The Truth about Personality

 

Retropost, 2013: The Truth about Personality https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-truth-about-personality.html

Shakespeare Sessions

Hamlet – The Royal Shakespeare Company.
Dir. Gregory Doran. Cast: David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie, Oliver Ford Davies, Mariah Gale. 2009.
http://youtu.be/aHtacpVY8DY?list=PL7o630PAoRHWbFxkXU4qbTEJbZRg6GwPh




 

The Tempest.
Dir. Julie Taymor, based on Shakespeare's play. Helen Mirren as Prospera. Premiere at Venice Festival, 2010. Online at YouTube (MotionPicturez) 25 Sept. 2013.
    http://youtu.be/jXoNHs3WOgM



—and the sleepwalking scene from Verdi's Macbeth, with Paoletta Marrocu:




 

 

Aquí la misma escena con Montserrat Caballé, ahora que está de moda en escenas de terror:

Hamlet marica

Como una burbuja (Like a Bubble)

 La gestión de la realidad mediante la atención: Como una burbuja https://www.academia.edu/42158761/

El momento fílmico: 'He estado en una película'

 El momento fílmico: 'He estado en una película': https://www.academia.edu/26472099/

Je crois entendre encore Alain Vanzo Les pêcheurs de perles Georges Bizet

Roméo et Juliette (1): Vérone

 

COMEDY (Princeton Encyclopedia)

 Comedy
 By Timothy J. Reiss.

From the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

I. DEFINITION
II. ANCIENT
III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN
IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY

I. DEFINITION.  Like tragedy (q.v.), the Western tradition of comic theater is considered to have begun with the ancient Greeks. Such a claim is however less clear than that made on behalf of tragedy, if only because no known culture appears to lack some form of comic performance. This fact has inspired various speculative theses concerning laughter—like reason and speech—as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. As in the case of tragedy, therefore, we need to distinguish with some care between speculative generalizations about the "comic spirit," and that more precious historical description needed to annlyze the function of comedy in society.   We must also discriminate between such description and attempts to analyze the "psychology" of laughter, because the event of comedy and the eruption of mirth are by no means the same. (I should add that althought the term "comedy" has been applied to any literary genre that is humorous, joyful, or expresses good fortune, what follwos will concern above all the theater, even if some observations have a broader application.)

The name "comedy" comes from Comus, a Greek fertility god. In ancient Greece "comedy" also named a ritual springtime procession presumed to celebrate cyclical rebirth, resurrection, and perpetual rejuvenation. Modern scholars and critics have thus taken comedy to be a universal celebration of life, a joyous outburst of laughter in the face of either an incomprehensible world or a repressive socio-political order. Carnival, festival, folly, and a general freedom of action then indicate either an indifference to and acceptance of the first, or a resistance to the second. But scholars have taken such notions yet further: if tragedy represents the fall from some kind of "sacred irrationality," comedy on the contrary becomes the triumphant affirmation of that riotous unreason, marking some ready acceptance of human participation in the chaotic forces needed to produce Life. The comic protagonist's defeat is then the counterpart to the tragic protagonist's failure, both versions of some ritual cleansing by means of a scapegoat—in this case one representing life-threatening forces. Such speculations have been advanced in one form or another by classicists (F. M. Cornford, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray), philosophers (Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer), and literary critics (C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye), not to mention anthropologists and even sociologists.

How much these theories help us understand what comedies are is another, and perhaps a different, question. For in the last resort such arguments depend on the assumption that beneath all and any particular comedy is some kinde of profound universal "carnival", a common denominator of the human in all times and places. Recalling Nietzsche's Gay Science, Jean Duvignaud has thus spoken of 'laughter that for a fleeting moment pitches humans before an infinite freedom, eluding constraints and rules, drawing them away from the irremediable nature of their condition to discover unforeseeable connections, and suggesting a common existence where the imaginary and real life will be reconciled" (229-30). But theories of this sort depend upon the idea that one can obtain the deepest comprehension of comedies by removing them from their distinct historical moment and social environment. They forget that such carnival and such laughter aree themselves the creations of a particular rationality, just as Dante's Divine Comedy universalized a particular theology. Even so seemingly fantastic a theater as that of Aristophanes (ca. 485-385 B.C.) is misconstrued by a theory that neglects comedy's essential embedding in the social and political intricacies of its age and place (Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars).

Setting aside these broad metaphysical speculations, then, we must look at accounts of laughter as a human reaction to certain kinds of errors. By and large, these may be divided into two theories. The one asserts that laughter is provoked by a sense of superiority (Hobbes' "sudden glory"), the other that it is produced by a sudden sense of the ludicrous, the incongrous, some abrupt dissociation of event and expectation. The theory of superiority is the more modern one, developed mainly by Hobbes, Bergson, and Meredith. It presumes our joy in seeing ourselves more fortunate than others, or in some way more free. Bergson's notion that one of the causes of laughter is the an abrupt perception of someone as a kind of automaton or puppet, as though some freedom of action had been lost, is one version of this.

The theory of comedy as the ludicrous or as the dissociation of expectation and event has a longer pedigree. It begins with Aristotle and has come down to us via Kant, Schopenhauer, and Freud. In the Poetics, Aristotle mentions another work on comedy, now lost; what remains are a few comments. In Poetics 5 Aristotle remarks that comedy imitates people "worse than average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others" (tr. Bywater). Similar remarks exist in his Rhetoric and in a medieval Greek manuscript known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, Aristotelian in argument and possibly even an actual epitome of Aristotle's lost writing on comedy (ed. Janko, 1984). Save for suggesting some detail of dissociative word and action, this text adds little to what may be gleaned from extant texts of Aristotl. It does make a parallel between comedy and tragedy, however, by saying that catharsis (q.v.) also occurs in comedy "through pleasure and laughter achieving the purgation of like emotions." The meaning of such a phrase is not at all clear, although it suggests comedy as an almost Stoic device to clean away extremes of hedonism and to root out any carnivalesque temptations.

Although both theories involve the psychology of laughter, the superiority theory seems less particularly applicable to comedy than that of incongruity, for the latter seeks both to indicate devices specifically provocative of laughter and to explain their effect on a spectator. The "Aristotelian" analyses suggest several matters. First, their kind of laughter requires oddness, distortion, folly, or some such "version of the ugly," but without pain. Such laughter thus depends on sympathy. Second, although this theory is kinder than that of superiority, it too has its part  of cruelty, just because of the touch of ugliness. Third, theories of superiority and of incongruity both take laughter as means, as commentary upon or correction of what we may call the real or even "local" world_unlike metaphysical theories, which make mirth an end in itself and an escape into some "universality." Fourth, both these theories (which supplement rather than oppose one another) require the laughter to be aware of some disfiguring of an accepted norm. Comedy and laughter imply a habit of normality, a familiarity of custom, from which the comic is a deviation. It may indeed be the case that comedy, like tragedy, shows the construction of such order, but above all it demonstrates why such order must be conserved.

II. ANCIENT. The fourth theory would at least partly explain why comic competition was instituted at the Athenian Dionysia some 50 years after that for tragedy (in 486 B.C.). Aristtle has told us the first competition was won by Chionides, who with Magnes represented the first generation of writers of comedy. Around 455 a comic victory was won by Cratinus, who with Crates formed a second generation. Many titles have survived and some fragments, but these constitute near the sum total of extant facts about Athenian comedy until Aristophanes' victory with Acharnians in 425. We know that in this competition Cratinus was second with Kheimazomenoi, and Eupolis third with Noumeniai. These names tell us little, but we may perhaps assume that Aristophanic comedy was fairly typical of this so-called Greek "Old Comedy": a mixture of dance, poetry, song, and drama, combining fantastic plots with mockery and sharp satire of contemporary people, events, and customs. Most of his plays are only partly comprehensible if we know nothing of current social, political, and literary conditions.

Aristophanes did not hesitate to attack education, the law, tragedians, the situation of women (though it is clearly an error to take him for a "feminist" of any kind), and the very nature of Athenian "democracy." Above all he attacked the demagogue Cleon, the war party he led, and the war itself. This says much about the nature of Athenian freedoms, for Aristophanes wrote during the struggle with Sparta, when no one doubted at all that the very future of Athens was in question. Aristophanes' last surviving play (of 11, 44 being attributed to him) is Plutus (388), a play criticizing myth, but whose actual themes are avarice and ambition. Quite different in tone and intent from the preceding openly political plays, Plutus is considered the earliest (and only extant) example of Greek "Middle Comedy."

The situation of comedy was, however, quite different from that of tragedy, for anothe powerful tradition existed. This was centered in Sicilian Syracuse, a Corinthian colony, and claimed the earliest comic writer, Epicharmus, one of the authors at the court of Hieron I in the 470s. We know the titles of some 40 of his plays. Othe comic poets writing in this Doric tradition were Phormis and the slightly younger Deinolochus, but the Dorians were supplanted by the Attic writers in the 5th c. and survive only in fragments. The best known composer of literary versions of the otherwise "para-" or "ub-" literary genre of comic mime was another Sicilian, Sophron, who lived during the late 5th c. From the 4th c. we have a series of vase paintings from Sicily and Southern Italy which suggest that comedy still throve there. The initiative had largely passed, however, to the Greek mainland. Plutus is an example of that Middle Comedy whose volume we know to have been huge. Plautus' Latin Amphitruo (ca. 230 B.C.) seems to be a version of another one, and, if so, one characteristic was the attack on myth. (Aristophanes' earlier Frogs [405], attacking Euripides and Aeschylus, tried in the underworld, may well be thought a forerunner.)

By the mid 4th c., so-called "New Comedy" held the stage. Among its poets the most celebrated and influential was unquestionably Menander (c. 342-290 B.C.).  His "teacher" was a certain Alexis of Thurii in southern Italy, so we can readily see how the "colonial" influence continued, even though Alexis was based in Athens. He is supposed to have written 245 plays and to have outlived his pupil. We know of Philemon from either Cilicia or Syracuse, of Diphilos from Sinope on the Black Sea, and of Apollodorus from Carystos in Euboea—worth mentioning as illustrating the great spread of comedy. Until the 1930s, however, only fragments seemed to have survived. Then what can only be considered one of the great literary discoveries turned up a papyrus containing a number of Menander's comedies, complete or almost so. These plays deal not with political matters or criticism of myth, but with broadly social matters (sometimes using mythical themes). The situations are domestic, the comedy is of manners, the characters are stock.

The widespread familiarity of comic forms helps explain why comedy was soon diffused once again over the Greek and roman world. By the mid 3rd c., not only had itinerant troupes spread from Greece throughout the Hellenistic world, but already by 240, Livius Andronicus, from Tarentum in southern Italy, had adapted Greek plays into Latin for public performance. Like Gnaeus Naevius and later Quintus Ennius, this poet composed both tragedy and comedy. From the 3rd c. as well dates Atellan farce (named from Atella in Campania), using stock characters and a small number of set scenes, and featuring clowns (called Bucco or Maccus), foolish old men, and greedy buffoons. These farces were partly improvised, on the basis of skeletal scripts, much like the commedia dell'arte of almost two millennia later. The influence of Etrurian musical performance, southern Italian drama, Greek mime, New Comedy and Atellan farce came together in the comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus, who wrote in the late 3rd c. (he is said by Cicero to have died in 184). By him 21 complete or almost complete comedies have survived. A little later Rome was entertained by the much more highbrow Publius Terentius Afer (Terence), by whom six plays remain extant. These two authors provided themes, characters, and style for comedy as it was to develop in Europe after the Renaissance (though farces, sotties, and comic interludes [q.v.] were widely performed in the Middle Ages).

III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN. As in the case of tragedy comedy was rediscovered first in Italy. While humanist scholars published and then imitated both Plautus and Terence (see IMITATION), vernacular art developed alongside wuch efforts. The early 16th c. saw the publication of much school drama in both Latin and Italian, while just a little later there developed the commedia dell'arte, wholse influence was to be enormous.This was a comedy of improvisation, using sketchy scripts and a small number of stock characters—Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, the Doctor and others—placing these last in various situations. These plots were as frequently derived from antiquity as they were from folk art. Later on, these two forms of comedy tented to feed one another; the popular Comédie italienne of the late 17th-c. France was one outcome. The Commedia's influence was equally visible in Marivaux (1688-1763) and Goldoni (1707-93), though in the case of the first, the Italienne was just as important. The Commedia survives vividly in our own time in the theater of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has put the old characters to work in the service of powerful political satire.

Apain vied with Italy on its development of comedy, starting with the late 15th-c. Celestina of Fernando de Rojas, written in Acts and in dialogue but never really intended for performance. By the late 16th c., Spain's theater was second to none in Europe. Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Calderón (1600-81) and a host of others produced a multitude of romantic and realistic comedy, dealing mainly with love and honor. They provided innumerable plots, themes, and characters for comic writers of France and England. These two countries started rather later than the South, but, like them, benefited from both an indigenous folk tradition and the publication of Latin comedy. The influence of Italian humanist comedy was significant in both nations during the 16th c., and that of Spain particularly in France in the early 17th c.

In France, humanist comedy gave way in the late 1620s to a romantic form of comedy whose threefold source was the prose romance and novella of Spain, Italy, and France, Spanish comedy (especially that of Lope and Cervantes), and Italian dramatic pastoral. The first influential authors in this style were Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean de Rotrou (1609-50). Thew were followed by many, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Thomas Corneille , and the poet whom many consider the greatest writer of comedy of all times, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-73). He wrote an enormous variety, in verse and prose, rangin from slapstick farce to something approaching bourgeois tragic drama. Comédie ballet, comedy of situation, of manners, of intrigue, and of character all flowed from his pern. He did not hesitate to write on matters that provoked the ire of religious dévots or of professional bigots, nor did he shirk the criticism of patriarchy, and many of his plays have political overtones. Having begun his theatrical career as leader of a traveling troupe, Molière made full use of folk tradition, of provincial dialect, of Commedia and of farce, as well as of Classical example. Many of his characters have become familiar types in French tradition (e.g. the "misanthrope," "tartuffe," "don juan"); many of his lines have become proverbial. While his plays do contain the now familiar young lovers, old men both helpful and obstructive, wily servants both female and male, sensible wives and mothers (whereas husbands and fathers are almost always foolish, headstrong, cuclolded, or downright obstructive); they bear chiefly upon such matters as avarice, ambition, pride, hypocrisy, misanthropy, and other such extreme traits. What interests Molière is how such excess conflicts directly with the well-regulated and customary process of ordered society.

Having followed a similar trajectory to that of its southern neigbours in the first half of the 16th c., England created a comic trad. unique in variety and longevity. The extraordinarily diverse comedies of Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the so-called comedy of humors (q.v.) favored by Jonson (1573-1637) seemed about to create two distinct comic traditions. Shakespeare wrote in almost every mode imaginable: aristocratic romance, bitter and problematic farce, comedy of character, slapstick farce, and the almost tragic Troilus and Cressida. If any comedy may be analyzed with some "metaphysical" theory it is no doubt Shakespeare's, with its concern for madness and wisdom, birth and death, the seasons' cycles, alove and animosity. Yet Shakespeare's comedies remained unique, and he had no successor in this style. Jonson's more urbane comedy of types and of character, satirizing manners and morals, social humbug and excess of all kinds, and falling more clearly into the forms already seen, was soon followed by the quite remarkable flowering of Restoration comedy, with a crowd of authors, including Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Behn, and Centlivre, among many others. They produced a brittle comedy of manners and cynical wit whose major impression is one of decayand an almost unbalanced self-interest. They were in turn suceeded by a widely varied 18th-c. comedy from the staunch complacency of Steele through the political satire of Gay to the joyous and mocking cynicism of Goldsmith, Inchbald, and Sheridan. This tradition was pursued thorugh the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a series of great Irish dramatists: Shaw, most notably, then Wilde, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey.

During this period France was equally productive, but with few exceptions failed to attain the quality represented by the names just mentioned. At the turn of the 17th c., Regnard produced serious and significant social satire, as did Lesage (esp. in Turcaret, 1706). Marivaux dominated the first half of the 18th c., as Voltaire did the middle and Beaumarchais the end. If any new form appeared it was doubtless the comédie larmoyante, a sentimental drama whose main (and stated) purpose was to draw the heartstrings; in a way, it did for comedy what the later melodrama did for tragedy. In the 19th c. Musset produced his delicate comedy of manners, while Dumas fils and others strove to produce a comedy dealing with society's ills. This culminated on the one hand in Scribe's "well-made play," on the other in the "realist" drama of Zola and Antoine at the end of the century.

In other European lands, authors tended to be isolated: in late 19th-c. Norway, Ibsen, in early 20th-c. Russia, Chekhov; slightly later in Italy, Pirandello. To mention them so briefly is to be unjust, for they were all major creative figures. In many ways they foreshadowed that breakdown of traditional comedy that marks the mid to late 20th c. Laughter tends to become mingled problematically with that sense of discomfort in the world and uneas in the self which is perhaps a principal sign of our age. Among representative authors one might mention such as Witkiewicz, Mrozek, and Gombrowicz from Poland; Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Handke from Germany; Switzerland, and Austria; Adamov, Ionesco, Arraabal, and Beckett in France; Capek, Fischerova, Havel, and Kohut in Czechoslovakia; Pinter, Arden, Bond, Stoppard, Benton, Hare, and Churchill in England; and Hellman, Albee, Baraka, and Simon in America. All have been writing plays that sport ironically with the political, social, and metaphysical dimensions of the human condition. Usually such issues are no longer held separate, and all are fair game for an ambiguous, perplexed, and uncertain derision. Such theater is now widely distributed, as strong in Latin America as in Czechoslovakia, in Italy or Spain as in Nigeria. It is almost as though comedy had lost a sense of that social norm to which we referrred at the outset, as if it were increasingly imbued with an inescapable sense of the tragic.

IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY. Comedy had from the start a rather ambiguous relation to tragedy, and it was never difficult to see in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai an inversion of Euripides' Bacchae, for example. A celebrated passage at the end of Plato's Symposium has Socrates obliging Agathon and Aristophanes to agree that comedy and tragedy have the same source. Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard has been played as both comedy and tragedy; so has The Merchant of Venice. Even the elements compounding the confrontation may be identical, as in Macbeth, Jarry's Ubu Roi, or Ionesco's Macbett. When the comic protagonist acquires attributes of typicality or of some absolute, then comedy may take on overtones of tragedy. A critic of Molière's Tartuffe (1667) remarked that whaterver "lacks extremely in reason" is ridiculous: anything contrary to a predictable reaction or an expected and habitual situation is absurd. This is of course straight from the Aristotelian tradition, but the emphasis on excess is significant. It shows just how close comedy always was to tragedy, explaining such comedies as Dom Juan or Le Misanthrope. Both focus on an idealism either misplaced or preposterous. Don Juan's ideal self is misplaced because it serves a violent and injurious sexuality; Alceste's self-righteous scorn becomes comic when he refuses even the most innocent concession, and his responses become inappropriate to his urbane surroundings. Yet if he lowered his tone to suit his milieu he would fall short of his ideal: the dilemma is that of dissonance between the dieal and the situation where it is expressed—incongruity again. The excessive ideal in this case contradicts society's needs and fails its norm.

Tragedy appears to require a world view such that a recognized human quantity may be pitted against a known but inhuman one (variously called Fate, the gods, the idea of some Absolute, etc.), permitting the "limits" of human action and knowledge to be defined. Comedy seems rather to oppose humans to one another, within essentially social boundaries. And if, as both the superiority and the incongruity theories hold, comedy is essentially a social phenomenon, then wherever humans are will be somehow conducive to it; whereas tragedy seems to signify a moment of passage from one sociocultural environment to another. That social nature of comedy may be why its characters sem to us so down-to-earth, pragmatic, and familiar. Even where a theater's real (and external) social context is very different, we can still recognize creatures of a social order. That is also why comedies are in league with their audience, obtaining their spectators' sympathy for what are given as the dominant social interests. Volpone menaces that order, as do Shylock, Tartuffe, and Philokleon (Aristophanes, Wasps). Volpone and Shylock are defeated in the name of the Venetian Republic, as is Tartuffe in that of the King, and Philokleon in that of a city longing for peace. In Palutus' Epidicus, the eponymous slave—archetypal outsider for 3rd c. Rome—is absorbed into and becomes a part of the social system. In Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the actors remain at loose ends because they are unable to situate either themselves or a social order. Similarly, Beckett's two tramps remain despairingly expectant at the end of Waiting for Godot. Comedy has always emphasized the conservation of an order it may well have helped construct. When we can no more grasp or even envisage that order, then derisive irony may make us laugh, but it also leaves us painfully disturbed. See also BURLESQUE; DRMATIC POETRY; FARCE; GENRE; GREEK POETRY, Classical; PARODY; TRAGICOMEDY.


—oOo—

G. Meredith, An Essay on Comedy (1877; ed. W. Sypher, 1980); F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882); H. L. Bergson, Laughter (1912; ed. W. Sypher, 1980); F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914); S. Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1916); L. Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (1922); M. A. Grant, The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable (1924); J. Harrison, Themis (1927); K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 2 v. (1934); J. Feibleman, In Praise of Comedy (1939); M. T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the 16th C. (1950), Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (1960); G. E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (1952); W. Sypher, Comedy (1956); Frye; S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (1957); A. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, tr. M. C. Richards (1958); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive C. (1959); E. Welsford, The Fool (1961); J. L. Styan, The Dark Comedy (1962); A., Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660-1900, 6 v. (1952-59), The World of Harlequin (1963); Theories of Comedy, ed. P. Lauter (1964); N. Frye, A Natural Perspective (1965); H. B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (1966); W. Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1967); M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. H. Iswolsky (1968); E. Olson, The Theory of Comedy (1968); E. Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (1968); L. S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy (1970); G. M. Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal Choruses: A Contribution to the History of Attic Comedy (1971); W. M. Merchant, Comedy (1972); K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (1972); M. C. Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 2nd ed. (1973); R. b. Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory (1974); A. Rodway, English Comedy: Its Role and Nature from Chaucer to the Present Day (1975); M. Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (1975); F. H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (1977); A. Caputi, Buffo: The Genius of Vulgar Comedy (1978); E. Kern, The Absolute Comic (1980); R. Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (1980); R. W. Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form, 2nd ed. (1981); Trypanis; Fowler; K. H. Bareis, Comoedia (1982); D. Konstan, Roman Comedy (1983); E. L. Galligan, The Comic Vision in Literature (1984); R. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy (1984); J. Duvignaud, Le Propre de l'homme: histoire du comique et de la dérision (1985); K. Neuman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character (1985); E. W. Handley, "Comedy," CHCL, v. 1; R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and rome (1985); W. E. Gruber, Comic Theaters (1986); T. Lang, Barbarians in Greek Comedy (1986); T. B. Leinward, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613 (1986); E. Burns, Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity (1987); H. Levin, Playboys and Killjoys (1987); L. Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Traditions in India (1987).

La comedia romántica: renovarse y vivir

—oOo—

La última cinta de Krapp

 

La abdicación de Albert de la Torre

Lope (de Vega)

 

Cole, Christina Elizabeth. (Indiana U). "An Ordinary Hero: Humanizing the Literary Icon in Andrucha Waddington's Lope." eHumanista 41 (2019): 202-11. Online at Dialnet.* (Lope, biopic on Lope de Vega, dir. Andrucha Waddington, 2010).

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/6946621.pdf

         2023

Carmina Burana

Nîmes Ferias

 

Tragedy and Otherness

 Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/rayreviewlong.pdf

The Mask of Normalcy

 

A book on masks, normalcy, and personal identity:

Book description:

Psychologists view well-adjusted behavior as conformity—the ability to navigate relationships and events within a framework of societal rules and regulations. George Serban argues that a better test is how well an individual is able to navigate adverse situations by handling conformity’s ambiguities and incongruities. He uses clinical findings and content analysis to explore the interface between social conformity and nonconformist behaviors.
The definition of the normal is itself problematic, since society’s expectations are sometimes controversial, arbitrary, or equivocal. As a result, people who have problems coping with social conformity choose between degrees of nonconformity or hiding under what Serban calls a "mask of normalcy." Further complicating matters is that some nonconformist attitudes are now seen as normal, supported by governmental policies tacitly favoring moral relativism. A multicultural society is crisscrossed by shades of controversial values and mores. New social codes of "correct" conduct blur the distinction between true and false, right and wrong; and social conflict simmers as a result.

What society perceives as well adjusted may even change within a society over time, depending on prevailing social values. Some noticeable variations have been within male-female relationships and sexual morality. Serban ultimately concludes that those who have learned how to manipulate social situations are viewed as well adjusted. Those who have not are seen as struggling or maladjusted.

New Age Matrix Mish-Mash

Tercer Cuerpo

Risarchers

 

Time & The Conways

 

Time and the Conways (y la falacia narrativa) https://www.academia.edu/23665446/

Tragedy and Otherness

 

Edipo en Alcañiz

 

Webster in Baugh

On the Jacobean dramatist John WEBSTER.  

From A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh.
Book II (The Renaissance, 1500-1660) was written by Tucker Brooke and Matthias A. Shaaber.

John Webster (28) was no traditionalist, as Dekker and Heywood were, and cannot be grouped with them without some blurring of his uniqueness; but he cannot be classed, either, with the more typical Jacobeans. He was neither a satirist, a defeatist, nor an escapist, and the tone of his greatest works allies him more closely with Shakespeare and Marlowe than with any of his more exact contemporaries. The record of his life is almost non-existent and the bibliography of his writings exceptionally obscure and fragmentary; two strange facts, since his prefaces indicate that hardly even Jonson had a serener confidence in the merits of his work, and the emphasis the publishers gave his name on the title-pages is equal to that they gave to Shakespeare's. The complimentary verses which Middleton, Rowley, and Ford all wrote for The Duchess of Malfi are a rare tribute to great (and it would appear, broadly recognized) achivement.

Webster is first mentioned in Henslowe's Diary in 1602 as author of various plays which have now disappeared. One of them, Lady Jane (viz., Grey), can probably be traced in Sir Thomas Wyat, printed in 1607 as by Dekker and Webster. It is a loose chronicle play, in casual verse and prose, and is most akin to the first part of Heywood's If You Know Not Me, which it likewise resembles in being preserved in a very faulty text (29). In 1604 Webster wrote for Shakespeare's company the famous induction to Marston's Malcontent, which, unfortunately brief as it is, gives a priceless view of what went on during a performance at the Globe. About the same time he collaborated with Dekker again in two city comedies for the Children of Paul's, Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! The former received a notable accolade from Ben Jonson in the prologue of the oppositely-named Eastward-Ho!

For that was good, and better cannot be

They are lively and well-plotted pieces, both in prose and both dealing with the amorous amusements of London wives. It is naturally impossible to recognize in them the later Webster, but they do not appear to be overwhelmingly Dekker's work (30). They are quite devoid of the caustic satire which was the fashion of the day, and, though the language and situations are pungent enough, the moral in both plays is the unfashionable one that the citizens' wives are a good deal better than their reputations. The loss of Webster's play of Guise is much to be deplored. He evidently thought well of it, bracketing it with The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi in the dedication of his Devil's Law-Case. It was most likely founded on Marlowe's Massacre at Paris and would probably emphasize the Marlovian strain in Webster. His fame rests now almost wholly upon the two tragedies just mentioned, which are like no other plays of the period.




The White Devil

The White Devil was acted by the Queen's Company (Heywood's) and printed in 1612. It concerns the rather recent case of Vittoria Accoramboni, Duchess of Bracciano, who lived from 1557 to 1585. By following the available accounts of her brief and stormy life Webster could have produced a much more plausible tragedy than the one he wrote (31); but Webster is never plausible, and when he varies from his sources usually does so in order to emphasize the brutal irrationality of life, and thus increases his constructional difficulties. Vittoria in his play is neither white nor a devil. Her complicity in her husband's murder, though morally certain, is not avowed, and in the great scene of Act III, in which she is arraigned before Cardinal Monticelso and the embarrassed ambassadors, Webster allows her all the honors of the conflict. It is a scene that John Fletcher may be thought to have done well to copy a year or two later, when he wrote Katharine of Aragon's defense of herself before Cardinals Wolsey and Campeius (32). Vittoria has a brother, Flamineo, who is one of the most bloodcurdingly real villains in English drama, and a mother, Cornelia, who is one of its most pathetic creations, a kind of ancient Ophelia. Webster works with terror and pity, undiluted, and in copious ouptorings. He employs ghosts and horrid dumbshows after the manner of the early Senecans, and has many of the grisliest stage deaths in literature. Isabella dies by kissing a poisoned picture of her husband. Camillo's neck is broken by his companions while vaulting, Brachiano is killed by a poisoned helmet (the pain driving him mad), Marcello is without warning run through the body by his brother in their mother's presence; Vittoria, Zanche, and Flamineo are all stabbed after a scene in which Flamineo has most horribly pretended to be shot with pistols. The deaths pile up so lawlessly that one is tempted to retort upon the author the last question of the play:

By what authority have you committed
This massacre?

But between these are small and moving voices that protest and point the pity of it; for instance, the boy Giovanni's talk with his uncle (III.i) and Cornelia's mad song (V. i),

Call for the robin readbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.

The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi, which was acted by Shakespeare's company about 1613 and revised a little later, is a better play because, along with as much terror, it has more pity, and so gives Webster's view of life in better balance. The plot, derived from Bandello through Painter and based on very early sixteenth-century history, has been made as absurd as possible. The duchess, contracting a marriage of love with her honest and knightly master of the household, must keep it secret from her two domineering brothers, who have planted a super-spy, Bosola, in her palace to inform them of just such matters. An average detective would do Bosola's business in a day, but in this play the obvious is never discernible. Years pass, while Bosola pries and plots. Children are born and almost grow to maturity in the way Sidney deplored, before the wicked brothers find a motive for their cruelty. The fourth act is wholly devoted to the duchess's death, and may well be the greatest death scene in Elizabethan literature. The fifth act, which presents six deaths more, should be anticlimax, but is kept aloft by Webster's mastery of the macabre.

The business of Webster's plays almost carries one back to the work of Kyd, but his strange art is far more intelligent. His style is curiously unrhythmic, except in the songs which crash in, like the trumpets of doom, upon the cacopohonies of mundane speech. His dialogue is often patched with sayings from Sidney, Montaigne, or Donne, which he had stored in his notebooks (33), and he sometimes introduces formal "characters" such as he was writing for the Overbury collection (34). His view of life is Elizabethan rather than Jacobean in the sharp distinction he maintains between good and bad and the straightforwardness with which he faces death and horror. He is one of the most romantic of dramatists. Life, he teaches, is a labyrinth. "Wish me good speed," says the Duchess near the beginning of her play,

For I am going into a wilderness,
Where I shall find no path nor friendly clue
To be my guide.

The only constant is death, up to which he leads his characters relentlessly, and dismisses them under the glare of death's great illumination. He makes no theological assertions, but the reading of him is a kind of religious experience, and if any affinity for him must be sought among the Stuart writers, it will be found in such mystic poets as Herbert or Vaughan. Webster, too, seems constantly to be whispering,

Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just,
    Shining nowhere but in the dark,
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
    Could man outlook that mark! (35)

No one, however, is more like him than Shakespeare's in the latter's darkest moods, and the play that most resembles Webster's two tragedies is King Lear. Lear says something very like "I am Duchess of Malfi still" (36), and Gloster parallels Bosola's cosmic despair,

We are merely the star's tennis-balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them. (37)

Webster's most famous line,

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,

may have had its cue in King Lear, v. iii. 242; and perhaps only Shakespeare can bedew his horror with such appeals to simple pity as the Duchess's

I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.

Webster's two later plays, The Devil's Law-Case (1623) and A Cure for a Cuckold (printed 1661)—the latter in unfortunate collaboration with Rowley—must be briefly dismissed; not because they are altogether inferior, but because Webster is here attempting tragicomedy and finds that medium too light for his hand. The chief figure of the Law-Case, Romelio, the wealthy merchant of Naples, who in one scene is disguised as a Jew, is a not unworthy imitation of Marlowe's Barabas, and his mother and sister belong with Webster's greatest women. The long court scene (IV. ii), which occupies a fifth of the play, is comparable with the one in The White Devil, and some of Webster's most characteristic lines are in this play, as well as one of his greatest songs,

Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites!
Sweetest breath and clearest eye,
Like perfumes, go out and die.

Notes

(28) See F. L. Lucas, Complete Works of John Webster (4v., 1927); E. E. Stoll, John Webster (Cambridge, Mass., 1905): Rupert Brooke, John Webster and the Elizaethan Drama (1916).

(29). See M. F. Martin, "If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody and The History of Sir Thomas Wyat," Library, XIII (1932). 272-281; W. L. Halstead, "Note on the Text of  . . . Sir Thomas Wyatt," MLN XIV (1939). 585-589.

(30). See F. E. Pierce, The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker (1909).

(31). See B. Colonna, La nipote di Sisto V: il dramma di Vittoria Accoramboni (Milan, 1936), and Lucas's historical introduction, Works of Webster, I. 70-90.

(32). Henry VIII, III. i. Fletcher's additions to Holinshed's account may be presumed to come from Webster.

(33). See C. Crawford, Collectanea, I. 20-46, II. 1-63 (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1906, 1907).

(34). E.g. White Devil, III. ii 82-85) (ed. Lucas); Duchess of Malfi I. i. 157-166.

(35). Henry Vaughan, "They are all gone into the world of light."

(36). King Lear, IV. vi. 110, "Ay, every inch a king!"

(37). See King Lear, IV. i. 36 f.

John Webster (The Oxford Companion to Eng. Lit.)

—oOo—

Puro teatro

 

THE INDIAN QUEEN

Dryden está seriamente purgado en esta versión, quizá con justicia poética. Queda la música de Purcell. Aquí puede oírse; con respecto a la india de la imagen, recordemos que las indias eran indias occidentales:

—oOo—

Twelfth Night (1969)

 Retropost, 2013: Twelfth Night (1969) https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2013/11/twelfth-night-1969.html

Hamlet's Human Nature

Retropost, 2013: Hamlet's Human Nature https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2013/11/hamlets-human-nature.html

Le Crocodile trompeur

 

'Art, Truth, and Politics' (2005) de Harold Pinter

 Art, Truth, and Politics' (2005) de Harold Pinter: traducción https://www.academia.edu/20167814/

Shakespeare, 'Julius Caesar' (RSC, 2012)

NOTAS SOBRE '1599'

 Notas sobre '1599: Un año en la vida de William Shakespeare' https://www.academia.edu/22522107/

Pepa, no me des tormento

 

Perdone caballero

 

Twelfth Night (Lincoln Center)

 

Shakespeare. Twelfth Night or What You Will. Dir. Nicholas Hytner. Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Video. (Live from the Lincoln Center). Cast: Paul Rudd, Helen Hunt, Philip Bosco, Kyra Sedgewick, David Patrick Kelly, Rick Stear. 1998. YouTube (gimmianidecanuse) 7 Nov. 2020.*

         https://youtu.be/9cU5Py8GCmA

         2023

 

—oOo—

The University Wits

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

John Lyly

Lyly, John (?1554-1606), the grandson of William *Lily. He was educated possibly at the King's School, Canterbury, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He studied also at Cambridge. He was MP successively for Hindon, Aylesbury, and Appleby (1589-1601), and supported the cause of the bishops in the *Martin Marprelate controversy in a satirical pamphlet, *Pappe with an Hatchet (1589). The first part of his *Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit appeared in 1578, and the second part, Euphues and His England, in 1580. Its peculiar style came to be known as 'Euphuism'. Among Lyly's plays, all of which were written for performance by boy actors to courtly audiences, are Alexander, Campaspe and Diogenes (see under Campaspe, its later title); Sapho and Phao (1584); Endimion (1591); Midas (1592), Mother Bombie (1594, see under Bumby). The attractive songs in the plays, including such well-known lyrics as 'Cupid and my Campaspe played', were first printed in Blount's collected edition of 1632; it is doubtful to what extent they are the work of Lyly. Although Euphues was Lyly's most popular and influential work in the Elizabethan period, his plays are now admired for their flexible use of dramatic prose and the elegant patterning of their construction. R. W. Bond edited Lyly's works in 1902, and there is a good study of him by G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (1962).


George Peele

Peele, George (1556-96), the son of James Peele, clerk of Christ's Hospital and author of city pageants and books on accountancy. He was educated at *Christ's Hospital, Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College), and Christ Church, Oxford. From about 1581 he was mainly resident in London, and pursuing an active and varied literary career. He was an associate of many other writers of the period, such as Thomas *Watson and Robert *Greene. His works fall into three main categories: plays, pageants, and 'gratulatory' and miscellaneous verse. His surviving plays are *The Araygnement of Paris (1585), Edward I (1593), *The Battle of Alcazar (1594); *The Old Wives Tale (1595); and *David and Fair Bethsabe (1599). His miscellaneous verse includes *Polyhymnia (1590) and The Honour of the Garter (1593), a gratulatory poem to the Earl of Northumberland. Peele's work is dominated by courtly and patriotic themes, and his technical achievements include extending the range of non-dramatic blank verse. The jest book The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607) seems to bear little relation to Peele's actual personality. His Life and Works were edited by C. T. Prouty (3 vols, 1952-70).



Robert Greene

Greene, Robert (1558-92), born in Norwich, educated at St John's College and Clare Hall, Cambridge, from 1575 until 1583, and incorporated at Oxford in 1588. From about 1585 he lived mainly in London. Although he liked to stress his connections with both universities, his later literary persona was that of a feckless drunkard, who abandoned his wife and children to throw himself on the mercies of tavern hostesses and courtesans; writing pamphlets and plays was supposedly a last resort when his credit failed. He is said to have died of a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings, though it may more likely have been plague, of which there was a severe outbreak in 1592. Greene was attacked at length by Gabriel *Harvey in Foure Letters (1592) as the 'Ape of Euphues' and 'Patriarch of shifters'; *Nashe defended him in Strange Newes in the same year, acknowledging Greene to have been a drunkard and a debtor, but claiming that 'Hee inherited more vertues than vices.' Greene's 37 publications, progressing from moral dialogues to prose romances, romantic plays, and finally realistic accounts of underworld life, bear out Nashe's assertion that printers were only too glad 'to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit'. The sententious moral tone of his works suggests that his personal fecklessness and deathbed repentance may have been partly a pose.

Among the more attractive of his romances are the Lylyan sequel Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587); *Pandosto: The Triumph of Time and Perimedes the Blacke-Smith (1588); *Menaphon (1589). Among his 'repentance' pamphlets are Greenes Mourning Garment and Greenes Never too Late (1590) and the work attributed to him *Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592). Greenes Vision (1592) is a fictionalized acccount of his deathbed repentance in which he receives advice from *Chaucer, *Gower, and King Solomon. The low-life pamphlets include A Notable Discover of Coosenage (1591) and three 'conny-catching' pamphlets in the same years 1591-2. His eight plays were all published posthumously. The best known are Orlando furioso (1595), *Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (1594) and *James the Fourth (1598), of which there are editions by J. A. Lavin and N. Sanders.

Greene is now best known for his connections with Shakespeare. The attack on him in the Groats-Worth of Witte (below) as an 'upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers' is the first reference to Shakespeare as a London dramatist, and his Pandosto provided Shakespare with the source for *The Winter's Tale. The voluminousness of Greene's works and the supposed profligacy of his life have caused him to be identified with the typical Elizabethan hack writer; he probably provided a name and a model for the swaggering Nick Greene in Virginia *Woolf's Orlando (1928) . Greene's works were edited in 15 volumes by *Grosart (1881-6).

Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance, a prose tract attributed to Robert *Greene, but edited and perhaps written by Henry *Chettle, published 1592.

It begins with the death of the miser Gorinius, who leaves the bulk of his large fortune to his elder son Lucanio, and only 'an old groat' to the younger, Roberto (i.e. the author), 'wherewith I wish him to buy a groatsworth of wit'. Roberto conspires with a courtesan to fleece his brother, but the courtesan betrays him, subsequently ruining Lucanio for her sole profit. The gradual degradation of Roberto is then narrated, and the tract ends with the curious 'Address' to his fellow playwrights *Marlowe, *Lodge, and *Peele, urging them to spend their wits to better purpose than the making of plays. It contains the well-known passage about the 'upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers', the *'Johannes fac totum¡, who 'is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey', which probably refers to Shakespeare as a non-graduate dramatist newly arrived in London.


Thomas Lodge

Lodge, Thomas  (1558-1625), son of Sir Thomas Lodge, lord mayor of London, educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London, and Trinity College, Oxford. He was a student of Lincoln's Inn in 1578. In 1579 he pubished an anonymous Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays, a reply to *Gosson's Schoole of Abuse, and in 1584 An Alarum against Usurers (dedicated to Sir Philip *Sidney), depicting the danger that moneylenders present to young spendthrifts. Appended to it was a prose romance Forbonius and Prisceria. *Scillaes Metamorphosis, an Ovidian verse fable, was published in 1589. In about 1586 Lodge sailed on a privateering expedition to the Terceras and the Canaries, and in 1591-3 to South America. On the earlier voyage he wrote his best-known romance *Rosalynde (1590), 'hatcht in the stormes of the Ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perillous seas'. After four more minor prose romances he published Phillis: Honoured with Pastorall Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights (1593), including many poems adapted from Italian and French models , to which was appended 'The Complaynt of Elstred', the story of the unhappy mistress of King *Locrine. His play The Wounds of Civill War (1594), about Marius and Sulla, had been performed by the Lord Admiral's Men; he also wrote A Looking Glasse for London and England (1594), in collaboration with Robert *Greene. It is not clear whether he wrote any other plays. A Fig for Momus (1595) was a miscellaneous collection of satirical poems including epistles addressed to Samuel *Daniel and Michael *Drayton. Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discovering the Devils Incarnate of this Age was published in 1596, as was a remarkable romance, *A Margarite of America, written during his second voyage, under Thomas Cavendish, while they were near the Magellan Straits. Lodge soon after this became a Roman Catholic, and studied medicine at Avignon; he was incorporated MD at Oxford in 1602, and in the next year published A Treatise of the Plague. He completed two major works of translation: The Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus (1602), which was frequently reprinted, and The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1614). His last work was a translation of Goulart's commentary on *Du Bartas (1621). Lodge is now mainly remembered for Rosalynde and for the lyrics scattered throughout his romances. His works were edited by E. *Gosse (4 vols, 1883).





Other "University Wits":

Thomas Nashe 

Thomas Watson

Thomas Kyd

Christopher Marlowe


 

La Celestina

The Twins Who Share a Body

 

Sentiments and Spectators

A lecture by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, "Sentiments and Spectators: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy." (The Human Nature Tradition in Anglo-Scottish Philosophy: History and Future Prospects. The Shalem Center, Jerusalem, Dec. 14-17, 2009). YouTube (gsmunc)

         http://youtu.be/oxXeDFjxRUw

         2013

Chaucer's Pale Blue Dot

 Moving towards the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde —"This litel spot of erthe" -

 

The wraththe, as I began yow for to seye,

Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;

For thousandes his hondes maden deye,

As he that was with-outen any pere,

Save Ector, in his tyme, as I can here.

But weylaway, save only goddes wille,

Dispitously him slough the fiers Achille.

 

And whan that he was slayn in this manere

His lighte goost ful blisfully is went

Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere,

In convers letinge every element;

And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,

The erratik sterres, herkeninge armonye

With sownes fulle of hevenish melodye.

 

And down from thennes faste he gan avyse

This litel spot of erthe, that with the see

Embraced is, and fully gan despyse

This wrecched world, and held al vanitee

To respect of the pleyn felicitee

That is in hevene above; and at the laste,

Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste;

 

And in him-self he lough right at the wo

Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste;

And dampned al our werk that folweth so

The blinde lust, the which that may not laste

And sholden al our herte on hevene caste,

And forth he wente, shortly for to telle,

Ther as Mercurie sorted him to dwelle.

 

Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus for love,

Swich fyn hath al his grete worthinesse;

Swich fyn hath his estat  real above,

Swich fyn his lust, swich fyn hath his noblesse;

Swich fyn hath false worldes brotelnesse.

And sthus bigan his lovinge of Criseyde,

As I have told, and in this wyse he deyde.

 

O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she, 

In which that love up groweth with your age,

Repeyreth hoom from worldly vanitee,

And of your herte up-casteth the visage

To thilke god that after his image

Yow made, and thinketh all nis but a fayre

This world, that passeth sone as floures fayre.

 

 

—oOo—

Ante un nuevo Golpe de Estado (Pau Guix)

El rey que fue

 

An Apology for Actors

 (Retropost, 2013)

Not the one written by Thomas Heywood, but an apocryphal apology for actors and theatre, in the context of a conversation on 16th-century London, put in Shakespeare's mouth by Christopher Rush, in his novel Will (2007).

 

Whores and actors are not so far apart—both faking it for cash, and both die and rise again. But the Puritans accepted the whores as they could never accept the actors. Whores descended from Eve, theology sound as Genesis. The prostitue was easy to understand and to embrace. She was recognizable—her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell, her cunt is a cauldron of unholy lusts, and there is no whore without Eve. No Eve, no sin; no sin, no damnation; no damnation, no redemption—no Christ, no Church, no Pope. And no Pope, no Reformation, no Puritan to oppose the Great Whore herself, Babylon the great. The whores of London, kept the Puritan in his post, gave him his living. The Puritan could not exist without the whore. Whoredom was as needful to his church as it was to fallen man, fornicating his life away in London.

'And the players?'

With the players it was the contrary. Actors descend from neither Adam nor Eve but from Satan, who came onto the world's stage disguised as a serpent. It was the first costume and the devil the original actor, and a good one too. His tongue dropped honey and Eve was taken in. She fell down and worshipped him and her suddenly naked navel became the entrance to the theatre. That's why Puritans and players could never live together. Our false idols lined the route to hell—Dick Tarleton, Ned Alleyn, Bill Kempe popular as primroses—and so the player was far more damnable than the whore.

'Mass magic'

Your whore can take only one man at a time. If a dozen a day go through her she's doing well by doing ill. But a single player, he could command an entire theatre of spectators in one speech. In one world.

'Why, they would hang on him—'

As if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. One word? I tell you even a word was not necessary. Windy suspiration of forcèd breath, a sweeping gesture, your fingers on your lips I pray, yes, even silence. Even the very thought of silence. To die: to sleep; no more.

'No more.'

And that's how it was done. Nailed them to the ground and galleries and kept them from the pulpits, lured them to the theatres instead, to applaud the actors to the very echo that should applaud again, to wait breathless in the London afternoon for the next word, for the very next syllable. Oh yes, the player could do all this, all this and more. He was the god of the groundlings, idol of the aristocrats. The Puritan, though he played the orator as well as Nestor, could never sermonise an audience into such submission. Even the silver-tongued friar who made the fields his pulpit—the audiences walked over his ghost, trampling him into daisies, and streamed straight into the theatres. Fear had been the weapon up till now. But now seduction was stronger than fear, and seduction was in the air—no, it was in the air, the very air we breathed. And all the Puritan could do was rage.

'Conscience, morality, divine reason?'

It was the theatres that brought men's humanity out of chests and closets and whispering chambers and placed it up on stage, where a handful of poor players, with four or five most vile and ragged foils, right ill disposed in brawl ridiculous, blazoned it to the world. As for right reason, the fear of God, wisdom, understanding, the knowledge of the holy—ah, these are not the stuff as dreams are made on, these are but pale shadoes of people beside the player's ability to be a walking mirror to everyman, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure, to make every spectator in that wooden circle see himself standing up there, standing up in the world for exactly what he is: man, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, aspiring-despairing, delighted-deluded, in love, in hate, in heaven, in hell, a thing of darkness and of light, a lover, a tyrant, a madman, a poet, a dragon, a worm. So the poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage was rich in that one enormous regard, his ability to see himself and present himself in the round and inside out by a species of sorcery that left the Puritan gaping.

    For the player was the man who showed you life as it is, not as it ought to be, who said what he felt, not what he ought to say.

'Truth's a dog must to kennel, I remember from somewhere.'

But a man's occulted guilt can itself unkennel in one speech, and guilty creatures sitting at a play are struck so to the soul that suddenly their spirits are off the leash and barking out the theatre, howling through the world. Did the spectator leave the theatre a purged and purer person? Or did he leave it corrupted? All a player can say is that he sent the theatre-goer out more human than he'd come in—which is the end of art and no bad boast: to make us more ourselves, not less ourselves, as the Puritans would have had it, by plucking us out of the murk and mire of humankind.

    Whatever the truth, the Puritan feared the player. And he feared the play, which staged several players, and the playhouse, which put out many plays. Theatres were outposts of hell, Satan's garrisons. Hell was an occupying force in England and its legions were in London, where the traffic of the stage took two thousand to hell in two hours. A frightening figure. Worse—with half a dozen plays running on any given afternoon the theatres were capable of ushering the entire cast of London into hell in ten days flat—which ought to have pleased your Puritan. So many souls bound straight for hell, with damnèd speeches buzzing in their ears, surely all the greater space for the elect and élite of God in their silent white heaven. But that perhaps is what they feared most—being with themselves.

'So you hated them, Will.'

The very name's a lie. Puritan. To the Puritan all things were impure. They could find no good in man, nor any god in man, and they lashed man himself and his eternal companion and corrupter, woman, for all evils. Even the queen was not spared. And puritan Stubbes, who pamphleteered against her, had his offending hand cut off. But in all their accusations they never accused themselves, though within their snow-broth blood there bubbled the same old cauldron of unholy appetites. Your Puritan wants to fuck the thing he fears and then to kill the thing he fucks—or, if he cannot have it, he must kill it to ease his fury. What was he really? At best he was a boil on the bum, spoiling your seat in the theatre: at worst a wild beast in the bowels. The ultimate revenge is to put him in the play, show him sick of self-love and laugh him to scorn—or stop the laughter and make the people hate him for what he is: ambassador of death, killer of laughter, a syphilis in the soul, a negation of all that is human and lovely and of good report.

'And graven images—?'

Are what we want—and what the players give us. We long for imitation. We long to be happy. Only the gods are bored. And the Puritans wanted us to be as gods. So I gave them instead unregenerate man, incapable of their Jesus: the poor wild Bedlam who ate the old rat in the fury of his heart, and the darkness that was Caliban. I gave them not their strait and narrow gateway to God, but the broad primrose way, the playhouse way. For the theatre was the only place in London you could go to outside the ale-house to hear an honest comment on our lives, uncolored by fear of God or the grave. Here the players were indeed the only men. Their theatres were islands of art rising out of the crude sea of corruption that surrounded them on all sides. They were the clear bright bells of London, beating loudly and sweetly over the sodden city.

(Christopher Rush, Will, Beautiful Books, 2007, pp. 200-204).

'Like a Comet I Was Wonder'd At': Shakespeare y las supernovas

 

 

—oOo—

Film aesthetics and style

 Estética y estilo en el cine (A Bibliography): https://bibliojagl.blogspot.com/2023/11/estetica-y-estilo-en-el-cine.html