Francesca's Folly

The following is something I wrote for the singers involved with our project, who had some (very good!) questions about the morality play I had written for section 2 of the concert. They were asking about their characters, some of whom are angels, and some of whom aren't, but more generally they were asking about the play's relation to Michaelmas. Earl, bless him, thought more folks might be interested in my explication, and he asked me to post my thoughts.

Francesca's Folly is a temptation story. The character of Francesca herself has a couple of precedents, and in the most basic way, when the story begins, she is like Milton's Eve on the morning before she eats the apple (cf. Paradise Lost, book 5, lines 1-94). Lucifer has infused her mind with dreams of transgression, and her state of innocence has been marred by unfamiliar longings for desires that remain unfulfilled. Francesca, like Eve, seeks knowledge--in this case, knowledge about herself as a being in the throes of unfamiliar emotion, but also knowledge about her beloved (whose behaviour she doesn't understand).

In other ways, however, Francesca is like her namesake: Francesca da Rimini of Canto V of Dante's Inferno. In Dante's text da Rimini is condemned to the second circle of Hell for lustful behaviour, and she and her lover Paolo find that their love endures despite Hell's torments (something that Milton later echoes when Adam and Eve continue to love one another after the fall). And for our Francesca, who loves her lover (even though he's a bit of a cad), the belief that her love will endure the torment that it causes is enough to drive her forward in pursuit of him.

The difference between our Francesca and her predecessors, however, is that in Francesca's Folly the protagonist is led by angels to rescue herself from the brink of damnation. This is what links Francesca's Folly to the medieval morality play, the genre around which the plot was conceived. Morality plays tend to begin with God, descend to earth, and return to God again: and in the earthly interlude we are shown the temptation of a protagonist, most often a generic figure meant to represent all of mankind. The protagonist, as in the case of a play like Everyman, encounters personifications of virtues or vices (creatively named things like "Vice" or "Sin" or "Good Deeds"), and these figures either mislead the protagonist from or redirect him towards the virtuous life--and, consequently, eternal life in heaven. Hence the form of Francesca's Folly: it begins with God, who laments that one of his creatures is being led astray; the protagonist then encounters the negative force (Lucifer), and two redemptive forces (Raphael, Michael); collectively these forces prepare her to confront the sin disguised within her breast (which is externalized and personified in the form of a monster in a cave). Francesca, like Everyman, has the strength to admit her own folly and repent it before she dies, and Michael (who, among other things, is the angel who conducts the dead back to heaven) brings Francesca's soul towards God. God, unsurprisingly, gets the final word.

Francesca's Folly is different from the morality plays in a couple of major ways, though. First, the protagonist is a woman, and the crisis she undergoes is entirely psychological. In the morality plays the 'evil' force is a common sin (someone loves wealth more than good deeds, etc); here, the problem is harder to define and certainly not what we ordinarily think of as 'sinful'. Francesca is in love, and she's in love with a man whom she suspects of toying with her affections. His perpetual rejections cause her to recognize how dependent her self-esteem is on her ability to command the love of others--but rather than confront that knowledge, she comes to think she might be returned to her former state of grace if she secures the love of the one person who denies it to her. A loss of integrity and a desperate pursuit of Lucifer are the result.

The good angels, however, intervene to correct the damage begun by Lucifer, and each angel offers Francesca the opportunity to shift her perspective. Raphael, the healer, speaks like a fool to encourage her to take her own folly less seriously, and brings her comfort in sleep. Michael awakes Francesca as a lover might, speaking in the language of the Song of Solomon (another story in which a bride flies after her groom)--and in his voice, which is in some ways a representation of the voice of God, Francesca hears, however elusively, something of a truer and more profound type of love. This exposes the egoism and self-indulgence that lies within her affection for Lucifer; when she confronts the beast in Lucifer's den, her love appears grotesque by comparison and she forswears it. She returns to Michael, she dies, and her soul is escorted to heaven.

If the ending is a little grim, I'd encourage you to think of death as a euphemism, Renaissance-style. And if the moral of my morality play appears a little too medieval for modern tastes (repent! repent!), I'd like to say that the theology really is not. I designed the angels as facets of the human spirit, cast outward into recognizable forms. When Dan approached me about the Michaelmas project he asked for a vision of how angels interact with us in everyday ways ... and while there isn't much that's ordinary about this bizarre little sequence, I think the phenomenon it attempts to describe is about as normal as you can get. It describes those moments of blindness or insight wherein the psyche hurts, heals, and becomes more visible to itself; the angels, fallen and un-, personify that process.