From Decadence to Dissonance: A leaf through the art, music, literature and sexual politics that shaped the late Victorian Era.
The 19th Century’s penchant for aesthetics helped define one of the most vibrant and vital periods in modern history. But the highly eroticised works of Klimt, Wilde and Beardsley would come crashing down through the courts, the irons, the fire and the brimstone of the impending 20th Century.
The ideal meeting of the decadent movement might have been Oscar Wilde’s short play Salomé. Originally written in French in 1891, Wilde’s tragedy tells in one act the biblical story of the beautiful Salomé, the stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, and the final few days of the life of John the Baptist. Told in elegant and powerfully symbolic prose, the play is often called Wilde’s piece of “strange music”. Oscar incited this idea himself by declaring in a letter that “the recurring phrases of Salome,… bind it together like a piece of music” Its flamboyance, its hypnotic rhythms, recurring lexical riffs and hauntingly melodic passages stitch the action together in such a way as to mimic some sort of dramatic aria.
When Salomé was translated into English three years later the text was accompanied by highly stylised and erotic illustrations by the young Aubrey Beardsley. Perfectly capturing the attitude of Wilde’s lyrical decadence and visual intensity, the etchings seem now almost inseparable from the original script.
Naturally, this movement wasn’t limited to Britain, the roots had been stretching out on the continent for the past 20 years. The development of the decadent movement there lead to painters like the Viennese Gustav Klimt creating artwork that was inspired by the priceless mosaics of Byzantium. Influenced by their inherent ‘flatness’, Klimt creates patchwork canvasses of glittering gold and vigourous colours.
In fact, the lack of ‘realist’ perspective in famous works like The Kiss and the Portrait of Adele seem to be the beating at the heart of the genre; to disband with depth and background and to push everything to the shimmering fore. When, in these images and in Wilde’s poetry, the visual intensity is forced to be so immediate and so beautiful, the allure of decadence suddenly becomes so directly apparent: these works are not concerned with representing anything, accurately or otherwise, they are concerned with creating art and nothing else.
This highly aesthetic approach is elegantly outlined in Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, he claims there quite simply that:
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
Of course this preoccupation with creating beauty was one that was not allowed to last. Salomé was banned from the London stage before it even had the chance to premiere and Beardsley was hounded as a pedlar of filth and obscenity and was forced to live out the rest of his tragically short life, a sickly Catholic convert, in Menton in France.
Wilde himself of course was tried and imprisoned for Gross Indecency on accounts of his homosexuality. Never truly recovering from the hard labour meted out at Reading Prison, Oscar Wilde died in Paris in 1900. So disgusted with Wilde’s crimes were the wider public that, from the point of his conviction, not a single child was christened Oscar in Britain for twenty years.
The imposed repression of the Victorian era at far reaching consequences. Forced by the prevailing society to conform with certain values and tastes, decadent art was forced out of polite conversation and largely ignored. As Wilde’s popularity receded, more ‘wholesome’ writers like Kipling and Hardy began to blossom.
In short, the century that followed seems totally at odds with the simple premise that Wilde laid down in his Preface in 1890. The world of Reading Gaol, of quantum mechanics, of Flanders, Ypres and the Holocaust often seems to have very little to do with artifice and beauty at all. Though Wilde’s imprisonment was to protect the sensibilities of public, the impending modernism, with its catastrophic treatment of banality, would ironically lead to dangers far greater than supposed moral delinquency.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: Heady Murder, Spoil and Villainy
Born in the same year as Shakespeare and every bit as popular with audiences at the time, meet Christopher Marlowe, the drunken, homosexual hell-raiser that is too often England’s forgotten literary genius.
Born in Canterbury in 1564, Christopher Marlowe would go on to capture the Elizabethan stage with his vibrant and often erotic plays. Drenched in sex, sin and sensational language, before Shakespeare had managed to get a foothold on the playhouses of the South Bank, Marlowe had arrived, achieved amazing success and then been stabbed through the eye in a barroom brawl… the man who killed him, it must be added, got off for self defence.
Unlike Shakespeare, Marlowe went to university and, thanks to wealthy patronage, was enrolled at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Here is where Marlowe’s colourful life and work first begins to take shape. An anarchic student, when he wasn’t drinking with other poets and playwrights like Robert Greene and Thomas Nash, Marlowe was embroiled in claims of spying and counter spying in Reims, an area of Northern France where many Catholic conspiracies were concocted. Initially being denied his degree by the university, the highest tier of government, the Privy Council, got involved and insisted that Cambridge issue him with the MA. What service, we may ask ourselves, had Marlowe done in order to win favours from the English authority?
Marlowe’s first literary works began to emerge whilst still an undergraduate. He translated the Roman poet Ovid and began work on his first play Dido, Queen of Carthage. This drama focusses heavily on events described in Virgil’s Aeneid and opens with Jupiter, the king of the gods, “dandling the infant Ganymede upon his knee” and whispering “Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me.” Can you imagine anyone getting away with that today?
When Marlowe’s plays are put on at the theatres of the South Bank, his penchant for the debauched shows no sign of slowing down. Edward II ends with the vicious murder of the king by the assassin Lightborn. As Edward is despised for his weakness at the hands of his supposed homosexual relationship with his “favourite” Piers Gaveston, Lightborn (a play on the name ‘Lucifer’ – the bringer of the light) enters Edward’s cell and murders him by ramming a red hot poker into his backside.
Of course, it’s not just fruity story lines that Marlowe is famous for. His poetic language and structure has influenced some of England’s most celebrated drama. “The Mighty Line” is how his admirers often refer to his verse because of its robust and rhythmical nature. It is true that Marlowe did not invent what we call today ‘blank verse’ (a line that is unrhymed and contains five stresses – “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships”) but he certainly mastered it. And his poetic imagination certainly influenced writers like Shakespeare. In the Jew of Malta Marlowe has the beautiful, young Abegail step out onto a balcony above her father Barabas who then asks: “But stay, what star shines yonder in the east? | The loadstar of my life, if Abigail.” Shakespeare borrows this for his famous scene in Romeo and Juliet when, in the second scene of act two, Romeo sees Juliet walk out onto her balcony and speaks the immortal: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? | It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
Marlowe’s most famous play is arguably Dr Faustus, a tragedy about the Wittenberg scholar who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for 24 years of magical powers. Inspiring works of drama, literature, opera and even an episode of the Simpsons, Marlowe’s version of the story, though not the original, is probably the most famous. Controversial throughout its 400 year history, Dr Faustus is troubling and thought-provoking but undeniably a work of vivid genius. The popularity of the play and its continuing appeal is what seems to be at the heart of all of Marlowe’s oeuvre. That is to say, his work and reputation have an intensity that defies the problems that they harbour. His style may be dark and dangerous to look at but, like Faustus, we cannot fail to still be intrigued by the power that he harnesses.
Dying at just 30, it seems impossible to imagine what he would have produced if he had lived as long as Shakespeare; and, indeed, it may be impossible to know what position this unruly and truly wild dramatist would command in the history of English literature today. He may not be the most level-headed or morally sound role model but he is an intriguing artist that can no more be ignored today as he could when he was alive.
