A quick reminder: conference abstracts are due in a week!

This week we discussed Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies, a play that capitalizes on what Diana Taylor refers to as “cultural repertories” of communal policing that are both culturally specific and abstract. Three general aspects we found striking:

• vacillating between domestic history and morality play,
• technological complexity of staging violence,
• emphasis on audience and didacticism.

We started by discussing the echoes of violence similar to King Lear, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus before considering the death of Beech as a kind of race killing. He is described in the play as “a little man of black complexion” and presumably this radicalizing is how his dismembered body parts are identified by the neighborhood.

At this point we turned to considering the emphases on civic duty and communal policing in both the Padua and Bankside plot lines. Rachel, Harry, Allenso, and the second murderer struggled most with the challenge of conscience to do the right thing, while Beech’s neighbors and the watermen find it less of a struggle. Rachel and Harry both have to struggle with to which sets of social norms are they loyal: that of the nuclear family or the neighborhood. For Rachel it is his loyalty to a brother, and Harry in his loyalty as a servant to his master.

The excessive violent of the play posed some questions about tonal consistency and humor in the play. As Carla reminded us, in murder tracts (from which these plays were derived) violence was meant to titillate but needs to be balanced with the weight of the didactic message. The technology of the plays is sophisticated but excessive: a bloody stabbing with a cheese knife fifteen times, successive headwinds where a hammer is left embedded on stage, two bags of body parts, and two hangings. We concluded discussing whether the violence balances with the proposed morality of the play, the didactic against the play’s allowance for violence.

NOTE: We also realized at least two pages are missing from the EEBO web scans of the play facsimile. The 2013 print facsimile edition includes the whole play, dissolving the problem of Rachel working a part-time job in Italy.