The Leader’s Moral Quandary—
Understanding Captain Vere

by Matthew Wynn Sivils, Assistant Professor of English at Westminster College

The following paper was presented by Prof. Sivils on April 30, 2007 at Judging Billy Budd, a panel discussion on the legal and moral aspects of the story. The panel was sponsored by Pittsburgh Opera and hosted by Judge Joseph James, President Judge of the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas.

If we distill the story of Billy Budd down to its purest essences, we may articulate the lesson of the tale this way: that while we are sadly well acquainted with the concept of evil, we are ill-prepared to deal with that which is truly good or innocent. The tragic events of Billy Budd arise from the unfortunate combination of Claggart’s treacherous accusations, Billy’s inability to communicate his innocence, and Vere’s poor leadership. Of these causes, Vere’s failure as a leader does the most to doom Billy and originates from a complicated moral quandary of Vere’s own making. His understanding of his duty as a captain of a British man-of-war conflicts with his more humanistic or intellectual sensibilities, and this internal struggle between what is right as a naval officer and what is right as a man creates a moral fog that clouds Vere’s judgment.

The problem of Vere’s morality emerges in both Melville’s 1891 novella and in Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera, and in transforming the book to the stage, Britten, along with librettists E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, took care to retain the story’s basic themes. Most importantly they managed to transplant the moral heart of the tale from prose to song, and they did it by enhancing the role of the one character who stands at the junction between good and evil, between innocence and depravity—the character of Captain Edward Fairfax “Starry” Vere.

Robin Leggate as Captain Vere in Francesca Zambello’s production at Washington National Opera. Photo by Karin Cooper.

The changes Britten and company make to the narrative take on a less intrusive quality when we realize that Melville never really completed the story. In his biography of Melville, Hershel Parker writes that “When he died, Melville was still revising the manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor,” leaving some details unfinished and “not having settled the direction in which Vere’s characterization was to go” (p. 886). Vere is a leader whose spirit lies ruined by the moral implications of his putting to death not only an innocent sailor, but a man who is an avatar for the concept of innocence itself. As Vere puts it, Claggart has been “struck by an angel, an angel of God, / yet the angel must hang! “ (Act 2, Scene 2).

In an interview, Britten justified his decision to center his opera on a much-altered Captain Vere by saying, “I must admit that Vere . . . has what seems to me the main moral problem of the whole work. . . . I think it was the quality of the conflict in Vere’s mind . . . which attracted me to this particular subject. The fact that he realized later that he could have saved Billy, and yet circumstances forced him to sacrifice him” (p. 286). Still, this seems like an oversimplification of Vere’s role in Billy’s death because Vere doubtless knew he had the power to either stop or delay Billy’s execution. In fact, during the drumhead court-martial Vere seems to purposely omit the important details behind Claggart’s false accusations of Billy’s alleged mutinous activity. When asked by the presiding officers why Claggart accused Billy of mutiny, Vere—who knows much more about the charge—answers “I have told you all I have seen. I have no more to say.” At the end of the brief trial, Vere’s officers—given the odious task of pronouncing a verdict against the popular Billy—ask their captain for guidance, but he refuses to help them saying, “No. Do not ask me. I cannot.” The officers plead with Vere: “Sir, we need you as always,” but Vere responds, “No. Pronounce your verdict.” Given the great remorse Vere feels about his role in Billy’s execution, these refusals to guide the court’s decision toward leniency seem cruel and contradictory.

Understanding Vere’s decision to condemn Billy is not easy, but the answer perhaps resides in Vere’s tendency to cross well-marked social boundaries, a trait that invites conflict with his duties as Captain. Vere suffers from a confused idea about the roles he must play both on the ship and in the court-martial, and as literary critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes:

As witness, as ‘coadjutor,’ as commanding officer, as best friend to the defendant, as chief prosecutor, as final judge, as consoler, and explainer and visitant, and at the last as chief executioner and chief mourner, Vere contrives by his ceaseless crossing of these lines of oppositionality and of rank not to obscure such demarcations but to heighten them and, by doing so, to heighten the prestige of his own mastery in overruling them. (p. 114)

Vere seems to relish opportunities to cross these boundaries. For example, after forcing the officers to sentence Billy without the benefit of their captain’s counsel, Vere—upon hearing that Billy has been sentenced to death—responds, “I accept your verdict. Let the Master-at arms be buried with full naval honours. All hands to witness punishment at one bell in the morning watch. I will myself tell the prisoner.” Vere appears to welcome the chance to break the news to Billy, perhaps because it allows him to cross further existential borders while witnessing how a man who is truly good handles the news of his impending death. Before he visits Billy, in a meeting neither Melville nor Britten allow us to witness, Vere delivers a telling aria that provides insight into how the Captain’s flawed self-perception fuels his equally flawed morality. During the trial Vere takes the roles of accuser, witness, and, indirectly, judge, but as he prepares to enter the state-room where a condemned Billy waits, Vere envisions himself in a series of more noble, even spiritual, incarnations. He is “king of this fragment of earth, of this floating monarchy;” he is a witness of “divine judgment” and has “beheld the mystery of goodness;” he is the destroyer of an “angel;” and he is again “Captain of the Indomitable” before becoming in his words “the messenger of death.”

In 1927, roughly twenty-five years before writing the libretto for Billy Budd, E. M. Forster, called Melville’s novella “a remote unearthly episode [which] reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are indistinguishable from glory” (p. 206), and perhaps at no point in the opera is this more apparent than during this aria. Vere—much accustomed to transgressing social boundaries—now begins to imagine himself crossing existential borders; he momentarily leaves humanity behind to become a witness of the divine and the embodiment of death itself. In Vere’s mind Billy also undergoes a transformation: he becomes one who holds the power to absolve Vere of his own crime as he enters the bleak privacy of the state-room wondering “How can he pardon? How receive me?”

By presenting the opera’s narrative as the melancholy remembrance of an aged Captain Vere, Britten, Forster, and Crozier depart from the plot of Melville’s novella, but this departure works in the opera because it highlights Vere’s struggle to live with the decision he has made. In the opera, the narrative both arises from, and is framed by, Vere’s memory, leaving the Captain an elderly narrator who describes his plight as a man “lost on the infinite sea.” In Melville’s original tale, Captain Vere—haunted by his role in the execution—dies in a sea battle that follows some time after Billy’s death. In the novella the two men are connected by their final words. Just as Billy responds to his imminent death with the cry of “God Bless Captain Vere!”, the Captain also invokes the sailor’s name with his own dying words of “Billy Budd, Billy Budd” (2782). Ultimately, Britten’s opera serves the same function as Vere’s dying words in Melville’s original story—it calls to the dead for absolution.

Works Cited
Britten, Benjamin. Billy Budd, op. 50. Libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. Decca Record Company, 1989.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Benjamin Britten: A Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 1992.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1927
.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor. Heath Anthology of American Literature. ed. Paul Lauter.
Vol. B. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 2727-2785.

Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. vol 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Contact Matthew Wynn Sivils at sivilsmw@westminster.edu.