A.C. Swinburne - Virtue and Vice

I discovered Swinburne's criticism years ago in St. Anne's college library, and it added to my admiration for his poetry (check out Edith Sitwell's collection, if you haven't already). Here he is on Lear:

"Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for here is very Night herself."

Yet he continues:

"As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so equally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and make bearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwise could either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attribute and epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth of human hell is so foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as foils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven should be no less immaculate and immeasurable."

Not a Warrior Princess

With all the "warrior princesses" lately -- Brave, The Hunger Games, Snow White and the Huntsman, Game of Thrones, Laurell K. Hamilton's groundbreaking Anita Blake, and Joss Whedon's recent ringside recitative of Buffy v. the Black Widow (the final straw) -- I've returned to thinking about the death of Webster's duchess.

(Image above of Daenerys, "Mother of Dragons")

I understand her death as triumphant.  Of course, she is assassinated.  However, she famously dies still asserting her power in her identity (not, apparently, in Brecht and Auden's adaptation, oddly enough). There is a Stoic or Christ-like quality to her death, and even, before that, to her mortification.  The act of remarriage itself, though secret, was a triumph over her brothers' obsessive control.  I even see the flight to Loreto as triumphant, because it is a return to the Holy House of the Mother.

Emilia Galotti

Emilia Galotti: Ein Trauerspeil in Funf Aufzugen by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an influential early German Romantic work (a copy of it lies open beside the hero of Goethe's Young Werther when he commits suicide) and adaptation of John Webster's Appius and Virginia, was first drafted in 1758 and revised in 1767-1770, finally debuting on stage in 1772. Lessing is believed by critics to have been influenced by the 1750 Spanish tragedy Virginia by Don Agustín Gabriel de Montiano y Luyando, which he read in the French translation of 1754. Emilia Galotti is considered Lessing's most mature work and a major statement of his dramatic ethos. It was a critique of tyrannical princes, yet Emilia's response to the prince's advances is ambiguous and the play emphasizes the domestic tragedy, including a mother, Claudia, for Lessing's "burgerliche Virginia." While Montiano's Virginia chooses for herself whether or not to inform her father and fiance of her danger, Emilia herself (like Webster's Virginia) instigates her death, ordering her father to kill her rather than let her suffer moral degradation in an affair with the Prince.

John Ford

The primal bonds of family unite young lovers in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Opposed to father, state, and church (see Giovanni's atheistic/agnostic comments), as well as the possible exogamous marriages for the young heroine, the brother-sister lovers' violation of the sexual taboo prohibiting incest participates in the play's overall anarchist bent. This bleak tale foregrounds incest with a sympathy almost unique to the period, and so the references to “blood” that proliferate in the text signify both the too-close bonds of kinship between the young lovers and the violence endemic to the plot.

This textual “bloodiness” literally problematizes incest: too-close DNA. Giovanni's early reference to the womb raises the issue of the Elizabethans' view of twin incest in the womb. Giovanni speaks of the first to the Friar: “Say that we had one father, say one womb / (Curse to my joys!) gave us both life and birth; / Are we not therefore each to other bound / So much the more by nature? By the links of blood, of reason?” (1.1.28-32).1 Shelly Errington, in her study of Southeast Asian tribal societies' beliefs that twins had incest in the womb, points out that, for royals, such births did not carry the same stigma as for commoners: “Incest or its compromise act, close marriage, in short, is a statement about status” (403). Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene refers to the same belief: “These twinnes, men say, (a thing far passing thought) / Whiles in their mothers wombe enclosd they were, / Ere they into the lightsome world were brought, / In fleshly lust were mingled both yfere” (Book 3, Canto 7). Giovanni and Annabella, born of the same parents (father and womb), still break an early modern taboo in their sexual relationship, though not in the womb.

Blood suggests equality in other manners, as the gentlemanly suitors use it as a term of rank and social status. Soranzo tells his rival, previous to an insult, “May be thou art / My equal in thy blood” (1.2.39-40). The young bloods desiring to gain some of Florio's property in the form of his daughter's dowry engage in this verbal (and otherwise) jousting to indicate the importance of their evolutionary imperatives. They focus on exogamy, suggesting in contrast to Giovanni's subversive argument that bloodlines need diversity to remain healthy. By turn, Florio, in his rebuke to the suitors, exclaims, “Have you not other places but my house / To vent the spleen of your disordered bloods?” (1.2.24-25). To him, their duels reflect poorly on their nature (their bloods), although, to the suitors, such duels necessarily weed out the inferior.

The violent action that concludes the play also enacts “bloodiness” - the literal spilling of blood and heating of blood in anger that follows the revelation of the incest (too-close blood relations) that has subverted the health of Annabella's exogamous marriage (to promulgate bloodlines). For example, upon learning of Annabella's incest, Soranzo exclaims, “All my blood / Is fired in swift revenge” (4.3.149-50). Giovanni, like his young rivals, also enacts “bloodiness” violently, as does Annabella, only upon her own body, writing a letter in her blood to Giovanni (5.3.31-32). Annabella enacts the ideal of early modern femininity in her repentance, particularly in her acceptance of guilt and shame (compare to Giovanni's defiance!). Annabella internalizes the violence of bloodiness: she takes no vengeance on others.

Blood, therefore, in an incestuous linguistic twinning, metaphorically represents not only existing social structures (the marriage mart), but also the anarchic drive that threatens them (the incest). Giovanni claims for his forbidden love the ultimate power in a blend of incestuous passion and avenging fury: “Here, here, Soranzo, trimmed in reeking blood / That triumphs over death, proud in the spoil / Of love and vengeance!” (5.6.10-12). The triumph of sterile celibacy over fertile sexuality in the conclusion, as the Cardinal claims the goods and possessions of the dead lovers, all of them, and the father too, enacts the ultimate tragedy. Blood thins.

References:

Errington, Shelly. “Incestuous Twins and the House Societies of Insular Southeast Asia.” Cultural Anthropology 2.4 (Nov. 1987): 403-444.

Ford, John. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. Ed. David Bevington et al. New York: Norton, 2002. 1911-67.

Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser. London: Grosart, 1882. .

Monday Madwoman: Edith Craig

Edith "Edy" Ailsa Geraldine Craig was the daughter and frequent collaborator of the great Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry (they are pictured together at left). She was a silent film star, a costume designer, an actress, and a theatrical pioneer. She was also a memoirist and museum curator at Smallhythe, her mother's home.  For a time, she was involved in publishing and the feminist bookstore and cultural center the International Suffrage Shop.

In 1919, her Pioneer Players performed Susan Glaspell's feminist classic Trifles (1916), and she oversaw two successful performances in October 1925 of The White Divel at the Scala Theater for the Renaissance Theatre Society. The play had not previously been revived since 1682, according to the production notes.

The Malcontent

M.C. Bradbrook on my favorite:

"Bosola, to the end of his final couplet adds four mysterious words which come from a state far on the other side of despair. 

"Let worthy mindes nere stagger in distrust

To suffer death, or shame, for what is just --

Mine is another voyage.  (5.5.127-9)

Monday Madwoman: Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco

I originally discovered Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco as the author of an essay on Vittoria Accoramboni of The White Devil in her collection Lombard Studies (1902).  (Her picture at left is from that collection.)

Her full name is given as Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo Cesaresco, an Englishwoman encountering Italy in the tradition of Ann Radcliffe or John Webster, in fact an Englishwoman who writes apparently exclusively about the country.  In the early 1880s she came to the palace at Salo as a bride, her father-in-law Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco.