Equus: “After Such Little Forgiveness, What Knowledge?”

For those of us who believe that it is impossible to read too much into literature and life, Hamlet's enigmatic warning, “You would pluck out the heart of my mystery,” serves as a reminder of the dangers of peering too deeply into the nature of things, and of the possibility of extracting the life from the subject we may be trying to save. “We murder to dissect,” Wordsworth said, applying a medical image to show how the intellect can rob our capacity to feel and to be. And T. S. Eliot expressed the fear in these haunting words: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” There is a tradition of literature in which, contrary to the classical notion that knowledge leads to power (or “Knowledge is power,” as Freud boldly affirmed), the artist sees a dichotomy between knowing and being, contemplation and action, art and life. The origin of this belief is as old as the myth of Adam and Eve, in which partaking of the apple of knowledge leads to the expulsion from Eden and the resulting loss of innocence, spontaneity, and organic wholeness.

It is to this tradition of literature that Peter Shaffer's psychological-detective mystery Equus belongs. Ironically, Hamlet's words assume an unexpected multiple meaning here: Equus not only dramatizes the idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but it vividly depicts the literal and metaphorical ways in which a self-tortured adolescent, Alan Strang, plucks out the eyes of several horses he loves. The intense dramatic suspense of the play derives from Dr. Martin Dysart's reluctant efforts to investigate the causes—the “madness”—of Alan's psychic illness, and to force the patient to abreact: that is, to act out the crime for the purpose of yielding a clue as to its meaning. At the