Paper 5 - Drama Flashcards

Boy-Actresses

Harley Granville Barker coined term

Boys [under 20-ish] playing adult women

Oxymoron intentional - reflects crossing boundaries

Roberta Barker - Ages of Boy Actresses

10-22 [ish]

Quote arguing against women onstage

George Sandys - 1615 - ‘the parts of women are acted by women, and too naturally passionated’

Arguments for boy-actresses [sexual morality]

Thomas Heywood - 1610 Apologie for Actors

‘to see our youths attired in the habits of women, who knows not what their intents be?’

Why were even obviously masculine boys still playing women?

Sometimes comedy

Often due to different focus: not on naturalism, but on technical skill of passionating

Crucial point around boy-actresses and audiences

Roberta Barker - ‘different viewers saw very different things when they looked at the boy who played the woman’s part’

Connotations of ‘popular’ in EMod period?

Emma Smith - popularity is ‘a downright seditious [term]’

How do plays interact with notions of ‘popularity’?

Emma Smith - ‘plays represent a challenge to traditional divisions between elite and popular’

WHY:

Scripted and oral [literate+non]

Various economic audiences

Across country + continent

Performers were common people

Text of play is often both vernacular and learned

How many titles published during EZ's reign, and what type was most popular?

Emma Smith - 11,000 titles [roughly], 40% were religious books

What book was price fixed - so everyone could buy it, even unbound?

Book of Common Prayer

Unbound = 2s. 6d.

Leatherbound = 4s.

Volpone - Labour and violence

1.1

‘wound no earth with ploughshares’

‘feed the shambles [slaughterhouse]’

‘no mills for iron, oil […] to grind em into powder’

‘expose no ships to threatenings of the furrow-faced sea’

Volpone talking about how he prefers to keep wealth than make it

How does Volpone open?

Pulling the curtain and revealing the discovery space [where gold is]

Volpone - Use of gold

Mosca 1.4 - ‘this [gold] is true physic, this your sacred medicine’

Year of Volpone

1605

Year of Gallathea

1588

Year of The Changeling and Author

1622

Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

The Changeling - Eyes [2 quotes]

Consistent motif throughout - differentiating moral good from evil

‘our eyes are sentinels unto our judgements’ - 1.1 [Beatrice to Alsemero]

‘I cannot strike; I see his brother’s wounds / Fresh bleeding in his eye, like a crystal’ - 5.2 [De Flores, guilt over killing Alonzo stopping him from killing Tomazo]

The Changeling - Deterioration/Amelioration [4 quotes]

Evil characters become more guilty

Good characters become more cruel/violent

‘No matter, if but to vex her, I’ll haunt her still / Though I get nothing else, I’ll have my will’ 1.1 [De Flores’ single-minded cruelty’

‘‘Twas a mist of conscience - All’s clear again’ 5.1 [De Flores ignoring omen, seeing Tom’s ghost - also relevance to eyes…]

‘I cannot strike, I see his brother’s wounds’ 5.2 [De Flores showing guilt]

‘O, thou art all deform’d!’ 5.3 [Alsemero lamenting state of the world at end of play]

The Changeling - Place [4 quotes]

CONSTANT sense of place, and of encroaching limits/claustrophobia

Play begins in street/town, moves to castle/asylum, then is reduced down to single room

‘spacious and impregnable fort’ - 3.1 - Alonzo [dramatic irony] describing the castle to De Flores

‘I’m in a labyrinth’ - 3.4 - Beatrice aside, lamenting over complex situation

‘a back part of the house / A place we choose for private conference’ - 4.2 - Jasperino overheard De Flores/Beatrice flirting only since he was also in a private secluded space

‘We are left in Hell // We are all there, it circumscribes us here’ - 5.3 - De Flores and Vermandero, final sense of evil enclosed space, great summary line

Year of Spanish Tragedy and Author

1587 [first performed]

Thomas Kyd

Arden of Faversham [approx.] date

1592

Maid’s Tragedy Author and Date

Beaumont and Fletcher

1619

Dr Faustus Author and Date

Christopher Marlowe

Premiered 1592

Arden of Faversham Genre

Domestic tragedy - normal middle-class people experiencing tragedy

VERY different to classical tragedy [great man in great kingdom has large downfall]

Arden is about the first of its kind in England

First speech of Arden

Franklin addressing Arden

Discussing deeds to the Abbey [of Faversham]

Foregrounding importance of land, ownership, and fragility of wealth in the play

‘Sealed and subscribed with his name [Duke of Somerset] and the king’s / Read them, and leave this melancholy mood’

Arden of Faversham - Evil

Many characters on spectrum, no-one really “good”

HEAVILY intertwined with class + wealth [Mosby is social climber, BW+S are working-class, etc.]

Black Will and Shakebag speak in prose - destabilising working-class violent force of evil

Alice to Mosby - about Arden’s death

‘My saving husband hoards up bags of gold / To make our children rich, and now is he / Gone to unload the goods that shall be thine’ - Alice to Mosby, euphemism focusing on goodness of husband’s death, wealth

Franklin about Black Will and Shakebag

‘‘Tis nothing but some brabling paltry fray / Devised to pick men’s pockets in the throng’ - Franklin describing BW+S, their violence to each other stops them from noticing Arden enter, limitations of evil

Mosby on evil

‘I can cast a bone / To make these curs pluck out each other’s throat […] ‘Tis fearful sleeping in a serpent’s bed, / And I will cleanly rid my hands of her’ - Mosbie, both revelling in manipulation and recognising anxieties in same speech - evil begets evil

Alice, evil and wealth

‘A fine device! you shall have twenty pound / And, when he is dead, you shall have forty more’ - Alice encouraging BW, distinct economic element

Arden of Faversham - Interiors

‘For simple truth is gracious enough / And needs no other points of glosing stuff’ - Franklin in epilogue, summarises importance + impact of keeping things close to home

One murder plot relies on doors being unlocked, but they are unlocked due to comic contrivances - ‘And coming down he found the doors unshut / He locked the gates, and brought away the keys’ - Michael explaining how the plot went wrong, keys are big symbol for enclosure

‘When he’s at home, then have I froward looks, / Hard words and blows to mend the match withal’ - Alice lying[?] about abuse from Arden, emphasises its location within the home

‘Ah, would he now were here that it might open! I shall no more be closed in Arden’s arms’ - Alice soliloquy, emphasises claustrophobia of relationship w/ Arden

Dr Faustus - Opening Speech

Chorus begins describing what’s NOT going to happen

Emphasising lack of marvel and grand battles

Also reiterating relative localness and low-scale of the play

Dr Faustus - Power [4 quotes]

Key motivator for Faustus - blinds him to flaws and supersedes all other results

‘emperors and kings / Are but obeyed in their several provinces / Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds’ - 1.1 Faustus wanting power that is exclusively otherworldly, universal power

‘Did not he charge thee to appear to me? // No, I came hither of mine own accord.’ - 1.3 Faustus believes his power caused Meph to arrive, Meph corrects him and undercuts his perceived power in the process

‘bell, book, and candle - candle, book, and bell’ - 3.1 F inverting Catholic excommunication ritual through chiasmus, sophistry undercutting power of Catholic Church

‘Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven’ - 5.2 F trying to delay his punishment, but admitting he can’t with the ever-moving'

Spanish Tragedy - Violence and War

Here falls a body scindered from his head,

There legs and arms lie bleeding on the grass,

Mingled with weapons and unbowelled steeds,

That scattering overspread the purple plain. - 1.2 - General detailing horrors of war - pre-empting extreme violence of revenge tragedy genre; purple plain = imperial blood

Spanish Tragedy - Revenge and War

1.4

‘But how can love find harbour in my breast / Till I revenge the death of my beloved’ - Bel-Imperia desiring revenge over killing in war [not standard]

‘Alas my lord, these are but words of course’ - Bel-Imperia seeing through Balthazar due to her resolution of revenge; ironic considering power of words in ending play?

Spanish Tragedy - Eloquence and Inverse

‘Why so: tam armis quam ingenio / Where words prevail not; violence prevails […] // [I think it] Both well and ill; it makes me glad and sad’ - 2.1 - Lorenzo and Balthazar speaking - L quotes Latin and waxes on violence; B is monosyllabic and more cruel

Spanish Tragedy - Use of Space

3.2

A letter falls from high window - written by Bel-Imperia

Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night, and day,

See, search, show, send some man, some mean, that may - H begging for some sign to do revenge, letter then falls down, almost confirming it

Spanish Tragedy - Madness

H goes progressively mad after Horatio gets killed

‘This way, or that way? Soft and fair, not so; / For if I hang or kill myself, let’s know / Who will revenge Horatio’s murder then? / No, no! Fie, no!’ - 3.12 - H tossing back and forth between different deaths in his melancholia, lots of linguistic loopiness [rhymes, repetitions]

Also in 3.13, he throws out a bunch of objects onto others - madness making him expel insides [humoral idea too]

Spanish Tragedy - Meta-theatre

4.4 - Play within a play (Soliman and Perseda), plot from H to kill Lorenzo and Balthazar [arguably first instance in history]

H demands it be performed in different languages - mimicking Tower of Babel and cementing control over actions - ‘Each one of us must act his part / In unknown languages’ [4.1]

Alexandra S. Ferretti - ‘language is no longer united with action, and action itself loses its typical meaning’

Gallathea - General Context Notes

First performed in front of Queen Elizabeth I

Prologue establishes deference - ‘in Your Majesty’s mind, where nothing doth harbour but virtue, nothing can enter but virtue’

Performed by Children of St Pauls [all under 18, maybe 16]

Childishness is visible - short speeches, lots of prose, short play, comedy, etc.

Gallathea - Gender - 4 quotes

1.1 - ‘To gain love, the gods have taken shapes of beasts, and to save life art thou coy to take the attire of men?’ - Tyterus swaying Gallathea to X-dress by appealing to authority; gender is mutable all the way up

2.1 - ‘would the Gods had made me as I seem to be’ - G’s gender incongruity is painful and would rather abandon birth gender to exist more plainly in artifice

3.1 - ‘myself in all things unlike myself’ - Eurota [nymph] describing love, bears big similarities to gender; both involve interplay of identity and desire

5.3 - ‘Neither of them shall know whose lot it shall be till they come to the church door’ - Venus declaring that love must be heterosexual but only after marriage, love can still exist unconsummated between women

Maid’s Tragedy - Evadne Killing King

5.1 - Best and Most Important moment in the play

‘You are too hot, and I have brought you physic / to temper your high veins’ - Alluding to bleeding and humoral theory to not dishonestly describe murder

‘How’s this Evadne? // I am not she, nor bear I in this breast / so much cold spirit to be called a woman / I am a tiger; I am any thing / that knows not pity.’ - Evadne throwing away it all to claim revenge

‘Thou art too sweet and gentle // No I am not, I am as foul as thou art’ - Evadne linking herself to the king, total debasement of all parties

SECONDARY - Faustus - Balance of Contrasts

Thomas Healy - ‘Marlowe employs a language that apparently allows him both moral edification and unconstrained spectacle’

SECONDARY - General - Rhetoric

Gavin Alexander - ‘We need then, to imagine […] audiences alive to the rhetorical skill on display on many levels in the plays they saw’

SECONDARY - SpanTrag - Inward/Outward

A.J. Piesse - ‘[Hieronimo is] a man whose innermost thoughts and outward behaviour are utterly integral with each other’

SECONDARY - Arden - Materiality and Nation

Catherine Richardson - ‘Arden is a strikingly material play’ & ‘the murder is Kentish born and bred, generated by the nature of its population’

SECONDARY - General - Tragic Subjectivity

Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. - ‘tragic subjectivity arises out of a character’s non-identicality to his or her social position; [it is] born of the ways in which society fails the subject it helps to create’

SECONDARY - Arden - Influences

Catherine Richardson - ‘In many ways, Arden is building on a tradition of murder pamphlets and broadside ballads about murder that germinated in the late 1570s’

SECONDARY - Arden - Statistic

Catherine Richardson - ‘Alice speaks 4,840 words (24.7% of the text), twice as many as both Arden and Mosby (12.5% and 11.9%)’

SECONDARY - General - Queerness

Chandan Reddy - ‘Queer is a word actively in formation, with continuously emergent and nonidentical uses of the word now a crucial feature’

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - ‘“queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances […] when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender [don’t] signify monolithically’

SECONDARY - Maid’s - Evadne

Katherine M. Graham - ‘Evadne is a character whose behaviour belies an investment in undoing, disrupting, and rebelling against given gender hierarchies’

& ‘the play foregrounds Evadne’s body’