or schemes to solve the national debt. Satirists like Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot were deeply critical of such schemes which  they saw as mostly resting on a delusion of the 'projector' and drawing naive investors into debt. We can see these opinions in the Academy of Lagado in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) or in Arbuthnot's Humble Petition Of the Colliers, Cooks, Cook-Maids, Black-Smiths, Jack-makers, Brasiers, and Others (1716). It is demonstrated by Hogarth in the Newgate prison plate of A Rake's Progress where one inmate behind Tom tries to produce gold, and another to his left has drafted a scheme for solving the national debt. In Stravinsky's version, this takes the form of the wonderful 'Bread machine' which Nick cons Tom into thinking can turn stones into bread, and which Tom then attempts to sell to recoup his fortune. Nick becomes the projector and Tom the naive dupe.

The second theme is 'curiosity' and curiosities, the eighteenth-century fascination in, and collection of, 'rarities' and artworks that demonstrated the wonders of nature and man's ingenuity. Ancient and natural objects were particularly popular. The collections thus formed attempted to show the world in one room - in German a wunderkammer or kunstkammer - and are exemplified by Sir Hans Sloane's collection which founded the British Museum. Such fascination with rare and wonderful objects, and often the possession of them for the sake of status, or deluded knowledge, was satirised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the character of the virtuoso. This was given vivid expression in the character of Martin Scriblerus (Memoirs published 1741) created by Arbuthnot, Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and others, who is raised by his father according to ancient knowledge and artefacts, and falls in love with a pair of Siamese twins in a curiosity show. The importance of objects, collection and consumption - particularly the adoption of aristocratic collecting practices by the upwardly-mobile middle class - are everywhere in Hogarth's work. They appear in A Rake's Progress in the paintings and objects bought by Tom and displayed at his levee. Marriage A-la-Mode expresses this even more clearly. Stravinsky and co brilliantly adapted this theme in the character of Baba the Turk, herself a curiosity bought, or collected, by Tom, who brings to his house a motley collection of objects given to her by European celebrities. She embodies curiosity as both the noun and the verb.

Lastly, I would like to pick up on the prevalence of gambling in Hogarth's work, and the question of whether or not we should see him as presenting life as a 'gamble.' In his 1722 satire, Annus Mirabilis, or the Wonderful Effects of the approaching Conjunction of the Planets Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, Arbuthnot was scathing of theological philosophers like William Whiston who saw celestial phenomena like comets as millenarian portents of social and political upheaval. Whiston is also satirised by Hogarth in the person of the longitude lunatic, one of whose solutions for longitude drawn on the wall is the one that Whiston had presented in 1714. Nevertheless, neither satirist saw life as undirected or a 'gamble.' Hogarth presents gambling as socially destructive through Tom's experiences in the gambling den - where the building is catching fire unheeded by the obsessed players. Stravinsky and co pick up on this theme by making Tom gamble for his soul with Nick Shadow and he does eventually go mad as a product of gambling, much like in Hogarth's version. However, the introduction of Nick entirely changes the message of Hogarth's work. Nick essentially splits the character of Tom into the evil and the weak, whereas Hogarth's Tom is a complex social being who is essentially the victim of his own passions and irrationality within a society which prioritised fashionable appearance over moral strength. There is no suggestion of evil, or non-human agency, rather the emphasis is on the corruption of man in contemporary society. This is the context in which Hogarth's longitude lunatic has meaning.