In both Equus and Amadeus Shaffer shows insanity in his characters. He does this not only to stress the characters feelings and state of mind of which they are in. Also, he attempts to cast a blanket over the reader; it gives the reader the feeling that Shaffer designed the characters to express and reflect the beauty in insanity and to convey the ugliness on normality.
Madness, if not out rightly divine, is at best preferable to the 20th centurys ruthless and uninspired sanity, is in this play, as it is so much fashionable philosophizing, totally dependent on a pleasant, aesthetically rational form of derangement for the credibility of its argument (Richardson 389). Shaffer brings us into these feelings with the story of Alan Strang, a seventeen-year-old British boy. He has been sent to Rokeby Psychiatric Hospital in southern England to get help for the crime of blinding six horses that he worked with.
Equus. rgically probes mans continuing fascination with violent forms of belief (Gill 387). Shaffer makes this all so obvious to us. Alan is an insane young man with no justification and quandary that must be dealt with. His therapist Dysart sees that this boy is troubled and can be helped, but fears that there might be something deeper. Dysart recognizes also that the boy he is treating has experienced a passion more ferocious that I have felt in any second of my life (Real389). Clearly he envies this. In turn Dysart fears that the passion of the boy, not because he cant understand it, but because he does.
The inference is that, once cured, that is, rid or his divine suffering, Alan will become a dullard like most normal people (Clurman 388). Shaffer is trying to illustrate that normality is not good, but bad and that the only way to be divine is this state of mind is to go by Shaffers idea of insane. Shaffer wants us to think in the mindset of the boy and see what he sees. He wants us to feel the insane thoughts of Equus and experience the urge to follow to voice, but we must ask our selves; what divine spirit is this we see? There is nothing to it but the pure crazed madness of a boy.
After reading the play you are left feeling sorry for the poor soul because he was never able to fit into society and the normality, but hear he is being forced into it. Shaffer uses the word insane is strong context because as the author he has control of how it will be read as a defined. With this power, Shaffer rolls the word off each readers tongue as if it were a holy name of god. Shaffer is questioning the notion or sanity and normality and this intrigues the reader. But when it comes time for Dysart to do his job, what will happen to the boy? Theres no question that the boy himself is in deep pain and distress (Shaffer 356).
Is Dysart the savior to the hell that Alan is going through or is he the fiend that will show Alan the hell that is normality? Amadeus begins with the savage whispers and snakelike hissing of the Ventricelli, the two Little Winds who appear throughout the play, spreading rumors. They spew forth words from their mouths like curses, First Saliere and assassin emerge, followed by the talk of Mozarts death, or murder, and the question that we are left with: Did Saliere murder Mozart? If he did, why did he wait thirty-two years to make his confession (Morace 37)?
Saliere starts his story off by telling us about his bargain with God. He says that in exchange for Gods making him a composer, he would dedicate his art to God and his life to serving God and man (Morace 37). This is the Saliere with love in his heart and good fortune in his future, but he soon changes his way of looking at the good that God does. The Saliere of 1781 is an honored and prolific composer in the court of Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, who he has dedicated his life and his talents to the greater honor and glory of God and has obtained fame.
Salieri belongs to a clique of Italians who have culturally colonized the court. His composure is shaken when Mozart, an upstart Austrian prodigy from Salzburg, comes to Vienna and makes a favorable impression on the Emperor. Though he never questions Mozarts talent, Salieri becomes insanely jealous (Welsh 34). Mozart challenges all Salieris assumptions: social, religious, and aesthetic (Morace 37). Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the genius composer, is presented as a crude, vulgar, and tactless young egotist who has absolutely no modesty with regard to his talent.
The victim of the drama, Mozart is innocent and nave in the devious world of court politics, too tactless to veil his contempt for the Court Italians and Salieris music and too nave to recognize Salieri as his most dangerous enemy (Welsh 34). Through this foul-mouthed, bottom-pinching boor, Salieri hears the voice of God, music more wondrous than he had ever imagined (Blake 384). This leaves Salieri feeling naked, empty, and jealous. Even worse he feels betrayed by God, fated, as he now believes.
Salieri believes that he has to kill Mozart in order to strike at his betrayer and enemy, God. Shaffer is raising the level of insanity, which seems to be leading to the evil scheming and deed that will leave Mozart dead. Salieri will do whatever he can to foil Mozart in order to force God to acknowledge Salieris existence, but here is the paradox. As a skilled student of music, he alone in all of Vienna seems to be able to appreciate the divine prodigy that has come in the person of the crude, but gifted, adolescent from Salzburg.
He alone knows that God is speaking to his people, and the thought that God speaks through such a vulgar prophet drives him to the edge of insanity (Blake 384). To my last breath I shall block you on Earth, as far as I am able how could God, after all, bypass a righteous Salieri for an infantile boy? (Shaffer 58) Salieri finds that God only mocks him now and must do everything in his power to end this. This rage even drives him to believe that the obscene laughter that comes from Mozart was not Mozart laughing.
That was God laughing at me through that obscene giggle (Shaffer 46). Salieri goes on to say that he indeed killed Mozart. Ecco mi. Antonio Salieri. Ten years of my hate have poisoned you to death (Shaffer 57). He believes that he drove Mozart to fatality with the hatred that hed conveyed. Mozarts death is, in this telling, sad; Salieris is at once self-serving and terrifying. Buried in famebut for work I knew to be absolutely worthless, Salieri survives only to see himself become extinct as Mozarts posthumous reputation increases.
For thirty-two years Salieri nurses his hate, refusing to be Gods joke and demanding to be remembered, if not in fame, then infamy. Thus, he composes a false confession in which he explains how I really murdered Mozartwith arsenicout of envy! Then, as the sun rises and the play draws to its conclusion, he cuts his throat with a razor. Again, however, Salieri fails. He does not die; his confession is found but not believed. It is dismissed as the raving of a madman (Morace 39).
Shaffer ends off leaving us with our mouths wide open, craving more of the story like bees after honey, more of the tale told by the insane old man. This story of the insane from the eyes of the insane also makes it seem as if the norm is insanity and we are all but puppets with our strings being dangled for us by normality. But positioning such an alternative is false. One need not be crazed to live untrammeled by conventional proscriptions. Most of the insane are in every way for more wretched and pitiful than the average man in his quiet despair of humdrum gloom (Clurman 388).
