Abstracts
Abstracts
Comedy, Carnival, and Class: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Rick Bowers
A Yorkshire Tragedyand Middleton's Tragic Aesthetic
Lisa Hopkins
"Today, Vindici Returns": Alex Cox's
Revengers Tragedy
Ben Spiller
Alizon Brunning
Realism, Desire and Reification: Thomas Middleton's
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
Pier Paolo Frassinelli
Comedy, Carnival, and Class: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Rick Bowers
By its very title, Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside signals social and behavioral edginess, a facetious, even somewhat modern, flippancy built on antithetical terms and powered by unremitting irony. The essay argues that Middleton foregrounds character conflict to assert a realist urban grotesque, a Bakhtinian assertion of the lower bodily stratum combined with dramatically reversible possibilities of gender, class, and situation. A girl in trouble can get rid of an unwanted child; an infertile couple can successfully procreate and thereby disinherit a loathed relative; a complaisant cuckold and part time pimp can even learn to love his wife - and all can become wealthy in the process. Constantly stirring ironic sensations, Middleton;s comedy undermines the bases of romantic myth, while also effectively defusing its sentimental possibilities, through character irrationality, class parody, and urban social contingency.
A Yorkshire Tragedyand Middleton's Tragic Aesthetic
Lisa Hopkins
This essay argues that A Yorkshire Tragedy's surprising silence about the identities of those who participated in the real-life family tragedy on which it was based can be traced to the fact that there was a link with the Cobham family, reference to which had proved so sensitive in Henry IV, Part One. Further, silence on the subject of the historical Calverley family's traditional Catholicism allows Middleton to offer in the play a complex meditation on the ways in which drama and religion can operate to modify human behaviour.
"Today, Vindici Returns": Alex Cox's
Revengers Tragedy
Ben Spiller
Alex Cox's latest film is an energetic and engaging modern reworking
of the play The Revenger's Tragedy, written in the early 1600s probably
by Thomas Middleton. The author of the screenplay, Frank Cottrell Boyce, sets
the film in Liverpool in the year 2011, after a comet has hit planet earth and
destroyed a significant part of it. The new temporal and cultural contexts for
the play present audiences with a strange yet rich blur between Jacobean, current
and possible futuristic sensibilities. The film emphasizes and often expands
upon the play's preoccupations with gallows humour, spectacles of death, and
brutal violence.
"O, how my offences wrestle with my
repentance!": The Protestant Poetics of Redemption in Thomas Middleton's
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Alizon Brunning
This essay argues that Thomas Middleton's city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is constructed through a specifically Calvinist Protestant poetics. It examines the ways in which the play appropriates a comic structure of redemption and resurrection which has its origins in the liturgy of the Catholic church and it contends that the use of this sacramental structure reveals ideological tensions. The work examines the presence of the two sacraments which were central to the doctrinal reformed church: Baptism and the Lord's Supper. The Lenten setting of the play, the central themes of transformation, conversion and redemption and the conflict between flesh and spirit all suggest a foregrounding of religious motifs. In typical city comedy style the theological import is lost on a comic community which pays lip service to the rituals of religion without any concern for spiritual insight. However, this essay argues that the object of satire is not only the godless community but ritual itself. The reliance of the citizens on outward signs rather than inner understanding could be read as a critique of Catholic forms of worship which are demonised as being superficial, material and theatrical. If this is so then the comic form itself can also be read as a signifying structure which belies the true experience of spiritual transformation.
Realism, Desire and Reification: Thomas
Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
Pier Paolo Frassinelli
This essay presents a rereading Thomas Middleton's city comedy,
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, that focuses on a cluster of crucial theoretical
problems in recent historicist criticism of early modern drama. Firstly, it
questions the traditional categories of realism and mimesis as interpretative
definitions for Middleton's comedy, and problematises the kind of rigid hierarchical
demarcations between context and text, history and fiction that these categories
imply. In turn, the essay highlights the cultural and ideological work that
the play performs and its status as a fictional construction that, by its very
nature, transcends historical and social reality, while conserving it as its
disguised interpretative key and referential system. Secondly, this essay develops
a particular case about the play's satirical treatment of the historically determined
interrelation of sex, class and commodity reification. It contends that among
the main formal traits of Middleton's comedy is the tension between the satirical
take on the materialistic outlook of early modern commercial and mercantile
estates, and the comic pleasure that the characters embodying these social groups
offer to the public. A key device to enhance this tension is Middleton's exploration
of the contradiction of the commodity - universally available and yet offering
the potential buyer the promise of an absolute right to consumption - which
in the play is embodied by the gendered construction of women as maids, wives
or whores. In conclusion, the essay argues that the limit of the play's social
critique lies in its representing merely a deconstruction from within of the
horizon of a middle class, male, normative heterosexual gaze.
© 2003-, Lisa
Hopkins (Editor, EMLS).