Dylan's Visions of Sin (35 page)

– sharply seen, this, in the way it catches the deep-set look of lust and of ageing (your eyes will deepen in your head, just as you will get long in the
tooth because of those receding gums), so as to mean
His old eyes deepened still further in his head
. Bed-rheumy eyes. And then Dylan’s sequence is perfectly clear and
yet not quite what you expect:

–
Sayin’
? It is as though his eyes were seen to say this in the split second before his lips did. Not
When the judge saw Reilly’s daughter, he
said
, but
His old eyes deepened in his head / Sayin’
.

When old Reilly hears of this (immediately, for the song cuts directly from the old judge’s words to old Reilly’s), he doesn’t crawl:

The vault into the saddle is from the creepily slow-paced “And my skin will surely crawl” into “Get on your horse and ride away”.
²⁶⁰

The horses, as so often in ballads and in Westerns (and in D. H. Lawrence’s
St Mawr
), suggest energies that include sexual energies, as riding does. “Old Reilly stole a
stallion”. “She rode by night and came by morning”.
²⁶¹
“Get on your horse and ride away”. But in the night (“In
the night the price was paid”) she submits to being not the rider but the ridden, mounted by her extortioner in his lust. Once again there might come to mind the opening soliloquy of
Richard III
, with its exacerbated sexuality:

One temptation that the song itself successfully resists is the sin of anger. (In
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
, the temptation might have been to respond
in kind, whereas anger is not what besets the perpetrator in
Seven Curses
.) More pressing might have been – though there was never any real danger of this, given the character of
Dylan’s art – the sin of lust in its turn. For attacks on lust are often in collusion with it. Think of all those films that mount a crusade against pornography in a way that makes it
deliciously necessary for them to show us a great deal of pornography.
²⁶²
Lust does not cease to be lust just because it is ostentatiously deplored.
One of the sleaziest forms that lust can take is prurience. So it is greatly to the credit of
Seven Curses
that the song does not yield to self-righteous anger in the face of the
judge’s wrongdoing, and that it offers no combination of the high-minded and the low-bodied. D. H. Lawrence was repelled by such a combination in the eighteenth-century novelist who
fascinatedly explored rape, “Richardson with his calico purity and his underclothing excitements”.
²⁶³
Seven Curses
does the decent
thing, and this with controlled imagination, averting not only its eyes but its mind from what took place “In the night”. This, as against the act itself, is an act of respect.

The story in Dylan’s ballad is folklore, sometimes all too true: a judge says that he will refrain from carrying out the death-sentence provided that the woman who is pleading with him for
someone’s life will bribe him with her body. This story is at the heart of
Measure for Measure
.
²⁶⁴
Shakespeare’s genius is in
eliciting the hideous complexities that ensue when Angelo puts it to the virgin Isabella (pleading for the life of her brother, who has been condemned to death for fornication) that all she has to
do is sacrifice her body. In Dylan’s ballad the strength is in the simplicity, in what is
not
questioned, whereas the very different strength of
Measure for Measure
is in what
is questioned. Yet it is crucial not to forget that both are grounded on the secure belief that what the judge does is heinous.

The contrasts are many.

In
Measure for Measure
, the justice of the sentence passed upon her brother is centrally vexed: death as the punishment for fornication? But that is the old law, there in Vienna, and the
absent old Duke had said that he had
been remiss in not enforcing the law, and venereal disease is death-dealingly rampant, and and and. And the man who now rules in the
Duke’s absence is not someone who is sympathetic to the lusts of the flesh. His lusts are of the spirit – or always had been until Isabella pleads with him on her condemned
brother’s behalf.

By contrast, there is nothing in
Seven Curses
to suggest that the horse-thief Reilly doesn’t deserve to hang.
²⁶⁵

The song simply sets aside the whole question of whether stealing a horse is justly punishable by death. The point is not that the song endorses the punishment; rather, that
this never enters at all. All we know is that we are in a world where such a sentence is unmisgivingly passed. As often in such a case, the modern listener (or reader or viewer) is asked to be not
a historian but an anthropologist – come on, you can imagine a society in which these severities make sense, however much they may strike you as cruel and unusual punishment. Reilly himself
doesn’t say a word about the sentence’s being too severe, and nor does his daughter. And when the judge is judged “so cruel”, this too doesn’t invoke the harshness of
the sentence itself, but the judge’s lustful incitement of the sexual bribe and then his ratting on it after he has taken it, taken her.

But then there is a related impassivity in the face of bribery itself. Shakespeare’s Isabella would never have dreamt of trying to bribe Angelo with gold and silver or with anything. So
she could not have been met by any tacky snigger along the lines of “Wrong bribe, darling”. (“The price, my dear, is you instead.”) For Reilly’s daughter, though, and
for the chilly realism in such respects that is characteristic of a ballad, there is no question as to whether she should try bribery – the morality of bribery, like the justice (or not) of
the sentence, just doesn’t come up. Reilly’s daughter brings gold and silver. Such is the way of the world, and the judge responds to it in his way of the world.

A further contrast between Shakespeare’s play and Dylan’s ballad would
raise another question that the ballad, secure within its due limits, does not raise:
is a judge the better for not acting on a bribe? Agreed, a judge should not accept a bribe, and certainly should not solicit one (a sexual solicitation here). But once he has taken the bribe, might
it not be better if he went ahead with the sentence that had been passed? At least he would not then have perverted the course of justice. Now, a key difference between the play and the ballad is
exactly here: would it be the course of
justice
, as against that of injustice, if Angelo were to proceed as though he had never incited and secured the bribe? Was the original sentence a
just one? (But then might it not be a judge’s duty to proceed with a sentence even if it were an unjust one?) Within the intricately philosophical and jurisprudential world of
Shakespeare’s play, a play of which the first sentence circuitously begins “Of government the properties to unfold . . .”, it must be in question, however distastefully, whether a
bribed judge does not do better by the world if at least he doesn’t act on the bribe. He may be the worse person, intrinsically – but consequentially, as an officer of the law?

Such are the knotty complications, ethical and political, characteristic of
Measure for Measure
. But
Seven Curses
cuts all such knots. The judge incurs seven curses. His not acting
on the bribe, far from being perhaps a mitigating circumstance, compounds his offence. Clean-cut simplicity, and clean lines – however dirty the world.

Another contrast such as brings out the ballad virtues of limits and of the off-limits: Reilly’s daughter has no doubt at all that she must “take the chance to try”. She knows
that it is only a chance, for the judge – as is to be expected in such a case – will almost certainly renege. (As he does in the play, too. The person who acts on a bribe makes any
subsequent accusation against him much more credible than if he just carries on in due process.) But she is sure in her own mind. To her father’s protest that she must leave at once
(“And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all”), she replies with her own
surely
:

It is up to her. Her father’s cry is more than advice, but she judges it right not to heed his cry. Yet in
Measure for Measure
there is an unending contention both
within Isabella and outside her. Is she right to repudiate
Angelo’s hateful offer? She is sure of her spiritual duty – her body is not hers to sacrifice, and
the more so because she is a novitiate nun. And yet she is agonized by her decision. Her brother at first rises to the high ground and agrees with her – but then breaks down: What is a
maidenhead compared to a life? She repudiates him, furiously. But what price will she pay, for the rest of her life, for her refusal to take the chance and try to save his life?

At which point a further contrast must surface, for Isabella is rescued from having to live with such a decision not to save a life: the Duke returns, and with providential powers he saves the
day by now saving the night. Angelo had been betrothed to Mariana, and Mariana is happy to take Isabella’s place by night, so that the bribe can be paid without Isabella’s having to pay
it. So far, so good. But not so fast, not far enough, for Angelo does the expected wrong thing, and – having (as he thinks) enjoyed Isabella – means to proceed with the execution of her
brother all the same. Once again, the Duke must act fast if he is to prevent tragedy . . .

The point of retailing all this is to bring out the contrast with
Seven Curses
. In the play, there is rescue, by the miracle that is providence and that is tragicomedy. In the ballad,
there is simply tragedy. Dylan’s voice, entirely without sentimentality, refuses to break or to break down, it simply catches, at the moment when he sings the word “broken”:

The proverbial hope behind the antithesis of “bend” and “break” is lost in tragedy. Wittgenstein: “You get tragedy where the tree, instead of
bending, breaks.”
²⁶⁶
The hanging branch hangs there, and there it hangs people.

There is no hope that anything but what we know will happen will happen. The daughter will sacrifice herself, to no avail. She and her father are differently lost. And so, in a further different
way, is the judge.

Not that there will be justice here on this earth. Whereas in the play’s world of strained hope, justice returns and the Duke effects a rescue, the ballad has to despair of any trust in
justice. Or even in revenge.
Measure for Measure
has a great many complicated feelings and thoughts about justice, as any Christian play ought to have, while containing Shakespeare’s
greatest evocation of Christian mercy:

Isabella’s cry to Angelo is in vain, but her cry to the heavens is not, and justice comes. So revenge is not called for, is not called upon. But in
Seven Curses
there is simultaneously a justified craving for revenge and an unflinching recognition that it will not be forthcoming. There will be no Clint Eastwood armoured in white light. Unfortunately not,
since revenge would be the real right thing. The ballad is as obdurate as was A. E. Housman: “Revenge is a valuable passion, and the only sure pillar on which justice
rests.”
²⁶⁷
Not the only pillar (that would be an exaggeration . . .), but the only sure one. So whereas the play can end with mercy of a kind,
the ballad must end with its hopeless seven curses.

Simplicity is won, hard-won, but this doesn’t mean that our response to it is uncomplicated. And it doesn’t mean that the art of such simplicity is easy. Take the expunging of
Reilly. “Old Reilly” opens the first verse, and “When Reilly’s daughter”
²⁶⁸
the second. The third opens, “When
the judge saw Reilly’s daughter”, and the fourth, “‘Oh I’m as good as dead’, cried Reilly”. So his name has been heard, though differently, as each of the
first four verses opens. But with the words “‘Oh I’m as good as dead’, cried Reilly”, he goes, as good as dead, to be unnamed in the succeeding verses, all five of
them. All that is left for him, and of him, is to hang there, in the last line of the last verse before the curses begin: “She saw her father’s body broken”. But then he had been
as good as dead from the very first verse, where Dylan had made the tiny inspired change of the preposition “on” to “in”. Originally he sang what is printed in
Lyrics
1962–1985
: