Workshop Discoveries 3: Malheureux’s Reason
Another of The Dutch Courtesan’s characters who revealed surprising pathos was Malheureux. Perhaps it was how the cut text focused our gaze more intensely on him, but it was striking to The Dutch Courtesan project team to hear how often Malheureux expresses to be not himself – ‘I am / No whit myself’ (2.2.75-6), 'I am not now myself, no man' (4.2.28) – or worries that he is out of his mind – ‘I must not rave’ (2.2.97). He additionally describes himself as ‘taken uncollected suddenly’ (2.2.194), and constantly returns to dwell on the failure of reason to protect him: ‘my lust, not I, before my reason would’ (3.1.195); ‘There is ... no reason in desire’ (4.2.11-12), and in 2.2 he desperately invokes a striking image of ‘accursèd Reason’ who ‘many eyes hast ... to sow thy shame[,] / And yet how blind once to prevent defame!' (2.1.85-87). Freevill, too, refers to Malheureux in connection with reason, perhaps most cruelly in 5.3, when he reprimands Malheureux at the scaffold saying ‘No requests, / No arguments of reason, no known danger ... Could draw your heart from this damnation’ (32-35). What is cruel about this statement is that Malheureux was only led away from reason as a result of Freevill’s plot to humiliate Malheureux and, by introducing him to a courtesan, to teach him that Malheureux’s moral code is against natural desire, and holds men to a standard of behaviour they are doomed to fail at upholding. Freevill find himself having to restore Malheureux to reason only because his plot fails, and Malheureux, rather than moderating his stance of sexual purity, goes to the other extreme, following his lustful desire to the point of very nearly choosing a courtesan over his friend.
Malheureux’s distress at his sudden discovery of sexual desire has, nevertheless, much comic potential. Indeed, the Toronto Dutch Courtesan played the hapless Malheureux’s belated sexual awakening for laughs, including comically miming covering an erection when he first sees Franceschina and exclaims ‘What a proportion afflicts me?’ Following our workshop and conversations that continued in rehearsal, George Worrall as Malheureux walked a fine line between buffoonish exaggerated emotion and serious psychological pain. In the final two acts of the play – notably after he decides to warn Freevill about Franceschina’s plot to kill him, using Malheureux as her pawn – Malheureux’s distress mounts in ways that are funny (because of his desperation) and painful. Although Malheureux expresses relief following Freevill’s revelations and his escape from the noose, saying finally ‘‘I am myself’ (5.3), Worrall also played the play’s final moments – in which the play’s noble characters ascended the stage balcony for a series of reunions – with a muted dismay, leaving the play’s happy ending, his recovery from Freevill’s lesson and his continued friendship with Freevill himself in some doubt.