The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [290]
As in Othello or Romeo and Juliet, this is Comedy without the saving grace of recognition'. Trapped by wicked deceit into their fatal misunderstandings, the innocent lovers are torn apart and die despairing lonely deaths without ever knowing the truth. But, unlike in the Shakespearian versions, there is no redeeming note at the end; whereby we might at least see the dark author of their misfortunes, like Iago, being taken off for punishment; or, as by the death of Romeo and Juliet, the feuding families being reconciled and harmonious order restored. Out of this black ending there is no victory for light. Only the dark inversion has triumphed. And thus, in a fundamental sense, the story remains unresolved.
When we move on to the operas of Verdi, we see this strange perversion of the plot of Comedy developed still further. A long succession of similarly black tales are based on misunderstandings, confusions of identity, disguises: all those devices familiarly used in Comedy to obscure the identities of characters from each other and themselves. But here the light of `recognition' never breaks in on the twilight (or not until it is too late). And again and again these stories end in the heartrending death of their heroine, although sometimes their hero and sometimes both. A typical instance of how relentlessly the tricks of misunderstanding or obscured identity could be piled on another to bring these stories to their melodramatic conclusions is the plot of Rigoletto (1851), based on a story by Victor Hugo, which so impressed Verdi that he called it `the greatest subject, and perhaps the greatest drama of modern times'.
Immediately established as the central dark figure of the story is the Duke of Mantua, Tyrant and libertine, the epitome of the `dark masculine' (as defined by the cruel exercise of power and the indiscriminate pursuit of sexual gratification). Set against him as the hero is Rigoletto, his court jester, who by dark inversion is made a hunchback. At first Rigoletto is infected with his master's darkness, addressing cruel, derisive remarks, first to the unhappy husband of a young woman whom the Duke is planning to seduce; then to the unhappy father of a girl the Duke has already dishonoured, who pronounces a curse on him.
But we now see the other side of Rigoletto, as he secretly comes at night to visit his beloved daughter Gilda, the anima, who is not allowed to know her father's name or position. Before she joyfully greets him, he curses the fate which has placed him in the power of the tyrannical Duke, whom he detests. When her father departs, the Duke himself arrives, in disguise, to woo Gilda, who had caught his fancy when he saw her in church. He pretends he is a poor student, and she falls in love with him. When he in turn leaves, his hateful courtiers arrive at the house to kidnap her, imagining she is Rigoletto's secret mistress. Rigoletto returns and, by pretending they have come to kidnap someone in the next house, the woman the Duke had earlier been planning to seduce, they blindfold the jester and persuade him to help them. He thus unwittingly assists in the kidnapping of his own daughter, whom they drag back to the Duke's palace. When Rigoletto enters the house to find her gone, he is heartbroken, remembering the curse. He heads for the palace, where the Duke has been overjoyed to see her, and she explains to her father that she and the Duke are in love. His only thought is that he must somehow murder the Duke and flee with her from Mantua.
He waits for an opportunity to revenge himself on the Duke, and at the same time to expose to his daughter her lover's true nature. The two of them watch through a crack in the wall