martedì 28 dicembre 2021

13) Debauch’d and diversivolent’: Men, Women, and

Tragedy

Although most of the tragedies of the 16th century and the first thirty years of the 17th
century were concerned with the fatal destinies of foreign emperors, kings, princes or of
noblemen, a new influential plays took in consideration the relations of middle class
husbands and wives in their domestic sphere.

Among the plays that have come down to us anonymously:

- ‘The tragedy of Mr Arden of Faversham’

- ‘A warning to fair women’
- ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’
Are all based on real events: the sensational murders of husbands by adulterous wives or
their lovers in the first two and the terrible massacre of his family by an husband in the third.
Topics are: untidy accounts of murderous plans, fortuitous escapes, bloody dispatches,
attempts at concealment and final judicial retribution.

They offer anticipation of the water development of domestic drama and of the horripilant
prose and ballad narratives which marked the popular criminal literature of the late 18th and
19th century. They are an anticipation of the gothic new interest.

These works represent an upper-class woman’s repressions, dark fatalism, satiric urgency
and the nervous fragmentation of character too.

Some examples:

- ‘ A woman killed with kindness ’ by Thomas Heywood. It opens with a wedding

between a supposedly ‘ideal’ woman and a man proud of both his happiness and his
social standing but everything degenerate into bloodshed and destruction. The husband
discovers his wife in bed with her lover and he decide to banish her from his house and
children. It is a revenge play without revenge, here murderous impulses are controlled.

- ‘ The maid’s tragedy ’ by the collaboration of Francis Beaumont e John Fletcher. It is the
story of two spirited woman of complementary temperament but of opposing
circumstances. Te plot: Evadne refuses to sleep with her new husband on their wedding
night because she is the king’s mistress. On the other hand there is Aspatia (the ‘maid’ of
the titile) who has been abandoned by Amintor ( husband of Evadne). Aspatia provokes
Amintor to a duel in which he fatally wounds (= ferisce) her. Evadne kills the king. The
play ends with the death of Aspatia with Evadne’s suicide an with Amintor killing himself
beside the corpes of his first love.

- ‘ Women beware woman ’: It is about woman who are first corrupted and then obliged
to follow through the consequences of their corruption before being consumed by it. Also
show women trapped in spaces, often confined, locked, contrived by men or by other
women acting as willing agents of male power.

- ‘ The Changeling ’ by the collaboration of Middleton and Rowley. The daughter of a

Spanish grandee, escapes from an undesired marriage, she finds him physically
repulsive. Her tidy plan doesn’t work out as she has hoped. Instead of leaving her to
marry the man if her choice, her ‘fiancé’ insists that his price is her virginity. Having found
herself ‘undone, she discovers that her disgust has become love, her repulsion
revelation, her physical revulsion physical rapture. What obsesses her now is how to
deceive. This play go beyond ‘gothic’ perturbation.

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 martedì 28 dicembre 2021
- ‘The Duchess of Malfi’: the widowed duchess of Mali commits what is seen by her
villainous brothers as an unforgivable sin against the dignity of their blood by marrying
her steward. These brothers are determinate to destroy their sister, her husband and their
children. Ferdinand ( one of the brothers) has a nasty mind “ I would have their bodies /
burnt in a coal pit” ; he has a plan of psychological torture. At the end the duchess dies
passively collecting what dignity remains to her, kneeling before her murderers. She is
like a decorous martyr in a Renaissance painting, a lonely pattern of virtue in an
otherwise dark, immortal, male and irredeemable world.

- ’tis Pity She’s a Whore’: this is the story of Giovanni and Annabella, the incestuous
brother and sister. They recognize that their illicit love is eternally damnable. Giovanni
finally compounds his sin against heaven by killing his sister declaring that his act of
murder is like the sacrifice of Christ.