Princeton University
Red Bull Theater’s Sardanapalus & Global Watch Party Review
By Susan J. Wolfson and Bailey Sincox
Byron did not intend Sardanapalus (written 1821) for the stage, and it wasn’t performed until the 1830s, and then as spectacle. Despite Byron’s insisting to his Tory publisher, John Murray, that this was not “a political play,” it obliquely was, by extravagant historical displacement. At its core are key political questions, in the post-Napoleonic era, about empire and war, about peace and seeming civic default. Sardanapalus’s court, moreover, flashes parallels to George IV’s spendthrift luxury, and his wronging of his Queen (Caroline), even as Sardanapalus wrongs his still adoring (not Caroline’s case) Queen Zarina, for his amours with his favorite slave Myrrha. And as everyone up on current gossips could discern, and Byron did not mind provoking with his own angle of apology and remorse, there were parallels to the scandal of Byron’s “Separation” from Lady Byron in 1816, amid rumors of his decadence and worse.
Byron based Sardanapalus, Emperor of ancient Assyria, on the account of Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, but recast the usual condemnation of this king of luxury, an “effeminate” (in civic discourse, a slacker) as a degenerate companion of eunuchs, a transvestite, a bisexual, a coward, a reprobate, a gourmand, a selfish and cruel tyrant. He had his work cut out for him: Byron makes his “Sardanapalus” heterosexual, and an upholder of enlightened pacifism (versus empire-building war-mongering) and human sympathy: not just “voluptuous,” but also “brave” and “benevolent,” even releasing his slaves at the brink of being vanquished (the historical figure did not but compelled them to die with him in self-conflagration). Byron makes a “Byronic Hero” (his brand) of Sardanapalus as a doomed idealist, given to caustic wit about the prevailing culture of warmongering, but also overlaps his counter-cultural self-heroizing with self-indulgence and self-mythologizing. Says Sardanapalus himself, at the end
Time shall quench full many
A people’s records, and a hero’s acts;
Sweep empire after empire, like this first
Of empires, into nothing; but even then
Shall spare this deed of mine, and hold it up
A problem few dare imitate, and none
Despise--but, it may be, avoid the life
Which led to such a consummation. (5.1.442-49)
Much depends on how actors inflect this, those who would scold him into military responsibility (his Queen’s brother and the priest), his forbearing wife, and his adoring slave-lover. What does it mean to be called “manly” or “unmanly,” “effeminate” or “feminine,” in Sardanapalus’s era, and in the 1820s, and in the 2020s?
Coinciding with the bicentennial of Byron’s death in Missolonghi, Red Bull Theater’s spirited reading of Sardanapalus evoked the political and cultural commitments of Byron’s support for Greek independence. One might read Myrrha––the rational philosopher, wise counselor, and temperate mistress––as a straightforward personification of Greece under Ottoman rule. When Myrhha declares that as a Greek she is “a foe to monarchs […] hating fetters,” she underscores the nation’s bondage (1.2.499-500). As Amir Arison and Shayvawn Webster illuminated through their skilled performances, Myrrha’s relationship with her king/lover/master is more nuanced. Voicing Myrrha’s “Why do I love this man?” with wryly self-critical exasperation, Webster drew laughs from the audience, her tone suggestive of a modern rom-com protagonist equivocating about a fatal attraction (1.2.641). Webster invited audience members into Myrrha’s predicament, her ramrod posture and unflappable composure contrasting not only with Sardanapalus’s flamboyance, but also with her own unruly feelings for the king. This production made clear that Myrrha’s Greekness does not so much reform Sardanapalus as embrace his carpe diem mentality, redirecting it, as she says, “from the banquet to the battle” (3.1.223). It is the interplay between decadence and heroism––or even barbarism and civilization––that this drama celebrates.
Byron’s Sardanapalus is a pathetic ruler of the same make as Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Marlowe’s Edward II. Like his sixteenth-century antecedents, Sardanapalus––beguilingly, in Arison’s version of the character––emphasizes that kingship is a performance, a kind of fiction and not an essential reality. In this way surpasses pathos with performative irony about his fate,. In the first act, Arison appeared theatrically with a diadem of flowers, looking less like King of Assyria than a May Queen. Arison’s Sardanapalus was sometimes sorrowful about what kingship has visited upon him, but frequently camp, gasping “Forbear the banquet!” with such exquisite affront that even his stern monitor Salamenes (Sanjit De Silva) chuckled (1.2.308). De Silva––the consummate soldier-courtier––contrasted beautifully with Arison in these early acts, far kinglier than his better when he accepted the signet ring. When Sardanapalus recalls “I have the goodliest armor, and / A sword of such a temper, and a bow […] ’tis long since I used them,” Salamenes asks incredulously, “If need be, wilt thou wear them?” (1.2.315-22). Even in this stage-spare production, Arison indicated Sardanapalus’s transformation in Act 3 by replacing his garland with a silver coronet and accepting a leather jacket from Sfero (Zack Lopez Roa).
At this point, Arison continued to play the dandy, fluffing his hair and primping as he complained “I had forgot the helm—where is it? / That's well—no, ’tis too heavy; you mistake, too— / It was not this I meant, but that which bears / A diadem around it” (3.1.128-31). Arison managed to make Sardanapalus in armor Sardanapalus in drag, troping the ghost of the woman-warrior Semiramis that haunts the play (1.1.6; 1.1.43; 1.2.126; 1.2.141; 1.2.152; 1.2.180; 1.3.139; 1.2.625; 2.1.373). By the final act, Arison transformed once more, to become had become a world-weary general, his voice lowered half an octave, sword always in hand. Is this his latest camp-indulgence, or an existential transformation in a national crisis? “It is said the King's demeanour / In the late action scarcely more appalled / The rebels than astonished his true subjects,” Balea observes (5.1.76-8). Arison brought forth Sardanapalus as masculine, martial monarch only in the moment of defeat––over Salemenes’s corpse, seeing the signet ring in rebel hands, resolving to immolate himself. Recalling Richard II’s “hollow crown” speech, Sardanapalus scoffs, “So there are / New monarchs of an hour's growth as despotic / As sovereigns swathed in purple, and enthroned / From birth to manhood!” (Richard II 3.1.149-92; Sardanapalus 5.1.323-6). A king is only a man, but for Byron’s king, as Arison embodied, “manhood” is a hard-won achievement. From being a “nothing” and “the effeminate thing that governs” “king” is less the latest link in the chain, than a chime with a difference—but at the verge of becoming no king nothing at last.
Weirdly, in this midst of this epiphany, Salemenes’ dying heroism got a laugh from the audience, as if the determined, fatal removal of the spear that has struck deep into his torso were fodder for farce. Was this intended? Or what is a logical, though surprise, extension of Salemenes own theatrical exhortations to manhood all along? The ultimate significance of Sardanapalus’s death—in the tried and true pattern of a Byronic hero—is ambiguous. Manly, or mannered? Is this auto-immolation a surrender to tragic passion, a Stoic suicide for the preservation of manly virtue, or a final heroic alingment with female despair? The play layers this ambiguity (or “problem,” in Sardanapalus’s farewell) through its treatment of religion. While the final scene is filled with prayers to both the Greek pantheon and the Assyrian deity Baal, religion is more a source of ritual gravity than an experience of faith. Religion is collapsed into Sardanapalus’s “inheritance,” fast becoming, like the empire itself, a relic of history (5.1.428). When Myrrha lights her torch from “The ever-burning lamp that burns without, / Before Baal's shrine,” this seeming symbol of cosmic power consumes both the king and itself (5.1.420-1). Byron’s play allows us to feel that Sardanapalus’s early speeches in the mode of Wildean aesthetic philosophy are far more compelling than this final act of flagrant self-historicizing piety:
SALAMENES Thy Sires have been revered as Gods—
SARDANAPALUS In dust
And death, where they are neither Gods nor men.
Talk not of such to me! the worms are Gods;
At least they banqueted upon your Gods,
And died for lack of farther nutriment.
Those Gods were merely men; look to their issue—
I feel a thousand mortal things about me,
But nothing godlike,—unless it may be
The thing which you condemn, a disposition
To love and to be merciful, to pardon
The follies of my species, and (that's human)
To be indulgent to my own. (1.2.267-78)
Though not a captive like Myrrha, Sardanapalus imagines himself a slave to his own dynasty. He evacuates Assyria’s past, its culture, and his own family of meaning as he strains against this yoke, “hating fetters” as much as his beloved. Everything valuable, everything revered he renders as nothing––only food for worms who, echoing Sardanapalus himself, “banquet” on a universe of waste. Despite his personal transformation, Sardanapalus reprises this melancholia in some of last words, telling Myrrha that “the commingling fire will mix our ashes” and “the winds of heaven” will scatter them over the earth (5.1.471; 478). The play locates true freedom in this collapsing of distinctions between Greek and barbarian, woman and man, slave and sovereign.
The worms may be gods, their appetites more powerful than either Beleses’s prophesies or Baal’s shrines, but both Sardanapalus’s and Byron’s “hero’s acts” survive, as this “Revelation Reading” in October 2024 attested once more.
