Frances Liberman
Ms. Kim
IBH Lang and Lit
January 15th 2015
Dysart’s Character and Dream
In Peter Shaffer’s play, Equus, one of the main characters is a psychiatrist named Martin Dysart who specializes with adolescents. The play begins with a seventeen-year-old boy named Alan Strang and a horse named Nugget. Alan is showing great affection towards the horse. Suddenly, a man in his forties is shown holding a cigarette. This man is Martin Dysart, the first character to speak in the play. He begins with a monologue describing Alan and the horse. Rather than focusing on the young boy, Dysart is examining the horse and its purpose. Using his psychiatric brain, Dysart is trying to figure out what the horse must be thinking in that moment. Whilst
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In the dream, Dysart is the ‘chief priest’ wearing a gold mask. He cuts children open which makes him feel nauseous but he wants to stay hidden under the mask. In the end, the mask slips off his face and his assistants discover that it was him. This is when he wakes up from the dream. The monologue mentions “Homeric Greece” (Shaffer 14) which is extremely symbolic to the play. Equus uses many similar techniques that were used in Ancient Greece plays such as the use of a chorus, and the setting of the play. Homeric Greece is the mythical land created by Homer, a famous poet, where lots of sacrifices were made for the gods. In the poem, he is cutting children and sacrificing them thus giving them to the gods. In the dream, Dysart is wearing a “Mask of Agamemnon” (14). This is a ‘gold death mask’, that was initially thought to belong to Agamemnon, a warrior written by Homer (Ancient-Greece). Dysart is also aware of the location of where this ‘sacrifice’ is happening. He believes that he is in ‘Argos because of the red soil” (14). This is a place in classical myths where the warrior Agamemnon went to sacrifice his daughter (Sikyon). Dysart is sacrificing children similarly to Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter. After cutting open each child, Dysart “parts the flaps, severs the inner tubes, yanks them out and throws them how and steaming on to the floor.” (14) while the other assistance “study the pattern they make, as if they were reading hieroglyphics” (Shaffer 15). Hieroglyphics was the alphabet of Ancient Egypt; in this dream, the insides of the children are thrown on the floor and observed very similarly to hieroglyphics. Dysart’s assistants look for the patterns and symbols, which is a portrayal of Dysart’s psychiatric work. The main aspect of this dream is the mask. The masks are not necessarily the physical masks that people wear rather they are figurative masks of which people
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