In keeping with my threat to write about the plays I'm reading (in order both to make myself take better notes and to make myself write better blog entries -- though this perhaps doesn't fulfill the latter ambition), I'll tell you, blog-world, that over the past few days something unprecedented has happened to me. I read one Renaissance play, one twenty-first century play, and two nineteenth century plays, all having to do at least in part with female speech and behavior (I won't say feminism or femininity, since that's neither properly the subject of any of these plays nor a particularly helpful subject on its own), and I....I liked the nineteenth century ones the best!
This is, probably, because the 19thc ones are better written than the other two, at least according to my tastes, but I didn't expect to like either, (well, particularly not the Romantic one) and I did expect to like the Ren. and the contemporary one, and they both ended up making me cranky! It's a good reminder that, while I prize my ability to make sweeping and certainly unwarranted judgments about entire literary periods (say what we will, this is a necessary skill if you want to become a professional at literature), it's much better to have those generalizations upset than it is to have them affirmed.
So. What I read:
Satiromastix. Thomas Dekker (probably not without help from John Marston). 1601.
This thing (and oh, it is a mess of a thing) is part of the "War of the Theatres" -- sometimes considered the final blow in them, in fact. What this means is: around about the late 1590s/early 1600s, Ben Jonson and John Marston got into a highly theatrical fight about who was the most...well...theatrical: i.e., the better poet an better dramatist. They were both famously egotistical, though Marston prided himself on his workaday theatrical sensibilities (he knew what sold a crowd) and Jonson vacillated between his (of course not inconsiderable) talents at popular theatre and his desire to join more elite forms of literary society (though hardly any purely literary society could be said to be elite) by publishing his talent for lyric, satirical, and epigrammatic poetry.
The satires and the epigrams were Jonson's primary weapons against Marston and crew -- Thomas Dekker being the primary "and crew," and Marston et. al. fought back in kind. The two playwrights satirized one another repeatedly onstage, to the delight, apparently, of audiences. Satiromastix is a direct response to Jonson's Poetaster, and, in fact, takes two of its primary characters, the filthy-mouthed Tucca (a sort of all-purpose satirizer) and Horace, the Jonson figure, directly from Jonson's play.
And it takes a hell of a lot from other plays as well. The thing about Satiromastix is that, formally, it's a mess! The thing I like best about Dekker, usually, is a) his flavorful dialogue and b) his splendid, tight sense of plot as driven by character, and there's very little of either here! There isa lot of reference to theatrical convention -- Dekker seems to have been determined to mention every major theatrical hit from Gorboduc, the earliest English tragedy, to the present, but it's all done in the lax manner of in-joke topical satire, and thus not terribly interesting. Moreover, the comedy itself is pretty lame: missing are the crisp "humorous" (i.e., stereotyped) portraits that make Jonson's comedies, and other plays by Dekker and Marston so interesting. Instead there's just a lot of rehased devices of comic humiliation and a lot of marriage-bed jokes.
And then, oh, by the way, the marriage plot. Weirdly enough, there's this partial tragic plot that keeps trying to sneak in, wherein a newly married (but not yet bedded) bride catches the eye of the King, who then tricks her husband into betting that if she is sent to court before the consummation of the wedding, she will "remain chase" and not be tempted by court love-talk. The bride, when this is revealed to her, rightly enough points out that the King's aim is surely to rape her, whether she feels constant or not. Her father then says he has poison for her to drink, which she snatches (to prove she has a constant heart). It turns out to be only a sleeping draught, the King is abashed, the husband is chastened, etc., but my point is: what on earth is this doing in this satirical comedy? "Filling it out" is clearly the answer, but it can't even credibly count as double-plotting, since it has no structural or thematic overlap -- pretty much not even any character overlap with the Horace plot!
About the only place where you can follow a whole thread through the thing is, loosely considered, the theme of "constancy." Because here's the interesting thing: the primary criticism leveled at Horace, in the end, is that as a paid poet, his words serve whoever employs him. What eventually brings him down is that, in this strange little love plot wherein three men are competing for the attentions of a wealthy widow and the third (Tucca) tricks the other two into both employing Horace, is that his work for one contradicts the other. (First he writes against baldness, then he writes for it.)
That is, Horace's words are inconstant to themselves, or he, as the maker of the words, seems to be inconstant because he can use his wit at any man's behest. Even Jonson's real characters seem in some sense to betray this inconstancy of poesy: not only is Tucca Jonson's originally, but two other Jonson-figures (besides Horace), Demitrius and Crispinis, appear as other poets, cronies of Jonson rather than Jonson himself.
But of course the idea that Horace's poetry is necessarily inconstant is an odd criticism, coming from one playwright to another. If Horace's characters -- and his mode, satire -- are necessarily "inconstant" because not only can they serve various masters, they must do so (since every audience member will form his own estimation of every play), that's a criticism that applies as much to one commercial playwright as another.
I suspect, in the end, that the real criticism Dekker and Marston level at Jonson (insomuch as there is one, which isn't much) is that, in attempting to raise the profession of playwright (and in insisting that it is a profession), Jonson is attempting the impossible. He had better accept play-work as a patched-together, disreputable thing, liable to fall into disaster at any moment -- like the bride's unconsummated marriage, or, I'm afraid, like this play itself.
This is, probably, because the 19thc ones are better written than the other two, at least according to my tastes, but I didn't expect to like either, (well, particularly not the Romantic one) and I did expect to like the Ren. and the contemporary one, and they both ended up making me cranky! It's a good reminder that, while I prize my ability to make sweeping and certainly unwarranted judgments about entire literary periods (say what we will, this is a necessary skill if you want to become a professional at literature), it's much better to have those generalizations upset than it is to have them affirmed.
So. What I read:
Satiromastix. Thomas Dekker (probably not without help from John Marston). 1601.
This thing (and oh, it is a mess of a thing) is part of the "War of the Theatres" -- sometimes considered the final blow in them, in fact. What this means is: around about the late 1590s/early 1600s, Ben Jonson and John Marston got into a highly theatrical fight about who was the most...well...theatrical: i.e., the better poet an better dramatist. They were both famously egotistical, though Marston prided himself on his workaday theatrical sensibilities (he knew what sold a crowd) and Jonson vacillated between his (of course not inconsiderable) talents at popular theatre and his desire to join more elite forms of literary society (though hardly any purely literary society could be said to be elite) by publishing his talent for lyric, satirical, and epigrammatic poetry.
The satires and the epigrams were Jonson's primary weapons against Marston and crew -- Thomas Dekker being the primary "and crew," and Marston et. al. fought back in kind. The two playwrights satirized one another repeatedly onstage, to the delight, apparently, of audiences. Satiromastix is a direct response to Jonson's Poetaster, and, in fact, takes two of its primary characters, the filthy-mouthed Tucca (a sort of all-purpose satirizer) and Horace, the Jonson figure, directly from Jonson's play.
And it takes a hell of a lot from other plays as well. The thing about Satiromastix is that, formally, it's a mess! The thing I like best about Dekker, usually, is a) his flavorful dialogue and b) his splendid, tight sense of plot as driven by character, and there's very little of either here! There isa lot of reference to theatrical convention -- Dekker seems to have been determined to mention every major theatrical hit from Gorboduc, the earliest English tragedy, to the present, but it's all done in the lax manner of in-joke topical satire, and thus not terribly interesting. Moreover, the comedy itself is pretty lame: missing are the crisp "humorous" (i.e., stereotyped) portraits that make Jonson's comedies, and other plays by Dekker and Marston so interesting. Instead there's just a lot of rehased devices of comic humiliation and a lot of marriage-bed jokes.
And then, oh, by the way, the marriage plot. Weirdly enough, there's this partial tragic plot that keeps trying to sneak in, wherein a newly married (but not yet bedded) bride catches the eye of the King, who then tricks her husband into betting that if she is sent to court before the consummation of the wedding, she will "remain chase" and not be tempted by court love-talk. The bride, when this is revealed to her, rightly enough points out that the King's aim is surely to rape her, whether she feels constant or not. Her father then says he has poison for her to drink, which she snatches (to prove she has a constant heart). It turns out to be only a sleeping draught, the King is abashed, the husband is chastened, etc., but my point is: what on earth is this doing in this satirical comedy? "Filling it out" is clearly the answer, but it can't even credibly count as double-plotting, since it has no structural or thematic overlap -- pretty much not even any character overlap with the Horace plot!
About the only place where you can follow a whole thread through the thing is, loosely considered, the theme of "constancy." Because here's the interesting thing: the primary criticism leveled at Horace, in the end, is that as a paid poet, his words serve whoever employs him. What eventually brings him down is that, in this strange little love plot wherein three men are competing for the attentions of a wealthy widow and the third (Tucca) tricks the other two into both employing Horace, is that his work for one contradicts the other. (First he writes against baldness, then he writes for it.)
That is, Horace's words are inconstant to themselves, or he, as the maker of the words, seems to be inconstant because he can use his wit at any man's behest. Even Jonson's real characters seem in some sense to betray this inconstancy of poesy: not only is Tucca Jonson's originally, but two other Jonson-figures (besides Horace), Demitrius and Crispinis, appear as other poets, cronies of Jonson rather than Jonson himself.
But of course the idea that Horace's poetry is necessarily inconstant is an odd criticism, coming from one playwright to another. If Horace's characters -- and his mode, satire -- are necessarily "inconstant" because not only can they serve various masters, they must do so (since every audience member will form his own estimation of every play), that's a criticism that applies as much to one commercial playwright as another.
I suspect, in the end, that the real criticism Dekker and Marston level at Jonson (insomuch as there is one, which isn't much) is that, in attempting to raise the profession of playwright (and in insisting that it is a profession), Jonson is attempting the impossible. He had better accept play-work as a patched-together, disreputable thing, liable to fall into disaster at any moment -- like the bride's unconsummated marriage, or, I'm afraid, like this play itself.
Labels: books, early modern, reading, theatre
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