A New Way to Pay Old Debts
Endymion
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Author Archives: peter d'antonio
Posts: 4 (archived below)
Comments: 1
A Very Modern Character
Before having read even a line of New Way To Pay Old Debts, I was immediately impressed by its title. At least to me, it seemed extremely modern and not unlike titles being created nowadays. Upon reading the play however, it struck me that the title was far from the only thing linking the play with our world at present. In fact, I’m pretty sure if you were to transport character, Giles Overreach, to the New York of today, he’d blend in a bit too seamlessly for comfort. In fact, his voracity for individual ruination would probably be welcomed in certain areas south of Fulton Street.
As a villain, he is scary because he is real; when he is out for you, he robs you blindly with calculation and without pretense. What drives this obsession of his? Perhaps, it is as he says simply the joy he gets from doing so…but even then, you can ask why? And I think for Overreach, it has to do with class and his natural born ‘disadvantage’. Since he himself could never ascend the social order on his own merits, he might as well have amassed a wealth at the cost of everyone else, at the chance that his daughter would one day be able to. Of course this doesn’t excuse any of his actions, but it does at least give some reason as to why he acted as he did; in our world today, with significantly less rigid social strata, such an explanation fails to apply, and yet the Giles still persist.
Posted in A New Way to Pay Old Debts
1 Comment
A New Way to Pay: Scene Study
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7MKa-Z2w1k
Hi everyone.
This is the final scene study of the semester brought to you by Peter and Eugene. While we will gladly share some of the tribulations that we faced in the course of doing this in class tomorrow (namely filming a two-character scene with a crew of two already acting in the scene), for now try to absorb the hundred or so lines that are as densely packed and difficult to recite as they appear to be. I am sure that Massinger never intended the likes of us to perform this, but I suppose that is the price to pay for having your play last nearly 400 years.
Anyway, enjoy (or at least try to).
Posted in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Comedy, Love relationships
1 Comment
What price goes murder?
On the surface, The Changeling isn’t all that different from some of the other plays that we’ve read in that by the end, justice (in some fashion) has been meted out to those deserving of it. Bodies strew the stage, dramatic final words are spoken (“‘Tis time to die when ’tis a shame to live.”), and things seem somewhat right by the close of the final curtain (perhaps because the two principal villainous characters are dead). Yet this play is far from just another Renaissance tragedy.
When compared with some other of our readings, the play’s conclusion seems rather tame; the deaths are numbered, and De Flores and Beatrice depart seemingly on their own volition. Yet by the time Joanna breathes her final breaths, she has already lost something perhaps more valuable than her life, her reputation. And what’s more the loss of this intangible is not merely the result of a one time occurrence, but rather a repeated and consistent set of choices that she makes throughout the play’s five acts. In many ways, The Changeling signifies the vast difference in female characterization that we’ve encountered since the start of our readings this semester. From the start of the play, Joanna is neither the passive nor genteel character we might’ve expected out of a female character. Her degrading treatment of De Flores from the onset foreshadows in many respects the downward moral spiral that her character will undergo.
As a character whose status is of less than noble standing, Joanna is able to hold herself on her virginal purity and (dare I say) innocence. She sullies both of these beyond repair. So to return to the question that Alsemero originally posed to De Flores in the final scene, What price goes murder? The answer for Joanna is not merely her life, but her reputation, honor and purity, and by 5.3, she pays up.
Posted in Power struggles, Psychological detail, The Changeling
1 Comment
Endymion: A fitting tribute to a Queen.
While I’m quite sure that Lyly’s contemporary audiences recognized the not-quite-so-subtle homage to Queen Elizabeth I from the get-go (who could mistake the fawned over Cynthia, a woman of unsurpassed beauty and excellence, for anyone else?), but for those of us today not catching on quite as quickly, Lyly’s conclusion proved without a reservation that the plot of the play was written foremost to flatter the Queen. Now this isn’t such a terrible thing, such an aim hardly inhibited Lyly’s stylistic choices as a playwright and that is arguably where he succeeds most, but it does necessarily affect his characterization, and it’s worth taking a look at.
For the majority of the play, Cynthia remains a figure of unattainable proportions, her appearances are few and her lines numbered, yet thanks to Endymion her presence is palpably felt even in her absence and her greatness simply understood. Taking Cynthia as a substitute for the Queen, it makes sense since Elizabeth’s power came not from her constant showing of authority, but the implicit understanding of its existence. Until the final Act, Cynthia maintains this somewhat removed nature, however by the final scene Lyly entirely shifts her role from a passive force to an active one.
No longer able to simply stand over watch, Cynthia assumes the role of judge, jury, healer, mediator, and all-around resolver, bringing to a close the various strands of the play in a way that only an omnipotent figure could really hope to do. In fact, it makes you wonder why none of this could have been accomplished sooner (given the decades that passed with Endymion’s slumber). But placing such quibbles aside, Lyly built up the play adulating a mythical woman almost without reason only to close by justifying such praise when she finally takes action; and while I’m none too familiar with the reign of Elizabeth I, I’m content to say that this is a fitting way to pay tribute to any figurehead under ‘threat’ of seemingly unsubstantiated praise.
