Jacobean Tragedy

[Dave Monroe]

Again, briefly, as I catch up on the week (been busy,
been sick, been gone, at al.), this reminds me, that
transition from revenge to Justice, from blood feud to
Athenian Law, enacted in Aeschylus' Eumenides
("Euripedes?" "Yeah, Eumenides?"), which
coincidentally (?) served as the basis for both J.P.
Sartre's The Flies (Les mouches) and T.S. Eliot's The
Cocktail Party ...  

Also note the setting of such plays in the presumably
degenerate Catholic South, vs. Protestant (and, esp.
Puritan) England, amongst Papist, nigh-unto-heathen
iconophilia (replete with, for example, descriptions
and depictions of gruesome martyrdoms) and kenoticism
(emphasizing the Incarnation, vs. the Resurrection,
note the cannibalistic parody of the Eucharist in The
Courier's Tragedy, "This is my body," "anti-clerical"
[p. 69] indeed) ...

Cf. the gothic novel, which takes up many of the same
elements, and note that Pynchon comments both on
Horace Walpole's ur-gothic The Castle of Otranto and
the genre's parodic apotheosis, Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein, in "Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?" ...

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

--- "calbert at mail.hslboxmaster.com"
<calbert at mail.hslboxmaster.com> wrote:
> 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...

And, while I liked Julie Taymor's Titus--interesting,
and surprisingly intelligible, legible--I've always
said, if there was a Shakespeare play (which has its
own similarities to The Oresteia) for Quentin
Tarantino to direct, it'd be ...


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger
http://phonecard.yahoo.com/