The Historical Wharfinger

[Dave Monroe]

"'I would like to find out,' she presently plunged,
'something about the historical Wharfinger.  Not so
much the verbal one.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 151)

Somewhere along the line here, somebody mentioned T.S.
Eliot as a possible source for background for The
Courier's Tragedy.  Just came across (sitting right
out in the open, of course) my copy of T.S. Eliot,
Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1956 [1932]).  From "Cyril Tourneur," pp.
110-24 ...

"None of the Elizabethan dramatists is more puzzling;
none offers less foothold for the scholarly
investigator; and none is more dangerous for the
literary critic.  We know almost nothing of his life;
we trace his hand in no collaboration....  Yet in no
plays by any minor Elizabethan is a more positive
personality revelaed than in The Revenger's Tragedy. 
No Elizabethan dramatist offers greater temptaion: to
the scholar, to hazard conjecture of fact; and to the
critic, to hazard conjecture of significance.... it is
no disrespect to ... scholarship and diligence to
remark how little ... has been added to our knowledge
of the singular poet with the delightful name.... all
that later students have been able to do is to piece
together several probable shreds....  And with ll
plausible guesses possible ... Tourneur's 'whole early
life is a complete blank.'" (pp. 110-1)

"The historical Wharfinger," hell, doesn't sound
unlike the historical Pynchon, for that matter ...

"... a highly original development of vocabulary and
metric, unlike that of every other play and every
other dramatist." (p. 116)

But note also ...

"It [The Revenger's Tragedy] does express--and this,
chiefly, is what gives it its amazing unity--an
intense and unique and horrible vision of life.... The
cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity,
expressed consummately in The Revenger's Tragedy, are
immature in the respect that they exceed the object. 
Their objective equivalents are characters practising
the grossest vices; characters which seem merelt to be
spectres projected from the poet's inner world of
nightmare, some horror beyond words.... its motive is
truly the death motive, for it is the loathing and
horror of life itself.  To have realized this motive
so well is a triumph; for the hatred of life is an
important phase--even, if you like, a mystical
experience--in life itself." (pp. 199-20)

Cf. ...

"... Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked
utterly into the landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger
had fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so
preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued,
unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of
civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a
few years ahead of them."  (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 65)

Not to mention ...

"... a new mode of expression takes over.  It can only
be called a kind of ritual reluctance.  Certain
things, it is made clear, will not be spoken aloud;
certain events will not be shown onstage ..." (Lot 49,
Ch. 3, p. 71)

"'T-t-t-t-t ...'" (p. 73)

Also essays on Seneca, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton,
Heywood, Ford, Massinger and Marston ...



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