Who Tells Your Story

“Let me tell you what I wish I’d known when I was young and dreamed of glory:

You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”

Hamilton (2015)

Just the ticket.

Warning: Hamilton spoilers ahead. In fact, let me be even more specific: Hamilton spoilers ahead, including the odd one that’s still a spoiler even if you know the soundtrack really well – because I’m one of those jammy so-and-sos who’s now been to see the show in the West End.¹ (Twice, actually, courtesy of the ticket-acquiring skills of two very dear friends of mine. Permission to glare daggers at me and grumble under your breath.) It was exactly as excellent as I was anticipating – a particular highlight was Michael Jibson’s weirdly static and intense portrayal of George III – and, unsurprisingly, it also got me thinking. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

For a start, who tells Hamilton’s story? Well, Lin-Manuel Miranda does, obviously:

 

Dear me, this makes me laugh; thanks, ciphereye.

But of course, he doesn’t just tell it, like that, as if this were Jackanory or something. He has his versions of a collection of historical figures tell it – sometimes in a very self-aware fashion. Who tells Hamilton’s story? Aaron Burr is responsible for a lot of the key structural narration that holds the storyline together, but what we’re getting clearly isn’t solely or even primarily his version of events.² Most of the time, he merely introduces, then steps back. The major case study I’d like to look at is ‘Say No To This’. As so often, Burr kicks off:

“There’s nothing like summer in the city.

Someone under stress meets someone looking pretty.

There’s trouble in the air; you can smell it,

and Alexander’s by himself. I’ll let him tell it.”

And Alexander duly tells it – ‘it’ being the story of his affair with Maria Reynolds. The portrayal of Maria initially really annoyed me, because she could not fit the paradigm of the evil, deceiving seductress any more closely if she tried. She shows up in her red lipstick and her low-cut red dress with her hair cascading unruly over her shoulders; she fawns over Hamilton in husky alto tones; she wastes no time in offering herself to him sexually; she plays up her stereotypically feminine helplessness to the highest possible degree in order to manipulate him. Mr Miranda, I initially thought, you portray the other women in this production – few as they are³ – with such nuance and humanity; what’s with the sudden clumsy use of this harmfully overworn trope?

But then I thought about it a bit more, and I began to wonder whether this might be not so much Hamilton’s portrayal of Maria Reynolds, as Hamilton’s, if you catch my drift. “I’ll let him tell it,” prompts Aaron Burr, and Alexander duly tells it. He tells it in just the manner he wishes to, and it’s clear from the off that the manner in which he wishes to tell it is one which does as much as possible to excuse his actions. “I hadn’t slept in a week, I was weak, I was awake; you’ve never seen a bastard orphan more in need of a break,” he begins. And, significantly, he introduces what Maria says, repeatedly: we’re almost three minutes into a four-minute track before she says anything at all that isn’t explicitly preceded by a “she said” or equivalent from Hamilton, and even that change would seem to have more to do with creating an increase of pace and texture appropriate to the song’s climax than anything else. The second “she said”, a lone interjection between two quatrains of Maria’s, is completely unnecessary either for lyrical sense or musical flow: it seems fair to deduce that we the audience are being deliberately reminded that this is Alexander’s version of what Maria said, and doesn’t necessarily correspond to how she would have told things herself. He is deliberately casting her as the stereotypical evil deceiving seductress, in order that he might cast himself as more of a victim in the proceedings, or at least a pardonable pawn in Maria’s game.

As a further justification for this reading, consider the immediately subsequent track, ‘The Room Where It Happens’, which includes a section where Thomas Jefferson tells events his way. Every couple of lines is preceded by an interjection of “Thomas claims” from the ensemble, in similar fashion to Alexander’s “she said”s in the previous song, and it’s pretty apparent that we’re not supposed to take Thomas’ account of things as entirely accurate. Indeed, if I’ve understood the structure correctly, the same conversation with James Madison that Thomas sums up as “I approached Madison and said, ‘I know you hate him [Hamilton], but let’s hear what he has to say’,” is later recounted very differently, with Madison persuading Jefferson that negotiating with Hamilton might be a good idea, rather than the other way round. The precedent, then, is set, if retrospectively: at least some of the characters in Hamilton are unreliable narrators. We can’t trust everything Hamilton says about his own story.

Who tells Hamilton’s story? Some of the time, he does it himself: perhaps that’s one reason why he ends up painted in such a positive light. Then again, it clearly represents an accurate reflection of the character of the real historical figure Alexander Hamilton, to have him make his defence to the audience about his affair – admitting the essence of the ugly facts, but exonerating himself of as much blame as possible – because that is, of course, precisely what the real historical figure Alexander Hamilton did, in the form of the Reynolds Pamphlet. In other words, ‘Say No To This’ is the fictional Hamilton’s Reynolds Pamphlet. He knows the truth is going to catch up with him, but he’s at least going to make blooming well sure he tells it his way. He’s taking the advice George Washington gave him, as per my opening quotation, as a challenge rather than a warning. He’s doing his very best to take control of how his story gets told.

The way Eliza Hamilton responds to her husband having disclosed the particulars of his infidelity for any old Tom, Dick, or Harriet to gawp at, on the other hand, reveals her very different disposition:

“You and your words, obsessed with your legacy –

Your sentences border on senseless

and you are paranoid in every paragraph, how they perceive you – you – you – you.

I’m erasing myself from the narrative.

Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart.

You have torn it all apart.

I am watching it burn.

The world has no right to my heart.

The world has no place in our bed.

They don’t get to know what I said.

I’m burning the memories, burning the letters that might have redeemed you.”

 

Watching it burn...

Alexander would rather the world knew the sordid details of his wrongdoing, as long as he’s the one who gets to tell them, because at least that way he avoids inaccurate rumours; he can exercise some measure of control over how people perceive him. Eliza, by contrast, would rather keep the truth under wraps, burn the evidence, and let the world say what they will; they have no right to know the sordid details.

Yet in the end, it turns out to be Eliza who strove the hardest to tell Alexander’s story. In the final track of the show, she recounts all the things she did after her husband’s death to secure the legacy she had earlier told him he didn’t need. She desperately wonders, “Have I done enough? Will they tell our story?” Alexander takes her hand (yes, I know he’s dead at this point, but it’s the sort of final scene where that doesn’t much matter) and gestures that she should take a look towards the front of the stage. She walks up to the edge and sees the audience; the last occurrence before the lights come on is her gasp of rapturous disbelief that all these rows and rows of people have heard the story she worked so hard to make known.

Who tells Hamilton’s story? Well, now the audience does. My knowledge of the American Revolution is minimal at best (apparently the British education system doesn’t think it’s a very important thing to know about), but Hamilton has certainly given me more of an idea of some of the key figures and events than I had before. I’d hazard, moreover, that the same or similar is true of a lot of the Hamilton fans I know. We didn’t know his story, and now we do – and we sing along to the soundtrack and post relevant memes on Facebook and urge our friends to check out what’s become our new favourite musical, and so we tell Hamilton’s story. The sheer record-breaking success of the show contains a peculiar double whammy of achievement: every time its reputation increases, that final hanging question – will they tell our story? – is answered with a yet more resounding affirmative. Hamilton’s story is unquestionably being better told at the moment than that of any other Founding Father.

But of course, it isn’t quite Hamilton’s story, is it? For all my talk of unreliable narrators within the world of the show, some of the inaccuracies in its storyline are blameable on the playwright rather than his creations. For instance: Angelica Schuyler was already married when she met Hamilton; it wasn’t Jefferson, Madison, and Burr that approached Hamilton about his affair, but three other randomers I’ve never heard of (presumably on account of the fact that my knowledge of the American Revolution is minimal at best, and primarily derived from Hamilton); George Eacker did not fire on Philip Hamilton before the count of ten in their fateful duel; and so forth.⁴ Please don’t think I’m criticising Mr Miranda for taking the decision to exercise dramatic licence on such points; frankly, it’s unfair to expect anything less when someone undertakes to tell a true story in dramatic fashion. Truth is messy and complicated and frequently dull, and rarely displays as pleasing a narrative arc as is demanded by a three-hour stage show. Still, the point remains: Hamilton’s story is told, widely and enthusiastically, but not totally accurately. And that’s without even beginning to consider concerns about overall approaches to storytelling: for example, is the ‘great men’ narrative too oversimplistic?⁵

Who tells your story? Hamilton let himself be governed by how other people perceived him and the legacy he’d have. Would he be pleased with the legacy he has now? Is Eliza’s gasp at the end of the stage show representative of how the real Eliza would feel, or is it just another piece of unreliable storytelling?

If my argument appears to have landed itself in a little bit of a mess, good. The fact of the matter is this: we are all unreliable narrators. Maybe we use dramatic licence to make a story smoother and more exciting, like Lin-Manuel Miranda. Maybe we’ve learned all our facts from one source and aren’t very aware of its biases and inaccuracies, like me in my minimal-at-best knowledge of the American Revolution. Maybe we conceal the truth from people because we don’t think they have any right to know it, like Eliza. Maybe we’re afraid of people misrepresenting and maligning us and our actions, and so determine to counter that by putting ourselves across in as positive a fashion as we can manage, like Hamilton. Or maybe, at the end of the day, we really do try our very best to represent the truth accurately, but the trouble is we can never know or comprehend it completely because we’re, well, not God.

The tagline is true: we have no control who lives, who dies, who tells our story. On top of that, no mere human being is ever going to tell our story completely accurately. No mere human being can ever know or comprehend our story in all its fullness. But on the other hand…

O LORD, you have searched me and known me!

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from afar.

You search out my path and my lying down

and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

behold, O LORD, you know it altogether…

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;

in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there was none of them.

That’s from Psalm 139, if you didn’t recognise it, which is one of my favourites.⁶ It manages to be mind-blowing (blimey, God knows everything about me and what I do) and deeply comforting (blimey, nothing about me and what I do can ever disappoint him) and completely terrifying (there is no possibility of ever hiding anything about me and what I do from the eyes of the one who holds all authority that exists). God knows each of our stories, completely. And he is not an unreliable narrator.

Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed in the housetops. I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell.

Those are the words of Jesus as recorded by Luke in the twelfth chapter of his account of the good news.⁷ You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story, but one day all of it will be known, and it won’t matter how people perceived you, or what legacy you left on earth – the power of such things only last as long as this life, whereas God’s power lasts forever and ever – and so it’s ultimately foolish to let ourselves be governed by such anxieties, as Hamilton is in the show. We need never be afraid of being misrepresented or maligned by human beings, because it doesn’t ultimately do us any damage if the world tells our story inaccurately. On the contrary, indeed, we have the reassurance from our Lord that Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account (Matthew 5:11). (Although do note that that verse is talking about being slandered for the sake of the gospel, and not for any other random reason.)

At the same time, though, there is every reason to be afraid of having our story accurately known and comprehended by him who has authority that lasts beyond physical death. Nothing done or said or thought in secret will not be revealed. We won’t be able to burn the evidence, or spin the story to absolve ourselves of the blame.

Thank God that if we’re trusting in Jesus, we won’t have any need to. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). Through Jesus’ death in our place, our story becomes his story – and in his story, the protagonist conducted himself with the very righteousness of God, even to the point of laying down his life for the unrighteous. We have no control who lives, who dies, who tells our story; but God is in control of all those things, and, if we’re trusting in Jesus, he has chosen to tell our story as if it were his sinless Son’s.

Footnotes

¹ Yup, it’s in the West End now. Here’s more relevant information than you can shake a stick at: https://www.londontheatre.co.uk/show/hamilton.

² Now seems an opportune moment to provide a link to a playlist of the soundtrack, with thanks to the kind human who put together these rather stylish lyric videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJW4fVtT68Q&list=PLKbpqbC5vCfqFxyv0wdx0w8FprCX4gh6u.

³ They basically consist of the three Schuyler sisters, who are amusingly MisCast in this charming video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYmavCsp8Hs. How weird is it that this might be my actual favourite portrayal of Angelica?

⁴ Not going to lie, I got that lot off Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_%28musical%29, so I wouldn’t blame you if you want to fact-check my fact-checking.

⁵ A decent and fairly brief introduction to the Great Man Theory: https://www.verywellmind.com/the-great-man-theory-of-leadership-2795311. Though to be honest, I expect you get the gist from the name.

⁶ Go on, have a read, it’s such a good one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+139&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Here’s the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+12&version=ESVUK.