Sayers and Constantine: 3

The Emperor Constantine is not a great play, largely because Sayers, who had done a tremendous amount of reading in preparing to write it, seems to be under some compulsion to share as much of that reading as possible. So we get a lot of backstory and political context hammered into the dialogue in classic “As you know, my Lady” style.

FLAVIUS [Constantinus Chlorus]: Yes. The old man sent me west and kept the boy at court — as a hostage for my loyalty, I suppose. He trusts no one. But when Diocletian retired, I sent to Galerius — who has succeeded him, you know, as Augustus of the East —

HELENA: Yes, yes, I know.

It’s painful, and even more painful when Sayers uses The Common Folk to mediate it:

So old Maximian starts cussin’ and swearin’ and tries to ‘ave the purple off ‘im, see? But the troops only laughs at ‘im, and the old boy runs off to Constantine, ‘owling blue murder. And Constantine treats ‘im very kind, but ‘e don’t give ‘im no power, see? because of upsettin’ Maxentius. Besides, the old boy was past it. But any’ow, Maxentius ‘ad is ‘ands full, because Africa goes and ‘as a rebellion and sets up a new Augustus on its own.

Stop. Please, make it stop. In his columns in the Irish Times Myles na gCopaleen would often introduce the thoughts of The Plain People of Ireland. Sayers seems to have had a similar idea of The Plain People of England and makes frequent use of them — even when she has to disguise them as Romans — from the East End of Rome, no doubt. Fossato di Riva. Or Cappella Bianca. (That was a joke for Londoners.) In general, though, while Sayers knows the shortcomings of the P. P. of E., she has more affection for them than Myles had for the P. P. of I., whom he called an “ignorant self-opinionated sod-minded suet-brained ham-faced mealy-mouthed streptococcus-ridden gang of natural gobdaws.”

But I digress. Back to the play.

There’s another bizarre moment when Sayers is describing the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and she gives us this:

OFFICER: We left the city by the Milvian Bridge, and when we got to the fork —

MAJOR DOMO: Where the Cassia turns into the Via Flaminia?

OFFICER: That’s it — we took the Flaminian Way. About a mile out, you come to a narrow defile between the hills and the river —

CRASSUS: I know it. The Red Rocks.

The Turn-by-Turn Navigation Is Definitely Not the Drama. This could not possibly be less relevant to the essential concerns of the play, and, alas, there’s more like it.

But the story has a strong spine, and if you strip away the irrelevancies, you can see its shape. I’m borrowing the “spine” metaphor from Peter Jackson, who said that when he and Fran Walsh and Philippa Bowens were writing The Lord of the Rings they knew they couldn’t tell the whole story, so they had to find a spine, a firm but flexible narrative line which would hold the movie together. The Emperor Constantine has such a spine, though it’s less like a straight rod than a double helix. It looks something like this:

The complex process by which Constantine moves from a vaguely pious religiosity to belief in the defense of what we could now call Nicene orthodoxy — and, ultimately, achieves a complete existential reliance on the Triune God celebrated at Nicaea.

The complex process by which the Catholic Church came to realize that the account given by Arius and his followers of who Christ is could not be tolerated as a viable option — even if the refusal of the Arian position brought, for a time, increased division in an already-divided Church.

And so the Council of Nicaea itself, presided over by Constantine, becomes the point at which the two helices meet.

The (even more complex) sequence of events and achievements by which Constantine became first a Caesar and then, eventually, the sole Emperor of Rome, however intrinsically interesting it might be, has nothing to do with double-helical spine of this story, and it’s a shame that Sayers did not recognize that. If she had recognized it, this might not be a forgotten play. I wish I had the time to make a reduced and clarified version of this play — an Imperial Edit, as it were, by analogy to the Phantom Edit.

More in the next post about this double helix.