That Revenge Drama in Lot 49.

[ish mailian]

Although it is four centuries since revenge tragedies like this first
appeared on stage, they have lost little of their charge.
And it seems we can't get enough of them.

So what is it about these violent and baroque plays, four centuries
old (Malfidates from about 1613,
The Changeling 1622 and 'Tis Pity about 1630), that haunt our
contemporary imagination?
What kind of culture did they spring from? And why are they once again
filling our theatres?

It was TS Eliot who rescued these plays from critical oblivion,
writing (in a poem) of Webster's capacity to see "the skull beneath
the skin", then in a 1927 essay acclaiming The Changeling as
Middleton's greatest drama: "an eternal tragedy, as permanent as
Oedipus or Antony and Cleopatra … the tragedy of the not naturally bad
but irresponsible and undeveloped nature, caught in the consequences
of its own action". Their ambiguity wasn't something to be apologised
for; it was an essential ingredient of their success.

Even Eliot struggled, however, with the plays' mutinous unwillingness
to be pigeonholed. Though they are tragedies in the mould of the Roman
writer Seneca, they are both funnier and crueller than we might
expect. With their wisecracking antiheroes and deliberately unlikely
plot twists, they are suffused by caustic irony, challenging us to
take them as shlock rather than shock.



https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/jan/20/jacobean-tragedies-changeling-duchess-malfi

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 9:12 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why did young Pynchon opt to place a play within his playful novella?
> And why opt for a revenge tragedy? His audience, like the audience of
> the Elizabethan/Jacobean must provide part of the answer. And the
> playwright/novelist, young Pynchon , must provide part of the answer.
> Why Seneca's tragedies were so influential in Elizabethan/Jacobean
> drama, for authors and audiences, and what young Pynchon hoped to
> convey, other than the fact that he can plot/knot into with skill and
> humor, to his audience, and why at the Tank this play is performed
> then, and what of himself, if anything he divulges to us.
>
> Young Pynchon, longing for order, for return, ultimately embraces play
> and indeterminacy. The revenge play has been linked to detective
> fiction and the "evolving attitudes to retribution."  The Crying of
> Lot 49 is planted in the military industrial complex of California, a
> country, as Hamlet might describe it, tilted toward war, and out of
> joint. A joint, joint, my country for a joint, a joint for my country,
> for the whole lot.
>
>
>
>  http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184515.001.0001/acprof-9780198184515
>
>
> On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 6:05 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > So bloody violent. Meanings? Is this History; is this the unverifiable
> > text that is the transmission of History?  The inherent vice of Human
> > Nature, which we must go beyond--if we can? History as Jacobean
> > revenge drama, Hegelianism as Titus Andronicus: History as the Marquis
> > de sade?
> >
> > Think of Lot 49, Pynchon and The Word. The religious, leaning
> > Catholic, obsession thru the fiction to AGAINST THE DAY, w Mark's
> > gospel. Think of the gnosticism
> > reading(s), finds, allusions of Pynchon.
> >
> > I have recently learned this about the Nag Hammadi scroll finds of
> > 1945. "One could hardly have scripted a more sensational story for the
> > explosive reintroduction of Gnocticism than that of the rediscovery of
> > the Nag Hammadi scrolls." Before those two brothers had gone out into
> > the desert and dug up the three foot earthen jar containing them,
> > their father had been brutally murdered by one Ahmed Ishmael.....While
> > the scrolls were being stored at home, and some used as kindling by
> > their mom, they had a chance to get even with Ahmed. They seized him
> > and "hacked off his limbs, ripped out his heart and devoured it among
> > them, as the ultimate act of good revenge".
> > This act is what led to the saving of the scrolls as they fled with
> > them fearing that they would be discovered as authorities looked for
> > them.
> >
> > The Word or words survived.
> >
> > Good times.
> >
> >
> >
> > Sent from my iPhone
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l