Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric

Abstract

contrasting fates of good and bad protagonists, . . .becomes merely a way to organize the presentation of two contrasting secular progressions: Witgood's 'prosocial' integration into an individualistic, competitive, and economically motivated society, and Dampit's 'antisocial' withdrawal through drink and his decline through the material consequences of his alcoholism" (p.94).But the "merely" is misleading, as he notes, since what Middleton has registered is something like the breakdown of Christian epistemology.Allegory does not work any longer as a mode of representing or understanding the cut-throat competition among Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, Dampit, and all the others.Ironically, their allegorical tag names serve only to flag that inadequacy.Martin's analysis of Middleton's philosophical stance is complemented by his concerns with sharp economic practice in the Trick chapter and with what he calls "patriarchal paradoxes" (p.115) in the Chaste Maid chapter.Though there needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that dads often undercut their own authority, the "second main comic principle" that Martin finds at work in Chaste Maid, namely "the paradox that restraint not only opposes but also in various ways generates license" (p.125), significantly forwards his case for the power of sceptical thought to destabilize communal values.When the much restrained Moll Yellowhammer escapes the watchful eye of her parents through the back door of apparent death and resurrection, it is theatrical performance, not spiritual transcendence that resolves Middleton's elaborate romance plot.The readings of individual plays in Between Theater and Philosophy are sensible and fun to read, at least when the jargon of Theory is held in check.Phrases like "city comedy often dialogizes absolutist ideology" (pp.83-84) and "to dramatize the improvisational and paradoxical reproduction of patriarchal sociosymbolic structures" (p.155) will not, I suspect, stand the test of time at all well.Nor do they lend precision to an often insightful first book for serious students of Jacobean drama offered by an already very accomplished scholar.I would venture to predict that Martin's second book will rely less heavily than this one does on the deconstructive and materialist philosophers whose heyday was the mid-80s.

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