The Courier's Tragedy

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, this just in, only time for the back cover blurb
right now, but, from J.W. Lever, The Tragedy of State:
A Study of Jacobean Drama (London/New York: Methuen,
1987 [1971]) ...

"The domination of the state over the lives of
individuals is a problem of the present-day world.  In
Jacobean tragedy J.W. Lever finds essentially the same
problem in the shape it assumed during the rise of the
first European nation states.  The English dramatists
of the early seventeenth century are seen as giving
expression to the ferment of ides which, only a
generation later, precipitated the revolutionary
struggles of the 1640s.  Some of the major Jacobean
tragedies are seen in this book as having a close
bearing upon the vital issues of our own age; not only
the evils of tyrrany but the ambivalent ethics of
revolt are explored."

Cf., as if you don't know already ...

"... 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)

This is kinda sorta a key passage for me, if you all
haven't noticed already.  Anyway, "Introduction" by
Jonathan Dollimore (Radical Tragedy: Religion,
Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries, 2nd ed. [Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993]) ...

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