Misc. on C of L49 Jacobean Tragedy

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I am going to synopsize an article I am reading on Jacobean Tragedies
> from an expert and from 1964. It is the introduction to the Penguin edition of three plays,
> The Revenger's Tragedy, by Tourneur---whose reputation has only climbed since the sixties---
>  the White Devil and The Changeling.
>
> (I think it entirely possible but a- kutely speculative that TRPjr. might have read these tragedies in this edition.)
>
> BUT, one fascinating tidbit....The cultural 'architecture' of Jacobean Tragedy combined
> "Machiavellian cynicism... and the revival of the medieval notion that the world was running down!
> .....and on the verge of dissolution."

>From T.S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1956 [1932]), "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 all plausible guesses possible ...
Tourneur's 'whole early life is a complete blank.'" (pp. 110-1)

[cf. not only "the historical Wharfinger," but the historical Pynchon as well]

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

"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 merely
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)

http://www.archive.org/stream/tseliotessaysone000809mbp/tseliotessaysone000809mbp_djvu.txt

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)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=59129