CoL49 group reading ch3 The Courier's Tragedy

[Joseph Tracy]

I got in touch with Richard Ryan and he is loosely following along but won’t have time to engage until end of June. My section went part way into the Couriers Revenge after which Richard was going to host the end of the chapter. I offered to take his hosting section and he agreed so the Courier’s Revenge play itself should carry the read into early next week.

The Couriers Tragedy ( bare bones, I wrote this to clarify and offer a reference for the main actions of a play that can be a bit confusing)

Act 1)Duke Angelo of Squamuglia has killed the good Duke of adjacent Faggio 10 years earlier so that his protege the illegitimate son Pasquale can serve as regent until the rightful heir , Niccolo comes of age. The Duke’s plan is to murder Niccolo by getting him to go into a  cannon in a game of hide and seek and then blowing  him away. The loyal-to-Niccolo Ercole saves Niccolo by substituting a goat.
Act 2) l Secretly an older  Niccolo, working for Thurn and Taxis mail carriers. is at the court of Angelo waiting for “a crack at the Duke”. The Duke wants to join the 2 Duchies by marrying his sister Francesca  to Pasquale despite her being Pasquale’s  mother and the Duke’s incestuous lover. Francesca doubts the Church will allow it but Duke Angelo says he will bribe the Cardinal, and he and Francesca have sex . Niccolo tells his real story to court attendant Domenico, who goes to betray him, but tells the loyal Ercole who tortures and kills Domenico, cuts out his tongue and sets it on fire.
  Duke Angelo tortures the cardinal for refusing permission for the incestuous marriage, Ercole hears it and reports back to Faggio of plan for Pasquale to marry his mother. 
 Niccolo hears from a group of Angelo’s men the story of 50 Faggian knights killed near the Squamuglian border right before Niccolo’s father was poisoned. Niccolo says if the 2 events are connected then “Boy, the duke better watch out”. This is overheard by Vittorio.
“Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, “This is my body,” the keen-witted Angelo observing that it’s the first time he’s told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying. Altogether, a most anti-clerical scene, perhaps intended as a sop to the Puritans of the time (a useless gesture since none of them ever went to plays, regarding them for some reason as immoral).”
Act  3)Pasquale’s orgy in Faggio  is interrupted by  Faggians disguised as apes and dancing girls who torture and kill him. Gennaro enters and proclaims himself interim ruler until the return of Niccolo
Act 4) Duke Angelo, upset by the coup against Pasquale and sensing the threat to himself writes to Gennaro to appease him, revealing that the ink is from the bones of the dead Faggian Knights. Gennaro is marching toward Squamuglia. Angelo sends the letter via Thurn and Taxis’s rep Niccolo. The Dukes courier Vittorio enters to report on Niccolo’s treasonous words and  Niccolo’s true id is revealed. Furious Angelo, amidst a chill and indirect words orders  a secret pursuit of Niccolo. Everyone knows who is being sent but cold silence prevails.
 Genarro’s army hears from a spy that Niccolo is on his way, they rejoice but grow somber and pray for the protection of St Narcissus when they are told he rides for Thurn and Taxis.
Back at Squamuglia, Ercole is revealed as Domenico’s killer, and hastily tried and killed in  “a refreshingly simple mass stabbing. “
Niccolo, by the same lake where Faggians were killed, reads the Duke’s letter and realizes he is riding toward his restoration,  but then, ”in lithe and terrible silence, with dancers’ grace, three figures, long-limbed, effeminate, dressed in black tights, leotards and gloves, black silk hose pulled over their faces, come capering on stage and stop, gazing at him. Their faces behind the stockings are shadowy and deformed. They wait. The lights all go out.” In Squamuglia, Angelo, unable to muster an army begins an orgy. Gennarro finds the dead Niccolo and Angelo’s blood stained letter, which is miraculously transformed into a full confession of Angelo’s crimes.The Faggians mourn. “But Gennaro ends on a note most desperate, probably for its original audience a real shock, because it names at last the name Angelo did not and Niccolò tried to: He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn, And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn. No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero. Trystero. The word hung in the air as the act ended and all lights were for a moment cut;”

Act 5 we are told is anti-climax as Squamuglia is sacked. “It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse. At the end of it about the only character left alive in a stage dense with corpses is the colorless administrator, Gennaro.

Questions:
1)I guess the big question for me is what is this bloody mysterious 17thC murder mystery with its invocation of an entity that is part competing mail service , part expert assassination service for ambitious royals doing in the center of a Pynchon novel about the settlement of a post war  California tycoon’s estate?

Most probably get the gist of what I am thinking. But how would others answer that question?

Let’s hear some other questions, proposals, tentative theories  etc. about this play.