Jacobean Tragedy

[calbert at mail.hslboxmaster.com]

Just wanted to check in....you guys are doing great work...yes, the genre most decidedly mixes high and low in many ways.....this is a form directed at a largely illiterate audience and employs material of prurient interest to deliver a distorted "message"......bear in mind that REVENGE is counter to God's law, hence its "celebration" must be tampered often by the complete annihilation of the cast, ironically, it is the milleu of revenge which draws the crowd.....but, like the "Hayes code" of old Hollywood, the censors must get theirs too...........


It is also the high drama of the classics twice reduced for "ease of consumption"....once by Seneca, and then again by the Kyd's and Middleton's...


love,
cfa


 

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Otto o.sell at telda.net
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 09:20:32 +0200
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Jacobean Tragedy 


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


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