5 Anatomizing the Audience: James Bridie, Melodrama, and The Movies

There is nothing very uncommon about you,

—Dr. Knox, The Anatomist

dr jekyll and mr hyde went some way to explicate and so to assuage the anxieties Knox provoked. Stevenson apparently thought as much, for when he next gave an outing to the uncanny body in The Wrong Box (1889), with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, the story took a comic turn. Uncle Joseph, supposedly dead in a railway accident, blithely wanders around England even as the body misrecognized for him is crammed into a barrel, then a piano case, and passed like a parcel between horrified recipients. This carnivalesque tale transposes the body in the box into a pending joke in a folk narrative when the last unwitting recipient, having stolen the cart with “Uncle Joseph,” hurtles off into the night. The events of 1828 have been evacuated of threat. They are incipient in society only as a good story.

A “good story” it was, as evidenced by its new career in colorful, cheap editions. The publisher Hugh Jamieson of Edinburgh enthusiastically plagiarized Leighton. Jamieson’s stripped-down text appeared between pink soft covers emblazoned with the famous line drawing of Daft Jamie. The inside cover of this Life and Times of Burke and Hare (c.1900) indicates the story’s audience niche: it advertises The Best Song Book, The Champion Song Book, The Famous Song Book, and The Holiday Song Book. History has become urban legend and has aligned with parlor ballad. In c.1910, publisher D. R. Burnside of Glasgow produced a more fictive version, complete with couthy and comic neighbor Sandy M‘Nab: Burke and Hare: The Body Snatchers (inside subtitle: Their True Lives). It too bore a soft cover—this time displaying both Daft Jamie and his hideous (and lively) murder. Advertised on its inside cover, we find the companion texts Willy Reilly: A Story of the Penal Days in Ireland; Sappho: A True Story of Life in Paris; and—from which we might derive much context for this series featuring Burke and Hare—Fanny Hill: A Fascinating Story of London Life. (John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was a notoriously pornographic “country girl comes to big city” eighteenth-century novel.) The back indicates a financial niche, too. It tempts with “Courting Cards” which promise “Roars of Laughter, useful for those in love, and those who would like to be very good for Pic-Nic Parties going on a Holiday”—four packets for six stamps, “all different,” and importantly, “sent in Sealed Envelope.”

In the larger market, the story took a turn toward genre fiction. Published in London, Hargrave L. Adam’s 1913  Burke and Hare, The Story of a Terrible Partnership, begins in Gothic tones: “The story I am about to lay before my readers is one of an exceedingly sordid character. … [we shall] see how these human ghouls, vampires and stoats lived” (Adam, 5). It, too, makes one in a series for sales. The Pearson edition lists it with The Sale of a Soul, “an ideal [book] for holiday or train reading”; The Terror By Night; “and other Notable Sixpenny Books.” Adam’s edition did double duty. Republished by the Mellifont Press [1936] it began a career as “true crime,” featuring alongside The Penge Mystery and Pritchard the Poisoner (both by Adam), and Crimes That Thrilled the World. The tale shifted along with its writer, who emphasized “true crime” as his career developed, but it easily adapted in any case: Burke and Hare made up one of the Secrets of Scotland Yard on British radio (1949); by 1952, America’s CBS Crime Classics picked it up (If a Body Needs a Body, Just Call Burke and Hare).

What is interesting here, however, is work the tale does not do in Scotland. Nineteenth-century Edinburgh police procedurals, both factual and fictive, already embraced the horrors of medicine and murder, though surprisingly not of Doctor Knox. Consider James McLevy’s “The Dead Child’s Leg,” or William Crawford Honeyman’s “The Mysterious Human Leg.”¹Close Of course, the story may inflect pieces by that Edinburgh doctor and crime writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived hard by the West Port, might have seen Burke’s skeleton at the university, and had his own copy of the West Port Murders (Edwards Quest, 195). Doyle’s detective may have drawn his name from Oliver Wendell Holmes (Senior)—who spent some weeks in Edinburgh in 1834, meeting Knox, and later became Professor of Anatomy at Harvard (205; Holmes, 9–10). The professor had told his personal story of auto-experimentation with ether in 1870, contributing to Jekyll as well as Sherlock Holmes, perhaps.²Close For Edwards, Knox lends both coldness and bonhomie to the detective; the victimized Mrs. Docherty shows up in a claim that “One of the most dangerous classes in the world … is the drifting and friendless woman”; and Sherlock Holmes draws his proclivity for pummeling bodies from Christison’s experiments on corpses to determine postmortem effects post–Burke and Hare (Quest, 197, 202, 196, 194). Christison, too, contributes to Holmes’s self-experimentation (194). The line of descent seems clear from Burke and Hare to Baker Street. Still, Scotland’s most noted crime writer makes little of this particular past.

Such an omission implies a larger point: the national investment of those who, like Scott, Pae, and Stevenson, so far make much of Burke and Hare and Doctor Knox. For others, it seems—even some Scots—by the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, their story no longer challenged beyond the conventions of genre fiction. As proof, consider the next two major documentary versions of resurrectionist times: these both arise outside Scotland and are directed to English interests. Tellingly, neither recounts the tale of Doctor Knox. The moment that had set going generations of Scottish literary and historical attempts to come to terms with the doctor simply disappears. In 1896, James Blake Bailey, librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, published The Diary of a Resurrectionist 1811–1812.³Close The diary stands out for its firsthand account of grave robbing, its uncanny echo of Burkean days (the writer frequently admits to being “intoxsicated” [sic] in a way that would have delighted Christopher North), and its disconnection from northern scandal. Bailey makes a feature of not discussing the Edinburgh context for his book. “The great crimes of Burke and Hare drew especial attention to body-snatching in Edinburgh,” his introduction states (James Blake Bailey, v–vi). “For this reason, Edinburgh has been omitted from the present work.” Cecil Howard Turner’s The Inhumanists (1932) leaves out Knox for an interestingly different reason:

For a hundred years, English surgeons have remained complacent at the obloquy exclusively heaped on the head of the unfortunate Dr. Knox. … I shall have done no bad thing if in trying to tell the truth of the alliance formed between culture and crime and reveal the frightful horrors that were perpetrated by the most iniquitous set of villains that ever lived to satisfy the requirements of surgical science I help to restore the balance of criminality.

(Cecil Howard Turner, vii–viii)

Turner celebrates the centenary of the Anatomy Act by detailing the bodysnatching and burking proclivities of other doctors and different places, homing in on London.

Does this double shift—to generic writing and away from Scotland—indicate that authors and historians have taken a step in resolving the trauma of 1828? Burke had suffered the pains of the law (see figure 5.1). Perhaps Knox’s story now has been told, the horror viewed and integrated, allowing Scots, like their untroubled English counterparts, to escape its old, obsessive terms. Or maybe the past now seems a problem best located somewhere else—preferably in Henry Jekyll’s London.

In fact, the general turn away from Doctor Knox and Edinburgh exposes a related but broader concern. As Dominick LaCapra has pointed out, trauma resonates not merely through victims but also, if problematically, through perpetrators—think Knox/Jekyll (LaCapra History, 41). We can carry this analysis further: when Scots hasten to draw the line of responsibility between themselves and Doctor Knox (as in Stevenson), or when they hand responsibility for their story over to other tellers in other places (as with these medical histories), they characterize themselves as victims now healed. But in so doing they imply anxiety about their own liability for events. So long as Knox remained silent, for Scotland he functioned as the trauma that needed to be expressed and integrated. Stevenson, by making “Knox” talk in the person of Henry Jekyll, and ironically Bailey and Turner, too, by removing him from consideration, expose the scandal’s wider context. Stevenson, despite the humor of The Wrong Box, winds in Uncle Joseph’s family and implicates strangers related only in the most tenuous way; Bailey and Turner, assertively not invested in Scotland, consequently extend the story’s historical and geographical reach. Together these three imply that the box of “Uncle Joseph” can turn up on anybody’s doorstep and reveal each and all of us as culpable for its criminal circulation.

Though few Scots had known about Burke and Hare until they were caught, all had benefited from Knox’s research—and had done so through succeeding generations. Doctors and lawyers stood particularly vulnerable by their relation to the scandals of 1828. Respectable professional identity teetered on whether any doctor was different from Knox, and whether any lawyer had played his part in policing events. Did doctors whose expertise derived from the bodysnatching industry share de facto responsibility for Knox’s actions? Did lawyers share de jure responsibility for the machinations that had removed Knox from trial and made him a site for cultural anxiety? Not surprisingly, lawyers and doctors had long struggled to deal with the scandal of 1828. Leighton and Lonsdale were only the most prominent Scottish trained medical men who so far had tried to negotiate their relation to the anatomist through prose; William Roughead is only the best-known lawyer. Leighton was a medical student who apparently did not take a degree but made much of his experience in his writing; Lonsdale studied under Knox and briefly partnered him (Rae, 125); Roughead was a Writer to the Signet (Scottish solicitor) and author of numerous criminal histories. Other doctors who wrote post-Knoxian tales and tracts on bodysnatching include Christison, who detailed his firsthand experience as the medical examiner for Mrs. Docherty in his Life (Christison, 1:305–11). Lawyers number Henry Cockburn, who recounted the trial in his Memorials (Cockburn, 456–58), and the Edinburgh-trained doctor and lawyer Samuel Warren, notable for his Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician in Blackwood’s (1832–37). Over the years, professional sympathy has continued to produce writings by non-Scots with a medical or legal investment (for instance the American James Moores Ball, M.D. LL.D, author of The Sack-’Em-Up Men). Typically, however, the earlier medical and legal writers follow the established pattern for Knoxian narrative. They focus on Knox to celebrate or damn him—when they can bring him into view at all—and in either case they look away from the implications of their professional similarity to the doctor.

Even that lawyer Robert Louis Stevenson, in a story made up of doctors and lawyers, does not seriously impugn these professional men. Mr. Utterson the lawyer feels like a criminal, but he is not to blame for Jekyll’s behavior; rather, Jekyll’s activities produce Utterson as the nemesis in the shadows. Lanyon understands Jekyll’s science, but the two have parted over the philosophy that drives Jekyll’s criminal acts some time past. Nonetheless, through Utterson’s uneasiness and Lanyon’s outright decline in the context of Mr. Hyde, Stevenson hints toward the connectedness of doctors and lawyers—as individuals and in the aggregate—in a society inherently problematic. In their professional roles and as respected representatives of the wider society, doctors and lawyers needed to recognize their duplicitous part in the scandal of Doctor Knox. It was now time for all Scots to acknowledge their role in the realities of Burke and Hare.

Doctor Osborne Henry Mavor, better known by his pen name “James Bridie,” was up to the task—and not just on behalf of his medical community. We might remember Michael S. Roth’s concern that history writing symptomizes a problem in memory—it becomes possible because a culture is in process of forgetting its past (Roth, 10). Doctor Knox had now been carefully placed through the strategic deployment of narrative memory—his tale had been told as fiction (by anxious Scots) and laid to rest within British history (by Bailey and Turner). Having blamed him, Scots were ready to forget him at last. But as a general practitioner whose training ranged from anatomy through Freudian psychology, Bridie knew the necessity of a full diagnosis; and as a national dramatist he knew how to bring all the makers of memory themselves into painful play.

Who was James Bridie? The Glasgow doctor’s writing first came to the commercial stage in 1928. When Bridie’s Knoxian play The Anatomist was staged in 1930, the Glasgow Bulletin considered it “one of the very best of Scots plays,” and when it went to London in 1931 Shaw Desmond described it as the work of “that extraordinary playwright, James Bridie” (GBulletin July 5, 1930; LP November 11, 1931). By 1934, Ivor Browne considered Bridie “Shavian,” and Bridie’s competing author, Eric Linklater, thought him a second Ibsen (NSN May 5, 1934; Linklater in MacDiarmid Raucle, 3:96). Browne stressed: “We know, when we go to a play of his, that we shall escape … the usual much ado about the couplings of nobodies,” and he singled out The Anatomist for being “as tidily made as it is brilliantly written.” On the basis of Bridie’s plays, he joked, “I wish he were my doctor.”

Publicly, Bridie demurred at such praise. His sardonic autobiography One Way of Living (1939) carries his attitude in three epigraphs. The first two situate the writer as a local and lost opportunity—the motto from Glasgow City Arms reads:

This is the bell that never rang,

This is the fish that never swam,

This is the tree that never grew,

This is the bird that never flew.

Bridie follows his compounded negatives with the double bathos of a dictionary definition: “Inertia is the property of matter by which it retains its state of rest or of uniform rectilinear motion so long as no foreign cause occurs to change that state.” But next we read from Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book:

Well, British Public, ye who like me not,

(God love you!) And will have your proper laugh

At the dark question, laugh it! I laugh first.

Bridie laughed last, too. Despite taking ten years to graduate as a doctor (“I do not, myself, understand Anatomy at all” [One Way, 14]), he served well in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, then ran his own practice from 1919 to 1923. In 1923 he became assistant physician at Victoria Infirmary, and subsequently a professor at the Anderson College of Medicine. Beginning as an amateur dramatist, Bridie turned full-time and wrote over forty plays, many of them successful (NSN May 5, 1934; chron. and bib. in Luyben). The crucial conjunction of doctor and dramatist came when Bridie crossed paths with “John Brandane” in the 1920s. Brandane, too, was a doctor (John MacIntyre) and playwright, with a distinct commitment to “a thing very grandly called The Scottish National Theatre Society” (One Way, 260). Under Brandane’s influence, Bridie helped to establish the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the College of Drama of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. He did become his country’s Ibsen or Shaw, having “put Scotland on the dramatic map of the world” (Linklater in MacDiarmid Raucle, 3:96).

The Anatomist marked the turning point between Bridie’s medical and dramatic careers, and the fulcrum for the doctor’s “Shavian” success was his national concern. Bridie tracked Robert Knox through medical and legal histories. He claimed to have deduced his fellow doctor “from Lonsdale’s Life, some Edinburgh College of Surgeons papers, some of his own writings & Roughead. … A friend of mine … was the son of a friend of Knox & the last act is based partly on an incident he described to me” (letter September 30, 1931, RCSEd). But whereas Lonsdale celebrated a heroic doctor, and Roughead chastised a Knox who anticipated “the privileges of the superman,” Bridie attempted a more complete assessment of the case (Roughead Burke, 80). With a theater for, by, and about the people in mind, he figured his anatomist as symptomatic of a generalized complaint. For Doctor Bridie, there was plenty of contagion to track and responsibility to go around. The case of Robert Knox manifested a systemic reality—a disease already spread through doctors and patients.

How does Bridie bring Knox’s human context into focus in a play dominated by its protagonist? Doctor Knox, after all, usurps a parlor drama, bringing his early ego and later problems with Burke and Hare into the Miss Disharts’ home, and complicating the love relationships between proper young ladies and eager medical students. One answer lies in the play’s noted discomforts: it promised “no moral. … no lesson” (Anatomist Westminster Theatre Program, 1931). Audiences, in fact, registered and picked at the play’s apparent problems. The Scotsman pondered “a lamentable obscurity of purpose” in the last act arising from confusion within the supporting characters: despite nefarious events, the ingenue Mary Belle “informs [Knox] that they will never believe the stories that are going about,” so “Her heart does her more credit than her intelligence or consistency” (Scotsman July 4, 1930). With this critique, the reviewer is drawn into the play’s dynamic and provides an index to its success: the stress Bridie lays on Knox, together with the diagnosis of the doctor that he fails to provide, provokes a reflex action in those beyond the footlights. We engage not with Robert Knox so much as with his stage audience, and their responses to the Knoxian crisis at hand. In so doing, we participate in the weave of relationships that makes an implicated community. This play is all about us.

Bridie understood such relationships. As O. H. Mavor but also “James Bridie” (and “Mary Henderson”), and as doctor, playwright, and thoughtful Scot, he made up a community in himself. Indeed he enacted a play of personalities, each implicated in the others. For instance, he was an anatomist, but a reluctant one. The first time (of many) that he took the Anatomy viva, the professor “roared and howled and chuckled for a full minute. Then he said, ‘Well, Mr. Mavor, I suppose it is no secret to you that you know nothing at all about Anatomy’” (One Way, 125). At the same time, Bridie appreciated his Glaswegian inheritance from the famous anatomist John Hunter, and his scholarly descent from Robert Knox: “Johnny Cleland had been taught by Goodsir, who had been taught by Knox, who was the patron of Burke and Hare” (16, 101). And Anatomy class cultivated Bridie’s dramatic sensibilities: Professor Cleland “had a large mop of sheep’s wool on his head. It was said that this was kept in position with the fat of human corpses, for, while he was demonstrating, he would frequently run his fingers through his hair” (97–98); in the anatomy lab, “The corpses were naked and bronze coloured. The general effect was rather gay. My head swam a little and I had an impulse of flight. [Another student] … smacked a corpse on the abdomen with a cheery greeting and passed on” (105). The doctor and the dramatist informed one another, standing, as both did, at the crux of medical and literary pasts and futures. Thus, Mavor finally connected with his work as a doctor when he realized the narrative drive of diagnostics and its humane application: Dr. Middleton “asked [a patient] three or four questions that seemed to have little bearing on the subject, and listened carefully to his answers. [he then diagnosed privately and]. … said we would [check] in the post-mortem room in a fortnight’s time”—and they did (183); Doctor Renton “was by far the most humane [teacher]. I could not have chosen a more pleasing introduction to my kindly trade” (131–32). Bridie shone as a practitioner informed by his humanity, and a dramatist supported by his diagnostic insight. Thus he produced Doctor Knox as the enlarged and inadequate heart of a failing body politic. For Mavor/Bridie, “Robert Knox” set the pulse for relationships with broad implications for doctors, Scots, and “community” in general.

At first, Bridie’s Knox seems the focus of the text. The play places the doctor in the drawing room, where he mediates between lovers Mary Belle and Walter Anderson; it moves on to show the love-crossed medical student (Walter) be charmed by Mary Paterson, then recognize her on the slab; and it concludes back in the domestic sphere, when murder has been revealed and the streets are filled with the mob against a blustering yet still lecturing Doctor Knox. This structure implies a persistent doctor, and perhaps a recuperated one. We hear echoes of Lonsdale’s heroic Knox as well as Roughead’s boneheaded doctor, and even Stevenson’s marginally self-doubting experimental scientist. Bridie’s play, it seems, like The Court of Cacus, Mary Paterson, and Strange Case, aims at Doctor Knox—with an overture of romance in the persons of Walter and Mary Belle, an interlude of sentiment provided by Mary Paterson, and incidental grosserie performed by Messrs. Burke and Hare.

But Bridie’s few statements on Knox confuse the anatomist’s role. After dismissing Lonsdale’s doctor as the work of “a frank Knoxophile,” Bridie indicates a possible medical moral for his story: “the shifts to which men of science are driven when they are ahead of their times. The ‘mob’ should be very careful in its choice of objects for persecution; for stoning the prophets is not so good for their moral [sic]” (Anatomist, xi, xiv).⁴Close However, to Alfred Wareing the theater entrepreneur, Bridie wrote that the play’s first performers had “no notion that it was a parable against modern scientific thought” (my emphasis); to Knox’s descendant, he declared that “For the purposes of the play I’ve definitely assumed [Knox] to be in the wrong”; and ultimately, he termed the doctor “the Scientist as Dictator” (October 26, 1830, NLS MS8181/12; December 1, 1931, RCSEd; One Way, 278). The anatomist provides only a contradictory center to a play that points somewhere else—perhaps back along the imprecisions of Bridie’s reference to “the ‘mob’” and “their moral.”

Bridie’s Knox manages to be multifaceted without being deep. The author stresses in his “Author’s Note,” “[Knox] did not usually wear a patch on his blind eye, but he definitely should in this play” (Anatomist, xii). The morally winking Knox is now simply half blind. Insistent on “facts” as pointing to the sum “Truth” when he presides over a trivial lovers’ quarrel, he cannot—indeed, will not—recognize the truth when the fact of Mary Paterson is literally staring him in the face (22, 46–48). This Knox, who mocks the lovers and rejects Walter’s concerns about Mary Paterson because “it is past the hour for sentiment,” is given to posturing on his own behalf (20, 46). Courting Amelia Dishart, the married doctor falls into the clichés of romance, declaring himself a “little pink shivering boy” (63). Worse, the doctor is apt to dramatize his professional role: “I have my pistols and I will fight if necessary,” he declaims, and he ludicrously exhorts his students: “I shall lead you to Surgeons’ Square” (69, 71). We should be mindful, perhaps, of Bridie’s later comment on sentimentality: it is “a form of voluptuous cruelty” (One Way, 244). Knox is contradictory rather than complex. He lacks the nuance that can inform even the least sympathetic protagonist.

So it is no surprise that this Knox claims a noble difference from other less able doctors, but for all the wrong, self-indulgent reasons. When he declares “Bob Liston is no friend of mine. I abhor his methods,” the ingenue Mary Belle promptly asks, “Where do you get your bodies from?” Registering no irony, Knox retorts: “How should I know?” (Anatomist, 22–23). Even when this Knox admits blame, he does so only within the parentheses of religious and dramatic convention:

Do you think because I strut and rant and put on a bold face that my soul isn’t sick within me at the horror of what I have done? … But I tell you this, that the cause is between Robert Knox and Almighty God. I shall answer to no one else. … I shall play out the play till the final curtain. (65–66)

Some critics find here a note of contrition and hence, greatness of character. The Evening News congratulated actor Henry Ainley for revealing “the diffident soul of the scientist within the ogre’s body” (EN October 8, 1931). However, any sincerity in Knox’s assertion is borne down by the continued strutting and ranting. Bridie’s Knox cannot help but strut and rant, whatever position he adopts. This is evident in his crucial test, when he can either feel someone else’s pain and accept responsibility, or pass it on because it does not fit his reality. Walter, devastated by finding his companion of the evening in a box, accuses Knox of paying blood money for Mary Paterson. Knox does not address the issue. Rather, he turns to the lowest form of argument with the riposte, “You paid the money, Mr. Anderson, I think” (Anatomist, 47). This doctor has lots of form, and no substance.

Bridie’s Knox finds his being not so much in medicine or its truths as through the posturings of dispute with weaker individuals—whether with sentimental Mary Belle, or conscience-stricken Walter. He thrives on opposition. “Only a fool is sure of himself until the mob denies him,” Knox declares, with a witty delight in contradiction (Anatomist, 12). His bon mot loses its joy for us, however, when an actual mob with a legitimate grievance hounds him through the streets. “The mob are cowards to a man,” this poor student of human nature declares; and though Amelia offers a corrective: “Their hatred is a dreadful thing,” the doctor refuses any relationship between himself and the mob beyond mere opposition: “Dreadful? It is the only compliment they can pay me” (64). If earlier texts worked hard to integrate for Scotland the trauma constituted by Doctor Knox, Bridie’s doctor has no intention of being integrated. This poses the mob sitting just beyond the footlights a bit of a problem.

Bridie makes no effort to help the audience. He seems not to want to integrate Knox. Amelia tells the doctor, “You will talk yourself out of Edinburgh,” and the dramatist lets him run on and on (Anatomist, 65). Indeed, Bridie primes us for this excessive yet impenetrable doctor. In his note, the playwright indicates the theatrical intensity but limited dramatic potential of Doctor Knox by his massed efforts to describe him:

He was a dandy. He wore a dark puce or black coat and a fancy waistcoat; a high cravat passed through a diamond ring. … He gestured when he lectured.

He had a bitter heart: he had served at Waterloo and in South Africa; he was eloquent and full of bull-dog pluck. … He had a well-stocked mind and kept the largest possible proportion of his stock in the shop window. He really did contribute to Science. He was the most popular lecturer in Britain. (xii)

The declarative statements pile up, multiplying facets of Doctor Knox but not focusing through to any complex heart. Evidently, Knox sets plots agoing, but their interest does not lie with him.

Knox may be a Shavian superman, and the character offers a plum, scenery chewing role sought by major actors from Ainley (who made a comeback in the part) to Seymour Hicks (who could have placed the Doctor alongside his Scrooge) to Alastair Sim (who built a career through the anatomist over decades).⁵Close But Bridie’s doctor constitutes an absence in the play. Early reviewers loved the part, yet noted how Knox manages to be at once central and a gap. The Curtain pondered: “a character which is constantly theatrical cannot be dramatic,” and the Sunday Times complained, “Yes, you say at the end of the first act, that’s a first-class bit of painting. Now let us see the monster in action. … But we were not so to see him” (Curtain January 1932; STimes October 11, 1931). Knox is a constructed absence. Though he stands at the middle of the play, he is too dense to have the heart necessary to center it. Rather, the doctor is the rhino on which, with unconscious irony, he bases his closing lecture. Knox turns from murder and mayhem to:

a weightier matter … “The Heart of the Rhinoceros.” This mighty organ, gentlemen, weighs full twenty-five pounds, a fitting fountain-head for the tumultuous stream that surges through the arteries of that prodigious monster. … [The] rhinoceros buffets his way through the tangled verdure engirdling his tropical habitat. Such dreadful vigour, gentlemen, such ineluctable energy requires to be sustained by no ordinary forces of nutrition.

(Anatomist, 72–73; ellipsis in original)

The supposed genius Robert Knox can only describe, not recognize himself. Evidently, it takes a rhino not to know one.

In fact, there is not much in Knox for the audience to know. Bridie’s note acknowledges the difficulty and perhaps the irrelevance of trying to judge the man with the sensibility of a rhinoceros: “No solution to the mystery of Knox’s attitude in 1828 is suggested. Perhaps Mary’s (in Act III) is nearest the truth, though she only says it to hurt him” (Anatomist, xiii). Mary Belle’s opinion, “I think you are a vain, hysterical, talented, stupid man. I think that you are wickedly blind and careless when your mind is fixed on something,” really reaches no deeper than that we can derive for ourselves (66–67).

The dramatic complexity of The Anatomist arises obliquely, through Knox’s troubled context. Knox is the rhino in a china shop, for the first and last acts of the play take place in the Miss Disharts’ drawing room. In the opening act Knox comes to perform on the flute, preside over a lover’s tiff, and make sheep’s eyes at Miss Amelia. In the closing act, the Miss Disharts return from abroad to find shrouded furniture (that for one reviewer recalls Knox’s dissecting room), riot in the streets, and a Knox at once blustering and bathetic (STimes October 11, 1931). This domestic background throws Knox into relief, but it also evokes the complexity in minor characters through their shifting relationships to the doctor. In anxious boys and silly girls, their easy opinions, conscience-stricken concerns, and sad compromises, the implications of Knox’s ventures reach beyond the anatomy lab. Bridie, that is, tracks the dynamics of groupthink. Whether Knox is a bully or hero, a sentimentalist or himself unsympathetic, fascinating or ridiculous in his relations to women, a realist or a parlor performer, what matters, as the News of the World captured in cartoon, is how individuals realign as they relate to him (see figure 5.2). The doctor, with his unpredictable positions, serves as a test of character to those around him. Yet he reveals them not simply as lesser intellects or softer hearts. Rather, as they react, critique, and adjust, these serious young men and thoughtful women show themselves to be involved and implicated in the human perplexity that is Doctor Knox.

Of course beside Knox, most characters look small. David Paterson the doorkeeper verges between religious cant and petty graft as he reads the “awfu’ curse” against disobeying the commandments yet haggles over the price for Mary’s corpse (Anatomist, 39, 33, 43). To Jessie Ann, the maid, Knox’s scandal offers an occasion for proud gossip about “Our Dr. Knox”—her response lends some credibility to the doctor’s derision of the mob (52). Still, the human context for Doctor Knox gets complicated early in the play and through the least likely character. Bridie denigrates Mr. Raby as “fictitious … intended to symbolise the dog-like loyalty of Knox’s students” (xiii). Raby is a comic butt. Yet he calls into question Knox’s supposed greatness (however wrongheaded) of character. Walter considers Raby “a dull fellow, sir, but conscientious and anxious to learn”; Knox parrots and parodies: “[Raby] is also most conscientious and anxious to learn. He ceased this evening, at my urgent request, to pursue his studies at Surgeons’ Square” (8, 13). The dull Raby possesses a nobility unavailable to his hero, and undermines Knox’s vaunted commitment as a teacher. Moreover, the dark questions refused by Knox swirl around this incompetent student. Walter has given Raby a head to work on and Knox bursts out: “Do you think that dissecting-room subjects are so easily come by that I can afford to have them mangled by that imbecile?” (8). Raby is the crux for the economics of anatomy that produce Burke and Hare—the more implicated, indeed, because he is so unwitting.

The noble lover Walter, righteous critic Mary Belle, and thoughtful Amelia, too, fall to complicity. Walter is embroiled in events through his naïveté. Helen MacDonald notes how the students of the past distanced themselves, citing David Paterson as receiver of bodies (Helen MacDonald, 30). As demonstrator, Walter tells Knox that arranging churchyard raids “is no part of my duty. … I disapprove of them very strongly” (Anatomist, 9). At the same time, he gives a zealot’s clichéd endorsement to anatomy: “It isn’t disgusting. It’s beautiful. Lovely intricate human bodies. It teaches me to see God” (6). Apparently he has no notion of meeting God through the act of premature resurrection in the cemetery. Where, then, does he think the bodies come from, and who does he think gets them? Ignorance and enthusiasm together bring us close to culpability.

That goes for Mary Belle, too. Her counter to Walter’s idealistic commitment to medicine is an equally thoughtless romanticism. She challenges Knox: “If you had the least sensibility you would feel—as Walter knows—that if he had been a poet or a musician or—or inspired in any way, I would have followed him barefoot through the world” (Anatomist, 20). Here we can only agree with Knox’s riposte: “That would have been very foolish of you.” And we must doubt if Mary Belle is so far removed from blame as she imagines.

No one is without some sort of guilt. Amelia idealizes the doctor: “Poor soul, he is lonely! … And he has married, we are told, so unhappily” (Anatomist, 2–3). So although she is generally the most mature person in the room, able to recognize contradiction and sense the anguish that may underlie it in Walter, Mary Belle, and even the doctor, Amelia, too, fails the test posed in Robert Knox. She states, with full complexity, “Doctor, it is terrible that you should be put in this position. I think of you galloping on a crusade with your eyes to the front, fixed on your goal. How could you know that your horses’ hoofs were trampling poor crushed human bodies? You don’t realise it yet,” but ultimately she, along with all the others, aligns with Doctor Knox (65). Walter and Raby put their own safety at risk, fighting their way through the streets to protect him; Amelia asserts, “My sister and I have just heard of the monstrous things that are being said against you. We are so sorry,” and Mary Belle follows up with “please believe that I and my sister will listen to nothing that anybody says” (59–60). So much for facts.

In the speech that Bridie suggests comes closest to understanding for the play, Mary Belle snaps: “Posterity will have to be very clever to judge you justly, Dr. Knox” (Anatomist, 67). Nor does she let Knox off the hook when he responds, “At least it will have the facts before it.” She retorts: “But the excuses will be hard to find.” Well said, but not just for Doctor Knox. The doctor is incorrigible, so whose reputation stands at issue here? Bridie pointed to the play’s complexity when he vaguely claimed: “The ‘mob’ should be very careful … for stoning the prophets is not so good for their moral” (xiv). Whose moral—or “morale,” if this be a misprint? The play’s structure allows no one any excuses. Winnifred Bannister applauded Bridie for frying up no “Knox steaks to be consumed by the mob” (Bannister, 87). At the end, in lieu of “Knox steaks,” we have Knox lecturing again. But amid shrouded furniture reminiscent of the dissecting lab, and despite the central fact of Mary Paterson, everyone is here; everyone is listening. For better or for worse, we are the mob, and our own moral/e is at issue.

In 1861 Alexander Leighton had carefully avoided implicating Knox’s students. In 1921, William Roughead hinted broadly in their direction (Roughead Burke, 80, 87–8). Now, characters revolve around Knox, casting light on the doctor, but themselves becoming illuminated as they twist and turn. Consequently, as Bridie’s play moves from a first act where characters argue over principles to a second full of hard fact and on to a final act stumbling into compromised practice, everyone is anatomized. Walter presumed that he could learn anatomy without dirtying his hands in the graveyard; fallen from romance, he imagines he can wash himself clean in the broad waters of the Forth (Anatomist, 40). But there are no innocents, nor any second baptism. And with Mary Paterson, the actual victim, kept in parenthesis in Act II, there is nothing to choose between doctors and ladies and even the naïve Mary Belle and thoughtful Amelia. All of Edinburgh is responsible.

Does Bridie’s analysis reach beyond the Miss Disharts and their Edinburgh coterie? The Anatomist’s final moments disturbed and asked something of the critics. With the play newly on the boards in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Herald expressed disappointment: “One would have liked it better had Knox been either a villain or a martyr. In this respect the play ends lamely”—“with none of the expectations of the audience fulfilled” (GH July 5, 1930). The Scotsman understood more fully. Although lamenting the final act’s “obscurity of purpose,” the review turns toward the site of this lack (Scotsman July 4, 1930). While “The doctor storms about,” he “has suddenly become a hero to his former accusers.” This is where Mary Belle comes in, with her heart that “does her more credit than her intelligence or consistency.” The review concludes: “[This] act is a strangely incoherent medley, most un-Scottish in its illogicality.” Here lies the point. We are looking at Scots not as they suppose themselves to be, but as they are—as individuals and by the handful—in complicated circumstances. Knox provides the occasion for us to question the flawed Mary Belle and the malleable students. Thus, disputing Bridie’s competence, the critic actually offers an index to the author’s effectiveness, for this reviewer finds himself entangled in the illogicalities of the last act, and embroiled in a defense of Scottishness. Bridie’s supposedly inadequate ending has implicated the critic.

That ending was no accident; rather, it seems part of a rigorous strategy founded in a philosophy of drama as it intersects with the theatricalities of life. Roughead had referred to “The Resurrectionist drama, of which Scotland in general and her capital in particular were the theatre” (Roughead Burke, 3). Bridie thematized the metaphor, even as he translated Doctor Knox into the realities of the playhouse. Knox, he claimed, “was so theatrical in his life and habit that it is possible to transfer him almost bodily to the stage” (Anatomist, xi). Bridie’s Knox lives within the discourse of the theater. He is a “barn-storming tenor” prone to “gesturing” and can easily be interpreted as “farce” (63, 69, 5). Nor is he wrong in diagnosing those around him as indulging in “theatricals” (7). However, Bridie goes further than this. The play resonates not just with metaphors of performance, but with the consonant necessity for audience involvement and interpretation. Knox arrives in the drama to play his flute which, we are told—ironically and significantly—he does very badly (3). The ladies, however, are supposed to support him in his avocation. As for his concluding lecture, it is not unusual for the man who “would go into the lecture-hall and gesture and rant to naebody but the auld skeleton in the cauld o’ the morning” (41). Lecturing is a habit of being for the doctor; his note is performance. Performance always beseeches an audience—whether a tatty skeleton, or a drawing-room assembly (41, 71). Bridie’s play is thematized as a constant manifestation of performance and thus as posing the problem of what can be “real” or “true,” both for and in the viewer.

That is, by dwelling on performance and resisting the drive toward critique and closure, the play turns our focus where we do not expect—toward each of us. Bridie described the play as a “fable” (Anatomist xi). Fables carry messages and meanings, but those meanings reside in us and are evident only through us. When the dull Mr. Raby arranges a scene, wanting “to see daybreak in the Chamber of Horrors,” the view is more than he bargained for (41). It redounds upon himself as Mary Paterson tumbles from her tea chest and into his own tale. When Doctor Knox poses for Mary Belle as “Your only jig-maker,” Bridie deploys the anatomist’s performance as the hub for the minor characters’ actions (8). What matters, and what Bridie seeks for the story of Burke and Hare, is our uneasy response in turn.

Bannister considers this Bridie’s great achievement as a dramatist. “A Bridie comedy,” she argues, invites the audience to “look at itself in the Hall of Mirrors”—and in The Anatomist Bridie offers less of an invitation than a compulsion (Bannister, 6). So who recognized themselves as mirrored in The Anatomist? Clearly, this was not an easy play; it posed questions about the shape of drama as well as about its meaning, never mind what it implied about the locations of meaning. Indeed, the Masque theater company in Edinburgh, which premiered the work, had no idea how to take it. Bridie complained that during rehearsal, “on numerous essential questions I put about The Anatomist they are silent” (to Alfred Wareing, June 15, 1930, NLS MS8181/7). It turned out that in trying to make head or tail of the play, the Masque was actually in the process of ripping it into shreds. When Bridie arrived for a preview, the performance bore no relation to his script:

The circumstances were … a lot of idiotic cuts. … As they destroyed the thread of the play altogether they all had to be put back with the consequence that the leading man, a bad study, forgot 80% at least of his words & simply yammered. … the story was quite unintelligible.

(to Alfred Wareing, 30 July 1930, NLS MS8181/8)

As Bridie remembered once the heat of the occasion was past, this Knox “forgot altogether the two sets of words he had learned, but carried through the part with great verve by dint of shouting ‘God Almighty!’ ‘Damn!’ ‘Rot their souls!’ and ‘Barbara Celarent!’ at suitable intervals” (One Way, 271). “Barbara” and “Celarent” are the first terms in a mnemonic detailing forms of syllogism—they thus provide an ironic filler for the actor trying to vamp in the part of Robert Knox. In this context, the play’s unlikely “great success” indicates that Knox, though the dominant figure, was not essential to its meaning, and that the audience did get Bridie’s meaning despite and perhaps because of the challenge the performance made to their understanding (271).

The play was an immediate hit with doctors. The Edinburgh Dispatch noted their support even on the opening night; the Evening Standard found in the 1931 audience “large numbers of doctors and Scotsmen, and particularly those who are both”; and Bannister considered the medical profession well represented and still appreciative in the audience for the 1952 production (EdEDis July 4, 1930; ES November 12, 1931; Bannister, 70). Doctors typified the general audience reaction in Scotland. The Glasgow Herald admitted that despite the failings of the last act, “there was no doubt that the audience enjoyed ‘The Anatomist’” (GH July 5, 1930). The columnist for the Times stressed that the Edinburgh premiere “was warmly received,” and the Dispatch was sure “there will always be crowds to see ‘The Anatomist’” (Times July 3, 1930; EdEDis July 4, 1930). They were right. Looking back from 1955, Bannister (67) stressed that “I have not yet come away from a performance of The Anatomist without sharing the satisfaction of the audience in the play’s ending” (though she herself rather misses the irony of that ending).

Importantly, too, all critics recognized this as distinctly a Scottish play. The Glasgow Bulletin touted a “Scots Dramatist’s Gripping Play,” and considered The Anatomist “one of the very best of Scots plays” (GBulletin July 5, 1930). The Times registered that the audience “showed much interest in the recounting of a famous incident in their local history” (Times July 4, 1930). Time and Tide urged “Let none assume that this is another of those too, too sweet Scottish comedies in which most of the characters are half-wits. … there is the true granite ring about the dialogue” (T&T October 17, 1931). That is, a hundred years after Burke and Hare, doctors and citizens stood forth, were recognized, and recognized themselves as implicated Scots in the refracting mirror of Bridie’s play.

There is no doubt that Bridie viewed his project as simultaneously medical, theatrical, and Scottish. He wrote The Anatomist in a moment of self-consciously national dramatic endeavor with a distinct agenda for bringing theater home to Scots and Scottish theater to a wider audience. The Switchback, its recent predecessor, was developed under the guidance of Brandane, of whom Bridie said, “If anything comes of the Scottish Drama, John Brandane is its begetter” (One Way, 268). Brandane “was for the pure milk of the Gospel. He considered that the [Scottish National Theatre] Society should produce a Scottish drama by Scottish authors and, as there was no existing Scottish drama by Scottish authors, that the Society’s sole function was to evoke one” (260–61). Bridie is just beginning to be recognized, too, for formal innovations that derive from his mixed agendas. The Scotsman caught a hint of Bridie’s deconstructivist dynamic when it recognized the “clever anti-climax” that ends The Anatomist (Scotsman April 30, 1931). The Evening News understood that Bridie’s play, although it appeared to have “no great meaning or message,” was “about twice as well written, produced, and acted as the average West End success,” and thereby stood as a Scottish challenge to the English theater’s conventional forms (EN October 8, 1931). Today, Bridie stands out as the Scottish philosopher and disputant who resists the sense of an ending and, in modernist mode, directs his drama out though the hall of mirrors that is his audience (Bannister, Carruthers).

Bridie’s play was not universally recognized as a work for Scotland in either its themes or its innovations. Many Scots acknowledged seeing themselves and their ancestors in Bridie’s portrait of Knox’s Edinburgh—the records of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh hold admiring letters to Bridie by Knox descendants, heirs to doctors, and record keepers.⁶Close Some arbiters of Scottish letters, however, did not recognize the Scottishness of Bridie’s plays: after The Sunlight Sonata was performed in Glasgow (1928), Bridie notes, “The o’ercome of the song of most of the other young men of genius was that the first great Scottish play had yet to be written. In the meantime it was necessary for them to be very firm” (One Way, 267). The Anatomist, too, stumbled over its national affect: “The performance was a great success and the dramatic critics of Edinburgh said that the first great Scots play had yet to be written” (271). Consider Bridie’s phrasing: “The performance was a great success and the dramatic critics. … ” Hugh MacDiarmid was one of those who did not recognize the Scottishness of Bridie’s writing—and he disliked Bridie’s plays in part for their very success.

MacDiarmid’s attitude poses a major question for Burke and Hare as national tale—what makes a Scottish tale, and when is a story too successful to be Scottish? Given that MacDiarmid presented himself as the manifestation of things Scottish and as fearless leader for Scottish literature, we might expect him to appreciate and recognize Doctor Knox—the moreso that MacDiarmid argued for the specificity of Scottishness and its eccentricity. We might think that MacDiarmid and Knox could match on all counts. We might further imagine that MacDiarmid would appreciate Bridie’s distinctly Scottish location, retrieval of Scottish history, and the play’s appropriate use of Scots dialect in a vehicle for Scottish actors that boosted Scottish dramatic writing, the theater, and theater attendance. But no. And it is worth considering MacDiarmid’s reasons for disliking Bridie’s plays.

MacDiarmid found no Scottish drama in Bridie—or anyone else. The poet had established his opinion in 1922, when he sweepingly declared: “There has never been a Scottish drama” (MacDiarmid Selected Prose, 14). Indeed, he swept aside Bridie’s cohort-to-be:

I do not attach the slightest importance to the present Scottish Players’ movement. … writing plays superficially Scottish—or at any rate superficially subscribing to the stock-conception of what is Scottish … [T]hese plays are in every respect inferior to English or Irish plays in their respective genres, and are entirely destitute of literary distinction or significance … they are not only not Scottish but anti-Scottish. (13)

In 1934, after Bridie’s massive success in Scotland and England with The Anatomist, and the successful production of at least half a dozen other plays, MacDiarmid had nothing to say in mitigation of his earlier remarks. Rather, he added Bridie to his list of problem Scots: “Scottish arts remain almost wholly derivative,” he declares. “Certainly nothing is to be gained by hailing all our geese as swans” (“Scotland and the Arts”). MacDiarmid’s criticism homes in on the fact that “Young Scottish artists of all kinds are drawn to London and become almost entirely subdued to the general art modes and material of the South.” He singles out Bridie for particular chastisement: “James Bridie is not a dramatist comparable to Synge or O’Casey, and (perhaps this is the reason) he is proportionately less national.”⁷Close That is, for a Scottish author to be recognizable outside Scotland makes him not Scots and also inferior—in equal measure. The unfortunate correlative might be that a dramatist can be considered Scottish only if unrecognizable in a larger context. From this perspective, and through his first successful London production that moved to radio, served as early TV drama, and motivated two generations of British and American movies, Bridie poses a problem.

What does it mean to succeed with a Scottish story, or as a Scot, outside Scotland? Does success demonstrate that the art and the story are powerful enough to penetrate a larger world, or have they lost their cultural specificity and been absorbed? MacDiarmid feared the latter: in 1922 he claimed that “most of these debased ‘Scottish’ brands of letters and drama are made in England, or by Scots enslaved by the ubiquitous and incessant suggestioning of the Sassenach” (MacDiarmid Selected Prose, 14). Bridie thought differently. A deep philosophical difference lay between the two authors, and it arose from their conceptions of where worth and value lie in any culture. Responding to MacDiarmid’s attacks, Bridie caught MacDiarmid precisely where he prided himself—on the Scottishness of character:

the Scottish theatre [has] taken over the delineation of character. … [I]t is possible to see, in many towns and villages in Scotland, what Scottish dramatists have found in the vein that seemed to be exhausted. Mr Joe Corrie is bringing life out of the miner’s row, Mr T. M. Watson has found it in the mean streets. Mr Donald MacLaren has found West of Scotland villages full of it.

(The Scottish Character, 20)

Bridie sees Scottishness not so much in the unique, the grand, or the distinctive, but in the ordinary—the common.⁸Close His philosophy motivates Mary Belle’s most cutting remark to Doctor Knox, who thinks himself so special: “There is nothing very uncommon about you” (The Anatomist, 67). What matters to Bridie is less the difference of nations than the similarity of individuals—as we can see in the plot of The Anatomist.

Bridie, then, offers a competing diagnosis of Scottishness—one that many Scots, willing to see themselves as Scots, not exceptions, clearly recognized. And it was on the basis of similarity, in ironic juxtaposition to Knox’s eccentricity, that Bridie’s Scottish play appropriately penetrated English culture and even gained American reference.

The Scottish author’s achievement, his translation of the story of Doctor Knox into a tale not uncommon and that weaves in a larger world, was not immediately evident. At first the play was read as too different to understand. English critics, falling into MacDiarmid’s stereotypes, presumptuously offered plot solutions to suit this provincial drama to the London stage. The Sunday Times complained that “when we return for the third act in expectation of the evening’s grisly but nevertheless bonne bouche, we find, alas, that all is over except that those things which we know already have to be explained to ladies returning from Dieppe!” (STimes October 11, 1931). The play needed to be rendered into an English plot and form:

Must not the ideal drama have concerned itself with the conflict between the man of science determined to admit no bar … and the man of normal conscience? … [T]here was a third act to this play [Knox’s London biography], which Dr. Bridie could have found if he had bethought him of that old question of dramatic conflict.

MacDiarmid might have felt justified. A Scottish play would have to become “English” to succeed. But did success indicate such a change?

Bridie’s drama actually foregrounded its difference through aggressively Scottish performance. Recurrently, critics have noted the impenetrability of The Anatomist’s language for foreign audiences: an American visitor to the Edinburgh production said that he “had once sat through an entire Chinese play. ‘I understand as little of this one’” (GBulletin July 5, 1930). When the play moved to New York, it was criticized for being “Delivered by so-so actors in a haze of Scotch dialect” (New York World Telegraph October 25, 1932). But even a better actor, Alastair Sim, eighteen years later in London had trouble bringing the audience beyond the bar of language—or didn’t try to. The Stage commented that “He delivers his lines with fluent ease, but often too rapidly and inaudible, a fault which all the cast might have borne in mind, considering the difficulty which the ear has in receiving Scots and Irish brogues” (Stage November 4, 1948). Yet Sim, speaking Bridie’s (English) prose, held the audience. These foreigners may have been perplexed by the play’s Scots enunciation, but they were not alienated from its ideas. Struggling with linguistic difficulty, they grasped that there was something challenging, and therefore worthwhile, in the play itself.

London critics, striving to tease it out, obsessed over the possibility that the piece was carried by its performances. The Lady gave a section of its review to “Fine Acting,” as did the Sunday Times (Lady October 15, 1931; STimes October 11, 1931). The Era commented: “Here is Acting at its Ablest” (Era October 14, 1931). Critics particularly admired Flora Robson, who rose to stardom through her nuanced rendering of Mary Paterson (Sphere October 17, 1931; EN October 17, 1931). There was something “extraordinary” here, as was recognized by the Irish novelist Shaw Desmond—oddly yet significantly giving advice about national writing to the Welsh in the Liverpool Post (LP November 11, 1931). What was it?

The Anatomist, despite and perhaps because of its overt Scottishness, was able to cross national bounds. The critic for the Evening Standard attended the play three times to figure out how that worked (ES November 12, 1891). His review gives a hint: the English actor Henry Ainley has started to collect Knox memorabilia; Londoners are claiming to remember Knox and Hare in London. Just like the Scots before them, Bridie’s wider audience was wound into The Anatomist. The Scottish story deployed national difference to tell a story of disturbing similarity. Critics might want to retell the tale according to English conventions, but the play itself, with its tortured relationships between protagonist and supporting characters, and characters and the punters in the stalls, reconstructed all audiences as potential Scots. All audiences for better, but mostly for worse, could recognize themselves in Bridie’s story.

We can track the degree to which this play, though with “no great meaning or message,” redirected the stories and practices of drama across the generations of movies that followed it, by testing Bridie’s Scottish effects against those of productions that were already in circulation (EN October 8, 1931).

The Anatomist did not enter an empty field either as art or as drama. Bridie subtitled the play a “Lamentable Comedy,” and ever since the Edinburgh immigrant de Quincey’s second paper on “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1839), authors had appreciated the blackly humorous aspect of the Burke and Hare murders. Stevenson, with his opposed characters of “Jekyll and Hyde,” then Joseph Forster, the author of the lusciously titled Studies in Black and Red (London, 1896), contributed further to the rendering of Burke and Hare as criminal and literary high style. Marcel Schwob, picking up Stevenson’s drift, had translated the two murderers into French and also into Burke “the mighty genius” who “evolved toward a kind of romanticism” recreating “the nocturnal ritual in the fog,” and Hare who shared his “dilettante style of life” (Schwob, 89). Together the two achieve “the classical period of their existence,” and “a beautiful, artistic effect” (89, 90). The problem of form as meaning by which Bridie challenged his audience had already been posed in short fiction.

More important, Burke and Hare had long since fallen into a competing form: melodrama. French authors Jules Lacroix and Frédéric Mercy had made them bit-players in novellas as early as the 1840s. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch held The Anatomist against a heritage of stock productions and portable theater or “penny geggy” performances that seem to have emanated from Scotland but traveled further afield:

Mr A. W. B. Kingston produced [Burke and Hare] successfully in the Pavilion Theatre, Grove Street [Edinburgh], many years ago. The crowds... were so great that police supervision had to be called in. …

To give the drama an air of respectability it was usually billed as “Bonnie Mary Paterson,” although Mr Kingston [christened] it “Old Edinburgh,” when he toured it with much success all over Scotland. …

That prince of portable theatre owners, Mr J. D. Mackenzie [was] amongst the first to produce “Bonnie Mary Paterson,” either at Fisherrow, Musselburgh or Penicuik. …

…Mr George Campbell … was also a power in the west.

…George Duckenfield … wrote an excellent version for Messrs Pierce and Bolton, who held premier place in the portable world for many a day [they established the New Gaiety, Ayr, in 1902].

(EdEDis July 14, 1930)

Industry ads that imply such plays were well known, and passing reminiscences of portable theater productions that “always packed the building,” together with the lack of scripts for Burke and Hare melodramas, indicate that the plot was one so frequently presented it was easily vamped by an experienced company.⁹Close Entertainment notes mention “Bulwer,” who “intends to strike at villany [sic] of a deeper dye, and [as early as 1839] is under an engagement to do what he can for Burke and Hare”; ads circulate for “‘Burke and Hare.’—The Greatest Card out. Manuscripts of this Startling Drama—Terrific Situations”; actors tout their experience in Burke and Hare productions—“Johnny Matthewson, Clown, Disengaged,” looks to “join any good Ballet Troupe” and has “a First-Class Fit-up to Lend” as well as “MSS. of ‘Burke and Hare’” to sell; and “Clark’s Portable Ghost Illusion, of Stewarton, Scotland,” advertises for “Scotch Actor, accustomed to Daft Jemmy in ‘Burke and Hare’” (Era December 13, 1839; February 24, 1867; March 22, 1874; September 24, 1892).¹⁰Close The play, in fact, appears to have evolved from Scotland as shorthand for a set of melodramatic types.

It seems to have met all the requirements of melodrama. The Dispatch recalled that “The story dealt with the love of Mary Paterson and a medical student, named John Haldene” (EdEDis July 14, 1930). “Daft Jamie” was a celebrated role. The paper described a famous performance that evoked Jamie’s sentimental potential: J. D. Mackenzie “played the part with the traditional stoop and in his bare feet, besides carrying his snuff box throughout. … [He] could reduce his audience to tears in his final death appeal to the murderers with, ‘Dinna hurt puir Jamie! Tak’ a sneeshin!’” “Jamie” was known, too, as a comic turn, famous for lines like “Dae ye ken why my head is like frae Seturday [sic] tae Monday? … Because it is the weak end!” Such humor frequently turned to pantomimic anachronism: in a rendition by John Fyffe, actor/manager of a penny geggy, Jamie asks: “ ‘Dae ye ken why Gladstone wears blue braces and Disraeli wears red ones? … To keep their trousers up!’ ”¹¹Close Even better, Jamie died in a splurge of violence and gore (see figure 5.3 for an 1866 rendition of the moment). The Dispatch insisted that unlike in The Anatomist:

All the murders were done before the audience, who believed in realism and blood in those days. When it came to the killing of Jamie, it took three struggles before he was finally disposed of. The death of “Daft Jamie” was highly realistic, and called for strength and endurance from all three actors taking part.

A generation later, the memory had not faded, north or south of the border. In 1962 Dick Milton described “a terrific scene”:

Jamie … while being suffocated with a pillow, becomes tenacious of life and, springing from the bed, he endeavours to escape. … The stage is strewn with broken furniture, smashed ornaments, and splashed blood (red paint) … until, at last, poor Jamie, maimed and bleeding, is overpowered, and killed by a blow on the head with a hammer. A real blood-freezer!

In 1965, Jack House recalled a post-Bridie melodrama staged by the Charles Denville Company in Glasgow: “Glasgow audiences had … never seen anything like The Horrible Crimes of Burke and Hare” (House, 112–13). With Jamie dead, Burke says, “Who would have thought that the boy had so much blood in him” (echoing Lady Macbeth). “Now”—in the way of melodrama’s easy oppositions and shocking juxtapositions—“it is time for them to go off to church.” In the empty room:

A green spotlight shines on the cupboard door and gradually the audience notice that a rivulet of some sort is coming from under [it]. It spreads slowly down the stage and they draw in their breath with terror as they realise it is BLOOD! … The Metropole was packed every night, and a large part of the audience was medical students from Glasgow University. They had already loaned a quantity of skulls and bones for the production. Every time … [Knox] appeared he had a special horrid spotlight on him and the medicals booed and hissed. (112–13)

Furthermore, in 1931 a direct heir of melodrama had taken to the boards in London, in opposition to Bridie’s play.

On October 17, the Aberdeen Press and Journal recorded that “‘The Anatomist,’ is not to be the only [play] presenting Burke and Hare to London, for on Monday week a drama called ‘The Wolves of Tanner’s Close,’ or ‘The Crimes of Burke and Hare,’ will be produced at the Brixton theatre.” The paper added to its concern at English competition surprise that the play was “the work of a woman, Gladys Hastings Walton.” Walton knew her context, writing that “‘ye villains’ are household words in the North—& they revel in them. … All our best murders … seem to come from the North!” (October 5, 1935, BTC EJE/001473). She sought to add the villainous duo to her repertoire of “‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Sweeney’ [Todd].” Not surprisingly, Walton’s play stood out for its similarity to past melodramas. The Manchester Guardian noted its staging on the low-rent “south side of the Thames” by a repertory company known for “weekly entertainments of the ‘Maria Martin’ and ‘Sweeney Todd’ brand” (MG October 28, 1931). Tod Slaughter’s production (that was his name) even begged such comparisons. Reviewers noted that the first act introduces “the old firm of Burke and Hare. ‘You want the best corpses; we supply them’” (Daily Telegraph December 3, 1931). They caught broader echoes, too. The Star celebrated the “noble sentiments uttered by the bluff sailor hero”; that “vice was shown up, and that gory deeds were accomplished with stirring realism” (Star October 22, 1931). This was “an admirably ghoulish entertainment, complete with orchestral tremolos, green limelight, and grand heroics in the good old style,” and it seems to have been much like its predecessors in crucial details. The Star critic “was lost in admiration over the Scottish daftness of Bryan Bishop” (presumably, “Daft Jamie”), while the Guardian described familiar death scenes:

Having seen the girl murdered—melodrama insists on that, and yet, as a tribute to gentility, the killing was exceedingly well bred, the stranglers roaring like Bottom’s lion—we were privileged to see still another victim die before justice overtook the villains. And a fine fight the victim made of it before he succumbed. The house rose at the death of Jamie, the daft loon. [Geoff Carlile] quite brilliantly suggested the bird-witted intelligence of the daft ragamuffin while blending a proper amount of low comedy to fit the part of the play.

(MG December 18, 1931)

The Wolves of Tanner’s Close, aka The Crimes of Burke and Hare, testifies to the degree that audience expectation now drove the representation of 1828. Walton, though an astute author of melodrama, had tried to make this play into something different. Her story of Burke and Hare is sandwiched between the two parts of a (lengthy) condemned cell scene—that features none of our usual three suspects. Hare’s descendant has murdered his wife, fearing that his child-to-be will perpetuate the family curse. Knox adopted him to track the descent of criminality, and he has already attacked Knox. Now, fulfilling Knox’s theories and, as the Saturday Review points out, giving an oblique argument for preventative abortion, he awaits his death and tells a tale of the past (SR January 9, 1932). But the play lodged with the Lord Chamberlain and the promptbook and partbook in the Bristol Theatre Collection show the depredations of the censor and the dramatic costs of the audience’s limited attention span. Walton’s play appears to have been cut severely—back to the parameters of melodrama. Moreover, whatever version they saw, reviewers respond to no nuanced text, but describe all the attributes of theatrical convention—right down to that stage villain, “the small and mean and cringing Dr. Knox” (SR January 9, 1932).

The 1948 film Horror Maniacs, also known as The Greed of William Hart, echoes this production—as well it might, since it stars Tod Slaughter in the role of Hare/Hart (see figure 5.4). There are some changes: Burke and Hare and Knox become Hart, Moore, and Cox. Rumor declares that Burkean relatives threatened to sue, and the change is to protect the guilty (see Greed at Classic Horror website). But given that the change abandons the innocuous title The Crimes of Burke and Hare and adopts Horror Maniacs (or even The Greed of William Hart) for a story that everyone knew anyway, it seems likely that any such demand merely served the needs of melodrama in the market place. Name changes and legal threats hype interest in the manner of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, with its nurses waiting in the wings.¹²Close Certainly, the script is remarkably similar to Walton’s, and also to N. Hastings’s Burke and Hare, registered with the Lord Chamberlain in 1947—lines and even speeches are repeated. That similarity points up both the incestuous climate of melodrama, and the debt of all to stock scenes. The movie, too (again like the Walton and N. Hastings plays), features a sailor hero. Its Jamie descends from the character of melodrama, accomplishing sentiment, humor, and a gory death. What is more, this Jamie’s comic routines come close to those now part of the character’s melodramatic repertoire, and reprised in Walton (EdEDis July 14, 1930). The Dispatch remembered Jamie’s crony, and Jamie’s risible commentary: “‘Dinna mind him, he’s daft. He’s a daft soul, Bobbie Aw.’” Now Jamie recounts that “Bobbie’s no canny like me.” And as in Walton, together they buy two glasses of beer, but Bobby drinks both: “wasnae that a daft trick?” Of course, Jamie dies in traditional lively style. Hart and Moore, meanwhile, sound like they have stepped straight from the music-hall stage: “I understand your honour perfectly, don’t I Mr Moore?” “I think you do, Mr Hart.”

The Slaughter play and film reveal their descent in one further, significant contrast with Bridie’s The Anatomist. They too pose a test for the audience, but one quite different from Bridie’s production. A. E. Wilson was gratified that the play revealed “the heart of Brixton beats true and sound” (Star October 22, 1931). Importantly, “The audience played its part as well as the actors. Tod Slaughter’s Hare will often be recalled with a shudder by many a local playgoer, and so will … Burke and [the] sinister Dr. Knox. I gloated with the best of them.” Slaughter’s work sets a test we can pass—the audience is invited to condemn the villains and to identify with pathos. Bridie, however, tests us in a way that reworks our understanding of ourselves. Slaughter’s audience can celebrate its commonality; Bridie’s audience must admit and lament it. To be not “uncommon” is to be like even Doctor Knox, and thus denied the luxury of seeing yourself on the side of the good (Anatomist, 67).

The outward melodrama and the inward dramatic conflict competed to direct the plotting of Doctor Knox’s story through the films of the twentieth century. Bridie was not afraid of competition; in fact, he considered it a necessary component of national literature. In 1949—just after the much delayed Slaughter film came out—Bridie declared: “All that I can find in the English Domination story is that the English, at one time, inundated us with their plays. If there is anything in the ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’ legend, we should have answered them in kind” (Bridie Dramaturgy, 3). Bridie himself took the battle to the enemy, and his concept of individual and community responsibility carried the day.

We can see Bridie’s effectiveness beginning with a story distinctly not his own. In 1945, Boris Karloff starred in The Body Snatcher, which claimed direct descent from Stevenson’s tale—with Bela Lugosi as the sneaking porter in the dissecting room (see figure 5.5). This RKO film echoes major plot elements from its source: the bodysnatcher combines the roles of resurrectionist and Burke and Hare, turning from snatching to murder; he also folds in the role of Stevenson’s Mr. Gray, who threatens Toddy Mcfarlane (here, MacFarlane) and ends up dead. MacFarlane has moved on a generation. Now he, as successful doctor, entangles a student, and together they exhume an old lady who morphs into Gray. There are some cinematic additions, notably a pathetic, sick child who both occasions and is constantly threatened with death and premature resurrection. For our purposes, however, the movie’s interest lies in the dynamic between two generations of students. MacFarlane is Knox’s medical heir; he escaped justice when the snatcher took the rap for him. Having come too close already to the problem of life and death as it is complicated by Knox’s bodies, MacFarlane today fears even to practice medicine. Fettes is MacFarlane’s junior student, who is beloved by the sick child. Out of concern for the child—so that MacFarlane may develop the necessary procedure—Fettes solicits a fresh corpse. The murder of a street singer (by Gray) and of Gray (by MacFarlane), as well as the death of MacFarlane (the runaway gig carries him over a precipice), all ensue. These sins of the fathers are visited back on them. But this plot takes a major turn toward complicity beyond that evident in Stevenson’s original tale. Stevenson’s Fettes has lived a life in decline as a result of a complicity that lacked any redeeming features; this new Fettes gets implicated in the plot not through his baser motives, but through his good intentions. He in turn re-implicates the doctor. Furthermore, MacFarlane repeats the anatomist’s line to Walter back to his student: “You ordered the subject … and paid for it.” Naïve Walter Anderson and the compromised Miss Disharts resonate through Fettes’s role.

We might think that a 1944–48 script by Welsh author Dylan Thomas and produced at the behest of English director Donald Taylor (known for wartime information films) would escape the influence of either Slaughter or Bridie (Dylan Thomas, 135–38; Ferris, 196 and n., 220–21). Here, however, Bridie’s theme of complicity takes over. Doctor Murray and Jennie Bailey repeat Walter Anderson’s fascination with Mary Paterson. Early in Thomas’s script Murray questions Knox/Rock’s assertion that “‘The end justifies any means’? … That is—to say the least of it—unscrupulous” (Thomas, 11). When Rock responds, “Then do not say ‘the least of it.’ Say ‘the most’: that it is honest,” Murray, with heavy symbolism, washes his hands alongside his mentor. Murray, then, is half implicated when Jennie Bailey turns up on the slab. Rock, again like Bridie’s Knox, manifests his own guilt by implicating his junior doctor fully. Murray accuses: “She was murdered by two paid thugs of yours: Fallon and Broom,” and Rock bristles like Bridie’s Knox before him (70):

Thugs of mine, Mr. Murray? Do you remember that you yourself paid them for the last three subjects? … We are anatomists, not policemen; we are scientists, not moralists. Do I, I, care if every lewd and sottish woman of the streets has her throat slit from ear to ear? … Let her serve her purpose in death. (70)

But both men, the unsympathetic and the sympathetic, are only part of a more visibly fallen community.

Taking a line from Lonsdale that Knox, with “a world of promise … before him … put shackles to his social progress by marrying a person of inferior rank,” Thomas introduces Knox/Rock’s wife (who appeared in the Karloff movie), and also his religious sister (Lonsdale, 36). The one represents domesticity, the other social judgment. When Murray brings his concerns to them as supposed angels of Doctor Rock’s house, they line up behind their doctor. Wife Elizabeth immediately temporizes, “Can’t people die a ‘natural death’ in twelve hours?” (Dylan Thomas, 74). She then twists the knife in Murray: “everyone will call you murderer, too. … I thought Thomas told me that it was one of your duties to buy the bodies.” (76). Then in the movie version (1985)—though Jennie (Twiggy) is kept alive for the romantic plot and a rip-roaring resistance to Fallon—the theme is further developed through sister Annabella. With Jennie’s friend and Daft Jamie/Billie’s sister serving as the victim, the religious Annabella sides against Murray with the wife who is otherwise her rival. Women, too, can be both sentimental and vicious, religious and wrong. Even enemies are alike in their complicity.

The McGregor Affair, produced for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1964 from a 1953 story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, shows how far the discourse surrounding Doctor Knox had shifted to the issue of the complicit community and folded in the gazing audience. In Sidney Rowland’s source tale, McGregor the porter decides to do away with his good-for-nothing wife, realizes that Burke and Hare are trading in murder victims, and places the drunken Aggie in their way. He subsequently delivers her, too, to the museum, but celebrating in the pub he himself falls victim to his employers. The Hitchcock production makes a subtle change to this American tale. It winds invented persons into this time and place so that innocents actually mimic the murderous role of Burke and Hare. A student questions the provenance of a body. Knox responds obliquely, “Young sir, what are you after?” and insists that “since the supply of bodies is not provided for by the government, we must find our own source.” The student is cowed, and his companion says “Agree.” These two students fold in both attributes of Walter Anderson: his concern and his complicity—the second young man is notable, in this respect, for always saying “Agree.” But the main interest lies with McGregor, who provides the audience for doctors and murderers alike. This McGregor, always watching, always at the window, and eventually prying open packing cases, figures out his new marital strategy. He has thought of killing Aggie before. Extended comic sequences show him trying to hang her from a tree, but dangling himself, or attempting to drown a preternaturally buoyant Elsa Lanchester—“You’ll never do it that way, McGregor,” he laments: “she’s a floater.” He is both an innocent and a rather dark dreamer. At last, however, he is fully involved: although he does not himself murder Aggie, he “brings the beef.”

The Horrors of Burke and Hare (1971) appears like The McGregor Affair in its humor, and unlike The Anatomist for its broad turn toward cockney comedy. The credits play rowdy doggerel over vivid woodcuts:

In the land of bonny Scotland,

It’s not very bonny today. …

Watch out! Don’t let’em catch you,

Or you’ll end up on a slab! …

Burke an’’are, beware of ’em

Burke an’’are, the pair of ’em

Out to snatch your body from you.

The main characters enter to the theme from Steptoe and Son, a 1960s British TV comedy about a rag and bone man (remade in the United States as Sanford and Son), and are quite the comic duo. Has the Bridie influence at last run its course? With its French prostitute, high-class brothel, louche young doctors, and entertaining murders, this film lies somewhere between Tod Slaughter’s productions and Joe Orton’s Loot.¹³Close Still, the anxious medical student who gets involved with a lovely victim-to be, and a community of medical students and prostitutes—both eager in every way—recall Bridie’s concern. The minor regrets available to comedy only highlight our shared blame.

We can trace Bridie’s influence beyond this moment, too—even in a film with no visible British connections and the unlikely title Nightmare in Blood (1976). What relation can there be to this scenario? Four friends/lovers organize a conference/screening in celebration of the good old days of Hammer Horror (British Hammer Studios opened in 1934, and their heyday in horror was the 1960s). The honored guest is Malakai, who stars in vampire films, and vogues in the part offstage—he sleeps in a coffin. As movie makers and cinema staff all over town are sucked dry or butchered for their organs, our intrepid four figure out that Malakai is (surprise!) a real vampire. In 1828 he was starring as Macbeth in Edinburgh, where he hooked up with Burke and Hare. Today, he lives on blood, but “BB” and “Harris” need to be topped up with decoctions from body parts every couple of years to stay immortal. These are provided by Malakai—a Knoxian experimental scientist. And of course the daring four (now three, since one was lost to Burke and Hare) fight back and win. How can this plot tie to James Bridie? Apart from the bloody slaughter, it does not much resonate with our story’s history in melodrama either. Again, community is everything. In a movie that overlaps with the development of urban folklore as a trend in horror cinema, a distinctly American group of city sophisticates unites against Burke and Hare and “Malakai”—but this community is sensitive to the threat because it is implicated to begin with.

Thinking that horror is merely a genre, these naïfs invite the vampire into their domestic space, the old-fashioned movie theater. Conforming to genre, but also to Bridie’s philosophy, they are therefore partly responsible for what follows. At the end, the conference convener addresses a more self-aware audience: “These creatures … do exist. … Beware the monster—he walks among us.” We have invited Burke and Hare in, and they reveal who we are—for better and for worse. Though we assert ourselves as the good, and expel them, they remain out there/in here.

The power of Bridie’s story, visible even in a low-budget mishmash of horror themes, is best indicated, perhaps, by a remake of the melodrama. In 1960, the writer for Tod Slaughter’s 1948 film scripted a second version: The Flesh and the Fiends, starring Peter Cushing. The film begins melodramatically: “This is the story of lost men and lost souls. It is a story of vice and murder. We make no apologies to the dead. It is all true.” It features a suitably daft Jamie, a ruthless Knox, and a leering Burke and Hare: “a man could become a millionaire at this game,” Hare gloats, “it gives a man pride. … Burke and Hare, members of the great medical profession.” Yet this movie offers a domestic setting for Doctor Knox, complete with lovely niece and lovesick junior doctor. Indeed, there are two lovesick young men: Mitchell for niece Martha, and Jackson for Mary Paterson. Jackson, a student, is implicated in an illicit relationship. He recognizes Mary on the slab, and he is murdered for it. Mitchell questions Knox about a number of suspicious corpses. And now, an unusually contrite doctor knows that “you are an ogre, Doctor Knox. … They seemed so small in my scheme of things, but I knew how they died.” Still Martha is sure he acted “For the good of humanity!” while Mitchell defends Knox on her behalf, attacking the consanguinity between all doctors: “We have all traded in death. … Ask yourselves whether you condemn each other.” So in this film, despite its descent from melodrama, significance still lies in a turn toward blame for all. Even lovely Martha, and Mitchell who has saved the doctor from legal consequences and thus colluded in crime.

Bridie was not uninvolved in this translation of his dramatic and philosophical values to the screen. He was well aware of the competition posed by film as he wrote The Anatomist, for in that moment, the theater and the cinema were in a pitched battle in which either might fail. Bridie jokingly warned that “until you go out for debauchery with your whole heart & soul you will never compete with the Talkies,” and working toward a Scottish theater he remarked: “We shall be wired for the Talkies in case” (n.d., NLS MS8181/6; [November] 14, 1931, NLS MS8181/22). At the same time, the Curtain noted that the London production of The Anatomist was staged in “The Westminster … another theatre converted from a kinema” (Curtain, November 1931). Furthermore, Bridie did show interest in writing for the movies. In 1946, Hugh MacDiarmid sneered:

Mr James Bridie has gone to Hollywood, where he would seem to have his spiritual home. It is to be hoped that he will remain there. He has certainly done nothing for drama in Scotland. … Hollywood is the proper place for a playwright who has such a lamentably—not to say ludicrously—inadequate aesthetic as to imagine that entertainment is, and should be, the Alpha and Omega of drama. Mr Bridie has, he says, no use for any propaganda of ideas, or apparently for any ideas. He is particularly opposed to the introduction of politics into plays.

(MacDiarmid Raucle, 3:95)

Undeniably, Bridie did go to Hollywood at Hitchcock’s invitation—though he missed the director, came back … and found Hitchcock waiting for him at Heathrow.¹⁴Close He wrote an unproduced screenplay for a Hitchcock movie eventually titled The Paradine Case (1947); he wrote the screenplay for Under Capricorn (1949); and he provided additional (uncredited) dialogue for Stage Fright (1950). Numerous of his plays were filmed.¹⁵Close But MacDiarmid here makes two mistakes. First, with his elitist notion of folk culture and art, he is deaf to the lively popular discourse of cinema. Second, with his determination to take Bridie at his word, he fails to read Bridie’s work by its aesthetic—which might reveal a philosophy (even a politics) strenuously in operation.

Needless to say, Bridie was incapable of singlehandedly infusing the movies with art and with Scottishness. Besides, art and Scottishness were doing just fine there, though differently than either MacDiarmid or Bridie might have preferred. Nor did Bridie completely redirect the story of Burke and Hare and Doctor Knox. Britannia and Eve’s 1939 “Murder in Auld Reekie,” written and illustrated by F. Matania, gave new life to the story through its voluptuous illustrations.¹⁶Close “Ghoul’s Gold,” an American comic (1946), showed its provenance through David Pae’s Sheffield syndication of Mary Paterson, for it takes place in the northern town, and through the melodrama: the Star mentioned a sailor in Slaughter’s production, and here he is (Star October 22, 1931). Robert Bernstein (writer) and Jack Alderman (graphic artist) give Burke and Hare a distinctly American tone that focuses the story on American-style crime and courts. And this comic rises to no heights of complexity either in presentation or in what it demands of its readers. Moreover, if Burke and Hare became shorthand for medical horror in Nightmare in Blood, they signified comedy in England’s Doctor in Love, where two irresponsible and lovestruck medical students go by their names.¹⁷Close Clearly, once it had entered the forms of mass culture, the story of Burke and Hare and Doctor Knox made its own way in the world.

Nonetheless, we can confidently trace Bridie’s influence in a range of later, non-Scottish dramatizations. The alternate speech Bridie provides to Knox (to allow for a faster curtain) gets reprised by Dylan Thomas (Anatomist, 72–73). Doctor Rock assesses the human heart, then on film he persists in not getting the point of his own lecture. Peter Cushing’s doctor in The Flesh and the Fiends does get the point: his lecture is on the Hippocratic Oath. However he has just admitted his guilt, so the niece and students who applaud him are wilfully complicit. Most notably, even as titles turn to melodrama and horror, or the tone to triviality and comedy, and even as movies end with distinct finality, Bridie’s formal innovation continues in the movies’ unclosable ethos. MacFarlane gallops over the precipice in The Body Snatcher; Hare is thrown to the mob in Horror Maniacs; Knox lectures to a full house in The Flesh and the Fiends; McGregor gets all boxed up in his own story; Mrs. Docherty falls from a cupboard and the players resolve into a woodcut in Horrors of Burke and Hare—and yet these stories never end, for they have opened the implicated community. Ultimately, these tales turn to us. “Posterity,” Mary Belle snapped, “will have to be very clever to judge you justly, Dr. Knox” (Anatomist, 67). Under Bridie’s direction, “posterity” is us—and we have quite enough trouble judging ourselves.

Still, the dynamic generated by The Anatomist was always a tough sell. We can see the challenge Bridie posed to himself as author in the performance history of the play. Bridie balanced the potential horror and guilt of his production with mild humor. Jokes such as Amelia’s claim that Mary Belle’s “heart is in the right place,” together with Walter’s riposte “As a student of anatomy I hope so,” give context for the play and cue its themes without yet taking us into any deeper concerns (Anatomist, 2). When Walter later gets a “corpse-reviver” (drink) from Raby even as we know his companion of last night has shuffled off her mortal coil, humor has turned to dark dramatic irony (40). And when Paterson describes the atmosphere of the dissecting room, “It’s as if the deid men stirred,” only to have Burke knock at the door with Mary Paterson, we are poised between laughter and tragedy (41–42). The later suggestion that a heavy piece of luggage indicates the traveling Amelia has “killed the courier and brought him home to stuff him” shows that we are all naïve whistlers caught in the graveyard (50). In this context, laughter implicates the audience. But subsequent directors of Bridie’s play, less nuanced in their reading, stressed humor in its own right.

Of the 1948 London production, the Scotsman noted, “Comedy … is the key” (Scotsman November 3, 1948). Sim “softens the grimness with gawky humour and in his richly rolling period, with something of the air of a Scottish Micawber.” The next celebrated Knox only carried the humor further. In 1968 the Glasgow Herald remarked, rather querulously:

[This is] … the social Knox, the Knox of “cheering words and affable manner,” the Knox “kind and sympathising with women.” The Knox of bitter tongue and Luciferian pride … has become jolly, pawky, almost bonhomous.

…everything goes tumbling along from laugh to laugh. … [T]he odious Davie Paterson … [is] like some one in pantomime.

(GH February 14, 1968)

The “lamentable comedy” has become merely funny.

These performances refracted an early tendency toward caricature in the play’s rendition. Even as Bridie’s play challenged audiences for the first time, Henry Ainley vogued in melodramatic portraits of the doctor (ISDN December 5, 1931: 548, 549 and UGla). Magazines featured humorous cartoons. But at least some of these, like the ones in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (ISDN November 7, 1931) and the News of the World (NW November 15, 1931), indicated that they understood The Anatomist was not simply a star vehicle (see again figure 5.2). They represent the importance of the ensemble cast, and the characters’ complicity in a layered plot. Moreover, the early performances enacted that complex dynamic with an uneasy audience.

It is significant that while audiences laughed at the Sim and Fleming portrayals of a Knox now decidedly center stage, they knew something was missing in the move from fable to entertainment. In 1952 Glasgow, Bannister registered an audience “who obviously cherished their memories of the original performance … there was some headshaking” (Bannister, 70). Still, there was confusion about what, exactly, was missing. The Stage caught a hint of the problem in this new Doctor Knox. This critic dropped the cautious thought that “it is the hovering between [comedy and tragedy] that leaves one’s emotions in a state of uncertainty”—or should do so (Stage November 4, 1948). That is, the audience is not there merely to be entertained. Rather, they are crucial in the dynamic of The Anatomist. If, however, we are not now poised between comedy and tragedy, where are we? Blackwood’s had encouraged the mob, but Bridie kept them offstage. Now, the Scotsman notices the lack of a crowd to attribute blame and enact justice: “Why was the Edinburgh mob, 2000 strong, powerless to follow the students into the Disharts’ drawingroom?” (Scotsman September 10, 1952). A comedy requires simple solutions, but Bridie’s nuanced drama pointed elsewhere. The lack of the mob never mattered before because a Bridie playgoer, caught in the hall of mirrors, should not need them. In the 1930s productions, the audience itself is implicated in the role of the Edinburgh populace. The riot should be internal. So we are the thing that is missing in these comic restagings of Bridie’s play. This Scottish author has taught us to expect more of the drama and of ourselves.

After a century during which authors had sought to define Doctor Knox and export him from Scottish culture, Bridie faced the issue of how to help Scots put themselves in the picture, and to help us all recognize the big picture. Walter, banished by Mary Belle and falling into drunkenness, moans what might be the Scots’ post-Knoxian catchphrase: “I’m all right, but the world’s all wrong” (The Anatomist, 30). In this respect, he is like Burke and Hare, who fear to place themselves in the mortuary where they eagerly send other people (43). Mary Belle and Amelia are like Walter and his underclass associates, for they refuse to acknowledge their relation to others. Walter needs their recognition, but it is withheld. They are “Scottish enough not to show it” (55). Bridie shows that we are all connected, whether we acknowledge it or not; we all carry baggage from our travels. The lady tourists who have managed to miss the entire Burke and Hare debacle arrive back into its midst—they need the smelling salts that they thought would support them in foreign lands, but not till they return to Edinburgh and catch the reek of their own involvement in nefarious deeds (50). Together, we make up quite a mob.

And this is our productive plight as the audience for James Bridie and his movie making descendants. Bridie successfully put not just Edinburgh, but us, into the picture. In a nation-building that might disturb Hugh MacDiarmid, Bridie’s many audiences find themselves rewritten as Scots through the story of Burke and Hare. This story that is “not our problem”—and even less our problem than it is the concern of any of the characters—is structured by Bridie to wind us into its toils precisely where we identify with those characters who are “all right” and comfort themselves with the naïve assertion that it is the world that’s “all wrong.” This is the bigger picture: our supposed distance from Edinburgh’s underside is what forces on us our disturbing proximity to cultural guilt. Even as—and even because—we assert our lack of involvement, and claim an absence in our memory, Bridie’s play remembers us. We, too, belong in the story of Burke and Hare.