Luther by John Osborne

First published: 1961

First produced: 1961, at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, England

Type of plot: Biographical; psychological

Time of work: The sixteenth century

Locale: Germany

Principal Characters:

• Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest of the Augustinian Order
• Hans, his father
• Katherine von Bora, Martin’s wife
• Johann von Staupitz, Vicar General of the Augustinian Order
• John Tetzel, an indulgence vendor of the Dominican Order
• Thomas de Vio “Cajetan,”, General of the Dominican Order
• Johan von Eck, secretary to the Archbishop of Trier

The Play

Luther opens with a knight appearing on the stage, clutching a banner and announcing (as he will at the beginning of each of the play’s three acts) the time and place of the following scene: the convent of the Augustinian Order of Eremites at Erfurt, Thuringia, 1506. The audience next sees a man in his early twenties kneeling in front of a prior, in the presence of an assembled convent, within a small chapel. He is Martin Luther, being received into the Augustinian Order. After being robed in habit, hood, and scapular, he vows to give up the world of men, to spurn his former self and live in obedience to God, the Sacred Virgin Mary, and “the Rule of our Venerable Father Augustine until death.”

Martin’s father, Hans, is in attendance, together with Lucas, Martin’s former father-in-law, both of whom dominate the center of the stage briefly after Martin has spoken his vows and been escorted out of sight. A hard-talking coal miner, Hans expresses bitter cynicism about his son’s decision to join the Order, just as he will a year later (in the third and final scene of act 1), when he attends the first Mass that Martin performs (act 1, scene 2). Hans laments over the loss of his son, as well as over Martin’s choice to give up the career he could have had as a lawyer to an archbishop or a duke.

Beginning with the first scene, Martin is troubled throughout the play, not by his missed professional opportunities but by his overwhelming feelings of unworthiness before God, his ceaseless and self-abusive pursuit of perfection, and his inexhaustible striving after a life in total harmonious accord with the will of God. Only gradually, beginning in act 2, does he begin to expect of others (including the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy) the same selfless, servile attitude before God that he has striven to achieve. Whereas the play’s tension in the first act derives primarily from Martin’s struggle with himself, and secondarily from his father’s bitterness over Martin’s choice to reject the mundane world, by the opening of act 2, when the audience witnesses John Tetzel browbeating the citizens of Jüterbog into purchasing indulgences, does the play’s focus widen beyond Martin’s personal life.

Although his discussion with Johann von Staupitz in the second scene of act 2 (1517) indicates Martin is still grappling with the spiritual demands he believes his religion imposes upon him, the play now concerns his disapproval of the Church’s practice of selling indulgences. He has recently begun to criticize the practice, asserting publicly that people cannot bargain with God or buy their way into heaven, and Staupitz informs him that his position against indulgences is upsetting powerful people. Martin refuses to stop his criticisms of the Church and of people who buy indulgences for entry into heaven; in the third scene of act 2 (1517), he preaches that “there’s no security . . . either in indulgences, holy busywork, or anywhere in this world.” He then steps down from the pulpit of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and nails to the church door his ninety-five theses for disputation against indulgences.

Less the result of the theses than of his sermon, in 1518 (act 2, scene 4) Martin is summoned to the Fugger Palace, Augsburg, to stand before Thomas de Vio (Cajetan). Pope Leo X has sent Cajetan to present to Martin three propositions: He must retract all sermons of his critical of the Church; he must promise to abstain from propagating his opinions in the future; and he must behave with greater moderation and avoid offending the Church in any way. “The Roman Church is the apex of the world, secular and temporal,” Cajetan tells Martin, “and it may constrain with its secular arm any who have once received that faith and gone astray.” Despite this threat, Martin refuses to retract his infamous sermon, and Cajetan informs him he will be released from the Augustinian Order. Although Martin later writes to Pope Leo X and pleads for an interview, in 1519 (act 2, scene 5) the pope views him as a “wild pig in our vinyard” that “must be hunted down and shot.” Thus, in 1520 (act 2, scene 6), soon after receiving from Rome the papal bull of condemnation, Martin and his followers in Wittenberg burn the bull, books of canon law, papal decretals, and all documents relating to the Catholic Church and Pope Leo, who, according to Martin, is “a glittering worm in excrement.”

Because much of the play’s first two acts consists of dramatic reenactments of historical events germane to Martin Luther’s religious career, the first two of three scenes in act 3 derive their substance from two such events: first, the Diet of Worms (April 18, 1521), during which Martin is brought before Emperor Charles V, and Ulrich von Hutten, the archbishop of Trier, and Johan von Eck; second, a scene in Wittenberg at the bitter end of the Peasants’ War (1525). In the former scene, Martin is interrogated and told he must retract his numerous books—many of which supposedly contain heretical statements—or be officially excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Martin refuses to retract them. In the latter scene, Martin is accosted by a battle-weary knight who berates him for turning his back upon the German peasants after being the catalyst for their revolt against the ruling class and the Catholic Church. With his opposition to the now-ended war transformed into his expressed belief that the slaughtered peasants got what they deserved, Martin dismisses the knight and waits in a small chapel for his bride, Katherine von Bora.

Noticeably tired in the final act’s third scene, and now the father of an infant son five years after his marriage to Katherine, Martin confesses to Staupitz that, instead of God’s voice, in the past he has heard only his own. Moments before he slips into prideful reverie by recalling his rebellious stance in Worms, he prays: “Oh, Lord, I believe. I believe. I do believe. Only help my unbelief.”

Dramatic Devices

Through the use of a dark screen as backdrop, dim lights, and the seemingly cramped enclosure of a small chapel in the play’s opening scene, Osborne establishes an intimate and private atmosphere for Martin’s introduction. In the second scene, through the use of various dramatic devices, the playwright directs the audience’s attention to the interior, psychological realm of Martin’s life. By so doing he indicates that the play will not simply be a reenactment of historic events, expresses the internal battle Martin is fighting with himself, and primes the audience to consider Martin’s psychology in the following scenes when such devices are absent.

The second scene is overshadowed by a huge knife, “like a butcher’s,” hanging several feet above the stage with its cutting edge turned upward; across the blade hangs a man’s naked body, the head hanging down. Below the knife is an enormous cone, “like the inside of a vast barrel,” and this object—surrounded by darkness—is filled with intense light. When Martin appears onstage, he walks slowly through the cone to its opening downstage. He is about to perform his first Mass, and it is clear by what he says to himself that he is racked with spiritual doubt. The central focus of his soliloquy is on his lost innocence, spoken of as a child: “I lost the body of a child; and I was afraid, and I went back to find it. But I’m still afraid. . . . The lost body of a child, hanging on a mother’s tit, and close to the warm, big body of a man, and I can’t find it.”

Afraid that he cannot find the lost sense of belonging he once knew, he is also afraid, he says, of “the darkness.” The cone from which he emerges into darkness, therefore, represents the mental tunnel back to his past, a tunnel narrow at one end (distant past) and wide at the other (recent past). Outside the tunnel, in Martin’s present of self-doubt and insecurity, is bewildering darkness. The knife and body suspended over it clearly represent the torturous ordeal Martin is suffering and the requisite severance of his head and heart from his sexuality and mobility—a severance effected through living according to vows of celibacy and poverty. Although neither the butcher’s knife nor the cone appears after this scene, the knife is alluded to in relation to God in act 3, wherein Martin asserts, “In the teeth of life we seem to die, but God says no—in the teeth of death we live. If He butchers us, He makes us live.”

Instead of interior, symbolic imagery, in the remaining acts Osborne employs simply painted backdrops suggesting flatness rather than depth, caricature rather than portraiture, and “men in time rather than particular man in the unconscious.” In other words, once Martin’s unconscious matrix and related complexes have been exposed for the audience’s consideration, all he says or does afterward finds its impetus in his pre-Augustinian psychological and emotional needs. Understanding history, Osborne suggests, demands that one delve below the surface of recorded historical events.

Critical Context

Of the four most important playwrights to emerge in the 1950’s—Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, John Osborne, and John Arden—Osborne is generally noted for inspiring a postwar renaissance of the English theater; this he did with Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956, pb. 1957) and its verbally abusive hero, Jimmy Porter. Of the four, Osborne was the only one obsessed with portraying the rebellious fight of one individual against everything—his own emotional needs, his family and origins, his friends, his lovers, his country and its government, and his century.

Osborne was criticized for creating only one-man plays, insofar as his central heroes often grow too large for their plays and supporting characters are often merely foils, seldom permitted to exist as believably as the heroes. Nevertheless, in an era when such a character as Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman seems the norm rather than the exception, Osborne’s rebellious individuals garnered for him a worldwide audience. Whether it is Jimmy Porter railing against established order, or Archie Rice trying to convince himself and the audience he is immune to pain in The Entertainer (pr., pb. 1957); whether it is Martin Luther excoriating himself and the Catholic Church, or Bill Maitland stammering to defend his floundering existence in Inadmissible Evidence (pr. 1964, pb. 1965); or whether it is Alfred Redl’s verbal denunciation of the Spaniards in A Patriot for Me (pr., pb. 1966), Laurie’s contemptuous condemnation of K. L. in The Hotel in Amsterdam (pr., pb. 1968), or Jed’s vitriolic warnings of doom in West of Suez (pr., pb. 1973), Osborne’s recalcitrant heroes generally suffer loneliness as the normal condition of their lives, frequently resort to vituperative monologues, and are unable to accommodate infidelity between the actual world and their ideals.

“Am I the only one to see all this, and suffer?” Martin asks in a prayer in Luther, and with his words—as well as by his unyielding posture against the established group and order—he expresses John Osborne’s characteristic theme.

Sources for Further Study

Banham, Martin. Osborne. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969.

Carter, Alan. John Osborne. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973.

Denison, Patricia O., ed. John Osborne: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1996.

Ferrar, Harold. John Osborne. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Gilleman, Lu. The Hideous Honesty of John Osborne: The Politics of Vituperation. New York: Garland, 2000.

Goldstone, Herbert. Coping with Vulnerability: The Achievement of John Osborne. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.

Hayman, Ronald. John Osborne. London: Heinemann, 1972.

Page, Malcolm, and Simon Trussler. File on Osborne. London: Methuen, 1988.

Trussler, Simon. The Plays of John Osborne: An Assessment. London: Gollancz, 1969.