Jacobean Tragedy

[Tim Strzechowski]

Found this in a used book store today:

Honor Matthews, _The Primal Curse: The Myth of Cain and Abel_ .
Schocken Books: New York, 1967.

Discussing Thomas Middleton's _The Changeling_, the author writes:

" ... In reading or watching [revenge plays of the seventeenth century]
we enter a new and more sinister world, where evil is all powerful, and
where goodness, when it shines at all, flickers fitfully, only to be
extinguished.  The authors of these plays, particularly Webster,
Middleton, and Ford, have, in their work as artists, lost all sense of
the order which was finally vindicated even in the work of the sombre
humanist, Chapman.  In this they reflect an obsession of their age,
whose tormented concern with evil has probably not been equalled since
until the third quarter of the twentieth century."

[ . . . ]

"These plays are closely associated with the break-down of faith in an
ordered universe which gives its peculiar quality to the
twentieth-century 'theatre of the absurd', where anything is possible
because nothing can be understood or expected.  In this godless world
men neither hope nor seek for an absolute revelation of value; they
pursue petty avocations with such attention, enthusiastic or
lackadaisical as their temperaments dictate."

Somehow, in this general description of Jacobean tragedy, I can see
flickers of _The Waste Land_, the Book of Job, and _CoL49_.  The author
continues:

"In the world of John Webster's plays we are not faced with the
spectacle of goodness being corrupted by evil and thus ensuring its own
destruction.  There are figures of real goodness in Webster's plays, but
they remain pitifully weak, and still uncorrupted they are swept to
destruction by forces of evil outside themselves . . . Webster writes of
a world which has indeed become 'absurd'.  In _The Duchess of Malfi_
there remain the last remnants of a metaphysical order.  Goodness is
helpless to defend itself, but evil is equally so.  Its triumph is an
illusion, for it is ultimately self-destructive.  The memories of
goodness in Webster's universe serve only to create a confusion, an
ambivalence, missing in Middleton's more consistently sombre and
materialistic one.  In Webster's plays a divine order lies in ruins, but
goodness remains beautiful, and its beauty is recognized even by its
destroyers."

Again, I see the Book of Job here.  Also, in a Jacobean sense might
Oedipa -- with all these guys hitting on her while she seeks answers to
questions she cannot really formulate anyways --- represent the sole
"goodness" that "remains beautiful" despite the presence of "destroyers"
all around her?  Just surmising.

Tim