on The Courier's Tragedy within CofL49

[Mark Kohut]

Hamlet is a revenge play we might know. (The only one I know, anyway). Beginning with something rotten in the Land
[Denmark] and involving kings and other aristocrats, murder, betrayal and suspect sexual acts and more,  it lives as 
a picture of Royal history in action, ending with a stage riddled with corpses. 
 
The Courier's Tragedy is that in parody with much more torturing and betrayal---reminding this reader, much more than Hamlet,
 of Inquisitional actions in the name of God in History.
 
>From a review of Simon Schama's new book, The Future of America: 
A year ago the British historian Simon Schama, who has done so much to promote our understanding of the high drama of Dutch and French history, was at lunch in an English country house. Sitting beside him was a woman who was astonished that he could stomach so much time in America, where he now teaches at Columbia University in New York. "Tell me," she asked, "why are they so religious?" His answer: "They got it from us."
 
And probably we did, but whatever the fervor of American religiosity, past and present, it is nothing compared with what the British have known. As Mr. Schama notes in "The American Future," the bloody events of the English Civil War and the Interregnum in the 17th century overshadow any religious extremism on these shores. "Americans may rant at each other and at the profanities of the modern world," he writes, "but we killed each other and King Charles for just such matters."
 
One way I read The Courier's Tragedy is as an over-the-top play about History, maybe English religious history if not to overgeneralize. And, down to the America founded by Puritans, maybe we did get IT from the English?