Shakespeare’s realistic deae ex machinae

Is life as we know it likely?

It took most of high school for me to figure out that my love for Shakespeare bore better fruit in commentary than in performance. In the meantime, I was cast in a variety of important roles, such as Second Guard in Twelfth Night. My last role before I graduated was playing a minor Greek goddess named Hymen who shows up at the end of As You Like It to preside over the characters’ wedding. According to Greek mythology, if Hymen doesn’t show up to a wedding, “the marriage would supposedly prove disastrous.” Bad news for all of Shakespeare’s other couples, though good news for the four (4!) couples married at the end of As You Like It. (Hymen is also a god, not a goddess, but what’s a gender between friends in Shakespeare?)

Literature has a term for the device of an obscure god or goddess that shows up to move the plot along, often apropos of nothing: the deus ex machina. Nowadays, the term is usually derogatory, but it wasn’t always. Drawn from ancient Greek playwrights’ propensity to literally drop a god on stage when they weren’t sure what to do next, the “god from the machine” is a character that appears, or event that occurs, to rescue characters or their writer from a problematic situation. More than half of Euripides’ plays employ the device, and Aeschylus parodied it in his Thesmophoriazusae, having Euripides himself appear via onstage crane.

Unknown god onstage (L’Andromeda, Ascanio Pio, 1639)

Nowadays, though, it’s thought of as a bit lazy, and might be considered a “plot hole” where it appears. Think of the eagles appearing to hoist Sam and Frodo out of a molten lavascape in The Lord of the Rings, or Fawkes randomly flying in to bring Harry a sword and save his life in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. When you consider these things, you realize that they aren’t likely, but often in the course of a complicated plot line they are easy to ignore.

Perhaps the most egregious example of the deus ex machina in Shakespeare’s works is the appearance of Jupiter in Cymbeline, where the god sweeps down on an eagle, thunderbolt in hand, to visit Posthumus in a dream. (I can’t help but imagine that Shakespeare had a new trapdoor, or very large eagle model, he was eager to use when writing this play.) He leaves a cryptic tablet which comes true, but has to be painstakingly interpreted in the half hour of overexplanation that ends the play.

But there are instances of the deus ex machina throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre—not only a plethora of classical gods and goddesses, many of whom appear for marriage scenes, but also plot devices that are simply pulled out of a hat. There is, of course, A Winter’s Tale’s famously contextless “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Another famous stage direction, “Enter Pirates,” is from Pericles, where pirates appear out of the blue to save a woman from death by kidnapping her. Speaking of pirates, Hamlet has a random run-in with them in his play, which if it isn’t exactly a deus ex machina is certainly a scene haunted by some unlikelihoods. It’s been pointed out that Hymen isn’t alone in As You Like It—Steve Werkmeister identifies a threefold deus ex machina in the play, citing Oliver’s run-in with wild beasts and Duke Frederick’s sudden conversion thanks to an “old religious man.”

Exit, pursued by a bear (John Masey Wright, c. 1820)

One of the potential poem titles that has floated around my mind for a long time is “The Likelihood of a Rare Disease.” The gist of the poem would basically be that though any particular rare disease is, of course, rare, I don’t think having-a-rare-disease is particularly rare. I (technically) have one. I have several close family members with different ones. All of them things that “normal” people don’t think about, but that irrevocably mark a life.

Recently I watched a gut-wrenching film called Lorenzo’s Oil, the true story of a young boy who, at age 5, is diagnosed with a degenerative nerve disease called adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). The first half of the movie is the most disturbing, as a seemingly normal, trilingual child begins to have mood swings, then tantrums, then degenerates to being fully nonverbal over only two or three years. The film focuses on Lorenzo’s desperate parents, who research ALD until they come to novel scientific conclusions and develop a therapy now called Lorenzo’s oil. The painful truth is that, while helpful as a preventative measure, the oil was unable to restore any of Lorenzo’s own decline, and he passed away at age 30. At one point in the film, Augusto Odone, Lorenzo’s father, says to Michaela, his mother: “Do you ever think that—maybe all this struggle, it may have been for someone else’s kid?” In this case, tragically, it seems that it was.

There are a lot of things in life that feel like they shouldn’t happen. Recently a friend was telling me all about scurvy. The crazy thing about scurvy is that it destroys your connective tissue—meaning that any scars you ever had will reopen (if I have to live knowing this information, so do you). “If they made it up for a horror movie, it would be rejected for being too campy and gross,” my friend said. And she’s absolutely right. I’ve also learned a lot recently about ticks, mostly against my will, and there’s a tick that can bite you and make it so that you’re allergic to red meat for the rest of your life. There are so many strange things like that in the world we live in—not just the huge, mass-scale tragedies of children starving or cancer or war, but also the seemingly meaningless accidents, the degenerative nerve diseases, the worries that were too obscure for you to have until you were being pursued by a bear or asphyxiating from an unidentified allergy.

Fra Angelico, The Forerunners of Christ With Saints and Martyrs, Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece (c. 1420)

I think this is part of why the classical world loved “the gods,” and many liturgical Christians love “the saints.” Life is complicated. It’s reassuring to tell yourself that for any rare issue you have, there will be a person whose rare issue it is, too—who will make it their own. The same friend who educated me on scurvy is a staunch Presbyterian but occasionally comes to me with (mostly) ironic requests for patron saints. Is there a patron saint of procrastination? Of dating? Of mental illness? Of mothers-in-law? Usually, there is. We know, theoretically, that God is looking down on us, but sometimes, blindly, we want the particular care of someone who we don’t think of as knowing everything. Someone who cares about the strange perversity of our small realities, because they have known a small reality of their own.

We often think that a deus ex machina would never appear in real life. But in my experience, these things happen all the time. So much of life is unexpected—the majority of it statistically unlikely. The stranger passing by when you got a flat tire on the freeway. The book that was left in your pew. The friend who was randomly awake when you called at two in the morning. A hundred tiny plot twists, perhaps a hundred a day, that didn’t need to be the way they were, but express a guiding hand of providence—a hand that somehow cares about the tiny particulars. In a world where the tiny particulars can be deadly, or destructive, or deeply and despair-inducingly meaningless, I think we have to believe that they can also be the fingerprints of divine care, oddly specific, always unexpected.

PS: Stay tuned for a new series announcement coming soon!