Jacobean Tragedy

[Otto]

Great thing, Tim, (as well as the website on it:
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/index.html)
and your quotes really fit:

>
> where evil is all powerful, and where goodness,
> when it shines at all, flickers fitfully, only to be
> extinguished.
>

The "natural" order of good vs. bad is reversed here, and this explains
Pynchon's interest in these plays.

>
> 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."
> (...)
> 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 (...)
>

Which is, so to say, the postmodern condition.

Otto