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EQUUS vs. AMADEUS Within the course of this report, we will compare and contrast two plays of Peter Shaffer Equus and Amadeus. The play Equus is about a young boy who viciously blinds six horses with a metal spike in a stable and the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, who investigates the boys mental state. It is a very complex, multi leveled story, with many relationships effecting Allens behavior. The relationship between Alan and Equus is a very complex one.
His worship for the horse comes from his mothers beliefs in God. She is very religious and pushes religion on Alan. His father was the opposite. He would not let Allen keep a picture of God in his room and forced him to replace it with a picture of a horse. Slowly, the horse became God in Alans eyes. (Shaffer 27) Alans father seems to fear religion and in some instances he fears horses. He becomes belligerent on the beach when the man lets Alan ride the horse with him.
He also becomes belligerent when Alans mother tries to include religion in Alans life. It seems his father has strong emotional reactions to anything he cant control or understand. Alan sensed that reaction and because of it he turned a horse into a god. Its almost like Alan was drawn to anything his father did not like because he did not want to be like his father. Allen is driven to all his father hates, such as television and religion. When Alan sees his father coming out of the porno movie theater, he is devastated because he is caught acting like his father.
The relationship between Alan and Dysart is one of mutual envy. Dysart envies Alan because of his passion. Dysart lives a boring life with a wife he does not love. He resents her for lacking passion, when he lacks passion himself.
He is sarcastic when he speaks of his relationship and his life. He has no passion for anything. He is saddened because his job is to cure Alan and in doing that he will make him a normal person with no passion in his life. To cure Alan, Dysart must destroy part of him. Alan envies Dysart because he is normal. Alans mutilation of the horses and his obsession with God and horses torture Alan.
I think he envies Dysart because he has none of the demons that he has. When Alan blinds the horses it is in desperation. He believes the horses are watching him, forever taunting him. It is his only escape. He feels as if he betrayed the horses by having a sexual relationship with a woman. In Alans mind he has committed a grave sin and the horses were the witnesses.
Blinding them was his attempt to cover up his actions. His sin makes him a failure in the horses eyes; unfortunately he is a failure in his own eyes as well. This is why Alans last words in the play were Find me Find me Kill me Kill me (Shaffer 106). He really was tormented by guilt and wanted to die himself. One of the most important concerns discussed in the play is a religious one.
Freud believes he has solved the problem while Dysart is confused and unsure. Religious belief is an illusion, says Freud, because it is motivated by a wish fulfillment without basis in what we know about reality. They cannot be proven nor can they be refuted and thus they must be rejected. But Freud does not say that currently we can live without religion, for without it the world might very well fall into chaos. Religion has done a great service in taming asocial instincts, but man can do better.
Freud saw humanity as an adolescent, a child who is still bound to the father. He also brings up the Oedipus complex which means that the child harbors feelings of resentment for the father and when it grows older, it will turn away from him as a process of growth. Freud thought that man will someday use scientific reasoning to outgrow the need for spiritual beliefs. Where Freud could live without a god, Martin Dysart cannot.
He too is a psychiatrist, and a very successful one. He has a flourishing practice at an overcrowded mental hospital and is highly respected. He has never had to question his beliefs or standards until he begins to counsel a young man named Alan Strang. Alan was referred to Dr. Dysart because he cut out the eyes of six horses, blinding them.
Dysart discovers that Alan worships a horse-god which he calls Equus. He lived for being able to ride Equus once every three weeks. Dysart soon realizes that he has never known the kind of worship Alan knows and he becomes jealous because he realizes how fulfilling worship and religion can be in life. Dysart says, "Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that... I shrank my own life" (Shaffer 82). Thus he does not reject worship and religion but he personally realizes its formidability even in the modern world.
The play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer was not written in order to be a biography of the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, much more than this, Peter Shaffer wrote it as a story, rather than a history. In his story he was free to insert fiction to make the play more interesting to a wide audience, as well as to fulfill his purposes. The center of the play lies on the character of Antonio Salieri and his obsessive jealously of Mozart. To convey this plot, it was necessary that Salieri had motives enough dislike Mozart. So it was necessary to build a character that was extremely competent but with no talent at all to contrast with a genius who behaved badly.
With this, Salieri would have reasons to be jealous. As his first attempt to convey his plot, Salieri is shown as a musical hack as we can see in this extract: Bewildered, Mozart does so (halts and listens), becoming aware of Salieri playing his March of Welcome. It is an extremely banal piece, vaguely but only vaguely - reminiscent of another march to become very famous later one. (Shaffer 44) The truth is that Salieri was recognized as a great composer and that is the reason he was appointed as the court composer and imperial Kapellmeister. He had several students, including Beethoven, Liszt and Schubert. His operas were performed and acclaimed in Italy and France during 1778 to 1790.
Unfortunately, his style lost worth and his works were no longer popular at the end of the XVIII century. However, showing Salieri as only a competent musician was intentional in order to convey the plot, which is the rivalry against Mozart's artistic creativity and Salieri's intellectual capacity. Salieri held his posts in the court from 1774 until 1824. He died one year later in 1825 and in his last years he suffered from senility.
During 1824 there was indeed the rumor in Vienna that someone had heard Salieri saying that he had poisoned Mozart. However, many biographies of Mozart dont even mention the probability of poisoning and in 1825 the attendants of Salieri said that they had never heard Salieri saying that he had killed Mozart. Furthermore, if Salieri had indeed said those things, it wouldnt have meant that he indeed poisoned him, it could be related to his weak mind. On the other hand, Constant supported the idea that Salieri killed Mozart and she believed that Salieri planned against Mozart during his life. Shaffer probably decided to write this play because of this rumor of a murder between two great composers. This idea, which at that time was indeed plausible, fed Shaffer with inspirations to write Amadeus.
Even not being true, Salieri poisoning Mozart was a demand for Shaffer's play. Again, a play here is a piece of art, not a biography. What seems to be the most important topic of the play is the relation between Salieri and Mozart. As it is seen throughout the play, Salieri's envy is not demonstrated to others; he treated Mozart with respect and had friendly manners. However, he boycotted Mozart inside the court. We see that Salieri betrayed Mozart when he was not around, while held courtly manners in front of him.
In real life, nothing can prove us that Salieri was or was not a jealous character. However, we can say that Salieri's jealously might have been true, as he had high posts and Mozart could seem to him as a threat. On the other hand, as Salieri had such honorable career inside the court, he could have done something to prevent operas like The Abduction from the seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, and Cosi fan Tutte from being presented in the court theaters. He had influence enough to prohibit these operas and he did not.
Besides, if his jealousy were obsessive as it is shown, others would have noticed. And all that is reported about Salieri is that he was a small-town, earnest young man, filled with a Single desperate desire to serve God. Again, in the play Salieri must be exactly how he is portrayed because his personality is the plot itself. His jealousy is the main plot of Amadeus.
In any other way Shaffer could convey his intentions. Another element that was controversial in the release of the play is how Mozart's character is portrayed. In Amadeus there are examples of Mozart using inappropriate language, lacking respect for the emperor and behaving like a child. However, it is said that at that time, if he behaved the way he does in the play towards the emperor, it would result in banishment from the court. At that time, it was impossible to imagine someone addressing an emperor the way he did.
Mozart is portrayed as a spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine man. () However, Shaffer himself tells that this portrait of Mozart was indeed excessive. The theatrical portrait of Mozart in Amadeus is clearly excessive and one-sided, at least in the expositional first act. It has been made so deliberately by crowding together into an hours time instances of Wolfgang's most unattractive behavior, so as to provide ever-increasing fuel for Salieri's equally mounting sense of outrage. This is dramatically essential, because at the end of the act, Salieri has to explode in a furious, pain-racked, violently aggrieved address to his God, upbraiding him for choosing a patently unworthy man to be his divine instrument. But what is documented is that Mozart was extremely irritable. All his sentiments had more violence than depths.
So Mozart personality was exaggerated in order to convey the plot. Being like this, we would give a minimal reason for Salieri being jealous. It was intentional to make Mozart as a silly person so that Salieri's rage would have a motif. With these discussed elements of the play, it seems noticeable that a playwright or any writer is free to use any ornament needed to convey what he wants to transmit to the readers. Shaffer, although being a Mozart scholar, used some fictional elements to write his story about the relation between the two composers. Words Count: 1, 862.
Bibliography: Shaffer, P. Amadeus. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Shaffer, P. Equus. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.
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