John Arden's anti-imperialist, anti-war play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, An Un-historical Parable (1959) centers on the lives of a group of deserters led by the eponymous Musgrave featured in the title of the play. Musgrave and his followers leave a late-nineteenth-century military enterprise in protest of what they saw as disproportionate violence. The deserters end up in an impoverished town in the North of England.
The play's theme of the contagious nature of the madness that is violence is reflected in the following passage from Musgrave himself:
Join along with my madness, friend. I brought it back to England but I've brought the cure too—to turn it on to them that sent it out of this country—way-out-ay they sent it, where they hoped that only soldiers could catch it and rave!
One of Musgrave's followers, Attercliffe, reproaches Musgrave for returning to the violence from which they ostensibly fled, saying, "You swore their'd be no killing," to which Musgrave responds, "I did not." Attercliffe persists, noting that "You gave us to believe. We've done what we came for, and it's there we should have ended." But the play shows that violence, once it has begun, keeps spawning counter-violence.
Towards the end of the play, a woman in the town, Mrs. Hitchcock, reproaches Musgrave for having brought war to a town that was already in the midst of a strike and plagued by hunger and instability. She says, "You brought in a different war," meaning a war other than the struggle of people to feed themselves and their families. Musgrave does not accept responsibility: "I brought it in to end it," he says. Arden's point is that all wars are made under the pretense of bringing an end to war, and that none of them, in his view, succeed.
Monday, May 12, 2014
What are some important quotations in Serjeant Musgrave's Dance?
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