[Middleton] in which Our Heroine is ambitious (The Phoenix, 1603-04)
First of all, I wish to squee a bit on the grounds that lareinenoire got me Jonathan Slinger's autograph. He has been the recipient of a lot of transatlantic fangirling from me although I have only seen him in some clips from Richard III on YouTube and one scene in A Knight's Tale in which he has a truly unfortunate medieval mullet; by all accounts, he is a brilliant Richard II, but I am unlikely to verify this independently, so what this all illustrates is that the quickest way to my heart is clearly to look good in Elizabethan semi-drag. Anyway, point being, thank you, lareinenoire! <3
Now to the purpose: since I have this great big edition of the works of Thomas Middleton, on which I spent $80 and which I have photographed myself licking, I have decided that I am actually going to see what happens if I read the thing more or less end to end (NB: not all at once), from The Phoenix to The Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets, and blog about it. So expect to see occasional yet reasonably regular rambles about Middleton in this space, when I have the time; I don't have a lot of time for leisure reading, and it says something about me, probably, that when I do it it's always stuff that will at some point be professionally useful, but on the other hand, I do love this stuff, which is why I'm going into this field in the first place, so. Also I made an icon for it to show that I am serious. ;)
I am not really that well-versed in Middleton's works -- I've read some of the best known plays, like The Changeling, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Roaring Girl, and The Revenger's Tragedy (assuming that one is his; the editors of this edition think so, though their rationale is something like "It's good, so it's probably Middleton and not Tourneur" -- though I don't really know enough about either to have an opinion), and yes, I know most of those are collaborations. And I was in a readthrough of No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's at SAA last year (I played much-sought-after widow Lady Goldenfleece). But most of this stuff is pretty new to me, and so I'm going into it with reasonably fresh eyes.
If you are interested in these texts and want to follow along, there is a fairly good website devoted to Middleton's plays here. It is only a partial selection and contains none of the non-dramatic works, but as online editions of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama go, it is quite a good one and is, unusually, annotated.
First up is The Phoenix, a play performed by the Children of Paul's in around 1603. It was performed, the introduction tells us, before King James in February of 1604, and exhibits a lot of the concerns and hopes of the beginning of his reign. In terms of plot, it is somewhat similar to Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, except that its disguised authority figure is not a total bonehead. ;)
I suppose I should start with a short summary. The Duke of Ferrara, who has reigned for forty-five years (all similarities to monarchs living or quite recently dead are entirely on purpose strictly coincidental), is always on about how he's about to die soon, but nevertheless decides to take the advice of his courtiers (who are about what you would expect of courtiers in a Jacobean play) that he should send his son, Phoenix, abroad, putatively so that he'll gain experience, but really because one of the courtiers, a slimy fellow named Proditor ("traitor"), wants the heir-apparent out of the way in order to knock off the feeble Duke. Phoenix, being a clever sort of prince, decides to stick around in the realm instead, and hang about in disguise, accompanied only by his servant Fidelio, because that's technically obeying his father, and that way he can scope out the realm of which he's soon to be in charge.
It turns out that the realm is a great big corrupt mess in which sea captains marry for money, regret it, and then try to sell their wives, justices propose incestuous marriages to their nieces so the nieces will refuse to marry and thus not give their dowry to anyone, the same justices encourage their daughters' affairs with knights in order to get a good word in at court, knights are just knights anyway because TPTB are handing knighthoods out like they're Pez, lawyers are shit-disturbers to encourage lawsuits (which they then go mad when they lose), and courtiers enlist random gallants they've just met to help them in their plot against the ruler and his son. Which turns out to be a bad idea because these random gallants sometimes turn out to be disguised princes who then reveal their identity, call everybody on their shit, and dole out punishments accordingly. The Duke is so impressed by his son's conduct that he decides to retire and live a monastic life, and hand over power to his son, because, you know, that always works. Also, the lawyer who went mad is cured by judiciously-applied bondage and bloodletting. Phoenix makes some remarks about orderly societies and we all go home happy that King James is watching over us and is going to clean up the place, if he stops handing out knighthoods like the aforementioned Pez.
A few thoughts:
+ This is a weird play to read if you're already familiar with Measure for Measure (which is closely contemporary with The Phoenix; Huston Diehl, for instance, writes about it as reflecting the problems hashed out by the Hampton Court Conference of 1604) and Bartholomew Fair, which are thematically and narratively similar (and were, in fact, both also presented at court; I wonder what James thought of all the disguised-ruler plays people kept doing in front of him? (Assuming he paid attention at all; we know thanks to Venetian ambassador that he was very bored by the parts of the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue that did not involve the Duke of Buckingham shaking his moneymaker, and one of the recurring questions at SAA this year was whether anyone gave a damn about the content of court performances, other than, like, not doing something that's obviously going to press buttons.) At any rate, Middleton's Phoenix isn't problematized anywhere near as thoroughly as Shakespeare's Duke Vincentio or Jonson's Justice Overdo, although part of this is because, unlike the Duke or Overdo, he's not observing the results of his own abuse or neglect of power; he isn't really imagined as bearing much responsibility for the sordid state of affairs in Ferrara, and thus his interventions in it feel slightly less sanctimonious.
+ The construction of a corrupt society is self-aware in a way that I can't decide is interesting or annoying. It reminds me of The Simpsons' sendup of Left Behind: "Lighten up! It's modern times!"
+ That said, I did find it quite interesting was that everyone's rationale for everything was, essentially, that if people aren't corrupt, society won't function and people won't be able to live:
If we should not lodge knaves, I wonder how we should be able to live honestly. Are there honest men enough, think you, in a term-time to fill all the inns in the town? And, as far as I can see, a knave's gelding eats no more hay than an honest man's -- nay, a thief's gelding eats less, I'll stand to't. His master allows him a better ordinary -- yet I have my eightpence, day and night. 'Twere more for our profit, iwis, you were all thieves, if you were so contented.
This speech comes from a groom working at an inn where Phoenix and Fidelio meet various unsavory characters, and it is actually a fairly sympathetic viewpoint coming from him (as a working-class person getting lectured by a prince), though it gets twisted pretty quickly (thievery = profit!) and when the same argument gets repeated by the corrupt well-to-do it is far less sympathetic. But it's interesting as an illustration of how everyone gets roped into the same oppressive structures. (This would be a really good play for Marxist analysis, I have to say.)
+ I am totally not sure whether the major issue in this play is money or sex or if they serve as metaphors for each other; things that are morally good get described as "chaste" even if there's no actual sex involved, but it seems as though money and law and sex all go hand-in-hand (there is, likewise, a lot of unpacking of the social and financial implications of credit) and are all insufficiently regulated: Phoenix at one point talks about marriage as "the greatest form / That put'st a difference between our desires / And the disordered appetites of beasts" (after which he complains a lot about women who pretend they're virgins, thus anticipating the gossip surrounding the Overbury scandal by nearly a decade), and he also goes on at considerable length elsewhere about the inviolability of the law (which he describes as "chaste from sale") and the distance between law and the lower classes/obscure people and -- I'm not sure what it is all doing, but it is doing something, clearly.
+ The subplot with the wife-selling captain is strangely poignant, on a meta level, if you know anything about Middleton's life (which I didn't before I read the intro to the Oxford edn); Middleton's abusive stepfather was a sea captain, and his marriage to M's mother was highly dysfunctional.
+ ...of course, some of the poignancy is dispersed when one has a tendency to hear the Captain's lines in a stereotypical pirate voice. Which I totally did. It's not entirely my fault; he's kind of written that way.
Next time: News from Gravesend, in which we learn that the one good thing about the plague is that it opens up the job market in the humanities.
Now to the purpose: since I have this great big edition of the works of Thomas Middleton, on which I spent $80 and which I have photographed myself licking, I have decided that I am actually going to see what happens if I read the thing more or less end to end (NB: not all at once), from The Phoenix to The Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets, and blog about it. So expect to see occasional yet reasonably regular rambles about Middleton in this space, when I have the time; I don't have a lot of time for leisure reading, and it says something about me, probably, that when I do it it's always stuff that will at some point be professionally useful, but on the other hand, I do love this stuff, which is why I'm going into this field in the first place, so. Also I made an icon for it to show that I am serious. ;)
I am not really that well-versed in Middleton's works -- I've read some of the best known plays, like The Changeling, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Roaring Girl, and The Revenger's Tragedy (assuming that one is his; the editors of this edition think so, though their rationale is something like "It's good, so it's probably Middleton and not Tourneur" -- though I don't really know enough about either to have an opinion), and yes, I know most of those are collaborations. And I was in a readthrough of No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's at SAA last year (I played much-sought-after widow Lady Goldenfleece). But most of this stuff is pretty new to me, and so I'm going into it with reasonably fresh eyes.
If you are interested in these texts and want to follow along, there is a fairly good website devoted to Middleton's plays here. It is only a partial selection and contains none of the non-dramatic works, but as online editions of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama go, it is quite a good one and is, unusually, annotated.
First up is The Phoenix, a play performed by the Children of Paul's in around 1603. It was performed, the introduction tells us, before King James in February of 1604, and exhibits a lot of the concerns and hopes of the beginning of his reign. In terms of plot, it is somewhat similar to Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, except that its disguised authority figure is not a total bonehead. ;)
I suppose I should start with a short summary. The Duke of Ferrara, who has reigned for forty-five years (all similarities to monarchs living or quite recently dead are entirely on purpose strictly coincidental), is always on about how he's about to die soon, but nevertheless decides to take the advice of his courtiers (who are about what you would expect of courtiers in a Jacobean play) that he should send his son, Phoenix, abroad, putatively so that he'll gain experience, but really because one of the courtiers, a slimy fellow named Proditor ("traitor"), wants the heir-apparent out of the way in order to knock off the feeble Duke. Phoenix, being a clever sort of prince, decides to stick around in the realm instead, and hang about in disguise, accompanied only by his servant Fidelio, because that's technically obeying his father, and that way he can scope out the realm of which he's soon to be in charge.
It turns out that the realm is a great big corrupt mess in which sea captains marry for money, regret it, and then try to sell their wives, justices propose incestuous marriages to their nieces so the nieces will refuse to marry and thus not give their dowry to anyone, the same justices encourage their daughters' affairs with knights in order to get a good word in at court, knights are just knights anyway because TPTB are handing knighthoods out like they're Pez, lawyers are shit-disturbers to encourage lawsuits (which they then go mad when they lose), and courtiers enlist random gallants they've just met to help them in their plot against the ruler and his son. Which turns out to be a bad idea because these random gallants sometimes turn out to be disguised princes who then reveal their identity, call everybody on their shit, and dole out punishments accordingly. The Duke is so impressed by his son's conduct that he decides to retire and live a monastic life, and hand over power to his son, because, you know, that always works. Also, the lawyer who went mad is cured by judiciously-applied bondage and bloodletting. Phoenix makes some remarks about orderly societies and we all go home happy that King James is watching over us and is going to clean up the place, if he stops handing out knighthoods like the aforementioned Pez.
A few thoughts:
+ This is a weird play to read if you're already familiar with Measure for Measure (which is closely contemporary with The Phoenix; Huston Diehl, for instance, writes about it as reflecting the problems hashed out by the Hampton Court Conference of 1604) and Bartholomew Fair, which are thematically and narratively similar (and were, in fact, both also presented at court; I wonder what James thought of all the disguised-ruler plays people kept doing in front of him? (Assuming he paid attention at all; we know thanks to Venetian ambassador that he was very bored by the parts of the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue that did not involve the Duke of Buckingham shaking his moneymaker, and one of the recurring questions at SAA this year was whether anyone gave a damn about the content of court performances, other than, like, not doing something that's obviously going to press buttons.) At any rate, Middleton's Phoenix isn't problematized anywhere near as thoroughly as Shakespeare's Duke Vincentio or Jonson's Justice Overdo, although part of this is because, unlike the Duke or Overdo, he's not observing the results of his own abuse or neglect of power; he isn't really imagined as bearing much responsibility for the sordid state of affairs in Ferrara, and thus his interventions in it feel slightly less sanctimonious.
+ The construction of a corrupt society is self-aware in a way that I can't decide is interesting or annoying. It reminds me of The Simpsons' sendup of Left Behind: "Lighten up! It's modern times!"
+ That said, I did find it quite interesting was that everyone's rationale for everything was, essentially, that if people aren't corrupt, society won't function and people won't be able to live:
If we should not lodge knaves, I wonder how we should be able to live honestly. Are there honest men enough, think you, in a term-time to fill all the inns in the town? And, as far as I can see, a knave's gelding eats no more hay than an honest man's -- nay, a thief's gelding eats less, I'll stand to't. His master allows him a better ordinary -- yet I have my eightpence, day and night. 'Twere more for our profit, iwis, you were all thieves, if you were so contented.
This speech comes from a groom working at an inn where Phoenix and Fidelio meet various unsavory characters, and it is actually a fairly sympathetic viewpoint coming from him (as a working-class person getting lectured by a prince), though it gets twisted pretty quickly (thievery = profit!) and when the same argument gets repeated by the corrupt well-to-do it is far less sympathetic. But it's interesting as an illustration of how everyone gets roped into the same oppressive structures. (This would be a really good play for Marxist analysis, I have to say.)
+ I am totally not sure whether the major issue in this play is money or sex or if they serve as metaphors for each other; things that are morally good get described as "chaste" even if there's no actual sex involved, but it seems as though money and law and sex all go hand-in-hand (there is, likewise, a lot of unpacking of the social and financial implications of credit) and are all insufficiently regulated: Phoenix at one point talks about marriage as "the greatest form / That put'st a difference between our desires / And the disordered appetites of beasts" (after which he complains a lot about women who pretend they're virgins, thus anticipating the gossip surrounding the Overbury scandal by nearly a decade), and he also goes on at considerable length elsewhere about the inviolability of the law (which he describes as "chaste from sale") and the distance between law and the lower classes/obscure people and -- I'm not sure what it is all doing, but it is doing something, clearly.
+ The subplot with the wife-selling captain is strangely poignant, on a meta level, if you know anything about Middleton's life (which I didn't before I read the intro to the Oxford edn); Middleton's abusive stepfather was a sea captain, and his marriage to M's mother was highly dysfunctional.
+ ...of course, some of the poignancy is dispersed when one has a tendency to hear the Captain's lines in a stereotypical pirate voice. Which I totally did. It's not entirely my fault; he's kind of written that way.
Next time: News from Gravesend, in which we learn that the one good thing about the plague is that it opens up the job market in the humanities.