COL 49 Chapter 4 Starters

[calbert at mail.hslboxmaster.com]

Original Message:
-----------------
From:  MalignD at aol.com


Wrote Calbert:

<<....one of the points I think P is trying to make is that what the world, 
for the most part credits to Shakespeare, is, in fact owed in greater amount 
to people like Kyd, Marlowe and Middleton. >>

Try as I may, I can find no context to contain what you're saying.  WHAT does 
the world credit Shakespeare, erroneously or overly, relative to Kyd, 
Marlowe, Middleton?"

Very badly put, I'll admit......I'm of the opinion that the recurring "bone" references have, as with many things in this slim volume, a large variety of "servicable" functions. One of these is the manner in which the genre itself represents a "resurrection", by that time on its fourth generation (greeks, Seneca, Italians, Elizabethans).....I also sense some effort to resurrect those who seem, at least to someone without a serious academic exposure to the period, to be relegated to anonymity by the "primacy" of Shakespeare...this is not mere nit-picking, given the praise that Eliot lavishes on the movement and its early practitioners.....There seems to be little in Hamlet, for instance, that Bill didn't borrow from Kyd. Eliot also argues that, given the sparse landscape of the prose form of the time, that much of what we appreciate of such fiction mundaneities as PLOT, for instance, we owe to these dramatists..... 


"On another point:  

In the Introduction to Penguin's Three Jacobean Tragedies (Tourneur, "The 
Revenger's Tragedy"; Webster, "The White Devil"; Middleton, "The 
Changeling"), one Gamini Salgado writes:  


Might this, perhaps, be the idea behind the flatness of Pynchon's characters?

Further, from the Introduction:

"The danger of this approach to character is monotony. " 


BINGO! THough I wouldn't second that "monotony part" with regard to Pynchon, I've never misssed "character" in his work, likely a bias from my years as a typical adolescent hooked on 19th cent. russian lit......THere is some further discussion to that end in one of the articles at hand, I'll try to find it......

btw, you didn't appreciate "zany paraclete"? I'm thinking of changing my name.....


love,
cfa  

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