C of L49: On Jacobean Tragedy

[Mark Kohut]

1964 piece in the Penguin edition of Three Jacobean Tragedies by Gamini Salgado,
an Italian expert.

1) in its cultural time, it was to the audience sorta like what 'thrillers' are to our time...
        1a) the audience was not the elite.....all classes 
        1b) with violence within a disordered society....

2) The best of the tragedy genre merged with a savage satire of society. Very interesting. 

3) a 'tragedy of blood"...."carnal, bloody and unnatural acts; casual slaughters"--[Hamlet--the best of them]

4) A "wild justice" [ F. Bacon]
     Themes involve       
 a) personal honor
 b) perseverance of feudal lawlessness
 c) resistance to tyranny and injustice
 d) concept of human vs. divine "vengeance"........Of course, the politically correct belief was that
'vengeance is mine' [only], sayeth the Lord...
BUT private revenge was linked with extreme notions of
personal honor.............ESPECIALLY Blood-revenge for murder..........revenge struck a responsive
chord in the period because law was just being codified (in many ways) and was often seen as lame...

Therefore there was sympathy for an avenger among the audience, only lost if he turned too treacherous,
too unjust himself.....as one guy in a play says "it is time to die when we ourselves are foes" ......

Does this,maybe, explain Driblette.....who, maybe, went too far with his three added assassins???

Murder had risen conceptually as the most heinous crime because, since the Renaissance, it meant that
ending a life destroyed human fulfillment. So, blood-revenge for murder was the most sympathetic and dramatic. 

**"The plays explored the lusts and appetities that drive men to destruction and self-destruction". Despite all the violent actions, the plays ended by implying a 'universal moral law"....

Italy was the stock nation to use to mean vice. The stereotype was that Italians were treacherous and revengeful
by nature. [This stereotype, muted, survived into my childhood --at least--- among various ethnic stereotypings]

In Tourneur there is a famous scene of a woman's skull done up in a headress.....Masked revels are rife. [remember
AtD?] ...Eliot says that Tourneur showed a "disgust with life" ....... 

Not least,  Salgado thinks that the savagery of the social satire naturally lead to "violent expression as the only effective protest".....which reminded me of GR---a savage, satire full of  "violent expression" .........aptly and justly. 
(acknowledged by the cowardly Pulitzer Committee which laughably misread it as "pornographic"....)